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yinx1 · 4 months

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I hope there is a chance that Amazon will let season 2 happen. I’d love to see this on screen with these incredible actors.

The Midnight Club - Season Two

I'm very disappointed that Netflix has decided not to pursue a second season of THE MIDNIGHT CLUB.

My biggest disappointment is that we left so many story threads open, holding them back for the hypothetical second season, which is always a gamble.

So I'm writing this blog as our official second season, so you can know what might have been, learn the fates of your favorite characters, and know the answers to those dangling story threads from the first season.

So for those of you who want to know what we were planning to do, here's a look at what would have been season 2!

AMESH Season 2 would open with Amesh, his glioblastoma advancing quickly. He would tell the first story of the season, but would be struggling to make it through. We'd focus on his love story with Natsuki for those first few episodes as it becomes clear that Amesh's death is imminent.

Meanwhile, Ilonka is trying to reconcile how she was fooled by Julia Jayne, all while falling further in love with Kevin, and she realizes he may be fading faster than he lets on.

Ilonka begins a serialized story in an effort to encourage him to "stay alive a little longer," like he did in season one. And the story she tells is... REMEMBER ME.

This was the thing I was most excited about for this season.

REMEMBER ME is one of my all-time favorite Pike books - it tells the story of a teenage girl who is pushed off a balcony, and awakens as a ghost. She has to navigate being a spirit while trying to solve her own murder. We would have stretched this story out over 5 episodes. We were going to use it as a vehicle for Ilonka to try to come to terms with the fact that she is going to die, and to begin to trying to wrap her head around being a ghost... but this is the coolest part... the lead character of Ilonka's story wouldn't be played by Ilonka. She'd be played by...

Anya.

Because this is how we live on, isn't it? In the minds of those we leave behind. And Ilonka would use REMEMBER ME as a way to imagine her dear friend Anya, waking up as a ghost, navigating the afterlife. And this sets up one of the best mechanisms of the show - even if a character dies, as long as they're remembered by members of the club, they live on in their stories.

As the story starts to pick up steam, though, the group will have to deal with the death of Amesh, which he greets with grace and bravery.

In his final moments, he sees someone in his room - the Janitor from the first season, as played by Robert Longstreet, who says comforting things to Amesh even though he can't respond.

In his final, final moments, the SHADOW descends upon Amesh, and he is engulfed into it, which reinforces the idea that the Shadow is DEATH...

With Amesh's death comes something that upends the entire thing: a NEW PATIENT. We didn't work out too much about who this would be, but it would be a new roommate for Ilonka. Someone taking Anya's old bed. Ilonka would find herself being initially cold to her - just as Anya was when Ilonka arrived. Even feeling like this new girl shouldn't necessarily be ushered into the Club. But of course they would develop a beautiful friendship over the course of the season. The new girl joins the club, where something else exciting is happening - Cheri is telling a story. We hadn't decided which one, but I think it might have been MONSTER.

Natsuki would be the next to die, which would be heartbreaking. And again, she would talk to the janitor just before it happened... and again, the Shadow would come in the final moments.

For Spence, though, things would take a different turn.

The advancements in HIV treatment in the late 90's would come into play, and we'd see his prognosis change. The HIV cocktail came out in Dec 1995, and we really wanted to explore that.

Spence would ride the swell of antiviral advancements, and by the end of the season, he'd no longer be classified as terminal. In the finale of season 2, Spence would leave Brightcliffe just like Sandra did in Season 1, heading off to manage his disease and live the rest of his life.

But onto the BIG MYSTERIES of the season one... here are some answers: What is up with Dr. Stanton's tattoo and bald head? Well, a few things. First, Dr. Stanton is actually the daughter of the original Paragon cult leader, Aceso. Her nickname was Athena, she wrote the Paragon journal that Ilonka found in S1. She turned on her mother and helped the kids escape, but because she was part of the cult in her teenage years, she had the tattoo.

It was her initials that Ilonka found carved into the tree in season 1 (her maiden name was Georgina Ballard, hence the G.B. that Ilonka finds carved in the tree).

She hated what her mother became, and the atrocities of the cult. She reclaimed the property after her mom was gone, and wanted to change it into a place that celebrated life. She was trying to undo her mother's legacy and leave something behind that was beautiful. She is wearing a wig at the end of S1 not because of a sinister reason, but because she is undergoing chemo. Dr. Stanton has cancer. Having helped so many people deal with disease, she now has to deal with it herself.

Her treatment would be successful, and she'd go into remission, but having to face that - while caring for the terminal kids at Brightcliffe - was going to be a very introspective arc for Stanton.

What about the Living Shadow? It's Death, right? Well... no.

At the end of the season, Kevin will die... followed shortly by Ilonka. And as she is dying, two things will happen. First, she'll find herself talking to the Janitor, played by Robert Longstreet... and she'll make a discovery.

HE is Death. And nothing to be afraid of. It turns out no one else ever saw this character. Stanton has a cleaning service, and the Nurse practitioners make up the rooms - the only people who ever saw this mysterious Janitor were the patients. He is Death, and offers them kind words before they die. Then what was the Shadow?

This is an idea we take directly from the book REMEMBER ME, and we'll see it play out in the final moments of Ilona's final tale. In Pike's book, Shari is pursued by a dark entity called The Shadow. When it finally catches her, though, it turns out it is not a bad thing at all.

The Shadow is THEMSELVES. It's the Unknown. As it engulfs someone, in the last moment of their life, it takes them through a place of understanding and catharsis, preparing them for the next step.

THIS is what happened to Anya in S1 when the Shadow finally reached her - that's why she fantasized a life beyond Brightcliffe, which ultimately let her find acceptance of her death. It looks different for everybody, depending on their mind-set - because it is simply an extension of themselves.

The Shadow is just the final catharsis, a return to our original form - it is a moment of true understanding, and once we experience it, we move on to the next place.

We see the Shadow in full effect when it finally comes for Kevin. KEVIN DIES with Ilonka at his side, and it leads to the biggest reveal of the season:

Who were the Mirror Man and the Cataract Woman?

They were Stanley Oscar Freelan and his wife, who built Brightcliffe (fun trivia, he is named after the real-life Freelan Oscar Stanley, who built my favorite hotel in America - the Stanley Hotel. The Stanley is also the inspiration for THE SHINING!).

But more than that... there's a reason that Ilonka only sees Stanley in the mirror, and sees the Cataract Woman whenever she looked at Kevin. This is something else we took from Pike's original book... these aren't ghosts, but glimpses of PAST LIVES.

Ilonka WAS Stanley Oscar Freelan, and Kevin WAS his wife. They've lived many lives this way, and are true SOUL MATES - they always find each other, and they always fall in love. In this life, they knew it would be a short one, so they agreed to find each other in the house they built. They've been "remembering" who they are, and glimpsing their former selves in reflections, and sometimes when they look at each other. This is also why Ilonka's very first words to Kevin in S1 were "Do I know you?" and why Kevin thought she was familiar as well. They are two souls who always find each other, again and again.

The story is this: Stanley was dying, and built this cliffside home hoping that the seaside air would help him. It did, and he far outlived his prognosis (this is also true of the real-life Freelan Stanley). However, his wife began to succumb to dementia.

She would wander the halls, looking for him ("Darling!") and would even forget to feed herself ("I'm starving...") and she eventually refused to leave the basement. Heartbroken for her, Stanley painted the walls to resemble the woodland view, and the ceiling to resemble the night sky, so that it would be a little more beautiful for her.

He also painted a labyrinth on the floor, which was a technique used to try to curb the effects of dementia. She'd walk the pattern of the maze and it was believed it could help her cognition. Eventually, she developed frightening cataracts, but Stanley loved her through it all.

They were soul mates.

So while they seemed scary in season 1, that was just how Ilonka and Kevin's mind were trying to remember their pasts. We even had their faces distorting in ways consistent with how memories degrade over time. When the Shadow comes for Ilonka, and gives her this understanding - this "remembering" - she realizes she has nothing to fear. She and Kevin will shed these personas and be reborn, and have the joy of finding each other another way. The Shadow comes for her, Death takes her gently, and Ilonka goes off with Kevin back into the cosmos, ready for their next incarnation. The series would end with Cheri telling this story to a whole new table of patients, including our new series leads. Most of our original cast now would exist as stories, a story told to the next "class" of storytellers at the table, all of whom we will have met by the end of the season. A story called "The Midnight Club."

Well, that's it... that was what we had in mind. It's a shame we won't get to make it, but it would be a bigger shame if you guys simply had to live with the unanswered questions and the cliffhanger ending. I loved making this show, and I am so proud of the cast and crew. Particularly our cast, who attacked this story with incredible spirit and bravery each and every day.

But for now, we'll put the fire out, and leave the library dark and quiet. To those before, and to those after. To us now, and to those beyond.

Seen or unseen, here but not here.

I'll always be grateful that I got to be part of this Club.

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yinx1 · 7 months

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Finally managed to get my hands on Interview With The Vampire (2022), and my first impression is massive disappointment. Flu-addled thoughts on episode 1 are as follows:

Every character is either excruciatingly boring or sickeningly annoying with the sole exception of Lestat, who has done nothing wrong in his entire life ever and deserves all the good things as well as to be the main character because he's the only person I'm even remotely rooting for here (the fact that I've been spoiled re: how the series ends just makes this a million times worse).

I've lost count of the number of times I've yelled at the screen for Lestat to go find a man worthy of him and Sam Reid to go find a better show to act in, because jfc both of them are WASTED here to a criminal extent.

Not nearly enough gay for a show made post-2010, either in actual kissing/sex, subtext, or even any sense of period-appropriate societal transgressiveness. I know it's American, but Brokeback Mountain was also American and managed to be both gayer and 100000x more convincing than this with maybe 1/8th of either the romantic or sexual explicitness, and it was made almost 20 fucking years ago. Because unlike with this show, the people involved in making Brokeback wholly embraced their subject and put their all into crafting a fearlessly authentic portrayal of it, and holy crap does it show in the final product.

Related to the above point: IWTV feels like it was made for straight people by a bunch of fellow straight people trying to be spicy and failing, and it's honestly excruciating. Louis is supposed to be repressed, sure, and the show is at pains to spell out exactly why that is, but any genuine sense of tamped down homosexual desire or inner conflict regarding it is totally fucking absent, because the people writing this thing are clearly so straight they can't get into that headspace hardly at all. Contrast that with Heath Ledger's masterful portrayal of inner conflict and repressed desire in Brokeback; Ennis has barely any dialogue in that movie compared to Louis in IWTV, and the truth of his feelings still manages to hit you across the face like a waffle iron in every scene because the writing and acting are just that fucking good.

I've never read the original IWTV novel or seen the 1994 movie, so maybe my expectations are to blame for why I found this so disappointing. But I went into this expecting gay vampires largely from the perspective of and in support of the gay vampires; ie. I was expecting the whole vibe of the show to be about embracing the darkness, metaphorically and literally, and finding out that actually, what Louis once considered monsterous is a lot more human than the supposedly God-fearing family and society he's left behind. What we've had so far has instead amounted to little more than a thinly-veiled bible-thumping session; Lestat is clearly meant to be seen as evil, is literally referred to multiple times as demonic/the devil, and the homosexuality he both engages in and functions as symbolic of is cast in the same light. The tone is social/sexual transgression as guilty tittilation and veiled warning, not social/sexual transgression as revealation and celebration of rebellion as both an escape from an identity and life unbearable in its inauthenticity and also a welcome and virile challenge to a suffocating, anaemic, and ultimately toxic status quo. I'll let you draw your own parallels between what I've written there and the history of gay culture in general, particularly in an American context, but they're present in spades, and the cack-handedness with which this show has tackled its subject and themes makes me all the angrier as a result.

Even if the goal was for Lestat to represent the brutal, predatory, animalistic nature of the vampire by being the kind of serpentine, silver-tongued, unrepentent, narcopathic asshole you love to hate (and I could've got behind that gladly, because characters like that can be incredibly compelling when written right), his portrayal here falls flat, because the show refuses to commit to showing us the true extent of his beauty, seductiveness, and all-around magnetic personality by refusing to admit how attractive, both sexually and otherwise, those same qualities make him. The show itself feels like a metaphysical closet case, terrified of the very thing it's desperate to portray, and the result is a sense that Sam Reid, whose acting is stellar and makes Lestat's sexual and interpersonal attraction to Louis entirely believable, is nonetheless trying to act inside an invisible box placed around him by the show's insistence that Lestat is, and can only ever be, The Villain. If they took that box away and allowed him to really embody the character as this larger-than-life antihero the narrative could really come alive, but unless things change in later episodes I don't have much hope of that happening given the tone they've established so far.

I'd say more, but the flu is kicking my ass right now and I need sleep, so I'm gonna end this with a) an illustration of the kind of genuine, celebratory homoeroticism I was expecting to get with this series, and which like Brokeback manages to be convincing on account of the atmosphere and the character dynamics that underpin it rather than any explicit romance, nevermind sex (there's a separate argument to be made that none of the three properties referenced go remotely far enough in depicting sexual contact between men, but that's for another day):

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and b) with the kind of vibe I was expecting to get from the vampire element of the series, and which is the only vibe I am every really on board with for vampires in any context since I've never found one as nuanced and multi-layered which manages to fit the concept so well:

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In conclusion, I am probably some mixture of too gay, too punk, too kinky, and too British to enjoy the latest iteration of IWTV, but I'm gonna watch a couple more episodes on the off-chance it gets better. And also to equal parts drool over and support Lestat/Sam Reed in spirit, because a) he's obscenely gorgeous and I'm not gonna pass up the opportunity, and b) the more I watch the more I start to see both character and actor scrabbling desperately at the screen trying to escape into a better show.

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