Favorite Fictional Character --- Philippa Georgiou

 

Since I’m almost finished with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, tonight felt like the perfect time to post about my favorite character from the show that came before it, Star Trek: Discovery.

I knew exactly who I wanted to feature. I even started typing her name in the title — then I changed my mind. Not because I didn’t want to write about her. I did. Promise. But someone else kept whispering that she should be the one instead. Smarter. Stronger. More interesting than anyone else on the show. She also insisted on being given the deference and respect her status as a former Emperor of the Terran Empire allows.

Honestly, it’s probably for the best. Even though Discovery isn’t my favorite — that honor still belongs to Star Trek: Enterprise — it has a lot of characters I really enjoyed. Given that, I think April might be the month I focus entirely on my favorite members of the Discovery crew.

So, before she decides to take me out, may I present Philippa Georgiou: Starfleet captain, Terran Emperor, Section 31 agent, time traveler, and one of the most complicated characters I’ve come across in science fiction — or any genre, for that matter.

When viewers first meet her, she’s the wise, compassionate captain of the USS Shenzhou. We don’t get nearly enough time with her before she’s killed by the Klingons.

The second meeting doesn’t go as well.

This time, she’s the despotic Emperor of the Terran Empire in a mirror universe defined by cruelty and violence — a world where a daughter might kill her mother for not being bloodthirsty enough. When she’s pulled into our reality, that’s when things really get interesting.

She is not a nice person. She’s arrogant, vain, selfish, and lethal, with the empathy of the devil himself. She’s probably responsible for more deaths than any other main character in Star Trek. And yet, I can’t help but love her.

As the series progresses, those edges soften — just slightly. She begins to experience doubt and uncertainty, maybe for the first time in her life. There are flashes of regret. Moments — brief, almost imperceptible — where something like compassion slips through. And if anyone notices, the sharp tongue comes right back out to put them in their place.

Philippa is all of those things. But she’s also someone capable of loving one person so fiercely that she allows herself to change just enough not to lose them. It may be selfish, but it’s also nuanced — and, in its own way, self-sacrificing.

And the fact that Michelle Yeoh was never nominated for an Emmy for this role is a travesty.

What I'm Currently Reading

 

A Plague on Both Your Houses by Susanna Gregory is a historical mystery set in 1348 Cambridge, at the start of the Black Death. I’ve been trying to remember what put this book on my radar, as it’s not something I would normally pick up, but I am enjoying it so far.

Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono is a collection of short stories she wrote between 1961 and 1971. I picked this up because a character in another book I was reading was reading it. Don’t ask me which book, because I truly don’t remember. I’m enjoying it, but I do feel like I’m missing something by not being able to read it in the original Japanese.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is one I’m still reading, as I’m deliberately taking my time with it because I want to relish every moment.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is the other one I’m taking my time with — mostly because every time I pick it up, I read a page or two, lose interest, and put it right back down. Maybe I’ll finish it by December.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

 

Synopsis From Dust Jacket:

In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapists in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynette's worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart, piece by piece. 

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up. 

The very first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Dawn of the Dead. My mom loved it, so when it was rereleased years later, she took me along. I saw Creepshow at the drive-in, but had to turn around and watch The Sword in the Stone on another screen during one particular scene that will remain unspoken.

I grew up on horror: Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. These weren’t just movies, they were lessons in survival, in what it means to be the one who makes it out. One of the first movies I saw on my own was Bad Dreams, and that giant fan scene has lived rent-free in my brain ever since, a moment I still haven’t quite shaken.

I’m laying all of this out so you understand exactly where I’m coming from. I loved The Final Girl Support Group.

This book reads like the twisted sequel to every slasher I’ve ever seen — not the movies themselves, but what happens after the credits roll. The five women at its center survived everything the genre throws at you: summer camp massacres, sorority house bloodbaths, a home invasion that wiped out an entire family, miles of road turned into a moving nightmare. And then there’s Lynette — the book’s version of Laurie Strode — a woman shaped by a killer who tore through her town and left her to live in the aftermath. If you’ve seen the recent Halloween trilogy, you already understand what that kind of survival does to a person.

In the wrong hands, this could have been a straightforward slasher novel, something predictable, something easy to put down. In the hands of Grady Hendrix, it becomes something sharper and more deliberate. He shifts the focus from the violence itself to what lingers after it, memory, damage, and the way the past refuses to stay buried.

Because if horror teaches you anything, it’s that the past is never really dead.

Challenges: Cloak and Dagger 

Favorite Fictional Character --- Lexington

 

It may be telling that so many of the fictional characters I've been featuring over the last several months come from cartoons. After books, cartoons were where I could get lost in storytelling, forgetting everything else going on in my life — think safety blanket, or blankie for short. As I got older, that dependency shifted into something else. Cartoons became a source of enjoyment first, escapism second. So yeah, I was still watching cartoons in high school.

And while I’m not going through a ton right now, there are a lot of changes at work, and I’m having to challenge myself and what I want moving forward, which is causing a little more stress than usual. That’s probably what’s led me back to revisiting the cartoons from my youth.

Today’s character is from a cartoon that debuted in 1994, the same year I graduated from high school, and I adored him from the beginning. For those of you unfamiliar with Gargoyles, the show follows a Scottish clan of gargoyles who find themselves magically transported from the tenth century to modern-day New York, or at least what was modern day three decades ago. They’re charged with protecting the city from threats, both old and new.

Lexington, the tiny green one, grabbed onto this new opportunity with gusto. He was fascinated by modern technology and dove into it headfirst. He taught himself so well he became a hacker extraordinaire, able to break into almost any security system. He also enjoys the fun side of tech, especially video games. If you need a new motorcycle, he can build one for you — just don’t let him test drive it.

Of all the clan, Lexington adapted to his new reality the quickest, and I think I loved him so much because I hoped some of his openness to new environments would rub off on me, especially as I was preparing to move out of state for college. I’m not sure it did, but I appreciated the inspiration all the same.

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

 

Synopsis From Dust Jacket:

After the terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine, and sunshine, but instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themselves heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia. 

In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns, but when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell something is not quite right in their home...or in their dreams. 

Let me tell you a story, and if it gets too long, you can skip it. Promise. One of the few places my mom stopped long enough, as we moved more times than I can count — pre-carnival years — was Salem, OR. We lived there for at least a full year before moving further north, but that’s not the story. The house we lived in is.

It was a yellowish beige house on the corner of State St. and some random street I don’t remember the name of. It dead-ended at a railroad track, if that helps anyone place it. Salem wasn’t the safest area to live in the mid-1980s, and our neighborhood was pretty rough… but that’s not really the point.

This little, unassuming house was odd from the start. I had never sleepwalked before, but I started within the first week of living there. The attic opened into the garage, and if you threw a rock up there, it came back down a few minutes later. My mom kept our dog in the garage — not the attic — and it would go absolutely insane, barking up at the attic like its soul was in jeopardy.

One night, some kids from the neighborhood were spending the night, camped out in the living room, when we all heard what sounded like a power saw starting up in the attic. There wasn’t a kid there who didn’t bolt for home. Then there’s the time I watched a crutch travel across a wall in my mom’s bedroom. That one stuck with me.

Needless to say, my mom did a little digging, and while I won’t go into the details, that house had every right to be haunted.

I’m not here to convince you that ghosts are real or that haunted houses exist. I’m just telling you all of that so you understand why I love haunted house stories as much as I do. You’d think an experience like that would’ve sent me running in the opposite direction, but it did the exact opposite. I can’t get enough of them — especially when they lean more Gothic, like What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher.

When I realized the sequel to What Moves the Dead was set in a haunted hunting lodge, I was basically screaming in delight like a six-year-old at a My Little Pony birthday party.

I loved What Moves the Dead so much that, despite all that excitement, I was a little hesitant going into this one. I was worried a second outing with Alex — which still somehow doesn’t involve us sitting down for tea — wouldn’t live up to my probably overinflated expectations.

Thankfully, Kingfisher didn’t let me down. I enjoyed the hell out of this.

I tore through this in one sitting, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get under my skin a little. There’s a slow, suffocating dread here that just keeps building until you realize you’ve been holding your breath right along with Alex. That dread comes through most in how the haunting itself plays out.

The way she crafts this haunting genuinely got under my skin. Alex is attacked by a vengeful spirit that literally steals their breath as they sleep, slowly wearing down their already fever-racked body. And as if that isn’t bad enough, they’re trapped in a nightmarish dreamscape that forces them to relive the worst atrocities they experienced during the war — along with all the guilt and regret that comes with it. To fight back, Alex has to work through those memories head-on instead of avoiding them, which makes this feel more personal.

Maybe that’s why this worked so well for me. That house in Salem never really left me — that feeling that something is there, just out of sight, but very real. This book taps into that same kind of quiet, creeping dread.

Some haunted houses try to scare you.

This one feels a little too much like home.

Favorite Fictional Character --- Captain Caveman

 

"Caaaptain Caaaavemaaaan!"

I was that kid who would plop himself down on his grandparents’ living room floor — even when they had brand new white carpet — turn on the USA Network, and get lost in USA Cartoon Express for an hour or two, depending on the day. The vast majority of the cartoons came out in the 1970s, but that never mattered to me. I could watch Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Herculoids, Thundarr the Barbarian, Space Ghost, Jabberjaw, and the rest of the gang just as easily as I watched newer shows like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, Shirt Tales, Kissyfur, and The Wuzzles. If it was a cartoon, I was all in. It didn’t matter how old it was or when it originally aired — if it was animated, it had my full attention.

One of the shows I loved most was Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels. If you’ve never seen it, think a mix of Scooby-Doo and Charlie’s Angels, with the addition of a caveman accidentally thawed from a block of ice by three teen girls. Cavey quickly joins them, and before long, he’s right there alongside Dee Dee, Brenda, and Taffy as they travel around solving mysteries and catching the bad guys.

There was something about Cavey — ridiculous as he was — that stuck with me. Between his Cousin Itt-like appearance, his “Me Tarzan, you Jane” way of speaking, and powers that never quite worked the way they were supposed to, he shouldn’t have worked as well as he did. And yet he did. He never gave up. No matter how often things went wrong, he would shake it off and keep going, completely content with the life he had found with the Teen Angels.

They only solved mysteries for 40 episodes, but those adventures have stuck with me far longer than that. It’s still one of those shows I find myself going back to every now and then — not just for the nostalgia, but for the simple joy it always managed to bring with it.

Trust: America's Best Chance by Pete Buttigieg

 

Synopsis From Dust Jacket:

Trust is essential to the foundation of America’s democracy, asserts Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and South Bend mayor. Yet, in a century warped by terrorism, financial collapse, Trumpist populism, systemic racism, and now a global pandemic, trust has been squandered, sacrificed, abused, stolen, or never properly built in the first place. And now, more so than ever before, Americans must work side by side to reckon with the monumental challenges posed by our present moment.

Interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir, Buttigieg explores the strong relationship between measures of prosperity and levels of social trust. He provides an impassioned account of a threefold crisis of trust: in our institutions, in each other, and in the American project itself. Today, these perilous patterns of distrust have wreaked havoc on nearly every sector of society, as Americans increasingly resent the very government that needs to be part of the solution. With the internet and partisan television networks acting as accelerants, Americans jettison any sense of shared reality, lose confidence in experts and scientists, and cope with the grim national tragedy of a pandemic that has only further exemplified the lethality of distrust.

Buttigieg contends that our success, or failure, at confronting the greatest challenges of the decade―racial and economic justice, pandemic resilience, and climate action―will rest on whether we can effectively cultivate, deepen, and, where necessary, repair the networks of trust that are now endangered, or for so many, have never even existed.

I’ve admired Pete Buttigieg for quite a while now, and reading Trust only deepened that admiration. During his presidential campaign, he and his husband Chasten carried themselves with a level of dignity and respect that often feels rare in modern politics. Even in a very intense national spotlight, they remained gracious, grounded, and consistently decent. As a gay man, that meant a lot to me then, and it still does now.

What stands out most in Trust is how clearly Buttigieg explains the growing crisis of mistrust in our institutions — and how complicated the reasons for that mistrust actually are. He writes about the erosion of confidence in government, the news media, and other institutions that shape our public life, and he does so thoughtfully rather than defensively. If I’m being honest, it’s one of the most balanced discussions of the issue I’ve read, and that approach really resonated with me.

He is also careful to acknowledge that mistrust didn’t simply appear out of nowhere. In many cases it was earned — particularly among marginalized communities that have historically been excluded, ignored, or even harmed by the very institutions now asking for their trust. At the same time, he addresses the rise of purposeful misinformation and how it has deepened existing fractures. In many ways, that deliberate misinformation feels like pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning.

When I finished Trust, I felt that the problem he describes is serious but not hopeless. Buttigieg clearly believes our democratic institutions are worth repairing, and I appreciated his willingness to engage the issue directly. The country could use more leaders willing to do that — and honestly, I’m begging him to run for president again someday.