Stranger Things: Season 5, Chapter 5- Shock Jock

"There are no happy endings, Jane. Not for us."

We begin (incidentally, Frank Darabont of Walking Dead fame directs), despite the awesome revelations about Will last episode, with the gang in a downbeat mood, positive and lovely that Joyce may be; Vecna has all the kids. This is bad on the surface as Vecna's plans are not at all good, but there's a definite subtext to Henry and it's a creepy one, one of grooming, noncery and such vile things which, sadly exist. So, yeah, let's actually release the Epstein files, hmm? Wouldn't it be lovely if they were leaked by someone beyond Dementia Donnie's reach.

We get reminded of Lucas' theoretical 6 November "deadline", which is at once diegetic and non-diegetic. So things are high stakes. Plus we now have, after last episode's events, Kali, whose own story is pretty damn bleak... Sarah Connor needed her blood to give to captive pregnant women in order to make more "numbers". And, this time around, the season is airing at a time when we can truly believe that the US government is evil, what with CECOT, the state terrorists of ICE, and all that. If Vecna is a metaphor for vile abuse, Sarah Connor is a metaphor for MAGA fascism.

Still, we have plans by the gangs. Joyce has faith in her awesome son, and wants him to go on the attack against Vecna, and this ends up happening by means of... well, the reason for the episode title. Meanwhile, Dustin plans to break through the wall in the Upside Down by means of a Death Star analogy. What could possibly go wrong?

The end is bleak. Max and Holly plot their escape, with some surprising help from Derek, but the first attempt never succeeds in such cases, and they end up in Vecna's clutches. Yes, Will attacks Vecna and helps them escape, but he's ultimately defeated, and rendered as comatose as Max is. Even worse, Dustin has a terrifying realisation...

This season is simply on fire, this episode as much as any, and I'm really liking the subtext.

The Walking Dead- Season 1, Episode 1: Days Gone Bye

"Is this real? Am I here?"

So, er... about me finishing off Buffy and Angel before I start anything else? I'm on it, really I am, but we have a missing disc from Angel season four that I suspect to be 200 miles away and... Mrs Llamastrangler and I just happened to start watching The Walking Dead. So I might as well blog it.

This is an extraordinary looking piece of television and, while pilot episodes are never the best ones as they have so many jobs to do and are setting the stage for good stuff later, you can tell that this is going to be a well-written, well-acted and thoughtful take on the zombie apocalypse

I watched Teachers back in my university days at the turn of the millennium, so first impressions of seeing him as a sheriff in Georgia with an accent to match are bloody disconcerting, but once I'd got past that barrier it was easy to appreciate his strengths as a sympathetic everyman, a hero with problems in the form of a rocky marriage- very much a hero in the Marvel mound; being a trained cop is very much a superpower after the zombie apocalypse.

Yes, this origin story, with Rick waking from a coma to find that the zombie apocalypse has happened, is more than a little Day of the Triffids, but it's also a neat short cut; we all know the zombie tropes, which also helps. It's an extra-long opening episode, but a lot of its work has already been done with the tropes being familiar. Including the cop show stuff at the start, which was pure Dukes of Hazzard.

The only possible criticism I have of this is to ask who carries a match in the twenty-first century, but that's a minor quibble. And I have to raise an eyebrow at both Rick and exposition man Morgan are American characters played by British actors, but this is brilliant, constantly and gradually revealing the true horror of the situation. We end with Rick trapped inside a tank, surrounded by the extremely large zombie population of Atlanta...