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xemilyxmariex · 5 years

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Conageddon 2 - Sunday Recap

The final day of Conageddon was jam packed and full of surprises.

I started the day by sitting in on the beginning of Richard’s panel but then eventually ducked out so I could get in line for autographs with Chelsey. I was third in line for autographs and while I was in line Chelsey asked if anyone had a pen so she could write out “Let’s show them how to live” for someone who wanted it as a tattoo. I had recently purchased a Bellarke pen from Fangril Probs Inc that has the 99. Bellamy Blake 100. Clarke Griffin on it. I handed Chelsey my pen and said I’ll want that back though. She looked down, saw what was printed on it. Then she started laughing mischievously got up out of her chair ran out the door pushing it closed behind her. It was so silly. Chelsey is so silly and fun to be around. When it was my turn for autographs I told her that leading up to the finale (which is also when tickets were going on sale) I didn’t really know whose VIP I wanted to get because I would have been happy to spend time with any of the cast. But the instant the finale was over through my tears I was just like “Well know i HAVE to get Chelsey’s.” Her reaction was so sweet and she told me about how she was watching the episode with Luisa, Tasya and Sachin and how all of a sudden she just felt arms wrapping around her sitting on the couch. I told her that Anna and I sat hugging and crying after for a while. When I showed her what I wanted signed I told her how happy I was that the line “Maybe we should just shocklash Pike’s fascist ass and hand him to the grounders.” was so prominent. She laughed and told me that is her all-time favorite line. Which lead to her writing “I won’t hand you to the grounders” on my autograph. We took our selfies and I told her how I had gone back on my phone and found pictures from the pizza place in Banff we talked about during her panel the previous day. So we chatted briefly about Banff and Jasper and how gorgeous it is there and then I was on my way.

After Chelsey I stopped over by Tasya for my combo with her. She is so stunning in person I couldn’t really comprehend it lol. She was a total sweetheart and I told her how I was excited to learn she speaks Portuguese because my sister studied it in college. Her eyes lit up when I told her and we talked about her dad being from Brazil.

By then Anna and Tarra wee done doing their photo ops with Richard so we headed back to the autograph room. Tarra and Anna got their autographs with Chelsey. Once again Chelsey was hilarious and a total sweetheart. Tarra has always been super into “background” characters and she told Chelsey about how much she loved Harper and Monroe from the beginning. Chelsey was so flattered and told us she was going to message Katie (Monroe) about what Tarra said. Chelsey also asked us what it meant that Anna and Tarra were wearing shirts that said “100% John Murphy Trash.” She thought that it meant they were saying Murphy was trash. We clarified what being trash for something means and she laughed. After Anna moved over to the Tasya line Chelsey yelled over to Richard “I’m Richard Harmon trash!” He yelled back “Who taught you that?” and Chelsey was like “Anna!”

I then went over to capture Anna getting her autographs from Tasya. Her husband loves Echo so she was going to surprise him with her autograph. She told him all about how much he loves Echo and her reaction was priceless. She was so flattered and a total sweetheart.

Once I caught the moment Tarra and I ran off to our photo op with Bob. I had a solo one and then Tarra had bought one for us to do together for my birthday. We realized we should have told Bob the day before about a funny story from when she first got me to watch The 100. She had already seen all of season one and half of 2. We were watching Murphy’s Law and she ended up babbling on and on about how much Bellamy was her fave, and it just so happened to be during the scene where Bellamy hangs Murphy (#awkward). Since I was doing two poses I decided that I would do my solo photo first, that way as Tarra was walking in I could quickly tell him the story. His response was “oh so Bellamy at his finest.” Bob with the jokes people. Then we took the picture and after I was like oh yeah, well look where we are now pointing to my Bellamy shirt. And he made a joke about things working out in the end.

Then we went into the ballroom for Bob’s panel. I decided to turn my story into a question so I got in line as soon as Jo told us we could. Able to elaborate more than in the photo room I fleshed out the story a bit. It was hilarious because Bob was like oh you gotta cut her some slack he turns it around in season 2 when I told him she’d seen into season 2 when I was only on season 1. Bob then gave a very lengthy answer to me asking when his personal perception of Bellamy changed in S1, looking back at me throughout his answer.

We all wanted to get some water and food so we headed back to the VIP area after Bob’s panel. Since the area was pretty empty I just went and sat in the Richard VIP room with Tarra and Anna. There were a few other people in there. And boy am I glad I did! Two of the girls who were in the room convinced a volunteer to go find Richard and tell him they had whiskey for him to try. All of a sudden Richard pops into the room and comes and sits down across from us at the table. We sat in there with him for probably 30 minutes or more just chatting. He told us that Bob had wanted him to be part of Conageddon last year but they couldn’t afford him. Richard even said that he told them this year that he would take a pay cut to be there because he did not want to miss out on St Patrick’s Day in Boston. We talked about how he was going to be seeing Dropkick Murphys later that night, his favorite Irish music, and just other random stuff. I even showed him my stuffed hippo Hippy that I bring with me whenever I travel, since he had gotten so fired up talking about hippos the day before. Richard came into the room probably 15 minutes before the Bob and Eliza panel started. Before heading to the panel Bob stuck his head in the room and just was like “Dickey! Whatcha doing Dickey?!” Richard was just like oh not much just trying some whiskey. It was the silliest moment; their friendship is so hilarious. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to just chill with Richard for as long as possible I stayed in the room until Richard had to leave. Which meant I ended up missing more than half the Bob and Eliza panel. Since I knew they were streaming it on Facebook I did not mind one bit. Richard is the coolest guy and just so chill and down to earth.

I was able to catch the tail end of the Bob and Eliza photo and afterward we all went in to do our Bob and Eliza photo ops. I really had not planned what I wanted to do so I decided to just have them hug me. Next year I definitely want to plan this one out better. As I was getting up to leave Bob gave me a sweet smile.

We then headed to the autograph room to get our autographs with Richard. We spent a lot of time at his table; he was talking Tarra and Anna’s ears off lol. He talked about how grateful he is to Jason for giving him a chance and how he owes a lot of what he has in his life now to him. He also told us that Jason writes Murphy as a kind of reflection of himself. Which knowing that now I will read ever tweet of Jason’s way differently! He also was being super mischievous. Throwing pens across the room at people. Eventually his handler Monica (who is awesome) was like yo you got photo ops you gotta be at soon so he got back to business and moved the line along.

The last thing we had to do was Luisa’s photo op, but since the Bob and Eliza photos were taking longer than expected we went back to hang out in the VIP area while we waited. We ended up running into Luisa, she was proud that we found a way to coordinate our outfits for a third day. Then Anna and I finally got to do our photo op with Luisa and it is honestly one of my favorite photos from the weekend. Anna told her we’re both just going to give you a big hug and she was like OKAY!

Then it was time for Eliza’s panel and wow being in the room during that selfie auction was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever witnessed. The positivity in the room was palpable and seeing Eliza’s surprise at how much money was being raised on the spot was so special.

All in all Conageddon was the most incredible experience and I 100% intend to be there next year. It’s so incredible that Bob, Eliza, and Zach put on this convention themselves with the fans in mind. It really showed. I made so many new friends that I can’t wait to see again.

#conageddon 2 #richard harmon #bob morley #eliza taylor #tasya teles #chelsey reist #luisa d'oliveira #the 100 #zach mcgowan

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wellntruly · 4 years

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BABYLON BERLIN | Season 3, Episode 4 Recap

Before I’d even finished this one I was referring to it as, as if it were the episode title, “GAY BERLIN!” A pleasure and an honor to end an episode with twice as many gays as you’d started it with, I always say!

Season 3, Episode Four

Cold open: a cold one. There is even a miserable looking rain falling outside, as Greta Overbeck cedes to Wendt’s threats and changes her testimony, announcing she was mistaken before and the boys who put her up to Benda’s assassination were Communists after all. There is great tumult in the courtroom! Gereon even stands all the way up about it (though who could notice), and catches the oddly un-tumultuous demeanors of Wendt and his NSDAP associate, who just look calmly pleased. Fuckers.

After the credits, our tiny inspector vaults up the stairs to Gräf’s darkroom, where abruptly his path is brought up short. Because: Gräf finally installed a lock. [*wheeeeze*] [*gesturing!!*]

Something I am just forever trying to ~express~ about this show, is how their attention to detail is so aligned to what I, personally, crave. I spent so much time in the first two seasons delighting over this small running joke of Gereon barging in when Gräf is trying to process photos, and requested this to continue & grow, pls. And IT DID, IT DOES, THEY DO THIS FOR ME. This show cares about what I care about and it brings me so much happiness.

Gereon just starts talking to Gräf leaning against his door (social distancing affects us all, also: fucking cute), and we learn that our one & only forensic photographer has special access to the archives Wendt had locked down. And Gereon, once Gräf can safely let him in without ruining his photos anymore than he already did last night, learns about Tilly Brooks. Oh shit he didn’t know yet.

The amount of things Gereon does not know about his own case right now could actually fill a book.

Or at least a chalkboard. With “Mordfall” in big letters, which means murder case! God I love a Germanic compound.

Charlotte is reporting the latest in the investigation to a table of like 50 dudes. Okay fine, 11 dudes. Two of them are Henning and Czerwinski though, so they’re 100% supportin’ her with their twin cups of Respecting Our Fun Lady Colleague juice. That other homicide detective with the penchant for pinstripes, however, is FRESH OUT. His name is Böhm, but before I had gotten that clear I had taken to calling him BONER, insultingly.

Ignoring his patronizing jokes, Charlotte wraps up with the tidbit that Tristan Rot vanished again last night, so has yet to be questioned about the murder of the woman who was set to replace his wife, also murdered. The mordfall thickens.

Gereon hurries in at that point asking if he can be caught up, and Gennat’s like, no. Be on time. He invites Fräulein Ritter to please take a seat with them, with a welcoming little smile, then immediately cuts her off to turn to Böhm with a question. Gereon and Lotte, clearly a work couple if not a real one, just start whispering together down at the other end of the table, prompting Gennat to wheel back going PIPE DOWN, PIPSQUEAKS. Oh I am loving the WORKPLACE POLITICS, just conversational sideswipes and power flip-flops in every direction this morning! Messy! Before you even know it fucking Ulrich is now taking this opportunity to just come at the entire rest of the homicide team??

Literally Ulrich: “You go around and ask questions of witnesses and suspects. Either you believe their statements or you don’t. Those are almost medieval methods. We, on the other hand, will prove with scientific precision—” Literally Gennat: “Ulrich, stop it already.”

Hah hah, hah hah, Councilor Gennat and his 12 terrible crime children.

THEN it comes out that Charlotte, sans crime scene authorization, mind, was the one who put together most of these witness reports, as Boner was evidently taking his sweet time getting there last night. Gennat chastens that this is Not procedure!, while she’s just brightly like oh hang on it gets worse!

Flashback:

--- surely you’re not gonna come over here

I’m gonna go over there

oh my God you came over here

Just...giddy about it. Cannot stop laughing. Charlotte just trotting up to her former secret employer-slash-one time kidnapper whom she last spoke to while wearing one of his blankets and discussing the whereabouts of a train car of gold, just all hello tall friend of Edgar’s, Edgar—can I ask you a few questions for The Police Department? They of course say no she cannot, scamper, Edgar's stare of muted disbelief still unbroken from when he first made eye contact with her. Edgar & Charlotte is another relationship I prize very highly, because like Gereon she’s another determined, ridiculous, large-eyed little creature who isn’t afraid of him, and every time when faced with them Edgar’s like okay lol what, where did you come from. I love it.

“The Armenian is Edgar Kasabian—” Boner now narrates back in the present.

(“Kasabian”…)

But they’re not gonna deal with Herrs Kasabian and Weintraub right now. In the meantime, Gennat, trying to enforce some order on them all, takes Assistant Ritter away from DS Rath as punishment on him for letting her go around without a license doing everyone else’s jobs for them, and gives her to DS Böhm, as punishment on him for being openly misogynistic.

Literally Boner: “No thank you.” Literally Gennat: “Overruled.”

“Three murders in one week. We have a reputation to lose, gentlemen,” Gennat says, delighting me.

Oh but we’re not done yet! It’s at this point that another of his unruly children walks in: Gräf, with his woefully underexposed photos of Tilly Brooks. Gennat just off-handedly but with great panache tears him a new one, and shakes his head exhaustedly as Gräf quietly make his exit, Gereon sadly slanting him some I’m sorryyyy buddyyyy eyebrows as he goes.

Lotte lets this mood sit for one second, then again reiterates that she has something new to report.

Ha ha ha ha ha

(Also, appreciate so much that upon discovering she’s an inadvertent accessory to murder, Vera instantly confesses it all to her detective friend. That is a big Me move---every time I’ve fucked up REALLY badly, my very first knee-jerk thought is “run! hide everything!”, and then my next thought, and the one that always wins, is “you will never avoid detection bitch, throw yourself on their mercy immediately!” Vera I feel you babe, much love)

So Böhm is directed to interview Miss Lohman, currently waiting at Miss Ritter’s request in the interrogation room. Lol she is bringing you all your work huh, how does it taste. Oh he hates it. He deputizes Henning and Czwerwinski to go interview the vendors who had a key to the studio courtyard, and condescendingly banishes his girl-rival to fetch files.

Finally, Gereon and Lotte are afforded a chance for a conference at the coat rack, where he informs her that this morning in court, Greta changed her statement. “Was?” And in the prison yard, the Communist doctor is also getting updated on the latest testimony from their fellow inmate.

memory-for-trifles: OH SHIT Dr. Red is gonna shank her

Close: she has her crew plunge Greta’s head into a big bucket of dishwater, demanding she tell them why she did it. But Greta never says a word, and with a contemplative look at the poor girl, bleeding from the forehead and not saying a peep, Dr. Red calls them off and leaves her coughing on the cafeteria floor.

Hey remember the autopsy doc and his young assistant Rudy, the dumb jovial pansexual soft-bro med student I call Doofus Sewell? They’re back! Lotte shows up at some sort of class they’re teaching to ask for the file she was sent for, only to be informed that Boner already picked it up himself earlier that morning. Terrific.

Rudy, ditching his lecture, follows her out of the hall expressing his hope that she would get in touch again after their date in morgue.

Charlotte, warmly: “Rudy, you have a certain quality, and you’re unbeatable in that department. But I have no use for that at the moment. I’m sorry.” Doofus Sewell to himself as she walks away: “…Unbeatable.”

memory-for-trifles: Rudy bout to give himself a high-five 😂 wellntruly: I nearly broke my rule that I’m watching this first round with no pausing & typing because that turn-down was DELICIOUS and I cannot wait to savor every word again

Elsewhere, Henning and Czerwinski arrive at a warehouse, jauntily closing their car doors in unison. We’re off to a great start, I’m already breaking down.

And that’s even before we meet:

Unaccountable handsome mumbling liquor distributor!

He’s ruggedly dashing and even the Germans can’t understand a thing he says. He just keeps the shots pouring like water and answering every question like he has a bag of marbles in his mouth, while Henning and Czerwinski proceed to play this, like every one of their scenes, as if they are starring in a cop production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I CANNOT GET OVER THIS! Like it’s not just that they too are functionally interchangeable paired figures within a greater plot, but they have that same conversational rhythm, constantly rephrasing things the other has said in this back-and-forth staccato patter. I love.

Finally, teetering, R & G depart. Watching them leave from a high window is a be-coated, bearded fellow. He looks thoughtful, and also maybe vaguely familiar, but I don’t….I don’t got it.

Back at headquarters, Gereon goes to visit Ulrich’s forensics lab, and witnesses him injecting something into his hip, which he then stores in a little Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs. Insulin? Listen I have a lot of questions about this gaunt forensics man with his injections and his secrets and his chips on his shoulder. But we’ll get this one answered at least, when Gereon, an inveterate investigator, just out and asks him about this box of vials resting on the table of evidence, and Ulrich reveals he is indeed diabetic.

Krempin’s stuff, on the other hand, reveals that he’s AN OCCULTIST.

Aaaaahhh! AAAHHHH!

I’M SO EXCITED I HAVE NO IDEA WHY!!! I’m thrilled. I didn’t even know I was interested in early 20th century occult activities, but here we are guess I super am!!

In Krempin’s PENTAGRAM BOX, they find an invitation from the Fraterna Saturnii, which I believe I’ve osmosed enough Latin in my life to guess is just ‘The Dark Brotherhood’. They’re holding a gathering at the end of the month, password ‘Osiris’ (!!)—“Tristan Rot is much obliged.” Oh so NONE MORE GOTH, really!

When Gereon makes it back upstairs with news of the satanic soiree, Henning & Czwerwinski have returned, still wasted, and are dazzling Gennat.

Gennat: “Congrats, Rath, your men are on the ball. What did you call it Henning?” Czerwinski: “Double arabesque.” They even answer to the other’s name, I just— Henning: “A double arabesque is when your opponent wants to dupe you, and thinks you don’t notice, but you do notice, and don’t tell them. Hence the double.” Czerwinski: “Dual, so to speak.” I JUST!

Gennat chuckles that this is all very interesting, and Gereon responds, “Yes, we have a lot of fun together.” GEREON: WELL WE LOVE TO HAVE FUN.

But, bringing them DOWN, Gennat instructs them to take Boner with them to the seance. [party bummer trombone] Gereon quickly scrambles though to make sure Lotte---currently sending him base-coach hand signals through the glass, adorable---doesn’t get left out, and I’m pretty sure just makes up on the fly that they won’t be able to get in without “female company.” They all turn to look at Lotte outside the office. Lotte just gestures back like “—me?” Well they love to have fun.

Meanwhile, in Boresville:

memory-for-trifles: Who has a sit-down lunch at home wellntruly: Boner does, that’s who

Lotte & Toni are lunching at Aschinger, as usual. In a pretty little shot, Lotte sees Vera behind her in the reflection on the etched mirror wall, and strolls up to her with one hand in the pocket of her detective pants, a cigarette loose in her other, literally going “Yoohoo, Vera!”

Devastating.

In agreement with that sentiment, Vera asks her sexy friend if she wants to go out dancing with her tonight, and Lotte suggests The Holländer. ABSOLUTELY, god I love the cozy Weimar gay bar, Calgon take me awaaayy!

Lotte’s calendar is filling up today, as Toni has made an appointment for her and Ilse at the eye doctor. And for analysis of this scene, we turn to

memory-for-trifles, Actual Eye Care Professional:

OH HELL YEAH MY NICHE!! I have to imagine old timey ophthalmologists are closer to modern day optometrists than modern ophthos, but I was wrong about insulin so who knows!

“Well, it’s not healthy” yeah no shit Sherlock

Ok this is....baffling. The two things he mentions (macular degeneration and glaucoma) are both way serious and would be quite rare in a young person who hasn’t had eye issues like...their entire life. I also couldn’t find much data on glaucoma surgery back then except that it apparently was invented, somewhat...all I could find were case reports and most seemed to involve what sounds like narrow-angle glaucoma which is more sudden.

People nowadays with severe macular degeneration that has started bleeding DO get shots in their eyes, but that def. wasn’t around then. And they’ve made a point to show her bruised face and red eyes, neither of which would lead to macular degeneration...however trauma to the eye puts you at a higher risk of glaucoma so I guess that part checks out.

Oh you know what, I just explained it to myself. She probably has traumatic glaucoma in that eye, and the surgery he’s talking about is probably an iridotomy, where you poke a small hole in the iris to relieve pressure. They do it today with lasers.

However I have no idea why she was getting a shot other than to gross the audience out, especially at the end of an exam! Maybe it was an anesthetic or something. (They used to use cocaine for that, and in fact still do in some clinics to check for specific pupillary defects!)

wellntruly: EYES 👀 EYES 👀 EYE DEETS. THANK YOU.

Tackling both of her side plots this afternoon, Lotte walks Ilse back to their old flat and then goes up to see what it is their neighbor has for her. Mrs. Cziczewicz has a sagely critical yet also warmly motherly energy that I find quite engaging. And for Lotte she has: a little box of her mom’s love letters, from someone who signed them E.

memory-for-trifles: Please tell me Edgar is her real dad lol, that’d be just the bonkers twist for this show wellntruly: Omfg ‘E’! Well in the event of that reveal, would need to rescind Edgar’s title as the only man in Berlin who isn’t a ho 😂

On the cablecar back, Lotte notices Helga out on the sidewalk and is like huh that’s weird.

Helga, she thinks unweirdly, but she is wrong, is currently returning to the hotel, where she finds that Nyssen is waiting for her. It’s weird, Helga! For instance, I am dismayed to find myself disabused of my notion that they’d been having an affair since the summer, as they are almost awkwardly formal with one another. Not awkward for them—for me. I don’t know why it’s worse for me this way!

“Your living situation…” Nyssen begins, “is there a solution you seek?” Nyssen I’m pretty sure you’re just trying to ask if she’s single now, but it sounds like you’re asking if she wants you to off a guy for her. Hey wait here’s a question actually: has Nyssen ever met Gereon? Does he even know who he is? Gereon fucked up the Prangertag plot Nyssen was involved in, so he maybe knows of him through that.

Anyway Helga demurs from answering anything about the future, and Nyssen just tells her she can stay in his pied-à-terre as long as she likes.

Meanwhile, Gereon rings up Cologne to see if Helga has returned there. As soon as his dad answers no he just quietly hangs up on him while he’s still talking, and I big laughed. Wow you are never going back home are you!

Then he calls in Henning.

Gereon: “How are your connections to the Tourist Board?”

Hahaa incredible

So Gereon asks him to find out if a Helga Rath is staying at a hotel in the city. Gereon like. Warum. To what end. You two were not happy, just let her get some spaaace.

Meanwhile, Gräf launches himself and his little cap into a traumatic espionage plot in the green-shelved archives beneath the building. We’re gonna get Backstory, but it’s gonna come at a Price! :(

This scene is noticeably shot on handheld and it gives it a very tense queasy vibe, very Guillam Goes To Steal The Duty Log in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, incidentally, so, I was losing it. Navigating past the suspicious and hassling old archivist at the front desk with his Gennat-granted security clearance, Gräf strides down to the B’s, and hurriedly begins photographing what he finds in the Benda files. One curious item is an odd little sheet listing names, with Confidential marked across the top (I remembered that one from Katelbach’s blueprints: Geheim)

But then with a start, Gräf finds that the security guard had come after him. With disparaging cruelty, he tells Gräf he now recognizes him after all, and no not from previous trips to the archives: from before he worked for the police. From the Red Light District. Oh What. He then forces Gräf to his knees with a metal bar, and my cry of “noooooooo!” filled the night. Sorry again to my neighbors. Sorry mostly to Gräf! :((

Helping us both to recover, is the unexpected and deeply welcome reveal that Gereon is visiting his apartment tonight.

“—and he said, ‘why didn’t you say so right away? I would have had a ladder for you’,” Gräf narrates from his improvised darkroom in his bathroom. “And overlooked the camera in my hand. I thought I was going to die.”

Hey, you know what makes me feel like I’m going to die? That Gereon comes over and you two hang out and talk shop out of work hours. You are actual friends! Omg Gereon Rath has a real friendship, alert the fucking presses.

Gahh look how loose and sprightly and cute they are like this, GOD they both needed friends.

Out of the police headquarters and alone with Gräf, Gereon is even somehow morphing into the Leslie Knope/Ilana Glazer friend who just relentlessly compliments you. In quick succession he tells Gräf he’s a hero, scoffs that if his dad wasn’t proud of him then he never really knew him, and then grinningly tells him he’s “turning into a master spy.” All while Gräf keeps winging around the doorjamb to say something to him before darting back in to his photos (and to occasionally close his eyes through little aftershocks of horror, oh darling!)

Also hey Gräf, babe—

what the fuck is this incredible photo processing set up you’ve rigged with a desk on a pulley in your bathroom!

One of the photos fresh out of Gräf’s lavatory studio is of that mysterious list, which contains a familiar name: Samuel Katelbach, Editor. Gereon’s like oh no, my acquaintance! They go down to the bar so he can call up their mutual confidant & landlady, ELISABETH BEHNKE. YAY. I mean this show never forgets anybody, but still! Good to see you, Lissie. Anxiously flapping at her from his doorway, Katelbach relays a message for Gereon to meet him for breakfast at Café Romanche tomorrow morning.

Great, business done, now it’s time to be gay in bars.

The first diegetic Bryan Ferry Orchestra song of the season is making its gracious presence (it’s Weimarized ‘Avalon’, I nearly cried), and our historical noir cop show political drama is setting aside the last 20 percent of this episode for its characters to just hang out drinking and talking and dancing with each other. This Show Cares About What I Care About and It Brings Me So Much Happiness - Reprise!!!

It’s all just so warm and sweet. Gereon and Gräf are comparing their childhoods out in “the provinces”, Vera’s quipping toasts about her too many fathers to make Lotte laugh with her mouth full of champagne, the Bryan Ferry keeps spinning..!

Soon the boys have gotten enough bevs deep for Gräf to regale us all with the story of how he, like Lotte, ~swapped sides~ as it were, from sex work to working for the police. Which for him was when Ernst ‘the Buddha’ Gennat quote “picked me up off the street,” going [Griffin McElroy voice] THIS AIN’T GONNA WORK, JUICE, WE GOTTA START OVER AND GET OUR BOY A NEW JOB. Gennat sent him to picture school and once Gräf was trained up, hired him as the first homicide photographer in Berlin. Holy, excuse me, fuck! YO I LOVE GENNAT? So does Gräf, who’s like, *literally* I owe that man my life.

This is when Catholic fucking Gereon from Cologne, who has truly and seemingly very happily come SO far in Gay Berlin, essentially perches his chin on his hands and asks so you got a boooyfriend or what. Gräf just dishes that he’s waiting for his crush to notice he likes him. Oh uh oh. That crush isn’t Gereon himself, is it..

memory-for-trifles: I mean really if you’re Gräf how could you not be at least a little in love with Gereon. wellntruly: Everyone is a least a *little* bit in love with Gereon, these are just facts. And I’m praying they handle this well!!! Because they are SO cute right now! Do NOT blow this for us!!

Meanwhile, over with the girls at the gay club, THE DRAG PERFORMER FROM THE FIRST SEASON IS BACK, with a metallic skull and femur they use to occasionally chime a note.

I luv u

Vera’s like oh yeah this is My Song, and with a big grin LIFTS Lotte off her barstool to come dance with her.

What follows cannot be good for the gays.

WHAT IS THIS DORK ASS DANCING, ALL OF YOU!

This unselfconscious….playing, sure they’re dancing but mostly they’re just PLAYING AROUND with each other, romping, oh this is SO FULL OF JOY! Gereon and Lotte with their parallel QUEER ASS EVENINGS, I feel like I’m champagne.

Then Vera rests both her arms Lotte’s shoulders and tells her she’s classy, and my heart turned over. I Felt That, as the kids say.

Vera, like James Dean in that screen test with Paul Newman, simply tells her to kiss her. Lotte smilingly declines, joshing “Stop that,” but lets Vera flirtily pull her back into her arms.

I’m champaaagne! 🥂💛💋

Bicurious Charlotte Ritter & Women-Loving Vera Lohman, a beautiful Weimar gift!! !

Later, Toni wakes up to her sister’s and another voice gigglingly arriving in bed. “Good morning Toni,” Lotte says softly. “We have a visitor. This is Vera.”

“Hallo Toni!” Vera greets her, with the cutest fucking inflection.

Toni just looks at Vera a little primly and asks, “Will you be coming often now, ma’am?”

I’m guessing our subtitles translator choose “ma’am” to get across that Toni used the formal you and that’s what absolutely DECIMATES Vera & Lotte with laughter, UNLESS, German also has the same pun on the word come.

“We don’t know yet,” Lotte tells her with a smile, a fond hand gently resting on each of her girls in their shared bed in the little room in the attic.

— • — • —

Season 3 Recaps - Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3

Seasons 1 & 2 MASTERPOST

All everything, past & future: #Babylon Berlin Blogging

#Babylon Berlin #Babylon Berlin Blogging #Babylon Berlin spoilers #BB S3 Recaps #Tarra recaps stuff

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wellntruly · 4 years

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BABYLON BERLIN | Season 3, Episode 1 Recap

Earlier this month, I invited a couple friends over to watch the first few episodes of the new season of Babylon Berlin. Aw remember having friends over? We had food and drinks, many drinks—German beer and a mysterious pomegranate cocktail I’d invented called Moka Efti, and by the time we started the second episode I already knew I was going to have to rewatch these, so just started making Aviations too.

It was in sloshing through the third episode that an idea began to take shape in my mind. Maybe I could watch the whole season this way. Not taking any notes, just [having a drink and] letting each episode play through. And then when I looped back around, maybe I could write recaps.

It’s been a while since I wrote a true recap. A real good old fashioned RECAPMENT---lengthy, digressive, resolutely unserious except for when I’m suddenly having an emotional break. They take mmm an amount of time to put together, but hey you know what I have right now? All the quarantime in the world. And I bet some of you might as well. Maybe you could use something to read.

So— Ich bin euer conférencier, je suis votre compère, I am your host Und sagen: Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome Im B-Berlin, au B-Berlin, to B-Berlin!

Season 3: Episode One

Bisher bei Babylon Berlin: Oh Jesus, just start here

Today:

….oh shit today’s Black Thursday

In classic Babylon Berlin form, we are beginning this season with a shattered dream of where we will be by the end of the finale. This time: the historic market crash of 24 October, 1929. Oh this plot sure is like a push down the stairs in late March 2020!!! !!! Ayy-yi-yiii…

What I cannot capture for you in soundless images is the shaky rasp of Inspector Rath’s breathing, his muted stumbling punctuated by a too-loud gunshot, a too-close thunk of a body on the end of a rope (ghastly but wow well blocked), amid the susurration of all these financial papers fluttering down from somewhere (-where?) like the first snow of the coming winter of the Great Depression. It is HIGHLY surreal, and I love that they’ve taken this approach, this numb shocked chaos of a world suddenly upended.

And as ever, our Patron Saint of Shellshock, Gereon from Cologne, is our perfect listing, seized-up guide through the latest hell of his history. Or, as Alex had it:

@memory-for-trifles: Volker Brunch your physicality!!!! Bitch!!!

Oh unlike yours wellntruly, Alex DID take down live watch-notes this season, and sent them to me after I watched each episode, which is really a huge benefit to you all because now you also get to experience them.

Five weeks earlier, the chyron reads after the credits, September 20th. Well certainly an expanded time span here than that in the second season, which by my best count lasted approximately five days. Ha ha ha DO NOT LET ME TRY TO TRACK TIME AGAIN THIS SEASON, PLEASE BITTE.

Anyway, five weeks ago Gereon awakes on the couch of the apartment he shares with Helga and Moritz—upon which reveal all of us at the watch party immediately took up yelling. HOW can you still be seeing Helga, Gereon, after the last finale’s psyche-quaking twist that her husband, your brother, is in fact NOT buried in a field somewhere in France but is as alive & well as Jacques Brel in Paris, only right here in Berlin!!!!!

For what it’s worth, Gereon does seem to be avoiding them, providing a clearly well-worn excuse that he got in late so that’s why he slept on the couch again, and honing right past the breakfast table to sequester himself in the bathroom. But, curiously, unlike the practically glitching mess I would have expected Gereon to be living with this secret, we see that between June, trembly, and October, trembly, was a period of September: not trembly.

We also see this bathroom. Hi to this bathroom.

Surprisingly, it would appear that whatever treatment Anno has been trying to pull on him as Dr. Schmidt has actually helped? I mean he’s off the drugs at least, & thank god. His hand steady, Gereon slips a still-full case of his barbiturate cocktail back into the medicine cabinet untouched.

Untouched, meanwhile, is what I wish Lotte was on her commute, but NO SUCH LUCK. She stomps the creeper’s foot and hops off at the women’s prison, which I imagine probably finally startled him quiet. But yes, the prison, because Greta is still in this show! Wow I’m impressed. And even with her doing everything in her power to not be part of the narrative any more, and refusing all visitors. In fact Greta has even specified that she does not want to see one Charlotte Ritter in particular, but by the same hand has also listed her title as a full Detective Inspector, instead of just an assistant. Even behind bars and not speaking, girls be supporting each other’s careers!!

Meanwhile at another prison, someone else is coming out—of the woodwork. Did we know Edgar had a….this guy? Who is this man! Who is this man to you, my Armenian-Berliner friend!

The police will sure know who this Walter is though, forever, as they’ve sent over this unwell-looking forensics individual to fingerprint him before he is released. And the lock of his hair?

Really terrific, could not have made that sound more like it is just for your own personal criminal scrapbook, Mr. Ulrich.

Finally finished, Walter casually straps his knife back to his ankle while still in the prison, and just moves off like “peace. haha jk, never. I’m out!!”

Edgar has not come to pick him up himself, but has sent over a few familiar faces of Gangland with a car. And the car contains a new babe: a light-eyed young lady named Vera, who in response to Walter immediately touching his hands all over her face, just sucks his whole ink-stained finger into her mouth. “Eugh” - all three of us in unison. Wouldn’t that ink taste,, bad?? But it definitely seems their relationship is of the contractual variety, so presumably she’s probably like, whatever I’m getting paid.

What Vera did not seem to anticipate being part of the bargain though was Herr Weintraub wanting her to let him tie a silky blindfold over her eyes before he drives them out to the woods to have sex in the backseat. You’d think this was the point of hiring Vera for him (mysterious blindfold part not withstanding), and yet it is made clear that Walter is blowing off his chauffeurs & awaiting reception at Edgar’s. Well this guy is not making a great showing so far in my personal criminal scrapbook! (It’s just a report card with ‘EDGAR’ written across the top in big letters and then ‘all those other fools’ at the bottom.)

Hey let’s take a little trip back in time, shall we:

Me, March 13, 2019: “the first second episode ended with the big Nikoros performance, and the second second episode opens with a whole choreographed dance fantasy. if the third second episode doesn’t hinge midway on the filming of a full staged musical number courtesy of the movie industry plot I will be let down.”

Hey guess what Past Me! This show will not be letting you down! It was in the first episode not the second, but I think you’ll forgive that, if you’ll TAKE A LOOK, KINDLY:

Folks???? I love this. Holy shit. Gimme that PURE GRADE WEIMAR PERIOD GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM CINEMA ARE YOU KIDDING! There are no 90 degree angles to be found for love or money, every costume is drop-waisted, there’s a dance move at one point where you mime hanging yourself on a brass beat—ja ja ja ja!

And as far as substitutions for ‘Zu Asche, Zu Staub’ go, well nothing can touch ‘Zu Asche, Zu Staub’ it is a perfect song, but when the beat drops in ‘Wir sind uns lang verloren gegangen’? Oh for sure.

So let’s all raise a glass to Betty Winter, star of this new movie musical, may she rest in peace. For while the cameras roll, the PHANTOM OF THE TALKIES swoops in wearing some deeply hooded cloak, and commits an act of SABOTAGE upon a big honking old light up in the grid. Which comes tumbling down on our poor leading lady, snapping production to a halt.

A phone rings across town.

memory-for-trifles: EDGAR!!! I literally squealed, I missed you my fur-lapeled gentleman-criminal wellntruly: Oh the second Edgar appeared I was lost, just immediately praise-heckling him from the audience about his dapper looks. King of Berlin king of my heart! memory-for-trifles: Omg Edgar totally does invite viewer-participation, doesn’t he. Just hollering!

Anyway on this second watch of him pulling his coat on as he walks quickly out to his car, I’ve made the discovery that it’s not merely the lapels—the Edgar coat is completely lined in fur.

Good god what a gift of information.

Hey remember that moment in the very first episode of the series where Gereon and Charlotte just fully collided into each other at work? In an adorable throwback to that meet-cute, they reunite with Charlotte practically toppling into Gereon’s paternoster lift while trying to balance a stack of books. And they’re like oh excuse me, sorry! back and forth at each other and it’s almost excruciating how much I want them to kiss on the mouth, please. Her hands full, Charlotte keeps blowing at a lock of her hair that has fallen into her face until Gereon asks if he may, and when she nods, gently tucks it away for her. Céline Sciamma talking about the sexiness of consent.txt

Lotte trips off, almost literally, to go take her detecting exam she’s been studying for, leaving Gereon to be intercepted by Henning and whisked right off to the Babelsberg Film Studios for the case of the murdered actress. I was very excited about the prospect that perhaps “Babelsberg” was a reference to the Tower of Babel, and therefore a reference to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but in searching learned that Babelsberg is a real historic studio, and where Lang FILMED Metropolis. Ha ha scream (!)

Czerwinski comes along with them of course, Henning’s Guildenstern, and they pile Gräf in as well, yay!

memory-for-trifles: Just a car full of boys!

Gereon keep your eyes on the FUCKING ROAD, do not make me remind you!!!

But he will not, as Czerwinski, revealed to be a massive musical fan, is sadly showing them his autograph book for his idol Betty Winter, star of stage and screen, while Gereon quizzically looks to Gräf for confirmation that Betty’s husband Tristan Rot is queer. Gräf just shrugs hilariously like idk he doesn’t come to the meetings?, while Czerwinski in the back blithely affirms “Yes he is, but he loved her very much.” Gereon’s gay ass team…..bless.

They manage to make it to Babelsberg in one piece, to take us into a very delightful juxtaposition sequence: while the G.A.T. carries out their investigation of the crime scene, Lotte explains each of their steps aloud during her practical exam. It is so fun. Simple, effective, classically entertaining. “Gloves!” Gereon calls down to Henning and Czerwinski, while across town Lotte snaps hers on. “Very good, the gloves,” Gennat, Head of Homicide, remarks approvingly, while next to him Charlotte’s friend Doris, grins as she checks off the box on her clipboard. So fun!!

This is just a sidebar, and I have no way to explain it, but when the American actress Tilly Brooks said she was from Boston, the two Americans and a Columbian that formed our viewing party all instantly cracked up laughing. Did anyone else experience that? God we were just undone..

Anyway, things then take a turn for the not so fun. At first it’s looking great: Lotte has solved the test case of the fake murder, and gotten Gennat to laugh at two (2) of her jokes.

You’re sailing, girlfriend!

But then that wan Ulrich guy, everywhere all of a sudden, takes it upon himself to pause the proceedings right before Gennat was about to pass her, and starts nitpicking Charlotte about fingerprint whorls. She got the answer correct, but it comes out that she doesn’t really know all the latinate names for things, and he’s just like hm-m-m. The dude is LITERALLY going on about “minutiae,” the fucking irony.

memory-for-trifles: “Mee-noo-tzie-in” eat your heart out Andrew Robinson wellntruly: aldkfjalfjsdkffdk

And so our girl doesn’t pass. UGH. I mean, god I can’t help but feel that if she got fingerprint comparison right, what does it matter how she got there? This is the same part of me that has always found it so funny and wonderful that Charlotte Ritter has the usually male role of the ambitious, jokey loose cannon who doesn’t play by the rules. Remember how many places she just broke into in Season 1 in search of clues, and straight-laced Gereon and Stefan were just like Fräulein Ritter pls! But on the other hand, it is important to have the grounding in procedure and evidence processing. I’d rather have the police force have a rigorous screening process than the opposite, you know? But also no, fucking whatever, the dude who invented the method was fully ready to pass her, and Ulrich is so clearly just coming from a place of patronizing superiority, so no fuck you, just go put Walter’s hair in your keepsake box and stop preventing my babe’s upward career mobility!!

Speaking of Walter, he has finally deigned to show up at what would appear to be Edgar’s grand private compound, just like hey gang did ya miss me! Two cute little kinder run up to him, aw they are so tiny and he is so big! He gives the girl Vera’s earrings he had plucked off her ears, and oh we hated that, oh no thanks, we all said quite strongly! Edgar pulls Walter into a close hug, tells him “Welcome home,” and immediately drags him off to Moka Efti to talk privately—but not before another new character, a tall striking woman named Esther, also bids Walter welcome home, with a cool touch of her thumb to the corner of his mouth. Well we will sure be pursuing all this at greater length in future episodes! Always exciting to be unclear on the nature of a whole constellation of relationships when you’re first introduced to them. Means that no matter what, they are gonna be interesting ones.

Over at the stock exchange, Nyssen AG, represented by the steely (hah) Annemarie Nyssen and her large adult son Alfred, listen to a happy banker promise them that prosperity is raining down upon Germany and the sun will never come out again! Or no…a good-sounding metaphor instead! Money! Buy stocks? Mrs. Nyssen puts down a cool $45 mil, American, and Alfred, increasingly contemplative, drives off with their personal accountant or lawyer or whatever is the role of this faintly amusing rabbitish man called Wegener.

“You see, Wegener,” Nyssen muses, “I am someone who is seeing a mad-doctor. He says he is a ‘psychotherapist’.” Wow let’s get ‘psychotherapist’ in German shall we! Oh my god it’s just Psychotherapeut. What the hell happened to the sounds between here and there!!! Sorry, apologies—Nyssen, continuing, in what I have to say is a typically phenomenal piece of acting by Lars Eidinger, goes on to describe the states of his that his therapist calls manic, and the ones he calls depressive.

This is the kind of character development announcement where you just breathe out “ohh totally.”

Popping some of his 1920s lithium this “mad-doctor” has prescribed to meliorate the swings, Nyssen, still with this incredible bright-eyed yet distant affect, informs Wegener that he knows when his manic spells are coming on because he suddenly sees that everything is connected. Right now, he is seeing his own mania in the stock market. A rising rising rising, that will lead to a crash. This is fascinating.

Anyway, memory-for-trifles: Please tell me Nyssen is seeing Dr. Schmanno wellntruly: If it was not Dr. Schmanno who diagnosed Nyssen with interwar bipolar disorder what is the point

Interlude where Helga receives an order of curtains. She’s nesting. Then while hanging them she momentarily feels faint. It is amazing how little you need to see know a character is pregnant.

At the restaurant that essentially serves as the Polizei’s secondary office, Lotte is snarfing lunch and reporting to Gereon how she was failed on a technicality. “Because of the minutes?” Gereon asks. “Minutiae,” she corrects. Oh my christ. Pass her right now.

Lotte: “Doris told me all the male candidates passed and they were a lot worse.” My friend Carolina: “Fuck that!” Gereon: “So you need to be better.” My friend Carolina: “Fuck you Gereon!!!”

Lotte, very put out and frustrated that she has to wait a whole other year to retake the test and graduate from assistant inspector to full detective, grouses—probably rightfully!—that they just don’t want any women in the department. “I do,” Gereon says simply, and Lotte just sighs.

Me: “Gereon walk back into frame.”

Carolina: [laughing] Me: “There ya go.”

Gereon advises her to just back to work, with him. He needs her, crime scene authority or no. Now let’s go see the Betty Winter footage Gräf has developed.

As they also file in for the accidental snuff film screening, Gennat is chastising Ulrich for being unnecessarily persnickety with Charlotte about terminology. “Precision is important,” Gennat says, “but pettiness is harmful.” Oh I like him. This man can stay in charge of homicide.

Aw and look at my cuties all perched in the front row. Like, how do you not look at this little team and be filled with confidence.

Meanwhile, Edgar is showing Walter just what it is he wanted him to see.

me: [sharp gasp] memory-for-trifles: Who dares fuck with Moka Efti?!?!

Because oh ho, fucked with it has been. The nightclub is currently inoperable, leaks and damage everywhere, the neon monocle man wavering—oh nooo Edgar your good branding! It was all caused by an explosion in the main water pipe, definitely not an accident. Edgar then begins listing all the misfortunes that have also been befalling his film production, from the very start: broken equipment, a fire, things going missing. And of course, the sabotaged light, the evidence of which he’d hidden before the inspectors arrived—because accidents will be covered by insurance, but if Betty Winter’s death is deemed a murder? That shuts down the production, and there goes every cent they’ve sunk into it.

memory-for-trifles: I would *love* to know the German word for “shitload”

Well interestingly, it appears that was a liberty taken by the English translator! He just repeats “Richtig hoch”, “really high” or thereabouts. Hey German pals, do you even have the construction “a shitload” to mean “a lot”, a whole fucking lot?

Incidentally, here’s some other things that are presently A Lot: - this old timey pregnancy test procedure of injecting your urine into a mouse and seeing if she ovulates??? - the women’s prison just building a dang GALLOWS right there in the exercise yard - a timeshare lease situation where you take over an apartment at 7pm each night and give the keys back to the day tenant in the morning

That last being Lotte & Toni’s tenuous little living situation these days. Yaayyy they’re out of the sad den of assholes! But oh man gals, hope this rent is dang cheap! At least the bartender who manages the key handoff seems pretty cool: while Lotte waits for her sister he just casually pours her a free shot as they shoot the breeze about the roommate she’s never seen. It’s a pretty nice, homey vibe, all things considered.

And when the girls get up to their shared room to find dirty dishes and laundry everywhere, our indomitable darlings of Berlin just put on a record on the guy’s gramophone and dance around while tossing all his mess into a pile for him to deal with later.

memory-for-trifles: This song fuckin’ rules, bring this back to the club. Also: fuck this scene is cute wellntruly: Are you referring to Weimar Wanda Jackson singing about women’s emancipation because hell yeah

Hell yeah.

Gereon is also finally getting home this evening, only he doesn’t quite stick the landing. Instead he just gazes up at the windows for a moment while inside Helga smokes broodingly, then kind of hauntedly moves off down the dark street instead of going up. [sadly] Oh Gereon, what’s going on here buddy.

At the end of an empty stretch of paving stones stands a pole.

Holy fuck What?

This is so strange, surreal like the beginning, my nerves are jumping!! Gereon Rath begins to climb down a ladder leading under the sidewalk, and at the bottom��.

THERE HE IS. THERE HE IS. Anno “Schmidt” Rath and his LITERALLY UNDERGROUND RADIO SHOW. Psychotherapy Hour with your host, Your Long Lost Brother. Everyone’s long lost brother. Don’t worry if you don’t have a brother, listeners—I’m your brother now. I’m here for you.

He has a guest tonight, he tells the radio waves, “let’s call him ‘Siegfried’.” WE’LL COME BACK TO THIS LATER OKAY. ‘Siegfried’ [scream] will be an illustration of “how much man tends to get tangled up in lies and self-deception, simply out of the desire to make sense of the incomprehensible things that happen to him.” You mean like any of this, Schmanno, you mean like the incomprehensible fact of being secretly drugged and treated for trauma without your knowledge by the sibling who’ve thought dead for twelve years and now he’s your therapist but you only meet at night, on air??

Schmanno’s current therapeutic approach is to ask Gereon questions he is supposed to answer automatically, without thinking. Do you love the sea? Yes. & etc. Do you love you father? Yes. WRONG, Schmanno swiftly slaps him, and again.

“Why are you crying?” Dr. Schmidt asks. “I don’t know,” Gereon cries. “Your tears are distracting. Why are you crying?” “Because…it hurts.” “Correct.” Fuck.

Schmanno now asks if he desires other women, Gereon says yes. He asks if he desires the women he lives with, and Gereon says yes, then no, with a confused frown. Ah, ahh what the fuck..!

“Because I am lying to her,” Gereon explains. “Why do you have to lie to her?” “Because he’s demanding me to.”

This was the point where I completely lost it. “This is so fucked,” I whispered urgently to no one in particular, eyes huge.

I don’t remember where in this I took this screenshot. It could have been anywhere. Those lashes.

But then—“Who is ‘he’?” Schmanno asks, calmly. “My brother.” “Where is your brother?” No answer. “Where is your brother?” Anno demands. Shaking, staring right at him, Gereon answers: “My brother is dead.” “Is that the truth?” “Yes.” “What is demanded of you?” “To tell the truth.”

I-!! I?? Under Anno’s hand, Gereon gets marched right back around: his brother is dead, and so he is not lying to Helga. This is the Truth his doctor wants to impress on him. But some part of Gereon still knows that it’s not right. Still he is losing her.

“You’re not losing her,” Schmanno corrects. “Because she’s not yours.” Oh y’know I can’t fault that one actually.

“You can’t lose anything, because you don’t own anything. You’re not afraid, because you can’t lose anything.” Huh! Huh? Huh..

memory-for-trifles: Why is his therapy...kind of good?! Like it isn’t, but kinda?? I feel like kombucha girl watching this scene

youtube

wellntruly: HOOTING. That’s it that’s the feel exactly!!!!!!!

“You’ve embarked on a journey, Siegfried,” Anno, Dr. Schmidt, intones, “on a journey to the light.”

“To the truth, to the light,” they repeat together in the pitch black night.

As does everyone back in the clinic, listening to this!

W h a t. What are you doing ! Are your aims with Gereon like, integrated with your aims with everyone else? Ancillary but complementary? And what ARE your aims? I have no idea what you want Anno Schmidt and it makes me feel very high key!

Welcome back, to B A B Y L O N

— • — • —

Seasons 1 & 2 MASTERPOST

All everything, past & future: #Babylon Berlin Blogging

#Babylon Berlin #Babylon Berlin Blogging #TARRA RECAPS STUFF #Babylon Berlin spoilers #BB S3 Recaps

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wellntruly · 4 years

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BABYLON BERLIN | Season 3, Episode 2 Recap

This was the last episode I watched earlier this month with my friends who’d come over for a Babylon Berlin party, though not the last episode I watched that particular evening---there would be one more, at maximum late night tipsiness.

But first, THIS venture:

Season 3, Episode Two

A grim beginning in the women’s prison. The platform they were building last episode turns out to be for executions by beheading, damn. We also learn that the communist doctor is serving time here, too. Her exact crime is not something that is specified, but I can’t say I’m surprised she wound up here given that her pre-jail lifestyle including such things as putting Gereon up against a wall to semi-formally execute him just right out there in the street. I mean sure organized crime kinda runs these streets, but in fact it was organized crime itself in this case who stepped up and went, no how about we don’t. We don’t do that. Not in Scamander’s river.

And so, Gereon Rath would live to see another grim morning of his own. Turns out he is not the only one who feels his partner in this relationship is slipping away: Helga feels the same way about him, and holds him up on his way out the door to try to get a proper goodbye kiss.

@memory-for-trifles: Girl that is the kind of kiss I give my old Italian relatives. Try again. memory-for-trifles moments later, possibly regretting that admonition: GEREON. Damn put this poor woman out of her misery!

Hands up, so who else was basically WHITE-KNUCKLING IT through this awful hallway sex scene! All three of us at my little watch party, can confirm!! Oh this is simply not good. You Must Break Up!

After this just terrible hall humping that gets no one anywhere, Helga fetches a glass of water and quietly considers just how bad things have gotten. It’s only been three months but it feels like a year. The child Moritz has practically doubled in size, though admittedly that’s kinda just how tween boys are.

“Gereon,” she asks, suddenly intent on this most immediate problem in front of her. “What’s going on? What is happening with you?”

Gereon:

o.o

“He’s coming between us again,” Helga realizes, which is in reality a pretty tame way to describe this present PSYCHOSEXUAL MINDFUCK, but yeah. Gereon just twitches once, and walks out the door.

You! Must! Break! Up!

The vibes are much more chill and like, cool, just Cool, over with Walter and Esther this morning. The gramophone is playing, Esther’s casually smoking at the breakfast table in her peach pajams...

Just with her knee up at the table yet still elegant, man I love her so readily!

So does Walter, clearly, and so does she toward him, but when they move close together, she warns with low worry: “He’s gotten worse since you’ve been gone.” Ooo I love this style of thing, whom?? Edgar, surely? Ah what is going on! And why doesn’t he want her to sing anymore…I’m so..intrigued.

“Kiss me” sounds virtually interchangeable between English and German, which is great news if I need to seduce some Germans.

But by the time Edgar walks in for breakfast, they are out of each other’s arms and sitting separately at his left and right hand. Before he takes his seat at the head of the table, Edgar quietly lifts the needle off the record.

!!! AH! Okay so definitely Esther singing on the record (smokey~), definitely Edgar who doesn’t want her performing, but yet she’s with Walter, but yet it’s morning...they all live together here in this house, and the exact relationships between the three of them I still….???!!

ME TOOO

Meanwhile, the trial of Greta Overbeck is getting underway. Aw, friends, Benda. Benda! I miss him so much. Benda and his sweet little daughter… A tragedy.

After he and Greta share a still, enigmatic look with one another in the courtroom that I found quite moving, Gereon departs with Benda’s widow, dressed in just a haunting amount of black lace and layers. Despite her rather harsh and definitive tone in the courtroom where she states Greta to be a literal emissary of the devil, in private we learn that she and Gereon both know that Greta was put up to this by two Nazi boys, whom Gereon has faithfully promised to Frau Benda that he will find.

memory-for-trifles: I hope Fr*tz fuckin gets his

F*cking…..

As Gereon continues to make his way in to work, we get a moment for perhaps my favorite Babylon Berlin sub-genre: Detective Rath offhandedly gets nearly run over by a car, no plot relevance. Just kills me. They take the time to block these little scenes of Vehicle v. Volker, for no reason other than their own enjoyment! And mine.

Unsquashed, for now, Gereon drops by the Central Archives to take a look at the transcripts of Greta’s interrogation. But he is met with a bad surprise: all of the documents related to the Benda case have been sealed, viewable only by permission. Can you guess who ordered this.

memory-for-trifles: Wendt.....fuck this guy completely

Councillor Wendt, whom we recall benefited handsomely from Benda’s murder due to taking his job as head of the Political Police, is now currently on a mission to oust Commissioner Zörgiebel as well. Wendt urges him to resign to save his department more legal cases about the First of May debacle, when the police shot those Communist protestors. Zörgiebel urges Wendt to get the fuck out of his office.

Wendt goes, passing a politely glowering Gereon at the door (Glowereon). Zörgiebel’s like well I could use a drink, and before Gereon can be like sir isn’t it the morning, Zörgiebel straight collapses on the floor, so that drink ends up being water instead. He has bad circulation, he says. I say: OH GOD DON’T DIE IN OFFICE, not with Wendt prowling around!

“I’ve weathered many a storm in this house,” Zörgiebel says to Gereon, gazing into the middle distance, “but this…”

“What do you mean?” Gereon asks.

Zörgiebel, sadly: “That I miss Councilor Benda.” 💔

Saaaaame, says me and Gereon’s jaw. He tells Zörgiebel this is why he’s here: he wants permission to look into the case of their murdered colleague & friend, because! : “I don’t trust Councilor Wendt any more than you do.” Thank god, I knew you were Benda’s Man, Gereon! You didn’t take Wendt’s offer at the end of last season! In fact, you've got this discount Diels in your sights. Get wreckt Wendt.

With this intra-Polizei intrigue starting to rattle forward, the music clicks along plottily at Gereon’s heels as he finally makes it into homicide. His team has been busy, procuring all sorts of folks related to the Betty Winter case, including the producer walking in with Charlotte now. Gereon hurriedly confers with Czerwinski all alright who am I going to be talking to again, and precious Czerwinski just goes: “Bellman. The great Jo Bellman.” This major fan.

Turns out this other fellow they brought in is not the missing electrician they’re after, but with Bellman’s help and this guy’s too actually, they’re getting closer. Hopeful, (desperate), Bellman asks for the insurance sign-off in the meantime, and Gereon’s just like ooo too soon.

As poor Bellman considers how he’s gonna break this news to the Armenian, Charlotte notices her older sister Ilse outside the office, come bearing the following pieces of plot information: 1) their Polish neighbor who was friends with their mom has something for her that she needs to come pick up, and 2) Isle has something wrong with her eye, quite obviously from being hit by her no-good scoundrel of a husband.

Someone else is waiting in the hallway as well: the actress Tilly Brooks, Miss Boston, whom the gang had called in after they noticed her noticing something in the film footage.

Tilly, full Americanly: “Detective.” Gereon, with a big nervous grin: “Yes. Of Coursze. [collapsing back into German] I need to ask you a question.” Oh I am having such a good time already.

But before he can get to his query, Tilly’s like hey didn’t we meet one night when you were really fucked up? and Gereon’s like well you’ll need to be more specific, and Tilly just sweeps her hat off her had and stage whispers dramatically:

Aaaaahhahahahaha. God, and I’ll be damned this show NEVER forgets a character!!! Beautiful, gorgeous.

Anyway Tilly just laughs companionably and goes “Don’t panic, [in German] I won’t tell,” with a big jokesy finger to her lips. She’s wearing a coat of green triangles and a necklace made of tiny wooden dice. I think I love her.

Gereon finds her a bit stressful, but that’s your problem, dude. Trying to focus on the task at hand, he asks her what it was she saw up in the rafters after the light fell. Fucking Tilly just lowers her chin and whispers from under her eyebrows: “Einen Geist.” A ghoooooost!! Hahahahaaaa

Gereon, FLOUNDERING at this, asks if she can give him like, a visual of, what…? And Tilly just goes, and I quote: “[German] He was wearing a cloak…[English] like, like a regular ghost you know?”

I’m bustin’ up.

At this point Gereon has maxed out on the amount of startling things he can handle in a five minute period, so gratefully grabs Charlotte as she walks by to take Tilly to a sketch artist to describe this suspect. Here let me preview this useful drawing: 👻

Leaving ghosts for monsters, Gereon heads off to try to find out what Wendt is up to. His way of doing this is apparently to just walk right up on the tea party Wendt’s having with his bros and be like [hatefully] hi.

Literally Wendt: “Work lunch in the sun. You could have had that too, if you’d said yes to the Internal Review Division.” This could be us but you playin. Actually that’s really just Wendt’s whole message of this conversation.

Back to the police headquarters!

Where we get to see THIS PNEUMATIC TUBE THING OH MY GOSH. For inter-departmental notes??? I want to see this in a plot!!

Tellingly, Tilly speaks only German with Charlotte, so she’s deliberately pinging between German and English with Gereon, that’s her move. I am dazzled by this flirting technique. Anyway, somehow not flirting with Lotte when given the opportunity, Tilly tells her that Betty Winter and Tristan Rot did not in fact have the happy lavender marriage Czerwinski believes in, but reports they used to argue quite violently about whether or not they were going to move to America.

Meanwhile, the police artist finishes up the sketch.

Ulrich, passing behind his shoulder: “Who’s this?” Sketch artist: “A suspect in the Betty Winter case.”

Have U Seen Him Around???

As Toni waits for Charlotte to join her for lunch at Aschinger, House Edgar is sitting down to dine with two new people to throw into the mix. But their presence is going to illuminate one key aspect of our trio: we learn this new man is a banker, who lent Edgar a neat million to finance this film project, out of familial affection the banker holds for his wife’s sister, Esther, Edgar’s wife. WHAT !

memory-for-trifles: Edgar....wife....those are his children?!?!?!?! wellntruly: It’s like you were here with us—we were *also* SO startled to realize Esther is Edgar’s wife!! I’m guessing because he just gives off such a solitary singleton vibe, contrasted to someone like Walter who creates the sort of impression where I would 100% expect him to have like, 2.5 romantic partners of various legal status, none of whom know about each other. memory-for-trifles: He does seem like a lone wolf rather!

But now Edgar is taking on more of the hue of a papa bear defending his family, as he stares at this banker brother-in-law, whose name I have not caught, with his accusatory implications that Edgar is somehow responsible for what happened to Betty Winter, as he assumes Edgar didn’t keep this film venture on the up-and-up. When in fact, it actually appears that he had really been trying to do this one legitimately, probably out of deference to Esther, whom we learn here had encouraged her husband to get into the movie business. However, Edgar is fully ready to go mobster on it all NOW, now that he’s being fucked with from all directions.

“If my word doesn’t bear any importance to you, I won’t say another word to you,” Edgar says. “You will find out about our other ways of communication, and then, any contact between my family and yours will end.”

“Any plans for the weekend?” Esther’s sister asks her after a moment of silence. Esther just languorously blows cigarette smoke toward her face. Lol Esther. Okay it is becoming powerfully obvious in every way why Edgar married you.

Honestly, what’s always been one of my favorite things about Edgar’s vibe is that he runs essentially a sex empire but he himself remains a kind of chaste figure in the midst of it. Like the Abbot of the Night Club or something. I’m so into it. Him being married is less interesting than if he were single and still like this, but being calmly monogamous is still so fun for the Lord of Gangland. I find I am also so into this. Edgar really is canon!Hades, it’s incredible.

Hey remember earlier when Helga made a call from a phone booth? You don’t because I didn’t mention it. We are now learning what that was about: she was evidently reaching out to ~someone~ about finding a place to stay. It’s Alfred Nyssen. They’re not gonna come out and say it yet, but we all know. We saw her go meet with him for dinner at the end of the last season after she confronted him for being an arms dealer in her war widows speech, we saw her in the flash-forward at the beginning of this season standing with him at a window on a high floor at the stock exchange as the rest of the world fell down, and honestly just who else has got the marks for this rich ass hotel she finds herself in now.

Every possible material in this room that could be William Morris is Williams Morris, a fact I have a familiar relationship to given that I personally have this wallpaper as a dress.

How’s YOUR Babylon Berlin fandom going, *I* can cosplay as HELGA'S HOTEL SUITE

Hahahaahhhh my god

Elsewhere, out in the bright autumn air, some Hitler Youth arrive upon Moritz’s Catholic volunteer group, announcing themselves by firing an arrow into a wheelbarrow a foot or so from his head. Tall Moritz is like what the fuck you could have hit me?, and it is a spectacularly strange moment for me as I realize I’m on Moritz’s side in a situation. [slight shudder] Weird.

Shooting bows & arrows obviously seems way cooler than raking leaves to the youth Moritz, and so as soon as they let him have a go with the bow, he just swaps his allegiance right then and there. We are all shocked™. Anyway if you need me it’s gonna take me several minutes more to get over that Pope in German sounds like “Pops”

Charlotte finally makes it to the restaurant after getting her drawing of a Ringwraith, but the kind elderly waiter informs her Toni is long gone. She goes to join Gereon instead, brooding in a corner unnoticing, until she just chirps “Herr Kommissar?” to raise his eyes. It kills me btw that a direct translation of ‘detective’ is just like, Mister Inspector.

Taking the proffered seat, Lotte rattles off her updates on the case while Gereon lights her a cigarette and distantly goes “hm” occasionally.

How you’re not paying closer attention to this Angel of Aschinger is beyond me, Rath.

Finally Lotte’s like oKay, what troubles you Mister Inspector. Wendt troubles him. Charlotte we have to get this asshole. He’s having evil luncheons just out in the sunshine and blaming every cloud on the Communists. We have to talk to Greta.

In fact, Wendt himself also needs to talk to Greta, as he has promised his horse racing buddy, a man he simply calls “Lieutenant,” that he’s going to get the NSDAP out of Greta’s testimony. NSDAP = Nazis, for anyone unfamiliar with the one million acronyms of Weimar Berlin politics. Lieutenant is part of the Party, and frustrated that Greta is still accusing his men. Oh incidentally, Fritz is here as a stable boy going by the name of Richard. Oh fuuck no. Fucking….F***z

Meanwhile in Babelsberg, Edgar and Walter are paying a visit to The Great Jo Bellman to make sure this production keeps rolling. As in rolling film. As in if we don’t finish this movie and make our money back we’re out a million we don’t have. The Not-Doing-So-GREAT-These-Days Bellman is like, but, the lead actress is dead..? As the inherent problem here does not seem to be having the desired impact on them, Bellman suggests maybe Edgar’s wife can explain how movies work?, and Edgar’s just like You Leave Her Out of Thisss!

Walter asks to see Bellman’s hand. Well that’s an immediate ruh-roh! What you would expect to happen happens. Knife through the palm, to drive home the point: restart the shoot tomorrow.

An interesting little juxtaposition now with Esther getting high at home and reminiscing about her performing days, while Lotte & Toni lie in bed and talk about how someday they’re gonna run the world—or at least end up better off than where they came from. There’s something kinda delicate here about dreams, past & future intertwined. I like how both have to do with like, purpose and personhood and your Work, for these three women in 1929. Maybe that she lacks this narrative independence and individuality is why I always struggle a bit connecting to Helga, as it seems that once again her story is inextricably tied to the men in her life. Embodying a sort of meta rage at this, if you want to see it that way, she hurls a glass against a wall alone in her kitchen.

Meanwhile, because he never sleeps, Gereon is hunting down the missing lighting tech. “Berlin PD,” he introduces himself as the electrician fits his key to his door, and is promptly shoved onto the stairs as the suspect runs off. See this is one of the problems of your chief detective being thisbig.

But while he may be small, he is undaunted! The chase is on. At least this time Gereon narrowly avoiding getting hit by a car is marginally more plot relevant. Running pell mell into a chicken cart is on him though. At last he just uses his size to his advantage and pops up onto the running board of a passing vehicle, and uses it to ferry him after his quarry, still running down the sidewalk.

me: “It’s gonna be really fun when he’s in front of you.” me: “It is!”

Gereon just starts interrogating the man in the car, because there are no rules I guess. The electrician is very agitated, and clearly in over his head. He confesses that he was hired to sabotage the shoot, but not to kill anybody! All he did was mess with equipment, he never would have tried to kill Betty Winter. Literally: “[sadly] It wasn’t supposed to be like that.” Aw, buddy.

“Who hired you?” Gereon demands, but it is at that moment that another car very deliberately pulls up right alongside his own, real close. The driver just frowns at them, between funny and disconcerting. And when Gereon turns back around, the electrician is shot through the head by someone on the sidewalk! And Gereon can’t get out because the other car is trapping his door!!! neat!, but outside the passenger window, he glimpses:

A regular GEIST! Ahh ha ha haha ha!

memory-for-trifles: Lol at this masked gentleman

— • — • —

Season 3 Recaps - Episode 1

Seasons 1 & 2 MASTERPOST

All everything, past & future: #Babylon Berlin Blogging

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wellntruly · 4 years

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BABYLON BERLIN | Season 3, Episode 3 Recap

Me, Feb 22, 2019, detailing my Weimar Period Wish List for Season 3: “I need more cafés, man, bohemian cafés! Katelbach encamped in one, full of people reading all the Berlin newspapers…”

This episode of Babylon Berlin: You ready to lose your mind, sugar

All this, and more!!! In:

Season 3, Episode Three

In case we had begun to wonder if it had been just a surreal figment of our imagination, this opener is only too happy to remind us that Gereon is indeed spending his nights regularly receiving underground therapy from a doctor/relation who, frankly, we don’t fucking know. Who is this man? These are just some of our questions.

@memory-for-trifles: Is Dr. Schmanno the Phantom of the Psychotherapie? Scarred face, tunnels, hypnotic voice... wellntruly: Phantoms EVERYWHERE this season!

What we can know is that you spreading your hand over the back of his neck to steer him is r e a l chill, bro.

Topside, in the pale light of morning, Gereon drifts sickly on the couch, arms out along the back as if searching for anchor, cryptic shit about ‘suffering’ and ‘invulnerability’ echoing through his mind.

Helga walks in on…*this*. Oh no.

She asks him where he’s been all night, he doesn’t say anything. She asks him to talk to her, he doesn’t say anything. (He doesn’t lie; he doesn’t say anything.)

What’s actually really remarkable here and what I can’t help but focus on, is that Helga already had the bags and Moritz all packed up and ready to go in the foyer. The woman was fully prepared to follow through on her Speak Or I’ll Go ultimatum, and does, just like that. Honestly I’m proud of her, that was an impressive move.

Meanwhile, at the Tempo newspaper offices: KatelBACK, bitches!

Love him, love this for us, love these framed caricatures the editor has behind his desk:

Adorbs

“Have you had breakfast, gentlemen?” the editor calls out after he gets off a rapid phone call, and then just starts slinging hardboiled eggs at people. Katelbach slips and drops his onto the uncleaned carpet; no one gives a shit. This unhinged newsroom energy,,…..extremely accurate. I’m hearteyes.

Alright so we’re gonna be covering a good deal of info in this scene, which they have handily handed to fast-talking journalist types. Let’s begin! Katelbach is working on a story that appears to be the big political kerfuffle Gereon was investigating last year: the German military’s secret illegal rearmament (Treaty of Versaille, blah blah blah look into it). But without ein Foto of this clandestine airfield Lufthansa is allegedly supplying, the editor is not gonna let Katelbach’s piece take the front page place of his prime story, the rip-roaring tale of the death of starlet Betty Winter, the kind of salacious scoop that is currently flying his paper off the newsstands. The lead on said Betty Winter angle is the high-foreheaded glasses man who had earlier called over to Gräf for deets outside the studio—calling him ‘Reinhold’ in the process, which, let’s not get too familiar, buddy. But we can call him: Jacoby. Describing, if you can believe it, his true crime story: “It’s about the inner turmoil of modern man, ignes fatui between archaic blood sausage and high sophistication,” Jacoby relays as he trips lightly down the stairs behind the editor, somehow not tripping over that pitch in the process.

“I want an article about the colorful world of film and its abysses, without a theoretical overhang,” the editor cajoles hilariously. Now if you’ll excuse him he has to go meet with the lawyer Hans Litten, who has been coming up a lot in conversation so far this season, though yet to be seen.

Speaking of seeing, Katelbach grumbles to Jacoby about this demand for pictures pictures pictures, since when has it been pics or it didn’t happen? “We used to have readers, now we have lookers. If people want to see pictures, they should go to the cinema. Goodbye.” And he’s just OUT, not even waiting for a rejoinder, god I laughed.

Jacoby to himself: can I offer you an egg in these exciting times?

Also Jacoby: why that would be lovely!

Over at police headquarters, Gereon broods distractedly in his office, Ulrich bobs around excitedly informing tired people he’s going to analyze the ballistics evidence in the death of the lighting tech, and distantly in the background Czerwinski struggles to fold an umbrella for about a minute.

Someone who is starting to show up more and more is a pale, long-faced Berlin PD man whom we can assume did take Wendt’s offer to join him, for all the good these en plein air business lunches are doing to make him look more alive. He has currently betaken his spectral form to an orphanage, where like some sort of bureaucratic grim reaper, he informs a kindly old nun and/or nurse that Councilor Wendt is taking over custody of the infant child of Greta Overbeck. Uh oh, looks like that little kid is going to become collateral :(

EXTERIOR: BABELSBERG FILM STUDIO. Distantly, we hear (or see, in my case) someone greet an approaching car with “Hello, Mrs. Kasabian.”

!!!!!!!!

Esther & Edgar KASABIAN. EDGAR OCTOPUS’S REAL SURNAME IS KASABIAN. Friends when I tell you I’ve been waiting 18 episodes!!!

And fuck would you LOOK at Esther Kasabian!! She’s wearing a whole raven.

“He’ll kill me, your husband,” Bellman says wretchedly as he pours her a drink. “Or his wannabe.” Lol. Jo the man stabbed you.

Esther just casually reassures him Edgar’s not gonna kill him, clam down. And when Bellman continues urging her to “rescue me from this beast” (!), she says, still calmly but a little more firmly: “Stop that.” He’s her Beast of Berlin, and reminds Bellman that when he had been begging around for money for his film, it was Esther—and Edgar—who had come through for him.

“The Beast made it possible. You knew who he was when you took his money.” God I love that. Bellman just nods; he did.

But the thing is: Esther knew who Bellman was, too, when she convinced Edgar to invest in his movie. Jo Bellman is the producer who once, when faced with a production crisis, had replaced an entire orchestra with a theremin. God bless. Oh fucking bless. And of course, Esther also reminds him, Bellman knows who she is as well: it was her idea back on their project in Vienna of how to change the libretto, that had made using a theremin possible. Just let her look over the material they’ve shot so far, and she’ll talk to her husband, and they’ll get this figured out. Oh this mediating, this artistic managing.

memory-for-trifles: I’m obsessed with Esther, her aesthetique....is everything wellntruly: Esther seems to be the Weimar Gwen Verdon and I am extraordinarily pro that

EXTRAORDINARILY PRO THAT

Back with the Polizei, Gennat, who apparently fully lives in his office, is shaving in front of a little mirror-fronted piece of furniture as Gereon updates him on what he learned from Felix Krempin, truncated as their conversation may have been, by Murder. “He was ready to spill the beans,” is the phrase Gereon surely doesn’t actually ruefully say in the original German??!

Gennat’s just like well it is what is, who can we turn to next? the husband? Oh please yes.

The amount of ambiguity packed into that sentence + image, delicious.

Finished with his morning ablutions, Gennat then, in a gesture of charming avuncular caretaking and complete insanity, cuts and hands Gereon a slice of cake as big as he is. OH what! Sir?? So let me get this straight: Gereon’s two bosses partake in breakfasts of BOOZE and CAKE, respectively. Well this bodes well for the longevity of the Berlin homicide department.

Trying to figure out what ties these two murders together, Gereon observes that the manner of the electrician’s death points to more of an organized structure behind this than something simple like another performer being jealous of Betty Winter. Around a forkful of chocolate and whipped cream, Gennat directs Gereon to a stack of papers on his desk.

I’M FUCKING CRYING. I literally just flapped my hands, tears in my eyes!! His still Buster Keaton face, with “CRIME TELEPATHY” just across his forehead like a fucking MEME or something, hoooooo my god I keep breaking down laughing---

Whewwww, okay, okay: what Gennat actually wanted to point him to was his motives record, where he keeps track of all the crimes & why. Then he folds up his HIDDEN FILING CABINET MURPHY BED (🙌this king), and bustles Gereon off to the press conference where he is in fact delivering his annual report of these particular findings.

Gennat has structured his categories around the Seven Deadly Sins, which is smart, memorable. Greed and Revenge are highest, followed by Jealousy and Lust, that last making a surge as of late. At this, Henning sculpts a little paperclip dick & balls and waggles it jovially. Czerwinski snorts and grins up to Lotte behind them to share in the joke (CUTE, teammates, they love her!), and Lotte snorts too and looks to Gereon to keep passing along the fun, only to be met with him minutely shaking his head at all of them (memory-for-trifles: doing *this* with his eyebrows). Hahaa wonderful. Gereon Rath is such a good illustration of how just because someone sleeps around doesn’t mean they’re not a prude.

“And as you can see—” Gennat concludes, with a proud tap to his belly with both hands, “Gluttony is the only deadly sin which doesn’t bear any weight for our department.” A double joke! Everyone laughs appreciably, as they should. Hopefully their goodwill toward him for that quote will carry him through then refusing to answer any Betty Winter questions to the ensuing melee of eager journalists.

The real takeaway from all this of course is that at one point Gennat said “sehr sehr”, possibly my favorite German phrase to hear someone say. WHY DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

Across town, Helga has taken Moritz to the hotel room held under her maiden name. “Fancy pad,” Moritz pronounces. “This works.” A sudden relief breaking over her, Helga starts giggling, and her kid follows suit. Okay this move is already better for her! We’ll deal with the Nyssen of it all LATER.

Though speaking of him: following his employer’s suspicions about the current stock craze, Wegener obtains a list of investors from somewhere or other, and goes around conducting a survey. What he is in fact doing is: conducting a survey. It’s a one-to-one upfront ruse. And his distressing discovery is that so many people from all walks of life, from bakers to retirees to that prissy fellow inspector in Gereon’s department, have invested thousands, tens of thousands of reichsmarks, that none of them had—they all took the sum on loan from the banks.

Wegener’s collection of increasingly “oh fuck!” faces

Over at the prison, Wendt has arrived to strong-arm Greta into changing her testimony. Alone in the visitor room, he urges her to come over by the window and step into the sun for a moment. Wendt keeps trying to offer people sunlight this season, as if they’re all Victorian Londoners choked with smog or something. Of course the “sunlight” he keeps doling out is actually as poisoned as those clouds, as Greta opens her eyes to see that down in the yard stands that tall thin man with a nurse, holding her chubby little baby. “Nein,” Greta cries. It’s very upsetting!

Down in his room at the bottom of the stairs, Ulrich is sifting through ballistics patterns, and suddenly there it is: a perfect match to the gun that killed the electrician. Elated, he rushes upstairs, and when Gereon is not in his office, barges straight into a meeting Gennat is holding in his office. This does not go over well!! Sternly, Gennat reminds him that they follow the chain of command for a reason, so please report your findings to the detective in charge of the case and stop interrupting the Head of Homicide with things that aren’t emergencies.

Ulrich is like: [offended] Ulrich is like, icily: “I beg your pardon.”

Walking back downstairs, he sees a massive stag horn beetle squirming on its back on the tiles, and picks it up. In the next shot he’s peering at the beetle now dead on a pin. WELL there’s a lot of information about Ulrich in that little packet! He asks his assistant if he believes in coincidence, and the kid says no, he believes in “the system.” “That’s why you work with me,” Ulrich praises him, as he quietly tucks the ballistics evidence into his bag. Well well WELL well well.

I wish I could include an audio sample or something to express the sound I made, both arms flung up straight in the air, at the reveal of Katelbach taking coffee in the Café Romanche surrounded by all the newspapers.

Do you ever wish something so precisely and then it happens and you feel like you’ve momentarily broken through into a world of magic? Me at this!!!

And what’s more, he’s there to pull off a clandestine document drop!! SPYCRAFT, in the café, I’m gonna die. Here’s the move: Katelbach requests to read a paper that’s already in the hands of another patron, and when the waiter brings it over, on its wooden reading frame thing (!!! ahh outmoded old timey objects), inside the pages is slipped some secret blueprints of his illegal airfield. And he and the other gentleman just slyly nod at each other like

Halp me

LOCATION: BABELSBERG. Gereon and Charlotte pull up to the studio right as Bellman is walking down the line of Betty Winter hopefuls and making the first cut, all Yes, No, No, Sure, and “For crying out loud, can you at least pretend to make an effort? That’s not even Betty’s hair color! Get out!” Jeez, chill, Tyra.

But he won’t just yet, because someone ELSE is also arriving on set right now. Finally, finally, Tristan Rot makes his goth ass entrance.

Here he is dramatically shielding himself from the producers anxiously rushing up to him, and also MY JOYOUS HOOTLING.

memory-for-trifles: OMG TrIStan! What kind of My Chemical Romance nonsense 😂 wellntruly: THIS FUCKING HAIR, his HEIGHT, he looks so much like Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari IT IS PERFECT.

AAAAHHAahahaha, I’m hopping up and down !

As Tristan melodramatically hisses that they’re inhuman to ask him to pick a replacement for his wife the day after her death, Gereon pops up all Police, Questions, and as this is evidently a more desirable prospect for him than what his producers want him to do, Tristan ignores their protestations and goes off with Gereon quite nicely. This is actually kind of reminding me of a story I heard from a sound engineer who once worked with Eddie Izzard. He reported that Izzard was a dick to his own producers, who were clearly annoying him, but was super sweet to the sound guys, whom he seemed to consider Not Part Of This Problem and just trying to do their job.

Anyway while Cesare over here leads Gereon side stage, Charlotte recognizes one of the Bettys—as do we, it’s Vera! She breaks into this big smile once she recognizes “Lottchen”, and very cutely is like ooh yeah I heard you’re a cop now! Literally Vera in whispered glee upon seeing Lotte’s badge: “Whee!”

With a sly finger to her lips, Lotte asks her to keep her working girl past secret, and Vera just smiles “Gotcha,” all but winking conspiratorially, and bids her little detective friend adieu as she goes to poke around. Well wow Vera turns out to be just a total sparkle dove when she’s with her gal pals and not blokes like Walter!

Elsewhere, this lion painting:

Roawr

I think this man is just straight up an insurance adjuster? And he’s informing Edgar, seated quietly, and Walter, looming by a lit fireplace, that the policy they took out on this film is absolutely not gonna cover Acts of Geist.

It is not Edgar nor the lion painting who is going to be the beast this afternoon, but Walter, who suddenly shoves the desk the insurance man is sitting at back toward the wall. “WALTER,” Edgar warns, and he reluctantly lets him go. Banker Brother-in-Law, also there, stares wide-eyed, and silently follows his shaken associate out.

Edgar: Walter, babe, you’re at a 9 right now and I need you to be down at around a 6 Walter: WELL YOU USED TO BE A STRAIGHT 10 BUT THEN I COME BACK FROM PRISON AND YOUR EMPIRE IS CRUMBLING SO WHAT GIVES Edgar: ….??

It is at this moment that the phone rings. That he’s receiving a call in this room should have been my second clue that we’re at Edgar’s right now, the grand lion painting the first, but in fact I wouldn’t put it together until they rush outside to have an intimate moment in the courtyard. First though, the context for that!

On the line is Bellman, alerting Edgar that the police are at the film studio. He asks who. It’s Detective Rath.

Typical.

memory-for-trifles: AHAHAHAHAHA poor Edgar wellntruly: When Edgar finds out that once again he’s got a Gereon on his plate I was howling at the moon like a happy wolf.

At this news, Edgar just crisply turns his back on Walter and walks out the door to go see just what the fuck Gereon is up to now. Startled, Walter runs hatless after him going “Edgar, what the hell—?” (actual dialogue) and gets abruptly sucker punched for his trouble. Whoa! The chauffeur standing near the car is like okayyy just gonna casually look away and mind my own business… (Great Job to this actor.)

Edgar crouches down over Walter, actually astraddle over one of his open legs if you want to get technical, and looks closely into his face. “There cannot be a single seed of dissension between us,” he begins.

They then continue their apparent shared aphorism in emotional unison.

This is when I had a thought.

So Walter Weintraub and Edgar Kasabian would not seem to be brothers, having different last names. And they would not seem to be strictly business associates, given that they live in the same home and have very intent partnership moments like this, underlining their personal bond with one another. And Walter is sleeping with Esther. And Edgar is the King of the Underground. It’s Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. IT’S GANGLAND CAMELOT.

I’d had very many drinks by the time I thought of this that first night but it makes me feel like I’m still drunk just thinking about it now, SO. Gonna follow that high!!

Over at the film set, Tristan admits to Gereon that he didn’t really know Felix Krempin, although: “We had some… [brushing his hair carefully *not* quite out of his eyes] common interests.”

Gereon: “Namely?” Gereon…..

“This world is just one side of the mirror,” Tristan answers. “The other side.. is another world.” Oh you know actually I’m starting to get the impression that maybe he doesn’t just mean “we gay.”

Then Gereon shows him Tilly’s Ringwraith drawing and Tristan loses his mind.

At this moment, Assistant Detective Ritter is poking around, like she said she was gonna, when the Phantom casually comes out of a dressing room in front of her and just walks off down the hall. Charlotte is like what the fuck?!? and sneaks on after him, only to end up in….Tristan Rot’s dressing room, OHH it’s a costume from THIS MOVIE. Gereon and Tristan tumble in behind her with the same revelation, as this “Phantom” is revealed to be just another actor, here for a fitting with the costume designer. Clearly not one to miss a moment, Tristan collapses moaning about murder into the arms of this equally tall, angular young man, who sets about cuddling him, and Gereon asks “Who are you?” Gereon…… ….

Turns out there are two sets of this costume, for Tristan’s character and his double, and turns out further that the browbeaten costume assistant had been helping Felix out by slipping him things like this neat ass geometrical cloaked getup to creep around in causing mischief, as his saboteur benefactors were paying well enough for him to take her out to “such fancy places, they even served Champagne.” ~Luxe~ But eventually he hit his limit, she reports tearfully, and had left the set hours before the light fell. This matches what Krempin had told Gereon himself in the car, and the second costume is still missing. Shit guys I think we got TWO Phantoms. Ein Doppelgeist!

We also learn that Tristan’s stand-in stands on a wooden leg. Will this be relevant? Who knows at this point, but it does afford us this cute clue glance between our favorite crime couple:

“Hm.” “Hmm”

Meanwhile, they’re getting ready to shoot screen tests with the Bettys New. Tilly Brooks is up first, and greets an instantly dazzled Tristan Rot in her flirty English. “Pleased to meet you,” Vera echos off-stage.

Lol Vera. Lol all these ladies. Let’s hang.

And add to the list of things “bitte” can mean: Action! Lotte is having a really fun day on the job, getting to watch a real film shoot from backstage. Gereon is like, okay.

Something I really do adore about Gereon and Charlotte is how often they visually check in with each other, like above and also like here, when Walter Weintraub walks up and asks to speak to Gereon privately, and Lotte catches his eye like he’s a girl at a bar being approached by a strange man. Like, “you good?” Fantastic. Someone’s gotta, honestly. Because the person Gereon now walks outside to talk to can’t always be around to keep an eye on him.

Canon German dialogue:

Edgar: “Mister Detective.” Gereon: “What’s up.”

I’m so happy. These two make me SO HAPPY. I was way too drunk for this.

“As you know,” Edgar begins, “my partner and I have made a range of different investments around the city.” I think a big part of what kills me about Edgar is that his actual lines sounds like sentences I would make up to josh him. “There are very concrete points of overlap between your activities and mine,” he continues.

Gereon lights a cigarette. “Let’s start with you telling me who would be interesting in harming you.”

“I was hoping you could answer that for me,” Edgar admits.

Oh my god. Oh my god are they going to——

Edgar: “I think we should join forces.”

At this point I screamed at such a high pitch that I suddenly remembered I have neighbors.

And his reasoning why?? Because of DR. SCHMIDT. Because of their SHARED TRAUMA. Because they were both shellshocked drug addicted wrecks left behind in the proverbial mud after the war, until a hypnotic-voiced experimental therapist plucked them up and helped them. But because “The healing has a price, and you have to be prepared to pay that price.” Because Anno Schmidt saved them, and now they’ve gotten bound up together in what they owe him. And because frankly, this chemistry is undeniable. We’re hilarious together, little Inspector.

memory-for-trifles: HoHO, my dreams are coming truuuuue! Dr. Schmanno’s Home for Traumatized Miscreants! wellntruly: Dream Plots, HOLY fuck. THIS SEASON’S GONNA TREAT US GOOD I JUST KNOW IT.

Anyway, let’s not forget: we’re still shooting a movie. Walter, who has reclined himself I believe on Bellman’s seat at the production table, announces that tests are for nerds. Tilly gets cast, being the only Betty they’ve seen, and after getting brushed off by Walter, poor Vera ends up just dutifully hugging her sighing “You’ll be okay Tilly” when she scampers into their dressing room all excited and nervous. Too nervous in fact, and when Tilly runs to the sink with an attack of nausea, Vera considers how it’s a hard luck world out there, and maybe she can make a bit of her own. Jealousy, Motive No. 3! With an endearing grimace, she locks Tilly in the dressing room.

Pic of that because Vera Lohman and her faces are absolutely sending me this episode

Vera then scoots back to the set, where she is perfectly positioned to be walking by looking hot and dramatic right when the production team is like WHERE the hell is our Fake Betty, we gotta shoot now. Walter gestures at Vera like, there’s a girl.

He actually looks genuinely chuffed that he was able to get this role for her after all.

And she looks great out there!!!

Crew member: “The girl has pizzazz.” Another: “But she can’t sing.”

Wellll what are ya gonna do. (Laugh about it, if you’re me right now)

And in a predictably well-cut interlaid sequence of dance and MURDER—very good very noir—poor weeping Tilly wheels around to see her ghost far too close, right as the song reaches the noose drop choreography. Aw, RIP babe, you were ridiculous. Newly Knifey Phantom then unexpectedly fireman slides out the window down a pole that is there, cloak billowing in the night, and races off out of the courtyard—under Assistant Lotte’s wide eyes. Second ghost, worse than the first!!

— • — • —

Season 3 Recaps - Episode 1, Episode 2

Seasons 1 & 2 MASTERPOST

All everything, past & future: #Babylon Berlin Blogging

#Babylon Berlin #Babylon Berlin spoilers #Babylon Berlin Blogging #BB S3 Recaps #Tarra recaps stuff

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wellntruly · 4 years

Note

Heyo. Have you by any chance watched Legion? I'm kind of in love with every piece of critique / commentary / analysis you do, and reading your thoughts on that mindfuck of a show would be SO VERY interesting. (Also, you've convinced me to start watching The Young Pope / New Pope. Your impact?? )

Aw thank you!! My impact!!

Every TV show I’ve written about can be found here, in the ‘TV Writing’ page linked at the top of my blog, and you will in fact find a lot about Legion! Which I loved deeply in season 1 and then broke up with very dramatically in season 2 :/

#replies #randomaccessrobots #Legion #Tarra takes notes #Tarra recaps stuff

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wellntruly · 5 years

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hey i know its Literally Years Later but ive been going through your hannibal recaps again and ive made it all the way to the end of the Super Concise ones and 3.12 seems to not exist anymore? it just says Not Found. I know a couple of the s1 ans s2 ones got caught up in the december purge so im assuming thats what happened here. TLDR hi i love your stuff, do you still have a copy of that one so i can read it again? thanks

FROM ALL THE WAY BACK IN 2015…..

HANNIBAL RECAP: S3E12

Last time on Hannibal: Hannibal tried to get Will’s family killed and Will was all “I hate you and I know you still like me but i don’t like you i don’t care what your stupid friends say you make me touch your hands for stupid reasons u accidentally say you hugged me i will never like you again I HATE YOU I HATE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THIS DAMN WORLDDDDDDDDDD”

But Hannibal’s just like, “you don’t hate me you just hate change.”

This time on Hannibal: You are cordially invited to the Third Annual CHILTON MAIM-FEST 2015

Season 3, Episode 12: “The Number of the Beast is 666…”

So, this is the longest recap I’ve written yet? Seriously, pack a snack my friends, it’s the PENULTIMATE EPISODE and we’re diving headlong here.

We begin, Will in Bedelia’s home-office again, talking about his troubles. In a development I couldn’t have even dreamed of, it seems that Will is legitimately seeing Dr. Du Maurier now, as his new therapist. HOW WONDERFUL.

Not wonderful though: Will is helplessly seeing himself killing Molly, the way the Dragon killed Mrs. Jacobi & Mrs. Leeds. Oh noo. Bedelia warns that you don’t know when brittle materials will break. It’s a good thing Will’s strength is of the bendy sapling variety then, I tell myself willing it to still be true, pls still be true.

Remember a couple episodes ago when Will asked where Bedelia’s scars were, to match how many he has? Well he’s still on that, wondering what it is that Hannibal is going to take from her, like he’s trying to take Will’s family away. Will Graham is a big believer in reciprocity & justice, which is one of the things that occasionally reminds me why he probably got into law enforcement in the first place. Anyhow, he trades Bedelia a warning of her own: she could still be killed, as “Hannibal has agency in the world.”

“Will raises a good point. Class, any insights on how this character enacts agency within the narrative?” - a liberal arts professor

But Bedelia responds, perfectly: “Hannibal has no intention of seeing me dead by any other hand than his own, and only then if he can eat me. He’s in no position to eat me now.”

Will, shaking with righteousness: “If you play, you pay.”

One time when I was home from college, I was watching tv with my sister while my dad read the newspaper, and apropos of nothing, he suddenly turning to us with an Aesop glint in his eyes, and intoned “When you play with the tiger, you get the teeth.” And then he made fangs with his fingers like the knights in Monty Python & the Holy Grail when they’re talking about the rabbit. So my dad would probably like this line.

Bedelia remarks that Will has paid dearly. “It excites him,” she says with the slightest suggestive wiggle, “that you are marked in this way.” Will genuinely asks why. Because he’s marking you as HIS you beautiful idiot!! Oh my god, I can’t deal with you right now you fucking innocent.

Bedelia also can’t believe she has to deal with this and just goes “why do you think,” and Will bitterly calls her Bluebeard’s wife and she gasps and these two are basically my favorite dynamic on this show right now oh my god. So slow & cool, with their liquid eyes always just about to spill over. Bedelia, a shimmering icicle, tells Will that if she were to be Bluebeard’s wife, she would have preferred to be the last. At first I thought this implied that Will is an earlier wife, blood filling the kitchen floor, but her past tense on “preferred” makes me think that she’s setting Will up as the last wife.

like most things Bedelia says, all interpretations are Way Interesting. also, petition to have Gillian Anderson record an Angela Carter audiobook ASAP.

But you guys. You guys. It seems, after multiple bride references from Bedelia, combined with literally every fucking other thing that Hannibal has done, that Will, world’s blindest empathy detective, is finally beginning to figure out something Important. He asks, carefully, because neither he nor I can believe this is happening right now: “Is Hannibal….in love with me?”

YOU SURE BET, LIL BUD. And YOU SURE BET, WORLD. We have made it 38 episodes into this gay-ass cannibalism show, and finally William Deerheart Graham has just literally asked, out loud with his own mouth: “Is Hannibal in love with me?” AND PEOPLE SAY WE’RE READING TOO FAR INTO IT. NO. LOOK INTO THIS MAN’S EYES.

BRYAN FULLER IS NOT FUCKING AROUND, AND HE WILL GIVE YOU THE POST-ROPE HOMO MURD SHOW OF YOUR DREAMS.

TO WIT, IT CONTINUES —

Bedelia, mouthpiece for a subset of the population for whom the first definition of the word cards is “running one’s fingers through someone’s hair in the present tense,” follows that question up with THIS, which, if I were writing fake lines as a joke, I would have looked at these and thought “oh you’ve gone a bit far on the sexual longing” BUT NO IT’S FUCKING REAL:

Bedelia: “Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you, and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?”

Will completely does not respond to this because he’s having to do a lot of recalculating right now. Oh so that would mean — oh yes and that time too — oh and THAT— oh god. Oh god, and I…? I’m assuming that when we get the deleted scenes we’ll find out that after this Will drives to Muskrat Farm and Alana kindly answers his tentative questions about bisexuality while Margot & the Verger Baby finger-paint in the background.

Meanwhile, at the Baltimore State Hospital for Crimes Against Milton:

Hannibal is talking with Jack about religion. God, the Devil, the Great Red Dragon — and the Lamb, our own Will Graham. The day of the Lamb’s wrath is coming, Hannibal says. This is all very ridiculous and biblical, and I’m pretty sure a quarter of it is just lyrics from Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around.” Which are in turn quotes from the Book of Revelation, I think, but lbr Cash is the Book I know.

“Righteousness is what you and Will have in common,” Hannibal says, and wow they are really pushing Will’s righteousness streak lately aren’t they? “In righteousness the Lamb doth judge, and make war. War against the Great Red Dragon,” he continues. Hannibal’s Will fan site is just like “new url: murder-deer >> murder-lamb”

Jack says that the Dragon is Hannibal, “the Devil himself, bound in the pit,” and Hannibal suggests that makes Jack God, and Jack’s just like, I’m fine with that. Heheh, Jack Crawford. But, “All gods require sacrifices,” Hannibal says. UH OH.

“Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” - Hannibal’s favorite Zora Neal Hurston quote

Meanwhile, Dolarhyde kneels in front of his Great Red Dragon print and tears his nails into his own shoulder repeatedly, then scratches lines of blood into the painting. UH OH AGAIN.

CREDITS. Holy hell was that the longest first act ever or am I just losing all sense of time / propriety? Both, probably.

After the creds, Will, Jack, and Alana plot their next move. Will is all bitter about offering his tiny bod up as murder bait again, which is very sad but also very funny to me. God what a specific thing to have as a recurring problem.

WHY DOES THESE KEEP HAPPEN 2 ME

Trying to distract himself from disquieting visions of Alana with the bleeding mirror eyes (shudder), Will then pretty much directly quotes Freddie Lounds from a few episodes ago about using the killer’s narcissistic desire to read about himself. Maybe Will can bash the murderer in print, then go and stand in an open area and wait for Dolarhyde to pounce on him, hoping the FBI can nab him before he gets in a killing blow. It sounds like a joke but this is in fact their real plan. To help it seem less trappy, Alana suggests that they have a professional voice legitimatize what Will’s saying.

Will: “Someone to hide the wire of the snare. Are you volunteering?”Alana, scoffing adorably: “No. I’d have to be a fool.”

SMASH CUT TO FREDERICK CHILTON. AAHHhahahaha, perfect. Chilty, you eminently fuck-with-able fool.

Frederick Chilton, incensed, is presently talking to Hannibal about the psychiatry articles he’s been writing. The most recent one is a special point of bother with him.

Hannibal: “A particularly good one.”Frederick: “It may be my fa-vor-ite!”

Oh my lol.

“I have seen a lot of hostility,” Frederick continues, and yeah I’ll bet, “but this is QUANTIFIABLY BITCHY.”

QUANTIFIABLY. HERE I HAVE CHARTED OUT YOUR BITCHINESS FOR YOU ON THIS DAMNING LINE GRAPH.

Chilton asks if Hannibal thinks he is his nemesis, and Hannibal chuckles “oho no,” because we all know Will is his true Nemesis Mine (god, a lot). But Chilton is SO MAD and it is SO FUNNY. I watched this scene multiple times just for the joy of listening to Broadway baby Raúl Esparza treat his dialogue like a piece of music.

Apparently, Chilton filled his book with lies to save Hannibal’s life (?? why did you do that!) but now Hannibal has gone and refuted his own insanity plea (why did you do that??). Hannibal then falls back on his usual “you’re just not going to be famous, Frederick” and Chilton’s just like “aaauugghhh!!!!1!!” Specifically, he refers to the “freak value” of Hannibal’s byline, and, bitchily, shoots the rolled up journal through one of the sniff holes. Bless u Chilts, I knew you’d be the first to capitalize on these.

I just knew it

Trying to tear Hannibal down a few pegs, Frederick then falls back on his usual: “the Dragon is more interesting than you.” Apparently he’s going to call his next book The Dragon Slayer. Will? Really it should be Jack, Jack the Dragon Slayer, that’s a pretty good reference and I’m surprised no one has made it yet (holy heck, wait — a prize for whoever rewrites me a Hannibal version of “This is the House That Jack Built.”) (WOW SOMEONE DIIIDDD!)

But Hannibal darkly warns Frederick not to get ahead of himself.

ugh, look at this Mikkelsen — now that’s knowing how to use your light

As a parting volley, Chilton then paints a threatening picture of what ending fate has chosen for Hannibal: life in the general ward, featuring prison rape & stewed apricots. It is VERY UNPLEASANT. After leaving Hannibal a personalized copy of his book (bonus unflattering doodles? that’s my guess) Chilton walks out to find Alana leaning against the wall.

much more pleasant

She’s just like “come along Frederick we need you to be useful for a change,” and hauls him off to meet with Jack, Will, and Freddie Lounds. Praise be, it’s a FREDSCAPADE. They explain the plan: having Chilton say unfounded & uncomfortable things about Dolarhyde, Will making them openly insulting, and then publishing the whole thing in TattleCrime to raise the Dragon’s hackles. Freddie mentions that a decent newspaper would never run this, and Will points out that she does not run a decent newspaper.

Will: “You sell T-shirts that say ’The Tooth Fairy is a One-Night Stand’.”Freddie: “I can get you one if you like. You a small or a medium? Small I bet.”Will:

THE SMOLLEST

They get down to business. Freddie sets up a mic on the coffee table in whatever the heck random Washington DC locale they are in, Frederick sits down and begins happily making up bullshit, and Will paces behind him delivering the pithy bites. It goes like this:

Chilton: “The Tooth Fairy’s actions indicate a projective delusion, compensating for intolerable feelings of inadequacy. Smashing mirrors ties these feelings to his appearance—“Will: “Not only is the Tooth Fairy insane, he is ugly, and impotent.”Chilton: “holy—crap, ok”

Chilton barely gets going on his next line before Will jumps in with “He is a vicious, perverted sexual failure. An animal.”

“do you want this to work or what”

Eventually they have enough (more than enough), and Freddie says she’d love a photo of Will in a bathrobe, for reasons, and Will’s just like “no.” Instead he stands by the window so the Tooth Fairy can see where he is, and asks if Chilton wants to be in the picture too. He obviously does.

Several hilarious things happen in quick succession. Jack is adjusting Tiny Freddie’s camera angle…

oh my god

Will & Frederick are having this supremely awkward physical space negotiation at the window…

“Gross, he’s touching me.”“Gross, I’m touching him.”

I think I read in an interview somewhere that Dancy & Esparza are, in real life, very fond of each other, which I think is why they clearly have so much fun loathing one another on camera.

Anyway, Freddie snaps the shot and they’re good to go.

Well what a murderer’s row of things I love there was in this scene! We’ve got:

- Frederick Chilton being a living reaction gif- Freddie Lounds not giving a damn- Will Graham hating everyone- Jack Crawford going “a good thing to do would be [a bad thing to do]”- a vague heist-movie vibe- everything is weirdly sexual- and: jokes about how little Hugh Dancy is

Thank u Bryan xoxo

Later, Jack & Will pace around the courtyard. The plan is “too passive” for Jack’s tastes, they “are playing games in the dark of the moon” (wow), but they don’t really have much else going on, so ehh.

Jack knows, very specifically, that pedestrian traffic drops off in this space:

pretty

at 7:15 pm. He wants Will to take a nice normal alone-time stroll in the dark around 8:30, wearing body armor.

Will: “Seven out of eleven times he’s gone for the head shot, Jack.”Jack, literally: “Yeeaahh…”

Honestly the people that should be most glad that this plan is not going to go the way you wanted it to are YOU, for pete’s sake.

Meanwhile, the plan (this fucking plan) starts to unravel. Dr. Chilton, schmoozing on his cell to some poor soul, walks into a parking garage flanked by bodyguards. Apparently he is going to write another book refuting Hannibal’s refutations, entitled….Blood & Chocolate. Hahaha. Out the rear window of the car, we see his bodyguards each get shot (in the head, JACK. 9 out of 13) while Chilton cluelessly laughs on the phone in his nice leather gloves. PERFECT. God, the stage play-ness of how Chilton gets fucked up on this show is one of my favorite things.

Then Chilton gets yoinked out of the car.

people entering or leaving your field of vision in unexpected ways: not just one of, my ACTUAL FAVORITE THING

Chilton gets woken up, in the Dragon’s lair. OH GOD. It’s happening. Do you feel that change in the wind? It’s that time of the season again! When batshit insane injuries are inflicted on Frederick Chilton, Hannibal’s Kenny. I mean, obviously I’m torn up about it, he is my trash fave, but there’s such a fun loop-the-loop to this. Chilton does awful things, and then awful things happen to Chilton. And repeat.

Raúl Esparza actually has quite a task in this sequence, because he has to balance a whole number of things. He wants us to laugh, as he always does, but he also wants us to be alarmed, because it doesn’t work if it’s just a cartoon character being tortured — it doesn’t work in the context of how we’re supposed to feel about Dolarhyde in these final episodes (legitimated frightened of him), and it also doesn’t work with how much this is gonna mess with Will later. So we need to be laughing, but we also need our heart rates to pick up a bit, we need to flinch. And on top of this, we also need to have at least a moment where we feel for him. Again, this is largely to do with how Will is going to react later. There needs to be something in Chilton that we recognise in ourselves, so that on a level of basic humanity, we regret what happens to him.

So, does he pull all this off? Of course he does, it’s Raúl Esparza.

champ

I think the quote that probably best captures what he does in this scene is this one:

“I have to tell you, I am scared. Man to man, I am scared, and it is very hard to concentrate when you are scared.”

Amazing. This is IDEAL Chilton, because it’s funny, we’re specifically laughing at him, and also it sounds like a paraphrase. This is maybe the thing I most love about Chilton’s dialogue, this strange…I don’t know, formal bluntness that he has. You never have to suss out the subtext to what Chilton says, because it’s all there in the text. It’s hilarious and I adore it.

But anyway, this works so well in this scene because it’s a Perf Chilts Line, but it’s also unnervingly believable, because who doesn’t understand that feeling? For the last two seasons, about the time it became apparent that Chilton was the only one besides Will who actually knew Hannibal for what he is, and was spending all his episodes quoting cannibalism puns, being weirded out by Hannibal’s food, and literally watching scenes on his laptop, that — as much as some of you will probably hate this — Chilton is us. Chilton is a certain part of us, the part that thinks we would be all suave & dark about it if we were in this show, but in reality, if Hannibal winked at us at a dinner party we’d freeze & fluster & look away with an internal monologue of “oh shit oh shit oh shit.” And I am so glad that Esparza has been playing Chilton this way, because it give these Dolarhyde scenes that last recognition element that they needed. Certain moments can hew a little too close, and it’s good that they do.

ANYHOW, this has been a lot about Frederick Chilton, but I love his role in this show, and this is the last chance I get to talk about him so whatever. Also, well-played as it might have been, you don’t really want me to do a blow-by-blow recounting of a 15 min torture sequence do you? Naw, we’re just doing highlights, like:

Dolarhyde’s robe & mask combo, a definite #look

Chilton’s face when he tries to figure out what the right answer is to questions like “do you feel privileged?”

Dolarhyde: “Do you think God is in attendance here?”Chilton: “No, no I do not feel God in this Chili’s tonight.”

The most important broad-strokes thing to happen, I’d say, is probably when Reba shows up with some soup. OH MY GOD. Dolarhyde just lets her in, because theoretically she can’t see the nude dude he has glued to wheelchair and hyperventilating over in the corner, except for the fact the he’s forgotten that she’s Reba and, I would guess, TOTALLY KNOWS HE’S THERE, because as mentioned: nude dude, hyperventilating. I hope this comes into play somehow in the future.

Reba mostly just drops off the soup & some Life Advice and leaves.

Chilton: waaaaaat?

More highlights in the following scene:

- Dolarhyde showing Chilton William Blake slides like the world’s worst art history quiz

“Uh, uh, William Blake’s ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed…In—”“WITH. WITH THE SUN. CHECK MINUS.”

-Dolarhyde asking “do you see“ enough times that it starts to sound very Garrett Jacob Hobbs

- the What’s Better Than This, Just Two Guys Hanging Out moment where Dolarhyde dramatically sheds his robe to pose shirtless in front of Chilton

- Dolarhyde adjusting his camera all “I am an auteur”

Eventually, Dolarhyde says that he’s going to send Dr. Chilton home, with a thermos and some ice, actually, which?? What. Anyway, before that, though, he wants to give him something to remember him by. Oh christ.

One of the problems with Dolarhyde putting on his teeth is that when he did so I suddenly remembered Will saying that the biting was a sexual behaviour as much as a fighting style, and then as if agreeing with me Dolarhyde goes right for Chilton’s mouth.

and he kisses him passionately and that’s it that’s the scene!

Ok no he tears his lips off with his teeth and it’s beyond gruesome, and I don’t know if that’s just Chilton screaming or if there’s an effect on it because I can’t stop screaming myself.

I cannot believe I watched this twice for you all. THE THINGS I DO FOR YOU.

Envelope processing transition! Is there any show on television that uses classical music as well as this one does? Surely not.

All cleared through the x-ray, Alana brings Hannibal his package, not accompanied with a smile. He asks if he may open it in private, and she’s just “No you may not.” A Hannibal’s gotta try. He pulls out a little paper towel-wrapped something. That’s when I realized. IT’S CHILTON’S LIPS. NOOOOOOPE.

WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THIS SHOW AND SENDING FACE PARTS THROUGH THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE I SWEAR TO GOD.

The….delivery was accompanied by a note saying “With these he OFFENDED ME,” capitalization Dolarhyde’s, and flawless. Hannibal says he was offended by Chilton too, so like, *shrug*. I mean he would shrug, but he’s currently straightjacketed to a dolly. Jack holds up one of Chilton’s lips on a platter.

he’s wearing white gloves and the platter’s silver so really this looks like Hannibal is being served dinner and that is perfect

But why just one lip though?

QUICK CUT

*gulp*

OH MY FUCKING GOD. I SCREAMED, I LAUGHED, I SCREAM-LAUGHED. Frankly they could get away with a lot more editing like this, it is SCARY and HILARIOUS and it totally fits.

Hannibal, unable to suppress his grin: “I’m sorry, Jack. The tragedy of what’s happened to Frederick has put me in an excellent humour.” UNDERSTATEMENT.

Hannibal asks what exactly Alana & Jack’s plan was — oh man, you do not want to hear this Hannibal, you are gonna judge them so hard. Alana tells him that they were using TattleCrime to make the Dragon really mad. Well it sounds dumb now, when we say it out loud. Hannibal observes that it could have just as easily been Alana as opposed to Frederick. “It could have been your lip I was tasting. Again.”

ew do not remind her

Alana halfheartedly tries to blame Hannibal for this, but honestly dear I think he’s actually right on this one: this is all on you guys. :(

Now it’s time to watch the home video Dolarhyde recorded of poor doomed fool Freddie Chilts. Who’s excited!!! I hate this.

oh hey, just now noticing that Dolarhyde has his other home videos playing behind Chilton, like a frame-in-a-frame — #technique

Chilton, repeating after Dolarhyde you may remember, haltingly talks of how privileged he is to witness this artful Dragon becoming, no one here is crazy or impotent, this is all Will Graham’s fault, etc. Alana glances at Will like “oh no” but I hasten to remind everyone in this room that yo, that was what you wanted to happen?? The whole POINT of this fiasco was to get the Dragon furious enough with Will to come after him? I know it is tempting because it is exactly the sort of selfish shit that Frederick would totally pull, but he is not in fact selling Will out here, because you can’t sell out someone who was already trying to sell himself out.

Anyhow. The video goes on. Soon Dolarhyde is addressing Will directly, through Chilton. He tells him to reach behind his back, and feel where his backbone connects to his pelvis. “That is the precise spot — where the Dragon — will snap your spine.” Chilton’s voice breaks here, because he refuses to just leave me in peace.

just LEAVE ME in PEACE, goddamnit

Frederick finishes what the Dragon wanted him to say, and then, well, you know what happens. Apparently that was on camera too.

Sometimes I like to think of Will Graham as one of those fundraising thermometers, only the red designates “horrible shit I have seen,” and once it reaches certain levels you unlock specific breakdowns. Watching Chilton be savaged by Dolarhyde raises him past one of these, and as a result he drops to the floor, clutching his shaking hands over his ears while his vision swims and his breath comes in sickening waves and Chilton screams and screams and screams.

Ok I know it’s like aaauuugghh but please remember this moment because I am going to bring it up again in the next scene. It is Important, to Remember.

Will returns for another complicated therapy hour with Bedelia du Maurier. She asks if he wants to talk about what happened with Frederick Chilton. Will literally looks like this

I don’t know when I’ve last seen framing that more broadcasts “I AM NOT OK :(”

But then Will leans back in his chair, and the camera moves from where it was hovering over his ear, and you can just see Will physically putting on his reflection of Bedelia’s tremulous remove, it’s astonishing. They start talking all slow about divine punishments & retribution, and irony. I mean yes Chilton’s fate IS super thematic, but so is everything on this show. It’s also HORRIFIC. “Damned if I’ll feel,” Will whispers very carefully, and I don’t know what the fuck that means but it upsets me.

Bedelia says that they are all Dante’s pilgrims in the Inferno, and Will retorts, “No we’re not pilgrims, we’re pets. And the Great Red Dragon kills pets first.” Yes sweetheart I know that distresses you.

Speaking of pets, Bedelia then proposes that by putting his hand on Chilton’s shoulder, Will visually claimed him, and that is specifically why what happened happened. Um. No? Wait. Seriously?! This is ridiculous, and I could go on at length over why this is ridiculous, but I think the simplest rebuttal is this: it implies that if Will had simply stood next to Chilton in the picture, at the same close distance, but WITHOUT his hand on his shoulder, then none of this would have gone down. THAT’S INSANE, OF COURSE IT WOULD HAVE. And I would have forgiven this if it just came up here, but Chilton is ALSO going to talk about the hand-on-the-shoulder thing, and I just. I can’t with this. This is a shoulder too far.

ALSO HIS HAND ISN’T EVEN ON HIS SHOULDER IT’S ON THE BACK OF HIS NECK AND THAT’S ACTUALLY FUCKING WEIRDER AND NONE OF YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THAT.

A big reason why this gets my goat is that they’re using this to once again try to convince Will that he’s ~murderously dangerous~, and I’m a little surprised at Bedelia right now honestly! The best apologistic explanation I can come up with here, to save her from simply being another Hannibal all “ur just a dark little murderer inside aren’t u” and Will going “omg maybe I am??” while I gesture chaotically to the scene immediately before this where he was literally shaking in a ball on the ground because of the violence he’s forced to bear witness to (remember), is that maybe she’s trying to subvert his survivor’s guilt. In earlier episodes, Bedelia has seemed interested in shoring up Will’s strength, in teaching him that it’s ok to protect yourself, even at the expense of “wounded birds.” And I get that as a thing Bedelia would believe, and as a mindset that could be beneficial for Will. And here, really underscoring that Will is complicit in this (because he totally is! he totally is, I am not refuting that, just as Alana & Jack & Freddie are also at fault) helps Will understand the impact that his actions have. You too have agency in the world, Will Graham. And ultimately yeah these could be helpful things/warnings to hear.

But damn if it doesn’t just sound a lot like Hannibal’s manipulative-ass conversations with Will throughout this whole series:

Bedelia: “Touch gives the world an emotional context. The touch of others makes us who we are. It builds trust.”Will: “I put my hand on his shoulder for authenticity.”Bedelia: “To establish that he really told you those insults about the Dragon. Or maybe you wanted to put Dr. Chilton at risk? Just a little?”Will: “I wonder…”Bedelia: “Do you have to wonder?”Will: “…No.”Bedelia: “What did you think the Great Red Dragon would do? You were curious what would happen, that’s apparent. Is this what you were expecting?”Will: “I can’t say I’m surprised.”Bedelia: “Then you might as well have struck the match. That’s participation.”

Like, I AM ALSO NOT SURPRISED THIS HAPPENED, but that doesn’t mean I did it! Although I’m glad you’ve given Will yet another complex about the act of touching, that should be fun times.

Bedelia: “Hannibal Lecter does have agency in the world; he has you.”

Ok I do like that line a whole lot though. That’s nice. I don’t fully agree with it in this context, again because they’re making it specifically Will and specifically that damn hand, but I do think that has a lot of validity in general.

Aaannnnd then flaming Chilton goes rolling down a path in his wheelchair, An Actual Fred On Fire This Time, and plunges into a fountain, because Frederick Chilton will always survive. Now this is ridiculousness I can get behind.

*sploosh*

Think of me what you will, but I would have let myself drown in that fountain. I have offed myself to get out of lucid dreams enough that I know with certainty I would just imagine this too was a dream, a nightmare, and fucking end it. He no longer has lips, vision in one eye, part of his jaw/cheekbone, several internal organs including a kidney and part of his intestines, and now he’s covered head to toe in third-degree burns. IT’S OVER, CASH IN.

But this is why I am not Dr. Chilton, IMPROBABLE SURVIVOR EXTRAORDINAIRE. Every single damn season. It’s fucking beautiful. My darling cockroach.

After the break, Will imagines himself lighting the match and setting Chilton on fire. I am 99% certain they recycled footage from his first openly cannibalistic dinner with Hannibal.

a less visually striking show could probably get away with this — really it’s a compliment

We cut to Jack talking to Will in the hospital. Well, Jack’s mouth is moving, but you can’t really hear what he’s saying, what I like to call the Ring-Fucks-With-Frodo Effect. It really creeps me out, so it’s a personal fave. When the audio comes back in, i.e. when Will has managed to drag his focus back up from the depths, we learn that Chilton said Will’s name when they brought him in to the ER. Oh boy. Will looks about how I feel. Even Jack asks him if he’s ok, and he just goes “Yeah I’m ok.”

Jack: “He’s trashed. You oughta get ready for this.”

again: same

If you thought, oh it’ll be fine, he’ll just be in full-body bandages, JEN, you were wrong. I’ll spare you all a cap of this mess, and instead offer you this:

Will swallows a few dozen times, and then announces that he’s there. Frederick starts talking to him, and I caught maybe half of it the first go round. “Can you understand what he’s saying?” Jack asks. Not entirely, Jack, thank u for asking. Will then becomes our Chilton translator, which is strange on a rational level because why should he be able to understand this better than Jack, but makes Full Sense on an emotional level because it forces him to say out loud all the things that Bedelia suggested about his responsibility for this. I also like the idea that this is why Will can understand Chilton: he’s already hearing this in his head all the time.

And what Chilton says is this: “You set me up. You knew it. You put your hand on me in the picture, like a pet.” It is so OUTLANDISHLY similar to what Bedelia said, that actually, I’m beginning to become Newly Suspicious about this. Is there perhaps some communication going on between some of these parties that we are not privy to? Given that Hannibal seems able to talk to Dolarhyde at any moment, I’m beginning to wonder if he hasn’t also been in contact with Bedelia. Bedelia working with* Hannibal for some inscrutable end is fully within the realm of possibility, I’d say.

*well, “with” — always to some degree for her interests alone

So that’s something I’m going to think about for a bit. In the meantime, Chilton says he saw a black woman, who was blind, and Jack’s like “oh dang that must be Reba!” and instead of a nice happy transition of Reba making a victory cherry pie for having successfully escaped the Great Red Dragon, we cut to her bound up in the back of Dolarhyde’s stalker van. Booooo. He must have gone off after her, and now he’s dragged her back to his murder manse.

Reba, in full “negotiating with a psycho killer” mode, says “I didn’t know you cared this much about me. I’m glad you feel that way, but you scared me with this.” Reba, my darling, this is unbelievably generous, and a Good Tactic probably.

Unfortunately, Dolarhyde just tells her to shut up, and says he has something important to tell her. “Sermon-on-the-Mount important. Ten Commandments important.” Ok, like, chill bro. We’re listening. He tells her about the Leeds & the Jacobis. He tells her he’s the Great Red Dragon.

then he steps back, unfurling his wings

Well, shit.

Anyway if Will doesn’t end every single one of his lines to Hannibal next week with a battle-ready “whatever you’re in love with me” then I will be disappoint.

No real talk though I have no idea what is going to happen in this finale oh good god somebody hold me.

- Earlier Recaps -

#Super Concise & Sensible Hannibal Recaps #Hannibal #Hannibal spoilers #Tarra recaps stuff #thinkin about cannibalism

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STRANGER THINGS Recap: 2x06

Somewhat like my rate of trips and events lately, the plot is really picking up speed here! Which in retrospect surely contributed to how rebuffed so many people felt by the complete veer off in the next episode. You got pace problems there, in addition to anything else you might feel about it.

But that’s for later! Right now: Antics & Agony, the Stranger Story. (Love it.)

Stranger Things 2, Chapter Six: ‘The Spy’

If you were hoping we’d just skip to the end of our small son being wracked with pain, BAD NEWS. Good news though is that Noah Schnapp has a killer acting reel thanks to this season. He moans and screams and cries, curling in on himself on a stretcher as he’s rushed into Hawkins Lab, the pain continuing unabated despite no visible marks of injury. Eventually they just knock him out with a merciful injection as Joyce sobs.

Wheeeewww. Okay we could use some leavening, yeah?

How about the new Dream Team of DUSTIN! and! STEEVE! They drive down the road together in silence for a few moments. “Wait a sec, how big?” Steve asks, as if picking up a conversation. God I love this kind of shit every time. Dustin is either an idiot—he’s not—or deliberately undersells how big D’Art is now in his reply. The second option is more likely, and, hilarious. It’s uh, it’s don’t worry about it big, Steve. Just drive.

I propose that the true reason why Steve was* popular (*was. sorry babe, but if it helps you’re only realizing your true form now that you’re Fallen), was not actually his good hair, but his physicality. He has an offhandedly elegant and sure way of moving, like, and I mean this in a good way, a juggler or other street performer. I realized this in the way he pops the trunk of his car, tosses his keys in an arc to Dustin, pulls out his nail-studded bat, and lightly passes it to the other hand before swinging the trunk back down. Yeah. Fuck yeah. Harrington.

There’s also the way he sighs and just GOES DOWN THE DARK CREEPY STEPS, bat in hand. I mean it probably helps that he still half thinks Dustin is trying to prank him. But then he finds another shed skin, and grimly calls Dustin down to see this whole ass tunnel dug out of the corner, off to god knows where. Oh no. Not fuck yeah.

Things are also not coming up roses for the folks at Hawkins Lab, except the benefit to me personally of getting to see Bob and Mike keeping vigil over Will in hospital blankets, Sean Astin’s over his shoulders like a Fellowship cloak and Finn Wolfhard’s pulled up to his chin like a Snuggie. They look cozy. Joyce just looks mad, off yelling at the scientists in some board room. She threatens to take her son somewhere else as no one here seems able to tell her what is wrong, and the scientists are like noooo. Yeah Joyce unfortunately I’m with the labcoats here, they’re behind the ball at the moment but at least they stand a chance of catching up---no one at your local Kaiser or whatever is gonna have a damn clue what to do with Will Byers.

The Lab better hurry up and get on that ball though, as Nancy, Jonathan, and Murray are actively trying to blow up their spot. The whistleblower gang assembly-lines out a stack of envelopes containing edited down copies of Nancy’s tape of Dr. Owens, to be shipped to the tip box of a bunch of major newspapers. Then they drink…..a lot of vodka.

In no way should the teens try to drive back home at this point, so Murray offers them his guest room. This is such a zesty mix of generous and creepy. Naturally Nancy and Jonathan manage to make it weirder by unnecessarily over-explaining that they will not be sharing a bed, at which Murray, investigative journalist & louche, just crows.

“Why not? You’re young, attractive. You’ve got chemistry, history. Plus, the real shit: shared trauma.” Shut up Murray how dare you be….Right.. He proceeds to paint the picture as he sees it, and like, I mean he’s good. At one point he cajolingly snaps his fingers, asking for the name of Nancy’s other boyfriend. “Steve,” Jonathan supplies, giving in. Nancy’s like *gasp* betrayed.

“Steeeve!” Murray croons. “We like Steve! But we don’t love Steve.” Ah see this is where you lose me Murray, as I kinda do love Steve. I think I may love Steve more than any of you lot. But you are endearing yourselves greatly to me rn with all this.

Satisfied with his work as their disreputable cranky jovial Yente, Murray departs for bed, leaving Nancy and Jonathan to stew---separately---over his devastating reads of their individual neuroses keeping them apart. Jonathan is so hung up on “trust issues,” in his fucking stellar yellow pajama pants, while Nancy, in a hilarious pink nightgown, mutters to herself “I don’t retreat.”

And finally, these two crazy kids find their way to what was always their destination: Makeout Town, pop. ~Just the two of us~

What’s super great about what happens next is that we transition to the next day. Which means, when we connect again with Dustin and Steve, now they’ve deliberately met up. They made plans. Steve was like, yeah I got nothing else going on this Sunday, might as well hunt a monster with this weird eighth grader. You got rubber gloves?

Lucas finally radios over, having regained his walkie from Erica, and Dustin, if he is anything like me, takes great pleasure in matter-of-factly catching Lucas up/melting his brain with every piece of buckwild information he has, delivered in succession in a casual tone. D’Art has grown three sizes, is a baby Demogorgon, is escaped into the community, and also we’ve adopted Steve Harrington.

Steve, in the background over the radio waves, moving a bucket of meat: “Alright, let’s go.” Lucas: “????!!!!!”

Delicieux.

Lucas rushes off to join them, but first detouring to grab Max---at last he’ll have proof that he’s been telling the truth. This affords Steve and Dustin some quality time to walk along dropping chunks of discount beef like monster-luring Hansel & Gretel, while bonding through Steve’s secret hair products and actually mostly decent relationship advice. They’re taking those wooded train tracks this show likes to come back to, and we do not fault them at all: this place looks so damn good. Running through those umber trees? God yeah. Retro small town feel, autumnal genre atmospheric, forever & always amen.

Meanwhile at the Lab, getting a night’s sleep seems to have allowed Owens’s brain the downtime to work out some of the problems he’s been mulling over, as is a nice feature of brains. One thing I wonder if he’s solved is the mystery of Will’s “Mom and Pop” Joyce and Hopper showing up with a third. In the meantime, Owens takes Hopper over to the rift and the fucking horror warrens apparently at the base of it, for a nicely dramatic backdrop to his take that Will has become psychically and physically connected to the Upside Down, which is essentially attacking them. This scene is a little aggravating when I pause to think about it, because it’s rather The Men Will Discuss This Separately isn’t it---why not tell this to Joyce as well, my dudes? But Dr. Owens will talk to her about it soon, and TV-structurally this gives Joyce a chance to have a whispered little supportive partner scene with Bob around the corner from Will’s bed, where he sleeps with Mike still right alongside him, napping shallowly in the hard chair at his shoulder. God I’m fucking dying. The loyalty? The tenderness? Mike’s Soft Lemonade.

Anyway, Bob, as we’d expect, is taking all this distressing supernatural bonkersness with typically good-natured aplomb. But he does basically say the equivalent of “I never thought I’d live to see such interesting times!” and aw geez oh no, Bob. Oh no Bob.

And when Will at last wakes from his drugged sleep, he doesn’t even recognize Bob Newby. We cut to Mike’s stricken face, and show I swear to god…..

Time to catch up with Nancy and Jonathan at Murray’s Place, which serves brunch on Sundays. They are slyly smiley at the table and Murray’s like awww yeaaaah. A piece of scrambled egg falls off his fork when he goes to smugly take a bite, which is so good there’s no way it was planned, but Brett Gelman is also so good that he just plays it. “Oops!” Stop.

He gives them, the minors, an entire handle of Slotichnaya as a parting gift, and a bottle of soda. “For your troubles. And to water them down.” That’s actually a damn quality toast my man. Then he slams the door.

Y’all? I Kinda Love Murray.

You know, considering this timeline…neither Nancy nor Mike have been home in two nights by this point. Gosh that sure must be some sleepover culture they’ve got in Hawkins. Mike didn’t even have a change of clothes with him and is still wearing the same things he was when he showed up at Will’s after school on Friday, standing out in this scene with everyone gathered around Will’s bed as he appears to be the only person brought in from the field who wasn’t put in scrubs. Logically, the adults’ clothes were probably considered compromised from their time in the Tunnels of Upside Down, and were confiscated when they were decontaminated. Emotionally, I feel it’s just a missed opportunity to have gangly Finn Wolfhard looking like a scarecrow in adult-size scrubs.

And visually, David Harbour in this shot stands literally head & shoulders taller than everyone in this room. LORGE.

After waking up looking quietly lost and not knowing Bob, Dr. Owens is asking Will if he remembers various things. “How about this guy?” he asks of Mike, who helpfully offers a little wave. Will searches his face. Oh my god my heart is suspended on a string. Then, like he’s pulling something up out of the water, he says slowly: “That’s….my friend. Mike.” I sagged back against my couch. Oh thank god.

He doesn’t remember this lorge man though, not even saving his life last night, as Hopper rather adorable reminds everyone. But Hopper gets a chance to look out for Will in return real soon, as now that Will’s awake the scientists take this opportunity to test Owens’s theory of his connection to the vines---with a hacked off tendril of one, and a blowtorch. As Will writhes in pain and the man keeps lowering the flame closer despite Joyce’s shouts that “That’s enough!”, Hopper, thank god for Hopper, surges forward as our resident Man On Our Side to place a protecting papa paw on Will and throw ALL the deep masculine power into his voice to bellow “YOU HEARD HER, THAT’S ENOUGH.” Listen to me if you won’t the women and children, goddamnit. - Chief Jim Hopper

So yeah what Will has is like a virus, Owens concludes, but an extra special deluxe virus that also links you into a hive mind. Super.

Feeling rattled and unable to properly protect his babies, Hopper sneaks out to his truck to try to contact El over the radio. Oh my goodddd, he was trapped for so long, he hasn’t been home in days! He doesn’t know she ran off so thinks she’s been in the cabin alone without hearing from him this whole time, and every one of Hopper’s considerable inches conveys such anxiety and guilt and worry and sadness. David Harbour really is good. And he finally delivers the emotional apology that we were waiting to cry about, but she’s not there to hear it :((

Back inside in that board room sort of space, one of the other scientists is suggesting that Will is just gonna be collateral in their fight against the hellvines, and they should proceed with torching everything and just chalk him up as a calculated loss. Owens does not care for that shit at all. I knew we liked you!!!! He has no alternative plan though, just asks for more time.

Over in his room, Will starts to slip into a sort of fugue state, gazing at the officers down the hall, remembering the flames…. Mike’s voice brings him back down. This is fine I feel a normal way about it. (---) Will turns to him, looking as haunted as ever, and says he thinks he’s seen something they can do.

Alright, a call to action, great transition back to Dusty & Steve-o, who have arrived at the setting for their impending showdown: Dustin has brought Steve to the junkyard up in the hills, the Party’s off-site locale that I missed very much. Steve looks around appraisingly in his Ray Bans, pleasantly satisfied. “Oh yeah. Yeah this’ll do. This’ll do just fine. Good call, dude.” Dustin beams.

Lucas arrives with Max, and Dustin is just like, sonofabitch. For multiple reasons. As Max gathers materials with Steve, the boys hold a whispered conference behind a rusting car about bringing people into confidence about your supernatural plot lines. Honestly Lucas has a pretty strong argument is that they could use the numbers. “And you haven’t heard from Mike? Or Will? Hopper?” he asks.

“NO,” Dustin reiterates, “no one is around, why do you think I’m with Steve Harrington.” It’s so good. I love that even in-world everyone’s like “Steve? but isn’t he just a recurring character?”

Steve Harrington, Promoted To Main Cast bitches, bangs a sheet of metal against the junker: “Hey, dickheads, how come the only one helping me out is this random girl?” His stress is on Random. God, good. Steve Good.

As this November afternoon starts to approach an early sundown, Nancy and Jonathan pull up to the Byers house. Oh my god, wait they’ve been gone since Friday, they---yeessss, they walk in to see the tunnels taped up everywhere and are like, whhaaaaaat. Haaahahahaha, see you can’t leave Joyce and Will alone for two days in Stranger Things, you’ll come back and find shit like this! God I love this house.

However, Jonathan does not love the empty cartridge he finds in it---Polaroid, not something he uses.

A useful medium though for scientists taking snaps they can then lay out across a conference table, rendering Will’s drawings in photo-replica. Will and Mike sit at the table, long-side, with all the adults gathered behind them---The Lab Supper. Will locates what seems to be the nucleus of the thing, somewhere important, potentially a spot of vulnerability. Eager for a lead, for knowledge, Owens assembles his team to head in to the tunnels and find what the Shadow Monster doesn’t want them to see.

Meanwhile, with a slow driving rock beat, Steve and his kids shore up the bus into a makeshift fort with metal sheets and loose tires, and lay their trap for D’Artagnan. Steve knows fire worked well on the last Demogorgon---they’re hoping it does again.

Night arrives in full. Lucas brings his dad’s binoculars (from ‘Nam) up to the top of the bus, peering through this good ‘n spooky ground fog that’s swirling in around the busted cars in the woods. Inside, Steve meditatively flicks his lighter, waiting. Max stares at him, mystified---now this guy is also involved with this weird horror story? She starts asking him if he’s sure it wasn’t a bear he’d fought last year, and Dustin, annoyed, grumps at her to just go home if she doesn’t believe them. Max literally goes “Yeesh,” and betakes herself up to the roof to join Lucas, where the air’s colder but more friendly.

Steve, observing all this, accurately believes he’s worked this one out. Dustin will not give him the satisfaction. “Why are you winking Steve,” he rebukes him, aloof. How is this so dismissive, how does this boy have no fear. Steve was a cool kid! HaHAHmygod Dustin.

Up on the deck, Lucas and Max have a bonding moment where she shares more about of her difficult circumstances and her thoughts & feelings, and hey guess what, now that we’re actually moving forward and not in repetitive loops, this is good! Character & relationship development!

“I like talking with you, Mad Max.” “And I like talking with you, Stalker.”

Cute.

Then a monster roars out in the dark.

They all peer into the fog, searching for it. Binocs gets a visual first---“I got eyes! 10 o’clock!” Lucas...bless. But D’Art isn’t going for the meat piled in a patch of weak moonlight, and just lurks there in the mist.

Turns out one of my favorite types of hero are the Julian Bashirs. The ones who seem at first like they’ll be all meaningless cool guy posturing, but then they’re doing something just unbelievably idiotically self-sacrificing, and you’re struck. Just like, “shit, there he goes.”

Steve, figuring that perhaps the nightmare creature will be more tempted by living prey, tosses his lighter to Dustin, hoists his bat, and steps out into the fog to use himself as bait---bait with a bat. To quote that very good gif set: “HEY THERE, DEMONS. IT’S ME. YA BOI.”

Max, staggered: “He’s insane.” Dustin, grinning: “He’s awesome.”

HE’S BOTH. Fuck yeah Harrington, you STUPID BRAVE-HEART.

Steve’s prediction is right, he does make a good lure. But no one predicted that we’d find out, in the worst possible moment, that there was never only just one teen Demogorgon. Oh FUck.

Dustin throws the door open: “STEVE. ABORT.” Steve manages to avoid getting ripped open with actually a pretty athletic dive, and lands a good bat-whallop on one of them too, before barely scrambling back into the bus just ahead of a fucking pack of these ravening Demodogs, who proceed to start tearing the bus apart like a particularly old tin can. The gang is doomed. Steve is absolutely ready to go down screaming into a monster’s face defending these idiot kids, leaping to do just that, but right as the big one on the roof is about to come through the hatch into the bus, the whole toothy pack is seemingly pulled away by some unheard call, and lope off into the night.

Dustin, faithfully: “Steve scared them off.” Steve, hair incredible, nail bat pitched up on his shoulder, framed in the moonlight, yet self-aware: “Naw, no way. They’re going somewhere.”

Oh jesus I love you. I full ass love Steve Harrington, what the fuck, Stranger Things what the fuck! I’m so happy, keep doing this to me.

Way way down in the Upside Down, the away team from Hawkins Lab approaches the junction Will had indicated. One of them: “Alright, stay frosty boys.” Uh, *right-click-save*

Watching their feed on a video monitor behind someone’s shoulder, Hopper suddenly exclaims. It’s “that damn graveyard” where he ended up. Thick fog starts rolling in from all the openings to this bone cavern, and other, new life signs begin to appear on the edges of the radar screen, moving in through the tunnels. Converging.

Will, looking exhausted with despair, suddenly whimpers “I’m sorry. He made me do it.” Mike, ever clued in to him, is the first to understand, going even paler, if that’s possible, as the horrified realization passes over his little face. He leaps up and scrabbles for that observation room, trying to let them know it’s a trap, it’s a trap!!! But with the sounds of screams, the lights on the radar screen are already winking out, until none are left.

Of our guys, that is.

Hopper is also usually pretty quick to figure things out, and moves to the windows, calculating, apprehensive, brows dark. He tries to peer into the hole down to those underworld warrens. And then a clawed hand slams onto the edge.

OKAY SEE U NEXT WEEK.

- - - - -

Love Letters to Stranger Things Stranger Things (2016) Stranger Things 2: Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five

#Stranger Things #Stranger Things 2 #Stranger Things spoilers #Love Letters to Stranger Things #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff

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STRANGER THINGS Recap: 2x09

Just like when I did this with the first season, rewatching the second season of Stranger Things was a totally enjoyable exercise in actually taking some time with this show, which I always fly through when the new seasons drop, and appreciate the work that went into making a TV season that is so dang watchable. The balance of action and heart in these two seasons is pretty fantastic, and I think a lot of it comes from the show allowing space for some really sincere and weird and emotional moments. The spooky kids fantasy genre they were working in those first two years in was always an odd and dark one, for all its cozy nostalgic reputation now. I think almost everything about the way the third season landed different with some of the audience has to do with Stranger Things 3 choosing to lean more towards a different genre reference point than it did in the first two seasons, but that’s for another time.

Right now, we’re closing out Stranger Things 2: More Strange More Things, the sequel season that rests only juust behind the first in my heart.

FYI this recap is also longer than the average, but the episode is 62 minutes. There was a lot of material.

Stranger Things 2, Chapter Nine: ‘The Gate’

Reunited at last, a year after she disappeared in the science classroom, Eleven and Mike swing into each other’s arms like a pair of little magnets, aw babies. Mike, v tearful, is Startled to discover that she had heard him having one-way conversations with her every night, but as our girl is also a weirdo she was merely charmed by this behavior. I am charmed by her and Hopper soft-barking “Where have you been” at each other before Hopper wraps her in a dad hug and gratefully smooches the top of her head while she presses into the protecting crook of his arm. These two! Too much!

But Mike is not charmed, no because Mike is learning that Chief Hopper, who he’d bravely answered over the radio in the bus a year ago, the only one this season he wanted to bring D’Artagnan to, his trustworthy Hopper---has been hiding El from him this whole time. And Mike has had a long day. Mike has had a long week. Mike is at his rope’s end. He gets blisteringly angry. Hopper swiftly hauls him off to have a talk, but Mike wants to have a YELL. He does not agree with Hopper’s viewpoint that this was the best way to keep them all safe, and Hopper’s like that’s FINE, be mad at me if you want to, blame me, and Mike’s like I DOOOOO and launches himself at him in a flurry of limbs. And for the second time in as many episodes, Jim Hopper just wraps his arms around a thrashing, traumatized boy, and lets him tire himself out against him. Again ends up just holding them safely in his arms after they’ve shouted themselves hoarse and limp. He tells Mike it’s okay, you’re okay, “I’m sorry, kid,” as Mike sobs against his coat. Wow wow wow wow, yeah show, yeah! Wow!

Meanwhile, back out in the living room, El is just being co-snuggled by Lucas and Dustin, bookended on either side of her, which is fucking adorable. Max tries to introduce herself but El terrifyingly walks right past her outstretched hand, ICE QUEEN, to instead dive into the waiting hug from her Hawkins mom, Joyce. Aw I missed them too. :’)

Somehow, because of course she does, El already knows about Will. Gently she asks if she can see him, and Joyce brings her to his bedside, still unconscious from his last injection, still in his little hospital gown. El looks at him tenderly, her partner in Upside Down suffering. The message was for her: close the gate. Little Eleven opened it for Dr. Brenner, and now she’s going to finish this.

On the one hand, Karen Wheeler has a really admirable bubble bath set-up. Loving these green tiles, all the candles, hell yeah. But on the other hand, when Billy shows up at the door looking for Max, half shirtless and skanky just like the cover of her romance novel, she lowers her eyelashes and writes down the Byers’ address. Karen! Betrayal! So now the loose Billy variable is headed our way, goddamnit.

Back at the Byers house, all our people are gathered for another kitchen table conference, Hawkins UN. Mike is voluntarily standing with his shoulder nearly brushing Hopper’s, his hair still kinda tousled up from when he’d flown at him in a rage. This is there to telegraph that they’re okay now, and I also love it powerfully. The way this show can do complex kid/adult relationships….it can be really good.

Anyway, El believes she can CLOSE GATE, but they want to get the Mind Flayer out of Will before she does it, or risk losing him in the colony collapse. They know He Likes It Cold, so that seems the best option: apply heat. Interestingly, I just listened to a whole podcast episode about medicinal fevers. They’ll need a new location the Mind Flayer doesn’t know, and Hopper’s like oh I got an obscure place NO ONE the fuck knows about—you can go to my home.

As they gather space heaters from the detritus piled outside the emptied shed, this time Steve reaches across the silence to Nancy. Ah, structure! Nice! He tells her she should go with Jonathan like she wants to and help with Will, that he’ll stay here and look after her brother. “I may be a pretty shitty boyfriend,” Steve offers, “but it turns out I’m actually a pretty damn good babysitter.” Aw STEVE, hell yeah you are, dude! You actually weren’t even that shitty of a boyfriend this past year, it seemed, you’re just not the boyfriend for Nancy. Nancy’s also like aw, Steeeve. She goes with his blessing, as Jonathan desperately repeats Hopper’s directions in his head, which are all shit like “drive on this unmarked road until you reach a fallen tree, then turn left straight into the woods. now go two miles….”

Hopper packs up his truck with all the artillery they have, as El earnestly promises Mike that he won’t lose her again. Mike half believes her, and is full crying. Then Joyce and Hopper drive off, leaving four schoolchildren with Steve Harrington, in Joyce’s house. God, the liability...fucking incredible. Love it.

On their way back to Hawkins Lab, Hopper had promised he wouldn’t be mad, so is now just sitting here trying to keep it together as El maybe deliberately keeps giving him exactly as little but as alarming information as possible about where she’s been. It’s a delight to watch. But eventually she just sadly said she shouldn’t have left, and Hopper steps in to take that right off her---no hun, I should have been there, and I shouldn’t have lied to you. It is REALLY SWEET. They’re finally having the talk we wanted! Hopper even tells her about Sara, and his startled realization that she doesn’t know about his lost daughter feels like it contains a lot. Hopper admits that he’s afraid, he’s afraid that El too will disappear, lost to the black hole that surrounds him. They admit they’ve both been stupid. “I guess we broke our rule,” Hopper smiles, and El smiles back. My heeaaaarrrt.

Meanwhile, another episode is getting underway of Steve’s Kids, with Steve. Steve has been talked into stuffing the dead monster into the fridge so Dustin can present it at a scientific conference or whatever his plan is. Lucas and Max are decently trying to clean up all the broken glass in Joyce’s house, while intermittently telling Mike to stop fucking pacing. But he is FREAKING OUT, El and Hopper are headed INTO THE LION’S DEN. God his razor’s edge ‘I am this close to murder’ sigh at Dustin hollering “Demodogs!!” in correction from the kitchen.

Steve wades in with a dishtowel in his hand (magnifique) and tries to impress upon them that their coach---the Chief---has set the play, and their role is to stay here and stay out of danger. But once again, the damn kids have a fucking ~*Idea*~. They want to create a diversion, draw the (Demo)dogs away from the Lab and give El & Hopper a clear shot. There is that tunnel system….

Mike, excitedly, pointing at Hopper’s boneyard on Will’s map: “Maybe if we set this on fire!—” Steve: “Oh yeah that’s a no.”

Poor Steve really regrets adding Nancy’s little brother, you can tell. That kid is just trouble. Like his big sister tbh. Pale passionate little faerie-faced people…why won’t u chill.

But the kiddos are really pumped up about their plan at this point, and Steve literally claps for quiet, hollering “Hey hey hey!”

Mama Steve, dishtowel slung over his shoulder, hands on his hips: “This is not happening.” His kids: “But!” Steve: “No no no no, no buts. I promised I’d keep you shitheads safe and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

And on that note, Billy drives up. Max, without dramatics, tells Lucas he’ll kill them. Steve has met Billy. He has seen Billy’s wild eyes, always just looking for an excuse. Steve’s own eyes go thoughtful, calculating. He said he’d keep these shitheads safe. And he knows he makes good bait..

When Bill gets out of his car, he finds Steve Harrington standing on the porch, hands still on his hips.

Billy: “Am I dreaming or is that you, Harrington?” Steve, flatly: “Yeah it’s me don’t cream your pants.”

The plan is brave but dumb, what do we expect. Steve and Billy get into a knock-down drag-out fight, Steve trying to keep Billy focused on him and not shoving Lucas into Joyce’s built-ins. Hey kids btw, I appreciate your vocal sideline support, but you could help. You got little legs, good for tripping! But Billy just gets Steve on the ground and starts happily whaling on him, grinning through his bloody teeth, as Steve starts to slip unconscious. I hate it!

Then Max stabs a hypodermic needle from the Lab into the side of Billy’s neck. The boys are like 👀. Billy fallen woozy on his back, Max slams Steve’s bat into the floor between his legs and makes him swear to leave them alone, then takes his keys after he passes out. The boys are like 👀👀!!

Deep in the woods….somewhere….Jonathan, Nancy, Joyce and Will (asleep) roll up to a structure like well this looks like a murder cabin, this must be it. Nancy, trying: “It’s actually….kinda nice!” No one bothers to respond. They tie Will down on the cot by the fire by the wrists and ankles, oh jesus THIS POOR KID.

And over at the Lab, another poor kid looks up at the building she used to be held in and forced into terrible experiments, as the floors howl with monsters both literal and figurative. She hasn’t been back there since she ran away, right? Oh baby :(

Cut back to Steve’s Kids, with the reveal that they did leave on their mission, but they took their unconscious babysitter along with them. Just the most perfect thing, holy shit. One of them is holding an ice pack to his head when Steve comes to, in a careening sports car driven by a 13 year old girl, next to a sloshing can of gasoline Mike is holding. “Nancy?” Steve slurs at his profile. This is….so fucking good. Mike’s just like *pause* *furrow?*

They’d put bandaids over his cuts. “Heeyyy buddy, shhhh,” Dustin soothes, adjusting the ice pack, as Steve does not shhh, but proceeds to get increasingly agitated as his brain catches up with what he’s seeing. Dustin, we learn, had insisted they bring Steve with them for their diversion, that counter to his order is, in fact, very much happening. Right now. Mike, right and pissed about it, just goes “I told you he’d freak out!” as Steve screams.

At Hopper’s cabin, I’m freaking out, as Will’s eyes finally open, and he starts screaming. All four of them are already soaked in sweat, and Joyce, determined, turns all the space heaters up to maximum. Jonathan can’t take it and turns helplessly to hide in Nancy’s arms as Will screams.

Over at the pumpkin patch, Max swings to an abrupt halt.

Mike, impressed, winded: “Incredible.” Max, chill: “Told you. Zoomer.”

She doesn’t even look back at him, just gets out. It rules.

What I adore about the way this storyline is going, is that we are aligned with Steve—what he missed, we missed. So we feel what Steve’s feeling as he stumbles out of the car amidst a gang of children all immediately setting about executing some plan without any need for discussion, they already have it all worked out. They are so fucking prepared, it’s fantastic, these kids!! I love yooouu. They have scarves, bandanas, goggles, flashlights, ropes to tie to the car to let them down into the hole—they’d even packed Steve a backpack, with his bat. I’m dying.

“Steve!” Dustin cajoles, trying to get him to focus. “You’re upset, I get it. The bottom line is, a Party member requires assistance and it is our duty to provide that assistance. Now I know you promised Nance that you would keep us safe. So keep us safe.” He pushes his backpack into his arms.

So Steve drops down into the tunnels first. God they all look SO GOOD in their eyeware and handkerchiefs, fuck! Yes! And now that he has a task, Steve has perked up considerably, stepping up all okay, OKAY, I’m in charge again, I’m leading the way, you dipshits DON’T DIE DOWN HERE alright.

You know what, not sure I could love this gang more.

Labward, Hopper and El have so far run into minimal resistance of the flayed faced demon dogs variety, good good good. And in a stairwell, Hopper finds Dr. Owens, alive! Gnarly leg wound, but breathing, verbal. Hopper uses his belt for a tourniquet while mildly but intently introducing him to El behind his shoulder, expressing just what a swell thing it would be if this little girl could maybe just live a normal life and not be anyone’s lab rat anymore. She looks so sweet and strong standing there in the shadows, how could anyone not want to do everything they could to help her, to do what Hopper’s asking. Free Eleven!

Alright a lot of things are about to happen all at once. We got three pieces: Steve’s Kids in the tunnels, Will’s sweat lodge from hell, and Hopper trying to get El to the rift. For all that Steve did not want to do this, their actions turn out to be highly significant to the success of the other two groups. Because they reach the boneyard—Steve, in his habit of charmingly calling all the kids by their last names: “Alright Wheeler, I think we found your hub”—soak it in accelerants, and light it up. The flames tear through the hivemind, pulling away the Demodogs between Hopper & El and the rift (toward Steve’s Kids, but we’ll hit that bridge with a nail bat when we get to it). Meanwhile Will’s possession narrative is getting peak disturbing, poisonous-looking black tendrils coursing under his sweat-soaked skin, reaching up his neck, as one of his hands wrenches free of the restrains to clamp around Joyce’s own throat. Thinking quick, Nancy scorches Will’s side with a burning iron from the fire, and he lets go. HARDCORE NANCE, BUT EFFECTIVE. And as the tunnels scream into flames, finally it’s all just too hot for the Mind Flayer, and it comes rushing back out of Will as that thick grey smoke, streaming out the door of the cabin. Nancy, always smart, runs out the door to watch where it goes, but the result is an inconclusive sort of dissipation into the night, mostly sailing up into the sky. Huh.

But Will’s voice is his again, oh my god Noah you’re so good. As his family falls on him in relief, Jonathan radios over to Hopper: “Close it.”

He and his small powerful daughter descend in one of those mining elevators in front of a massive, pulsing, red-orange rend in the fabric of reality. She takes his hand, oh my god. Hopper & El Hopper & El Hopper & El!!! TEARS. They’re both just so prickly and don’t know what the heck they’re doing and mess things up, and then they hold hands and face the monster and I DIE TEN THOUSAND TIMES OVER. There are dark leviathan shapes moving in the red dim, and he holds her hand.

Down in the tunnels as they race back to their escape hatch, Mike trips and gets vined, because of fucking course he does. They come back to save him, allowing a Demodog to come strolling up. It does rather stroll. And it looks…vaguely familiar. Greenish. Yeah it’s D’Art.

Dustin starts talking to him, walking up to him, to everyone’s piercing horror and disbelief. He starts pulling out 3 Musketeers bars as he chatters, D’Art watching him attentively. Lucas, turning to Mike, desperate for rationality: “He’s insane.” But Mike just flaps at him while they all three whisper “Shhh shut up!” This is just very enjoyable to me, I love the dynamics of this. And it works, perfect call-back reward from an earlier stage of the adventure. They sidle around this monster happily chomping down on sugary processed chocolate & nougat, and frantically make a beeline for the exit.

At the rift, the Gate, El remembers what Kali told her about channeling her feelings, and fiercely, she starts to close this damn thing. Oh the hivemind does not like that. Wheel around, Dogs, come back to the Lab! At the hole in the field Dustin and Steve haven’t made it up the rope yet as the pack comes racing down the tunnel——!

But it’s one of those scenes I just find SO VERY COOL, no idea why, where the scary thing is so focused on some bigger problem that it just goes right past you. Steve grabs Dustin to him, trying to balance, as a herd of Demodogs stream past them on either side. Why do I love this!

But the monsters do have a care to spare about the people on this lift, and Hopper starts picking them off one by one as they scale the walls and leap for their platform, defending El as she channels all her strength, and starts to lift off the ground, both hands outstretched, screaming back at the darkness. Every light in Hawkins glows with her, it’s gorgeous, I’m sobbing, in real life.

And she closes it, and collapses to the floor with Hopper, where they just cuddle about it, exhausted. “You did good, kid. You did so good,” he tells her, and kisses the side of her head as she just burrows into his arms. WEIRDEST BEST DUO AT THE FATHER-DAUGHTER DANCE. They have to cancel it after they attend because somehow the hall ends up on fire. Hey guess what I’m still crying!

For a tone change, remember Murray? Well Murray is back, along with that whole plot. Seems at least one paper must have picked up his and Nancy’s story, and Hawkins Lab is forced to shut down at the wave of public disapproval. Everyone departs in their army trucks while Murray sits outside the gate with a cooler, waving and laughing. Haha you asshole.

Barb’s parents finally hold a funeral for her, which will give them the closure they deserve. #JusticeforBarb though.

Doc Owens is out of a job, but he lives! And he has a gift for Hopper: a birth certificate for one Jane Hopper, born in Hawkins. There’s just, there’s something in my eye….

Hey here’s another thing you might remember, even earlier than the Murray plot, waayyy long ago, last season long ago. Remember at the school, before Dr. Brenner showed up, and Mike asked El to go to the Snow Ball with him, and she was like what? Well this thing happens every year, and this year we’re GOIN’.

In a nice callback to the Halloween day episode, we get a little montage of each of the boys getting ready. Joyce is teaching Will how to dance while Jonathan films them, affording us this very good dialogue:

Will: “Are you sure people still dance like this?” Joyce: “Yeah, it’s, it’s what’s happenin’.” Will, turning to Jonathan: “IS it what’s happenin?” Jonathan: “Yeah, yeah it’s what’s happening.”

Jonathan’s distinction on his “it’s what’s happening” is the best thing Charlie Heaton has ever done.

At the other houses, more of my favorite photography genre: Mike stares in glum annoyed disbelief as Karen takes pictures of him dressed up. Lucas practices asking Max to dance in front of his mirror, and hilarisadly tells himself no every time. Dustin steels himself, and starts applying the Farah Fawcett spray to his hair, before Steve The Hair himself arrives to pick him up. Steve’s his ride. Help, cute.

After sending Dustin in with some more advice about just being himself, just not a himself that does that weird purr thing, Steve sees Nancy through the door, one of the teen chaperones. He looks sad and regretful, but not in an off-putting way? It’s sort of an acknowledgment that this didn’t work out and he’ll miss her, but there’s no sense that he’s going to be obsessive or weird about it, just that he’s still feeling blue. Steve Harrington has really grown my friends, what a season for Steve.

Anyway, Nancy and Jonathan, dorks, would be working the middle school dance. He’s taking photos and she’s serving punch. They smile at each other. Seriously, dorks.

But ooohhhhhh no, dorks gonna be out in force: IT’S A SLOW DANCE.

The Party has commandeering a table, naturally, but start falling one by one. First some cutey very unexpectedly bops up to ask Will “Hey Zombie Boy, wanna dance?” He just turns and looks at Mike, stammering. Oh my BABY, oh god, aaah! Mike gently hits him until he says “Uh, sure.” Convincing! She doesn’t seem to mind. Max also doesn’t mind Lucas’s halting invitation to her, and just drags him out on the dance floor with a fond eye roll.

Dustin is next to go—on a quest for a dance partner, that is. He tries several girls, but they all keep meanly turning him down! Poor little buddy! But Nancy spies this going down, and with the generosity and benevolence of someone with the most social capital of anyone in this room, absolutely untouchably elite and happy to pass some of this glow onto someone else, swoops him up from where he’s quietly crying on the bleachers and pulls him out onto the floor. All the middle schoolers are like whoa and Nancy’s like ha ha ha. She tells Dustin he’s cooler than they are anyway.

“You know, out of all my brother’s friends, you’re my favorite,” she confides, grinning. He beams. God, I’m pretty sure I’ve told one of my little sister’s friends something like this once—is this just something older sisters DO? Haha I love us.

Out in the parking lot, Hopper walks up to Joyce, so we know what’s going to be happening soon in the gym, but first they get a moment. They share a cigarette as they gently joke that the teacher that used to get them in trouble for smoking is long since retired, then Hopper just snuggles her as she mourns Bob. Hopper snuggles a LOT of people in this season doesn’t he. Our Papa Bear.

Anyway, we’ve waited long enough, which is nothing compared to what they feel: El and Mike are finally at a dance together. She looks adorable, Mike tells her so immediately, starry eyed. And then they attempt to figure out how to dance (god).

To be perfectly honest, Nancy and Dustin, bopping around half singing at each other, are DEFINITELY having the most fun right now. Will is nervous as hell and clearly just waiting this out. Lucas and Max are Freaking Out because they can tell something is coming, and Mike and El both look about ready to cry. And these last two pairs finally kiss, chaste little PG pecks. ~Pipsqueak Romance~

I guess in retrospect, seeing the big hulking monster again hovering over the Upside Down gym is probably just like, Puberty, on the horize. But that too is pretty dumb. Listen, it’s kinda dumb! This season ends exactly as we left things at the end of the previous season, with a monster still there. So what did we actually accomplish? I would have just, not had this last shot, I would have done the first season, and then this sequel, literally stylized Stranger Things 2, and then ended it.

But I did find a good deal to enjoy in the third season they made anyway, and we will get to that….later! After Stranger Things 4 comes out, following my tradition of only recapping seasons of this show after I’ve watched the newest season. No I don’t know why I do this. But I’m glad to have you with me. 🧡

- - - - -

Love Letters to Stranger Things

#Love Letters to Stranger Things #Stranger Things #Stranger Things 2 #Stranger Things spoilers #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff

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wellntruly · 5 years

Text

An overdue post sitting in my drafts I gotta get out of my system

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“God’s Grace Spares the Struggling ‘Kings’ For Another Season, New Showrunner To Step In,” reads Variety in Imaginary 2009. “New ‘Kings’ Showrunner Promises Fresh Vision,” reports Vulture, subhead: “‘Doin’ right by God’s Boys’ she Tweets.”

IN WHICH

I slide out of the pieces of Season One I wanna keep like blocks in a Jenga game, blithely topple the remainder, and REBUILD THE TOWER ANEW.

IN WHICH

Sly Tower of Babel references...are welcome & appropriate!!!

IN WHICH

I Break Season 2 of NBC’s Kings

Oh do know now---this is a long post

Alright. So first up, if this show were to come back in real life, Michael Green’s wish to skip ahead 10 years between seasons has become both a better choice as well as the only choice, as it is in fact 10 human years later for all the actors. But we’re imagining a fantasy 2009 where Kings was a) renewed even with those numbers, b) I am there, as a time-traveling showrunner from the future, who may or may not have sent Michael Green off on a long vacation without cell service under the impression that the show was cancelled, and just---[*slide whistle*]---taken his place. “Yeah Michael says it’s fine if I invent Gilboan social media,” I say after checking a “text” from him on my “phone” (it’s my dead Blackberry from college I’ve brought as a prop).

So! It’s ten years ago, and we’re coming back One Year Later, in Kings time. Often fans think they want things to pick right back up where they left off, but I assure you you don’t actually want that here. What you do want is to feel the air on the streets of Shiloh almost twelve months after the Prince and Princess each vanished from public sight. The Palace assures that they’re fine, but where are they? Where are the twins? And you do want to see what shape the stories have taken since Gilboa’s shining hero David came back from the dead, only to disappear again over the border, leaving a strangely bloodied King back on the throne. He headed toward Gath, the whispers say---toward Gath? We pick up one year later so we can see what all this has wrought, what movements have begun to rise, what is transforming. Aannnd so that in the last act of the premiere Michelle can return from her year-long exile, disrupting this new Gilboa, the catalyst that sets off the narrative thrust of the season.

Now I am so sorry to say it, but we’re losing Ian McShane. Not right away! He’ll get two episodes, technically three, and they’ll be good ones. But then he has to go, because we’re doing a classic three act structure and this is not his story much further. Season 1 is David in the court of King Saul Silas, Season 2 is King David establishing his own court, and Season 3 is God’s Boy Gets Dark. As much as I generally dislike good-guy-goes-bad character arcs, this is just what we’re working with in canon here. And we’ll do it right, it’ll be Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, and “wow God kinda destroyed this man to achieve His own aims didn’t He?”, and, you know, if Gilboa is God’s Kingdom on Earth than what must be God’s Kingdom in Heaven, etc. Also, by Act/Season 3 it will be crystal clear that this was always the story of Jonathan as much as that of David, his own transformation over the three seasons taking up just as much emotional oxygen, and then he can die in Season 3 possibly more Good than the man who brought him there is anymore, and take the show he stole with him.

Also if we lose Ian McShane we get more $$$ to spend on other things, because he is easily our biggest salary the rest of this cast is cheeeaap as hell in 2009 value, and this whole exercise may be pure spitball fantasy but I’m a producer at heart and still gotta think about those imaginary dolla’s.

All the rest of the characters stay though. Thomasina stays because they gave me like TWO total personal details about her and that’s SORELY LACKING, Season 2 sees much more. (What compelled you to give that lovestruck guard a kiss! What was behind your bone-chilling advice to Jack as you locked him in!! Thomasina?!) Hanson stays, absolutely, because he’s the clean-featured, tightly-wound, tidy little pointman, and like hell am I losing this show’s Arthur now that I’m here to finally do something with him. Also people will start actually calling him Handsome in the show not just in my ears. The guards stay too, because that’s easy continuity, in light of how I’ll be changing...so much else. And Rose Benjamin stays, albeit in a reduced capacity, because after deposing her husband it’s just gonna be structurally necessary. We’ll make sure all her scenes are extra juicy though, don’t worry.

Anyway, is there anyone else on this show besides these ones and the three young bloods.... Oh Reverend Samuels! Totally Ghost Samuels stays, haunting peeps and disrupting yer peace. I find I’m actually glad he was killed now, because he’s not actually going anywhere, and now I’ll get MORE CLERICAL FIGURES FUCK YEAH. There will be a NEW head of the church, oh I am agog with possibilities, AND, we’re adding mooooore. Do you know what this show needs? Fucking prophets, listen to me: imagine a modern prophet flapping around Shiloh’s parks like Gilboa’s Prior Walters. Imagine a prophet smoking. Imagine a prophet with a vlog. Imagine a prophet literally has your number. He texts you. Imagine Jack leaving a prophet on read. Delicious, it’s all happening.

Another thing that is happening is that we’re editing a sequence to the whole ass entirety of the Jeff Buckley cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. It’s happening, it can’t not happen. What is the point of this show if that does not happen. I was going to say that we’ll earn it but we don’t even need to it’s already ours, it’s David’s song. Listen if The Young Pope can do ‘Hallelujah’, we can fucking do ‘Hallelujah’.

Now that I mention it...I mean not that we’re just going to become The Young Pope, but here are the things we’re doing like The Young Pope:

1. Music. This show is gonna have a MUSIC DIRECTOR and MUSIC, bold/borderline embarrassing contemporary as well as old as balls & neat as hell. We’ll use one of our McShane $s for that. We will potentially use two $$s for that. I mean you know who else used a ton of existing music right? Our night soap spiritual leader The O.C. [Fiddler on the Roof boom] TRADITIIOOOOONN 2. God & Mysticism. Again, shockingly little of these things in Season 1. Sea-change starts now. It’s gonna be massive. 3. Do not try to be too cool for any of this, shun reservation, embrace the inherent aggrandized absurdity of our premise and just Do The Damn Thing. Every choice should be the big choice. This will also allow us to start deploying... 4. ARTSY TABLEAU SHOTS. Will they heavily reference the history of artistic depictions of these events from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition? Is the Pope Catholic?? 5. Specific, but at some point my prophet wears Diane Keaton’s “I’m A Virgin But This Is An Old Shirt” T-shirt

Speaking of character design, David comes back with a beard, right? Yeah David definitely comes back with a beard. David for sure comes back with a beard, why would I even question that. We will be accused of using superficial appearance changes to do the bulk of the legwork necessary for character development, by me I will do that accusing, but we were left with Season 1 David---we need all the legs up we can get. God’s Dimwit is coming back looking older, looking more anti-establishment, self-reliant, hot, and, most importantly: LIKE KING ARTHUR AND ALSO JESUS. If Christopher Egan can’t carry off a beard, I’ll replace him. He is expendable---this beard is not.

Oh my god, if I could replace Christopher Egan…..oh I never should have thought about this. I wouldn’t. But if I had to...what I want is like a younger, American Ewan McGregor….and I can’t think of who that is, but it doesn’t matter anyway slam the door on that vision we’re sticking with what we’ve got.

For instance, something we’ve got, got to DEAL with, is that Gay Prince Jack is, and I must just stress that this is CANONICALLY how things were left, imprisoned in a room of the palace with his lavender marriage fiancé, and told that maybe they’ll be let out if they produce an heir for Silas to “raise right this time”, in a fully Fuck Or Die [Imprisoned] scenario that really aired on NBC, America’s Secretly Fucking Wildest Network. And while a year will be just the right amount of time to allow Outlaw David to maybe learn some things and get a little bit scarier in a sorta unknowable, static-on-the-air God-y way, which will be great fun, it’s also aaalmost too much time, really dancing on the edge here, which feels right, for imprisoned Jack to get hella pale and listless and cracked-smiled and strange but not fully fully mad. Just, a little half-mad. The Half-Mad Prince in the North Wing. We’ll let that poor girl get rescued out of there somehow or another after a few months, maybe in flashback we’ll see see him help her fake some sort of medical crisis (“This is not your prison---go”), and just leave him alone for the rest of the year suspended in air, to quote St. Vincent’s ‘Pills.’ Ooo maybe they keep him on pills… Oh I don’t know, too dark? Hell it’s Jack on Kings, probably not dark enough.

And what of his sister? Ah Michelle, you may be my greatest challenge, but I have a somewhat unorthodox idea that maybe, just maybe, might make you great. Michelle always had plenty she was doing in the show, the problem was that they literally made her shoulder Virgin, Whore, and Mother in just one season, which is a fucking lot for one character to try to sustain. No wonder she felt so inconstant and flip-flopping, they kept changing her positioning as soon as she could get her feet under her! Also she’s an idiot, like her dear David. And listen, I’m not actually going to change that for either of them. David’s going to be my good-not-bright King Arthur straight out of T.H. White, and Michelle I’m just gonna tweak juuuust a bit, combine her dumbness with her drivenness so that she’s just more boneheaded than anything. Sorta like Peggy Carter? That thing where she’s just stubbornly walking into the burning house because That Woman Cannot Be Told. She’s still gonna be stupid, but she’s also going to be braver than everyone else, partly because of it. She’s also gonna be a mom now, because thanks for this pregnancy plot Season 1, you shouldn’t have! You...shouldn’t have. But you did! So we’re committing to Rose’s pregnancy-hiding exile of Michelle, setting her on some bright & cool wind-and-sun-scoured island, Mediterranean meets Maine, which sounds like I’m insane, so: these paintings. She has people with her, community and purposeful work and whatnot---we don’t need to bother fleshing that out really in the show, just enough to indicate that her situation is much much more mentally healthy than Jack’s.

So to catch up: David’s in the forests of Gath building an army and a personality, Jack is languishing in captivity building himself intricate rituals with no idea how close God is resting near him these days (He loves the ones who barter themselves), Michelle is resting with her sleeping infant daughter on her chest, a warm fire within it, waiting, and the Benjamin monarchs have turned super withholding and mysterious, deflecting all questions about their children, as the city grows ever colder and the people more restless, pieces of iron and flint skidding down stone streets.

And our season begins.

Thirteen episodes, like the art-house standard of five years yore.

Episode 2.1

Establish new paradigm, new artistic language, new television show, it’s A Whole New Kings. Here’s what we do: long cold open, not a single character from last season---we’re out on the streets of Shiloh. We’re with the people, all kinds of people, people at carts selling food, people clumped on city squares, talking a little furtively, bundled against the cold. “Holy shit,” a woman says, the first audibly spoken line (New Kings’ got jokes). She’s looking at her phone as she holds something hot and foil-wrapped in the other. She looks up at another woman with her, shows her the screen, voice awed stunned excited scared: “They’ve added it.” It’s Gilboa Twitter, no I have not come up with an alternate name for Gilboa Twitter, and it has appended a white moth emoji to the hashtag ‘#WherearetheTwins?’ As the scene spools out we realize that quiet yet growing activist groups have begun using a white moth to symbolize the missing Prince and Princess, the pale, darkness-kept reflection of their father’s orange butterfly, and that now the largest state-independent social media platform & news source has picked it up as well. The question, and the attendant doubt in King Silas, is getting too big to ignore.

We won’t connect with the King and Queen until after the credits, and they’re strained and tired and brittle. They each try to talk of their children but in ways the other one does not want to. “Your daughter will be returning soon,” Rose says, air like a lioness indoors, and Silas just throws a gruff hand, “Bah!”, looks away under his saturnine brows. Rose looks out the window, across a courtyard, her eyes finding the room where her son is locked in.

The rest of the episode continues to build the King & Queen’s tension with each other and their country, and the growing movements out on the street. David’s name is spoken a few times---maybe he has an epithet now? That might be fun. But we do not see him. We do see Jack in act three, and he’s quite worrying. In Season 1 Jack spent three quarters of his time being a smug (scared) asshole lashing out at everyone around him, and one quarter of his time shaking apart in just tremendous pain as his parents ripped him open again and again like Prometheus and the eagle. This Jack has maintained his defensive sarcasm and cleverness for where to jab people back, but he’s too tired and sunlight deprived to keep the forlorn glimmering in his eyes tamped down anymore, and it’s a really disconcerting combination. He has a letter from Michelle that a sympathetic servant had slipped him, and through that we see some of Michelle’s very different but still lonely prison, hear the bright wind and her words of promise. That she’s working on something. She also mentions David.

At the end, Michelle returns quietly to the Palace. She does not have her baby with her. She and her parents have a weird dinner. During it, a flag is unfurled on a pole somewhere high up---the Princess’ flag: she is in the royal residence. The servant who pulled it up looks nervy but committed, eyes glowing as he puts his phone back in his pocket. The people on the streets fucking notice. At dinner, Silas’ phone buzzes. Michelle smiles at her parents over her glass of red wine, as some thunder rumbles. “It’s good to be home,” she says. Michelle??! (Hell yeah.)

Out on the border, David steps up on top of a small knoll. He has The Beard, and forces behind him. He looks over to Shiloh in the distance, searching, and spies Michelle’s flag. He grins. “God save the Princess,” he says lowly, and steps forward.

END EP 1

Episode 2.2

And now we go BACK in time, and we DO pick up with David right where we left him in the Season 1 finale, and then spend the whole episode catching up on his year of Plot-Plot-Revolution, bringing us up to speed with him at the end of Ep 1, because that kind of Ep 1/Ep 2 structure is FUN. When Episode 2 begins with ‘One Year Earlier’ in contrast to the first episode’s ‘One Year Later’, the audience is gonna be like, *scream*

Now, I do not know the particulars of how David gathers an army and makes a plan and takes Gilboa, but that is why I will have a writers room. What I do know is that he gets a hell of a lot more God-touched, as mentioned earlier, and he grows that beard. He also figures out a way to communicate with Michelle on her island and they plan most of this shit together, because let’s be real they share one brain cell between them and need all the support available. Do you all like epistolary novels? Great, because these two are gonna cover a lot of ground in letters. Such hits as “hey I’m having your baby!” and “omg babe WHAT :D” and “you getting real God-y has illuminated for me that ultimately I do want to maintain my vow of celibacy and be close with God in my own weirdo way but I do still love you I know this is strange but like, platonic life partners with our daughter maybs?” and “I love and respect you in whatever way you want, I am Dad.”

We don’t catch all the way up to the exact moment that ended Ep 1, because we’re gonna want to see the heisty shenanigans unfold in all their glory in the next episode, so instead we end with marching and someone being like “What if her flag isn’t up when we reach the border?” and David just grinning “It will be.”

The soldier pausing with a cart but calling after him: “Sir, how can you be so sure?” David’s voice coming back strong through the trees: “You have to have faith!”

Episode 2.3

The big throne-taking episode, David returning like the King Under the Mountain. I do mean it, this one’s gonna have a heist vibe. Partly because THEY’RE MY FAVE, partly because battles are expeeeensive. You gotta pay all these actors for so many days of filming, do all this stunt coordination, edit for ages, and then so often battles are just boring to actually watch. Clang clang clash, yawn, naw. We’ll spend more time writing and do the coup CRAFTY STYLE. Michelle on the inside, peeps on the street, David’s gang will have their part too. Ends with David taking the Palace in Shiloh, killing King Silas because a bloodless rendition of this old story is a wrong one and also like hell are we letting Ian McShane go without a bombass death scene. But what we save for the final moment, the real whallop, is David, splattered with blood, triumphant but ignoring everything to find Jack, and free him from his gilded cage.

Listen, you guys already see what I’m setting up here. Kings, if you didn’t want me to do this, you shouldn’t have started adapting the story of David and Jonathan. And established that David’s initial love interest had taken a vow with God AND that this Jonathan is gay!!

Anyway, ‘Border Song’ for the end sequence of the episode? Why not. I can guarantee you it will cost us less to license an Elton John song than film a big battle number, especially in 2010 when no one’s making Rocketman. We do it all in a visual ballet with that “Holy Moses” refrain arcing over it all, it’ll be great. On-the-nose but satisfying about it. The “I have been removed” stanza is Jack and Michelle, the “I have been deceived” Silas, the rising “I’m coming BACK to the BORDER--” section David walking on Shiloh, arty gestures to effective military maneuvers during the instrumental bit and regicide, last stanza David is climbing stairs, “He’s my brother” when he opens the door to Jack’s prison room, embrace, “Let us live in peace” over the black cut to credits. So like it’ll be a Lot, but that song’s so good people will enjoy it in spite of themselves. “Wow this dumb show’s really going for it,” critics will remark in mildly affectionate surprise.

Episode 2.4

Really tempting everyone to be like “So is Kings a musical now?”, but this is our ‘Hallelujah’ moment: whole cold open is dialogue-free, just that song as we pick up the pieces of the city, and our characters mourn the King and their own fate in their differently situated ways, fitting the mournful tone of the song.

The rest of this episode is about whatever plot business will be necessary with a new monarch, but emotionally, it’s mostly about establishing a new sorta Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere structure between David and the Benjamin siblings. He’s the King, and they’re the two most important people in his life, and he openly loves them both, and they (twins now instead of lovers) are conferring like, so he’s *our* David, is that what arrangement is coming together here? We share him? Share and yet no one is sleeping with anyone, to make this even further heady and undefined and in-ter-est-ing. Jack is also still pretty mentally and emotionally topsy turvy as he recovers so we have a ton of leeway with him.

Anyway David and Michelle get married in this one, a combo ceremony with their being publicly crowned King and Queen. They make sure Jack is involved in the proceedings in a pretty unorthodox way. The populace is like “huh” and “this could be weird, but I think I’m into it?”

Oh also, this will just be happening throughout this season periodically, but in S1 they established that there’s a public address system built into Shiloh that Samuels could speak through at the pulpit in his house of worship. Love that, definitely keeping that, definitely having calls to prayer, with a like, shofar horn heralding them.

Episode 2.5

My goal here is to make as many of these episodes as I can the FUN kind of episodes. Structurally these last two are actually pretty down the line, so we’re getting back into the concept pieces with this, The Thomasina Episode(!)

You know that thing shows do sometimes where they’ll suddenly follow a more secondary character around the whole time, literally following them whenever they move from room to room, and you see everything from their perspective? That’s what we’re doing, babey! FINALLY we’ll learn some more about THOMASINA. There are so many options, can’t wait to pull this together with my writers room. Due to Thomasina’s role in the household/government (monarchies, man), we’ll get views on both the politics and David/Michelle/Jack, and what the deal was with Silas and Rose over the past year. But mostly we get to center Thomasina. Does the episode open with the camera tracking along close behind her heels as she walks into a room? Obviously. In the last scene does she slip those heels off and rub the arch of her foot while sitting on some stairs talking with Hanson or someone like that? You know it.

Episode 2.6

More fun episodes: pack everyone up and move them somewhere NEW. [chanting] Vacation ep! Scene change! Yeah yeah! Concept: the royal household takes a long weekend to breathe at one of the Benjamin’s summer villas. Does not need to actually be summer, I think chronologically it may even be winter---possibly even better tbh. Finding, securing, and filming at whatever manor or whatnot we find will cost a pretty penny, but we’ll save money down the line with our classically defined bottle episode (hold tight!). But here, the different surroundings and dress code frees everyone up to get looser, get odder, get both more familial and more sexy. If you’re starting to think, “oh so kinda Charles Ryder with the Flyte siblings at Brideshead vibe---hey wait how come David and the Benjamin twins wasn’t more Brideshead from the start?!”, welcome to my world.

And because we’ll need something to cut some tensions, one night Hanson gets drunk with those two guards. It’s honestly a great section, humorous and humanizing.

Episode 2.7

Alright we’re halfway through IF U CAN BELIEVE IT, time to bring back: ROSE BENJAMIN. She was not killed in the taking of Shiloh, she was removed until things had time to cool off. She’d actually gone to Michelle’s island, and now returns with: THE BABY. The baby’s here y’all! I have not decided yet how I want Michelle and David to play this off to their people. They are the King & Queen and Gilboa has a lot of goodwill towards these young cuties, so they probably have a fair amount of options really. I’m almost thinking it might be charming to have them say they’ve adopted this baby because they just wanted to start a family right away, and everyone’s like ohhh okay sure ;) sure you did ;) we got it ;) ;)

Meanwhile, post-Brideshead Jack is about crawling out of his skin over David. He has fully admitted to himself that he wants him, Biblically, jokesjokesjokes, and is LOSING his mIND about it, because it’s Kings’ Jack. Content warning for internalized homophobia, Rose with her son (woof, remember them in S1), and ~Religion~. Because Jack has the additional problem of how God got very interested in him during his imprisonment, and the Prophet character I’ve added is not making any of ANY of this easier. Things start breaking and cracking around Jack like his own visual leitmotif. Rose takes him to church. Exquisite use of Jack on his knees, repeatedly, we are dying. It is, in short, this season’s most Catholic episode, for our most Repressed Catholic Gay, but with the added twist that God Himself almost seems to be trying to draw him out, to Jack’s intense erotic confusion. ‘Big God’? Why not. Why the fuck not. If we have not earned Jonathan Benjamin Florence + the Machine’s ‘Big God’ by this point, what are we doing. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ it hurts.” No I do not care that ‘Big God’ was not released yet---this is all made up.

Episode 2.8

Alright alright it’s BOTTLE EPISODE TIME. Fuck guys I love bottle episodes. Location: that court business conference/throne room with the glass wall onto the park, of course. An unusual bottle episode in which the characters are not physically held there through any outside means or internal motivations, it just happens that after David walks in for his first meeting that morning, events upon events conspire so that he just does not leave. Whatever actual kingdom-relevant plot is forming the backbone of especially this latter half of the season will really be fomenting here, but listen, I do not know what it is. Le shrug!

Anyway, Michelle’s a fucking mover and a shaker in this ep, appears a handful of times in various meetings and sessions, sometimes in a seat sometimes in the audience sometimes holding her daughter, and it’s only the last time that we learn what she’s forced through over the course of the day. Dare I say it, Michelle might be smartening up!

Also we realize in this one how badly David’s going under for Jack too, HALLEFUCKINGLUJAH. Of course it dawns on him in a fucking court session, wouldn’t expect anything else for God’s Dumb Boy, whom He loves bothering. By the time we get to the last act it’s late at night, and everyone has filtered out, leaving just David and Jack. Aaaannd they somehow end up sublimating their leaping feelings for one another into deciding to enter into dangerous political cahoots together. Fuck. Something they do not do. Because why do this if we don’t drag it out am I right!!! Hahahahaha, ur welcome about it.

Here I’ve got a final image for this episode for you: Jack leaves after David makes some excuse that he’s just going to stay and finish up one last thing, because naturally this episode has to end on David, he got us into this bottle. He’s sitting in one of the chairs at the table facing the windows as Jack departs, maybe watching him softly in the reflection. The camera finally moves to outside the room for the first time, looking back in through the glass, and though you can’t hear it you can feel David’s groan of exhaustion & longing as he just slides forward to press his face into the table, arms outstretched to either side, wrecked boardroom Jesus.

Episode 2.9

So do you like mutual pining? Are you ever going to like Episode 9! David and Jack are getting full into their dangerous cahoots, and their FEELINGS. David is fucking smitten at this point, and in agony, because Jack is going high key fey and seems absolutely ready to die on the altar of his love for David, in service to his King, whom he won’t touch, he won’t he won’t he won’t, he prays to God that he won’t. Will they get it together before something terrible happens??? Before we all die???!!! Fans are losing their goddamn minds.

Really this whole season exists to give Sebastian Stan the chance to have a scene where he’s flashing his white-like-the-edge-of-broken-china smile at David in some social-political setting and David smiles back all secret and fond and golden, and the group breaks up and Jack ducks into an empty locked room to let out a dry sob and masturbate tragically with his forehead leaning against a wall, and then dashes the tears out of his eyes and fixes them fiercely and goes off to tear someone apart on David’s behalf, if not really his request. I actually don’t know if that happens here or in Ep 7, and then something even better happens here, but IT HAPPENS. All manner of this happens. Again, you’re welcome.

Episode 2.10

Jack leaves the city as part of the cahoots, off doing something risky and nuts because they’re fucking idiots. David glowers and broods, stormclouds gather over Shiloh in pathetic fallacy/God’s sympathy, take your pick. Michelle’s like good Lord just take him to bed already, Tumblr’s like, my Queen?? Trying to distract himself but unable to do kingdom work, David wanders around the palace barefoot carrying his kid on his hip, teaching her stuff, inspo heavily Robert Pattinson in High Life.

In the last scene Jack comes back to Roxy Music’s ‘Psalm’ and It Finally Happens, with full orchestral magnificence courtesy of Bryan Ferry belting about deliverance. We’re not doing the whole 8 minutes because we’re not out of our minds, but we’ll cut it up into something shorter that still keeps that good build, and will make sure we keep the “He’s gonna take you by the hand / He’s gonna make you feel so good” bit, because hohoho. Public’s like “wow Kings really did it.” On Twitter I retweet my pre-season promise with “How’s that”

Episode 2.11

Recall that it is NBC, but also recall what Bryan Fuller got away with on Hannibal. So, we do some very, veerrry clever storyboarding, and intercut various palace business with various boning business. I am all in it for this edit, this is gonna be so fuuunnn.

Also, whatever political plot is continuing off of the cahoots. I think it will in some way involve Michelle and her mom working together on something, too. Also Michelle gets coffee with the Prophet and we realize that they hang out and talk about people, vibes like a less sinister version of Syd and Clark in that one episode of the season of Legion that shall not be otherwise named. One thing Michelle and the Prophet are coordinating on is making sure Rose doesn’t find out that her son has been taken to the King’s bed, as-it-were, etc, because sadly she just does not understand that God’s Plan is for them to get gay married.

Episode 2.12

Speaking of: David & Jonathan make a covenant with one another. Bible fans lose their SHIT. We’re doing Oscar Wilde proud, we’re doing James Baldwin proud, we’re doing GOD proud.

A large portion of this episode is given over to the new “Reverend” (we might just...elide giving them an official title this season) conducting a religious service. This is our most Jewish episode.

Also whatever the political plot is continues along.

Episode 2.13

Finale. I really have shot myself in the foot vis-à-vis actually coming up with a good payoff for you in the last episode, given that I never did figure out the rest of the plot did I. Eh I’m not a real showrunner, what do you expect.

I do know the finale opens with the Prophet, out on the streets, for a nice resonant echo with how the first episode began. Probably it ends with a neighboring country at the border, right, in another echo? You’ve made your kingdom, now you gotta defend it? And King David seems weirdly chill, or no, confident. He’s smiling, he almost seems like he’s glowing a little bit, his eyes a little God-mad, a little unhinged. “It’s gonna be alright,” he’s assuring Jack, in a room in the Palace as you hear horns outside. Jack is concerned, becoming more concerned, David’s low-level thrum of holy manic energy making him shake a little, especially when David grabs him, his grin now like a crack of lightning. “We have God,” David says in a rush, and kisses his forehead almost roughly, soundly, and wheels out of frame.

We end on Jack’s face, the Fear of God, the Fear of Man, an enigmatic play of emotions as the score crashes around us, a hint of what territory we’ll be traveling into for Season 3.

Okay there we go, that’s my second season of Kings.

-- -- --

More Kings nonsense, unfolding in chronological calamity: The O.T.

#SURPRISED BY MORE KINGS CONTENT FROM ME?#same #I actually broke this last month after I watched the show and had then just put it on the back burner #but now I want it out of my hair so I'm posting it #now YOU have to deal with it!#that's how blogging works!!#Kings #The O.T.#television #and now I really don't know what else to categorize this as #Tarra recaps stuff #is probably closest?#recapping an imaginary season??#or like #free form spec scripts #? y'know I guess if I ever do something like this again

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wellntruly · 5 years

Note

I woke up today with the distinct desire to reread your Hannibal S3E13 recap, so I did, and I’m pleased to report that I’ve spent the day in an acutely nostalgic excellently painful daze. What an ep, what a recap, what a time~

As time passes I’m beginning to understand that when I write recaps, it’s not just for people to read when they’re watching the show too, but that actually, perhaps more than anything, I’m creating time capsules. People go back and reread them years later---including me I do this too!---not just for the show, maybe even barely for the show at all, but to dip back into the time when they were watching it. It’s time travel. My time travel TV diary for you to share in. And folks, it’s an honor and privilege.

#replies #anon #Tarra recaps stuff

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wellntruly · 5 years

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STRANGER THINGS Recap: 2x08

This is another episode where I remember a fair deal of my initial experience watching it back in 2017 on Jen’s couch. Or more, I could feel the shape around where this episode was. This one, I could VIVIDLY recall, had been TOO MUCH FOR ME, and I had definitely blacked a lot of it out, deliberately, in self preservation. This was confirmed not only by being repeatedly startled into wails by actually seeing the events that occurred inside the shed I had just marked with “AAAAUUGHH”, but also by being taken ENTIRELY by surprise at the ending, A SECOND TIME. And then I cried.

So alright let’s have some fun!!

“” “f u n !! ! !”” “

Stranger Things 2: Chapter Eight, ‘The Mind Flayer’

If you felt like the last episode was a break in the action, because it was, well hang on because we’re sure gonna be jolted right back into it!!! We’re at Hawkins Lab and all Hell is quite literally breaking loose. I love when scientists tell you that some otherworldly creature can’t get through their defenses. YOU DON’T KNOW THAT POLYCARBONATE WORKS ON DEMOGORGONS, OWENS. Fun fact it doesn’t.

Palm slam that big red alarm button and get the f*ck out of there, we got monsters a’crashing and a’clawing right into your laboratory spaces!!!

Dr. Owens grabs Hopper and pulls him into the stairs with him, savvily surmising that maybe what is true in instances of fire is also true in instances of swift-footed tooth-faced beasties: don’t take the elevators.

It is, the rest of them all get eaten.

Upstairs, at the emergency sirens suddenly blaring out through the halls, everyone stops. Mike is currently being held with his back against a wall by Bob, which is a real gift because it indicates that between the last time we saw him, trying to get past the guards yelling about a trap, and now, boy got into such a state that mild-mannered Bob Newby felt the only recourse was to take him by the shoulders and flatten him to the nearest surface. This also affords us the chance to note that Finn Wolfhard is already as tall or taller than Sean Astin as well. What dwindling percentage of this cast was still taller than Finn Wolfhard at 13? An Investigation.

But right now our tall son is getting another opportunity to live his best life: CHAOS LIFE. Because Mike Wheeler is always at his peak in HIGH STAKES DRAMA. He shines in danger, he is On. He plunges back into Will’s room ahead of Bob, declares “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK,” grabs a syringe, and insists “We need to make Will asleep!” The odd, child-like construction of this thought is a fantastic tell for how this worked up kid’s brain is hopping right now. Knock him out, put him under—NO TIME TO FIND THESE PHRASES, NOW NOW NOW WE HAVE TO GO.

Will starts shrieking that Mike is lying about the Shadow Monster being able to see through him and then momentarily fails to recognize his mom, so Mike’s definitely right, and softly, Joyce asks Bob to hold him still. God this must have suuuuucked to film, jesus, Noah Schnapp with his voice all high and course screaming at them to let him go while Winona Ryder and Sean Astin have to hold this struggling little kid down and pretend to inject him with something. It’s upsetting! They did a very good job with this trembling reaction shot of Mike, hands clasped over his ears against his friend’s screams but eyes locked open in terror. God they’re so young, they’re so young to be going through all this.

Hopper and Owens bust in through the door, assess this tableau, and Hop just easily scoops up now-comatose Will like a small duffle bag—“We gotta go, we gotta go.”

But the Lab is practically overrun already---those fuckers move quick. Something captured all too well by the bank of security camera feeds in the control room they duck into, snarling carnage replicated across every floor, no where is safe.

And then the electricity cuts out, all the screens going out with a static fizzle. You should—hell yeah they do, move us to a wide shot of the building so we can watch each floor go dark one by one, and echoing through the night, that otherworldly screaming.

Like I said, they really threw us back into it, huh!!!

After the credits, we learn that Max and Billy have a scary abusive dad, from whom Billy is just continuing the cycle of violence. Sucks! This whole situation sucks! Tearful and enraged with a smarting jaw, Billy is sent out into the night to find his sister. Wow I do not want that variable out loose in our environs tonight? That is something we are not gonna need!

Somewhere in the woods, Dustin, Lucas, and Max are back on the train tracks with their exasperated loyal guardian Steve. The three kids are getting all worked up over who’s rule-break was more dire, Dustin’s lie about having D’Art all along, or Lucas revealing Party secrets to a non-Party member, while un-patiently waiting a few paces away in the dark Steve does this loll of his head like a mask-work eye roll that is really very good, A+ Joe Keery.

Then he hears a distant roar. All three of the boys head off in its direction, leaving Max to ask rationally: “Guys? Guys why are you headed towards the sound?” With a groan she follows, to come out of the trees on a little knoll overlooking: Hawkins Lab. The lights are off, but the Demodogs are very much home.

Inside the Lab, Owens is explaining that unless they can get the electricity back on, they’re trapped in here with the monsters, as the doors are programmed to deadlock at a power outage. The breakers are down in the basement. Hopper takes the alpha man approach of identifying the the largest and most dangerous task and immediately trying to set off to take care of it for his group. It’s a noble instinct, I have great respect for this type of man-oeuvre actually. But also it is dumb and wrong. You need to be more strategic in this and frankly most situations, talk it through just a little more first, make sure the right people are on the right job and that you’ve thought through what will come next. For instance, as Bob explains, after the breakers are flipped someone will have to manually enter a command into the computer system to actually unlock the doors.

“Fine, how do I do that?” Hopper asks. “You can’t!” Bob replies. “Not unless you know BASIC!” Hopper, grim, miserable, courageous, pleading: “I don’t know what that means.”

You know what David Harbour did totally get screwed over in Season 3, I’ll say it, because the man is REALLY good at these complex emotional registers that take me at minimum three adjectives to try to describe, and all he got asked to do the next season was shout.

Anyway, Mike, geek-chirpy and unproductively useful: “It’s a computer programming language.” Thanks bud, but I believe Mr. RadioShack here is gonna be the only one who actually knows how to speak it.

Yup, the time has come again for Bob Newby, Superhero, to be the man we need right when we need him. He says goodbye to Joyce, who is understandably distraught about how everything just keeps getting worse, and out in the hall Hopper gets Bob set up with a handgun. Guns are easier to teach than BASIC. There’s a sentiment about society somewhere in here. Then there’s another man moment, man to man: Bob tells Hopper not to wait for him after he springs the doors, and Hopper, understanding, promises that he’ll get Joyce and the little ones out no matter what, which is all Bob wants. Aww, my men. They’re good ones.

Meanwhile, accurately determining that if someone was poking around the ever weird Byers house taking pics, it would be that mysterious quasi-government run paranormal investigative facility on the edge of town that caused so much trouble last year, Jonathan and Nancy pull up to the gate outside Hawkins Lab, resolutely locked down in front of the dark building. Unusual. Standing outside the car, Nancy hears a sound in the woods of her own, and immediately takes off for it with Jonathan, because everyone in this town has a death wish. Watch out Max, you stay here much longer and you’ll be just like the rest of them.

One thing I remember clearly wishing for while fist watching this season, ever since the events of Chapter Six, was that eventually Nancy and Jonathan would run into Hawkins’s back-up babysitter Steve Harrington and his tween charges out in all the monster nonsense, and be like “—STEVE???!!!?” And I Got That. The reason why both the Duffers and I wanted this so hard, is because it’s such an entertaining and elegant crystallization of Steve’s new role within both the story and the social structures therein. Before, Steve only got pulled in to the Upside Down story through his social structures, specifically through Nancy and sometimes by extension Jonathan. As a secondary character, he was reliant on them for an entrance into this part of the story—he was never going be off doing things related to the monster plot on his own. Now, Steve’s whole role has transformed. He’s been upped to main cast, and suddenly he has agency to move on his own trajectories, this new autonomy within the narrative allowing him to get involved in this season’s Upside Down story when his path just happened to cross with Dustin’s. And what makes this moment SO FUN, is that like everyone else Nancy and Jonathan did not receive a memo about this, and so are just now discovering what we learned two episodes ago: that Steve isn’t just their satellite character anymore. He no longer stays put when they aren’t paying attention to him. No while you two have been out of town, Steve’s been out here tromping around in the woods having his own adventures and lookin’ good doing it. Not only that, he’s in charge of others. Like imagine, last time you saw Steve he was bummed out outside the gym, and now he’s striding out of the forest with his nail bat on his shoulder and Demogorgon blood on his jeans, leading a child militia. What the FUCK. G O D it’s so fiercely enjoyable.

So this moment happens, I’m incandescently happy, everyone’s like what are You doing here??, it’s one of those great little tumults—and then we’re dropped ungently back into the stakes. Because one of the most satisfying things about this show is its established pattern of letting groups work on problems independently before eventually coming together to combine forces & knowledge. And one of the terrible things about this show is when that happens, and two older siblings suddenly learn that both of their cute little brothers are in that battened down Lab, being stalked by vicious ravenous monsters. Their faces are just like Oh noooooo!

(Incidentally, god really: a Wheeler always loves a Byers, and a Byers always loves a Wheeler. And it’s so cute every time, a sweet shy Byers boy & their dramatic firebrand Wheeler child. LUV THIS PAIRING. REAL GOOD.)

Suddenly, the lights come back up in the Lab. Such a triumphant and visual indication to the team in the control room that Bob made it, he’s still alive and he’s doing it! And now they can see him too, on the feed from the basement, as he taps out the BASIC commands to unlock all the doors. And we are GO for exit, team! “Son of a bitch did it,” Hopper says, grinning warmly at the screen. \o/ Bob!

Looking at the screens, Owens has realized something. He’s realized that something that would be invaluable to anyone trying to get out of this building, would be if they had eyes on their route warning them what was up ahead. And Doc Owens feels responsible. And Doc Owens really is a good guy, we do get to like him. He tells the Chief that he’s staying behind at the comms, and he’ll guide them out. Aw Doc!

Joyce and Hopper and the boys make it to safety, a clear shot, and then Joyce lingers by the doors praying Bob gets there soon. But Bob is having a much more challenging departure. Carefully, Owens leads him around the Dogs, but he can’t prevent an errant broom handle from falling to the linoleum floor as Bob slips back out of a custodial closet. Bob makes a run for it, and he almost makes it, he sees Joyce there at the doors—!

And then the monsters get Sean Astin. Oh Bob, I knew you weren’t gonna get out of here alive, but I’m so sad! :(

Hopper runs in at Joyce’s screams but it’s too late, and he has to pull her out of the lobby as, mindless with grief, she keeps trying to go back for Bob. Just outside Mike is trying to hold Will’s unconscious body up to his chest, which is so charmingly silly, my own son you could just lay him on the ground. Hopper lifts Will back from his skinny arms as Jonathan and Nancy peel up in their car, tapping out a little honk call sign that I find unaccountably endearing and absurd. “Come on! Get in!”

Back at the gate, Steve and his ducklings scramble out of the way as Jonathan comes racing back away from the haunted castle with his mom and their brothers in another little flurry of honks, Hopper right behind in his empty truck for the forest gang to pile into.

And they all head for, where else: the Byers house.

I wonder what time it is, by this point. It’s still Sunday night, but I don’t know how late. Joyce is the only one who knows where her kids are, but her phone isn’t ringing with any other parent of Hawkins, because Hopper is on the line. As Jonathan sits on the couch with Will’s unconscious head in his lap, gently apologizing to him for not being here, Chief Jim Hopper is attempting to explain to whatever federal cavalry he has called that they have got to get out here right away. They clearly must suggest he call the police, allowing the bleak hilarity of Hopper going “I AM the police!” Haha, oh god what a mess. All the kids sit at the table watching their policeman, knowing that Hopper’s adults are not going to believe him. They know how this works. Hopper’s like well we’ll see and Mike exclaims “WE’LL SEE?” and Hopper’s just like son, chill. We wait for help. Remember how we learned that help is good.

Then he goes and sits on Joyce’s floor, leaning against her dresser, and just *is* there for her, while she sits on her bed in a blanket and cries. Aw :(

But Mike, a Protagonist, is not going to take this sitting down. Or looking down—he’s the only one in the kitchen with his eyes up, and I just chuckled like “here he goes.” Mike fetches Bob’s brain teasers he’d brought over for Will, and starts telling everyone about how Bob was the originally founder of Hawkins A/V. Oh my heart, he’s eulogizing him through story! And he’s motivating them. Mike wants to Do Something, for Bob, but the rest of them are like what though, Michael? Oh you know what, Dustin: ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE. Yaaaayy. This constant theme of this season…I love it.

So Mike starts talking out what they know so far, putting things together, making new connections. Steve, who has now gained another child to look after, finds his main role with this new one is to keep asking, “Slow down—what?” But Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are on a role now, figuring that if Will is part of this interconnected hivemind that Dr. Owens talked about, then the head of it, the brain, would be the Shadow Monster that was stalking him at Halloween, the huge smokey spider-legged being that got him on the field. And Dustin realizes this whole thing sounds familiar.

I like a lot this echo reverb on Lucas’s snap as he sees what Dustin is putting down.

Dustin, dropping a Dungeons & Dragons book open on the kitchen table: “The Mind Flayer.” Hopper: “What the hell is that.”

I’m living. God and Gaten Matarazzo’s uptalk on his correction “No, no it’s a manual?” Incredible.

Seriously whenever the kids’ D&D references work as the best metaphor to explain what they’re facing, it’s just so fun. Revenge of the Nerds. Metaphor, analogy, fine thank u Lucas—this is the best blueprint for action and you know it. Reluctantly, Nancy agrees to engage with this concept. “It wants to conquer us, basically,” Dustin explains at her question of motivation. “It believes it’s the master race.”

Steve: “Oh like the Germans.” Dustin: “Uh, the Nazis?” Steve, panicking: “Yeah, yeah the Nazis.” Hopper: [pushing his fingers over his eyes and groaning in the background] Dustin: “Uh, if the Nazis were from another dimension, totally.”

Where the metaphor really breaks down though is when they get to the zombies. Dustin acknowledges that yeah this no longer has much practical application for them in their situation.

But Joyce arrives at this point to add her voice to the conference, and Joyce wants to kill that thing. Hopper’s like I am extremely down with this, just give me a WAY. And Mike remembers whose voice has been missing in all this: Will’s. The thing about the spying going both ways, is that the spying goes both ways.

It’s risky. If Will recognizes where he is, the Mind Flayer will send the Demodogs after them. But are they still gonna do it? Oh heck yeah.

Everyone sets to work masking the shed out back, in convenient pairs that will afford them the chance to talk. Nancy tells Steve that it was really cool of him to step up with the kids. Dustin apologizes to Lucas about D’Art and says he can feel the vibe between Lucas and Max. Max tells Mike she understands why he misses El so much, because from what Lucas told her she sounds awesome.

And Steve, Lucas, and Mike ALL respond rather poorly. It’s kind of amazing. Wow we didn’t accomplish much there, three times over! Listen sometimes emotional injuries are not simple fixes. But hey, we’re trying.

Team Will the Wise has added Jonathan in, and kept Mike because he has not let Will out of his line of sight in over 48 hours and sure isn’t starting now. And inside the shed, the shed I’d marked “AAAAUUGHH”, they genuinely tie Will up in a chair and turn a spotlight on him. Okay Noah, you ready for your greatest challenge yet?

Hopper wakes him with some ammonia, and now we’ve officially entered into a full-fledged possession narrative. The Mind Flayer has the reigns, and Will screams and screams and screams to be let go, the lights flickering all the way into the house where the rest of our kids waiting anxiously. But Hopper just holds him, and wow, it works? Will tires himself out, braced against Hopper’s dad arm across his chest instead of pulling against the cords and hurting himself, aw Hop.

As Will breathes heavily, drained, his mom suddenly asks him if he remembers his eighth birthday. Emotionally, lovingly, Joyce tells him about how she gave him a huge box of crayons, and he drew this enormous rainbow spaceship. Oh my god <3 my boy <3

Jonathan sees what she’s doing, and asks if Will remembers the day their dad left, and they stayed out in the woods building Castle Byers even after it started raining. And as they talk to him, telling him about himself, reminding him who he is, and that he is loved, he is so loved, Will just keeps staring at them, transfixed. It feels like a struggle, like a clinging, he stares and strains, not against the ropes but against whatever Else it is that’s holding him.

Mike asks if Will remembers the day they met. Oh no Mike has a tear coursing down his cheek, oh god I was not ready for that cut! First day of kindergarten, so alone, and he saw Will on the swings and asked if he wanted to be his friend. This is exactly how I made my first friend too, god children are pure.

“You said yes. You said yes. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

…I’m gonna need a minute???!

Will trembles, and then he stills again. He doesn’t shout, but his voice still isn’t his. “Let me go,” he repeats. Aaahh !

But Hopper notices his fingers, tapping rhythmically against the chair leg. Oh! Aah?! This whole plot is a lot I see why I buried it!

Back in the house, he draws out the dots and dashes on a piece of paper.

Steve: “What is that?” Literally everyone in the room in unison: “Morse code.”

Oh Steven. Love you.

The message reads “HERE.” Hell yeah baby!!!! That’s my Will!!!! THE DEAREST, THE SCRAPPIEST.

They swiftly reassemble in a new system, Joyce and Jonathan and Mike telling Will stories and playing him music while he stares in bright-lit strangled longing at them, and Hopper watching his little hand, tapping the Morse into a transmitter held behind his back, relayed to the house where Dustin and Nancy transcribe it at the kitchen table. I love…..analog.

At last, they have Will’s message: “CLOSE GATE”. Gate? Oh gotta be that rift right!

Abruptly, the phone rings, cutting through the night. It might actually be the military calling back, occurs to me. But NOT RIGHT NOW, PLS. Dustin scrambles over and hangs it up, as if that has solved the problem in perpetuity. A second later it just rings again, and Nancy pushes him out of the way, rips the whole receiver out the wall and throws it down the hall. I fucking love Nancy.

But it’s too late. Will’s eyes R.E.M. flicker under his eyelids—the Mind Flayer is finding them.

They put poor, poor Will under again (god he must be wrecked), and Hopper gathers everyone in the house to make their stand against whatever comes their way. When Jonathan just stammers at Hopper asking if he can use a shotgun, Nancy “Sharpshooter” Wheeler steps up with “I can” and he tosses it to her no questions asked. Behind her Lucas has his wrist rocket pulled and it’s pitifully adorable. Frankly Steve’s bat is still maybe the best weapon against the Demodogs, as bullets haven’t even seemed to slow them down much, but a slam with the business end of this baby at least knocks them to the ground for a moment. My son Mike appears to be holding a small trophy and I don’t even know the best joke to put here. Worlds #1 Dumbass. At least you’re the winner in my heart. Listen he’s participating.

So very soon, the terrible chittering sound arrives, rustling through the bushes, bangs and other noises circle the house. I am on tenterhooks! But nothing is coming inside……

Until the body of one of the Dogs comes crashing through the living room window---but you can tell it’s dead even before Hopper nudges it with his foot. Oh shit what? WHAT could have killed one of these? What is stronger than them?? What the fuck is out there????

Guys they got me two times. They got me this time too, I was genuinely like ??!!??! with my teeth on my knuckles. But when the lock undid itself inside the door, I remembered, I KNEW, I KNEW AGAIN and my whole heart was yelling!!

A slow pan up from her dorky socks pulled over her cuffs, Hopper immediately letting his weapon fall, me CRYING, all their faces, Mike stepping forward already a fucking mess, and he just smiles at her. Eleven smiles so happily, so teary, blood running under nose, and that’s how you close a penultimate episode.

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Love Letters to Stranger Things

#since my last one was atypically short this one is allowed to be longer than usual right?#Love Letters to Stranger Things #Stranger Things #Stranger Things 2 #Stranger Things spoilers #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff

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wellntruly · 5 years

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STRANGER THINGS Recaps - Masterpost

Revisited these this week after Stranger Things 3 and found a) I had never made a masterpost, b) wow I miss writing these?? Stranger Things recaps were such fuuunn. I mean god, maybe I just, start this project up again....like rn...

Anyway, until then---

STRANGER THINGS (2016)

Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street

Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly

Chapter Four: The Body

Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat

Chapter Six: The Monster

Chapter Seven: The Bathtub

Chapter Eight: The Upside Down

These plus more: Stranger stuff

#Stranger Things #Stranger Things 1 #Love Letters to Stranger Things #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff #television

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wellntruly · 5 years

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STRANGER THINGS Recap: 2x07

My recaps aren’t usually this short, but also Stranger Things isn’t usually ‘The Lost Sister’

Oh dip do you think Kali might be like…her Spiritual (Adv)isor?

Stranger Things 2, Chapter Seven: ‘The Lost Sister’

I don’t remember disliking the Chicago episode when I first watched this season. Admittedly it was in the midst of a binge with Jen and we were really going through it by this point!! I remember thinking it was abstractly interesting that the show stepped away from the rest of the action to follow just one character’s story for a whole episode, and that that story was such a textbook Hero’s Journey. The Hero, our Eleven, must go on a quest alone without her companions, she must cross a threshold into another world, where she will encounter trials, and guides, and choices, and where she will Learn Something, which she will bring back with her to her community when she returns to her world. Beat by beat by beat, it’s all right there.

But I’ll say again: abstractly interesting. It’s interesting in theory that they would pause to do a side-quest episode. At the time, I do not believe I was paying much attention to the execution of it. And this time I was. And it is not great! I'm a nut and have no problem with the swerve on principle, but I do with swerving into something this clunky. There is so little internal logic or emotional cohesion between scenes, nothing to organically lead the characters from what they were just doing to what they are doing now, only the top-down requirement that this moment needs to happen for the episode to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. It ends up feeling like an extended walk-and-talk through an Ikea showroom floor of pre-fab punk set pieces. Wait, why are we now in the scene from X-Men: First Class where Erik tries to move the satellite? Oh that’s just what comes after the kitchen introduction scene---keep moving, please, we have to reach the shoot-out at the end before 8pm.

Again, a lot of what it is they wanted to accomplish here I have no problem with. I like El getting to bond with another girl that went through Dr. Brenner’s experiments. I like that she thinks of her as her sister, so much! And hell I like that this group’s philosophy is so exactly the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants answer to the more Xavier’s School vibe she has with the Party and Hopper, that scene a mirrored reflection where instead of Charles coaching Erik to move through his anger to serenity, Kali is another Erik encouraging El—or Jane now, her Mutant name—to go All Rage All the Way.

However, and again this comes back to execution, the depiction of Kali and her gang of misfits….I feel this could have used another read. It’s quite hackneyed. And while it’s nice to have more characters of color onscreen in Stranger Things, that they are so openly being used to just be The Other, is a bummer.

So, what do we take away from this interlude? One, and most importantly, EL’S BABY-PUNK MAKEOVER. Bitchin’. Hilarious. Two, wow I had completely forgotten that one of the largest mythology reveals of this season is that Dr. Brenner might still be alive?? So we learn THAT.

But third and finally: El realizes that while sometimes they may make her angry or sad, her Hawkins family are still the most important people in her life, and where she wants to be. When El sees Hopper and Mike as we last saw them in the Lab, though now just as isolated pale figures moving through that black panto space, so beset by troubles, I got goosebumps!! We care about them so much, already miss them even though for us it’s barely been one episode, and you can see the same feeling crashing over El. She loves them, and they love her, Hopper’s message over the radio finally making it to her here, sob.

They’re her people, and they are in TROUBLE, they are in danger!

“They cannot save you, Jane,” Kali tells her. “No,” El agrees. “But I can save them.”

LOVE. PROTECTION. This is such a stronger and healthier driving purpose than Kali’s wrathful revenge.

And so, Hero’s Journey complete, having Learned Something, El sets off back to our world, on another night bus through Indiana. “♫ We gotta get back to Haw-kins!” I sang to myself, loonily, “We gotta get back to schoooooool! ♫”

Man it’s gonna be GOOD to be BACK!

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#Love Letters to Stranger Things #Stranger Things #Stranger Things 2 #Stranger Things spoilers #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff

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wellntruly · 5 years

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STRANGER THINGS Recap: 2x04

This episode sure makes a lot of headway on just what horrible nonsense is happening to our collective tiny son, William “Just A Button” Byers, and also introduces this season’s version of the string lights, god, yeah, shivers, joy and good-fright shivers. I also find the development that what is eating at Will is connected to what is leaching the life from the pumpkin patches a real good one. I’ll take Spooky Crop Magic for Every Plot Conceivable, Alex!

Stranger Things 2, Chapter Four: ‘Will the Wise’

The Duffers & Co know we’ll all be binging this show, so they just run nearly every episode right into the next. It is a bit of jolt to drop back in after even a short week-long break, actually! Not disorienting, just kinda like jumping into a pool instead of taking the steps.

So here we are gathered around Will, who’s standing stiffly on the field, eyelids fluttering. Mike’s hand on his shoulder, then both of Joyce’s, who had raced over to the school on her mom intuition. In the Upside Down, the tendrils of this smokey monster are still rushing into his eyes and nose and mouth, holding him hostage in our world, until at last it must be done with him, and lets him go, his eyes snapping open on the field with a gasp. I don’t know what you DID, Monster, but I HATED IT, and I will find a way to kick your ass, I’ll do it!!

I mean we already know Noah Schnapp is an incredible young actor, but this scene with Winona Ryder at their kitchen table, oh my god. His little face. What kills so much is that it’s not just that he’s finally telling his mom the truth, but that the truth he has to tell is how much he’s been suffering. My daaarrrling!!! Tears spill out of his eyes as he tries to explain that he tried to get away, he tried to make it go away, “but it got me, Mom.” Oh noooooo!!

Joyce clutches her sobbing son to her, and her eyes vow vengeance on all these goddamn frights frightening her boy. She doesn’t really know the technicality of how she’s going to achieve this, but I understand this urge, I wholeheartedly support it, we will figure this out, Joyce, we will KICK ITS ASS.

Across town, another very emotional parent-child scene, though this one a father and daughter. El returns home, to Hopper smoking broodingly on the porch waiting for her. It is pretty quickly just thundering in that little cabin, as these two human storm fronts collide. Hopper is furious (and scared) that El would so recklessly endanger herself, and demands she just follow his three simple rules. And El is furious (and scared) that doing so means she’ll never leave and just stay here forever imprisoned. Part of the issue of course is that with his first daughter Hopper hadn’t gotten a chance to get to the impetuous tween stage of kid yet, and now he’s trying to figure it out alone without a meliorating influence of a co-parenting partner, say, just throwing this out there, a Joyce Byers maybe. So he’s falling back on a pretty blunt crime=punishment model (he is a cop, after all), and not taking as much consideration as we would like for how this is a 13-year-old girl, with superpowers. And if the X-Men taught us anything, it’s that the roiling confusion of emotions that comes with growing up can really come out with a bang when you’re also a baby telekinetic. After throwing the cabin into disarray while Hopper shouts at the sliding couches and whatnot pummeling into his knees, El shatters all the windows in a wail of angry sorrow, and then sobs against the wall in her room. Oh baby!

The next morning, over a toast breakfast at the Wheeler’s, Nancy proposes to her mom that she’s thinking of going to a sleepover tonight, and then hilariously just starts listing as many sleepover activities as she can come up with, ~for verisimilitude~. What, specificity is the soul of narrative! Lol Nancy I love you. In reality of course she’s hopping into Jonathan’s peeled old car to go try to outwit some X-Files-esque baddies. Listen, her aptitude for detail recall is exactly something this ballsy stealth mission is gonna require, my girl’s gonna do great.

Will is not going to school today either, but his mom very much knows, probably came up with the idea herself. Just like she’s drawing a hot bath for him, puzzled and concerned over how oddly low his temperature is. But when she leaves Will to it, you can see apprehension in every line of his trembling body.

“NO,” he intones, another’s voice. “He likes it cold.” Oh my god now I feel cold?? Oh NO. Oh YIKES. Is this shadow possessing him? He’s so small how dare you!!!

Over at Dustin’s, he tosses some morning nougat to his own little Musketeer, who fucking yawns and stretches like a little green reptilian cartoon. You can kinda see what Dustin sees in the thing, actually. But no fuck this monsterette. Lucas’ feelings exactly, mind you, as he “wins” the lottery to go dumpster diving out back the school this morning, as the gang keeps searching for D’Art—Dustin, uh, awkwardly. In science class, Mike rests from searching for signs of the creature to just resting his eyes worriedly on Will’s empty seat.

Hopper really does intend to get into work today himself, he’s just been busy this morning hammering boards over the broken windows in his cabin. Thoughtfully, his posture gentling, he moves over to El’s closed door. “Hey, kid…” he starts, pulling a blue bracelet from under his cuff and wrapping it around his hand, seeming all the world like he’s about to apologize for getting so worked up last night, and then she’ll apologize too, and we’ll all cry. But goddamnit no, he just abruptly snaps himself back into Gruff Dad mode and tells her to clean up the mess in the cabin while he’s gone. Gahh.

In his truck he is greeted by the police station receptionist on the radio, where he learns that Joyce has been blowing up their phone all morning trying to get ahold of him. Listen, you tell Joyce to call you first, she’ll call you first eight times in a row. And she’s right to—he peels out, headed for her house.

Over at the high school gymnasium, well nothing good. Billy is still obsessively taunting Steve. Steve is kind of admirably just staying quiet, like he’s hoping to just ride this out. Steve gives off the impression that he’s rather getting over the high school popularity dramatics, frankly. But while he seems only distantly bothered by Billy and his new garbage pail sidekick, incidentally Steve’s old garbage pail sidekick, he is upset to hear that Nancy seems to have quite literally run off with Jonathan yesterday and not reappeared. But one thing he knows that these assholes don’t, is that usually when Nancy and Jonathan run off, it’s to do something weird. Not like, weird like that—really weird. Weird like lure a Demogorgon to the Byers house and try to set it on fire.

Or this, where they sit nervously on a park bench watched the passers-by in the small town John Le Carré spy novel they’ve stepped into, as around them the score riiiiiises. Anxiety snapping, they hurry back to Jonathan’s car, only to get nowhere far: a host of figures from the park all rather amiable surround them, on a relative scale. I mean it’s sinister, but they’re very open about it. As their car won’t start, just the darnedest thing, the guy at Nancy’s passenger window kindly offers them a ride.

They won’t pass Hopper on the road, who has just pulled up to Joyce’s house to find her front door wide open and her inside wrapped in a sweater, instructing him to leave it like that. Hopper’s just like, why are things always Like This here. For today’s answer she brings him to Will, sitting shirtless in his room, pale with pink rimmed eyes, solemn. Lowly, Hopper starts asking him questions. See Hopper this, this energy is what we want you to bring to El, this thing where you gently ask questions and listen to the answers, and figure out what you can do to help. I think you’re just blinded by her being too close, being too Daughter, you forget that you can actually be great at this!

By this point Noah Schnapp is letting tears stream out of his big eyes again, trying to describe these flashes he’s been seeing, this growingspreadingkilling. We see like, tunnels, cold bluish burrowed tunnels branching in some under-the-ground. Joyce, truly one of the most innovative characters on this show, suggests that maybe Will could try drawing what he sees instead of trying to describe it? An idea he takes to with a feverish focus.

So you could say the household is pretty occupied when Mike rings over from the pay phone at school, hanging up with a twist of his mouth when he reaches the answering machine. He calls a meeting—sorry Max, Party only. He is too worried about Will to be kind or care when her faces closes off, left out again.

Mike sits perched on the V of a table in the A/V room, shoulders tipped forward with his folded hands clasped at his knees, and in this most perfect posture for this boy in this moment, confides in Dustin and Lucas what really happened to Will on Halloween night. There is a Shadow Monster out there, and it’s hunting their friend. They just don’t know how. And their best reference point is seeming insufficient. “This isn’t D&D, this is real life,” Mike says, and I just have to commend Finn Wolfhard, holder of great instinctive comedic gifts, for delivering this without any joke to it at all. How did you do that.

Their next step is to, quote, “acquire more knowledge” (my boy, my son). He’ll go to Will’s after school, and Dustin and Lucas can keep looking for D’Art, who has to be connected. Dustin swallows uneasily.

Acquiring more knowledge turns into rather the theme of the rest of this episode, in fact, nicely done!

Sweeping up glass at the cabin, El discovers the storage space under the floor, with the box atop one of the stacks labelled “HAWKINS LAB”. (The box is upside down—real good.)

And over at said Lab itself, Nancy and Jonathan sit at a cold metal table and wait to learn something themselves. It’s taking too long though, for Nancy’s taste.

“Hey! Hey assholes!” she gets up and yells at a security camera, because Nancy knows know fear.

Realizing Chief Hopper is not the only iron-spined resident of this town who’s not gonna take no for an answer, Owens is like OKAY and sails in being his usual oddly charming self that I want to trust but just don’t know for sure. For sure he’s hilarious though, god that “Assuming you’re behind me” from a few paces out the door as they’re still standing inside…I laughed. And then he just sweeps through the Lab showing them all the shit! He repeats frequently that scientists make mistakes, and are then responsible for fixing them too—that’s what he’s trying to do here. It’s smart, he shows he’s taking responsibility because he needs them to trust him. Buuuttt also to fear him, so he makes sure to also show them how he has to regularly fire blast the grasping tendrils coming off this pulsing rend in reality on the lower levels. Those tendrils, you see, are mistakes that must be corrected, and also the truth—because if either gets out, they’re screwed. ~Metaphorical~

Over at the Byers house, Joyce and Hopper sit shuffling through the drawings falling one after the other from Will’s desk, like an autumn tree dropping leaves. The boy’s usual representational style has gone more…abstract. Graphical. They actually don’t even know what they’re looking at here, these geometrical washes of blue-purple and black-brown. But then Joyce, of course it’s Joyce, figures it out: the drawings CONNECT to one another. Hopper pushes the coffee table back, and they start piecing together a network of vines on the living room floor. And it’s SO GOOD, THIS IS SO GOOD, IT’S AN UPDATE ON THE LIGHTS YOU SEE! THE BYERS HOUSE AGAIN, ALWAYS THE BYERS HOUSE, BECOMING THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF THE PROCESS OF FINDING OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING, THROUGH LIGHTS AND PAPER. SIMPLE HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS, MAGICKED INTO COMPASSES AND MAPS. I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT.

Hopper does not love it though. He puts on his hat, and grimly goes to see if this might be what he thinks it is: the killing force that’s been laying waste to the farmers’ fields.

Another school day has wrapped, as has Max’s patience. She has had it up to *here* with being excluded, and isn’t going for Lucas’ protestations that they can’t tell her things for her own safety. Admittedly, that sounds compLETEly bonkers. “Have a nice life,” she glibly tosses off in farewell, which is really a phrase we should bring back.

Let’s not bring back ANYTHING TO DO WITH BILLY THOUGH, who stares after Lucas from his car in a way I do not like. Then after they’ve climbed inside, he darkly instructs Max that there are “certain types of people” she should not interact with, and Lucas is one of them. Gripping her wrist fiercely, he bites out that she is to stay away from him, while Max’s face goes ashen. There is really nothing he could mean here besides that Lucas is black, right? Yeah. Fuck Billy forever.

Appreciate that he’s paired with rot, as the score from this scene carries through to Hopper striding onto one of the dead fields in heroic three-quarter-speed, and taking a shovel to the fouled earth.

On her own digging project, El sifts through the contents of the HAWKINS LAB box. She finds a folder on Terry Ives, she finds a photo of Terry Ives, she finds Terry Ives. In that vaulted endless ink-black space, Terry still sits in her rocking chair, repeating the same list of words in a mild mutter. But with a horror movie start, suddenly her eyes snap to Eleven’s. It is a testament to what a horror show this girl’s whole life has been that this doesn’t actually frighten her. “Jane?” whispers Terry. “Momma?” El whispers back, frayed and hopeful. But as soon as she touches her hand, Terry and the chair both dissolve into smoke right before her brimming eyes. Why? No idea, beyond that it gives Millie Bobby Brown another opportunity to do a really tremendously good job sobbing on the floor. :(

Straight from school with his rockin’ little ivory, evergreen & brown colorblock canvas backpack (I covet), Mike and Joyce have a little Mom-Friend to Mom engagement on the Byers porch. Joyce kindly tries to rebuff him, but Mike has a card ready to hand over: “It’s about the Shadow Monster, isn’t it?” Oh it is. Their Loving-Will-So-Much eyes lock.

Apropos of nothing plot wise, but Finn Wolfhard is already taller than Winona Ryder at this point. Which is admittedly not that difficult to achieve, but also: my pale beanpole <3

Over at the Lab, Mike’s sister climbs back into Jonathan’s car, which starts up just fine now. They share a Glance. After they’ve driven silently for a few minutes, Nancy pulls the recorder out of her bag, and grimly starts replaying things Owens said unknowingly on the record.

“You still want to do this?” Jonathan asks, eying her.

Nancy turns to him, steady and sure: “Let’s burn that lab to the ground.” There is no one better than a Wheeler when you want dramatics, I tell ya. Love ‘em.

A different kind of drama is playing out over at the Henderson’s, one of the much squishier, gorier kind. Dustin arrives home with bad news in his voice for his ever-growing friend, but worse news is waiting for him: the glass wall of the turtle tank is shattered, weird goo and what looks like a shed skin left behind in the mess. But the mess gets bloodier the closer Dustin looks at his room, following a trail of dark blood and a really unpleasant wet munching sound.

D’ARTAGNAN IS EATING MEWS BEHIND A CHAIR.

And it’s Mews size itself now, with a juvenile Demogorgon face, those petaled, toothed things that flay open with a shriek, a shriek right at Dustin! DUSTIN WE DID TRY TO TELL YOU! Oh nooo! 🙀

And over at the dusk-fallen field, in a big ol’ hole, Hopper drives his shovel into the earth again, and breaks into something. Something strange, dark and bluish, something that makes a gloppy hiss noise, in exactly the way dirt usually does not. Hopper widens the cavity, and just drops on down in there, fuck. He looks like he’s inside some sort of root system, branching underground, dim and cool and…..

“Oh Jesus,” he sighs ruefully, bitterly, not-this-again, as the score picks up a twanging minor chord, and the camera pulls back through some driiiffting flaaaaakes, and then begins to tuuuurrnn upSIDE DOWN.

SO. FUCKING. GOOD. THE UPSIDE DOWN HAS TWINED BACK INTO HAWKINS, right under your feet. This is how you do a sequel!!!!!! Painting new pictures with those same rich colors we looooove!!

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Love Letters to Stranger Things Stranger Things (2016) Stranger Things 2: Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three

#Stranger Things #Stranger Things 2 #Stranger Things spoilers #Love Letters to Stranger Things #Tarra recaps stuff #Stranger stuff

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