Contributor, The A.V. Club. Emily L. Stephens writes about film, television, entertaining, gender, and cake. A lot about cake, really.
I admire how seamlessly and thoroughly the set design and background decor of Stranger Things 3 integrates the grid motif that was the hallmark of season one and continued in season two. It’s everywhere, but nowhere is it as pervasive as Starcourt Mall.
“Who here wants to see some fireworks?”
“Those morons!” “Those total morons!”
“Chapter Five: The Flayed” opens with a thrill ride, there’s no denying it. As Starcourt’s “secret room” plunges (as Steve poetically puts it) “halfway to hell,” our heroes’ screams rise over the screeching of metal on metal as their elevator car drops. (Dustin’s scream alone is bloodcurdling; hats off to Gaten…
This is a code red!
“You can stop this,” Tom (Michael Park), editor of The Hawkins Post, pleads with his daughter as he waits, bound, next to his sobbing wife.
“There is no stopping it, Daddy,” Heather tells him gently. “You’ll see.”
“It’s probably for his muscles or something,” Max tells El as the two stand over a now-melted ice bath in the Mayfield-Hargrove bathroom. “He works out like a maniac.” Even before El finds the missing lifeguard’s fanny pack and her bloody whistle, we know Billy’s bags of ice are not “for his muscles or something.”
“What’s your emergency?”
In the first few minutes of Stranger Things’ third season, not much seems to have changed. In a familiar-looking underground lab, scientists and soldiers steeped in a familiar frisson of stress and sweat blast an elaborate beam into a familiar portal, one that opens to a Cronenbergian world beyond our own.
“You know what they say about revenge: Dig two graves”
“Sometimes I remember things one way, sometimes I remember them another.”
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome to the most fun American Gods has had all season long. “Donar The Great” isn’t quite as, well, great as its burlesque strongman, but it’s nice to see American Gods return to its strengths. Split between the Regius Theater in pre-WWII Chicago and a mall somewhere in America (as the show’s…
“Everything that you said about things getting better was a lie!”
“How much longer can we afford to wait?”
Like the believers who brought their gods to America, or like the down-at-heel gods themselves, I can’t seem to stop offering up scraps of faith to American Gods. I want it to be good. I want it to reach the heights and breadths of season one. I want it to evoke the ineffable,…
“How the fuck is that an upgrade?”
“You can’t just give up because the fuckin’ road ends.”
“I know where I’m going!” That plaintive whine, uttered by Technical Boy (Bruce Langley) as he charges over a golf course (and golfer) in a stretch limo, is not a reassuring opening for a beleaguered show.
“Now Am Found” delivers everything I expected from a True Detective finale: two hardbitten men having a talking like this contest, a perversely cheerful dungeon for a kidnapped child, and a last-minute revelation in the form of that conspicuous landscaper and his scampering daughter.
“The Final Country” feels like it’s breaking new ground showing teenage Becca Hays (Deborah Ayorinde) as Wayne drives her to college, his truck loaded down with furniture and boxes. The absence of adult Becca looms over the third season, starting well before Wayne lost her at Walmart. It’s one more thread tying Wayne…
“It’s terrible what this work makes you ponder, isn’t it?”
At a 1990 reading from Life And Death And The Harvest Moon, Amelia Hays concludes, “A lost child is a story that’s never allowed to end,” and her rapt audience nods along. New evidence (and fresh publicity) in the Purcell case means renewed interest in her…
“You shouldn’t have seen that. Try and forget it.” That’s what Roland West says after Tom Purcell walks in on photos of his dead wife and possible daughter.
For inveterate puzzlers, “If You Have Ghosts” provides some choice dates and details to enter into your spreadsheets or tack up on your bulletin board. Lucy…
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