It’s not the ‘00s anymore, nothing an IP holder does is without synergy

Ultimately I can’t look back on the season without thinking of Blade Runner 2049 - often spectacular, clearly ambitious, and yet... vestigial, the production budget not quite masking the synergy of IP usage.

Not that they needed to (and thank God). They were just sort of unnecessary HEY EVERYTHING’S CONNECTED IN THE KINGVERSE codas, as though everything else about Annie Wilkes didn’t already serve that purpose.

The easy thing to do would be to compare it with
the most famous Bad Robot production, Lost, in that it has so many threads but in the end is really only concerned with a few of them. So if you care about things like, say, the town of the title, or any of the secondary characters, you won’t be satisfied, because in…

I think it was the bridge and the gazebo / Dead Zone reference.

I think the show’s content to let the how of the Kid’s escape be a mystery. And that’s fine, we don’t have to see everything all of the time. The escape and Black Henry’s disappearance can be ominous things that we never learn the details about (for the best, probably, given that Andre Holland’s got a higher profile…

I’d give it a lower grade, tbh. The most perfunctory end to the Castle Rock threads and then the show becomes all about its least interesting aspects, and really its least interesting characters, for the last half hour. What a mess.

Since I’m the only one around, I’ll also throw in predictions here: Joy will be faced with the choice to go along with the bodysnatching and tempted by her real mother, brought back as a revenant. She’ll still choose Annie, though.

That reminds me - are we going to get any actual explanation for why the protagonists (sans Joy) were immune to the dimensional screech hypnotism?

Oh lord the autoplay videos have finally landed on AVC

There were some cool and unnerving images this episode, starting with Chris Mulkey in the dark room. Annie walking past the threshold to confront the mole was about as close to a Thing (original flavor) reference as we get. Also some really funny line readings from Tim Robbins and the guy who plays Ace.

Was I just not paying attention or did we never see how Annie escaped Chris Mulkey?

I also think King’s bugfuck prog epics (both sober and less-than) are underrated, but they do tend to plod in retrospect, and he makes the mistakes common to most if not all of his work.

Emily really nails the particular thing of how shambolic this show is, which is how the ensemble feels both vast and shallow. It feels more like a Bachman book than one of King’s better works - though even in massive crowd pleasers like IT have characters who in the end feel like they’re given short shrift. I reread…

There are a set number of colonist-revenants, so presumably they’re being strategic about who they select and just murdered the rest of those who got in the way, before they acquired their hypno-statue… however that turned up. It’s definitely messy. 

Whether they appreciate them or not, the ones that succeed, succeed big, and they basically never stop earning. That’s what matters to publishers, and has mattered since the launch of WoW.

It might be easy to overpraise FROM. in this regard but I don’t think it is. Soulsborne games have a very elegant and deliberately structured multiplayer element (both synchronous and asynchronous) and no voice or text chat, only emotes and pre-written messages. Perfectly calibrated for an immersive and purposeful…

I also got Death Stranding, and I’ve only played a few hours but I’m not impressed.

Having just finished Blood Meridian and prevailed in a western sort of mood (to the extent that such a book could be called a western), I finally made my way to Red Dead Redemption 2, which I had bounced off of in a big way back when it came out - didn’t consider Rockstar to have the narrative chops to match their…

Possible. That we got an episode from The Kid’s perspective leads me to trust the first season’s version of events at face value.