The Mighty Nein

 I started playing D&D in 2015, having bought myself a set of the three core rulebooks for the then-relatively-new 5th Edition of the game (each edition being a pretty radical redesign of its rules) for my 29th birthday and finally wrangling a group of friends to start playing it (with myself running the games as the "Dungeon Master," which is not usually how people start playing this game - typically it's the more experienced players who run things and introduce others to it) in November of that year (meaning it's almost precisely 10 years since I started).

Around this time, a group of fairly prominent voice-actors started an "Actual Play" series (a term that I think came later) on Geek & Sundry called Critical Role. While they hadn't really invented the format - that honor probably goes to the folks at Penny Arcade, who teamed up with the creators of D&D to have Creative Director Chris Perkins run their "Acquisitions Incorporated" podcast to introduce the then-new 4th Edition. But Critical Role took off in popularity and made much bigger names of its voice actor cast (I think it's honestly been very good for their VO careers in animation and video games, and has contributed to the celebrity status that voice actors have now - I don't think as many people would know who Ben Starr, Jennifer English, or Neil Newbon were if it weren't for Critical Role expanding the profiles of folks like Matthew Mercer or Laura Bailey).

Critical Role famously broke records with a Kickstarter campaign to finance an animated adaptation of their first campaign, Vox Machina, getting fully funded with their modest 300k goal in less than an hour and going on to get 11 million in the first day (if memory serves). With the success of The Legend of Vox Machina, with a few seasons already out and two more coming to conclude the story, it was perhaps unsurprising that they'd move on to the character and plot of their second campaign, Mighty Nein.

For me, this is pretty exciting, as I think (and I think the general consensus agrees with this) that Mighty Nein is their best campaign to-date (admittedly of a relatively small sample size of 3 long-form campaigns. The fourth started just over a month ago, which saw a lot of format changes, with additions to the cast and a new Dungeon Master).

The Mighty Nein campaign takes place decades after Vox Machina, and on a distant continent, though still within the fantasy world of Exandria. Its heroes are somewhat more conflicted and complicated (though while the folks at CR insist they aren't heroes, I've actually tended to find them better people than the ones in Vox Machina, perhaps because they have to overcome dark pasts).

There was no crowdfunding necessary for this one - The Legend of Vox Machina was a big enough success that Amazon was willing to fund this one themselves. The show is also taking a somewhat different approach to the material, with a lot of details filled in that we never saw at the game table.

D&D is a storytelling game, but because it's a game, one of the general rules is that you tend to limit the "viewpoint" to the players' characters. Scenes that don't involve the characters the players are embodying tend to be learned about or alluded to indirectly. These games also tend to have the player characters stick together, because it's not very fun for a player to have to just sit and not participate while dramatic stuff is going on.

Of cousre, a TV show works differently, and the first episode, which dropped for free on YouTube before the official premiere, makes ample use of the format to tell the story at its own pace. Indeed, of the core, central characters in the eponymous group, we actually only see four of the founding seven, and one of them only in a brief tease right at the end.

However, we're introduced to the continent of Wildemount, where a long-simmering cold war has been fought between the Kyrn Dynasty and the Dwendalian Empire. While each of these factions has its heroic and villainous qualities, the inciting incident here is when a group of Volstruckers - mage-assassins who work for one of the Empire's shady and unchecked agencies, called the Cerberus Assembly, steal a priceless and religious artifact from the Kryn, an object that helps to facilitate and regulate the reincarnation of souls (the exact mechanics of this are something someone who has seen the campaign will know a lot more about than the show has revealed so far, though it also looks like there have been some tweaks to how it works. The key is that it's a deeply powerful, magical, and spiritual object).

The Volstruckers and the Assembly are clearly working without the oversight or knowledge of the Empire's king or ministers, and have triggered was is sure to be a bloody and destructive war.

Meanwhile, we're introduced to Beuaregard Lionett (Marisha Ray), a novice monk of the Cobalt Soul, an order dedicated to unearthing the truth and knowledge, and function as archivists and detectives. Beau is clearly a talented detective, but her hotheaded nature (and a general stuffiness amongst her superiors in the order) leaves her forced to work independently when she stumbles across evidence of this Volstrucker plot, at least until she finds a fellow monk, Dairon (Ming-Na Wen) who has been looking into the same grand conspiracy.

Meanwhile, we're introduced to Caleb Widowgast (Liam O'Brien), a sad and depressed vagrant whose motives aren't totally clear, though there is a wanted poster with his face on it that accuses him of murder. Initially marked by a little goblin thief named Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel,) the two wind up teaming up with one another when they realize it's better than going alone. Caleb, it turns out, is an arcanist of some skill, and the theft that Nott assists him with was actually to get the components required to cast a spell to conjure his beloved cat back to him. (Those who know the full story here are going to get pretty teary-eyed from this detail).

In addition to spending more time with non-central characters (including Trent Ikithon (Mark Strong), one of the leaders of the Cerberus Assembly and arguably the most evil character in all of Critical Role) the show also has expanded its runtime to a 40-minute show, more akin to a 1-hour drama, while Vox Machina has been in 20-minute segments.

We have yet to meet some of the core characters, and I imagine it will be a little while before the eponymous group truly takes form. But we do at least get a glimpse of one - Yasha Nydoorin (Ashley Johnson,) a towering barbarian currently under the influence of a magic rune on the back of her neck.

It was around the time that I started listening to Critical Role in podcast form that the Mighty Nein first premiered back in 2018, and unlike the Vox Machina campaign, which had been a home game for the players before they jumped in to do their initial Actual Play show on Geek & Sundry, Mighty Nein started with the momentum Critical Role had already gathered, with their own studio and everything, and with the characters truly just setting out on their journeys.

The show, similarly, is giving us the characters before we even met them in the game, with all the clashing personalities and awkwardness of coming together as a team there to be mined for dramatic heft.

While Vox Machina's conflict largely focused on global threats - the dragons of the Chroma Conclave and the insidious evil god known as the Whispered One (a.k.a. Vecna, who expanded into the broader pop culture consciousness thanks to Stranger Things, but has been one of the most enduring villains throughout D&D lore), the Mighty Nein are far less public-facing than Vox Machina, largely working on their own personal conflicts, even if these do wind up becoming world-threatening menaces.

Beau asks Dairon in this first episode why they would choose her to help uncover this conspiracy, and Dairon responds by saying that, as a nobody, no one will see her coming. This winds up being the whole M.O. of the Mighty Nein - heroes who work behind the scenes, saving people from threats that they might not even be aware of.

Anyway, I'm really excited to see more.

Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein

 Over two hundred years since it was written, Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, remains one of the absolute classics of literature. Launching, effectively, both horror and science fiction as the genres they are today with a single novel, it's also a speculative exploration on the moralities of accelerating scientific progress.

For the past 96 years, of course, the most famous portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster was Boris Karloff's, with his iconic flat brow and neck-bolts, here portraying the creature as a mute, unintelligent brute. In 1994, Kenneth Branagh made a more faithful adaptation, with himself as the doctor and Robert De Niro as the creature. I suspect that this film was made in the wake of Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," which had come out two years prior, and which sought to be a more faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel (hence the use of his name in the title of the film). Branagh's adaptation was "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," in the same format.

I've often said that I think Del Toro loves monsters the way a child loves a teddy bear. He clearly has a great affection for them. As we saw in his Oscar-winning riff on Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Shape of Water, he transforms the amphibious creature from a rapacious menace into something graceful, romantic, and possibly divine.

His Frankenstein - an inevitable project when considering his body of work - makes adaptational changes to the novel to reinforce this affection: Shelley's creature (whom I like to refer to as Adam, though I don't think he's ever given a proper name, except maybe being Victor Junior) does commit murder in his rage against his neglectful master. Despite these acts, Adam is still more sympathetic than his creator, who callously tosses him aside when he realizes the enormity of his magnum opus, and refuses to do anything to ease Adam's crippling loneliness.

The film reshuffles some of its plot elements, painting both a more sympathetic version of Adam (Jacob Elordi) and a more damning one of Victor (Oscar Isaac).

Actually, when the story-within-a-story begins, we get a rather sympathetic view of Victor in his childhood - he has a loving mother, but a distant father (played by Charles Dance, who has a lot of experience playing a shitty father). Both a Baron and a renowned doctor, Victor's father trains his son in medical science, but in a manner that is just straight-up abusive, physically striking him when he fails to remember the purpose of some piece of anatomy when he's maybe ten years old.

Victor's ailing mother dies when she goes into labor with his little brother William, and while it's not explicitly confirmed, it seems that Victor believes that his father erred on saving the baby over his mother (caesarian deliveries used to be very deadly for the mother).

This cycle of abuse is very much what the film focuses on. Unlike in the novel, Victor's immediate reaction to his creation's awakening is not one of sudden terror and loathing. Initially, he's overjoyed (especially because the entire venture looked like it had been sabotaged by circumstance). It's when Adam is slow to progress, unable to say anything other than his creator's name, that he becomes resentful and fears that his grand project was a failure. He stops looking to his creation with any kindness or enthusiasm.

In the novel, Elizabeth is a childhood friend of Victor's whom he eventually seeks to marry, only for her to be killed by Adam before the wedding. Here, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is initially betrothed to his brother William (Felix Kammerer,) and not long after Adam's creation, she finds and befriends the creature, seeing him as the conscious, intelligent being that he is, rather than the "it" that Victor believes him to be.

Del Toro presents an Adam who is not just extremely resilient, but truly invincible, granted a regenerative ability on top of his hardiness that allows him to survive holding an exploding stick of dynamite, among other injuries. Victor's aim in his research is to fully defeat death itself, but in creating a truly immortal being, there is no means by which to undo his creation, nor any way for Adam to escape the pains of life.

While the novel has an Adam who is bent on revenge, tormenting Victor by slaying those around him, this film's version is nearly a perfect innocent - he does kill some people, but only in self-defense (sure, you could argue that an unkillable being can't kill in self-defense). The people around Victor who die are either killed by accident, or by Victor's own hand (and Victor multiple times blames Adam for deaths he has caused).

Victor ultimately, in this film, is someone who passes on the abuse that he received as a child. There's a popular saying: "Hurt people hurt people," and Victor surely seems to be an example of that. He is, also, someone who displays narcissistic tendencies, struggling to see others around him (not just Adam) as real people with all the inner life that he possesses.

It is Adam, the Creature, who has and seems to take the opportunity to bring the cycle of abuse to an end. Though he must soldier on with no end to his life, within that lack of closure, he has the opportunity to grow and become a far better man than his creator ever was.

As a minor note, the movie bumps the setting up to the 1850s (the novel was published in 1818) and has Victor study medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. I recently watched the video series An Agony of Effort, by Charred Thermos, which analyzes the game Bloodborne as an extensive allegory for the development of modern medicine in the 19th century. Edinburgh was a real center of that research at the time, which also made it a hotbed for grave-robbing "Resurrectionists" that sold cadavers to medical researchers. In the film, Victor uses the impunity of money and aristocracy to quite overtly claim the remains of the executed or battle-slain, but it's a keen era in which to set the story.

Plur1bus

 I was vaguely aware of Vince Gilligan when, in 2008, the year that I graduated from college and moved out to California, my best friend and I watched through the entirety of The X-Files, a show that I'd been aware of growing up, but never actually seen. Gilligan was a frequent writer and director on that show. Later, of course, he'd make a far bigger name for himself specifically with his thrilling series about drugs and toxic masculinity, Breaking Bad, and its prequel/spin-off follow-up (which I have not seen yet) Better Call Saul.

In Pluribus (or, stylized as Plur1bus,) Gilligan returns to sci-fi with an interesting twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that asks: what if the pod people were super-polite?

The opening minutes of the series' pilot recall, to me, Stephen King's massive novel The Stand. In The Stand, the first half or so of the book shows how an engineered super-flu called "Captain Tripps" ravages humanity, killing off about 99.9% of the population. The small few survivors in the US, seemingly living by simple chance at having immunity to the virus, are then called separately to the side of two individuals, one representing good and the other evil.

In Pluribus, a group of scientists are shocked and thrilled to discover a genuine signal from an alien world, and after over a year of work, they determine that the signal contains an RNA sequence. Replicating that sequence, though, a mishap leads to the RNA spreading like a virus, swiftly taking over peoples' minds and compelling them to spread it.

Eventually, on one fateful night (though I guess it's day in other parts of the world,) the virus is spread to all of humanity.

We're introduced to Carol (Rhea Seehorn,) a successful fantasy-romance author who is deeply bitter and cynical about the ways she has chosen to sell out to make her books more popular, including hiding her own sexual orientation and original desire to make her novels' primary love interest a woman.

Helen, her partner, is clearly her better half, and someone she certainly relies upon to make it through life. Thus, when a strange pattern of airplanes flying overhead sends a nearby driver unconscious, crashing into a parked car, the most horrifying sequence starts in earnest: everyone around Carol starts to convulse, and Helen falls hard on the pavement outside the bar at which they were winding down from Carol's book tour.

Carol rushes to get help for her partner, but there's no one in a state to aid her, even when she drives to the hospital.

And then... everyone recovers. It's not clear to me if the infection itself kills Helen, or if the hard fall onto the pavement did (hitting her head). The point is, Carol finds herself alone amidst a mass of people who are now all walking and talking and speaking in unison.

She turns on the TV, and discovers that she is the sole person in all of America who has not been changed like this, and we find that the hive-mind now controlling the vast majority of humanity is... actually super nice and pleasant. They tell her that they're only there to help her, and they want to figure out why it was that she wasn't affected.

The "Joined" as they call themselves, are chilling in a way that the screaming pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers aren't, because they're just so damned polite and understanding. They assure Carol is her own person, and free to do as she wishes, though they still make it clear that their intent is eventually to convert her as well.

We see the shocking coordination of this new Joined humanity - a woman in what I read as somewhere in the West Bank (though I'm probably wrong as it also seems near the Mediterranean coast, though maybe that's actually the Dead Sea?) cleans up corpses from the chaos that occurred when everyone was convulsing as the virus took over. (The juxtaposition between the modern structures of what I assume are Israeli settlements versus the cramped, dense houses of the Palestinians is potent, raising interesting doubts about whether a hive-mind that removes all the artificial divisions we've created amongst humanity is such a bad thing.) Without missing a beat, a young man comes and takes over her role, handing her his motorcycle helmet as she travels to an airport, gets into a plane, and flies to the US, where people are waiting to bathe, clothe, and do up her hair and make-up, all to present Carol with the person who most fit a feminine version of the art on the cover of her first novel depicting its romantic interest hunk, Rabad.

A few things are spelled out for us: while the signal that encoded this RNA sequence was alien in origin, the aliens don't seem to actually be actively involved in any of this. The sequence just creates a connection between anyone infected so that every body can access every mind in the network. The Joined claim that they cannot harm any living being intentionally (which does mean that everyone's going vegetarian as soon as the meat in peoples' fridges and freezers is eaten or goes bad,) and they don't push themselves on Carol, always stepping away when she asks them to.

As with so many stories of this ilk, we're invited to question whether individuality and free will are really worth all the problems they cause. After all, the moment that this takes humanity over, no one is murdering anyone anymore. Wars are all over, every prisoner is released.

We're given Carol as our main character, and she's a bit of a mess - she has clearly had problem with alcohol (hence why her car has a breathalyzer that is required to start it) and she's dismissive about all the fans who come to fawn over her books. While it might be there for some kind of ironic reason, she also has a Phrenology bust in her house. I think we're meant to really question: is she a good person?

When the Joined (primarily through "Rabad") agree to arrange a meeting with the five other people in the world (of 11) who speak English, Carol is shocked to find that they aren't nearly as upset as she is. Each has family that have all been Joined, and they seem to be ok with it. After all, the Joined are happy to cater to all of their needs.

Carol, of course, just lost the one person in her life who seemed to mean anything to her. One wonders how she would feel if Helen had survived, even if she was Joined (as the other Joined claim she was before she died - hence their insights into Carol's original intentions for the Rabad character).

I think it's also kind of interesting that she's the one American to be unaffected, and how that might inform her attitude.

Breaking Bad was very much an exploration of the toxicity of how men, and in particular, American men, are expected to behave. Walter White's evil comes from his need to be the alpha male - he can't stand that others are willing to help him when he's weakened by his cancer diagnosis, and his conflict with Gus Fring is largely due to his inability to be subordinate in any way to another person. Walter White has so many opportunities to avoid all the pain and death that he causes, but he isn't willing to take a path that doesn't make him the central paterfamilias.

I do wonder, then, if Carol's immediate assumption that the Joined are an evil that must be stopped, an attitude that is not shared by the other five English-speaking non-Joined, might be a comment on the extremist stance Americans tend to take toward individualism in contrast with the collective. I suppose that might make her seem more heroic if you have that gung-ho American outlook, but in my opinion, the "rugged individualism" so championed in American culture has, paradoxically, curtailed a lot of our freedoms by preventing collective action that might wean us from the power of corporate institutions.

I hate that I find myself boiling things down to a Left/Right political alignment so much these days - obviously reality and humanity is more complex than a one-dimensional spectrum. But I do think it's curious that the Joined, in their polite way of speaking, in their patience and affability, and in their vegetarian ethos, could be seen as a satire of progressive politics. (Funnily enough, the RNA sequence is spread through an aerosol distributed by planes overhead - literally chemtrails.)

At one point, Carol gets so angry at "Rabad" that she yells at her, and this sends the entire hive-mind into a minutes-long convulsion, which we discover caused the deaths of eleven million people. Should Carol feel guilty about this? Sure, it's rude to yell at people, but surely it's not murder.

I think, if you were so inclined, you could read this as a satire of the left-wing idea of needing "safe spaces," though I think that if that were your read, you'd be playing into an absurdist oversimplification of that concept that has become more of a right-wing talking point than a reality on the left.

What it reads, to my mind, is as emotional manipulation. An emotional abuser will often try to make themselves the victim, and make accusations of abuse out to be abuse itself.

I really don't know where the show is going with all of this. The most obvious path would be for the Joined to demonstrate greater and greater menace, perhaps pushing harder and harder for Carol to conform and manipulating her in more and more overt ways.

The alternative, though, that might be more original (though tricky to pull off) would be for the Joined to be exactly what they say they are: that they are truly just trying to do what's best for the other eleven humans, and that it's purely through Carol and the others that we'll get the conflict and drama of the series, up against a morally neutral force.

Still, I think it's a smart choice to make Carol a novelist. Carol is someone who has engaged in an artform that seeks to communicate something to readers - not just ideas, but a sense of world, of people. Her novels are fantastical, featuring pirates sailing on sand-ships across a purple desert. There is a joy in communicating ideas in this way, seeking always to find a more perfect way to share the feeling you have in your mind.

When we see the Joined acting with one another, no one ever speaks. No one needs to speak. Any information that one possesses, the rest do as well. With no challenge in communication, how can there be art?

Midnight Mass

 Suzy Eddie Izzard has a bit from one of her older stand-up specials that I always found quite funny: imagining Jesus returning to Heaven after the Resurrection, speaking with God the Father, and the Father reacting with shock and dismay that Jesus had introduced this idea that his followers should eat his body and drink his blood: "You've introduced cannibalism and vampirism on the first day of a new religion!"

The Eucharist is, if you're not Catholic or at least culturally familiar with Catholic practice, a really weird idea. At Mass, the priest transmutes the wafers and wine into what is believed to literally be the body and blood of Christ. And it is right there in the Gospels, where Jesus says that the bread and wine at the Last Supper are these things, and a pretty core tenet of Christianity is that you take Jesus at his word.

I guess I should state here that I don't really want to get into a judgmental space here. My mother was raised Catholic, and a lot of her side of the family are quite devout. (My mom's own beliefs were a little hard to pin down - I think she remained culturally at home within Catholicism but was agnostic in her belief in the supernatural. That she married an atheist Jew, my dad, spoke to her comfort stepping outside of that circle). The point is, lots of people have lots of beliefs that will look odd from an outside perspective, and I'm not here to single out Catholicism: I'm just here to comment on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass.

Released in 2021, Midnight Mass was the third of a number of miniseries projects created by Mike Flanagan, following up The Haunting of Hill House and the Haunting of Bly Manor. While the previous two were loose adaptations of previous stories, I believe that Midnight Mass is a wholly original one.

Set on the (I'm assuming) fictional island of Crockett Isle, off the coast of New England, the story is about a community that is dying out because of economic and environmental devastation that is thrown into upheaval with the arrival of a new priest to take over the local Catholic church.

Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) is warm and friendly, and more than anything energized, bringing an optimistic spirit of someone who has witnessed a miracle.

Oh, and also, he arrives on the island with a giant trunk that apparently has something alive within it.

Yes, this is a horror story, but three episodes in, the horror has been played quite slow. Largely, we're shown a tiny community that is very tight-knit and centered around the local church, which thus manages to create a few outsiders because of those who don't fit in as well to that religious community.

This, of course, is the paradox of organized religion. There are few institutions, maybe none, that are more effective at bringing people together in community, but because they are built around supernatural belief, those who cannot or will not conform to the expectations of that community will inevitably feel alienated. Those within the community see the solution as simply converting those outside of it: to those within, this seems like a warm act of love and welcome, while to those without, well, it feels like the invasion of the body snatchers.

Vampires, as monsters, are near-universal. Cultures across the world have monsters that drink peoples' blood. But I think there's a special resonance that these monsters have in cultures where Christianity is dominant, because there's this kind of weird perversion of that which is holy: Jesus offers up his blood for humanity to drink and benefit from, while vampires take the blood of their victims. That vampires in particular are often said to be thwarted by religious accoutrements - abjured by crucifixes, seared by holy water - really places them, as monsters, in that religious/spiritual context in a way that, at least by the current folklore/pop culture associations, is not true for something like a werewolf.

Vampires are sometimes depicted as leaning into this kind of blasphemous, sacrilegious appropriation of religious iconography and practice. On a straightforward level, this feels like a cruel kind of mockery of that which gives the devout comfort.

But I think there's a deeper horror inherent in it that veers into cosmic horror: what if it's no mockery, but the real deal? What if the benevolent salvation promised by religion is a facade over something horrific?

Fantastical stories are rife with cultists who have been fooled by demons or other monsters into thinking that service to their so-called savior will bring about salvation. But how much more horrifying would it be to discover that this was not limited to some minor, recent cult, but some major, mainstream religion?

Again, I don't want to offend anyone with sincere beliefs, but it's this kind of dread that even veers into cosmic horror that I think is really potent.

I'm only three episodes into the show's seven-episode run. But we have had some rather huge reveals regarding what is going on. The show is only four years old, so I think I'll do a spoiler cut:

Spoilers Ahead: