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American Horror Story: Apocalypse / Episode 9: Fire and Reign / FX

Honestly, after the last episode I’m not too excited about this penultimate episode of the season. We got more backstory of Michael’s rise, but nothing really pushed the story forward. It was just a bunch of connecting points to the original theme of the season, Apocalypse, which at this point has been lost and become Coven 2. The only other thing is we saw how robo-Miriam was made, but anyway…

Now then, shall we proceed…

*Spoilers coming like the number of people ready for the end of this season*

We are back in the lab of Jeff and Mutt about a week after Michael has left, and Jeff is giving a speech about how Michael basically ain’t shit and it’s an embarrassment. So, he and Mutt must do something to help push the moment of the great apocalypse forward…and now! Oh, and Ms. Venable is fed up with them and quits.

*does American Horror Story bop*

Why it Gotta be the Black Witch???

At the witches’ mansion, they believe they are safe and are preparing protections spells to keep Michael away. Cordelia has even cast a spell over the house to keep everyone and everything out, or so she thought. Dinah-Oprah appears on the mansion porch and preforms some high-level voodoo magic that breaks all of Cordelia’s magical walls. This allows Michael and robo-Miriam to enter the house and kill all the witches, including Zoe, Queenie, and Bubbles. Cordelia and Myrtle escape with Mallory (the maybe next Supreme).

So full stop….I AM PISSED OFF!!! Why is it once again that voodoo aka Black witches are made to be the evil or villains to the Salem witches?!?! Yes, I know that there are Black witches in the coven. But you know what else, the Salem witches were taught their magic by a slave named Tituba. (Now, I will pause my anger to say that we don’t know for sure Tituba’s racial background, but the main thing is she wasn’t white.) Tituba is an “other,” and it is too lazy and too easy to make “the other” be the evil. What makes this worse is that Dinah-Oprah does all this just to make a deal with the Devil to survive and get a talk show. (That we know gets cancelled later.) So, her ass is making deals with the literal white Devil but can’t come to some kind of agreement with Papa Legba. Fuck you, Dinah! And some sincere side eye to the writers for this lazy BS writing. See my feelings below.

Now, back to the show. Michael is upset that he couldn’t kill Cordelia and is pouting about it. We find out now that robo-Miriam on some level can be controlled, because Jeff and Mutt are literally typing in her dialogue. (I’m pretty sure Michael ain’t this stupid.) They use robo-Miriam to convince Michael to ask them for help. He agrees, and it is during this meeting that they tell Michael about “The Cooperative” aka “The Illuminati.” They tell him all these world leaders have sold their souls to the Devil and are technically under his command as well. Basically, they tell him to get them to start a nuclear war.

Desperate Times

In Misty’s swamp home, what remains of the coven are there as Cordelia astroprojects herself back to the mansion to see the carnage of the bodies of all her dead young witches. She goes to Zoe to try and revive her, but her body disappears. The same happens with Queenie’s body. Cordelia is distraught and comes back to her body. She is babbling about not being able to bring them back or even feel their souls to which Madison reveals having seen Michael kill two people and literally destroy their souls making them none existent. And it seems Michael has decided to play eye for an eye to get back at Cordelia for magically hiding Miriam’s soul from him.

Everything is looking bleak. The coven is down to Supreme Cordelia, her right-hand Myrtle, supposed to be next Supreme Mallory, walking Weight Watcher’s Coco (once again forgot all about her), I’m that badass Madison, and technically flower power Misty, but she is absent (even though they are at her house). Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Cordelia and Myrtle think the only way to stop Michael is to go back into the past and probably stop him from being born. Myrtle reveals that witches have tried to travel through time, but it has never ended well. All have died trying. She only thinks Mallory may be able to do it after she saw her undo time when she brought a deer back to life earlier. However, once again no one, until now, has ever truly believed this power to be possible at all. So, this could be a suicide mission for Mallory, but she is willing to try for the coven’s sake.

A Royal Witch From the Past

Myrtle gives us story time and takes us back to Serbia in July 1918. We witness the death of the royal family, including Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. Yes, that Anastasia. It turns out that she was a witch and tried to save her family using a spell and a charm, but she wasn’t powerful enough and they all died. Like an item that makes its way to Legends of the Hidden Temple, Myrtle has Anastasia’s charm and gives it to Mallory before having her get into a bathtub of water. (Sidenote: the last time a witch was in a bathtub Fiona and Marie were drowning Nan. RIP!)

They have Mallory relax, clear her mind, and concentrate on the charm as Myrtle recites the spell. The water in the bathtub turns ink black and apparently that means it’s working. Cordelia pushes Mallory into the blackness, and she is now in the past. She can help Anastasia protect her family for a few moments longer than she was able to on her own, but ultimately the spell wears off quickly and Grand Duchess Anastasia and her family are killed once again.

Mallory leaps from the tub screaming she has to go back, but the spell is over, and she is back in the present.

Running Out of Time and Help

Cordelia and Myrtle are on the porch of Misty’s house lamenting their situation. Cordelia believes the only way Mallory will be strong enough to stop Michael is for her to die as is the custom of the Supreme power transfer. She asks Myrtle to perform “The Sacred Taking” ritual which will kill her and give her power to Mallory, but Myrtle refuses to do so. In the end, they decide to go back to the warlock’s academy to ask them for help in trying to slow Michael down and buy some time. However, what they find is a bloodbath. Every warlock, from the young boys in training to John Henry and Behold, is dead. The bodies that are not piled on top of each other are laid out in the formation of a pentagram in the middle of the room with Behold’s head resting on John Henry’s shoulder at the top point of the pentagram’s star.

In a scene, that is honestly only a connecting point, we see Jeff and Mutt offer Ms. Venable the job as an overseer at one of the outposts after the apocalypse. Meanwhile, and more importantly, Michael has called together the members of “The Cooperative-Illuminati” to reveal his plans to end the world.

Final Thoughts *sighs with boredom*

The best part of Apocalypse continues to be the parts the focus on Coven characters or incorporates them into what is essentially a Coven storyline. However, I am still pissed about them continuing to make voodoo that “bad” thing here and making Dinah-Oprah so petty as to kill all those girls for a damn talk show that’s going to get cancelled, because it leads to this…

Voodo witches are the worst. They destroyed our coven #AHSApocalypse #AHS pic.twitter.com/eBBcyoC6N2

— cheko MZ (@PavZam) November 8, 2018

Once again, white women as witches get to do magic and be our heroes, but Black voodoo is the evil monster. Give me a break. I’m so over it.

Speaking of me being over something, I also think it is lazy writing, and has been repeated far too much over the course of this entire series, that at the end of the series the only way to get rid of everyone is a mass death. This has happened since the beginning of the series, and what makes this worse is that I’m guessing that this is partly a callback to the witch hunter killing all the voodoo practitioners in Coven, who happen to be Cordelia’s husband at the time. (This could give Dinah-Oprah a reason to do this to the witches, but since he was going to kill the witches too, it’s once again a lazy and petty reason. And it makes Dinah-Oprah nothing more than a hated Deus Ex Machina character.)

I think I’m done now. I’m glad next week is the finale. Hopefully, this season can end on some type of decent note (not even a high or good, just want it to be decent). And pour some potion out for Queenie and Zoe.

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The post Everybody’s Dying in Episode 9 of ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

Well, that was unexpected. In a conference call with reporters, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed a second live action Star Wars series will be coming to Disney’s long-anticipated streaming service. Rogue One star Diego Luna will be reprising the role of Cassian Andor in a series set before the events (obviously) of the Star Wars […]

The Harlem Renaissance. Black life. Root work. Jazz. Diesel Funk (shout out to Tim Fielder) Monsters and monster hunting. Family. Action. Challenging of gender stereotypes. Camaraderie. Mysterious villains. A world adjacent to the world of the normals. Bitter Root delivers all this, and more. It also asks some very good questions. One of the problems […]

In a midterm election cycle marked by tight races and brutal contests, the Democrats emerged victorious in key races, capturing the majority of the House. However, history was not made in high-profile, competitive races for the governor’s mansions as Andrew Gillum in Florida and Benjamin Jealous in Maryland lost their bids to become the first African American chief executives of those states.  In one of the biggest battles of the election season, Democrat Stacey Abrams refused to concede to her Republican opponent Brian Kemp in the gubernatorial race in Georgia due to the fact that the contest is still too close to call.

With an estimated votes approaching 3.8 million, Kemp was just shy of 51%, but Abrams and her campaign maintain that there were enough outstanding ballots – notably, those that were absentee and mail-in ballots in heavily Democratic metro Atlanta counties, — to bring him below the majority threshold required for victory. In that scenario, it could trigger a runoff between the two. Throughout the Georgia race, there were allegations of voter suppression leveled at Kemp, the Secretary of State who oversees voter registration regulations. However, two federal rulings last week allowed roughly 3,000 naturalized U.S. citizens to vote in Tuesday’s elections and in addition, the state has been prevented from tossing out absentee ballots placed on hold due to Georgia’s “exact-match” law stipulating that personal information on voter applications must correspond to state databases. With a significant turnout from African Americans throughout the state – including during early voting — Abrams received 93% of that vote.

With approximately 114 million votes cast in U.S. House races in 2018 versus 83 million in 2014, according to estimates by The New York Times, strong black voter turnout — along with women, Latinos, millennials and new voters — proved to be a significant factor in key Democratic victories Barack Obama, who crisscrossed the nation to campaigns for Democratic candidates vying for Congress and the statehouse released a statement today on the Midterms’ outcome: “The Democrats’ success in flipping the House of Representatives, several governorships, and state legislatures will get the most attention. But even more important than what we won is how we won; by competing in places we haven’t been competitive in a long time, and by electing record numbers of women and young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, a surge of minority candidates, and a host of outstanding young leaders. The more Americans vote, the more our elected leaders look like America.”

And Women’s March, an organization focused on empowerment, released this statement on the power of the female vote in terms of bringing greater diversity to political representation:

The #WomensWave that just took the House is flooding our country, electing the most diverse Congress in our nation’s history, and adding millions of formerly disenfranchised voters to the rolls. Candidates like Stacey Abrams inspired the nation. She continues to inspire, fighting for democracy and working to ensure that every single vote is counted. We elected the first two Muslim women to ever serve in Congress, Black women will make history representing Massachusetts and Connecticut, and two Latinas will make history representing Texas. And voters showed up to elect two Native women to Congress, a historic first that will help reshape the future for Indigenous people on a federal level.

The loss of the House represents a huge defeat for Donald Trump in which Democrats flipped seats in key districts in such states as Virginia, Florida, Texas, Colorado and Michigan, especially in urban and suburban areas.

The party fell short, however, in their takeover of the U.S. Senate, marked by a major loss in Texas: Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke was defeated in a nail-biting campaign to unseat Texas incumbent Ted Cruz, former GOP candidate for president in 2016. The Senate’s hold on red states like Indiana and Tennessee was largely due to the embrace of Trumpism – namely, supporting Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice and deriding the migrant caravan as a threat to national security. Democrat Mike Espy may still become the state’s first black U.S. Senator since Reconstruction though; Due to the fact that he and Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-White did not gain more than 50% of the vote in the special election, the two will face off in the Nov. 27 run-off.

By retaining control of the Senate, however, Trump can move forward on nomination and approval of federal judges and possibly Supreme Court justices, solidifying a conservative bench that can make rulings shaping a generation,

The African Americans Joining Congress

What does all of this mean? More partisan and ferocious political battles in a divided government. The Democrats control of the House will have a huge impact on the Trump, giving a branch of Congress oversight of an Administration that has operated unchecked. As such, Democrats will gain key chairmanships, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus like Rep. Maxine Waters and Rep. Elijah Cummings, who will take the reins of Financial Services and Oversight & Government Reform committees, respectively. With their renewed status, the Dems will most assuredly engage in investigations, use their subpoena power and very well pursue impeachment of the president if they gain an opening, possibly through the ongoing Mueller investigation.

African Americans joining the 116^th Congress also plan to vigorously challenge Trump’s agenda. This group – a number of whom are young history makers and women – represent the pool of diverse candidates who beat establishment GOP politicians:

-Former Boston City Council Member Ayanna Pressley, 44, became the first African American Congresswoman in the state of Massachusetts. Now representing the 7^th district – the only one in the state that’s composed of primarily minorities – Pressley paved her way to Congress with her Democratic primary victory over 10-term incumbent Michael Capuano, who has backed prominent black politicians like civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and Massachusetts first black governor, Deval Patrick.

Ayanna Pressley

-Schoolteacher Jahana Hayes, 45, emerged victorious in her campaign to become the first African American woman to represent Connecticut, defeating Republican Manny Santos in the state’s hotly-contested 5^th district.

Jahana Hayes

-One of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, Ilhan Omar, 35, will now assume the Minnesota seat previously held by Keith Ellison, the deputy Democratic National Committee Chair, who was elected the state’s Attorney General. Running on a platform that includes Medicare-for-all and free tuition, she handily won the seat. Rashida Tlaib was the other Muslim women who won in her bid for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District seat.

Ilhan Omar

-A former adviser to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and registered nurse who never held office, Lauren Underwood scored an upset victory by defeating four-term Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren to win a seat in Congress from Illinois’ 14th Congressional District. Gaining donors outside the state, she also beat Hultgren in raising campaign funds: $4 million to $2 million.

Lauren Underwood

After months of being attacked on his past career as a rapper, Antonio Delgado, 41, a Harvard-trained attorney and Rhodes scholar, campaigned in New York’s 19^th District on expanding health care to win against GOP incumbent John Faso, who supported the Republican plan that discarded provisions for pre-existing conditions.

Antonio Delgado

-Former NFL player and civil rights attorney Colin Allred, 35, changed Texas’s 32nd District from blue to red by giving the Dems a major victory in a battleground state: Unseating GOP Rep. Pete Sessions, a 22-year congressional veteran and powerful chairman of the House Rules Committee.

Colin Allred

-Democrat Joe Neguse, an attorney and civic leader of Eritrean heritage, became the first black congressman from Colorado, when he defeated GOP challenger Peter Yu to represent the 2nd District that includes Boulder and Fort Collins. He won the seat vacated by Democrat Jared Polis, who was elected the first openly gay man to become governor in the nation.

Joe Neguse

-In the race for Nevada’s 4th District, Steve Horsford, 45, clinched his return engagement to Congress beating Republican Cresent Hardy. Horsford previously served as the district’s congressman from 2013 -2015, having lost his bid for a second term in 2014 and declined to run in 2016.

Steve Horsford

-The 29-year-old Bronx native and waitress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the first-time candidate who defeated Democrat Joe Crowley in the first primary challenge in 14 years. She is now the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Beyond those in congress, one who achieved a milestone in a statewide races vows to challenge Trump as well: Letitia James, now the first African American Attorney General for New York state, vows to use her position to investigate former real estate baron’s dealings.

The post Midterms Recap: The New Black Congress Members Joining the Battle Against Trump appeared first on Black Enterprise.