A handful of shorts and a feature does not a marathon make, but it does give a person a solid evening of science fiction.

Mark Slutsky's Final Offer (2018) is a clever, generous two-hander with a premise worthy of Fredric Brown, namely that the fate of humanity in the face of interstellar expropriation rests with a scruffily hungover lawyer who scrapes himself off the floor of an elegantly appointed, eerily wall-less office to discover that he has five minutes to negotiate for the retention of his planet's oceans and spends most of them panicking. Since he's played with an infinite wince of flop sweat by Aaron Abrams, it would be unnecessarily rude to call him an ambulance chaser, but he freely admits that he wins most of his cases on no-show technicalities: "I do traffic tickets!" Anna Hopkins gives a practiced polish to the human veneer of his opposite number, the sfnal reality shock of her true form looming all iridescent streamers and eyes like mother-of-pearl out of Cthulhu: "I'm confident we'll get to a yes on this." The comedy of their corporate first contact comes from its earth-draining banality, but its charm shines when it exceeds its tongue-in-cheek brief and goes out not on the fine print of the punch line, but the much better twist of unexpected rapport, sincerely extended by a man so accustomed to losing, he doesn't need to be magnanimous to commiserate. It runs an adroit twelve minutes and had it been a short-short of the Golden Age, I could look forward to locating the fix-up novel. Wormholes and time scales may be a dime a pulp dozen, but the quick shot of the negotiator's business card with a fax number for the Virgo Supercluster is adorable.

As a complementary lesson in the pitfalls of science fiction comedy, the pilots of Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft's Come Back Mrs. Noah (1977–78) and Nigel Kneale's Kinvig (1981) make an instructive contrast, which is unfortunately not the same thing as a great double feature. The one appears to have been written by a team who didn't know very much about science fiction, meaning its already thin jokes are further slowed by infodumps and technobabble. Its funniest scene of a presenter chirping on about technological miracles while behind him three people grimly fail to open a tin of condensed milk doesn't need to be set aboard an unlaunched orbital vehicle in 2050. In a rare line that isn't cued to wackiness with retro-futuristic props, Michael Knowles helpfully kills a conversation: "It's just that if this blows up, there'll be Pontefract cakes all over Cairo." The other appears to have been written by someone who didn't know very much about comedy, meaning the satirical ambiguity of its extraterrestrial visitations washes out in the sitcom clichés of its marital boredom. Colin Jeavons salvages all of his scenes as a flat-capped anorak with a near-eidetic memory for every close encounter claimed in the UK and a dump stat of life skills, which may have insulted the fans who did not consider themselves interchangeable with ufologists and endeared him instantly to me. He jumps characteristically into a conversation with head-scratchers like "Well, what about the Great Pyramid, then? You given it any more thought?" The intrusion of a laugh track benefited neither show.

Mohamad El Masri's Other Other (2024) is one of the more ambitious and delicate short films of my recent acquaintance, a many-worlds interpretation of online dating which reveals its parallel conceit without once using the language of science fiction, relying instead on silhouettes and logistics and the eventual double-casting of Sosie Bacon and Scoot McNairy to draw out its meditation on the gulfs between our screen-bounded selves and the glitches of fitting together in three-dimensional space. It doesn't fuzz out into metaphor or enmesh itself in explanations of the elusive interpenetrations that allow a book or a key or a signal to cross where a door has someone and no one on its other daemon lover's side; it has the heft of a feature in half an hour, handheld as cinema vérité of a dream. Her spiky melancholy and his uncertain romanticism could bind or break them in the ordinary course of a relationship. The sleight-of-hand cinematography by Joshua Knoller cuts its lovers simultaneously together and apart, an eloquent incoherence: "I don't want to like solve all the like mythic mysteries that the universe dumps in my lap. I just am a person who's trying to be on this earth and just be." A more schematic, ironic screenplay could have been made of this material, but it feels true to its championing of messiness that the film as it stands in our reality is sweeter and more loose-ended, the hopeful blaze of its ending as vulnerable as the intimate digital distance of its original connection. It feels only a little as though the filmmaker is telling his characters literally to touch grass. "If we're going to do this, it has to be real."

Anthony Kimmins' Once in a New Moon (1934) is never going to be mistaken for a classic of British science fiction cinema. It has so many doubts about the genre literacy of its audience that it summarizes its thought experiment in the title crawl and gets such cold feet about its political implications that it reverses its sense of wonder for the finale. For most of the hour between these cop-outs, however, it has the herky-jerkily spirited charm of a quota quickie on the model of a cozy catastrophe: the fortunes of a seaside village after it is wrenched off the face of England and into an involuntarily independent planetoid by the fly-by-night gravity of a "dead star." More Verne than Godwin, the first half of the picture furnishes its hardest sf as Shrimpton-on-Sea orbits uneasily between the influences of the earth, the moon, and the close-veering comet and the resultant phenomena of slack tides, off-kilter constellations, time-lapse dawns, and finally earthrise are collated by the unlikely authority of Eliot Makeham's Harold Drake, the mild-mannered star-gazer of a postmaster whose one-day circumnavigation of the globe confirms its new designation of "Shrimpton-in-Space." Less Chesterton than Mackendrick, its second half satirically observes the celerity with which this island England crumbles into civil war, sparked by the complacent autocracy of Morton Selten and Mary Hinton's Lord and Lady Bravington and fanned by the agitation of sullen socialist Edward Teale—John Clements, making his screen debut at the thanklessly humorless end of the love triangle. A free and fair election does not lead to a more equitable distribution of rations. A prim refusal of timber to the communal kitchens inspires a sortie to torch the manor instead. Freder-like, Derrick De Marney's Hon. Bryan Grant tries to talk some égalité and fraternité into his Blimpish parents: "Just because it doesn't work in England doesn't mean it can't work here!" Just in time to forestall the all-out class war, the deus ex runtime of the dead star splats Shrimpton back to the status quo of earth where all ideological differences can be overcome through the fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. "What did I always tell you, Mr. Drake? Just a bad flood." I can't speak to the fidelity of any of the above to its credited source material of Owen Rutter's Lucky Star (1929), but it performs the B-prestidigitation of all seeming to belong to the same movie while it's rattling out, even if it decoheres into two or three different stories the minute the viewer takes a step back. It is a nice touch that before she is packed off into the romance which is a no-brainer between the well-mannered ex-aristocrat and the revolutionary wannabe, Rène Ray's Stella Drake sails around the unknown world with her father. The transit of Shrimpton is finessed with some stock storm footage and educational animation. The final gesture of lighting the beacon suggests more topical symbolism than the film was built to take, but then I am not sure it was built to take the democratically identified Bryan seriously advocating the adoption of socialism in space. I regret nothing about the time I gave it. I hope the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 felt the same.

I had no particular shape in mind for this collection of speculations—a Black Kitten Micro-Thon 2025? It is more than I managed last year. I found some of these items, spatch came up with others. It is a meaningful tradition to keep. There were no donuts, but Hestia was present on my lap for both watching and writing. This universe brought to you by my mythic backers at Patreon.