#Both seasons are very good- but season one set the groundwork for something truly spectacular

[i-really-like-phrogs]

And here we have… yet another Aziraphale! He is most certainly my favorite fellow, positively tickety-boo.

[theconservativebrief]

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for August 19 through 25 is “The Queen,” the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock.

“It could have been just a spectacular fucking disaster,” says Sam Shaw, as we discuss the seventh episode of Castle Rock. “It wouldn’t have just been a ‘gentleman’s B.’ This could have been a catastrophe.”

Even the most cursory look at the episode makes it clear what Shaw, who co-created the series with Dustin Thomason, is talking about. “The Queen,” which Shaw also wrote, is the keystone of the entire season: It provides further context for what’s happened in the six episodes preceding it, as well as laying out a groundwork for what’s to come. And, in what seems like the ultimate gamble, it’s presented through the eyes of Ruth Deaver (Sissy Spacek), whose struggle with dementia sends the story flitting between the past and the present.

But the operative phrase here is “could have been.” In the days since the episode’s airing, it’s been hailed as the series’ best episode, as well as one of the best hours of television this year, with Spacek’s performance drawing praise as a “tour de force.”

And rightly so. “The Queen,” beautifully directed by Greg Yaitanes, is a wonderful, devastating hour of TV, and impressive on every level. That it holds a certain personal significance for Shaw only adds to the weight that it carries.

Ruth with her grandson, Wendell (Chosen Jacobs). Maura Connolly Longueil/Hulu

Thus far, we’ve been witnesses to the effects of Ruth’s dementia; “The Queen” makes us active participants. The moments earlier in the season in which she’d lost focus become moments of clarity as they’re revisited through memories, with Ruth’s perspective on scenes that we’ve already seen pulling back the curtain on the Deaver family past.

It’s a feat of what Shaw calls “advance planning and strategy, and then serendipity, instinct, and luck.” A Deaver-centric episode was always in the cards, given the way Henry (Andre Holland), Ruth’s son, is positioned as the show’s point of entry into the world of Stephen King, but the exact nature of it developed as the family was fleshed out.

“This is a story about a protagonist who is missing time from his childhood, whose own memories are somewhat problematic, who’s kind of estranged from his own story, and has had a story imposed on him by this town,” Shaw explains. “To put a character who is losing her bearings and losing her memory at the center of that story in the form of Ruth, and tell a story about a character who actually, ironically, becomes the important custodian of a whole lot of backstory and a whole lot of the dramatic information that pushes the story forward — to have that person be someone who is losing her memories felt like an interesting irony to write about.”

To keep that in everyone’s heads, a notecard labeled “Ruth, dementia” kept moving about the writers’ room as the show took shape. In Shaw’s words, the writers set the table, making sure that the reckonings to be addressed in Ruth’s episode had all been set up before diving in.

“At a really practical level, there were some things that the episode just had to accomplish,” Shaw says. “There were two stories it had to tell.”

The first was filling in the blanks regarding Matthew Deaver (Adam Rothenberg), Ruth’s late husband, revealing the darker, abusive side of the preacher as well as establishing that Ruth had once had the option of taking Henry and running away with the lovelorn Alan Pangborn (played as a young man by Jeffrey Pierce, and by Scott Glenn in the present day). The second was the back-and-forth between Ruth and the Kid (Bill Skarsgård) — for which Shaw cites the 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark as inspiration — culminating in Pangborn’s accidental death by Ruth’s hand.

Though those aspects of the story were worked out in the writers’ room, the task of actually committing the episode to writing fell to Shaw.

“I think we were in the writers’ room one day and [writer] Tom Spezialy just casually said, ‘Let’s just skip to the next one,’ because I had sort of decided that I would write this episode, and Tom just had this instinct that, given the nature of the episode, and given the year I’d had and some personal stuff that had gone on for me, and my own interest in the subject matter of the episode, I think he felt like it lent itself better to a kind of solo mission.”

“The Queen” sees Ruth square off against the Kid (Bill Skarsgård). Dana Starbard/Hulu

Though loss and heartbreak figure prominently in “The Queen,” the episode ends on a note of tenderness. Battling through memories of Matthew as the Kid stalks her through her own house, Ruth finally finds the bullets for her late husband’s gun. When a figure appears in the doorway, she shoots, not realizing that it’s Alan until it’s too late. In the morning, after she’s washed off all the blood, there’s a knock on the door. Standing on the other side is Alan, in a memory that we’ve only heard Alan relate.

Old and exhausted, he begins to make excuses for what’s brought him back to town after all these years before finally confessing that he’s returned because he loves her. The episode ends as they hold each other on the porch, as Ruth tells him, “Don’t leave.” Behind them are the chess pieces that indicate it is indeed just a memory and that Alan is truly dead, but it doesn’t diminish the moment. If anything, it’s what makes the episode so wrenching, capturing both heartbreak and joy in a single moment in a way that feels distinctly true to life.

The desire to frame Ruth’s journey with some measure of truth — and kindness, in conjunction — stemmed from the episode’s extenuating circumstances. The day before “The Queen” aired, Shaw tweeted out a short thread, calling the episode likely the most personal thing he’d ever worked on, and dedicating it to his mother, who passed away shortly before the writing on Castle Rock began.

As such, it became all the more important to figure out just how to address and portray Ruth’s dementia. It became a collaborative effort between Shaw and Spacek, as they talked through personal experiences with people with dementia, as well as reading the same books and watching the same documentaries on the subject.

“There’s this documentary that Sissy loves that I’d never seen called Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter,” Shaw recalls. “It’s this really poignant, kind of miraculous picture of a relationship between a mother who has dementia and her daughter, and part of what’s incredible is that there’s lightness, and there’s spontaneity, and there’s laughter. It is a much more specific picture of what dementia looks like than the picture that we usually see represented on-screen.”

Bringing all of that to life visually also sprang from that desire to portray dementia in a more considered way, as the idea of making the Deaver house into a literal memory palace — in the episode, Ruth leaves one room in 2018 and enters another in 1991 — appealed to Shaw, not least because it struck him as atypical.

“We think about dementia as this process of subtraction. Memories are taken away, and as the memories go, so do parts of the identity of the person who suffers from dementia,” he explains. “But there was something that was really interesting to me about the idea that, actually, the experience that Ruth is having over the course of this season might look a little different from the experience that you might imagine when you think about dementia and about Alzheimer’s, that the past might be very present to her.”

The emotional core of the episode, meanwhile, became clear in Spacek’s insistence that Ruth’s story not be presented in a strictly black and white matrix. According to Shaw, she didn’t want Ruth to be just a figure of tragedy, or somebody essentially haunting her own story — and Shaw didn’t want that, either.

It was this realization that helped ground the episode in the love story between Ruth and Alan, bringing warmth and light to a storyline that could easily have slipped into something less nuanced.

“In a way, the mission became telling a love story for Sissy and Scott,” Shaw says, adding that that approach also opened up the story to further explore the bond between Ruth and Henry, not just in terms of the mother-son dynamic, but in terms of Ruth’s old doubts and regrets.

That “The Queen” is so heartbreaking comes down to that focus on love; the Lewis chessmen that Ruth uses to remind herself that she’s in the present, while also a narrative solution to keep viewers oriented, lend an extra dimension to the story as a gift from Alan. They serve as repositories for Ruth’s memories. In his explanation, Shaw cites a piece in the New Yorker on the cognitive scientist Andy Clark and the idea that the way that objects can hold memories helps to constitute a person’s identity.

“It dawned on me that it might be really interesting if there were some objects that have a kind of almost talisman-like or magical set of properties for her character,” Shaw adds. “Genre stories are most interesting when they live in a place of ambiguity. It can either be a story about dementia or about something like time travel — that really appealed to me.”

As such, the relatively commonplace use of chess as a means of trying to stave off the effects of dementia gave birth to the idea that these objects would become magical wards, keeping the “monster of dementia” at a distance.

“You sort of have those little moments where you feel like the universe is telling you, ‘Keep writing,’” says Shaw. Dana Starbard/Hulu

The amount of work that went into “The Queen” is obvious, but just as the episode mixes the realities of dementia with the undefinable feeling of love, the creation of the show similarly lends itself to a few supernatural touches.

“You get kind of superstitious at times, as a writer — or I do, at least — and there are little moments or breadcrumbs or discoveries that suggest, to me, that I’m writing in the right direction,” Shaw says, “and there were a lot of those kind of spooky moments for me in the course of making this episode.”

The biggest revelation was the Lewis chessmen. Though never explicitly stated in the show, Ruth was envisioned as having studied Icelandic literature, and the Lewis chessmen were what came up when Shaw went looking for Viking chess sets.

“There was this theory that they had been carved by this woman who was the wife of a priest, and of course Sissy’s character is the widow of the minister,” Shaw explains. What also struck him were the expressions on the queen’s faces — both looked stricken, with a hand held up as if in shock. It was supposed that they looked that way because, at that point, queens were considered the weakest character on the chess board, whereas now they’re the exact opposite.

That turn helped inform the way that the episode centered on Ruth, who, like the queen, had largely been relegated to the sidelines and dismissed up until this point in the season. To Shaw, it seemed like a sign, and one that’s only become more profound now that he’s on the other side of it.

“When I set out to write this episode, I think if you’d asked me [if it was a personal experience], I would have said that I was just writing an episode of TV,” he says. “But I also think, by the end of it, that I was really metabolizing something over the course of working on it and making the episode. It sounds a little crazy to say that you had this personal experience writing an episode of a JJ Abrams-Stephen King horror thriller, but in hindsight, I think it was. In the end, I think, whether the episode worked or didn’t work, it worked for me.”

Castle Rock is streaming on Hulu. New episodes are released every Wednesday.

Original Source -> Castle Rock showrunner Sam Shaw explains the series’ best episode yet

via The Conservative Brief

[kickstarter-promotion]

Another Amazing Kickstarter (The Secret of Akkadian Island by SecretsOfAkkadianIsland —Kickstarter) has been published on http://crowdmonsters.com/new-kickstarters/the-secret-of-akkadian-island-by-secretsofakkadianisland-kickstarter/

A NEW KICKSTARTER IS LAUNCHED:

Have you Ever wondered ‘IF’ something STRANGE is going on in our world? Is there A Secret or ” Shadow movement”, Behind the scenes of the world stage?  Is there a New World Order? a Babylonian Illuminati?  An Unseen HAND?  A force so POWERFUL, so Intertwined, That those aware of it  dare not speak about it above a whisper.  Is there an Evil that is HELL-BENT, on bringing the nations of the earth to their knees, forcing all governments to merge  into a ONE World Government, One World Financial System and One World Religion?  What about HAARP and Weather modification, Animal / Human DNA manipulation, and The CERN project in Europe?  WITH YOUR BACKING AND HELP!!! ALL of these topics, and MORE,  will be addressed and EXPOSED in THE SECRETS OF AKKADIAN ISLAND!  You will discover MANY of the situations , conflict and Game Scenarios, Within ” The Secrets of Akkadian Island”, seem RIPPED from Today’s Headlines!  Secrets of Akkadian Island is Based on DECADES of research and evidence, from some of the World’s BEST and TOP Researchers!  PLEASE help us FINISH this GAME and Get the TRUTH of what is going on in our world OUT THERE, to COUNTLESS MILLIONS of GAMERS!!!

Akkadian Island is an open-world game, similar to hits like Fallout, Far Cry and Just Cause, yet with some refreshingly new game play features:

1. Your mental perception can be altered by the paranormal powers of hybrids and super soldiers who are hunting you down. Hallucinations and fear can cloud your thinking at certain points of the game. You will seek to discover what they have created on Akkadian Island. AND Why are the ELITE of the earth racing to find, and steal bodies, from ancient tombs around the world?  Is there an EXTINCT, Ancient, DNA strand they are hoping to resurrect?  Are they seeking help , through a doorway, or stargate, to the other side?

2. Dark areas and creepy settings combined with paranormal , and Demonic enemies.  Will kick up the fright factor to keep you on the edge of your seat!  You will need to learn the Spiritual Secret to stop and DEFEAT these powerful Demonic FORCES! There is a FAR Superior force than these demons and , in that NAME, you will PREVAIL!

3. Using high tech glasses, you will control your self aware, GHOST drone.  As you accomplish various missions( Both on Top of Akkadian Island, and in the Hidden Shadow Government base below) in the game.

 4. Stealth combined with invisible camouflage (which can only be used for short periods of time) in some difficult areas will make for some interesting challenges.

 THE AMAZING STORY BEHIND THE CREATION OF ” SECRETS OF AKKADIAN ISLAND”

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 Due to recent anomalies in the air and around the region of Akkadian island, several local scientific teams have asked a well respected geographer , Dr Colm Macklin to investigate the mysterious and rarely charted ” Akkadian Island”. Though he is a scientist, Dr Macklin was trained for years in military combat and covert skills.

Dr Macklin then lands on Akkadian Island in what The Underground Movement calls  ” Ghost Armor”. This is a high tech armor designed by the Underground military to make a soldier  almost invisible. Dr Macklin releases a stealth drone called a ‘ Ghost Drone” that he must use to avoid detection.  These are critical Recon.missions , to Discover the carefully hidden and cloaked entrances to Akkadian Island, These entrances will not be discovered easily!

You will want to avoid detection, by above ground robotic sentries, Created by the Shadow Government called ‘ TECH REAVERS’. These cyber electronic creatures are based on ACTUAL TECHNOLOGY being engineered and built by the military today… in the real world, To create an almost unstoppable KILLING MACHINE!

Macklin will meet and rescue Physicist Dr Adelle Tabor. Dr Tabor doesn’t know it YET, but she is UNDER God’s Guidance. HIS Guidance will lead her out of the LET corporation and into the Christian Underground movement! her Knowledge of Akkadian Island will be a ” KEY” to Surviving and Completing your mission on Akkadian Island!

  As  Macklin discovers hidden entrances into the underground base, He finds dozens of earth diggers.  Lucent Edge Technologies corporation, and the shadow government, have used these to build a MASSIVE underwater Hadron collider!  The Collider runs for miles under the ocean FLOOR!     The supercollider begins and ends at Akkadian Island.

With this CERN-like device, LETCORP has opened an Inter-dimensional Stargate in the base at Akkadian Island! AND, When the collider is activated…it sends shockwaves out across the ocean floor and Land mass around Akkadian Island. Unleashing small Tsunamis, to the surrounding regions.

 Macklin will come to learn they are using this collider and stargate to open a dimensional rift.  Not to explore other worlds… BUT INSTEAD… to bring back the ancient “FALLEN ONES” from the Spiritual Nether World.  These spirit beings will also need bodies to inhabit.  Macklin and Dr Tabor will eventually discover , to their horror…   that the Babylonian Illuminati are creating MODERN , six fingered six-toed , NEPHILIM !!.  Re-creating them FROM recovered ANCIENT DNA, found in Lost Tombs from around the WORLD.   Macklin’s mission becomes all too CLEAR! This base and startgate… MUST be DESTROYED! He will also uncover plans for a Scalar Weapon that will have the ability to STRIKE anywhere in the world , without warning!  These plans lay the Ground for the Ultimate weapon of the anti-christ , mentioned in the Book of Revelation Chapter 13:4 and 13:13 ” Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him? … he doeth great wonders, so that he makes FIRE come down from heaven, on the earth, in the sight of men, ”  No Matter what , at all costs, The Underground MUST find and Destroy this Weapon! Or else the time of the END, may indeed, be Upon US ALL!

   With this project, we want to ensure its success, so we have our minimum goal of $34,000.  From this lower total we can create a spectacular game which includes all the main features we have listed already. This will allow us to Deliver a workable and Playable Short Version of this game to the STEAM PLATFORM.  As with MANY other successful video game projects of the recent past, we believe this will SPRING BOARD us into a TERRIFIC BUZZ within the gaming community. Then we can take this TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY UNIQUE GAME AND STORYLINE… to the NEXT LEVEL! 

Should we reach our Stretch Goals? MANY other highly SUCCESSFUL PROGRAMMERS Would like to JOIN us in this Undertaking!  More on them and their accomplishments in the TEAM description below!

With YOUR Donations and HELP, these new levels will contain.. MORE HIGHLY Successful Programmers and Animators!  MORE complex high tech gadgets, extended level play, easter eggs, characters and other game surprises!  so we have made various stretch goals that go past the minimum in creating this awesome game. PLEASE HELP US turn this fundraiser into an AMAZING, one of a kind game and STORY!!  ONE NEVER BEFORE SEEN in the gaming WORLD.  REVEALING MORE of the HIDDEN things Going on in our WORLD, THAN have EVER BEEN REVEALED BEFORE, in a video game!!!

 STRETCH GOALS:

$49,000 – Enhanced graphics, up to 10 more hours worth of gameplay

$65,000 – More bosses, more items/weapons, special mission rewards for a better experience.

$90,000 – Multiplayer (local co-op), some weapon customization, more things to do on the island to expand on multiplayer

$115,000 – Porting to XBox and Playstation becomes possible here

$140,000 – At this point we will start making seasons/episodes each as long as the original game. Episodes take place in alternate parallel universes that tie into the original game. We also lay the groundwork to start adding in game modes, more enemy types, and re-playable fun missions.

$190,000 – A truly cinematic gameplay experience. Everything from the ground up gets an intense overhaul… everything… This also includes additions such as a lot of crafting and a “Survival Mode”, all with the option of two player coop where one person plays as the drone, the other as the main character. In Survival, your job is to survive the night. The enemies are smart, they are strong, and they are searching for you. Hurry and craft yourself some weapons. Daylight is one hour away. Surviving rewards you with special boosts, and a chance at a very rare weapon or gear piece to use in game.

$240,000 – Additional game modes such as a unique Survival/Defense mode. Survival/Defense comes packed with a special set of levels which you can find yourself on a ghost ship at sea fending off various creatures, or even a smaller island full of surprises. You have to survive as long as you can while crafting defenses to protect your area’s beacon. Fight endless waves of enemies, and every 10 levels fight a boss that drops special timed gear. Every 50 levels you get a boss drop that grants you a story mode item to use in game, permanently. Getting to 50 is no easy task. 

   Every dollar raised from this Kickstarter Campaign will be used for the creation and development of this game, “Secrets of Akkadian Island”. We are vary serious about this project and spent a good deal of time seeking out the right programmer, along with project director and marketing/design lead to ensure this game will be a success.

 Also, Because of our Lead Programmer Justin, we have many other Top-flight animators and programmers with INCREDIBLE Programming backgrounds willing to work on our Project, once it is FUNDED above the $100,000 dollar plateau.  Among these titles ( these additional programmers have  worked on are)  Call of Duty, Hunger Games Mockingjay, Transformers Fall of Cybertron, and many more. PLEASE Help us reach our Goals and Stretch Goals, and we can produce .. By God’s direction and Grace, A Mind-Blowing Game that will compete with ANY game being produced out THERE! ( from a Graphics and Gameplay standpoint) BUT a COMPLETELY Original Storyline, NEVER before seen in Video Games !!!

WEAPONS USED IN THE GAME

  From Top Left to Bottom Right:

Assault Rifle: 5.56 Bee [An advanced adjustable assault rifle with semi or fully automatic fire. Can be silenced at the cost of range/damage. Medium damage against all targets at medium range. High accuracy. Optional customizations including SMG conversion on the fly for less range, but more fire rate]

Grenade Launcher: Six-Zero-Mitch2 [A 60mm tactical grenade launcher that can fire HE, Chaff, and Smoke grenades]

Pistol: .45A Scott [.45 caliber handgun that has high damage, high accuracy, very low ammo pool, and loud]

Shotgun: 12g Driver [12 gauge pump action shotgun sporting extreme damage against soft targets, or medium damage + stagger against armored targets. Has low range/fast damage drop over distance]

Marksman Rifle: 338LT Flat-Liner [When you REALLY need to put a big hole… through 1/2 inch thick steel… from 200 yards away… you use a custom 338 Lapua Thermite round]

Rocket Launcher: Tinker[Because who needs a bunker?]

APPROX. PC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

OS: Windows® 7 (SP1) / Windows® 8 / Windows® 8.1 / (64-bit only) or Higher

Processor: 2.6 GHz Intel® Core™ i5-750 or 3.2 GHz AMD Phenom™ II X4 955

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD5850 (2 GB VRAM) DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 20 GB available space

* ( The above is for PC only. If we receive enough funding we will also do a MAC Version and later also, we potentially will have a Playstation, XBox and/or other potential console versions. )

 There are 11 different reward levels for pledging anywhere between $10 and $1995+:

  INFORMATION PROVIDED BY Kickstarter.com and Kicktraq.com VISIT PAGE SOURCE