Category: Reviews

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai

We all have holes in our reading, some more surprising than others. I started reading “comics” seriously about 1986, when I went off to college to a town (Poughkeepsie) with a good shop (Iron Vic’s) and bought mostly the weirdest stuff I could find on the racks at that time. There’s a lot that I’ve read since then, sometimes by following the same creators and ideas, sometimes by deliberately paying attention to new things (manga! YA! Eurocomics!). But no one can read everything – no one wants to read everything, to begin with, and it’s not physically possible now, if it ever was.

So I’ve known who Stan Saki was almost since that first trip to a comics shop in 1986 – maybe even earlier, since my kid brother might have already been reading Groo before then – but I’ve never sought out his central series Usagi Yojimbo, which started in anthologies (the old-fashioned kind, single issues published on a semi-regular schedule) in the mid-80s. As I’m writing this, I looked up the details , discovering that there are thirty-eight Usagi collections to date – well, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the end, but let’s see if I can read at least a few of them.

To make clearer my ignorance: I think the only Sakai book I’ve read – I have read his stuff in anthologies and collections, and works he contributed to but doesn’t own, to be clear – was The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy , a pre-Usagi short series of stories I saw a decade ago.

So this is a thing I could have paid attention to, and maybe should, but didn’t. And, nearly forty years later, I finally got to the beginning: Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin .

It collects eleven stories, originally published in random single issues, mostly the anthologies Albedo and Critters – all of the scattered Usagi stories from before the main series began in 1987. (This book was also published in 1987, back in the era when trade paperbacks were random and occasional rather than the expected next step of every series. That’s a sign of the initial interest or importance of Usagi, I think.)

The stories are episodic, but the world and backstory is clear from the beginning – it’s an anthropomorphic version of late Edo-era Japan, with different clans and groups drawn as different animals. Our hero is Miyamoto Usagi, a rabbit samurai formerly in the service of an (I think unnamed) lord who was betrayed by one of his generals at the battle of Adachigahara and died there. Usagi now wanders the country, working as a bodyguard (Yojimbo). I gather Lord Hikiji, the evil feudal leader who betrayed Usagi’s master, is the major background antagonist of the series, and he shows up here, both in person and through his minions.

So this book is a mixture of early world-building – the very first story tells us the story of Adachigahara in flashback – and random wanderings, which I gather stays the pattern of the series throughout, with longer stories that seem to fall into both categories (“mythology” and “monster of the week,” to use not-quite-accurate borrowed terms).

The art is crisp and clear from the beginning, though some angles (especially Usagi looking up) and some of the smaller panels of battle scenes are not as clear as I might like – these are shorter stories, that likely had page limits, and Sakai was trying to tell expansive stories from the beginning. 

I often have a quizzical reaction to anthropomorphic stories – wondering why that style was chosen, and if there are world-building hints buried in the choice of creatures – but this seems to be the old, traditional style of anthropomorphism: the creator’s style aims this way, he’s leaning into it, and that’s all it means. The style is slightly disjoint from the bloody, mostly serious and mostly historical matter, but that doesn’t seem to be meant as a source of irony: it’s just the way Sakai tells stories.

These are good stories, though they seem somewhat derivative (of samurai movies, mostly) at this point in the series’ history. That’s not a fatal flaw – lots of things are derivative, maybe most things – but it is pretty central. On the other hand, going in any reader knows this is a long-running comic about a rabbit samurai, so all of the potential deal-breakers are right up front. The good news is that it was strong and assured from the first page: if you are interested in rabbit-samurai stories, you can start with Book 1 very easily.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest

Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest (Phenomena Book 2)

By Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima Araújo

Abrams ComicArts/156 pages/$24.99

It has to be said that writer Brian Michael Bendis rarely, if ever, repeats himself. His Ultimate Spider-Man is unlike his New Avengers, which is nothing like his Legion of Super-Heroes, his self-created Takio, or Murder Inc. He is incredibly prolific and highly original, with a gift for dialogue and character that always makes his stories engaging.

Here, he and André Lima Araújo have created a new science fiction world and populated it with all manner of organic and technological wonder. In 2022, we first met the trio of hotheaded Boldon, the outcast Matilde, and Spike and their exploits on a nearly unrecognizable Earth. An event dubbed the Phenomena, something shrouded in mystery, resulted in a towering wall separating two warring cultures.

In book one, The Golden City of Eyes, the protagonists meet and unite for the common good despite their drastic differences. They have traveled through several villages, and with each adventure, their legend begins to grow. As they arrive at Valentia Verona, once London, they must confront their legacy, and here, Bendis explores just whose story it is. Boldon complains that storytellers are stealing his story, but its enduring nature provides some new lessons.

The first volume was a little off-putting and confusing with the races and worldbuilding. Here, everything is put in its proper context, a neat feat considering all the new characters introduced. From the title, you know it’s Matilde’s story, and she proves to be an endearing figure, especially after she crosses the wall and confronts the enemy with a simple question.

Araújo (A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance) provides impressive black-and-white artwork that switches from the intimate to the magnificent, opening up this new Earth in interesting ways. All the characters are well-delineated, and his line work is intricate and appealing.

This clearly is the second volume in a trilogy, with Boldon’s story yet to be explored. This volume works fine on its own, but is a strong second chapter in this series.

One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka

It’s tough to be a fan of someone when you’re not quite sure what aspect of their work you’re a fan of. I read a big bunch of Osamu Tezuka books, mostly published by Vertical, more than a decade ago – MW, Ayako , Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, a few others – and liked them all a lot. They were smart, sophisticated, serious books for adults, with a striking depth of expression and focused imaginative power.

Vertical might have published everything Tezuka did in that vein; I really don’t know. But I haven’t seen anything else similar from Tezuka in my scattered reading since then. The latest attempt was One Hundred Tales , originally published in Shonen Jump magazine in installments in 1971 under the title Hyaku Monogatari and translated by Iyasu Adair Nagata for this 2023 Ablaze edition. (It was part of a series called “Lion Books” that some awkwardly-worded backmatter in the this book attempts to explain, but doesn’t do a great job of – they don’t seem to have been “books” in the first place, but multiple-segment manga stories published in SJ; the narrative slides from talking about this series to other manga projects to anime projects without a whole lot of clarity; and there’s no explanation of what “Lion” is meant to mean in this context.)

Tales is, I think, part of the main flow of Tezuka’s career, the huge flood of stories mostly for teen (and younger) boys that he created for so long at such volume. There are elements that resonate with adults, but it’s mostly an adventure story with minor pretentions of philosophical depth, with the usual random Tezuka comic relief and contemporary cultural references thrown in willy-nilly.

The title makes it sound like a retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it’s actually a loose retelling of Faust, set in a vaguely historical-fantasy Japanese setting. The main character is a mousy accountant/samurai (shades of “Office? Submarine!” ), Ichiru Hanri, sentenced to commit ritual suicide for his very minor role in a coup plot against his feudal lord. He doesn’t want to die, and offers his soul if he can survive – so a demon (yokai, more accurately) in the form of a beautiful woman, Sudama, offers to buy his soul in exchange for three wishes.

Ichiru wishes to live his life over again, to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and to rule his own country and castle. And so the episodic story moves forward – first Sudama makes Ichiru young and handsome, then he visits (in his new face and under an assumed name) his horrible wife and lovely young daughter, then he chases his choice for most beautiful woman (Tamano no Mae, a powerful yokai) with no good result, then has the requisite training montage to become a stronger and better sword-fighter, and finally spends the back half of the story working for another minor feudal lord, massively enriching that lord and then overthrowing him.

It’s all pretty zig-zag. It does add up to a coherent story, but it only maps to the wishes fairly loosely. Sudama is also vastly more “helpful attractive supernatural woman” than she is “powerful scary demon” – the Faust parallels are mostly superficial, and drop away for the required happy ending.

Tezuka was an energetic cartoonist – sometimes too much so, to my eye, since this book starts off with Ichiru in full comic-relief mode, all goofy panic and silly faces, and the tide of comic relief comes in several more times as the book goes on. But, if you think of this as an adventure story made very quickly for publication in a massive weekly comics magazine for boys – which is exactly what it is – it’s admirable and pretty accomplished in that context.

Whether that context is enough to overcome the negatives is up to every reader to decide. Tezuka is a world-renowned creator of stories in comics form, but his standard mode is very idiosyncratic and very tied to the specifics of the Japanese market and audience at the time.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Contagion

In 2011, I watched Contagion and found it a gripping thriller with an all-star cast–Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan, and Gwyneth Paltrow–then promptly stopped thinking about it. I was, though, reminded of it in 2021 when the global pandemic became a reality.

And yet, Warner Home Entertainment skipped the obvious 10th anniversary in favor of finally releasing the 4K Ultra HD edition. It’s a stunning disc and well worth your attention.

From director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns, we have a now-eerily familiar situation that a weary world is hardly prepared for. As the camera casually pans across the empty spaces and we see only masked faces, it feels more like memory than fiction. We can admire how accurately they projected what a modern pandemic might be like and you would have thought more people would have paid attention back then and made us all better prepared for what is now clearly the inevitable.

PR executive Beth Emhoff (Paltrow), returns from Asia, and brings with her a disease that was already spreading. A flashback at the end shows how it all innocently started with…a bat. Her husband, Damon, is the character we follow through the various lot threads as the world rapidly spirals out of control. Dr. Leonora Orantes, Cotillard’s WHO epidemiologist, comes from Europe to study the disease and her outsider status rubs people the wrong way and also is discordant with the rest of the narrative.

We’re far enough away from our real-world life-changing circumstances to once again watch the film, but with fresh eyes and knowing nods of the head. Overall, it’s a compelling story with many strong performances.

The studio’s 2160p/HDR10 transfer is superb and an improvement over the previous Blu-ray edition. The DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix is fine, although can’t keep up with the visual. Not that most of us would notice.

The release offers just the 4K and a Digital HD code, repackaging the 2012 special features while adding nothing new, which is a missed opportunity.  For the record, these include The Reality of Contagion (11:00), The Contagion Detectives (5:00), and How a Virus Changes the World (2:00).

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it’s personal; for others, it’s public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it’s both, intertwined.

Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town where she and her brother were  the only people at all like them. Her mother Rose is mixed-race, born in tumultuous 1950 Shanghai to a Swiss diplomat who had already run back home before the birth and a Chinese journalist, Sun Yi, who thought she could weather any storm.

Hulls tells the story of all three women, over the last hundred years, in Feeding Ghosts , a magnificent, impressive first graphic novel all about the ways Tessa and Rose, and Sun Yi before them, are haunted by history.

Hulls is the one telling the story, and that frames it all: she has those core American concerns of “who am I?” and “where did I come from?” Making it more complicated, she’s here exploring her Chinese identity as the daughter of two generations of Chinese women who had children with European men, and as someone raised in America entirely in the English language.

One more thing: one very big thing. Sun Yi was moderately famous: she escaped China for Hong Kong in the late 1950s, when Rose was a child, and wrote a scandalous memoir of her life under the Communist upheavals of the previous decade. She got her daughter, Rose, accepted into a very highly regarded boarding school in Hong Kong, despite not really having the money to pay for it. And then she mentally collapsed. Sun Yi spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals and was eventually cared for by her daughter in America starting in 1977, when Rose was 27. Rose spent her teen years in that boarding school, alternately worrying about her mother’s care and being molded to be part of an internationalist elite. And then Rose fled to America, first for college, then for a brief nomadic freedom that her daughter would eventually emulate.

Let me pull that all together: Tessa Hulls, whom a lot of Americans would cruelly call “one-quarter Chinese,” grew up in a town with no other Chinese people. Just a mother, quirky and specific and tightly controlled, the kind of mother who has Rules for everything that are rarely said explicitly, never explained, seemingly arbitrary, and core to her concept of the world. And a grandmother, trapped in her own head, scribbling every day as if she was eternally re-writing that famous memoir, and speaking only the smallest bits of broken English. That mother and grandmother spoke a different language together – I think mostly the dialect of Shanghai – which they never taught Tessa. “Chinese” was that language, that mysterious past, the symbol for all that was hidden and frightening and different for Hulls growing up.

Hulls has a lot to get through in Feeding Ghosts: a lot of family history and related world history, a lot of nuance and cultural detail that she learned as she was researching her family’s past. She tells it all mostly in sequence, after a brief prologue, but “Tessa Hulls” is present throughout, our narrator and filter, the voice telling us how she learned the story almost as much as she tells the story itself. This is a story unearthed and told, not something pretending to be purely dry and factual. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s primarily about Tessa’s journey, how she decided to figure out this tangled knot of her family history, to do it with her mother as much as possible, to reconcile the two of them and try to come to a place here they could better meet and understand each other.

Hull’s pages are organic, specific, inky. She uses swirling white outlines on a black background as a visual element regularly – the pull of all of those ghosts, if you want to be reductive – to open and close chapters, and more subtly in the backgrounds of fraught moments.

One of the hallmarks of a great big book is that it leaves you wanting to know more. I was enthralled by the stories of young Sun Yi and Rose, and how Tessa learned what they did and what it meant. (The latter is the more important thing, in an ancient, rule-bound, formalistic society like China – maybe even more so in a time of such transition and upheaval as the early Communist years.) But I felt that she was less forthcoming about her own youth. This is very much a story of these three women, but I wondered about other figures: Hulls’s father is almost entirely absent, signposted as a British man with a thicker accent than Rose and seen only a handful of times. And Tessa’s brother, just one year older, growing up in this same house and environment, is even less present – did he feel any of these pressures? Or was this so much a matrilineal thing, tied into those cultural assumptions of what men and women do, that he was able to “be American” in ways more closed to Tessa?

But that’s not the story Hulls is telling. And every story casts shadows: the story that-is dimly showing flickers of other stories that could have been, or might yet be. The brightest, most brilliant stories cast the clearest shadows – that may be why I wonder so much about Hull’s father and brother; they’re dark, mysterious shadows just outside the circle of these three women, brilliantly illuminated and seen in depth.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Michael T. Gilbert’s The Complete Wraith!

Sometimes there’s a creator whose work you like, and you keep checking to see if they have anything new, and they just don’t. For a decade or two. You’re pretty sure they’re still out there, and you hope they’re doing something fun and interesting. You may have the secret hope, most famously centered around J.D. Salinger, that the creator is just piling up lots of Good Stuff, kept unpublished for idiosyncratic reasons, and you will eventually get to see all of that on some glorious future day.

Michael T. Gilbert is one of those, for me. I liked his Mr. Monster stories both in the ’80s, with goofy, near-parody humor/horror style, and in the ’90s, when he retooled in a more serious mode for an “Origins” series. And I gather he’s had some random Mr. Monster stories since then, but nothing regular. I keep hoping there will be a book, since I mostly read books these days, but that seems unlikely. (I gather most of Gilbert’s comics work for the last two decades has been scripting Disney comics for European publishers – nice work if you can get it, but apparently completely unseen in his own homeland.)

But I did just see Michael T. Gilbert’s The Complete Wraith! , which collects the major work he did before Mr. Monster, in the late ’70s. And I’ll take what I can get.

Wraith is an anthropomorphic version of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, created as such to be a feature in the all-anthropomorphic anthology series Quack! in 1976. Quack! had six issues, with eight Wraith stories, over the next two years, and there was one more Wraith story in a 1982 solo Gilbert comic – add in a new comics introduction featuring Mr. Monster, some explanatory text-and-photo pieces between the stories, and extensive story notes from Gilbert, and you have this book. It’s designed well, and showcases what does seem to be the entirely complete Wraith: it’s a model of what a book like this should be.

On the story side, Gilbert is very clearly aping Eisner, in story structure, twists, ironic reversals, and even cast. That’s not a bad model, since Eisner’s Spirit was a lot more ambitious than it might look, and Gilbert is always entertaining here, even if not all of the stories make full use of the Eisnerian materials.

Gilbert was already experimenting with washes and Craftint and other texture and background effects that I can’t really describe adequately – I’m no artist, or a serious scholar of comics art. But his pages, even at the very beginning of this book, were carefully constructed, from panel layout to art tools to textures, and towards the middle of the book, it begins to look pretty much the same as Gilbert’s mature Mr. Monster style. (And, aside from the first story, which is pretty thin, the storytelling holds up as well, too – they’re short kicker stories about a dog adventurer in an Eisnerian world, admittedly, but they do good work within that tight structure.)

This is a fun ’70s exercise, collecting energetic work from a then-young creator working out some of his influences and seeing how different kinds of stories can work on paper for him. It’s not a lost classic, and the tone is pretty different from both Mr. Monster eras, for anyone looking for more of that. Oh, and he gets testy if you call him “Wrath,” which I expect a lot of readers did. With that in mind, this is a lot of fun, presented in a well-made package.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Fall Through

Fall Through

By Nate Powell

Abrams ComicArts, 192 pages, $24.99

Artist Nate Powell gained international acclaim for his work on the March trilogy of graphic novels recounting the life and career of the much-missed John Lewis. However, he is more than just that; he’s an acclaimed writer/artist, as seen in the just-released Fall Through.

Powell is celebrating the punk aesthetic from the late 1970s and early 1980s, set somewhere between the Ramones and the arrival of the New Wave sound. It’s a narrow slice of music history since the beloved Ramones started in 1974, and New Wave may have first appeared with the Talking Heads in 1977, a year before part of this story is set. He traces the rise of Diamond Mine, a small quartet that struggles to get from gig to gig as they attempt to be Arkansas’ first punk band.

While that would have been interesting enough for a story, he layers on the fact that they have crafted a song that propels them through time and space to alternate realities and it then becomes a search for home. They arrive in 1994 and want to get back to 1978 without a pair of silver slippers in sight.While the marketing calls it “Love and Rockets meets Russian Doll”,  I call it needlessly confusing. Powell vividly presents the power of music, adding in a layer of lightning to accompany their thrashing. It’s a visually interesting story if the narrative doesn’t quite connect.Of the four characters, vocalist Diana is perhaps the best delineated. It’s her powerful song “Fall Through” that sends them everywhere. Interestingly, this isn’t her story, but it’s Jody, the band’s bassist, who emerges as the protagonist. With the encouragement of her father, she leaves home with her bass, and hooks up with the others, forming the group. Unfortunately, she’s not particularly well-defined, and the other members of the band, Napoleon and Steff, come across with barely acknowledged wants and needs. We get glimpses of what’s on her mind through her tour diary, which spaces six weeks for her, and years for everyone else.

I don’t mind a good circular story (I really enjoy Russian Doll), but visually, it’s hard to parse which reality we’re in or what time period. Had Powell stuck with the punk community the band encounters across the country and the power of music. This could have been a significantly stronger narrative.

REVIEW: Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar

Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar very much wants to be one of the plethora of low-budget 1970s knock offs of Star Wars riding the comet tail of that phenomenon. It’s just not bad enough to be lumped in with Bartle Beyond the Stars or the 3-D mess of Spacehunters. Nor is it good enough to be a thoughtful low-budget meditation on the soul. It falls in between and is quickly forgotten the moment you turn off the DVD of the 2022 release, out now from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Late in the 30th century, mankind has somehow managed to survive the contemporary mess we’ve made of ourselves and has even managed to find a way to preserve the human soul, reducing it to a blue goo. The catch is that it’s expensive, so only the top 1% of the 1% can afford it, although starship captain Kip Corman (Michael Paré), a scavenger eking out a living, won’t let that stop him. He’s recently lost his wife and wants her essence poured into an android. With his daughter Taylor (Sarah French), they search for credits and the legendary Deepstar, where his salvation awaits.

This quest occupies the bulk of the film, as any story adhering to the three-act structure demands, and here there are some interesting obstacles, such as pirate Dykstra (Olivier Gruner). They even encounter an interesting scientist, Jackie (Anahit Setian), who promises them the starship’s location in exchange for their protection.

Based on what we’re shown, the future is shinier but nowhere near as advanced as one would have hoped. The costumes and sets are okay while the CGI effects get the job done.

Paré was on the cusp of stardom in the 80s with features like the underrated Streets of Fire, and here, he’s an older but engaging leading man. The relationship between him and French show some genuine warmth. However, they’re stuck with mediocre dialogue from Joe Knetter and Garo Setian, with the latter directing in an adequate, if unimaginative, manner. The rest of the cast are less talented and without stronger material to work from, fill the screen, and keep things moving.

The film is available as a DVD only and comes with a fine 1080p digital transfer and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio track. Neither are great, nor do they need to be given the content.

There are a reasonable number of Special Features including Commentary from director Garo Setian, screenwriter Joe Knetter, and stars Anahit Setian and Sarah French. Additionally, there are four Deleted Scenes (5:29), the inevitable Bloopers (4:15), and the Trailer (1:34).

REVIEW: The End we Start From

Climate change has become the Go To dystopia for stories these days, each with an apocalyptic feel, showing little hope for humanity. Paramount released the film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s novel The End We Start From, the latest such installment, in December. Now available for streaming rental, the film, starring Jodie Comer, explores the aftermath of such a climate incident.

Water rushes from the skies, flooding ensures, and soon towns and cut off and cities can’t cope. England is submerged (the rest of the world’s fate is left up in the air) and the Woman (Comer), finds herself giving birth without any of the usual medical support. When we first see her, she’s in a bathtub as the rains fall outside so there’s no escape. The graphic birth shows the stakes she  and her partner R (Joel Fry) face in not only their survival but of the infant.

Thankfully, they make it out of London and are briefly ensconced in his parent’s home in a village located on higher ground. But supply chains have been wrecked, food and tempers run short, and they find themselves separated.

What follows is a largely episodic film, directed by Mahalia Belo, from Alice Birch’s script, following Woman’s struggle to stay sheltered and keep the infant safe. Along the way, she finds O (Katherine Waterston), with her own two-month-old. They bond and work to survive together against increasingly bleak odds.

There is an almost monotonous pacing to the film, as we see man’s humanity toward fellow man, leavened here and there with genuine acts of kindness. Still, so much of the emotional weight is carried by Comer, who gives a strong performance There is conflict, but nothing she can’t seem to navigate so she’s not challenged and we’re left lulled.

We never get to know Woman, or her relationship with R. Her friendship with O is the warmest part of the narrative, set against gray skies and damp environs. She survives, which isn’t a spoiler, but the world she is left to raise her child in is a cautionary one.

 

REVIEW: Special Ops: Lioness

Paramount+ was called, by some, the Star Trek channel when it first launched, but it rapidly was changed to the Taylor Sheridan channel, as his various series fuel their original programming slate. Thankfully, they are different and distinct, each with its own genre.

After conquering the modern and historic Western, he gave us the gritty Mayor of Kingstown and Sly Stallone’s Tulsa King. Then, this fall, came Special Ops: Lioness, an international espionage story that was (finally) female-centric.

The premise for the ten-episode show is based on a real CIA program, “Team Lioness,” from a Marine Corps program, “created to grant the Marine Corps closer access to women involved in potential terrorist plots,” according to Collider. The female Marines could search for potential female threats and form bonds in Iran and Afghanistan that their religious beliefs kept them apart from men.

Sheridan took things one step further, with the Lioness team actually embedding a Marine, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), close to an Iranian daughter of their target, the moneyman behind Iran’s terrorist activities. Each team had a searcher and a guardian angel, with the latter being the hardened Joe (Zoe Saldaña), and her support troops.

There is a tense relationship between Manuelos, who had a hard life before enlisting, and Joe, who distances herself from her husband (David Anabele) and two daughters. Who watches the watcher? The ubiquitous Nicole Kidman fills that role back at Langley, and she reports to Morgan Freeman, so the cast is stellar.

The story traces Manuelos’ recruitment into the program and hurried training, and then we see her befriend the mark, Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur), about to be married, bringing her elusive father into the public eye (and target scope of Manuelos’ rifle, they hope).

There are some digressions that feel like filler to stretch out the story and tension across the episodes. Still, the domestic and international stories are riveting, and Sheridan’s hallmark of never leaving his characters undamaged effectively continues here. Manuelos’s arc is the most compelling as she is pushed way beyond her comfort zone, forming a social and then romantic entanglement with Aaliyah.

The series may or may not be back for a second go, but Paramount Home Entertainment has released Special Ops: Lioness Season One in a three-disc Blu-ray package. No 4K or digital HD code, but each disc has special features.

The 1080p digital transfer is fine, if unspectacular, good for home viewing. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack is an equal match.

As for the features, on the first disc you get Behind the Story: Sacrificial Soldiers (7:21), The Beating (7:14), and Bruise Like a Fist (4:11). On disc two: The Choice of Failure (6:16), Truth Is the Shrewdest Lie (4:29), and The Lie Is the Truth (7:43); and on disc three: Wish the Fight Away (7:25) and Gone Is the Illusion of Order (7:30). There is also Embedded with Special Ops: Lioness (21:38), a behind-the-scenes exploration, Battle Forged Calm: Tactics & Training (9:02), and Inside the Series (19:00) with LaMonica Garrett, who plays Tucker, leading us through more background.

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