The Machiavellian Pig

Vafer Porcus: Overthinking Most Forms Of Media Since 9am

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 14: The Mourning After

Episode 14 of the Walking Dead, and we get to see all sorts of people trying to deal with their many and varied sorts of problems - some far, far more successfully than others. 

Full review and spoilers below. 

After last week's excellent but very focused arc, it was a little comforting to find ourselves back in one of the Walking Dead episodes with multiple ongoing plotlines - three sets of characters all working their way through things, and one fun adventure in the hopes of making new friends. 

We'll start with the fun adventure, because it was genuinely pretty fun. The time has come for Eugene to go and meet Stephanie, his Friend with a Radio and, to his credit, he doesn't actually just vanish off by himself. Breaking some of the rules laid down by Stephanie, he finally tells the few survivors of Hilltop what he's been doing, after the gentlest of nudges from Rosita. He doesn't make excuses for not telling them earlier, and he doesn't waste a lot of time getting defensive when they're angry - he just wants to be able to believe in people again. 

It's a nice line of thought, especially given how difficult the communities have found things since the Saviour War, and it's especially nice that Ezekiel, who literally built an entire kingdom on little more than hope and a good voice for Shakespeare, backs Eugene up in his quest for hope - both when talking to the other survivors and by volunteering to go along on the adventure. Yumiko also goes along, for reasons that are a little murkier, but probably have something to do with vague optimism and the need to give Magna a little space after, well, everything. 

This most unlikely of trios sets off - but not before we get a very sweet scene between Ezekiel and Jerry, who say goodbye just in case. Adorably, Jerry's concerns about Ezekiel going on the adventure aren't because Ezekiel's sick, but simply because Jerry's going to miss him. It's entirely fitting that Ezekiel passes the legacy of the Kingdom to Jerry, who always worked so hard for a king and an ideal he believed so much in. I would very, very much like to see more of Jerry in the future, please and thank you. 

On their merry adventure, we see two walkers trapped in a cage (deeply concerning), Ezekiel struggle to take out two other walkers (also deeply concerning) and then a horse having to be put down because it's been bitten (deeply unsetting). Interestingly, I don't think Ezekiel has told Yumiko and Eugene about his illness - he makes one attempt to get Yumiko to agree to leave him behind if he should "fall", but it was too vague to tell if Yumiko knew why Ezekiel was suddenly so concerned with slowing the group down. 

Finally, one horse short, the group arrives at the edge of the city. And there they find some super messed up tableaus of "normal" life, made with actual walkers in the place of all the people - and these are still active walkers, chained in place but still biting. What the heck. 

Ezekiel finds the whole thing pretty funny - although he stops laughing pretty quickly when a young woman in a bright pink jacket with a machine gun, appears out of nowhere and starts yelling greetings. 

I cannot wait to see what that's all about next week. 

Meanwhile, we get some answers to the whole "what the heck is Negan up to?" question that has been tormenting us for a while now. As the fandom predicted, it was Carol who let Negan out of his cell with orders to find Alpha and take her head. In exchange, he would get a hero's welcome back in Alexandria. Negan's only concern with such a plan, interestingly enough, was the potential for the whole thing to blow up in Alexandria's face if he screwed up, nevermind that Negan himself would almost certainly be dead in such a situation. 

Back in the present day, Carol finally gets to put the head of her enemy on a spike and then, much to Negan's displeasure, swans off by herself to do a little processing. Carol is, I think it's safe to say, a pretty darned complicated character at the best of times, although I would dearly like it if the writers could stop killing children to make her character suffer. We've seen Carol mourning before, and we've seen Carol pull away from the group in times of stress. At the end of season 6, she exiled herself from Alexandria, remember, when she could no longer accept what she herself was willing to do for the people she cared about. 

So it's not all that surprising that her plan post-Alpha is to get the heck out of dodge. This time, the plan is to get a boat and head out on the water again - but that plan is pretty neatly derailed by the guilt-induced hallucination of Alpha which invites herself along for the ride. 

Samantha Morton is a fantastic actress, and it's really nice that we got some more scenes with her - the version of Alpha that apparently lives in Carol's head is gloriously bitchy and spiteful, calling Carol out for lying to herself ("I want to be alone." / "That's not it.") and dredging up all the old wounds, from Ed's low opinion of his wife to all the children Carol's lost along the way. 

The title of the episode always made it very clear that this episode was going to be about Carol - the phrase "look at the flowers" being so tightly tied up with maybe one of the worst days of Carol's life - and I'm glad that, in the end, Carol made the decision that she didn't want to die, and that she didn't want to be alone. She chooses, at the end, to return to Alexandria. No one asks her to, no one makes her, and I hope that the fact that she made that decision entirely by herself is a sign that she's finding her way through what has happened to her and what she's done to others. 

Finally, we get to see Negan and Daryl interacting properly for the first time in, I think, years. Negan, realising that Carol is not going to walk him back through the gates of Alexandria like a conquering hero, heads back to the hut where he stashed Lydia - only to find a really pissed-off Daryl waiting for him instead. Crossbow to the face, it never gets old. 

Negan's attempts to explain himself go maybe a little worse than he was hoping - with the only other conspirator AWOL, he does look incredibly guilty and he more of less freely admits that. His attempts to prove what he's done are poor - Alpha's mask proves nothing, really, and even taking Daryl to visit the spike when Carol left Alpha's head is unfortunately ruined by the fact that Beta has already taken the head - more on that later. 

Unfortunately, while at the spikes, they are sadly surrounded by a handful of the Whisperers, who recognise Negan as their new Alpha. Daryl ends up being the one tied up, on his knees and surrounded by enemies, and there's a brief moment when Negan really leans into the whole "maybe I will be the new Alpha" thing, largely because he's a huge Drama King who has really had to behave himself for way too long. 

The act only fools the Whisperers, who hand over the precious Alpha's shotgun to Negan and then are properly quite bitterly disappointed when he shoots one of them in the face rather than Daryl. The remaining two Whisperers are quickly dispatched and Daryl, for one, maybe feels a little bit better about the whole "where does Negan really stand" thing. 

The two settle down to wait for Carol to return; while waiting, Negan admits to Daryl that he did like being part of the Whisperers, just for a moment - after so many years in a cell, it was just nice to feel like he mattered and had power again. But it was just for a moment, and he doesn't seem to regret what he's done to the Whisperers at all, because even he can see that Alpha had to be stopped, no matter how much he might have been able to enjoy being her right-hand man. 

The morality of Negan is more twisted that a box full of snakes, but he does seem to have one line that he's not willing to cross - you don't kill kids. It's an interesting line to have drawn for himself, or more accurately, an interesting place for Negan to act like everyone knows that that's where his line is, considering that the children killed by Alpha were older than Carl was when Negan nearly beat him to death at the end of Season 7, but it is at least a line that makes sense for the character when you think about it. 

Daryl finally decides to head back to Alexandria - and presumably, he lets Negan tag along too. 

Finally, we have Beta, who is having maybe the worst day of his life. Alpha and Beta were always, always a match made it hell - we've known that since the fantastic flashbacks to their meeting from way back in episode 2. And, the longer this episode went on, the more disappointed I was that nobody has ever openly worried about what Beta would do without Alpha to keep him under control, because I've been worrying about that for the entire season. 

As it turns out, what Beta does without Alpha to keep him in line is, firstly, feed one of his own men to Alpha's reanimated head and, secondly, set himself up in an abandoned tavern to, I don't know, reforge his own destiny by listening to what the newly reanimated head of Alpha has to say to him. 

He is insane. He is absolutely insane. 

But, before he was insane, he was apparently a country music star, which I have to admit I did not see coming. Looking at his own on a poster is too much for Beta to handle, but he does listen to some of his own music - specifically, recordings of his old shows, which I was sort of expecting him to burn on the grounds that they 'proved' that he hadn't always been Beta. 

(Sidenote, it turns out that Ryan Hurst has a rather lovely singing voice)

It would probably have been better if he had burnt them, to be honest, given that instead he uses the music to lure in as many of the undead as possible to start reforming a brand new horde. I am certain that I am not going to like what he does with all those walkers.

Finally, he takes a little inspiration from an insane note he finds ("These 2 eyes see 1 truth", which in either a terrifying post-apocalyptic log, or someone's attempts at new lyrics) and finally puts down Alpha with one clean stab to the brain. Normally, I would assume that this was a good sign - putting down a loved one is normally a good thing in the world of the Walking Dead, and I was genuinely a little bit worried that Beta was going to carry around the head of Alpha in a bag for the rest of the war, using it as some sort of messed up talisman and/or Magic8 ball. 

Unfortunately, Beta is clearly not moving on from anything. Instead, he skins Alpha's skull and uses half of it to repair his own mask. 

I am definitely not going to like whatever this man does next. I just know it. 

Previous season 10 reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 13: Roads Not Taken

Episode 13 of The Walking Dead, and it’s the end of an era. Safe travels, Michonne; hopefully we’ll see you again someday. 

Full review and extensive spoilers below. 

Throughout this episode, the last for Danai Gurira, we follow Michonne’s attempts to help out the mysterious Virgil in exchange for the weapons which are absolutely definitely somewhere on his island, promise. 

Really, were any of us surprised when the weapons turned out to be a lie? Virgil didn’t have anything to trade, but he was perfectly willing to take advantage of Michonne’s well-honed survival techniques to clear out the walkers from his island and, at long last, put his family to rest. 

It’s a shame that we only get to see the shattered remains of this community - it was isolated from hordes of walkers, growing their own food and with their own solar power set-up, and and it may have been a pretty decent place to try and ride out the apocalypse, once upon a time. The early sign that things were not quite so utopian as all that, however, comes in the form of a map of the island, with clearly defined ‘Groups’ labelled on it. Whoever was living here, they were not a united community. 

The overrun building containing a whole mess of walkers and, allegedly, Virgil’s family, was suitably creepy. The fact that Michonne could clear it single-handed and with a handicap in the form of someone who - a decade into the end of the world - still hasn’t learnt how to stay quiet or kill walkers, speaks volumes as to her skills - and also to the difficulty in maintaining an air of danger in a world where most people are pretty well-equipped to take care of themselves. It’s been a long time since any of our survivors ran and hid from a handful of the dead. 

The overrun building also has a deeply creepy room, in which a large number of survivors chose to hang themselves rather than face the undead. Canonically, that’s where Virgil’s family ended up. And while I do understand “the better to die than be killed” mindset, especially in a world where far too many people die by being eaten alive by the undead, it’s another sign that something went terribly, terribly wrong here - why couldn’t the people escape from the building? Why didn’t the rest of the community come to get them? 

The sense of niggling unease seems to affect Michonne as much as it affected me - when told to wait until morning to search the rest of the island for important supplies, she instead goes for a wander, and finds something rather surprising. 

I have to admit, while I fully expected Virgil to be lying about the weapons, I was not expecting him to be a former scientist who had trapped some of his former colleagues in some sort of cell, or for him to then lock Michonne in a cell when she discovered his dark and terrible secret. 

Fortunately, the three helpful co-workers (Jeremiah, Celeste, and Lucy) fill in some of the blanks in Virgil’s story. The island was, instead, once a thriving community - one which even took people in. But when a fight broke out over dwindling resources, Virgil’s solution was to seal the entire group in and wait for the dust to settle. 

To make such a choice seems monstrous. To make it without knowing where your family is seems somehow even worse. 

Virgil helpfully continues to lean into his new Bond Villain persona by drugging the holy heck out of Michonne, forcing her to go on some sort of messed-up vision quest to help her "see the truth." Unfortunately, while Virgil's drug fuelled experiences seem to be of the positive sort, Michonne's take her on a much darker journey. 

Specifically, it takes her down the road-not-taken, which is such a weakness of mine. The choice of defining moment for Michonne is a beautiful one - for Michonne, the single moment that changed her entire life for the better was the moment she chose to save Andrea, way back at the very end of Season 2, the first time we as an audience ever saw her. The decision to save Andrea brought Michonne back into the land of the living, which then eventually led her to Rick's group and to the creation of her own new family with the Grimeses. 

Without that decision to save Andrea, Michonne stays alone in that dark place that used to be her existence; a later attempt to rejoin civilisation goes badly when Michonne becomes the person with the orange backpack that Rick refused to help - although as Andrew Lincoln has left the show by this point, it's actually Daryl that gets the car moving again before Michonne can catch them up. Finally, AU!Michonne runs into the Saviours, and has a decent attempt at decapitating Negan before agreeing to join this new outfit. She ends up at the Satellite Outpost, and kills Glenn and Heath when they hesitate over killing sleeping Saviours. She raises the alarm against the Alexandrians, and takes her revenge for her murdered friends at the line-up, when Negan hands Lucille to his "right-hand woman". Finally, she's shot and killed during the war by Daryl and Rick. 

The whole sequence is beautifully put together, reusing old footage from previous episodes and slicing it together with new footage of Michonne the Saviour - it was deeply, deeply weird to see Rick back on the screen, even if only for a moment, and opens up all sorts of questions about what happened to Rick's group in that alternate timeline - their presence in the Saviour War would imply that they still lost the prison, so maybe the Governor was still a problem even when the group wasn't harbouring Michonne. Glenn's death at the Satellite Outpost would change Maggie's storyline significantly, and raises the question of if there was a second victim at the lineup. 

Ultimately, the whole sequence just reinforces the idea that the single biggest factor in this new world is the people who end up around you - Judith told Mary/Gamma that she would have been a better person if she'd found a better leader than Alpha to follow, and obviously the reverse is true - Michonne, or indeed any of our heroes, would have been far, far worse if they'd fallen in with different crowds. 

When the drugs wear off, leaving Michonne back in the actual hell of her cell rather than the metaphorical hell of the road-not-taken, Michonne understandable decides that she's had enough of all of this and promptly stabs Virgil with some cutlery and escapes. She released the trapped colleagues, hunts down Virgil on the Island (but not before he manages to torch the only boat in a moment of pure idiotic spite), and then convinces Virgil's newly-freed victims not to kill him for what he did to them. Amazingly, they listen. 

And then the episode starts to take a real turn. 

While gathering her equipment back up, Michonne finds a very, very familiar set of boots - the very worn cowboy boots that saw Rick Grimes through almost 9 seasons of The Walking Dead. Of course, one pair of boots does not really a mystery make - but an old phone, with a portrait of Michonne and Judith on the front with the name Rick Grimes and "Believe a little bit longer" in Japanese, that's definitely a mystery. A mystery which, for the record, Virgil denies having anything to do with - he never knew the people who were once on the boat where the boots and the phone were stored, the boat just washed up after a storm. 

But Virgil agrees to get the boat working again, and the groups sets off for the mainland again - leaving Virgil behind on the Island with his family, at his own request. 

And then we come to Michonne's big decision. Faced with proof that Rick didn't die on the bridge, she has a terrible choice to make - staying with her children or abandoning Rick to whatever bad situation he's found himself in. 

Fortunately, it is not a decision that she has to make alone. She finally gets Judith back on the radio, telling her daughter what she has found, and it's ultimately Judith who tells her to go and find Rick. They're in perfect agreement that Rick would not have stayed away for so long voluntarily - someone or something must be keeping him away, and so he must need help. What if he's trying to get home, Judith asks, but no one will help him? 

It's the permission that Michonne needs - she heads off to find Rick, taking a few Walker buddies along for protection. 

And in the final scene of the episode, and presumably our last sighting of Michonne for quite some time, we get to see her abandoning her dead companions once again in order to help the living - to help two humans, in danger of being left behind by their group because they can't move quickly enough - and what a group it is, a full-on exodus of humans moving in columns and herding what looks like horses or cows along with them. Post-apocalyptic cowboys, perhaps? 

Ever since Danai Gurira's departure from the show was announced, I was curious about how they would manage it without killing her off - for Michonne to leave the community without her children seemed unrealistic at the beginning of the season, and taking the remaining Grimes children out of the show would change the world of the Walking Dead in a way which I wasn't entirely sure would work, especially given my lingering disappointment with the decision to kill of Carl and rob us of the chance to see how people grow and develop in this bold new world. But the decision to have Michonne follow Rick, with her daughter's blessing, was a good balance, and opens the door very firmly for Michonne to make an appearance in those Rick Grimes films we've been promised. 

Lord knows I would dearly like to see Michonne on the big screen as well, when that time finally comes. 

Previous Season 10 reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 12: Hilltop Has Fallen

Episode 12 of the Walking Dead, and farewell, Hilltop, you were too beautiful for this world. 

Full review and spoilers below. 

In a genuinely fun move, the Battle for Hilltop takes up very little of this week's episode - we really just see enough of it to make the conclusion (the destruction of Hilltop) feel suitably inevitable, opening up the rest of the episode for more decent character beats and little hints of further disasters yet to come. The lose of Hilltop is, obviously, going to be a problem moving forwards - as pointed out last week, Hilltop had the only decent blacksmith set-up they'd been able to find. Its destruction is going to put a real hitch in the production of armour, knives, spears and those sweet spiked shields moving forwards. 

Hilltop, it must be said, put up a hell of fight, even when the Whisperers managed to set so much of it all on fire. Earl's homemade catapults were lovely, as was the attempt to jam the broken gates with piles of the dead - had the horde been less of a horde, it might even have worked. But the walls couldn't hold, and once there was more than one point of entry, Hilltop was lost. We don't see the moment when that decision was made, we don't see who made the call to abandon the site and run, but it must have been made at some point. 

We do get to see Ezekiel trying to evacuate the children, as he'd planned with Daryl - Judith pauses to finish off some walkers following the little trail of children and kills a Whisperer as well, not realising the difference until its too late. As the Whisperer was lunging at a child, I'm not going to mourn their death, but Judith's another story. She's very little to have taken a human life, even for all of her training, and I do hope that it doesn't knock too much of her optimism out of her. 

And, in the second most important story beat in the battle, Yumiko spots Magna in the middle of the horde - not dead, just hiding. Hey, what better way to get out of a horde than to cover yourself in guts and go with the flow? We've seen this trick before, but never in the midst of such a large horde or for so long. 

Our final look at the battle comes courtesy of Carol's archery post - and from her perspective, everything is on fire and overrun with the dead. 

We cut to daylight, the fires put out, and the Whisperers picking through the battlefield to find more "Guardians" to replenish their horde - even Alpha admits that Hilltop did its fair share of damage before going down. Negan's still skulking around in his new mask, putting a Hilltop fighter out of their misery with a blow to the heart rather than a blade to the heart - a mistake which is noted by Alpha, who's still looking for Lydia. She dispatches Beta (or "Frowny McTwoKnives", as Negan dubs him) to find the errant heir, and send Negan off to collect more walkers for the horde. 

Negan, out of sight of Alpha, is still pretty against the Whisperer way of doing things and decides to wipe out a few more walkers rather than recruit them. His little smash-a-thon is interrupted by a brief sighting of Lydia, and then the most poorly-timed run-in with Aaron imaginable, who takes one look at Negan's new accessory and jumps to some rather understandable conclusions. Their dust-up is postponed by the walkers that Negan leaves Aaron to deal with, but I imagine that that conflict is going to be resolved at some point in the future. I certainly hope so. With Aaron surrounded and protecting a wounded colleague, Negan catches up to Lydia and snatches her. 

Meanwhile, Kelly made it out of Hilltop with Alden, little baby Adam and Auntie Mary. Alden is still being a little bit of a bastard, but he does eventually allow Mary to hold Adam and help to calm the poor little guy down. He extends an olive branch by asking about Adam's mother, Mary's sister - Frances. The hint of a reconciliation is interrupted by more walkers, and Mary volunteers herself to lead the undead away from her nephew and his guardians, with the customary "yell at the walkers until they follow" move. 

In a scene which was actually pretty darn heartbreaking, she kills all the walkers and has a rare moment of victory, before Beta pops up behind her and stabs her twice, fully intending to wait for the woman to turn and then add her back into the horde. If you won't walk with the Whisperers in life, you'll have to in death instead. She claws part of his mask off before succumbing, revealing Beta's actual face for the first time in the series. 

This is a problem for Beta, it would seem, as he kills the first Whisperer to comment on his face - a man who seemed to recognise Beta in some way. (Somewhere in my brain is the idea that Beta was a celebrity pre-Apocalypse in the comics, so maybe they're going the same way here?) Well, it's one fewer Whisperers for us to have to worry about, and then one fewer walkers as well, when Alden mercy-kills the newly-turned Mary with his bow. 

It's a real shame he didn't take a shot at Beta instead, but beggers can't be choosers, I suppose. 

We skip groups again to Carol, Eugene, Yumiko and the newly recovered Magna, who explains to Yumiko how she escaped the cave - and lost track of Connie along the way. Yumiko turns her rage and frustration on Carol, punching her in the face, despite Magna not really seeming to hate Carol at all. Yumiko and Magna, who left their relationship on pretty shaky ground before the whole cave expedition, finally decide to draw a neat, surprisingly mature line under the relationship, possibly acknowledging on some level that they're not really good for each other anymore. 

Eugene has a little wobble at the lose of all his radio equipment and at the possibility of missing his date with Stephanie; Carol pushes him to make the date, which is all the encouragement Eugene needs to set off on his own to (hopefully) make some new friends. Lord knows they could use some more nice people. Carol, left alone with her thoughts, finds Lydia's abandoned staff. 

Our third group of survivors (Daryl, Rosita, Jerry and his wife Nabila, and assorted Hilltop civilians) arrives at the agreed rendezvous - when Ezekiel was supposed to bring the kids. But there's no Ezekiel and no kids, just a walker with fresh red blood all over its mouth. It's too much for Nabila, who desperately wants her kids back in her arms, and Jerry and Daryl head off to find their missing children. 

We're not kept in suspense for too long, though, as we cut immediately to Earl and all the kids, safely hidden away somewhere with some supplies. Earl, even for a man of his age who's just fought a huge battle and then saved a host of little lives, looks awful - and no wonder, as he's bitten. It's on his arm - a shame, as in any other circumstance he might have had a chance to amputate and save his life that way. Instead, all he can do is go into another room and prepare to end his own life before he can become a danger to any of the kids. 

Judith, who is having to be far, far too mature this week, puts the pieces together and offers to stay with Earl so he won't be alone. He sends her back to the kids, saying that he's not alone - his wife and son are right with him. And then he nails a spike through a convenient table and slams his own head down, trying to destroy the brain before he can hurt anyone else. It was maybe the best he could do - but sadly it's apparently harder than Earl though to hit yourself in the brain, because he's up and growling, once again leaving little Judith to do all the heavy lifting.  

Daryl and Jerry find Ezekiel alive and unharmed, trapped under part of Hilltop's walls - returning so soon was a bit of a risk, but they don't even mention the Whisperers, so I assume Alpha's already moved on with her herd. They track the kids to their little shelter, finding all of them unharmed, and with little Judith sitting sadly by Earl's body, his blood still on her sword. She desperately needs a hug, and thankfully Daryl provides one. 

Finally, we have Negan telling Alpha that he's found Lydia. Alpha's view of her daughter has shifted a little - the last they met, Alpha tried to get Lydia to kill her and take her place as Alpha. With Lydia's refusal, Alpha's shifted to demanding her daughter's death instead, and she remains fixed on that idea even as Negan tries to gently nudge her away from such a plan. He opens up about Lucille, his wife from before, and how her death did really kill him as well - and then basically tells Alpha that she's not dead, she's lying about being emotionless and (reading between the lines a little) would she please just stop seeking her daughter's death? 

Alpha is unconvinced, so Negan leads her to an empty house and then slits her throat. Then he decapitates her and takes the head to Carol, who's entirely unsurprised and, I would assume, definitely the person who released Negan from his cell back in Alexandria. 

The Queen is dead. But what the hell is Beta going to do when he realises what's happened? 

Previous Season 10 reviews available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 11: Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Hilltop

Episode 11 of The Walking Dead, and we get to see characters! Talking to each other! Being good at communicating and also fighting! (Look, one day I’ll be over this development, but it is not this day.) 

More specifically, we get to see what happens when a horde shambles into town, Eugene definitely makes a new friends, and there’s so many heartwarming character moments that I am genuinely terrified about who’s going to die next week. 

Full review and spoilers below. 

The episode opens with the Whisperers getting ready for some sort of hijinks - Beta angrily stabs a tree until sap starts coming out, and Alpha gets Negan to cane her. The indulgence in physical chastisement isn’t particularly new or surprising for the Whisperers - what is interesting is the look on Negan’s face when he actually strikes Alpha. 

Now, this is the man who, ten years or so earlier, held red-hot irons to people’s faces and beat randomly-selected victims to an actual pulp in front of their nearest and dearest. He is not a man who you would expect to be uncomfortable with violence, hence his most interesting discomfort. 

Maybe it’s just because he can’t see the point of this violence - his violence was always public, a spectacle designed to act as education and deterrent for all involved, so a private caning session might be out of character. Maybe it’s because he’s just not used to any sort of violence anymore, after so many years farming and helping Judith with maths homework. 

But, regardless of his hesitation (the first real hesitation, I would argue, we’ve seen from him since he joined the Whisperers), he beats Alpha, is beaten in return, and is rewarded with his very own Whisperer mask, standing by Alpha’s side as she leads her army of the undead out to cause some trouble. 

Interestingly, Negan also tries to get Alpha to tone down her plans for Hilltop and Alexandria - to break the communities and make them surrender rather than just massacring all of them. Again, is this because of a genuine desire to save lives or just because he’d rather see his captors humiliated than killed? I’d really like it to be the former, but we all know that I don’t always get what I want from this show. 

The army of undead shambling towards Hilltop is, thankfully, spotted in time by Daryl and Lydia, who have been out trying to find a way back to Connie and Magna - Kelly’s remaining surprisingly level-headed in the face of her sister’s ongoing disappearance, but does have a moment of anger when Yumiko more or less admits that she’s not expecting to see either of the women alive again. 

But that concern, and those of Earl (who’s been raising Adam, the little Whisperer baby, alone since his wife’s murder at the hands of Alpha, and who doesn’t want Mary-the-Former-Whisperer anywhere near his little ward), are all pushed aside in favour of deciding whether to stay and fight, or run and hide. 

The compromise - to evacuate the kids at least - is a delightfully smart and reasonable one, and the sight of little RJ climbing into a wagon with his sister’s hat and Uncle Daryl’s vest on his tiny shoulders was flat-out adorable. Unfortunately, RJ doesn’t get his fun holiday to the safety of Oceanside because the roads are all blocked in a move entirely reminiscent of Negan’s redirecting of the gang way back at the end of Season 6 - as Daryl immediately puts together. 

With the ways out blocked, and no way to get anyone else in place in time to make a difference, Hilltop has to stand and fight - no question about it. 

Meanwhile, in between the fears for the future, Eugene is continuing his long-distance flirtation with the mysterious Stephanie via radio-links. It’s adorable, genuinely adorable, and it was admittedly working really well to quieten down my concerns over the whole “don’t tell anyone about these conversations” thing - although the fact that Stephanie then asks Eugene to meet her somewhere without telling anyone about that either immediately set off all my Teacher-Safeguarding-CyberSafety alarms. 

Their interactions are temporarily derailed by Rosita finding the unattended radio and trying to speak to Stephanie - in direct contravention of the “no one else can know” rule. Stephanie freaks out and stops responding, while Eugene snaps at Rosita to, essentially, mind her own business. 

Eugene later opens up a little bit more to Rosita, telling her the bare bones and voicing some of his concerns about the potential of such a relationship. Rosita, for obvious reasons, can’t really comment on the intentions of a voice on the other end of radio, but she does help Eugene figure out that, actually, he is pretty serious about Stephanie - certainly serious enough to knock his lingering attraction to Rosita squarely on its ass, which is a bit of relief for everyone involved, I’d imagine.

He then gets Stephanie to pick up the radio again by singing to her - a move which was way sweeter than I imagined, even as it played over the sights of Hilltop preparing for the kind of noble last stand that you normally see in old black-and-white war films. It works! The two set a date and a location for a face-to-face meeting - here’s hoping it’s a date that Eugene doesn’t miss due to unexpected death. 

In their maybe-final-afternoon, Carol and Ezekiel “reconnect” (*coughcough*) after Ezekiel admits that his health isn’t actually all that great, and Carol and Lydia had a weird little moment, the daughter of a monster talking openly with the mother who lost a son to that very same monster - even the admission that Carol will kill Alpha, not even to save others but just because it will feel good, isn’t enough to make Lydia hate someone who already seems to hate themselves so much.  

Alden, former boyfriend of Enid and surrogate son to Earl, is in a far less accepting mood, and snaps at Mary when she comes to see Adam - despite the genetic factor, Alden rejects her as any relation of Adam, pointing out that she and the Whisperers abandoned Adam. It’s an argument which isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon, and I do hope that they'll revisit the issue with whoever survives the horde. 

Daryl and Ezekiel speak for the first time since maybe the first episode of the season - the two have never really been at odds, expect for the moments post-Henry’s death in which Ezekiel thought Daryl’s presence was going to end his marriage, and it was nice to see them speak respectfully to one another. Daryl’s quiet sympathy over the cancer is perfectly in character and his request - that Ezekiel saves Judith and RJ should Daryl fall in the battle to come - is perhaps the single greatest sign of respect that Daryl could possibly give to the King without a Kingdom. 

Speaking of Judith, the conversation between her and Daryl was all sort of adorable, especially her firm insistence that she’s not scared, really she’s not, but that if she was just a little scared, it would be of losing her family. In a moment which did really almost make me cry, she found some time and some paint to replace the broken wing on Daryl’s vest. 

With all the players feeling surprisingly sorted, the gang forms up for their defence of Hilltop. The plan isn’t bad, per se, especially given their limited numbers of fighters: as many fences as they could cobble together (including a really good, if sadly shortly-lived, electric fence courtesy of Eugene and his stash of car batteries) and then some really long weapons to stab walkers with.

Of course, very few battle-plans survive contact with the enemy, and the fences give way under the weight of the approaching horde.

And that’s when the Whisperers reveal their trump card - exploding bundles of sap, which is way, way more flammable than I ever realised. A few well-placed flame arrows later, and the Hilltop defenders are trapped between an army of walkers and a wall of fire. 

My final note for this episode is simply “How dare you?”, which pretty much sums up that cliffhanger, if you ask me. I swear to God, next week’s episode had better also be at Hilltop or else I’m going to throw things. 

Previous Walking Dead reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 10: Making Friends and Influencing People

Episode 10 of the Walking Dead and, wow, why do the bad guys always get to have the good plans in this world? 

As always, full review and spoilers below. 

We start off with Beta heading off to find Gamma, as the flashback helpfully reminded us of, but he starts off in a mysterious abandoned RV with two Whisperers guarding the entrance to some very shadowy underground tunnels. As far as camouflage goes, it’s a solid cover up - even someone scavenging for supplies would be unlikely to rip up a chair to check under the carpet. 

Meanwhile, Rosita's back at Alexandria and struggling to keep her shit together, haunted by nightmares of Whisperers standing over her daughter's crib. Which, you know, fair enough, given what nearly happened to poor little Coco before the mid-season hiatus. Her understandable trauma is temporarily put on hold when Gamma appears at the gates to Alexandria with information about the missing group, and then right back to the forefront when she knocks Gamma clear out after the Whisperer agrees to tell them the location of the cave with the horde. 

Gamma comes to facedown in the bloodstain left in Alexandria's cell after Gabriel's execution of Dante. Gabriel is very much back to being Father Gabriel this week, in a very Battle Pope kind of way; the fact that his pastoral experiences and all that time in the confessional would have made him a pretty good judge of character is used to easily break Gamma, who admits openly that she killed her sister for Alpha, and not even because Alpha told her to do so. We get a pretty hardcore boast from Gabriel in this scene - "I've spoken to God and He's told me to hang you" would have sounded ridiculous coming from the terrified pastor we met way back in Season 4, but I completely buy it from this updated version, who later on advises his people to take "fingers and teeth" from any Whisperers they catch until they have all the information they need. 

Yeah, so that last line was probably a step too far, and I was deeply pleased when Rosita calls him out for such an extreme comment; the scenes between Gabriel and Rosita this week were actually really good, I thought, especially as these are two characters than have not really had anything resembling character development for a while now. They are both, in their own ways, deeply broken by recent events and both recognise that trauma in each other while struggling to process their own. It's sweet, and a little dysfunctional, and actually shows the survivors looking out for each other and communicating clearly, which we all know is what I really want from this show. 

While the Alexandrians prepare to help their missing friends, we get a very sweet scene of Judith and Gamma talking - but seriously, is Judith really so starved for friends that she keeps feeling the need to befriend people who her family have imprisoned in their basement? Gamma tells Judith her real name (Mary) but admits that she can't really remember what she was like before she was a Whisperer. She was normal, allegedly, but spent the first part of the apocalypse making so many bad decisions with her sister that she was glad to find a leader like Alpha who could make their decisions for them. 

Judith's counter-point - that Mary and her sister found the wrong person first - is a delightfully simple one from the little Grimes. Her belief that Gamma/Mary would have been better off if she'd met Rick or Michonne first instead is probably true enough, but it shows a little of the sweet innocence and trust in parents that really no one was expecting to survive the end of the world. (I mean, it does also strongly imply that no one's ever told Judith about the Ricktatorship, but she's still little enough to be entitled to her optimism). Their conversation is cut short when Alexandria goes into lockdown in preparation for most of their fighters heading out to save the group trapped in the cave. 

The rescue plan is temporarily put on hold when some of the outer scouts warn Alexandria of an incoming herd - Gabriel takes most of the fighters to scatter the herd before it can hit Alexandria, but leaves Rosita behind to watch the settlement. In a genuinely delightful move, Rosita doesn't take offence at Gabriel's decision and instead admits that she shouldn't be out there just yet. She even tells him about the nightmares! And so they part on excellent terms with very few regrets or recriminations, which is probably a very good sign that both are going to survive the episode entirely. 

We leap ahead a little to some point after nightfall, where we are treated to one of the most gloriously creepy sequences that I think we might ever have had on The Walking Dead - Beta in Alexandria. Firstly, erupting from a grave like every classic horror movie trope you could possibly want to hope for, then stalking his way through a house or two, slaughtering defenceless Alexandrians and then *waiting calmly for them to rise again as his little undead task force*. Seriously, I had chills. 

With his new undead buddies causing one hell of a distraction, Beta finds his way to the cell and orders Gamma to come with him, promising her a quick death if she doesn't fight. She calls bullshit, having finally realised that all Alpha wants is them all in pain, and decides to stand her ground. Their little impasse is interrupted by Laura, the former-Saviour whose name I had to google while writing, who gets Beta at halberd-point but is sadly later crushed by the giant man. There is still technically a question mark over her fate, but the crunch of her bones hitting the walls of the cell did not sound good at all. 

(The fact that this character’s apparent death needed to be confirmed via The Talking Dead is possibly one of my major gripes with the episode; I’m glad in part that the show no longer feels the need to labour over every grisly details of every death, but surely we could at least have deaths which register properly on screen.)

Gamma/Mary is less foolish than once she was, so she doesn't miss a chance to run from an angry Beta and end up hiding in Judith's home with the girl and her little brother. And Judith, because she's sweet and innocent but also very definitely not an idiot, shoots Beta through a closed door when he tries to force the lock. If someone had ever taught Judith about confirming kills - ideally with a headshot taken from a safe distance, Alpha would have lost her greatest soldier. 

Instead, and also I suppose understandably, Judith takes RJ and runs the second Beta hits the floor. In all fairness, there really wasn't any part of the Whisperer MO that made me think "bulletproof vests" *before* they let a child shoot Beta. 

Judith and RJ make it out safely, but Gamma/Mary isn't so lucky. Beta's attempt to drag her away is interrupted by Rosita, who really does a very good job of hurting Beta before nearly getting her skull caved in. She's saved by Gamma/Mary, who holds a knife to her own throat - Alpha will only get her back alive, as she wants, if Beta leaves Alexandria with her right then. It’s a brilliant threat, and a great moment of self-sacrifice - one that I hope will endear her to the Alexandrians. 

The two set out back to the Whisperers, with Beta talking creepily all the way about how Gamma/Mary will die and rise again and be reunited with her sister in death. I honestly can't tell if he was trying to be creepy or comforting at this point, but fortunately they were interrupted by Gabriel and the gang returning from their wild-goose hunt after a non-existent herd. They drive Beta away, but Gamma/Mary holds her ground and tries to explain what had happened.

Now, there was a moment where I really, really thought that Gabriel was going to shoot her. His irrational threats of torture and his bone-deep confidence that he could tell when people were telling him the truth seemed set up to kick him in the teeth sooner or later, and him pulling the trigger on the woman who sacrificed herself to save Rosita would have been a particularly bitter slice of humble pie. 

But he didn't, and I'm actually kind of glad. The moment at the end when Mary reclaims her name to introduce herself to Rosita is a sweet little taste of the kind of future Rick wanted for his people - where people can be forgiven and become part of the community - it even looks like she's getting a trip to Hilltop to meet her nephew, which is all she's really asked for since trying to leave Alpha. 

Meanwhile, the other plotline of the week sees Daryl having his own moment of righteous but foolish anger, as his plan for finding another way into the cave to save Connie and Magna involves finding Alpha and beating the information out of her. 

Alpha's made of slightly sterner stuff than that, though, and the first assault leaves both of them pretty brutally injured and Daryl with no more information that he started with. When half-blinded by his own blood and surrounded by walkers, he retreats, and is followed to an abandoned gas station by a bloody but not yet beaten Alpha. 

The brutality of the first fight, however, has left both of them essentially unable to commit to round two - Alpha's losing too much blood, and Daryl's more or less immobile with Alpha's knife in his thigh - so Alpha decides to even up the odds by summoning some more of her undead friends, who head straight for the bleeding Daryl. Even injured, Daryl can take care of three walkers, but he was out of weapons by the time the third and final walker got close, so he yanks Alpha's knife out of his own flesh and makes do. This does, admittedly, kill the walker, but it does also leave Daryl really quite definitely bleeding out. 

With no more walkers to do her dirty work, and apparently hallucinating from blood loss, Alpha resorts to actually talking to Daryl, but becomes enraged when he says that she never loved Lydia. 

And, as if summoned, Lydia is suddenly there with them in the gas station; the interaction is largely shown from Alpha's point of view, which is trippy enough to imply "hallucination" pretty strongly, but Lydia is actually there, having been watching both groups since her departure to try and decide where she belongs. 

In a very twisted moment, Alpha ruins their little reunion by trying to get Lydia to kill her and take her place as leader, claiming that she had made sure that Lydia would be ready for such a moment. In yet another rejection, Lydia tells her mother that the Alexandrians aren't perfect, but they're human - and that's all she's ever wanted, and something that her mother simply can't give her. Lydia leaves her mother behind, but hauls Daryl out of there and to relative safety somewhere else in the forest. 

She leaves one last message as she goes - "Your way is not the only way", scratched into a table with Alpha's own knife. 

It's the final, irrefutable proof for Alpha that she didn't imagine this little reunion - Lydia really was there, she really did refuse to either kill or help her mother, and she did once again choose the weak strangers over her own family. 

And, judging by Alpha's terrifying final monologue, this really was the last straw for an already dangerously deranged woman. 

Previous season 10 recaps are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 9: Teamwork makes the Dream Work

Episode 9 begins with the traditional quick recap of the first half of the season - apparently all we need to know for the moment is that Carol's not doing so well and that Negan joined the Whisperers. 

All caught up? Good. Then let's begin.

Full review and spoilers galore below. 

We find our gang - Daryl, Carol, Jerry, Aaron, Connie, Kelly and Magna - right where we left them: trapped in an underground cave with a horde of walkers and no easy way out. Alpha watches them from on-high, apparently enjoying herself greatly, and then leaves Carol screaming in rage (literally) behind her to tell some faithful Whisperers to make sure the group doesn't find their way out. 

Of course, the gang is not prepared to let a little thing like being trapped underground with a horde of walker ruin their day, so they start making their way out of the cave - first, leaping from small island of safety to smaller islands of safety to make it to a wall they think they can climb. It's a sequence full of minor scares - Kelly's bad ankle makes leaping perilous, Aaron nearly gets surrounded, but they all make it safely to the other side because of TEAMWORK, which is one of our big themes this week and I have to admit that I have always loved some well-done co-ordinated overcoming of trials and tribulations by competent characters. 

Bonus points to Daryl for using a walker's severed arm as a makeshift torch - even though they have plenty of battery powered torches with them. It’s totally worth it for Jerry’s nonplussed reaction to being asked to hand off the limb in question. 

Leaving the sea of walkers behind them, the gang work their way through the caves, using airflow and lit matches to head towards a likely exit. Carol is revealed to be claustrophobic, Magna is still being a bit of a bitch, although I suppose I would also snap at the person who led me into a cavern full of walkers. 

The heart of the episode comes in a conversation between Daryl and Carol, in which Daryl once again lays out his worries about Carol (and also Aaron's habit of hanging out with "the skin freak" Gamma) and outright admits that he doesn't know how to help her anymore. In a rare return moment of honesty, Carol admits that she doesn't just want to kill Alpha, but to hurt her first, to break her down and take everything from her before killing her. Daryl admits that, had Alpha taken from him what she took from Carol, yeah, he would probably be out for blood too - but only until Carol tried to stop him: "We fight for our future, we don't fight for revenge."

And, for I think the first time, Daryl explicitly calls Carol out on the consequences of her actions - she's not just putting herself at risk, she's putting all the people she cares about at risk too. 

Any further character development is put on hold for the Whisperers to attack the group - interestingly, Alpha's command to make sure that the group didn't leave apparently meant "go in and kill them", not just "guard the entrance until later", as I had thought. Killing so many members of the rival communities in the dark seems a little too casual for Alpha's usual theatrics, but it does allow for more awesome teamwork and some satisfying combat which the gang emerges entirely unscathed from. And the Whisperers give the gang a fantastic and entirely unintended gift in the form of road signs and helpful arrows carved into some walls. 

The arrows led the gang to the narrowest possible passage, which Jerry (6ft2ins, and apparently too large for airplane bathrooms in the world before) eyes with great and considerable distrust. The following scene is so claustrophobic that I had trouble with it, never mind poor Carol. And then, of course, some walkers yank themselves along the passage in pursuit of the gang and start trying to gnaw on Jerry's feet - at which point I started composing my outraged tweets about Jerry's death, but such anger was (possibly) premature, given that Daryl managed to drag Jerry out of the passage just in time. 

"Possibly" premature rejoicing on my part, given that Jerry's boots had definite bite marks and what looked like fresh blood on them, hinting at a possible bite, but the gang claim that Jerry's feet are unscathed and he certainly doesn't move like someone with bitten feet for the rest of the episode. Additionally, I will eat my own non-existent hat if Jerry turns out to be the kind of person who would conceal a bite from his friends, so I am cautiously removing Jerry from the critical list.

And then the gang nearly falls into another bloody chasm of walkers - the bulk of the horde collected by Alpha, and it makes the earlier sea of walkers look like a drop in the ocean. The gang decides against going anywhere near the chasm and head the other way, finding the remnants of pre-apocalypse mining operation. They start slowly and carefully clearing a way out, deciding against using the at-least-a-decade-old dynamite found by Kelly, and giving Magna a chance to admit to Aaron that she regretted fighting with Yumiko before coming on this mission - an admission which I took to mean that her days were numbered, given that the odds of all of them making it out in one piece was catastrophically low.

Unfortunately, the gang's very sensible escape plan is completely ruined by Carol taking the outdated dynamite and going to do something fairly stupid. 

Daryl steps in long enough to stop Carol plummeting to her death, but he's not in time to stop some of the dynamite going off and triggering a massive cave in. Jerry earns his own weight in literally whatever he wants by holding up a beam long enough to get most of the team out, but he's not actually Superman and so he can't stop the beam from hitting the box with the rest of the dynamite in, bringing down the rest of the roof and leaving Connie and Magda trapped inside the cave. 

And, while Daryl wants to try and dig them out immediately, it's poor little Kelly who has to say the terrible truth - they can't stay. The blast will bring down walkers and Whisperers and they can't save their friends if they all die on that hilltop. It's such a beautiful moment of maturity from Kelly, who's still terribly, heartbreakingly young, and she deserves so much credit for saying probably the hardest thing she's ever had to say just moments after screaming for her trapped sister.   

But, while that moment is the kind of awful, unfair decision making that The Walking Dead generally does very well, I am still kind of mad that we needed to have it at all, largely because I'm struggling with Carol's behaviour. Now, just to be clear, trying to destroy or trap the horde so Alpha can't use it against the communities, that is not necessarily a stupid move. But trying to do it without telling the rest of the group is the worst kind of stupid - a few sticks of dynamite would only stop the horde with a cave-in and triggering a cave-in without clearing your allies out first is stupid. 

And for her to do such a thing - literally, to play with dynamite while her friends were still in danger - so shortly after Daryl called her out on her behaviour and her reckless attitude to the safety of others, made the earlier conversation feel cheap. This is becoming a pattern - Daryl reaches out, Carol pushes back, Carol does something stupid, Daryl reaches out again. It will be interesting to see how this latest episode will affect their relationship moving forwards - especially given Daryl's fondness for Connie, and the fact that he himself hasn't been directly harmed by the cave-in, as Daryl has never held his own safety in particularly high regard. 

Meanwhile, our secondary plot of the week involves Negan making inroads with the Whisperers, in more ways than one. 

Having noticed Alpha's anger that the gang had made it so close to the horde, Negan is the one to point out the possibility of a traitor in their midst - this is a man who does still seem to be coming to terms with how easily Dwight turned against him and undermined so many of his efforts against Alexandria - and he even points Alpha towards Gamma as the likeliest suspects. I'm curious whether Negan's rapport with the Whisperers is real or manufactured, and whether he's genuinely trying to help Alpha or just turn her against her own right-hand people. 

While Alpha tells Negan in no uncertain terms that he is not to "sow paranoia" in such a way, she does send Beta to find Gamma and bring her back when she fails to return from a fairly routine chore. And then Negan gets his "crass reward" for being brave enough to tell Alpha his concerns about Gamma - an intimate moment with Alpha herself, who strips them both fully nude, except, of course, for her mask. 

And I really thought the severed arm torch was going to be the grossest thing in this episode. 

Previous Season 10 reviews available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 13: Is this what they mean by “working holiday”?

Episode 13 of Prodigal Son, and I'm really late to this party but I am having such a good time right now because this was the most fun episode of Prodigal Son that we have had for quite a while. Holiday suits! Mockery! Monte Cristo themed elaborate demises! 

Full review and spoilers below. 

Seriously, guys, I am so glad I started watching this show. 

The episode beings with a fun look at Malcolm's and Martin's relationship from Martin's own perspective, something that we've been mostly missing up until this point. Given just how gosh-darned enigmatic Martin could be, the opportunity to peak at his subconscious was delightful. Dream!Malcolm was entirely unsubtle, as dreams often are, but it was interesting that Martin admitted openly that Malcolm probably shouldn't be visiting him - even if he can only admit that in his nightmares. 

Meanwhile, Actual!Malcolm is trying and failing to muddle his way through a yoga routine, with traumatic flashbacks really throwing off his balance. But it's fine, Malcolm doesn't need his yoga today - he's going on an actual holiday. Jessica bursts in with two gifts for her son - a new holiday outfit and a lift to the airport, courtesy of Gil, who is similarily thrilled that Malcolm is actually taking some time off. 

Given how well he knows Malcolm by this point, it really was a bit of an oversight for Gil to leave the police radio on, given that Malcolm has never met a crime scene he didn't want to profile over dinner. Gil's exasperated "Fine!" when agreeing to take Malcolm along made me actually snort with laughter, but not as much as the team's reactions to the white holiday suit - Miami Vice, Bond Villain, Coke Dealer, Colonel Sanders and Ivory Poacher are all suggested as new careers for the snappily dressed Malcolm. 

Malcolm brushes aside the gentle mockery to examine the body of a former district attorney who had been shot with a flintlock pistol and had the name of a character from the Count of Monte Cristo carved into his arm. 

The crime scene is immediately enlivened by the presence of Dr Tanaka (yay!) and a landmine (definitely not-yay!). 

Malcolm, in the first of at least three superhero acts this week, manages to catch the landmine's trigger before it fully activates, giving the coroner's team time to grab the body and hustle out, accompanied by the rest of the team at Malcolm's insistence that he had a plan. 

He did not, of course, have a plan when he said that, but fortunately our lead character is very good at thinking on his feet. I'm not sure it would ever have occurred to me to grab a flintlock pistol and use it to shoot my way out of a crime scene's window before a landmine exploded behind me, but that is one of many reasons why I will never be a consultant for the NYPD. I am, however, very sorry about Gil's car, and I'm reasonably sure that Malcolm is as well. 

And, of course, it's in that moment, sitting there with an actual landmine in front of him, that Malcolm speaks to his father for the first time in months. Martin is very unconcerned about the landmine, possibly because he's too delighted that Malcolm apparently wanted to hear his father's voice at such a time. 

We also get the chance to see Martin back in his normal prison routine, which apparently includes browbeating an inmate called Hector to pretend to be Malcolm in "therapeutic roleplay" so that Martin can practise his conversations with his son ahead of time. 

Bloody hell, this family, you guys. 

And then Martin calls the police station to share his thoughts on the case with Malcolm and the team. He's still apparently very desperate to know about Malcolm's life, wanting to be introduced to the whole team before he talks shop, and clearly on his best behaviour in front of his son's friends. 

I now desparately, desperately want to see him interact with Edrisa. Just, I think that conversation would be amazing and I will pay good money to see it. Please? But only if Edrisa comes out entirely and utterly unharmed. 

Now, one of the many advantages of Malcolm grabbing the flintlock pistol as he escaped an exploding landmine is that it made it far easier to trace the gun back to the man who purchased it - who they then find wired into an elaborate sword trap, because apparently Prodigal Son is leaning back into its Hannibal vibe this week. 

And then Malcolm gets the team to cut the man free while he catches the falling swords before they impale their new source. And amazingly no one really tries to stop him. 

Sidenote: I am so glad that both I and the show itself decided to stop take all this crime-fighting business so seriously. And the slide under all the tripwires was also extremely cool, I will admit. 

Once not-at-risk-of-impalement, their new source fills them in on the person he purchased the gun and the swords for - Mr Taylor, a member of the so-called New York royalty, who is about to get married in the social event of the season (which Jessica has scored an invite to and which Ainsley is reporting on, and I feel that having two Whitlys at any event surely infinitely raises the potential of hijinks. Surely.) 

We get a little bit of next backstory - a very suspicious "accident" in which Isabella, the daughter of the family's cook, was killed and which the drug-using Taylor heir had absolutely nothing to do with,thank you very much. 

Such a tale of woe, all neatly swept under the rug by the family's enforcers who are now being targetted, fits the Monte Cristo theme so neatly that the team immediately zeroes in on Cal Taylor as the third victim, and Malcolm and Gil head over to ruin a man's wedding day. 

And a good thing they did too, because they find Ernesto, Isabella's father, running around the old bootlegging tunnels, surely up to some sort of nefarious deed. 

With a really good suspect in custody, Gil does, to his credit, do his absolute best to get Malcolm to go on his holiday, even sending Dani along to make sure he goes to the airport. But Dani and Malcolm are increasingly thick as theieves and, when Malcolm admits that he doesn't want to go on holiday because he's scared of what he thinks about with no work to distract him, she agrees to go with him to visit Martin - Malcolm isn't convinced by Ernesto as the killer, and he wants a second opinion from someone who is not constantly trying to put him on an airplane. 

And this, not the dream sequence from earlier, is the first time that Malcolm and Martin really see each other since Malcolm learnt about the camping trip. Unlike the hallucination of Martin from two episodes ago, the real Martin doesn't admit to doing any such thing - not because he would have been incapable of killing his own son, but because he wouldn't have failed to do so if that was truly his wish. 

Which, you know, isn't a very comforting response, but it doesn't feel a lot more honest than a lot of the stuff that Martin says. 

It's enough for Malcolm to hand over the case file, at any rate. Martin agrees that Ernesto doesn't fit, claiming that such an ending lacks the drama surely required by the earlier crime scenes. Malcolm instead zeroes in on Isabella herself - what if she wasn't actually dead, but instead was back for revenge against the people who took everything from her? 

After a brief pause to get Malcolm and Dani dress-code approved, the two gatecrash the wedding (with Gil's knowledge - I'm so glad Malcolm might actually be learning about 'backup' and 'telling people where you're going', I really am), 

They get another conversation with Cal Taylor, Isabella's former boyfriend, who admits to driving the boat, admits to loving Isabella, and admits that he begged his father to help find Isabella after the crash - and that his father refused to even call the authorities, valuing his son's future over a girl's life. 

And so the final victim isn't going to be Cal at all, but his very smarmy father instead. Realising at literally the last possible moment that Isabella was planning to shoot Taylor Senior during his speech, Malcolm grabs the microphone and fillibusters his way through several excuriating minutes about failed fathers and quiestionable choices before Isabella reveals herself - and the gun she stole to shoot Taylor. 

There was then a fantastic little moment in which Malcolm tries to talk down Isabella with a quote from Dumas - and for a brief moment it seems like maybe it worked, but then Isabella goes all shooty instead. In his third and final superhero act of the week, Malcolm tackles Taylor behind the table before Isabella can kill him, and Dani gets to arrest someone while looking absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. 

Jessica basks in a little positive social publicity as her son is revealed to be the saviour of the night - genuinely, the look on her face when Malcolm introduced himself as her son was adorable. And then she steals an entire bottle of champagne on her way out, because she deserves it. 

Finally, on the way out, Malcolm and Jessica check in with Ainsley, who seems delighted that she gets to report on an attempted murder rather than just a boring society wedding. And we get confirmation that Jessica was invited to the wedding because her daughter sneakily pulled some strings, just because she knew how much getting invited to an event like the Taylor wedding would mean to her socialite mother. It is perhaps the cutest thing Ainsley has done so far this season, and I love her a little bit for it. 

Previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 12: Psychiatrist, Analyse Thyself

Episode 12 of Prodigal Son, and Malcolm actually deals with some consequences. And also saves someone from a cult, because he's good at multi-tasking like that.

Full review and spoilers below.

This episode begins with a little flashback to "Last Night", involving some sort of argument between Gil and Malcolm, resulting in Malcolm locking himself in a room at the precinct and firing up some sort of threatening technology, while a worried Dani bangs on the door. Malcolm's little science project either causes or is interrupted by a blackout - and then we jump ahead to the next morning, when Malcolm is, to my endless joy, going to have to talk to a psychiatrist! About his feelings! And his trauma!

The rest of the episode unfolds as a mixture of flashbacks, Malcolm and Dr Coppenrath speaking about the case, and the rest of the Malcolm's team giving their sides of the story. I have a massive weakness for set-ups like this, particularly when used to comic effect, and they did it very well here. More characters giving sarcastic commentary on Malcolm's actions, please!  

JT, also, is clearly enjoying the opportunity to tell someone just what he thinks of Malcolm's mental state: "If Bright was an actual state, he'd be Florida."

The murder of the week involves a young man called Tristan, who was electrocuted and strangled, then literally dumped in a pauper's grave. We only know this, of course, because Malcolm refuses to take any time off after being kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer and gleefully followed Dani to a crime scene.

At least Edrisa was pleased to see him - almost as pleased as I was to see her. Oh, Edrisa, you adorable dorkiness almost makes up for the creepiness of reading Malcolm's medical records behind his back. Her inviting him to the autopsy because, a), he's very good at his job, and, b), she missed him is just straight up adorable.

Tristan leads the team to the Vosler Institute, a self-help/therapy group allegedly specialising in trauma who is already on the FBI's cult index. The leader, Quentin Vosler, comes across as wonderfully smarmy in his first appearance, then gives the NYPD the time of day, claiming that he cannot help them in their inquiries because of all the "propriety knowledge" his group has.

So while Gil and the others are trying to find a subpoena, Malcolm goes and signs up as a new member. The Vosler Institute apparently screens their potential members for trauma and Malcolm manages to set off all sorts of bells and whistles - enough to get the personal attention of Quentin Vosler. Malcolm maintains later that he cheated the test - I wonder which way? Did he tilt his trauma up for effect, or down for believability?

And then we discover that the Vosler Institute is using electroshock therapy to suppress trauma.  

(To be honest, this was the moment when I actually started to like Dr Coppenroth a little bit, because he was so wonderfully mad that Vosler was using ECT in such a way.)

Malcolm, being Malcolm and also being haunted by hallucinations of his younger self, allows Vosler to shock him. When he wakes up, he convinces one of the Vosler members - Andi - to leave with him to give evidence against Vosler who, between the control he exhibits over his members and his fondness for ECT, seems like a likely bet for "who electrocuted and murdered Tristan?"

Unfortunately, Andi is kidnapped by an imposing gentleman in a black van before Malcolm can get her to safety - and his accusations against Vosler lose a little of their impact when Vosler himself turns up at the police station to report Andi's disappearance as a kidnapping - not by him, but by a deprogrammer, who either 'liberates' people or 're-traumatises' them, depending on your feelings about Vosler and other such groups.  

Gil and Malcolm use Jessica to stand-in as a wealthy women looking to hire a deprogrammer to save a family member, letting Malcolm profile all the deprogrammers they can find until he spots Curtis, a huge and imposing man with stains on his boots that match the soil at Tristan's ignoble resting place.

Curtis seems like a sure-fit for the murder, a man hired to save Andi from the cult and who snatched a fellow member to get information - but lost control before completing the job. While the rest of the team is satisfied, Malcolm can't accept it - Curtis lacks the skills necessary to do anything other than extract a cult victim. He couldn't deprogram them.

Gil's less convinced and, in the way that these disagreements so often do, the matter escalates until Malcolm blames Gil for bringing all the murderers back into his life. That takes us neatly back to where we started, with Malcolm reaching for the ECT machine and Dani trying to stop him.

Back in the present, talking through the case with Dr Coppenrath, Malcolm finally tells someone what's been bothering him. He tells Dr Coppenrath about Martin Whitly apparently being prepared to kill his own son and admits that, while as an adult he understands his father's pathology, the child in him just wants his dad to love him. He even admits that he's been hallucinating and that he wanted to shock himself to make them stop - because Vosler had been able to make them stop. Understandably, Coppenroth is unwilling to allow someone in such a state to continue to consult for the NYPD and encourages Malcolm to get proper, professional help.

And then Dr Coppenroth makes a glorious mistake; when asked about what will happen to Andi, he replies that he's sure that the NYPD will find her.

But Malcolm never told him that Andi was female.

Turns out that Malcolm's not really being evaluated for a return to work, he's laying a trap for the real deprogrammer, who became obsessed with saving Andi after he was unable to save his own daughter from a similar bad situation. The confrontation between Malcolm and Coppenroth escalates to the point of Malcolm having a gun in his face, but it honestly felt more tense before that, in the moments before they revealed that Malcolm was running this sting operation with his team, not alone, because really, who would have believed Malcolm if he suddenly turned around and accused the man who blacklisted him from consulting of being the mastermind behind his last case? I mean, really?

Fortunately, we don't have to see Malcolm being gaslit for any period of time, and Coppenroth gets shocked by the ECT machine he hated so much, which does at least get him to put the gun down. A little psychological profiling and they find Andi in the place when Coppenroth and his daughter had spent their last family holiday.

I'm a little torn about how this plotline was resolved, to be honest. I knew from the trailers that Malcolm was going to be evaluated and I was intrigued by the idea of Malcolm trying to process his experiences in such a setting, so I'm a little disappointed that potentially Malcolm has been vindicated in his poor life choices because the man who told him that he had to deal with this stuff properly turned out to be the bad guy. Dr Coppenroth was, admittedly, unstable and unhelpful and was happy to label Malcolm as incompetent to save his own interests, but he wasn't wrong. A man who's currently and persistently hallucinating probably shouldn't be at crime scenes.

Fortunately, it looks like I'm not the only one to think this. A tired but victorious Malcolm tells Gil that, actually, no, he's not okay - and Gil, ever the optimist, says that the fact that he knows that will be enough to make it okay.

I mean, admitting you need help is a good start and all, but also I would really like Malcolm to get some help which isn't from a cult deprogrammer trying to cover up his own crimes, if that would be alright?

Left alone in his apartment, with two weeks of leave stretching out in front of him, Malcolm tries talking to the hallucination of his younger self, who offers a new perspective on the issue. Yes, Martin Whitly may have tried to kill them, but he didn't succeed.

I don't know if that will be enough to carry Malcolm through the next dark period of his life, but it's certainly a starting point.

Previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

“Remembrance”: Nostalgia and Moving Forwards in ‘Picard’

When it was announced that Patrick Stewart was returning to the role of Picard after a seventeen year gap, I was pretty much torn between delight and deep-seated fear. There is always a slight fear that this sort of return to form will either rest too comfortably on its laurels, or set fire to those laurels and leave nothing but a burnt pile of ashes where there was once a childhood treasure. 

As it turns out, and as we all could probably have predicted, I didn't really have anything to worry about. 

Spoilers for Picard below: 

During episode one (neatly titled "Remembrance") we are treated to plenty of small hints that Picard, just like a great deal of his likely audience, is pining for the good old days. References to the Next Generation are easy to find, such as the name of Picard's dog, Number One:  

(I dearly hope that we get to see Will Riker responding to that particular honour at some point this season)

There's also the Captain Picard Day Banner which has been lovingly preserved in Picard's storage room/secure archive from episode 7x12 of The Next Generation: 

(Unfortunately, the Captain Picard doll from the same episode is nowhere to be seen - maybe Riker still has it somewhere.) 

There are also the dreams; the episode's opening scene is of Picard and Data playing poker together, almost exactly as we left them at the end of The Next Generation. Data's wearing the uniform we saw him during Insurrection; they're in a space entirely reminiscent of Ten Forward, albeit a Ten Forward with a better set budget. 

Later on, in a separate dream, we see both of them in the classic Next Generation uniforms. When speaking to Dajh, Picard's red jumper and small pin-badge cannot help but remind us of his old uniform, long since put away. The references to Earl Grey tea also come thick and fast - although at least one of those cups is decaffeinated. 

A fondness for the past, particularly for all the good parts of the past, is hardly surprising. The problem comes when that fondness for the past is used to excuse problems in the present. 

But Picard is a historian, as well as a retired Admiral. While he may choose to focus on the good, that in no way blinds him to the bad. In his preparations for the first interview he's given since the destruction of Romulus, he seems to have only one clear boundary - that his departure from Starfleet is not a topic for discussion. And, when the journalist pushes right past that one clear boundary, we learn the real reason that Picard is on his family’s vineyard in France, not changing the galaxy at Starfleet Command: 

Journalist: What was it that you lost faith in, Admiral? You’ve never spoken about your departure from Starfleet. Didn’t you, in fact, resign your commission in protest? Tell us, Admiral. Why did you really quit Starfleet?  Picard: Because it was no longer Starfleet.  Journalist: I’m sorry?  Picard: Because it was no longer Starfleet! We withdrew! The galaxy was mourning, burying its dead, and Starfleet had slunk from its duties. The decision to call off the rescue and to abandon those people we had sworn to save was not just dishonourable. It was downright criminal! And I was not prepared to stand by and be a spectator. And you, my dear, you have no idea what Dunkirk is, right? You’re a stranger to history. You’re a stranger to war. You just wave your hand and, pfft, it all goes away. Well, it’s not so easy for those who died. And it was not so easy for those who were left behind. We’re done here. 

No matter the love Picard had for Starfleet, and the love he still has for the people and achievements of the past, that does not stop him from seeing how far the Federation has fallen. He is not blind to its faults and, when it became clear to him that it was no longer a Starfleet which he recognised, he made the decision to walk away. 

He was not going to be a spectator to the moral decay of the Federation - but, interestingly, he was also not going to fight it. He retreated to his family’s vineyard and, it would seem, from public life as a whole. For more than a decade, he stayed quiet. Having resigned for moral reasons, he never made those reasons public. Whether due to external pressure, or fear of making a bad situation worse, or maybe even just being too tired to continue the fight, Picard moved silently into a quiet and studious retirement. 

But Picard, as a series, seems to be shaping up to be an exploration of what happens when a man like Picard finds the strength and impetus for one more fight. 

I, for one, can’t wait.

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 11: Malcolm’s No-Good, Very Bad Day

Episode 11 of Prodigal Son and, good Lord, was this an episode worth waiting for. 

Malcolm begins the episode metaphorically much were we left it - in the hands of a maniac - and geographically in an unknown location. Being hit hard enough to be knocked out isn't good for anyone, so it's probably no surprise that we start off with a little flashback/hallucination to a much younger Malcolm being reassured by Jessica that he is not a monster; he's a survivor. 

As the episode proceeds, all we can do is hope that Jessica is right. 

Full review and spoilers galore under the cut. 

The story splits off into two separate threads - Malcolm trying to survive his imprisonment and torture at the hands of Paul Watkins, the Junkyard Killer, and the rest of the team desperately trying to find him in time.

Malcolm's interactions with Paul serve as a very good reminder of how good Malcolm is at his job, as he uses his knowledge of Paul to try to forge a connection or, at least, find a weak spot to exploit. The trouble comes from the fact that Paul knows more of Malcolm's story that Malcolm may of Paul's - particularly when it comes to their original meeting. Over the course of a significantly unsettling conversation, we learn that Paul did accompany Malcolm and Martin on a camping trip, and that Paul enjoyed his time "working with" Martin - I'm really hoping for some hints in later episodes as to how the discovery of the Junkyard Killer develops the story of the Surgeon. Maybe it could be the topic of Ainsley's next exclusive? 

Interestingly, Paul declares himself to be finished with his previous mission of punishing the wicked, in favour of trying to convince Malcolm to take his father's place as Paul's co-murderer. Even though Malcolm makes the valid point that he's not a killer, Paul remains unworried - he wasn't a killer either until he passed "the trials". 

Paul also indirectly confirms that the girl in the box was real and that she was killed on the camping trip which Malcolm can barely remember - but she wasn't the only one to suffer on that trip, as Paul himself was stabbed. 

He was stabbed by none other than little Malcolm. 

And, because turn-around is fair play in the world of serial killers, Malcolm gets stabbed as well. 

Meanwhile, the NYPD and the FBI are doing all they can to find Malcolm. Paul's blind and furious grandmother refuses to do anything more helpful that sing creepy Old Testament hymns about the wicked being punished, so Gil gets Special Agent Swanson to agree to two very different, and equally questionable, lines of inquiry - Malcolm's mother and Malcolm's father. 

Sidenote, but Swanson does explicitly say that she doesn't trust Jessica purely because she was married to the Surgeon - and while a certain degree of scepticism about Jessica's innocence or guilt may be understandable (I indulged in a little of it myself in the first half of the season), intending not to inform someone that their son has been kidnapped by a serial killer is a choice which I really want someone to call her out on at some point. 

Gil, one way or another, gets permission to share some of the photos of John's childhood home with Jessica, in case she can remember anything about John or the camping trip which might help them locate Malcolm. It certainly shuts down her attempts to identify the Girl in the Box, at least in the short term. 

(I also like that Gil clearly knows how Jessica got the picture of the bracelet, because he's not an idiot, and also how he is clearly not sharing that information with anyone else, because FBI doesn't deserve to know.) 

We also get a brief glimpse into Ainsley's life; the interview with her father has benefitted her career in the way which she had hoped, and she's on her way to a meeting with some bigwigs about her next move when her mother summons her home for emotional support. Ainsley and Jessica's last conversation was hugely stressful for all involved, and for me watching it, but I couldn't help but notice that at least one thing that Jessica said in episode 10 seems to have stuck ("There are victims! Real ones! ...And why is the story never about them?"), because she wants to do the next feature on the victims, not the killer. I am very amused that Jessica using 911 as an emergency code fails - but the word please succeeded. 

And then we get the interaction which I have been dying to see for quite some time now - Gil versus Martin. 

Apparently an NYPD consultant being kidnapped by the Surgeon's former accomplice is a valid reason to yank someone out of solitary confinement, but Martin's time in solitary has scrambled his brains a lot more than maybe anyone was anticipating. Amusingly, Martin instantly knows that it was Malcolm, not the NYPD, who found Paul Watkins - although the news that Paul has taken Malcolm knocks him for six. So convinced is he that Malcolm is dead that he collapses. There are still plenty of questions still to be answered about Paul and Martin's partnership, and about how Paul evolved after Martin was arrested, but it's very interesting that Martin is so instantly convinced that Malcolm is dead - unlike the NYPD, who are clinging to the fact that Paul liked to hold his victims for some time before killing them. Is that a habit which he developed after Martin was out of his life - or does Martin simply know that the relationship between John and Malcolm was far more adversarial even before Malcolm started actively hunting him?

Either way, the strength of Martin's reaction to the news prompts medical intervention in the form of sedatives - which gives us all the joy of seeing a Martin Whitly who is not in full command of his faculties accuse Gil of trying to replace him in Jessica and Malcolm's lives. Apparently this is a notion which has been plaguing the bad Surgeon for quite some time. But even with his concerns, he can still be convinced to give up the location of the cabin from the camping trip - if only as a sign of faith in his own son's ability to stay alive. 

Given the amount of time left on the clock, I was pretty certain that the cabin location was going to be a bust, but I was still on the edge of my seat as the show cut between JT and Dani on one side of a door and a madman with an axe on the other side. Different doors, of course, but a classic done well is always a lovely thing. 

While the FBI, the NYPD and a whole host of other people with guns kick down the wrong door, Malcolm learns a little bit more about his camping trip - and his first serious assault, which was apparently in self-defenses, as the whole point of the camping trip was allegedly to kill Malcolm. Little Malcolm, who had seen too much and, apparently, been chloroformed to the point of it losing effectiveness, and who therefore was starting to remember too much. 

It's a revelation which definitely takes Malcolm by surprise - and while it's something which he openly rejects when Paul first says it, it is something which he later accuses his 'father' (okay, fine, the stress-induced hallucination of his father) of attempting to do. Most telling of all, the hallucination of Martin openly admits to it. No matter what the truth was or is, in the moment, Malcolm truly believed that his father attempted to kill him - and will he ever really be able to believe any of Martin's denials?

Unfortunately, in the course of this particular argument, Malcolm reveals his ultimate motivations: "I protect my community and my family!" 

And Paul, being not all that stupid, immediately zeroes in on the best way to hurt Malcolm: by hurting his family: "Sacrifice shall be your final trial. But don’t worry. It won’t be something you have to do, just something you have to endure." 

Meanwhile, Ainsley is putting together some of the story for herself. The photos left by Gil almost immediately trigger a memory - the collection of angel statues in John's childhood home matches one which Ainsley was given as a child. Jessica brushes this aside as a present from Martin, but Ainsley disagrees - her imaginary friend, Mr Boots, gave it to her. The imaginary friend who she saw moving through the Whitly home, but thought was simply a ghost because he vanished in the basement. 

And then, in a gorgeous piece of timing worthy of any high budget horror film, Jessica and Ainsley look around a corner to see John Watkins emerging from the secret room in their basement, axe first. 

(Was this secret room where Martin killed his victims? How paranoid will Jessica be about that entire basement from now on? SO MANY QUESTIONS)

In the ensuing chase sequence, Jessica loses some points for stopping to fiddle with light switches, then immediately gains all those points back and then some for smashing John over the head with the first ceramic object to come to hand. She gets herself and an injured Ainsley upstairs in a bathroom, behind two locked doors, and barricades the door further with a dressing table. She is calm, collected, and absolutely bloody furious. Her attempts to reassure Ainsley are simply heartbreaking, talking about the headache Ainsley have in the morning, the illicit pills Jessica will offer, the simple declaration that they don't need anyone to save them even as John starts to chop through the door. 

All she had was a pair of scissors, but I truly believe she would have made John pay dearly before the end. 

Fortunately, it doesn't come to that. Malcolm, egged on by the hallucination of his father (I, as always, preferred the therapist), smashes his own hand with a hammer to get out of the cuffs and off he goes after John. He's been stabbed, concussed, and now just a little mutilated, so it's understandable that he avoids a straight-up confrontation, instead luring John back downstairs so he could freak him out with a open trunk and then blindside him with a crowbar - before locking him in the trunk. 

The framing of the final confrontation made me wonder for a second if we were going to have to watch Malcolm become the killer he's always feared, probably as he brutally beat to death the man who had tried to kill his family. A potentially unsatisfying plotline would develop of Malcolm being tormented by his own dark side, or equating justifiable homicide with his father's sadism. Maybe even a hugely dull trial. But I didn't need to worry. As Jessica said in the opening scene, Malcolm isn't like his father. He's a survivor. 

A survivor with a bit of a mean streak, given the way in which he effortlessly uses John's claustrophobia against him, but still. Not yet a killer. 

The reunion with Jessica and Ainsley was adorable, and almost makes up for us not getting to see Malcolm reunite with his team - especially after they gave us cute flashbacks of Dani's developing friendship with Malcolm, and showed JT's obvious and understandable concern for the guy. Hopefully we'll get to see a little more of that in next week's episode. 

Previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here. 

Ainsley Whitly Character Profile available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

“I’m Telling My Story”: Ainsley Whitly, The Prodigal Daughter

Throughout the first half of season one, we can see a great deal of how Martin Whitly’s actions affected his wife and son, both of whom are still actively struggling with the guilt of having been in some way intimate with such a man. Ainsley, in contrast, seems relatively unaffected by the situation and even describes herself as “lucky” in comparison to her brother- she is at least five years younger than Malcolm and seems to remember little of her father, giving her a significant emotional disconnection from his crimes. In direct contrast to her brother, she can hold down a steady job, engage in close relationships, and doesn’t appear to be in any kind of therapy. Unlike her mother, she isn’t even shown to be self-medicating in any way - she simply does not seem to need such coping methods. 

This relative stability is a gift, one for which Jessica explicitly gives herself credit: “Do you sleep at night? ...When you close your eyes, do you find peace? That peace is because of the choices I made. You can thank me any time you like.”  (1x03)

And it’s a gift which, arguably, Ainsley squanders over the course of the first half of season 1. 

“I don’t remember my dad. I was forbidden.” In the first ten episodes of Prodigal Son, we get to see some of the time immediately before and after Martin’s arrest, all from either Malcolm’s or Jessica’s point of view. We see nothing at all of Ainsley, except for a brief shot of her being held by her mother during Martin’s arrest. Given that Ainsley was only five years old at the time, this is admittedly unsurprising. Her memories of that time, so far as we know, are limited to Malcolm’s reassurances (“I was only five when Dad was arrested, I don’t really remember it. But I remember you. Telling me everything was going to be okay when you knew it wasn’t.”, 1x01). 

But she would certainly remember what happened afterwards, in the twenty years between Martin’s arrest and the first episode of Prodigal Son. We do not know exactly how Malcolm and Ainsley grew up following Martin’s arrest, but we can make certain deductions. 

Malcolm, as the person who discovered Martin’s true identity, as the one who was clearly and obviously traumatised by the discovery, would likely have been the focus of Jessica’s attention - in the same way that any child in crisis would be. Jessica’s active concern for Malcolm continues into the present day, clearly signposted in the first episode: Malcolm: “I assume you don’t break into Ainsley’s place like this.” Jessica: “God, no! She’s perfect. You’re my only concern.”

Additionally, we know that Martin Whitly, perfectly understandably, becomes something of a ghost in his former home. All reminders of him are packed away - there are no photos of him, his private study in the basement is walled up and forgotten, leading Malcolm to hide certain reminders of happier times in a shoebox under his bed. We don’t know exactly how Jessica navigates this particular transition from well-to-do nuclear family to tabloid fodder - how she told Ainsley the truth about her father or, quite frankly, if she ever did explicitly. Did Martin become something which simply was not spoken of in polite company, or indeed any company at all? 

Ainsley’s choice of words in 1x03 (“I was forbidden”) suggests a harsher line than simple silence, potentially indicating that questions about Martin were not only frowned upon but actively discouraged. Martin Whitly, loving father, was gone for good; the Surgeon was all that remained, and the Surgeon was not to be discussed. As early as 1x03, Ainsley even says that she has no idea what being back in contact with Martin will do to her brother’s mental health because she has no knowledge of who or what Martin Whitly really is. 

Just like Malcolm and Jessica, Ainsley seems to be struggling with having a connection to a monster. Regardless of the fact that she doesn’t remember having a familial relationship with Martin, he is her biological father - and if her mother and brother can’t give her the answers that she needs about him, she’s going to go straight to the source instead. 

“Martin Whitly is your biggest fan.” Ainsley’s decision to meet with Martin in episode four is prompted, I would argue, by a combination of curiosity and, let’s be fair, the sort of spite that springs up when a controlling parent tells you not to do something - after all, she only goes to visit Martin after both her mother and her brother have done the same thing, all while maintaining that nobody should ever go and speak to the Surgeon. But I find it very interesting that she only makes the decision to visit him after her mother lets slip a brand new piece of information: 

Ainsley: Thanks to both of you, he doesn’t even know I exist.  Jessica: He knows all about you. He watches you every day. He daughter, the ace reporter. Martin Whitly is your biggest fan. 

This information, it should be noted, is only news to Ainsley. We, the audience, see Martin watching one of Ainsley’s broadcasts in 1x02; in episode 1x03, he asks Malcolm to “Please tell your sister that her diction is impeccable!” and, in the same episode, he compliments Jessica on her excellent childrearing (“You did well, Jessica. I am so proud of him, and of Ainsley, and of you, for raising our beautiful children.”). 

And, from my perspective, this information is also profoundly creepy. A convicted serial killer obsessively watches all of a homicide journalist’s broadcasts? That’s a two-parter of Criminal Minds right there. 

But to Ainsley it’s a link, a connection, to a part of her life which she has never really been allowed to engage with. The trauma of Martin Whitly is written large on her mother and brother, but her trauma is second-hand and reactionary, which is admittedly a great improvement on the alternative, but would Ainsley see it that way? All children want to do is feel like they belong, and being the one left out - even the one left out of trauma - is never pleasant. 

Now, through an offhand comment from her mother, Ainsley knows that her father is interested in her, and in her work - in direct contrast to her mother, who supports her work idly, never really watching her reports (“Not with the sound on!”, 1x01), who finally starts to tell her something real about her father and his opinion of her and then immediately tries to shut the conversation down (“Can we please talk about something else?”, 1x04).

And so Ainsley heads off to see her father for the first time in twenty years. 

“You made him out to be just a monster.” We, the audience, had a full two weeks to wait between seeing Ainsley in Martin’s cell and hearing anything of the conversation that they shared, which was genuinely one of the most infuriating cliff-hangers I’ve seen for a while. 

The meeting with Martin undoubtedly rattles Ainsley, albeit not in the way she expected. As Jessica points out, Ainsley went to that cell to meet a monster, and instead found a seemingly loving father (1x06). A man who regretted his absences in his daughter’s life and had filled the gaps with daydreams of “birthdays, piano recitals, dancing with [her] at the debutante ball” (1x06), daydreams in which, judging by the fantasies shared with Ainsley, he plays the starring role of Devoted Father. This conversation could have been repeated between any father-daughter duo separated in television plotlines around the world - the cause of that separation is so overlooked by Martin’s little fantasy to be actually hilarious. 

And, by this point in the series, we’ve seen both Malcolm and Jessica be taken in by Martin’s acts, not to mention all the people that Martin had fooled during his days as an active serial killer, so it’s hardly surprising that Ainsley is at least a little taken in as well. The split between Martin-the-father and Martin-the-serial-killer is also one that has preoccupied Jessica and Malcolm throughout the twenty-years and it’s one that Ainsley, through her lack of memories about Martin, has been spared up until the moment she comes face to face with him, and asks him the “most important question”: ” “Was it real? … Did you love us or was it just some psychopathic act?”

The surviving members of the Whitly family may never really know the answer to that question - and it’s a question which has no easy answers. Which would truly be worse - being an unwilling cover story for a monster, or genuinely being loved by a monster? 

But, for Ainsley, the question is no longer about what her relationship with Martin was; it’s about what it could be - or, more precisely, about what it could do for her.   

“Ambition is not a dirty word.”  The decision to interview Martin is one which, full disclosure, makes perfect sense from a professional point of view; an interview with a notorious serial killer, particularly one who had never spoken publicly about his crimes before, would be a feather in the cap of any crime journalist. She is also arguably the best choice to conduct such an interview from a creepy mercenary perspective - her familial relationship to the Surgeon gives the interview a sensationalist angle which would be impossible for any other network to easily duplicate - and, unlike the rest of her family, Ainsley has not yet been traumatised by Martin Whitly. 

Of course, it's the ‘yet' in that last sentence that has Jessica and Malcolm so worried about Ainsley - her visiting Martin might be less immediately damaging that Malcolm or Jessica coming face to face with their own personal demon, but it's still very unlikely to be healthy. 

Interestingly, Malcolm's concerns about the interview seem to be extremely focused on Ainsley's immediate personal safety ("You’re putting yourself in his cross hairs"), and his reaction on learning that she's already seen Martin is to ask if she is okay. Jessica, as the only member of the family who really remembers the immediate media aftermath of Martin's arrest, becomes far more focused on the potential PR concerns: 

Jessica: Ainsley, if you do not have a plan to make him look bad, he will look good. Tell me you understand. Ainsley: Mother, these are the questions I sent. Not the questions I’m going to ask.  Jessica: Alright. I see what you’re doing.  Ainsley: Good. Can you stop worrying?  Jessica: I am far more worried now.  Ainsley: What? Why?  Jessica: Thinking you are more clever than Martin Whitley, that’s the worst mistake you can make. He’ll exploit that. He’ll find a way to come off sympathetic and you will be sitting there like-  Ainsley: Like what?  Jessica: His accomplice. 

Jessica, as we learn later in the season, was herself questioned by the police about her role in Martin's crimes, and I am sure that the media speculation around the Wife of the Surgeon would have been horrific and heartbreaking. She clearly does not want Ainsley to put herself through the same thing - and she certainly does not want Martin to have any opportunity to manipulate the wider population, as he has so easily manipulated his own family in the past. 

This is not to say that Jessica has no concern for Ainsley's safety - her immediate reaction to the potential interview is to get the entire thing blacklisted by the network itself. It's only when Ainsley reveals a willingness to outplay her mother at that particular chess game that she relents - not to give her blessing, but to step back and allow Ainsley the dignity of her own choices. 

And, potentially, Ainsley does take some of her mother's fears seriously - she insists on keeping Martin in his restraints during the interview, despite technical concerns from Jin the Cameraman, and she makes sure that the red safety line on the cell floor is in shot. She even refuses Hair and Makeup the chance to make Martin look anymore physically presentable before the interview begins.  

The interview itself, however, does not go exactly as Ainsley had clearly wanted it to - first, Martin neatly sidesteps her attempts to throw past crimes in his face, then her brother interrupts with police business, then her cameraman gets stabbed. All in all, hardly a good day at the office.

The interplay between Martin and Ainsley hashes out the timeless question of what really makes a person - Ainsley focuses on the lives her took, complete with grisly details ("Billy Franklin, age 23. Aced his LSATs, wanted to become a civil rights lawyer. You removed his heart to see how long he could live without it. He died a gruesome, agonising death. My question is why?", 1x07), Martin fights backs with the lives he saved ("How about Corey Goldstein, age 10? A brutal car accident left him with a surely fatal aortic rupture. Until he landed in my OR, where I saved his life.") and the medical procedures he developed ("Did you know they named a medical procedure after me? ...I’ve heard a rumour that doctors still call it the Whitley, in hospitals all around the world", 1x07). 

It's a far more complicated portrayal of evil that Ainsley had prepared for - she has no good response prepared for the accusation that Martin did some good in the world, unlike her pithy retorts about particular victims and what Martin did to them. We don't get the chance to see if Ainsley would have been able to retake control of the interview, given Malcolm's interruption, as his arrival gives Ainsley a very different line of attack - the only line of attack, it must be said, that ever seems to really rattle Martin. Ainsley is the only character in the first part of season 1 to really get under Martin's skin - but she can only do it by using her own brother as bait: 

Ainsley: So. I mentioned a number of your victims earlier, but I’d like to discuss one more. Malcolm. Malcolm Whitly.  Martin: I’m not sure I understand Ainsley: You claim to care about your son, but what you did twenty years ago harmed him irreparably.  Martin: Well, that’s not true.  Ainsley: Isn’t it? He’s been diagnosed with complex PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder, night terrors. Dr Whitley, do you know what happens to the human body when it withstands that much stress for that long a period of time?  Martin: I’m not sure that’s relevant-  Ainsley: He was fired from the only job he was ever good at. He hasn’t been in a stable relationship for years. And the ten years he went without seeing you were by far the happiest, healthiest of his life.  Martin: Well, that’s absolutely not- Ainsley: What does that say about you, except for you’re an absolutely terrible father?  Martin: I’m not.  Ainsley: He just wanted to love you. And you caused him so much pain.  Martin: Stop it.  Ainsley: What kind of a father does that?  Martin: Stop it! I was a good father, damn it! 

This interaction goes on to form a crucial part of the interview - Martin's loss of control is featured in the introduction to the actual broadcast (as seen in 1x10) - and it was not at all discussed with Malcolm beforehand. We, the audience, are not entirely clear on how much information Martin had about his son's condition prior to Ainsley’s disclosure- he would have known some things, noticed symptoms such as the hand tremor, but that is still potentially miles away from Malcolm's having his mental health history spelt out like that in front of Martin and, potentially, in front of everyone who watched Ainsley's interview. 

It's a successful and potentially satisfying manipulation of Martin, to be sure, but it's also a heart-wrenching violation of Malcolm, and Ainsley never seems to notice. 

In a matter of hours, Ainsley double-downs on the notion of violating the privacy of others when she films Martin perform surgery on Jin the Cameraman, stabbed in the patient-uprising which Martin himself engineered. We never get to see Malcolm's reaction to his violation - he doesn't seem to challenge Ainsley on it directly in any way - but Jin does (1x08). Jin, when he wakes in the hospital to find that Ainsley filmed the surgery and didn't tell him about it, has a very simple and understandably reaction. 

Jin: What is this? You filmed my surgery? Ainsley: I was going to tell you. I just- I- I- I got so caught up in the adrenaline and it was so compelling- Jin: Oh, was it? Was it compelling when I almost died?  Ainsley: We went there to get a great story and we got one. I was doing my job!  Jin: I understand. This is who you are. I just don’t think that’s the kind of person that I want to be with. 

And Ainsley doesn’t try to apologise to her boyfriend, or try to explain herself any further - she leaves Jin in the hospital, taking the interview footage with her instead. 

“I’m telling my story!” The interview, despite the various dramas around it all, is eventually broadcast. Thanks to Jessica’s well-thrown shoe (seriously), we never get to see the interview in its entirety (which is a great shame, seeing as we only see Ainsley get a few minutes of usable footage in 1x07), but we do get to see the introduction: “Dr Martin Whitley murdered 23 people as the Surgeon, making him one of the world’s most deadly serial killers. I’m Ainsley Whitley for American Direct News and the Surgeon is my father.” 

The clips that we see include Martin's lose of control at being called a terrible father, which strongly implies that at least some of the section concerning Malcolm was kept in; we have no idea if the footage of Jin was used, although I'm assuming that he would have had to give permission for his own surgery to be shown on national television and, given his reaction in the hospital to the footage, I'm equally comfortable assuming that he would not have given such permission. 

While Malcolm tries to watch the interview, possibly to support his sister, possibly to torture himself futher, Jessica is adament that she will not. Her initial plan seems to have been to pretend that it never happened; she only speaks to Ainsley about it when Ainsley pushes past her joking “no comment” to challenge Jessica on her perceived lack of support for her daughter's professional accomplishment. 

This pushes Jessica to have perhaps the most genuine and honest conversation with her daughter about Martin and their past which they had ever had (1x10):  Jessica: Your father destroyed us. Your brother and me. You put him on television and let him talk about it. You have gone and soaked yourself in blood. The press devoured us twenty years ago, and now they are at it again.

This information is given calmly, perhaps even dispassionately: for Jessica, the destruction of herself and her son is a simple matter of fact. Not to be spoken of, of course, but ever-present and utterly undeniable. She does not even become angry until Ainsley accuses her of "playing the victim": "I am not a victim! But there are victims. Real ones. How do you think those twenty-three families feel when they see you on television? And why is the story never about them?"

The story is not about them, of course, because for Ainsley, the story is currently about her. Ainsley's newfound 'ownership' over the Surgeon story is clearly spelled out in the interview's introduction ("the Surgeon is my father"), her reaction to the paparazzi outside her mother's home ("Any breaking news about my family is mine to report") and, finally, in her retort to Jessica's challenges over the entire interview: "I'm telling my story!"

But, as we've discussed earlier, Ainsley doesn't actually have a story with the Surgeon. In the real-crime biography of Martin Whitley, she's a footnote at best. Jessica, who married a monster, Malcolm, who unveiled a monster, the twenty-three or more people who died at the Surgeon's hands, the hundreds of people, including Jin, who had their lives saved by the Surgeon, they all have a story with the Surgeon. Ainsley simply does not. And in her attempts to create one during the first half of season 1, she only really gets anywhere when she uses the stories of others - her casual retelling of the horrific things the victims went through, her reveal of Malcolm's mental health diagnoses, her filming Jin's surgery.

Ainsley’s lack of personal connection to the Surgeon was her greatest asset in a very broken family at the beginning of the series; her attempt to create such a narrative when none organically existed has been the cause of pain for plenty of people other than herself. 

All that remains to be seen is how this narrative - either genuine or manufactured - continues to develop in the second half of season 1. 

[themachiavellianpig]

Lake Ridden: Quality Puzzles and Puzzling Ghosts Galore

Lake Ridden, a first-person puzzle game created by Midnight Hub, invites you to solve the mysteries of an abandoned estate in the hopes of discovering what has happened to your sister, Sofia, who has vanished from your sisterly camping trip. Along the way, you pass through some suitably creepy locations with some surprisingly soothing music and gather as many clues as you can.  

The game labels itself as a supernatural puzzle game, with the latter elements being somewhat stronger than the former. The game itself is very clear that it is not a horror game - you have the ability to run and crouch, but there is never even the slightest need to run and hide. The supernatural element comes through whatever ruined the estate and turned all the inhabitants into ghosts a century earlier - and it seems to exist largely in order to justify the inclusion of certain puzzles and the exclusion of any other visual characters, given that we are never really given any concrete answers as to what plagued the estate, turned huge numbers of people into ghosts or stole our sister. 

However, I do greatly appreciate a game which will let me brute-force the final number of a combination lock and then have a little ghost-girl call me out for cheating. 

The supernatural element did also allow for the inclusion of far more creative puzzles than would otherwise have been feasible, although the inclusion of a surprisingly-benevolent mad gentleman inventor in the estate’s history needed accounted for the rest. Each section of the game comes with a few ‘feature’ puzzles, several of which required actual note-taking on my part to solve, and a scattering of repeated puzzle-boxes and rotating locks which got steadily trickier as I made my way through the estate.  

The porting to Xbox seems to have gone smoothly - there was one moment in which the game glitched and crashed in my playthrough, but a generous approach to auto-saving made this far less stressful than it could have been. The dialogue is all helpfully subtitled, which even change depending on the speaker, although the subtitles themselves are hard to read in places - especially when there’s small white letters with a faint grey outline on an entirely white background. 

Ultimately, Lake Ridden succeeded at the most crucial part of its mission - the puzzles. The storyline, although somewhat thin in places, was plenty enough to keep me moving through the estate, and the setting and music made it a perfectly pleasant way to spend a few hours. 

Now I just need to find some more puzzle games to get this need to solve all the things under control… 

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 10: Merry Christmas with the Whitleys

Episode 10 of Prodigal Son, and Malcolm really honestly tries to follow orders. For at least a whole minute. Promise. Meanwhile, Ainsley and Jessica have an honest conversation, and Gil tries desperately to juggle the Whitley’s never-ending nonsense. 

As always, full review and spoilers galore below. 

The episode begins with the highlights of Ainsley’s interview with Martin, which Malcolm is watching as some sort of self-inflicted penance. Ainsley included the footage of Martin absolutely losing it at the accusation of being a bad father; it’s less clear whether or not she used the footage in which she outlines her brother’s personal mental health diagnoses to boost her own ratings. 

The appearance of Jessica in Malcolm’s apartment is heralded by her shoe going through Malcolm’s television - seems she’s about as happy with Ainsley’s interview as I am. Her main worry, though, is the Girl in the Box - more specifically, the way in which she and a whole lot of well-meaning adults told young Malcolm over and over again that his memories could not be trusted. The revelation that Malcolm was chloroformed by his father is another blow to an already unsteady woman; the idea that Martin had, at the very least, been a good father seems to have meant more to Jessica than we might have earlier realised. But of course, how else could you rationalise inadvertently raising children with a monster? By believing that the monster only really happened to other people. 

Malcolm gets called away to a crime scene in a busy hotel, everybody but our hardworking detectives in full Christmas mode. The crime of the week includes a dead high-ranking police officer and a prostitute in a hotel room in an apparent murder-suicide. Given the way that such episodes go, it’s hardly surprising that Malcolm deduces that it wasn’t a murder-suicide in less than a minute. 

It’s more surprising that everyone in the room just lets Malcolm wave around a loaded gun, including pointing it at his own chest and head and even cocks the damn thing before anyone calls him out on it. Good gun discipline is needed, especially when you don’t want a double homicide to become a triple. 

Special Agent Colette Swanson makes a grand entrance, taking over the conference room, throwing Malcolm’s new lack-of-job-title in his face, and then accusing him of misogyny-through-profiling before claiming Dani for her team. She comes across as staggeringly unlikable in this scene - a bit of a disappointing choice, to be honest, given that it would likely have been far more interesting to watch Malcolm and the team hand over the case to someone who wasn’t instantly the bad-guy. 

Malcolm, meanwhile, consoles himself with a box full of Turner’s old cases, trying to find someone who hated him enough to murder a bystander to get to him. He finds a photo of Owen Shannon (played by Sean Pertwee), a detective who had borderline harassed little Malcolm after the arrest of Martin. Shannon doesn’t seem to have calmed down at all in the intervening years, answering his door with a loaded gun pointed at their heads. 

Shannon, it turns out, is massively jealous of the fact that Gil arrested the Surgeon, the man who Shannon had been hunting, and doesn’t have a huge amount of time for Gil, Malcolm or their accusations that he should be the prime suspect in Turner’s death. He’s far more concerned about Emily, the young woman in the hotel room - who couldn’t have been hired by Turner, given that the man was apparently gay. 

In a brief interlude, Colette continues to have issues around Malcolm, so self-evident that they could probably be seen from space, and can definitely be seen by her colleagues - even the usually professional Dani accuses her of coming here to bury Bright rather than catch the Junkyard Killer. 

Jessica comes to speak with Gil, desperate to identify the Girl in the Box and find her body so that Martin will finally go away for good - I’m not sure why one more body would take away Martin’s freedom to have visitors or give interviews or consultations, but Jessica is convinced. Not convinced enough to sway Gil, who wants to save her from the case which is already destroying Malcolm, and so who can really blame Jessica for nosing through his files and stealing a photograph of the Girl in the Box’s bracelet. 

Dani and Malcolm have a sweet moment, in which they commiserate about their respective cases and Malcolm opens up a little about his difficulties with Eve - although saying “screwed up” instead of “nearly attacked her with a knife during an intense hallucination” is a hell of understatement even by Malcolm’s generous standards. Dani insistence that Malcolm isn’t beyond fixing is pretty gosh-darned optimistic at this point, but goodness knows that boy needs all the encouragement he can get at this point. 

Ainsley goes to Jessica’s for Christmas and they finally talk about the interview - harsh words are exchanged, especially when Jessica accuses Ainsley of throwing not just their family but the families of all of Martin’s “real victims” back into the media storm purely to serve her own ambition. Ainsley’s claim of retaking control of the narrative of the Surgeon seems a flimsy defence at best - especially when she takes off immediately afterwards, reclaiming the bottle of rosé she’d brought with her for dinner. 

Malcolm gets waylaid on his way to this fun family dinner by Shannon, complete with creepy flashbacks to Shannon’s attempts to get little Malcolm to confess to helping his father with the murders. Malcolm opens up a little - Shannon was right, there was another person involved, but Malcolm can’t find him without help. Shannon offers some help in exchange, in the form of Turner’s private stash of information. 

Gil and JT, left to their own devices, have managed to do some actual proper policework and have tracked down the Madame of Caged Bird, Emily’s “matchmaking” service. She admits to sending Emily to trap Turner in a compromising position, in an attempt to stop Turner coming after the Caged Bird business. 

Turner’s private stash is so private that I genuinely thought that Shannon was going to try and torture Malcolm for information in an isolated storage shed; fortunately, that doesn’t happen and instead they discover that Turner was investigating the Junkyard Killer, complete with all of Shannon’s old files. Despite Shannon’s belief that Turner gave up on him and the case, just like everyone else, Malcolm points out that Turner must have been trying to help - to prove that Shannon was right, that the Surgeon wasn’t working alone. 

They find Shannon’s old list of suspects - useless at the time, but with the new information that Martin met his accomplice at a specific hospital, they managed to whittle down the list to a single name: John Watkins. 

And now they do maybe the stupidest thing that Malcolm has ever done, and I’m included the earlier incident with a loaded gun - he goes to the last known address of a serial killer without telling Gil what the address is, even when Gil calls to ask him where he is. Seriously, Malcolm, backup is a wonderful thing and needs to be far more than a drunken cop with an unregistered firearm. 

Award for Most Awkward Moment this week goes to Gil, who has to go and admit to Colette that not only have Malcolm accidentally been working on the case that he was repeatedly ordered to leave alone, but that he had no idea where Malcolm is. If someone doesn’t LoJack Malcolm in the second half of this season, I will be most surprised. 

At the house, Malcolm and Shannon find Matilda, the Junkyard Killer’s blind grandmother. After Malcolm’s glee at being inside the childhood home of a serial killer (the apparent “Holy Grail” for profilers”, he starts trying to gently unravel John’s childhood - in between trying to escape being force-fed microwave ready-meals by the woman who raised a serial killer. Matilda quickly hits all the buttons Malcolm was probably looking for - she writes off her own daughter as a sinner, a filthy whore who chose heroin over her family, thus giving us a neat one-sentence summary of the beginning of John Watkins’ messianic mission of “salvation” for addicts and other such “sinners”. The only missing components were given when John’s grandfather died - crushed underneath a car right in front of the young John - and when someone installed a lock on John’s cupboard, complete with metal restraints and claw-marks inside it. Where John himself was punished a child, or where he kept his first victims? A flashback suggests the former, but who knows?

Malcolm returns to the table to find Shannon’s throat slit and blood pooling into the ready-meals; Matilda called John and is utterly unconcerned by the dead man at her table, as “Johnny takes out the trash!”. Malcolm grabs Shannon’s gun and goes outside to be smacked down by John, at last revealed to be being played by Michael Raymond-James with a most impressive beard, who Malcolm finally remembers as the other man on the camping trip. With the promise that “they’ll never find us where we’re going”, he drags Malcolm off into the dark for one long mid-season hiatus. 

Finally, trapped in her own home by ambitious paparazzi, Jessica finally decides to try directing the narrative herself. She steps out of her house to give a statement, showing the photo of the bracelet and begging for help to identify the Girl in the Box - complete with a million dollar reward for any real information. 

As far as mid-season finales go, Silent Night was a strong contender, yanking the ongoing plot of the Junkyard Killer onwards to the reveal of John Watkins, leaving us on an acceptable cliffhanger for the second half of the season. I can guess the bare-bones outline of episode 11, but am still interested to see these characters moving forwards - and, in a era of endless crime dramas, the characters are all we’re really here for. 

The only thing missing was Dr Tanaka and her delightfully inappropriate flirting, but I suppose they had to save something for the mid-season premiere. 

Other Prodigal Son Reviews are available here. 

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 9: Normal Is Just Too Weird

Episode nine of Prodigal Son, and Malcolm is possibly even worse at normal than he thought he was going to be. 

As always, full review and spoilers galore below. 

This week, we get to see Malcolm deal with his removal from the Junkyard Killer Case - there’s no direct interaction with the FBI, who’ve taken over, but the consequences of their actions are clearly playing merry hell with Malcolm’s subconscious. 

The dream sequence, in which the Girl in the Box does her best Samara from The Ring impression and then stabs Malcolm with his own 17th Century very expensive Japanese katana, was delightfully creepy, as well as giving us another excellent excuse to talk to Malcolm’s favourite therapist. 

She’s apparently rather into dream analysis and zeroes in on the, um, penetrative aspect of the dream, gently suggesting that Malcolm’s subconscious is not so much processing trauma as protesting poor working conditions - specifically the lack of food, sleep and sex. 

Malcolm: “It’s a little Freudian, but I’ll go with it.” Dr Therapist: “Not everything's about your father.” 

And as Malcolm goes on his way, of course with the customary post-therapy lollipop, he bumps into Eve, who thoughtfully asks after Jessica (“no longer armed, still a little dangerous”, what a way to talk about your mother, Malcolm) and then agrees to a date with Malcolm. It’s really quite hard to tell which of the two is more surprised that Malcolm has actually asked, but it’s a sweet moment all the same. (It also allows Jessica to freak out about a good thing, for once, more on that later).

So the cuteness is immediately followed by murder. 

The case of the week involves a dead man in someone else’s bed, a dissatisfied wife who’s hiding way more than her smoking habit from her husband, and an honest-to-God sex club, because why the heck not at this point. 

The initial crime scene was delightfully complicated by the arrival of the man they thought was dead, but the entire set up of the crime of the week was completely swept aside in my mind in favour of the revelations that JT has a wife, that Edrisa has been to a cuddle party and that Malcolm, in between being summoned to a crime scene and actually arriving at the crime scene, has already told Gil about asking Eve on a date. Plus, Malcolm’s immediate and entirely understandable look of pain when realising that he’d let slip about the date to Jessica. 

The two plots then unfold more or less concurrently - unravelling a top-secret sex club and unravelling ‘normal’ dating, and there is absolutely no surprises as to which one Malcolm seems to find easier. 

The crime of the week devolves into the expected tale of love, jealousy and revenge; given the set-up, it was never going to be about tax breaks, was it? 

Caleb, the victim of the week, is quickly revealed to be the lover of Beth - the owner of the apartment where Caleb died, but not the woman who slept with him shortly before his death. She confesses to having met Caleb as part of a high-society sex club which, crucially, made abundant use of their members’ property for private rendezvous, meaning that any number of people may have had access to the crime scene. 

So it’s up to Malcolm, an independently wealthy criminal consultant with a very nice apartment, to infiltrate the club. And, of course, he knows a guy. 

I fully was not expecting that guy to be Nico, the man whose hand Malcolm cut off way back in episode 1, and who is absolutely not ready to see his saviour/mutilator walk into his very classy I’m sure sex shop. 

Poor Nico. 

Nico gets Malcolm to Simone, the second-in-command of the sex club, who has a very good attempt at taking Malcolm for a spin before the team intervenes. As a former lawyer, she’s very clear that she hasn’t broken the law - it’s a sex club, not a business, and so the only rules it breaks are cultural. She even shuts down the accusation of being too calm with a brilliant, biting remark: “I’m devastated, but that’s not for you to see.” 

Simone points the team back towards Beth’s actual husband. The did-he/didn’t-he regarding the jilted husband would normally be fairly dull in this sort of episode, but it did allow for one of Malcolm’s patented “inappropriate ways to interact with members of the public”, when he turned up at a children’s playground and started loudly talking about sex clubs in front of the dean of a fancy prep school to try and intimidate a potential witness. 

Seriously, how many complaints about Malcolm does the NYPD have to deal with? 

The truth behind the sex-club is far more interesting; the illusive Jasper St George is revealed to be Charles Garner, a tech genius suffering from ALS, who used his algorithmic know-how to create a perfect playground for his wife to get the companionship he could no longer give her. 

As far as reasons to start a sex-club go, it’s fairly convincing. 

Unfortunately, the algorithms weren’t enough to weed out unstable or aggressive personalities, hence the jealousy-fuelled murders: Beth had broken the club’s rule of no attachments and fallen for Caleb, then been unable to cope when he didn’t want to be exclusive. Having killed Caleb out of jealousy, then Charles/Jasper to try and cover it up, Beth has a decent go at killing Simone as well before Malcolm talks her down. 

In our other plotline of the week, Malcolm fails a little bit at dating. Having successfully dodged his mother’s attempts to get him to take Eve to the opera in a private helicopter while wearing a brand-new tailored suit, he then gatecrashes JT’s date with his wife playing pool. Eve turns out to be very good at pool, even when she’s overdressed, and we get a chance to meet Tally, JT’s wife. 

Unfortunately, after a little prodding from Tally, Malcolm agrees to profile Eve and presses a little too hard on the kind of emotional scars that might lead someone to work against human trafficking. Not the best move for a first date. 

Given a little time, though, Eve comes back to Malcolm and they apologise to each other - Malcolm for what he saw and said, Eve for pushing him into saying it. Unsurprising, this mutual forgiveness leads to certain other boundaries being crossed, and we get the traditional fade to black. 

The subsequent reveal that Malcolm, in addition to having sex with Eve, also managed to sleep with her (actually sleep), given that he told Dani earlier in the season that he’d never managed to do that with anyone. Of course, this potentially very sweet start to a relationship is completely ruined when the nightmare/hallucination of the Girl in the Box reappears to taunt Malcolm some more - leading to him getting dangerously close to Eve with a kitchen knife. 

Finally, Jessica confronts Gil about whatever’s been tormenting Malcolm recently - and Gil reveals that the team now has evidence that the Girl in the Box was real, not just a figment of Malcolm’s imagination, and that the Junkyard Killer gave them her bracelet as proof of, well, death more than life, I suppose. And Jessica, although initially thrown, sets off, clearly determined to do something for once, rather than just waiting for Martin to do something to her or her family again.   

Previous Prodigal Son reviews available here.

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 8: What to do with Dante?

Episode 8 of The Walking Dead, and what to do with Dante? 

Full review and boatloads of spoilers below.

We kick off this week’s episode with a look at Dante’s journey thus-far - his recruitment as Chief Spy for the Whisperers, his induction into Alexandria and his nefarious deeds while within the safety of the walls. There’s nothing particularly shocking - him being responsible for the ‘Silence the Whispers’ graffiti was a nice touch, and we might get a small hint as to why Dante doesn’t care that Lydia is still alive - it’s possible that he doesn’t know the story about Alpha killing Lydia for the good of the pack, so there might be less of the outright betrayal that we saw from Beta and Gamma when they discovered the truth.  

With the past safely behind us, we move to the immediate aftermath of Dante’s shocking betrayal last week - a dead Siddiq on the floor, and a worried Rosita at the door. Dante’s attempt to brush off her concerns goes badly from the start, given that Rosita has never been a fool, and then goes horribly awry when Siddiq - with some of the finest timing ever seen from the living dead - reanimates and starts growling away like mad. 

The following sequence worked brilliantly to establish clearly just how much of an utter bastard Dante is - even for the Whisperers, letting a baby be eaten by her own father while her mother watches is pretty awful. I was deeply, deeply pleased when Rosita turned the tables and started beating him into the ground as he so richly deserved. 

With Dante safely restrained in the cell (shout-out to Morgan for building the damn thing way back when), Alexandria indulges in some undeserved “how could this have happened?” 

Because your entry procedures following the bold appearance of a new threat are criminally lacking, that’s why. 

The same thought seems to occur to Gabriel, who spends a little time obsessively watching Dante’s entry interview and then goes back to see the man himself. I have to say, I was expecting a certain amount of Alexandrian handwringing over what to do with Dante and I was expecting to be annoyed by all of it, so I was pleasantly surprised by his swift execution. 

I was not expecting that execution to be at the hands of Father Gabriel, immediately after he sermonised on the nature of undeserved second chances, but I’m sort of here for it. I am definitely here for the way in which Rosita stood literally and metaphorically shoulder-to-shoulder with him at Dante’s cremation. It’s another nice reminder of the way in which this season of The Walking Dead has done away with at least some of the unnecessary drama in favour of respectful acceptance when someone makes the hard decisions. 

Elsewhere, Michonne and Judith continue to make their way to Oceanside. At Luke’s suggestion, they stop at a library in search of more books for Judith - and also so Luke could scavenge more sheet-music. Rachmaninov is a hell of thing to cry-laugh over, I’ll admit, but it was pretty adorable. 

So, of course, a couple of walkers come along to ruin it. 

(Really, Luke? All these years in the Land of the Dead and you don’t check your corners properly when entering a new space? Connie is clearly the brains of your group, don’t even lie.)

Fortunately, Luke is saved from having his face bitten off by a strange man, hence referred to as Library Man, who saves our hapless music teacher and then legs it. Luke, for the record, does finally get his priorities in order, first asking the man’s name, then just bellowing “Thank you!” after his retreating form. Manners still matter, guys. 

The library trip is cut short but the news of Siddiq’s death, which sends Michonne and co hastening off to Oceanside to warn them of possible Whisperer infiltration. The possibility of more Dantes is put aside when Library Man reappears, having tried and failed to steal one of Oceanside’s boats. 

Luke, to his credit, tries to vouch for the man, but it takes far more than one act of altruism to win over this unfriendly crowd. The situation is nicely complicated by a walker attack, which likely does nothing to convince anyone that the man isn’t a Whisperer, and then we get to see little Judith Grimes hamstringing a guy. 

“Good girl,” according to Michonne. Library Man is less convinced when he wakes up to find his leg stitched and Judith reading a book he had in his bag, although he is genuinely more upset by the book than by the stabbing, given that the book is intended for his own daughter, part of the family he’s trying to get home to. 

While talking with Michonne, Vergil, as he turns out to be called, hits just enough buttons to make her reconsider her previous sceptical stance, and even to agree a tentative deal; she helps him return to the naval base he calls home, and she can take some of the weapons to help in the fight against Alpha. 

The decision to trust Vergil reminded me, oddly enough, of Gabriel’s earlier point about second chances - sometimes we get them, despite not deserving them. Even though nothing in Michonne’s behaviour up to that point would have made her seem trustworthy, Vergil still makes a choice to trust her. Sometimes, we get second chances. 

Meanwhile, Gamma’s apparently made up her mind to betray Alpha, hoping to leverage the information to see her nephew, Adam, the baby abandoned at Hilltop. Aaron’s steadfast refusal to risk a child for unconfirmed information was a solid choice and an interesting moment of principle - how easy would it have been to lie, to promise everything, and then string Gamma along with half-baked reassurances and delay tactics until all information could be wringed out of her? 

Maybe that honesty was appealing after all Alpha’s lies, because Gamma apparently gave up the holding location for the horde, and a group of literally almost all of my favourite remaining characters heads out to cause some trouble. 

(Sidenote: What the hell was the plan if this group had actually found a horde big enough to wipe out Alexandria? Sneak away and hope to find it again later? Maybe such a group could hold against a horde in the right setting, somewhere with traps and strong walls at their backs, but in the open?)

Along the way, Carol and Daryl find time for another blunt conversation; Daryl accuses Carol of never coming back from the boat, of being like a ghost, and finally begs her not to let Alpha take her future, on top of everything else. 

But, of course, it’s not that simple. Carol’s lost a lot since the world fell apart - and, for the first time, she has an actual person to blame for it. Sophia, Lizzie and Mika all died, but none of them left behind a murderer who taunted Carol with her failings. 

The group fails to find the horde where Gamma said it would be so, at Daryl’s insistence, they move off to try and find Lydia instead, despite Carol’s claim that she doesn’t want to be found. Instead, they find Alpha, and Carol takes off running. 

Daryl and the group follow, because of course they do, and they follow Alpha-then-Carol into a small cave - with a false floor that falls out beneath them, dumping them in the middle of a cavern filled with all those walkers they were so desperate to find earlier.

And that’s where they’re going to stay until February. Whoops.   

Previous Walking Dead recaps available here.

[themachiavellianpig]

The Walking Dead, Episode 7: More than One Way to Wear a Mask

Episode 7 of The Walking Dead: Aaron tries to make a new friend, Carol threatens a man with bread and jam and, holy hell in a hand basket, I didn’t see all of this coming. 

As always, full review and spoilers below. 

The episode kicks off with our clear reminder that Alexandria and Siddiq are both Not Doing Well; Alexandria continues to be in the grip of some nasty illness, spreading fast through the citizens, and Siddiq continues to struggle with traumatic flashbacks and even hallucinations of Alpha standing outside his clinic. 

Meanwhile, outside of the walls, Aaron’s thankfully managed to set aside his earlier prickliness in favour of the world’s most awkward lunch dates with Gamma; the decision somewhere along the line to skip the early stages of this was an excellent one, as it allows us to jump right to Gamma criticising Aaron’s choice of lunch. 

Once upon a time, Aaron was Alexandria’s recruiter, which meant a decent amount of being good with people. We haven’t seen this side of Aaron for a long time, but it was out in full force in his conversations with Gamma; the use of little Gracie’s picture to start a conversation about children and siblings was a cute little bit of emotional manipulation. At one point, Aaron seemingly puts all his cards on the table, claiming that there’s no point in the two of them trying to tease out tactical information from the other, so why not just be civil? 

Seemingly a nice gesture, of course, but also one which makes a great deal of sense given that the Whisperers may not have the particular kind of tactical knowledge to give away - they don’t have walls to break or wells to poison, they don’t have crops to burn or citizens to terrify. But by sharing personal information, Aaron forces Gamma to see the Alexandrians as people, not just as enemies. 

We also get another nice little reminder of the tentative peace Gamma has forged for herself; her outright denial of any siblings, when she’s still seeing her sister being torn apart by walkers, comes across more as a lie she’s telling to herself than a lie she’s trying to get Aaron to believe. Her theft of Gracie’s picture aside, she’s obviously trying very hard to stick to the morals of a good Whisperer - but even this level of control isn’t enough for Alpha, who reassures Gamma and then viciously canes her in the same breath. 

Aaron’s tactic of trying to kick-start humanity in the Whisperers is also being followed in Alexandria, where Carol tries to get her captured Whisperer to talk through judicious application of jam to fresh-baked bread. The unnamed Whisperer is moved almost to tears by the baked goods, but it isn’t enough to get him to do anything other than literally spit in Carol’s face. 

So then there’s a little bit of torture, with the added bonus of Daryl stopping Carol from going too far only to pull out his own knife nad threaten to cut off the man’s fingers. It takes all sorts in the apocalypse, I guess. 

Finger-cutting goes off the board the second the Whisperer tells them that they’re wasting their time; he knows that Alpha truly loves him because she killed Lydia to keep the Whisperers safe. 

This is a weakness of epic proportions and Carol is on it, immediately going to get Lydia to wave triumphantly in the Whisperer’s face. (Sidenote, I am fully on Team “No, Leave Lydia Be”)

The questions of “how much torture is, morally speaking, too much torture?” and “can we ask a vulnerable young woman to put herself in danger for our benefit?” were, however, interrupted by the untimely death of the Whisperer in question - apparently due to a medical mishap by Dante, who weakly protests that he didn’t check the bottles properly because Siddiq packed the bag. 

Amazing, this declaration apparently requires no further investigation by any of the Alexandrians and the two medics who may or may not have poisoned a man, either on purpose or accidentally, are allowed to continue to go about their business. 

Their business, of course, being the plague that’s sweeping Alexandria. Throughout the episode, we’re treated to various montages of Siddiq tending to the weak and fevered - along with enough meaningful panning shots over water in every possible container that I was almost screaming at the screen. 

Like, I know we’re all still adapting to this brave new world, but surely someone is checking the water supply? Especially when some sort of ailment is sweeping through parts of the community which have nothing in common with each except for the water system? 

Fortunately, Siddiq does seem to figure this out before the end of the episode, although a little bit of surprisingly clunky editing made it a little unclear whether Siddiq actually clarified his assumptions about the water-system or whether he just trashed the water-system in a fit of manly rage. Because, if he didn’t share those concerns with a whole lot of people before the closing credits, Alexandria may well be royally screwed. 

And we all know why: Dante, you little traitor. We’ll get back to you in a moment. 

Firstly, I have to give credit where it’s due - the very sweet scenes between Rosita and Siddiq throughout the episode made me suspect that Rosita was going to die, not Siddiq, so his brutal murder at the end of the episode was genuinely a surprise. And, given Avi Nash’s stellar acting in both the comic scenes (“Your other other man?”) and the tragic ones (“People that I love died right in front of me, and now I get to watch it over and over and over.”), I am going to miss this character as we move forwards. 

Secondly, Dante turns out to be a Whisperer spy. What the heck. While I wouldn’t normally accept flashbacks from traumatised men as definitive proof, his subequent murder of Siddiq really put all of those concerns to rest. It’s also an odd choice, given the idea shown by Aaron, Carol and Lydia - the idea that Alexandria itself is enough to show the Whisperers that they don’t have to live like that. Dante’s been living in luxury with the enemy for all of this season and his commitment to the Whisperers was still strong enough to poison a community full of people he knew - full of people who were going to come to him for help when they got sick. His commitment is strong enough to kill possibly his closest friend in Alexandria, all while sounding suitably wracked with guilt.  

Plus, why doesn’t Dante care that Lydia’s alive? 

The Whisperer in the cell presumably would have cared, or else his poisoning was just some damn fine timing before Lydia was revealed. Gamma certainly cared when she saw Lydia at the border. Even Beta cared, for reasons best known to Beta. So why doesn’t Dante? Alpha’s proof of devotion to her people has been almost entirely reliant on Lydia’s death, so what’s her real hold over Dante? 

And, speaking of Lydia, the poor kid has finally had enough of all this nonsense and legs it over the border to Whisperer territory once she realised that Carol’s been using her. Admittedly, she’s had such a rough time in Alexandria that such a move makes a certain amount of sense, or at least as much sense as any decision made by a distraught young person does. 

But if she goes back to her mother, I am going to be so, so disappointed. 

Previous Season 10 Reviews here.

[themachiavellianpig]

Fractured Minds: Beautiful Representation of Difficult Things

Fractured Minds is the short but beautiful creation of Emily Mitchell. Through six levels, players are invited to explore themes surrounding mental health, including depression, isolation and anxiety, all of which are handled with quiet dignity and a wonderfully engaging art-style.

Despite the inclusion of instructions on how to run, this is not a game which requires such quick-movement. Each level has a distinct design, from a cosy sitting room to a crowded city street; the puzzles needed to proceed are simple, which works to keep the player’s attention on the atmosphere, rather than the ins-and-outs of a particular solution.

And it’s in the atmospheres that Fractured Minds really does its best work. Emily Mitchell created the game in response to her own struggles with anxiety (as discussed here) and she uses each level to explore a different aspect of those experiences, from the use of game-text to mimic intrusive thoughts, to the sudden shift from bright and sunny to dark and stormy. Particular mention must go to Chapter 4 (‘Paranoia’), which replicated my own feelings of anxiety so well that I was genuinely a little creeped out. 

Throughout the game, the player encounters the same dark shadow monster with a smiley face mask so out of place that it’s almost funny; its reappearances, somehow unexpected and yet unsurprising at the same time, works well as a metaphor for the ups and downs of mental health, especially when it appears in one level to quite literally pull the plug on all my progress - a feeling which I’m sure will be familiar to a great many people other than just myself. 

All in all, this little game is well-worth the time of anyone who picks it up; by illustrating the feelings and consequences of such mental health conditions in such an engaging way, Emily Mitchell reassures us that we are not alone in dealing with such matters.  

Fractured Minds is currently available on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, with a portion of the profits going to Safe in Our World, a mental health charity with a focus on the gaming industry.