Haven: Season 3, Episode 12: Reunion

 

Haven’s back for its finale – time to settle these cliffhangers.

Not!Claire reveals she killed the real Claire a few days ago and she can pass as her because Claire, as a psychiatrist, taped every session and kept excellent notes, making it easy to step into her shoes – and her skin. Unsurprisingly, the Big Bad Guy thinks she is the victim not the monster-  because of what Lucy did; though she’s only just realised that Audrey’s telling the truth and really doesn’t remember her past incarnations. Apparently James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, Audrey’s son knows how to stop the Troubles – or so Not!Claire says before bashing Audrey over the head with her gun.

This is when Nathan comes in and finds Audrey alone. He’s, rightfully suspicious, why didn’t the Skinwalker kill her when she had the chance? But Audrey easily proves her authenticity by touching Nathan – a touch he can feel. Of course, now the Skinwalker will have to change to stay hidden – so they need to figure out who is next.

Cut to a man running through a high school gym, chased by another who crushes him to death behind the bleachers.  Except, after death, the body is suddenly awfully young.

Time for Nathan and Audrey to check the body, from the wallet they find it’s Paul Sullivan who went to school with Nathan – and is ages with Nathan, despite the body looking no older than a current student, but Nathan recognises him and it’s definitely the same man. Audrey has more important things on her mind – she sees a banner, it’s Nathan’s high school reunion.

In runs several of Nathan’s former class mates – the Mean Girl (Denise), the Class Dork (Robert) and the Prom Queen (Jeanine) who are involved in the reunion. We learn that Robert is a millionaire motivational speaker (kill him with fire) and they all want to set up for the dance

Time for a meeting of the Scooby club: Nathan, Audrey, the Teagues, Duke and Dwight (who I’d lay odds on being the next Skinwalker) with the news of Claire’s death and a computer programme to put together a composite of all of the Skinwalker’s victims and the pieces they’ve been taking to make a new woman. The person the Skinwalker’s build? Looks exactly like Arla Cogan, James Cogan’s wife. We cut to the Skinwalker putting on their flesh mask – and becoming Arla Cogan.

Duke raises the possibility that the Skinwalker always was Arla – after all, Arla disappeared when James Cogan died. Everyone starts gathering information. They need answers before Audrey disappears for 27 years.

At his bar Duke briefly sees Jeanine until Arla shows up, with a gun, for a little chat. She wants Audrey to find the barn, so they can all go back to being normal; just like Lucy and Sarah did before her. She tries to use Claire’s notes to snipe at Duke – Audrey loving Nathan – and prey on his dislike of his own Trouble, and Duke asks what Arla wants (are we supposed to believe that Duke is betraying Audrey, really?)

The Teagues are doing their research and find that a woman did go missing after James Cogan died – and a body was found near the fishing shack afterwards, badly scalded or burned. Dwight drops in with his own information: the Guard are following Duke and Nathan around ready to intervene if Audrey doesn’t go into the barn.

Review: Elemental: The First by Alexandra May

 Rose Frost has had a difficult childhood moving from place to place due to the demands of her father’s job – and it has only been exacerbated by her odd gift, a gift she doesn’t understand and has scared her in the past.

Her father’s job has now lead her to live with her grandmother, Daisy, while her family move abroad. Long estranged from the family, Rose remembers little about Daisy’s home in Warminster, Wiltshire but quickly re-establishes the few old friends she has in the area

But people are going missing in mysterious ways and there are definitely secrets being kept in the town. Not least of which the mystery of Halika Dacome, goddess, saviour, perhaps even devil who is constantly referred to – and who haunts Rose’s dreams and may be the key to everything – her gift, her family’s secrets and the enemy that is hunting her.

This book is probably a decent prologue for the series. I now know who everyone is, what everyone does, I have the world building, the concepts, the relationships, the setting – I have all the information for the whole book series now.

But it’s a long prologue and I kind of wanted to read a book, not a prequel for an actual story. I think this book can be split into 3 parts. In the first, we have a brief introduction where we’re introduced to the idea that Halika Dacome is going to be reincarnated into a young girl’s body and that there’s a bad guy who wants to kill her and he has a grandson who’s not exactly on board for this plan.

Then the bulk of the plot where we follow Rose who is 16 and has an odd gift and lots of hints about someone called Halika Dacome. And there’s a boy who is attracted to her but everyone says is a wrong ‘un and he has an evil grandfather. I felt a little like I was given the answers and then was asked the question – but everyone was acting like the question should be a great mystery.

It doesn’t help that for the majority of the book she never explores this power. She uses it to find a mysterious box she doesn’t open (I’m still not sure what this box is for?) and she uses it to make herself warm when she’s cold, even when someone is found well and truly mangled and tortured she doesn’t use her ability to heal. The result of that is that for, maybe, 75% of the book we have a paranormal novel with precious little of the paranormal – it’s a mystery, it could be a famous five book.

Supernatural: Season 8, Episode 10: Torn and Frayed

 It’s finally back – Castiel is back! It’s been a long holiday but at last the angel has returned. Oh, yeah I guess the rest of show did as well. Which is important, of course, yes. *ahem*

We start with poor fast food angel, Samandriel, still Crowley’s very very unfortunate guest. While he’s alone he quietly informs Naomi (that would be Castiel’s new boss) that he’s being held by Crowley. His guard and torturer is not happy with him using Angel radio and puts the very unpleasant spike back into the poor angel’s skull.

Meanwhile Sam and Dean meet up again and Sam is still pouting. Ugh, I didn’t agree with him pouting last episode and I still don’t agree with it now. Less Sam, more Castiel. Dean tells Sam that Benny killed the fool hunter in self-defence (why not just say in defence of the human woman he was holding hostage? Maybe Sam could understand that). Sam is upset because of Dean’s trickery using Amelia which was, yes, unpleasant – but it’s not like the man was listening to reason. On where they go from here – Sam wants to know where or not Dean is done with Benny.

Choice between Benny and Sam? I’ll take Benny.

Dean says he doesn’t know and since Sam won’t bend, he leaves.

To Castiel! YESSSS! He randomly heals a passing baby, because he’s awesome like that, when Naomi drags him up to the office on high to tell him about Semandriel. She orders him to intervene (not asks or suggests outright orders) and makes him believe it’s his idea to rescue him – not Heaven’s and not Naomi’s.

So from there Castiel goes to Dean – creepily standing over him while he sleeps, as he does. He tells Dean he’s turned on angel-radio and heard Samandriel’s predicament as well as a rough location in Nebraska. And he needs Dean’s help for the complex task of talking to people – something he just can’t do. To Dean’s laptop to research (and for Dean to hide his porn)  to research strange incidents that are caused by angel screams. Catiel also notices Sam’s absence but Dean brushes it aside (we don’t need Sam, we have Castiel!)

At which point we join Sam (hey, no, go back to Castiel!)

Go away Sam, you're taking up valuable Castiel time

 

Ok, fine, let’s have some Sam time. Amelia has come to talk to him about stuff. Sam assures her he’ll leave because he didn’t want to cause trouble he thought she was in trouble. She keeps finishing his sentences and points out him coming back to check on her means he cares. Just like her. Awww, they both care. For the record, I really don’t.

She spends the night in his motel, they have sex and they discuss whether it was a mistake and how Amelia doesn’t want to hurt her husband but also can’t stop thinking about Sam. If he stays she will be with Sam, if he leaves, she can’t have him return because she can’t have him with just one foot in her life. They discuss and think and angst and decide in 2 days whether to meet up again – if they both show, one shows or neither shows.

Meanwhile poor Semandriel is still being tortured by the nasty demon and is suffering almost as much as I am when I have to sit through Sam and Amelia’s scenes. With a second spike being drilled into his head, he starts chanting – chanting that is heard by a man coming from a bush outside and presumably some distance away from the little torture prison. The bush spontaneously combusts and throws the man across the garden. As far as super divine powers go, random combustible foliage seems rather low down the list.

Dean and Castiel go to interview the man with severe burns after the “ambush” (oh Dean that’s a bad one). Castel recognises the words he heard as Enochian for “obey” and also that for an angel to communicate through shrubbery and to cause it to burn would indicate he’s in incredible pain. And the “shrubbery” is his choice of words there, not my snark, honest.

American Horror Story, Season 2, Episode 12: Continuum

 We open to lots of camera panning around a house, (I think they may have let Overly Arty Cameraman out again), lots of domestic images – and a photograph on the wall of Kit with Alma and Grace and the 2 babies.

Kit himself is crying, splattered with blood and carrying a large, blood stained axe. There’s a blood covered body on the floor and a little girl calls for Kit – her daddy. He says he’ll be there in a minute

Hah, you expected a happy ending on American Horror Story?

1967

Time to flash back before the deaths –and we have happy families going on – Grace drawing a charcoal sketch of the aliens (which Alma insists she doesn’t remember) and Alma preparing vegetables while the children play. Kit comes home all enthusiastic about some kind of activist march which Alma greets with sensible practicality about taking toddlers to a march and isn’t too keen with Grace showing the babies traumatising sketches of their alien abductors (I like Alma’s acting throughout here, it has such a powerful note of “I’m really trying to be nice about this whole thing but I’m not loving it at all”)

That night Kit and Alma are sat on the bed but Alma is concerned about Grace and her obsession with the abduction (and Kit notes Alma never talks about it). He says that Grace is just processing what happened but Alma rejects that, saying Grace is obsessed with the past because she’s unhappy in the present – and Kit needs to spend more time with her. He goes and finds Grace drawing the aliens again, she claims she’s doing it for the children so they know where they came from. Grace also reminds Kit that she has other memories that ambushing her that are even less pleasant than the aliens – the whole axe murdering her family thing.

They kiss and have sex, Alma in the next room – when the lights start flickering and go out – followed by blinding white light – alien light. Alma screams and panics, Grace grabs her and they both go and get the babies while Kit gets a shotgun. It turns out not to be aliens, but a truck full of arseholes who throw something that sets fire to the curtains before driving off, Grace puts them out and the police arrived.

The police interview Kit who knows who did it –Billy Marshall – but the policeman has little inclination to follow it up and instead takes a dig at Kit over his polygamy. He returns to the house to see Grace, Alma is crying in her room, panicking because she thought it was the aliens. Grace says Alma is repressing the memories and sends Kit to her.

Later it’s all happy daylight and Alma and Grace finally have it out about the aliens. Grace loves the aliens as miracle workers, Alma hates them as cruel monsters who experimented on them. Try to reconcile those positions. And Alma pulls out the ace – before the aliens came Alma and Kit were married and happy, after the aliens he brought home an axe murderer to play house with. Grace asks Alma if she wants Julia to grow up ashamed of who she is and Alma slaps her – and instantly apologises. Grace breaks a glass and storms out while Kit comes in and looks kind of gormless.

That night Kit leaves Alma’s bed to go see Grace in the living room, again drawing alien pictures. She talks about how she loves everything – Kit, Alma, the babies and the future is coming and it’s bright and amazing – and Alma hits her with an axe

I’m debating whether to go with “feel the love” or “so you like axe murderers, eh Kit?”

She keeps on chopping until Kit takes the axe off her. Alma panics and talks about having to hide while Kit wrenches the axe out of Grace and goes and sits in a chair.

American Horror Story and Gratuitous Rape

 
American Horror Story is a show that loves to push boundaries. Sometimes it does this with some terribly emotional, painful and dramatic scenes that are incredible to watch. Sometimes it does this by invoking and presenting a horrendously hard to watch issue, realistically and with no sugar-coating as it did in American Horror Story: Asylum, with the painful depictions of ex-gay “therapy” inflicted on Lana. And sometimes it does this by deciding to have Anne Frank run around in an act of line crossing that left us stunned.

In it’s urge to shock, American Horror Story loves to leap across lines it should hesitate to cross, and rarely have we seen this more evident than with the constant depiction of rape through these 2 seasons.

Rape was a consistent theme throughout American Horror Story: Asylum. In many cases, it was absolutely brutal and painful to watch.  In the media, it is not uncommon to see violence aimed at women but the degree to which American Horror Story: Asylum included rape in its storyline this year was absolutely gratuitous. One cannot even reasonably argue that the rape occurred to move the plot along - it was inserted for shock value, nothing more. Leigh didn’t need to try and rape Jude to have his revenge with her, any more than in America Horror Story: Murder House, Tate had to rape Patrick to murder him. The point of  American Horror Story: Asylum, was for the viewer to be horrified by the conditions of the inmates and this most certainly could have been done without the continual rape of women.  Rape became a facet of entertainment, a tool for setting the theme.

All of the rapists were clearly to be understood as evil and in particular Dr. Thredson played by Zachary Quinto. It is good that rape is understood as a terrible violation; however, American Horror Story: Asylum made it seem as though all rape occurs because of psychopaths. Even though the rape itself was intimate because all of the victims knew their attacker in someway, the attacks still occurred within a framework of the rapist being psychologically damaged in some way, as a way of explaining his actions. The true motivation for rape is power, not psychosis, as American Horror Story: Asylum would have us believe. It doesn’t take a mental illness to make a rapist, nor can we attempt to excuse or distance ourselves from the horrors of rape, by presenting the perpetrators as always as these evil, mentally damaged people, rather than, as is often the case, the normal man in the street, the neighbour, the friend - even the loved one. This is a trope which was continued on from  American Horror Story: Murder House, where the rapist of Vivien and Patrick was Tate, a mass murderer and someone who was again presented to be insane. This approach servers to pathologize the mentally ill and establish mental illness as a threat to the safety and society. 

Walking Dead Trailer

Make a note on the calendar guys, because soon the Walking Dead will be back. Until then, enjoy a trailer to keep you hungry

Review of Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish by Andew Buckley

The devil has made a deal with God and gets to spend a week on earth.  Unfortunately for the devil, the body he had arranged to inhabit is not available, so he is forced to inhabit the body of a cat.  Things get worst for the world when the Angel of Death is then convinced by the prince of darkness into quitting in a drunken rage. So, not only is the devil free to run amok but people can no longer die.  Then there is a thing with evil elves and a penguin who becomes human.  If this sounds confusing trust me, it will all become clear when you read this book.

As I was reading this book, I kept wondering how I was going to review it.  So much happened that at times I felt that it was headed nowhere and had no discernible plot.  To add to the problem, I don't even think I can say that Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish, even had a clear protagonist. The protagonist could easily have been a penguin named Gerald, a police officer named Nigel, or a scientist named Celina. With the importance of Death in story, I'm sure some might argue that the protagonist is actually the grim reaper. The only thing that I can identify for certain is that the devil is indeed the antagonist.

Normally I wouldn't even finish a book with this much confusion but would you believe that not only did I finish Death, the Devil and the Goldfish, I loved it?   The plot was thin at best and the story seemed to move from amusing anecdote to anecdote.  Normally, this would not be enough to hold any book together but Buckley's writing is laugh out loud funny and with each absurdity, I became more and more excited to see where his imaginative mind would go next.

How could I not love a story which involved the devil inhabiting the body of a cat named Fuzzbucket and then getting frustrated about having to cough up furballs?  Then there is the penguin who shifts into the body of a millionaire, while his body is shifted to a plane where humans worship penguins.  There is also the line dancing elves, which of course makes us question how the macerna ever became a popular dance. Also, the very idea of God as a wine waiter, wisely guiding the universe along is absolutely irreverent. It is impossible to read this book and not giggle.

Death the Devil and the Goldfish takes place in London, which is a very diverse city.  There were no GLBT characters or disabled characters.  There were few characters of colour in the story and they essentially added very little to the sparse plot.  I would remiss if I didn't mention one scene in particular that I found problematic.

Dark Angel, Season 2, Episode 7: Some Assembly Required

 

The steelheads from last week – the ones who had their little run in with Alec – are busy robbing a store and trashing the place in their usual less-than-elegant fashion. The action is being caught on Camera and Logan is showing the security tape to Max. Why? Because the gang has 4 members now – and one of them is the newly patched together Zack with extra metal implants. Yes, Zack, X5 Zack, her brother Zack, the guy who has disappeared, presumed dead, a fair few times now. He should start his own religion.

When last we saw Zack he was being kept semi-alive in Manticore labs so they could harvest him for organs. Max falls into angst and they moot the theory of why Zack is here and not dead (and by “moot the theory” I mean “desperately spackle over the plot holes”. Renfro moved him to a different facility where they experimented on cybernetic and fitted him out as he is now – including new heart, live, kidneys, oh and helped him recover from the gunshot to the head – and when Manticore shut down after Max killed on facility, they sold this VITAL SUPER TECH THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH TRANSGENICS on the black market, apparently within the price range of a street gang. As you do). Logan, of course, isn’t fond of “British Eddie” and his steelheads who are harvesting and selling human organs.

At work, Original Cindy is making excuses for Max being late again and settles on Max needing to see a psychiatrist to deal with work stress and that she has violent fantasies involving the work place (oh, fun, mentally ill as dangerous and violent – c’mon Dark Angel, you can do better than that). This causes Normal to put on his kid’s gloves and be warily polite and nice to Max.

When Cindy learns about Zack and the Steelheads she remembers Sketchy having trouble with them and bellows for him. After Max threatens Sketchy he reveals Alec’s connection and Max goes to make his day more difficult. Getting the fully story about him trying to sell steroids she drags Alec to place he met the Steelheads and demands (in the face of his reluctance – he thinks the Steelheads will come back with guns) he pretend to start his business again to antagonise them into showing up. He also is amused/bemused at Max considering Zack her “brother.”

In the Steelhead base one is testing his cybernetic arm against Zack’s muscle and losing when the news that Alec is back comes in. Max and Alec easily take down the Steelheads who arrive – and then Zack grabs Alec by the throat and lifts him and points a gun at Max. He doesn’t recognise her at first, she keeps saying his name and hers and finally shows him her barcode. He recognises her as 452, from his unit and goes with her (ignoring poor Alec).

They go to see Sam, a doctor friend of Logan’s who, among other things, concludes that Zack’s memory is damaged because of the bullet to the head, but there’s an implant in his head that may bring his memories back – albeit confused and possibly out of order or context. Zack comes through, sees Logan and remembers him – but the shattered flashbacks he remembers largely consist of him warning Logan that Max’s attachment to him is a threat to her (no surprise since he was a bit of a one track record before).