He wears only the helmet, and everyone's too distracted to look up.

Highlights of this week's podcast (which is growing on me, even though they continue to obsess about Steven Strait's abs):
[note, unfortunately I have a lot of trouble telling Franck's & Abraham's voices apart - even though it shouldn't be that hard due to the big difference in sound quality between their phone…

It's the basic needs… for 30 billion people. Most people are on subsistence welfare, and then a way smaller number of people have jobs and nice things. There are opportunities for upward mobility theoretically, but in practice if you're on basic it's hard to get anywhere. So, back in season 1 when Avasarala threatened…

I wouldn't take it as 100% gospel that Mao is really working for Mars. Errinwright assumes so, but it's not clear whether he really knows anything at this point except that Mao is no longer working for him.

That last part makes me think now of a certain kind of Internet troll. Like, maybe (I hope!) in real life Mr. Asshole is sweating and snarling and looking upset while he types a bunch of poisonous shit, but you can't tell because he's really good at keeping his tone cheerful, lots of "lol"s, he's always winning and…

I think the only things that subplot contributes to the book are 1. creating a slight temporary hope that Henry might come back from the brink of madness after meeting someone worse than him, and 2. the mildly funny joke that It can't really pick a good monster face because Patrick doesn't experience fear like a…

I was precocious and somehow got hold of Night Shift when I was maybe 9 or 10. That was… probably a mistake. I had kind of a "fire burns, OW, okay let's check if the fire is still dangerous" attitude at the time: I would read a story, it would confuse and terrify me, I'd have some nightmares, then I'd read the next…

To be fair, King didn't direct the damn thing; conveying terror etc. is not all down to the script. Mick Garris could make the best script in the world uninteresting. This was definitely not the best script in the world, but a good director with a feel for the material probably could've worked with King to shape it…

That's really well done. I think a couple of those are a stretch (I don't think there's any suggestion that Astrid in Revival changed her orientation due to trauma— I read it recently and to me it just comes across as "she's bi enough to have enjoyed being with a guy in high school; that guy might think it's a huge…

I like all the books people have mentioned so far, but if we're counting not-exactly-horror stuff, I'd have to put The Dead Zone pretty high up there. It's not the best-written one by any means, but it's a really interesting mix of psychological/character stuff, social horror (Martin Sheen did a decent job in the…

That makes sense. Derry is more of a depressed ex-industrial mini-city than a suburb; it's mostly based on Bangor, which was a thriving manufacturing center for a long time and the biggest thing in its area, but got hollowed out by economic changes (including the classic "build a bunch of malls on the edge of town,…

Not a thing most 11/12-year-olds would contemplate doing in regular life, sure. But puberty hits a lot of us pretty early, at least mentally even if the physical changes haven't kicked in yet; I had an incredibly lurid sleazy imagination by that age, and I know now that I wasn't the only one. It's just a lot less…

Yeah, they would pretty much have to do that if there was the slightest chance that they would want to include kid scenes in the second movie. Otherwise the child actors grow up too much in between parts of the story that aren't supposed to be that far apart in time.

I don't know what King's intentions were, but I hadn't thought of it as an "It's Now the Eighties" device because I grew up in the eighties— in a town slightly bigger than Derry, but with a similar feel in some ways, and I figured he was just being real. It wasn't like a total shitkicker hellhole, it had standard…

Well yeah… there's always a risk that anything that could be done well might instead be done badly.

(Just saw your "edited to add" - yeah, having the only other person with any apparent same-sex interest be a total psycho [who may or may not really be in the movie - I'm not sure if he's just being referenced as a past victim or what] was icky. As I said, King has always been kind of tone-deaf in that regard. But I…

Kind of a double misdirect too, because when he gets stopped by the sign, the way that shot is framed strongly suggests that whatever's about to happen will involve that ominous roadwork tent on the side of the street. But no.

Not sure what you mean by "go off the rails as far as tone and setting up the rest of the movie"; to me, the idea that there's a lot of what looks like regular violence in Derry which sometimes turns out to also be monster-related or monster-inspired, and that authority figures are weirdly blind to this as long as it…

the gay bar/gay bashing stuff would probably need to be updated or gotten rid of

I haven't read the book in a while, but I remember thinking that what made the adult storyline hold together and not just be a bunch of "oh yeah, now I remember this other scary thing too" was the continuity of having two opposite characters who never moved on and never forgot— Mike, who's spent 30 years being all…