Harlan Coben's Shelter: Stranger Things Meets Hunters

Stranger Things meets Hunters: that's what came to mind after seeing the first three episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter (that's its name) on Amazon Prime Video back on August 18th, and I felt the same after seeing the finale eighth episode of what I hope will be just first season last night.  By which I mean: the center of the story are a bunch of idiosyncratic highly intelligent high school kids (Stranger Things) but the larger picture is not some Duffer Bros horror story, but a group of all-too human slave traders descended in some way from the Nazis (Hunters).

Stranger Things starred mostly unknown or little known performers with the exception of Winona Ryder, Hunters was pretty much the same except it had the mega-star Al Pacino, and Harlan Corbin's Shelter was more like Stranger Things, with Tovah Feldshuh the biggest star.  My wife and I first saw her on Broadway in Yentl years ago, and it's always good to see her again.  The rest of the acting in Shelter was pretty good, too, with standout acting by Jaden Michael as Mickey, the hero of this otherwise ensemble story.

I'm not going to say anything specific about the plot, because there are narrative-upending developments in just about every episode.  But I will say that you won't be sure or likely right about any of the villains until close to the end, and not every character you've come to know survives, and the ending will make you unsure about even that.  I'll also say that just as Stranger Things exults in the 1980s, Shelter is very much in the present, with even a political awareness displayed by some of the characters, and that's very much Harlan Coben and very much welcome.

I'll also say that I wish all eight episodes had been put up all at once, as Amazon and Netflix used to do it. That's what created binging, which turned the TV series into a novel, where you could enjoy as many chapters as you wanted in one continuing experience, but that's become an increasingly endangered species, as the streamers want to maximize their continuing subscribers.

But now that all eight episodes of Harlan Coben's Shelter are up there, you can binge them in this our degraded media environment, which I highly recommend.

And I hope to see you back here when I review the second season, which I intend to do it there is one.

Salvation: Plans A and B and more

Salvation was shown on CBS this summer - finale was just this past week - but binge-junkie that I am, I binge-watched the whole 13-episode run over the past few days on Amazon Prime. And this series is binge-watchable and excellent indeed.

The premise or starting point is actually the least original part of the story, one we've seen several times before: an MIT student discovers a deadly asteroid is heading towards the Earth, due to arrive and likely render us into extinction in less than a year.   But the series really takes off from there - figuratively and literally - and delivers all kinds of surprises and lessons, just what a good science fiction story should do, including -

• an Ethan Musk kind of billionaire, working on not one but two ways of countering the impending catastrophe - an "arc" (named Salvation) that can get 160 or some number like that of people off this planet, with a view towards setting up shop on Mars or anywhere the human species can continue; and a device, separately launched, which can pull the asteroid enough off-course that it avoids the Earth (crashing into the asteroid won't work because the resultant pieces will still take out a lot of the Earth's population)
• a Hillary Clinton type of President in office, who's beset by people high up in the government who want to kill her
• a Russia a lot like the one we have today, though more on the verge of attacking the U. S if provoked
• a top-notch mainframe computer - reminiscent of the one in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - though not sentient
• all manner of loving and not-so-loving relationships, with characters who manage not to be cartoonish 

On the last point, Jennifer Finnigan does an excellent job as Grace, one of the central female characters (and it's good to see she got over Barry from Tyrant).  Ian Anthony Dale puts in a similarly strong performance as Harris - he's Grace's boss in the Department of Defense - and it's always good to see Tovah Feldshuh (this time as President) and long since time that we saw John Noble (Fringe) back on television again.  Charlie Rowe (the MIT student) and Jacqueline Byers make an appealing couple struggling with a relationship as they each struggle in different ways to prevent or do something about the end of the world.  But my favorite is Santiago Cabrera as Tanz, the billionaire computer-genius high-tech quick-witted space-engineering mastermind - so good I'm sorry he's not with us here on this Earth right now, even without an asteroid rapidly approaching.

Top notch science fiction on television, highly recommended, and I'd watch a second season right now if it existed.

a different kind of space travel