Short Reviews 25Q4
Fourth Quarter 2025
Being a list of brief notes on other culture consumed over the this quarter of the year that I either abandoned or don’t feel needs a longer discussion.
Exit Strategy - Martha Wells. Continuing the re-read prompted by the Apple TV series. Things are getting slightly repetitive here, there's lots of running around on space stations, taking over feeds and wiping security cameras, all of which we have seen before. It is still quite exciting though, and the odd throwaway observations on human behaviour are priceless - my favourite “how humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis is beyond me”. It's nice to catch up with our Preservation Alliance friends again and I'm happy for Murderbot that he gets to relax and chill at the end while he contemplates his next move.
Task - Sky Atlantic. Mistook this for a reality show based on the title but closer inspection revealed Mark Ruffalo as a washed up FBI agent with a dysfunctional relationship with his daughter and a gang of trash collectors who use their trash collecting wiles to identify crack houses worth knocking off. Presumably these two threads will combine at some point but for the first episode we largely follow the two main protagonists and their challenging family lives, through which they both remain cheerful and positive and thus not black and white but drawn with more realistic shades of gray. A slow start that didn't get any more dynamic and for much of the time descended into a fog of mumbling. Also seems to be getting darker, with scary biker gangs and child abduction. Not sure I'm going to like where this is going. Abandoned.