#todd vanderwerff

[femignome]

I peaked all over again reading todd vanderweff’s “coming out” essay where he says watching women suffer on the handmaid’s tale is what made him realize he was actually a woman.

that and he has the audacity to name himself after the lesbian who was mutilated on the show.

[xfilesnews]

Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files is being released on October 16th. Find out how to get a signed bookplate from @abramsbooks, and check out our giveaway here! 

[heisenbergchronicles]

I Think You’re Interesting podcast: Better Call Saul's showrunner Peter Gould tells Todd VanDerWerff everything about the show’s amazing Season 4 finale. This is one of my favorite interviews from this season, as Todd asks thoughtful questions and Peter, who normally stays very close to script on his media talk track, goes off the cuff a little and gives some great quotes. I am particularly underwhelmed by what mainstream critics had to say about the show this year, so I’m grateful when I run into folks like Todd that have something astute to say and discuss about BCS. 

[reactingtosomething]

The 24 best TV shows of 2018 so far

The medium has had better years — but there are still lots of shows worth watching.

The Magicians, season 3 (Syfy)

The middle stretch of this season reeled off classic episodes, like the show was in a groove it was never going to leave. What’s more, those episodes are all so recognizable as episodes — from a magic-inflected hour of short stories to a musical — that it became hard not to get caught up in the inventiveness. And the series’s emotional core about sad 20-something magicians trying to bring back the thing that makes them sad (magic) remains rock solid.

How to watch it: The Magicians is available for digital purchase, or on Syfy’s streaming platforms. It will eventually be available on Netflix.

by Todd VanDerWerff

Click through above for his other 23 picks.

[themotivationjournals]

There’s nothing wrong with being happy. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something so much that it strips away all that irony and cynicism. And there’s nothing wrong with loving anything so much that it feels like it could pull your heart out of your chest and toss it on the floor. We build ourselves up to not do that, and then we build up the armor so thickly that we have trouble finding what’s underneath. We use that as an excuse to lash out at people who do feel stuff, who do like things (and I am, of course, mostly saying this about myself). It’s hard sometimes to remember that the world isn’t a place to glide through, so nothing can touch you. It’s a place to be experienced.

Todd VanDerWerff

[pablolf]

But what made Twin Peaks so vital was its insistence that, no matter what, these questions of evil and suffering and darkness didn’t suddenly arise in the past few months. If you were to engage with the world and humanity’s place within it, you’d see that those questions were always there. Indeed, much of the story of the season — if you can call such a loose, free-floating experience a “story” — involved characters trying to put one thing right and restore some sort of balance, only to find balance not forthcoming. You can’t simply do away with the murder of Laura Palmer (as Agent Dale Cooper attempted in the two-hour finale) and expect that you’ll invent a world without horrors. The atomic bomb — another symbol of darkness scattered throughout the season — can’t be un-exploded. You can’t hope to restore the world to a perfect state by performing some sort of cosmic fix. When Cooper leaves behind his reality in the finale and seemingly enters ours (the woman who owns the house that is “Laura Palmer’s house” on screen appears in the last few moments of the finale as the woman who occupies said house), it’s in a desperate attempt to “fix” something. But reality won’t be fixed, because there’s always something rotten at its core. To make it better isn’t to heal anything but, rather, to accept that cycles of trauma exist and will continue to do so for as long as humans do. Putting things right has to begin, necessarily, with ourselves and with accepting our role in these cycles — and the ways that we can help end them by making our own lives better and kinder.

Twin Peaks was the only TV show that made sense this summer

[omeletsforpepper]

9 winners and 10 losers from Game of Thrones’ season 7 finale

The show closes out a solid but listless stretch of episodes with its worst season finale.

Winner: Lena Headey, for being the best actor on the show

Every year, Lena Headey gets nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and every year, somebody else wins and she applauds politely. And yet she deserves so much more recognition for how beautifully she plays a tough, tough part. There have been a lot of good to great performances on Game of Thrones, but Headey gives the only all-timer out of the bunch.

Loser: Sam, for apparently only listening to Gilly offscreen

It could have been fun to see the moment of realization dawn over Sam’s head as he and Gilly rode toward Winterfell. You can just imagine him saying, “Wait, who got married?” and Gilly exasperatedly repeating what she told him. Instead, Hannah Murray gets no lines, and Sam gets to sit around and occasionally prompt Bran to deliver more exposition. Good times.

Winner: Ramin Djawadi, for continuing to be one of the very best things this show has going for it

Ramin Djawadi’s use of music has long been a key part of Game of Thrones’ success. I can’t think of a musical moment that has struck the wrong note, or seemed tonally jarring. He’s done everything from write the Westeros equivalent of pop songs to offer stirring music for battles, and he’s proved just about perfect at handling all of it.

That applies even more to “The Dragon and the Wolf,” which features plenty of moments where Djawadi’s score is the main thing holding the scenes together. He pushes the otherwise shrug-worthy scenes of Bran gazing upon the wedding of Lyanna and Rhaegar into the territory of tragedy, and his muted version of the theme song that plays as Jaime heads north, the first snows falling over King’s Landing, is starkly beautiful.

He doesn’t hit the same heights as he did in the season six finale (which opened with that nearly wordless montage of Cersei destroying her enemies, scored largely to one of his best pieces of music), but “Dragon” was some of his best work all season long nonetheless.

by Todd VanDerWerff

Click through above for much more.

[reactingtosomething]

The Expanse is an excellent sci-fi space opera. But it’s fundamentally a detective show.

The cases these detectives solve are the mysteries of the universe.

The Expanse is the rare series in which the most dramatic action of an action-packed season finale involves shutting down a superweapon, not seeing what happens when it goes off. It’s ostensibly a story about humanity chasing its better angels all the way to far-off galaxies, but it’s also about how a mysterious alien species is probably playing us for chumps. I love it.

[...]

The Expanse suggests that change is possible, for an individual, for a planet, for a species. But you have to really want to change, and all it takes to gum that up is one person who brings up the horrors of the past and forces you to fixate on them all over again. Maybe even with good reason! There are so many terrible things badly buried in our history books. And 200 years in the future, there will only be more.

by Todd VanDerWerff

Click through above for the rest.