It all dates back to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, doesn’t it? At the time it was a fairly clever and innovative idea that your group of threatened youngsters might be so awful that some terrible part of you wanted them to get meathooked and felt complicit in the horror, but it’s become a pretty standard trope, now.

Rite of Ash’Kente , I think - only 3cc’s of mouse blood required. But High Energy Magic dept doesn’t turn up until after Moving Pictures, I think (or at least that’s when we first meet Ponder Stibbons).

I agree there’s a difference - I’m saying I’m glad they’ve done the latter, because the setting is interesting enough in itself, and trying to be faithful to the books hasn’t, so far, seemed to work.

I’m actually glad they’re not doing a straight adaptation. They’ve never worked - the books are written from an omniscient narrator POV, and the narrator gets most of the best jokes. That’s why Good Omens just hacked through the Gordian Knot and literally included an omniscient narrator.

Much as I like the books, I don’t think it would take as much stuffing as you think. There’s a lot of wheel spinning in the later books - 8 in particular could be done in a double episode, more or less.

I honestly think that they might have wanted to end at 6. It was originally a D&D campaign setting - the idea might have been to get us to the point where humanity is more or less out of the immediate crisis engendered by the stargates turning up and is learning to live with them long term, and meanwhile there’s a…

It would be an absolutely wild departure from the books if he wasn’t for at least some of the show.

Been rereading the books, and I had forgotten that Drummer was a TV series invention who was basically retconned in when she became a fan favourite. I’m wondering if she’s going to get the Michio Pa storyline (if they bother with that - it’s eminently excisable and largely seems to exist to give us a reason to…

BOOK SPOILERS...

I have a feeling that they’re going to wrap it up at the end of book 6 - I think those ones were the arc that they already had planned, and the last 3 are just because someone offered them a massive advance. Which sort of shows, to be honest - the writing and characterisation is as good as it ever was but in 7 and 8…

God, he seems a bit...always on, doesn’t he?

It’s an odd thing (and bear in mind that I’m as cis and male as they come so my opinion shouldn’t have any political weight here) that the issue was so off the radar up until now that you could almost headcanon that the 90s Star Treks (TOS had too many gender politics issues) took place in a world that had genuinely…

I’m criticizing a trope, not the novel. And I have read (or in the end tried to read, I think I ended up just hurling whatever William H.Gass I ended up having a go at into the nearest volcano 100 pages in) enough of that trope to (a) feel justified in being somewhat jaded about it when it looks like someone else has…

Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t seen it but I suppose ‘the desire to be Joycean’, minus (in most cases) anything like the talent to actually do that, is proably a tributary to this particular kind of novel product. You could make a case for the funny names being an attempt to go Dickensian, for that matter.

Not sure Joyce is fair (I do really like him though, so might be a bit biased). I mean, almost everyone in Ulysses who isn’t Bloom or Dedalus (which was his sort of alter-ego anyway) has various standard Irish names/nicknames. Paddy Dignam, Blazes Boylan etc.

‘B Rosenberger Rosenberg’? ‘Inigo Cutbirth’?!?!? I have time for Thomas Pynchon (at least early Thomas Pynchon) but by god he uncorked of a whole tide of (let’s face it) middle aged white dudes who think whimsical and occasionally violent things happening to people with silly names for nearly a thousand pages is what…

I think his films have always had a somewhat right wing outlook - Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and to a certain extent Mulholland Drive are all to some extent about how once you decide to take a step outside the narrow world of socially accepted mores and customs, whether out of teenage curiosity, a desire…

What with all the grand guignol it tends to be less remarked on that Silence of the Lambs is also a really solid procedural, providing the sort of satisfaction you get from seeing professionals do a complicated job well that you get in, say, All the Presidents’ Men (and, indeed, Manhunter). The subequent Harris…

The problem with it, I think , is that it doesn’t really start bringing the fever dream madness until late in the first season. I have friends who  quite reasonably gave up after the first few episodes where it looked like it was just going to be a slightly wacky Hannibal-Lecter-fights-crime procedural.

Presumably there’s the same consequences for killing him as there would be for any other vampire. And I guess as a daywalker who actually knows what’s happened for the last half century he’s pretty valuable.