Entertainment
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms Betrays Its Audience And Turns Back Into A Nihilistic Game Of Thrones Show
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms spent four episodes building up endless amounts of audience goodwill by being exactly the opposite of every previous Game of Thrones show. It positioned itself as a simple story about genuinely good and kind people doing good things in a beautiful, relaxing, perfectly shot and framed pastoral setting.
And then it threw it all away.
The show’s fifth episode, titled “In The Name Of The Mother,” is what it’s been building up to all along. A battle in which seven good men face off against the worst villainy that Westeros has to offer. The audience was primed for heroic combat, in which the show’s loveable main character, Duncan the Tall, would finally show us what he’s capable of, presumably with some sort of dazzling display of sword skills taught to him by his beloved deceased master, Sir Alfred Pennyworth.
We were ready for a half-hour celebration of heroic jousting, fencing, and flashing chain mail. We were ready to leap out of our seats and pump our fists as Duncan the Tall knocked that psychopath out of his armor and won one for the good and kind, the merciful and just, with superior strength and skill. We were ready for him to surprise everyone, to show the world that good can triumph over evil, and that it can happen in a setting where you can actually see what’s going on.
A Franchise Built On Death And Gore Returns To Its Roots
We got none of that. Oh, Duncan won, sort of, but in a way that might as well have been a loss. What we really got is a reminder that while you may have thought you were watching something refreshingly different, this is still Game of Thrones. The franchise that brought you the Red Wedding. The franchise that murdered all the best Starks. The world set you up for the heroic triumph of Daenerys, only to murder her in cold blood at the last minute for no good reason other than some vague handwaving about fascism.
This is Game of Thrones, the franchise where good people suffer for no reason, where beloved characters lose their heads, where everything is rot and filth and nihilism. That nice, clean show about that lovable knight you’ve been watching up til now? It was all a smokescreen, a bait and switch, so it could drag you right back into that pointless, stinking Game of Thrones hell.
When the trial of seven starts, Ser Duncan is knocked out cold in the first three seconds, allowing the show to avoid the battle and give us a 20-minute flashback of Duncan’s childhood, in which he lives in garbage and makes money by both murdering and robbing dying soldiers. It culminates in a scene where the camera lingers for nearly a minute, with an almost debauched sense of pleasure, over a little girl who used to be his friend as she very, very slowly bleeds out, spitting and dying and suffering in front of us after having her throat cut.
It’s All A Smokescreen
With that bit of pointless nihilism over, Ser Duncan wakes up in the middle of the battle, lying in a muddy puddle. The trial of the seven is still going on around him, but almost none of it is visible to the audience. Instead, we mostly see a bunch of mud.
Like the Battle of Winterfell that took place in the dark so you couldn’t see any of the actual battle, the trial of seven takes place entirely in a thick fog. The show’s producers claim this was because they don’t have enough money in their coffers to show a joust, but if you’ve seen any of the series The Pendragon Cycle, which operates on a micro-budget compared to the one mustered up by HBO for a Game of Thrones show, you know that’s total crap. The Pendragon Cycle routinely shows big battles, and they don’t hide them behind a smokescreen. This is just what Game of Thrones does. It teases the audience with something awesome, then shoots it in a way that never shows anything awesome.
After missing most of the battle, though, Duncan’s awake and ready to fight. Now, after that flashback, we know that what’s driving him isn’t goodness and decency, but standard Game of Thrones anger and filth.
Fortified with hatred for the world, Duncan gets involved in the fight, mostly by falling down in the muck and getting brutally stabbed out of nowhere a lot. Soon, there’s another knight wading around in the mud with him, and they’re both a mass of blood and gore, but they begin half-heatedly stabbing and hitting each other.
Many more minutes of mud later, Duncan collapses again and lies there staring at a puddle through his one remaining good eye before getting back up and punching his opponent in the face until he gives up. Some brains fall out of a heroic character’s head, everyone looks like hell, and there’s nothing enjoyable or pleasant in any of it. Just mud and gore. You thought you were watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but really it’s still season eight of Game of Thrones, and everything sucks, and there’s no way out.
Game Of Thrones Hates Its Audience, And Always Has
Except this is worse. Because the show’s first four episodes showed that the people making it know exactly what their audience wants and are totally capable of giving it to them. They’re just not going to do it. They’re so obsessed with gore and sick, they’d rather spit in the face of their viewers than give them anything uplifting, beautiful, and heroic. This is a show that hates its audience and wants them to suffer even more than it wants to hurt its characters.
It’s a sickness, and one with only a single cure. Give up and go watch The Pendragon Cycle. There’s nothing worthwhile left in Westeros.
Entertainment
T-Mobile is giving away the Apple iPhone 17 for free — how to get yours
TL;DR: Score a free iPhone 17e when signing up for a T-Mobile plan with no trade-in required. The iPhone 17 is also available for free from T-Mobile when signing up for an Experience More plan and trading in an eligible device.
March was massive for Apple. After months of anticipation, new iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads were finally released to the public.
So what now?
Is the expectation that we all just sit around and wait for the next announcement from Apple? No, this is the time for finding the best deals on this fresh lineup. And there’s a special offer available right now for anyone interested in upgrading to the new iPhone 17.
For a limited time, you can switch to almost any T-Mobile plan and get a free iPhone 17e (no trade in required). Alternatively, you can claim the iPhone 17 for free when signing on for 24 months of an Experience More plan and trading in an eligible phone. It’s important to note that T-Mobile will charge taxes on these deals and a $35 device connection fee, but that’s pretty much always the case with these “free” deals.
The Experience More plan is designed for power users who want 4K streaming, huge hotspot data, and international roaming that can keep up with even the most frequent flyers. You’re therefore faced with a higher monthly bill than more limited plans. The Experience More plan does include perks like Apple TV+ and Netflix, which helps to offset some of that cost.
Mashable Deals
The iPhone 17 is the first base model built to handle Apple’s most advanced AI features. Mashable’s Stan Schroeder said it’s an “excellent phone that matches the iPhone Pro models in many ways that matter.” Content creators should note that the camera is “almost as good as the one on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.”
Score the Apple iPhone 17 for free this weekend with T-Mobile.
Entertainment
The Extremely R-Rated 90s Sci-Fi That Sent An Alien Caveman On Revenge Quest
By Robert Scucci
| Updated
It really takes a lot for me to sit through an entire movie without knowing what the hell it’s about, and I most recently experienced this with 1996’s Savage. There are so many unrelated storylines that feel like they should connect and lead to a satisfying payoff, but they never really do. My experience with the film made me want it all to make sense, but I had to read detailed plot synopses on both Wikipedia and IMDb just to make heads or tails of the thing, and somehow I ended up even more confused.
Normally when I write reviews, I open those tabs to get the character and talent names straight because I’m great with faces but terrible with names. In this case, I had to SparkNote my way through the plot because Savage is profoundly nonsensical, to the point where I think it should be studied.
Savage is a sci-fi action film, but also a revenge film, but also a film about ancient aliens, super-powered cavemen, and an evil virtual reality game company, all of which are completely at odds with each other. Visually, it’s an absolute feast of low-budget special effects, which is what drew me to it during a late-night Tubi scroll in the first place. I don’t regret watching it, but I can’t speak for how you’ll feel about this one, dear reader.
Hell Hath No Fury Like An Alien Caveman Hellbent On Revenge
Here’s where I try to explain what Savage is all about. A man named Alex Verne (Olivier Gruner) gets committed to a psychiatric hospital after his family is randomly murdered. One day, two years later, he decides it’s time to escape. Wandering through the desert, he hears a voice that leads him to a cave. Inside are paintings of ancient aliens. Alex lives like this for an indeterminate amount of time until he encounters an alien apparition that first takes the form of his dead wife, and then the killer. The alien tells him he has to get revenge because the killer will do it again to “millions of others.”
Alex gets electrocuted and suddenly has superhuman strength, which pairs nicely with the caveman skills he developed while living out in the desert. He wanders the streets naked and gets taken into police custody, where he meets Officer Nicky Carter (Jennifer Grant), who’s put off by his strange behavior but still somehow finds him irresistible enough to become a valuable ally by the third act.
Meanwhile, and completely out of nowhere, we’re introduced to Reese Burroughs (Kario Salem), the corrupt chairman of the Titan Corporation. He specializes in virtual reality video games and has hilariously named henchmen Marie Beloc (Kristin Minter), Edgar Wallace (Sam McMurray), and Allan Poe (Herschel Sparber) following him around wherever he goes. As luck would have it, Reese has been waiting a long time for a police report about a weird naked caveman type getting arrested, and now he has to track down Alex and eliminate him for … reasons, I guess.
Alex, now referred to as a savage by Reese and his goons due to his alien caveman abilities, escapes the holding cell, hellbent on breaching the Titan Corporation for … other reasons, I guess, as the home viewer (because this is obviously a direct-to-VHS effort) tries to piece these plot points together. You’re left wondering how the final showdown between these characters will play out in both the real world and the virtual one they occupy.
Thematically Bankrupt With Plenty Of Visual Bangers
Most reasonable people will read the above synopsis of Savage and decide not to watch it. I don’t blame them. However, for a direct-to-video sci-fi B-movie, it has tremendous visuals. The virtual reality sequences are immersive. The aliens are corny but cool, and they perfectly capture that “waking up at 3 am and this is what’s playing on TV after I passed out watching something else” vibe that I remember so fondly from my university days.
If you can get past the fact that the plot makes no sense, Savage is tremendously fun to watch. Personally, I treated it as a series of vaguely related vignettes occupying the same universe, which allowed me to appreciate the visuals without scrutinizing the storytelling too much. That said, it feels like there has to be a director’s cut floating around somewhere because the connection between Alex and Reese is vague at best until far too late in the runtime.
Savage, in all of its insane glory, is currently streaming for free on Tubi. Throw it on when you’re looking for something different because there’s nothing quite like it. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you get halfway through and realize that so much has happened without telling anything close to a coherent story.
Entertainment
How A Case Of Mistaken Identity Led To Bill Murray’s Most Bizarre Role
By TeeJay Small
| Published
You probably know Bill Murray as one of the greatest comedic minds of the 1980s through the mid 2000s. If you’ve followed his career closely, you’ve seen him put audiences in stitches with performances in Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, Zombieland, and everything in between. Still, every actor makes a few questionable choices in their time, and not every Bill Murray performance is a slam dunk. Fans of the comedic A-lister were shocked, for instance, when Murray agreed to voice the titular orange cat in 2004’s Garfield: The Movie, a role he later revealed he took by mistake after mistaking writer Joel Cohen for Joel Coen.
When this casting news was first announced, fans pontificated on the reason why Bill Murray would agree to lead a highly sanitized PG movie. After all, his other projects around that time include such mature, introspective hits as The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Surprisingly, it turns out that Murray signed on to voice Garfield not for a quick paycheck, not out of love for the original comic strip, but purely by accident, due to this case of mistaken identity.
Not The Coen He Was Looking For
2004’s Garfield: The Movie was written by a screenwriter named Joel Cohen. Cohen is credited as a writer on such hit films as Toy Story, Cheaper By The Dozen, and Evan Almighty. When Bill Murray saw the name on the screenplay for Garfield: The Movie, he mistook the scribe for the very similarly-named Joel Coen, of the Coen Brothers. The Coens, as you likely already know, have a penchant for writing off-beat comedic films that would be a much better fit for Bill Murray’s off-the-walls personality than Garfield: The Movie.
Bill Murray spoke on this subject over a decade ago during a Reddit AMA session. Responding to a fan who asked if there would ever be a third Garfield film, Murray stated “I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind. So I didn’t really bother to finish the script, I thought ‘he’s great, I’ll do it.’” The comedian claims that he didn’t realize Cohen and Coen were different people until months later, after he started laying down his lines.
A Simple Misunderstanding Extrapolated To Absurdity
In that very same comment, Bill Murray outlined his process while working on Garfield: The Movie, and spoke as though the experience was complete torture. He adds “It was sort of like Fantastic Mr. Fox without the joy or the fun.” Furthermore, Murray claims that all the live action parts of the film were shot before he laid down any lines, and the Garfield model was composited in as a gray blob. It’s well known that Murray improvised heavily throughout the recording process, but he revealed during his Reddit Q&A that he made numerous attempts to reframe entire scenes by swapping his dialogue with jokes that more closely aligned with his vision, much to the chagrin of Joel Cohen.
In an era of social media, it seems like celebrities are more accessible to the public than ever before. Even still, I’m not sure there’s anything more relatable than a guy taking on a massive months-long job based on a simple miscommunication because he couldn’t be bothered to proofread for a single letter H. To this day, Bill Murray has still never worked with the Coen brothers, but he did complete two Garfield films, which are currently available to stream on Hulu.
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