Tag: Psychological Thriller

The Innocents Season 1 Episode 4: Deborah Recap

~ Metacrone

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This episode, we get some back story on the beginnings of Sanctum and more insight into Ben’s relationships with Steinar and Runa. As Sigrid inches closer to leaving Sanctum, her confidence grows and so does her willingness to engage in harem rivalries. Ben loses control of his harem, proving it’s probably not the best place for a teenage shifter.

Steinar and Alf have a misunderstanding that leads to a major falling out between them. Alf finally calls Sanctum what it really is, a cult.

John is proven incapable of sharing information, no matter how vital. Probably because it would require him to speak in full sentences, possibly even paragraphs. Christine starts to put together some old and new puzzle pieces regarding Lewis’ case, even though Doug still wants her to drop the matter.

Harry and June figure out some of the basic rules of shapeshifting, while June takes a brief excursion away from reality. Ryan proves to be the best once again. And Harry and June reach a major new milestone in their relationship.

It’s a very productive episode.

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The Innocents Season 1 Episode 3: Bubblegum & Bleach Recap

~ Metacrone

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Best episode title ever.

There they go again. With so many people chasing them, June and Harry are always moving from place to place, trying to stay once step ahead. It’s a stark contrast to the Norwegian portions of the show, which are based on the subtle, slow moving character arcs of the people living in the Sanctum compound. You can’t help but compare June and Harry’s youthful exuberance to the damaged, uncertain middle-aged adult shapeshifters at Sanctum. Is June doomed to also lose her confidence and identity, or will Harry’s love and a supportive community help keep her psyche intact?

Harry gives Christine a rare chance to parent him without any interference in this episode. With just a few words she shows what an impact a supportive community can have. He’s overwhelmed by the ramifications of June’s shapeshifting, and not sure he can cope with how huge the whole thing is, plus he’s worried that he’ll end up injured by one of her shifts. When he tells Christine this, in very general terms, she says that’s how love works. Things change, but it’s still the same person.

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The Innocents Season 1 Episode 2: Keep Calm, Come to No Harm Recap

~ Metacrone

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Episode 2 of The Innocents picks up roughly where the pilot left off. After June (as Steinar) has forced her way back into their hotel room and shown her boyfriend, Harry, that Steinar reflects her image in the mirror, Harry does the only sensible thing and makes a run for it. He runs for freedom, through a field of wheat, in an image similar to images from earlier this year in The Handmaid’s Tale, season 2.

June Osborne ran through a corn field toward freedom in one episode and then a grassy field in a later episode. She didn’t make it to freedom either time, and neither does Harry. His June, June McDaniel, follows him, still in Steinar’s body, trying to convince him that she’s herself, not the Norwegian henchman. She flails and cries, and finally quotes one of his love letters, which makes Harry stop and really look at her. “You told me that you kept all my letters and that you weren’t embarrassed. Harry, I don’t know how, but it’s me. It’s really me.”

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The Innocents Season 1 Episode 1: The Start of Us Recap

~ Metacrone

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Metawitches full review of The Innocents is HERE.

The Innocents is finally here. It’s time to go on the run with June and Harry, a teenage shapeshifter and her stalwart sidekick devoted boyfriend, who leave their home and strict families for something better, only to discover that it’s a cold, cruel world out there, and everyone has been lying to June about who she is for her entire life.

Except June isn’t secret royalty or a mob princess, she’s a werewolf shapeshifter, whose body takes on the form of the first person she touches during stress-triggered shift-states. June discovers this accidentally, when she’s alone with an unconscious man. Later she has to convince Harry that she is who she is, despite the way she looks now. Love and mirror reflections (see the photo at the top of the page) conquer all, eventually.

It’s Twilight meets Orphan Black, with some Altered Carbon thrown in.

This show is for fans who’ve missed classic supernatural teen romances set against the background of larger mythology and ideas, like Roswell and the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries. The soulmate aspect is important, and as the season goes on, it’s explored not just through June and Harry, but through other couples as well.

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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 Episode 1: She Did Something Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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Spoiler free review of season 1 is HERE.

In episode 1 of Netflix’s Kiss Me First, we meet Leila, a quiet, introverted young woman who has spent the last few years at home caring for her dying mother. With her mother gone, Leila moves out into the world. Sometimes it’s the virtual world and sometimes it’s the physical world. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one world ends and the other begins.

Once her mother has passed on, Leila begins forming new relationships and trying to figure out where she fits in the world. She’s intelligent, strong and willing to continue looking out for other people, but she’s also sheltered, a bit innocent and can be impulsive.

We meet Leila for the first time at her mother’s funeral. She and the priest are the only ones there, besides Myra in her casket. Afterwards, Leila brings Myra’s ashes to the river, but doesn’t throw them in. Instead she brings them home and puts them in a prominent place on the mantle.

When Leila gets home from the funeral, the medical service is at her apartment collecting all of Myra’s adaptive care devices. The nice nurse mentions how much she liked Myra, and how her death seemed sudden. She asks if Leila has someone coming to stay with her, and Leila says yes, friends.

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Movie Review: Get Out

~ Metacrone

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Get Out * 2017 * Rated R * 1 Hour 44 Minutes

😸😸😸😸😸 Rated 5/5 Happy lap cats

Jordan Peele has written and directed a powerful, thought-provoking movie with layers of statements to make. He’s also made a taut psychological thriller that combines the racially motivated social awkwardness of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” with the justified paranoia of “The Stepford Wives”and the slowly revealed evil of “Rosemary’s Baby”. Get Out reveals the truth about its premise incrementally, at just the right pace, so that the viewer, like lead character Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), ends up similar to a frog in slowly boiling water. When he, and we, finally become sure that things have gone bad, it’s already too late, and it’s unlikely any of us will forget what we’ve already seen. As with any horror movie, there’s no escape left, so the best way out is through.

Along with Chris, Get Out follows the story of Rose Armitage (Alison Williams), a white woman who’s been dating Chris, an African-American photographer, for 4-5 months. Rose has decided that it’s time to bring Chris home to meet her upper class parents, Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford) who live in the exurbs of New York City, where the nearest neighbor is so far away that they can’t hear you scream. Chris asks his best friend, Rod, a TSA agent (LilRel Howery), to take care of his dog while he’s gone. They check in with each other several times during the weekend.

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Mindhunter Season 1: Review

~ Metacrone

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In Which the FBI Learns to Think Like a Serial Killer

Mindhunter is a new 10 episode original series from Netflix based on the true crime book of the same name by John E Douglas and Mark Olshaker. Douglas spent 25 years in the FBI, many of them developing the science of criminal profiling. The series is a fictionalized account of  Douglas’ time with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, where he worked with Dr Ann Wolbert Burgess and Robert Ressler to study and categorize the behavior of psychopathic criminals.

The first season starts before Holden Ford, the stand-in character for Douglas, and Bill Tench, the stand-in for Ressler, meet. Ford is an FBI hostage negotiator and instructor at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. Tench travels the country teaching FBI methodology to local law enforcement agencies. He listens in on local concerns and occasionally assists with cases at the same time. Ford feels he’s wasting his time teaching a subject that’s too limited to students who don’t care, while Tench wants help carrying his slide projector, so their supervisor pairs them up.

While Shepherd, the supervisor, originally pairs the two as a way to get both to stop hassling him, it proves to be a stroke of genius. Local officers frequently approach Tench and Ford during and after their presentations with unique cases that seem unsolvable. These spark Ford’s instincts, leading him to seek out more information about crimes involving fetishes and repeat offenders: what would come to be known as the work of serial killers.

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Riverdale Season 1 Chapter Eight: The Outsiders Recap

~ Metacrone

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This week’s episode centers around Polly, finally in Riverdale, available to tell her side of the story, and to give the Blossoms and the Coopers a chance to fight over her in person. Jughead references The Stepford Wives in his opening voice over. There are two facets to the story of The Stepford Wives at play here. The first goal is turning all of the wives into perfect clones that fit the exact parameters of societal and male ideals of perfection, which is done by replacing them with androids. The second goal is finding the wives with secrets and intelligence, and moving them to the top of the replacement list. So many secrets are revealed in this episode, and so many characters try to control and manipulate other characters. Too many for me to list in what has become a very long recap.

Jughead tells us in his opening voiceover that Alice and Hal Cooper were high school sweethearts who got married and had two beautiful daughters. Their lives appeared perfect until Polly got pregnant and Jason was murdered.

Then Jughead recounts a summary of Polly and Jason’s history together. None of the information is new, but we do see new footage while he talks, including a conversation between them in the school hall with Polly in her cheerleader uniform, an argument at Pop’s, Nana Rose giving them her engagement ring, and the two of them at Pop’s while making plans to run away. Jughead is sitting across the aisle from them, looking bored as he watches.

Polly is sitting in Hermione’s living room, telling her story to Sheriff Keller. She tells him that the last time she saw Jason was the day that they made plans at Pop’s. Jason was going to make a one-time drug delivery upstate in order to raise the funds for he and Polly to run away together. He made a deal with the Serpents to deliver the drugs in exchange for cash. The drugs burned up in Jason’s car, along with the ring, and everything else she had to remember him by. Hermione stops the interview when Polly gets upset.

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