TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

It’s impossible to spoil The Boroughs. The new Netflix show is so uninterested in keeping its secrets that the first episode tells you all you need to know: a monstrous presence lurks in a retirement community whose young, cheerful owners look and dress like they’re stuck in the 1950s. Because the residents are already at an age when it would be completely normal for them to die, nobody suspects that they’re being preyed on, even though the owners give an obvious creepy vibe from the moment they show up. You can put the pieces together: a large mass of easy victims, plus a rich couple with suspiciously youthful beauty, equals you already know what’s happening here.

So why dress up this show as a mystery, when the script is so eager to reveal everything up front? It’s not particularly subtle with its references: its plot beats proceed as a dark mirror of E.T. (instead of a human befriending and protecting an alien with healing powers, this human decides to imprison and exploit it) blended with a dark mirror of Cocoon (instead of aliens giving vital energy to old people, they devour old people to extract vital energy) and an even darker mirror of Omelas (instead of everyone benefiting from one person’s suffering, we have one person benefiting from everyone’s suffering).

With so many recognizable story elements, the only thing that keeps The Boroughs interesting and watchable is its spectacular casting. You couldn’t have asked for better actors to play the senior heroes of this show: Alfred Molina is pitch-perfect as a grumpy grandpa thrown too soon into too many otherworldly shenanigans precisely when he needs space to properly grieve his late wife; Denis O’Hare brings a sweet mixture of worldliness and vulnerability to the role of a man whom life has never ceased to punish; and Geena Davis rescues her character from the dreadfully bland arc the writers gave her. But the absolute show-stealer is Alfre Woodard, whose deeply layered performance deserves a dozen shelves full of awards.

The show sometimes alludes to themes worth thinking about, although they could have been explored to a greater extent. We’re told that Molina’s character’s devastating grief opened his mind to be receptive to a key character’s unspoken pain, but this revelation is addressed in a hurry, without giving us time to consider what this says about the nature of empathy. Both the monsters and the people who use them to unnaturally maintain their youth are vulnerable to the light of old TV sets, but whether this is a commentary on, say, the power of media to “shed light” on corruption is left unclear. The only theme that seems properly handled has to do with the fact that the retirement community is built on the site of a former mining town that became rich very quickly and was deserted just as quickly, which symbolically links the villains’ theft of vital energy to an earlier instance of rapacious extractivism.

If you focus your attention on admiring the actors, you’ll survive the predictable derivativeness of The Boroughs. As could be expected from the much-touted involvement of the creators of Stranger Things as executive producers, The Boroughs is unashamed to proclaim its references as loudly as it can. That’s the only warning you need: at no point are you going to be surprised.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: One Piece Live Action – Season Two

Picking up the pace with more quirky characters, lots of fighting, and some tearjerker moments as Season 2 sails into the Grand Line.

After a long wait, the second season of Netflix’s One Piece live action series has finally arrived. Season One of One Piece was a hit with a range of fans as it explored the adventures of a pirate boy and his ragtag crew. Due to the quirky nature of anime in general, it’s normally a challenge to bring those fantastical stories and characters to life in a live action format. Fortunately, Season One managed to navigate the source material’s wild visuals and storytelling to create a show that appealed to everyone from complete newcomers to superfans. The show has strong diversity in its characters and great character chemistry which draws the audience in. In Season One we met the five original Straw Hat crew members, one at a time, with pacing that allowed for poignant backstories and the development of strong character chemistry in the midst of some big adventures. In Season Two, the slower pace is gone, and the show dives right into a dizzying array of new, outlandish characters along with lots of fight scenes brought on by the busy new antagonist, Baroque Works. While the new adventures lack the wonder of the first season, the characters are still charming and the adventures are still entertaining, particularly for long time fans.

Summary: Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) is an enthusiastic adolescent boy in pursuit of his dream to become a pirate and to ultimately become the “king” of the pirates. To do this he must find a hidden treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy gradually assembles a rag-tag but loyal crew to join him on his hunt for the One Piece which is hidden in a dangerous place known as the Grand Line. Among his crew are Zoro (Mackenyu), a fierce and cynical swordfighter; Nami (Emily Rudd), a cartographer and navigator; Usopp (Jacob Romero), a shipbuilder with a knack for exaggeration; and Sanji (Taz Skylar), a suave chef who is talented at both cooking and fighting. Luffy calls his crew the Straw Hat Pirates in honor of the straw hat he wears. Season 2 begins with Luffy and his crew finally entering the Grand Line and realizing how much they underestimated its wild nature and complicated politics. The primary antagonist for the second season is an assassin agency known as Baroque Works whose oddball killers target Luffy and his crew. But things get more complicated when Luffy comes to the aid of Vivi, an undercover princess, and meets a shapeshifting reindeer named Chopper. 

While the first season did a good job of entertaining a wide range of viewers, Season Two seems more targeted to established fans. Many of the new villains appear with little introduction and the plot moves fast as new obstacles and new adventures arrive. But, as in the first season, we are helped out by explanatory signs that fly onto the screen when a new character is introduced. The design and presentation are different from the first season, but it’s still a helpful tool, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve consumed the anime and don’t immediately catch the characters’ outlandish visual cues. The new adventure brings to life episodes of the anime’s early story arcs including the amusing giants of Little Garden and the tragic oppressed kingdom of Drum Island. As the plot and the pirate ship move along, several of the show-stealing characters from the live action’s first season are left behind, or only have brief moments on screen, including pirate captain Buggy the Clown, the pure-hearted Koby, and the stern marine commander Garp.

Fortunately, Season Two adds appealing new characters with particularly good acting. Among the best are the determined Princess Vivi, played by Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandan, and the stalwart, guilt-ridden Drum Island soldier Dalton (Ty Keough), the ultimate green flag hero who finds his true strength. But the most fun arrivals are the sweet and much awaited, Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover) and his gruff mentor Dr. Kureha (perfectly played by Katy Sagal). One Piece stands out in anime for its particularly fantastical characters in very outlandish costumes. The live action show does a good job of adapting the character designs, rather than just directly copying them, so they fit in a real-life setting. This is especially true for the adorable Chopper, an orphaned reindeer who gets turned into a human-reindeer hybrid after eating a magical devil fruit. Chopper is the kind of character who seems impossible to pull off in a live action but the show succeeds in making him believably real and endearing, rather than artificial and creepy. Like Golum in the Lord of the Rings movie, Chopper is presented via motion capture so the facial expressions are heartbreakingly engaging.

Some of the future main characters like Brook and Nico Robin appear briefly as set ups for future story arcs in future seasons. The main plot of Season Two is Baroque Works versus the Straw Hat Pirate. With so many Baroque Works agents the story focuses more on adventure and fights and less on the slow moments of character introspection that we saw in Season One. However, we do get some thoughtful and emotionally impactful intervals with the tragic stories of Chopper and his former mentor Dr. Hiruluk, and also with Dalton finding his voice and strength to deal with the despotic oppression of his people. There is even a rare quiet moment of Sanji recalling cooking for his sick mother when he was a child.

While Season Two doesn’t have the same magic of the first season, it is still a fun adventure that manages to capture some moments of emotional storytelling and manages to showcase some appealing new characters. The pacing is fast and the tale feels like it is over quickly, leaving viewers anticipating the next adventure in the Grand Line. But overall, long time fans will enjoy seeing more of the major characters come to life in this latest wild adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Faster pacing, more fighting
• Appealing new characters
• Emotional moments buried in the non-stop action

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

The Duffer brothers stick the landing, bringing a close to nine years of epic storytelling

Volume II of the Stranger Things final season dropped on Christmas day, and when we last left our heroes, we discovered that Will could tap into the hive mind and hijack its powers—Will the sorcerer, indeed! I've now watched these episodes twice,  and simultaneously so much and so little happens in them. The vibe is a little different from Volume I, as somehow there's even more exposition to get through. Rather than go through the plot, I thought I'd go through what really works, and why the epilogue to episode 8 was fantastic.

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

After discovering some of Dr. Brenner's notebooks in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, Dustin pieces together that everything they thought was wrong. The Upside Down is actually a wormhole to  Dimension X, the place Vecna was transported to by El. It was sort of a Chekhov's Wormhole, though, as the crew had discussed wormholes in Mr. Clarke's science class years before. We still don't learn exactly why the Upside Down is the way it is, all decaying matter and dark skies, but ultimately that's less important than just knowing it was never the ultimate bad place. It's just a tunnel to another dimension. On the other side of the gooey, fleshy wall surrounding the Upside Down is sheer space, as noted by Steve's BMW getting sucked into it and vanishing into the galaxy.

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

Everyone's favorite science teacher is recruited to help build a telemetry device so they can locate Dustin and company, and watching him finally join was absolutely heartwarming. Without him, the kids never would have succeeded in the prior seasons, and his reward is getting to witness all the insane things that have led to this point. It's a very sweet payoff, and he adds a lot to the team. Also, I love that Mr. Clarke is always sleeping with a different member of the Hawkins High School staff. 

Karen "Walk 'Em Down" Wheeler proves she's a badass once again

Still recovering from vicious demogorgon slash wounds in the hospital, Karen saves the day yet again when Lucas, Robyn, and Vicki are cornered by demodogs. After ripping her IV out, she deftly places oxygen tanks into huge commercial dryers, triggering an explosion that takes them all out. Moms in '80s movies are rarely given such agency, and watching her stagger down to the basement to take care of the kids is truly epic. In the epilogue, we see a fully recovered Karen at the kids' graduation, her huge scars visible but worn proudly on display in a V-neck dress.

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

When the team finally makes it to Dimension X, they're set to face off against the corporeal forms of the Mindflayer and Vecna. A lot of folks online complained that the battle was too short, but the team literally spent 5 seasons getting to this point. I thought it was awesome, as it actually felt like watching a D&D game in real time, from Steve and Dustin stabbing the Mindflayer's belly to Nancy leading them into the trap where Robin and Lucas and Will could rain down fire from above. Also, Joyce getting to hack off Vecna's head with an axe was a gift she truly deserved. I don't think anyone suffered more than her throughout every season, given her constant panic and stress.

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

The two needle drops of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" were not only incredibly appropriate, the Duffer brothers somehow managed to convince Prince's estate that their show was worth granting the green light—no doubt because of the viral success that seemed all but promised. Having the record literally be the detonation devices for the destruction of the Upside Down is a fantastic choice, and El and Mike's final conversation set to "Purple Rain" is absolutely heartbreaking.

Why I choose to believe El is alive

A lot has been said about El's fate, but I think the Duffer brothers did it exactly right. By leaving El's death open to a different interpretation—namely, that she survived thanks to one final illusion by Kali—it gives everybody what they need. Some people are fine with a final sacrifice by a hero, while others (like myself) can choose to believe Mike's ending, that she escaped and is living far away, safe. I choose to believe she's still alive because it's what her character deserves, and at heart, I'm an optimist. But more importantly, I like that we, as the audience, get to choose our ending. It's like D&D itself! I personally don't need a ton of deaths to make a finale more meaningful.

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

By season 5, we're dealing with upwards of a dozen folks that we have to check in on (somewhat) equally, and that starts to make things cumbersome. I wouldn't trade Robin and Steve for the world, but the subplot of Nancy and Jonathan's relationship was given way too much screen time for a duo that most folks couldn't care less about. (There's a reason no one was buying the Jonathan Byers Funko-Pop.) Will's coming out scene, meant to be a vulnerable and tender moment for his immediate family and ride-or-ride friends, ends up giving his speech to a room full of people, including his science teacher, his friend's girlfriend he's never met, and Murray, everyone's favorite mean weirdo.

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things was the little show that could, made by an unknown duo of brothers with a super small budget. As the fame of the show grew, so did its budget, and by season 5, we had something that felt visually and thematically more like X-Men or The Avengers. Superpowers, excessive CGI, different dimensions—it all feels a little too much. The grandiose nature of the final season, for the most part, felt light on the nostalgia (the show's bread and butter) and heavy on the special effects. To put it another way: light on the bowl cuts and heavy on the white-out eyes of Will Byers. Vecna is the big bad in Stranger Things, but his motivations aren't entirely clear to me. He was abused, clearly, but he feels more like a Thanos than anything else, unfortunately. By giving him such a broad impetus, I think the show really missed out on a meaningful villain.

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

A product of both the extraneous characters and the Marvelification is the fact that the plot was fairly thudding. In Volume II, nearly every other scene sees characters grabbing objects and telling us the plot, "Imagine this record is Will, and this one's Holly." Everything felt jam-packed, with no room for characters to just be. It's more than just a sense of urgency, though, because it felt like something was missing. I read that most of the episodes went through some pretty extensive scene-cutting, and I think it's definitely apparent. The only time characters really have heart-to-hearts is when they're on the way to a battle. Maybe it's because the show finally lost a bit of the childlike wonder that made it so special, because the kids are all in their 20s now.

Overall

Season 5 is definitely worth watching, and I think it's a fitting conclusion to the near-decade-long run of the show. It suffers from the issues I mentioned (and more), but if you really loved the characters and the story, I think the ending pays off. When I looked up after the epic battle in the finale and saw that there were still 45 minutes left, I wondered if there was going to be another stand-off with Dr. Kay and her army.

Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow, thoughtful ending and watching our kids graduate. The scene of everyone putting up their D&D books on the shelf was heart-wrenching as they literally were closing the book on their childhoods.

Show endings are hard, because not every show knows at the outset how long it's going to last. While not perfect, the Stranger Things finale sticks the landing and leaves the viewer with a tale well told and a happy ending. And that's all we can really ask for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 2

The gods watch over humans, but who watches the watchers?

Previously on The Legend of Lara Croft, we saw Lara learn to stop trying to save the world on her own and rely more on her allies. In season 2, we see her take that lesson to an unreasonable extreme and rely too quickly on a stranger who is obviously wearing a blinking neon sign that says, “Villain of the Season.”

This new antagonist, a rich entrepreneur named Mila, describes herself as being in the business of saving the world. To most people, that lofty goal takes the form of selling a new form of plastic that degrades more quickly. But in secret, she’s behind a series of thefts of religious relics, because her idea of saving the world is amassing enough supernatural power to press Delete and Reboot on reality. That’s why she’s collecting the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Orisha Masks: with the magic of all the Yoruba gods, she’ll become an uncontested force to deal with.

This plot sets for itself a very unstable tightrope to walk. Lara is still the star of the show, so she has to be the one to try to stop Mila from remaking the world. However, as a rich white Brit, she’s a distasteful choice of hero to save Yoruba relics from misuse. Even though the script takes care to have her eschew her late father’s less respectable methods, it still has to avoid portraying her as so ethical that she might come off as a white savior of Yoruba culture.

So the show’s solution is to have its main charater arc happen to someone other than Lara. This time there’s no personal lesson for her to figure out, so she cedes the moral spotlight to a new character: the human incarnation of Eshu, one of the Yoruba gods. At some point in the past, he had a moment of weakness and failed to protect his followers from a colonial invasion, and since then he’s lost his self-confidence and self-respect. On one hand, this is a compelling backstory for a character to deal with. On the other hand, it detracts from the thrill of the season’s climax, because Eshu happens to possess exactly the repertoire of divine superpowers that can immediately stop Mila, so a whole season’s worth of tragic losses could have been avoided if only he’d heard the requisite pep talk a bit sooner. That’s the core weakness of this plot: Eshu could have saved the day any time he chose to. All that was stopping him was low morale.

Because the focus moves away from Lara’s choices, this season doesn’t animate its action scenes in the style of a videogame like the first season did. Lara can’t be the hero in this story, because that would be horrendously problematic, so the role she fulfills is as a catalyst for Eshu’s return to heroism. It’s nice that she shares with him all the personal growth she acquired in the first season, although it feels strange that a god would need that kind of lesson.

In a way, the plot of this season resembles the plot of Eternals: someone is hunting down the gods in the present day, when they’re more or less retired after centuries of watching over humans, and the question implicit in the call to action is whether the human world deserves to be saved. Whereas the first season had humans debating whether divine powers could be trusted, now it’s the gods who debate whether humans can be trusted. That’s a neat way to carry a theme full circle.

One last, welcome addition to the show is the character of Fig, a professional assassin who works for Mila and ends up occupying a niche as Lara’s equal in martial arts. At every exotic location our protagonists visit, Lara has a fight with Fig that tests both of them in skill, strategy and endurance. It’s an exciting tension to follow, and apparently a thread that will be extended into a future season. So  even after searching for treasure in sunk ships, mounting a village’s defense with meteorite armor against modern guns, evading a shark in bloodied waters, and making it alive out of a crumbling Viking fort, there’s still much more to tell in The Legend of Lara Croft.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: The Legend of Lara Croft, Season 1

For what does it profit you to raid all the tombs and forfeit your soul?

With the tiniest lip service to the ethical problems related to tomb raiding, the Netflix animated series The Legend of Lara Croft asks what that kind of life does to a person. Usually, in a Tomb Raider videogame, you’re mostly worried about the right timing of an acrobatic stunt and about the remaining number of bullets in a shotgun when angry dobermans come barking at you. In the show, it’s a given that Lara will succeed at everything, because she’s just that awesome, so the stakes become personal: is tomb raiding a worthy pursuit when it can get your friends killed, when it can attract the worst kind of enemies, when it can become an easy substitute for processing difficult emotions?

The adventure for the first season is nothing exceptional: it’s a globe-trotting quest to collect all the Dragon Balls—sorry, the Infinity Gems—sorry, the Peril Stones before the bad guy does, because if one individual accumulates that much power—I’m sure you’ve fallen asleep by now. For the most part, the adventure is an excuse to boast gorgeously drawn scenery from every corner of the world, including Mesoamerican jungles, Mongolian steppes, Chinese rivers and French catacombs. The quality of the landscape drawing is one of the high points of the show.

Also, it’s fascinating to watch the flow of a videogame narrative play out in television. In every episode, Lara has to solve a puzzle rigged with traps, or fulfill a side quest to find some lost children before the villagers will help her, or jump between areas of a room in a precise sequence, or frantically run around a dinosaur to shoot it dead before it eats her. Some of these sequences are animated to have the “camera” follow Lara’s movements just as if they were happening in the game, and that’s a nice degree of attention to detail.

But what really makes the story interesting is Lara’s inner journey. At the start of the series, one of her traveling companions is killed, and she spends subsequent episodes processing her guilt and learning the difference between protecting her loved ones from the ugliest bits of tomb raiding and pushing them away for fear of losing them. She’s incredibly lucky to have the excellent friends she has, because their support stays unwavering through her worst tantrums. She eventually comes to realize that choosing the tomb raiding lifestyle is something she needs to do for reasons that matter to her, instead of doing it out of loyalty to dead mentors. In particular, she needs to learn to not use her adventures to distract herself from her grief and anger, because that’s the same mistake that the villain makes in his own quest for revenge, so he serves as a dark mirror of what she could become.

So, in between climbing cliffs and dodging bullets and deciphering clues and wrestling crocodiles and sneaking in secret lairs, she has valuable conversations with her allies that help her grow beyond her learned coping style. The messy feelings she harbors about the burden of the Croft name get resolved elegantly when she decides that she doesn’t have to follow the template of how her father defined the Croft legacy: the name belongs to her now, and she gets to define it in her terms.

I don’t know whether the Holy Grail of a good videogame adaptation has been found yet, but The Legend of Lara Croft clears the bar of not sucking. There’s enough dungeoneering for those who like dungeoneering, enough drama for those who like drama, and enough comedy for those who like comedy. Tomorrow we’ll see whether season 2 can stay the course.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Hollywood is Dead. Long Live Hollywood.

Netflix's Potential Purchase of Warner Bros. and the End of Hollywood (As We Know It… Now)

Last week, on December 4, 2025, news broke that Netflix had prevailed over Paramount and/or Comcast Universal to acquire Warner Bros. As I write this, news has just broken on December 8, 2025, that the Ellisons and Paramount have initiated a hostile takeover bid to prevent the Netflix purchase and bring Warner Bros. under the recently-expanded Paramount/CBS/Skydance umbrella. So we'll see what happens.

But whoever wins, the rest of us lose.

There will be different ramifications if Netflix buys Warner Bros. or if Paramount Skydance's shenanigans work out in their favor, but either way, the sale of Warner Bros. is the definitive closing of a chapter in Hollywood history. People have written "the end of Hollywood" pieces since before The Jazz Singer introduced talking pictures to the mainstream film audience in 1927, and yet Hollywood has managed to live on for another 100 years, so this piece will not be one of those. Movies and TV shows will persist as forms of entertainment moving forward, but this is the end of something, and what comes next will look different from what came before. The biggest questions in my mind are "What will be lost?" and "For what?"

What Will Be Lost?

First of all, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. When Disney bought Fox in 2019, there was some chatter that the majority of the job losses were going to be administrative, as the two studios merged their business operations. But the notion of relatively minimal job losses and the two studios' creative slates remaining independent was a fiction from the start. Disney immediately began shuttering specialty film groups like Fox 2000, which had been releasing cultural touchstone films like Fight Club, The Devil Wears Prada, and Hidden Figures since 1996.

So that brings us to what the audience is losing: the movies and TV shows that will never be made, the voices we will never hear, and maybe the spaces to share them.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, there were six studios that could buy your project—Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony (formerly Columbia), and Paramount. There were other, smaller outfits that could buy projects because they had distribution deals with a studio or for straight-to-DVD releases, since DVD revenues were just absolutely insane at the time, and cable television channels that produced original content and were either wholly-owned subsidiaries or joint ventures between the major studios. Going a little farther back in time, MGM and United Artists used to be their own studios, too. So at one time, there were a lot of buyers, a lot of places that were mounting productions and employing crews, studio development departments shepherding feature film scripts, an entire pilot season apparatus where TV studios were making full pilots for shows that may or may not ever air, and an attendant set of opportunities for writers, actors, and directors to potentially break in or break through.

The loss of DVD revenue was transformative as the home media bubble burst alongside the advent of streaming, and industry contraction followed, alongside runaway production away from Los Angeles. There was a writers' strike, MGM folded, indie producers went under, but then Netflix jumped into original programming, and audiences soon found Peak TV dropped into their living rooms. Networks like AMC made must-watch programming like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and suddenly Netflix had a bottomless appetite for original programming, with Amazon and Apple jumping in, and the glut of new streamers from Disney+ to FreeVee making new content specific to their own new platforms.

And then Peak TV peaked. For years, the number of theatrical feature films had been declining, but the explosion of TV and streaming productions led to an employment boom, particularly for writers. But under the surface, things were sketchy as hell. The unfair employment practices led to the concurrent 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (which I wrote about here). The face of that employment battle was David Zaslav, CEO of the recently-merged Warner Bros. Discovery, who was on the receiving end of a quarter-billion-dollar compensation package and had recently dropped into town acting like the second coming of legendary studio head Robert Evans (even buying Evans's fabled home). As it stands today, the Writers' Guild reports TV employment has fallen by 42% and Zaslav's Frankenstein monster of Warner Bros. Discovery is being split back apart and sold off. Good work if you can get it—$250+ million to destroy a company in three years.

So either Netflix or Paramount is going to roll Warner Bros. up under its corporate umbrella, and what will result are job losses, fewer movies, and fewer TV shows.

If Paramount prevails in its hostile takeover bid, the films and TV shows it does wind up producing going forward are likely to bend toward Trump-friendly, fascist-curious content. Exhibits A through D: A) firing Stephen Colbert, B) installing heterodox blogger (and higher ed grifter?) Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News, C) greenlighting Rush Hour 4 after credibly-accused sex pest and director Brett Ratner made a Melania Trump documentary, and D) Jared Kushner's involvement in Paramount's hostile takeover bid. In the last year, Warner Bros.' current studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy oversaw Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Zach Cregger's Weapons, and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Say goodbye to movies like those. After Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, I weighed in along similar l ines, lamenting how the acquisition would shrink the range of releases that Disney would produce. Time has more than borne out that prediction, but it didn't have the ideological corollary, which makes the prospect of a shrinking media landscape even more troubling.

If Netflix's bid holds, a lot of smart industry watchers think it will mean the beginning of the terminal decline of movie theaters. Many speculate that Netflix only wants this acquisition in the first place as a way to remove the second-largest supplier of theatrical content (Warner Bros. lags behind only Disney) from the marketplace entirely. Last week, box office analyst Scott Mendelson told The Bulwark's cultural editor Sonny Bunch:

"Something that Netflix has done a lot of in the last few years is it seems like every time there’s this big, buzzy, crowd-pleasing festival flick that might theoretically do well in theaters, Netflix flies in, drops a $20 million check on it, grabs distribution rights, and then it dies in the algorithm. And I think, I would argue, that they are doing that at least partially intentionally because the worst thing that can happen for Netflix is for that film to be successful in theaters."

The argument here is that Netflix's entire business model is for you to watch movies at home, and anything that lures you out of the house to watch a movie is competition. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said almost as much, prompting pushback from arguably the most commercially-successful film director of all time, James Cameron.

I go to movies a lot these days. I probably see more movies in theaters now than I have at any point since high school, when a typical Friday night was just going to the megaplex and seeing whatever was new that week. But the catch is that I almost never see first-run movies in the theaters these days. I am an annual member of the amazing American Cinematheque non-profit organization in Los Angeles, and live around the corner from the revitalized Vidiots, so a couple times a month I'll be in a theater seeing an animation retrospective with the animator in person, or a 70-mm restoration of a sci-fi or western classic, or introducing my kids to samurai movies, or a midnight screening of a bizarre French film, or… or… or. And that's a future we might all be heading for.

Will movie theaters vanish? No. Could the multiplex? Yeah. We've only had movie theaters for about a hundred years. That's nothing. They are not immutable. If Netflix prevails in a push to keep new movies out of theaters and force first-run films into the algorithmic churn of a decreasing number of streamers willing to vanish $90-million-dollar movies because David Zaslav needs a tax write-off because of his dipshit merger decisions, then we're all stuck with the consequences as a audience. We might all need to find, or create, our local repertory film screening series if we want to see anything at all projected on a screen in community. We might be looking at the very real possibility that the theatrical experience becomes akin to the way most of us experience live theater here in 2025: some small number of people see a ton, most people see none.

And for what?

In the beginning, movie studios made movies. That's what they did, and they did it like factory work, with actors, directors, writers, technicians all under contract. If they made enough movies that brought in enough people, the movie studios made money. Then Howard Hughes decided Jane Russell should be a star, so he got involved in Hollywood as a producer. Hughes had more money than he knew what to do with, but wanted to spend it. So he built the Spruce Goose, and he bought RKO Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios, and brought it under the umbrella of the Hughes Tool Company. This was about the time that James Stewart decided to skip a studio contract and struck out on his own, under the guidance of his agent Lew Wasserman of MCA. This shift in the business model ruptured the studio system that had been in place since the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood was never the same.

Hughes sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company, of all places. The manufacturing conglomerate Gulf+Western bought Paramount Pictures for some reason in the 1960s, and Lew Wasserman's MCA wound up buying Universal. Ever since, the movie studios have been chips in higher-and-higher-stakes corporate merger poker games. Amazon owns MGM (and MGM+, which is different from Prime Video). Disney owns Hulu (which is different from Disney+), Comcast owns Universal, and before Zaslav and Discovery came in and bought Warner Bros. and HBO, for some reason AT&T owned HBO. The studios don't make movies. They don't make TV shows. They "return value to the shareholders." If releasing a surefire IP-based hit like The Minecraft Movie returns value to the shareholders, they'll do that. If *not* releasing Batgirl returns value to the shareholders, then they'll do that instead. If installing an opinion journalist and blogger over their news division greases the wheels for governmental approval of a merger, they'll do that. It's all just corporate bullshit to make line go up after quarterly investor calls. The audience isn't even the product, like we were during the network TV days when networks were selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

So who benefits from any of this? Not the fans, not the audience, not the creators. Netflix is a tech company. Amazon is a tech company. Apple is a tech company. Apple makes their TV shows at a loss for a reason that they'll figure out some day but for now just seems like as good a way to set a billion dollars on fire as any. If Amazon decides that the MGM brand is a better fit for, I don't know, a line of dog and cat food, then we'll all be getting MGM Leo the Lion Pet Food on Prime Day and no more James Bond movies.

I recognize the Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud vibe here, I do. But what I really want to emphasize is that these mergers didn't have to happen. These studios, provided a madman like Howard Hughes didn't systematically destroy them, probably could've kept going as they rebuilt after the fall of the studio system in the 1950s. Talking pictures came in the 1920s, and what came next was never the same. Television came, introducing a new medium and forcing filmmakers to innovate 3D and widescreen and VistaVision and CinemaScope and the R rating, and what came next was never the same. The studio system collapsed, but Blaxsploitation films, risk-taking visionaries like Robert Evans who gambled on Francis Ford Coppola, and upstarts like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper saved Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, and what came next was never the same. A real estate boom in the 1990s led to the creation of the multiplex, and suddenly theater owners needed more, more, and more movies to fill their screens. So the independent cinema boom of the 1990s (seriously—just banger after banger after banger) changed the types of stories being told and the storytellers who had the opportunity to tell them, and what came next was never the same. The explosion of creativity that I got to witness at the megaplex in the 1990s on those Friday nights wasn't because there was something in the water, or everybody just got narratively hip all of a sudden, or because they took the lead out of the gasoline finally (OK, maybe that, a little bit), but it was because more people got to tell more stories that only they could tell.

The diversity of voices and opportunities gave us all better art, and created meaning in countless lives. How many people out there do you think have tattoos inspired by The Matrix? You ever had a case of The Mondays? I've got one right now. How many times have you looked at a rug and thought, "That rug really ties the room together"? My friend named his kid after a character from The Fifth Element. Suddenly the need for movies to put on all those screens made room for weird, idiosyncratic stories, queer filmmakers, more women, more people of color telling stories that spoke to individuals and communities and moments that would have not been seen or recognized before.

But that's the point, right? These days? Tighter control over who gets to tell their story? Fewer outlets? There are still a ton of cinema screens, but they're all showing the new Marvel movie, every half hour. On the apps, the algorithm serving up what the owner of the algorithm wants you to see? Hiding what it wants you *not* to see?

So, look. Whichever corporate entity prevails in this Warner Bros. buyout, it is the closing of a chapter. Not the closing of a book, I don't think, but whatever comes next will never be the same.

Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood.

Posted by Vance K -- Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together.

Film Review: In Your Dreams

Maybe sleep on this one

It’s tricky to make a story about dreams feel like it has actual stakes. In Paprika, the danger is that the outlandish creations of the dream world are leaking out to reality. In Inception, the danger is that going too deep may make you lose your mind. And you know what you’ve gotten into if you start dreaming of Freddy Krueger. But if you’re telling a cute adventure for kids, you can’t make things too dangerous. Ultimately, the consequences of experiencing a dream only matter in the real world; that’s what Pixar’s Dream Productions understood so well. In the new Netflix animated film In Your Dreams, the danger for most of the plot is rather unclear; whenever a dream gets too scary, the kids simply wake up. It’s only in the third act that the script seems to remember that something must be at stake.

In Your Dreams plays with the double meaning of “dream” as “the random images your brain vomits while you sleep” and “a heartfelt desire” to turn the character of the Sandman into a sort of wish-granting genie. Our protagonist, a young girl called Stevie, is worried that her mother’s new job opportunity may cause her parents to divorce, so she embarks on a quest across the dream world to find the Sandman’s remote lair and ask him to fix reality. The fact that in stories involving the Sandman he typically has no power outside of dreams should give you a hint as to how the whole matter will turn out.

As derivative as the story gets, it should at least be commended for destigmatizing divorce and women who pursue their careers. But do children in the 21st century really need to be reminded that divorce isn’t the end of the world? One would hope not, but with the conservative bent that the culture is taking, I guess any progressive message is welcome.

The movie follows to the letter the basic scriptwriting advice that what your protagonist thinks they want is not what they actually need. Stevie thinks that she should defend the sanctity of the nuclear family, but what she needs is to learn to stop poking her nose in adult decisions she doesn’t understand. She’s the only character in the movie with an arc, and it leads to not trying to fix what’s not broken. It’s an odd way to resolve a plot, because it implies that things were already going to sort themselves out before she started overthinking.

There's a minor additional arc for Stevie regarding her relationship with her little brother, and it goes exactly in the direction one can predict in a story for kids. The fact that she’s written as a control freak who must learn to take it easy, while her brother is a chaos goblin who is not required by the plot to mature or discover any lesson in order to repair their relationship, points to uncomfortable gendered assumptions that the script seems unaware of. You know your choices in characterization need some extra work when your most interesting character is a smelly plush giraffe.

In Your Dreams does fulfill the requisite task of making its dreamscape look random and whimsical, which is what should be expected of a child’s unconscious, but there’s a disconnect between Stevie’s current worries and the content that her dreams show her. It’s curious that during her whole adventure she doesn’t encounter any dreams about her parents’ crisis, and instead she spends the movie’s runtime revisiting the greatest hits of her own oneiric repertoire. That’s a missed opportunity for thematic cohesion.

There’s an original piece of lore that the movie comes up with to explain nigthmares, which has fascinating implications worth pausing to examine for a moment. Because the Sandman can’t affect the real world, it’s actually very dangerous to ask a wish of him: he’ll only make it true within his domain, which requires you to stay trapped in it. To protect dreamers from ever meeting the Sandman, his counterpart, a giver of nightmares, distorts dreams so that you’ll wake up before you make it too far into the world of dreams. This means that nightmares are good for you, and you should be grateful that they keep you from a much worse dream experience. I can’t wait to see parents try to soothe their kids’ night terrors with this argument.

In Your Dreams is pretty to watch, but it’s far from the visual grandeur of Inside Out and somehow, amazingly, less deep in its themes than Slumberland. I can’t even recommend it for a couple hours of mindless fun. You can get that on your own by going to sleep.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: The Witcher Season 4

A big casting change and a return to linear storytelling redefines the tone in season 4

Netflix’s popular fantasy adventure series, The Witcher, has returned for its fourth season with a significant change. The title character is no longer being played by the formidable Henry Cavill but has instead been replaced by Liam Hemsworth. After three seasons, the change is undeniably disorienting and results in a significant change in the overall aura of the show. 

The Witcher is the story of Geralt of Rivia, a magically enhanced, but emotionally repressed, professional monster killer whose destiny changes when he becomes a spiritual father to Ciri (Freya Allan), a hunted, deposed princess with supernatural powers. As evil forces attack both of them, they are aided by Yennifer (Anya Chalota), a powerful, morally gray (but ultimately good hearted) mage, and Jaskier (Joey Batey), a cheerful bard who provides cynical comic relief and helps nudge the stoic Geralt towards appreciating human emotions and connections. 

Season 1 gave us the satisfying adventures of the journeys of Yennifer, Geralt, and Ciri converging on each other as the intimidating Geralt and the fugitive child Ciri, fight to find each other. Season 2 focuses on Ciri, with Geralt as her new father, training to fight while sinister forces (and some allies) plot to take Ciri’s power for themselves. Season 3 offered a highly complicated plot where multiple villains, antagonists, and traitors from multiple kingdoms and cultures all fight and betray each other in an attempt to capture or duplicate Ciri. Season 4 opens with a more cynical Ciri abandoning her family of Geralt and Yennifer, changing her name to Falka, and joining up with a ragtag band of thieves called the Rats. In the meantime, Yennifer reassembles a team of mages to fight the current central villain Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), the evil mage who is helping the other central villain, Emhyr (Bart Edwards) in a plot to capture and marry Ciri (who is his daughter) to create an ultimate power that will give him world domination. 

While many of the characters remain the same, the biggest issue of season 4 is obviously the replacement of Henry Cavill with Liam Hemsworth, which is a major and distracting cast change. For better or for worse, re-cast characters happen in series periodically and it’s always odd. The issue is not the quality of the acting, which is fine in season 4, nor is it the physical difference which is, admittedly, very significant. The strangeness also comes from the distinct onscreen change of personality, aura, and chemistry. The new version of Geralt is delivered in a way that is much more passive and quiet. He periodically smiles in a way that is out of character with the brooding, grumpy, always vaguely irritated hero of the earlier seasons. The intrigue of The Witcher often lay in the contrast between Geralt’s monstrous strength, lethal focus, and stoicism being unexpectedly juxtaposed against surprising moments of compassion and empathy. But, in season 4, we no longer have that contrast. The new Geralt is more quietly sad rather than being a smoldering, fierce killer. From a plot perspective, this could arguably be due to the many losses he has suffered over the seasons. But, probably the best way to enjoy season 4 is to calibrate your expectations and perhaps treat the new Geralt as if he were a new version of the Doctor on Doctor Who. Same memory and relationships, different body and personality. 

On the bright side, season 4 gives us much more linear storytelling which is a relief from the overly complicated and confusing machinations of season 3. While season 3 gave us a dizzying amount of villains and antagonists, season 4 distills them down to just the evil mage Vilgefortz and the evil ruler Emhyr, and a brief appearance by a local villain Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley). The remaining antagonists are either killed off or redeemed into helpful anti-heroes and allies. In a return to the format of season 1, we have three separate stories of Yennifer, Geralt, and Ciri. 

Plot one involves Yennifer gathering her mages, including her former enemies, to kill Vilgefortz. This is the most cliched but also the most enjoyable part of the three part storytelling. The story of the team up of the mages is filled with lots of girl power, diversity, plenty of enemies to allies energy, and a good amount of entertaining action. It’s also filled with lots of melodrama and some great stand out moments from former antagonists Fringilla (Mimi Khayisa) and Phillipa (Cassie Clare). 

Plot two involves Geralt and his new loyal traveling crew, including Milva (Meng’er Zhang), Zoltan (Danny Woodburn), and Regis (Laurence Fishburne), along with Geralt’s longtime ally Jaskier. They are all on a misdirected journey to find Ciri because, unfortunately, the Ciri he’s chasing is a decoy. In this adventure, Geralt repeatedly finds himself vulnerable due to a leg injury and is repeatedly being saved by others. Obviously there’s lots of good messaging about reliance on others and the need for community but this is not the intense Geralt of season one. The addition of the legendary Laurence Fishburne as Regis, an observant and seemingly helpful vampire, creates some much needed gravitas to the tone of the story. However, the introductory plot connecting him to Geralt and crew is one of the most unbelievable moments in the story and is another indicator of how different and passive the new Geralt is from the old one.

Plot three involves Ciri inexplicably hanging out with a morally gray band of tropey ragtag thieves. The group includes one member whose attempt to assault her is just brushed off and then she moves on to intimacy with another member. The acting is solid and the anti-establishment heist plot is predictable. But the characters are all so shallowly presented and unlikeable that when they finally get their comeuppance it’s hard to feel sorry for them. This storyline also includes violent bad guy Leo Bonhart as the local over the top villain. Considering Ciri’s immense power, her interaction with him is ultimately a little disappointing.

In season 4 major many issues are raised and then completely discarded so it’s hard to know who or what to become emotionally invested in. This is fine as long as you calibrate your expectations. The only true surprise is that the story continues to end on a cliffhanger. The tale is no longer must see television, but it is still entertaining as a standard fantasy. Especially, if you want a bit of escapism without having to think too hard about it.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Highlights:

• Major casting change shifts the energy of the series
• Cliched but more streamlined storytelling
• Lots of appealing girl power and diverse characters

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

TV Review: Tomorrow and I

In the future, humanity is the same, but we find new ways to complicate our lives

The anthology miniseries Tomorrow and I, produced in Thailand and released last year on Netflix, explores near-future scenarios where personal identity, social mores and class divisions intersect with digital tools, biotechnology and climate change. Although the stories told in the four episodes have universal appeal, they are related to topics that are deeply important in today’s Thailand: the struggles that trans people still face in conservative families, the government’s hypocrisy that keeps sex workers out of the formal economy, the rapidly changing attitudes about the place of religion in the 21st century, the dangers of rising sea levels for a coastal country, and the slow distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

The first episode, Black Sheep, is a bittersweet tale of selfless love. The story is about a closeted trans man who has been so far resigned to a life of unhappiness. He finds a measure of satisfaction in his job as a doctor who does cutting-edge research on 3D printing of organs for transplantation. It turns out that growing living tissue into the desired shape works better in microgravity, so he’s been recruited for a space mission where his experiments have more promising chances. However, his return trip results in a fatal accident, and that’s when his husband sees an opportunity to use forbidden cloning technology to bring him back—this time in the right body.

We don’t learn about the protagonist’s gender dysphoria until after his death, when the cloning technology scans the memories from his brain. Most of the episode actually follows the husband, whom we see grieve for a while before he comes up with the cloning idea. There’s a very interesting scene where he argues with his in-laws about the process: they strongly oppose it for religious reasons, and he has no time for talk of the afterlife. The Buddhist doctrine that the material world is full of suffering takes a central place in the discussion.

This episode makes good use of the narrative rule that victories must have a painful cost. For our astronaut doctor, it’s the legal limbo of existing as a cloned person (not unlike the real-life legal limbo of trans people in Thailand, who still can’t change their ID to one that reflects their true gender). For the husband, it’s a prison sentence for stealing the head from the morgue, and after that, the separation from his spouse, who miraculously got his job back, but is now permanently stationed at a lunar research lab.

Pros: Great casting for the role of the astronaut doctor, with separate actors for the scenes before and after resurrection/transition.

Cons: The reveal of this character’s history of gender dysphoria is handled without much tact, almost crossing the line into sensationalism.

The second episode, Paradistopia, is a warped reflection of real life through a neon lens. The protagonist is a businesswoman who founds a sex robot factory with the dual goal of relaxing the tight social expectations regarding sex in Thailand and giving less arduous white-collar jobs to aging sex workers. The story of her rise to commercial success is interweaved with flashbacks of her childhood as the daughter of a sex worker, struggling to finish her studies and dreaming of leaving her slum behind. In the present, she’s returned to the same slum and transformed it into a proud red-light district where every desire is catered to with the latest robotic technology.

There are several scenes of talk shows discussing the planned launch of a robot brothel; cabinet members warn that men who get too used to consequence-free interaction with a machine may carry the same behavior to their real relationships, while our protagonist insists that Thailand needs to develop a more open attitude about the varieties of erotic desire. These scenes have the clear intent of inviting the viewer to side with the protagonist, but she’s not above playing dirty herself. She bribes several government officers to secure the legal permits for her robot brothel, and even orchestrates a false-flag smear capaign against herself to draw public sympathy.

The resolution of this episode is rather abrupt and inelegant, but it does pack an implied punch: just because the authorities aren’t ready for a world with robot sex doesn’t mean demand will magically vanish.

Pros: The fabulous retrofuturist aesthetic in every detail.

Cons: The cringeworthy attempts at humor.

The third episode, Buddha Data, is about the meeting between digital culture and ancient tradition. We follow a Buddhist monk who starts questioning his purpose when the whole country becomes obsessed with a new mobile app that adds gamification to acts of charity. The creator of the app resents the Buddhist priesthood for cheating his parents out of all their possessions in the form of offerings, and has given himself the mission to bring actual, material consequences to good deeds. Instead of accumulating merit for the next life, users of his app receive karma points they can exchange for discounts. It doesn’t take long for some people to perversely game the system and earn points for technically fulfilling the quests.

So our monk, who happens to have coding experience, teams up with a former colleague and launches his own spiritual progress app. While his competitor turns charity into a performance for selfish motives, this app guides the user through the steps of enlightenment with the help of wisdom extracted from the brains of veteran monks. All seems to go well for this project, until a scandal blows up and brusquely reminds the viewer that scanning a monk’s brain is no guarantee of holiness.

Pros: The dialogue scenes between the monk and his robot sidekick.

Cons: The plot relies on too many convenient contrivances.

The fourth episode, Octopus Girl, is the show’s pièce de résistance, although the budget was clearly spent more in set design and casting than in scriptwriting. We’re introduced to two adorable schoolgirls who live in a slum during a worldwide three-year-long rain caused by a collapsed climate cycle. Most people have become accustomed to the perpetual rain, and some animals have begun showing impressive adaptations, but tropical diseases are out of control. The United Nations have developed a vaccine prepared with octopus genes; the only side effect is that your face grows little tentacles. In Thailand, the comically inept Prime Minister makes a big show of banning the vaccine from the country while proposing instead to enclose flooded towns under glass domes.

Meanwhile, our girls sneak into a TV singing contest and steal the nation’s hearts by bringing attention to the way the government neglects poor neighborhoods. The scenes in their slum have a cute slice-of-life vibe that is only hurt by the tonal mismatch of a sense of humor more appropriate for an audience of children (which is hard to believe, given this is the same series that had an episode about sex robots). But the biggest tonal whiplash is the episode’s ending, which just wipes off all the goodwill the episode has laboriously tried to earn.

Pros: Excellent set design.

Cons: Very strange humor, needlessly mean ending.

Taken as a whole, Tomorrow and I is pessimistic about the potential of technology. Even when people seem to achieve their goals with the help of advanced genetics or robotics or informatics, the situation invariably turns more adverse and the achievement becomes unusable or unenjoyable. However, this doesn’t mean that the stories take a nihilistic stance about the human search for happiness. This is no Black Mirror. What these stories are saying is that, while technology makes our faults more notorious and therefore more consequential, that doesn’t negate the sincerity of our efforts. Fundamentally good people find themselves in defective systems that don’t allow for neat, clean solutions.

The nuances of this humanist stance are hindered by the show’s painfully simplistic and obvious dialogues. I must admit that I watched with English subtitles and can’t understand Thai, but to the extent that each plot can be followed, what is gained with great visual effects is lost with lackluster scripts, by which I mean that the characters’ reactions can get too melodramatic, or too predictable, or too hackneyed. One can believe that the future will be hard to navigate, but not that we will lack the capacity to describe it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Bon Appetit, Your Majesty

Outlander meets Iron Chef in this addictive time travel K-drama rom com

When it’s time for your next guilty pleasure, Netflix’s Bon Appetit, Your Majesty has a tasty twelve course menu for your indulgence. The twelve episode series follows the adventures of a confident, modern-day French-trained chef, who falls through time to ancient Korea and lands in the court of a tyrannical young king who has a demanding palate for gourmet food when he isn’t tormenting his subjects. The new series is a romantic combination of the time travel elements of Outlander, the tyrant king and daily survival of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, and the intense cooking competition of Food Network shows like Iron Chef, Top Chef, and Chopped. As the stressed chef tries to find a way back to her own time, she must survive the dangers of ancient life and the palace’s political intrigue, while being forced to prepare meals for an angry young king who will kill her if the food displeases him. Despite a fair amount of drama and bloodshed towards the end, the story is primarily humorous with appealing enemies to lovers, mistaken identity, and fish out of water story elements.

The story starts in modern day France where elite chef Yeon Ji-young (Im Yoon-ah), wins an international cooking competition and is headed back to her home in Korea. Her father asks her to get a copy of an antique cooking manuscript from an academic colleague. During her flight home, the ancient book pulls her through a time travel portal to Korea in the Joseon Era. She soon encounters an angry, pompous young man Yi Heon (Lee Chae-Min). Not realizing he is the king, she assumes he is from a movie set and he believes she is a witch / spirit creature due to her strange clothes and manner of speaking. King Yi Heon’s intention to kill her for annoying him is interrupted when an archer assassin shoots him and Ji-young reluctantly keeps him from bleeding out and cooks for him while hiding out in the home of a local girl who befriends her. When the king is rescued, Ji-young finds herself in prison for her disrespect to the king. But the king is intrigued by her unusual cooking and orders her to become his chief royal cook. However, he promises to execute her if she serves something he doesn’t like. Over time the two grow closer despite their bickering and they bond over food. However, due to the king’s past tyranny, multiple enemies are plotting his demise and Ji-young finds herself in danger as assassins target the king and those close to him. In particular, the king’s uncle, Prince Jesan (Choi Gwi-hwa) and one of the king’s consorts, Kang (Kang Han-na), are determined to overthrow Yi Heon.

The series uses elements of Korean history with King Yi Heon inspired by (and recognized by Ji-young) as a real life sixteenth century tyrant known for his cruelty due to the murder of his mother. The balance of upsetting, true history with the rom com elements creates an interesting contrast. In Bon Appetit, the king is grieving the murder of his mother by undisclosed members of the royal family (and with collusion of others). This occurred when he was a child and he is determined to solve the mystery of her execution. Due to his bitterness, he treats his own people with contempt and cruelty, taking land, executing or exiling dissenters and earning the anger of his political rivals who seek to dethrone him. Ji-young’s presence and influence over the king gradually creates an alternate history timeline as she persuades the king to be more compassionate. Despite the general elements of lightness, there are moments where otherwise likeable characters admit to having done terrible acts. Additionally, although there are several strong female characters in the story, the historical context makes it clear that women are treated as commodities and are offered as tribute or payment in negotiations.

The villains are, unfortunately, mostly two dimensional and lack subtlety. Viewers are subjected to the evil uncle’s villainous laugh and the consort’s perpetual sneer. Initially, there seems to be no clear motive articulated for their desire to overthrow the king. However, a consideration of the real life history as well as the show’s backstory adds some context for the escalating hate and reciprocal violence between the tyranny of the grieving king and his political rivals’ vengeance.

Against that historical backdrop, we still have a swoony rom com love story between the arrogant king and the spunky modern chef. Bouncy rom com music alternates between intense moments as Ji-young tries to convince the king that she is from the future and needs to find the ancient book to portal her way back home. There are funny moments where the king struggles to understand Ji-young’s modern slang and, despite his tyrannical tendencies, endures her lecture on consent when he unexpectedly kisses her. Ji-young also has her medieval bestie Gil-geum (Yoon Seo-Ah) who provides comic relief elements along with the comedic royal kitchen team who struggle to warm up to the idea of a woman as the head chef.

However, the true heart of the show is not the romance, or the political intrigue, it’s the cooking. Each episode is named after a particular dish or cuisine and Bon Appetit unapologetically treats viewers to a detailed examination of unique ingredients, thoughtful preparation techniques, and the emotional power of cooking as a means of human connection. When people taste Ji-young's cooking they enter a fantastical sensory realm where the taste of the food is conveyed through dramatic visual symbolism in a way that is reminiscent of the Food Wars anime. In an homage to Food Network shows like Top Chef and Chopped, Ji-young repeatedly finds herself racing against the clock and cooking with her life on the line. In fact, a particularly long food competition arc stretches over four episodes in which Ji-young and her team face off against three sharp Ming chefs with the fate of the kingdom at risk. Their competition leads to the invention of the pressure cooker and lots of dangerous adventures outside of the kitchen.

The two lead characters have great chemistry and the journey feels like an authentic, slow-burn redemption story. However, that kind of potential happiness is fighting against the truth of history and the consequences of hate. As the last episodes grow more grim and violent, beloved characters meet their end and it becomes hard to imagine how things will conclude. But this story is a fantasy that leans into the fantastical when it needs it. Bon Appetit, Your Majesty ultimately brings the tale to a satisfying, although stressful, ending that’s literally and figuratively a chef’s kiss.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Time loop, time travel, portal fantasy
• Tropey villains and supporting characters
• Gorgeous food explorations

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance to find the killer and save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos.

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton) and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.

While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

Highlights:

• Escalating emotions
• Lots of subplots
• Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.