Favorite Characters: Stahma Tarr (Defiance)

Pound for pound, easily the most intriguing character on Defiance. Never to be counted out, this is the one and only Stahma Tarr (some Stahma-related spoilers.)

It’s easy to take the initial impression that Datak is the big mover in the Tarr family. After all, he’s the patriarch and Castithan society is very male-dominated, and he’s a crime lord to boot. He’s the one swinging his “I started with nothing and look at me now!” status around, the one who makes the threats and breaks the hands. Stahma walks behind him, smiling and soft-spoken, ingratiating. It’s clear from the beginning that she’s not blind to the kind of work Datak does – she knows exactly how the family bread is buttered – but it’s tempting to think of her as the respectable front that gives him legitimacy, giving him quiet support in the background.

But that’s not who Stahma is. She’s much more active in the schemes and machinations around which the Tarrs’ lives revolves. She’s just subtler and softer about it. While Datak is the sledgehammer, she gently nudges things and people to get them where she needs them to be, including her husband. She makes the plans and feeds them the Datak, planting them in his mind so he takes them up of his own accord, not always aware of whatever secret additional agenda Stahma has running. In this way, Datak (and later Alak) serves, in a sense, as Stahma’s front. She has the ruthlessness and acumen to go after what she wants, but she’s smart enough to know that 1) Castithans won’t accept power from a woman and 2) staying behind the scenes also maintains her deniability to anyone who might come after them.

It’s interesting to see how Stahma interacts with Castithan gender norms. She often uses them as a cover, smiling and simpering because “how could anyone suspect a mere woman of” XYZ. But she rankles under them too, longing to be the one out front and in charge for once. Datak’s moods can make him unpredictable, and his ego means she treads dangerous ground if she tries to take too much for herself. When Datak is imprisoned in season 2, Alak proves much more pliable to control, but why? Why should she have to hide behind her son and keep the family business running in the shadows while he serves as the figurehead? Once she has that chance to make the decisions outright rather than manipulate them into place, she’s less content to keep up the appearance of having nothing to do with it.

Stahma’s not incapable in a fight, but she definitely doesn’t carry the “badass” image that characters like Irisa do. In a rough, dangerous world, she keeps herself and her own safe most often through cunning, finessing her way out of situations or getting those who are physically stronger to act at her behest, and when she does resort to violence herself, poison is her preferred method. When she really needs to, though, she can throw down hard – Stahma is nothing if not a survivor, and she’ll do anything in service of that goal. Family is deeply important to her, and she’ll go to great lengths – and sink to great depths – to keep them safe as well, but her devotion isn’t absolute, and she can be at her most dangerous when someone she loves pushes her to her breaking point.

The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections (1991-1993)

It’s been quite a while since I read/reviewed a volume of Sandman – I got caught up in other titles. I find that I often enjoy these vinette-filled volumes the best in this series, and this one offers up a good example of that.

In this aptly-named volume, we flit through a number of fables involving people – some real, some imagined, some mythical – who have encounters with Dream. Each story takes its own path and Dream himself is only occasionally a focal point of the tale, but all of them play out with grandness and mystery.

When you take a long-running series like this, one that’s known to twist its shape at various points in its run, and you read it for the first time after it’s all been published and packaged into trade paperbacks, it’s hard to know how intentional some of these volumes were when they were written. Did Neil Gaiman mean for there to be some invisible thread connecting these mostly disaparate stories, or do I invent a unifying force between them because I’m reading them as one collected volume? Hard to say. Either way, the effect comes off well.

As I said, the vinettes range through all sorts of subject matter and take a lot of different forms. There’s a story featuring Mark Twain and the one and only Emperor of the the United States, along with a story set during the French Revolution and one involving Marco Polo finding himself in a sort of dream way station in the desert. There’s a legend from the old county featuring werewolf-like creatures, and there’s the story of the King of Arabia wanting to sell Baghdad to the King to Dreams. Cain and Abel exchange bedtime stories, and we take an extended visit through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Lots of variety, which keeps my interest. I read, not so much to find out what happens next, but to see what notions will be put forth next, what flights of fancy uncovered. In some stories, Dream is a major player, while in others, he makes little more than a cameo. His siblings make a few appearances as well – Death continues to be the best, and Desire has all the best androgynous fashion.

I’ll also mention that, while I enjoyed the Orpheus section plenty as I was reading it, I retroactively gained a greater appreciation for it after picking up the cast recording for Hadestown (review of that coming later!) I wasn’t particularly thinking about Sandman when I got the album, but I flashed on different panels as I was listening to it, especially the long walk out of the underworld.

Doctor Who: Season 12, Episode 9 – “Ascension of the Cybermen: Part 1” (2020)

Premise spoilers for this episode, which also gives nods to last week’s “The Haunting of Villa Diodati.”

The first part of the season finale reads a little to me like the first part of the season premiere: some interesting threads and some good character moments hampered by too much plot messiness, but the ending has my excited for next week’s conclusion. I loved “Spyfall: Part 2,” so hopefully Chibnall will pull off the same trick and the season finale will be great.

The Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan head to a war-torn ruin near the end of the Cyber Wars in search of the Lone Cyberman, a Cyberman caught halfway between human and conversion with human emotions fueling the zealotry of his deadly rampage. They meet and attempt to help a small group of human survivors while the Doctor works to figure out the Lone Cyberman’s ultimate aim and stop him.

Honestly, once I hit on the “Spyfall: Part One” comparison, I couldn’t stop seeing it. There’s a lot of cool, intriguing stuff here. The Lone Cyberman is a neat concept, and I’m interested to see where the show goes with it. While it’s a lighter episode for Ryan, both Yaz and Graham make a strong showing, having to fend for themselves a bit as they help the survivors, and all three companions have some good lines/moments. We visit an interesting new locale, and there are some nice if perplexing interludes in what looks like maybe early(-ish?)-20^th-century Ireland. The Doctor gets some fun bits, my favorite being her ramble down memory lane while she hotwires a spaceship.

But again, like “Spyfall: Part One,” there’s an unfortunate amount of flab and inconsistencies too. Given the setup of the episode (that the Cyber Wars have drive Cybermen and humans alike to near extinction,) it doesn’t make sense that the Cybermen are so trigger-happy with our heroes and the human survivors – surely their interest in their own continued survival would prompt them to capture/convert rather than shoot? And while I like a number of the different threads, they don’t gel together at this point. Not even in an “I wonder how this is all going to fit together!” sense, more like a “good luck getting all this to fit together!” sense. Now, maybe it’ll come together magnificently next week, and I’ll eat my words. I hope it does. But for now, this aspect of the episode has me scratching my head, not waiting with bated breath to find out what happens next. Finally, it’s not an especially strong episode for the Doctor. It’s one where she doesn’t get to feel particularly effectual for much of the time, and those episodes always get me feeling a little nervous.

Yet, there’s that ending, kicking my anticipation for the finale into high gear. Maybe Chibnall is a bit like Suzanne Collins. Sometimes the Hunger Games books were great, sometimes not so much, but goodness gracious, that woman knows her way around a cliffhanger. I had to start actively choosing to stop reading those books when I had a page or two left in a chapter, because I knew that the final paragraph would send me scrambling to read on and find out what happened next. Bring on the conclusion to this season!