Credit: Pierce Brosnan, Jay Godwin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Helen Mirren, Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 3.0; Ben Kingsley, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Credit: Pierce Brosnan, Jay Godwin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Helen Mirren, Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 3.0; Ben Kingsley, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
The movie adaptation of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is gaining steam.
Both Amblin and Netflix are behind the feature adaptation of Osman’s first book in the series, which centers on four friends in a retirement community who research cold cases for fun and end up entangled in a recent murder in their town.
None other than Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire) is on board to pen the screenplay and direct, and as of a few hours ago, we know the complete cast for the four core characters that make up the aforementioned murder club.
The actors on board are Helen Mirren, who will play the ex-spy, Elizabeth; Ben Kingsley, who will be the detail-oriented psychiatrist Ibrahim; and Pierce Brosnan, who plays the rough teamster and former activist, Ron. Those three actors are pictured above, but the final cast member announced was Celia Imrie, who will play the cheerfully indomitable widow, Joyce. You can see her in the image below, as Madge Hardcastle in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:
We’ve known about Mirren, Kingsley and Brosnan joining the project for a few weeks. Joyce, however, was still unknown until Osman himself broke the news about Imrie’s casting on a recent episode of his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment (via Digital Spy).
As someone who has read and loved the entire book series—there are four books currently out with a fifth expected sometime in 2025—the level of talent behind this adaptation is exciting.
No news yet on when The Thursday Murder Club will be making its way to Netflix (or if Netflix will give it a theatrical run, though I’d bet a shilling that the streamer will). Osman has said, however, that the production would start filming sometime this summer. [end-mark]
A new murder mystery series is heading to PBS. The show is called The Marlow Murder Club and stars Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey, Home Fires), Jo Martin (Doctor Who, Back to Life), Cara Horgan (The Sandman, Traitors), and Natalie Dew (Sandylands, The Capture).
Based on the eponymous book by Robert Thorogood, the series, which got a release date and first trailer today, gives us a group of unlikely sleuths who work to solve a local murder case.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Retired archaeologist Judith Potts (Bond) lives alone in a faded mansion in the peaceful town of Marlow, filling her time by setting crosswords for the local paper. During one of her regular wild swims in the Thames, Judith hears a gunshot coming from a neighbor’s garden and believes a brutal murder has taken place.
When the police are reluctant to believe her story, Judith finds herself forming an unlikely friendship with local dog-walker and empty-nester Suzie (Martin) and unfulfilled vicar’s wife Becks (Horgan) as they start an investigation of their own. Eventually asked to assist with the official police investigation, headed by newly promoted Tanika (Dew), the women must piece together clues, grill suspect witnesses, and face down real danger as they work against the clock to stop the killer in their tracks.
The Marlow Murder Club will premiere on Sunday, October 27 at 9:00 p.m./8:00 p.m. ET/CT on PBS. And for those who think this show will be right up their alley, I have good news! Masterpiece has announced they’ve already greenlit a second season, which means more murder is coming to Marlow’s new cohort of amateur detectives.
What if King Henry VIII’s son, Edward, didn’t die of tuberculosis? And what if Lady Jane Grey wasn’t beheaded along with her husband Guildford? And… what if the alternate history that unfolds is full of modern-language, NSFW jokes and shenanigans?
That’s the premise of the upcoming television series My Lady Jane, which is based on a book of the same name by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows. We’ve got our first trailer for the show today, and it looks like a rip-roaring, tongue-in-cheek affair.
Here’s its official synopsis:
Gird your loins for the tragic tale of Lady Jane Grey, the young Tudor noblewoman who was Queen of England for nine days and then beheaded, back in good ol’ 1553. Actually… f*ck that. We’re retelling history the way it should have happened: the damsel in distress saves herself. This is an epic tale of true love and high adventure set in an alt-universe of action, history, fantasy, comedy, romance, and rompy-pompy. Buckle up.
The co-showrunners for the series are creator Gemma Burgess (Brooklyn Girls trilogy) and Meredith Glynn (The Boys). Laurie MacDonald (Men In Black, Gladiator) and Sarah Bradshaw (The Mummy, The Hedge Knight) are executive producers. Jamie Babbit (Only Murders in the Building, But I’m A Cheerleader) directs five of the eight episodes and is producing director/executive producer.
Emily Bader will play the titular role of Jane Grey. Other cast members include Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve) as Guildford Dudley, Jordan Peters (Pirates) as King Edward, Dominic Cooper (Preacher) as Lord Seymour, Anna Chancellor (Pennyworth) as Jane’s mother, Lady Frances Grey, Rob Brydon (The Trip) as Lord Dudley, Guildford’s father, and Jim Broadbent (The Duke) as the Duke of Leicester, Jane’s uncle.
Others on the call sheet include Henry Ashton (Outlander) as Guildford’s brother, Stan, with Isabella Brownson (Napoleon) and Robyn Betteridge (Wheel of Time) playing Jane’s sisters. Kate O’Flynn (Landscapers) and Abbie Hern (Enola Holmes 2) portray the king’s sisters, Princess Mary and Princess Bess, respectively.
All eight episodes of My Lady Jane will premiere on Thursday, June 27, 2024 on Prime Video.
Academy Award-winner Holly Hunter, whose previous credits include The Piano, The Big Sick (pictured above), and the voice of Elasti-Girl in The Incredibles, is joining the Star Trek universe as a captain and chancellor in the upcoming series, Starfleet Academy.
Varietybroke the news, though Paramount+ has since confirmed, that Hunter will be the head of the Academy who oversees both the thirty-second-century school’s faculty and cadets.
“It feels like we’ve spent our entire lives watching Holly Hunter be a stone-cold genius,” co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau told Variety in a statement. “To have her extraordinary authenticity, fearlessness, sense of humor, and across the board brilliance leading the charge on Starfleet Academy is a gift to all of us, and to the enduring legacy of Star Trek.”
Hunter will most likely join Star Trek: Discovery’s Tilly (Mary Wiseman) on the call sheet, and chances are good that other Discovery characters, such as Doug Jones’ Saru, might make an appearance as well.
The series is set to go into production in Toronto, Canada this summer, and the set will boast, according to Variety, “the largest contiguous set ever constructed for a Star Trek series, a central academic atrium that will span two stories and include an amphitheater, classrooms, a mess hall, and an idyllic walkway lined with trees.”
No news yet on when we can matriculate to Starfleet Academy on Paramount+. [end-mark]
As if they hadn't already had enough of a hard time, the adorable human/animal hybrids of Sweet Tooth are up against a new threat in the show's final season. Rosalind Chao joins the show as Helen Zhang, who wants to eradicate the hybrids entirely. (Kelly Marie Tran is also here, in an excellent all-black getup, as Zhang's daughter.) But Gus and his friends are on a mission, heading north in search of the answer to a question about the origin of the Sick.
This season's synopsis says:
Having defeated General Abbot in the battle at Pubba’s Cabin, Gus (Christian Convery), Jepperd (Nonso Anozie), Becky (Stefania LaVie Owen), and Wendy (Naledi Murray) embark on a journey to Alaska in search of Gus's mother, Birdie (Amy Seimetz), who has been working to uncover the mysterious origins of the deadly Sick. Along the way, they are joined by Dr. Singh (Adeel Akhtar), who may have his own dangerous beliefs about Gus and his role in reversing the virus. Meanwhile, a new threat emerges in the form of Helen Zhang (Rosalind Chao), her daughter Rosie (Kelly Marie Tran), and the ferocious Wolf Boys, who seek to restart human birth and view Gus as the solution to their plans. As they navigate through perilous terrain, Gus and his group of friends find refuge at the Outpost in Alaska, where they meet a new ensemble of characters including Siana (Cara Gee) and her hybrid daughter Nuka (Ayazhan Dalabayeva). With the clock to find answers running out, alliances are tested and destinies intertwine, all leading to a thrilling climax that will determine the fate of humanity and hybrids.
That's quite a roster of new actors for this season—not just 3 Body Problem’s Chao and The Last Jedi’s Tran, but also The Expanse’s Cara Gee (who looks very different out of Camina Drummer's intense eye makeup!).
Showrunner Jim Mickle told Tudum, “In Season 3, everybody is dealing with some kind of wound or emotional loss, whether that was somebody in their life or a part of themselves. ... Everybody is looking inward and looking to move on and ultimately learning that life doesn’t stop. You have to keep putting one foot in front of another.”
Sweet Tooth is, of course, based on the graphic novel by Jeff Lemire. The final season begins June 6th on Netflix.[end-mark]
The actor Xelia Mendes-Jones has had two breakout roles recently on two Prime Video shows: Renna on Wheel of Time and Dane on Fallout.
In a recent interview, Collider talked to him about his approach to acting generally, as well as his preparation for both parts. The whole forty-three-minute video is worth a watch, but there’s some especially interesting tidbits in it for those interested in the Wheel of Time series.
“I thought the toughest part would be, ironically, convincingly making her hateful. Then, what ended up being the toughest part was seeing everyone hate her,” he said about Renna. “I got so drawn into, when you play someone that horrible, for me, I had to humanize her. I had to justify, like really justify everything she does to myself. Otherwise, I don’t think I could play her as someone who knew that she was doing bad.”
Mendes-Jones went on to say that he developed a backstory for Renna. “I found it very difficult to find exactly what it was that met the really visceral violence and cruelty that she regularly shows over the course of her four episodes while meeting it with the fact that she seems incredibly kind and generous at the start with Egwene,” he said. “I know there’s kind of sexual overtones in the style of the writing in the books from Robert Jordan, and that flowed through the scripts because Rafe’s a huge fan of the books. It was never going to not be there.”
Credit: Jan Thijs/Prime Video
He added, “I didn’t want to give that the emphasis because I felt that was already going to be there in the writing. It’s cooked in, I don’t need to push those buttons. So, for me, the key trait that I gave her was that she is incredibly egotistical, like an egomaniac, and Egwene is a rung on a ladder towards Renna being the star. So, she sees Egwene’s strengths and her power as a jewel in a crown for herself. I kind of gave her this kind of egotism because the niceness comes from disagreeing with the methods of the empire, but not with the ultimate goal and the structures and systems. So, she believes in the system of the Sul’dam-damane dynamic, but she believes she can do it better than they do it. So she wants to use Egwene’s resistance and power of fire to make her an even stronger damane than the ones who are broken.”
The first season of Fallout and the first two seasons of Wheel of Time are now streaming on Prime Video. No news yet on when season two of Fallout will premiere (though there’s a good chance Mendes-Jones will be back to reprise his role as Dane), nor when Season Three of Wheel of Time will be available on the streaming platform. [end-mark]
Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For a more in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
There aren’t many names in American gothic literature that carry the weight of Edgar Allan Poe. A journalist and writer by trade, Poe melded an early form of pulp fiction and the preoccupations of (for his time) modern American with a deconstructive eye of his literary counterparts across the Atlantic. From this fertile imagination grew classic horror stories like “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” works that incorporated (in a rudimentary way) both the focus on his characters’ psychology that characterized Poe’s own unique approach to gothic fiction, and issues like insufficient mental healthcare, class violence, and other social concerns.
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” a gothic work published in Grotesques and Arabesques, is a terrifying portrait of a nobleman driven insane by inbreeding, generational trauma, and his own refusal to leave his ancestral home. Within the traditional gothic framework of the story, Poe also takes jabs at aristocracy, the idea of families as institution, and various conventions of gothic literature itself.
On a gloomy fall day, the unnamed narrator rides to the House of Usher, the ancestral manor of his former best friend Roderick Usher and his family. The house is in disarray, a ruin afflicted by fungal rot and disrepair only matched by the mental and physical decay of its sole surviving inhabitants, Madeleine and Roderick Usher. While the narrator helps Roderick in every way possible to shake off his gloom and find his way back to health, it’s clear that the rot goes much deeper than the House itself. As the House of Usher’s darkness threatens to envelop the three of them, the narrator must escape before both the family and the house drag him down with them.
The sickly environment of the Usher siblings’ home provides a feedback loop for Roderick. By the time the narrator arrives at the titular house, it’s in disturbing disarray, with the narrator even mentioning multiple times that there’s a horrifying malaise to the air. Gothic fiction relies heavily on visual cues to help cultivate its atmosphere of unease, and the environment feeding off Roderick’s advancing mental illness (and clear environmental illness, given that his sensitivities are signs of an advancing case of mold toxicity from all the fungus) exemplifies this. It’s clear that between the loss of his family, his clinging to the moldering ruin as the last vestige of his family’s memory, and the deeply toxic relationship between himself and his sister, he's not doing well either mentally or physically. The longer he stays in that depressive loop without any kind of change, the worse things get. Eventually, it leads to him accidentally burying his sister alive, and the two of them dying as the house crumbles and falls apart around them.
Within that gothic tragedy, Poe finds an unusual note of grim and deadpan humor about the situation. While there’s a supernatural air about the House and the Ushers within, everything in “The Fall of the House of Usher” has a reasonable explanation. The unnatural glow at night is swamp gas, Madeleine’s ghostly appearance is due to the fact that she’s been locked in a vault underneath the house, and the constant descriptions of the House (itself a sideswipe at the need to detail every inch of the architecture frequently found in older gothic works) foreshadow it eventually falling apart completely. The story isn’t sympathetic to Roderick, with the narrator consistently more unnerved and terrified by his former friend than anything else. The Usher family line, fallen far from whatever nobility they held in the past, is portrayed as so inbred their family tree is basically a trunk. Roderick even becomes one of the earliest depictions of the dreaded Guy Breaking Out an Acoustic Guitar as he holds the narrator hostage in order to perform his original compositions, which the narrator describes as “unnerving.”
The combined effect of the empathic environment, Roderick’s numerous failings, and the deadpan way Poe pokes fun at the traditional conventions of gothic literature center the blame mainly on Roderick for being idle, privileged, and doing nothing to change his situation. He’s intellectual and clearly has a great taste for art, music, and literature but lives isolated and alienated from everyone in a moldering gothic ruin infested by fungi. In the end, it’s that stubborn refusal to change, and the narrator’s own realization that Roderick has destroyed not only himself but his sister Madeleine (and is possibly on the way to destroying the narrator), that proves to be the undoing for two-thirds of the cast, as the vengeful Madeleine dies strangling Roderick to death only for the house to collapse upon them, ending the line of Usher.
Roderick, in perfect adherence to the genre conventions, ends the story in a state of terror as he realizes that Madeleine’s clawed her way out of the vault and is probably not particularly happy that her brother and sole companion buried her alive. There’s not much nobility and romance to the story, just a grotesque man forcing the narrator to paint horrid landscapes with him, listen to his bad poetry, and read depictions of historical atrocity, none of which seems to help improve his mental or physical health.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” functions as a send-up of both gothic tradition and the more right-leaning conventions of genre—the doomed family cannot be saved, the dead woman who haunts the estate isn’t dead, the misogynist subtext of gothic literature is made distinctly text as Roderick would rather lock his sister away (much like the classic tropes of the madwoman in the attic and the mysteriously ill waif) than deal with her problems, the stately manor is a crumbling wreck that collapses in on itself, and the noble yet doomed scion of the cursed family is the maniac result of centuries of incest who holds his good friend emotionally hostage in a damp moldy ruin. In the end, there’s no cruel whims of fate or supernatural curses, just the narcissistic and literally toxic influence of a self-destructive noble unable to (literally) see beyond his own front door.
Institution in “Fall of the House of Usher” is not upheld. It is a poisonous and ultimately fatal thing, clung to by someone for whom family name and generational property are all they have left.
And now to turn it over to you. Did “The Fall of the House of Usher” successfully criticize the decadence of the upper classes through the medium of gothic literature? What story first got you started reading Poe? What’s your favorite depiction of an annoying guy forcing everybody to listen to him jam on an acoustic guitar in all of literature?
Also, please join us next time for an exploration of Stephen King’s own dalliances with gothic fiction.[end-mark]
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from Lost Ark Dreaming , a new science fiction novel by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, available now from Tordotcom Publishing.
Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.
There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.
Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this conflict: Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living—for everyone.
Prelude
What are we but water and skin?
My dearest All-Infinite—
You must understand that this is the way the world always ends:
in
worthy questions left unanswered lonely hearts and empty eyes;
lapping warnings nightly silence ripples in the undersea.
Yekini
Yekini had one dream, and the ark was always in it.
She had never been religious—not in the old ways before the deluge, not in the new way of the Master Clerics, and not in the way of those who secretly tended to bygone spiritualities. Yekini should never have even known the tale of the ark and the flood. But somewhere between tower-wide broadcasts regaling denizens with sermons about the fulfillment of the Second Deluge, and Maame—who was intensely spiritual and knew too many tales from above and under the sea—learning about it was inevitable.
The dream was always the same. The ark’s keeper stood at the bow in a flowing robe, reaching out, asking Yekini to hand over the basket. Sometimes, it was Olókun who stood there, stretching forth a tentacle rather than an arm. Sometimes it was Noah, with a bushy beard and a tight squint, crow’s feet at the edge of his eyes. Other times it was Sekhmet in her lioness head, or Utnapishtim looking like immortality personified, or Deucalion or Waynaboozhoo or Manu. Sometimes, the ark was a boat or a ship or a raft.
Regardless of who stood there or on what, Yekini always looked down, into the face of the baby in the basket.
The baby was her—or at least had her face. Sometimes, the face was that of her foster grandfather’s, Maame’s husband—an approximation, since he died before she was three. Sometimes, it was what she imagined her own parents would’ve looked like if they’d survived long enough for her infant brain to retain their features. Sometimes it was a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance. Always someone she could choose to save.
The real problem was that she always chose not to.
The ark’s keeper would try to collect the basket from her, but she would hold on, fingers locked in a vice grip, knuckles taut. Halfway through this tug-of-war, her awareness would return, and she would see that they were not standing on the deck of the ark or boat or raft, but on the roof of the Pinnacle, overlooking the other four towers of the Fingers—back when they were still beacons of radiant hope, before they fell and became derelict. Except, it wasn’t the Fingers, but Old Lagos from the time before the waters, how she’d seen the city portrayed in image and video feeds.
And just when she thought of that, the waters would come.
The wind always arrived first, tickling her eyebrows, and when she looked down, the waters would rise, rise, without warning, as the reports had said they did. One moment, yellow automobiles littered the streets far below; next moment, they floated on their sides alongside everything else: trees, buildings, people. She would look up and realize the ark was not the ark at all, but a rescue helicopter, taking off with the ark’s keeper staring out the window, shaking their head as they left her standing there with the basket. The basket, which, when she looked down, was now empty, lacking answers yet filled with questions.
Then she would wake up in a sweat and realize she was late for work.
Today, for instance.
0730, Day 262, Year 059, the glowing numbers on her nightstand read, which meant she was on the morning rota, which meant she was due at 0800, which meant she was already half an hour behind schedule, which meant she had slept through her alarm—which meant her dreams were becoming more intense.
Yekini scrambled out of bed, slammed her knee into the built-in nightstand and cursed. She crawled to the kitchen, put a dish cloth under the spigot, squeezed, and wiped her armpits and privates. Next: a breath mint. Between cleaning her teeth and dressing up, there was only time for one.
When the pain in her knee subsided, she slid the wardrobe open, moisturized her locs and palm-rolled those closest to her face while picking out a clean suit. Midder dress code for work was pastels, and she went for a quick and efficient gray and white. She was halfway through stepping into her shoes when she heard Maame’s raspy breathing from the living room.
Shit.
Yekini hopped to the kitchen and programmed a breakfast sequence for her grandmother. As the pot confirmed the prep settings for corn pap, Yekini popped her head around the doorway to see if the woman was awake. Light washed over Maame from the screen she’d been watching the night before, but her chair was still reclined to its sleep position, her eyes still shut.
Yekini whispered the remaining instructions to the unit’s assistant: shut off screen, set timed lights, set alarms for Maame’s medication, set alarms for Maame’s programs. The assistant whispered back its confirmation. Satisfied, Yekini slipped out the door and whispered her final instructions for a timed lock.
The hallway outside was wide and curved, as most of the corridors in the Pinnacle were. Yekini ran for the elevators, often not seeing oncoming pedestrians until she’d almost bumped into them. It took a while for her to realize she was on the southbound track. She crossed quickly to the outer northbound track, to the dismay of a tram driver who almost careened into her. No time to apologize. She had to make the elevators.
She arrived just in time to catch the last one, slipping in before the doors closed, breathing heavily, sweat lining her neck. The car advanced upward, packed full of Midders like her who worked so high up the tower that their shoulders almost brushed the Uppers. Most were dressed in the same way as she—essential, minimalist—making it clear they also worked in some arm of government.
Yet they shot her glances anyway. Perhaps today it was the sweat and her slightly rumpled clothes. But it could just as easily have been the blotch of yellow dye in the corner of her hair, or the fancy pin on her suit. She enjoyed a dash of color every now and then. Her coworkers and superiors, like most Midders, did not.
Once the car eased into Level 66 and the doors opened, Yekini shot down the corridor, glancing at her wearable every few seconds. 0756, 0758, 0759. At 0800, she crossed the sign that said Commission for the Protection of the Fingers.
A grid of workstations, laid out over the large floor, welcomed her into the agency. She scurried through them to the workzone in the rear that read Analysts, one eye on the clock. Her station, all the way in the back row where junior analysts sat, was within reach.She raced to her desk and pressed her finger onto the station scanner, clocking in. The desk pinged its acceptance and began to process. Yekini crossed her fingers, counting the seconds, wishing for a miracle.
The desk pinged. You Have Arrived, it congratulated her. 0801 hours.
“Fuck me,” said Yekini, slumping into the chair.
She leaned her head back over the headrest, waiting for a second ping, one that was definitely going to be bad news. Sure enough, before her thought was complete, the desk pinged one more time. Yekini sighed, tapped the screen, read the message, then frowned.
This was a mistake, surely? She’d only been a minute late this time—that didn’t warrant this kind of response. And yes, her punctuality strikes had racked up, blah blah blah, but…something was wrong here. Something had to be.
Because why on Savior’s given waters would they send her undersea?
Tuoyo
Tuoyo’s day had begun with a literal bang. A junior technician had woken her up by slamming repeatedly on her unit door rather than do the respectable thing and ping her ahead of arrival. But all expectation of etiquette vanished from her mind when he revealed that something had torn a hole in the airlock of Level 9, and as Level Foreman and Head of Safety, it was her duty to see to it.
First things first: she sent a sitrep upstairs, labeled it critical as protocol demanded. Then she reported at the desk long before her shift was due.
Turned out the culprit was a broken panel in the sluice gates used to flood the airlock for underwater exits, an action they hadn’t carried out in a while. A broken gate meant they couldn’t deflood and depressurize the airlock, the one thing it was good for.
The hole in question was a split seam in the airlock’s wall. Tuoyo guessed that sustained underwater pressure on the aging walls must’ve done it. They were lucky this was a level where the walls were fortified, meaning there was no structural damage. This was also a work wing and not a residential one, so the leak had only affected a few isolated areas and some engineering equipment.
She quickly dispatched two teams: a cleanup crew to seal off the wet areas of the tower and begin siphoning the water, and a tech team to the airlock to repair the gate and mend the seam. In the interim, she spent an hour peering over sweaty heads into various monitors with feeds from the Pinnacle’s exterior underwater cameras.
There was no sign of any NTD—non-tower dweller, as the OPL classified them. No sign of a breach on the outside walls either. The sluice gate’s break was clean along the edge, so it didn’t look like the work of an external party. Constant pressure changes could do that to aged material. She’d noticed such weaknesses in other parts of the level, so it wasn’t far-fetched. The Lowers were built shitty anyways, a situation she found surprising for people as smart as Uppers supposedly were. Didn’t they know that if the Lowers crumbled, the whole tower would follow?
She watched from the monitors as the techs replaced the broken gate, then returned to the airlock and began to weld the split seam. It was really one errant wall panel, and took about an hour to fix. Afterwards, they de-flooded and de-pressurized the airlock, checked for leaks, pressurized and flooded again just to be sure.
Everything seemed fine.
As the team waited in the chamber for the final de-flooding and de-pressurization, Tuoyo sent a follow-up sitrep upstairs with copious notes about cause, damage and repairs. She removed the criticalwarning she’d initially appended to the report. Hopefully, upstairs hadn’t dispatched a response yet—and even if they had, she could defend her decision. A seam split in the walls was critical.
One hour left until her shift ended. She retired to her workroom to catch a bit of sweet sleep, and was just about dozing off when she was awakened, rudely, by the beeping of her handheld.
She rose from the pull-out bed in the tiny workroom and peered at the screen. A visit: two officials from the midders were on their way to see her with regard to the breach.
Ugh. Protocol would be the death of her.
But then she looked at the two officials, and her heart began to beat a little bit faster.
The last time an official from COPOF had shown up to see her, it was for a very different reason. The dark cloud that hung over her life had formed that day and had not left since.
Breathe, Tuoyo. Breathe.
She pushed the bleak thoughts down and folded the bed back into its compartment. As she squeezed back into her jumpsuit, she swiped through their profiles, wondering why the COPOF would send someone. Did they think this was an internal threat? Or worse, external?
Did they think it was Children?
The thought of Children sent a chill through her, fear braided with antipathy. She pushed it down.
She met them in the hallway. They were dressed funny, their protective getup a mixed bag between high-risk conflict and underwater gear, but completely neither.
“Are you the Foreman for this level?” the short man asked without pleasantries. Tuoyo was immediately reminded why she hated being in the same room with these Midder government types.
“Good day to you too,” she said, her demeanor flat. “I’m Tuoyo Odili, Foreman, HSE and Security, Level 9.”
“I’m Yekini,” the woman next to him said, and waved awkwardly.
“Yes, yes,” the man—profile name: Ngozi—said impatiently. “Can we get this done?”
Tuoyo led them down the corridors to the south end of the level, what she liked to think of as the Aft of the Pinnacle. The tower itself was almost shaped like the old ships of yore—or like many such ships stacked one atop the other. The south face was the stern, and the north face the bow—which was why her mind thought of it as the Pinnacle’s Forward. It was a marvelous feat of engineering and architecture, and if not for the challenging conditions of the Lowers, amidst other life challenges, she might’ve even loved living here.
“Why are you dressed like that?” she asked the two officials.
They looked at each other, confused.
“The mobilization brief said this is how we should gear up,” Yekini said. She was a young woman—younger than Tuoyo, at least—slightly impish, and gave off the impression that she regarded all of this as some sort of novelty.
“Oh,” said Tuoyo. “So, you fell for the prank, then.”
Ngozi frowned. “The what?”
“Your people do it all the time. Because you lot never come down here, they tell you that you need all these ridiculous things. See if you’ll know.” She eyed Yekini’s firearm. “You don’t need that for anything here, unless you’re trying to start some disturbance. Or you’re police. Or both.”
“I knew it,” said Ngozi, slapping his palms. He turned to Yekini. “You know your superior will be hearing from me, yes?”
Yekini had something on the tip of her tongue, but decided against it. They went on in silence.
“You sound very erudite,” said Ngozi. “I was led to believe that Lowers aren’t very, well, sound.”
“Mr. Nwafor,” Yekini said.
“What? It’s just a question.”
Just a question. Tuoyo snorted.
“Something funny?”
“Yes,” said Tuoyo. “You. You are funny.” She said funny like idiot, and hoped it was obvious to any discerning ear, Ngozi’s included.
“Explain.” He said it like a command, an attempt to claw back some of his splattered dignity. Tuoyo didn’t want to fall for it, but decided he needed the lesson anyway.
“Just a question,” she said. “People like you say things like that so you don’t have to face the truth about yourselves.” He made to interject, so she hastily added: “And before you say it’s not true, I know it is because I used to live in the midders.”
That gave him pause, and she proceeded.
“People told me things like this throughout my time up there. They thought they were being nice. I don’t know what your definition of nice is, but implying that everyone is stupid where I come from doesn’t sound nice to me. And, if you must know, many Lowers are very well educated, myself included. You think this tower is held up by the Savior’s hands?”
Ngozi, who seemed to have tuned out a while back, suddenly snapped his fingers. “I knew it!”
The two women glanced at one another. Yekini made a disdainful click in the back of her tongue.
“And what did you knew?” Tuoyo said dryly.
“Your name,” said Ngozi. “It sounded familiar.”
Oh no, Tuoyo thought.
“You’re that Tuoyo Odili,” he was saying. “That was your wife, right? The anthropologist who was all over the screens a few years ago—she was on that boat expedition that was attacked by Children?”
Tuoyo swallowed. Though she had long left that Midder life behind, every now and again she ran into someone who recognised her from the family photos of her and Nehikhare that had filled the broadcasts. The OPL had put them up without her consent, of course, trying desperately to turn eyes toward the stories of the people lost, and away from the cause of the disaster.
She’d hated talking about it then, and she hated talking about it now. She’d spoken about it enough for a lifetime.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Yekini said.
Tuoyo nodded. “It was a long time ago.”
“So you know about Children, then?” Ngozi said, oblivious. “Tell us—do you think it’s Children, this breach?”
She did not think it was Children. She did not think it was anything. She did not think at all. She wanted to stop talking.
“Children can’t survive out of water,” was all she could offer.
“Ah,” said Ngozi. “Of course. I knew that.”
The airlock’s heavy doors came into view. Tuoyo breathed a sigh of relief and punched in the entry code.
The airlock looked and smelled exactly like it did after every flooding—dank and moldy. It used to be re-insulated periodically, but like most things in the Lowers, that had not been done in a long time. Rust had now taken over the place and it looked more derelict than it should have. Light came from a single source: a large lamp at the sealed exit.
The most alien thing here was the sea gunk that stuck around after every flooding, and the smell that came with it. Some of it was possessions from a life before, things that did not degrade, mostly plastic. Some of it was the nondegradable parts of unrecognizable gear, industrial and building material from whatever structures still stood undersea. But most of it was litter—container caps, cosmetic products with the names washed off. They clung to the walls like starfish.
Tuoyo remembered how fascinated Nehikhare used to be by this trash. Not trash, as she’d say. A window into the lives of the old world. Every now and then, there would be knickknacks from the old nation in their unit—a personal item recovered on an expedition, a portion of a piece of equipment, some sand dug up from the sea bed that used to be Old Lagos. Tuoyo hated it then, and as was her way, had been vocal about her distaste. But Nehikhare would laugh it off and kiss her, and then Tuoyo would forget how to make words again.
Ngozi coughed. It echoed in the metal chamber.
“My ears.” He poked a finger in each ear and twisted.
“You get used to it,” Tuoyo said.
“I don’t know how you can. Smells like fish in here.” He surveyed the compartment. “If this is just a transition chamber between us and outside, why is a broken sluice a critical problem again?”
“The critical alert wasn’t for the sluice,” she said, pointing to the newly repaired section along the wall edge. “That was.”
The weld lines were so clean they would’ve been unnoticeable if not for existing rust. Tuoyo marveled, for a moment, at how neat it all was, how much good training she’d imparted to the techs.
“Okay, but I’m still struggling to see how that’s critical. It’s just leakage, right?”
It wasn’t a bad question—not from a non-engineer, at least. But she found herself swallowing a scoff at just leakage. This man and his justs.
“We have a saying down here: every leak is death,” she replied. “Maybe for you up there, a leak only means a failure of plumbing. But down here, an unattended leak could easily mean a structural failure. A leak here is bad for all of us.” She leaned in, hoping to drive home her message. “All of us.”
“Okay, wow, you’re an intense woman,” Ngozi said, recoiling.
Yekini, who had been pacing around the airlock so far, poking her head into corners and peering at edges, had stopped at the sluice gate and was inspecting the repairs. Without looking at the others, she said: “That split looks bigger than I expected.”
Tuoyo was unsure how to respond to that.
“Unless they welded beyond the hole.” Yekini’s expression had shifted from impish to serious. “Because that looks almost big enough—”
“To fit a person,” Tuoyo completed, and she suddenly wasn’t so sure what she believed had happened anymore.
“I thought you said it was pressure?” Ngozi asked, but Yekini was already moving. She approached the weld, ran her fingers down the lines, then took out a flashlight and swung its beam across the walls.
“Is there something you’re looking for?” Ngozi pressed.
Yekini ignored him and turned to Tuoyo: “Did you scan the airlock before or after the repairs?”
“Both? Sweeps are automatic sequences within the pressurization and de-pressurization cycles.”
Yekini pressed a button on the flashlight, and another light came on—ultraviolet. “Including a UV sweep?”
“No.” Tuoyo frowned. “That’s not included. Why would we want to do that?”
Yekini pulled out a medium-sized can and sprayed it in a spot. “To check for things that say that something alive was in here, perhaps?”
“Alive? You mean, like, my tech staff?”
“What’s that?” asked Ngozi, pointing to her can.
“Luminol,” said Yekini, spraying another spot. “And no, not your techs, who I’m sure were suited the whole time. I’m more concerned about anything else that was not them.” She sprayed again. “Any fluid will show under Luminol and UV—blood, semen, saliva, urine, sweat. For aquatic creatures, we’re looking for Trimethylamine. That’s what gives that fishy odor you’re smelling.”
Tuoyo knew that word—Trimethylamine. After what happened with Nehikhare, she had done a lot of reading aboutthe sinking of The Centurion—most of which she wasn’t really supposed to have been doing. It was where she had come across this word.
Yekini was still spraying. “I’m just looking for traces. See if maybe something got in here that was big enough to—”
Yekini stopped short at a spot near the weld. She sprayed again, tentative. Reflexively, her hand reached for her firearm and paused there.
“What is it?” Ngozi asked.
Yekini gulped. Slowly, she sprayed from her can, in long, large bursts, over the welded panel. Then she clicked her UV light on and pointed it there.
It took a second, but slowly, the outlines came into view: sets of five digits, scattered all over the formerly split seam.
Fingers, maybe; toes, maybe. But the most prominent thing was that which connected them—the light membranes of a web.
“Children,” Tuoyo whispered, and overhead, her dark cloud rumbled.
Neon’s marketing push for the upcoming horror movie Longlegs has been intriguing to watch. The clips released in the past were either vague, full of vibes but lacking in plot details, or laid out actual puzzles that they hoped people would work to solve.
Until today! Well, kinda. The latest trailer for Longlegs gives us details on the character Maika Monroe is playing, as well as very strong clues (and maybe even a glimpse) of Nicholas Cage’s role in the film.
The trailer reveals that Monroe’s character is a “lady FBI agent” who admits to a child that it’s scary to be in her profession. She appears to have been called in to a case with a lot of dead bodies, and examines a letter left with the corpses that includes a coded language we’ve seen in previous marketing materials, as well as the word “LONGLEGS.”
The trailer also includes Monroe researching into the nine circles of hell and having her tell her FBI boss that the murderer in question (aka Nicolas Cage) will kill again. We also hear Cage’s warped voice in the trailer telling Monroe, presumably (though not confirmed), that he knows she’s not afraid of the dark, because she is the dark.
That setup is reminding me a bit of Silence of the Lambs, but this is clearly a different beast, in part because Cage’s serial killer is never behind bars. The trailer also suggests that we’ll see atrocities unfold across different-but-connected timelines, which is disturbingly intriguing.
Longlegs is from writer-director Osgood Perkins. It’s set to premiere in theaters on July 12, 2024.
We’re back with a landmine of an episode! (Get it? No, you’re right, it was bad. I feel bad.)
Recap
A man named John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) is making his way home out of a war zone to see his daughter Splice (Caoilinn Springhall), but the ambulance (Susan Twist) in the area notices that he’s temporarily blinded and determines that his recovery rate is too slow—it terminates and compresses his body into a cylinder. The Doctor and Ruby land on this world, called Kastarion 3, and the Doctor wanders out first, accidentally stepping on a landmine. He cannot move, lest he set the thing off, and Ruby has to help him shift his weight by handing him Vater’s cylinder. They sing to one another to distract from how terrifying the ordeal is, and the Doctor manages to shift his weight a little with the cylinder in hand.
Back at the camp, Mundy Flynn (Varada Sethu) is helping to look after Splice, one of the medics in the army. She asks Canterbury James Olliphant (Bhav Joshi) to switch shifts with her—Olliphant clearly has a crush on her and Mundy hasn’t entirely figured that out. When Splice runs out to look for her father, she hears his voice, generated by an AI projection of her father connected to the cylinder that the Doctor is holding, and almost sets off the mine. Mundy arrives and the Doctor begins to put together what’s going on here. The equipment for the war is manufactured by Villengard, the biggest supplier of arms in the universe, and the company has parameters in place that ensure enough casualties to continue conflicts so they keep making money. He asks Mundy who they’re fighting and she tells him there are creatures in the mud or the fog, that they’ve been attacking since the Anglican soldiers landed. The Doctor informs her that there is no war, and her people are fighting shadows, which is exactly what the Villengard algorithm wants them to do.
The ambulance arrives and wants to treat the Doctor, meaning it will likely set off the mine, but the Doctor tells Mundy to scan him—if he dies in this explosion there will be enough energy to take half the planet with it. In order to stop the ambulance, Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her. While they’re busy arguing over logistics, Olliphant shoots Ruby, believing her to be a threat to Mundy. The ambulance scans Ruby, finding all sorts of information on her, but it cannot tell them who her parents are. It also won’t treat her because she isn’t insured. In the panic to try and stop the system Munday and Olliphant start talking about their feeling for each other, but Olliphant is killed by the ambulance—his AI has a message for Mundy that it’s okay that she didn’t love him, even though he loved her.
The Doctor tells the AI version of Vater to remember the part of him that’s a dad, and to go into the system to stop all of this. The ambulance claims to have deleted him, but Vater resurges, becoming a virus that destroys the algorithm, saving the planet. After a moment looking out at the planet, the Doctor tells Ruby it’s time to go because they’ve seen enough and human lifespans are too short to stand around.
Commentary
Image: Disney+
For some folks, I’m sure that this is the breath of seriousness they were hoping for in the wake of two very goofy opening episodes. But when I’m watching, what I see is a redux of Davies’ favorite mechanisms and tropes followed by a redux of Steven Moffat’s favorites. And I’m a little worried for it, knowing that we’re only getting one episode written by new writers (that’s episode six, a few weeks off yet).
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing good in this episode because Moffat’s strengths on encapsulated Who stories have created some of the best the show has ever seen: “Blink,” “Silence in the Library/Forests of the Dead,” “The Girl in the Fireplace”… There are things that make these entries sharp, snappy, and plain good television—tense plot mechanics, high key emotions, occasionally gorgeous use of repetition (I did punch the air at the reuse of “everywhere’s a beach eventually”).
One of those strengths is giving the lead actor(s) a chance to showcase their extreme talent, and Ncuti Gatwa took that opportunity with both hands and wrestled it into a marble flipping sculpture with this episode. It’s a great challenge for an actor, having to showcase all that visceral emotion while rooted to the spot, and he was ready for it. Absolutely gorgeous.
Having said that, this is literally the “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” condensed into a shorter format. It’s using the story to highlight different things, which I appreciate—war profiteering, blind religious obedience, capitalism run wild, the myriad problems around medical care, problems with AI—but the beats are the same. The ambulance is messing with people in a war zone; there’s an eerie child, this time looking for daddy instead of mommy (Splice isn’t a gas mask zombie, but she might as well be for how oddly her dialogue is written); the power of being a parent solves the problem and saves the day. They’re good beats, of course, and they still worked on me emotionally, but the recycling is a bit too obvious to miss.
There’s also Moffat’s endless well of romances where a man is sad that a woman doesn’t love him as well or much as he loves her. Which annoyed me enough with Amy and Rory—either leave or ask for what you’re worth, guy, you’ve had years to figure this out—but here it’s particularly egregious and bogged down in TV Problems that should not be an issue in this, the year of our Time Lord 2024.
It’s clear that we’re supposed to feel heartbroken over Olliphant’s message for Mundy because we know that she did care for him: that’s the TV drama plight here. But whether or not you care about that context, it doesn’t change the fact that this man recorded a post-death message to let a woman he loved know that it was okay that he died without her loving him in return—which is massively manipulative and utterly fucked as a choice for a person to make. Why would you leave this weird guilt-trippy aside for her, dude? Suck it up and tell this to her face in life; you don’t wait until after you’re dead to leave this little video note, the universe’s most passive-aggressive Nice Guy epitaph, and get kind thoughts for it.
And it’s extra upsetting because up until then, the romance had been kinda cute? So there’s that ruined by an afterlife WhatsApp message.
These points are a true shame, because when the episode is on, it is gorgeous. The growing bond between the Doctor and Ruby is good stuff, and it’s exciting to see the Doctor be more forthcoming with a companion, not only about history, but about his feelings. The transition from Thirteen to Fourteen to Fifteen can be felt keenly here, this sudden bend toward emotional honesty and a desire to be known now that the Doctor realizes they don’t fully know themselves. That’s where the heart is, and it hits just right every time they find it. More of this, please.
The mystery around Ruby also works better in this episode, I think, because it’s just the right amount of distraction without feeling overwrought and shaping too much of the episode itself. And the little bits and pieces of the Doctor’s past that keep barging in are so moving and also get the mystery balance just right: We’ve had the Doctor talk specifically about being a dad before, but the moment where he talks to Vater’s hologram about what that means, what being a father is, it’s the very first time we’ve seen how much it mattered to him. We have no details and I genuinely hope we never will on that, but we don’t need them—we can find what we need to know in Gatwa’s face.
Also, I love a sci-fi mechanism that requires a character to stay calm—that should get used way more often. Just a note from me, personally.
All of which is to say that there was so much to love about this episode and so much to deride that I’m feeling thoroughly whiplashed. Which generally describes my feelings about most of what Steven Moffat writes, so at least you can say he’s consistent.
Time and Space and Sundry
Image: Disney+
The song that the Doctor is singing to calm himself down once he’s stepped on the mine is “The Skye Boat Song,” which was actually rewritten in the 19th century to be about Bonnie Prince Charlie, not originally about him. But the real deep cut of this is that the Second Doctor played this song on his recorder in the serial “The Web of Fear” back in 1968. I am loving the throughline we’re getting now of different Doctors preferring different instruments—Two had the recorder, Twelve had the guitar, Fifteen prefers to use his voice (and a gorgeous one it is, too).
Vater is German for father, of course. That's why Darth Vader is kind of a give away.
Yes, Mundy is played by Varada Sethu, who is playing the new companion next season. And she said via a PR statement that this is the end of Mundy Flynn’s journey, so the question of how she gets onto the TARDIS is still up in the air. We don’t know if she was cast in this episode before or after the choice to bring her on as a companion, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone guest-starred as a different character before starring on the show: Colin Baker was a guard on Gallifrey before he became the Sixth Doctor; Martha Jones made a comment about her cousin dying at the Battle of Canary Wharf to make sense of Freema Agyeman’s first appearance on the show; Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor had an entire lesson attached to bringing back the face of a man from Pompeii that he played in 2008; Karen Gillan was thankfully behind facepaint in that same Pompeii episode, so no one was the wiser when she got cast as Amy Pond.
The ambulance being played by Susan Twist plays into an unfortunate tendency in Doctor Who to vilify middle-aged and elderly women as nameless figures of menace, and it would be nice if that could lay off for a bit? At least this one wasn’t in Moffat’s usual dressing, a fancy updo and blood red lipstick. (I only accept Missy in that pantheon, the rest can go home.)
There are moments when the show is so aggressively British that you have to laugh, and Mundy Flynn saying “I’m Anglican,” like it’s this upsetting, powerful thing is definitely one of them. That’s not really going to read the same to anyone outside of the U.K., methinks.
Sylvie Cathrall’s debut novel, A Letter to the Luminous Deep, is a romantic book, and not just because of the burgeoning relationship unveiled between the two central characters. The story, told entirely in epistolary form, takes place over two timelines. The first centers on E. Cidnosin and the scholar, Henerey Clel. E. lives in an underwater abode called the Deep House, a home created by her now-deceased mother, who was a renowned architect. Unlike her two siblings, her scholar sister Sophy and her self-centered artistic brother Arvist, E. has not left the Deep House in years because of a “Malady of the Mind” that makes venturing outside of her home difficult. She is a reader of Henerey’s scholarly work, however, and sends him a letter about some unusual underwater creatures she observes outside the window one day. The two strike up a Victorian-esque correspondence that unfurls into love.
The second timeline centers on E. and Henerey’s siblings, Sophy and Vyerin, who strike up their own correspondence when E. and Henerey are presumed dead after a mysterious seaquake destroys the Deep House. The premise of their correspondence is to create an archive of their deceased siblings’ writings in order to commemorate them, and the two uncover—and partially solve—a mystery while doing so.
Both of these timelines occur on a planet almost completely devoid of land. The worldbuilding trickles out slowly, but we eventually find out that a thousand years ago, their vastly more advanced ancestors lived in “Islands in the Sky.” A cataclysmic event caused that civilization to crash on a world covered by water, leaving a handful of survivors to build anew. By definition, this makes A Letter to the Luminous Deep a post-apocalyptic story, but the book is far from the grim fare one expects from that subgenre. Life for Henerey, E., Sophy, and Vyerin is comfortable, with technology that roughly matches that of our early twentieth century. (Amenities like telephone communication, for example, have been newly implemented, as has a version of sending messages via telegraph or an antiquated form of email.)
The writing style of this society, however, is solidly Victorian; if reading pages of prose that feel like letters written in a Jane Austen novel doesn’t sound appealing, this might not be the book for you. But if following a correspondence where two people who feel ostracized find solace and acceptance in each other and eventually move from bashful expressions of affection to eloquent statements of love sounds like an endearing, cozy read, then Luminous Deep will be right up your alley.
The intricate descriptions of this sea-dwelling society and of the slow growth of E. and Henerey’s relationship (and, to a lesser degree, Sophy and Vyerin’s relationship) are the strengths of the book; while the stakes at the core of the mystery around E. and Henerey’s disappearance appears to have massive implications, they happen almost in the background, with the burgeoning romance via correspondence the forefront of the story and our emotional anchor. The plot here, as little of a plot there is, is secondary.
Through all the letter writing, however, we learn about a mysterious “Structure” that has appeared outside of the Deep House, a creation that seems to be more than an art installation that Arvist claims he made. The truth of it slowly unravels, not least because violent geologic events happen near it with devastating consequences. We also travel to the deepest depths of the ocean with a team of scholars that includes Sophy and her future partner (a romance we also see unfold in the writings). Even living in the hadal depths sounds cozy in this book, despite the fact that their living quarters are subjected to enough pressure to pulverize a body into goo in seconds if any part of the structure failed.
A Letter to the Luminous Deep is about its characters, which Cathrall has crafted with exquisite detail. E., for example, suffers from severe anxiety and agoraphobia, and eloquently explains her condition to Henerey in one of her letters to him: “
"O Henerey, I can tell from your letters and from your academic writing that you have a wonderful imagination, so perhaps you understand how a lively mind can be as much of a burden as it is a gift. Mine tends to fixate on scenarios—memories—difficulties—and then embellish them with such detail that I feel as though calamities have actually happened, and I the cause of them.”
That passage not only gives you a sense of the book’s writing style, but also describes E.’s struggles with her condition. E.’s so-called “Maladay of the Mind,”’ however, doesn’t limit her or minimize her in any way, but is simply part of who she is, making her a rich, complex character that you can’t help but care about.
Character development aside, events move slowly—very slowly—over the novel’s 432 pages. The pace does pick up in the last fifth or so once we catch up to the present-day happenings impacting Sophy and Vyerin. But the nature of the epistolary format makes the story’s urgency muted, causing the book to strain under the confines of having the entire tale explained via letters and other collected writings.
And while the mystery around E. and Henerey’s disappearance is ultimately explained, it is far from resolved. Other questions about their civilization are not fully answered, though enough hints and clues are offered for a reader to piece together the nuts and bolts of what happened a thousand years and what happened to E. and Henerey. Those looking for a standalone novel won’t find it here—A Letter to the Luminous Deep ends suddenly, with the promise of a sequel that will presumably move the story forward. Whether that assumed sequel will also be in epistolary format—and whether that structure can deftly carry the story forward—remains to be seen. [end-mark]
“And the Sky Full of Stars” Written by J. Michael Straczynski Directed by Janet Greek Season 1, Episode 8 Production episode 106 Original air date: March 16, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A human boards B5 and goes to a cabin, where he meets up with another human, and they identify their target as Sinclair. So that’s ominous. They never get names in the script, but the credits identify them as “Knight One” and “Knight Two.”
A security guard named Benson is approached by several thuggish gentlemen who remind him rather forcibly of his gambling debts. Benson is then called into Sinclair’s office where the commander and Garibaldi interrogate him about those selfsame gambling debts. However, Benson insists that he hasn’t gone over the limits imposed on security personnel for gambling in the casinos. (Benson is lying, but he’s also covered his tracks decently.) He’s taken off active duty pending a full investigation.
In Medlab, Franklin conducts a physical of Delenn, thus giving him a baseline of a healthy Minbari. Franklin mentions his past as an itinerant doctor, trading passage on ships for serving as ship’s doctor so he could travel the galaxy. That ended when the Earth-Minbari War started, and Franklin scores points when Delenn asks what he did during the war, and he says he destroyed all his notes on Minbari physiology rather than turn them over to EarthGov for use in developing biogenic weapons to use against the Minbari.
When asked what she did during the war, Delenn doesn’t actually answer. This will probably be important later.
Our two Knights are putting a device together clandestinely. They still need a power source, which Benson provides in exchange for enough cash to pay off his gambling debts.
Sinclair has a nightmare about the Battle of the Line. He wakes up only to find that his computer terminal and his link aren’t working, and the station appears to be abandoned save for him—
—and Knight Two, at which point it becomes clear that this isn’t real and that Knight Two has ENTERED SINCLAIR’S BRAIN!
Delenn reports to Garibaldi that Sinclair never showed up for their meeting, nor did he answer calls. It quickly becomes clear that he’s missing, and Garibaldi starts up a search. The first thing he notices is that Sinclair’s link is in his quarters and Sinclair himself isn’t. He never goes anywhere without the link, so something bad has probably happened.
Knight Two tells Sinclair that this VR setup is still one wherein he can feel pain. To demonstrate both that that’s the truth specifically, and that he’s an asshole generally, he sends a shock of electricity through Sinclair, which really really hurts. Then he explains the point of the exercise: The Knights and the people they work for want to know what really happened at the Battle of the Line, as they don’t buy his “blacked out for 24 hours” story. Sinclair, however, doesn’t remember a damn thing after deciding to ram the Minbari dreadnought.
To add to the pathos, Knight Two brings up an image of Mitchell, Sinclair’s wingman, whom Sinclair watched die when he broke formation and got himself blown up.
Knight Two takes a break and discusses the situation with Knight One. The former suggests upping the psychotropics, as they’re on the clock, given that the station personnel are likely to notice that their commander is missing. The latter cautions that it may kill him. Knight Two follows the Evil Dude of Evil Handbook by saying, “So be it” in his posh British accent, which conveniently ignores the fact that this is an interrogation and you can’t get information out of a corpse.
Whatever. Garibaldi tells one of his people that it’s all hands on deck to find Sinclair, and the aide says he’s already doing that, even activated Benson. When Garibaldi questions that, the aide says that Benson’s bank account had plenty of cash in it, so he doesn’t appear to be in debt. But Garibaldi already checked that, and yesterday he was nearly broke. Turns out he got a huge deposit not long before Sinclair went missing. A clue!
Benson, meanwhile, is panicking, because the Knights failed to mention that they needed the power source to kidnap the station CO, which is information he feels he should have had before he made the deal. Knight One shoots him with a PPG, killing him, then dumping the body. However, the body is found outside the station, and Garibaldi orders the search focused on the areas proximate to the part of the station the body was floating near.
Once again, Knight Two ENTERS SINCLAIR’S BRAIN! He pushes, and Sinclair finds himself remembering being inside a circle of people in gray cloaks, hoods covering their faces. And one of them shoots Sinclair with an energy beam.
Sinclair has no idea who all those figures in gray are. Knight Two puts forth his theory: The Minbari were worried about losing the war, so they surrendered, and set up Sinclair as a fifth columnist, who is helping the Minbari lure humanity into a false sense of security as allies before striking.
However, Sinclair pokes multiple holes in that theory, because they were absolutely toast at the Battle of the Line. He has no idea why the Minbari surrendered, but there was no obvious tactical reason for it whatsoever.
But—remembering the last words of the assassin who tried to kill Kosh that Sinclair had a hole in his mind—Sinclair really tries to push through the mental block.
He finally recalls it all: His Starfury was captured and taken into the dreadnought before it could complete the kamikaze run. Sinclair was captured and tortured and then brought before a circle of gray-cloaked Minbari—one of whom, it turns out, was Delenn. The gray-suited folk are obviously the oft-mentioned Grey Council that Delenn has studiously avoided letting anyone know she was part of.
Sinclair also manages to break out of the VR prison and come back to reality. Knight Two is still in the machine, though, so Sinclair smashes it, which renders Knight Two unconscious. Sinclair is also able to knock Knight One out and take his PPG, then go stumbling around the station in a delirious state. Knight One follows, killing a security guard before she can report in her sighting of Sinclair. For his part, Sinclair is hallucinating members of the Grey Council all over the place.
Knight One and Sinclair get into a shootout at the Zocalo, and Garibaldi and his people join in. Knight One is shot and killed. Eventually, Delenn manages to talk Sinclair down long enough for him to pass out from exhaustion.
Sinclair recovers in Medlab. Knight Two is not so lucky, as he’s gone completely cluck-cluck-gibber-gibber-my-old-man’s-a-mushroom from the VR machine’s feedback when Sinclair smashed it while Knight Two had ENTERED SINCLAIR’S BRAIN! He remembers nothing about who he is, who Sinclair is, or what happened, aside from tiny snippets here and there.
Visiting Delenn in her quarters, Sinclair thanks her, and then lies and says he doesn’t remember anything of the experience of Knight Two ENTERING HIS BRAIN! After he leaves, another Minbari—presumably one of the Grey Council—makes it clear to Delenn that if Sinclair ever does remember, he needs to be killed. Meanwhile, Sinclair goes to his quarters and reports a log entry making it clear that he does remember everything and wants to know what the fuck is going on.
Nothing’s the same anymore. We finally fill the hole in Sinclair’s mind, and find out that the Minbari surrendered after the Grey Council examined him. This explains why Delenn has befriended Sinclair in general, though the specific reasons for sparing him, for surrendering, and for Delenn staying close, remain a mystery.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi does pretty well in this one, catching on to Benson’s illegal behavior, and using the latter’s body as a guide to finding Sinclair.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. After being told several times that Delenn was on the Grey Council, we see her on it for realsies in Sinclair’s memory. Her no longer being on it seems now to be in order to keep an eye on Sinclair—who was, it should be pointed out, the Minbari’s choice to command B5.
Looking ahead. This is the first flashback to Sinclair’s lost 24 hours. It’s not the last.
Welcome aboard. Judson Scott and Christopher Neame play the two ill-fated interrogators, who are billed as “Knight One” and “Knight Two” for whatever reason. Jim Youngs plays the ill-fated Benson and Justin Williams plays Sinclair’s memory of the ill-fated Mitchell.
Also, Macaulay Bruton is back as Token Security Personnel With A Speaking Part So Garibaldi Has Someone To Talk To, last seen in “Mind War,” and now officially a recurring role. He’ll be back in “By Any Means Necessary.”
Trivial matters. The title of the episode derives from a line of Sinclair’s in “The Gathering” when he describes what he remembers of the Battle of the Line to Sykes: “The sky was full of stars—and every star an exploding ship.”
This episode finally fills in the “hole” in Sinclair’s mind that we first learned about in “The Gathering.”
Originally Walter Koenig was to play Knight Two, but he had to have surgery and couldn’t do it. J. Michael Straczynski wrote the part of Bester for him instead. (“Mind War” was filmed four episodes after this one.) They then offered the role of Knight Two to Patrick McGoohan (of, among many other things, Secret Agent and The Prisoner fame), but McGoohan was unavailable as well. So they cast Christopher Neame.
Footage from this episode will later be used in the prequel movie In the Beginning.
The newspaper Garibaldi reads, Universe Today, has some fun headlines, some of which are (or will be) relevant to a story. One headline reads, “Is There Something Living in Hyperspace?” which will be referenced in “A Distant Star” and answered in Crusade’s “The Well of Forever.” Homeguard, established last time in “The War Prayer,” is referenced, as one of their member is found guilty of attacking the Minbari embassy on Earth (possibly one of the coordinated attacks mentioned by Biggs in that episode, though it seems unlikely that the perp would be arrested, tried, and convicted that fast…). “Narns Settle Raghesh III Controversy,” which refers back to the incident in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” “Psi Corps in Election Tangle: Did Psi Corps Violate Its Charter by Endorsing Vice-President?” is a bit of foreshdadowing of both Vice-President Clark’s eventually-to-be-revealed dodginess and continues the notion, first put out by Ironehart in “Mind War,” that Psi Corps is trying to expand its influence over EarthGov. And then there’s “San Diego Still Considered Too Radioactive for Occupancy,” establishing that San Diego was nuked at some point between the present day and the time of the show; Straczynski lived in San Diego for seven yeas, and, to quote him: “it's actually a great place, so I'm inclined to tweak it once in a while, just for funsies…”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I didn’t just see my death—I saw the death of the whole human race!”
“Then why did they surrender?”
“I don’t know! Maybe the universe blinked! Maybe God changed his mind! All I know is that we got a second chance!”
Sinclair and Knight Two discussing the end of the war.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Maybe we’re both still inside.” I have a lot to say about this episode, some of which is tangential and/or nitpicky, so let me lead with this: “And the Sky Full of Stars” is a fantastic episode, the best one of the season so far. I said in the “Soul Hunter” rewatch that an episode without G’Kar or Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about, and with this episode we have our first exception, as neither ambassador is missed this particular time ’round.
While I would love to live in the parallel universe where Patrick McGoohan played Knight Two, Christopher Neame is still good in the role: Somewhat over-the-top, but the part calls for that, and his deep, intense voice is used to good end. (Judson Scott not so much, but he’s always been pretty much entirely 80s-pretty-boy looks and no talent, and he keeps that sad streak going here.)
But writing this rewatch, I hit back on one of my greatest frustrations from watching this show three decades ago, as I went to the Lurker’s Guide web site (which I strongly recommend) and found this gem from J. Michael Straczynski from one of his online posts prior to the episode airing: “Absolutely unlike anything ever produced before for television.”
And, um, no. Just off the top of my head, I can think of two examples of this being done before on television—and, I might add, done better. One should be obvious given who his choice for Knight Two was prior to casting Neame: the final two episodes of The Prisoner (especially the penultimate episode “Once Upon a Time”). The other is Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Chain of Command, Part II,” which is superior mainly due to the much higher quality of acting on display. (This is not meant to disrespect Neame or Michael O’Hare, but we’re talking about Sir Patrick Stewart and David Warner here. They’re on a different level…)
And honestly there was no need for this level of hyperbole, because the episode is damn good. But being primed with being told it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before makes all the parts we have seen before stand out. In particular, the tired clichés in how Benson’s debt collectors, the Knights, and Delenn’s cohort at the end are all written.
In all three of those cases, the characters say that someone might have to be killed, which is to show that the characters in question are, at the very least, ruthless, and at the most, incredibly evil. But it also makes them, at best, stupid and at worst incompetent. First off, anyone who is collecting debts is not going to make a threat, the fulfillment of which will not result in the debt being paid. Compulsive gamblers are addicts, so they’re not going to be dissuaded by someone making an example of them (the usual reason for threatening violence given in fiction that portrays such). Debt collectors are in it to collect debts, not commit acts of violence. (Plus, killing a member of the security force of your mini-city in space will just draw attention to you that you do not want.)
Knight Two saying “so be it” when Knight One says Sinclair might die is equally ridiculous, because they’re trying to obtain information. (Much like Number Two was on The Prisoner, ahem ahem.) You can’t get information from a dead body, and, again, killing the commander of a major space station will just draw attention to you, which you don’t want on a covert mission.
The last issue is less of one because we don’t know the truth behind why the Minbari surrendered, but once we do find out, the threat to kill Sinclair makes absolutely no sense, since the Minbari suddenly realized that killing humans would be bad. But we’ll get to that down the line…
One final nitpick: Garibaldi is reading a printed newspaper. This seemed a failure of imagination thirty years ago, and is something of a howler now when far more people in 2024 consume their news on a computer, tablet, or television, and the physical newspaper is dying a slow death. Heck, the original Star Trek understood that in the future people were more likely to be reading on an electronic medium than a paper one.
Okay, now that I’ve spent all this time on nonsense, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty—damn, this episode is good. For starters, it’s easily O’Hare’s best work to date, showing the character’s anger, confusion, and especially frustration. The missing time in his memory is something that’s gnawed at him for a decade, and this interrogation brings all those questions and annoyances to the fore. It’s a beautifully done set of sequences, culminating in some genuine revelations about Sinclair’s missing time. Of course, those revelations just prompt more questions, but it’s progress. I kind of wish Sinclair had confronted Delenn about it right away instead of holding off for a future episode, but we’ll find out soon enough.
And while I wasn’t all that thrilled with the “if he finds the truth, you must kill him” tag, I will say that Mira Furlan has done superb work in showing Delenn’s complexity and depth—and deviousness. There is a lot more to her than meets the eye, and Furlan expertly plays it without overdoing it or losing the character’s charisma and charm.
Fans of The Sandman comic series definitely, absolutely noticed that the first season of Netflix's The Sandman adaptation did not include all the members of the Endless, the siblings of Dream (Tom Sturridge). We got half of them—Kirby as Death; Mason Alexander Park as Desire; and Donna Preston as Despair.
But here comes the rest of the fam. Adrian Lester joins the show as Destiny, the eldest of the Endless. Esmé Creed-Miles plays Delirium, the youngest, who (say it with me!) was once known as Delight. And Barry Sloane will be The Prodigal. Yes, The Prodigal, specifically. This sibling has also been known as Destruction, but he goes by a different name early in the comics. You can get a too-brief look at each of them in the video below.
Lester was recently seen in Renegade Nell. Creed-Miles played the title character in Prime Video's Hanna and provided the voice of Cassandra in The Legend of Vox Machina. Sloane was recently in Passenger and has done voice work in Call of Duty games.
The second season of the show seems likely to follow the second graphic novel collection, The Season of Mists, which begins with a family meeting and then—literally—goes to hell. Gwendoline Christie will be returning as Lucifer; the rest of the returning cast includes Patton Oswalt, Vivienne Acheampong, Jenna Coleman, Ferdinand Kingsley, Stephen Fry, Asim Chaudhry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Vanesu Samunyai, and Razane Jammal.
There's no word as to when The Sandman will return to Netflix, but the streamer's announcement about the new cast members makes note of today's date: The comic series debuted 35 years ago today, exactly. So that's neat.
The first season of The Sandman is available on Netflix.[end-mark]
Sometimes we just need a stupid movie. MST3000 built a whole cult around reviews of genre films, the more ridiculous, the better. Chupacabra Territory never made it onto the roster, but it definitely falls into the category of “so bad it’s hard to even say if it’s good.” It has a 14% Rotten Tomatoes score. It is, in its own weird way, surprisingly entertaining.
It’s an unabashed knockoff of The Blair Witch Project. Mock documentary, found footage allegedly retained by the FBI. College kids on a beer-fueled road trip into CHUPACABRA TERRITORY. There are signs and everything.
It’s set in California because that’s where the movies live, but in an obscure area, the Pinewood Forest near Lake Emerald. Three guys and a relentlessly perky girl are all excited about tracking down the monster that slaughtered four campers, leaving behind an assortment of random body parts and a strange hand-written book liberally stained with blood. It’s so cool! Let’s find old Chup (which rhymes with Soup)! Let’s get naked and have wild sex! Let’s party!
Perky Amber is the ringleader. She’s a self-professed witch and psychic, and she’s bubbling with glee about the book and the rituals and how she’s going to summon the chupacabra. It clearly has not dawned on her that if the monster shredded four previous campers, it’s probably not going to be all cuddly and cute and nice to her, either.
Her guy friends are mostly there for the beer and the sex. There’s her boytoy Joe, token skeptic Morgan, and camera guy Dave. Dave shoots most of the film, but they all end up wearing cameras, for extra-special bonus shakycam footage.
For further extra bonus points, they come across another party of clueless youth, with two hot girls and a guy and another camera. They’ve lost their number four (four seems to be the statutory number of campers in this park), and are roaming around calling for him. This is on top of the One-Eyed Yokel at the gas station on the way in, who intones dire warnings about the beast and the darkness, and the Clueless Guy in Uniform who tries to keep them out of the park, and the Coyote Biologist in camo with a big gun.
The script operates on the principle of throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall and not caring if any of them stick. There’s a heaping helping of gore on top of the bouncing boobs and the booze-and-sex gags. And raccoon pee. And toilet paper. Never forget the toilet paper.
The chupacabra lore is as random as the rest of the plot. Matt McWilliams’ script may owe a distant debt to the Princeton timeline of the chupacabra, with its references to livestock mutilations. The animals supposedly killed by the cryptid, including a coyote and a deer, are extensively (and bloodily) torn up, with two signature wounds: paired punctures in the neck, and lingeringly filmed and described removal of the genitals.
That’s not too far off the standard accounts, but McWilliams has more to add. This chupacabra can be summoned by arcane rituals or, like Bigfoot, by hooting, howling calls. Its own roars and howls fill the woods at night.
But that’s not all. The chupacabra can take over a human’s mind and turn them into a kind of zombie, with effects that may wear off, or may not, depending on whether the victim is a main character or a bit player. It exudes a weird sticky “residue” that causes a severe allergic reaction and eventually eats away the skin. Like a demon, it is repelled by salt; a circle of that keeps it away, as long as no one is stupid enough to break the circle.
It’s not clear what these additions to the lore are for, except to up the grue factor and provide an excuse for a scene in which Amber masturbates at length under a tree. See above re: ideas thrown at wall. Some of them are stickier than others.
We never get a clear view of the actual cryptid. Even the blurry, pixelated ones don’t show up until quite late. We see what it does to animals and humans, we hear it roaring and howling and rampaging around the woods. When we finally get a glimpse, it’s basically Gollum. Weird, skinny, grey, big head, pointy ears. That’s the Latin American version rather than the canine subspecies supposedly found in Texas: more X-Files than Monsterquest.
McWilliams’ Pinewood Forest is full of chupacabras, happily devastating the wildlife and tearing up camps and campers. We’re not supposed to wonder how it gets there from Mexico and points south and east, and we certainly won’t be asking how it sustains a population. We’re here for the gore and the girls, and we know how it has to end. Blair Witch points the way. We have no choice but to follow. [end-mark]
[Spoiler warning: I’ll be talking about Sugar here. There will be spoilers. Big, big spoilers.]
There’s an exchange in the seventh episode of Sugar that raised far more existential questions for me about the show than I’d expected to have. On one level, the conversation on screen was to be expected in the penultimate episode of the debut season of a series that abounds with mysteries. The setting was the top of a parking garage in Los Angeles. Sitting in a stunning vintage Corvette are private detective John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) and sometime rock star Melanie Mackintosh (played by Amy Ryan).
Throughout the season thus far, the two have had a slow-burning flirtation; they’d met while Sugar tracked down Olivia Siegel, a missing member of a prominent Hollywood family. Over the course of the investigation, some secrets from Sugar’s past had—if not come to light, then at least been hinted at. And so this was, presumably, the moment when Sugar would explain everything to Melanie. The duo has just escaped from an unnerving showdown with an acquaintance of Sugar’s when she asks for more details about what, exactly, he’s been up to and what his connection is to the man who attacked them.
Sugar reveals that “[w]e’re members of a group. An organization that no one is allowed to know anything about.” He reiterates the ways in which he’s been sworn to secrecy, and about how he can’t reveal anything about his mission to anyone. And finally, Melanie puts the clues together and comes up with an answer:
“You’re a spy,” she says. “The languages, always watching, always listening, more curious about others than you are than talking about yourself. I should’ve known. Even by Virgo standards, I should’ve wondered at that.”
“The only reason I ever asked you any questions was because I wanted to know the answers for myself,” Sugar replies.
“You’re a spy. That’s what this is, right? A foreign spy.”
“I’m just here to observe.”
Here’s the thing: It’s a good guess. We’ve seen Sugar meet with other members of this secret society, known as the Société Polyglotte Cosmopolitaine, including tech genius Ruby (played by Kirby) and university professor Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner). We know that, as befits their name, the members are gifted when it comes to languages; we know that the members have a habit of jotting down observations in Moleskine notebooks. All things being equal, “spy” is an excellent guess. It’s also incorrect; John Sugar and his cohort are, in fact, aliens.
We don’t learn too much else about them, though. When Farrell adopts his true form, he isn’t replaced with a blob of CGI but instead turns blue and bald; I’ve seen a few comparisons to Karen Gillen’s Nebula makeup in the MCU, which are pretty spot-on. As for why the aliens are on Earth, it’s not clear—there’s a reference to “preserving [their] way of life” at one point, but unlike Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, there isn’t a clearly stated motive for why the aliens are here. Or how long they’ve been here. Or how they managed to create new identities for everyone. Or why they traveled in space with this mission to begin with.
When Sugar muses about how being around humans is making him act more like a human, it’s difficult to know what he means, because we’ve never seen the society that he came from. We know that he has an absent sister and is sad about her, but that’s a far cry from an alien emotion. And, as the first season of Sugar approaches its endgame, the lack of aliens who feel alien starts to feel like a problem.
Here’s where the existential angst kicked in while watching episode seven. At that point, Melanie’s line about spies left me wondering if Sugar would have worked equally well up until that point if Sugar and company had in fact been undercover agents for some international organization. With one exception — Sugar moving at lightning speed to get out of a threatening situation in episode six — it wasn’t remotely difficult to imagine a version of this show without any science fictional elements at all. And when you have a series that’s nominally a combination of an LA noir and science fiction, having half of those genre elements feel superfluous seven episodes into an eight-episode first season is a little worrying.
The second half of Sugar’s season finale does take strides to make the case for itself as both a science fiction show and a detective show. There’s a long tradition of works that blend the two: books as stylistically different as Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw/Elijah Baley novels, Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music, and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries have all blended SF with mystery elements. And the idea of humanlike aliens living covertly among humanity also has plenty of history; it’s not hard to imagine Sugar being elevator-pitched as “The Man Who Fell to Earth meets The Long Goodbye.” Which, to be fair, is an excellent elevator pitch. I’d watch that show. But instead, we get a lot of (well-acted, admittedly) drama among the family whose paterfamilias hired Sugar to find Olivia.
It’s in the eighth episode that we finally get a few glimpses of Sugar’s home planet, via a flashback in which Sugar watches an otherworldly murmuration along with his sister Jen. Earlier in the series, John revealed that his sister was gone, and that her loss fueled the intensity of his search for Olivia. One of the other running threads in the season involved John struggling to maintain a sense of detachment—something he arguably failed at when he killed a trio of human traffickers, one of whom was unarmed at the time.
Over the course of Sugar’s search for Olivia, it becomes clear that some part of the Société Polyglotte Cosmopolitaine is interfering with his investigation. In the seventh episode, we find out the reason why: Olivia was kidnapped by the son of a powerful politician, and for Sugar to pursue the investigation further would put the aliens at risk of being revealed. Also relevant here: The kidnapper is also a serial killer with a body count in the dozens and a habit of making audio recordings of his ruminations on torture and murder, as well as his actual torturing and murdering.
It’s at this point that Sugar threatens to veer into a much more sensationalistic vein. To counterbalance that, much of the cast plays things relatively naturalistically, and that goes a long way towards keeping the mood of the show grounded. The same is true for the visuals, which abounds with natural light and shot compositions that offer a grand sense of the landscape, whether a luxury hotel or a scrapyard for airplanes.
Finally, in the second half of episode eight, Sugar—having seemingly solved the case—followed in the footsteps of countless fictional detectives and realized that he missed one critical detail. The kidnapper wasn’t working alone; there was another man in the basement with him where he went about his gruesome acts—and the other man there was Henry, one of Sugar’s alien colleagues. Which, presumably, explains how a well-connected politician became aware of the existence of aliens in the first place.
As another alien living on Earth recently pointed out, there is indeed always a twist at the end. And, look—the reveal that the hero’s sympathetic buddy is actually a much nastier customer than they’d first appeared to be is a device that’s worked well in fiction of all sorts for decades. It also brings together the mystery and science fictional elements of Sugar in a cohesive way, rather than treating them as something to run in parallel.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the last ten to fifteen minutes of Sugar’s eighth episode feature a lot of exposition. Sugar learns that Henry is responsible for taking his sister, and that she might still be alive. Henry also gives the impression that he’s about to go full serial killer on his own. As the rest of their people head back to the stars, John and Henry remain on Earth, presumably setting up a second season that’s radically different from the first and finds the two of them at odds.
While a season finale essentially blowing up the premise of a show to reveal something different at its core isn’t easy to do, it is doable; the presence of The Good Place alumnus Kirby in the cast is a reminder that it can be done well. On the other hand, “alien detective chases alien serial killer in Los Angeles” is also the premise of the 1987 film The Hidden, perhaps best known for being the non-Twin Peaks project in which Kyle MacLachlan plays an FBI agent. The Hidden is a fun movie, but it said its piece in 97 minutes.
And it’s in this potential status quo change that Sugar reveals the flaw at the heart of its attempt at genre hybridization. Where does it leave us? With a rogue detective trying to track down the bad guy who did something terrible to a woman he loved. That description could apply to dozens of shows, movies, and books. If you’re adding science fiction into the mix, that should expand the boundaries of what’s possible. The note Sugar ends on should feel limitless; instead, it seems all too constrained. [end-mark]
