Hollywood is Dead. Long Live Hollywood.

Netflix's Potential Purchase of Warner Bros. and the End of Hollywood (As We Know It… Now)

Last week, on December 4, 2025, news broke that Netflix had prevailed over Paramount and/or Comcast Universal to acquire Warner Bros. As I write this, news has just broken on December 8, 2025, that the Ellisons and Paramount have initiated a hostile takeover bid to prevent the Netflix purchase and bring Warner Bros. under the recently-expanded Paramount/CBS/Skydance umbrella. So we'll see what happens.

But whoever wins, the rest of us lose.

There will be different ramifications if Netflix buys Warner Bros. or if Paramount Skydance's shenanigans work out in their favor, but either way, the sale of Warner Bros. is the definitive closing of a chapter in Hollywood history. People have written "the end of Hollywood" pieces since before The Jazz Singer introduced talking pictures to the mainstream film audience in 1927, and yet Hollywood has managed to live on for another 100 years, so this piece will not be one of those. Movies and TV shows will persist as forms of entertainment moving forward, but this is the end of something, and what comes next will look different from what came before. The biggest questions in my mind are "What will be lost?" and "For what?"

What Will Be Lost?

First of all, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. When Disney bought Fox in 2019, there was some chatter that the majority of the job losses were going to be administrative, as the two studios merged their business operations. But the notion of relatively minimal job losses and the two studios' creative slates remaining independent was a fiction from the start. Disney immediately began shuttering specialty film groups like Fox 2000, which had been releasing cultural touchstone films like Fight Club, The Devil Wears Prada, and Hidden Figures since 1996.

So that brings us to what the audience is losing: the movies and TV shows that will never be made, the voices we will never hear, and maybe the spaces to share them.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, there were six studios that could buy your project—Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony (formerly Columbia), and Paramount. There were other, smaller outfits that could buy projects because they had distribution deals with a studio or for straight-to-DVD releases, since DVD revenues were just absolutely insane at the time, and cable television channels that produced original content and were either wholly-owned subsidiaries or joint ventures between the major studios. Going a little farther back in time, MGM and United Artists used to be their own studios, too. So at one time, there were a lot of buyers, a lot of places that were mounting productions and employing crews, studio development departments shepherding feature film scripts, an entire pilot season apparatus where TV studios were making full pilots for shows that may or may not ever air, and an attendant set of opportunities for writers, actors, and directors to potentially break in or break through.

The loss of DVD revenue was transformative as the home media bubble burst alongside the advent of streaming, and industry contraction followed, alongside runaway production away from Los Angeles. There was a writers' strike, MGM folded, indie producers went under, but then Netflix jumped into original programming, and audiences soon found Peak TV dropped into their living rooms. Networks like AMC made must-watch programming like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and suddenly Netflix had a bottomless appetite for original programming, with Amazon and Apple jumping in, and the glut of new streamers from Disney+ to FreeVee making new content specific to their own new platforms.

And then Peak TV peaked. For years, the number of theatrical feature films had been declining, but the explosion of TV and streaming productions led to an employment boom, particularly for writers. But under the surface, things were sketchy as hell. The unfair employment practices led to the concurrent 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (which I wrote about here). The face of that employment battle was David Zaslav, CEO of the recently-merged Warner Bros. Discovery, who was on the receiving end of a quarter-billion-dollar compensation package and had recently dropped into town acting like the second coming of legendary studio head Robert Evans (even buying Evans's fabled home). As it stands today, the Writers' Guild reports TV employment has fallen by 42% and Zaslav's Frankenstein monster of Warner Bros. Discovery is being split back apart and sold off. Good work if you can get it—$250+ million to destroy a company in three years.

So either Netflix or Paramount is going to roll Warner Bros. up under its corporate umbrella, and what will result are job losses, fewer movies, and fewer TV shows.

If Paramount prevails in its hostile takeover bid, the films and TV shows it does wind up producing going forward are likely to bend toward Trump-friendly, fascist-curious content. Exhibits A through D: A) firing Stephen Colbert, B) installing heterodox blogger (and higher ed grifter?) Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News, C) greenlighting Rush Hour 4 after credibly-accused sex pest and director Brett Ratner made a Melania Trump documentary, and D) Jared Kushner's involvement in Paramount's hostile takeover bid. In the last year, Warner Bros.' current studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy oversaw Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Zach Cregger's Weapons, and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Say goodbye to movies like those. After Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, I weighed in along similar l ines, lamenting how the acquisition would shrink the range of releases that Disney would produce. Time has more than borne out that prediction, but it didn't have the ideological corollary, which makes the prospect of a shrinking media landscape even more troubling.

If Netflix's bid holds, a lot of smart industry watchers think it will mean the beginning of the terminal decline of movie theaters. Many speculate that Netflix only wants this acquisition in the first place as a way to remove the second-largest supplier of theatrical content (Warner Bros. lags behind only Disney) from the marketplace entirely. Last week, box office analyst Scott Mendelson told The Bulwark's cultural editor Sonny Bunch:

"Something that Netflix has done a lot of in the last few years is it seems like every time there’s this big, buzzy, crowd-pleasing festival flick that might theoretically do well in theaters, Netflix flies in, drops a $20 million check on it, grabs distribution rights, and then it dies in the algorithm. And I think, I would argue, that they are doing that at least partially intentionally because the worst thing that can happen for Netflix is for that film to be successful in theaters."

The argument here is that Netflix's entire business model is for you to watch movies at home, and anything that lures you out of the house to watch a movie is competition. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said almost as much, prompting pushback from arguably the most commercially-successful film director of all time, James Cameron.

I go to movies a lot these days. I probably see more movies in theaters now than I have at any point since high school, when a typical Friday night was just going to the megaplex and seeing whatever was new that week. But the catch is that I almost never see first-run movies in the theaters these days. I am an annual member of the amazing American Cinematheque non-profit organization in Los Angeles, and live around the corner from the revitalized Vidiots, so a couple times a month I'll be in a theater seeing an animation retrospective with the animator in person, or a 70-mm restoration of a sci-fi or western classic, or introducing my kids to samurai movies, or a midnight screening of a bizarre French film, or… or… or. And that's a future we might all be heading for.

Will movie theaters vanish? No. Could the multiplex? Yeah. We've only had movie theaters for about a hundred years. That's nothing. They are not immutable. If Netflix prevails in a push to keep new movies out of theaters and force first-run films into the algorithmic churn of a decreasing number of streamers willing to vanish $90-million-dollar movies because David Zaslav needs a tax write-off because of his dipshit merger decisions, then we're all stuck with the consequences as a audience. We might all need to find, or create, our local repertory film screening series if we want to see anything at all projected on a screen in community. We might be looking at the very real possibility that the theatrical experience becomes akin to the way most of us experience live theater here in 2025: some small number of people see a ton, most people see none.

And for what?

In the beginning, movie studios made movies. That's what they did, and they did it like factory work, with actors, directors, writers, technicians all under contract. If they made enough movies that brought in enough people, the movie studios made money. Then Howard Hughes decided Jane Russell should be a star, so he got involved in Hollywood as a producer. Hughes had more money than he knew what to do with, but wanted to spend it. So he built the Spruce Goose, and he bought RKO Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios, and brought it under the umbrella of the Hughes Tool Company. This was about the time that James Stewart decided to skip a studio contract and struck out on his own, under the guidance of his agent Lew Wasserman of MCA. This shift in the business model ruptured the studio system that had been in place since the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood was never the same.

Hughes sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company, of all places. The manufacturing conglomerate Gulf+Western bought Paramount Pictures for some reason in the 1960s, and Lew Wasserman's MCA wound up buying Universal. Ever since, the movie studios have been chips in higher-and-higher-stakes corporate merger poker games. Amazon owns MGM (and MGM+, which is different from Prime Video). Disney owns Hulu (which is different from Disney+), Comcast owns Universal, and before Zaslav and Discovery came in and bought Warner Bros. and HBO, for some reason AT&T owned HBO. The studios don't make movies. They don't make TV shows. They "return value to the shareholders." If releasing a surefire IP-based hit like The Minecraft Movie returns value to the shareholders, they'll do that. If *not* releasing Batgirl returns value to the shareholders, then they'll do that instead. If installing an opinion journalist and blogger over their news division greases the wheels for governmental approval of a merger, they'll do that. It's all just corporate bullshit to make line go up after quarterly investor calls. The audience isn't even the product, like we were during the network TV days when networks were selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

So who benefits from any of this? Not the fans, not the audience, not the creators. Netflix is a tech company. Amazon is a tech company. Apple is a tech company. Apple makes their TV shows at a loss for a reason that they'll figure out some day but for now just seems like as good a way to set a billion dollars on fire as any. If Amazon decides that the MGM brand is a better fit for, I don't know, a line of dog and cat food, then we'll all be getting MGM Leo the Lion Pet Food on Prime Day and no more James Bond movies.

I recognize the Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud vibe here, I do. But what I really want to emphasize is that these mergers didn't have to happen. These studios, provided a madman like Howard Hughes didn't systematically destroy them, probably could've kept going as they rebuilt after the fall of the studio system in the 1950s. Talking pictures came in the 1920s, and what came next was never the same. Television came, introducing a new medium and forcing filmmakers to innovate 3D and widescreen and VistaVision and CinemaScope and the R rating, and what came next was never the same. The studio system collapsed, but Blaxsploitation films, risk-taking visionaries like Robert Evans who gambled on Francis Ford Coppola, and upstarts like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper saved Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, and what came next was never the same. A real estate boom in the 1990s led to the creation of the multiplex, and suddenly theater owners needed more, more, and more movies to fill their screens. So the independent cinema boom of the 1990s (seriously—just banger after banger after banger) changed the types of stories being told and the storytellers who had the opportunity to tell them, and what came next was never the same. The explosion of creativity that I got to witness at the megaplex in the 1990s on those Friday nights wasn't because there was something in the water, or everybody just got narratively hip all of a sudden, or because they took the lead out of the gasoline finally (OK, maybe that, a little bit), but it was because more people got to tell more stories that only they could tell.

The diversity of voices and opportunities gave us all better art, and created meaning in countless lives. How many people out there do you think have tattoos inspired by The Matrix? You ever had a case of The Mondays? I've got one right now. How many times have you looked at a rug and thought, "That rug really ties the room together"? My friend named his kid after a character from The Fifth Element. Suddenly the need for movies to put on all those screens made room for weird, idiosyncratic stories, queer filmmakers, more women, more people of color telling stories that spoke to individuals and communities and moments that would have not been seen or recognized before.

But that's the point, right? These days? Tighter control over who gets to tell their story? Fewer outlets? There are still a ton of cinema screens, but they're all showing the new Marvel movie, every half hour. On the apps, the algorithm serving up what the owner of the algorithm wants you to see? Hiding what it wants you *not* to see?

So, look. Whichever corporate entity prevails in this Warner Bros. buyout, it is the closing of a chapter. Not the closing of a book, I don't think, but whatever comes next will never be the same.

Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood.

Posted by Vance K -- Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together.

TV Review: Zomvivor

An entertaining succession of jump scares and survival stress.

Horror stories have been abundant in 2025, providing a cathartic outlet for processing contemporary stress. One of the latest contributions to horror’s zombie sub-genre is a new Netflix short series from Thailand. Zomvivor is the story of several groups of college students trying to survive a zombie outbreak on their locked down campus while trying to uncover and understand the true nature of the infected people who are trapped there with them. With plenty of blood, zombie bites, and moderate gore, the series works well as an entertaining succession of jump scares and survival stress, despite the fact that the larger story arc and backstory are much less satisfying.

The show begins in the midst of a zombie outbreak on a college campus in Thailand. Hordes of flesh-hungry, infected humans attack the remaining survivors on the campus. Once bitten, the victims also turn into a ravenous, vicious, but seemingly mindless, zombies. As students flee the escalating attacks, the survivors settle into several groups including a group of cheer squad guys in a greenhouse and a group of alpha personalities and their minions in a library. In an ironic flashback we see a student film project about a woman who has been turned into a zombie and is now tied to a chair as her colleagues figure out what to do with her. The student actress, Lily, agrees to the student director’s request that she cry tears in her bound zombie state and Lily ponders whether a person so damaged and infected would have the capacity for that type of self-reflection. 

A central plot point involves a genius student Ning who accepts an offer to work with a nervous Professor Wiroj on a project that may cure her comatose mother. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Ning and her younger brother Non were raised by their single mother in a working class household. Ning and Non are both students at the university where Ning is a promising honor student on a scholarship. Their mother becomes unexpectedly ill and eventually comatose. Professor Wiroj recruits Ning to help find a cure by working on a body-preserving project for rich people called Anisong. The project is funded by the mysterious benefactor who funds the university. However, through a series of unfortunate and deeply upsetting events, the benefactor’s awful son and heir gets infected with a defective serum and the research pivots to a cure to revive and regenerate his body and that of Ning's comatose mom. As part of the test trials, Dr. Wiroj targets poor, vulnerable, working class workers on the campus to be the test subjects. He feels bad about this, but not enough to stop, especially because he is secretly in love with Ning’s mom. As it turns out, the variant serum is volatile and the test subjects begin to display some very odd behavior. Meanwhile, back in the present, a group of students try to make a stand against the growing hordes of zombies. On group is focused on compassion and the other is focused on violence. Complicating things are the military / private security who want to kill all the students to contain both the outbreak and the secrets behind it. Some of the survivors are also impeded by an uninfected but delusional student who sabotages their safety. They are also hampered by power dynamics among the alpha leaders; and by many students’ feelings of guilt at having to kill their fellow classmates.

Zombie stories have so many commonalities that viewers often know what they're getting when they start to watch. Zomvivor adds some interesting twists to the usual zombie drama which make it quite entertaining, despite the predictable elements. One useful twist is having the story take place in an elite college setting. This allows the characters to have a more strategic engagement with the zombie outbreak since many of them are science students who can theorize on how the zombies behave and can try to create biological and chemical based options for responding, rather than just fighting, running, and hiding.

Another interesting twist is the contained nature of the outbreak. Many zombie horror films involve a zombie apocalypse where entire countries are devastated and only pockets of survivors remain. In Zomvivor, the zombie outbreak we see is essentially confined to the campus. The surviving students are unable to leave but so are the zombies. In the series, the rest of the country may theoretically still be living a normal life while the survivors and zombies remain caught in a confined, locked room adventure.

The story is also told from multiple points of view rather than focusing on a single, lead character. And, Ning, the character who has the most camera time, is an interestingly unreliable narrator and ultimately unlikeable character as she processes new revelations about her morally gray science project. There is, in fact, no central, pure heart hero with whom viewers can emotionally align themselves. The very large ensemble cast makes it hard to bond with a particular character. This is surprising given the show’s survival story concept but it also adds tension to the story by emphasizing the general sense of uncertainty.  On the other hand, the series does a nice job of showcasing kindness, through the altruism and compassion the cheer squad boys show to an infected friend and with each other. The show also briefly addresses class disparities and the way the working class people are treated as disposable, even by the lead characters. In a creepy twist, the zombies, particularly the original cleaning and custodial workers, continue to incoherently follow their pre zombie life routines on the campus, compulsively and sloppily mopping or sweeping with vacant eyes and bloodstained hands. The effect is nicely poignant.

However, despite these interesting elements, the larger sinister background plot feels a bit convoluted and ultimately not emotionally engaging. Key moments of revelations about the villains are hurried through, larger motivations are unclear, and the show ends on an incomplete cliffhanger. After so many satisfying, intense, and entertaining moments throughout the series, the finale is a bit frustrating and leaves viewers without closure. Instead, the ending intentionally leaves us with more questions. For those who like a twisty ambivalence, the adventure may be worth it. For everyone else, it may be a thoughtful and enjoyable ride with an unexpectedly abrupt exit.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Entertaining jump scares and intensity
• Appealing side characters mixed with negative or unreliable narrators
• Leaves viewers with more questions than answers

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Graphic Novel Review: The One Hand and The Six Fingers, by V, Campbell, Watters, Kumar, Loughridge, Bidikar and Muller

 The Left hand can't know what the Right hand is doing

Cover Artist: Anand Radhakkrishnan

I don't read many graphic novels - mainly because I'm a latecomer to the field. I love stories - I read, I listen, I watch. Akira, which I first discovered as an imported graphic novel as teenager cemented a love of visual media. However I haven't ever really had the time for or interest in reading about superheroes. 

In a confession of my own ignorance I discovered only very late that western graphic novels were much broader than simply Marvel and DC. My exploration of what they do have to offer has led to me developing a bit of a habit which I’m sure keeps my local comic book shop happy. 

A recommendation for The One Hand and the Six Fingers came to me through a friend after he sold me on another of Ram V’s standalone stories – Rare Flavours. The One Hand and the Six Fingers has a central premise that’s outside of the story; that Ram V collaborated with two different other writers on the story to bring together essentially what is two stories about the same subject into one intertwining experiment in storytelling.

To understand how that works we have to explore the story itself a little (although no spoilers). The One Hand and the Six Fingers is a tale about a set of murders happening in a city that could be any big American city but mostly reads as New York or Chicago. We learn in the first chapter that the murders are serial murders and have been solved not once, but twice before by the same cop and now they’re back for a third spree it’s all falling apart.

The thing is the people locked up for the first and second set of murders each obviously did those murders. The cases against them were watertight. So what is going on and how is someone replicating the cases exactly, including elements that were never released to the public?

As it turns out the two sides of the story were planned as a complete arc but then the different people involved in each side got on with producing their pieces separately (with Ram V being the common writer across both sides). This is an audacious piece of plotting and artistic creativity because it means the telling has contextual divergence built into its fabric even if the meta-narrative is coherent.

There are the classic set of tropes – the cop due to retire, the maverick nature of their obsession with the murderer. We also have a murderer who’s not entirely sure if or why he’s doing what he’s doing. We have black police lieutenants ready to suspend the cop, we have accidentally caught up love interests who may or may not support the murderer.

Across the top of this we have the setting which is neo-noir but also cyberpunkish in a very Bladerunner 2049 sense. The detective has a long term relationship with a synthetic human, called here a Cog. The entire thing is at once familiar.

What is interesting to me though is what V and his collaborators do with the story. There are two extremely pertinent references beyond Bladerunner – Dark City, the 1998 film directed by Alex Proyas and the Matrix, the 1999 film written and directed by the Wachowskis. In that sense, The One Hand and the Six Fingers is treading well worn ground for people as old as I am. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun or interesting both from a dramatic and a philosophical point of view, just that it’s standing on the shoulders of giants.

The themes here, hidden behind gory murders and lush, economically structured panels and vistas are about meaning, information, the lives we perform for ourselves and how we create coherence in the worlds we build.

When I talk about world building I mean that in the personal sense of how I construct the world I encounter each day, the meaning in my experiences and what baggage I bring to it as well as grander ideas about how meaning is constructed.

V et al are very interested in deconstructing how we consider the world is put together. From Gerard 't Hooft’s holographic principle to Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis we are asked to question whether the world we encounter with our senses, while the ‘us’ exists somewhere internally, can be considered real. If the world is not ‘real’ then what does that imply for both our sense of self but also our sense of self through instantiation?

This is the kind of thing that you might think is a bit sophomore in nature – to be discussed at three am at a house party with strangers but the narrative here handles it pretty well. Certainly the framing device of the killer and the detective wrestling with the same crimes adds more flair and nuance than the simple contemplation of everything being constructed (i.e. the classic antirealist stance). 

Not that V tackles it here, but if the world is one that’s entirely constructed whether by our social consensus or through the illusionary constructs of our sense data then building racism, sexism and other prejudices into it becomes a deeply weird position to take.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers doesn’t offer a definitive answer – its characters are in one specific iteration of the nexus of these ideas (which I am being careful not to spoil!) and in true story telling style it follows them to the end of that idea, to a position that is very definitely reductio ad absurdum. 

This is where it fell a little short for me. It may well be because I’ve come across these ideas a lot in my own reading/studying/writing but the main characters are, in the end, sitting in the well of fatalism. They are most concerned with identifying that they’re in the well and when they do? At that point they stop fighting and that was kinda disappointing to me. 

That’s a me thing – I want existential puzzles to have meaning, to be an impetus to changing the world. Ram V’s story presents a different epistemology – in that the limits of knowledge are both emotional as well as physical and intellectual. For his characters the weltanschauung they dwell within is one that starts and ends in despair and the discoveries along the way being transformative are decidedly not transformative of the fundamental meaninglessness of existence.

The One Hand and the Six Fingers suggests that learning the truth might only offer us an escape from these limits through non-existence because only by non-being can we counter the futility of being. It’s bleak when you write it out longhand.

--

Highlights:

• Serial killers
• Cyberpunk, noir, hard bitten detectives
• Weird as fuck world building

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, a familiar set of tropes given new life with a brilliantly structured, drawn and coloured story about meaning wrapped up in a serial killer mystery.

References: V, Ram. The One Hand and the Six Fingers [Image Comics 2024].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he co-owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

Stranger Things Season 5: Part One

Hawkins residents assemble! The final season's first part starts off slow but delivers the goods in the form of more needle drops, more character transformations, and more killer '80s vibes. (Spoilers abound below.)

A lot has changed since Stranger Things first premiered back in 2016. America has had three different presidents. A worldwide pandemic happened. And all of these children have grown up. Before I dive into the details of this new season, I'll acknowledge that these kids are all in their early 20s and they look grown as hell. But hey! That's not their fault. And it's not entirely the Duffer brothers' fault either, given the complexities of scheduling shows in the modern age of pandemics, writers' strikes, and other obstacles. I personally think the age thing is easy to overlook if you love the show. If you can believe in demogorgons, you can believe that these grown folks are juniors in high school. 

A brief recap of where we left off in Hawkins in Season 4: Joyce and Murray have rescued Hopper from the Siberian prison, Max is in a coma after fighting Vecna, Eleven got her powers back, and Mike, Dustin and the gang are all back together in Hawkins, which is currently quarantined off from the world after being devastated by Vecna's final attack. 

Season 5 picks up a year later in November of 1987, and our team is still hunting Vecna, who seems to have gone dark. Hopper, with the help of everyone, ventures out occasionally into the Upside Down on military recon "crawls," but nothing seems to be turning up. Things are set into motion when a demogorgon breaks into the Wheeler's house and kidnaps Mike and Nancy's little sister, Holly. 

The first few episodes start off pretty slow, but the time spent with the characters isn't wasted. I'm a true believer in this season, and I've loved it so much. Here's what I think really works. 

The power of radio nostalgia via WSQK

Robin and Steve are working at the local radio station, and in between pop songs they're using a secret code to communicate to the others troop movements and scheduling crawls in the Upside Down. It's extremely clever, and as a former college radio DJ, it sparks all kinds of feels. The station is essentially a character this season, and it plays an important part in both the plots of episodes 1-4 and most likely in the final episodes that air later this year. 

Music and needle drops have always been a core part of Stranger Things, and having the characters literally take the helm at WSQK just feels right. It's hard to explain to younger people, but terrestrial radio used to play an important part in people's lives, and everyone listened to it. Having it be the lifeline for our heroes as well as a cultural touchstone just makes sense. Playing Diana Ross' "Upside Down" as part of their code is just brilliant, too.

As part of the promotion for Season 5, I've been listening to the online version of WSQK, not only for the '80s tunes but also because they have in-world ads for Scoops Ahoy, Palace arcade, and more. It's immersive, fun, and a great way to keep vibing in the ST world. Have I also bought a WSQK t-shirt? Absolutely. (This review has not been sponsored by Netflix, I'm just a real big nerd.)

The big reveal of Will's powers

I will admit that Noah Schnapp's acting hasn't been wonderful this season, but I think that's more a function of having a grown man say lines like "We have to stop Vecna!" over and over again. But I think what people forget (especially after how emo and laid by the wayside he was last season) is that Will is the heart of this show. It started with his abduction in Season 1, and ever since, he's been the emotional core of everything. So yeah, I'm willing to ignore some clunkily spoken lines. 

In the last ten minutes of episode 4, everything comes together truly magnificently for Will. He's been seeing through the eyes of Vecna and various demogorgons, paralyzed by fear and horror at what he's witnessing. Having him finally(!) get some agency and be able to fight back was so invigorating. I was jumping up and down and screaming at the screen. The Duffer brothers' decision to make Will the equal of Eleven, powers-wise, is a twist I didn't see coming, and honestly, the gang is going to need it if they're going to defeat Vecna. I'm so glad Will gets to take part instead of just cowering.

Rewriting queer representation in '80s film settings

As an avid fan of '80s teen movies who happens to be queer, watching them can be a little dicey. On the one hand, they're awesome, but on the other, the frequency with which gay slurs are used is mindblowing. The homophobia was rampant back then. To give you an example, in Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox's best friend is more worried that he's gay than being a werewolf. Yeah.

The world is different today, thank God. And having fully fleshed out queer characters in the form of Robin and Will help rewrite that narrative in the modern age. Robin's speech in episode 4 to Will is a tear-jerker in the best possible way, allowing Will to know that he's okay just as he is. For five seasons he's been tortured, coddled, disregarded, and underestimated. Allowing him to come into his own is super powerful, and the Duffers have done something wonderful for a whole new generation of queer kids looking for representation in the media they love.

The Home Alone-inspired Demogorgon trap

This whole scene is just classic Stranger Things, and it's a perfect example of how they can bring levity to an objectively frightening situation. In order to implant the tracker in the demogorgon, the team sets up an elaborate scheme involving swing-down traps, a rug over a hole in the floor, and our gal Nancy Walk 'Em Down Wheeler doing what she does best — shoot baddies. 

The introduction of A Wrinkle in Time

The entirety of Stranger Things has revolved around metaphors from D&D, the game that Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas were obsessed with. When weird things started happening, it was that vernacular that helped them make sense of the world(s). With the introduction of Holly as a plot-important character, we're also getting language and ideas cribbed from her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. Even though we're just learning about Henry/Vecna as Mr. What's it, I think time travel is going to play a large role in the upcoming episodes. The Duffer brothers listed The Terminator and Back to the Future among the movies they recommend folks watch to prep for the finale.

Unanswered questions:

• What is Vecna’s end goal with Holly?
• Did Nancy graduate? Is she working? Robin?
• What is the wall of goo/demogorgon flesh?
• Why is Vecna afraid of the rocks?
• Will Robin get to go on that date with Vicki?

Overall, I think this first part of the last season did a good job of setting up what's promising to be an epic conclusion. Every season of Stranger Things improves upon a rewatch, and I watched these four episodes twice. It's different, in many ways, but it also holds up really well. Everyone's forecasting a major death (or even two!) toward the end but I'm hoping that doesn't end up happening. I love all these kids so dang much, and they all deserve the world.

Also, Linda Hamilton as Major General Kay was the icing on the cake these episodes —nobody cocks like a gun quite like her, even after all these years.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Review: Bloodtide by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s Bloodtide continues the Ex Romana trilogy started in Sargassa, peeling back more the story of Selah, her companions and rivals, and of the city of Sargassa herself

Sidewise Award-winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham provided us with a setting and a vision of a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Part of the story of Selah, new Imperial Historian and the rest of her rivals, adversaries and contemporaries in the novel is finding out that the truth of history is somewhat more complicated than they believed, in the midst of a twisty conspiracy of imperial ambitions, secrets, plots and lies.

Bloodtide continues the story of Selah and the others in her orbit, in the fantastically imagined world of Sargassa.

From a plot perspective, in looking at Bloodtide I am going to skirt the big reveal of Sargassa, since it would not be fair to readers who have not read the first book in the series. Readers who have read the first book and are looking to see how Burnham can possibly follow up that big reveal don’t need to be reminded of what it was. So instead we will carry forward into the second novel and what it tries to do without referencing it.

Having assembled its characters as a rough and contentious group in Sargassa, Bloodtide for the most part scatters them to the winds. This second novel focuses less on Selah than the first novel, instead providing a lot of screentime to the other members of her somewhat contentious circle of colleagues and associates. Darius is in exile in the badlands, giving us a view of some of the rest of the continent and the price of his Javert-like obsessions for his investigations from the first novel. Arran and Theo, on the other hand, with the growing revelation that there is a lot more of the old solaric tech lying around than anyone ever suspected, go off to try and resurrect the power and communications arrays from long ago.

We get a greater sense of the scale of the revolutionaries and their opposition to Roman rule. Theo and Arran’s mission is predicated on a slow but smart bit of strategy—they realize that Sargassa casting off control by the Romans is a doomed enterprise, destined to be squashed quickly by the rest of the empire. But if they could coordinate across cities and towns by means of the solaric technology, then all the cities and settlements could rise up at the same time and make stopping the revolution much more difficult, if not impossible. It’s an excellent recognition of the tactics and necessity of coordination of a revolution. This puts me in mind of a Silverberg story where a revolution fails, and the revolters recognize, in hindsight, that they needed uprisings in more than just one city in order to have a prayer of success.

So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’s plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as do Tair and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the spoilery revelations it contains. This means the often thorny relationship between Selah and Tair gets less play than, say, the budding relationship between Theo and Arran. Still, this is a novel with interesting and fascinating queer relationships, and a preponderance of characters who are not straight men. We get character development, growth and an intense look at these characters, just like in the first novel.

Like Sargassa, Bloodtide is not just queer-friendly; it is queer-forward. These are the queer-forward alternate history/future history SF novels you may not have known you wanted, but are here for you.

And then there is the titular Bloodtide, which is a large set piece of a flood in the city of Sargassa. All the characters who are in the city at the time confront what turns out to be a quite catastrophic storm for the city. Rain and flooding, and the inevitable stresses to civilized behavior that occurs afterwards. It’s a challenge for Selah and the others, not only for them to survive, but to help as much of the underclass as they can. (The Patricians, of course, are doing fine. Same as it ever was.) While the first novel made the social divide in Sargassa stark, here, in the midst of the storm that hits the city, the haves and have-nots, in the wake of a disaster, are even more starkly defined. I was reminded, and I believe the author intended it, of the wake of the utter disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Burnham does not pull her punches in depicting the devastation, which of course plays merry hell with the plans of our protagonists. It is a black swan event that none of them prepared for, and that they have to struggle to survive.

The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa we got the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. In the first novel we have descriptions of lower-class areas of the city, Sinktown, that are prone to flooding in the best of times. And so we get not just tidal flooding, but a full-on hurricane and storm surge.

So is there another big reveal in Bloodtide? In a way, there is an extension of that big reveal, as in the final portion of this book we get a sense of more about it. While the novel has danced around the consequences of the world as it is now, a thing deliberately engineered to be misunderstood, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa aren’t really explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. At the end of Bloodtide, however, we get a bifurcation of character knowledge and reader knowledge. Selah and the others come across information that they cannot quite decipher or understand, but the reader can definitely put the pieces together and come to a conclusion and a revelation that broadens and further extends the revelation in Sargassa. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire backstory is not clear, however; there are still questions as to the state of affairs, in addition to the unresolved character beats. But once again, the book remains relatively unique in its approach to worldbuilding.¹

My hope is that this sets up the final book in the trilogy and a broader set of revelations and things coming to a head. I’ve been quite entertained both by the characters and the fascinating and clever worldbuilding in the Ex Romana series, and I have high hopes for the third and final volume to stick the landing.

Highlights:

• Fantastic depiction of the set-piece disaster as the heart of the book.
• Excellent character beats.
• Deepens the worldbuilding of the first book and provides more context to the surprise of the first book.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie. Bloodtide [Daw, 2025].

¹ This makes it hard to compare this book to others as is my wont, because the books I can think of that tie into Ex Romana might inadvertently give a hint to the twist in the series and worldbuilding.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

TV Review: Talamasca

The world’s most clueless spy, working for the world’s most ineffective spy agency… what could go wrong?

Our guy has a problem: his name is Guy. This show’s lack of imagination only gets worse from there.

Guy has another problem: he can hear other people’s thoughts, but the universe conspires to put him in the presence of either so many people that telepathy is too painful to use, or one person who is specially trained or magically gifted to resist it, so he’s that supremely irritating type of protagonist who has an awesome superpower that is of no use ever.

As it turns out, Guy’s life has been watched and orchestrated by the secret order of the Talamasca, who recruit people like him to keep tabs on the hidden supernatural world. The theory is that collecting data on vampires, witches, ghosts and demons (the series is set in the same universe as Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches) will help normal humans keep a reasonably peaceful life alongside so many warring superhuman factions. The reality is that the magical police is incapable of keeping its own house in order and its hierarchy is a tangled mess of betrayal and backstabbing enabled by jaw-dropping incompetence.

Welcome to the worst spy agency I’ve seen since Get Smart.

Our guy Guy is played by a too distracting Nicholas Denton, who, in fairness, isn’t to blame for looking so much like the spitting image of Eddie Redmayne that one forgets to listen to what he’s saying—not that he has much to comment on, what with the absurd level of secrecy his boss likes to maintain. Said boss, who goes by Helen, is a veteran spy and a master of the art of posing dramatically and giving a knowing smile as a substitute for having anything useful to say.

Helen has been the one in charge of steering Guy’s life from behind the scenes, preparing him for the right time to recruit his psychic talents in the neverending mission of keeping humankind safe. Nevermind that she never does anything to earn Guy’s trust; every one of his questions gets slammed down with the promise that all will be revealed in due time, which I guess is intended to be in the middle of season 4.

Because there’s apparently an urgent crisis going on, Helen gives Guy a crash course in spycraft (inexplicably, the course doesn’t include a lesson on “Don’t Read Your Spy Textbook in Public Transportation”), and sends him on his own across the pond to listen to the thoughts of a powerful vampire who has infiltrated the British branch of the Talamasca. On his first day in London, Guy fails at basic spying and hooks up with the first woman who makes eyes at him. One has to wonder why the spy textbook didn’t cover this kind of scenario.

Guy is supposed to be provided with a mentor/handler, who is alarmingly absent during most of the mission, and when it’s finally time to go looking for the big bad vampire, Helen refuses to make any plan. She basically tells him, “You’re smarter than any plan I could give you. You’ll think of something.” With this dismal neglect from his superiors, it’s no wonder that he turns against the Talamasca at the first opportunity.

Even before that, he seems to devote more effort to spying on his boss than on the vampire. He has valid reasons to resent the ways the Talamasca has meddled in his life since childhood, and when he discovers that his mother was also some form of spy, and that she and the agency parted ways in bad terms, any hope of retaining his loyalty is lost. But the side he chooses instead cares even less for his personal gripes, his lack of experience, or his continued existence. At times I wondered whether this series was supposed to be a comedy, because Guy speedruns through one disastrously bad choice after another, somehow making it way past the point where he should have already been dismembered by vampires several times.

The show’s aim appears pointed at feeling mysterious rather than narrating a mystery. We’re told that the magic police has vast resources, but when they task a complete noob with undoing a vampire conspiracy, they don’t equip him with as much as a cove of garlic. We’re told that the world has vampires, witches, ghosts and demons, but we only ever see vampires, and in the rare scenes that feature a witch coven, they don’t do anything particularly witchy, so they may as well be a hippie commune. We’re told that the order is ancient and has tentacles everywhere, but across the season we meet at most the same half dozen top operatives, which gives the impression that we’re watching a school play with zero budget.

As for the mystery of the season, it’s admittedly a clever one, but getting there is an ordeal, even with just six episodes. Someone has destroyed the centuries-old archives of the Dutch branch of the Talamasca, which should severely cripple the order’s ability to keep tabs on the supernatural world, but we don’t see any serious consequence. Out of earshot of her colleagues, Helen has been searching for something called The 752, which sounds like the name of a chemical weapon, or a model of missile, or a limited edition comic book. Whatever it is, it has immense power, so it must not fall into the wrong yadda yadda, or else the world will yadda yadda. And it just so happens that the person closest to finding it is the same vampire our guy Guy has to follow. Neat!

Oh, have I already mentioned that the season’s two-part premiere has not one but two fridged women? You know, for extra drama.

I haven’t watched the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, but the praise I’ve heard about it has been consistently enthusiastic. This spinoff, on top of being mediocre on its own merits, does a shameful disservice to a beloved story.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social