#the chosen tv series reaction post

[antiquelaceartist]

Chosen fans after watching The Chosen Last Supper

[antiquelaceartist]

Me when I saw this beans and prepping materials that compliment the mess is coming

Will The Chosen get into whether any of the disciples experienced survivors' guilt due to what happened to Judas? Did they say, "Why me, Lord? How come I was able to avoid making the mistakes Judas made?" Or did they experience survivors' pride and say, "Thank you, Lord, that I am not Judas!"?

AND IF PETER HAS ANOTHER BREAKDOWN AND THINKS HE DESERVES THE SAME END AS JUDAS WHAT THEN??????? WHAT IF I CURL UP AND SOB?????

i fully believe that'll happen. John will probably have a bit of that pride (i'm sure we'll get some tension post-Crucifixion/Resurrection with John being the only Apostle to remain at the foot of the cross, and being entrusted with the care of Mother Mary), but can you imagine the pain of Thomas being the doubter (especially with what's happened to Ramah), and being fully ready to be rejected by Jesus after doubting his return.

i swear, seasons 5-7 are going to make me emotionally distraught

[postguiltypleasures]

My Peak TV journey Severance Season 2

I was really excited for the season through most season. Then I left the finale feeling if like it was still zigging when it should start zagging. I have read other people’s writings and I can say I get what they were going for intellectually, but it still felt wrong for me. Some of this involves me being more involved with episode discussions a they are. The fact that I did it, was a sign that I am just this enthusiastic about the show. But also, I think that this approach to watching a series leads to people missing the forest for the trees. Would I feel as strongly about how the finale should have started a look at Lumon from the out side if I hadn’t been theorizing about it? I am posting this so I can move on and maybe the answer will come to me. Here are some further thoughts while comparing it to other TV that I mostly haven’t seen anyone make, as well as a couple of fan cast idea.

I also need to mention that my reaction to how the season wrapped is related to reading Inkoo Kang’s unimpressed review of the season. In it she states that the series seems to give Mark too much of a “chosen one” status, and how that reduces the women in his life. I wanted her to be wrong. Early episodes, I would look at how relatively little time was spent on Mark and his point of view and think about The Magicians. That started off as The Quentin and Julia Take Different Paths in Their Magical Education Show, and developed into a an ensemble of people making their way in the world and with each other. They eventually even killed on Quentin, which was exciting! (But also had a huge backlash.) After all, Severance star Zach Cherry, Dylan, had a memorable guest star on The Magicians as a jaded expert in luck magic. (He also had a memorable guest star on Succession, as a guy Roman teamed up with at a Waystar Royco training session. I definitely saw more comparisons between Severance and Succession than The Magicians on here, and I get it. But what The Magicians lacks in bleak corporate satire it makes up for in themes of how circumstance affects identity and needing to learn to reject the mythology groups create around themselves.) And his character, Dylan and his outie had some of the most poignant and affecting scenes all season!

Since the penultimate episode I’ve read a lot of posts about how “this show has always been The Mark and Helly Show, complaining about the season finale confirming this just makes you seem media illiterate” posts. But there are plots that were brought up and then not continued. For example, after the first couple of episodes of the season people were speculating that Lumon can't be as large as they say it is. This was spurred largely by the presence of the replacement MDR team with their comparing different Halls of Perpetuity and their severance thresholds. Not all the offices have the same kind of funding. One that had a fair amount of funding apparently turned into a fiasco. What does that mean for the company that seems to hold such power over their employees? I think Lumon has been a large pharma company, but they recently over leveraged themselves with this "sever the whole world" thing, and could collapse into debt really quickly. But innie Mark, and by extension the whole show, does not seem interested in this question after the first two episodes.

Going into the season I kept thinking of how many outside things I didn’t want to see. Most of these which would be related to world building and were related to Ricken's familiar but wrong sayings. I don't want a deep history explaining Kier, PE is in a state that only exists because of some alternate history events. I also don't want to see the Severance version of real major American cities. I felt like the world building outside of Lumon threatened to stumble into something unbelievable that would become too big a stumbling block for my leaps of imagination. Some critics of the "robots as working class" series Humans had similar hang ups. (In that world humans developed humanoid robots, but not some common technology that we actually have.) Even as someone who really liked Humans and was disappointed when in got canceled, they had a point. But ultimately, that was the wrong direction to worry about. While we spent more time with the outtie versions of Dylan, Irving and Helena, it came with less interest in the outside world. We never heard from The Whole Mind Collective or other anti-severance organizations. While I get that this would probably be a distraction from the arc they were giving the innies, it also feels unintentionally agoraphobic.

I was very let down by the finale, and after deliberating and reading a lot about how the innies are acting on self definition and value, I think I know how this ended in a way that would inevitably hit me wrong. I have never been in love, but I was once a teenager. And as a teenager I was frequently told that what I was going through was not the "real world." So just move on and don't think about it too much. I hated it then, and now think it did active harm to me. So I intellectually get that the innies, as adolescent like versions of the outties need to have their experiences recognized. But in retrospect, the reason I think people telling me that what I wasn’t experiencing wasn’t the "real world" harmed me because either was a denial of interest where I fit in the world, what my experiences were signs of. In the Severance finale, as a viewer, I felt like the innies were choosing to prove their value as individuality at the expense of learning more about where they fit in the world. A choice that feels false.

For a while I have been predicting that Milchick's fake newspaper saying the MDR team was the "Faces of Severance Reform" was foreshadowing for Gemma and Mark becoming the "Faces of Severance Abuse" in a very public news story. (And I still think that would be a good place for Gemma's story to go in season 3). So I was really surprised when in the Inside the Episode clips Ben Stiller talked about how the contained MDR Uprising in the video was foreshadowing the real and out of control rebellion with which the season ends. I feel like that is less to build on than my idea. During the finale, when the Gemma rescue plot cut to Helly and Dylan battling Milchick I thought “this is still going on?” Watching more scenes of that siege has no appeal for me. There has been a lot of writing about Milchick this season and his relationship to his blackness. The minstrelesque routine followed by the marching band would have been an interesting continuation of that, if it wasn’t also a tactic to slow down the rescue of Gemma plot. As it is, I’m kind of over the Cult of Kier’s placating spectacles. It’s might be a sign that the show and I should go our separate ways.

Further thoughts on the season:

I wish I had re-watched the first season before this. I needed to be reminded of things like Irving falling asleep at work, the four humors. But mostly for pacing questions. I remember thinking it was ell paced. I watched some clips and realized that I had completely forgotten that they would do a sequence from one point of view then another later on. The first two episodes pairing made more sense like that. After the episodes “Woe’s Hollow”, “Chikhai Bardo” and “Sweet Vitriol” I wanted to defend the series for not addressing any other subplots to show time moving. I could point to episodes of great series’s like The Americans or Dickinson where scenes for the serialized continuity mess with the main plots themes or are just a weird fit. But, I mostly thought of the two season lasting Amazon Prime series The Wilds, where the second season’s inclusion of a a new set of male characters meant that the set of female characters all got less time. There were only eight episodes in the second season, so things felt especially choppy. I didn’t like that feeling, but I also didn’t dislike any of the scenes. It made me wonder if there was a longer episode count could they tell their story without feeling that kind of rushed? I had similar thoughts about the second season of Severance. Would episodes that stuck to one story be better received if there were more episodes in total and it didn’t feel like we were running out of time? I don’t know. But the second season finale of The Wilds got me excited for a format shift in a way Severance’s didn’t. Though, if Rachel Griffith’s joined the Severance cast in the future, that could be fun.

Another show I thought about often during the season was The Leftovers. They are both post- Lost shows, The Leftovers in a more literal way than Severance. Both are about not having any way to deal with traumatic events, and how cults seem to worm their way into those situations. I ended the second season wishing that Severance had the kind of boldness The Leftovers had when it up and moved its entire setting in each of its three seasons. And I kind of want Irving to become to Severance what Matt was to The Leftovers. (Guy on a spiritual journey that is always getting into frustrating and crazy misadventures.)

Also as Lost was a “disillusionment with the War on Terror” series, Severance is a “living with the opioid crisis for an extended period” series. See the goal of Lumon being a “world without pain”, the ways in which this comes through the individual experiencing it, the fact that their history is tied to an anesthetic for proof.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Jame Egan shares a legal first name with The Silence of the Lambs’s Buffalo Bill. I think they named if this because they want us to think of the severance procedure as akin to being kidnapped, thrown in a well and starved before being killed so your kidnapper/killer can turn your skin into clothes. It is just too weird of a coincidence. That said, Jame Egan isn’t really a dynamic villain. He has little screen time because he is clearly someone who doesn’t want to be around people, and probably doesn’t want to be seen either. He also feels like a charisma void in a way that similarly placed characters, like Senior on Matlock, don't. I found myself wondering how much the fan anger directed towards Helena, Cobel, Milchick was because of what a non presence he is versus the sexism and racism. While I do think there is an interesting story about how much was done under his orders, how much was done because people thought he’d like it, and how much was abuse that his practices allowed (Dr Mauer, treatment of Gemma), is interesting. I don’t see a need for him to be alive for it. I didn’t think he would die in the second season finale, but I hoped he would. He’s not really an interesting character. Moving on from him and how he runs Lumon/the Cult of Kier could be.

This train of thought led me to thinking that meeting the board members is probably inevitable after a while, and deciding I would really like to see one of them played by Kyle MaLachlan, someone who can definitely fill a charisma void.

Dylan is the character that I most identify with, and for whom have the hardest time thinking of future plots. I just know that I want more of him, Gretchen and their kids. Part of the appeal is that there is the least amount of mystery with him. As in during the first part of the season there was writing about how the series subverted the failures of the mystery box show by answering things relatively quickly, Dylan and his family continuing to do that while the rest the show got mired by unanswered questions, I want to look towards his character as an example of what righting this series would look like. Does this seem like some contradictory thoughts? Well I guess it is.

The first season finale reveal that Helly R is a Egan and Miss Casey is Mark’s not-dead wife were such good twists. In someways the Helly one should have been obvious, I even had a prediction that she would turn out to be someone who came from money, but recently lost it. The Helly/Helena relation was the most interesting in the season. And I do think it is interesting that she and Mark seem to be going in opposite directions regarding their respective innie-outie relationships. (Mark’s are a cross purposes, Hellyna’s realizing how they both are defined by lacks of freedom.) It added a unenjoyable futility feeling to their running together. I didn’t get the, “there’s a deeper story here” feeling from the second finale that I did from the first. The closest the finale got to that hat feeling was Dr. Mauer’s terrified “You’ll kill them all!” But I couldn’t blame the characters for not wanting to know more what that was about/ think it’s just a manipulation tactic.

[culttvblog]

Denis Shaw Season Introduction: The Prisoner - Checkmate

With fear and trembling I start a series of posts which are by way of an experiment for both me and this blog. Over the past decade of blogging I have never really focussed much on the actors in these shows, in fact it bugs me like nothing else if an actor is one of the 'familiar faces' of 1960s TV and I can't work out where I've seen them or remember their name. Generally speaking I consider it to be one of the weaknesses of TV of this era, and means that it looks as if the world of TV was a very small village at best.

However this experiment I'm starting is to try to turn this on its head and see what happens if I focus on one of these 'familiar faces' instead of blanking them out, and blog a series of posts about their roles. This is really very strange, new ground for me indeed.

My first victim is Denis Shaw (1921 to 1971) who will be familiar to anyone reading this blog for playing a series of villains. One of the reasons I've picked him as my first is that his career exactly coincided with the peak junking era so I'm not sure how much of his actual television work (I suspect more film survives) I may be able to obtain and this may end up being a very short experiment indeed.

The other reason is that my interest was first aroused by the Free for All podcast about The Prisoner which contrasted his jolly persona as the shopkeeper with his real life personality where he sounds very much like the sort of person who could start a fight on his own in a room. I have read pages saying that he had the name of the rudest man in London, owed money to everyone he knew, was banned from so many bars in Soho that he had difficulty getting a drink, and of course there are all the allegations that he was an actual gangster and started fights in real life. Definitely a colourful character.

Born Douglas Shaw in 1921, according to IMDB his acting career began in 1938 in the films The Case of the Frightened Lady and General John Regan. He was a wireless operator in a Sherman tank on D-Day. Biographical information is rather lacking and tends to focus on the things I've already said, but he seems to have fitted in a huge number of roles given that he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49. He will be familiar to every reader of this blog for playing relatively minor roles, usually as quite sinister characters.

He appears in two episodes of The Prisoner, Arrival and Checkmate, and the played the jolly shopkeeper who we all love. A clear contrast to his usual roles and to his real-life persona!

I have chosen Checkmate over Arrival because he has a slightly more involved role than in Arrival. He appears twice. The first is during the experiment to see which Villagers are prisoners and which are guards, in which ihis reaction to Number 6's demand to see his accounts clearly indicates that the shopkeeper is a prisoner rather than a guardian. Later, when Number 6 starts the revolt, the shopkeeper has the role of tying up Number 2's hands.

It's an interesting use of his character, because up to now he has seemed very much the face of the Village, handing out the inadequate maps and saying all the right things. Any consequences for this revolt are not made explicit however in Hammer into Anvil the shopkeeper is instead played by Victor Woolf who can obviously be relied on to ring up Number 2 and tell him what Number 6 is listening to. I have not seen any rumours online of real-world reasons for why Shaw didn't play the shopkeeper again in Hammer into Anvil, but I can definitely see the meeting of his personality with the notoriously temperamental Patrick McGoohan resulting in fireworks, so it could well have been that.

And that's it. That's his role. I have not expatiated at length about the episode (which is why I've used it as a sort of introduction) because you all know it and I've posted at length about it frequently. Going forwardI expect that I will talk more about the episode as well as Shaw's role simply because his tendency to have small roles will necessitate doing this to make what I have to say into a blog post.

Coming next: further posts about TV episodes in which Denis Shaw appears, probably his more accustomed rather sinister roles.

This blog is mirrored at

culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)

Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog

[lookingforhappy]

disclaimer: i found this in my drafts like a year after writing it, i've jazzed it up a bit so it reads a bit better.. hopefully?

i'm guessing from this commenter's url that they don't want to be interacted with/drawn attention to, & it has been months since i got this comment so i won't include their url for their privacy's sake

i'm sorry but i'm gonna be really annoying and disagree with this statement.

if this was an irl situation, then i would 100% agree with this sentiment. seeing a person for 6 seconds doesn't mean you know anything about them, and unless you're literally watching them murder someone or commit some other horrid crime or otherwise harass someone then you shouldn't judge them either.

however.

this is fiction. and every single aspect of a shot or scene is meant to elicit a reaction, opinion or thought from the viewer. when english teachers say "the door was red because they were angry/passionate" this is exactly the irl application of that lesson. that scene was only 4 seconds to us, but to the creators? they cast that actress, they chose the set decoration, the outfit, the action and reaction of the character. every aspect of that scene was chosen. on purpose. we're not looking at a glimpse of a real person in a real setting by chance, this is choreographed specifically for us to draw conclusions. this is our first (and likely only) impression of five's mother. and what impression did that leave the majority of viewers with?

link to post

to clarify, this isn't a dig at @feralnumberfive or anyone who had this reaction, and there were quite a few:

i think this is exactly what the creators wanted people to take away from this scene. and thats why i hate it, because this was intended. and its lazy, boring and detracts from five's character rather than adds to it.

but lets backtrack a bit. what exactly is this scene trying to tell its audience? there's two answers to this:

on the surface it's meant to communicate that five's mother, Efa, died in the same manner as the other mothers - a violent, psychically inflicted brain hemorrhage.

but the subtext of this scene, the implication, is that Efa passed down her "butcher genes" or "serial killer genes". this is what bothers me. and i know it's meant to be humourous. it's a gag. it's poking fun at five having the most brutal, gorey fight scenes in the whole series. but it doesn't work in the context of five's arc in either tv show or comic series.

see, i think this is a subtle reference to the comics plot of five having serial killer genes spliced into his own. (one of the tags screencapped above says excatly this). but that is five's only redeeming quality in the comics, because he hates that dna and what it made him into. he resents himself. it's not treated like a joke because to five and damn near everyone around him, it isn't funny.

even in the show itself, its not funny. five has explicitly expressed a hatred of killing, and what the commission forced him to do (the other nod to the dna plot of the comics).

the implication is that nature wins over nurture. that Five has always had butchery in his genes, and he was always destined to be violent and to enjoy that violence because of who his mother is/was.

but what's worse is that it means The Handler was right. Five was always a killer, its in his genes. his mother was a butcher. this is where he was always going to end up.

when the handler originally said this, we didn't have the context of five's mother being a butcher. five's dna/inherited genes was a blank slate. the audience was meant to hope that five would prove her wrong. in fact, that was integral to his character throughout s1 & 2. he was constantly trying to prove that one statement wrong. he did his best not to kill anyone while also protecting his family, he tries the diplomatic route every single time.

and now, that one 6 second scene has twisted the narrative and implied that Five was always destined to be good at killing, to take pride in it.

and this isn't an isolated incident. the other mothers have subtext to them as well.

luthers mother is a business woman, drawing a connection to luther's role as the leader.

diegos mother is seen cooking at home, drawing a connection to diego's close relationship with his homely, adoptive mother grace.

allisons mother is a teacher, drawing a connection to her status as a mother herself, and also to the role that speech plays in allisons life.

klaus' mother is amish, drawing a connection to klaus' eccentricity and possibly to his cult.

(insert this whole reblog for fives mom)

bens mother is a schoolgirl, which draws a connection to his naivety and his youthful hope and optimism.

viktor's mother is a young swimmer, drawing a connection to his ambition to be a part of the umbrellas.

those clips are meant to mean something. its not random, its chosen.

and, side note, i hate how five's mother isn't even chopping up meat. she's just pureeing it randomly with a cartoonishly large knife that she should never be swinging from the height or angle. all while she's covered in blood? just c'mon man.

... i just think there were different ways to do this. for one, spend more time on this plot point, make the mothers a whole arc or season. fives mother could stay a butcher if we got to see more of her. give her something else to define her character (is she family orientated or a lone wolf? what are her hobbies? who are her friends?) so that she isn't simply known as a butcher. so that the connection between mother and son isn't immediately blood and gore and cutting flesh. maybe even explore how five could move past his violent past by having him draw this conclusion and then discover through his mother that there is more to him than that.

TL;DR

Five's birth mother being a butcher implies that it's in Five's nature, his DNA, to be a killer. thereby proving The Handler correct: he was always a killer.

i feel like having five's mom be a butcher is such a misunderstanding of five and what his character means.

it implies that the violent, brutal actions he commits are in some way genetic/inherited, rather than cultivated after nearly five/six decades of desperate survival and manipulation. it implies that five was always going to become violent, that he had no chance at being soft or innocent because of his genetics.

and that, to me, takes away so much of the tragedy of his situation.

five doesn't want to be a killer, but he had to become one to have a chance at saving his family. he had to accept the handler's deal because if he didn't, if he refused to kill, he would be stuck in the apocalypse with no one but a mannequin to talk to and no clean water or stable food source or general quality of life.

five's brutality and willingness to kill was man-made and cultivated by the commission. sure, his already there traits helped to propel him towards this outcome, but it wasn't his first or even second choice.

depicting his mother as a butcher by itself is a betrayal of this character. but to also depict her as someone who loves this job, who has won awards for it, who takes pleasure from driving a knife through a slab of meat over and over again?

the implications of five having always enjoyed inflicting pain or of having that base instinct his entire life strips his character of agency, and makes his choice to sacrifice some of his humanity void. he didn't choose to become a killer for any higher purpose or sacrifice, but because he was always going to be that killer, because he enjoyed it.

[antiquelaceartist]

The Chosen fandom in hearing Season 5 release date

[antiquelaceartist]

Jesus when his cover was blown by the crowd in the wedding

[antiquelaceartist]

Here's the post to celebrate the upcoming season 5 new trailer for The Chosen Last Supper

[antiquelaceartist]

When Jesus said that he is the law of Moses to a mad group of teachers of the law

[antiquelaceartist]

Jesus said he love his fam no matter what

[antiquelaceartist]

When we got the teaser of the passion season coming on Monday

[antiquelaceartist]

Us seeing the sweetness with Judas and Jesus whole knowing what happen despite being 2000 plus years old

[antiquelaceartist]

Dallas in seeing the reaction from The Chosen fandom on Season 5 release date

[antiquelaceartist]

When Joanna and Claudia gave a girly chat over the drama from the dinner

[antiquelaceartist]

Chosen fans when they saw the last supper picture and know what’s happening from there

[antiquelaceartist]

Us when herodias use the dance to kill John the Baptist