Weakness, War, and a Different Drummer

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THE EXPANSE – Season 6 Episode 4 – SPOILERS

Vanessa Smythe Samer Salem, and Cara Gee

Josep (Samer Salem) has his left arm amputated by Michio (Vanessa Smythe).

Samer Salem will be Rafi in Rose Troche‘s upcoming romantic comedy MY FAKE BOYFRIEND, due to be released in June 2022.

Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) and her crew board one of the Free Navy‘s supply depots and find it unexpectedly guarded. After a battle to capture the place, there is an intense scene in which Michio (Vanessa Smythe) is forced to amputate Josep‘s arm after it is pinned under a crate. (She uses a knife, and one wonders why a laser cutter is not available, but Michio is clearly much better as a field medic than she is as a weapons control officer.)

Drummer decides enough is enough and broadcasts a challenge: “This message is for the traitor, the coward, Marco Inaros. You hunted me and mine, and still we are here, unbent, unbroken, unbowed. And you, you are nothing.” Continue reading →

Memorable TV Characters of 2021

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NORA BRADY (Marin Ireland) Y:The Last Man

Marin Ireland

Marin Ireland as Nora Brady

We get several versions of Nora, the first being a press aide promoting the ideas of a politician with with whom she entirely disagrees. The apocalypse makes her, first bewildered, then desperate, hopeless, and finally ferocious. At the end of the show’s first (and hopefully not last) season she realizes that the post-apocalyptic world in which she finds herself is where she was born to be and reverts to the name she was given at birth: Victoria. Showrunner Eliza Clark described Nora to SyFy Wire: “She’s stripped of the things that she thought her life was made of, and what her identity was made of. I think she feels oddly strange about being alone with her daughter. I don’t think that was ever in her plan. You see in the pilot that the kid wakes up from a nightmare and is calling for her dad. That scene, and Nora’s discomfort with motherhood continues in a way that I think is really exciting, and you don’t see a lot of that on television.” Continue reading →

Cara’s Dogs, Owain’s Cat, and RSR-G6

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THE EXPANSE – Season 6 Episode 3 – SPOILERS

Vieslav Krystyan

Owain and his cat, Tumang Shenyon, who seems to be the only feline ever to appear on THE EXPANSE.

The Free Navy has ceded control of Ceres to UN forces, but left the place with food for only three weeks, forcing the UN to come up with a way to feed its million residents. Monica Stuart (Anna Hopkins) is embedded with the UN forces there but manages to break away from her chaperones long enough to start a conversation (she speaks Belter fluently) with an old man named Owain (Vieslav Krystyan) and his cat. “Her name is Lucky Earther,” he tells Stuart. “She is fat and lazy, and I give her whatever she wants.” Just then a series of explosive devices, doubless planted by Inaros and company, detonate. Stuart’s next report might be delayed, but will almost certainly include input from Owain (who might have been named after Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Welshman to be Prince of Wales. Glyndŵr waged a long war of rebellion against England’s King Henry IV.) Continue reading →