The Keep (Movie) Review

There are a lot of movies that got a bad reception but go on to become cult classics. The Shawshank Redemption, The Thing and Blade Runner all bombed on release but are now hailed as masterpieces. Then there are films that don’t just don’t just fail, they are reviled like The Keep.

Hated by the director, the lead actor, the author of the book it was based on, and the studio that funded it The Keep was plagued by problems on the set, cost overruns, the effects supervisors untimely death, and a rejection by the moviegoing public. It is universally agreed upon to be a failure as a film.

A failure, but an interesting one, which is why it is still being discussed more than 40 years after it’s release.

The pedigree helps. Michael Mann (famous for Heat) directed an astonishing cast including Ian McKellen, Jurgen Prochnow Gabriel Byrne and other heavy hitters. The book it was based on was a bestseller and it also comes with an anachronistic, but strangely appropriate, soundtrack by electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream. The ingredients for success are there

We open in 1941 with a convoy of German soldiers heading up a mountain pass to a remote Romanian village. Their commander, Jurgen Prochnow (from Das Boot to Beerfest), is quickly identified as one of the Good Germans who serves Hitler’s War Machine while not buying into the Nazi cause. His goal is a mysterious black fortress with obsidian walls and little rhyme or reason. Is the courtyard his troop makes camp in open to the sky or is it a soundstage? How large is the keep? Who owns it and what purpose does it serve? When the soldiers under his command defy the local harbringer and break into a vast underground cavern a new question arises. With a cavern that big, why has the entire region not collapsed into it?

These questions are quickly abandoned when German soldiers start dying. Watching this on Pluto things happened so quickly I wondered whether parts of the movie were being snipped during the commercial breaks. It turns out the trimming happened much earlier. The director’s cut came in at 210 minutes but the studio demanded it be trimmed back to a slim 96. Mann being Mann kept all the moody atmospheric bits at the expense of plot and exposition. Probably for the best because The Keep holds your attention for most of it’s run.

Prochnow, fearing for his men, asks to abandon his post but never thinks of stationing them outside the eponymous keep. His cries for help are met by a detachment of the SS, led by Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing, Usual Suspects) who we meet massacring the local villagers. This establishes him as one of the Bad Germans whom it is OK to hate. Emphasizing this point, when we meet Byrne he is a disembodied torso protruding from the turret of an armored car, making him a literal part of the Nazi War Machine.

(On a tangent? The vehicle itself is apparently a LeichterPanzerspähwagen and this one later appeared as Hubert Jr in the BBC Comedy comedy set in Occupied France Allo_'Allo! 

After the opening massacre establishes his evil bonafides Byrne decides to get to the bottom of things. He starts by ordering the village priest to translate inscriptions in a dead language carved into living rock by claws of inhuman strength. Knowing he is out of his depth, the priest suggests calling in Gandalf/Magneto/Ian McKellen, a Jewish scholar who once lived in the village.

The plan is to spring McKellen, accompanied by his daughter and caretaker, Alberta Watson, out of the concentration camp and get him to safety overseas, but McKellen switches the plan after meeting the monster stalking the keep.

The monster, named Molasar, has been literally body building by snacking on German soldiers, but is now looking to leave the keep and recruits McKellen as his ally. After curing his ailments, saving his daughter from certain rape, and spinning a pretty good line of BS? Molasar quickly gains an ally in McKellen who needed little convincing, because hey, dead Nazis.

What follows is a game of wits as each of our four players schemes against each other amidst a background of horror and rising madness as Molasar’s influence erodes the sanity of all involved. Or it would in a better film. Instead we waste screen time one Scott Glenn, a stoic, mysterious and rather boring immortal who is summoned by Molasar’s efforts to escape the keep. Glenn by the way is wasted in this role but was a memorable bad-ass in his brief appearances in Hunt For The Red October and Silence of the Lambs.

This is where things kind of go off the rails and despite some pretty impressive scenes, including:

• A discussion on fascism that hits uncomfortably close to home in 2025

• A re-telling of Abraham and Issac where the good guys win

• A brutal offscreen massacre told entirely via sound effects

The rest of the film, and to be honest most of the earlier part as well, just doesn’t gel together. Some critics will refer to this as ethereal, fever dream-like logic soaked in symbolism. Freedonia’s take is informative and typical of that interpretation. Or you could just say it's half-baked.

Which might be why we are still talking about. Masterpieces are recognized and enshrined, mediocre works are forgotten, but the ones that are almost there, but just miss the mark… those are the ones that haunt us.

Or as the old social media chestnut goes? “No more remaking good movies. Remake movies that were almost good.”

Wednesday (TV Show) Review

Wednesday (Two Seasons, 16 Episodes – Netflix – 2022 to Present)

The Addams Family are becoming an increasingly popular touchstone in popular culture and the latest incarnation, Netflix's Wednesday, continues to expand on America's favorite spooky family. Sorry Munsters, but you'll always be number two in our hearts.

Starting as a series of cartoons in the 1930s New Yorker the macabre family rose to fame with a black and white sitcom in the 1960s, rose to dizzying heights with a pair of cult-classic movies in the 1990s and were kept alive in the interim via a beloved pinball game and a variety of cartoons and TV revivals that I never watched.

The current version focuses on Wednesday, the Addams daughter whose portrayal by Christina Ricci in the 1990s probably kept the Goth subculture going another decade. Filling in for Ricci is Jenna Ortega, a veteran of both the Scream franchise and The Disney Channel. You can choose what's more impressive, the fact that she hasn't fallen prey to the Disney Channel curse, that she can convincingly portray a teenager at the age of 20 or that she's a worthy successor to Ricci.

Dour, snarky, and above-it-all, this version of Wednesday is sent off to Nevermore, a boarding school for "Outcasts" or Cryptid-Americans like werewolves, gorgons, sirens and presumably the Addams Family. Fortunately the early efforts of sorting everyone into neat categories seems to have been dropped in favor of a supernatural grab-bag of Outcasts. As opposed to Normies aka ordinary people, muggles, mundanes, baselines, saps, flatscans, rubes or whatever reverse-fantasy racism term you prefer.

When you have a boarding school? Mysteries and love-triangles must follow and while there were plenty of hidden doorways, secret societies, riddles and puzzles in the first season they all kind of got lost in an effort to copy the "mystery box" format created by Lost. There was always a new mystery with supporting characters emerging each episode. Unlike Lost the old mysteries were neatly explained, but the leftover characters and red herrings did tend to pile up.

This continued into season two where they decided they needed to prune things back. Deceased characters were brought back as ghosts, presumably to welcome the red herrings and supporting characters who were ruthlessly killed at the hands of a bevy of killers including a super-intelligent zombie, a murderous psychopathic Hyde and the Alan Parsons Project which I believe was some type of hovercraft.

Suffice to say it's watchable, but with Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville and the underrated Into The Badlands) at the helm  it could be more. Even with the subplot pruning there feels like a lot of dead weight and aimless B-plots.

Less so in season two with frequent appearances by Gomez (Luiz Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) Addams as boosters of Nevermore Academy to speed things along. They join Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) with appearances by Billie Piper, Lady Gaga and Christina Ricci herself amongst the surprising star power of the cast. Also Fred Armisen is a delight as Uncle Fester in a more animated performance than I think I've ever seen from him before. If Netflix doesn't give him a Fester's Eleven spinoff focusing on his criminal antics? Straight to jail. 

One thing the show isn't nailing is soap opera antics, despite the Smallville credentials of the creators. Wednesday's emotional restraint and disdain for displays of pathetic sentimentality unfortunately reins the rest of the characters in as well. Even when her werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Sinclair, ) is dealing with delayed puberty metaphors, boyfriends, peer group acceptance and cracking Wednesday's shell it's treated as a tedious intrusion on mystery solving.

Which is odd, because they mysteries don't have much depth. There were a few puzzles in the first season that were fun to unravel but those are gone. While Wednesday hunt serial killers during her summer vacation she doesn't show any any of the investigative chops of Veronica Mars, Dale Cooper, or even Dale Gribble. Instead she glowers and bosses others around like a pint-sized police captain from a 1980s buddy cop movie. That's when she's not longing for the return of psychic powers that others warn her are unreliable at best.

Given that Ortega convincingly portrays Wednesday as driven and obsessive you would think she'd be delighted to supplement her absent psychometry with observation, deduction and forensics. The opportunity for gruesome experimentation gags writes itself. Alternatively she could lean into the Dark Academia bookish side of things and drop references to Blackwood, Hopley and Campbell. At the very least she should have a psychic logbook noting her hits and misses. That would be a much more interesting MacGuffin than her unsold and frequently unsecured novel.

There's a lot of potential here, but like Tim Burton who directed a number of episodes it's all surface and no depth. It's frustrating because there are so many missed opportunities. It's watchable, but far from riveting.

So, what RPG system to run this in?

• You'd think that a PbtA version would fit best, MASKs or Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but those systems lean into soap-opera complications and Wednesday fails to hit the mark on those. Her own romances fall flat and those of her classmates rarely impact or interest her.
• Any combat oriented game isn't going to capture it. There are clear tiers of power and stronger always beats weaker. While you would think Wednesday would learn her opponents weaknesses and exploit them? You'd be wrong. She does look stoic and fearless when she's being knocked through a window, but she doesn't equalize a fight by prepping the battlefield with strobe lights, loud speakers, electrified tripwires, or mystical herbs. This isn't any of the Hunter lines from World of Darkness. 
• Gumshoe, or it's teen-oriented version Bubblegumshoe would seem to be a natural fit with the emphasis on finding clues, but most of the mysteries of Nevermore seem to have been exhausted in the first season. There's a lot of characters being introduced (and subsequently killed) but finding out their connection to a mystery is usually done offscreen without even the thrill of a Library Use montage featuring microfilm newspaper archives. 

So, probably best to ignore the show as written, lean into one of the choices above, or grab anything close enough, plus one of the brainteaser books always on sale at Barnes & Noble, set up a rival Griswold Academy and have fun. Something that Wednesday the show has had trouble doing despite being an overall entertaining watch.

Valkyrie (noun, slang, potentially derogatory)

The common name for Time Patrol recruitment agents (aka Temporal Recruitment Agents or TRAs).

Most Time Patrol agents will be highly-skilled individuals recruited from upstream history before the moment of their recorded historical death. In order to reduce hostility and encourage enlisting in the agency, most recruitment agents will be attractive women matching the local ethnotype and often dressed in a militaristic but provocative costume. It is unclear if the Norse concept of valkyries as choosers of the slain was predestined via information leakage during recruitment or is just one of those things.

Male recruitment agents, dubbed einherjar, will be used for special recruitment missions prior to the Second Franchise War. After this point the Fixer/Devil/Old Scratch archetype will become predominant and the gender of TRAs will be considered irrelevant outside of the Unfranchised Territories. Female TRAs will enjoy a surge in popularity during the Second Dark Age, Third Dark Age and Post-Nothis Collapse when traditional gender roles temporarily reassert themselves.

Valkyrie Selection

Despite rumors to the contrary, TRAs will be not selected because they have a pretty face. To the contrary, they will be expected to be fully fluent in local languages, history, morals, mores and theology in order to prevent a convincing case for reasonably-informed consent to recruitment in the Time Patrol and all the contractual obligations thereof.

While often dressed in a salacious fashion, teams that are accompanying a TRA should be aware that there is an excellent chance they will have more knowledge of the local temporal operation area than many veterans and should be treated with the appropriate respect, consistent with their rank and current Time Patrol regulations.

Denigration of TRAs based on their physical characteristics will be considered grounds for disciplinary action outside of the Third Dark Age.

Branches and Fake Valkyries

While terms like forks, alters and dupes have waxed and waned in popularity over the millennia, this document will constrict itself to using branch (plural, branches) as the term to designate the currently unexplained appearance of multiple individuals in the same time stream. If this term causes you distress please be aware that we will be writing this document for both a future and past audience and will be unable to accommodate all local temporal moralities.

That being said, it is understood that downstream Temporal Law Agencies (TLAs) have "right of first-refusal" for all recruitment candidates due to their more sophisticated temporal technologies. This has lead to Time Patrol agents "meeting themselves" during joint operations with downstream TLAs. Field managers and affected agency personnel should consult "Meeting Your Branchself: Time Travel and Yous" <v 201.4> to resolve the philosophical and motivational concerns these encounters may create.

Current Time Patrol agents will be advised that Hostile Timeline Activity (HTA) is both sophisticated and informed. There will be recorded instance of efforts to subvert Time Patrol agents by posing as a Valykyrie working for a downstream TLA. It is critical that any such encounter be denied unless and until the recruiting agent authenticate themselves via <REDACTED>, <REDACTED> or if they know your PIN code which is BOSCO.

Just a reminder

Counting down to on

That's seconds

That's minutes

That's hours

That's days

That's weeks

That's about months

That's years

We can do this!

The Night Comes For Us (Movie) Review

The Night Comes For Us (Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, Netflix, 2018)

This Indonesian martial arts movie is very much a throwback. Our unstoppable hero punches his way through hordes of endless mooks, each one of which is polite enough to attack solo before meeting their gory finish. The rest are content to wait their turn for a grisly demise, or to run around menacingly in the background for no reason. Except to look cool and pay homage to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.

The homages come frequently and the heightened gore and quick dispatch of nameless extras reminds me a lot of Sonny Chiba's The Street Fighter series. Which for those unaware should be taken as a warning. The Street Fighter was rated X when it was released in the US and The Night Comes For Us is cut from the same cloth. This isn't just a violent movie, it's a hard-R violent movie with buckets of blood and horrible deaths. Meat hooks are prominently featured in more than one scene.

The plot is bare bones but what do you want from a martial arts movie? An elite triad assassin has a crisis of conscience and saves a little girl after massacring everyone else in her village for stealing from his crime lord boss. This act of defiance can not be tolerated and the triad declares all out war, sending a battalion of their most-expendable henchmen after the traitorous Ito (The Raid alumnus Joe Taslim). Once the henchmen are dispatched in ignominious single combat, the field is cleared for the elite assassins (who actually have some personality) to arrive.

These include the younger, hipper version of Ito, his conflicted childhood friend Arian (The Raid 2 alumnus Iko Uwais) and a trio of female assassins who dispense with all the brooding and really vamp it up. The Operative (The Raid 2's Julie Estelle) steals the show and appears to be on loan from the Marvel Universe as a graduate of the Black Widow program.

It's not a great movie. It's very retro and that extends to a lot of the fight choreography. There are a few memorable scenes and fatalities, but none of the non-stop razzle dazzle you'd get from The Raid or vintage Jackie Chan. But for a bit of action movie nostalgia there are worse ways to spend two hours.

Notes

• The final fight between Ito and Arian borrows a lot from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, by which I mean Warner Brothers cartoons

• I'd like to give props to Ito's gang buddies who bravely join his fight, but *spoiler alert* none of them appeared in The Raid movies. Fortunately they are fun while they last and each gets the kind of cool last stand that guys fantasize about having.

• For some reason I accept this universe's treatment of guns. Guns exist, people use them, they are not dishonorable. They just don't get used much. People are really into stabbing.

• Speaking of which, if you get stabbed? You shouldn't pull out the knife. It's keeping the blood in. Also, walking into the knife so you can punch your opponent at closer range? Not a good idea.

• Fortunately nobody worries about blood because bleeding out isn't a thing. You can get stabbed twenty, thirty times and as long as you have an artfully ripped t-shirt to soak up the blood? You'll be fine.

• One last shout out? To Reina (Asha Bermudez) as the little girl who didn't sign up for any of this. She wakes up, pets her cat, helps mom with breakfast, goes to school. Then everyone she knows is murdered by gunmen, her village is burnt to the ground, and she's kidnapped by an angst-ridden psycho. Her next few days are filled with crazed murderers dying in brutal hand-to-hand combat interspersed with the occasional car chase and everybody is yelling all the time. The kid is going to need either years of therapy or a sequel where she appears as a kick-ass vigilante out for revenge.

Super Genii

 “Is Root smarter than Finch?”

It's a simple question about Person of Interest that unpacks a lot of thought. What do we mean by smarter? Encyclopedic recall? Perception and pattern recognition? The ability to make a lie detector out of coconuts?

Psychiatrists are still trying to figure out whether general intelligence (aka IQ) is a thing and if so how it should be measured. Typical eggheads. Fortunately pop-culture has all the answers, or at least the answers that reflect the way our society thinks it works.

I started out by doing a quick Kagi search to see if it was better than Google. It is, but I'm not sure it's $5/month better. Fortunately what I was looking for wasn't obscure and a half-dozen websites yielded up their lists of the smartest characters in popular fiction. Between the lists, comments from the peanut galleries and my own entries we wound up with 152 nominees which resolved to 77 unique characters dubbed geniuses..

From which we learn:

• Geniuses are overwhelmingly male. Only 17.1 percent of the characters dubbed genius were of the fairer sex.
• They fight crime! A first stab at professions had a detective of some sort as the most popular job with 30.7 percent of our geniuses working for The Man. The second most popular choice was, ironically, being a criminal at 18.7 percent.
• Being a genius is serious business. Only 22.7 of the nominated geniuses appeared in a comedy, the other 77.3 percent appeared in dramas.
• Things are less serious if you are in a comedy. Geniuses in comedies are ridiculously lacking in grace, humility or a non-sesquipedalian vocabulary a whopping 58 percent of the time, while those in dramas suffer from such stereotypes at half that rate.
• Child prodigies are the minority. Only one in five of our geniuses was under the age of 18. Interestingly if you are a child genius the chances of being a woman doubled to 35.7 percent.
• We like our geniuses credentialed. Almost one in three (29.3 percent) of our geniuses had some sort of PhD, MD or law degree, which compares favorably to the US total of 5.5 percent.
• PhDs are the way to go with 45.4 percent of our credentialed geniuses having one or more, with MDs coming in second at 36.4 percent.
• Lawyers and “professors” rounded out the roll call at 9.1 percent each.
• Only one of our geniuses, Michael Scofield of Prison Break, decided that a master's degree was the sweet spot for higher education.
• It was impossible to determine the educational attainment of four geniuses. Three of them were beings from another planet, but Walter White of Breaking Bad was a human enigma. His degree is never mentioned on the show, but it was revealed he did original research in chemistry at CalTech. That suggests some kind of post-graduate degree but we don't know what kind. Perhaps it's fitting that a man who chose the alias Heisenberg resists categorization.

• The most nominated genius was Sherlock Holmes whose adventures have been continuously retold since the character debuted in 1887. If nobody is doing a Holmes homage on Tik-Tok, the bit where he reveals everything about someone he just met should fit into a 30 second video pretty easily. Ironically Sherlock is canonically not the brightest person in his own stories. His brother Mycroft is unquestionably smarter, Irene Adler outwitted the Great Detective at his own game and Moriarity ran a criminal empire under Sherlock's nose for decades. Plus their final battle ended in a tie, until audience demand resurrected Sherlock from the grave.
• Pop culture has a short memory. With few exceptions most of the listed geniuses had a show that debuted or was still airing new episodes in the last ten years. In fact the only character that received more than one nomination that did not appear in TV or movies during the 21st century was... Urkel from Family Matters.

With a list of geniuses the logical next step is to set up a bracket, have them face off and determine the winner. But how? Sherlock Holmes would probably bomb an IQ test since he doesn't know or care about things that don't concern him, like the basic movement of the planets. Adrian Monk can't compete in a Jeopardy tournament because the buzzer would be too unsanitary to pick up. The Professor from Gilligan's Island would dominate any inventing contest as long as he had access to palm fronds, while any kind of murder mystery party with the likes of Rick Sanchez, Frasier Crane and Hannibal Lecter is going to end up in actual murder before the night is out.

Still, I'm not done playing around with this spreadsheet, which I'll have to post once I figure out the best format, so I may revisit this topic. It was a lot easier figuring out which cereal mascot would win back in the day.

Oh, and while Root is clearly more dangerous than Finch, she's only a menace as long as she's an unknown. Once aware that she and people like her exist he'll come up with a devious plan worthy of Harold Finch/Benjamin Linus/Michael Emerson. It's a pity he's American because if you were looking for a character to play Doctor Who's nemesis, The Master? He'd be perfect. Audiences love watching that guy scheme.

Squid Game (TV Show) Review

Squid Game (Season One, Nine Episodes, Netflix, 2021) 

I'm obviously late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to watching South Korea's entry into the Battle Royale genre. It definitely deserved the hype as I can't remember the last series I watched which played with my emotions and intellect as much as this one did.

By Battle Royale, I'm referring to the 1999 book by Kōshun Takami which invented the now-popular “Let's all murder each other for prizes!” genre. Notable entries include the 2000 movie of the same name, the Hunger Game series (first published in 2008), and Squid Game in 2021. So if you are looking for a shockingly violent critique of society seen through the lens of a murder competition? We can expect a new one to arrive about every ten years or so.

Squid Game takes the formula and puts a reality show spin on things, with the characters signing up to play a series of children's games with deadly consequences. Teams, alliances, secret challenges and all the other tropes of the reality genre make their appearance but fortunately the show aims higher than a simple Survivor satire. Instead it takes it's audience and characters through a series of gut-punching twists and turns that feels surprisingly packed even at eight hours split up over nine episodes. If I was to compare it to anything it would be early Lost before the ever growing cast and mysteries turned it from compelling to frustrating

Unlike Lost, Squid Game actually answers the questions that the audience raises. Why don't the players do X? What about Y? Why are the game-masters doing Z? The creators thought of these things as well and rather than paper them over with more, distracting mysteries they actually answer them. And after doing that they pile on more plot twists, but all of them make sense in the context of the show, unlike some of the “OH COME ON!” twists in say... Money Heist or late-season Heroes and Westworld.

If I'm comparing Squid Game to a lot of other shows? That's because Squid Game shines in comparison. It's a thriller done right. And if that's all it did it, it would deserve all the praise heaped upon it. But, it's also a Battle Royale show and that is it's own special thing. The audience is compelled to wonder not only how they would handle the physical challenges, but the moral ones as well. It's a crucible where character is revealed, and Squid Game has some great characters.

Our initial viewpoint character, Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae who I won't pretend I've seen before) does almost too good a job in the first episode portraying the sort of degenerate gambler who could easily vanish and not have the authorities concerned about his disappearance. It's actually a brilliant choice and without giving too much away while his arc may not be classically heroic? It's still a journey and we learn this man is just that. A fallible person who found life's circumstances more than they could handle. After the first episode you might decide you'll never root for him, and you might not, but you will understand him better as the series goes on.

The contestants are quickly whittled down but I do have to give shout-outs to Il-nam, the old man with no other place to go (played by Oh Yeong-Su), Deok-su, the gangster with a heart of poison (played deliciously and increasingly over-the-top by Heo Sung-tae) and Jun-ho, Republic of Korea's Super Action Police Agent Number One! (played by Wi Ha-joon). There's really not a bad performance in the bunch, and if you think there is? Just wait 15 minutes.

Speaking of which, this show is violent. Not John Wick violent or Kurosawa violent or John Woo violent with cartwheels and squibs and fountains of blood, but disturbingly close to the real world violent. Lots of people die in this show and it is depicted graphically on camera. People get shot in the head a lot and they don't die nobly. They plead and cry and beg for their lives and that's the point. The Squid Game (which by the way is named after a Korean schoolyard game whose closest equivalent was homophobically called “Smear the Queer” in my youth) takes advantage of people in bad circumstances and shows them no mercy. It makes sense since series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had to hock his laptop to pay his bills while writing this script, then spent ten years getting rejection, after rejection while trying to get it made. When Battle Royale came out it was considered disturbing, controversial and horrific. Now we are grading the genre on how well they criticize modern society without falling into parody.

(Gore warning. Gore is plentiful but brief, and unlike the real world? Bullets are wands of instant death. You won't be subjected to endless screaming as participants bleed out and/or choke on their own blood. I guess that's something we can look forward to when the next Battle Royale drops in 2030 or so?)

For those into non-gore visuals? You are in for a treat. Some impressive design choices upfront are honestly like few things we've seen before. The bland contestant costumes, the inhuman outfits of the game-masters and the innocent, pastel sets for the deadly children's games add up to a gripping mix of beauty, dread and shocking violence. The terrible threat of violence elevates even the most mundane activities into terrifying situations and the recurring use of certain motifs might change your opinion of certain classical themes forever. Time will tell, but Squid Game has a good chance of claiming Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz away from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And switching back, not to say it's all horrific. There's plenty of twists and turns and thrilling victories, and to be honest? There are certain creators whose work clicks with me and I know we both read the same kind of stuff growing up. Squid Game, above and beyond it's social criticism, includes masked villains, secret islands, uniformed henchmen, frogmen, secret passages, even a monologue about how the bad guys are just trying to create a better world. Here's hoping that with his Squid Game success that creator Dong-hyuk can stretch his wings, because I am totally down for that kind of swashbuckling, comic-book action.

A second season is promised and while sequels rarely improve on the original I'm cautiously optimistic. There is a larger world to explore and while the games will undoubtedly return they don't have to be the whole focus. There is also an actual game show being worked on, which will somehow make the inspiration which focused on the horrific murder of desperate people for the entertainment of others wholesome and family friendly. Call me skeptical. But who am I to judge?

Additional notes:

• There's a surprising amount of competence porn going on, as in people who know what they are doing and doing it well. It's worth watching for that alone. And if you are into that? Watch Travelers, also on Netflix. Trust me on this one.
• If you are the least bit intimidated by the fact that this is a South Korean show? Relax. Dubbing has come a long way since 1970s Kung-Fu flicks. Besides you are probably old and watching with subtitles on anyway.
• You don't have to google exchange rates during the show. 1,000 Republic of Korea won is about a dollar. So 10,000 won is $10 USD, and one billion won is about one million USD. You can probably double that because things are cheaper over there. Or so I'm guessing from the price of a bus ticket mentioned on the show.