Late yesterday, we finally got our first look at the long-awaited movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s novel about the child soldiers trained to fight in a war against alien invaders. The movie looks visually impressive, and there’s no denying the appeal of its cast, which includes Asa Butterfield as potential military genius Ender Wiggin, Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff, the administrator of the Battle School in which Ender is enrolled, Haileen Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian, one of Ender’s classmates, Viola Davis as Major Gwen Anderson, one of Graff’s colleagues, Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine, and Ben Kingsley as Ender’s teacher Mazer Rackham. But the trailer also leaves out five key elements of Card’s novel—and the decision to exclude them in favor of action sequences gives a sense of what kind of movie Summit Entertainment wants us to think Ender’s Game will be:

1. Peter Wiggin: Ender’s sadistic older brother, Peter was the first of three attempts to breed a perfect general from the Wiggin family. Because Peter was too aggressive, and Valentine too empathetic, Ender’s family was allowed to have him as a third child in defiance of the United States’ population laws. Peter viciously bullied Ender while the two of them were growing up, and after went to Battle School, enlisted Valentine in a scheme to gain political power through an early form of blogging. He’s a painful illustration of the price of greatness, and one of the key people through whom Ender’s Game explores international politics in the wake of alien attacks.

2. The Fantasy Game: We see the children in Battle School playing with powerful simulations on computers, but we don’t get a glimpse of one of the novel’s most interesting devices: a video game that’s personally tailored to each student’s experience, and that Battle School uses to monitor their mental health.

3. Alai and Bean: Two of Ender’s best friends at Battle School are Alai, a talented Muslim student, and Bean, a younger boy who comes under Ender’s command as he rises through the ranks of students. Alai, who begins as Ender’s equal, is a reminder of how the drive for excellence can alienate even your closest friends. And Bean is an illustration of how to bring out the excellence in someone else.

4. Bernard: And just as we’re missing Ender’s friends, the trailer doesn’t show us Ender’s greatest human enemy at Battle School, a French student named Bernard. There’s no question that the advertising for Ender’s Game has to outline the main conflict between humans and the Buggers, the pejorative name for the alien invaders. But it’s losing a lot of Card’s point if the movie forgets that the conflicts between humans are just as important as space opera.

5. The Net: Much of Ender’s Game is set at Battle School, but the story back on Earth, where Peter and Valentine become powerful political commentators on the Net, Card’s version of the Internet, is equally important. The Cold War between the United States and its allies and the countries aligned under the Warsaw Pact has an enormous influence on Battle School’s commanders and the way they push Ender and pace his training. And Peter and Valentine’s very different feelings about the influence they accrue offers an important contrast to Ender’s command of his troops far away in space.

Now, I assume most of these elements will appear in the finished film that we’re going to get in November. Peter, Alai, Bean, and Bernard all are in the cast list. Major Anderson is the character who oversees the Fantasy Game. But given that much of the power of Ender’s Game comes from the fact that the war on the Buggers takes a surprising turn, and the question of whether humanity wins or loses it becomes much less important than issues of psychology and ethics. I understand why Summit feels more confident selling audiences who aren’t familiar with Card’s work on a major space war than on a meditation on empathy. But I hope that the film itself stays true to the best, most penetrating aspects of Card’s work, and the trailers are as much of a bait and switch as the one Ender’s subjected to throughout the novel.

This post discusses plot points from the April 14 episode of Game of Thrones. As always, if you want to discuss events from the books in comments, please mark your posts as such.

This episode of Game of Thrones begins with Edmure Tully shooting flaming arrows at the boat that’s carrying his father’s body—and falling short, repeatedly. It’s an apt opening to an episode of the show that’s concerned with rituals and institutions, and that argues, often in dreadful ways, that Westeros’ best institutions and traditions are frequently doomed to failure or misinterpretation, while its worst are the ones to which people adhere most rigorously.

First, there’s the drive for individual glory, which leads Edmure to attack the Mountain rather than listening to Rob’s strategy, and recognizing that long-term goals sometimes involve short-term losses of face, and understanding how badly the King in the North needs to preserve his resources. “I wanted to draw the Mountain into the West, into our country where we could surround him and kill him,” Robb tells Edmure despairingly. “I wanted him to chase him, which he would have done because he is a mad dog without a strategic thought in his head. I could have had his head on a spike right now. Instead, I have a mill.”

South in King’s Landing, Tyrion Lannister is learning that his family has pursued another opportunity open to them to ruinous ends: the ability to finance their war to hold the kingdom together with debt, rather than through taxation or budget cuts. “For years I’ve herad that Littlefinger is a magician. Whenever the crown needs money, he rubs his hands together and poof! Mountains of gold,” Tyrion tells Bronn wearily. “He’s borrowing it…We can’t afford to pay it back, that’s what’s wrong with it. The crown owes millions to my father” Bronn tries to brush his concerns aside, telling the man he serves, “Seeing as it’s his grandson’s ass on the throne, I imagine he’ll forgive that debt,” an assessment that ignores the fact that the Lannisters have a tendency to collect on their debts as well as to pay them. And Tyrion points out a larger problem, explaining that unlike the United States, Westeros has gotten itself in hock to people who will more than gladly move against the regime. ” It isn’t my father I’m worried about,” he tells Bronn. ” It’s the Iron Bank of Braavos. We owe them tens of millions. If we fail to repay these loans, the bank will fund our enemies. One way or another, they always get their gold back.” If the Chinese government worked the same way, then we’d really have a problem.

Overseas and in the countryside, other characters are discovering the weaknesses of institutions and reputations they depended on. “I bet you feed that pig better than you feed us,” a ranger complains bitterly to Craster when the deeply depleted Night’s Watch patrol returns to his keep on their way back to the Wall. “That pig has value to me,” Craster tells him. Craster may never have been particularly deferential to the institutions of the civilized world, given the harem he’s built for himself beyond it, and the extent to which he’s able to enforce his will as law. But the venom of his contempt demonstrates the extent to which the stock of the Night’s Watch has deteriorated as the wildlings organize and as winter approaches. And so has the Greyjoy family’s brand. “I’ll make you a Lord of the Iron Islands for this,” Theon tells the mysterious man who is helping him escape. “We’re not in the Iron Islands,” the man warns him cryptically, though whether he regrets Theon’s lack of power to reward him or is only to happy to reinforce is left an open question by his tone.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

Before this Sunday, the Walking Dead had seemed to suggest the brewing war between the two factions was nearly as much a tragic systemic failure as it was a byproduct of deep-seated hatred created by a long history of violence.

After Rick and the Governor’s meeting this week, the answer is clear: hatred is the root cause, but not in the simple, “out for revenge” way one might have assumed. Sunday’s episode was a lesson in how history and memory become overlaid with moral meaning, shaping how we perceive the world and decide to act when faced with hard choices.

We like to think of history as something clinical: people look at the past, scientifically discern its lessons, and distill them down to principles that guide them going forward. Milton was the night’s avatar of clinical history, awkwardly asking Hershel if he could see his amputated stump because “it’s important data” for future generations studying the zombie apocalypse. Hershel’s partly creeped out (“I’m not showing you my leg”), partly amused (“at least buy me a drink first”) reaction captures this approach’s alienness. People don’t see themselves as data; writing a history isn’t the same as compiling social science data.
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This post contains spoilers through the August 18 episode of Burn Notice.

Okay, this may make me a total nerd, but I really dug that tonight’s case had Fiona, Jesse, and Michael going all vigilante on a corporate goon (James Frain, who someday is going to play all sweetness and light and vulnerability and people’s heads will explode) in the name of making generic drugs available to the people—and romantic payback. Burn Notice can be a little random when it comes to picking villains, especially those who end up in Miami—though interestingly, there have been protests about biotechnology developments at the University of Miami—but this felt a little fresher than usual. It’s a big season for evil pharmaceutical companies or executives on television, between this episode and Torchwood, and it’s nice to see the issue of drug access bubbling up in popular culture at the same time that steps like the Obama administration’s regulations on birth control copays are making things a bit better.

Other than that, this episode felt a little frustrating. Old, generic war criminals (I mean, is it that hard to think of a particular war?) with electrocuting metal grates are kind of fun in an eccentric, James Bond kind of way, and Sam’s promise that “Just tell us who you built the bomb for and we’ll share these delicious carrot sticks,” was new and entertaining ground in interrogation. But introducing these people and then killing them off or helping them escape isn’t really making this conspiracy against Michael very entertaining to investigate. Nothing here is adding up to a coherent season-long arc.

And Paulie mentioned in comments last week that he’s frustrated by the way Fiona’s supposed badassness and moral ambiguity are something that we’re told about rather than shown in a sustained way. And I think that’s right. I want nothing more than to see Fiona break with Michael and see what happens, but setting her up as a whiny girlfriend doesn’t really seem like the way to do it. Yes, it’s irritating when you ask a fella “You want me to cancel the reservation?” only to realize “there was no reservation.” But I think Michael needs to do something where he definitively treats her like staff, or really makes a decision that she violently disagrees with. We need a big conflict here, not the squabbling of two people who are at the getting-stale stage of their relationship.