Movies & TV House of the Dragon Rushing Headlong Toward a Terrible Fate: House of the Dragon, Season 3 Episode 5 White Worms, deadly butterflies, and some significant departures from the source material… By Tyler Dean | Published on July 20, 2026 Credit: Ollie Upton/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Ollie Upton/HBO The back half of season 3 starts out strong with an entry that sends its characters hurtling towards the terrible fates they have wrought for themselves. Whether it’s Criston Cole telling his assembled men that the Stranger (the aspect of the Seven-Faced God that symbolizes death) offers them rest, or Daemon coming across the gruesome display of his Gold Cloaks, or Alicent and Helaena lost in the darkness beneath the Red Keep, the show is not pulling its punches. There is a section below (clearly marked) that gets into some bigger-than-average spoilers for the source material (and potentially for future episodes of the show) as it discusses some of the major ways in which the series is now deviating from its source material, so be mindful of that as you read further if you’d like to remain completely unspoiled. The Title Tonight’s episode is entitled “Unbowed and Unbent.” It’s two thirds of House Martell’s motto—Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken—cleverly hidden in Ormund’s history lesson about Meria Martell. The words of House Martell are overdetermined in their meaning. They refer to the favored Martell weapon, the spear—straight and whole despite adversity. They also refer to Dorne’s status as a kingdom unconquered by the Targaryens: during HotD’s era, Dorne remains an independent kingdom ruled by Prince Qoren Martell. They would not be brought into the Seven Kingdoms save by marriage 57 years from the current, in-world date, meaning they were arguably never conquered at all.  But, of course, the episode does not refer to the entirety of the house words. Notably, tonight’s episode leaves open the possibility that whomever is unbowed and unbent may well be broken. “Broken men” is the term Martin gives to soldiers who have been defeated in battle and either broken rank with their lords or been disbanded by them. They are one of the great dangers of Martin’s post-war eras as well as one of the great tragedies. Janos (Oliver Coopersmith), who meets his end tonight, is one of these broken men, only nominally loyal to Ser Criston Cole.  But it is Cole himself, the most broken, who vows to suicidally confront Lord Tully and the Winter Wolves head-on and remain, on some level “unbowed and unbent”: his days of servitude behind him and his last days lived out on his own terms. It should be noted that Cole is the only Dornishman of note in the series—the ultimate outsider, having been raised in the household of Marcher lords who had cause to hate him. The only one who might understand the words of House Martell in full. In spite of what Ormund Hightower might grotesquely call the “taint in his blood,” Cole has risen to the second highest office in the Seven Kingdoms only to realize he will never be respected or loved by those he rules over. Cole is (rightly) detested for his bitterness, his misogyny, and his somewhat pathetic inability to bear rejection by both Rhaenyra and Alicent, but the show has given him a third path—neither failure nor redemption. Daeron asks Ormund if Meria was a hero or a villain. Ormund responds that her cunning mind makes her laudable regardless of what side she was on. And here we see Cole threading the same needle. His aim is not to be remembered as heroic, just to be remembered as unbent…and maybe that sort of immortality will be enough for Alicent to remember him—perhaps not fondly—in the same way. Unraveling the Opening Credits There is a new panel at the end that shows two men facing one another, one dressed in white and another dressed in brown. They are riding in a boat or maybe standing behind a hay bale… Very unclear as to what they might represent, but I have a feeling that there is a larger panel being drawn depicting Rhaenyra’s reign as a whole including the previous panels of her arriving with Syrax, the scene of Alicent and Helaena, and the panel showing someone whispering into Manderly’s ear (could the other figure be Sabitha Frey?). At any rate, the rent in the tapestry tears through this new panel.  It has also been pointed out at the self-animating, blood-soaked threads that rise up in the new opening shot are fourteen in number. This is conspicuous as it was the Fourteen Flames (the fourteen active volcanoes extending across the Valyrian peninsula) erupting all at once that brought about the Doom of Valyria. Here, fire and blood literally rise up from beneath the earth to weave history—that’s a neat touch.  The Joys of Motherhood Credit: Ollie Upton/HBO So much of the first season of House of the Dragon was a reflection on the ways in which patriarchy uses pregnancy as a form of violence against women—Queen Aemma’s death in childbirth, young Rhaenyra’s abhorrence at having children, Aegon II’s discarded bastards. This season is really bringing that theme back in this plot between Alicent and Helaena.  There is something particularly heartbreaking in Olivia Cooke’s performance of Alicent’s panic over her daughter’s refusal to take the abortifacient procured from Orwyle. Not just her fear for her daughter’s life and freedom, if a male child is born, but the recognition of Helaena’s continued subjugation as part of a patriarchal system that binds women’s fate to their children and refuses to recognize them as anything more. We never see young Alicent reckon with this. She dutifully agrees to marry Viserys at her father’s request and then, after a time jump, she is already a mother. The tragedy is in her recognizing that, if she could have avoided giving birth to her own children, she would now be free of the horrible men who have kept her subjugated, and also recognizing that she cannot, in good conscience, make that choice for her own daughter—the only one of her children she both raised and does not consider a failure.  This gets even more complicated and poignant when Mysaria discovers the pregnancy. After all, Mysaria is herself, infertile as a result of having had a miscarriage after being sexually assaulted by her father as a child. Alicent appeals to her on the basis of not being constrained by fealty to Rhaenyra (especially when Daemon will always be Mysaria’s favorite). But she is also striking a chord by reminding Mysaria that no woman is free from patriarchal violence and that, as horrific and unconscionable as the reasons for it were, Mysaria’s own infertility is part of the reason she has been able to raise herself up in the world, leaving her far freer from the indignities of men than either Alicent or Rhaenyra. DragonWatch  This episode features only a single shot of Seasmoke and Moondancer as they wait patiently while Baela and Addam search for Vhagar. It’s always great to see them near one another for the size comparisons that, I assume, are meticulously orchestrated in every shot. I can go one episode without a bunch of dragon glamour shots so long as more are coming, especially since we’ve had such a glut this season. Odds & Ends Credit: Ollie Upton/HBO RIP to lord Petyr Piper (Antonio Magro), one of the lords that Alys Rivers helped to deliver Daemon last season. In the book, he is already dead at this point, having had a heart attack during the battle at Acorn Hall (one of the three battles they combined into the opening scene of Daemon this season) upon seeing the mutilated body of his favorite grandson. After Criston Cole stabs him, we see the House Piper heraldry featuring a nude maiden with a swirl of white silk, invoking Pinkmaiden, the seat of House Piper. Much of the episode revolves around Tully and Cole’s armies trying to make it to Stoney Sept. That crossing is at the very southern end of the Riverlands, and the river it fords is the headwaters of the Blackwater Rush which eventually empties into King’s Landing. We never see the town itself, but if they keep hewing closely to the novellas, a future season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will be set there.  Alys Rivers summons a swarm of bats from the depths of Harrenhal. Bats have long been a part of Harrenhal’s ecology. In fact, the next two houses to inherit the castle (and the only two houses to occupy it between now and the events of Game of Thrones), House Lothston and House Whent, both take bats as their sigils. The story Alys tells to the first band of would-be kingslayers references how King Harren Hoare, for whom Harrenhal is named, worked thousands of enslaved river men to death building it over the course of decades.  Gotta love the cats now populating the Red Keep. They’ll be there for the next 120 years.  Back in episode 2, Helaena remarked that it was the wrong season for a caterpillar in the godswood to be becoming a butterfly. This feels like it must be in reference to her unexpected pregnancy.  I did not spot it then, but the caterpillar she has been obsessing over this season also appears to be the larval form of what she refers to as the “Alicium of Naath.” This would be the same Naath that Danaerys’ servant, Missandei, is from—an island which is said to be populated by beautiful but disease-carrying butterflies. An open page in Helaena’s notebook details that “they are said to cause death to people around them while living but so far, I remain alive.” The prop work on this show is exquisite. Sabitha Frey (Sarah Woodward) returns this episode, taking a seat on Rhaenyra’s small council. I will talk more about how this is a stark departure from her characterization and plot in the book in a section below, but I’m down for pairing her with the droll and catty Torrhen Manderly. His too-loud whispering of all the court gossip while they sit at the council table is fantastic. Given that Alyn is the acting Hand, Manderly is the Master of Coin, Orwyle is Grand Maester, and Mysaria is the Mistress of Whispers, I presume that Daemon is Master of Ships and Lady Frey is the new Mistress of Laws. Those last two might be reversed, but it seems odd to appoint a Frey to a naval seat given that they live inland and at one far end of the Trident’s Green Fork. Both Torrhen Manderly and Alicent use Mysaria’s sobriquet “The White Worm” this episode. The show has largely dropped Mysaria’s nicknames. I hope they get around to using the best of them—Lady Misery.  Wendish Town, where Vhagar was last sighted, is in the far West of the Riverlands, near the headwaters of the Blue Fork of the Trident. It would, indeed be preposterous for Aegon to try and get there from Rook’s Rest. He’d be crossing nearly the entire length of Westeros from East to West.  Mysaria asking if Alicent’s lover was “a lord or a commoner, or perhaps both” is proving that she is well aware it was Criston Cole who, for all his flaws, his dead-on in his assessment of how much contempt the nobility of Westeros has for him. Yes, it’s primarily about the subjugation of women and the horrors of patriarchy, but the Alicent and Mysaria stuff in this episode is also delightful in showing us the two women who have feelings for Rhaenyra sizing each other up and recognizing that they can have some modicum of allyship as long as Daemon is in the picture.  The metal crow’s feet (or caltrops as they are sometimes called) that maim Criston and Gwayne’s horses recall the sigil of House Footly. Obviously, neither Sharis nor Glendon Footly have anything to do with the events this episode but it’s a neat little bit of resonance, especially since there will be a group of warriors called the Caltrops who show up later in the series. The Hightower agent in King’s Landing with heterochromia was the second-in-command of Ser Freddryk, who we last saw ordering his men to not fire their scorpions at Syrax et al. when Rhaenyra arrived at King’s Landing. Ormund gives Daeron a history lesson on Meria Martell, the Yellow Toad of Dorne. She was the elderly princess of Sunspear during Aegon’s conquest and one of the chief reasons that Dorne remained unconquered (and will remain independent until just a few decades before the era of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms). She’s one of Martin’s best creations from that time period and, if HBO goes forward with their proposed film covering Aegon’s Conquest, she’ll absolutely be one its highlights. Ormund and Daeron play a round of cyvasse—I believe for the first time on any A Song of Ice and Fire show. It’s the in-world version of chess, hailing from the free city of Volantis and popular with some Westerosi nobles including Doran Martell and Tyrion Lannister. Like chess, it consists of pieces with different abilities. We know that they include: rabble, spearman, crossbowman, light horse, heavy horse, trebuchet, catapult, elephant, dragon, and king. The dragon, with which Daeron wins, is the most powerful piece on the board but also precious—the equivalent to the queen in chess. I’m surprised that unlike sabacc, gwent, and triple triad, cyvasse doesn’t have real world-tournaments or at least one hit videogame you can play it online.  While threatening to assault Alys Rivers, one of the sellswords says he’ll make her his “saltwife.” That’s the Iron Islands term for lovers taken while raiding the mainland (as opposed to a rockwife—the one back at home). I think this is our first confirmed Ironborn of the series! Tyland Lannister really hated those monkeys, apparently.  Daemon has gotten a lot of love from the internet over the last season or so, but this episode reminds us that he is, at his roots, a corrupt cop. He’s never more at home than when he’s with his Gold Cloaks causing injury or enforcing a brutal regime. Yes, he’s a wife guy and yes, he’s played by the unbelievably charming Matt Smith, but watching him torture that Hightower spy with glee was a real reminder that all City Watch are bastards. Butterflies Credit: Theo Whiteman/HBO Beware of Potential Spoilers Below Since we’ve passed the halfway point of the season, let’s take stock of all the changes the House of the Dragon is making to George Martin’s source material, Fire & Blood. Martin has been fairly vocal about his disagreements with Ryan Condal over changes to the plot of his novel, which the author believed were too numerous and momentous to square with the version of history presented in both his A Song of Ice and Fire books and the original Game of Thrones show. He’s called these changes “butterflies,” referring to the Butterfly Effect. Personally, I feel like the show, while definitely making significant changes to his original vision, is still on track to have the plot reconcile more or less in line with the general history of Westeros. It’s not quite the deep integration with Gyldayn’s unreliable history that the first season was (where Fire & Blood would offer multiple possibilities for an event about which there were conflicting accounts and House of the Dragon would thread the needle and reveal the truth of it)—but we are not in a place where the show directly conflicts with the major beats of the endpoint of this chapter in Targaryen history. I’ve saved this section for the end because it will contain some spoilers for Fire & Blood. I’m leaving out obvious and major ones as best I can, but if you want to go into the end of this season and season four with no idea about where it’s headed, I’d stop reading now. Here we go: Luthor Largent — Largent, the latest beefy police chief to die horribly on House of the Dragon, does meet his end more or less around this time in the source material. But rather than being murdered and put on display by a Hightower agent in order to taunt Daemon, he is killed during a riot among the smallfolk of King’s Landing. It seems likely that such a riot is still coming but that it will be directly as a result of Hightower treachery rather than as a result of poor stewardship. This is in line with the show’s general departure from the novel; Gyldayn is a misogynist who thoroughly believes that Rhaenyra is a bad monarch, where the show wants to portray her as someone making mistakes while also trying her best to handle a bad situation.  Gwayne Hightower — Freddie Fox’s softer, gentler, take on Otto’s youngest son has been great this season, but he’s also already dead in the book. In fact, Gwayne serves as the second-in-command of the City Watch in the book; he was installed by his father to spy on Luther Largent in case the watch commander was still loyal to Daemon. In Fire & Blood he is killed by Largent when he tries to sound the alarm over Rhaenyra’s approach. Instead, the show has Alicent play on Luthor’s sympathies in order to get his Gold Cloaks to stand down. It’s unclear what the show will do with Gwayne now that he has apparently left Cole’s retinue.  Queen Helaena and Maelor — Helaena is also dead by this time in the book. It should be noted that the Helaena of Fire & Blood is basically a non-entity. Gyldayn mainly notes that she is not particularly attractive and that she loves riding her dragon, Dreamfyre (who we saw, only briefly, back in season one). In the book, she descends into madness after the murder of her son, Jaehaerys, and throws herself off the parapets of the Red Keep early in Rhaenyra’s rule. She is not pregnant with Aegon’s child in the book; rather, she has already given birth to her second son, Maelor. Maelor dies at the hands of a mob after being escorted secretly from Red Keep by Ser Rickard Thorne. I had originally assumed that Helaena would suffer the same fate as Maelor, but after this episode I’m not sure they are playing it that way. This is probably for the best as show-Helaena is fantastic and deserves something better.  Tyland Lannister — In the novel, Tyland never goes to the Triarchy personally; he merely brokers the deal that brings Sharako Lohar to the side of the Greens. He is in King’s Landing when Rhaenyra arrives, and is put in the Black Cells and tortured for information pertaining to the whereabouts of the missing treasury. While he has a role to play later on, placing Tyland with Aegon and Larys is a genuinely unexpected move that gives him a much more central and active role this season. Because book readers know where Aegon is headed but not how he’ll get there, this is all new territory for Tyland as well as his compatriots. Grand Maester Orwyle, Torrhen Manderly, and Sabitha Frey — Placing Lady Sabitha on Rhaenyra’s small council is, like Ser Torrhen’s elevation to the council last season, an invention of the show, with no basis in the source material.Similarly, book-Orwyle is currently languishing in the Red Keep’s dungeons. In the case of the latter, I think they’ve kept Kurt Egyiawan front and center because he’s a great actor and using Orwyle instead of Gerardys (who, in the show, is still back on Dragonstone) is not a gigantic change. But with Manderly and Frey, both are important during events that will likely come to pass at the very end of the series. My guess is that they are bringing them in now to make sure that, by the end of the show (when we have far fewer friendly faces), the plot won’t seem to hinge entirely on newcomers. In the book at this point, Torrhen Manderly is journeying by boat alongside his brother Ser Medrick to serve Rhaenyra as good subjects of Lord Cregan Stark. Sabitha Frey, by contrast, is at Harrenhal and rumored to be Alys Rivers’ lover. There are plenty of other minor changes that have been made but we’ve either discussed them in previous articles (you can read my account of the changes made to Rhaena in my coverage of “The Red Sowing” from back in 2024), or they mostly down to changes in characterization rather than plot.  In Conclusion… Slower and less thematically tight than previous episodes this season, the episode, nevertheless, is another great entry in what has so far been the best season of House of the Dragon (and maybe the best season of any A Song of Ice and Fire show, period). Condal and his writing team have a very firm handle on both the overall world and their very specific takes on characters that were pretty broadly sketched in the original. But what do you think? Are you on board for the various butterflies and other departures from the book, or are you disappointed by them? If you haven’t read Fire & Blood, does this season feel exciting and novel to you? Or have you cooled as things have slowed down over the last few episodes? Let me know in the comments![end-mark] The post Rushing Headlong Toward a Terrible Fate: <i>House of the Dragon</i>, Season 3 Episode 5 appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Vampire Lestat The Vampire Lestat Goes Deep and Dark in “The Failures” The too-short season comes to a close in appropriately dramatic fashion By Molly Templeton | Published on July 20, 2026 Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Well, my chaotic theories were all wrong, and I love it. We did not end with the concert, and Lestat was not in on the beheading. Which was a stretch, I know, but Lestat’s blasé attitude toward the Great Conversion and his obliviousness to Armand’s presence when he sensed the gremlin before? Those things still don’t add up unless you really buy the vampiric “fog of love” thing, which I don’t; it keeps coming up too conveniently, and feels like an excuse. But none of this is all that relevant to a season finale that went deep into one vampire’s psyche, dredged up everybody’s trauma, and wound up on a cliffhanger that tantalizingly teases the least interesting part of the future that we have yet to see. The single most applicable word for “The Failures” is brazen. This season’s tonal shifts have been delicious and wild. The swings are big, the performances bigger. On the one hand the finale did everything I expected it to; on the other, nothing I expected happened, and several things shocked me. It is grand and personal, performative and intimate, over-the-top and heartbreaking. In other words, it’s just right. (It’s written by Hannah Moscovitch and directed by Deadwood and Game of Thrones alum Alan Taylor, who also directed the Interview with the Vampire pilot.)  I’m going to borrow a structure here from our boy himself. Let’s start with Side A: Lestat  This entire season has been an extended breakdown for the brat prince, and now we have rock bottom: almost dead (“Dyyyyyying,” insists Gabriella, in one of my favorite line deliveries of the week) and faced with all of his failures. Or rather, representations of his failures: the people who made him, the people he loved and let down, all reminding him of all the things he’s done wrong.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Does he need reminding? All of this is in Lestat’s head, every table, every location, every face, every line. This show has always been interested in perspective, in the stories each character tells and the way they don’t agree with anyone else’s stories, but this is different. This is Lestat’s psyche, shattered into fragments while his body is in pieces. A slightly more romantic way to describe it might be that we all carry pieces of the people who’ve shaped us. Lestat, in his unraveling, has given all of those pieces weapons to use against him. They call themselves the failure finders, but they are the ways he’s failed each one of them.  As the table moves from forest to tower to Paris street to recording studio, and the courses (all souls, all numbered) come and go, Lestat relives his existence: the people, the places, the mistakes, the horrors. Magnus is the chair until Lestat insists that Gabriella take the role. She occasionally defends him, but even she giggles at his bad reviews. Claudia is not present, having already said her piece.  The idea that Claudia had nothing more to say to him snagged me, since in the seance, she (assuming, for the moment, that it was her) mostly lit into Louis. In Lestat’s telling of that encounter, what did he edit or leave out? Was that, like so many other moments, framed in the kindest-to-Lestat way possible? We are still in Lestat’s perspective, but at the long table the suggestion is certainly that he is no longer in control. As the timer TC set ticks down, he begins to also seem unmoored in time.  The tenor he murdered appears to critique his vocal delivery. Daniel’s giant head appears from the ceiling as he berates Lestat’s head in the bowling bag. We finally visit the absolutely horrible burning of the witches, only to discover that two of them were girls Lestat’s age—and that Gabriella wanted to horrify him so badly that he would run away from Auvergne. “Did you run?” she asks him as they sit alone at the long table. “No. Did you stay home until you were 30? Cabbage!” At least that’s what this version of Gabriella says in Lestat’s mind. He is calling himself a cabbage—but he is also clocking that there is no separating her love for him from her behavior toward him. Even the person he felt closest to, as a child, would hurt him in order to try to drive him away.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC (The music is always great, but the music in the witch scene is as split as Lestat’s mind is: it’s poignant and tragic, but at the same time reflects the murderous enthusiasm of the crowd. I could also spend a lot of time going on about the sets! The costumes! The way every element of this series works so perfectly in concert with the rest! But there is a lot of story to talk about.) Every Lestat scene in “The Failures” is deeply, enjoyably surreal, all these vampires judging, talking over each other, Louis mostly quiet, Antoinette taking notes, TC digging into all the horrifying food. And yet, oddly, it’s kind of straightforward. The unraveling has intensified, and Lestat, facing his potential death (again), is facing himself. (This is what happens to Louis, too, but we’ll get there.) There’s a hint of Labyrinth in the way things from Lestat’s past recur in his dying mind’s dream: “Come now, Lestat; no falling behind,” says his terrible brother, and also one of the “murder of waiters” that leads him out of the dead forest full of unseen birds.  (It’s interesting to me that he doesn’t seem to clock that all the trees are dead.) Everything echoes: Lestat’s mom forces him to watch the witches burn, and he forces Claudia to watch the boy she killed burn. Lestat mocks a musician; he is mocked in turn. And in any one of these scenes you can find the key to the whole thing, the whole sequence, the whole show: All these vampires are terrible, majestic monsters, and all of them are so wounded, so painfully shaped by the lives they’ve lived, that their attempts to demonstrate love look like anything but.  It is to the show’s credit that it does not oversimplify this and reduce it to too-basic trauma math: Thing A happened to person B and therefore their behavior is C. The math is much more complicated than that, an equation that never ends, only continues to reshape itself. Lestat is not just the product of his abusive family and deeply inappropriate mother and traumatizing childhood and nonconsensual vampire transformation—but the person he is will always be shaped by those things. And maybe blame himself for those things. Until it stops. Until a dissolving Lestat veers backward through time in a fantastic montage, and then takes the table—the stage—himself. The performer returns, welcoming to the audience everyone he made, murdered, or memorably traumatized. “Congratulations for your historical proximity to me,” he says, stalking around the stage to a looping, playfully sultry bit of “Butterscotch Bitch.” Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC The powerful, painful suggestion is that Lestat remembers everyone he has ever harmed. Enzo, with the beautifully wrapped package. The train guy. The kid he killed in the Lower Ninth. He greets people by name. He recognizes the venue: the Parisian street where “music first wrapped its belt around my aorta and yoked me through two centuries plus of vampiric life.” He recognizes the people. And when Gabriella snaps “Failure!” at him, he finally pushes back: “I don’t agree! I think in the end, in the end, I think, I was pretty fucking great. But if I failed, if—if I failed, then that means I actually attempted something. Which is more than I can say for most of those I love the most. I don’t know if I mean that. That was performative. I loved you. I did. As grotesque as that love appeared to you, I did.”  It’s such a basic idea, a thing you may have heard over and over again if you are a writer, an artist, a musician: failure means you tried. Fail, fail again. Fail and try harder. But being told this, in a well-intentioned, advice-giving way, is not the same as taking the concept into yourself and accepting that failure is necessary for greatness. Lestat does not come to this moment easily. He has been through his failures, cataloging them, examining them—if unwillingly—and has begun to put some blame where it belongs. Sometimes your failure is your own; sometimes it’s something someone else has put on you. In one moment, he recognizes and accepts his own ugliness and his own success. It is, as they say, progress.  Throughout it all, he flashes back to Louis, to the “could be nice” exchange, to their hands touching. It’s like a lifeline. But eventually he stumbles. Even grammar leaves him. (Lestat the pedant! I love Lestat the pedant.) And the least expected cameo happens: Louis’ brother Paul appears to tell Lestat the most important thing: “He has a hard time saying it. Got that from our daddy. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t. It’s just his way. Thank you for loving him, for loving him the way he needs to be loved. I still wish you were a woman.” “Me too, sometimes,” says Lestat. But there is no time to dwell on his feelings about gender, because there is a great light from above, and “silver threads stretched out over other threads,” and Paul listening carefully to some birds, and replying “Yes, ma’am.” Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Paul appears walking across the stage to sit by Lestat. The implication may be that he is not part of this audience, though he certainly was traumatized by Lestat. I think you can read this two ways (like so many moments in this densely fantastic show): Paul, too, is part of Lestat’s mind, and Lestat here is allowing himself to know what he has been afraid to face: that Louis loves him. The theme of birdsong connects Paul and Lestat, but it also brings us back to the beginning of Lestat’s long dark teatime of the soul. (The soul!) But you can also see Paul as something separate from Lestat—an apparition from outside his mind that comes to communicate something important to him. The silver threads are straight out of The Queen of the Damned, and are something Lestat might not know about yet (though of course he has the blood of Akasha in him). Paul is the last thing Lestat sees before he wakes up on his tour bus (not actually sunk in the river) in a field of screaming vampires and beautiful unwell.  We’ll come back to the very end. First:  Side B: The Dubai Trio (and Associates) Not everyone gets an emotional resolution this season, least of all Daniel, who monologues at Lestat’s head to no end, and Alex, whose only line in the whole episode is “I wanna play the concert.” Which is really interesting, as—as far as we know—he’s in Armand’s pocket, and it has seemed that Armand is opposed to the Great Conversion. It does not fit with his laws. He discouraged Lestat from performing.  Armand also knows that telling Lestat not to do things will not stop him from doing things.  It is interesting that Daniel is not present for Armand’s little science experiment. It is interesting that Daniel is fully sidelined, left babysitting the head in the bowling bag. It is interesting that if you put together Fareed livecasting Jacob’s situation, and Raglan James showing up with a whole posse, and Raglan James saying that Lestat’s still-living parts prove the existence of the soul, it almost begins to seem almost as if the Talamasca was behind this whole beheading situation. Which is a bit odd given that Raglan also says they’re on board with the Great Conversion (in order to save the planet?!?!). Could they not have timed this a little better if they wanted the show to go on? Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Perhaps it’s the other way around: Armand, ever the planner, carefully executed his scheme, and the Talamasca hopped on board. I’m a bit disappointed with the show version of the Talamasca—the Talamasca series was terrible, and not least because if you want to get viewers interested in a secret magical society of watchers, you might consider not making them corrupt from the very start. Also, that protagonist was boring. I miss the book Talamasca, who are essentially a bunch of nerdy researchers with special skills. I feel confident, though, that the Talamasca had nothing to do with Armand’s deeply upsetting, shocking treatment of Regina. This reveal took my head off. It never crossed my mind, not once, that he was collecting other minions beyond Alex. The cunning, the planning, the cruelty—the things she was saying about how he signed her work visa! She had no recourse!—and then to make her one of his followers, triggered to self-harm by the word “Rest.” (It’s so alarming to look back at all the times he’s said that.) But of course as soon as he says it, it all makes sense. Armand is the maitre, the director; he is constantly controlling things, fighting all the loss of control he endured as a child. In hindsight it’s painful that Louis ever believed Armand had nothing to do with the play in Paris. Under no circumstances would he let the coven make him do anything he didn’t want to do. And he says as much in his “Armends” letter, delivered to Louis in a situation in which the latter has absolutely no choice but to listen. “The coven was twisting my arm but I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating.” For all the ugly things it includes, Armand’s letter is devastating. “I told you I loved you, but did I?” he asks. “Or was it a clinging to the underside of anyone who would help me survive?” He says he might be a room “without walls, floor, a ceiling. An infinite nothing.”  Through all of this, we watch Armand from Louis’ perspective; he’s blurry, haggard, restless. Louis’ gurgling is awful, and so is the way his body reaches for his head (and later tries to fend off Armand’s poking). Regina is the unwilling audience, and still a weapon for Armand to be used against Louis, who absolutely refuses to play Armand’s apology game until Armand threatens Regina’s life. Whether or not this is all a Talamasca experiment, I kept thinking that Armand was smart—in a terrible, unconscionable way—to render Louis immobile while making his demands. Armand is strong, and much older, but we’ve seen Louis tear through an entire coven. I’m not sure he would have done so well with a Louis who was not so drastically incapacitated.  Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Assan Zaman is magnetic throughout. He has entirely transformed Armand from his retiring but intense presence as Rashid in the first season to the alluring lover of the second to the nightmare fuel flashing into Daniel’s mind—and now to this. Much of this sequence is him monologuing, as Louis can’t make his mouth work, and Armand doesn’t care at all if he’s talking over Regina. Zaman brings a specific wounded intensity that battles Louis’ own wounded intensity; the nuances are crisply different, and beautifully matched. And Jacob Anderson has to act without moving his head! I think I held my breath for half of this.  “I wasted a near century and that is not nothing. That deserves amends,” says Armand, the man who spent that near-century in a relationship built on multiple lies he just admitted to. (“He said to the head on the skewer,” Louis shoots back.) He calls Louis his Claudia, comparing the way he carried guilt over lying to Louis to the way Louis carries his guilt over Claudia’s fate. It might be true, but this comparison feels calculated to infuriate Louis. Louis makes a mockery of apologizing, writing that he’s sorry for kissing Armand in Magnus’s tower in front of Lestat. He eventually says that Lestat was the love of his life, not Armand, which is obviously true to anyone with eyes. (Not that those two haven’t done terrible things to one another, but again: people demonstrating love in deeply fucked-up ways is the name of the game here.)  Eventually, trapped by the threat to Regina and with his own vitals fading, Louis relents. He has already said that he will never forgive Armand, but there are other things that he needs to admit to himself, and that Armand needs to hear. He says them telepathically, no longer able to move his mouth, because he has put this off as long as he physically can. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking speech, and one that Armand repeats for posterity up until the point Louis gets specific about Armand’s past. Then it’s camera off, laptop slammed shut. He will give that story to no one else. He can barely seem to stand to hear it himself. Louis acknowledges his lies, the way he’s tried to be people he’s not, but more importantly he acknowledges Armand’s past, and the ways in which it overlaps with his own past in New Orleans—from “the opposite shore,” as Louis puts it. “You and I didn’t talk about it much. With you… cause I didn’t want to think on my own sins. Or picture you at twelve. At twelve. You were twelve. Scared. Poor boy. Arun. You need a love that’ll cradle you. You should have that. And I was never that for you. And I’m sorry. My coldness, my denial, drove you to this. I saw good in you. For a while.” The layers here are matched in their richness only by Zaman’s performance as Armand listens. His face tightens up, transforms; his whole body shifts. This is ugly, difficult stuff, and so true to life, the way that sometimes people are unable to hear or deal with the terrible things that have happened to the people they love. They push it away, shove it down, let it be cold. It feels trite to say that Armand needed to be seen. But he gave Louis that story about himself in the Louvre one night, and then it sat there between them, apparently un-discussed. It was too hard for Louis, so Armand stayed alone in that history. It is another litany of failure: Armand failing Louis, Louis failing Armand, the two of them failing to be honest with each other. Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC And despite everything, Armand does need love. They all do. This very strange, messed-up, torturous situation is, at its core, Armand looking for some kind of grace, for the ability to move on. Is there something real between him and Daniel? Can there be? I want to skip ahead to The Vampire Armand in my reading so badly, even though I know it won’t be the same. Book Armand is a very different creature at this point in the book narrative; book Devil’s Minion is much less fraught and combustible. I have this little dream that somehow, this Armand will still get to the point of living in a beautiful Florida mansion with art on the walls and enough guest coffins for all the vampires that are his friends. I think it might take a little longer, though. He’s not there yet. He did carve an A into Louis’ chest before walking out into the daylight. But he also let Regina go. Progress? Lestat, in the end, brushes past the facts for the feelings, which is the way this entire episode works. It’s not a narrative climax; it’s an emotional climax. He summarizes the information he learns from Raglan (“a man I did not recognize but now call a friend”): how the Talamasca was there in the park (why? how??) the night of the beheading, plus some vagueness about Alex’s role. He refers constantly to the “now infamously catastrophic gig,” but the only thing that matters is Louis. Not the 45,00 vampires (down from the 50,000 they kept saying before) and 10,000 foolish mortals in the park. Not the show that Gabriella still wants him to put on. Just Louis, sitting on the bus with that terrible scar on his neck. Lestat sits close to him, but not too close, and for just a moment, the whole show calms.  There is one little breath before Lestat lights into Gabriella and they have a screaming match about whether the show is going to go on, the final line of which is “I am not fucking singing, you fucking monster.” One of those things clearly turns out to be untrue, but Lestat calling his mother a monster feels like progress from his time in purgatory, no? The question of Gabriella still lingers: Why is she like this? How much of what we’re seeing is purely Lestat’s version of her, as not-quite-accurate as first-season Lestat was as seen through Louis’ eyes? I’ve never stopped thinking about perspective, this season, about who is telling which story—and about the rare moments in which the POV is neutral. In Dubai, the initial presentation is of a neutral situation, an interview, but as the show went on, the perspective moved closer and closer to Daniel. But he’s never narrating. We are not seeing the story through him, just from next to him. The most narratively neutral moment in the whole show, maybe, is the auction at the start of this season. Lestat has not yet begun to narrate. We don’t know why these people are here or what has happened to them. It’s just interesting that the season that sinks the deepest into one entirely subjective psyche starts out on such neutral ground.  The end here certainly isn’t the end of the story. At long last, we return to the future, where Lestat is smoking and recording his story. “Am I talking to myself?” he asks before he switches off the recorder. The narration doesn’t end, though. With the hiss of a needle hitting vinyl, Guy Maddin’s voice comes back: “You are listening to The Failures, Album 58, Side A.” And Lestat says: “What did I say at the start of this, as to the Queen, as to destruction unleashed? Something about the regretful dead and the hmm, what was it? Traumatized alive. That I had made a contribution. Let me take that back. The fault was mine. All mine.” Outside, Montreal is a wasteland. And Lestat is kind of standing in the light, like he was in the dead forest. Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC Lestat? Taking responsibility for something? Something this massive? He’s clearly been changed by his experience. I want to argue with him, but that’s book-brain talking: I just reread The Queen of the Damned, which is largely all the backstory to Lestat’s disastrous concert, as experienced by a whole bunch of other intriguing characters whom I would very much like to see on screen. The Vampire Lestat, the novel, is mostly Lestat’s biography, with a bit of rock-band-chaos at beginning and end. The bigger picture comes through in the third book, which we are essentially set up for now. He’s there. The vampires are there (though not trying to kill him, as they were on the page). Akasha is clearly going to show up and wreak havoc.  None of that would have fit in this last episode of the season. I thought that we’d end mid-concert, with a certain amount of the chaos that happens there, but “The Failures” is a different kind of performance entirely. It transforms all of the novel’s backstory into a crucible for change. The Lestat that we’ve seen for three seasons has often been a projection in some way starting with Louis’ version of him as a villain, and then as a haunting. In this season he is spurred into musical activity by anger and betrayal—the book’s release—and then all of that is twisted when Gabriella starts pushing him toward the Great Conversion. His near-death experience is like a very belated coming-of-age, or at least the conclusion of his quarter-millennium crisis.  The Vampire Lestat is about its title character’s transformation, but what of Louis, who has also been through so much? It’s harder to guess what the show will do with him; in the second and third novels, Louis is just kind of there while a lot of wild things happen. But his encounter with Armand will have changed him, too, and I hope we get to see how that shapes his future.  There is resolution in this episode, but it is specific, emotional, psychic resolution that leaves us with Lestat doing two things he would previously have found anathema: Being alone, and taking responsibility. But that last scene is still in the future. There are still mistakes to be made. I hope we get to see them.  THE LAST LITTLE SIPS Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC I did not clock at first that one of the waiters, who is also in the studio later, is Dee Pharma. We never got enough of her. But it’s right that she’s here. This is the only time we go straight into the titles, no messing about—and there’s no little sly comment at the end of “All Fall Down,” just silence. The episode opens on Album 57, Side A, which I just need to note is bananas as at the end we’ve moved on to Album 58. All of that on just one record?!?! The flipping of the image of Alex, like the flipping of a record, or the flipping of reality, is a nice touch.  Sam is not in the band at the end of Lestat’s vision. Gone back to the Talamasca? They do seem to have been quite busy. Some of the course/soul numbers are 187, 205, 214. I do not know what the numbers mean. Ages at which Lestat failed in specific ways? Lestat’s cheery little, “Antoinette, hello” was oddly delightful. “The plays ran for a century and a half.” / “That’s longer than Wicked.” I had to look up Wheelchair Jimmy, which turned out to be another Drake joke.  I love that in Lestat’s final psychic concert, TC is both on the stage and in the audience. Is Fareed Talamasca?  What is it with Armand and white-tiled spaces this season? The subway, the butcher shop. HOW did Armand listen in on the seance? Psychically? Through Louis’ mind? Or did he get in Merrick’s head? (Would have been crowded in there.) Or bug Lestat’s apartment? I wouldn’t put it past him. Speaking of heads I cackled at Daniel saying, “Rescue the head, save the planet?” Was that a Heroes reference, Dan? I’m fascinated by the way Raglan describes the results of this little experiment: “meaning beyond mortality. Wonder returned.”[end-mark] The post <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Goes Deep and Dark in “The Failures” appeared first on Reactor.

News Shifter Adam Scott and Two Severance Colleagues Are Teaming Up to Develop a New Sci-Fi Series Face … off? By Molly Templeton | Published on July 20, 2026 Image: Apple TV+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV+ While one certainly hopes that it won’t be too long before we see more seasons of Severance, one also understands why the creative folks involved on said show might need some other projects to keep them busy in the downtime between seasons. Now, three of said creative folks—star Adam Scott, writer Ezra Claytan Daniels, and producer Eli Jorné—have teamed up to develop a series based on Koren Shadmi’s graphic novel Shifter. The adaptation is being developed for Hulu. Shifter does not appear to be available in English publication just yet. Last year, author and artist Shadmi posted about its French publication, saying that he hopes the book will also come out in the US. Presumably the adaptation news might hurry that process along. According to Deadline, which broke the news about the adaptation, Shifter “is set in the near-future, where a banned cosmetic procedure lets people change their faces on the fly, creating a new underground industry of Shifters, who can become anyone you want, for any purpose you can imagine, for a fee. Rose is making a name for herself as one of the best, but the more she gives to her gigs, the more she risks losing herself.” Shifter will be written by Daniels and Jorné, and produced by the two writers along with Adam Scott, Naomi Scott, and Kevin Cotter (all of Great Scott Productions). Jorné is a producer on the upcoming third season of Severance, and was previously the creator of The Walking Dead: Dead City, and Daniels is a graphic novelist, writer for the third season of Severance, and writer of the remake of The People Under the Stairs.[end-mark] The post Adam Scott and Two <i>Severance</i> Colleagues Are Teaming Up to Develop a New Sci-Fi Series appeared first on Reactor.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Objects at Rest” Sheridan and Delenn prepare to leave Babylon 5 for Minbar By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on July 20, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Objects at Rest”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by John CopelandSeason 5, Episode 21Production episode 522Original air date: November 18, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… Sheridan is restless, unable to sleep as he prepares to leave with Delenn for the new IA capital in Tuzenor on Minbar. He finds Lochley in CnC, equally restless, and they have a nice moment where she admits the station is growing on her and he thanks her for taking over. He also asks that, when he and Delenn leave, there’s no fanfare. They just want to exit quietly and discreetly. Vir sees Ta’Lon ringing G’Kar’s doorbell, and the Centauri explains that G’Kar left several days earlier, with no plans to return. Ta’Lon is confused, as G’Kar summoned him. He breaks into G’Kar’s cabin, but as soon as he enters, a message for him from G’Kar starts playing. G’Kar wishes Ta’Lon to replace him as Narn’s ambassador to B5. Narn needs someone with equal doses of strength and spirit, and G’Kar’s reputation has made him far too much spirit and left him with little strength. While he’s sure that Ta’Lon doesn’t think he’s ready for the job (and Ta’Lon says as much), G’Kar assures him that G’Kar himself felt that way when he got the gig. He’s confident that Ta’Lon will grow into it as G’Kar did. Franklin meets with Hobbs in the Zocalo to offer her the job as his replacement. When she points out that there are other more experienced doctors (who are such hot shit that they’ve never once been mentioned or seen in five years), Franklin counters that they’re all specialists, and he needs a generalist. (Why he doesn’t mention that Hobbs has already had the job while Franklin was on walkabout in season three is left as an exercise for the viewer.) She accepts. As Delenn is packing, Lennier arrives. He was able to take a working vacation from Ranger training to help Ranger One relocate. At one point, he looks longingly and disapprovingly at a picture of Sheridan and Delenn together. Halloran gives a report that things are generally quiet—just a minor disagreement between the Drazi and Brakiri—so Sheridan and Delenn should be able to transition to Minbar without any problems. Sheridan then explains to Lochley that Halloran will remained stationed on B5 as that’s a better location from which to do her job as the head of covert intelligence. Credit: Warner Bros. Television On Mars, Garibaldi meets with a bunch of Edgars Industries employees. They’re all troublemakers and malcontents and firebrands. They assume they’re being fired, so they’re rather gobsmacked when Garibaldi informs them that they’re the new board of directors. He expects them to be brutally honest with him. On B5, Franklin boards his shuttle for Earth. ISN has picked up that there’s a White Star coming to B5, and speculation is that Sheridan and Delenn will be moving to Minbar. Lennier informs Sheridan and Delenn that their stuff is on the White Star and they can leave any time. While Delenn gives their quarters a final once-over, Sheridan thanks Lennier for coming and offers to have him over to visit any time. Lennier accepts the invitation in a way that makes it clear that he will never ever take him up on it. They head to the docking bay only to find a huge crowd waiting for them. Everyone saw the ISN report. Delenn gives a speech about how there is no Minbari word for “goodbye,” as the Minbar mindset allows for the possibility of meeting again, some day, some way. She won’t say goodbye now, either, but instead, “Until we meet again.” Allan sees them off at the docking bay. Sheridan is grateful that not all of the veteran staff is leaving. On the White Star, there’s no captain on the bridge. Lennier explains that the captain remained on B5 so Sheridan and Delenn can command the flight. Sheridan orders that they match rotation with the station, putting their nose facing the CnC window. They see Lochley, Halloran, Vir, Allan, Ta’Lon, Hobbs, and Corwin in CnC. Lochley salutes Sheridan, who returns it. Then they head to Minbar. En route, Sheridan is restless, so Delenn suggests he go for a walk. As he’s walking, he hears a commotion—there’s a coolant leak. A Ranger is trying to get it under control, and Sheridan rushes to help him. Unfortunately, the area is sealed off to protect the rest of the ship, trapping Sheridan and the Ranger. Lennier comes by and Sheridan urges him to override the controls to let them out. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Instead, Lennier turns and leaves them to die. After a bit, Lennier experiences tremendous remorse and runs back, only to find that Sheridan has used the Ranger’s pike to get the door open. While Sheridan and the Ranger are treated, Lennier buggers off in a fighter, disappearing into hyperspace, promising Delenn that some day he will earn her respect back. Sheridan is pissed, even more so when the report comes in from Minbar that authorities there have read Lennier’s diary as part of what is now a criminal investigation into his behavior. Apparently, his love for Delenn was even deeper than they all realized, and he did not approve of her marriage to Sheridan at all. Sheridan agrees not to speak of it, or the coolant leak. They will say nothing of Lennier and if anyone asks about his cough, he’ll say he caught a cold. Upon arrival on Minbar, they have a guest: Mollari, who has come on an official state visit. He joins them for dinner, explaining that his harsh words on Centauri Prime were in order to fire up his people for the long rebuilding process. He still considers them his friends in private, even if he must excoriate them in public. He also has a gift for their unborn child: an urn, which he says is traditionally given to the heir to the throne when he comes of age, but Mollari has no children, nor any plans to sire any, and he says they’ll likely abolish the office after his death. It should be given to their child at age 16. After Mollari departs, the Drakh inform him, through his Keeper, that he has done well, and they will reward him with an hour’s respite from them. The urn, we soon see, has another Keeper in it, one which is obviously intended for Sheridan and Delenn’s child. That night, Sheridan records a message for his child to hear in the future. He only has two decades of life left, so he wants to give as much to his offspring as he can. Delenn comes in at the end and provides the quote from his father before Sheridan gets the chance to say it: “Never start a fight, but always finish it.” Then they go to bed together. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan records the first of what one assumes are many many recordings for his kid, since he knows that the most time he’ll have with the child will be two decades. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s method of choosing a board of directors is unorthodox to say the least, especially since boards of directors are usually people with a financial stake in the company… If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn moves back home to Minbar permanently, makes a lovely speech to the B5 crew, finds out Lennier is an even bigger shithead than she realized, and senses something wrong with Mollari, but can’t put her finger on what. Never work with your ex. Lochley says that she’s come to like serving on B5. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari is very much under the thumb of the Drakh, as his trip to Minbar is primarily so that he can set up Sheridan and Delenn’s kid to have a Keeper, and thus put him under Drakh control. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. Ta’Lon is one of the few Narns G’Kar has complete respect for, so it’s not surprising he was tapped to replace G’Kar. We live for the one, we die for the one. While the focus is on Sheridan being trapped in the chamber with the coolant leak, nobody even mentions the Ranger who found the leak and who almost died. Poor bastard… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Lennier is so in love with Delenn that he’ll commit manslaughter on two people, one of whom is a fellow Ranger. Sure. Looking ahead. Allan muses that he’ll probably still be on B5 when they turn off the lights. The finale, “Sleeping in Light” (which had already been produced a year prior to this), will establish that Allan will, in fact, be on B5 when they turn out the lights. Welcome aboard. It’s a recurring character roundup! Back for their final appearances on the show are Marshall Teague as Ta’Lon (back from “The Ragged Edge”), Jennifer Balgobin as Hobbs (back from “Walkabout”), Simon Billig as a never-named Ranger (back from “The Fall of Centauri Prime”), Joshua Cox as Corwin (back from “Movements of Fire and Shadow”), Marjorie Monaghan as Halloran (back from “Objects in Motion”), and Maggie Egan as Jane the ISN anchor (back from “Rising Star”). Teague will next appear in Crusade’s “The Long Road” as Captain Daniels, Cox will return as Corwin in a couple of the movies, and Egan will return as Jane in three episodes of Crusade. In addition, the crowd scene in the Zocalo that saw Sheridan and Delenn off was populated by members of the crew and actors who appeared out of makeup (such as Peter Jurasik). Trivial matters. This was the last episode of the Babylon 5 TV series to be filmed. “Sleeping in Light” was originally produced to end the fourth season when the fifth season was in jeopardy, then punted forward when the show was picked up by TNT. This is the final appearance on the show of Mollari, G’Kar, Lennier, Lochley, Corwin, Ta’Lon, Halloran, and Hobbs. Lochley and Corwin will next be seen in River of Souls, G’Kar will next be seen in Legend of the Rangers, and the others will all appear in The Road Home, though in the case of Halloran, Ta’Lon, and Hobbs, it’s a very brief cameo re-creating their final appearance in this episode. Both River of Souls and The Road Home pick up shortly after this episode. We saw G’Kar start the recording he made for Ta’Lon in “Objects in Motion.” The ghost of Morden predicted that Lennier would betray everyone in “Day of the Dead.” Mollari made a fire-and-brimstone speech excoriating the IA in “The Fall of Centauri Prime.” Several short stories were published in both Amazing Stories and The Official Babylon 5 Magazine in 1999 and 2000, most of which took place in the two-decade gap between this episode and “Sleeping in Light.” Four of them were written by J. Michael Straczynski: “Shadow of His Thoughts,” which focuses on Mollari shortly after his coronation; “Genius Loci,” which looks in on G’Kar and Alexander on their journey after leaving B5; “Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic,” which takes place three centuries in the future, and bizarrely follows up on the Ivanova-Cole romance; and “Hidden Agendas,” which takes place in the middle of the fifth season and has Captain Ivanova returning to B5 for the first time as a ship captain. The other two are “True Seeker” by Fiona Avery, which involves the Narn as well as Alisa Beldon from “Legacies”; and “The Nautilus Coil” by J. Gregory Keyes, which focuses on Garibaldi and Alexander and ties into Keyes’ Psi Corps trilogy. The echoes of all of our conversations. “There are moments when we all become someone else, something other than what we are. It only takes a moment, but we spend the rest of our lives looking back at that moment in shame.” —Delenn discussing Lennier Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Home is not a place, it’s wherever your passion takes you.” The endless denouement continues! Seriously, it’s epilogue after epilogue after epilogue, and it’s really getting wearing. This episode at least has some excitement with the coolant leak, but it’s ruined by the continued character assassination of Lennier. Turning him into a toxic man-baby was certainly a choice, and it was annoying enough watching it happen to a character who has been previously defined by quiet dignity. Having it take a turn to attempted murder just makes it worse. It’s nice that they got Marshall Teague and Jennifer Balgobin back to reprise Ta’Lon and Hobbs. Ta’Lon has been a fabulous character since we first met him way back in “All Alone in the Night,” and Hobbs proved herself to be way more competent than the guy she replaced (a low bar to clear, admittedly; for starters, Hobbs isn’t an addict…). I’m still not clear why Hobbs was so confused about being tapped to replace Franklin when she’d already done it before, but whatever. Sheridan and Delenn’s departure for Minbar is nicely done, from the big goodbye to one final Delenn speech to the salute to seeing the new guard, as it were, standing in CnC. It’s especially interesting to see that none of the people we see in CnC at the end was on the station in “The Gathering”—indeed, only Vir and Corwin were there in the first season, but Vir didn’t arrive until “Midnight on the Firing Line,” and we didn’t see Corwin until “Signs and Portents.” While some of the personnel changes were dictated by external circumstances (the departures of both Claudia Christian and Michael O’Hare), the show still does a good job of showing that things are never constant. In a medium (a weekly TV show) that rewards maintaining the status quo, it’s good to see that the regular changes that would be part of a milieu like this space station are being shown. There are some head-scratchers here. Halloran says that everything’s quiet, which is a neat trick given that they just fought a big-ass war against the Centauri. There should be a ton of relief efforts and repairs and such going on, not to mention collection the reparations from the Centauri, which has to be fraught. (That it’s not brought up at all during Mollari’s visit is also annoying.) Lochley says that Delenn came back last night, which doesn’t seem to have left enough time for Sheridan and Delenn to do the ten-mile walk across the station and back that they went off on at the end of last episode. Overall, it’s hard to get too worked up about this episode because it’s yet another epilogue, and it’s just gotten so damn tiresome. Next week: “Sleeping in Light.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Objects at Rest” appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary The Sassy Horses of Disney Animation Who needs words when you have attitude? By Judith Tarr | Published on July 20, 2026 Credit: Disney Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Disney I’m taking a sidestep this week, from animals that speak like humans to animals that say everything they need to without uttering a word. It came about after a discussion in the horsegirlsphere, with commenters voicing expert opinions about horses in Disney animated films. The tl:dr comes to: Khan awesome, Samson awesome, Maximus is a dog, dammit. I have thoughts about this. The animated Mulan is one of my favorite Disney films. Sleeping Beauty was a fixture of my early childhood, but I had not seen it in quite a few years. Tangled, the most recent of the lot, I saw when it first came out because everyone, and I mean everyone who knew me and my horses said, “You have to see this. Maximus is your horse.” Disney has produced numerous talking-animal films, but it’s also racked up a substantial collection of films in which the animals communicate without using human words. They make animal noises: whinny, nicker, snort in the case of horses. The bulk of their communication is body language, expression, and above all, attitude. Sleeping Beauty’s Samson doesn’t get a whole lot of screen time, but he makes the most of what he has. He’s Prince Philip’s mount; we first meet him riding through the forest just before the fateful encounter with the long-lost princess. Philip hears her singing away in the woods, and takes it into his head to find the singer. Samson is not in favor. There’s a struggle, with Philip trying to haul him around and Samson resisting. Philip resorts to bribery: “An extra bucket of oats? A few carrots?” Samson’s expressions and body language tell us (and his rider) all we need to know about his opinions. He’s not well or truly bribed, either; during the pursuit of the singer, he scrapes Philip off into a pond. That costs him the carrots, but turns out to be a stroke of fate for Philip and his One True Love. Samson is not too far off reality in horse terms. He has a mind of his own, but he’s always there when he’s needed. His forms of resistance are familiar to many a horse kid. When he neighs, he’s sounding an alarm, which is accurate: Horses are generally silent; they don’t whinny unless they have a clear purpose, usually to express alarm, call out to absent herd members, or sing the song of the stallion to his mares. He is a weird color. Probably a buttermilk buckskin, a sort of cream color with black and mane and tail, though he’s missing the dark points (lower legs, tips of ears). Maybe he’s supposed to be light grey and his mane hasn’t greyed out yet. Khan in Mulan is less realistic and more fantasy-coded. He’s clearly devoted to Mulan; he’s always nearby and strongly resists being separated from her. This makes sense for a war horse, as he’s her father’s retired charger. Horses will and do bond with a single human, and war horses are both trained and naturally inclined to protect their rider. The horsegirlsphere speculates to how old he has to be if he was trained as a war horse, then came home with his rider, and now it’s how many years later and Mulan is taking him to war again. He has to be at least in his late teens and probably older. Which is not impossible—horses often live into their thirties and stay sound well into their twenties—but it says a lot for his quality that he goes through as much as he does and makes it home in perfect condition. He would be a very special breed of horse, the Ferghana or Horse of Heaven. They are creatures of legend, and Khan has the characteristic build and substance, as well as the longevity and stamina. His coloring is, again, on the weird side: he’s what we call true black with chrome (blaze face, white stockings), but he has human-like eyes with whites and blue pupils, and a grey belly and light grey eyebrows. Horses have some movement in the skin and muscles above the eyes, and they can have lovely eyelashes, but eyebrows they do not have. Mostly he’s there as transport, but he has perceptible opinions. These are expressed through the eyebrows, as well as through more general body language. When Mulan dithers over how to approach the military camp, he sprawls like a human, chewing on a grass stem, and manages to look both long-suffering and bored. One truly horselike thing he does is his reaction to the arrival of the tiny dragon Mushu. He tramples Mushu into the dirt. Horses will do exactly that with creatures to whom they take exception. Snakes, scorpions. Noisy and annoying lizardy things. If they’re not dragons and therefore both magical and immortal, they don’t survive the encounter. Maximus in Tangled is a different animal. Samson and Khan are important in their roles, but they are supporting cast. Maximus is a main character. When we meet him, he’s the mount of the captain of the guard, but he quickly graduates from transportation to active participant in the pursuit of the thief, Flynn Rider. He is the most realistic as to color: your classic elite rider’s “white horse,” which usually means he’s a grey. His behavior ranges from fantastical to completely off the wall. Mostly, what he reads as is a dog, complete with tailwagging, occasional random noisemaking (whinnies and the odd nicker), and a propensity to put nose to ground and sniff his way toward his quarry. Now here’s the thing. Horses have an extraordinary sense of smell, well up there in the dog range. They can be used in the same way as scent-tracking dogs, with the advantage that they’re that much larger and that much higher off the ground. They may put their noses down to find a scent, but they’re more likely to track it from higher up, through the air. He does use his hooves as Khan does, to stomp his quarry, and when he uses his teeth, he’s being reasonably horselike. Horses will bite, and will grab hold of handy pieces of clothing or human anatomy. Hurts like hell, too: horses have serious bite power. Maximus has human-level intelligence. He knows exactly what he’s doing and to whom he’s doing it. He’s devoted to his duty as a royal horse. He pursues the thief relentlessly, applies strategy and tactics to the hunt, and he never gives up. He has an extremely expressive face and a ton of attitude. He also succumbs to the allure of the horse girl. When Rapunzel loves on him, he melts. He doesn’t exactly change sides—she is after all the lost princess—but his priorities shift. He stops being the enemy and starts being an ally. All without saying a word. He doesn’t need to. His intentions are clear, and humans in this world are capable of understanding them. They don’t have any delusions of human superiority, either, as we discover at the end, when Maximus takes the place he’s earned in the palace hierarchy. Yes, I had that horse. Gone now and much missed, but he was Maximus. He had a fancy registered name and a royal pedigree, and attitude for days. No, he never wagged his tail, but he could lash it like a cat, and if he loved you he’d die for you, but if he didn’t, you seriously had to watch your back. Every horse kid can tell you stories of Samsons or Khans that they’ve known. Maximus, too: even the fantastical bits.[end-mark] The post The Sassy Horses of Disney Animation appeared first on Reactor.