#thing with that draft is that i blame a lot of the issues on Rise of the TMNT

[kifu]

Hey, look. Story. Rewritten in what may be an acceptable way, but I still mourn my missing words.

I might post big blocks I've worked on here. Might get bored of that. But I don't think I'll be posting on AO3 until this story is completely redone and I'm satisfied with it.

Have everything I wrote today and yesterday.

The demon jerked with a sharp inhale, breaking the steady, deep rhythm of his sleep. Michelangelo looked up from the comic in his hands, set it on the table, and stood to his feet to watch him. The demon’s chest rose and fell quickly before evening out, all the while his eyelids fluttered.

“The demon’s waking up,” Mike announced.

Leonardo appeared from out of the candlelight’s threshold to stand beside the chair in their living area. Mike hadn’t seen where he came from, but he already had his arms crossed over his plastron in an over dramatic no-nonsense stance.

The demon groaned, his eyes fully opening. He rolled his head on his shoulders, eventually locking eyes with Leonardo. He stared for a moment. “Morlocks?” he croaked.

Leonardo broke the eye contact to exchange a look with Mike. Mike frowned and offered Leo the barest of shrugs. Leo looked back at the demon with a carefully blank expression.

The demon pushed himself upright with difficulty, leaning heavily on the back of the couch. His eyes flicked toward Michelangelo. They were completely yellow. No differentiation between iris and cornea, and certainly no pupil. Mike wasn’t entirely sure how he knew the demon was looking at something, but he could feel his gaze nonetheless. Michelangelo was quite proud of himself for keeping relatively calm this entire time, but seeing the demon’s eyes opened a kind of flood gate for his anxiety. He shifted from foot to foot to give the energy a healthy way out. “I appreciate the help, I really do,” the demon said, “but I need to talk to Storm.” His words slurred, running into each other and trailing off in weird places, but he did manage to get the point across well enough to understand.

“Great, he’s a whack bag,” Raphael said. He silently slunk into the light beside Mike. He was tense, but he refrained from mirroring his brother’s intimidating posturing.

“He’s not a whack bag, Raph,” Leo said with a hint of exasperation. “He’s concussed.”

“Definitely concussed,” the demon agreed. He faintly hissed air in through his teeth with a sharp breath of pain.

Leonardo’s mouth fell into a frown as he studied the demon. “Why are you covered in blood?”

The demon didn’t respond at first, but eventually his eyes widened and he gasped. “Oh God,” he said in such a low voice Mike could have mistaken it for a groan. “The children. Are the children okay?” Underneath the slur, he had an accent that Mike couldn’t quite place, even though it sounded vaguely familiar.

Leo checked in with his brothers again, but Raph shook his head to one side in a subtle no. “There are no children,” Leo said. “Just us.”

The demon stared almost vacantly at Leo.

“The blood?” Leo prompted.

“It’s not mine,” the demon responded, more quickly than before. He reached up into his hair, lightly touching the side where he’d hit his head. “Except this. This is mine.”

“Whose blood?” Raphael growled.

The demon stared off, focusing off of Leonardo as his thoughts wandered. “I was supposed to save the children. It’s their blood. I don’t know if I succeeded.”

“What children?” Leonardo asked.

The demon licked his lip. His words came after a couple shaky breaths. “The cult – Friends of Humanity – held a rally. They were going to execute mutant children on live TV. It was my job to get the children to safety.”

“Are you sure you don’t meant H.A.T.E.? Humans Against Extra Terrestrials?” Mike suggested helpfully.

The demon’s brows knit together briefly before he relaxed his expression again, though with a small wince. “Friends of Humanity. They’re gaining a lot of political traction somehow.”

“They were gonna execute mutant children?” Raphael clarified. “Only mutants around here are us an’ ol’ Leatherhead.”

“We’re in New York City?” the demon asked.

“Manhattan Island,” Leo clarified.

“Sewers,” Michelangelo added.

The demon stared off again, his head waving back and forth with a distinct lack of balance.

“What were you doing in Donnie’s explosion?” Raphael asked. His tone came out with accusation, but Mike could tell that he tried holding back.

“Explosion?” the demon echoed. He focused his eyes on Raph, his balance temporarily returning. “What explosion?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Leonardo asked.

The demon’s focus slowly faded out again, the waving picking up again. “I saw the children. I leapt toward them. It was stupid, but I was going to teleport them away. It was their best chance at survival.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. “I don’t know if I got them away.”

“Teleport?” Mike asked.

“I’m a mutant,” the demon replied casually. “I can teleport.”

“Sure,” Raph grunted. “Let’s see it.”

“It requires concentration,” the demon explained. “Which is not something I have right now.”

“Likely,” Raph mumbled with a roll of his eyes.

The demon watched Raphael for a moment and then looked back in Leonardo’s direction. “I’m Nightcrawler. Or Kurt. Kurt Wagner. I don’t know how I got here, but I do thank you for taking care of me.”

Leo set his jaw and Mike didn’t think he was going to answer. As soon as Mike opened his mouth to introduce them all, Leonardo finally pipped up. “I’m Leonardo. These are my brothers Michelangelo and Raphael. Our sensei, Master Splinter, is with our last brother, Donatello, who was caught in the same explosion as you.”

“I really need to get back. I need to know what happened.”

“You’re going to need to wait on that for a little bit,” Leonardo said, almost as a suggestion rather than an order. “You’re in no state to be moving. Raph? Could you bring our guest a glass of water?”

Raphael dipped his chin in acknowledgment and turned to head to the kitchen.

“Wait!” Leo called. Raph stopped mid-motion, balancing himself expertly to turn his head to regard Leo. “Can concussed patients have water?”

Kurt snickered and then groaned. “Ja, I can drink water. Thank-you.”

Slowly dipping his foot back to the ground, Raph nodded again and disappeared back into the darkness that filled their home.

Kurt leaned heavily against the back of the couch, his eyes staring off between Leonardo and Michelangelo. “Something is not adding up,” he murmured, barely loud enough for Mike to catch. He stepped forward and tilted his head for the words to better catch his ear. Louder, conversationally: “Humans Against Terrestrial Extras. You are not aliens?” Kurt’s eyes caught Mike. He asked the question in a way that Mike knew he already knew the answer, but he was double checking his facts.

“We’re not,” Mike confirmed. “But we did kinda have an alien problem a little while back. Our planet was invaded for a couple days. We took care of it and Donnie sent them all away, but you know how humans are sometimes.”

Kurt’s lips drew a fine line.

“What’s wrong?” Leo asked.

“What you tell me is only adjacent to my memories. Like they run in parallel, but not …” Kurt trailed off, squinting as he struggled through the sluggishness of his concussion. That, or he didn’t know the words at all and he was throwing word salad at the two brothers.

“It’s nothing,” Kurt eventually summed up. “I just – I need to get back home. I need to know how the mission turned out. I need to know if I got the children to safety.”

“Do you think that will make the news?” Leo suggested.

“Ja, probably. They were preparing to film live, though we struck before their equipment was up. FoH is not exactly a little movement anymore.”

“Too bad our power’s out,” Leo said, this pointed at Mike.

“We could always call April,” Mike suggested.

“No, don’t worry about it,” Kurt said. “I don’t need to bother anyone else. I just need to … I need to sleep,” he said with a defeated and extremely tired tone. Mike heard it before, when Donatello had something bothering him that he couldn’t drop.

Raphael returned, sticking his arm out sharply with the glass to give to Kurt. With a little effort, Kurt pulled himself back into a self-maintained sitting position to accept the glass. As soon as it left his fingers, Raphael looked about himself and then settled on the couch arm farther from where Kurt sat and then crossed his arms.

Kurt took a long, but slow drink, using one hand to hold the glass and another hand to hold himself upright. He settled the drink onto his knees with both hands around it, staring down at the ground. “How long have I been out?” he asked the floor.

Raph looked at Leo with one brow pulled low. “Like an hour, right?”

“If that,” Leo confirmed.

Kurt took another drink, and then moved to stand. Mike watched Kurt critically, but Raph immediately jumped to his feet and grabbed Kurt by the arm before he had a chance to straighten out. Mike saw the wobble and the expression of impending doom cross Kurt’s face. If Raph hadn’t caught him, he’d have ended up face down on the ground. Mike wouldn’t have been able to react in time. Raph pushed Kurt down to the couch again, letting go in the same movement.

“Ya ain’t ready for that,” he scolded Kurt. He motioned sharply. “Drink some more.”

“I need to go home,” Kurt protested in a rather pathetically weak voice.

“We’re not taking you anywhere until you’re safe to move,” Leonardo repeated. “Judging by how hard you hit your head, it might be a couple days.”

Raph shook his head with some vigor. “Nuh-uh. A concussion this bad, he ain’t moving for at least a week. Even if you can heal like us. Heal up more like a human, I dunno. A month?”

Kurt wrinkled his nose in a feeble attempt at disgust. “I can’t wait that long.”

“Too damn bad,” Raph grunted.

Kurt dropped his head into the palm of his hand, his elbow resting on his knee. He groaned. “It shouldn’t take that long. I can’t … remember … anything right now, but that – it’s wrong.”

Raph snorted a small laugh through his nose. “Can’t remember, but the concussion ain’t bad, huh?” He took a step back toward the couch arm, his eyes locked on to Kurt in case he decided to make another attempt at standing.

“No, I’m not saying it’s not bad. A month is excessive.”

“How come you can remember what you were doing if you can’t remember anything?” Mike asked.

Leonardo threw him a look that told Mike something along the lines of ‘shut up’ and ‘not helping’.

“Different parts of the brain,” Raphael said casually, though he didn’t look away from Kurt as he spoke to Mike. “Probably gonna be a lot of things he can’t remember that he don’t normally have a problem recalling any other day.” He settled back onto the arm. “Should all come back. But for the next two days, I don’t wanna see you off this couch, you hear?” Raphael stared Kurt down, completely no-nonsense.

“I can’t – ”

“Shut up,” Raph snapped. “You’re being stupid, and if you didn’t just try and knock your block off, you’d know it, too.”

“Raph,” Leo said with a warning tone.

Raph threw up a hand to wave him off. “I’m calm.” He tapped the couch, his eyes never having left Kurt. “I’m gonna make sure you stay on this couch no matter how many times you repeat yourself that you’re missing from home. They’re gonna have to stay worried for a little bit, because you ain’t moving and I ain’t carrying you. That much jostling will have you throwing up all over the place.”

Leonardo sighed and dropped any pretense at an intimidating pose. “We’ll watch you and make sure you’re getting better and not worse. Head injuries are, unfortunately, common enough around here.”

“And that means, we’ll let ya sleep. Ya need it. But we’re gonna be watching ya to make sure you ain’t suffocating in your sleep or seizing. You need to pee, we need to know. You need water, we’ll get it for ya. You need food” – Raphael jerked his finger in Mike’s direction – “you let him know. Definitely not him.” Raph’s finger moved from Mike to Leo. Leonardo scoffed.

“This is ridiculous,” Kurt mumbled.

“Don’t care,” Raphael grunted. “You’re not in great shape. You’re holding a conversation, but you’re slurring, you’re dizzy, and your memory ain’t good. You’re also about to pass out at a moment’s notice.” He leaned forward and grabbed the glass from Kurt’s hand. “Gimme that before you drop it. Bet your coordination is shit, too.” Raph set the glass on table, easily within Kurt’s reach.

“Raph, I think he gets it,” Leo said testily.

Raphael shrugged. “Don’t think he does, but I sure wanna drive the point home.”

“So now that we’ve figured this all out and Donnie’s safe and everything, can I go to bed now?” Mike asked.

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Master Splinter’s with Donnie for when he wakes up, but I doubt that will be for, well, a long time. I don’t think a head injury is the worst of his problems and his lack of sleep will keep him down and out. Raph, do you want first or second watch with him?” He motioned his cheek in Kurt’s direction.

“I’ll stay up with him.”

“Can you play nice?”

“Guy’s gonna conk out in half a minute anyway.”

Mike didn’t doubt Raph. Kurt slowly began to slump to the side and back as the turtles debated amongst themselves, the topic gradually stepping away from his immediate concerns. His eyes fluttered again as he tried to force himself awake, but it was a losing battle.

Leonardo studied their guest for a moment and let out a long breath. “Okay. Raph, I know you know what you’re doing. Grab me if you or Master Splinter need a break. Mikey, you’re on standby.”

Mike saluted in acknowledgment.

“I think Don did wait for half the night before he tried exploding the place apart,” Raph remarked. “Don’t know what time it is, but I ain’t that tired.”

“Maybe your adrenaline hasn’t worn off yet,” Leonardo said. “I’m still tired.”

“Go on. I’ll get ya if I need ya, Fearless,” Raph said. He stood up and reached for Kurt’s foot, pulling his ankle to stretch him more comfortably across the couch. He grabbed the pillow and was working on getting it under Kurt’s head when Mike finally walked away, plunging himself into the darkness of the lair.

“I told you he’s not an alien,” Leonardo said from beside Mike.

“I dunno,” Mike said in a low voice. “He’s not an extra-terrestrial kind of alien, but I get the feeling he’s not from around here.”

“From New York?” Leo asked.

“No, maybe he’s from New York, but don’t you think we should have heard about him or the cult he was trying to stop? Murdering children on live TV? Or do you think he really is some kind of whack job like Raph said?” Mike stopped moving, sure he was close to the ladder leading up to their rooms, but not immediately able to spy it out in the inky dark.

Leo was quiet for a moment and Mike would have believed that he’d found the ladder and left him if he thought Leo could pull that off silently. They were ninja, but even Leo had his limits in the way of silence and invisibility against used and abused structures. “I still don’t think he’s crazy, but you do make a really good point.”

“And you really think he can teleport? That’s nuts, even for us.”

The metallic groans of the ladder from ahead notified Mike that Leo had found their way upstairs. “Why not?” Leo asked conversationally. “We’ve been pulled into other dimensions in different ways and had our matter moved from one side of the universe to another. We stole a sword from the Foot that is half mystical. We found a civilization that’s powered entirely by crystals. Mikey, your comic book characters turned out to be real people with real powers. Why is teleporting weird?”

The ladder continued to groan as Leonardo slowly climbed it. Mike used the noise to find his way up and followed Leo.

“I dunno. Maybe I’m jealous. He’s a mutant and he can teleport. Or he’s nuts. We’re mutants and we can do ninjutsu? Because we trained really really hard our whole lives. And! We’re mutant turtles. Sensei’s a mutant rat. LH is a mutant ‘gator. What is he a mutant of?”

Leonardo waited until Mike’s feet hit the solid ground on the upper level to respond. “Your argument is getting weaker. It doesn’t really matter. We’ll help him get back on his feet and go home. Then we won’t have to worry about it.”

“That’s the thing, Leo,” Mike said. “What if we can’t get him home?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Where did he come from?” Mike said with a little more conviction. “I know you’re playing this light so I’ll shut up and go to bed, but we’re missing a lot of this story, Leo, and you know it.”

Leonardo sighed and placed both hands on Mike’s shoulders. “I know. The thing is, he’s not a threat, for right now at least. Nothing he said really made any sense, but it can all wait until his brain isn’t pudding and we have Donnie back.” He removed his hands and began walking to his room. “Goodnight, Mikey.”

Mike stood still for another moment. “Yeah, ‘night Leo.”

[phoebosacerales]

idk if you've seen what happened in Valencia, Spain. It was strongly hit by DANA recently, on October 29, and it was the worst DANA catastrophe out of all Spain history. It's been a real madness, and what angers people the most is the bad management of the government. If they had acted well, many lives would've been saved, because they were preventable deaths. The help the victims got was mostly by other civilians and a huge long story that I wouldn't be able to end if I had to tell it all.

My point is, if you find it interesting and you heard about it you could analyze the astrology behind all these events, 'cause this event definitely is a turning point for spanish people.

Oh, I'm seeing it now. What you're telling me sounds very familiar, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul went through a similar catastrophe in April this year, when incredible heavy rains and storms flooded rivers, lakes and destroyed entire cities, and all because the government hasn't been doing what's needed to prevent this. It's a very predictable event caused by climate change's aggravation of the effects of El Niño. It was the worst we've seen, 94% of Rio Grande do Sul's cities were affected. To get an idea, Rio Grande do Sul is a big state, like more than half a Spain.

I think I wouldn't be able to give a deep analysis of what's happening in Spain, I don't have the lived experience of the country and not much context. I only dare make analysis for the USA because that's the imperial core and those mfs politics affect the whole world.¹ So, this is just a superficial reading and I think I can compare it to Brazil, because we had the same ascendant and consequently the same house placements on the Aries Ingress chart, and it's interesting to see how the different degrees of the angles change predictions a whole lot. I actually have something on my drafts about other aspects of the climate crisis for Brazil this year, I'm glad you asked this question so I can introduce the topic.

I've been attributing these latest escalations of the climate crisis to Saturn in Pisces. We're to expect this realistically and I believe Saturn in Pisces is fitting, because as the last sign it has a bit of an apocalyptic/endings theme to it and it's been very scary how things are escalating now.² To make this clear, the sky isn't to blame and astrology does not cause any of these issues, it just shows tendencies through symbols. Any prediction heavily depends on context and the context of climate change, of bad urban planning etc is of our own political leaders' making and their inaction.

Madrid and Brasília both have gotten Capricorn rising on the Aries Ingress 2024, and that happens for many places, but the annual ruler for each country differs depending on the strength and condition of the planets that have dignity on the exact degree of the ascendant. If we get a cardinal sign rising, in order to analyze the whole year we need to open up 3 more complementary charts for each of the next seasons. This is how hard mundane astrology is.

Brasília

Here's how things looked for Brasil. The 4th house and the IC are obviously always affected when we get catastrophes like this. The Sun is in the 4th house here, but the IC is in Pisces with Saturn and Venus. We also have to consider that these planets are moving and soon we're going to see Mars get into Pisces too. On the degree where Saturn finds itself there's a fixed star called Alpha Hydrus, (the male Hydra, a water snake), which is a more obscure constellation near the south pole that represents the tail end of the river Eridanus.³

Three weeks after the Aries Ingress, Mars meets Saturn. One of the most important conjunctions to watch for in mundane astrology is the Mars-Saturn one, because they're famous for signaling calamity and disease. And they're a lot more frequent than the Great Conjunctions (Jupiter-Saturn). The chart for their conjunction can be interpreted, but to keep it short, I'm just going to say that the conjunction was in the 6th house and they met at 14°, on top of the fixed star Achernar of the river Eridanus. One of the worst things about the floods was that it meant a lot of spreading of diseases through the water, which happens with Mars-Saturn in water signs.

Full Moon in Scorpio

Soon after the conjunction, the Full Moon in Scorpio came with Mars-Saturn in the 4th house this time, and that's when it happened. Notice how Mars reached the conjunction with the IC of the Aries Ingress, where there's another fixed star very much related to stories involving water: Markab, of the Pegasus constellation, who in the myth used its hooves to create a spring on Mount Helicon. The Full Moon is in fall in the 12th house, ruling the 8th, indicating huge loss.

I also recommend this analysis made by a local astrologer from Rio Grande do Sul where she compares this year to another historical flood in 1941 that had similar configurations, and she takes Uranus and Jupiter into account, because of how in mundane astrology Jupiter (especially Mars-Jupiter) gets associated with storms and rain.

Madrid

Now, in Spain, the Aries Ingress didn't indicate this so strongly, because the IC isn't in Pisces. But still, the Mars-Saturn conjunction still happened and here Mars also rules the 4th house. And then Jupiter is on the IC, with the close aspect to Saturn in Pisces. But because we're on Scorpio season, we should look at the Libra Ingress chart, where Jupiter acts as the ruler for the trimester and it's ruling the 4th. Notice how it has anticia with Mars in fall in the 8th, who rules the IC. And then Saturn actually falls in the 4th house now. This is how the lingering effects of a Mars-Saturn conjunction shows up: whenever aspects are made between them we can prepare to see something. The Mars-Saturn-Venus water grand trine also had something to do with the hurricanes in the gulf of Mexico.

The Full Moon in Aries and the New Moon in Scorpio

The disaster happened after the Full Moon in Aries, which also had Sagittarius rising. When a lunation shows that kind of similarity to the Ingress chart we can count on seeing the most significant events of the season or year. The IC is the same too, but the Moon is there with it. It has extra importance because of the aspect to the ascendant. Full Moons have to do with big events related to the masses. Here it makes a square to Mars in the 8th in mutual reception. Because this happened very near the end of the lunation and it's probably still going on to some degree, you should also see the chart for the New Moon in Scorpio. Here there's similitude with the Aries Ingress and now Mars looks directly at the ascendant degree ruling the lunation.

Those are my simple observations, but I bet there's better local astrologers who can do this with much more skill and lived experience of Spain; because I think that's important, not only to understand the astrology better, but also to give it a heart, and not look at these horrible things from a detached point of view.

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

¹ See tag #mundane astrology to check what I've been writing on this. And see my book recomendations for my sources in mundane astrology.

² I've been writing about this aspect of the constellations and symbolism surrounding Pisces and I hope I'll be able to post it soon. It's not just a superficial association.

³ Hydrus is not a very well researched constellation and I wouldn't consider it in higher latitudes, but I've been watching out for it since these events.

[firefaerie81]

(liveblog tag in chronological order)

This conflict is also really compelling. The Thundercats need the Book of Omens to save Third Earth, and Soul Sever isn't necessarily opposed to that so much as he doesn't care because he has his own goal that he desperately needs to achieve that he thinks the Book is the answer for.

But here's where it falls flat for me, because what this episode is actually about is a debate on whether technology is good or bad. Which is such a random thing to be on about this late in the game. Especially for Lion-O, because last we could tell, he still loved technology.

Over 20 episodes he's either had no issue or was still actively interested in tech, but all of a sudden he blames tech for the fall of Thundera??? Where is this coming from?? Not to mention how he hasn't been this aggressive (and imo stupid) about something since his character development, so it's doubly weird.

All right, so my tinfoil hat theory is that this episode may have been originally conceived for earlier on in the show, but then for any number of reasons, it was moved to here and reworked for plot but not character.

Remember how I pointed out that Pumyra wasn't mentioned with Cheetara and the twins when Tygra handwaved their absence? Maybe the original draft took place before she was introduced.

Same for that odd moment where they didn't acknowledge the Berbils, maybe it was supposed to be these events that led them to later accept the Berbils. That quick exchange about Panthro's arms would've been obviously necessary, but maybe going any deeper on continuity was overlooked.

But those details are conjecture at best and could easily be explained as just mistakes. All I really have here is vibes, and this character beat has the vibe of something that was written for Early Lion-O, who used to run his mouth about whatever the episode was about and then be forced to reevaluate. See also: Ramlak Rising, Song of the Petalars, The Duelist and the Drifter, Sight Beyond Sight, and Between Brothers.

He doesn't do that anymore since his character development had him grow up and learn to be more understanding, but here it is again out of nowhere. Even in Recipe for Disaster when he backslid into impulsivity, it was brief and he regretted it immediately, and you even got the sense of building anxiety that led to it within the episode. He just started the episode like this right out of the gate. The best I've got is what I said earlier about him just being in a mood, but it still feels weird narratively.

Lion-O suddenly going on about how he hates technology for destroying his home is nonsensical in episode 24 when there’s been no buildup to it and it frankly contradicts his character up to now. But what if it had been episode… 7 or 8? Either right before or right after Legacy.

That early on, it would make sense that he had a leftover reaction to the trauma of losing his home, he was still getting his feet under him. And then an episode like this would have him grapple with that and resolve it and the show would proceed, like those other early episodes.

The theme and arc this episode is going for are sound, but the problem is that they don't fit right here at this moment. If you try to transplant an earlier episode to later in the show, you have to account for character in addition to plot. Lion-O has been so chill with technology, even when he was in the thick of his trauma, so why is this happening now, when by all rights he didn't have this hangup before today?

I could be full of it since I have no evidence to back this theory up, but it would explain a LOT of what bugs me, and I'm just trying to make sense of everything because the way Lion-O is written in this episode doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

It could also just be that this is the only episode credited to this particular writer and maybe they just didn’t have a good grasp on how Lion-O’s character had already developed or what events had already happened.

Whatever the case I’m not a fan of the results.

[emospritelet]

Heatstroke - chapter 24/24

Last time, Gold confronted Zelena over trying to frame Regina, and Lacey caught the whole show on tape. This is the final chapter! Happy endings FTW!

[AO3]

x

Lacey set down the camera on the shop counter, and raised an eyebrow at Gold.

“So,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

He inclined his head, lifting a hand and letting it fall.

“It appears you have a story to tell about Miss West,” he remarked. “I feel the choice is very much yours. Perhaps Mr Glass can be persuaded that running an exposé is in the public interest.”

Lacey hesitated.

“Yeah, I think he would,” she acknowledged. “It’s just - Mayor Mills doesn’t know, does she? About Zelena.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I think maybe we should tell her,” said Lacey. “Before it all comes out, I mean. That would be the decent thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” he agreed, and let out a heavy sigh, his head rolling back. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“What is?”

He raised his head again, sending her a stern look.

“It appears I’ve discovered a conscience,” he said. “The rumour was I didn’t have one. I blame you for this outrage.”

Lacey giggled, and leaned in to kiss him.

“Does that mean you’ll come with me to break the news?” she asked, and he offered his arm.

“To the Mayor’s office,” he said. “I’m sure Regina will be just delighted to see us.”

-

“This can’t be true.” Regina was staring at Lacey’s phone, having watched the recording twice. “This - this is impossible!”

“This must be a hell of a shock,” said Lacey, and Regina shook her head.

“I always thought she disliked me, but Mal told me I was being paranoid,” she said. “All this time she was plotting to ruin my life because my mother abandoned her? The nerve of the woman!”

“I guess sibling rivalry’s tough to deal with,” said Lacey. “Makes me glad I’m an only child.”

“Well, she certainly has my mother’s ambition and vindictiveness,” said Regina, with a sigh. “I don’t suppose you know anything about the father?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Gold. “Did your mother ever hint that you had a half-sister?”

Regina shook her head.

“She never spoke about her youth,” she said. “Other than to tell me she had to fight for anything she could get and I should do the same.”

She handed the phone back to Lacey and frowned at Gold.

“Exactly how long have you known about this?” she demanded, and he smiled.

“I heard what you did,” he said.

“That wasn’t what I asked,” she said coldly. “I know you, Gold. Were you holding onto this information until it was of use to you?”

“You think I’m working against you?” he asked, in a mild tone.

“I think you never do anything that doesn’t benefit you.”

“Well, perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think,” he said. “Or perhaps we assess risks and benefits differently. Either way, you have Miss French to thank for the investigation of her past and this recording. I merely - encouraged a confession.”

“Quite the sleuthing team,” said Regina, in a dry tone. “Can we expect a new office in town? French Gold, Private Investigators?”

“I don’t mind investigating his privates,” said Lacey, and Gold shot her a very level look as Regina curled her lip.

“Thanks, I’m going to spend the rest of the evening trying and failing to get that image out of my head.”

“You’re welcome,” said Lacey cheerfully.

“The question for you,” said Gold, “is how are you going to handle this? Miss French has quite a scoop on her hands, but she wanted to bring it to you first before raising it with Mr Glass.”

Regina shot Lacey a grateful look before sitting back in her chair with a sigh.

“There’s supposed to be a debate,” she said. “The two of us up on stage. You think it’s her intention to reveal the whole sordid story in front of the whole town?”

“I don’t believe she wants the rest of the town to know,” said Gold. “If they did, then her whole campaign reeks of sour grapes. She’ll want to play on the image she’s created while she’s been here. However inaccurate it is.”

Regina growled under her breath.

“I can’t believe I’m having to go through this charade!” she snapped. “I’m supposed to stand there and - and debate her when she’s trying to frame me for corruption and destroy my life!”

“We don’t have any actual evidence that she’s tried to frame you,” said Lacey, and Regina nodded impatiently.

“I know, I know. Nothing court worthy on that tape, however much she hinted at it,” she said. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to hand it over to the Sheriff, get him to look into it.”

“If you agree to an exclusive interview with me after the debate, sure,” said Lacey quickly, and almost blushed as Gold shot her an approving look. Regina drummed her fingers on the desk.

“She’s far too good for you, Gold,” she said abruptly. “I hope you know that.”

He smirked at that, winking at Lacey.

“Oh, I’m well aware.”

-

Gold was finding it hard to stop grinning like an idiot now that he and Lacey were dating, and even found himself unexpectedly granting rent extensions, much to the surprise of nervous tenants. He made dinner for her again later in the week, and she stayed the night, Darcy curled at their feet as they drifted into sleep. It was pleasant being nuzzled awake by a purring cat and finding Lacey in his arms. It was a feeling he could get used to.

They had eventually managed to finish the interview, most of which was carried out in bed, and he had found himself telling her things he had previously had no intention of revealing. He blamed that on Lacey; it was difficult to maintain his usual cool distance when she was wearing his discarded shirt and looking at him as though he was a particularly delicious snack. She kept her word about giving him the final say on the article, however, and upon reading her draft, he noted that she had kept some of the more personal details to herself. He only felt the need to redact a couple of minor points about his early life, but was happy to let the remainder stand as it was. If the rest of Storybrooke was surprised at the intimacy of the piece and his sudden desire to be open about his life - well, they could all go and fuck themselves, as far as he was concerned.

The only opinions he cared about were those of his family, and it wasn’t too long before Neal called. Gold sighed as he looked at the number flashing on his phone. They’re gonna tease me relentlessly about this. Emma especially.

Shaking his head and smirking to himself, he picked up.

“Dad, hi,” said Neal. “Thought you might have called to let us know how your big social occasion went. You’re not avoiding the issue, right?”

“Of course not,” said Gold. “Been a busy week, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh. Emma thought you’d say that.” Neal sounded amused. “She’s been dying to find out about the dance, so I said I’d call for an update.”

“Tell her she needs a better hobby than worrying about my social life,” said Gold dryly. “How’s Henry? I was wondering what to get for his birthday.”

“Nice attempt at deflection, but I’m not done with you,” said Neal. “Come on, how did it go?”

“Uh - it was fine,” said Gold.

“Did you ask Lacey to dance, like I said?”

“Yes.” Gold hesitated. “We’re - uh - sort of dating now.”

Neal whooped, making him grin.

“Way to go! See, I knew you could do it!”

“Yes, well.” Gold scratched the back of his neck, feeling awkward. “It’s early days, I suppose. Very early days, but it’s going well.”

“I am so happy for you, really. Wait until I tell Emma.”

“She’s gonna tease me, isn’t she?” said Gold dryly.

“No more than usual.”

“A lot, then.”

“Hey, her teasing comes from a place of love.”

“Hmm.” Gold was amused. “Well, you can tell her I love her too.”

“And you can tell Lacey we can’t wait to meet her,” said Neal, and Gold’s grin widened.

“I believe the feeling’s mutual,” he said.

“Good. How about in two weeks’ time?”

Gold smirked to himself.

“Excellent timing,” he said. “It’s the Mayoral debate and election.”

“I’m almost certain we can find something better to do than listen to some crusty old politicians.”

“I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised,” said Gold. “It could be an interesting night.”

-

The evening of the debate arrived more quickly than Lacey thought possible, and she was nervous about more than just reporting the evening’s events. Gold’s son and daughter-in-law were due any minute, and there was a tiny part of her that kept whispering that they wouldn’t approve, that they would wonder why the hell Gold, with his money and power and class, was dating the likes of her. Stressing over her coverage of the election was a welcome distraction from the unwelcome internal monologue, and she concentrated on getting her things together for the debate, checking the recording equipment on Gold’s kitchen table and fretting about the sound quality.

“You’ve already checked it three times,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“I’m supposed to be writing the front page article!” she snapped. “What happens if I fuck up and don’t get anything recorded? I’m gonna look like a total idiot and Sidney won’t trust me with anything more complex than the hot dog eating contest!”

“I can record everything on my phone, if you’re worried,” he said. “Besides, don’t you do shorthand?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You’ll be fine,” he said gently, and kissed her head. “I promise.”

The doorbell rang, and Lacey started, heart thumping.

“Relax, that’ll be Neal and Emma,” said Gold, heading for the door. Lacey frowned at his back.

“Relax, my arse,” she muttered, shoving the recording equipment into its bag.

There were voices from the hall, and a sudden burst of laughter, and she closed her eyes, willing herself to calm the hell down. Footsteps from the doorway made her look up, and she was greeted by a warm smile and an outstretched hand. Gold’s son had his eyes, and curling dark hair above a ready grin.

“I’m Neal,” he said. “Really pleased to meet you.”

“Lacey,” she said, shaking his hand. “Uh - likewise.”

She was reminded vividly of the fact that she had flashed him on their first encounter, and felt a blush start to rise in her cheeks. If Neal was thinking of it too, he was better at hiding it than she was. His wife was a pretty blonde, with a kind look in her eyes and a plump baby in her arms, who was glancing around curiously at everything.

“This is Emma,” added Neal, “and that’s Henry.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you,” said Emma, shooting Gold a teasing look.

“Well, I won’t ask if it was all good, because I’m willing to bet it wasn’t,” said Lacey, and they chuckled.

“Maybe not at first,” admitted Emma. “Don’t hold it against the old bastard, though.”

“Oh, believe me, the feeling was mutual,” said Lacey.

“I’m standing right here,” said Gold evenly.

Lacey caught Emma’s eye and returned her grin. She felt herself relax a little, and leaned over to kiss Gold’s cheek.

“We got there in the end,” she said. “Uh - how hungry are you guys? I didn’t even think about dinner.”

She shot Gold a look, hoping that he would suggest something, and he nodded.

“We’ll head to Granny’s after the debate,” said Gold. “I have no doubt that Lacey will be demonstrating her excellent skill as a journalist, and I’d hate for you to miss it.”

“No pressure then,” said Lacey, and he smiled.

“You’re writing the article for the Mirror front page,” he said. “You have an exclusive with the Mayor herself after the debate. Sidney Glass clearly believes you to be as capable as I do.”

“Yeah, because I got that interview with you,” she said. “I didn’t tell him we were naked when I got most of that info.”

Neal closed his eyes with a pained expression.

“Shows ingenuity if you ask me,” said Emma abruptly. “I can usually get a ton of stuff out of Neal when we’re naked. Must run in the family.”

It was Gold’s turn to look pained. Neal put his hands over his face with a heavy sigh, and Lacey and Emma chuckled. Lacey decided that she liked both Emma and Neal very much. She zipped her bag and nodded to Gold.

“Okay,” she said. “Wish me luck.”

-

The town hall was filled with residents, chatting amongst themselves and casting curious glances at the empty stage. Ruby was seated next to Leroy on the third row back, and she winked at Lacey as she and Gold took their own seats. Ruby had been delighted to hear that the two of them had started seeing one another, and had only made a salacious comment to Gold on one occasion. Maybe two.

“Big turnout,” said Neal, glancing around. “I had no idea the people in this town were so into politics.”

“Usually they don’t bother,” said Gold. “The Mayor getting some competition appears to have piqued their interest.”

As though his voice had summoned her, Regina walked onto the stage, chin held high, looking calm and competent in a sharp black suit. Zelena followed, in a green dress with a soft silk scarf around her neck and gold hoops in her ears. A green folder was tucked under her arm, her hair tied up, and Lacey thought she was going for the image of a respectable school teacher. A gleam in her eye spoiled the look.

Dr Hopper was moderating the debate, and Lacey quickly checked her recording equipment and opened her laptop, rattling off a few sentences about the tense atmosphere of the hall and the opening statements from each of the candidates. Zelena gave a speech about decency and traditional values, at which Regina seemed to be stopping herself from rolling her eyes with some difficulty. Regina spoke of her record on town planning, law and order—she shot Zelena a look at that point—and prosperity.

“Thank you, ladies,” said Dr Hopper, when she was done. “Now, perhaps we’ll go to some questions from the press before we deal with those the townsfolk have submitted.”

“I have a question for Miss West,” said Lacey, in a loud, clear voice, shoving her laptop at Gold as she got to her feet.

Zelena’s mouth twisted, her smile more of a grimace.

“Of course,” she said lightly. “It’s - uh - I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

She waved a languid hand, and Lacey felt her mouth flatten.

“Lacey French, Storybrooke Mirror,” she said evenly, and Zelena let out a tinkling laugh.

“Of course, silly me,” she trilled. “How could I forget Storybrooke’s eager young reporter? Lending the local newspaper such an air of class in that - lovely - outfit.”

There was a muttering amongst the townsfolk, and Lacey distinctly heard Ruby say ‘What a bitch!’, but she smiled sweetly as though she hadn’t understood the insult.

“Yeah, I have a question about your motivation for running for Mayor,” she said. “You said yourself you’ve never been involved in politics, so what inspired you to make this move now?”

Zelena smiled widely.

“Well, as I said, I thought about where I could do the most good,” she said. “Storybrooke is a wonderful town, with many excellent qualities, but talking to its residents has made me realise that there’s a feeling that it may be lacking direction. I sense a need for a return to the basics of community. Neighbourliness. Family values. The traditions of small-town America that we all grew up with.”

“But you grew up in England,” said Lacey. “Wasn’t your father a diplomat? How do you know this view of America is either accurate or desirable?”

Zelena’s nostrils flared as she continued to smile brightly.

“Well,” she said. “Who’s been doing her homework?”

“Yeah, it’s just that people hear politicians mention tradition and family values, and all too often it’s a smoke-screen to hide racism and homophobia,” went on Lacey. “How would you address those concerns?”

Zelena spread her hands.

“I’d say look at my record,” she said. “Since I moved here I’ve made it clear that I’m happy to work with people of all backgrounds. It’s important that no one feels left out, and my initial conversations have led me to believe that there are concerns, and that some residents feel that their interests are not - fully appreciated - by the Mayor.”

“What kind of interests?” asked Lacey quickly, before Zelena could turn away, and her mouth twisted again as she tried to keep smiling.

“As I said, some feel that traditional family values are being lost in the push for modernity,” she said. “I’d like to reassure them that I stand for everything that Storybrooke represents. Decency. Morality.”

“Does that mean you think the Mayor is immoral?” asked Lacey, and Zelena pulled a face.

“I think there have been some questionable decisions at city hall under her watch, yes,” she said. “Does anyone really think that a seedy bar called Queens of Darkness is fitting for this town?”

“It’s a jazz club,” said Regina. “And there’ll be dance lessons each week. A perfectly respectable establishment, run by three accomplished businesswomen.”

Zelena let out that insincere laugh again, and Lacey sat down, retrieving her laptop from Gold and opening it up as Zelena addressed the room.

“Well, it’s not only the company the Mayor keeps,” she said. “We’ve all heard the rumours. Missing money, accounts not holding quite as much as people thought…”

“That’s an outrageous lie,” said Regina coldly. “Where’s your evidence, Miss West?”

Zelena smirked, as though she had been waiting for that very question. She held up the green folder, showing it to the room.

“I have the evidence right here,” she announced. “A brave employee of city hall managed to smuggle this out to me. Evidence that the Mayor has been embezzling town funds!”

There was a shocked intake of breath around the room. Lacey typed furiously.

“How dare you!” snapped Regina. “That’s a lie and you know it!”

“I believe this is my allotted time to speak!” Zelena snapped back. “I think the people of Storybrooke deserve to know exactly who you really are, don’t you? They should understand the choice before them!”

The doors at the end of the hall opened, and there was the sound of heavy boots on the floor. Zelena looked surprised, and then somewhat nervous, and a low-level muttering started up in the audience. Lacey glanced over her shoulder, watching as Sheriff Graham Humbert walked towards the stage with his deputy Dorothy Gale by his side. Regina appeared to be drumming her fingers on the lectern, and Lacey couldn’t work out whether it was anxiety or impatience.

“Miss West,” said Graham. “We’d like you to come with us, please.”

“Why?” demanded Zelena. “I’m a little busy winning this election, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s a matter of obstruction of justice,” said Graham. “If you could come to the station, please.”

Zelena opened and closed her mouth, a sudden flicker of fear in her eyes.

“What if I say no?”

“I’d prefer not to have to handcuff you,” said Graham.

“But we will if we have to,” added Dorothy, folding her arms.

“This is a conspiracy!” blurted Zelena, waving a finger at Regina. “Did the Mayor put you up to this? This is exactly the kind of corruption I’m talking about! The Sheriff being used as the Mayor’s enforcer!”

“Miss West…”

“Mayor Mills will do whatever it takes to silence me!” she went on. “She’s scared I’ve exposed her for what she is!”

“Miss West, I didn’t want to have to arrest you, but…”

“One hint of competition and she calls in her - her goon squad to crush it!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I know you’re my sister!” said Regina loudly.

Silence fell, and Lacey hurriedly typed a few sentences, describing the shocked atmosphere of the town hall. Zelena was staring at Regina, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.

“I wasn’t going to mention it,” said Regina, curling her lip. “I wanted to give you a chance to be a decent person and deal with this in an honourable way. But since you’re determined to try to ruin my life for no good reason, then yes. I’m well aware we share the same mother, and frankly she’d be disappointed at this pathetic bid for attention.”

“How dare you—”

“I believe it’s my turn to speak,” interrupted Regina. “We’ve listened to enough of your rambling this evening. Since you’d been dropping hints about corruption in my office, I had Sheriff Humbert investigate. He told me earlier this evening that someone had been planting evidence to try to frame me. No doubt that’s what he wants to speak to you about.”

“This is—”

“The residents of Storybrooke know how seriously I take my duties as Mayor,” Regina went on, addressing the room as a whole now. “They know that I value their support and their trust. Of course I’d want any threat to that to be investigated. I’m just - I’m beyond disappointed that the threat comes from my half-sister.”

Her voice echoed around the silent room. Lacey was watching the townsfolk avidly, their eyes fixed on Regina as she spoke.

“I had no idea that my mother had had a daughter before me, no idea that I had another family member out there in the world,” she went on. “Her coming to Storybrooke should have been a time of joy and reunion. But instead of her reaching out to me, she tries to undermine me, to take away the most important job I have in this town.”

She looked down, shaking her head, and Gold leaned in close.

“I wonder how much of this is for the benefit of the voters and how much is genuine,” he murmured.

“Maybe fifty-fifty,” Lacey whispered back, and he nodded in agreement.

Regina raised her head, taking a deep breath, as though steeling herself for something unpleasant. Graham and Dorothy had edged towards the stage, Dorothy removing the cuffs from her belt.

“All I can do now,” said Regina, “is trust that justice will take its course.”

“You know nothing about justice!” shouted Zelena, as the Sheriff started reading her her rights. “You’ll pay for this! All of you!”

She was still yelling when Dorothy handcuffed her and marched her from the room. The sound of the doors closing was very loud in the silence that remained.

“Well,” said Regina, placing her hands on the lectern and looking around the room. “I think we can all agree that this was one of the more - eventful - political debates this town has seen.”

There was a ripple of nervous laughter, and she smiled.

“I truly hope that Miss West gets the help she so desperately needs,” she went on. “And when she has, I want her to know that she’s welcome to visit with Mallory and I. After all, we may not be able to choose our family, but that makes it all the more important to nurture the bonds we share with those around us.”

There were noises of agreement from the audience, and Gold leaned in close again.

“Ever the politician,” he murmured, and Lacey nodded.

“Storybrooke is like an extended family to me,” went on Regina, “and all families have their moments of conflict and frustration, but underneath that there is respect for one another, and a common set of values. I believe I have lived by those values for every year that I’ve served as your Mayor. I will always reach out to those in need and I will always act in the best interests of this town. Under my leadership, Storybrooke will continue to prosper. I guarantee it.”

There was applause, and a couple of cheers, and Regina nodded, looking extremely self-satisfied. She started taking questions, and Gold kissed Lacey’s cheek and whispered that he would see her in the diner when she was done. She watched him leave with his family, Emma balancing the baby on her hip and Neal pushing the stroller after them. Lacey turned back to listen to Regina field a question about the state of the town’s roads, bent her head to her laptop, and began typing up her article on the Mayoral debate.

She emailed the article over to Sidney before leaving for the diner, and walked back there with Ruby, who was chattering about the drama that had unfolded. Regina had been in her element when answering the remaining questions, and Lacey had felt a surge of satisfaction over her part in exposing a crime. Perhaps small town life offered the chance for rewarding work after all. She could see Gold and his family through the window, and his face lit up as she entered, making her stomach flip. Damn the man. I’m falling in love with him.

“Excellent job this evening,” he said, getting up to pull her chair out and kissing her cheek. “I got you a rum and coke, I hope that’s okay.”

“Perfect,” she said fervently, and took a slurp, relishing the taste on her tongue.

“How’d the Mayor look at the end of all that?” asked Emma, and Lacey pulled a face.

“The whole place gave her a round of applause, and she was looking about as satisfied as she could, I guess,” she said. “I still feel kind of sorry for her. Not every day you find out you have a half sister. Especially one that’s out to get you.”

“Well, it could have been a lot worse,” said Gold. “I very much doubt Miss West will present much of a challenge from a jail cell.”

Lacey nodded, taking another sip of her drink.

“Does this mean you and Regina are friends now?” she asked, and Gold smirked.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “What’s that term the kids use these days?”

“Frenemies?”

“That’s the one.”

“Kind of like we were,” she observed, and he laughed.

“Regina would fillet me with a letter opener if I even contemplated looking at her the way I look at you.”

“No, I don’t mean that,” she said. “I just meant - well, we kind of had that thing where we poked at each other to get a reaction, right?”

Gold looked as though he was trying very hard not to laugh, and she swatted his arm.

“Stop thinking about dirty stuff! You know what I mean!”

“I do,” he acknowledged. “And I, for one, am very glad that we - er - got the reaction we wanted.”

“You’re still thinking about dirty stuff, aren’t you?” said Emma shrewdly, and Gold shrugged.

“Maybe a little.”

-

They ate ribs, sticky with Granny’s special sauce, licking it from their fingers and washing it down with beer and wine and rum. By the time they got out into the cool night air, Lacey felt wonderfully tipsy, and regretted putting on her high heels earlier in the evening. At least there was no one else around to see if she fell on her arse, she supposed. Neal and Emma were walking ahead, pushing the stroller and talking quietly, and Lacey let out a sigh, slipping her arm through Gold’s for support, and resting her head on his shoulder.

“I ate too much,” she said, and Gold chuckled.

“We all ate too much.”

“You didn’t throw half of it over your lap, though.”

“No, I thought I’d leave that to you.”

“Stupid gravity,” muttered Lacey, and he laughed, squeezing her arm with his.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Yeah. Long day.”

“Maybe you should have an early night.”

She glanced up at him, and he was grinning at her, his eyes twinkling.

“How’s that gonna work?” she asked flatly. “Your family’s staying over. No way I’m letting you give me screaming orgasms while they’re in the room next door.”

“In that case I could sneak over to yours,” he suggested. “You could scream to your heart’s content.”

Lacey giggled, barging him affectionately with her shoulder.

“I think I love you, Mr Gold,” she said, and Gold stopped dead, turning to face her with a stunned look on his face.

“Really?”

Lacey turned to face him, taking his hand.

“Really,” she said. “I mean I’m kind of drunk, but that’s not why I’m saying it. I think I’ve sort of been in love with you for a while now. Is that okay?”

He was staring at her, wide-eyed, and a softness seemed to spill over his features, making his eyes gleam as he smiled.

“Well,” he said. “I think I love you, too, Miss French. Is that okay?”

“More than okay.”

He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then raised his chin.

“D’you want to move in?” he asked.

“Can I bring Darcy?”

“Of course.”

“Then you got a deal.”

He was grinning, and she found herself grinning back, her heart swelling with love for him.

“Let’s wait until after Neal and Emma go before I move in, though,” she said. “I think you said something about screaming orgasms?”

Gold’s grin turned wicked, and he bent his head to kiss her.

“I’ll be over later.”

She let his lips pull at hers, leaning in to feel the warmth of his body as his arms went around her, and let out a sigh of contentment. Yes. Life in a small town could be amazing.

[asprettyasyourown]

How/Where do you think Jon and Arya will meet again? And how/where do you think Dany and Arya will meet?

Honestly, I can’t see Arya and Jon meeting anywhere else other than Winterfell. It would be such a satisfying “conclusion” to this aspect of their storyline. For Arya, both Winterfell AND Jon have been associated with home. She has tried since day one to return to either of them, and to see her do both at the same time would be so lovely. And Jon too, who has struggled for so long with his desire to have Winterfell (feeding his rivalry with Robb and his conflict with his status as a bastard) and Arya (contradicting his position as a member of the Night’s Watch, who have no family), would then get both at the same time. I know GRRM doesn’t like to hand things on a silver platter, and that “Be careful what you wish for” is a massive theme in the series, but come on. You can’t tell me they had it easy, and that they didn’t fight for it.

Now how and when is a little trickier.

Unfortunately, it won’t happen before a loooong time. Arya has a long way to go before leaving Essos, let alone reach Winterfell. She still needs to: 

Tie the story with the FM (including a ��training” with the courtesans/the Black Pearl, and of course leaving them);

Deal with the wildlings women and children that are stranded in Braavos now that the Sealord captured the ship (= slavers) that intended to sell them;

As I’ve mentioned before, I very much see the Iron Bank being involved in her storyline, so there’s that to deal with as well;

Meet Dany (I’ll go back to this later);

Go back to Westeros;

Deal with the Riverlands, the Brotherhoods Without Banners and, most importantly, Lady Stoneheart;

Reconnect with Nymeria.

And all that doesn’t even take into account what GRRM could throw in her way on top of all of this. That’s a lot. And since Arya will definitively not see Jon anywhere outside of the North, it could only happen after she resolved all those things.

Jon too has a lot on his plate. He first needs to be resurrected (duh). He also needs to deal with the traitors who stabbed him and his future in the Night’s Watch. If you omit the whole murder thing (kinda hard to tbh), there is still the fact he broke his vows for Arya. He was already set to leave before he died. And since his last thoughts were about Arya, and we know the dead who get resurrected focus on their last conscious thoughts, his resolve to get her back will not be lessened.

Honestly, I think he’s done with the NW. I think he’s gonna do what he intended to before dying, aka kill Ramsay and get “Arya” back, whether by allying with Stannis or at the head of his own wildling army. I don’t know if he’s gonna become King in the North like in GoT, but he’s definitively going to be considered for the role; and since Bran, the legitimate heir, is still alive and will one day return to Winterfell, this could be the catalyst for the tension between these two George planned in his original draft. Not to mention the tensions it would create with the other northern lords, who would not see with a kind eye a bastard allied with the wildlings (enemies of the North for generations) and Stannis; or those who simply won’t appreciate a king not as malleable as a child (side-eye to the Manderlys).

(Oh, and there is also the matter with fArya and Theon. I’m going on a limb here, but I doubt he’s gonna be happy to learn that what he thought was his precious “sister” is really an impostor (though he might be happy to know the real Arya didn’t get what Jeyne had to endure). Or that she’s bringing along the guy who betrayed the Starks and supposedly killed Bran and Rickon. His first reaction definitively won’t be good, though it will probably soften once he learns what happened to them and how Ramsay is the real culprit. But I’m not anticipating much benevolence from him, especially since he’s in dark mode now).

So yeah. Lots of issues to be resolved before they can be reunited, and that’s without counting on the threat of the Others or what other characters might do. Honestly, I’m anticipating a reunion between the end of TWOW and the beginning of ADOS. On one hand, I think it would be more impactful in TWOW; most specifically, the last act of either Jon or Arya’s chapters. It would be a nice conclusion for the both of them, before the Others mess everything up. But I’m also aware that all the issues I’ve previously mentioned might not be resolved in one book, and that it might spill on the second one.

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

Now Dany.

Honestly, it’s kinda hard to be sure of how they’re gonna meet. They will, that’s a certainty. There is so much hints, since the first book really. Remember this?

This time the monsters did not frighten her. They seemed almost old friends. [Arya, IV, AGOT]

Which is exactly how I’m anticipating their relationship. At first, things are going to be tense, especially on Dany’s side who has been fed lies about the Starks and their role in her exile (and who could blame her). So there’s definitively room for Arya to be frightened. But once she gets Dany to see her side to the story, and her vision of the events become more balanced, they’ll become fast-friends. They have so much in common, it’s impossible for them not to.

But, once again, the details of how they’re gonna meet is blurry. Arya will need to at least be done with the FM. And Dany... Dany has a lot on her plate too. She’s gonna need to deal with the khalasar she hears at the end of ADWD, and a possible confrontation (alliance?) with the Dothraki. She will also need to end the plot in Meereen (aka choose between “fixing” its whole culture or do what she always intended to, return to Westeros and seize back the Iron Throne). Of course, we know she’s gonna choose the latter - but a bunch of things can happen between that, and with them time passing.

At this point, Arya and Dany are very far away, each at one extremity of Essos. For them to have a chance to meet, I anticipate that Dany will end things with Meereen at the same time Arya closes the storyline with the FM (maybe even before, so Dany could already be on the road towards Braavos). Now is the tricky part. I have two theories on how they will meet: through the lost Wildlings and through the Iron Bank.

The lost Wildlings

We know the wildlings women and children in Braavos were “freed” when the Sealord seized the ship carrying them. Unfortunately, others were not so lucky.

“I know why the Sealord seized the Goodheart. She was carrying slaves. Hundreds of slaves, women and children, roped together in her hold.” Braavos had been founded by escaped slaves, and the slave trade was forbidden here. “I know where the slaves came from. They were wildlings from Westeros, from a place called Hardhome. An old ruined place, accursed.” Old Nan had told her tales of Hardhome, back at Winterfell when she had still been Arya Stark. “After the big battle where the King-Beyond-the-Wall was killed, the wildlings ran away, and this woods witch said that if they went to Hardhome, ships would come and carry them away to someplace warm. But no ships came, except these two Lyseni pirates, Goodheart and Elephant, that had been driven north by a storm. They dropped anchor off Hardhome to make repairs, and saw the wildlings, but there were thousands and they didn’t have room for all of them, so they said they’d just take the women and the children. The wildlings had nothing to eat, so the men sent out their wives and daughters, but as soon as the ships were out to sea, the Lyseni drove them below and roped them up. They meant to sell them all in Lys. Only then they ran into another storm and the ships were parted. The Goodheart was so damaged her captain had no choice but to put in here, but the Elephant may have made it back to Lys. The Lyseni at Pynto’s think that she’ll return with more ships. The price of slaves is rising, they said, and there are thousands more women and children at Hardhome.” [The Blind Girl, ADWD]

So the Goodheart was too damaged to go to Lys, but the Elephant wasn’t. It means there are still hundreds of wildlings women and children enslaved there. Honestly, I’m not sure how Arya could be involved in freeing them. Lys is a long way from Braavos, which means she would have to travel down there (with no resources and the other half of the wildlings), free them and get back up to sail across the Narrow Sea, deal with the Riverlands and then go North. It’s a little much for one girl, even one as resourceful as Arya. Sure, she could ask help from the Iron Bank (see my second point), but I doubt they would indulge her (high risk for no rewards).

But. You know who is as strongly against slavery as Arya, whose path might make her travel to Lys and who has the resources to fuck shit up? Yep, Dany.

The way I see it is, after being disheartened by Meereen and her failure to change the slaver(y) culture, Dany could very much decide to go home to Westeros - and set everything ablaze in her path. If she failed to abolish slavery from the inside, she might decide to do it by force, as a last FUCK YOU to the masters. This could be the beginning of her rock bottom, before she rises back again. It’s also coherent with the Dothraki culture of “Submit or be killed”, which could play a part if she allies with them again.

So I could see her attacking the big cities of Essos, destroying the masters and freeing the slaves as she goes along, until she reaches Braavos - who may be protected since 1. she would use its port to journey across the Narrow Sea and 2. they’re famously known for being founded by slaves and anti-slavery as a whole (and they actually enforce that rule, not just preach it and close their eyes when it counts). There, she could meet Arya through the wildlings women reuniting. Like I said, things would be tense at first, but if they might not be friends at first, they might respect each other for having their hearts set on the same goal (protecting their people). Friendship would come later, I’m not worried about that.

The Iron Bank theory

For me, the Iron Bank doesn’t get the recognition it deserves as a threat, and I fully anticipate them having a much larger role in the next book.

I really believe they will have a hand in Arya going back to Westeros. After she leaves the FM, I very much see them stepping in to offer their “help” to Arya. Personally, I believe the Kindly Man informed them of her real identity (though his motivations are yet unclear). I believe he’s aware of her value as a princess, and the (supposedly) last heir of the North. Look how people are rallying for her in the North when they hear “Valiant Ned’s precious little girl” is being brutalized. Do you think the Iron Bank is gonna pass on such a prize? I can see them trying to do to her what the Manderlys are doing with Rickon, or what Illyrio tried to do with Dany - offer their protection and help so she would be/feel indebted. They could get ahold of the North through Arya, and of the other Kingdoms through Stannis/the crown’s debt. Not too shabby.

But wait, there is a problem arising. A problem named Daenerys, who fully intends to take back the Iron Throne - and if she does, she’s not gonna care about reimbursing the debt her predecessors/usurpers left, thus lessening their leverage (and with three dragons, a Dothraki army and the Unsullied, threatening her is not gonna fly well). I can see them trying to step in too, promise the same things to her they did to Arya - except she’s not gonna fall for the same ploy like Viserys did with Illyrio.

(Btw, I’m sure Arya too will see right through them - she had a whole training dedicated to make her see beyond appearances, and she’s always been pretty observant (like when she didn’t fall for trap Cersei laid for her, with Lannister soldiers dressed as Stark men in AGOT). But she also don’t have the same resources Dany has, and if she frees the wildlings, she’ll have hundreds of mouths to feed and transport back to Westeros. I can’t see her do that without external help, so she might be playing along til a better opportunity arise.)

Now, both these theories have their flaws. The biggest one, for me, is time. Meereen is not gonna be resolved in a day (unless Dany just sets everything on fire the moment she arrives and takes off into the sunset, but I doubt that). She still needs enough time to travel to Braavos. Even if George takes his sweet time closing the FM storyline, dealing with the wildlings in Braavos and the Iron Bank, it’s not gonna take a million chapters. Unless he throws something in there to delay her departure, something that wasn’t foreshadowed yet? Because I don’t see them meeting first in Westeros. What would be the point of having them on the same continent if they don’t meet there? As always, there’s a lot left hanging in the air.

[scribblesandsnark]

“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)

There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)

I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)

Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,

Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.

But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.

Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?

I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.

There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.

So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.

There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)

…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??

(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)

The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).

Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start.  In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)

I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever  appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife.  And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).

Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.

Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)

Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.

Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)

Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.

Con: Leon is a fucking moron.

Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??

Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)

Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.

Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.

I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))

Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!

It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.

Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.

There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.

Dammit, Shane.

You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.

Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)

I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.

Moving right along…

Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.

I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?

I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.

Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.

It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”

Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)

Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.

Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)

The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.

I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.

On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?

At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)

Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.

I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…

Ahem.

Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)

Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.

Wait.

Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.

I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.

I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.

PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.

DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.

The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.

That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.

I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…

I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.

That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.

Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)

Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.

There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.

The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!

(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)

CORAAAL!!

Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)

Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”

As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)

Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?

Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.

Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.

(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)

Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.

Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…

Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.

The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.

Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!

Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.

Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?

As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?

There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!

Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.

I do love that shot though.

Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.

Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.

Sidebar complete.

I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.

It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.

I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.

Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.

Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.

Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)

How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.

Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.

Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)

There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.

Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)

Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.

How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??

I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.

Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.

Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?

This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.

Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.

I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)

I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.

“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.

I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.

As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!

RIP Leon Basset.

I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??

Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.

There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).

Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.

Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.

Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:

Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.

Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.

WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.

Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)

Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…

It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.

God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.

Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.

I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??

So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??

Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.

…that poor horse.

Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.

Iconic shot!

It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).

Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)

There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.

One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…

I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.

And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.”

So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.

For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.

Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.

I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)

That poor horse…

Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”

Men have huge feet. Yeek.

It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)

Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.

I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.

“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.

Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?

love  em

[gffa]

I’ve just seen the TCW Season 7 and I’m already pissed at that girl who accused the Jedi of starting the Clone Wars. Who does she think she is?

I KNOW THAT FEELING, but it’s entirely fitting with the state of the galaxy at this point, that they blame the Jedi as part of the problem, rather than understanding who they actually are and how little say they actually had.This is why Star Wars: Propaganda is one of my favorite books, that it’s such a great in-universe look at the bigger picture of everything that happened and it shows so much of how the Jedi’s PR problem shaped so much of what happened.In the lead-up to the Clone Wars:          “The Core Worlders became more enamored with the fleeting distractions of fame and fashion, transitory fascinations with sophistication that left little room for messages of faith or tradition that the Jedi exemplified. The lack of representation in the galactic mindshare undoubtedly fixed their future, as dark forces were on the rise that would poison the public sentiment toward the Jedi in the decades to come.”  (Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)The beginning of the Clone Wars:         “Dooku had a commanding voice that demanded attention. He also had the authority inherited from his previous role, a former Jedi Master of the Order. Once again, the Jedi Order’s eschewing of the galactic spotlight allowed another to reshape the image of the Jedi, and for nearly a decade, the most famous Jedi in the galaxy was one who advocated for the dissolution of the Republic.”  (Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)        “It was Chancellor Palpatine himself who recommended that images such as this poster not be used to bolster wartime support for the Republic, citing sympathy toward the Jedi discomfort. Very few examples exist of government-approved imagery that showcased the Jedi Knights in their capacity as military leaders.”  (Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)       “The ancient eight-spoked sigil of the Republic found new application on freshly minted Republic war machinery as well as on snapping flags and military banners. These were the soldiers risking all for the sanctity of the Republic and the cherished freedoms of democracy—so went the stirring messages, ballads, and holographic short subjects. Absent from these portrayals was any lingering focus on the Jedi Order.”  (Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)        “At the start of the Clone Wars, the Jedi were largely kept out of Republic propaganda, with the clone troopers becoming the face of patriotism during the conflict. This was the preference of the Order, which eschewed imagery of heroism or the romanticization of warfare.”(Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)When saying why the Jedi weren’t enough and the Republic should vote for creating a galaxy-wide miliary, the Republic’s propaganda laid the seeds of “don’t trust the Jedi”:         “Rather than detail the inevitable horrors of impending war, its singular lightsaber and well-chosen words instead demonstrate how undefended the Republic was. In crafting this message of vulnerability, the Commission for a Safe and Secure Republic (a nonprofit think tank based on Level 5121, Coruscant) also unwittingly seeded a secondary story that would grow during the Clone Wars—that no salvation lay in the direction of the Jedi Knights.”(Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)Showing just how little choice the Jedi actually had:        “In the blink of an eye, it seemed, the galaxy was embroiled in a full-scale galactic war. The Separatist Alliance congealed into the Confederacy of Independent Systems, a coalition of loosely aligned worlds united for war. It pooled its resources to purchase huge quantities of battle droids, creating a ready-to-deploy army. The Republic mobilized its newly activated clone forces and hurriedly brevetted the Knights of the Jedi Order into military commanders.”(Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)         “A lot of people say, ‘What good is a lightsaber against a tank?’ The Jedi weren’t meant to fight wars. That’s the big issue in the prequels. They got drafted into service, which is exactly what Palpatine wanted.”  (George Lucas)         “Absent from this hero-making were the Jedi Knights. Citizens who witnessed the Jedi in action were understandably in awe of their abilities, but it was the clone trooper who was the public face of the war effort. The mystic Jedi remained forever inscrutable to the Republic citizenry at large. To the Separatists, they were branded as hypocrites (thanks to firsthand criticism by Count Dooku). That they could so callously brandish a clone army—“slaves bred for war,” as Separatist propaganda proclaimed—did not speak well to their character, though few among the Separatists knew that the Jedi were given no choice in the matter.”(Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)When pointing out uhhh the Jedi aren’t actually like that, it was once again that other people shaped their image for them:         “After three long years of conflict, which included military strikes that reached the heart of the Core Worlds, public opinion soured on the war. More and more citizens saw the conflict as fruitless and demanded a negotiated settlement. It was during the height of this discontent that Chancellor Palpatine shocked the galaxy by exposing the Jedi Order as traitors. Despite some muted protests in the Senate, Palpatine easily spread this claim by reminding the galaxy that Dooku, the Republic’s greatest threat in a thousand years, was a former Jedi.“ (Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)And the part that sums everything up the best of all:        “Anti-Jedi sentiment was more a product of their cultural absence rather than a refutation of anything substantive. Separatist worlds that had experienced lawlessness attributed that to Jedi neglect, a failure of policing. Indeed, the war itself was a failure of the peacekeepers. To these disaffected worlds, the Jedi were just one more symptom of an inattentive Core World. They imagined the Jedi to be cultural elites, or in the case of this piece, a zealous sect of warmongers.        “Had the Jedi made more of an effort to engage in the populace, such deadly misunderstandings could have been avoided.”(Star Wars: Propaganda | by Pablo Hidalgo)This book is the best example of showing how things got to where they were and it’s a really good example of showing why the Jedi chose the paths they did–for one thing, they were drafted into the war, both in-world and out-of-world sources have said so.  We’ve seen them try to object to things like, THEY DID NOT WANT TO SEND ANAKIN TO TATOOINE, PALPATINE MADE THEM, they did not want to let Anakin hang around Palpatine, but had no evidence to object with and so Palpatine shut them down, they did not want to put Anakin on a Council he wasn’t ready for, but Palpatine made them, Mace wanted leniency for Boba Fett, but the Judiciary Branch ignored his plea, when Dooku was a Jedi, he talked to the Senate to ask for help for Outer Rim planets, they told him him that he was stepping out of line to address them this way, to stop trying to influence them (an implication of “don’t you dare use your weird and scary mind powers on us, you weirdo Jedi!”, I think) AND how they eschewed getting deeper into the propaganda because it romanticized war, as well as they believed their traditions and faith would speak for itself, BUT that allowed over and over and over again to have OTHERS shape the Jedi’s image.By the time they would have realize it was a problem, so many of them were already dead and they had thirty tire fires to put out and they were exhausted and still had more to do and nobody really wanted to listen.The above shows an incredibly consistent pattern of the Jedi were drafted into this war, they weren’t given a choice about the clones, their image was spun by people who had an incredibly vested interest in painting them as the bad guys for their own manipulations, and they eschewed public imagery because they didn’t want to become known as warriors, they didn’t want to romanticize this war.So when the people of the GFFA are like, “Yeah, the Jedi are just part of the Core World Elites!  They never come down here with us lowly folks!” that’s playing into the propaganda that was spun about them (look how it also conveniently ignores how many “lowly” worlds they’re visiting and working with), it’s playing into what Palpatine was selling, what the Separatists were selling, and ignoring what the Jedi were actually doing and saying, what they actually had feasible options for.When people accuse the Jedi of starting the wars, it’s supposed to be contrasted against the audience knowing the truth–that Palpatine started that war, but that we know he was a master of propaganda and manipulative lies.  That girl accusing them of starting the war isn’t meant as truth, the idea that the Jedi were Core World Elites isn’t meant as truth, it’s meant as part of the political landscape that they weren’t prepared to navigate (because they’re not meant to be politicians!), but that people painted them that way because Palpatine wanted to make sure they were to blame for everything wrong in the galaxy so that when he murdered their children and burned their home, people would just stand by and watch.That girl saying it was the fault of the Jedi is a huge part of the story, how the galaxy believed the lies about them.  She’s wrong, but she was fed a steady diet of GFFA FOX News and we know exactly what’s going to happen because of it.

[thebastardofgloucester]

So...The Rise of Skywalker (Spoilers, obviously)

No Star Wars movie is anywhere close to perfect. Frankly, they all have serious flaws of logistics or plot logic or characterisation changes or deus ex machinas or lack of originality (which includes A New Hope when you look at its inspirations). It's pointless and silly to pretend otherwise. At its best, Star Wars overcomes that with captivating characters, glorious spectacle, and John Williams.

I think you'll all be familiar with how much I disliked The Last Jedi (and chafed at being lumped in for disliking the movie in with bigots, unimaginative fanboys, and the like).

I liked The Rise of Skywalker. A lot. It had more than enough to offset its major shortcomings, in my opinion. It was not 'soulless,' it was not a complete recreation of Return of the Jedi anymore than The Last Jedi was a rough retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, and it was not as bad or incoherent as Attack of the Clones, jfc are you high

There are certain areas where I am more sympathetic to that not being the case for some people than others. I don't think it completely junked The Last Jedi, but it did demonstrate a huge gap in creative visions, preferred plot structures, and other priorities. Blame for that should not lie with JJ Abrams (or Chris Terrio) or Rian Johnson, who did what they thought was best, and what they were hired to do, and what they thought audiences would enjoy. It should lie with the Lucasfilm story group and Kathleen Kennedy, who had every opportunity to make a trilogy with a united vision and simply declined to do so. (There are a set of different issues with Disney that I'll get to)

Anyway, here's my take on individual components.

Rey ‘Palpatine’

We might as well start with the single most contentious part of the film, and where it is perceived (wrongly, in my opinion) to clash the most with The Last Jedi: Rey being of the Palpatine bloodline.

Rey's arc was about pushing past her own past traumas and doubts and the repeated attempts of other people to define who she was to make her own identity. It is about the refutation of destiny, of genetic determinism. I'm not really sure how anyone really came away with a different impression. I understand being annoyed that Rey couldn't just come from nothing, but call me an annoying fanboy - I wanted some explanation for how Rey was a match for the grandson of literal Space Jesus. Anakin being the most powerful Jedi ever born (and how he was failed by those who were supposed to guide him to that destiny) is kind of central to the entire mythology of Star Wars. Is it reductive and elitist? I guess. I certainly enjoy having Jedi not born of the Skywalker bloodline in the old EU and the Clone Wars/Rebels story. I was frustrated by killing off all of Luke's students as part of resetting the universe in The Force Awakens, and never learning anything about them.

Honestly, as somebody who was in the Rey Skywalker camp (and wrote fanfiction to that effect!), I was glad to be wrong. This was better. It gave Rey more agency, and emphasized found family.

The exposition is weird and clunky. JJ clearly meant for Rey to have some kind of blood link to the previous mythology of the series - you cannot watch the sequence in Maz's castle and tell me otherwise. Rian didn't want to tell that story. JJ did. Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm threw their hands up in the air and Disney raked in the cash. Looking at that Maz castle beat, there's a very good case to be made that Rey was supposed to be either a Skywalker or a Solo, and Palpatine was JJ's attempt to not completely throw out Rian's idea (that her parents went into hiding, becoming 'no one,' abandoning her and being killed somewhere else - their motivations in TLJ (drunks ditching her) are imputed by Kylo and Rey's own fears of abandonment, remember).

Weirdly, I think that of the outcomes, Palpatine was the best one. Explaining how Rey ends up alone on Jakku when she's related to either Luke or Leia is pretty hard without further damaging their characters. Palpatine having lovers, mistresses, whatever before Mace melted his face is gross but entirely plausible. The timeline is...confusing - I guess there's enough basis for Palpatine still having agents running around, chasing down Rey, that even years after his death Rey's parents would leave her behind in an attempt to protect her. It's a bit muddy, but so was Anakin being Luke and Leia's father before we had the prequels. A novel here would probably help if it is written competently)

The point is that Rey's arc refutes genetic destiny. Instead of being afraid of her, as the Jedi were of Anakin (and to an extent, the Skywalkers were of Ben) Luke and Leia (specifically Leia) allow her to grow into her own person, and ultimately she chooses to take the name Skywalker to honor them (and Ben's sacrifice). The problem in my mind is less that Rey is a Palpatine by blood or a Skywalker by choice, and more that she's the only Jedi standing at the end of the trilogy. Making Finn's absolutely obvious force sensitivity a bigger deal narratively in TROS would have helped a lot (more on that later). And we still have the important implications of Broom Boy! He's not erased from existence, there simply wasn't room for his story in these 2.5 hours.

The First Act (and a bit)

The first 30 minutes or so of The Rise of Skywalker are...nuts. They feel less like a movie and more like a series of trailers or a 'previously on' for a movie we never saw. It's about as well done as it could be at establishing plot threads, the situation of the Resistance v the First Order, and where characters are starting from, as you could reasonably expect, but it's like cramming the entirety of the Jabba's Palace segment of Return of the Jedi into about half its runtime, at most.

What it comes down to, and I said this at the time, is that The Last Jedi is a very bad sequel to The Force Awakens. That doesn't (REPEAT: DOES NOT) make it bad film, or even a bad Star Wars film. But in terms of what the middle movie of a planned trilogy should be. It is. Not Good. JJ had seeded hints of Rey's origins and opened a bunch of mysteries. You can contend that he never intended or was never capable of answering them, and I think that's entirely unfair and reducing JJ's opus to the unsatisfying ending of 'Lost' is stupid and lazy, but they were there. The Last Jedi threw all of that out with extreme prejudice. I deeply disliked that; other people didn't. Either way, you had a problem (and you would have had even more of a problem if Colin Trevorrow had directed Episode IX as planned - this could have been SO. MUCH. WORSE.). The Rise of Skywalker is a natural sequel to The Force Awakens, though Palpatine's return could have been foreshadowed much better (or at all, if we're honest?) and it really makes me wonder how much changed from the first drafts of The Force Awakens to the version of The Rise of Skywalker we saw on screen.

I saw some criticisms that we had to read the tie-in material (including a bit from Fortnite??) to understand all the specifics of what planets these were, who Kylo Ren was murdering, etc...I don’t really think any of that was particularly important. It actually opens up a ton of new storytelling opportunities and made the universe feel big again, which The Last Jedi didn’t, at least for me. Apparently the planet Kylo is fighting on is Mustafar. That...doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense (maybe we finally have a Star Wars world that isn’t a single biome?) but it wasn’t actually that important. We saw Kylo searching for the Sith Wayfinder and murdering anybody in his way, we saw Poe and Finn being pursued from one end of the universe to another, and we got the 16 hour deadline before the fleet was ready (which was...weird, admittedly, but not in the slightest less weird that the fleet running out of fuel on a slow-motion chase or needing to fly off to an entirely different system to find a ‘code breaker’ to counter a techo gadget thing that let you trace people through hyperspace.

And yeah, if you are going to forgive The Last Jedi the dumb codebreaker/fuel shit which led to the detached Canto Bight B plot, you have to just acknowledge the Wayfinder thing as a macguffin that gets the plot moving in a certain direction and gives a clear path from narrative point a to narrative point b. Rian is not ahead of JJ on this aspect.

The subsequent fetch quest is less about the macguffin and more about the character beats on the way. Kylo and his boy band pursue Rey, Rey realizes her powers are kinda scary and hella impressive (including the healing mechanic, which is entirely precedented in past canon), you get to see some brilliant, funny, and touching moments between the trio we were not allowed in The Last Jedi, Rey discovers hints about her past, and Lando shows up.

We also get to my least favorite part of the film.

Poe Dameron is Better Than This

I do not understand why they ret-conned Poe into having a past as a smuggler, or why Keri Russell’s character was even necessary. You could explain it as youthful rebellion, maybe after Poe’s mom Shara Bey died (both his parents were Rebel veterans - that’s a lot of pressure), but it fits awkwardly into the established timeline.

The one good thing that came out of it was a moment where Poe is tempted to leave the Resistance, but that only makes sense because of Poe’s terrible hotheaded, reckless characterization in The Last Jedi, neither of which at all fit with his portrayal in the Poe Dameron comics (which are excellent). Poe eventually gets where he needs to be, and the conversation with Lando after Leia passes is one of the best moments of the film, and justified bringing Lando all by itself. Oscar Isaac is apparently really frustrated with Poe’s character and I cannot blame him. Rian Johnson started this weirdness, and it is one of the greatest flaws of The Last Jedi and more people need to acknowledge how racist it was to reduce a 30-something brown-skinned veteran to an impulsive, out of control idiot who gets physically and verbally smacked around by two white women, and JJ didn’t really try to fix it. I guess his arc kinda works in a vacuum. I still deeply dislike it. Cutting that entire section down to the bare bones would have made more room for...

Finn and the Triad

The dynamic between Finn, Poe, and Rey was fantastic. There is abundant basis for Finn and Poe to be canon romantic interests, and I cannot conclude it was anything but Disney’s cowardice that prevented that from happening (and honestly, same for Finn and Rey). JJ is no more to blame than Rian - I genuinely believe this came from higher up. It sucks. A lot. What we do get is precious, and frankly makes Rian’s argument for separating them (that they would get along and it would be boring) kinda silly. They are also incredibly funny together - John, Isaac, and Daisy play off each other so damn well, and I was cackling when the Falcon was on fire and Poe was mad about BB-8.

Finn is absolutely force sensitive. It is apparently what he was trying to say to Rey, he has feelings that turn out to be correct like three times, he wielded a lightsaber with some proficiency in The Force Awakens. It’s canon. Why it isn’t explicit is a function of the Force User plot becoming divorced from Finn and Poe in The Last Jedi. JJ and Terrio also could have fixed that, and chose not to.

We got a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been with Janna and the other defectors. It was really good, but it wasn’t nearly enough, and I am Mad about it. To borrow from some great ideas on twitter, Janna could have revealed that her unit heard about Finn on Jakku and it inspired them to defect. They could have together swayed a bunch of reluctant stormtroopers to rebel (they were otherwise just treated as facist canon-fodder, which, not great when a lot of them are child soldiers!). It was perfectly set up from TFA and they just...dropped the ball.

Like I said, I’m Mad. TLJ did nothing with Finn as a defector or the child soldier thing in general, and TROS did the bare minimum. Huge, huge wasted opportunity. We got promises that we’d get to find out more about who Finn is and...we didn’t, or at least, not in the theatrical cut. TLJ had a scene of Finn and Phasma talking about his being a traitor/defector. Rian cut it down to a fight scene and the ‘Rebel Scum’ line. Writers jail for both of them, tbh, though JJ clearly cared about Finn (he’s why the character exists as he does, as why Boyega was cast, and maybe if TLJ doesn’t make Kylo into Rey’s co-protagonist we get something different. I'm not going to blame Rian for something JJ could have fixed if he cared to.

And least we got something, I guess.

Kylo Ben

I think the first time I actually cared about Ben Solo as a character was when Kylo symbolically ‘died,’ and Ben was saved by Rey’s healing abilities. That was excellent writing, even if it was not subtle. I liked Leia and Han (as part of Ben’s memories) have a role in helping him find some sort of redemption. I was frustrated and mad that Anakin Skywalker’s grandkid could be a straight up space fascist with even fewer redeeming qualities. He still deserved to die. He had no family to go back to and he was directly responsible for thousands of innocent deaths and closely linked to the death of trillions. Like Vader, you don’t just come back from that.

Like Anakin, Ben made his own choices. Was he manipulated by Snoke/Palpatine? Sure. He still had multiple occasions to chose differently and did not. It’s part of his flaws as a character. Han and Leia did their best as parents - we find out Leia even abandoned her Jedi training because she was afraid for her son. Ben’s inevitable fall (which mirrors that of Jacen Solo, a truly fascinating character who I will always be Mad about) soured the sequel trilogy from the start in some ways, but it is hard to envision it without Ben turning. I don’t know. I think without Ben being who he was we simply have a different set of movies.

The kiss is...I don’t even know. Rey clearly cared about Ben, and believed he could change, but also refused to compromise who she was in order to pull him back to the light. I would have vastly preferred a forehead kiss or something along those lines.

On balance I’m glad he got a Vader redemption. I think Palpatine came back in part because Ben simply was not a particularly captivating villain, and without him to provide contrast and make the stakes clear, Ben’s redemption is not possible, and that’s arguably an even worse outcome, especially given how he was manipulated so much at an impressionable age. I’m really glad Leia had a chance to influence his turn as her final act in this life (Carrie deserved a better ending but it was the best they could do after Carrie’s death imo).

Grandpa Palps

First, Palpatine finding a way to survive and setting up multiple contingency plans to return to power is completely in keeping with his portrayal in both the old and Nu EUs (a big part of the post-Endor stuff is Operation Cinder, where Palpatine posthumously ordered the scouring of dozens of Imperial loyalist worlds to spread fear and prevent the Empire from continuing without him). Palpatine also LOVES his superweapons - he built two Death Stars, ffs. A fleet of them is not exactly a stretch in terms of strategy. The Rise of Skywalker definitely felt like it owed a debt to one of the more divisive bits of the old Star Wars EU - the Dark Empire series of comics by Tom Veitch and Kevin J Anderson, which have cloned Palpatines, Luke turning to the Dark Side, an ungodly number of superweapons, and a planet where Palpatine hides and builds them after his defeat.

I don’t think his survival ruins Anakin’s arc - Anakin’s actions still destroyed Palpatine’s Empire (that he helped to build) and its 26 year reign of terror. The galaxy got 30 years of relative peace and then a war that was not nearly as destructive or large scale as the Galactic Civil War. People saying it makes Anakin’s arc irrelevant are just being silly.

Retconning Snoke to a cloned puppet (probably an unwitting one) is actually not a bad writing choice. It explains why he was such a cardboard cut-out villain, and why he was so easily defeated. Honestly, I’m far more okay with how he died in The Last Jedi now that I know this (even if the pacing and the placement of that scene is still utterly bizarre).

The new EU set up cults and fanatics around the Dark Side and its avatars in the emperor and Vader. None of that felt particularly implausible to me as a result.

Legacies in the Sequel Trilogy

I really loved the ‘thousand generations live in you’ conceit. I loved the power of the old Jedi, snuffed out by Palpatine, helping Rey defeat him one last time (including my girl Ahsoka, RIP, I'm sure you went out like a badass). These are legacies and powers that don’t require blood ties or dynasties, they just rely on the force spanning the whole of the GFFA.

Ben is offered the chance to either turn away from his grandfather’s dark path early enough to warrant redemption, or to follow it through until the end. He actually chooses to do neither. With Leia’s dying intercession, he ends up following Anakin’s path to an extent, but his story is ultimately about the tragedy of expectations, fears, and the immense weight of the Skywalker name and legacy. All of his family are caught up in it. Rey is mostly apart from it, and then explicitly subverts her destiny to be Palpatine’s heir, and faces her fear of ending up there, by intent or just fate. As Luke says, some things are stronger than blood. Rey’s story is the ultimate testament to that, and it’s a pretty powerful message.

Leia. Oh god. I was absolutely thrilled when we found out she trained as a Jedi, and then served as Rey’s Jedi Master after Luke failed Rey so badly (after failing Ben). I think Luke’s story from TLJ to TROS is easily the most consistent, honestly. He made mistakes, both with Ben, and then with Rey, and he recognized it. The Rise of Skywalker acknowledges that Luke wasn’t right in how he handled training Rey either, and that went a long way to making me better accept how Rian portrayed him as flippant and dismissive and cynical.

Carrie’s absence was so badly felt. As I’ve said previously, I think they did the best job they could with the footage they held back and Carrie’s recorded audio. They managed to give her a relatively coherent story and an effect on the plot which she didn’t really have in The Last Jedi. I’ve seen speculation that it was supposed to be Leia, not Luke, who gave Rey that pep talk on Ahch-To, and in some ways it might have made more sense. Selfishly, I’m still glad it was Luke, because it helped reconcile my feelings about him in The Last Jedi. But they really did a great job in a really, really tough situation.

Rose Tico

Let’s just get it out there: the film’s treatment of Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran was inexcusably bad. Whether her character was a great addition to the cast in the Last Jedi or not, KMT faced horrendous abuse from various bigots and assholes, and after making a lot of public promises they reduced her to barely a minute of screen-time and no real impact on the plot. It’s shitty, it’s bad, and JJ and Disney should feel bad.

Introducing a character like Rose mid-way through a trilogy is risky, and while it worked with Lando, JJ clearly had no idea what to do with her. It’s just a mess, it’s the biggest black mark on the film, and on the sequel trilogy more broadly. Nobody comes out looking good here, and Rose Tico needs a Disney + series of her own or something. Protect Kelly Marie Tran at all costs.

The Rest

- Lando was great. So great. I wish we’d gotten the line that his daughter had been stolen by the First Order (and thus was potentially Janna) - we’d better get a book or a film or something. Lando’s conversation with Poe salvaged his character arc. Billy Dee Williams did a damn good job getting in shape for the role. He came out as genderfluid recently. He’s an absolute treasure and thank god they didn’t waste him.

- I just wanted to reiterate how HAPPY I AM THAT JJ ABRAMS MADE LEIA A JEDI HOLY SHIT

- It was a blink and you’ll miss it moment for people who didn’t read Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath series, but the death of Temmin ‘Snap’ Wexley in a battle where his step-dad (Wedge Antilles) made a brief appearance was devastating and I still don’t know how to feel about it.

- The space battles were awesome. Lando and Chewie bringing in the cavalry was what we were so cruelly teased for in The Last Jedi, which I am still mad about. Forget the logistics, forget the story logic, it was awesome. Maybe in the future I’ll be more annoyed. I honestly doubt it.

- Hux lives (and dies) for drama. He’s the pettiest son of a bitch in the GFFA, he would absolutely turn informant to win his fight with Kylo Ren, especially if he suspected that Kylo had killed Snoke and then was an incompetent child. His dying shortly thereafter is honestly exactly what the character deserved.

- On the cavalry moment, and the galaxy rising to destroy the First Order - I loved it in Return of the Jedi’s special edition, I love it here. There’s a thematic resonance with our heroes overcoming their fear and the galaxy at large being stirred to action. I just wish we’d gotten a few ragtag forces to show up at Crait, but that was a choice Rian made. I’m glad JJ chose differently. It was incredibly Star Wars.

- The 3PO stuff was weird, especially given how emotionally centred it was in the final trailers. It was also tied up in the Poe stuff I disliked. I don’t really know what else to say. At least R2D2, BB-8, and him felt like characters, not purely plot devices.

- Chewie - his reaction to losing Leia was absolutely devastating, his relationship with the next gen trio was great, and his death fake-out was...weird. I could go either way with that - killing him would have been a huge risk I could have respected, on the other hand if he was going to go out he deserved better than that (like, say, a moon getting dropped on him saving the life of Han Solo's kid). His ‘death’ did set up a crucial character beat for Rey. And there were, in fact, two transports, I remember that.

TLDR;

It was a fun movie! It tried to do way too much because The Last Jedi was not an effective sequel to The Force Awakens, and that’s on Kennedy and the LFL story group more than anyone else. It nailed the broad strokes of the Jedi/Force plot in my opinion, including subverting genetic destiny and the power of blood ties over everything else. In the process, it let a number of characters down, who were unfortunately also the characters of color, which is: not great.

I found it rewarding as a fan. It rewarded my faith in the goodness of the denizens of the GFFA and the power of found family. I’ve loved Rey from the start and I’m thrilled with how her arc ended with her burying the Skywalker legacy and making a new start with her new family in Poe and Finn (and Rose, damn it). I’m glad it made me feel better about Luke Skywalker and finally made Leia a bona-fide lightsaber wielding Jedi. I was exhilarated coming out of it, instead of exhausted and frustrated like I was in The Last Jedi. It didn’t make me hate Star Wars. It had extreme Return of the Jedi energy, and that is literally all I needed out of this film.

Here’s to a load of more complex, nuanced, and adventurous storytelling that the Skywalker saga never really allowed. I’m still excited for the prospect of Rian working with his own characters in the universe. I think JJ should probably be done.

Chuck Wendig said that the Star Wars universe was junk. Fun, whimsical, exciting, but ultimately not really a well-crafted piece of art. I’m inclined to agree.

[ivory-in-rapture]

The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh: A review

I had to take a break from writing this review. It was four pages of angry salty rant and all over the place but now I’m calm so I can review the book in a logical manner.

Name: The Beautiful

Author: Renee Ahdieh

Genre: Historical fiction, fantasy, paranormal, vampires

Category: Young Adult

Rating: 2/5 stars

The beautiful is a historical romance, a young adult novel with themes of vampires, horror and mystery.

Summary: “It’s 1872. (wow really?!) Meet Celine. A young French seamstress who is moving to the new world (specifically New Orleans) to start anew away from the monsters of her passed. But then a series of crimes begin to terrorize the citizens of New Orleans just as Celine begins to fall for this super-hot, emo, sexy boy with a really weird edgy attitude. And obviously, it seems like this love-interest is the murderer. (of course!)”

                                                   ****************

I have a lot of problems with this book. I’ll start with the good though. The story is very beautifully written. Ahdieh has a lot of poetic, scenic descriptions and all the emotional descriptions are grand and lovely and beautifully expressed. The descriptions of the city of New Orleans are very beautiful. In fact, my favorite part of the story was the exploration of this new town and its customs. I just wish there was more of that in the actual story. (Aaaaaand there ends the nice things) In fact, while the story tries very hard to be diverse and open-minded, we only really discover the very…not-diverse side of New Orleans. I would have loved for the story to get into the other cultures that really define New Orleans as a fictional landmark but it was the same as reading about the rich of Paris.

Well failed to be nice there. Anyway, I have condensed my disappointment in this book down to three points:

1. This was not a good vampire book

2. This is not really a vampire book

3. Vampires aside, this book is actually not good.

I’ll explain. Expect spoilers.

1. This was a bad vampire book.

A lot of readers might have gotten into this book knowing nothing but this book had been hyped for over a year as the “resurgence of the vampire genre in YA lit”. Everyone in the YA community was talking about how this book is going to be innovative and breathe new life into the dead trope and it was subversive and I got really hyped!

I used to love vampire books (until I got tired of the cliche plots.) I have read many vamp books and after reading the description and beginning of this book, I thought I knew just how this book would be different.

I thought Celine was the murderous vampire terrorizing the city and she was actively seducing the guy so he’d get blamed while she can get info about his personal life to further the illusion and also so she can have deniability if she gets caught!

I was wrong. This book actually didn’t do anything innovative in its vampireyness. The story is about a “strong female character” in the most cliché and transparent way you can imagine. Celine takes stupid, illogical risks without any sensible reason because she’s just “so brave!”. She makes mistake after mistake and for some really lousy reason, she becomes the object of the vampire’s obsession. Everyone she meets falls in love with her. She’s just…a really cliché vampire-genre heroine. Just like its genre, this trope of protagonists is outdated now. There’s this push to make vampire stories less creepy by making it so the woman seems so in control and powerful but news flash: Vampires are creepy! It’s not gonna be a vampire story if it isn’t creepy! That’s the whole point! That’s why the trope still works for adult novels but it’s just not working for YA anymore. YA has moved on to better things. All this said, this book?

2. It’s not even a vampire story!

Despite the excessive marketing of this novel, this isn’t actually a vampire book. This book is not interested in the horror, the mystery or even the aesthetic of vampire stories. There are vampires somewhere in there but it’s not really important. The word isn’t even mentioned until 140 pages in and the characters don’t really ever talk about it either. We get every mystery resolved before we really get to stew in it. There’s really no shock or smart plot twist in it (oh there are plot twists, they’re just not smart). We get these long, boring chapters from the perspective of the vampire/killer which just ruins the whole allure of it. This killer is such a snooze! He was so boring that I’m pretty sure I zoned out during his chapters and missed some heavy exposition. The victims of the crimes are skeleton characters we barely care about, too. I mean, I’m pretty sure we learn the name of one victim after he is killed! The stakes are below ground in the story. The story is actually about two humans… reluctantly falling in love...and there are some vampires in the background besides the boring killer, who really should join a theater group and get his angst out there instead of on his food. We only really get some vampire-related action at the very end but by that point, I was already so exhausted by the boring plot and the terrible main character that I was too irritated to care. And that brings me…to the third point

3. This was just a really bad book.

I am sad. I really liked The wrath and the dawn (I’m actually questioning that these days too…) but I have yet to read something else by Renee Ahdieh that I’ll enjoy. It’s possible that we just don’t work; her writing and my reading taste.

But I really think this book was bad. Like I mentioned before, this book has both a plot problem and a character problem.

The plot first: The story doesn’t make sense in a lot of places because the character doesn’t operate on a logical wavelength! It’s terrible at building tension; mysteries get solved before they really sink in and the explanations are not good enough. There’s no cohesive rise and fall to the plot. It’s mostly grunt work; we move from the main character arguing with someone in one scene to her arguing with someone else in another scene. All around, there was just so much argument in this book! Celine is such an outspoken woman that she just can’t leave anything well enough alone. She has to fight with everyone over everything. It was exhausting and she argued over the most mundane and ridiculous things. She is probably one of the worst characters I’ve ever had to tolerate throughout a book! She never actually argued about anything that mattered. It was always about her pride and just for the sake of being stubborn. I think she even says at some point that she didn’t disagree with the character but she just had to argue with their point.

On top of that…Celine is not like other girls. She’s different. She actually thinks she’s better than the other girls she meets on her journey. She acts like she doesn’t want a husband but then goes and falls for the most eligible bachelor of the town after three meetings. (One just a glance, the second an argument…and the third, another argument.”) It’s instalove and it’s convoluted and stupid. By the end of the book, she’s so in love that she’s shrieking over the body of the guy, she’s almost had sex with him and she already knows everything about him because they had one nice conversation while they walked about being mixed race.

This brings me to the character issue: The story tries too hard to be diverse and edgy but it just comes across as fake and pretentious. Every character has one or two “diverse points”. This one is a lesbian, that one is half Chinese and the other is half African. The main three have diverse points of their own which they ‘bond’ over and that was actually one of the few saving graces of the story but as a whole, the book chooses to be about the most boring characters of the story! Others might disagree but even the meek friend, Pippa, who we are supposed to look down at in the story for being a good and nice girl, is more interesting than Celine. If the story was actually about the lesbian vampire side character, this book would have actually been something special. The love interest is so boring? He’s like a nice guy in the most innocent ways possible. A pioneer of consent and equality in 1870s, Bastian is treated as devil-incarnate because he beat up a creepy dude that one time! The book keeps saying he’s a bad boy…but then like he’s one step away from joining a 2010s women’s march! It’s just almost laughable. I don’t have anything to say about him. He’s just a really handsome, nice but bad boy looking guy?! I don’t know.  

Okay, I think I’m done. I could nag more but I’m going to cut it here. This was still salty but oh boy! You should have seen the first draft. There was a lot of all caps!

Anyway as a whole, I think this book was a total failure because it failed in every sense. It failed to be true to its marketing promises, it failed its genre. The plot was poorly thought out and uninteresting and the characters were not compelling or sympathizing.  

I’m not going to read the sequel. Even though the cover looks gorgeous and we might have a main vampire character. I just dislike Celine too much to tolerate more of her irritating narrative voice!

I really hope someone reads this.  Thank you if you stayed through this. I know it was long.

[roseate7]

(my no good utterly pretentious reaction to Geno’s interview in Russian wherein he expresses himself in a way we non-Russian-speaking fans rarely get to see and I go into an absolute asjafjsaghjas)

I just think about how lonely Geno has been in with such a hostile spotlight so young, the kind of thing I haven’t seen since the first defectors. Growing and maturing and then attending a draft alongside another Russian phenom bred to be lauded along his journey from league to league, by comparison Geno’s own hype and success ended up on a journey that paralleled those first Russian pioneers to NHL hockey more than any other player of his generation. In particular, a stark almost flip-opposite to the one his fellow draft alumnus experienced.

The NHL that Geno had begun to dream about joining in his teens had developed a different relationship to Russian players since his very early childhood. It was a stage set almost perfectly for the star rising elsewhere who would one day become The Russian Superstar in commercial terms and popularity that not even the Russian greats before him had managed to be. What’s relevant in particular is that Ove is famously known as an un-Russian type player, and was made so more or less by design. His destiny was patently to go out and “conquer” (to use his and his press’ patter) the NHL. His playing style is much more that of a North American power forward and the C*pitals’ hierarchy that places his scoring chances as top priority is the perfect environment for his style to flourish. He is the THE superstar, even having been mentored by Fedorov during his tenure with Washington. All and sundry around Ove have been driven toward his accomplishments. (Fed himself called Ove’s style not at all typical for a Russian. Ove’s falling out with his Russian coach at Sochi in some part to this.) Btw I know tumblr tends to be hyper sensitive and reactionary about this kind of thing, so just a reminder that these are facts that are *constantly* corroborated every year by every sports pundit and player, including respected colleagues and friends of Ove’s. The overwhelming majority of C*ps fans, and the entirety of the franchise, are perfectly happy with it! And thanks to getting a Cup into the bargain, very proud to continue it. To paraphrase him, if it never breaks then don’t “fix” it!

I bring it up with regards to How Very Russian Indeed Geno is by contrast, and now especially amid the many Ov*chkin-ized Russian NHLers. It marks a turning point in how Russian players in the NHL are presented and interact.

Geno in no small way represents the Old Gods. He’s got far more in common with Alexander Nevsky than Alexander Ov*chkin, if I can be allowed to be so pretentious and very historically loose. His choice to keep the A on another C’s team rather than seek out his own personal superstardom elsewhere - which would absolutely have been the parallel to Ove’s, as their close draft class status has proven repeatedly through the years - is Russian to the core. The desire to reflect on his own position in a club in terms of broader, collective success is - albeit to a North American anyway! - achingly Russian.

The many old world fables his story resonates with come right out of Russian stories: rags-to-riches; daring defection from his home country; from “jewel in the crown” of home to persecution as a perceived traitor; dramatic arrival to his new foreign city, including the first meeting with the young phenom he had followed since their childhood; the cruel and abrupt challenge of faith in himself at his first appearance on NHL ice; from cultural and linguistic isolation to half of a dual leadership with one of hockey’s greatest players on a three-time Cup winning team. It’s all there in fascinating, ever-revealing detail.

The Russian Five were my personal fascination when I was a teen early in my hockey fan days and the mention of them in this interview reminds me of how, in just one player, I have seen that same Old Russian magic revive again. The fierce loyalty to the new guard he belongs to but that unmistakable, slightly haunted aura of traveling with his heritage in everything he does is a lot more of what I was used to seeing in Russian NHLers than the more casual, comfortable relationships Russian players have with North American media and fans nowadays. I know we all have to be cautious about the Russian Bear analogies, especially as they relate to the media- and opposition-feeding frenzy that seeks to vilify him as having some sort of pathological level of rage and lack of control. Especially when spoken at the same time as North American players with blatant anger issues are coddled into fantasies of ‘simply doing their job’ good guys or flat out victims themselves. Geno has pride and a hockey temper, but it only looks out of proportion to the average pride and pugilism of any other player targeted for aggression, by those who don’t feel that he’s presenting himself in a way that is palatable to them. Most modern Russian NHLers return home and relax into very different personalities than the big smiles, laugh-along, don’t-talk-about-anything-serious versions of themselves that keep NW fans and media happy. Even if they find themselves in the box far more often or just as much as Geno, if the public already considers them a friend then much is forgiven. No armchair psychology of “anger issues” needed, no matter how bad the high stick or how many PIM. (and I won’t even get started on who ends up staying on referees radars more often than others, because it absolutely happens but most folks stay in denial unless it serves their own purpose)

As for the nature of his pride, Geno himself says that staying on a team he believes in is worth more than his own C. It’s worth taking a cut in money to help cap space. It’s worth being on the second line, and using his intelligence and vision to work with who he’s given to form his own leadership. And that leadership becoming seen by all as an equal and vital part of the captaincy - no “alternate”. With any other captaincy than Sid’s, Geno would absolutely have left to find his own rightful dominion. But for the grace of Sid being born and made with “hockey is a team-first and team-only effort” as his defining characteristic, Pittsburgh would have lost 71 and seen him become number one elsewhere… and very likely winning his own Cups. Geno’s loyalty to the city and franchise does not at all end or limit itself to Sid, but it absolutely begins with him. One superstar’s personality kept the other on his team, and that other’s personality is why he stayed on the other’s.

The Russian Five felt like “fish put back in the water” when put together. Geno has used his own tenacity, bravery and ingenuity as a generational superstar to find a swift current with that most Canadian of archetypes, Sidney Crosby. The combined effort is perfectly fluid, perfectly aligned, with not even a faint whisper of friction or disturbance in thirteen years. There have been and will continue to be many dynamic duos in hockey: there’s a reason why this one is called unique. They’re both natural born captains and each chasing each other within a delicate margin along the record books. They absolutely work well together on the ice, but genuinely operate best when leading their own lines. Maybe psychologically there’s an argument about how much they lean on each other, but I think it’s much more to their credit to point out that Geno found himself in familiar waters with a fellow leader who shares exactly the same principles as him. Side by side, and more than once proving capable of taking the team on their own back when one is out injured.

It’s a big part of why a major club like Pittsburgh has made the often baffling decisions throughout these thirteen years to take on hard-luck cases or players nearing the back end of their careers. A team whose leadership is founded and successful on load-sharing and listening is the perfect environment for players who still have the fight and/or the skill but who have lost their way. Or perhaps aged out of their old club. All you have to do is your best and the Pens will try to find you. But if you want to be the superstar or leap ahead of the guys who’ve done more time, you won’t find any sympathy in Crosby and Malkin.

And it’s just so poetic that Geno’s story, told by himself so beautifully by himself in this interview, is one of heart and good faith overcoming adversity after adversity. And that he did it by making wise decisions for himself, while holding himself unnervingly well in response to his own feelings of guilt and responsibility. And how his success in Pittsburgh has been to make the smart decision about staying with a club because of his faith in it. And that his personal successes and pride are the result of endurance and patience rather than a succession of fireworks, or even getting the credit he deserves.

Sid absolutely represents the ‘anything is possible through hard work’ and the more nurturing side of the Pens’ leadership. But Geno is the steely resolve and quiet rumble leading to powerful force that bears aloft even unlikely rosters to their absolute best.

-

-

-

-

-

(asterisks and spelling changes used because I don’t know how tumblr searches tags anymore and I’m being careful - if you still somehow found this and get huffy about what I said wrt Ove then swallow it down and move along. Nothing I said is untrue or considered an insult even by Caps hockey pundits. It’s all factual and highly relevant in terms of how NHL hockey has changed for Russian players. Don’t blame me for watching hockey for decades and stating what absolutely everyone else does, including the Caps coaching and management! Their style is not under my control lol.)

[musicprincess655]

Back in America, Mei complained constantly about having to wake up before he was ready. Today, though, he couldn’t get out the door fast enough. Even the lingering effects of jetlag couldn’t keep him down. 

“If only you were this excited for practice the rest of the time,” Ueda grumped, hunched over his coffee like it was a talisman. 

“The rest of the time I’m not practicing with an Olympic baseball team,” Mei countered. “It’s different.”

“You’re like a little kid,” Ueda told him. 

“You’re excited for this too,” Mei said. “You love baseball too.”

Ueda just shrugged, but Mei knew he was right. The care Ueda put into his work wasn’t someone just doing his job. Even though Mei made it harder for him, sometimes even intentionally, Ueda did what he did because he loved it. 

“Japanese baseball is the same as always,” Ueda commented. “No first meeting to go over anything. They’re just jumping into it.”

“It’s better this way,” Mei said. “You don’t play baseball in a boardroom.”

“I guess you have a point,” Ueda admitted. “Go have fun. Play nice with the other kids.”

“Yes, Dad.”

Even though a baseball field was a baseball field, there was something special about stepping on one in Japan for the first time in so many years. Mei couldn’t pick up the subtle differences in the field, not really, but somehow, the atmosphere was different here. He breathed in deeply, scanning the field for familiar faces. He recognized a few former teammates, and patted himself on the back for his eye for talent. He knew Shirakawa and Carlos both had what it took to go pro. There were a few other players he recognized from other high school teams, although not by name. There were even a few younger players that Mei didn’t know at all. But then his eyes caught on a particularly familiar face, and his lips tilted up in a grin. 

“Kazuya!” Mei called. Kazuya whipped his head around, sports goggles flashing in the sunlight before a grin split his face to match Mei’s. He jogged over, catcher’s gear shifting softly. 

“Never thought I’d see you again after you disappeared to America,” Kazuya said. “How have you been?”

“Good, good,” Mei said, waving his hand grandly. “America’s been good to me. And there was never a chance of either of us missing out on the Olympics.”

“True enough,” Kazuya agreed. 

“Narumiya-san!” A voice that loud and exuberant could only belong to one person. Mei narrowed his eyes as Sawamura dropped an arm around Miyuki’s shoulders. “You’re back!”

“You got taller,” Mei said. “Rude of you.”

“Wasn’t it?” Kazuya complained. “He decided to go on ahead of us.”

“Miyuki Kazuya!” Sawamura complained. “You’re supposed to side with me!”

“You shouldn’t have grown taller than me, then.”

“You-!”

“Hello.” 

All three of them turned, and then had to look up. If Sawamura had grown, Furuya had exploded. He was probably pushing 190 centimeters at this point. 

“I knew I should’ve expected to see the Monster Pitcher here,” Mei said. “How fast can you pitch now? Don’t tell me you’re over 200.”

“161,” Furuya said, looking a little annoyed about it. 

“Put your aura away,” Sawamura said, grabbing Furuya’s shoulder. His tone made it obvious how friendly it was, though. Being on different pro teams must have really taught them how to have a healthy rivalry, even when high school hadn’t. “And you shouldn’t be so proud of that. It’s only because you don’t have good control.”

“You only say that because you can only throw 157.”

“I don’t remember him being witty,” Mei commented to Kazuya as Sawamura started yelling and Furuya countered by not rising to the bait. 

“I don’t think he is,” Kazuya said. “I’m pretty sure he was being completely serious.”

“That’s even better.”

Mei watched Sawamura and Furuya argue, and considered. There were a few other good pitchers that could be here - and he would probably know better if he’d actually listened to Ueda - but Sawamura and Furuya’s rivalry had taken the Japanese pro baseball world by storm. It was likely the two of them would be his main competition for playtime, doubly Sawamura because they were both southpaws. 

Which meant the pitching would be determined by the strength of the batteries they could form. 

“Are you still opposed to catching for me?” Mei asked. “I know why you were in high school, but haven’t those reasons changed now?”

Mei could admit that he and Kazuya had been weird about each other in high school, and only some of it had been because of baseball. However, they were adults now, and Mei could understand and even appreciate the way Kazuya played. 

“I don’t have an issue catching for you,” Kazuya said. “You’re not the same person who treated catchers like walls to pitch to. But I doubt we’ll be the battery they want to focus on.”

“Why not?” Mei asked. “We’re a good battery, when we work. Why shouldn’t we be a main battery?”

Kazuya gave him an incredulous look, and Mei was starting to think that he really should’ve listened to Ueda. 

“Because…” Kazuya started, but Mei happened to glance over to the bullpen, and all the breath froze in his lungs. 

“Itsuki,” he gasped. 

“Uh, yeah,” Kazuya said. “I’m pretty sure he’s the one they want to pair you with.”

Mei barely heard him. He was too busy tracing the lines of Itsuki’s shoulders, staring at his face and convincing himself over and over that Itsuki was here, Itsuki was going to be playing. 

Ueda’s comment about bringing in a catcher just for him made a lot more sense now. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Kazuya asked. “You look kind of sick.”

“Fine,” Mei choked out past his heart that had climbed its way into his throat. 

“Did you two have some kind of falling out?” Kazuya asked. “Weren’t you really close in high school?”

“Mm,” Mei hummed, moving towards the bullpen. There was a lot between him and Itsuki that was still unsaid, and Mei couldn’t decide where he wanted to start, but he knew it had to be somewhere. 

How did he fix eight years of radio silence, when they’d once meant so much to each other?

“Good, it seems all the pitchers and catchers have found us.” A man stood up, clearly the bullpen coach. “We’ll just be doing some light pitching practice today. There’s no reason to get everyone tired out, and we’ll just try out a few things to see what works.”

Mei forced himself to listen, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Itsuki. If Itsuki was aware of Mei’s attention, he didn’t show it, eyes facing resolutely forward. 

“Enjou-san will be with Furuya-san,” the coach announced. Mei had heard a rumor that Hongou was out on injury. That was a shame. “Miyuki-san will be with Sawamura-san.” That also wasn’t a surprise. Kazuya and Sawamura had always had an explosive battery, and they’d been drafted by the same team since they’d first entered pro baseball. “Tadano-san will be with Narumiya-san.”

Mei gulped. Whatever he wanted to say to Itsuki, now was the time to say it. He just had to figure out how. 

“Hey, Itsuki!” Mei called, injecting all the cheer he had into his voice. “Long time no see! Looking forward to working with you again.”

Itsuki finally turned and looked at him, and Mei’s heart dropped to the floor. 

“Hello, Narumiya-san,” Itsuki said. Mei winced. The chill in Itsuki’s voice stung like a bitch. “Let’s just see how this goes.”

Mei trudged forward, feeling significantly less confident about this whole endeavor. He’d thought he could say everything he didn’t eight years ago, but now, he wasn’t even sure he could pitch to Itsuki anymore. All of the connection, all of the trust they’d relied on in high school...it wasn’t there anymore. 

Still, Mei wasn’t one of the best pitchers of his generation for no reason, and he wasn’t going down without a fight. So when Itsuki signalled for a high inside fastball, Mei gave him a perfect one. 

Itsuki ran him through spots, checking his accuracy, and then asked for breaking balls, signals unchanged from the last game they’d played together. Technically, there was nothing to complain about, but even before the coach stopped them, Mei was ready to scream from frustration. 

“Well, it’s certainly not bad for a first run.” Mei had never been more grateful for the Japanese tendency for politeness. It meant he was spared the coach telling them they sucked. “But it’s certainly not one of the best pitching games Koshien has ever seen, either.”

Mei could answer right now what was missing. In that last game they’d played together, there had been a spark to them, the same spark that lit up Sawamura and Kazuya’s battery, functioning now without even a single hitch. He’d had that with Itsuki, once, but it was long gone. 

He had only himself to blame for that. 

“Why don’t we try switching the batteries up?” the coach suggested. “Tadano with Furuya, Sawamura with Enjou, Narumiya with Miyuki.”

It was a relief to pitch to Kazuya and know that it was a good one. Mei could already feel his shoulders relaxing from the success. 

“Nice ball,” Kazuya said, throwing it back. Mei could see his confusion, even from here. 

He wasn’t particularly interested in explaining himself. 

“One of the best pitching games Koshien has ever seen, huh?” he thought darkly. It was true, he supposed. Mei was mature enough to understand that the kind of battery he’d had with Itsuki was something special, and maybe even something precious. It was the kind of battery Sawamura and Kazuya had had incomparable luck to keep for so long. Mei hadn’t been quite so lucky. 

At least his session with Kazuya proved that there wasn’t a problem with him, not entirely. His success there would give him more time to try and prove himself, to try and fix his battery with Itsuki. 

They’d had a battery to be feared before. They could have it again.

[rebeccaseattle]

Stand and Deliver

I am, practically speaking a math teacher. Technically speaking, I am a mild/moderate special ed teacher, but I teach math, to special ed kids, mostly.   

Growing up, one movie I saw over, and over, and over again in school was Stand and Deliver. It was played almost every day we had a sub or the teacher didn’t have a plan, etc, etc etc. Then, my senior year my school theater program (of which I was highly involved) decided to do the play version. I essentially memorized that film. If you don’t know the movie, is carefully based off a true story of the famous math teacher, Jaime Escalante, an immigrant from Bolivia, whose teaches/coaches/mentors a handful of underserved high school students from a gang-ridden Garfield High School in LA into taking and passing the AP Calculus exam. These students success is so impressive, that they naturally are accused of cheating and the students have to retake a harder version of the test to indeed prove they do know math that well. 

Anyway, now that I am working math students, I asked myself, should I show the movie to my students? Somehow no one in my school seemed to know about the film. I’m sure things have changed in the 15 years since my own high school experience, and I’m in a different demographic. So I researched the movie carefully and how different educators felt about it. 

I ended up reading a lot about Jaime Escalante and the true story the film was based on. It was actually pretty close, a lot closer than your usual Hollywood films, it’s inaccuracies were few and not to dramatic. 

I found one fascinating blog post all about why teachers should not show this film to their students. One major point was, while Jaime Escalante was clearly an amazing educator who lead his kids to success, he was very controversial. Not only at Garfield high school as is portrayed in the film for pushing his kids so hard and setting high expectations for him, but also for later in life as he supported “English Only” movement in education. Many had the opinion that such an outlook is oppressive to students learning English as a second language. Most of the blog readers I read who said this, were like me, white, and native English speakers. I found this fascinating. I don’t necessarily agree with the English only movement, I don’t have an opinion and don’t think it’s my place to form one at this time. However, I think it’s possible to separate one person’s endeavor from another and appreciate one without the other. For example, I do in fact like Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however Albert was a huge jerk to his first wife, Meliva (whose name appears on one of the early drafts as its often said she helped with the math involved) and left her penniless with 3 children he refused to support for over a decade. Still Albert Einstein did do an amazing job of figuring out, testing, and working on this theory and that’s still amazing and inspiring. So I don’t think that was a valid reason to not watch it. 

Another educator wrote that Stand and Deliver was in the same spirit of “Dangerous Minds” which is definitely a movie about white saviorism. That movie, whose title alone offends me, also based on a true story, is about a white lady who comes to a gang-ridden high school and teaches English to underserved populations and like reduces gang violence or something (it’s been a while). That of course is a theme I need to avoid at all costs, savorism is a horrifying myth I seen projected onto my job, more on that later. For more fun we can watch the SNL skit “Pretty White Lady.”

However, Stand and Deliver is not the same as Dangerous Minds. The teacher is not a white person, but an immigrant himself who is technically classified as Latino. Okay, yes Bolivia is a very different country than say Mexico, or the other countries my students, or his, may come from. And I’m sure they don’t speak the same type of Spanish is Bolivia then say other countries, but still he’s an immigrant literally speaking the same language as his students. 

Also, the other factor I had to point out, is the math in Stand and Deliver, is actually very real math. In college I learned an excellent short cut to integration by parts, that my professors learned from the movie. Today things are a lot better, but in that era, the math in movies, was actually quite fake, and bad. The math that is done in SD, is actually quite accurate. It’s real calculus, algebra, and trig. I figured if nothing else I could show it to my kids purely for them to try to recognize the math happening in the movie. 

So I played the movie for my students and kept an open mind. I tried not to lecture or get to preachy toward them, I just wanted to be open to how they responded and then figure out if this was an advantageous movie for them to see. I did tell them to be aware of the various math tricks that happened in the movie. 

Also it was my first time watching the movie since I learned calculus and was very excited to revisit these scenes and examine the math. 

So here is the results:

1. My kids loved the movie. If for nothing else, they liked watching a movie in their math class. They would much rather watch movies then do math. It didn’t matter that the movie was nearly half a century old, still better than doing a worksheet or something. 

2. One thing that I noticed is that a number of my kids liked that the movie was about latina/latino students. A number of my students have a lot of pride in their ethnicity. While there are a number of white people in the movie, they show up in minor supporting roles. Much like the reverse of what we see in Hollywood today. The movie really is about Latin Americans and they seemed to appreciate that they were in the foreground. The minute it started, one of my students who had never spoke to me before then, told me about one of his favorite old movies, that was casted completely by latino actors. 

Furthermore, while Escalante is central, and he is portrayed as a hero, the real heroes of the movie are actually the high school students. It was very much a movie about kids in high school that delved into their family lives, dating issues, career decisions, conflicts with friends, etc. So it’s also a movie about high school kids. 

3. In addition, despite the movie being around 40 years old, there were a couple of cultural elements my students seem to relate to. For example, the way my students greet each other and their particular hand shake (which I can’t do, but am learning, growth mindset) was done in the movie by adults. In the scene when Guadalupe was putting her brothers and sisters to bed, one of my students, who identifies as Mexican, called out, “That’s a Mexican household there. That’s my cousins” My students commented on what food was being cooked in scenes and compared it to their friends and families’ cooking. In the conflict scene where Escalante confronts the college board representatives about the accusations, they were super engaged, predicting, accurately what Escalante would say next and how they would have handled it. They pointed out to me we have the same desks as the students in the movie (facepalm here). They even explained to me, the subtext of the gang violence around Angel in the movie. This is something I didn’t see or understand when I was a kid.  Of course this wasn’t the whole movie. A lot of the scenes culturally didn’t make sense to them, they were outdated, not relatable, or relevant. 

4. They liked that the movie talked openly about racism. Going back to that scene where Escalante confronts the school board, they were super engaged. They got very excited when Escalante confronts the college board representatives, and the fact that they were sent out because of their distinct ethnic backgrounds. They liked that the racism was being called out rather than everyone turning a blind eye and closed mouth. Most of my students, regardless of ethnicity were engaged in that part. 

Some of the kids though just spaced out, or were on their phones. I still have mixed feelings about the film, and would welcome other’s opinions about showing stand and deliver as a math teacher. It could be they were just grateful for a chill day. 

For me, I noticed a few things. 

1. The math is very accurate, and there are a couple of really cool math tricks happening in it. Namely integration by parts and the trick to multiply by nines using the fingers. 

2. I liked that Escalante pointed out the Mayans understood the concept of zero long before europeans did. I personally also like pointing out white people did not invent algebra, middle easterners did. I think the history of math is important, but is often whitewashed to be just about the Greeks and Romans. Often in history, only white history is told and the accomplishments of groups is silenced. 

3. The only math flaw I saw in the movie was when Escalante read ln(x-1) as the words L N. Any Calculus teacher worth their weight would of course read it as “The Natural Log of x minus 1. 

4. There are all sorts of subtext I understand now as an adult, that I didn’t as a kid. The fact the Ana leaves the test early so others won’t be accused of cheating off of her, or that Guadalupe doesn’t have a place or time to study when she’s at home. 

5. There is a honestly, the kids are clearly treated unfair by society and the movie points out this truth. The kids rise above by having to work extra hard to retake the test. I don’t know about the message of having the kids to work extra hard, I don’t want to get to preachy in my profession. But at least it acknowledges the unfair, racist elements the kids deal with, rather than be in denial or victim blaming I often see. It does have the message that the the kids are up to the challenge. They may have to work harder, but they are certainly underestimate by those in power over them. That makes an interesting point, but I’m not sure what it is yet. 

Anyway, I showed the movie this year, and I would love other’s thoughts about it. 

[nanowrimo]

How Dabble Just Might Help You Write Literary Gold

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Dabble, a Camp NaNoWriMo 2018 sponsor, is a writing platform designed to help you become a better novelist. Today, writer and educator Galadriel Mitchelmore shares her experience with dabbling in different writing platforms:

Dabble is “to try”. The dictionary definition implies a blasé application of effort. But the word “dabble” is often paired with “magic” and the “occult”—essentially, bringing out what is hidden. And isn’t that what writers do? Pull up characters, worlds, conflicts, stories—all mined from the mind. Writing is alchemy. It requires transmuting fragments of imagination, attenuating repeatedly until literary gold rises to the top.

Writing is hard. So, is there a way of not getting hopelessly lost in the process? Is there a crucible, of sorts, that the writer can tip all their story elements into? One place where ideas can be experimented with and the results clearly seen?

Paper Rafts Don’t Float, and Word is by No Means Final

In the beginning was Microsoft Word. But Word does not appreciate the writerly mind. For me, story planning and writing is messy. There are myriad ways to create a map of intentions, and I’ve made many in lots of different places—which is probably why it took me several years to complete my first novel. I’m not blaming Word for my incompetence as a developing novelist, but the program has its limits.  

I generated copious Word documents, saving different edits in several folders. When I wanted to return to a particular one, I could never find it.

Ditto that for my use of paper. I used reams of it: post-it notes, A4 plot grids, plain paper, lined paper, notebooks, index cards to hold on the spur ideas, web addresses, research sources, word counts, timelines, character files, story arcs.

Yes, I was being creative; my ideas were abundant, my research thorough. At the time, writing on paper was a comfort; it was helping me to organize my ideas. I thought I was getting on, getting ahead, succeeding.

But you know, paper makes for a poor life raft in a sea of paper. Sure, my ideas were organized—just organized all over the place. Somehow, everything required being neatly assimilated and tied up in Word. That’s what agents want—a coherent novel.

With much angst, I did it.

For the next novel, I needed to work quicker and smarter if I was going to get anywhere soon. I needed an outside pressure, so I joined NaNoWriMo.

I won. I had fifty thousand words of a new novel. As anyone will know with first draft material, any gold is buried in masses of dull prose and clunky sentences. Haunted by my previous novel and slightly sick at the thought of repeating old mistakes, I turned back to the NaNoWriMo pages for inspiration. That’s when I saw Dabble.

I was skeptical. How could a program make you better at writing novels?

Dabble’s subscription was very reasonable; it seemed ridiculous not to try it.

Dabble, and Dive Deep

Dabble’s website will tell you all you need to know. What I will say is, it’s revolutionized my writing process. I still use some paper, but it’s easier to keep notes together in Dabble. The cloud facility means I can work on any computer, anywhere. It’s made story-crafting so much easier. 

For me, controlling scenes is paramount. In Word, scenes and chapters are in one, continuous, scrollable document, and things can get messy. In Dabble, each scene is a discrete document. If I want to try out a variation of that scene, I add a new scene, and because it won’t impact what I’ve already written, I can choose later which one I prefer. The drag and drop facility means it’s easy to move scenes and chapters around. If I need to make changes to my first novel, it’s going to be easier with Dabble. As for the work in progress, well, I haven’t cried yet and I did plenty of that with the first.

No Need to Dabble Alone

Dabble is new and evolving, and the roadmap is exciting. The online community is warm and inviting, and users can request features they think would benefit creative writers. The “Chat with Support” function is brilliant. I’ve really appreciated being able to fire off a question when I’ve needed to, and get a quick to response to my queries and issues.

Dabble is an excellent tool that enables you to focus on writing excellently. Jump in and Dabble! You may make enough ripples of sparkling prose for someone to notice.

Galadriel Mitchelmore taught English at Secondary Level for almost ten years. She now works from home, teaching herself the craft of writing. She’s currently seeking representation for her YA Gothic Horror. When she’s not writing, she can be found tackling her garden or out walking with her husband, Andy, on Dartmoor.

[veneataur]

Prompt: Kidnapped (day 7)

Fandom: Salvation

Title: A New Start

A/N: This was supposed to be a humorous story but I was watching the last couple episodes of season 2 and I got mad about some things that happened. This is not an ‘everbody is friends’ story. I don’t want to spoil anything and this isn’t intended to absolve some characters of their actions. Pretty much everyone’s done something illegal by this point in the series, but I do have some questions about the actions of certain characters.

Oh, and I think I forgot the whump. So, perhaps light emotional whump? Sorry, I got caught up in my frustration. Maybe I need to ease up on my re-watching of the show.

“Darius, give it back to me,” Harris says, storming into the Treehouse where Darius is examining some plans on his desk with Liam.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Harris.” Darius doesn’t look up.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Now give me back my phone. I don’t even want to know why you’ve taken it or how you got it.”

“How do you even know I’m the one who has it?”

“Who else would take it? And I tracked it here. Now give it back to me. I have a lot of meetings to be in today and I can’t afford to delay getting to the Pentagon anymore.”

“Fine.” Darius sighs but takes Harris’ phone from the drawer on his desk and hands it over. Harris examines it briefly, noting that nothing looks out of the ordinary on the outside. It even unlocks to his fingerprint.

“Are there going to be any surprises on here?”

“How am I supposed to know what sort of emails and texts you get during the day,” Darius says, shrugging his shoulders.

“I’d better not find that you messed with anything.”

“Just some upgrades. Nothing harmful. I promise.”

Harris doesn’t completely believe Darius but lets it go for now because he really does have meetings to get to. His first inkling that the upgrades were not upgrades comes when he gets out of his second meeting of the morning and checks his email on the way back to his office. Before he has a chance to check the string of emails that pop up the hallway is filled with the lyrics from “I’m Too Sexy for my Shirt” and his screen is plastered with images Claire took. He doesn’t know how Darius got those photos but he knows that it’s Darius to blame. While the lyrics are still sounding, because he can’t figure out how to turn them off, he quickly dials Darius and dashes to his office, ignoring the snickering around him.

“Darius, what the hell.”

“I’m busy working on plans, Harris. I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk. Enjoy your upgrades,” Darius says a smirk in his voice and hangs up the phone. Harris sighs and glares at his phone, which has now stopped making noise but his background has been replaced with the posed shirtless image of him.

“Damn it, Darius.”

He shuts off his phone to save him any further surprises, calling his secretary to let her know that his phone is broken and will be off for the rest of the day. Then he gets to work, sorting through his emails, responding to what’s necessary, and completing reports.

Then, “I’m a Barbie Girl” sounds loudly through the office just as his secretary walks through. Grace is calling and even as he answers the call, the song continues.

“Harris? Where are you? What is that noise,” Grace asks.

“Just a gift from Darius,” Harris says with a grimace. He sees the secretary leave out of the corner of his eye and the door close, but not before he hears even more laughing.

“He got to your phone, too?”

“I don’t even know how he got a hold of it. Wait.” Harris pauses. “He got to yours as well?”

“Yes. Yesterday. It’s still acting up, but don’t worry the worst of it will only last for the day.”

“A day? Do you know what chaos his upgrades have already caused?”

“I can imagine. And don’t try getting him to take care of it. He’ll just say that he’s busy,” Grace says.

“Yeah, I got that sense when I called him earlier. Do you know why he did this? Is this just him being bored and pulling a prank?”

“No. He never said anything.”

“Well, after work I’m going over to question him. He can’t just do this. You’re welcome to come if you’d like.”

“Five o’clock work?”

“A quarter after. I’ll drive us over.” Harris ends the call after that and tries to go back to work. His phone wreaks havoc with those attempts. It goes off randomly, plays tunes ranging from “Wild Thing” to “Row, Row, Row your boat.” The early afternoon is spent going from “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on repeat to his phone flashing as though it were a disco ball.

Rather than be embarrassed by his phone, he leaves it in his office when he goes to his next meeting. His secretary comes in halfway through, his phone in hand as it blares out “I’m Too Sexy for my Body.”

“You have to do something with it, sir. It won’t stop. It’s disrupting the offices.”

He thanks her, embarrassment clear as he tries to hide the phone. She leaves quickly.

“My phone has had a malfunction,” he tells the generals he’s meeting with. “I apologize for the noise and disruption.”

“Can you simply shut it off,” one of the generals asks with barely hidden irritation.

“I’ve tried. I’ve been in touch with tech support and they don’t have a solution,” Harris adds when there’s a collective sigh of irritation. “I’ll be going to see Mr. Tanz after work today to get him to find a solution.”

“Surely the phone will simply go dead soon.”

“It’s still at near a full charge. I don’t know what’s going on with it. I’m very sorry about the disruptions.”

The meeting doesn’t last long after that, especially when “The Ketchup Song” begins blaring. The generals leave quicker than the song can restart and Harris finds himself sitting at an empty table with the urge to throw his phone across the room. He won’t give Darius that satisfaction, whatever the man’s plan is in sabotaging his and Grace’s phones.

Mid-afternoon finds him back in his office, trying to work but he can’t take the racket and tries to call Darius. He gets TESS reading nursery rhymes. Because it’s better than the songs and disco lights, he lets it go on speaker. It works until his phone screams and he nearly falls out of his chair, cursing Darius all the way. Then, the Hamster Dance begins with his phone running the antiquated animation. It takes several rounds, but Harris blocks the tone out and is able to get back to work. Until the song changes and a routine quickly develops. The song repeats for a random period of time; he has timed the segments and there’s no rhyme or reason behind how long it repeats except that it’s just slightly longer than the time it takes for Harris to adjust to the tune and block it out.

By a quarter to five, he’s cursing Darius and calls Grace to meet with her early. She’s ready as her phone has apparently taken a turn for the worse again and is now blaring out “I am a gummi bear” in a variety of languages, particularly Russian.

“What the hell, Darius,” they say in near unison as they exit the elevator to the Treehouse. Darius is still at work at his drafting table. He sets his pen aside and looks up at them as they enter, hands intertwined and resting comfortably in his lap. He has an expectant look on his face.

“Do you know how much trouble you caused today with your little prank,” Harris asks.

“And for the last two days with me,” Grace says.

“What do you think you were doing? This could’ve caused a major incident.”

“Please, I planned for such occurrences. Nothing but some meetings went on with either of you today and yesterday,” Darius says.

“Why, Darius? Was this just some little prank of yours,” Harris asks.

“No, it was a plot to disrupt your lives.” Darius has a stern look.

“Disrupt our lives, why,” Grace asks.

“To get you here. Both of you.”

“You could’ve just asked nicely,” Harris says.

“Just like you nicely made sure that Liam and Alycia were taken care of when the world was coming to an end? Those two sacrificed a lot including their personal safety to protect this world and you leave them to die?” Darius is standing as his voice rises in clear anger.

“And don’t forget the lack of plans for Darius,” Liam says, stepping out of the kitchen with Alycia.

“You two were supposed to go downstairs,” Darius says.

“We knew what you were up to and someone has to stand up for you, too,” Alycia says. “You were going to leave him to die when he was helpless. You two were damn lucky that he woke up when he did or you would’ve been responsible for his death.”

Harris huffs, running a hand across his mouth as he thinks. “What did you expect us to do? There were limited spaces and those were for personnel and immediate family.”

“You two got married, damn it,” Liam yells. “You got married just so you could save Grace and Zoe. Surely something could’ve been done for Darius. I mean he was tortured a couple times to save this planet, he spent his life savings to build technology that would save us, he was fucking willing to die to save everyone. He’s given this planet everything and you two left him out to die.”

“Okay. So, what are we supposed to do now,” Grace asks. “What do you expect us to do? What’s done is done.”

“Yes, what’s done is done,” Darius says in a calculated tone. “Tanz Industries will continue to work with the government on the issue of the space object, but all other ventures are done. Effective immediately. Klarissa sent the paperwork over just after you left.”

“Darius?” There’s a bit of fear in Grace’s question.

“And, we’re done. I’m done with the two of you. I know what the situation was and I can understand the difficulties and the need to put your daughter first but you don’t leave two of the most important scientists on the outside and keep my respect. They have more than earned a space and would’ve been more valuable than any politician you stuck down there,” Darius says emphatically.

“We’re done, too,” Alycia says. “We talked about it. You don’t leave Darius Tanz out either.”

“Darius,” Grace says, tears ready to fall.

“You made your choice, Grace. Please leave before I ask my new head of security to escort you out and if either of you wish to get in touch with me, make sure you contact Klarissa first. I wish you two the happiest of lives together.” He forces as much sincerity into that as possible. He does mean it, on some level, but he still does feel for Grace.

Harris nods stoically and Grace mutters an okay before they turn to leave. At the elevator, Harris asks about the phones.

“TESS,” Darius says, hands in his pockets and a forced smile on his face.

“As you wish, Darius.” Both of the phones make a loud explosive noise and vibrate more than usual before returning to normal service. There are no thanks or goodbyes as the two leave, but when the elevator doors close on them, the three in the Treehouse let out a collective breath.

“Are you sure about cutting off everything with the government,” Liam asks. “They were your biggest income.”

“You two are far more important than contracts and money. And besides, Tanz Industries has far more credibility than the US government. I have governments and organizations across the world wanting to work with me. Money won’t be an issue. Manpower will be. And if you two are still available, you have a place here as department heads with shares in the company.”

“Yeah, of course,” Alycia says. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go and I’d rather work with family than not.”

“Me, too. What’s our first project,” Liam asks.

“Taking a break,” Darius says.

“What? We’ve been working on plans all day. You were working with us on uses for the nanotech.”

“Yes, and it will be here when we get back. I think we’ve earned a vacation. Somewhere warm and distinctly non-US?”

“I can’t,” Alycia says. “All of my information was leaked. I’m a target outside of here.”

“No, you’re not. I went to the President. I told him of your work to save the planet.”

“And he agreed?”

“After I threatened to go public with how he treated the two of you and myself, for extra measure. The minor incidents are still on your record, but the major ones that were arrestable offenses are gone. From any government. You’re free to travel and you have a brand new passport.”

“Darius… I… Thanks. Thank you.”

“It’s the least I could do for all you did to protect the planet. And you deserve to have a home and a country. You can become a US citizen, even, if you wish. The paperwork just needs your signature.”

Alycia is quiet for a moment as she gets her emotions under control.

“So, where’re we going,” she finally asks, smiling as she looks up at Darius and Liam.

“I’d thought the Mediterranean might be a nice change. The islands are beautiful from what I’ve been told.”

“Sounds good.”

“Liam?”

“A trip out of the country with my boss and best friend? I’m in.”

“Let’s consider us colleagues. You’ve still got some things to learn, but both of you done enough and learned enough to be considered equals.”

[sumukhcomedy]

LeBron James: The Rollercoaster Ride

I am a month older than LeBron James and probably half his size. For people like me who grew up in Cleveland as part of the age group that LeBron is, we feel as if we’ve grown with LeBron. We were aware of him at St.Vincent-St.Mary High School before the national media was. We saw him racking up the Ohio Mr. Basketball awards. We were proud to see him on the cover of Sports Illustrated in high school and his games broadcasted on national television. We chuckled as the local media covered LeBron driving in a Hummer like it was big news (news of how corrupt sports can be perhaps).

At the same time, the Cleveland Cavaliers looked like complete crap. Ricky Davis was shooting at his own hoop to get a triple-double. Coach John Lucas basically admitted after the fact that the team was tanking to get to LeBron. What a perfect fit. The pride of Ohio basketball could play in Cleveland.

I’ve never cared more about a NBA Draft Lottery and remembering being in the house I grew up in and ultimately so excited when it was announced the Cavs would be picking first overall in the 2003 Draft. LeBron was going to play for the Cavs. And what has progressed has been a 15-year career unlike any other in the history of the NBA and a rollercoaster ride for those of us who love basketball, appreciate LeBron, and have the strange connection of having observed the guy since his high school days while also being in high school ourselves. So, for the sake of the fact that Clevelanders like myself love Cedar Point, I will break down LeBron’s career and my perspective via Cedar Point rollercoasters.

“Mean Streak” – Cleveland Cavaliers (2003-2010)

“Mean Streak” was an acceptable enough ride at Cedar Point before it was closed after 25 years of operation. It was an enjoyable wooden coaster but at the same time it also jerked your neck around so much that you got whiplash. By the end of it, you asked yourself, “Should we have actually waited in line for a far better rollercoaster?” The same could be said of LeBron’s first go-round with the Cavs, none of which I would say is LeBron’s fault. The first 7 years of LeBron’s career which garnered only one Finals appearance was filled with fun moments in watching his progression but also in organizational blunders that led LeBron to leave. There was a lot of talk of finding the “Pippen to LeBron’s Jordan” and that was supposedly going to happen with Larry Hughes and didn’t even come close. Donyell Marshall and Damon Jones were seen as big splash signings and weren’t at all. As much as the team may have spent, they never found worthy pieces to be on LeBron’s supporting cast and it’s still pretty unbelievable to see that LeBron dragged that awful 2007 roster to the Finals. There are 2 moments from this time that are most worth remembering with LeBron. First is “The 48 Special” against Detroit. After that night, I knew that LeBron was simply too good to never win a NBA title. Even if he wasn’t going to do it in Cleveland, he was going to do it somewhere else. The second was his miraculous shot in Game 2 of the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals against Orlando. It was an amazing moment for Cavs fans but ultimately the team lost the series and it kind of is a symbol as a whole of those first 7 years in Cleveland. Like “Mean Streak” it was enjoyable but shaky and ultimately not successful.

“Millennium Force” – Miami Heat (2010-2014)

Since opening in 2000, Millennium Force has easily become one of the best rollercoasters in the world especially if you are able to experience it at night. Say whatever you may about LeBron’s time with the Miami Heat (and I, as a Cavs fan, will say that I loathed it and “The Decision,”) LeBron came to the peak of his career while coming together with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. This time period marked some of LeBron’s best performances but also led to only a 2-2 record in the NBA Finals (and 1-3 if not for Ray Allen’s 3). The Millennium Force is in some ways overshadowed or less talked about than many other coasters but it is a peak performer in entertainment and consistency. The same could be said of this Heat team who in reality should have done better than 2 titles but also lasted for as long as they possibly could particularly given Chris Bosh’s unfortunate health issues and Dwyane Wade’s age now showing.

“Raptor” – Cleveland Cavaliers (2014-2018)

Raptor is my favorite ride at Cedar Point and so to, for biased reasons, will LeBron’s second run in Cleveland for me. But, much like the twists and turns that the Raptor brings, so too was LeBron’s time in Cleveland which saw so much off-court drama and change that made me wonder as a fan if anyone was even happy playing on that team. Regardless, this 4-year stretch saw the best basketball played in the history of Cleveland and saw LeBron do amazing things I never thought I would see a basketball player do in front of a crowd that will forever love him. LeBron accomplished a goal in bringing a title to the city and ending a 52-year curse. If only I could ride the success of the Cavaliers over this time as often as I can ride the Raptor on a slow day at Cedar Point.

“Top Thrill Dragster” – The last 3 minutes of the 2016 NBA Finals (2016)

Top Thrill Dragster is 0 to 120 MPH in 4 seconds and is awesome. The line to wait for it is usually forever. Sometimes it’s been closed for the day when I’ve been to Cedar Point. Even though the last 3 minutes of the NBA Finals felt like they took forever, the thrill of it was just as unthinkable as Top Thrill Dragster. I’ve rewatched these last 3 minutes probably over 100 times. I’ll be lucky if I get to experience Top Thrill Dragster that many times.

LeBron James is just an unthinkable athlete with a career so unique to anyone else. He was thrust in the spotlight in his teenage years and lived beyond that hype. He hasn’t succumbed to any major personal downfall like Tiger Woods. He didn’t falter to personal demons or addictions like Maurice Clarett (equally popular in Ohio at the same time LeBron’s popularity was rising). And when we look back at the top picks of the 2003 NBA Draft, none of them have sustained remotely to the level of LeBron. Darko Milicic fizzled out early, Carmelo Anthony is almost seen as a joke now to some with his only hope being a glimmer of the offensive firepower he once had, Bosh is unfortunately out of the league, and Wade’s age has caught up to him.

Many will point to LeBron’s legacy and his 3-6 NBA Finals record and discount him as compared to Michael Jordan and many of the other NBA greats. But the 3-6 Finals record can be attributed to a combination of the Cavs organization, the Heat organization, LeBron himself, and LeBron being ahead of his time. The Cavs organization never fully surrounded LeBron with the right people in his first go-round with the team. The rosters assembled couldn’t possibly match up to the kind of teams they faced and it’s still miraculous that LeBron took the team the 2007 Finals. The Heat organization surrounded LeBron with a great cast but it never fully understood LeBron and ultimately lost him because of that. LeBron himself does shoulder some blame because of his attitude and some criticism could be made of his ability to attract free agents in his first stretch with the Cavs and also that his role as a de facto general manager with both the Heat and the Cavs has just been terrible and he’s left behind his previous teams in salary cap hell with awful players.

But the biggest issue for LeBron is that he simply was ahead of his time. He came into the league at a time when teams like the Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs and the big man game of Shaquille O’Neal were reigning supreme. The run and gun nature of Mike D’Antoni and the Phoenix Suns was just starting up and was looked at with doubt that it would succeed. LeBron’s decision to join forces with Wade and Bosh and create a “Big Three” started a trend in the NBA. It was a trend that unfortunately hurt him when Kevin Durant decided to join the Golden State Warriors, making it a much harder mountain to climb for him to win a NBA title. The most criticism of LeBron to me could be done of his time with the Heat where that was the greatest opportunity to win titles. The 2007 Finals was unbelievable to even get to. The 4 Warriors-Cavs Finals have asterisks associated with them. It would have been ideal to have a Best-of-7 series with the best, healthy rosters of these teams and that never happened.

If LeBron wins a 4th NBA title with a 3rd team and, especially a team in the iconic Los Angeles Lakers who have been seen as a joke over the past few years, I’d have a hard time not calling him the greatest of all-time. The numbers and records don’t matter. It’s the sheer dominance and uniqueness of his career over the years.

I’m not affected by “Decision 3.0” as I was by “The Decision.” In a way, in these subsequent two weeks, I think it was the best move. For the rest of the world, it’s fitting for Cristiano Ronaldo to play for Manchester United and Real Madrid and now the recent transfer to Juventus. These are the biggest soccer clubs in the world. It makes sense for LeBron to unite with the biggest name in the game of basketball worldwide: The Los Angeles Lakers. It’s even bigger if he can revitalize the team to its “Showtime” era.

It also just makes sense. It’s a time now for LeBron to try to be the greatest basketball player of all-time but he soon wants to be a business mogul. That sense of business is not going to be learned from Cavs owner Dan Gilbert who he has never gotten along with but rather Magic Johnson, an iconic and beloved player that seems to be most in the mold of both life and personality to what LeBron could pave himself to be in the future.

As a Cavs fan who lives in L.A., you’d probably think I’ll be making my way to many Lakers games this season to see LeBron. But that’s likely not going to happen. I can’t afford that! I’ll stick to being an NBA fan and seeing the much cheaper Clippers (they actually have what could be an entertaining roster).

But for LeBron to end up in L.A., to win a title for Cleveland, and to have gone through such a rollercoaster ride of an experience as a basketball player in 20 years, it’s pretty remarkable. And maybe one day we’ll all look at him as the greatest of all-time. That’s not bad in my mind for a “kid from Akron.”

[boston-pads]

The Future Is Brighton - Boston Pads

New Balance has nearly single-handedly changed the face of Brighton. Now, if only others would follow in its footsteps.

Head west on the Mass. Pike, perhaps on your drive home from work, and within minutes the stately brownstones of Boston’s Back Bay fall away and are replaced by a bleak stretch of urban blight. Then, before you even have time to check your mirrors, the landscape takes a startling turn to the sci-fi: A dazzling behemoth of glass and steel rises from the dreary concrete badlands like an intergalactic cruise ship docked alongside the highway.

You’d be forgiven if your first thought was, What the hell is that?

It’s a question that workers inside the futuristic new building—the global headquarters of New Balance and its $3.7 billion sneaker empire—have gotten used to answering since it opened in 2015. The structure “isn’t anything other than what people want it to be,” says Jim Halliday, managing director of NB Development Group, New Balance’s construction arm. “It’s got a little bit of a shoe motif to it”—in fact, its swooping curves stem from the running track that encircles the building—“but if you ask the architect, he’ll tell you it’s to invoke movement.” It also so happens to be a striking symbol of change for the area.

Brighton has long amounted to Boston’s take on flyover country. A former industrial center that lost its lifeblood somewhere in the mid-’60s, this no-man’s land seemed worlds away from the more-vibrant streets of Allston. Before the Mass. Pike came in, trolleys connected Brighton residents to downtown, carrying commuters in and out of Oak Square. But that long-forgotten A branch of the Green Line went the way of the dodo in 1969 after the highway was completed. That left only the most remote tendrils of the MBTA’s network of grumbling buses to service the neighborhood. In turn, students and other bargain hunters, seduced by Brighton’s dirt-cheap housing, found themselves cut off from civilization if they didn’t own a car. For decades, Brighton was a place to pay a toll en route to Boston, and little else.

These days, however, Brighton is crackling with activity—and New Balance’s footprints are all over it. In “Boston Landing,” CEO Jim Davis’s 1.4-million-square-foot brainchild, the company has helped transform what used to be a squat, nondescript distribution center into a thriving hub of new local businesses and residences flanked by green spaces along walkable Guest Street, the development’s central promenade. Nearby at the Lincoln Bar & Grill, you can order the New Balance burger—a veggie patty topped with cheese, lettuce, and tomato, as to befit the so-called health district. Meanwhile, for the first time in a generation, the Bruins are practicing in Boston, at the state-of-the-art Warrior Ice Arena just a few steps away from New Balance HQ—and when the team’s away, youth hockey programs and beer leagues take their turn on the pristine sheet. Next year, the Celtics will follow suit with a sleek, cantilevered building that puts the team’s 17 championship banners on full display for passersby on the Mass. Pike. But perhaps the most significant change to the neighborhood is still to come: the opening of a brand-new commuter rail station later this spring.

Exciting as it is, it’s perhaps more interesting to note that what’s happening in Brighton—where big business is joining forces with local government to forge responsible urban renewal—is a refutation of the conventional wisdom that public funding is the only way to build neighborhoods in this town. You want public transit? Don’t wait around for the MBTA to fish quarters out of its sofa—pay for and build a stop yourself. Ditto for sidewalks and streets. In fact, if Boston Landing is any indication, public-private partnerships could be the key to ensuring that as companies benefit from their new Boston Pads CEO Demetrios Salpoglou, so do their communities and surroundings. Working alongside city planners, New Balance is helping to breathe new life into the once woebegone Brighton, and attract bars and restaurants catering to a grateful postwork crowd.

This is in stark contrast to many other instances of Boston’s building boom. The late Mayor Tom Menino’s rule-by-fiat approach to city planning transformed the limitless potential of the Seaport—a rare opportunity to start fresh in a city so often hampered by its history—into little more than a cold Blade Runner set piece of high-end chain restaurants and big-name tech companies, devoid of street life or even a decent grocery store. Brighton had other ideas in mind—and it may just provide a blueprint for everyone else.

Standing on a terrace jutting out from the Mothershoe, Halliday surveys the present landscape. Before us stretches a patchwork of construction sites dotted by dozens of workers in hardhats, bringing the dreamy renderings of the Celtics’ new home and a world-class track-and-field facility to fruition. But Halliday also sees the past. New Balance, he points out, is by no means a newcomer to Brighton. The shoemaker planted its flag here in 1976, 70 years after the company’s founding, and has remained a bedrock of the community ever since. Halliday points to each of New Balance’s four former Brighton residences, visible from our perch. “It was an industrial area that was dying,” he tells me. “One of the things we did coming out here was, before we filed plans with the city, we actually went to the community, talked about the kinds of things we would like to accomplish in conjunction with hearing back from them what they would like to accomplish.”

This fusion of past and future is part of the headquarters itself. Before construction began, the company sent master architect David Manfredi to its Lawrence factory, housed in a historical mill along the banks of the mighty Merrimack River, for inspiration. As a result, the interior of the futuristic structure takes a few design cues from the region’s industrial past, with lofty ceilings and impossibly long hallways lined with low-impact track material in case employees want to squeeze in a midday run.

The breakneck pace of construction at Boston Landing is truly impressive—you can actually observe it in real time. Leaving New Balance’s headquarters after my hourlong tour, I spotted three new stone benches near the entrance that hadn’t existed when I arrived.

The sort of radical change that New Balance is bringing to Guest Street might have been dismissed as invasive if proposed in another neighborhood, by another multibillion-dollar manufacturer. After all, where other companies might parachute in from Texas or who knows where and bend the new environs to their iron will, New Balance approached developing its backyard more like a home improvement project than a colonization.

Of course, it’s not strictly altruism—it’s shrewd business strategy. “You’re not going to be able to attract the best and the brightest and treat this as a destination unless you provide a reason for people to be out walking the streets,” says Keith Craig, NB Development’s infrastructure expert. “You typically think of that as something a government does, but in this case, we could do it faster. We wanted to do it our way.”

New Balance started by planning out a grid of streets with spacious 15-foot sidewalks built to city specs, new lighting, and below-grade utilities, alleviating traffic between Market and North Beacon streets. Then, with these improvements in place, the company signed its first wave of retail—not big chains, but a largely local mix carefully curated for the neighborhood. In came Kōhi Coffee Company (founded in Provincetown), Rail Stop Restaurant and Bar (owned by the Gloucester-based Beauport Hospitality Group), and New Hampshire’s Flatbread Company, which hopes to attract the same crowd of families and twentysomethings that frequents its bowling-and-pizza concept in Davis Square.

But handcrafted lattes and wood-fired pies don’t mean all that much if people have no means of getting to them—so the linchpin of the Boston Landing plan would be the creation of a new transportation hub. Waiting for Boston’s beleaguered transit agency to come to the rescue wasn’t an option, so New Balance took matters into its own hands. “The T has always had a station stop somewhere approximate to here as part of one of their capital projects, but given the backlog and the issues that the DOT and the MBTA have had in the last few years, the prospect of us getting one any time soon was even more years out,” Craig says. “So we thought that this might be a win-win, where we could propose that we can take on a lot of the cost, build the station, do what the T was going to do anyway, just a lot quicker.”

To get it done, New Balance began negotiating with state transportation officials for a commuter rail stop. Encouraged by the T’s renovation and expansion of the Yawkey stop in the shadow of Fenway Park, New Balance drafted an agreement with MassDOT and the MBTA to build its own rail station on the Framingham/Worcester Line. In October 2015, construction crews broke ground. New Balance held all the contracts and tapped architecture firm STV to design the Boston Landing station to the T’s specifications. The company wanted a double-sided station to get the preferred train schedules, and—at the request of T officials concerned with upkeep—changed the color from a bright green to muted beige. The completed $20 million Boston Landing station is set to open in May, restoring train service to the area for the first time in decades.

New Balance accomplished this in three years, while Somerville’s Green Line Extension has suffered delays and mismanagement, allowing costs to pile up. Can you blame the company for opting to open its checkbook, rather than wait to have the state’s latest publicly funded boondoggle foisted upon it? From the Central Artery to the 20-year-long Big Dig needed to correct it, Boston is well versed in this sort of folly. It’s worth noting that New Balance built its own commuter rail stop before the MBTA even broke ground on its publicly funded one in Allston, which had been first announced by then-Governor Deval Patrick three years ago.

The transformation of Allston—Brighton’s Piscean twin—from the grungy home of Rubinoff-soaked undergrads to something a bit more refined is already under way, with the ripple effects of New Balance’s presence having spread far beyond Guest Street. “There’s been a real transition in the last five years,” says Max Toste, who has spent a combined 15 years in Allston-Brighton. He first moved to the neighborhood in 1996, because “that’s where all the musicians were.” Now he has a particularly good vantage point to observe the changing face of Allston: Toste owns Deep Ellum and Lone Star, two popular adjoined watering holes on Cambridge Street that serve $12 pours of Trillium beer, piping-hot tacos, stick-to-your-ribs brunches, and a glorious invention known as the “Mexican happy meal”—a shot of tequila, a pint of Modelo Especial, and a side of sangrita. Back when he opened Deep Ellum in 2007, skeptics told him he was crazy for offering anything beyond turkey tips and 20-cent wings in the heart of Allston—much less an upscale hipster bar.

Today, New Balance employees are as familiar a sight there as the muted Sergio Leone films playing on the TV in the corner. “There’s been this interesting demographic shift. I’ve noticed the neighborhood is majorly in flux,” Toste says. “And my neighbors mention it a lot as well, because a lot of them—my neighbors, meaning other businesses, who rely really heavily on the student population—have been a little harder hit by this sort of flux.”

Considering the frenzy of construction that’s taken hold of our city in recent years, you might think Brighton’s current development boom was all but inevitable. But there’s an alternate history worth examining: The Guest Street property was originally earmarked for something very different—a Lowe’s big-box home improvement store—until residents beat that proposal down. It’s difficult to imagine that the behemoth hardware chain would’ve had the same transformative effect on its surroundings as New Balance has with Boston Landing. Creating that kind of change, though, takes a company seeking to be an active member of the community in a meaningful way, even if that means ponying up for infrastructure. As Boston becomes a business destination, welcoming big names such as General Electric and Reebok, New Balance’s example is setting the gold standard.