Books Alasdair Gray Alasdair Gray’s Speculative Brilliance, From Lanark and Poor Things to His Short Stories Gray’s unbounded imagination and innovative approach to fiction offers a joyful, weird, incredibly immersive experience for fans of the fantastic. By Jonathan Thornton | Published on September 9, 2024 Art by Alasdair Gray Comment 1 Share New Share Art by Alasdair Gray “Of course you changed nothing. The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. Nobody can persuade owners to share with makers when makers won’t shift for themselves.” —Lanark, 554 Alasdair Gray was a key figure of Scottish literature in the late 20th century, a socialist, and a talented visual artist, some of whose murals can still be seen around Glasgow today. But while his importance to the landscape of Scottish literary fiction has long been acknowledged, he is less frequently acknowledged as one of the great imaginers of the fantastic. Some of this is no doubt due to Gray’s magpie approach to genre. Within the same text he’ll happily mix elements of biography, literary fiction, fantasy, metafiction, and art and design. Gray incorporated his line drawings into his books, meticulously designed the layout of the words and images on the page, and even insisted on having control of the cover art for his books, much of which he created himself. He was fond of formal experiments, pushing what text on a page could do, sometimes to its very limits, with a cheerful playfulness. All this makes Gray’s individual books absorbing works of art in and of themselves, as objects—and no doubt causes massive headaches to publishers trying to make his work available in ebook or audiobook format. They are uniquely compelling and immersive experiences, if occasionally frustrating and opaque.  Yet none of this should discourage the adventurous reader of genre fiction. While it’s possible to quibble about exactly how to categorize his work, in my opinion Gray published at least four key works of fantastic/speculative fiction. His debut novel Lanark (1981) is a towering achievement of the fantastic, in which the fantasy city of Unthank and the real-life Glasgow that Gray grew up in during the post-war period are both mirror images of Hell. Poor Things (1992), recently adapted into a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a postmodern reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that relocates the original to Gray’s beloved Glasgow and uses its metafictional framing to pose feminist questions about narrative and agency. A History Maker (1994) is Gray’s most explicitly science fictional text, exploring life in a future post-scarcity socialist utopia which comes under threat from extremists. And his first short story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), demonstrates Gray’s skill at crafting Borgesian metafictional puzzles and charming fables in equal measure. Together they demonstrate a body of work that engages with the science fictional and the fantastic in innovative and playful ways.   Lanark Until the council sends us the decimal clocks it’s been promising for so long Unthank is virtually part of the intercalendrical zone. At present the city is kept going by force of habit. Not by rules, not by plans, but by habit. (437) Lanark is the book that made Gray’s literary reputation when it was first released, and in some respects remains his most important achievement. A massive ambitious epic, over four books Lanark tells the story of Duncan Thaw, a working-class artist growing up in Glasgow after World War II, and of Lanark, whom Thaw becomes after his death, a man with no past who finds himself in the magical city of Unthank where there is no sun, the people are subject to bizarre mutating diseases, and life is controlled by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Books one and two chart Thaw’s life, whilst books three and four tell Lanark’s story, but they’re placed out of order (as are the Prologue and Epilogue). The novel actually begins with book three, enveloping the realist depictions of Thaw’s life in Glasgow with Lanark’s life in its fantasy equivalent Unthank. But much of the genius of Lanark comes from its sheer disregard of genre boundaries—the novel incorporates semi-autobiographical realism, surreal fantasy, and a metafictional section where Lanark meets Gray himself, and only acknowledges boundaries between them in order to poke holes in them. Lanark should be mentioned in the same breath as Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories (1971-84), and Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001) in terms of great metafictional stories of the urban fantastic. Unthank is a place where time doesn’t follow the normal rules, where you can be infected by a rash of mouths or start growing dragon skin, where the government is in thrall to a malevolent creature, but in its own way Gray’s Glasgow is every bit as wondrous, grotesque and surprising. This sense is encouraged by Gray’s heightened prose, in which the mundane details of Thaw’s life are described with as much vivid hallucinatory intensity as Lanark’s journeys through the underground labyrinths of Unthank. The way that Lanark’s story mirrors and refracts Thaw’s life, with elements of Unthank clearly echoing elements of Glasgow, provides a brilliant commentary on the fantastic’s relationship to reality. Unthank is not an allegory for Glasgow anymore than Lanark is an allegory for Thaw, nor are they metaphors. Rather they are shadowy extensions of their realist counterparts which, through their inhabiting of the imagination, show us deeper truths about the real world.  Of course, Gray’s big trick is that his “real” world is as much a fabrication as the world of Unthank, something acknowledged by the novel’s forays into metafiction. When they meet, Gray and Lanark immediately begin arguing with each other, with Gray resenting his own creation and Lanark interrogating his creator’s ethics and competence—he even accuses Gray of writing bad science fiction, much to Gray’s chagrin! All this happens alongside “an index of diffuse and imbedded Plagiarisms,” in which Gray points out his influences by explaining where he “plagiarized” elements of the text to create his novel, referencing everyone from Carl Jung and Franz Kafka to William Blake and Lewis Carroll. Yet even this is complicated by Gray’s inclusion of imaginary texts alongside real ones, and his continuing of the index beyond the end of the book—in an imaginative flourish, the fates of the surviving characters after the end of the novel can be worked out from Gray’s indices that extend beyond the end of the book. Like both Unthank and Glasgow, Lanark itself is a sprawling, labyrinthine city of a book, mesmerizing and enticing, but one in which the reader is in danger of becoming lost. Poor Things As I said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless over-ornamentation was paid out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly. We did not use it. The huge profits of the owning classes were too sacred to be questioned. To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s crinoline must have stunk after a cheap railway excursion to the Crystal Palace. (275) After a series of less well-received works, Poor Things revitalized Gray’s career, and remains one of his most popular books. The novel is the author’s reimagining of Frankenstein, transposed to 19th-century Glasgow. But of course, being Gray, it’s not quite that simple. The novel purports to be Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer by Archibald McCandless, M.D., a book published by a vanity printing press and rescued from a skip by one of Gray’s historian friends. Poor Things is a wonderful gothic comedic romp of a story, in which the young doctor McCandless falls in love with Bella Baxter, a woman who has been “created” by benevolent mad scientist and McCandless’ friend Godwin Baxter by taking the body of an anonymous drowned woman and bringing it back to life using the brain of the woman’s unborn fetus. It’s a thoroughly charming story in which Bella resists being influenced by the cynical male figures who surround her and claims her own agency as a woman and a doctor, defying the expectations placed on her gender; eventually, she happily marries McCandless, very much on her own terms. However, this is all immediately contradicted by another note found with the original text, a letter from Bella herself, or Victoria as she is calling herself by then, long after her husband’s death, where she decries the entire story as contemptible nonsense. Both texts are annotated by Gray himself, who purports to believe McCandless’ account, whilst his historian friend sides with Bella’s rebuttal.  The brilliance of Poor Things lies in how Gray pits these two voices against each other. The reader is sucked into McCandless’ story, despite its melodrama and ridiculousness, because it is fun and charming, and Gray is clearly having a great time playing with the gothic form. But crucially, Gray gives Bella her own voice, allowing her to talk back to all the men who have tried to “create” her, either through controlling her education, directly trying to control her life through traditional patriarchal bonds, or by controlling the narrative in which she appears. She reminds the reader of the conventions of Victorian and gothic storytelling that shape McCandless’ narrative, and the political assumptions they reinforce, particularly about gender and class. These contradictory takes on the same history, which are then editorialized upon by Gray and his historian friend, remind us that all narrators are inherently unreliable, that all texts are constructed within a base set of assumptions, that storytelling itself is an inherently political act.  A History Maker “When a lot of folk watch something on a screen they all see the same thing. What a damnable waste of mind! Readers bring books to life by filling the stories with voices, faces, scenery, ideas the author never dreamed of, things from their own minds. Every reader does it differently.” (140) A History Maker is set in a 23rd-century Scottish utopia, in which the technology of household powerplants that can generate any object desired brings capitalism to an end. Wat Dryhope is a hero from the wargames that occupy the men whilst the women of the future run the world. Chaffing against his reputation and the expectations foisted upon him by the society in which he lives, he becomes embroiled in a plan by a group of radicals to use a global war to reinstate capitalism. The main text of the novel tells Wat’s story, but it is prefaced and annotated by Wat’s mother, who received the text from Wat himself before his disappearance, and who is writing these historical notes many years after the failure of the radicals’ plot.  Much has been made of Gray’s influence on other Scottish writers, and in particularly the great Iain M. Banks, who also straddled the worlds of literary and genre fiction. It might be a bit of a stretch to call A History Maker Gray’s attempt at a Culture novel, but it does feature a far-future socialist utopia under threat by malevolent forces, and the shadowy secret society that fights to defend it. It’s just that in this case, the shadowy secret society aren’t Special Circumstances or sentient starships, they’re Scottish grannies sitting round a campfire telling stories.  Gray brings his usual inventiveness and playfulness to exploring the science fictional ideas of utopias and post-scarcity society, but imagining a society built around traditional Scottish forms of storytelling rather than interstellar travel. Even more so than Poor Things, A History Maker reflects on unreliable narrators—both Wat and his mother are telling their version of the story to achieve very specific political aims, and we are reliant on their worldviews to explain to us the reader how this far future society works, with all the baggage that their viewpoints come with. Thus, whether it is us reading the book in the novel’s distant past, or the implied future reader reconstructing their own history from Wat’s story and his mother’s annotations, we are made aware that the tools we are given to grasp the world of the novel contain their own implicit political biases.  Unlikely Stories, Mostly For a moment the wheel of the civilized world was joined to the wheel of heaven. The disaster which fell a moment later was an accident nobody could have foreseen or prevented. I am the only living witness to this fact. I have been higher than anybody in the world. The hand which writes these words has stroked the ice-smooth, slightly-rippled, blue lucid ceiling which held up the moon. (77) Gray wrote many short stories in his life, amounting to seven collections, which these days can all be found in the huge anthology Every Short Story, 1951-2012. His short fiction frequently engages with the fantastic, perhaps more directly than his novels, but still retains his joy at experimenting with form and metafictions. In this way, they bring to mind the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with Gray’s trademark Glaswegian wit. All his collections are worth reading, but much of his best work in the short form, and his most fantastic, can be found in his debut collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. As with his novels, Gray took great care with his collections, so many of his stories are accompanied by his striking line art, which adds to the poetic, haiku-like beauty of the text. Into this category falls “The Star,” a charming tale about a boy who finds a fallen star, “A Unique Case,” about a friend who suffers a head injury that reveals he has tiny men working in his brain, and “The Spread of Ian Nicol,” in which an ordinary riveter grows another version of himself out the back of his head. These stories are charmingly whimsical, and beautifully manage to root the bizarre and the inexplicable in the everyday, working-class Glasgow that Gray lived in, using only a few pages and some inventive illustrations.  Other stories are longer and more ambitious. “The Comedy of the White Dog” mixes folklore and sexual farce, whilst “The Great Bear Cult” is a bonkers alternate history about a cult of bear worship that sweeps Britain in the 1930s, told through the format of a script for a faux-documentary. It is the five linked stories that make up the final two-thirds of the book that are the real meat of the collection. These stories are bookended by “The Start of the Axletree” and “The Fall of the Axletree,” an extended riff on the Tower of Babel, in which the ruler of a powerful empire with nowhere left to expand realizes the only way to keep the empire growing is to divert all resources into a grandiose project, a tower that will connect the ground with the sky. The first story chronicles how the emperor comes across the idea and sets his people into building the Axletree, while the last story tells of its inevitable hubristic downfall after it reaches the surface of the sky. The stories in between are kind of implied to be set in the same world. “Five Letters from an Eastern Empire” is perhaps Gray’s most well-realised short story, the tale of a man selected to be a poet in the far Eastern empire—on the other side of the world from the empire building the Axletree—whose illusions about the rightness of the state and the emperor are gradually stripped away as he learns about the horrific costs of empire building. “Logopandocy” is the most radical story in the collection, another riff on the Tower of Babel and an exploration of the decay of language in which language itself collapses over the course of the story, leaving nothing but gesture at the end. And “Prometheus” is a retelling of the myth of the Titan and bringer of fire embedded in the story of a man trying to retell the story of Prometheus as a play. This cycle of stories is as powerful and ambitious as any of Gray’s novels. Gray was a writer whose restless creativity and disregard for genre boundaries led him to frequently engage with fantastical and science fictional ideas. They were tools to be played with, as much as metafiction or autobiography or any of the other techniques and genres Gray would use over the course of his career. His books are tributes to his unbounded imagination and to his love of books as objects of art in their own right. While they can sometimes be messy and daunting, there’s no doubting his ambition. At his best, his books are immersive works of art for the adventurous reader to get lost in, meticulous constructions that reflect the bizarre and confounding worlds contained within. He was one of Glasgow’s key literary voices, and the fantastic was an essential part of how Gray put literary Glasgow on the map. All of these works, and Lanark especially, offer a singular experience that any fan of literary fantasy and the urban fantastic should be eager to embrace.[end-mark] The post Alasdair Gray’s Speculative Brilliance, From <i>Lanark</i> and <i>Poor Things</i> to His Short Stories appeared first on Reactor.

Blog Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Chrysalis” Big changes are in store for the cast of Babylon 5 a we head into the season 1 finale… By Sarah Tolf | Published on September 9, 2024 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Chrysalis”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Janet GreekSeason 1, Episode 22Production episode 112Original air date: October 26, 1994 It was the dawn of the third age… As the new year approaches, the B5 Council is meeting. The meeting mostly serves as an audience for a shouting match between Mollari and G’Kar. The Narn have an outpost in Quadrant 37, which Mollari says is in violation of the treaty between their worlds. But since the treaty was negotiated under duress, the Narn refuse to abide by it. When Mollari starts making threats, G’Kar leaves in a huff. One of Garibaldi’s informants, Stephen Petrov, approaches him, bleeding badly. He says, “They’re going to kill him,” but dies before he can identify who “him” is. Sakai is on the station, and after she and Sinclair watch ISN’s coverage of a goodwill tour being conducted by President Santiago and Vice President Clark, Sinclair rather awkwardly proposes to Sakai, and Sakai very enthusiastically says yes. Mollari is lamenting his life, but then he’s contacted by Morden, who wants to meet. Mollari, still grateful for Morden getting him the Eye back, agrees. Morden says that his associates and he can help Mollari with Quadrant 37. Morden tells Mollari to inform his government that he will take care of the situation. They want no credit for what they do, as the point of the exercise is to improve Mollari’s position. Lennier informs Delenn that Kosh said yes to, um, whatever it is she told him to ask the Vorlon. Delenn then goes to visit Kosh, where he allows her to see inside his encounter suit. She bids him farewell, saying this is the last time he will see her as she is now. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Garibaldi goes to downbelow to try to find out who killed Petrov, and he eventually finds a Lurker actually willing to talk to him. Petrov took a job loading cargo for a guy named Devereaux. Petrov actually looked at the cargo (which is generally a no-no, as asking questions means you don’t get more work), and it scared the bejabbers out of him. The chief takes Devereaux and two of his flunkies into custody. Devereaux does the usual tired boasting about how Garibaldi doesn’t know what he’s getting into and it’s way above his pay grade and various other clichés that Garibaldi is unimpressed by. Sinclair visits G’Kar in his quarters and urges him to back off on Quadrant 37. G’Kar won’t, though he respects Sinclair’s warning that they’re all coming to a crossroads. Sinclair and Sakai go to dinner at Fresh Air with Ivanova and Garibaldi and reveal that they’re getting married and they want the other two to be their maid of honor and best man, respectively. Both agree, and then they’re interrupted by Garibaldi being informed that Deveraux and his thugs have escaped custody. This irks Garibaldi, and he was already irked by the weapon Deveraux was carrying—a PPG without a serial number. Those are rare and only issued to special agents in EarthForce Security. So maybe it really is above his pay grade… A handful of shadowy (ahem) ships arrive at Quadrant 37 and wipe out the Narn outpost and all the attendant vessels. An ISN news piece reveals that Clark has departed from EarthForce 1 with the flu, and that he hopes to rejoin Santiago on Io. This will probably be important later. Garibaldi and one of his security guards, Jack, go over some of Deveraux’s cargo that didn’t make it onto the ship that Petrov helped load, which was heading for Io. It’s equipment that can flood the Gold Channel frequency, completely jamming it. Putting it all together, Garibaldi calls Sinclair and says they have to meet now, but he won’t say why over an unsecured link. He goes to leave the cargo bay and is confronted by Deveraux and his henchthugs. Deveraux reiterates that Garibaldi shouldn’t have stuck his nose in this, and then the security chief is shot in the back—by Jack. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Sinclair is beside himself with worry, as Garibaldi never showed up for the meeting he called, and no one can find him. Delenn approaches him, holding up the triluminary, which Sinclair last saw when he was the Minbari’s prisoner after the Battle of the Line. Sinclair confirms Delenn’s suspicions that he remembers more of his missing twenty-four hours than he’s let on, though he still has many gaps. Delenn offers to fill those gaps, but Sinclair has a missing security chief and can’t really talk to her right now. Delenn understands and says she’ll wait in her quarters, but she can only wait so long, as events have been set in motion. Na’Toth reports the destruction of Quadrant 37 to G’Kar. The ambassador is at a loss as to who would be responsible. The Minbari would not conduct a sneak attack. Neither Earth nor the Vorlons have the motive. The Centauri lack the resolve. And no other known nation has the firepower.  Through sheer force of plot armor thanks to being in the opening credits, Garibaldi crawls to an elevator and collapses inside it, to be found by someone leaving a New Years Eve party. He’s brought to medlab right away. He manages to tell Sinclair that someone’s going to kill the president at the Io jump gate before lapsing into unconsciousness. Sinclair immediately goes to CnC, but Ivanova informs him that all communications are jammed—even the Gold Channel. ISN is on one of the monitors, and they see EarthForce 1 blow up. (How a transmission of the ship blowing up is possible when all communications were jammed is left as an exercise for the viewer.) Mollari meets with Morden and is outraged. He was not expecting a massacre. However, Morden insists that all is well. “They’re only Narns.” And Mollari is now being spoken of as a hero in the halls of power on Centauri Prime. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Sinclair tries and fails to convince a senator that there was a specific plot against Santiago. The senator assures Sinclair that the findings are that it was an accident, and she finds it impossible to believe that a security chief on a remote outpost found a conspiracy that EarthForce Security missed. Jack “finds” Devereaux and his dudebros, and reports that they died in a firefight with him. Curiously, Devereaux’s PPG is cold, but sometimes that happens. Sure. No problem. Nothing to see here. Sinclair is watching the ISN feed of Clark being sworn in when Kosh approaches him, reminding him that he’s forgotten something. The light bulb goes off over Sinclair’s head and he high-tails it to Delenn’s quarters— —but it’s too late. She’s inside a chrysalis. Lennier has no idea when she’ll come out of it, or what she’ll come out as. Na’Toth goes to G’Kar’s quarters only to find a prerecorded message set to play on her arrival: G’Kar has gone off to investigate what happened in Quadrant 37.  Mollari and Ivanova sit in medlab, keeping an eye on the comatose Garibaldi. Lennier continues to watch over Delenn. Sinclair laments to Sakai that everything is changing. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair blows his chance to get the whole skinny on the Battle of the Line due to the incredibly bad timing of Garibaldi getting shot. He also gets engaged to Sakai and tries to warn G’Kar that everything’s changing, all in what turns out to be his swan song as station commander. Ivanova is God. Sakai asks Ivanova to be her maid of honor because she doesn’t know anybody on the station, and Ivanova is the highest ranking woman in the opening credits so, um, why not? I’m stunned she didn’t say, “Really? Me? Don’t you have any, y’know, friends?” The household god of frustration. Garibaldi might want to consider improving his vetting process for hiring subordinates, as we’ve already had an inveterate gambler in “And the Sky Full of Stars,” and now this. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn gets to see under Kosh’s dress, as it were, and goes into a cocoon. It’s all part of some greater purpose. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… At one point, Morden says that all he wants in return from Mollari is to one day do a favor for him and his associates. That, for the record, is when Mollari should have said no and backed away. We also learn that the Centauri currently have either forty-nine or fifty gods, depending on how you count Zoog. (For what it’s worth, Vir generally doesn’t count Zoog.) Credit: Warner Bros. Television Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn Regime is committed to expanding at all costs—even if it’s violation of a treaty. (They consider that treaty illegitimate anyhow.) They also believe that the Centauri Republic doesn’t have the stones to fight back, which is true in the abstract… The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh is in cahoots with Delenn on whatever it is she’s doing, and he allows her to see his true face. Meanwhile, the Shadows make their first big appearance. Having previously destroyed a pirate ship few people would even miss, this time they wipe out an entire outpost and its support ships, a massacre on a truly appalling scale. Morden assures the Shadows that Mollari is definitely their man… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. When Sinclair shows up at G’Kar’s quarters, Na’Toth says he’s very busy, but then three human women depart his bedroom, at which point Na’Toth dryly says that he’s free now. G’Kar then comes out wearing only a nightshirt. Wah-hey! Welcome aboard. Julia Nickson makes her third and final appearance as Sakai, returning from “Mind War.” Maggie Egan returns as an ISN anchor from “Survivors”; she’ll be back in “GROPOS.” Ed Wasser officially makes Morden recurring, returning from “Signs and Portents.” Macaulay Bruton is back as one of Garibaldi’s security guards from “By Any Means Necessary.” Ardwight Chamberlain is peculiarly uncredited as Kosh, who was last seen in “Grail.” Gary McGurk makes his first appearance as Clark. All four will return two episodes hence in “Revelations.”  Trivial matters. This is the final appearance by Michael O’Hare as an opening-credits regular. He’ll reappear in “The Coming of Shadows” as a guest star.  The story of Sinclair and Sakai following this episode is told in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan. It’s also last appearance by Caitlin Brown as an opening-credits regular. The role of Na’Toth will switch to Mary Kay Adams in season two. Brown will return in a different role in season two’s “There All the Honor Lies,” and she’ll reprise the role of Na’Toth in season five’s “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Delenn shows Sinclair the triluminary, which Sinclair was established as having seen when he was a Minbari prisoner in “And the Sky Full of Stars.” Delenn was given the triluminary at the end of “Babylon Squared.” Credit: Warner Bros. Television In “TKO,” Smith warned Garibaldi to watch his back. His inability to follow that instruction proves his undoing here. G’Kar quotes Gandalf when he tells Na’Toth, “Expect me when you see me,” which the wizard said to Frodo at the end of Chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is far from the last reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings we’ll see on this show… The camera angles on the footage of Clark being sworn in were deliberate homages to the photography of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Alisa Beldon telepathically sensed the word chrysalis in Delenn’s mind in “Legacies,” and this episode pays that off. This episode was held back by PTEN until the week before the second season debuted so that viewers wouldn’t have to wait an entire summer for the cliffhanger to be resolved. (Some airings of the episode also went out with a “To be continued…” card at the end, though that was not supposed to be there and was removed.) This became a fairly standard practice for B5, to save the final few episodes of a season for late summer/early fall right before the new season debuted. The echoes of all of our conversations.  “This is like being nibbled to death by, um—ah! What are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long beak, webbed feet, go ‘quack’?” “Cats?” “Cats! I’m being nibbled to death by cats!” —Mollari and Vir failing their saving throw versus exobiology. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “You have forgotten something.” This is a fairly effective season finale, but it suffers from two problems, one actively while watching it and the other from rewatching it and knowing what will come next. The problem watching it is that the episode desperately wants us to be affected by the assassination of President Santiago, and—for me, at least—it utterly fails to do so. I don’t know who Santiago is. The fact that he’s president is not, by itself, enough for me to give a damn. If we’d actually seen Santiago at any point, even if it was just news footage of a press conference or an interview or something, it would’ve helped. Hell, in “Survivors” Santiago was right there on the station. That was the perfect opportunity to see him, get to know him a little. It wouldn’t require much, just a few bits here and there to make him a person rather than an abstraction. As it is, his death is just a CGI explosion, and who cares? (Also I ask again: how could they see the ship exploding if all transmissions in the area were jammed?) Clark as his replacement is certainly sinister enough given that he left EarthForce 1 just before the explosion with a sudden flu, and he will eventually become quite the problematic president (though that has similar issues, which we’ll cover). The other problem with rewatching this is that this is supposed to be the big thing where everything changes and gets upended—but it doesn’t, entirely. Yes, Delenn’s in a cocoon, but she’s going to come out as the same person, but with hair. Yes, Garibaldi’s been shot and is in a coma, but he’s going to recover completely. There are only really two big changes, and one of them doesn’t count because it doesn’t kick in until the top of season two: the departure of Sinclair, replaced by Sheridan. It’s not even entirely clear that Sinclair’s departure was known when this episode was written. (The reasons behind Michael O’Hare’s departure were not revealed until after the actor’s death.) However, then we have the one significant change, and that’s one that truly will matter. As is often the case when discussing the best thing about a B5 episode, it involves the Centauri and Narn in general and Mollari and G’Kar in particular. Mollari’s Faustian deal with Morden and G’Kar’s continued righteous fury and patriotism come to a rather vicious head. Up to this point, the relationship between the two characters has seemed simplistic. Mollari is the washed-up diplomat on a shitty assignment for a failing republic, G’Kar is the mustache-twirling villain determined to do everything he can to improve the Narn Regime’s standing in the galaxy. Their rivalry has been played for laughs (e.g., “By Any Means Necessary”) almost as often as it’s been serious. The performances of Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas have elevated that to some degree, as have bits and pieces of script, but this is the episode where the picture starts to get more complex. Mollari’s arc will continue to darken, while G’Kar will come into focus as a tragic, noble figure, which you would not predict from the preening bad guy we first met in “The Gathering.” And it all starts here, with Mollari allowing himself to be sucked into Morden’s plot and G’Kar realizing that his people are in trouble. This conflict will be the heart of the rest of the series, truly. Despite how much I’ve ragged on the episode, it is, as I said at the top of this segment, an effective finale. The pacing is superb as we bounce from plotline to plotline, and Janet Greek does a superlative job with the visuals, especially at the episode’s close. The shots of Sinclair and Sakai sitting apprehensively on the couch of Sinclair’s quarters, and the closeup of Lennier crying by candlelight as he stands watch over Delenn’s cocoon are beautifully composed and framed, images that stick in the brain. (Greek is the second most prolific director in the franchise, as she will in the end direct 14 episodes of B5 and Crusade, second only to Michael Vejar’s 18.) In addition, Garibaldi’s being shot in the back is magnificently filmed. And J. Michael Stracyznski’s script is tight and focused and keeps things moving very well, making you eager to know what happens next. Which we’ll get to in a couple weeks… Next week: An overview of the first season.[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Chrysalis” appeared first on Reactor.

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Nighttime light was also correlated with Alzheimer’s in older people, more strongly than some other known risk factors.

Since 2013, the overall use of the drug has increased across the country, but there are some surprising results related to teenagers and households with higher incomes.

While ABC, CBS, and NBC have still yet to cover the rise of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua setting up shop in U.S. cities (thanks to the Biden-Harris border policies) on their flagship morning and evening shows, the New York Post has been on it every step of the way and, on Friday, their indefatigable Jennie Taer revealed two suspected TDA gang members have been released from custody in Aurora, Colorado. Taer noted that a 20-year-old and his 19-year-old brother were originally “busted in connection with an attempted murder” back on July 28, “in the migrant hotbed of Aurora, Colorado”, but were released into the far-left state to further wreak havoc thanks to a puny $1,000 bond. She explained that sources told her “the brothers entered the US on Aug. 22, 2023 at a port of entry in Eagle Pass, Texas, using the CBP One app, even though they lacked proper documents to be allowed in,” but were let go as they claimed asylum. They reportedly told Biden immigration officials they wanted to go to New York, but they “instead turned up in the sanctuary city of Aurora, where Tren de Aragua members have been taking over whole apartment complexes and terrorizing residents with violent crime.” On Friday, Taer discussed her scoop on the Fox News Channel’s Fox News @ Night with our friend, Trace Gallagher:     To read Taer’s full report, click here.

A mother with a concealed-carry license said she opened fire on a male trying to climb through her daughter's bedroom window in Chicago over the weekend."That motherly instincts kick in, so as soon as something happens, it's like fight or flight," the mother — who asked for anonymity — told WLS-TV.'Try not to be out here committing crimes, especially trying to come into somebody's house, because you never know what's on the other side of that window.'The mom told the station she's been a CCL holder for years and never had to fire her gun until Saturday night's incident at her South Shore apartment.Her 18-year-old daughter had just returned to her bedroom after bathing just before 11 p.m., WLS said."So, I put the towel on, and I run out my room, and I ran right there. I'm like, 'Yo, somebody's trying to come through my window.' So, my mom immediately acted on it," the daughter told the station.The mom told WLS, "He was, like, hanging on her window. I just told him that 'I have a gun. I'm going to shoot.' And he just didn't stop. I fired a warning shot. I didn't even know that he got hit."Police soon found the 36-year-old suspect shot in the leg on East 69th Street near Oglesby, the station said, adding that he was taken to a hospital in fair condition. Charges were pending against the suspect Sunday night, WLS added.The mother and daughter both had advice for the would-be intruder."Next time you think about coming through somebody's window, you just remember how that bullet felt," the daughter told the station.Her mother added to WLS, "Try not to be out here committing crimes, especially trying to come into somebody's house, because you never know what's on the other side of that window."She noted to the station that police confiscated her gun.You can view a video report here about the incident.Blaze News over the weekend reported on 10 times Chicago concealed carriers stopped crooks in their tracks over the last year.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!