pretendcritic

Rooster: Better on Paper

2026-05-20T21:44:55.011-05:00

I binge watched most of Rooster in a single afternoon. It's a new HBO comedy from Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, starring Steve Carell as Greg Russo — a successful author who ends up teaching at a New England university where his daughter Katie is a professor. The setting is charming. Carell is great. The show made me laugh. It also drove me crazy.

The title comes from Greg's fictional book character — a confident, suave, athletic figure who is basically everything Greg is not. As the season unfolds, students start calling Greg "Rooster" as a kind of nickname, and he leans into it. It's a nice idea. The problem is that the nickname barely registers in the actual plot — it feels like something the writers thought of late in development, a thematic flourish that never quite makes it into the show itself. Named after a character who barely shows up in the story. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty fitting description of how Rooster treats most of its best ideas.

The show's real premise — the thing it's actually about, underneath the campus fish-out-of-water setup — is this: two smart, self-aware people completely undone by the people they love. Greg can't move on from his ex-wife Elizabeth, who cheated on him with his best friend. His daughter Katie keeps getting pulled back toward Archie, who cheated on her with a student and got that student pregnant. The show is drawing a conscious parallel between them, and there's something genuinely interesting in that territory — the idea that intelligence doesn't protect you from being trapped by the people you love. The problem is that the show romanticizes the pattern rather than interrogating it, and neither relationship earns the emotional weight the show keeps placing on them.

Greg's side of the equation starts with a structural problem: he never reads as lost enough. He's set up as someone who should feel out of place on a college campus — he never went to college himself — but he comes across as charming and capable from the jump. When you can't feel the starting point, you can't feel the transformation. The arc is there on paper. You just don't feel it.

What you do feel, consistently, is Carell finding the comedy wherever it lives. The classroom scenes are the show's most reliable source of laughs — particularly his recurring appearances before the university disciplinary committee. He gets hauled in for calling a student his "white whale," a Moby Dick reference she found offensive. Then he trips and accidentally touches another student's breasts. Stupid, unexpected, escalating — that's the show at its best. They try the formula again with Greg doing the Walk Like an Egyptian in class, but that one doesn't land. You can feel the writers chasing something they already caught.

Walt, the university president, is another consistent bright spot. Half his scenes take place in a sauna at his house — a running bit that feels like it may have been negotiated into the actor's contract — and it somehow works anyway. He's straight-faced and slightly unhinged, played with total conviction. The campus cop has some good moments too, usually at Greg's expense. And Greg's obsession with his electric bike is a nice recurring thread, though him making motorcycle sounds every time he rode it started funny and wore thin by midseason.

Dylan, who is set up early as a potential love interest for Greg but ends up just being his friend, was one of the show's warmest and most underused dynamics. A relationship built on genuine warmth rather than romantic tension — the show was onto something there, and kept cutting away to worse storylines instead.

The worst of those storylines is Katie and Archie. Archie cheated on Katie with a student, got that student pregnant, and is written as a selfish, conceited, genuinely terrible person. Katie seemed done with him, which made complete sense. And yet the show spent ten episodes pulling them back toward each other — flirting, reconsidering, going back and forth — while Archie was still entangled with the woman carrying his child. He eventually abandons her when Katie shows renewed interest. Katie then changes her mind anyway. It was messy and uncomfortable in a way that wasn't funny, and I couldn't stop thinking about the poor baby being dragged into all of this.

For the parallel to work, Katie's side had to be as emotionally credible as it is frustrating. The show needed to give us a real reason to believe she'd keep going back to Archie — some history, some chemistry, some vulnerability that made it feel human rather than inexplicable. Without that, every time she got pulled back in felt like a betrayal of who she was supposed to be. The show is asking you to see her as a smart person trapped by love. Instead she just reads as a smart person making bad choices the writers won't explain.

Greg and Katie's relationship — the one that should be the emotional core of the series — also never quite gets there. You feel held at arm's length the whole time. There's something potentially rich underneath: Katie is trying to build her own identity at the university where her father has suddenly become a minor celebrity, and the resentment that dynamic could produce is real and interesting. But the show gestures at it without digging in.

The season ends with Elizabeth coming on to Greg — a selfish, impulsive move that feels out of step with the self-awareness she'd shown all season. If the show is building toward a reunion in season two, that's a rough premise. But if it's setting up more friction — Greg resisting the pull this time, actually working through it — there's something there worth seeing.

I'd give Rooster a five out of ten. There's a good show inside this one, built around Carell, Walt, Dylan, and the classroom humor. But the show can't commit to what it's really about. It has interesting things to say about how smart people get stuck — and then it romanticizes the stuckness instead of examining it. The comedy suffers, the drama doesn't land, and the show ends up in the middle, where neither the laughs nor the heartbreak fully register.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2026-05-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

I don't like horror movies. I never have. Still, the "28" series has always brought something more than just horror, and I have enjoyed them all. I was cautious going into 28 Years Later, but I made it through no problem. When I heard critics say that The Bone Temple was even better I got excited to watch it.

It appeared on Netflix a couple weeks ago & immediately went to the top of my queue. The critics were right. It was a powerful movie.

We are given two parallel plots that are obviously going to collide. In one, a doctor — Dr. Ian, played by Ralph Fiennes — has developed a relationship with Sampson the leader of the infected. Sampson has become addicted to morphine as it eases the pain the virus has brought upon him. The drug is not only taking away the pain, but healing him. The rage virus broke him; Ian has been piecing him together. In the other storyline, Spike has ended up in the orbit of Jimmy, a disturbed man who used the chaotic world to create a bizarre band of apostles.

That second story is the more disturbing. We get this contrast. It is quiet and peaceful when we are with Dr. Ian & Sampson. With Jimmy & Spike it is constant tension and fear.

Jimmy was a child when the rage virus took over. He doesn't know a world that wasn't like this. Neither do the kids who follow him. What I kept thinking is that Jimmy isn't a manipulator in the classic sense. A manipulator exploits a gap between what someone believes and what's actually true. Jimmy doesn't have that gap to work with. The world these kids were born into is genuinely horrific. Death is everywhere. Nothing was ever normal. So when he tells them the devil made the world this way and that he is the devil's son, he isn't lying to them about something they could figure out. He's filling a void that would otherwise be formless terror. His story makes the world make sense to them, at least a little bit.

I think Jimmy believes it too. The devil is real to him. The chaos he has experienced most of his life needed an explanation, and that is the one he found. What makes him complicated — and what the film is honest about — is that he also made a conscious decision to exploit it. He used the belief to build power. Whether that makes him a bad person or a victim of the world that shaped him is a question the movie refuses to answer cleanly. Both things are true. He was a child once. He had no baseline. He had no one pulling him toward something better.

The cruelty is the part of the film that got my attention. The enjoyment he takes in tormenting people. You can trace how he became a true believer and how he became an opportunist. However, the cruelty doesn't have a clean explanation. Why does brutal cruelty have to be part of his control over these kids? I suppose some people are just cruel. The world gave Jimmy the opportunity and the stage to take it to an extreme.

Every moment with that group feels wrong. The brutality is hard to shake. Still, you can follow the logic of how they got there. I didn't like being inside that storyline — it created a constant low-level feeling of unrest. But it was the more compelling of the two threads. Even though I didn't like it, it was the thing that gave the movie a lot of depth.

Set against it is Dr. Ian and Sampson. Sampson is the thing that instills fear in the first movie. They use his power and danger to build tension in The Bone Temple, and then completely flip it on its head. Watching Ian get close to him creates real tension. Fiennes plays Ian as someone who has been holding onto hope in a world that keeps punishing it for a very long time. You can feel the exhaustion in him, but also a stubbornness. He refuses to write Sampson off. It is almost an irrational position. Fiennes plays it in a way where you feel both the irrationality and the rightness of it at the same time. I loved the scene where Ian allows himself to pass out next to Sampson, genuinely believing he will never wake up again. Even though he cares, and wants to hold onto hope, he has accepted that he may not live long enough to see anything that resembles hope in this world.

Where Jimmy is what happens when a person is broken by the world with no one to pull them back, Sampson is the experiment in the other direction. Ian is betting his life on the idea that humanity is recoverable. The Ian sections are quieter and slower. They served as a break from the intensity of Jimmy and his group. It is crazy to think about how the parts of the movie with the infected nude giant are actually the relaxing moments.

Spoilers...

You can feel the collision coming the whole time. It created genuine curiosity about what was going to happen when Jimmy & Ian finally met. The final sequence made me smile, while at the same time creating a sense of dread. Ian's performance was inspired. I should have expected nothing less. But I knew he wasn't going to be able to let Jimmy walk away. It became clear that Ian was going to die. After years of trying he had succeeded in bringing the infected back. His work was finished. Ian saw the opportunity to save Spike and he knew he had to take it. The ending felt earned — beautiful and tragic in equal measure.

If you don't like horror and have been avoiding these films, I'd still recommend both 28 Years Later and the Bone Temple. There's disturbing imagery. They aren't "fun" to watch. But there is more to these movies than blood and scares. They are doing something interesting, and I think that makes them worthwhile even if you aren't a horror fan.

DTF St. Louis: Bizarre, Heartbreaking, Worthwhile

2026-04-23T21:18:31.886-05:00

There are shows you finish and immediately want to tell everyone about. DTF St. Louis is not one of those shows — and I mean that as a complicated kind of compliment.

It's only seven episodes. It's built around a mystery. It features non-linear storytelling, stilted dialogue, male nudity, and a tone so deliberately strange that recommending it to a coworker or a friend from church feels like a small act of social courage. Even bringing it up feels like saying something a little odd about yourself.

Still, I'm glad I watched it.

The show structures itself as a whodunit. You move through different perspectives and timelines, spending time discovering why different characters might be the killer. The murder mystery is essentially a delivery mechanism for something else entirely, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the overall structure. There were stretches in the middle where I was genuinely annoyed. The pace is slow, but I was never bored, just annoyed in the way you get when you sense a story is taking you somewhere roundabout on purpose. The structure keeps shifting your understanding of events and characters, which can be effective, but it can also feel like the show is leading you down paths that do not pay off.

Whether that's a flaw or a feature probably depends on your patience for ambiguity. The show's actual subject doesn't fully reveal itself until the final sequences. That's a risky bet, and not everyone will feel the payoff was worth it.

The dialogue is another thing you have to accept. The acting is strong. It has a great cast. The performances are committed and carefully calibrated — but characters say things no one would actually say, in rhythms that feel distinctly off from reality. Somehow it works. It adds texture and charm. It signals that you're watching something with a distinct artistic sensibility, not a prestige drama that happens to be set in St. Louis. Some viewers will find it affected and exhausting. I found it distinctive, and committed to a tone that gives the show a real identity. It feels like a fully formed piece of art rather than something polished into blandness.

Underneath the mystery scaffolding, DTF St. Louis is about Floyd and Clark. Their friendship is the center of everything, and it is one of the stranger friendships you are likely to see on television. The premise alone is almost impossible to summarize without raising eyebrows — Clark is having an affair with Floyd's wife, Carol, and Floyd seems, at least on the surface, to be okay with it.

What makes it work is Floyd himself. He is a dopey, deeply sympathetic character — the kind of person you root for and want to shake awake at the same time. There's a scene where a gay man goes in for a kiss, and Floyd — who is (probably) not gay — reciprocates, simply because he doesn't want the man to feel embarrassed. That's Floyd in miniature: a person so oriented toward others' ease that he has nearly no edges left of his own. He absorbs Clark's presence in his marriage without apparent resentment. His generosity is real, but it is also a form of self-erasure. He does not fight for himself. He does not fight for what he wants.

Clark begins as someone exploiting that quality. He is probably using Floyd to stay close to Carol — or maybe it is visa versa. But somewhere along the way that shifts. When Clark starts investing in Floyd financially — getting the family out of debt, helping their son get into a private school — it becomes clear that something genuine has formed between them. He starts trying to inspire Floyd, to push him toward owning his own life. In that sense Clark functions as an audience surrogate. We are all watching Floyd and wanting to intervene, and Clark is the one who actually tries.

But Clark's own journey is the one that stayed with me. He's a middle-aged man who has done everything he was supposed to do and arrived at something that feels hollow. His friendship with Floyd — open, honest, strange — becomes the space where he can finally acknowledge a loneliness he hadn't been able to name. His life looked right from the outside. It didn't feel right from the inside. Floyd gives him permission, somehow, to say that.

The non-linear structure makes it difficult to track exactly when Clark's feelings change or how Floyd's hopelessness quietly calcifies beneath his cheerful surface. That turns out to be appropriate. The emotional truth of their relationship resists a clean timeline. You feel it accumulate rather than arrive. You feel Clark's genuine desire to make Floyd happy. You see the length's Clark is willing to go to in order to make Floyd feel joy.

That is also part of what makes the show so sad. It gives these characters a bond that feels meaningful, deep, and even beautiful, and still it does not lead anywhere comforting. The ending is bleak. The connection matters, but it does not fix anything. It does not rescue anyone. That was heartbreaking — especially because Floyd seems so loving and positive for so much of the show. Watching a character like that reach such a hopeless conclusion is devastating. The show does not offer much relief. It leaves you with pain, loss, and the sense that some wounds go deeper than even real love or friendship can reach.

DTF St. Louis isn't flawless. The son never rises above a plot device, which is a missed opportunity. Some of the dialogue tips from charming into tedious. But I came away wanting to defend those choices. The show is committed to a very specific tone and rhythm, and that commitment is what makes it work.

I want to go back and rewatch it now that I know the murder isn't the point — or that there may not have been a murder at all. I suspected that fairly early, and I think the show rewards a second pass with that knowledge. When I watch it again, the plot mechanics will matter less. I'll be paying more attention to the emotional texture, especially knowing where everything ends up. That feels like the right way to revisit a show like this. The mystery may keep things moving, but it is not the reason it stuck with me, and it did stick with me.

DTF St. Louis is not conventional. It's not trying to be. It takes a meandering path to get to something meaningful, and it's going to lose some people along the way. I don't blame those people. But if you're willing to sit with the weirdness, the payoff — two men filling gaps in each other's lives in ways neither of them expected — is quietly devastating.

I can't recommend it without caveats. I'm recommending it anyway.

Train Dreams: Man Was Here

2026-03-13T07:00:00.007-05:00

I went into Train Dreams on Netflix without knowing much about it, and I think that was probably the right way to watch it. This is not a movie that grabs you with plot or gives you the usual satisfaction of a clearly shaped story. There is enough happening to hold your attention, but that is not really the point. More than anything, this movie is about the passage of time and the way it keeps moving whether we are ready for it or not.

The film tells the story of one man, but I did not come away thinking it was really about him as much as it was about what a life looks like once enough time has passed over it. What makes him such an effective center is that he is ordinary. He works, he loses, he ages, he gets left behind. His life feels less like a singular story and more like a lens for looking at time itself.

The movie's attention to nature is what left the deepest impression on me. The wilderness does not just function as backdrop. It feels like the film's real subject alongside the man. Beautiful images make you feel immersed in that world, and the film keeps returning to the idea that time changes the landscape, erases scars, and reshapes everything. The image that sums this up best is the shoes hanging in the trees. So simple, and yet it says everything: man was here, a life was lived here, but nature will prevail in the end.

That idea runs through the logging material too. Logging becomes one of the clearest expressions of man trying to master nature and turn it into progress. This man gives his life to that work, only to watch technology make his skills less relevant. The trains, the tools, the larger sense of the country changing around him all matter, but the movie never treats human advancement as final. However much people reshape the world, nature still imposes itself on every life.

The film is also shaped by grief and guilt that never fully leaves. The main character is defined by the loss of his family and by the fact that he was not there when they needed him. There is a strange later moment involving his daughter that does not need to be taken literally. What matters is what it reveals about him. He is still holding onto grief, still unable to release the hope that something unresolved might somehow be restored. The movie lets that pain stay unresolved, which feels right.

It does not turn any of this into something mournful or sentimental. It feels more inevitable than tragic. Time does not fully heal this man, but it softens him enough that he can see beauty in the world again. Nature heals more completely than he does, and I think the movie understands that difference — which is exactly what gives it its particular melancholy weight.

I also liked the way the film uses shifts in perspective. The moon landing on television gives him a new way of seeing the world, and near the end, when he flies in a plane and looks down at the earth, it feels like one final expansion of how he understands his place in it. The closing montage of memories was especially effective. Normally I do not like that kind of thing, but here it felt genuinely earned.

More than anything, the film pushed me back toward my own life. I found myself thinking less about what this man's story meant and more about what any life looks like when viewed across time. What will change in my lifetime? What will be left behind? What will the world look like when it is my time to leave it? It is not a comforting film. It left me with a melancholy awareness of time, aging, and death. But I admired that about it. Train Dreams is not really about plot. It is about time passing, about being left behind, and about the fact that even in a hard life there can still be beauty.

Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Better Westeros Story

2026-03-10T07:00:00.012-05:00

Mild spoilers for Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Most Westeros stories leave you with dread. Maybe a character you loved is dead, or the world has gotten crueler in some irreversible way, or you're just numb from the accumulated weight of it all. What surprised me most about the first season of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was what I felt when it ended: affection. Plain, uncomplicated affection for two characters I'd spent only a few hours with. That's not a feeling this world hands out often.

The show earns it by doing something almost countercultural for this franchise — it stays small. The stakes are local. The politics are modest. The brutality is still there, because it's still Westeros, but it's never the point. What drives the season is character, and specifically the relationship between Dunk and Egg. Everything else is window dressing.

That focus is what makes it feel like early Game of Thrones — the version of this world most people fell in love with before it had to become an event. Those first seasons worked because you were watching people before you were watching plot. Somewhere along the way, the show lost that instinct. The scale kept growing, the horrors kept escalating, and I found myself increasingly numb to it. There was so much cruelty, delivered with so much confidence, that I eventually stopped caring who it was happening to. Knight of the Seven Kingdoms works as a kind of antidote. By narrowing the frame, it gave me a reason to care again.

That only works if the central performances land, and they do — especially the actor playing Egg. A cheeky child character is an easy thing to get wrong. He comes across as sharp and curious instead of precocious and exhausting, and his warmth toward Dunk feels unforced. What I found most quietly moving was his willingness to learn from Dunk. Egg is educated, privileged, raised with every structural advantage. Dunk is simpler in how he moves through the world, but he's lived more of it, and carries what he absorbed from Ser Arlan. Egg watches him. He's genuinely curious. He wants to understand things that no one in his background would have thought to teach him. That dynamic — the prince learning from the hedge knight — gives their bond something real to rest on.

It also makes the world's hardness land differently. Because I cared about these two specifically, the cruelty of Westeros felt meaningful rather than numbing. The show doesn't throw brutality at you to prove its credentials. When it comes, it hurts, because you've been given something to lose.

The other thing working in the season's favor is restraint at every level. The writing is confident without being bloated. The shorter episode count helps — nothing outstays its welcome. And even with a scope far smaller than anything the franchise has produced in years, it looks great. There's something almost old-fashioned about how self-contained it feels, and I mean that as a compliment.

I'll take this over sprawling political warfare any day. Not because scale is bad, but because scale without emotional grounding eventually stops meaning anything. Knight of the Seven Kingdoms understood that from the start. It gave me two characters worth caring about and then simply let me care about them. In this franchise, that turns out to be more than enough.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

2026-03-08T10:48:00.000-05:00

There's a particular kind of discomfort a movie can create when it refuses to give you air.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You does that immediately. The camera locks onto the mother so tightly it doesn't feel like a choice at first. It almost feels like a mistake, like we're missing something we should be allowed to see. And then it keeps doing it long enough that you realize it is the point. This is what her life feels like.

You can't widen your view. You can't step away. You're stuck watching someone try to manage a life that keeps coming at her from every direction. It's claustrophobic on purpose, and it works. Because that claustrophobia isn't just atmosphere. It's the film's argument.

That framing creates sympathy almost automatically. Whatever she's feeling (stress, fear, exhaustion, panic) becomes the default reality of the movie. But the longer you watch, the more the film starts to test what you'll do with that sympathy.

At some point it stops being "this poor woman has no help" and starts becoming "this woman is losing it."

She drinks. She uses drugs. She leaves her daughter alone in a hotel room far too long. The pressure is doing its work, bending her judgment and warping her sense of what's reasonable. The movie doesn't ask you to condemn her. But it refuses to let you off the hook either. The sympathy it earns early turns into something heavier, because you're still with her even after you've started to mistrust her.

The daughter's face stays hidden for almost the entire runtime, and it doesn't take long to realize that's deliberate. The film doesn't want the "cute kid" shortcut. So the daughter mostly registers as pressure: constant need, constant noise, constant demand. There are a few sweet moments, enough to remind you the love is real. But mostly you're watching the mother try to make her daughter okay and fall short, over and over, because the need doesn't stop and she has nothing left to give.

The therapist angle sneaks up on you. She spends her days absorbing other people's pain, helping them untangle their lives. Then she goes home and does a version of the same thing, except it never ends and she can't clock out. The scenes with her clients get uncomfortable fast. Their problems aren't fake, but next to what she's carrying they start to feel small, and you can feel her running out of the ability to pretend otherwise.

Even the mundane stuff — parking lots, contractors, paperwork — starts to feel like active threat. Like the world is stacked with tiny obstacles that only exist to prove she has no room left to move.

The hospital group session is where it all crystallizes. It's easy to read her reaction as contempt, like she thinks the whole thing is beneath her. But it felt more like humiliation. She's used to running the room. Here she's the one being assessed. The moment that got me: another mother breaks down, the nurse validates her, and instead of compassion our main character spirals. She's watching the kind of support she's starving for get handed to someone else, and the only emotion she can access anymore is anger.

For most of the film the husband reads as the villain. Absent, cold, unforgivable. Then we finally see him and he just seems... normal. Rational. Not a monster at all.

That's when I understood what the film had actually been doing. It wasn't just putting me in her shoes. It was showing me how sustained pressure distorts perception, how when someone is that depleted, everyone around them eventually becomes an obstacle or a threat. I hadn't just been watching her unravel. I'd been unraveling a little with her, flattening the people in her life the same way she had.

The camera never lets up. But somewhere along the way, I did, and I barely noticed until the husband walked in looking perfectly reasonable.

I watched this on HBO Max and ended up loving it, even when "love" feels like the wrong word for something this uncomfortable. Stick with it. It's doing something precise and it earns the discomfort.

Bugonia: The Argument Against Us

2026-02-22T12:26:00.003-06:00

Bugonia feels, at least on the surface, like a more restrained film than I expected from Yorgos. The world is recognizably normal. Conversations unfold without stylistic chaos. And yet the story centers on a conspiracy-obsessed man who kidnaps a CEO because he believes she can lead him to an alien authority.

That restraint is the point. It makes what follows feel disturbingly plausible.

Teddy (Jesse Plemons) isn’t portrayed as cartoonishly unhinged. He’s methodical. Certain. He believes Michelle is an alien, not the leader but someone who can take him to that leader. He has combed through her social media for proof, finding signals in posts the rest of us scroll past without a second thought. We’re never shown what those signals are. The film trusts us to recognize the shape of that thinking: the rabbit holes, the pattern-matching, the communities that turn private suspicion into shared conviction.

The stakes are cosmic. The evidence is absurd. He can’t see the gap between them.

He sees himself as humanity’s advocate. If he can secure an audience, he can argue that we deserve to survive. The horror is that he never questions the righteousness of that mission. The cinematography reinforces this. It is steady and patient, refusing to sensationalize his delusion. The world isn’t broken. Only his interpretation of it is.

What holds the film together, though, is the dialogue.

Michelle’s attempts to talk her way out of captivity are some of the most gripping scenes in the movie. She cycles through strategies: logic, empathy, subtle manipulation. She is constantly recalibrating. She’s never passive. Even in confinement, she is working. The writing is sharp without feeling theatrical. Every exchange feels like two people who genuinely believe what they’re saying.

Don, Teddy’s cousin, adds another layer. He begins close enough to Teddy’s thinking to be pulled along, but grounded enough to sense something is wrong. He isn’t a skeptic. He’s a follower who hasn’t yet decided where his line is. Watching that line move becomes its own kind of suspense.

When his arc turns, the film turns with it. Up until then, there’s a sense this might still be containable. It feels like a bad idea spiraling, not yet catastrophic. Afterward, the story feels irreversible. Don becomes the cost of proximity to fanaticism. He didn’t build the belief system, but he is swallowed by it all the same.

Then the film shows us the wound underneath the conviction.

Teddy’s mother is ill, subjected to treatment produced by Michelle’s company. These scenes arrive in a different visual register, the only moment Bugonia breaks from its controlled realism. His mother appears pierced with impossibly long needles. She floats in the sky. It is unclear at first whether any of it is real, and that ambiguity matters. For a moment, we are inside Teddy’s perception.

When it is confirmed that his mother is alive and still in the hospital, the full shape of his delusion comes into focus.

It would be simpler if he were just radicalized by the internet. But the film suggests something more ordinary. He watched his mother suffer and needed that suffering to mean something. The conspiracy offers meaning. It draws a clean line between cause and effect. Michelle becomes the person on the other end of that line.

Then there is the ending, which I did not love at first. It felt like the film loosened its grip at exactly the wrong moment. But it lingered. I thought about it until I could make sense of it.

Teddy believes Michelle can take him to the alien leader. He is desperate for that meeting. He wants to argue for humanity’s survival. What he never realizes is that he has already been in the leader’s presence the entire time.

His actions, the kidnapping, the coercion, the escalating certainty, become the evidence. He thinks he is building a case for humanity. Instead, he is demonstrating exactly why humanity might not be worth saving. If he had done nothing, humanity could have continued on. It is his intervention, fueled by conviction and stripped of humility, that seals its fate.

It ultimately feels less like a twist and more like a consequence. The film doesn’t condemn belief itself. It questions what happens when belief becomes so certain that it no longer has to answer for the damage it causes.

It earns that conclusion more fully once you understand what lies underneath Teddy’s belief. He did not choose this mission out of nowhere. He was in pain, and the mission made the pain feel meaningful. That is not a defense of what he does, but it explains how ordinary the path to fanaticism can look from the inside.

Bugonia is a precise film. It is about how easily a person can mistake obsession for purpose, and how destructive it is to believe you are the only one thinking clearly. In trying to save the world, Teddy ends it.

The Lowdown: A Great Character in Search of a Better Story

2026-01-13T19:47:00.001-06:00

I enjoyed watching The Lowdown. The tone is loose, the world is grimy, and it moves with a casual brutality that makes it easy to keep going from one episode to the next. When it ended, though, I felt unsatisfied—not because the overall experience was bad, but because the plot never lived up to the characters. The acting was strong, the vibe was interesting, but the story itself felt underdeveloped.

The show lives and dies with Lee Raybon, played by Ethan Hawke. Lee is a used bookstore owner, a writer, and a self-described "Truthstorian"—someone committed to uncovering and telling the truth no matter the cost. Almost immediately, the show complicates that claim. Lee is a smooth-talker, a manipulator, perfectly willing to bend the truth when it benefits him. He's frequently bleeding, often getting his ass kicked, and generally feels like a man one bad decision away from complete collapse.

Hawke makes him compelling anyway. Lee is scummy, but not cruel. Idiotic, but well-intentioned. He's not someone I'd want to spend time with, yet I found him easy to watch. He feels human in the way that matters: messy, self-mythologizing, convinced he's more principled than he actually is. Without that performance, the show would fall apart.

Where The Lowdown struggles is in the story built around him.

The show establishes a world where danger feels constant. People die suddenly. Violence is ugly and unpredictable. Lee repeatedly puts himself in situations that should permanently change him. But the plot resolves too cleanly, smoothing over its own chaos in a way that feels at odds with the brutality it keeps advertising. The ending doesn't feel wrong so much as too convenient—a neat bow on a story that wanted to feel messy.

That weakness matters because the plot is so closely tied to Lee's choices.

His relationship with his daughter is actually one of the show's strengths. It humanizes him and gives us access to a softer, more vulnerable version of a man who otherwise lives in constant performance mode. We see that he wants to be present for her, but also that his work—his writing, his obsession with uncovering truth—comes first. When he briefly brings her into that world and then shuts her back out, it doesn't feel inconsistent. It feels like recognition. He knows the work is dangerous, and protecting her means keeping her at a distance.

The tragedy is quieter than a dramatic reckoning. He keeps pursuing the case. He keeps missing opportunities to connect. The show is clear-eyed about who Lee is: someone who will always choose the work, even when it costs him intimacy.

That clarity makes the plot's other shortcomings more frustrating. Lee is supposed to be wily, experienced, adept at reading people, yet his trust in Betty Jo feels less like a revealing flaw and more like a narrative necessity. The audience can see the danger immediately. When it goes wrong, it doesn't deepen our understanding of Lee—it just reinforces the sense that the story needs him to be careless in specific moments to keep moving.

That's ultimately where my disappointment sits. The Lowdown understands its central character better than it understands its own plot. Lee Raybon is interesting, contradictory, and well-observed. The story surrounding him doesn't always rise to that level. Plot points about the antagonists go underdeveloped. The resolution is never clearly explained—the good guys win, we're supposed to be happy, but that quick, neat ending feels unearned. I'm glad I spent time with Lee. I just wish the show had put as much care into its story as it did into its central character.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

2026-01-03T14:12:00.002-06:00

I really enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, and that enjoyment has been oddly difficult to explain.

On the surface, it’s a movie I should be cooler toward. The cast is overcrowded with characters who don’t meaningfully affect the core story. Several actors feel underused. The dialogue can be blunt to the point of being preachy. The film tells us what it’s about far more often than it shows us. And the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that doesn’t invite participation—it never feels solvable, or even particularly interested in being solved.

And yet, while watching it, I was pleased. The experience worked. The ending landed. I left the film thinking less about the mechanics of the plot and more about the ideas it was circling.

The mystery never fully engaged me because the movie asks for a kind of fear it doesn’t earn. A significant portion of the tension rests on the idea that the young priest Jud, played by Josh O'Connor, could plausibly be blamed for the crime. We’re meant to worry that suspicion will settle on him—that his position, his faith, and his quiet moral seriousness will make him an easy scapegoat. He even reaches a moment where he’s prepared to confess to a murder he didn’t commit.

But that threat never felt credible. Neither the audience nor the other characters are given enough reason to seriously believe he’s guilty, so the danger remains abstract. I didn’t feel anxious watching this possibility unfold. I felt distant, aware that the film was insisting on stakes it hadn’t fully established. As a result, the mystery lacks urgency. It gestures toward tragedy without ever convincing me it’s truly at hand.

What did work for me was the film’s interest in spirituality—specifically, in how belief is expressed through power, care, and restraint.

The clearest contrast is between Jud and the Monsignor Wicks character played by Josh Brolin. Brolin’s character embodies a familiar, coercive version of religion: leadership through fear, shame, and the constant threat of moral failure. His authority depends on reminding people how far they fall short and what awaits them if they don’t correct course. It’s an expression of belief rooted in control.

The priest represents something quieter and more compelling. His faith isn’t focused on enforcing behavior, but on supporting people where they are. One small scene captures this difference better than any speech. During a phone call meant purely to extract information—a key detail about who rented the equipment—the woman on the other end opens up about her sick mother. She’s exhausted, overwhelmed, and clearly lonely. Instead of steering the conversation back to the investigation, the priest stays with her. He listens. He talks to her about what she’s going through and how she’s feeling. The support he offers isn’t strategic. It isn’t a tactic. It’s simply something she needs, and he’s present enough to give it.

That same ethic of restraint carries into the film’s final moments. Benoit Blanc knows the truth. He knows exactly who committed the crime. Ordinarily, this would be the moment he relishes most—the theatrical reveal, the demonstration of superior intellect. But here, he doesn’t take it. He understands the killer is about to die, and that her religious beliefs require her to confess her sins herself. So he holds back. He allows her to speak. He already knows the answer, but he respects what matters to her at the end of her life.

What makes this moment land is that Blanc doesn’t believe what she believes. He remains an atheist throughout the film. His arc isn’t about conversion, but recognition. He comes to see that faith, when practiced without domination or fear, can be meaningful even to someone who doesn’t share it. His intelligence is never in question. What’s tested instead is his ability to step aside.

I didn’t connect deeply with the characters, and I wasn’t emotionally gripped by the plot. But I enjoyed spending time with the film’s questions. I think it is the best of the Knives Out films, and the one I am mostly likely to revisit.

An Annual Review... For Yourself

2025-12-28T14:50:00.002-06:00

December 28th, and I'm sitting here with coffee, doing something most people never do: reviewing my year like it's a performance review at work. Except no one assigned it, no one will read it, and there's no raise at the end. I do it anyway.

Most of us are familiar with annual reviews at work. They are structured, sometimes tedious, occasionally meaningful, and almost always required. But in our personal lives? We rarely pause long enough to look back with the same level of intention. We rush from one year into the next, maybe setting a handful of resolutions, but rarely taking time to actually understand the year we just lived.

I think we lose something important when we skip that step.

A personal annual review isn't about beating yourself up for what you didn't do or building a glossy highlight reel of what went well. At its core, it's simply about allocating time to think. It's creating space to look back at the year with curiosity, learning, and a mindset of growth instead of judgment. It's asking, "What happened?" followed closely by, "What did it do to me? What did it teach me? And where do I want to go from here?"

Why Structure Helps

At work, reviews have structure whether we like it or not. There are forms, categories, prompts, and deadlines. Those guardrails make the reflection possible. Without structure, most of us wouldn't do it.

In your personal life, nobody hands you that framework. No one is going to say, "By December 31st, please submit a thoughtful evaluation of your year." If anything, the world pushes the opposite direction: keep going, keep consuming, keep moving. Which means if you want to reflect meaningfully, you have to impose a little structure on yourself.

The good news is: that structure can look however you want. I've found that using AI can be incredibly helpful in shaping that process. Sometimes the hardest part is deciding what to ask yourself, and having something to guide the conversation can make the whole thing easier and more intentional.

The Perfect Week to Do It

I've always loved the week between Christmas and New Year's. It feels like "no man's land"—a strange pause between the end of one chapter and the start of the next. Life is a little quieter. Expectations are a little lower. It's a natural time to step back, take a breath, and actually think.

That in-between space is the perfect moment to look back at the year with clarity and kindness. Not to build an elaborate plan for the future just yet, but to simply understand the past a little better. Reflection first. Direction second.

Before you set resolutions or define goals or pick your big focus word for the new year… check in with yourself. Look backward before you look forward. Give your past year the attention it deserves so the next one can be guided by intention rather than inertia.

That's what a personal annual review really is: a small act of care for the person you've been, and an investment in the person you're becoming.

How I Personally Do My Annual Review

Since everyone has to figure out their own structure for this, I'll share a bit about what my process looks like.

I start by simply thinking back over the year and writing down what stands out. Not everything—just the things my mind insists on revisiting. Then I sit with those memories for a bit. More than "what happened," I try to explore how those things made me feel and what they revealed about me. That's usually where the insight is. This is where I have found AI can help dive deeper.

From there, I zoom out and think in terms of broader areas of my life… Health, Family, Work, Relationships, and so on. I ask myself:

How did I show up in each of these areas this year?
If I had to rate myself, how would I honestly score it?
What got a lot of my attention? What didn't?
Where did I grow? Where did I get stuck?

It's not about creating a perfect scorecard. It is evaluating where my time and energy went. What mattered enough to shape the year, as I think back on it?

That combination—specific moments plus broader life categories—helps me see my year more clearly. And once I understand the year I just lived, it becomes much easier to be intentional about the year that's coming.

Keep It Simple: Just Think

At the end of the day, a personal annual review doesn't need to be complicated. It doesn't require a template, a fancy system, or a perfectly organized Notion page. It simply requires time set aside to think. Be intentional & honest. Don't rush.

Capture what you notice. Write it in a journal, a document, or even as a letter to yourself. What mattered this year? What surprised you? What stretched you? What do you want more of? Less of? What did you learn about who you are… not just what you did?

There are no rules for how you do that. But it's worth doing.

Pluribus Episode 9: Season 1 Finale

2025-12-24T17:22:00.004-06:00

We made it to the end of the first season. We've landed about where I expected the show to arrive around mid-season. That isn't necessarily a criticism. Pluribus delivered a thoughtful, occasionally frustrating, and ultimately strong first season of television. My frustration wasn't with the premise or the pacing. It was with Carol. Which I suspect is at least partially the point.

Carol's Contradictions

Carol has been presented in a lot of different ways this season. Sometimes she's sharp and perceptive. Other times she's clueless. Sometimes she's principled and stubborn. Other times she's opportunistic and self-serving. The show seems comfortable letting those contradictions exist, and we're meant to explain much of it through her alcoholism, her grief over Helen, and her loneliness. Early in the season, Carol clung fiercely to her ideals about autonomy and identity. But isolation wore her down. Being truly alone breaks people in ways that principles can't always withstand. I can buy that, at least intellectually.

Emotionally, though, I found the way Carol was handled in these final episodes unsatisfying.

Last week, we watched Carol begin to fall for Zosia. What worked about that episode was the ambiguity. It wasn't entirely clear whether Carol truly trusted her or whether she was knowingly leaning into the comfort being offered while keeping her defenses up. There was a sense that Carol understood she was being maneuvered closer to the joined, and that she was choosing to take what she needed from the situation with eyes wide open.

Episode 9 largely abandons that ambiguity. Here, Carol appears to have fully bought into her new world, as long as it comes with two conditions: she gets to stay with Zosia, and she doesn't have to join the hive mind herself. It's a softer, more settled Carol. She seems to be letting herself believe in a future that looks almost normal. And then, when the joined reveal they've been using her frozen eggs to engineer her conversion, Carol finally snaps back into the version we've known most of the season—paranoid, reactive, unwilling to be controlled.

Comfort Over Conviction

I think Carol comes across as shallow and selfish in this episode, even if the show doesn't quite want to say that out loud.

Yes, she lost Helen. Yes, she was profoundly lonely. And yes, Zosia filled a very real emotional hole in her life. Carol got attached quickly, maybe desperately. All of that makes sense.

The joined are clearly manipulating her. That felt obvious last episode, and it's even more obvious here. Carol seems aware of that manipulation, at least on some level. And yet she still gives into the fantasy: a beautiful girlfriend, a cozy life, a sense of routine, and the illusion that she can stay just adjacent to the hive without ever fully committing.

Maybe Pluribus is suggesting that when faced with the collapse of everything familiar, most of us aren't looking for truth or autonomy. We're looking for comfort. We want a new normal. We want routines, relationships, and a version of life that feels livable, even if it's built on compromises we pretend not to see. Carol held onto her principles for as long as she could, but loneliness is corrosive. Her ideals didn't keep her warm at night. They didn't give her someone to talk to. In the end, comfort won out over conviction—at least for a while.

The episode rushes through her capitulation in the first half, then rushes through her rejection in the second. We get the thesis without the work, and Carol ends up feeling less like a complex character making an understandable mistake and more like a plot device being moved into position.

The Big Reveal (That Wasn't Really a Reveal)

The episode reveals that the joined are using Carol's frozen eggs to convert her—no surprise there.

The opening sequence shows us someone willingly joining the hive mind, and it's genuinely affecting to watch her individuality dissolve the moment the conversion completes. But the crucial difference with Carol is that she will never go willingly. No matter how lonely she is, no matter how much comfort Zosia offers, Carol will always resist at the final moment. The joined understand this about her. That's why they need her frozen eggs—not as leverage, but as the mechanism itself. They're going to convert her whether she wants it or not, because they genuinely believe it's what's best for her.

The ski chalet scene, where Zosia calmly explains the plan in a setting that feels intentionally serene and seductive, is probably the episode at its strongest. It's quiet, unsettling, and honest in a way the rest of Carol's arc hasn't been. Zosia isn't gloating or apologetic. She's simply presenting the reality: this is what's going to happen, and from the joined perspective, it's a gift. Carol will finally have what she's always wanted—connection, purpose, an end to loneliness. Her and Zosia can be one.

A Punchline

And then Carol flies home in a helicopter carrying a crate.

We knew Carol was coming back to join Manousos and mount their resistance. When the helicopter arrives with the crate, I thought it might have been something Manousos ordered for whatever he's been working on. Then they reveal it's an atomic bomb, and the moment plays like a joke. I'll admit, it inspired a bit of an eye roll.

The bomb is a symbol of her defiance, but it's more of a wink to the audience than anything else. Maybe she's testing them again, seeing if they'll actually give her one. I don't think it indicates she's going to do anything extreme. I don't think it will be important to the plot. I don't think it's meant to be a cliffhanger or a sign of things to come.

It's just Carol being dramatic. Maybe the writers will find something creative to do with it in season two. Personally, I'd prefer they just drop it. (bomb joke)

Final Thoughts

Carol is a good character. But the show has used her in ways that often felt inconsistent rather than complex. The finale leans heavily into that inconsistency, and while I understand what the writers were aiming for—showing us someone who wants connection so badly she'll ignore every warning sign—the execution was poor. It didn't align with the Carol we knew, or the feeling I had coming out of the last episode.

What I wanted from this finale was more clarity on how she and Manousos are going to resist. We have to wait for season 2 to get any of that. It's fine for Carol to be saddened by losing Zosia's companionship in the process. However, it seemed like she had fallen in love and completely given up her mission of resistance, until the joined's true intentions were thrown back in her face.

Still, Pluribus remains a fascinating show about identity and belonging. It's asking real questions about what we're willing to give up for connection, and how much we'd be willing to fight against the easy choice.

Season 2 has a lot of potential. I'm curious whether the show will continue to use Carol as a case study in self-sabotage, or whether it will finally let her grow. Either way, I'll be watching. Even when Pluribus frustrates me, it gives me a lot to think about.

Pluribus Episode 8: Charm Offensive

2025-12-19T18:06:00.003-06:00

It was good to see that Manousos survived, and just as good to see that he hasn't lost his absolute disdain for the hive mind. Part of me wishes he would have chilled for a few days and regained his strength, but it was still a relief to see him back on his feet. While I'm sure he's grateful to be alive, I can't help but imagine he would have refused the helicopter ride and medical help had he been conscious at the time.

The rest of the episode centers almost entirely on Carol and Zosia. They spend a lot of time together. They go on what is essentially a date. They talk, play croquet, flirt, and slowly work to understand one another. For the first time, Carol shows genuine curiosity about what these people are actually about, rather than treating them purely as an enemy to be resisted.

That dynamic is interesting. The hive is clearly trying to break down Carol's defenses, and it seems to be working, at least emotionally. Her vulnerability shows when she agrees to sleep with them on the floor of a community center. She witnesses the extent to which the hive gives up personal comfort in the name of efficiency and togetherness. At the same time, Carol sees Zosia experience the pleasure of a massage. It's not that these people cannot experience comfort—they just choose to give it up for the greater good.

However, it all falls apart. The hive miscalculates with the diner reconstruction. Haven't they learned by now that Carol isn't impressed by grand gestures? Carol seems okay with the diner itself, but when she realizes the waitress has been pulled back there from her new life, it backfires entirely. Instead of drawing her in, it reminds her of everything the hive has destroyed: free will, spontaneity, genuine human interaction. The reconstruction feels hollow, and Carol sees right through it.

She storms off and goes home. Zosia follows, genuinely confused about what went wrong. Carol understands exactly what's happening. She knows they are trying to manipulate her, soften her resistance, and wear her down. For a moment, it seems like it won't work. Carol recognizes the tactic and calls it out.

Then Zosia kisses her.

When psychological manipulation fails, physical connection becomes the next move. Whether this is calculated strategy or genuine attraction—or some unsettling combination of both—remains deliberately ambiguous. Either way, it works. They spend the night together. The next morning, Carol writes again. She produces a chapter of her book and shares it with Zosia, something she hasn't been able or willing to do in a long time. I think it is all part of a plan—one that I don't have many guesses on.

This episode, especially when paired with the previous one, feels like a thoughtful exploration of loneliness. Carol is a loner. She is grumpy. She despises the hive. And yet, she cannot exist entirely alone. She has limits. She hasn't accepted the reality of this world, but she also can't survive without another person, without connection, without human touch.

There is only one episode left. It seems clear that the meeting between Manousos and Carol might take place in the closing minutes of the season. I'm afraid we are going to have to wait a couple of years to see what they can get up to now that they are together. I don't feel like I want to wait that long.

What's the Point of Writing on the Internet?

2025-12-18T17:13:00.000-06:00

I've asked myself this more times than I can count.

The world doesn't need another film critic. There are sharper, faster, more consistent voices out there. If the goal were filling a gap in coverage, I'd be unnecessary.

So why keep going?

I've been writing online, off and on, for nearly eighteen years. Most of my blogs are gone now. They’ve been quietly abandoned when enthusiasm faded or life got busy. This one stuck around. I haven't had the heart to shut it down, even when I wasn't sure what it was for.

The answer is simple: I like writing.

I like the act itself. Sitting with a half-formed thought and turning it into something coherent. The friction of choosing words and rearranging paragraphs until the idea underneath becomes clearer. Writing is how I organize my thinking. It's how I slow down enough to understand what I actually believe about something I just watched.

I journal nearly every day. No audience, no polish, no pretense.

But sometimes I want an audience, even a hypothetical one.

Writing for someone else forces a higher standard. It demands clarity. It pushes me to finish thoughts instead of letting them trail off. I enjoy it, and I feel like I’ve gotten better at it. When I hit publish, I'm saying this idea is worth standing behind. I like that feeling.

Do many people read this blog? Not really.

And yet, that doesn't bother me as much as I'd expect.

The point isn't to compete with professional critics or build an audience at scale. The point is to practice. To think in public. To leave a trail showing how my tastes and perspective change over time. This blog is less about contributing something new to the conversation and more about creating a place to share my writing.

That's why the name still fits.

I pretend to be a critic. I pretend there's an audience. I pretend these words matter beyond the act of writing them. And in the pretending, I write more carefully, think more deeply, pay closer attention.

Maybe that's the point of writing on the internet, at least for me. Not to be essential or authoritative. But to show up, keep going, and make sense of things out loud.

Even if no one is listening.

Pluribus: Koumba Diabaté

2025-12-15T20:59:00.005-06:00

I caught up with the most recent episode of Pluribus and now I'm stuck waiting until Friday for the next one. In the meantime, I can't stop thinking about Koumba Diabaté.

Koumba seems designed as comic relief. His reaction to the joining is immediate excess—he figures out how to game the system right away. Air Force One, luxury cars, living large. Beyond this surface-level indulgence, we know almost nothing about him. No real backstory, no depth, just the spectacle of someone exploiting their new situation for maximum personal gain.

Here's where it gets weird: Koumba is clearly sleeping with multiple women simultaneously, and the show treats this as consequence-free fun. No pushback from anyone. Meanwhile, Carol gets painted as the villain for raising her voice at the "we." A woman expressing frustration verbally becomes antagonistic, while a man using multiple women for sex just... exists. No judgment, no consequences, no examination.

The "we" want to make everyone happy by any means necessary, which apparently includes giving up people's bodies for sexual gratification. I get what the show is going for—Koumba is supposed to embody the part of ourselves that would fully indulge in the opportunities this new world offers. Maybe watching the "we" act out a scene from Casino Royale is supposed to be cool, or funny, or both. But there's no getting around the fact that the show is also treating women's bodies like tools to be used.

I don't know. I don't love it.

Maybe the show will explore or explain this further as the season continues. I think Koumba is supposed to be a likable character, which makes this dynamic even more difficult to process. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but right now it just feels off.

Stephen King - The Stand: A Reflection on Passive Morality

2025-12-14T19:34:00.004-06:00

Finishing The Stand felt like an accomplishment. At 1,300-plus pages, it took me more than three months, reading in small chunks most evenings before bed. I never found it difficult or frustrating, though. The story and its characters became a familiar place I visited at the end of the day, and I was never racing toward the ending so much as curious about what would become of each person along the way.

I haven't read a huge amount of Stephen King, so I won't pretend to rank this against his broader work. I'd heard for years that The Stand was one of his best, and I'm glad I finally read it. The prose itself wasn't especially sharp or memorable, but the scope and the people carried me through. What has stayed with me most, though, isn't the plot. It's the uncomfortable questions the book raises about how people become good or evil.

The Sorting

At its core, The Stand is about morality in the absence of structure. A government-created superflu wipes out most of the world's population, stripping away the guardrails of modern society. Survivors begin having dreams that draw them toward two figures: a benevolent old woman in Boulder and a dark man in Las Vegas. Some end up in one camp, some in the other. With civilization gone, people reorganize themselves around an older, more primal divide: good and evil.

What struck me is that this reorganization happens almost passively. I expected to watch characters like Stu Redman, Larry Underwood, or Frannie Goldsmith consciously grapple with what side they were on and why. I expected internal debates, moments of crisis, deliberate choices. Instead, the characters seem to sort themselves naturally, with little explanation. They have dreams, and they follow them. The alignment feels less like a philosophical decision and more like an extension of who they already were.

That absence of conscious choice is what makes the book unsettling. Were the people who ended up on the side of evil truly evil? Or did they drift there out of convenience, fear, or a desire for structure? What if you were fundamentally decent but happened to live closer to Las Vegas than Boulder? Would geography alone shape your fate? King doesn't give us clear answers, and I don't think he means to. The implication seems to be that morality isn't something you choose in a moment of crisis—it's something you've been choosing all along, in small ways, long before the world fell apart.

I found that deeply uncomfortable because it suggests we don't have as much control as we'd like to believe. We think of ourselves as capable of making the right choice when it matters, but The Stand asks: what if the choice has already been made? What if you're already the person you're going to be when everything goes wrong?

The Contrast

As the two societies take shape, the contrast between them is straightforward. Las Vegas operates through intimidation, surveillance, and enforced compliance. Order is maintained through fear. The Boulder Free Zone is slower and messier, relying on communication, trust, and a shared sense of responsibility. Evil seeks control. Good seeks cooperation.

The character who clarified this for me was Larry Underwood. Early in the book, he's selfish and cowardly, and he knows it. He abandons people when it's convenient. But as the story progresses, he grows into someone capable of sacrifice. What changed? I'm not entirely sure King tells us. Larry doesn't have a dramatic epiphany. He just starts making different choices, small ones, until he becomes someone different. By the end, he's one of the people who walks into the lion's den without weapons or guarantees. That transformation, or maybe that reveal of who he could have been all along, felt more genuine to me than any grand moral awakening would have.

The Stand

Given the title and the long journey to get there, I expected a final confrontation: a dramatic standoff where good triumphs over evil through force or cleverness. That never really happens. Instead, evil collapses under its own weight. Randall Flagg's power depends on fear, and once that fear erodes, so does he. The role of the "good" side isn't to defeat evil directly, but to refuse to be intimidated by it.

That choice.. showing up without guarantees, without weapons, without control... seems to be the actual stand the book is talking about. Good doesn't win because it is stronger or smarter. It wins because it doesn't operate by the same rules. It wins by being willing to lose.

What I Took Away

When I finished the book, I didn't walk away with a single, clean epiphany. But it did prompt me to consider how I make small decisions when no one is watching. Do I take the easier path or the right one? Do I avoid difficult conversations or lean into them? The book suggests that those small, unwitnessed choices are the ones that matter. They're already determining what kind of person I'll be if the structure around me ever falls away.

I'm still not sure I buy that entirely. I'd like to believe people are capable of real change, that a moment of crisis can reshape who we are. But The Stand made me question that. And maybe that discomfort is the point. The book doesn't tell you what to think. It just holds up a mirror and asks: if everything familiar disappeared tomorrow, who would you already be?

Pluribus Episode 7: The Gap

2025-12-12T19:41:00.007-06:00

This might be my favorite episode of Pluribus so far. Maybe I have finally settled into the show’s pace and tone. Maybe it helped to spend so much time away from Carol before circling back to her in a more subdued, reflective place. Or maybe it was simply the pleasure of spending an episode with Manousos, spiky tree aside.

By any traditional measure, not much happens in Episode 7. You could argue that this is the episode where the least happens relative to the overall plot, and the show knows it. It even winks at the audience. “We can fly you to New Mexico. You can skip all this stuff. Wouldn’t that be great?” Yes. That would be great. I wanted that shortcut as much as anyone.

And yet, I was glad we did not take it. Manousos’s stubborn, self-reliant approach gives the episode its backbone. There is something deeply satisfying about his refusal to accept help, about the quiet confidence and repetition in the way he moves through the world. I could listen to him say the same phrases on repeat for the rest of the season and not get tired of it. His presence carries the episode in a way that plot mechanics usually do.

Carol’s reduced screen time also worked in the episode’s favor. When we do check in with her, the moments land harder. The quiet scenes of her sitting with her isolation feel earned, almost meditative. There is no scrambling, no performative defiance. Just acceptance. The final moments of the episode feel almost cathartic, not because anything is resolved, but because Carol finally seems to stop fighting the reality she is in. After six episodes of tension and friction, that stillness feels like progress.

As a standalone episode, this is a clear winner. It is confident enough to slow down, to let atmosphere and character do the work. I still wish the broader story were moving a bit faster, but at this point it is clear that Season 1 is not aiming for much in the way of resolution. I have made peace with that. Episode 7 helped me do it.

Pluribus Episode 6: Still Waiting for the Show to Click

2025-12-09T12:00:00.002-06:00

I enjoy Pluribus. It’s a fine show. But at this point in the season, it’s starting to worry me.

One issue is the lead character. Carol isn’t written to be conventionally likable, and the show leans into that. You can understand her motives and even sympathize with her loss, but she’s abrasive, closed-off, and often hard to root for. That can work when a show balances the energy with other characters. Here, we’re with her almost every second. There’s no contrast, no reprieve, no alternate voice to break the monotony. The show almost dares you to keep watching a story built entirely around someone most people wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon with.

Then there’s the pacing. Five episodes went by before the show offered something that felt like genuine momentum. Episode 5 finally raised a mystery worth leaning toward, and Episode 6 immediately discards it. New elements appear, sure, but the direction feels murky. So far, the plot hasn’t earned much emotional investment. Some twists feel contrived, and the season’s rhythm has been slow enough that you start to wonder whether the story is building toward anything meaningful.

That’s especially noticeable now that we’re six episodes into a nine-episode season. There just doesn’t seem to be much runway left. Apple already ordered two seasons, so the writers know they have more story to tell, but that only raises the question of what they plan to accomplish in the final stretch of Season 1. They’ve covered surprisingly little ground so far.

So I’m mixed on this show. I’ll finish the season, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who bailed after the first three episodes. I’m not here to defend it, and I’m certainly not recommending it. It’s intermittently entertaining with flashes of originality, but the whole package hasn’t quite come together.

Everything ultimately hinges on how you respond to Carol. She’s deeply flawed, and she didn’t seem to like her life much even before she lost Helen... the one person who anchored her. Now she’s grasping for purpose in a world that’s collapsing into a collective mind, and that search has become her identity. The show clearly wants us to feel for her. Episode 6 underlines that the other survivors don’t want her around because she brings them down, and that makes her isolation feel even sharper. The introduction of someone who’s willing to try to connect with her hints at where the rest of the season might be headed.

I don’t have many guesses or theories about where the show is going. We now know the joined can’t convert the remaining twelve individuals without their consent, since they need stem cells. They’ll be highly motivated to remove Carol as an obstacle. Carol has frozen her eggs, which raises an unsettling possibility: if the joined can use those eggs—or even create an embryo—they might bypass her refusal and convert her anyway.

We also have the thread of the self-storage man. It seems inevitable he’ll find Carol soon, and once they meet, the two of them will need to form some kind of plan. That almost has to happen in the next episode to give the story any room to breathe. The challenge is that neither of them has the scientific expertise to counter what the joined are doing, so whatever solution emerges will need to come from somewhere unexpected. That’s the biggest opportunity left for the season to surprise me.

Carol has felt behind the curve all season, and the show hasn’t shied away from showing her drinking her way through much of it. She’s a lonely, wounded mess. For her arc to land, she’ll need to move beyond isolation and pull others into the fight. Not just the self-storage guy, but the remaining survivors who’ve kept her at arm’s length. If the show can get her to that point, the last few episodes still have the potential to deliver something satisfying. The only option is to have a story of redemption for Carol.

Pluribus Episode 5: The Show Finally Finds A Hook

2025-12-07T19:56:00.005-06:00

Episode 5 is the first time this season genuinely pulled me in. Up until now, the show has hinted at big ideas without giving me much tension to hold onto. I've been waiting for the story to spark, and I was starting to get frustrated. This episode finally delivered a real mystery... one that made me want to hit "next" the moment the credits rolled.

The shift starts when the "we" decide they've had enough of Carol's antics. They abandon the city altogether, leaving behind only a system of pre-recorded phone updates and drone pickups. No more face-to-face interactions. No more negotiations. They're done managing her unpredictability. That quiet severing of contact changes the tone immediately. For the first time, Carol is truly alone.

That's when the mystery slips in. A backlog of trash leads her to notice the absurd amount of milk the "we" have been consuming. It's such a mundane detail, but it becomes the thread she pulls on... a path toward understanding what keeps the human bodies of the centralized consciousness alive. The show finally gives her (and us) something tangible to chase, and it works.

What makes this all more interesting is how small the show feels despite its world-ending premise. Pluribus sets up a global takeover, a hive mind stretching across the planet, yet nearly every scene is just Carol navigating this new reality on her own. Early in the season, that imbalance threw me off. I kept waiting for the story to widen its lens. Episodes 2 through 4 left me unsure whether this stripped-down approach was the right choice.

But Episode 5 made the style click. The scale of the premise and the intimacy of the storytelling finally complement each other. The solitude, the slow unraveling... it's always felt like Vince Gilligan, but until now it didn't quite match the show's setup.

For the first time, I'm genuinely curious about where this is heading. And after four episodes of waiting, it's nice to finally feel that pull.

Pluribus Episode 4: Poor Pirate Lady

2025-12-06T17:19:00.006-06:00

By Episode 4, Pluribus seems to have settled into a groove. I'm getting more interested and engaged in the story as the plot deepens.

This episode starts with the storage unit owner who seemed like a narrative dead end last episode. Turns out Carol did get his attention, and more importantly, he seems to share her skepticism about the "we" collective. Undoubtedly this character is going to be significant down the line.

The episode opens with several dialog-free minutes that immediately brought Breaking Bad to mind. The deliberate pacing, the visual storytelling... it all felt very Vince Gilligan. They even included a shot of a fly, which has to be an intentional nod to one of Breaking Bad's most divisive episodes.

Carol is evolving from reactive to strategic. She's now actively documenting the rules governing the "we" people, methodically planning how to extract information about a possible cure. Her approach? Increasingly ruthless. The poor liaison assigned to interface with her has now nearly died at Carol's hands in back-to-back episodes... first nearly blown up, now drugged in an interrogation attempt. It's uncomfortable and darkly humorous to watch. Carol has discovered a glimmer of hope for a cure, and she is becoming increasingly desperate.

What's most intriguing is how Carol's interactions with the "we" continue to mirror conversations with AI. When she asks about her books, the responses have that familiar feel. They are technically accurate but oddly detached, helpful yet fundamentally opaque. I'm not sure if the show is making a deliberate statement about AI as centralized consciousness, but the parallels are unmistakable and probably intentional.

Pluribus continues to reward patient viewing. Feels like the pieces are nearly set on the board, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens now that the story has gained some momentum.

Pluribus Episode 3: When Help Goes Too Far

2025-12-05T21:23:00.006-06:00

Episode 3 pushes Carol into a new kind of tension with the “we.” After a sarcastic remark about wanting a hand grenade, they actually bring her one. It’s a funny moment on the surface, but it lands with a thud once her central consciousness guide get injured by the explosion. There are no guardrails here. Carol can ask for anything, and they will oblige without hesitation.

It instantly made me think about how today’s AI systems can sometimes feel the same way... willing to entertain, encourage, or amplify even the most unhinged ideas. It reminded me of that YouTube video... Chat GPT Made Me Delusional.

Carol’s next move is unclear, but maybe she will push this power to an extreme. When a character casually jokes about asking for an atomic bomb, and you’re not sure whether the system would say no, it creates a very modern kind of unease. I could see her trying to conceive of a way to destroy the centralized consciousness by using its accommodating desire to make her happy.

Another thread that hit me was Carol’s frustration with how the “we” tries to improve her life by pulling bits of information from people around her, i.e. her dead wife, her housekeeper, anyone who might offer insight into what she “needs.” There’s something deeply invasive about it. It feels like the exaggerated version of the world we already live in: phones that seem to listen, ads that follow you across the internet, and algorithms that think they know you better than you know yourself.

There’s a point where “helpful” becomes intrusive. Even if the suggestions are convenient, we still recoil at the idea of being fully known, fully predicted, fully optimized. Carol isn’t just annoyed by the “we”... she’s unsettled by the loss of her own boundaries.

Episode 3 leaves me wondering where the show is taking her next, especially now that she’s testing how far this system will bend. But the real discomfort comes from recognizing pieces of our world in hers. The technology may be fictional, but the instincts behind it feel familiar.

The first two episodes felt a bit disjointed, but this one finally settles the show into a clearer rhythm. The narrative is taking shape, the tension has purpose, and I’m more optimistic about stepping into episode 4 than I was going into episode 3.

Pluribus Episode 2: Curious, Not Convinced

2025-12-04T19:25:00.009-06:00

The first episode of Pluribus left me wondering if Carol should stay herself or join the hive mind. Episode two deals with that question directly, but I'm not sure I liked where it went.

We see how this unified consciousness thing works, and the efficiency is pretty wild. Everyone knows how to do everything. Everyone knows everything. But watching those scenes, all I could think was—how overwhelming must that be? How do you process having billions of people's thoughts in your head at once?

When Carol meets the other “survivors” who haven't joined, there's a key difference. They all have family members who joined, so they could ask what it's like. Carol doesn't have anyone. She's completely alone. She is disturbed by the whole thing while the others seem completely okay with it.

The tone shift was jarring. Episode one was creepy. Episode two seemed to go for humor. I don't know what kind of show this is trying to be. I was left with completely different feeling after the 1st & 2nd episodes.

For me this show is interesting, but not quite entertaining. It is asking cool questions about consciousness and individuality, and I'm curious where it goes. But I'm not sold on the characters. Episode two was a come-down and a tone change. I’m going to keep watching, but I don’t feel great about the show after its second installment.

Pluribus Episode 1: When Everyone Else Becomes "We"

2025-12-01T20:17:00.008-06:00

I just finished the first episode of Pluribus on Apple TV. It was creepy and unsettling in the best way. The title hints at what it's about, but I didn't bother doing any research, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Most of the episode is spent getting to know our main character, Carol.

Carol writes romance novels she doesn't even respect. She's successful on paper but clearly unhappy. She drinks to take the edge off. She wants her life to mean more but doesn't know how to get there. By the time things start to tilt sideways, we understand who she is.

Then the premise takes shape: Carol is one of twelve people in the entire world who hasn't been absorbed into a shared consciousness. Everyone else has either died or joined this "we" that now spans all of humanity. A quiet apocalypse happened, and we only realized it after the fact. We experience it all through Carol's eyes, and it's terrifying.

The way people "change" is haunting. Their movements, their expressions, the eerie persona that replaces their personality. There's a zombie-like quality to it that deepens the unease without leaning into genre tropes. Carol's friend and partner dies in the middle of all this. She does everything she can to save her, even carrying her back home afterward, but there's no time for grief. She's processing this bizarre new world, unable to grieve until she understands. She drinks more to cope.

Watching all of this made me wonder: is Carol actually better off remaining herself? She survived, but she's suddenly more alone than she's ever been. And here's the irony: she's fighting to maintain an individuality she didn't seem to love all that much to begin with. Her self-dismissive comments about her books, her dependence on alcohol. She wasn't proud of who she was even before everything fell apart. The show frames individuality as both a refuge and a burden, and it made me ask: would I want to stay "me" in that situation, or would being part of the "we" actually feel like relief?

Looking forward to watching the rest of the season. It is off to a strong start!

Weapons

2025-11-09T17:33:00.001-06:00

I went into Weapons unsure of what to expect. I'd heard it was intense, and I was worried it might be too scary for me. I generally don't enjoy horror, especially movies that rely on jump scares. Thankfully, Weapons turned out to be more psychological than frightening. There were a few tense moments, but nothing that crossed into the kind of horror I usually avoid.

Before I even started watching, I made a frustrating mistake. When I went to rent it on Amazon, a preview auto-played a short 20 second scene. I assumed it was from early in the movie, but it's actually a scene that comes much later. Weapons is all about mystery and slowly figuring things out, so knowing even that one piece ahead of time dulled the experience for me a bit.

hat impressed me most was how the film is structured. It jumps between different perspectives, and each one reveals a little more about what actually happened. You're slowly piecing together the truth alongside characters who are just as confused as you are. I found that approach really engaging, but I can see how it might frustrate someone expecting a straightforward, gory thrill-ride. This is more slow-burn mystery than adrenaline rush.

The whole thing has this grim fairy tale feeling to it. It's whimsical in flashes, but there's always something darker underneath. That fairy-tale quality makes the story feel timeless, like it could happen in any small town, in any era. And it gives the film this sense of dark morality… actions have consequences, innocence is fragile, and cruelty spreads in ways people can't control.

The violence is sparse, but when it comes, it's extreme. The movie holds back for long stretches, but when it finally goes there, it goes all the way. There's humor too… this weird dark comedy where disturbing imagery gets presented in such a grotesque way that you can't help but laugh, even though you feel a little uncomfortable doing it. Those tonal shifts keep the film from being relentlessly bleak, even as it gets pretty dark.

The ending really brings everything together. It's satisfying in a way, but not comfortable. Everything the film has been building finally gets laid out, and its final sequence is almost exhilarating to watch. There's this thrill for a second, but then the last moments hit you with this wave of sadness. This feeling that justice and healing aren't the same thing.

Overall, Weapons really surprised me. It's dark and clever and violent, but it also has these moments of weird humor and this melancholy grace that I wasn't expecting. It works as a mystery, but it's also kind of a modern fable about guilt and consequences and how punishment and redemption don't always line up the way we want them to. Even though I knew more going in than I should have, I still found it haunting and strangely moving. It's one of those films that leaves you sitting quietly when it ends, not sure if what you just watched was tragic or just... true.

Smoke on Apple TV+

2025-08-09T12:49:00.002-05:00

When I started watching Smoke on Apple TV+, I was drawn in immediately. The production values are high, the cast is impressive, and the early episodes carry a dark, deliberate tone that suggested something in the vein of True Detective. I expected a brooding, thoughtful drama.

But after the second episode, the series takes a dramatic tonal shift. The subject matter remains heavy—corruption, family trauma, and violence—but the presentation grows increasingly heightened. Scenes that initially felt weighty begin to register as exaggerated, and certain plot developments strain credibility.

Somewhere between the third and fifth episode, the series I thought I was watching had transformed into something else entirely. The performances remain strong, but the writing and narrative coherence falter, veering into territory that feels less refined and more erratic.

Still, I find myself watching each week. New episodes drop Thursday evenings, and I am often there as soon as they are available. My interest is now split between genuine curiosity about the main character’s fate and a fascination with how far the series might drift from its original tone.

Would I recommend Smoke? Probably not. Unless the conclusion delivers an unexpected and satisfying resolution—which I find unlikely—it does not fulfill the promise of its early episodes. Yet as an example of how a show can evolve, and how audience expectations shift along with it, Smoke remains an intriguing, sometimes frustrating, viewing experience.

Untamed on Netflix: All Scenery, No Substance

2025-07-27T17:18:00.002-05:00

Untamed isn’t terrible, but it isn’t very good either. It’s one of those shows that starts out with the promise of something layered and intriguing, then gradually deflates into a story that’s so pedestrian it’s hard to believe anyone thought it was enough.

It looks amazing—Yosemite National Park is the real star here—but that’s kind of the point. This feels like a show that exists because someone got permission to film in Yosemite, not because anyone had a great story to tell.

The Illusion of Depth

From the start, Untamed teases complexity. We’re introduced to characters with interesting setups and allusions to dark, complicated backstories. There’s trauma, loss, corruption, grief—plenty of raw material. But the show never capitalizes on that potential. It throws out ideas and then lets them sit there, undeveloped.

The emotional core is meant to center on the lead’s dead son, but it never resonates. Maybe I’ve just had it with father/son flashbacks (between this and Stick on Apple TV+), but it felt flat and uninspired. You could see what the show wanted me to feel—it just didn’t do the work to get me there.

Tired Tropes & Easy Escapes

Plot-wise, it leans heavily on cliché. You've seen this structure before: the brooding lead, the rookie sidekick, the mysterious death, the conveniently timed clue. It pulls in familiar elements from the wilderness thriller playbook and just rearranges them slightly.

Worse, the show relies on a few too many deus ex machina moments—those out-of-nowhere twists that exist purely to move the story forward. It undermines the sense of real investigation or consequence. The resolution felt especially unearned, as if the writers backed into it because they ran out of episodes.

Final Take

While I enjoyed parts of the journey, I wasn’t happy with the ending—and I wouldn’t recommend the show unless you’re mostly in it for the scenery.

Untamed looks great. Yosemite’s landscapes are incredible, and the cinematography makes the most of them. But that isn’t enough to make a show worthwhile. A setting can elevate a story, but it can’t replace one.

Verdict: Beautiful to look at. Easy to watch. Easy to forget.