Tag: metacrone

Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 2: Habeas Corpus Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 4 Comments

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In episode 2, Henry investigates Lacy’s suicide, hoping it will lead him to his missing client. He stops by the church again and connects with Jackie Torrance, a local history buff who helps with the local church program to minister to the prisoners. Henry also connects with Zalewski, who helps him get his first look at the Kid. The Kid is having adventures in the regular prison population, as the Warden agrees to put him into solitary, doubled up with a roommate. Pangborn is playing his own complicated game using inside information.

More of what the town put Henry through when he was a child begins to come clear. It’s obvious that he was convicted in the townspeople’s minds as soon as his father’s injured body was found, while Henry himself was still missing. Being black and adopted was enough for the town to use their imaginations to come up with a story that they found believable. The truth was irrelevant, and still is.

Continue reading “Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 2: Habeas Corpus Recap” →

Reverie Season 1 Episode 6: Pas de Deux Recap

~ Metacrone

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This week Mara helps a dancer who’s unable to envision her life without dancing, but who’s lost the ability to dance after a devastating bicycle accident. Mara’s patient has gotten lost in her Reverie, reenacting the best parts of her life and the experiences she wishes she could have had. Saving Holly reunites Mara with Chris, the psychiatrist who was her boyfriend before her family’s murders. In her grief, she shut him out. Now, she has to deal with him in a professional capacity, and face the hurt she caused him by pulling away from their romantic relationship 19 months ago.

Holly is a former dancer who is now paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. She lives with her sister, Vivian, who is also a dancer. While her sister runs a dance studio and lives a busy life, Holly spends her days in Reverie dancing in an empty theatre. At the beginning of the episode, Holly spends too long in Reverie and needs to be brought into Onira Tech’s medical wing.

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Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 1: Severance Recap

~ Metacrone

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I was undecided about whether to recap Castle Rock because I was afraid it might be too scary for me, but we had a request, so here we are. Be prepared to hold my hand, dear readers!

The show takes place in the Stephen King universe, using some of the locations and characters from his books and some actors from Stephen King’s other filmed properties, but it tells an original story. Castle Rock itself is a small rural town in northern Maine, home to several King books, including Cujo, The Dead Zone and The Dark Half. Shawshank State Penitentiary, from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, lies outside of town and is one of the town’s main employers.

Hulu released the first 3 episodes this week, but I’ve only watched the first, so no spoilers for the other 2 here. I’m also not going to spend much time looking for Stephen King Easter Eggs or referencing the stories that are the foundation of this one. I’ve read some of Stephen King’s works and seen some of the films/TV series, but I’m not the kind of fanatic who’s tried to keep up with everything he’s ever done.

King also has a tendency to either forget to include female characters or be misogynist toward the ones that are there, so by about the 1990’s I’d had enough of that and haven’t read/seen much that’s new since then. Castle Rock should be able to stand on its own in the modern world if its going to survive, not depend on nostalgia for old works, and it shouldn’t stay stuck in King’s past mistakes.

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Netflix’s Altered Carbon Renewed for Season 2: Anthony Mackie Takes Over as Takeshi Kovacs

~ Metacrone
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buzzfuss / 123RF Stock Photo

Netflix has given us some great news to start the weekend! They’ve finally officially announced the season 2 renewal of their neo noir sci fi thriller Altered Carbon. It seems they were waiting to make the announcement until they could also announce who the new co-showrunner and star would be.

Anthony Mackie, who’s most well-known for playing the Falcon/Sam Wilson in the MCU Captain America and Avengers films, will play the new sleeve of former Envoy and Protectorate soldier Takeshi Kovacs. Mackie has been in numerous other films, notably the critically acclaimed The Hurt Locker. His only other major foray into television was the 2016 HBO film All the Way, in which Mackie played Martin Luther King, Jr opposite Bryan Cranston’s Lyndon Johnson. That film was also well received.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 2: Unwomen Recap

~ Metacrone

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Episode 2 is Emily’s episode, the episode of the Unwomen, the gender traitors, the sinners and the resisters. We follow Emily and Janine to the Colonies to get a look at what Gilead is like in another part of the country. And we watch Emily’s back story as a wife, mother and university professor. Emily fights for freedom of expression and sexuality, while June is taken to stay at the former offices of the Boston Globe newspaper, where the entire staff was executed for their part in maintaining the American right to freedom of expression. They each deal with the enormity of the loss of this freedom in their own way.

June rides to freedom, or at least her next hiding place, in the open flatbed of a delivery truck and muses about the meanings of freedom, both symbolic and practical. She wonders whether the Resistance can really get her out, or if the infection that is Gilead is so deep inside her that she’s no longer capable of escaping it.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 1: June Recap

~ Metacrone

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Welcome back to Gilead! Things are still as much fun as ever, as you can see from the photo above. June is on a roller coaster ride this episode, going from punishment for standing up to Aunt Lydia during last season’s finale, to special treatment because she’s pregnant, to barely being tolerated by Serena (so, back to normal), to a sudden chance at escape. As always, June is never sure where any of this is leading, but she’s not the kind of gal to stay home and knit sweaters, so she jumps into every opportunity, feet first.

“Whether this is my end or a new beginning, I have no way of knowing, and so I step up into the darkness within. Or else the light.”

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Kiss Me First Season 1 Episode 3: Off the Rails Recap

~ Metacrone

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Leila is further drawn into Adrian’s machination’s in episode 3 of Kiss Me First, as she tries to save Tess from herself and Denier from Adrian. She learns more about Adrian’s methods and begins to work with an important ally. Adrian and Leila’s interactions begin to turn into a very intense chess game when he starts to figure out that she isn’t as predictable as he thought.

March 2005- Azana Planet Launch

Ruth Palmer: Welcome to Azana Planet. Friends, colleagues, gamers, the wait is finally over. My name is Ruth Palmer, and today I’m going to change your world. You’ll decide what it becomes.

Newsreader: The wait is finally over for gamers around the world with the release of the widely anticipated Azana Planet.

Ruth: We’ve created it with a morphable engine. It’s scaleable, immersive. A whole planet of experience with no boundaries. It can become literally anything.

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Kiss Me First Season 1 Episode 2: Make It Stop Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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In this episode of Kiss Me First, Leila begins her investigation of Adrian and Red Pill, while Adrian draws Leila further into the Red Pill world that he’s creating. Tess and Leila grow closer in the real world, and learn each other’s difficult truths. Adrian insists that everyone in Red Pill will get what they need, though it’s not clear that Adrian is actually able to judge what they need, as opposed to what he thinks or wants them to need.

The episode begins with Calumny’s grayed out, dormant avatar standing alone in an empty field. Adrian rides up to it on a motorcycle, touches it, says, “Do widzenia,” and it dissolves. He rides away again.

In a flashback, Leila buys Axabutol from the pharmacy. The pharmacist is concerned about the potency of the medication and wants Leila to speak to a pharmacist, but Leila refuses. Axabutol is a fictional drug, as far as I can tell, but meant to be an opioid.

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Kiss Me First Season 1 Review (Spoiler Free)

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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Kiss Me First is a new Netflix/British Channel 4 series that is loosely based on Lottie Moggach’s 2014 debut novel of the same name. The six episode first season focusses on Leila (Tallulah Haddon), a young woman whose mother has just died, and Tess (Simona Brown), a mentally ill woman with a troubled history.

Both women escape from the difficulties of their lives using a ubiquitous gaming program called Azana Planet, but Tess, known as Mania within the game, has found her way into a hacked section of the program that’s set up as a private meeting space. It’s reserved for friends of a gamer who calls himself Adrian (Matthew Beard), who collects troubled young people and theoretically gives them what they need.

Eventually Leila, who goes by the name Shadowfax in the game, also finds her way into the private space. The club and its virtual clubhouse are known as Red Pill, for the pill Neo took to get out of the Matrix, rather than the Men’s Rights Activists’ delusion of choice. Before long, Leila suspects that Adrian isn’t as benign as the others thinks he is. Her real world investigation of Adrian involves the rest of the Red Pill members and becomes high stakes, as members start meeting sinister fates, one by one.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Finale: Did June Betray Rita and the Marthas by Staying in Gilead?

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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In the season 2 finale of The Handmaid’s Tale, June chooses to stay in Gilead rather than escape with her baby daughter, despite several Marthas and others having risked their lives to help her and Nichole. This has become a controversial choice with the audience. I’ve seen many commenters who feel that June was selfish to stay behind, because the Marthas had taken serious risks to get her and the baby out. Some people think that the Marthas will feel angry and betrayed when they find out that June didn’t leave. Since even major outlets were shocked and disgusted by June’s choice and agree with the judgement that it makes her selfish, I’ve decided to address it in a separate post from my already extra long recap/analysis.

This is a complex issue. First, calling June selfish for sending one child to safety but giving up her own chance at freedom so that she can try to save her other child and work with the Resistance to save more people, is blatantly ridiculous and misogynistic. What would be selfish is saving herself without a thought for the other people it would affect, which is what the Marthas expected her to do.

Second, June didn’t ask the Marthas to get her out. She owes them now that her baby is hopefully free, but she wasn’t required to take them up on their offer, since she didn’t request it in the first place. Even if she requested it, she would have been allowed to change her mind. Her life and her children’s lives are the lives most at stake in an escape attempt. If she wasn’t comfortable with what was happening, she had the right to change her mind. After all of the uproar about the rapes in this show, are people now saying that June doesn’t have the right of consent to the escape plan that others devised for her and her children? That’s insane. Hannah and Nichole are the most innocent victims, and as their parent, June’s first responsibility is always to them. She has the right to consent to the plan or not, and to withdraw her consent if needed when conditions change. Which they did, when she saw that she could send Nichole to Canada with Emily.

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