When Elementary premiered, I really liked it, but worried it would get networked to death, or that they’d be “platonic” for Chris Carter values of platonic, or – worst – it would slowly forget the canon, and stray from the heart of 221b.

It didn’t. I have an article at io9.com today, about how Elementary did what many great adaptations do – interrogate, not portray, the canon – and gave us one of the most interesting takes of the last twenty years. (Without a Clue was the last Holmes adaptation to deconstruct the mythos with the sort of ambition Elementary has.)

There have been so, so many Holmes adaptations. I’ve been a fan of several. But I think one of the key aspects in adapting Holmes for a long-form work is one that goes straight back to canon: Holmes was a layered character, but largely static. With the exception of an ever-growing list of things he knew, as Conan Doyle turned him slowly superhuman, Holmes existed in an episodic medium, and had a reset button so big it could literally bring him back from the dead. Any ambitious adaptation of his work will take the Holmes given to them, and let him grow. Elementary saw that, and Elementary did.

Make no mistake, it’s not perfect. I haven’t seen a show that strained so hard to escape the bonds of episodic TV since the first season of NBC’s Life, and much of their development is of the slow-and-steady sort, without the bursts of forward motion allowed in serial dramas. They also, if we’re being honest, fell down on the job somewhat with Irene Adler, who I guess will never get to write Sherlock a scathing note and soprano off into the sunset ever again. (I understand and respect the setup involved in the relationship between Irene and Moriarty, and have zero problems with a woman Moriarty, but I find it notable that Irene Adler remains more progressive in 1891 than in the vast majority of her iterations since.)

However, those are failures of the middle scope. In the great scope (upturn everything on which Holmes relies, put an unwanted woman Watson on his doorstep, and make them go through the wringer from scratch), and in the small scope (a balance of light and dark characterization, payoffs for passing setups a dozen episodes down the line, a progression of meetings on the roof as signposts for their development), it’s done markedly well.

That’s it. That’s the show.

And much of Elementary’s strength comes from that attention to canon – not just passing quotes, but dynamics present in the text; the manic, excited Holmes is straight off the page, just as much as the cold and ruthless misanthrope ever was (and we get him, too).

Watson is still clever, attractive, and perfectly capable of living without Holmes, thanks much – but this Holmes doesn’t get away with merely pulling out the old conductor of light speech. I mean, he pulls it out, but she rolls her eyes to the ceiling and says, “An insult AND a boast,” because Watson is fond enough of Sherlock to be a roommate, but that roommate has been a dickweed since 1891 and this Watson isn’t having it.

Watson, in fact, isn’t having much of anything: while I hope that next season she gets a crisis of her own, rather than just handling Sherlock’s, in every other respect she’s been delivered in spades. I appreciate someone whose detective skills build slowly based on experience and research; I appreciate a woman of color whose relationship with her mother is an actual relationship and not just a stand-in dynamic. I appreciate that she has a relationship with Sherlock’s sponsor that is 1% references to Sherlock and 99% breaking into cars.

I appreciate that, in the big finale, Watson fucking wins.

But on top of all of this, it’s honestly refreshing to see a show that (whenever networks allow, at least) spends so much time and energy working on a dynamic with roots in canon but forward motion. While Sherlock is never in doubt that detecting with him would be the awesomest profession and says so often, when he’s finally driven to make the real offer, he takes the time to relieve her of the professional confidentiality which would have had her at a disadvantage, and encourages her to discuss it with others. That’s a Holmes who’s in motion; it’s been a pretty fine journey so far.

If you gave a 7th-grader a pan of cupcakes during American History, and he fell asleep during a Law and Order marathon while his siblings watched Charmed upstairs and his parents chatted about the historical intricacies of Anno 1790, and then he wrote down his dream and got a magical wish granted by a TV wizard, you’d have this show.

And it’s JJ Abrams, so, yes!

But this beautiful trainwreck doesn’t stop there. In fact, it doesn’t even start there!

It starts with some actual draws in its stars, Nicole Beharie (Deserves Better Than Michael Fassbender woman, from Shame) and Tom Mison (Has Been Paying His Dues in Poirot Episodes and Supporting Parts in Miniseries So You’ve Probably Seen Him guy, from the UK). If it looks like she wants to murder him, that’s probably about right.

They are both good, which is handy, since they’re principally responsible for carrying the premise that Ichabod Crane has been raised from the dead as part of a mystical pact to stop the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starting with the Headless Horseman and proceeding with what we can all assume is one additional Horseman per season, because Abrams is spectacularly handwavey but he’ll make sure that a premise that can barely support an ’80s B-comedy has a four-season gimmick. (That comedy would be Oh, Ichabod!, and star David Warner and Geena Davis.)

Joining them are Orlando Jones and John Cho, which is fun! (A friend asked me how Cho was being incorporated into the show; unaware she hadn’t seen the trailer and thinking she was messing with me, I said he was either a cop or, in a twist, a stripper pretending he was a cop. His confused face here supports either theory. However, if it really was the second thing it would be the premise of an entire show on USA called Bare-ly Legal, where he’s a hardworking single-dad stripper who always gets roped into solving crimes by people who assume he’s an officer of the law and has an on-again-off-again relationship with a lady DA, and I would watch it every day of the week.)

Orlando Jones is the police chief! He’s tired of all these murders in his tiny town! I bet he’s going to be writing someone up about it and reminding everyone a lot about how in Sleepy Hollow they do things by the book. But can he be trusted? As our lead cop voiceovers, “I don’t know who to trust,” he gives us this face into an empty room:

Hmm, that COULD mean anything! I guess we don’t know if we can trust him! It’s hard to say.

We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.

And of course, as the plot thickens with the clues in George Washington’s Bible (you know the one), we’ll be skillfully incorporating other speculative elements, elements that totally hold together without sounding like someone in a pitch meeting desperately spinning out his premise! Elements filled with strong women characters!

(Occurs under VO about two covens, “representing good and evil.” This show knows it might lose you with its completely nonsense premise! It doesn’t want to lose you! It will feed you all the thematic and plot help you need, to make sure you tune in to our buxom witch as she leans forward to enhance her urgencies! Wait, where are you going? Have a Starbucks joke, Ichabod’s never seen a Starbucks! He probably gets startled by electric light! The Horseman has machine guns! COME BACK.)

However, the people for whom this show really is a gift? Dedicated reenactors who have spent their lives learning how to shove calico down rifle barrels for no payoff – until today. No more shall your glorious face be confined to fuzzy close-ups in History Channel documentaries, George Washington Man! (Now you get fuzzy close-ups on a network upfront.) May you fight valiantly with your fellow featured extras and explosion-operating crew members!

EAGLES FOR EVERYONE.

It looks like a disaster, and Abrams being involved pretty much seals it. However, I’ve been looking for an accidental comedy, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. See you then, Sleepy Hollow.

(Screencaps can’t really do all that historical recreation justice. If you want the full impact of the Starbucks joke (Ichabod’s never seen one!), you can see for yourself here.)

I hadn’t seen it in at least twenty years, and remembered only that Val Kilmer could barely handle his hair, the baby had great faces, and the credits rolled under the Renn Faire flute jig to end ‘em all.

Wow, did I forget a LOT about Willow.

1. George Lucas has a knack for cooking up trope soup in ten minutes and leveraging it into a franchise and licensing orgy until no one wants it any more and then sending it to Disneyland. If given a quest fantasy, it’s to be expected he’d do the same thing; there are plenty of fantasy tropes to pick from. It gets a little weirder when he gathered all the ingredients for his trope soup directly from Tolkein’s garden and the script was originally full of eraser holes where he replaced “ring” with “infant,” and then, grudgingly, crossed out “throw it into the fires” and replaced it with “give it to a nice family,” because he really wanted ILM to work on fire and hadn’t really thought much about what they were actually gonna throw into the flames, because George Lucas.

(Example of his thematic rigor: I wanted to give the movie full marks for casting little people, until I read on the Wikipedia page that Lucas had said he “thought it would be great to use a little person in a lead role. A lot of my movies are about a little guy against the system, and this was just a more literal interpretation of that idea.”)

2. Said infants did the best acting of anyone in the cast. (How do you even get faces like that from a baby? I’m asking academically, no one hand me a baby, I don’t like them.) Largely this success was because she was not required to say any of the lines.

3.That doesn’t mean all the acting was bad! Warwick Davis, who had to say a huge number of lines like, “She needs to be changed,” and “Look out!”, did a better job than the movie deserved. David J. Steinberg, as his friend Meegosh, was set up to be a great companion until everyone realized he was way too Sam Gamgee and literally sent the guy home. Val Kilmer nailed the Ye Olde Indiana Solo bit as Madmartigan; Gavan O’Herlihy was appropriately handsome in the role of Madmartigan’s ex-boyfirend. Jean Marsh was…inexplicably present. Joanne Whalley was convincing as the head of the guard, and Patricia Hayes turned in a performance she probably couldn’t believe would ever be asked of her.

4. …because “Can you give us what you think you would sound like if you were a possum, then a crow, then a goat?” is not a thing you should generally ask of people who need to be powerful sorcerers later, because Industrial Light and Magic’s live-action tech abilities to use animal-morph technology did not filter down into their ability to create one animated mouth flap on that possum, which sent an entire theatre into hysterics for reasons no one understood. A straw poll reveals no one who’d seen it on the small screen had ever given it a second thought, but a ten-foot-tall possum with a squeaky voice and an animated mouth flap is TOO MUCH TO TAKE.

5. It’s to the credit of Patricia Hayes that when she finally does become human again, she is in fact pretty badass. In fact, she’s one of three canonically badass and powerful women in this movie over the age of 50, including also the evil Queen Bavmorda, and the nameless laundress who smuggles the baby out of the palace in the film’s opening moments and spirits it to safety. Of the women under the age of 50, one is Kaiya, Willow’s wife, who runs the house and farm in a way not portrayed as a nagging shrew, and one is Sorsha, an evil-soon-to-be-good captain of the guard who never has to prove how spunky she is because her authority is assumed and absolute. There’s a Powerful Floaty Plot Device Cameo Lady, if we must, and of course, the whole reason Elora Danan is in trouble in the first place is because she’s going to grow up to become an awesome queen. (We still spend most of the movie with Willow and Madmartigan, but it was genuinely interesting to see so many women, especially in a movie about a baby where many of them did not care about nurturing that baby except for ritual-death purposes, and where the primary caretaker is a dude.)

This is this baby’s ugliest face, no joke. Everything else is cuter than this.

6. It is to no one’s credit that the Brownies exist at all; if you want to know what forced comedy looks like, that’s your ready example. There’s a lot of comedy in this movie! That’s fine! (The scene where Billy Barty blows the lid off “The Bones have spoken”? Nice!) This part is not fine! Does NO ONE in that entire enormous ranch-slash-sprawling-underground-city have the power to rest their hand on Lucas’s pen and say, softly but firmly, “That’s enough, George”?

7. Speaking of amazing humor, you’re never too old for a vomit or bird-poop-in-the-mouth joke, if you are Ron Howard or George Lucas! (You’re also never too old for a troll that boils away into a brain and instantly becomes an enormous two-headed monster full of gooey special effects that you name “Eborsisk” after Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, I guess.)

8.Only vaguely related: Val Kilmer is genuine funny. Obviously it’s no secret, see also Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or Top Secret!, but in his hit-or-miss career it’s easy to lose the thread of his grumpily affable humor, and he really saved a lot of his screen time with it here. The scene where, drugged, he pitches starry woo to the armed Sorsha is great screwball. The scene where he’s sobered up and has to hash it out after he takes her prisoner is almost as good. His still-druggy defense to Willow of “I don’t love her, she kicked me in the face!” might top them all.

9. Totally unrelated: did you know there are fans of this movie whose favorite character is Burglekutt and who will say all his lines in time with the movie? I sure didn’t! If you’re one of those people, don’t tell me!

10. There is a lot of divided opinion on this movie. Part of me finds that surprising, since by no movie rubric (the Camp Scale or the Artistic Accomplishment Ladder) would this be considered anything better than Eh, but one of the people in our camp considers this one of their favorite movies in a totally unironic way; it happens. I will say, rarely have I seen a studio adventure that so much wanted to be either a comfortable B-movie with moments of delight, or a blockbuster epic with moments of humor, and spent the entire movie unable to decide. It had dogs in shaggy sweaters as the demon hounds and it also flew everybody to New Zealand! They went to all the trouble of CGIing the Brownies without ever apparently realizing how grating and unfunny the Brownies actually were! It staged a battle in an empty castle but filmed a ten-minute chase scene that was mostly two paper-mache wig heads stapled onto a sled and sent down a hill! Oh, movie; like your hero, you try so hard, and come back to what you started with, except knowing you can rub your pig trick in everyone’s faces forever.

Oh, what a laugh it must have been in the Museum offices, listening as the screams of the Look Pretty Industry filled the air!

There’s some resistance in the red-carpet industry to looking too sharp or tough or butch or uncaring. Women show up for photocalls in cocktail dresses and you show up on the red carpet in a gown, that is what a red carpet is for. Punk is an aesthetic born from actively not caring, from anger at established systems, from tearing apart the old to make the new. To go punk at the Met Gala would generally mean wearing a pair of oversize boyfriend jeans and a black tee-shirt washed until it’s grey and some orthopedic biker boots. The film and television people couldn’t risk looking unattractive in this simulacrum of real life, and the fashion crowd were all attending alongside dates/billboards for their work, and none of them were about to step out in anything that carried even a whiff of not caring about fashion. (The fact that Vivienne Westwood, who made a career of taking punk from chaos to couture, had her interview cut off when she tried to talk about punk as speaking truth to power, and hence her Bradley Manning badge, indicates how much this crowd cared about the punk part of anything, ever.)

As such, Punk was going to be a pretty ignored mandate. A few tried and succeeded; a few tried and failed. Some aimed for Punk Couture and hit Vaguely Goth, which is fine, for what it is. Most people showed up in red carpet standard with the addition of a fauxhawk or a spike or a safety pin or a smokey eye, as their sty lists pretended really hard that they’d only heard the “Couture” part of the invite. Therefore, making Punk a rubric for this red carpet is not going to even function in this recap. We’ll make do.

THE “YOU TRIED” DIVISION

Vivienne Westwood, of course, did not try Chaos to Couture; her career has embodied it. Lily Cole, beside her, obviously nailed it because look who her date was.

Zhandra Rhodes, looking amazingly Zhandra Rhodes.

Christina Ricci (in Vivienne Westwood), demonstrating to everyone who might have forgotten that Punk Couture exists.

Madonna, never afraid to commit to a look, who got the invitation and went, “Oh, I’m going to blow these prom queens out of the WATER.”

Carey Mulligan. I laughed out loud when I first saw it (“Safety pin! NAILED IT”), but the sharp lines and the foldovers and peeks of skin worked better on her than for others, and it’s a nice attempt to bring hints of punk into an existing aesthetic without looking like Etsy Halloween.

Liu Wen, who looks amazing, even if it’s more Goth Baroque than punk.

Miley Cyrus, who gets full marks, with a dress that’s appropriately punk and hair that looks like Cynthia, Angelica Pickles’ doll from Rugrats.

Sacrificing pretty for striking is very punk. Nicole Richie does better than I would have expected.

Diane Kruger, dressed as the lead singer of a band called Sleek Executive Punk. (Their first single, “The Revolution Has an Appointment With You,” is out this summer.)

Beyonce. When you arrive last and have the red carpet to yourself, you want to make it count. It’s without a doubt a dramatic look; I’m not sure she had any intention of going punk whatsoever, and settled for Edgy Baroque. I will say, not many people can carry off a dress whose gloves only work when your hands are pressed to your hips.

Ginnifer Goodwin in a sharp and shiny interpretation, determined to have the most eye makeup of anyone on that carpet ever.

Lily Collins, in Jareth the Goblin King extensions, with a gown and a leather jacket; her sheer joy in playing badass dress-up sort of makes this outfit.

Sarah Jessica Parker, in a faux-fauxhawk and a gown in muddy colors. Still closer than some.

Kristen Stewart, who would have nailed a look much punker than this one, still looking kind of great in an outfit that halfheartedly waves at punk because there are pants involved.

Florence Welch, who is wearing a garment. (I can’t even tell any more what makes an attempt at punk, it’s just a sea of dresses that somebody picked in the dark because they saw a photo shoot or a leather jacket one time, help me, HELP ME.)

Anne Hathaway. The dress is amazingly fitted, but not particularly interesting and is clinging with its last threads to the departing sideboob trend. The platinum hair was a bold move; you can decide whether or not it paid off, I don’t care enough.

Sofia Coppola, in formal pajamas. Punk!

And Sienna Miller, the Sandra Dee of punk.

THE “YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY AT ALL” DIVISION

How Anna Wintour must have grinned as she took secret meetings for this year’s Institute exhibit. “Punk? That’s cute,” she said, as she pretended to make notes that really just read ‘hahahaha.’ “Punk is for the little people,” she sighed as she smoothed her pastel-trellis dress and walked across a carpet of living humans to reach the photo area because she didn’t want carpet lint to get stuck in the heels of her shoes, and smiled into the camera while muttering through grit teeth, “Punk is a fuck-you, darlings,” and levitating up the stairs and into the festivities.

Rooney Mara, a chair of the event because of her involvement in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (you can’t imagine the faces I’m making) and who has been wearing edgy looks with some success since that movie was first announced, who somehow chose this ensemble for the Met Costume Gala. (When your punk outfit makes me think of Christine’s dressing gown from when I took family to see Phantom of the Opera last month, that’s a thing.)

Lauren Santo Domingo, demonstrating the “a punk accessory makes my whole lovely-but-otherwise-unrelated outfit punk!” fallacy.

Jennifer Morrison, demonstrating the similar Fauxhawk Fallacy.

Emmy Rossum, bringing it home with the Eyeliner Fallacy, Also I Hope That Hair Looks Better from the Side.

Michelle Dockery, the business manager of Sleek Executive Punk.

Katy Perry, who heard someone mention “Goth” and thought they meant Visigoth. All the trouble of sourcing a circlet for nothing!

Michelle Williams, that Artsy Serious Girl from your high school prom who was going to study theatre at Vassar.

Jennifer Lawrence and Marion Cotillard, who are both spokespeople for Dior; Dior is not a punk designer, but that house has walked some edgy, sleek stuff down the runway. The fact that “I missed the assignment and heard Film Noir” Lawrence and “Summertime Barbie” Cotillard ended up in these seems like Dior purposely refusing to participate in these punk theme-party shenanigans.

Kate Beckinsale, whose pink dress is not punk in the slightest no matter how hard her earrings are trying, and the woman behind her, who looks like I am beginning to feel about this.

Jaime King, accountant for Sleek Executive Punk.

Nina Dobrev, who saw an ’80s music video one time.

Hailee Steinfeld, this look is adorable, as per your usual. (The smokey eye is a tenth-hearted attempt at punk, but it does what I suspect it’s really trying to do, which is make her look ever-so-slightly sultry in preparation for Romeo and Juliet.)

Nicki Minaj, who is about 500% more punk than this when she’s headed to the grocery store, I don’t understand what happened.

Dakota Fanning, in a very cool dress that is not particularly punk.

Elle Fanning, interpreting “punk” to mean “trick or deceive,” because whoever convinced her to wear this craft project was doing exactly that to her.

Bella Heathcote, whose team burned the dress code to make the eyeliner for her Regency-upholstery gown.

Emma Watson, who looks lovely and chic and who’s letting her public image age by degrees, taking this chance to ease into Baring Skin in a red carpet environment where she knew it wouldn’t stand out.

Elizabeth Banks, looking just how I feel about this outfit.

Naomie Harris. See, if you’re going to ignore the theme, just ignore it and go for Fabulous instead.

You too, Uma Thurman.

You too, Amanda Seyfreid.

Kim Kardashian, who has been getting a lot of shit for gaining weight during pregnancy like some normal, wearing a dress so deliberately tight and loud and overwhelming that it might actually be coming back around to punk.

Allison Williams, whenyourdressiswearingyou.jpg.

Katie Holmes, just happy to be in clothes she picked herself.

Gwyneth Paltrow, trying to remind you about the last time you liked her enough to give her an award, when her dress was also pink and equally off-putting.

And the award for interpreting “punk” in the sense of “intimidated into quitting the field entirely,” after long deliberation and fierce competition:

Kate Mara, in a dress that looks like sadness pudding with some tinsel stapled on.

Also I guess we’ll eat squirrels.

VITAL STATS

Era: Victorian
Chef Grade: Sophie Grigson, A+ cheffing and an extra + for the calf’s head
Best Guest: Pub denizen and wine expert Colin Deane.
Best Food Moment: Christmas dinner or the squirrels, depending on how you define “best.”
Worst Food Moment: That calf’s head.
Equality Now!: Sue receives instructions on minimizing her opinions on anything ever.
Worst Thing Giles Says: “We gave India education and engineering in return for tea and curry.” (Actual thing.)
Best Sue Thing: This entire episode. She’s gotten into the swing of things.
Moment Giles is Most in Love with Sue: Someone hands them mistletoe, and it goes downhill from there.
Most Random Moment: Giles fulfills his Masculinity Olympics quota with some fisticuffs.
ASPIC. There is a lot of jelly, but this week is aspic-free!
Quote of the Week: “Sully these lily-white hands with the devil’s own work?”

So, by now these two have settled in but good, and their dynamic can be assumed to slide fluidly between sniping siblings and old marrieds for the remainder of their outings. This episode is largely playful and cozy, though there are also a few things that made me raise my eyebrows (not them, they’re fine).

Let’s get started! As always, Giles enjoys a bit of fancy dress, and chats about his villainous curled moustache:

Sue gets her waist taken in several inches (she laughs in disbelief when they tell her), and struggles with a hoopskirt she clearly leveraged into No Wig Because Nope.

They meet up with Sophie, who’s arranged true bounty inside this vivid foyer:

When Sophie points out the enormous calf’s head, as if you might not have noticed, Sue starts to suggest alternate uses and Giles gets in an actual good one with, “You can slip it in Sophie’s bed if her cooking displeases you.” Corleone zinger!

And now, to table.

(This is the only piece of ephemera I capped from this episode, but worth it. “An English Breakfast Table: Remote and Silent with a Palm Tree in the Middle, Just Like We Like It.”)

BREAKFAST: Mutton cutlets, fried potatoes, smoked mackerel and anchovies, omelette, tinned meats, oysters wrapped in bacon, pears, oranges. (Carson can’t be bothered to mention tea, I guess, but it’s there. You’re welcome, Carson.)

Sue is excited about the variety of mostly-fresh things on the table that suggest some actual nutritional value! Giles is excited to call Sue “my dear.”

Not fresh: their Spam, created for use by the Navy because it would last about a hundred thousand years from all the preserving. Giles, of course, takes the entire brick. It’s pronounced to be very Spammy.

Then after some more “my dear”s and some cheek kisses, he’s off to work at a place they never even bother to set up for him at all, because he’s really just waiting outside for ten minutes before he comes back in and calls Sue “my dear” some more.

(Giles. Buddy.)

In his absence, Sue gets to read Mrs. Beeton to learn about household management! “As with the commander of an army, so it is with the mistress of the house.” Mrs. Beeton was not here for your nonsense.

Meanwhile, Giles’s lunch on the town is Indian food to reflect the British Raj. He says in a voiceover, “We gave India education and engineering in return for tea and curry,” which is a thing someone actually wrote down and said out loud in a show meant for national airtime! Let’s all just imagine it a moment.

Damn right you look abashed, sir. What the hell.

LUNCH: Beef curry, rabbit curry, vegetable curry, club claret (said with the disdain only Carson could suggest for in-house libations, and also that crap about India).

Trivia: Chefs of the age added curry to already-cooked ingredients rather than cooking them together for a proper maturation of flavor, so it tasted not super great. Giles mentions it’s like at his school (Masculinity Olympics Academy and Dorms), and then launches into a clearly-prompted line of nonsense about lovely it is for a Victorian gentleman to be able to get away from his wife (complete with joke about dessert, because Giles), and if there’s one thing he doesn’t like it’s being around his wife! Ugh, wives are the worst, he says, looking desperate to end this entire awkward bit and go back and sit next to Sue just as soon as possible.

He wouldn’t be looking forward to dinner so much if he knew what we know.

There’s a calf head in them there hills. Sophie is truly amazing about attacking this calf head to get the eyes and brains out. She ends up axing part of it open and sawing open the rest. Sophie is not messing around.

And neither is Sue, who comes down to the kitchen ostensibly to find out why dinner is late but mostly so she can hang out with Sophie and get in some awesome dialogue.

“Mrs. Beeton says cleanliness is next to godliness and two doors down is puncutality,” Sue says, as Sophie laughs and suggests she help. “Sully these lily-white hands with the devil’s own work?” Sue gasps, as Sophie nudges her out of the way before her crinoline lights on fire and coos, “It’s nice to see that you’re in charge, isn’t it,” as Sue blusters and points a finger vaguely at everything.

I would watch Sue, Allegra, and Sophie in a cooking show, I’m just putting that out there.

DINNER: First Course – Fried sole in anchovy sauce, mutton curry, sherry. Second Course – Boiled calf’s head, brains in butter and herb sauce, fried calf’s ears with tomato sauce, carrots, tipsy cake, claret.

I don’t even care about the food at this dinner until we reach the calf’s head, because in the meantime Giles and Sue working together to make Sue’s reactions into Victorian lack of affect is so amazing.

“That’s the face I know from our lovemaking,” says Giles to cap the bit, and I laugh nearly every time.

CALF HEAD TIME. It’s been boiled for what looks like several hours, which is good for leaching out all the flavor that was hanging out in there. Sophie’s stuffed it with parsley, including in the eye sockets, to disguise what it looks like. It has not helped.

They’re thrilled.

Especially about the bits of teeth that got grafted to the cheek during the boiling process. Giles, stricken: “Aw, it’s all clanky!”

They try the brains, which go over no better. Sue: “My bit was, What are you doing with those electrodes? Then nothing.” Giles loses it.

And with this dry and flavorless tipsy cake, Giles, looking genuinely upset, sums up the dinner and what it indicates about his Victorian preconceptions: “Self-flagellatory, imperial, trussed-up, sexless bunch of dopeheads.” Is Giles my granddad?!

Sue: “I’d love to have an opinion……but I don’t.” Oh Sue, I always think I can’t love you more, but I can.

Field trip! It’s time for the Natural History Museum and Darwin’s diet.

“I hope there’s squirrel – oh, and there is!” exclaims Sue. After Giles touches her face with the furred foot, saying “Feel it on your face” in a voice that tries for Igor but ends up as Sue Please Love Me, and Sue affirms, “It’s a loving touch” (these two), it’s time to eat the squirrels. They are pronounced to be tasty.

Next up: candied maggots! Ennui all around. (Giles, long-suffering but optimistic: “That’s about the third nicest thing I’ve eaten this week.”)

Banishing ennui forever, it’s time for Sue to ride a bike in the cutest outfit in the WORLD.

(Fun fact: I saw this episode a little while before Kate Beaton’s velocipedestrienne comic came out, and in my head that lady is Sue, because look at her.)

Having worked up an appetite, they head for fish and chips and chat about its history as a food prepared for the Jewish Shabbat. Sue declares it the best invention ever. Giles: “You’re such a woman!” (Giles, that’s not even a thing, please just shut up.)

Sue doubles down on her claim by shouting him down about things like the light bulb (“YAWN”). The show doubles down by making him brush his teeth with charcoal and honey.

Serves you right.

Dinner party time! There’s a guest chef, Michael Weiss, to reflect the French cuisine (and French-chef employment) expected at this dinner.

DINNER PARTY: First Course – Red deer a la Royale, French beans, potato croquettes, claret. Second Course – Pigeon a la Duchesse, lamb’s tongue with spinach, claret. Third Course – Partridges with truffles, chicken quenelles, snipes on liver toast, snipe heads, champagne. Dessert Course – Russian jelly, claret jelly, champagne jelly, rice cake with almonds, torte frangipane, eggs a la tripe. (Carson judges the claret a lot. We’ll see why.)

Deer!

Pigeon, stuffed with veal forcemeat, stitched together, dipped in bechamel, covered in breadcrumbs, fried, and served with more bechamel. (VICTORIANS.)

Everyone, in general, loves the food. Sue, in particular, loves the wine. She begins the evening with slightly-blushing faux-faints where Giles gets to gripe to the rescue:

Awkward Victorian prom photo!

But that is only the beginning of Sue’s drinking tonight.

Things soon escalate from hilarity to actual falling off chairs. To his credit, at that point Giles drops all his snarky pretense and becomes honestly, kindly concerned about her, trying to move conversation along as he helps her back up:

That is the prolonged hand contact of someone who is making sure their person is not going to fall off another chair. Good on you, Giles.

Roast platter, featuring snipe heads from which you suck the brains! Everyone’s very suave about it except Giles, who reacts like every baby tasting a lemon for the first time.

The dessert course is a success, featuring several colorful jellies and a tart of which Sue becomes very fond.

(“I’m picking at it.”)

Sue confessional: “I haven’t even gone to bed yet and already the recrimination has kicked in.”

The next day, Giles gets some street food of kidney and various others:

And Sue goes to a soup kitchen to cook Victorian recipes.

So, okay, let’s pause. Obviously these shows are not meant to be nuanced sociological studies of the politics of food so much as they are the Sue and Giles Funtime Hour, and we all understand that. They’re generally very clear about their elevated social status in each era, and they touch on the diets of the lower classes regularly enough; Giles’s street meat is a good example. (Also a good example: the bedbug, lice, and dog hair-infested ice-cream he mentions, because euuugh.)

And it’s illuminating to see the proportions on which the poor were expected to subsist, as Sue cooks it up. I am torn, however, about the bit in which she actually serves it to soup kitchen patrons; while it’s one thing to have a Tube station picnic in front of the unsuspecting, I am not comfortable with the idea of this being considered the equivalent (here is where I’d like to know who was informed beforehand), and though Sue seems to be taking it seriously, the idea of getting historical-cuisine bon mots from people coming to a soup kitchen weirds me out. Basically, my feelings about this segment will always be dicey, the end. (Giles’s over the top in-character monologue about the poor and do-gooder women wanting the vote does not help anything, shut up, Giles.)

The next day at home, it’s back to business as usual. Teatime (food not pictured due to boringness) is held in honor of a séance, which is probably not a thing you should get Sue to do, because she mostly shakes the table herself and makes faces at a visitor who suggests she feels something amiss:

Giles, meanwhile, has absconded to a pub with a gentleman so fun they actually identified him ON SCREEN:

Colin Deane, wine expert, explains to Giles the seductive nature of gentlemen sneaking around in pubs living dangerously, as Sue goes Full Teetotal outside. It’s adorable, particularly when she breaks into falsetto singing and people on the street halfheartedly applaud.

Then she comes inside for a beer break with the gents before she arms herself to go back outside, where there are “hoydens.” Colin, aghast: “Don’t SAY so!”

Day Mumbly, and it’s nearly Christmas! After an in-costume trip to Sainsbury’s with Sophie, during which people react about how you’d expect, Sue comes home to prepare for the big day and set out her stocking with Giles as they try to suppress giggles.

These two.

CHRISTMAS: First Course – brown Windsor soup, potato croquettes, baked cod’s head. Second Course – cold game pie, boiled red cabbage, roast goose and stuffing. Third Course – Plum pudding, bird’s custard, furmity, mince pies. Not mentioned: the claret that everyone is drinking throughout this entire meal. (Carson has had enough of all that, I guess.)

Giles cannot escape the meat-pie coffins no matter where in the past he may go; serves him right, just in general. He does, however, have the manners to lick the leftovers off before he mistletoes Sue:

(She takes a break from drinking juuust long enough for this kiss. It’s amazing.)

Also amazing: this dessert plate. Let’s just be honest.

But not as amazing as Giles, who juggles mince pies right into his mouth, which impresses Sue enough to grab the mistletoe, I guess, because the next thing you know, this is happening:

(GILES. BUDDY.)

Sue falls on the floor in a fake swoon, wisely drawing attention away from Giles at a moment when I bet his face was like a Lisa Frank notebook.

And as we get an exterior shot of the house shining into the darkness, Sue declares, “A voyage of discovery, that was,” in a sound bite that could have been about anything but seems to sum up the kiss, the evening, and the Victorian era in food pretty well.

NOTE: Usually the doctor’s signoff and the farewells are pretty standard, but this one had two moments I wanted to catch. The first is what we get as Sue and Giles mount their bikes to ride off their lethargy, and Giles assures us, “No more Victorian snacks”:

Beautiful cut, show.

And then this, under the credits, shows Sue going to the window for what I desperately hope is just fresh air, as Giles leads the way and hovers like the awkward Victorian prom date he is.

Next up, these two tackle the Seventies, in which Sue has to do some of the cooking, probably because the stand-in chef for the week gives up in despair, which is cute of him, considering Sophie axed her way through a calf’s head forty screencaps ago. It should be fun, though. Fondue for everyone!

I watched two episodes! I took ten screencaps, mostly of people making hilarious faces! Let’s do this.

Our protagonist and his two friends, Imperiled Plot Device and Actual Dashing Guy.

Its an earnest attempt to hit some Caravaggio light and its adorably gormless Raphael-portrait youth. Though the only thing you really notice is that Da Vinci and his fellow humanists suffered under the burden of punishing button-and-lace taxes that rendered them unable to fasten their shirts.

Da Vinci spends the first two episodes getting tied up with the Medicis by trying to paint a portrait of Lorenzo’s mistress as an inroad to building defensive weapons for Florence, mostly to see if he can. The show assumes an Amadeus-esque insufferability accompanying such genius. They also give him Da Vinci Vision, which would be of stylistic interest to anyone still insisting Elementary is ripping off BBC Sherlock, I expect, but is so cheesy it doesn’t deserve its own cap. Instead, let’s enjoy the freeze-frame that accompanied these birds. This isn’t an awkward screencap I took mid-conversation – the show chose to freeze their faces here for the duration of the extremely slow-motion bird flight.

History’s comin’ alive, you guys!

But in addition to being annoying as hell on a general basis, Da Vinci is also literally a bastard! Know how we know?

This is his dad! Every time his dad speaks to Da Vinci, sees anyone in the vicinity of Da Vinci, or speaks with anyone in any capacity about things entirely unrelated to Da Vinci, he manages a round of, “My son’s a bastard!” or whatever equivalent he can squeeze in, saving “Msunzabastard!” in case someone relevant passes him on the street. (I guess it’s aiming for Game of Thrones, but it hits somewhere around Stiff Upper Lips.)

Also a bastard, maybe? This dude!

He’s Girolamo Riario, the Pope’s nephew/spymaster/mystical subplot devotee/creepy bad guy; he’s not super into some of it, I guess, based on this face, and Blake Ritson makes him one of the more complicated characters on the show. Too bad he’s firmly ensconced in the mystical subplot, which is just uuuugh.

The guy who starts it is Al-Rahim, a mystical Turk (of course) who arranges to meet Da Vinci in a mystical graveyard he thoughtfully filled with romantic votives ahead of time, and gives Da Vinci mystical smoke (sure) to give him visions of a mystical purpose (yup).

Accurate facial expression by Alexander Siddig. (The second episode has them investigating the secrets of mystical-brotherhood member “The Jew,” too, so it’s cultural-sensitivity hour just everywhere!)

Next on the list of eyebrow-raisers, sex! Da Vindi’s sexual history is the subject of centuries of speculation; he never married (inconclusive), was said to be extremely passionate about his apprentices (inconclusive but interesting), never took a mistress (interesting) and was once arrested for sodomy (very interesting). It stands to reason that our hero is, if not exclusively gay, certainly tap-dancing his way along the Kinsey scale. Obviously this show will take the opportunity to – oh, nope!

Well, perhaps we’re introducing him as super hetero to lure people in, and the exploration will happen later when he and Actual Dashing Guy wake up in bed together casually! So long as the text is treating homosexuality with respect, I think we can – hold up:

So this is our Evil Gay Pope, and the Licentious Gay Duke gets murdered ten seconds into his part in the pilot, and that’s what we have going so far? Huh. Well, that’s. A thing.

This is Lorenzo Medici. His face pretty much sums up my feelings about all that.

Nothing can sum up my feelings on the parade of bad decisions in this cap:

Ignore our third chest of the day in the middle ground. It is nothing compared to the costume that is happening in the foreground. (I tried to get into what’s wrong, but that sheath-skirt chemiseless mess doesn’t deserve it.)

Let’s play a quick game of How Hard Is It.

Left: Da Vinci, “Portrait of a Young Woman.” Right: Joanne Whalley as Vanozza in “The Borgias.”

Faithful recreation? Nope. (Not necessary.) Close enough to evoke the era? Absolutely. Chemise: present. Difficulty level: Not super high, Da Vinci’s Demons! If you’re trying to create a fantasy Italy in which all the men are super straight and just happen to be half-undressed all the time on purpose, that’s fine, but damn, show, that dress.

In fact, if I had to pick one screencap that gets closest to my thought about this costume, and really encompasses my feelings on the show, any of the faces here would pretty much do it:

Have fun, show! Yikes.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about David Bowie’s “The Stars Are Out Tonight.” People were thrilled about the appearance by Tilda Swinton (who wouldn’t be), and there was a lot of talk about David Bowie’s foray into music-video-as-short-film as an awesome extension of his music video career. And so it is! But it’s also not his first.

Bowie (and the directors with whom he tends to collaborate repeatedly on these projects) has a history of peppering his music-video career with conceptual pieces that, when strung together, become a long-term conversation; to no one’s surprise, it deals mostly with the concepts of doubling, fame, and the uncanny being filtered through his public self, which is an interesting conversation to have when you’re public-ing yourself as much as David Bowie has.

Now, let’s be honest, they can’t all be winners; aside from the occasional eyebrow-raising moment, he’s also peppered his music video career with some of the worst videos you can imagine. “Dancing in the Streets” takes a strong and early lead, for good reason, but let’s never forget the Labyrinth tie-in “As the World Falls Down,” in which he does some halfhearted Casablanca cosplay while faxing photos of himself to a grown-up Sarah – or a totally unrelated private investigator, it’s hard to tell – because nothing says Magical like a printer standing in for a fax machine in a Tuscan Office Rent-a-Room. (Actual thing; you can and totally should watch it here.)

And while I can’t equally recommend you spend the time on (nor quite believe the existence of) the classic* twenty-minute song-based short film “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean,” you don’t have to; the short-form is one of those I single out for discussion in my column “Loving the Alien,” up now at at Strange Horizons!

* Nope.

[Note: An image used in the article to illustrate "I'm Afraid of Americans" depicts stylized gun violence.]

Watching Alien Resurrection is like going to an extremely confusing and uneven semester of a mildly-unaccredited film school; you learn the importance of repetitive visual motifs to establish relationship dynamics, and and you also learn that one-upping the last installment in your inherited franchise should take priority over everything else no matter what, NOW CALL THE EFFECTS GUYS.

Coming on the heels of Alien3, a film better than its press but lesser than its predecessors, Alien Resurrection had some advantages. It was already assumed to be better than Alien3. It had a director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) with visual flair, and a writer (Joss Whedon) who had not yet become exhausting. And it had Sigourney Weaver, who as we will see in this movie carries about eighty percent of what she’s asked to do, which is a pretty amazing percentage given that this film is a conceptual mudslide punctuated by uneven casting, plot holes, and occasionally beautiful cinematography.

(She is never seen again, but this is my favorite shot of the movie, I think.)

We begin 200 years after our last glimpse of the Weyland-Yutani universe. Someone’s on an operating table, and scientists surround her; we’re treated to her chest surgery as someone makes the unerringly-creepy mistake of trying to Achieve Alien.

Let’s all note that 200 years AFTER Ripley’s death, accepted medical technology still requires a team of doctors at the helm, PROMETHEUS MEDPODS.

And of course, who else could you pluck an alien fetus from the chest of but Ripley herself?

Questionable premise. Great shot.

…that has nothing to do with the next, artsy sequence of her emerging from a filmy hospital gown (this movie is obsessed with motherhood and birth/rebirth, let’s all get used to it now). It reminds me not a little of Sigourney’s emergence from a filmy cocoon in Snow White: A Tale of Terror! Sigourney Weaver is very good at artfully clawing at stuff. (Like her characterization.)

So yes, to no one’s surprise it’s Ripley they cloned to get the alien out! (“But that wouldn’t even wor-” “THIS IS OUR FILM SCHOOL NOW.”)

What follows is a nicely creepy sequence of everyone trying to get Ripley to cooperate, slowly finding out after their cloning process she is partially alien, which gives her new biological advantages, like the ability to heal rapidly and the ability to be awesome at flash cards.

Sigourney Weaver manages to sell this by giving us 110% physicality, like her T-Rex arms:

Not so sure about it all is Dan Hedaya, who ended up in this movie for reasons that no one, least of all Dan Heyada, can explain.

(This is the face of a man who thought he was showing up for a heist movie.)

Everyone else, however, finds Ripley interesting, leading to handy shots like this one, in which you could walk into not just this film but this entire franchise cold and still know this woman, a stranger to her surroundings, has one creepy ally and one powerful enemy in frame.

The powerful enemy is Doctor Dickhead; the ally is Brad Dourif, on the short list for We Need A Creep on every casting director’s roster in every town there is. As he watches Doctor Dickhead and Ripley hash it out about what the aliens are gonna do (spoilers: kill everyone), Brad Dourif does some pretty passable Tennis Eyeballs:

Brad Dourif, who loves the aliens a lot (there always has to be one creep who’s totally into the aliens, except in Aliens when it was Bishop and it was used as a red-herring trait because it’s so creepy to enjoy the aliens), excitedly explains to Ripley that it’s all going to be fine! Everything is in balance now, and nothing can change that!

…except the soft-open cast of Firefly.

From left: Michael Wincott as Charming Rogue, Kim Flowers as Girlfriend Woman, Dominique Pinon as Vriess, Ron Perlman as Jayne, Winona Ryder as Call, and Gary Dourdan as Christie.

Even though we know most of them are doomed to be impaled by Alien extremities, there’s some conflict handwaved for us to start with. Charming Rogue has Girlfriend Woman (foot-rubs are involved), Call is new, Vriess likes Call, Christie has guns in his sleeves, and Ron Perlman tries his best to justify the survival of a character who should, from his very first moments, just be killed for everyone else’s peace of mind.

And it turns out they’re on the ship because Charming Rogue has brought some illegal human cargo for everyone to experiment on.

Pause. That is dark. That is absolutely one of the darkest things in the entire Alien franchise, which is saying something. That is a mirror of what happened to Ripley and crew in Alien, which was presented there as a completely chilling reveal around which the entire emotional arc of the movie bent. Here, it’s a reason to get them onto the ship, and to introduce another doomed character later, and is addressed as an awkward cocktail party subject.

Of all the mistakes this movie makes, this might be one of the most thematically disappointing. It means that this shot is one of the darkest in the entire Alien franchise:

And these are the only people who ever really think so.

It could have been a brittle mirroring of the first in the franchise, or even a callback to Aliens, in which Burke’s betrayal and its emotional and thematic fallout is a pivotal moment treated with shock and disgust by those involved. Instead, this is the only moment we get to think about it, because the big moment of creeping horror had to be saved for something else, less successfully. (We’ll get there.)

In the meantime, the crew of the Betty comes together to get the shit kicked out of them by Ripley and have a burger, and the kitchen’s closed.

Ron Perlman gets things rolling by harassing Ripley. She beats the crap out of him in about three moves, at which point everyone gets in on the action, and Sigourney Weaver transforms instantly in a way we are going to talk about, specifically this shot right here:

She beats the crap out of him in about three moves, at which point everyone gets in on the action, and Sigourney Weaver transforms instantly in a way we are going to talk about, specifically this shot right here:

Pause. The idea of Ripley as superhuman was pretty solidly established in the trilogy by the fact that the only thing in a universe crawling with Company reps and aliens and faulty suspension pods that could kill Ripley was Ripley. Making it literal by giving her mutant abilities in this movie is anticlimax. This shot is nothing, on its own, she couldn’t have accomplished before cloning. However, in this moment before her acid blood and unbreakable skeleton get their big reveal, we already know she’s been fundamentally altered, from this frame – a fleeting blankness, a certain surprise that violence is happening, in an expression already changing to the face we know from when Ripley gets into an altercation, which is her I Will End You face. Sigourney Weaver, you are pretty great.

Anyway, Ripley hands everyone their asses, and as the scientists summon her to her cell for the night, she gives the Betty crew something to remember her by.

(Movie fact! Sigourney trained for this trick herself. She was down to a pretty decent ratio, but at a much closer distance than Jeunet wanted. Still, Sigourney insisted they try it on set rather than CGIing it in post. She did it on the sixth take. Ron Perlman promptly ruined it by breaking and celebrating to the camera. So the actual take in the movie is unaltered by CGI but also ends about a nanosecond after she makes the shot, because Ron Perlman.)

Everyone licks their wounds in their own way. Brad Dourif shows us why he gets paid Brad Dourif money:

(“Can you make alien teeth?” “Is it my birthday?!”)

While Call wanders off to kill Ripley and get totally outacted!

Just so we’re clear, every shot of them is framed as a romance where Winona Ryder is the tremulous virgin and Sigourney Weaver is Carmilla.

Here, Ripley tells Call she’s too late for a mercy killing because the alien’s already out, and she can hear it, because she’s the mother of the monster, which is vaguely disappointing as a gender construct of the indiscriminate violation-horror on which the Alien series is predicated, and also hilariously inappropriate when you consider what happens in about an hour!

(There’s not a lot of Winona Ryder in this recap, mostly because Winona Ryder is miscast for this and adds literally nothing to the film except giving Sigourney someone to deliver lines to. I will always wonder what this role could have been with someone else; since Winona Ryder has it, the answer is, Not Much.)

PS, the aliens have escaped and they took Brad Dourif with them. Everybody is pretty pissed about it! It’s probably a bad time to sneak out of Ripley’s cell, since Call is totally busted and the crew of the Betty are dragged in for some back-space justice! Michael Wincott is not happy, Doctor Dickhead is even less happy, and Girlfriend Woman’s skintight spacesuit has some storage-pocket placement:

(“Otherwise I lose my passports! Stop laughing!”)

Not here for the ensuing fight and brutal coup by the crew of the Betty is Vriess, who encounters some aliens, decides Not Today, assembles a shotgun from components hidden in his chair, and blows an alien’s head off.

Others have not fared so well. The Army staff have been dispatched by some aliens who are not really thinking straight about those facehuggers who will be waking up needing incubators, I guess, and now the crew of the Betty, the soldier they’ve taken hostage, and Doctor Dickhead who they haven’t killed because we need a betrayal later have to fight their way out! First to go: Charming Rogue, who literally wanders down an abandoned hallway for no reason and therefore gets no sympathy from me even though it means we don’t get Michael Wincott speaking any more this movie.

Everyone is accurately overwhelmed by the implications of this alien. Happily for them, Ripley has acid-blood-jacked the lock on her door and shows up from under the alien corpse!

This frame is pretty much any Alien movie in a nutshell – Ripley dispatching the alien as everyone else in various stages of freakout literally/figuratively illuminate her.

(Ripley, who spends the rest of this movie wildly vacillating between tragic-est hero and Bruce Willis in Die Hard, because someone decided that would be a great idea, tries out the latter by asking, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” to which Ron Perlman delivers the eye-rolling if flawlessly timed, “I can get you off. Maybe not the boat.” Forcing out-of-character unfunny jokes that have a weird aftertaste? It must be Joss Whedon!)

They head to the Betty, but Ripley gets sidetracked by a room labeled 1-7, which contains previous attempts to clone her.

I have mixed feelings about this scene. It’s a powerful piece of acting by Sigourney, as Ripley and as #7, an almost-but-not-quite being held alive in reserve surrounded by the grave-tanks of her predecessors. Its monstrousness is palpable. Ripley’s mercy-killing of #7 is poignant; the torching of the rest is uncharacteristic of Ripley, who generally cuts her losses, but not completely out of line with the impact we’re told it’s making on her. The fact that she doesn’t kill Doctor Dickhead where he stands is absolute plotcakes nonsense.

And as soon as she’s gone, Ron Perlman’s character claims it a waste of ammo and deems it a “chick thing.” No one contests it. (It must be Joss Whedon!)

(Motif alert.)

Probably the only person who could claim a worse reveal than Ripley’s is Purvis. He’s one of the human cargo – the only one whose chest has yet to burst.

He’s not thrilled. But besides a few “What the fuck is inside me?!”s delivered as the Betty’s crew looks elsewhere, they pretty much hash out how little anyone cares and move on. (Sigh.)

Tank scene! You know what actors love? Filming for days in an enormous tank of water that’s slowly gotten filmy with human slough and rotting lettuce!

God, they just love it so much!

Sigourney Weaver, delivering an amazing monster-sees-monster facial expression under water in what’s essentially a four-day group bathtub. ACTING.

We lose Girlfriend Woman in the swim (no one cares), and when they finally burst through the membrane over the water, they’re greeted with this:

NOPE, FUCK YOU, EVERYBODY JUST DROWN.

Of course, they manage to explode the thing and climb some ladders. Doctor Dickhead asks for Call’s gun, gets it, and immediately shoots Call, who plummets and vanishes. People are upset, but even Ripley has a face like, “Welp.”

Christie excuses himself from the movie by unbuckling himself from Vriess, who he’d piggybacked through the tanktub, after Ron Perlman does some ladder-hang shootfesting just to make sure the alien’s super dead.

But just when they think Doctor Dickhead has locked the door, Call shows up! She’s fine!…because she’s synthetic. Dun dun DUN.

Technically she’s an auton – a robot made by robots, soldier helpfully exposits. Everyone says extremely creepy gendered things to her (Joss Whedon!). Ripley’s mostly interested in whether she can patch into the mainframe and help them crash the ship, which is headed for Earth and probably shouldn’t land, given that it’s an aluminum egg sac at this point.

Call can! They do. It’s framed romantically.

They have some vague, tryhard banter (it’s remarkable how well Ripley holds together in this movie, given that on paper she is a total disaster – never underestimate Sigourney Weaver’s ability to hold on to a role with her teeth), but the framing has to do all the work here, because these two are just awkward together.

Speaking of awkward, Ripley soon gets sidelined by the alien queen calling.

…booty calling.

Here, a love scene in which she impregnates the alien queen. (“But is that even –” “Silence.” “I mean, it doesn’t seem like -” “SILENCE.”)

The alien queen becomes instantly pregnant with their baby. (“But even the life cycle of aliens requires -” “FILM SCHOOL SAYS SHUT IT, SHE HAS A WOMB NOW, THE LEFTOVERS OF BRAD DOURIF SAID SO.”)

A+ work on the alien baby; that is an uncanny valley. But we’re so far off the rails by now that this baby – which promptly eats its birth mother because Ripley is its real mom, because this movie isn’t going to be okay until the motherhood subtext is run into the GROUND – is just a symbol of this movie playing Franchise Top-This, and at this point my interest drops by about five hundred percent.

Everyone makes it onto the Betty, where Doctor Dickhead is of course waiting, and Purvis bravely shoves his torso against the Doctor’s head to make sure the alien baby bursts through it, which is a perfectly good use of alien baby but is an awkward goodbye for Purvis, who was helpful and kindhearted to the people who literally sent him to his death and somehow never got a character beat of his own (probably because it would have made it more difficult to root for funloving mercenaries if we had to all sit down and talk about poor Purvis). Goodbye, Purvis, and your bloody death scene I wasn’t going to screencap. Text-only godspeed, buddy.

Besides, everyone instantly doesn’t care, because Ripley shows up to fly them out of there since none of them can (this group of mercenaries is actually pretty awful both as people and at mercenarying, if you think about it), and everyone greets her with delighted “Ripley’s here!”s that stop just short of bursting into song about it, and with Ron Perlman I’m still not sure a bar or two didn’t slip out.

(“Ripley, be honest, do you think my arm-belts are too much?”)

But because this is an Alien film, of course they’re not home free. Call gets sent to the back to seal the hatch, only to meet the alien baby! Running and cringing ensue as the baby scrabbles its gnarly fingers at her. (Inherited memory has told it that acting out means you get attention from Mom.)

And speak of the devil! (Oh, Sigourney. If I had to describe “Watching your alien-hybrid skullbaby be sucked by inches through a tiny hole in the window of this storage bay as it screams for you because it’s your child because the idea of the cycle of horrific birth/rebirth and inherited monstrous motherhood is something we would like to present but not address, okay action” in a single facial expression, I had no idea this is what it would look like, but you’re right, it is.)

And as the vacuum of space claims the last of alien baby, they reenter the atmosphere and skim lightly down across a beatific, beautiful Earth:

It looks pretty green for as far in the future is this supposed to be! The Sierra Club won some important battles somewhere in the interim. Ripley and Call winsomely ask what will happen now; neither brings up that they’re getting awfully close to a landing that nobody up front can handle, and maybe Ripley wants to get up there and make sure they don’t plummet into a volcano or something.

And that brings this movie to an atonal, sputtering half-ending that seems fitting, all things considered. Oh, Alien Resurrection. Sometimes you exist mainly to serve as a warning to others.

Defiance, the SyFy TV sensation that exists mostly as a weekly ad for a video game apparently, premiered on Monday! There are some things you should know.

(This won’t be overly detailed; partway through I checked the timestamp and realized this pilot was an hour and 26 minutes, at which point I called Hulu a son of a bitch out loud in a room by myself, so that’s pretty much how this is going.)

1. If you don’t have time for ten things, Graham Greene’s face sort of gets it in one.

2. If you do have more time, let’s knock out some things: Video games can be amazing narratives. TV shows can be amazing narratives. I do not think they are necessarily the same kind of narrative, nor do I think they tend to benefit from forced, ongoing synergy. Could it work? Sure! Does it work here? Oh gosh, no.

3. For instance! The pilot, as it was presented, was a colonialist fable in which Earth has been usurped by an alien coalition of several races and terraformed into Galactic Greenscreen Standard, with Occasional Vancouver. One human town, Defiance (built in the remains of St. Louis), is home to scrappy humans and some colonial alien races, and while the humans have nominal leadership, looks like the aliens have major economic, social, technological, and military power. Tensions ensue!

…though we don’t see a lot of particular tension except Graham Greene, a First Nations actor (and the only major POC in the cast) playing a human character of similar background, who is the bigot blowhard who irrationally hates the colonist peoples.

4. Turns out, when you go on Wikipedia to check some cast names, there’s a lot of backstory that nobody went into! And while you obviously don’t want to spend your pilot rattling exposition until everyone falls over (that’s Copper), turns out the aliens aren’t a colonizing force, they’re the remnants of races whose star system died, and the terraforming was an oopsie, and some plot happened with the Pale Wars, and so essentially we are looking at a refugee narrative instead. Now, that could be very interesting, but it means that some of the politics have shifted, and now Graham Greene is just a bigot for the hell of it?

Great, thanks, helpful.

5. Accidental overtones aside, Graham Greene is as deligthful as ever when he gets a line that’s anything other than Pilot Episode Bingo, and is one of the acting highlights of the show. The others are character-actor stalwarts Jaime Murray (genre aficionado) and Tony Curran (always gets cast in parts that require gallons of makeup), as a Shakespearan alien couple who seem like they could be wonderful if the writing gave them a chance. Amazing despite the writing is Trenna Keating, who plays Defiance’s premiere MD, Doctor Over It. Sadly her makeup precludes a lot of facial expression, but she does everything she can with the lines she’s given, even when they are, literally, “If you rush me, we go Boom.” Here she is, suggesting bed rest for a patient by pushing on her head until she lies down.

6. The rest of the cast doesn’t fare so well. There are two teens in a starcrossed romance that isn’t even worth getting into. Julie Benz, as hapless mayor Amanda Rosewater, exists mostly to be a nexus for plot elements, including overtures from our hero, a vortex of anti-charisma whose name I have already forgotten but can be substituted with “Dallas,” probably. Dallas gets off a couple of Han-Solo “sweethearts” at her, which seems like a very direct shortcut this show has not earned, particularly because there is zero chemistry there. There’s also zero chemistry with brothel owner Kenya, played by Mia Kirshner, though there is a sex scene involving Dallas performing enthusiastic cunnilingus, which I guess is worth some points.

7. Not that our hero is utterly without romantic chemistry – he has some! It’s just with the actress playing the adopted daughter only a few years younger than he is.

8. Working hard on this show: the extras. I cannot tell you how much I noticed the enthusiasm of these extras. Partly this was because none of the main narratives held my interest, but partly I really appreciate a set of extras who show up to the set and are like, “Live action slow-motion raving? ON IT.”

And these two, mourning a coming battle. It’s hard to tell, but they were shoulder-gripping their HEARTS out.

And you want that when you’re worldbuilding! Great job, extras. May you recur often and get SAG cards one by one.

9. You also want your world to look great. The scope of the production design is certainly ambitious, with an entire town on the docket. Of course there’s supposed to be a mix of slightly American-West-frontier human living conditions amid the schmancy blue alien tech, and I get that; nothing says “pilot of a tight-budget show” like a blank wall for no reason, and I get that, too. You layer your backgrounds. That said, I still laughed out loud when I saw this in the infirmary.

Align our racks of old-timey snake oils? NOT IN THE FUTURE, PAL.

10.And never forget, nothing caps a pilot like someone we briefly met outlining a season-long dastardly plan!

…with someone else, at normal speaking volume…in a public restaurant…that is in the city you are talking about.

Part of me wants to give this pilot the benefit of the doubt. There’s space (har har) in the canon for SF westerns (we just haven’t hit a good one yet, and no, Firefly does not count); there’s space for clunky pilots that introduce a pile of things intended for a slow unravel (look at Babylon 5) ; there’s room for uneven adventure/drama/comedy romps with lots of makeup and puppets (look at Farscape)!

On the other hand, even at its silliest (and oh, it got silly), the leads in Farscape had fantastic chemistry; and even as it was still trying to develop a myth out of a pile of vague omens and collarless shirts, Babylon 5 was aware of real-life politics that could be drawn from its SF allegories.

For now, at least, Defiance is lifting the tropes without doing the work; there are hints of the potential under the surface, but with as many drawbacks as we’re looking at, maybe you’re better off just firing up the game in the meantime, after all.

But then there are red carpets like the MTV Movie Awards, where attendees’ outfits are separated less by the success of the fashion than by how seriously their images need to be leveraged for a demographic whose awards categories include Best Kiss and Best Fight (or as the Oscars usually call them, Best Production Design and Best Sound Editing).

And things got pretty serious! For some weird and Machiavellian values of serious. Values of serious that Kerry Washington cannot even believe are ruining her actually-amazing dress.

(I am not actually sure why Kerry Washington was there, though I appreciate how hard she’s working this pretty awesome cut. If you’re going to go with a high-low hem, GO WITH IT, I guess? I don’t know if that’s good advice for everyone, but I really love it here.)

Kerry, the MTV Movie Awards equivalent of Dame Helen Mirren, is sort of in a class by herself. The other divisions are sorted by the directions given to the stylists by the publicists and managers of these famous people who generally still aren’t old enough to rent cars by themselves.

DIVISION ALPHA: Movie or mostly-movie stars who have been prevailed upon to show up; often promoting a project, occasionally just in it to attend what’s probably a hilarious afterparty.

Zoe Saldana, looking more formal than most of the dresses here, while still showing more leg than almost any of them. That’s some skill.

Melissa McCarthy, in a slick black pantsuit and rocker boots that she seems to like a lot more than her red-carpet standard, making me wish it was more standard to have pants on the red carpet.

Edide Redmayne, whose Blue Steel look here literally made me laugh out loud even before I got to the part where someone handed him a chambray shirt and said, “No no, this won’t look dated at all in three years, just put it on!”

Chloe Moretz, who thinks that dress is a lot funnier than I think it is.

Quvenzhané Wallis, in perfect-for-this-carpet sneakers, carrying the cat purse she saves for casual occasions.

DIVISION BETA: They’re on an MTV show or recently starred in an MTV Studios feature film that has traction with young people. They should look really good! Fancy but youthful, sexy but classy. They are tentpoles of the MTV scripted-drama brand, and should look extremely employable.

Crystal Reed, looking as though she carelessly tore away the long skirt of a ballgown and was left with only this coltish yes lovely cocktail number. Good Girl chic.

Anna Camp, Girl Good Grown Up, in an outfit that would not look out of place at the Emmy Nominees Brunch. That’s on purpose.

Brittany Snow, in a cocktail dress with thousand-dollar shoulders and five-dollar fabric.

Holland Roden, who wanted to look sexy but not TOO sexy, in a great black dress, killer jewelry, and shoes that look like she stubbed her toes on the Marshmallow Curb on her way in.

Jordana Brewster, who looks confused to be here. Is Dallas secretly an MTV show? They do kiss in the rain a lot, but there are hardly ever party scenes. Mystery remains!

Hana Mae Lee, worried her picture wouldn’t get taken, going for broke.

DIVISION GAMMA: Reality TV stars, who always know their job more than people think they do, and dress accordingly.

RuPaul, looking amazing in a silver lamé suit, because of course RuPaul looks amazing, with an extra dose of subverted expectations that I enjoy.

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, who’s apparently famous enough to be lent a dress, but not famous enough to be allowed to hem it.

DIVISION TREBLE: Musicians! MTV sometimes remembers to invite some.

Kylie Minoque, in a dress from Thunderdome’s Etsy store, looking game for everything.

Ke$ha, who spent weeks holding up up a picture of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and a picture of Janis Joplin, looking at one and then the other. “God,” she thought, “what can I do? If only there was some sorcery that could combine them in a way that’s not appealing in the least, and then top it off with the most amazing laquer lipstick ever seen?” Yes, Ke$ha, dreams can come true.

Macklemore, having accepted an invitation MTV will probably regret in five years, in an outfit he will probably regret sooner than that.

And Selena Gomez, who has navigated her professional image with Atreides-level under-the-radar PR, emerging from the very last of her teen-idol days in a glitzy mini, hair punky yet polished, and hundred-inch heels, because she is DONE with Wizards of Waverly Place, and she is DONE with teen romance, and whatever she’s doing next, based on this outfit, you are probably not going to be able to handle it but will also be paying money to find out what it is, and if that’s not the spirit of the MTV Movie Awards, I don’t know what is.