Entertainment
Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen's Shocking Ending Explained
By Brian Myers
| Updated
Something Very Bad is Going to Happen jumped to the top of Netflix’s most-watched shows immediately after its March 26 release on the streaming service, quickly catching buzz from horror and thriller fans. And for good reason. From its opening frames, you can tell something pretty bleak is surrounding a young couple’s wedding. The eerie series of events that occur while they are en route to the groom-to-be Jamie’s (Adam DiMarco) family home and the strange cast of characters that his fiancée Rachel (Camilla Morrone) meets when they arrive make you wonder where the story is going, exactly.
For the first few episodes, it’s assumed that Jamie’s family has sinister motives with Rachel as their target. But after all of their bizarre behavior is rationally explained away, the storyline focuses on Rachel’s family and their dark past. A strange older man brings her up to speed on how her bloodline is tainted by a curse that kills anyone who marries someone other than their soulmate. Skip out on the wedding after a proposal has been accepted, and that very curse gets passed on to the bloodline of the significant other.
Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen’s Wedding
The series has lots of great twists and turns, and is more of an eerie mystery than outright horror. Until the last episode, that is. During the finale, a series of complicated events unfold simultaneously that are worthy of dissecting.
Rachel and Jamie are finally at the altar, and it’s about to be known whether or not she is marrying her soulmate. If so, the couple lives happily ever after. If not, Rachel will face the same fate as so many of her relatives before her and bleed to death in a hellacious hemorrhage.
Rachel says her vows first. The look in her eyes leaves little question about whether or not she’s making the right call. When she speaks, it’s from the heart.
Jamie follows this up with his clunky vows. But when he’s finished, he backtracks. “I wrote these a week ago,” he stammers, before launching into a diatribe about how their love doesn’t need to lead to an institution that he knows she doesn’t embrace. He walks away, determined to keep his relationship with the woman he loves, but not wanting to tie the knot.
While all of the wedding guests wait, Jamie and Rachel have a heated discussion. Jamie finally admits that he doesn’t believe that the curse is real, devastating Rachel while simultaneously summoning her ire. When it’s brought to his attention that the curse is indeed very real and his family members are starting to bleed from their eyes and noses, he scrambles to get Rachel back to the altar and complete the ceremony. Rachel, due to Nicky’s dismissiveness of the curse, no longer believes that he is her soulmate. But as she had already said her vows to him earlier, her fate has been sealed. In spite of her protestations, the witness signs his name, and the chaos begins.
Something Very Bad Does Happen
As the show’s title foretells, something very bad is indeed about to happen. The last half of the finale has so much blood that you’d think someone set off a plasma sprinkler on the set. Most fans, including me, believed that the curse (if passed to Jamie’s family) would impact anyone in his bloodline who had not yet married. But in the immediate aftermath of the certificate being signed by the witness, viewers become privy to the horrific reality that the curse on Jamie’s family is retroactive. Meaning that any living person in his bloodline who had married someone who wasn’t their soulmate would hemorrhage and die.
The moment the ceremony is completed, everyone’s fate is sealed. Rachel begins to hemorrhage and runs out to the atrium. She collapses in the snow, her tainted blood offsetting the pure white snow in beautiful form.
Though Nicky is not bleeding, you might assume that the curse wasn’t passed on to his family. But then, more members of his family begin to bleed. Slowly, at first, from their noses. But as time marches on and the panic begins to grow, more and more of Nicky’s relatives are bleeding profusely from every orifice.
They collapse on tables, on the dance floor, and in each other’s arms. The curse doesn’t just whittle at the family tree. It hacks at it quickly with a vengeful ax that only Death itself could masterfully wield.
The survivors are few. Those who had married into the bloodline were spared, of course, but they all seemed to have fled in a hurry by the end of the episode. In the final minutes, we see that young Jude is still among the living, as well as Nicky. Boris Cunningham, the hopelessly romantic patriarch, is seen in his bed clutching his newly dead wife. Where her brothers and father seemed to be spared from the curse, Portia (Shining Vale‘s Gus Birney) isn’t so lucky. She revealed to everyone earlier that she married a stranger on a whim in Las Vegas. This man clearly wasn’t her soulmate, leaving her fate marked for a premature death.
Jude’s wife, Nell (Under the Dome‘s Karla Crome), having married into the bloodline, is spared. But Jude seems to be unmarked by the curse. This revelation lends to the theory that, in spite of their marital strife and near divorce, the events surrounding Nicky and Rachel’s wedding have brought them closer together, making them the most unlikely of soulmates in the series.
Why Nicky Survives
But why was Nicky spared? After all, he is the one who refused his marriage vows at the beginning of the episode, leading to the twisted turn of events. Examining his words during his rejection of marriage as an institution, Nicky doesn’t back out of the ceremony because he isn’t in love with his bride-to-be.
Nicky walks away from the altar because he feels he needs to prove his deeply rooted love and respect for the woman that he wants to spend the rest of his life with. In his unplanned speech, he says he doesn’t believe in marriage and knows that Rachel only agreed to marry him because that’s what she knew he wanted. But after discovering that his mother had an affair, seeing his brother come close to yet another divorce, and recounting all of the craziness from the last week, he concludes that marriage isn’t necessary to prove love for a partner.
Nicky lives because he married a person he truly believed was his soulmate. Sadly, it was all for nothing and came too little too late. Rachel was doomed because the ceremony wasn’t completed in time, regardless of whether or not she believed she was marrying her destiny. But in an interesting final twist, we see that life (or Death) isn’t through with Rachel just yet.
Rachel’s Resurrection Explained
Death is never seen in the series. Audiences get a first-person view of who the specter is gazing upon and following, but never so much as get a glimpse of the Grim Reaper. This gaze is set upon the immortal witness, who has settled down at one of the tables. The witness smiles and greets Death with the words “I’m ready.” At this point, Rachel is resurrected. As she wanders through the carnage, she sees the witness face down at a table in the dining room. Next to his body are the words “your turn,” scrawled in blood.
Rachel seems to know what her role is now. She finds her mother’s bracelet on the witness’s wrist (he told her several episodes back that he always takes trinkets from the deceased), and begins to rummage through his belongings. She finds that he had also taken her father’s wedding suit, which she changes into. The witness had been kept alive for more than 200 years and appears to have amassed a substantial amount of money. Rachel cleans him out and begins her departure.
On her way out, she finds Nicky huddled on his bed. He’s clutching a stuffed animal and isn’t responsive when she asks him a question. Here, we see just how cold the new role has made her. Instead of consoling the man she was about to marry about the horrors he had just witnessed, she asked him about the whereabouts of her cigarette lighter. He remains silent, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. Rachel then boldly storms out, climbs into the previous witness’s pickup truck (which is adorned with the words “just married” on the tailgate), and drives down the road.
She finds herself unable to skip past the song playing on the truck’s CD player. Try as she might, the Waterboys track “We Will Not Be Lovers” is the only tune that she can play. Like her new role, she embraces the song. She finds herself singing along to it as she rolls down the window and tosses her wedding ring onto the roadside.
Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen Season 2
Will there be a continuation of the storyline in a new season? There’s no word on that yet.
Fans of the series are already buzzing about the possibilities of future episodes surrounding an adult Jude, about to tie the knot. After all, when Rachel was saying her quick goodbyes, she made it a point to pull the lad aside and give him some needed advice. Rachel told the child that he needs to believe what happened that day, no matter who tries to tell him otherwise. She also warned him that he needs to be very careful about who he marries in the future, should he choose to do so. “I’ll be there to witness it,” she says before exiting the home and entering the first phase of a life of immortality.
You can stream Something Very Bad is Going to Happen on Netflix.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
Ryan Gosling’s R-Rated Netflix Thriller With An MCU Budget Is Worth Its Weight In Shootouts
By Robert Scucci
| Published
After watching 2021’s Kate, the almighty algorithm threw 2022’s The Gray Man onto my radar, and I can’t say Ryan Gosling has ever disappointed me, so I figured I may as well give it a shot. He has a built-in level of charisma that lets him do his thing, and most of the time it lands. Going into the Russo brothers’ film expecting to see $200 million well spent on action sequences, with the added bonus of Gosling in the mix, I didn’t quite know how things would play out, but I had a hunch I wouldn’t feel let down.
But here’s the problem with straight-to-streaming action thrillers. Films like The Gray Man never get much time on the big screen, and they kind of need it if you want to enjoy them at the highest level. Across roughly 400 theaters, the film only brought in $454,023, which isn’t really its fault. It had a very short run across a disproportionately small number of screens, meaning it was never meant to recoup its budget this way. It’s a Netflix Original, designed to pull huge numbers on streaming.
The reason I see this as a bad thing is because this is an expensive movie. MCU expensive. Waterworld expensive. When that much money goes into blowing stuff up in spectacular fashion, I want to see it on a giant screen. Living in an apartment, I don’t have a fancy audio setup because my neighbors would murder me if I did, and my 44-inch TV is fine for most things, but less than stellar when entire city squares are getting leveled with all guns blazing.
Long story short, The Gray Man is a lot of fun, but it would be even more fun if you could watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
Let’s Not Get Bogged Down By The Details
The Gray Man also has an extremely convoluted plot. Not in a “too many twists” kind of way, but it’s a “load up the guns, spray and pray” kind of movie that would have been better served by simplicity. It’s executed well, but as side characters keep getting introduced in the second and third acts, part of me gets annoyed that I can’t fully shut my brain off because there’s always a new name or face to keep track of after the blasting has already started.
Ryan Gosling is a black ops agent known as Sierra Six, formerly Courtland Gentry. He was locked up as a minor after murdering his abusive father, and CIA officer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) decides he’s the perfect candidate for a second chance. The deal is simple: Courtland works for him in exchange for his freedom, knowing he’ll be dealing with some very dangerous people.
Once things get rolling, Sierra Six teams up with Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), and the first mission we see involves assassinating a target named Dining Car (Callan Mulvey). Complications arise when the job goes sideways and Dining Car reveals he’s also part of the Sierra program before succumbing to his wounds. A flash drive gets passed off with vague instructions, and the wild goose chase begins, centering on CIA officer Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), who sends a swarm of operatives after Six and Dani to retrieve it.
Along the way, we get more backstory on Six’s relationship with Donald and his niece Claire (Julia Butters), who Six previously worked security detail for. This obviously becomes important later because more collateral has entered the equation. The scenes between Six and Claire offer a surprisingly wholesome break from the chaos in Prague, and they’re a welcome addition.
From here on out, you pretty much know the deal. Double crosses stack on top of double crosses, things explode, and there’s so much inter-agency confusion over who’s good and who’s pulling the strings that you almost wish they’d ease up on the exposition and just keep blowing stuff up.
Solid, Pulse Pounding Action Thriller
The Gray Man’s budget absolutely shows on screen from start to finish. The action sequences are gorgeously shot (something that’s not always consistent across Netflix Originals), and at one point Sierra Six is standing on top of a moving tram, firing through the roof while tracking targets through reflections in nearby windows as the city flies past. This comes after he’s handcuffed to a railing in a town square, picking off attackers before they even get a chance to take him out.
Ana de Armas wielding a shotgun after throwing hands is also worth your time because she fully commits when the moment calls for it.
The only real issue I have is the film’s tendency to overload its premise with complexity for the sake of it. Most people don’t turn on action thrillers to do mental gymnastics. At least I don’t. I love psychological thrillers when I want things to get murky, but with action movies, I just want to sit back and watch things explode.
The convoluted plot isn’t a dealbreaker, just a nitpick. Some people enjoy sprawling shadow government conspiracies. It’s just not really my thing, so take that with a grain of salt. It’s still a great watch, just not one you can fully sink into the couch for and completely turn your brain off.
The Gray Man is a Netflix Original, and you can stream it with an active subscription.
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