People requested more boardgaming posts, so:

Dice are what a lot of people think of when they think of board games (well, that or tiles with letters on), thanks to childhoods spent playing roll-and-move games like Sorry! or snakes-and-ladders. Because of this, many designers have tried to incorporate dice into board games in different ways. Not, generally speaking, in a roll-and-move sense; instead, designers usually try to use the random-but-not-quite-that-random allocation of numbers that dice present to their advantage.

Can’t Stop! is one of the older examples of using dice in a non-traditional sense: this is a design by the late, great Sid Sackson (who designed hundreds of games, most notably Acquire). In Can’t Stop!, the dice are used in a way not unlike the way they’re used in craps: you roll four dice, and combine the dice to make two numbers (a five and a nine, an eleven and a six, two eights, etc.). Then you advance your markers along those number-tracks. Then you decide if you want to roll again, and if you roll numbers and can advance markers (you can advance up to three markers per turn, but no more); if you can’t roll the numbers for your markers, though, you lose all the progress you’ve made that turn. Can’t Stop! is a fast little game about pushing your luck, which is something dice are good for doing.

Can’t Stop! isn’t particularly representative of modern dice games, though. Yspahan (which I think is pronounced “Ees-pa-hohn,” but don’t quote me on that) is more in that vein, where the random roll of dice represents, in a sense, the allocation of supplies within a certain amount. Yspahan’s dice rolls represent the allotment of supplies (camels, gold, buildings, and special cards) purchasable by all of the players, which can then be used to build up in the various city sections of the board. It’s a pretty simple realization of dice being used to generate random stuff but using the probabilities of various amounts rolled accordingly, and a good application of the rule that any game with camels in it will be reasonably good. (There are no outright bad games with camels in them, and more than a few truly great games with camels in them. There is just something about camels.)

Kingsburg does sort of the same thing. Here, the trick is thinking of your dice (each player gets their own dice!) as sort of being your servants: you rolls your dice, and their totals tell you where you can send them to influence people at court for assistance as you build up your part of the kingdom. With three dice, the King himself is hardest to influence (as he requires an 18); meanwhile a lowly sergeant only needs a 5. The various elements of court get you resources: soldiers, building materials, and stuff that lets you influence future rolls of the dice. You then use the building materials to build buildings for extra abilities – much like a civilization-building sort of game – and the soldiers to defend yourselves from the waves of bandits and zombies and orcs that attack each year. Kingsburg is a pretty popular game because, firstly, you get your own dice and everybody likes having their own dice, but also because bad rolls won’t necessarily hurt you: strategic placement of your low-roll dice can mean you get to influence multiple courtiers while other players with better rolls only influence one (since each courtier can only be influenced by one player, normally).

An additional note: there is an expansion for this game, one element of which (a variant on how the military defense of the realm works) is absolutely mandatory for the game to truly shine. The rest of the expansion is pretty awesome too (variant buildings, more buildings, opportunity to play as characters with different abilities, a random event deck), which means for the “full” game Kingsburg is essentially more expensive than it should be. But it’s a really fine game.

Alien Frontiers was released last year (initially through Kickstarter) and is currently very much a Hot Thing with serious boardgamers. I am not a fan of it, personally, because I find that although the theme (alien planet colonization) is fun, the actual gameplay bores me: there’s no real ability to plan out your turn in advance. When your turn comes, you simply roll your dice and place them as best you can to get benefits, and that’s it. If this sounds underwhelming – well, I was underwhelmed by it. Very pretty pieces, though, and lovely graphic design. Some people quite like it. (These people are of course completely wrong and bad.)

Troyes is the most recent dice-as-resources game to come along, and probably is the most complex. Here, you use dice for all the activities on the board, as in other games, but the twist in Troyes is that players can buy each other’s dice in order to use them, which means that each player’s supply is somewhat variable and you can’t rely on getting to use all of your dice – and further, most of the things you can use those dice for are similarly limited to a certain number of uses per turn, so each allocation of dice becomes quite strategic as a result. I’ve only played Troyes twice so far, and in terms of mechanics it’s really very clever (a little difficult in terms of learning curve – this isn’t a game for beginning boardgamers – but not insurmountable). The downside for Troyes is that it is game number 27452 where the theme is “let’s build and improve a town in Middle Ages Europe,” which is at this point almost actively repellent to many players because how many goddamn towns in Middle Ages Europe do you have to improve? Given Troyes’ mechanics it could have been about almost anything else, but European designers really do goddamn love improving towns in Middle Ages Europe.

Going from advanced to suitable-for-beginners, Roll Through The Ages is a civ-building game based solely around dice – albeit special dice with fancy symbols on them. Roll Through The Ages cribs from Yahtzee in that you roll your dice and then get a couple of opportunities to reroll certain dice to alter what you receive. You can then use the resources your dice have generated (workers, food, and trade goods) to build up your civilization by researching technologies (which give you additional abilities), building wonders (victory points at the end of the game) and building cities (which give you additional dice, but also require additional food to keep from starving). Roll Through The Ages is a favorite of mine: it’s quick, simple and fun. Also because it is a dice game where you can inflict plagues on other people.

Finally, we have Perudo, or as it is more commonly known, Liar’s Dice, or sometimes The Dice Game They Were Playing In The Second Pirates of the Caribbean Movie. Liar’s Dice is dead simple: everybody gets a cup and five dice, and each player uses their cup to roll their dice and check them to see what they rolled. Then you start bidding, based on what everybody has rolled (of which, you only know your own dice). “Three twos.” “Four twos.” “Four fives.” “Six fives.” “Seven threes.” Et cetera. Until somebody says “you’re lying,” and then you all reveal dice: if your bid was true and there really were seven threes (or whatever), the player who called your bluff loses a die. If your bid failed, you lose a die. And then you continue like this until only one person is left. Variant rules for Liar’s Dice are common as dirt: the most widely used rule is that ones are wild (which in turn means that a bid of ones is twice as valuable as any other bid). Liar’s Dice is simple and straightforward, and the bluffing element makes for a fun, riotous game. (Any game where people swear a lot when a bluff is called is a good game so far as I am concerned.)

EDIT TO ADD: As always, Canadian readers interested in purchasing any of these games are advised to consider Meeplemart, which routinely has the best prices for games in Canada. As in “it’s not even close.”

Via Pajiba:

One thing I feel needs mentioning: this is not Martin Campbell’s cut of the film, but the studio’s. I live in New Orleans where it was shot, I read the shooting script, all of which was painstakingly filmed with intense research, and all of that was left on the cutting room floor — a sort of combination of what happened to Daredevil and Watchmen, respectively — character development sacrificed for CG, scenes made irrelevant by removing their setup. The movie in the theater starts with an explanation of mythos that is made redundant by the more natural, scripted questions from Hal when he gets the ring. Ten minutes of childhood Hal, Carol, and Hector that sets up Hal’s first ring construct is reduced to an awkwardly placed flashback in the middle of another scene. The training with the ring is almost completely excised except for one minor scene. Most appallingly, the ending completely deletes the fact that Kilowog, Sinestro, and Toma-Re arrive at the end and help Hal defeat Parallax. Not to mention Parallax was supposed to be a 3rd act reveal after we spend the film worried about Hammond going evil, not the main villain for the entire film. I sincerely hope we get a director’s cut or at least all the deleted scenes on the video release.

Is it just me, or do those studio changes seem responsible for a lot of what wasn’t good about the movie? This sort of makes it sound like Green Lantern got the Kingdom of Heaven treatment: reasonably decent film cut down by studio into crap-burger.

It’s been a couple of months since I last took requests, so… have at it.

Usual caveats apply: no “I should writes,” and if you want to request more comics – well, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

In a recent tweet, Michelle Bachmann’s campaign wrote:

Lesson in economic recovery: Consider Canada. No stimulus & unemployment is 20% lower than US.

Uh, guys – we did have a stimulus. We passed stimulus in 2009 as part of the budget, at practically the same time that the USA did: $40 billion in spending and $20 billion in tax cuts for a total of $60 billion in stimulus spending and cuts. Now, our budget was only $274 billion CDN in expenditures, so that $60 billion represented about 22% of our overall budget, whereas the USA’s stimulus of $900 billion measured against its expenditures of $3.5 trillion USD represented about 26% of its budget, so percentagewise our stimulus was a bit smaller than yours, granted – but then again, thanks to strict banking regulations that most of the world didn’t have, we didn’t take nearly the hit that the United States did from the financial collapse of 2008.

So basically Michelle Bachmann is wrong. I know, you’re having trouble processing such an idea! But that is in fact the case.

The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. First in a seven-book series about young boys growing up in late 19th-century Utah (Catholics rather than Mormons, if you’re wondering), and specifically the adventures of an intelligent, indeed devious young boy and his little brother (who narrates). What is particularly great about these books is that the Great Brain, as he is called, is first and foremost a con artist; he isn’t especially malicious, but like most people he’s self-interested and uses his intelligence to get himself ahead in life, and often in unethical ways. This makes him more realistic than your average Encyclopedia Brown. However, because he’s not a bad person at heart (his cons, like the cons of most con-artist protagonists, are designed to play off the greed of his marks and therefore he can always justify the con to himself), when his adventures inevitably lead to something more threatening than rooking schoolkids out of their stuff, he makes an excellent hero – again, moreso than your average Encyclopedia Brown. The Great Brain books are smartly written and bring the 19th-century Utah setting to life remarkably well, and because of the period setting haven’t aged even slightly.

The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald by Clifford D. Hicks. The Alvin Fernald books have aged slightly (written in the 60s and set contemporaneously), but pair off as a nice comparison with the Great Brain books because both series are about smarter-than-average kids (Alvin frequently refers to his “Magnificent Brain”) who have adventures as a result of their smarts. Alvin is a more conventionally likeable hero than the Great Brain; most of his books feature Alvin getting into a situation by dint of his smarts – becoming mayor for a day, starting up his own TV newscast, and so forth – and then getting into an adventure as a result of that. The Wacky World veers away from that model by being a collection of shorter stories, mostly inspired pranks dreamed up by Alvin, some of which are quite sophisticated (an early instance of identity creation, for example, which seems eerily prescient and relevant now) and serves as a decent entry point for the series as a whole.

The Seventh Princess by Nick Sullivan. A brilliant little pageturner wherein a young girl finds herself transported from her schoolbus to a magical kingdom where she is informed she is now the princess of the kingdom. Except she’s the seventh princess – and nobody seems to want to tell her what happened to the first six. A self-driven female protagonist, some really great writing and a clever plot make this a must-read for any kid so far as I’m concerned. I’ve been told once or twice that this was the first book in a trilogy, but can find no trace of the other two even existing.

Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Snyder (still writing in her eighties) is nowadays best known for The Egypt Game and The Witches of Worm, both of which won her Newbery Awards, but these were always my favorites of her books: her biggest venture into science fiction, a trilogy about a future where humans escaping a war-torn Earth settled a new, low-gravity world with gigantic, enormous trees – and then couldn’t agree on how to proceed. The fallout from that decision seeds the entire story, which is uniquely nonviolent in its handling of conflict. At some point, some enterprising producer (probably Pixar) is going to realize that these three books are a megablockbuster children’s movie waiting to happen, so I advise everyone to get in on the ground floor and read them before that happens so you can get the literary experience first.

The Westing Game and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin. Speaking of film, The Westing Game has been adapted into a film – and disappointed, which is a shame because a good adaptation of it would be simply cracking. Both of these books are mysteries as well, but epic mysteries. Westing features a large cast, most of whom are the heirs of a murdered tycoon, trying to solve the mystery of who murdered him in order to claim his estate. Leon (Noel) is a quest-mystery as the heroine searches for her missing husband – whom she has never met – over the course of many years. Both novels play expertly with language and words, both to stimulate a young mind and to teach it about language. and both are entertaining; Leon (Noel) is a comedic farce and Westing a more serious thriller, but neither one anything less than engaging at every moment.1

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. The original cover of the book does it a terrible injustice, making it look like some dreadfully boring bog-standard kidslit. This is not that book; this is a deeply weird and highly dystopic novel about a literal war between teachers and kids, with actual battles and everything. An Orwellian vibe permeates the whole novel, and Kiesel ramps the absurdity up to twelve (eleven is for pussies) with each new chapter, as a gorilla-like sixth-grade girl jousts against the ultimate evil gym teacher in the climax of the book. And then Kiesel gets truly brave and has the kids lose. A sequel, Skinny Malinky and the War for Kidness, eventually got written in order to provide the requisite happy ending, and it’s good too, but I almost prefer the tiger-ending of the first book, as the hero learns what’s happened to his closest friends. Dark, dark, dark. And wonderful.

I Want To Go Home! and No Coins, Please by Gordon Korman. Both of these were written before Korman was out of high school, which should make you deeply jealous of Korman’s abilities. Korman’s early kidslit tends to be wildly farcical, but these two of his books are his most engaging because the farce emerges in each case from a wildly competent non-POV character, which for me makes the point that if Batman were to really exist he would bring us high comedy all the time. In I Want To Go Home!, the Batman kid is so good at absolutely everything camp-related that the only thing at camp that gives him any pleasure is escaping it repeatedly; in No Coins, Please the Batman kid is a wildly brilliant entrepreneur with a talent for bending laws, so that he ends a junior-kids auto-tour about a million dollars ahead of where he started. Korman has a gift for writing slapstick and making it resonate on the page, and for making ludicrous situations seem plausible; these are valuable talents given his plots.

Bone by Jeff Smith. Christ, how many times do I have to tell you people to read Bone before you do it already?

1. Raskin also had a fondness for footnotes that was positively Pratchettian, and my love of footnotes in fiction stems from her rather than Sir Terry. [↩]

Due to some family issues, Davinder’s had to take a brief break, but rest assured Al’Rashad will recommence as soon as he is able.

(FYI: Spoilers, obviously.)

So… yeah. It’s okay. It really doesn’t deserve the critical beating it’s taking; it’s certainly more entertaining than, say, Daredevil (which has a Rottentomatoes score nearly double that of Green Lantern) or Ghost Rider (three percent higher) or Spider-Man 3 (forty percent higher). Ryan Reynolds gives a strong performance, as expected; Mark Strong is a very good Sinestro (despite his disappointing amount of screen time), Geoffrey Rush is simply charming as the voice of Tomar-Re (making him a clear audience favorite), the effects look much better than they did in the trailer, and the direction and editing is as professional as one would expect from Martin Campbell, who makes easy-to-follow-with-your-eyes action movies and was largely the reason The Mask of Zorro was as good as it was.

But it’s not especially good either, and I think the reason it’s getting such a critical drubbing is because instinctively we all recognize one thing: Green Lantern is, from a writer’s perspective, slow-pitch softball. Of all the DC heroes, the only superhero with an origin story that lends itself to film so smoothly is Batman – even Superman doesn’t have as simple and easy-to-write an origin story as Green Lantern does (because Superman’s powers are part of who he is rather than something that happens to him, which makes all the difference in the world). Guy gets ring, guy is exposed to wider universe because of ring, guy has adventure with ring. Done.

But Green Lantern isn’t happy to play at that level; instead, it makes this movie about Hal Jordan overcoming his fear in order to save the day, which is terminally lame. Quick, count the number of times Indiana Jones expresses self-doubt in Raiders of the Lost Ark – that’s the level we’re playing at here. Seeing Hal whining onscreen about how he’s not brave enough (and make no mistake, this is the greater part of the movie we’re talking about here) doesn’t make him relatable; it makes him a pussy. People have to deal with all kinds of real-world crap: cancer, unemployment, having cancer while being unemployed, whatever. Hal Jordan has a magic fucking wishing-ring and watching him complain about it takes the audience out of the movie, because nobody in the world thinks “yeah, if I had a magic wishing-ring and got to fly through space, I would totally freak out like a loser wimp.”

And beyond that, the movie is simply stupid in a number of ways, most of them tied to Parallax being the movie’s villain. (In the movie, he’s a former Guardian who decided to try out the energy of fear as a weapon and was corrupted by it.) Before the movie begins, Abin Sur traps Parallax in “the hidden sector” – in a prison that only takes some folks stumbling on it by accident for Parallax to escape, so apparently Abin Sur was kind of stupid, I guess. The entire movie hinges on the Green Lanterns and the Guardians not realizing that you can overcome fear, so having Hal Jordan come in and lecture these immortal beings about a concept a third-grader could explain is just silly. And the post-credit reveal (Sinestro donning the Fear Ring and getting his Sinestro Corps costume) is similarly terrible, because the entire movie has negated the point of Sinestro doing that in the first place: he wanted to use the Fear Ring because he was afraid standard Green Lantern rings couldn’t handle Parallax, but this comes after Hal smokes Parallax, so… why is Sinestro doing this?

(The movie also has a lot of Explainer’s Disease, which makes sense given that Geoff Johns was so involved in it. The entire concept of the Green Lantern Corps, Oa, and so forth is explained in a voiceover at the beginning of the film, which takes all the Green Lantern stuff and makes it blase by explaining it a second time for Hal’s benefit. Show, don’t tell – how is this hard?)

Anyway. It’s not bad, although the 3D version is a complete waste of time. It’s just not great, and this one, especially with the talent involved, definitely had the capacity to be great. That’s the fault of the script and nothing else.

Ghostbusters: No matter how big and wild and crazy and wonderful a job sounds, it’s probably just a job to the people who do it.

Night of the Living Dead: The biggest threat in any crisis isn’t whatever’s going wrong, it’s the stupid ways people react to it.

Up: What’s important in life isn’t whether you achieve what you set out to do, it’s whether the things you did were worth doing.

Memento: Revenge is an ultimately hollow and meaningless pursuit that makes you into a monster.

The Limey: It still beats not getting revenge.

Star Wars: Adventure reveals people’s hidden talents.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: If you’re stuck in a bad situation, it helps if you can keep your sense of humor.

Labyrinth: If you make a mistake, you have a responsibility to make it right no matter how hard it is.

Logan’s Run: It’s easy not to care about a problem until it becomes your problem too.

Blade Runner: Anyone who tries to divide the world into “us” and “them” is probably trying to justify the terrible things they do to people.

The Little Mermaid: You have to let your kids grow up, even if it means they make some really dumb mistakes.

The Wicker Man: The protections of civilization do not extend beyond civilization’s boundaries, and you forget that at your own peril.

The Ring: Just because bad things happened to someone does not automatically make them worthy of your sympathy.

The Princess Bride: Love is worth everything you have to go through for it.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Obsession can be a very dangerous thing. (Actually, this could be the ultimate message of just about every story ever.)

Aliens: Imperialism has consequences.

Spider-Man: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Donnie Darko: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Pulp Fiction: The path of wickedness might be glamorous, but it’s ultimately poisonous and destructive.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Part of growing up is dealing with the crazy fucked-up world your parents left for you.

The Birds: Sometimes bad shit just happens and all you can do is deal with it.

The Wedding Banquet: Your parents are always going to be smarter than you are.

Doctor Strangelove: People in positions of authority are no less likely to be crazy and/or stupid than the rest of us; in fact, they’re probably moreso.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Greed and selfishness are ultimately the root cause of all of society’s problems, even the ones that seem minor and unconnected.

Transformers: As long as you cram enough giant fighting robots that turn into cars and planes into your movie, it doesn’t have to mean a goddamn thing.

People have been emailing and asking me what I think about the editorial/story implications of the DC reboot (beyond obvious snark, anyway), and I’ve been resisting the urge to talk about that because the books aren’t out yet and for all I know there are 52 works of genius coming at us every month starting in August or September or whenever this happens. Which won’t be the case, obviously, because Rob Liefeld working Hawk and Dove means there will be at least one comic coming out of the reboot which will be hilariously nigh-unreadable. But that still leaves 51 books.1

But what I can say is that looking at the solicits, the reboot looks awfully like DC wanting to have its cake and eat it too.

Here’s the thing: I understand the appeal of a clean reboot. Start from scratch. Day One of the new DC Universe. This is not a bad idea: Crisis on Infinite Earths gave DC the opportunity to do so and they largely squandered it by rebooting some titles (notably the Superman books) and letting others just sort of meander onwards (Flash, for example, was a book completely rooted in what happened in Crisis) so that the result was a bit of a well-intentioned mess. A well-intentioned mess that created some really great comics, mind you, but a mess nonetheless and one that didn’t achieve DC’s goal of simplifying continuity and creating a perfect start point for new readers across the line.

DC appears to be doing this again with the reboot, where the philosophy is, so far as I can tell, “whatever’s selling well stays more or less as is, and everything else, start from scratch as we like.” This has odd results. Damian Wayne being Robin, for example, has no place in a continuity-wide reboot, because Damian is the result of years of storytelling, but worse than that is the fact that in postboot DC, all four Robins are still around, and as they do that they’re also de-aging Batman a bit, with the result that Batman will apparently have taken in Dick Grayson as his ward at the age of eighteen or so.2 Similarly, all of the various-colour Lantern Corps are sticking around, because I guess people really like Larfleeze.3

I like Damian and the various Lanterns.4 But these are things you toss in a linewide reboot: that’s the cost of doing a reboot properly. Never mind that keeping the stuff you want to keep just embitters fans who feel like they’re losing out on stuff they like on an arbitrary basis (Barbara Gordon as Oracle, Superman and Lois being married, Secret Six, and so forth); by keeping the complicated stuff that sells better, you’re losing your “this is your start point” appeal of the reboot.

I could go on about how some of the titles also don’t just “feel” like DC comics – but that’s another post for another day.5

1. Of course, the important question for DC is “can they realistically expect there to be a new audience willing to pay $150 a month to keep up with the entire DC Universe?” and the answer is “probably not, but maybe they know something I don’t.” [↩]
2. This actually isn’t that bad an idea, because face it, Bruce taking in Dick was always a sort of a stupid idea to begin with and it actually makes more sense if Bruce is young and maybe a bit headstrong in making this sort of decision. But it definitely doesn’t work so well with what DC’s idea of Batman should be. [↩]
3. Other than Larfleeze and Sinestro, does anybody at all care about any of the other various-colour Lanterns? Anybody at all? Maybe people like that Blue Lantern who looks like an elephant? I dunno. [↩]
4. Although I think the Rainbow Lanterns are almost completely out of gas at this point and in six months we’re all just going to be sick of them; after three or four years of more or less dominating DC’s storylines it was bound to happen. [↩]
5. Which will probably also involve a complaint about Superman’s terrible new costume. [↩]

Your judges are Nigel, Mary, and an embarrassing miscut to backstage Megan Mullally, who is apparently a superfan with dance history so… why not, I guess.

Jordan and Tadd: afro-jazz. Always glad to see Sean Cheeseman get work, but he can do so much more than afro-jazz. Still, the American show is all about niches. The piece was okay; the lifts were a bit laboured but Jordan and especially Tadd really seemed to find their groove as it progressed. All three judges are nonspecifically pleased.

Sasha and Alexander: contemporary. Your standard Travis, which means Mia Michaels-lite (although he’s starting to develop his own identity – but it’s kind of hyperactive, which I’m not sure I like, because when he’s better than that he’s really better than that). Sasha’s transitions here were excellent. Alexander… reminds me a lot of Robert from last season, except perhaps not with all of Robert’s technique, and Robert bored the crap out of me more often than not. Judges ding Alexander for a dull performance, but he should be fine.

Clarice and Jess: Broadway. I’m not sure if giving Jess Broadway his first week is giving him an advantage.. oh, who am I kidding, the audience eats Tasty’s stereotypical Fosse-ripoffs up with a spoon. Dull choreography, but Jess’ center is absolutely insane and Clarice reminds me greatly of Katee from season four, although of course it’s early yet (because Katee was good at everything). Judges give Jess a verbal blowjob and Nigel scolds Clarice for not being as good as Jess.

Nancy Travis Ryan and Ricky: lyrical hip-hop. The cynic in me says that they’re pushing lyrical hip-hop as a genre because the mass of contemporary dancers they get every year can’t consistently dance straight-up hip-hop well. I liked Chris Scott’s choreo, but Ryan’s performance left me cold – smiley face all the way through in what was supposed to be a “sad” routine is one thing, but her moves were just soft and although she didn’t miss anything she really didn’t hit anything either. Ricky, in comparison, did the choreo justice and then some, and that was pleasantly surprising.

Caitlyn and Mitchell Apparently An All-Star Robert: jazz. Huh, Robert. (My previous criticism of Alexander stands.) Sonya’s choreo just gets more and more repetitive with each season; she needs new tricks really, really badly. This was fine for what it was.

Miranda and Woo Man: “Latin.” Apparently “Latin” is a style now? Which is weird, because this wasn’t especially a genre-crossing dance that Jason Gilkison put together: this was ninety-five percent jive with a few swing and salsa moves (which felt horribly out of place) and would have been perfectly fine just labeled as a jive. Robert was fine; Miranda was bland and I’m not inclined to think she’ll stick around too long.

Missy and Wadi: jazz. See? Sean Cheeseman can do more than afro-jazz! Wadi is a really impressive partner: he’s athletic and strong and he looked incredibly comfortable in this, and I don’t see how he can’t be a frontrunner after this. Missy was very good and didn’t let Wadi steal the whole thing from her.

Melanie and Marko: contemporary. Obviously praised as the routine of the night, and deservedly so, but… about two-thirds of the way in, after Travis has been choreographing this simply excellent routine and avoiding all of his usual bad habits, and it’s like he just needed to let out his Travisness and be all “here’s a BIG MUSICAL MOMENT so let’s bust out the big pairs choreo” and it just felt sort of predictable in a “okay now here’s the guitar solo” portion of a 90s rock song. Which – I’m not saying it wasn’t good. It was very good. But it wasn’t perfect and it came so close, and it’s frustrating when it gets ever so nearly there. Oh, yes, Marko and Melanie were both dead-on perfect in this.

Ashley and Chris: hip-hop. They weren’t in sync for big chunks of the dance, they didn’t hit their moves hard, and they didn’t have terribly demanding choreo either. Worst routine of the night by a country mile. Judges try to soft-sell it.

Iveta and Nick: quickstep. A remarkably strong performance in one of the show’s most difficult dances: Iveta was predictably excellent and Nick was surprisingly strong, and this isn’t the first time Gilkison has choreo’d a great, entertaining quickstep either. The judges hardsell them because quickstep doesn’t draw votes sometimes, but I think it may have been unnecessary, because this was entertaining on its own right.

Predicted bottom three: Ashley and Chris, Caitlyn and Mitchell, Sasha and Alexander.
Should go home: Ashley and Chris.
Will go home: Ashley and Mitchell.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And so concludes Book Two – we are already 25 percent finished. (Or not, if I decide to eventually pace it to nine issues instead. Now I know how George R. R. Martin feels.) The entire second issue is now archived in the Al’Rashad page (button at right).

Book Three commences shortly. Tip your waiters!