Some short, mostly spoiler-free notes on the second and third episodes of this fantastic series. I hope you’ll join me in reading these either now or in book form later!
#2: Walk the Plank
After that kind of brilliant first episode of this series of short stories, I was like, YES MORE OF THAT PLEASE. Give me more crazypants space exploits and intrigue and danger! And then I read the second episode and I was like… um… what. It’s written as a transcript of an audio file, which I suppose is not a completely foreign concept for a Scalzi short story, but I was still thrown for a loop. Where The B-Team was all description and narrative and plot, this was dialogue and dialogue and a little bit of exposition by dialogue. And even worse, it was about a completely different planet and set of people and I was very very confused and a little worried about how the rest of this book was going to go.
#3: We Only Need the Heads
But then this story happened and oh, goodness. It more or less explains everything that was described in the last story, and then it dials up the intrigue and the squick factor by bringing in the title. Thanks for that, Scalzi. But really, thanks for bringing back the plot and the humor and the conspiracies, because I am all about those! I am on the edge of my seat again for the next installments…
Rating: 5/10 and 9/10, but probably still a 9 taken all together.
Yes, episode 3 did a really nice job of making episode 2 worthwhile. I enjoyed the second one but don’t feel that it worked as well as a stand-alone story. Ultimately I don’t care as much about that given that we are getting a new chapter each week but I do know that stand-alone nature is what Scalzi is shooting for and it has been more and less effective depending on the given chapter.