SPLICE TODAY: Trading the Iron Curtain for the Iron Law

New article on Splice Today: How the Iron Law of Bureaucracy led us to the latest standoff between West and what remains of East. 

SPLICE TODAY: Forget Everything You Know About Schooling

My latest for Splice Today involves my epiphany about formal schooling after hearing so many professional educators fret about how much their students are forgetting during the break between when schools stopped classroom instruction because of the COVID-19 pandemic and when schools might reopen in the fall: Formal schooling is largely a waste of time and resources.

REBELLER: H.P. Lovecraft, The Color Out of Space and the Fear of Everything

In a piece originally written for the late Rebeller, I examine Richard Stanley's H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space and how both Stanley and Lovecraft deal with fear of the outsider:

The irony of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction is not that it works in spite of his well-documented racism; it’s that it works because of it.  

While Lovecraft's prejudices against black people and foreigners sometimes enter his works directly (see “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Horror at Red Hook”), they usually manifest in a more generic and universal way: a fear of a mysterious and existentially threatening other. This is what makes Lovecraft's works, especially his later works that formed what became known as the “Cthulhu mythos,” more palatable and more enduring. Fear and loathing of particular groups may be learned and depend on time and place, but fear of “the other” in a general sense is universal, and possibly at least partly instinctual. Like it or not, humans are essentially tribal, and a lot of human progress has depended on broadening our definition of who belongs to the tribe.

The trick today in adapting Lovecraft, especially for the movie screen, is to keep Lovecraft's fear of the other without keeping Lovecraft's particular targets.  

Director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) meets the challenge with Color Out of Space, his first narrative feature since his close encounter with 1996's cursed production The Island of Dr. Moreau and its temperamental stars, Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando.

Apart from dispensing with the British “u” of Lovecraft's original spelling, Stanley moves the setting to the present day. He also gives us something Lovecraft never would: an African American narrator played by British actor Elliot Knight as a hydrologist whose work takes him into the wild woods west of Lovecraft's witch-haunted Arkham, Mass.

In interviews, Stanley has said casting Knight is one way of confronting Lovecraft's racism head-on, but it does so unobtrusively. It's simply not a factor in the story, which is playing on a different level. It's a kind of fan service, where those of us in the know about Lovecraft's more unsavory traits can sit back and laugh at the joke Stanley has played on him.

It's ironic, then, that Stanley's Color Out of Space is more in the spirit of Lovecraft than most other Lovecraft-inspired movies, which get by with name-dropping Lovecraftian creations like Cthulhu, Dagon or Yog-Sothoth. (Fear not. Stanley drops a few names, too.) As fun as Stuart Gordon's Lovecraft movies are, for example, only 2001's Dagon and his 2005 Masters of Horror episode “Dreams in the Witch-House” really feel like Lovecraft.

Knight's Ward Phillips is surveying for a new reservoir, which brings him to the Gardner farm where Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) and his family have traded life in the city for the tranquility of raising alpacas in the sticks. Wife Theresa (Joely Richardson) is a stock trader recovering from cancer surgery and connected to her clients by dodgy satellite internet. Daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) is a practicing Wicca casting spells that fail to transport her back to civilization. Eldest child Benny (Brendan Meyer) spends his days getting high with the neighborhood squatter, Ezra, played by stoner specialist Tommy Chong. And Julian Hilliard of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House plays youngest sibling Jack.

From the start, this is a family under stress and just one crisis away from full dysfunction. The crisis arrives as a large glowing meteorite that crashes in the Gardners' front yard.

Within days, the meteorite has disappeared, but its unearthly color remains. Indescribable colors, like non-Euclidean geometry, may sound great in print, but they don't translate to the screen. Stanley settles on neon lavender. Anyway, it gets into the soil, into the plants and into the water that the Gardners and their alpacas drink.

From there, the color's malignancy proceeds in true Lovecraftian style, bringing madness, body horror, transformations, and death, all of which provide another chance for Cage, fresh off Mandy from the same producers, to go Full Nicolas Cage. If that's what you're here for, you will not be disappointed.

Stanley and co-screenwriter Scarlett Amaris drop hints of contemporary relevance — glimpses of pollution and climate change we're probably meant to take as akin to the color — but in the end the color is a different threat entirely. As Lovecraft would insist, human activity is trivial compared to the threats posed by a universe indifferent to human existence.

Medical science can fight Theresa's cancer, and Ezra's boondocks shanty can escape the prying eyes of the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism, but both are powerless against the color.

And what a color is it. Everything is beautifully shot by Steve Annis, whose previous work is in music videos. Color Out of Space is a bold standout in a genre that's come to be dominated by low lighting and monochrome.

For Lovecraft, the “colour of space” might have been a stand-in for a flood if immigrants he saw entering every aspect of society and corrupting it, but its power lies in that it could be any invader. Stanley's own spin on the formula is to make the Gardners invaders, too. Unlike the family of Lovecraft's story, Stanley's are transplants just as the color is.  

Nathan has a Baby Boomer infatuation with getting away from the rat race, but his way of going about it is to embrace the latest fad, alpaca ranching: Alpacas are “the animal of the future,” he tells his children. Taking over a house that used to belong to his estranged father, Nathan is the only Gardner who wants to be there. The rest would just as soon have stayed in the city, but they're all a disruptive influence in the woods west of Arkham, just like the color is.

Particular fears may change, but the instinct remains.  

Franklin Harris is an editor at The Decatur Daily in Decatur, Ala.

We don’t need another hero: Nearly 25 years later, Alan Moore’s Watchmen remains a stirring warning against absolute power

NOTE: I wrote this, according to the time stamp on the file, back in 2009. It was published by a libertarian student organization called Young Americans for Liberty. It doesn't seem to be otherwise webbed anymore, so here it is again:

You can tell a work of fiction is influential when other writers are still grappling with its implications nearly a quarter of a century later — usually with limited success.

Since its publication in the mid-1980s, Watchmen has been the poster child for pop art that transcends its origins. Having garnered accolades usually reserved for highbrow literary fiction, Watchmen is the reason we now refer to comic books as graphic novels. It birthed countless newspaper stories with unfortunate headlines like “Bam! Pow! Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore.” It changed the aesthetics of superhero comics, both for better and for worse. And this year, of course, it inspired a major motion picture that, if nothing else, perplexed audiences expecting the next The Dark Knight or Iron Man.

While Iron Man and The Dark Knight both deal with issues of power and corruption, they ultimately side with their vigilante protagonists. Superheroes, those movies tell us, are a good thing. Watchmen, however, remains admirably faithful to its source material and comes to a different conclusion. Its costumed crusaders are, at best, powerless when it comes to doing good and, at worst, make the world a far more dangerous place. If, as Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then unaccountable superhumans with near God-like powers are not necessarily a good thing to have around. Like a powerful central government that is able to dominate local governments or an imperial presidency that co-opts powers properly belonging to Congress, superheroes upset existing power structures, and not always in a good way. “Who watches the Watchmen?” It’s a question with no obvious answer.

It is little surprise, then, that libertarians have latched onto Watchmen, claiming it, along with the works of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, and the 1960s cult-favorite television series The Prisoner, as part of libertarianism’s artistic canon.

The graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, is set in an alternate 1985, in which the existence of superheroes has turned the United States into a virtual dictatorship. President Richard Nixon, having engineered the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, is in his fifth term, and corruption and chaos are rampant. As gangs terrorize the streets, the U.S. and the Soviet Union plunge toward seemingly inevitable nuclear annihilation.

The main point of divergence between our 1985, which turned out comparatively well, and the 1985 of Watchmen is the existence of Dr. Manhattan, the one costumed hero in Watchmen who possesses superhuman abilities. With Dr. Manhattan’s help, the U.S. wins the Vietnam War, a victory that Nixon uses to become all but president for life. The Soviets, meanwhile, regard Dr. Manhattan as such a threat that they’re willing to risk nuclear war to avoid U.S. domination. In Watchmen, the old adage “Better dead than Red” might as well be “Better Armageddon than American.”

Dr. Manhattan, in short, changes everything. As one character in the graphic novel observes, “It is as if — with a real live Deity on their side — our leaders have become intoxicated with a heady draught of Omnipotence-by-Association, without realizing just how his very existence has deformed the lives of every living creature on the face of this planet.”

Dr. Manhattan is the literal embodiment of amoral power. Following the accident that gives him his superhuman abilities, Dr. Manhattan gradually becomes more and more removed from his humanity. Time, for him, has no real meaning because he can see past, present, and future simultaneously. As a result, death has no meaning for him, either. As such, he is the perfect tool for the politicians who would seek to exploit him.

It’s also no surprise that the U.S. government in Watchmen maintains a monopoly on superheroes. A law bans costumed adventurers except for those who work for the state, namely Dr. Manhattan and the equally but more aggressively amoral Comedian. The only masked crimefighter working, illegally, outside of the system is Rorschach.

Of the characters in Watchmen, Rorschach comes closest to being a real libertarian, although Moore’s portrait of libertarianism isn’t exactly flattering. Rorschach is brutal, smelly, and, most importantly, psychotic. Moore bases him on The Question and Mr. A, two characters created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, an adherent of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Despite his antiauthoritarianism, Moore is still a man of the political left, and his Rorschach is a not-at-all-subtle critique of Ditko’s “right-wing” libertarianism.

Libertarians, however, tend to focus on the positive character traits hidden beneath Rorschach’s psychosis. Rorschach believes in truth and justice, and he is uncompromising in his pursuit of them, which is why he continues to work outside of the government even after the government criminalizes costumed vigilantism. He is, whether Moore likes it or not, the moral center of Watchmen, and readers — not just libertarians — gravitate toward him. Rorschach remains the book’s most popular character. Rorschach may be insane, but at least he sticks to his principles, even in the face of death.

Even as Moore’s Rorschach was capturing readers’ imaginations, Frank Miller’s daring interpretation of an old mainstay was doing the same, and for the same reasons.

Published at about the same time as Watchmen, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns covers many of the same themes and is no less influential. It casts a middle-aged Batman in the Rorschach role of uncompromising individualist and Superman in the Dr. Manhattan role of government stooge. Yet despite the shared dark tone of both works, the similarities between Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns end there. Moore’s only solution to the problem of Dr. Manhattan is for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth, leaving humanity to its own fate. Miller, however, has faith in superheroes, so long as it is the right superhero.

Miller’s Batman is a quasi-libertarian anarchist, a genius hero who, like the characters in Rand’s novels, uses his brain to thwart the brute, physical power of Superman and the state. And like the image of the student standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, Miller’s version of Batman as an ordinary man prepared to stand up to seemingly omnipotent power has endured, inspiring everyone from libertarians to politically apathetic fanboys to subsequent Batman writers.

The libertarian/Randian themes are even more explicit in Miller’s follow-up, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. In the sequel, Miller brings in Ditko’s The Question as a mouthpiece for Objectivism, of sorts. The difference here is that Miller’s version says, “I’m no Ayn Rander! She didn’t go nearly far enough!”

But can libertarians put their faith in even a libertarian superhero? The treatment of Batman post-Miller raises lots of red flags. Just as Miller’s Batman developed a contingency plan to take down Superman, Batman, as portrayed in more recent comics, has formulated plans to deal with just about any superhero who, for whatever reason, might go bad. Unfortunately, time and again, Batman’s plans have fallen into the wrong hands, with disastrous results. For example, in the recent series Countdown, Batman creates Brother Eye, an artificial intelligence to watch over all of Earth’s superpowered heroes and villains. Yet, as one might guess from Brother Eye’s Orwellian name, this ends badly when a covert government agency takes control of the A.I. for its own purposes.

As a new generation of comic-book writers picks up and runs with the ideas Moore and Miller first explored, it seems there is need for a libertarian critique of even “libertarian” superheroes. Ultimately, even superheroes who operate without government sanction, so as to preserve their independence and integrity, run into problems because they still serve a law-enforcement function. They’re still appendages of the state, if only unofficially.

Marvel Comics’ recent Civil War story arc illustrates the point. After a botched operation in which a team of young superheroes accidentally kills 600 civilians, the political leaders in Marvel’s fictional universe take a page from Watchmen. They pass a law outlawing all costumed superheroes except for those who agree to register with and work for the federal government. The Superhuman Registration Act splits the superhero community, with pro-registration heroes lining up behind Iron Man and anti-registration heroes backing Captain America.

Although it is never spelled out so explicitly in Civil War, the pro-registration side has a point. What are superheroes, anyway, except unauthorized, unaccountable law enforcement agents? Superheroes don’t obtain search warrants. They don’t read suspects their Miranda rights. If they screw up, they don’t face disciplinary action. And it’s almost impossible for a wronged party to sue them for misconduct. Just try serving a court summons to the Hulk. In short, all of the real-world problems associated with police misconduct are potentially worse when it comes to superheroes. They exist outside the rule of law.

Against that possibility, the Superhuman Registration Act seems, in libertarian terms, to be the lesser of two evils. Of course, as libertarians are fond of pointing out, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Any law that can be abused eventually will be abused. In our world, Republicans constantly pass laws they would never trust Democrats to enforce and vice versa. Each side, when out of power, complains that the other is abusing the powers of government. Yet when the sides swap places, the incoming party never repeals the laws that the other side abused.

In the Marvel Universe, Iron Man currently finds himself on the outside, on the run and wanted for crimes he didn’t commit. Meanwhile, the villainous Green Goblin, in his civilian identity of Norman Osborn, has become leader of the government’s registration effort. If there is any consolation, it’s that Iron Man may have learned his lesson. After all, he is one of the smartest characters in the Marvel Universe, which puts him leagues ahead of our real-world politicians.

For all their efforts, no one writing superhero comics has yet come up with an answer to Moore’s critique of superhero power. Moore’s own solution isn’t really conducive to writing ongoing superhero comics. He sends Dr. Manhattan packing. Dr. Manhattan decides to leave our galaxy — end of story. When all else failed, Moore opts for abolition, which is, of course, what one would expect of any anarchist, of either the left-wing or the libertarian, anarcho-capitalist variety.

Perhaps that is why Watchmen maintains its resonance with libertarians, despite Moore’s antipathy toward much of libertarian thought. Unlike Miller, Rand, Ditko, and others who gave us idealized libertarian supermen who could fly in and save the day, Moore takes a more radical, yet more realistic approach. His hero-turned-villain, Ozymandias, is named so as to evoke the image of the broken idol in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name. Essentially, Moore is telling us to put not our faith in idols, even if they’re wearing a smile and spandex.

The Watchmen movie and the renewed interest in the graphic novel couldn’t have been better timed. Several comic-book artists have taken to depicting President Barack Obama in superheroic terms. Alex Ross’ painting of the president striking a Superman pose emblazons posters and T-shirts. Spider-Man and Obama do the fist bump in a recent issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And for his part, the new president seems happy to play up his heroic image, as when he posed with the statue of Superman in Metropolis, Ill.

Whatever your politics, if you’ve grasped the message of Watchman, images like that ought to have you at least a little worried.

Review: 'To Charles Fort, With Love'

Going through old files, and here is the review I wrote (must have been in 2005) for Rue Morgue magazine of Caitlin R. Kiernan's story collection To Charles Fort, With Love.

SPLICE TODAY: Doomsday Was Yesterday

My latest for Splice Today is a look back at the 1979 Bible prophecy documentary The Late Great Planet Earth, based on Hal Lindsey's unlikely bestseller and hosted by a slumming Orson Welles. Nearly 40 years on, Lindsey's brand of Bible exegesis motivates the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, but his prophecies are all busts.

SPLICE TODAY: Characters vs. Trademarks

Entertainment companies want to reach out to an increasingly diverse and historically underserved audience. But in the age of remakes, sequels, and tentpoles, that rarely results in new characters. Instead it manifests in the laziest and most unsatisfying way possible: diversifying existing trademarks. My latest at Splice Today.

REASON: Captain American Exceptionalism

My latest for Reason is online: "Captain American Exceptionalism".

On Trumpism

By Franklin Harris

Trumpism is bullshit. That is to say Donald Trump, his bombastic proclamations, his haphazard policy pronouncements, and his supporters are bullshit.

I don’t mean bullshit in the usual sense of a crude insult. Nor do I mean it in the sense of magicians Penn and Teller, who on their Showtime television series referred to frauds and hucksters as peddling “bullshit,” rather than in terms that might lead to lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.

Rather, I mean bullshit in a precise, technical sense.

Ten years ago, Harry G. Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, published a slim little book called On Bullshit. Surprisingly, this philosophical essay became a best-seller. Frankfurt was on to something. He surveyed the landscape and saw bullshit.

The best way to summarize Frankfurt’s analysis is through his distinction between a bullshitter and a plain old everyday liar. They have different relationships with the truth.

A liar knows and cares what the truth is, because the truth is something to avoid. The bullshitter, however, doesn’t care about the truth. He is indifferent to it. For the bullshitter, the truth literally doesn’t matter. Sometimes he may even tell the truth, and that’s fine, too. But most of the time, he doesn’t. When you speak or write without regard to the truth, the odds are against being truthful.

Talk radio, website comment sections, and cable television are fertile ground for bullshitters. But bullshit on Trump’s scale is new to presidential politics. We’re used to politicians who simply lie.

Richard Nixon lied. Bill Clinton lied. George W. Bush either lied or was lied to and passed it on. Hillary Clinton is intimately acquainted with the truth and wants no part of it.

President Barack Obama lies, but sometimes he bullshits. Is “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” really a lie? President Obama would have said whatever he thought people wanted to hear regardless of its truth value. The only important thing was enacting the government program that would be his legacy. Regardless, Obama is not in Trump’s league when it comes to bullshitting. Compared to Trump, Obama is — as he himself might say — junior varsity.

Trump bullshits all the time, no matter the subject. Does he still believe thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Who knows? He said it, and he’s sticking with it. The truth isn’t something to avoid or embrace; it just doesn’t matter.

The same goes for illegal immigration. Trump speaks off the top of his head, calling upon half-remembered headlines and something he may have seen on TV. The details are unimportant because the truth is unimportant. All that matters is Trump says what he says with gusto, that he convinces his supporters he’s the fighter they longed for.

The news media can fact-check Trump and proclaim his pants on fire, but for Trump that’s just another baseless attack. Truth is irrelevant to the bullshitter. Trump gets that, so why can’t those losers at The Associated Press and The Washington Post?

If the polls showing Trump extending his national lead are to be believed, Trump has found a constituency eager for bullshit. He also has found room to operate. If a candidate isn’t beholden to the truth or trapped in a lie, he has true freedom. He becomes the uber-candidate, a candidate beyond mere truth and falsehood. The old rules don’t apply to him.

Trump supporters display the same lack of regard for truth. Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast interviewed Trump donors and found people like “the man who believes Trump has great intellect and his bold pronouncements are just showbiz.” They know Trump is bullshitting, and it’s part of his appeal. It may even be the key to his appeal. If so, it’s the answer to the question pundits and pollsters have asked themselves since Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in June and immediately claimed front-runner status, which he has yet to relinquish.

Trump is a bullshit candidate with bullshit ideas and bullshit supporters. As those of us not under Trump’s spell have feared, this presidential campaign is going to shit.

Franklin Harris is an editor and writer based in Alabama. His website is franklinharris.com, and he tweets at @FranklinH3000.

'Rowdy' Roddy Piper, RIP

Roddy Piper as Nada in John Carpenter's "They Live."

The passing of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper at the too-young age of 61 strikes surprisingly hard. Unlike others who have died this year — Leonard Nimoy and Christopher Lee among them — “Hot Rod” died too soon. It’s a fate he shares with too many stars and former stars of professional wrestling.

The matches may be scripted, but wrestling takes a physical toll, none more brutal than what wrestlers do to themselves to make it to the top of their profession.

Still, Piper’s sudden death was a shock. Just hours earlier he was tweeting away on his frequently ungrammatical but always entertaining Twitter account. For a guy who spent the peak of his wrestling career as a heel, Piper always seemed to be the nicest of guys when it came to his fans. And Piper had lots of fans, both in and out of wrestling.

While other wrestlers have come out of the ring to try their luck in movies, few have done it so memorably as Piper did. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have racked up more lead roles and a lot more money at the box office, but Piper will always have John Carpenter’s “They Live.”

As a wrestler, Piper was known as much for his mic talent as for his moves in the squared circle. The man had charisma to spare, and that came through just as well on the movie screen.

For me, personally, Piper came along at just the right time. One’s teens are the perfect time to fall in love with wrestling and cheesy movies, and Hot Rod was there for both.

Back in the dark ages of cable TV, when USA Network was really worth watching, a kid could watch Rowdy Roddy ham it up in prime time during WWF (not yet WWE) matches from Madison Square Garden. Then he could tune in late on the weekend to watch Gilbert Gottfried host Piper’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick “Hell Comes to Frogtown” on “USA Up All Night.”

That, my friends, was quality television.

Piper’s death hits my inner teenager pretty hard. Piper was comfort viewing. He played the bad guy, but he was like a best friend. He had your back.

Now the curtain comes down on Piper’s Pit one last time. Cue the bagpipes.

‘Doctor Who’ survives the wilderness

Paul McGann continues his adventures as the Eighth Doctor
in one of Big Finish Productions' audio dramas.

There was no real official theme, beyond the obvious, to this year’s Con Kasterborous, north Alabama’s annual “Doctor Who” convention. Yet had the convention’s organizers only thought of it, the theme could well have been “Doctor Who: The Wilderness Years.”

Four of this year’s celebrity guests played roles in keeping “Doctor Who” alive during the dark days between the classic series’ cancellation in 1989 and the revived series’ debut in 2005.

The guest of honor for the fourth Con Kasterborous, held earlier this month at The Westin Huntsville at Bridge Street Towne Center, was Paul McGann. McGann starred in the ill-fated 1996 “Doctor Who” TV movie, whose producers had hoped it would restart the series.

Two other con guests also appeared in the 1996 movie: Eric Roberts — as the Doctor’s arch foe, the Master — and Roberts’ real-life wife, Eliza, who played a supporting role.

McGann was arguably the most talented and accomplished actor to portray the Doctor up to that point (or possibly even since), and that’s no slight against his predecessors. McGann had previously played Anton in director Ken Russell’s 1989 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” (available streaming on Amazon Prime) and starred opposite Richard E. Grant in Bruce Robinson’s wry, must-see cult comedy “Withnail & I” (find a copy if you can).

Alas, the 1996 pilot was neither a critical nor a ratings triumph. Fans would have to wait another nine years for a successful reboot.

No one, however, blamed McGann. Maybe the script wasn’t up to snuff, maybe Eric Roberts overacted a bit — OK, more than a bit — and maybe the whole enterprise, being a U.S. co-production, was too “American” and not enough “British.” But McGann acquitted himself flawlessly. In just 90 minutes, he showed the world he could be an excellent Doctor if given a real chance.

As it would happen, that chance would come, just not in front of a camera.

That brings us to Con Kasterborous’ fourth crucial guest. Jason Haigh-Ellery founded Big Finish Productions in 1996, and it was Big Finish’s full-cast audio plays, along with novels from Virgin Publishing, that kept new “Doctor Who” stories coming during the wilderness years.

McGann returned to appear in many of Big Finish’s new “Doctor Who” stories, along with a series of new traveling companions, some of whom have themselves become fan favorites. And it was in the Big Finish audio plays that McGann’s Doctor — the Eighth Doctor — really came into his own.

Now that the revived “Doctor Who” has been around for 10 years and seen four new Doctors, it’s easy to forget what it was like not to have a new season of “Doctor Who” on television every year, much as the dark decade between the cancellation of the original “Star Trek” and the release of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” is now just a dim memory.

Not only did McGann’s Doctor get to have via the Big Finish audios all the adventures he never got to have on television, previous Doctors got in on the act as well. Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, who was never served well by the quality of scripts during his too-brief tenure, finally got to shine in the Big Finish stories, proving that Six wasn’t such a bad Doctor after all.

The Big Finish audios and Virgin novels were also a training ground for writers who would go on to work on the revived TV series. “Doctor Who” writers who cut their teeth on either the audios, the novels or both included Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and “Doctor Who” producer Russell T Davies.

Between McGann, Eric and Eliza Roberts, and Haigh-Ellery on the one hand and the 1,623 fans who came out to see them on the other, Con Kasterborous 2015 was a commemoration of those years when the fans kept “Doctor Who” alive, in spite of the BBC’s indifference.

“Doctor Who” is back on television now and more popular than ever, but Big Finish keeps putting out its excellent audio dramas and McGann keeps appearing in them, even though his Doctor finally did get a proper sendoff in a 2013 “Doctor Who” 50th anniversary short, “The Night of the Doctor.”

For the Doctor and his fans, those wilderness years paid off.

Forget ‘Genisys’; we need ‘Terminator: Exodus’

By all rights, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” should have been the end of the line. The machine apocalypse had been averted, the loop in time had been closed and the audience was left, quite unexpectedly, with a happy ending.

But if there’s one thing the Hollywood studios hate more than reasonable copyright laws, it’s happy endings. Leaving the audience wanting more is the same as leaving money on the table, and that just won’t do. So we got seven “Saw” movies in as many years. Hollywood will dish it out until you’re sick of it, and then some.

That’s why, despite the fact “Terminator 2” left no room for a sequel, 2003 brought us director Jonathan Mostow’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” which was all about that thing “Terminator 2” prevented happening. And that was just where the trouble started.

You might think Arnold Schwarzenegger taking time away to play the Governator of California would spare us yet another unnecessary “Terminator” installment, but you’d be wrong. The franchise hit its lowest point yet in 2009 with “Terminator: Salvation,” directed by “Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle’s” McG and starring “Avatar’s” charisma-challenged leading man Sam Worthington at the height of his inexplicable rise to fame.

With Schwarzenegger back to making movies, yet another “Terminator” sequel was inevitable. So we now have “Terminator: Genisys,” directed by Alan Taylor, whose other credits include “Game of Thrones” and Marvel’s most disappointing movie to date, “Thor: The Dark World.”

The good news is “Terminator: Genisys” is better than its two immediate predecessors. The bad news is that’s still not nearly good enough to justify its existence.

“Genisys” starts with the events leading up to James Cameron’s original “The Terminator.” That means we get to see John Conner (Jason Clarke) send his father Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to save his mother Sarah Conner (“Game of Thrones’ ” Emilia Clarke) from Schwarzenegger’s T-800 so that John can be born and lead humanity to victory over the machines.

Only this time when Reese arrives in 1984 Los Angeles, he doesn’t find the past we know. Instead he finds a Sarah who is prepared for both him and the T-800, as well as a second T-800 that was sent back to an even earlier point in time and programmed to protect Sarah. And that’s before the shape-shifting T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) from “Terminator 2” arrives — 11 years ahead of schedule.

It’s a premise that requires a lot of mostly nonsensical plot exposition. Unfortunately, there are few things more awkward than Schwarzenegger portraying a robot tasked by the script with explaining quantum physics and temporal paradoxes. Such things are better left to eccentric Time Lords.

Speaking of which, Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”) has what amounts to a cameo, no doubt meant to set up a larger role for his character in future unnecessary sequels.

Basically, humans and Terminators have jumped through time so many times they’ve managed to break time itself, which is as good a metaphor as any for what all this time hopping has done to the “Terminator” franchise. In other hands, “Terminator: Genisys” could have been a sly, tongue-in-cheek commentary on Hollywood’s financial dependence on sequels and remakes, always repeating itself with minor variations. But screenwriters Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis play it all depressingly straight, littering their script with callbacks to the other “Terminator” entries without a hint of irony.

The result is “Terminator: Genisys” plays like a greatest hits album, only the hits are all performed by cover bands. We’ve heard them before, and they were better the first time. Nothing in “Genisys” tops “Terminator 2’s” stunts, while Clarke and Courtney have the impossible task of following in the footsteps of Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, and doing so with inferior material.

The lesson here is if time travel ever is invented, it’s probably too dangerous to use. But if we do use it, we should send someone to the past to stop all these unnecessary “Terminator” sequels. With any luck, the Terminator won’t be back.

Mockingbird sequel kills a Finch

Flannery O’Connor famously dismissed Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a “children’s book,” which it is, obviously. But that’s only the half of it.

Many children’s books do their young readers a service, dispelling the illusions in which adults attempt to disguise their follies. Think of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” or “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Children who read those books come away with a healthy skepticism for the adult world’s duplicity. That’s a valuable lesson.

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” however, reads like warm, fuzzy nostalgia for a childhood that is more fantasy than reality, in which a beloved father figure comes across as something just short of a saint.

The movie version, in which the upright country lawyer Atticus Finch is played by Gregory Peck, only adds to Atticus’ larger-than-life allure. It won Peck an Academy Award, which should have been a warning, given Hollywood’s tendency to reward fantasies disguised as reality.

Lee’s novel doesn’t dispel illusions; it is the illusion. It sets up its readers for either crushing disappointment or imprisonment in a nostalgic fantasy world of their own making.

Thus came the shock and disillusion that greeted Lee’s accidental sequel — if we can call a book that was written first and then locked away a “sequel” — “Go Set a Watchman.”

In “Go Set a Watchman,” Jean Louise — “To Kill a Mockingbird’s” Scout, now all grown up — returns home to 1950s Alabama and a now aged Atticus, who we come to find out is a racist and none too happy with the new stirrings for integration and equal rights.

The Atticus Finch who was the perfect father and moral conscience of his community turns out to be just a man after all — a man of his time, and all the more flawed for it, looking back from Jean Louise’s now enlightened vantage point.

With all the suddenness and finality of Toto pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, “Go Set a Watchman” breaks “To Kill a Mockingbird’s” spell. Jean Louise’s younger self, the tomboy Scout, turns out to be an unreliable narrator, and once you realize that, there is no going back.

This is where trusting in a child’s naïveté has brought us. So, if we feel misled, we have only ourselves to blame.

No doubt many readers who grew up admiring Atticus Finch will tell themselves “Go Set a Watchman” doesn’t count. I sympathize. In some ways, it’s a lot like all the movie sequels I pretend don’t exist: the “Matrix” sequels, the “Highlander” sequels, the “Jaws” sequels, everything after “Terminator 2,” “Ghostbusters 2” and so on.

But in the case of “Go Set a Watchman,” there is one crucial difference: It’s not really a sequel. It’s the story Lee wrote first, even if it saw daylight last. In a way, its Atticus is the original, the genuine article, while the venerated Atticus of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the impostor.

“Go Set a Watchman” is the story Lee originally wanted to tell, the demon the first-time novelist had to exorcise. We got “To Kill a Mockingbird” only because her editor convinced her to put the demon back in the bottle. Thus, “Go Set a Watchman’s” flashbacks become Scout’s idealized childhood, which became Lee’s best-seller.

Lee wrote the truth, but her publisher convinced her to sell the lie, and generations of schoolkids have been taught it in class ever since.

Maybe in that lies the answer to the mystery of why Lee never, of her own initiative, published another book. She wrote two and saw readers fall in love with the story she originally had envisioned just as Scout’s falsified memories. Given the choice of the truth or the legend, she printed the legend, and everyone took it to be truth. That is a powerful and dangerous gift to discover one has.

None of that makes “Go Set a Watchman” the better book, the one that will now occupy space on all the required reading lists. But it is the more honest one.

Are the Dukes’ days numbered?

How you reckon them Duke boys are gonna get out of this one?

Well, them Duke boys have got themselves in a real heap o’trouble this time. How do you reckon they’re gonna get outta this one? They’re just spending their days the only way they know how, but that’s just a little bit more than Hollywood will allow.

“The Dukes of Hazzard,” long ago a staple of family television viewing, is now collateral damage in the culture war, and it’s all on account of that Confederate battle flag on the top of the series’ iconic 1969 Dodge Charger, the General Lee. After all, why react when you can overreact?

First, the consumer division of Warner Bros., which owns the series, said it would no longer license merchandise emblazoned with the Confederate flag, which means no more General Lee models and toys. Then TV Land abruptly dropped reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its schedule, drawing the ire of one of the show’s stars, John Schneider.

We should have seen it coming. Although it appears in a recent Autotrader.com commercial, the General Lee is shot entirely from low angles, so the spot where the flag should be is never visible.

This all comes as the Confederate flag in particular and reminders of the Confederacy in general are becoming as endangered as photos of Leon Trotsky in Stalinist Russia.

Even NASCAR, once a uniquely Southern sport, has turned on the battle flag, going so far as to ask spectators not to fly the Confederate flag at NASCAR races and offering to accept used Confederate flags in trade for the Stars and Stripes.

That went over about as well as you might expect. At Daytona, for the first race after NASCAR boss Brian France told fans to leave their Confederate flags at home, the infield was full of pickups and RVs decked out in Confederate colors. Tell some Southerners they can’t fly the battle flag and they might do it just to show you they darn well can — even if they might not do it otherwise.

Whenever the issue of the Confederate flag is raised, we go around in circles with the same old arguments about what the flag means. Is it a symbol of heritage, as its defenders say, or a symbol of hate, as just about everyone else says? If only it were that simple.

The problem with symbols is they don’t mean anything in and of themselves. They mean different things to different people at different times. The battle flag is no exception. If someone tells you the Confederate flag means heritage, he’s right. If someone else tells you it means hate, he’s right, too. And heritage and hate don’t even begin to exhaust all the possibilities.

That brings us back to “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Running for seven seasons from 1979 to 1985, the series came at the tail end of a period when the South embraced the romance of the outlaw. Movies such as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “White Lightning” turned bootleggers and moonshiners into heroes. A lesser-known entry in the cycle is 1975’s “Moonrunners.”

“Moonrunners” became the basis for “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which toned down the lawbreaking for family viewing, but just the same was an outgrowth of the outlaw South, which pitted honest outlaws just out to make an honest, if illegal, living against the same corrupt authority figures who in real life were the villains of the civil rights era.

Confederate flags atop Southern state capitols are a relic of 1960s Southern intransigence on civil rights. But the Confederate flag atop the General Lee is a symbol of something else — opposition to corrupt politicians who use the law to keep honest folks down, regardless of their race.

The Confederate flag is as complicated as the South itself. The South likes to think of itself as the Bandit, but it keeps voting for Sheriff Buford T. Justice. And while we Southerners love the backwoods glamour of bootleggers and moonshiners, Southern prisons — just as Northern ones — are filled with pot dealers, a disproportionate number of them black.

Maybe the period when the Confederate flag was an outlaw symbol was a brief window, one that has since closed. So, maybe we can’t do “The Dukes of Hazzard” today; even the movie version was 10 years ago. But that doesn’t seem like a good reason to consign the reruns to the memory hole.

Are you paranoid enough?

It seems appropriate that “The X-Files” will soon be returning to our TV screens, even if only for a limited engagement.

If you believe your eyes, recently released production photos showing Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) back in action confirm the six-episode “miniseries event,” scheduled to air in January, is really happening. Before you know it, Mulder and Scully will be back to chasing ghosts and unraveling conspiracies.

When “The X-Files’ ” original run limped to an end in 2002, the war on terror was just beginning. The idea that the government might have surveillance programs capable of spying on the phone calls and emails of every American seemed like just another of Mulder’s wild conspiracy theories.

That was before WikiLeaks, before Chelsea Manning and, most importantly, before Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents detailing the NSA’s sweeping domestic surveillance agenda.

Reading journalist Glenn Greenwald’s account of the Snowden revelations, contained in Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide,” is almost like getting caught up in an “X-Files” plot, only without the extraterrestrials. That there are no hints of extraterrestrial encounters in Snowden’s treasure-trove of incriminating NSA documents is probably a good indication that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it has better things to do than visit us.

“The X-Files” returns to a landscape where large-scale wrongdoing and coverups by secretive government agencies are pretty much accepted as a given.

It is a landscape eerily similar to that of the 1970s, when revelations of government misconduct, especially by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, forged a golden age of Hollywood thrillers.

If you weren’t paranoid, you weren’t paying attention. This was the age of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. It was also when the public first learned of COINTELPRO, an unwieldy acronym for Counter Intelligence Program. Via COINTELPRO the FBI waged a sometimes illegal campaign against domestic political organizations it deemed subversive — organizations both on the left and on the right. The FBI’s tactics involved infiltration, surveillance and, most worryingly, disinformation.

COINTELPRO came to light only when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office, took more than 1,000 classified documents and turned them over to the media. It was the Snowden leaks but with analog technology.

As far as Hollywood was concerned, this landscape was fertile ground for a decade of political thrillers, from “The Parallax View” to “Three Days of the Condor.”

Now the ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy thrillers are in bloom again. They sprout even among superhero movies, where “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” deals in secret governments within secret governments and spy networks that can be turned on innocent people with the flip of a switch.

It’s no surprise that Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” is in the early stages of being dusted off and updated for the 21st century by Skydance Productions, which is looking to adapt the story for television. Nor is it a surprise that “The X-Files” isn’t alone in bringing back the combustible mix of conspiracies and the otherworldly.

Netflix is prepping a series based on the “Montauk Project,” which is half science fiction and half urban legend, and takes in everything from secret experiments and time travel to aliens from space and Nikola Tesla. It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to paranormal conspiracies. And the strangest thing about it is it’s set to star Generation X “it girl” Winona Ryder.

A true conspiracy theorist might well wonder if the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex is churning out truly outlandish conspiracies just to make a buck off the public’s renewed interest or to make people more skeptical of the real conspiracies.

The KLF, the universe and everything

Depending how you look at it, JMR Higgs’ book “KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money” is either a book about the British pop band The KLF or it’s a book about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Or maybe it’s a book about how something may appear to be one thing while also appearing to be something else entirely.

It’s a story that begins in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and ends Aug. 23, 1994, on the Scottish island of Jura, where The KLF, then known as The K Foundation, burned their last 1 million pounds. According to an online exchange rate calculator I found, that amounted to more than $1.5 million at the time.

These two incidents — the death of a president and the burning of 1 million pounds — either have nothing in common or everything. The complex web of relations linking them are either the product of coincidence or something more or possibly both — again, depending on how you look at it.

Both incidents are mysteries. Theories about the Kennedy assassination are endless. Theories about why The KLF burned 1 million pounds are less so but usually amount to “because they’re A-holes.”

Needless to say, Higgs has not written a typical music biography. But The KLF were not your typical band. “KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money” is a detective story in search of a motivation for something The KLF themselves cannot explain.

The KLF were Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, and while they were far more popular in the United Kingdom than in the United States, they greatly influenced music on both sides of the Atlantic, making contributions to hip hop, dance and techno, and helping invent chill out.

The KLF recorded under other names, too. Sometimes they were the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. At other times they were simply the JAMs. They had their biggest hit while as the Timelords.

Here we see the first clues. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu leads us to “The Illuminatus! Trilogy” by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a cult sci-fi novel that mixes occultism, conspiracy theories, joke religions and cutting edge physics into one of the most mind-bending works of fiction ever conceived. The Timelords is a reference to “Doctor Who,” and the Timelords’ hit single, “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” is a novelty cover of the “Doctor Who” theme.

Wilson and his ideas about how we perceive the world are central to Higgs’ story. So, too, is modern neuroscience, which sees the human brain as mainly occupied with finding patterns, even where they may not exist. Higgs’ pattern brings in acclaimed comic book writer Alan Moore and Discordianism, a parody religion co-created by Kerry Thornley. It also features a cameo appearance by “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams, by way of Adams having written episodes of “Doctor Who.” Discordianism is a major factor in “Illuminatus!” and Thornley knew Lee Harvey Oswald, which leads to the JFK connection. JFK was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, and “Doctor Who” first aired the next day, Nov. 23, 1963. The number 23 is a holy number in Discordianism, and Wilson plays up the significance of 23 in “Illuminatus!” What does this have to do with The KLF? Nothing. Or everything.

As I said, Higgs has not written a typical music biography. But what he has written is fascinating and consistently funny. It may be the first music bio where knowing or caring about the band isn’t necessary, or even relevant. Higgs’ method is like that of a Douglas Adams character whom Higgs doesn’t mention: Dirk Gently, a “holistic detective” who investigates cases by first assuming that everything in the universe is connected. To solve the KLF mystery, you start with the JFK mystery.

Is it coincidence KLF and JFK share two letters while J and L are mirror images of each other?

But there are traps along the way. Once someone tells you the number 23 is everywhere, you start seeing it everywhere. It’s a glitch in our brains’ pattern recognition software. It could have been any number. For Adams, the number was 42, his nonsense answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Still, was Adams’ choice of 42 mere chance?

Forty-two and 23 are related: 4 plus 2 equals 6, while 2 times 3 also equals 6. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. But don’t panic. It probably means nothing.

Good night, Sweet Prince (of Darkness)

Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in 1973's "The Wicker Man."

When you live to the ripe old age of 93, you collect a lot of stories — both the ones you tell and the ones others tell about you.

In the week since news of his death became public, people who knew him, and many who didn’t, have told a lot of stories about Sir Christopher Lee. Lee appeared in roughly 250 films yet never quite escaped his earliest starring role as Dracula in Hammer Films’ 1958 movie “Horror of Dracula.”

My favorite Christopher Lee story goes like this: Asked by an interviewer about his still-classified exploits during World War II, Lee sat forward conspiratorially and asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

Excitedly, the interviewer said, “Yes,” to which Lee, sitting back in his chair and smiling as only he could, with a combination of menace and charm, replied, “So can I.”

Lee’s wartime exploits, some reportedly involving Winston Churchill’s clandestine special ops force, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” and his postwar Nazi-hunting activities would be enough for most men. You could call that a job well done, a life well lived, and write your memoirs. But Lee was only in his early 20s when the war ended. He was just getting started.

It’s for his second act — as an actor — that we will remember him. It’s not the stories he told — no matter how well — nor the war stories he lived that will endure, but the stories he helped bring to life on the screen. In a movie career that spanned nearly 70 years, he went from “uncredited spear carrier” in Sir Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” to Saruman the White in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies. In between he was Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy and Fu Manchu (all roles also played by Boris Karloff), as well as Bond villain Scaramanga in “The Man with the Golden Gun,” “Three Musketeers” antagonist Rochefort, lecherous Russian holy man Rasputin, and countless other silver screen adversaries.

While somewhat resenting his villainous typecasting, Lee also realized early on that the bad guys got all the good lines — except when they didn’t get any lines at all.

Lee claimed he played the part of Dracula mute in the 1966 sequel “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” because the lines he was given were terrible. (For his part, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster claimed not to recall having written Dracula any lines in the first place.)

The true mark of a great actor isn’t how good he is with great material, or even good material, but how good he is with lousy material. By that standard, Lee was one of the greatest who ever lived.

Even without lines in “Dracula: Princess of Darkness,” Lee hisses and snarls and dominates the screen. Just as his dear friend and frequent co-star Peter Cushing did for the original “Star Wars,” Lee brings menace and gravitas to its prequels, which need all the menace and gravitas they can get. He took his roles, however outlandish, seriously, and when he is on-screen, so do audiences.

Occasionally, Lee’s perseverance paid off and he’d get a great role, such as his own favorite, Lord Summerisle in the 1973 version of “The Wicker Man,” or Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” But great role or not, he was a professional, bringing to his craft the same discipline that must have kept him alive during World War II.

Lee may not have won any Oscars, but he racked up the Guinness world records: most screen credits for a living actor (in 2007), tallest actor in a leading role (tied with Vince Vaughn), actor in most films featuring a sword fight, oldest video game voice actor, and most connected living actor (meaning Six Degrees of Christopher Lee is a lot easier to play than Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon).

The man of many roles was also a man of many contrasts. He was a British aristocrat often cast as the shadowy foreigner. He was prickly and reserved, yet warm and generous with those who got to know him. He sang opera, then later, in his 80s, recorded a heavy metal concept album. And he was a serious man who could become a babbling fanboy upon meeting his hero, J.R.R. Tolkien.

For most of the world, though, Christopher Lee was an unforgettable actor who often made even the most forgettable movies worth watching. And for an actor, there’s probably no better life story.

‘Hannibal’ becomes a fairy tale

NBC’s “Hannibal” is many things: a horror story, a police procedural, a dark comedy, even a cooking show — albeit a cooking show where sometimes the main ingredient puts up a fight.

I, for one, approve of the entrée getting a fighting chance. That’s something we couch potato foodies haven’t seen since Food Network stopped showing reruns of the original — and vastly superior — Japanese version of “Iron Chef.”

Who, having seen it, can forget Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai’s battle to the death with an octopus?   There is something primal about a chef literally wrestling with his main course and, in the end, producing a dish that looks, as the cliché goes, too good to eat. Sakai, nicknamed “the Delacroix of French Cuisine,” after the French painter, often produced just such dishes.

So does Dr. Hannibal Lecter, portrayed with sinister serenity by Mads Mikkelsen (“Casino Royale”). Maybe there is a warning in that. On “Hannibal,” you never know whom you might be having for dinner. Then again, when has “looks too good to eat” ever stopped anyone?

The best — and best looking — show on television opens its third season with Hannibal and his former therapist and colleague (now accomplice?) Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) having escaped to Europe and assumed new identities.

When last we saw FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), his boss Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), Hannibal had left them all for dead, and the first episode keeps their fates simmering in suspense. Showrunner Bryan Fuller has elected instead for a palate cleanser, setting up Hannibal and Bedelia’s new status quo.

With the change of setting, “Hannibal” becomes something new, too. Now it’s a fairy tale, in addition to everything else it is. Eddie Izzard’s wonderfully batty Dr. Abel Gideon, whom Hannibal ate last season, one severed limb at a time, tells Hannibal as much during a flashback.

“Let it be a fairy tale,” Hannibal replies as he pulls back a curtain to rejoin the story in the present, where the fairy tale is a grim twist on “Beauty and the Beast.”

After a brief sojourn in Paris, Hannibal and Bedelia land in Florence, Italy, where Hannibal assumes the identity of a Dr. Fell, as well the late doctor’s position as a resident scholar of Renaissance Italy.

But Hannibal is becoming restless and Bedelia increasingly apprehensive. Hannibal has barely killed anyone since arriving in Florence, but clearly that is about to change. One of his jealous colleagues is practically begging for a dinner invitation. Hannibal now kills for aesthetic reasons.

As Bedelia, Anderson is doing her best work to date, and her elevation to series regular — at least as long as her character survives — makes a great show even greater. As for Mikkelsen, he is simply the definitive Hannibal Lecter, which is the highest praise I can summon.

Fuller’s breaking of the fourth wall with Hannibal’s curtain reveal shows he is confident and fully in control of his story. It also shows him playing with themes that run through Thomas Harris’ Lecter novels. The idea of becoming something else is central to both “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Red Dragon.” As “Hannibal” the series reenacts “Hannibal” the novel, in all of its over-the-top, Grand Guignol glee, some sort of transformation is inevitable.

In Florence, everything is bright and colorful. The show reserves the clinical, desaturated look — so prevalent at times in the previous seasons — for the flashbacks. Fuller is painting in broader strokes.

Thanks to the quirks of intellectual property, “Hannibal’s” producers have the rights to all of the Lecter novels except “The Silence of the Lambs.” That means no Clarice Starling. Fuller has adapted by moving up the Italy story line and creating characters to fill the Clarice-shaped voids. Anna Chlumsky’s Miriam Lass is Clarice as trainee. Bedelia is Clarice at the end of “Hannibal” the novel. Fans dissatisfied by where Harris left things are finally getting a resolution, of sorts.

So far, it has all come together beautifully. That almost qualifies as a fairy tale ending.

Victorians cast a long shadow

The cast of Showtime's Victorian horror series "Penny Dreadful" season 1.

They lived more than 100 years ago, but our Victorian forebearers cast long shadows.

Every so often, we get a TV show set in a recent decade, say the 1960s, and TV critics go mad for it. But the Victorian era (1837-1901), especially the latter half of it, seems quietly ubiquitous on our screens of late, much as it was 50 years ago, when Westerns dominated the airwaves.

This, however, is a proper Victorianism, a Victorianism of the city and not of its frontier periphery.

Last month, Showtime’s excellent horror series “Penny Dreadful” returned for its second season. “Penny Dreadful” is the latest from the sub-genre of Victorian literary mash-ups, which include Kim Newman’s recently reissued “Anno Dracula” novels and Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” comics.

(Fox turned “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” into a movie so bad it drove Sean Connery into retirement, and just last week news leaked that Fox wants a mulligan on the property. If at first you don’t succeed, and so on.)

Like its predecessors, “Penny Dreadful” weaves its narrative out of threads of late-Victorian fact and fantasy: “Dracula,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Jack the Ripper — and some pre-Victorian “Frankenstein” just for a bit of Romantic contrast.

But this would be trivia if “Penny Dreadful” were an isolated incident. It isn’t. BBC America has “Ripper Street.” NBC recently tried to give Dracula a makeover by turning him into Nikola Tesla. And Sherlock Holmes is always with us — doubly so at present, with the BBC’s “Sherlock” and CBS’s “Elementary,” which both transport the Great Detective from gaslit streets to Internet cafes.

When Holmes first met Dr. Watson, he greeted the doctor with, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and indeed Watson had just returned from a war in Afghanistan. No wonder Sherlock Holmes adapts so easily to the 21st century; even the historical particulars are still current.

Holmes isn’t alone. Whenever Hollywood returns to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” or H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” or some other Victorian best-seller, it’s as likely to bring the story forward to the present as leave it where it was. Wells’ Martians have invaded Earth three centuries straight, and may well do so again in the next.

You don’t usually see this with works and characters from other periods, excepting the occasional updated fairytale or gimmicky out-of-time, out-of-place stagings of Shakespeare. (“Richard III” set in a thinly veiled Nazi Germany? Why not?)

The human condition hasn’t changed much throughout history, although we’re slightly less violent nowadays, arguably. But the Victorians were the first people really like us — and by “us” I mean 21st century inhabitants of the small-l liberal, small-d democratic, small-c capitalist West.

Caricatured as pearl-clutching prudes both by those who like to feel superior and by those who’d like society to “go back” to the caricature, the Victorians were the first moderns.

The Victorians, both in England and the United States, had the first sizable middle class. They had the first mass-produced popular culture in the form of novels and magazines. They ordered from catalogs. They were wooed by advertisers. They consumed lots of pornography, then felt guilty about it and took cold baths. Their doctors turned every bad mood into a disease, especially when it came to women patients. They invented our modern notions of childhood and the serial killer.

It all seems familiar because it’s so like us. We have Netflix and iTunes instead of plays and the opera, but apart from the new wrinkle of mobile phones and instant communication, we’re little changed from the Victorians. They struggled with war and peace, science and faith, sex and family,  race and ethnicity much as we do.

With “Penny Dreadful” and the like, we continue to mine the Victorian era. It’s as far back as we can go and still feel we’re with people we really get. The main difference is the value of the penny.

Mad Max goes to Frogtown

With its minimal plot and intricately staged mayhem, George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is an action movie made into a Las Vegas hotel’s resident show. Think of it as Cirque du Apocalypse.

Cars, motorcycles and tanker trucks — all outfitted for war — spin, jump and collide as they speed across a landscape rendered cinematic by nuclear holocaust. This goes on for roughly two hours.

Miller’s return to the world he last visited in 1985’s “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” is a feature-length car chase executed with uncommon visual flair. At age 70, Miller retains his sense of style.

Also, an estimated budget of $150 million will buy you a lot of crashes and explosions.

The lavish praise most critics have heaped upon “Fury Road” is understandable, as is the moviegoing public’s relative indifference. Any action movie that isn’t in the style of Michael Bay’s poorly shot, badly edited and generally incoherent mode of filmmaking is a welcome respite. Critics have rewarded Miller accordingly, with a 98 percent fresh score on the Rotten Tomatoes meter.

Most moviegoers, however, seem content with the usual Bayhem, and they aren’t much interested in a film franchise that went dormant before most of them were born.

That doesn’t bode well for those of us who’d rather Hollywood bankroll a better class of action movie, which is what “Mad Max: Fury Road” is — a better class of action movie.

It isn’t just that Miller is a better action director than virtually anyone else handed a $150 million budget nowadays. It’s that his deceptively simple story leaves us with a lot of ideas to unpack.

Max, played by Tom Hardy, is a supporting character in his own film. With his story already told in the three previous installments starring Mel Gibson, Max is now our entry point for other characters’ stories. In “Fury Road,” those other characters are Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa and the women she is helping to escape lives as sex slaves and broodmares to monstrous cult leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne).

“Fury Road” will seem familiar to aficionados of post-apocalyptic cinema. The film’s plot is a reworking of 1987’s “Hell Comes to Frogtown,” starring pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper (“They Live”). Both movies feature a reluctant hero forced by circumstance to help women escape from a hideous mutant’s harem, and both wear their sexual politics on their sleeves.

While “Hell Comes to Frogtown” plays the war between the sexes for laughs, “Fury Road” plays it straight, which can be jarring for a movie in which so much else is deliberately absurd.

Immortan Joe and his followers are cartoon characters. Wearing a face mask that renders his speech a bellowing mumble, Immortan Joe might well be a parody of Hardy’s Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Joe and his “war pups” ride into battle spurred on by thundering drums and a screaming electric guitar — a leather-and-chains update of the fife and snare that led 18th century armies into battle. It’s a send-up of hyper-masculinity, contrasted with the earnest feminism of Furiosa and the other escapees.

“Fury Road’s” feminism is unavoidable. It’s in the title and in Furiosa’s name, which both recall the Furies of Greek myth — female spirits of vengeance.

Yet the feminism of “Fury Road” isn’t the feminism currently in fashion in academia or at websites such as Jezebel. “Fury Road” takes as given innate differences between men and woman that can’t be explained by alleged patriarchal social conditioning. In “Fury Road,” men are naturally more aggressive and women naturally more nurturing. Furiosa has shaved her head and become more physically masculine to survive, but she seeks to escape to the matriarchal paradise of her childhood, where women safeguard seeds and hope to restore life to the barren wasteland.

The movie’s climax then adds another wrinkle. Matriarchy ends up being just as much an illusion as patriarchy. In the end, men and women work together, and women redeem the civilization men have already started to rebuild from the rubble of the one they destroyed.

Action movies this simple yet this layered are rare. “Fury Road” is a film to be emulated, not a road less traveled.