Bonus points if you can name anyone in the photo.
Dare I Say…
That this particular performance by The Three Degrees of their 1979 hit, The Runner, written by Giorgio Moroder…
Reminds me way too much of this?

The 3-hour premier episode of Battlestar Galactica, in which this appeared, debuted in September 1978. The Three Degrees released The Runner on the LP New Dimensions, a month later in October.
Just Sayin…
Gutted
A few weeks ago, since most of our current favorite shows were on hiatus, we were searching for something new to watch to fill our evenings. We started on Babylon 5, a show I warmly remember from the late 90s that my roommate in San Francisco and I used to enjoy together. It seemed that my memories were tempered; twenty five years later and the show—while still decent—was obviously plagued by a multitude of sins, not the least of which being the cheesy visual effects and the overly harsh lighting in nearly every scene. I mean, the premise of the show was good—and I remember it actually getting better as the years progressed—but we couldn't even make it through the first season before giving up and moving on.
Thinking about other shows from the past that might be worth revisiting, we remembered that Fringe had been one of our favorites. We found all five seasons streaming on HBO+.
A full decade has passed since the show last aired, so my memories of the story line were occasionally hazy or at times outright misremembered, but I have to say that after we wrapped up the five seasons last night, I was just as gutted by the end of it as I had been those many years ago. And while the writers did wrap everything up (unlike certain other shows in this genre, cough, Westworld, cough) by the final episode, I had become so invested in the characters and their stories that it still left me wanting more.
The ensemble cast is top notch and the series has its moments of fun and laugh-out-loud frivolity (the character of Walter brings much-needed comic relief when things get too heavy)…
…but overall I think it's a serious and oftentimes—sad—story. It addresses love, family, loyalty, separation, and forces you to ponder the really big questions of life: why we're here and whether or not there is something more out there. Fringe is one of those shows that stays with you long after the final note of the final closing credits ends. But maybe I'm just listening to the soundtrack as I write this and it's causing me to wax poetic. Or maybe I'm simply biased because I'm an inveterate nerd, and so many of the themes (whether it's alternate universes, time travel, or the horror of a being trapped in a ruthless totalitarian society) resonate with me on a fundamental level.
Have I mentioned Joshua Jackson's awesome perma-scruff?
Quite surprisingly, it appears Fringe is enjoying a bit of a renaissance on HBO+ due to Anna Torv's appearance in The Last of Us. (A show we're just starting.) Coming fresh off Fringe, while watching the first episode of The Last of Us, I couldn't help thinking that this was just yet another alternate universe that Olivia has somehow gotten herself trapped in…
If You Haven't Seen It Yet…
DO IT.
I'll admit I'm late to this party.
I've have seen two series in the past couple months that absolutely left me gutted. This is one of them. The other was American Horror Story: NYC. For those of us of a certain age…these two series reflected our lives, albeit in two very different ways. AHS focused on the terror; It's a Sin not only gave us the unspoken uncertainty swirling about our daily lives, the discrimination we faced, and the abject sorrow of the late 80s and 90s, but also embraced the unbridled joy before the plague. Memories I thought I had safely sequestered to the back of my mind came rushing forward in a way I never expected. Tears of joy and tears of sadness streamed down my cheeks. Far too many scenes that perfectly mirrored actual events in my life and the lives of those around me.
And in what has to be a first for a historical drama, with only one exception It's a Sin got the music down pat. Not only were the songs used in the soundtrack musically accurate by year, but also by season. Someone in the production was paying attention.
You Guys…
I Am Probably Going to Hell for Reposting This
Don't Be Surprised…
? ? ?
Yes, But…
? ? ?
Oh Misha…
And That's a Wrap
I only read Philip Pullman's amazing trilogy, His Dark Materials, in 2003 at the recommendation of a friend. I'd never heard of it prior to this, and yet it is a story that has stayed with me for the last twenty years. While undergoing cancer treatment that summer, I spent many a sleepless night glued to the pages of the books, mesmerized by the story unfolding before me.
Billed as "young adult" fiction, it is anything but.
When, several years later, I caught word of the story being made into a series of feature-length films, I was of course, elated. After seeing the first installment, The Golden Compass, however, and then learning that the studio would be going no further, I was understandably heartbroken. While I enjoyed The Golden Compass, I didn't appreciate how the film so abruptly ended—especially when that ending was not true to the original source material whatsoever and left the audience hanging.
Pullman's story seemed—much like Dune—unfilmable. Unlike Dune, however, where the novel contained so much internal dialog to make filming difficult, His Dark Materials—and especially the final book in the trilogy, the Amber Spyglass—contained ideas that skittish Hollywood executives would probably rather not address. (Never mind the plethora of daemons, angels, talking polar bears and Mulefa.)
And much like with Dune, I gave up all hope of ever seeing a faithful on-screen representation of Pullman's books.
All that changed when HBO released the first season of His Dark Materials, aka The Golden Compass, in November 2019, with news that the second book/season, The Subtle Knife would follow at the end of 2020.
And then the pandemic hit, and the fate of the most controversial book of the series, The Amber Spyglass, hung in the balance.
I was both surprised and delighted to learn a few months ago that yes, The Amber Spyglass had been in production post-pandemic and was wrapping up with a release date of December 2022. Time to fire up the HBO subscription again!
From Mashable (because I couldn't have said it better myself):
Philip Pullman's novel The Amber Spyglass finally gets an on-screen adaptation with Season 3 of His Dark Materials, and what a heartbreaking, gorgeous adaptation it is.
Easily the most ambitious and most fantastic of Pullman's trilogy, The Amber Spyglass gives this final season of His Dark Materials a lot to work with: the land of the dead, teeny tiny spies, rollerskating elephant creatures, and more. On top of all that, the novel concludes Pullman's re-interpretation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, meaning we get some pretty intense discussion of free will and individuality in the face of religious oppression. Yes, that includes the "let's kill God" plotline.
Luckily for fans of Pullman's books, His Dark Materials does not water down the novels' thematic content, nor does it stray away from the stranger aspects of its fantasy worlds. The season, while not without its own flaws, proves to be a rewarding finish to a solid show that tended to be overlooked in a crowded fantasy TV landscape.
Season 3 of His Dark Materials brings us to new and exciting worlds.

At the start of Season 3 of His Dark Materials, our characters are scattered. Lyra (Dafne Keen) is in the clutches of her mother Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), who keeps her asleep as a twisted form of protection from the evil Magisterium. In her dreams, she sees her late friend Roger (Lewin Lloyd), who calls for help from the land of the dead. Meanwhile, Will (Amir Wilson) uses the Subtle Knife to search for Lyra across worlds, and Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby) ventures into a new realm where she'll make unexpected friends. Then there's the not-so-small matter of Lord Asriel's (James McAvoy) final assault against the Authority, which will unite angels, witches, and humans.
The sprawling scope of the season gives us several new fantasy locations to enjoy, from Asriel's bustling battle camp to the austere yet grand kingdom of heaven. Two worlds in particular stand out: the land of the dead, with its fascinating industrial feel and terrifying harpy guardians; and the world Mary stumbles into, a lush paradise populated by the elephant-esque Mulefa. That's right, book fans: We finally get to see the Mulefa and their seedpod wheels. Rejoice!
His Dark Materials Season 3 goes out with a bang — and a lot of tears.

In what felt like a gamble to be more like Game of Thrones, the first two seasons of His Dark Materials chose to split time more evenly between Lyra and other characters, like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel. As a result, the show could sometimes feel like it was treading water. Characters in non-Lyra and Will storylines spent a lot of time having Big Important Discussions about Dust and prophecies, but these were often redundant and drew focus from Lyra and Will's compelling journey.
With Season 3, however, most of these stories get the opportunity to go full speed ahead. Now, Asriel—who was absent from Season 2 due to COVID-19 shooting complications—rallies his troops, and Mrs. Coulter reckons with her love for Lyra. When the two cross paths, it's like lightning in a bottle. McAvoy and Wilson play the layers of Asriel and Coulter's relationship with a perfect mix of love, hate, and ambition, creating a push and pull throughout the season that will keep you guessing. And of course, the much-discussed rebellion against the Authority finally gets its appropriately epic payoff as His Dark Materials concludes.
Unfortunately, His Dark Materials does not completely fix its pacing problems in Season 3. I say only "most" of the stories get more interesting because the Magisterium scenes are still a slog to get through. The introduction of fanatic Father Gomez (Jamie Ward) does bring our villains in a slightly more dynamic direction, but the constant returns to the Magisterium pull time away from stories that deserve far more of our attention. The main victim here is Mary Malone. His Dark Materials sprints through her time spent with the Mulefa (and the construction of a certain spyglass), touching on key plot points but never letting us truly sink into the world of the Mulefa. It's both a shame and a missed chance, since passages involving Mary and the Mulefa are among the most memorable from The Amber Spyglass.
The Mulefa and the Land of the Dad were honestly the only parts of the story I remembered after 20 years.
Mashable continues:
As with the rest of His Dark Materials, Season 3 most comes to life when it focuses on the relationship at the heart of the show, that between Lyra and Will. While a divine war wages around them, their main focus is helping each other accomplish their goals—be that finding Roger or bringing the Subtle Knife to Lord Asriel. Keen and Wilson continue to have excellent chemistry, grounding each other amidst a sea of lofty fantasy set pieces and cementing themselves as young performers to watch. It's their scenes that pack the biggest emotional punches this season. A heart-wrenching conversation between Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon (voiced by Heartstopper's Kit Connor) reduced me to tears for a good ten minutes straight, while the journey to the land of the dead is a quietly moving rumination on the beauty of life's small truths.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room… or, rather, the Mulefa.
From EW:
His Dark Materials is bringing one of its most complex creatures to life with the third and final season: the Mulefa, sentient beings with trunks that dwell in one of the alternate dimensions of the show's multiverse.
Executive producer Jane Tranter discusses how the crew adapted them from book to screen for the first time. "We'd talked about it a lot because it was what we were frightened of," Tranter says. "We would address the Mulefa in the room, if you like, constantly."
Based on The Amber Spyglass, the third installment of author Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy of books, season 3 of the fantasy drama opens up the multiverse to even more parallel worlds as Lord Asriel (the returning James McAvoy) assembles an army to wage war against the Authority and the kingdom of heaven. As Lyra (Dafne Keen), the prophesied child, and Will (Amir Wilson), the bearer of the Subtle Knife, travel to the Land of the Dead, Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby) will go to the home of the Mulefa where she'll make startling discoveries about Dust.
The Mulefa are rather unique creatures, even more so than the angels and insect-riding Gallivespians audiences will meet over the course of the season. Pullman describes them in The Amber Spyglass as spineless creatures with trunks, and spurs for feet. They move about by inserting those spurs into disc-shaped seedpods and roll along tracks dug into the ground:
The Mulefa of His Dark Materials are slightly different. We will see them move both with and without their seedpod wheels.
"Philip Pullman is so generous with us, both in terms of what we actually physically just can't do and also what we need to do in order to help contextualize for an audience what's going on," Tranter says. "His narrating voice would supply that information, and we have to dramatize it in some way. But every now and again, he's clear about what a red line is."
The red line with the Mulefa was that they have to travel on seedpods. "I thought, 'Is that gonna look a bit rubbish [on screen]?' And he was like, 'Yes, they do!'" Tranter recalls. No matter how ridiculous it might sound, it's a visual representation of the symbiotic connection the Mulefa have to the world around them. "It is like a paradise world where the environment, the landscape, and the beings who live in it all live in perfect harmony," she continues. "So there are tracks, for example, all the way through the world of the Mulefa, and those tracks are there because the Mulefa have made them riding along on their seedpods, but they exist for each other."
Then came the language. Mulefa have their own means of communication, through sounds and sign language with their trunks. Tranter and her team used the form of the Mulefa—not quite elephant, not quite zebra, not quite horse—to dictate their sound, one that the character of Mary would be able to learn herself and understand. That entailed enlisting a language expert to create the Mulefa's means of communication.
"We knew that the Mulefa needed to be immediately beautiful and immediately appealing and immediately not scary," Tranter notes. "They're strange for sure. Mary hasn't seen anything like them and the landscape in which they live with these massive, massive, massive trees the size of skyscrapers."
At this point, Kirby is now fluent in Mulefa, Tranter says: "She can put it on her resume."
I found the series immensely satisfying. Did it do full justice to Pullman's work? I would have to say yes. To be honest, at first I didn't particularly care for either James McAvoy as Asriel or Ruth Wilson as Marissa Coulter (I felt Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman personified those characters to a tee), but over the course of the series they grew on me, particularly Ruth Wilson. I applaud that HBO did not shy away from the "killing God" aspect of the story—or even bringing the two gay angels to the screen. There were parts of the last season that seemed a bit rushed (particularly Mary's time with the Mulefa), but that's the extent of my quibbles.
I read that some fans are upset that there are no more scheduled seasons, but to them I say, "What would these additional seasons be? While there are other, post Materials books in Pullman's universe, His Dark Materials itself was a trilogy, and the story ended. Get over yourselves."
If you're a fan of the books and somehow haven't seen this production, do yourself a favor and seek it out. The first two seasons are available on DVD so you don't need a subscription to HBO, and I'm sure this final season will be available on disc shortly.
Wait…Wut?
Hmmm…
Season 2 is sure to be interesting!
Happy Holidays
? ? ?
BURN!
There Will Be No Final Season ?
This is sad, although not entirely surprising. Thankfully the 4th season and its final episode did wrap up the story to a degree (and in my opinion got its footing back after a lackluster 3rd season) that one can walk away from it with a certain degree of satisfaction. The story wasn't over, but it was an ending we can live with, still leaving the door open to something further (see: The Expanse)
The questions of consciousness and free will that were explored in the first two seasons are ones that will stay with me forever. To this day I cannot listen to Dr. Ford from the soundtrack and not get a little misty eyed, contemplating everything he was attempting to accomplish and how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.
The Cas and Dean Show, Episode Infinity
Last image is the face of a man who just decided he's gonna be bottoming tonight.
It's Always an Option, Eddie.
Sorry…I Couldn't Reist
Yeah, I Caught This Last Night Too
I'm as Disappointed as Anyone
But as this graph suggests, I don't think current viewership would've justified or sustained a fifth and final season.
But let's say for a moment that HBO did renew for a 5th season. What do you reckon viewership would look like? Did HBO make the right decision? Or was there nothing left to salvage?
It Started So Well…
I stumbled upon this via Amazon Prime. The first season did a good job of putting a new spin on this well-worn story. Engaging characters, lush sets and cinematography, beaucoup interpersonal and familial drama (some with a oversize "ick" factor), some decent eye candy (who unfortunately seem to get killed off all too often), and aliens who were decidedly not what you normally encounter in this kind of story.

When I was finished with that first season, I was disappointed that the second and third seasons were not available via Amazon; that I'd have to subscribe to EpixNOW to see how the story played out. I was engaged, so I laid out $15 for a six-month subscription.
And then…Season Two happened.

[Spoilers ahead, not that I'm sure any of you care.]
So the aliens presented in Season One weren't actually the aliens. They were just the aliens' tools. And the real aliens? As revealed in the final episode of Season One, uniformly Caucasian, English-speaking humans…who (revealed in Season Two) share DNA with several earthly humans in the story. How could this be?!
"For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!"
Sorry, wrong fandom.
Early into the second season, it's determined that the attacking humans are indeed human, albeit with a plethora of genetic defects. (This explains why the alien robo-dogs were abducting babies and cutting fetuses out of pregnant women – it was for the stem cells.) In the blink of an eye, all the sick aliens are back to full health but still on the offensive, killing as many of the remaining human residents of planet earth as possible. Because reasons.
I made it about halfway through the second season before I hit the internet and got the whole story (at least through where we currently are in the third season) and gave up actually watching any more of it.
Time travel, parallel universes…and pretty much every worn out sci-fi trope out there.
Le sigh. And it had such promise.
Maybe there's something else on EpixNOW I can watch. If not, $15 is less than the cost of three coffees, so it's not like I threw away a lot of money.
The Way Eddie Struts Up…
More from 9-1-1
Even When I First Saw This Episode…
A Little Humor from 9-1-1
While nothing would please me more than if Buck and Eddie came out as boyfriends (I'm not the only one who's gotten that vibe from these characters, but again, maybe it's just personal projection because I want to see them together), teh ghey is already fully represented in the show by the characters Hen and Karen, and I'm fine with that.
HOWEVER…
I don't mind them being shipped by the fandom, and I think these are brilliant:
Oh My…
I mean I knew about Kirk/Spock slash, but…oh my.