#show/movie adaptations will always have to be fast tracked unless the book is just incredibly short

[highfantasy-soul]

So with the news that Netflix has cancelled Shadow and Bone season 3 and the Six of Crows spinoff, I feel extra justified in supporting the changes made to the show, specifically the advancement of Kaz's revenge story and Wesper. (This also goes for the Wheel of Time show that I feel shares many similarities to the process of adaptation that S&B faces)

In this day and age, showrunners can't expect 7 seasons of 24 episodes anymore. They have to cram as much into the (shortened) seasons they do get as they possibly can - which is where I and so many others get the frustrating feeling that they aren't sitting in the moments as long as we want them to.

BUT, script writers are having to work within insanely small parameters which makes sprawling fantasy stories (specifically ones based on books and with heavy internal dialogue and a huge cast of characters spread out over the world) extremely difficult to tell without having to cut massive sections to streamline the story or fast track some things/make things much more obvious than is shown in the book (as the internal monologues take care of clearing up confusion in written media).

So the frustration with ending 'slow burn' romances in visual media, while objectively I agree that it sucks we don't get more time to explore the character's feelings for one another, I'd much rather have canon, on-screen Wesper than another 'queerbait' flirtation that those who haven't read the books could just interpret as two guys being pals. Both Jesper and Wylan are side characters to the side characters in the show - they just couldn't get as much time to develop their relationship as say, a show with only two main characters who are the slow burn romance.

I'm glad the Crows got their due in the show - I felt they were all so incredibly in-character even doing things that weren't in the books (as of course, the Crows weren't in the Shadow and Bone books at all) and I love that we got to see more of Matthias in prison and Kaz got his revenge on Pekka in a wonderfully book-accurate way.

People who want one-to-one on-screen adaptations with books seem to ignore the logistical factors showrunners face with their shortened episode counts and the threat of cancellation looming over just about every single first season a show gets now. (Honestly, it's a miracle that Wheel of Time got a 3 season deal to start with so the showrunners could plan out three full seasons to make their bid to keep going with the story as Shadow and Bone didn't even get that).

Should we demand better from companies like Netflix that continually cut budgets and axe shows despite their massive popularity so they can save money? Yeah, duh. But let's put our anger and frustration where it deserves: on the powers that be, not those who are desperately trying to write a meaningful story in those terrible conditions.

Kind of a huge part of the writer and actor strikes was against these practices that make it so difficult for artists to make a consistent living in conditions that can sustain art rather than just content. We've still got a ways to go, but in the mean time, I'm going to enjoy the work they are able to create and view it from a more grounded perspective, understanding that they have time, monetary, and casting constraints they've got to work within.

If you want slow burns, go to books where authors have an infinite number of pages they can stretch the romance out in and you get all the juicy inner dialogues. For now, slow burn anything isn't really possible in the visual media sphere - not ones that are guaranteed to come to fruition at least.

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY At University of Zurich Institute of Medicine in Switzerland, Herbert West brings his dead professor, Dr. Hans Gruber, back to life. There are horrific side-effects, however; as West explains, the dosage was too large. When accused of killing Gruber, West counters: “I gave him life!”

West arrives at Miskatonic University in New England in order to further his studies as a medical student. He rents a room from fellow medical student Dan Cain and converts the building’s basement into his own personal laboratory. West demonstrates his reanimating reagent to Dan by reanimating Dan’s dead cat Rufus. Dan’s fiancée Megan Halsey, daughter of the medical school’s dean, walks in on this experiment and is horrified. Dan tries to tell the dean about West’s success in reanimating the dead cat, but the dean does not believe him. When Dan insists, the dean infers that Dan and West have gone mad. Barred from the school, West and Dan sneak into the morgue to test the reagent on a human subject in an attempt to prove that the reagent works, and thereby salvage their medical careers. The corpse they inject comes back to life, but in a frenetic and violent zombie-like state. Dr. Halsey stumbles upon the scene and, despite attempts by both West and Dan to save him, he gets killed by the reanimated corpse, which West then kills with a bone-saw. Unfazed by the violence and excited at the prospect of working with a freshly dead specimen, West injects Dr. Halsey’s body with his reanimating reagent. Dr. Halsey returns to life, also in a psychotic, zombie-like state. Megan chances upon the scene, and is nearly hysterical. Meanwhile, Dan collapses in shock.

Dr. Halsey’s colleague Dr. Carl Hill, a professor and researcher at the hospital, takes charge of Dr. Halsey, whom he puts in a padded observation cell adjacent to his office. He carries out a surgical operation on him, lobotomizing him. During the course of this operation, he discovers that Dr. Halsey is not sick, but dead and reanimated. Dr. Hill goes to West’s basement lab and attempts to blackmail him into surrendering his reagent and notes, hoping to take credit for West’s discovery. West offers to demonstrate the reagent and puts a few drops of it onto a microscope slide with dead cat tissue. As Dr. Hill peers through the microscope at this slide, West clobbers him from behind with a shovel, and then decapitates him, snarling “plagiarist!” as he drives the blade of the shovel through Dr. Hill’s neck. West then reanimates Dr. Hill’s head and body separately. While West is questioning Dr. Hill’s head and taking notes, Dr. Hill’s body sneaks up behind him and knocks him unconscious. The body carries the head back to Dr. Hill’s office, with West’s reagent and notes.

In his re-animated state, Dr. Hill acquires the ability to control other re-animated corpses telepathically, after conducting brain surgery on them. He then directs Dr. Halsey to snatch Megan away from Dan. While being carried to the morgue by her reanimated father, Megan faints. When she arrives, Dr. Hill strips her naked and straps her unconscious body to a table. She regains consciousness as Hill begins to sexually abuse her, including touching her breasts and placing his bloody severed head between her legs. West and Dan track Halsey to the morgue. West distracts Dr. Hill while Dan frees Megan. Dr. Hill reveals that he has reanimated and lobotomized several corpses from the morgue, rendering them susceptible to mind control as Halsey is. However, Megan’s voice reawakens a protectiveness in her father, who then fights off the other corpses long enough for Dan and Megan to escape. In the ensuing chaos, West injects Dr. Hill’s body with a lethal overdose of the reagent. Dr. Hill’s body mutates rapidly and attacks West, who screams out to Dan to save his work before being pulled away by Dr. Hill’s mutated entrails.

Dan retrieves the satchel containing West’s reagent and notes. As Dan and Megan flee the morgue, one of the reanimated corpses attacks and strangles Megan. Dan takes her to the hospital emergency room and tries to revive her, but she is quite dead. In despair, he injects her with West’s reagent. As the scene fades to black, Megan, apparently revived, can be heard screaming.

DEVELOPMENT When thinking of the sort of person who would have written a movie as bloody and outlandish as The Re-Animator, one might not immediately think of someone who teaches literature at a New York college but that’s exactly what screenwriter Dennis Paoli does for a living when not working on film scripts. Paoli has worked on and off with Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon since their high school days in Chicago, collaborating on projects that have ranged from comedy skits to a stage version of the hero epic Beowolf. By the time Gordon and William Norris contacted Paoli about the idea of collaborating on a Lovecraft script, Paoli’s academic pursuits had primed him for a venture into the bizarre.

Paoli says that he was originally brought onto the project as “the Gothic consultant,” because at the time he was working on his PHD in 18th and 19th century Gothic fiction. Paoli found that his knowledge of this style of literature could be applied to the task of adapting that latter-day Gothic H.P. Lovecraft. “The Gothics’ Paoli says, ” were the first kind of novels written. It’s very strange what’s happened to them. On the one hand, when you say Gothics you think of these current formula romances, but in their time, the first Gothics were the experimental novels. They would try anything to tell a story. They strove for effect, to have an immediate and violent effect on the reader. So they were banned in many places. In the House of Commons in England they called for a stop to romances, especially Gothic romances, because they were believed to be corruptive-just the same argument you get today.”

The Gothic-style source material for The Re-Animator was a series of six grisly stories by Lovecraft revolving around the mad scientist Herbert West. In a quest to conquer death, West concocts a serum that can re-animate dead bodies. The serum produces macabre results and West spends six stories refining his ghastly experiment.

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At first The Re-Animator was envisioned as a series of 13 half-hour episodes to be produced for either syndicated or cable TV. Once an outline was drawn up, Paoli says that William Norris wrote the first half-hour pilot, but then the collaborators found that there seemed to be more interest in an hour show that might be included in an already existing anthology series. Paoli expanded the script to an hour, and then went on to expand it again to an hour and-a-half when prospects arose to produce the story as a feature film.

Adapting Lovecraft to create a violent, Gothic effect on screen has its problems, says Paoli, which may account for the mediocrity of previous Lovecraft films. One problem, says Paoli, is that most of the author’s stories were written in the first person; in the case of the Herbert West stories, the narrator is Dan Cain, West’s reluctant assistant. “Most movies,” explains Paoli, “aren’t made that way. It’s very difficult to get across the first-person point of view unless you use a lot of voice-over narration, but then that distances you from the screen. You don’t get that immediate effect”

Another problem concerns the nature of Lovecraft’s horror. “Lovecraft’s people have seen something that has changed them, that has twisted them, that has ruined their lives or made them mad. In the stories, all you get is the reactions to the horror. You do get some descriptions, actually some quite vivid descriptions, but they’re always made more vivid by your own imagination. On film, you have to show these horrifying things, these things that the narrators see which make them mad, and you’re under the obligation, in a way, to make your audience mad. That is an awful obligation for a filmmaker.” In the past this has been an area in which Lovecraft pictures have really fallen apart. Anyone who has been subjected to the endless psychedelic shots from the point of view of the monster in The Dunwich Horror can attest to that. In The Re-Animator, though, the graphic horror is displayed-in spades. “Because we have reached a period now where you can be explicit, it allowed us to show these bloody events without cutting away or suggesting them off-camera. You have to take that excessive route,” adds Paoli.

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PRE-PRODUCTION Producer Brian Yuzna describes the original story and the way it was adapted to the screen. “H.P. Lovecraft’s story takes place at Miskatonic University at the turn of the century,” he says. “It has a very grisly, dark kind of feeling to it. The medical students there are digging up the dead and bringing the dead back to life. It goes on and on. It’s a kind of serial. These guys grow up and it just continues and continues.

The director selected for the project was Stuart Gordon, a theatrical director from Chicago who has written and produced some 25 plays including play versions of Sirens of Titan and Huckleberry Finn. He did a three-part science-fiction play to be performed on three consecutive nights, called Warp, which went on to Broadway and later became a comic book. He also directed the original version of the play E.R., which later became a television series starring Elliott Gould.

Yuzna describes Gordon as a “very talented guy and a real horror fanatic.” H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator will mark his directorial film debut. Remarks Yuzna, “Stuart is such a talented director, though he had some trouble adapting to film because he really knew very little about the mechanics of filmmaking, but he’s an incredibly fast learner and he’s a very, very talented director of actors.” According to Yuzna, the production has aimed for “the sort of shock sensibility of an Evil Dead with the production values of, hopefully, The Howling.”

BEHIND THE SCENES/INTERVIEWS Robert Sampson, who plays Dean Halsey in the film, had some personal experience in what it’s like playing a zombie. He describes the film as “the most fun ! ever had going on to explain that it allowed him to indulge in the wildest fantasies I’ve ever had as a child, of scaring people, of doing all those things that I wasn’t allowed to see when I was a kid. I was not allowed to see the scary Frankenstein movies and all that stuff. My parents were afraid that it might do a number on me, so I would sneak out to go see them. And now I’ve had the opportunity to do one. I did a Twilight Zone and a One Step Beyond that were similar to this, but they weren’t as rich, as thought out.”

Halsey goes on to describe what happened when a corpse was injected with the re-agent. “They inject it at the base of the skull, and what it does is, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. You just go Ahhh! There isn’t any control. You turn into just this mad, re-animated thing.

“There’s a scene where I’m in a padded cell, and I have a strait jacket on, and my daughter doesn’t understand what’s happened to me. So she is standing there talking to this evil doctor standing behind this one-way mirror. It’s a mirror on my side and a window on his side, and he’s trying to seduce her. Heturns and looks and can’t find me at all. All of a sudden, I’m gone. But, as he’s making a move for her, I bang my head against the window. Now I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I still have a sense of feeling. The timing of it is so weird, because I just come up and bam!

“Stuart Gordon has this off-the-wall sense of humor that I didn’t even know was there until I went to see the first dailies. I was shocked by his macabre sense of humor, but it comes out of the reality of the situation. He has everybody playing it very serious, and the humor comes out of these seemingly normal people in this bizarre circumstances.”

“What this film is about is conquering death. I mean, Herbert West’s dream is something that all doctors have shared, and that is to prolong life as long as you possibly can. It used to be believed that when your heart stopped, you were dead. Now they have drugs like epinephrine which is an adrenaline derivative which can start the heart after it’s stopped. They use fibulators and electric shock to make the heart start again, so now the stopping of the heart does not necessarily mean you’re dead. Now what they’re calling death is defined as ‘brain death, which happens six to 12 minutes after the heart stops.

“West is trying to conquer brain death. What he is trying to do is prolong that six or 12 minutes as long as he possibly can so that a person who has died, even though their brain has never received any blood or oxygen, he can be brought back. His attitude is the same as any doctor’s, that it’s better to save a life even if it means the person is going to be debilitated, than to let the person die. Even if there is brain damage, it’s still better to have that person living than dead, so under that philosophy, his approach is medically correct.”

Gordon hopes that while watching these bizarre, bloody experiments, audiences will get involved with the film’s characters. “I’ve seen many horror films where you don’t care about anybody, and that to me sort of sinks the film. If you’re not afraid for someone, you’re not afraid. It’s important. I think that one of the things that we’ve really got going for us is that we really have some wonderful actors in this film who are giving spectacular performances. When things happen to them, I think the audience is going to really care, and they’re going to really feel bad about alot of it-and horrified.”

SPECIAL EFFECTS A tall order, to be sure, especially since the budget is estimated to be just under a million dollars, far less than most of the other competitors in the zombie-film field. But then, Yuzna expects Re-Animator to be an energetic film. Unlike most movie zombies, the living dead in this film are not slow, shambling creatures. The re-animating fluid Lovecraft imagined is a sort of super-adrenaline, and so the living dead are almost supercharged. In fact, one of the opening makeup effects, devised by John Buechler, is a Cronenbergian eye-popping caused by overdosing a corpse with too much of the serum.

While Buechler was called in to handle the exploding head, plus an articulated version of a re-animated decapitated noggin, and three special corpses in Dr. Hill’s zombie army, the main effects chores in the film were handled by Tony Doublin (mechanical) and John Naulin (makeup). Naulin has gone from managing the Shop of 1,000 Faces on the Universal Studios Tour to being manager of research and development at Don Post Studios for several years, and has since been teaching makeup and working on projects related to the entertainment industry including working on the Stilsuits for Dune. He headed a makeup crew which included Gerald Quist, John Criswell, Therese Shirley, Dana Ginzberg, Richard Davison, Jeff Seigal, Julie Manegers, Melonie Cleric and Richard McGuire.

Unlike the simple gray pallor that the undead have in many flicks, Re-Animator has some rather colorful zombies. John Naulin describes how this look came about. “Stuart, the director, had some disgusting shots brought out from the Cook County morgue of all kinds of different lividities and different corpses. We sat down with that and with a book of forsenic pathology, and picked about eight or nine special colors that are not normally available with the makeups that we were using, and we had the makeup lab mix up some custom colors for us,” he said. “The corpses in this film will reflect how a corpse actually looks once the blood has settled in the body.” (After death, gravity causes blood to pool in the lowest portions of the body which in turn creates a variety of odd skin tones.)

When we ask Naulin how he would describe the effects in this film, he replies, “Moist. This is the bloodiest film 1 have ever worked on. I’ve been mixing up the blood on this film, and in the past I don’t think I ever used more than a couple of gallons of blood on a single film, but on this one, when we’re done, we’ll have used 24 gallons.

“So far the stuff looks real good. We had some of our crewmembers that couldn’t make it through some of the screenings, let’s put it that way. What especially got them was the scene where David Gale, who plays the zombiefied Dr. Hill, gets his head cut off with a shovel. I don’t think this has ever been done where somebody, on camera, has a shovel shoved through a live actor’s head and there’s a live body that is still moving and kicking, and then the head rolls off, and it’s still moving.”

The headless Dr. Hill zombie was the biggest challenge in the film. Explains Naulin, “Most times somebody loses their head in a film, you see maybe a 100 frames of it and it’s gone. We’ve got to carry 50 pages of it.” The effect was achieved a number of ways, most of which were designed by Tony Doublin. Doublin explains that the problem wasn’t “so much the body being headless, but the fact that you always run into the problem of what you do with the nine or 10 inches you lose when you lose somebody’s head. If you go up with the shoulders, the crotch and the arms become all distorted, and all the proportions go to hell. I’d seen The Dark where this guy’s head was pulled off, and it looked like a midget in a fiberglass body, but it didn’t stumble around quite as badly. Each scene we had to use a different technique! One technique that proved quite effective was building an upper torso that an actor could bend over and stick his head through so that his head appeared to be the head that the walking corpse was carrying around.

To keep Hill’s head alive, it frequently sits in a pan of blood to get its blood supply replenished. This required numerous scenes where David Gale had to sit with his head sticking up into a bloody pan while blood dribbled down the cracks in the opening. While this effect proved simple to do, it was quite un comfortable for the actor. Well, nobody said Hollywood was all glamour.

The big climax necessitated the most work. The various undead in Dr. Hill’s zombie army had to be made up, plus effects rigged not only for Dr. Hill, but also exploding veins (caused by an overdose of the serum) and burn effects. In addition, there were Buechler’s three special corpses: one of a motorcycle accident victim who looked like he skid for awhile; a failed operation that had been stuck in a body bag without the doctors bothering to remove the hospital tubes or put his guts back into his abdomen; and a third corpse, nicknamed “Gesundheit,” which was supposedly the victim of a close range shotgun blast at the back of his head which blew off the front of his face and left a gaping orifice which has hardened and dried.

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 CAST/CREW Directed Stuart Gordon

Produced Brian Yuzna

Screenplay Dennis Paoli William J. Norris Stuart Gordon

Based on “Herbert West–Reanimator” by H. P. Lovecraft

Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West Bruce Abbott as Dan Cain Barbara Crampton as Megan Halsey David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill Robert Sampson as Dean Alan Halsey Al Berry as Dr. Hans Gruber Carolyn Purdy-Gordon as Dr. Harrod Ian Patrick Williams as the Swiss Professor Gerry Black as Mace Peter Kent as Melvin the Re-Animated Craig Reed as the One Arm Man Corpse a.k.a. the Burn Victim

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Fangoria#61 Fangoria#46 Fangoria#50 Delirium#01 Cinefantastique v15n04

Re-Animator (1985) Retrospective SUMMARY At University of Zurich Institute of Medicine in Switzerland, Herbert West brings his dead professor, Dr.

[kjwongsbrain]

Bond, but not Bond.

The sub genre of 'adaptations' has always been quite a bit of hit and miss. Considering the scope of the material that has been adapted in the long history of film, some would also say that it has seen some rather incredible highs and some really desperate lows. Some of the best films of all time have been excellent adaptations of award winning novels. And then there are adaptations on screen that make us wish they'd left the source material alone instead of bastardizing it to cash in on some Hollywood money.

But the very notion of adapting a novel into a movie baffles me. The idea that you could take a 400 page novel filled with rich details and characters and snaking plot lines and condense that all into a single two hour serving seems a bit daft when you think about it. And I've always felt that way when watching adaptations of novels that I've read. A large chunk has to be left out constantly in order for it to shrink itself down into palatable film size. And that has often been the main cause of adaptations failing, especially when compared to their source material.

Think of it this way. The experience of reading a novel takes days of processing, some times weeks. The best of authors don't even waste a single word in their tomes, using every opportunity to draw their reader in even further into the world they create. A film has to achieve all of this - build its characters and make you care about them, teach you about the world that all of this takes place, create a story deep enough to keep you entertained and intrigued - in a mere two hours. Unless you're Peter Jackson, in which case you have three and a half hours.

I've come away from several adapted works feeling like I wanted more, especially if I am familiar with the source material. Even great and successful adaptations such as The Lord of the Rings - which had the Peter Jackson benefit I mentioned earlier - and Harry Potter suffer from this. There is a lot left out of these films and it ends up creating characters that are slightly different from their book counterparts. One of my favourite scenes in LOTR is when the battle of Helm's Deep settles and Gimli and Legolas compare totals and we're only treated to this bit in the Extended Cut of the film. In the attempt to get the film down to bite size, this scene is left out and the only glimpse we get of it is a 5 second bit of each of them counting as they fight. Which doesn't amount to much.

Harry Potter on the other hand gets fast tracked through his entire year in just two hours. So much of what happens really goes missing. This was especially apparent in Goblet of Fire where we're skipping from task to task in a blink of an eye because there's a whole bit at the end that we have to get to. But without as much of the buildup and teasing that was done in the book, the final reveal doesn't really have the same impact. Also part of what made that book so much fun despite its ambitious length (that was the first book to go really big compared to the three that came before it) was the learning process before each and every task. The desperate hours poring over books in the library, the training of spells and skills up till the very last minute. All of it kind of goes missing in the adaptation.

But there have also been adaptations that work extremely well on screen. My favourite of which has been The King's Speech, a film that wastes not a single second of on screen time and accomplishes all those things I mentioned earlier in its two hour serving. The conclusion should be that certain adaptations work better in the two hour medium and certain others lack the amount of time needed to truly deliver the experience that is written down.

The easy solution to this would be to add more time (as LOTR did with the extended cuts, but not every film gets this luxury), but how much is too much for the cinematic experience to contain?

This is where we're lucky to be in a golden age of Netflix and television right now because we are getting some adaptations in the smaller screen that have been absolutely amazing. The industry of TV is becoming more lucrative for middle sized projects and with a budget that is now significant enough to attempt more ambitious adaptations than ever before.

Take Game of Thrones for example. Can you even imagine if someone wanted to adapt those monstrous bricks into single serving films? I don't think it would even be remotely possible. But rather than cave in to the allure of Hollywood monies, the medium that was chosen has allowed the source material to shine and draw in people into this exceedingly rich world.

But there's a medium that sits in the middle of the two hour movie adaptation and the eighty episode television adaptation - the miniseries. And that brings me neatly to The Night Manager.

I've not been overly enthused with the works of John Le Carre before. I'm not really interested in espionage novels of any sort. I do, however, enjoy them in film and so one of my first exposures to the works of John Le Carre was A Most Wanted Man, a film that I thoroughly enjoyed. Yes, I've not watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in its entirety, nor the Constant Gardener, both of which are famous John Le Carre works that have been adapted into film. So I don't go looking for these things.

Recently, however, I started rewatching House again for some reason and I decided to look up what Sir Hugh Laurie has been up to lately and that landed me at the doorstep of The Night Manager. Coupled with Tom Hiddleston and the fact that it was a British production (this will be important later), I was sold.

And now, having binged all six episodes, I am happy to report that The Night Manager is nothing short of brilliant. And I can honestly say that the medium of miniseries has never looked more enticing as the medium of choice for these kinds of stories to be adapted into. I kept thinking to myself how this story would've looked like as a movie (of which many attempts were made to make one) and I couldn't imagine it. The complexity of the story, the multiple layers that it holds, all come together to make the final payoff that much greater. The time spent with each element of the story made so much more sense as the threads wove together into a singular plot. Even smaller characters are given enough screentime so that their actual impact on the events of the story make sense and don't feel rushed or crammed in.

The show plays like a six hour film. It would be ludicrous to think if it was to be cut down to two and a half hours.

I didn't think I would like it that much considering the topic, but it really did draw me in for the full six hours. Coupled with the fact that the performances by the two main characters are absolutely sublime, this is one great piece of work. And I'm also very glad that it remained in the hands of a British production because I could imagine Hollywood taking it and, well, Hollywood-ing the hell out of it. But no, The Night Manager doesn't go for large set pieces with chase scenes and explosions and dramatic music. Most of it happens in an eerie tension, much like how you'd imagine real spy work to be. And like I said, the payoff at the end is so much more satisfying when everything is put in place with time and care.

The Night Manager is a triumph in adaptation. It is also a triumph in the selection of mediums. I really honestly wish more directors and producers would first consider the medium in which the source material would shine before embarking on an adaptation. And with the ongoing success of some of these middle sized projects on internet TV, I really do hope to see more attention being paid to creating incredible medium sized experiences like these.

So, you should really go and take a look at The Night Manager. I hear it did well at the Golden Globes. Well, how can it not, considering you have performances from both Hiddleston and Laurie to ride on? If nothing else, watch it for those two. Laurie makes a great villain.

Next up will be my long awaited review of the new Black Mirror season, so more TV talk to come.