Uncategorized
Last season on Mr. Mercedes, the AT&T original series which airs on the Audience network, Det. Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson) finally proved that the deranged Brady Hartsfield (Harry Treadaway) was the “Mr. Mercedes” killer.
The show, based on the first novel in the Bill Hodges trilogy by Stephen King (who is having quite a grand moment with all the adaptations of his works currently in production or already airing), returns August 22, 2018 for a second season. The season will deal with the aftermath of Hartsfield’s actions that have left him in a coma, his “friend” Lou Linklatter (Breeda Wool) recovering from being stabbed by him, and Hodges being vindicated that his determination to catch the real Mercedes killer paid off.
At San Diego Comic-Con 2018, returning showrunner Jack Bender, as well as returning cast members Wool and Justine Lupe (who plays Holly Gibney), participated in separate roundtable interviews along with two new cast additions, Jack Huston as Dr. Felix Babineau and Maximiliano Hernández as Assistant District Attorney Antonio Montez (a character created specifically for the show).
The second season encompasses parts of the remaining two novels, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, says Bender, because several returning characters don’t show up until later in the second book.
“The big trick with Season Two was Season One; we basically had the architecture of Stephen’s first book, Mr. Mercedes, which even though we changed specifics in it, we followed the arc,”
he said, adding that “in his brilliant second book, Finders Keepers, he starts with other characters, and Hodges and all our characters don’t come into the show for 250 pages.”
“We realized that wasn’t going to work,” he noted, “and we had to bring up some of the third book, End of Watch, and go our own way with some of it. Because of how Brady Hartsfield is left at the end of last season, we had to invent and figure out with Steve [King] some of the seeds that are in Stephen’s book where Brady Hartsfield is and how he is able to continue to spread his evil shit on people around him in the world. And that’s part of the challenge because it deals with the brain and the power of the brain and things we all know so little about,” he added.
A continuing challenge, according to Bender, is adapting the narration aspects of King’s work to the small screen. “In the first book, there’s a lot of Brady narrating it,” he said, adding that “King is a genius at writing twisted, wounded characters and how they see the world and what they say about it. You really get a glimpse of who this guy Brady is, you know, anti-everybody. He thinks everybody’s a low life.”
“I didn’t want to do [voiceover] narration because I felt it would be too easy,” Bender said. “So both with good writing and the brilliant performance of Harry Treadway and the use of music and a few other things, I think we were able to create that guy and tell the story of that guy without relying on” King’s narration technique.
Bender also noted that King “writes very internal books, and I imagine sometimes that’s difficult to make visual. [I]t is a challenge. But I think that we made it an asset.”
One of the themes tackled in the television adaptation in season one was that of cyberbullying, which Hartsfield sadly excels at. Because Hartsfield hates everyone and is racist on top of that, The Nerd Element asked if any of the new season would reflect the current discourse about racism in the U.S.
“When Stephen wrote it in 2009 or whatever,” Bender began, “it was based on something he heard about on the newspaper in the Midwest that didn’t even make the national news. Once it became the modus operandi for terrorists around the world after,” he continued, “my objective as a director was to make it as real as possible—not to embellish it, not to have sexy action music over the opening, not to do Sam Peckinpah slow-motion to glorify any of the action—I wanted it just to be in your face and what it would really be like to be in one of those horrific events.”
“One of the things we all talked about that is important is the repercussions of those kinds of ripples,” he said, adding that “when you do evil as Brady Hartsfield [has], it touches many, many lives and destroys many lives. [W]e felt it was important in the second season, as much as possible, to dwell on or hit some of those points of people who were affected by it.”
However, the current political climate didn’t factor into the new episodes. “On a political spectrum,” Bender said, “as much as I would love to have it stand up and wave that flag, which I think desperately needs waving, I probably can’t claim that our show does that. Maybe on the humanistic level because it is about dignity; it’s about how does everyone have dignity, how do you not take it away from somebody.”
“When Lou Linklatter gets stabbed and betrayed by her friend,” he added, Hartsfield “robs her of her life, essentially. She keeps living, but a part of her is destroyed by him and that happens all the time in our world, not just through violence.” Bender stated, though, that perhaps “on a characterological level and subtext, I hope it deals with that, but it probably on a plot level doesn’t.”
Please click the link to read excerpts of the roundtables with Lupe, Wool, Huston, and Hernández: Mr. Mercedes, Part Two
The post Mr. Mercedes Returns for Another Season of Detective Work and Mayhem (SDCC 2018) appeared first on The Nerd Element.
Last season on Mr. Mercedes, the AT&T original series which airs on the Audience network, Det. Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson) finally proved that the deranged Brady Hartsfield (Harry Treadaway) was the “Mr. Mercedes” killer.
The show, based on the first novel in the Bill Hodges trilogy by Stephen King (who is having quite a grand moment with all the adaptations of his works currently in production or already airing), returns August 22, 2018 for a second season. The season will deal with the aftermath of Hartsfield’s actions that have left him in a coma, his “friend” Lou Linklatter (Breeda Wool) recovering from being stabbed by him, and Hodges being vindicated that his determination to catch the real Mercedes killer paid off.
At San Diego Comic-Con 2018, returning showrunner Jack Bender, as well as returning cast members Wool and Justine Lupe (who plays Holly Gibney), participated in separate roundtable interviews along with two new cast additions, Jack Huston as Dr. Felix Babineau and Maximiliano Hernández as Assistant District Attorney Antonio Montez (a character created specifically for the show).
The second season encompasses parts of the remaining two novels, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, says Bender, because several returning characters don’t show up until later in the second book.
“The big trick with Season Two was Season One; we basically had the architecture of Stephen’s first book, Mr. Mercedes, which even though we changed specifics in it, we followed the arc,”
he said, adding that “in his brilliant second book, Finders Keepers, he starts with other characters, and Hodges and all our characters don’t come into the show for 250 pages.”
“We realized that wasn’t going to work,” he noted, “and we had to bring up some of the third book, End of Watch, and go our own way with some of it. Because of how Brady Hartsfield is left at the end of last season, we had to invent and figure out with Steve [King] some of the seeds that are in Stephen’s book where Brady Hartsfield is and how he is able to continue to spread his evil shit on people around him in the world. And that’s part of the challenge because it deals with the brain and the power of the brain and things we all know so little about,” he added.
A continuing challenge, according to Bender, is adapting the narration aspects of King’s work to the small screen. “In the first book, there’s a lot of Brady narrating it,” he said, adding that “King is a genius at writing twisted, wounded characters and how they see the world and what they say about it. You really get a glimpse of who this guy Brady is, you know, anti-everybody. He thinks everybody’s a low life.”
“I didn’t want to do [voiceover] narration because I felt it would be too easy,” Bender said. “So both with good writing and the brilliant performance of Harry Treadway and the use of music and a few other things, I think we were able to create that guy and tell the story of that guy without relying on” King’s narration technique.
Bender also noted that King “writes very internal books, and I imagine sometimes that’s difficult to make visual. [I]t is a challenge. But I think that we made it an asset.”
One of the themes tackled in the television adaptation in season one was that of cyberbullying, which Hartsfield sadly excels at. Because Hartsfield hates everyone and is racist on top of that, The Nerd Element asked if any of the new season would reflect the current discourse about racism in the U.S.
“When Stephen wrote it in 2009 or whatever,” Bender began, “it was based on something he heard about on the newspaper in the Midwest that didn’t even make the national news. Once it became the modus operandi for terrorists around the world after,” he continued, “my objective as a director was to make it as real as possible—not to embellish it, not to have sexy action music over the opening, not to do Sam Peckinpah slow-motion to glorify any of the action—I wanted it just to be in your face and what it would really be like to be in one of those horrific events.”
“One of the things we all talked about that is important is the repercussions of those kinds of ripples,” he said, adding that “when you do evil as Brady Hartsfield [has], it touches many, many lives and destroys many lives. [W]e felt it was important in the second season, as much as possible, to dwell on or hit some of those points of people who were affected by it.”
However, the current political climate didn’t factor into the new episodes. “On a political spectrum,” Bender said, “as much as I would love to have it stand up and wave that flag, which I think desperately needs waving, I probably can’t claim that our show does that. Maybe on the humanistic level because it is about dignity; it’s about how does everyone have dignity, how do you not take it away from somebody.”
“When Lou Linklatter gets stabbed and betrayed by her friend,” he added, Hartsfield “robs her of her life, essentially. She keeps living, but a part of her is destroyed by him and that happens all the time in our world, not just through violence.” Bender stated, though, that perhaps “on a characterological level and subtext, I hope it deals with that, but it probably on a plot level doesn’t.”
Please click the link to read excerpts of the roundtables with Lupe, Wool, Huston, and Hernández: Mr. Mercedes, Part Two
The post Mr. Mercedes Returns for Another Season of Detective Work and Mayhem (SDCC 2018) appeared first on The Nerd Element.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement officially exists, as it may sound, to offer support and resources to refugees resettling in the United States. Under Donald Trump, though, the department is led by Scott Lloyd, who seems to have made it his #1 priority to make sure refugee and immigrant women and girls don’t get access to abortion services—up to and including the discussion of “abortion reversal.” (Under his predecessors, abortions were routinely granted to women seeking them.)
Lloyd has interfered in a number of these cases, blocking immigrants and refugees from getting abortions, even in cases of rape. In response to an abortion request from a 17-year-old girl who had become pregnant through rape, Lloyd wrote a patronizing report stating that he could not direct the office to “participate in killing a human being in our care.”
As justification, he concern trolled the hell out of the situation, expressing concern for the young woman by saying, “It is possible, and perhaps likely, that this young woman would go on to experience an abortion as an additional trauma on top of the trauma she experiences as a result of her sexual assault.” He also wrote that abortion was unfair to the fetus. “The child—the one who is destroyed—is not an aggressor,” he wrote. “The aggressor, again, was the rapist.”
(This, by the way, is the guy Trump’s Supreme Court Justice pick Brett Kavanaugh has famously sided with on issues of granting migrant women and girls access to abortions. Just a reminder to call your senators!)
Now, Mother Jones has released a report detailing Scott Lloyd’s anti-choice villain origin story. Apparently, he wrote a paper during his first year at a Catholic law school that was so over-the-top in its anti-abortion proclamations that a classmate held onto a copy for nearly a decade and a half.
In the essay, which was written for a class of about 80 students, designed around discussing each other’s papers, Scott explained that he had previously gotten a girlfriend pregnant. The woman insisted on getting an abortion. They argued, but he ended up paying for half, and he never got over it.
“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”
In the essay, he says that abortion is “the exact same thing” as the Holocaust, in that it is “the violent result of society assigning lesser value to a vulnerable segment of its population.”
Actually, he implies that it’s worse than the Holocaust, because “The Jews who died in the Holocaust had a chance to laugh, play, sing, dance, learn, and love each other. The victims of abortion do not, simply because people have decided this is the way it should be, not through any proper discernment of their humanity.”
(Are we just choosing to ignore the implication that the Nazi’s discernment of the humanity of Jews was “proper”? Okay, cool.)
Scott wrote that the Supreme Court ruled wrongly in Roe v Wade, and that he doesn’t support abortion in any case, even in instances of rape, incest, or health risks for the mother. He also wrote that women give up their “bodily integrity” when they choose to have sex. Really.
Strap in.
Roe v. Wade points to the mental and financial troubles a pregnant woman faces. It doesn’t speak highly of women to assume that they can’t handle the pressures of being a mother, and that they need a procedure that is so directly opposed to femininity. Ask any of the female deans or professors at our school how much abortion was a factor in their success as a female professional. Ask them if having a child spelled mental and financial ruin. I sort of doubt that abortion was a key step on their path to success. Is abortion a choice we should endorse in an effort to make women a more successful segment of society?
This paper was so outrageous that it prompted at least one student to save a copy of it. Multiple students called it a “manifesto.”
In other circumstances, one could maybe cut Lloyd some slack, thinking that he was overreacting to an early sexual experience and hoping that he’d grown out of that phase—except he clearly hasn’t. He’s obviously still fundamentally opposed to abortion; the only difference is that he now serves as the legal guardian to young immigrant and refugee women, some of whom come to the U.S. in search of an abortion. He hasn’t grown up; he’s just been put into a position of power where he can deny women the constitutionally sanctioned abortions he so despises.
(via Mother Jones, image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
I was browsing reddit not long ago and I came across this video:
how you feel about this pic.twitter.com/TTwR9mps1w
— grimey (@babygrimey) August 3, 2018
Watching it was a roller coaster experience. First, I thought, “OK, a dog, let’s see what happens.” Then I saw the spoon in its head and thought, “This boy is fluffy, let’s see how far its owner can push the spoon into its skin without hurting it. I bet it’s comically deep.” Then the spoon started getting uncomfortably in there, and a panic set over me. Then the dog’s whole face just slid right off, at which point I bathed in a wave of relief and realized this couldn’t be a real dog. Turns out it wasn’t an actual dog at all, but a hyper-realistic ice cream treat from a cafe in Taiwan (via Design Taxi).
About a month ago, J. C. Co Art Kitchen started serving the gelato puppies, which come in three dog breeds with different flavors for each, as The Straits Times notes: The Labrador is earl grey-flavored, the Pug is chocolate, and the Shar Pei has a peanut-like flavor. Each chilly dog dessert takes about five hours to make. The cafe is actually having a hard time meeting demand, as they can only make about a hundred per day.
#臭臭#雪兒
#豆豆
Yuki 
Could you bring yourself to lop this little guy’s head off? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Featured Image: Straits Times