Last week, for the first time in the three years since I started writing these “Geek Punditry” blogs, I missed a post, but I think you’ll forgive the reason. Thursday, while I was still brainstorming possible topics for pop culture effluvia to talk about, I got a phone call from my father to tell me my grandmother had passed away. It wasn’t a shock – she was 94 years old, after all – but just because something isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it isn’t painful. My grandmother was one of the most important people in my life, and I’m sure you’ll understand why I just wasn’t in the right headspace to go into some sort of lighthearted analysis over an episode of SpongeBob or something the next day.

I’m still not in that headspace, not really. On the day you read this we’ll be having her funeral and saying goodbye, and I’m still not in the mood to do any serious kind of dissection of the kind of stuff I usually write about here. But I didn’t want to go another week without a Geek Punditry, so I decided instead I would just spend this week’s post talking about a few things I’ve read or watched recently that I enjoyed. These are just short, capsule recommendations for pieces of media that have pleased me in some way, and that’s really the reason I started this feature in the first place. I wanted to talk about the things that I love and share them with other people. 

So here we are, just a few short suggestions for things to watch or read.

DC KO

DC Comics’ latest crossover event (they have so, so many, the Big Two publishers) ended this week, and it ended in a spectacular fashion. In DC KO, the Justice League discovered that Darkseid – who had been presumed dead since 2024’s DC All In Special – was not, in fact, dead, but coming back more powerful than ever. The only way to stop him would be for one of them to claim the Heart of Apokalips, a powerful, sentient artifact that has been supercharged with Darkseid’s “Omega Energy.” Claiming the artifact would give the holder the power of the “King Omega,” and make them a match for Darkseid, capable of resetting the universe as they see fit. In order to claim the power, though, the heroes would have to prove themselves worthy of it by fighting one another in a tournament across the entire multiverse. And it gets even worse when the villains get wind of the plan and worm their way into the tournament as well.

The premise – and I’ll be the first one to admit it – is absolutely preposterous. It sounds like the setup for a video game or the kind of story a kid whips up in the backyard as an excuse to have all of his toys fight each other. It’s an excuse for huge, over-the-top fight scenes pitting hero and against hero (and occasionally villain), to transform our characters into variants of themselves from other parts of the multiverse, and to give them new, temporary costumes that will look really dandy as action figures and other merch. There was even a one-shot spinoff where they fought characters from OUTSIDE of the DC Universe, including Red Sonja, Vampirella, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Homelander from The Boys. It was an enormous, bloated, insane cash grab.

And damned if I didn’t love every minute of it.

For one thing, superhero fans love a good fight scene. It’s just inherent in the genre. And having the heroes fight one another is the kind of thing that fans like to bicker and debate – who would win in a fight between the Flash and Green Lantern, for example. But to explain why friends and teammates would fight one another usually requires some sort of contrived coincidence, mistaken identity, mind control, or other overused trope. DC KO bypasses all that and makes the contrivance the whole plot, and somehow, that made all the difference. Why would Green Lantern fight the Flash? Because they know that the only way to save the universe is for ONE of the heroes to beat all the others in a fight, so they’ve gotta give it their best.

But it didn’t stop there. Although KO was structured as a series of fight scenes, the writers still managed to do some excellent character work. There was a series of one-off issues in December featuring some of the marquee matchups: Superman Vs. Captain Atom, Harley Quinn Vs. Zatanna, Cyborg Vs. Swamp Thing, and perhaps the most personal of them all, Red Hood Vs. the Joker, the man who killed him that one time. And in each of these issues, the fights and the choices the characters made delved into who they really were and what they really wanted. Was it an excuse to see Superman and Captain Atom throwing down in a way that they usually don’t do, needing to hold back in fear of annihilating a city or something? Absolutely. Did it say something real, important, and powerful about who Superman is as a character? Dang right.

The series ended this week in a way that I found quite satisfying as well, taking a step towards meta-commentary about what the DC Universe actually is and where its soul comes from. And people who know how I feel about the DC heroes will not at all be surprised that I loved the conclusion this story drew. I felt great about what I read, and I’m looking forward to the next act of the larger story DC is telling (of which KO is, evidently, the end of Act I). 

Pluribus

I know I’m behind on this one, but in my defense, I don’t have Apple TV+. I do, however, have a friend who has given me access to his Plex server, and he’s got Pluribus on his system, which means that I get to watch the newest show by Vince Gilligan, the man behind a couple of shows called Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I’m four episodes in to the nine-episode first season, so I’ve still got a ways to go, but I’ve seen enough to be confident in saying that Vince Gilligan has got to stop hoarding all the awesome, because it’s not fair that one man gets to create one of the best shows on television THREE TIMES IN A ROW.

I’m not going to say very much about the story of this show. I think it’s the kind of thing that works best if you don’t really know much going in and just let the surprises hit you one at a time. In fact, prior to watching the show all I knew was:

• The show is science fiction (and although he’s best known for crime dramas, don’t forget that Gilligan cut his teeth in the industry as a writer for The X-Files)
• It stars Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn in the lead role (and she is FANTASTIC)
• Gilligan made some statements about how much generative AI sucks while promoting the show (which has turned out to have some thematic resonance, but nothing plot-relevant, at least not as of episode four)

Although it is sci-fi, Pluribus has a lot of the same DNA as Gilligan’s other two acclaimed series. The shows are all about deeply damaged people who are pushed into a situation that quickly grows out of their control and they’re forced to make morally questionable choices for the sake of survival. Tonally, I think it’s similar as well. Although Pluribus is probably the most serious of the three series, it still has a lot of moments of dark comedy that help you make your way through it. 

Basically, if you like what Vince Gilligan has done so far, you’re going to like this too.

Miracle: The Boys of ‘80

I am, as most people who know me will tell you, a total sucker for the Olympics. I love the games, and I spent the better part of two weeks recently absorbed in the snow and ice of lovely Milan and Cortina, rooting for Team USA. And to feed the hunger for people like myself, Netflix recently dropped a new documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ‘80. This film is all about the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and the journey that led to the moment called “the Miracle on Ice,” when they managed to defeat the highly-favored Soviet Union in the semifinal round of the games. 

The Miracle on Ice is a story that, of course, has been told many times. This isn’t the first documentary about it, and Disney even made a narrative film about it starring Kurt Russell, Miracle, that was pretty good. But this particular film tells the story through the eyes of the players and people involved, mostly through interviews with them as they detailed the path they took from the inception of the team – a ragtag band of underdogs that couldn’t have been more dramatic if they’d been hired by a studio casting director – all the way through the games. I recently made one of my “LitReels” about the concept of sports as storytelling. I think the reason that sports are so important to a lot of people are because they are, in fact, stories that we attach ourselves to, as much as any book, TV show, movie series – even history and religion are important to us (I believe) because of their value as the stories that we internalize. This is a fine documentary that does a fine job in telling one of the greatest stories in the history of American sports.

There you go, friends, a few things to dig into between now and next Friday. Hopefully by then I’ll be a little more coherent, a little more capable of finding a topic to do a deep dive. Until then, be good to each other, and let the people you love know it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok.