#L criticizing Operation: God of the New World

[captainhysunstuff]

L’s got a bone to pick with Light’s grand plan. (And Light’s kind of into it…)

[spiritualnaturalist]

Protestantism and Capitalism

Hi guys ! I hope you’ve been enjoying the blog so far ! Today we’re venturing into the realm of economics which is a bit out of my wheelhouse so bear with me. Nancy Fraser is a political philosopher from Baltimore. She is a critical theorist who is currently a professor of political science and philosophy at The New School. She has authored books such as Cannibal Capitalism and Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. In this blog post we will be discussing her text Climates of Capital. 

As environmental catastrophe plague the world we are seeing now more than ever the economic and social effects that they have. Floods, Famines, Heat Waves, and Torrential weather have no conscious thought, they do not choose to target the rich or the poor. They do not decide where to land based on the community's ability to bounce back, they just land. We saw it with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, The Haiti Earthquake in 2010, The Afghanistan Blizzard in 2008, even the European heat wave in 2003; these are varying regions of the world with varying levels of economic stability, yet they have all been plagued in some way by environmental disasters.  What we see arising from this is just how deep the disparities are, the level of support and the speed of recuperation for the events in Europe were light years ahead of those for places like Haiti. 

As you all know by now, this blog is about religion. Assuming you didn’t read the title, what religion do you think we are going to be discussing today ? ……..that's right, Protestantism ! Protestantism is a branch of Christianity which was formed after the Protestant reformation in the 1500’s. It is composed of the religious groups in the faith of Christianity who do not subscribe to the Roman Catholic Church due to their different doctrines. But why are the Protestants relevant to Capitalism ? Why are they relevant to environmentalism ? We can tie the main ideals of the Protestant Ethic can be directly tied to the development of the Capitalist belief system. The main beliefs of the Protestant Ethic are the living of an Ascetic lifestyle, the dedication of long hand manual labor to give attributes to the glory of God, idleness is a sin, and money is to be valued and saved for oneself. Ideals have led to the conception of capitalist ideals such as the development of the workforce, the intrinsic value for productivity over ethics, and the compulsion to save money or hoard one's wealth. There is a clear tie in between Capitalism and Protestantism, and as Fraser will soon show us, that means a tie into the environment and the communities that are affected by it. 

One of the main structural arguments in Fraser’s work is that Capitalism harbors ecological contradiction at its very core. One is either on the planet's side, or the investors side. In Frasers writing she discusses that what an environmentalist would see nature as having intrinsic values, a capitalist would see nature as having extrinsic values as raw material or a disposal site. As we discussed in our anthropocentrism blog ( which also happened to discuss a closely related religious denomination) we saw the ideas that humans are responsible for generating value. As Fraser discusses, humans have taken that power and operated under the assumption that nature is self-replenishing and here for the disposal of those who have the technology to utilize it. Frasers implements this idea of the 4 D’s of Capitalism and how they relate to our interactions with the environment. 

Dependence - upon nature as a resource but also for general survival

Division - of human values , we are either economically oriented or sustainably oriented

Disavowal - of the costs and wastes of Capitalism , on top of this I would personally add a disavowal for human life. 

Destabilization - of ecosystems for capital gain and lack of regard for the effects of that 

Now I don’t want to drone on as this blog post could really be a novel on its own but I like to think I gave you guys something to ruminate on and think about ! Have  a great rest of your day and tune in next week for a discussion on Deep Ecology : ) 

[apptowonder]

Beautiful City -- A Theological Ramble on “Godspell”-- Pt. I: Jesus Musicals and Christology

So I had a lot of thoughts and F e e l i n g s about the 2011 revival of Tebelak and Schwartz’s musical Godspell and I wanted to share some of them here. This is gonna be a pretty disorganized piece (hence the title), but I hope that whether you’re a fan of the show or a reader of my work, you might find at least one thing that resonates or helps you understand why I feel the way I do about this show. To give my thoughts some structure, I’m turning this into a blog post series. This first piece will be divided into two sections: a longer section on theology and a shorter section on personal response.

1. Godspell vs JCS, and a Brief Diversion on Christologies

So one easy hot take is to compare and contrast Godspell with Jesus Christ Superstar, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that came out around the same time. Conservative Christians at the time were not too fond of either of them, but both found a strong audience among secular theater-goers and (presumably) progressive Christians. Tebelak, fwiw, was gay and a lifelong Episcopalian who had considered the priesthood at various points in his life. Webber is an agnostic who says he finds Jesus fascinating as an important historical figure. These facts aren’t meant to favor one writer over the other (although I will explain below why I personally prefer Godspell), but knowing these facts does do some to explain why these shows ended up the way they did while covering very similar subjects.

The general consensus I’ve heard and would agree with is that Superstar is about the interpersonal relationships of Jesus the man, and especially his relationship with Judas Iscariot. Godspell also brings the relationship between Judas and Jesus to the foreground, but Godspell (true to its name) is ultimately more about the gospel itself. About Jesus’ teachings, about the community of love that he created, and a little bit about Jesus the Son of God.

In this respect, I’d like to propose that these two musicals unintentionally illustrate two historic approaches to understanding the person and work of Christ. Jesus Christ Superstar loosely follows a theology of Christ which is aligned with the historic Antiochene school of Christology. 

A. Antioch

(St. John Chrysostom, famed Patriarch of Constantinople and student of the Antiochene School)

The Catechetical School of Antioch was a loose affiliation/institution of theologians who trained many of the prominent clergy in the Eastern churches. It emphasized the distinction between the divine and human natures of Christ. It was most invested in historical readings of Scripture. While the orthodox Antiochene scholars certainly confessed that Christ was both divine and human, they tended to state that the divinity of God the Son was not always accessible to Jesus in his humanity. Taken to the extreme, some Antiochenes embraced the heresies of Adoptionism* or Nestorianism**. The value of this school, however, was the investment in an accessible, anthropological reading of Scripture, and an understanding of Christ that emphasized the transcendence of the Son of God and the humanity of Jesus as one of us.

Jesus Christ Superstar approaches its subject matter with a mixture of both pathos and cynicism (intentional or otherwise). Taking place entirely during the Passion, none of the theophanic moments of Christ’s life are depicted (eg, the Baptism of Christ or the Transfiguration).*** We see only his humanity, and it is a very pitiable humanity. I say this not as a criticism, clearly the show succeeds at producing a great deal of sympathy and poignancy for its characters. The presence of the divine in the show is nearly absent. The Last Supper in both shows is not given its full doctrinal weight, but Superstar tones down the spiritual significance of it more than Godspell does. In Superstar, Jesus notices the indifference of his Apostles and says “For all you care, this could be my body that you’re eating, and my blood you’re drinking.”

Jesus and Judas both talk to God, and imply that God answers, but we are only shown one side of the conversation. When Judas commits suicide and is singing the titular number to Jesus on the cross, he does so as a disembodied spirit whom Jesus is not able to interact with. Rather than the traditional account of Jesus going down to Hades and preaching to the dead, here the dead preach to a human Jesus who is doing God’s will but may or may not be able to hear them. All in all, Webber (though obviously not himself an Antiochene by confession) is showing us a Jesus who is primarily a glorified human with a relationship to God, who is nonetheless not especially divine in his capacities, outlook or body. Where he is connected to divinity, there is a clear separation between his divinity and his humanity

B. Alexandria

(St. Cyril, famed Pope (Patriarch) and student of the Alexandrian School)

The Catechetical School of Alexandria was the other major center for Christian theological training in the early Eastern Church, located at Alexandria in Eastern Roman Egypt. It traced its lineage all the way back to St. Mark, but was most strongly influenced by the teachings of Pantaenus, Origen, St. Clement and St. Cyril (above). The Alexandrians were invested in allegorical readings of Scripture, and the use of “pagan” philosophy in the service of theology. They also emphasized the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Orthodox Alexandrians recognized that Jesus’ divinity and humanity were not consumed by each other, but they tended to suggest that Christ’s divinity and humanity were always operating simultaneously and synergistically, that it was impossible to tell exactly where one ends and the other begins. Taken to the opposite extreme of the Antiochenes, some Alexandrians embraced the heresies of Monophysitism (i) or Apollinarianism (ii). The value of this school was an investment in a polyvalent, mystical approach to Scripture, and an understanding of Christ that emphasized the saving power of God’s own divinity taking on our humanity in an immanent way. 

Godspell is more invested in the ethical impact of Jesus’ life and ministry. However, it is more willing to blur the lines between the divine and human world for the sake of its message and framing of Christ. We see the Baptism of Christ on stage, and although there is no explicit depiction of the Holy Spirit or the Father, the scene is preceded by John the Baptist’s messianic song, “Prepare Ye,” and is woven in and around the song “Save the People,” a song where Jesus proclaims the coming salvation that God the Father will work in their midst for the benefit of all. This happens while the new disciples are also being baptized and receive a flower signifying their membership in the community forming organically around Christ. Jesus’ presence is charged with the eschatological promise of God being in their midst, which is a more Alexandrian reading that blurs the line between where Jesus the human ends and Jesus the divine begins.

I argue that we also see in Godspell an allusion (perhaps unintentional) to the Transfiguration. There is a scene where the stage lights are off and the disciples hold wave glow sticks around Jesus in rhythmic patterns while Jesus talks about the light within. Even if this is not an intentional reference, the visual language of the scene lends itself to the light of God being present in the midst of the people.

Before the Last Supper, Jesus sings the ballad “Beautiful City,” encouraging the disciples to continue the beloved community after his death. While it is a secularized approach in some ways, there is again that blurring of humanity and divinity where the promised city is coming, is beautiful, marked by eschatological hope, and is still “not a city of angels, but a city of man.” During the Last Supper, Jesus prays the traditional Jewish blessing over the bread and wine, and then has lines which mirror the words of institution for the Eucharist. Whether one reads it as a memorial or a sacrament, Tebelak and Schwartz choose to frame the Last Supper as an intentional institution on Jesus’ part. The table is also bathed in light and smoke, implying divine energy or grace gathered around Jesus and his disciples.

On the cross, in Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus’ last words emphasize his human obedience to the Father: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In Godspell, the words are less literal to the Gospel text, but they lean towards a more divine-human reading of Jesus. He says, “Oh God, I’m dying,” and the disciples respond, “Oh God, You’re dying,” with the dual meaning of expressing despair and acknowledging his divinity. Jesus’ exclamation here is also very in line with Alexandrian theology, which emphasized the idea that if Christ is truly God incarnate, then a part of God did truly die on the cross, and not just a human who represented God or who was carried through his existence by God.

Finally, though both shows are ambiguous on the Resurrection in order to place their emotional cores front and center (iii), Godspell arguably has the more explicit allusion to the Resurrection. While Superstar ends with Jesus’ death on the cross and a final overture, Godspell ends with a stirring reprise of “Prepare Ye,” intermingled with “Long Live God,” again the messianic expectation. Jesus’ body is lovingly carried by the disciples offstage. In the production I saw, they carried him upwards into the house, where a bright white spotlight was shining. Though both the Antiochenes and the Alexandrians would naturally endorse faith in the Resurrection, in a secularized context, the Alexandrian-flavored Christology of Godspell is more comfortable with depicting Jesus’ divinity infusing and breaking into the human sphere of action. As such, Godspell is more comfortable than Superstar with at least alluding to the most awe-inspiring feat of Christ the God-man, his rising from the dead.

2. Conclusions and Pointing to Pt. II

In the end, the earnestness, exuberance and eschatological hopefulness of Godspell won me over, whereas after Jesus Christ Superstar I was impressed but not moved in the same way. The interplay between grounded radical ethics, unironic joy and tenderness, and the sprinklings of luminosity and divinity in Godspell spoke to me profoundly as a queer Orthodox Christian. Watching a filmed version of the stage show, I felt a visceral sense of connection to my faith and my God, one that echoed various points along my spiritual journey where my heart “burned within me” like the disciples on the Emmaus road. Where I was surrounded by friends who were seeking Christ, and the presence of God was an animating energy of love, hope and joy in our midst. In the next part, I want to pick up the Alexandrian lens to begin to talk about what moved me about this musical in particular, drawing on my specific experiences as a queer Christian, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and as someone who inhabits both of those identities simultaneously.

*Adoptionism is the belief that Jesus was entirely human at his birth and that the divinity of the Son of God came and inhabited him at his baptism or later.

**Nestorianism is the belief that Jesus had a human nature and a divine nature, but that the two were entirely separate from one another, with the divine nature operating the human Jesus without experiencing any of the human things Jesus experienced directly.

***The Transfiguration is not explicitly named as such in Godspell. However, I will argue later that it does make an appearance.

(i) Monophysitism is the belief that Jesus had one nature which was an indistinct mixture of humanity and divinity. This belief is not to be confused with its orthodox Alexandrian counterpart, Miaphysitism, which is the belief that Jesus has one nature where the humanity and the divinity are united but do not dissolve into each other. The latter doctrine is the belief of the Oriental Orthodox Churches.

(ii) Apollinarianism is the belief that Jesus had a human body but a divine soul/mind.

(iii) Jesus Christ Superstar’s emotional core being the pathos of the character relationships, Godspell’s emotional core being the poignancy and ethos of the gospel and the community of disciples.

[scribblesandsnark]

“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)

There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)

I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)

Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,

Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.

But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.

Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?

I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.

There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.

So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.

There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)

…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??

(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)

The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).

Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start.  In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)

I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever  appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife.  And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).

Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.

Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)

Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.

Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)

Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.

Con: Leon is a fucking moron.

Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??

Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)

Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.

Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.

I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))

Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!

It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.

Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.

There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.

Dammit, Shane.

You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.

Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)

I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.

Moving right along…

Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.

I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?

I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.

Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.

It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”

Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)

Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.

Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)

The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.

I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.

On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?

At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)

Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.

I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…

Ahem.

Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)

Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.

Wait.

Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.

I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.

I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.

PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.

DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.

The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.

That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.

I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…

I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.

That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.

Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)

Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.

There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.

The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!

(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)

CORAAAL!!

Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)

Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”

As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)

Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?

Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.

Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.

(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)

Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.

Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…

Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.

The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.

Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!

Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.

Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?

As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?

There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!

Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.

I do love that shot though.

Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.

Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.

Sidebar complete.

I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.

It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.

I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.

Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.

Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.

Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)

How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.

Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.

Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)

There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.

Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)

Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.

How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??

I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.

Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.

Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?

This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.

Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.

I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)

I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.

“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.

I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.

As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!

RIP Leon Basset.

I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??

Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.

There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).

Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.

Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.

Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:

Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.

Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.

WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.

Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)

Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…

It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.

God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.

Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.

I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??

So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??

Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.

…that poor horse.

Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.

Iconic shot!

It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).

Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)

There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.

One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…

I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.

And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.”

So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.

For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.

Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.

I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)

That poor horse…

Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”

Men have huge feet. Yeek.

It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)

Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.

I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.

“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.

Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?

love  em

[jaskiers-sweetkiss]

Bombshell [B. Barnes] - Prologue

Pairing: British S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent!Reader x Bucky Barnes

Summary: Agent Y/N Y/L/N hadn't known what would happen when an old friend from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Academy reached out in search of intel on an assassin much of the world believed to be a myth. She certainly hadn't expected S.H.I.E.L.D. to fall to Hydra and Captain America and the assassin to go missing.

Months later Y/N finds herself living a double life as both an agent in the private sector with her former Supervising Officer, Maria Hill, and an agent in Phil Coulson's new S.H.I.E.L.D. Not to mention, she located the mysterious Winter Soldier and was now providing him asylum unbeknownst to any of her employers.

Warnings: Violence, guns, mentions of blood, death, swearing probably

Word Count: 2.7K

a/n: This is my first time writing a self-insert fic and my first time posting on Tumblr so any *constructive* criticism or advice is welcome. I’m also super not British so if any of the dialog sounds too American PLEASE let me know so I can fix it! This fic will also be published on wattpad with an OC instead of self-insert so if that’s more your speed you can check that out here!

___

It had felt like any other day at the Hub the day S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. Nobody would've imagined that the infamous was Hydra even still standing, let alone strong enough to infiltrate the world's foremost intelligence agency, and yet, that's what you found yourself up against that fateful evening.

You had reported to the Hub as usual, swiftly making your way to your cubicle to check for any new assignments. You may have had a desk, but your job was far from a desk job, usually involving jetting around the world on dangerous missions or organizing and executing extraction plans. However, that day had been a desk day, no missions, just paperwork; you got restless on desk days, unable to stay in your cubicle for long, so you often wandered. As a Level 7 agent, you had access to most of the Hub, something you often took advantage of. Your ability and need to wander had probably saved your life that day.

A graduate from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Academy of Operations, you were first and foremost a field agent, and a good one at that. You'd been assigned to the Hub immediately following your training; you knew exactly how everything was run and you knew when something was going on, so when you noticed the abnormal number of soldiers running through the corridors as you left the indoor tack late that afternoon you became immediately suspicious. However, you returned to her cubicle in accordance with S.H.I.E.L.D. protocol; if your presence was needed you would've been informed. Your cubicle was part of a larger room full of identical office spaces, it was always bustling with noise and movement as agents worked, but when you approached that day, it was silent.

And then you heard gunshots.

You flattened yourself against the wall, listening for anything that would let you know what was happening. You crept closer, simultaneously thanking and cursing the eerily empty corridor for making it easier to hear but providing no cover.

"Hail Hydra." You heard a chorus of voices shout and your blood ran cold.

You managed to peek into the office, though immediately wishing you hadn't. Bodies of your colleagues littered the ground and in the middle stood about ten agents, dressed in S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms with their fists raised in the two-arm Hydra salute. You pushed down the feeling that you might vomit, just as you were trained to, focusing only on your new mission: to make it out alive and save as many people as possible.

You ran to the first place you could think of: the Holobox. Hopefully, you could use the secure line to reach the Triskelion and get help. You rushed through the corridors, staying out of sight of the soldiers, forced to assume they were Hydra. When you reached the room where the Holobox was kept you slipped inside, quickly shutting the door behind you and pressing your back against it, gun pointed out into the room.

"Agent Y/L/N?"

There were two others in the room with you already using the Holobox to contact what sounded like the Academy of SciTech's director, Agent Weaver. You recognized the others as well, Jemma Simmons, youngest Academy graduate to date, and Antoine Triplett, fellow Operations graduate and occasional colleague in the field.

"Agent Triplett," You acknowledged in your clipped British accent, not lowering your gun. You had been about to interrogate the two when Agent Weaver's voice cut through.

"Have your commander report the Academy is under siege." You could hear gunshots in the background. "Don't know how long Hydra's been inside S.H.I.E.L.D. but they're taking over."

Agent Simmons didn't even appear to have noticed your presence, her attention focused solely on the Holobox transmission, but Triplett's attention on you became even sharper with the announcement of the Hydra takeover.

"Hydra?" Simmons gasped. "What? Where?"

You didn't hear Agent Weaver's answer, focusing on the other agents' mannerisms. Either the two were incredible actors, which Agent Triplett should have been as a specialist, or they were just as surprised by Hydra as you. You really hoped it was the latter.

"Trust no one." Agent Weaver warned before an explosion was heard in the background and the transmission was cut.

You locked the door. Either Simmons and Triplett were Hydra and you'd have to take them out or they were S.H.I.E.L.D. and they would need the door locked for protection anyway.

"What are you doing?" Simmons asked nervously, finally acknowledging your presence.

"Either you're Hydra and I have to take you out or you're not and we need to stick together. Either way, I want that door locked to keep anyone else from getting in," you answered firmly, eyeing both agents warily.

"How do I know I can trust you?" Simmons asked the room, looking back and forth between Agent Triplett and you.

"Because I'm trustworthy." You scoffed at Triplett's answer.

Then he pulled a knife and you immediately cocked her gun, as he walked towards Simmons.

"Put the knife down Agent Triplett." You warned.

"Here," he handed the knife to Simmons, "take it. If you try to kill me with it, I'll know I can't trust you."

"I'm not handing over my gun to a potentially compromised agent." You said when Simmons and Triplett turned towards you expectantly.

"Agent Y/L/N, I'm unarmed and she's a scientist," Triplett spoke, raising his hands in the air as he turned to face you, and Simmons slid the knife into her pocket. "Neither of us is much of a threat against the British Bombshell, with or without a gun."

You rolled her eyes at the nickname but nodded, heart racing as you kept yourself pressed against the door.

"Just lower the gun."

You did as requested, going a step further and unloading the clip which you tossed to the man as a sign of trust, tucking the unloaded gun into the back of your pants.

"Neither is very good without the other." You shrugged, moving away from the door and towards the center of the room where the Holobox was set up.

"We need to contact the Triskelion."

"We need to contact our team first," Simmons spoke, booting the machine back up.

"Can't wait to tell them the good news," Triplett said bitterly.

However, there seemed to be some sort of signal preventing any transmissions.

"Something terrible has happened." Simmons fretted, though they weren't left any time to discuss it as the door busted open.

"Show me your hands!" An agent shouted as they filed into the room, surrounding you.

The three of you stood there with what felt like hours before Victoria Hand walked in. Initially, you were thankful to see your boss, thankful she had survived the attack, but then she started talking.

"The rest of your possibly very short lives hinges on this moment. Hydra has successfully infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. at the highest level. It only took seven decades, and today is our coming-out party. We have the support of the Level 9 and Level 10 agents. And those who have resisted Hydra have been crossed off...Director Fury included." You cursed, not realizing how deep the infiltration went.

"I'm here to offer you a choice." Hand continued, "Either you swear unwavering loyalty to Hydra right now for all time...or share Fury's fate."

You looked at your companions questioningly. You weren’t going down without a fight and you hoped they were on the same page.

"I won't wait long." The agents surrounding you raised their weapons.

In a split second, Triplett tossed you your clip, elbowing the agent nearest him and pressing the knife Simmons had thrown him to the agent's throat. In the same instant, you reloaded your gun, aiming it directly at Hand. Victoria Hand had been your superior and a mentor for years and finding out she had been Hydra shook you to your core.

"Cross us off and two of you go out too." Trip threatened and you were thankful for his bravery in the face of what was certainly your deaths.

"Right answer." Hand smiled, and you nearly wavered in your confusion. "The number of people I trust is now eight."

The surrounding agents lowered their weapons but you and Triplett held your positions, you following Hand with your gun as the woman began to walk around the room.

"Where are we on the roundup?" Hand asked, ignoring the threat she and her agents were still under.

"We're moving all agents below level five to east holding. I have men monitoring microphones placed in most of the rooms." Someone answered.

You looked between Simmons and Triplett, neither of them understanding what was happening.

"And our strike team?"

"Has stormed the plane, yes."

"I'm sorry, was that a test?" You interrupted what appeared to be a debriefing.

"One very few have passed," Hand answered grimly. "I'm glad to know you're still on our side Agent Y/L/N."

"I thought we were dead," Simmons said, voice shaking as she breathed a sigh of relief. "You're not Hydra- thank God."

It was the longest day of your life as yuo helped Hand's team canvas each floor of the Hub, testing loyalty and stepping over bodies. You did your best not to look, too afraid of recognizing them, but the worst was when you recognized the turncoats. As a Level 7, you had helped lead a lot of operations throughout your time at the Hub and you had plenty of higher-ranking agents that you looked up to, so you understood the gut-wrenching feeling Simmons must have felt when Phil Coulson was suspected of being Hydra, and you knew the gut-punch Triplett felt when he found out John Garrett actually was.

It was a terrible day, but at the end of it, you were all just thankful to be alive.

"Captain America has defeated the Helicarriers at the Triskelion," Hand announced.

She had essentially named you her second-in-command that day as you were one of the highest-ranking agents left, and so as the sun began to rise you were standing by her side in the nearly empty control room.

You suspected knowledge of the Helicarriers had required Level 8 clearance, but it seemed Hand didn't care and you supposed clearance level didn't matter anymore.

"But his status is unknown." Hand continued and you sucked in a breath.

You knew Natasha had been working with Captain America, you had even sent the pair intel during the previous week. If Captain Rogers was down, Nat likely was as well.

Hand and Coulson continued to debrief the evening's events and next courses of action but you had once again become antsy and began to pace as you worried about your old friend.

"Is everything alright, Agent Y/L/N?" Coulson asked, sensing your anxieties.

"I had a friend who was working with Captain Rogers, sir." You answered, not wanting to give away too much information. You knew S.H.I.E.L.D. had fallen and that all of its files had been released into the world but Nat had come to you in confidence and you'd be damned if you betrayed it now.

"Understandable," Hand acknowledged with an empathetic look, before returning to business. "I'm leaving you and Coulson in charge of the Hub while I take Garrett to the Fridge."

"I can handle this, you should go try to contact your friend," Coulson said softly, placing a reassuring hand on your shoulder.

"Thank you, sir."

"The 'sir' really isn't necessary."

"Oh, well, as a higher ranking agent-"

"Coulson is fine." He reassured you. "Besides, I think it's safe to say you're Level 8 now."

You couldn’t help but laugh bitterly, "I'm probably the last S.H.I.E.L.D. agent to ever be promoted."

Coulson shrugged with a bittersweet smile of his own. Phil Coulson cared deeply for S.H.I.E.L.D., he had died for it, after all, so you were thankful that he would be by your side as you did whatever you could to salvage the organization.

You shook Hand's hand as you left the control room, wishing the other agent luck on her trip to the Fridge before you began your search for a holobox. The remaining agents had begun to relocate whatever resources they could to the same floor as the control room in an effort to consolidate, so hardly anything was where you’d thought it’d be. You finally found one on the floor below, either not having been moved yet or missed in the haste.

You attempted to contact Nat first, but you couldn't get through. So you contacted the person you felt sure would have all the answers, though it may come at the cost of a lecture.

"Y/N/N?"

"Maria, thank god." You breathed out a sigh of relief as your friend's face appeared. "Bloody hell, are you alright?"

Though she was clearly alive, Maria Hill looked as though she had fought hard for her life. Her hair was falling out of its usually neat ponytail and dried blood was caked to the side of the woman's face.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just haven't gotten a chance to clean up yet." Maria waved off your concern. "Are you safe?"

"Yes. The Hub is secure."

"Good. So is the Triskelion."

"I heard about Captain Rogers and the helicarriers," You revealed. You knew Hill would know about their existence as a Level 9 agent and the Director's right hand, so you weren’t concerned about divulging secrets. "Have you heard from Nat? I know she was involved."

"Natasha disclosed classified information to you?"

You smirked despite the circumstances. It had been years since Maria Hill had been your Supervising Officer but she had never stopped acting as though she was.

"Well she was in a pinch and I do outrank her; she thought I might have access to information she didn't. Plus, I don't work directly for her boss." You rationalized.

"She's appearing before a senate subcommittee right now," Maria answered, choosing to ignore the fact that you and Natasha had broken protocol.

"Still no word on Captain Rogers?" Hill shook her head. "What about the assassin?'

"Christ, how much did Nat tell you?"

"She came to me for intel on him."

"He seems to have disappeared alongside Rogers."

"Agent Y/L/N?" A voice interrupted. You turned to see Agent Simmons standing in the doorway. "I'm afraid I have some bad news."

You nod before turning back to the holobox, "I have business to take care of here. I'll contact you as soon as I can."

"Stay safe, Y/N/N." You nodded before ending the transmission and giving Simmons your attention.

"The U.S. Military is coming; Coulson wants to enact Odyssey Protocol. He's requesting your presence," the scientist explained and you balked at the news. Military involvement could mean either months of subpoenas and court appearances or very big bombs, neither of which was a very good option. 

"Where is he?"

"Helping get the Bus ready for takeoff."

"Lead the way."

[blackkudos]

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left upon his death.

Early life

Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on March 1, 1913. He was the second of three sons; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916, after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen, when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, Ralph discovering as an adult that his father had hoped he would grow up to be a poet.

In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. According to Ellison, his mother felt that "my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north." When she did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant. From the father of a neighborhood friend, he received free lessons for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster.

Ida remarried three times after Lewis died. However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attending Douglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team. He graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons. At Douglass, he was influenced by principal Inman E. Page and his daughter, music teacher Zelia N. Breaux.

At Tuskegee Institute

Ellison applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.

Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens," critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." In passages of Invisible Man, "he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee."

Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor, Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthusiastically let Ellison share in his knowledge.

A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drezel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collection Shadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life." Through Sprague Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.

As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moved on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult. He discussed this passion in a December 1955 essay, "Living With Music," in High Fidelity magazine. Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form. Ellison remained at Tuskegee until 1936, and decided to leave before completing the requirements for a degree.

In New York

Desiring to study sculpture, he moved to New York City on 5 July 1936 and found lodging at a YMCA on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America." He met Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing. Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.

He met several artists who would influence his later life, including the artist Romare Bearden and the author Richard Wright (with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship). After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull," inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.

Wright was then openly associated with the Communist Party, and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in Divided Minds. Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.

In 1938 Ellison met Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior. They were married in late 1938. Rose was a stage actress, and continued her career after their marriage. In biographer Arnold Rampersad's assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him--but not challenge his intellect." At first they lived at 312 West 122nd Street, Rose's apartment, but moved to 453 West 140th Street after her income shrank. In 1941 he briefly had an affair with Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterward, and in 1943 the marriage was over.

At the start of World War II, Ellison was classed 1A by the local Selective Service System, and thus eligible for the draft. However, he was not drafted. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in the United States Merchant Marine. In 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, an accomplished person in her own right: a scholarship graduate of the University of Iowa who was a founder of the Negro People's Theater in Chicago and a writer for The Chicago Defender. She helped support Ellison financially while he wrote Invisible Man by working for American Medical Center for Burma Frontiers (the charity supporting Gordon S. Seagrave's medical missionary work). From 1947 to 1951, he earned some money writing book reviews but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted him in editing the typescript as it progressed.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

Later years

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Bard College, Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a Book Week poll of 200 critics, authors, and editors was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2,000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.

Awards and recognition

Invisible Man won the 1953 US National Book Award for Fiction.

The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. He eventually was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received two President's Medals (from Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) and a State Medal from France. He was the first African-American admitted to the Century Association and was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Harvard University. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument. In 1955 he traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957 Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest. Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period, and the two writers became close friends. Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and the Civil Rights Movement for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth. During the 1950s, he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the Civil Rights Movement, and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Legacy and posthumous publications

After Ellison's death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999 his second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of 40 years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting...

On February 18, 2014, the USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.

A park on 150th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem (near 730 Riverside Drive, Ellison's principal residence from the early 1950s until his death) was dedicated to Ellison on May 1, 2003. In the park stands a 15 by 8-foot bronze slab with a "cut-out man figure" inspired by his book, "Invisible Man."

Bibliography

Invisible Man (Random House, 1952). ISBN 0-679-60139-2

Flying Home and Other Stories (Random House, 1996). ISBN 0-679-45704-6; includes the short story "A Party Down at the Square"

Juneteenth (Random House, 1999). ISBN 0-394-46457-5

Three Days Before the Shooting... (Modern Library, 2010). ISBN 978-0-375-75953-6

Essay collections

Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964). ISBN 0-679-76000-8

Going to the Territory (Random House, 1986). ISBN 0-394-54050-6

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995). ISBN 0-679-60176-7

Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library, 2002). ISBN 0-375-76023-7

Letters

Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (Modern Library, 2000). ISBN 0-375-50367-6

[sablelab]

Covert Operations - Chapter 75

DISCLAIMER: This is a modern AU crossover story with Outlander and La Femme Nikita. LFN and its characters do not belong to me nor do those from Outlander.

SYNOPSIS:  Murtagh tries to elicit information out of his buddy Fergus about Jamie’s return to Section sans Claire.  Needing to test his suspicions, Jamie sets about collecting proof of skulduggery by the target he has in his sights, while Fergus seeks Intel on Karen and her boyfriend Andy Ma.

THANK YOU for reading, liking reblogging and for your comments on the last chapter. Much appreciated. x  Previous chapters can be found at … https://sablelab.tumblr.com/covertoperations

  CHAPTER 75

Retracing his steps back towards Munitions, Murtagh Fitzgibbons went in search of his buddy Fergus Claudel to ask about why Jamie had returned to Section without Claire. As he approached Comm., he stopped in his tracks when he noticed that his friend wasn’t alone, so Murtagh returned to his work station and busied himself in the guise of fixing some equipment. He looked over to Systems every now and again while he bided his time waiting for the right moment to go over and talk to him. He’d been surprised to see Jamie back in Section and the curiosity as to why, was killing him. Not only had he returned but the conversation with the level 5 operative in the corridor also raised more questions than were answers as far as he was concerned. When the rest of his team had returned their weapons to him and Jamie hadn’t, he’d just naturally assumed that he had stayed in Hong Kong with Claire. So, what was going on? Murtagh walked into his supply room to put away the mission equipment and returned with another, so as to look busy if anyone was watching him. He looked over to Comm., to see that Fergus was still engaged in conversation with an operative. Racking his brain, he tried to unravel the mystery, however, everything he thought of was sheer speculation and until he spoke to Fergus, he was none the wiser. Jamie had returned alone, Operations wanted to see him ASAP and where was Claire? The two operatives were joined at the hip. So, where was she? Jamie and Claire always watched each other’s back but now he was back in Section and Claire was God knows where? Had Operations and Madeline found a new way to separate the two best operatives that they had? Their missions were successful and they had made great in-roads into the Rising Dragons’ triad so far, so why would they do that? Perhaps the mission had been aborted ... but that still didn’t explain why Jamie was back in Section without Claire. Murtagh’s real concern was that if Jamie was here ... then who was keeping an eye on his Sugar? Her cover was integral and he wouldn’t just leave her to her own devices at this critical stage of the mission. One thing he did know was that Fergus always had a finger on the pulse. He would know what was going down and explain the mystery surrounding Jamie’s recall back to Section once more. He looked over to see if Fergus was alone yet, then when he thought it was clear, he began to hurry over to Comm., but just as he did, he saw one of Fergus’ Techs walk over to him and hand him a disk. Backtracking Murtagh returned to his work station and impatiently cooled his heels once again until the coast was clear and the operative had left. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* “What's this Rachel?” “It's the Intel on The Triangle nightclub that you wanted.” “Thanks.” “Will that be all?” “Yeah ... you can go home now Rachel.” “Thanks ... Goodnight Fergus.” “Goodnight.” Fergus Claudel returned to his computer station and sat down to finish working on his summation. He’d already given Operations what he had on tonight’s mission but Rachel Hunter had been working on a different angle for him. He fingered the disk carefully before inserting it into his disk drive. Tiredly he removed his Comm. unit and glasses, rubbed his eyes and sat staring at his computer watching as Intel appeared on his monitor. Visual images of inside Jonathon Randall’s nightclub appeared on the screen one after the other. He numbly stared at the computer screen trying to get a handle on the data. Looking up at the monitor mounted above him, he saw the same images there too. He rubbed his hands over his head; leaned back in his chair then stretched his arms above his head trying to keep himself alert. Gathering his thoughts he put his glasses back on again a couple of minutes later, leaned forward and began cross referencing the faces to Section’s known triads’ data base. If he was able to match some of the Intel to their data, they could widen their net in capturing Sun Yee Lok. Many of the guests were prominent business people but it was unknown how legitimate they were or if they had ties with the other triad groups or were indeed Rising Dragon members too. As he worked, his face suddenly lit up with a sense of accomplishment. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place and the faces and names of suspected triad members who were at Jonathon Randall’s party were corresponding to the Rising Dragons’ file as well as to other prominent triad groups.

“Fergus Claudel? Are you good ... or are you good?” he proudly declared out loud pleased at himself now that he was finally getting some results for analysis.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* 

Engrossed in his task, the young techie failed to notice that Murtagh had finally managed to make it over to Comm. for he was happily piecing together Section One’s dossier on members of the Rising Dragons, and other people of interest from the party. The sudden sound of a voice behind him came as a complete surprise and made him jump. “Hey amigo ... You still here?” Because of the hour, Fergus thought he was alone until he realised that it was only his buddy who had spoken. “Yeah.” “It’s late. What are you working on?” He asked trying to get a look at what it was Fergus was doing. “Just stuff,” he replied nonchalantly. “It’s the mission evaluation, isn’t it?” Murtagh surmised intuitively. “Maybe.” Giving Fergus a craggy smile, his face lit up, “Come on ... You know you can tell me.” Fergus looked around to see who may be watching before replying. This part of Section was eerily quiet now. All the techies who had been assisting him had logged off and had vacated Comm., while he’d been immersed in his own little world going over the data.

 “Yeah.”

“So how come you’re still here then?” “I’m still working on something.” “Yeah ...I can see that. It must be good.” Murtagh then looked him in the eye to gain his friend’s undivided attention and cut to the chase. “Do you know why Jamie’s back in Section?” Fergus continued to study the data on his computer and answered his friend at the same time.  “Operations called him in.” “Was the mission aborted?” He asked fishing for the information he’d guessed at but wasn’t quite sure of... that is until Fergus replied and the pieces started to fall into place. “It was, but Jamie asked me to cover for him because of an anomaly.” “Why? What happened?” Fergus turned back towards his buddy.  “He broke protocol and didn’t come into Section when ordered. Claire was surrounded by hostiles after the mission was aborted. He went in to cover her.” “Sounds like something Jamie would do.” Murtagh’s face broke into a smile and he laughed before voicing his opinion with his next question. “Is that why he’s back in Section without Claire?” “Most likely.” Noting Fergus’ reticent reply he asked for more clarification, “What about Claire?” “Jamie arranged for Abernathy and Wakefield to keep surveillance.” “That’s good.” His friend looked him in the eye and Murtagh could see that Fergus was worried. “I screwed up Murtagh.” “Why? What are you trying to say amigo?’ “I had to inform Operations what was happening at The Triangle." “Hmmm? ... That could have caused a problem.” “Yeah ... it did. Now I’m under the pump. Operations said they’ll cancel me if I fall out of line again.” Murtagh brushed this concern off.  “Nah ... you’re too valuable.” “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m more scared of Jamie’s reaction when I see him.” “Why?” “I had to tell him that Operations knew he had stayed behind.” “Hmm ... I see what you mean,” he answered deep in thought. “Jamie will kill me. I promised that I would cover for him” “Don’t worry, he’ll understand.” “I’m not so sure ... because of it ... Madeline has profiled a new mission for Claire.” “Do you know what?” “I think it’s similar to the Grant Mission.” Murtagh was familiar with the mission Fergus mentioned, and he was not happy. “No! ... You can’t be serious! She wants her to be his girlfriend?” Section’s weapons expert began to pace as a worried look crossed his face. The Grant mission had not turned out well and if Jamie knew that something along the same lines was being planned for Claire ... then he knew there would be trouble brewing for Operations and Madeline if it went ahead. “Jamie won’t like to see Claire in a cover mission so soon after Madame Cheung.” “No ... he won’t that’s for sure. What can we do Murtagh?” “Nothing ... the final decision is with Ops and Madeline.” “True ... but I feel somewhat responsible.” “You can’t blame yourself Fergus ... you had nothing to do with their decision.” “Yeah ... but what will I tell Jamie? How am I going to get out of this one?” “I think you might be on your own amigo. Operations has probably already told him.” “Gee, thanks Murtagh ... that’s just what I wanted to hear!” “When are you going to see Jamie?” At Murtagh Fitzgibbon’s words they both looked up and saw that James Fraser was still in the perch with Dougal Mackenzie. “Soon, I guess. I’ll wait until he gives me some sign or other.” Hearing the despair in his friend’s voice, Murtagh took pity on him. “Don’t worry ... if l think of something I'll get back to you.” “Thanks buddy ... I’ll owe you one.” ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

With Operations’ dismissive words ringing in his ears James Fraser turned on his heel and exited the Perch furious at Claire’s new profile.

The constant baiting to test their relationship by his superiors was wearing a bit thin. Claire had already been through a deep cover mission with Madame Cheung and this new profile was just their attempt to keep them under control. If Madeline and Operations thought he would take this lying down, they had another thing coming. He would certainly check what she’d profiled for her on his PDA as soon as he reached his office along with the other things he planned to do. 

Jamie descended the stairs and strode determinedly through the eerie quietness of the common area while in his mind he was churning over the possible dangers involved for Claire on this new mission scenario.

He would run checks through the system about the targets he had in focus who may be a threat to her safety. Now that her profile had been set, he would also need to be more vigilant as to her protection. Operations’ flippant reply as to Claire’s safety was worrisome too. If she exposed Inspector Jiang Ng as a member of the Rising Dragons, then her life would be in jeopardy especially if he realised just how much she actually knew about him. Jonathon Randall was another proposition altogether. He was not at all happy that his Sassenach would need to be in his company one minute longer than necessary ... and then there was Karen Yee. Claire’s enigmatic neighbour was a conundrum. It was imperative that he was thorough in his search to enable him to piece any Intel he found with his gut feelings about her neighbour Karen. Hopefully Fergus would have something to add on her by now too which would shed light on her relationship with the Rising Dragons. 

Passing through Comm., on his way to his office, Jamie noticed that Fergus Claudel was still in Systems talking to Murtagh Fitzgibbons. He gave him a covert nod aware that Operations would still be watching him from the Perch, letting the techie know he wanted to see him when he was able to get away.

Although Section One’s computer wiz looked a little frazzled when he made eye contact with the imposing figure of James Fraser, he acknowledged Jamie’s directive with a nervous but penetrating glance his way. This was the first time Fergus had seen him since he’d communicated with him at the nightclub. It was obvious by his nervous demeanour that he was still stewing over what he would say to the Level 5 operative when they came face to face. However, Jamie continued past as if nothing had happened rounding the corner out of sight of the Perch and the prying eyes of Operations and entered his office. 

Closing the door firmly behind him, he walked behind his desk and booted his computer typing in his secret code that would give him access to Section One’s classified data. Sitting back in his chair, Jamie looked at his computer for a moment before typing in a set of numbers that opened up the files but disallowed detection of personal usage by Section’s computer surveillance. He then keyed in a search for Claire’s neighbour Karen Yee and waited for any Intel to appear, and for Fergus Claudel to arrive. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Just as he did so, Jamie looked up from his computer when he heard a cautious knock on his door. He saw Fergus put his head in his office.

 “Come in.”

Not being able to decipher what mood James Fraser was in, he entered and quickly closed the door behind him. In trepidation Fergus approached his desk with a computer disk in his hand.

 “You wanted to see me?” he asked nervously, knowing that he had to confront Jamie at some time about breaking his confidence. 

Without looking up at him, Jamie stopped what he was doing. His right hand immediately moved to put the scrambler on to screen his office from Section’s scrutiny while the nervous techie waited until the screen was up until he spoke again. His voice quavered a little not knowing what response he would get.

 “Jamie about ...”

“Dinna fash, it’s okay,” he reassured him then let him off the hook by asking, “How did it go?” Knowing immediately what Jamie was eluding to, Fergus responded, “Not so good.” “Did you find out any Intel on Karen Yee?” “Sorry Jamie, but I’m no closer to finding anything on her. Everything I’ve tried has come up empty.” “What? ... Are you sure?” “As sure as I can be.” “Have you checked in Procedures?” “Yes ... I’ve followed several leads but ... there’s nothing. The woman is clean. What do you want me to do?” “Try checking any incoming or outgoing communications on her landline and cell phone. This is a priority three Fergus.” “What are we looking for?” “Any communication of a suspicious nature.” “Friendly or hostile?” “Hostile ... hidden messages to silent numbers,” Jamie added in clarification. “Okay. I’ll get on to it ASAP.” “Good ... Have you cross referenced her picture with our data base?” “Yes ... there was no match." “There could be another possibility.” Fergus racked his brain thinking of what Jamie could be eluding to, but came up empty. So, he asked. “What?” “A surgical procedure. She could have changed her appearance completely.” “Everything?” “Yes. She could be anyone.” “And without a physical to match to....” His voice stopped in mid-sentence as the penny dropped.

“I know. We need a more personal profile.” “Jamie this could take a while ... We’ll be flying blind. There is very little to go on.” “I understand ... but do anything and everything ye can think of Fergus... she is not an innocent.” “Okay ... I’ll do my best,” he stated in a last ditched desperate effort to do what he could to find any clue as to her identity. “Thank ye ...” “What about her boyfriend Andy Ma? Do you want me to do the same checks on him?” “Yes, we may get lucky there. It might be another avenue to finding out about Karen that could lead us to her real identity.” “I’ll work on it all night if I have to Jamie.” “Thank ye ... By the way ... what’s on the disk?” Looking at the forgotten disk in his hand he replied, “The mission evaluation ... hostiles, causalities, aftermath ... the usual ... it’s all there ....” Fergus handed the disk over to Jamie who placed it on his desk. “I’ll view it. Thank ye Fergus. There might be something ye’ve overlooked.” “Unfortunately, there were no matches for Karen Yee on our data base; however, there were a couple of anomalies ...” “Yes?” Jamie’s voice intonated interest in what Fergus had found out. “It appears that the surveillance inside the nightclub was inactive for most of the fracas. It shows Claire getting separated from Karen and her boyfriend and then it cuts out.” “Hmmm? ... That means that Jonathon Randall is not aware that she was involved in any shootouts.” “Yes ... or you,” he added with a wry smile on his face. “Good.” “Is that all?” “Aye.” Fergus hesitated somewhat. “It looks like it is going to be a long night.”

Then as he made his way to the door to leave, he gave Jamie a final penetrating look before stating the obvious. “It’s necessary for us to be thorough though ... Claire’s safety is at stake.”

His acquiescent look at the techie was Fergus Claudel’s answer.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ~ James Fraser indeed knew that he was in for a long night. Since Fergus was now checking on Karen Yee and her boyfriend, that left him to check on the man in charge of the OCTB ... Inspector Ng. He needed to find out as much as he could about the Inspector before Claire was ousted by the Chief Commissioner for her new mission profile. Once Fergus left his office Jamie viewed the disk he had given him about the mission tonight. After screening what was on it, he knew that Jiang Ng wasn’t in attendance at the party tonight. However, footage from outside the club showed that he did turn up at the nightclub after the incident with several other police vehicles to investigate the killings and firebombing. Jonathon Randall would have obviously contacted the OCTB and in particular the Inspector to provide a legitimacy to the investigations. The head of the OCTB would be able to personally oversee the case and therefore would be in a position to cover up any sensitive information that may implicate the owner of The Triangle in membership of the Rising Dragons. If the firebombing was triad related, then the reason why members of the Black Panthers and Red Lanterns’ triads, who had started the fracas were at the nightclub, could be suppressed and Jonathon Randall would keep his covert association secret. Jamie had much to do. He began checking his sources in search of any advanced updates or Intel on Inspector Ng but he knew he needed to delve deeper if he were to uncover any covert communication from the Inspector’s office. Any communication he’d had about Claire was critical. He had a couple of options including channels that Fergus had used, but first he decided to call in his marker from an informant who owed him a favour. Reaching for his cell phone Jamie placed a scrambler demodulator to the transmitting mechanism and dialled a secret code number. “Jurgen ... can ye speak freely?” “Yes.” “I need information ...” “You’re a man of your word James Fraser; I wouldn’t do this for anyone else. I owe you for Korea. So, tell me, what’s this about? How can I help?” ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ~ What Jamie had suspected was confirmed by his informant. It appeared that Inspector Ng had been making inquiries about Claire after all, but had been coming up empty handed. Information about her credentials was available but her assignments for the Hong Kong Water Police had been suppressed. The only Intel he had been privy to was that Claire had been given leave to go on vacation while she was in Hong Kong. Whether this had piqued his curiosity or not was debatable, but Jamie knew Inspector Ng was a smart man and he could possibly put two and two together and make his own conclusions. Inspector Ng was a major player who could blow Claire’s cover out of the water. He was, in Jamie’s opinion, their number one priority to bring into Section. Catching him unawares would be his plan and not before too long. The investigations on the firebombing and shootings could be his Achilles heel and he could be vulnerable while inquiries were pending. It could be the perfect time to make a move on the elusive head of the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau. Knowing Fergus would contact him if he found out any Intel on the couple he had under surveillance, Jamie finally prepared to leave Section One to return to Hong Kong. Given that he also trusted Joe Abernathy and Roger Wakefield to do their job as ordered and keep a close eye on Karen and Andy while he was not there to do it himself, he knew what needed to be done. There were too many things that could go wrong and he wanted to cover all bases where Claire’s safety was concerned. The violence that had perpetrated tonight was the tip of the iceberg. Now that there were rival triads mustering in on Jonathon Randall would she be safe? He would have none of it. The profile planned for his Sassenach to get closer to him could backfire and she could be placed in extreme danger. If he couldn’t be with Claire 24 hours a day, he could do the next best thing. He would be there as back up and he could cover the movements of those under suspicion ... and until Fergus had something more concrete on Karen Yee and Andy Ma, he didn’t want to alarm her. But being forewarned was forearmed. He would do his best to keep his Claire safe at all costs.

Hopefully a scenario to avoid her meeting with Jonathon Randall may present itself which would give him some more time to put an alternative plan into action.

Therefore, the sooner he returned to Hong Kong, and back to his Sassenach, the better.

 *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ to be continued

[vince-thrilligan]

'Breaking Bad' Returns: Aaron Paul and Vince Gilligan Take a TV Classic for a Spin in 'El Camino'

The Hollywood Reporter  |    by Rebecca Keegan   |   September 18, 2019

In their first interview about the new movie, star and creator reveal why they risked messing with their defining show ("Is there another story to tell?") and how they shot the hot Netflix project in near-total secrecy.

One day late in 2018, the phone of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, man named Frank Sandoval started ringing off the hook. Sandoval runs a local outfit that operates Breaking Bad-themed tours in an RV identical to the battered Fleetwood Bounder that served as a mobile meth lab for Bryan Cranston's Walter White and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman on the Emmy-winning AMC show. Five years after Breaking Bad went off the air, the distinctive vehicle had — suddenly and mysteriously — reappeared in town outside a diner on a main road. "People were calling us and saying, 'Is that your RV up there?' " Sandoval says. "We'd heard rumors for years that they were shooting. But nobody we talked to ever knew anything." Sandoval asked around about the mystery RV and eventually came across a printed flyer explaining that a New Mexico tourism commercial was shooting in town. He figured that explained it.

Not quite.

In fact, Jesse and Walter's old RV was in Albuquerque that day, as were Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan and his cast and crew, engaged in a secret project. They were shooting El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which will premiere Oct. 11 on Netflix and in theaters in 68 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Albuquerque, before it airs on AMC early next year. Netflix only just announced the project in August, after Gilligan had wrapped postproduction. That's because despite the Virginia-born writer's gentle Southern manner and almost pathological humility, Gilligan, 52, is a showman at heart, and he wants to lift the curtain at the last possible second. "I don't want to open my Christmas presents a week and a half before Christmas," Gilligan says, explaining his insistence on a covert production. Gilligan's producers say they had nothing to do with the tourism flyer, but they did use other means to keep the project hush-hush, including waiting until the last possible minute to share the script with crew, obscuring locations with trucks and screens and relying on a private jet to shuttle a key castmember in and out of Albuquerque without notice.

The two-hour feature film, which Gilligan wrote and directed over the past 18 months, is premiering six years after Breaking Bad ended with Walter dying and Jesse driving an El Camino to freedom from his imprisonment on an Aryan Brotherhood compound. (A trailer set to debut during the Emmys on Sept. 22 will offer a detailed peek.) The Netflix partnership fulfills a long-standing wish of Gilligan's for a Breaking Bad theatrical experience and follows the formative role the streaming company had in the series' success — Breaking Bad was the first cable show to benefit from a so-called Netflix boost.

El Camino centers on what happens to Jesse after he drives out of that compound covered in physical and psychological scars, and it features more than 10 familiar characters from the show. In deference to Gilligan's spoiler aversion, THR will name only two: fan favorites Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) and Badger (Matt L. Jones), the Beavis and Butt-Head of the greater Albuquerque meth community.

Returning to the world of Breaking Bad comes with some risk for Gilligan — during the course of its five-year run, the crime drama about a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who transforms into a ruthless drug kingpin came to exemplify a new, golden era of TV, engrossing critics and audiences with its dense, character-driven storytelling, winning 16 Emmys and delivering one of the most satisfying mic drops in the history of television with a finale that more than 10 million people watched on AMC. In the rarefied club of early Peak TV auteurs, including Mad Men's Matthew Weiner, The Wire's David Simon and The Sopranos' David Chase, Gilligan is the first to take a leap and make a film from his signature show (Chase's Sopranos movie is due next year).

There also is the danger of dwelling indefinitely in the world — however rich — that Gilligan created. Breaking Bad diehards already have the show's spinoff prequel, Better Call Saul, which just finished shooting its fifth season. "I'm hoping when the movie comes out, people won't say, 'Oh, man, this guy should've left well enough alone,' " Gilligan says in his first interview about the film. "Why did George Foreman keep coming out of retirement, you know?"

***

Gilligan works in a nondescript glass office building in Burbank with a view of a dry cleaner and a parking lot. This is the "fancy" office he reluctantly moved to before his team started making Better Call Saul — superstitious, he didn't want to vacate the derelict space deeper in the San Fernando Valley where they had made Breaking Bad, a building they shared with a private investigator, a music charity and an hoc threading business operating out of the women's bathroom. Also, for reasons no one can recall, there was a guy in the building who always wore a kilt. Gilligan, who lives on L.A.'s Westside with his longtime girlfriend, Holly Rice, chose the location because it was convenient not for him, but for his show's editor. When it came time to select offices there, he picked for himself the room that didn't have a window and housed a giant humming server.

His newer, comparatively luxurious space is decorated with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul memorabilia — the special effects bust of Gus Fring's (Giancarlo Esposito) exploded head is next to Gilligan's desk, and bottles of Blue Ice Heisenberg vodka sit on a bookshelf. There also are model helicopters, tokens of Gilligan's other passion, aviation. At 50, he fulfilled a decades-long goal of obtaining his helicopter pilot's license. One of the locations in El Camino is a spot he used to glimpse while choppering with his flight instructor, 500 feet above the ground, en route from L.A. to Albuquerque. "When I'm flying a helicopter, I'm as happy as I ever get, which is not particularly happy, but still, as happy as I ever am," Gilligan says. "I'll never master it. It's one of those … Is that a Zen thing? When you have some sort of avocation that you're continually a beginner at. You're never going to perfect it. But in a weird way, that feels good, because you're never going to get tired of it either."

Gilligan first started ruminating on the story that would ultimately become El Camino before he finished making Breaking Bad. "I didn't really tell anybody about it, because I wasn't sure I would ever do anything with it," he says. "But I started thinking to myself, 'What happened to Jesse?' You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, 'What did that ending — let's just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?' " It was while planning events in 2018 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad that Gilligan first told his inner circle he had an idea to revisit Jesse, perhaps a five-minute short film, he mused to his longtime producer, Melissa Bernstein. "He just started letting his mind run over that," Bernstein says. "And he started to realize, 'I have a lot to say about this.' "

Gilligan, who wrote the feature films Wilder Napalm (1993) and Home Fries (1998) as well as some unproduced feature scripts, found his comfort zone as a writer in the collaborative, deadline-oriented environment of TV while on the staff of The X-Files. "I was the laziest writer in creation," Gilligan says. "I'd piddle around. It took me two years to write a first draft of a movie script in the early '90s, just because I had no one holding a gun to my head. I just didn't have that work ethic. Working in TV changed everything for me." But on El Camino, Gilligan returned to the solitary lifestyle of a feature writer. "I had been working with excellent writers now for well over a decade, and I'd forgotten what it was like to write something by myself, and it was daunting," Gilligan says. "Suddenly I'm trying to write this and thinking, 'God, I really could use a writers room about now.' " Gilligan outlined the story using note cards, his usual method, and then began on his first draft at his time-share in the Bahamas.

As a business philosophy, Gilligan is a believer in the idea that you "dance with the girl that brung ya," and at a time when many other top showrunners are managing multiple productions and seeking nine-figure deals at streamers, he has remained at Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul studio Sony Pictures Television, re-upping with the company last year in a three-year, mid-eight-figure overall pact that includes his work on El Camino. When Gilligan told executives there about his idea for a Breaking Bad movie, "We all just fell silent in the room," says SPT co-president Chris Parnell. "It was one of the moments when you think to yourself, 'Did I just hear that? Is that something he genuinely wants to do?' " Together with his agent, ICM Partners' Chris Silbermann, Gilligan quietly walked the script into just a handful of offices in Hollywood before deciding to partner with Netflix, as well as AMC. Both companies represented a crucial part in Breaking Bad's history, AMC for picking up the show after FX passed on it and Netflix for building it into the binge TV era's first true streaming/cable hybrid hit.

In 2010, Breaking Bad was at a crossroads: With the show averaging about 1.5 million viewers a season despite being a critics' darling, AMC informed Sony and Gilligan that the series could end with season three. When Sony began shopping Breaking Bad to competitors — quickly finding a taker for two more seasons at FX — AMC reversed course. Netflix, meanwhile, was aggressively licensing shows for its nascent streaming service, and content chief Ted Sarandos made a syndication deal with Sony for Breaking Bad. Originally, the arrangement was for the series to start streaming on Netflix after its fourth season finished on AMC, but, with the show's future uncertain, Sony accelerated the plan, and new fans began discovering and bingeing Breaking Bad on Netflix in time to catch some of the fourth season and all of the fifth and final season on AMC. When season five premiered in 2013, the audience had more than doubled from its previous outing. "We felt that it was a virtuous cycle, where we were introducing the show to new fans, who were then going and experiencing new episodes on AMC, and then when we would launch a new season, we would again see another wave of new folks coming," says Netflix vp original content Cindy Holland. Since news of the movie broke in August, Holland says, viewership of Breaking Bad on Netflix is up, some from rewatchers and some from newcomers to the series. "We were a natural home for the movie," Holland says. "It wasn't a really long conversation. It was a simple, 'Yes, please.' "

Netflix also brought the theatrical component, which was crucial to Gilligan. "Every time we'd put out a new season of Breaking Bad, we would have a premiere in a big movie theater," Gilligan says. "We would watch this quote-unquote television show. I mean, I guess quotations aren't needed. It is absolutely a television show. But we would have this wonderful, very limited, one-time opportunity to watch our television show on a big screen with giant stereo speakers thumping, the image filling 40 feet across. I always thought, 'This thing, it looks like a movie. It doesn't look like a show.' I really want to be able to share that with fans." As with its other theatrical releases, Netflix will exhibit the film in independent theaters for a very limited period.

The secrecy on the project extends to the budget, which all interviewed decline to disclose beyond saying that it is significantly higher than what Gilligan had ever worked with on the show, including the $6 million for an episode in the final season. Gilligan's producers Bernstein and Diane Mercer went to great lengths to keep the film under wraps during production, shrouding locations from onlookers' view, covertly ferrying key castmembers to the set and warning crewmembers to be discreet around town. "Don't be sitting on a barstool somewhere and talk about the project you're working on, because God only knows who's sitting next to you" was the mantra, Gilligan says.

The movie, which plays like a coda to the series, is thick with details that will tickle the superfan base, which is its true intended audience, Gilligan says. One that only the most devoted may pick up on is a key address at the corner of Holly and Arroz streets — a wink to Gilligan's girlfriend (arroz is rice in Spanish). "If, after 12 years, you haven't watched Breaking Bad, you're probably not going to start now," Gilligan says. "If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there's no doubt in my mind that you won't get as much enjoyment out of it. We don't slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, 'Maybe there's a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there's a way to explain things to the audience.' If there was a way to do that, it eluded me."

Breaking Bad was particularly cinematic television, with its wide-angle shots of the stark New Mexico landscape, expressive lighting and deliberate pacing. At one point during the series, Gilligan and his cinematographer, Michael Slovis, made an unsuccessful pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot Breaking Bad in the CinemaScope format that Sergio Leone had used to shoot Clint Eastwood's Dollars Trilogy. On El Camino, Gilligan got his wish — Better Caul Saul DP Marshall Adams shot the movie on the ARRI Alexa 65 camera used for The Revenant and in a 2.39 wide-screen format that seems designed to showcase a gunslinger's squint across the desert.

Gilligan is perfectionistic in a way that television schedules rarely have time to indulge. El Camino proceeded at an even more leisurely pace than his shows. Instead of shooting six to eight pages a day as Gilligan had on Breaking Bad, he shot one and a half to three. Most of the 50-day shoot happened in the same Albuquerque locations where Breaking Bad is set, but the larger budget meant he was able to take advantage of some picturesque out-of-state locations, too. "This is my first movie as a director, and I have to say, it made me want some more of that," says Gilligan, who has directed five episodes each of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and two of The X-Files. "You truly have time to get things right. It feels very decadent."

***

Returning to the character of Jesse Pinkman for El Camino was an unexpected career twist. While making Breaking Bad, Paul had grown as an actor under Cranston's tutelage and shed some fatiguing habits. "The first couple years were really torturous for me," Paul says. Often, after shooting had wrapped for the day, "I found myself in dark alleys in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at 3 in the morning, just to try to get more information, which was not a good thing. I just didn't want to mess it up, and so I stayed in that guy's skin, but I learned from Bryan it's OK to shake it off and wash up at the end of the night and just have time for yourself." When the finale aired, Paul says, "I really loved Jesse. I knew him better than anyone, but it was a big weight off of my shoulders to hang up the cleats and walk away. I thought it was goodbye, and I was OK with that." 
In early 2018, while Paul was in New York shooting The Path, Gilligan called him and shared that he had written a movie about Jesse. "I'm like everybody else on the planet — I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that?" Paul recalls thinking. "But it's Vince we're talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That's how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to." (Gilligan inspires a fierce loyalty, and most of his colleagues have been with him for years, starting with Mark Johnson, who discovered Gilligan while judging a screenwriting competition in 1988 and has served as a producer on Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and El Camino.) Within months of answering Gilligan's call, Paul was back in Albuquerque's dark alleys, bearded and in scar makeup. "It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse's at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some, and so, honestly, it felt like a part of me had gone through that as well," Paul says. "All I had to do was just memorize these words and then play them out when they yelled 'action.' "

***

Gilligan, too, grew up, in a sense, on Breaking Bad, and he has a wistfulness about how it has shaped his life over the last 11 years. "I'm about 25 to 30 years older than I was when I started," he says. "Yeah, I'm just worn out. I mean, part of what excited me about doing this was it was a movie, a closed-ended story of about two hours. If I was starting now, I'm not sure I'd have the intestinal fortitude to fight all the fights and expend all the energy."

Gilligan is not ready for retirement — not at all — but when he looks ahead to life after Better Call Saul, he sees something outside the universe of characters that have become his trademark creation. He plans to make another show after Better Call Saul ends, but what exactly that will be and where it will air, he doesn't know. "Personally, I'd love to figure out something different, which at this point would be, God, not another antihero," Gilligan says. "Is there something else I can do? Is there another story I can tell? But I've got to tell you, it's harder to write a really engaging good guy than it is a really engaging bad guy."

[13eyond13]

The Rest of the “What If?“ Questions:

I’ve had a huge influx of “what if” alternate scenario type asks the last 2 days, and I’m not sure if they’re all from the same person or several people. I really do appreciate the interest in getting my take on this stuff! But to avoid spamming the dashboard more with all these answers I’m just going to put the rest of them into one ask here:

FEM!LIGHT’S STANCE ON WOMEN:

I think she would both resent being a woman and also still look down on other women, but still be extremely confident and sure of herself on the inside. She’d probably have some internalized misogyny and still view men as superior and wish to compete with them more than with women, but she’d also resent men for being valued more highly within the patriarchal culture she was raised within, so it would be a bit of a complicated mix. She’d probably still grow up idolizing Soichiro instead of her mother, because even though Sachiko is no doubt also smart and talented she is submissive and seemingly content with carrying out her supportive, servile domestic role as a mother and a housewife. Light would probably dream of far more ambitious things for her own future with the idealistic and egotistical personality she has and all the accolades she’s gotten in her academic and athletic and social pursuits. I also think she’d be a lesbian, but that it would only really awaken in her once she met L, who would also be female in this AU, and the first woman she found genuinely fascinating and truly “worthy” of respect.

HOW L WOULD CONVICT A MEMORYLESS LIGHT:

I’m not really sure. I guess L would have to get irrefutable physical evidence that proved Light had been Kira originally. Even if Light denied it the entire time he obviously could still be condemned as Kira if the evidence against him was strong enough. I think proving some of the rules fake would’ve brought L a lot closer to proving Light was guilty, but I’m a bit too lazy right now to try to think this AU scenario out the whole way through from beginning to end. It takes a lot of mental energy and revisiting of the source material to do so entirely accurately, so I definitely very much admire Ohba for keeping the canon plot so free of holes. There are always so many technical little things and different characters’ points of view to keep in mind!

IF THE DEATH NOTE WAS A “LIFE NOTE” INSTEAD:

Lol, I mean I guess a Life Note would probably revive people who had already died, or something like that? That could also cause a lot of worldwide havoc, though I’m not sure it would technically be a crime to bring people back from the dead! I wonder how Light would use something like that to achieve his New World… revive all the innocent victims who had been unjustly murdered by evil criminals or something? Lol I don’t really know, my brainpower is pretty zapped for thinking these things out right now…

However, this does remind me a bit of the “Death Eraser” that was included in the original Death Note pilot chapter! Ohba initially toyed with the idea of having an eraser that went along with the notebook which would bring the Death Note victims back to life. You can find that pilot chapter online with a little Googling if you’re curious about it. I’m so glad they decided to scrap that silly idea for the actual official series, haha.

HOW INNOCENT!LIGHT WOULD REACT TO MISA TELLING HIM HE IS KIRA:

@whiteroes1977 I think he would be both horrified and also know that it made sense, since he was already thinking that Kira’s ideals and methods lined up pretty closely with his own. He also thought that he would probably try to catch himself if he’d lost his Kira memories. It would definitely be a big internal struggle between Light’s desire to see himself as a good/innocent person who operates within the Law and his ego/ideals/belief that he was the only person who could truly bring about the new world he envisioned from the start. I’d love to see him have to make a big moral choice about becoming Kira again like that when he was still amnesia!Light, since he really didn’t know he was going to regain his Kira memories when he touched the Death Note in the helicopter at all.

IF SACHIKO PICKED UP THE DEATH NOTE:

Hahaha hmmm… I like to think that Sachiko is where Light gets most of his brains and also his more mysterious and sneaky side! There isn’t much to go by in canon about Sachiko’s character other than her role as a supportive and hardworking mom and housewife, but it would be very interesting if she decided to do something with a Death Note that would go totally against what everyone expects from her somehow. Maybe she’d also have a strong vigilante streak based on the frustrations she felt about Soichiro’s career; or maybe she would do something totally for herself with it and way outside of the box, and end up carrying on with this secret life that was both a guilty thrill and an escape from her humdrum duties in the home. It’s a bit hard to say without fleshing out her character a lot more than Ohba did in canon though, and I’m not really feeling up to doing that right now, sorry.

WHAT IF RYUK HAD KILLED EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WAREHOUSE INSTEAD?:

I think that Light would have been very happy if Ryuk did that, and he’d have continued right on with his plans to become the God of the New World. The SPK and task force was pretty much the only thing standing in the way of him achieving this goal at this point, so he’d just see it as serving them right for defying him like that. I don’t know the exact specifics of how he would achieve actual godhood, like if he would choose to make himself a public figure as Kira or just continue to work behind the scenes forevermore? I’ve always wanted to read a really detailed and realistic AU about Light actually winning and the crazy ways the world would change, but I haven’t managed to think it out myself to any satisfying degree yet. I definitely don’t imagine it would be the idealized world he imagined though, as even if crime was completely eliminated it would be a totalitarian dictatorship under which everyone was living in constant fear and feeling very oppressed.

HOW LIGHT WOULD REACT TO MALE!MISA:

Male!Misa could be pretty interesting too, with both canon Light and fem!Light. I imagine it would still be very off-putting to Light for a guy to show up at their house and come onto them that strongly, no matter how you headcanon Light’s gender or sexuality. I guess Light wouldn’t automatically look down on male!Misa for his gender, so that might be a small advantage that male!Misa would have over female Misa. But it could also potentially work against male!Misa since Light would probably expect more from guys and find that kind of behaviour from a man extra unsettling. What i find the most interesting to think about with male!Misa is how the fandom’s reaction to the character might differ, honestly. I think male!Misa would both have way more stans and also way harsher criticism piled upon him, maybe? I think he’d be shipped a ton with the male characters as well. Certain flaws and behaviours would be treated with way more lenience and forgiveness, and then other ones would be pointed out much more harshly, as well. It’s always pretty interesting to contemplate this stuff, but unfortunately I’m a bit too tired to add a whole lot of detailed insight on the topic at this point.

[damnbrosius]

About paste for mobile users:

• Character’s full name: Ambrosius

• Character’s given name/Nicknames: “Bro” to his friends. “Rose” to…certain others.

• Birth Date: N/A

• Gender: Male

• Orientation: …Complicated; let’s just call him bi for now.

• Species: Spirit (avatar, god, relic, etc.)

Physical appearance:

• Age: Several millenia

• Height: Roughly 13’ / 397 cm.

• Weight: Technically weightless; were gravity to apply, roughly 700 lbs.

• How old does he look: Could be anywhere from early 20s to late 30s.

• Body Build: Tall, Muscular, broad

• Shape of face: Strong jawline, smooth-cheeked.

• Eye colour: Dark blue sclera and pupil, bright blue iris.

• Skin tone: Blue

• Distinguishing Features: He’s huge, naked, shredded, floats in the air, and is b l u e

• Hair Color: Sky blue

• Hair Style: Cut and styled short over most of the head but for the back, which is long enough to reach the back of his thighs and is kept in place with a golden barrette.

• Voice/Tone: Voiced by Valentine Stokes; voice is deep, rich, and loud. Speaks in a style of unusually modern syntax sprinkled with somewhat baroque verbage here and there.

• Usual Fashion of Dress: Mostly naked; he is adorned with gold chains and cuffs, braces over his upper arms, and metallic casts along his calves.

Personality:

• Good Personality Traits: Passionate, creative, cheerful and encouraging

• Bad Personality Traits: Devious, mischievous, doesn’t take criticism well.

• Mood Character is Most often in: Calm and content.

• Sense of Humor: Verges on dark.

• Character’s greatest Joy in life: Creation!

• Character’s greatest fear: His brother awakening from his dormant state, and the return of the gods.

• What single event would most throw this character’s life into complete turmoil: World destruction, and really nothing less.

• Character is most at ease when: Working with well-equipped patrons.

• Most Ill at ease when: Around his brother, the Relic of Destruction.

• Greatest Vulnerability or Weakness: Bound to follow instructions, so long as they do not violate particular rules…though these are often open to interpretation.

• Biggest Regret: His worst projects were…embarrassing.

• Minor Regret: He told that dude the city was gonna fall. And look what happened!

• Biggest accomplishment: [REDACTED]

• Past failures he/she would be embarrassed to have people know about: Oh god

• Why?: Some of the things people have asked him to make were not well thought out at all.

• Character’s darkest secret:

• Does anyone know this secret?:

Present:

• Current Location: Atlas

• Current Living with: A few forms of life he created to entertain him.

• Pets: See above.

• Occupation: God of creation, benefactor of patrons seeking his power.

Habits:

• Hobbies: Designing new mechanisms, exploring art.

• Plays a musical instrument?: Several.

• Plays a sport?: Despite appearances, no.

• How he/she would spend a rainy day: Partaking in the arts.

• Spending Habits: He has no money. He needs no money.

• Smokes: N/A

• Drinks: N/A

• Other Drugs: N/A

• What does he/she do too much of? Talking

• What does he/she do too little of: Worrying

• Extremely skilled at: Any manner of construction or artistry.

• Extremely unskilled at: Can’t bring the dead back to life, or shut up.

• Nervous tics: Tapping his chin, rubbing his forehead..

• Usual body posture: Often lays horizontal in the air.

Abilities:

• Levitation

• Capable of existing and operating with no need for food, water, air, or sleep

• Can create anything the wielder of the staff desires, provided it does not involve destruction or reanimating the dead.

[davidmann95]

ok WOAH I just read your thing about the Justice Legion Alpha with the crazy archetypes and I'm curious if the team consisted of more than just Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Super-Superman. If the answer is yes PLEASE tell me more because I am so curious and then tell me every single place I can read about them and when they're getting their own comic because they sound FASCINATING AS HELL.

THEY’RE GREAT.

Justice Legion Alpha is actually, as their name suggests, simply the head of many Justice Legion teams - B is the future equivalent of the Titans, L the Legion of Superheroes, T Young Justice, Z the Legion of Super-Pets, and S is a bunch of Superboy clones with their own individual superpowers run by OMAC’s Brother Eye. The main team, basically the classic Justice League archetypes as screamed through a megaphone, is made up of:

Superman: Kal Kent, the latest descendant of the original Superman, is faster than a speeding tacheyon, more powerful than the gravitational pull of a collapsing star, able to leap from world to world in a single bound, a genius to the power of 10 Einstein Units, and has numerous additional senses and superpowers beyond the base Kryptonian set due to generations of breeding with other alien species, including a fifth-dimensional queen in the 67th century. His only weakness is that his powers diminish within days if away from the Super-Sun of his native system; he protects Earth.

Batman: A child of prison guards on the asylum world of Pluto, a planetwide prison break resulted in all 10,000 guards being herded into the prison stadium and being executed in front of their traumatized children over the course of days. Vowing vengeance, this child grew up to become the latest Batman, who has an IQ of 1067, knows telepathic octopus martial arts, and built a digital copy of his pre-trauma personality and installed it into the robot body of “Robin, the Toy Wonder” to keep himself in check as he guards Pluto alone.

Wonder Woman: After the Amazons colonized Venus, the Goddess of Truth - implicitly the original champion by that name - brought life to a marble sculpture, who has the aid of not only the Lasso of Truth, but a pair of sentient shapeshifting bracelets known as Harmony and Charity.

Flash: One of the two members who were around before the JLA’s debut, he’s John Fox, a Flash native to the 27th century who after an encounter with Wally West retreated into the further future due to laws against his time-travelling abilities in his own time; he joined Alpha (even though he should pretty much be a caveman by their standards) and patrols the data-mining cities of Mercury.

Starman: An odd inclusion for the ultimate superhero team outside of that stretch of time when Starman was one of the most critically acclaimed books on the stands, Farris Knight is a distant descendant of the original bearer of the name who inherited the Cosmic Rod and the duties of the name; he’s personally uninterested in heroism, but feels obligated and enjoys the perks that come with the gig. He operates out of the ruins of Uranus as caretaker to Solaris, once a deadly enemy of the Superman Dynasty but now rehabilitated as a secondary power source for the solar system.

Aquaman: King of Neptune, he’s pretty much just regular Aquaman, but in the future and with a beard made of water.

Hourman: An android built by Tyler Chemorobotics - a descendant of the company formed by the original Hourman Rex Tyler - he commands time as the possessor of the Worlogog, defends Saturn and is a mentee of the New God Metron.

Resurrection Man: Mitch Shelly, one of the few survivors of the dim and distant original age of heroes, was long ago cursed to die and be born anew each time with a different superpower - he can now trigger deaths on command with an implant and chose which power to return with. He’s the JLA’s tactical adviser, operating out of their headquarters orbiting Jupiter.

Owlwoman: Little is known of her: she joins the team after DC One Million proper, the child of parents of both the matter and anti-matter universes and able to accelerate to lightspeed on photon wings as well as breach the dimensional barrier separating her native worlds.

Atom: Another latecomer, he’s the survivor of a displaced universe, working with the JLA until he can rediscover his home; a side-effect of the accident that stranded him also allows him to divide himself into proportionately smaller individuals indefinitely, linked by a hivemind.

Sans spoilers, that’s the lineup! If you want to dip your toe in I’d suggest either the DC One Million Eighty-Page Giant or Superman/Batman #79-80; if you enjoy those almost all of their appearances are collected in the DC One Million Omnibus, one of the few such collections I’d actually recommend purchasing, as it’s maybe the only event comic ever where the tie-ins are generally really good across the board (though the omnibus itself frustratingly puts a couple of those out of order; if you can find any of the single issues of the original book from the fourth week of the event, they have a proper reading order in the back). Outside what’s collected there, you can find members of Justice Legion Alpha in:

* All-Star Superman, where Kal Kent ends up appearing and playing a pretty significant role.

* Batman #700, which has the Batman of the 853rd century in a cameo.

* Hourman, a spinoff series for him by Tom Peyer and Rags Morales that was I understand unsurprisingly very good; I hear he hung with the Justice Society of America in their book for awhile too.

* JLA 80-Page Giant #2 has a bizarrely uncollected One Million story that shows a humorous tour of the solar system conducted by Kal Kent.

* Young Heroes In Love #1000000, the one issue of the event proper not collected due to some unusual rights agreement regarding that comic in general.

* The back half of Superman: Grounded, which gets good once Chris Roberson takes the story from JMS and draws on an element introduced by Kal Kent to great effect.

* They apparently make a teeny-tiny cameo in JLA Secret Files & Origins #3.

* They have a one-panel appearance in the wonderful World’s Funnest.

* The first issue of the new volume of Justice League that kicked off last week, suggesting they may be back in the near future.

* They fight the Crime Syndicate in the latter’s Convergence title, but it sucks and I fully recommend you skip it.

[unbroken-imagines]

The Best Fans in the World

Pairing: None

Requested by: @devils-rival

Request: I'm having heart surgery soon and I've been in and out of the hospital for months. I missed the BVB concert in my city. Is there anyway I can get an imagine or one shot about the band visiting reader in hospital?

All the medical knowledge comes from my first aid training and Grey’s Anatomy, I’m sorry if I got anything wrong.

You laid back in your hospital bed, headphones in volume at the highest level. You hated being here. It had become your prison, constant check ups and appointments, CAT scans after cardiograms, after angiograms. It was getting too much for you. To top it all off you had missed the Black Veil Brides concert. You begged your doctors to let you go but they feared your health would be in danger during the crowd, especially if you were in the pit. You hated the hospital room, the staff said you could personalize it, but as soon as you put up a poster of the boys in their make up from the Set the Wold on Fire era the nurses made you take it down since it was scaring the other patients in the ward. The hospital had spotty wifi at best, you’d managed to download all the new BVB songs that had just released but the wifi wasn't strong enough for YouTube so the music video had to wait.

You paused your music when you saw the door to your room open and your doctor plus your parents walk in.

“Good afternoon y/n, how’re you feeling?” Your doctor questioned.

“Good all things considering.” You shrugged pulling your headphones from your ears.

“Well, we’d like to discuss the strategy for the surgery again to make sure you understand what’s going on.” Your doctor explained pulling out the iPad that he would without a doubt have tonnes of your scans on them and different pictures of what he and his team would be doing to your heart in the operating room.

You tried to focus on what he was saying, but it was more or less the same as the strategy he talked about with you 3 days earlier. You mind drifted to all the pictures of the concerts you saw on Instagram and tumblr. You begging your parents to disregard doctors orders and let you go but they were having none of it, they were too concerned for your health. You loved that they cared about your health but goddammit you missed seeing BVB perform live!!

You hoped that your make a wish would come true. You were in enough critical condition considering you were having heart surgery that allowed you to be accepted into the program and your number 1 wish was to meet the band. Now that they were on tour you accepted the face that they probably wouldn't be able to get to you before you had your surgery and you understood that. They were on tour and their schedule was insanely busy, but you could still hope.

You came back to reality just when your doctor was finishing his explanation. “Understand y/n?” He questioned.

“Yeah.” You nodded, knowing your parents would be talking about it after so you could get all the information you missed from them.

“Well then, I’ll leave you guys to each other.” Your doctor smiled one last time before leaving your room.

“I know you’re still disappointed we didn't let you go to the concert y/n.” You dad spoke up, seeing you playing with the BVB wristband you had on.

“I know you guys want me to be safe, but they’ve helped me though being diagnosed and all the hospital visits. Who knows when they’ll come through here again? I wish I was health enough to see them.” You sighed.

“I know sweetheart.” You mom sighed, she knew how much you loved the band, and how much they meant to you.

“Have you heard back on my wish?” You asked hopefully.

“Nothing yet honey.” Your dad sighed, “They’re on a world tour, I’m sure they wish they could make it but they’re too busy.”

“I know I know.” You sighed, pulling harder at your wristband, refusing to let tears form in your eyes.

“How about we go grab you something from that place you like down the street, considering you haven't touched your lunch.” You dad suggested seeing you lunch tray untouched and pushed to the side.

“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks dad.” You smiled softly.

“We’ll be back soon then.” Your mom smiled, kissing you on the forehead before she and your dad left, closing the door softly behind them. You sighed collapsing back into your pillow, putting your headphones back in and pressing play again, smiling as the song continued to play, you had been listening to Vale nonstop since it came out and you were ecstatic to hear the new content BVB had created. Closing your eyes as you let the song take you away to the imaginary concerns in your head. You were apart of the crowd, screaming out the lyrics with them, watching the boys perform on stage. You were pulled from your thoughts when you heard the door to your room open. Wondering who the hell it could be you paused your music and opened your eyes.

Your jaw dropped seeing Andy, Ashley, CC, Jake, and Jinxx standing in front of your bed.

“Oh my god!” You couldn't help but fangirl a little, you were in no way expecting this.

“Hi y/n” Andy smiled, “Heard you couldn't make it to the show, so we decided to come to you.” He continued.

“I-I” You were at a loss for words, your idols were standing at the foot of your bed and you were too star stuck to speak. “I thought you guys weren't coming, with the tour and all.” You managed to finish.

“Today’s an off day.” Ashely waved his hand, “We heard how much you wanted to make the show, even disobeying doctors orders like Mr. breaks everything over here.” He elbowed Andy in the ribs, earring a glare from the singer and causing you and the other 3 members to laugh at Ashley’s joke and Andy’s distain towards the bassist.

The day soon turned into a whirl wind of you taking selfies with the guys and them giving you signed t-shirts and posters, plus other goodies. “Y/n we’re ba-” You dad was cut off seeing you in bed surrounded by 4 men clad in leather and one on the bed with you with his arm wrapped around your shoulders as you took a selfie together.

“Awkward.” Ashely coughed, nudging CC to get off the bed so it would be less awkward.

“Mom, dad. Meet Ashley, Andy, Jake, Jinxx, and CC.” You introduced the band members, pointing to them and them also waving as you said their names.

“It’s nice to meet you Mr. and Mrs. y/l/n” Jinxx said politely, holding out his hand to shake their hands. After your parents got acquainted with the band members it turned to more pictures and them signing your personal merchandise that you had on you in your room.

Sooner than you wish, your time was up and the guys had to leave so they’d make the next city on time.

“Here.” CC handed your dad a card with an email on it. “It’s our tour managers personal email. When y/n is back to full health and ready to join the pit, there’s free VIP tickets waiting for her and the both of you.” He smiled

“Thank you.” You smiled at the band.

“No problem y/n.” Jake smiled, “Now all you need to do is focus on getting better.”

“Yeah, we wouldn't want to lose an Army member.” Jinxx smiled softly.

“Stay strong kid, remember never give in.” Ashely started.

“Never back down.” You finished with a smiled. the guys smiled, all giving you one last hug before they left to embark on the rest of their tour.

You laid back in your bed, clutching one of the t-shirts they brought you to your chest a smile never leaving your face, they really did love their fans.

[blackkudos]

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.

Life

Early life

Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on Saturday March 1, 1913. He was the second of three brothers; firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice (or Millsap) was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died in 1916 after an operation to cure internal wounds suffered after shards from a 100-lb ice block penetrated his abdomen when it was dropped while being loaded into a hopper. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, so Ralph discovered as an adult that his father had hoped his son would grow up to be a poet.

In 1921, Ellison's mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. According to Ellison, his mother felt that "my brother and I would have a better chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north." She did not find a job and her brother lost his, the family returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter, and a dentist's assistant. From the father of a neighborhood friend he received free instructions for playing trumpet and alto saxophone, and would go on to become the school bandmaster.

Ida remarried three times after Lewis died. However, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attending Douglass High School, he also found time to play on the school's football team. He graduated from high school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a down payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians, and to take further music lessons. At Douglass, he was influenced by principal Inman E. Page and his daughter, music teacher Zelia N. Breaux.

At Tuskegee Institute

Ellison applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, a prestigious all-black university in Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a trumpet player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.

Ellison's outsider position at Tuskegee "sharpened his satirical lens", critic Hilton Als believes: "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it." In passages of Invisible Man, "he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee."

Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by composer William L. Dawson. Ellison also was guided by the department's piano instructor, Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent his free time in the library with modernist classics. He specifically cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment. In 1934, he began to work as a desk clerk at the university library, where he read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Librarian Walter Bowie Williams enthustically let Ellison share in his knowledge.

A major influence upon Ellison was English teacher Morteza Drezel Sprague, to whom Ellison later dedicated his essay collection Shadow and Act. He opened Ellison's eyes to "the possibilities of literature as a living art" and to "the glamour he would always associate with the literary life ". Through Sprague Ellison became familiar with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, identifying with the "brilliant, tortured anti-heroes" of those works.

As a child, Ellison evidenced what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology, starting by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moved on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult. He discussed this passion in a December 1958 essay, "Living With Music", in High Fidelity magazine. Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form. Ellison remained at Tuskegee until 1936, and decided to leave before completing the requirements for a degree.

New York

Desiring to study sculpture and photography, he moved to New York City, where he found a Y.M.C.A. room on 135th Street in Harlem, then "the culture capital of black America." He met Langston Hughes, "Harlem's unofficial diplomat" of the Depression era, and one—as one of the country's celebrity black authors—who could live from his writing. Hughes introduced him to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies.

He met several artists who would influence his later life, including the artist Romare Bearden and the author Richard Wright (with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship). After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged him to write fiction as a career. His first published story was "Hymie's Bull", inspired by Ellison's 1933 hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944, Ellison had over 20 book reviews, as well as short stories and articles, published in magazines such as New Challenge and The New Masses.

Wright was then openly associated with the Communist Party, and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in Divided Minds. Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II, when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, dated August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.

In 1938 Ellison met Rosa Araminta Poindexter, a woman two years his senior. They were married in late 1938. Rose was a stage actress, and continued her career after their marriage. In biographer Rampersad assessment of Ellison's taste in women, he was searching for one "physically attractive and smart who would love, honor, and obey him--but not challenge his intellect". At first they lived at 312 West 122nd Street, Rose's apartment, but moved to 453 West 140th Street after her income shrank. In 1941 he briefly had an affair with the seven year older white writer Sanora Babb, which he confessed to his wife afterward, and in 1943 the marriage was over.

At the start of World War II, Ellison was classed 1A by the local Selective Service System, and thus eligible for the draft. However, he was not drafted. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in the Merchant Marine service. In 1946, he married his second wife, Fanny McConnell. She worked as a photographer to help sustain Ellison. From 1947 to 1951, he earned some money writing book reviews but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted him in editing the typescript as it progressed.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man's search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel, with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism, won the 1953 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument. In 1955 he traveled to Europe, visiting and lecturing, settling for a time in Rome, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a 1957 Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest. Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period, and the two writers became close friends. Later, Warren would interview Ellison about his thoughts on race, history, and the Civil Rights Movement for his book Who Speaks for the Negro? In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth. During the 1950s, he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the Civil Rights Movement, and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.

In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book. Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

Final years

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Ellison died on April 16, 1994 of pancreatic cancer and was interred in a crypt at Trinity Church Cemetery in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. He was survived by his wife, Fanny Ellison (1911–2005), who died on November 19, 2005, eight days shy of her 94th birthday.

Legacy and posthumous publications

After Ellison's death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999 his second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of 40 years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting...

On February 18, 2014, the USPS issued a 91¢ stamp honoring Ralph Ellison in its Literary Arts series.

A park, residing on 150th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem, was dedicated to Ralph Ellison on May 1, 2003. In the park, stands a 15 by 8 foot bronze slab, with a “cut-out man figure” inspired by his book, “Invisible Man.”

Bibliography

Invisible Man (Random House, 1952). ISBN 0-679-60139-2

Flying Home and Other Stories (Random House,1996). ISBN 0-679-45704-6Includes the short story "A Party Down at the Square"

Juneteenth (Random House, 1999). ISBN 0-394-46457-5

Three Days Before the Shooting... (Modern Library, 2010). ISBN 978-0-375-75953-6

Essays

Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964). ISBN 0-679-76000-8

Going to the Territory (Random House, 1986). ISBN 0-394-54050-6

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995). ISBN 0-679-60176-7

Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (Modern Library, 2002). ISBN 0-375-76023-7

Letters

Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (Modern Library, 2000). ISBN 0-375-50367-6

Wikipedia

[vansypencil]

JEREMY WOOD

 Jeremy Wood, is an artist and mapmaker, whose work is a contemplation of the poetry and politics of space. Since the beginning of The Fourth Industrial Revolution in the end of the 20th Century, he has been working with mark making process on variety of topographies by employing GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite technology.

What made me fascinated his work was he had become the first person to combined technology science and art simultaneously for over a decade. With his operation skill on GPS data, who co-operated with Hugh Pryor to launch the GPS Drawing project on White Horse Hill, Oxfordshire in 2002. They changed old conceptions from the Bronze age, that Uffington White Horse could be only seen by god from heaven (Pryor and Wood, 2002), yet GPS is looking down on us (BBC, 2013). Forty-three-kilometer-walking project stunned the public as the artists turned the world into gigantic canvas, contradict to other artists who were working with oil pigments, graphite, charcoal, … Sandhana (2002) added that sculpting artist for ages have captured essence of the everyday beauty, Wood and Pryor walked, drove, traversed the roads to sketch out the line.

My graphic media project was focus on the perspective of a dog on a night walk in Homerton, London. To know where we are going is to know where we are. Jeremy Wood employed GPS as geodesic pencil to accomplish his work, this beagle dog used his nose and his whiskers as his territory detector and antenna. Wood traced his tracks by memories, intention and knowledge about the places he wanted to go, the dog traced by the sense of smell and sound; they both make their own lines. Both of them has made attraction to me with the new idea of perceiving myself of the places I am surrounded by.

In the detective series Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, when the main character was “kidnapped” and blindfolded, he made use of the smell from bakeries, the stumble due to potholes, … to detect where he was being delivered to.

My Ghost, a 16-year-geo-centered performance recorded everywhere Wood went around London, has the density of lines and the significant specific area claims the importance of habits when we walk. I am more aware of the time I spend at a place, noticing others’ footsteps, perfume, arm to open or lock the door with, … Hence, Wood’s work reminds of not only identifying my state of mind, but also having the act of caring for others’, which is the ultimate purpose of art.

The similar idea was portraited by Richard Long; however, while rather than focusing on political and poetic statements, Wood visualized the unseen physical space into the virtual space by sketching shapes and lines with his steps (Psarras, no date). According to Long’s idea, he drew lines from stones and branches collected during his walk and considered walking is a tool for drawing.

In conclusion, the embodied technology, in art specifically, has turned itself from a device to a virtual level, also the main focus is still the experience we have as we walk. The advance in technology are shifting us to new ways to perceive art, anything or anyone could be materials and involve in the work itself (Psarras, no date). The GPS technology changed the answers to the questions: “Who we are? And What is it?”; the artists turned into living brushes, the earth turned into a territory of creativity.

  REFERENCES:

 Pryor, H; Wood, J. (2002) White Horse Hill GPS Model. Available at: http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/maps/whh-model.htm (Access: 19 October 2020)

 BBC (2013) The art of walking. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22025531 (Accessed: 18 October 2020)

 Sandhana, L. (2002) With GPS, World Is Your Canvas. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2002/06/with-gps-world-is-your-canvas/ (Accessed: 19 October 2020)

 Psarras, B. (no date) From stones to GPS: Critical reflections on aesthetic walking and the need to draw a line. Available at: https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/GPS-aesthetic-walking (Accessed: 19 October 2020)

[jbk405]

The worst part of “Both Sides Now” was that it really had potential

I said back towards the start of season three that it looked like Supergirl had turned a corner.  Still not a good show, but at least it stepped its level up to “basically competent” in a lot of areas.  It dealt with some lingering plot-threads of season two, introduced new stories that were clearly being seeded for later in season three, and had a level of production quality that put the first two seasons to shame in areas of editing, camerawork, lighting, blocking, and direction.

It has, of course, squandered all of that over the past half-dozen episodes, and that’s the tragedy.

“Both Sides Now” started very strong in the first ten seconds: The simple CGI of having Supergirl fly in was a nice touch of establishing that she has powers, along with the massive DEO support being deployed.  It gives the impression that they’re taking this seriously and trying to cover their bases, even though we of course know the grunts aren’t going to actually have any impact on how things play out.

It starts to go wrong when Mon-El jumps into frame.

And this isn’t Mon-El bashing (Not only Mon-El bashing anyway), I’m serious: His presence is a major misstep for the episode in oh-so-many ways.

1) Why is he jumping into frame?  It has been established that Daxamites cannot fly, they can only leap great distances, so are they trying to say that he literally hopped here from DEO headquarters?  Why not just ride in one of the cars?  Kara has several additional senses that would be helpful to deploy before arrival at the location, but he doesn’t have any of those other abilities that would be useful before getting to the destination.  Mon-El jumping along the way is...just weird.

2) Why is Mon-El here at all?  Again, not Mon-El bashing, but he isn’t a member of the DEO, nor does he have the same working relationship with the organization that he did in season two to just automatically get him assigned to missions.  Yes, Mon-El has superpowers, but so do Imra and Brainiac, and they aren’t here despite being critical to defeating Reign in combat the first time.  As of yet the DEO has no idea what kind of powers this new Worldkiller might have, so if they decided to branch out and draft other supers, why not all the ones at their fingertips?

3) Though not introduced until later in the episode, apparently at this time Mon-El is in the middle of a spat with his wife that boils down him being a douche (Surprise).  Running off to fight a supervillain without even telling her about it is exactly part and parcel of that.  Trying to present Mon-El as having grown and become a new person since his doucheiness of the second season falls even flatter by having him ditch his wife to hang out with his ex-girlfriend in the first scene of the episode.

We are only ten goddamn seconds into the episode.

Anyway, let’s continue, because again this post isn’t just about Mon-El bashing.

We seem to recover our footing when they storm the house and find Julia Freeman just casually listening to music, completely unaware of what’s going on.  She freaks out when she sees a squad of soldiers aiming weapons at her, but Kara recognizes that she isn’t a Worldkiller and begins to reassure and calm her down, trying for an emotional connection.

This starts as a good scene.  Emotional and tense, and sure we (The audience) know that Julia really is a Worldkiller and Kara is pretty sure, but with the genuine fear in her eyes Kara begins to have doubts.  And then Alex -- ALEX of all people -- ruins it with violently flaring panic and aggression that spurs Julia to activate the Purity persona.

I recognize that Alex is very tense and scared to be confronting a potential Worldkiller: There’s the immediate personal fear of facing a being which has powers beyond your control, and the much deeper biting fear of Kara facing somebody with powers beyond her control.  After seeing Supergirl beaten bloody by Reign, she’s going to be on heightened tension at the possibility of that happening again.  It makes sense that Alex be riding high on adrenaline and wire-thin control.  So why is she here?

J’onn is a telepath.  He should know how close she is to losing control, how close she is to snapping and doing something violent, and since she is carrying lethal weaponry that snap could have permanent repercussions.  It is standard operating procedure for police and military personnel to remove members who have an emotional connection to the situation for exactly these reasons.  Why is J’onn, who’s supposed to be a competent and all-together supervisor, even letting her monitor the situation, let alone be there with a gun in her hand?  Why does he not reprimand her at all when her brazen hostility triggers the fight they were trying to avoid?

...we’re still in the first scene and I’ve written seven flipping paragraphs already.

Moving on, we get Lena and Sam at her office.  Zero complaints here, those two together were great.  This bit of dialogue not only allows us to empathize with both characters while still tying in to the main plot (Since we know that Sam is Reign and the “blackouts” which have them concerned are when Reign comes out), but it actually fills in some backstory that has bothered me since Sam was first introduced as running L-Corp in Lena’s absence.  They finally establish how Sam got such a powerful and high-paying job when dialogue between her and Ruby implied that she had been a struggling worker beforehand.  And this is part of what I mean when I say this episode had potential: Here we see characters we already know dealing with the unknown dual identity of being a Worldkiller, which lines up directly with Julia and Purity as the main plot of the episode.  If only the writers knew what they were doing.

After this we get Mon-El’s whining punkfest as he works on his car and complains about how hard it is to have a beautiful, kind, caring wife who loves him.  This part here is just revolting: I honest-to-god hate his character.  I can’t recall the last time I have despised seeing somebody on-screen as much as I despise seeing him.  Especially in the self-pitying, blame transferring, petulant shitshow that he offers here.

Moving on again, there’s the interrogation of Purity, and for this you can just scroll up and read my complaints of Alex’s outburst at the house all over again.  She shouldn’t be in the room or even watching on a monitor, she is just messing up an effective interrogation tactic because she can’t get a handle on her emotions.  And yes, I freaking love Maggie too, and it sucks what you’re going through, and I’m not saying that I would handle it better than she would, what I’m saying is that everybody else should get her a cup of cocoa, sit her down somewhere, and keep her away from the supervillain so that they can stop from killing the world.  Not to be callous, but effectively countering the Worldkillers counts for more than letting Alex work through her issues by shouting at somebody.

After this we’re at....I can’t even remember where we are anymore, so let’s jump to Sam and Ruby together.  Like with Lena, this is gold.  It is adorable and fun and sweet, it gives us a reason to care what happens to Sam because we see that she is loving and caring and a great mom to Ruby, who is also amazing.  Sam doesn’t tell us that she Really Loves Her Daughter, we actually get to see it, and none of it is twistedly manipulative or abusive in any way.  When Sam disappears because Reign has activated, it’s a great scene, contrasting the Big Scale Danger of a supervillain awakening with the much more personal but very real fear of a little girl who just noticed that her mom has disappeared.

Ditto again the scene with Ruby and Lena, and ditto-ditto Lena and Sam again at the end of the episode.  These scenes work, especially when Lena deduces that Sam is Reign and promises to help her.  This is Lena recognizing now bad this is for Sam, not about how this affects her.  It’s the difference between “I will help you because you need help” and “I will help you because somebody else wants me to”.  That is also the fundamental difference between Lena and Mon-El.

Let’s skip over a lot of the “action” of the climax because most of it is just generically bad, and hop over to Alex and Kara having their heart-to-heart to clear the air at the end of the episode.  Normally I’d be happy at finally letting these two talk and not having Mon-El involved (Seriously, why is he the counselor over the past set of episodes?), except that all of the scenes focusing on him earlier in the episode -- and especially his absolutely ridiculous pityfest -- meant that this is the only part of the episode where the two of them delve into why Alex was acting out and how it drastically affected their operations.  These scenes should have been spread all throughout the episode, with Kara (And also J’onn) trying to sideline her from the activities and dragging out the realization of why she’s on the edge.  By pushing it all into one single conversation at the end it means that she’s just acting irrationally without being countered throughout the entire episode.

This episode had real solid material to work with, and even with the trainwreck it became some of the buried worth shone through, but Mon-El’s overpowering story presence and the sheer incompetence of the writers mean that it winds up just being a mess.

[technoprophecy]

The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ was a term created by the CIA to originally discredit and debunk conspiracies involving the JFK assassination. In an official CIA document released under the FOIA, the first use of the term is presented, and gives the reason and purpose for the term. It reads in part, “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims…”

Thus, the government labeling something as a conspiracy theory, or a person as a conspiracy theorist is intended to totally shut down conversation, publication and research on the theory without regard to whether or not it is true.

On the flip side of the coin, only government sanctioned viewpoints are allowed to officially circulate in the public. This is known as politically correct speech, political correctness, or pc for short. Everything that is not pc is discredited in one way or another, and when appropriate they are discredited by labeling them as conspiracy theories. The pc view thoroughly saturates culture through major media 24/7 until the culture is ultimately brainwashed.

This dishonest approach by the government to conspire to silence and brainwash the public obviously doesn’t promote freedom of speech or freedom of thought. Gov’t intrusion by subversion upon freedom of speech by using discrediting labels and planting officially approved ideas into society, and by using agents provocateur against targets is known as Psychological Operations or Psyops for short.

How should Christians deal with so-called conspiracy theories? Should they be automatically discarded? Or are some conspiracies worthy of our time and research? To which I would answer the first question, NO; and answer the second a RESOUNDING YES!

Here are some principles I follow when dealing with conspiracy theories…

(1) Obviously, not every idea and theory is equal in terms of what is true. Approach all theories with caution and thoroughness.

(2) Always compare everything with Scripture. This assumes you are a diligent student of the Bible, and have some level of spiritual discernment.

(3) Some ideas washout immediately when compared to Scripture because they promote occult and/or cultic ideas that are not from a true and Biblical worldview.

(4) Be careful, however, just because an anti-Biblical worldview is presented, doesn’t mean there aren’t those who are conspiring together to promote the anti-Biblical worldview. In other words, the conspiracy could be true in the sense that there are those who are promoting the unbiblical ideas ether secretly or out in the open.

(5) Many ideas don’t pan out as true simply because of lack of evidence, or shoddy research, and/or out-right lies that are presented as supposed facts.

(6) Here again we must be careful. Some true conspiracies are clever lies presented to justify belief. For example, Hitler and his Nazi henchmen used the cleverly concocted lies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to “prove” their was a Jewish World Conspiracy. They used this false belief to justify the Holocaust. The lie was that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. The true conspiracy was that the Nazis were perpetrating a secret murder machine called the Holocaust as the Final Solution to rid the world of Jews.

(7) Perhaps the most important principle when dealing with conspiracies is NOT to allow the label ‘Conspiracy Theory’ to bias your research one way or the other if the Lord is leading you to look into the matter. In the end, the truth of any theory must rise and fall with the facts or the lack there of, but not with any labels that have been arbitrarily attached to the theory. Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.” Ephesians 5:11 says, “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them.”

Even the Gospel itself was presented by the Jews and Romans as a conspiracy theory perpetrated by Jesus’ disciples who they said stole Jesus’ body to perpetuate the resurrection myth. Furthermore, there was a conspiracy to murder Jesus by the Jewish leadership, who held illegal secret trials against Jesus in the middle of the night.

(8) There is a Biblical warning against giving into obsessive and endless questions that lead to nowhere. When you suspect that is the case with any theory, abandon the research and wash your hands of it. As Paul wrote, in 1 Timothy 1:4 - “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.”

(9) If the actual truth about something is that it involves a conspiracy, and in your thinking you have discarded the possibility of conspiracies, or you have refused to look into conspiracies, then it will be impossible for you to ever come to know the truth about what truly happened?

(10) There are so many true conspiracies in history that it would take many libraries to tell them all. Just to name a few, the Lincoln assassination, JFK assassination, Holocaust, Julius Caesar assassination, Jesus’ execution, Donation of Constantine, all the Biblical conspiracies (do a Strong’s word search of conspiracy), all the massive amounts of legal court cases that proved a conspiracy, etc. etc.

(11) Conspiracies occur constantly. It is really anti-intellectual and illogical to not accept the reality of conspiracies as part of the fallen sinful universe. Satan himself is conspiring with his fallen angels in a spiritual warfare against every human soul on earth from the beginning of time until the ending of time when Satan is finally judged by God Almighty and cast into the lake of fire. Satan, the god of this world, conspires with human subjects to lead to his final solution to raise up the political-religious figure the Bible identifies as the Antichrist, and his accompanying Antichrist world system. This evil does not occur in a vacuum, but there is stage setting that is occurring right now as you read this, as Satan manipulates the world into falling for his global schemes.

(12) Here is a partial list of conspiracies that I have found and believe HAVE TEETH, and have been inspired to study from time to time (some even currently) because they touched my life in some way, and I wanted to know the truth.

a.) JFK b.) UFO’s c.) Pizzagate d.) Nazism e.) New Age Movement f.) CIA and the Intelligence Community g.) MKULTRA h.) Cattle Mutilation i.) Deep State j.) NWO k.) Globalism l.) Cults and isms m.) Vince Foster n.) Vax coverups o.) Plandemic p.) Evangelical Deep State q.) Google’s “Creepy Line” Finally, I have a personal example that shows that labeling something a conspiracy theory is effective in shutting down investigation and critical thinking. For a long time, I had heard about and read posts concerning the elite pedophile ring called Pizzagate. Liz Crokin broke the story around 2017. She has been labeled a conspiracy theorist by the major media, and has been shutdown by Twitter, and has banned her for life. Wikipedia has labeled Pizzagate as a debunked conspiracy theory. I don’t know about you, but that almost proves there is something to the theory. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I would read some of these Pizzagate stories, and I began to file it away under unbelievable. However, I never got past a cursory reading of the stories. I just grazed the surface, and I believed the debunkers. That was how I left it until I had read a series of articles concerning Jeffrey Epstein, and recently when I watched the YouTube video “Out of Shadows.” I am not endorsing the apparent New Age concepts that the makers of the video apparently believe. I am merely weighing what they say about conspiracies, and making critical judgements on its content.

The most powerful part of that video was the interview with Liz Crokin. I encourage you to watch that portion. It starts at 51:20… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wTiCxXgrJw&fbclid=IwAR24v2ULIMVrXWbCb1Cr5gxBkK4BWLrMk571cDwNoLA3Z-hC2A-K9NWyl_s&app=desktop

Liz Crokin showed how code words like pizza and other food related words, and the context in which they were used, relates to pedophile sex. She further shows that law enforcement confirms that the use of pizza is an actual code word for child porn and pedophilia.

These code words were littered many times throughout John Podesta’s emails, and were never explained by the debunkers.

An example of one of John Podesta’s emails is, “Would love to get a pizza for an hour? Or come over.”

Who has a pizza for an hour? That doesn’t make sense.

This is an eye opening interview that everyone should watch with critical thinking. I’m convinced there is something to it. Christians all over America should rise up and be asking questions about child trafficking and child porn. God has wiped out whole cultures for abuse of children. Is America next? Jesus said in Luke 17:2, “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.”

Furthermore, the major arrest and subsequent death (murder?) of Jeffrey Epstein for multiple pedophile sex charges is key. His Orgy Island is only now being comprehended for its deep connections to the elite of our society, and it’s ritualistic Satanic sexual abuse of children. Epstein, and likewise the arrest of pedophile Harvey Weinstein and Anthony Weiner gives major weight to the reality of the elite pedophile ring. How long will this travesty be allowed to exist in the land that God has blessed before people wake up and rise up against it?