Slovenly Muse

So, not satisfied with killing Devon Sawa only ONCE per season, eh? (No way that body double is long for this world.) Awww, this is gonna be good! Chucky. Nuked. Santa. How does this dumb show make me so damn happy every week?

I'm so glad this show is back! It just never fails to make me happy! And getting Hardison is always a bonus! I do get a kick out of the opening credits EVERY TIME with the silhouettes showing everyone's skills, and Harry's is, apparently... turning around. I legit chortle every single time. I will say, as much as I love Breanna and was glad to see her hold her own here with Hardison around trying to be the big brother, I do think she played a valuable role in the first season as the newbie. These sorts of con/heist shows ALWAYS eventually encounter the same problem (looking at you, Hustle!), which is that after years of watching these characters get out of extremely tight situations using almost superhuman levels of skill, it becomes really hard to build tension in an episode. What could possibly be happening that this highly-skilled team can't gain control of? And if everything seems to be going wrong, OF COURSE it's a fake-out and they planned it this way all along, because they're just too good to leave themselves open like that. Establishing stakes and creating tension and uncertainty, from a writing perspective, is just too hard, and eventually the show becomes predictable or stale. This is why I was glad to see Breanna and Harry come in last season as genuine newbies. They had some skill, but they were actual real wildcards, and maybe they COULDN'T handle the situations they were in, and maybe they WOULD need rescuing, or make a dumb mistake and endanger the plan... I thought it was a really brilliant way to reintroduce some of that tension into the storytelling! So, this episode, establishing Breanna as being a worthy successor, who can even outdo Hardison at times, felt like a bit of a misstep. It was lovely for the character, but I'm not sure it's the best for the overall dynamics. It was so fun to watch her learning the ropes last season! Let her keep learning! And yes, Harry still feels like a newbie, but he's so inconsequential that it doesn't really matter what he does. Breanna typically has a lot more resting on her shoulders. Man, I'm so happy that this show is still going, and that it is still delightful. The last season of the original run was starting to wear on me, but the reboot has managed to recapture the magic, and I am in!

Ok! This series is starting to click for me! I had heard a reviewer say that it was balls-to-the-wall bonkers, and you'd either love it or hate it. I quite enjoyed Flanagan's "Oculus" because it was balls-to-the-wall bonkers enough to distract from the weaker story elements, and since the Haunting series' were more story-forward and put those storytelling flaws on display (which detracted from my enjoyment), I figured there would be a good chance I would enjoy something of his that was more of a return to his "Oculus" style. And I'm starting to see what that reviewer meant! The first three episodes didn't wow me (especially having so much revealed in episode 3), and it still has a lot of the same issues as the Haunting series', but this is not going in the direction I expected, and I'm really appreciating what it seems to be trying to do! I was bracing for the low-key horror of people embracing miracles not knowing there was an evil force behind them, but seeing people actually disposing of bodies for the homicidal, blood-drinking Monsignor because he is a man of God and must therefore be simply acting out God's will is A CHOICE that I RESPECT! Looking forward to seeing what the rest of the show has in store!

Oof. Oh, Mike Flanagan. His stuff is just interesting enough to keep me coming back (and let's be honest, there is a dearth of good horror on TV these days), but it absolutely perplexes me how a successful horror writer/director can have SUCH a poor grasp of how horror works. My partner saw me starting the pilot earlier with the cat in the room (our cat is a panicky weirdo) and joked that it's not nice to watch horror with our poor cat who is easily scared. I joked to him not to worry because, "It's a Mike Flanagan show, so I'm sure by episode 3 all the horror will be explained, so we won't have to be scared of anything for the rest of the series and can just focus on criticizing the writing." I was INTENDING to exaggerate for humorous effect. I was not expecting a full-on SOLILOQUY in episode three OF SEVEN explaining exactly what the supernatural terror is, why it is there, and what it is doing. I just can't believe he did this, even though it's the same every damn time. Good horror trades on the audience's fear of the unknown, the ambiguity of possible explanations for what is happening and the maddening lack of certainty. It maximizes on the fear of "the uncanny:" the disconnect between what your senses are perceiving and what your brain understands to be possible. Every damn time, Flanagan kneecaps himself by not only explaining but OVER-explaining his horror elements WAY too early in the show, and draining the tension out of everything that comes after! I'm hopeful that he is planning to capitalize on this early reveal by mining it for dramatic irony (when the audience knows something the characters don't), watching the townspeople become increasingly enamored by the church and its "miracles," not knowing they are putting themselves in danger... but I just don't trust that he's going to be able to build that tension successfully. Still, I'm in it now and I'm going to find out! OK, one more before bed!

Yeah, this was one of my biggest complaints about the film. Once Taskmaster was revealed to be Dreykov's daughter (what's her character's name, by the way? Was she given one, or did I just not catch it?), it was really disappointing that there was no real payoff for that. The death of Dreykov's daugher (calling her DD since I don't know her proper name) was a huge millstone around Natasha's neck. Deliberately killing that girl to get the father affected her greatly, and she clearly never managed to leave it behind her (with good reason). So it was disappointing that she didn't get to really confront DD (only physically fight Taskmaster) and own up and come to some sort of closure about what her actions cost DD. Furthermore, DD's story was simply not told at all. She absolutely had legitimate reasons to want Natasha dead. It wasn't until the very end when she was freed from the mind control that I realized she actually WAS mind controlled. Her story is even more traumatic and horrible than Natasha and Yelena's: She was caught in an explosion when she was just a child because the supposed "good guys" wanted her father dead and didn't care that she was in the way. Then, she grew up (enduring what I'm sure was a long and painful recovery) only to find herself enslaved to her own father through mind control, forced to try to kill the very person she blamed for her condition in the first place, but with no agency or personhood to exact vengeance, because her father wanted to use her as nothing more than a tool and didn't love her as his daughter anymore. She could have been a central plot of the movie! But this story was not told or explored AT ALL. Not only was it a waste of a villain, it was a waste of a truly interesting character. Ignoring her story seemed like a lazy way to let Natasha off the hook by confirming that Dreykov was the one who REALLY used and exploited girls for his missions, including his own daughter, so really Natasha wasn't the problem and we shouldn't think any more about it. But the thing that actually bothered me the most about the movie is actually a fairly minor point: the accents. It was so weird to establish that these characters learned flawless English to blend in seamlessly to an American community, and then have them speaking in heavily-accented (even broken) English later on. Learning a language involves practicing pronunciation just as much as vocabulary and grammar, and they obviously mastered it. Having three of the four former-spies talking like... well, like comic book Russian villains, instead of capable international agents who could speak English as comfortably as Russian was distracting. I get that the production didn't want to have them actually speak Russian and subtitle it (hard on the actors and the younger audience members), and wanted to emphasize that they were of Russian nationality, but it really distracted and annoyed me, especially David Harbour's broken English. Of course, I am a language teacher myself, so I will admit to being especially biased. As for the controversy around ScarJo's lawsuit, I really hope she's successful and opens some doors for other actors with fewer resources to fight back against Disney and the other major production companies too. As a culture, we often talk about the insane salaries that actors receive for movies (same as athletes), but we don't often talk about the amount of money that a film (or game) will generate over time, as it is released on screens around the world, and on streaming, and eventually licensed for TV, etc., and who actually sees that income. When you consider the amount of money the movie will make, you realize that the actors, who have done the hardest work and provided the largest draw, are only getting peanuts compared to what the execs will rake in. Those people saying "she's rich enough already, does she really need to do this?" are totally missing the point that if SHE'S not getting that money, it's going to someone else who I guarantee is even richer and has done less work for it. Plus, if they're trying to short the headliner, you just know they're doing it to everyone else too. Good on her for fighting for the cut she deserves, and setting precedent for others to do the same.

Do these people not have agents to figure this stuff out for them? Doing this in public was super gross. This was the professional process running its course; there was no need to have a tantrum about it in a public forum. Actually, having SOME involvement from Sam/Jared (even extremely limited) would probably be considered a DRAW for the show, which his agent could have leveraged to get him involved, but he may well have shot himself in the foot here by personally lashing out at the very people he is hoping will HIRE him. I mean, if Jared's not finished with Sam Winchester, or is just mad to see Jensen continuing to ride the SPN gravy train without him, he's welcome to pitch his own spin-off and involve whomever he wants. That's how the business works. No one is stopping him. Riling up the fans to turn this into a personality conflict, rather than a business decision, is pretty low, and disingenuous to the actual process of launching a project like this.

Excellent episode, with great points all around. I only wish John had taken the extra step of drawing the clear line between Stand Your Ground laws, and the knee-jerk defense of "Israel has a right to defend itself." Because this mentality, that "I have a right to shoot at and indiscriminately kill anyone I feel threatened by, regardless of their actual ability to do me harm" is baked into the American understanding of violence, and what is and isn't considered "morally acceptable," which is just as much present in foreign policy as it is domestically. We don't often stop to examine the issues of violence as it is enacted on American streets, and violence as it is enacted through American involvement in international warfare, and acknowledge how this violence is fundamentally the same. An America that sells weapons to Israel to "defend itself" against its relatively-powerless Muslim "adversary" is operating on the same moral principles as an America that passes Stand Your Ground laws and selectively enforces them along racial lines. The folks in power who support these narratives WANT us to see them as two different, unrelated issues, that we will have to fight as two separate and costly battles, so that we will be forced to prioritize and divide our efforts unnecessarily, when in reality they are the same issue, with the same root cause, which can be addressed through the same shift in thinking and policy. I do wish John had been able to make that explicit, that both of his main stories were essentially the same story. I think it's an important thing to acknowledge!

Sure... but then, if the two offshoot-worlds weren't deterministic, shouldn't the origin world (or "real" world) be even MORE strict about allowing paradoxes to exist, since it's the "correct" one that shouldn't be changed? Jonas and Martha weren't just erasing their worlds, they were preventing their worlds from being created in the first place, and they DID cease to exist as a result of their actions which could therefore have never taken place, so I would have liked a bit more exploration of that paradox, rather than just handwaving it away as "oh, it works now," especially from a show that has put so much thought and care into the other paradoxes it created. (I would have even been happier if Jonas and Martha had continued to exist as like, shipwrecked sailors in someone else's timeline, surviving and living in a world that is not facing imminent apocalypse, but where all their family and friends will never exist. I feel like that would have made more sense than, they prevented themselves from ever existing and didn't create a paradox somehow.) Yes, you're exactly right. I'm just annoyed that the show presented it in EXACTLY the same way they presented the other 3-part situations, mirroring the reveal in season 1 that the portal ALSO goes to the future, because there are always three: Past, present, and future. They used this imagery and theme throughout the show, and then tried to use it on the last reveal as well as a sort of re-reveal ("you should have known there are always three"), only, as you say, it is NOT the same situation, so it doesn't actually work. In the case of the three worlds, three is an arbitrary number chosen to fit with the other, more meaningful, occurrences of the 3-pattern. Any number of parallel timelines could have been created from people's diverging decisions, so that point felt weaker than it could have. Anyway, I've been surfing around and having a hard time finding reviews of the season that aren't glowing, so I'm glad people are enjoying the show. I did enjoy it, I think? Or not? It hurts my head, but, in a good way? I still don't know!

Netflix's Dark! The show that dares to ask the important questions, like, "If banging my aunt is wrong, could I travel to a parallel timeline where her sibling never had me, and bang THAT version of my aunt? Is that cool?" I am super late to the party on this one, but I finally watched the show and had some thoughts! First of all, any fellow Parks and Rec fans remember that throwaway joke, when Ben invented the "Cones of Dunshire" board game and was ridiculously pleased that a games magazine had reviewed it as "punishingly intricate?" That was the exact phrase that kept going through my mind the whole way through this thing. This is the most punishingly intricate time travel narrative I've ever seen, and I really appreciated that! I give it kudos! It taught me a lot about the things I do and don't like in time travel stories. I'm really in awe of it's plotting, and the way it managed to open and close these twisting, tangled loops so that it all made sense in the end. I do wish it had gone a little further! Partway through season 1, I started envisioning a more chaotic version of events, where Jonas DID rescue Mikkel from 1986 and bring him home. I started wondering if this show was going to break out of the standard time travel story, where you have to avoid paradoxes and take care to preserve one chronological sequence of events that is for some reason more "correct" than other possible sequences of events.... and just fucking go for it! What if time isn't a line, but rather an infinite web of possibilities, where paradoxes aren't possible because the past, present, and future are all influencing each other in non-linear ways that have never been explored on television before? So, the show I GOT was a bit of a let down. I appreciate that the loops all connected, and while I glazed over some of the details toward the end, I didn't have a problem tracking everybody's progression through the series. But other than it's intricate time loops, I was pretty disappointed with the story. For one thing, there was just way too much of characters being confronted by older versions of themselves, and guided towards certain actions, only to find that their older selves had lied to them... and that even OLDER selves had lied to those older selves, and manipulated THEM into manipulating their younger selves, until it became impossible to figure out what anyone's motivation for doing anything really was. It got tiresome, and not that interesting. Because everyone's goals were so muddied it was impossible to know what anyone was really fighting FOR (and if you did, it turned out they'd be fighting for the opposite thing later on), it made the emotional stakes hard to connect with. For another thing, I did not AT ALL buy Jonas and Martha as star-crossed lovers. Their incestuous love was weird in ALL timelines, and I had no emotional investment in their connection. For another thing, the show thought it was pretty clever making Charlotte and Elizabeth each other's mothers... but didn't want to acknowledge at all the fact that to make that happen, Charlotte and Elizabeth both had to sleep with their own grandfathers (and those men both had to sleep with their own granddaughters). I understand not wanting to dwell on it, but that's a bit fucked up to completely ignore and hope no one notices. I really LIKED its use of the bootstrap paradox, and things that only exist because they had already existed... but that made it even more frustrating when it got hung up on other types of paradoxes. Like, you can't kill yourself because an older version of yourself "already exists," so "time won't let you" do it. Saying that paradoxes like that simply can't exist is a bit of a cheat, but it's fine, I can buy that... the problem is that the resolution of the series is EXACTLY that paradox! If Jonas and Martha changed the timeline to prevent their worlds from ever existing, then how did they exist in order to be there to change the timeline? Did "time" change its mind about allowing that, or what? Also, the running theme of the three-part situation. Past, present, and future. Child, adult, elder. Three dimensions. The trifecta. Suddenly making Jonas and Martha's worlds part of a 3-world system doesn't track with the other examples, because in what other three-part situation in the show can you remove TWO of the parts and see the remaining one continue to exist normally? It would have made more sense to have the origin world need the other two to exist as well, creating a three-part loop with some sort of mutually-beneficial or mutually-destructive property; making the three worlds interdependent, creating each others' problems and solutions. Suddenly making two of the worlds disappear through a paradox we've already been told "time simply won't allow" just doesn't fit with the rest of the story, and feels lazy in comparison to the otherwise very intricate plotting. I have so many mixed feelings about this show. I finished A LOT of episodes by shouting at my TV, "I wish I knew if I hated this!" Because I honestly still don't know if I loved or hated this show. I've told my partner HE should watch it (he has strong feelings about time travel stories) so that he can tell me whether or not I hated it! Nevertheless, I admire what it did, even though I can't commit to actually liking it. I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad I watched it, and my other feelings... well, they're probably going to remain stuck in an infinite knot, trying to come to some sort of conclusion!

Yes. Her "experiment" is completely stupid and proves nothing. What happens if the Twilight of Adam island actually does do better? Is she prepared to make her grand speech in front of her imaginary audience about how her experiment definitively proves that women are not suited to leadership and should take a back seat to let men rule forever? No? Then how can she possibly argue the opposite if the Dawn of Eve island pulls ahead? Clearly her fingers are on the scales in every way, and she'll never let the "experiment" play out fairly if it looks like it might contradict her agenda, and that will be obvious to anyone who looks at her results. Nothing about her methodology or even premise has the slightest whiff of legitimacy to it. Co-operation and leadership in our infinitely-complex, diverse society has nothing to do with what specific individuals are suited to survival on a deserted island. I find it ludicrous that so many characters are on board with this idiotic, cruel, and deeply immoral plan that serves no purpose. It takes me completely out of a show I was otherwise quite enjoying!

I just caught up with this show after a few recommendations, and I have some pretty mixed feelings! I really liked the island stuff - more than I expected to. I think the story of the girls trying to make it work in a desperate situation on an island was compelling, enhanced even more by the flashbacks to their lives before the island, so we see how their individual struggles inform their behaviour, the way they treat each other, the way they approach survival... I thought it was fascinating and really well-drawn from a psychological and sociological point of view (and great storytelling). And then, as others have mentioned, there was the experiment plot. WTF was that? It seems like they had a GREAT premise for a show, and then bumped it up to a comedically absurd level with this experiment nonsense. It makes no sense at all and is insulting. Gretchen and a couple of young women have been victimized by the patriarchy so much that they decide to do something about it... by victimizing other young women to an even greater degree? No one, no matter how feminist, could think that is feminist! And it just doesn't track. From her conversation with Leah's parents, it sounds like the families don't know what the girls are going through. So how can she possibly ever discuss this experiment in academic circles without getting into a shitload of legal trouble? She doesn't have informed consent from the participants or their families. Her experiment has resulted in at least one death and one mutilation (of minors!), as well as severe psychological trauma. How is she going to reunite these girls with their families without anyone figuring out that they were lied to and exploited? Making the girls feel guilty so they "won't sue" just doesn't cut it. What about when the parents get their kids back from their "therapeutic summer retreat" and find out what was happening all those weeks while the nice therapist lady was videoconferencing them about how great their daughter was doing? And then there is the control group. The names "Twilight of Adam" and "Dawn of Eve" perfectly convey the immense bias baked into the very premise of the experiment. It's just stupid! Even calling them "Camp Adam" and "Camp Eve" would have been at least a NOD to impartiality. If the NAMING process is biased so heavily towards the girls, how much faith can we really have in the selection process, intervention decisions, or the interpretation of the results? Everything about this experiment seems like they're just shooting themselves in the foot if they attempt to share their findings with ANYONE in possession of half a brain. Which brings me to Nora. I appreciate that they wanted to keep the "confederate" a bit mysterious, but Nora makes no sense. This was clearly a decision based on "shock value" rather than story logic. DOT makes sense - she's lost a parent and is vulnerable and potentially seeking a new parental figure, this could keep her off CPS's radar, and she's enough of a survival nut to willingly sign up for this nightmare. But Nora? No way. I'm sorry... her not-boyfriend was killed by toxic masculinity (i.e., Gretchen's son), and her response is to torture other girls, including her sister? I just don't buy it. Not only that, but I don't buy that someone as naive as Nora wouldn't be completely shattered to learn that Jeanette, the one who was supposed to look after them and be the adult, has actually DIED and Gretchen is not going to intervene! If the death of the person who is arguably most crucial to the experiment's safety and success is not enough to warrant an intervention, whose death would be? Any of them could die at any time, and Gretchen would likely still let the experiment take its course. There's no way Nora wouldn't realize that once they lost Jeanette! Why is she still calmly playing along and reassuring Leah that she's "safe?" This makes no sense to me. And unlike Dot, whose participation in this could be seen as empowering, Nora comes across as an idiot being exploited by Gretchen, which is just not narratively satisfying. So they took a great idea for a psychological drama, and ruined it by adding this meta layer of stupid, poorly-thought-out conspiracy stuff. I do not want to watch this dumb non-scientific experiment conducted by apathetic morons who embody the worst stereotypes about "radical feminists" wanting to take over the world from men. I want to watch the gripping, heartfelt TV dramatization of the RESULTS of the experiment. Could I just have that, please?

I've been surprised, looking over reviews of the movie, that almost none (even the negative ones) mention the racist stereotyping of Egyptians/Muslims that bothered me throughout the film. Finally, Slate tackled the topic, and it turns out those portrayals are not only lazy and Islamophobic, but also REALLY inaccurate! Worth a read, for sure.

Thanks, @slowpoked! Yeah, "Kill them all" is a rather unexpected interpretation of my comments, but in the interests of clarity, in case anyone else was misled, here we go: It is a well-worn trope in movies and TV shows that the hero wants to "teach a lesson" to the rapist/sexual harasser/domestic abuser by beating the shit out of them, so they know "how it feels" to be a victim. It's a very trite, reductive, oversimplified solution to think that you can just beat someone up to "scare them straight" or whatever (or because "they deserve it" and that somehow stands in for actually solving the problem). The truth is, abusers typically feel powerless, emasculated, or self-loathing, and they take those feelings out on their victims. They feel powerful in relation to the women they're abusing, which is why they do it. So beating them up, making them feel even MORE powerless or emasculated, is only going to make them take it out on their victims even harder! It might feel satisfying to watch a rapist get his teeth kicked out, but ultimately it's only making the problem worse and is doing nothing to protect or prevent future victims. At a minimum, movies like this would typically leave the guy for the cops to deal with, so he'd be incarcerated and not an immediate threat to others, but WW didn't even do that. A film that was actually interested in justice would have used WW's Lasso of Truth to make the guy see the dark cycle of misery that he was perpetuating within himself, and make him understand that he would never be a happy and fulfilled human being as long as he treated other people this way, and would show him a path out of his unhappiness through changing his life and trying to make restitution to his victims. But I get it, no one wants to see that on the big screen, when you've got a hero who can knock bad guys around like bowling pins and a budget for explosions. Like I said, I don't really expect movies like this to actually dive into the philosophical question of what it means to "do good." But if they were going to make "how do you deal with a rapist" an important question to assess someone's morality, I would have liked a more complex answer than just "apply as much violence as WW, but not as much as Cheetah."

Yes, this. Plus, Diana, a character bursting with humanity, ALSO dealt with him by beating him up, just to a lesser extent. And clearly this had zero impact on his willingness or ability to continue harassing women in the future. So there was no correct solution explored for dealing with men like him, just "use brute force to knock them around, but not too much, or it's inhumane." Not that I'm surprised - these sorts of movies really bank on vigilantes fighting crime by stopping specific criminal acts from taking place, but have no interest in what a "safer" or "more just" world actually looks like, or what it might mean to stop somebody from being a criminal, rather than stopping the criminals from making off with the loot. Still, I wish if they were going to make "how to deal with creeps" a significant moral story point, they had at least had a contrasting good and bad idea in mind. I pretty much came to say what others have said. I wish Chris Pine hadn't been in the movie. He didn't add anything romantically (not being in his own body, which was icky), or plot-wise, having nothing to really do. If they were committed to bringing him back this way, I wish they'd acknowledged the impact that him taking over another dude had on that other dude. A line about whether or not he could sense the other dude dormant in his consciousness somewhere, or whether he had died/disappeared completely so that Steve could replace him, or some acknowledgement that they were risking this other dude's life by involving him in multilple armed conflicts. Or some indication that he had a life and family/friends, and that if Steve stayed he'd be robbing this guy of his life. You know, that kind of thing! The lack of any examination of the morality of the situation was weird and jarring. I also wish, instead of Steve, we'd had more time to develop the relationship between Barbara and Diana. They never really felt like friends, and they never really felt like enemies. I guess it leaves Cheetah in a morally-grey space moving forward, which has potential, but I really wish her character had been developed a little better. The closest comparison I got from her story was Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. She starts off as this frumpy, nerdy scientist, and then gets superpowers and becomes sexy, and immediately turns evil for some reason. I like that they made her transformation gradual enough to make sense - she wished for power, but lost her humanity, and it was from a place of having already lost her humanity that she wished for deadlier power. I just wish we had gotten a better sense of her. She just seemed miserable and lonely. I wish we had a better sense of what she was LOSING while her power was growing. Like if she'd had an obvious moral decline, and seemed in some clear way more pathetic as a superpowered badass than she had as a friendless scientist, so that we could really feel what this was costing her. One bookended moment with a homeless man didn't quite do the trick. I wasn't totally clear on what Maxwell Lord was up to. Sure, he wanted to be successful enough to impress his son and got carried away on his power trip, but what did he want by the end? What did he stand to gain, exactly, from making the world wish itself into nuclear Armageddon? More power? Over the smouldering cinder of planet Earth? Why? What was his endgame? And... was the moral of the movie that we should accept the world the way it is and not wish for anything better? The monkey's paw "wishes turn bad" story has been told so many times that I really wanted a stronger moral through-line that had something new to say, perhaps about wishing versus earning? They seemed to be setting that up, and then never followed through! I also could have lived without the Egypt stuff. It bothers me when Hollywood blockbusters want to incorporate Middle Eastern or other Muslim-majority countries into their stories, but obviously don't see that these places/people/cultures have anything to offer the world besides oil and conflict. It's reductive and Islamophobic. They're pretty much brought in to be a shorthand for villainy or terrorism, and while I don't think that was really the intention here, the Egyptian characters still had nothing to do besides shoot guns and explosives at the heroes while looking Muslim and sinister. It's odd that the film's biggest action sequence pitted Wonder Woman against a convoy of heavily-armed Muslims (who weren't even acting of their own free will, being under the control of Max Lord, and were therefore innocent casualties - not that the film was interested in exploring that fact), rather than the film's actual villains. Not to say that I disliked the movie. I had a lot of notes, but I mostly enjoyed the experience of watching it. The performances were good, and Gal Godot may not be the most dynamic actress, but she is magnetic onscreen. I could watch two and a half hours of her doing laundry. Despite its issues, I don't regret the time I spent. I just wish the script had received a bit more (or, as is more likely the case with a movie of this scale, LESS) revision beforehand.

I've got to hand this to a show I stopped respecting a long time ago: I've grieved more for Dean Winchester today than I have for any other fictional character I've ever watched die. I get the complaints that Dean didn't get a "hero's" death, but I'm kinda ok with that. Dean has died many times, and they've all been "heroic" and self-sacrificial... he's thrown his life (and soul) away countless times to protect others, and because he believed his life was less valuable than theirs. He's already had his big hero's death, multiple times. But this time, it was different. He didn't die deliberately throwing himself between those kids and certain death, or because he gave up and refused help thinking he wasn't worth saving... this time, it was just the regular misfortune that happens on a hunt, and he knew he wasn't going to survive, but he fought for every minute he could get, to tell Sam what he needed to say and what Sam needed to hear, so that he could go on his own terms. This might be the only time he's died NOT believing he deserved it, or that he was expendable, or that the world would be better off without him. This time, he got to die at his brother's side, knowing for certain he did good (saving those kids), that he and Sam were free (and Sam was actually going to be ok without him, no longer in need of Dean's protection, no more demons, angels, or deities pulling his strings), and that he was loved (No, Sam didn't say it the way Cas did, but it was agonizingly clear, and they've never really needed words anyway). I honestly never thought I could find a Winchester death this affecting, since it happens so damn often, but it seems they got me despite myself, no matter how stupid the journey was to get here. Regardless of the exact manner of his death, I just keep thinking about the hole that Dean has left in the world: A young man named after him, who was surely raised on the the stories of Dean's feats, and is now the sole bearer of that enormous legacy. A bunker left dark and shuttered, just waiting for a new generation of hunters to stumble across it, wonder at the lives of the people who used to live there, try on Dean's robe and call it "the dead guy robe." The community of hunters who saw the Winchesters as legends, and will certainly be telling wilder and wilder stories about Dean after his death (it's my head canon that Jody, Donna, and all their other living hunter friends threw a massive wake for Dean, which Sam politely declined to attend). A black '67 Chevy Impala likely now owned and maintained by a new Dean Winchester, possibly still hunting the way she should be... Even though it was unsaid, or not shown, it's all undeniably there in the fabric of this universe, and the more I think about it, the more stuff emerges, the more I realize Dean has left behind. It comes over me in waves, breaking my heart all over again, when I think back on the complex history of this show. And even though they may not have had the budget, or the Covid safety measures, or the creative capacity to put it all on the screen, for me it is no less present or powerful. This episode sucked, but, it was really just a formality anyway. We know what Dean and Sam meant to us and to their world. We understand what it means for them to finally be at peace together, and what it means for those (of us) left behind to live in a world without them. It was so poorly executed, but fuck, I'll take it. The legacy of these characters was always going to be bigger than the show would be able to do justice to.