#like all things Andrew it’s convoluted as all hell

[void-and-virtue]

I’m a big fan of the whole concept that Andrew actually ends up grudgingly enjoying Exy at some point, entirely because he enjoys being contrary. Like. To Andrew, denying people who think they can one-up him their success is a basic need. Riling them up for his own amusement in the process, only to make the takedown that much more humiliating when even the anger is not enough to give them an edge against his immovable presence is Andrew’s idea of self-fulfillment. Exy makes it so he’s literally getting paid millions of dollars to do that.

Kevin would be so much more successful in his pursuit to get Andrew to actually play if he stopped trying to get him to like the sport itself, and instead started to subtly market it as a professional career in being a little shit. I like to think Neil eventually figures out how to intentionally garner Andrew’s interest and starts to capitalize on his instigative tendencies to the fullest to give him incentive. Andrew plays Exy like it’s psychological warfare when he puts his mind to it. They could probably get him to run precision drills at night practice by prompting him to imagine how mad it would make people if he managed to strategically bounce balls off of his opponents’ helmets mid-game as a way to pass the ball up to Neil so that he can score. Stuff like that is actually creative, and hard to do, so the challenge becomes interesting when the reward (grim satisfaction in his own skill, his opponent being mad at him but unable to do anything about it, Neil’s smile) is worth the shot. It’s not the game itself that interests Andrew. It’s the opportunity to thoroughly mess with people and be as much of an inconvenience as humanly possible that sometimes makes playing Exy satisfying for him.

On a more serious note, there’s also something to be said about how his personal history/trauma feeds into this. Saying ‘No’ and the ability to see through that his ‘No’ is final is a very integral part of who Andrew is as a person. It’s really tangled up with Exy for him because, as Neil accurately put it, he plays Exy like he plays life.

Andrew is someone whose choice has been taken away from him far too many times in his life. The ability to choose and deny what happens to him and those under his protection is the highest good he has. Playing as the last line of defense at his level of skill quite possibly has the potential to be downright therapeutic. There’s satisfaction to be found in every goal denied, in being the best at what he does and taking control of his part in the game, if he allowed this to mean that to him. And that could factor into enjoyment of the sport as well — a quiet, subdued kind rather than loud celebration, but silent satisfaction is just as valuable as the much louder, more obvious kind. Anybody who matters can recognize happiness and contentment in him without needing him to say anything anyway.

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Garak

By Ames

No one here but us plain, simple tailors this week on A Star to Steer Her By. We’re finally scrutinizing fan-favorite recurring character Garak, who’s definitely more complex and nuanced than even some main characters we’ve discussed before. As we assembled our classic Best and Worst Moments lists, we found that Garak has the most moments that somehow end up in both. That’s how morally (and physically) grey this guy is.

So let’s get our measurements taken as we spotlight DS9’s resident Cardassian spy, played so stunningly by Andrew Robinson (have you read his book yet? It’s amazing). Scroll on below or decode some ciphers with us on this week’s podcast discussion (jump over to 48:23). Of all the moments we’re spotlighting, which are the best and which are the worst? My dear reader, they’re all best moments. Even the worst moments? Especially the worst moments.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Let us haggle Our very first introduction to Garak in “Past Prologue” sets him up as mysterious, sneaky, and downright sassy. It’s always nebulous just how far his covert information extends versus how much he’s ever just toying with Julian, but in this early episode, he helps the doctor uncover some shady dealings that the Bajoran terrorist Tahna Los has been engaging in. And it’s delightful.

Schemes within schemes Garak and Bashir team up again in the season two “Cardassians,” in which Garak sees through decades’ worth of Cardassian scheming (the best kind of scheming) to expose Dukat’s war orphan plot. The details are convoluted and Rube Goldbergy, but the tailor puts together all the pieces and concludes that Dukat is looking to undermine Gul Pa'Dar, some-freakin’-how.

Personally, I find this style a bit too radical Listening to Garak’s smoothtalking is always extra fun because he’s always saying more than is just on the surface. Even when he doesn’t have to! In his own way, he warns Quark that Natima Lang is in danger in “Profit and Loss.” By the end of the episode, he goes so far as to shoot Toran, saving Quark’s lady love and her students before they go “out of fashion.”

My best friend, Elim The first episode to appear on both lists is “The Wire” because it’s just so Garak. While he never tells Bashir the truth once, he’s at his most vulnerable when he’s telling his various Elim stories. In his own Cardassian way, he connects with his dear doctor and expresses things about himself that, though not empirically true, are him at his most real. And the shippers rejoice.

Major, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so ravishing We give Major Kira major props for her role in the stunning “Second Skin,” but Garak plays a large part as well. When Kira and Ghemor’s backs are up against the wall, Garak comes through for the DS9 crew. And like when he killed Toran in “Profit and Loss,” he’s able to put his Cardassian patriotism aside to kill the hell out of Entek and quip about it at the same time.

The spy who loved me It’s no wonder people ship Bashir and Garak so much when there are episodes like “Our Man Bashir” to fan the fires. And when things go awry in the holodeck, Garak is able to quip his way through the Bond-style holoprogram that they find themselves trapped in, all the while mocking what Julian seems to think the spy world is actually like. And he pulls off a tux pretty well too!

Excuse me, my dungeon awaits So many times that Garak saved the day have seemed to just be convenient for the character, but he’s especially heroic in “By Inferno’s Light.” He fights through his fears to go into the claustrophobia closet in the Jem’Hadar prison and remote into the waiting shuttle. Without Garak doing what needed to be done, surely the Jem’Hadar would have killed them all.

I promise you I will come back While the relationship between Garak and Ziyal always seemed kind of one-sided to us, we must admit that it was good for both characters to have someone whom they could relate to on the station. We see between “In Purgatory’s Shadow” and “By Inferno’s Light” that they care about each other, though sadly Garak never understands why before her untimely death.

A very messy, very bloody business Another episode that belongs on both lists is “In the Pale Moonlight.” We already gave Sisko some guff for this one, so let’s start off by being impressed by the layers of Cardassian scheming Garak does. Sure, it’s unethical and kind of monstrous, but it’s also a thing of beauty watching all the pieces of Garak’s plan come together to trick the Romulans into getting into the war. Not only can he live with it, but he sleeps like a baby.

Alan Turing, eat your heart out Garak uses some of his Obsidian Order talents to do some code breaking for the Federation in “Afterimage.” His arc in the final season of DS9 is a hell of a journey because he knows the work he’s doing for Sisko and crew will hurt the Cardassia he loves, but he also knows it’ll be for the best in the end to rid the quadrant of the Dominion so they can start rebuilding.

We might have a revolution on our hands Speaking of the Cardassia that Garak loves, he joins Damar and Kira’s little resistance in “The Dogs of War” and goes down to the planet to incite a revolution against the Dominion. When even Damar has opened his eyes to the atrocities the Founders are commiting in the Alpha Quadrant, then you know that it’s got to be something worth fighting for.

The last Weyoun In the siege of Cardassia Prime in “What You Leave Behind,” Garak gets to be the one to shoot Weyoun 8 after the two chirp at each other first. Turns out this is the last of the Weyoun clones, which Garak has firmly put to rest as the Federation ousts the Dominion forces from Cardassia. Garak’s story finally complete, his exile has ended in time to return to the ashes.

—

Worst moments

Nothing to look forward to but having lunch with you We’ll also see later in the series that Garak isn’t one to prioritize his mental health, so his abuse of his feel-good wire in the titular “The Wire” portrays how bad he is at taking care of himself or getting help when he is at his lowest points. When he attacks his friend and doctor when he’s going through withdrawal, you just wanna see him get better because this isn’t healthy, Garak.

Initiating counterinsurgency program level four Though Garak apparently has access codes that no doubt Sisko revoked after “Civil Defense,” he still utterly fails to stop the station’s counterinsurgency program from locking out the Starfleet personnel. In fact, per the “Attention Bajoran Workers” protocol, he’s made things that much worse by insisting they have to shut down life support only for a laser ball to replicate in Ops.

You can’t waterboard a goo It’s hardest for us to forgive Garak from ruthlessly torturing Odo in “The Die Is Cast” just to get back in the good graces of Daddy Tain… but we’ll probably do so anyway. We see just what Garak is capable of with these glimpses into his Obsidian Order past. We can absolutely easily picture how he could torment someone with just his unblinking stare. His eyes. HIS EYES!

But have you considered… murder? I may have found it adorable for Garak and Bashir to play spies in “Our Man Bashir,” but he has no idea how holoprograms work. Garak is so fast to jump to the conclusion that they kill everyone that it leaves one’s head spinning. This isn’t real-life spying, Garak. This is Julian’s sexy adventure, so of course the answer is seduction, not murder, and you should’ve known that.

Is this a date or an assassination? Ziyal is looking for company and invites Garak to sunbathe on rocks like the lizards they are… and Garak spends the whole of “For the Cause” caught up in highschool drama of what Ziyal’s inventions are. Does she like him or LIKE him? Or does she just want to lure him in to present his head to her father later? It’s all below Garak, frankly, when he could just, I dunno, talk to her.

Something swift and painless and preferably bloodless I gave Quark most of the stink for this one, but I can’t let Garak off the hook either. It’s a complete missed opportunity for “Body Parts” to necessitate Quark asking Garak to assassinate him when instead he could have enrolled Garak into some even more nefarious scheme. Garak himself should have suggested faking Quark’s death and it would have been excellent.

They’re dead. You’re dead. Cardassia is dead. I always found Garak’s plan in “Broken Link” to be tenuous at best and contrived at worst. He tags along to the Gamma Quadrant for seemingly no reason, then it turns out he wants to ask the Founders if any of the Cardassians from “The Die Is Cast” are still alive (a possibility never alluded to before), then he straight up tries to destroy the Founders’ planet until Worf beats him into submission. Huh?

It looks like I’ve captured your last piece, Chief The pretty decent horror episode “Empok Nor” has got a lot going for it, but every single time they made the kotra metaphor more and more blatant, I started checking out. Dear writers, your metaphor stood on its own without you announcing it twenty-five times. Have a little confidence that your themes are working because it was a good one… until it wasn’t.

Do you feel lucky? Do ya, Chief? But that is far from the worst thing Garak does in “Empok Nor.” The psychotropic drug is mostly at fault here, but that doesn’t mean Garak feels completely innocent. He straight up murders the Cardassian sleeper guards AND crewman Amaro in cold blood, and then kidnaps and threatens Nog so he can get at the Chief, taunting him like a serial killer the whole time.

Star-crossed lizards The sweet friendship Garak strikes up with Ziyal belongs on our good list for sure, but frankly the romance between them never quite gelled for us. We see in “Call to Arms” that they kiss goodbye when she flees the station before the Dominion swoops in, and it just feels… unearned? Garak admits in “Sacrifice of Angels” that he doesn’t know what that was all about, and neither do we.

When the devil asks you to dance, you say yes I may have marveled at Garak’s precarious plan in “In the Pale Moonlight,” but that doesn’t mean I condone any of it. Even the writers make it clear in Sisko’s actions that he finds it reprehensible how many casualties there were to pull it off: the cold-blooded murder of Vreenak (and his innocent guards!), the assassination of Grathon Tolar, the deaths of literally all of Garak’s contacts. This one’s on Sisko’s list too of course, but he at least knows it’s wrong.

You’re not worthy of the name Dax One final episode that’s on both lists. Classic Garak, playing both sides. In this case, it’s more evidence that Garak does not seem to value his mental health because, when he’s suffering panic attacks and more claustrophobia in “Afterimage,” the first thing he does is lash out at his therapist, Ezri Dax, who certainly doesn’t deserve it! The poor thing.

—

Well I hope we got in some cutting remarks about the good tailor of Deep Space Nine. Next week we’ve got another frequent guest star of the station to spotlight: Keiko O’Brien! Stay tuned for that while also tuning in every week as we venture through Enterprise over on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast. You can also quip with us over on Facebook and Twitter, and remember: the truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination.

[wesawbears]

Posting here in its entirety now that it’s complete. Featuring the favors Neil used to get Andrew to go to Aaron’s wedding, Neil being a menace, and Andrew and Aaron talking, as well as Andrew submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Enjoy!

--

Andrew shut the door with his foot, letting his bag sit by the door for a minute. He knew Neil would call out his hypocrisy the moment he saw,considering their previous conflicts about what apartment etiquette entailed, but for now, what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

Walking into the kitchen, he set his keys down on the table and scratched at Sir’s chin where he was headbutting against his hand. He stopped when he saw something unfamiliar on the fridge and walked over to inspect. They weren’t the type to keep mementos or reminders there; the dark blue stood out against the bareness there.

In loopy script, it read: “Save the Date! October 21st. Aaron Minyard and Katelyn Winters”.

He began peeling it off the fridge. Neil had wanted him to see it, but there was no way. Just seeing their smiling faces made something surge up in his stomach. He had let Aaron go years ago, but he never said he had to be happy about it, and he certainly had said nothing about supporting Katelyn or their relationship, the same as Aaron had never said anything to Neil that wasn’t strictly required for Exy. He could tolerate talking to Aaron, more than he had when they’d been in the same state, but that didn’t mean they did things like this. Nicky’s wedding was bad enough.

“Oh, you found it.”

Andrew turned, determined to not give Neil the satisfaction of seeing that he’d startled him. The slight smirk told him he hadn’t succeeded, but he kept his face placid and unbothered. “So you put it there on purpose? I assumed it had been put there by mistake.”

“No. I put it there so I’d remember to put it on the calendar...eventually.”

“What for?” Andrew asked, tilting his head in mock confusion. Better to not give him the satisfaction..

Neil raised his eyebrow, a look of condescension that had Andrew’s hackles up. “Because I’m going? I assumed you would too, but I can go alone.”

It was true. Neil was an adult who could make his own choices and Andrew wouldn’t stop him from going. But somehow he doubted that Neil would leave it there. The very fact that Neil had taken the time to put it on the fridge meant that this was premeditated and that, likely, this was an argument he wasn’t going to win. That didn’t mean that Andrew didn’t intend to gain as much ground as he could.

“So eager to go play with your friends?”

“Our friends.”

“Presumptuous.”

“You’re right. Aaron will be there, considering it’s his wedding. So he would be just yours then.”

“Aaron is no longer my responsibility. He can fuck up his life however he wants.”

Neil leaned against the kitchen counter, staring back at Andrew with the same level stare. “What do you want for it?”

Andrew held himself against the weight of being known that well. He kept his voice casual. “Skipping ahead so soon? You haven’t appealed to the fact that he’s my brother yet.”

Neil huffed. “Wouldn’t work. I’ve already worked through all your arguments. Had about a week to practice.”

Andrew drummed his fingers on the table. It was unnerving, as always, to know that Neil knew him well enough to anticipate his arguments, to have already taken the time to work this through in his head. It was as irritating as it was calming, in a way only Neil could manage to be.  “You assume you have something worth that much to me.”

“Don’t I?”

“This conversation is starting to bore me. Get to the point.”

“I can sign the papers. One phone call and I’m transferred to Chicago. Same schedule, same weekends off. No more watching each other’s games on TV.”

Andrew worked his jaw. Neil’s status states away had been a source of more irritation than he wanted to admit. It had taken him a long time to be able to admit that Neil was a part of his life that was maybe permanent, as close to permanent as he could allow himself, and now that he had, he felt every mile like a slow healing bruise. Neil’s contract was due for renewal, but Andrew’s team conveniently needed a striker. No coach would turn down one of the best strikers in the game. It was the one thing worth saying yes to and Neil knew it.

“Yes or no?”

Andrew knew that Neil would drop it the moment Andrew said no. Neil didn’t pick fights he couldn’t win. He was only asking because he knew from the start Andrew would agree.

“I’ll go.”

Neil grinned, and moved closer, hovering his hand close to Andrew’s. Andrew took the next step and linked their fingers together. For once, Neil didn’t push his luck with some smartass comment, but Andrew could practically see him biting it back. 

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m just glad you’ll be there.”

“Don’t say stupid shit,” he countered, pulling Neil in. 

“Yes,” Neil said, before Andrew could ask.

He pressed him to the counter and kissed him, letting the invitation fall to the ground.

--

It takes another favor for Neil to convince him that threatening Katelyn at the wedding wasn’t worth the trouble. Andrew severely disagreed, but pushing the issue wasn’t worth it, when Neil would pull back on both their agreements if he did. He didn’t linger on what that meant, on the fact that somewhere along the way he’d decided that keeping Neil meant more to him than settling past scores, and more to him than his brother. He wasn’t sure if that was healthy or not, but healthy had never been in his lexicon either way.

Neil still looked like a disgruntled cat any time he had to wear a suit, but Andrew had picked out a nice fitting one for him years ago, and he takes a moment to appreciate his handiwork. Neil is oblivious as always, though, and it takes him about two minutes of trying to get his tie right until Andrew can’t take it anymore.

“Impossible,” he huffs, and moves closer to secure it properly. Neil grins down at him and Andrew still feels the urge to push his face away, not knowing what Neil finds there to look at. “Staring.”

“Says the man who was literally standing there for two whole minutes.” Not as oblivious then.

Andrew doesn’t dignify that with a response, turning with a hum and heading towards the door. He’s timed it so they’ll be just close enough to on time for the ceremony that they can slip in the back. He lets the hum of the highway drown out the tight feeling in his chest.

When they get there, there’s an annoying sign that says “We’re all family! Pick a seat, not a side!” and Andrew considers walking out, but Neil is swept up by Matt and carried away, so Andrew has to follow, despite his misgivings. Nowhere in their agreement did it state that Andrew had to pay attention to the ceremony, so he tunes out and recites some book he has memorized to himself instead. 

It becomes painfully obvious at the reception that Neil is keeping an eye on him, so Andrew leaves him with Kevin, fighting over something inane and exy-related, and goes outside for a cigarette. He steps onto the terrace, only to find his brother leaning against a fence.

“I don’t think this is how weddings work,” he says as a greeting.

Aaron glances up, scowl as familiar as a mirror. “I told Katelyn I needed a minute.

Andrew nods and leans against the fence, taking a drag of his cigarette.

“Didn’t think you were going to come.”

“Thank Neil.”

“After you thank Katelyn. It was her idea to send you the invitation. I told her not to bother.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Here you are,” Aaron agrees, leaning further back against the fence.

Andrew lets the conversation drop for a moment. He’s about to head back inside, when he hears, “Why?”

He turns back. “Why what?”

“Why did you come? We both know Neil isn’t here as a favor to me. So why would he think it’s important for you to be here?”

And wasn’t that the million dollar question. Why had he bothered to come, when he and Aaron only spoke a handful of times a year? 

“I don’t know,” he answers truthfully.

Annoyingly, Aaron scoffs. “Yes you do.”

“Enlighten me then,” he plays along.

Aaron shrugs. “I didn’t say I knew why. I just know that you don’t do anything without having some convoluted reason for it.”

“I didn’t know I was coming out here to have a conversation with the cheshire cat.”

Aaron chuckled and the sound was foreign to him. “We’re not 16 anymore. Hell, we’re not 20 anymore. We’re grown up.” He holds his glass up, toasting to nowhere.

“When did you start philosophizing? Andrew asked.

“It’s my wedding day-I’m allowed,” Aaron says, shaking his head.

“You’re so weird,” is all Andrew can think to say.

He looks at Aaron and wonders what he sees. Wonders if he mirror the relaxed posture, the way Aaron looks comfortable in his own skin. He wonders how long it’s been since he woke up screaming, if it’s a dull ache in the back of his mind, or an almost healed bruise, flaring up only when pressed on.

He hears the tell tale sound of heels on cobblestones. “Aaron? Honey, we’re about to cut the- oh.”

He looks up and sees Katelyn, wide-eyed and hesitant. He feels long forgotten anger well up, but thinks of Neil and pushes it down. With a long forgotten salute, he turns and leaves Aaron to his future.

Inside, Neil is leaning against a table, sipping his drink that Andrew can tell he hates. He takes it from him and downs it in a quick swig.

“That was mine,” he complains, nudging Andrew’s hip.

“You were too slow.”

“Everything okay?” he asks.

Andrew looks down at their hands, sees the newly acquired neat letters on the side of Neil’s thumb that match his own and feels something settle back into place. He looks up and past him to where Aaron is laughing while Katelyn puts whipped cream on his nose. 

“Yes or no?” he asks instead.

Neil smirks. “In the middle of their moment?”

“Yes,” he taps Neil’s thumb, “Or no?”

“Yes, Andrew,” he says and pulls him in the rest of the way. He hears Nicky yell something and flips him off. 

He’s okay.

[lyss-writes]

Excelsior (Part 10)

[10/12]

The problem with living at home with your folks when you were in your forties was that you couldn’t expect to have a social life without your parents eagerly inserting themselves into it.

Which was why, after giving his parents the runaround for two solid weeks, Tom finally had to call it and invite Greg over for dinner at their house on Sunday night.

“Sorry,” Tom said grimly, when he extended the invitation after they finished up rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. “I couldn’t get them to lay off. They’re unreasonably involved in my life these days, you know, now that I’m not allowed to actually have one.”

“No, no. That’s cool,” Greg shrugged. “I like parents. And, uh, I never say no to free food, like, on principle.”

Tom snorted. “Quite a code you live by there, Greg. Who said that, Tacitus?”

————————

“So! This is the famous Greg,” Tom’s mother said, beaming.

The four of them were standing around in the kitchen. Tom’s parents had been cooking all day long in preparation for this dinner, hard at work on a convoluted recipe from the New York Times that his dad had been dying to try his hand at for weeks. It was weird. They were acting like Tom was some kind of misanthropic neckbeard loser living in their basement and running up a hefty tab with pay-per-view porn and cheap beer, and he was finally venturing out into the real world to make friends. Which was a little insulting. He had plenty of friends! Friends he hadn’t seen or heard from in a couple of years, but friends all the same. He had Jonas. He had… his therapist. (Fine, maybe they had a point.)

Greg grinned. “Really? I’m famous?”

“Not especially.” Tom shot his mom a warning look. “You’re a curiosity, maybe.”

“Oh, don’t listen to him, Greg,” his dad said, swatting Tom with a dishtowel. “Tom’s a comedian.”

They ate at the dining room table. His mom had made a point of breaking out the ‘good china’ for the occasion, had even set down a silk-blend tablecloth. There was red wine and braised short rib stew and, miraculously, free-flowing conversation that didn’t center on the veritable grab bag of verboten topics: dead husbands, estranged wives, restraining order violations.

Instead, his mom and dad peppered Greg with questions about his childhood (apparently Greg had grown up in Canada, splitting time between his grandpa’s ranch in Quebec and his father’s one-bedroom apartment in Toronto) and his Thanksgiving plans (“Oh, no, we don’t really celebrate, me and my mom,” Greg said, which earned him an immediate invitation from his parents to their house for the holiday) which led, inevitably, to talking about the dance competition that would be held that same weekend.

“How are the rehearsals going?” his mom asked.

“Good,” Greg said. “Uh, like, they’ve been going really good, actually. Tom’s been like, super helpful, with the uh, the song choices and putting the whole thing together.”

“Oh, please. You’re just flattering me,” Tom said, slightly abashed.

“I’m not,” Greg insisted.

“You boys think you actually have a shot at winning this thing?” Tom’s dad asked, his eyes lighting up with a gleam of interest.

“Mm. It’s not really about that,” Greg said, chewing thoughtfully. “I mean, it is for the, like, real, uh, the real professional dancers? I guess? But I’m not, like, interested in winning, per se.”

Tom held back a wry smile. “Also, no. There’s literally not a chance in hell.”

“Fair enough,” his dad said. “So, Greg, if you don’t mind me asking—”

“—like, why do I do it?” Greg lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. It’s fun. It’s… a good reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.” He twisted his wedding band around his finger as he spoke, almost unconsciously.

For a moment, the room was quiet. Greg didn’t have to mention Andrew to make it plain what he was talking about. His name was unspoken, but Tom still heard it loud and clear.

————————

Tom led Greg out onto the porch after dinner. They sat close on the front steps, shoulders pressed together, and watched as all of the streetlamps flickered to life down the block.

“Did anyone ever tell you how Andrew died?” Greg asked, tracing the rim of his coffee cup with his thumb. “Jonas? Or Hannah?”

Tom shook his head.

“It was, uh. Earlier this year,” Greg said after a pause. “February 12th. Three days after our second anniversary, um.” His mouth twisted into a grim, humorless smile. “Yeah, so, we were married for two years and three days, and I loved him. So much. But we’d been going through, like, a dry spell, for a couple of months and we weren’t really having sex anymore, and it just felt like we were so… uh. Disconnected. And I was depressed, and maybe some of it was my fault, like, that’s always been a part of me, and some of it was him wanting us to have kids, like, get serious and start thinking about finding a surrogate or something, but I have a hard enough time taking care of myself, so I don’t know, I wasn’t ready.” Greg cleared his throat. “Anyway. Uh. One night after dinner, he took the car to Minneapolis and bought some—stuff, you know, condoms and lube and shit to get something going between us again, and this—” He shuddered out a breath. “—this dude comes barreling down the Intercity Bridge, drunk as fuck, in the wrong lane, and Andrew, he swerves so that he doesn’t hit the guy head on, but he loses control and the car goes off the side of the bridge and into the river.”

Tom stared at him in horrified silence.

“Yeah,” Greg said. His eyes were glossy with tears, shining under the dim porchlight. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

Tom had no clue what to say to that. It felt like it might be better to say nothing at all.

He felt for Greg’s hand in the dark and gripped it tight, and Greg squeezed right back.

————————

Andrew’s death haunted Tom for days. He worried, maybe a little selfishly, that it would change his dynamic with Greg. They had a good thing going, witty banter that, even if Greg couldn’t exactly match Tom beat for beat, he took it all in stride. And the dancing was fun in a way Tom really hadn’t expected it to be. It had started out as an obligation, a begrudging favor to a vaguely irritating acquaintance, but somewhere along the way, Tom found himself looking forward to their rehearsals. Found himself kind of eager to see Greg and fall into step with him.

But his worries were unfounded. Greg was back to his usual irrepressibly cheerful self at their next practice session on Wednesday afternoon. They even managed to work out a tricky section of their routine that had been tripping them up for a few weeks now. Weird, how figuring out a step in a ballroom number could put Tom in a good mood.

“Oh, hey, I almost forgot,” Greg said afterwards. “Shiv replied to your letter.”

“What?! When?”

“Uh, like, it came in the mail the other day, I think?”

“And you forgot to tell me?!”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Greg said, shrugging.

Tom gaped at him. “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Give it to me!”

Greg sighed and trudged upstairs to the second floor of the garage apartment—his bedroom, ostensibly—and returned a minute later with a nondescript white envelope in hand. “Here,” he said. “I just hope you can, like, handle it.”

“Why would you say something like that?” Tom asked as he tore into the envelope.

“I mean, like, I just don’t want you to get your hopes up?”

“Thanks, Greg.” Tom held the folded sheet of paper in his hands and stared at it. Shiv had written him back. He almost couldn’t believe it, but here it was. Six months of no contact, and now he had this tangible proof that Shiv was thinking about him. His heart pounded wildly in his chest.

Greg was watching him closely when he looked up. “Are you… like, you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. He swallowed. “Uh, I think I’m just gonna read it out loud? You know, if she says anything that’s, ah. Is that too much to ask?”

Greg nodded. “No, ‘course not.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Tom took a deep breath and unfolded the letter.

Dear Tom— I was so happy to get your letter. I’m sure—

“I thought you were gonna read it out loud,” Greg said.

Tom blinked. “Right. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “‘Dear Tom, I was so happy to get your letter. I’m sure you know that you were taking a huge risk by writing to me, but you did the right thing by sending it discreetly through Greg. This is a good way for us to communicate while I keep the restraining order in place for the time being.’” He looked up at Greg, who nodded for him to keep going. “‘You sounded like your old self in your letter. It sounds like you’re working hard on yourself these days, becoming a much happier and healthier person, like I always knew you were. And you’re doing an amazing thing by doing this dance competition with Greg. It’s very selfless of you, and I’m sure it means the world to him. I just wish that I could be there to see it.

“‘Obviously these are some extremely positive developments, Tom, but if I’m being honest with you, I need to see something to prove that you’re ready to come home and work on our marriage. Otherwise, I think we might be better off apart. Please take some time to think about this before you write to me again. You can give your letter to Greg and he’ll take care of getting it to me. I’m really glad that you’re doing well. Love, Shiv.’”

He folded the letter back up into a tight square and tucked it into his pocket. It wasn’t until he lifted his eyes to look at Greg that Tom realized he was crying.

“She said that you need to show her something,” Greg said, stepping in close. His eyes were dark and serious. “Like, this dance could be that something.”

Tom sniffled, wiping his eyes roughly with the back of his hand. “Yeah,” he said in a broken voice. “Maybe.”

“Don’t think of it as, like, a favor to me,” Greg told him. He touched a soft hand to Tom’s shoulder, the weight and warmth of his giant palm serving as a real comfort. “It’s for Shiv.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Tom said. He looked up into Greg’s face and resisted the sudden, powerful urge to hug him. “Thanks for the, ah, the letter.”

“Anytime,” Greg said, his expression blank as slate.

“See you tomorrow, Greg.”

[missjanjie]

Better Than Revenge | Chapter 3

Title: Better Than Revenge Summary: Karma Inc.’s business structure is simple - clients hire them when they’ve been grievously wronged and they send one of their revenge mercenaries to right them. As painstaking as their efforts to remain ethical may be, that may be tested when former detective, Rosé, enlists the squad to pick up where she couldn’t on a much higher scale, with potentially greater consequences. Word Count: ~2.7k (this chapter) | ~8k (total) Relationship(s): Rosnali (Rosé/Denali Foxx), Jankie (Jackie Cox/Jan Sport), Halldoll (Nicky Doll/Jaida Essence Hall), Gimone (Gigi Goode/Symone), Gottlux (Gottmik/Olivia Lux) Rating: T

Read on AO3 | Ko-Fi

Chapter Summary: Rosé learns Gigi, Symone, and Denali's revenge origin stories

-

Woodstock, IL — 2016

Gigi took a deep breath as she stared at herself in the mirror. She could do this, it was fine. Every time her suspicions or confusion would bubble up, she forced them back down. Hannah was nice, she was different from the other popular girls. She didn’t see the ‘weird art lesbian’ with the braces and thick-rimmed glasses, who rarely got pop culture references post-1989, at least, that’s how she made her feel.

“I’ll text you in the morning,” she assured her mother as she threw her bag over her shoulder. “It’ll be fine, I’m just hanging out with a friend.” She was out to her mom, of course, that was her biggest ally. But she wasn’t ready to tell her that the head cheerleader had taken an interest in her. Maybe when and if they became official. Until then, she shook off the last of her nerves and drove to her house, only pulled from her thoughts by the time she was sitting on Hannah’s bed.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Hannah cooed, batting her lashes and resting her hand on Gigi’s thigh.

If Gigi hadn’t been so blinded by her crush, she might’ve thought Hannah was laying it on a little thick, but she couldn’t act like she didn’t enjoy the attention. “Me too, a-about you, I mean. Sorry, I’m just nervous…”

“How come? I didn’t come on too strong over text, did I?”

“No, no I liked it, it’s just… I’m a virgin, like, I’ve only ever kissed before,” she confessed, her cheeks flushing rosy pink. She had talked a big game over text, but being faced with the chance of starting a physical relationship brought her back to reality.

Hannah pouted, rubbing Gigi’s thigh as she thought, letting her hand inch higher. “Well, you’ve got fantasies, don’t you? I know you’ve masturbated before. What do you think about while you touch yourself?”

Gigi hesitated, chewing on her bottom lip. The other girl wasn’t wrong, she did know what she liked, could conjure up vivid imagery to get herself aroused, but she had never said any of it out loud. “I like powerful, confident women. I guess that’s something that drew me to you,” she started, “I wanna just… give up control, be dominated.”

“Really? Tell me more,” Hannah prompted, kissing along her neck and jaw and slowly tugging Gigi’s shirt off in an attempt to coax her to continue.

When Hannah didn’t seem deterred by her confession, Gigi started to relax. “It’s just, I don’t know, I always feel the need to be in control of my life and with sex, I just wanna let go and give up that power.”

“So like, what would you want someone to do to you?” she asked, a smirk tugging at the corners of her lips.

She bit down on her lip. “Um… tie me up, spank me, choke me, and I know it’s kind of intense but maybe something like cnc or—” the incessant buzzing of her phone distracted her and, concerned it might be an urgent call or text from home, she took her phone out. “Sorry, one sec.”

It wasn’t from home, she had two missed calls from her best friend, Crystal, followed by several texts.

Crystal: GIGI STOP Crystal: SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! Crystal: She’s broadcasting you on IG live! Crystal: We can see and hear everything…

Gigi’s face fell, her first instinct to pull her shirt back on. Then she slowly looked up and in front of her, that’s when she saw it, nestled between stuffed animals — Hannah’s phone with an instagram live going. She didn’t say anything, just ran out of the house as fast as her legs would take her and through her tears drove right to Crystal’s house. That was when the two of them formed their plot.

In and of itself, it was simple. Gigi waited one day until Hannah was away for a cheer competition and went to her house. “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Andrews, but I think I left some of my homework in Hannah’s room, she just said to let you know so I can run in and grab it.” Once inside, she found exactly what she was looking for, sliding Hannah’s diary into her backpack and went right back out.

“This feels very Mean Girls, I love it,” Crystal remarked as they taped page after page of the diary on lockers, walls, anywhere they could.

“Well, plan B was to go the Heathers route, so let’s just hope it works.”

And to say it worked was an understatement. As it turned out, Hannah had written things far more incriminating, and because it came from someone of her social ranking, it made everyone immediately lose interest in Gigi’s livestream scandal, and she graduated with the anonymity she needed for survival.

Present Day

“I’ll be honest with you,” Rosé remarked, “it’s kinda hard to picture you as an ugly duckling, especially the way you described it.” Gigi was too pretty, too perfect. Something didn’t add up.

Gigi got out her phone and scrolled through her photos until she found one from her senior year. “Believe it, doll,” she said as she held her phone up. She watched with an amused expression as Rosé looked from her phone, to her, and back with her eyes wide and mouth agape. “Braces off, lasik, learned a lot about how to dress while going to FIDM, which is where I met Symone, who helped fill in the blanks.”

“And made sure she got to do all them things she listed to that bitch without feeling ashamed about it,” Symone added with a smirk, draping her arm around Gigi and pulling her close, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

“Why don’t you tell her your story next, baby?” Gigi prompted.

Conway, AR — 2014

Symone watched her sister throw her bag over her shoulder and start to sneak out the window. “Look, I ain’t snitching or nothing, but I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

She and her sister, Lala, were close, sometimes referring to themselves as twins – they were only ten months apart, in the same grade at school. And until the summer after sophomore year, they had the same group of friends. But the crowd Lala ran with now just rubbed her the wrong way.

“You worry too much,” Lala brushed it off. “I’ll be fine, in bed by morning like nothing happened.”

But when Symone got a collect call two hours later, she found out things were far from fine. She drove down to the county jail as fast as she could without getting pulled over herself. Luckily bail was a mere fifty dollars, but once she got her sister back in the car, she looked at her incredulously. “What the fuck happened?”

“One of ‘em brought weed, another brought booze, but when the cops rolled up on us, they said it all was mine. And who was they gonna believe, me or three white kids?” Lala sniffled, wiping her eyes. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me,” she whispered.

“I don’t either,” Symone admitted quietly, frustrated at her inability to come up with an immediate solution. “But we’re gonna do our best to get you out of this, okay?”

The best they could do wasn’t easy. It involved a lot of legal maneuvering, meetings with one person in a suit after another. The end result wasn’t ideal, but it was far better than what could have been. Lala was fined three hundred dollars and put on thirty days of probation. In and of itself, it didn’t seem so bad, but the residual consequences took their toll.

“I lost my scholarship, ‘mone. That was my ticket into college,” Lala sighed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know I’m getting off with a slap on the wrist, but I really ain’t thrilled about taking out student loans,” she sat down on the floor beside the bed, head leaning against it. “Or maybe I’ll start with community college, I dunno. It just fucking sucks that they all got off with warnings.”

Symone’s brows knitted together, her lips pressed into a fine line. “Don’t you worry baby,” she said after a moment, “they gon’ face consequences one way or another.”

It had taken most of spring break, but Symone finally had all of the pieces for her plan. “Not the most convoluted thing in the world, but it’ll get the job done,” she mused.

Lala looked at her sister, then at her desk and back. “Do I even wanna know where the hell you got coke from?”

“No, you do not.”

Getting the drugs was the hard part. Getting into school early to plant the drugs in the lockers of Lala’s former friends was far easier, as was leaving an ‘anonymous tip’ from a ‘concerned student’ on the principal’s desk.

“God, I wish I could’ve seen them get hauled off in cop cars,” Lala remarked as she and Symone drove home from school. The three students were quietly escorted out of class and arrested, the school wanting to bring as little attention as possible. “Shame that they rich daddies will still get them off lightly.”

Symone sighed and nodded. “Sure, but they’re still gonna get something, which is more than what they got when they threw you under the bus. Bet they’re gonna think twice before they let someone else take the fall for them.”

Her sister smiled softly and shook her head. “You really ain’t gotta do all that for me, you know?”

“I know,” she hummed, “not gonna stop me, though.”

Present Day

“Wow, that’s both selfless and hardcore,” Rosé remarked with an impressed nod. “Did she ever find out where you got the coke from?”

Symone laughed and shook her head. “Nah, that secret I’m taking to the grave.”

Rosé jokingly put her hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, fair enough,” she chuckled. After a moment, she turned her attention to Denali. “That just leaves you, princess,” she remarked, a slight smirk tugging at her lips. “What’s your claim to infamy?”

Denali tossed her hair off her shoulder and grinned softly. “Who, me?” she cooed, fluttering her lashes. “Well, it is kind of an interesting story…”

Nicky rolled her eyes and tossed one of the couch pillows at her head. “Stop flirting and get on with it already.”

Fairbanks, AK — 2011

Denali groaned when the sound of loud footsteps racing up the stairs pulled her from her quasi-asleep state, then pulled a pillow over her head when the door swung open.

“What the hell are you still doing in bed when the qualifiers are in two hours?” her friend, Kahmora, asked with incredulous horror. She yanked the covers off of her, but stepped back in concern when she finally caught sight of Denali’s face. “Oh god, you look like shit.”

She frowned and rolled over to face away from her. “I feel like I died and was in the process of being reanimated, then killed again,” she lamented. “It’s probably food poisoning… or maybe swine flu came back, I dunno.”

“Did you eat anything unusual?”

Denali furrowed her brows as she wracked her brain. “I mean, Tara gave me those brownies and I had one, but when she said they were ‘special’, I just thought she meant they had weed in them, but that sure as hell isn’t it.” With as much energy as she could muster, she sat upright. “Oh my god, do you think she poisoned me?”

Kahmora arched her brow. “I think that’s a bit much, even for her. Do I think she put something like a laxative in there so it’d take you out long enough that you couldn’t beat her out in the international qualifiers? Yeah, probably. She’s a cunt.”

The skater scowled, her jaw clenched. “She’s a dead cunt,” she corrected, then suddenly shot out of bed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she muttered as she raced to the bathroom yet again.

There wasn’t an obvious revenge plan for Denali. She knew that nothing she did would get her spot in the competition, and she wondered if it was even worth it. But her pettiness and spite won out and she began planning out her course of action.

“Remember,” she was saying, “if all else fails, we go the Tonya Harding route.”

Kahmora sighed. “For the last time, you are not whacking Tara’s kneecaps, now let’s go.” Despite some pouting from Denali, they went to get the gears turning in their plan. They got to the ice rink and slipped into the locker room without being noticed by Tara, who was in the middle of practice.

Denali picked the lock and took out Tara’s change of clothes. Then she reached into her own bag and pulled on latex gloves and a plastic bag containing several leaves of poison ivy. She turned the shirt, pants, and socks inside out and firmly rubbed the leaves against the fabric, making sure she left as little fabric uncovered as possible. “She’s lucky I’m merciful or I’d rub it on her panties too,” she remarked offhandedly.

Kahmora tilted her head as she watched her. “Do you actually think it’ll take her out of the competition?” she asked as her friend put the leaves and gloves into the ziploc bag.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I mean, it’s possible, probable really, that the constant itching might make it too difficult for her to skate. But this is more about getting even with her. I might not ever get another chance to compete for internationals. She’s lucky the only retribution she’s getting is a few weeks of itchy blisters.”

“Otherwise you’d Tonya Harding her?”

Denali nodded brightly. “Exactly! Now come on, we have to get rid of the evidence.” And with that, they scurried out of the locker room as inconspicuously as they’d entered it and threw out the evidence in a trash can several blocks over.

When the news broke that Tara had withdrawn from the competition due to ‘unexpected physical problems’, Denali did her best to feign shock and didn’t celebrate until she and Kahmora were alone.

“So, what do you wanna do now?” Kahmora asked.

Denali tilted her head in thought, then smirked. “Let’s go get brownies.”

Present Day

“Personally, I still think you should’ve busted her knees,” Mik mused offhandedly. “Like, I bet you would’ve figured out a way to get away with it, you conniving bitch,” he teased.

Denali shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s not very original and it’d look a lot more suspicious on my end.”

“I think it was pretty badass,” Rosé offered, making the other woman smile which, in turn, made her heart flutter — something she chose to actively ignore. Instead, she let all of their stories sink in. None of their reasons for revenge were out of line, none of their victims undeserving. And none of the consequences were as severe as some of the things she had seen in her time. “You all really know what you’re doing, huh?”

“We wouldn’t have been able to keep this up for three years if we didn’t,” Jan replied. “We had all of the potential on our own, but we make a difference together, and then we added Jackie to tie up the loose ends. It’s been smooth sailing from there.”

“Yeah, and now Jackie ties you up instead,” Nicky teased, earning an eye roll in response.

Rosé watched the group interact with a fond smile. She had assumed they all got along to be working together for as long as they have been, but she hadn’t anticipated them truly behaving like a family. It was a stark contrast to the constant coldness and curtness she had grown accustomed to, both in her previous career and in the environment she grew up in. She only hoped it would make the tasks ahead that much easier for them.

[nellie-elizabeth]

Supernatural: Carry On (15x20)

Oh my god. Lol. So... did Andrew Dabb forget to read back through his finale script one final time before deciding it was finished? Because like... Dean says "if we don't keep living, all that sacrifice (Cas and Jack) will be for nothing." Cut to a comically short time later, where Dean dies and is just like "time to go, let's not keep fighting, I'm tired lol."

Like WHAT did I just witness. I'm so grateful, in this moment, to a little show called The Magicians, because in April of 2019 they ended their fourth season with such an egregiously terrible decision that I literally couldn't sleep for a week, I was shaking and intermittently sobbing, I had never felt so betrayed and devastated over any piece of media before. After that, I've sort of become numb to bad endings, and this is no exception. This episode was absolutely terrible and I'm just sort of like... meh. I'll ignore it. Whatever.

I do want to forego the usual "pro" and "con" sections in this review, and do a more traditional full-on ramble about my thoughts, because they're kind of convoluted, if I'm gonna be honest.

The first thing I want to say, is that this wasn't the worst finale I've ever seen. Objectively, it was a terrible episode of TV and an insulting wrap-up to a fifteen-year-show. But I have a very specific category for the worst finales ever, and those are the ones that provide endgame states for the characters that are... unfixable in a post-canon but still-canon-compliant world. So, for example, the How I Met Your Mother finale killed off the titular mother and betrayed years of buildup, and that's a real-world sitcom. There's no resurrecting people from that shit. Or like. Game of Thrones being an obvious recent example. The Rise of Skywalker is a good movie example.

This? It's a little different. The endgame state of Sam and Dean and Cas is that they all die and spend eternity in Heaven, where they get to be with all their loved ones. I mean, sure, we don't get to see that, we only get a throwaway line to imply that Cas made it out of Super Turbo Hell The Empty, but that's the endgame state of the characters. And that's more or less what I would have wanted, as like a... years after canon situation. Right? So yeah, this was a bad episode, but if I edit in the shit I wanted to see, none of it contradicts the canon in a way that's not workable. It's a sad world we've come to where this is all I can really grasp at, but there is a perverse sort of comfort in that.

So, should we talk now about how Dean dying is a betrayal of what they said this whole season, and maybe whole show was about? Ha. It's so ridiculous. It's embarrassing. I watched Dean's final moments and I was embarrassed for Jensen. For Dean. For all of us watching.

Just. Watch the end of 15x19 again, okay? Watch it, and hear what they're saying. Yay, we killed God, we killed the author of the story, which means we get to write our own stories, finally. We get to do that. After all this time, we're finally free. And what does freedom look like? It looks like Dean dying on a run of the mill hunt.

We get this little montage of Sam and Dean at the Bunker, you know? They're doing laundry and going on jogs and cuddling with Miracle the dog, and they're brushing their teeth and going on hunts, I guess. And the emotional resonance from that scene was just kind of... ennui? And boredom? And that's what's so terrible and depressing about this ending. It's so empty, because Dean didn't get to do the thing he said he was fighting for. Sure, he was always fighting for Sam, but he should have been able to fight for himself, too, right? He should have been able to fight for a life after the years of programming. He should have gotten to be a rock star or a chef or worked at an animal shelter or become a foster parent or grown old as Sam's brother, as an uncle to his kid. He should have been able to find love, if he wanted that.

Look, I'm not even mad that Dean died in a "mundane" way. It's not like "nooo Dean is too coooool to die in such a laaaame way, he's a bad-ass and he should have gone out in a blaze of glory!" That's actually not what I'm mad about at all. Sam died old in his bed, and Dean should have been able to do that too. This whole season, since finding out that Chuck was the ultimate big bad, was supposed to be about free will, and Dean never got to figure out a way to be happy and find peace. That's fucking dour and stupid.

I kept saying, in the buildup to this finale, that a depressing, grim-dark ending to this show would be a failing of the themes they set up, and, hey, they didn't go grim-dark, because the writers did not think this was grim-dark. They thought it was powerful and emotional and resonant. You can tell they thought that, even though they're... uh... what's the word. Wrong? Yeah. Wrong. You know what I realized while watching this? It was just a lamer, less resonant and appropriate version of Sam's sacrifice at the end of season five.

Right? Because after Sam yeets himself into hell to save the world, Dean just has to keep going, and as Cas says, "you got what you wanted, more of the same." Just... more of the same. And Dean couldn't hack it, he was miserable without Sam, and Sam came back and we got ten more years of the fucking show. And now... what, we just get that in the other direction? Because Sam is the strong one and can soldier on without Dean because his codependency was a little less crippling? Wow, what a great ending for him, I guess. It doesn't work because we've seen Sam without Dean, and he falls apart too.

And now the show ends with Sam alone. Sure, he gets married to a blur in the background and has a kid, but let me ask you a question, here. Did Sam... want to be a father? I didn't know that was a thing he wanted, that would make him happy, honestly. I had no idea. So this doesn't seem like it works as something even remotely satisfying as an endgame state for him either. It's bleak.

And it's bleaker because there's nobody else in this fucking episode, y'all. The other big theme in all of Supernatural, after "free will" would be "family don't end in blood." And guess what? Apparently it does? Apparently Sam and Dean are each other's whole worlds and nothing else matters? We get... an implied wider world but we don't get to see it. We don't get to see Eileen, Jody, Donna, anybody left alive for Sam. So from the standpoint of characters that we know and give a shit about, Sam loses Cas, Jack, and Dean and lives the rest of his life lonely and sad. Nobody else even comes to Dean's funeral. It's just Sam alone with the dog. Like... that's bleak.

This ending gave the fucking Wincest shippers everything their hearts could desire, for fuck's sake. Like. Why did they cater to that and not follow through on the idea that they had created a family and community beyond each other? You know, this thing called character growth?

To take a brief break from the negativity, I will say something here about Sam and Dean. In the weird hysterical euphoria of the whole Destiel thing a couple weeks ago, I lost sight of something, which is that for me, the draw of this show has always been the relationship between Sam and Dean. I was never a brothers-only person, but it was their fucked up codependent bond that drew me to the show over the years. I loved the idea of Destiel, but I never thought it was going anywhere, so really I loved Castiel, the character, separate from the context of his relationships. Having a big dramatic death scene where Dean says "I love you so much" and there's a forehead touch and Dean saying "it's always been you and me" and confesses that he was scared to get Sam at Stanford because he didn't know how to survive if he didn't have him, and to have Sam say "don't leave me" and then give Dean permission to go... I mean, all of this is catnip, right? All of this is great, like, in isolation, it was such an amazing "broment," as the fandom says. I mean, it made no sense with context, it was utterly insulting in every way, but Jensen and Jared acted their lil' hearts out and I could tell they were really in the moment.

So let's talk about Cas for a second, while I have you here... they never should have done the big gay confession. They just shouldn't have even fucking bothered. I'm telling you, that makes this whole thing worse. It felt completely intentional and weird that Dean never acknowledged the confession, never told Sam, never had a moment where he specifically reckoned with Cas' loss. But that's what I knew would happen. I knew it in my blood and bones, and as the meta started pouring in, I knew people were getting their hopes up for nothing. See, Cas saying "goodbye Dean" and the handprint on the arm... I knew that was their catharsis, that was the writers' and Misha's big goodbye to the character of Castiel. They thought they fucking nailed it. I knew we wouldn't see him again.

Like I said before, I have to be satisfied with an endgame state that doesn't totally suck, right? So, we get this throwaway line from Bobby that Jack fixed Heaven and made it not suck, and that Cas helped. This implies a multitude of things that are... comforting. At least Cas doesn't get that dour, dark, helpless oblivion that I worried he'd get. We can assume Jack plucked him out of the Empty, that he gets to be with his son, and that, if the fic writers so choose, Dean and Cas can have lots of gay sex up in Heaven. I think Misha not being in this finale was frankly a slap in the face to one of the biggest and most important characters the show has ever seen, you know? And I think that they kept him out of it so we could have Schrodinger's Destiel. Because if we'd seen Cas in heaven, and he hadn't confessed his big gay love, Dean could have been like: "hey Cas! Buddy! Good to see you, my friend." But since we did have the love confession, whatever Dean did upon seeing Cas would have to mean something in that context. So instead we didn't get to see him at all.

Which is stupid.

Also stupid is that the big sacrifice was to save Dean's life and then a couple weeks later he gets impaled on a rusty nail and dies anyway. Thanks for making the whole thing feel so utterly pointless and empty. No pun intended. Wow, they did Misha dirty, here, didn't they.

Turning back to Sam's ending, let's just talk about that for a minute. Like I said, I'm happy he got to live a long life and die an old man, what Dean always wanted for him. But nothing about that ending was more poignant because Dean was gone. In fact, it just made it super duper depressing and lame. There was no reason Dean couldn't have gotten a happy life, too. It adds nothing that he died young and unfulfilled. Like, you know how people joke about the end of the Titanic, where you see that Rose's Heaven is reuniting with Jack and everyone else on the ship, and people will say "well, gosh, that's kind of a slap in the face to Rose's family" since she clearly got married and had kids and grandkids? This is literally that! Like, having an ending where a young-again Sam Winchester gets to Heaven, and his whole Heaven, the thing that he needed to find peace after death, was a return to his brother... look, I'm not mad about that, but what the fuck about nameless blurry wife that we couldn't even confirm to be Eileen for some reason? What about everyone else?

And did Sam... keep hunting? Did he go to law school? Maybe there were background details that confirmed what he ended up doing with the rest of his life besides becoming a husband and father, but I didn't see evidence of it because I was too busy rolling my eyes out of my skull at how dumb this all was. So Sam just gets a generic "raking leaves in the yard" ending, like we saw for Dean at the end of season five, with nothing to challenge that. Even though we've seen why life outside of hunting, life without Dean, isn't satisfying for Sam, we're now supposed to accept it as how he spends the rest of his life, without seeing him put the work in to get there?

One thing I realized watching this episode is that it tries to play the middle. Like, with the Cas thing, they didn't want to make his noble gay sacrifice totally meaningless, so they couldn't just pop him back into the story, but they did give us one single throwaway line to reassure fans that he's not still in The Empty. So, people who don't give a shit about Cas can assume he's off being Jack's assistant and doesn't really interact with humans in Heaven. People who do give a shit about one of the show's main characters can assume that he has a home in Dean's little Heaven neighborhood too, and they all get to buddy around for eternity. People who don't like Eileen? Well, Sam married some nobody who we never got to meet. People who liked her? Well, you can't prove that wasn't Eileen, can you? Even Dean driving around in the impala waiting for Sam to die so he could finally be happy with his fucking soulmate or whatever. Time in Heaven is weird, Bobby says. It's metaphorical. You could assume that the driving montage was actually intercut with other moments, with Dean getting to see dear old mom (and dad, I guess, but ugh), and spending time with Bobby, with OG Charlie, with other familiar faces, and new ones as they finally reach their own deaths on Earth and come up to party with the rest of the gang.

Like, in a better show, in a world without Covid, maybe they had plans along these lines, to get more guest characters back and show Dean getting sappy hellos to a bunch of side characters in Heaven. To be quite honest, I would not have been mad about that. If you're going to make Dean die young and never give him the chance to find out who he could have been when the choices were all his own, which is, in case I haven't made that clear, a horrendous and insulting ending for his character... at the very least you could have given us the cheesiness of seeing him hug his friends in Heaven. Jeezus.

I want to hammer in this point one more time before I wrap up: they ended the show by saying that character development didn't matter. They had Dean's dying speech be a meta reference to the pilot episode of the show, they had him saying "it's always been you and me" and then they confirmed that with everything they had. Sam became a father, but did he have a happy life? Seems like he pined away for his dead brother for decades and then died. If the pilot had never happened, if Sam had stayed at Stanford and Dean had gone on hunting by himself, you know what would have happened? Sam would have had a "normal" life and married a woman and had a kid, I guess, and grown old, and Dean would have died fighting some vampires in a barn. This show has been on for fifteen years, and the ending did not honor anything about the journey the characters had been on.

A particularly egregious example is the early scene with the pie festival, where Sam is like "I'm sad about Cas and Jack" and Dean is like "if we don't go on living it won't honor their sacrifice" like... yeah, I get it, bringing people back from the dead time and time again is supposed to be a bad thing that Sam and Dean did for each other because they were selfish. So Sam giving Dean permission to go was supposed to be a growth moment. Sam and Dean accepting that Cas was gone and not even asking Jack to make sure he got sent to a happy eternity instead of oblivion, that's supposed to mean they've learned their lesson. And what a fucking lesson to leave things off on. Jesus, this is grim.

So like. As I try to figure out what to say at the end of this review, I will point out one glimmer of light in the darkness, which is that this finale isn't going to ruin the rewatchability of the show for me. I can still come back and re-watch without feeling like the whole thing is ruined by the ending. It's more than I can say for some other shows.

But honestly, if this was the ending we were going to get? Why the fuck not leave it open-ended? I did not enjoy 15x19 particularly well, but at least that episode left them on the open road, with a wide future ahead of them. Anything might have happened. It's their turn to write the story, right? Chuck is dead, the writer is "dead", the show is over, and now the possibilities are endless. That would have been an anticlimactic ending, for sure. But this ending just turns around and slaps the whole point of that first ending in the face and says "haha bitch you thought". They don't get to write their own stories. We see exactly how those stories end, and it's lame. Leave something to the imagination, yo. Leave it vague how and when they died, what their lives turned into. Show them in Heaven, getting to their peace at last, reuniting with their friends, including Cas. Put in a significant glance between Dean and Cas, and leave it to the internet to go wild about what it could mean. And never answer when fans ask "so what happened, when did they die? Did they keep hunting?" Just leave it vague. If this was the only ending they could come up with, I'd rather be left with questions.

This finale gets a low score from me, because they couldn't even pull on the right heartstrings to make me sentimental...

4/10

But the show as a whole? Well, it was a mess, and it had some seriously high highs and some devastatingly low lows. It's a bummer that the lowest low came in how they tried to wrap up the whole shebang, but like I said, this ending isn't going to ruin the whole fifteen-year run for me. We get to make up what happens next, and we can make Jack's new and improved Heaven our post-canon fix-it haven. I don't think there's ever been a show in my life quite like Supernatural. The fandom is so bonkers. The meta narrative of the show is so convoluted and twisty and goes in so many unexpected directions. I liked watching this show for its own sake, and also as like... an anthropologist trying to discover something about humanity and American values specifically. It wasn't always a pleasant experience, but it was one I know I'll never forget. My heart tells me to give the show as a whole a high score, representing the many, many hours of joy and dread and delight and horror I got over the near decade I've personally been watching. How do you wrap up fifteen years in a score out of ten?

9/10

[simpsonsnight]

Episode #659

WHAT THIS?

I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say D'oh Season 30 - Episode 20 | April 7, 2019 A pretty lame one. In this one Marge transforms the community theater production of Oklahoma into an original musical about Jedediah Springfield that’s in the vein of Hamilton/Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and they preform it on TV outdoors for some reason, and then it rains, and they have to improvise while the town floods. It’s so convoluted and not that fun. John Lithgow and his tight little mouth guest star. In the b-plot Homer attends a daddy-and-me class with Maggie that is lead by a hot young girl, which is why the class is packed. I don’t remember either of these plots ending in a satisfying way. The class ends. The play ends. All life on Earth ends. Who cares.

THE B-SODE: 

Baby Blues: “World's Greatest Dad” Season 1 - Episode 6 | August 11, 2000 Surprisingly I had a hell of a time finding a Hamilton parody. That might be on me. But the Homer story made me think of this episode of Baby Blues, where a Chuck E. Cheese type place has a hot lady singing the birthday song and it’s like a secret among dads. But in the Baby Blues episode she is basically like, a stripper. The Simpsons episode is more believable, she’s an attractive young woman who isn’t trying to sexualize herself and it’s more about the dads perving on her because of toxic masculinity reasons. But anyway the only thing toxic about masculinity is when I accidentally eat my own cum. That stuff belongs inside a broads snatch, face or butthole, baby!

[thewordreaper]

Apparently

(My 8th story for @short-story-slam . This takes place in my supervillain universe. This should work fine as an independent story but if you want know more about Grahitha look no further. And here are the rest of the stories in this universe.)

"Apparently, I am not allowed to use the word apparently."

"Really?"

"Apparently."

Moira sighed and put her head in her hands. "Grahitha we're going to talk about this at some point but please take your break now. Please."

Grahitha gave her a two-fingered salute as she walked out.

"You better be back before nine," Moira called after her. "Otherwise I'm cutting your pay."

It was Moira's favourite threat but so far she paid Grahitha more than was initially promised for each job. After every successful job that is. After failed jobs, Moira would usually steal a few coffees from Starbucks for the both of them. And as long as the reviews were over 3 stars they'd often watch a movie. Moira's girlfriend, Nikita would sometimes tag along which was great, because it meant Moira could discuss her idiotic ideas with someone else for once.

As she stepped out, Grahitha really wished she had a car. Not to get around in, because her villain pass gave her nearly unlimited free rides. No, it was because she had heard that Uber drivers got paid really well.

The problem was Moira was a pure villain, in it for philosophy, the values, and most importantly the show of it. She had even started taking magic lessons last year. She could do some pretty neat card tricks now. Grahitha wasn't against that. The downside was that Moira didn't have a ton of actual cash lying around, and actual cash was what Grahitha needed. All she had with her right now was change of about 18 rupees in her pocket.

That's why she was going to use this break wisely, instead of taking aesthetic pictures of her feet against various surfaces. She was going to work!

It had been easy enough in theory. However, certificates and awards given by the league of villains were only recognized for positions within it.  Plus she wasn't sure where her newfound prowess with lasers would get her a part-time job.

Thank god for relatives. Some uncle, she still wasn't sure how they were related, on her mother's side maybe, owned a clock shop. He said she could come help out twice a week, under supervision. Apparently 22  years old and 2 years equated to the same thing in his eyes. At least she wasn't forced into babysitting again. Her cousins were fine as long as she was the one encouraging their reckless behaviour and not the one responsible for the repercussion of it.

Even though it seemed rather impossible, Moira's current apartment was only two minutes from the shop. She was convinced something was going to go wrong, and like clockwork it did.

Running down the street at full speed was Andrew. Seeing her, he tried to stop but overbalanced, crashed into her and sent them both to the ground.

"For once in your life can you say hell like a normal person?"

"Ah hah! I don't believe I fall into the category of a normal person. I have powers." He said smugly.

"How wonderful that you remember now and not when we need it." Said Grahitha as she got up.

"I always remember that I have powers. I just sometimes forgot how they work." He said, sounding almost hurt.

"Isn't that practically the same thing?" Asked Grahitha as she held out a hand to help him off the ground.

"Where are you headed to now"

"Work."

He made a face. "Skip it for once. We'll go crash a video game tournament or something."

Unless you can pay me for the hour for that, no."

He made another face, more convoluted this time. "You know I'm broke."

"You're not the only one. Apparently, I'm the only one trying to remedy that."

As she walked on he called out. "Hey, I know about Zeher's new girlfriend."

Grahitha stopped, cursed quietly for a bit, the turned and walked back.

He grinned. "I knew that would do the trick. You can start by telling me what you know and I'll correct you."

"Apparently," She began and finished the entire thing in three minutes with only six apparently's, which was a new record.

"And what do you have to say?" She ended finally. He grinned even wider, which should not have been possible.

"I just knew he had a girlfriend. Thanks for the details."

Grahitha stared at him n outrage. "You are not going to get paid." She managed to say finally.

He looked confused. "What?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, I've been spending way too much time with Moira. What I meant to say was, fuck you, I'm never talking to you again."

"I'll make it up to you."

"By falling into a ditch,"

He slung an arm around her. "I'll steal something for you. Just remember to use it before I steal something else."

She rolled her eyes. "You can exchange it with something else before that stupid."

"Oh yeah." He laughed. "I forgot."

"So you can still steal just one thing at a time? At least it corresponds to the number of brain cells you have."

"I can steal stuff the normal way as well. My power is just a bonus."

"Fine." She relented, "But I need the actual notes."

"Why?"

She just grinned mysteriously, which neither of them knew was possible. "You'll see soon enough."

In a world of villains that was usually promising.

It was a nice moment, dramatic even, reeking of promise and possibilities. It was entirely destroyed by the empty space where her uncle's shop used to be. Grahitha pinched herself hard, to confirm this was in fact real. Imaginary items tended to crop up in her work a lot. Then for good measure, she stomped on Andrew's foot as well. He yelped and started hopping backwards on one foot. This did nothing to improve his already terrible sense of balance. Does it even have to be said? He fell down again. At least this time Grahitha was aware enough to step out of the way.

He painfully got up and waited for Grahitha to finish her talk with her uncle.

"Well?"

She glared at her phone. "He's gone on a chai break."

"How long do those usually last?"

"A day. Unless its festival time. Then it's a week." She turned her glare towards Andrew who nearly fell down again.

"He ordered me not to enter the shop without his supervision." She said, gesturing wildly, "That's not going to be a problem!"

Andrew cautiously walked around the empty lot and slowly stuck his foot into it. Seeing nothing happen, he stuck his tongue out as well.

"Do you want to taste the shop?" Demanded Grahitha.

"For all you know it might taste amazing. "You've never tasted a shop. You don't know"

"I was supposed to get rich during this break. Not get stuck babysitting again."

He stuck his tongue out at her.

"So that this isn't a total waste of time, can you at least steal something for me?"

"No problem. Just tell me what you want me to steal."

Grahitha sighed and cast her gaze around. "What did you steal last? I'd rather not have something dangerous replace what you steal now."

He shrugged. "I don't remember. I was with Zeher and he dared me to something. So it's probably something dumb."

"If it turns out to be a pigeon again, I will dig a ditch for you to fall into."

"That was one time!"

Grahitha ignored him and pointed to an extremely fancy bike parked nearby.

"Think you could steal that?"

"I can steal anything." He cast his hand out and pretended to snatch the bike and place it in his pocket.

Within a second it disappeared and was replaced by a shop.

There was a looming silence.

"So that's what it was." Said Andrew finally.

"How did you forget you stole a shop?" Shrieked Grahitha.

"In my defence, he had asked me to steal a clock. I happened to mishear him. So I stole a shop."

"That answers nothing." She stared at the relocated shop, a sense numbness creeping over her. "He's never going to let me work here again. Oh god, I need to go back to babysitting. You are not getting paid."

"Neither are you. Unless you sell the bike he offered?" He offered. "And look at the bright side. I finally remembered to put in new batteries in my hearing aid."

She sighed and let him sling his arm over her shoulders again. She had found a forgotten hundred rupee note which was a success, no matter how small. Apparently, she was learning more from Moira than she thought. She smiled as they headed to the nearest cafe, intent on breaking Moira's curfew. She could be content on living of stolen coffees, last-minute solutions, and threats of not getting paid. Apparently, today was a day to spend all money away. Apparently.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Taglist:  @velvetlighthouse @ohlooksheswriting @madsaialik @purpleshadows1989 @lacklusterswirl @focusdumbass @livingthelovelylife

[aidaronan]

Hi anon, 

This will also be long, because of who i am as a person so there is def a cut. (Also for anyone reading it who cares about season 8 spoilers, there will be some of those.) Hey, I totally feel you on being sad and bummed out. I’m sad and bummed out too. I’ve been a fan of TWD since 2010. I’ve been writing fics for it for five years now. I’ve written over half a million words for this fandom alone, and that’s just ao3. It doesn’t include my half-finished drafts and random drabbles in PMs and tumblr shorts, etc. I’ve gotten to know myself as a writer because of the show, and that will never not be true.  I don’t know what it seems like from the outside looking in, but me falling out of love with this show isn’t something that’s just happening willy nilly. It’s been a long process that started back with Glenn or maybe even with Denise, and I’m not just skipping my way out of the fandom throwing confetti like “bye bitches, have fun!” For me, it actually has little to do with Andrew leaving (not that it really HELPS) and everything to do with realizing that the show I was actually watching wasn’t the show I wanted to watch. 

For the past few seasons, I watched TWD on hope alone. I’m not talking about hope for Rickyl or even Desus. I’m not an idiot, and I knew the show that constantly kills off the other half of queer couples, minimizes the screen time of queer characters, or shoves them to the side until they’re needed as Maggie’s GBF isn’t gonna put their fan fave in a relationship with another man. 

I knew my ships would never sail. My hope was more for payoffs. When there would be a long, convoluted mess of a story, when there would be a bunch of bottle eps where we didn’t even see our MC, I would tell myself like... okay, this is a mess, but I think the writers are trying to get from point a to point b and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, it really did pay off. Sometimes we got the Family Murder Montage or the Rickyl Hug and it was fucking glorious. 

But the scale, for me, remained highly imbalanced. More and more, we weren’t getting the character interactions that made us fall in love with the show. And, the biggest issue of all for me, well, Negan got to live. 

There are probably people who will disagree with me. I know there are longtime  comic readers that wanted to see him do whatever he does in those things. 

But when I’ve already got to see a fascist piece of shit get away with murder in real life, I really have no interest in seeing the same on my television. Negan’s rise to power was rough. That whole half-season between Glenn’s death and the Rickyl hug was horrible to watch because Negan was the epitome of a toxic male in power, which was... you know... samesies here in the real world, yo. 

I watched anyway. Why? For one, I knew the writers had no way of knowing stuff in real life would go down the way it did when they wrote those eps. Two, that same fucking hope. 

It was, admittedly, a very naive hope. Scott was all about Negan from the second he showed up. The show became more about him than about anything else and everything else fell by the wayside. It was the Negan show, and I will forever think they missed a huge opportunity by not taking advantage of the parallels between reality and fiction to give the audience some catharsis. Because watching Rick slit Negan’s throat was the most satisfying few seconds of my life. Until it wasn’t. Hell, even if I believed Negan would actually spend life rotting in prison, that’d be fine, but I know better than to hope anymore. Finally, I learned. 

And well, that brings me to my next point. The TWD fandom has a toxic mascuIinity problem on screen and off. I don’t have a problem with people being fans of Negan. In fact, I’m a fan of Negan. Jeffrey is a talented actor and he’s a sometimes-fun-to-watch asshole. I’ve never been one to berate people for liking the bad guy, because it’s fiction and it’s okay to find the antagonist compelling since that’s sort of what writers try to do? Conversely though, it’s not okay to apologize for their behavior. Which this fandom does often. Re: “Negan is not a rapist.” Yes. Yes, he fucking is. 

And of course there are the real life men the fandom likes to apologize for, which is far worse than giving a pass to some fictional jackhole. This fandom has seen two public incidents where men got called out. Both times, I’ve had to watch friends jump in to defend the indefensible. Both times, I’ve had to re-evaluate my friendships and cut people away. These aren’t just random internet friends. These are real life friends I have known for years and hang out with at cons and fandom events. I won’t get into how painful it is to have a bunch of friends tell you that you can’t trust them, but that’s how it feels. Every time. And it’s exhausting. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of assumptions about why people are jumping ship with TWD. Some of those assumptions may be true for some people, but for a lot of us it’s a lot more complicated than one bad season or even Andy himself. This was a slow death for me that came from both the show and the fandom itself. An inside and out situation. Like a rope burning at both ends...the fire just finally met in the middle. 

I understand that it might suck to watch a fandom die, especially if you’re new and want to get into it and wait where’s everyone going? But at the end of the day, fandom participation is a hobby. It’s meant to be fun and enjoyable. I was no longer having fun or enjoying myself. And I’m just one person. Even if I put my head down and stuck it out until I hated myself, I couldn’t save the fandom by myself. I’m not that good. 

With all that said, I’ll always love the earlier seasons of this show. I’ll always love Rickyl in any form whether they’re just next level besties or so in love that they feel like clawing off their own skin just to get a little closer. I’ll always have my faves from the cast who I will support in other endeavors. I’ll always have fond memories from cons and stuff and things. I’ll always love Andrew Lincoln’s legs in those goddamn jeans.  And you know, all the fandom content you already love isn’t going anywhere. The great thing about fandom is that you can come in late and still enjoy yourself. And there are definitely still people sticking it out in Rickyl and Desus. And as I said answering the last anon, I’ve still got WIPs to finish and I wouldn’t put it past me to still write the occasional thing. Plus, there are tons of people trying to give AK a chance, and maybe she’ll blow on the coals a bit. 

Also I don’t see why people changing fandoms/ships means that you can’t be friends with them anymore. I mean, you might not be able to scream about future seasons of TWD, but you can talk about other stuff. Like food or space. Space is pretty cool. Also, you know, you probably can still scream about past seasons of TWD. We all know Daryl has been in love with Rick Grimes for eight-going-on-nine fucking seasons and being mostly out of the fandom will not change this opinion that I hold with my very soul. 

In conclusion, it’s okay to feel sad about something you love seemingly falling apart, but in the end people are gonna do what makes them happy, and that’s okay too. 

[artificialqueens]

Better Than Revenge, Chapter 3 (Multi) - Joley

Chapter Summary: Rosé learns Gigi, Symone, and Denali’s revenge origin stories

ao3 link

Woodstock, IL — 2016

Gigi took a deep breath as she stared at herself in the mirror. She could do this, it was fine. Every time her suspicions or confusion would bubble up, she forced them back down. Hannah was nice, she was different from the other popular girls. She didn’t see the ‘weird art lesbian’ with the braces and thick-rimmed glasses, who rarely got pop culture references post-1989, at least, that’s how she made her feel.

“I’ll text you in the morning,” she assured her mother as she threw her bag over her shoulder. “It’ll be fine, I’m just hanging out with a friend.” She was out to her mom, of course, that was her biggest ally. But she wasn’t ready to tell her that the head cheerleader had taken an interest in her. Maybe when and if they became official. Until then, she shook off the last of her nerves and drove to her house, only pulled from her thoughts by the time she was sitting on Hannah’s bed.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Hannah cooed, batting her lashes and resting her hand on Gigi’s thigh.

If Gigi hadn’t been so blinded by her crush, she might’ve thought Hannah was laying it on a little thick, but she couldn’t act like she didn’t enjoy the attention. “Me too, a-about you, I mean. Sorry, I’m just nervous…”

“How come? I didn’t come on too strong over text, did I?”

“No, no I liked it, it’s just… I’m a virgin, like, I’ve only ever kissed before,” she confessed, her cheeks flushing rosy pink. She had talked a big game over text, but being faced with the chance of starting a physical relationship brought her back to reality.

Hannah pouted, rubbing Gigi’s thigh as she thought, letting her hand inch higher. “Well, you’ve got fantasies, don’t you? I know you’ve masturbated before. What do you think about while you touch yourself?”

Gigi hesitated, chewing on her bottom lip. The other girl wasn’t wrong, she did know what she liked, could conjure up vivid imagery to get herself aroused, but she had never said any of it out loud. “I like powerful, confident women. I guess that’s something that drew me to you,” she started, “I wanna just… give up control, be dominated.”

“Really? Tell me more,” Hannah prompted, kissing along her neck and jaw and slowly tugging Gigi’s shirt off in an attempt to coax her to continue.

When Hannah didn’t seem deterred by her confession, Gigi started to relax. “It’s just, I don’t know, I always feel the need to be in control of my life and with sex, I just wanna let go and give up that power.”

“So like, what would you want someone to do to you?” she asked, a smirk tugging at the corners of her lips.

She bit down on her lip. “Um… tie me up, spank me, choke me, and I know it’s kind of intense but maybe something like cnc or—” the incessant buzzing of her phone distracted her and, concerned it might be an urgent call or text from home, she took her phone out. “Sorry, one sec.”

It wasn’t from home, she had two missed calls from her best friend, Crystal, followed by several texts.

Crystal: GIGI STOP Crystal: SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! Crystal: She’s broadcasting you on IG live! Crystal: We can see and hear everything…

Gigi’s face fell, her first instinct to pull her shirt back on. Then she slowly looked up and in front of her, that’s when she saw it, nestled between stuffed animals — Hannah’s phone with an instagram live going. She didn’t say anything, just ran out of the house as fast as her legs would take her and through her tears drove right to Crystal’s house. That was when the two of them formed their plot.

In and of itself, it was simple. Gigi waited one day until Hannah was away for a cheer competition and went to her house. “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Andrews, but I think I left some of my homework in Hannah’s room, she just said to let you know so I can run in and grab it.” Once inside, she found exactly what she was looking for, sliding Hannah’s diary into her backpack and went right back out.

“This feels very Mean Girls, I love it,” Crystal remarked as they taped page after page of the diary on lockers, walls, anywhere they could.

“Well, plan B was to go the Heathers route, so let’s just hope it works.”

And to say it worked was an understatement. As it turned out, Hannah had written things far more incriminating, and because it came from someone of her social ranking, it made everyone immediately lose interest in Gigi’s livestream scandal, and she graduated with the anonymity she needed for survival.

Present Day

“I’ll be honest with you,” Rosé remarked, “it’s kinda hard to picture you as an ugly duckling, especially the way you described it.” Gigi was too pretty, too perfect. Something didn’t add up.

Gigi got out her phone and scrolled through her photos until she found one from her senior year. “Believe it, doll,” she said as she held her phone up. She watched with an amused expression as Rosé looked from her phone, to her, and back with her eyes wide and mouth agape. “Braces off, lasik, learned a lot about how to dress while going to FIDM, which is where I met Symone, who helped fill in the blanks.”

“And made sure she got to do all them things she listed to that bitch without feeling ashamed about it,” Symone added with a smirk, draping her arm around Gigi and pulling her close, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

“Why don’t you tell her your story next, baby?” Gigi prompted.

Conway, AR — 2014

Symone watched her sister throw her bag over her shoulder and start to sneak out the window. “Look, I ain’t snitching or nothing, but I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

She and her sister, Lala, were close, sometimes referring to themselves as twins – they were only ten months apart, in the same grade at school. And until the summer after sophomore year, they had the same group of friends. But the crowd Lala ran with now just rubbed her the wrong way.

“You worry too much,” Lala brushed it off. “I’ll be fine, in bed by morning like nothing happened.”

But when Symone got a collect call two hours later, she found out things were far from fine. She drove down to the county jail as fast as she could without getting pulled over herself. Luckily bail was a mere fifty dollars, but once she got her sister back in the car, she looked at her incredulously. “What the fuck happened?”

“One of ‘em brought weed, another brought booze, but when the cops rolled up on us, they said it all was mine. And who was they gonna believe, me or three white kids?” Lala sniffled, wiping her eyes. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me,” she whispered.

“I don’t either,” Symone admitted quietly, frustrated at her inability to come up with an immediate solution. “But we’re gonna do our best to get you out of this, okay?”

The best they could do wasn’t easy. It involved a lot of legal maneuvering, meetings with one person in a suit after another. The end result wasn’t ideal, but it was far better than what could have been. Lala was fined three hundred dollars and put on thirty days of probation. In and of itself, it didn’t seem so bad, but the residual consequences took their toll.

“I lost my scholarship, ‘mone. That was my ticket into college,” Lala sighed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know I’m getting off with a slap on the wrist, but I really ain’t thrilled about taking out student loans,” she sat down on the floor beside the bed, head leaning against it. “Or maybe I’ll start with community college, I dunno. It just fucking sucks that they all got off with warnings.”

Symone’s brows knitted together, her lips pressed into a fine line. “Don’t you worry baby,” she said after a moment, “they gon’ face consequences one way or another.”

It had taken most of spring break, but Symone finally had all of the pieces for her plan. “Not the most convoluted thing in the world, but it’ll get the job done,” she mused.

Lala looked at her sister, then at her desk and back. “Do I even wanna know where the hell you got coke from?”

“No, you do not.”

Getting the drugs was the hard part. Getting into school early to plant the drugs in the lockers of Lala’s former friends was far easier, as was leaving an ‘anonymous tip’ from a ‘concerned student’ on the principal’s desk.

“God, I wish I could’ve seen them get hauled off in cop cars,” Lala remarked as she and Symone drove home from school. The three students were quietly escorted out of class and arrested, the school wanting to bring as little attention as possible. “Shame that they rich daddies will still get them off lightly.”

Symone sighed and nodded. “Sure, but they’re still gonna get something, which is more than what they got when they threw you under the bus. Bet they’re gonna think twice before they let someone else take the fall for them.”

Her sister smiled softly and shook her head. “You really ain’t gotta do all that for me, you know?”

“I know,” she hummed, “not gonna stop me, though.”

Present Day

“Wow, that’s both selfless and hardcore,” Rosé remarked with an impressed nod. “Did she ever find out where you got the coke from?”

Symone laughed and shook her head. “Nah, that secret I’m taking to the grave.”

Rosé jokingly put her hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, fair enough,” she chuckled. After a moment, she turned her attention to Denali. “That just leaves you, princess,” she remarked, a slight smirk tugging at her lips. “What’s your claim to infamy?”

Denali tossed her hair off her shoulder and grinned softly. “Who, me?” she cooed, fluttering her lashes. “Well, it is kind of an interesting story…”

Nicky rolled her eyes and tossed one of the couch pillows at her head. “Stop flirting and get on with it already.”

Fairbanks, AK — 2011

Denali groaned when the sound of loud footsteps racing up the stairs pulled her from her quasi-asleep state, then pulled a pillow over her head when the door swung open.

“What the hell are you still doing in bed when the qualifiers are in two hours?” her friend, Kahmora, asked with incredulous horror. She yanked the covers off of her, but stepped back in concern when she finally caught sight of Denali’s face. “Oh god, you look like shit.”

She frowned and rolled over to face away from her. “I feel like I died and was in the process of being reanimated, then killed again,” she lamented. “It’s probably food poisoning… or maybe swine flu came back, I dunno.”

“Did you eat anything unusual?”

Denali furrowed her brows as she wracked her brain. “I mean, Tara gave me those brownies and I had one, but when she said they were ‘special’, I just thought she meant they had weed in them, but that sure as hell isn’t it.” With as much energy as she could muster, she sat upright. “Oh my god, do you think she poisoned me?”

Kahmora arched her brow. “I think that’s a bit much, even for her. Do I think she put something like a laxative in there so it’d take you out long enough that you couldn’t beat her out in the international qualifiers? Yeah, probably. She’s a cunt.”

The skater scowled, her jaw clenched. “She’s a dead cunt,” she corrected, then suddenly shot out of bed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she muttered as she raced to the bathroom yet again.

There wasn’t an obvious revenge plan for Denali. She knew that nothing she did would get her spot in the competition, and she wondered if it was even worth it. But her pettiness and spite won out and she began planning out her course of action.

“Remember,” she was saying, “if all else fails, we go the Tonya Harding route.”

Kahmora sighed. “For the last time, you are not whacking Tara’s kneecaps, now let’s go.” Despite some pouting from Denali, they went to get the gears turning in their plan. They got to the ice rink and slipped into the locker room without being noticed by Tara, who was in the middle of practice.

Denali picked the lock and took out Tara’s change of clothes. Then she reached into her own bag and pulled on latex gloves and a plastic bag containing several leaves of poison ivy. She turned the shirt, pants, and socks inside out and firmly rubbed the leaves against the fabric, making sure she left as little fabric uncovered as possible. “She’s lucky I’m merciful or I’d rub it on her panties too,” she remarked offhandedly.

Kahmora tilted her head as she watched her. “Do you actually think it’ll take her out of the competition?” she asked as her friend put the leaves and gloves into the ziploc bag.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I mean, it’s possible, probable really, that the constant itching might make it too difficult for her to skate. But this is more about getting even with her. I might not ever get another chance to compete for internationals. She’s lucky the only retribution she’s getting is a few weeks of itchy blisters.”

“Otherwise you’d Tonya Harding her?”

Denali nodded brightly. “Exactly! Now come on, we have to get rid of the evidence.” And with that, they scurried out of the locker room as inconspicuously as they’d entered it and threw out the evidence in a trash can several blocks over.

When the news broke that Tara had withdrawn from the competition due to ‘unexpected physical problems’, Denali did her best to feign shock and didn’t celebrate until she and Kahmora were alone.

“So, what do you wanna do now?” Kahmora asked.

Denali tilted her head in thought, then smirked. “Let’s go get brownies.”

Present Day

“Personally, I still think you should’ve busted her knees,” Mik mused offhandedly. “Like, I bet you would’ve figured out a way to get away with it, you conniving bitch,” he teased.

Denali shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s not very original and it’d look a lot more suspicious on my end.”

“I think it was pretty badass,” Rosé offered, making the other woman smile which, in turn, made her heart flutter — something she chose to actively ignore. Instead, she let all of their stories sink in. None of their reasons for revenge were out of line, none of their victims undeserving. And none of the consequences were as severe as some of the things she had seen in her time. “You all really know what you’re doing, huh?”

“We wouldn’t have been able to keep this up for three years if we didn’t,” Jan replied. “We had all of the potential on our own, but we make a difference together, and then we added Jackie to tie up the loose ends. It’s been smooth sailing from there.”

“Yeah, and now Jackie ties you up instead,” Nicky teased, earning an eye roll in response.

Rosé watched the group interact with a fond smile. She had assumed they all got along to be working together for as long as they have been, but she hadn’t anticipated them truly behaving like a family. It was a stark contrast to the constant coldness and curtness she had grown accustomed to, both in her previous career and in the environment she grew up in. She only hoped it would make the tasks ahead that much easier for them.

[aion-rsa]

New Netflix Christmas Movies in 2020 Ranked from Best to Worst

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Netflix is doing its level best to eat everyone else’s entertainment lunch, and the holiday movie game is no exception. Just a few short years after planting the flag that was the cult megahit A Christmas Prince, the streamer has more offerings than ever, including some sequels to their top-notch 2018 productions. We break down some of this winter’s already released heavy hitters so you know what to watch and what to skip.

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

Available Now

This star-studded Christmas musical is the most magical of the bunch. Picture The Wiz meets Willy Wonka, with John Legend as a producer. Forest Whitaker stars as a down-and-out toymaker who has lost his touch and everything else that makes life special: his wife (Sharon Rose) has passed and his daughter (Tony winner Anika Noni Rose, Little Fires Everywhere, The Princess and the Frog) moved away, estranged. Years earlier he created a unique matador toy that comes to life (voiced by a delightfully villainous Ricky Martin, who has a lot of fun with a wandering accent). The naughty toy and the toymaker’s apprentice (Kegan-Michael Key) left with the toymaker’s book of ideas, putting him out of business and making themselves mega-rich.

Things really get going when the toymaker’s granddaughter (bonafide star Madalen Mills, who I can’t believe is a newcomer) comes to town and she, along with a neighborhood boy with aspirations of being a great toy inventor, try to save the toymaker from himself. There’s singing, dancing, baroque steampunk galore, earnest lessons learned, and magic that’s something like science. It’s the kind of movie the phrase “family fun adventure” was invented to describe.

Clocking in at more than two hours, this one could tighten up the runtime a bit, but that just means there are plenty of safe opportunities to refill your eggnog or run to the restroom. I dare you to watch this movie and not feel the holiday spirit.

Operation Christmas Drop

Available Now

In order to protect her boss’ interests, congressional aide Erica (our girl Kat Graham/Bonnie Bennet from Vampire Diaries!) is sent to a military base in the Pacific over Christmas to find excess spending in order to justify budget cuts. Her biggest target is Operation Christmas Drop, a real-life program where service members from the U.S., Japan, and Australia drop presents (and life-saving supplies) to remote surrounding islands. Hyper-focused Erica knows there’s a possible promotion on the line and she has to work harder than a bunch of white dudes named Matt back in DC in order to get it, putting her at odds with the base’s own Santa, Capt. Andrew Jantz (Andrew Ludwid, Vikings, The Hunger Games). 

Any time one of these movies has a protagonist of color, it’s unfortunately notable, though Netflix (with the exception of the Christmas Prince franchise) creates more diverse offerings than just about anyone else. In addition to directly engaging with how much harder the Ericas of the world have to work to get their due, Operation Christmas Drop also highlights the people who live on Guam and the surrounding islands, as the first full-length major studio movie filmed there. 

Featuring the old favorite romance trope “enemies to lovers,” a tropical Christmas, and some of the real-life people who make the actual Christmas Drop possible, Operation Christmas Drop is an ideal holiday romcom. It’s still goofy at times and heart-fluttery at others, and of course everything will work out in the end, but it’s better written than most of what’s on TV and casting Kat Graham is always a good choice.

The Princess Switch, Switched Again

Available Now

It’s not Christmas until you’ve seen Vanessa Hudgens chloroform herself. The sequel to 2018’s The Princess Switch, The Princess Switch, Switched Again, rightly knows that Kevin (Nick Sagar) is a better leading man than the walking melba toast that is Prince Edward (Sam Palladio). When we last saw the sous chef dad with the six-pack abs who likes sappy Christmas movies and wearing the hell out of sweaters, he was making out with Lady Margaret. In the two years since then, they’ve split up, the king of Montenaro has passed away, and Margaret’s cousin who was next in line for the throne has abdicated, which means Lady Margaret will be crowned on Christmas. Naturally. 

The Princess Switch franchise has found the sweet spot between “painfully bad” and “so bad it’s good.” The latest iteration adds what the first lacked – a worthy villain. Vanessa Hudgens gleefully vamps around as a Kardashian-esque cousin of Lady Margaret’s who goes after the Montenaran crown. It’s fun to watch Hudgens be bad, and it adds a requisite layer of novelty to the proceedings. 

There’s also a little crossover moment from the Christmas Prince franchise. It’s very quick and I don’t think anyone even says a word, but it’s a fun one for fans. It also probably means that in the world of the NCCU (Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe), The Christmas Prince movies are documentaries, which is more than I can handle. 

It’s a rarity, but with The Princes Switch, the sequel is even better than the original. The Princess Switch 2 knows exactly what kind of movie it is – fun, silly, romantic, distracting, a purveyor of both great and terrible fashion, and maybe a little eye roll-inducing. Perfection. 

Holidate

Available Now

If you like a little spice with your sugar, Holidate is the right holiday rom-com. Netflix is already the anti-Hallmark in this category, trading judgey and Jesus-y for a sense of humor and soundtracks worth bookmarking on Spotify. And Holidate doubles down on the snark and PG-13-ness of it all.

Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey star as Sloane and Jackson, two singles sick of shrugging off a million questions and setups throughout the holiday season. The cast is rounded out with Frances Fisher (Watchmen, Titanic), Jessica Capshaw from Grey’s Anatomy, SNL’s Alex Moffat, Jake Manley from The Order, and Manish Dayal of Halt and Catch Fire and The Hundred-Foot Journey, proving he deserves to play a romantic lead.

Taking inspiration from Sloane’s perpetually single Aunt Susan (Kristin Chenoweth, who gets away with being so much weirder than anyone else ever could thanks to her many charms), Luke and Sloane go out as platonic dates to a year’s worth of holidays, starting with New Year’s. That also means that while we see two Christmas’, the movie spends a large chunk of time on the other holidays – St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, etc – so this one doesn’t always feel the most Christmas-y. 

Read more

TV

Christmas Movies and TV Specials: Full 2020 Schedule

By Den of Geek Staff

Movies

The Best Alternative Christmas movies

By Mark Harrison

This flick may end up being too tart (or just plain awkward) for some, and the repeated use of the word “pussy” during what’s ostensibly a Christmas movie is not for everyone. But if all the sappiness of the season is feeling too saccharine and you’re sick of being seated at the kids table or getting grilled about when you’ll finally get married, Holidate might just hit the spot.

The Christmas Chronicles 2

Available Now

The follow-up to one of Netflix’s best family holiday offerings, The Christmas Chronicles 2 brings back Kurt Russell’s cool Santa for a sequel that has 100 percent more wormholes and time travel than fun side characters and snappy jokes. There’s a much larger role for Goldie Hawn’s Mrs. Claus, who is something of a kind-hearted Christmas sorceress. Kate (Darby Camp, Big Little Lies) is now staring down the barrel of teenagerhood and spending Christmas in Cancun while her mom makes heart-eyes at a new guy, who brings with him his 10 year-old son, Jack (Jahzir Bruno).

Big brother Teddy (Judah Lewis) moves into the backdrop as Kate and Jack go on an adventure in the North Pole, squaring off with one of Santa’s former elves, Belsnickel (Julian Dennison, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2).

While it’s always nice to revisit a favorite – and Christmas Chronicles is so much about the best aspects of a family movie – the sequel loses a lot of that appeal. Without a clear and compelling story to drive the plot forward like the original had, Christmas Chronicles 2 lags significantly throughout and it’s unclear when the adventure starts, what it’s goals are, and then the movie even struggles to wrap up as a result.

It doesn’t help that this movie is bogged down by some convoluted mythology tying the elves to Christianity via the Star of Bethlehem that low-key paints Santa as a Moses-like figure.

The musical number does bring things back to life for a while. This time it’s in a 1990-era Logan airport in Boston with Darlene Love singing a duet with Santa instead of Stevie Van Zandt, though they are singing his song, “The Spirit of Christmas.”

This makes for Darlene Love’s second appearance in the NCCU; The first was Holiday Rush, where she played Rush’s Aunt Jo. I’m ignoring the fact that she’s credited as “Denise” in Christmas Chronicles 2 and choosing to believe that Aunt Jo worked a desk for Pan Am, TSA or whoever in the ‘90s to pay the bills while waiting for her true calling as a singer to take off.

Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square

Available Now

In between funding a possible cure for the coronavirus and trying to solve illiteracy, Dolly Parton found time to star in and write 14 original songs for a Christmas special. The great Debbie Allen of Fame fame (more recently, Dr. Catherine Avery on Grey’s Anatomy) directs this all-singing, all-dancing Christmas musical, bringing her multi-talented prowess to bear. That means this thing follows the musical tropes more closely than those of a typical Christmas TV movie, even though it also falls into the Hallmark penchant for religiosity that feels a bit off.

The best parts of Christmas on the Square are all the toe-tapping small-town songs about the townsfolk banding together to stop local Scrooge named Regina (played with adroit dry wit by Christine Baranski) from selling off their town. There’s a pastor named Christian (obviously) and a cute kid who gets hurt but only in a way that’s dramatic and leaves her still very cute and able to join in the final town celebration. That’s the kind of silly holiday fun we all signed up for. 

Regina’s best friend Margeline (Jenifer Lewis, The Princess and The Frog, Black-ish) is a scene-stealer and the back half of the movie is lesser for her relative absence. The numbers get a little less zippy and the movie feels a lot longer than roughly an hour and a half. Somewhere along the way, we get the sort of slutshame-y backstory of Baranski’s character, whose first-ever high school dance resulted in a pregnancy which she (obviously) carried to term. Her father took her baby away from her while she was crying in the delivery room, giving it up for adoption. Pretty intense for the genre! 

It’s not like the movie becomes a portrait of gritty realism from there–Dolly Parton is definitely a floating, glowing, rhinestone-encrusted angel, although that’s closer to what folks come for. An underutilized Jeanine Mason (Roswell, NM) and Matthew Johnson (Songland) – whose voice is arresting – add to the fun, but there’s no two ways around it: It’s an odd little movie.

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[irregularjohnnywiggins]

(in response to @mirrorfalls question on my favourite Moriarty, which I answered... then deleted. Because I’m good at tumblr.)

To answer the question of what my favourite versions of Moriarty is, we need to figure out what, imo, makes a ‘good’ Moriarty. For my money, there are three aspects that make Canon Moriarty interesting:

Intellect: probably obvious, but Moriarty is an opposite to the World’s Greatest Detective, so his intellect, like Holmes’, is key to his character.

Familiarity: the phrase ‘everything I have to say has already crossed your mind/then possibly my answer’s crossed yours’ is a cliche of Holmes/Moriarty interactions, but it’s a damn good cliche for a reason. Holmes and Moriarty should have a healthy respect for each other, that’s true, but more importantly they should have this sense of, as Neil Gaiman once said about him and Terry Pratchett: ‘You’re another one of me! I didn’t realize they made another one!’

Savagery: Seems weird given the other two points, but a good Moriarty should always have this point that, if pushed off, attempts to, say, push a guy off a waterfall. If my favourite Holmes is a bleeding heart barely pretending to be an unfeeling machine, Moriarty is barely hiding his inner savage behind the mask of congeniality.

So, with that out of the way, my most interesting (not objectively worse/best, just the ones I feel deserve attention) Moriarty’s from worst to best.

10: BBC Sherlock (Andrew Scott)

Let’s break this down: he’s not 1 because no-one in Sherlock is smart, it’s just Moffat trying to trick the audience with lack of explanation. He’s not 2 because Moffat is so obsessed with twists that Sherlock and Moriarty spend most of their time twisting each other so much that there is no time given to their familiarity between them. He’s not 3 because he’s not savage - he’s a poor man’s Heath Ledger’s Joker, but boring and with more homoerotic subtext. He’s not Moriarty. He’s just boring.

9: Elementary Moriarty (Natalie Dormer)

I really wanted to place her higher because I honestly love Natalie Dormer’s version, but whilst she covers the first two points the focus is more on her torrid romance with Watson Holmes, which is all well and good but does rather detract from her Moriarty-ness.

8: Young Sherlock Holmes (Anthony Higgins)

This version of Moriarty, like this version of Sherlock, is... interesting. We don’t really see his savagery, but the entire movie works to build up his relationship with Holmes. I could have done with a little less racism, though. And a little more actual Egyptian Moriarty in a movie that makes him Egyptian.

7: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

1 and 3, mostly - as interesting as the idea that he’s a former British agent turned actual bad guy is, that’s the disadvantage of removing Holmes from the story - it’s like a Joker story without Batman, Moriarty doesn’t really have anyone to contrast with, and the two people who can contrast with him - Mycroft and Fu Manchu - never share a second of pagetime with him. And yet you can only do Holmes v Moriarty so many times, so how do you make Moriarty interesting without Holmes? Well...

6: Newman’s Moriarty

...You make them the contrast of another character, that’s what. In all seriousness, Newman’s version of Moriarty might not get much to do, but man does he feel good.

The premise of Hound of the D’Urbervilles, i.e. Sherlock Holmes but Moriarty instead, is brilliant at giving us not just how similar Holmes and Moriarty are, but how different - a personal highlight being Moriarty telling Moran that of course he didn’t figure out Moran’s backstory using deductive reasoning, why would he waste his time, he researched everything about him before he entered the room. 

I’m not entirely sure if Newman’s Moriarty is savage as opposed to increasingly petty, but his relationship with Moran hints that whilst Holmes looks at people and sees problems to be fixed, Moriarty looks at people and sees tools to be exploited, and that is a pretty sweet contrast that isn’t really explored in other versions.

5: Brett Moriarty (Eric Porter) + Merrison Moriarty (Michael Pennington)

Moving on to a classic Moriarty, whilst I don’t really think Porter adds anything the same way Brett does, he is still a really engaging portrayal. The bit where Holmes and Moriarty exchange a look on the Reichenbach Falls? Brilliant, and it wouldn’t be half as good without his particular portrayal, which stems far closer to the canon than previous ones on this list.

The BBC Radio adaptation is practically tied with this because they’re extremely similar - both attempt to follow canon as closely as possible, whilst adding their own twists. I do prefer the radio version, though, because we get some hint as to how Moriarty’s organization works and how much of a threat Moriarty is. This is actually enhanced by it being radio - whereas Brett’s version has to have Moriarty enter the room because it’s a visual medium, the radio adaptation can just have Holmes playing the violin, suddenly stopping and then revealing Moriarty’s been in the room this whole time. It’s really good, is what I’m getting at. But speaking of canon...

4: Canon

@mirrorfalls said in their original question that no version of Moriarty since the canon has ever actualized the reptilian qualities of Moriarty, and I can’t help but agree. It’s really interesting that Moriarty is linked to an animal whilst Holmes compares his body in another story to ‘a mere appendix’ - something intrinsically human even as it is superficially worthless. The idea of Moriarty in this version - calm, cold, but liable to snap at any point - is quite simply perfect, and the only thing that doesn’t rank him higher is that, in the same way William Hartnell doesn’t rank as one of my favourite Doctors, what it means to be Moriarty has changed so much since his inception. I don’t think Conan Doyle ever intended Moriarty to have the staying power that he did - he’s a plot device, pure and simple. Other authors added to that, and so we’ve got the version of Moriarty which lasts today.

3: Light Yagami

...Hear me out.

No, Light isn’t exactly a traditional Moriarty. For one thing, I’m fairly certain Moriarty doesn’t have a god complex, or a magic notebook that kills people, or a snarky apple loving Death God as a sidekick (Though, who knows, give Moran an apple fixation...) But, there’s a reason I recommend at least the first half of Death Note for anyone wanting a great Holmes/Moriarty story... It’s really good at outlining exactly what makes Moriarty and Holmes so interesting: Mind Games. Mind Games galore.

Watch, say, L’s introduction. Now imagine Holmes challenging Moriarty in the same manner. Hell, Light definitely ticks all of the points of a good Moriarty in this scene alone: he anticipates the police noticing him, he builds such a good rapport with L without either of them actually meeting that I remember losing my shit when I first watched Death Note and realized that this episode would feature the two of them actually meeting face to face, and despite his apparently calm demeanor at first, he immediately kills Lind L Tailor the instant he says something he doesn’t like. Just... he might not be a ‘true’ Moriarty, but he’s a damn good interpretation even if that wasn’t the goal. Speaking of not exactly ‘true’ interpretations...

2: Professor Ratigan (Vincent Fucking Price)

No objections, I trust?

Really, though, I wasn’t someone who watched Great Mouse Detective as a kid - I first watched it about two years ago, and god damn is this a good movie. True Story, when thinking about which Moriarty’s belong on this list, I immediately jumped to Ratigan, because he’s brilliant. He ticks all the boxes and then some - His intellect may not be his primary trait, but it’s still there, and his rapport with Basil is the stuff of legend at this point. And, to be brutally honest, Ratigan is the reason savagery is on this list in the first place. That fight on Big Ben? No version of Reichenbach has yet surpassed it, and it is everything great about this version of that core concept. Really, everything about Ratigan is a summation of how to do a brilliant Moriarty.

So, who can top the World’s Greatest Criminal Mind? Well...

1: RDJ Moriarty (Jared Harris)

Yes, I know, I was surprised to.

I was around during the Sherlock/RDJ films strife. I remember how much these films were lambasted for being ‘too action-packed’ and ‘not cerebral enough’, in stark contrast to the majesty of Sherlock and it’s twerpish plot twists. But when I think of a great Moriarty? Oh, boy, this one kicks Sherlock’s ass.

It’s also irritating, because it’s really hard to point out what makes him better than Ratigan or even Light. His plan is convoluted at best (not that the other two are any better - a good Moriarty does not a decent plan make), not helped by it being exactly the same as his plan in that godawful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie (which, btw, would still be bad even if it didn’t drive Sean Connery away from the film industry, but is far worse on those grounds) but, still, look at this scene. Or this one. Or that fight scene.

Tell me that’s not Moriarty.

That first scene especially runs through all three establishing Moriarty traits, yet perfectly utilizes all of them. We see how smart he is, we see his and Holmes’ respect for one another, but at the same time we see how much Holmes wants to see him behind bars and we have the perfectly paced reveal of his murder of Irene and that he intends to do the same to Watson and Mary. Everything about this scene is brilliant despite it being just the two of them talking. There’s even a bit later in the movie where Moriarty outsmarts Holmes and they communicate the gamut of emotions both characters are feeling through them exchanging a single glance.

So, yes, these films may be a bit too action packed. Yes, they may exaggerate character’s abilities, their plots may be inconsequential for the most part. But goddamn is their Moriarty a classic.

[the-desolated-quill]

Listen - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Something I’ve been crying out for as we’ve been going through these episodes is something new. Something different. Something that isn’t just the bog standard, monster of the week format that has become boringly commonplace in New Who. Listen provides just that.

Compared to previous episodes, Listen is much more slower paced, atmospheric and contemplative, which makes a nice change of pace. I also like that the Doctor isn’t just randomly landing somewhere and happening upon an evil plot to take over the world this time. Instead we get to explore the more methodical and science-y side to the Doctor’s thought process. He’s developed a theory about creatures that have evolved to be perfect at hiding, and is travelling to different times and places to test that theory. There are really so many different kinds of stories you could tell in a setting as flexible as Doctor Who’s, and Listen proves that in spades.

It seems Moffat is going back to basics with this episode. No complicated plots or wibbly wobbly, timey wimey bollocks. Just a nice, simple story like Blink that draws tension and fear from everyday things. Blink had statues. Listen has the unknown. It plays on the childlike fear of a monster under the bed or hiding from view waiting to get you, and on a first viewing it’s really effective. By far the best scene in the episode is in the children’s home with Rupert Pink and the ‘monster’ on the bed hiding under the blanket. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been properly scared by Doctor Who, but this absolutely terrified me. When I first watched it in 2014, I was cowering behind a cushion, and I think the reason it works is because of the subtlety that’s involved. It’s not in your face like other Who monsters have been. Its fear factor comes from what you imagine is going to happen rather than what is actually happening. The scene at the end of the universe is very effective too because of this reason. Using nothing but some creaking pipes, Moffat is able to create something intensely frightening by letting our imaginations do the rest. Who are these creatures? What do they want? What do they even look like?

And a big, shiny gold star has to go to Peter Capaldi, who after the disaster that was Robot Of Sherwood has been given darker material to work with again, and he knocks it out of the park. I loved his scene with Rupert and his speech about how fear is like a superpower, and what I find very interesting is how this Doctor isn’t very reassuring. We’ve had moments where Matt Smith and Christopher Eccleston’s Doctors were very blunt about the level of danger, but Capaldi is not only blunt about it, he actually adds to the tension and makes these scenes even scarier. He’s not there to protect you anymore and that’s something I’m really not used to seeing, but I like it.

Listen is a very different episode. One that’s refreshingly subtle and smaller in scope and scale, thus giving it a greater impact. But different doesn’t necessarily equal good, and sadly Listen doesn’t work on a number of levels.

Like I said, the episode is really scary on a first viewing. In fact I’d go as far to say it’s just as scary as Blink. But the thing is Blink still holds up on multiple viewings and the Weeping Angels are still just as scary the first time around (obviously we’re not including the sequels here where Moffat started to bastardise his own creations). In Listen on the other hand, once you’ve seen all the twists and turns and had a peek behind the curtain as it were, it loses its fear factor dramatically. And it’s much easier to spot all the numerous flaws in the narrative when you’re not having the living shit frightened out of you.

Was there ever a monster under the bed? The episode kind of leaves it open to interpretation, but I think it’s safe to say the answer is a definitive no. There’s a rational explanation for everything that happens (the thing under the blanket could be another kid playing a prank. The creaking pipes could just be creaking pipes. The Doctor could legitimately have forgotten he wrote something down, etc.). In fact the episode foreshadows this with the disappearing coffee cup that turns out to have been stolen by the Doctor. Also there’s the Where’s Wally joke:

The Doctor: “Where’s Wally? He’s not in this book.”

Rupert: “It’s not a Where’s Wally one.”

The Doctor: “How do you know? You may not have found him yet.”

Rupert: “He’s not in every book.”

It all builds up to the final twist, which is that there is no twist. Fair enough, i guess. Moffat asks some questions and provides some adequate answers. But it’s not exactly satisfying, is it? And it has an adverse affect on future rewatches. When you watch Listen again a second time, you’re no longer wondering what’s under the blanket or fearful at the prospect of what’s behind the locked door. You’re just watching a lump on a bed and listening to some creaky pipes.

There are other things I’m not fond of neither. The whole subplot with Clara and Danny just bored me senseless. Like in Into The Dalek, it’s just the same cliched romcom shit you’ve seen dozens of times before. And Moffat clearly expects you to be invested in their romance despite the fact this first date clearly demonstrates the two have no chemistry whatsoever. No, really! Look at them! Clara is callous and bossy, Danny is overly sensitive and a bit gormless, they’re constantly arguing over every little thing and they don’t really have anything in common outside of being teachers. What possible reason do I have to want to see them together when they’re clearly not suited for each other at all?

Also Moffat seems more concerned with developing the mystery surrounding Danny Pink rather than actually exploring his character. You know? Because big, convoluted mysteries dragged out over the course of an entire series is pretty much the only way Moffat knows how to get us interested in his characters. So who is Orson Pink? Is he related to Clara? I don’t know and I don’t care. The astronaut at the end of the universe could have been anyone really, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

But the thing that pisses me off most about Listen is Clara. More specifically, how Moffat uses Clara in this episode. I’ve always hated Clara (I may have mentioned it one or several times over the course of these blogs) and Listen really highlights the flaws in her characterisation. Moffat has always had a predilection for female characters that fall into either the mother or dominatrix roles. Clara ends up playing both this time around. She mothers Rupert and then at the end of the episode she takes care of Doctor Jr (oh we’ll get to that. Don’t you worry). Like I’ve said in the past, Clara has no character. She exists solely to prop up the Doctor or whatever male character is important at the time. Hell, in The Name Of The Doctor, she outright says she was born to save the Doctor. That’s her sole purpose in life. Realising the distinct lack of character and independence she possesses, Moffat tries to compensate by throwing all this dominatrix type stuff in in an attempt to make her seem confident and authoritative. She slaps the Doctor again, she tells him to shut up and bosses him around. Except that doesn’t make her a compelling or unique character because all of Moffat’s women behave like this. River Song. Amy Pond. Irene Adler in Sherlock. Their dialogue is pretty much interchangeable. Forcing all of his female characters into these mother/dominatrix roles is not only sexist as shit, it also displays a sheer lack of imagination on Moffat’s part. It’s just boring by this point.

And it only gets worse when you factor Moffat’s humungous ego into the equation. He wants to put his own stamp on the franchise, and fair enough. Except that’s not what he wants to do, is it? He wants to carve his bloody name into the thing and leave a permanent mark on it. That’s why his characters often seem to out-Doctor the Doctor and are the most important people in the fucking universe. That’s why River Song went from being just a future companion that the Doctor hadn’t met yet to being his bloody wife that the Doctor’s entire life revolves around. That’s why Clara was born to save the Doctor and why she seems to have taken charge of the whole show. Not only is she not travelling in the TARDIS on a permanent basis, thus forcing the Doctor to come and pick her up because she’s that special and important she has to have the Doctor permanently on a leash and at her beck and call 24/7, she’s also now able to drive the damn thing. And the Doctor is constantly asking her for validation. For advice and consultation. Let’s not forget Moffat has in the past gone as far as to imply that the Doctor is completely ineffectual without Clara. He’s just thrown the entire dymamic out of whack just so his precious Mary Sue can be the star. And look, I’m all in favour of proactive companions, but at the end of day, it’s not her name in the fucking title. And if the only way you can make your companion interesting is by diminishing the Doctor’s character, you’ve fucked up.

But then Moffat takes it one more, borderline unforgivable step further. Yes, we’re talking about that scene.

Moffat isn’t the first to want to explore the Doctor’s history and add to the mythology. Other writers have done it in the past. From Robert Holmes and the 12 regeneration limit to Andrew Cartmel and the Cartmel masterplan. But one thing you must never do is mess the basics, and one of those basics is the Doctor’s mystery. It’s interesting wondering where the Doctor came from, which is precisely why we shouldn’t know. Finding out the origins of the Doctor wouldn’t make him more interesting. It would diminish him as a character. Which is why I HATE the ending to Listen with a fucking vengeance. Not only should we not be in that barn with Doctor Jr, end of (and on a side note, how the fuck did the TARDIS land on Gallifrey when the planet is supposed to be lost and still in a time lock because of the Time War?), the way Moffat does it is just beyond insulting. The Doctor is motivated by fear?

And the only reason he was able to turn it around and draw from it was because of Clara?

I’m sorry Moffat, but you can fuck right off with that idea. In fact you can take that idea and shove it firmly back up your arse from whence it came.

What’s worse is that it’s his fear the episode revolves around, forcing the Doctor to behave out of character and allowing Clara to step up and take his role in the first place.

Listen is different. I’ll give Moffat that. And it’s bloody terrifying on a first viewing. But it’s also a very shallow and paper thin story that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and it demonstrates that Moffat’s ego is so massive and so uncontrollable that he’s prepared to piss around with the most vital components of the show he claims to be a fan of in order to leave his mark. Well congratulations Moffat. You have indeed left your mark. And now it’s going to take a very skilled mechanic to repair the damage you’ve done.

[chiseler]

STEVE COCHRAN: The Rough and the Smooth

The Chase (1946) opens with a broke ex-serviceman finding a lost wallet, plump with cash and bearing the name and address of its owner, Eddie Roman. Being an honest guy—or, as Roman’s sidekick puts it, a “silly law-abiding jerk”—the vet goes to return it. As though wandering into an opium trance, he enters a classical-rococo-tropical mansion, a fantasy of vulgar magnificence. The front door is bedecked with cherubs’ heads (one of which swivels to reveal a peep-hole framing the unmistakable eye of Peter Lorre). The dazzling white interior is cluttered with marble statuary on pillars, crystal chandeliers, antique chairs, banana trees, all slashed by thin bars of sunlight falling through white shutters.

Eddie Roman, a Miami gangster, is at home amid this surreal decadence. We first see him sitting regally in a barber’s chair, crowned with a pearl-grey homburg, intently studying his pencil-thin mustache in a hand-mirror. He has reason to look pleased as he contemplates his handsome face, its square-jawed and thick-browed swarthiness lightened by limpid eyes and a deceptively sweet smile. Absorbed in admiring his appearance, he pays no attention to the girl kneeling at his side giving him a manicure, until her file slips and nicks his finger. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roman, you moved,” the frightened girl gasps. “Yeah, but you didn’t—fast enough,” he replies, knocking her to the ground with a casual blow.

With a different actor, this whole set-up—the flamboyant interior decoration, the classical allusions, the dandified sadism, the ever-present sidekick played by Peter Lorre—might come across as heavily lavender-tinted. But Eddie Roman is Steve Cochran, who plays it straight in more ways than one. Cochran grew up in Wyoming and had worked as a cowboy before trying his hand at acting, but Hollywood took one look at his oily black hair and arrogant poise and pigeonholed him as a mobster. He took to the role with a patented brand of velvety menace, concluding that the way to play heavies was to assume that his characters had done nothing wrong, as they themselves would no doubt believe. Not for him the noir torments of guilt or anxiety or haunted memory. His gangsters were slick and unfeeling, and when he came to play deeper roles in films like Tomorrow is Another Day, Private Hell 36, and Il Grido, he plumbed the specific melancholy of men whose inchoate vulnerability is forced through the conventional expressions of machismo.

He was born Robert Alexander Cochran in 1917 and adopted the name Steve while acting in stock. (It suits him, perhaps for the same reason Lauren Bacall assigns it to Bogart’s Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not, giving it a distinctive inflection that conveys, “You’re an overconfident jerk—if only I didn’t find you so attractive.”) Cochran left college and headed to Hollywood convinced he could be a movie star, but despite his looks and confidence he was no overnight success; it took seven years of provincial theater (including Shakespeare in Carmel) before he finally scored a contract with Goldwyn in 1945. The Chase was his first decent break, after a series of small parts in Boston Blackie programmers and Danny Kaye vehicles.

Directed by Arthur Ripley and gorgeously shot by Franz Planer, The Chase is a baroquely convoluted adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear. The centerpiece is an extended dream sequence that eschews the usual cinematic clichés but unsettles through jarring plot discontinuities; a maze of dark, disorienting spaces; and inexplicable poetic images like the woman weeping at a table bearing the half-eaten carcass of a watermelon, like something out of a 17th century Spanish painting. The film’s seemingly normal hero (the ex-serviceman, played by Robert Cummings) turns out to have a fragile mind prone to sudden white-outs. He’s almost as passive as Eddie Roman’s imprisoned wife (Michèle Morgan), who drifts around the mansion in draped Grecian gowns and a fog of hopeless terror. What she’s terrified of is her husband, and Cochran makes you believe that Roman is capable of even worse cruelty than anything we see him do. The calmer he is the more anxiously we wait for his outbursts of violence. His light voice, sweet smile, and hypnotic stillness create a deliciously sinister effect. Here and elsewhere, there’s something about the way Cochran’s hazel eyes catch the light, with a gleam that can register as tenderness or threat. It’s hard to pin down this luster, and that’s one of the best assets a movie star can have—some small thing that can’t be explained.

Though the bulk of his work was in B movies, Cochran appeared very briefly in Goldwyn’s great triumph, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Near the end of the movie, the beleaguered former airforce captain played by Dana Andrews—an intelligent, serious man stymied by a bad marriage and a humiliating job as a soda jerk—walks into his apartment to find another man lounging around in his shirtsleeves. It takes only moments to register the kind of heel he is: a self-satisfied, flashily handsome guy in a loud pinstripe suit, smoking and chewing gum and condescending to his married girlfriend’s husband. It’s his job to embody the crass, unscrupulous side of postwar life, the veterans who aren’t haunted by what they’ve seen, the operators who see money “lying around” for the taking. Cochran nails the type in under five minutes of screen time.

Virginia Mayo plays the wife he’s fooling around with, and they were paired frequently in the late forties, both typed as low-class, sexy but vulgar. They’re forgettable in A Song is Born (1948), Howard Hawks’s lifeless musical remake of Ball of Fire, but wonderful as a pair of greedy, backstabbing lovers in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Cochran is “Big” Ed, a discontented second-banana to Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), who taunts him with sneering air quotes around his moniker. Cagney’s majestically psychotic performance fills the movie like a bellows, as he crumples inward under the pressure of his migraines and then explodes in gleeful violence. Big Ed is his opposite, cool and smooth, his stolid repose off-setting Cody’s trip-wire sensitivity. Cochran looks fantastic in a dark suit with a black shirt and light tie, and his best moments are tiny touches like the way he loudly spits out his gum before kissing Mayo, or blows smoke sideways in a beautifully nasty, smirking close-up as he quietly threatens to tell Cody who killed his mother if she walks out on him. If Cagney is white heat, Cochran is black ice.

He played a variation on Big Ed the next year in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), one of those fun, full-throttle Joan Crawford vehicles that follows a woman as she claws her way out of dreary poverty, attains a pinnacle of penthouse luxury, and plunges from there into the abyss. Starting in the Texas oil fields, she winds up as the mistress of a racket boss (the terrifying David Brian), who sends her on a mission to spy on one of his regional under-bosses, whom he suspects of plotting to take over. That would be Cochran, who is not satisfied with the desert fiefdom where he lounges around swimming pools in white terry-cloth robes and saunters around nightclubs in loud sport jackets. He’s not a bad guy here, especially compared with Brian, but he remains devoted to the one Big Ed calls, “a very good friend—me.”

Cochran’s philosophy of playing heavies as though they were blameless did not mean he tried to make them sympathetic; indeed, it’s the utter remorselessness of his bad guys that makes them so bad. Still, it can be hard not to root for him in formulaic “crime does not pay” flicks like Highway 301 (1950), which opens with not one but three state governors solemnly addressing the camera, and then smothers all the action with heavy-handed voice-over. It’s tempting to just turn the sound off, because the film looks terrific, darkly glistening with rain-wet streets, sleek curves of forties cars, the matte sheen of good suits and perfect fedoras. Cochran, as the leader of a heist mob, wears an arrogant sneer as stylishly as his overcoat. When his girlfriend whines about feeling bored and neglected, he says coldly, “Why don’t you do something about your face? That ought to keep you busy for a few hours.”

He took a break from suave gangsters to play a cowardly redneck lout in Storm Warning (1950), an “exposé” of the Ku Klux Klan that proves nothing is more pusillanimous than Hollywood when it thinks it’s being courageous. Cochran cited the role as a favorite; he recalled being terrified by Klan demonstrations as a child and spoke of wanting to show how “shabby” they really were, of his pride at striking a small blow for racial tolerance. He was clearly sincere, and he later attended the 1963 March on Washington with fellow progressives like Marlon Brando; unfortunately, Storm Warning makes no mention whatever of the Klan’s attitudes towards blacks or Jews, depicting it as merely a racket to extort money from gullible hicks.

The film is further compromised by shameless plagiarism of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Ginger Rogers visiting her pregnant sister (Doris Day), who dotes on her crass but hunky working-class husband. Cochran, wearing a white t-shirt and sucking on a bottle of beer, lays on the dumb rube act a little thick, though at least he does not come off as a Brando impersonator. After a beautifully filmed opening in which Rogers witnesses a Klan killing in the deserted streets of a Southern backwater, and a powerful scene in which she is bullied into lying under oath about what she saw, the film turns luridly exploitative. Rogers is spied on and assaulted by her drunken brother-in-law, then publicly whipped at a Klan rally. This pushes the film’s wrong-headedness to absurdity: the culmination of the Klan’s evil is an attack on a beautiful blonde white woman.

In the 1950s, Cochran got tired of playing heavies and biting the dust in every movie; unhappy at Warner Brothers, he left in 1952 to form his own production company, producing a few change-of-pace films like Come Next Spring. But one of his very best roles came at Warners in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951), an unusually subtle and character-focused B noir directed by Felix Feist. Here he sheds his usual self-assurance to play a rough, unfinished man, drastically inexperienced and socially awkward—and does it beautifully. His character, Bill Clark, was sent to prison at age 14 for the murder of his abusive father. Released at 31, he’s a child in a man’s body, touchingly naïve but also insecure and truculent, readily falling back on violence.

Like Rip Van Winkle waking to an unfamiliar world, he wanders around town in a cheap, unfashionable suit, carrying his few belongings in a cardboard box. He’s drawn first to the new cars, studying one with boyish wonder; then to girls, hesitantly trying to follow one in the street. His uncertainty and sulky defensiveness are painfully exposed, whether he’s being teased for ordering three pieces of pie in a diner, or stumbling sheepishly into the dime-a-dance Dreamland, where ten cents buys sixty seconds of feminine company. Here he is easy pickings for Kay (Ruth Roman), a gorgeous, hard-shelled bottle blonde who demands trinkets in exchange for her time. When he obediently returns with a wrist-watch, she rewards him with a peck on the cheek and a “Thanks, Jim.” Still smitten, he shyly kisses her hand, and on learning she doesn’t get off work for hours, mutters, “I’m used to waitin’.”

When Bill and Kay are mixed up in a killing, he panics, knowing that with his record he’s a “dead pigeon.” They go on the lam, but their route takes them far from the usual lovers-on-the-run formulas. Without a car of their own, they sneak into one of the vehicles being towed on a tractor-trailer, hop freight trains, and hitch a ride with a Joad-like family on their way to a lettuce-picking camp in Salinas. They start out hostile and bickering, and when Bill proposes in a motel room he does so by handing her a ring and saying churlishly, “Pawnbroker gave me a good deal.” But though he implies that marriage is a sacrifice to necessity, the truth is that he desperately wants her and has decided this is the only way he can get her. In the scene that follows, as they lounge on a bank above the railroad tracks, he tells her about the murder of his father and about his years in jail, where he earned ten cents a day as a welder. “You worked a whole day,” she says wonderingly, “Just to dance a minute at Dreamland.”

Bill asks his bride if she thinks people change, “I mean, inside.” She does: dying her hair back to brunette, switching her name to Kathy, she emerges from her cynical shell. But Bill never seems to change; in the end, when he’s betrayed by a friend and threatened with going back to jail, he reacts with blind anger and panicked violence. This incorrigibility coexists with his gentleness: when Kathy tells him she’s pregnant, his sullen face delicately opens into an angelic smile, but not long after she has to shoot him to stop him from killing the sheriff who comes to arrest him.  The ending of the movie is a cop-out, but the revelation that the whole saga has been driven by mistakes, lies, and misunderstandings has a certain fitting irony.

Cochran drew even more deeply on this strain of confusion and sorrow in Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957), another movie about life on the road. The title translates as “The Cry,” and the film is essentially one long, muted howl of loss. Dubbed in Italian, Cochran plays Aldo, a simple working man who has lived for years in a common law marriage with Irma (Alida Valli), with whom he has a daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). The movie opens as Irma, without warning or explanation, tells Aldo she’s leaving him for another man.

Like Bill Clark, Aldo is a muddled mixture of gentleness and violence, an aching wound papered over with inarticulate masculine pride. His reaction to Irma’s rejection is baffled and ineffectual; his instinct is to lash out, but he pulls back from hitting her. Later, desperate to assert his authority, he beats her in front of a crowd of townsfolk, but it’s he who comes away looking weak and defeated, having now sealed their estrangement. Taking their daughter, he sets out on an aimless journey, a futile search to replace what he’s lost.

The real star of Il Grido is the wintry landscape of the Po Valley. Nothing could be further from the Italy of vacation fantasies than this grey, muddy, industrial wasteland. Thin, bare branches are traced on the fog, sprouting from pollarded trees like amputees’ stumps. Desolate fields of rocks, marshes, and flat sodden riverbanks are made even bleaker by factories and construction sites, gas stations and refineries. The relentlessly overcast, drizzly weather is like an expression of Aldo’s numb, mournful mood. Cochran’s face, beginning to look worn, blends in with the landscape; he’s still ruggedly handsome, but stripped of all glamour and self-assurance, an ordinary man suddenly adrift with no bearings.

Aldo is hardly a model father, as he subjects his little girl to a tough and lonely life on the road, but there are moments when he comforts her with heartbreaking tenderness, and you always feel that in his fumbling way he is doing his best for her. (Still, it’s a relief when he finally sends her back to her mother.) The structure of this episodic film comes from Aldo’s encounters with three different women, each a possible but ultimately inadequate substitute for Irma. A former girlfriend (played by Betsy Blair) and a sexy young widow who runs an isolated service station both offer him refuge, and he has a torrid affair with the widow, but both times he drifts away. He has the chance to go to Venezuela, but inexplicably tears up his papers. He winds up with a prostitute who suffers from malaria, huddling in a leaky hut made of reeds and filled with acrid smoke. Amid this wretchedness, he remembers visiting a museum with Irma, a poignant revelation of what she represents in his barren and messy world.

He is inconsolable, and the life and purpose just drain out of him, leaving him an empty husk. In the end, Aldo returns to the town he left, to find it roiling with mass meetings over land seizures, a chaos of bulldozers, ruins, blazing fields and armed police. But for Aldo, the last straw is seeing, through a window, Irma with her new baby, annihilating his hopes. It’s hard to think of another movie in which someone essentially, and convincingly, dies of love.

Steve Cochran had a great deal of practice at dying; having succumbed onscreen to many predictable violent ends, he topped them in 1965 with one of Hollywood’s most legendarily bizarre deaths. That he was only 48 is tragic, but that he died aboard a yacht with an all-female crew is irresistibly titillating. None of the young Mexican women (whom he had hired, allegedly with a view to making a movie about a real yacht captain who had an “all-girl” crew) knew how to pilot the boat, which drifted for ten days off the coast of Guatemala after Cochran unexpectedly fell ill and died of a respiratory ailment. This story left a somewhat lurid stain on his life, though it seems to have been nothing but a publicity stunt gone terribly awry.

Alas, Cochran’s off-screen behavior rarely enhanced his reputation for seriousness. He seems to have been amiable and well-meaning, and neither his chronic womanizing nor his penchant for reckless driving and flying were anything out of the ordinary in Hollywood. More damningly, Don Siegel claimed he had trouble catching Cochran “even slightly sober” during the filming of Private Hell 36 (1954), though you’d never guess this from his sharp, nuanced performance as a corrupt cop in love with a nightclub singer (Ida Lupino, who co-wrote the script). His character, Cal Bruner, is callous, vain, and morally shifty—a plainclothes dick who tackles and fatally shoots a robber, then readies himself for a date with perfumed aftershave while complaining that the “miserable creep” ruined his new suit. He’s a guy on the make, lightly detached from everything except his own concerns. Yet when Cal falls for Lily, a canary with an exhausted voice and bone-dry sense of humor, he becomes someone we care about. He has better taste than we would have expected (Lily—who seems older than Cal, though Lupino was a year younger than Cochran—is no brainless babe), and more substance.

“You know, somewhere in my dim past I seem to have heard this before,” Lily deadpans when Cal makes a pass. “I’ve said it before,” he replies readily, “To all shapes and sizes. Only this time I mean it. Don’t ask me why.” Cochran and Lupino have serious chemistry (the scene where he unties the halter neck of her dress and massages her naked shoulders is a classic of Code-era steaminess), but Cal and Lily also connect on some deeper level, making us believe these two what’s-in-it-for-me types surprise themselves with genuine feeling. When he sits at the bar watching her croak out a hard-hearted ditty called “Didn’t You Know,” his eyes brim with a clear, soft light. In this part, Cochran layers cool selfishness and tender warmth so closely, nothing thicker than a razor could separate them.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[kayura-sanada]

I Got Tagged?!?!

Rules: Answer these questions, and tag 10 amazing followers that you would like to get to know better.

I was tagged by: @tony-starks-heart (I read this by you and didn’t even bother looking at who got tagged bc I didn’t think I could possibly be one and saw an e-mail notification and was like “!!!!! YAY!!! Omg, she tagged me, OMG NO WAY!” Thank you!!!)

Name: Danielle

Nickname: Depends on who you ask. Some call me Dani. Those who want me to like them do not call me that.

Zodiac sign: Oh-ho, the fun question. I am a twin. We technically were born on the edge of Gemini. My brother is 100% Gemini. I am more like the other side of the edge we missed by a couple of days, and am far more Taurus. (The new Zodiac puts me firmly in Taurus territory, btw. Oh, horoscopes, you convoluted things.)

Hogwarts house: I dunno. Probably Ravenclaw, maybe Slytherin? Hold on. /takes a quiz/ Yup, Ravenclaw.

Height: 5′4″

Orientation: Demiromantic Asexual.

Ethnicity: Uhhh, mostly Irish, with some Dutch, French, and Cherokee mixed in for good measure. Super-duper white. Freckles that will explode on a sunny day white.

Favorite fruit: Strawberries. Second is kiwis!

Favorite season: ...spring? I think? Does it even exist anymore?

Favorite book series: My go-to answer is Brent Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy, but I love gay romance more, and the first one that pops into my head is Jordan L. Hawk’s Widdershins series.

Favorite fictional characters: AHAHA YOU GOT ME STARTED. Let’s see: Tony Stark, Riku (KH), Gaara, Lelouch Lamperouge, Duo Maxwell, Yuri Hyuuga, Thane Krios, Fenris (DA2), Solas, Midnighter, Apollo (Andrew) (DC), Portgas D. Ace, Dorian Pavus, Hancock (Fallout 4)... /goes on ad nauseum/

Favorite flower: The edelweiss. It means “daring and noble courage.”

Favorite scents: UUuuuhhhh... I like the scents of fruits, I guess? I honestly never thought about this, but yeah, that’ll work. I hate flowery scents, and I despise musk. Simple scents like apples or pears or something

Favorite color: Oh, no! The other dreaded question! I can never choose. Indigo or maroon? I don’t know, but one of those. Probably. Or teal? Hell.

Favorite animal: Ocelot. (Finally, an easy question!)

Favorite artist/band: Disturbed

Coffee, tea, or hot cocoa?: Hot cocoa! And then green tea, but only cold, thanks.

Average sleep hours: lol. I sleep when I’m sleepy, usually no earlier than 2 or 3 am unless I’m taking a nap. My sleep schedule has gotten even worse ever since I started working night shifts.

Number of blankets you sleep with: A giant comforter, sometimes with my Iron Man blanket overtop it.

Dream trip: Trip to Japan! Or a trip to the Isle of the Blessed.

Last thing Googled: Meaning of the Sweet Williams flower, for a drabble I just finished writing.

Blog created: Uh, August 2015, I think.

How many blogs do I follow: 28

Number of followers: 82 (and to me that is CRAZY; I am honored, absolutely speechless, and I’m certain I’m not posting the stuff you guys wanna see but you’re still here and that amazes me I love you all so much)

What do I usually post about: lol Tony probably and my other random obsessions. Lately it’s been SoRiku because I was stupid enough to write a short story and now have a giant story idea and am replaying all the games to learn how to fit my story in the world. OMG, I am dumb to even consider this but I’m going to do it, I just know it.

Do you get asks regularly: I hardly ever get asks, but my inbox is always open! I would LOVE to hear from anyone! I am always ready to nerd out!

What is your aesthetic: Characters Who Are Both Strong and Kind, Hurt/Comfort Drama, People Being Honorable, Sunlight through trees, Meadows filled with flowers, Love as a feeling of comfort, romances where the focus isn’t sex, Tony being loved for who he is, my faves being themselves

I tag @capsing, @fallinginstyles, @remsyk-blog, @cpt-skully, @the-emerald-halla, @hedgehog-goulash7, and anyone else who wants to join in!!!

[oscopelabs]

‘The Counselor’: No Movie for Most Men (or Women) by Mike D’Angelo

[This month, Musings pays homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to film we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Over the next four weeks, Musings will offer its own selection of tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

Most people prefer movies to be affirming, in some way. Life-affirming, love-affirming, norm-affirming—just so long as something we believe (or want to believe) gets reinforced, everybody’s happy. Declining to satisfy that desire is step one en route to making an art film, or what publicists who are nervous about the word “art” like to call a specialty release. These, too, cater to viewers’ preconceived notions about the world (good luck finding something that doesn’t), but they target notions that are less commonly held, which makes them less commercially viable. Deriving enjoyment from genuinely despairing or pessimistic movies is a taste that must be acquired, and only a small subset of the population has the time or the inclination. These are the folks who’ll go see a Moonlight, say, or a Manchester By The Sea. They’re game.

It’s possible to alienate these adventurous, open-minded viewers, too, though, by making a movie that’s not just challenging or upsetting, but flat-out nihilistic. A movie that assumes the worst about human nature, with few (if any) mollifying grace notes. A movie that, at least to some extent, glorifies venality and ugliness. “Alienate” is too mild a word for the common reaction, actually. They will be pissed off.

Such was the reception that greeted The Counselor back in 2013. Expectations for the film were sky high: It features a superb cast (Michael Fassbender, Pénélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt); was directed by Ridley Scott (a decidedly erratic talent, but still capable of greatness); and, most exciting of all, boasts a screenplay from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s books had been adapted several times—most notably by the Coen Brothers, whose version of No Country for Old Men won multiple Oscars—but he’d never before written an original story expressly for the big screen. Had The Counselor been made available intravenously, many would have mainlined it without hesitation.

Cue the adrenaline-shot scene from Pulp Fiction. Not all of the Counselor reviews were negative, by any means, but the critics who hated it really, really hated it. “Meet the Worst Movie Ever Made” ran the headline on Andrew O’Hehir’s savage takedown at Salon, and that wasn’t some editor’s hype; in the actual piece, O’Hehir expands his assessment to “the worst movie in the history of the universe,” thereby dismissing the possibility that alien life forms in faraway galaxies may possibly have committed an even greater sin against cinema. Other reviews in major publications deemed the film “lethally pretentious,” “a jaw-dropping misfire,” and “unforgivably phony, talky and dull.” (Characters do indeed talky on the phony sometimes.) Audiences were similarly repulsed: The Counselor got a dismal D in Cinemascore’s survey, which generally skews so positive that you can currently find an A- assigned to the likes of Assassin's Creed (Metacritic score: 36/100) and Collateral Beauty (Metacritic score: 23/100). It’s not a popular title.

Here are a few reasons why many people seem to hate it:

The narrative is ludicrously convoluted.

All of the characters speak primarily in lengthy philosophical monologues.

It’s just a catalogue of horrible things happening to people who mostly deserve them.

Cameron Diaz fucks a car.

We’ll come back to that last one. Let’s start at the beginning, with the basic story McCarthy wants to tell. The Counselor is about a drug deal that goes horrifically wrong, mostly because the title character (played by Fassbender; we never learn the guy’s name), who’s never done this before and just wants to make some quick cash, has not the slightest clue what he’s doing. That’s essentially all you need to know, as far as making sense of events is concerned. McCarthy lays out some essential details—how the drugs are transported, and by whom, and who’s looking for a way to intercept the shipment—but only in the service of making it clear that what befalls the counselor is to some degree just very bad luck. What matters is that he was completely unprepared for the possibility that some random misfortune could cost multiple people their lives. Indeed, even the characters, like Brad Pitt’s Westray, who consider themselves prepared, and keep warning the counselor that he’s unprepared, are not themselves really prepared.

Think for a moment about Jurassic Park. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t much matter exactly why the dinosaurs get loose—that Wayne Knight’s programmer was planning to steal embryos, and that he got killed by a dinosaur in the attempt, and that his death left the fences unelectrified, and etc. It could just as easily have been some other series of seemingly random deviations from expected outcomes. (Indeed, Ian Malcolm, the chaos theory-obsessed mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum, would argue that it surely would have been.) Jurassic Park is a simple tale of hubris: Various smart people foolishly imagine that they can control the uncontrollable, but something utterly unforeseen occurs, and all hell breaks loose. Nobody complains that the chain of events leading to disaster is overly complicated, because it’s all just a means of providing the exciting sequences of people being menaced by dinosaurs that we want to see.

The Counselor is basically the same movie, aimed at a different sensibility—one that doesn’t necessarily require some of the threatened characters to be sympathetic, and that appreciates a more detached approach to carnage. About halfway through the movie, a man about whom we know nothing shows up at a motorcycle dealership, waves off the salesperson, and proceeds to measure the height of a particular bike. For those on the right wavelength, curiosity about this anonymous character’s purpose is its own reward, and the gruesome payoff constitutes just as much “fun” as does watching a dude cowering on a toilet get chomped by a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s not even wholly clear to me why the latter is almost universally perceived as entertainment, while the former got widely dismissed as empty grotesquerie. Both involve a benignly sadistic voyeurism that’s always been at the core of the moviegoing experience.

Granted, The Counselor’s nihilism might be less off-putting to many if the characters didn’t keep openly discussing it, often in speeches that occupy several minutes of screen time. (And that’s after they've been trimmed—the unrated extended cut of the film, available on the Blu-ray release, runs an extra 21 minutes, with most of that consisting of additional monologue.) This is a natural reaction, as most screenwriters would hesitate to include even one such blatant exegesis in a screenplay, much less a baker’s dozen of ‘em. There’s something strangely liberating, though, about seeing this dramaturgical rule violated with such gleeful excess. Almost every character in The Counselor, including those who drop in for just a scene or two, is ludicrously verbose, prone to bloviating. The first couple of times, it’s a weird distraction; by the end, it’s become an even weirder form of gallows humor. How many different ways can this movie’s pitiless thesis be openly analyzed by the very people who are doomed to be spared its pity?

If McCarthy were Joe Eszterhas, sure, it’d be a problem. But the speeches are beautifully written and performed, and the ordinary give-and-take dialogue is even better. There are admittedly some howlers, like Malkina, the femme fatale, being asked if she’s really that cold (emotionally) and replying “Truth has no temperature.” (Though even that line might have worked with a different actor; I'll get to Diaz shortly.) The stuff that makes me cringe is handily outweighed, however, by the stuff that makes me chortle.

“Is this place secure?” “Who knows? I don’t speak in arraignable phrases anywhere.”

“I want to give her a diamond so big she’ll be afraid to wear it.” “She’s probably more courageous than you imagine.”

“Cheers.” “A plague of pustulent boils upon all their scurvid asses.” “Is that your normal toast?” “Increasingly.”

As far as I can determine, McCarthy invented the adjective “scurvid,” but it sounds suitably noxious. In any case, the notion that a movie chock-full of pungent exchanges like these offers nothing of value is absurd. Certainly the actors relish them. Pitt, who’s usually at his best when he goes over the top (Twelve Monkeys, Burn After Reading), finds just the right degree of languid sangfroid for his cautious middleman, and Bardem turns in a performance as amusingly eccentric as the wardrobe his character sports. The one weak link is Diaz, for whom Malkina’s predatory nature proves just too much of a stretch. (It doesn’t help that she reportedly performed the role with a Bajan accent, then was asked to overdub it.) The infamous scene in which Malkina intimidates Bardem’s Reiner by rubbing herself against the windshield of his Ferrari was always meant to be ludicrous—although McCarthy’s screenplay conceived it entirely as a story that Reiner tells the counselor, not something that we’re meant to actually see. With Diaz visibly straining to look depraved, it comes across even sillier than was intended; imagine Charlize Theron in her place, and see if it doesn’t suddenly shift into focus, along with the rest of Malkina’s presence in the movie.

Even with these undeniable flaws, McCarthy’s offbeat vision for the movie survives mostly intact. Scott wisely stays out of his way, choosing to serve the text, though he declines to indulge some of the screenplay’s most experimental ideas. The opening scene, for example, depicting the counselor and his girlfriend (Cruz) in bed, begins with the two of them hidden entirely beneath white sheets, suggesting two corpses. As scripted, they were supposed to remain hidden from view the entire time, for what was originally going to be six or seven minutes. What’s more, McCarthy specifies that all their dialogue should be subtitled, despite being spoken in English, as it’ll be too muffled to hear. (Said dialogue is also considerably more blue in its original form.) The decision to shoot the scene more conventionally seems perfectly defensible, but I do wonder whether the more extreme version McCarthy intended might have at least helped to signal that The Counselor doesn’t operate like a traditional thriller. Its subsequent discursiveness and single-mindedness wouldn’t have seemed so thoroughly out of character.

Ultimately, what made this film an object of ridicule—see also everything from Ishtar to Drive—is the enormous gap between the size of the audience it courted and the size of the audience predisposed to appreciate it. Not many people would salivate at a description like “what you might get if you gene-spliced a slow-motion multi-car accident with a freshman comparative philosophy seminar.” (That’s not from a negative review—it's my own best précis.) But not every movie needs to appeal to every taste. And a movie that makes a lot of folks mad is always more interesting than a movie that makes everyone shrug.