Looking Back at The Transformers

Does an old toy commercial have the Touch?

Before I begin - since I will be discussing a Hasbro property, I want to bring up the fact that staff at Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, have successfully won a union and are now bargaining for a contract. You should support the union here.
  
                                      

The 1986 Transformers show lurked over my nerd-dom for a long time. I got into the franchise in the early 2000s as an impressionable preschooler who dove headfirst into the 2001 Robots in Disguise show (does anyone else remember that one?), and then loved Armada and was more intermittently into Energon and Cybertron. I got rid of my Transformers toys in 2006ish, and then was left to look longingly and regretfully at the toys released for the Michael Bay movies. Even then, I could tell there was something off about those films (I rewatched them recently and concluded that they’re not terrible but they are seriously hampered by being late 2000s blockbusters but that is an argument for another day), but I enjoyed them as impressionable boys do. All of those, though, I knew ultimately came from this cartoon from before I was born: The Transformers, released in 1983.

I wasn’t entirely unaware of the contents of that show when I was a kid; my parents bought me a video tape of the 1986 movie as well as another with two episodes (City of Steel and A Prime Problem), which together formed my view of that show for a long time. I remember being spellbound by the animation of the movie, and bits of those episodes stayed with me as half-remembered snippets for over twenty years (like Long Haul’s line in the former of the aforementioned episodes “Remove! Remove! Always remove! I didn’t join this outfit to be a dump truck! For whatever reason, I also remembered Mixmaster’s particular verbal tic in that episode and that episode alone). But then, last year, I finally got around to playing War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, both great games that take a military science fiction approach to the basic conceit of Transformers, and I felt that, at some point, I should actually get around to watching the cartoon that started it all (along with the eighties Marvel comics, of course). And then, to my joy, it turns out Hasbro put the entire show, excepting the movie, on one of their YouTube channels. I went on this quest in earnest.

The thing that struck me again and again about this show is how clearly very few people involved in its creation actually gave a shit about it as a work of art. Every comment one of the writers, Donald Glut, made about the show in retrospect sounds like more polite versions of “why do you still give a shit about this?” Glut, whose most prominent work is probably the novelization to The Empire Strikes Back, nevertheless created several characterizations and wrote several memorable episodes, which to me is a sign of how good he is; even his phoned-in scripts are entertaining. The animation is often clearly phoned-in, with many, many obvious errors with little regard to consistency or continuity. More broadly, there’s a sort of slap-dash quality to the writing, not necessarily the dialogue (which is usually serviceable if never particularly deep), but rather the coherence of the world. You have Atlantis out of nowhere in one episode, never mentioned again, and in another episode the main characters are sent back to Arthurian England for no particular reason.

But it’s this potpourri of SFF influences on the different episodes that I think ultimately made the cartoon, and from there the franchise, the success that it was. As I watched it, I came to understand why so many kids came to love this show, as the sheer variety of situations, the sheer diversity of the little nooks and crannies of this universe both on Earth and on Cybertron as well as elsewhere, comes together in a way that feels vast rather than inconsistent. Sure, we have talking, transforming robots at war with one another, so why not Atlantis? Why not time travel to Arthurian times? I have a hard time putting my finger on why, precisely, this worked out the way it did, but it did.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of the time the show is not obviously a toy commercial. Yes, the robots look cool and can do things, but for the most part the fast-paced adventure plots don’t feel too contrived to sell a toy (there are, of course, exceptions). The toy-driven nature of the show is much clearer when you take a look at the broader narrative arcs. The show starts with the Autobots’ ark stranded on Earth, and there is a fairly small cohort of both Autobots and Decepticons for the first season and the opening few episodes of the second season. But, after those few episodes, for no reason whatsoever there are more and more new robots, on both sides of this war, that were never established previously. The cast grows and grows, to the point that the Protectobots, a team of five Autobots that can combine, are inelegantly squeezed into the final episodes of the second season, the last before the 1986 film. This is also at the expense of human characters, several of whom appear only a few times but could have been turned into series regulars to its profit. The one who comes to mind first is Raoul, who appears in two episodes set in New York, a city which is given a certain grotty atmosphere that is ultimately a kid-friendly pastiche of a Scorsese film of that era. He is a product of that particular era in the city’s history and as such he feels rooted in a way that few human characters do. I wish we got more of him. Likewise, I wish we got more of Carly, the girl who eventually gets romantically involved with Sam Witwicky but is ultimately both more intelligent and more daring than he is (it’s why, after finishing the first two seasons, I came to see how Dark of the Moon was a massive character assassination on Carly. She is far too interesting a character to be reduced to eye candy).

Another reason the show has endured as long as it has is the voice actors. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are legends for a reason, after all, and the voice actors more generally are one of two groups of people involved in the production of this show who are clearly giving it their all. It can be very surprising to see how certain actors provided so many voices; both the rasping voice of Megatron and the breathy voice of Soundwave are both Welker! All of these voices are unique, all capable of giving their characters a vibe, which provides a certain depth.

The other group of people who clearly gave a shit about their jobs are the composers. There were but two of them: Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh, who produced the wide variety of background music in the series. What struck me, looking on from forty years in the future, is how much of it is orchestral. You’d think that your giant transforming robot show would have a lot of synthesizers, more electronic music, to go with the artificial nature of the protagonists. There is some of that, yes, but for the first two seasons the score is overwhelmingly recorded via orchestra, which felt like a sixties World War II movie - tell me this doesn’t sound like something out of the golden age of those films. There are even leitmotifs! There are bits for triumph, and for planning, and for panic. The spacier third season changed this, halfway through, to a soundtrack with more synthesizers that quoted liberally from the score of the 1986 movie, which worked for the pulpier feel (the particular sound of the old score just felt out of place in the new setting, feeling less John Williams and more Ernest Gold).

I didn’t binge this show and I think that was the right call; I watched one or two episodes a day, mostly, with the exception of multi-episode events which I watched the whole way through in one sitting. I think this was the right call; these older series, with less connective tissue between episodes (and frankly a raft of continuity issues), benefit from letting the characters stay in your mind a while, so that the underlying repetitive structures don’t become too obvious. I started in January and ended in April, and remained mostly consistent to the one episode per day rule. It became a ritual I looked forward to, for as long as it lasted.

And this, of course, brings us to the movie, and what a movie it is. The movie is the first two seasons of the show, but more epic - better animation, better voice acting, better writing (none perfect, mind you, but definitely on a higher plane). It’s a better movie than it is a toy commercial, seeing how Hasbro treated its characters like the disposable toys they thought they were, rather than the beloved icons of childhood the children in question did. And so, the deaths of Optimus Prime and so many other stalwarts of the cartoon were decreed with no thought to the fact that people actually loved them, to be replaced with shiny new toys with not enough writing done to make them lovable.

(in fairness to them, Hasbro has tried to make up for it)

I had watched the movie on VHS as a kid several times without the benefit of familiarity with the series before it; now that I have, I realized what I was missing. The conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons in those early seasons is a conflict fought under conditions of utter scarcity; their wars are fundamentally for fuel, regularly raiding power plants and the like for the bare necessities of their continued existence. There is a sparseness to those seasons that doesn’t really come into relief until you compare them with the movie, which begins with a lush view at a fully functional Autobot base on the moons of Cybertron with the stated intention of soon liberating the planet from the clutches of the Decepticons. The music in that sequence, a soaring number by Vince DiCola, is designed to highlight the awe of this new state of affairs, the rough-and-tumble Ark of the series replaced with Cybertronian civilization in its resplendent glory. The same goes for Autobot City, which is more detailed than anything that came before it, and the battle for that city is a crowning achievement of the franchise.

I have a vivid memory of watching this movie as a kid and finding the Quintessons to be terrifyingly fascinating, all through that one scene where Kup and Hot Rod are thrown to the sharkticons. The way that these various scary faces coexist around a central bulb with tentacles, each a personality that bickers with the others, lodged itself in my mind and never really let go. That’s why I found the way the Quintessons were portrayed in the third season to be so disappointing; none of them get a name, none of them really get a personality, and as such they are just sort of a blob.

After the movie, the third season felt like a step down. The movie wasn’t free of animation errors but neither did it look as shoddy as the rest of the cartoon could look. The third season, the one that is the most openly space opera, looks all too fake. This is unfortunate, as the upgraded animation of the movie really sold the vastness of space and therefore the vastness of the story, something that the third season is lacking. You have the growing pains of the new cast; this season has a strong idea for a cast dynamic, with the rookie Rodimus Prime contrasting the experienced, firm-handed Optimus, while leading and serving the more experienced Kup and Ultra Magnus. There’s also one of the few female transformers, Arcee, and the first to be a major part of the cast. Not unlike Avatar: the Last Airbender, Rodimus’ arc is about the burdens of being the chosen one.

In terms of deeper themes, there are two major ones beyond the obvious one of “buy Transformers toys.” Much of this show, if you think about it for a bit, is about anxieties regarding the nature of industrial civilization as something capable of both great accomplishment but also great destruction. This becomes very obvious when you consider the Constructicons; I find it very telling that construction vehicles were chosen to be Decepticons. All six of them have vehicle modes that can be used to create things, oftentimes good things, but together they can combine into a gigantic robot literally named Devastator. This suggests a dialectical relationship between the positive and negative aspects of the second industrial revolution; that which creates can also devastate.

There’s one particular episode in the earlier part of the second season that has a heavy subtext about this, namely The Master Builders. In this episode, Autobots Grapple and Hoist, who turn into a crane and a tow truck, respectively, are possessed by the idea of building a solar power collection device, and in the process of doing so are offered help by aforementioned Constructicons, who claim to have defected. The episode bounces between these two groups, one building for altruistic reasons and the other building for sinister reasons. Again and again, you are confronted with their fundamental similarity. The difference is the choices they make with their awesome powers of creation. Throughout this episode, I was reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai, particularly the character of Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, the British engineer captured by the Japanese whose love of building is harnessed by his captor and used against his own people. Both Nicholson and the two Autobots are entranced by the act of creation, but refuse to think about on whose behalf they are creating, and to the detriment of their own.

The other big thematic category that appears a lot in this show is the cost of warfare on the environment and on the combatants. The conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons is a resource war for their own survival. Their sustenance is energon, and energon can be created from terrestrial sources of energy, such as oil or hydroelectric power. A surprisingly high percentage of episodes in the first two seasons are about raids on power plants and the like, and the results are always destructive to the environment around them. One episode has the Insecticons running roughshod over Indonesia, and another features Constructicons drilling into the Earth’s core. Both sides of this war are concerned with survival, but they differ in what they are willing to justify in its name.

I finished this show with an understanding of just why this toyline became a cultural juggernaut. When you get down to it, the show is simply fun, and in a way that creates a universe that feels like it could be endlessly explored. It’s rough around the edges, yes, and it’s a bit janky, yes, but by the end I found it quite charming if you can stomach something which was obviously created to sell toys. By the end of the last episode, there was part of me, somewhat surprisingly, that was sad it was over.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

Video Game Review: Marathon (Season 1) by Bungie

This ain't a sprint, it's a goddamn marathon.

My teammates are dead. I can hear the enemy team scurrying about; they’re searching for me: the rat in the attic. They know I’m somewhere around and they want to enforce a “no mercy” policy lest the festering rat comes back to bite them. I can hear them continuing their hunt. It feels like they can smell my blood. Then I hear a Recon prime ability activation; my heartbeat quickens: they’re scanning my location. I apply a signal jammer and try to lose myself in a group of bots. Two of the enemies give chase, but I lose them while they fight bots and then I circle back. One player stayed back to loot my teammates. I catch them with their pants down and kill them, then lay claymores around the body bag. I use my Triage Prime ability to bring one of my teammates back instantly (normally a ten-second process). While he heals up, the remainder of the enemy team rushes us. One hits the claymores and goes down to a few bullets, then my teammate and I take down the final player. The rat bites back. Marathon is filled with PvPvE moments like this, from 3v3 to 1v3 to 1v2 to 2v2 to 2v1, all in the matter of a few minutes. What seem like impossible odds are quickly reversed with patience and game knowledge. Not to mention hitting some of your shots.

Marathon is the latest effort by Bungie, an extraction shooter set in the world of their original Marathon IP from the mid-90s. While the original was a single-player series with some LAN multiplayer options, Marathon of 2026 is anything but: a first-person shooter multiplayer with no single-player elements whatsoever. If any of the old guard are seeking a throwback to the old days, this isn’t it. What Marathon is, however, is absolutely brilliant.

Bungie, despite its developmental and managerial mishaps, makes some good gameplay, and Marathon is no exception. For those who haven’t played an extraction shooter, the goal of the game is to gather loot, get to an extraction point, then leave with it. You can then use the good loot you’ve gotten to use in a future match. If you want to do a quest, or have a key for a loot room, or run Cryo Archive, you’ll want to equip your best gear. Bungie does this with panache. Every element of the game, while not perfect, is meticulously designed and creates an addictive loop that can hook you for hours on end.

The movement is smooth but weighted, with a feel that borders on Halo and Apex Legends. In a similar fashion to the latter-mentioned game, Marathon’s playable entities comprise different shells (playable characters) with different skill-sets. Each one has a tactical, passive, and prime ability, similar to Apex and Overwatch. My main shell, Triage, has three main abilities; med drones that heal over time and prevent a full death of a teammate on a down (not to mention, if a teammate has a drone attached, you can share your consumables with them), an ability that increases the efficiency of volt weapons, and the ability to revive teammates instantly or EMP enemies (or even both simultaneously if you aim it right). In addition, each shell comes with preset baseline stats. These stats can be upgraded over the course of the season either through faction upgrades or implants. For instance, a knife skill of 5 will take five stabs to kill an enemy at full health, but at 100? Two stabs and they’re mince meat. Gunplay feels incredibly responsive with satisfying hit detection. Playing the game is a real treat.

Marathon is a looker. With top-tier graphics and peak lighting, it would almost make me want to visit if it weren’t so deadly. Tau Ceti IV is a dangerous place, with UESC patrols coming in and out, not to mention alien lifeforms nagging you around every corner (damn you, poison plants!). Every map is distinct and enjoyable to play for its own reasons. Want a smaller, open map with opportunities for mid to long range combat? Perimeter will do the trick. Want to snipe to your heart’s content? Dire Marsh has your back. Close to mid-range? Focus on Outpost. Want to question your life choices and whether one, as a thirty-seven year old person like me, should even play video games anymore? Play Cryo Archive (only available on weekends). Each map is beautifully created and distinct from one another. And while there are certain parts of specific maps that look a little too similar for my liking (like North and South Relay on Perimeter, or some wings of Cryo), the attention to detail is there. Combined with the Codex entries, the artists at Bungie paint a lurid picture of the lives of the Tau Ceti IV settlers.

Speaking of the Codex, this is absolutely brilliant and a huge part of what drew me into Marathon. Certain items that you extract, or specific story missions you complete, or even certain places you discover open up codex entries that share insights into the lives of the scientists and settlers of Tau Ceti IV. What problems did they face? What diseases did they have to fight off? What was this room used for? What were the power dynamics between superiors and inferiors? While much is unanswered, there is much to read up on between matches, and it fills in some holes left by omitting a single-player mode. By doing this, they make four maps feel like part of something bigger. And the best part? Despite dying over and over and over, you can still make progress toward unlocking lore goodies. It makes the defeat not feel so daunting.

One of the biggest elements of this game is the audio. I highly recommend a decent headset for playing Marathon; it can be the difference between life and death and is without a doubt a game saver. Everything, and I meant EVERYTHING, makes a sound. Healing? Makes a sound. Aiming down your sights? Makes a sound. Switching guns? Makes a sound. Crouch walking? Sound. Granted, some things make less noise than others; being able to hear everything puts a player at a distinct advantage, and Bungle has created a game that rewards the ever vigilant. Turn your sound up and focus. The more time spent in the game, the easier it becomes to distinguish what each sound is and how far along an enemy player is toward pulling off a heal or revive.

But what are the flaws? Great question. I didn’t find very many in my multi-month marathon of Marathon. An occasional sound glitch here, a geometry bug there has definitely spoiled an experience and/or ruined a run, but they were rare instances. I’d say the biggest drawback of the game is the learning curve, and that’s not necessarily a negative regarding the game itself, but in the ability to onboard potential players. It took me five hours before I felt like I had somewhat of a grasp on what was going on, even longer to distinguish between the footsteps of UESC and Runner shells, and I am a dedicated gamer. I can only imagine what it would be like for someone a little more casual. The UI management system could be smoother, but like every other aspect of the game, I came to learn it and appreciate its depth. And, as is persistent in most multiplayer games, the occasional weapon balancing issues occur. At first it was the knife, then the bubble/shotgun meta on Cryo Archive, but Bungie has been doing its best to tweak these imbalances.

And don’t get me started on Cryo Archive. It is both the most frustrating and rewarding gaming experience I’ve ever had (in a multiplayer game). I completed a Compiler run (the final raid boss) the night before the end of the season, as well as every Vault except 4, thanks to some friends. The map is so huge it still confuses me in some areas, and despite how much time I’ve spent in there, I still have a ton to learn. I wish the visuals had a little more variance throughout the map (like how Control and Panopticon feel very distinct). But despite the challenge, the reward feels worthwhile.

Marathon is unapologetically hardcore. There is absolutely nothing about this game that I would recommend to a casual player unless they were willing to take the time to ensure that they learned the game’s systems. You don’t have to be great at this game (I’m not), though it certainly helps. What you need is stubbornness, perseverance, and the knowledge that you will die a lot. Sometimes unfairly, but mostly because you did something stupid. In an age of gaming where everything is made easier (not saying I have any problems with accessibility!), it is nice to see a game that doubles down on its goal, deepening the experience by creating a very hardcore sci-fi multiplayer experience. With Bungie’s regular efforts to update the game and consistently balance not only the gameplay but also the systems within the game, the future for Marathon seems bright, so long as they can retain a decent number of players. My advice: if you are going to play Marathon, expect to play for an entire season and give the game the time it deserves; otherwise, you’re doing both yourself and the game a disservice. With Marathon, I truly believe Bungie has crafted one of the best multiplayer experiences of the last decade and I'm so glad I took the gamble and purchased the game.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10

Bonus: +1 for gameplay depth. +1 for world building.

Penalties: -1 for poor player onboarding. -1 for weapon balancing issues.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead

The latest novel by K.J. Parker set in his Parkerland ‘verse

K.J. Parker has settled into doing novels set in his Parkerland ‘verse. For lack of a better term for the setting, since it involves a variety of locations, timelines, characters, and inconsistencies, it is a medieval world that isn’t our own, but rhymes and plays with that rhyme in a whole bunch of different ways. Be it the Siege (Sixteen Ways to Defend a City) Trilogy about the not-quite-fall of Byzantium to Saevus Corax, battlefield salvager who winds up trying to head off international conflicts, to various novellas involving the ubiquitous Salonicus, who is a con artist, inventor, playwright, and possibly also the most brilliant person in the entire timeline. The novellas and novels aren’t in any sort of sensical order, the very idea of a map is scoffed at, and just when things actually took place is not clear.

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead is the latest in these. This novel feels, from internal evidence, to be late in the timeline of events compared to the others. The church has been going along for quite a while and doesn’t have any competition anymore, and seems ready to have a schism of some size. The eternal threat of the Sashan Empire seems muted. Once again we have people lamenting lost manuscripts, writings and whole technologies.¹

And an impious monk and a female assassin/nun are dispatched to a synod where they have been tasked with killing a troublesome princess. But things get hot and hairy before they can even get there, and when they get to the synod itself, trouble erupts not of their own making, but definitely because they are there.

Despite the title, our viewpoint character is not the assassin/nun Sister Svangerd herself, but rather a more typical Parker point-of-view character: Brother Desiderius. He is a well worn and familiar archetype to readers of Parker’s work. A cynical, knowledgeable, brains-driven protagonist. He’s also an out-and-out atheist, even given that he’s a monk. He also has some other useful skills, and the classic Parker game of “I reveal this about the character and that changes what you just read” runs riot through his story. Sister Svangerd, for all that she is in the title, doesn’t hold a candle to our real protagonist, and that is a shame and a missed opportunity.

This novel’s theological debates about The Invincible Sun and the minutiae of its dogma are interesting if you want a debate over a religion in a fantasy novel. Parker, and to various extents his characters, are engaged with it. And there is a veneer of the idea that maybe there are supernatural forces using human agents here—or are the human agents simply thinking they are working for those supernatural elements—or is it all lies, delusions and half truths?

Take the Not-Quite-Dead from the title. Yes, this novel has a type of zombie in it. Or at least an undead. But there is a real fascination with Parker with the idea of people thinking they are supernatural, and regarding their presence as prima facie evidence for the truth of evil, versus the alternative. Our protagonist is from a country where this happens in families: naturally, there are families where, when people die, they come back as these undead. He’s an atheist and has a materialistic view of the entire affair, even if nearly nobody else does. It’s like this novel is having arguments with the more fantastical novellas such as Inside Man about whether the supernatural elements of Parkerland are actually real or not. Are they? Unclear!

And that is the thing about this novel, for better or worse. This novel is very much, absolutely meant as inside baseball catnip for people who have read a bunch of these novels and stories already and want to keep burrowing into this world and try to figure it out and see if there is a consistent design behind everything. Is there? Some days I think Parker is deliberately inconsistent just to mess with his longtime deep readers, and half the time I think he is just winging it and doesn’t have a consistent theory of worldbuilding. As I have read a number of books and reviewed them, here. Making History, for example, seems like a serious contemplation on the nature of history and its transmission. The Saevus Corax series, which this book resembles in some ways, does a lot of what this novel does, although with a somewhat different focus and at a different point in the timeline. I do think, especially given his academic focused stories, that it is all a game to Parker.

And that’s fine, but, and here’s the but. I might enjoy trying to figure out things here, trying to tease out where and when in Parkerland these events are happening and what it all means for the history and development of the world. I might enjoy the reading references, the aforementioned familiar archetype of a character. There is a well worn groove here in these novels.

The problem, the but, as it were, is that there is no way I would recommend this book to someone absolutely new to Parker. I am glad Parker is not writing solely for the inside baseball (the aforementioned Making History works pretty well for readers who haven’t read much or any of Parker). But a novel like this, although it is first in a series, really isn’t the first in a series at all. It’s a novel for a limited audience—deep fans of Parkerland.

I can hope, based on prior experience, that the next two novels will tie things together and get me to reconsider this novel and its merits. But then again, that’s once again something for the deep Parkerland reader, not for the casual fantasy reader picking up Parker for the first time. And so we come back to the original problem.

So in a real way what this review boils down to is: If you like and read lots of Parkerland novels, you get more of the same here. Other readers probably won’t derive as much enjoyment out of the novel as you’d hope. I think it’s not worth your time, frankly. I enjoy Parker’s tone and world, and his knowledgable protagonist, but this is down deep in that, and starting here won’t land well at all. There are better places to start, I think (e.g. Sixteen Ways to Defend a City).

Highlights:

• A novel set late in the Parkerland timeline
• A familiar protagonist despite the book title
• Too well worn a groove for a limited audience

Reference: Parker, K.J. Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead [Orbit, 2026].

¹ Inside baseball here. One of the things that make it hard to date and come up with a chronology of the Parkerland ‘verse is that technology and knowledge keeps getting lost. This world seems to be continually in a trap where no sustained technological development can take place without a war or other disaster knocking the sandcastle down all over again and regressing to an equilibrium. Even for a world with multiple organizations trying to preserve and extend knowledge, in Parkerland, it never *lasts*.

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

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

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

Obsession, Backrooms and the rise of the YouTube movie

Can saving Hollywood be as simple as this One Weird Trick?

Movies created by YouTubers are having a moment. A very, very lucrative moment.

In January of this year, video game YouTuber Markiplier released his self-financed, $3-million debut theatrical film, Iron Lung, which he mostly promoted by appealing directly to his 40 million YouTube subscribers. In its opening weekend, it looked like it might beat Send Help, legendary director Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre after his adventures in the MCU. The Walt Disney Company financed, produced, and marketed that movie, with an estimated budget of $40 million, and Oscar-nominee Rachel McAdams played the lead.

In May of this year, Curry Barker, an aspiring actor and director of popular YouTube horror shorts, released his theatrical writing and directorial debut, Obsession, produced for a reported $750,000. It finished third at the box office on its opening weekend, with $17 million. The following weekend, it made even more money, landing in second place with $24 million. On its third weekend, it made even more more money, finishing again in second place, with $27 million. As a rule, movies don’t improve on their opening weekend in their second weekend. And they certainly don’t improve on their second weekend in their third weekend. The last movie to do so was, I kid you not, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in friggin’ caveman days back in 1982 (editor’s note: this post’s author saw E.T. in the theater in the caveman days of 1982. Don’t even let him pretend like he didn’t.).

In Obsession’s third weekend, it finished second behind a new release, Backrooms, the theatrical directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, based on his YouTube series of the same name. Produced on a budget of $10 million, it grossed over $80 million in its opening weekend, tying the previous weekend's haul for the debut of the latest Star Wars movie. By just its second weekend, Backrooms had already become distributor A24’s biggest release ever, beating the total domestic haul of last year’s Timothée Chalamet Oscar-vehicle Marty Supreme.

So… what’s going on? What does it mean?

Capsule Reviews

The Occam’s Razor answer to why these three movies are doing absolute gangbusters at the box office is, hey, maybe they're all just really good? Let's see.

Iron Lung: Based on a somewhat popular video game, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a small submarine, with only Simon (Markiplier) appearing onscreen. It is over 2 hours long. Markiplier is not an actor, and doesn’t know how to command the screen. But he's the only actor we get. There is a section of the film where we watch water drip. Later, something happens. We don’t know what. Maybe he’s hallucinating it. Maybe there are giant dead aliens outside the sub. It’s not clear. Then there is so much blood. So, so very much blood, and Simon's body begins to disintegrate. I don’t know why. From the blood maybe. This is a bad movie. But you know what? Markiplier stans went and saw it, they had a great time, and I have zero desire to take that away from them. It had a great opening, it made the folks who saw it happy, it made Markiplier a good return on investment, limped across a couple more weekends, and was gone. It’s not looking good for Occam’s Razor.

Obsession: Bear has a crush on his friend Nikki, but doesn’t have the nerve to tell her. She’s about to quit her job at the music store where they both work, alongside friends Ian and Sarah, so Bear buys her a going away present at a New Age store, a novelty toy called a One-Wish Willow. But Bear chickens out before he can give it to her, and makes his own wish on it—that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. He gets his wish. Inspired by the Monkey’s Paw vignette in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror anthology, it’s also the basic setup of a Twilight Zone episode, a million other things, and the aphorism “be careful what you wish for.” Sounds kinda derivative. But in execution, this movie is flawless. It’s not just that Inde Navarrette gives an all-time horror movie performance as Nikki, but the writing and the implications for things taking place just outside the frame of the movie’s point of view will stick with you for days after you leave the theater. It’s a phenomenal film.

Backrooms: This movie has a lot going for it. First, you’ve got a small cast led by magnetic Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve. Second, there is something primal and dreamlike in the basic premise of finding another room that somehow you’ve always missed before in a space you are intimately familiar with, maybe even living in. This is eerily similar to the closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream. So when Ejiofor’s Clark finds a secret, permeable section of the basement wall in the furniture store he owns that opens into a seemingly never-ending network of (mostly) empty rooms, I for one felt a profound sense of uncanny recognition. But moments later, I realized that if this actually happened to me in real life, I would nope out of there so fast I’d leave vapor trails through the portal. So even though the direction is competent and the producers brought in a veteran TV writer to handle the screenplay, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this movie and believable human behavior. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s a good movie that feels like a talented young filmmaker with a lot of support trying to find their way. And, it must be said, once we do see the monster of the backrooms, it’s pretty derpy.

Despite a strong (for January) opening, Iron Lung wound up with only $50 million in worldwide grosses. Backrooms has, at the time of this writing, made over $300 million worldwide, but its week-over-week drop-offs have been massive. Obsession has made almost $400 million, and when I saw it last weekend on a Sunday at 5 pm, the theater was sold out. So with the exception of Obsession, I don’t think these are great movies where word of mouth is driving their success in theaters.

A Grand Theory

So not Occam’s Razor, then. What's the next simplest explanation? Probably that these creators were successful on YouTube and just brought their audiences out to the theaters. Let's check that one.

Markiplier is one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform, with nearly 40 million subscribers. He made multiple webseries for YouTube as his popularity expanded, and Iron Lung is a video game adaptation, which feels at home with his core content of the video game play-through. Massive YouTuber brings $17 million of ticket sales to the box office by hyping the movie on his channel throughout production, editing, behind-the-scenes, and as it neared release. Cool. Seems reasonable.

As of today, as I type this—even after the success of the movie—the Backrooms YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Obsession’s Curry Barker‘s channel—again, even after the black swan success of the film—has a little over 1 million subscribers. It seems implausible that these creators ported their vastly smaller YouTube audiences over into the multiplex seats in the same way that Markiplier did to multiples of that success. So what gives?

I think it’s actually really simple. You know who has always gone to the movies? At least since the 1950s, anyway? Teenagers. Young people. You know whom studios have been trying to lure into the theaters for the last 20 or so years? Families. “Four-quadrant pictures” that appeal to everybody, where parents can take their kids. The conglomerate-owned studios justify $200-400 million investments in IP and sequel-driven four-quadrant pictures by wagering that these are safe bets. But you know who doesn’t want to sit with their parents at the movies? Teenagers. These massive tentpole pictures have spent 20 years teaching young people that going to theaters is boring and for old people or little kids.

These three directors have something in common that I think is much more powerful than their shared YouTube origins—they're young people. Markiplier is the oldest—he's in his thirties, but he's been on YouTube since 2012 (same year this blog started. James Wan, call me).

These are young people making movies for young people. Where have we heard that before?

A… ahem… New Hope?

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet got in trouble during his Oscars blitz because he said he was worried that the theatrical experience was moving toward niche entertainment, like the ballet or opera. I found his comments utterly unobjectionable, but lots of folks got Big Mad. Not that Timmy C needs me in his corner, but box office has been down for years, never bouncing back from the pandemic closures, and the rise of streaming has led to so much hand-wringing and so, so many op-eds about whether or not this is the End of Cinema.

It's not. It never is. But as I wrote at the end of last year, Hollywood will become something different. It has to, and it always does.

The studio system collapsed throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s young people like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other young filmmakers who either got their start or a significant boost from Roger Corman (my man, the GOAT, whom I interviewed in 2017). The thing that Corman gave them was an opportunity to get reps, to make things, to learn the ropes as storytellers, and to introduce themselves to other producers who could give them work on bigger platforms. It sure seems like YouTube gives today’s creative folks the same opportunities.

As the 1970s reached their back half, suddenly Stephen Spielberg gave us Jaws and George Lucas gave us Star Wars—both previously unimaginable box office and cultural successes. Lucas was 32 or 33 when he directed Star Wars, his third feature film. Spielberg was 29 when he made Jaws, his third theatrical feature and fifth or sixth overall including made-for-TV movies. These were all young guys. Spielberg and Lucas went on to be responsible for most of the top-10 highest grossing movies of the 1980s.

Moving forward in time, Spike Jonze was 30 when he made Being John Malkovich after a career in successful music videos. M. Night Shyamalan was 29 when he made The Sixth Sense. Quentin Tarantino was 31 when he made Pulp Fiction, which essentially invented an entire genre of 90s action movies by mashing up things Tarantino grew up with into a distinct package that appealed to young moviegoers and other young filmmakers.

So Hollywood will probably learn the wrong lesson from this year, because it usually does. Back in the early aughts, blogs and Twitter feeds were the new hotness, especially after blogger Diablo Cody’s script for Juno turned into such a beautiful movie. Hollywood signed everybody with a blog or a Twitter feed, resulting in utterly forgettable (or worse!) shows like Shit My Dad Says and movies like I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. So they'll probably sign folks who have big YouTube channels, regardless of their storytelling ability, and some of them will never make anything, and some creators behind breakout hits (remember The Blair Witch Project? Remember?) will fizzle.

But others will not. Other creators will go on to write and direct movies that we will talk about forever. The nice thing is that the success of this year’s smaller movies will create a permission structure for not only distributors like A24 and NEON, but also for studios to take chances on more and smaller movies. And if they’re made by young people for young people, in a way that excites young people, or scares them, or reflects back to them a world that they recognize or dream of, then that’s what movies do best, and that’s what brings people together to experience them together.

I know Toy Story 5 just made all the money in the world this weekend. But if you are rooting for the future of movies in theaters, go see Obsession. Or if you’re squeamish, go see Backrooms. Don’t dismiss them because their filmmakers came from YouTube. In the end, these particular movies might not be for you, exactly, but their success will open the door to more movies in theaters that don’t start with the word “Avengers” or end in a number.

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

Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

The adversary in no man's land

cover artist: Julia Lloyd

This is my first Daniel Kraus, and I came to it because it won a prize and because I’ve been on something of a horror kick the last few months. In case you didn’t know, Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and another of his novels, Whalefall, is about to hit cinemas.

This is by way of saying I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t for Kraus being seen by other people first. Talk about the things you love, folks.

>It’s also a novel that’s quickly become (in)famous for its treatment of punctuation. Angel Down is told as a single sentence. There are people who’ll raise their eyebrows at that, others who’ll say that books should cater for the reader first. I have no time for either. I love it when writers play with the form of the novel as much as the text. Sure, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it’s clear the writer thinks they’re cleverer than they are, but so what? Personally I think we should reward ambition and intensity and reaching for the edges of things.

Still, stuff like this can be a gimmick, and by that I mean they add nothing to the narrative, the sense and atmosphere of the novel itself.

Kraus’s first big achievement, then, is to make this structure work. He does it in a specific way that allows you as the reader to breathe while also rendering the entire story urgent and imminent in a way that more conventional punctuation would have missed.

This urgency, the quasi-stream of consciousness that Kraus invokes on the page, is essential to the tale he builds over the course of the book, and I didn’t even notice I’d not seen a full stop until three or four pages in. Then I noticed, and then I thought hard about what it was accomplishing, and then I relished getting back to the rest of it.

The story itself follows one Private First Class Cyril Bagger: scumbag, conman, son of a bishop who lost his faith and, mostly, concerned with surviving the First World War no matter who else dies in the process.

Bagger has spent most of his life insulating himself from feelings towards his fellow man. He’s done this because feelings make it harder to steal from rubes, fools and the greedy, and these folks are Bagger’s congregation.

If his father is a bishop, in one of the endless self-made Puritan inspired American expressions of Christianity, then Bagger is his own sort of preacher—one of confidence and misplaced faith, of chance and getting ahead of those around you. Bagger’s view is the distillation of the American dream—the idea that you can make it big, built on the truth that if you do, others can’t. Kraus illuminates in swift strokes of the pen how the American Dream is built on a zero-sum game where, for you to win, many others have to lose.

And Private Bagger is determined to win that game—other people are his stepping stones.

The thing is, in the battalion in which Bagger serves (and swindles soldiers around him to go over the top on his behalf), there are very few good men of his acquaintance.

On a morning when the familiar screams of the wounded fill the air from no man’s land, Bagger and four of the worst soldiers in the battalion are left behind by their commander as the rest of the unit marches away. Their mission? To find and “help” the person screaming. By which they know to kill them, as that’s the easiest thing they can do.

Kraus has the patter and feelings of these fellows down—he has done the work to make this feel like a specific time and place. Attitudes, technology, experiences are all there situating Kraus’s characters in the most miserable of trenches at the end of WWI.

I think this would be enough to tell a story with. Erich Maria Remarque did it with All Quiet on the Western Front and told one of the most profound anti-war stories ever seen.

Kraus does something different here. This setting, with its horror—bodily, social, political and existential—morphs into something else when they discover that the person wailing in no man’s land is no wounded soldier. They retrieve an unconscious body whose appearance none of them can agree on, save to say it’s a woman (clean and unspoiled by mud, war or time).

Krauss departs here, using this woman’s presence to help outline each of Bagger’s comrades, to show them at their weakest and most venal, their most desperate and most vulnerable. None of these men are good, but none of them are quite intentionally evil either.

Don’t get me wrong, part of Kraus’s theme here is that men do evil things and relish them for the benefits they bring them. However, he’s also quite clear that it is this equation, that evil brings good things to those performing the evil deeds, that drives so much suffering and harm.

Krauss doesn’t say that this justifies acts, or even that the perceived and actual benefits of doing evil last. He just carefully lays out how ordinary people are quite capable and willing to do evil to others if it helps them get what they want in the moment. It’s not even that they’re great planners—a momentary feeling of satisfaction can be enough. We see this in the acts of complying in advance we have observed in the USA since White Supremacists came to power there. For each valorous act of resistance there are the equivalent acts of cowardice, complicity and collusion.

Bagger and his comrades are prepared to suffer so long as it means those around them suffer more. Kraus is clear that each of these men are traumatised, but also that they brought nothing but themselves to the war, and those selves were already primed to walk paths in which other peoples’ suffering was a price they were happy to see paid.

War is misery, says Kraus, but war exists because we make it. Where, then, the blame?

I don’t want to say too much about the story here—it is a gossamer thing which rewards a lightness of expectation and a lack of foreknowledge, especially around who this woman is and what she wants. I'm going to elide the way Kraus treats the uncanny too. It is good but nothing special in its own right. It's the service to which he puts it I find especially interesting.

Suffice to say that Kraus is, I think, playing with our ideas of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, not simply with the story but with the way he’s written the book. Bagger is human. In the end he can’t escape feeling things for the people around him. He hates this as much as it’s a salve for his soul. Kraus isn’t writing a Disney movie here—the real story isn’t the friends he makes along the way. It is about the choices we make—the ones we barrel through and feel are inevitable because we are hemmed in on all sides, as well as the power to stop and choose something different, something new, something that can break not just us but the world around us.

There are revelations that Kraus delivers to people who think about changing but often cannot, or who might try but have no moral muscles and so can’t make it stick. The weight is too heavy to lift. So they find change hard and leave it untried.

Angel Down is a horror novel. It is a speculative novel. It is an anti-war novel. It is a novel about the American Dream. Most of all it is a novel about how, across our entire lives, it might be that only one choice matters and how we might miss it because we sleepwalk through life without considering what we do and how it changes us and the world around us.

It’s not about agency per se; it’s about moments when who we are and what we choose matters, about how the rest of our lives might seem full of choice but are, really, expressions of us playing in tiny little prison cells where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re acting across the entire world.

Kraus, in the end, skewers the idea of agency as the supreme good in the same way a tender philosopher might skewer the idea that free will is absolute, and he does so with the uncanny and the otherworldly sitting in judgment of our hubris.

Highlights:

• One freaking sentence
• Layered, thoughtful and mystical

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, a superb experimental novel that has a lot to say about the things we take for granted as good and the things we might really consider if we wanted to actually do good.

Reference: Kraus, Daniel. Angel Down [First Atria Books, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA 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.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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