Its The End, But... Star Trek Discovery season 1

(SPOILERS, very obviously...)

I didn't think Cadet Tilly could be more endearing than when she said “Fuck” on screen but then she opened a conversation with “I'm really high...” having inhaled groovy volcanic ash with an Orion.

On a more serious note there was something about this episode that made it feel we were getting back to Star Trek being Star Trek. They ended a very action heavy and shooty season with an unconventional negotiated peace and a speech about facing fear and second chances. Between this and booting Evil Lorca into an artificial sun a couple of episodes ago it feels like the production team were very consciously bending the format up to breaking point before jettisoning the very things that were breaking it.

Not that I hated the series before now, far from it, I adored this run (DS9 is my favourite Star Trek so that probably tells you why).

And just to push the point home, in the final moments of the episode, the Enterprise turns up. This was either a very good idea or a very bad idea depending on how (or if) this plays out at the start of the next season.

On the one hand this series has spent so much time establishing its own style and soul that I'd hate for it to open its second season with fanservice. Yes, even if it gets us Michael and Spock interacting at last, though I admit I'm not clear on whether Spock would be on Enterprise at this stage. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see an extended take on the character of Captain Pike beyond the stern father figure the reboot movies had Kirk projecting all his sudden daddy issues onto.

Eh, we'll see.

As a last note, I am obscurely glad that Michael is reinstated as a science officer instead of just returning to the command track. I don't doubt part of the logic is that no way is Starfleet so forgiving as to put the woman who started a war anywhere near the centre seat but it is also probably meant to speak to development on Michael's part. I like the idea that she's returning to science and exploring the wonder of the universe after all this slaughter.

Also it means Saru still has a job since for some reason they decided not to make him captain, which is a pity. I absolutely think Doug Jones could carry the role and the way Saru has developed over the last few episodes into a more confident leader.

Also, just to place my bets now, I fully expect the Prime Universe version of Lorca (or the Mirror Universe version of Tilly) to make an appearance around about the mid-season break in the next run. 

It's The End, But... Batman Incorporated v.2

It seems odd to say this of the last hold over from the pre-Flashpoint DCU but it really was the perfect example of what a New 52 series should be.

Okay... back up... explain the assertion, James. To put it simply: compared to the rest of the New 52 this series was off in fairyland half the time. Try to reconcile half the characters in this with the rest of the present DCU and this is thrown into stark relief: Jason Todd as Wingman has nothing to do with events in Red Hood And The Outlaws; Red Robin is so much closer to the Bat-family than Teen Titans suggests; Batwing is from “Mtamba” not the Congo; and the Outsiders don't seem to exist at all outside this series.

And I couldn't care less. This series told a tight, self-contained and thoroughly entertaining story. Despite using a lot of iconography from Morrison's previous work on the franchise (Talia's Man-Bat Commandos; the apocalyptic future where Damian is Batman) and obscure relics from the past (the Kathy Kane Batwoman) it really didn't rely on continuity all that much. A doubly impressive feat since the series was consciously and explicitly the pay-off to all of Morrison's Batman series.

In effect this series was Grant Morrison writing the All-Star series Batman deserved instead of the insane trainwreck Frank Miller half-produced.

The series had some very cool nods to the past. My personal favourite was resurrecting Bruce Wayne's down-at-heel gangster alter ego Matches Malone. They were nods, though, and this wasn't a story about that past, as much nostalgia as Morrison clearly has for it. History here is a menu to choose from rather than a strict order of published events not to be contradicted.

It helps that this was probably the most linear and accessible series I've seen from Morrison since, well... All-Star Superman, I should think. Action Comics, Final Crisis and even the end of the first Batman, Inc. series all played around with complex and sometimes unreliable narrative structures. This was, beginning to end, the story of Batman having the final confrontation with Talia al Ghul that had been building since Morrison entered the scene with Batman And Son. It was a refreshing change of pace.

Given all this, it was right and proper that Morrison got to kill off Damian. Characters don't belong to people in work-for-hire comics but when he died it did feel like this was the pay-off to Damian's introduction and that all those other stories other writers told in the interim served their purpose in making us care all the more when the poor, ill-treated boy finally snuffed it.