 The Alex Ryder series is very easy to explain. It's James Bond for children. Really, there's nothing else to it. Alex Ryder is a super cool spy that goes to exotic locales, outsmarts insane bad guys, saves the lives of millions, and all the while he looks stylish. The only thing missing is the gratuitous level of sex because Alex is 14 years old and no one wants the police called on them. Just like James Bond, the books are episodic, action-packed, silly at times, and they often ignore character in favor of action and fast-paced storylines, but that's probably part of the success. They're pure wish fulfillment. Except unlike most wish fulfillment for kids, these are a bit edgier, with some more violence and stakes that feel at least a little grounded in reality. It might not be realistic for a pop star to hijack Air Force One and launch nuclear missiles to destroy the international drug trade, but it's more realistic than some evil wizard trying to enslave humanity. Even though Alex is a normal kid who discovers a whole new world, he's not just one more in a long line of Harry Potters. It's not all about him discovering an unknown world of magic where he learns to control his powers and is also some sort of chosen one who will save humanity from a vaguely defined evil. He accidentally gets sucked into a very unpleasant, dangerous underworld that he can't leave no matter how much he tries. Most of the skills he learns that help him be a spy were learned before the series begins, so there's not any training or exposition about how the hidden world works. It's not even surprising that the spy world exists. We all know that there are drug dealers and arms dealers and such out there causing trouble, only the specifics are lost on us since they're secretive. But action scenes can only take you so far. Even the most amazing idea in the world will only take you through a couple of books if you can't expand on it or add something new. Much like other popular kid series from the aughts, Alex Ryder went on far longer than it had any right to, leading to a sharp decline in quality, a lack of proper villains, minimal themes, stagnant characters, and an ending that amounts to little more than a giant shrug. Now that the first season of a TV show has come out, with a second season on the way, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this series that was a huge time sink when I was a kid. What it did well, what it did wrong, and when precisely it started to fall apart. In what is quickly becoming a tradition for this format, there are still Alex Ryder books being released. However, everything after Scorpia Rising is a soft reboot, so I'll consider that to be separate. Spoilers for everything ahead. Show. Movie. Books. Everything. The first Alex Ryder book is titled Stormbreaker, and it starts off with Alex learning that his uncle Ian is dead. Alex's parents died not long after he was born, and Ian was his guardian, so with him gone, Alex has no family left. Alex immediately suspects something is going on though, since the police claim that his uncle was in a car crash and only died because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, which would be completely out of character for him. His uncle also claimed to work at a bank, but never spoke much about his job or coworkers, so when they show up at his funeral, Alex watches them closely. When he notices one of them hiding a gun, he becomes determined to figure out what's going on. He tracks down his uncle's car to a junkyard where it's being demolished and sees that it has bullet holes in the side and blood on the driver's seat, meaning there clearly wasn't a car crash involved in his uncle's death. Unless you count crashing into a storm of bullets. Not long after, the president of the bank where his uncle worked invites him over to discuss his estate. Alex takes the opportunity to break into his uncle's office, look through some suspicious papers, then get knocked out and dragged away. When he comes to, he speaks to a man named Alan Blunt, who runs MI6, the British Foreign Intelligence Service, as well as a woman simply named Mrs. Jones. Wait, her first name is Tulip? Are you fucking joking? That's almost as bad as Albus Percival, Wolfric Brian Dumbledore. Long story short, Ian wasn't a banker. He was a spy for MI6. He was killed while heading back from a mission, leaving the whole thing unfinished, and now Blunt wants Alex to complete it. At first, Alex refuses because, you know, he's 14 and using child soldiers is a war crime, but Blunt manages to persuade him despite Mrs. Jones objecting. You see, with Alex's uncle dead, he's being taken care of by their housekeeper, an American woman named Jack Starbright, and her visa has been expired for years. Blunt makes it clear that if Alex doesn't work for him, Jack will be deported, possibly even imprisoned, while Alex will be put into the foster system until he's 18. He's forced to agree to finish his uncle's work. Yeah, Blunt is kind of a dick, but we'll get to that later. You might have noticed I haven't talked much about Alex's personality or life. That's because the book doesn't either. I'm going to keep hammering it in. This is just James Bond for a young audience, and in most iterations of James Bond, he isn't a particularly complex character. Why does Bond work for MI6? Patriotism. And because he feels like it, I guess. He's just a Superman-type character who we're supposed to watch and think, wow, he's cool! The past few films have made an effort to expand on that with little success. Alex is similar in that he's not very complex. He is, in many ways, a normal 14-year-old boy living in London. He has a more interesting life than most since his uncle took him on exotic vacations and had him learn stuff like martial arts, skiing, mountain biking, and scuba diving. Whenever any of these things come up, Alex has some experience in them which helps get him out of a jam. He's just naturally good at everything, which is how he saves the day so often. That might sound like a criticism, but it's not. If this was a character-driven story that you're supposed to take 100% seriously, then having a protagonist who doesn't have much to him is going to affect your enjoyment. In a spy thriller, the plot and action are far, far more important. I might hate James Patterson, but stuff like Alex Cross appeals to millions of people for good reason. They aren't there for deep discussions of what it's like to lose loved ones or how difficult decisions that stain your soul sometimes need to be made to protect others. They're there to watch minions with guns attached to their arms chase the hero on jet skis. Too much humanity would get in the way of that. That's not to say Alex doesn't get some development, because he does, and he's not a total blank slate to start off either. He's naturally suspicious, intelligent, has an eye for detail, and makes some amusing jokes. But as for his life, hobbies, friends, what sort of career he wants in the future, that's all pushed to the side. All we really know is that he went on a bunch of cool trips with his Uncle Ian, but that won't happen anymore since he's, you know, dead. It's actually ambiguous whether Ian was training Alex to one day be a spy or if he was just trying to teach him skills that were generally valuable. Even if you grow up to be an accountant or something, self-defense and speaking French are useful. Alan Blunt clearly believes Ian was training him to be a spy, and in the Stormbreaker movie he tells Alex as much, which is probably the best scene in the film, but it's never confirmed. It's difficult to judge Ian since he literally never appears, so your interpretation of this can color how you feel about him. Was he a loving father figure who was stolen from his family too soon, or was he a calculating abuser who was trying to force Alex into a life he never wanted and caused him nothing but misery? I don't know, it's just something I wish they spent more time on. Maybe the second season of the show can do that. But let's get back to Stormbreaker. As far as openings go, this is pretty standard. Kid notices strange happenings, investigates, then gets caught up in something bigger. The only unique bit is how Alex was blackmailed into being a hero. After a brief training stint with the SAS, Alex is sent out on his mission. A wealthy Lebanese businessman named Harrod Sale has developed a revolutionary new computer which is called the Stormbreaker, and he's going to give one to every school in the United Kingdom. Keep in mind, this book was published in 2000, so that would have been a much bigger deal at the time. But in the American version of the book, Sale is Egyptian, for some reason? Did they think American kids wouldn't know that Lebanon is a real country? Still better than making him a white guy played by a half-drunk Mickey Rourke though. MI6 has their eye on Sale since he has ties to terrorist organizations, and they had sent Ian Ryder to investigate him when he was killed. His last message simply said that the Stormbreaker couldn't be allowed to leave the manufacturing plant. Alex replaces another kid who won a contest to stay at Sale's mansion and be the first one to try out the Stormbreaker, and he's given very simple orders. Figure out what's going on and report it back to MI6. MI5 should really be handling this because it's a domestic issue, but whatever. Before he sets out, he visits a man named Smithers, insert Simpson's joke here, who gives him some neat gadgets, including zit cream that can burn through steel and a smoke bomb that looks like a Game Boy cartridge. Later books include tons of weird gadgets too, like a CD player that doubles as a buzz saw or a knife made of tough plastic that won't set off metal detectors. They're fun, and it's always neat to see the creative ways Alex uses them since they aren't as straightforward as a gun. From there, the story plays out how you would expect. Alex meets Sale, tries to avoid blowing his cover, Sale acts like a thinly veiled evil guy, etc. Not to say it's all bad, just that it's a spy story that goes about how you would expect it to, in fact that goes for most of the books. A few important notes stand out though. Foremost is that one of the men working on the Stormbreaker project is a Russian assassin named Yasin Grigorovich, the same man who killed Alex's uncle. Yasin is a cold-blooded killer who's willing to murder Stormbreaker employees that screw up in any way. Despite being such an important figure in Alex's life, he doesn't feature in the plot of this book very much. But don't worry, we'll get back to him later. Second is just how intense some of the action gets. There's a scene where Alex almost gets crushed in a car compactor and has to break out, a scene where he has to go swimming in a mineshaft with no idea if he'll be able to get out before he drowns. Even a sequence where two men try to cut him in half with barbed wire. Despite being aimed at a younger audience, the books don't shy away from the violence, nor do they downplay the consequences should Alex make even a tiny mistake. Alex isn't just an observer to the violence either. He straight up kills people all the time. It's usually in self-defense, and the people he kills definitely deserve it, but he does kill people. As a kid, I liked that the books don't go out of their way to try and make Alex more of a hero by having him use non-lethal force even against the evilest people imaginable. Remember how Voldemort only died because of some weird magical technicality? That was stupid. This is one of the major ways that the series stands out from other books with a similar setup, and one thing that appealed to my sadistic fourth grade self. And third, Alex is on his own during the whole mission. He can call for help in a jam, but MI6 is hours away. If he winds up in a tight spot, he has only himself to rely on. This gives every book a sense of isolation that I hadn't seen before back when I first read them. Sure, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson went on dangerous adventures, but they usually had friends with them. The most exciting sequences were usually the ones where they had to sneak off alone. They needed to rely on themselves and couldn't just putter around until their smarter friend gave them the answers. Alex is always alone, meaning the danger he's in feels more... than ever has to share the spotlight. Alex finally discovers that the Stormbreaker manufacturing plant is tricked out like a chemical weapons facility and the computers are being filled with some sort of liquid. He realizes that Sail is planning some sort of biological attack and runs off to warn MI6, but he's captured by Sail's guards and brought before him so he can give his evil villain monologue where he explains the plan. Turns out, Sail hates the British because he was bullied as a child. As a Middle Eastern immigrant with a funny accent, he became one who later became the Prime Minister. This made him so angry that he decided to pump every Stormbreaker computer full of a modified form of smallpox, send them out to every school in the country and then release the virus during the opening ceremony. Not only will he have killed all the kids he hates, but the Prime Minister will be the one who activates the devices and will be partially responsible so his career will be ruined. So yeah, this is a pretty silly motivation. I can excuse hating the English, but you'll leave the Scots, Welsh and Irish alone... Well, okay, leave the Irish and the Scottish alone. But I want to reiterate and say that silly motives aren't that big of a deal here. Whatever his reasoning, Sail's plan is both evil and destructive. Millions of people will die if our brave hero doesn't succeed. He tries to kill Alex by dumping him into a giant water tank with a deadly jellyfish in it rather than just shooting him because James Bond villain logic. While he goes off to the opening launch ceremony in London, Alex escapes the tank by using his acid zit cream to melt the supports. After a thrilling car chase, Alex hops aboard a cargo plane and holds the pilot up at gunpoint to make him fly to London. I don't know why they changed it to mind control in the movie, maybe to make it more child-friendly. When they get to London, there's no time to land, so Alex parachutes out and the pilot tries to murder him with the plane's propeller, forcing him to detonate a smoke bomb which causes the plane to crash. Then Alex crashes through the ceiling of the museum where the opening ceremony is taking place and fires blindly at the Stormbreaker computer. He hits Sail twice in the arm, the Prime Minister once, and destroys the computer's mouse, rendering it inert. And since Sail operates on Bond villain logic, that was the only way to release the virus, so the day is saved. Despite this looking an awful lot like an attempt on the Prime Minister's life, Alex avoids being shot long enough for MI6 to bring him back in and debrief him. He makes it clear that he'll never work from them again and leaves in a taxi, but surprise surprise, Sail is driving it and kidnaps Alex. He's holding it and is about to kill him before Yasing Grigorovich shows up and shoots Sail. According to him, Sail was a loose end and so Grigorovich's employers wanted him gone. He tells Alex to give up the spy life, Alex swears to kill him one day, and the book ends on a sort of we'll meet again note. Just from this summary, I think you can see some of the logical leaps. If an MI6 agent was murdered while investigating Sail, why don't they just bring in law enforcement to openly investigate? It's hard to bring more attention to him. Also, why would Sail invite some random kid to his home if he was planning a terrorist attack? Even if Alex hadn't been sent there by MI6, wouldn't he risk a bystander figuring out he was up to something? And wouldn't a smallpox outbreak spread beyond the kids and kill a bunch of others all over the world? There are some issues, but the action, twists, and general cool factor mean that most kids wouldn't notice them. Overall, Stormbreaker is a solid book. Silly? Yes. Childish? Stupid at times? Of course. But the author was clearly aware of that while writing and just had fun with it. Too many people, critics included, treat stuff that's silly as somehow being less worthy than serious works, and I find that to be reductive. Power fantasies and stories with illogical aspects to them have their place. Expecting everything to be a deep discussion of the human condition, complete with characters who exist only to suffer endlessly, is asinine. Not to mention that the brutality of it all is grounded in reality. Other than that tease at the end, it's mostly self-contained, so you don't feel like you need to read more to get the entire story. Just like how you don't need to watch GoldenEye to understand Casino Royale. Every book after this has Alex going out on a new mission to stop some nefarious plot. In point blank, he infiltrates an elite boarding school in the French Alps to stop a bunch of wealthy children from being replaced with clones of an old Nazi. It makes sense in context, I swear. But wait, you might be thinking. I swear, he'd never work for MI6 again? Yes, but at the start of this book, he helps the police bust a drug ring. Does he do it by informing them of the whereabouts of the drug dealers production facility? No, he locks the dealers up on a boat, holding their lab, then lifts it out of the Thames with a crane he hijacked and drops it in the parking lot of a police station. While this is effective in getting the drug dealers arrested, it's also very illegal. Alex nearly gets sent to prison before Alan Blunt steps in and offers to make his legal troubles go away in exchange for him going on a new mission. Whatever the case, Alex succeeds in bringing the bad guy to justice with the power of explosions. The bad guy also made a clone of Alex, sort of. He made a clone of himself and gave it cosmetic surgery so it could replace Alex. By the end of the book, after the villain's plan is foiled, the clone attacks Alex at his school and then gets arrested. In Skeleton Key, he foils the plans of a Russian general who wants to cause a nuclear disaster and become the president to make his country a world power again and is totally not an exp for Vladimir Putin. Again, he does it because he got in trouble and needed MI6's help again and again he pulls it off against all odds. The most notable thing about this book is the introduction of a new character named Sabina Pleasure. She and Alex meet by chance and become friends quickly. He's also interested in her romantically because he's a 14 year old boy and that's what they do. In Eagle Strike, he has to stop a world famous pop star from hijacking Air Force One and launching a large part of America's nuclear arsenal at places that make drugs because drugs are bad. Okay? Most of these books are on about the same level as Stormbreaker since they are admittedly formulaic. Bad guys are up to something. Alex gets sent in undercover to investigate with some gadgets made by Smithers. He slowly pieces things together and then he saves the day with lots of explosions. Every book has some aspects that set it apart from the others to keep things from getting too stale though. Eagle Strike has three notable ones. First, Yasin Grigorovich comes back. In Chapter One, Alex sees him walking in public and knows something is up, which leads to him discovering the bad guy's plan. Grigorovich is working for the aforementioned pop star to help him hijack Air Force One, the personal plane of the US president. Seems like a lot of risk for little reward to me, but whatever. Second, Alex isn't working for MI6 in this one. He brings evidence of the plot to their attention and they do nothing about it. It's a bit forced since they've been working with Alex for a while now and they should know he isn't stupid. At the least, they should look into his accusations, but they don't. And he's even more alone in this book than the others. Smithers, in Search Another Simpsons joke here, manages to get him some gadgets that help, but that's it. Third, Alex tells Sabina about his secret second life. She's the first person he brings this up to and she doesn't believe him because, well, why would she? But not long after, she gets held hostage to lure Alex into a trap and she helps him save the day at the end. The same things are mostly good and bad about every book. The action is always great. Alex is a likeable enough hero, if a little thin on personality, and the villains are fun. At the same time, the storylines are full of logical leaps and are often more concerned with looking cool than making sense. Whether that bothers you or not is a matter of personal preference, and when I was a kid, my response to most of that was a big shrug. The timeline does have some issues, though. At one point in Skeleton Key, Alex mentions he was three years old when the Berlin Wall fell, meaning he was born in 1986 and the series starts off in 2000. But then at the end of Crocodile Tears when he's about to turn 15, he mentions that the new Assassin's Creed is coming out, which is weird since that series didn't start until 2007 and will continue until the heat death of the universe. That's what happens when a long-running series tries to stay contemporary for the entire time. Plot holes pop up. Some are small, some are big, but they all exist. My head canon is that this all takes place in 2000 and 2001. It's also annoying how Alex stays the same for the first four books. He never goes through any sort of development beyond being slightly more willing to do spy stuff. However, by the end of Book 4, that all changes. Like I said, Yasin Grigorovich comes back in Eagle Strike. He's working for the bad guy again, and during the climax, he's ordered to shoot Alex, but he refuses. For the second time, he spares Alex's life, and this one is in direct defiance to the man paying him. Anyways, the bad guy shoots Grigorovich after Alex stops the missiles and saves the day. With his dying breath, he tells Alex that his father used to be an assassin, too, and that he saved his life. His father is also named John Rider because everyone in this family has hilariously basic names. Grigorovich tells Alex to go find Scorpia to find his destiny. Then he dies. This scrambles Alex's head, making him feel like he's been lied to his whole life and that MI6 hasn't just been using him, they're actively evil. Sabina moves to the United States with her family, too, leaving with this new information. And that brings me to the next stage in this series's life cycle. Part of the problem with an episodic format is that the series doesn't go through the ups and downs that come with a single story. There's no greater goal the heroes are working towards or a main villain whose plans they need to stop. The good guys just have to stop a series of bad guys. Repeat until your audience has grown tired of the formula and you no longer make enough money from them to justify the effort you put in. So I'm going to say that Scorpia is the best that Alex Ryder ever got. After Gugorovitch told him to go to Venice to find Scorpia, Alex does just that. While there he notices a yacht with a giant scorpion on it and follows it to a fancy mansion. He sneaks in later but gets captured and locked in a basement that will flood during high tide. He only escapes by managing to squeeze himself through a small drainage pipe that leads out into the canal, knowing all the while that he might get stuck and drown in the dark. Alex seems to almost drown a lot. I can only assume that Anthony Horowitz is deathly afraid of that. Not that I blame him. Later he breaks into another facility connected to Scorpia. Specifically he climbs up a cliff next to the facility and base jumps down into it because rule of cool. He then gets captured again. This time he's brought to one of Scorpia's leaders, a woman named Julia Rothman. Rothman explains that Scorpia is basically a private intelligence agency. The name is short for their four specialties. Sabotage, corruption, intelligence, and assassination. As long as you're willing to pay them, they'll do almost anything you want them to. And they have the expertise to do so because they're led by a bunch of spies who were left out of work by the end of the Cold War. Rothman tells Alex all about his father. It turns out, John Ryder didn't die in a plane crash. He worked for Scorpia as an assassin. That's how he knew Yassin Grigorovich and he was murdered by MI6 during a prisoner exchange. She even shows him video of his father being shot because that won't scar a kid mentally. And in the footage, Mrs. Jones can be seen giving the kill order. With all this, Alex agrees to work for Scorpia. He goes on a several weeks long training course where he does very well but his instructors seem concerned that he'll be reluctant to kill someone. This is a little odd since Alex has killed multiple people by this point. You could argue that maybe he's only willing to kill in the heat of the moment when he has no other choice and that he couldn't do a cold-blooded assassination. However, the book doesn't talk about that much and Alex DOES kill people when he didn't have to at a few points. At the end of Point Blank he kills Dr. Grief by blowing up his helicopter. He was fleeing and his plan was in shatters. Functionally speaking this is little different than a police officer shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. Rothman sends Alex off to assassinate Mrs. Jones in her home. He holds her at gunpoint and yells angrily about stuff before shooting, but the bullet hits a plane of invisible bulletproof glass. She lives and Alex is arrested. Later they show that Alex turned the gun at the last second so the shot would have gone over Jones's head. It seems that he couldn't bring himself to kill her even believing that she murdered his father. Meanwhile, Scorpia is setting their big plan into motion. They send a list of demands to the British government however they're all aimed at the American government and say that if the demands are not followed they will kill all the school children in London. As a demonstration they kill the England national football team as they step off their plane. No assassins or weapons are nearby. The players just all drop dead of heart attacks simultaneously. The idea is to break up the alliance between the US and the UK since there's no way the Americans will ever concede to Scorpia's demands and when a bunch of British school children are killed they won't want to work together anymore. Six months later they plan to kill a bunch of American kids too. MI6 brings all of this to Alex's attention while he's in custody and tells him that if he helps they won't send him to prison. He agrees. Based on some info Alex found when he was with Scorpia they deduce that a deadly poison has been added to injections that were given to both the football team and London school children. However, it won't activate until Scorpia sends out terror hurts beams which are basically just a type of radiation. They need to find and destroy whatever Scorpia is using to send them out. Alex fakes his escape from custody and heads back to Rothman who lets him see that the satellite dishes are being mounted on a hot air balloon so they can be hidden until the last moment. He accidentally gives himself away but not before signaling where he is to MI6. They attack the facility just after Rothman launches the balloon. Alex manages to jump on and destroy the equipment before gently floating to the ground. Rothman is killed by falling debris during the battle. During his debriefing Alex tells Blunt and Mrs. Jones that he understands why they killed his dad and that he isn't angry anymore. Bitter, yes. But not angry. But then, plot twist. John Ryder was a double agent in Scorpia who actually worked for MI6 the whole time. The sniper killing him was actually him faking his own death so he could retire from spy life. But then Rothman found out he was alive and blew up the plane he was on with his wife. This is kind of stupid. Alex spends this entire book struggling with his identity, what he wants and where he comes from and it led him to do many stupid things. He almost murdered an innocent person over it. He never had a chance to know his parents because they were in the spy world. Then he lost his father figure for the same reason. Then he's had his life put in danger multiple times by the same people that took his family from him. He's angry and trying to gain some level of control over his own circumstances but ironically he's still being manipulated and he still feels like he has no choice in any of this. When he accepts that his father was a horrible person who he has no real attachment to he grows up and becomes more of his own person one who isn't shackled to the past. When we learn that his dad was actually a good guy there's nothing for Alex to get over emotionally. He just gets to be the hero who has descended from other heroes which we've all seen a million times. I don't like how Horowitz went with the more boring way of handling this. This was also a missed opportunity to spend more time on how bad MI6 and Blunt really are. By this point they've spent time showing how awful it is for them to force a kid into doing their dirty work. At first it barely gets a mention however later books really dive into the fact that forcing a teenager into all these situations is pretty, let's call it morally questionable to be nice. By the last book it's clear that Blunt is even worse than many of the criminals he fights. He's willing to lie, blackmail, and murder to get his way. Most of the time it's for the greater good but it doesn't make him a good person. He's just trying to protect his government's interests and that goes for MI6 as a whole. If Jones really had given the order to shoot a fleeing man in the back during a prisoner exchange that would be heinous but instead she's given it out. So anyways Alex leaves the bank and gets shot by a sniper who was hired by Scorpia. The book ends on a cliffhanger and if this had been a climax then I think the ending would have been halfway decent. Alex lives though. The sniper apparently drills holes in his bullets because according to the narration the air does as much damage as the bullet itself. That's... not how that works. Drilling a hole makes the bullet hollow point which causes it to squash on impact and make a much larger hole in the target. This is a small detail but in a series all about cool spy stuff that thrives on explaining technical details getting something like this wrong is much more annoying than it would be otherwise like this that don't affect the story much and should have been avoided with a few more minutes of research. The next book is Archangel. Archangel kind of sucks. It's not awful, really. It's just boring compared to the rest of the series. The mission is to stop a billionaire from crashing a space station into the Pentagon. Alex goes to space briefly at the end. That's all you need to know. Snakehead is the last truly great Alex writer novel. Scorpia comes back with a new plan this time to create a giant tsunami that will strike the west coast of Australia because... poverty keeps people in their place. Look, the motives aren't that important. They were hired by someone else to create an evil plan that Alex must stop. The real crazy thing is that Alex goes on this mission with a man named Ash. Ash isn't just some random Australian spy. He's Alex's godfather. The only reason he never raised him is because he left the United Kingdom and that came with a whole host of legal issues so his uncle Ian did it instead. He was in MI6 before a battlefield injury made them send him to desk work. When he got fed up with that, he resigned and left the country. Now he works for the Australian Intelligence Service and he's being sent to investigate a gang called Snakehead, who they believe is working with Scorpia. Alex agrees to help because he wants to learn more about his dad. Ash and Alex pretend to be Afghani refugees that have hired Snakehead to smuggle them into Australia, complete with dying their skin to appear darker. Nope, not touching that with a 10-foot pole. They search for a large prototype bomb called the Royal Blue that has been stolen by Scorpia and trace it to a man named Winston Yu. Yu is the leader of Snakehead as well as board member of Scorpia who is in charge of this operation. While sneaking around a cargo ship, Alex confirms that Yu has the bomb, gives himself admin privileges and manages to escape to the North Coast of Australia by himself. However, Yu holds Ash hostage and forces Alex to come back into custody. During his obligatory villain speech, Yu explains that Royal Blue releases shock waves in such a way that if it were put into an underwater tectonic platefault, it would cause an earthquake and tsunami. When it comes to terrorism, go big or go home. Yu tries to harvest Alex's organs but he escapes again and gets into contact with his allies. They track the bomb to an offshore oil rig that they then attack. Yu escapes but his assistant is shot. His assistant also turns out to be Ash who had been a double agent this whole time. After MI6 removed him from field work, his dreams were shattered and he got angry enough to join anyone who would let him do spy stuff that happened to be Scorpia. He was the one who planted the bomb that killed Alex's parents. In his final moments, he begs for forgiveness that Alex refuses to give. Alex detonates the bomb early so it doesn't cause an earthquake. It does kill Yu though. So that ends the last good Alex writer book. It doesn't do anything new but it has all the same action and over the top spy stuff that brought us all in to start. We even get a little bit more information about Alex's past which he has to work to move past. There are several different places that could be considered the shark jump of this series. Usually when the main characters go into space that's a sign that the writers are out of ideas so when I was younger I thought it would be Archangel but then Snakehead turned out really well. I'd have to go with the last two books Crocodile Tears and Scorpia Rising. With the death of Ash, the last villain that had a personal connection with Alex is gone and without any sort of larger story to work with there isn't anywhere for the series to go. All they can do is do some more spy plots and the more of those you do the more formulaic they become. The first time the hero saves a million people it's amazing, a fantastic accomplishment. The 8th time? Meh. Crocodile Tears is boring. There's a retired boxer who wants to destroy a dam in Africa. Who gives a shit? There's one scene where Alex has to escape a car that sinks to the bottom of a deep lake. That's pretty cool. Scorpia Rising isn't the worst ending ever. It's the final showdown between Alex and Scorpia, his last mission for MI6, the climax that everything has, sort of, been building towards. And I'll give Horowitz credit that he does pull out all the stops to make this last entry as exciting as he could. He really leaned into the darker side of spy thrillers making Scorpia Rising feel more like the born identity than James Bond in some ways. The problem is that there aren't many stops left to pull out. With Scorpia having their last few plans foiled the organization is in dire straits. Their finances are in disarray, their reputation is under water, and several of their leaders are dead. They need a massive success to get themselves back on track. The new leader after the death of Julia Rothman is a man named Zelion Kirst, the former head of the Yugoslav secret police. He's been shown a few times now, and though he's never met Alex personally, he knows about him. He hates and respects him in equal measure, so you think he'd be the villain here, right? Wrong. A new member of Scorpia named Abdul Aziz Al-Rahim is. I mean, of course. Audiences love it when you bring in a new villain at the last second. Just look at the final season of Chuck, or Spectre, or The 100, or The Rangers' Apprentice, or the entire plot revolves around Scorpia terrorists attacking people to get the British government to return the Elgin marbles to Greece, and the government still refuses to give them up. Well, that much is believable. That's only the surface plan though. Scorpia also attempts to gather proof of Alex's activities with MI6, kill him, then threaten to release all of this to the public so that the British government will be forced to return the marbles. Scorpia's reputation will be repaired, they'll make money from their client, and their main rival will be dead. It's a solid plan, and it's kind of nice that it doesn't revolve around a way to kill large numbers of people secretly. Remember the Alex clone from way back in Book 2? Yeah, he's still alive and in prison until Scorpia breaks him out by faking his death. His real name is Julius, by the way, and I'll call him that to avoid confusion. Then they lay a trail, which makes MI6 think they're planning some sort of attack on the Cairo International College of Arts and Education, where many wealthy British children are sent. Blunt manages to wrangle in Alex once more after saving him from a sniper that attacked him at his school. Blunt sends him down to Egypt as a fake student at the school. This time, his caretaker, Jack Starbright, demands to come along. Yeah, remember her? Probably not. Smithers also comes along to provide more gadgets, and more opportunities, for Simpson's jokes that I will not utilize. Alex does his usual investigation shtick where he nearly dies a few times and gets captured. The people who catch him are unknown at first, but after they torture him for a bit, their boss comes and tells them off. Turns out they were with the CIA and they're in Cairo because the US Secretary of State is visiting, and they know Scorpia is operating nearby. They let Alex go with a simple R-Bad bro, and he goes to speak with Smithers. In the middle of their conversation, Scorpia attacks and they're forced to flee, using a bunch of gadgets and booby traps to kill or slow down the villains. Remember that scene in Tomorrowland where robots attack George Clooney's house? It's basically just that. When they get away, Smithers says that he has to go into hiding now. Then he takes off his fat suit that he's been wearing the entire time. Yep, turns out he was a normal-sized person in disguise the entire series. He's also Irish, for some reason. Let me tell you, that's the funniest fucking thing I have ever read. It was eight and a half books of build-up for this one punchline that doesn't even get much focus. Smithers was a minor character, but he was one of the few unambiguous good guys in the series. Even when MI6 leaves Alex out to dry, Smithers goes out of his way to help Alex as much as he can, usually by giving him cool gadgets. He's the one guy I was sad to see go. Alex heads home where he finds Jack gone and a note telling him to come to a secluded location alone. He goes and is captured by Julius and taken to Raheem's compound. Raheem, as the villain of a spy thriller, needs to have some odd quirk to make him stand out as something other than a power-hungry madman. In his case, he wants to create a unit of measurement for pain. Unfortunately, the only way to get that is by torturing people and measuring their reactions. To his credit, that would be a useful thing to have. Raheem decides to measure Alex's emotional pain by allowing Jack to escape, then blowing up her car while Alex watches. Jack's death is kind of sad, I suppose, she was an innocent victim in all this. The issue is that we don't know her. She's always been more of a plot point than a character. You could count all her spoken lines before this book on your fingers, so even if the audience feels bad for Alex, we don't care all that much. If they wanted to make us hurt, they would have had to kill off a different character that we actually knew and liked. The only ones I can think of are Smithers and Sabina, but they still aren't major characters. Alex's isolation gave this series a sharp edge, yet it left us without any other characters to be attached to. During his torture, Alex also learns about the evil villain plan. Julius is going to shoot the American Secretary of State while she makes a speech. Then he'll dump Alex's corpse with the murder weapon nearby to make it look like he did it. Then Scorpio will blackmail the UK government with releasing this information to get the Elgin Marbles back. It's at this point you should be thinking that this final book is a bit too complex. It's not that hard to follow when you're reading, but hearing it relayed to you is a good way to get lost. That's not what this series was about. It was about relatively straightforward evil villain plots that made a modicum of sense, usually. Alex manages to avoid being killed and throws off Julius' aim, so he misses, but alerts security to their presence. He tries to flee, but Alex chases him down and shoots him. The CIA and Egyptian government take Alex with them to regime sport in the desert. A battle ensues and regime dies an unusual death during it. You know, more James Bond stuff. After being defeated by the same teenager three times in a row, Scorpio's reputation is dead and the organization dissolves. Most of the remaining leaders are arrested, including Zilean Kirst. Yeah, the guy built up to be the main antagonist of the entire saga not only never meets Alex, but he gets arrested by law enforcement made up of people that we've never met either. How climactic. Alan Blunt is forced to resign from his position to be replaced by Mrs. Jones. Before he goes, he gives a speech about how one day she'll make hard choices. He always did what was right, et fucking cetera. It's also revealed that Scorpio didn't send the sniper to Alex's school. Blunt did. Meaning that he almost killed a bunch of school children and indirectly got Jack killed. This is the final nail in his coffin. The point where even the most permissive members of the audience finally have to accept that in some ways he's just as bad as the leaders of Scorpio. In the epilogue, Alex goes to start a new life in the United States with Sabina's family. And that's it. That's the end. For a long time, I wasn't sure exactly what it was about Scorpio rising that made it fall flat for me. There wasn't much worth hating. A lot of the story felt competent. And it seemed as though Horowitz was at least trying. I had to start doing research for this video before it struck me. Until the end, this is just more of the same. The bulk of this is just another Alex Ryder book. It doesn't feel like a climax other than a few scenes. He doesn't face off with some sort of rival or ultimate enemy. He's only introduced in this book. He's got no pre-existing connection to Alex. Julius seems like he'd work for this on paper. After all, he has personal reasons to hate Alex and he takes sadistic glee in hurting him. But he hasn't even been mentioned since the end of Point Blank. Alex doesn't give a shit about him until he suddenly shows back up. They aren't rivals, they're opponents where one is obsessed and the other is disinterested. It's just Naruto and Sasuke after the time skip except worse somehow. The big villain plan isn't any bigger or better than other plans they've had. In fact, it's worse. In the past, Alex has stopped plans that would have killed millions of people from smallpox outbreaks to nuclear disasters to tsunamis. This one would kill two people and embarrass the British government. Big deal. You could argue that this one is more personal as it's aimed directly at Alex but his life has been in danger during every mission. He's always had to run, hide, fight and kill to protect himself. It's always been kinda personal. Then there's the issue I already mentioned where we don't care that much about most of the people who are in danger. None of this was truly built up over the series since every book is largely self-contained. There was no leading up to the climax, there was just the climax. Take this as writing advice. Always edge your audience to the point of satisfaction multiple times before you allow the story to reach an explosive finale. The most satisfying part of the ending is seeing Alex get to lead the spy life and blunt war crimes blowing up in his face. Those are both subplots that have been here since day one and so when they reach a boiling point, it's rewarding. Alex always wanted to be a normal kid. He lost multiple guardians to the violence inherent in this system and he knew that he'd be putting himself at risk in the same way if he ever worked for MI6 so he refused until he was blackmailed. Even when he does stuff on his own like when he arrested drug dealers with a crane he does it for personal reasons, not out of any sort of patriotic fervor. His government, personified by blunt, forced him to do its bidding. That saved a lot of lives, there's no getting around that fact but it doesn't mean that MI6 wasn't using what was essentially a child soldier. They forced him into situations where he had to kill or be killed by threatening him. They may as well have rolled into a Somalian village and handed him a Kalashnikov. In a way, it's like the debate on bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did it save more lives than it took? Probably. Does that make it okay? Depends on who you ask. And I'm not getting into it because that's a whole other discussion. My point is that watching all this come to a head made for a rewarding conclusion. My point is that watching this all come to a head made for a rewarding conclusion but the main storyline didn't have anything of that nature. Imagine an alternate version of Scorpia Rising. Cursed is the new leader of Scorpia and he wants to get revenge on Alex while also preventing MI6 from interfering with his business for the foreseeable future. He lays out clues in London that he's planning something nefarious prompting Blunt and company to investigate. They ask Alex to help but this time he puts his foot down. He refuses to help and they have no leverage on him so they're forced to let him go. Unfortunately, he's still targeted by Scorpia agents and nearly dies. They manage to kidnap his friends, Jack and maybe one or two others, hostage to try and lure him out. And if he goes to MI6, they'll know so he's completely on his own. He attempts to save his friends but is captured instead. Cursed, in classic Bond villain fashion, doesn't shoot him and instead gives him some sort of test. If he succeeds, him and his friends go free. Maybe Cursed plants a bomb on a subway or at a hospital and Alex has the code to disarm it. He has to run out and take care of it, only barely succeeding. Cursed is surprised he pulled it off and goes back on his word, killing Alex's friends. Then, before he's killed himself, MI6 tracks down wherever Cursed is hiding and attacks. In the chaos, Alex manages to kill Cursed. Not long after, he learns that Scorpia had sent out all the information they had on his missions and the British government is disgraced. Blunt is still forced to resign, Alex still goes to start a new life, Scorpia is still finished. There are a lot of similarities with the real ending here, but it's better because it takes advantage of what came before to make a proper climax. The villain wasn't introduced at the last second and his plan was focused entirely on Alex, meaning the revenge aspect isn't a sideshow. This would make it so that more plots and ideas from earlier in the series come to a head here. This wouldn't be a perfect ending, but at least it would try to go out with a bang rather than an apathetic shrug. And that's really what it comes down to here. Alex Ryder was a series about being cool with a sharp edge of darker themes. It's hard to make that into anything other than a series of episodic adventures. It wasn't about having any sort of overarching story with a small group of main villains, it was about Alex defeating an endless series of evil dudes. The only way that sort of series can go is to pump out more entries with the same formula until it gets stale and the author tries to make some sort of big ending. But there's nowhere else to go. The main character already saved a measurable fraction of the world multiple times. He even went into space. From there it's all downhill. Endings are hard at the best of times. The ideal ending is one that is built up to so that it makes sense, but is also surprising. It's entirely possible to do this in an episodic format, just look at most sitcoms. The finales usually work because they're just feel-good send-offs to beloved characters. They aren't about wrapping up specific plot threads so much as finishing off character arcs and bringing their goals to fruition. Alex Ryder was never going to be a series with a satisfying conclusion. It was made impossible by its very nature, but that's only obvious in hindsight when it's clear there was no plan. When you're driving in the dark, you can't see the cliff until it's too late. Hello to of Patreon of to the people ten dollar and up. Appo Savilane and Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten, Echo, Great Griebo, Joel Carcat Kitsune, K.R. Stevenson, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Microphone, Moritz Fuchs, Sad Mardigan, Tobacco Crote, Tom Beanie, and Vaivictus. You of to be grateful, want to of to Patreon request, please help channel grow, subscribe and like video. Bye.