Doc’s time-traveling DeLorean gets all the Back to the Future love, but lots of cars played important roles in the films, both to reflect the timeline of the characters as well as their class status. To celebrate Back to the Future Day, Toyota announced it will be honoring one of the other automobiles from the films by showing off special Toyota Tacomas based on the one Marty lusted after in the films. You remember it, all awesome and cool.

Fans in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York City will be able to see the special versions today, at what Toyota is calling “major tourist destinations.” We imagine they were all waxed up by Biff’s Auto Detailing. Two coats.

Toyota says they made a number of modifications to their 2016 Tacoma to capture the look of the one Marty so desperately wanted to use to take Jennifer to the lake (he had been planning it for two whole weeks mind you).

Some of the modifications highlights include:

• A custom 1985 black exterior paint job
• Lots of KC HiLite driving lamps
• A badge for D-4S fuel injection
• 1985 mud flaps
• Custom tubular bumpers for the front and rear
• Custom headlights and taillights
• The classic “TOYOTA” logo

The DeLorean would be a lot of fun to drive/fly, but man, this, this is what you’d want if you were heading to the lake. Plus, I bet with all that power you’d easily be able to beat Needles off the line–oh man just let me race him one time–sorry, sorry, it’s like I learned nothing from these movies.

We’ve got a few more pictures of the special Tacoma in our gallery, so make sure to check them out.

What vehicle from Back to the Future would you most want to own, assuming the DeLorean can’t actually go back in time, but hoverboards exist. Tell us in the comments below.

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HT: autoblog.com
1985 Tacoma Image: Universal Pictures
2015 Tacoma Images: Toyota

Most films set in the future involve something trying to put an end to humanity as we know it. Machines try to kill us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, Blade Runner, and The Matrix. Creatures try to kill us in Alien, Starship Troopers, and Planet of the Apes. And if that weren’t enough, we try to kill each other in Mad Max, Children of Men, The Hunger Games, and countless others. Movies that try to positively frame aspects of future living (Minority Report, Equilibrium, In Time) usually end up a complete nightmare.

In short, most films aren’t looking forward to the future. Except for one. There is one shining light in all the futuristic cinema that manages to give us a not only a good future, but an absolutely great one. Few films feature the future in a more positive light than Back to the Future II. I’m not a religious man, but awaiting the arrival of Marty in 2015 is pretty much the closest I’ll ever come to worship.

Today at 4:29pm Pacific Standard Time is when Marty, Doc and Jennifer arrive in the futuristic Hill Valley. BTTFII got enough right about what our year might look like that I’m wondering if the DeLorean could really travel through time. They were a bit off sure, but there are many real-life analogs to the events and technology BTTFII predicted.

Futuristic Eyewear

BTTF 2015: We see three different types of eye wear that are more than just fashionable in the film. Doc’s opaque silver glasses are used as a rear-view mirror while driving; Marty and Jennifer’s kids use glasses to watch TV and take phone calls respectively. It seems Marty Jr.’s can actually do both.

Real life 2015: Google Glass, Oculus Rift , Microsoft’s Hololens and even Google Cardboard give us augmented realities to use in everyday life. It’s not used as mundanely as in the film, and most of these products are still fairly pricey (with the exception of Google Cardboard) — the future McFly’s were framed as a middle class family so it might be awhile until tech like that is a humdrum part of life. We’re not without progress though, maybe even surpassing their tech with this VR setup that Kyle got to demo:

Mr Fusion

BTTF 2015: The DeLorean was initially powered by stolen plutonium. (If we really think about Doc Brown’s actions, he was basically just as bad as the terrorists in the first film and has followed that up with fairly dubious motives and ethics throughout all three movies.) BTTFII used a Deus Ex Machina for the plutonium problem by introducing the “Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor,” which converts trash into power. The concept of powering a time-traveling car with a handful of garbage is pretty amazing if it’s assumed the 1.21 gigawatts are still needed to achieve time travel.

Real life 2015: We’re nowhere near Mr. Fusions but we have made advancements in solar energy, biodiesel, and alternative fuel sources. There are also worms and microbes that can consume plastics, which means that someday we may be able to harness that trait for power. It wouldn’t surprise me if a future Tesla had something like this considering all they can do now.

People Wearing Utter Nonsense

OK, so maybe this isn’t an actual prediction, considering spandex was as prevalent in 1985 as yoga pants and Under Armour are now, but BTTFII‘s 2015 people looked bananas. Every next generation will dress seemingly weirder than the previous one, so it’s not entirely fair to judge what they thought we were going to be wearing. However, it’s safe to say anytime after its introduction, skin tight clothing in some form will continue to be prevalent. Also, dude in the background is pretty much rocking a “left shark” sweatshirt.

Power Lace Shoes

What kid didn’t want a pair of these!? Nike designer Tinker Hatfield announced they were working on their BTTF-inspired power lacing MAG shoes in 2014 but replicas existed as far back as 2011, which were auctioned off to benefit the Michael J Fox Foundation.

Know what? Take a break from this and go donate — if you can — to the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. It does a lot of good and it’s the least we all can do as fans to thank him for decades of entertainment.

As for the Nike Mags, is there really a need for this sort of technology? It’s doubtful, as shoes without laces already exist which are considerably easier than shoes requiring a power source. If and when these arrive they’d be a novelty at most.

Autofit/Dry clothes

BTTF 2015: In addition to the power lace shoes, Doc suits Marty up in an auto-fit jacket that also detects when it’s wet. With some sort of tiny and unobtrusive fan it can dry off its wearer.

Real life 2015: Sadly there are no auto-dry jackets as of yet but there have been advancements in fabrics over the years. Under Armour, Gore-Tex, moisture-wicking and stay-cool clothing are available in some form at most clothing stores.

Robotic Gas Stations

BTTF 2015: The Texaco station in the film appears to be completely automated from re-fueling to checking the status of other components of hover-cars. Oh yeah, also, there are hover-cars.

Real life 2015:  Gas stations are still staffed by human beings but Tesla’s charging “snake” promises to be creepier than any 4am gas station attendant could ever hope to be.

Movie Theaters

BTTF 2015: The holographic Jaws 19 — directed by a Max Spielberg — was playing at the Holomax theater where “This time it’s really REALLY personal.”

Real life 2015: We don’t have holographic movies yet but we have seen holographic technology in the form of various Tupac Shakurs, Michael Jacksons and Li’l Sebastians. Our 3D movie tech is pretty damn awesome as well, but we do still need glasses to achieve it. Thankfully, the Jaws franchise stopped long ago and we only have to deal with three awful Jaws iterations, but the wonderful folks over at Universal made a Jaws 19 trailer for us to enjoy:

The real Max Spielberg was born in 1985 and actually did end up working in movies. Not that hard to predict when you’re the son of Stephen Spielberg.

Robotic Restaurants

BTTF 2015: Cafe 80s had no human waitstaff. Instead, robotic TV waiters with screens depicting Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan and Ayatollah Khomeini took orders and interacted with customers. Beverages are served up through the counter itself and dishes are explained to you by the figures onscreen. MJ offers a patron a “Fajita Tortilla Pita, It’s got hot salsa, avocados and cilantro, mixed with your choice of beans, chicken, beef or pork.”

Real life 2015: Auto-mat diners have been around for ages and it seems every year we hear of a new robotic restaurant opening somewhere (usually Japan, it’s always Japan). But can we talk about the real eye-opener here? The Michael Jackson robot predicted Chipotle’s entire menu.

Elijah Wood is 4 feet tall

Alright, hear me out. Knowing Elijah Wood was in Back to the Future II is simple trivia, but in this scene (which is set in 2015) he’s shown not wanting to play Wild Gunman after Marty, the one with experience, shows him how to defeat bad guys. A hobbit-sized Elijah Wood is shown turning his back on fighting bad guys head-on and leaves the movie’s hero with his blonde and slightly taller best friend. Some sort of time loop was closed with this scene.

Pepsi Perfect

BTTF 2015: Marty orders a Pepsi and a futuristic bottle of Pepsi Perfect rises up out of the counter itself.

Real life 2015: IT EXISTS YOU GUYS! Well, sort of. A number of bottles were given away at New York Comic Con this year to people cosplaying as Marty. A reported 6,500 bottles will go on sale for $20.15 (ha, the year) sometime this month.

Beercades

A bit of a stretch, but the idea of Cafe 80s has somewhat come true in the vein of countless beercades across the world where anyone can enjoy the cabinet video games of the 80s. I live in Chicago and there are exactly five within a 3-mile radius of my apartment.

The Hoverboard

BTTF 2015: There is no reason that this far into an article about BTTF tech that you don’t already know about hoverboards.

Real life 2015: Alright, let’s put this to bed right now. Hoverboards — at least in the BTTF sense — are not a thing, but to some degree they do actually exist. With spinning magnets and Lenz’s law, hover tech is possible. It’s something we can all envy Kyle Hill for getting to try earlier this year:

Lexus has announced its own hoverboard technology that works in much the same way as the Hendo board. However, Lexus was a bit sneakier about things and buried a magnetic rail under a skatepark, making it look as though it’s hovering above normal ground. Also, the board has to be refueled with liquid nitrogen about every ten minutes, so there’s that. Oh, before you get your wallets out, Lexus won’t actually be selling it — it’s part of a bigger ad campaign for, you guessed it, something Lexus actually makes. Sadly, the hoverboards of our dreams are just that at this point, and we still have a long way to go until we can involve entire town squares in hoverboard-related gang scuffles.

The Chicago Cubs

BTTF 2015: The cubs sweep Miami in five games (according the the newspaper, but we’ll get to that in a bit) and win the World Series.

Real life 2015: This is quite possibly the scariest prediction of BTTFII. The Chicago Cubs — who haven’t won the world series in over a century — might actually stand a chance this year. Right now everyone is wishing they could go back to the beginning of the series and “put some money on the cubbies.”

The Miami Marlins were even in the BTTF spirit earlier this year when they gave away this shirt with a distinct logo change:

Last chance! Being given tonight only to those who buy the $25 special event package at http://t.co/GME8jnnvuk! pic.twitter.com/sOqMpXXPBF

— Billy The Marlin (@BillytheMarlin) June 2, 2015

Flatscreens/Videocalls

BTTF 2015: Large flat screens and projectors around the McFly household can broadcast television, conduct video calls, and even process peer-to-peer credit card transactions.

Real life 2015: Yeah, we got all that.

Biometrics

BTTF 2015: The same cubbie-betting old man made of rejected Doc Brown face pieces asks Marty to “Thumb a $100” to save the clock tower (which has apparently stood the test of time, so they are really doing something right). You can see a thumb sized pad on the device he’s holding, so it would stand to reason bank accounts are connected to biometric technology. This is also true for the doors in the McFly household — Jennifer can’t figure out how to leave since the doors have no knobs.

Real life 2015: Biometic door locks? Check! Finger print capable mobile devices? Double check! Paying with your fingerprint!? Triple BTTF’n check!

The Newspaper Lightning Round

As proof something had to be done about his kids, Doc Brown shows Marty a copy of the October 22nd, 2015 USA Today newspaper and it is chock full of future info. Why Doc didn’t just bring some sort of futuristic vasectomy ray gun to shoot Marty in the crotch with is beyond me, especially considering he had that weird knock out ray he used on Jennifer at the ready. What I’m saying is that Doc is a shady character and really shouldn’t be trusted. His kid turns into a wiener-poking weirdo like right out of the gate in the third movie so how can Doc tell anyone they have to fix their own kids? I’ve gotten off track. Let’s have a closer look at the paper:

Female President – Not yet, but Hillary Clinton might win next year.

Swiss Terrorist –  A rare BTTF miss.

Queen Diana Will Visit Washington – Sad.

Thumb Bandits – If you can pay with your thumb this is akin to identity or credit card theft.

3-Minute Mile – ALMOST! Hicham El Guerrouj holds the record at 3:43.13

USA Today Having Three Billion Readers Daily – Eh, not quite.

What BTTF Got Wrong

If you look past the fantasy aspects of the film — of which there are a lot — there are only a few glaring mistakes that we’ve surpassed in our own 2015.

Pay Phones

Couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a real working pay phone. Do they even exist? We kind of have to let this one slide though — they got payphones wrong but the sign to the right is offering breast implants on sale. The future is grand.

Faxes

So. Many. Fax machines.

The major thing BTTFII didn’t, or rather couldn’t, predict was the prevalence of handheld technology and everything it can do. The movie has almost every bit of technology voice command driven. Additionally, we barely see any touch screen technology. A printed newspaper is needed to convey the goings-on of Hill Valley and faxes are used enough to warrant multiple machines in a single household. Both of these functions would be taken care of by a google search and an email on a mobile phone. Walkie Talkie’s are used later in the film and Doc doesn’t seem to mention that there might be an alternative — cell phone technology really wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

Although we only spend about 34 minutes in 2015 Hill Valley, that short amount of time has made an immense impact on the pop culture landscape and clearly my obsession with movies. Back to the Future II promised us a 2015 with amazing technological advancements. The incredibly unexpected thing is, the movie was actually pretty spot-on.

Did we leave something major out? Want to talk a bit more on how Doc is a terrible person? Let us know in the comments below!

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Images: Universal Pictures

Blake Rodgers writes for Nerdist from Chicago IL where he lives happily with his Guinness World Record for High Fives and his Mattel Hoverboard. You can be his pal and send him Pepsi Perfect by following him on Twitter @TheBlakeRodgers.

The folks who created the Back to the Future movies want you to know: The future doesn’t stop here.

I started the day of October 21, 2015 in the most appropriate way possible: hoverboarding talking to Michael Klastorin, the unit publicist for Back to the Future Part II and III, and the co-author of new book Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, as well as Bob Gale, the writer and co-creator of, you know, the entire series. Basically, I was talking to folks who knew everything there ever is to know about the movies, the world of Hill Valley, and the future. On the very same day that Marty, Doc, and Jennifer arrive into their “future.”

I see that your eyes have gone wide. Good. Keep them that way.

The Ultimate Visual History chronicles the extensive production process for the three movies, broken down into detail week by week, and supplemented by a tremendous amount of supporting visual material–initial script pages, concept drawings for the gadgets in the films, Bob Gale’s old yearbook, the never-before-seen letter that Marty left for Doc in 1955… There’s so much in the book that it literally can’t all fit on the page. Many of the items, like George and Lorraine’s prom photo or the poster for Jaws 19, are attached separately.

The book also makes you privy to the heavy-duty process that went into filming Back to the Future II and III back to back. Michael Klastorin’s role as the unit publicist on these two films put him in a central position between the requests from the media, the expectations of the fans, the demands of the studio, and the work of director Robert Zemeckis and his crew. Klastorin was there, in essence, to watch Back to the Future grow from a goofball surprise time travel hit, into a beloved touchstone of pop culture.

According to Klastorin, the crew spending the entirety of 1989 deep inside the world of Hill Valley played a large part on the ultimate the impact the trilogy had on the world. “I say in the book that I’m proud and honored to be in the Back to the Future family and that’s really what we became during our work on the sequels: a family. A part of my job was to keep folks away from the set, because we needed to focus on making these two films, these two very complex films.”

Klastorin and the production got a bit lucky in that creating their sci-fi epic in 1989 meant that the influence of the outside world was more centralized. “We didn’t have to deal with fans filming the set on their phones, or a hundred different outlets digging for information on the story. We didn’t have to deal with everyone knowing the budget for our movies beforehand, which was good. You never want a movie to be judged on those small pieces. You want the movie to be considered as itself.”

With outside influence turned away, the already vivid settings in Back to the Future Part II and III became reality for the cast and crew. Visual History details the intense amount of work that went into creating not one, but three different worlds for the characters to inhabit, all with their own separate challenges. “The pizza scene [in BttF II] in the McFly house took two whole days to shoot,” Klastorin reveals, referencing a scene where Michael J. Fox depicts Marty, Marty’s son, and Marty’s daughter all sitting down for a meal and interacting in one complex shot. Zemeckis and his crew had to invent an entirely new camera system, creating movable split screen technology years before CGI houses would perfect the same tech. Visual History also contains a three-week breakdown of how the hoverboard chase was created. (As well as some very, very spooky pictures where the hoverboards look like they’re actually hovering even when the cameras aren’t rolling.) Having to take so much time on just one-third of one of the movies required focus and dedication from every crew member. The separation from outside influence, the vivid worlds of Hill Valley in 2015, 1985, and 1955, and the focus from everyone on set created a familial, supportive atmosphere. It was them against the world. “It was hard work, yes,” Klastorin admits. “But it was such a great world to spend your time in!”

As filming continued on, the movies intruded more and more into the lives of the crew. “2015 was bright, but really challenging, so we didn’t get to appreciate it as much as you do when you’re watching the film,” Klastorin explains. “Then we moved into the alternate 1985, which we called ‘Biffhorrific’. The dark tone stayed with us as we were working on it, and [director] Bob Zemeckis says that because of that Part II is probably the darkest movie he’s ever done.”

A movie lasts only two to three hours, and can be shut off anytime, but the cast and crew of Back to the Future had to spend weeks inside Biffhorrific before moving on to the 1955 sequences of the film. In that kind of atmosphere, the BttF family had to squeeze in some fun where they could. Case in point: Lester: The Wallet Guy.

Personally, I have never, ever, forgotten this moment from Back to the Future Part II:

What’s the deal with that guy? For a moment, you think the movie actually might start following HIS adventures…

Writer Bob Gale explains: “The wallet gag was something Bob Z. came up with on the set to make that character memorable. Obviously, it worked!”

Wallet Guy obviously made a big impact on the crew, as well, even thirty-ish years later.”That actor has actually taken it out as a one-man show,” Klastorin jokes.

If only.

Random stress-relieving moments like The Wallet Guy were obviously required during the filming of Back to the Future Part II, and who knows what kind of non-sequiturs we might have gotten had the series not switched gears into the Old West in Back to the Future Part III?

In both the Visual History and Klastorin’s recollection, the western-themed Part III stands in great contrast with the creation of Part II. Although Part III took just as much, if not more, work to create than Part II (Part II could just redress the existing Hill Valley from Part I, but Part III had to build a whole new town.), the atmosphere was markedly different. “Part III was a great decompression after the filming of Part II because where Part II was hard, Part III was QUIET,” Klastorin reveals. “Part II was a closed set in Los Angeles with machinery and rigs and sixteen guys walking around with ladders.”

Part III, however, switched locations to dusty fields outside of Sonora, California, near Yosemite National Park, so far north that director Robert Zemeckis’s daily schedule involved flying between L.A. and Sonora on a daily basis so he could film Part III, then work on post-production for Part II. The majority of the cast and crew, however, essentially lived just outside the old West town they had created. “I mean, we didn’t build a hotel just off camera from old Hill Valley, but when you were there it was a much different place. There weren’t jets and trucks rolling by the time. You could only get to the set by walking there or taking a motorized cart. It was almost like actually going back to 1885.”

That sense of fun and camaraderie is clearly evident in the finished product, from Doc Brown’s gun-toting entrance to the clock tower dedication dance to the various and colorful townspeople of 1885 Hill Valley–a group that includes Klastorin himself! “I’m in there as Townsman #1!” Klastorin hails Marty, rather Mr. Eastwood, a good morning during the scene where Marty walks through town after having unwisely challenged Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen to a gunfight.

There was plenty for the Back to the Future family to do while they lived in the Old West. “Some of us would go horseback riding around the town on Sundays [the only days off that the shoot got] when the handlers took the horses out to be exercised.” The crew would also gather when new folks came to town, like legendary western actors Pat Buttram, Harey Carey Jr., Dub Taylor, and Matt Clark, who played the Hill Valley saloon bartender and the peanut gallery poker table. “It was so much fun to have old cowboys on the set! They’d be telling us all stories about their careers in between takes,” Klastorin says. “Sometimes at the same poker table they camp out at in the movie.”

Even the train itself in Back to the Future Part III carried movie history. “They loaded that train up with the entire crew and we would ride the rails for weeks! That particular train has a lot of movie history itself, been in dozens of movies starting from the silent era to today, like the Marx Bros’ Go West and some Buster Keaton movies.”

“And then you’d have ZZ Top come in and play concerts for us,” he continues, referencing the suspiciously familiar band visible during the clock tower dance scenes. “How can you not have an amazing time?”

After spending more than a year working alongside the same folks, experiencing the same surreal “outtatime” moments, it’s easy to see how Back to the Future turned from a movie trilogy into a formative familial experience for the crew. The tremendous box office debut of Back to the Future Part II further validated that experience, and the fans themselves would go on to sense the warmth and love put into the making of these movies. Some of us would be affected very deeply by them. The movies became pop culture, which became a continuum that carried us through the decades.

It’s a continuum that resulted in, amongst many things, Klastorin’s compilation of his time with the movies, as we can now see in Visual History. “You’ve been carrying this book inside your head for almost thirty years…” I told him.

“Yeah… We originally pitched this for the 25th anniversary, but it was supposed to happen now,” Klastorin laughs, telling me this on the morning of October 21, 2015. “This was the perfect time for the book.”

Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History really is a deep mining of the memories between Klastorin, co-author Randal Atamaniuk, and movie writer Bob Gale. Every false start, every failure, and every triumph of the films is chronicled within its colorful pages, to such an extent that it seems impossible that the first movie ever got made, let alone three monumental films. It also knows how to have fun with itself, as the movies themselves do. One of the props included is a lenticular photo of Marty and his siblings. Twist it one way and they disappear. Twist it back and they reappear. It’s so funny that it makes you want to do the same with your own family photos.

This article is being written mere hours before Marty and Doc “arrive” on the afternoon of October 21. So as you’re reading this, the entirety of the 130 year-spanning story of Back to the Future has finally become history. The future is now past, and once again unknowable.

And that’s great! As Klastorin, a person who has not just helped create Back to the Future, but very substantively lived Back to the Future, points out: “The positivity of the entire trilogy goes beyond the events in the movies. The future really is what you make of it. It’s up to you and the possibilities are endless. The future doesn’t stop at October 21, 2015!”

One Last Fan Theory…

Being a huge fan of Back to the Future and working at a science fiction publisher, I had to ask writer Bob Gale something I’ve been wondering about George McFly for a long time.

Did George McFly write episodes of the original series of Star Trek based on his encounter with Marty/Darth Vader in the first movie? In 1985, George and the McFly family are clearly is doing okay in terms of money, but he’s only just published his first novel, so where did that money come from? My (and Ryan Britt’s) theory: George wrote for television in the 60s, probably for Star Trek, and may have even created the planet “Vulcan” for the series.

Howsabout it, Bob?

George was likely a college professor of English or literature while he sold short stories and worked on his novel. He probably became head of the department at Hill Valley College and got tenure, allowing him to buy some nicer things for his family.

This also jives with the initial script for Back to the Future Part II, where Marty visits his parents in 1968 and George has become a professor.

So, George didn’t write any Star Trek, but Bob Gale very kindly tells me…

[George] probably assumed that Gene Roddenberry was visited by another alien from Planet Vulcan named Spock, and that inspired him to create Star Trek.

…and that’s just as awesome.

 

One Last LAST Fan Theory, I Promise…

I’m terrible, I know. The Visual History contains the mass market edition of George McFly’s book A Match Made in Space, which details the story of the book for the very first time. Bob Gale wrote the synopsis for that story and it is very clearly inspired by the events in Back to the Future Part I.

Since the events in the movie had such an impact on George, I asked Bob if he eventually recognizes that his son Marty is a time traveler.

A college aged George goes searching for Calvin Klein in issue #3 of IDW’s new comic series.

Looks like that issue just came out, too! At long last, the answer to my weird questions…

Chris Lough writes for Tor.com and is very, very happy with how he ended up spending October 21, 2015.

Yesterday, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss their Welcome to Night Vale book and to listen in on Night Vale’s community calendar. Oh, and Oprah was there, too.

It’s incredibly fitting that Colbert had the podcast creators on his show, for two reasons: First, there’s the obvious geeky connection, as summed up by Cecil Baldwin performing while standing next to Colbert’s treasured Captain America shield. But the four also have a theatrical connection: Cranor, Fink, and Baldwin all met through the New York Neo-Futurists, an experimental theater company; and Colbert was oh-so-briefly a Chicago Neo-Futurist way back when. Does that mean in an alternate universe, Colbert could have voiced one of the many oddball residents of Night Vale or (boo) Desert Bluffs? We think so!

Check out the interview and surprise mini-performance!

You can watch the full episode here; the Night Vale segment comes at the 36-minute mark.

Want to watch a scary movie but still sleep at night? These 10 titles will do the trick.

The Road So Far

Welcome to week forty-six of the Supernatural rewatch project, superfans! If you like to alternately laugh and cry like a maniac, then these are the episodes for you. The show gives, returning to meta-awesomeness bystaging a geeky Supernatural convention attended by Sam and Dean. And then it takes away, killing off two fan favorites. RIP, Jo and Ellen.

Let’s pour one out for the baddest mother-daughter team since…well, ever.

THE OFFICIAL FYA SUPERNATURAL DRINKING GAME:

Take a drink every time:

•  There’s a corpse

•  A demon possesses/de-possesses and/or makes a deal with some hapless schmuck

•  A far-off disaster is mentioned but not shown for budgetary reasons

•  Dean crams his face full of junk food

•  An angel is snotty

•  Anyone is tied up

•  Either brother picks a lock

•  Someone employs a Titan of Classic Rock as an alias

•  The Glorious and Faithful Impala is damaged in the line of duty

5x9: The Real Ghostbusters

Monster of the Week: Ghosts, creepy child edition

The Winchesters rush to respond to a 911 text from Chuck, only to find out it was actually from Becky, who swiped his phone. She’s sorry for the trickery, but she needed them to see it. It, of course, being a Supernatural convention that she and Chuck set up.

Sam and Dean enter a hotel only to be surrounded by other Sams and Deans.

Who’s your favorite? Mine’s the lady playing Bobby.

After a list of panels are announced (including one entitled “Frightened Little Boy:  the Secret Life of Dean), Chuck takes questions from audience members who take that as a cue to air their grievances about inconsistencies in the show. Becky doesn’t take it well.

FANGIRL4EVA

Chuck saves face with a big announcement. He’s found a wealthy investor and is going to start publishing more books in the Supernatural series! Sam and Dean are not amused.

After the discussion is over, Chuck tries to talk to Becky. It’s clear he’s got a crush. But unfortunately for him, she still has (crazy) eyes for Sam.

Can I say once again how much I adore Emily Perkins?

The game portion of the convention takes place, as an actress playing a hotel maid claims to have seen a ghost and launches into a tale of how the hotel used to be an orphanage and is haunted by the ghost of the former matron who slew several of her charges and then herself in a fit of rage.

The real Sam and Dean roll their eyes and go get a drink. But when a cosplaying Sam is attacked by what appear to be real ghosts, they begin their own investigation. It turns out the fake ghost story is actually based on the real history of the hotel. The orphanage matron killed four boys, including her own son.

One of murdered boys appears to another pair of Winchester cosplayers and points them to an old map that shows where the matron is buried. Sam and Dean overhear them discussing it. Dean wants to take it from them at gunpoint, but Sam convinces everyone to work together. The cosplayers agree, but only if they can be Sam and Dean. They assign the real Sam and Dean the roles of Bobby and Rufus. Heh. But when “Rufus” and “Bobby” start digging up an actual grave, the cosplayers freak. Things get worse when the matron’s ghost appears and attacks them! Luckily, real Dean salts and burns the bones just in time to save them.

It should be over. But when they get back to the convention, the hotel’s exits all seal, trapping everyone inside. The ghost of the matron’s son appears, asking why they sent his mommy away. It turns out her ghost was all that was keeping the other ghosts of the evil little boys from hurting people. On cue, the said evil ghosts corner a Hook Man cosplayer in the hall.

I feel you, Hook Man.

Sam and Dean discover the body and herd everyone into the main conference room, discretely salt the doors and tell Chuck to keep them busy while they hunt the ghosts. The hotel manager gets quickly sick of Chuck’s stories and tries to leave, breaking the salt line. Almost immediately a ghost attacks, but Chuck snatches up an iron music stand and sends it fleeing. Becky is intrigued by this display.

Her body is ready.

Meanwhile, using the actress who played the matron in the convention’s game, the boys lure out the ghost children, while their cosplaying dopplegangers manage to escape the hotel. The real Sam and Dean fight the ghosts while the costumed Sam and Dean find and burn the bodies.

After it’s all over, Becky breaks up with Sam, telling him she’s in love with Chuck. Sam gracefully says he’ll have to find a way to keep living.

Brotherly Angst Quotient: Infamous

Dean gets increasingly frustrated with the convention goers, saying he doesn’t understand why they’d want to emulate the Winchesters’ lives.

Doesn’t he just, darlings.

But later, after the Sam/Dean cosplayers help defeat the monsters, Dean thanks them. The Dean cosplayer says he’s wrong about Supernatural. In real life, they work retail jobs. The idea of waking up to save the world with a brother who’d die for you, who wouldn’t want that? Dean realizes they have a point and tells them they don’t make a bad team themselves. He’s right as it turns out. In addition to being Winchester cosplayers, they’re also lovers.

Aw, adorable subtext.

Paradise Lost of It All: After Becky breaks up with Sam so that she can be with Chuck, she gives him a consolation prize: she’s such a close reader of the Supernatural series, that she remembers Bella never actually gave the Colt to Lilith. She gave it to a demon named Crowley. The boys now know where to start looking for the weapon that might kill Lucifer!

How Drunk Are We?: Sociably! Take three drinks for rock aliases and a single corpse.

The Quotable Winchesters: “The way I look at it, it’s really not jumping the shark if you never come back down.” –Chuck the Prophet.

Moment Most Likely to Inspire Troubling Fan-Fic:

I suppose a panel discussion doesn’t technically count as fic, but close enough.

Notable Cameos: None

5x10: Abandon All Hope

Monster of the Week: Lucifer, Meg, hellhounds

Cas manages to find and follow the demon Crowley to his anti-angel warded home. With an assist from Jo, the boys manage to get inside Crowley’s compound. Just as they face Crowley himself, they’re captured by a pair of demons. Crowley shoots both demons. He claims to be on the boys’ side, theorizing that once Lucifer is done killing all humans, he’ll be after demons next. He simply hands them the Colt, extra ammunition, and tells them that Lucifer’s likely to pop up next in Carthage, MO.

That was suspiciously easy.

Wary of Crowley’s intentions, but without a lot of choice, Sam and Dean take the gun and head back to Bobby’s. It’s a party of sorts. Ellen and Cas having a drinking contest! Dean finally notices Jo’s hotness and tries to use the end of the world as a way to get her into bed.

The hardest of hard passes.

Bobby insists they all get a photo together, since they’re probably all going to die tomorrow, and that thought pretty much ends the celebration.

When Sam, Dean, Ellen, Jo, and Cas roll into Carthage, the town seems empty. But Cas says it’s not. Reapers are everywhere.

Saddest street festival ever.

Cas walks off to talk to one Reaper and instead runs into Lucifer, who traps him in a ring of holy fire. Lucifer’s vessel is looking kind of gnarly as he offers to let Cas join his rebellious angel team. Cas says he’d die before helping him.

Meanwhile Ellen, Jo, Sam and Dean run into Meg. Lucifer wants to see them, and she’s brought a bunch of hellhounds to enforce his request. They run! A hound grabs Dean. Jo tries to save him only to be mauled herself! The rest manage to pull her into a hardware store. They quickly turn it into anti-demon safehouse while Jo bleeds out. Ellen tells her she’ll be okay, but by the blood pouring from her abdomen, everyone knows it isn’t true.

Dean contacts Bobby by radio and gives him the news. Ellen tells him about all the reapers and Bobby says he thinks Lucifer’s planning to unleash the horseman Death. He’s picked this town because it as the site of a really bad battle in the civil war. They need to get to it and stop him.

When Sam and Dean argue over the best way to get Jo on her feet, she tells them to be realistic. She’s not going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean she can’t help. She outlines a plan to build a salt/iron suicide bomb so she can hit the hellhounds while the rest escape. Ellen is not trying to hear it, but Jo stops her, saying, “This might be literally your last chance to treat me like an adult. You might want to take it.” Ellen tearfully agrees, and I’m not crying, you’re crying.

They build the bomb and Dean hands Jo the trigger saying he’ll see her on the other side sooner or later.

*sobs*

It’s time to leave. But Ellen says she’s not going anywhere. She’ll never leave her daughter alone. While Sam and Dean escape, Ellen cradles Jo. But just before the moment of truth, Jo dies, leaving Ellen alone.

Can I give Samantha Ferris a retroactive Emmy?

Ellen hugs her dead daughter closer and blows the bomb, killing the hounds.

Sam and Dean escape and find all the missing townspeople lined up on the Civil War battlefield along with Lucifer. Sam distracts Lucifer while Dean shoots him in the head with the Colt!

It doesn’t work.

Lucifer pops up and says there is only five things in Creation that the gun can’t destroy and he’s one of them. He starts the ritual to free Death, his demon-possessed townspeople sacrifices dropping like flies.

Meanwhile, Meg brags to Castiel about how they’re going to win. Cas plants a seed of doubt in her mind, saying Crowley belives Lucifer’s using demons and he’ll kill them all when their purpose is complete. Then he manages to grab her and pull her into the holy circle. When he tries to angel-murder her, he realizes his heavenly power kill demons has been cut off. But he can and does throw her into the holy flames and escapes. On his way out of town, he rescues Sam and Dean just as Lucifer frees Death.

At Bobby’s, everyone takes in the defeat, listening to news reports of terrible storms over Carthage. Bobby throws the photo he took the night before into the fire.

Brotherly Angst Quotient: Parallels

Lucifer tries to win Sam over by pointing out that they’re both little brothers rejected by the older brothers they worshipped for thinking for themselves. Sam holds out for now, but some of Lucifer’s words look like they hit home.

Paradise Lost of It All: Thanks to the Colt’s failure, Lucifer’s got himself another horseman on the loose.

How Drunk Are We?: Clinically dead. The number of demon-possessed corpses alone made counting too difficult, so I’m just going to give the okay to chug the whole bottle/keg.

The Quotable Winchesters: “Number one, he's gonna wipe us all out anyway, two, after you leave here I go on an extended vacation to all points nowhere, and three, HOW ABOUT YOU DON'T MISS, OKAY? MORONS!” –Crowley, on what will happen if Dean fails to shoot Lucifer.

Moment Most Likely to Inspire Troubling Fan-Fic:

SOMEONE WRITE FIC WHERE THIS ALL ENDED BETTER, PLS

Notable Cameos:

Mark Sheppard of basically everything (Warehouse 13, White Collar, Leverage, Battlestar Galatica to name a few) plays Crowley.

Next Week: Sam goes all Freaky Friday with an unfortunate teen

What movie could you watch over and over again without getting bored? For Walt Hickey of the statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, it's the 2009 film Star Trek. But that's just his personal taste. He conducted an online poll asking people to name the most rewatchable films of all time. Here are the top 10:

I certainly agree with the #1 pick. Star Wars never really gets old--especially Episode IV. I am a bit surprised with Gone with the Wind, though. Is it really that compelling?

-via Ace of Spades HQ

It’s the usual shenanigans at Brigham Young University. This intriguing item is from the police blotter of the BYU newspaper. Apparently, the students were professional level hide and seek players. -via reddit

Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany will co-star with Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Emmy-nominated “Orphan Black” actress Tatiana Maslany has entered negotiations to co-star with Jake Gyllenhaal in Lionsgate’s Boston Marathon bombing project titled Stronger, directed by David Gordon Green (George Washington, Pineapple Express).

Based on the non-fiction survivor’s memoir of the same name by Jeff Bauman (with Bret Whitter), Stronger tells Bauman’s story of waiting for his girlfriend to cross the finish line on April 15, 2013 when two pressure cooker bombs exploded killing three and wounding 264. Bauman lost both his legs and became a key witness in the ensuing manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the former having been sentenced to death this past May.

Bauman’s story of recuperation and triumph is being adapted to the screen by writers John Pollono (Sex & Marriage) and Scott Silver (8 Mile, The Fighter), and produced by Silver along with David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman of Mandeville Films.

There is no word on whether Maslany’s casting in Stronger infers that she is out of the running for Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: Episode VIII, for which she did a chemistry read last weekend. 

(Photo credit: WENN)

The post Tatiana Maslany Joins Jake Gyllenhaal in Boston Bombing Film Stronger appeared first on ComingSoon.net.

It’s been a mixed bag of news for Showtime’s Twin Peaks revival lately. On the plus side, we have great new actors joining the cast, like Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard. On the down side, we lost the Log Lady herself, actress Catherine Coulson, who was due to return to the series in her iconic role, but passed away last week. Today’s news item is another mixed bag, so let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

It’s seem that in 2017, the town of Twin Peaks will have a new sheriff, as original series actor Michael Ontkean will not be returning to play the part of Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Ontkean was the right-hand-man to Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and in fact had second-billing in the show’s credits. The chemistry between he and MacLachlan was a vital part of the show’s appeal for many, so this is a pretty big bummer for fans. As for why Ontkean isn’t coming back, a source close to the actor said “Michael is fully retired from show business, and has been for many years.”

While that may be true, as of this past February, Ontkean was publicly looking for his old Harry Truman jacket on social media, or a replica of it, and other returning cast members said that series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had coaxed Ontkean out of retirement for the new season. Obviously, something happened between then and now. What that something was remains a mystery.

On the plus side, Lynch and Frost have found a damn fine actor to replace Ontkean, as they’ve hired veteran character actor Robert Forster (Jackie Brown, Heroes) to be the new Sheriff. Interestingly, Forster was supposed to play the part of Harry Truman way back in 1989, but prior commitments kept him from taking the part. (Lynch would later give him a small role in his film Mulholland Drive.)

What remains unclear is whether or not Forster is playing an all new character as Sheriff, or playing an older version of Harry Truman. If it’s the latter, it wouldn’t be Twin Peaks’ first recasting of a major role, as the part of Donna Hayward was recast for the film Fire Walk With Me when series actress Lara Flynn Boyle bowed out.

This Twin Peaks fan is hoping Forster is playing a new Sheriff, because although both Michael Ontkean and Robert Forster are very good actors, they have very different energies, and it would be hard to buy Forster as Harry for a lot of old school fans. The original show didn’t really leave any loose, dangling plot threads around the character of Harry Truman, so it would be easy enough to say that the character retired, moved away, or even passed away (it has been twenty five years after all.) But I trust that whatever David Lynch and Mark Frost have planned, they’ll find a way to make it work.

—

HT: TV Line

IMAGE: CBS Studios, LA Times

As an avid Jeopardy! viewer, one gets to see all kinds of odd ducks from the farthest corners of these United States. We have grown accustomed to Alex Trebek's beautifully stilted intros — "Darlene from Akron, Ohio, I hear you have an unusual collection of old keys?" — and untraditional trivia geniuses. But there's something deeply fascinating about the show's newest phenomenon, Matt Jackson.

A paralegal based in Washington, D.C, the 23-year-old Jackson (he auditioned when he was 22) has won just over $230,000 in eight appearances on the show, virtually destroying the competition each time. Nobody else comes close. 

The contestant has also provided the show with its most slow-building smile, which begins in a frown at the top of his introduction and crawls into a grin. He has repeated this, without fail, at the opening of each episode. 

As each smile concludes its journey, Jackson holds up the number of shows he has logged in his streak.

He doesn't do witty banter, and cheeky questions from Trebek are often met with a stern look and a tilt of the head, as if to say, You are wasting my time, Host Man, let us move along so I can take more of your money.

The self-proclaimed son of a Jewish liberal mother and a black conservative father told Trebek he prepared for the show by listening to the Hamilton soundtrack and repeating "I'm not throwing away my shot" over and over. Far from humble, Jackson doesn't hide his satisfaction with a particularly impressive answer, and has even created a mini-catchphrase that he delivers with panache. 

If it has been a while since you've tuned into the game show, these next episodes would be a good time to reacquaint yourself. Jackson, as Trebek suggested in Tuesday's episode, might just be the one to break Ken Jennings's 74-game streak. 

Read more posts by Lucas Kavner

Filed Under: jeopardy! ,matt jackson jeopardy ,matt jackson

Supernatural is headed into its eleventh season on October 7. In that time, Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) have carried on their family business by facing countless monsters and demons—external and internal. Supernatural isn’t the bleakest show on television, but the premise is a more serious one. Still, the dialogue is peppered with humor, and occasionally, the writers go all out and tear down the fourth wall. It’s more than that; they ignore the existence of the fourth wall. They’ve spun whole episodes into entertaining meta, self-referencing affairs. Episodes like these:

“Hollywood Babylon”
In Season 2 of Supernatural, the Winchesters investigate a mysterious murder on the set of a horror movie called Hell Hazers II: The Reckoning. Dean takes on a job as a production assistant, and McG, a producer of Supernatural directs the fake movie. The actual McG appears in the episode while an actor playing a faux McG talks to the crew. The episode frequently references Eric Kripke’s (another producer on Supernatural) Boogeyman. My favorite part? When the brothers take a tour of the Warner Bros. lot and the guide mentions Gilmore Girls, Sam looks uncomfortable and leaves the tour (Padalecki had a recurring role on that series).

“Ghostfacers”
The third season sees the return of Harry Spengler and Ed Zeddmore. The duo works on a pilot for their low budget, unscripted reality show Ghostfacers. Their actions reference other series about paranormal investigators, and since it was the first episode of Supernatural filmed after the writer’s strike ended in 2008, it was a jab at the type of shows that could have aired if the situation hadn’t been resolved.

“The Monster at the End of This Book”
Things go extra meta in Season 4 when Sam and Dean discover the Supernatural books by Carver Edlund. They learn the series has been published for the last four years (as long as the show had aired at that point) and documents every event of their lives, and that the books have a passionate fan base. Like real Supernatural fans, there are Sam girls, Dean girls, and fans of slash fiction pairing the brothers. The Winchesters eventually learn Carver Edlund is the pen name for Chuck Shurley (Rob Benedict), a prophet of God. Because obviously. Also, the name Carver Edlund references two Supernatural writers/producers: Jeremy Carver and Ben Edlund.

“The French Mistake”
This sixth season episode blurs the lines so much that it’s almost confusing. Sam and Dean end up in an alternate reality on the set of Supernatural, but Sam and Dean think they’re still Sam and Dean and everyone on set calls them Jared and Jensen. They’re confused by locations such as Bobby’s house being fake sets, by Castiel being some Twitter-loving guy called Misha Collins, and by Sam/Jared being married to Ruby (Genevieve Padalecki). Whew.

“Fan Fiction”
Supernatural hit the 200 episode milestone in Season 10, and they celebrated in style. Remember those books by Chuck? An all girls school adapts them into not just a play, but a musical. Supernatural: The Musical attracts the attention of Dean and Sam because a teacher at the school goes missing. The musical references fans shipping Dean and Castiel, the bromance, emo scenes between the brothers–it’s basically a sweet and sincere love letter to the fandom.

This isn’t a complete list of every meta moment in Supernatural. Head to the comments and tell me about your favorites.

—

Images: The CW

As it turns out, having your product featured in a major motion picture doesn’t only pay off when the movie first heads to theaters, but it can reap promotional gold for years to come, if you play it right. To that end, Pepsi announced it’s offering a limited quantity of Pepsi Perfect on the day Marty McFly orders a Pepsi in Back to the Future: Part II — Oct. 21, 2015.

The collectible bottles will be filled with Pepsi made with real sugar, the company said in a press release, and will sell for $20.15 (get it?) per 16.9-oz bottle. But hey, it comes with a “special collectible case,” so there’s that. There will only be 6,500 available online to people in the U.S., which means fans will likely have to hover carefully over their computers/mobile devices for the moment the clock strikes midnight on that day.

Movie fans who are in New York for Comic Con on Oct. 8 can also score a bottle of Pepsi Perfect in a variety of ways, one of which involves dressing up like Marty (puffy red vest or BTTF:PII jacket, blue jeans, white high-top sneakers, watch — required) and being one of the first 200 fans at the Pepsi Perfect Booth.

“Fans have always been a little crazy about it,” Lou Arbetter, PepsiCo’s senior director of marketing, told USA Today about the scene in the movie where a Pepsi Perfect is delivered to Marty via a pneumatic tube, “and so we wanted to take advantage of the fact that Marty travelled to the future, to this month, and wanted to actually come out with the product.”

Nobody likes to see the beach ball (aka pinwheel, aka the spinning pizza, aka spinning wait cursor) in OS X, but have you ever wondered why you see different ones from time to time? Or, when things get real weird, you’ll sometimes see a ticking watch? It turns out that the answer has to do with the app you’re working with.

Read more...

Sleepy Hollow’s back! Is that something we should care about? I just don’t know! I’ve been telling my colleagues at Tor.com that I expected this season to suck. I assumed the magic would be gone, and after all the last-minute deaths, narrative shifts, and the disappearance of Orlando Jones, I felt too jerked around to care anymore. But this Season 3 premiere seemed dedicated to getting back to basics, and strengthening the core relationships that were the whole reason the show became a surprise hit in the first place.

We open on a not-Katrina acting witchy in the woods. She imprisons Headless in a box after cooing sweet magical nothings at his horse. I think to myself, “That had better not be Pandora, show.”

Then we cut to Abbie taking a perp out with a garbage can lid in an unnamed city that looks bigger than Sleepy Hollow. I love it when SH tries to be a cop show. Abbie’s with the FBI now – has she already made it through training at Quantico – and she has a new older mentor who yells at her but then watches her admiringly when she’s not looking. This is promising.

But! This is Sleepy Hollow, dammit, and if we wanted a procedural we’d be on a different channel. Cut to: Abbie bailing Ichabod out of Immigration! ICHABOD’S HAIR IS GONE. Oh, and Katrina’s locket has turned black which means something icky has happened to Headless. And by the way, the Witnesses haven’t seen each other in nine months, while Ichabod was off mourning his old life, and Abbie was creating a new one. Abbie’s pretty pissed at Crane. Wait a second, why is Ichabod being detained by Immigration? Well, it seems there’s this 4,000 year old Sumerian tablet, and he didn’t declare it properly…

But let’s cut to the meat here. The Witnesses haven’t spoken in nine months. Abbie dismisses the idea that she’s a Witness, or that they’re partners, by saying that they defeated Moloch and succeeded in their mission. She got tired of waiting for Ichabod to return, hence Quantico and the FBI. Ichabod, meanwhile, feels utterly purposeless without Witnesshood, and to make matters worse, his entire (evil) family is dead. He spent the nine months going to his old ancestral land in Scotland, where he found a Sumerian tablet, handily titled “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that he believes is the key to their next mission. Which launches Abbie back into denying that there is a mission.

The show is casting around, nakedly, openly, and onscreen, for a plot. They hang a lampshade on it by having Crane quite openly looking for a plot – a purpose for the Witnesses to get back to Witnessing. I have to admit that I’m so busy missing what this show could have been, that this feels like an echo of what the show could have been. But I’m trying to get on board again.

She’s in the middle of denying that they have a next mission when they get called to a crime scene.

It takes Ichabod only a few moments to declare that a demon did it, which means…JENNY!!! (YAAAYYYY!!!!) So now the core team is reassembled, researching demons, trading stories, it’s like old times. Jenny even assures everyone that she smuggled Irving and his family to safety. Ichabod and Jenny piece together a probable demon backstory: a red substance called cinnabar that Abbie found at the crime scene, plus the fact that the victims were literally paralyzed in fear, means that it was a yaoguai. Yaoguai were the “red devils” Ben Franklin talked about in his war journals: they looooove gunpowder and freeze their victims with terror. (So, was it released by not-Katrina? She was talking about fear quite a bit…)

In a few choice pieces of, um, Twistory, the phrase, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was apparently Prescott’s order to people fighting the demons, not the redcoats, and Betsy Ross, whom we’ve already heard was liberated woman, was apparently also a super spy. Possibly even more beloved than Ichabod himself? And we get a fun flashback that proves that Ichabod did have a life before Katrina.

The show did a nice job of tying the two threads together, with Abbie going after the gangsters while Ichabod and Jenny attempt to tag team the demon. Because Abbie is not allowed to ever have friends, the demon kills her FBI boss in front of her, allowing the gangster to escape, which brings us to a surprisingly effective scene. The gangster, apparently having a mental breakdown from seeing a monster in real life, takes hostages and demands to talk to Abbie. She finds herself having to explain that monsters are real, while simultaneously justifying and accepting her new role as a Witness. Was Moloch thwarted? Yup. Has the Apocalypse been cancelled? Mostly. But the monsters themselves are still real, and until they’re taken care of the world will need people like Abbie, Jenny, and Crane to fight them.

Speaking of whom…Ichabod offers to draw the yaoguai out while Jenny shoots him, but the demon overcomes them both, which leads to another return to form: a helpless Crane is rescued by crack shot Abbie, who arrives just in time to dust the demon, and then pulls Crane in for a welcome home hug. Reader, I’ll admit, I let myself get sucked into the hug. The show got me back…for a second. But then I remembered that Jenny’s unconscious in the other room, and I started yelling at them to go take her to a doctor.

So we wrapped up in a strange place. Abbie doesn’t have an immediate authority figure, as she did in the last two seasons, although I’m sure they’ll plug a new one in, and I’ll just keep pretending that whomever it is it’s actually Captain Irving in disguise. Jenny is working at a bar and trying to figure out how to make “Rogue Demon Hunter” look good on a CV. And our Witnesses have a brief encounter with this season’s Big Bad, the woman from the beginning of the show.

Pandora.

Ughhh dammit show…

 

Notes & Errata:

At the end of last season I wondered how they would restructure the show. They have, to all outward appearances, thwarted Moloch, Katrina and Henry are both gone (and barely mentioned), and there doesn’t seem to be a giant overarching plot to end the world. If this episode is any indication, they’re going to be bringing large threats from various cultures, and pairing them with a Monster of the Week.

I’ve always found SH‘s fast and loose approach to monsters interesting, but today we get a Sumerian adaptation of a classic Washington Irving tale, obscure Akkadian writing (which of course Crane can read) which is an early Semitic language, and thus not directly related to Sumerian, a problematic figure from classic Greek mythology, and a Taoist Chinese demon.

We have the Witnesses referred to as “Destroyers” on the aforementioned tablet…which can’t possibly be good. Plus, if there are seven years of Tribulations, and we’re only in year three, we’ll still get a few more seasons.

Does that make Pandora a Tribulation? Even though she’s from a different mythological system?

Was that seriously the Holy Grail that Jenny offhandedly tossed into a cardboard box?

Ichabod’s Struggles With Modernity!

Ichabod’s nightly communion with fellow Immigration detainee Jesus (“And I return to the question that echoes through my soul: Is my destiny to be naught but a ceaseless traveler, inexorably slouching my way through this mortal coil?”) which resulted in Jesus quoting Jay-Z, was a fantastic return to form, as was Ichabod saluting his fellow detainees at Immigration with a quote from Thomas Paine, and finally, his exchange of a chest-thump-peace-sign with Jesus.

But Highlight Of The Episode has to go to: Colonial Times Restaurant! We could have just spent the entire episode here. I really thought the show had exhausted Ichabod confronting our modern reinterpretation of history, but seeing him grab the poor host’s tri-corner hat and yank it around while yelling “The corner goes in the front! You’re not a pirate!” and then side-eye the Ben Franklin hydrocephalic bobblehead, only to admit that “at least they got something right,” was AMAZING.

But seriously show? You just tell us about Crane on a Plane? We want to see Crane on a Plane. Come on.

Abbie’s Struggles with… Anything?

Oh Abbie. Seriously, stop having mentors. Your entire life is watching older men you respect bleed out in front of you. If an older dude tries to act paternal toward you, run away! Quickly! Before he spontaneously combusts!

Final Thoughts!

The show ends with a callback to the Jay-Z gag. So in the end we’ve replaced “Sympathy for the Devil,” and all its epic promise of apocalypse and doom, with “Hard Knock Life,” which, in the show’s context, has become an anthem of keeping at the day-to-day drudgery of Witnessing and monster-hunting, even when your larger mission remains a mystery. Nice.

Leah Schnelbach wants to Witness the Witnesses! Please stay good, show. Come witness her tribulations on Twitter!

Where is your Cool Pope now, America? His PR game is undoubtedly on fleek, but he's still beholden to the same homophobic crap we know and love from the Catholic Church, the world's most powerful supporter of impunity for priestly pedophiles.

(more…)

The full Back to the Future trilogy will stream exclusively on Amazon Prime in October

Calling all Marty McFly fans – starting tomorrow, Thursday October 1st, 2015, the blockbuster Back to the Future trilogy will be available to stream or download on Amazon’s Prime Video. For the month of October, Prime members in the U.S. will have unlimited access to watch Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III, at no additional charge to their membership.

Back to the Future is one of the Top 50 movies of all time on IMDb and is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its debut this year. October 21, 2015 also marks the exact day Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, and his girlfriend Jennifer, played by Elisabeth Shue, time travel to, in the second installment, Back to the Future Part II.

Prime Video will be the exclusive subscription streaming home for the three films – it is also the first time these films are available on a subscription streaming service, for unlimited viewing. Prime members can watch each film via the Amazon Video app for TVs, connected devices, mobile devices or online at Amazon.com/PrimeVideo.

The post Back to the Future Trilogy to Stream Exclusively on Amazon Prime in October appeared first on ComingSoon.net.

Grace Brett, 104, is part of a guerrilla crochet group called the Souter Stormers who yarn bombed landmarks in Selkirk, Ettrickbridge and Yarrow, Scotland. The installation was tied to an arts festival in the area. Video below.

“I liked seeing my work showing with everyone else and thought the town looked lovely," Brett said.

Her daughter Daphne, 74, added "She thinks it is funny to be called a street artist.”

More at the Daily Record.

https://youtu.be/sa5FCItlIzU

 

 

 

 

 

Vimeo user Michael Suich (TheMikeSwitch) has a dream, and it involves Robert Zemeckis’ much-obsessed-over Back To The Future trilogy. “I wanted,” he writes “to do a chronological edit of Back To The Future—meaning the order that Hill Valley experienced events.” Now, chronological fan edits are not strictly a new phenomenon. People have been tinkering with the timeline of Pulp Fiction for years, and there must be a few chronologically-ordered Memento cuts out there, too. But Back To The Future offers unique challenges to the fan editor, as its main two characters, Rick And Morty progenitors Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), take active steps to alter the space-time continuum, meaning that there are multiple, parallel versions of “reality” in the series. At one point in the middle of the trilogy, there are even multiple Docs and Martys running around the same version of 1955 Hill ...

Welcome back to Stay Tuned, Vulture's TV advice column. Each Wednesday, Margaret Lyons answers your questions about your various TV triumphs and woes. Need help? Have a theory? Want a recommendation? Submit a question! You can email staytuned@nymag.com, leave a comment, or tweet @margeincharge with the hashtag #staytuned.

One of my favorite things about TV is that because it's scripted, they get the chance to think of the best timely insults (and the occasional, "The jerk store called, and they're running out of you"s). I'm with you in loving shows where people genuinely like each other, but in my friendships, that often means ribbing each other. Obviously Veep is No. 1 in this genre, and The League (when it was good) will work in a pinch. What are some other great insult-humor shows? —Zach

It's not constant insult humor, but 30 Rock has some real gems — particularly from Jack Donaghy. I feel like I'm always sneaking in suggestions that people watch Cheers, regardless of the question, but honestly, Cheers has great one-line digs, especially from Carla. Silicon Valley has plenty of put-downs, as does It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and while it's more one-liners than straight-up zings, Archer might also fit the bill. Going further back, Rescue Me had billions of insults, as did House. Ryan Murphy loves insults, and Glee was full of them, as are many seasons of American Horror Story. (The upcoming Scream Queens is equally nasty.) Orange Is the New Black has some strong put-downs, as did Weeds during its Celia moments. Obviously, if you like Veep, The Thick of It and In the Loop will scratch a similar itch. Is it too obvious to say South Park? Because South Park is way up there, too. Finally, there are some really galling insults hurled on pretty much every episode of any Real Housewives show. "You're a slut pig" is untouchable.

Last week I started rewatching Scrubs. I knew it was a show I loved, but rewatching it is just reminding me how great it really is. It seems like everyone has collectively decided to forget that it was a great show. Why is it not on more "best of" lists? Is it because the world has seemed to sour on Zach Braff? (Which I don't understand, by the way.) I even recommended a watch to a friend of mine, and her only response was, "For some reason, I just hate Zach Braff." What gives with the lack of respect for Scrubs? —Kerrie

Hey! I love Scrubs! It might be my favorite no-respect show, so I feel your pain: It's a series I've recommended in Stay Tuned a lot, so I doubly feel your pain because people often scoff. Scrubs is great. (Though I will say the whole "calling a man a woman's name" thing wears me down.)

So why doesn't it get more cred? Part of it is timing: Scrubs debuted in 2001, which was not a great year for comedy debuts: Do you remember Off Centre? How about Men, Women & Dogs? Raising Dad? Bob Patterson? Maybe It's Me? Ellen DeGeneres's second sitcom, The Ellen Show? The late, great Undeclared debuted that season, too. The big new comedies from Scrubs' freshman class: Reba and According to Jim. You can't blame this on Americans not being ready to laugh or something after 9/11 either. These shows would have flopped anyway. Terrorism is not responsible for the failure of Emeril Lagassi's sitcom Emeril. America did that all by itself.

So Scrubs was already swimming in an awkward school of fish. But it also didn't fit in with the shows that were already on the air: Its lead-in its first season was Frasier. Frasier is a wonderful show, one I admire and revere, but those two don't go together very well. It aired between Friends and Will & Grace, which is as plumb a spot as exists, except single-camera comedies and multi-camera comedies rarely pair well together because the single-camera comedy always winds up feeling small somehow in comparison. (That smallness is actually intimacy, which is essential.) Then NBC started to bottom out, and Scrubs bounced around the schedule a bit. It aired after Father of the Pride in 2004; that was that computer-animated Sigfried and Roy show, if you remember. It also aired as a lead-in for Committed, which barely lasted 13 episodes. Joey and Teachers? Those aren't helping anyone. By the time Scrubs got paired with The Office — correct! finally! — NBC had had enough. Then ABC picked it up, and it aired after a reality series called Homeland Security USA. Until it changed time slots again. It finished out its run with its own rerun as a lead-in. Scrubs got the shaft from NBC and ABC in terms of scheduling, and it never had the same time slot for more than season. That taints its legacy, making it seem like an also-ran, even though it was terrific. Punch for punch, Scrubs gives The Office a run for its money.

As for Braff, some people just don't like him. That's true for all of us, but I think he gets hated on extra-hard because he winds up serving as a clearinghouse for our culture's deep discomfort with the concept of celebrity; on the one hand, we want access and intimacy, but we also want a performance of superiority, something to aspire to. We want them to continue earning their keep through output, but also lament all the chances they're given over someone less famous. We want them to be rich, but also very humble and discreet about it. It's fine if you hate Garden State, but there are plenty of movies much, much worse than that. Humanity is mostly garbage, I guess. I also remind skeptics that Braff didn't write Scrubs, so it is possible both to enjoy the series and dislike his screenwriting.

Staring down the barrel of Hulu Plus just for The Mindy Project. What else is in there to ease paying for another service? —Alice (@deliciousnicity)

So technically Hulu got rid of "Hulu Plus," but I feel you. If you like Mindy, you might like Difficult People, which is darker and more disdainful than TMP but shares some of its pop inclinations. (Its creator and star is former Vulture contributor Julie Klausner.) It's less marathon-able than Mindy, and way less hopeful, but it's also edgier and more committed to its deal. It's called Difficult People, so you don't get to act surprised when its leads are … difficult. It's easier to forget that Mindy can be outrageous sometimes.

The Hotwives of Las Vegas might also appeal to you. Think of it as the Real Housewives equivalent of Burning Love:  Yeah, it'll be funnier the more familiar you are with the source material, but I can say as someone who largely avoids and loathes Real Housewives, I still find Hotwives enjoyable.

In totally different veins, I love both The Wrong Mans and Behind the Mask. Mans is a British action-comedy, sort of a hybrid of Chuck and The Office. If you enjoy James Corden, then the fact that he's a co-creator and co-star of the show should be a selling point. If you still don't know who James Corden is, he's the one who took over for Craig Ferguson. Behind the Mask is a doc series about mascots; season one was surprisingly charming, and season two is more of the same. (Remember a "This American Life" episode about a high-school student who loved being her school's mascot? She's in season two.)

Outside of its originals, you should watch Fargo, Party Down, Ugly Betty, My So-Called Life, Absolutely Fabulous, The Profit, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bridge (Scandi version), Hindsight, and Steven Universe. Some of these shows are also available elsewhere, but more episodes are on Hulu than other outlets. (For example, there are 35 eps of Steven Universe on Hulu and 14 on Cartoon Network's site.) There are other shows, too, particularly foreign-language soaps, but those are the first ten I thought of.

Read more posts by Margaret Lyons

Filed Under: stay tuned ,tv ,scrubs ,hulu

Do you need your huh moment today? In its list of the best 100 TV shows, The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting fact: NBC originally wanted Bill Cosby, who was the biggest comedian at the time, to play the womanizing bartender Sam Malone on Cheers. "We declined because it would have meant doing the Bill Cosby Show," said co-creator Les Charles. Of course, Ted Danson would eventually go on to play the part, and Cosby would get his own show, The Cosby Show. It was a boon for Cheers, too, which was critically acclaimed but had bad ratings. "We were worried because the ratings were so dismal, but The Cosby Show premiered, and it lifted the whole night," said George Wendt, who played Norm. Whatever the case, aren't you glad you can still watch Cheers without second-guessing yourself?

Read more posts by E. Alex Jung

Filed Under: what could have been ,tv ,cheers ,bill cosby

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