works of wanderlust

I haven’t been much of a television watcher these last ten years or so, but I do hunt down good science fiction when I can and enjoy a good speculative romp through the clever landscapes of surrealism and technology mashed together. Fantastic creatures, galactic politics, or philosophical swirls through the soul, it all nabs me when I can spare the time to watch. I mean, part of me would rather read, but I love cinema and long form media in all shapes and sizes.  

Winter affords me more time to dig into neglected series, though, what with being trapped indoors by cold temperatures, icy sidewalks or often both.  This winter I have indulged quite a lot. I am currently mid-season three of Foundation, and I did a rewatch of Severance. But what I have to write about for now is:

streaming: pluribus

Let me just step in and join the millions of other people group-mind-posting reviews onto their blogs, newsletters, feeds, podcasts, and youtube channels gushing about this surprise nine episode show that seemed to have popped out of nowhere late in 2025. I should note that the Kid and I have started a rewatch of The Walking Dead, so zombie comparisons are rife in my brain. Pluribus is a kind of philosophical reverse zombie horror show: semi-spoiler alert for the first episodes ahead. The plot kicks off with the discovery of a signal from space which turns out to encode a seemingly benevolent virus that when it successfully infects a human being it links their consciousness, merges them, into a hive mind of all other infected humans. Unsuccessful infection results in the person dying, which becomes a bit of a plot point because our protagonist’s spouse is one of the one percent that doesn’t make the transition of infection. And our protagonist herself is one of the rarest cases, one of thirteen who are seemingly completely immune and neither transition nor die from the virus. The story erupts as that of the lone survivor in a world transformed into benevolent zombies who only want to fulfill her every wish and desire, to make her happy, while relentlessly seeking a “fix” to have her assimilated somehow into the hive mind, and our protagonist is not having any of it.  What results is a clever narrative of trying to justify lonely and overwhelming individuality against the comfortable collective. The zombies may not be moaning about munching brains but they want to consume something deeper: the self, and the first season debut is a ride of humour and horror that stands out as something fresh.

streaming: stranger things part 5

I know how much people wanted this to be amazing, and I’m going start with a couple points on why I liked it: First, Stranger Things was a soft story built on channeled 80s Stephen King-esque horror nostalgia. It delivered that, even through the end of season five, and watching I forgot all the plot holes and the narrative overkill and even overlooked the realities that kids grow up faster than writers can sometimes tell stories and in general enjoyed the final season. I enjoyed it. I didn’t regret watching it.  As much as some people want to tear stuff apart. Second, and if you’ve been paying attention at all—which likely you haven’t—I’m going to blame the victims here. Netflix has paid more for market research than they have for production and the one thing they have learned is that YOU won’t put your phone down for an hour to watch a show. I mean, I struggle too, I admit, but the general, broad, and generic “you” the television audience, you are texting and scrolling and looking up the actors socials and playing another game on your phone. Netflix understands. And they want to help. They need to explain everything out loud, three times at the very least, so that you can keep your eyes glued to the little screen in your hand and you don’t need to stop flirting or tweeting or whatever the fuck y’all are doing instead of pausing your life for sixty minutes to focus on a show. 

Netflix has formulated the only way to keep you engaged is to turn the script into a damn audiobook that the characters take turns reading over the action of what is being shown on screen. If they don’t too many people get lost, then bored, then click away—and their ratings for the show plummet like a child falling through the upside down from another dimension.  What bugs you most about this style of storytelling is it assumes an backwards approach to what we used to consider good storytelling: show don’t tell, which is to say the actions and the words and the expressions of the characters should tell the story, not some long-winded explanation telling you what is happening beat-by-beat. Stranger Things 5 had very bad writing, yes, but I can read between the what-are-you-the-narrator?! soliloquies of the characters to read Netflix’s unpublished focus group data upon which this script rested. 

streaming: 3 body problem

I think what intrigued me most about the trilogy of novels that inspired this Netflix science fiction series was that it did something a little rare: it is a hard sci fi story with a galactic scope disguised as a modern human drama. If you don’t know the plot, here’s a breakdown: a persecuted and imprisoned Chinese scientist (the original novel was written in China) leverages her captive position in a secret research facility and knowledge of physics to send a radio transmission into space in the early 1970s and a few years later responds to a warning from four light years away telling the alien at the other end that humanity is failed and to come. What follows is the modern response and hundreds of years of imagined history as a response to a slow motion alien invasion in a hostile galaxy. The television adaptation makes the story a little more international, keeping a lot of the Chinese subplot and motivations but spreading the influential characters across a more diverse set of characters. The novels go deep, spanning hundreds, then hundreds of thousands of years, all of it based in an approach rooted in scientific “hard” speculative fiction, leaning into the physical realities of space travel, answering the fermi paradox, and unraveling the deeper dimensions of space and time. Season one of the miniseries has yet to leave the present day, but having read the books twice thru I suspect the in production season two will launch into the medium future and close the gap on the imminent arrival of the aliens. This is not an American-style sci fi story, either, as there are no solutions in big guns and shallow bravado, but rather hope is found in long and deep thinking across systems and time that ultimately rebalances the fight with the invaders and helps humanity understand its place in the universe, small as that is.