My Cultural Life - Lang May Yer Lum Reek

What's Up?

It's Wednesday (as I write this). It feels like a Sunday. Every day since Christmas Eve has felt like Sunday and the week of Sundays will come to an end tomorrow, when we'll have another Sunday to get over it and then it will be the weekend. 

I don't do anything. I need a hobby.

My days consist of (in no particular order) cooking, playing on-line golf, watching TV in the evening after 7 and usually until about 10ish. Walking the dogs, surfing the internet, and then I start to have to think about what I do. There are days when I'll write a lot more than I do on other days and while a lot of what I write ends up being deleted or tucked away to maybe be looked at again, if I live long enough, I like writing, like some people like riding a bike. Writing is a mental exercise, not everything I write needs to be for an audience.

Oddly enough, I actually spend far too much time editing or writing pub quizzes. I have another at the end of the week, then four weeks before the next. I have completed - 98.5% approved - useable quizzes written until April, with folders in the pub quiz master folder for music rounds, including mp3 files, to be loaded onto my phone, which I use as a digital jukebox at the local pub. When I say 'digital jukebox' we are talking about my music taste so it might not be to everyone's taste, but I only use it on quiz nights and it's possibly better than listening to me.

Obviously writing plays a big part in my existence. I don't think I'd ever thought about it as a percentage of my waking existence but it is and a sizeable wad of what I do write is a diary of the shite I watch on television - a cultural chunk of life to anyone who stumbles across this blog in 30 years time just before deleting it to make room for more AI - which will assimilate this blog and all my thoughts, meaning I will live on forever, like an actual ghost...

Anyhow, writing blogs, making notes, from status updates to simply jotting something down on a pad, which is never more than a few feet away from me, that is what my life revolves around now without anything to show for it at the end. Well, I say nothing, but that isn't strictly true. Anything that gives us pleasure by whatever means is good and if it doesn't cost anything, even better. One of my friends will be thinking about wanking about now. That's not illegal, yet.

Boring Things

So, The Guardian hasn't reviewed the finale of Stranger Things (yet). The newspaper has been all over the Duffer brothers long and sprawling TV show for almost a decade, but the finale lands and in the newspaper - nada. Not a mention (yet). It's almost like they're hoping everyone forgets about it and talks about something else by the water cooler on Monday when this long and laborious Festive season finally ends... Perhaps the absence of a review is an admission by the newspaper - maybe by everyone - that Stranger Things ended up being an absolute load of whelk testicles.

It was on for almost two hours, but that included a 45 minute epilogue set 18 months after the end of the story, giving the cast the chance to look a little like they really do. Oh and wow, what an epilogue it was. Almost every sinew in my body was just wishing it would end, maybe end on a real downer, just to fuck everyone off. Instead, we got the token death, the almost complete void that was Wynona Ryder - who if nothing else overused an axe when everything was almost over. I have to admit by the time we got almost an hour into this I really couldn't remember anything about why or how we got here, only that I had the unshakeable feeling that I'd just had almost a decade of my life pissed on by a couple of hack filmmakers who will - I guarantee - have a string of failures before probably ending up directing the 9th reboot of the Toxic Avenger with Gaten Matarazzo as the eponymous Avenger, with little or no makeup or special effects.

Stranger Things is over. Rejoice. Rejoice. What an absolute load of whelk bollocks. 

Zombie Apocalypse

It's been a few years since I last watched World War Z, the big budget zombie thriller with an A list cast. The thing about walking dead films is do you go for creepy or do you go for frightening, because you either have weird or you have psychopathic you don't have anywhere in between. 28 Days Later was the film that took the 'virus sufferers' and made them relentlessly hostile and after that film we've had TV series and dozens of takes on the zombie apocalypse. What makes WWZ different isn't much; it ramps up the relentless and it's more vicious than I thought, but it is still just a zombie movie and will never be anything but a zombie movie, with Brad Pitt. 6/10

Goodbye Ted?

The Christmas special of Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing felt more like an epitaph for the aging dog called 'Ted' (which isn't his real name). I half expected to see a remembrance for the old dog given the number of Ted montages the show included. I expect Ted is going to retire, which would require the show to find 50% of its content all over again. The special was nothing special. It was clearly filmed in late summer, possibly September, but given how shite that month was everywhere, I suspect it was probably filmed in August. It looked very warm. Fish were caught. Laughs were had.

Modern Nostalgia

George Clooney doesn't appear to make many films now and when he does they tend to feel like George Clooney films. Jay Kelly is a George Clooney film. Some people have suggested this Noah Baumbach sort of fictional biopic of a Hollywood legend is Oscar material, but in reality this is far too boring for the Academy Awards and George Clooney is far too much like George Clooney. In this fictional world Baumbach has created Jay Kelly is the equivalent of George Clooney; maybe a little more meta and with some changes. He is the go to actor; the A list's A lister. He is an industry; his staff are a well-oiled machine and order is Jay Kelly's watch word. One day he realises that he's been a bit of a shit for a long time and has an existential crisis. The end. 5/10

Time Crap

We watched a film called Time Trap. It was made in 2017. A man finds a cave and inside the cave is a strange place where time goes at a much slower pace. Some of the man's friends go searching for him. They all get trapped in the time trap. The time outside the cave is travelling forward thousands of years while the people in the cave age by just seconds. Some cavemen appear. Then a giant alien. There's a space station. The earth is ruined. Something saves the day. None of it makes any sense. 2/10

Nobody's Fault Lines

I was suffering on New Year's Day. I had a hangover and sat and stared at the TV for most of the day. For nearly two hours I watched Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in San Andreas, essentially a remake of Earthquake. It was unbelievable; The Rock flies helicopters down ravines; he flies them until they blow up; then he finds a plane to fly, but not before stealing some looters' hot wheels. After the plane is dumped into the Pacific, he finds a boat to attack a tsunami with and then finds a needle in a haystack, performs a miracle, wins his wife back and he probably would have found a cure for cancer had someone left some test tubes lying around. It was ideal for a hungover NYD. 3/10

More Bollocks

I think I'm beginning to see where this season of Fallout is going. The wife's problem is she can't. She doesn't think enough happens and that it's a bit too on the crazy side of Mad Max. I can see that, because it does have some zany humour and not a lot happens. I can't get over how Walton Goggins' career has taken off in the last couple of years; this was a supporting actor who played sleaze balls and crooks; he wasn't a good advert. Now here he is leading this show, turning up in stuff like The White Lotus; he's almost an A Lister. I want to like this show, but it's a tough ask, especially with Ella Purnell who, it seems, her character has learned nothing and is somehow still alive, or maybe that's the joke that keeps on giving but isn't very funny.

What's Up Next?

Blimey. Is that it? It's Friday 2nd January as I type this and if I didn't know for sure that it was Friday, I'd question it. Frankly, if I hadn't been hungover on NYD I probably wouldn't have watched The Rock film and this blog would have been even thinner on the content.

What can we all expect for next week? Well, we might start watching The Night Manager (but we might wait until we have them all in the can) and there will be more Fallout. Then it gets a wee bit pot luck. It's the first full week of January, you expect more, you get disappointed. Wait and see. 

The X-Men Re-Assessed

The X-Men is likely to be the next BIG thing in the MCU once we get all this current Doctor Doom nonsense out of the way. This got me thinking about Marvel's mutants and what Disney needs to do to get them to work in the 25th century...

I started by re-reading old X-Men comics and re-evaluating all the years when reading comics was the most important thing in my life. The X-Men is a comic I became synonymous with in the 1990s; not only did I produce a popular fanzine about them, I was friends with the editor, two of the writers, often wrote reviews about the comics (and the labyrinthine continuity) and even got a job at Marvel writing the history of mutants for Marvel UK.

Yet, if you were to look at the shelf over my shoulder, which contains the last remnants of my 'comic book collection' you would not see a mutant comic there, in fact I've often thought about this, considering I was such an X-fanatic I couldn't think of a single issue that I could imagine wanting to keep and this led to me wondering why I was so intrinsically linked to this series of comic books. The wife suggested it had more to do with my collector's mentality than any actual love I had for the comics and I don't think she's far off. When you consider the vast array of Marvel comics mutants, my favourite characters were a [non-mutant] dragon, a drunken super-powered buffoon also not a mutant and ... and... very little else. I actually found the X-Men titles far too restrained; the prejudice never felt like real prejudice, especially when you had minority races with mutant powers who might also be gay or trans or all at once. Racism was paid lip service, very much in the 80s and 90s. 

I jumped into he comics after 'The Death of Phoenix' and I would work my way up until The Uncanny X-Men and the X-Men became two different comics - or the point where it simply got too stupid or I'd lost the will to live. The thing is by the time Marvel Comics exploded in the early 1990s, spawning many books and concepts, most of the output was stylised already, bullshit that was too stupid or pointless to follow - even things regarded as classics have not aged well. But, don't let that cloud anything...

I'm no longer sure why I liked comics and I wonder an awful lot about my friends who still like them. Maybe in 2025 the comic book is a far more sophisticated (and expensive thing) than it was? But in the 1990s millions of copies of comics flooded a market that couldn't handle it, even if the comics had been any good, but most of them were all absolute shite, with bad dialogue, poor plotting and full of overwrought angst. 

The issues I re-read followed the soap opera path that had catapulted The X-Men into being Marvel's best selling comic. This was a family unit comic and half of every issue was dialogue driven, story-based with 'lives' for each mutant. In 2025, these stories, plotting and delivery now look old, plodding, dated and cheesy, at best. Even the 'classic' death of Jean Grey is anything but classic (and given how no one dies forever in comics, also quite pointless). It feels as though we were all caught up in this hype but no one sat down and actually critiqued the comics - because the only people reviewing comics were comics fans - therefore there was no objective criticism of the medium and everyone loves what they review (or they wouldn't buy it). 

The further down this rabbit hole I fell, the harder it was getting to follow. The X-Men - at their height - got involved in so much bollocks it's difficult looking back and understanding how this could be such a successful comic. The artwork was mostly average, the plotting lurches all over the place like it was written by a drunk with amnesia; huge swathes of subplot were simply forgotten about; ongoing stories abandoned (probably due to editorial interference and the need for more and more crossovers with other comics) and it still suffered from the worst thing of all, dialogue that if you said it out loud made you sound like a proper cunt. The Marvel Comics 'way' was that you had to treat every issue like it was someone's first, which meant we were reminded with metronomic regularity that Wolverine was the best at what he does, that he has an adamantium skeleton and his history is long and convoluted, or that Storm was the Goddess of the weather, or a street fighter or an orphan or from Egypt ad nauseum. If I had to be reminded one more time that Cyclops needed to wear special ruby lensed glasses either in dialogue or in thought bubbles I think I would have screamed. I'd hazard a guess and say that 15% of all X-Men comics have a subliminal recap or explainer written into it, this is probably the single biggest reason why reading them now - as a kind of box set - is as painful and laborious as having teeth pulled.

Comics are rubbish. I know there's going to be loads of people who disagree with me and as many saying, "But, you have to read #### because it's a work of genius," yet even classics from the 70s, 80s and 90s now read like superficially written snapshots of someone trying to drag comics into maturity and failing miserably. Try reading Watchmen now by speaking all the dialogue and you will understand why comics are just ephemeral shite to be read and thrown away. It is probably why superhero films have bottomed out, because when you strip everything away, superhero comics are about people who dress up to fight other people who dress up, either for a bit of money or for world domination and if a villain ever achieved world domination, just what would they do with it if they were in charge of it? Wander round being evil? Even the concept doesn't stand up.

I spent nearly 30 years of my life reading, writing and earning money from comics and yet when I fell out of love with them it wasn't a long and drawn out break up. It was a case of me looking at comics and thinking 'I don't know what I saw in you'. 

The sad thing about rereading all those X-Men comics was when I reached an issue that I had fond memories of, because of an artist or particular story, I found myself even more disappointed - like seeing an old relationship partner and wondering what you saw in them. 

Along my journey into my past, whenever I reached a 'crucial' point in Mutant History, I'd dip my toe into rereading issues of the myriad other Marvel Mutant comics, to ensure that I didn't miss anything I might have needed to know and for the benefit of completing stories that only finished in other comics. This proved to be even more wrenching, because it made me realise that every mutant comic available suffered from the same problem - overwrought, unrelenting shit dialogue and a kind of interesting idea badly executed - essentially the same book with different characters and relative scales of peril... And then the stories got really convoluted and with so many mutants to deal with even more subplots and ideas (many of which got left along the way), and Wolverine appearing in more comics than there are months in a year - simultaneously - I'd sit here, mouth agape, thinking of all the drugs I could have spent my money on had I never found comic books.

One of the things that set the X-Men apart from other comics and could well be one of the underlying reasons why it has been popular was the calibre of artists working on the book. Historically, in the 1960s, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams and Jim Steranko had stints on the comic and furthered their careers because of them. John Byrne had been the first dynamic 'popular' artist to handle the 1970s team, he was followed by Paul Smith, John Romita Jr - son of one of the original Bullpen at Marvel in the early 1960s - Alan Davis, Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee. The artist of the X-Men was usually the most current artist du jour. You can cover up a lot of shit things with pretty pictures and the X-Men became synonymous with covering over its cracks with pretty pictures.

An example of why any X-Men film or TV show needs time to create itself organically; one of artist John Romita's early issues was the Uncanny X-Men #200 special edition featuring the trial of Magneto - a former bad guy turned good - and it seemed to be a turning point for the comic. As a standalone, this is the kind of comics story that film could adapt really well; comics (and films) like redemption arcs. The problem was it needed 30 odd years of history to get to this point. You could not make this story into a film without there being a few before it, that were good enough to have allowed us to get to the point where a film would work given the amount of time that has to pass from Magneto being a 'nasty man' to him leading the X-Men. 

An even bigger problem and one that Fox's X films struggled with at times are characters who are telepathic, telekinetic or used their minds to move, bend or destroy things. Twisting your hands in the air, or having a slightly constipated look while special effects does all the heavy lifting is one thing, but if you want your audience to believe in your genetic mutations it's got to feel as feasible as Tony Stark learning to be Iron Man before he became a hero. Some mutants look fantastic, but most of your heavy hitters - your super mutants - do stuff with their minds and that doesn't look too good.

Reading the comics again was actually a little depressing because they are not good and by today's standards... well, I don't know what they're like compared to current mutant comics, but they were simplistic, with dialogue that allowed you to get from one plot to another and while I know they were limited by page count and people buy superhero comics for action, but when people talked you wanted to hear their voices in your head... 

The original MCU used updated versions of classic Marvel comics; they took it slow and did enough to maintain interest; the X-Universe needs to be given that time too. Re-start small, concentrate on quality and then there are some stories that need to be told, with good writers and directors.

It is going to be interesting to see what Disney and the MCU do with the X-Universe. For starters, the X-Men comics aren't as popular as they were. It does have a lot of history and this should be the opportunity to build something with that history rather than bludgeon people with a new history. The problem is time is a massively valuable commodity and you'd have to be some patient and chilled investor to give Disney that again, given how superhero films are no longer the Midas touch they once were.

All indications are that once the Avengers stuff is over, we will have a drastically different, rebooted MCU and that will be to help accommodate mutants into it without the inevitable continuity questions being asked by fans who have nothing better to do. This means the X-Men could be given time to develop. Whatever happens, the honest thing to say is I hope they don't use the comics history as a template; yes, some of the stories work, but in general it was a badly-written, poorly-scripted load of nonsense with no distinct narrative... 

The only thing Marvel/Disney has to ensure is that an X-Men film is good - this solves most problems. 

My Cultural Life - What Day Is It?

So, This is Christmas?

It's probably just me, but as we get older and Christmases come round faster every year, I really couldn't give a flying fuck about this festive season. No, it's not nice for bad shit to happen to people at Christmas, but, you know, let's put it into perspective here. It's not nice for bad shit to happen period! There is no good time. If bad shit happens in the summer, the blow isn't softened by our ability to function in minimal clothing.

When I say I don't give a flying fuck about Christmas, I should put that into some context. I don't have children. I have dogs and my dogs think every day is Christmas. Dogs are vessels of untainted joy; if ever a creature understood the fact that we're just electrical impulses masquerading as individuals and when the spark stops, so do we, it's a dog. Carpe diem, or something like that. 

It's like Valentine's Day, ennit? What a load of old fucking bobbins that is. 'Hey, it's annual remind your other half that you love them day!' I don't need a fucking excuse to tell my wife I love her; she knows I do and I tell her often enough. What it really is is a company that creates a market for a product they sell. Oh God, I haven't got my wife a Valentine's Day card she'll think I don't love her any more and suspect there's a problem in our marriage unless I add a bunch of roses to this Moonpig order. 

We are capitalist animals; the cows and sheep, maybe even wombats, thrown at the planet to feed the monster that is called Profit. Maybe I'm not so much because I don't tend to spend much money and what I do is rarely further than eight miles from where I'm typing this blog entry, unless it involves a delivery driver. So when I say we are all capitalist animals, what I'm saying is you are all capitalist animals, I'm more benign hanger on.  

The thing is, it's the 23rd and I still haven't wrapped her presents and I bought them in October. This is something I should prioritise.

... And Then it isn't Anymore

I am known for not being a Christmas kind of guy and to be fair, I have transmitted an general air of disgruntlement at the festive season. I realised what it was that changed in me a long time ago, but that kind of realisation doesn't always guarantee a changed view or perspective of something. Christmas is for kids, ostensibly. I people who would argue with that, but the reality is Christmas, like most 'seasonal festivals' is pretty much made for children and if you can look past the rampant consumerism, most festive pleasure arrives via a young person and if you haven't got children then that general enjoyment is absent.

I also just fucking hate Christmas. It's almost on a DNA level now and it's because it really only is for 24 hours. Because Capitalism doesn't really do spiritual 'festivals', not for more than 12 hours at best, Christmas isn't and never was the Twelve Days of Christmas. In fact, all that song did to me when I was a kid was think what a bunch of bourgeoisie cunts the people in the song must have been, flaunting their wealth, when all I got was some crappy Hot Wheels loop-de-loop game that I got bored of before it was fully out of its wrapping paper. Plus, in what reality is someone going to get a full 12 days off  full of joyous shit happening? So this picture I was fed as a child of Christmases all looking like Hollywoodland and hyper real and the reality of the world never looking as good as the ones on TV struggled to sit side by side and the cynical miserabilist that writes a weekly blog and occasionally vlogs from the beach has felt like way since about 1970. 

I also went through a phase of being disappointed that Christmas wasn't about a celebration of Jesus Christ, someone I have believed in for about 3 weeks of my entire life. One of the things that made me feel less ambivalent about Christmas was hearing stories about people doing good shit for the 25th. Giving up the time no one would blame you for giving up to make sure that someone else, even a miserable cunt like me, is happy. It happens all the time and has done for as long as Christmas has existed and much longer than that.

My happiest Christmases that I can remember happened in the mid-noughties when I worked in a homeless hostel for the YMCA. The centre's cook was not working over Christmas and I was not on the rota to work. Several of our younger kids - 16, 17 and first Christmas away from their families - had asked me if I would work so they could be guaranteed a good Christmas dinner and when the rota came out and the person who was on duty you would have had trouble trusting with an egg and a pan of hot water... I said to my boss that I'd come in between 10am and 12 noon. I'd basically cook Christmas dinner for 16 residents, two members of staff and other things to guarantee they all had a 'family' Christmas.

I'd never had to work on the 25th before. I don't know what I thought might happen to me if I did, but Christmas 2003 was a memorable one for me. When I got home, the wife said I was just beaming and buzzing on what a good time I'd had, being Christmassy for other people and enjoying doing it.

Christmas is most definitely a day (or a week) for doing something that makes someone else's life better. I know we can choose to or not to make decisions like this at any point in the year; good will unto all men shouldn't be confined to a week at the end of the year, but actually, doing it now really is a great feeling. You know, in the past, where you did something for someone and there was a look on the other person's face; the one you knew was the most naked of thanks or warm wishes or happiness aimed towards you, well it ain't wrong to feel that way and it's most definitely not wrong to do stuff, during a period where people can be really lonely despite being in a room full of people, that brightens the darkness inside people we have no idea about.

It might have been Hollywood painting a picture about Christmas being a special time, but that was because it should be seen as a special time, not one governed by excess and how much money you've spent. 

Things Can Only Get Better

Now, I really don't believe that when the Duffer Brothers were casting their net far and wide for their four bicycle riders of the apocalypse; the heroes of their magnum opus, Stranger Things, that the young weedy one who gets kidnapped by the bad demon man has to end up being gay. I think Noah Schapp - who plays gay Will Byers - blames himself for all the bad things that have happened, but equally his gayness makes him the key in defeating Vecna and saving the world from collapsing in on itself and destroying existence.

I fucking shit you not. This is all because Will doesn't like girls in a stiff winkle kind of way. The US army are bad guys, the demons and nasty creatures are also bad guys, but none of this would have happened if Will had just knocked one out while thinking about Nancy Wheeler's flesh coloured lemon. I mean, that isn't all that happened, but it was the most lucid and easily to follow bits. There was a scene where baby Wheeler, who is a different actor than the two girls who played her last time, and Max, who has but hasn't been in a coma for 18 months, are agonising over saving their lives while running away from danger, where they could have sat down at a picnic table, had a coffee and some cake, had a pedicure and maybe dreamt of something really boring. We have to escape, so lets stand around and reminisce about bullshit until our escape goes wrong. Who fucking writes this shit? Really? Three hour long episodes to get to the point where all of them get in a van and head off for the final showdown. It's been the longest televisual foreplay since the end of the porn film industry.

One of the things about the cod science they use in this is that it's only slightly less fucking loopy than the cod philosophy that gets wheeled out whenever one of the main cast characters is facing imminent death. There was lots of crying, wringing of hands and teenagers shooting trained army personal with high powered automatic weapons with an ease only equalled by the amount of wankiness on screen at any singular moment. You wonder how them Duffers are going to end all of this neatly with the New Year's finale unless that's about 12 hours long. The Duffer Brothers are absolute cunts. Make no mistake. 

Oy Vey

My paternal grandmother was a lapsed Jew... Now, if you were Jewish, that would be the start of a joke. My dad was a little like his mum with his humour and a lot of that humour was Jewish. I think it comes with the territory, or at least it once did. The entire 'point' of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel [I'm sorry, I can't write it as the Americanisation it calls itself] is to reproduce that wholesome, comedy Jewishness that pervaded entertainment between the 1930s and the early 1970s. Despite fewer than 3% of the entire population of the USA being Jewish. But there was a period where television made it look like everyone lived next door to a Jewish family and they were all Groucho Marx. This TV show reproduces that so well, yet manages to have an adult story going on against this backdrop of comedy Jewish family dramady. 

The thing about the first season is how it arrives at the end and you're puzzled about how you got there. Rachel Brosnahan is extremely Lucile Ball mixed with Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr. She is breezy and disposable as a character but when she's on stage she turns into a beast. Alex Borstein as Susie - Midge's manager - is not dissimilar to a character a female Danny DeVito might have played, while the supporting cast of Maisels and Wisemans just adds to this impression every one in the USA lived this comedy Jewish existence. What makes it work is there's an adult story going on behind all of this 2025 aping 1965; it's like a 1950s wholesome family comedy where half the cast say fuck all the time.

The New Top Gear?

Watching bits of old Top Gear episodes recently made me yearn for that kind of television again. I know there are a lot of people who couldn't stand Top Gear, but sometimes, it scratched an itch other TV couldn't. While you could make an argument that there were many presenters of Top Gear who made good TV, most people would point at the former disgraced, TV show host and now beleaguered farmer and NHS cardiac out patient, the short one from Birmingham who was always crashing cars and the slow posh one the other two took the piss out of and remember that the most fondly...

The thing is, I'm a fan of the slow posh one and I think he might have come up with a 2025 version of Top Gear. One without cars, with little or no insulting and with James May as the main presenter holding it all together. I say this all because of James May's Shed Load of Ideas, which teams the 62 year old May with his friends Sim Oakley and Tony 'the Tool' Bains, has that devil-may-care self-awareness that could turn it into a hit (when typing the previous line I wrote 'git' instead of hit). It's like 'What If Top Gear was more like How?' Throw in some beer, a slightly dull 'fixing my mate down the pub's toaster segment and the fact, in real life, James probably goes to his own pub, in Wiltshire, less often than he goes to Japan and you have a televisual winner. Seriously, some of the stupid stunts are stupid, but some of them will have you weeing yourself (and they can probably come up with a solution for that problem). It's paced perfectly for Top Gear fans now in their 60s, but with no cars or chest-beating or xenophobic comedy. 

Trailer Trash

I'm off to the pub again later, so I'm filling space... The first trailer - proper - for Avengers: Doomsday has dropped and I expect it would have been something of a shock to your average cinema goer. I've seen some speculation, but I don't tend to patronise gossip and rumour columns or stations, so if there was rumours of this I'm sure my geek-o-meter would have gone off. It's Captain America - Steve Rogers - in the 1950s with a baby and it's Chris Evans; last seen as a 120-year-old man handing over the mantle of Captain America to Sam Wilson, who possibly thinks he might be Captain America.

The trailer is not even 90 seconds of what could be a massive bit of obfuscation. For starters, Steve looks a bit AI, don'tcha think? Yes, it's him looking longingly at his paradoxical suit, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's got to put the duds back on. Holding a baby - his baby - who might be an adult now, might play a part. This could almost be Evans's cameo - his name wasn't included in the chairs bollocks because he's in it for three minutes and he's changing diapers in two of them. 

There is also another vitally important thing everyone needs to understand going into this film when it eventually is released [to the sound of money leaving Disney like shit from a cow] it's likely to be just shy of three hours. It needs to set the stage, nothing else, but it will need to be like Infinity War and be a great movie. This is a movie with so many people in it, some of them are not going to get more than a minute on screen.

For Disney to announce this a full year to go before it's released suggests to me that this is either a ham-fisted bit of PR or they have had to make some huge changes in the story to be able to shoo Rogers into it and if this is a thing what about Tony, um, Victor Von Doom? If we're getting 1950s Cap, why not get 2012 Tony Stark to help fight a guy who looks like him? For this to work it needs to have a good story; we know the directors are capable of delivering big, but this is going to need a story that feels like whatever it does there can only be one more film after it, but also it can't be all anti-climax.

What follows Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027 is anybody's guess; if you asked me to put my old comics column hat on and say what I think *might* happen, then I think the reason future films have become a topic that isn't discussed reflects the mood inside Disney and whether the MCU needs to have a more stringent economic outlook going forward. There is nothing on the horizon that feels nailed on other than the X-Men film and my gut feeling is Doomsday and Secret Wars are going to be the end of the MCU. By the end of 2027, the shared universe will become one single timeline with a new singular history.

Here's another idea, they've announced the recasting of all the X-Men, not who has been cast, just that there will be no returning actors to same roles. Maybe this is because Disney is going to allow Marvel to try and repeat what they did with the MCU with a new mutant universe. Make the X-Men film about the past; if they're going to have a new Charles Xavier and Erik Lensher, if these actors are in their 60s in 2025, then have realistic doppelgangers in the 1970s and 80s and have stories that make them worth wanting to see.  

The Fantastic Four film was not frightened to be different and MCU films rooted in the past have been huge successes. Maybe the new Marvel, after all these bombastic event films, will concentrate on quality over quantity.

One last thing. Marvel never told us about Chris Evans' return, we've not seen anything from the actual film and everything else is literally being fuelled by fan sites. Marvel is keeping this close to its chest. If Evans is back as a lead character, then what about Scarlett? Was Mark Ruffalo's name on one of those deckchairs? What about Jeremy Renner? Is Robert Downey Jr really playing Doc Doom? Could he be playing Tony Stark as well? Is Doomsday just going to be loads of superheroes dying on screen? Could Secret Wars just be going to feature the original Avengers? 

Where We Are

Regardless of the hype around this series, Pluribus has been an odd concoction of ideas and there's obviously a certain amount of luck regarding its success. Now that Carol has effectively become a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, it's up to Manousos to try and make her see the light and, naturally, the entire point of this series was to put Carol in exactly the position she had put the other 11 human beings in earlier on in this story cycle. So, other than failure and with an example of how giving up ones individuality for the hive mind really is as banal and not exciting as you would imagine it to be, this first season went nowhere at a reasonable preamble...

I have just got the feeling that the hivemind, which I believe will  have to attempt to protect itself if threatened, is going to evolve. There's got to be something like a subplot in the second season because it doesn't matter how good it is, you need a reason to be watching it. This isn't a celebrity fishing show and it doesn't have David Attenborough giving us a blow-by-blow account of the final days of individual man. 

I will say this; 2025 has been a year of false starts. The number of shows I've watched that have knocked it out of the park in the opening two episodes and ended up like a fart in a bath... I have gone from pondering whether Pluribus could be one of the greatest TV shows of all time to wondering how it's going to maintain my interest.

Wholly Underpants

"It dawned on me about half way through the first episode, this is that boring thing about idiots living in giant vaults underground..." The wife had remembered season one of Fallout and now might have condemned it to an early bath, in football parlance. Considering it's only been about a year since season one, everything seems far more convoluted and complicated now. Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell are still working their way across post-apocalyptic USA trying to track down Kyle MacLauchlan's bad guy father. I managed to stay awake through this one, but I'm struggling with it.  

What's Up Next?

Next week might be the time humanity discovers they're not alone in the universe. Equally we might have another week to suffer the company of each other while watching 'lesser creatures' be tortured by barbarians. I'm sure it will be a bundle of laughs. 

My Cultural Life - The Runs

What's Up?

The Epstein Files have been released. I said to the wife less than two weeks ago, "You watch, it'll be loads of redacted stuff and only half of them will be released." I actually said this; the wife would verify it if she could.

[He did - the wife]

Did people seriously believe that files would be released that could possibly incriminate many of the world's former and presently most powerful people? I mean, really? Did you not realise that they waited the full time possible to release them so they could put black lines through everything remotely incriminating, unless it involved people Donald Trump doesn't like or couldn't care less about?

Ornery folk ain't never gonna learn what's in them there files...

Run Like Hell

Edgar Wright's remake of The Running Man felt a little more like Stephen King's original story (but it has been over 40 years since I last read that, so...) and for most of the film's duration it was a very enjoyable, if slightly camp, adaptation. It was the last five minutes or so that let it down and this is weird, for two reasons. 1) Everything I've seen or heard about the movie suggests the ending lets it down and 2) I remember seeing the trailer for this about seven or eight months ago and something in that trailer was omitted from the final print. Now, that isn't unusual, lots of trailers use footage that doesn't make it, but this specific section of the trailer had Josh Brolin explaining to Glen Powell why he can't win the Running Man competition because of the financial hit his company would take. This made me think that Wright's vision of a media-run dystopian USA - quite a recurring theme in recent years - maybe had the ending changed because it wasn't as ... revolutionary as it ended up being.

Is it any good? Like I said, until the final ten minutes or so, it's a seat of your pants action thriller. Yes, there's elements of it that feel a little too like the Awkwafina/John Cena comedy from last year called Jackpot, which is essentially the same movie but played for laughs, but in general it's not bad. It could have done with being a little more serious at times, maybe a look at just how the Network manipulates and doctors stuff, or even just how much of the government it runs would have made the viewer realise what Powell's Ben Richards was truly up against. It was, in general, an interesting and mildly enjoyable way to spend a Saturday night, that otherwise would have been the pub had the weather not been so awful. 7/10

Holy Mystery, Benoit 

This is the third Benoit Blanc movie that Rian Johnson has made with Daniel Craig - who's almost made as many of these as he did James Bond films. I don't think they get any better, I just think they become more convoluted and longer. This story of a monsignor murdered by a member of his dwindling parish felt like a cross between fire and brimstone and hell hath no fury like a devotee scorned, wasn't that clever really, it's just dressed up that way to make Blanc seem more Sherlock Holmes than a Baker Street impostor. Because that is essentially what Johnson has created - a new Holmes or Poirot or Marples, but without their particular charms... 

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery puts Josh O'Connor's Jud Duplenticy in the centre circle as both prime suspect and obviously innocent victim. He's the new assistant priest sent wherever he had to go (but clearly England, despite being told it was New York State) to work with a senior figure in the church who was losing his congregation through his increasingly hostile sermons. The monsignor - played by Josh Brolin - upsets one of his faithful flock enough for them to kill him, but why? What secret did he hold? How could someone create a crime that seemed almost impossible to commit? This movie was two and a half hours long, it could have been an hour less and still packed the weak and feeble punch it delivered - especially as Josh O'Connor's character in a previous life was as a boxer. I just don't think these films are particularly good; that said they're relatively enjoyable without taxing you too much and never really too heavy. I expect we'll get another one of these for Christmas 2027 or 2028 and I will probably watch it. 5/10

It's Over

Jesus H Christ, there was one moment in the finale of It - Welcome to Derry which required you to suspend most of your free thinking abilities. I won't spoil it for all my readers who will ignore my warnings and still watch this heap of arse scrapings, but it needed added ghost to get the story over the line. This was fucking abysmal. This started brilliantly, but shot its (and It's) load inside the first two episodes, we all know the only way is down after that. It was never going come back - at least, not until next year. If that's the case, I'm not sure I can be persuaded to drink the Kool Aid next time. Pennywise is becoming the new Freddy or Jason...

Expletive Deleted

You will be hard pressed to see a better, more funnier movie this or any year than I Swear, the story of a Galashiels man's struggle with Tourette's Syndrome. John Davidson is quite well known to people around my age; he first came to prominence in the 1980s while trying to make people aware of Tourette's and how it affects his life. It is genuinely funny; Davidson - played quite brilliantly by Robert Aramayo - is the first person to admit it and from almost the opening minute, when he calls the queen a cunt, you know you are watching the story of a special man, who has overcome so much and now has been rewarded with an MBE for services to health and the Tourette's cause. Maxine Peake plays his mate's mum, a former mental health nurse, who can see that John is desperately unhappy, so takes him under her wing to bring the best in him out.

This is a phenomenal movie. It possibly rates as one of the best British made films I have seen this century; it might even be close to being one of the best films I've ever seen. It is a docudrama and is as much educational as it is emotional and also entertaining; it borders on tragic at times, but those moments are what makes it such a quality feature. I have seen three or four bloody brilliant movies in 2025, this might be the best one. 10/10

Laugh, I Almost Did

On Tuesday night, we started a new journey; one I didn't expect to be going on. On Tuesday night, we started watching The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, with Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, a woman who finds herself in the world of stand-up comedians and after spending four years trying to help her husband become one, she ends up being far more successful than he'd ever hoped... But I expect I'm getting ahead of myself; as opening episodes go I was not hooked, but I saw enough to make me want to watch some more. Given the ridiculously high rating it has on IMDB and the fact that I did laugh at the opener and was rather stunned by Brosnahan's boobs making a very unexpected appearance, during her first stand-up routine; I expect this is going to be an enjoyable 43 episodes of fun. I shall drop back into reviewing this, now and again.

Fall... Asleep?

I was really looking forward to season two of Fallout. I seemed to recall a slightly anarchic dystopian series, with crazy creatures and Mad Max-styled lunacy. So when we had a five minute 'Previously on Fallout' section at the front, I expected to have remembered a lot of it, but I didn't. After that some stuff happened but I can't really remember much; something about a dinosaur's mouth - not a real one - and Kyle What'sisface giving us a forgettable dialogue over a transmitter. It was just a bit meh and not at all as fun as I seemed to think it was (or others thought it would be)...

Free Will

Now that Carol has 'apologised' to the hive mind of humanity, everyone is moving back to Albuquerque and she doesn't feel so isolated. She's begins to form almost a relationship with Zosia and learns that the hive mind has its own individuality, but it's not really fooling her because she is still planning or at least that's how it seems. Pluribus has really just meandered for the last few weeks and this was without a doubt the meandering of the lot. All the media has been talking about this show for most of the last week; it's Apple TV+'s biggest hit apparently and it's got everybody talking. While I've not doubt this is the case, it really does need something to happen and as Manousos zeroes in on Carol, the hive mind of humanity seem unsure about what the future might hold. I haven't fallen out of love with this, but after eight episodes, five of those have been as illuminating as a computer screen picture reel. Nothing happens! Maybe we might get an episode where something happens that feels like an important step rather than the feeling we're having the piss taken out of us at times. Season finale next week; it needs a boost.

Sea Creature Feature

I'm not sure what is happening with The War Between the Land and the Sea because it's gone a bit wonky and logic seems to have taken a backseat. Sea Devil diplomat - Gugu Mbatha-Raw - has suddenly realised she loves Russell Tovey's Barclay and vice versa. Some humans try to blow up the fish people then make it sound like it was the fish people's fault and there's not a lot of war going on. I'm not sure this is going to get finished...

What's Up Next?

By the time you've sat down to read this next week Christmas will have been over a couple of days and there will be just one episode of bloody Stranger Things to go...

There's probably shit going on this coming week; I know I'm doing the pub's Christmas quiz on Sunday, so next week's effort might be even smaller than this. Whatever. 

My Cultural Life - To Rate or To Overrate

What's Up?

A bit of education you won't be interested in. Venezuela isn't the enemy it has been portrayed in the media for many years. Venezuela has been a country run by left wing governments for many years. This left wing government did not seize power in some coup, they were elected, continually, in fair and ratified elections. The problem for Venezuela is that it is extremely oil rich. It is one of the richest countries on the planet. 

The USA and the rest of the western civilisations don't like this. They like their oil rich countries to be run by right wing, authoritarian regimes that they have some control over. The scenes of thousands of people leaving Venezuela in recent years - heading for the Colombian or Brazilian borders - were not the poor and disaffected, they were the country's right wing; the already rich and people who were intent on stripping Venezuela of a government that put the people first. Keeping Venezuela in the news became difficult; we got many largely made up stories over the last decade, but when you have a country that uses its oil to improve the lives of many, the last thing you want to do is have news stories about how nice it is to live in a country that isn't run by corrupt right wing arseholes.

Venezuela has been a constant thorn in the side of the USA, as you can currently see at the moment, as the US targets anything coming out of the country and claims it is drug related. Venezuela doesn't have a drug problem and even if Colombian drug lords were using it as a port to ship their wares from - which they are not - it is no excuse for military action on levels never seen before when there was an actual war on drugs. Trump and the USA will do anything they can to get rid of the left wing government and put someone more 'accommodating' in power. That would mean the end of free health care, free schools and university, an end to house improvements, subsidized travel costs and lower crime rates.

The Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado is a right wing politician. She has been working in the interests of Venezuela's rich and right wing supporters; she has some following in her own country, but most of her fans are ex-pat Venezuelans who want to return to their country but not while the 'commies' are in control. The world doesn't really like left wing governments, it specially doesn't like them when they have something the USA wants. This is why Cuba is left alone, despite the tensions between it and the USA. Cuba doesn't have any oil or rare earth minerals and its cigars can be obtained through the right channels. 

The Maduro government will be overthrown and like other countries that have been 'rescued by democracy' - such as Iraq, Syria, Libya - Venezuela will no longer be talked about in the press and that's when the press should be focusing on it the most...

That 70s Movie

I cannot believe that I have gone 25 years without seeing this film. I cannot believe that I was never tempted by it, given the subject matter. Yet, here I am, sitting here reviewing a movie at 63 that I should have reviewed at 48, when I was still too old... Almost Famous is a fantastic thing, especially the Director's Cut, which added an extra 25 minutes to the running time. Even at two and a half hours it could have been twice as long and still it would have been excellent. This is Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical story about how he made it as a rock journalist, in the early 1970s, despite only being 15 years of age.

Patrick Fugit plays William Miller, who through good writing gets himself a gig accompanying an 'almost famous' rock band on the final leg of their US tour. Billy Crudup and Jason Lee play the band's two frontmen, the singer and the guitarist; while Kate Hudson plays one of their groupies, the adorable 'Penny Lane.' Frances McDormand plays William's crazy, new-old age non-hippy, mother and Zooey Deschanel his deeply angry sister, but everybody in this film is a star. It is a truly bitter-sweet story which examines the seedy side of a touring band trying to make it big. It's a road movie but also a coming of age fable and it has a great soundtrack. 9/10

Two ShIts

The first film was great, how can we improve on it? I know, let's make it longer; much longer. Make it a little quest thing; have lots more special effects and a bunch of annoying adults. It Chapter Two was all of that and more. Nearly three hours when it could have been an hour and a half. It just went on and on. It had none of the first films suspense or jeopardy; none of the humour or the pathos. It was just one long drawn out special effect. I thought the scenes with the Losers as kids were good because they were obviously filmed when the original movie was made, but some of the scenes were wrong - either they were things that didn't happen or no one bothered to check the continuity of the first feature. Yes, there are scenes that appear to set up the TV series (which, apparently had already been mooted when the first chapter came out), but I still don't expect that from a feature film, really; despite having nearly three hours to play with. All in all, it felt like an episode of Little Britain edited to look like a horror film... 5/10

Fear Is The Key

Oh just shoot me now... Andy Muschietti isn't quite a one-trick pony, but he's almost there. His original It was a really good movie, I personally enjoyed The Flash, despite many people hating it, but everything else has been... poor. It - Welcome to Derry is a perfect example of why he should consider moving into insurance sales or maybe yogurt pot production. The penultimate episode of this increasingly (or is that decreasingly) shite TV show looked at the disaster at the black servicemen's club and was one of the slowest small buildings to ever be consumed by a raging fire, ever. We're talking about a building the size of two garages, but it managed to take almost half the episode to burn it down, allowing most of the key characters to escape. 

The carnage has fed Pennywise enough, so he's off to sleep for another 27 years. While It heads for It's bed, Dick Halloran finally has a vision that's useful and the real reason for all of this bullshit is finally revealed and boy... is it a flimsy, poorly executed, plotting disaster, with a switchback 'surprise' that, to be fair, was unexpected, but really didn't do anything but make me roll my eyes and wish the fucking nonsense was finally over. It will be next week. If there's a season two I'm not sure I'm going anywhere near it.

Rough Einstein

It's been nearly 30 years since I last watched Good Will Hunting, so it was a little like the first time. The story of a boy genius who is also the most annoying belligerent shit ever to exist. Matt Damon - looking very young - is the eponymous Will Hunting, facing prison but able to solve mathematical problems that would stump Einstein. He is given the chance of redemption by Stellen Skarsgård, but must attempt to remain in therapy sessions once a week with Shaun Maguire - played by Robin Williams - despite finding them insufferable and way too personal. Throw Minnie Driver into the mix as his on/off clever girlfriend and - an even younger looking - Ben Affleck as his best friend Chuckie and you have a really solid film that actually feels a little dated, all apart from Williams, who was having a real superstar period when this came out. It's always going to be a solid 8/10. 

Never Again

Usually, if I watch the first episode of something and I think it's shite I rarely continue watching it. I might, sometimes, watch two, maybe three parts before condemning it to the scrap heap of shit programmes. With Down Cemetery Road, I pretty much nailed it after the first episode. I said it was a load of bollocks then but because the wife wanted to carry on, we did. I should have stopped. We both should have stopped, because by the end of the final part, even the wife was slagging it off. It was excrement of the stinkiest kind. A 1970s sitcom about government fuckery, the torture of innocent soldiers and the subsequent operation to have as many people disappeared as possible. It was without a sense of suspense. It had no jeopardy. It was badly acted. I doubt it will get a second season, but if it does, I will download the first part, burn it onto a DVD and then take a big shit on the top of said DVD before posting it to Emma Thompson.

The Accidental Diplomat

The Doctor Who spin-off series has arrived and The War Between the Land and the Sea was mildly entertaining. This is probably because it doesn't have the Doctor in it, but he was referenced at least once in the first part and I expect he will be mentioned again (he was, twice in part two). Russell Tovey plays a low level UNIT grunt, charged with sorting out transport for people far more important than himself, who mistakenly gets called to an incident involving a dead Sea Devil, killed by fishermen when it got trapped in a net. He's along to watch the professionals prevent an all-out war with our big fishy cousins until our big fishy cousins decide he needs to be the diplomat to discuss a peace treaty between humans and homo aqua [some idiot's name for them, not mine].

Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the head of the Sea Devil delegate - she looks like a hybrid human, while her companions look more fishy, some even codlike. I'm not sure where this is going to go; presumably humans will do something very stupid and start a war that only someone ill-equipped can stop. The first part definitely eels, sorry feels, like a Doctor Who thing, but equally it also feels less Doctor Who-ey. If that makes any sense...

Hey, I've watched enough shite to firmly declare that my jury is out on this one.

A Journey

We watched the first part of some Channel 4 programme where Sandi Toksvig travels from Marseille to the Italian border, along the French Riviera, by train. I like the Dane, but this was hard work and felt slightly pointless. I might be reaching celebrity travelogue burn out. I'm not sure I will watch any more...

A Jaysun Stayfum Movie

It's been a while since we last watched a Jaysun Stayfum film, so we remedied that by watching the generally meh Homefront, where the English action hero with a dodgy line in general acting plays a former DEA cop who retires after a drug bust goes a little bit ... actually, I'm not really sure why he retired, all I know is he was sporting a terrific mullet. Fast forward two years and he's moved to somewhere else in Louisiana with his 10-year-old daughter, we never knew about, a year after the wife we never knew he had died of something we never find out about. 

His daughter gets bullied by an arsehole at school so she deals with it by beating the bully up and somehow ends up starting a war between the beat up kid's arsehole mother - Kate Bosworth - and her family. It's standard Jaysun Stayfum fayre; he plays a one-man army with a gentle side who takes out a small platoon of wankers in extremely violent fashion. Head wanker is James Franco as a man who supposedly runs the drug business in the town Jaysun Stayfum has moved to, but spends a lot of time being an absolute twat. Winona Ryder - pre Stranger Things career revival - plays his girlfriend as a cheap ex hooker, while Clancy Brown plays the sheriff whose honesty and integrity seems all over the shop. Frank Grillo is also in it, but he doesn't last that long. 4/10 

The Age of Stupid

I'm sure most people have at some point in their Facebook (or TikTok) lives clicked on a Reel and watched some cute and very short video of a dog, a cat or something 'funny'. Reels are big business now, with dedicated 'studios' making 30+ second films on an industrial scale to gain a response from the growing number of complete and utter morons who inhabit the internet... Many of these reels are now AI generated, which really should make people understand that, at the moment, they have little to fear from AI if they have a working brain. I got fooled into looking at TWO AI generated reels, presumably designed to garner as much response in comments, likes and shares as possible. The first one was 'filmed' in a wildlife cameraman stylee, where there were two sheep, one standing on the bank of a raging river, the other standing static on a log in said 'raging' river. Along comes a male lion, who walks down the steep side of the riverbank and grabs the sheep, flips it onto his back and saves it from drowning before walking away leaving the two free dinners to go about eating grass. I'm not going to say anything about this, I will leave that up to you... 

The second reel features a woman throwing a cat out of her car, into a flooded curb side, where a box with the words 'KITTENS' is situated, full of giant baby cats. The next scene is of a truck driver with the caption, "If it hadn't been for this truck driver, the cats would have died!" Having seen more than enough, I clicked on the comments and was blown away by the number of people who thought the reel was real. Despite comments from sane people pointing out that all the cats were fucking gigantic, or that the 'mother cat' wasn't wet when it walked out of the deep water, or why the person filming it didn't save the cats, or any logical comment that essentially debunked this 40 seconds of exploitative nonsense; people didn't want to know. They didn't care that it was clearly a fake AI generated story; in fact many didn't believe it was fake. None of these cretins seemed to realise the 'story' was told cinematically, from a 3rd person POV.

We are doomed. You realise this, don't you? For every one of you raging about the AI takeover, there are mentally challenged people out there cheering on six fingered truck drivers saving abnormally large kittens from fake floods.

It Never Ends

There's a buzz going around - allegedly - about the psychological horror film It Ends. TikTok has made it a big hit and frankly if this is what the youth of today think is a good movie, I'm giving up this reviewing lark and taking up something else to pass my time. This is about 87 minutes long, but it felt like it really was going to go on forever. Four friends take a (wrong) right turn onto a road that never ends, or at least that's how it seems and behind them are hundreds of people who want their car, maybe - presumably - to try and escape this highway in hell. 

I asked the wife what she thought and he answer was 'It's not a bad idea' and she's not wrong, but it needed something to happen, even if we weren't going to get an explanation as to why it all transpired and not just to these four people. It would have been good if there had been some suspense, some jeopardy, something other than crazy desperate people trying to steal their car. I dunno, some monsters maybe or a pitstop with a vending machine... I wasn't impressed and it's not worth anything more than a 3/10.

A World of Boredom

Carol is bored. With the hivemind of humanity having deserted her, the isolation is driving her crazy and it looks like she might be about to crack. You see, we were told in an earlier episode of Pluribus that the only way she could become like everyone else was through a long and complicated procedure, which she would have to agree to and the boredom of her existence might have driven her to this idea. Little does she know that Paraguay man is trying to get to her and he wants what she wanted - to save humanity; his problem is he's in trouble because he won't rely on the hivemind. So we're set up for a  (series) finale that will involve Manousos Oviedo trying to persuade Carol that her idea of restoring humanity is the best idea, or at least that's what I think is going to happen. 

In truth, this has been a great idea that has grown increasingly more boring as it has gone on. Yes, I get that this is the entire idea - Carol has to go through all the stages of grief and distrust before she is finally won over by the fact that she will have all of her late wife's memories even if she will no longer have free will. But it's needed something else to happen; something more than Manousos learning English and not communicating with the rest of the world. Let's hope the final part of this series offers us something other than the rather pedestrian offering this has, sadly, become...

What's Up Next?

Fallout is back next week, plus some season finales, some films we'll get around to watching and probably some other stuff. 

You know the drill.