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Review: Game of Thrones: Season Two
Even though poor Ned Stark's head was lamentably lopped off at the end of the show's first season, Game of Thrones is very much only the initial act of George R. R. Martin's vast A Song of Ice and Fire saga. If book one represents an executioner's great sword being raised in the air above an accused traitor's skull, then A Clash of Kings, the second novel in Martin's celebrated series, is that weapon steadily beginning its downward strike. (Sequentially, part three, A Storm of Swords, is the sharpened steel meeting its intended fleshy target.) Filled to the brim with underhanded stage settings, backdoor wartime politics, and fractured tales of redemption both extremely personal and emotionally wide-ranging, the altercations depicted in the second season of Game of Thrones are significantly more intimate than what came before. While the barbarous butchery still continues, albeit in sporadic, gritty, non-flashy action sequences (think Spartacus minus the repeated slow mo and CGI fountains of shimmering bloodshed), this season's most affecting confrontations are fought not on grisly battlefields, but in tightly intense close quarters as characters verbally and spiritually crisscross, perpetually testing each others' limitations of implicit power, examining just how far they can throw their weight around before windfalls cease and an unfortunate fate, or the contrary, reaches out to seize them.
A bright red comet steaks across the summer sky of Westeros, some considering it an omen for the truly harsh times ahead and the coming of a protracted winter, while others believe it to be a signifier of the birth of dragons. The rest of the populace hardly notices the vivid shooting star at all, far too preoccupied with placing themselves in the best possible position for a war that's yet to fully materialize. The meteor, a much weightier point of focus in the novel, is but a momentary MacGuffin buried beneath the wide scope of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss's serviceable adaptation. Geographically speaking, Game of Thrones's second season is roughly twice as spread out and fragmented in narrative as its previous one, with five well-defined seats of sovereignty vying for sole claim to the Iron Throne, the legitimate position of dominance within the Seven Kingdoms. In moderate contrast to season one, conflicts now occur between warring factions much less than turbulent familial infighting.
Sean Bean's now-deceased Ned Stark, who arguably served as the most stable, honorable, and sympathetic inhabitant of Martin's world, was a rigid mediator for the unmitigated cluster of recklessness constantly on display in the show. In an intelligent and admittedly somewhat predictable move given Peter Dinklage's award-winning turn, Tyrion Lannister, nearly the antithesis of Ned in many aspects (his humaneness excluded), has come to possess many of his sensibilities, assuming the lead role of a go-between, though with much less exaltation for his attached royal house. Dinklage's take on the character, slightly less cynical than as depicted in the novels, is unmistakably the identifiable heart, however small (no pun intended), of this season. As Tyrion, the Hand of the King in his father Tywin's (Charles Dance) stead, walks the halls of King's Landing, his faithful whore Shae (Sibel Kekilli) in safe keeping, he calmly whistles to himself between sessions of calculated plotting and intuitive allying with potentially dangerous members of the king's council, totally in control and content with his surroundings. In a very amusing string of scenes in the third episode, "What Is Dead May Never Die," Tyrion cleverly establishes three faux allegiances with Cersei's scheme squad—consisting of Grand Maester Pycelle (Julian Glover), Varys (Conleth Hill), and Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen)—in order to rapidly out the most dishonest of the three by seeing who will betray him to the queen reagent the fastest. Using quick match cuts in a sequence fueled entirely by Tyrion's relentless wit, the imp essentially tells a similar story thrice over, and once we figure out what he's up to, it's exceedingly captivating. Even Varys, perhaps the sneakiest character in the entire series, later admits, "A small man can cast a very large shadow."
"There's a king on every corner," relates Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) to her newly battle-hardened son, Robb (Richard Madden), in the season premiere, "The North Remembers," and a more appropriate summation of the atmosphere and mood of the early episodes cannot be found. The sadistic and consummately prickish Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) struts around King's Landing carelessly and ceaselessly ordering the massacre of innocents, including infants identified as bastards of a man (Robert Baratheon) he wrongly thinks was his father, ostensibly slain via a conspiracy cooked up by his own wife and council. Joffrey is the biological son of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and her twin, Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and thus Robert's two brothers, the elder Stannis (Stephen Dillane) and the younger Renly (Gethin Anthony), demand the primary kingship for their own. Renly has attrition on his side, yet Stannis prays to entirely different gods, led through a path of secretive dark magic by the mysterious priestess Melisandre (Carice Van Houten), who persuades him to forsake his kin's idols, burning their erected statues and worshiping R'llor, the Lord of Light with the hopes that the meager army at his direct disposal will be supported by almighty supernatural forces.
Game of Thrones does a terrific job of smoothly cutting back and forth between its many locales and concurrent situations, never lingering in one area too long and rarely confusing one location's thematic tone for another. As is evident by the additional graphics in the opening credits, season two introduces an assortment of fresh environments, expertly visualized by the show's tremendous production values and adept crew. The rocky, volcanic cliffsides of Dragonstone, the misty salt waters of the Pyke, and the affluent city of Qarth beyond the Red Waste where Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her khalasar seek refuge are indisputably Martin's words brought to life in exquisite form.
The show trims much of the fat that periodically bogs down Martin's work, choosing to ax lengthy sections where characters travel from one place to another and toss prosaic troublesome thoughts around in their damaged brains. Due to the POV chapter format of A Song of Ice and Fire, the innermost turmoil of certain integral Westeros denizens are hardly touched on. In most cases, Game of Thrones remedies this, particularly with Littlefinger, Varys, Cersei, Stannis, Tywin, and even Joffrey, but sometimes it layers on unneeded asides for the sake of risqué showiness. The awkward love triangle between the closeted Renly, his new wife/beard Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), and her brother Loras (Finn Jones) is the most obvious example, unnecessarily forcing Renly's sexuality, kept mostly clandestine in the books, wide out into the open. This serves no purpose but to poke fun at Renly's uncomfortable position of seclusion in the marshy Stormlands, having fled from King's Landing with his tail between his legs, a self-anointed king who has loyalty but no idea how to wage war. Stannis's scenes with Melisandre and a smuggler turned allegiant knight, Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), on Dragonstone are better executed; the writing is more concise and in tune with the dramatic beats of A Clash of Kings.
Game of Thrones's second season is not as wholly engrossing as its first, and the blame for this rests solely on the source material, that, while commendable, isn't as altogether vital as the initial novel. Reading the series in advance helps in identifying just who's who and where's where (names and places aren't always mentioned). Yet, in spite of its imperfections, season two must be admired for its gripping presentation of splintered families and unwavering ruthlessness. Principal elements, from the acting to the visuals and the translation of page-to-screen pacing, is as deftly handled as before. Witnessing memorable passages that meet expectations in their live-action depictions is a pleasure, and is also likely to entice those unfamiliar with Martin's novels.
Cast: Peter Dinklage, Michelle Fairley, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Aidan Gillen, Iain Glen, Kit Harington, Richard Madden, Charles Dance, Maisie Williams, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Sophie Turner, Jack Gleeson, Alfie Allen, Jerome Flynn, Rory McCann, Conleth Hill, John Bradley, James Cosmo, Sibel Kekilli, Julian Glover, Donald Sumpter, Finn Jones, Ron Donachie, Gethin Anthony, Stephen Dillane, Gwendoline Christie, Carice Van Houten, Liam Cunningham, Natalie Dormer, Patrick Malahide, Rose Leslie Network: HBO, Sundays @ 9 p.m. Buy: Amazon
Review: Season 3 of The Crown Makes Progress Look and Feel Wearisome
The series homes in on the growing chasm between royal expectations and public norms.2.5
Season three of The Crown lacks the urgency that previously made the Netflix series so engaging. This is partly due to the more subdued relationships between the older members of the House of Windsor, now settled into their various roles as sovereign, husband, sister, and wife. Only a few years have passed between seasons, but Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman), her husband Philip (Tobias Menzies), and sister Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) have accumulated a deep weariness that can be enervating to behold.
This season, the countercultural politics of the Swinging Sixties nurtures a new sense of awareness around the myriad hypocrisies and criticisms of aristocratic life. The series homes in on both economic inequality and the growing chasm between royal expectations and public norms, with the British crown's traditional nonpartisan position becoming increasingly detrimental to its image. The antiestablishment spirit of the time seeps into Buckingham Palace via the small rebellions of Princess Anne (Erin Doherty), now a miniskirt-wearing, David Bowie-loving young woman. And it's through her that the monarchy makes small but significant steps toward changing its perception as an outdated institution.
The Crown's first two seasons tapped into the allure of a world insistent on formality. The '60s, though, bring a new set of societal challenges that redefine the relationship between the Windsors and their American counterparts, especially in the episode "Margaretology," in which Margaret takes a tour of the States. Her spontaneity and charisma—the very qualities that make her a liability to the monarchy's rarefied image—help Elizabeth to win over President Johnson (Clancy Brown), who dreads the codified etiquette that dictates their countries' "special relationship." Johnson doesn't care about exclusive invitations to Balmoral Castle; he's happy with dirty jokes and drinking contests that fly in the face of royal protocol.
The crown's relationship to the British people is also changing, as highlighted in "Bubbikins," which chronicles the impact of the infamous 1969 BBC documentary Royal Family. One of Philip's public relations projects is to make the Windsors seem more appealing to the masses, but in his vanity, he fails to understand the importance of mystery and ritual to their public image. Royalty is the ultimate spectacle, and The Crown valiantly attempts to illuminate the psychological and emotional toll it takes on those who have little control over their lives. But it's more than a little difficult to feel sympathy for the royals when the prince consort is seen trying to explain why the queen deserves more taxpayer money.
Despite Philip's efforts to sweeten their image, the Windsors' most likeable member is as un-royal as it gets: his mother. At turns fragile and fearless, Princess Alice (Jane Lapotaire) is a welcome mid-season addition, providing a much-needed contrast to her son, who's still itching to find meaning in his life. Where Alice is selfless and warm, Philip is consumed by the need to micro-manage everything around him. As the younger Philip in the show's first two seasons, Matt Smith was palpably angsty, but in Menzies's hands, the neurotic prince is drawn ever inward. And a highlight of the new season is an entire episode concerned with his midlife crisis. Set during the events of the 1969 moon landing, "Moondust" is a sensitive exploration of masculine insecurities, and in no small part for the way Menzies calls upon reserves of pathos to chart his character's miserable descent into self-pity and spite.
The most prominent thread running through The Crown's third season is the dualities in people's lives. It's in the juxtaposition of the royals' public and private selves, the ever-present chasm between aristocratic and common society, or the much more personal struggle of characters reconciling individual desires and duties. There's plenty of fertile ground to explore this dynamic, as almost every character is in a state of conflict, from Elizabeth, who struggles to show genuine humanity to her people, to Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor), who reckons with his destiny as the future king. Within their rigid world, the royals pursue their desires in their own little ways—Charles with his love of the performing arts, Elizabeth with her beloved racehorses at Sandringham, Anne with a casual fling that surprises her family.
Toward the end of the season, even Margaret has a fleeting taste of happiness outside of the public eye, before getting sucked back into the vortex of her unhappy marriage. It's impossible for the Windsors to fully escape the demands of the crown; several extended family scenes see even the most individualistic characters obediently falling in line. Elizabeth is ultimately the only character who digests and accepts this reality without much drama. Colman brings a hard-won confidence to the queen, who weathers changes and hard decisions with the mettle of a ruler who recognizes the importance of self-reliance and stability.
The title of the season's first episode, "Olding," is a play on Elizabeth's age (and the code name of a K.G.B. spy), setting the tone for the queen's private musings on the trajectory of her reign. The episode is an exploration of appearances and what they conceal, with a number of pieces of fine art and literary metaphors hammering that point home. During a pivotal moment in the season premiere, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, Anthony Blunt (Samuel West), gives an overblown lecture about the layers of deceit and multiple meanings lurking within Renaissance art—and the moment is followed by a longwinded scene that overcomplicates an otherwise simple allegory about hidden identities and trust.
The Crown presents a network of relationships that are more meaningfully connected by ringing telephones, newspaper headlines, letters, and electric buzzers than face-to-face communication. The show's royal family is "alone together," settled in their identities and the demands of their station. Philip only reconciles with his mother after reading an article about her in the papers, and one of the season's most heartening scenes depicts Alice and Philip walking arm-in-arm together in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Young Elizabeth once confronted Philip about what he does and where he goes, but she's since risen above these small concerns. Given the queen's inability to show her feelings, it's fitting that the season closes on a note of solitude and isolation. In her own words, "One just has to get on with it."
Cast: Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Watkins, Ben Daniels, Marion Bailey, Josh O'Connor, Charles Dance, Jane Lapotaire, Erin Doherty, Emerald Fennell, Gillian Anderson Network: Netflix
Review: For All Mankind Prioritizes Cynical Alternate History Over Character
The series suffocates its promising characters with the tedium of backroom politics.2
According to For All Mankind, if the Soviet Union had landed humans on the moon before the United States did, the space race would have continued at full speed, escalating from moon landings to the building of lunar bases to cosmic subterfuge. But the Apple TV+ series, created and written by Ronald D. Moore (of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander fame), Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, sluggishly leads to little of interest. For All Mankind prioritizes its alternate history's tedious political maneuvering over its characters, suffocating their development and deflating emotional payoffs.
Navy veteran and astronaut Edward Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is the primary focus of the series. In an early scene, set in 1969, he's sitting in a bar in Houston, watching on TV as a Russian cosmonaut steps on the moon. Ed was on Apollo 10, a trial run for Apollo 11, which in the show's alternate history is a footnote in the space race. Now, he and crewmate Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) strive to get back to space and break new ground.
Most of the show's supporting characters come and go as if at random. For one, steely astronaut Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger) and her endearing hippy husband, Wayne (Lenny Jacobson) become central figures and then inexplicably, and disappointingly, disappear. Often, characters exist less to provide a human perspective on the space race than to represent issues, a problem that's more acute when it comes to the show's women. Some of them—like astronaut Danielle Pool (Krys Marshall) and Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones), Gordo's wife—propel more substantial narratives whose social commentary informs, rather than supplants, their personhood. But others, such as engineer Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) and Ed's wife, Karen (Shantel VanSanten), are merely stand-ins for forces and experiences like sexism in the workplace and the trials that servicepeoples' families endure.
After the Soviets land a woman on the moon, President Nixon—who's depicted via archival footage overlaid with recordings, both authentic and fabricated—wants to do the same, which sets up an episode about the training of female astronauts. When the Soviets are expected to establish a military presence on the moon, Nixon and the Pentagon move to ramp up their own, which cues an arc about the creation of a lunar base. Throughout For All Mankind, NASA higher-ups, beholden to the president, ceaselessly relay his demands to Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton (Chris Bauer) and Flight Director Gene Kranz (Eric Ladin) over in mission control, but all their exhaustingly repetitive policy debates siphon attention away from the human beings whose lives they shape.
As For All Mankind proceeds, however, it shifts its focus from broad political mandates to the specificities of its characters. One episode that centers around three astronauts penned up in a claustrophobic lunar base is among the show's most evocative. The astronauts spend nearly half a year sleeping in cramped bunks, pickaxing moon rocks, and eating goo. When they intently and gravely tinker with an off-screen item, the stakes feel life-or-death, but a cut to the subject of their concern reveals a damaged VHS tape, one of their six episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. The crew watches the episodes on repeat, eventually reenacting one in a welcome act of catharsis. But later, when an astronaut feverishly acts out all three parts in a scene from the Newhart series, we see how much these people have given up, how profoundly it can hurt to be so far away from home.
One of the show's notable revisions of the historical record is its portrayal of Ted Kennedy having succeeded Nixon as president, along with the former's triumphant push to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Kennedy initially wants to bring the moon-marooned astronauts home—a relief crew is repeatedly delayed from replacing them—but he ultimately tolerates their stranding because the lunar outpost distracts the nation from his ongoing sex scandal. These and other dynamics fuel the show's deeply cynical framing of the space race not as a struggle for key geopolitical advantage or a fight for national principles, but as a conflict as fruitless and myopic as a dog's quest to catch its own tail.
Cynicism suffuses the series both subtly, with its framing of NASA as a pawn of the
president's administration, and overtly, with Wernher von Braun (Colm Feore), the German aerospace engineer who designed the Saturn V, saying that "every political system is flawed, and every bureaucracy is corrupt." Soviet points of view are almost entirely absent from the series, but the American cronies on hand justify his mistrust.
Such disenchantment occasionally generates intriguing reflections on imperialism, discrimination, PTSD, and more. It also renders the earnestness of a side plot about a young girl, Aleida Rosales (Olivia Trujillo), and her father, Octavio (Arturo Del Puerto), jarring in contrast. The pair immigrates to the U.S. from Mexico, and Aleida develops a fascination with rockets and space, as well as formidable skills in math. She's poised to become an engineer, maybe even an astronaut, one day. The suggestion, here, is that the American dream is alive and well. But it seems that Aleida will have to leave Earth to find it.
Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Michael Dorman, Shantel VanSanten, Chris Bauer, Sarah Jones, Colm Feore, Wrenn Schmidt, Sonya Walger, Krys Marshall, Jodi Balfour, Nate Corddry, Eric Ladin, Rebecca Wisocky, Arturo Del Puerto, Olivia Trujillo, Lenny Jacobson, Dan Donohue, Wallace Langham Network: Apple TV+
Review: Apple TV's See Feels Startlingly Uncommitted to Its Bonkers Concept
The series struggles to sensibly lay out the particulars of its post-apocalyptic feudalism.1
Apple TV's post-apocalyptic drama See will undoubtedly be sold on the credentials of those involved, from director Francis Lawrence to star Jason Momoa to writer-creator Steven Knight. Knight is best known for TV dramas like Peaky Blinders and Taboo, but his most relevant credit is one that will certainly go unmentioned in trailers and other marketing materials for the series: the stupefying, bonkers Matthew McConaughey fishing-centered noir Serenity, as See suffers from a similarly bizarre, overreaching concept.
In See's vision of the future, only a couple million people are still alive, almost all of them blind. Society has, for some reason, gone feudal, with everyone decked out in furs and living in huts and broken up into different tribes. They call the sun the "god flame," and, at the behest of tyrannical Queen Kane (Sylvia Hoeks), they burn heretics who espouse the mostly forgotten idea of vision. The three-months pregnant Maghra (Hera Hilmar) is taken in by a remote community headed by Baba Voss (Momoa), who marries her. When she gives birth, it's to twins who can see just fine. This, of course, being heresy, Baba Voss and the rest of the village flee from Kane's witchfinders, building a new home in a remote location to keep the children safe.
The show's opening credits display wispy yellow shadows of things like horses and spiders to suggest recognition even through blindness. Beyond that, though, See feels startlingly uncommitted to its gimmick of a blind world. The series is filmed in bog-standard fantasy style, all wide vistas, expansive greenery, and ominous smoke in the distance with seemingly no concession for how its characters' perception of the world might differ from the audience's. There's a near-total absence of subjective camera work here, a sense of how the characters might have to rely on touch, sound, or smell to navigate. Barring a person's occasional stumble to find their footing or moving a hand along a guiding rope tied across the top of the village, everything unfolds so expectedly that it's easy to forget the show's concept entirely.
Even with interminable amounts of exposition in the three episodes provided to press ahead of the show's premiere, Knight struggles to sensibly lay out the particulars of this post-apocalyptic feudalism in terms of government, social hierarchies, and basic navigation between settlements. Everyone is incongruously well-groomed and color-coordinated, even going so far as to wear hoods when burning people at the stake despite no one being able to see their faces. Gory battle scenes include someone like Voss groping around for a handhold only to swing his blade to perfectly meet an enemy's throat the very next moment.
See is at its most engaging when it allows itself to get truly silly and weird: A naked woman in white paint follows people unnoticed because she's said to purge herself of thought, and Queen Kane prays via masturbation, concluding each invocation in the throes of orgasm. But the majority of Knight's series is a self-serious dirge, where sight-based wordplay like "So they just walk around with their eyes closed?" is delivered with a straight face. In the end, See's myriad absurdities somehow add up only to a run-of-the-mill dystopia, where the children are the "chosen ones" and the tyrant must be overthrown.
Cast: Jason Momoa, Sylvia Hoeks, Hera Hilmar, Alfre Woodard, Christian Camargo, Archie Madekwe, Nesta Cooper, Yadira Guevara-Prip, Josh Blacker, Christian Sloan Network: Apple TV+
Review: The Morning Show Boldly Navigates the Nuances of the "Me Too" Era
The series is an uneasy, sometimes nauseating, and often fascinating examination of our current moment.3
In the third episode of The Morning Show, two disgraced men sit down after a spirited tennis match and chat over scotch and Chinese takeout. One, a film director of apparent renown (Martin Short), tells the other—Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), a TV anchor recently accused of sexual misconduct and fired from his job co-hosting the nation's most beloved morning show—that he feels bad for people coming of age in the #MeToo era. "There's nothing sexy about consent," he says. When Mitch responds with visual discomfort, the director revises his statement: "I guess what I'm saying is, humanity happens in the unspoken moments."
Mitch claims that his only sin was engaging in consensual "extracurricular sex." But while the three episodes provided to press ahead of the show's premiere don't confirm exactly what Mitch did or didn't do, and while he expresses genuine contempt for unequivocal predators, we're granted hints of the unspoken moments he may have orchestrated. At one point, Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman), a producer on Mitch's former show, enters Mitch's abandoned dressing room and presses a button under his desk, which automatically closes the door.
Earlier, Mitch receives a surprise visit from Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), his longtime co-host. He's been cooped up in his house, surrounded by reporters, for days. The two clearly adore each other, and when Alex starts to leave, Mitch begs her to stay. His pleas are unnervingly murky: They may be the innocent symptoms of his loneliness and isolation, or they could be glimpses of the tactics he uses to keep women where they don't want to be.
Alex is furious at Mitch for leaving her on her own, at executive producer Charlie Black (Mark Duplass) for keeping her in the dark about the allegations, and at the network itself for the bitter contract renegotiation it's putting her through. The network is represented largely by Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), an executive who's dismissive of hard news and devoted to entertainment. He's a delightfully odd highlight of the series, less traditional suit than android: unblinking, unreadable, and teetering on the edge of going haywire.
The rage that Aniston summons as Alex is beguiling. She slams her fists on conference tables and roars at her staff, achieving a catharsis that's at odds with the passive aggression that permeates The Morning Show. But when she interviews Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), a firebrand reporter from West Virginia who's gone viral thanks to a candid video of her passionately telling someone off at a protest, Alex demonstrates a subtler wrath; thinking that the viral video was part of a scheme for fame, she asks increasingly antagonistic questions. Bradley, though, stands her ground, and the electrically pointed but within-bounds exchange escalates like a polite knife fight. Bradley's resolution, verve, and popular appeal catch Cory's eye, making her, unknowingly, a candidate to replace Mitch.
Bradley is predominantly limited to her outsider-ness—being a moderate conservative from a rural locale—and clichés about both-sides journalism that undercut her supposed radical streak. But Witherspoon infuses the character with scrappy charm and complexity, namely in Bradley's uncharacteristically tender interactions with her brother, a recovering drug addict. Mitch, meanwhile, is thoroughly ostracized. Carell delivers bursts of pathos that disconcertingly temper Mitch's grotesque rants, but the series uses Mitch as too broad a stand-in for the fallen man. A conversation between him and Charlie feels as though it's meant purely to squeeze in boilerplate talking points about "McCarthyism" and "the court of public opinion" (and to make the insufferable Charlie even less sympathetic).
In its introductory episodes, however, The Morning Show mostly avoids trite, glib, or otherwise thoughtless writing. The series takes on the risky goal of humanizing Mitch—albeit inconclusively, for now—and carefully navigates the minefield of its sensitive subject material. Propelled by its magnetic performances, the series is an uneasy, sometimes nauseating, and often fascinating examination of our still-unspooling current moment.
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nestor Carbonell, Karen Pittman, Desean Terry, Janina Gavankar, Bel Powley, Jack Davenport, Victoria Tate, Tom Irwin Network: Apple TV+
Review: Season 2 of Jack Ryan Leans Hard on Generic Action and Stale Plotting
The occasionally thrilling series relies on generic action cribbed from other, more distinct espionage fiction.1.5
Early in season two of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, C.I.A. analyst Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) lectures a rapt audience of college students, defining for them the meaning of the term "failed state," and warning them of the looming threat of economic collapse in Venezuela. Ryan has an easy charisma, owing to the amiable presence of Krasinski, and he describes the South American nation in overly simplistic terms that fit the show's polarized, good-versus-evil worldview: Its strongman president, Nicolas Reyes (Jordi Molla), is "an asshole," and the country is destined for ruin. And so begins the new season, with the series in thrall to its title character—and, by proxy, America—and concerned with its South American setting mostly as one more Banana Republic to be saved from itself.
Pitting moral opposites against one another for an occasionally thrilling eight episodes that place the fate of a nation in the balance, Jack Ryan harkens back to the anodyne action thrillers of the 1980s and '90s. It's also clearly influenced by the Reagan Doctrine of interventionism, which encouraged guerrilla wars against left-wing governments. The show's paternalistic vision of Venezuela, like season one's notion of the Middle East, leans toward portraying the nation as one inherently incapable of self-management—thus necessitating the help of Jack Ryan, a character who moves, frustratingly, into messianic territory here.
Ryan finds himself in Venezuela on a diplomatic mission to question Reyes regarding a mysterious shipment deep in the jungle, which is being guarded by notorious weapons traffickers. His earlier warnings about the country are quickly justified, as he's ambushed by a mysterious hitman after the meeting with President Reyes seems to ruffle political feathers. The season's winding plot spins out from this point, as Ryan and C.I.A. colleague Jim Greer (Wendell Peirce) must attempt to find out who ordered the ambush and what's in the jungle.
Jack Ryan's loose grasp of U.S. foreign relations, while providing a poor representation of our history in Latin America, is a feature of its action-hero formula. Yet because the series has little unique to convey about the world Ryan inhabits, it's composed solely of the brand of generic action and manipulative reliance on cliffhangers cribbed from other, more distinct espionage fiction. Jack Ryan is the Bourne series without the well-honed, if pummeling, stylistic brio; it's James Bond minus the elegance; Mission: Impossible without the gonzo stunt work. What joys can be derived from it come mostly from Krasinski's affability and his character's prickly chemistry with Greer, to whom Pierce lends a warm grouchiness.
Throughout Jack Ryan's new season, its relatively meaningless story doubles back over itself with a number of twists before, inevitably, the "good guys" win. Right out of the gate, you sense the show's creative regression, as Ryan has transformed from a fish-out-of-water C.I.A. analyst to a natural superhero—one comfortable liberating prison camps in the jungle, spying on weapons caches, and invading foreign government buildings. The season stretches credulity even by the show's own standards, culminating with Ryan and a small band of black-ops cohorts invading the Venezuelan presidential palace on election day—and its laughably unrealistic final climax includes Ryan fist-fighting with President Reyes.
Though Ryan is sketched loosely, and strictly in terms of his heroism, Krasinski's everyman persona and knack for sarcastic comedy assures that he's believable as a smart guy with hidden ambition and untapped potential, as well as a dash of ego. But despite Krasinski's effort, the series remains most engaging when the season's action turns away from Ryan. A secondary plot, involving a foursome of American black operatives invading the jungle, provides some of the season's most suspenseful action sequences—and its most potent source of pathos, when Marcus (Jovan Adepo), one of the young soldiers, is lost alone behind enemy lines.
As in its first season, the series is still better at assigning motivation to its antagonists than it is at developing its title character, as the palace intrigue between Reyes and his chief advisor, Miguel Ubarri (Francisco Denis), efficiently gets at their motivations, revealing the history of their corruption and foreshadowing a dark fracture in their alliance. In stark contrast, Ryan is merely good, and his goodness is seen as a function of his profession, blank personality, and nationality. While season two is never boring, the series nonetheless has little new to say about Jack Ryan or the world, and while it doesn't lack for suspense, the fate of the latter is never really in doubt. The season's length strains the effectiveness of its throwback sensibilities, passable action choreography, and formulaic characters—attributes which may be better suited for standalone feature films.
Cast: John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, John Hoogenakker, Jordi Molla, Eduar Salas, Francisco Denis, Michael Kelly, Cristina Umaña, Jovan Adepo Network: Amazon
Review: His Dark Materials Is a Coming-of-Age Tale Dressed in Retro-Futuristic Garb
The series underlines the loss of creativity and boldness that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood.2.5
HBO's His Dark Materials is a beautifully orchestrated reminder that there's life after Westeros, albeit with airships, science, and sensible sweater vests. The first of Philip Pullman's iconic trilogy of novels springs to life in the show's first episode, "Lyra's Jordan," effectively erasing the memory of Chris Weitz's 2007 film adaptation of The Golden Compass, which failed to embrace the depth of the universe Pullman created.
Dafne Keen slips naturally into the role of orphan Lyra Belacqua, who's eager to explore beyond her home at Jordan College in an alternate version of Oxford. The actress brings a bristling restlessness to the young girl, who's much more into stealing wine and sliding down rooftops than reading books and doing chores. In this world, all humans have talking daemons, physical manifestations of their souls that exist outside the body as animal companions. Children's daemons don't take on a fixed form until their humans reach puberty, so Lyra's daemon, Pantalaimon (Kit Connor), constantly morphs between a moth, wildcat, ermine, and a blur of other creatures. It's a heavy-handed metaphor for coming of age, but it lays a crucial foundation for the story's existential exploration of knowledge, individuality, and truth.
A visit from Lyra's absentee uncle, Lord Asriel (James MacAvoy), throws her life into chaos. Asriel is cold and calculating, showing cool indifference even when Lyra saves his life. However effective MacAvoy is in his five minutes of screen time, though, he's ultimately forgettable—unlike Ruth Wilson, who unfurls like a carnivorous plant as Marisa Coulter, a powerful "friend of the college" who hires Lyra as her assistant and takes the girl to London. Wilson's performance is a study in expertly controlled layers barely concealing a well of rage and cunning; there's also the inscrutable face of Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey daemon, an unnerving extension of her formidable will. In episode two, the full thrust of this relationship is on full display in a traumatic incident involving the monkey and Pan, while in episode four, a wickedly primal scene blurs the line between Coulter and her daemon.
Jack Thorne, who adapted the series from Pullman's trilogy of novels, takes a balanced approach to world-building without drowning the audience in minutiae. The version of Britain imagined by the series is ruled by the Magisterium, the theocratic government that clashes with colleges that provide traditional academic sanctuary. Given the anti-intellectual inclinations of current real-world politics, it's frustrating to watch the long arm of the law curl around those that would challenge it, even within its ranks. Thorne generally does well at crafting dialogue that reveals thoughtful bits of backstory, as well as the sociopolitical context of the characters' struggles. Given that there are so many elements to cover—such as the concept of Dust, which consists of subatomic particles that tend to gather around adults, which the Magisterium views as controversial, even heretical—Thorne pares down the novel's science-magic descriptions without diminishing their importance.
Expository scenes detailing the history, science, politics, and arcana of the show's alt-Britain might be necessary to understand the machinations of this world, but they're at times weighed down by clunky dialogue, as in a scene in which Ariyon Bakare's Lord Boreal circles around a Magisterium priest, threatening to reveal his depravities if he doesn't help him. But where the writing can drag, the show's visual style is efficient, as in the warm, earthy textures associated with the downtrodden and the sleek jewel tones that mark the powerful. Familiar motifs, from the foreboding pseudo-Brutalist architecture of London to classically framed scenes depicting the apron-clad laundrywomen and busy servant class at Jordan College, succinctly key us into the power dynamics of this universe. And while the show's retro-futuristic setting hews to a mainstream steampunk aesthetic—a genre that's historically rife with European colonial associations—it's encouraging to see a diverse cast, including Bakare, Clarke Peters (as The Master), and Lucian Msamati (as John Faa), playing characters in positions of power.
The main catalyst for the story of the show is the kidnapping of the children of Gyptians, a semi-nomadic people who live in houseboats, bringing simmering class politics to a near-boil, especially when evidence leads back to the Magisterium. In its timely depiction of a grassroots investigation into the disappearance of vulnerable children, His Dark Materials invites comparisons to the banal acts of evil that flourish in a corrupt system. At one point, Mrs. Coulter visits the children to help them write cheery letters to their loved ones before they're brought northward, and the camera follows their slight frames down a dank, narrow hallway. In this moment, the visual allusion to concentration camps is unmistakable.
Thorne's character development falters slightly in the scenes set in Trollesund, a gateway port to the north, home of armored bears and as-yet-unseen witches. Throughout, Lyra's small victories here are almost effortless: She wins over the exiled bear Iorek Byrnison (Joe Tandberg) a little too easily, and Byrnison, while suitably gruff and jaded, comes off as a one-dimensional outcast with little at stake. And it's in Trollesund where the audience is introduced to the tedious theatrics of Lin Manuel Miranda, thinly disguised as a Texan aeronautist named Lee Scoresby. It's an ongoing struggle to get past Scoresby's overcooked Texan accent and constant rambling, and he ends up more caricature than comedic relief.
His Dark Materials underlines the loss of creativity and boldness that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. As Lyra intuitively learns to read her alethiometer—an arcane truth-telling device that requires years of study—she starts growing into her own identity. Keen shines when she's at her most defiant, giving stubborn, righteous life to a child struggling to understand the complexities of the real world. At the end of episode four, the series has barely begun to unpack its more fantastical elements, instead choosing to draw us into its well-rounded interpersonal relationships and emotional connections, all of which add an extra sense of profundity to an otherwise straightforward coming-of-age story.
Cast: Dafne Keen, James MacAvoy, Ruth Wilson, Clarke Peters, Lucian Msamati, Ariyon Bakare, Archie Barnes, Kit Connor, Joe Tandberg Network: HBO
Review: Season 2 of Castle Rock Favors Family Drama Over the Supernatural
There's little apparent benefit to how the show's second season foregrounds its interpersonal relationships.2
The first season of Castle Rock was essentially a basket of Easter eggs. With an assortment of peripheral Stephen King characters and locations, Hulu's horror anthology series revolved around an entirely original but ultimately uninspired plot. The second season dives more visibly into the King universe, sending one of the author's most famous characters, Misery's murderously obsessive nurse Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), on a collision course with another King staple: the undead-inhabited town of Jerusalem's Lot. Employing these more famous King touchstones, however, hasn't narrowed the show's focus so much as it's left it feeling scattered and unmoored.
At the start of the season, Annie drifts from town to town with her teenage daughter, Joy (Elsie Fisher). She works as a nurse long enough in each town to gain access to its hospital's array of anti-psychotics in order to continue self-medicating, at which point she and Joy hit the road, swapping out license plates as they drive across the country. A late-night car crash strands them in Castle Rock, Maine, where their skeezy landlord, Ace Merrill (Paul Sparks), clashes with his adopted brother, Abdi Omar (Barkhad Abdi), over business with the local community of Somali immigrants. There's clearly meant to be some social commentary here about racism and even, to some extent, the opioid epidemic, but even after the five episodes made available to critics, the season has yet to really dig into these thorny topics.
Castle Rock uses neighboring town Jerusalem's Lot and its witchy history for a new set of mysterious resurrections. But compared to the first season's supernatural hook, there's a much stronger focus on family drama here that spreads the story thin across so many characters; the series struggles to cover not only Annie and Joy settling into town, but the bad blood between Ace and Abdi. Ace and his biological brother, Chris (Matthew Alan), are the nephews of the unscrupulous, hard-nosed, but fair "Pop" Merrill (Tim Robbins, who unearths an intense weariness in the role). Out of a desire to make amends for his military service and no small amount of white guilt, Pop fostered both Abdi and his sister, Nadia (Yusra Warsama), who's the head doctor at the hospital where Annie now works. It's a tangled web, but the drama never boils to a degree that explains the eventual violent escalation. A shot of a younger, jealous Ace and some snippets of a right-wing radio program are an unsatisfying shorthand for his decision to start lobbing Molotov cocktails at his adopted brother's house.
The most engaging drama here is actually the one with the lowest, most ordinary stakes, in Joy reaching the age where she's grown restless under her mother's wing. She starts to seek out friends her own age, but Annie is, as one might imagine, not an easy person to leave behind. The first season tackled dementia with surprising sensitivity, and there's a similar undercurrent of palpable pain to watching Joy struggle with the mental illness of a loved one, sorting out what's best for herself even when she loves and cares for her mother.
Unfortunately, Annie isn't nearly so easy to empathize with as Joy. She's such an outsized presence, with her torrent of childish pet names and G-rated curses delivered in an odd folksy accent, that it's difficult to view her as anything but a caricature. Originally conceived as a strange Other in Misery, Annie has been thrust into the role of protagonist with few apparent changes beyond her dedication as a mother, which nevertheless has its roots in her obsessive tendencies. It seems telling that, in a mid-season flashback episode meant to make young Annie more of a sympathetic character, her conspicuous tics are significantly dialed down.
There's little apparent benefit to how Castle Rock's second season foregrounds its interpersonal relationships. Deemphasizing a strong supernatural mystery leaves only a cast of characters that alternates between the dull and the exaggerated. Opting for more recognizable, overt King references hasn't enriched the show's storytelling so much as clarified the gap between the author's best work and this TV imitation.
Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins, Paul Sparks, Barkhad Abdi, Elsie Fisher, Yusra Warsama, Matthew Alan, Abby Corrigan, Chad Knorr, Owen Burke, Paul Noonan Network: Hulu
Review: Daybreak Depicts a Unique but Indulgent Apocalyptic Wasteland
Insipid comedy aside, the Netflix series offers evocative reflections on the premature death of a generation's childhood.2.5
The universe of Netflix's Daybreak, based on the graphic novel by Brian Ralph, is both familiar and indulgent, as far as post-apocalypses go: Its wasteland is roamed not only by zombie-esque figures, but also by themed packs of survivors sporting rides decked out in spikes à la Mad Max. The show's doomsday premise, however, features a unique twist: The apocalypse was triggered by a bomb that turned only—and, seemingly, all—adults into trudging undead "ghoulies," leaving children and teenagers mostly unharmed.
In the six months since the bomb dropped, the young survivors from Glendale, California have responded to the nuclear family's disintegration with the entrenchment of the chosen family, turning their social circles into tribes: the Cheermazons, the STEM Punks, the Disciples of Kardashia, and others. The tribes largely keep to themselves throughout the five episodes provided to press; only Baron Triumph, a mysterious, motorcycle-riding cannibal, and the Jocks, led by the grunting Genghis Khan wannabe Turbo Bro Jock (Cody Kearsley), resort to gratuitous violence. The post-apocalypse is, as a result, a relatively peaceful place.
Our guide through the cataclysm is Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford), a tribeless loner looking for his girlfriend, Sam Dean (Sophie Simnett). Throughout the series, Josh often breaks the fourth wall by introducing flashbacks, cuing montages, and contextualizing the apocalypse for the audience. These meta moments are less charming than lazy, rejecting subtle world-building in favor of information dumps. Much of the Daybreak's comedy is similarly uninspired: While Glendale High School's Principal Burr (Matthew Broderick) hilariously evokes a certain kind of white, bubble-blinded progressivism in Josh's flashbacks ("We're all woke here. Uh, wide awoke"), the teenagers' dialogue relies on meme-y jokes—like one about never skipping leg day—that result in a stilted representation of Gen Z.
Insipid comedy aside, Daybreak offers evocative reflections on the premature death of a generation's childhood. After one of Turbo's underlings fires a homemade gun, Mona Lisa (Jeanté Godlock), Turbo's right hand, declares, "You broke the Emma González Accords. We're not playing with guns." The throwaway line briefly hints at the trauma that the kids have experienced. They won't use guns, even at the world's end, because school shootings have scarred them. They can't reckon with the apocalypse because they're still processing the horrors of their old lives, still fettered by a social order that can't see beyond jocks and nerds and cheerleaders, still reeling from the damage caused by neglectful parents and bullies.
Daybreak most formidably juxtaposes the past and the present in an episode following Josh's newfound companion, Wesley Fists (Austin Crute), a jock turned ronin seeking redemption for his sins. Director Sherwin Shilati and writer Ira Madison III have created a remarkable samurai-flick-style exploration of Wesley's various personal apocalypses: his relocation from Compton to the much-more-white Glendale; his falling-out with the cousin (Frederick Williams) he used to do everything with; and, now, his need to choose between a forbidden love and his friends. It all unfolds beneath an astonishingly versatile voiceover by RZA, who's both very funny and very capable of hitting the episode's dramatic beats.
When, toward the end of the episode, Wesley speaks directly to the narrator, the exchange avoids the triteness of hollow fourth-wall-breaking. It reads, instead, as an honest confrontation between the character and his psyche, a clinging to selfhood all but reduced to rubble. In such sequences, Daybreak flexes against the mechanical writing that constrains it elsewhere, exploring forces and fears powerful enough to render the apocalypse insignificant.
Cast: Colin Ford, Austin Crute, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Matthew Broderick, Sophie Simnett, Gregory Kasyan, Krysta Rodriguez, Jeanté Godlock, Cody Kearsley, Jade Peyton, Rob H. Roy, Austin Maas, Chelsea Zhang Network: Netflix
Review: El Camino, a Breaking Bad Sequel, Is a Man's Rueful Lament for Past Wrongs
The film mixes a self-help message with moments of hard, cruel detail.2.5
Writer-director Vince Gilligan's El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is driven by a structural perversity. The story—about a man fleeing from the aftermath of the events of the AMC show's finale—is rife with flashbacks, often resisting to answer the "What happened next?" question that drives most follow-ups. Young meth-cooker Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) was last seen at the end of Breaking Bad driving a stolen El Camino into the desert darkness, hysterical after escaping imprisonment and torture at the hands of white supremacists, whom his partner, Walter White, ultimately killed. We last saw Jesse in a sort of propulsive extremis, which one assumes might bleed into a sequel, but Gilligan conjures in El Camino a rueful tone that bears more of a resemblance to the recent seasons of Better Call Saul than to Breaking Bad. Before Jesse can move on to the next stage in his life, he must reckon with the abuse he's just fled, with the wreck his life has become.
El Camino mixes a self-help message with moments of hard, cruel detail. Gilligan hasn't lost his talent for narrative invention, especially for rendering subterranean criminal worlds hidden in plain sight. One of Breaking Bad's most chillingly casual, self-rationalizing henchman, Todd (Jesse Plemons), returns in flashbacks, and is revealed to have acted as a kind of gaslighting partner to Jesse, offering him breadcrumbs of kindness in order to use him to carry out side errands. In the present, Jesse is on the run, trading the El Camino for a friend's car, staking out Todd's now abandoned apartment, which he knows contains a large stash of cash. Jesse has this information because he helped Todd remove the corpse of a housekeeper that the latter killed. Todd views this disposal as just another errand, and Jesse drops the body from several floors up like a bundle of laundry. In an especially macabre flourish, Todd removes his belt from the dead woman's neck and re-loops it into his pants.
Of all the Breaking Bad characters who briefly return in El Camino, Todd seems to stimulate Gilligan's imagination most. He suggests a modernization of a Donald Westlake character—a thug who's selfish and intelligent enough to wall himself off from the implications of his actions. Gilligan goes to town finding various ways to express Todd's callousness, which Plemons plays with extraordinary understatement. When Jesse finds a gun and briefly toys with escaping from Todd, the latter's understanding of his own power and entitlement is truly unnerving. Todd says, "I'll have that gun now, Jesse," with condescension, and, more audaciously, with something resembling actual pity.
Gilligan's aesthetic also appears to be influenced by Westlake, as El Camino has a crisp, streamlined, matter-of-fact sense of framing that suggests the pared-down prose of the legendary crime writer, while recalling the confident visual style that Breaking Bad grew into and that Better Call Saul inherited. There's also a bit of Twin Peaks, and Breaking Bad itself, in Gilligan's chronological hopscotching, which shifts one's focus from the plot at large to individual scenes. El Camino is ultimately concerned with a simple narrative thread: Jesse's attempt to find the money to pay Ed (Robert Forster) to help him disappear into a kind of witness protection program for criminals. Jesse could've went with Ed in Breaking Bad and didn't, and so El Camino often suggests a long act of atoning for one essential failure of self-preservation, as Jesse remembers pivotal details from his past to pry himself free from his current predicament. Forster, in his final role, is a master of the implicitly emotionally charged deadpan that Gilligan's characters use to protect themselves and to launder atrocity.
Yet Gilligan somewhat outsmarts himself in El Camino. For all the film's invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn't really move. Jesse isn't an interesting enough character to connect the film's various tangents; he's certainly not a Walter White or a Saul Goodman, criminals who dare the audience to like them via the visceral nature of their inventiveness and need to succeed and dominate. Audiences who're "Team Jesse" will probably enjoy El Camino more than those who always found him to be somewhat tedious—a youth-flattering character who's divorced of complicity from the plot of which he's a part. Gilligan's love for Jesse doesn't do the protagonist any favors either, as El Camino is composed of a series of riffs in which he's continually upstaged by characters who're allowed to be true to their maliciousness. Breaking Bad ended with Jesse discovering himself in chaos, El Camino reins him back in.
Cast: Aaron Paul, Jesse Plemons, Charles Baker, Matt Jones, Bryan Cranston, Jonathan Banks, Krysten Ritter, Todd Bower, Robert Forster, Gloria Sandoval, Tess Harper, Michael Bofshever Network: Netflix
Review: Watchmen Is an Intriguing Rebuttal to Its Source Material
The series argues the ways injustice might persist, and in that sense, its alternate history doesn't look so alien after all.2.5
HBO's Watchmen isn't a straightforward adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but rather a present-day sequel where the events of the original took place decades ago. At one point, a newscast briefly shows a naked blue atomic man, Doctor Manhattan, on Mars, and in another, we learn that the Cold War effectively ended when a massive alien squid beamed into the middle of New York City, killing millions while uniting the world against some vague extradimensional presence. For a while, anyway.
In modern-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, a white supremacist group called the Seventh Cavalry has risen, opposing, among other things, the reparations paid to descendants of the people caught in the city's 1921 race riot (these are called "Redfordations," after President Robert Redford, who's been in office for decades since Richard Nixon abolished the two-term limit). Some tensions, the series posits, won't be quelled by the appearance of some separate, cephalopodic other; the hatred of the human other is still very much alive.
The Watchmen universe's primary wrinkle, beyond an alternate reality so alternate that Vietnam is part of the United States, is the way costumed heroes figure into the whole thing. The Cavalry wears Rorschach-blot masks patterned after one of the graphic novel's heroes, a violent right-wing vigilante-slash-detective. The crux of the original mid-1980s Watchmen comic lies in the complicating of the superhero archetype through a whole mess of psychological hang-ups and generally unsavory preoccupations (Rorschach, for one, is never explicitly racist in the original text, though he's a considerable misogynist). It fixated on the idea that so-called "costumed adventurers" took to the streets to beat people up often for the hell of it, because they had a messiah complex or because their mothers told them to or just because it felt good to draw blood. Facing down oblivion was the thing it finally took to pull their heads out of asses that wore the underpants on the outside.
Yet even after the six episodes made available to critics, it can be a little tough to swallow some aspects of showrunner Damon Lindelof's brave new Watchmen, where a big dead squid has apparently shifted the present racial paradigm so completely that the Tulsa police force is not just masked, but predominantly black. Police weapons are lodged in remotely unlocked car dashboard holsters, and racists live within a "Nixonville" trailer park as though they're the new oppressed. The idea of a country that both won the Vietnam War and elected Nixon for five terms going on to accept a masked, armed police force composed mainly of minorities seems, to say the least, optimistic. The pacing doesn't make things any easier to interpret, as the show spoons out details about its larger world as needed, often after deploying some particularly charged imagery. You're mostly asked to take it on faith that the writers have thought this stuff through, that later everything will make sense rather than serve as empty provocation.
The ensemble cast is anchored by Regina King as Angela Abar, an ex-cop turned vigilante called Sister Night. Draped in a hooded long coat with face paint sprayed across her eyes, King brims with steely confidence as well as a controlled, driving anger. But it's difficult to shake a general suspicion of the way the series positions racial pain as a constant instigator, with responses to prejudice seeming to entirely define its people of color; they're more walking expressions of hurt than well-rounded characters. And though the first six episodes have not yet revealed enough about Vietnamese trillionaire Lady Trieu (Hong Chau), her initial appearances exhibit some typical, worrying signs of paranoia about Eastern invaders.
The series expands the comic in some fascinating ways, weaving a dense, bizarre mythology and a richly conceived world to get swept up in. The pilot episode in particular introduces various complicated ideas, drawing clear lines to fascism in the actions of the police and vigilantes. But the series misses some of the novel's complexity in its eagerness for loaded imagery—lynchings, riots, police violence—and slowly-unfolding mysteries. These episodes offer little follow through on the initial themes, seemingly content to raise questions and then set them aside while indulging in the excesses of fascism-is-sexy fantasy, with "enhanced interrogations" dispensed upon the deserving while set to a soundtrack of fat synths by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Regardless of whether the series plans to return to consciously critique these ideas, its habit of leaving them to hang in the air is troubling.
As thorny as Watchmen's handling of politics can be, though, it still offers an intriguing rebuttal to its source material. Even the boundless cynicism of Moore and Gibbons's comic had its potential rays of light, the idea that prejudice might look small once everyone recognized the futility of crying out to be better dead than Red. HBO's Watchmen argues the ways injustice might persist, and in that sense, its alternate history doesn't look so alien after all.
Cast: Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Hong Chau, James Wolk, Frances Fisher Network: HBO


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the closer
unable to get any info from channel4 as to when this series is on could someone please tell us
march 5:54pm Fri 12 Aug Report Abuse
Total waste
I can't believe they still haven't given this fantastic show an appropriate mainstream primetime slot. It's one of the very best US shows out there and deserves better.
hollowbabes 5:33pm Thu 14 Jul Report Abuse
Scheduled for a Seventh Season!
Voted the best show on cable TV in the U.S, apparently. Used my couple of weeks sick leave to download and watch every one of the first five seasons. Awesome. Thank you so merch!
Chome4 9:02pm Thu 23 Sep Report Abuse
Top Quality
Best thing on More4
Him 9:43pm Thu 27 May Report Abuse
excellent show
Should be on earlier
suzi 1:44am Sat 6 Feb Report Abuse
Best on TV
The Closer is a brilliant series. Please show all series' over again as lots of people must have missed previous episodes since it's on so late! Prime Time please:)
Bub 9:34pm Mon 4 Jan Report Abuse
The Closer
Come on Channel 4 programers. You have a huge opportunity to show one of the best series for some time and you air it at 3am!!!! That is when you do show it. Do you not recognise a good program when you see it?? Have you got the right people choosing the programing???
Val a huge fan. 12:02am Sun 26 Jul Report Abuse
the closer
I love The Closer i have been a fan since the first series began. It's great that they are showing it on Channel 4, i just wish they would it at a better time like prime time. Love Kyra as Brenda she's really cool!
BrendaJohnsonFan 12:14pm Wed 3 Jun Report Abuse
3:05am ???
What is with Ch4 and crazy times for interesting shows? What's next, Hill St Blues at 4am...oh wait a min they do that already??????
P.Lowe 1:25am Mon 25 May Report Abuse
...& if this series had been broadcast during 1975 it would have been considered ahead of its time.
Dafurda 6:27pm Sat 31 Jan Report Abuse

subset: commoncrawl


text:
(A) Persons Required to Be Present
(1) The party, or in the event a party is not a natural person, a representative of a party having full authority to negotiate a settlement on behalf of the party or a representative of an insured party having full authority to negotiate on behalf of the party; and
(2) The party's counsel of record, if any; or
(3) In the mediation of a case involving a putative or certified class action, the court has the discretion to determine whether the class representative will be required to attend.
If a party fails to appear at mediation session without good cause, the court on motion may impose sanctions against the party failing to appear. Such sanctions may include an assessment of the attorneys' fees incurred by the other parties in preparing for and attending the mediation session and the fees of the mediator for preparing for and attending the mediation session.
(C) Counsel
(E) Termination of Mediation
At any time on the motion of any party, the court may enter an order terminating mediation for good cause shown.
[Dated July 29, 2013, effective August 1, 2013.]
Privacy Policy Disclaimer Legal Holiday Schedule Rules of the Court Orders of the Court
Illinois Supreme Court


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The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for Dr. Terry Oder.
Oder, of West Hartford, was at the AFC Championship game between the Baltimore Ravens and the New England Patriots with friends Jan. 22, when he became a part of sports history. He caught the football kicked by Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff, after the ball sailed left, missing the uprights and landing in the stands. A field goal would have tied the game, sending it to overtime. Instead, the miss sent the Patriots to the Super Bowl.
Oder held onto the treasured ball until Saturday, when he presented it to Patriots owner Robert Kraft in Indianapolis, the site of Super Bowl XLVI.
"It's very kind of the good doctor to be donating it to us," Kraft said. "This will go in our Hall of Fame."
The Patriots owner rewarded Oder and two of his friends with prime seats at Sunday's Super Bowl in Indianapolis.
Catching that ball in the AFC Championship was no accident, Oder feels. One of his best friends and fellow Patriots fan, Aran Patrican, died heart infection two weeks before the AFC Championship. While Patrican couldn't be at the game with him, Oder feels he was definitely there is spirit.
"That's what makes me think this was some type of divine intervention, because he was a prankster before he was a police officer. So it would be just like him to do something like make the ball miss the uprights and land in our hands," Oder said. "I can't help but also think that the spirit of Myra Kraft was involved."
Myra Kraft, wife of Robert Kraft, died of cancer in July 2011. Kraft and the Patriots have dedicated the season to her.
"People refer to this ball as the Myra ball," Kraft said. "It's the ball she either touched or helped make the wind blow left."
For Oder, returning the ball was the right thing to do. He is also using the opportunity to raise money for his late friend's 1-year-old son.
"We've set up a trust fund for him, trying to raise money through fan donations," Oder said.
In a private meeting after Oder returned the football to Kraft, the two discussed the trust fund for Patrican's son, Thomas. While Oder wouldn't discuss details of the meeting, he did say he had a wonderful experience and was very grateful to Kraft and the Patriots.


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Only two weeks left to submit to Asymptote's first-ever Special Feature on Contemporary Indian Language Literature in English Translation!
Since we first announced the Feature in August, we have received some very exciting work from all across the Indian map. And we can't wait to find more voices, because in a country so large, we know there are more out there.
Take advantage of these last two weeks to revise your best translations and send them in!


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|Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
|Aural Training IV
|Two semester hours.
A continuation of MUSI 2216, this is a companion course to 2212. It is designed to further the understanding of Twentieth Century harmony through related aural exercises, dictation and sight singing. Prerequisites: Completion of MUSI 2216 with a grade of "C" or better, completion of MUSI 2211 or consent of instructor, current enrollment in or completion of MUSI 2212.
Home - General Information - Student Services -
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Undergraduate Degrees - Academic Graduate Regulations -
Graduate Degrees - Course Descriptions - Faculty -
Appendix A - Appendix B - Appendix C - Appendix D


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Panorama of a wizard sculpture carved out of a tree trunk on the Zauberwald walking track. Zauberwald translates to Magic Forest and this walking track in the nature reserve Taubenmos in Bernau-Oberlehen leads through a magic place in the black forest. Part of the 2.5 kilometre long track leads along and across the little creek Rönischbächle. The track offers views over moor areas which were created by glaciers during the last ice age and which are a retreat for many endangered plants and animals. The track leads through dark and more light stretches of pine forest and past the weather station which often records the coldest temperatures in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
Baden-Wuerttemberg is the most south west land of Germany


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I thought it would probably be good if I shared my humble personal opinion about the recent "drama" and "raging feuds" between a number of Youtube 'Truther Channels' (for lack of a better term) - were it only to show that I have indeed paid some attention to the whole hubbub - and that I'm not going to pretend it has nothing to do with our forum and our efforts to expose (among other things) the rampant TV image fakery. Of course it has. That hyper-inflated TAIPEI-TRANSASIA 'infighting' episode among truthseekers - and obvious trolls (what with its 9/11 connotations and memes, "planecrash / "CGI" / "staged drills") stinks of classic and wholly predictable 'divide-and-conquer' antics whipped up by the Nutwork.
So, allow me to bluntly ask : WHAT'S NEW?
What's new with the fact that discussions about Image Fakery in The News has become, by far, the most shill-infested area of the wider psyop / truth research being performed by growing numbers of independent, critical minds ? Has Cluesforum not been the target of countless attacks over the years - due to our diligent exposure of the continuous use of fake imagery in the news media? To be sure, such cointelpro attacks are to be FULLY expected on the part of this world's rogue "intelligence agencies"- since just about ALL of the major media / military hoaxes of our times have been pulled off with the use of FAKE IMAGERY: the NUKE hoax, the NASA Hoaxes, the TERROR hoaxes - etc, etc (you name it!). Yes, ALL of the afore-mentioned hoaxes - and many more - have relied primarily on "Hollywood-aided skullduggery" (or, if you will, "visual mind-programming") sold to the public.
It stands to reason - and shouldn't surprise anyone - that people who have started using their eyes and brains to expose the fact that FAKE IMAGERY IS SOLD TO US ON TV AS REALITY - will be the PRIME targets of the cointelpro spooks appointed by the fakers themselves, whose main objective is - of course - to infiltrate our 'ranks' in order to try and deligimate / discredit our findings.
Their old & tiresome tactics / MO ( Modus Operandi) always remain the very same old same - and can be summed up as follows:
1: Befriend and gain the respect of REAL & HONEST TRUTH SEEKERS by first producing some supportive research and videos.
2: At some stage, totally flip-flop ('turncoat') and start launching vitriolic denigration-campaigns against the same.
3: Lastly, as you get exposed as a cointelpro clown, accuse all REAL & HONEST TRUTH SEEKERS of being cointelpros - and start behaving like a complete fool / madman - lashing out sinister accusations so as to sow as much strife and insider-fighting as possible while, at the same time, discouraging / putting off outsiders to even look into honest truthseeking circles.
That's just the way it goes - and has always gone.
And just to remind you :
No legit videos captured by any camera will produce such artifacts. Period.


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The Advertising Educational Foundation invites you to apply to the Visiting Professor Program (VPP)
The VPP is a two-week fellowship for professors of advertising, marketing, communications and the liberal arts. In 2012, 18 professors were hosted by advertising agencies in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle. Whether a professor is placed with an agency, a marketing or media company depends upon his/her area of expertise. The number of placements in the VPP is contingent upon the number of companies willing to host a professor. Preference is given to professors with little or no industry experience and to those who have not already participated in the program. Note: Program is only offered to professors teaching in the United States.
Click here for complete details and to apply. The application deadline is January 31, 2013. Letter of recommendation (on school letterhead) must be mailed and postmarked by January 31, 2013. Letter of recommendation is not accepted via fax or email.
Please contact Sharon Hudson, Vice President, Program Manager, at firstname.lastname@example.com or (212) 986-8060 x15 with your questions.


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Eagle - 3D Wooden Puzzle
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Product Information
|Pop out the pieces and assemble the 3D wooden model.
|Models and Kits
|12 in x 11 in x 7 1/2 in / 30.5 cm x 27.9 cm x 19.1 cm
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Product Description
The Eagle 3D wooden puzzle is a challenging and creative toy made of high grade 3mm natural wood and comes in a shrink-wrapped package with instructions and sandpaper included. This fine bird is part of our animals collection, just match the numbers together 1 with 1, 2 with 2 and so on. After assembly you can paint, play, display or disassemble and enjoy the challenge of building again. Our 3D puzzles collection is a great educational tool and pass time for you and your family. Suitable for all ages simply pop out the pieces and go. Start your collection today.
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MAGNETIC™ Pressed Eyeshadow
Coral with pink highlights and a metallic finish.
$6.00 excl. VAT
Ready to ship in 1-2 business days. Free shipping to United States for orders $80.00 and over
DescriptionOur MAGNETIC™ pressed eyeshadows burst with intensity and style for looks as magnetic as the tins they come in. Laden with pigments and carefully formulated for smooth application, these eyeshadows blend like a dream, never fade or crease and are bound to amaze wherever you go. Each eyeshadow comes in a unique tuck-top box and will also fit in our MAGNETIC™ customizable palettes.
- Highly pigmented
- Wet and dry application
- Won't fade or crease
- Vegan and cruelty-free
- No matter if applied with the finger, a dry or damp brush, our metallic eyeshadows always provide excellent color payoff!
- Kick some serious ass!
- Share your looks using our hashtag #lethalcosmetics
DetailsIngredients: CI 77019 (Mica), Magnesium Stearate, Caprylic/ Capric Triglyceride, Dimethicone, Kaolin, Zinc Stearate, Octyldodecanol, Silica, Phenoxyethanol, Ethylhexylglycerin. [+/- (May Contain): CI 77891 (Titanium Dioxide), CI 77499, CI 77492, CI 77491 (Iron Oxides), CI 778161 (Tin Oxide), CI 77007 (Ultramarines), CI 77288 (Chromium Oxide Greens), CI 77742 (Manganese Violet), CI 42090 (Blue 1 Lake), CI 16035 (Red 40 Lake), CI 19140 (Yellow 5 Lake), CI 15850 (Red 7), CI 45410 (Red 27 Lake)]
- NET WT. 1.8g / 0.06oz
- Made in Germany
- 24 months shelf life


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See Through
See Through
see through | 1.85 x 2.5 | copper tone | $35
I lay each individual flower on to hand-rolled clay. One by one, I carefully remove them from the clay, exposing all of their beautiful details left behind. After adding my signature, a wooden frame is placed over the clay so that the plaster/concrete mix can be poured on top. Once the mix has set, the clay is peeled away to reveal their relief.
This is READY TO SHIP (Shipping days TUESDAY AND FRIDAY)
The sculpture has a copper loop in the back for easy hanging.
Dimensions: 1.85 x 2.5 inches
Color: copper tones
Materials Used: Clay, Flowers, Plaster, Concrete, Water, Copper/Steel Wire
Flat rate shipping for all US orders
As International Shipping cost can be prohibiting, when placing an order you will receive an email with your shipping quote. Invoice must be paid before shipped.
.......................................................................................................................................................How much is shipping?
There is a $5 flat fee for all US small packages/ $50 large packages
International shipping order must be calculated and invoiced when your address is received. You will receive an invoice within 1 business day.
Where do you ship?
Ron Nicole ships world wide.
When will my order ship?
Shipping occurs on Tuesday and Thursdays for all ready-made items placed by 3pm the day before. All made to order items can take 7 days to 4 weeks depending on the complexity of the art.
Rush Shipping?
If you would like to arrange to have your Ron Nicole earlier please email me at email@example.com, subject: "Rush" and I will do my best to fulfill your request. Custom Made orders usually take up to 4 weeks before they are shipped. If it's a ready-made item I will gladly rush shipment. You will receive an invoice for the additional shipping.
How do refunds, exchanges, and returns work?
While I hope you love your new Ron Nicole piece, I am happy to chat about any issues concerning your satisfaction. I stand behind what I do, and want you to love it too. That being said, if you are at all unhappy with your purchase, please get in touch with me via email firstname.lastname@example.com. Please do so within 24 hours of receiving your shipment, so that we can discuss a resolution together; whether it is issuing a credit note or exchange. I only offer refunds in exceptional circumstances. (To be eligible for any of the above, all items must be returned in new condition.)


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The season premiere of DogTown, a National Geographic Channel show that follows rescued dogs at the largest no-kill animal facility in the U.S. by the same name, will have an extra-special focus tonight: The pit bulls rescued from Atlanta Falcons quarterback and kennel/dog fight ring operator, Michael Vick. The episode focuses 4 of the 50 dogs that were rescued from Vick's compound, some of which have a great fear of humans, intense scarring, and physical illnesses due to abuse. The show follows the dogs' healing process and underscores the fact that pit bulls are affectionate when not in the hands of psychotic boneheads. [LA Times]
The Lords Of DogTown


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Marie A. Gray, 89, Andrews, passed away at 2:45 a.m., Saturday, Nov. 30, at her daughter's home in Lagro. Marie was born on Dec. 13, 1923 in Huntington, daughter of William and Augusta (Kinsey) Burtnett.
She married Forrest Dale Gray, Sr. on Dec. 13, 1940, and he preceded her in death on Oct. 26, 2009. She worked at Goodrich Grocery and Keefer's Greenhouse, both formerly in Andrews, and she worked in sales at the former Grant's Department Store in Huntington. She was a member of Andrews Wesleyan Church.
Marie is survived by one son, Forrest Dale (Diana) Gray, Jr., Andrews and one daughter, Wilma Leonhardt, Lagro; eight grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren, and 14 great great-grandchildren. Her parents, her husband, one brother, George Walker, one great-grandson, and one great great-grandson preceded her in death.
Family will receive friends from 12-2 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 3, at Bailey-Love Mortuary, 35 West Park Drive, Huntington. Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Bailey-Love Mortuary with Rev. Richard Deisler officiating. Burial will be in Andrews Riverside Cemetery in Huntington County.
Preferred memorials are to Wabash Miami Home Health Care and Hospice, in care of Bailey-Love Mortuary, 35 West Park Drive, Huntington, Indiana.
Bailey-Love Mortuary is honored to serve the family of Marie A. Gray. Please sign the online guestbook at www.baileylove.com.


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Intelligence Specialist (Operations)
- Employer
- USAJobs
- Location
- Washington D.C.
- Posted
- May 23, 2019
- Closes
- May 23, 2019
- Function
- Operations / Logistics
- Industry
- Government and Public Services, Federal
- Career Level
- Experienced (Non-Manager)
- Hours
- Full Time
50% or less - TDY will be required up to 40% of the time.
Relocation expenses reimbursed Yes You may qualify for reimbursement of relocation expenses in accordance with agency policy.
Only applicants who meet one of the employment authority categories below are eligible to apply for this job. You will be asked to identify which category or categories you meet, and to provide documents which prove you meet the category or categories you selected. See Proof of Eligibility for an extensive list of document requirements for all employment authorities.
- 10-Point Other Veterans? Rating
- 30 Percent or More Disabled Veterans
- 5-Point Veterans' Preference
- Current Army Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System (DCIPS) Employee
- Current Department of Army Civilian Employees
- Current DoD Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System (DCIPS) Employee (non-Army)
- Current Permanent Department of Defense (DOD) Civilian Employee (non-Army)
- Disabled Veteran w/ a Service-Connected Disability, More than 10%, Less than 30%
- Non-Department of Defense (DoD) Transfer
- Prior Federal Service Employee
- United States Citizen Applying to a DCIPS Position
Army DCIPS positions apply Veteran's Preference to preference eligible candidates as defined by Section 2108 of Title 5 U.S.C., in accordance with the procedures provided in DoD Instruction 1400.25, Volume 2005, DCIPS Employment and Placement.
In order to qualify, you must meet the experience requirements described below. Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religious; spiritual; community; student; social). You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience. Your resume must clearly describe your relevant experience; if qualifying based on education, your transcripts will be required as part of your application. Additional information about transcripts is in this document.
SPECIALIZED EXPERIENCE: To qualify based on your experience, your resume must describe at least one (1) year of specialized experience that equipped you with the particular knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position, and that is typically in or related to the work of the position to be filled. To be creditable, specialized experience must have been equivalent to at least the next lower grade level (GG/GS-12) in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. Specialized experience demonstrates experience performing polygraph examinations according to current guidance and regulations; prepare finished polygraph exam reports; review and evaluate reports from polygraph exams; and, present findings from polygraph examinations to supervisors and organizational leaders.
SELECTIVE PLACEMENT FACTOR: This position requires the incumbent to possess a Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA), Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI) or a National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) certificate.
You will be evaluated on the basis of your level of competency in the following areas:
- Compliance
- Decision Making
- Polygraph Examination
- Technical Competence
Progressively responsible experience is that which has included intelligence-related research, analysis, collections and /or operations. This experience should have included intelligence analysis and/or production, intelligence collection and/or operations, counterintelligence, or threat support directly related to the position to be filled.This experience should demonstrate: Knowledge of intelligence processes, cycle and organizations; Knowledge of and/or ability to use research tools such as library holdings, photographs, statistics, graphics and maps; Knowledge of the systems, procedures and methods of analyzing, compiling, reporting and disseminating intelligence data; and/or Knowledge of organization(s) for and methods of collecting and analyzing intelligence data.
This job does not have an education qualification requirement.
- Male applicants born after December 31, 1959, must complete a Pre-Employment Certification Statement for Selective Service Registration.
- You will be required to provide proof of U.S. Citizenship.
- Direct Deposit of Pay is required.
- All INSCOM employees may be subject to extended TDY or worldwide deployments during crisis situations to perform mission essential functions as determined by management.
- Must be able to obtain and maintain a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance.
- Selection is subject to restrictions resulting from Department of Defense referral system for displaced employees.
- If you have retired from federal service and you are interested in employment as a reemployed annuitant, see the information in the Reemployed Annuitant information sheet.
- This is a Career Program (CP) 35 - General Intelligence position.
- Multiple positions may be filled from this announcement.
- Salary includes applicable locality pay or Local Market Supplement.
- When you perform a Civilian Permanent Change of Station (PCS) with the government, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers the majority of your entitlements to be taxable. Visit https://www.gsa.gov/cdnstatic/FTR%20Bulletin%2018_05%20Relocation%20Allowances_0.pdf for more information.
- If you are unable to apply online or need to fax a document you do not have in electronic form, view the following link for information regarding an Alternate Application.
- Permanent Change of Station (PCS) allowances may be authorized, subject to the provisions of the Joint Travel Regulations and an agency determination that a PCS move is in the Government Interest.
You will be evaluated for this job based on how well you meet the qualifications above.
Once the announcement has closed, a review of your application package (resume, supporting documents, and responses to the questionnaire) will be used to determine whether you meet the qualification requirements listed on this announcement. If you are minimally qualified, your résumé and supporting documentation will be compared against your responses to the assessment questionnaire to determine your level of experience. If, after reviewing your résumé and/or supporting documentation, a determination is made that you have inflated your qualifications and/or experience, you may lose consideration for this position. Please follow all instructions carefully when applying, errors or omissions may affect your eligibility.
You should list any relevant performance appraisals and incentive awards in your resume as that information may be taken into consideration during the selection process. If selected, you may be required to provide supporting documentation.
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I'm imagining a Venn diagram of 1.) people who've already built a PC compatible with USB 3.0 and 2.) people who are gravely concerned about data security. The middle section is quite large! Hence, the Super Talent SuperCrypts.
These jumbo-sized flash drives, which are backwards compatible with USB 2.0, have been built around AES hardware encryption, with 128-bit ECB and 256-bit XTS encryption for the Standard and Pro Editions, respectively. Capacities will range from 16GB to 256GB, and while Super Talent hasn't announced prices yet, don't expect these drive to be cheap when they start selling later this month.
Anyway, encryption and comically huge storage options are nice features and all, but this is a USB 3.0 drive, so tell me about the speed:
This new drive supports USB 3.0 speeds of up to 240MB/s.
Granted, that's almost certainly a read speed rather than a write speed, but still, 240MB/s download put this in league with later generation SSDs, which is pretty amazing for a thumb drive - even a chubster like this one. [PCPer]


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America's about to get sweeter.
That's right, friends--it's time for a totally sweet giveaway!
This time, it's a super-exciting one: three lucky winners are going to win a copy of the delightful new book by Warren Brown (you may know him as the kind-of-a-big-deal owner of the Mid-Atlantic sweet empire CakeLove), United Cakes of America: Recipes Celebrating Every State, in which you'll be treated to many, many delicious cake recipes inspired by different regions of the USA.
How do you get yourself in the running?
It's easy. Just share your favorite regional cake recipe! It can be from the state or region you're in currently, or perhaps the place you grew up, or maybe just a place that has special meaning for you. Be sure to specify the region and why it has special meaning for you! You can either link to the recipe, or simply copy and paste the entire recipe in the comment section.
The fine print: the giveaway will be open through next Friday, July 9th, at 12pm PST; the winners will be announced as soon as they have been contacted and their information has been confirmed (usually within a day or so). US residents only this time, please! Oh, and P.S. if you can't wait for a sneak peek of the book, check out some extras (videos, how-tos) here; and check out the recipe for Hartford Election Day Cupcakes I tried from the book here!


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text: For the ultimate in beach chic and summertime glam, our sizzling range of swimwear is sure to set temperatures rising. Our range remains comfortable and guaranteed to keep all your bits and pieces in place! Whether you are looking for a smokin' swimsuit or bangin' bikini, we are sure to have the perfect style for you to take the beach by storm. Some of the new SS19 range is also made from recycled plastic bottles - save the planet and look good at the same time!