Bates Motel, Season Finale, Episode 10: Midnight
Don’t order the muffins with your continental breakfast at the Bates Motel. The chef has included a special ingredient; just ask little Emma. While Norman is planning something nasty for Bradley, Dylan may have risked his life in helping her find closure over her father’s death. Mr. Abernathy wants his money and he wants it now! Sounds like a JG Wentworth commercial to me. Norma doesn’t have it. Who does? Find out after the jump.
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R.I.P. Ray Manzarek
I am absolutely stunned to learn of the passing of Ray Manzarek, keyboardist of The Doors. Manzarek passed away from cancer in a German hospital this afternoon. He was 74 years old.
I bought a keyboard last year. One of the first songs I tried playing was The Doors’ When The Music’s Over. A few days ago I bought the great new Doors app, created by Elektra records founder Jac Holtzman. This morning I imported all my Doors studio albums into iTunes. And now I found out that Ray has died.
I saw Ray and Robbie Krieger with Stewart Copleand and Ian Astbury over a decade ago. It was amazing hearing those songs played by two of the architects. If you grew up on classic rock, you probably loved The Doors at one point. They were a right of passage for all of us. And it was Ray Manzarek who helped perpetuate the myth of Morrison and the band.
Raymond Daniel Manzarek. Born 2/12/39. What a wonderful musician. I hope he and Jim are finally reunited, hanging out on heaven’s beach, singing Moonlight Drive together. Rest in peace, Ray.
Biff Bam Popcast – The Star Trek Into Darkness Edition
Spoiler alert! The latest and greatest Biff Bam Popcast is up. In this edition, Glenn Walker, JP Fallavollita, Emily McGuiness, Jason Shayer and Andy Burns talk Star Trek Into Darkness, what we liked (lots), what we didn’t (more than we thought) and much more.
As well, we take a look at the gorgeous new IDW hardcover, Star Trek: The John Byrne Collection. As mentioned in the popcast, IDW continue to knock it out of the park with their licensed properties and this book is no exception. Take a look inside during the popcast and then order your own copy here.
Star Trek: Into Darkness Shines (Kinda?) Bright: Biff Bam Pop’s Box Office Wrap-Up Report
This week, instead of “Wrap-Up Report”, we should have titled this column the “Warp-Up Report”. I mean, really, there’s only one film to talk about, isn’t there?
Last Friday, our esteemed Editor-In-Chief, Andy Burns, threw down the gauntlet, decreeing that the latest iteration of the Star Trek franchise would beam up $90 million of box office revenue. Today, I get to sit in the catbird’s seat and reflect on his predictions alongside the actual numbers. It’s an easy job.
Did J.J. Abrams’ second stab at Trek beam up the goods? How did Iron Man 3 fare? And what did the classic The Great Gatsby garner from the movie-going public?
Find out after the jump!
Guest DJ Jae’s Stash of Wax – Long Weekend Listening
I’ve been hunting down records for years now and am stunned at the endless supply of amazing and sometimes forgotten music that’s still out there. You need to hear this stuff!
So allow me to share with you some old and new gems from my milk crates. The only thing that I ask from you is that you leave your musical prejudices behind and read on with an open ear.
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Orphan Black, Episode 8: Entangled Bank
Last week, we peeked into the future of genetic manipulation. When Felix and Sarah/Beth visit Club Neolution, or what I like to call Club Clones; they witness first hand, the extremes of body altering; Olivier has a tail, Astra, weird eyes. The girls might very well be part of an experiment that seeks to improve on nature. Dr. Leekie believes that technology can improve the human condition, but what makes him the expert? What is the ultimate reason for altering a human; designer babies or enslaved workforce? Our clones don’t know who to trust; can we blame them? Meet me after the jump. Read the rest of this entry
Doctor Who S07 E14: The Name of The Doctor
The Doctor has many secrets, but not the least of them is his real name. Other than The Master and other Gallifreyans, few folks are aware of it. River Song knows it, and she’s back in tonight’s season finale. Will we at last learn “The Name of The Doctor”? Find out in my review, after the jump…
The Impossible Girl
Did you hear that “squeeeee”? Yeah, that was me watching the pre-credit sequence of this episode. We see The First Doctor, yeah baby, William Hartnell, and his granddaughter stealing a faulty TARDIS on Gallifrey… before being stopped by Clara Oswald. Then it gets better.
Her voiceover claims she was made to save The Doctor, and then encounters the Colin Baker version, Tom Baker, then Sylvester McCoy, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, then finally Matt Smith, then the other shoe drops.
She says she entered the world on a leaf, the leaf that caused her parents to meet, fall in love, and have her. She’s the Impossible Girl who was born to save The Doctor. Roll credits. If the rest of the episode holds up to the opening, Steven Moffat, you are The Man.
The Conference Call
Through the magic of dreams, ‘where time travel has always been possible,’ several old friends return in a magical unconscious conference call. Among them are Madam Vastra, Jenny, and Commander Strax (where’s our spin-off??!), as well as Professor River Song and Clara Oswald.
A murderer has traded his life for a secret to Vastra, one of The Doctor’s secrets. Unfortunately, new monsters, called The Whisper Men, attack the conference call and capture our Victorian London trio. Once again, Moffet has created couchworthy monsters.
Trenzalore
Clara returns to The Doctor, relates the tale of a secret The Doctor will take to the grave, that is discovered, and of the place called Trenzalore. It upsets him greatly. Of course he’s upset. When you’re a time traveller, there is one place you must never go. Trenzalore is where The Doctor’s grave is. Whoa.
Hard to get there, as the TARDIS refuses to go, but eventually The Doctor and Clara arrive on Trenzalore. There, surprise surprise, the villain of the second half of season seven reveals himself, Dr. Simian, possessed by the Great Intelligence. He’s holding Vastra, Jenny, and Strax captive in the tomb of The Doctor.
The Open Wound
Once inside the tomb, which is the TARDIS of course, albeit super-sized because all the paradoxes that make it bigger on the inside are broken, they encounter The Doctor’s corpse. It’s not a body, but an energy signature of all his trips through time, an open wound in the fabric of time itself.
The Great Intelligence, in a bid to destroy The Doctor once and for all, enters the wound, destroying all of The Doctors all at once, reversing all of his victories into defeats, and erasing The Doctor from history. If you’re following along, you know what happens next.
Yeah, enter the Impossible Girl. She counteracts the Great Intelligence at every turn, saving The Doctor as we’ve seen her do multiple times in different incarnations – and as we saw in the pre-credits scenes of this very episode.
Goodbyes and Hellos
Just when we thought even in death, River Song gets the short end of the stick, she gets a proper goodbye and a hot goodbye kiss, along with a juicy ‘spoilers’ line. Then The Doctor jumps into his own timeline after Clara. Yeah, crazy sumbitch thinks he’s going to save her.
That’s when things get bad. While The Doctor is looking for her, she keeps seeing ghosts of old Doctors. These visions, as well as those in the beginning, including colorized versions of the first two, are very well done by the way.
The Doctor finds her, inside his own time stream, haunted by ghosts of the past and the future. That’s when they encounter John Hurt, credited as The Doctor, and whom Matt Smith names as not acting in the name of The Doctor. Could this be another evil future incarnation of The Doctor, like The Valeyard referenced earlier this episode? Or could it be the incarnation who performed unspeakable acts in the Time War? Time will tell.
Next
The Doctor (perhaps several different ones) returns in November for the big 50th anniversary, and hopefully some answers… And if you can’t wait until then, you could always go see Star Trek. What’s that you say? You missed Noel (Mickey Smith) Clarke in Star Trek Into Darkness? You better get to the theater and see him, great flick!
Saturday At The Movies: The Greatest Gatsby
The summer movie season is in full swing and our next entry is Baz Lurman’s The Great Gatsby. This is a supposedly unfilmable novella. Other productions have been somewhat cursed. Even the Robert Redford version fell flat. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Baz stated box office sales were of no concern. The truly artistic director saw this as a challenge to his creative yen and that was satisfied just by making the movie. This attitude prepares you a bit for what you will see on the screen. The love and reverence for which Baz holds Fitzgerald’s actual words is obvious. Not only do they literally float across the screen in some places, we see Nick Carraway’s narration literally rips quotes from the book.
