Black Knight

CBS Sports had an interesting article laying out how Watson's suspension could end up being longer. I hope it ends up playing out that way. I also hope this all blows up in the Browns' face one way or another.

Waiting to introduce their child to someone they're dating is one thing - a parent should take as long as they need on that score. But "I have a child" is information that must be shared by the end of the first date unless you've already decided you aren't interested in seeing that person again. There is no acceptable reason for withholding it. The only reason to withhold it is if you are concerned your date would be turned off by that information and you want to keep seeing them. But children are a dealbreaker issue for a reason, and compounding that by making it a secret, another dealbreaker, is no foundation for a relationship. Just think of the number of outright lies and omissions Nate would have had to make over an 18-month period in order to conceal that simple fact of having a child whose life he is involved in. It would be impossible to trust such a person.

What I really want to know is how they'll handle Snow's inner monologue near the end - any reader knows the one I mean. It's so crucial and so chilling. Even if the scene were in the hands of the best actor in the world, I think Snow's thoughts still have to be verbalized at least somewhat.

The rumor panned out! If the writing for this movie is even half as good as the casting, it's going to be an incredible movie.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion that if I hadn't read the comics, I would not recognize the Corinthian's eyes for what they are. It's not supposed to be a mystery, but the camera's just too far away to see those eyes clearly. Maybe it works if one has a 75-inch TV, which I do not.

Rewatching that scene, I don't think Paul helped, at least not intentionally. We aren't shown his face when the wheelchair is being turned and breaks the circle. Paul walks away, then pauses as if in realization, and looks back at the floor and sees the circle is indeed broken. That points to him not breaking it deliberately. I think his little nod to Dream at that point is sort of an "Well, c'est la vie, I won't say anything about it." I don't think in magic you can just dump chalk (or whatever) into the broken part of a circle to make it whole again, so there wasn't anything Paul could really have done to fix the issue anyway. He might have hoped by not yelling it out to all and sundry, and sort of acting like it was intentional, Dream would spare his lover.

Especially the way Hector was dissipated. If he'd just subtly faded into nothing that would have been one thing, but seeing your husband go practically skeletal first and them crumbling away, yowza. That was a nightmarish visual. Poor Lyta.

The term derives from the John Fowles thriller titled "The Collector", which was then made into a film. Several real-life serial killers have claimed a connection to the novel and/or film. It's very dark humor, so laugh away. I did!

I've been doing a re-read of the comics after watching the show - I'm now partly through Kindly Ones - and it's been interesting to think about which shorts might make it in and which might not. The Calliope short has to make it in, because she's Orpheus's mom, and it also is a way of showing how Dream has changed from the old days. And I'm sure they're going to do Ramadan, because that was the single most successful issue in the series' history. And Midsummer's Night because that's the most decorated issue in the series' history. And of course Orpheus's own story. The others in the short-story collections likely will be skipped, though - which is all of Worlds' End, much of Fables & Reflections, and at least half of Dream Country. They might do the cat short as half an episode as an animated story, because that one is also so popular and they might like the idea of inserting a brief animated short as a departure from live action. Kinda like the Harry Potter movie.

Her rep indicated the reason Heche remains on life support is because she's registered to be an organ donor, and they need to determine if any of her organs are viable. So it's not going to be long now, either way. Tragic.

Although Wikipedia is not an official source, since it was mentioned as a reference I'll note the Wikipedia page lists a number of bottle episodes that had nothing to do with budgetary reasons or the other reason of a script that fell through and had to be replaced. So Wikipedia itself acknowledges that budgetary/script issues are not required. Writers discovered there were such creative advantages to the format that they started doing them for creative reasons alone, and by this point in television they're done as often for creative reasons as for budgetary reasons. And certainly in 24/7 we can see the creative advantages of sticking to one location with one small set of characters: It creates a hothouse atmosphere that makes us feel as trapped as the characters are in the de facto horror house. Though thankfully we don't die too. :)

Death is all those things - sunny and bubbly and warm and grounded. It's important to remember that while Death was and is embraced by the goth community, she was not intentionally conceived as goth. She does happen to fit the goth archetype of "perky and sensible," along with her brother who fits the other goth archetype of "lonely and brooding." But, as someone who isn't actually goth, she's not always going to fit perfectly in that box. She's other things too. As is Dream.

The legacies of those shows have nothing to do with shocking twists. Lost didn't bother to follow through on its mythology, leaving viewers with tons of unanswered questions. TWD told the same story over and over, which is the opposite of a shocking twist. There was nothing shocking about HIMYM either; that show's problem was that it should have ended several seasons earlier, and because they chose to drag the story out for money, the planned ending no longer made much sense but they still stuck with it. But again, not shocking: If you gave a brief synopsis of the premise of the show and the original characters, anybody familiar with the basics of storytelling could have said who Ted would end up with if the writers were not inventive. The source material for the original Sandman series was completed long ago, and has a secure place in comics history as one of the greatest comics ever produced, building such a devoted fanbase that Netflix thought it worth adapting for TV. And what happened to Gregory was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the source material. That's why I said the show essentially laid down a marker with that bit, to let viewers know what kind of show this is. It serves other important functions, of world-building and character-building - we learn quite a bit about Dream and the rules he operates under, and it helps make Cain, a guy who repeatedly kills his brother on the flimsiest of pretexts, three-dimensional. Sandman's not for everyone. No story is for everyone. There are popular ones that have bored or alienated me. But my own very individual reaction doesn't say anything about a story in itself or can necessarily be assumed to be the reaction of a majority. No story keeps everyone to the end.

It is a bottle episode. But they don't need to fend off accusations about it being that, because there's nothing wrong with being a bottle episode. Granted, some people don't like bottle episodes (or issues), but a lot of others do. It's just a format and like any format, some people like it and some don't. The EW binge recapper for Sandman, for instance, wrote that bottle episodes are often the most interesting in a series and that this one was no exception.

Durant wants to go to a great winning team, though. (I guess he's not so concerned now about being considered a bus rider.) Those teams typically don't have GMs on the verge of being fired.

It's interesting that Durant thinks GMs are going to line up to trade for him knowing that he'll demand they be fired if (when) things don't work out this season. It was foolish of him to leak this demand. Likely he thought it would force the Nets to go ahead and trade him instead of trying to run it back this season, and that if he deliberately hurt his trade value that would make it easier for other teams to get a deal done, but he doesn't seem to have realized what other GMs might think. Not to mention the owners. Saying he wants a new coach is one thing, a new GM is another.

I think with Emily's season, because she was A Mother Whose Partner/Child's Father Died, the show made an effort to cast sincere guys instead of ones who just wanted camera time or to be the next bachelor. (And some wrong reasons dudes stayed away out of the recognition that pulling this on The Grieving Mother's season wouldn't work out well for them.) It's probably not a coincidence that one of the very few Bachelors to actually get married to his final-final choice started out on Emily's season. The producers are worse, but I also wonder if with the guys especially, they've just sort of given up on finding right reasons men as either Bachelors or contestants, and think by this point the Bachelorettes ought to know better than to be sincerely trying to find a lasting commitment, and so they deserve whatever humiliation the show might dish out. There are almost no genuine love stories coming out of this franchise, which makes it hard to hold onto right reasons viewers, so they're going all in on the draaaaaaama instead to try to hold onto the wrong reasons viewers.

Lost went for 6 seasons (and only ended at 6 at the insistence of the showrunners - the network wanted more seasons). The Vampire Diaries lasted for 8. Game of Thrones increased its audience every season despite killing off a bevy of characters every season, and most complaints about the final season aren't about character deaths, but about poor execution of plot points and rushing the endgame because the showrunners wanted to be done. The Walking Dead was similarly brutal about killing off characters and remained a phenomenon for a long time, until it just kind of ran out of steam because it was the same plots over and over. An individual's decision to stop watching doesn't necessarily translate into massive audience loss. The Sam/Diane hypothetical doesn't really track since Cheers was a pleasant sitcom and Sam murdering Diane would have been wildly out of step for that genre. Sandman is horror, and it would be pretty poor horror if bad things didn't happen to characters people like. Gregory is a marker the show laid down to help calibrate viewer expectations about how dark the show can be: Yes, it will shoot your cute puppy (or gargoyle). Best for viewers to know that now so the ones who are turned off by such things can leave. Sandman has a story to tell.

And also with who's looking at them. They've already established that for the TV version with Dream in his scene with Nada (and did they ever cast someone good looking for Kai'ckul - I can see why Nada fell in love at first sight!), and to some degree with Unity referencing Desire as a man. It can be argued that the comics version of Despair isn't relevant for the current era the show mostly takes place in. They kept the hook and how she uses it on her own body, which are the important elements from the comic to carry over.

It would have been interesting to know what Bette would have done if Mark had been Maria. Was she really trying to fix Judy up with a guy specifically, or just with the first available person she saw walk into the diner while Judy was moping over her girlfriend, who happened to be a man? I don't think we were given enough information to know for sure.

Well, they wrapped up the current arc, but ended on a big cliffhanger about Lucifer's plans - and the nice thing about that is the cliffhanger isn't out of nowhere, it's getting back to the unresolved plot point earlier in the season of Lucifer vowing to destroy Dream. I would also gladly watch a S2. I binged this season in less than 24 hours (the first seven episodes Friday night, the final three Saturday morning).

They were never going to be able to have the comics version of Despair in a live action adaptation, because who is going to play that? No actress is going to sign up for the level of abuse they'd get online. They had to find a different visual for TV Despair. I thought the Crocs were a nice touch.

Roderick really isn't a terrifying figure though. The spell he cast was a penny-ante one that only snared Dream because he was so exhausted and weak at the time; it's why it didn't bring in Death. He pretended to be more than he was, so I don't think it's a huge change to have the Corinthian advise him on how to keep Dream captive. And bringing the Corinthian up to the first episode made sense since he's the big villain of the second volume, and this made him a through line that tied the two volumes together. Roderick was always gonna be gone before the end of the first episode anyway, so no sense building him up into more than he was anyway. And having his son kill him made for a nice little bit of payback karma for what he did to Dream. Viewers probably would not have found his dying peacefully of old age to be satisfying. Roderick's death at Alex's hands also fits in thematically with a trope Sandman plays with a few times, that of a father not paying enough attention to what's going on with his son, with disastrous consequences for both. We will see that again later with Shakespeare and Hamnet, and Dream and Orpheus. The latter especially is so consequential for the series that I think it's fitting to have an instance of the trope in the series premiere.

It's a very strange coincidence: First Jensen Buchanan drives drunk and injures somebody and serves a year in jail. Now Anne Heche drives drunk, through incredible good fortune narrowly misses that poor woman who was just sitting in her own home, and will certainly be looking at some kind of criminal proceedings. Ellen Wheeler is Mormon and so presumably doesn't drink. She should stick to that and avoid becoming the third Vicky/Marley actress to get into DUI trouble.

Yes, the legal rights to the character John Constantine are held by others (there's an HBO Max show in development using the character), so that necessitated the change.