Landing That Plane

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Carrie, Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, and its fumbled final episode have me once again thinking about endings, how critically important it is to get them right, and the properties that have crashed and burned because of that failure. I am going to examine some endings that did not work and explain why they failed to give me the conclusion that they required. There are undoubtedly people out there for whom some of the endings are perfect, and that is the beauty of artistic works; it is not science or mathematics with objective provable answers. It is, in the vernacular of the time, vibes.

Spoilers ahead for the following films:
An American Werewolf in London
Resident Evil (2026)
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Carrie (2026)

An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ film that, along with The Howling, changed forever how audiences experienced the transformation from human to wolf in cinema, has one of the most fumbled endings in film history. The movie is noted for its heavy mix of humor and horror and its score that features a number of pop songs with the word “moon” in their lyrics or titles. Despite the frequent jokes and gags, the story ends in a very traditional manner for werewolf movies, with poor, doomed David being gunned down by London’s special forces. Even ignoring the poor blocking of the scene (just how did all those men with rifles shoot David so many times when his love, Alex, stood directly between them and their target?), the lack of any time for a denouement, a breather to let the tragedy of the tale sit in the audience’s mind, coupled with a hard edit to black and a doo-wop version of Blue Moon, emotionally scrambles the ending. What the hell am I supposed to be feeling at that moment? Triumphant because the murderous beast is dead? Sorrow at David’s fate that was no fault of his own? Mirth because that song, that version, at that time is so out of place? While there is much to admire about that movie, that ending strips away and ruins everything that came before it.

Resident Evil (2026): I have already reviewed this movie and commented that the ending did not work for me, and for much the same reason that An American Werewolf in London failed: a disconnect between the tone of the movie and its conclusion. While an audience might walk into a werewolf movie expecting a tragic end (that has been the genre’s tradition since 1941’s The Wolf Man), walking in to see a movie adapted from a video game is entirely different. One expects, or at least hopes, to win a game. Like John Landis’ take on the werewolf tale, Resident Evil is stacked with humor, much of which comes from Austin Abrams’ performance. The movie is, for all practical purposes, a one-man show centered on Abrams, and without a compelling setup to ready the audience for his failure to save himself and his transformation into one of the monsters he has spent the entire evening combating, his fall comes off as unjustified. Some might argue that is “realistic,” for whatever that word might mean in a fictional context, but stories are not about realism save the emotional variety. It would have been realistic for Luke Skywalker to continue to rely on his targeting computer and not the apparent hallucination in his ears, miss the shot, and doom the rebellion. While “realistic,” it would have been entirely contradictory to Star Wars’ tone and a terrible ending.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986): The feature film adaptation of the stage musical that was adapted from a 1960 low-budget horror of the same name has the distinction of having bungled its ending twice, in both its theatrical release and its director’s cut.

The theatrical cut, after negative responses in test screenings, forced a victorious ending with a wholly unestablished, sheer-luck method for defeating the murderous plant. The film found only middling success at the box office, which I would partly attribute to the forced feeling of the reworked conclusion.

In the stage play and the director’s original cut, both of the principal characters end up eaten by the plant, followed by an extensive sequence without any characters for the audience to identify with as the plant and its offspring conquer the world. When this was rejected by test audiences, director Frank Oz and producer David Geffen attributed the rejection to the “power of the close-up,” which they felt created a powerful bond between the protagonist and the audience. I think this reading is incorrect. In the director’s cut, a vital song, Meek Shall Inherit, is edited down, cutting out the very moment that earns the protagonist his doomed ending. In the excised section of the song, Seymour recognizes the evil of feeding people to the plant, even though he himself did not kill them, and commits himself to destroying the plant, but, fearful that a life of poverty would cost him the love of Audrey, then reverses his decision and commits himself instead to a life of evil, feeding the plant corpses. It is at this moment that he and the story earn their tragic and doomed ending. With this critical moment removed, the ending that brings about his death is no longer morally justified.

Resident Evil (2026), Little Shop of Horrors, and Carrie (2026) all fail to land their stories cleanly by ignoring the moral vector of their plots. Resident Evil employs an ending fit for a tragedy but without a character that presented a tragic flaw that earned such a sad state. Little Shop of Horrors short-circuited its tragic ending, expecting the audience’s forgiveness for the character’s misdeeds. And in Carrie, her reward of safety and compassion is wholly inappropriate for a character who willfully murdered scores of innocents and gleefully danced afterwards. An American Werewolf in London, while morally consistent with the rest of the film, rushes it ending spoiling what may have worked.

An ending, like an aircraft coming in for a landing, requires that everything be lined up and on the right glide slope at the right speed to avoid disaster.

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The Hour of Judgment Fast Approaches

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As I write this on October 28th, 2026, what should be the conclusion of the midterm elections is less than a week distant. In many parts of the nation, voting has already been underway both by mail-in ballot and by early in person voting, but under the secrecy of the system, the total for those votes remains unknown.  There has been much reading of the bones, casting of the lots, and peering into the entrails to divine the outcome to come, hoping that early turnout, party participation, and other indirect data might just a glimpse of the future state. The future is unknowable, only expressed in probabilities and mathematics for most people provides cold comfort.

It is highly probably that when the voting is over the Democratic Party will have gained control of the House of Representatives to wield its powerful committees in a manner that is unlikely to be welcome at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is likely, but without the highly favorable probability seen for the House, that they may also gain control of the United States Senate. However, even a random fluctuation within the margin of error of accepted polling can still result in the Republicans retaining the Senate. A moderate system polling error in either party’s favor drastically alters the makeup of the next Senate and until the votes are tallied that nature will remain unknown.

It is obvious to all that a political storm threatens the Republican Party. When nearly 200 million dollars must be spent to fight for the survival of a Republican in Texas, that is a sure sign that there are deep and powerful forces working against that party. That GOP candidates are threatened in Iowa and Kansas provides even further evidence of a mood that has swung hard against the Republican party.

I hope that the vote next week is strong, decisive, and utterly unambiguous. It is no secret that my desires are for a powerful sweep by the Democratic Party: we desperately need a check on the rampant corruption of this administration, but even more than that we need a clear and definite victory of a scale as to push it beyond any conspiratorial fantasies of ‘stolen’ elections.  For a decade poison has been infused into the electorate, the elaborations of a liar, a thief, and a man of low character who has wounded our democracy and we urgently need to heal.

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Carrie (2026): A Final Report

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Last night I completed my viewing of Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie for Amazon Prime. Overall, I enjoyed the season and thought that Flanagan in many respects has elevated the novel’s story and plotting, but in the end, quite literally at the season’s close, it fell flat. I doubt that I will have much interest in the second season, and the manner in which Flanagan engineered a second season is much of the reason why this adaptation fails.

Amazon Studios

First, what I liked and what worked in Flanagan’s reinterpretation of King’s debut. Carrie, the novel, is a short book even by the standard of most novels, and by the standard of King’s later works it is practically a piece of flash fiction. When it was announced that there was going to be an eight-episode series adapted from the novel, I knew that much of what would end up on the screen would be invention not found in the source text. What remained to be seen was if this expanded material would enhance the story or be more like the trilogy of movies produced from The Hobbit, wandering so far afield as to lose connection to the story’s spine. I am happy to say that the expansion enriched the story and the focus remained on Carrie White as she navigated a world that was alien to her.

In the novel, Carrie has always attended public school along with her classmates, and this actually opens up an issue that I have no memory of King addressing. Since Carrie has attended physical education with her classmates into high school, even if Carrie’s mother, Margaret White, never discussed or explained menstruation to her, I find it beggars belief to accept that Carrie never witnessed it in any form among her peers. Flanagan’s choice to have Carrie homeschooled until her father’s death neatly avoids that fault in the backstory.

Flanagan also deepened and fleshed out the character of Margaret White, a vast improvement over King’s one-note crazed Christian caricature found in the novel. I have grown quite weary of King’s stock and stereotyped fundamentalist as an easy villain. While the Whites remained a deeply religious family and Margaret seriously socially conservative, Flanagan gave the character more understandable motivations and the sense of a person with contradictions and someone who struggled to find her own way in a world to which she was, in many ways, as alien as her daughter. As the story climbs the rungs of the ladder of escalation that ends with the “Black Prom,” Margaret is not simply a doomsayer and obstacle for Carrie but a voice that is sometimes one of reason as the school and the community hurtle towards disaster.

Continuing on the notes concerning characters and where Flanagan improved on the source text brings us to the story’s principal antagonist, Christine (Chris) Hargensen. It has been a number of decades since I read Carrie, so my memory may be a little faulty and colored more by the De Palma film than by the actual text, but, as I recall, King gave very little exploration of Chris’ character. Where the novel briefly touched on her father as lawyer who failed to save her from her exclusion from the prom, Flanagan crafts a more detailed home life and history of a father who is emotionally distant and a bully, behavior that Chris mirrors. I recall scenes where she and her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, plotted and carried out the hideous attack on Carrie but very little that explained, in any manner at all, why Chris was the way she was.

There is a fairly strong current over the last few decades, in film at least, of not only making the villains of a piece understandable but also a little bit right. Magneto’s experience as a European Jew who barely survived the Holocaust gives weight and authority to his argument that humanity and its racialized hatreds is the real villain of history. It is true that every villain is the hero of their own story, but that does not mean that every villain needs to have any sense of pursuing a worthy goal. With Chris Hargensen, Flanagan gives us enough of her life that we can understand without excusing her cruel and spiteful nature. She is a spoiled rich girl whose universe has always bent in her favor Now, as that world fractures and shatters and her entitlement goes unfulfilled. Instead of looking into herself and growing as a person, she lashes out, making others, particularly Carrie White, the recipients of her misplaced anger and frustration.

Another improvement is one I mentioned in passing earlier in this essay: the ladder of escalation. The novel opens with Carrie’s first menstruation and the cruel jeering she receives from her classmates, which leads almost immediately to Chris’ punishment and expulsion from the prom, which provokes the pig blood bath she and Billy carry out on poor Carrie. The reader is left to understand that there is a long history of Carrie being bullied and to accept this as justification for the rapidity with which the situation grew. Flanagan, having established that Carrie had never attended public school, crafted a series of incidents, each building upon the previous, that pushed the character of Chris further and further in her need to lash out and hurt someone for the shambles that her life had become.

Taking the story out of its mid-’70s setting and placing it into a contemporary environment with social media and school shootings and the vast web of conspiracy-addled subcultures proved one of the most challenging aspects of adapting the novel and one that Flanagan met quite handily. More than simply bringing cell phones and their cameras to the Black Prom, Flanagan integrated our current social issues and media into the story itself, making them essential rungs on that ladder of escalation that climbs to disaster.

With all these promising and praiseworthy elements, it makes the parts of the series that don’t work even more disappointing.

I found all of the teenage boys to be woefully underwritten.

Tommy Ross, Sue’s boyfriend, whom she convinces to take Carrie to the prom in her place, left no lasting impression in the novel, feeling more like a plot contrivance than a character, but he has even less to do in Flanagan’s adaptation. He spends six episodes either playing the devoted boyfriend or the sulking teenager when Sue, wrapped up in her own crisis, ignores him. It is only in episode seven that he takes any action of his own before briefly being cut down at the disastrous prom.

Billy Nolan, even more than Tommy Ross, is a device whose only function is to move the plot forward. My memory of Billy in the novel is of a sociopath who got sexual excitement from using his car to run down and kill dogs. In Flanagan’s version, he is a low-level drug dealer and not much more than that.

Moving beyond the thinly written teenage boys, I found it difficult to fully accept Flanagan’s opening up the world of Carrie to a constellation of enhanced and psychically empowered women beyond Carrie White. While King hinted at this when he closed the novel with a mother’s letter reporting that she watched her little girl move marbles without touching them, Flanagan introduces disciplined organizations of psychics, detecting each other psychic over vast distances, moving to recruit them. The series also introduces organizations that, seeing the psychics as an existential danger, hunt and murder them. Tonally, this moves the entire series from horror to nearly a superhero story. All this I might have been able to set aside had Flanagan not, with his radically altered ending, changed the very nature of Carrie.

Spoilers for the season finale follow.

Carrie at its core is a tragedy. The characters are trapped by their nature on a course that can only lead to their own destruction. The novel ends with Carrie White, racked with guilt at the death and destruction she has caused, bleeding out and dying. While some characters survived the hellish prom, there is no happy ending for anyone, and the end result of so much hatred and pettiness is fire and death.

Flanagan instead has Carrie White survive her night of retribution, saved by the psychic friends who have come to foil the hunter bent on Carrie’s murder and who spirit the young girl away for some undefined future.

This ending transforms a tragic conclusion into one that is disturbingly close to a victorious one. Let us be plainly clear here: in this story Carrie White murdered hundreds of people, the vast majority of whom not only had performed no act of cruelty towards her but in this very version had been in her corner, celebrating and honoring Carrie White. King was right in having her die at the end of the story: there is no redemption for her mass murder. Flanagan, setting up a season two, has in effect given a victory to what is for all practical purposes a school shooter. The ending as he crafted it is not one where a person who possesses both the ability and the temperament to murder on an unimaginable scale has frighteningly escaped but rather one where this person is given safety and support and is assured that she did nothing wrong. This ending inverts entirely the thematic nature of King’s novel. Perhaps Amazon/MGM pushed for something like this so they could have a franchise to profit from; perhaps Flanagan himself pitched this new take. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The ending makes its case clear: it justifies murdering those who torment you, and collateral damage is of no consequence. That is a conclusion that drives me away from having any interest in the already announced second season.

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Movie Review: Klara and the Sun

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After I recovered from a brief illness from some bug I caught at jury duty that kept me home on Friday, my sweetie-wife and I attended a screening of Klara and the Sun on Sunday morning.

Sony/Columbia Pictures

Adapted from a novel by prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned the novel that was the source material for one of my favorite films, The Remains of the Day, and adapted to the screen by Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi and co-scripter Dahvi Waller, Klara and the Sun is the story of an artificial friend, Klara (Jenna Ortega), a humanoid robot that is purchased as a companion for an ill teenager, Josie (Mia Tharia). Klara, who has never experienced anything beyond the confines of the retail store, has a childlike understanding of the larger world and believes the sun to be a magical being with healing powers. Josie’s home is a broken one, her father having left after the death of Josie’s older sister, and her mother (Amy Adams) still harboring secrets and unresolved grief that are exacerbated by Josie’s serious illness, an illness that is an adverse event from Josie being “lifted,” that is, genetically manipulated into superior academic ability. Klara attempts to navigate a world that she doesn’t understand, Josie’s illness, the housekeeper’s suspicions, and the secret plot hiding at the heart of the shattered family while growing beyond the confines of her programming.

Waititi is a filmmaker known for an energetic and somewhat chaotic style of cinema. His first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Ragnarok, shook that franchise free from the staid and neo-Shakespearean style in favor of something more akin to the wild and psychedelic art of Jack Kirby. His adaptation of Caging Skies into the dramatic comedy Jojo Rabbit, where Waititi himself played the young protagonist’s imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, won both critical and popular praise but again leaned heavily into wild absurdist humor that served as a contrast to the darker story of a young boy enraptured by Nazi ideology and his process of breaking free from it. Klara and the Sun required a lighter touch than Waititi typically employs, and he managed it.

I have read only one novel by Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, and while the writing is absolutely brilliant, I have no memory of the text being particularly funny. It is a tragic tale of a man so bound by his sense of duty that he puts everything else aside, including family and his own chance at real happiness, to perform services that are mostly taken for granted. I suspect that the novel Klara and the Sun is equally humor-free, and expecting Waititi to craft a feature film free of humor would be asking too much. Waititi managed to find a balance between his own wild sense of humor and the needs of this particular project.

Cinematographer Mike Berlucchi captures Klara’s wondrous rapture with the sun quite well, giving us magical moments at sunrises and sunsets, even finding those fleeting moments in the middle of an urban landscape when the sun can still bring life to the tired.

Klara and the Sun is a charming and sentimental film that never stumbles into being maudlin, one that reminds us that there is magic in life if only we would look for it with the right eyes.

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Starlink, Starshield, and the Betrayal of Ukraine

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It is no state secret that Donald Trump holds an affection for the Russian despot Vladimir Putin. The depth of that affection, well, only Trump knows. This affection biases him towards Putin and the invaders that have attempted to subjugate and destroy Ukraine. The Ukrainian president’s refusal to trump up a false investigation into Joe Biden at Trump’s pleading only further pushed Trump deeper into his embrace of Putin. Given this, and the antipathy toward Ukraine of Trump’s own number two, JD Vance, it is far from startling that the second Trump administration has done very little to aid Ukraine’s fight to survive as a democratic nation, but the revelations of the last couple of weeks are shocking.

The invasion of Ukraine ignited the first true large-scale war of the twenty-first century, and as with the first large-scale war of the twentieth century, it has brought with it massive technological changes to warfare with the wide and deep deployment of drones.

The United States used drones as a supplement in the Global War on Terror that followed the horrendous September 11th attacks. In that campaign, it affixed missiles to high-flying uncrewed aircraft and rained death down from these platforms, but what has happened in Ukraine is leaps ahead of that. Instead of a few very large and very costly drones, the Ukrainians are producing cheap disposable machines that can be dispatched in large swarms. It is these drones that allow the Ukrainians to strike deep into their enemy’s territory, destroy vital logistical and command-and-control targets, and bring the war home to Russia. The drones also allow the Ukrainians to intercept Russian drones and attacks on civilians as the Russians attempt to break Ukrainian will from the air. (Has that ever worked? Nazi bombing of London did not break the British, and Allied bombing of German cities did not break the Germans either.)

Starlink is a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that provides commercial low-latency, high-speed access to the internet via individual subscriber terminals. Starshield is a secure, military-grade service provided by SpaceX via specialized satellites, which use the Starlink network as a backbone for the hybrid system. US military assets connect to Starshield from secure, proprietary terminals that use strong encryption. To my knowledge, no one outside of the US military has access to Starshield terminals. That said, the Ukrainian military has access to Starshield, but from commercial Starlink terminals, and access to Starshield is critical to Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian attacks on their civilian population.

Overnight on October 13 to 14, Starshield in Ukraine stopped working if the receiving drone exceeded a speed of one hundred miles per hour (161 kilometers per hour). This crippled some of the Ukrainian defenses, and Russian attacks killed numerous civilians. As of this writing (October 22), it is unclear whether the speed restrictions have been eliminated; reports are in conflict.

There is also a deep conflict over the cause of the speed restrictions.

Elon Musk, owner of the Starlink and Starshield systems, said on Twitter, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” but left out of his statements that Ukraine uses Starshield via Starlink terminals, an elements that would appear to be entirely under Musk’s control.. It should be noted that Musk has shown a bias towards Russia in the conflict, parroting the Trump administration’s position that the Ukrainians should compromise with their invaders to end the war.

The Trump administration has made contradictory statements on the speed limits suddenly appearing on the system, suggesting that it is merely a technical fault that has been corrected and suggesting that the system’s owner, Musk, initiated the cap, with Trump saying, “It wasn’t me.”

Reporting from The Telegraph indicated that Musk came to President Trump with the proposal to limit Ukrainian defenses by way of the speed cap and that the White House agreed to the action. The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk and Trump conferred on the possibility of limited Starshield for the Ukrainians without saying who imitated the concept, but that Musk ordered the reduction. Reuters reports that the order to do so came out of the White House. The White House has disputed the reporting, throwing responsibility back solely to Musk.

This is a deeply troubling incident. Does one man, in this case, Musk, have the ability to cripple another nation’s defenses at his whim? Is the U.S. government undercutting a nation’s ability to deal with an aggressive invasion for the personal and petty purposes of the president without consultation with either the other branches of our government or our allies?

Since everyone involved on the US side, civilian and political, are liars, we cannot, at this moment, know the truth, but change is coming. It is a near certainty that the Democratic Party will gain control of the House of Representatives, and it is a better than even chance they will also control the Senate. Next year, the subpoenas will fly, and perhaps the world’s richest man will flee the nation to avoid the harsh questioning that will surely follow.

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Light Posting the Rest of the Week

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So, Tuesday I reported to the county courthouse in El Cajon for jury duty. In my decades of living in San Diego County I have been summoned to jury duty a number of times, more than half a dozen, perhaps more than ten; I truly do not have an accurate count. In all those instances I have never served on a jury panel, often never making it as far as being questioned by one or more of the lawyers before being excused.

Yesterday I was in the second pool of prospective jurors called to a courtroom along with more than forty others. Voir dire took up the entire day and continues today. I have been neither empaneled nor excused. Because the case is still “live” and I may still serve on its jury, I cannot reveal anything about the parties involved or the nature of the trial, but if the past holds any predictive power, I think I am likely to be cut free a few hours into today.

As it is, that leaves little time for writing thoughtful blog posts, so I may be absent from this space for the next several days.

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Movie Review: Resident Evil (2026)

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The PlayStation horror-themed video game Resident Evil spawned a film franchise that, from 2002 through 2021, comprised seven feature films and now, in 2026, the franchise is restarted with a new movie set in its own continuity.

Directed and co-written by Zach Cregger, Resident Evil (2026) reduced much of the lore and expectations from both the previous movies and the video game series itself, opting for a simplified structure and character set-up.

Sony Pictures

Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier floating through life, not quite ready to grow up and assume the responsibilities of adulthood and parenthood with his unseen significant other. He is offered an emergency high-speed run delivering a vital package to the general hospital in Raccoon City, and despite not having the required snow chains and other equipment for icy mountain roads, he accepts the contract.

It has been commented by others, quite correctly, that Resident Evil (2026) is structured like a video game. Bryan’s first encounters with the bizarre monsters between him and his goal are simple, easy to navigate, almost tutorial in nature, but each new set piece is more complex, requires greater danger to face and more skill to overcome, until his battles are with hordes of monsters.

Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten, in addition to the video game feel of the structure and the body-horror of the people deformed by the loosed reagent, also infuse the script with plenty of humor derived from Bryan’s most understandable reactions. Perhaps the most uttered line in the film is Bryan whispering, “What the fuck?” The comedic and absurdist aspects of the script are enhanced by Abrams’ performance. He takes a character that is very, very thin on the page, with only the barest sketches of anything beyond the needs of the plot, and imbues it with a warmth that makes Bryan sympathetic and likable.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and Cregger shot the film quite well, photographing at night in a manner that preserved that the darkness held terror just out of sight but without producing a screen so dim that the action became hard to follow. Cregger only occasionally slips into a loose point-of-view shot that echoes the screen of a first-person shooter video game but not so much that it becames a tiresome gimmick.

With Austin Abrams’ performance and the light touch of comedy throughout the movie, I was ready to judge that I had had a good time watching Resident Evil, but, alas, that is not something I can say in good conscience.

At the opening of David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, Princess Irulan advises the audience, “A beginning is a very delicate time.” The same is quite true of endings. I would even argue that it is possible to recover from a bad beginning, as you have the rest of the story to course-correct, but a bad ending only leaves you with a sour note as your conclusion.

Resident Evil’s ending is bad.

A good ending unifies three elements: Character, Theme, and Tone, producing the conclusion that fits the story and satisfies the audience.

Had Steven Spielberg in Jaws filmed the novel’s ending, that movie would not have spawned the age of the blockbuster. In the book the shark, exhausted by the barrels, loses the strength to swim and, unable to push water across its gills, suffocates. That is a realistic ending but not one that would have been in step with the tone of the film. The exploding compressed air tank, however physics-defying it was, provided the audience with the heroic and victorious bang that they needed.

In Star Wars, had Biggs or Wedge scored the ‘kill shot’ on the Death Star, that would have been a terrible ending. The ending must flow from our principal character, their actions, and their decisions. It must be Luke, and he must trust to the Force for all three elements to come together.

These elements are required for the right ending even when the right ending is not a “happily ever after” one. With The Godfather, Michael by the end of the film has become what he did not want to be. He had told Kay, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” However, by his decisions, step by step, he has become that criminal Don, unifying in theme, tone, and character with that moment as the door closes, shutting Kay out of the office.

Resident Evil‘s ending fails on all three elements.

The movie has a very weak theme, if any is present at all, and so, being generous, we can disregard this element, but on the remaining two criteria this script’s ending is seriously flawed.

Tonally, it swerves from the comedic horror to a dark, dreary, and cynical take that is wholly unearned. The goodwill of the previous hour-plus of footage is discarded without preamble or consideration. The ending feels very much like a case of cynicism being mistaken for wisdom.

But perhaps the greater writing crime is that the finale, the last action set piece takes place without Bryan having any agency at all over its nature or its outcome. Bryan, as a character driving a story with his decisions and actions vanishes and instead is railroaded to a disappointing conclusion.

I was quite disappointed by the final act of Cregger’s Barbarian, and while the whole of Weaponsworks beautifully, it would seem with Resident Evil he again shows that where he needs to grow the most as a writer is crafting endings. He, so far, only lands that task one time in three.

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Television Bits and Bobs

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So, just a few quick observations and comments about recent things I have watched on television.

Slow Horses (Season 5): This is the weekly-released British spy drama on Apple TV+ adapted from a series of novels by Mick Herron concerning a team of MI5 agents who have been disgraced and assigned to a dead-end office where, instead of waiting out retirement, they get tangled up with active threats, becoming heroes, but in the eyes of the agency, never redeemed. My sweetie-wife and I adore this show even as it continues to off some of my favorite characters. The writers never ever let the ironic humor remove the danger these characters face. I cannot say that season five is my favorite, but it is still top shelf television.

Mobland (Season 2): This is a Paramount+ series centered on the Irish mob family, the Harrigans, and their fixer Harry Da Souza. While the family survived, mostly, the crisis from season one, internal fissures are prompting a war for control, and the perception of weakness from without threatens to wrench them from their spot as the dominant organized crime family in London. This show is still great, bloody, and sexy, with a cast that is utterly stacked with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and Tom Hardy.

Carrie: I am now three episodes into Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s debut novel, and it is still working. One aspect of the production that I must salute is that, though the performers playing the girls are actually college-aged, they, for the most part, look like high schoolers. They are incredibly attractive high school girls because the industry is never not going to go for gorgeous, even with characters who are underage, but I am not for a moment pulled out of the story because you have adults trying, and often failing, to pretend to be children. This does not hold true for the actor playing Tommy, who is supposed to be a high school senior but looks very much like a college sophomore or better. In the first three episodes Tommy hasn’t had a lot to do, but since this is a very well-known story, we know that there is a lot more to come from poor doomed Tommy.

VisionQuest: The concluding entry in a trilogy started by WandaVision and continued with Agatha All Along, this series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe follows the artificial lifeform Vision and his quest to regain the humanity he had discovered within himself during his brief life. While Disney continued its tradition of releasing two episodes for the premiere before returning to a weekly model, we only watched the first this week. I thoroughly enjoy the mental illusionary space created where Vision confers and debates with the various artificial intelligences that he has incorporated. The writers did not delay the reveal that, at least in part, this series is going to be dealing with the other missing Maximoff twin, Tommy, eschewing the mystery approach they took with Billy in Agatha All Along. I found the initial episode set up the situation and the stakes quite well, but, of course, the real test is, does the whole story hang together, or does it crash and burn before the end?

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Red Diesel, Red President

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To the things I learned because of this administration’s clumsy, corrupt, and stupid nature, now, I can add to the list the fact that diesel fuel in America is sold in two varieties: clear and red.

Clear diesel is used for transportation; it is what those massive trucks on the highways and interstates fill up with before they go off to terrorize henpecked men on lonely stretches of the desert. Red diesel is functionally identical to the clear stuff sold to truckers and the like but dyed so that its unique color so it can be easily identified for tax purposes. You see, the red stuff is sold for use that doesn’t involve the US interstate or road network: farm equipment and home heating for the northern reaches of the nation. As it is never supposed to touch the highways, it is exempted from the federal highway fuel tax, making its per-gallon cost somewhat cheaper, a benefit that accumulates when one needs to buy so much of the red diesel to make your farm work or to keep from freezing to death in the middle of a New England winter. The highways taxed and non-highway taxed versions of the fuel is logical and serves both consumer communities, until now.

Trump, either manipulated by allies or as a product of his own narcissistic ego, launched a war in the Middle East disrupting the global petroleum markets, driving up the costs of everything downstream of the oil wells, including diesel fuel. The escalating fuel costs combined with the economic terrorism of his tariffs accelerated inflation, the beast that had slain the Biden administration just as inflation had begun to falter. The vast farm states in the middle of the country suffered from both policies as retaliatory tariffs destroyed their markets and skyrocketing fuel costs consumed their budgets from the other side of the equation. Of course, no fence kept the inflation to merely the Trump-supporting farm belts and prices rose throughout the country and an electorate content to ignore the administration’s criminality are unwilling to ignore the injuries it inflicts upon them.

So, the president who helps maintain a far-left socialist government in South America, that considers the Red China leadership his friend, and acquires ownership stakes in private US corporations, turns to his friends in the Kremlin to try, vainly, futilely, to save his government in the face of public wrath. Trump announced a “deal” to purchase fuel from Russia, a small and insignificant amount that he attempted to disguise by reporting it in tons instead of the industry standard of barrels and which is even questionable, given the war there, if it will ever be delivered. In addition to a phony deal that supplies hard cash to a nation that is assisting the killing of American troops, Trump has also announced an intention to allow red diesel to be sold and used for transportation purposes, hoping, irrationally, but everything he does is irrational, that this will somehow and magically tame inflation in time to save him from a hostile House and Senate.

However, the cold equations of supply and demand doom this move to failure with the predictable result that those farmers, who so enthusiastically threw their support to Trump, will suffer even more. Without expanding the supply of the fuel, allowing the trucking industry to use it on the nation’s highways only increases the demand for the red-dyed diesel which, as any highschool-level economics class with tell you, correspondingly drives up the price.

The Midwest is learning the lesson of the Second law of Trump, the first being that Everything Trump Touches Dies, and the Second that is Trump Always Betrays His Partners.

From installing industry-nationalizing socialists, to close friendship with dictators, to acquiring ownership stakes in private business, to his inclination to command the economy, Trump is the most communist, most socialist chief executive this nation has ever seen. It is fitting that his most recent idiotic move is to make red fuel available everywhere.

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Don Jr.? I Do Not Think So, JVL

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Jonathan V. Last, staff writer and watch-geek over at The Bulwark, has intoned both in print and on various podcasts from that fine publication that if Donald Trump does not run for a third term as President of the United States, then the man would be unwilling to hand such awesome moneymaking and criminal authority over to anyone who is not in the family by blood. JVL has suggested that one of the prime contenders to take the Republican nomination, should Trump, in a break from character, obey a law that disadvantages him, would be the eldest son, Don Jr.

While JVL is often right and can do a pretty decent job as a modern Cassandra seeing the disaster around the corner while far too many ignore his warnings, here I think his gift of prophecy fails him.

Several factors worked synergistically to curse our nation with the two terms of Donald J. Trump, destroying our alliances and our institutions, causing the deaths of countless people, loosing masked police madness on our streets, all while engorging himself and his cronies at the public trough. Decades of priming the GOP base for cruelty and to view their fellow Americans not as people with a different view as to how this nation might improve but as ‘the enemy’ worthy only of contempt and destruction cultivated the poisonous soil for a crude, mean man like Trump. A 40-year parasocial relationship built on the myth and the lie that Trump possessed some innate and superhuman talent for business, despite managing to drive casinos into bankruptcy, paired against a professional politician who had been the subject of vicious attacks for more than twenty years, made the unthinkable a reality with Trump’s election in 2016. Biden’s physical feebleness combined with the toxic stew of his inherent arrogance made it impossible for him to step aside in 2022, and then his far too late departure in 2024 crafted the conditions to return to the presidency a convicted felon who, despite Senator Collins’ insistence, had never learned a lesson in his life.

None of this applies to Junior.

Prior to 2016, I doubt many people could pick this man out of a photograph. He has no long parasocial relationship either through culture or politics. He has displayed none of his father’s dubious talents for working a crowd, and outside the circle of sycophants, grifters, and foreign money, he has no base of support from which to build any sort of electoral coalition. Trump commands a cult of personality that built around himself and solely himself. While the cultivated ground will be there for another ideologue to harvest a crop of hate, that gardener will not be Junior. Trump has expended zero energy in building anything around his son, or any of his children. For a cult leader to successfully transfer the devotion of the cult to a chosen successor, that leader must work, and work hard, to affix the affections of the masses to the next in line. Trump, handicapped by his own blinding narcissism, finds such action an impossibility.

Perhaps most damning of all, I would suggest to you that to the broader public not only does he have no real base, he is, in fact, for all intents and purposes, an unknown.

I have laid out the reasons why, practically speaking, Junior has no real base of support, but here is a different yardstick by which we can measure the man’s invisibility to the public at large: do an impression of him.

As with every sitting president, Trump impressions are everywhere. That is true for every person who has sat in that office and for all the major contenders for that post. The satirical impression is a marker for how far your star has risen above all the other people vying for the public’s attention. Fifty years later, people can still recognize even a bad impression of Richard Nixon, but is anyone anywhere doing an impression of Junior that isn’t simply a one-note punchline about rumored cocaine use? Elections are about public perceptions, good or bad, and frankly, in my opinion, the public has no perception of Don Junior at all.

I don’t know what the presidential field in 2028 will look like on either side, but I am confident that even if Junior makes the attempt, it will flame out rather quickly.

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