Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat Are You Enjoying This Exclusive Fan Experience? The Vampire Lestat, “Toledo” “Are all your songs about this guy Lewis?” By Molly Templeton | Published on June 15, 2026 Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC My regular process for reviewing TV episodes is to watch once, without taking any notes, just experiencing the episode like any viewer, and then watch again with my laptop at hand, writing down everything that seems intriguing/interesting/especially funny/etc. But with The Vampire Lestat, I had to make one change: On second watch, I have to turn on captions. I hate turning on captions. My reader-brain takes over and tries to just read instead of focusing on the whole picture. But there’s just so much. There is so much going on in any given moment of this show.  Except when there’s not. What a perfect shift, after last week’s chaos and highs, to open with the dreary part of the life of a touring band: gray, endless, repeating highways. Even when your tour bus has a frankly outlandish mid-room shower, there are some things you can’t escape. The cloud gift does not allow for carrying a drum kit and an entourage. The gray of the road gives way to Lestat’s miserable childhood, which, to be honest, I always pictured as rather more dark and gloomy. More Winterfell, less sunlight. But the problem here is less the setting than the people. In a series of escalating moments that are eventually revealed to be his really terrible dreams, Lestat illustrates what he—and his mother, Gabriella—were up against: his brothers and father, whom they call the cabbages. They are beyond dreadful. They mock Lestat’s stutter, take Gabriella’s book away, generally act as boorishly as possible. Of course, this is Lestat’s version of things. His memory is both tedious and traumatic: Every scene starts with him sitting at the same table, enduring the same garbage and abuse. People age, but everything otherwise stays the same until the introduction of the wolves. The killing of these wolves, Lestat said last episode, is something he let define him for a time. Then why does he speed right past the telling of it?  Setting aside the practical realities (by which I mean AMC’s budget), there are possibilities here. There are believers and unbelievers where Lestat’s wolf-killing background is concerned. It does seem certain that the wolves end up dead, because the villagers wouldn’t be coming to worship him otherwise. But his story elides a lot. Future Lestat, the one telling this story, is more interested in illustrating his fraught relationship with his mother. He doesn’t bother with subtext; he tells us, straight up, that she sent him out there to die, because then at least he wouldn’t be stuck in that house any more. (That he wanted the wolves to come until he didn’t is a classic Lestat detail; he wants to live, whatever form that may take.) But—and this is neither the first nor last time I will have this question about Mr. de Lioncourt—do we believe him? Or, a more polite phrasing to the question: Why is he telling the story like this? Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC This Lestat is an editor. The format of his voiceover tale—the 111 vinyl albums—is something that can’t be edited. No one can take a red pen and highlighter to it like he did to Louis’ book. A listener might skip tracks, skip sides, jump around, but they can’t take pieces out and put other pieces in. He wanted this story told in exactly his way. The documentary is, as he said, the liner notes. It’s someone else having their say alongside him. Which is kind of like Armand relating his version of events alongside Louis in season two. The setup of Louis’ storytelling is theoretically cooperative: he is telling his story to an active, present listener. When he shares Claudia’s diaries with Daniel Molloy, and then when Armand joins in, there are other voices. It becomes more elaborate, more fraught; the voices don’t always agree. But sometimes they are corroborating. Lestat, though, has both created a version of his story in which his is the only voice, and allowed, or invited, a second version. And all the while he remains furious at Louis for telling his version. For letting it go out into the world without warning Lestat. For taking away Lestat’s control over his own narrative. For making him the villain.  What does he do in return? Puts words in Louis’ mouth, for one thing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am trying to reserve judgment on this version of Gabriella, in part because she too is Lestat’s creation. But he is also hers: the product of her manipulation, her slipperiness, her… well, I can think of no better term than “her damage.” They made each other, and they are bound together, and is it just me or is Lestat trying just a little too hard to convince his listener just how great and fun and magical she is? Their scenes together have a languor that is very different from the chaos that surrounds Lestat with everyone else. But it’s also just the two of them. He takes her out of the equation of the rest of his life. He demands her time and then she toys with him (and with her food).  Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC Gabriella’s slinkiness, her peculiar way of holding her face, her thick accent (after all these decades!)—they feel contrived. A little campy. It all makes her hard to be around, which is pretty brilliant: Ehle’s performance, her very way of walking, contradicts everything Lestat tells us about her. He loves her, but he is not unaware of how she is. He just can’t tell that part to us straight. That scene where she finger-fucks his wounds and then walks away after he says she would still belong to him? Grotesque. Cruel. Definitive. He asks someone to confirm their love and they walk away. No wonder he’s like this.  And yet Louis (probably) doesn’t know she exists.  When Lestat is not with Gabriella, this episode, he is having arguments. Each of his bandmates takes a slightly different angle of fury and/or rage and/or curiosity on his vampiric reveal, and it’s wonderful. Alex only wants to know if he eats people. Larry gets angriest when Lestat calls it his band. Salamander, engrossed in Daniel’s book, asks really specific questions and gets specific, and possibly disappointing, answers. (“I make it a rule never to sleep with my bandmates.”) TC is snarky and also interested in details. The way Reid plays this scene, it’s like Lestat is kind of having fun—there’s relief in not having to hide anymore—but also like he wishes these foolish humans could just accept reality and get on with it. Lestat also masterfully dodges answering the great majority of their questions. Telling them he has the blood of Akasha doesn’t count. Nobody knows what that means, bud. Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC But the band argument has got nothing on the exes-across-the-conference-room-table scene with Lestat and Louis and their lawyers/fuckbuddies. I generally try not to put too much weight on what anyone says in the little post-show breakdowns, but I did love Jacob Anderson saying that he thinks Louis is trolling. He’s doing it so perfectly! Lestat, I care about you; Lestat, your songs sound like a cry for help; oh, and Lestat, I own 45 percent of your merchandise. (How? HOW does he own the merch rights? This detail is bothering me.) If anyone wondered how exactly Louis got so wealthy, now we know: real estate, merch deals, hotels, malls (??), all the other things Daniel mentions later. That was his vampire-themed hotel that got trashed. The he said/he said here is great, especially the little mutter about how supposedly Lestat was the one that called the meeting: more trolling courtesy of Louis’ team, or something Lestat didn’t tell us?  If I had time, I would watch this episode a third time just to track Sam Reid’s physicality, and the way Lestat is dressed in each of his encounters. In the meeting with Louis, Lestat is in layers and sunglasses, fully protected. Deflecting. On his dinner date with Gabriella, he’s clothed, though more lightly. Arguing with the band, he’s just out of the coffin, half naked, and notably relaxed. On stage, of course, he’s also half naked. Because he’s in control: he’s performing his stories, the versions of them he’s chosen to share. With the band, there’s that NDA. He controls the narrative. Gabriella messes with him, skewing how he sees himself, so there’s a layer of protection. And Louis took Lestat’s story entirely out of his hands. Lestat only looks Louis in the eye on Lestat’s terms: mid-performance, time stopped, a seemingly romantic gesture drastically shifted by the arrival of that book. Just like that moment on Facetime in Montreal. That concert scene is relatively brief (at least compared to last week) and decidedly not about the music. It is instead about the audience, about who’s in the crowd and how they’re interacting: Daniel directing his cameraman to film Louis and Gabriella; Daniel displeased by the arrival of Rashid; Daniel and Louis having a little private chat; Gabriella watching Lestat and, later, Louis. It is, in short, about who’s watching, and the version of things that they’re seeing. A directed version through a camera lens? A curious version, one of Lestat’s lovers eyeing the other?  And the band plays on, none the wiser. (Alex is still mad, I guess.) Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC There are two prongs to this episode’s climax (a word that feels uncomfortable to use with Gabriella around). Lestat has a private meal with mommy dearest, who says some very manipulative things about Louis and Claudia and manages to make Lestat genuinely cranky with her for the first time that we’ve seen. (Vulture clocked that he’s singing one of his mentioned-last-episode Baudelaire songs. Cheeky!) The flashbacks to her turning, and their subsequent murder of the cabbages, are jumpy and brief, almost like Lestat doesn’t want to linger on them. Their reactions after Gabriella’s turning illustrate their personalities in a nutshell: he wants to look out for her, to get her home where it’s safe. And she wants to go wipe out the rest of their family. Immediately. And she gets what she wants. (Sure, this was Lestat’s fantasy, but he doesn’t look super thrilled about it after.) I just don’t believe that this woman is the greatest person to kill time with, you know? But I was also much more interested in Daniel and Louis Go to Dinner: Lestat’s Version. I love the explicitness of the invention: “I know what you’re thinking,” Lestat says. “He wasn’t there. But this is my hour, and when tertiary figures appear in it, I will be speaking for them. Daniel, Mr. Du Lac, anyone I feel is important towards understanding how I woke the queen and unleashed her wrath upon the world. I am everywhere.” Welp! That’s a little less vague than previous references to the calamities that occur as a result of Lestat’s album and tour. He does love to invoke Akasha’s name. The hints keep coming: Gabriella references the Great Conversion, and Lestat doesn’t bat a glittery eyelash. To Louis, Raglan James says there’s been exponential growth in “your numbers.” These things are all casually stated and yet shocking in their way: The show’s perspective has been so Lestatian, so myopically focused on his loved ones, his music, his tour, his hurt, and here in episode two—there are only seven!—come all these not-quite-revelations about the precarious and threatening world outside the tour bus. I love, love, love that dinner scene, though. The way I kept forgetting that Lestat is puppeting his little narrative devices/fledglings/tertiary beings. The story Daniel told about how everyone raptures around him and he feels Armand’s presence. Louis’ dislike for Daniel’s version of him. The story Louis tells about seeing a girl who looked like Claudia—a story about love and guilt and grief and being haunted. Daniel’s apology! Louis saying he and Lestat were finding their way back when the book came out! Is any of this even real?!?! Photo: Sophie Giraud/AMC And then there is the thoroughly enjoyable way that Raglan James is even more over-the-top in Lestat’s view. (Justin Kirk is having entirely too much fun with this.) Raglan gives us the only hint we’ve gotten about what happened after the end of season two, when Louis sat in his fancy apartment and invited all the other vampires in the world to come and fight him: he dispatched a rather large number of them.  So it is Louis, the sensitive vampire, the one who doesn’t eat people, that is invited by the Talamasca to take out an entire troublemaking, fentanyl-distributing coven. It is Louis who they think will be good at this. And, more pressingly for our gents, it is Louis for whom it is personal, because the Fang Gang’s leader, the one whose nickname was tattooed on the back of Baby Jenks’ neck, is none other than that absolute slimeball Bruce.  LITTLE SIPS We-scuze me! The way Gabriella kept kicking the robot without saying anything!!! This was perhaps her most likable moment. Everyone in Lestat’s family pronounces his name differently than he does. The loss of Lestat’s dog(s) and horse, in the book, are very important, which is why it’s so weird when he just sends his single dog to its doom among the wolves. Very weird indeed. There are human blood farms?!?!? Salamander just casually mentioning that Armand is a daywalker seems a detail worth noting. Lestat knows off the top of his head that he lived for 54,554 days before he met Louis, and while I do not think these two are good for each other, that does have a certain swooniness to it. “I want to play cornhole.” In theory, Lestat and Gabriella go alone to the strip club, but then Rashid is there, and then Lestat’s shittiest brother ghosts through the scene, unwanted, and phew, this man is haunted and hunted and I think we’re only seeing the half of it. When Gabriella asks if Lestat has a lot of sex, he doesn’t say yes directly. He says he’s a rock star now. The sex comes with the territory. He also asks Christine—who he says he’s fucking, but this is likely him actually messing with Louis—if he has to fuck the “fan” who owns the hotel that was trashed, and she says yes, which really implies a lot of transactional sex that flies directly in the face of his drug-fueled elevator rant about sex, though he did say not that sex was the fourth best thing a vampire could do but the fourth best thing a vampire could do to avoid thinking about the past, which, phew, there are layers to the fucked-uppedness.  Usually the phrase “gave him a daughter” would be used about a woman—gross men in books are forever demanding their wives give them sons—and so there is something extra super weirdly loaded there, given everything we know about Gabriella and her feelings about her own children (and the having of them). I started watching the Talamasca show, which is not very good, alas, but there’s a scene in the first episode where Daniel tells annoying main character Guy that the Talamasca put a whole-ass page in his book, which adds another wrinkle to the question of narrative control.  “I put the emPHAsis on the first sylLABle.”[end-mark] The post Are You Enjoying This Exclusive Fan Experience? <i>The Vampire Lestat</i>, “Toledo” appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews This Is Not Idyllic: Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey Is this a murder cult? By Tobias Carroll | Published on June 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Is this a murder cult? It’s a question that can come up a lot when encountering a story in which a character seeks psychological relief in the arms, literal or metaphorical, of a reclusive group that promises a better life. The film Midsommar is one good example of this; watching it, you spend much of the film waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the smiling Scandinavians to reveal a lust for blood. Yellowjackets season two featured a New Age organization that gave off cult vibes, albeit not murdery ones. Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy involves a cult that makes frequent use of meteoric hammers.  Alternately, stories involving a character seeking solace with a group promising relief tend to fall into one of two categories: inspirational works and cult dramas. Some of that is a matter of perspective, of course: Plenty of people find happiness through embracing the tenets of a specific belief system. But if you find yourself reading a novel by an author with a penchant for the uncanny where a group claims to have all the answers, it’s a safe bet that something is about to go very wrong. The question that comes to mind when reading Sarah Gailey’s Make Me Better, then, is: What? It begins with an arrival. A woman named Celia arrives by boat at an island called Kindred Cove to witness their annual Salt Festival. The event is said to have therapeutic properties; attendance is strictly limited, and the islanders can’t stop gushing about how the experience of being on the island transforms the lives of the people who go through it. Celia has her reasons for wanting to travel there. As Gailey reveals through a series of flashbacks, Celia is restless. She’s been trying to conceive a child, and has experienced several miscarriages thus far. She works as a lifestyle influencer; there’s a passing reference to her home containing products from network marketing companies. She’s also profoundly lonely, and learned of Kindred Cove through a friend named Adelaide, who told Celia about her own roots on the island and traveled there six months earlier. Celia wants what many people seek: a community, a sense of belonging, a family.  Buy the Book Make Me Better Sarah Gailey Buy Book Make Me Better Sarah Gailey Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget For much of the Salt Festival, Celia is under the supervision of Kindred Cove resident Easy. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Easy knows more than she’s telling Celia, but that could be true of any situation in which one person has more information than another—like, say, when one of them is a longtime resident of a given community. Some of Easy’s rhetoric does tap into a vein of what could be called the menacing therapeutic, however: “You fell, and then you got back up, and now look at you. Walking on your own two feet. I’ll bet that five minutes ago, when you were flat on your back you thought you’d never be moving forward again. Do you know what I see when I look at you now?” Easy’s answer to the question she poses to Celia: “You’ll figure it out. I know you will.” If that sounds a little sketchy, phrasing summoned up by someone who’s trying to keep someone else’s spirits up but doesn’t quite know how to do so, that’s probably because it is. Earlier in the book, Easy tells Celia, “You never have to be all alone again, Celia. I’ve got you. I’ll show you everything.” Again, this probably should be setting off alarm bells—but what kind?  Celia’s journey to the island is not the only plot thread Gailey incorporates into this narrative. A parallel plotline set several months earlier focuses on Adelaide’s return to Kindred Cove, and shows the reader some of the same characters we’ve met earlier in a new light. Adelaide is no newcomer to this society, after all, though her time away from the island has led to some estrangement from her peers there. Her reasons for wanting to stay away have a familiar ring; she’d felt stifled by certain elements of the society, whose methods of living in harmony with the environment can lead to some feelings of alienation. Gradually, Gailey introduces some details that seem designed to disquiet. A selection of discarded objects could hint at violent acts in the recent past, but it’s also possible that the presence of blood was due to Kindred Cove’s practice of eschewing shoes on the island. Several characters refer to feeding the reef; that also sounds ominous, but feeding coral is something that people can do. Maybe this is all a wacky misunderstanding. Maybe it’s Celia who’s the threat. Then again, Kindred Cove is home to a building called the Old House, and the presence of capital letters there also foreshadows something ominous. Reading Make Me Better gives a sense of Gailey experimenting with how they handle pacing for this book. It’s not difficult to imagine a novella-length work telling just Celia’s story (or just Adelaide’s, for that matter). Some of the other flashbacks provide insights into Kindred Cove’s origins and to the peculiar environmental circumstances that surround it. The aforementioned reef is not the only curiosity there, and eventually Gailey reveals both how the outside world views Kindred Cove beyond its status as a healing destination and its role as the source for artisanal salt. Gailey does something else noteworthy here, and it wasn’t something I had expected. Besides the feeling that something is wrong on this island, they also casually suggest that Make Me Better might be set in the near future, rather than the present or recent past. It’s a subtle thing, but the effect is unmooring; much as Celia finds herself in a place where she doesn’t quite understand how things work, so too does the reader discover that one of their preconceptions might not apply at all.  It’s elements like this that make Make Me Better come together in a way that elevates it from some of its peers in the “is something amiss in this isolated community” narrative world. In telling the story of Celia’s desperate search for healing, no matter what the cost might be, Gailey takes several risks. The result is a slow-building sense of dread, a cautionary tale as chamber epic.[end-mark] Make Me Better is published by Tor Books.Read an excerpt. The post This Is Not Idyllic: <i>Make Me Better</i> by Sarah Gailey appeared first on Reactor.

News Only Murders in the Building Two Doctors Who—and the Incomparable Kathryn Hunter—Are Checking In to Only Murders in the Building’s London Season At this rate they’re going to cast more UK superstars than that OTHER series By Molly Templeton | Published on June 15, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share For season six, the murders are going overseas—and casting appropriately. Deadline brings the news that among the cast for the next season of Only Murders in the Building are David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker, Jim Broadbent, Richard Ayoade, Nicola Coughlan, and Kathryn Hunter. Or, in other words, the Tenth Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor, Bridget Jones’s dad, Maurice Moss, a Derry Girl, and Syril Karn’s terrifying mother. These actors have all played so many incredible roles that I could have summed them up using entirely different properties! But these seemed fun. Also joining the cast is Adrian Lukis, who has crossed over with several of the aforementioned performers in spirit if not in spacetime: he’s in the Who spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea (which maybe we’ll be able to see someday) and has had numerous appearances on British TV. This powerhouse lineup of actors join stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, and a recurring cast that includes Jennifer Saunders, Sean Teale, Simone Ashley, Amar Chadha-Patel, Rhea Norwood, Matthew Beard, Sharon Horgan, and recently announced new recurring castmembers Martin Freeman, Geri Halliwell-Horner, Jamie Demetriou, Anjana Vasan, Jane Horrocks, Derek Jacobi, and Lesley Nicol. This is a LOT of murderers and/or suspects. The sixth season of Only Murders in the Building is presently in production, and continues the story begun in the season five finale, as the three sleuths/podcasters work to solve the murder of Cinda Canning (Tina Fey). The show is co-created and written by Martin and John Hoffman; you can catch up on all the murdery fun (?) on Hulu.[end-mark] The post Two Doctors Who—and the Incomparable Kathryn Hunter—Are Checking In to <i>Only Murders in the Building</i>’s London Season appeared first on Reactor.

Blog Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder” The Centauri withdraw from the Interstellar Alliance with a display of force… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on June 15, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder”Written by J. Michael StaczynskiDirected by Goran GajicSeason 5, Episode 16Production episode 517Original air date: June 10, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn is having trouble sleeping, given the gravity of what they’re facing. She’s staring at a candle. Sheridan gets up and resists getting dressed. At one point, he puts a slipper on, before he drops the other one. So I guess he doesn’t have to wait for the other shoe to drop! (Har har!) The IA council meets, though Mollari and Vir are forbidden from entering the session by Allan and some security personnel. Medical evidence of Centauri weapons being used is presented by Franklin, followed by Garibaldi providing more evidence, both in the pattern of attacks and the button he found on his attacker on the Drazi homeworld. Also, one Centauri ship was allegedly attacked by the cargo raiders, but unlike all the others, it was a surplus ship, barely in service, and there was no loss of life or goods, which points to it being a decoy. Franklin and Garibaldi stopped by Mollari’s quarters to drop off copies of their testimony. When G’Kar arrives at his door, Mollari assumes that he, too, will be testifying to what he saw while he was pretending to be Mollari’s bodyguard. However, G’Kar assures him that he wasn’t pretending, and he will not testify to what he saw while protecting Mollari. The prime minister thanks him for respecting his privacy, and then asks why he is there. G’Kar says the council is ready to let him and Vir in now. Upon arrival, Mollari derides the evidence as circumstantial and not remotely definitive. However, there is one piece of evidence they haven’t shown yet, as they wanted Mollari present for it. Lennier then shows the recordings he made of the Centauri base and the Centauri attack on innocent Brakiri cargo ships. Mollari’s bombast deflates, and he quietly says he must speak to his government. Sheridan says that he’d better talk fast and tell them that the Centauri republic has committed acts of terrorism against the IA and will be blockaded until such time as an apology and reparations are forthcoming. Credit: Warner Bros. Television In private, Mollari is appalled. They’ve never fired on civilian targets, except in times of war, and the republic isn’t at war with anyone right now. Cholini contacts Mollari, having consulted with the Regent, and they are of the opinion that this is a frame job. Mollari points out that Lennier is an unimpeachable source, but Cholini agrees—that’s why whoever is responsible, probably the Narn, went to all this trouble to fake it, so that Lennier would believe it, and therefore the IA would believe it. Mollari returns to the council chambers and shares the Centauri POV, withdraws the republic from the IA, and states that they do not recognize the authority of the blockade, and that any attempt to enforce that blockade will be considered an act of war. He is also departing B5 and returning to the homeworld. Sheridan threatens that he may never again be welcome on the station. Mollari instructs Vir to remain on the station, to relay messages to and from B5. G’Kar also goes along with Mollari—without informing him ahead of time—to once again be his bodyguard. Allan goes to Garibaldi’s quarters to inform him that Sheridan is looking for him. It takes Allan all of four-and-a-half seconds to figure out that Garibaldi is drunk. Garibaldi tries to take the self-righteous route by reminding Allan that he’s had his own problems, but Allan takes precisely none of that, and so Garibaldi shifts gears to pathetic and asks for just a few days to get his shit together. Allan does give him that. Garibaldi meets with Sheridan. The plan is to use the White Stars to back up the blockade ships. Garibaldi’s job is to coordinate the fleet and send them where they’re needed once the Centauri are sighted trying to run the blockade. Mollari and G’Kar arrive on Centauri Prime and meet Cholini. Cholini isn’t thrilled to see G’Kar; Mollari isn’t thrilled to be informed that the Regent is unavailable to see him. White Star 43 contacts Garibaldi on B5 to inform him of Centauri ships about to run the blockade. But he’s passed out again. So that ship goes alone to back up the IA ships. It turns into a brutal battle with huge losses on both sides. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Vir tries to get in touch with Mollari, but Cholini informs him that he’s indisposed. Franklin then arrives to get Vir to safety, as he’s not safe in Mollari’s quarters, or his own. En route, they’re jumped by Brakiri, but they manage to get away unscathed. The council chambers are in chaos. Garibaldi is weakly trying to “figure out” what happened and why White Star 43 was on its own. The ambassadors are all pissed. Sheridan finally screams for everyone to shut up, makes a self-righteous speech about how nobody wanted peace or cooperation, they just want war, so war they shall have. On Centauri Prime, Cholini informs Mollari that the IA has officially declared war on the Centauri Republic. Cholini insists that G’Kar be imprisoned for the duration of the war, as he is on the IA advisory council and is therefore a security risk. Mollari refuses, as G’Kar is still his bodyguard. Mollari also confidently states that even Cholini wouldn’t be so churlish as to imprison the prime minister. Cholini then imprisons the prime minster in the same cell as G’Kar. Sheridan finds Delenn again staring at a candle. She says that the flame represents life, and that they’re all made up of the same molecules, each no better than the other. The flame of the candle is a reminder that life is precious, and when it’s extinguished, it’s gone forever. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan tries to blame the people in the council chambers (including, to be fair, himself) for being forced to go to war, which is entirely the wrong message to be delivering at that point. It’s the Centauri who caused this… The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is somehow able to convince Allan not to turn him in. This results in a war starting that might have been prevented if Garibaldi hadn’t been passed out when he was supposed to be on duty. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. G’Kar entrusts Delenn with the latest chapters of his book, asking that, should anything happen to him, she make sure the chapters get to the Narn homeworld. Delenn agrees, and tells G’Kar that he’s the finest writer she’s ever known. Credit: Warner Bros. Television In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Cholini is obviously the tool by which the Drakh are manipulating events, as he carefully keeps everyone in the dark and away from everyone else—and also comes up with the bullshit justifications for the evidence that the IA has gathered. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar basically forces himself on Mollari as his bodyguard, including getting the seat next to him on the transport so he can talk to him on the flight. When Delenn points out that Mollari hates talking to people on flights, G’Kar smiles and says he knows. We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers seemingly can only talk to Garibaldi, and when they can’t reach him, they just go off on their own, apparently? Welcome aboard. Thomas MacGreevy is back from “Darkness Ascending” as Cholini; he’ll return next time in “Movements of Fire and Shadow.” Kim Strauss and Jonathan Chapman make their final appearances on B5 as, respectively, the Drazi and Brakiri ambassadors, both last seen in “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Chapman will be back in the role on Crusade in “The Rules of the Game.” Trivial matters. Lennier recorded a Centauri attack in “Darkness Ascending.” Garibaldi got a Centauri button off an attacker on the Drazi homeworld in “The Ragged Edge.” Director Goran Gajic is the husband of Mira Furlan, who plays Delenn. The character of Aldous Gajic in “Grail” was named after him. The conversation between Garibaldi and Allan about the dangers of addiction has resonances in the real lives of both actors, as both Jerry Doyle and Jeff Conaway dealt with substance abuse issues in their lives, and both actors’ deaths were due to health problems that were exacerbated by those issues. (Your humble rewatcher was a guest at a convention with Doyle in 2001 in Indianapolis. I was commuting to and from the convention, as the person I was dating at the time had family locally. Doyle and I, and several other guests, were in the bar, and upon learning I would be driving that evening, Doyle—who was pretty drunk—gave me a lengthy and impassioned lecture on the subject of drunk driving and that I should avoid it at all costs. It remains one of my more surreal convention memories…) The echoes of all of our conversations. “Don’t worry, even one as arrogant as this would not take it upon himself to imprison his own prime minister.” —Mollari describing Cholini right before Cholini imprisons his own prime minister. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Shut up.” This episode absolutely made me crazy. I’ve been doing rewatches on this site since 2011, and for many of them, I’ve found myself altering my opinion about at least one of the main characters while doing so. With this one, it’s the realization that Michael Garibaldi absolutely sucks at his job. Well, okay, both his jobs. In his capacity as IA intelligence director, that incompetence exacerbated by his alcoholism, and his constantly being passed out during important moments has caused all manner of problems. Making it worse is that we finally get a member of station personnel who finds out—but it’s Allan, who owes Garibaldi for looking the other way about his own sordid past, so he lets him off the hook. With awful results. Not that those results should ever have happened, as the whole setup makes no kind of sense. How is it even possible that the only method by which the Rangers had set up to get White Star assistance to the blockades was through Garibaldi? What if he’s in the bathroom when they call? Or if he’s doing one of the other eight billion things he might need to be doing as the head of intelligence for a massive interplanetary alliance? Or, and here’s a biggie, what if the crisis happened when he was legitimately asleep? Why don’t the White Stars have backup contacts? Like Lennier, who’s on B5 already. Or, and here’s a crazy idea, what about Delenn who’s supposed to be Ranger One, for crying out loud. Deploying the Rangers is kind of her job. So why is it suddenly entirely Garibaldi’s responsibility? That’s not the only example of terminal incompetence on the part of our heroes. There is no reason, none, why Mollari and Vir should be excluded from the presentation of evidence. Yes, Franklin and Garibaldi also provided written transcripts of what they were testifying to, but these weren’t depositions, they were testimony, one in which questions could be asked. Excluding Mollari from the proceedings makes it suspect, and actually lends credence to Cholini’s accusations of this being a frame-up. It also cuts Mollari off from whatever follow-up questions or clarifications that might come out in the course of giving testimony, and denies Mollari the opportunity to make those queries. Indeed, the entire decision to keep Mollari in the dark back in “The Ragged Edge” was an idiotic one, as it puts Mollari in an impossible position. He has no time to prepare an adequate defense—though he makes up for it in theatricality, bombastically and characteristically ripping the evidence to pieces and tossing it in the air in council chambers like confetti, a classic Londo Mollari moment—and no good argument to give Cholini. If he’d been in on the investigation from jump, he might have had more ammunition to hit Cholini with, beyond, “I trust Lennier,” which is, let’s face it, pretty weak. It probably still wouldn’t have worked anyhow, but at least Mollari would have been informed instead of being blindsided as he is here, leaving him with no idea who to trust—beyond G’Kar, anyhow, especially since G’Kar takes his bodyguarding sufficiently seriously that he refuses to testify against him. Which gives G’Kar the distinction of being the only person acting actively ethical in the whole damn episode… Some of this could be considered a feature rather than a bug. After all, we knew (from Morden in “Into the Fire,” from Sheridan’s jump forward in the “War Without End” two-parter) that the Centauri would pay a price for Mollari’s turning on the Shadows. And the notion that the IA’s first year was wracked with storm and tempest, as it were, was foreshadowed in “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,” though that episode also saw Delenn having the last word and insisting that Sheridan was a good person. And maybe he was, but man has he been shitting the bed in his first few months in office… Next week: “Movements of Fire and Shadow.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays techno-thrillers Looking Back on the ’90s Films That Tackled Our Anxieties About New Technologies These movies gave us a language to voice our misgivings — but does the same formula hold up today? By Jake Pitre | Published on June 15, 2026 Image: MGM Comment 0 Share New Share Image: MGM If you are of a certain age, let’s say over 30, you have at least some memory of life in the 1990s. This was the end of history, and as the millennium was approaching its conclusion, we were increasingly preoccupied, nay, obsessed with emerging technology, and one in particular: the internet, or as it became known, the World Wide Web.  Beginning in the late 1980s and hitting a peak in 1995, internet mania quickly became easy fodder for Hollywood, and especially a certain kind of Hollywood film: the paranoid thriller. New tech has long been a going concern for filmmakers—the artform is, after all, inevitably a technological one, the product of machines and human creativity coming together. Even within the subgenre of early internet films, though, there exists a rather wide range of takes on what the web could or would do, what it looked like, and where it might all be headed.  There was, for instance, a parallel focus on virtual reality via computers—The Lawnmower Man (1992), Virtuosity (1995), The Thirteenth Floor (1999)—ultimately culminating with The Matrix (1999). At the same time, though, there were films more interested in capturing if not the full reality of the present internet, then at least the on-the-ground allure and anxiety surrounding it.  One of the most frequent ways into both of those feelings was to focus on hackers. As a distinct hacker culture developed, so did a wider mainstream culture awareness of what hackers could do, alongside the aesthetic and behavioural qualities which defined them: anti-authority iconography, numerous aliases, DIY tinkering, and maybe black clothing, tattoos, bleached and dyed hair, and piercings to complete the look. They also tended to be social outcasts, who collectivized around their technical wizardry and pranks.  These films also, certainly, aimed to heighten and exploit ongoing fears around the internet, specifically in terms of security and privacy. The hacker figure was simultaneously emerging as a folk hero and an antisocial menace, depending on one’s perspective or class position, and Hollywood took notice of a new world that offered such a potent blend of zeitgeisty pathos.  These films, focused on the dangers of the ’90s internet, ranged in quality, but there was a fascinating confluence of examples trying to understand what this globalized technoscape would mean for how we lived our lives. Tapping into what the systems could actually do, while usually making attempts to forecast what may be ahead in the near future, was a reliable way to engage with an audience likewise figuring out what online life could be. Were we feeling optimistic?  Image: MGM Hackers (1995) is the obvious starting point. Starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard, and others as a ragtag group of teenaged hackers explicitly inspired by the ideals and principles of the Hacker Manifesto, the film was both a reaction to the rising subculture and a surprisingly coherent representation of their apparent value (and threat) to the new digital order.  Fisher Stevens plays the film’s main antagonist, nicknamed The Plague, a computer security expert and former hacker who now works for the megacorporation targeted by the teens. In grand movie villain eloquence, he tells them: “Let me explain the New World Order. Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are Samurai… the Keyboard Cowboys… and all those other people who have no idea what’s going on are the cattle… Moooo.”  Here, of course, the vast majority of the moviegoing audience is being analogized to the cattle. The film itself is utterly absurd, and most of the visual attempts at representing the online world are hopelessly dated in retrospect, even if tinged by a nostalgic wonder and awe at what could’ve been. As a recent paper by Roberto Dillon argues, mid-90s cinematic hackers were “a symbol of youth, rebellion, and cyberpunk coolness,” aligned “with broader cultural narratives of resistance and self-actualization.” The hackers are quite clearly positioned in the folk hero role, in a way that can almost feel like a lost opportunity. Watching it in 2026, one can’t help but wonder—where are our hacker savant saviors to rescue us from the techno-megacorps?  Image: Sony Pictures Other films, perhaps most notably The Net (1995), with Sandra Bullock as a computer systems analyst being hunted by cyberterrorists when such a word was still a complete novelty, did take more time in their approach to capturing the actual internet as people knew it, with some prescient stabs at what was around the corner. Consultants were hired to ensure a relative level of authenticity, and even the forecasting was largely kept within reasonable boundaries of the technically possible. This was an opportunity to understand how the internet could simultaneously connect the world, while also demonstrating how easily it could be weaponized. It was also an early example of an internet-focused premise whereby characters routinely trust what the computers are telling them over the human being standing in front of them. Still, though, the idea was very much centered around the internet as a tool that anyone could make use of, for good or for ill, without considering that there may be something about the technology itself that would pose more fundamental problems for society.  An underseen personal favourite is Ghost in the Machine (1993), which is far more abstract and even silly in its digital imaginings, but nevertheless gets at something distinct about the internet age. A serial killer dies, and during an electrical storm, his soul gets uploaded via an MRI machine into a computer (sure). He then gains control over computer networks, and starts to kill everyone surrounding a woman named Terry (Karen Allen), who later teams up with a hacker to fight back. In the end, the killer becomes a virus, and is brought back out into the physical world where Terry can face him head on.  This little film in many ways predicted how the computer age would spread to every other device in our everyday lives. The Internet of Things, as this process came to be known, is the 21st-century promise that everything can be automated into the electrical networked grid, and the result is mass convenience and efficiency. Our domestic lives become seamless experiences of desire and its satisfaction thanks to an interconnected system of data extraction, surveillance, and networked cooperation. We will live in smart homes inside smart neighborhoods inside smart cities, all of which are connected to the same system to ensure complete knowability and trackability—for our benefit, of course, because we get our groceries ordered before we even know we’re out of ketchup and any number of other seemingly utopian things, many of which are tied to what we consume because that’s what is smart about smart technology. The allure of this dream is obvious for capitalism, because it guarantees sustained and dependable consumption that is automated without the kneejerk whims of humans getting in the way. Even if we understand all this, the way these technologies demand our participation and are imposed into every nook and cranny whether we asked for it or not, sometimes the temptation of the ease and convenience can make one give in to the ghost in the machine anyway.   Image: 20th Century Fox Of course, then, Ghost in the Machine’s mistake is that final-act decision to materialize the virus, to make the menace corporeal and tangible, taking the machinic out of the machine. The problem isn’t the cheesy VFX—that’s part of the film’s quasi-avant-garde charm. The problem is that it returns us to the familiar horror: the man stalking us, physically in our space, threatening in his imposing embodiment. What makes this movie so successful, though, is the reminder throughout the rest of its runtime that there is an inherent and intrinsic danger within mass connectivity, which can otherwise be seen as uniformly benevolent. We can lay the blame on a singular hacker or killer, sure, but the real fear comes from the unknowability of a system that makes decisions without us knowing why or even being able to question them. A microwave, a dishwasher, a telephone, it’s all one and when we give in, we risk giving up. It’s this balance of techno-optimism and cynicism that marks this era of internet movies. While other films would soon come along to blast open the societal, civilizational transformations of this technological shift (often from outside Hollywood; see Pulse [2001] and Demonlover [2002]), it is these ’90s experiments which tell us much about the mainstream discursive emergence of the internet and, I would argue, about the parallels we can see today in how we talk about generative AI.  In a sense, we can say that these ’90s films were “training” the audience in how to think about the internet, wrapped up in genre conventions and dramatic extrapolation. They were, for better or worse, reflecting people trying to understand how the internet would change their lives. It’s easy enough for the cinema to hijack the fears latent within the unknown, technological or otherwise. To put it plainly, the movies underlined the optimist vs. pessimist binary when it comes to new tech that we are still essentially stuck within today. They trafficked in varying degrees of hysteria, distorting attitudes and ideas about the internet in their own present, which inevitably has some influence on ours. As Dillon puts it, these films and their influence on what came next demonstrates “a culture repeatedly reconfiguring a stable set of symbolic figures to grapple with its own changing anxieties.”  Particularly as blockbuster-level films like the last two Mission: Impossible installments, as well as the latest Tron and Scream films, identify “AI” as the bad guy, it is by repeating the patterns of the ’90s films, literalizing an understandable anxiety about something beyond their control. In the case of Tron: Ares, two tech CEOs are battling to bring the virtual into the physical world, vying for control of AI in the process—the most generous reading of its half-baked story is that AI is okay as long as the good billionaires are in charge. Scream 7, on the other hand, is more interested in using one part of the AI discourse, the threat of sophisticated deepfakes, to help underline the twisty nature of its villain in this septenary outing for the troubled franchise. In any case, “AI” basically operates here as something to easily villainize or to softly gesture at ongoing cultural debates.  Image: Briarcliff Entertainment On the one hand, one could see this having the perhaps unintended effect of preparing audiences for scenarios which are frankly impossible (full sentience, for one), which could make smaller incursions into our lives more palatable in comparison. Still, even if I had many issues with, say, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Gore Verbinski’s recent return to the multiplex about a time traveler gathering helpers to destroy a rogue superintelligent AI, I was at the very least charmed by its full-throated rejection of AI’s narrative of inevitability. It reminded me of what was most satisfying about those ’90s films: New tech isn’t something to necessarily be optimistic or pessimistic about, it’s something that can remind us to pay attention to the ways our lives change, especially when it feels like we have no say in the matter. At least at the movies, maybe we do.[end-mark] The post Looking Back on the ’90s Films That Tackled Our Anxieties About New Technologies appeared first on Reactor.