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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 6: The Black Tower

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FUCKING RAVENS EVERYWHERE
My favorite episode to date, and I suspect it will remain so. I also suspect I’ll end up out of sync with the bulk of other reviews here. Much as I found “Arabella” to be a bit blandly straightforward compared to the (in almost everyone else’s eyes overly) expository and theme-heavy  “All the Mirrors of the World,” I will end up in the minority for my love of “The Black Tower.” In turn, I suspect I’m going to be a bit let down by the denouement, simply because it’s going to revert more towards plot than theme and not provide anything quite like the giddy thrill of this episode’s central moment for me. No matter; for my money, this is comparable to “Kill the Moon” in its genius, and it establishes Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell as a genuine classic of What The BBC Is For. 
It is, for what it’s worth, and I think the answer to this is “very little unless you are the sort of person who is seriously considering openly declaring himself a Peter Harness fan and injecting some of his critical capital into the claim that he’s one of the greatest writers in British television right this second,” not quite as good as Kill the Moon. This is, I think, mainly down to direction. Toby Haynes is excellent, but he is very slightly on the wrong side of a stylistic evolution. You can see it in the conclusion – the Restoration of English Magic itself – which is ever so slightly too naturalist. To my mind, what’s Very Interesting In Prestige Television right now is the the sort of artifice-heavy subjective trickery that people like Nick Hurran and Paul Wilmshurst have been bringing to the style – the sort of thing that’s even more embraced by Hannibal and Mr. Robot right now. And the big “ravens explode everywhere” moment, I can’t help but feel, needed a bit more of the uncanniness that style brings. Haynes broke ground with this televisual style five years ago with “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,” and those episodes remain classics, but there have been aesthetic developments since that would have been helpful here. 
Anyway, there’s my utterly minor nitpick for the die-hards. Now for the fun bits. 
One of the dualisms central to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has been the Enlightenment rationality of Mr. Norrell and the Romanticism of Jonathan Strange. But the actual content of Strange’s Romanticism has not really been explored much. Here that changes with wondrous decisiveness, with an episode that immediately focuses on Strange as a Romantic figure (indeed, he’s, hilariously, someone’s rebound after Lord Byron), foregrounding the act of visionary madness.
Meanwhile, the mythology of the Raven King starts to flesh out in earnest. This began to be alluded to last episode, with its suggestion of the Raven King as a figure of populist uprising, but here it moves center stage as the Raven King’s restoration (entextualized within the body by Vinculus) moves back into the foreground.
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Saturday Waffling (July 18th, 2015)

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Finally getting my teeth into the extra essays for the Davison/Baker book, so that’s nice. Shouldn’t be much longer on that. After that, Last War in Albion Book One, alongside my end-of-year targeted collection of a couple of my stand-alone pieces. So that’s all fun.

Speaking of the Davison/Baker book, I’d love to do an essay on the original Paul Cornell story serialized in Queen Bat that he later adapted into Timewyrm: Revelation. Anyone who has a lead on a copy that they could help me with, I’d be appreciative.

“Blackwater” will go up Monday, and then “Valar Morghulis” the week after, with the Super Nintendo Project resuming in August. I’m not planning on going back to Brief Treatise until at least Season Six’s transmission. Super Nintendo Project will run until mid-September, at which point I’ll either switch to Doctor Who reviews or, if the Patreon gets above $325 by then, do Super Nintendo Project alongside Doctor Who reviews.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will go up tonight. It’s a good one.

How did people end up voting in the Hugos? And also, reactions to the Season Nine trailer from ComicCon? Or to any other announcements from last weekend?…

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Art that cannot move people effectively loses the war. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part One: The Beginning)

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Figure 832: The cover of Watchmen #1,
depicting the iconic badge.
Yellow smile in bloodpool as panel one, single stain on right eye. An image and synecdoche, it is Watchmen’s true face. Marketing and trade dress have made it a precisely defined sigil of Watchmen, just as the Guy Fawkes mask is the sigil of V for Vendetta and the serpent of Alan Moore. It is a Harvey Ball style smiley, a type first drawn in 1963, linked with a host of 1970s culture both kitsch and psychedelic. The bloodstain is four-pronged splash in the upper left, three droplets petering out before the eye, a fourth traversing the eye at a sharp angle like a pair of clock hands converging on midnight. In some renditions there are six precisely placed patches of white, as on the cover, but in the first panel the badge is already in the midground, framed by a monotone slate of red upon purple-grey bricks. There is a gutter in the lower left which the blood flows into. It is an iconic opening panel of comics as an artform, setting up the book’s aesthetic approach from the beginning. The War begins thusly, in the middle of a cataclysmic battle the history of which will serve as its own battleground.
Figure 833: The first page of Watchmen. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins,
from Watchmen  #1, 1986)
The close-up, a cover-to-panel transition, defines a mystery even before the comic’s six-panel pan up from the street to a man staring out a broken window many stories up. A red-haired man carrying a “The End is Nigh” sign walks down the street, yelled at by a man hosing down the bloodstain. In four pages the red-heard man will tacitly be revealed as Walter Kovacs, the civilian identity of Rorschach, whose journal provides these panels’ narration, written in a slightly blobby typeface upon caption boxes like torn notepaper, with splatters of ink on every scrap, never in the same arrangement twice. The monologue is as famous as the image: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “no.” 
These first six panels are arranged in two rows of three, occupying the upper two-thirds of the page. The bottom third is a single panel, precisely three times wider than each of the six. These demonstrate the first narrative conceit of Watchmen, the juxtaposition of text and images from different parts of the narrative. The reader does not yet know that Rorschach is visually present in the second through fifth of these panels.
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“Snake, a snake!”: The Masterpiece Society

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This is probably the episode I’ve changed my opinion on more times than any other. The first time I saw “The Masterpiece Society” I thought it was middling, though acceptable in a vague sort of way: It didn’t really hold my interest long enough to leave much of an impression, though I liked that Geordi had a meaty plot with a lady guest star. Later, I came to understand that this episode has, or at least had, a very significant and vocal hatedom, with many fans describing it as the flat-out worst episode in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which struck me as odd, considering “Code of Honor” and “Reunion” both exist. Then I remembered I had read somewhere that some fan forum or critical aggregate site (I can’t remember which one) bestowed upon “The Masterpiece Society” the unusual title of “most average Star Trek: The Next Generation episode”. As in, if you were looking for one episode that best encapsulated what the show looked like and how it operated on an average week, this would be it.

So going into it this time I really had no idea what to expect. These are the kinds of episodes I actually secretly like revisiting the most: I always know the classics and my old favourites are going to be just as good as I remember, but it’s the episodes I haven’t seen in many years or don’t remember as well (or in extremely rare instances have *never* seen) that often prove the most rewarding from an analytical perspective as it gives me a chance to approach a show I typically have a very hard time maintaining any sort of real emotional distance from with the full arsenal of critical tools and ideological maturity I’ve accumulated over the years. So my takeaway from “The Masterpiece Society” in a nutshell is that it is actually kind of bad, but not at all for the reasons people tend to say it’s bad and is actually way less egregious in some respects than other times the show has slipped up. And even then the only truly irredeemable bollocks is in the last act, and there’s quite a strong kernel of a good idea here that’s obfuscated by the unpleasantness at the end.

The first thing about this episode is that, like a lot of middling Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, it’s basically an Original Series episode. The Enterprise discovers a “Planet of Hats” where everyone behaves in a programmatically idiosyncratic manner where said idiosyncrasies put them at philosophical odds with our heroes and the crisis of the week. There is a conflict of interests and culture clash between the two parties as they work to resolve the crisis, exacerbated at least in part by one of our heroes falling in love or becoming otherwise involved with a prominent figure among the natives.…

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The Last War in Albion Book Two: Introduction

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Before we start, there’s a new podcast featuring an interview with me by James Wylder up. It’s a nice, lengthy chat about occultism, Recursive Occlusion, Gamergate, and all sorts of other stuff. It’s in two parts, the first a bit over an hour long, the second a nice solid ninety minutes. Part one. Part two.


Right, so, you may have noticed that we, at long last, reached the end of Book One of The Last War in Albion last Friday, which means that we’re finally going to start Book Two tomorrow. And that seemed like a good time to take a breath, recap events, and give some explanation for what’s coming up next.
First off, if you’ve not been following The Last War in Albion, or have fallen behind, this is, as they say in comics, a great jumping on point. So, let’s recap. 
The Last War in Albion is a history of British comic books told through the lens of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. It’s epic, sweeping, and although the story it tells starts in 1979, frequently dips into the history of Britain and of comics to paint a fuller picture of what’s going on. Individual chapters are in turn cut, with wry arbitrariness, into two-thousand word chunks, which are serialized weekly. A user’s guide can be found here.
Book One concerned the early careers of both Moore and Morrison, from 1979-86. Mostly it’s about Moore, since he was the more prolific in that period. Here’s the recap I’ve got in the omnibus of the next chapter:

In 1979, two men got their starts in the British comics industry. One, a young Scotsman named Grant Morrison, largely sunk without a trace, writing only a few short stories for a failed magazine called Near Myths, a local newspaper strip, and a couple of sci-fi adventurers for DC Thomson’s Starblazer, a magazine renowned for only ever giving the editorial note “more space combat.”
The other, a decade older man from Northampton named Alan Moore, steadily worked his way from some low rent gigs writing and drawing his own strips to a career in the mainstream British industry, pulling together a living writing disposable short stories for 2000 AD, superheroes for Marvel UK, and low-selling but critically acclaimed work like V for Vendetta for Dez Skinn’s Warrior, before making the jump to American comics to try to salvage the failing title Swamp Thing, which he did in spades, taking it from a book on the brink of cancellation to one of DC Comics’s crown jewels.
Meanwhile, Morrison, having largely failed in his goal of being a rock star, and inspired by Moore’s work, particularly his postmodernist superhero tale Marvelman in Warrior, got back into comics, following the trajectory of Moore’s early career by securing a strip in Warrior (unfortunately for Morrison, his first appearance was Warrior’s last issue) and beginning to write short stories for 2000 AD.
In 1986, DC Comics published the first issue of Watchmen, a new superhero series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

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Comics Reviews (July 15, 2015)

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As always, from worst to best of what I voluntarily paid money for. Also, if you’re the sort who only swings by for these, you should know that book two of my epic history of British comics, The Last War in Albion, kicks off on Friday. Book Two is on Watchmen, and should be a fun time. Do drop by. I’ll have a bit of an intro to it/recap of Book One up tomorrow as well.

Years of Future Past #3

At no point during the course of reading this issue could I have articulated what the point of its existence was. I am writing this mere minutes after finishing it, and I am already forgetting it.

Silver Surfer #13

I know this book is a Doctor Who homage, but there’s a thin line between homage and rip-off, and “let’s rewrite The Big Bang only as a Jack Kirby pastiche” is on the wrong side. Fun, but tough to feel good about.

Guardians of Knowhere #1

Thus far, Guardians of the Galaxy only without Star Lord and as an overly black (literally) book drawn by Mike Deodato is, thus far, not an electrifying premise, although as usual Bendis makes the ebb and flow of fuck all happening entertaining.

Hawkeye #22

It’ll be perfectly fine shoved at the back of the fourth and obviously weakest Hawkeye collection, like “Return of the Good Gumbo” at the end of the shitty sci-fi volume of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, but not actually as good as that.

Crossed: Badlands #80

An inevitable and effective ending with all the happiness you’d expect, but ultimately the Homo Tortor arc feels like a missed opportunity that fizzled instead of exploding.

Mercury Heat #1

Good stuff, but it’s firmly the second-best take on classic 80s British comics of the week, and so it’s got to go here in the rankings. Basically, good premise, but there’s enough heavy lifting to do in terms of explaining the rather baroque hard-SF mechanic that the book doesn’t get a ton of opportunity to actually do anything. But it’s no worse a start than True Detective Season Two.

Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders #1

A Muslim woman becomes Captain Britain, then gets plunged into a Judge Dredd pastiche. Yes, of course my reasons for liking this comic are in part political, but screw it. The multiversal conception of Captain Britain and Judge Dredd were always political, as readers of this site well know. This is a beautiful homage to British comics in a fun romp of a package. It’s delightful that Secret Wars allows such silliness.

Trees #11

It’s clear that Trees is not a book about momentum. And I won’t lie, I think Ellis’s experimentation with things you should have trade-waited for is a bit frustrating at times. But I don’t care; that last panel transition is fucking beautiful, and as far as I’m concerned, worth eleven issues of buildup. Now I just need to clear the time to reread those eleven issues so I understand it.…

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“Dark Thoughts”: Violations

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So. There are a handful of episodes that, irrespective of their quality one way or another, I simply cannot watch. This would be one of those.

The first strike against “Violations” is that it’s one of those infamous “Issues” stories. Even though this is the kind of story Star Trek is arguably most famous for doing, the fact of the matter is they’re also the kind of story Star Trek is also the most terrible at telling. There’s no way it can do a story like this and not come across as equal parts blinkered and self-absorbed. The best way for Star Trek to do “social commentary”, as it were, is through its utopianism: Demonstrate a utopian approach to solving a problem or portray a world where a specific problem is conspicuously absent. Conversely, if you must tell a story about a specific social topic that would no longer be strictly speaking relevant in a utopian future setting, you have to speak about it in allegorical generalization. The problem “Violations” has is that it doesn’t quite commit one way or the other, which is deeply unfortunate as it also happens to be “The Rape Episode”.

I’m not even sure how to tactfully go about this. I mean, I think the story has its heart in the right place, but it’s deeply, deeply uncomfortable to watch, and not in a good way. And just being right-on politically and ethically does not mean can adequately translate that into a narrative setting. Alien this isn’t, that’s for sure. Actually, Alien might be a good place to start: Like “Violations”, that’s a story that is at its roots a condemnation of rape and rape culture told mostly through allegory. But while the Alien eventually did end up going around indiscriminately slaughtering people, the key thing there was that the first victim was male, part of an attempt to force male audience members to come face-to-face with the rape culture they have been brought up a part of. “Violations” already comes up short by comparison, because two of its three victims are women and the first is…Deanna Troi. Someone who has an unsettling predisposition to mind rape. And this one doesn’t even have the excuse most of Deanna’s possession plots do (that being allowing Marina Sirtis to actually do shit) as she’s comatose for most of this episode.

Another crucial aspect of Alien‘s success is the fact that so much of it is conveyed through its own awareness of its cinematic nature. It’s a film so loaded with symbolic imagery that it basically runs on it (thanks in no small part to H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott), demonstrating a peerless mastery of Long 1980s cinematography. “Violations”, meanwhile…doesn’t. It’s a further continuation of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s frustratingly conservative and dated filmmaking techniques, and this is a major problem for a story like this because of the subject matter.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.08: The Prince of Winterfell

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lannister
The Direwolf, Catelyn Stark
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
Bears of Qarth: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Lions of Harrenhal: Tywin Lannister
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
The Direwolf, Robb Stark
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
The Burning Heart, Stannis Baratheon
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
The episode is in fifteen parts. The first part is four minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The first image is of a man dumping a pile of ravens out. 
The second is two minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Winterfell to Ygritte identifying Jon Snow as the bastard of Winterfell. 
The third is six minutes long and is in two parts; set in and around the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The first part is four minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Robb Stark. The other is two minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Robb Stark sending out more men to capture Jaime to Jaime and Brienne. 
The fourth part is three minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Jaime to Kevan and Tywin Lannister. 
The fifth is one minute long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow. 
The sixth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Ygritte to Bronn playing with a knife.
The seventh is two minutes long and is set at the Fist of the First Men, north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion to an establishing shot of the Night’s Watch on the Fist. 
The eighth is two minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion saying “pig shit” to Samwell and the others digging latrines.
The ninth is seven minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya to Tyrion. 
The tenth is seven minutes long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by the theme of ill-advised sex, from Tyrion and Shae to Robb and Talisa. 
The eleventh is one minute long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by family, from Robb to Arya Stark.
The twelfth is three minutes long and is set on the sea a day outside King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya and her friends leaving Harrenhal to testing a catapult on one of Stannis’s ships.
The thirteenth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Stannis making Davos his Hand to Tyrion. 
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“Strange New Worlds”: Hero Worship

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And this would be the perfect counterpoint to that argument. It’s one of my absolute favourite episodes in a season mostly made up of favourite episodes.

I used to get “Hero Worship” mixed up with “The Bonding” a lot because they both deal with helping children cope with a traumatic loss and move forward with their lives. They’re also both fucking brilliant and textbook example of what Star Trek: The Next Generation is all about. It would be understandable to make the assumption “Hero Worship” is a ripoff or rehash of “The Bonding” in this respect, and I even thought that myself for awhile. But it’s actually not: Both episodes approach loss from different angles, and Jeremy from that episode and Timothy in this one deal with their confusion and sadness in two very different ways: Jeremy tries to cling to a past he can’t go back to, while Timothy shuts down and doesn’t want to acknowledge his feelings. Also, and this is just me I’m sure, but I almost think “Hero Worship” is maybe a little more nuanced and sophisticated than “The Bonding” in some areas.

Firstly though, the title is very apt. Timothy doesn’t pretend to be an android just because they don’t have emotions and he doesn’t want to feel pain and guilt anymore: As Deanna Troi points out, Timothy also sees a strength in Data that he wants to emulate. It’s pretty much the first diegetic acknowledgment in the entire history of the series of how Star Trek: The Next Generation is actually supposed to work, and if there’s a better place to put an episode like this than in the 25th Anniversary year as part of a season of growing strength and confidence, I don’t know where that is. There’s also the very nice touch early on of Data turning to Geordi for help in understanding childhood trauma so he can better help Timothy, to which Geordi naturally responds with a story.

He’s not the one directly interacting with Timothy, but Geordi helps Data who then helps him. Reading Data, as we do, as filling the kind of role that might otherwise go to a child character, this results in a very sweet and elegant chain of empathy showcasing how role models work: One person is inspired by another, they then take those lessons into their own being and, through living their lives in accordance with them, can then go on to inspire a third person. Role models are important not only because we see in them the sort of person we’d like to be ourselves, but because they can sometimes provide example of solutions to confusing and painful situations. We trust their judgment not necessarily because they think like us, but because they think the way we would like to think, and that can be profoundly helpful on many different levels.

(In fact Deanna gets a very telling quote early in the story: “His world is gone, Data.…

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 5: Arabella

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Peter Harness has said that he thinks this episode is the best thing he’s ever written. It’s not an unreasonable assertion. This is a precision-engineered piece of television. It starts impossibly big and careens at unrelenting speed towards an equally grandiose conclusion. On each end is a different version of the same event: the cracking of Jonathan Strange. At the outset is the Battle of Waterloo, a sequence one imagines gave Harness his most thorough grounding to date in what writing Doctor Who is like (“What can I have to do the Battle of Waterloo?” “Thirty extras, a courtyard, and a half-dozen CGI shots.”), and one that culminates in Strange breaking his previous assertion that a gentleman could never kill another man. At the end is Strange finally figuring out the secret that Norrell has been keeping from him, and plunging into dangerous obsessions.
In between, meanwhile, is a very carefully subverted fridging. That it is a fridging is difficult to dispute. Arabella is killed in order to give Strange some angst. The entire plot of the episode is literally “Strange goes a bit mad because his wife dies.” It’s as classic a fridging as you can do. Except, of course, that Arabella’s not dead, and all of the scenes of Strange’s angst are necessarily weighed up against this fact. As has been the case since the end of “The Friends of English Magic,” this is a show in which we frequently know more than the characters. And here the nature of the big secret shifts – where it had been the question of what actually happened to Lady Pole, now, as Strange, Secundus, and Honeyfoot all figure out key parts of that, the big secret becomes Arabella’s captivity.
It’s notable, then, just how straight all of Strange’s scenes of angst are played. Nothing in how they are shot or written betrays the secret. Instead, “Arabella” plays out as a normative fridging, except that the audience knows more. This has an interesting effect – it creates a sense of estrangement from the scenes, making the tropes more visible. As, of course, they are meant to be – in a story that has made as much of marginalized populations as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has, the fridging of a character cannot be read straightforwardly. (Although man, I wish Harness had avoided the temptation to have the last conversation the Stranges have prior to Arabella’s disappearance be about having children, a thuddingly cliche note.)
It also has to be said, it’s very well done. The sense of dread that hangs over the episode’s start, running through to when the Gentleman finally captures Arabella, is a magnificent thing. There’s a lovely twist pulled in naming the episode “Arabella” and then quickly establishing the inevitability of her demise, then having it actually happen early on. One expects Arabella’s “death” to be the cliffhanger (a move that would have made the fridging much less of an object of critique), so the point when it happens becomes, instead, a point where the episode goes weirdly off the rails into something altogether more unsettling.
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