Books Reading the Weird The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” first published in Lightspeed in April 2014., and collected in John Joseph Adams’ Futures & Fantasies. Spoilers ahead—but it’s short and it’s good and you should go read it. 1. [The man sitting next to the Trapped Woman opens with:] This cabin’s so hot I could hardboil an egg in my mouth. What’s your name? 2. If you watch the whirling egg cook, a golden hemisphere in a corona of white, you’ll see what only a god might see. You (not you personally, now that you know the secret) become a god for a couple seconds and create a new world somewhere in existence. You’ll received prayers from your frightened worshippers via cryptic notes and misheard colleagues. It’s terrible to be a god. I don’t recommend it. 3. If you freeze an egg, the shell will pop off like a bottlecap, and the insides will lie in your hand like a stone. In some countries, you can trade such yolks for necessities. Rumor (inaccurate) has it that planting a frozen yolk will cause something better than potatoes to grow. 4. If you look inside an egg you’ve just cracked, you may see reflected another kitchen, another face from someone else who has cracked and looked inside the same egg, could be in Brooklyn or an alternative universe. 5. woman I once dated thought you cut cows open to get milk. How silly. You can cut eggs out of a chicken, clean off the blood and feathers, and they’re good to go. 6. “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” 7. Farmer’s market eggs sometimes open to drop a fetal dragon into your pan. Don’t try to incubate the other eggs to hatching. All the babies will be dead in the shell. That’s fine, dragons will always turn on you in the end. 8. Hermann Hesse on eggs: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” Hesse isn’t writing figuratively, and he’s a bastard. 9. How many eggs have you eaten in your life? A thousand? All those chickens are now inside you, their potential thoughts and dreams, their lives and deaths. “In a way, I think, we’re all a thousand chickens.” 10. It’s pleasant to take an egg and splat it down on a hard surface with all your might. In some villages it’s a competitive pastime. 11. I’m sure the flight attendant does have some eggs in back, but she’s saving them for First Class. You were smart to bring your own eggs in that lunchbox. 12. Patsy Cline believed that all the parallel universes touched each other in the wet places of the world. She died in a plane crash, but not a plane like ours. A small one. 13. I know you. We shared an egg once. You won’t remember because it was your first time egg-side. I thought you were so beautiful. I’m disappointed to see you looking angry. Smile. 14. [The flight attendant intervenes.] It’s all right, Miss. I’m sure she didn’t mean to throw that egg at me, I don’t need to change my seat. Ha-ha! 15. [In conclusion, maybe.] “That hardboiled egg looks delicious.” I’d like a bite. The Degenerate Dutch: You can’t even call the flight attendant a “stewardess” these days. Whatever are you supposed to say, when you can’t say that? Libronomicon: The universes you’ve accidentally created communicate through scraps of found paper, and mysteriously appearing Word documents. Weirdbuilding: Patsy Cline did not, unless I’ve failed my websearch, have a theory about parallel universes. But Brian May was part of NASA’s New Horizons team and Natalie Portman is a neuroscientist. And Patsy Cline’s voice, in an alternate universe, has been to Mars. (If this really happened in our own universe, I can’t find documentation. Perhaps it’s an uncollapsed waveform.) Ruthanna’s Commentary Someone asked me about Carmen Maria Machado’s writing, and I picked this for an illustrative example. Specifically, they wanted to know if she writes realistic near-future science fiction. Listen. Listen. This story could happen tomorrow. It involves a plane, which is totally science, and mentions parallel universes, which are almost as clear a genre signal as rocket ships. Of course, it also mentions dragons. Perhaps the best genre parallel is Larry Niven’s “For a Foggy Night,” which as best I can recall frames most of the speculative elements in an uncomfortable conversation with some random guy in a bar. There might be actual dimensional travel at the end—listen, I haven’t actually reread any Niven since I got exasperated with Footfall early in the century, and I have fond memories of this story, don’t make me ruin them. Anyway, the difference between a bar and an airplane is that you can walk out of a bar. Into another universe sometimes, but probably with survivable temperature and air pressure. You can even just switch barstools. Plus you’ve probably been drinking, at better prices than an airline’s, which makes every companion in not-entirely-consensual conversation seem cleverer and more welcome. (See for evidence Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar series, which I read around the same time period as I was reading Niven. I still wake up sometimes shouting, “Toony is a perfectly reasonable nickname! Don’t marry the incel cyborg! No one else wants to pee in the sink, you’re just tall!”) Where was I? My point, I swear I had one, was that “guy in the middle seat who won’t stop talking” is a perfectly plausible future event. And yet, the genre boundaries waver like uncooked egg white. The dragons get into rocket ships and the ships grow tentacles. A guy can violate your personal space, the rules about things you say to strangers, and your sense of reality all at the same time. Herman Hesse says that who would be born must first destroy the world, and that the world is an egg. Or at least, he says that the egg is the world, which implies the commutative. The Ohtori Academy student council says “Smash the world’s shell, for the revolution of the world!” The asshole in the seat next to you says that Herman Hesse was a bastard, which was certainly also true of the student council. But maybe the world is full of bastards trying to crack it and be reborn as airplane creepers. Maybe they are succeeding, all the time. Maybe that’s how we got to this reality in the first place. Perhaps when we land, more shells will have cracked and we’ll find ourselves in yet a different one. Perhaps if you crack an egg yourself—say, over this guy’s head—we’ll find ourselves in a better one. Every time you talk with a stranger, there’s risk. They may know something you didn’t know, or believe something you didn’t think anyone believed. They may have experiences that break your assumptions about how people act, and what kinds of fixes to the world’s problems could work at all. This can be valuable—but it’s also true that some strangers really are deeply incorrect, or deeply unpleasant, or both. You want to have an out. Yesterday on the train home from Amsterdam, I heard a cellist talking to her friend. An American man had started telling her all about his pets, and this felt to her like an unusual level of “opening up.” She thought he was offering a more intimate relationship; he was just the kind of guy who cheerfully blabs about his life. Or maybe Americans are just like that? (I was tempted, illustratively, to intervene and admit that yes, we kind of are.) It’s an awkward ambivalence. If you tell strangers about your life, they may not understand your intent or appreciate your confidences. But if you never talk about your pets, or your attempt to hatch a dragon army, you will never be known. After a few rounds of rebirth, when you already know everyone—for definitions of “know” that have nothing to do with their personal boundaries or comfort with sexism—it’s tough. I very nearly sympathize. But maybe try it at the bar, rather than mid-flight. And not with me. Anne’s Commentary My first thought on seeing the title of this story was: EGGS ON A PLANE. Slither the hell out of my cockpit, you sorry excuses for CGI that are the Snakes on a Plane ophidians. You make the Anaconda movies look like models of herpetological accuracy. Besides, as Machado’s seatmate from hell declares: An egg is the most dangerous thing in the universe. It’s the ultimate emblem for potential, and the egg’s potential can range from breakfast to dragons to xenomorphs with multiple jaws, maybe even to whole new worlds, somewhere out there, for good or more likely for just one more set of people who pray to an unresponsive god, and what universe needs that? Planes, trains, buses, boats, whatever the vehicle of mass transport may be: It should come with Interaction and No Interaction sections, the rules strictly enforced by burly attendants, or maybe by electric shock emitters in the seat cushions. Or tranquilizer darts embedded in the same. Let the offensive passengers drift off and quietly dream about their obsessions instead of inflicting them on the innocent. Enough with the curmudgeonly venting. Listening to your random seatmates in life can be an act of kindness, of compassion, of contrition for earlier sins of turning away. This poor old guy, he may have no one else to talk to but the stranger temporarily stranded with him for whatever reason. Smile, nod, drop in the occasional “mm-hmm” or “I see.” For extra karma points, ask a pertinent question or two. As Machado says in the Author Spotlight linked to “Observations,” she’s “had to spend many hours at the mercy of people exactly like [her egg-expert character.] Planes are interesting and terrifying like that.” Mr. Egg-Expert is both interesting and, if not terrifying, at least unnerving; the stuff about cutting chickens open for their eggs and competitive egg-splatting are a bit on the far side of enough, while the man’s claim that he knows his listener from that time they shared the same egg before she was born, that’s getting creepy. No wonder that hardboiled egg “accidentally” slipped out of TW’s hands and landed on the old guy. But maybe we can’t call writers complete innocents in such situations. Again in the Author Spotlight, Machado describes imagining that her listener character is jotting down the old man’s comments—hence the list structure of the story. Asked what she would do if she was actually stuck next to such a seatmate, Machado responds that she’d “listen long enough to get a good story to tell later, and then pull out a book.” I guess you could call that a predatory interaction, or at least a commensal one. That’s unless the old man belatedly realizes Observation #13 is stalky enough to merit the retaliation of a thrown egg. From his exchange with the flight attendant, it seems that he might, making the passengers’ encounter mutually beneficial on the whole. Or… We can read the Egg-Expert as someone more sinister than a garrulous senior with a touch of disinhibition. “Observations” reminds me so much of another story we’ve discussed: Shirley Jackson’s “The Witch.” Four-year-old Johnny is riding on a train with his mother and baby sister. He comments on everything he sees from the window, progressing from cows and bridges to “a bad, old, mean witch” intent on eating him, whom he’s chased away. Mom, who is reading, responds calmly, “Fine.” An elderly man, white-haired and pleasant-faced, enters their coach and strikes up a conversation with Johnny that starts out innocuous, then abruptly shifts into a story about the old man’s little sister, just like Johnny’s, whom he loved so much he bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops, and then he strangled and dismembered her and put her head into a cage for a bear to eat. Mom is horrified, especially when Johnny reacts with laughing enthusiasm and suggests they cut his mommy’s head off, or, alternatively, that his mommy eat up the old man. Mom orders the old man to get out of their coach and he retires, still laughing. Mom knows she should say something to counteract the old man’s malice; the best she can think to do is give Johnny a lollipop and insist the man was just teasing. Probably, Johnny allows, but adds that probably the old man was a witch. What if the old man on the plane is also a witch, determined to plant seeds (eggs!) of disquiet in his seatmate’s mind. To rattle her worldview out of whack. To shiver her faith, out of sheer random spite. Or what if their meeting isn’t random, because the old man (wizard, demon) really has met her before, her twin in a double-yolked egg? Easy enough to dismiss the Egg-Expert as demented, deluded, tiresome but not a serious threat. You never do know, though, do you, about random encounters on a plane? Forget about trusting in the kindness of strangers. Even trusting in their harmlessness may be unwise “in a world with eggs, which give us life, and have so many uses besides.” Them’s my paranoid italics, not Machado’s. Next week, we continue to track the fate of the dead in Chapters 5-6 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” appeared first on Reactor.

News H.G. Wells Gael García Bernal Stars in Netflix’s Adaptation of H.G. Wells The Country of the Blind The adaptation is currently titled In the Valley of Shadows (En El Valle De Las Sombras) By Molly Templeton | Published on March 11, 2026 Photo: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Netflix Here’s an adaptation you won’t have to wait a million years for: Deadline reports that filming has wrapped on In the Valley of Shadows (En El Valle De Las Sombras), an adaptation of the H.G. Wells short story “The Country of the Blind.” The movie comes from director Sebastián Cordero (Europa Report), and stars Gael García Bernal as mountaineer Álvar Toledano, who falls into a valley and finds himself the only sighted person present. The valley—cut off from the rest of the world by an earthquake—is home to a community that has been blind for generations. As Deadline explains, “Toledano is convinced of his superiority, but soon discovers that his ability to see is considered a disturbance rather than an advantage among the people of the valley. As he tries to adapt, Álvar falls in love with Medina (Natalia Reyes), the woman caring for him. Per the synopsis: Álvar must decide whether to renounce who he is in order to belong, or whether the price of seeing is to flee the valley of shadows.” Wells’ story was originally published in 1904 in The Strand Magazine, and later collected in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. He expanded and revised the story for a later publication, and it seems the end is rather different; it’ll be interesting to see which the film uses. Previous adaptations include radio plays, an opera, a stage production, an episode of a 1962 TV series called The DuPont Show of the Week and a short animated adaptation, but no feature films. Director Cordero co-wrote the screenplay with María Camila Arias (a story editor on Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). The cast also includes Claudio Cataño, Diego Vásquez, Irina Loaiza, and Margarita Rosa de Francisco. No Netflix premiere date has been announced, though the film will be released theatrically first in Colombia, where it was filmed.[end-mark] The post Gael García Bernal Stars in Netflix’s Adaptation of H.G. Wells <i>The Country of the Blind</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Elio The Loneliness of Elio: Growing Up Queer in the American Military Rewrites and studio pressure may have stripped Elio of its personality, but there are still glimpses of truth throughout… By Sarah Welch-Larson | Published on March 11, 2026 Credit: Disney/Pixar Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Disney/Pixar It’s a miracle any of us can understand each other. What’s meant isn’t always what’s understood, even if it was said with the best of intentions. If there’s no one to receive the message, we might as well be setting our words adrift, like the Voyager probe broadcasting its “hello” into a possibly empty universe. It’s an act of faith, an open hand extended toward the possibility of other beings who might not be friendly, even if they exist. If we’re lucky, we find moments of connection and understanding, even in surprising places. Despite its recent Oscar nomination, Disney/Pixar’s Elio might as well have been a shout into empty space. It set the record for Pixar’s worst opening weekend, and most of the conversation about the film was about the departure of director Adrian Molina after the studio demanded significant rewrites that stripped the film’s protagonist of his queerness and personality (a response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay laws). The story we received is not the one the original writers intended to tell. It’s garbled, like a scratchy transmission on a ham radio, but I still heard it: You’re not alone. The titular Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is an eleven-year-old boy being raised by his Tía Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña) after his parents died in a car accident. Olga is a major in the Air Force working long hours to track space debris, a far cry from the career as an astronaut that she wanted, but had to give up in order to raise her nephew. Elio, too, feels as though a chunk of his life is missing; he’s a classically lonely child whose longing manifests as attempts to get aliens to come and take him away. Despite their similarities, Elio and Olga are incapable of understanding each other. With a lot of determination and the help of a ham radio, Elio gets the attention of a collective of aliens called the Communiverse, who assume he’s the leader of the planet Earth and enlist him to help them with a diplomatic crisis of their own. They’re afraid of dealing with a warlike race of aliens called Hylurgians who wish to conquer everyone in their path. In a fit of childish optimism and out of a need to be accepted, Elio offers to negotiate with the warlords. The original story is reported to have been personal to Molina, who is gay, Latinx, and a child of someone who served in the military. The version that was released (under the co-directorship of Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian) is mostly benign, a gently sweet adventure film that is incapable of maintaining a cohesive core beyond the standard “be true to yourself” messaging of most animated children’s fare. It follows the Pixar formula to the letter: a problem grounded in dissatisfaction, driven by its characters and presented using technically brilliant animation, with a climax in which everyone gets what they need instead of what they thought they wanted. It shouldn’t work; it certainly doesn’t hold together the same way Up or Wall-e do. It still knocked me back on my heels: I saw glimpses of myself in the film. Like Elio (and Molina), I grew up on a military base. From a child’s perspective, the experience isn’t much different from growing up in a gated community, albeit one guarded by soldiers. Military children tend to make friends quickly—you have to find your people, or else be left out of the loop until the next time your family has to pick up and move. You have to be used to at least one of your parents being gone for months at a time, sometimes on short notice, sometimes longer than originally planned. Loneliness is a threat, though it’s not always a given. You can either retreat inward or push yourself toward other people. Elio retreats inward, though his gaze is perpetually turned up toward the stars in an obsession that remains his only coherent character trait. (Flashes of humor hint at the more rounded version of the character who was buried under script rewrites, but those flashes feel incongruous alongside the single-minded determination of the boy we spend our time with.) Elio sketches pleas in the sand on the beach for aliens to come and take him away, dismissing the other children on base because he thinks they wouldn’t understand his mission. In return, a handful of them bully him, pushing him away because they perceive he’s different. Children have always done this. It’s a human reaction: stick close to like-minded others and reject those who don’t belong. If everyone implicitly agrees on the same things, so much the easier; no need to talk about it. I grew up during the era of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a policy in which queer service members were permitted to remain in the military so long as they also remained closeted. I didn’t meet anyone who was openly gay until I left for college. I assumed there were no queer service members, and that all my peers growing up were straight, too. Talking politics was also verboten. It felt as though everyone around me was conservative, especially after 9/11. I remember the tense feeling in the air, the tight-lipped desire to keep OPSEC. It used to be possible to order delivery pizza on base, but after the Twin Towers fell, every gate sprouted concrete serpentine barriers, and anyone over the age of ten had to have their ID checked to get on base. There was a bristling that I didn’t recognize until years later, because it at the time, it was just the waters I swam in. Not the braggadocio of patriotic country songs or the vocally angry posturing of conservative talk radio (though I heard that, too). It was a hardening all the same. Every child on the playground told the same ugly jokes about ending terrorism. I can’t say how any of our parents felt; we didn’t really talk about it. The message I implicitly received was conformity. I didn’t question it. We didn’t understand the weight of the things we said. We took them at an abstracted sort of face value anyway. Every joke, every defensive measure, every decision to tighten security all built up into an almost-insurmountable mountain of acceptance. Some of them were more innocuous than others; some of them truly did save lives. All of them together had the effect of drawing everyone into line. Taking the small changes in stride made accepting the big shifts—like invading Iraq—that much easier to accept. I first felt my conscience twitch a few years later when news broke about CIA black sites and waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It hadn’t occurred to me till then that war could mean atrocity, and that atrocities could be committed by my side. Before that point, it was all abstract, words on a page, action happening elsewhere, even though half the adults I knew would deploy for months on end. The language and the reality didn’t quite match up. When Elio reaches the Communiverse, he offers to negotiate a peace deal with the warlike Hylurgians, an attempt to earn the trust and acceptance of the other aliens that he so desperately craves. Elio’s offer is one of the many incongruities in the film; up till being brought into the Communiverse, he’s turned away from conflict, choosing instead to send one-sided pleas into space. His offer to negotiate doesn’t reflect who we understand him to be. The peace talks fail immediately—eleven-year-olds aren’t great at bargaining with warlords—but they do lead Elio to meet Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), the cheerful son of the Hylurgian emperor. Despite their cultural and physical differences—Elio is human, Glordon is an eyeless alien with a toothy smile who looks like a cross between a tardigrade and a puppy—the two recognize themselves in each other, developing a swift friendship with the easy, innocent trust that only a lonely preteen can give. They become friends in swift montage, careening throughout the Communiverse as if it’s a theme park and as though they’ve been friends forever. The film skips through the getting-to-know-you stage at a speed I remember from my childhood: acceptance of the other children living on base first, fill in the details later. When the two bond, Elio admits to Glordon that he “thought Earth was the problem,” but after spending time in the Communiverse, he wonders, “What if it’s me?” Here the cracks in the film are most obvious: Elio is an inert character, his reasons for wanting to leave Earth in the first place left fuzzy, a cipher that can only be cracked by metatextual knowledge about the movie’s development. Pixar’s executives didn’t want the script asking questions about the character’s sexuality, so the movie doesn’t tell, and as a result, the boy conforms to the shape of every other generic coming-of-age protagonist. Elio is a child questioning his place in the universe without even a satisfying reason prompting him to ask. If it weren’t for Glordon, the film would fall apart entirely. He, too, is drawn in broad strokes: the child of the leader of a warlike race of aliens who live to conquer everyone else, a fuzzy gray character who comes from a people who view the universe only in black and white terms. I used to bristle at the military being described with language I thought was over-simplistic and un-subtle. I lost a friend my freshman year of college when he called the American military “butchers” and refused to take it back. At the same time, I was troubled by yellow ribbons and calls to support the troops from people who didn’t actually know anyone in the military. The language felt like abstract fetishism, a declaration of ideals that didn’t understand the weight of what those words actually stood for, the blood and injury and loss of life. Glordon doesn’t question his circumstances either, at least at first. His character arc mirrors the one that seems to be missing from Elio’s life: something’s wrong, and he can’t understand it until his horizons are widened. He describes his impending coming-of-age ceremony with enthusiasm to Elio, telling him, “I can’t wait to be installed [into my armor]!” (A disproportionate number of American military children end up joining the military themselves.) Glordon is soft, vulnerable; the adults around him live in spiked carapaces of armor that make them perfectly suited for war. He accepts constant conflict as a fact of life: his mother is away “fighting in the Blood Wars,” and his father is emotionally absent. “To expose your soft flesh is to bring great shame on your family for all eternity,” he tells Elio, who to this point has only ever seen Glordon as a gentle being, someone who hasn’t learned how to put on any armor, emotional or literal. The cognitive dissonance goes unremarked-upon, a rare moment of subtlety in the film. Things come to a breaking point. They always do. Half the friends I made in college came out of the closet—some while we were at school, some afterward. We find each other, even when we don’t know what exactly we’re searching for at first, even when we don’t yet have the language to communicate it. Learning to let go of my unquestioning trust in American exceptionalism took longer, a slow erosion of the belief that the system works for anyone willing to conform. It took me too long to accept that we’ve spent too much time at war, and that the wars we’ve fought since World War II have done more harm than good. Even saying that out loud feels like breaking ranks, like entering potentially hostile territory… like coming out. But I can’t be silent any more. We have no business bombing fishing boats and schools. There’s no good reason for us to go to war, and even if there were, the collateral damage reveals an appalling lack of respect for life, and we as a nation will never be able to wash the blood off our hands. I had to learn to be vulnerable before I could learn how to accept that I’ve been wrong about this before. What I want is perfect agreement. What I need is to be honest—a poetic irony, a reversal of wants and needs that fits the Pixar formula. I need a level of vulnerability I admire in others and fear for myself. I’m still learning how to do this. Vulnerability means opening up to the possibility of attack—and to deeper understanding. When I first told my mother I was queer, I suspect it was a confirmation of something she’d somehow always known, even though we’d never have discussed it unless I brought it up myself. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Putting up walls and defenses is the safe thing to do; harden yourself and you can’t get hurt. To expose the soft flesh of your heart is to be vulnerable… and to bring the possibility of understanding. I never intended to come out publicly. But if I can’t be honest about who I am, how can I speak the truth fully? Elio was never intended to be a coming-out story, even before the rewrites. Glordon’s character arc ends in a coming out of sorts anyway. He tells his father what he’s only just realized for himself: “I don’t want to be a war machine.” Edgerly’s delivery is simple, almost embarrassed; a line reading that gets at the truth of Glordon’s vulnerability and fear of rejection. He’s seen what the isolation of an armored carapace means; now that he’s encountered others, he understands that he wants something different for himself. To overcome loneliness, you have to meet other people; to make a change in the way things are, you have to imagine and communicate the possibility for a different world. I don’t want to be a war machine. I want my heart to remain tender. The film handles Glordon’s coming-out clumsily, as though it’s a one-time revelation that leads to perfect understanding and acceptance. Nor does the movie question the role of the Air Force as part of the United States’ military apparatus; it’s just another job, albeit one that gives Elio access to the equipment he needs to make first contact. Elio is a movie for children who need the simple reassurance of happily ever after, who might not be tuned in to the finer points American foreign policy. Those issues are for us to wrestle with after the movie ends and we pick up the threads of the rest of our lives. In reality, coming out is an ongoing process, an eternal practice of vulnerability. It requires honesty, and communication; if we’re lucky, it means a deeper connection, an opportunity for greater understanding, a chance to tear down the walls and start to build something new.[end-mark] The post The Loneliness of <i>Elio</i>: Growing Up Queer in the American Military appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Outlander Outlander Season 8 Premiere Proves the Series Still Has the “Soul of a Rebel” Faith, bees, and a bombshell from Frank Randall kick off Outlander’s final season. By Natalie Zutter | Published on March 11, 2026 Image: Starz Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Starz We’re in the final home stretch for Ronald D. Moore’s Outlander: eight seasons over twelve years, jumping back and forth 200 years in time and spanning almost 30 years in the lives of Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser (Grey), Jamie Fraser, and their many children and grandchildren. With only ten episodes to complete this epic love story—or perhaps remind us that it will never truly end—the season premiere “Soul of a Rebel” does a fair bit of scene-setting while still raising the emotional stakes. Along with some sweet and silly Easter eggs, it reminds us that this series is the true home of our hearts. Spoilers for Outlander “Soul of a Rebel” The final season certainly starts on a bleak fuckin’ note, as we pick up with Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire (Caitríona Balfe) half a year or so after the big revelation from 7×16 “A Hundred Thousand Angels”: Faith, their stillborn daughter in France, actually lived?! Presumably Master Raymond—who came to Claire in a post-gunshot-surgery hallucination, begging for her forgiveness—deceived them and raised Faith. That said, there’s a big absence of information between her birth and her death, still tragically young, in her thirties. In the opening scene, the Frasers have tracked down Vasquez, a smuggler who claims to have killed a Captain Pocock, raped his young daughter Jane (while dismissing her even younger sister Fanny), and tossed his wife Faith overboard when she tried to save her children. The man is far too proud in detailing his crimes, so it’s no surprise that Claire, who is supposed to be listening quietly in the corner to this false whiskey deal, grabs a knife and stabs him. Image: Starz Jamie and Claire’s debrief later, having escaped the smugglers, makes it unclear whether this is a dead end (in more ways than one) or some twisted form of closure. The Vasquez conversation corroborated some of the details from Fanny (Florrie May Wilkinson), lending credence to her story, but it doesn’t explain anything about what happened in France. The way they talk about it, it seems as if they’ve exhausted their resources and emotional fortitude for the moment, but are open to discovering new information down the line. I wonder if part of closing the loop on Faith (for now, at least) in the premiere was because the episode encompasses all of their children—starting with Fergus (César Domboy), Marsali (Lauren Lyle), and their brood, who (surprise!) Jamie and Claire are visiting as doting Grandpère and Grandmère in Savannah, Georgia. Image: Starz The brief scenes certainly have the feel of an early series-end sendoff for this branch of the family. They’ve built a life in British-occupied Savannah—as opposed to electing to join Fraser’s Ridge—where Fergus operates a printshop by day and secretly prints seditious pamphlets on the side. Jamie is less-than-thrilled that Fergus is putting himself in danger now that he has a huge family to support. And if Jamie could find the hollow spot in his walls within just a few minutes, that doesn’t bode well. But Fergus, with all his calm conviction, reminds his father that if he is to be killed, it may as well be doing something he believes in. Which (a) is a testament to how much of an impact Jamie has had on him, and (b) feels like a bit of ominous foreshadowing for this season…! Image: Starz Elsewhere in Savannah, Jamie’s less-motivated son William Ransom (Charles Vandervaart) is drunk, to his other father Lord John Grey’s (David Berry) disdain; devastated over Jane’s death; disillusioned with the British Army—and suspicious of the household’s new arrival, Lady Amaranthus Grey (Carla Woodcock). Claiming to be the widow of his beloved cousin Benjamin, who was captured and died of jail fever, Amaranthus also has baby Trevor, Benjamin’s supposed son. Lord John, who opens this season adorably fussing over baby Trevor, pushes William to have some sympathy for a baby who will never know his father, considering that William’s mother died when he was just a bairn. Lord John’s complete acceptance of Amaranthus’ claims is a little surprising, but if she does happen to be playing them, it’ll make for an interesting subplot. As it is, the more obvious development telegraphed here is when William apologies to Amaranthus and pledges to protect Trevor and her in honor of Benjamin’s memory. Yeah, these two are definitely gonna get together. Image: Starz Before the final family reunion, the Frasers get to return to Fraser’s Ridge for the first time since they went off to fight in the Revolutionary War. It’s a mostly sweet homecoming, as Young Ian (John Bell) gets to show off the new house he built them. It’s gorgeous, especially Claire’s brand-new surgery—which will come in handy when his wife Rachel (Izzy Meikle-Small) delivers their baby any day now—and all of her medical tools that Ian tracked down thanks to the shiny new trading post. Oh, yes, commerce has come to Fraser’s Ridge without the couple’s say, and while everyone seems delighted by this center of trade and socialization, its owners raise some eyebrows. Hiram Crombie partnered with Captain Charles Cunningham (Kieran Bew), our first major antagonist for the final season: a retired Redcoat who nonetheless faced Jamie across enemy lines at the Battle of Saratoga. Cunningham is all “war is hell” and “bygones are bygones” but Jamie can’t shake his mistrust, especially considering how comfortable Cunningham seems to have been in their home during their absence. Image: Starz But the Frasers don’t have long to linger on this because coming up the Ridge are the MacKenzies! Though last season teased whether Brianna (Sophie Skelton) and Roger (Richard Rankin) would remain in 1980 after her colleague Rob Cameron kidnapped Jemmy in an attempt to find the hidden Jacobite treasure that Jamie buried, the family ultimately decided that they were safest with Jamie and Claire. Their reunion is very endearing, with toasts of dram and reverse-souvenirs in the form of books from the future. It really has been a delight to watch Balfe and Heughan grow these characters from pretty young things into middle-aged role models aging like fine whiskey. Claire possesses a gravity and spine of steel, while Jamie is rather adorable as a grumpy, sassy grandpa. Now, let’s peruse their unusual TBR stack, by way of the MacKenzies and 1980: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown: A sweet throwback to season 3’s “The Doldrums,” when Jamie and Claire were still reconnecting after their decades apart and on a ship to the Caribbean to rescue Young Ian. Looking at the moon, Claire murmured some of Goodnight Moon to Jamie as a way of letting him in on all those bedtime stories with Bree that he missed out on. Fanny’s reaction to the pages “looking like a painting” seems very telling that she might catch on to her new family’s oddness sooner than later. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: While Bree bringing back some Tolkien for her Da is certainly part of Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, there’s also the sweet meta layer that Sam Heughan was named for Samwise Gamgee. (His parents were part of a London hippie community called Gandalf’s Garden, incredible.) The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, 13th Edition: Always useful for Claire to have an up-to-date manual for her work, especially since I can’t remember how much of her personal library—modern books and her own notes—was destroyed in the fire. Perhaps the Merck Manual will come in handy for Rachel’s impending delivery, or for some other surgery to come this season; or it may merely provide the gift of Nurse Jamie cheekily offering his own medical advice to “not eat shite.” Image: Starz The Soul of a Rebel: The Scottish Roots of the American Revolution by Franklin W. Randall: Excuse me, WHAT. Frank, you dramatic bitch. You researched this book after Claire returned from the stones; you found out everything you could about her second husband and soulmate James Fraser, including his death at King’s Mountain; and you never said a word to her or Brianna about it.  Sure, the book was published after Frank’s own death, and after his wife and daughter both passed through the stones. But it opens up so many more delicious questions about how much he knew that he never shared—about if he ever guessed that Claire would go back—about when he started researching Soul of a Rebel. Could it have been as far back as the very first episode, when he saw Jamie’s ghost in Inverness? Unlike the first time Brianna went back, to warn Claire and Jamie about their supposed deaths in the Fraser’s Ridge fire, she doesn’t realize quite what a bombshell she’s carrying. She says she couldn’t bear to read the book because she’d miss her dad all over again, but Jamie has no such compunction—though the poor man gets a fright when he flips to the author photo and sees Black Jack Randall staring back at him. (Yay also for a brief Tobias Menzies return, even if only in voiceover!) His upset at Claire never telling him about the startling resemblance is such a heartache moment, because you can see why it at first didn’t occur to her, then she realized she could never properly explain it; but his reaction to finally seeing Frank is such a little knife twist even eight seasons and thirty years later. Further twisting the knife is the doubt over whether everything Frank wrote was true. Will Jamie die at the Battle of King’s Mountain in October 1780, less than a year from now? Is this a bit of futuristic posthumous torture, or a historian laying out the truth? Can Jamie avoid his fate, or will any decision lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Interestingly, Outlander author Diana Gabaldon told Parade that in the book version of Soul of a Rebel, Frank mentions several James Frasers, “some of whom might be Jamie, and some who definitely aren’t,” leaving us with some ambiguity about Jamie’s fate. With Gabaldon adding that a TV adaptation necessarily streamlines some of this book subtlety, it seems that the TV show is hinting that the 14-plus mentions of Jamie are all the same person. The fact that the next morning Jamie and Bree come upon two dead bodies with GR carved into their foreheads—for George Rex, so these are Loyalists killed by rebels—signals that despite resigning from the army, Jamie can’t escape war on his own land. Image: Starz Claire and Jamie’s conversation at the episode’s start is likely setting us up for heartache by the series finale. She agonizes over the entire life that Faith lived, that they can never know all the pieces of. But Jamie reminds her that while Claire, too, lost her parents at a devastatingly young age (their fate hopefully revealed in Outlander: Blood of My Blood season two!), he became the true home of her heart. The episode’s takeaway seems to be to mourn one absence while keeping room in one’s heart for all of the time (or, here, the children and grandchildren) that exist alongside that loss. I’m willing to bet that at least one of them, if not both, will not live to see the end of the series. I agree with The A.V. Club’s take, that season eight will likely be less concerned with life and death than with legacy. And considering that a housewarming gift for the Frasers’ new home is a beehive from Lizzie Beardsley (Caitlin O’Ryan) and her twin husbands—bless the Outlander triad—it seems that it will behoove either surviving Fraser to pass on any new happenings to the bees, lest any ghosts go wandering through time… Let’s also remember that Gabaldon has one more Outlander book to be published—A Blessing for a Warrior Going Out, from which Gabaldon teased a few bits did make it to season eight—so there will naturally be some plot divergence between the adaptation and source material. I haven’t read Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, on which this season is based, and I’m not going to look up spoilers because I want to go into these final episodes with the same sense of “anything can happen” from my first watch of the first season. What did you think of the Outlander season eight premiere? What predictions or hopes do you have for the final season?[end-mark] The post <i>Outlander</i> Season 8 Premiere Proves the Series Still Has the “Soul of a Rebel” appeared first on Reactor.

News conan the barbarian Arnold Schwarzenegger Set to Return as Conan in King Conan From Mission Impossible‘s Christopher McQuarrie What is best in life? To return to your old franchises, apparently. By Molly Templeton | Published on March 11, 2026 Photo: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Pictures It has been many, many, many years (42 of them, to be precise), but after all this time, Arnold Schwarzenegger is heading back to the land of barbarians—as its king. The Hollywood Reporter has the news that Schwarzenegger is attached to a new Conan the Barbarian movie, King Conan, which also has a somewhat surprising writer-director on board: Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie’s big breakout was writing the script for The Usual Suspects, but in more recent years he’s been the mastermind behind the Mission: Impossible franchise, directing and co-writing the last four films, including Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. That film was promoted as the last entry in the franchise, despite not feeling like a final film in the least; the filmmakers (and star Tom Cruise) certainly left some doors open for the franchise to revive itself someday. But if McQuarrie is heading off to Conan land, that might indicate he really is done with Cruise and his ludicrous stunts. Schwarzenegger told the crowd at his Arnold Sports Festival that King Conan is “a great story where Conan was 40 years as king” before being forced from his kingdom. “Then there’s conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there’s all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures. Now, of course, you have all the special effects, and the studio system has plenty of money to make those movies really big.” A couple of years back, Schwarzenegger was talking about the then-up-in-the-air rights to a potential Conan sequel, and how he wanted the next film to lean into the fact that he’s not a young man anymore. “I think you do it like Unforgiven, where you play the age,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. Apparently, the former Governator may be returning to several of the franchises where he made his name. According to Variety, he told the sports festival audience, “As a matter of fact, Fox Studios has kind of rediscovered Arnold. They’ve come to me and said, ‘We want you to do Predator, we just got a script for you to do Commando 2.’” The actor sorta kinda appeared in the animated film Predator: Killer of Killers, in which his character (among others from the franchise) was seen in a suspended animation chamber. It may have been a hint of things to come.[end-marl] The post Arnold Schwarzenegger Set to Return as Conan in <i>King Conan</i> From <i>Mission Impossible</i>‘s Christopher McQuarrie appeared first on Reactor.