Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 3/14/25

Snakes and Lagers edition

As all members of the NTAB staff prepare for St. Patrick’s Day, I would like to remind all bunker residents and affiliate members of the extended North Texas Apocalypse Bunker family to please refrain from drinking in public this weekend. It will be full of people who only come to the bar once a year, having forgotten what jackassery they got up to last year, and they will be pounding Irish whisky in the most amateurish way possible, which is to say, they will be drinking like fish with no thought of consequences. You don’t need that to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. If we’re being real about it, I doubt St. Patrick would cotton much to the idea of a bunch of lapsed Catholics and other heathens and hypocrites getting pole-axed drunk in his name.

Then again, maybe we could all use a stiff drink and bang on the ear, eh? This may be the cutest St. Patrick origin story ever: Story of Saint Patrick - Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Who cares what it gets wrong? That little girl could tell me I’m going to die in two weeks and I’d go, “Aww, aren’t you just the cutest li’l Angel of Death ever?!”

LOST Really did a Number on Me

I keep wanting to talk about Yellowjackets, but I find myself unwilling to start the conversation. I honestly don’t know where to start with that show. Picking at one corner often leads nowhere, and every new episode answers a question and asks another. This is all part of that wonderful TV Renaissance we’re supposedly living in, but I think those halcyon days are behind us now.

The start of the 21st century looked like it was going to be a New Frontier for television. We were all talking about The Sopranos and The Wire and The Shield and there was this sense that we were getting something new and different. The premium channels had been flogging original shows for years, but they tended to be lighter in fare. But something broke open when The Sorpranos hit and everyone started chasing that high, none more so than the networks.

But they were slow to change, of course. So many shows started up with great promise and then flamed out on the way back down to Earth, Icarus-style. We all remember how Firefly was treated before dying an ignominious death. Freaks & Geeks didn’t even make it to 2001. And the less said about Heroes, the better. They clearly had no idea what they wanted or how to go about doing it. I don’t think there’s a term for when you keep changing your premise and your plot from one season to the other; “moving the goalposts” is taken already. But that’s what Heroes did and man, did it not work.

That was not the real problem, however. No, I’m talking about LOST.

I think LOST was part of the last gasp of “must-see TV”, because by that time, the Internet had evolved to the point where message boards were live-watching with commentary, and seconds after the show was over, people were online, cutting up the episode into seven second increments and sifting through them all in a valiant effort to figure “it” out. It was a communal exercise; it was where the fans were hanging out, and of course, it was that way for all of the genre shows in the early aughts.

That concentration of people, all talking about the show, must have been heady stuff for the creators, because, if you were lucky, and if you asked the right question in such a way as to catch the eye of one of the writers or producers, they might deign to answer you in the ongoing discussion. That felt like you were praying to Zeus and then he answered you with lighting in the town square.

It's no surprise then, that early discussions of LOST in season one were particularly heated, as first the hatch was discovered, and then the numbers, etc. Coupled with the teaser for the show wherein the treetops shook and we heard a gruesome groaning bellow from the treeline, followed by the logo for the show, leading me and a bunch of other folks to assume that the LOST was followed by WORLD, because the only thing that shakes treetops is dinosaurs moving through them.

But that wasn’t it, either, was it? Early on in the online fan spaces, someone threw out a somewhat blasé comment in answer to the question about early theories, and he said they were all already dead, and this was their hell. He provided a few examples, and then one of the guys, I can’t remember if it was Cuse or Lindeloff, waded in and said, “Nope, it’s not that, you’re far off the mark, thanks for playing, we promise, we know what’s going to happen and it’s gonna blow your mind!”

With that out of the way, we all settled in like Internet Sleuths to collect new clues, ponder revelations, and get to know and love most of the characters. I still say “Brother” like Desmond did, you know, “broothah?” I wasn’t as active on the message boards, but other friends of mine were, and we’d often discuss the new theories away from the boards, because we didn’t want to wait for other people to chime in.

Over the years, some newcomer would wander into the fan space and ask, innocently, “Hey, have we considered the idea that they may all be in Purgatory?” They were then shouted down by the fans, who insisted that, whatever it was, it sure wasn’t an afterlife, because “they said so.” They did, and really, why would they lie? We’re all friends, here, right? Online? In this space?

The truth is pretty mundane. They may have had an ending in mind, at the start, but they had no idea how they were going to get there. Primarily because the show had only been greenlit for two seasons. ABC still didn’t think they had a hit, despite Sawyer blowing up as the new badboy crush of the summer, and marketing setting up all of this ancillary merchandise you can buy, and websites you can go to, and phone numbers to call, all of which was supposed to give intrepid sleuths new clues as to what the hell was going on with the Dharma Initiative, what’s up with “The Others?” and Ben Linus? And all of the nutty bits and pieces that seemed to mean something to someone, but we just lacked the context—that one missing piece of the puzzle that was going to be the “AHA!” moment when we snapped it into place.

They were writing to the season finale, not to the overarching plot—a term I use very loosely, because if we’re being honest about it, LOST moved its goal posts several times in the course of the show. What makes it all the more galling is that we kept drinking the Kool-Aid, despite evidence to the contrary. They made a promise, tacitly, if nothing else. They named the show LOST and tricked us into watching it. They tricked me with the teaser, and when we found out that the smoke monster was chains? What the hell, man? They told us it wasn’t an analogy for Purgatory, or Heaven, or any kind of afterlife, and then they leaned on that crutch (yeah, I’m talking about Locke, among others) for the rest of the show!

To me, if always felt like they lied about their premise in order to try and create a twist-at-the-end Twilight Zone kind of finale that they didn’t earn and cheated to get.

In a real fit of synchronicity, unlike any of the bullshit thrown around in LOST, BuzzFeed (remember them?) posted an article from one of their intrepid reporters just yesterday that defended the LOST ending by telling us we weren’t smart enough to get it. What she gets wrong is that it wasn’t the ending that bothered us; rather, it was the deceit from the showrunners that we all objected to, especially when the show pivoted away from all of the fascinating little mysteries they used for five seasons to keep us watching, all while insisting that the island wasn’t a metaphor for purgatory, or an afterlife, or any of that nonsense.

Which brings me back to Yellowjackets, on Showtime. Now in its third season, the show has covered a lot of territory, and it has introduced a number of quasi-mystical plot points without much of an explanation. So far, they are leaning heavily into the idea that their crashing in the wilderness was magical, and the things they are dealing with are magical in nature. Of course, we have two narratives, here, right? The present day, wherein they are all seriously messed up adults, presumably from their ordeal of being marooned in high school, and the flashback, wherein we see all of the weird and messed up stuff they are dealing with as teenagers marooned after a plane crash.

Are any of y’all watching the show? It’s got a great cast, and it’s got an interesting idea, if a bit worn-down by Lord of the Flies, which is clearly what they are going for. I’m worried that they are going to do a Lord of the Flies ending as well, right up to the beautiful pull back from the kids dressed as savages. It’s just obvious, and if they are going that route, it’s because they think no one has read the book in thirty years. They may be right.

I really want to invest a little more of myself in the show, but I have a Charlie Brown-amount of anxiety that Lucy (the showrunners) are going to yank the football (the ending) out from under me (hah hah, you dumb bastard, it wasn’t magic, it was whatever else we decided it to be at the last possible second) and leave me out of breath, on my back, swearing to never again try to kick the damn football. If they are trying like hell to keep things interesting with supernatural goings on, only to have the finale be a mundane, psychological or natural occurrence, I will at least have been spared the outright lying to my face that they weren’t gonna do a Lord of the Flies thing. But it’s still disingenuous storytelling.

We are owed an ending to your story, whatever it may be. You’ve invited us to your comic, your book, your movie, your tv show, etc. You’ve created hooks, a narrative, some interesting characters, the works. Your responsibility as the storyteller is to bring the narrative home. It would be nice if you did so in a way that was pleasing and surprising, but we know that a lot of genre fans don’t want novel and unique, they want the same thing, over and over again, so I guess predictable is okay, too, as long as we enjoyed the ride. All of that should happen without you feeling like you need to trick us. Conversely, having contempt for the audience is just as bad.

Not for nothing, but that’s why The Sopranos series finale was bullshit, too.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: Before this week’s review, we’d like to register a formal complaint to HBO for their lack of thoroughness in describing the content of the season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones.

Here’s what the episode purported to contain.

The aforementioned brief nudity. Male side-ass.

And here’s what the content warning skipped right over: horrifying Civil War violence, of which there were buckets.

Being as how we are all adults over here, it’s a minor point, but for some people, gore and flailing bloody limbs and exit wounds is more of a concern than fat male side-ass.

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Daredevil: Born Again (Disney)

Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio reprise their roles as Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk, with each man trying to rebuild their lives after tragedies, only to find themselves locked back into a collision course with one another.

I always knew this day would come. Okay, maybe not this particular day, but how many cameos does Cox have to make in other MCU projects before you make more Daredevil episodes? My initial frustration with how the Netflix series was handled, and then mis-handled, has been somewhat mitigated now that Daredevil is officially in the MCU in series form. Mind you, I am still waiting for them to issue an apology for mishandling Iron Fist, but if they were to do a Night/Wing Investigations series with Heroes for Hire making one or two episode appearances each season, all would be forgiven.

Seeing as how I have yet to be consulted on any of the MCU/Star Wars/Pirates of the Caribbean development discussions, I am not holding my breath, nor should you.

Daredevil: Born Again feels like a seamless transition from the last Netflix season and this beginning; there’s intentionally a lot of connective tissue in the first episode, as much to bridge the gap as to also wrap up some hanging plot threads. Charlie Cox remains one of the best casting decisions to date for his everyman charm and his physical intensity. And what can you say about D’Onofrio (one of my favorite actors to begin with) that hasn’t already been said? He’s been crushing it ever since the show started. It’s a little weird seeing them on the promotional circuit together because of how contentious they are on the show.

It wouldn’t be an MCU takeover without a few little adjustments—you know, the “Hey, you guys over at Netflix did a great job—we’re all really big fans over here—but we’re going to pick up and run with a couple of things you sort of missed. No biggie, it’s just that there’s this iconic Daredevil rope swing that we never saw from your show; I mean, we sent you all those comics! So, anyway, we’re going to do that in the hopes that four bearded idiots on the internet notice and comment on it in their weekly Substack.”

I kid. I kid the Netflix. Truthfully, they did such a good job on Daredevil that there wasn’t much to try that they hadn’t already done, so this is one of those rare instances where someone told them if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and the 27-year-old vice president in charge of brand development actually listened and just got out of the way. How refreshing!

That being said, I think it’s impossible to jump into Daredevil: Born Again without first watching Daredevil seasons 1-3 (and also, after season 2, the two Punisher seasons as well). As they are all currently sitting under their own tab at Disney, it shouldn’t be a problem to watch them in twos and threes while the rest of us wait for the weekly drop, like Skinner rats.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”