When the Living Pays the Price of the Dead

There’s something deeply unsettling about being trapped, especially when one doesn’t recognize their environment as a prison.

Definitely Not A Monster, written and directed by Brea Cola Angelo, premiered in 2024 at the Atlanta Film Festival—receiving a nomination for Outstanding Short Form (Live Action) at the 56th NAACP Image Awards in 2025.

Starring April Grace as Blythe Booker and Brea Cola Angelo as Whitney Hunt, Definitely Not A Monster centers on a devoted widow who invites a journalist into her home to clear up accusations against her husband.

But what starts as a tale of absolution quickly turns into one of anagnorisis—and suddenly, the man is no longer the subject of examination.

She is.

Definitely Not A Monster takes it even further, digging deeper into Blythe’s grief and forcing her to examine her marriage in a way no one prepared her to do.

What happens when the person who is meant to carry the shame of their actions is no longer alive to face scrutiny?

Who bears the cost?

The Pain Underneath the Performance

The beauty of this film is the eerie single-location setting in a living room that’s meant for comfort but becomes the walls within which Mrs. Booker’s most uncomfortable revelation comes to life.

Pressurized.

Immobilized.

Unable to run away from the secrets and pain she’s locked away for decades.

The style becomes a part of the narrative—using medium shots and intimate close-ups to capture the micro-expressions between Blythe and Whitney as each woman processes the other’s words.

Blythe struggles with the depth and poignancy of Whitney’s questions, while Whitney’s reactions expose the absurdity of Blythe’s decades-rehearsed answers, unveiling a woman desperately clinging to a mask that cracks with each new revelation.

It draws the audience into the interview, forcing them to contend with the very questions that Whitney asks.

It’s what makes the film haunting and memorable long after the credits stop rolling.

And April delivers a bone-chilling performance as Blythe—showing just how ingrained it is for Blythe to internalize her pain and trauma as devotion and security.

In the final moments, April’s performance as Blythe captures the paradoxical existence of Blythe’s internal pain and her external dialogue as she recites the very words she rehearsed in order to protect herself from the truth.

She is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and brilliant.

Definitely Not A Monster puts denial, grief, and memory on display—calling forth the uglier parts of our pain, the twisted ways in which we lie to ourselves, and the lengths we go to protect our sanity.

This leaves the audience with just one question to ask themselves:

How far would you go to protect your monster?

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Independent Film Reviews

• Still Life Captures the Quietude of Grief and the Life That Remains

• Life Goes On Examines What We Discover About Living When Death Comes Near

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

Reviewer’s Note: The film was made available to the reviewer in January 2025 during its 56th NAACP Image Awards nomination campaign. This review was published following the film’s public release.

Netflix Found the Tree in the Road

The most-watched series in MGM+ history, FROM, is heading to Netflix ahead of the highly anticipated fifth and final season.

On Tuesday, October 13, What’s On Netflix reported that the first three seasons of FROM are expected to arrive on Netflix in the U.S. Monday, October 19, under a limited-time licensing window.

Netflix subsequently confirmed the announcement via social media.

UPDATE:

What does this mean for a series that already built a devoted audience on MGM+?

While FROM has already become MGM+’s most-watched series, Netflix’s established reach gives FROM another avenue to find viewers beyond MGM+’s existing subscriber base.

FROM premiered on Epix, now MGM+, in 2022. Created by John Griffin and executive produced by Jack Bender and Jeff Pinkner, FROM is about travelers who come across a fallen tree in the road and get trapped inside a mysterious and deadly town.

Over the course of four seasons, the series centers on Boyd, played by Harold Perrineau, Tabitha, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Jade, played by David Alpay, as they work tirelessly to try to save the group from the monsters—and from themselves.

And in Season 4, the group discovered that the more answers they uncovered, the more the town would fight back to ensure they never lived to tell the tale.

Why the Timing Matters

With Season 5 slated to premiere in 2027, a licensing window before the premiere gives unfamiliar viewers the opportunity to discover the series, become invested in the mystery alongside established FROMily sleuthers, and potentially lead those new viewers back to MGM+ to finish out the final season.

While this is not a guarantee of higher ratings or even another 100% Rotten Tomatoes score (Season 3), it’s an opportunity for both Netflix and MGM+ to win.

With three seasons arriving, newcomers could have 30 episodes available to watch at their own pace. This may prove perfect for the Netflix subscribers who enjoy binge-watching over weekly releases.

For a mythology-heavy series, this could be extremely valuable for FROM—new viewers can follow the clues and character relationships, investing in its mysteries before the story reaches its conclusion.

So There’s That has followed the series since Season 1 and established a curated podcast playlist for new and old fans alike to explore prior seasons, questions, fan theories, and cast interviews.

And for those looking to see how Season 4 connects to the earlier seasons’ clues, a FROM Theories and Analysis hub exists here, just for you (although I warn you, there are major spoilers).

Whatever your preferred method in joining the FROMily, So There’s That has you covered.

With multiple seasons of clues, major character revelations, and unanswered questions behind it, FROM approaches a conclusion that longtime fans have spent years trying to unravel.

And if Netflix viewers become as invested in the town’s mysteries as the established audience, the biggest impact of this licensing deal may not be how many people join the FROMily—but how many follow the story to its conclusion.

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FROM Theories, Characters, and Mysteries

• Start at the Bottle Tree

• Why Abby’s Season 2 Arc Matters Now

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

Ability Isn’t Defined by Legacy

Line of Fire Episode 4, “Paper Trails,” explodes onto the scene.

Literally.

What begins as an ordinary delivery to the Secretary of Agriculture’s home ends in an explosion on his doorstep, drawing multiple federal agencies into the investigation.

Jane immediately gets pulled in and calls the FBI to ask for Clare to join the investigation.

Their relationship is on the mend since Clare moved back after Logan’s death, and Clare no longer sees herself as her mother’s shadow but as a formidable agent all her own.

But what starts as a mother-daughter investigation quickly turns into a family affair as Mike steps in with the Secret Service now formally involved.

The resulting friction echoes the tension we’ve seen between Mike and Micah, testing Clare’s patience in ways her father doesn’t anticipate.

In Episode 3, “There Are Two Wolves,” Mike’s pride for Clare’s ambition swells, but in Episode 4, it becomes another source of anxiety as she once again feels overshadowed by the Hollingsworth legacy.

“If you’re not going to help me, get out of my way.”

With every piece of information, Clare feels the walls of her lineage close around her as she fights to establish a professional identity of her own.

Having only recently stepped out of her mother’s shadow, Clare now finds herself contending with her father’s.

Her sharp, no-nonsense approach clashes with Mike’s easygoing charisma, introducing an unfamiliar tension between the doting father and his only daughter.

Mike now finds himself on the receiving end of her frustration as she pulls further and further away from her parents’ expectations to perform her job her way.

But what Clare perceives as another expectation placed upon her by her parents may be one she unconsciously placed upon herself.

This insecurity becomes apparent when Mike reminds Clare that her way and his way share the same goal, just different roadmaps to arrive there.

This realization shifts how Clare sees both herself and her parents: her ambitions can exist alongside theirs, adding to the Hollingsworth legacy rather than succumbing to its weight.

Jack’s Absence Reveals Deep Sibling Wounds

If it’s not enough that Clare finds herself enmeshed in another case with one of her parents, Micah lands on a deposition list that Russ has to conduct on behalf of the DoJ.

The deposition takes the audience deeper into the sibling dynamic between Micah and Russ—the baby brother who shields his life from everyone he loves.

In this case, Russ and Micah are at odds but not for reasons Episode 4 places on the surface.

Yes, the deposition keeps Micah from his dalliance with Sydney, the president’s daughter.

Yes, the deposition keeps Russ from meeting his girlfriend’s parents.

But at the core of both relationships is a reluctance to share their romantic lives with one another. Like Clare, Micah and Russ conceal parts of themselves, perhaps to avoid their family’s scrutiny and disappointment.

But as the brothers confront one another with the hurt they’ve carried, it becomes clear that Jack’s presumed death changed the dynamic of their bond.

Clare had Mom.

Micah had Dad.

And suddenly Russ had no one but himself.

Jack’s presumed death didn’t simply leave the Hollingsworths grieving. It changed how they leaned on each other, who received comfort, and who learned to navigate the loss alone.

Now, as the siblings begin to confront those fractures, the secret their parents kept from them threatens to reopen those wounds.

Throughout “Paper Trails,” each revelation exposes another fracture, and every Hollingsworth finds themselves entangled in situations that force them to look at the other in a new light.

Clare begins to understand her father differently, while Micah and Russ find common ground through pain that once drove them apart.

This begs the question:

Would the family turn a blind eye to the law to protect one another?

For Clare, Micah, and Russ, that choice may prove more complicated than anything they’ve faced professionally.

Their careers have been built around institutions that demand accountability, yet their family’s survival may depend on the very secrecy those institutions are supposed to challenge.

Jane and Mike prove as parents they’re willing to go to any length for their children, as the mystery surrounding Jack continues.

But what happens when the children, now adults in law enforcement, must make the same choices?

Counter to the brisk pace of Episode 3, “Paper Trails” slows us down, focusing the audience on the Hollingsworth family as conspirators to Logan’s death.

This gives us breathing room to look at the entire Hollingsworth family as a unit, as individuals, and as potential suspects.

In Episode 3, Det. Nia Wallace found a clue that made her suspect the family, or at least the parents, knew more than they were letting on.

With her on the case and the entire family in her crosshairs, the answer may come sooner than we expect.

But just as Nia digs deeper into the Hollingsworth family, Jack gathers his own counterintelligence against her and the entire task force.

Where Loyalty and Law Collide

Jack’s presence grows with each episode, advancing the mystery surrounding his alleged death and his purpose for returning to the edges of his family’s lives.

He moves in next door to Clare, kills Logan, gets a job that puts him close to the investigation of a murdered CIA agent, and then breaks into the precinct to gather intel.

Why?

Currently, signs point toward Micah, and Jane goes into mother hen mode to protect him from interrogation.

If Nia asks about the origami birds, Micah will answer freely.

This makes him the prime suspect in the murder of a man who died in his childhood home.

Just as Nia doesn’t play fair, neither does Jane.

When Nia comes to Jane’s house to find Micah, Jane confronts her with the truth—evidence of Nia breaking in to find information that supports her case against the Hollingsworths.

But fire meets flame.

Nia returns the heat by challenging Jane, stating that she may be hiding from her children as much as she’s hiding from the law.

For Jane, the confrontation with Nia brings her two identities into direct conflict.

As a U.S. Marshal, she’s sworn to uphold the law. But as a mother, she’s willing to challenge those boundaries to protect her children—the ones still within her reach and the son whose existence she spent five years protecting.

“How could her parents keep such a horrible secret from her in the name of love? Must’ve been eating them all alive.”

At the end of Episode 4, Jane confides in Mike that Nia is onto her, and Mike suggests they tell the kids the truth.

Jane changes the stakes of Jack’s disappearance when she decides to tell Nia what she knows—that five years ago Jack was offered an undercover assignment.

For life.

And to take the job, he would have to die.

Jane takes a risk by exposing her and Mike’s secret to the authorities while still choosing to conceal the truth from Clare, Micah, and Russ.

Jane and Mike decide to keep their secret and face the consequences together, but the truth threatens the one thing their children are struggling to rebuild.

Trust.

But Jane’s admission threatens the entire family as she also tells Nia about Jack’s origami.

His calling card.

The one Nia found at Logan’s crime scene in their family home, the one she discovered in Jane’s house on the windowsill, and the one Jane gave her—taken from a crime scene to protect his identity.

By removing evidence, Jane risks more than her career. Her actions could trigger an internal investigation, expose her to potential criminal charges, and increase suspicion about her involvement in Logan’s murder.

However, the truth comes at a cost.

While Jane’s cooperation may temporarily protect her children from Nia, it can’t protect them from the truth.

And with Jack operating beyond his parents’ control, the Hollingsworths may soon discover that protecting one another will cost more than any of them is prepared to pay.

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The Hollingsworth Family Secret

• Episode 2 Puts Clare at the Heart of Many Secrets

• Episode 3 All Points Back to Jack

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

Ambition Has a Price

Season 2 of USA Network’s hit series, The Rainmaker, finds Rudy Baylor as one of the most sought-after young lawyers following his $80 million win against Great Benefit Hospital Systems in Season 1.

But winning a high-profile case on your first try is very different from knowing what it takes to become a great lawyer.

And with that level of success come expectations that may prove more difficult to navigate than the law itself.

Starring Milo Callaghan as Rudy Baylor, Lana Parrilla as Bruiser Stone, and P.J. Byrne as Deck Shifflet, Season 2 continues to follow Rudy on his journey toward becoming a great lawyer, or what he believes a great lawyer should be.

In the first two episodes of The Rainmaker Season 2—Episode 1 “Dear Uncle Rudy,” premiering Friday, October 16, and Episode 2 “Cards Up,” premiering October 23—Rudy faces the challenge of proving to Bruiser that his ambition is matched by his ability.

But with every compelling legal procedural drama, there’s a formidable opponent, and, in Season 2, Merle Dandridge suits up.

Dandridge joins Season 2 as Amanda Vonn, a cutthroat powerhouse attorney who appears to go to extraordinary lengths to protect her reputation and to win.

Amanda doesn’t just own the room.

She is the room.

Amanda is someone Sarah Plankmore (Madison Iseman) looks to for a second chance after the fallout at her previous firm—Brad Noonan was imprisoned and Leo Drummond and the CEO of Great Benefit, Wilfred R. Keeley, were indicted.

Sarah also destroyed her relationship with Rudy in the process.

At the end of it all, only Sarah remains—with just one case under her belt, an embarrassing loss, and a reputation torn to pieces.

But starting over doesn’t necessarily mean making new choices, nor does it mean that Amanda is the answer to Sarah’s professional problems.

For Sarah, it becomes a question of whether she’s learned from the pattern of decisions that now shape her professional and personal reputation or if her ambition continues to lead her toward the very people who could threaten her future as a lawyer.

A pattern that suggests a character trait she has yet to recognize within herself—one that led her to use personal information about Rudy to advance her case.

For both Rudy and Sarah, Season 2 presents two distinct challenges born from the same case:

Can Rudy live up to the expectations created by his victory, and can Sarah recognize the choices that contributed to her downfall?

What It Means to Win

Season 2 begins with J. Lyman Stone and Associates taking up a case where the lives of hundreds of children hang in the balance.

A win in this case could be even more costly than a loss.

With so many lives at stake, the question isn’t whether Rudy and his team win or lose. It’s whether they’re prepared for the fallout that comes from taking on the case in the first place.

And caught in the crossfire yet again is Sarah, who finds herself back as opposing counsel with a case whose legal implications run far deeper than they initially appear.

As Sarah gets pulled back into the courtroom, the question becomes whether the road to rehabilitation is all that different from her past—potentially finding herself surrounded by the very ruthlessness that contributed to her downfall.

And on the edge of Rudy and Sarah’s rivalry is a blast from the past in Bruiser’s life: her ex-husband.

Tom Cassady (Austin Nichols) upends Bruiser’s life by reaching out for legal help to save his own life and that of the star pitcher of the minor league baseball team he coaches.

Tom’s return complicates Bruiser’s personal and professional life—bringing up old wounds that could test her judgment and principles.

And in the midst of all the legal drama is the heartbeat of the series:

Rudy Baylor.

Is flying too high too fast a bad thing?

Depending on who you ask, the “yes” can mean different things.

Yes, because of arrogance.

Yes, because of inexperience.

Yes, because of the danger that awaits on the other side.

And what makes the danger worth it is how Rudy, Bruiser, and Deck—an unlikely combination of personalities—come together in their cases.

They bring their individual wit, intelligence, and cunning methods to the firm in a blend of comedy that gives The Rainmaker a refreshing identity that makes people tune in week after week.

It’s within this contrast between their personalities that the humor finds its home.

Even when the stakes are high, their differences remind us that being good at what you do doesn’t mean everyone agrees on how the job should get done.

As they continue to learn about one another—what makes the others tick, what they care about, as well as the skeletons in their closets—they realize they share the same passion for winning.

Not at all costs.

But with a willingness to fight for what’s right, fair, and just for their clients.

And if the first two episodes are any indication, Rudy and his team have a few battles ahead of them.

With conspiracies, hidden agendas, and powerful enemies emerging, they will have to fight with everything they have to succeed—not just for their clients, but for themselves.

Winning may have made Rudy Baylor a lawyer worth remembering, but what comes next will determine the kind of lawyer he chooses to become.

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Rudy Baylor’s Law Journey

• The Rainmaker Season 1 Finale

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

A Supernatural Inheritance

Haunted Hotel Season 2 drops us right into a battle between human and monster within the mundane ritual of checking into a hotel.

And as the doors reopen with the new season, Katherine (Eliza Coupe) wants to expand her horizons—starting with hiring a new employee.

Haunted Hotel continues to explore the Freeling family—Katherine, her two kids, Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and Esther (Natalie Palamides), her inherited demon child Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson), and her deceased brother, Nathan (Will Forte).

And everyone does their part to make Undervale’s “underworld charm” a joyous attraction while protecting unsuspecting guests from danger.

Season 1 of Haunted Hotel showed us a single mother and a family battling loss, grief, depression, and a secret—Nathan’s death.

Yet between hotel hospitality and outrageous ghost busting, a family learned to redefine the term in order to move forward through life stronger than before.

And they’re going to need it because Undervale houses more curses within its walls than the “Book of Shadows.”

A new evil festers underneath the hotel, and there’s someone who may hold the answer, who’s been in the background all along:

Shayna.

Shayna, voiced by Natalie Morales, pretended to be a ghost since Season 1.

Once found out by Esther, she explains that her presence is linked to her heritage—a bloodline that requires a member of the family to always remain in Undervale to prevent the awakening of a cosmic god.

Haunted Hotel Season 2 effectively weaves Shayna into both the characters’ and the audience’s memories by taking us back to major moments within Season 1 where she lurked within the halls.

This clever introduction creatively expands Haunted Hotel without sacrificing the elements that make it entertaining and relevant.

But Shayna’s presence isn’t just about her bloodline.

It’s also about inheritance.

The Family Beneath the Haunting

Shayna’s relationship with the supernatural happenings at Undervale is a surprising connection that extends to Katherine’s relationship with the hotel.

They both inherited the hotel in different ways—ownership versus obligation—each carrying a burden that demands personal sacrifice to keep it afloat.

An inheritance that requires both Katherine and Shayna to either confront their family’s generational curse or run away from it altogether.

But in a hotel where curses are practically an architectural tradition, Dante enters the picture.

Dante Crowe, a supernatural investigator, comes to Undervale to help stop the awakening.

His supernatural lineage allows him to exist between the worlds of the living and the dead—making him a formidable opponent for anyone who encounters him.

Especially because he can touch the ghosts.

And he can harm them.

But what keeps Haunted Hotel entertaining is the cohesion of horror and humor.

And as Dante works to keep everyone in Undervale safe, Katherine sees an opportunity to date.

Throughout the season, she attempts to balance her responsibilities at Undervale with her identity as a woman seeking normalcy beyond motherhood, ghosts, and the children who consistently chase them.

But the dating pool is dead.

Literally.

However, her optimism—alongside Esther’s paranormal investigations, Ben’s ghost-girlfriend woes, and Nathan’s spirited (pun intended) enthusiasm—adds to what draws audiences to the series, despite impending doom.

Haunted Hotel Season 2 brings us deeper into the family dynamic, the supernatural chaos, and what it means to call a place home.

And yet, the madness isn’t separate from the family story at the heart of the series. It’s woven into the very fabric of what it means to experience grief and still find ways to love and to live.

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The Hotel Horrors Continue

• Haunted Hotel Season 1 Review

• Hazbin Hotel Season 2—Hell Got a Little Bit Hotter

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

From Fiction to FYC

Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang.

BANG! BANG!

Lestat de Lioncourt leapt from the pages of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and onto the stage as the official For Your Consideration Grammy campaign begins for the vampire rockstar.

In an astonishing meta-moment for the series and fans alike, Daniel Hart’s musical genius—through Sam Reid as Lestat—creates a historic moment for fictional TV bands in the Visual Media Grammy landscape.

The Grammy category now known as Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media was established at the 2nd Annual Grammy Awards in 1959—recognizing Best Score for cinematic features.

The inaugural award went to Duke Ellington for Anatomy of a Murder, and since then, the category has been largely dominated by film.

Over the years, the category underwent numerous changes regarding eligibility and which contributors received the recognition.

Between 2001 and 2007, the category expanded recognition to include mixers, producers, and sound engineers for their contribution to the scores before reverting back to composers only in 2007.

While the category largely defaulted to film, the culture began to change, and television finally started constructing doors its composers could walk through for recognition long overdue.

The shift to television was a long and difficult road for TV composers and production teams. Historically, only a handful were ever nominated at a time and it became almost a given that they wouldn’t be competitive enough for a nomination, let alone a win.

Audiences were trained not to expect much, even from the small victory of getting considered.

However, the boom in streaming changed everything.

In 2020, Hildur Guðnadóttir made history by winning Best Score Soundtrack for her work on HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards—becoming the first solo woman ever to win in the category, the first woman winner in 35 years, and the first TV score to ever win.

Two years later, Carlos Rafael Rivera won in a historic four-way tie for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, alongside Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross for Pixar’s film, Soul, in 2022.

Since then, Theodore Shapiro was nominated for his work on Severance Season 2 for the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, held in February of 2026, another sign of the competitive television landscape being built in real time.

What does this mean for The Vampire Lestat?

In the 1985 novel, Lestat awakens from a vampire sleep to discover 1980s rock music—using it as the answer to Louis de Pointe du Lac’s tell-all book, Interview With the Vampire, breaking all the rules, and revealing the secrets of his beings.

But in the hands of Rolin Jones, Hannah Moscovitch, Daniel Hart, Sam Reid, and the entire team at AMC, Lestat became more than a one-night-only act that awakened the Queen Akasha.

The immortal Brat Prince became a global icon—amassing a fanbase that expanded beyond the one already established through the books and the first two seasons of the series.

This history became cemented when AMC made a bold move and booked The Vampire Lestat in a sold out concert at Beacon Theater in New York in June 2026.

While the building capacity held 2,894 people, the streets were lined with even more fans from all over the world, hoping to get just a glance at the vampire rock god.

By bringing music created for a fictional artist into a real-world FYC Grammy campaign, AMC collapses the boundary between Lestat’s fictional rock stardom and the very real awards landscape—introducing the Recording Academy to the narcissistic yet charismatic immortal rock god who demands the world’s highest musical accolades.

The Vampire Who Refused to Remain in the Subtext

The FYC campaign for Daniel Hart’s original music, album, and Sam Reid’s raw vocal performances is for the following categories:

• Best Song Written for Visual Media - “The Loneliness”

• Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals - “Black Licorice”

• Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media - The Vampire Lestat (Original Series Soundtrack)

• Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media - The Vampire Lestat, The Failures

The official nominations will be announced Monday, November 16, 2026, ahead of the ceremony, which takes place Sunday, February 7, 2027.

While a win is what the fans want, a nomination for any of the campaign’s submissions would mark another significant milestone for television music and its competitiveness within the industry.

For Hart, a nomination would further validate his range as a composer—moving beyond traditional dramatic scoring to construct a gothic rock opera through 16 original songs.

A nomination would not only solidify his standing but also prove that the music exists beyond both the version readers imagined from the novel and the fully realized television world that eventually gave it architecture.

A nomination would also be a significant win for the gothic-horror genre, which is largely shut out of recognition across many traditional awards—television, cinema, and music.

One nomination that would truly amplify the creative risks taken for the series is Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals.

While the category recognizes the arranger rather than Reid as a performer, his voice is inseparable from the execution.

And because Sam committed to the tireless work and conditioning of both his body and his voice to deliver Lestat in the only way in which he could be delivered, a nomination in this category would celebrate the physical and musical chemistry between Hart’s music and Sam’s visceral and erotic vocal performance.

The Grammys are only part of the journey for Daniel Hart.

While the show was slow to be recognized across the major award stages, a Grammy nomination could generate massive buzz for Hart ahead of the 2027 Creative Arts Emmys circuit.

The nomination could not only be a historic win for AMC but also for Hart, as it positions him as a dual-threat across music and television academies.

And if he wins?

The music and television industries would have one less excuse to overlook the series—and the genre—as legitimate competitors on their biggest stages.

Diegetic music is already an extremely hard task to pull off.

But a win for the individual songs “The Loneliness” and “Black Licorice” would mark a point where the Recording Academy voters recognize Lestat’s music as something capable of standing alongside real-world acts, rather than functioning solely as a TV prop.

While the FYC campaign places Hart’s music at the center of each submission, any recognition would still prove an undeniable victory for Sam Reid, whose vigorous studies and interpretation brought Lestat to life.

And despite the immense critical acclaim across multiple outlets—major, freelance, and independent publications—major television award bodies have historically snubbed the show and its performers.

A Grammy win would bite through biases, forcing the entertainment industry to confront what fans have known all along:

The unparalleled creativity and bold execution that is the Immortal Universe.

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The Beautiful Unwell

• Lestat’s Truth Finds Its Home in the Music

• Anne Rice Immortal Universe Hub

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

When Doubt Creeps In

Line of Fire Episode 3, “There Are Two Wolves,” lands like glass in a smash room.

And everyone is at risk of getting harmed.

From grand jurors to Clare to Jack—no one is safe.

And with a family full of law enforcement, how long can secrets remain buried?

Clare struggles with the fact that Logan was not who he said he was—replaying moments in her mind to feel something real.

But what she finds is real, just not the real that she wanted.

Clare connects with Detective Wallace to find out more about Logan, trying to reconcile why he was with her and how she failed to detect his deceit.

But before she can crumble beneath the weight of it all, a grand jury tampering case lands on Russ’s desk, requiring Clare’s help for a second opinion.

Russ comes from behind the desk and into the field when the death of a juror triggers his intuition, causing him to bring Clare in.

A welcome distraction after finding out her boyfriend of six months wasn’t who he said he was.

And that maybe everything she shared with him wasn’t real.

While a case can’t take away the grief, the next 72 hours buy enough time to at least recenter while Detective Wallace digs a little more into Logan’s background.

And while Clare questions whether she can trust her instincts, another Hollingsworth sibling is struggling to trust his.

Mike and Micah collide as Mike goes analog with the entire Secret Service team—implementing old-school training that the young group vehemently resists.

When we first met Micah, he was looking forward to his father’s retirement. But with an old threat resurfacing and the retirement on hold, Micah is back in his father’s shadow.

He’s both the golden boy and the punching bag among his team.

And like Clare, he desperately tries to claw beyond the shadows of his father’s legacy yet feels like he falls short at every attempt.

The Weight of the Hollingsworth Legacy

One thing that emerges within Episode 3 is the way the law and the Hollingsworths intertwine with one another.

At the center is Russ—the one with high-level clearance and access to information that can help his siblings.

But he’s also the youngest and the easiest to get steamrolled by his siblings’ ambitions.

He is the one most at risk of losing his job right now if any of his superiors find out.

Although the Hollingsworths clearly love one another, it’s radically obvious that boundaries are a foreign concept.

This dynamic couldn’t be more apparent than Mike coming over to Jane’s house to check on Clare when he walks in on her dinner date with Terry.

The Senator.

Every skillset converges in the back room as a family full of law enforcement, and their dates, who are also lawyers and law clerks, help Clare uncover evidence on the jury tampering case.

But just as Clare finds success, a phone call could end Russ’s career.

“Somebody has to toe the line.”

For the first time, it seems, Russ stands up to Clare—showing her that his way isn’t wrong, just different.

While her ambition is admirable, it can cause chaos for those who encounter its orbit.

And in her orbit is a proud father, one who comes alive when watching his daughter succeed.

Mike knows how to admire the parts of Clare that resemble him, but with Micah those similarities seem harder to recognize.

Or maybe just harder to accept.

And for the son carrying his father’s name into the same profession, approval becomes something he continually seeks but can’t quite obtain.

In the entirety of “There Are Two Wolves,” Micah struggles with living up to the demands of a legend while desperately searching for the man he once called Dad.

It’s within the chaos of the house that everyone’s problems and frustrations implode, the truth becoming even more apparent:

The Hollingsworths are at their best when it comes to everyone else’s mess.

And at their rockiest when they have to face their own.

Centered in the mess is Jack:

On the outskirts of his family’s lives, yet integrated in ways we have yet to uncover.

In communities.

At work.

Watching and lurking in the shadows yet hiding in plain sight.

But to what end?

The Family Beneath the Business

One thing to caution as we all come together on Monday nights is the current pace that Episode 3 sets.

Multiple storylines compete, which often makes the premise of a chaotic family dynamic louder than the narrative and the character personalities.

With A through D storylines following each family member alongside their connections to Jack, the question becomes whether this pacing model is built to last.

A more focused A-and-B episodic structure could give audiences more time to get to know these charismatic siblings beyond the crises surrounding them.

Their chemistry is at the heart of the series, and their on-screen interactions reveal a healthy dynamic free of competition and envy.

It would also allow space for us to explore the complicated “ex-but-not-my-ex” situationship between Jane and Mike.

A sneaky-link romance between the parents is one of the surprising highlights of the series, yet Line of Fire hasn’t found a way to let us in on the secret.

That may be purposeful—the hidden romance from the kids and the audience alike.

But it’s a bright spot that scratches the nostalgia itch—not for the audience’s past but for this family’s past.

Together, Jane and Mike provide us fleeting access to what the Hollingsworth family looked like before it was broken—bringing back a sense of whimsy to characters that can often become lost in fast pacing.

“There Are Two Wolves” gives us a glimpse of the family before they became so fractured.

A love they all wish to rediscover.

Peace.

A peace that was shattered when Jack died.

It all comes back to him.

And we’re hoping Line of Fire can deliver a season that makes this whirlwind worth it.

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The Hollingsworth Family Business

• Episode 1: The Hollingsworth Put the Family in Family Drama

• Episode 2 Puts Clare at the Heart of Many Secrets

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

Hal’s Choices and Consequences

Lanterns Episode 8, “Dirt and Stars,” is all about choices.

The ones that shape us.

The ones that make us.

And the ones that scare us.

The finale doesn’t immediately pick up where we left John and Halogram. Instead, it takes us back to 2016, in the aftermath of the destruction, and then to 2026—the aftermath of Hal’s choices.

When Hal was released from prison, Kerry stood waiting for him.

He had a choice: leave Rushville or stay to face the consequences of his actions.

Hal chose Rushville.

He chose Kerry.

In that, the town chose to remind him daily that he was unwanted and unwelcome—their anger direct and arsonous.

In a house fire caused by vengeful townspeople, Hal lies on the floor near death. That is, until Noah saves him.

The way Zoe saved John.

Noah is a Manhunter.

Now facing Sinestro, John and Halogram realize Hal’s final years aren’t as disconnected as they once appeared.

Hal found out the truth about Noah, but Manhunters don’t give without exchange, and Noah’s (Shea Pritchard) request in exchange for revealing his identity was one man.

Sinestro.

Noah broke him out.

With every passing moment John and Halogram interrogate Sinestro, the truth reveals itself beneath the layers of Sinestro’s careful admissions.

Manhunters are transactional—no reason for morality and ethics to cloud their judgment.

There was a transaction with Hal.

And there’s a transaction with Sinestro.

John will stop at nothing to find out what Noah wants with Sinestro—torturing him until the truth explodes.

Noah wanted Sinestro to forge a lantern.

But Sinestro is out for Sinestro.

First, appealing to Halogram about the new ring being able to bring him back to life for real.

And when that fails, he appeals to John to charge the ring—speaking to the friction between him and Hal.

The friction between a man and his replacement.

But this time, Sinestro’s seeds of distrust don’t work.

With everything John and Halogram went through inside the boat during Episode 7, “The Jordan Boys’ Legacy,” this Hal and John are finally on the same page, leaving Sinestro behind.

Halogram and John discuss the ring and the newly forged lantern.

They bicker back and forth when Halogram, frustrated by John’s stubbornness, suddenly asks what Hal’s last words to him were.

“Don’t tell anyone you’re in Rushville.”

Halogram admits something he knew about Hal all along, and something John may have secretly hoped but never allowed himself to believe:

Hal was always, and still is, trying to protect him.

Always.

This revelation takes John by surprise, continuing to break down his former perceptions of the Hal he knew and finding space to reconcile the Hal he needed.

This Hal.

And they hatch a plan to address Noah.

The new Manhunter.

Where Programming Ends and Life Begins

John’s plan lands him right into the arms of Noah—the yellow lantern ring on his finger—as he demands John tell him why he killed Zoe.

And John tells him plainly: Zoe wanted to be killed to keep everyone else from looking for Noah.

From knowing that she’d found a way to no longer be the last of her kind.

Why she welcomed death with a smile.

And when Noah trusted Hal with his identity, Hal’s persistence in knowing what Noah was up to in the portal led to Noah taking the ultimate steps to protect his species.

Suddenly, survival takes a different shape when filtered through Noah’s fear and his need to protect his identity and the existence of his people.

Noah killed Hal.

But this act cost him.

It cost his innocence, forcing him to struggle with the version of himself who is a product of his loving environment and the one that’s a product of what Manhunters were made to become.

A struggle that John knows all too well.

“For a long time I couldn’t tell where I started and where my programming ended.”

John takes a risk in vulnerability by sharing his life and traumatic upbringing with Noah.

To the boy he taught how to throw a perfect pass.

To the Manhunter with a conscience that now sits beside him.

One who feels.

One who cries.

One who wants to simply live.

Noah and John live with the same question about their purpose, their programming, even though they were created under two entirely different circumstances.

But both were given instructions on who they should be before ever having the chance to choose for themselves.

It’s in this vulnerable space where John connects with Noah the most—where his existence as a human and Noah’s as a Manhunter feel the same.

Noah recognizes this shared experience, but he recognizes where they diverge in their assigned destinies as leaders.

And Noah wants John to release him in the only way he knows will ensure he doesn’t succumb to his programming.

In death.

When John calls on Hal—for guidance or to talk him out of what Noah asks of him—he doesn’t appear.

But maybe Hal’s absence is the guidance.

For once, there is no one standing over John’s shoulder telling him what the right decision looks like.

No commander.

No Guardians.

No mother.

No Hal.

Just John.

So he chooses to trust his gut. To process everything Noah said and everything that was left unsaid.

And if there’s one thing John has learned from Hal/Halogram, it’s to ask questions and pay attention to the answer.

Pay attention to the child.

Pay attention to the mother who would do everything to protect her child.

John recognizes this fierce protection because he felt it every day that his mother waited for him to return home.

Holding her breath.

Waiting.

Hoping he’d survive.

Just like Kerry held her breath.

Waiting.

Hoping no one would discover Noah’s identity.

But Hal never stopped digging.

And it cost him his life.

The Choice John Makes for Himself

Kerry killed Hal.

Not Noah.

And when John asks her why she called him, knowing he’s the one person who would uncover the truth, she admits her fear that maybe she’s been raising a monster this entire time.

That the son she raised is a product of what made him, not a product of who loves him.

But John grants her a gift.

The truth, letting her know that Noah is more than his programming—he wants to be good.

So good he admitted to a murder and asked to be killed just to protect her.

A goodness that reflects John’s internal dilemma that he’s been battling his entire life.

But one that’s finally showing John who he is, not who people made him to be.

He realizes, through Noah and even through Hal, that we are the sum of our choices, not just a product of our predispositions.

Although Kerry possessed those fears about Noah, it’s a fear John has spent the entire season wondering about himself.

And with this recognition, John embraces that fear, allowing it to take on a new form.

Determination.

John chooses to bear the ring.

He activates the lantern beacon to summon Guy Gardner, to let him know that a different kind of hero will protect Earth.

With a new ring—Hal’s decommissioned ring—and a newly forged lantern.

Not quite green. Not quite yellow.

An “independent contractor” not bound to the rules of anyone but himself, his integrity, and his morality.

John chooses not to become the Green Lantern everyone expected him to become, but he doesn’t abandon everything Hal left behind, the lessons his mother taught him that worked, and the many lessons everyone taught him that didn’t work.

With this decision, John becomes something brand new.

Once an outcast by circumstance.

Now an OutKast by choice.

But in his final stand, his subconscious calls forth Hal.

When John thought he needed Hal to help make this decision, Hal didn’t appear. But now that John made it on his own, Hal appears one final time.

For validation.

For reassurance.

For the passing of the torch.

John is scared, but Halogram tells him what he’s known all along.

“You’re ready.”

Halogram urges him to charge the ring, knowing he will cease to exist for John.

But this time, there is love.

It’s always been love.

A spoken love between the two of them that didn’t get room to exist during Hal and John’s training.

The love from John the little boy who idolized Hal in his prime.

The love from John the trainee, who watched Hal piece together information faster than anyone he’s ever seen.

And the love from John the man, who got to experience Halogram—a version of Hal that wasn’t yet exhausted.

It was exactly the moment needed for John to accept that he’s ready, to make a choice on his own that wasn’t driven by anyone or anything else except his own desires.

“In the brightest day and the darkest night I’ll embrace my fear I’ll do what’s right. I choose this ring I choose this fight. In service to this lantern’s light.”

A new oath.

John’s oath.

One that imbues both fear and bravery.

One that honors agency.

John Stewart spent an entire season being chosen for circumstances he never asked for.

But the man standing in the streets of Rushville with his new ring isn’t waiting on orders for anyone to tell him who to be.

“I know exactly why me” now changes meaning. The answer is no longer rooted in why his mother knows and why the Guardians know.

It’s rooted in why John finally knows the answer for himself.

And for the first time, the lantern’s light and the choice to bear it belong entirely to him.

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The Evidence Continues

• Episode 1: The Tragic Cost of a Hero

• Episode 5 Forces John Stewart to Make a Choice

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

What Happens When Everyone Has Access to You

The iconic Stephen King story of Carrie White makes its way to Prime Video in a new adaptation, Carrie, on Wednesday, October 7.

This time, her story doesn’t just exist as small-town lore. It’s online.

Starring Summer H. Howell as Carrie White and Samantha Sloyan as her fiercely protective mother, Margaret, Carrie emerges from the confines of her sheltered life and into a world she’s been shielded from her entire life.

One with cell phones, social media, and teenagers who misuse them.

After the sudden death of her father, Carrie is thrust into a world for which she is completely unprepared—navigating bullying and scandal that rips through the community like wildfire.

All while experiencing an awakening of powers alongside her growing rage.

Unlike its film predecessor, Carrie slows us down, taking us inside the world of a teenager and how she processes information, people, beauty, and the cruelty around her.

Through this slower pace, the series allows room for a natural buildup—from the innocent and sheltered life to the bloody icon that represents a powerful image of female rage.

The additional element of modernizing the reach of bullying—from the 1976 version to including social media—takes Carrie’s rage from her school to the world.

Everyone can see the posts.

Everyone can see the likes.

And Carrie’s rage no longer exists within her small bubble; it extends across physical and digital time and space.

This changes the scale of what Carrie must survive before we ever meet the version of her audiences already know.

There Are No Rules to Rage

The opening episodes establish the iconic and recognizable history that Sissy Spacek brought to Carrie White in the 70s.

But soon after, the series settles into its new identity.

This Carrie isn’t just thrown into her new surroundings like a fish out of water.

She’s gaining an understanding of the world around her through a firehose—an understanding that fuels her curiosity and grants her agency.

It also shows the audience Carrie’s increased autonomy over her emotions rather than the unchecked outrage that could make people perceive her as unhinged.

And as the series takes care to weave in the history of telekinesis and witchcraft and how women were historically treated when seen as “other,” it gives Carrie context for understanding what she can do and how she can do it.

She’s in control now.

And for adults watching the series, it pulls you back into the world of high school cruelty—one you’ve maybe compartmentalized to the point of no longer existing within your own memories.

It shows you how time and technology make the space for bullying that much more dangerous.

It’s no longer in a silo, confined to your school and local town.

It’s worldwide.

And the internet is forever.

But the series isn’t just interested in what modern bullying does to Carrie. It takes time to examine those who are responsible for it.

On the other side, Carrie expands and deepens the antagonist, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton).

The series doesn’t excuse her increased malicious behavior, but it does peel back the veil on the circumstances and structures that influence her cruelty.

Through Chris, Carrie investigates the conditions that produce her behavior—how the way she’s being raised impacts her self-perception and how she retaliates against the world around her.

Cruelty isn’t made by accident.

Rage isn’t present at birth.

Life is the author of our actions, and Carrie’s life is, well, something of a horror story.

It All Begins Inside the Home

If the outside world gives us a glimpse of where Carrie is headed, the world inside her home shows us where it all began.

Her mother.

In the 1976 adaptation, Margaret was depicted as cold, callous, and rigid in her treatment of Carrie.

But in this series, we’re shown a new version—not necessarily soft but that of a genuinely concerned and grieving mother.

A mother who lost the center of her household while trying to raise a teenager who is as displaced in the world as she.

And even within her rules, she still extends herself to Carrie—letting her know that above all she’s still her mother, she’s here for her, and she loves her.

And as Carrie’s moods change, Margaret must watch her go down a path that she does not understand.

A path where she carries the burden of grief for her daughter and for herself.

And there’s no rule book for navigating grief.

There’s no rule book for joining a world in which you don’t recognize yourself.

Pressurized between a mother who’s desperately trying not to lose her daughter and high school bullying that threatens the threads of her resolve, Carrie learns she must make her own rules.

Howell and Sloyan are phenomenal in not only inhabiting the world of the story but also breathing new life into a fragile relationship as old as time:

The mother-daughter relationship.

And what’s even more beautiful about their performances is how when they share space, it feels as if you’re in their bubble—a show within a larger show that makes you invested in the dynamic that built the pyre for Carrie’s rage.

And more than just the set design—which physically takes you between the modern world in school and Carrie’s outdated surroundings inside her home—both actors still preserve that chemistry when they share space everywhere else.

They aren’t just othered; they also feel othered.

And in their nuanced performances, you connect with both characters.

You feel bad for them both.

You feel rage for them both.

And for Carrie, the rage has only just begun.

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The Scorned Teen…

• M.I.A. Brings Bold Energy in Revenge Series

• Wayward Turns Troubled Teens Into Psychological Horror

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

The Line Between Malice and Morality

It’s a deliciously evil concept to form a show where the audience shares a secret with a character.

A secret that could irreparably damage another.

A secret that could start a war.

HBO’s newest series, War, premieres on Thursday, October 1, and it’s here to rattle everything you thought you knew about lawyers with power.

Starring Emmy Award nominee Dominic West as Morgan Henderson and Golden Globe Award nominee Sienna Miller as Carla Duval, War is a high-stakes legal drama that follows the lives of London’s most powerful lawyers as they clash over a sensationalized legal battle.

A battle that draws in Jonathan “Johnny” Warren (Archie Reneaux)—a bright and ambitious young lawyer—like a moth to a flame into a ruthless world where the line between strategy and betrayal blurs.

Where winning isn’t nothing.

It’s everything.

Traditionally, legal dramas build tension around the pursuit of justice, professional ethics, or the moral compromises required to uphold them. War takes a keen interest in what happens when winning becomes the morality.

But the courtroom isn’t the only place where ugly battles take place.

In War, strategies unfold behind closed doors, information becomes ammunition, and knowing exactly where to strike is just as lethal as knowing the law.

Season 1 centers a volatile divorce case between Morgan Henderson and Carla Duval—pulling you into the drama from the inside out before revealing the masterminds behind the increasingly malicious divorce battle.

Lawyers.

Collateral Damage Spares No One

As the saying goes, “No one wins when the family feuds.”

And across eight episodes, both sides prove they are willing to go to the depths of hell to win.

But not at all costs.

Every cost.

At Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne, they’ll risk it all to gain everything for their clients and for themselves.

And in War, the series understands the stereotypes that surround powerful lawyers and doesn’t try to convince us otherwise.

Instead, it leans into the calculating brutality, unchecked ambition, and willingness to exploit weaknesses to make every choice feel oddly believable.

Though the viewer may not agree with the methods, War shows you enough to make you understand why.

But what happens when the lawyers’ self-interest no longer aligns with their clients?

Then what?

Morgan and Carla pull out all stops during their divorce battle, but the battle behind the scenes doesn’t just exist between the opposing law firms.

It’s embedded within their own teams.

This is where War truly shines as a series—showing just how the blade wielded to cause harm to someone else harms the wielder just the same.

And the longer the battle continues, the more difficult it becomes to determine where one war ends and another begins.

Professional competition bleeds into personal relationships, loyalty becomes conditional, and victories within one relationship create casualties in another.

And in war, who becomes the casualty?

The couples.

The children.

The interns.

The lawyers.

Everyone.

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Power, Pressure & Prestige

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Review

• The Pitt Season 2 Review

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

The Truth of the Father

Average Joe Season 2 finale, “Teddy’s Dead—That’s What I Said,” takes you into Teddy’s world one week before Joe, Touch, Leon, and Cathy came to Cape Town.

And what we see is a man who’s out for one person and one person only:

Himself.

He confronts Jamila about telling Imani about Joe—the son in America that she knew nothing about.

Teddy’s true colors show as the facade of a husband fades, only to be replaced by the monster no one ever knew.

Not Imani.

Not Jamila.

Not even Joe.

But for every step Teddy carefully planned ahead, Sipho took one more—his men surrounding Teddy as he attempted to flee after killing his own wife.

Imprisoned and surrounded by a family he didn’t choose, Joe, Imani, and Teddy sit in front of Sipho—a man who pursues greatness at any cost.

A man who pursues the greatness of his father before him.

Father and son.

Son and father.

Sins and inheritance live within the confines of brick walls, each person burdened with the weight of the consequences of carrying both.

Leon and Cathy also sit imprisoned with the weight of the consequences of the many decisions and missteps within their marriage.

And it all comes to a head when Cathy confronts Leon with her reality:

“Joe and Imani are not a part of us!”

Years of frustration, years of being silenced, and coming in fourth place behind his friends finally lead Cathy to voice the root of her decision-making.

Feeling outcast by the man she chose.

Feeling alone.

But for Leon, the betrayal is too much, and he asks for a divorce…should they make it out alive.

In both Joe and Cathy’s present circumstances, family changes shape yet again as frays turn into full-blown fractures—pieces of what was once good in isolation now a tragedy when exposed.

But where one door in the family closes, another one opens, and it’s a relationship that is a matter of death or survival.

A relationship that neither Teddy nor Sipho sees coming.

The Inheritance That Keeps on Giving

Bound.

Broken.

Lined up one by one, Sipho demands to know where his heroin is and uses Imani as currency to get Teddy to talk.

Her life on the line, Joe pleads with Teddy to tell Sipho where the heroin is.

In a moment where he can show up as a father, he shows the man he truly is—the man who values himself.

And there would never be room for anyone else.

Instead of answering the question, he places the burden of his choices, his theft, and his lies back on Joe—a cycle of generational trauma that he actively inflicts so long as it saves him from facing the ugly truth about himself.

A cycle that Joe fights with all he has to break.

When Ahmale’s people come to assist Joe, chaos allows everyone to break free from capture, and all hell breaks loose.

Kill or be killed.

If there’s anyone who has nothing to lose, it’s Cathy.

And Imani.

Cornered, injured, and out of options, Teddy uses all that he has to manipulate Imani into turning her gun on Cathy.

But when she confronts him about his actions, about killing her mother, he immediately renegotiates terms with Cathy to kill Imani—willing to sacrifice his own family for the sake of securing his survival.

As the bodies pile up, so does the debt.

And the Afghans come to collect.

With Sipho dead and no successor named, the Lion has to seek another way to get her heroin or her money for the amount stolen.

The entirety of Season 2 of Average Joe has been about family and inheritance—relationships, fatherhood, the family by blood, and the family chosen.

Every decision one makes impacts everyone else, even when every attempt is made to shield someone from the consequences.

And in true Average Joe fashion, Teddy’s consequences are an inheritance that keeps on giving.

Stealing the heroin from Sipho didn’t end with Sipho.

Teddy inherited the product and the debt to the Afghans.

But with Teddy and Sipho out of the way, Joe once again finds himself the beneficiary of horrific circumstances because of the man he once called father.

And who would Teddy be if he didn’t leave behind more clues for Joe to find?

Maybe the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. Maybe Joe is like Teddy.

Cars.

Money.

Heroin.

Joe unlocks the final clue to retrieve what he’s been chasing all season long. But if he thought it would be simple, he has another thing coming.

Cathy.

Once again, Cathy fights for her agency and autonomy by looking out for herself—fighting to build a future that no longer resembles her former self.

A fight Joe expects.

One he respects.

Joe realizes that if he’s going to participate in crime, it’s better to do it with the family he knows he can trust rather than go it alone.

A deal is made for Joe, Leon, and Touch to get the money and the gold while Cathy gets the heroin—a deal that pulls the family back together.

Even if it’s only for a moment.

Only for another season.

But the Lion threatens everything when she comes to collect Sipho’s debt.

Teddy’s debt.

Joe’s debt.

And the Lion knows exactly how to harm him.

Family.

Using his wife and daughter as collateral, gunshots ring out, altering Joe’s life forever.

And with the audience left assuming that Angela and Jennifer are deceased, we also have to wonder if Joe is like his father after all.

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Joe’s Dysfunctional Family

• Episode 7: Teddy Turns Family Into His Greatest Weapon

• Why Cathy is the Most Misunderstood Character

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

The Tangled Webs We Weave

NBC’s Line of Fire Episode 2, “A Bigger Picture,” gets off to a chaotic start as the Hollingsworth family deals with the death of Clare’s boyfriend, Logan.

The murder committed by the brother none of the siblings knows is even alive.

Jack.

And her grief is amplified by the resurfacing feelings surrounding Jack’s death—both losses now living inside her in a panic.

The worst part:

Mike and Jane know that Jack went undercover and is potentially alive.

What they don’t know—but highly suspect—is that Logan was his doing, and Detective Nia Wallace, played by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, suspects they’re holding back more than they’re willing to give.

Det. Wallace heads to Logan’s place to gather more information about him when she asks a neighbor about Joel, a man frequently seen hanging out with Logan at his apartment.

But the neighbor informs Det. Wallace that there is no Joel.

Suddenly, the suspicions around Logan’s real identity increase, and for the audience, why Jack specifically watched Clare becomes even more intriguing.

Even more interesting is Clare’s insistence on staying in the field even though she’s emotionally compromised—her feelings about her mother influencing how she leads her new case.

This places her and Jane on opposite sides of justice, fueling an already volatile relationship that’s been simmering beneath the surface.

All while Russ is unfortunately stuck in the middle of their feud as a new DoJ employee—still finding his identity in the workplace while trying to define boundaries with his siblings and his parents so he doesn’t get fired in his first week.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree

FBI versus U.S. Marshal.

Mother versus daughter.

Clare makes a decision that leads her directly between the suspects of her case—and on the business end of a barrel.

And the reality of her predicament is one she won’t fully accept: she is more like her mother than she’s willing to admit.

Each woman goes against the other to prove her case, fighting to be heard—choices that could have cost one of them her life.

A realization that rocks Jane to her core.

The fear of losing another child, her only daughter.

For the first time, Jane shares her human side—her motherly side—with Clare, trying to make her understand how throwing yourself into work to run away from grief can cause more harm than good.

And Clare listens but also lets her mom know that while she recognizes their similarities, she’s carving a path all her own, which requires her mother to trust her.

Trust her with her instincts.

Trust her with her feelings.

And as the episode ends, the concept of trust gets warped under the weight of the enormous lie that Mike and Jane sit on.

Jack.

“I had to tell myself he was dead because, to us, he had to be.”

But believing something in order to survive it doesn’t make it an absolute fact.

Mike and Jane knew Jack went undercover. They knew he didn’t die in service. And that truth alone could be enough to destroy the relationship between the parents and their children.

And while Mike and Jane reconcile the lie they needed to believe about Jack, another truth rocks Clare.

Logan was an undercover CIA operative.

His assignment?

Clare.

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More Crime, More Drama

• Line of Fire Episode 1 Review

• The Rainmaker Season 2 Renewal

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

The Path Given

1975 (Then)

Young Hal Jordan in the coach’s office with his dad, who had to be called in because Hal wouldn’t give the baseball—nor his time to keep shining on the field—to the backup pitcher.

To his replacement.

Instead of allowing someone else the opportunity to shine, he decided to fight his whole team.

And he still never relinquished the ball.

In Lanterns Episode 7, “The Jordan Boys’ Legacy,” metaphors and symbolism take root in Hal’s backstory—painting a clearer picture of how Hal processes relationships, disappointment, and responsibility.

The first teacher of this lesson?

His father.

But instead of his father teaching him a lesson in humility, he fights the coach—telling him that being good is “all that f—matters.”

“I fought with you; I fought on your side long before you were born.”

Lyrics from “Father to Son” by Queen play in the background, bringing into the scene with them a feeling of a father saying goodbye.

A father who on the outside looks and acts tough but does everything he can to fight for his son, even when he doesn’t always win.

And while both bruised-up Jordan boys share a popsicle, the perception of the previous confrontation and everything we thought we knew about Hal changes.

Was it arrogance or was it advocacy that motivated Martin?

Or was it both?

As they sit nursing their wounds, Martin hands Hal a key…

Then asks him if he’s scared, to which Hal replies, “no.”

Immediately, the passing of the key from father to son comes with a story and a lesson about fear and preparation.

When Hal’s grandfather gave the key to Martin before war, he didn’t come back.

Now Martin bestows the key upon Hal—a symbol of responsibility and maybe a foreshadowing of the moment Hal’s father knew he would embark on a mission from which he wouldn’t return.

In that moment, he speaks about that very determination that’s in the Jordan blood—their legacy of bravery and endurance, but also in knowing when to let go.

The baseball.

Hal clenches it still, and his father tells him he can simply throw it away, that he can’t hold onto it—being the only gifted one—forever “because it’s f—exhausting.”

A lesson young beat-up Hal receives after fighting for his perfect game status on the team that echoes everything we know about his fight to hold onto the Lantern title now.

The Path Taken

2026 (Now)

Halogram is stunned by his death and that it’s been ten years since he’s last been called upon.

But just like Hal, he quickly sifts through John’s lies and demands to know what the hell is going on.

John puts him back inside the ring, but it’s clear that John intends to use him to access Hal’s vault.

The key from Martin.

A key that now has a bird keychain attached to it, a symbol that Hal knows is important to John—a clue he knows he would follow.

What does Hal want John to find?

Whatever it is, Halogram won’t help until he takes him to see Kerry.

This is where the heart of the brotherhood shines.

Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre put their biting banter on full display—digs and jabs at one another that hurt, but with enough care not to hit too far below the belt.

This relationship extends even deeper than John wants to acknowledge when he subconsciously manifests the hologram and maintains the projection even without the ring.

John thinks Halogram manifested himself into the passenger seat, but he tells him the only way he is present is if John thinks about him at all.

The sudden realization brings Halogram’s teasing to a full stop as he realizes the complete anomaly of his presence.

John isn’t wearing the ring.

Halogram is stunned and impressed, delivering a compliment about John’s talents that momentarily takes him off guard.

It’s here where John grants himself permission to wonder what his relationship with Hal would have been like had he met this version of him.

Before Hal was exhausted.

For John, this comes as a balm to all of the stress he’s experienced in the last ten years and especially the last 24 hours.

And even if just for a moment, John allows himself to accept the kindness.

A kindness that’s quickly clouded by the secret John withholds from Halogram about who actually killed the Manhunter.

While John wrestles with his new and complicated feelings about Hal, he sticks to his bargain and takes Halogram to see Kerry.

And it’s one of the most heartbreaking moments of the entire series.

“Did we talk about my father? How he died?”

Kerry nods but also discloses how Hal felt about John over the ten years they didn’t speak.

How he was “the TV he would yell at every Sunday, but he wouldn’t miss a game.”

For ten years, John knew Hal as the man who was washed up.

The man who fell.

But Kerry gives him a glimpse of the man who apparently never stopped watching John, never stopped showing up for him, even if it was from a distance.

Suddenly, the revelation washes over John, along with the guilt of learning that their estrangement may not be what he thought it was all this time.

As quickly as the truth about Hal’s true feelings about John enters the room, another potential truth shows up beside it when Halogram tells John something about Kerry.

“She killed me.”

The Path Chosen

The vault is open, and Halogram pulls out a mysterious black blob while John arms up with a weapon.

Halogram asks John if Hal ever taught him Einstein-Rosen bridge theory, then quickly explains the dark matter manhole is essentially a portal.

To another planet.

And Halogram wants to get himself and John wherever they need to be before Kerry returns to the vault to find them.

John takes him to a part of town that’s still recovering from the destruction when he abruptly stops and tells Halogram to ask him if he’s afraid.

Is this to prove a point to himself or Halogram?

At the moment it’s unclear, and John bravely walks through the portal without hesitation to a place that feels to him both unsettling and familiar.

When they look up, they see what appears to be a destroyed civilization.

And Halogram quickly realizes Hal never taught John to fly.

As they walk through the deserted land, John realizes they are walking on top of bodies—the souls of a forgotten civilization.

That’s when it hits John that this place is the land where Antaan showed him.

His people’s experience.

A people destroyed by a rogue Manhunter.

But there’s no time to linger on the gravity of where they stand, and they set out for Hal’s boat—back in a small space, yet again, with the elephant between them.

John and Hal’s relationship.

And Halogram asks him point blank:

“Why did you come back?”

But John’s answer reveals his return is deeper than Hal.

Perhaps even deeper than his mother having the power to convince him to go back in the first place.

So much of John’s life has been shaped by paths other people chose for him—the Guardians, his parents, Hal, the Marines, and the weight of responsibility attached to each identity he was expected to wear.

And it’s glaringly clear John holds a lot of anger and resentment over having no control over his own path.

But instead of just wanting an apology from Hal, maybe John came back so he could walk the path he’d finally chosen for himself.

These feelings take hold of him, coming to an explosive head in the eye of a storm—not just the one surrounding John but the one that dwells inside.

John Sr. appears with an apple atop his head.

“Are you afraid, son?!”

John pulls the gun, thrown back into a childhood lesson as he yells his answer.

No.

Young John Jr. with an apple atop his head.

John freezes.

And his younger self speaks the truth aloud that John himself was afraid to voice his entire life.

He is and has always been extremely afraid.

Before he’s completely consumed by his fears and insecurities, Halogram saves John from himself and his hallucination, the atmospheric gas playing on his mind like a fiddle.

But it reveals a truth John has never allowed himself to confront—his fears, his wants, and his needs.

John’s demons aren’t the only ones present in the boat, however, as Halogram opens up about his own father.

The test pilot story wasn’t a training accident.

He was living with a pain that was growing, one that he could no longer hide from his family.

And the note young Hal inherited about the truth of his father’s death was the very same pain Martin inherited from his father.

Depression and suicide.

The Jordan Boys’ Legacy.

And Halogram confesses what we’ve been running toward the entire season about Hal:

“I’m not fearless because I’m brave, I’m fearless because I’m broken.”

In Episode 4, “The Weenie,” we came to this very conclusion, understanding that it wasn’t fearlessness that made Hal capable of saying yes to the ring, but the fact that he already understood how to live with fear after suffering a devastating loss.

And in Episode 7, Hal confirms what we’ve been ruminating on from the start.

It’s here, within this confession, that John finally acknowledges the ring’s construct as just Hal and extends an apology to every Hal—the man he knew, the man he’s learning, and the boy he never got to meet.

When they make it to their destination, a mysterious figure surprises them and takes Hal hostage.

This time, Hal and John are no longer on opposite sides of their fear.

They’ve found kinship in one another through it.

“Trainee, they’re playing our song.”

And John uses his willpower to make Hal disappear and sucker punches the hooded figure in the face to reveal someone we didn’t see coming.

Sinestro.

“Great arm, kid.”

Hal to John.

The very same words from Martin to young Hal.

And we’re back in 1975 with different lyrics from “Father to Son” blanketing the scene.

This time, young Hal in his funeral clothes goes to retrieve the baseball he threw during the last conversation he had with his father.

The symbolism in this ending frame encapsulates a part of Hal Jordan that maybe he’d forgotten.

Yes, he was broken.

Yes, he inherited his father’s “legacy” of depression.

But young Hal goes back for the baseball—changing the meaning of an object that connects him to his father and his father’s father.

It’s a representation of the exhaustion that lives inside him, but Hal realizes that what he inherited doesn’t get to choose the path for him.

Decades later, returning to Hal and confronting everything he spent years running from, John also makes a choice.

John and Hal realize they don’t have to be defined by their inherited pain.

They can embrace it and still choose to keep going.

This time, choosing to keep going with one another.

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The Evidence Locker

• Episode 5: John Stewart’s Choice

• Episode 2 Turns Everyone From Witness to Suspect

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

Hillman College Here We Come

SCHOOL IS IN SESSION!

A Different World premiered all 10 episodes Thursday, September 24, on Netflix, and it’s the perfect start of freshman year…

If you include the chaos and aimless decision-making that 18-year-olds are prone to make once they’re out from underneath their parents’ surveillance.

Fitting in, boys, girls, grades, and envy live within the students as they stumble through Hillman trying to find their identity and find their way.

AND IT’S HARD!

New crushes.

New secrets.

Looking for husbands?!

But the lessons that come with it equip you with the tools to call upon should the need come. 

And that, students, is life.

Creator and showrunner Felicia Pride brings another ensemble cast that includes Maleah Joi Moon, Alijah Kai Haggins, Cornell Young, Jordan Aaron Hall, Kennedi McClure, and Chibuikem Uche.

The legacy cast includes Kadeem Hardison, Jasmine Guy, Darryl M. Bell, Cree Summer, Charnele Brown, Jenifer Lewis, Dawnn Lewis, Glynn Turman, and Jada Pinkett Smith.

With legacy, however, comes the heavy weight to live up to family expectations, standards, social pressures, and personal goals.

A Different World returns to Hillman College with a new class stepping onto campus. At the center is Deborah Wayne (Moon), Whitley’s (Guy) and Dwayne’s (Hardison) lovingly sheltered youngest daughter, a free spirit with a flair for the spotlight and a big heart who’s still figuring out her own path at Hillman.

Throughout each episode the effortless mix of humor and depth remains and translates across time—integrating punchlines, one-liners, and social media interactions that feel both familiar and fresh.

And to their credit, the new generation has their own identity.

Though they occupy similar spaces (same jobs, dorm rooms, the jock, the sheltered), A Different World expands common generational behaviors and tropes in a way that still makes the characters feel brand new.

However, there is a downside to A Different World.

I know, don’t kill me, but it’s not what you think.

It’s not the writing, or the costumes, or even the story itself.

It’s that we simply didn’t get enough time to fully move into the dorms with these characters.

The ten-episode series glides through the personal struggles of the students, their successes, and past traumas quite smoothly—grounding the audience into the story without overwhelm.

Even the cast from the original series enters each scene authentically, still connected through nearly four decades of friendship.

But ten episodes just isn’t enough to keep us satisfied. 

More episodes would allow audiences to create deep and rich connections with the new cast outside the shadows of their parents.

While keeping the previous cast connected to the series is the perfect bridge for fans old and new alike, more episodes could wean us away from the reliance on the original cast and develop new relationships with the younger generation.

It could also allow more breathing room for serious issues like under-testing and under-diagnosis of learning disabilities in Black women that get overlooked or often framed as “doing the most” or being “all over the place.”

It’s exactly the conversation A Different World has always made room for. Here, however, the shortened season means the series has to move on almost as quickly as it introduces it.

But as quickly as the topic comes, A Different World still manages to give the characters enough reflection to establish what the issue means.

Finding Yourself Within the Noise

A Different World still manages to infuse social and world issues into the messaging, and one of those issues is the navigation of social media.

There is power in what you say on the internet.

And A Different World tackles a storyline where the students must learn to maintain conscious awareness of their influence and how, if not taken seriously, it can negatively impact everyone around them.

For a generation whose social currency increasingly exists online, the series asks what happens when digital influence collides with real-world consequences.

And the storyline beautifully navigates the shift in how younger generations communicate and the responsibilities that come with that influence.

But there’s one storyline that is bold, loud, and proud.

The fashion. 

Historically, Black sitcoms have pushed artistic boundaries and expressed their political views through fashion, and Emmy-nominated costume designer Provi Fulp delivers.

Every outfit, every color, and every stitch enhances each character’s personality, personal journey, and emotional state—deepening our connection to who they are.

Deborah’s style changes from patterns and pairings that depict the daughter her parents want her to be to pieces that feel elevated—finding her voice through fashion just as much as her studies.

And with Fulp, style is more than something to admire. 

It’s a lifestyle.

It’s a statement.

And the students of Hillman are bold with what they have to say.

Even if what they say turns into a hashtag.

What cannot be a hashtag is the power in Black education. From the original series to now, that messaging still remains.

Though it was compressed across a short order series, the value of what A Different World represents still matters.

Parents tell us who we’re supposed to become.

Social media tells people who we are.

Fashion tells people how we see ourselves.

Friends and relationships help us figure ourselves out within the noise.

But education gives the students the environment in which they can discover who they want to become.

This is where the old meets the new—a series that still makes space for conversations about identity and agency.

That’s why Hillman matters.

And it’s only just getting started.

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Your Next Weekend Binge

• Netflix’s Wayward Turns Troubled Teens Into Psychological Horror

• Elle Brings a Bright New Chapter to the Legally Blonde Legacy

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

The Woman We Perceive

The saying goes, “There’s no woman like a woman scorned.”

But what happens when the scorn doesn’t present itself in open rage and destruction?

What if it’s quietly brewing during years of being wronged?

And when it finally comes to light, it isn’t explosive but calculating and self-protective.

What if the scorn looks like something you can’t stand to face because facing it would mean recognizing some parts of your life within the woman taking action?

These are questions that I pondered across two seasons of Average Joe when experiencing Cathy—a multidimensional and astoundingly dynamic woman who embodies everything we love and dislike in a person.

In women.

And judging by the way audiences react to the escalation of Cynthia Kaye McWilliams’ portrayal of Cathy in Average Joe, they don’t much like her.

McWilliams’ character consistently makes decisions that appear selfish from the outside looking in. But internally, Cathy is also a woman trying to have her voice heard in a world where the men around her often get the final say.

Even now, in Cape Town, Cathy is surrounded by Leon, Touch, and of course Joe—who often make decisions for the group that Cathy openly challenges, only to privately convince Leon that another plan may be better.

Her voice? Suppressed.

Her ideas? Discarded.

And it breeds a resentment that at first appears to be disloyalty but could come from years of feeling unheard and misunderstood.

For two seasons, the core group has been dodging danger across two continents, yet Cathy’s proposed plans have often proved correct after the men rejected them.

That is, after her ideas were shot down, something went wrong, and the men eventually came back around needing Cathy to bail them out.

It’s a cycle many women recognize: having the answer isn’t always enough when people believe you shouldn’t be the one that has it.

Even in a marriage where her husband built a pedestal on his back for her to stand on, Leon questions the validity of her ideas in front of his friends. And with every dismissal and Leon’s wavering support, something between them fractures a little more.

So for a woman on screen who, by all accounts, looks like nothing will ever be enough for her, it’s true.

But it’s not the money or the drugs that aren’t enough.

There’s never going to be enough apologies to fill the emptiness she’s been left with time and time again whenever she was told and shown that her voice didn’t matter.

The Woman They Perceive

In Season 2 Episode 6, “Blind Spot,” this ire comes fully forward as Cathy betrays the group and offers Joe to Sipho in exchange for money and freedom.

It’s also in “Blind Spot” that Joe discloses the secret that Leon lied about being sterile and that it was Cathy who was infertile—mocking her for being unfit to be a mother.

This is information that causes her deep harm, as flashbacks in Season 1 show a brighter, more hopeful Cathy crumble under the weight of feeling “broken” because she couldn’t get pregnant.

For Cathy, the inability to have a child becomes more than infertility. Season 1 shows how deeply she internalizes not becoming pregnant as a brokenness within herself—a perceived failure attached to the life she thought she and Leon would have.

And that pain becomes difficult to separate from the expectations women are taught to carry around motherhood—where the ability to become a mother can become entangled with ideas about womanhood, fulfillment, and worth.

So with Joe’s spiteful confession, Leon’s act of selflessness is now perceived as a wound to Cathy’s agency, further fracturing the trust and family she thought she built with Leon.

And although his decision proved he loved her enough to protect her from the news he knew would devastate her, he didn’t trust her enough to handle her own feelings about it.

In his attempt to shield her from pain, he took away her power to choose how she would have wanted to grieve the loss of motherhood in the first place.

Now, Joe weaponizes this information to further divide her from the group.

It’s Joe’s family.

Then there’s Cathy.

The Woman She Chooses to Be

So what makes Cathy’s anger so difficult to untangle?

She did everything society tells women to do—get married, try to start a family, build security.

All the things that are the alleged ingredients to a life that’s supposed to lead somewhere.

But little by little, the life she thought she was building became something she no longer recognized.

A life for which she was no longer willing to settle.

The easy thing to do is categorize all of her actions as selfish, but underneath them is a Black woman with rage.

A Black woman with grief.

A quiet rage that built over years of being let down.

Years of being silenced.

Years of seeing what life could be all for the possibilities to vanish before her eyes.

And years of grieving the discrepancy between the life promised by doing everything “right” and the life she actually received.

So when following the “right path” gets her nowhere, the opportunity to start over—by legal or illegal means—is attractive enough for her to go into self-preservation mode.

But self-preservation has a cost.

The cost?

Cathy making the same decisions for the group that she herself resents.

Her freedom now comes at the expense of Joe, Touch, and Leon.

Her survival requires someone else to become collateral.

And that’s where Cathy’s actions become difficult to defend even when she remains easy to understand.

Maybe that’s the uncomfortable line Cathy has been walking all along.

After spending years believing everyone else’s needs, decisions, and futures came before hers, choosing herself begins to feel less like betrayal and more like survival.

And for Cathy, survival begins to require the sacrifice of everyone around her, which makes it difficult to tell where self-preservation ends and selfishness begins.

She loves Leon.

It’s been apparent across two seasons.

But in Cape Town, love and survival are at war, and her life depends on every decision she makes.

And each decision she makes in pursuit of survival can make the audience believe she’s incapable of truly loving anyone else at all.

But she isn’t a woman who doesn’t love.

She’s just a woman who decided she loved herself just a little more.

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Average Joe’s Family Dynamic

• Episode 7 Turns Family Into Teddy’s Greatest Weapon

• Episode 6 Exposes the Truth in Every Choice

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

The Prodigal Father

Teddy.

Alive, breathing, and well.

After one and a half seasons of being burdened with the consequences of his father’s illegal career choices, Joe finally comes face to face with the source of his problems in Average Joe Season 2 Episode 7, “Family Reunion.”

In Episode 6, “Blind Spot,” Joe turned himself over to Sipho with a recon mission to get his sister safely out of the compound and all of them (well, maybe except for Cathy) out of the country.

This becomes foiled when he finds himself locked in a cell with no clear lines of communication to Leon and Touch.

But his incarceration came with a revelation he couldn’t have predicted; even his life depended on it.

Teddy is alive.

And suddenly, Joe’s suppressed rage has a physical target.

In a flashback, Teddy, played by Dennis Haysbert, sits with a more reserved Joe—a conversation that feigns normalcy but exposes the depths of Joe and Teddy’s relationship.

Joe feels small.

Meek.

And childlike.

Given what we know of his strict upbringing from Season 1, we see the power dynamic on full display in the diner.

Teddy isn’t just a figure that’s larger than life.

He is larger than life.

It’s within this flashback that Teddy casually brings up the buck head that, unbeknownst to Joe, contains millions of dollars.

What once appeared innocuous now reveals Teddy laying the groundwork for his disappearance long before anyone suspected he intended to die.

But the manipulation doesn’t end there.

“I love you son.”

It sounds genuine.

It comes out like a fall breeze.

Yet Joe is rendered momentarily speechless from the intrusion of it, as if he’s never heard it at all.

“I love you too, Pops.”

Joe’s inner child becomes present in the scene, unknowingly vulnerable to the events that lay ahead.

Every Teddy defense, every scoff at Imani telling Joe he was alive, and every “almost” respect for his deceased father now shatters under the weight of the truth of Teddy’s existence.

The Son Who Fights Back

Father and son.

Maker and made.

Teddy and Joe.

It all boils down to a confrontation that is long overdue—not just for the mess Joe is in currently but for the boy who sought his father’s love just to be given less than what he deserved in return.

“You think I won’t f— you up for what the f— you did to my life, to my family?”

Finally, the crux of the entire series is exposed in a single combative question.

Teddy destroyed his family.

Joe’s family was destroyed by Teddy’s choices.

And now Joe’s chosen family is fractured because of Teddy’s schemes.

Family, for Joe, is everything he had that separated him from being his father’s son.

But it is now the very thing that is heading toward the very outcome he tried hard to avoid.

Joe can’t change the family Teddy gave him.

But Imani, Leon, and Touch are the family he chose and built himself.

Allowing Teddy to destroy them would mean letting his father take something from him one final time, and Joe refuses to allow this version of his family to be consumed by Teddy.

Another man whose present conflict with family determines how he operates is Detective Akinyemi.

In Episode 6, Akinyemi found Phyllis and Imani at Jamila’s house and brought them into custody for questioning.

But the image of her dead in front of him, alongside the bodies piling up on this case, continues to pull forth his inner demons.

A father whose profession led to an inheritance his son didn’t ask for.

A son who lost his life because of it.

Driven by his need to reconcile not being able to change his son’s fate, he makes a critical mistake that lands him, Phyllis, and Imani in Sipho’s hands.

In “Family Reunion,” everything collides at Sipho’s compound, and the definition of family takes a different appearance.

Leon versus Cathy—a family fractured by lies and ambition.

Teddy versus Jamila—a family curated as a means to an end to acquire power.

Imani versus Teddy—a daughter who has yet to realize how the woman she loved most was merely a blip in Teddy’s criminal ascension.

But new family alliances form as Phyllis and Touch’s season-long yearning finally finds acknowledgment between them—a shared moment that ends with Touch bringing in Joe’s newly acquired family.

Ahmale.

A Double-Edged Sword

Teddy’s transactional approach to relationships inadvertently appears as the very connection Touch uses to try to get everyone out of the compound safely.

A blind spot that Teddy won’t see coming because Teddy believes Joe is like him.

But unlike him, Joe values those he calls family and doesn’t discard them at the slightest inconvenience.

What he did for Ahmale and her people may be the difference that makes her choose to show up for Joe.

Not because of Teddy, but because of who he already proved to her to be.

But Teddy knows something about his son too.

He sent Joe the picture of his wife and daughter knowing Joe would come to Cape Town. He knew discovering he had a sister would make him stay.

Now Teddy has positioned himself as the one parent left Imani wouldn’t leave without. And he knows Joe won’t leave without Imani—playing on his wounds at already losing his wife and daughter.

“You won’t leave without her, which means you won’t leave without me.”

Teddy turns the very thing that separates Joe from him into his final act of manipulation.

Family.

Joe may want to leave Teddy behind, but saving Imani now means saving the father who destroyed them both.

By the end of Episode 7, Joe’s fight is no longer simply about getting his family out alive.

It’s about deciding whether or not Teddy is a part of the family he’ll choose to save.

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Joe’s Family Tree

• Episode 6 Exposes the Truth Underneath Every Choice

• Episode 5 Proves Survival Runs in the Family

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

1

Waiting for the End

Cold rooms.

Stiff beds.

Terrible pillows.

For anyone who’s ever visited a hospital, the idea of staying longer than necessary is a cruel one.

Now imagine it being the very place you go to live out your final days.

And suddenly the cruel idea becomes a harsh and lonely reality.

Life Goes On is about a man in hospice care, Bill (David Bradley), who’s ready for death and the silence that comes after such a long life. And though he’s ready to be through with life, life isn’t through with him yet.

This is the debut short film from writing, producing, and directing duo Kat Butterfield and Daniel Audritt, who deliver a film that is hilarious and audaciously dark.

But it’s a reality that is explored in a way that allows us to sit alone with the scary feeling that overtakes our bodies whenever we think of death.

We can’t escape it.

It’s inevitable.

But if given an opportunity to establish a relationship with death, how would we treat it?

When Life Refuses to Let Go

Bill awakes every day to repeat his last day on Earth in a cycle that increasingly forces him to confront the relationships he’s going to leave behind.

The title sequence alone, synced with the steady beeping of a vitals machine, immediately pulls you into the dark humor that blankets the film.

On.

And on.

And on…

The yellow lights.

Pale painted walls.

Nurses, aides, and doctors come in and out to poke and prod, but Bill sits in a state of mild disgust—feeling like less of a man and more a simple body occupying a bed until it’s his time.

His annoyance is amplified by the comings and goings and endless one-sided conversations from those who, through Bill’s eyes, may be there as much for themselves as they are for him.

Is it to say goodbye, or is it to resolve their own feelings?

These inner thoughts manifest in Bill’s retreat—placing himself inside an emotional cocoon, safe from the outside noise, biding his time until his last breath.

As each person comes to visit, Bill steps outside of himself, examining their motivations, his surroundings, and the repetitive mundanity of one’s last days from the lens of someone who’s had enough.

And Bradley poignantly carries the rigidity and impatience that comes from those who were once vibrant but now feel the wheels of time slowly bring their existence to an end.

What We Leave Behind

But one relationship cuts through the humor like a surgical knife:

His daughter.

Bill can race toward death, but he can’t outrun the regret he leaves behind.

Every “should’ve,” “could’ve,” or “would’ve” feels much too little and far too late.

It’s within these feelings that Life Goes On truly comes to life—where presence becomes the lesson.

The very thing we take for granted, that we believe time will wait for, is what cripples us in the moments we feel both most alive and most alone.

There’s no getting that back.

We must decide to be in the present the moment it’s with us or risk leaving the Earth mourning the moments we allowed to pass us by.

With Life Goes On, Kat and Daniel accomplish something extraordinary through something remarkably simple.

They capture a feeling of peace many of us hope to experience when faced with the finite nature of our own lives.

The humor.

The laughter.

The parts of ourselves we hope remain with the people we love.

In Life Goes On, death doesn’t become a punchline but rather the inevitable we can come to accept once we reconcile how we’ve lived.

When everyone else’s lives go on, how will they carry us with them? 

The film doesn’t answer the question. 

It simply allows you to wonder.

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More Short Films to Explore

• Still Life Captures the Quietude of Grief and the Life That Remains

• Paralysis Turns Technology Into Psychological Terror

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

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The Family Business

Two Secret Service agents, an FBI agent, a Department of Justice officer, and a U.S. Marshall.

What do they all have in common?

The Hollingsworth family.

While it may sound like the beginning of a bad bar joke, this family knows that nothing they do is a laughing matter.

NBC’s newest series, Line of Fire, is about a family of law enforcement agents who struggle to bridge personal differences and cross professional boundaries in service to the public.

Starring Peter Krause as Mike, Hope Davis as Jane, Kat Cunning as Clare, Tommy O’Brien as Micah, and Taylor Bloom as Russ, Line of Fire tackles family drama through an unusually tangled professional lens.

Yet it seamlessly weaves between humor and depth in a way that doesn’t allow the audience to settle for too long, but just enough to feel the weight of the story.

NOTE: Light premiere spoilers ahead

Line of Fire approaches family crime drama with an energy reminiscent of the height of the 2000s while pulling the audience into a unique dynamic that is fresh, grounded, and oddly spicy.

For a show that should feel off-kilter and out of place, the Hollingsworth family is a humorous reflection of a family of professionals who solve more cases than their own personal issues.

Estranged spouses.

Secret boyfriends.

Unprofessional relationships.

And the pressures of family legacy.

It all collides and collapses under the weight of a family who knows how to be there for everyone but each other.

But how do you repair something that you didn’t know was broken until it was too late?

As the family struggles to come to grips with their new dynamics that threaten to pull them further apart, justice works even harder to bring them back together.

Even if it’s only for a little while.

The Case They Struggle to Solve

The beauty inside the chaos is the Hollingsworth siblings—adults who never abandoned the kids inside them who need their mom and dad.

The adults who fight for identity and agency in professions where they are defined by the reputations of their parents.

And the parents have their faults.

Mike and Jane are estranged.

But the way they brought up their children didn’t suddenly disappear once they decided to temporarily call it quits.

The damage lingers.

And it lingers within the children because the mess was never addressed.

Every new case, every new victim made it easier to ignore the problems growing at home.

But another thing that lingers between the Hollingsworth parents is the love that never found a reason to fade away—punctuated by the secret affair they’ve been having with one another behind the kids’ backs.

It’s revelations like these that make Line of Fire exciting.

While the introduction of the series may seem scattered and disconnected, Line of Fire uses the Hollingsworths’ professions to set the stage for real interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration to solve cases.

This is what makes the show unique.

Most crime series focus on a specific profession, bringing in departmental agencies across one or two episodes before refocusing on the original storyline.

But Line of Fire isn’t bound by jurisdictional prudence.

It takes the professional family dynamic that occurs among law enforcement and amplifies that by making it literal.

Episode 1 sets the stage.

And the stage ends on a jaw-dropping bombshell that changes everything we assumed about the series.

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More Crime, More Drama

• The Rainmaker Season 2 Renewal

• Average Joe Season 2 Episode 6 Review

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

A Life Beyond the Ring

The end of Lanterns Episode 6, “Bad Optics,” has me asking myself the same question as I did in Episode 1:

What the hell is going on?

Just when you think you know the direction the series will take, it snatches you back from your machinations and grounds you into its reality—reminding us that we, in fact, do not know what’s going to happen.

This is precisely what makes Episode 6 both incredible and infuriating.

“Bad Optics” begins in 2026 with John, along with his brother Marcus, making a pitch with the Midway City Comptroller department for an underground city panic room.

The moment shows us a somewhat repaired brotherly relationship and a John that constructed a life outside of becoming the next Green Lantern.

But a phone call destroys ten years of avoidance, pulling John back into Rushville, the place he abandoned but never abandoned him.

Rushville’s hold on John runs deeper than he’s willing to admit. Even with his panic room, he’s still building something to protect the lives of everyone around him—a decision that may carry guilt from the destruction he left behind.

And his mother knows John’s protective instincts and guilt still live within him, which is why her call is the only call capable of sending him back.

She speaks of a friendship she forged with Hal, offering John a display of understanding and forgiveness in order to get him to at least hear Hal out and do the same.

John isn’t keen on revisiting the past, but his curiosity takes him back anyway.

But just as soon as John sits with Hal, he comes to realize that Bernadette lied about a friendship.

Or maybe Hal is too proud to admit he missed John’s companionship and looked for it through whatever means were afforded to him.

Either way, John scrambles to gain control of the conversation, releasing pent-up anger and frustration at Hal with zero sympathy for Hal being in jail for the past ten years.

“You didn’t take the fall. You fell.”

Though the statement stings, Hal doesn’t let John sit in his self-righteousness for too long before calling out the fact that John is a murderer too.

John arrives having convinced himself that he’s settled the question of who Hal became.

But in a single conversation, Hal destabilizes John’s sense of morality once again.

The Life Hal Left Behind

That the events in 2016 altered them both as Lanterns.

As men.

But just as the evidence laid before us in the previous five episodes suggests, Hal instructs John not to tell anyone he was there to visit—further solidifying that Hal may be on a mission to uncover the truth about the Guardians and Lianna.

Frustrated and fed up, John leaves Hal alone.

And it’s a decision that may hold great regret when Kerry calls and tells him Hal has passed, taking us back to the end of Episode 1 and unloading a myriad of questions ahead.

At the end of Episode 1, audiences saw that John looked for the ring on Hal’s frozen hand, but there wasn’t one.

But in Episode 6, the perception of this scene shifts as John looks for defensive wounds on Hal’s hand.

How did he die, and, more importantly, why didn’t he fight back?

After Hal’s release, he moved to Rushville to make amends to the people of the town—attempting to right a wrong that could never, in their eyes, be fixed.

Kerry gives John the key to the place Hal lived as he tries to figure out what happened and why.

It’s a somber moment but indicative of the respect John held for him since he was a boy.

But Marcus calls, reminding him of yet another responsibility, another expectation from someone who isn’t himself—binding himself to what’s comfortable rather than exploring a life of the unknown of who he could be on his own.

As much as John wants to ignore Hal’s death, he insists on being deputized to investigate alongside Kerry, making choices that are of his own volition even though he has every reason to return home.

In his belongings lies a key to a storage unit that John and Kerry check out, though Kerry’s reluctance belies a relationship she wishes to keep secret.

For now.

As John heads to Kerry’s house for a quiet evening at dinner with her and her son, Noah, he’s confronted by Billy and his goons, leading to a fist fight that lands him in jail.

But not before he activates the Green Lantern signal.

A Truth That Refuses to Stay Buried

In jail, Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) answers John’s distress call, finally showing just who took up the mantle that John left empty.

“Everything you have is because I didn’t take it.”

There is an arrogance that enters John as Episode 6 progresses, one that sows seeds into viewers’ minds as his civilian identity collides with the one he walked away from—the Lantern the Guardians begged for, not the other way around.

And Guy knows this.

John asks Guy to assist with Hal’s burial by getting his suit and decommissioned ring, but he’s also dealing with his parents as well as Maggie (Hannah Christine Shetler)—the little girl from 2016 who was crying in the carnage—who’s now blackmailing him (with an oddly specific dollar amount, which makes us wonder if she’s an alien, but I digress).

Weighed down by everyone and everything, John finds the walls of his past closing in around him.

At the funeral, Guy comes through with the lantern suit and the ring at John’s request—the last thing keeping John around before heading back to his new life at Stewart Brothers.

The eulogy, written by Hal, echoes Episode 1 and the tragic cost of being a hero and the loneliness it entails when those who depend on you for survival turn their backs on you when you no longer serve them.

Hal came to Rushville to save them.

The people of the town blamed him for the wreckage, locked him up, and discarded him.

The loneliness alone gives added weight to John, telling him, “you fell.”

Not just from being a Lantern, but from the pedestal on which John placed him.

It also embodies the feelings of a man who, while well-intended, made many mistakes in the name of saving those around him. What Hal once bore proudly eventually became a burden placed upon him without his will.

This parallels Marcus turning his back on John when John’s decision to return and stay in Rushville impacts their company, digging up old wounds of John as the “Chosen One” while he reaps the benefits afforded to him through John’s very upbringing.

But as John lets the call end, he averts his attention back to his task—digging up Hal’s grave.

It turns out getting Guy to bring a ring wasn’t just to honor Hal but to settle a gut feeling.

As John boots up the last 5% charge of the ring, clone Hal appears.

“Goddamnit” is right.

What in the hell did Hal get himself into?

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The Evidence Locker

• Episode 5 Forces John Stewart to Make a Choice

• Lanterns Rewrites Everything We Thought We Knew About Hal Jordan

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

A Life Once Imagined

No one prepares you for what it looks like to continue living after losing the promise of a life you longed to meet.

And you never realize how much you’ve been surrounded by new life until you lose one of your own.

Sometimes the simplest words set off an internal alarm that echoes in your core like the beat of a drum.

A pounding beat that starts off distant then suddenly becomes a loud and unyielding thing that you can never escape.

Still Life, a short film starring Jacob Anderson (Interview With the Vampire) as Max and Ophelia Lovibond (Minx) as Jess, explores the immediate aftermath of a couple struggling through daily life after suffering the loss of their child.

Written by Kate Radcliffe and directed by Sophie King, Still Life is incredibly honest in how it carefully examines the traumatic space losing a child leaves behind.

In eleven minutes, Still Life delivers a bone-chilling truth that highlights the joy, expectation, and subsequent grief of an expectant mother and an expectant father fighting to hold themselves—and each other—together.

This is where both Lovibond and Anderson shine as performers.

Lovibond carries the dark humor, awkward social interactions, and heartbreak like fine china on the edge of a coffee table as Jess attempts to resume her normal life.

She represents strength and fragility—the parts of grief that allow you to both move forward and fall apart at any moment.

Then there’s Anderson, who delivers a quiet kind of pain—the one where society imposes how a father is supposed to mourn loss.

Be a rock.

Be there for her.

But Anderson doesn’t allow the imposition to define Max. Instead, he shares emotional space with Jess, both of them present with the life they almost welcomed and the one that fell apart in front of them.

What makes Still Life especially powerful isn’t just how it explores loss, but how it shows the audience that mundane tasks and actions can trigger someone else’s greatest trauma.

Going for a walk.

Shopping.

Even going to the movies can become an unexpected reminder of what could have been and a stark reminder of what is not.

And Lovibond and Anderson carry the weight of this reminder beautifully.

Yet Still, Life Remains

Radcliffe pulls from her own experience with child loss, transforming something deeply personal into a story that gives language to an otherwise invisible grief that many families navigate silently.

Radcliffe and her co-producer Sarah Roy hope to use Still Life as a proof of concept for a potential television series, using the story to help amplify the voices and the lingering pain families feel when left to pick up the pieces of a life imagined.

But the hidden beauty in Still Life is in the name.

Still.

Life.

The film holds within it the possibilities of a life beyond loss.

A life that may be riddled with lows but is one that is still capable of holding great beauty.

And it’s in the unknown where something new can begin again. It doesn’t mean that you’ve moved on or will ever move on from what life could’ve been.

But it does mean that there is still more life ahead.

For more short film reviews, subscribe to get articles sent directly to your inbox. Have a short film you want analyzed? Leave a comment.

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More Short Films to Explore

• Jon Kent’s Paralysis Turns Technology Into Psychological Terror

• Apple TV’s Corked: Indie Crime-Dramedy

Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.

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