Star Trek: Picard, Episode 14: "Watcher"

* Sadly my Paramount+ trial has expired so I will be unable to watch the rest of Star Trek Peecard.

* Alas.

Star Trek: Picard, Episode 13: "Assimilation"

* Trying to watch Star Trek Picard but the Paramount+ app is terrible.

* Thank goodness I'm not paying for it!

* Rated TV-14 for coarse language and violence.

* First shot of the episode and oh my god there are so many lens flares?

* Why are they doing this? JJ Abrams doesn't even work for Star Trek anymore.

* Seven's husband and his crew hold the Picard gang at gunpoint but Seven and Raffi just casually grab their phasers away from them because they are strong female characters.

* They then fucking disintegrate the bad guys and fly away.

* Q appears and tells Picard that this life of violence and fear is all he understands then he disappears again.

* There's a shitty holographic HUD floating in front of Rios's face and every time the actor turns his head or cranes his neck the whole giant holographic panel moves with him and it looks so stupid.

* The Borg queen warps the ship around the sun. "This is loco!" says Rios.

* Did you know that he's Spanish did you get that

* They safely arrive in the 21st century and the ship immediately crashes because that's exciting.

* The ship loses power and Raffi starts screaming because the medbay's bio-bed is the only thing keeping Legolas alive after he was shot.

* I literally laughed out loud. She is so overwrought and none of the other characters give a shit. Wasn't Picard like Legolas's adoptive father last season or something? I don't remember Raffi ever even interacting with him.

* Oh he's dead now I guess. I'm sure that's permanent.

* Seven and Raffi turn on Picard and start calling him a bad leader and a douchebag because he won't let them revenge-kill the Borg queen and strand them in the past.

* "You have spent decades screwing around with Q! You play little games and ruin people's lives!" Raffi accuses Picard. Remember all the episodes where that happened?

* Oh they establish right in this scene that fixing the timeline will resurrect Legolas for no reason. Now I'm really devastated that this character I loved is gone.

* "We have to be careful while we're in the past that their technology doesn't detect our VACCINATION CHIPS." What the shit.

* I guess COVID really never will go away. 

* The Borg queen is in a coma. Someone needs to send their consciousness into her mind to wake her up but it can't be Picard because having been assimilated previously he would be easy prey, so Agnes decides that she will do it. 

* Meanwhile Raffi is being emotional and jeopardizing their mission.

* Why does she care lmao. No one else gives a SHIT. They are completely indifferent to Legolas dying. It's hilarious.

* "The longer you're inside her the stronger she becomes." ~ Jean-Luc Picard

* Raffi, Seven, and Rios leave the ship to go find "the watcher" while Picard sits on the ship because he's the main character.

* There's a cute scene where Seven materializes in front of a little girl who asks if she's a superhero.

* I guess the transporter isn't working right or something because the three of them wind up in different places. Rios materializes on a fire escape and immediately falls off, landing on his head.

* A good Samaritan takes him the hospital but he tells them not to call the police.

* Lmao he's going to get deported isn't he.

* Raffi explores a trailer park and some white dude in a hoodie tries to mug her in broad daylight.

* "Give me your wallet!" 

"What? Oh. Money. Right. Uh, no. Wow though."

* I guess they're back to not using money in Star Trek even though Raffi was shitting on Picard last season for living in a mansion while she was growing space pot in a shack.

* Raffi just grabs the gun away from him again and knocks the guy out, then disassembles the gun.

* How would she know how to do that? I don't even know how to do that and I'm from this century.

* Raffi robs the guy while he's unconscious for what she calls "the apocalypse fund." These are our heroes.

* Remember when Kirk and the gang needed money in the '80s and instead of robbing some homeless tweaker they just pawned Kirk's glasses?

* Seven walks up after the confrontation and finds her erstwhile lover picking the pockets of an unarmed man lying unconscious on the ground. "We just got here and you're already making friends," she jokes.

* "He started it," says Raffi. "A wonderful ambassador up against a backdrop of hope meets hopelessness. You're killing it, 2024." 

* Pure cringe.

* Back on the ship Agnes's brain is hooked up to the Borg queen while Picard supervises.

* This scene is actually sort of interesting as Agnes is conscious and describes the process of assimilation as the Borg queen infiltrates her mind.

* I mean if I gave a shit about anything that was happening it would be interesting.

* Seven and Raffi need to go to the top of the tallest building in LA because for some reason their tricorders need to be up high to get a better reading. I get better reception on my iPhone!

* A security guard stops them but Seven says she and her girlfriend wanted to go to the top of the building and "capture an image."

* "Take a picture" Raffi translates into 21st century-ese. Why would she be any more likely to know that?

* Seven says that another guard named Kevin let them go up before so the guard assents.

* Meanwhile Spanish Rios talking to a Spanish doctor named Teresa.

* Once she leaves he notices that he has lost his comm badge! Some little kid is trying to play it like a video game. 

* Fortunately he is sitting right outside Rios's room so Rios staggers out and confronts him.

* Teresa comes out and tells the little kid to finish his homework or he can't watch Rick & Morty. She is his mom but the dad is out of the picture. Make your move, Rios!

* On the ship Picard has disconnected Agnes from the computer. She is unconscious but now the Borg queen is awake again.

* "You have to help us find the watcher!" says Picard. "What can we give you?" 

"Your ship!"          

* Rios is preparing to leave the clinic when the cops pull up outside. "Immigration raid!" cries Teresa.

* I'm dying.

* The queen tries to extort Picard with the location of the watcher but Agnes wakes up and says "Aha! You don't even know it anymore because I stole that file from your brain!"

* "What you've done is more dangerous than you realize," the queen tells her. "You've impressed me."

* The cops demand to see Rios's ID then arrest both him and Teresa. Tragically his comm badge lies just out of reach on the desk! 

* He's marched out the door just as Picard is calling.

* NEXT TIME: Picard goes on a rescue mission to the southern border???

Star Trek: Picard, Episode 12: "Penance"

* Time for STAR TREK: PUKEHARD SEASON 2: PUKE HARDER.

* “I am too old for your bullshit, Q!”

* Q is acting cray cray. 

* “I have had enough of your stupid patronizing!” Picard says and Q fucking bitch slaps him across the face.

* “And I have had enough of you refusing to change in the only way that matters!” Q retorts, addressing the Star Trek franchise at large.

* In this reality the Earth is a poisoned wasteland kept habitable by giant atmospheric shields.

* Picard is a slave-owner who keeps the skulls of his vanquished enemies in his study.

* One of the skulls belongs to Sarek, who Picard decapitated in personal combat.

* Q says that in this reality Picard got his Noonien Soongh bio-android body in a fight with DS9 villain Gul Dukat.

* Which makes no sense.

* Q is mad at Evil Alt Universe Picard and has brought regular Picard and the Stargazer crew here to atone for Bad Picard’s crimes.

* Or something.

* All will be revealed!

* “I don’t know who I am, but I’m not myself” Picard says to one of his slaves.

* Picard finds a hologram of himself doing Starship Troopers propaganda broadcasts.

* Picard is called to the presidential palace for Eradication Day.

* And the president is Seven of Nine!

* For some reason Q has transported her normal self here as well.

* In this universe the Federation is called the Confederation.

* REMEMBER THE CIVIL WAR???

* Meanwhile Captain Rios is on the Vulcan Front, where the Confederate fleet is nuking Vulcan from space.

* “Those Vulcan bastards will meld your minds and scramble your balls.”

* MEANWHILE in Okinawa (???) Space Legolas also appears in this universe, even though as far as I know he wasn’t even at the battle with the Borg.

* I guess Q just plucked up everyone in the main cast.

* Maybe he was there, I don’t fucking know.

* This reminds me of that Animorphs book where the Ellimist changed the past so they never got their powers.

* Except way more stupid.

* Eradication Day is the holiday for eradicating terrorists, aliens, alien terrorists, and other enemies of the Confederation.

* Agnes Gerardi wakes up in a lab with a cartoon cat who is her virtual pet.

* Seven walks in and Agnes is like “wow you look hot!”

* All women are bisexual in the future. 

* This character is so terrible and obnoxious.

* AU Agnes has a Borg Queen frozen in a tube or something.

* “Reality has been split, time has been broken,” the Queen says.

* Seven exposits that Borg Queens share knowledge across timelines and universes, apparently????

* Was this ever established before?

* I guess Guinan could do it in Yesterday’s Enterprise.

* Raffi has pretended to capture Legolas, who is a terrorist in this reality, and Picard randomly bumps into them. 

* “Picard has petitioned to be titled ‘the Borgslayer,’” Seven’s husband announces.

* Seven’s husband is not Chakotay because the writers never watched the Voyager episode where they got together.

* “This is not another reality, this is our reality! Q went back in time and changed the present!” says Picard. 

* Sure whatever.

* “Q seemed unstable, not quite sane!” 

* Picard, Raffi, Legolas, Seven, and Agnes all meet up in the basement and Picard demands the Borg Queen use her random omniscience to explain what Q did to the timeline.

* The Borg Queen says that a “temporal recision” happened in Los Angeles in 2024.

* Please let it be Trump getting re-elected lmao.

* Picard describes the plot to Star Trek IV and says they need to go back in time by slingshotting around the Sun.

* Agnes says “But we need someone to plot the temporal whatever like Spock did in The Voyage Home!”

* They’re going to have the Borg Queen do it but a machine suddenly pulls her out of the room for the Eradication ceremony.

* Seven says Picard is scheduled to publicly execute her on stage. 

* Not-Chakotay comes in and is like wtf is going on with you people and Agnes gives this terrible cringey fake explanation that goes on forever and is supposed to be really funny.

* You know they say multiple times that the tech level of this reality is about the same as the normal timeline but apparently Earth all by itself somehow managed to completely wipe out the entire Borg species down to this single queen.

* Sure why not.

* Picard and Seven go on stage with the queen. The crowd chants Picard’s name and he pumps his fist to rile them up.

* Meanwhile Raffi and Legolas have to shut down the palace shields so Rios can transport everyone out. Legolas violently slashes the throats of several security guards, proving himself a worthy addition to Starfleet Academy. 

* Rios reunites the cast. “Well that was all kinds of terrible,” says Agnes. My thoughts exactly.

* Agnes plugs the Borg Queen into the ship to calculate whatever, but Seven’s husband beams aboard with a security team and shoot Legolas!

* “Jean-Luc Picard: traitor!” says Beta Chakotay. “Killed while rescuing a Borg!”

* Cut to credits, what a cliffhanger!

* Remember when they used to do this type of story in 90 minutes.

* Now it takes 10 hours because it’s better.

Star Trek: Picard, Episode 11: "The Star Gazer"

* Ok so apparently we currently have a free trial subscription to Paramount+ for some reason so I am going to try to watch the Picard season premiere because I lack the courage to kill myself quickly.

* It opens on the bridge of a starship filled with explosions and people being killed by robot tentacles. So par for the course. 

* Picard says “computer activate self destruct sequence!” and the computer immediately starts counting down from 10. Ships today are so advanced they don’t even need that code Kirk had to put in. They’ll blow themselves up on a whim.

* But then in a shockingly original narrative device it says "48 HOURS EARLIER" and Picard is back on that damn vineyard again.

* Hover-drones are hovering up and down the rows of grapes, beaming the grapes off of the vines to collect them. Which I guess makes sense but just looks silly to see.

* Picard picks up a fresh bottle of wine and the vintage label is beamed onto it (???).

* In season 1 Picard had two ex-Tal Shiar Romulan servants who kept his house clean and changed his adult diapers, a married couple named Larex and Jarex. They were vaguely interesting but abruptly vanished from the story for no reason in like the third episode.

* Now in season 2 Jarex has apparently been dead a year and a half for unexplained reasons and Larex, a 50-year-old Irishwoman, is putting the moves on 107-year-old Picard.

* Um hello power dynamics?

* "Cheers, Big Ears," says Picard, then pumps his fists enthusiastically when he correctly translates some Romulan gibberish. Classic Picard mannerisms.

* "I thought you chose the stars, Picard, but are you running away from something?" she asks inexplicably. "Why are you always alone?" 

* Picard says that his personal wants and desires are secondary to his commitment to duty, forgetting that he has been in retirement and without commitments for like 20 years.

* Picard almost kisses her but then betas out and she leaves.

* Where the fuck is Beverly Crusher?

* Then there is a flashback to Picard's childhood on the vineyard. He is dressed like a 1920s Oliver Twist.

* "Will you fight less here?" Picard asks, followed by a quick-cutting montage of his dad beating his mom. Great!

* "If you hear us shouting, look up at the stars and imagine how tiny our voices sound out there," his mom tells him.

* All of TNG happened because Picard was running away from his childhood trauma of having an abusive father. Just like Gene Roddenberry intended. 

* Picard is so old. They should have called it Star Trek: Imhotep.

* "We often refer to space as the final frontier," Picard says in a speech at Starfleet Academy, "but the older I get, the true final frontier seems to be time."

* Picard introduces "the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy" and the camera cuts to Legolas, the male warrior-nun from season 1 who was always cutting people's heads off with a samurai sword.

* Meanwhile in space Seven of Nine is beating space pirates with a wrench.

* Her crew consists of the EMH program of Captain Rios, Picard's pilot-for-hire in season 1. 

* Captain Rios as I'm sure you don't remember had a dark and tragic backstory that manifested in him crewing his ship with half a dozen holo-people all played by the same actor as Captain Rios, because he was a complete narcissist. 

* I mean because they each represented some fragment of his broken psyche. Or something.

* Idk why Seven has this one when they could have just hired Robert Picardo but okay. 

* "Computer, disengage hologram safety protocols!" Seven says and then the EMH starts punching the pirates. Why would she even have that turned on?

* They capture the pirates and the EMH randomly starts psychoanalyzing Seven: "A lifetime of humans reacting with fear and prejudice to your Borg enhancements may have inhibited developmentally appropriate relationship skills."

* He says it in Spanish of course because that's more diverse.

* "Reacting with fear and prejudice" is so on-the-nose as a description of humanity in Star Trek it's hard to believe the writers didn't put it in intentionally as a fuck-you to the audience.

* Then a glowy green space anomaly appears.

* Meanwhile in the Beta Quadrant we cut to Data's "daughter" who ended up having no actual connection to Data whatsoever. She exposits that the Federation is no longer racist against "synthetics."

* Over at the bar Dr. Agnes Gerardi, who murdered Measure of a Man's Bruce Maddox in season 1, tells a bald guy that she was recently cleared of that murder for reasons of "alien-induced temporary insanity."

* "I'm half in the bag," she says.

* If you look on social media/Reddit there are a lot of bots I mean Star Trek fans saying "boy Picard season 1 sure was bad but this new season premiere is a big step up and I loved it!" They are LYING. 

* Suddenly Captain Rios is there in orbit. His Starfleet commission has been reinstated apparently and he's now the captain of the Federation starship STARGAZER.

* Rios smokes a cigar on the bridge and gives orders in Spanish. He's going to investigate the green glowy thing and wants Agnes aboard because she is a main character.

* "Make it so!" he commands. "The pressures of legacy!" Agnes titters.

* Back on Earth Picard exposits to Raffi, the drug addict 9/11 truther who made Picard check his privilege in season 1, that he is now chancellor of Starfleet Academy and is considering updating the Kobayashi Maru test. I know what that is!

* Raffi and Seven are a lesbian couple because Chakotay was that bad in bed.

* Raffi makes several pointed remarks about Picard being lonely and avoiding working on himself.

* Legolas is about to ship out. Picard gives him a book written by Spock and this piece of advice: "Live a little!"

* Seven meets up with Rios at the green thing, which emits a mysterious transmission. "It's a Unix system, I know this!" says Agnes, translating the message.

* "It says 'Help us, Picard!'" Cut to commercial break.

* Meanwhile Picard goes to visit Guinan's bar, which conveniently located in some dingy alley where they could shoot on location for cheap and just add a few CGI affects to an air conditioner.

* Guinan's bar is building number 10 on Forward Avenue.

* "Why are you so old and fat now?" Picard asks. Guinan explains that her people only age slowly if they choose to. "I've noticed that humans don't like to be reminded of their mortality so I try to keep up." 

* What

* Picard has come to complain about his love life. "You only date women you know you won't have to stay with," Guinan tells him.                 

* Picard is afraid of commitment!

* "Why did you decide to go to the stars in the first place?" she asks him. Man what a lucky coincidence for the writer that so many different people all happen to be asking him this same question at the same time.   

* Picard starts talking about new life and new civilizations but Guinan says the only place he's ever been afraid to explore is his own heart. "I think your answers are not in the stars and they never have been."

* Later an admiral lady brings a copy of the glowy green thing message to Picard's house. The entity wants to join the Federation so Picard must go back into the field. He arrives on Rios's ship and casually remarks that this isn't the same Stargazer he served on.

* So what was even the point

* For once the set design doesn't look bad actually. Lighting is too dim and all the surfaces are way too shiny but it's the closest they've gotten in any of these shows.

* "PICARD" the mysterious anomaly says in a voice that is clearly the Borg while Seven just stands there cluelessly.

* A Borg ship emerges from the green glowy thing. Instead of being a geometric shape it looks like a bunch of spikes because that's more badass.

* Agnes and Picard want to hear the Borg out and let them join the Federation but Seven is like y'all crazy let's just kill them.

* "THERE IS NO MORE TIME," say the Borg. "WE ARE SENDING OUR QUEEN TO NEGOTIATE WITH PICARD."

* "They can't transport through our shields," says Rios. Am I crazy or haven't they always been able to do that?

* Oh they just do it now anyway.

* The queen materializes on the bridge dressed like Darth Vader. "We wish for peace, but first we require...." 

"What?" says Rios. "What do you require?????" 

"Power!"        

* Borg queen shoots out Doctor Octopus tentacles and jacks into the ship's computer. The bridge officers open fire, which has no effect, and the queen kills them all with magic green lasers that emanate from her body like a Power Rangers villain.

* "Cease fire!" Rios orders but no one listens to him. 

* "She's assimilating the ship!" says Seven. "Not just our ship, the entire fleet!" says Agnes. This is where Picard activates the auto destruct.

* "Authorization: Picard-Zero-Zero-Zero-Destruct-Zero!" Yay, he said the thing.

* "Look up," the Borg queen tells Picard in his mother's voice. Then the ship blows up.

* Picard wakes up in his vineyard in an alternate timeline where Trump won in 2020.

* Q appears as Deepfake Young John Delancie. "You're a bit older than I expected, Picard," he says. "Let me catch up." and he turns into Old John Delancie.

* That's fine but it's very apparent that they could only afford to show him de-aged for like two seconds.

* Picard is like Q, you bastard, what's going on here! "You've been thinking a lot about second chances lately. Welcome to the very end of the road not taken."

* TO BE CONTINUED

* Hurray, it sucked.

Breaking Bad and Media Illiteracy

Is it ironic to complain about media illiteracy by defending media illiteracy? "The main character is likable and relatable but he does bad things, therefore it's reasonable to assume the author is saying those things are okay." This is like a child's understanding of literature.

This is how Walter White sees himself, not how anyone who consumes media with a remotely critical eye should see him. Walt is cowardly, weak, pathetic, and so full of himself he's incapable of recognizing his own limitations. He repeatedly bites off more than he can chew and only survives due to his intelligence and dumb luck. Along the way he loses his family, his best friend, his surrogate son, his dignity, and eventually the "money, power, and respect/fear" that he sacrificed everything for.

Darth Vader is maybe the coolest character in movie history. He looks awesome, he has an awesome voice, he dominates the scene every time he's on screen. Yet he's obviously fucking evil; clearly "looking cool" doesn't excuse any sin or personal suffering. Also like Darth Vader, Walter White gives his life to save his "son" by eliminating an evil even greater than himself. There is catharsis in seeing these Nazi bastards get what they deserve, but these are redemptive acts for fallen characters, not a glorification of their badassery.

Similarly this would be an inappropriate time to rub the audience's face in these characters' failures. They've already lost their power and dignity, reduced to cringing, pathetic figures barely able to walk, facing the end of their miserable lives.

It's also odd to complain about media tricking the audience into misinterpreting it as saying the protagonist is cool and good while misinterpreting the protagonist's victims as unsympathetic. You don't even have to like Skyler. What about the terrible paths down which Walt's actions send Hank and Jesse, the two most sympathetic characters on the show? What about the horrific domestic violence that plays out in front of Walt's children? What about the pathetic wretch Walt is reduced to at the end, having lost the money for which he sacrificed his family and the family for which he sacrificed his soul? This is all part of the story, not just the parts in the middle where Walt does something cool.

"I am the one who knocks" is a badass line but it's all bluster. Heisenberg is just the hat.

 

The humans win in Starship Troopers! They have cool spaceships and cool space guns and cool costumes (some of which look like Nazi SS officers, weird coincidence)! Therefore the humans are right and good! The bugs are ugly monsters, therefore they are bad!

Interpretations like this are a result of media illiteracy, not an excuse for it. There's no sin in misunderstanding a text, but such fundamental misunderstandings of such straightforward allegory indicate a flaw in reader analysis, not the author making their villains too cool.

"I agree that people are bad at understanding media, and here are some examples that confirm people are bad at understanding media, but it's the media's fault for not being stupid and obvious enough."

If straightforward narratives like Breaking Bad and Dune are too nuanced and complex for their own good, exactly what media can the reader ever be blamed for misinterpreting? Marvel movies? The fucking Star Wars sequels? Or maybe Star Trek: Picard, in which Pulitzer Prize- and Academy Award-winning writers took the humanist ethos of Gene Roddenberry’s vision for a utopian future free from bigotry and told a story about how it’s good to fear and hate people who are different from you? 

In today’s Golden Age of Media, anything’s possible!

The Real Star Wars Sequels

There are three Expanded Universe series that function very well as sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy and are valid alternatives to the Disney films.

The Thrawn Trilogy, starting with Heir to the Empire, was the first “big event” set after Return of the Jedi. It feels like a logical continuation of the story, progressing the personal lives of the main characters, adding to the secondary cast, and depicting the next stage of the war after the Empire’s defeat at Endor. However, it reads primarily as military science fiction and lacks the underpinning mysticism and philosophy of the Original Trilogy, and the movie characters, while well written, don’t go through much of a developmental arc. Consider this more of a “what happened next?” plot-centric sequel.

The Dark Empire trilogy, consisting of the comic series Dark Empire, Dark Empire II, and Empire’s End, feels in some ways like a counterpart to the Thrawn books. The plot is large, bombastic, and frequently silly, but it takes a back seat to the themes, philosophy, and character growth. Luke finally faces the temptations that ensnared his father and confronts the darkness within himself, while Leia embraces her Jedi heritage and takes up a lightsaber against evil when Luke is unable to. Consider this more of a sequel in terms of continuing the themes of Force mysticism and confronting the Jungian shadow established in The Empire Strikes Back.

Lastly is The New Jedi Order, a 19-book series beginning 21 years after Return of the Jedi. With the Empire defeated, the New Republic in power, and Luke’s reformed Jedi Order 100 Knights strong, the galaxy faces an existential threat in the form of alien invaders from another galaxy. The children of the legacy characters come of age in a war against an enemy who challenges their preconceived notions about the Force and the limits of Jedi philosophy, while the disparate power factions of the galaxy must unite or face extinction. Consider this a generational sequel, where the Original Trilogy characters still play major roles but the focus is equally on their children, and the mantle of galactic heroism passes from one generation to the next.

So these three series can adequately replace the Sequel Trilogy in terms of offering what good Star Wars sequels should have: continuation of the story, further character growth, expanded exploration of established themes and philosophies, and the coming of age of the next generation. Not that there aren’t other good and important post-Return of the Jedi EU stories that take place before and between these ones (Shadows of Mindor, the X-Wing series, the Jedi Academy Trilogy, and the Hand of Thrawn Duology, just to name a few), but in terms of being good sequels, these are the big ones to check out.

Nothing happens and no one learns anything.

 

The Cuckoo's Cry 

By Caroline Overington

Narrated by Aimee Horne 

 

This book takes place during a COVID-19 lockdown and is about as interesting as being stuck in one. It wants to be a slow-burn suspense thriller but in reality it’s just slow. For the first four hours people just sit around inside their houses or talk to each other on Skype. There’s a very slight mystery hook but it’s left mostly undeveloped until the climax, when the book becomes an action scene from a daytime soap opera. Instead of being on the edge of their seat, the reader just feels the mild curiosity one has when watching a Lifetime drama.

The book makes some overtures of being about isolation and society’s neglect of the elderly but these are just passing observations and ultimately the book has nothing to say about them. In the end most of the characters are exactly where they began, with no lessons learned and no changes made. This would be all right if the book was making a point, but instead it just makes everything that happened feel pointless. The majority of the story is just dull and full of references to life during COVID that already feel dated a year later, then it abruptly changes from dull to nihilistic and mean-spirited without any apparent meaning or intention. It’s like you took the aforementioned Lifetime movie and tacked on the ending from American Psycho: “This confession has meant nothing.”
 

I only finished this book because I got it for free; if I had paid for it I would have returned it.

 

Overall: 1 out of 5 stars

Performance: 3 out of 5 stars
Story: 1 out of 5 stars

Alan Wake – The Complete Experience

 

In celebration of Remedy Entertainment's announcement of the upcoming Alan Wake remaster, here is a post enumerating every item in the Alan Wake expanded universe and where to get them.

First is the prequel web series Bright Falls, which takes place immediately before Alan Wake in both chronological and release order. It takes place between August 25 and August 31, 2010.

(Bright Falls can also be viewed in its original format of six individually titled episodes.)

Next is Alan Wake itself. The remaster, set to be released in fall of 2021, will include the base game as well as the two subsequent DLC Specials, The Signal and The Writer. Alan Wake takes place from September 1 to September 14, 2010.

An optional companion piece to the game is the Alan Wake novelization by Rick Burroughs. A faithful retelling of the original story (the two Specials are not incorporated), it also includes unique scenes and character insights not found in the game.

The official music video for Poets of the Fall's song "War" features original live-action footage of Alan Wake during the course of his adventures.

Next are the graphic novels Psycho Thriller and Night Springs. Officially available only as bonus content for the current PC version, it's unknown if they will be included with the remaster. These stories take place during the second half of Alan Wake, on September 13, 2010.

The Alan Wake Files, an in-universe chronicle of the history of Bright Falls and Alan's writing career, is available as a physical book with the Xbox 360 Collector's Edition or as a PDF with the PC version. It takes place in 2011, the year after the game.

The official strategy guide from Prima Games, Alan Wake: Official Survival Guide is written in the style of an in-universe document and contains unique lore not found elsewhere. The Author's Foreword is dated May 13 of the year following the game.

 

Throughout Alan Wake, the player can find and watch several episodes of a Twilight Zone-inspired fictional TV series called Night Springs. Three additional episodes were scripted and shot but did not appear in the game.

The next major narrative installment is Alan Wake's American Nightmare, a spinoff/pseudo-sequel/dream sequence (?) only available on digital platforms. It takes place in 2012, two years after the events of Alan Wake.

Next is This House of Dreams, an ARG blog set in the world of Alan Wake and featuring the first appearance of the town of Ordinary, which plays a major role in Remedy's game Control. This House of Dreams takes place from February 22 to July 29, 2012.

Remedy's 2016 game Quantum Break includes a viewable in-game video featuring Alan Wake, titled "Return." It takes place five years after the events of the original game.

Finally, Remedy's most recent game, Control, is set in the world of Alan Wake and features many allusions to its story and lore. The second of its two DLCs, AWE, is fully centered around Alan Wake. The events of Control begin on October 29, 2019.

a. Expansion 1: The Foundation
b. Expansion 2: AWE
• PlayStation 4 exclusive content

i. Dr. Yoshimi Tokui's Guided Imagery Experience side mission
ii. Astral Dive Suit
iii. Tactical Response Gear
iv. Urban Response Gear
v. Dr. Tokui Tapes

With any luck, the next entry on this list will finally be, at long last, Alan Wake 2.

 

Kung Fu (1972) starring David Carradine is a great and anti-racist show

I don’t understand this need to hawk your cheap wares by tearing down the foundation you stood on to make them. Yeah they cast a white guy as a half-white, half-Chinese character 50 years ago, in a different time with different standards. But the supporting cast was Asian American, the most memorable characters who delivered the most famous lines. Virtually every Asian American actor working at the time appeared on the show at some point. Their culture and heritage were never treated as objects of mockery.

The show wasn’t racist; it featured racism, and condemned it. Caine was an immigrant looking for belonging in a country that didn’t want him, and the anti-Asian bigotry he encountered in his travels was always shown for the ugly thing it was.

Yes, Bruce Lee could have done the fight scenes better, but the fight scenes weren’t the point. The show preached non-violence and the preciousness of life; Caine mourned for everyone he couldn’t save because he recognized the value in each of them, even those blinded by hate.

It was a great show with a diverse cast and a powerful message, so it’s disheartening to see it used as a sacrificial lamb to prop up this CW revenge drama whose common DNA apparently includes the name, the inciting incident, and nothing else.

Talk about an insensitive 50-year-old casting decision all you like, the show’s most embarrassing legacy will still be the lead actor accidentally choking himself to death while rubbing one out. Maybe that’s the wrong this new version is supposed to fix!