#i have to confess i have never actually seen kill bill but the aesthetic of the movie poster is so iconic and matches the outfit perfectly

[roscoehamiltons]

LHFW 2024 graphics: 11/24

[crookswithbooks]

Unwanted Company

Day Six - Blitzo is lonely and Stolas is horny. Together, they make a wonderful pair.               

Christmas in Hell was an interesting affair.

Being a commemoration of the birth of their tormenter, most demons chose to celebrate the holidays by burning Christ memorabilia or getting drunk and cursing his names in the streets. Sometimes both. Others merely ignored the holiday, seeing it as just another winter day, or in other words just another day as winter in Hell was essentially the same as every other season in Hell, i.e. terrible and on fire.

Stolas was an exception to this rule. As a mortal he had loved the holidays, and that love had transferred over into the afterlife. He liked to see it as less of a celebration of Jesus and more a celebration of capitalism and beautiful aesthetics. That was more his style. Unfortunately, the rest of his family did not share his love for the season. He was subjected to another series of lectures by Estelle when she discovered wreaths hung about the house, lectures that involved the catapulting of many an object towards his face, and Octavia merely groaned and left the room whenever he tried to coerce her into a Christmas carol.

Thus Stolas was forced to turn to his one source of comfort when his family decided that even they were fed up with his shenanigans. He twirled the phone wire around his fingertip as he waited for the call to pick up.

“Oh Blitzy~!”

On the other end of the line, Blitzo felt one of his eyes twitch. He was already in a terrible mood and this phone call was the cherry on top of the shit sandwich. As it happened, Blitzo was not a Christmas person. He was happy to take advantage of the season’s marketability for his business, but even that only served to sink his spirits more than they already were. It was depressing to watch the atrocious acts that greed prompted humans to commit.

Now he found himself curled up in his office chair, all alone with not even Moxxie or Millie to keep him company; both of them had taken a day off for the holidays even though Blitzo knew for a fact that neither of them bought into the Christmas spirit either. He had invited Loona to join him but the conversation had lasted for about two seconds before she flipped him off and went to go burn down a building with her friends for anarchical reasons.

He was lonely. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it was true. So it was just his luck that he was to receive a phone call from the one person he would never choose to spend the holidays with.

“What do you want you piece of shit dicklord?” Blitzo grumbled, slumping down on his desk so that his chin rested in his arms. He was too tired to be genuinely angry at him and so his words were devoid of their usual ferocity.

“You flatter me. I was wondering if you wanted to join me for the evening? I was thinking we could…” Stolas smiled as images flashed through his mind. “Entertain each other?”

Blitzo opened his mouth to tell him to fuck off but found himself pausing. He had caught a glance of the picture hanging over his desk, one of him and the rest of I.M.P smiling after a successful kill. Blitzo had his arms clutched around them and the others smiled up at him, admit a bit reluctantly. He stared around again at his empty office and before he knew what he was doing, he said, “Okay.”

“…Okay?” Stolas, who moments before had been lounging casually upon his bed, now sat up, a hint of hope and confusion coloring his tone. “Okay, you want to join me for Christmas?”

“Yes?” Blitzo cringed further into the safety of his arms. What the hell was he doing? Surely he couldn’t be considering spending any amount of time with the horniest owl lord in hell, and yet… It was too late to take back his words so he pushed forward, hoping not to regret them further. “We’re not doing anything, just to be clear. However, I don’t… entirely hate the concept of your presence right now. So… what do you say?”

Stolas had no idea what had prompted the change of heart, but he wasn’t about to turn down an offer like that. “I would love that. And you’re sure this is what you want?”

Weirdly, Blitzo was.

 When he arrived he was greeted with a text that merely read Meet me on the balcony ;), thus implying that the use of a front door was one they would be forgoing that night. Blitzo sighed and prepared for the painful climb up the tangled tresses and onto the sculpted balcony. He pulled himself over the last rung with a pained grunt, using the length of his tail to secure him the rest of the way over. At first he didn’t see anyone and he was almost worried he had fallen for one of Stolas’ tricks despite himself. That was when he noticed the owl demon skulking in the shadows of the doorway, the light from the moon casting specters on his looming form.

“Hello Blitzy,” he greeted softly, his head tilted incredulously to one side. “I didn’t think you’d really come.”

“Yeah, well, I almost didn’t,” Blitzo confessed bitterly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Truthfully speaking, I have no idea why I’m here. I hate a lot of people, and I mean a lot of people, but you take the cake for the filthiest scum of the earth I’ve ever encountered.”

“The night’s still early for talk like that.” Stolas waltzed forward, his steps a lilting, sensuous thing. Blitzo found himself staring, hating himself for doing so. As much as he insisted it was purely business to friends and co-workers, Blitzo couldn’t deny that he didn’t entirely hate their nights together. It certainly beat whatever plans he would have had for the evenings. Stolas leaned on the railing besides him, his gaze piercing as he stared down at Blitzo. Later the imp would deny the blush that crawled unwanted up his neck.

“I’m fairly certain I said nothing was happening tonight,” Blitzo reminded him, brushing off his pants. “I just wanted some company and you happened to be the easiest solution.”

“Of course,” Stolas agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “I would never think of doing anything untoward to you. I know our past has been mostly, or rather completely, sexual in nature, but I do have interests outside of intercourse you know.”

Blitzo scoffed. “Oh, like what? And please never say intercourse like that again. I feel like I need to take a shower.”

Stolas traced a fingernail across the railing, a slow, lazy path. Blitzo’s throat went dry and he reminded himself again that nothing was happening that night. His body, however, did not seem to get the memo. “I am a fan of stargazing myself and I’m actually quite a good herbalist. I’ve also been known to enjoy conversation from time to time. What about you? Any interests outside of your own personal pleasure?”

“Every interest is to serve my personal pleasure,” Blitzo said smugly, his tail coiling tauntingly behind him. “It’s the only real thing worth pursuing in this dump of a hellhole we’re all living in. I don’t have time or use for hobbies.”

“Is that why you’re so interested in killing?” Stolas prompted. “It provides you pleasure to watch others fail and die?” There was no malice or judgement in his voice, just plain curiosity. Blitzo hesitated a moment before answering.

“It pays the bills,” he said at last, the current line of questioning making him strangely uncomfortable. “I don’t really like it so much as it’s convenient. Not to mention those assholes deserved it. Not a single human gets by without doing something disgustingly rotten to someone else and damning themselves for all eternity. Why do you think we have such an overpopulation issue?”

“But you can’t really believe that, can you?” Stolas insisted, drawing closer to the imp. Blitzo’s skin prickled with goosebumps and he took an instinctual step back. “Surely there’s some good in people. At least one of them?”

“There isn’t,” Blitzo snarled, anger fueling into his voice to make up for his discomfort. “And I know for a fact you don’t believe so either.”

“Ah, you caught me,” Stolas admitted, but instead of moving back in defeat he only drew in closer. This time Blitzo found himself unable to move, his feet seemingly stuck to the floor. “I find humanity to be quite undeserving of any kind of mercy. But I know you don’t.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Oh but I do.” Stolas met his gaze, but something had softened in his eyes and it was no longer the predatory look from before. “I don’t just want you for your body, you know. I’ve watched you with your supposed ‘co-workers’—I’ve seen the way you look at them. You care for them. That’s why you’re here with me tonight. I’m a replacement for them, aren’t I?”

Angry heat flashed through Blitzo and he moved to step away but Stolas caught his wrist in one hand. His grip was surprisingly strong, a fact that did many things to the imp. “Don’t lie to me. Not on Christmas.”

“Oh please,” Blitzo snorted, rolling his eyes and ignoring the pounding of his heart. “You don’t really buy into all that cheap Christ stuff, do you? It’s just a scam to sell candy and toys to desperate parents. Christmas spirit is just a lie we tell ourselves to sleep better at night.”

“Maybe I don’t believe all of it,” Stolas admitted, his other hand sliding down Blitzo’s throat and curling around the base of his neck. Blitzo felt a shudder work its way down his body and he cursed the fact that this always happened whenever he got around the other demon. “But is it so wrong to want to celebrate, to spend time with the people you love?”

“What about your own family, huh?” Blitzo shot back, the words his only defense mechanism as Stolas slowly unraveled him. “You have a real one so why don’t you spend this stupid holiday with them?”

For a moment the seductive façade faded and it was just Stolas, eyes widened and beak tightened into a frown. “They’re busy,” he snapped quickly, and the look was gone before Blitzo could evaluate it too heavily. “Besides, I’m spending it with you. Per your agreement, if you remember.”

He took another step forward so that their two bodies were pressed flush up against the railing. Blitzo’s hands tightened on the cold metal and he averted his eyes. “I didn’t agree to this.”

“Then stop me,” Stolas said in reply, knowing for a fact that the imp wouldn’t. As he leaned down, the heat of their bodies mingling, Blitzo considered breaking the moment, pursuing the look on Stolas face from earlier. In the end though, he decided they would have enough time to discuss it later that next morning, after the events of the night had faded into a distant dream.

Right then, though, Blitzo had a horny demon owl to attend to.

[oscopelabs]

The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr

“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in his memoir Include Me Out. The actor was in his early twenties when the Master of Suspense plucked him from Samuel Goldwyn’s roster. He’d star in the first production from the director’s new Transatlantic Pictures as Phillip Morgan, a pianist and co-conspirator in murder. John Dall would play his partner, homicidal mastermind Brandon Shaw. Granger had the stiff pout to Dall’s trembling smirk.

The “interesting technical experiment” was Hitchcock’s decision to shoot the film, adapted from a twenty-year-old English play, as a series of 10-minute shots stitched together into a simulated feature-length take. This allowed him to retain the stage’s spatial and temporal unities while guiding the audience with the camera’s eye. In the process, he’d embed a host of meta-textual and erotic nuances within the sinister mise-en-scène. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Granger’s boyfriend, for a time) updated the play’s fictionalized account of Chicagoan thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to a penthouse in late ‘40s Manhattan. There, Phillip strangles the duo’s friend David—his scream behind a curtain opens the film—immediately prior to a dinner party where they’ll serve pâté atop the box that serves as his coffin. It’s a morbid premise for a comedy of manners, and Brandon taunts his guests throughout the evening. (Asked if it’s someone’s birthday, he coyly replies, “It’s, uh, really almost the opposite.”)

Granger deemed the film lesser Hitchcock due to two limitations. One was the sheer repetition and exact blocking demanded by its formal conceit, the other the Production Code’s blanket ban on “sex perversion,” which meant tiptoeing around the fact that Brandon and Phillip—like their real-life inspirations and, to some degree, Rope’s leading men—were gay. That stringent homophobia forced Hitchcock and Laurents to convey their sexuality through ambiguity and implication; the director would use similar tactics to adapt queer writers like Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. (“Hitchcock confessed that he actually enjoyed his negotiations with [Code honcho Joseph] Breen,” notes Thomas Doherty in the book Hollywood’s Censor. “The spirited give-and-take, said Hitchcock, possessed all the thrill of competitive horse trading.”) The nature of the characters’ relationship is hardly subtext: Rope starts with their orgasmic shudder over David’s death, then labored panting after which Brandon pulls out a cigarette and lets in some light. A few minutes later, Brandon strokes the neck of a champagne bottle; Phillip asks how he felt during the act, and he gasps “tremendously exhilarated.”

Like Brandon’s hints about the murder, the homosexuality on display is surprisingly explicit if an audience can decode it. The whole film pivots around their partnership, both criminal and domestic. In an impish bit of conflation, their scheme even stands in for “the love that dare not speak its name,” with David’s body acting as a fetish object in a sexual game no one else can perceive. The guests, as Brandon puts it, are “a dull crew,” “those idiots” who include David’s father and aunt, played by London theater veterans Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier. Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick, both a couple years into what would be modest careers, play David’s fiancée Janet and her ex Kenneth. Character actress Edith Evanson appears as housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, a prototype for Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and a top-billed James Stewart is Rupert Cadell, who once mentored the murderers in arcane philosophy.

This was the first of Stewart’s four collaborations with Hitchcock. It cast the actor against type not as a romantic hero but as an observer and provocateur, his gaze shrewd, his dialogue heavy with irony. The role presaged his work in the ‘50s, with Mann rather than Capra, emphasizing psychology over ideology. Rupert, like L.B. Jeffries or Scottie Ferguson, is rooting out a crime, and in so doing comes to seem more loathsome than the villains themselves. “Murder is—or should be—an art,” he lectures midway through Rope, eyebrow arched, martini glass in hand. “Not one of the seven lively perhaps, but an art nevertheless.” Half an hour in real time later, having seen David’s body, he flies into a moralizing monologue: “You’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of!” It takes up the last several minutes of the film, with Rupert snarling from deep in his righteous indignation, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”

Stewart was a master of sputtering, impassioned oratory, and his facility for it renders Rupert’s hypocrisy especially stark. He taught these murderers; he can’t just shrug off his culpability. The Code decreed that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, or sin.” Every transgression reaps a punishment. The ending of Rope abides by the letter of this law, as Rupert fires several shots into the night, drawing a police siren toward the building. He sits, deflated, while Phillip plays piano and Brandon has one last drink. But none of David’s loved ones get to excoriate his killers. The one man here with no integrity, no moral authority, is the one who gets the final, self-flagellating word.

The Code forbade throwing sympathy to the side of sin, but if Hitchcock meant any character in Rope as his stand-in, it was Brandon, not Rupert. The top to Phillip’s bottom, he’s the director of the play within a film. He’s storyboarded it to perfection. Janet, realizing he’s toying with her, cries that he’s incapable of just throwing a party. “No, you’d have to add something that appealed to your warped sense of humor!” Hitchcock, who’d built a corpus of corpses, must have gotten a chuckle from that line. Whereas Phillip fears discovery, Brandon puts symbolism above pragmatism, prioritizing what Phillip dubs his “neat little touches.” He needs to have dinner on the chest, the murder weapon tied around antique books, and his surrogate father Rupert in attendance, much as the film’s director needed to shoot in long takes—not because it’s pragmatic, but because it’s beautiful. He went to great lengths for verisimilar beauty here, as Steven Jacobs details in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Miniatures in the three-dimensional cyclorama seen through the broad penthouse window were wired and connected to a ‘light organ’ that allowed for the gradual activation of the skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs. Meanwhile, spun-glass clouds were shifted by technicians from right to left during moments when the camera turned away from the window.

Jacobs notes as well that a painting by Fidelio Ponce de León hanging on Brandon and Phillip’s wall actually belonged to the director and had previously hung in his own home. Rope is avant-garde art wrapped in a bourgeois thriller, about avant-garde art wrapped in a dinner party, pushing moral and aesthetic boundaries while collapsing any distinction between the two. In this nested construction, Brandon the murder artist becomes a figure of auto-critique or perhaps apologia. Did you think you were God, Alfred? By 1948, he’d already made dozens of films, often obliquely about sex and violence, across decades and continents. He’d become the world champion sick joke raconteur. Rope is a reckoning with the ethics of his genre.

By 1948, the world had changed. A few years earlier, Hitchcock’s friend (and Rope co-producer) Sidney Bernstein had asked him to advise on a film about Germany’s newly liberated concentration camps. As Kay Gladstone writes in Holocaust and the Moving Image, Hitchcock worried that “tricky editing” would let skeptics read its footage as fraudulent and asked the editors “to use as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts.” The director took his own counsel to heart.

Rope was also his first color film, the start of his fascination with dull palettes. (A quarter-century later he’d limn Frenzy’s London with every shade of beige.) Genteel browns and grays dominate the penthouse, the hues of men’s suits. Only after nightfall does the apartment glow with, in Jacobs’ phrasing, “the expressive possibilities of urban neon light.” The dinner party takes place at the crest of postwar modernity, a world away from the camps. Here, among the East Coast intelligentsia, murder’s merely a thought experiment. When David’s father mentions Hitler, Brandon dismisses him as “a paranoiac savage.” Yet even in polite society, the evening can begin with a secret killing and end with that iniquity brought to light. “Perhaps what is called civilization is hypocrisy,” says Brandon. “Perhaps,” David’s father concedes.

In 1948, the world was changing. That year saw the publication of Gore Vidal’s landmark gay novel The City and the Pillar and the first of the Kinsey Reports. Antonioni was a documentarian about to make his first feature; Truffaut was a delinquent catching Hitchcock movies at the Cinémathèque. Rope’s amorality and pitch-black humor augur a world and a cinema that were yet to come. It’s thorny gay art through a straight auteur. The film’s last thirty seconds show Rupert’s back to the camera while Brandon sips his cocktail and Phillip plays a tune, the trio lit by flashing neon. In this denouement lie decadence and damnation, art and death, the Code-closeted past and a disaffected future.

[journalxxx]

Awesome And Emotional Multichapter Fics That I Will Never Write - 4

This is a very messy and sloppy patchwork of a Discord convo, I hope it's somehow understandable. 

AU where, after Bill's demise, one of the Fords still roaming the universe finally manages to make his way back to his own universe. In a Gravity Falls where Stan has given up working on the portal a decade or so ago. Imagine Stan's surprise when, one foggy evening like any other, someone knocks on the door and interrupts his The Duchess Approves marathon. Guess who's the untimely visitor.

Now there's a funny idea... Bill getting in touch with Stan to get him to fix and reactivate the portal. He speaks with him only in dreams, obviously, but never reveals himself: he always takes the shape of Ford, taking advantage of Stan's guilt to make him work without questions. At some point though, Stan realizes the portal is Bad and stops working on it. Needless to say, it ends up with Bill/Ford screaming in his face how much of a useless, incompetent, straight-up murderous fuck-up he is and blaming him for letting his own brother to rot where he pushed him. It simply kills Stan to admit it, but it's obvious that the Ford giving him instructions is insane or positively evil, so he stops working on the portal.

Did I mention that Bill/Ford didn't just order Stan around and guilted him into doing stuff, but also straight up seduced him and gave him plenty of dreamscape sex as a further encouragement

"Wait, that wasn't you?" "I've never had the means to contact anyone telepathically through dimensions. They were likely just dreams." "...........................Oh..............." Imagine all the passionate dream sex, the heartfelt declarations of love and forgiveness, crowned by a warm "I trust you, Stanley. Get me out of here. I know you can do it." Imagine the memory of this leaving Stan positively gutted as he decides to seal the portal Together with the mandatory backlash of Bill hauting his dreams for the weeks to come, taking the shape of a fuming, looming, nightmarish Ford vomiting insults and accusations on him until he ultimately gets bored of it all So when Stan finds an angry Ford on his doorstep, his first thought is Shit, how did he come back?? The second ...Fuck, he's going to kill me. It doesn't help that Ford greets him with a deadpan "Long time no see", gun in hand out of habit/precautions, unadvertedly channeling all the right Professional Killer aesthetics. when ford asks for an explanation, stan just. lets his second nature kick in and maybe exaggerates a lil bit when talking about the blind eye, how they wanted to erase his memories, how he pretended to know nothing and turned ford's life upside down to throw them off completely while ALSO having the chance of working on the portal but then things happened so he was forced to chose between his brother in the portal or the crazy one in his dreams ford is glad that stan made the right choice (Probably throws in a curt "Mph. Could have thrown the towel much sooner, it would have spared you a lot of fruitless efforts. It's not like you had any hopes to make it work to begin with.") i kinda see..........stan...................................packing and leaving himself with no prompting from ford i hope wendy tied ford up to a tree trunk and she and soos questioned him for 47 hours straight soos KNEW there was a reason why stan didnt celebrate his hecking birthday or why on the winter nights he slept over snowed in, stan disappeared in the basement and looked like he hadnt slept in the morning Meanwhile, Stan has packed his stuff on the car, left, and parked less than two kilometres away because his eyes were too teary to see the fucking street. And then he fell asleep in his car, crying, like in the good old days How about bad stuff but with a good outcome. For example, Stan did get a bit too careless around toxic waste and inks and got cancer in the latest years. No one knows, obviously, thanks to the fact that he got a relatively tame and slow case in regards to symptoms, but a terminal one nonetheless. He doesn't really put up a fight when Ford kicks him out because it's not like he was going to spend much more time in that house anyway. Ford realizes only one or two weeks later, when he gets a call from the doctor asking why he didn't show up for the usual therapy. He finally has the common decency to start looking for his brother Eh, he's probably staying in the cheapest motel around, whiling his days away with pug trafficking and small jobs like that. Ford does find him and is not impressed, and Stan gets immediately defensive when he's asked about his illness. Turns out Ford has a cure for the thing (a sample and its formula snatched from a very polluted and irradiated dimension where tumors are just as common and manageable as the flu), and that he would gladly drop the stuff there and "fuck off" as Stan suggests - if it wasn't obvious that Stan can't even be trusted to follow simple therapies and instructions like the missed appointment with the doctor proved that's probably when Stan punches him it surely leaves him winded enough for Stan to grab him by his lapels and bodily hurl him out of the room. Barking insults at him and calling him a hypocrite and a coward, because he's obviously come simply to clear his own conscience for throwing him out while he's sick. Just remove the sickness and bam, problem solved, he's done his good, charitable deed for his idiotic brother, he can resume treating him like trash now. He can keep his bogus scifi meds for all Stan cares, he'd rather die out of stupidity than live out of fake pity. He wouldn't obtain anything that day, no amount of knocking or calling or talking at the door would get Stan to answer. But in the following days, he probably rummages around the house enough to find old and recent medical reports about Stan's health, which prove the problem does need to be addressed in a timely fashion. He finally finds Stan's notes about the portal too, and the instructions the fake Ford gave him to fix it and adjust it - and just by looking at the math, Ford can tell with certainty it was Bill, rather Stan's misguided subconscious. Knowing that he inadvertedly dragged Stan into the mess to the point of exposing him to Bill's dirty mind tricks is quite a blow to Ford. That's on him, 100% Stan keeps not answering for a few subsequent visits, but in the end he gives up and opens the door. Ford looks uncharacteristically subdued and, much to Stan's surprise, he asks him to come back home, at least for a while. Stan's ready to throw the invitation back in his face because he doesn't feel like playing the poor invalid patient to appease his brother's fleeting sense of charity, but Ford tells him that he wants to talk about a few things. Calmly and in due time, not as a hurried and snappy back and forth in a shadowy motel in the middle of nowhere. Stan hates himself for it (nothing new about that), but of course he lets himself be convinced

Turns out Stan's just as lonely as in the motel for the first days. Ford is constantly buried in the basement (turns out this dimension doesn't have the technology to produce certain components of the medicine, so Ford has to piece together the necessary machinery first, and then he can make the medicine itself, so he's always busy busy busy) and whatever he wanted to discuss with Stan isn't urgent, apparently. They barely cross paths in the kitchen and the bathroom, and they exchange no more words than strictly necessary. Anyway, after a few days of mandatory emotional constipation, Ford emerges from the basement to find weary post-chemo Stan tiredly dragging himself to the bedroom. Perfect occasion for a good old heart-to-heart, right? After the first assurances that Ford's medicine will be ready shortly and the following deafening silence, Ford finally starts talking. Stan isn't exactly in a conversational mood at the moment, but the stuff Ford's saying is pretty interesting, so he listens. He learns about Bill and his persuasive lies, of the actual dangers of the portal and of the possible consequences of its use. Although he can't remember for sure if he's ever shaken the fake Ford's hand or worded any sort of pact with him, it seems it doesn't really matter any more, since the bastard's dead. Ford's heard about it from other dimensional travellers, of how a human by the name of Stan Pines from the Earth had tricked the trickster. Until then, Ford confesses, he had believed there had been a slight misinformation spreading around, that another Ford had accomplished the goal, finished his gun and got close enough to Bill to use it. But maybe not. Maybe - considering how Ford had fallen for Bill's flattery hook, line and sinker, while Stan had seen through his lies before any damage could be done -maybe the stories were more accurate than he thought. Who knows. Stan doesn't contribute much to the conversation, partly because he doesn't really know what to make of it, partly because he feels about to puke his guts at any moment, and eventually Ford leaves him to rest. The next days are slightly less tense. Finally Ford can have Stan answer the phone, avoiding an impending house invasion by very concerned Dipper and Mabel. Soos and Wendy also drop by and Stan bullshits his way out of their questions (the Shack is closed for renovations, that weirdo who looks like him is an old relative visiting him, yada yada), just like he knows how to. Surprise surprise, Ford realizes it's the first time he's seen Stan smile since... he doesn't even remember. He does smile on the phone and with his employees - actually, his whole demeanour changes with them, he's more open, more boisterous and chatty. Until Ford enters his field of vision, that is. Then he's back to monosyllabic replies, ill-concealed hostility and reserve. Ford wonders which one of the two attitudes is a charade, or if neither of them is, and if Stan's even aware of his own bizarre behaviour. Eventually, the cure is ready, and Stan accepts to take it with a passiveness that confuses Ford. Truth to be told, Stan isn't very convinced it'll work. It's not like he doesn't trust Ford's knowledge, but he kind of expects some unforeseen problem to come up and screw him over. You don't go through all the stages of grief and acceptance of your own mortality just  to start hoping for miracles from dubious pseudo-scientific sources. The real shocker comes after one week of his new therapy, when he goes to the hospital for a check-up and the exams show that the mass has reduced by like 70%. Ford gets called by the doctors, has to take a taxi, retrieve the car and drive a slightly unhinged Stan home. "I told you I could come with you, but 'No Stanford, I'm not an invalid' -" "YOU COULD HAVE TOLD ME IT WAS GOING TO FUCKING DISAPPEAR OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE" "I wasn't sure it would! Sometimes it takes a while to start working, it depends on the kind of tumor, the general health of the person-" "YOU'RE THE WORST SHITHEAD THAT EVER LIVED-" Bickering aside, Stan's not dying anymore. Would you look at that. At the current pace, he's going to be fully recovered very, very quickly. Then what? When Ford decides they've talked enough about whatever they need to talk about, then what, back to the motel and out of his life? Just beautiful. Before long, Ford corners him while giving him another injection and drops another bomb on him. Apparently, the nosy bastard has found some old notes detailing some of Stan's... less scientifically-oriented dreams. (Stan calls bullshit on that. Surely he never wrote that stuff down. Surely. Probably. Did he? Sure, he used to immediately jot down everything he dreamt about as soon as he woke up, to make sure he didn't forget or misremember any of Ford's instruction, but he wouldn't... not those... right...?) By whatever freaky means, Ford has a general idea of the methods Bill used to ensure Stan's cooperation, and he's oddly concerned about them. Oddly as in, not freaked out because of the obvious problem of Stan repeatedly dreaming about banging his own brother, which would be perfectly understandable. The curious thing is that his questions seem to imply that he thinks Stan might have found those dreams unpleasant or even hurtful, as if Bill might have twisted Stan's desires unnaturally, as if they hadn't been lingering in Stan's mind since way earlier than that. Which is such a laughable idea that Stan starts laughing in Ford's face. He could have seized the occasion to deny everything and preserve some dignity, but to what end, really? And uhm... as much as I want this to end in a heap of love, mush, forgiveness and cuddles, as usual my brain gets stuck when it comes to actually build a believable way to make that happen, so... yeah, eventually they talk about everything, somehow fall for each other deeply and sincerely, have lot of very passionate and very cathartic intimate moments. You know they do. The end :)

[hawksmoor17]

Doctor Who vs. Sherlock  — S9E11 “Heaven Sent” and S4/TFP

Apologies if anyone’s already done a meta on this. The parallels are pretty blatant so it’s likely that it’s already been done.

Anyway. I decided to watch a random episode after only seeing up to S7 + S10. I wanted something highly rated, something written by Moffat — and ended up picking “S9E11 ‘Heaven Sent’”. (Turns out the episode’s also directed by Rachel Talaylay!)

The moment I start it instantly I’m like ... Oh god. I literally cannot escape TFP wherever I go.

The aesthetic is immediately similar — with a weird symmetrical barren prison setting, televisions randomly everywhere with staticky screens and glowing backdrops, a similar colour scheme ...

But then I’m like — wait a second. In any normal, relatively sane universe that part of an international conspiracy, surely this would indicate that this scene takes place in some sort of dream-like setting?

And sure enough the episode turns out to literally be constructed using the Doctor’s nightmares as fodder.

And then the more I watch the more I realise that it’s not just visually similar to TFP — the episode is in places an exact mirror of TFP/S4.

The focus of the Doctor’s dream sequence? It’s the inevitability of death.

The episode even starts with the Doctor having this lengthy monologue which is literally just “Appointment in Samarra” — talking about how no matter how fast you run, Death (”the Veil”) will inevitably catch up with you, calmly walking.

And when the creature that represents Death does catch up with Twelve he actually stops and says “I’ve just realised something ... I’m actually scared of dying." causing time to stop and he frowns and asks “Was it something I said?”

And if that wasn’t subtle enough, when time unfreezes, to escape, the Doctor jumps out the window, presumably to his death.

He then monologues, explaining what you have to do to survive death, to survive a fall:

“Rule one of dying — don’t. Rule two — slow down. You’ve got the rest of your life. The faster you think the slower it will pass so concentrate. Assume that you’re going to survive. Always assume that. Imagine you’ve already survived.

“There’s a storm room in your mind. Lock the door. And think. This is my storm room. I always imagine that I’m back in my TARDIS, showing off, telling you how I escaped, making you laugh. That’s what I’m doing right now. I am falling. Clara. I am dying. And I’m going to explain to you how I survived.”

“I can’t wait to hear what I said! I’m nothing without an audience.”

Full analysis under the cut:

Then the Doctor falls into the sea — he’s drowning. And his subconscious, through the form of Clara, starts communicating with him via chalkboard.

Clara/Doctor: “What is this place?” Doctor: “Can’t I just sleep?”

Clara/Doctor: “What did you say that made the creature stop?” Doctor: “Do I have to know everything?”

“I don’t want to die.” — “I’m actually scared of dying.”

Clara/Doctor: “How are you going to ... WIN?”

How do you win a seemingly impossible game?

Both the Doctor and Sherlock approach their situations through the lens of a sort of game — where winning means for everyone just this once to live.

It reminds me a bit of S10E2 “Smile” when the Doctor tells Bill “Do you know why I always win at chess? Because I have a secret move. I kick over the board.”

... As the Doctor is drowning after jumping into the ocean he suddenly realises that he’s surrounded by hundreds of the skeletons of people who have died before him.

Arguably a few more than at the bottom of the well in TFP.

And once he crawls to shore, he magically gets a dry change of clothes, and continues to try to escape Sherrinford the weird Hell Labyrinth he’s trapped in which is surrounded by water and filled with puzzles and TV screens (sans Psychopath Sister).

“It keeps coming, Clara. Wherever I go it follows. Why does it do that?”

“This is theatre! We’re in a fully automated haunted house. A mechanical maze [...] designed to scare me to death and I’m trapped inside it. It must be Christmas!”

The next scene/puzzle the allegorical Death monster sets for the Doctor is an exact mirror for the scene where Sherlock digs up Emelia Ricoletti’s body in TAB.

The Doctor is given a shovel and a place to dig, he starts digging, we get a transition to night, and eventually he uncovers what he’s digging for — in this case it’s a plaque that reads “I am in 12″ which is a bit of a double entendre because not only is the Doctor, the Twelfth Doctor, trapped in Hell conjured up from his own worst fears, but also the only escape is through Room 12.

And then as he’s trying to figure out what he’s missing — HOLY CRAP! THE MONSTER POPS UP! and scares the Doctor into “waking up”.

Except whereas Sherlock ‘wakes up’ at the waterfall, every time the Doctor ‘wakes up’ he returns to the TARDIS — like a sort of subconscious reset button.

It’s likely that in the same way Sherlock’s subconscious ‘base of operations’ or ‘storm room’ as the Doctor calls it is a plane, going off of ‘Eurus’’ speech in TFP.

(”Every time I close my eyes I’m on the plane ...” / “Your mind has created the perfect metaphor” etc. + TAB + TST, building upon ASiB which created that initial allegorical link between the 007 flight and death.)

“This whole place was designed to terrify me. It wants confession. I have to tell truths I’ve never told before. That’s the only thing that stops it.”

“But the thing is ... There are truths I can never tell. Not for anything. But I’m scared and I’m alone. Alone and very, very scared.”

(”Every time I close my eyes, I'm on the plane. I'm lost. Lost in the sky and... No one can hear me.”)

The Doctor realises that the only way to fend off the monster is to confess — which he manages to do at first, ‘waking up’ again, back at the grave he was digging up.

While trying to escape the castle, trying to solve a number puzzle, he questions where he is, that perhaps the place he’s stuck in is in a locked energy loop or ...

“Maybe I’m in Hell. I’m not scared of Hell. It’s just Heaven for bad people. But how long will I have to be here? ... Forever?”

“I’m following breadcrumbs that have been laid out for me. This is someone else’s game. And I can’t stop playing.”

“Just tell them! Just tell them! Whoever wants to know! [...]. I can’t keep doing this! I can’t. I can’t. I can’t always do this! It’s not fair, Clara! It’s just not fair! Why can’t I just lose!”

“No more confessions. But I will tell the truth.”

“The Hybrid is a dangerous secret. A very, very dangerous secret. And it needs to be kept! So I’m telling you nothing. Nothing at all. Instead I’m gonna do something far worse. I’m gonna get out of here and find whoever put me here in the first place and whatever they’re trying to do I’m going to stop it!”

“I should have known ... The creature from my own nightmares. This place. My own bespoke torture chamber. Intended for me only. All those skulls in the water. How could there be other prisoners? In my Hell? The answer of course, is there were never any other prisoners. The stars haven’t moved. I’ve just been here ... a very long time.”

In the end — the episode turns out to be quite like Doctor Strange. Basically the Doctor is stuck in a loop where he has to kill himself over and over again to jump start a teleporter that puts him back at the beginning of the loop. All the skulls at the bottom of the ocean were his own. The only way to get out is to punch his way through a material that’s like 200 times stronger than diamond which takes him over a billion years.

The reason he’s stuck in his own personal version of Hell is because he’s trapped in a ‘Confession Dial’ a device made to try to scare a confession out of someone. In the Doctor’s case it’s the existence of ‘The Hybrid’, a half dalek, half timelord.

In the end the Doctor finally reveals that there isn’t actually such thing as ‘The Hybrid’. There is never any monster. The ‘creature’ in the prophecies is him.

rhgdkfhgsdkfdfsdkfjsdlfjds --

A bit of a ramble towards the end there, but a whole bunch of things in this episode really had me raising my eyebrows like, gee whizz. That monologue about surviving a fall at the beginning of the episode? The Samarra metaphor? The whole ‘confess to escape’ thing? ‘Christmas’? The TARDIS as a mental ‘storm room’???

Up until this point I’ve been under the impression that the only way for Sherlock to escape EMP is to kill himself like in Inception/”Amy’s Choice” — but perhaps there might also actually be an element of Sherlock having to confess like Culverton Smith kept emphasising, for Sherlock to actually face the truth of his past and admit his fears.

Has anyone else seen this ep or the rest of the season? Thoughts?

@the-blue-carbuncle​ @tjlcisthenewsexy​ @sci-fi-hero​ @deancasisendgame