When watching tonight’s expectedly bloody Hannibal, I was often reminded of this past Sunday’s Game of Thrones. What struck a chord was remembering the collective social media PTSD being broadcast non-stop after that thing happened in GoT, and people were openly questioning why it was they were watching the show in the first place. Tasha Robinson has already provided a fantastic analysis of why that thing had such a huge impact on viewers, and what it means for the series moving forward, but the question still lingered for me as to why it is we submit ourselves to the kinds of negative emotion shows like Game of Thrones and Hannibal often elicit.
Even after seven weeks, it hasn’t gotten any easier to believe that Hannibal is a show currently airing on network television. Perhaps it’s the show’s dire ratings that have prevented a class-5 $hitstorm from getting kicked up, but were it doing Following numbers, it’s guaranteed you’d be hearing outcry about Hannibal’s existence from more than just stuffy shirts in Utah. Bryan Fuller is running his writers room like a nightmare factory, with each episode’s exquisitely designed murder tableaux adding a new flavor to the season’s selection of memorable horrors. Taking any musician’s fear of choking on stage a bit literally, this week’s macabre masterpiece presented a symphony orchestra trombonist taking center stage, a cello neck shoves down his own, the skin of his neck flayed open like a barn door, to expose rigid, strummable vocal cords.
Within the 30,000 or so words I’ve written about Arrow since it premiered in the way, way back of 2012, I don’t know if I ever gave the show proper credit for just how good it’s been at making you want to see another episode, week after week. The 11th hour conspiracy twist that closed out the pilot was the moment that I realized I was in for at least one more hour of Arrow, a moment that would repeat itself often during the uneven early days of the first season. Few weeks of the show ever opened half so strongly as they closed, so the intriguing teases at the end of even particularly bad weeks became like a cruel joke. Fool me once with a good cliffhanger, Arrow, shame on you; fool me twenty-two times, shame on me.
Welcome to We Got This Covered’s Deals of the Day. In this brand new column, we’ll be scouring the web in order to bring you hot deals on Blu-Rays and video games. Today, we have one great video game deal for you, check it out below.
It’s been said that every single scene in a script is, at some level, about the transfer of power. As a bluntly literal example, look at Iron Man getting supercharged by Thor’s lighting in The Avengers. That's an exciting scene, though not because Iron Man gets to use a bigger repulsor blast; what makes it work is getting to see the mortal Tony Stark turn the tables on a literal god. Power exists everywhere, not just in comics, and sci-fi: it cannot be created or destroyed, or even felt in a tangible way, but so long as there is social interaction, power is as vital to human existence as oxygen. It’s the driving force behind the toppling of empires, and how your restaurant order is affected by that of your date’s, and as such, power is also the essence of drama. CGC and SCDP may have agreed to a superhero team-up last week, but Mad Men, as a great drama, knows that the partnership can't possibly last two minutes before each side starts trying to make the other its sidekick.
Welcome to We Got This Covered’s Deals of the Day. In this brand new column, we’ll be scouring the web in order to bring you hot deals on Blu-Rays and video games. Today, we’ve found two Blu-Ray deals worth getting excited about, check them out below.
As one reader pointed out last week, these last few episodes of Arrow’s first season are being constructed as a three-part whole. Therefore, trilogy structure dictates that this week’s meat in the finale sandwich be the dark middle chapter (Empire Strikes Back being the proto-example, though the overt Star Wars homage this episode is to A New Hope).
