News Wednesday Wednesday Adds a Pile of People for Season Two, Including Billie Piper How many of these characters will make it through alive? By Molly Templeton | Published on May 7, 2024 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix The second season of Wednesday is now in production—officially, and finally, given that the show was renewed in January of last year. Wednesday’s immediate family—Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzmán as Gomez, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley—have all been upgraded to series regulars, as has Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo, who plays Deputy Ritchie Santiago. Also returning: Emma Myers as the irrepressibly chipper Enid; Hunter Doohan as Tyler Galpin; Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay; Victor Dorobantu as Thing; Moosa Mostafa as Eugene Ottinger; Georgie Farmer as Ajax Petropolus; Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester; and Jamie McShane as Sheriff Donovan Galpin. But wait, there’s more! New series regulars, whose roles have not been all disclosed, include Evie Templeton (Disney’s Pinocchio), Owen Painter (The Handmaid’s Tale), incredible character actor Noah Taylor (Preacher), and none other than Rose Tyler herself, Billie Piper (Doctor Who, I Hate Suzie). Pipe is playing a character named Capri. As was previously announced, Steve Buscemi will also be a regular. He is playing Barry Dort, principal of Nevermore Academy. But wait, there’s still more! You can also expect a pile of guest stars, including Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) as Grandmama; Thandiwe Newton (Westworld) as Dr. Fairburn; Christopher Lloyd (The Addams Family), Frances O’Connor (The End), Haley Joel Osment (What We Do in the Shadows), Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and Joonas Suotamo (best known as Chewbacca). That is quite a mix: a pair of grown-up child stars, a star of the beloved Addams films, and Chewie? Okay, then. According to Netflix, the first episode of season two is called “Here We Woe Again,” and is directed by Tim Burton from a script by series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. This time around, Jenna Ortega isn’t just starring as Wednesday; she’s also a producer. Netflix released a cute little video with the cast announcement, which you can watch below. No premiere date has been announced.[end-mark] The post <i>Wednesday</i> Adds a Pile of People for Season Two, Including Billie Piper appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches The Wheel of Time Reading The Wheel of Time: Bonds, Power, and the Allegory of Assault in Winter’s Heart (Part 17) Sylas Barrett discusses “Bonds,” chapter 25 of Winter’s Heart. By Sylas K Barrett | Published on May 7, 2024 Comment 13 Share New Share This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we are covering chapter 25 of Winter’s Heart. In this chapter, simply titled Bonds, Rand and Alanna confront each other over the difficulties of their shared tether, the Warder bond Alanna thrust onto Rand without his consent. At the same time, Min struggles with possessiveness over Rand and fear over a vision about Alivia. And Verin ascertains Cadsuane’s true intentions, leaving the reader to continue to puzzle over Verin’s. Rand and Min have moved to a room in a different inn, where Rand sits playing the flute. They’re waiting for Alanna, who Rand can feel coming closer. The bond with Alanna feels wrong compared to the comfortable, natural presence in Rand’s head of the bond with Elayne, Min, and Aviendha. Min is also upset because she had a viewing that Alivia is going to help Rand die. Rand points out that helping him die is not the same as killing him, but Min doesn’t see a difference. “Sooner or later, I have to die, Min,” he said patiently. He had been told by those he had to believe. To live, you must die. That still made no sense to him, but it left one cold hard fact. Just as the Prophecies of the Dragon seemed to say, he had to die. “Not soon, I “hope. I plan not soon. I’m sorry, Min. I never should have let you bond me.” But he had not been strong enough to refuse, any more than he had been strong enough to push her away. He was too weak for what had to be done. He needed to drink in winter, till he made winter’s heart seem Sunday noon. Min tells Rand firmly that she will not let him die, and if he manages it anyway she will follow him and bring him back. They are interrupted by a knock at the door, and Min takes some time to arrange herself, draped over Rand on the bed. But when Cadsuane enters before Alanna, Min jumps up again in embarrassed alarm. Rand greets Cadsuane insolently, prompting her to observe that his manners haven’t improved. She tells him that his presence in Far Madding has saddled her with many inconvenient companions—not just Alanna but Nesune, Sarene, Erian, Beldeine and Elza, as well as Harine, her swordmaster, and Shalon. When she mentions sending the Sea Folk to Rand, he forces himself to ask her, politely, to keep his presence a secret from them. But when Cadsuane reveals that Narishma, Damer, and Hopwil have been bonded, Rand curses, prompting Cadsuane to slap him. Cadsuane orders Min to leave the room with her, so that Alanna can have a moment alone with Rand. Rand asks Alanna why Cadsuane didn’t ask what he was doing in Far Madding, and Alanna says that she doesn’t think Cadsuane cares about Rand at all. She demands to know what he did to cause her to be unconscious for three days, and Rand explains simply that he let himself be bonded by someone he actually gave permission to. Alanna is outraged, demanding to know who it is and insisting that she’ll drag the woman before a court and see her birched. She insists that Rand is hers. “Because you took me, Alanna,” he said coldly. “If more sisters knew, you would be the one birched.” Min had told him once that he could trust Alanna, that she had seen the Green and four other sisters “in his hand.” He did trust her, in an odd fashion, yet he was in Alanna’s hand, too, and he did not want to be. “Release me, and I’ll deny it ever happened.” He had not even known that was possible until Lan told him about himself and Myrelle. “Release me, and I’ll set you free of your oath.” Alanna admits that she has dreamed of being free of him, and even asked Cadsuane to accept Rand’s bond from her. But Alanna declares that, however Rand was bonded, he is her responsibility now.  “That is as strong in me as the oath I swore to obey you. Every bit as strong. So I will not release you to anyone unless I know she can handle you properly. Who bonded you? If she is capable, I will let her have you.” Rather than tell her, Rand asks how she is so certain Cadsuane has no interest in him—after all, she had Alanna bring her to him. But Alanna counters that she didn’t know Rand was in Far Madding, only that he was far to the south. She had to beg Cadsuane to bring her, expecting to have to Travel halfway to Tear to find him. She adds, warningly, that now that Cadsuane has taught Alanna to Travel, Rand won’t be able to elude her so easily. Rand asks if the other sisters took the Asha’man the way Alanna took him, but she insists there was no pressuring that she knows of. She also tells him about Damer discovering a way to Heal stilling, and that all the sisters being held by the Aiel, even the Reds, have now sworn fealty to him. She urges Rand to accept the fact that he needs the Aes Sedai, that they can help end the rebellions against him and unite the lands for him. She reminds him that the treaty Rafela and Merana negotiated with Harine got him everything he asked for, and almost begs him to let them help him. Rand realizes that his fear of being manipulated by the Aes Sedai has blinded him to any of these possibilities, and that he has been a fool. In his head, Lews Therin remarks that both a man who trusts everyone and a man who trusts no one is a fool. Rand tells Alanna to go back to Cairhien, and to send Rafela and Merana, along with Bera and Faeldrin, to Haddon Mirk to negotiate with the rebels. These are the four who, along with Alanna, Min told him he could trust. Alanna is disappointed to be sent away from him so soon, but Rand tells her that if he is still in Far Madding by the time she finishes in Cairhien, she may return to him. Alanna realizes that Rand isn’t going to tell her who bonded him, and asks Rand why he’s here. She promises to keep the secret, and he knows she would, but also knows that as a Green she would feel compelled to stay and help him, so he refuses.  She leaves, and Rand sits and ponders how to make Cadsuane interested in him, so that he can learn whatever it is she is supposed to teach him, according to Min’s vision. Verin arrives at Aleis’s Palace after having been out. She is using the name Eadwin because she still has a warrant out for her exile, and although the people of Far Madding are respectful to Aes Sedai, they also have little reason to fear them, and the Tower usually keeps quiet if Aes Sedai are arrested and punished for some offense. She finds Cadsuane in a sitting room, working on her embroidery while Elza upbraids her for letting Alanna go to Rand without them.Elza was always very conscious of where she stood with respect to other sisters, perhaps too much so. For her to ignore Verin, much less confront Cadsuane, she must have been in a fine swivet. “How could you let her go?” she demanded of Cadsuane. “How are we to find him without her?” Ah, so that was it. Cadsuane replies calmly that Elza can wait for Alanna to return, and cuts off more arguments with a raised finger. Elza leaves, and Cadsuane asks Verin to make her a cup of tea. Verin asks, carefully, if it was wise to let Alanna go, and Cadsuane replies that she couldn’t stop Alanna from going without “letting the boy know more than he should.” When Verin suggests confusion and worry over whatever Rand might be doing in Far Madding, Cadsuane replies that he can do whatever he likes, as long as he lives to see Tarmon Gai’don, and as long as Cadsuane can stay by his side long enough to teach him laughter and tears again. “He is turning into a stone, Verin, and if he doesn’t relearn that he’s human, winning the Last Battle may not be much better than losing. Young Min told him he needs me; I got that much out of her without rousing her suspicions. But I must wait for him to come to me. You see the way he runs roughshod over Alanna and the others. It will be hard enough teaching him, if he does ask. He fights guidance, he thinks he must do everything, learn everything, on his own, and if I do not make him work for it, he won’t learn at all.” She adds that she seems to be in a confiding mood tonight, and might confide more if Verin even finishes making the tea. She slips a vial back into her sleeve.  Was Verin going to poison Cadsuane? My first thought was that she was going to use forkroot on her, but would that even matter since they’re in Far Madding? I guess it would still put her to sleep, just as it would any non-channeler, but I can’t see how that would actually serve any ends for Verin; she doesn’t know how long Rand intends to be in Far Madding or what he’s doing there, and there are other sisters to worry about besides Cadsuane.Not that I know what Verin’s ends are, of course, but she does seem to be trying to protect Rand in some fashion. She’s relieved and puts the poison away once she learns that Cadsuane’s intention is to make sure Rand makes it to the Last Battle and to teach him to be human again, which seems to support the idea that Verin’s goal is also to protect Rand. In the same way that she used her cobbled-together compulsion to make all the captive Aes Sedai decide to swear fealty to him, Verin seems determined to serve Rand in secret and through morally dubious means. My best guess for Verin at this point is that at some time in her life she discovered something about the Dragon Reborn—some ancient text, or interpretation of the Karaethon Cycle, or even an interpretation of her own—that made her believe that the Dragon Reborn needed to be kept free from too much control by the White Tower. If Verin was also able to deduce that the Oath Rod could be used to lift the Three Oaths, perhaps she used it upon herself in secret, in order that she might have as many means as possible to do the work she deemed necessary. There are some holes in this theory, of course, including the fact that I don’t think you can use the Oath Rod on yourself, but it’s the best one I can come up with, and if true, it wouldn’t make Verin that different from Moiraine and Siuan, who also spent the last 18ish years working in secret towards the goal of finding and guiding the Dragon Reborn, and who also employed dubious method and lied in every sense except the literal one to the sisters around them, so much so that Elaida was able to incite a good number of the Hall against Siuan when her duplicity was at last discovered. And Elaida herself has also been acting alone on secret knowledge around the Dragon Reborn, following what she believes her own Foretelling indicated about his coming. The question of who should be directing the Dragon Reborn’s actions is a difficult one for everybody in this world. Most people feel frightened and helpless in the face of what the Karatheon Cycle says will come to pass at his hands, and despite the fact that he is very young, his power and the prestige that comes with his identity is not easy for anyone to face, even powerful, intelligent rulers. People seem to believe they must either stand against him because he is a danger to themselves and their nations, or that they must be bowled over by the very power of his identity. And then there are the Aes Sedai. Many, perhaps even most, believe that Rand should be controlled and directed by the White Tower. And in truth, it’s easy to understand their perspective on the matter. As Alanna points out to Rand in this chapter, the Aes Sedai have thousands of years of experience leading the world, in fighting against the Dark and (at least in theory) in preparing for the coming of Tarmon Gai’don. Until very recently, Rand was a teenage shepherd with little knowledge of the world and no knowledge whatsoever of channeling, warfare, or the Shadow. Though Rand has learned much in the short time since he discovered the truth of his identity, and has become in his own right a great swordsman and a good general, he owes so much of what he has done and accomplished to the fact that channeling and weaves seem to come naturally to him, without much need for study. Of course there is also the guidance he receives from Lews Therin and the teaching from Asmodean, but no one else knows anything about this, or would trust these teachers if they did. As a result, Rand appears to everyone to be—and in some ways kind of is—a young man with no experience doing any of the things he is trying to do, who accepts little help and only has a finite amount of time to accomplish his goals before the Last Battle arrives. And before he loses himself to taint-induced madness. As a reader, of course, I’m going to see Rand differently than the outside world does, and it’s easy to get frustrated when people misjudge him or his intentions. But it is also important to remember that everyone else has important stakes in this fight as well, and I think Rand’s encounter with Alanna, and his realization that he has been letting his fear drive his choices, is a very important reminder of this fact. Because Rand is the Dragon Reborn, the chosen one, he has been feeling and acting as though he is the only person in the world carrying the burden of the future. But that is not, in fact, the case. The Prophecies state that he must do certain things and be certain places in order for the Light to defeat the Dark, but that doesn’t mean that no one else needs to do anything, be anywhere, or make any choices. Rand feels understandably burdened by his identity and the fate that he believes is waiting for him, and as a result he is somewhat blinded by that sense of fate and duty. The balance, one assumes, lies somewhere in between Rand having all the control and Rand being controlled by the Aes Sedai, and I doubt it will be an easy balance for either side to find. But perhaps Verin believes—either from something she’s read, her interpretation of the Prophecies, or for some other reason—that the Aes Sedai represent a threat to Rand and his success. I doubt she’d go so far as to think that the Aes Sedai have no place in Rand’s future or that he must be allowed to proceed with no checks or restraint from others, but she is certainly acting as though he must be protected from the Aes Sedai, and that it is important that the Aes Sedai serve him. She worked her cobbled-together compulsion on all the prisoners who were being held by the Wise Ones, after all, compelling all of them to pledge their service to him. It’s a fairly intense action for her to take, on women who weren’t even currently a threat to Rand, so I think it speaks to Verin believing that having Aes Sedai serve Rand is important. That compulsion is no doubt at least partly responsible for the level of upset Elza feels over Cadsuane’s handling of Alanna. And it is interesting to consider how compulsion is a violation not unlike non-consensual bonding. In Rand’s case the bond has less effect on him than on other men, possibly because he is ta’veren, but for ordinary Warders, the bond can be used by their Aes Sedai to compel them to certain actions. Verin’s version of compulsion also makes a person believe that the actions she compels them to are their own desire, which adds in a little extra moral complexity. Min’s viewing that the other Aes Sedai will serve Rand “each after her own fashion” probably refers to the compulsion as well. Verin’s weave required that the victim supply her own reasons for choosing to swear fealty, which might not align with Rand’s needs or desires at all, as indeed we saw when these sisters swore to Rand and he questioned them about their motives. Alanna is not one of these, however, and since Min saw her as one of the Aes Sedai that Rand can fully trust, I suppose we must believe it. She certainly seems sincere, and seemed to be speaking plainly, when she reminded Rand that the Aes Sedai can be assets to him, if only he’d use them for more than a display of his power. Given how she phrases it and how adamant she is, not to mention Min’s vision, I’m inclined to believe what she says, as Rand seems to be. What Alanna did to Rand is heinous, and her continued insistence on holding onto him in the face of that act even more so, but I don’t think she actually wants to hurt Rand, or that she intends to act maliciously. I think she really believes that Rand is her responsibility now; despite mentioning that she wants to be free of him and even asking Cadsuane to take his bond, she also refused to dissolve it, even with the very tantalizing promise that Rand will lift her oath of obedience from her. Unless Alanna turns out to be in the Black Ajah, which at the moment seems unlikely, this refusal to even entertain the prospect shows that she believes in what she says. And the fact that she holds Rand’s bond while Rand holds the binding oath over her does, in a way, make them more equal than otherwise. Perhaps this is even the reason why Rand offered to lift her oath in turn. All that being said, however, the fact remains that Alanna did violate Rand. Despite the disapproval and disgust shown by her fellow Aes Sedai over her action, and despite his very measured and reasonable request for her to lift the bond, she continues to hold it. I believe it was Verin who thought that Alanna’s seemingly-impulsive decision to bond Rand might have been brought on by the effects of losing Owein. If true, this doesn’t excuse Alanna’s decision but does mitigate it, morally speaking. However, even if Owein’s death was a factor in her decision, Alanna has shown, both right after the bonding and here in this chapter, that she also believes that Rand should and must be bonded and controlled by an Aes Sedai. She does offer to release him to the other woman who bonded him if she deems that woman capable of controlling him, but that is as far as she will go. Alanna believes, as many Aes Sedai do, that Rand must be controlled. She is willing to violate him if she must, just as nearly everyone is willing to use him if they must, and he is willing to use people in turn. Rand is wrong about the need to turn himself into a stone, and it is too bad that he can’t learn differently from the three women who love him, but you can see why he believes he must become cold and hard. To many he is more of an object than a person, or more of a symbol, or more of a threat. And that shows in how most people interact with him, even those who care about him. It’s not just about steeling himself to be a commander in wartime. It makes me wonder how Cadsuane will teach him the lesson he so desperately needs to learn. Perhaps she will offer her own long experience, her own trials as someone whose primary task in life is to fight the war the Shadow—Cadsuane is a Green, after all—to show him that he can dedicate his life to this cause without sacrificing his humanity. If Rand can approach Cadsuane in the way she wants, perhaps she will meet him as an equal, allowing him to see her as one in turn, and to learn from her example, rather than from her discipline. I was interested, too, in Alanna’s assertion the Asha’man were not coerced into accepting the Warder bond. She is careful to say only that she never saw Merise pressure Jahar and then to bring up the point that the men had little choice; they couldn’t go back to the Black Tower because they feared being taken for Rand’s attackers, and they couldn’t leave Cairhien because then they would be taken for deserters, so, Alanna points out, choosing the Aes Sedai was really their only option. She frames this as Rand’s fault, which in a way it is, and then suggests that Flinn’s discovery of how to Heal stilling made the whole thing worth it. But without seeing it that way, Alanna has actually pointed out that there can’t really be any true consent within the Warder bond, no matter if the potential Warder agrees at the time of bonding, and especially not if he has any reason to choose it besides a genuine desire to be a Warder. In the case of Flinn, Narishma, and Hopwil, even if they weren’t verbally pressured by the Aes Sedai—and I imagine they were, at least a little—Alanna’s point here shows that they had little choice. Left behind by Rand in Cairhien, they had nowhere else to go but to the Aes Sedai. They may get protection from the exchange, but they were also trapped, and now that they have agreed, they cannot change their minds even if they want to. Even if a potential Warder agrees to be bonded solely because he desires the life of a Warder, even if he goes to the White Tower specifically to seek out that calling, there can’t be any true consent unless both parties have the ability to withdraw that consent at any time. Once a man is bonded he cannot be released except if his Aes Sedai chooses to do so. He can be compelled to obey her through the bond, he can even be given to another sister. Such an act is frowned upon, of course, even taboo, and would result in punishment for the offender, but it is still possible. Look at what happened Lan, after all. One of the conditions of his bonding by Moiraine was that she would never use the bond to compel him, and she did exactly that, going so far as to transfer his bond without his permission to force him to live and continue to serve in the fight against the Dark One. Her reasoning was that he was too valuable to waste in an empty death, and while I’m sure she also hoped to make him happy by ensuring that he ended up with Nynaeve, but I am just as sure that her primary desire was to make sure he survived to fight on once she was dead. And then Lan was raped literally as well as metaphorically by Myrelle, once the bond transferred to her and he was compelled by it to go find her. There is deeply rooted sexism in the idea that men in Lan’s position can be given the will to live through sex—any sex, apparently—and it clearly did Lan no good. But one thing that is good about his time with Myrelle is that Lan and Nynaeve were able to get married and establish their relationship before Nynaeve held Lan’s bond. This puts them on a much more even playing field as they figure out the parameters of their marriage, and makes the issue of consent much more palatable than it would be if Lan was already Nynaeve’s Warder before he was her husband. I find that the more time goes on, the less I believe that Rand is actually fated to die in the Last Battle. The fact that he has been so sure of it has always felt like a narrative clue, but it also feels very significant that it is never actually said that Rand will die at Shayol Ghul. The prophecies only said that his blood would be on the rocks, which could mean anything, really: a non-fatal wound; the non-healing wounds opening up anew, the way they tend to whenever he’s in a difficult fight; and even some kind of blood ritual (not really a thing with channelers, but the cour’souvra is made using blood and spit, so anything is possible, especially if Rand is facing off with the Dark One himself). And as Rand points out, Min’s vision was not that ​​Alivia would kill Rand but that he would “help him die” which could be literal but also might come from a more poetic reading. Maybe Rand will fake his death at some point, to fool the Forsaken or to get away from his allies; he’s practically done that already. Alivia seems to be very devoted to him, and you definitely need an insider or two if you’re going to fake your own death. It would be nice if Rand survived the Last Battle, not least because it would show him that he was wrong to want to push away the people who love him, and that they were right to take a risk with him. Not that it would be wrong to choose the bond even if he did die—some joys are worth the pain—but it would be even better if he survived and they could all tell him they told him so. And finally, I found it very clever of Cadsuane to act in a way that convinced Alanna that she wasn’t really interested in Rand, so that Alanna could in turn convince Rand of it. She’s a clever one, that Cadsuane, and I really like her even if she is mean. Honestly, I want her and Verin to be friends—I half expected Verin to figure out Cadsuane’s little mirror trick—and maybe now that Verin is certain of Cadsuane, they will be. I also really want to know what it is that Verin did the last time she was in Far Madding that had her exiled! She’s such a tantalizing mystery, and I respect Jordan so much that he has kept it going all this time. It’s frustrating and it’s great. Next week we’re catching up with Egwene and Elayne, who has some very interesting news of her own, in chapters 26 and 27. In the meantime, I am pleased to report that I have learned a new word today—swivet. Swivet sounds like it means a bird, or maybe a kind of chair, but it actually means “a state of nervous excitement, haste, or anxiety.” Love a good vocabulary lesson. Thanks Jordan! Oh, and also, shout out to the book’s title in the quote from Rand about his need to become even harder. Love that.[end-mark] The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Bonds, Power, and the Allegory of Assault in <em>Winter’s Heart</em> (Part 17) appeared first on Reactor.

News Marvel Studios Disney Boss Bob Iger Says Marvel Will Make Less Stuff But Disney will still make plenty of sequels By Molly Templeton | Published on May 7, 2024 A scene from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Comment 0 Share New Share A scene from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earned $31.6 million last year, has gotten specific about the number of projects Marvel will release in the future, reportedly as part of Disney’s “overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality.” Variety says: “We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” the Disney CEO said during the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday. “And we’re working hard on what that path is.” It would be nice to be optimistic about this—Marvel has seemed a bit overextended of late—but Iger has a way of tamping down any excitement a person might feel. He said, in this same call, that some of the upcoming series are “a vestige of basically a desire in the past to increase volume.” Variety notes that he is including Agatha, the Kathryn Hahn-starring WandaVision spinoff, in that. In the broader Disney scope of things, Iger also disappointed those of us who are always hoping for more original films, saying, “We’re gonna balance sequels with originals. Specifically in animation, we had gone through a period where our original films and animation, both Disney and Pixar, were dominating. We’re now swinging back a bit to lean on sequels.” Were not Pixar original films some of the best animated movies of the last few decades? Can you have sequels without having great original films? These questions do not arise.[end-mark] The post Disney Boss Bob Iger Says Marvel Will Make Less Stuff appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Let’s Start a Fight: Are Science Fiction and Fantasy the Same? What are the differences that separate sci-fi and fantasy into different genres? Do they really hold up, and are they important? By Kristen Patterson | Published on May 7, 2024 Comment 42 Share New Share The other day, my dad texted me a link to this John Hodgman piece weighing in—or I guess I should say “adjudicating”—on whether the Star Wars series is really sci-fi or fantasy. This was apropos of an argument we (dad and I; Hodgman was not yet involved) had over the holidays about the delineations between those two genres. I proposed that the delineations between science fiction and fantasy can be more aesthetic than substantive; he maintained that there are more fundamental differences. He prosecuted his case with a lot of references to Star Trek, a childhood favorite of his which he introduced to us, his own children, in turn. I, like an egghead, countered with many “yes, but” theoretical arguments. I love to play the egghead. My brother even-handedly tried to parse out the merits of both sides while dad and I continued to lob differently-worded versions of the same point back and forth across the dinner table. Mom and grandpa did not engage. The tone was occasionally pretty strident for such a goofy topic. You know, the way you argue with your family? And now dad’s fired another shot across my bow, courtesy of a cultural commentator with real-fake authority and fake-fake judge’s attire. Well, fetch my red shirt! Time to relitigate this argument in public, for if Star Wars has taught me one thing, it’s that throwing yourself in the path of a more powerful man in a dowdy black robe is a great strategy for winning a fight with your father. May it please the court: The Honorable John Hodgman, we should note, begins his short piece by noting that he also finds genre distinctions, or arguments about said, to be questionable or tiresome. Nonetheless, he delivers a verdict, finding that Star Wars is a narrative fueled by nostalgia rather than futuristic speculations, landing it much closer to Tolkien than Trek. This is a common enough differentiation between sci-fi and fantasy: that they look towards different horizons, the latter retro-gazing, the former speculating on what could be. Construed in this way, the two genres are not just different but full opposites. And that is indeed a perfectly workable measure for explaining how sci-fi and fantasy stories have been traditionally classified. What bothers me, however, is the sense I get that assigning Star Wars the label of fantasy is a kind of relegation. That is, it’s not just that the fantasy label is a better fit, but that Star Wars is too unserious to deserve to be classified as sci-fi. Fantasy is fuzzy and frivolous, sci-fi is sophisticated and cerebral. (Plenty of people, I’m given to understand, think all genre fiction is fuzzy and frivolous, but that’s another matter.) The emblematic example of Star Wars’ conceptual squishiness is that it misuses the metric of the parsec, referencing it as a measure of time rather than distance. Someone has likely explained this factoid to you before, probably one of those early figures in your life who tried to convert you to pedantry. We all had them. Mine were well meaning, good humored, and delightful. But we likely also overlook the parsec error, because we recognize that the real central concept of Star Wars is “the Force,” which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with feelings. Frivolous. Fuzzy. Star Trek, by comparison, has very serious and grounded mechanisms like warp cores and transporters and dilithium crystals, which are also made up but could be totally scientifically plausible. Except that the scientific plausibility of dilithium-based technology, much like the parsec error, doesn’t matter. In fact, you could say it anti-matters (yuck yuck).  What is important about the starship Enterprise is not how it goes but where it goes. Star Trek may feature many, many episodes that revolve around fixing the warp core, but for the most part the concepts Trek wants to explore are really political and sociological, about interactions between the diverse crew and encounters with alien life. How many of these civilizations’ representatives are eager to sleep with Commander Riker? Better make a tally. For science. But specifically for the “soft” science of sociology. To be sure, the sociological premises of Trek interact with its technological ones. For instance, the technology of the replicator helps to explain how the Federation’s egalitarian, moneyless society operates. But how does a replicator convert energy to matter? And why can’t it successfully replicate dilithium of sufficient quality to serve in a ship’s matter-antimatter reactor? Maybe it has something to do with how dilithium is also an energy source, and therefore the replicator’s process of converting energy to matter saps the dilithium of its potential energy? Or maybe it’s about dilithium possibly being a four-dimensional substance in a way that replicator technology can’t yet reproduce? To both the physicists and Trekkies out there, does any of that… make sense? This kind of explanation, whenever sci-fi properties even bother to engage in it, substantively amounts to what is commonly called technobabble—or as I think of it, Ruddigore-ing! Meaning: this particularly rapid, unintelligible patter isn’t generally heard, and if it is, it doesn’t matter (matter matter matter matter). My eyes are fully open. If Gene Roddenberry and his ilk really had a feasible and fully mapped-out mechanism for how their tech worked, they would have been on their way to the U.S. Patent Office, not NBC. But again, it doesn’t matter that the science is hokum, because what’s important is that said hokum permits us to engage in generative imagining. What would it be like to live in a society empowered by this kind of technology? How much would that change, and how could it change one’s relationship to their own identity and to others? That sort of thing. I don’t wish to be too dismissive here and give the impression that all the science in sci-fi media is technobabble. Sci-fi writers show, rather splendidly, out how incredibly fruitful it is to engage with actual principles of physics and biology and programming. Heaven knows, Asimov got a lot of mileage out of simple conflicting booleans. Only, the “fi” half of the sci-fi requires audiences and writers to lean in to unproven, speculative territory. The exact same sort of sociological speculation can and does occur in stories that are premised around the lack of common post-industrial technologies or around the existence of some magical force that has shaped society in much the same way that a microchips-and-circuitry technology would. A Song of Ice and Fire, when you get down to it, is the tale of a world whose dynastic politics were heavily shaped by the “technology” of dragons, and their subsequent, erm, obsolescence. Ditto pretty much every dragon-riding story, Eragon, Temeraire, The Dragonriders of Pern (which already casually straddles the border between sci-fi and fantasy in its premise), etc. So: if we dispense with the technobabble and just say our space machine or what have you is powered by magic, what exactly do we lose? Just the flashing lights on the dashboard? I am willing to concede that we do lose slightly more than just that.  Because it’s often futuristic and therefore less likely to hold itself constrained by historical precedent, science fiction may, generally, be more inclined or more free to imagine radical ideas. The aforementioned moneyless society of Star Trek, for instance. But that is just a tendency and not a strict constraint. Fantasy stories set in alternate worlds are just as free to imagine strange, unprecedented societies as sci-fi set on alien worlds. While a considerable bulk of traditional fantasy takes inspiration from medieval Europe, it’s disingenuous to say that worldbuilding that deviates from either European or other historical models is therefore “unrealistic,” as author and medievalist Shiloh Carroll points out in a critique of how the House of the Dragon showrunners have discussed the inclusion of elements like sexual violence in their show as necessary toward the interest of historical accuracy. Phillip Maciak had the same note for House of the Dragon’s parent series, Game of Thrones, in a review from back in 2011. We’re all, evidently, still waiting for someone to hear it… Regardless, while they might trend in different directions, both fantasy and sci-fi are equally free to imagine whatever they will, empowered by the license of otherworldliness and the equally potent forces of either magic or super-advanced technology. This is not an original argument, of course. J.R.R. Tolkien made this observation in his magisterial essay “On Fairy-Stories,” at one point in which he proposes that H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine better meets the criteria for what counts as a fairy story than some other tales that have traditionally made the cut. In justifying this claim, he argues: “The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.” To paraphrase that, Tolkien identifies the fact that sci-fi and fantasy fulfill a common wanderlust; to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; one could even say, to boldly go where no man has gone before! (How do you like them apples, Dad?) We should not fail either to mention Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, the third of which is the most famous: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There are a few ways to interpret that statement’s meaning, either as about the gullibility of rubes who mistake tech for magic, or as about the wonder of tech so powerful and with workings so obscure that it seems magical to everyone. I lean toward the latter camp, and reading Clarke’s third law in the context of the first two, oft elided, supports my inclination. Those read as follows: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Collectively, the three laws read as a commentary on the relationship between imagination and possibility, with Clarke arguing that imagination consistently expands our ambition about what could be possible, even to the point of achieving something that felt so impossible it was labeled as magical.  Clarke’s laws, then, muddle the idea that we can divide science fiction from fantasy on the grounds that sci-fi deals with the plausible while fantasy peddles the implausible. Both genres invite their audiences to flirt with unreality, they just use different pretexts to do it. For a more contemporary version of this same take, see China Miéville: “[T]he boundaries between the impossible of the fantastic and Gothic on the one hand, and the impossible of science fiction on the other, are simply too fuzzy to be systematically maintained. What they share is as important as what distinguishes them. What they share is the starting point that something impossible is true.” To go along with Tolkien, Clarke, and Miéville, we ought to put sci-fi and fantasy together in the same Wittgensteinian family of resemblances. Almost all members share the aquiline nose of fancifulness. The square jaw of obeying the laws of thermodynamics? Less prevalent. But I promised that we would actually concede one major difference between the sci-fi and fantasy genres. And we will. Is everybody ready? Here it goes: people don’t relate to them in the same way. I know: groundbreaking. But really. Technobabble may be, for all intents and purposes, the same excuse as “it’s magic,” performed with slightly more elaborate hand-waving, but science-y explanations flatter the sensibilities of some readers who may otherwise have a more difficult time getting on board with a premise that isn’t legitimized by a rational explanation. (As evidence of this dynamic, I submit the classic Dropout, née College Humor, sketch “Why Can’t You Use Phones on Planes?”) We live in fairly rationalist societies—and we should keenly note here the difference between “rationalist” and “rational”—so we like to be reassured that we are not engaging with bald-faced flimflam. The rationalist, scientif-ish explanation places its impossibilities on a continuum with the scientific and technological advances of the modern era. Sure, it’s not possible now, but it could be in the future! This concern has even bled over into fantasy and its sweatily rationalized and rule-bounded “Hard Magics,” whence the Larry Niven corollary “any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science”   The reverse also applies, with the fantasy genre’s monarchs who are destined to reign over all appealing to a human liking for neat and “natural” hierarchy. Even Ursula K. Le Guin, who consistently problematizes hierarchy across her work, indulges some in this trope with the character Lebannen from the Earthsea series, whose ascension to the throne parallels a cosmic return to natural order at the conclusion of The Farthest Shore. Both of these gestures are different sorts of appeal to legitimacy, the legitimacy of scientific rationality on one hand, and the legitimacy of tradition and historicity on the other. Both have the effect of offering their audience some form of comfort to counterbalance any ensuing strangeness. But people do relate differently enough to these forms of legitimacy that it would be disingenuous to write them off the same thing. As with many labels, the distinction being made is not so much to do with the qualities or inner workings of the things described; rather, they evoke the different ways we feel about the things described. And feelings matter, since they inflect the way that we read—or write. Because its genre boundaries are defined by the somewhat persnickety standard of rationality, sci-fi has to be a little more choosey about what it will admit to its club. Hence, when Star Wars flubs the definition of a “parsec,” science fiction apologists must rush to disavow it as mere fantasy. At least, that’s the way it is for now. Look, can’t we all agree to believe that the whole parsec thing, spoken as it is by gorgeous idiot Han Solo, is just a bit of fast-talk aimed at some desert yokels? Moreover, can we agree that the Star Wars universe, with its light-speed spaceships, laser-based weaponry, and beep-booping droids, all equally dubious and equally science-y, is as much science fiction as any other good old space opera? Yes, it also has “the Force,” which just goes to show that magic-y concepts, like the Vulcan mind meld or “the Voice” from Dune, fit perfectly comfortably alongside technological ones is speculative fiction. They are all pulling together, doing the same work of making the impossible possible. There’s a line in the denouement of the musical My Fair Lady where Eliza, a lower-class girl who has been trained in upper-class affectations, explains what she has realized about class distinctions. “You see, Mrs. Higgins,” Eliza tells her erstwhile tutor’s mother, “apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and flower girl is not how she behaves but how she is treated.” We can and should apply Eliza’s epiphany to a liberal swath of topics, including the matter at hand. Star Wars is as much science fiction as John Hodgman is a judge. They’re both wearing the right pajamas. The rest is all about how they are treated. As for the treatment of fantasy, or of fantasy elements in whatever genre they might lie, we might do ourselves some good by treating them less literally—they are impossible!—and permit ourselves thereby to take them more seriously. It would be a mistake to take Le Guin’s Lebannen as a literal pro-monarchy gesture, and as much a mistake as to overlook that Darth Vader isn’t just powerful because he wields the Force. His literal, “magical” Jedi powers to move objects with his mind and terrorize the cream of the British Actors’ Guild is less significant than the symbolic, thematic power he is revealed to occupy in the narrative. He’s powerful because he’s a father. My own dad is also a father, and as such is unlikely to cry uncle anytime soon. That’s alright, though. If he did, it would only mean an end to the fun. He’s the reason I was introduced to Star Trek and Star Wars, and hopped from there to other genre fiction. His influence is probably also to blame for so much of my logic being grounded in references to musical theater. The Force is strong with that one. Dad, argue again soon?[end-mark] The post Let’s Start a Fight: Are Science Fiction and Fantasy the Same? appeared first on Reactor.

News Blade Runner 2099 Michelle Yeoh Will Turn Into a Replicant for Blade Runner 2099 Ridley Scott is executive producing the sequel series By Molly Templeton | Published on May 7, 2024 Screenshot: Paramount Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Paramount Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 series was announced over two years ago—long enough that a person could be forgiven for thinking maybe it just faded away, as so many potential series do. But no: It’s trucking along, and what’s more, it has a pretty incredible star. Variety reports that Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (Star Trek: Discovery, pictured above) has signed on to the series, and while all the plot details are secret, “sources say Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life.” Blade Runner 2099 is a slightly odd duck. As suggested by the title, it takes place 50 years after Denis Villeneuve’s film Blade Runner 2049, but Villeneuve is not involved; instead, it’s a project from original Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, and is also a sequel to that film. Scott is an executive producer, and Silka Luisa is the series’ showrunner. Luisa was the showrunner for Apple TV+’s The Shining Girls, a very good adaptation of the Lauren Beukes novel of the same name. She was also a writer and supervising producer on the first season of Halo. And one more interesting person is attached to this Blade Runner: Jonathan van Tulleken is set to direct the first two episodes. Van Tulleken recently directed two episodes of Shogun, as well as four episodes of The Changeling. No premiere date has been announced.[end-mark] The post Michelle Yeoh Will Turn Into a Replicant for <i>Blade Runner 2099</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Dissecting the Dark Descent Intimate, Brutal, Indelible: “Dread” by Clive Barker A master of the genre puts his unique stamp on gothic horror in this disturbing tale. By Sam Reader | Published on May 7, 2024 Comment 4 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. Clive Barker is a name that looms large in horror, and not just due to his habit of putting his name all over everything he’s worked on. He’s lent his unique blend of European gothic storytelling, modern interplay of desire and punishment, and a willingness to go to more gruesome and intimate places than his peers to a variety of comic books, movies, and video games. His seminal work of extreme gothic horror, Books of Blood, redefined what modern horror meant when it emerged, complete with endorsements from blockbuster authors. “Dread,” a story which first appeared in Books of Blood, uses the familiar structures of gothic fiction and the twisted horror-noir aesthetic of 1950s stories and comics to build an intimate and disturbing portrait of a mad philosopher and his trusting pupil. By subverting the standard tropes through a punishing application of realism and disallowing any form of detachment, “Dread” transcends its influences to become a truly disturbing and indelible tale. A chance encounter with a stranger at a university bar brings Steven into contact with the mysterious Quaid, an older man with an arresting presence whom everyone seems to know, but few know anything about. Intelligent, charismatic, and eccentric, Quaid delights himself in philosophical discussions about the concept of dread and trauma with both Steven and Steven’s classmate Cheryl, a staunch vegetarian who is willing to charge headlong into Quaid’s arguments. As the year goes on, Quaid and Cheryl become close, and Steve drifts along, eventually losing contact with them both. That is, until after a holiday break when Quaid approaches Steven with an unusual invitation: Come to his house in a decaying neighborhood, and Quaid will show him pictures of what happened over the holiday between him and Cheryl. Soon, Steven learns of Quaid’s horrifying experiments on Cheryl to expose the root of her dread and trauma. Worse still, he finds himself trapped, the subject of Quaid’s next twisted experiment to understand the roots of fear and dread, even if it destroys them both. So far, so gothic—a mad scientist (in this case a mad philosopher) performs inhuman experiments on people. A younger man, more idealistic and an audience surrogate, is drawn in and befriends this mad scientist, and then is told in horrifying detail of the ways his new best friend has perverted the natural order. Where it differs is that the scientists in these stories are usually presented as someone who goes mad—at one point they were sane, regular people. Quaid is not presented that way. He’s an enigma, a figure who dresses in shabby and nondescript clothes, his eyes described as snakelike with pinprick pupils. The usual elements that would make him seem like a normal human being—a place to live, distinguishing marks, relationships—are all strangely absent from him. From the beginning, he simply appears at the bar and Steven can’t remember where he’s seen Quaid before. Rather than the mad scientist, he resembles a different familiar figure in gothic fiction, that of a devil drawing people in and leading them to their damnation, the ambiguously human creature tempting and manipulating desire in exchange for death or worse.   Quaid’s presence in “Dread” as a devil offering what the other characters desire plays on the recurring theme throughout The Books of Blood: the idea of desire (as commonly presented in gothic fiction) as bait in a trap that costs you everything. Quaid, a man who views himself as above his fellow humans and presents as a complete enigma who disappears and reappears at will, is adept at finding out what others need and desire, baits the hook, and then psychologically guts his victims, turning them into manic animals. The focus in Barker’s work is never the desire. It’s the self-annihilation that comes about as consequence for that pursuit. In the case of both his victims, Quaid presents himself as a provider, someone willing to give them what they need. For Cheryl, that’s companionship. For Steven, it’s a person he respects (and is obsessed with) who gives him validation. Quaid even lures Steven to his apartment with answers about what happened to Cheryl. It makes what he does even more horrifying, as he views his torture (the way Barker’s devils do) as transactional: While the cost certainly isn’t worth the reward, he provides something both of his victims tell him they want. In “return,” he uses them as subjects in his experiments. Steven, our audience surrogate, is one of those subjects. His fascination with Quaid’s world makes him a perfect target for Quaid’s experiments, and unlike his predecessors in the gothic tradition, Steven feels every moment of Quaid’s punishing intelligence. Barker eschews the idea of a detached moral observer standing in for the audience. In intimate detail, Steven is subjected directly to confinement and sensory deprivation mirroring his childhood trauma, and as the viewpoint character, that means we’re given a front-row seat to the erosion of his sanity and humanity. Worse is how genuine it feels. Most of the people reading this are lucky enough to never experience confinement, to never experience the conscious feeling of one’s sanity and personhood slipping away. Barker writes with the visceral knowledge of someone who has experienced such pain, or who at least has access to firsthand accounts of that experience. Seeing Steven as he was and then watching him crumble into a fear-driven shell with the mind of a seven-year-old isn’t horrifying simply due to the end result, but also the intimate, human depiction of Steven’s breakdown and the knowledge that his trauma will alter him irrevocably. Once Steven is no longer a sane narrator, the story splits between Quaid and his own dread and the broken, deranged “Stevie” as he giggles his way through the streets on his way to exact vengeance on Quaid. By comparison, Quaid’s inhumanity, and desire to process his trauma (nightmares of his parents’ murder and his subsequent fear of clowns) through his experiments is what eventually damns him, as he refuses to confront his own trauma and instead visits trauma on others. As he lies dying after Steven attacks him with an axe, he can only think about how torturing his former pupil destroyed all shreds of Steven’s humanity. That his own trauma turned him into an equally inhuman monster that condemned two people to a fate worse than death is clear, but only occurs to him in the final moments of his death. “Dread” ends on that ironic note, with neither humor nor pathos for its villain. While the ending’s irony and final gruesome image of a broken Steven hacking Quaid to pieces with an axe while dressed like a ghastly vision of a clown is pure EC Comics, the stark realism of its depiction of trauma and gothic moral calculus played utterly straight gives that ironic twist a much heavier impact. It’s Barker’s ability to wield these elements—devil figures, mad scientists, grim irony, gothic morality—and bring them into modern focus while denying the reader’s ability to look away that makes “Dread” such a punishing, intimate read. It leaves a fingerprint as indelible as the one Quaid left on Steven, and one equally as disturbing. And now to turn it over to you. What are your thoughts on “Dread,” and does its power lie in its lack of escapism, or its successful blending of modern and classical horror elements? What’s your favorite “Clive Barker Presents…” property? Or, for that matter, your favorite story from Books of Blood? Please join us next week as we discuss familial curses, evil aristocrats, and other classical gothic elements in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”[end-mark] The post Intimate, Brutal, Indelible: “Dread” by Clive Barker appeared first on Reactor.

News A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Game of Thrones Spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Gets a Director and Surprisingly Short Episode Count Saddle up, knights! By Molly Templeton | Published on May 7, 2024 Images: Warner Bros. Discovery Comment 0 Share New Share Images: Warner Bros. Discovery It’s a smaller story, so it gets a smaller series: The Hollywood Reporter has the news that the next Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will have a mere six episodes in its first season. The series is based on a trio of novellas, so presumably that makes a certain kind of sense. The show was previously going by the slightly more ponderous title A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, but apparently has dropped those last three words, at least for the time being. What’s more, Owen Harris has joined the adaptation as an executive producer and director; he will tackle the first three episodes. Harris famously directed Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” several episodes of Brave New World, and—most importantly, in my book—four episodes of the criminally under-watched and entirely wonderful Mrs. Davis. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms recently cast its two leads, enlisting Peter Claffey as Ser Duncan the Tall and Dexter Sol Ansell as his young squire Egg. (Anyone familiar with the regularly recurring names of the world of Game of Thrones can probably guess what “Egg” is a nickname for. Here’s a hint: There are a lot of Targaryens.) Here’s the official synopsis: A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros… a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), and his diminutive squire, Egg (Ansell). Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends. George R.R. Martin is writer and executive producer for the series, which also has Ira Parker, Ryan Condal, Vince Gerardis, Owen Harris, and Sarah Bradshaw as executive producers No premiere date has been announced, but the show is expected to arrive next year.[end-mark] The post <i>Game of Thrones</i> Spinoff <i>A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms</i> Gets a Director and Surprisingly Short Episode Count appeared first on Reactor.

News Snowpiercer Snowpiercer’s Fourth Season Hits Tracks Sooner than Expected, With First-Look Photos to Boot You’ll be able to watch the whole series on AMC soon By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 7, 2024 Credit: AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: AMC The television series Snowpiercer has had a rocky journey. The show’s first three seasons ran on TNT, but the network chose to not air the already-shot fourth and final season as part of the large number of tax write-offs that came with the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Luckily for us, the show found a new home at AMC, with that network saying they would release the final episodes sometime in early 2025. The network announced today, however, that we would be able to see the fourth season—as well as the three seasons that came before it—in mere months. For those who need a refresher, the Snowpiercer series takes place seven years after the world has become an arctic wasteland and focuses on a 1001-car train of survivors that continually run on tracks laid across the globe. It’s based on the graphic novel series by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, and the film from Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho. Season three saw the train cars split into two factions, with one led by Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), who wants to maintain the status quo, and the other by Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs), who wants to explore new territory. Credit: AMC “We can’t wait to share the final season of this thrill ride of a series with this vibrant fan community and new viewers starting July 21 on AMC and AMC+, with plenty of time built in to catch up on previous seasons on a variety of on demand platforms and AMC+ before then,” Courtney Thomasma, Executive Vice President of Streaming for AMC Networks, said in a statement shared with Deadline. “Snowpiercer is an entertaining drama with a great cast and seeing how the ride ends will be a highlight of summer viewing worthy of a 1001-car train.” The first two seasons of Snowpiercer will start streaming on AMC+ beginning June 1, 2024, with the third season premiering on the platform on June 8, 2024. The fourth and final season will premiere on July 21, 2024 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and AMC+. The network also released first-look photos of the final season, which you can see above and below. [end-mark] Credit: AMC Credit: AMC The post <i>Snowpiercer</i>’s Fourth Season Hits Tracks Sooner than Expected, With First-Look Photos to Boot appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Dead Boy Detectives Dead Boy Detectives Make a Case for a Cute Gay Afterlife A fun, weird, and joyfully queer series adapted from the work of Neil Gaiman By Leah Schnelbach | Published on May 8, 2024 Comment 2 Share New Share Let me start by saying that Dead Boy Detectives is often delightful—but that I also don’t think it’s exactly for me. The Sandman is for me. Season One of American Gods was VERY MUCH for me. I think Dead Boy Detectives is for who I might be if I was in high school now, and that makes me incredibly happy. Grateful, actually, that this kind of show can be there for kids now, and be so fun and weird and queer. The show was developed by Steve Yockey, who acts as co-showrunner with Beth Schwartz. On #TeamDeadBoy, George Rexstrew plays stuffy Edwardian Edwin Payne, Jayden Revri plays late-80s punk Charles Rowland, Kassius Nelson plays teen psychic Crystal Palace, Yuyu Kitamura plays Crystal’s neighbor-turned-friend Niko, and Briana Cuoco plays their furious goth landlord, Jenny, who is also the town’s butcher. On the villainous side of the aisle are Jenn Lyon as a centuries-old witch named Esther, and Ruth Connell as an afterlife bureaucrat who thinks the Boys should be less “detectives” and more plain old “dead”. And then there are fabulous ghost clients, town denizens, high school students, demons, a Cat King—everyone’s pretty great. My personal fave is Michal Beach as Tragic Mick, proprietor of Tragic Mick’s Magic Tricks, who used to be a proud walrus before a curse trapped him on land. I want the Tragic Mick spinoff NOW. And, obviously, I have to give a special nod to Lukas Gage who steals the whole show as the Cat King (until Edwin gets his shit together and stands up to him, anyway) and whom I also found delightful in a very different role in the Road House reboot. Credit: Netflix The Dead Boy Detectives began life (heh) as minor characters in what was, for my money, the best arc of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, “Season of Mist”. That’s the one where Lucifer quits his job, and Hell falls into chaos while various entities fight over who’s going to rule it next. (<GrouchoVoice>It’s been on my mind a lot because it’s an election year here in the US. </GrouchoVoice>) Little Charles Rowland is the last living student at his boarding school, and when it’s overrun by demons and ghost teachers, little Edwin Payne, who died in 1916, helps him navigate all the horror. When Death comes to collect them, the two decide to stay on Earth (and eventually go into business as afterlife detectives) and she lets them because she’s incredibly busy. In the comic it’s a dark take on a classic boarding school story, it’s really sad and horrific under the black humor, and the boys are both around 12 years old. Neil Gaiman loved the characters and the concept, and brought them back for a Children’s Crusade crossover comics event, Jill Thompson adapted their story for Death: At Death’s Door, they got a four-issue miniseries called Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives from Ed Brubaker and Bryan Talbot. and most recently, two appeared on Doom Patrol, where they were aged up a little and played by Sebastian Croft and Ty Tennant. In the new iteration, the boys are sixteen—I’m assuming for romantic spark reasons—but I guess the title Dead Teen Detectives doesn’t really roll off the tongue. The boys have both come into clearer focus: Edwin Payne died in 1916 rather than 1914, and Charles Rowland died sometime in the late 1980s I think—both deaths the result of attacks by fellow students, but in both cases I think their deaths would be called hate crimes. Edwin is stuffy, snarky, and dressed in perfect Edwardian upper-crust fashion; Charles is as punk as a boarding school uniform will allow, with a mohawk-adjacent haircut, an earring, and a jacket bristling with buttons for ska bands and Union Jack patches, and he radiates happiness and optimism. Obviously, these facades get chipped away as the series rolls along The Boys have three antagonists of differing levels of importance: a witch they piss off in the first episode, members of the afterlife bureaucracy who want to separate them and sort them into their “proper places”, and, of course, Death Herself—though I suspect Death isn’t the antagonist they think she is. We quickly learn that the boys have been working together since Charles’ death, and have racked up an impressive roster of solved cases over almost 30 years. But it’s always been just the two of them, until a botched exorcism leaves them with a traumatized psychic teen named Crystal Palace, who in turn leads them to a case in America that entangles them with a troubled student named Niko, their lonely landlord, a truly heinous witch, and the Cat King of Port Townsend, Washington. Credit: Netflix Much like The Sandman, the ensemble grows a bit in each episode, until each new member feels vital to the show. Each episode is named for the week’s case, and one of the strongest parts of the show is the Case of the Week format. The larger concern always tie-in to the cases. “The Case of The Dandelion Shrine” brings Niko into the group, “The Case of the Devlin House” helps unravel a little of Charles’ past, “The Case of the Two Dead Dragons” brings up some of Crystal’s past with David, her Demon—but each case stands on its own merits as well. Also like The Sandman, the show is dark fantasy edging into horror. I would argue that the horror is a lighter and more kid-friendly than the other Gaiman adaptations, but as ever it depends on the kid. And there is a trip to Hell, and somehow even more discussions of death and its complications than you’d expect from a show about ghosts. And yes, two members of the Endless do make appearances—one is pretty obvious, but I was startled by which other Endless the show’s writers chose to feature. As much as I’m talking about DBD as a fun, cute time, there are some really dark undercurrents here. Where the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman felt like The Sandman, and sometimes stuck too close to the source material, Dead Boy Detectvies is freewheeling, and throws dashes of Pushing Daisies, Buffy, modern Doctor Who, and Riverdale into the core Gaiman-ness, and, happily, reaches beyond all of those core influences to create its own tone. Best of all, to me, is that the show as a whole acts as a weird, queer, outsider rallying cry against despair. Why should the Boys submit to the afterlife status quo, just because it’s expected? Why should they create an afterlife that suits them, and helps people both living and dead?   As I said, I especially loved the episodes that made the Case of the Week the focus, and poked at the overarching themes in a way that was in service of the case. The best example would be “The Case of the Devlin House”, where Edwin, Charles, and Crystal investigate a haunted house. The haunted house turns out to be kind of a supernatural cold case, and, for reasons I shall not spoil, ties in incredibly well with Charles’ ongoing struggles with trauma and anger. The episode comes together extremely well, and feels inevitable rather than overdetermined, and also features a genuinely scary monster and a creative use of VHS tapes. As the credits came up I realized that it was damn close to the X-Files high I’ve been chasing most of my adulthood. (Also a fun dovetail with seeing I Saw the TV Glow, another incredible work of queer horror, with my beloved colleague Emmet a few weeks ago.) Credit: Netflix The villains are two variations on the Bitchy Authority Figure. Ruth Connell and Jenn Lyons both do fabulous jobs playing iterations of this character, with Connell making Night Nurse a Schoolmarmish Afterlife Authority Who Wants Everyone To Go To Their “Proper” Place, and Lyons having fun with the Condescending Witch Who Wants To Be Young Forever—they felt like riffs on villains we’ve seen in Buffy and Doctor Who, but they both get actual characters arcs, and become more than archetypes. Thematically they work perfectly—Edwin, who seems upper-class but is also a gay nerd, and Charles, who is biracial and sticks up for outsiders in his oppressive boarding school, are both boys who challenge the idea that anyone has a proper place, and making their antagonist a bureaucrat who “just follows orders” is a great idea—though I do think she needed a little more development for their antagonism to pay off better. Making the Boys’ other antagonist a literal child predator was perfect—but I wish there had been a little less emphasis on her, because of my one big overall issue, which I’ll get into… now. I have some quarrels with the structure of the show. For me, personally, the show culminates in Episode 7, “The Case of the Long Staircase”, which made the actual finale, “The Case of the Hungry Snake”, feel a bit overstuffed and frantic. But that also might just be a me thing—I loved the themes that were explored in Episode 7, and felt like the finale was a bit too much… plot. Effective plot, to be clear, and plot that made me want a second season, but after the delicacy and depth of Episode 7 it was a lot to process. (For those who have watched the show, I’m planning a spoiler essay later this month that will go into the themes of Episode 8.) One other thing that plays into this is the show’s habit of telegraphing too many of its emotional beats. A traumatic or pivotal event happens, and before the event has room to breathe, the characters are explaining it, talking about it, underlining it—basically holding the audience’s hand as they navigate it. Several of the episodes follow a pattern where Person A urges Person B to talk about trauma, Person B allows several nudges and then blows up, Person A backs off, and a few minutes later (minutes, not episodes) Person B apologizes for blowing up and talks about trauma to Person A. It would have been much more effective and natural to let these conversations play out across multiple episodes, to leave things unsaid, to allow the gentle prods and subsequent blow-ups to play out over a few weeks in the show’s world so that the audience could feel move involved. And again this is by no means a dealbreaker for me, just one area where I think the writers can trust their audience to come with them, rather than having to spoonfeed anything, and I really hope that if we get a second season the writers allow the characters their space. You might have noticed, if you read other reviews of mine on this site, that I’ve used some variation on the words “joyfully queer” or gleefully queer” a lot lately—because there’s been a beautiful lava flow of fucking rainbow Skittles in pop culture. And please understand that I don’t mean that it’s all been cheerful—The People’s Joker, I Saw the TV Glow, Interview with the Vampire, Good Omens, and Dead Boy Detectives are not exactly chipper fare. But they are all honest about queer experience. They give no quarter and no credence to the straight world’s opinions. THAT’S where the joy comes in. This makes me incredibly happy, and also worried, because so much of the world is attempting to crush this latest wave of queer joy, but also hopeful, because I think the kids coming up after me are much stronger than I was—and I was goddamn strong. Dead Boy Detectives features some completely matter-of-fact queerness of a kind that would have been revolutionary only a few years ago, and has a slightly more complicated plot centered on Edwin, who grew up in a time when being open meant imprisonment and probably death. (Edwin was born the year Oscar Wilde died, after all.) The nimble balance of these threads is one of the great joys of the show, among a lot of joys.[end-mark] The post <i>Dead Boy Detectives</i> Make a Case for a Cute Gay Afterlife appeared first on Reactor.

News 11817 Greta Lee and Kingsley Ben-Adir Might Have Some Trouble at Home in 11817 What kind of title is that?? By Molly Templeton | Published on May 8, 2024 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix It is almost time for the annual Cannes Film Festival, which means that a lot of uncertain movie news is in the air: Movies that may or may not get picked up, after festival screenings, for distribution; movies that may or may not be coming together for future productions. A lot of possibility is floating about, some of it more enticing than other bits. But this one is quite intriguing: Deadline reports that Greta Lee (Past Lives; Russian Doll, pictured above) and Kingsley Ben-Adir (Barbie; Secret Invasion) are in talks to star in 11817, a sci-fi horror film from director Louis Leterrier. Leterrier is, depending on your personal predilections, either an interesting director of large-scale action films, or the guy who made the Ed Norton Hulk movie. His resume includes episodes of Lupin; the delightfully silly The Transporter; Fast X, which really ought to have been called Fast10 Your Seatbelts; and also the 2010 Clash of the Titans. 11817, which sounds more like a zip code than a film title, is written by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters). According to Deadline, “The film watches as inexplicable forces trap a family of four inside their house indefinitely. As both modern luxuries and life or death essentials begin to run out, the family must learn how to be resourceful to survive and outsmart who — or what — is keeping them trapped…” Actor Omar Sy (Lupin) is among the film’s producers, along with Leterrier and Thomas Benski (a producer on The Northman, Pig, and Midsommar, among others); the three have a production company called Carousel Studios, and this film looks to be their first project. No production timeline has been announced.[end-mark] The post Greta Lee and Kingsley Ben-Adir Might Have Some Trouble at Home in <i>11817</i> appeared first on Reactor.