#YES John has THE MOST FLAWED logic but that is part of what makes him so fascinating

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

John haters in the Saw fandom make me uncomfortable

[romancomicsblog]

Who should play Professor X in the MCU?

Despite multiple X-Men movies with multiple bad interpretations of classic X-Men characters, Professor X is a character that has been adapted to the screen fairly well.

With Patrick Stewart portraying in multiple X-Men films and even all the Wolverine films (yes post credit scenes count), and James McAvoy playing a younger Charles, both felt like the same character but in very different parts of his life.

With the X-Men on their way, it's nearly impossible to imagine them without a Charles Xavier, even just to begin with. So I will be my darnedest to cast a Charles who feels fresh but can live up to both these outstanding actors.

Before we look at who we should cast. We need to answer a few questions.

What can we learn from past portrayals?

As with all my castings (check out Flash and Lex Luthor here), I will briefly go over what came before and what I loved about them to look ahead, starting with:

Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier

I mean, he's a legend.

Patrick Stewart is most people's definitive Charles Xavier and it is easy to see why. He's charming, calm, and a strong steady presence for his X-Men.

Stewart portrays a wisdom mixed with sincerity that I quite like. You get the sense he genuinely believes humanity, even when it fails him.

I do want a that genuine nature, but my only fault with this version is he is not arrogant enough. We get glimpses of it in X-Men the Last Stand, but Charles can be and should be wrong in many of his decisions. Unlike most mutants, Charles views all come from privilege, and that should be reflected through mistakes.

James McAvoy as Charles Xavier

While I'll admit Stewart feels more like classic Charles, James McAvoy's version is still my favorite.

While he still contains that half glass full hope that Stewart has, McAvoy mixes it with this arrogance, charm, and wit of a young man I just love.

McAvoy was able to lean into the flaws of Charles, making him more relatable and sympathetic. I think he was a standout of the First Class, and was able to hold his own with the likes of Hugh Jackman.

This should be more of the blueprint for me, someone who guises their poor decisions with a calm intelligence and logic that often lead the X-Men into more trouble.

Where does Charles fit in the MCU?

In my mind, Charles will not be the leader of the team for long. I think a well-intentioned Charles could die within the first two films, leaving the X-Men to find a new leader and continue his legacy.

This gives us enough room to get an actor who maybe wouldn't normally do a role like this and leaves the X-Men in an interesting place to elect a new leader. Perhaps Storm, Cyclops, or even Magneto.

What ethnicity/race should Charles be?

Charles has been exclusively white through media, particularly British.

While I don't think he needs to be white, British is a staple of the character and I think adds a barrier of "I'm better than you" to others that I want to keep.

I do think it is interesting that for a team that is meant to be a metaphor for racism, there is hardly any people of color on the X-Men.

While I think there is value to keeping Charles white, as he is the embodiment of privilege leading the X-Men, I will say a person of color can still nab this one.

Any other stipulations?

Yes, a few.

We want an actor old enough to feel like an equal to a Magneto and an elder of the team. While we don't have a clear view of how the MCU would do a Magneto, I think over 50 is a safe bet.

Given we had Stewart and McAvoy, we have some wiggle room to get some big name actors. We should go for names only.

I don't like casting people who have already been in superhero media. It's not entirely off the table, but most likely I will look elsewhere.

Bald is cool but not a dealbreaker.

Let's get into it.

3. Jude Law

I know I just said no superhero repeats, but he is just too good.

Jude Law is known for roles like Dr. John Watson, Dumbledore, and Yon-Rogg, Law has an intense presence that cannot be denied.

While he is a bit younger, just on the cusp of 50, I can see Law playing a very flawed version of Charles, picking up right where McAvoy left off.

My main concern is he has played a role within the MCU before, as Yon-Rogg.

While he was wasted here, it was a noticeable role, and MCU fans aren't soon to forget.

I also don't know if Law is a big enough name to helm the X-Men or take over for the great performances that came before.

I think he's got a solid shot, but there's a few more I like a bit more.

2. Daniel Craig

Arrogant. Smartest person in the room. Cool smooth British man. Daniel Craig has done it all.

Known for James Bond or Benoit Blanc, Craig has been known to part of big franchises, (although he seems less excited about it these days.)

While he was apparently rumored to play Balder in Multiverse of Madness, Craig has not been in a part of any Marvel or DC Comics.

I think this role suits his resume quite nicely, and depending on the writer/director, this could be the best Professor X we have ever seen.

If it weren't for his history being anti Bond, and his love for Benoit Blanc, I'd say this would be a slam dunk. But because of the uncertainty, I have to leave him at number 2.

1. David Oyelowo

Known for roles in Selma, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Nightingale, and The Butler, David Oyelowo may be the only name on this list you don't know.

Oyelowo is best known for playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, where he was nominated for several awards.

Charles Xavier is often seen as a stand in for MLK in the X-Men Universe, so casting MLK as Charles can be kind of meta, and we can play with expectations.

Oyelowo has played unlikeable villains, heroes of Civil Rights, even a redeemed empire soldier (watch Star Wars Rebels it's really good).

This Charles can go in any direction we want, and with an actor who won't take us out of the film for their name.

While he is the youngest actor, at 47, Oyelowo can play older believably, and can easily play a mentor to the X-Men.

And as a person of color, I believe this will help the metaphor of the X-Men and racism feel improved.

If we want a dramatic force with room to see where this Charles leans, I think Oyelowo is the way to go.

Thank you for reading! If you'd like to support me, you can follow me on my socials here!

[slasher-smasher]

Cassidy Bishops Info Sheet

Thank you @sehtoast for letting me use the outline for the sheet! I didn't use all the questions.

Cassidy Bishop

Link to google doc of more detailed version

Face claim: Alexandra Daddario

Age

Looks 37 (real age is 117, I tried making her age accurate so that she was in her late 30s in 1943, but the wiki for The Boys is wacky for timelines)

Nationality

British

Current residence

Manhattan (Apartment)

Occupation

Medical Doctor

Talents and skills

Fast Learner, Expert Surgeon, Art Sketching

Parent (describe relationship)

Her father was one of the top geneticist for the British government and worked along with Fredrick Vought when he defected to the Allied Powers. He is a strict man that loves his country and Queen (rip) to the extent that he would sacrifice his only daughter in the name of science and the benefit to Britain.

Significant others (describe relationship)

Ian Quinn - Journalist that covers wars and corruption. He met Cassidy when she moved back to England after she left Vought and tried to move on from her past.

Homelander/John- It's complicated. He is obsessed with her. She tries to keep him at arms length as just friends.

Relationship skills

Empathy, Patience

Height

5'8"

Weight

140lbs

Hair color

Brown with blonde highlights

Eye color

Lavender (Light Blue before Compound V)

Glasses or contact lenses?

Wears blue contacts when at work.

Skin color

Pale

Dress style

Casual mostly, but wears blouses and dress pants when at the hospital

Mannerisms

Even though she is a 117 year old doctor that has been through some shit, she is socially awkward when it comes to social situations.

Hobbies

Sketching, reading medical journals, listening to music while at the park, baking.

Favorite sayings/quote

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein

Style

Comfortable

Greatest flaw

Her empathy. She allows people Homelander to manipulate her when she feels guilty.

Best quality

Kindness, strong ethics

Introvert or extrovert?

Introvert

Educational background

Many many MD degrees over the years and masters in psychology

Mental health

A bit traumatized by her injection of V by Vought and her father.

Short-term goals

Keep up D-grade supe status cover, save lives in the hospital,

Long-term goals

Bring Vought's corruption to light but not willing to join Billy's team and go to his extremes. Have a normal loving relationship, maybe a family.

How emotional is your character?

One would think being through 4 wars she would learn to hide away her feelings but Cassidy wears her heart on her sleeve. She gets super passionate about things.

How logical is your character?

Even though she is emotional her professional ethics are strong and is used during emergencies.

What would most embarrass your character?

She is subconscious about her age. Even though she is basically immortal, she hates the fact that she is twice peoples age. Being in the spot light.

How does the character deal with conflict?

Often uses logic.

How does the character deal with sadness?

Sketches, cuddle times with her Rottweiler.

What does the character want out of life?

A normal non supe life

What would the character like to change in his or her life?

Being a supe. Saving Homelander as a child from the lab.

What motivates this character?

To be opposite of her father. Help heal people without the cost of others.

What frightens this character?

Being taken to be experimented on. Letting people down. Not being able to heal people.

What makes this character happy?

Friends, her dog, baking, lots of tea (no it's not a British joke, I just LOVE tea)

Is the character judgmental of others?

Homelander is mainly the exception due to their history but yes when it comes to people like Stormfront and Vought higher employees in general. She HATES greed and manipulations.

Is the character generous or stingy?

Generous

Is the character generally polite or rude?

Polite but can be sarcastic.

Is religion or spirituality a part of this character’s life?

No.

What is this character’s role in the story?

Protagonist

Describe the scene where this character first appears

Cassidy was a nurse during WW2 that was forced to be injected with compound V. She worked with Solider Boys team for a bit and reluctantly stayed with Vought.

Consider this character’s relationship with other characters.

Homelander- almost motherly when he was a child, cared about him until he started to become more obsessed and sexually attracted to her when he hit his teens which made her leave due to ethical reasons. As an adult, awkward budding friendship with some sexual tension mixed in much later Maeve- acquaintances Starlight- later becomes friends

How does this character change over the course of your story?

She tries to be a moral and ethical person but her feelings towards Homelander that she starts to accept much later makes her bend her code a bit. She knows he is a monster but her guilt prevents her for seeing him as that completely.

Superpowers:

Longevity/ fast regeneration, super strength but she doesn't use it much.

[themastermarkus]

Arthur Morgan's a Hypocrite (and that's okay), but so is Some of the Fandom (and that's...not)

Excuse me for this being less polished than I'd like, but I've been thinking about it, and I want to post it. Do comment if you have any thoughts or further examples! Of course, this ends up getting a bit...Micah-focused, but...That's because it's me. Arthur is a hypocrite, but this isn’t a bad thing for his character. However, I do think that too few fans give credence to this fact (and I will admit that sometimes the honour system and side missions can make Arthur’s morality a little fuzzy and often result in him looking “more good” on account of how many involve helping someone), and this unfortunately factors into the deep hatred that some people have towards Micah (which also results in jumping to conclusions, like saying “Micah is a sexual predator” or “Micah was going to betray the gang all along” or “Micah mistreats his horse” regardless of if it would make logical sense or if there's evidence to back it up), as well as the tendency to ignore Dutch’s flaws because that’s what Arthur does.

An example of Arthur's hypocrisy and bias that really sticks in my mind is when he is angry at Micah for making him help shoot up Strawberry in “Blessed are the Meek?”. This would be an understandable reaction, but when similar things happen in “The Sheep and the Goats” where he has to shoot up Valentine because of Dutch and John and later in Saint Denis during “Urban Pleasures”, Arthur is annoyed afterwards, but he’s far less outraged at being part of a massacre when Dutch causes it. By no means am I claiming that this is unrealistic (of course he trusts and likes the guy who raised him over a man who joined the gang six months ago), just that it’s notable and would be unfair to say something like “Well, of course Arthur hates Micah after making him kill several people in Strawberry!”

Arthur hates Micah, but is almost always strangely non-specific about it. Like, there are totally valid reasons to hate Micah, like the racism and general bullying, but Arthur doesn’t really bring those things up when talking about Micah. At most, he expresses a dislike of how Micah is so hot-headed and quick to violence, has a cold-blooded attitude towards death (as seen when Sean dies, though to give Micah the benefit of the doubt, he may have had a different reaction to the death of someone he liked), and Arthur is always suspicious of Micah trying to manipulate Dutch. During the ending section of Chapter 5 (and into Chapter 6) Arthur will start greeting Micah with things like “I know what you’re trying to do” (and yes, greeting, not antagonizing) even though at that point there has been no indication that Micah has done anything except get to the rest of the gang before Arthur has and is sticking around Dutch more (Arthur is right to be suspicious, but…how would he know at that point?). Maybe that’s just a developer/writer oversight, but I can neither confirm nor deny that.

Regarding how Arthur talks to Micah, when “greeting” Micah after he’s been bullying another character, Arthur tends towards saying something like “can’t you just leave them alone?” in a way that sounds genuine, but not particularly emotionally charged. And during some of the conversations where Micah expresses his dislike for the more “useless” members of the gang, Arthur doesn’t really tell him off. Does Arthur not think of this bullying as particularly concerning? Is this lack of response perhaps reflective of the fact that Arthur, and others including Dutch, the leader, will sometimes bully other members, particularly Bill? And will some people who dislike Micah say that it’s okay that other characters bully Bill because he’s also mean to others sometimes? For a clear, comparable example of both Arthur and Micah being assholes, Arthur is just as, if not arguably more mean to Bill about his name being Marion that Micah is! Micah says “your parents must have hated you before they met you, explains a lot” and then walks away saying Bill’s secret is safe with him (is he being honest? It’s unclear, but he's talking quietly like it's a personal conversation and doesn’t push Bill into getting more upset). Meanwhile Arthur is loudly exclaiming “Hey, Mary!” and “Sorry, Ma’am” about it—Which is funny, but…definitely a dick move. Micah said a mean thing, but at least he wasn’t trying to attract other people’s negative attention to Bill. This isn't a time where I think what Micah said was okay—he was still being cruel, just...quietly—but my point is that you can't exactly say something like "What Micah said was bad, but what Arthur said is fine" while being totally honest.

[4ragon]

how do you feel about Justine Courtney 👀

Justine Courtney is the single most competent character in all of Ace Attorney, she is awesome and wonderful and smart and also why the hell didn’t they make her at least in her thirties, why is Capcom so afraid of making women the ages they should be, I hate it, I hate it here.

But anyway

She’s this incredibly smart and no nonsense single mother and she’s really fucking cool? Like I said, if Sebastian was made to be this joke of a rival (at least initially), Justine was the real challenge, the real threat. She was our rival, even if Sebastian thought he was filling the role. And she does it so well. She’s just as smart as Miles is, but also she’s clearly in a position of power above him, making her threats both narratively and mechanically much more serious. She’s in the PIC, directly investigating his every action, and she’s also perfectly willing to use her position of power to shut Miles down when she deems fit. She doesn’t give a shit about emotional platitudes, all she cares about is rules and ensuring they are followed.

She’s also super intimidating because of all that, the perfect example of a Lawful Neutral character who is still deeply complex and flawed. She’s not a bad person by any means, but she’s not willing to compromise the rules when it suits her, save for only the most dire of times.

And despite that, she’s still willing to try to do what is right, particularly when dealing with Blaise Debeste. It feels early on that she is fine ignoring corruption as long as she is upholding the status quo, but she sticks to her moral guns even in the face of someone so clearly dangerous, even if she pretends to let things slide. I think that’s a cool facet to a character like this. Not blind loyalty to any person or establishment, but blind loyalty to ideals.

And then I love how we see her interact with John. She’s still this no nonsense, lay-down-the-law kind of person, but you can see so much more emotion in it when it comes to John. You can tell she’s still that strict woman, but you can see how much love and care goes into John’s upbringing when they interact, and it adds this whole extra layer to her. Before the moment John enters the picture, she really comes off as this emotionless, distant figure, and giving her this boy that she is so proud of, that needs to call her every night or she gets upset, it really helps us connect with her. It gives her something she cares about other than facts and logic, and that goes a long way to humanizing her, creating this three dimensional, multi-faceted character.

I will say, as a fan of certain media that likes to create interesting powerful women only to undermine them later on in the narrative (cough Naruto cough) I was a little worried about that happening with John’s introduction, turning her from this character with agency and power into a helpless damsel. And I feel like they manage to toe the line on that for the most part. She never stops being a badass, even though she does in the end need Miles’s help. She’s able to keep the trial going when she needs to. Although I do wish she could’ve done a little more in the ending of the game, either when Lang accused her/John of wrongdoing or when confronting ~The Mastermind~. Again, she’s the most competent character in this series. Let her shine. Let her kick ass. I know she can do it, I’ve seen her do it to me for literal hours. 

I love her development in the game, feeling she needs to let law and rules dictate her life, and eventually coming to understand she can allow herself to feel emotions and let that affect her. She’s such an interesting take on a rival, especially given “All Emotions McGee” from the first Investigations game (I’m looking at you, Lang, you fucking weirdo, I love you). It’s a fun inversion, since usually Miles is the stoic, all logic no emotions character, and now he has to help someone else learn the importance of letting your heart be your guide or whatever. That’s some character development for Miles, being able to help someone else come to that understanding.

I will say though, I love her design but I?? I don’t like her panic face?? I don’t know, it’s something about her mouth. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t really place why.

But yes, Justine is a great rival in so many ways, and I am so happy with her addition in AAI2.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Weird q..but i really dont understand why most fans hate season 4, especially the last episode. Why? I think it gave us a deeper look on both sherlock and mycroft! I felt it tells a lot about mycroft how he had to step in and take control of things ever since he was a kid himself. Also he is not a robot or a killer. Also redbeard thing. It was an appropriate deep psychological trauma (cause most shows usually disappoint in that area). I am not trying to impose my opinion. Just want to understand

Hey Nonny!

It’s all good, and I totally respect your opinion and how you enjoyed S4! It’s totally okay! I know that there are quite a few who got a lot of of S4, and who genuinely enjoyed it.

Sadly, I am not one of those people, and I’ll try to be as diplomatic a possible in my response, but PLEASE know that I don’t think you’re “terrible” or “stupid” for liking S4 because I DO get passionate sometimes in my responses, and I’m just merely speaking as someone who studied the series very closely for quite a long time before S4 aired, and as someone who knows Day-One-ers (ie., people who watched Sherlock on its day one airdate) who also are a large majority of the people who did not like S4. This is just me simply stating why I didn’t like it, but it’s different for everyone.

Stating what I DO like: The acting and cinematography of the first two episodes were brilliant for what they had to work with, and I’ve never faulted any of the actors for the flaws of S4. And for TFP, they did the best with what they had to work with.

That’s… pretty much all I really liked about S4.

Now, here’s my problems with S4:

Nothing made a LICK of sense to the narrative that they were telling in Seasons prior. 

This series was always based a bit in reality, and suddenly everything became comic-book rules: X-Men villains, shitty “redemption” arc, destroying favourite characters just for drama, ludicrous physics, explosions that only destroyed one small room in an apt where in previous episodes one explosion destroyed an entire block, etc.

Sherlock was OOC.

Mary was being built up to be a fantastic villain? Ah, nope, here’s the lacklustre twist where tee hee Mary’s just an assassin with a heart of gold that still emotionally abuses Sherlock and John and just won’t fucking stay dead.

And speaking of this, the DVD’s make NO LOGICAL SENSE unless she was planning to kill herself

AND she tries to make her death equatable to Sherlock’s??

Everyone was RIDICULOUSLY out of character in TFP, I’m so sorry: Mycroft is a bumbling coward for the most part, Sherlock disregards John when he gives the Vatican Cameos warning, the Holmes Parents are assholes because Mycroft COULDN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM WHEN HE WAS 12?? ARE YOU SERIOUS???? And that creepy Moriarty / Eurus thing, and LITERALLY they’re implying that EVERYTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE EURUS DIDN’T GET A HUG. Like, I’m so sorry, but that’s lazy writing.

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculousness of the entire character of Eurus. She LITERALLY had X-Men powers, and like… just nothing made sense. Her involvement in the entirety of S4 MADE NO SENSE. Why go back to prison if you can get out?? WHAT IS THE POINT?? AND I repeat: She did all this because she didn’t get a hug. Yes. I’m oversimplifying, but at the base level, that’s what it was, because she wanted Sherlock’s attention. Welcome to the club, kid, stand in line, everyone on the SHOW wants his attention.

The ENTIRE plot of the first 2 seasons got wiped out all because it wasn’t Moriarty who was interested in Sherlock, but Eurus?? What… What about Carl Powers?? Like…. the ENTIRETY of season one and TGG makes no sense now, because of that one 5 minute scene where Eurus “enlists” Moriarty. I… ugh.

The SUDDEN tonal switch from kind-of Sherlock to James Bond, for some fucking reason.

And on that note, how terribly lazy and cheap TFP looks in comparison to the other two episodes. The whole episode looks like it was filmed in a small house with 4 identical rooms.

EVERYTHING that was etablished in 2 episodes prior were COMPLETELY forgotten when Mary was “shot”.

The complete character assassination of one loyal blogger John H Watson in favour of Mary for some fucked up reason, even though AT HIS OWN WEDDING HE COULDN’T STAND BEING AROUND MARY. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for one damned second that John would EVER forgive Mary for murdering his best friend after seeing what it did to him. That’s not love from her, and that’s NOT John’s character EVER in the ENTIRETY of the series.

And speaking of character assassinations, Molly’s character being devolved to S1E1 Molly, where instead of giving her agency like they were doing with her the ENTIRE series, so much so that Sherlock picked up on her dominance enough to give her a big role in his mind palace in HLV and TAB, only to make her a sad little self-insert Mary Sue pining for the main character, and in turn made Sherlock a TERRIBLE human being for MAKING HER say what she did. It’s gross.

AND speaking of Molly’s character, they’ve been setting up Mollstrade since as early as ASiB, but I guess that plot line got shafted. Look I LOVE Hopkins, and I am ANGRY they didn’t give her more than 3 fucking lines in the entirety of ONE episode after HEAVILY promoting her actress and character, but they essentially reduced her to a piece of ass for Lestrade to chase. AND THAT’S NOT HIS CHARACTER EITHER. EW GROSS.

The constant plot holes being gaped wide open, and the Chekov’s gun moments where they bring up shit but do nothing with it!! 

TD-12? Nope, just a lame reference to a story we like. 

John got shot at the end of TLD with a VERY REAL FUCKING GUN? Nope, it was a dart gun. 

John not suddenly knowing how to be a doctor.

The TGG one I mentioned up above. 

What was in the letter? And who was Anyone??

Moriarty essentially being erased as anything other than a hired thug and had no part whatsoever in Sherlock’s history. 

Eurus… Just all of her character is asinine. 

Everyone in T6T suddenly not knowing John’s the blogger, which is in direct contradiction to literally the entire series. 

The AGRA plotline was ridiculous, in the end.

Baby? What baby? It was only there when convenient.

They dropped whatever plotline they were going to do for Mycroft: He was being set up as either dying, or the villain.

Redbeard. I’m sorry, I disagree with you on that. Mofftiss is trying to tell me that a little boy fell down a well and went missing, and that WASN’T the first place searchers / the police wouldn’t have looked? Sorry, no. And then. AND THEN his parents just… go along with this thing where Sherlock shuts down and they DON’T get him therapy? Yes, I agree the mind is a funny thing, and we can be traumatised into forgetting or dissociating from traumatic events. I GET IT. But… like I don’t believe the Holmes are so heartless as to just never grieve or have memories around about their supposedly dead daughter. It’s another OCC thing for me.

John’s cheating.

Disappearing and reappearing characters, like this scene, and the entirety of the aquarium scene.

Mary and John being terrible parents

OH GOD THIS FUCKING SCENE. That bomb SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED THE ENTIRE BUILDING.

What… who was this girl on the plane? What? Like I know WHO, but if she’s supposed to be Eurus talking to Sherlock, why don’t we see Eurus… talking to Sherlock? I … Ugh.

NORBURY. 

The glass SUPER SECRET GOVERNMENT ROOM THAT NO ONE SHOULD SEE INTO in T6T.

Sloppy camera work that some believe was intentional, but if it wasn’t, jesus c’mon.

The RIDICULOUS amount of 4th Wall Breaking. Like… even the actors didn’t give a shit.

Essentially, everything on this list here and in this blog tag here.

And everything mentioned on these three posts:

T6T: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night 

TLD: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night

TFP: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night

There’s SO much more I can go into, but please go through my “something’s fucky” tag in that last link.

Notice how probably 90% of that has NOTHING to do with “johnlock not becoming canon” because the Johnlockers get MONSTROUS accusations as to THAT being why we didn’t like S4, even though it was, like critically panned by the GENERAL AUDIENCE who have NO investment in the series other than “I liked it in the past”.

Two of my fave YouTubers have interesting (not perfect, but still good) takes coming at the series as casual viewers:

‘The Day Sherlock Died’ by The Closer Look

‘Sherlock is Garbage, and Here’s Why’ by hbomberguy

So it’s NOT just Johnlockers. I’ve talked to Sher1011ies at 221B con who didn’t like S4 either, because most of them realized how shitty Molly was treated in the last episode. So yeah, a big middle finger to those who think I dislike S4 because of  “no Johnlock”. No, I disliked it because I need my stories to make logical narrative sense. I disliked it because I love John and they ruined his character all for the sake of drama and because Moffat has a “hurting Ben” kink. I disliked it because Mary should NOT have been “redeemed” because she was an abuser. I disliked it because Moriarty was turned into a cartoon villain, even though he was already overused in the series. I disliked it because the core of the show – the FRIENDSHIP of Sherlock and John, and their solving mysteries together – did not exist at all. I disliked it because John got sidelined. I disliked it because TFP was a ridiculous episode that, if you replace ANY of the characters, it wouldn’t make a difference, because it didn’t feel like an episode of Sherlock. I disliked it because everyone was OOC.

Anyway. Sorry. One too many accusations my way over the past 1100+ days LOL.

As for your assessment of TFP, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you. There was no growth and actually it implies something far more sinister: That the Holmes are and were terrible parents that gave no shits about their daughter, their traumatized son, and expected their eldest to essentially be a parent. It implies that Mycroft, at 12 years old, orchestrated the ENTIRE Sherrinford thing… Look I can suspend my disbelief, but there’s limits, and this is one of them. A LITERAL CHILD. Perhaps Uncle Rudy had a hand in it somehow, but then why not shit on Uncle Rudy? Why is Mycroft blamed for it all?

Look, I don’t doubt Sherlock had a traumatic experience regarding “Redbeard”. But then why play into the fact that he was a dog? Why bring another character into the series just to have a gotcha moment? Because Mofftiss wanted a “Shyamalan twist”, that’s why. They threw EVERYTHING away for a twist ending either because they GENUINELY thought it was good, or they got tired of doing Sherlock. ALL of TFP is LITERALLY a really bad plot twist because reasons. TFP makes no sense to the ENTIRE narrative structure of the previous 12 episodes. It erased EVERYTHING from the previous episodes, and coated it with a gross closing by a character no one wanted in the series, and then tried to convince us that it’s a new beginning – “a journey they had to go through” – but it SOLVED NOTHING.

Anyway. I have big feels about S4, and the only way I can enjoy it is to watch it subtextually, but even then, I cannot sit through TFP without cringing. 

That said, Lovelies, please do not attack Nonny for enjoying S4! I know you guys won’t, but Nonny came out with an olive branch and they just want to understand why the fandom is passionate about S4′s… whatever it was. We can have a civil discussion about it, and point out – without attacking – why S4 is universally panned. It’s okay to like things no one else does, and Nonny was respectful to me in this ask! 

So with that, feel free, lovelies, to express why YOU didn’t enjoy the series, or why you did! I’m interested in both “sides” / pov’s whatever :)

[jpegjade]

The Blind Date - Spencer

Request: I'd love one where the reader has dated around with no success (terrible tindr dates, disappointing connections through work, etc). Somehow her and Spence cross ways and go out. He treats her really well and looks at her like she's his world. Shes been dying to have a good man look at her like she's precious and melts at it 🥰

hey hi hello! im working though my requests lists faster than i thought lmao. i do have some ideas that i’ll work through but if you have an idea, my asks are still open. 

Warnings: if you hate dad!spencer, then you will hate part of this. But this is fluffy tbh. 

“Hey babe, look what I found!” You said, flipping through a stack of polaroids hidden away in another pointless stack of papers and other items. 

It was time to clean out the attic since all those dusty boxes were really filling up the space. It had been your dream to build a cave up there just for yourself, away from both your husband and your three kids. 

Spencer climbed up the stairs, squinting to see where you were as his eyes adjusted to the terrible lighting.

 “What did you find? Aside from Asbestos and lung disease… Are you sure you want to build something in here? I can’t imagine it being comfortable considering the way the house is made. There’s nothing to cool you down in the summer months and who knows how winter will fare here.” Spencer looked deeply concerned. 

“Spence, honey, would you come and look at this?” You held up the first ever picture you took of him, your first date written on the back of it in metallic sharpie with the words “I really like him…” in your handwriting. 

“‘I really like him?’ What’s that supposed to mean?” Spencer asked, bending over to look over your shoulder at the photo. In the photo, Spencer was giving the most awkward smile, one hand in the air in a semi-wave motion. He looked like his mom asked him for a photo and he was just doing it to make her happy. 

“I wrote this on our first date… I wasn’t even sure about going on the date before that night…” 

**10 years ago**

“Just one date.” JJ said. “You don’t have to love him but I know you’ll like him.” 

Your friend was insistent that she could set you up on the perfect blind date but you weren’t convinced. You went on so many different Bumble dates, had Tinder hook-ups, and even accepted John from marketing’s proposition to take you on a date last week. It ended in you faking food poisoning and having JJ pick you up from the restaurant because you didn’t have the heart to tell him that you didn’t want to hear about his mom’s weird growth that she needed to get checked out. He was supposed to be showing you pictures when you got back to the table but you knew that was going to definitely give you food poisoning. 

“JJ, if this goes south, I’m just going to swear off dating for a while.” You said, agreeing over the phone. 

“Great. He’ll pick you up at 5 pm for dinner and a horror movie tonight.” JJ said, hanging up before you could protest. 

A horror movie for a first date? What did she expect from you? You knew this wasn’t going to go well but you promised her that you would try. 

He was 15 minutes late. He kept you waiting for 15 minutes and for what? He better have a good explanation. In a huff, you swung your front door open to see if his car was even outside and you came face to face with a messy haired brunette with his arm raised to knock. 

“Hi.” He said, arm still frozen in the air. “I’m Dr. Spencer Reid.”

“What kind of medical doctor shows up late to a first date?” You asked, crossing your arms over your chest. 

“Well, you see, I’m not that kind of doctor but that’s a common assumption. I have three Ph.Ds so you can say I’m more of a specialist in scholarly knowledge and I get to put it into practice with my job as a profiler at the FBI, which is how I got here. Not being in the FBI, per say, but being in the FBI with JJ. As to why I’m late, I was given information that I blindly followed from this other agent, Derek Morgan, which I probably should not have followed.” 

You noticed that Dr. Spencer Reid hadn’t taken a single breath until now. 

“Was that advice to piss me off before you even met me, Doctor not a doctor?” You said, still annoyed. 

You knew JJ had talked about Spencer before when you guys met for breakfast or girls’ night out. You didn’t think about what he looked like until now, though. He was pretty but not so pretty that he knew it. It was more like an understated thing. 

“He said that pissing you off in the beginning would give me a better chance of being able to woo you with my charm and charisma, to quote him exactly. I now realize the flaw in my thinking was that he would be correct and misunderstanding that he was kidding because JJ didn’t tell me you would be so beautiful and while I have a genius IQ, I’ve been told that I lack the social skills needed to accurately assess a situation where I have a beautiful woman staring at me like you want to punch me but also intrigued at the sight of me.” Spencer stopped and realized he still had his arm in the air and dropped it by his side. 

You stared at him quietly. You weren’t sure what to make of him but you did know that you were getting hungry. Your stomach growled loudly. 

“You’re a talker.” You said. “I appreciate that.” 

You turned to lock up the front door before dropping your keys in your bag. Walking to the car, he opened the door for you before you could put your arm out. You looked over at him, stunned. Other guys you “dated” didn’t do anything like that. Yeah, it was a simple thing but it was something that mattered at least a little bit to you.

“Wait.” You said, pulling a small Polaroid camera out of your bag. “Smile for the camera.” 

Spencer smiled, showing all of his teeth, and raised his hand in a wave. You hoped to god that wasn’t his real smile as you snapped the picture. The polaroid came out nicely, his face well lit, and you noticed that in the light, his purple shirt looked nice with the black skinny tie and black pants. 

“I like him” You wrote on the back of the polaroid in metallic marker before getting in the car.

The rest of the night was a breeze. Dinner was filled with intelligent conversation and responses beyond what any of your Tinder “Dates” could comprehend. He ordered the nicest wine on the menu and you nearly choked on your water. So he had money, check. That meant he wasn’t attempting to live off his friends’ couches like the last guy you went on a date with. He let you order whatever you wanted and didn’t care about how much or how little you ate. He didn’t make snide comments about how you should “slow down on the wine.” He didn’t want to make you run out of the building. He made you want more. Of him, of the night, of him. Oh and him. 

The movie was filled with jumpscares and things that were generally uncomfortable to watch but Spencer remained unphased. In fact, he nervously slipped his hand into yours about 20 minutes into the movie and you stayed like that the whole time. When you got particularly scared, he would talk to you in your ear and tell you about the inaccuracies of what was happening, straightening out the facts. As if any of the movie was logical, he kept talking to you like everything could make sense, and it calmed you down. You even found yourself leaning into him by the end of the night. 

When he took you home, that was a bittersweet ending to something you hoped would blossom. 

“Do you...” You started. 

“Can I...” He said at the same time. 

Mumbling a chorus of “you first,” you paused long enough for him to say it. 

“I enjoyed spending time with you tonight. When JJ said it was a blind date with her friend, I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I did. I don’t have the best luck with people so I thought I might mess this up too. I can only hope you had as much fun as I had...” He trailed off. 

“I did.” You said a little too quickly. “I mean... I enjoyed your company tonight.” 

There was a weird pause and you waited for him to do it but he kept staring at you. You had to do it, you decided. So you did. You kissed him. And at first he was tentative but then he really got into it. 

“Okay, wow.” You said, finally breaking away. “Do you want to come in? I don’t really want this to end...” You said. 

“Yes.” 

****** 

Spencer was sitting on the floor next to you as you recounted your thoughts on that night to him. Sure, he remembered it but he didn’t remember it like you remembered it and that was what kept him intrigued. 

“Y/n,” Spencer said, looking over at you. “I was 15 minutes late because I was standing at the door practicing my opening line.” 

You looked back at him and you knew the look he was giving you, the one he had given you every time you saw him since that first night. He was staring at you like you were the only thing that mattered. 

“What had you planned to say?” You asked, completely curious. 

“Baby, are you on fire? Because you’ve got me all hot.” He said, looking down at his hand, which you suddenly noticed was holding yours. You were so caught up in telling the story that you didn’t realize what was happening around you. 

You burst out laughing. “Spencer, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.” 

He smiled and looked up at you through his glasses. When your laughter finally died down, you were able to concentrate on him again. He was staring at you in that weird way again. Ever since your first date, he always gave you that look. 

“What?” You said, still smiling. 

“Nothing in particular.” He said, looking over at the staircase. Your 7-year-old was climbing up the stairs. 

“Mommy? Daddy? What’s going on? Did daddy tell a funny joke?” She asked, walking over to sit in her father’s lap. 

You looked over at them as she got comfortable. He kissed the top of her head and went back to staring at you. 

“Yes but it’s a joke you won’t get until you’re much older. And one you won’t hear until you’re much older, if ever.” You said poking her belly. 

“Hey, why don’t we go fix lunch?” Spencer said, putting your daughter back on her feet and standing up. 

“That sounds good.” You said, thinking about how hungry you were. 

Standing up, Spencer stopped you for a second while your daughter climbed down. 

“Can we come back up here once the kids are asleep and go through more of those photos? I remember each one you’ve taken of me but I want to know why. You never explain, even now.” He pulled you into a tight hug. 

“Sure. I have enough stories to fill hours of dates.” 

“You know I loved you since that first photo, right?” He said, kissing your cheek. 

“Really? You’ll have to tell me about your version of some of the dates one day.”

_____________

Okay we had a flashback sequence for this one. i tried to keep it simple so there wasn’t a lot of flashing back and forth. I wanted to make that as long as possible bc idk if anyone wants more, honestly. 

ANYWAY HELLO im so sorry for my longass one-shots

Tags: 

@winchestertardis

@ancailinaerach

[kinetic-elaboration]

June 2: 2x21 Patterns of Force

Took a nap after work today!! Perhaps a bad idea.

Anyway, some thoughts on the... awkward Patterns of Force.

Another story about Jim looking for his hero, I see. That never (always) ends badly.

Definitely getting an image of little Spock (teenage Spock? young adult Spock? all little Spocks) reading about Earth history.

Oh no, an armed drone. That does not bode well. Why do Kirk’s heroes always betray him?

A subcutaneous transponder. That seems like a useful device to introduce into the narrative. (Slash remember for future purposes...)

Also it reminds of me “He’s a...a... a transponster!”

Spock in a hat. I guess the Ekosians and/or Zeons don’t have pointed ears, then.

“It’s our old enemy...fascism.”

Well this guy literally was not subtle in his references to Nazi Germany. (I’m referring in universe to what’s-his-face but this also applies to the episode writer.)

“The evidence is clear... someone did interfere.”

“You look quite well for a man who’s been utterly destroyed, Mr. Spock.” This man canNOT stop flirting for one second.

Lol, using Spock to distract the Nazi.

“It’s logical to pretend to be a Nazi? Okay, I’m convinced. You said the magic word.”

“Look! I captured him!” So proud.

Kirk’s face when Spock says he would make a convincing Nazi. Bb, you’re not doing the compliment thing right. (I’ll actually be quite honest... I find the humor in that moment but it also makes me uncomfortable given both these actors are Jewish.)

That said, Kirk is canonically better at blending into undercover scenarios than Spock is. He thinks better on his feet, creatively.

How do these people NOT recognize two whole-ass aliens.

...Maybe they do.

I do like when Kirk is being interrogated and still tries to be charming..

That Nazi really lost a lot of authority after being dressed down by his superior in front of the captives.

I like this Zeon. 

“The flaw in the plan is this locked door.” Thanks Spock. It’s this subtle humor that I think people often miss in him. Like where you can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.

Kirk is so smart!!! He never gets credit for being this smart.

Hmm, taking out the transponders is such a weirdly intimate scene.

The Zeon wants to be included in this adventure so much but they’re obsessed with each other, like “What Zeon?”

“I’ll be your platform, Mr. Spock.”

This is such a weirdly humorous interlude for a story about Nazis. Kind of reminds me in a way of that conversation with the police man on City on the Edge of Forever. I mean that ep was much better but just like the sudden switch in tone.

Spock’s like “Oh, that was cool. Made a laser.”

I heard Kirk say, “You, over there,” as in directing Spock to stand over there, but the subtitles say “Beautiful. Over there.” As in, “we did a beautiful job getting out, now Spock, stand over there.” But combine them...?

Not gonna get a disguise for Spock huh? Just gonna let him be shirtless a little more for no apparent reason.

Poor Zeon. These aliens are inscrutable and not letting him in on anything.

“Alien pistols.”

“Who would win? the entire military force of this planet or two phaser-less space husbands?"

I probably shouldn’t laugh every time Kirk impersonates a Nazi but I do. "Don't mind me... completely believable Nazi here..."

The unsubtle of the Hebrew names. And of course.. .Zeon.

“We’ll be just as bad as the Nazis.” No, actually, you’re not and never will be that’s not how it works. BUT you definitely should help the aliens. Like, that phrase grates because it’s usually used to refer to, like, use of violence, use of “censorship” but here’s it more about turning away people who are different or minority and so then it does make sense but....the connotations.

Spock’s like, “May I... get away from this emotion? Has enough time passed for me to ask that?”

More Nazis! Following them everywhere!

Oh, psych. Not Nazis after all.

Spock’s like “Betraying your own father, you say? I have never thought about that.”

“The Fuhrer... is an alien?” Actual real line AND a correct summation of the situation.

This ep does not paint the Federation in a great light. Although to be fair... John Gill was breaking the rules so.

Documentary corps... I love it. Great disguise. Flash lights in people’s eyes, have an excuse to stay in a group, no on looks at you. Genius.

Spock is honestly so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about EVERYTHING. He cannot be tamed. Again, really an aspect of him I miss in the reboots.

Kirk really is the captain of everyone in his vicinity.

“Think positively, Spock.”

Uhura is unflappable. “A Nazi Colonel’s uniform? Of course, Captain.”

Send him down naked if you have to!! Yes, please, send him down naked.

Spock giving McCoy detailed instructions on how to put on boots... Why was dialogue like this not in the reboots?

McCoy is so polite. Polite first, confused later. “Nice to meet you, Nazi--wait, Nazi???”

I love how McCoy immediately put on his drunk face and Spock was like, "An opportunity to insult McCoy?? Awesome.”

So I assumed the Chairman was either dumb or didn’t recognize them with their shirts on but apparently he was yet another mole, so. At least it’s not a plot hole.

“The speech has no discernible pattern or logic.” Hmmm, I wonder what it feels like to have a leader who speaks with no discernible pattern or logic?

Guys. Pals. Awful people. Did he really give orders, or did he just say random shit? People will flock to anything. I'll be honest, I actually think this is one of the subtler and better parts of this episode: how chilling it is to contemplate how people will rally around any non-speech that has the right tone and a few key words. This is garbage language. But it incites people to kill.

McCoy and his stimulants again.

Spock and his mind probing again.

Wow Spock really messed with his mind there. “He can answer questions but not otherwise speak?” What kind of crazy shit is that?

They are being so mean to Spock. “Malformed ears.” “Low forehead.” That’s not a low forehead, that’s bangs.

Nice triumivirate scene at the end. Feels good, feels organic. Kirk likes to hear his two BFFs bickering because it feels like all is right with the universe, and I agree. Nature is healing.

This episode has a very weird (and very hard to swallow imo) backstory. Like, who primarily associates the Nazis with efficiency? And even if you do, if you think there’s something to the way they put together the country so fast post-WWI, all of this “efficiency” is directly tied to hatred and violence. Like Isak said, the Ekosians have nothing to hold them together BUT hating Zeons. That's at the center of the design. It's not like Gill’s plan backfired it was just... a horrible plan?? It doesn’t even make sense to me that his “effective regime” was co-opted by one hateful person because what was at the center of the “Nazi” regime before the hatred of Zeons? What could it have been? There are no other alternatives provided. Also, even if it could have been somehow accomplished without the use of a scapegoat.. is fascism really an ideal? Like the story never reckoned with that concept at all, which I find disturbing.

Here’s the thing about Gill. He is a certain real type and I appreciate his inclusion up to a point. He’s the Naive, Hubristic Intellectual. He thinks because he’s studied something, academically, he knows more about it even than people who experienced it, and he can fix all of its problems. “I can do this, but better. I am so smart, I am so well-informed, I have no flaws.” I can even see this sort of person being someone a young Kirk would admire because there’s an optimism and idealism to this naivete. I don’t think Kirk is arrogant but he is very idealistic, and when he was a young man, still in the market for heroes, or at least idols or mentors? Yeah, someone with that kind of attitude toward life--that we can deeply understand and then improve upon history--would have appealed to him. It’s possible that Gill even was the “compassionate, gentle” person that Kirk thought, or that he had that side to him.

Where I think the episode erred is in absolving Gill of most of his guilt for this state of affairs. He does die and he does admit he was wrong, but his biggest sin is allegedly in introducing a regime that could be co-opted for evil rather than one that was inherently bad. He is literally drugged (tortured in a way), to emphasize just how non-culpable the narrative thinks he is. Also, while he does apologize for interfering at all, even this is fairly brief and not expanded upon in the rest of the narrative. The truth is he shouldn’t have interfered in general, because that’s not his place or his right, and he shouldn’t have interfered in this way specifically. Even if Malakon hadn’t risen and taken over, the ideal Gil was imposing was one of unthinking uniformity, lack of autonomy, worship of a leader over the rule law--these are not the values of the Federation, the show Star Trek, or me. But he’s used more as a device to explain why the show is so unsubtly Nazi, rather than a real villain or object lesson. Even though Gill is a much better object lesson than Malakon.

And what about Malakon? The ending presents him, literally and in so many words, as the “one evil man” responsible for all of this. I think we know both from studying history and, unfortunately, from our own times, that this is untrue because impossible. One evil person is just a lunatic ranting on the street corner. One evil leader became leader because others agreed and gave him power, or agreed in part, or made a deal with the devil, or disagreed but said nothing, or spoke but were overwhelmed. It’s a disservice to the subject matter to say that dictatorships or authoritarian regimes are that simple. I get that the episode is only 50 minutes and it needs to wrap up, and it’s simpler to say “Okay, killed the Villain, now we can go back to being Not Evil, all the Ekosians will be as happy as the Zeons because we never really wanted this.” But Hitler and his henchmen weren’t the only Nazis. Regular people--and in this context, regular Ekosians--weren’t Nazis too.

Overall, the episode was okay. Very awkward though. Very blunt. I think it would have been better off not using the Nazi symbology so literally. Like the idea that a human would come into a society and purposefully create something from our history is interesting (and “what if Earth but alien?” is certainly something TOS likes doing and finds various ways to do--like the gangsters in A Piece of the Action or Neo-Rome in Bread and Circuses or even literal Greek Gods in Who Mourns for Adonais?) but not worth it given which society was being emulated. It seemed to be too much an excuse to dig out the old WWII movie costumes (and put Jewish actors in Nazi regalia which... is very... distressing) and not so much an excuse for some kind of commentary along the lines of what I said above re: the hubris of historians, the hubris of time. That aspect leaves a bad taste. It had some good ideas but I think, again, it was hindered rather than helped by how literal it insisted (for some reason) on being. Compare it to A Private Little War, which was just about as obvious a Vietnam allegory as you can get, and yet still didn’t literally transport anyone to Vietnam, and this ep looks all the more clunky. I’m probably judging it more harshly than I have on previous viewings, but I really feel like... you can use sci fi to make a commentary on the rise of authoritarianism, but the delicacy of the subject matter requires you to be particularly thoughtful in the way you do it and the actual statements you’re making.

Anyway, the Enterprise Defeats Nazis is a good episode summary at least.

I think in my last attempt at a whole rewatch I stopped at around this point. I seem to have watched the next two episodes, according to Amazon, but I have a weird feeling I only watched one, the next one, By Any Other Name, and then stopped. I don’t remember either of them so we’ll see how that goes! Will they seem familiar or not?

[howterrifying]

inside the hearts of machines

I've been doing a re-watch of BBC's Sherlock and I am always happy when new little things stand out for me. Back in the day whenever a new series aired I would watch the episodes religiously and continuously because I was basically obsessed with the show. I would watch it to the point where it almost become background music when I was working freelance projects at home or exercising etc. 

So since it's been a number of years since the final series aired, I've been excited to re-watch Sherlock because I think I need something familiar and beloved to sort of feel alive and happy again in this very weird and anxiety-ridden work situation I'm in. (I'm grateful to finally have a stable job that pays the bills, especially in the midst of a pandemic, but I hate almost every part of it).

Anyway, I've reached TSoT and I was very intrigued when this line jumped out at me. The funny thing is, when you've watched something enough times, you find yourself reciting certain lines or being able to finish certain dialogues from memory. So when I reached this point of Sherlock finally confronting The Mayfly Man and his murders, I already had a particular line primed in my head. When he did say it the final time, however, I was intrigued by the tone with which he had done so, something I had never noticed before:

You should have driven faster.

I don't know about you but first of all, the line in question is a very interesting one. I had always wondered why Sherlock repeated this line. The first time he says it, it's said in his usual, wry way and more as a casual response to The Mayfly Man remarking that he was almost halfway home. 

When Sherlock says it the second time, it is after the entire revelation is made; the identity of The Mayfly Man as Jonathan Small, his connection to Major Sholto and thereby his plot to murder Sholto. The case with Major Sholto is a very complicated one where there is sympathy for everyone on all sides. We feel the searing loss for the families affected by the unfortunate accident. We also feel the horrid burden of Sholto's survivor's guilt as well as the fact that he has now become public enemy number one in the eyes of the victims' families. 

This is where, for me, Sherlock's tone in his final line reflects the wonderful irony of how Sherlock's machine-like logic lends to his humanness. A symptom of being ruled by logic is that Sherlock usually remains the most objective person in the room. However, this is precisely why this flaw of his is his most beautiful trait. 

Sherlock is a man of analysis and can immediately see both sides of the coin. He listens, without judgement, to Small's rant on how Sholto is the 'killer' and is able to see that the heaviness of this tragedy weighs the same on both sides. Which is why at the end of Small's rant, Sherlock does not judge, does not make any remarks on Small's 'criminal intent', but merely states a fact instead. A fact that, to me, implies Sherlock can see why Small had done what he did. By responding with something so factual, hinting that Small could have succeeded if he wanted, it shows Sherlock understood he was in no position to judge the rightness or wrongness of Small's actions. Rather, Small's actions fell into a grey area and a plausible grey area at that. Meaning anyone would have done the same had they been in Small's shoes. So who was anyone to judge?

I don't know if I'm describing my thought process right, but I suppose this is akin to John confronting Sherlock about 'not caring' in The Great Game. Sherlock's answer is one of the most beautiful lines I will ever come across:

John: There are lives at stake, Sherlock. Actual human lives. Just so I know, do you care about that at all?  Sherlock: Will caring about them help save them?

I mean, Sherlock's answer is just so packed that my heart literally bursts when I think about it. In its dryness, its wry rhetoric and clear avoidance of sentiment, it exposes the true height of the floodgate which conceals the real motivation behind Sherlock's work. As Mycroft so eloquently put:

My brother has the brain of a scientist or a philosopher, yet he elects to be a detective. What might we deduce about his heart?

Sherlock has flaws. And as I've grown up together with this show, I can see how some of his behaviours well and truly are problematic. The way he treats John or the women in his life really have no reason to be excused and once the rose-tinted glasses come off, it's frightfully obvious. 

That said, there is so much poetry in this particular portrayal of Sherlock that I can't help but love him. I look forward to future writers of Sherlock Holmes who will rework and refine this character whilst still preserving all that makes him (or her!) such a riveting character. I will never say no to series five (or a second season of Miss Sherlock, yes HBO, I'm looking at you...), so if he (or she!) should ever grace our screens again, I would be most eager to devour it. 

The game is always on!

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 130: In Plain Sight (Transcript) - 25th November 2019

tw: none

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

In early winter of 1822, Captain Samuel Barrett Edes became a hero. He was sailing in the south-east Pacific when he and his crew encountered a Dutch ship that was in trouble. Edes managed to save every single one of the Dutch soldiers, and then headed for the city of Batavia, known today as Jakarta, to drop them off and see if a reward could be collected. While he waited, he did some shopping. Now, Edes wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but he owned a small portion of the ship he sailed and of course, he was expecting a handsome reward for his heroic efforts. With this in mind, he kept an eye open for something unusual and conversation-worthy to take home, and that’s when he saw it. It was a mummified mermaid. It was over two feet long, had the curved tail one might find on a fish, but the upper body of something much more human in shape. It was brown from the preservation process, wrinkled with age and entirely addictive to look at, and Captain Edes knew instantly that he had to own it. In late January of 1822, he did something bold. He sold the ship he did not fully own and used the proceeds to buy the mermaid. Then he found transportation back to London and put the odd creature on display, because just about everyone who saw it believed that it was real.

Of course, there were those who could see through the hoax. Captain Edes had been fooled by a clever craftsman who had sewn the torso of an orangutan onto the lower half of a large salmon. Elements were added to the face and hands to give it a more humanlike appearance, but those with training in natural science and anatomy could spot the hidden clues that gave it all away. That didn’t matter to most people, though. The idea that mermaids could be real had been around for centuries, so when something as powerful as a mummified specimen floated into their world, they were blind to its flaws and impossibility. They wanted to believe, deep down inside, that the hybrids of folklore actually existed. Today, we know a lot more about our world than we used to, but if we were to go back in time and live through a less learned age, we would be amazed at the stories that await us, tales of creatures that sit at the very edge of our imagination, living things that defy logic, and monsters that inspire wonder. Our hearts want to believe while our minds are ready to move on. Instead, what we tend to feel is a mixture of deep curiosity and primal fear, and if the tales from the past are any indication, there’s a good reason why. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

 When we talk about the natural world, the very first thing we need to do is gain some perspective. Today, we live in a technologically rich society. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that are more powerful than the ones that sent the first humans to the moon. We can walk past an intriguing part of our neighbourhood, pull out our phones and look at a satellite map or do a search for more information. We’re still hungry people, curious and drawn to unanswered questions, but rather than starving in a house with little food, we feast each day on a never-ending buffet of answers and information. Today, if you want to know something, chances are good you can learn about it in an instant, but hundreds of years ago, that was an impossibility. Not that people didn’t try, though. 2000 years ago, a Roman named Gaius Plinius Secundus attempted to gather everything knowable into one place, and he did an admirable job considering the world he lived in. Gaius was born into a wealthy Roman family in the year 24AD and followed a path of privilege all the way to the top. He was well educated, well connected, and when he entered the Roman military, he quickly rose to the second highest level possible – the equestrian order. Once out of the military, he served as a lawyer, before being assigned various governorships around the empire, and towards the end of his life, he had the privilege to serve as advisor to two different emperors. Today, we know him as Pliny the Elder, but in his day, Gaius was a success story.

Looking back, his biggest legacy was his 37 volume collection of knowledge called Natural History. It was possibly the world’s first encyclopaedia, gathering everything known about a whole array of subjects, from farming and botany to geography and anthropology, but the most influential contribution, filling up volumes seven through 11, were his writings on zoology, the study of all living creatures. But here’s the thing – Pliny the Elder, like everyone else in his society, lacked the proper tools to dig deep and apply hard science to every creature he wrote about. He also lacked the ability to travel and see each animal he described, so he relied heavily on others, like Aristotle’s Historia Animalium and the writings of Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, and that meant his collection was less than perfect. How so? Well, his work on zoology included such amazing animals as dragons, mermen, and even something called a blemmyae, a race of hairy, human-like beings who literally had no head on their shoulders, with eyes and a mouth right in the middle of their chest. Pliny was thorough, for sure, but not very discerning with his source material.

But what his work did do was give birth to something a lot of people have heard of, a type of book known as a bestiary. It took a while for their availability to spread, but by the early middle ages, bestiaries were a common enough resource. They were, at the basic level, books about known animals, typically with colourful drawings to help the reader visualise the specific details of each entry, and over the centuries, some editions became more popular than others. One of the most famous is the Aberdeen Bestiary, an illuminated manuscript that dates back to the 12th century. Aside from being a beautiful example of medieval artwork – and I mean that, you should seriously do an internet search for sample pages – the Aberdeen Bestiary is also a powerful example of just how popular these books really were. It’s filled with images of all sorts of animals, along with rocks, fish, trees and even worms, and a lot of the entries in the manuscript include notes about the nature of the thing in question, making it a valuable reference tool for any budding naturalist. But these bestiaries did more than that – they inspired the popular culture of their day.

England’s King John, who reigned from 1177 to 1216 was said to have a copy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in his personal collection, and John’s son and successor, King Henry III, even used images from it to decorate one of the chambers at Westminster. As their popularity spread, more and more writers got in on the tradition. The Norman poet Philip de Thaun wrote a bestiary about a generation after William the Conqueror invaded England, and it became a gift for King Henry II’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Even Leonardo da Vinci made one. It seems if you were an intelligent person in the middle ages or the Renaissance, making your own bestiary was practically a rite of passage – and let’s be honest, colourful manuscripts filled with unbelievable creatures and animals that defied logic couldn’t not be popular. Humans have this innate desire to look at curious things. We’ve always been rubberneckers, straining to take a long, hard look at things that sit outside our normal experience, and the spread of bestiaries is proof of that. But those ancient books and manuscripts also teach us something else about ourselves. Human beings are creative creatures. When faced with a mysterious gap in our knowledge, we’re more likely to invent something to plug the hole than to leave the question unanswered – and what we’ve come up with is equal parts entertaining and downright terrifying.

 I mentioned earlier how the internet and the accessibility of powerful devices has given us an edge over our predecessors, and in a lot of ways that’s true. Yes, we have access to a huge majority of our collective knowledge, but not all of it. In fact, there are still things we don’t know. For example, scientists today believe that there are roughly 8.7 million animal species on this planet, and yet 86% of the ones that would live on land still haven’t been discovered or studied, and it’s even worse inside our oceans, where over 90% of life is still a mystery to us. We know a lot, yes, but our world is massive and diverse, and that makes the learning process slow and tedious. Some animals are also a bit harder to track down, they’re less abundant or more shy, and so it’s made studying them more of a challenge. A good example is the platypus. For a very long time, scientists thought the descriptions of it were nothing more than a hoax. I mean, it was rumoured in 1799 to be a hybrid of a duck and a water rat, part mammal and part bird, with venomous spurs that could kill a dog, and while we’ve learnt more about them over the years, the platypus is still an allusive creature. A recent documentarian was able to get what he considered to be a goldmine of actual footage of the animal, amounting to about 30 seconds, and when only half a minute of film is something to celebrate, you know the animal is hard to study.

Of course, while we’re searching for new species, the ones we do know about are slowly dying off, which doesn’t help. Some estimates place the number of species on the edge of extinction at around 20,000, and more get added to that list all the time. For the medieval writers of bestiaries, this would be their worst nightmare. All those creatures belong in their books, and yet they keep slipping away. But at the same time, not being able to see an animal never really stopped those ancient writers from including it in their catalogue of life on earth. In fact, there are a lot of entries that would cause most people to scratch their heads, because while, yes, we’ve grown in our understanding of the world around us, these bestiaries serve as a time capsule of our gullibility. As far back as Pliny the Elder’s collection on natural history, we can see those less believable creatures pop up. He once wrote that thousands of sea-nymphs known as neriads had washed up on the shores of what is modern day France, and that they looked just like the nymphs of the land, except that they were covered in fish scales. He also wrote about that fiery bird of legend known as the phoenix, which was known to burst into flames before re-emerging from its own ashes. And of course, I’ve already mentioned his fascination with mermen and blemmyae. It seems that Pliny the Elder had an obsession with gathering all known creatures, whether or not he had witnessed them with his own eyes.

Other historians added their own contributions to those mystical lists as well, and if I ran through it for you now, it would sound like a recap of the Harry Potter series. Hippos and elephants shared the same space as hippogriffs and mandrakes. There were dragons and tritons, giants and sea monsters. Honestly, it sometimes seemed that if a young child could draw a picture of it, that was good enough to get it included. Of course, some creatures were more popular than others, and that popularity varied from culture to culture. In Europe, one of the most talked about creatures of all was also one of the smallest, but don’t let its size fool you, because there was nothing safe about the basilisk. Our old friend, Pliny the Elder, wrote about it 2000 years ago, describing it as a serpent with legs that was no larger than a foot in length. But what it lacked in size, it more than made up for with attitude and special features. A basilisk was said to stand tall on its back legs and had a crown-like plume on top of its head. And they were dangerous, too – according to the stories, basilisks were so poisonous that even looking at them could get you killed. Other creatures avoided the like the plague, and wherever they chose to make their nests, the plant life would die and wither away. One description I read said that if a man on horseback stabbed the basilisk with a spear, the poison was so powerful that it could climb up the spear, kill the man, and then kill the horse as well.

Of course, when something is that powerful and deadly, it eventually becomes the centrepiece of tales of valour. It’s said that Alexander the Great once killed a basilisk, and like many of the other legends about him, he did it in a way that proved not just his might but also his intelligence. It’s said that he polished his shield until it was like a mirror, and then approached the creature holding it outward. When the basilisk saw its own reflection, it fell victim to its poisonous gaze and instantly dropped dead. We can find images of the basilisk in just about every bestiary in existence, most of which look like a cross between a snake and a rooster. There’s a statue of one in Vienna, commemorating an 11th century hunt, and there’s even a church in Sweden with a carved relief showing St. Michael stabbing one with a spear. So popular was this creature that people sold powders that they claimed to be ground-up basilisk, something that most people purchased for use in alchemy, but more than a few used as an antidote to poison. Everywhere you look through the middle ages and earlier, the basilisk is waiting to rear its poisonous little head. You can see society’s attraction to it in their folklore and superstition, a mixture of fear and fascination, of wonder and disgust. For centuries, it popped up in stories whispered all around Europe, like a well-loved character in a popular book series. But if one account is any indication, it might not be a work of fiction after all.

 The people of Warsaw had a problem on their hands. They were two decades into a new political structure known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and while it gave a lot of freedom to the wealthy and elite, it left the lower class in a constant state of fear and oppression. Life in the city was challenging for many people, but that was the new normal. In 1587, though, something happened to put the people of Warsaw on edge. Livestock in the area around an old, ruined building had begun to turn up dead. Even a few of the neighbouring residents had been found poisoned in their beds, washing over the community with a wave of grief and loss. And in the midst of all that confusion and pain, two of the neighbourhood children disappeared. Well, disappeared might not be the right word for it. Folks had seen the two young girls playing near the ruins, they had watched them laugh and skip and revel in the freedom and joy that came with childhood, most likely muttering quiet prayers that it would last as long as possible. The neighbours knew what sort of hard life awaited those girls once they were old enough to work and carry their own weight. Their joy must have been bittersweet.

And then someone watched them step inside the ruins. That was the first reason to worry. Folks avoided the ruins for a good reason – it was dark and dangerous, and the cellar beneath it had been a den for all sorts of animals. So, whoever it was that watched them disappear into the shadows most likely headed over to warn the girls’ parents. When everyone arrived at the ruins to call them out, though, they were no longer visible. While there was a good chance they had simply moved on to a new playground, someone decided to peer inside the dark cellar, and there, laying on the broken stone floor, were the sleeping forms of both girls. So, one of the older women stepped inside to wake them. A moment later, though, she collapsed into a heap beside the girls, sending the growing crowd into a panic. They didn’t know what was causing the people inside the cellar to lose consciousness, but they knew there was something dangerous about the dark space, so they sent for a fire hook – a long pole with a metal hook on the end – and then reached in and pulled each body out into the light. All three of them were dead, and not just dead – they were bloated and dark, as if they’d been dead for days. Most frightening of all, though, was that their eyes seemed to be protruding from their sockets. No one could be sure, but it almost looked as if they’d been frightened to death.

Wanting answers, they sent for Benedictus, the king’s very own physician. If anyone would have the skill to identify the danger, it would be him. And, sure enough, after taking a long look at the trio of bodies, he brought them a definitive answer. All of them had been killed by a basilisk. In an instant, the atmosphere around the old ruins changed. Newcomers came to watch, while leaders gathered to form a plan. Something had to be done, and just like the stories all of them had grown up with, it seemed that a basilisk hunt was in order, but the trouble was no one wanted to risk their lives by entering the cellar to kill it – not even Benedictus, who seemed to know the most about the creature. But they had an idea. A group of leaders from the community quickly headed to the local jail, where two men awaited execution for various capital crimes. Each man was given the same offer: come kill the basilisk, and you will receive a full pardon and your freedom as a reward. It seemed like an easy choice, too – inside jail, there was no chance of survival. Outside, though, there was at least the possibility they might survive. It made sense to everyone.

The first criminal declined the offer, but the other one, a man named Johann Faurer, agreed to help. He was escorted from the jail to the old ruins, where Benedictus awaited him with tools and instructions. The townsfolk had quickly gathered dozens of small mirrors and sewn them onto a pair of leather pants and a coat. I imagine Johann gave the old physician a sideways glance at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, but at the same time, he would have known the folklore just as well as everyone else. Alexander the Great had defeated a basilisk using a mirror-like shield, so why would it not work for him? With a crowd of over 2000 witnesses watching, Johann began to carefully walk into the ruins, where he entered the cellar. He had a long rake in one hand and a torch in the other, to light his way, and as soon as he stepped into the darkness below, he cried out that he could see it – a long, serpent-like tail, with a head that resembled that of a rooster, right down to the crown-like plumage. Benedictus called out instructions to the man. “Grab it with the rake,” he told him, “and then carry it out here into the light.” Johann shouted back that he understood, and the entire crowd began to shift and rumble. If a basilisk was going to be dragged out of the ruins, no one wanted to be around to see it, so they all ran for cover and hid their eyes. When Johann emerged, he held the writhing creature by the neck in one of his gloved hands. They daylight somehow made it weaker, and that gave Benedictus the courage to step closer and examine it. It looked exactly like the bestiaries of old had taught him – the body of a snake, four long legs and a head that looks very much like a rooster.

But sadly, this is where the account of the basilisk hunt ends. Whoever had been recording the events had most likely been in the crowd, and when Johann had begun to emerge from the cellar, they had followed the crowd into hiding, which leaves the ending a bit of a mystery. Who killed the creature, when all was said and done, and how did they do it, knowing the risks the old legends spoke of? What we do know is this: the Warsaw basilisk hunt of 1587 was the last time the creature was reported anywhere in Europe. Maybe it had been the last of its kind, and its death marked its extinction, or perhaps the few that survived had a knack for staying out of sight – like the platypus of Australia. Either way, all that was left from that moment on were legends and stories. Like so many creatures that have once walked the earth, the basilisk – if it was ever real to begin with – has slipped into the shadows of the past, and it’s never been seen again.

 There really is something delightful about the bestiaries of old. Their colourful pages and evocative descriptions were beyond sensational. In a world without television, radio or easily accessible works of fiction, those catalogues of natural history were the closest most people could get to travelling the world. Of course, the things most authors chose to include in their bestiaries would probably never make the cut in our modern times. After all, headless tribesmen with eyes on their chests, unicorns and sea nymphs all feel more like characters in a fantasy novel than entries in a study on the world’s flora and fauna. And yet some of those expectations have been broken over the years. For centuries, sailors told stories about the kraken, enormous sea creatures that could reach out and drag an entire ship underwater with its long tentacles. King Sverre of Norway recorded its description way back in 1180, and for hundreds of years people claimed to spot them in the waters of the ocean. Then, in 1853, the carcass of a giant squid washed up on a Danish beach, giving the legend new life. Over the century and a half since then, scientists have determined that there is indeed a giant sea creature that fits the ancient descriptions – give or take a few sinking ships, of course – and while they’ve been challenging to catch on film, we now know they exist. And those mermaids of old might have roots in actual animals as well. Many scientists and scholars now believe that old reports of mermaids could very well be mistaken sightings of an aquatic mammal known as the manatee. As is so often the case, our misunderstandings had given birth to frightening legends, only to have science bring a bit of clarity to the tale. Sometimes the monsters of the ancient world turn out to be real, and sometimes legends inspire new discoveries.

In the part of the world that stretches from Mexico to South America, scientists have been familiar for over a century with a lizard from the iguana family. It’s not the largest reptile around, but it can grow to around 2ft in length, and it can run at amazing speeds. Some scientists refer to it as the Jesus Christ Lizard because of its strange ability to run across the surface of water. But its most common name is based on other features, like its tendency to run on two legs and its serpent-like body – a body that’s topped with a head and plumes reminiscent of a crown or a rooster, which is why its name is both logical and a bit of a throwback. They call it the basilisk.

 There’s something enticing about the mysteries that fill the gaps in our knowledge of the world around us. Looking back at the bestiaries of the middle ages, its clear humans have had a lot of fun filling those holes, and the creativity of the past has continued to inspire stories today. But there’s one more creature I want to tell you about. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to learn all about it.

[Sponsor break from Bombas, Casper and Fracture]

They had fallen in love, and it was something that would change their destiny forever. At least, that’s how the legend tells it. Long ago, a young man lived on a small island surrounded by deep blue seas, and in the process of hunting one day, he encountered a beautiful young woman. But the hunter quickly learned that there was more to her than he could see with his eyes. The woman, it turns out, was a fairy. In fact, she was well known to the locals there, who referred to her as the Dragon Princess. Despite their differences – him, a normal human being, and her, a magical fairy – the two of them fell in love and were soon married, and that helps this tale become on of those happily ever after stories that we all love so much. The couple went on to have twins, a boy and a girl, and just like their parents, they were an odd pair. The boy was just like his father, a human with no magical powers of his own, while the girl took after her mother, and because of that, both parents decided that the children should be raised in separate places to help them fully become who they were meant to be.

According to the legend, it was many years later when the son was out hunting, just as his father had taught him. He was creeping through the forest, his spear balanced in one hand, when he spotted a deer. He quickly threw the weapon, which found its target, and a heartbeat later the young man was carefully making his way over to collect his prize, and that’s when the dragon stepped out of the trees. It was enormous and frightening, and it clearly wanted to take the deer that he had just killed. The young hunter spoke to it, begging it to leave his future meal alone, but the creature ignored him and proceeded to move toward the deer, so he lifted another spear and got ready to take aim at the dragon. Suddenly, a figure stepped out of the shadows of the forest and stopped him. It was his mother, the fairy princess, who he had not seen since his childhood, and as she approached him, she spoke a word of warning. “Do not throw that spear”, she told him, “for that is no ordinary dragon. That is your sister.” Instead, she taught him to live in harmony with his sister, and according to the legend, that fateful meeting set the destiny of their entire community on a new path. Even today, if you were to visit the place where they lived, the people there would tell you that they are descended from dragons, illustrating how that harmony has continued.

And of course, this story is just one of many tales about dragons that fill the pages of folklore. In fact, most of us would be hard pressed to find a creature mentioned more often than those magical beasts, from the 11th century legend of King George and the Dragon to the fantasy novels and television shows of our modern world. They really do seem to be the king of monsters. Dragons are also one of those nearly universal creatures. It seems just about every culture around the world has had some version of them in their folklore. The ancient Egyptian god of chaos was Apophis, represented as a giant serpent. The Babylonians had their own god of chaos called Tiemat, and in Arcadian mythology there were not one but three dragons on display. Norse mythology features a giant serpent who gnaws at the roots of the world tree. In Ukrainian folklore, there is a dragon with three heads, while images of dragons can be found all over medieval heraldry. And of course, few cultures on earth hold as tightly to their dragon mythology as the Chinese, who have been decorating objects with images of the creature at least as far back as the Neolithic period, and we could speculate why, I’m sure. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how the accidental discovery of dinosaur bones might spark fear and wonder in the minds of humans thousands of years ago. The places where stories of dragons are most common are also places where such fossils have been uncovered, so it does make sense.

So, when Europeans arrived on an island in the Flores Sea, just south of Indonesia, they probably didn’t think twice about the local stories about dragons. In fact, those tales were probably a bit old hat, as they say. Dragons lived in caves, breathed fire, were vicious killers and could fly when necessary – nothing about all of that was new. What was new, though, were the things they saw there. On an island surrounded by deep, blue sea, an island full of people who believed they were descended from dragons, mind you, they discovered a creature that brought all of their legends to life. It lived in the caves along the shore, it was an enormous killer, and it sometimes even followed its prey up into the trees. It ticked all the boxes. These were 300lb serpent-like monsters that could bring down a half-tonne water buffalo. When they licked the air with their bright red tongue, it looked as if they were spitting fire, and they even dug into the graves of the dead looking for treasure. Of course, that treasure was always food, not gold. And they’re still there, crawling across the sandy beaches of the island, living in harmony, more or less, with the people who still call the place their home. They might not have wings or piles of golden treasure to curl up on, but they are the largest lizard on earth, measuring in at over 10ft in length, and they’re deadly. Sometimes the tales of the past stay shrouded in mystery, and other times we manage to crack the riddle and shed new light on the shadows that once frightened us. This living, flesh and blood dragon seems to offer a fresh answer to an ancient question, however incomplete it might be, but at least we now know that there really is one place in the world where that old cartographer warning is actually true: Here, on Komodo Island at least, there be dragons.

[Closing Statements]

[scarfacemarston]

Hiya!!! Idk if you do angsty headcanons. But I was wondering if you would do a head canon with any of those sexy cowboys. (Except Micah for obvious reasons). So the headcanon is that it’s a robbery but turns bad when the s/o goes blind by a gunshot?!? That’s super angsty I know but I’m super curious. If you don’t wanna I completely understand. Thank you so much and I hope you have a wonderful day or evening!!

Hey anon! No worries, I love writing and reading angst, so no issues here! I actually feel like a lot of the members would treat a blind reader similarly, but here it goes!

* One thing they all have in common is that they feel immense guilt for the incident. They all struggle with the idea of “What if” or “ I should have …” - but they all react to this in different ways.

Arthur: I have a feeling Arthur would struggle with the guilt the most. He’s very hard on himself at almost all times. He is also seen as the lead enforcer and protector after Dutch and Hosea. You can just hear the anger and the sadness in his voice. I think part of him would want to withdraw from you out of guilt, but he would force himself to do all that he can to help you. Luckily, you do manage to navigate your new lifestyle rather easily.  Arthur is still the type to hover all the time. He’s willing to help you with anything and everything. At night, he would hold you close against him. The fact that he almost lost you terrifies him, especially since he’s lost so much in his life already. He constantly talks about how sorry he is and how much he loves you. You’d have to take him aside one day and admit that the life of an outlaw is unpredictable and that there was nothing that could have been done. You’d have to reassure him that you harbour no ill will against him and that you still love him. He is extremely protective - the only flaw is that he tends to treat you like glass. John: John is actually a bit spooked about the incident because his own father became blind after a bar fight. However, he is more cynical and realizes that you all do live a violent lifestyle - but he still feels guilty and that he should have prevented this. His father going blind was his fault and not anyone else’s. This was different. Once he gets over the this, he’s actually very helpful because he’s lived with a blind person before. John is not as openly affectionate, but you can feel his love for you in his words. It’s like a stable current in everything he does. He tends to do some hovering of his own, but he focuses more on helping you adjust to the lifestyle. He’s surprisingly calm, overall. His voice is very distinct and like a beacon. Sadly, there are days though where the guilt and stress tend to boil over. He’ll definitely need some reassurances like Arthur does and in private, he will let his guard down and tell you how thankful he is that you’re with him still. Charles: Charles handles the situation with logic and calmness - which is the way he handles a lot of situations. Unlike the other two, he will want to sit down with you and discuss the event, and more importantly your needs. He’ll hover from a distance if that makes sense. He doesn’t want you to feel belittled or coddled, but he does want to make you feel loved. He’ll try to teach you how to stay calm and how to focus on your other senses. While he has no idea what it is like to be blind, he does know a lot about completing tasks in the dark. He is also the best one to vent to when things start to bother you. Yes, he feels a lot of guilt, but that was why he discussed this with you early on. When these feelings creep up, he tends to deal with it in a healthy way like crafting items or hunting.  He tries to empower you by talking about how strong, beautiful, intelligent and innovative you are.

Javier: Javier’s reaction actually surprised a lot of the people at the camp to the point that some people were actually mad at him. He didn’t treat you any differently. He didn’t look at you with pity or guilt. He kept those feelings to himself and knew they would pass in time. He is very practical about the situation and allows you to do almost everything for yourself. Make no mistake! He WILL help you with whatever you need, he just wants to make sure that he isn’t stepping in too early. He tries to make you laugh and is still as loving and loyal as ever. He’ll serenade you, tell you stories while you work, snuggle you and more. He thinks that if you wanted to, you could take on some of your old tasks. He wouldn’t’ feel comfortable with you in a robbery or any obviously dangerous situations, but little things like distracting someone while another camp member steals items from the back is something he thinks you’d be great at. Of course, he would bring this up in a very tactful and respectful manner. 

[ardenttheories]

I think one of the biggest letdowns about the Meat Epilogue for everyone seems to be how much it trashed the development of the characters up to the end of Homestuck. 

A lot of people have been pointing this out most fervently with Dirk. He went from someone who was well aware of his flaws, of his obsessions, of his tendency to take over and control, of his capability to hurt the people he cares for most, from someone who genuinely cares about every single person he’s met and tries his best to be a better person for them... to someone who was actively harming them without a fucking care in the world, under some misguided theory that he was doing the right thing. 

And yes, I recognise that this is because of the Ultimate Self bullshit. Dirk has become every little splinter of himself that exists across Paradox Space - all the good ones, all the bad ones, all the ones in between. All of that mingles and merges into what we get in the Epilogues, and it, to some degree, makes sense. 

But here’s two thoughts for you.

Why did he have to end up like that? If, by the end of Homestuck, he was getting better, and if the chances of there being just as many Emotionally Developed Dirks as Emotionally Stunted Dirks is incredibly high, why does he have to take all those bad qualities and bring them out to the fore of who he is in the Epilogue? Why does that have to be the route he goes down, when he was in such a good position when Earth C was created and when he’s merged with plenty of emotionally capable Dirks as part of becoming his Ultimate Self? 

When Homestuck ended, I considered Dirk a Realised Prince of Heart. A Prince of Heart who’d worked through all his shit, opened up to people, recognised that he needed to share his burdens and to let people in - to use his powers for good, not for the harm of the people around him. He was aware of what he could do, and actively choosing to use it in a productive way. 

In the Epilogue, he’s a True Prince of Heart. He’s destroying without truly recognising it as destruction. He’s become the epitome of what it means to be a Prince of Heart, without any growth of character or any attempt to use what he can do for the benefit of the people around him. He’s hurting them instead; shaping them into things he thinks they should be, completely disregarding their individuality because of his own thoughts on free will and how illusive it is. 

This is the Dirk we had at the beginning of Act 6, merged with the Bro we saw at the beginning of the comic. And sure, from the standpoint of the Ultimate Self, it can make sense - if you disregard the fact that he could as easily become a Good Dirk as a Bad Dirk. 

But what makes this suck so much as a fan is that, as people, we fucking hate seeing characters lose their development, and that’s what we see happening to Dirk. He’s regressed back to a point prior to all his development throughout Act 6. Everything that we saw him achieve has been lost, and it feels cheap because it fucking is cheap. It’s a literary constant. It’s one of those things that you don’t do. Destroying a story worth’s of development for no actual reason, or without showing why they’ve regressed, will never come across well. Especially in regards to an idea as abstract as the Ultimate Self - and, again, the very clear knowledge that Dirk, even as an Ultimate Self, didn’t have to end up like this when you consider his position at the end of Act 7. 

The development doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t flow. You don’t just go from “emotionally developed individual” straight back to “emotionally distant and morally perverse”, even with an idea like “he’s fused with every other instance of himself” - because logically, if he was in a good position, why wouldn’t he remain in that good position? What about the Ultimate Self ruined his development? Why does merging with every version of himself - the good and the bad - suddenly revert him all the way back to square one?

Which brings me on to thought two. I hope you’ll excuse me for the really dumb choice of fandom to explain this.

Supernatural is notorious for frequently setting its main characters - Sam and Dean - back to square one in terms of emotional development. Inevitably, something that was resolved in series 6 ends up being revisited in series 7 without explanation. Emotional issues that the brothers had resolved almost always become an issue again; relationships that they thought had healed always find a way to come back; issues with their past that they had come to terms with almost inevitably cause them to split up yet again, and become the main issue to be resolved throughout the new series. 

This, from what I can tell, is a big reason why a lot of people fell out of the fandom. It’s why I did. You can only watch characters grow, and regress, and grow, and regress again over the same thing so many times before it starts to get disheartening. Just when you think they’re better, that they’ve solved it, that everything’s okay, it’s brought up all over again to make them suffer over and over and over. There’s only so much of this you can take in a character before it becomes dull, or boring, or unrealistic. 

And that’s exactly the issue with Dirk’s development in the Epilogue. For a lot of people, it’s unrealistic. Even with the Ultimate Self taken into account, it still seems wrong - because we’re seeing him go through the same mistakes all over again, and when you’ve already seen it once, seen him get through it and grow and progress and and become better, seeing it again but worse does not leave you feeling satisfied. It’s disheartening. It’s narratively a cheap move to try and cause more tension. 

The fact of the matter is, whether that’s the point or not, it’s a sign of bad storytelling. There’s no reason for Dirk to have slipped during the Epilogue, other than “because Hussie said so”. Narratively it just didn’t need to happen. Narratively, it’s not what people were expecting, either. And dropping something this huge without providing any hints beforehand just doesn’t work. If you’ve set up a character to get better, to be in the best possible place he could be, or on the road to recovery, suddenly pulling out a regression of character doesn’t work. It won’t feel satisfying because you didn’t imply the possibility - you didn’t build suspense, you didn’t leave the seed for people to think about at the end of Act 7. You just dropped it, at random, and expected people to be prepared for it.  

This is like Hussie pulling out a gun and yelling “aha! Look at how wonderfully I have crafted this masterpiece!!” without ever having insinuated that he was going to pull out a gun to begin with. 

Compare this, for instance, to the reveal that it’s Adult John who ends up getting sucked into the Ultimate Treasure alongside Teen Jade, Dave, and Rose as part of the Epilogue. This is a good drop. This is a good reveal. We knew this was an event that happened; we knew that it was something an unreliable narrator had said; we knew this was something that never actually ended up happening in the main story of Homestuck. This isn’t a surprise because the foundation of the reveal was all there. We knew it was John, Dave, Rose, and Jade that would end up in there - we just didn’t know which John, Dave, Rose and Jade it would be, or why. Our expectations for that scene are shattered, but because of how it was set up it ends up being more shocking and more exciting because of it. All the pieces were put in place for Hussie to build on. 

That’s not what we get with Dirk. The pieces put in place for him were that he was meant to get better, that he was improving, that we’d see him as the best Dirk Strider there could possibly be - a foil to Bro, the abusive dickhead Dave had dealt with his entire young life, someone who would step up and take the shape of a healthy familial figure in Dave’s life. This subversion doesn’t work. Not in a satisfying, enjoyable, or natural way. It’s shocking, yes - but it’s a bitter shock, a shock that no-one saw coming, rather than a shock that suddenly blows your mind.

A Dirk who goes from “I wish I could love Roxy, because (s)he’s the best one out of the lot of us, and (s)he deserves that” to “I’m going to actively misgender my best friend because part of my Ultimate Self was merged with Lord English and I rely heavily of the dichotomy between male and female to understand myself” is interesting, yes, but not the way it’s done. It’s fucking horrific to read Dirk talk about someone he’s meant to love that way, and it’s not a good sort of horrific. 

Ultimate Self Dirk being the douchebag he is in Meat can make sense and work, sure. But not in the way Hussie framed the narrative of Act 6-Act 7. When you’ve framed your narrative to make the character grow, reverting everything in some shock twist at the end will never settle well with your fanbase. That’s why Dirk’s role feels weird, and out of place, and overall bad on an emotional level. The jump was too big, too unbelievable - and for the main plot point of your Epilogue, that’s not really what you want to end a series. 

[naruhearts]

OKAY SO I've just spent the best part of an hour scrolling through your blog and reading a bunch of your destiel meta and I HAD to message you... I was one of the many people who STRONGLY believed destiel had a chance of being canon after season 8 (more like season gr8 am i right), but throughout the years I slowly lost all hope. However, S14 has made me 110% invested in the show again and YOUR META IS GIVING ME HOPE FOR DESTIEL, which is TERRIFYING. Your writing is wonderful and I'm STRESSED.

Got back from Washington late last night!

Oh my gosh @alovelikecas, your message really made my day and I’m SO glad you enjoy my meta xox (even when most of my meta looks like, to me, sloppy-ass writing, haha! I’ll probably make an end-season meta post after 14x20 — if I have the time — that touches upon SPN’s current and repeating themes since Season New Beginnings S12/Dabb Era, not to mention I have, like, some more unfinished meta in my drafts >.>)

Yeah I mean, I didn’t join Destiel land until Summer 2016, and before that, I was late to the Season 11 party, so I basically had no narrative context for anything, and I’ll copy-paste what I said here: 

Looking back, one significant thing I recall? S11 gave me a sense of Destiel’s true narrative validity (as not a ‘fanon’ ship but organically developed in the canon) when I perceived it as a season that was ‘missing something’. Keep in mind I had no idea about Destiel yet while watching S11 at the time.

I was literally asking myself — repeatedly — why Dean/Amara seemed to contain odd narrative holes, considering A. Dean explicitly said that the non-consensual attraction he felt for Amara was NOT love and “it scares him”, B. Amara told Dean that ‘something stops you - keeps you from having it all’, C. Djinn!Amara stated that she can: ‘feel the love [Dean] feels, except it’s cloaked in shame,’ and D. Mildred’s iconic ‘You’re pining for someone’ —> which did not logically correlate with A and C, meaning: since Dean doesn’t freely love Amara and thus isn’t possibly pining for her — with female love interests as currently non-existent (I remember crossing off the dead/gone girls on a piece of paper lol) — who the hell was he pining for, then?

Originally posted by elizabethrobertajones

Obviously, without writing long-ass paragraphs of meta about it again in this post, S11 made sense as soon as I watched it within the Destiel context (especially after I read up on some grandiose pieces of Destiel meta (@charlie-minion was the very first person who inspired me to write meta; I followed her once I joined the fandom Oh my god, here we go, holy crap this subtext – I’m invested in this godforsaken ship because they’re in love with each other and I’m not getting off any time soon. The rest is history.

I’m aware that I do come off as positive (and I’m still Destiel-positive; whatever happens in 14x20 this week may or may not change that), but I hope you don’t mind if I use your lovely ask as an additional opportunity to clarify my meta standpoint: no one’s saying Destiel WILL become text. 

The general Destiel meta community (all subfactions: Destiel-positive, -negative, -neutral, and in-between) is not the Most Holy Canon Word, and we aren’t SPN writers, and again, we can’t actually speak to the veracity of Destiel as guaranteed-gonna-go-textual, but we — a diverse pool of critical thinkers from all walks of life: particularly those who have some degree of experience in literary academia/English literature studies (fun fact: I was actually pursuing a Minor’s in English until I changed my mind - my first love’s Health Science/Biology, which I stuck with, but here I am doing lit-crit analysis on the side *wink*) — can speak to the veracity of Destiel as a real, palpable, and ever-substantial long-running romance narrative aka the love story between Dean and Cas IS THERE. I see it. We all see it. We didn’t pluck it out of the random ether one day. It naturally evolved across the show’s overarching narrative like some vast spiderweb, linked together by numerous character arc amalgamations of Dean Winchester and Castiel as separate individuals who were then brought together — who brought themselves together, by the sheer force of free will and choice — and are now inherent parts of the other’s story (and respective character progression).

I say this too many times to count: the entire point of writing meta? Personally, it enables me to appreciate the literary gorgeousness of Dean and Cas’ relationship as, first and foremost, a tentative alliance offset by the very moment Cas raised Dean from perdition (it’s a poetic beginning). Their alliance then inevitably proliferated into a rocky — at times, necessarily turbulent — friendship, then a deep profound bond…one that crossed platonic boundaries since S7/8 and is, ultimately, indelibly rooted in romance. Together, Dean and Cas build up each other’s strengths, complement each other’s flaws, and narratively motivate the other to self-introspect — to become the best version of themselves that they were always meant to be: self-actualized entities who let go of their painful, horrifying, psychologically/emotionally destitute pasts.

These above reasons and more are why I think Destiel belongs right up there on the shelf of Ye Olde Classics, similar to epics by John Milton, Shakespearian tragic dramas, Homeric characteristic cruxes, and the great Odyssey journey: a legendary journey, fraught with circumstance, that finally ended with Odysseus (now an enlightened man) returning to Penelope, the love of his life.

Channeling the scope of Homer’s Odyssey, Destiel is an incredible storytelling feat of obstacles, both internal and external, romance tropes, mirroring, foreshadowing, and visual cadence/emotion, enhancing SPN’s already character-driven main plot in that Dean and Cas try to make it back to one another; like Penelope, their love holds true despite everything. If Destiel were an M/F couple, we all know their love story would be absolutely undeniable to the GA.

I do understand the bitterness S14’s fostered in some viewers, though. I do understand that Dean and Cas seem distant (and yeah, it’s a noticeable difference compared to S12/S13), but I believe the Destiel subtext is still heavy and holds steady.

Right now, at this point, there remains multiple personal issues for the characters to solve, you know? Dean and Cas aren’t talking properly; their love languages stay mistranslated, although we’re persistently shown that they still understand each other on a certain level that no one else can, and the visual narrative keeps framing them as on-the-nose solid counterparts: a domestic-spousal romantic unit independent of Sam.

Originally posted by incatastrophicmind

They want to be there for the other. They need to quash the final remnants of their respective internal loathing (Dean’s self-worthiness, Cas’ self-expendability) before they’re able to give the other 100% of their time, efforts, attention, and love (as flawed and complicated but compellingly beautiful as it can possibly be). During the times Dean and Cas do try to talk shit out, extraneous issues continue to get between them.

As other friends/meta pals discussed with me, S14 is like S10 in that it’s confusing the cast/audiences. And exactly: S8, besides S11/S12/early S13, also belongs in the close-to-canon serious Destiel narrative transition! I can discuss the showrunning/writer problem of SBL (Singer + Bucklemming; @occamshipper hits the nail on the head) that tugs subtext – especially subtext linked to Destiel – back and forth, sometimes in the weirdest nonsensical ways, but I won’t go too far into it here. I agree, however, with the recent idea that Jensen does seem a bit confused as to where he should bring Dean emotionally this season (don’t get me wrong, I do NOT believe Dean is OOC; OOC is a completely different concept vs expected character behaviour). And if Dean’s consistently romance-coded past interactions with Cas are any indication, Jensen would also — in the same vein as all of us — want Dean and Cas to start getting their shit together. Long-running fictional characters like Dean and Cas, conceived over 10 years, are so well-written to the point where you, the author, can predict what they’ll do even if you just plop both of them inside a room and give them no direction, and I personally feel that nowadays Jensen is prevented from achieving Dean’s further internal growth/unsure how to act in the moment because of some dumb SBL scripts saying one thing while his character’s heart says another. Wank aside—

Season 15 should hopefully convey a much more logical subtextual perspective e.g. unbelievably amazingly cohesive Season Destiel 11 that aired after choppy S10. Not all hope is lost!! I also want to clarify that I personally LOVED Season 14 in general. It’s been mostly Emotion-centric constant, with Yockey, Berens, Perez, and Dabb usually making my top-rank SPN writer list.

Currently the narrative’s still allowing pretty significant (imho) wiggle room for the lovers to fracture apart and get back together, where their miscommunication comes to a dramatic head. We just saw Dean and Cas argue over Jack’s well-being in 14x18 and 19. Dean — besides putting Cas at the top of his You’re-Dead-to-Me-Because-You-Lied-but-I-Still-Love-You-Goddammit hitlist (for clear spousal-coded reasons) and taking Cas’ actions to heart (he’s the person he trusted the most who lied to him) — no doubt blamed himself for what happened, and Sam was, like I said, the mouthpiece of truth. TFW were all culpable. They all failed Jack in some way, shape, or form.

I’m not expecting anything for 14x20, but I’m nervous either way! Thanks for sticking with my long answer

[a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives]

The ‘Lost In Space’ Cast Takes Us on a Journey About The Reimagined Classic

Looking for your next binge-worthy series? Look no further than Netflix’s original series,Lost in Space. The show is a re-imagining of the classic 1960s TV series, updated for today’s audiences.

Lost in Space follows the Robinson family, space colonists who crash land on a distant planet. At the end of the first season, they somehow survive their ordeal but find themselves in a precarious position, yet again. I chatted with the cast members of the show: Molly Parker (Maureen Robinson), Toby Stephens (John Robinson), Ignacio Serricchio (Don West), Max Jenkins (Will Robinson), and Mina Sundwall (Penny Robinson). We discussed their characters and their experience on the series.

How did you become part of the project? What drew you to the role, and were you a fan of the original series?

Molly Parker: I did not grow up watching the original series. I didn’t have that much TV in my house when I was little. I remember seeing bits of it. When my agent first called me about it, I thought, “I don’t know if that’s what I need to be doing.” Then, I read the script and I got on the phone with the creator. It was exciting that this character on the show was inverted from the kind of archetypal gender roles of the mom and dad. She’s a hero. She’s coming from this kind of really scientific, engineering, logical brain, and every problem has a solution. She’s not particularly emotionally intelligent, which is not the place that a lot of female characters are written from. Yet lots of women come exactly from that place. I just love that she’s quick to action. My first questions [in playing Maureen] were really like, “What’s wrong with her?” She’s a brilliant scientist and she’s this great mother, but she does all these things. What’s her problem? What makes her interesting? That was exciting about doing it. Certainly, I think people can see her as the sort of American hero, which makes me laugh, but then I’m always trying to scrape out the corners of those places and find where she’s wrong and where she’s flawed and where she’s screwing up. There’s lots of opportunities for that, because basically, for all her good intentions, she is the one that wants to go to space. She’s the one that puts her family in a situation where they’re constantly almost dying. [Laughs.]

Toby Stephens: I wasn’t really a fan of the original series. I didn’t really watch [the show]. I saw a couple of episodes when I was a kid. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I just didn’t really know it. I was much more of a Star Trek person when I was a kid. That was my meat and potatoes in terms of sci-fi. I watched Space 1999, which we used to have in the UK, and Doctor Who, but I didn’t really watch Lost in Space. Then when this came along, I was dubious only because I had that distant recollection of what it was. I remember the film remake being a bit of a disaster. So, I thought, Is this something that’s going to be worth doing? I read it and then I thought, “This is great. I love this. I love this take on it.” I like that it was very believable, somehow. I believed in this family. What’s great is that it’s a family that is not some sort of perfect apple pie family. It’s this kind of slightly dysfunctional, very real family with real problems that just happens to be in this context of being lost in space. l like the fact that its sci-fi — it’s not a space opera. It’s couched in some kind of scientific reality. I actually found that really interesting. Then I knew Neil Marshall, who was directing the first few episodes and was one of the original creators, spoke to me about it. Then I spoke to Zach [Estrin, showrunner], who talked me into doing it. He told me the story arc of John and Maureen, particularly. I really liked the idea of him being this archetypal character. The strong father, but he wasn’t a very good father. He was learning to be a better father. That really appealed to me. I think what I liked about it was that a lot of parents who are watching it with their kids can really identify with those characters. Most parents are good people struggling to do the right thing for their family, and at times feel like they’re failing. You’re doing this tough job, being a parent and not getting it right.

Ignacio Serricchio: Yes, I was obsessed with the original series because Guy Williams, after he finished Zorro, I wanted to know what else he had done after Zorro. I noticed he did Lost in Space. I wasn’t a fan of space and science fiction, but what caught my eye with this show was that it was so family oriented. My family is absolutely everything in my life. I could relate to that. When I was a little kid, I watched the reruns. I loved the family dynamic. On top of that, there’s a robot and a chimp. Chimps are one of my favorite animals. I think I’m a chimp. I actually think I’m devolving as we speak. I find more hair on my shoulders; I’m walking with my legs open more. It’s a weird transformation. [Laughs.] The project caught my eye, and I got the audition. Immediately, I got super giddy, but at the same time, I told myself to control myself. I said, “You’re probably not going to get it. They’re going to go with a white person. I don’t know why my mind was thinking this way. I thought, Don’t get too excited, because it’s going to be heartbreaking. So, I went into the audition very relaxed, just going to do whatever I wanted to do to entertain myself. I least will get out of it a fun experience. Then, they called when I was in Vancouver shooting Girlfriends Guide to Divorce. My manager called me saying, “They want to fly you down to meet you and read for the part,” and I said, “Do they fly everyone down because they have a lot of money? Or is it like on a special thing?” These are all questions that are going through my head. Then, it turned out good.

Max Jenkins: What got me involved in the project, actually is a funny story. I came home from school one day, doing my normal thing as a sixth grader. I go upstairs and I see this copy of a script on a table. I start reading through it. Then, I asked my mom, “Hey, mom, what’s this Lost in Space?” And she goes, “Yeah, that’s the script but we’ll pass on it because it takes you away from home too long.” And I said, “It has a robot, and I get to be in space. I get to wear spacesuits. I really want to do this.” One thing led to another, and now I am Will Robinson. I watched the original series, and our director for Season 1 recommended a few movies: Black Stallion, ET, and my favorite, of course, The Iron Giant. I also got to become friends with the original Will Robinson, Bill Mumy. That really helped me form my character. We became great friends. We bonded over music, and we bonded over Will Robinson, our love of sci-fi, and comic books. He’s a big Bucky fan, and I’m a big Captain America fan.

Mina Sundwall: I auditioned for the role of Penny. I got a call from my agent that they were doing a remake of Lost in Space and that they were looking for a Penny Robinson. I met with the showrunner, Zack Estrin, and some of our producers and our writers. I was drawn to Penny immediately because I see a lot of myself in her. She can be very sassy and very quippy. She thinks more than she says a lot of the time, in the sense that she is one step ahead of a lot of people, even if they don’t know it, which I was really drawn to immediately. She’s very smart. She’s very generous. I admire her and I respect her a lot, especially after now having been with her in my head for two seasons. I’ve seen her grow a little bit. Immediately, I was drawn to those qualities about her. I did see the original series, and I thought that it was very funny. I love it a lot. It’s definitely different from our version of the show. Yes, it is. It has its own charm that I love a lot.

What can you tell us about Season 2?

Toby Stephens: The next season picks up where we left off, and it just expands everything. What I love about an American TV series is generally if it’s successful, they want to make it even more successful. They want to take all the way, and they’re constantly improving things. That doesn’t necessarily mean you just spend more money and throw more money at it. It’s more about how can we take this and make it better, more entertaining, more fun for the audience, and just make the story more satisfying? It’s really a continuation of where we were, but expanded. Who were the robots? Where did they come from? What is the mythology behind them? What is the science behind them? Who made them? Where is Will’s robot? Are we ever going to see him again? We know all of that stuff. What is Smith going to do next? They’re stuck with Smith; she’s stuck with them. How far is she willing to go to survive? How does this family dynamic develop as the kids grow older? We watch them grow older, and we watched the parents grow. How does that change the dynamic? It just seems to get bigger and bigger.

Ignacio Serricchio: I can tell you that it’s going to be incredibly mind-blowing. Honestly, just from me being on set, I knew that it’s going to be gigantic. I cannot even wait as a fan to watch it when it comes out. I’m a fan of our editors, and I’m a fan of our effects department. Those are things that I have to wait to see until it comes out so I can watch it with everyone else. There’s so much of it that we don’t get to see in the final product. I know it’s going to just blow everyone away. I’m going to react the same way people who were not in the show are going to react. That’s what I can tell you. I’m really, really excited as a fan, not just as an actor.

Max Jenkins: The second season is going to be humongous. It is going to be out of this world, no pun intended. We have an amazing new director. He’s our producing director, and he really led us through this journey. His name is Alex Graves. He directed for Game of Thrones and Homeland. He took us to Iceland, which was really amazing. We spent about a week or so in Iceland, filming from glaciers to waterfalls to black sand beaches. That was really amazing. We went to Drumheller, Alberta, where you see a bunch of dinosaur bones lying on the side of the road. He really helped me build a new Will Robinson, which was amazing. He really helped me age Will Robinson up a little bit. He made him older, a bit stronger, a bit wiser, but he didn’t change who Will Robinson was.

Mina Sundwall: For the family in general, I have to say, look forward to bigger, more scarier, more answers, more questions — exploring much more space, more robots, more creatures. For Penny, as far as growth goes, it’s a lot about finding her position and what she can contribute to the family, given that she isn’t the science one. Towards the end of Season 1, she felt quite lost and a little useless. In Season 2, you see her begin to find what she can contribute and use that to help the situation. I don’t think that her growth is done whatsoever. I think that it’s only started.

The Robinson Family and company will return for a second season. Netflix has not dropped a release date yet but rest assured another season will be on its way. In the meantime, you can stream Season 1 of Lost in Space on Netflix. The complete first season is also available on Blu-Ray and DVD. The Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack features extras and behind the scenes you won’t see anywhere else. Here’s hoping we’ll see the Robinsons soon.

credits to BlackGirlNerd (x)

[douxreviews]

Legends of Tomorrow - ‘Nip/Stuck’ Review

"Gary Green is all the man we need."

This episode title got about 1000% funnier after the reveal of Gary's evil nipple last week.

I'm just saying.

Technically, this week's title only represents two out of the three plotlines. What we really get is more like Nip/Stuck/Sunday in the park with Neron, but it's hard to complain too much about it since it's both a solid joke and a pleasant reminder that the show Nip/Tuck was a thing once. Plus, and it hurts me to say this, the Constantine stuff was really the weakest of the three plotlines.

That's probably a good place to start. At the end of the last episode, Neron-in-Ray's-Body teleported away from the Waverider taking with him Gary and Constantine. I actually missed, at the time, that John had been taken with them, and so I was a little confused when we opened in the ice age with Him and Neron and no Gary in sight. That said, they cleared up pretty quickly that Gary had been sent to the Time Bureau, although why Neron would bother to do this was a little unclear at first.

Gradually, however, one thing became very clear. Neron is probably the most competent villain that the Legends have ever encountered, and his 'to do' list is shockingly task oriented. What Neron wants, ultimately, is his lady friend Tabitha to be released from Hell. Once she's out there's probably some idea about conquest and domination, but for now all we really see is Neron being laser focused on getting her out. Seriously though, how nice would it be if step two was just him and Tabitha taking a nice vacation in the wine country and getting a couples massage?

In any case, Neron has clearly taken a moment to troubleshoot his plan, because he's very efficiently begun from 'the Legends will try to stop me', reasoned that forcing John to use his magic over a very large trap will be a nice way to get them out of the way, foresaw the hitch of the Legends just calling the Time Bureau to rescue them and headed that off by getting Gary on his side and having him make the Time Bureau unavailable to help.

So, despite how things look at first glance, all three of the plotlines this week are just three different pieces of the same plan, and neither Neron nor the show feel any need to overtly point that out. Indeed, the most impressive part of Neron's plan such as we see it this week is just how not flashy it is. He's not showing off for anyone or trying to impress his enemies, or any of those common villain-flaws. He's efficiently anticipating threats and neutralizing them while simultaneously maneuvering John into the position of either allowing both himself and an innocent to be sent to hell, or to stabilize the portal to Hell which will allow Tabitha to come back to him.

And the ultimate result of this well prepared and competently executed plan? He wins. Absolutely, 100% Neron achieves exactly what he intended to do, with no hiccups whatsoever. There are precisely two things that happen which Neron didn't intend, and neither of them matters to him in the slightest. The Legends manage to escape from their snowy grave and Constantine decides to swan dive into hell to save Ray, and neither otf those things matter, as they have zero impact on Tabitha's successful escape.

The Swan dive into Hell was a nice resolution to a theme that's been bubbling away under John's plotline. He's repeated many times that he's a complete bastard, that he's a monster, that he's a horrible person. Because believing that about himself is kind of Constantine's character brief. But the emotional climax of that theme was probably the easiest thing to miss in this episode. We're told that the Puca only mirrors those that are around it. If you're angry, it's angry, If you're violent, it's violent. And when it's alone with John, it's kind. Judging from the look on John's face when the Puca heals his forehead, he didn't miss the significance. That's what brought about the change of heart that led him, the first one to board the 'Ray's gone and never coming back' train, to jumping into Hell to bring back his friend.

That's just a really solid emotional through line.

Meanwhile, The Waverider is trapped below 500-odd feet of snow during the ice age. Sara immediately makes the logically correct choice to turn power down to minimum so that they can conserve it as long as possible while they slowly freeze to death while bickering. How nice was it, by the way, that they were all wearing spare Captain Cold jackets because Snart left a supply of spares. That was just adorable.

It's easy to give Ray short shrift as compared to his team-mates. He's the sunny, optimistic one, and that's a character type that it's just way too easy to make fun of these days. Character's like Mick and Sara, with all their gruff cynicism are just more fun to watch, we tend to think. How wonderful is it, then, that the secret to the Waverider's escape was to find and embrace their inner Ray, turning the heat back up to full and determining to enjoy each other for as long as they can, because even if all they have is each others company, that is not nothing. The answers in the Cards to Save the Timeline game were a little on the nose, but I don't care. The Legends were saved by the magic power of optimism and friendship, and that's just fine by me. We need more of that. Also, please mass produce that card game, I want to play it.

Which leaves us with Gary and his hypno-nipple, Stepford Wife-ing his way through the Time Bureau and interrupting Nora's new hire paperwork. This is basically your by the numbers 'all of your friends are being turned against you, one by one' template, although it's very well done. It also must have been nice for Adam Tsekhman to get to shake things up in his portrayal of Gary, although I do wonder if he was told early on just how much of the plotline this year was going to be driven by his nipple. I feel like that would be a weird burden to carry. It's thematically pleasant that this plotline too was solved by remembering that you aren't alone. In this case, Mona and Wolfie. It would appear that Wolfie is essentially a separate personality from Mona, and can take control of just portions of her body to communicate, which is interesting.

So, three distinctly separate plot threads, all of which are really just different parts of the same plot thread, all of which essentially boil down to the idea that 'friendship is good'.

This episode just works really, really well.

Everybody remember where we parked:

The first stop for both Neron and the Waverider is the Donner Pass in the Ice Age. This is little less precise than they usually get, as there were at least five ice ages, and they tended to last for a little while. Things get a little more specific when the Legends trace John's magic and realize that he's 1.3 million years in the past, but that still seems like a suspiciously round number.

It also begs the question of whether the Donner Pass would actually exist 1.3 million years ago. Wikipedia assures me that the Sierra Nevada range began it's uplift 4 million years ago, so it's theoretically possible, I suppose. But let's be honest, they really only set things there for the sake of a few cannibalism jokes.

Next, Neron takes john to a 'Celtic village' in 55 BCE. That's 'Before Current Era', which is an alternative phrasing to B.C. although they both refer to more or less the same thing. It's a little odd that a show that's already confirmed the existence of Christ would use the more neutral term.

Quotes:

Nate: "And who knows what he’s doing in Rays name, or his perfectly grass fed organic butter-body."

Nate: "What do we do till then?" Zari: "Stress eat." Mick: "Drink." Charlie: "Yeah, how’ve you lot survived until now?"

Gary: "Let’s rap for a sec." Mona: "Is Gary cool now?" Co-worker: "That’s impossible."

Gary: "No need to stress. Unless your infraction is looking too good in that suit. Agent Reyes knows what I’m talking about." Mona: "Oh my god, I think she just swooned."

Sara: "There is such a thing as too much exposition, Gideon."

Nora: "My forms keep getting rejected because records show I’m fifteen and living in a mental institution."

Charlie: "Good thing that this Snart bloke kept a supply of supply of jackets though, innit? They smell good, too, actually. What is that, is that sandalwood?"

Sara: "Look, I know that book convention was important to you. And I’m really glad you got to go." Mick: "I’m glad you have Ava."

Sara: "Look, Ray would want us to have faith that we will escape. He wouldn’t want us cold and miserable. So right now, we are going to enjoy our time together. Let’s go."

Wolfie: "You will do no more harm with your nip-ple!"

Ava: "It’s a long story, but Gary took over the bureau. He nip-notized everyone." Nate: "Yeah, you’re gonna have to explain that."

Bits and Pieces:

-- So Tabitha is the fairy godmother from 'Witch Hunt'. I did not see that coming. Did they meet in Hell after the team sent her there? Are fairy godmothers all really demons? I have so many questions.

-- They seem to have forgotten that Mick likes Ray. That was sad.

-- It's out of character for Mick to question Sara's decisions. That felt forced.

-- It appears that Wolfie ate Gary's Evil Nipple. Is Gary still evil? He did choose to go with Neron at the end.

-- 'Gary's Evil Nipple' is going to be the name of my new punk band.

-- Dragon eggs need more heat than that. They should be kept on a fire because their mothers breathe on them. Yes, I am a Ravenclaw.

-- It's surprising that we went anther week without Wixtable the Dragon hatching or becoming particularly relevant. Perhaps they're saving him for the finale.

-- Everybody knows that Zari and Nate are hooking up and responses are in the positive to indifferent range.

-- Neron slicing his own throat was a really nice effect. And of course John couldn't not stop him.

-- calling John 'Johnny' was Dez' thing, not really Neron's. It seems odd that Neron is still doing it.

-- Honestly, the gimmick of John's ancestor being the one who was persecuting the Puca felt a little gratuitous. Like, they really only did it because they thought it would be fun for Matt Ryan to play a different part for a bit.

-- 'Persecuting the Puca' is going to be the name of my new punk band.

-- Back in the day, the Hellblazer comic's letter page was constantly full of the debate about whether it was pronounced Constantine rhyming with 'mine' or Constantine rhyming with 'mean'. The publisher was very clear that it was 'mine'. I suspect we've ended up with the other pronunciation entirely because of the Keanu Reeves film, which isn't as bad as you remember by the way.

A deceptively elegantly structured episode that comes down whole-heartedly on the side of optimism. What's not to like?

Three and a half out of four creepy nipples.

'Creepy Nipples' is going to be the name of my new... oh, never mind.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

[chiseler]

Larry Cohen Isn’t Alive

Writer, producer and director Larry Cohen, who died on March 24th at age 77, rightfully earned his spot among the Pantheon of low-budget independent American filmmakers.

Like so many great satirists before him, Cohen had a knack for using a good story, off-beat characters, misdirection, humor, and monsters to disguise some pointed commentary about the most sacred of our sacred cows: childbirth, religion, cops, race, the military, AIDS, health care, and consumerism. And he always did it in a hugely entertaining way, squeezing the very most out of tiny budgets, small, fleet-footed crews, and simple guerilla tactics.

The artist responsible for Q: The Winged Serpent, God Told Me To, and the It’s Alive! films was a maverick, an independent’s independent, who wasn’t afraid to put a wild story on the screen and populate it with oddball characters (that Michael Moriarty would become his standard lead in four films in the ‘80s says something). If Cohen owed a lot to Sam Fuller and Roger Corman, then most indie directors who’ve come along since owe a lot to him, and the evidence is right there in their films.

Even when he was making low-budget monster pictures, Cohen’s films were always character-driven, so when it came to casting even the smallest part he was looking for people with interesting voices, faces, and personalities. He populated his films, in short, with the modern equivalent of Forties character actors. It’s no surprise that he would so often choose to work with like-minded maverick young actors like Moriarty, David Carradine, Karen Black, Sandy Dennis, Candy Clark, even Andy Kaufman. At the same time, though, Cohen also went back to those old films, hiring great character actors like Sam Levine, Broderick Crawford, and Sylvia Sidney.  With casts like that together on the screen (many of them there simply because they wanted to work with Cohen) it’s sometimes easy to forget you’re watching a horror movie.

It seems Cohen was born with a little too much energy. Years before getting his degree in film from the City College of New York, he was already selling scripts to television. In the short years following his graduation in ‘63, he was creating shows that would go on to become classics, like Branded and The invaders. Hearing it now, he almost sounds like the kind of guy you’d like to punch.

After ten prolific years as a television writer, Cohen finally made the expected jump into film directing. But Cohen didn’t go to Hollywood to do this, and lord knows he didn’t aim for the mainstream. Although considered a blaxploitation picture today for some reason, Cohen’s directorial debut, 1972’s Bone, begins like a standard home invasion film a la The Desperate Hours or Five Minutes to Live, as would-be burglar Yaphet Kotto  takes a wealthy white man and his wife hostage in their palatial home. When he sends the husband out to get money, though, the crime film becomes a social satire about both race relations and the generation gap. The wife begins to fall for her kidnapper, and the husband starts falling for a young hippie chick he meets on the way to the bank. In later films, Cohen would mix and match genres in a way that hadn’t been seen since the W. Lee Wilder wierdies of the Fifties.

His next two films were both fairly straightforward blaxploitation numbers, and both Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem would become  genre standbys.

It was in 1974 that what is considered Cohen’s golden era would begin. Between ‘74 and the early ‘90s, Cohen was writing and directing the films he wanted to make. They were films that were completely his own, more than a little odd at times, and utterly memorable. For a career that lasted over half a century, having a Golden Era that ran nearly twenty years ain’t too shabby.

Switching from blaxploitation to horror, Cohen made It’s Alive! starring the great John P. Ryan. On the surface it’s a horror film about a killer baby. It’s also a conspiracy film about some nefarious shenanigans at a large pharmaceutical company, and a social commentary about the power of the press to destroy innocent lives. At it’s heart, though, it takes The Bad Seed a step further in exploring our deep fear of children and the screaming bloody horror of that most beautiful of miracles, childbirth.

Using the power of suggestion and some fantastic performances (many of the actors here would become members of Cohen’s stock troupe), coupled with some solid direction, clever cinematography, Rick Baker’s special effects, a Bernard Herrmann score and one of the most effective trailers of the Seventies, this low budget killer baby film caught a lot of people off guard. It was smarter and slicker than anyone would’ve expected given the budget, and was a big hit for Cohen.

After that success he came back two years later with a film that was even stranger, more complex, and much harder to categorize. Trying not to give too much away here for those who haven’t seen it yet, God Told Me To stars Tony Lo Bianco as a New York cop who’s never been sick, feels he has some strange powers, and whose early biography remains a little up in the air. As the film opens, he’s  investigating a series of seemingly inexplicable and unrelated rampage killings. A soft spoken gay man climbs atop a building with a high powered rifle and begins shooting. A cop (Andy Kaufman in his big screen debut) shoots up the st. Patrick’s Day parade. A man slaughters his family for no apparent reason. The only explanation any of them can give is that, yes, god told them to. Well, his investigation leads down some strange channels, including stories of  an alien abduction, a secret cabal of wealthy  executives, and reports of a glowing figure who had contact with all the killers and who may or may not be god incarnate. In short it’s a film that asks the eternal question, “What if Jesus was a Venusian?” It may also be the best film Cohen ever made.

Although the film looks great (and brings together a remarkable cast), it represents a perfect example of the guerilla filmmaking Cohen would come to be known for. All the location shots, from the parade to the subway to the shooting of half a dozen people outside Bloomingdale’s were stolen. Cohen saw where he wanted to shoot, set up his crew, and shot. If he were to try doing that today there would likely be casualties, but because he did it then he captured a portrait of a city long gone.

On the downside, in his excitement  to grab shots of actual events as they were happening, one sequence finds Lo Bianco racing from the st. Patrick’s day parade in March and ending up some 70 blocks to the south  at the San Gennaro festival on the Lower East Side in September. It was a hell of a run.

The film was picked up by Corman’s distribution company, New World. Before releasing it, they decided that title of his was too long and too complicated, so needed to be changed. They decided to call it The Demon, and changed the font on the poster to match the font used recently on the posters for the incredibly popular The Omen. It didn’t seem to help. Whether it was the title or audiences were merely baffled by the film itself it’s hard to say, but it was a definite step down from the success of It’s Alive. Still, in subsequent years it has become one of the most popular of Cohen’s films, and in terms of influence, well, all you need to do is watch the last few seasons of the X Files to see for yourself if anyone was paying attention.

Following God Told Me To, Cohen took a radical turn in more ways than one. After making three blaxploitation films and two sci-fi horror movies, he took the next logical step down the genre trail by making, yes, a J. Edgar Hoover biopic.

A clear though uncredited influence on the 2011 Leonardo DiCaprio Hoover picture, 1977’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover makes for an intriguing double bill with another AIP film from around roughly the same time, John Milius’ Dillinger. It stars screen legend Broderick Crawford in a brilliant turn as the enigmatic and all-powerful head of the FBI, and co-stars a slew of famed character actors, from Lloyd Nolan and June Havoc to Howard DaSilva and Rip Torn.

Couching the story of Hoover’s life within the frantic scramble across Washington to gain access to his titular secret files after his death, Cohen does something I don���t think anyone was expecting. In spite of Hoover’s reputation as a neurotic, paranoid, cross-dressing monster, Cohen treats him fairly, even sympathetically at times. There’s no real secret about his sexuality here, but it’s never made cartoonish. It’s a portrait of a deeply flawed man and a publicity whore, yes, but one who was trying to do right. Oddly enough the historical figures who get slapped around more than anyone here are the Kennedy brothers, who come off like a couple of smug rich, asshole college boys. Martin Luther King doesn’t get off too easy, either.

It’s an odd man out in Cohen’s filmography, but what the Hoover film proved without a doubt is that he was a director who knew pacing, who knew editing, and who could, even without monsters, turn material like this into a gripping story.

Good as it was, The Private Files wasn’t a big hit either, so Cohen returned to killer babies  in ‘78 with It Lives Again. Not interested in simply rehashing the same material, Cohen expanded the original story, broadening the idea of a conspiracy (conspiracies would play a larger and larger role in Cohen’s films), and multiplying the number of killer babies afoot.

As more and more mutant babies are born throughout America, a renegade group of scientists and parents (including John P. Ryan and expecting father Frederic Forrest) criss-crosses the country trying to save the mutants before the government can terminate them with extreme prejudice. The hope is to be able to raise the mutants in a reasonably loving environment, rehabilitating them and making them contributing members of society. Let’s just say their success is limited.

The later ‘70s and early ‘80s were kind of rough for Cohen. His teen horror comedy Full Moon High bombed, and a made-for-TV mystery was ignored. He planned to resurrect Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer character in a film version of I, The Jury starring Armand Assante, but after a major studio picked up the project, they promptly fired Cohen.

Knowing he had to get right back on his feet, Cohen had a new independent film in production within a week. He started grabbing some location shots around New York before he had a cast, and started filming before he had any backing. Still, he was able to wrangle together another great (in B film terms) cast, and he had a fantastic story to tell, even if it owed a bit to 1948’s The Flying Serpent. He had some more wonderful characters, he had a monster, and once again all of New York was his playground. Samuel Z. Arkoff, who’d just sold AIP, fronted him a little cash and they were off.

Cohen’s mixing and matching of genres was never more evident than it was in ‘82’s Q The Winged Serpent. It’s a bungled jewel heist/cult murder/police procedural/giant monster picture with Michael Moriarty as an ex-con and failed jazz pianist who’s forced to participate in a heist that goes very, very wrong. He’s a neurotic to begin with, and this doesn’t help. David Carradine, meanwhile (who filmed his first scene before he’d had a chance to read the script or find out who his character was), is a detective investigating a series of murders in which the victims have all been skinned alive. And then there’s that pesky Aztec god who keeps flying around New York plucking people off rooftops and construction sites.

They all eventually do come together inside the cone atop the Chrysler Building (it was actually filmed up there too, even though Cohen and his crew didn’t exactly have permission). Before all these storylines and genres come together, Cohen has us so wrapped up in these individual character’s )and the countless little stories and side characters we encounter along the way) that the monster barely matters, save for providing some of the best aerial shots ever taken of NYC.

It’s a film packed with great small bits, set pieces, and locations. And Moriarty, crazy and pathetic and fucked up as he is, is a gem. In one of the best (and mostly ad libbed) scenes in the film, he attempts to negotiate a deal with city officials and the cops. He knows where the creature’s nest can be found, and wants money and amnesty in exchange for the information. It’s a real tour-de-force of sniveling bravado and desperation.

Cohen had more stories to tell about the making of Q than any of his other films (and he was a man with a lot of stories). The final joke of it all being that Q opened the same day as I, the Jury and made four times as much money.

It occurs to me that any young would-be indie filmmaker would be better served by watching the film and listening to his commentary than anything they’d learn after 3 years of NYU film school. He knew how to work fast and work cheap, yet still come away with a film whose production values matched anything being produced in Hollywood.

Cohen was back on a roll after Q, and even when he wasn’t working on a film himself he was selling  scripts that had that unmistakable Larry Cohen feel to them. The William Lustig-directed Maniac Cop and Uncle Sam come to mind as prime examples, though Abel Ferrara dropped the ball, and dropped it hard, on Cohen’s reboot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a film I keep trying to like, but just can’t. Cohen’s understanding of character is something Ferrara’s never been able to grasp. It had so much going for it, it should’ve been so good, but Christ it’s just a tedious fucking mess. Okay, I’m starting to ramble.

After making a few straightforward thrillers, Cohen returned to horror and social satire in 1985’s The Stuff. There had been elements of social satire and commentary in his previous films, but usually so well disguised it was easy to miss. Michael Moriarty’s gift for the ad lib and his ability to play crazy and manic so brilliantly allowed Cohen, in their second film together, to slap the satire right there on the surface, plain as day.

When a thick white goo coms bubbling out of the ground at a mining operation in Georgia, one of the miners unwittingly discovers it’s not only delicious—it’s downright irresistible. Before you know it, “The Stuff,” as it’s marketed, has become the most popular dessert item in the country, helped along by a celebrity-laden ad campaign (though many of the celebrities may no longer be recognizable to most audiences) and the small fact that it’s five times as addictive as crack. Yes, it’s mighty good right up to the point when it makes you explode. But no one talks about that.

Moriarty plays an ex-FBI man turned industrial spy who’s been hired by a now-struggling ice cream company to find out what’s in The Stuff. What Begins as a simple bit of industrial espionage quickly becomes much more than that when people start dying, small towns start vanishing, an ex-FDA employee (Danny Aiello in a smart and funny cameo) is killed by his stuff-addicted Doberman, and Moriarty uncovers a sinister, far-reaching conspiracy.

Along the way he’s assisted by Garrett Morris as a Famous Amos clone who’s cookie company was stolen from him, a young boy who realizes there’s something evil going on with The stuff, and  Paul Sorvino as an insane and paranoid militia leader/radio show host who’s more than willing to spread the word and lead a commando raid on the stuff factory.

There are nods throughout the film to everything from Dr. Strangelove to White Heat, but the one film that kept coming to mind was Halloween III: Season of the Witch from three years earlier. Both, after all, are horror conspiracy films concerning the potentially diabolical threat posed by marketing and consumerism. The ironic thing there is that when Halloween III came out in ‘82, I assumed given the way the story was structured that it had to be a Cohen film, or at least based on a Cohen script. I was wrong, of course; the film had been written by the equally great Nigel Kneale. So it only made sense that here we got Cohen’s version of a similar storyline. While Halloween III was very sharp and dark, The Stuff reaches for some broad, heavy handed laughs and often falls short. Maybe Cohen figured if you wanted to reach an audience in the Reagan era with a dire warning about rampant consumerism, subtlety would get you nowhere.  The film does have a number of moments, though, and I love the fact that the “monster” here is a smooth, white, featureless dessert. I also love the fact that a paranoid Right Wing nutjob saves the day in the end.

Two years after The Stuff, Warner Brothers offered Coen a deal to direct two straight-to-video pictures: a second  sequel to It’s Alive, and a sequel to Tobe Hooper’s TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Cohen, anxious to work with Moriarty again and push the story of the mutant babies a little further, signed the contract.

Working fast and cheap as ever (he said all of his films were shot in 18 days), Cohen returned to form with It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, with one difference. While the previous two films had been stark and ultimately quite grim, with Moriarty aboard Cohen was able to bring out a lot more humor.  Mixed more evenly with the violence, the blood, a half-hidden AIDS parable,  and Cohen’s trademark strangeness, here it works more effectively than it had in The Stuff or his straight comedies.

This time around, Moriarty is a struggling actor who finally gains fame after he and his wife (Karen Black) become the proud parents of another monster baby. That’s pretty much it for the marriage, but instead of destroying the baby, a judge orders that all the mutant babies be sent to, yes, an island where they can roam free and pose no threat to anyone.

Moriarty’s life, meanwhile, collapses under the constant questions and accusations until he finds himself working in a children’s shoe store. In a delightful set piece, he finally cracks and gives the what-for to all the rotten little brats and their obnoxious parents. There’s just something both terrifying and hilarious about Moriarty when he loses it.

Anyway, he joins a government-sponsored expedition to the island to study the mutants and run a few tests. Along the way, we learn the government has stopped trying to destroy the mutants after deciding instead they represent a new stage of human evolution, quite possibly a form of human who could survive a nuclear war. Moriarty, who loves his child and wants to protect it, tries to warn the babies to stay away from the researchers, which does not endear him to the researchers. No matter, it isn’t long before all the members of the expedition are dead save for Moriarty, who finds himself alone on a boat with four mutant babies. And that’s when things start taking any number of strange turns.

Island of the Alive is also marked by a fantastic opening sequence, in which a woman gives birth in the back of an NYC cab as the cab driver panics about the mess. Or maybe that scene’s just memorable to me because it was shot in an alley behind the building where I used to work.

After the film was wrapped, Cohen packed up his crew and several members of the cast and flew to a small town in Vermont to start shooting the Salem’s Lot sequel, a sequel in name and font alone. Compared with Island of the Alive, A Return to Salems Lot seemed almost an afterthought. Maybe people were just tired after the previous shoot, but the cinematography has all the flat earmarks of a TV film, and the music, usually so rich in a Cohen picture, has been reduced to a cheap, cliched electronic score. Even the actors, apart from Cohen’s usual suspects (like Andrew Duggan), are abrasive at best.

Story’s still good, though. In their fourth and final collaboration, Moriarty is a famed anthropologist whose ex-wife saddles him with his troubled and foul-mouthed teenage son. Not knowing what else to do with the kid, he takes him to Salem’s Lot. Moriarty had visited an aunt there once when he was young, and when she died she left him her (now decrepit) house. It doesn’t take long to figure out the town is home to a colony of vampires.

Cohen’s script plays around quite a bit with the mythology, with the anthropologist being conscripted to write the vampires’ history to set the record straight, but the film is memorable for one reason. Sam Fuller appears for the second half of the film playing, well, Sam Fuller. He’s given a different name of course, and he’s playing a Van Helsing-type vampire hunter, but it’s Sam Fuller all right, as short, gruff, and straightforward as ever, and always chomping on that ever-present cigar. Cohen’s homage to the king of independent filmmakers is the only thing here that lifts the picture above second-tier Cohen fare (which is nevertheless still more interesting than most vampire films made in the last 20 years).

Cohen went on to make another straight thriller and a comedy about witches that turned out to be Bette Davis’ last film before returning to the horror, conspiracies, and New York that always brought out the best in him. It would be the last of the classic Larry Cohen films.

In 1990’s The Ambulance, Eric Roberts plays an enthusiastic young comic book artist working for Marvel (Stan Lee has a few cameos as himself) who sees a young woman on the street and falls immediately and stupidly in love with her. When she collapses to the pavement while they’re talking and an antique ambulance appears out of nowhere to whisk her away, he sets out to find her without even knowing her name.

It sounds like fairly standard romantic comedy material and there’s no denying that’s at play here, but as usual there are a few other genres at work, too, as we learn the drivers of that creepy antique ambulance are making their own victims all over the city.  It’s best to leave the story there and not mention the organ harvesting ring, but the film does include James Earl Jones, Eric Braedon, and a grainy, dirty, street level Manhattan that, even circa 1990, still seems so ancient and alive.

Moving into the later ‘90s and 2000s, as films like his were no longer really viable in a marketplace so fixated on formula and empty pointless characters, Cohen concentrated more on his screenplays, but even if the stories had that old Cohen spark and warp, the films that were made from them tended to be sadly conventional. He was behind Phone Booth, Cellular, Messages Deleted, Captivity, and rewrote his own script for the reboot of It’s Alive.  

He once made the excellent point that B films tended to have a longer lifespan than A films, because it’s the genre pictures that find a new audience every generation. Kids have no idea who Robert Taylor or Greer Garson are anymore, but they will always know Karloff and Lugosi, because people will always be going back to horror films while the big dramas, so important at the time, will fade away.

Cohen made films that weren’t like anything else (except maybe Halloween III). They weren’t aimed at teenagers and they weren’t slasher pictures. They were intelligent, textured, character-based, and they dealt with adult themes. Plus they had monsters in them.

Cohen’s career, as noted above, spanned some fifty years, and fifty years from now, I can almost guarantee no one will remember Titanic or whatever the hell nonsense won a Best Picture Oscar over the past two decades, but they’ll still be watching God Told Me To.

At the time of his death, Cohen left behind dozens of unproduced screenplays. If anyone had seen fit to toss him the funding to make the films he wanted to make, who knows what else he might have left us?

by Jim Knipfel