QuantumMechanic

They definitely made it somewhat subtle. You had Fry saying "I found the use of force efficacious", Calliope saying "I didn't give it to him, he took it". And then when we go back to Madoc after that fade-to-black he's typing furiously away and we see a bloody scratch on his face. I wonder if I would have picked it up had I not read the comics.

The ending was probably the best and most logical thing about this season.

Or can see it from a plane, satellite, etc., which is quite possible.

I view that as a feature, not a bug. :)

The abject laziness of the writing this season is something else.

The harlequin chest with all the stuff laid out in it made me think of the vault in Friday the 13th: The Series. And hey - someone other than a Locke got to be stupid! How could you not tell your mom, Rufus?? She of all people would understand. And could have passed a message to Nina.

While there can always be take-backsies, the Duffers have gone on record as saying season 5 is it.

An interesting thing is that the campy perhaps drag-esque performance was a choice made by the TV show production, since at least in the comics that this season adapts that is not how Desire comes across at all. Admittedly, Desire appears in only 9 pages out of over 200 (separate 5 page and 4 page appearances). But in the first appearance they are in a smart suit smoking a cigarette. And in the second appearance they are wearing cat ears, a tail, and a simple black leotard. In both cases they are not wearing any jewelry and (as was an intentional choice) their face looks like a Patrick Nagel painting. (Think the album cover of Duran Duran's Rio).

It wouldn't be Locke & Key without overweening Locke family stupidity.

On the other hand, something like this is warning about not being taken in by people like Weinstein who say all the right things in public but are oh so different out of the spotlight. No one is being done any service by pretending people like Weinstein (or Madoc) don’t exist.

It is. My god, it is.

I find it interesting to read the reactions from people who never read the comics. I wonder how much of stuff like "Ugh, Dream is so unlikeable and like I XYZ character better. What were the writers doing??" is due to 1990s vs today or comics vs TV or whatever. Now sure, people have no obligation to have read the comics and the TV show needs to stand or fall on its own and I think it's totally fine for non-comic-readers to judge the show entirely on its own. But what's the deal with this "the main character has to be likable", etc. attitude? I'd agree the main character needs to be interesting. But likable? Not necessary so long as there's some growth.

Fun Land's costume in the show matches what's in the comic -- wolf ears and a wolf on the shirt. They did leave out some of what he said when he was talking to that other killer about "the nice place Iwhere I hunt". After saying what he says on the show, in the comic he continues with So quite the slam on the House of Mouse. I guess they were too nervous to remind Disney of what was written about them 33 years ago in the comic, given Disney's power in TV, streaming, and movies.

The thing is, the writers don't have a free hand. They are, as we all know, adapting an existing work. The stuff adapted by this season represents (eyeballing shelf inches) less than 20% of the entire work. The stuff adapted by this season covered somewhat over 200 pages of the original work. And (I just checked) in those 200+ pages Despair appeared in only five and Desire in only nine (five of those with Despair) and what you saw on the show was basically all that was said on those pages, i.e. not very much. So unless they're going to make up a bunch of things from whole cloth or drastically change or reorder plotlines & stories there wasn't anything they could do along those lines this season. The comic, IMHO, was very much a slow burn with lots of different stories and plotlines that over the long haul advance various overall themes and character development. It will be interesting to see how (or even if) that comes over into TV.

You’re not the only one. I was convinced it was gonna happen while they were singing to her and she’d take one of them out.

Oh, one other bit of Locke stupidity — so you done want to mention Eden to the cops so they place doesn’t become a crime scene — ok, I get that. So instead you throw the unweighted body where it’ll land all of 20 feet off shore. What do you think happens when the body washes ashore? (Assuming the demon doesn’t re-activate somehow). Speaking of Eden, does anyone remember/know why her body is frozen? At the end of last season Gideon just threw her down the well. Heck, why is she even dead? Aren’t the demon-possessed humans pretty hard to kill?

I cannot get over how truly stupid the Lockes are. It’s beyond amazing at this point. And Bodie really took the cake in this one. Using the key at all. And then telling the bad guy how you beat them in the future (though admittedly that doesn’t seem to matter given how this version of time travel works, which is fine), and then not immediately booking it to somewhere you can hide until the 5 min runs out.

This show really has degraded into extreme Idiot Ball plotting. 😢

To be fair to Dream

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Ryan George comes for Fett :)

I see the Lockes are still as stupid as ever. Let’s leave the key in the globe and leave the globe in the house while we fiddle around outside. Let’s stand there and watch these strangers getting closer and closer. Let’s pause and wait a bit before removing the mirror key after throwing the demons into the mirror. I only hope they’re intelligent enough to tape a “don’t use - demons trapped inside” note over the mirror’s keyhole.

I just ran across this Atlantic piece from a week ago. Touched on some of the very stuff I've seen in the comments on the episode threads here, too: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/08/netflix-the-sandman-tv-show-neil-gaiman/671062/

Well, the show is in a tough spot on this, because (a) that is basically how those characters look in the comics (Despair actually looks worse and Desire is intentionally modeled on Nagel's art) , and (b) the comics have an intense fan base. So on the one side there's what you're talking about and on the other side this is an adaption of an existing work and its characters have very iconic looks and styling.

Well, we might done with Ivy’s (and the writers’) doubts about it, but unless they significantly change the characterizations of one or both of them the stuff that actually happens on-screen will still demonstrate they’re not good for each other. And they are both characters with a history (in this show) of making themselves believe in someone who’s wrong for them. That said, the writers say they are now a couple for ever and ever and ever. Let’s see if the writers actually show it or if it’s just more of the same and we have to convince *ourselves* they make sense together regardless of what we see.