Which loops us back around the the open question of Iron Gold's status as the successor to a mostly resolved trilogy. And really, the less said about the canonical abomination that is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the better. Season 9 of Scrubs is billed as the 'Final' season on the DVD packaging, but it's effectively an entirely new show in and of itself, jettisoning most of the original cast in favour of several unsavory replacements acting out a story arc which is, more or less, the one the show started with back in Season 1. Having continuations of both stories is bad enough, robbing those original endings of the heightened catharsis they imparted, but what makes them worse is that those continuations are terrible. leaving Sacred Heart in a tear-jerking flashforward montage that is still a surefire Kleenex magnet. Both are prime Postscript Partworks: Deathly Hallows wrapped things up with a sickeningly twee epilogue showing that, yes, Harry and friends would be fine decades down the track now that Voldemort was dead, while Scrubs' eighth season concluded with J.D. The two big case studies for me are Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the ninth season of Scrubs. Many others, though, quite obviously don't. The examples I mention above came about because the creators had meaningful stories they wanted to tell (and sure, Denis Villeneuve was probably also gunning for an Academy Award in directing Blade Runner 2049, which wouldn't have hurt). What irks me is when a Postscript Partwork exists without obvious meaning. Given the way author Pierce Brown used Morning Star to pretty decisively wrap the vast majority of the trilogy's plotlines, Iron Gold is tipped to be an example of the Postscript Partwork par excellance. It's an example of what I call a 'Postscript Partwork': a series concludes pretty definitively, or has been ended for quite a long time, yet the author/creator decides to give (some of) the people what they want and pens another book/film/season for them.

The reason I bring up a trilogy of YA sci-fi novels whose 'final' book came out two years ago is because the trilogy's fourth installment, Iron Gold, hit shelves this month. With a ton of foreshadowed resolutions and a body count that makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows look conservative, Morning Star wasn't a bad book, but it certainly sacrificed most of what made the middle chapter of the series so gripping.

It becomes clear there's only one of two ways that Darrow's crusade against the Society can conclude, and as the end draws near it makes things highly predictable. Again, without wishing to spoil, the story moves in a different direction, albeit a far more conventional one. That in turn made the decline of its successor, the trilogy-capping Morning Star, all the more disappointing.

Red rising light bringer