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15 Sep

Star Trek: Ranking the Stories Set in the Present Day

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So the new Star Trek: Picard trailer has dropped and among the big plot twists it revealed are the fact that Picard & Co are going to be travelling back to Earth, circa 2022 AD. We’re looking forward to exciting scenes of people from the 24th century being unable to drive cars (despite the pretty lengthy car chase we saw in the last episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks), Q and Picard sparring again, and wondering how Guinan fits into all this. My personal theory is that after her adventures with Picard and Mark Twain in the 19th century, Guinan…
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09 Sep

Doctor Who: Ranking the Master Stories – Which is the Best?

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Roger Delgado looms large over the character of the Master, being simultaneously influential and something of an anomaly: Delgado played the role with a debonair front, but since his death, the character has been less urbane and more desperate, manic and violent. In fact the actor who’s come closest to Delgado’s approach is Eric Roberts, who plays an American version of Delgado’s Master until his performance goes big towards the end of 1996’ ‘The TV Movie’. Each actor brings different facets to the fore, but after the character’s successful launch in Season 8 we get the tricky balancing act of…
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03 Jun

Kings of a Dead World: Why We Tell Sleep Dystopia Stories in an Age of Climate Change

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This piece is sponsored by Author Jamie Mollart laughs while admitting this, but the idea for Kings of a Dead World, his new dystopian novel about a world put to sleep to conserve resources, came to him in a dream. And why shouldn’t it have? “Sleep on it” is the common advice for a human being pondering a big choice or change, with the promise that a good night’s sleep will allow them better perspective to write a novel, make a life-shifting decision… maybe even save the world? Over fifty years ago in Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut…
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27 May

Doctor Who: Ranking the Cybermen Stories – Which is the Best?

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The Cybermen are really camp. They’re meant to be cold, logical, emotionless cyborg vampires, but mostly they’re just silly. They do slow fist-clenches and macho posturing. They wail and flap their arms around. They get killed by glitter. They make insanely convoluted plans and pretend they’re very clever. They are ridiculous and this is as entertaining as it is frustrating. They are also a terrifying spectre of death. As a child, you know when you see them that death is near, so their mere appearance induces tension. Nearly every Cyberman story combines these elements of death and camp (two of…
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13 Apr

How We Use Dystopian Landscapes to Tell Very Human Stories

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This guest post was written by Caroline Hardaker, author of Composite Creatures, a character-driven science fiction debut about the burgeoning relationship between two people set in a melancholic and mundane near-future climate change dystopia. When we think, we escape our biological bodies. We hardly ever reflect on it, but from the day we’re born until we collapse into ash – that’s all we are. Organic machines, birthed in balance with an environment we spend our lives harvesting. No matter how much we sometimes take it for granted, we can’t survive without the land, sea, and sky working in perfect harmony,…
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06 Apr

Doctor Who: Ranking the Dalek Stories – Which is the Best?

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“… hideous, machine-like creatures. They are legless, moving on a round base. They have no human features. A lens on a flexible shaft acts as an eye, arms with mechanical grips for hands.” Terry Nation’s script for ‘The Survivors’ (aka ‘The Daleks’ Part Two) The Daleks, along with Judge Dredd, are fictional fascists beloved by a wide audience. At their heart is a combination of terrifying concept – Nazis who always return (imagine) – with a triumph of design. The greatest Dalek stories tap into this uneasy alliance. A quick summary of the thinking behind this article: A. We thought…
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31 Mar

Was The Walking Dead Planning to Go Past the Comic Stories?

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When AMC announced that its franchise-spawning series, The Walking Dead, was coming to an end, it was surprising, yet expected. While the ratings-dominant heyday of the prolific series is well in the rearview mirror, the mothership show continues to guide what remains an immensely profitable franchise. Yet, as TWD approaches the endpoint of its source material, Robert Kirkman’s comic books, fans assumed that the show was ending on its own terms. However, star Jeffrey Dean Morgan says that plans were still being made for more seasons when AMC axed the series, which would have surpassed the comic’s storylines. In a…
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01 Feb

The Little Things: True Stories That Might Have Influenced The Movie

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This article contains The Little Things spoilers. You can read our spoiler-free review here. Despite what those looking for clear answers after that ending might hope, The Little Things is not based on any specific true story or serial killer investigation. It was a 1993 screenplay penned by writer-director John Lee Hancock. However, there are similarities to several well known cases. The film even mentions the Night Stalker, aka Richard Ramirez, all while stopping short of naming names or committing to a specific lethal predator in its own yarn. This is by design. In a recent interview with The Wrap,…
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19 Dec

Scary Christmas Stories: A History of the Holiday’s Ghostly Tradition

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“It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story” – Jerome K. Jerome, 1891 In the English countryside, dinner had ended, and the company retired to the drawing room. They gathered around the fire as the parson, who sat in a high-backed oak chair, proceeded to tell of goblins and ghosts. The squire, not a superstitious man himself, listened intently  as the parson spoke about the crusader who rose from his tomb for a nighttime ride. The old porter’s wife added to the tale with her own of the crusader’s march on Midsummer Eve, when fairies became visible. Such was…
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12 Dec

How Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Could Reboot the Classic Legends Stories

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In the mid-1990s, the coolest, most hardcore Star Wars thing you could get into was the nitty-gritty world of Rogue Squadron. From the X-Wing novels by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston to the ongoing Rogue Squadron comics published by Dark Horse Comics to the iconic 1996 video game for the Nintendo 64, the Rogue Squadron storyline explored a corner of the Star Wars universe only teased in the Original Trilogy. Focusing on an elite squadron of Rebel (and later New Republic) starfighter pilots, the X-Wing and Rogue Squadron stories were not only like Top Gun in space but also…
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12 Nov

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: ‘I Wanted These Stories to Go Through the Bloodstream of the Country’

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If there’s a sense of planetary alignment in the timing of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe – five films about London’s West Indian community airing weekly from this Sunday on BBC One – it’s not by design. Over a decade in the making, the creators couldn’t have known that these stories would land in a year marked by both the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and the disproportionately devastating impact of Covid-19 on black communities in the UK.  The collision of 2020’s events with five stories celebrating black British history feels fortuitous to the cast. “The…
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10 Nov

Small Axe Cast, True Stories, Air Dates, Where to Watch: A Guide to the 5 Steve McQueen Films

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‘If you are the big tree, we are the small axe’ Made famous by Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1973 song ‘Small Axe’, that’s the traditional proverb behind the title for a five-film series by Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger). Two of McQueen’s Small Axe films were selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival and in October, one opened the 64th London Film Festival. Now, all five are coming straight to BBC One and iPlayer in the UK, and Amazon Prime Video around the world. The home release has nothing to do with the…
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09 Nov

Star Trek: Discovery’s Adira & Gray and The Need For New Kinds of Origin Stories

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This Star Trek: Discovery article contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 3, Episode 4. Note: I highly encourage you to read Riley Silverman’s “Star Trek: Discovery’s Trans Representation is Both Heartbreaking and Groundbreaking” over at SyfyWire. As a trans woman (not to mention a brilliant pop culture critic), Silverman has a perspective on this representation that I, as a cis woman, do not and has beautifully written about her complex reaction to Discovery‘s latest episodes. If you pay attention to Star Trek news, then you probably saw and got got hyped about the pre-Season 3 announcement that Discovery would be introducing…
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06 Nov

Link Tank: The Stories Behind 11 Iconic TV Show Theme Songs

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From The Sopranos to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, check out the stories behind the iconic theme songs for these eleven shows. “Whether it’s a wordy epic that chronicles the show’s backstory or an orchestral piece that lends itself to lyrical parody, a good theme song can augment a TV show’s popularity and even sometimes outlive it. But there’s no clear path to creating—or even just choosing—the perfect track.” Read more at Mental Floss. Sam Wilson may still be able to suit up as Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. “At the end of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame,…
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30 Oct

Horror Movie Origin Stories: Directors, Actors, and Writers on How They Fell in Love With the Genre

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If you’re a horror fan you’ll have one. A memory of a moment, or a series of moments, where you first felt the thrill of the genre. That sparkly feeling of fear and delight, when you want to look away but you feel like you can’t. It could be a book, a film, a tv show, a snatched glimpse of something you shouldn’t have seen when you were too young to understand it. We all start somewhere. Den of Geek spoke to a whole range of top people working in horror movies and tv to find out where it all…
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02 Sep

How Elder Scrolls Online: Stonethorn’s Dungeons Bring New Stories to the Dark Heart of Skyrim

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Elder Scrolls Online’s yearlong “Dark Heart of Skyrim” story continues to unfold in its third chapter, Stonethorn, which is out now for PC and consoles alongside the MMO’s 27th update. Aside from the update, which introduces character pathing in the game’s housing system, new cosmetics, and performance improvements, the DLC chapter features two new dungeons: Castle Thorn, where a vampiric army amasses at the feet of the powerful Lady Thorn, and Stone Garden, the underground lab of mad alchemist Arkasis, whose evil experiments have been yielding monstrous results. I had an opportunity to play through Stone Garden with some of…
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27 Aug

How Lovecraft Country Uses Horror to Tell Black Stories

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In Lovecraft Country, Atticus “Tic” Freeman is a Korean war vet, who went to war to escape the physical abuse he received at the hands of his father. But before that, he escaped into the imagined worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, and countless others. Reading stories wasn’t just something he did to pass the time; reading stories was survival. Commercial books, film, and television, what we call popular culture, are gateways to the world outside of the small spaces we each occupy. We connect to each other across the globe through shared experiences in the media we consume.…
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25 Aug

Star Wars The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark Review

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars is having a Renaissance at the moment. The powerful, status quo-shattering season seven was just one of the ways this fan-favorite animated series was able to live on past its original 2014 series finale. And after the success of the seventh season, which saw the show revisit some of the darkest moments in Revenge of the Sith, it isn’t much of a surprise that Lucasfilm is anxious to bring more The Clone Wars stories to life. Stream your Star Wars favorites right here! Unfortunately, The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark short story anthology…
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05 Aug

Link Tank: How the Pandemic Will Change Zombie Stories

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Zombie horror has always adhered to certain tropes, but here’s why these tropes are going to have to change. “At the core of every book, video game, television series, or movie involving a zombie apocalypse is an idea about humanity’s drive to consume, or how easy it would be for civilizations to crumble in the midst of an unforeseen disaster. Like, for instance, the sudden spread of a deadly virus that swept its way across the entire globe within a matter of weeks.” Read more at Gizmodo. Andrew Lincoln, star of The Walking Dead, still has not watched The Walking…
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05 Aug

11 Diverse Vampire Stories To Read Instead of Midnight Sun

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There’s a very good chance we’re going to read Midnight Sun, the companion novel to pop culture juggernaut Twilight that retells the first story in the Stephanie Meyer YA vampire series from Edward Cullen’s perspective. But we can enjoy something while also being critical of it, and the truth is: our culture deserves more, better vampire stories than what the Twilight saga has to offer. With that in mind, we’ve pooled our collective knowledge to recommend the following vampire stories that have more diverse and imaginative takes on the popular genre. From short stories to book series, hopefully there’s something…
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DVD Guide reviews current dvd releases of movies and TV shows. The reviews of these dvd releases are my thoughts and understandings of the movie, dvd releases or TV show and not be taken as fact.

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