Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | 2.21 - “Becoming, Part I”

Why Riverdale doesn’t work as a TV show-- but other TV shows in same or similar genres do

TV has slowly become more campy over the past couple of decades. The 90s started with Twin Peaks and ended with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The 2010s gave birth to Teen Wolf, Riverdale, and then the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. 

Teen Wolf ended in 2017, with 81% overall on Rotten Tomatoes. The first season rated 68% and the last season rating 83%. 

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina ended in 2020, with 81% overall on Rotten Tomatoes. The first season rated 91% and the last season rating 78%. 

Riverdale’s fifth season was supposed to come out this year (2021) but due to Covid-19 restrictions, nothing has aired yet. Nevertheless, it rates 86% overall on Rotten Tomatoes. The first season rates 88% and the last season aired, season 4, rates 84%. But this is on the Tomatometer, not the audience review scores. And isn’t the audience the most important part of all? 

Teen Wolf - 83% on average audience viewing

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina - 74% on average audience viewing

Riverdale- 57% on average audience viewing

But maybe let’s start with the original campiness and why they work so well. 

~These are all TV shows that I have watched or am currently watching~

~~I’m also using the Tomatometer because everything seems to be low on on IMDB and also percentages make it look like I know what I’m doing~~

Spoilers for Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Riverdale below the cut

Twin Peaks is about a murder, and then another, at least in the first season. It’s quickly established that there’s something a little off with the town of Twin Peaks. Agent Cooper has some sort of supernatural dream very early on containing information of who the actual murderer of Laura Palmer is. It established supernatural tones quickly, and viewers know what they’re getting into early on, especially considering the first 15 minutes or so focus on the finding of Laura Palmer’s body. The characters were all fairly likeable, even if they made questionable decisions and in the 90s, this was new, exciting territory. Twin Peaks has now become a pop culture reference found in many media forms, even receiving a third season in 2017 with the return of some of the original cast. 

Twin Peaks, while not hilarious, was rather good at dry humor, the line, “This is a town where a yellow light still means slow down instead of speed up.” coming to mind. That, combined with the writing, cinematography, and the compelling little stares, made for a TV show that hit 88% on the Tomatometer and 89% based on audience views. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave us a badass female protagonist who killed vampires throughout her lifetime. BTVS also quickly established elements of the supernatural in the first season and built upon it. There were multiple werewolf characters and Buffy herself dated two vampires, her other love interest being human but working for a government organization that studied supernatural creatures. In seasons 3 and 4, Buffy’s best friend, Willow, starts to dabble in spells and the occult and other witch characters, including Willow’s girlfriend, Tara, are introduced into the series. Coming on the tail end of the 90s, viewers were enthralled with the wit and brashness of some characters and the fact of the a protagonist that was allowed to be feminine and powerful at the same time. BTVS has an 82% on the Tomatometer and 92% based on audience views. 

Basically, in terms of these two shows, the characters were likeable, the writing was rather witty, and the shows very quickly established what they were about, making them popular with viewers. 

Now we come to the 2010s, starting with Teen Wolf. 

Teen Wolf’s very first episode turned Scott McCall into a werewolf fairly early on in the episode and introduced a family of werewolf hunters, as well as --quote unquote-- “popular kids” Lydia and Jackson, and Scott McCall’s smartass best friend, Stiles Stilinski. The dialogue was fresh, the cinematography was rather dark, but overall a memorable first episode. They built upon this, season by season, and the acting and writing became a little more powerful and a little darker through every season. The characters changed but also stayed true to their roots and new characters were fairly likable when they were added. Teen Wolf told viewers what they were getting into from the very first episode and it was rather consistent throughout the rest of the show, that Scott and his friends would be facing monsters and only monsters. There would be a new threat each season but it would make sense from where each season respectively ended. 

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina also established what would be happening throughout the TV show. It would be about witches and the occult and fighting demons and going to hell. The writing could be cringy sometimes and essences of Riverdale leaked through (unavoidable, as the writer of Riverdale adapted Sabrina for the modern screen), but the show was overall consistent and the characters were appealing to the viewers, plus it gave representation to POC and LBTQ+ community. The show could become slow at times, but other than that, it was a solid TV show and did well on Netflix’s platform. 

We arrive at Riverdale. 

Riverdale’s first season started off well enough, with four high schoolers investigating the murder of Cheryl Blossom’s twin brother. It was a decent first season and the characters were fine, although there were a couple plotlines that seemed oddly dark for network TV. The second season, while still decent, had a plot line that revolved entirely around a serial killer that didn’t actually fit the classic definition of a serial killer. Both of these were likened to Twin Peaks, and there was an obvious Twin Peaks connection, with Madchen Amick, who played Shelly Johnson in 90s TV show, playing Betty Cooper’s mother in Riverdale. 

Season 3 went wild, with a plotline that villainized a game similar to Dungeons and Dragons, had Archie go to jail and get attacked by a bear, Mrs. Blossom opened a brothel, while Veronica opened a speakeasy and introduced a cult run by Chad Michael Murray, which is an odd sentence to type if you’ve seen Gilmore Girls or The OC. This is also the season that gave us the line, “I dropped out in the fourth grade to run drugs for my nana.” “Then you haven’t known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football.” Season 4 gave us blackmailing, two teenagers running an alcohol business, creepy tapes with creepier masks and a Jughead--is--dead--but--not--really--and--Barchie--became--a--thing--for--a--hot--second plotline. 

All four seasons are campy, just like the other shows, but not supernatural. This begs the question, why don’t people like Riverdale? 

Looking at Riverdale and then the four other shows I mentioned, it’s because Riverdale isn’t consistent. 

The first season established that murder would happen. That’s what people signed up for. They didn’t sign up for singing episodes or bear attacks. They signed up for teens solving murder, and viewers receive that with each season but they also get a bunch of weird, extended plotlines they didn’t ask for. The other shows stayed consistent with the content they delivered, while Riverdale didn’t--and, predictably, still won’t-- in the upcoming fifth season. 

Riverdale also takes heavy influence from Twin Peaks, with The Maple Club being their version of One Eyed Jack’s, and both TV shows having a diner main characters frequent. Other similarities include the killers in season 2 being revealed to be fathers/uncles of main characters and the dual opening on Laura Palmer’s dead body and Jason Blossom’s. It’s hard to unsee it, which just adds to the oddness of the show overall. 

That’s not to say the other TV shows aren’t connected. The actress who plays Hermione Lodge in Riverdale, Marisol Nichols, plays The Desert Wolf in Teen Wolf. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a singing episode in their sixth season. It’s just terribly obvious when a show draws from the same influence over and over again, which Riverdale tends to do. 

Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf, and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina work because they are consistent, in content and character writing,  which is just something Riverdale hasn’t mastered yet. 

Why I think Barchie Needs To Happen.

Well I’m bored so I figured I would pass the time by rambling on about Barchie. So I figured I would explain why I not only think Barchie will happen in season 5 but why it needs to happen. Obviously these are just my own thoughts, feelings and opinions on it, totally fine if anyone disagrees. 

One of the biggest reasons why I think Barchie needs to happen is one I’ve made no secret of in my previous posts. I’m bored with the current couples. That’s not to say that Jughead and Betty and Veronica and Archie are necessarily bad couples. It’s just that they’ve become too repetitive. To be honest I don’t feel like those relationships are progressing anymore. They’ve become stagnant. All Betty and Jughead do is investigate crimes and all Archie and Veronica do is get into conflicts with Hiram. It just keeps going round in circles. In the first two seasons their relationships were still progressing and growing but in my opinion the relationships haven’t really developed any further in season 3 and 4. Shaking up the couples would change that. 

Another problem that I think occurred from keeping the same couples for so long was with character interaction. It seemed like Riverdale had gotten into this rut where only the same set of characters would interact with each other. For example most of Betty’s scenes were with Jughead. Most of Archie’s scenes were with Veronica, pretty much all of Toni’s scenes were with Cheryl. It became very rare to see these characters interacting with anyboby else. Which again, this becomes boring and monotonous. But if you look at season 4 with the plot of Jughead’s fake death and the Barchie plotline we immediately started to see other characters interact with each other. We saw Veronica with Cheryl, Jughead with Charles, Ethel and the Stonies. We also saw Betty interacting with Donna. Toni, Reggie, Kevin and Fangs all had a storyline together, admittedly a terrible one but it was still a group of different characters interacting, the thing I loved about the last episode was it was a large group of characters together and that was fun to see. By breaking up the core four you open it up for other interactions and the possibilties are really interesting. It was one of the best parts of the blackhood storyline. We got to see Betty and Archie investigating a mystery instead. We got to see Jughead more involved in the Serpents and hanging out with Toni. The same again when Archie left. We started to see Veronica have storylines with other people like Reggie and the Pretty Poisons. Even getting mixed up with Gladys Jones. It was something different and that made it exciting and interesting. Season 5 is going to be introducing some new characters and this is one of the things I’m most excited for because we’ll be seeing something new and new interactions between characters. There are so many possibilties for new conflicts, new friendships and new love interests. Obviously I don’t think B*ghead and V*rchie are the sole reason why there was so little interaction between all of the characters but I do think it was a huge contributing factor, I feel like the writers just got too comfortable if that makes sense. 

Reason number 3 why Barchie needs to happen is because I feel like they need to be properly explored. Because of the way they were set up in the pilot and then the following seeds that were planted over the following seasons if they don’t get properly explored then they will always be a what if, a loose end if you will. I know some people feel like Barchie came out of nowhere but I personally think it was pretty obvious that they were laying down the paving stones for Barchie in pretty much all the seasons barring season 3. I mean the pilot episode established their backstory of childhood crushes, and made it clear that Betty was in love with Archie. The way the rejection happened in my opinion very much left the door ajar for them. In my opinion it wasn’t a straight forward rejection on Archie’s part. I just think he was confused and conflicted and wasn’t ready to start a relationship with Betty at that time. But later in the season it was obvious Archie had some jealous feelings towards B*ghead, Veronica even called him out on it. Then there was the whole ‘A little part of me always thought.’ Jughead’s voiceover about the boy next door looking at the girl next door as if for the first time. The kiss that they didn’t talk about, the fact that they didn’t talk about it very much again left that door ajar for them. They have never ever completely closed the door on Barchie. Whilst all of these were small moments they were all little stepping stones that were being laid down leading up to the events of season 4 where you got this perfect storm of situations, the stress of Jughead’s fake death, the fake dating, the fact that with graduation coming up it felt like everything was changing. All of this contributed to all of Barchie’s oppressed feelings coming back up again. But this time Betty is the one that’s not ready to commit to a serious relationship with Archie. But once again the door hasn’t been completely closed. Again I know some shippers feel like the cheating storyline in season 4 means Barchie has been explored and thats it now. But in my opinion with the unfinished song and the unburned diary Barchie’s story still remains unfinished. In order for them to really be done with the Barchie storyline they need to fully explore them. That means having them in a relationship, going on dates, sleeping together, having fights, making up, being domestic with each other and all that jazz. Otherwise they will still be that what if. I think post timejump season 5 is the perfect time to explore them. Enough time would have passed for the hurt from their breakups and the betrayal from the cheating to have healed somewhat. Both Jughead and Veronica are going to be in other seemingly serious relationships. Veronica will be married and Jughead has a live in girlfriend. With them in other relationships it would make sense for Archie and Betty to feel more comfortable starting a relationship then right after they all break up. Also they are older and more mature so they will be able to work through those emotions better. 

Why I think they should be endgame. 

Ok so I’ve put this in a separate section because its slightly different from them being explored. I 100% think they will be explored but whether they will be endgame is another question. I know there’s alot of talk about Barchie having a relatively short lived relationship and then the original couples coming back together. Most are comparing it to Spaleb from PLL but here’s the thing the two situations are completely different for one very good reason. Spaleb were not explored at all before that timejump so they really did come out of nowhere. However as I’ll talk about more later Barchie has already had romantic moments a set up before now, basically Spaleb had no foundation Barchie does. I personally think its too early to tell what will happen. There is still a possibilty that Barchie will end up together in the end. 

The first reason why I think they should be endgame is because I am a Barchie shipper who is obsessed with all things Barchie so naturally I want my ship to be endgame and I think I deserve to have my ship become endgame for a change otherwise I’m going to think I’m bad at this whole shipping thing. Basically I’m biased but I am aware of this and have no shame in it, like that’s sort of part of shipping everyone has their favourites and they want their favourites to be endgame. 

All jokes aside though one of the most common arguments I’ve seen against Barchie becoming endgame is that they are the childhood to lovers troupe and that troupe is overused so it would be too predictable. However this is actually the reason why I think they should be endgame because whilst I agree that the troupe is popular in tv shows from what I’ve seen it’s actually kind of rare for those couples to actually become endgame. I mean maybe I’m watching the wrong tv shows but some of the couples off the top of my head, Joey and Dawson from Dawson’s Peak not endgame, Willow and Xander from Buffy not endgame, Vanessa and Dan from Gossip Girl not endgame, might be wrong about this one but I think Hanna and her boyfriend Sean were childhood friends but not endgame, the only couple I can think of off the top of my head who were endgame were Navid and Adriana from 90210. Like I said it could just be the shows I’m watching but it seems to me that if Barchie do end up together it would actually be more of a twist than if they didn’t. It would be nice to see that troupe actually work out for the couple for a change. 

Another argument I see alot is that it wouldn’t be realistic for them to be endgame. Some say it wouldn’t be realistic for them to date their best friend’s ex, some say it wouldn’t be realistic for them to last when they were childhood sweethearts. The thing is realism in tv is a bit of a tricky thing because is some instances I do think its ok to complain about the lack of realism but other times its not. What I mean is that you have to look at realism within the boundaries of the show. And it can be different for each show. For example if a monster jumps out at a character in Supernatural that’s realistic for that show, you know its what the show is about. However if you were watching something like NCIS and a monster jumped out at a character that wouldn’t be realistic at all. An example of this in Riverdale is when thugs break into the Maple club and then Veronica apologises to Penelope. To me this was completely unrealistic for Veronica’s character to be apologising for putting Penelope, the woman who had recently tried to kill Veronica and her friends, in danger. But something like dating your friend’s ex or high school sweethearts getting married and becoming endgame happens all the time in this type of show, its not only realistic in the show but expected. Also if you go the realistic route then none of the couples should end up together. In reality only 2% of marriages are between couples who met and dated in high school and alot of them don’t last. For me within the boundaries of the show I actually think Barchie would be very realisitc. Like I said it is way too early to really know at this moment. But I could see Archie and Betty becoming sources of comfort for each other in the dark world that is Riverdale. They are each other’s constant the person they know will always be there, whether that’s as a friend or a lover. No matter how mad they get at each other they’ll still be there. I said in one of my reviews that I think part of the reason why Betty rejects Archie is because she knows that he’ll still be there even if she tells him she doesn’t want to be with him romantically. She was very worried about losing Jughead but she knew that she wouldn’t lose Archie, because Archie is always there and has been since she was a little girl. However I do think Betty will get a scare while he is in the army and that will be what pushes them towards having a relationship. Bascially I can see them being each other’s rock in the crazy town of Riverdale. In my opinion they have a more mature relationship with mature feelings towards each other and at the moment whilst in high school I don’t think they are ready for those feelings but after the time jump and as adults I think they will work really well together. I think they needed the relationships with Jughead and Veronica, they grew through those relationships, they learnt through those relationships but I think as they get older Archie and Betty will be more suited to each other. I know Betty has had some, hmm how to put it? Spicy scenes with Jughead but to me I feel like Archie would be more into that kind of thing than Jughead. I feel like while Jughead doesn’t mind it he more goes along with it because its what Betty is into whereas I feel like Archie would be more of a match to her if you get my drift, for some reason I’m picturing fireman roleplaying. Also I am still conflicted about the whole erasing asexual Jughead. I did read something a while back, think it was like 2017, where Roberto touched on the subject saying that “I think all of the kids are discovering themselves, and a big part of that is discovering their sexuality, their sexual selves. Rather than have everything fully formed — for instance, we’re not going to start with Archie’s band or Jughead’s asexuality or any of the things that have become canon — those are all stops on the way to the journey until the show catches up to 75 years of Archie history.” Also around the same time Cole said “The entirety of season 1 sets the pace for a character’s narrative arc. Because of the fluidity of sexuality and how oftentimes a person discovers who they are after a series of events – like those told in our origin stories – this is an ongoing conversation.”  But bascially I am hopeful that they might still explore Jughead as asexual. As time has gone on that hope has dwindled a bit but its still there. Again I think the time jump is the perfect time to start exploring this. Obviously this doesn’t mean that Jughead can’t fall in love or wasn’t in love with Betty of course he was but I would like to see a Jughead who is asexual because I do think this is something that needs to be more explored in popular media and if they are going the route of Jughead discovers his sexuality over time then this is the perfect moment for them to introduce that. Again this is just my opinion don’t come for me with pitchforks. 

Anyway that’s it for now I have a lot more thoughts but no one wants to read a novel on my non sensical ramblings of barchie. Also I’m sorry if this post doesn’t make much sense it’s nearly 2 am where I am and I’m having trouble sleeping so... Anyway what do you guys think do you think they’ll explore Barchie in season 5? Do you think they could be endgame or do you think they will unltimately end up back with the original couples?       

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 5

1. Favorite character of this season?

Anya, I love her arc this season. She's just kind of been... there, in season 4, running along. No one really acknowledged the demon thing, there was no real bonding between Anya and everyone, she was just there. This season, finding her place in the world? Working at the Magic Box, then her in The Body – I mean seriously, her confronting mortality like that, I love it. I love her growth.

2. Outstanding minor character (positive or negative)?

Dawn. Sure, technically you could argue she's a “main character”, however... she's barely even a character, she's a plot-device so that really qualifies her as a minor character for me.

I always disliked Dawn, even when I was a teen myself. With some things, perspective shifts when you grow older, but Dawn just... always sucked. As a teen, I found her to be a cringey parody of the teen girl experience and now as an adult I still think that this is the peak of what a middle-aged man thinks the teen girl experience is. She's a cheap, one-dimensional caricature of a teenager.

She is a whiny brat, she constantly acts like “no one sees the real me”, she becomes a kleptomaniac to try and gain attention, she acts like no one loves her even though everyone constantly fawn over her every chance they got, she is a spoiled little brat that is completely unappreciative of all the things she gets. It's like they crammed every single shallow teen stereotype into this one character, making her a very one-dimensional character. Which is a bafflement considering Willow, Xander and Buffy started out as teenagers but they were always fully fleshed out characters with actual personalities. Heck, Cordelia was the most stereotypical character in the teenage years but even she got more depth and individuality.

Though I'd like to point out that while, as a character, Dawn is incredibly obnoxious, I do like her as what she is – a plot device. The way she creates new dynamics among the Scoobies, how other characters play off her and grow on her existence, the villain-plot she triggers.

3. Favorite character dynamic?

Too many, honestly. I adore the way Tara-Buffy grow in this season. Generally the friction between Spike and the Scoobies. Spike and Dawn in particular. The Buffy-Dawn dynamic too – Dawn being such a blank slate of Teen AngstTM allows for the other characters to shine in comparison. They get a new dynamic here, through the New Kiddo that puts them in perspective. Caring, gentle. The sisters-angle is a new one for Buffy and I do love her as a big sister, even if I wished her retconned sister had like... an actual personality.

4. Favorite canon romantic ship?

Spike/Buffy. Sue me, I'm Spuffy trash. Always been. The way he cares for her, the things he's willing to do. The little things. The self-sacrificial side, how he drops everything to help her whenever she needs him. And, I know, I give other ships flag for things equal or less in comparison to some of the shit that's happened/happening between Spike/Buffy, but see that's where taste comes into play. Liking and disliking things is just... all about that taste and tastes differ. For me, Spike/Buffy hits all the right spots. I love them so much.

5. Least favorite canon romantic ship?

Riley/Buffy. Once again. Seriously, this is just such a bad relationship. From the get-go she constantly put herself down to lift him up. Holding back her powers – which, of course, because otherwise she'd snap him in half during sparring – but pretending that's the max. She is always going out of her way to make him feel special and useful.

And he goes and gets fed on by a vampire and has the audacity to blame it on Buffy, because Buffy doesn't make him feel wanted enough. Even though she continuously tries making him feel important. It's ridiculous. Complaining that she didn't think about calling him when her mom went to the hospital, like she didn't have something else in her mind there? Setting her an ultimatum that she has to give him a reason to stay. After he essentially cheats on her, by sneaking around with vampires and letting them feed on him for the rush.

Now to go and leave with his little military buddies once more. After everything the military has done to him...? Their relationship was so bad for Buffy.

6. Favorite episode?

The Body. This is the singularly best episode... ever. In all television I've ever seen. This episode is overwhelmingly good. Sarah Michelle Gellar's acting is overwhelming in this episode. The choice to exclude music entirely, not even sad ones. How silence is allowed to longer, how unnerving the background noises become due to this silence.

The writing too, of course. Anya's words about death and mortality are so intense, they'll always stick with me. And not just her. Xander, Willow, Dawn, how they all handle this in a different way.

The choice alone that Joyce dies from something so fundamentally human, something no one could have prevented, something Buffy couldn't have fought. And – yes, that reaches ahead some – but the fact that the next episode also serves to have this unfold. It's not just “death and move on”. It's being dealt with, it's being digested, it's being taken seriously.

Too many writers feel the need to fun things up when it's getting serious, because they are afraid to lose their audience if there isn't a joke every five minutes. There is not a single joke in that entire episode. This show is funny as hell, but they know when not to joke. There is nothing to be made light here, this is serious, they are truly suffering. They know how important that is.

I've seen this episode surely a dozen times now. I cry so much every single time. Not just once. There are so many well-written, well-acted and well-executed moments in this episode. It's brilliant TV-making. It encapsulates what's so brilliant about this show overall; the human element, suffering, pain, dealing with pain, the balance between seriousness and humor and knowing when not to use humor.

7. Least favorite episode?

Episode two Real Me. It's the Dawn introduction episode and I've made clear what I dislike about Dawn; this episode introduces it all in the most teen angst cliche possible – writing a diary entry about how no one sees you for who you are and like no one could ever actually understand you.

8. Favorite Monster Of The Week?

...Dracula. I still... I consider that episode a fever-dream. It's one of the ones I opt to forget about whenever enough time has passed since my last rewatch because it just... doesn't fit into this show at all, it feels like a whacky filler arc in an anime, or a one-shot comic spin-off. But it's fun.

9. Least favorite Monster Of The Week?

This season doesn't actually have much of those. There's 4 or 5, depending on how you'd count, out of those 22, because this season is very streamlined about the Big Bad, more so than previous seasons were, and it is also very focused on the human issue – on Joyce's sickness and then her death. Out of those few, I guess the “let's split Xander in half” demon from episode 3 was my least favorite. It was... boring and due to this season's streamlining the fact that this was the most fillery filler episode felt a bit out of place, really.

10. Rate the overarching villain!

SO FREAKING GOOD.

Glory is a truly glorious villain. She's a god. But she is so – so frantic, so manic. She is fun to watch as a villain. The sheer size of the threat too. Which, it figures. There's always an escalation of threat.

(We will get back to that in the season 6 review though.)

Glory may just be my favorite Big Bad on this show, which only adds to how much I love this season. It's one of my favorites. Granted, I have a lot of favorite seasons.

Bonus: Other thoughts?

I love this season so very, very much. The human element, the growth, the villain-plot, the relationship developments. It's an incredible season. I'll get back to this when I finish my rewatch and actually do my ranking of seasons, but I am rating each episode – 1 to 5 – and getting the point-average, to have a more factual look at how much I loved a season. This one is through the roof, it scored an entire 1,5 more in average than season 4 did. There's only one episode in this that I gave a 1 to, but there are so many 4s.

That ending, to truly kill off your main character like that. So many gut-punches – but deserved gut-punches, not the ones that come out of nowhere and only serve shock-value.

I greatly enjoy and love seasons 1 to 3, but this season – this season reminds me why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the best damn TV show ever created.

❝ The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. ❞  SCORPIUS MALFOY looks a lot like that muggle, FROY GUTIERREZ, right? Only 20 years old, that SLYTHERIN alumnus works as a HEALING APPRENTICE and is sided with the ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. HE identifies as a CIS MAN and is a PUREBLOOD.

CHARACTER PARALLELS: Amy Santiago (B99), Claire Temple (Daredevil), Chidi Anagonye (The Good Place), Giles (Buffy TVS), Michelle Jones (Spiderman: Homecoming), Elizabeth Swan (PoTC), Spock (Star Trek), Clarke Griffin (The 100), Harley Keener (MCU), Gregory House (House) suggested honorable mention Gizmo (Gremlins)

Full Name: Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy Gender/Pronouns: Cis man | he/him Age: Twenty Birthdate: January 20th Parents: Draco Malfoy & Astoria Malfoy (née Greengrass) Siblings: N/A. Birth place: St. Mungo’s Hospital, England Height: 5’11” Weight: 56 kg Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Demiromantic Bisexual Nationality: British Body Alterations/Marks: A ragged diamond shape scar at the base of his throat.

Blood Status: Pureblood Hogwarts House: Slytherin Wand Arm: Right Pet: A crested toad named Jarvis. Patronus: Arctic Fox Wand: 11 2/3 inches, Willow, Supple, Dragon Heartstring.

Willow is an uncommon wand wood with healing power, and I have noted that the ideal owner for a willow wand often has some (usually unwarranted) insecurity, however well they may try and hide it. While many confident customers insist on trying a willow wand (attracted by their handsome appearance and well-founded reputation for enabling advanced, non-verbal magic) my willow wands have consistently selected those of greatest potential, rather than those who feel they have little to learn. It has always been a proverb in my family that he who has furthest to travel will go fastest with willow.

Personality Traits: Brilliance, innovation, empathetic, individuality, openness, social consciousness, inventiveness, logical, practical skill and self assertion; lack of attachment to people and the “real world,” over-intellectualizing of the emotions, dismissiveness, anxious, crotchety tempered, facetiousness, rigidity, prone to self-isolation, intellectual arrogance, and stubbornness. Zodiac Sign: Aquarius/Capricorn Cusp Moral Alignment: Neutral Good Core values: Loyalty, Knowledge, Hope Four temperaments: Melancholic  

HOGWARTS HOUSE BREAKDOWN

Slytherin Primary and a Burned Ravenclaw Secondary.

Slytherin Primaries prioritize their own selves and loved ones first. Slytherins don’t feel guilty or selfish about this– they feel righteous and moral. The most important thing is to look after your own. Abandoning or hurting one of your own is the worst thing you can do.

A Burned Ravenclaw Secondary might want to be skilled, curious, and prepared, but they feel like they are (or like people think they are) limited, clumsy, or inconstant. Gathering knowledge, hobbies, skills, or tools is the right way to achieve their goals, but Burned Ravenclaws know that’s not going to work within their capabilities. So they take other paths and use other tools– maybe a Gryffindor’s bluntness, a Slytherin’s flexibility, or a Hufflepuff’s slow and steady dedication.

You may have a Hufflepuff Secondary Model.

Hufflepuff is the House of grit, reliability, and determination, and Hufflepuffs use those values to help live, act, and succeed. If you model Hufflepuff Secondary, you also value these things and like to live by them. You like to be hardworking, dedicated, and consistent– but you wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning those values in the service of other, higher priorities. If there’s another, easier way to get what you want– you’d take it. You think hard work provides valuable rewards– and those rewards are why you work. The work doesn’t have persuasive value in itself.

9. The Expositor will have to destroy the one who they love. There is no other way. It cannot be avoided. Their fate – possibly even the entire world’s fate – depends on it.

39. You are in the Order, and as a spell inventor, you played a key role in helping the Knights mutate the Patronus Charm to create daemons. Because of this, you have a daemon of your own, and you have been experimenting with the limitations of the magic, trying to figure out if there are any ways to improve them.

Code Name Revontulet, which literally translates to “fox fire.” Legend says that an arctic fox dashed across the tundra swiping snow up into the sky, while others claim his bushy tail caused sparks when brushing the peaks of tall mountains to create the Aurora Borealis.

Despite his very best resistance he’s always been pretty empathetic in nature, he tries to rule his emotions as well as he can but fails more often than not. He was always one of those toddlers that if another kid started crying he’d be right along with them, not because he wanted attention but because he just couldn’t not. A bit of a crybaby, honestly, has researched how to magically seal up his tear ducts. Obviously managed to keep the family’s flair for the dramatic there as well.

Just managed to scrape through his schooling with nearly all top grades, this isn’t due to him being an excellent student. He has always accrued information with a voracious appetite. Any knowledge he could find, even if most people would consider it entirely useless. His mind clicks into that place? You can’t keep him away. However, when there is not an immediate stir of interest on his approach to a topic he has to fight with himself tooth and nail to carry on. Predictably found exam season highly stressful, was never open about it but was quietly competitive and silently smug over his good grades. Could comprehend well above his reading level from an early age and would often look into experimental research and complicated magic but found himself lost in OWL level History of Magic when chapter upon chapter lay ahead of him about something that didn’t catch his interest.

Tends toward introversion and finds himself tired sometimes quite easily by a large amount of social interaction. Witty and big-mouthed when he feels comfortable or is in the presence of those that embolden him and very likely to get flustered and snap at people when things are becoming a bit too much. Especially if he feels however unjustly that someone is blocking his escape. Has matured slightly in this since leaving school but it happens still, he’s just anxious. Quite fickle and can at the drop of a hat decide that he’s done with you for the day once his Give Me Attention Meter is maxed. Could be an absolute bloody brat when he felt like it but feels he has grown out of it, which he mostly has.

Always been very, very aware of many people’s distrust of him and his family, he used to sneer and play it up if anyone tried to bring up his dad and go on the offensive but was genuinely affected quite deeply by it all. In his early school years, despite his weakness to the cold, he constantly had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow so that his blank forearm was bared as a statement to just about everyone. I am not marked, I never will be. Now he’s older he has more of a handle on things and can be diplomatic in situations where people are clearly discomforted by his presence and his family history.

Scorpius was in his seventh and final year when the Knights were first created and he spent a lot of his time patching people up and teaching simple healing here and there, wherever he could. It was a natural transition to become part of The Order once he graduated, he still kept in contact with members of the Knights but while he had no way to access the grounds at all it seemed ridiculous that he be privy to everything, especially as sharing such information could have been intercepted by the opposing side. He was absolutely horrified by Harry’s resurrection and his stomach rolls every time he even thinks about it.

Never produced much of a talent for offensive magic and wouldn’t resort to those methods unless he had literally no other choice, not a front line fighter by any means. His talents with strategy, healing and his perseverance with defensive magic meant that he was an ideal candidate, in his head, to have the singular daemon amongst the Order and to test all of their hard work. Then the prophecy was slowly unravelled, silver spool of damning words in a pile at his feet.

Is in a strange place in that he can’t simply stop loving people he’s always loved whilst working simultaneously to strangle any potential for more people to be added to the list as frantically as he can. Tends to just try and put the prophecy out of his mind otherwise he stares at Cleo for too long and his hands start to shake.

Very nearly lost his apprenticeship due to his intensity over developing and refining the magic of the patronus charm. It was an all-consuming obsession, he went so far into the zone that he was a bit of a liability for a while there. He would turn up at any hour to other Order members for their opinions on an obscure theory, an element of the magic, the importance of ritual and their thoughts on his experiments with dementors. Alot of people were like you’re a bit young to be doing this aren’t you love? And he was like I’m not going to tell you to fuck off, just explain that I will not let this go and if you exclude me I will continue working on it alone.

[ DEATH TW ] Although this can be said for anyone possessing a daemon, he is protective of Cleo to the point of neurosis, the magic was experimental at the time of her manifestation and he felt every single layer of his soul flayed away and the creation of atoms from a matter that he still doesn’t quite understand. Only that it came from him. They have managed to limit the bitter, burnt iron taste that lingered at the back of his sinuses for two weeks, the numbness of his fingers and toes and the burst blood vessels in his eyes on other subjects. Oh and the part where he stopped breathing for nearly an entire minute. By the time he performed it successfully he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone else to ever experience it, the spell basically consumed his life for several years and when the research was finally over he was stood there blinking owlishly with no real concept of where the last couple of years had gone.

Always had somewhat fragile health tending toward sickly. Hands are never warm. Bruises like a peach and scars so easily.

Views quidditch as a good fly spoiled.  

Is a very skilled pianist.

Has a fabric sling that he wears across his torso that Cleo is often curled up in. Looks like a single dad at Order meetings, toad on his shoulder.

While very eloquent and well spoken, he is markedly less posh than when he first arrived at Hogwarts.

When he isn’t prone to bouts of insomnia he can take a nap pretty much anywhere. He was once found in a tree after several frantic hours search.

the stillness of the world the moment you take the first step into fresh snow, cashmere and fine wool, the pearlescence of dreamless sleep draught, the scratch of a quill on parchment, faintly tremoring fingers, a shiver up your spine in a warm room, the exhilaration of a problem solved, a thunderous grey overcast sky, the bite of a stitching charm, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, petrichor, the burn in your eyes before a well of tears.

Tonight is it. Tonight is the series finale of Supernatural. 

When I started watching this show in 2009, I had no idea the impact it would later have in my life. I owe so much to Supernatural, and especially Destiel, for the person I became. This show basically feels like a part of me, and even though I did fall out of love with it for some time, I never stopped watching it, because Sam, Dean, Cas, and later Jack, meant so much to me, even though I didn’t like the story/plot anymore, I cared to see how their stories would end. 

I had never gotten this emotionally involved with a TV show in my life. I’d say I got even more involved than Buffy, which is the other big TV show in my life. The difference probably lies on the fact that I binge watched Buffy, but I watched Supernatural real-time for 11 years. 

Here is my story with Supernatural:

I first heard of the show from one of my best friends at University. She was a huge fan. She recommended the show to me in 2008. She showed me images she had saved of Dean and Sam, and told me the basics of it; she was a Wincest shipper (later converted to a Destiel shipper), so her biggest investment in SPN was the brothers. I didn’t think Dean and Sam (Jensen and Jared) were as handsome as she thought they were. haha But she was crazy about them! I didn’t really get interested in watching the show; it didn’t exactly sound like something I’d watch.

Later, in 2009, my mom left the TV on as we sorted the laundry, and Supernatural was playing on TNT. My mom is a huge fan of Charmed, and she would always watch the Charmed reruns on TNT. She left it on and Supernatural started, and she got interested so she kept watching it. I don’t remember exactly which episode was playing (maybe the Wendigo episode? Not sure, but it was an early season episode). And after that day, we kind of started watching it out of order. 

I became really interested in the show and kept watching it after that day with my mom and sisters, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fan. I mean, I was a fan, but I still wasn’t that emotionally invested. When I could finally watch the entire show up to that point in order until Swan Song, that’s when I was already emotionally invested. I had become a “Sam!girl” and I cared so much about what was going to happen next. I was really happy when I found that a season 6 was happening and Sam was alive and out of Hell, and I was really happy to see that it was Sera Gamble running it, because her episodes had been my favorite. (I regretted being excited about Sera Gamble later though lol). 

During season 6 it’s when I started to notice Destiel. Or at least, I started noticing that Castiel was in love with Dean. In my mind, though, there was no way Dean was in love with Cas because for me back then, Dean was straight. I was also raised very conservative and catholic, so for me back then, homosexuality was a sin and it made me uncomfortable to think about it. Especially when deep inside, I wondered if I was not straight myself and I was scared about it--I knew I wasn’t exactly straight, but I was afraid to even consider the possibility (turns out, I’m asexual--I’ll get to that in a minute). For me Dean was straight even if Cas did love him. I started hearing about Destiel around that time in the internet, too. And my sister from the moment she saw Cas’ intro she was like “that’s Dean’s man”, though I thought she was joking. I saw Destiel art for the first time under Facebook posts, and I remember replying to those posts that it was beautiful art, but “the show is about Sam and Dean, about the brothers” (How dumb was I. lol).

So, I watched through seasons 6 and 7, and around this time Cas had become a favorite character for me, and seeing what Sera Gamble did with the character really hurt me. I hated the Megstiel fling they wrote for Cas, and hated what happened to Cas in season 7 when he lost his mind. That was painful to watch (I especially hated the Megstiel in season 7, it felt like... rape? If you know what I mean, since Cas wasn’t okay in his mind I felt like she could take advantage of him... That’s another conversation for another time, though). I had fallen out of love with Supernatural for the first time during season 7. But watching Supernatural had become something obvious for me and my family, you know? We’d always watch it, even if I wasn’t enjoying the story anymore. So, when season 8 started, we were right there to watch. 

And that’s when I really, really, saw Destiel happen right before my eyes. It was episode 8x02, and Dean remembered the moment he found Cas in Purgatory. That scene, that moment... I ran to my sister’s room (who was no longer interested in Supernatural), and I told her. I told her Destiel is real. I started researching online to see if other people really considered Destiel as a serious ship, or if it was just a for fun ship, as I had thought until then. And that’s how I came across Tumblr. I found Destiel Meta about season 7. And it made so much sense. Like, even season 7, which I hated and didn’t make sense to me, started to make sense! As a matter of fact, it only made sense when I looked at it through a Destiel lens. I found this huge community of people who saw Destiel and hoped for it to happen in canon. People who, like me, would only ship relationships that had potential for canon, and saw this in Destiel. I found, I am not imagining this; it’s really there. Dean and Castiel really have a shot at being together in canon. 

I also discovered the word “asexual” and what it means thanks to the reading of Castiel as asexual, during this time in late 2012, and I could finally define myself after wondering for years if I was actually a lesbian and I still hadn’t really defined it, though I liked boys but not in a sexual way. I found the term asexuality and I finally knew where I fit. I learned SO much through Destiel, and Tumblr, about sexuality and sexual orientations, about gender, about identity and representation, about the struggles and fight of the LGBTQ community... I can honestly say I am a better person today thanks to this ship. This is why representation matters so much.

Moving on, I fell out of love with Supernatural again during season 9. But by this time, I was too emotionally invested in these characters to quit the show. Seasons 10 was the same. I didn’t care much. Season 11... I was really uncomfortable with the Amara thing, given she was shown as a baby and Dean had this sexual connection to her... It was so darn weird. But then I realized something: Amara was an object that was there to develop Destiel even more?? And I got interested in SPN again, but I was treading carefully, because I felt like this show was kind of always baiting the fandom with Destiel, never to deliver in the end. I cared again, but never like I used to care back during season 8. 

Season 8 was my peak as a Supernatural and Destiel fangirl. During season 11 it was when I realized that I only cared about the characters now, but predominantly, I only cared about DeanCas at this point. The storylines were not engaging anymore, and some themes had become repetitive, because everything had been explored with these characters, except for the DeanCas romance (in a textual way). I wanted to see if their relationship was ever going to be acknowledged somehow in the show. 

Since season 11, up until November 5th, 2020, season 15 episode 18, I was watching Supernatural casually, just to see what would become of the characters and especially what would become of Destiel. I thought the MOST we were ever going to get was something ambiguous and easy to dismiss. Something like hand holding at MOST, but realistically, a glance that shippers could say meant more, but haters could easily dismiss. And then, 15x18 happened: Castiel confessed his love to Dean Winchester, in a final sacrifice of love. Cas said “I love you” after saying all these beautiful things about Dean and all the reasons why he fell in love with him. How Dean changed him for good. 

Suddenly, everything was possible. Suddenly, Destiel could really happen. It didn’t matter that Castiel was dead, because Castiel has been dead before too many times, and so has Dean (lol). Cas had to come back! And Dean would say those words back. 

All of those years, we were right! Destiel was truly a love story. 

I was okay for years, if Destiel never went canon, I didn’t mind anymore, because they were canon to me. I never even dreamed we’d get a canon love confession, and even less did I consider we’d be getting such a beautiful and epic love confession as the one we got. 

Now, as I wait for the finale episode in the series, I expect Destiel will be fully canon tonight. As I wait, I am a bundle of nerves and anticipation for the first time in years, in wait for a new episode. I am once again emotionally invested in these characters like I was years ago. Because now, Dean and Cas really do have a shot at being together at the end of this story. Now it’s no longer a fan fantasy and hope; now it’s real. Destiel is real. Destiel is canon. I have to say, after the way they have set up the story, I will be incredibly disappointed if it doesn’t resolve the way I hope, with a DeanCas happy ending. I cannot forgive a one-sided Destiel ending when they could have just let us have our headcanons at the end of the show. But at least we know Destiel was always real, and it was mentioned in the show, so it’s now indisputable that this was always a love story. That’s the up side. Castiel has confessed his feelings for Dean; he was canonically in love with Dean all this time and his rebellion against Heaven was all for Dean, and nobody can take that away from us now. In my heart I know, Dean is also in love with Cas, and that will be one of my takeaways from this show, especially now that Cas has come out and said the words. If I was right about Cas loving Dean, I am right about Dean loving Cas. 

As I wait for the series finale, I know in my heart, Supernatural will always be special for me. Not only because of Destiel, but because of all the years watching it with my mom and sisters and finding the fandom and participating in a fandom for the first time in my life. It was fun, and it was life-changing. 

I am incredibly grateful to Supernatural, this fandom, and especially Destiel. I am a better person because of this fandom, and I have zero regrets having been a part of this. (Even when I complain about Supernatural all the time! haha).

Super long ramble, and probably I could have worded this better, but I had to write something today, as it is the final day of Supernatural.

Let us hope for a happy ending. 

~ Des., November 19th, 2020

tag 9 people you want to catch up with

Thanks for the tags @hopskipaway & @kinetic-elaboration! I liked reading your updates! I’ve been super busy with Halloween & clean up and then omg this wild election season so I feel like I’m trying to catch up on everything!

six favourite ships:

Murphy & Raven, The 100

Buffy & Spike, BTVS

Hyde & Jackie, That 70s Show

Aethelflaed & Aldhelm, The Last Kingdom

Clint & Natasha, Marvel

Cooper & Audrey, Twin Peaks

last song i listened to:

Some kidz bop pop thing my kiddo did a “brain break” to while homeschooling LOL! Oh man this is really my life right now, huh?

last movie i watched:

My family is working our way through the Harry Potter movie series for the first time for the kids, and we watched Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince (#6) this past weekend.

tv show i’m watching:

I saw a commercial on youtube for the tv show FOR LIFE (on ABC) about a man sent to prison for something he didn’t do, and his journey into becoming a lawyer so he could argue his own case. I ended up binging the whole first season of 13 eps and s2 will start next week-ish on ABC. Legit it’s REALLY GOOD! The characterization & continuity is very good and I am super caught up in the story. Highly recommend!

Consider yourself tagged if you’d like to play!

My girlfriend asked me to make her a list of works of fantasy and science fiction so should could feel keyed into references when they come up in conversation. She wanted to feel more grounded in these genres, which she likes, but hasnt made the effort to be on top of everything.

I was happy to compile the most important names, but told her it couldn’t be a short list because recognizing the works of today means honoring their origins, which goes way back into our past. 

What’s below is my best effort to include what I assess to be the most culturally relevant becoming, tempering my favorites, and trying to keep it from being totally overwhelming. I’ve left off works from the past five to ten years because it can take a span of time before we're aware the effects new ideas may have. Felt like sharing here in case you or your friends want a crash course on the bedrock of our imagined landscape. I do try to be globally aware, however this list will reflect my bias as a white, straight, male who grew up in the States. And as this is an ongoing conversation between her and myself, I wanted to be able to vouch for the contents.

-Key-

(Wiki)  Read up for cultural significance *         Personal Favorite +        Hugely influential ^        Non-Essential but worth listing

-Literature-

8,000 BC Aboriginal mythology (pre written language)

2,300 BC Egyptian & Chinese myths+

1,000 BC The Old Testament+

900 BC Greek myths, fables, and all the rest

300 BC - 1800 AD Folk and fairy tales+

1000 AD Beowulf (Wiki)

1100s Legend of King Arthur+ 1200s Norse mythology+

1300s The Inferno - Dante Alighieri+

1500s A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Shakespeare

1600s Paradise Lost*

1700s Gulliver’s Travels The Arabian Nights (Wiki)

1800s Faust Frankenstein* - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly+ Grimm’s fairy tales+ (Wiki brothers, who collected folktales) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* Dracula - Bram Stoker+ Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll+ Flatland The Time Machine & War of the Worlds - HG Wells+ (godfather of SF) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne+ The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe+

1900s Peter Pan - JM Barry The Comet - WEB Dubois Little Nemo in Slumberland - Winsor McCay The Book of Wonder - Lord Dunsany (less known now, he was highly influential in his time for fantasy & mythos) The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka+ (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) The Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum+ John Carter of Mars - (Wiki) Call of Cthulhu or The Outsider - HP Lovecraft+ Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Teacher of Orwell https://bit.ly/2xayA23) 1984 - George Orwell+ Amazing Stories magazine - John Campbell+ (writer & editor)

After 1950 Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien+ Chronicles of Narnia* - CS Lewis I Am Legend - Richard Matheson (The first real zombie story. Also wrote for Twilight Zone) Childhood’s End - Arthur C Clarke+ I, Robot - Isaac Asimov+ Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury Funes the Memorious or The Garden of Forking Paths - Borges+ Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut Wizard of Earthsea or The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula LeGuin Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein Dune Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak The Neverending Story* ^The Man in the High Castle Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - (inspired Bladerunner) Philip K Dick+ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy A Wrinkle in Time The Stand - Stephen King+

After 1980 Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino Xanth series* Communion - (True account of alien abduction) Neuromancer - William Gibson+ Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton+ Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson Ender’s Game* - Orson Scott Card Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler A Song of Ice & Fire - George RR Martin ^Hunger Games Harry Potter - JK Rowling+ Who Fears Death

-Comics/Superheroes-

-DC Comics- Superman (Wiki how he came to be) Wonder Woman (Wiki how she came to be or watch Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Very interesting) Batman (and Joker) The Sandman - Neil Gaiman Watchmen* - Alan Moore+

-Marvel Comics- Spiderman* (Wiki how he came to be) X Men* Avengers (the hugely popular films all started with decades of comics) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles* Hellboy*

-Games- Dungeons & Dragons+ Magic the Gathering Netrunner

-Artists & Illustrators-

1100-1200 Anonymous monk’s illuminated manuscript creatures - https://bit.ly/2Ynytf7

1400s Hieronomous Bosch+ Leonardo DaVinci Michelangelo+ 1500s Arcimboldo

1800s Gustav Doré+ Howard Pyle JW Waterhouse

1900s Maxfield Parish NC Wyeth+ Sir John Tenniel Windsor McCay+ Arthur Rackham - fairy tales Jack Kirby - superhero comics Margaret Brundage - Weird Tales covers Picasso - Cubism Chesley Bonestell - space travel, integral to NASA Frank Frazetta MC Escher Heinrich Kley Sun Ra - Afrofuturist musician

After 1980 Jeff Easley - D&D Jim Lee - X Men Michael Whelan  H.R. Giger - Alien films Brian Froud  Syd Mead - design of Bladerunner & other films Roger Dean - album covers Jean Giraud aka Moebius Bill Waterson - Calvin & Hobbes Leo Dillon and Diane Dillon James Gurney - Dinotopia Alan Lee - Lord of the Rings Alex Ross - superheroes Chris Van Allsburg Mike Mignola - Hellboy Mary GrandPré - Harry Potter

-Radio-

1930s -1950s Flash Gordon War of the Worlds (Wiki Orson Welles’ radio hoax) Buck Rogers The Shadow and much more in the ensuing years, including adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide

-TV Shows-

After 1950s Twilight Zone - Rod Serling Lost in Space Star Trek - (Wiki) Gene Roddenberry Dr Who (Wiki) The Jetsons (Wiki) Cosmos - Carl Sagan+ (Science fact)

After 1980s Transformers Quantum Leap Twin Peaks - David Lynch (not really either genre but impact has been undeniable) Buffy the Vampire Slayer* - Joss Whedon X Files* Neon Genesis Evangelion

After 2000 Firefly - Joss Whedon Lost* - JJ Abrams Battlestar Galactica Black Mirror* Game of Thrones Westworld* - reboot of Michael Crichton 1970s film

-Films-

1900s King Kong (Wiki) The Wizard of Oz+ Fantasia- Disney+ Monster movies- Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein (Wiki)

After 1950 Godzilla+ (Wiki) Seven Samurai or Hidden Fortress - Akira Kurosawa+ (Not SF or fantasy but influential) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - Special effects by Ray Harryhausen (Wiki) Invasion of the Body Snatchers 2001 A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick+ (Wiki) Planet of the Apes Night of the Living Dead+ (Wiki) Superman #Star Wars Trilogy - George Lucas (owing to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth)+

After 1980 Bladerunner* - Ridley Scott ^Legend Mad Max series Alien or sequel Aliens Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind - Steven Spielberg+ ET Star Trek series Back to the Future Brazil - Terry Gilliam+ Tron+ Ghostbusters* Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure* The Princess Bride* Labyrinth* The Terminator & Terminator 2* - James Cameron+ Akira The Fifth Element Robocop Beetlejuice ^Nightmare Before Xmas* Jurassic Park - Steven Spielberg+ The City of Lost Children* The Iron Giant* 12 Monkeys Groundhog Day* The Sixth Sense Ghost in the Shell (1995 anime) Gattaca* Donnie Darko* Starship Troopers (tongue in cheek adaptation of Heinlein’s classic) The Matrix*

After 2000 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away - Hayao Miyazaki ^Underworld Minority Report Lord of the Rings Primer ^The Incredibles Shaun of the Dead*  Pan’s Labyrinth - Guillermo del Toro Moon* Marvel Cinematic Universe ^Idiocracy Inception* &/or Interseller - Christopher Nolan+

But Veronica Mars is very much the child of many pop culture influences, especially on television. Creator Rob Thomas combined elements of several different series to create something unique and wonderful. If you’re diving into the world of Veronica Mars for the first time, or are a returning fan, here are four series that contributed to its creation that you might want to check out before the new season drops.

Twin Peaks

The influence of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks on almost every single “prestige television” series over the past thirty years is immeasurable. But the show’s fingerprints are especially all over Veronica Mars. The 1990-91 cult classic was centered on the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, a character we never see in the series except via flashbacks and in the ephemeral “red room.” Her girlfriends from school, Donna Hayward and Audrey Horne, become teenage detectives obsessed with finding her killer. This all leads to a mystery that covered the show’s full first season and part of its second, and which became a national obsession.

Veronica Mars takes a similar approach. When we first meet the titular character, she’s mourning the death of her best friend Lily Kane. Much like Laura Palmer, she was a popular and well-liked student who hid a much wilder side. One that ultimately got her killed. The mystery of both girls’ murder was at the core of both series. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas cites the show as an influence but said in an interview  “they didn’t solve anything. When you realized they were jerking you around, that’s when it fell off.” However, Thomas might be misremembering. Peaks’ central mystery was solved 14 episodes in… and it took a full 22 chapters for the Lily Kane murder to be solved!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Veronica Mars premiered exactly one year after Buffy went off the air, but many Buffy fans felt the influence of on this new show from the get-go. Both shows centered on small, affluent towns in California that are the focal points for much strange goings-on. In the case of Neptune, CA on Veronica Mars, those goings-on are not supernatural. But that’s really the main difference. The rest of the similarities are numerous. Like Buffy Summers, Veronica is a plucky and sarcastic high school girl, who despite everything is a social outcast. Yet the other students all know to come to both girls when they need the kind of help only they know how to give because of their special skills.

Veronica’s supporting cast is also very much from the Buffy template. Computer genius Mac is her analog for Willow Rosenberg, while her platonic male bestie Wallace Fennel is a stand-in for Xander Harris in many ways. Veronica has a very similar relationship to her dad that Buffy does to her surrogate dad, Rupert Giles. And her volatile relationship with boyfriend Logan Echolls is reminiscent in some ways of Buffy’s love affair with the vampiric Angel. Even in its day, the show was well aware of the similarities and played upon them. Buffy alum like Alyson Hannigan, Charisma Carpenter and even Buffy creator Joss Whedon appeared on the show. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, clearly everyone involved with Buffy was very flattered indeed.

Freaks and Geeks

It might not seem so upon first glance, but the cult “one season wonder” series Freaks and Geeks was also a huge inspiration for Veronica Mars. The 1999 Paul Feig/Judd Apatow produced a show about high schoolers in the early ’80s was a very real presentation at how kids interact with each other and the social constructs of high school life. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas loved the series, as did many critics at the time. But it found a hard time finding a “hook” for the audience by just being a nostalgic slice-of-life drama. It was sadly canceled after one season.

So Thomas decided to use the teenage dynamics of Freaks and Geeks for inspiration on how his kids interacted, but surround it all with a noir-mystery story to get audiences sucked in. In an interview with Vulture back in 2014, Thomas said, “If you’re going to try to get a teen show on television, give them something high-concept, something that they can market. So I tried approaching my teen character piece through a high-concept idea.” He then added, “I can get a teen show on the air if I sell it as a teenage private eye, and then I can still somehow get some of these small-story show ideas in there.” It might have been another cult show in the end as well, but it lasted two seasons longer than Freaks and Geeks did!

Nancy Drew

If you say the words “teenage girl detective,” chances are the first thing anyone says in response is “Nancy Drew.” Even if the person saying it has never seen or read a single thing involving the character! That’s how deeply synonymous the concept of Nancy Drew is with “teenage girl detectives.” The character first appeared in 1930 and has since gone on to dozens of novels, movies, and a pair of television series. Soon there will be a third one on the way via the CW.

The character has undergone many revisions since being created nearly a century ago, but she has always remained a plucky teenage sleuth who lives with her single dad, much like Veronica Mars does. But the main inspiration Nancy Drew gave Rob Thomas was to create another young female detective in the popular culture who wasn’t Nancy. Veronica was created to finally eclipse her as America’s #1 teen detective. In an interview with NPR, Thomas once said “Nancy Drew…like, I feel like she had her run.” Still, it’s impossible to deny that without Nancy, there’s no Veronica.

Emily Deschanel on Biggest 'Bones' Lessons, Working With David Boreanaz and Returning to TV

  June 04, 2019 9:45am PT by Jean Bentley

  The actress formerly known as Temperance Brennan is returning to television in TNT's 'Animal Kingdom,' and discusses the evolution of her career with The Hollywood Reporter.

When Emily Deschanel graduated from theater school, she planned to spend her career doing off-Broadway shows and the occasional indie film. The actress, who is best known for the 12 years she spent starring on Fox procedural Bones, chuckled on the phone while remembering those early career goals.

"I remember somebody laughing at me, like, 'OK, if you never want to make any money, then great,'" she told The Hollywood Reporter.

While her earliest credited parts include small roles in not-so-indie films including Cold Mountain, Glory Road and The Alamo, Deschanel's big break came after being cast in Stephen King's ABC miniseries Rose Red. A couple of pilot seasons later and she was the No. 2 on the call sheet for Bones, behind former Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel star David Boreanaz, where she'd spend the next decade-plus of her life.

                          Two years after her Fox drama ended, Deschanel now finds herself headed back to television in a recurring role on TNT's crime family drama Animal Kingdom. While she spent 12 years playing forensic anthropologist and straight-laced FBI collaborator Temperance Brennan on Bones, she's on the other side of the law as recovering addict Angela on Animal Kingdom.

Deschanel spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about her nearly two decades in Hollywood — including following in the footsteps of her younger sister, Zoey Deschanel (their parents are both in the industry; their father is the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and their mother is Twin Peaks actor Mary Jo Deschanel), working with occasionally difficult co-workers, the Bones lawsuit that has made her wary of signing contracts, and deciding to return to the small screen after a hiatus.

When did you start acting?

When I was growing up I always wanted to be an architect, for whatever reason. I guess it's the perfect blend of art and math and science, which, to me, was really appealing. But then I went to Crossroads for high school and I discovered theater and discovered acting, and I really loved doing it. I think I wouldn't have become an actor if I hadn't gone to the conservatory at Boston University for theater. You get to do four plays a year there, and I think I wouldn't have had the experience to give me the confidence to pursue being an actor after college if I hadn't done something like that. Of course, I look back and wish I'd gone to a liberal arts school and got a more well-rounded education, but there's always time to educate yourself, I guess. I think it was probably the right path for me because it gave me the experience, it gave me the confidence to try and pursue acting. My sister was already [acting]. She was always a natural performer, so she didn't need an external source to tell her she could pursue something.

I just loved theater, I loved to study, I loved Shakespeare. I'm the kid that went to Shakespeare camp three years in a row. Of course when I left school I was like, "I'm going to do Off-Broadway theater only and maybe independent film. And that's all." I remember somebody laughing at me, like, "Okay, if you never want to make any money, then great." It was such a specific thing. I can't say that I had a grand plan of what my career would be. Clearly I had one idea that changed completely, and I've done television for many years.

I moved back to L.A. after a period of time in New York and I finally got representation that sent me out. I had representation in New York but I think I got zero auditions for a whole year, so I was just working in a restaurant there, but it was still fun. A few months in, I think it was six months after moving back, I got this miniseries: Stephen King's Rose Red. Such a big job to get, where I was in Seattle for many months and it was so exciting to me. It was not a main character but it was a character that was in the show a lot. It was so much fun and I quickly loved being a complete sellout. [Laughs] I met one of my best friends, Melanie Lynskey, on that. We're still so close. I love the camaraderie with the actors — I love working on set and being on location too, you get to know people even more because you're kind of stuck in a place far away. I loved it.

Then I did a pilot after that and I did a Law & Order: SVU, so my first several jobs were all in television, and then I did some independent films and small parts in other films.

   What was it like when Bones came along? It was probably exciting to book a pilot, but obviously at the time you have no idea that it's going to last more than a decade.

I had zero idea, and that was not my plans for things, either. I had done a couple pilots before and this was towards the end of the pilot season, or the end of their casting of the show, and I got a call to come in and audition for it. I met with Hart Hanson, who created the show; Barry Josephson, the producer; Greg Yaitaines, who was directing it. They laughed at my jokes, so I thought they were really nice people. Especially Hart Hanson loved my stupid jokes, so I'll always remember that.

I remember loving the dialogue between the two characters, really quick witty repartee, and I liked that relationship. I liked that it was a strong female character. When you sign on to do a TV show you have to think about the long term, especially in the beginning when you're doing the pilot, what kind of message you're putting out there for people. Of course this is like the opposite of now what I'm doing — Animal Kingdom is like the worst thing that could ever happen to a person for what you put out there. On Bones it was a different show. Younger people watched it, so you have to think about young girls watching the show and seeing female role models and scientists who are really smart and accomplished in their careers, and are successful.

I thought about all of that and I really responded to the script, and then I met David Boreanaz. He already had the part when I auditioned for it. I remember thinking, Oh, this could last us three years. That would be the longest I could ever in a million years imagine that it could ever last. And then it kept going and going and it was a lot of fun, with some great people. I look back with such fondness.

I [spoke with] a friend recently who was an actor on the show as well, and he was saying, "You seem so might lighter than when you were on the show!" And I'm looking back on it thinking I was so easy-breezy but apparently I was like "I will stress out about every single thing that I could possibly stress out about." It's a lot to be the lead of a television show. It's a lot of responsibility and it's an honor, but you do have to set a tone for a set, and there's pressure to keep the show going and be good. There's all kinds of things that I was probably holding on to that I wasn't realizing, and I look back just remembering all the fun times we had on set with the other actors — like the times in between when they say "cut" and before they say "action" — and of all the conversations we had. I look back thinking I was so easy-breezy but was usually very stressed about everything.

 She's also a character who is not very emotional, so you probably also had to tamp down your own feelings more when you were playing her.

Yeah, that's true. I remember the first season doing takes where there was some things that were super upsetting. I remember there was an episode about a girl in foster care and my character was supposed to be in foster care and I was just bawling crying. We couldn't use any of it. I was so upset but my character was so cut off emotionally. I loved, like I was saying, that we had these strong female characters. Hart Hanson, who created it, was a feminist himself and we talked about how my character would never be saved by the male lead until I saved him first. We had things like that, and my favorite thing ever was when I met young girls who said they wanted to become scientists or they were in the process of studying science because of watching the show. That just makes me so happy that we had that kind of impact on people in such a positive way.

What was it like working with David Boreanaz, who had come off of a decade of successful shows with Buffy and Angel? What was it like for you as a relative newcomer to be paired up with someone who can be notoriously prickly sometimes?

No comment. [Laughs.] No, he was very respectful of me. He respected me from the very beginning, and I will always appreciate that. We had a great relationship. I had worked for several years but I'd never been a regular on a TV show before, so it was very new to me. He never tried to tell me what to do, never tried to school me in any way or make me feel like I didn't belong or like I was learning and new. We went to an acting coach, so we basically had therapy every week together which is kind of hilarious, in certain ways, 'cause we would talk about our lives as well in the sessions.

We also had an agreement: We spent more time with each other than we did with our own spouses — with anybody else, really — and we fully acknowledged that we would drive each other crazy. We gave each other permission to walk away at different times, or just say "you're really bothering me right now," or "you're annoying me, I have to get away from you." And we rarely used that because we gave each other permission and we talked about it. It really helped us to get along better in that way, and he always respected me and I love that about him. We would laugh about a million things and he became like a brother and played jokes on me and stuff. For some reason it became a joke that if someone was acting badly, you give them a Diet Coke. I don't drink soda, so if somebody brought me a Diet Coke, I knew it was because he would tell a PA to bring me a Diet Coke as a joke. I didn't do that to him every often. He was more of the mischievous one of the two of us for sure, but we had a lot of good times together.

That sounds like a healthy way to approach that type of relationship.

People have work husbands and work wives at their jobs. I think that's not uncommon, but it takes it to another level playing opposite each other and being married to each other, for sure.

You and David still have a lawsuit pending against Fox for withholding profits from the show. Is there anything you can say about what you learned from that whole experience, and how it has impacted your deals going forward, or even advice to other actors dealing with that issue?

I can't really talk about it because it's still going on. It's not over. I would love to talk about it at some point, but I can't talk about it now. I can talk about it with my friends, but I can't talk to the [press] about it. We can talk in a couple of years. It makes me nervous to sign a contract.

                   What's your biggest takeaway from your experience on Bones?

Oh, there's so much. I loved playing that character for 12 years. I loved the people I worked with, not just the cast but the crew. I loved telling the stories. I loved all of it. For me, going forward, I just don't want to do the same thing twice. At this point, I have no interest in doing 22 episodes of a television show. I want to play different characters, I'm open to anything — I'm not going to say that I'm not doing television because I'm currently filming television, but I'm not a series regular. That was a plus to me going in. I have flexibility. When you're a guest star you can come and go, and there's no contract, which is great going into my first job after doing Bones. And I don't want to take too much time away from my kids. So that's basically how I see things now, but I'm not anti-television by any means. It really is the golden age of television right now; there's so many amazing things going on, so many stories that are being told, and people doing it so well. I would never write off doing television.

You produced and directed on Bones, is that something you want to do more?

Yeah, all of it. I loved being a producer on Bones. It gives you a say in things, and I really appreciated that. Directing I really loved, and I'm very much interested in doing more of that in my life, but it takes up time. It depends on the time and finding the right project, because you don't want to spend all that time producing or directing something that isn't something you are completely passionate about. It's about finding the right project, and the right timing, with family and everything, I could do that again.

Your character on Animal Kingdom is very different than we've seen you play in the past.

I was really interested in having the conversation about addiction. The character is a recovering heroin addict, and this is a big issue in our country right now. This is a character you're seeing enter the show at rock bottom: She's just come out of prison, she's got nowhere to live, and she's trying to establish herself. This is a character who is sensitive to things, has seen everything in life, has done all kinds of things in her life, like a lot of people who have dealt with addiction have. This is a character who is a survivor. She's trying to find her way in the world and she's doing to do whatever it takes to establish herself to get what she needs, basically.

So she might come across as manipulative. She always has the reasons for doing what she does, but that's like all the characters on the show. They're like criminals, addicts, sociopaths,and she fits in with all that. My character is the best friend of Ellen Barkin's character's daughter so I've known the family for years and years and years, and I see it as an opportunity for myself to get in with the family and see what I can get out of it.

It sounds like there might be a throwdown between Angela and Smurf, Ellen Barkin's character.

Yeah, my character and her character did not like each other. I blame her for her daughter's death, and she blames me, essentially. There's no hiding how we feel about each other. It gets very intense between the two characters for sure. I'm the woman coming in for her territory and I move in to her house. She is not happy about that. I can't say that there's a throw-down fight between us, but it gets intense. Which is always uncomfortable because I love Ellen Barkin so much as a person and as an actor, so I hate the fact that our characters don't get along. But at least we get along off camera!

Animal Kingdom airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on TNT.

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If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

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When it comes to the shows that hog all the attention in our era of peak TV, The Magicians is nowhere near the top of the list. Mainstream conversations about fantasy TV are often limited to the wild success of Game of Thrones, and The Magicians is nestled into an underrated corner of TV on the Syfy network. It’s easy for any series to get a little buried when there are 500+ shows and the Stark family around. But if we’re judging on ambition and inventiveness, The Magicians is one of the most notable shows on television — and its third season, which wraps up this week, proved that point over and over again. It’s a show that plays with story convention so consistently it blows up any boundaries that might hold it back.

Technically, The Magicians is built on the familiar. Based on Lev Grossman’s book series of the same name, the show began in 2015 as a sort of advanced-age Harry Potter meets Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike Hogwarts, the Magicians’ magic school — Brakebills — serves grad school students instead of children. When the characters discover and eventually become kings and queens of Fillory, their own version of Narnia, the escapist world operates as a Technicolor meditation on what it means to embrace adult responsibility. The series is also a direct descendant of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: It follows a group of ragtag young people as they repeatedly try to save the world. The characters fight through depression, sexual assault, addiction, and the general sense that things may never get easier. That’s all classic, well-trod territory. Which makes it all the more impressive that The Magicians inspires the feeling that it’s doing it all for the first time.

Here are just a few of the elements that make it stand out.

It’s one of the best ensemble shows about a group of twentysomethings.

From left: Stella Maeve as Julia, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Appleman as Eliot, Bishil as Margo, Jason Ralph as Quentin, and Arjun Gupta as Penny in a promotional shot for The Magicians.

The Magicians has always had a stellar cast of characters on its side — a group of friends brought together via Brakebills and overlapping heroes’ journeys. They’ve fought moth-faced villains and conquered gods, each character an integral part of a larger and pretty magnificent whole. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has a palpable regality in both his look and his soul; Margo (Summer Bishil) has blossomed as a brazen queen; Quentin (Jason Ralph) is steadfast and earnest, buoyed by Ralph’s deep pleasantness, an energy that’s completely transformed the character from what he was in the books. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg — Julia (Stella Maeve), Penny (Arjun Gupta), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Kady (Jade Tailor), and Josh (Trevor Einhorn) are all worthy of their own odes. In a strange way, through them, The Magicians sits right alongside Insecure, New Girl, and Girls — it’s a sexy ensemble show about a twentysomething friend group. They muse on responsibility and the big life decisions you’re forced to make as you become a true grownup. They just do so while having hoversex, battling literal manifestations of their depression, and trying to run a kingdom or two.

And it has the kind of diversity that so many of the shows it riffs on lacked.

Beloved as Buffy may have been, it was also notoriously white. The Magicians, on the other hand, very much lives in a socially conscious 2018. A significant portion of its main cast is made up of people of color. Not only that, but every single one of them — from Maeve’s Julia, to Gupta’s Penny, to Bishil’s Margo — is the kind of complex, specific character you won’t find anywhere else on television.

A sizable portion of the characters also appears to be sexually fluid. Quentin, who on most shows would be the straightest white man on the planet, has a threesome with a man and a woman. He hooks up again with that same man in a later episode. There are no coming-out storylines, no hemming and hawing about labels — intimacies just happen to manifest in all types of ways on this show. On the one hand, there are always downsides to a lack of labels, including perpetuating the erasure of orientations like bisexuality. On the other, it’s kind of freeing to watch a show where it’s genuinely possible that anyone could sleep with anyone else and everyone treats that pretty casually. It goes well with part of what makes The Magicians so fun to watch: It actually does feel like anything could happen. The story options are wide open when everyone’s at least a little bit queer.

The Magicians’ third season has also heavily featured Candis Cayne, a trans actor who previously broke ground with her role on Dirty Sexy Money — the first time a trans actor had a recurring role playing a trans character on primetime television. Here, she plays the Fairy Queen, an intimidating force and a standout of the season. Another standout: Marlee Matlin’s Harriet — a deaf actor playing a deaf character who gets a beautiful moment in the spotlight with Season 3’s “Six Short Stories About Magic.”

What’s more, most of the show’s inclusivity goes unremarked upon on the show itself. Race, gender, and disability aren’t invisible to any of the core characters, but neither are they the focus. Characters will call out white supremacy and sexism without the show bragging about having a queen (and king!) of a magical realm be played by an actor of Mexican, Indian, and European heritage. Or a black man as the king of their neighboring kingdom. Or a mixed Native American woman on the path to becoming a goddess. And so on. Which is not to say The Magicians shouldn’t brag — if they want to spend all of Season 4 bragging about their magnificent ensemble, that would work too.

The show has a true sense of playfulness.

When Buffy aired its iconic musical episode in 2001, it had a ripple effect. Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Psych, That ’70s Show, and even 7th Heaven all turned themselves into musicals for an episode. The Magicians, for its part, has been following in those same footsteps since its first season. Only instead of just one designated episode, they’ve peppered musical numbers into every season so far. In Season 1, Quentin sang Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” while trying to break out of a spell that had him trapped in a psychiatric hospital. “One Day More” from Les Misérables made a magnificent appearance in Season 2, as Eliot prepared for a duel to save his kingdom. (That one resembled what Game of Thrones might look like if Game of Thrones liked to party.) And this season, The Magicians did finally designate a full episode to several numbers. It culminated in the show’s main ensemble joining together in a rousing rendition of “Under Pressure.”

Integrated throughout the show, these moments stand as a declaration: This is just what The Magicians is, at its core. These scenes aren’t just an aside, a whim to break through the mundanity for a single episode — though The Magicians is also very good at that. With this show, narrative is twisted like a rubber band and then flung across the room. This is a series where talking sloths serve as top political advisers, party gods get banned from Instagram for posting too many shots of nipples, and messenger rabbits say things like “eat my ass.” It’s a blast.

And the fun they have with the story will also punch you in the heart (in a good way).

Wrapped up in all of its magical elements, The Magicians also happens to be wildly convoluted. Here, though, it’s at least in a way the show seems to truly delight in. As things grew more complex in Season 3, every week felt like the writers were taking the series’ classic fantasy tropes and conducting science experiments on them. Sometimes the effect is that aforementioned playfulness. But their characters are still on a variety of heroes’ journeys — which means this show is also willing to rip your heart out and tap dance all over it. Honestly? It feels great.

If there was one shining highlight of the season — and the show overall — it was the Feb. 7 episode, “A Life in the Day.” In it, Quentin and Eliot are tasked with completing a mosaic puzzle as part of a season-long quest to bring magic back to their world. To do so, they have to travel to a past version of Fillory. But unable to leave until they complete their mission, they wind up staying in the immediate vicinity of that puzzle for…well, the entire rest of their lives. The show plays this out in an extended montage. The two grow restless. They fight, they bond. They hook up. Quentin meets a local girl, settles down, has a son. When she’s gone, Quentin and Eliot spend the rest of their lives raising the kid and growing old together. Like the opening montage of Up, it’s the kind of sequence that really hits you with everything that it means to be human. It stays with you.

By the end of the episode, Quentin and Eliot had completed the puzzle and found their way back to their youths and their usual timeline. But the show made sure the impact of their time together was felt. These two characters had lived out an entire life as loving partners, side by side. It was an emotional beat that packed a hell of a wallop, and payoff has been sprinkled through the episodes that have followed. Sometimes it’s in small asides between the two characters; sometimes it’s just in knowing the way they look at each other. It’s hardly the first time characters in a genre show have lived out their entire lives in a separate timeline. But “A Life in the Day” was indicative of what The Magicians does best: It uses its magical setting and all-star cast to mold itself into different forms. Sometimes, like in that episode, it knocks you off your feet in the process.

In another episode, called “Six Short Stories About Magic,” the narrative is split into six vignettes sorted by character. The final one is centered on Harriet, a freedom of information activist and magician who runs a BuzzFeed spoof called FuzzBeat (hi, guys!). As Harriet is deaf, 10 minutes of the episode take place in silence. The segment includes some long-awaited exposition into Harriet’s backstory, which we get through her perspective before the series explodes back into sound in its final moments. The effect is stirring.

In “Be the Penny,” we get another play on perspective as Penny finds himself separated from his body with his friends believing him dead. We spend the episode with his astral self, watching people react to his death as he tries desperately to contact them. In both of these, the show plays with form to reveal depth. Penny doesn’t get a normal death, so it follows that the episode focusing on that would be just as off-kilter as the story itself — and just as sad. Penny watches his friends grieve, though not always to his satisfaction, and he can’t reach them to tell them that he’s still there.

This kind of experimentation is not new to fantasy. Supernatural, in its seemingly 500th year on television, has employed practically every genre and meta twist there is. Most recently, the characters crossed over with Scooby Doo and literally became animated. And Buffy was groundbreaking in this field before that, not only for the aforementioned musical episode but also for forays into silent filmmaking with “Hush” and character experiments like “Tabula Rasa.” One of the joys of sci-fi and fantasy is that it gives you a built-in excuse to fuck with convention. The Magicians has reveled in that from day one — and from the ground up. And with this third season, it took itself to a whole new and thrilling level.

David Boreanaz has had great success in television. For the past twelve years, he’s starred as FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth on Fox’s BONES, now in its final twelve-episode run on Tuesday nights. The character has gone through just about everything: getting shot, a near-death experience, wrongful conviction and jail, marriage to his partner, forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennan,” played by Emily Deschanel, fatherhood, the death of his brother and much more.

Before BONES, Boreanaz spent eight years, and gained a major fan following, as the vampire with a soul Angel, who he played first on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, then spun off onto ANGEL. Boreanaz directed an ANGEL episode, and has become one of BONES’ top directors, with eleven episodes to his credit. He is also a producer on the series.

With BONES coming to an end, Boreanaz participates with his cast mates, series creator Hart Hanson and current show runners Jonathan Collier and Michael Peterson in a Q&A session.

During the panel, Boreanaz talks about shooting the last twelve episodes, knowing it was the end. “I think we got so much in the twelve episodes, quite honestly, that we could have done it in twenty-two episodes. These twelve episodes are packed with moments and bringing back characters [played by] Cyndi Lauper, Betty White. It feels like a full order. We really jammed in a lot of stuff.”

Boreanaz has often expressed his belief that the chemistry with Deschanel, romantic onscreen and with a strong friendship in real life, has been crucial to the success of BONES. How does he feel about the chemistry in the final season?

“It’s the same. I maintain that we go back to the relationship. Starting the series at the onset of getting an order for a pilot to shoot a show, and reading the script, and knowing that there’s a relationship there between these two, that was really, for me, a point into jumping back into a series so quickly and understanding [it’s important] to work on those relationships outside of the work environment, and working with our acting coach, and bringing moments to hart and using our improvisational stuff to say, ‘Hey, we would like to change this, or work with this,’ and always go back to the relationship. To me, the last scene in the last shot with Emily is the same moment I would have [in] the first scene of the pilot with Emily. I also maintain that was the most important part of the show”.

Two years ago, there was a season finale that could have been the series finale. Was Boreanaz ready to end BONES at that time?

“I don’t really think about when it’s going to end. For me, it was really moment to moment. When you’re working on the scenes and you’re working on the episodes, it’s always about being present in the moment. With that, when we go off the stage, the next moment is whatever that moment is and wherever that takes you. So I think a little differently with that. When we always think about, are we going to get picked up or is there going to be another [episode] order, I think that was a conversation that was internal between us at certain times, but I never thought, ‘Oh, this is when it should end,’ or ‘This is when it should.’”

As for favorite guest stars, Boreanaz and Deschanel almost talk over one another in their enthusiastic recollections. “There are so many to choose from,” Boreanaz begins. “I remember Heavy D and how great he was in the opening season, and how heartfelt and warm and genuine of a person he was, and how great Wong Fu’s was, and how I enjoyed going back to Wong Fu’s and having Booth pull up and have a drink and talk to Heavy D about some stuff. It was pretty emotional, and so I really liked Heavy D.” He also cites Eric Millegan, who is back this year as Dr. Zack Addy.

Deschanel adds, “I love all the people that we’ve already mentioned. I would say Linda Lavin was on the show playing a judge, and I’m a huge fan of hers from when I was a kid, and I’ve stayed a little bit in touch with her. Stephen Fry …”

Boreanaz thinks of more guests. “Hal Holbrook, Michael B. Jordan. Also, when we went to London and shot, we had some tremendous actors over there that were just fantastic to work with.”

“Indira Varma,” Deschanel suggests.

“Yeah,” Boreanaz agrees.

Deschanel next says the name of the actor who portrays Brennan’s father, Max. “Ryan O’Neal. He’s here so much, you don’t think of him as a guest star, but …”

Boreanaz finishes the thought. “He was more like part of the family to me.”

Millegan, also on the panel, proposes the actress who has played D.A. Caroline Julien for most of the show. “And Patricia [Belcher].”

“There’s a lot,” Boreanaz declares.

“All of them,” Deschanel decides. “All of them are our favorites”.

Something Boreanaz says he wishes he’d had a chance to do during BONES’ long run was play Booth as an old man. “I still want to do the old man episode. I actually went and got fitted for the prosthetic. One of the episodes I wanted to do was where we’re in prosthetics and we’re old. I wanted to play the old Booth really bad, and it just didn’t work out time-wise. It was hard on the schedule; it’s hard to get people in and out of makeup. It was very difficult.”

With so many TV shows coming back for limited-run follow-ups – Fox’s PRISON BREAK, Netflix’s GILMORE GIRLS, Showtime’s upcoming TWIN PEAKS – does Boreanaz ever see himself returning to Booth for a BONES reunion movie or miniseries?

“For me,” Boreanaz replies, “It’s really a moment of where I am in my life with what I’m doing. It’s very hard for me to answer that question honestly. I don’t know what’s going to happen in six hours. Everything is possible in life, but I tend to like to go forward. I don’t like to go backwards. When I’ve got ice skates on my feet and I’m playing hockey, that’s probably when I most like to go backwards, or if I’m doing some historical research. But in general, I don’t like reunions and I don’t like to go back. For me, it’s really about going forward.”

But he doesn’t completely rule it out. “It’s hard for me to answer that question. Look, I’ve grown with this character for twelve seasons. I love him. He’s great, but we’ll see what happens.”

After the panel, Boreanaz makes himself available for a few more queries.

Does he feel there are any boundaries in directing television?

“No. Boundaries for me – you prep and then you throw everything out the window and I create with the actors. I’m an actor’s director, and then what I’ve learned, especially working on the show and with [director of photography] Bobby Altman is lenses and sizes and how to manipulate stuff. So I’ve gained so much through that, and lighting, and how to light scenes, and working with gaffers and best boys, to me, that’s really the art, is knowing what everybody does, and knowing how they do it, and then forming that and bringing it all together.”

Might Boreanaz direct a feature film? “Sure, why not? Any theatre, sure why not? I’d love to do anything. I’m a worker, so I think for me, I’m forty-seven [laughs], I think, so I think I’ll start to pop when I’m late fifties, sixties, into that genre, maybe, but I think I have a longevity in it, so …”

Is he looking more towards acting or directing right now? “Producing, creating, directing, acting – I’m a triple threat, baby,” Boreanaz laughs. “I’ve got a good track record, I’ve been blessed, I’ve really paid the price of being down on the front, in the war room, and knowing how to shoot a show and what it takes. And I know budgets, I know above and below costs. So we’ll see.”

The Best Geek TV Deep Dives on YouTube

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From the heyday of Television Without Pity to niche podcasts that cover every small screen angle you can think of, TV show deep dives have always thrived online, and popular platforms like YouTube and Vimeo provide opportunities for talented creators to add a visual angle that can often make a well-edited analysis of your favorite series even more compelling.

YouTube is positively teeming with potential rabbit holes for TV obsessives to fall down. Sometimes at 3 a.m. Sometimes after a few beers. Sometimes when you should be working (couldn’t be us) but whether you’re drawn in by a near-obligatory shocked reaction thumbnail or you accidentally stumble across an interesting take on something you’re passionate about, there’s usually a rabbit hole waiting that feels like it could have been made just for you.

With any luck, falling down one of those rabbit holes ends with you landing far away from the world of destructive opinions, of which there are many, and not just on YouTube. Most of us have probably seen a clip floating around of someone spouting the most harmful, misinformed nonsense at one time or another, and asked ourselves whether giving that person a platform was really the best idea.

Well, this isn’t that. Instead, we’ve pulled together some weighty YouTube-accessible examples of what happens when someone loves a TV series or franchise so much, they can’t stop talking about it – even decades later. Most of these deep dives are a labor of love, which is not to say that they always have a happy ending.

The Retrospective

Ian Martin, who runs the YouTube channel Passion of the Nerd, says his journey began rather accidentally in his early 30s when he found himself feeling a little lost in life. He admits he tried a variety of ways to rid himself of the sensation, including “too much alcohol,” but after deciding on a career change and fruitlessly looking for ways into the voiceover industry, he decided the best course of action was to go ahead and just …make stuff. After all, this course of action didn’t require anyone else to give him a break, and made him the master of his own destiny.

“I sat down and wrote a script about a show I’d become consumed by and edited it into a video called Why You Should Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he wrote. “In that video, I mentioned that Buffy’s first season was a little rough and, for people who just wanted to get into the show, I would create a short little episode guide just to get them through the first season.”

Six years later, Martin is still at it, and his audience has grown into a supportive community that includes over sixty thousand subscribers, propped up by funding from Patreon. Not only is he still covering Joss Whedon’s first series in depth, episode-by-episode, he’s now delving into spin-off show Angel and Firefly.

Martin’s videos don’t pore over every aspect of these shows, and rarely does an instalment hit the 30-minute mark. Rather, they tend to examine the philosophy behind their themes, citing absurdist and existentialist influences. The host himself doesn’t push these ideas on his audience, but if you don’t end up buying a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea by the time you get to the end of Season 3, it may be that you’ve missed out on a pretty essential element of Buffy’s enduring appeal.

“It took me a long time to figure out what Passion of the Nerd was but I started to find its shape through the journey it was taking ME on,” he explained. “On any average day it’s a chance to make someone laugh over our shared interests. But my favorite experience of art is the one in which we find ourselves. That movie, piece of music, performance, or show that makes us feel like its creator opened up our heart to take a picture of its inner depths. And I love talking about why media MATTERS and finding those moments in popular culture. Sometimes I get to distil those moments for other people and when I do, I hope it does for them what the channel has done for me.”

Martin’s coverage of the very first episode of Buffy lies below. If you continue watching his series of videos after that, it’s unlikely you’ll want that time back. They’re incredibly thoughtful and, frankly, an absolute joy.

The Deconstruction

Ah, Twin Peaks. The show that changed television forever, and one that has been hard to forget ever since. You’ve not been able to throw a golden shovel without hitting a Twin Peaks deep dive online in the last three decades, but occasionally one arrives and threatens to pull apart the backbone of its dreamscape for good.

Twin Perfect’s Rosseter turned in a Twin Peaks deep dive last October with a running time not for the faint of heart. His deconstruction of David Lynch’s endlessly puzzling mystery, supported by myriad quotes from its beloved co-creator, is over four-and-a-half hours long, but its length certainly hasn’t put off curious viewers – over a million people have already chosen to hear what Rosseter has to say about the real meaning behind Twin Peaks.

“Garmonbozia, the Black and White Lodges, Mike, Bob and the Little Man, Judy, Audrey and Charlie, Season 3’s ending… The mystery of Twin Peaks has survived for nearly 30 years… until now,” the video promises, which is a tease that even casual fans of the series can’t possibly resist. Their mileage may vary with the host’s loud impression of Lynch throughout the video, however, even as he produces what feels like a fairly accurate interpretation of Twin Peaks’ initial intentions, its ongoing message in the prequel film Fire Walk with Me, and a gut-punching look at 2017’s The Return.

Rosseter starts out by warning his audience that if they haven’t consumed all three Twin Peaks seasons and the film, they should consider stepping back until they have, which stands to reason: he’s about to spoil most of their various twists and turns. But he then goes on to say that die-hard Twin Peaks junkies should also reconsider watching the video, because after they’ve heard him out, they might never be able to look at Twin Peaks the same way again.

For many, the temptation to potentially peek behind the red curtain has been too great to ignore, and the comment section is filled with people who sat through the whole thing, having felt truly changed by the experience.

“David Lynch didn’t even know what this show was about until he saw this video,” someone joked, while another added more solemnly “I just feel regret. I appreciate the show on a whole other level but the haunting magic that it had for me is gone.”

One viewer thought that Rosseter’s comprehensive offering “may legitimately and unironically be one of the most intelligent and well-constructed videos ever put on YouTube,” but others hit the nail on the head when they realised that unwrapping Twin Peaks’ clues over the years had only led to one significant discovery: “we were controlling Twin Peaks the entire time.”

So, what’s at the heart of Rosseter’s theory? You may want to find out for yourself, and he certainly makes an incredibly detailed case for it. In this event, a brief explanation in the next paragraph will be a SPOILER.

While it’s common knowledge that David Lynch didn’t want to reveal who was responsible for killing Twin Peaks’ central victim, Laura Palmer, and that he was forced by TV bigwigs to wrap up the storyline and the investigation into her murder during Season 2 in late 1990, Rosseter posits that the reason we were never supposed to uncover the mystery of who ended her life and get closure on her death is because Lynch fundamentally believes that consumable TV violence is rotting our brains, and that’s why he created the series in the first place.

Still intrigued? Take a look…

The Discussion

Two-time Shorty Award winner Kristen Maldonado launched her YouTube channel in 2014 as a place where pop culture meets community, and she has the kind of drive, ambition and fast turnaround skills that make other creators look like they’re napping on the job, frankly.

While working as a social media manager for MTV, she’s used her YouTube platform to support women, diversity, and LGBTQ+ representation, discussing everything from the acknowledgement of Kat’s identity on The Bold Type, to the highs and lows of TV’s YA-skewed failures, emphasising the importance of why representation matters “on screen, behind the scenes, and critically.”

Along the way, she’s become a notable queen of deep dives, and not just where TV or movies are concerned – at one point she was even documenting her own musical journey on Spotify, where she was keen to bring attention to emerging artists. Discussing TV still feels like Maldonado’s reigning passion, though, and she usually explores her favorite shows in bite-sized segments that add up to a comprehensive look at their subjects.

One show she’s been extremely passionate about is the Charmed reboot, which she was beyond excited to see come to fruition on The CW. The fantasy drama series originally ran for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006, and CBS had tried and failed to reboot it before, but this time The CW intended to get the job done, bringing the story of magic and sisterhood back to TV and hoping to entice both fans of the old series and a new, younger audience.

The reboot was initially touted across industry trades as a project that would star three Latinx actresses, and that casting choice meant a lot to Maldonado. When news later emerged that only one of the new Charmed sisters would be played by a Latina actress, she posted a video addressing her feelings of confusion about how the show was originally announced, her disappointment that the roles wouldn’t be filled by three Latinx performers, and why series creators need to start using valuable representation opportunities properly.

Maldonado has covered the Charmed reboot comprehensively since it began in 2018, and this year has moved into livestreaming her reviews, switching from shorter videos to longer discussions about the episodes. If you’re a fan of Charmed, or any of the other series she covers (and there are quite a few) you might well find her channel to be an insightful addition to your subscription list.

The Takedown

Chances are, a TV show has pissed you off or upset you before. That Game of Thrones ending? Probably. Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower? Sure. Quantum Leap? We’re not over it. Only a few of us take the time to make a video detailing just how upset we are about a show and upload it to YouTube, though.

Mike Stoklasa is likely to be a pretty familiar face to some of the Very Online movie and TV addicts reading these words. He’s the founder of production company RedLetterMedia, through which he’s been creating content and offering his desert-dry opinion on various facets of pop culture for well over a decade.

On YouTube, Stoklasa is regularly accompanied by cohorts Jay Bauman and Rich Evans as they take a hard look at some of their favorite films from the past, some of the worst straight-to-video movies of all time, and some of the bigger releases, too. He also voices a character called Mr. Plinkett, and when he does, viewers know that they’re about to peer screaming into the void, because ‘Mr. Plinkett’ does not hold back, especially when it comes to Star Wars or Star Trek.

Stoklasa is one of the most vocal Star Trek fans alive, and is known to consistently derail otherwise unconnected discussions with his Trek references, often explaining how Star Trek may have influenced the subject’s storytelling, and how it might have been – or should have been – a positive lesson from TV past.

To say that he’s not a fan of Star Trek’s fairly recent resurgence under the eye of executive producer Alex Kurtzman is probably an understatement. He covered CBS All-Access’ Star Trek: Discovery, a series that has, for the most part, chosen to abandon Trek’s previous lean towards standalone stories and episodes in favor of season-long arcs, and he seemed interested but trepidatious ahead of Star Trek: Picard’s arrival on the streaming service. But after the show had run its course, he uploaded a 94-minute takedown called ‘Mr. Plinkett’s Star Trek Picard Review’.

The broader world of YouTube takedowns is, objectively, a cesspool – misogyny, racism and homophobia have often run rampant – but Stoklasa has been in the business of keeping more of a constructive balance going for a long time, so when ‘Mr Plinkett’s’ review of Picard appeared online towards the end of May, anyone with even a little backstory on his recent problems with Trek’s TV universe suspected that the fresh adventures of the aging ex-Enterprise captain had finally pushed him over the edge …but they weren’t quite prepared for the ‘Dear John’ letter that ultimately arrived.

Whether you enjoyed Picard or not, Stoklasa makes some constructive points in his video review, and his breakup with the current Star Trek TV world is one for the ages.

The Art of More

If it’s the visual element of a TV show deep dive you’re into, YouTube has plenty to offer.

Art meets skill as Skip Intro takes a fascinating look at the editing behind David E. Kelley’s Big Little Lies, Ladyknightthebrave spends the best part of an hour pondering how Fleabag’s gimmick of breaking the fourth wall serves the show’s characters and story, and balancing ‘point of view’ vs ‘the big picture’ becomes the focus of Lost Thoughts’ It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Island.

Here, Thomas Flight explores how HBO’s award-guzzling Chernobyl became a masterclass in perspective…

We hope you found something worth your time in this piece, and writing it up wasn’t really an excuse to discover more of them, but it also wasn’t NOT an excuse to discover more of them. So, if you’ve found any notable examples to keep us busy, please direct our attention to them in the comments, thank you.

The post The Best Geek TV Deep Dives on YouTube appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Vampires exist! A spooky Halloween post

From the Berkeley Blog, by Wadim Strielkowski | OCTOBER 29, 2018

Is everyone looking forward to the forthcoming Halloween? The “All Hallows Evening” is at our doorstep and everyone is preparing for trick-or-treating, brushing off their scary costumes, renting horror movies, carving pumpkins and generally intending to have fun.

Halloween is the holiday that originated from the Celtic rituals in Ireland and the United Kingdom only to be brought by the migrants to the United States to become an event that can now only be compared to Christmas when it comes to its business potential, overall sales, as well as its economic significance. Last year, American consumers spent about $9.1 billion on Halloween festivities. A paper published in 2017 claimed that the share of more “consumer-focused” Halloween products gradually increased over the years in relation to the share of more “traditional” products. And the most popular Halloween activity is wearing a spooky costume.

Vampires and Halloween

One of the most popular Halloween costumes is to dress up as a vampire. For some reason, people just love Dracula and others of his kind. There are many films, comics and popular literature on and about vampires. And you would be probably surprised to find out that vampires can actually exist and their existence does not contradict modern science!

Well, there are plenty blood-sucking animals found in nature, and even humans need to drink the blood from their own spices sometimes to survive. So, why cannot vampires (the creatures from the myths and legends, as we tend to think of them) exist too? Most scientists use simple math to prove that the existence of vampires is not possible. Their line of argumentation is the following: assume that a vampire needs to feed only once a month (we ignore the mortality rate, since it is irrelevant here). When this process occurs, another vampire is created. If the countdown starts in 1600 AD or some other time around that (on the 1st of January 1600 the world’s population was 536 870 911), then by February 1600 there would be two vampires (one who turned a human into vampire to start with and another one who was a human but became a vampire after the encounter with a vampire). In March 1600 there would be four vampires in existence, and in April 1600 – eight vampires. Therefore, some scientists say, each month the number of vampires doubles and after n months there are 2^n vampires which gives us a geometric progression with ratio 2.

As most of you might know, the geometric progression is increases at a very quick pace and if you sit with a pencil and paper and calculate it for our vampires example, you will arrive to the conclusion that after 30 months there would be no humans left – everyone would be turned into a vampire and the humanity would be wiped out by June 1602. Even if human birth rate is included into our calculations, it remains a very small fraction deaths caused by the vampires and would have prolonged the extinction of human race by just one month. Therefore, some scientists conclude, vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings. This logical proof is of a type known “as reductio ad absurdum”, that is, reduction to the absurd.

However, if one starts digging dipper, everything is not that straightforward. Some works of fiction, Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight series”, Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stockhouse (Southern Vampire) series”, “True Blood” (TV series) as well as Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian”, show the world where vampires peacefully co-exist with humans.

In Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight series” vampires can tolerate the sunlight, interact with humans (even fall in love with them) and drink animals’ blood to survive. Of course, they have to live in secrecy and pretend to be human beings. In “True Blood” TV series, however, a world is shown where vampires and humans live side-by-side and are aware of each other. Vampires can buy synthetic blood of different blood types that is sold in bottles and can be bought in every grocery store, bar or gas station. They cannot walk during daytime, so they usually come out at night. Humans also find use of vampires’ essence – vampires’ blood (called “V”) is a powerful hallucinogenic drug that is sought by humans and traded on the black market (sometimes humans capture vampires with the help of silver chains or harnesses and then kill them by draining their blood). Some humans even seek sex with vampires (vampires are stronger and faster than humans and can provide superb erotic experience). There is a possibility to turn a human being into a vampire, but it takes time and effort.

Let us assume that at the time of the events described in the first book of the series, “Dead Until Dark” (2001), the world’s vampire hypothetical population was around five million (the population of the state of Louisiana in 2001 we arbitrarily use in our calculations). The initial conditions of what I call “a Harris-Meyer-Kostova model” are the following: five million vampires, 6 159 million people, there are organized groups of vampire “drainers”.

Simple calculations yield that the human population will be growing until 2046 when it reaches its peak of 9.6 billion people, whereupon it will be declining until 2065 until it reaches its bottom at 6.12 billion people. This process will repeat itself continuously. The vampire population will be declining until 2023 when it reaches its minimum of 289 thousand vampires, whereupon it will be growing until 2055 until it reaches its peak at 397 million vampires. This process will also repeat itself continuously and we will end up with a cyclical system of human-vampire co-existence.

Under certain conditions, the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model seems plausible and allows for the existence of vampires in our world. Peaceful co-existence of two spices is a reality. However, this symbiosis is very fragile and whenever the growth rate of human population slows down, the blood thirst of vampires accelerates, or vampire drainers become too greedy, the whole system lies in ruins with just one population remaining.

There are more interesting implications to this study: consider for example the organized groups of vampire hunters (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) or superhero vampire hunters (“Blade”). The results seem even more interesting and all clues lead to the one simple fact – vampires might co-habituate with humans and modern science cannot refute their existence! Here, you can download a poster explaining my research on this topic and covering different models of vampires and humans co-existence: Poster Vampires exist

Karl Marx, a vampire hunter

You would be surprised to learn that the works of Karl Marx are full of mentioning of vampires (Marx used the vampire metaphor at least three times in Capital). For example, in one of the cases Marx describes British industry as “vampire-like” which “could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too”. Here is another quote:““Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. Marx’s colleague and long-time sponsor Frederick Engels also used the vampire metaphor in his works and public addresses. In one of his works entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels identifies and blames the “vampire property-holding class” as the source of “all the social troubles”.

Marx described vampires’ habits, their greediness and their lounging for blood in such a detail that in many cases it crossed the boundaries of the mere metaphor. Although many researchers perceive Marx’s vampires as metaphoric abstract bourgeois bloodsuckers feeding on working people, his knowledge of vampires is very peculiar. In one particular case, when describing Wallachian peasants performing forced labour for their boyars, Marx refers to one specific “boyar” who was “drunk with victory” and who might have been no one but Wallachian prince Vlad (called “The Impaler”) – or Count Dracula himself!

All this is very interesting because the best-known novel of vampiric genre, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, did not see the daylight until 1897, 14 years after Marx’s death. Surely, one can place the Marx’s metaphor in the wider context of nineteenth-century Gothic horror stories which were abundant these days, and of which Marx was a huge fan. On the other hand, one might assume that some of the vampire legends were true and Marx and his contemporaries were aware of that!

Till the last drop!

My research on vampires and humans co-existence (that has been going on for almost 10 years now) is thoroughly described in a popular science book Till the last drop! by “Emily Welkins (my pen name and pseudonym) that shows how vampires became a part of the popular culture. The book also analyzes all possible models of humans-vampires coexistence using mathematical calculations. For the shorter version of the whole story, you can read a paper entitled “How to Stop a Vampiric Infection? Using Mathematical Modeling to Fight Infectious Diseases” (available here). You can also find more on interesting scientific facts about vampires, werewolves, demons (and other spooky topics) in my blog called “Supernaturaleconomics“.

Have a spooky Halloween!!!

Some time ago, I found myself in need of a vacation read. I am a book critic, so this was an easily solved problem: I perused the enormous pile of books on my desk that had been sent to me by publishers, found a galley that didn’t look too dark or esoteric, and set out for the beach with it. Bookburners, it was called.

Many pages later, I put down the book in a state of deep confusion. I wasn’t confused by the plot, which was deeply readable: It was the story of a black ops team working on behalf of the Vatican to exorcise demons from books, and it followed the team all over the world as they traveled to one beautiful city after another to kick demon butt.

Nor was I confused by the writing, which was zippy and fun, if oddly variable from chapter to chapter.

But I couldn’t make heads or tails of the structure.

Each chapter of Bookburners was a discrete unit, with its own three-act structure and a clear ending, but I couldn’t call the book a series of vignettes, exactly; there was too much of a through-line for that. There was a twist toward the end that arrived earlier than it would have in a traditional novel; it felt like the twist that typically comes four episodes before the end of a 22-episode season of television. (Think Tara dying and Willow turning evil in the 19th episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season, as opposed to the big reveal that traditionally comes in the penultimate chapter of every Harry Potter book.) In fact, the whole thing felt kind of like a TV show, just in text form.

But it was a book! Why, I wondered, would you structure a book like a season of television? It made no sense! The flow was disrupted; Bookburners felt like a story that did not want to be swallowed whole but rather read in discrete bites, one after another. I couldn’t lie on the beach and lose myself in it because it actively did not want me to do so.

Then I looked up Bookburners online, and everything became clear.

Bookburners was one of the first works published by Serial Box, a service that aims to become the HBO of serialized fiction; I was reading a novel/TV show hybrid, a book that was designed to read like a season of television. Its very existence displayed a major reversal of how we’ve traditionally thought about these two media: TV once aspired to be called “novelistic,” but now, in an age in which TV is increasingly described as “better than books,” here was a book built to act like a TV show.

“I need to understand everything about this,” I thought to myself, and made some calls to Serial Box.

Over a series of conversations, I was introduced to a new way of thinking about written narrative fiction that pulls heavily from the way we think about TV in 2018, and that seeks to lend the ever-endangered medium of the book some of TV’s bright Golden Age sheen. Here’s how you try to create a new kind of written fiction for the age of Peak TV.

Serial Box

Serial Box’s serials are built roughly on the TV show model. Like most TV shows, each title has a writers’ room, with one or two showrunners leading the charge. The showrunners develop a Bible that contains all of the necessary information and backstory for the world and the characters, and the writers’ room works together to break down each “season” into episodic chunks that are helmed by individual writers.

Every week, Serial Box publishes a chapter-length episode for its active serials. (Just like a TV show, each serial goes on hiatus for part of the year.) You can buy chapters on their own ($1.99 each), buy a season pass that gives you access to one season of a specific serial ($16.99 to $22.99 depending on the length of the season), or subscribe to a whole serial ($1.59 per episode no matter how many seasons or episodes are ultimately produced). You can read episodes via the Serial Box app, on the Serial Box website, or download them to one of your own devices.

Each episode is designed to take 40 minutes to read, so that you can finish one during the average two-way commute. Once a “season” of any given story is complete, after 10 to 16 episodes, it is bound together into a book, the way an arc of a comic book is bound together and sold as a graphic novel. In the case of Bookburners, the bound version of season one was what had ended up in my galley pile.

Serial Box

Serial Box was founded by Julian Yap, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice, and Molly Barton, who used to oversee Penguin Random House’s global ebook strategy. It emerged in part out of a desire to problem-solve for writers.

For Barton, serialized fiction seemed like the best solution to a very basic problem she encountered again and again among authors she worked with: “One of the ways popular authors outgrow their following is having trouble consistently coming back with new books on a regular schedule,” she told me over the phone. “But it’s hard to write great fiction on a regular schedule.”

With serialized fiction written by a TV-style writers’ room, the requirement to produce great fiction gets delegated. It becomes easier to put everything together. “You each write about 30,000 to 40,000 words [over a season], and altogether you end up with a book of about 120,000 words,” explains Bookburners showrunner Max Gladstone.

For readers, the pitch is that Serial Box marries the best of two media: “Serial Box brings everything that’s awesome about TV (easily digestible episodes, team-written, new content every week) to what was already cool about books (well-crafted stories, talented authors, enjoyable anywhere),” promises the website.

“I was aware that for many people, reading a book can feel rather slow and daunting compared to other media forms at this point. It’s harder to fit into your life,” says Barton. “Let’s go back to the Dickens model. Let’s be Shonda Rhimes for books, and harness the power of telling a little bit of the story each week, and really take pleasure in consuming the story bit and bit, and being able to switch seamlessly from reading to audio.” (Serial Box also publishes its serials in audiobook form.)

But there’s a danger that the television-style writers’ room that makes Serial Box an attractive sell to writers might dilute the sell to readers; namely, that books come with distinctive voices from authors they already know and love.

In a Serial Box serial, each episode is written by a different author, and the author’s narrative voice is responsible for everything: not just the dialogue, but also details about what the world and the clothes look like and what the reader can “see” — details that, onscreen, would be handled by set-dressers and costumers and directors. Serialized books don’t have the same crew around from week to week providing a consistent aesthetic, the way that TV shows do; in effect, you are getting not just a new writer but also a new director and art department and actors and editors every single episode.

So to keep a serial from getting jarringly inconsistent each week, the writers’ room has to develop a voice. But to keep the voice compelling, each writer has to maintain a certain amount of individuality.

“There’s a balance to be struck there, always,” says Gladstone. “On the one hand, you probably don’t want one episode of a series to feel like it was written by Virginia Woolf and another episode to feel like it was written by Joyce Carol Oates. But if you have two authors who have markedly different styles, there’s enormous artistic potential in how the two voices talk to each other.”

“In the end we decided: Try to sound as much alike as possible, but don’t go crazy,” says Ellen Kushner, author of the beloved Riverside series of novels and the showrunner for Tremontaine, a Serial Box prequel to her Riverside books.

She says she spent a lot of the first season of Tremontaine revising each chapter to make the voice consistent (“The secret sauce is me,” she admits), but now that Tremontaine is four seasons in, she finds that her team has developed a house voice that it can maintain on its own.

The ideal balance between authorial voices depends on what episodic structure any given serial wants to take on. One like Tremontaine is almost purely novelistic in its sensibility and voices — it sprawls like a TV season, but you can binge-read it like a particularly long fantasy epic. In part, that’s because it is Kushner’s brainchild. “I don’t really watch TV,” she says. “I don’t know that aesthetic.”

Kushner brought in other writers to function as her “TV brain,” but the idea of structuring each chapter like an episode of television was foreign to her. Instead, she turned to the model of the short story. “When I wrote episode 1×01, it was great!” she says. “Everyone came back and was like, ‘This is the first chapter of a novel.’ And I was like, ‘So?’ And they were like, ‘Where is the tension?’ So each episode,” she concludes, “has to be treated as a genuine short story.”

That’s part of why the Tremontaine writers’ room had to develop a consistent voice under Kushner’s supervision: There isn’t much space, in a series of connected short stories, for the narrator’s voice to veer around.

But Bookburners is what Gladstone describes as “a monster-of-the-week serial” in the mode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files, “where every week there’s some core supernatural issue to be resolved.” Within the monster-of-the-week format, there’s more leeway to swing between tones and voices from episode to episode.

Gladstone’s other serial, The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, has more of a prestige drama structure, like Breaking Bad: “There’s forward momentum,” Gladstone says, “but each episode will raise and answer its own questions.” Thus, the voice needs to be tighter and more consistent.

Tremontaine is now entering its fourth and final season, and Bookburners is in its third. In the meantime, Serial Box has begun to branch out into nonfiction with serials like 1776, a collaboration with the Associated Press. It currently has 16 serials in total, all of which are actively publishing or soon will be.

The overall approach seems a lot more logical and reasonable to me now than it did when I opened up the first season of Bookbinders without any idea of what I was looking at and tried to read it like a novel — but I also haven’t been able to read most of Serial Box’s serials all in one go. They seem to resist binge-reading.

But if the company is successful in its goal to become the HBO of serialized fiction, if serials become the go-to thing people read on their commutes and lunch breaks and at night before they fall asleep — if they are successful at flooding the market in five or 10 years, will the structure of that Bookburners galley still feel so intuitively strange to me? Or will it simply feel like the way we read now, and perhaps the way we will read for years in the future?

Original Source -> Meet a new kind of book, designed for the age of Peak TV

via The Conservative Brief

If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

https://styleveryday.com/2018/04/03/if-youre-not-watching-the-magicians-at-this-point-youre-missing-out-on-something-great/

If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

Hale Appleman as Eliot, embracing Summer Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

When it comes to the shows that hog all the attention in our era of peak TV, The Magicians is nowhere near the top of the list. Mainstream conversations about fantasy TV are often limited to the wild success of Game of Thrones, and The Magicians is nestled into an underrated corner of TV on the Syfy network. It’s easy for any series to get a little buried when there are 500+ shows and the Stark family around. But if we’re judging on ambition and inventiveness, The Magicians is one of the most notable shows on television — and its third season, which wraps up this week, proved that point over and over again. It’s a show that plays with story convention so consistently it blows up any boundaries that might hold it back.

Technically, The Magicians is built on the familiar. Based on Lev Grossman’s book series of the same name, the show began in 2015 as a sort of advanced-age Harry Potter meets Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike Hogwarts, the Magicians’ magic school — Brakebills — serves grad school students instead of children. When the characters discover and eventually become kings and queens of Fillory, their own version of Narnia, the escapist world operates as a Technicolor meditation on what it means to embrace adult responsibility. The series is also a direct descendant of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: It follows a group of ragtag young people as they repeatedly try to save the world. The characters fight through depression, sexual assault, addiction, and the general sense that things may never get easier. That’s all classic, well-trod territory. Which makes it all the more impressive that The Magicians inspires the feeling that it’s doing it all for the first time.

Here are just a few of the elements that make it stand out.

It’s one of the best ensemble shows about a group of twentysomethings.

From left: Stella Maeve as Julia, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Appleman as Eliot, Bishil as Margo, Jason Ralph as Quentin, and Arjun Gupta as Penny in a promotional shot for The Magicians.

Syfy

The Magicians has always had a stellar cast of characters on its side — a group of friends brought together via Brakebills and overlapping heroes’ journeys. They’ve fought moth-faced villains and conquered gods, each character an integral part of a larger and pretty magnificent whole. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has a palpable regality in both his look and his soul; Margo (Summer Bishil) has blossomed as a brazen queen; Quentin (Jason Ralph) is steadfast and earnest, buoyed by Ralph’s deep pleasantness, an energy that’s completely transformed the character from what he was in the books. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg — Julia (Stella Maeve), Penny (Arjun Gupta), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Kady (Jade Tailor), and Josh (Trevor Einhorn) are all worthy of their own odes. In a strange way, through them, The Magicians sits right alongside Insecure, New Girl, and Girls — it’s a sexy ensemble show about a twentysomething friend group. They muse on responsibility and the big life decisions you’re forced to make as you become a true grownup. They just do so while having hoversex, battling literal manifestations of their depression, and trying to run a kingdom or two.

And it has the kind of diversity that so many of the shows it riffs on lacked.

Candis Cayne as the Fairy Queen and Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

Beloved as Buffy may have been, it was also notoriously white. The Magicians, on the other hand, very much lives in a socially conscious 2018. A significant portion of its main cast is made up of people of color. Not only that, but every single one of them — from Maeve’s Julia, to Gupta’s Penny, to Bishil’s Margo — is the kind of complex, specific character you won’t find anywhere else on television.

Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

A sizable portion of the characters also appears to be sexually fluid. Quentin, who on most shows would be the straightest white man on the planet, has a threesome with a man and a woman. He hooks up again with that same man in a later episode. There are no coming-out storylines, no hemming and hawing about labels — intimacies just happen to manifest in all types of ways on this show. On the one hand, there are always downsides to a lack of labels, including perpetuating the erasure of orientations like bisexuality. On the other, it’s kind of freeing to watch a show where it’s genuinely possible that anyone could sleep with anyone else and everyone treats that pretty casually. It goes well with part of what makes The Magicians so fun to watch: It actually does feel like anything could happen. The story options are wide open when everyone’s at least a little bit queer.

The Magicians’ third season has also heavily featured Candis Cayne, a trans actor who previously broke ground with her role on Dirty Sexy Money — the first time a trans actor had a recurring role playing a trans character on primetime television. Here, she plays the Fairy Queen, an intimidating force and a standout of the season. Another standout: Marlee Matlin’s Harriet — a deaf actor playing a deaf character who gets a beautiful moment in the spotlight with Season 3’s “Six Short Stories About Magic.”

What’s more, most of the show’s inclusivity goes unremarked upon on the show itself. Race, gender, and disability aren’t invisible to any of the core characters, but neither are they the focus. Characters will call out white supremacy and sexism without the show bragging about having a queen (and king!) of a magical realm be played by an actor of Mexican, Indian, and European heritage. Or a black man as the king of their neighboring kingdom. Or a mixed Native American woman on the path to becoming a goddess. And so on. Which is not to say The Magicians shouldn’t brag — if they want to spend all of Season 4 bragging about their magnificent ensemble, that would work too.

The show has a true sense of playfulness.

Appleman as Eliot and Bishil as Margo singing “One Day More” in The Magicians.

Syfy

When Buffy aired its iconic musical episode in 2001, it had a ripple effect. Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Psych, That ’70s Show, and even 7th Heaven all turned themselves into musicals for an episode. The Magicians, for its part, has been following in those same footsteps since its first season. Only instead of just one designated episode, they’ve peppered musical numbers into every season so far. In Season 1, Quentin sang Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” while trying to break out of a spell that had him trapped in a psychiatric hospital. “One Day More” from Les Misérables made a magnificent appearance in Season 2, as Eliot prepared for a duel to save his kingdom. (That one resembled what Game of Thrones might look like if Game of Thrones liked to party.) And this season, The Magicians did finally designate a full episode to several numbers. It culminated in the show’s main ensemble joining together in a rousing rendition of “Under Pressure.”

Integrated throughout the show, these moments stand as a declaration: This is just what The Magicians is, at its core. These scenes aren’t just an aside, a whim to break through the mundanity for a single episode — though The Magicians is also very good at that. With this show, narrative is twisted like a rubber band and then flung across the room. This is a series where talking sloths serve as top political advisers, party gods get banned from Instagram for posting too many shots of nipples, and messenger rabbits say things like “eat my ass.” It’s a blast.

And the fun they have with the story will also punch you in the heart (in a good way).

Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Rupert, Kylee Bush as Arielle, Ralph as Quentin, and Appleman as Eliot in the episode “A Life in the Day.”

Syfy

Wrapped up in all of its magical elements, The Magicians also happens to be wildly convoluted. Here, though, it’s at least in a way the show seems to truly delight in. As things grew more complex in Season 3, every week felt like the writers were taking the series’ classic fantasy tropes and conducting science experiments on them. Sometimes the effect is that aforementioned playfulness. But their characters are still on a variety of heroes’ journeys — which means this show is also willing to rip your heart out and tap dance all over it. Honestly? It feels great.

Eliot comforting Quentin and Rupert in “A Life in the Day.”

Syfy / Via whitefluffyyeti.tumblr.com

If there was one shining highlight of the season — and the show overall — it was the Feb. 7 episode, “A Life in the Day.” In it, Quentin and Eliot are tasked with completing a mosaic puzzle as part of a season-long quest to bring magic back to their world. To do so, they have to travel to a past version of Fillory. But unable to leave until they complete their mission, they wind up staying in the immediate vicinity of that puzzle for…well, the entire rest of their lives. The show plays this out in an extended montage. The two grow restless. They fight, they bond. They hook up. Quentin meets a local girl, settles down, has a son. When she’s gone, Quentin and Eliot spend the rest of their lives raising the kid and growing old together. Like the opening montage of Up, it’s the kind of sequence that really hits you with everything that it means to be human. It stays with you.

By the end of the episode, Quentin and Eliot had completed the puzzle and found their way back to their youths and their usual timeline. But the show made sure the impact of their time together was felt. These two characters had lived out an entire life as loving partners, side by side. It was an emotional beat that packed a hell of a wallop, and payoff has been sprinkled through the episodes that have followed. Sometimes it’s in small asides between the two characters; sometimes it’s just in knowing the way they look at each other. It’s hardly the first time characters in a genre show have lived out their entire lives in a separate timeline. But “A Life in the Day” was indicative of what The Magicians does best: It uses its magical setting and all-star cast to mold itself into different forms. Sometimes, like in that episode, it knocks you off your feet in the process.

In another episode, called “Six Short Stories About Magic,” the narrative is split into six vignettes sorted by character. The final one is centered on Harriet, a freedom of information activist and magician who runs a BuzzFeed spoof called FuzzBeat (hi, guys!). As Harriet is deaf, 10 minutes of the episode take place in silence. The segment includes some long-awaited exposition into Harriet’s backstory, which we get through her perspective before the series explodes back into sound in its final moments. The effect is stirring.

Gupta as an ailing Penny in The Magicians.

Syfy

In “Be the Penny,” we get another play on perspective as Penny finds himself separated from his body with his friends believing him dead. We spend the episode with his astral self, watching people react to his death as he tries desperately to contact them. In both of these, the show plays with form to reveal depth. Penny doesn’t get a normal death, so it follows that the episode focusing on that would be just as off-kilter as the story itself — and just as sad. Penny watches his friends grieve, though not always to his satisfaction, and he can’t reach them to tell them that he’s still there.

This kind of experimentation is not new to fantasy. Supernatural, in its seemingly 500th year on television, has employed practically every genre and meta twist there is. Most recently, the characters crossed over with Scooby Doo and literally became animated. And Buffy was groundbreaking in this field before that, not only for the aforementioned musical episode but also for forays into silent filmmaking with “Hush” and character experiments like “Tabula Rasa.” One of the joys of sci-fi and fantasy is that it gives you a built-in excuse to fuck with convention. The Magicians has reveled in that from day one — and from the ground up. And with this third season, it took itself to a whole new and thrilling level.

Appleman and Ralph behind the scenes on the episode “A Life in the Day.”

Hale Appleman / Via instagram.com