The Big Bang Spin-Off We Didn't Know We Needed

Stuart Fails to Save The Universe looks wild, and totally not what fans of the largely-grounded Big Bang Theory were expecting. Even Rachel's looking forward to this one.

The Plot That Got Away From Me

A tunnel of light carried Marigold away from her dying world... but where to?

When my friend Simon stumbled across his old copy of the Heroes & Other Worlds rulebook and posted online about how it brought back fond memories of the campaign I'd run for the Tuesday Knights back in 2014-2016, it got me thinking about that campaign again.

Rereading some of my old write-ups reminded me of the "great plan" I had hatched to tie the apocalyptic ending of that campaign into the next one I was kicking around at that time: a contemporary superhero campaign set in Knight City.

With that game faltering and my realisation that I'm not really a good "superhero" gamesmaster, I might as well share the "big idea" I had for linking our old fantasy game - The Chronicles of Cidri - to Knight City.

The HOW game ended... with the end of the world (the planet Cidri - an alternate Earth - was transformed into a Hellworld by the ancient god known as The Yellow King).

Only one member of Cobblethwaite's Companions (the player-character's party), Marigold Weaver (Clare's character), escaped Cidri's transformation, thanks to a mystical portal the heroes had opened during their final stand.

Marigold Weaver

But that was not the end of the character. I'd decided that she had materialised out the other side of the portal on the world of Knight City, and had taken a job as a fortune teller in the city.

In my write-ups of the HOW campaign, I had "cast" the various player-characters using pictures from TV shows, films etc and trainee sorceress Marigold was represented by Renée O'Connor aka Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Posing as Madame Gold, in Knight City, she set up business in the middle-class to low upper-class residential borough of Fairlight.

Her write-up on the Knight City campaign guide/blog at the time was:

"Psychic to the stars - by appointment only. Generally considered a fraud by most people, Mary Gold is still treated with a great degree of respect by the residents of this borough. She is also one of the few people known to associate with Salem Saberhagen, the mysterious resident of the nearby Saberhagen Mansion."

Madame Gold

There was even a picture (left) to go with the entry, of Renée O'Connor put through a "fortune teller" filter on the Photofunia picture editor.

The "great plan" was then, at some point in the campaign, the new characters the Tuesday Knights would have been playing (ie. superheroes) would contact, or be contacted by, Madame Gold.

She would then warn them of the impending arrival of an apocalyptic Hellplanet (ie. the transformed Cidri, being 'piloted' by the Yellow King) in our solar system.

Part of her prophecy to avert disaster would involve tracking down a collection of "sleeping" heroes and "awakening" them.

These "sleeping heroes" would be the reincarnations of the Tuesday Knights' characters that had died at the end of The Chronicles of Cidri campaign (still with me?)

I had recast all the actors who had been used to represent the fantasy characters in the first campaign as random people in the world of Knight City, totally unaware of their "previous lives".

I'd thought it might have been quite cool if the player's superheroes had somehow come into - innocent, casual - contact with one or two of these people prior to their pivotal meeting with Madame Gold.

Anyway, that was about as far as I had gotten, as I'd planned to firm up details to fit the Knight City campaign as it developed... only it never did.

And my "great plan" never saw the light of day.

But I'm still rather pleased with it.

NB. Some of this multiversal mayhem did, eventually, manifest itself at our table, during Simon's epic 5e Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft campaign (2018 - 2021).

During Lockdown, Meredith, our occasional Antipodean player, returned for a spell (thanks to the magic of Zoom), playing her rogue, Imogen, from the HOW game, who'd stepped out of the legendary mists of Ravenloft to aid our party. 

I seem to recall there was mutterings that she might be a trans-dimensional agent of one of the facets of Baba Yaga, who also appeared (in some guise) in both the worlds of Cidri and Ravenloft.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Honestly, it's next to impossible to summarise what's going on in the mind-bending Everything Everywhere All At Once without attempting to spell out every single moment of this gorgeously crafted movie.

Michelle Yeoh is Evelyn Wang, a middle-aged Chinese immigrant buckling under the pressure of running a launderette, filing her taxes, and coping with family drama.

Unbeknownst to her, her gentle husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) wants to divorce her, but first they must report to the Internal Revenue Service for an audit by the officious Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis).

However, that's also when Evelyn unexpectedly learns of the existence of the multiverse and the fact that she's the only hope for saving all of reality from erasure... by drawing upon the unique skills of other versions of herself from across the infinite planes of existence.

Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (as Daniels), Everything Everywhere All At Once is simultaneously unlike anything you've seen before and yet comfortably familiar to genre fans.

Superficially it is The Matrix meets Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness with a shot of Rick and Morty thrown in for good measure.

But mix in talking rocks and apocalyptic bagels amidst the frenetic wuxia martial arts and reality-bending and suddenly Everything Everywhere All At Once is also a cerebral art house flick as well.

Once the action begins, it's pretty much non-stop (I couldn't help but be reminded of Mad Max: Fury Road in that respect) with a visual assault of chaotic images that often comes at you faster than your brain can process, almost certainly necessitating a repeat viewing.

Yet, for all the cosmic, existential, threats, at its heart this is a film about family, handled in a way that rings true without getting overly mushy.

Ultimately, though, no mere words can do it justice. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a film that has been to seen - experienced - rather than read about.

The Dark Tower (2017)

I've only read the first three of Stephen King's Dark Tower books - and that was many, many years ago (pre-stroke), so don't have particularly enduring memories of any of them beyond the first, The Gunslinger, which I have returned to a few times.

But I thought that lack of investment in the source material might be a benefit when coming to the cinematic adaptation, as I understood this was to be a 'different take' on the story, possibly a sequel or an alternate world view of the epic events of the multi-book mythology.

While I really liked the occasional Easter Egg nods to other works of Stephen King, what I wasn't expecting was a very generic, stereotypical teen adventure (with shades of The Mortal Instruments, The Neverending Story, Maze Runner, Hunger Games, and even the Star Wars Prequels with their demystifying of The Force through the introduction of midi-chlorians).

Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is a troubled New York kid, living with his mum (Viking's Katheryn Winnick) and douche-bag step-dad (Nicholas Pauling), but plagued with dreams of an otherworldly Dark Tower and an ongoing battle between the Man In Black (True Detective's Matthew McConaughey) and the last of the gunslingers, Roland (The Wire's Idris Elba).

Jake runs away from home, to find a house he dreamed of, which contains a portal to Mid-World - a post-apocalyptic world-between-worlds.

There he discovers that not only were his dreams real and that he is gifted with something called The Shine (the same psychic power as evidence by little Danny in The Shining), but also that the magic-using Man In Black aka Walter O'Dim believes Jake's powers are strong enough to topple The Dark Tower.

Teaming up with Roland, Jake also learns that the Dark Tower is keeping the Multiverse safe from the demonic hordes that live on the outside, and Walter wants to bring the tower down and welcome in these murderous creatures.

The story jumps from Mid-World to our world, place to place, with the brevity of a CW hour-long drama, and even as it stands, The Dark Tower clocks in at less than an hour and a half duration - a fine length for a trashy, direct-to-DVD movie, but way short for a modern Hollywood blockbuster.

Going from zero to hero in no time at all, Jake manages to master The Shine (quicker than Luke Skywalker masters The Force in the Original Trilogy), and then is handed one of Roland's hefty pistols and appears to be a crack shot with that as well (again, with no background in firearms and, you know, being a kid and all).

It's as though all The Dark Tower's character development moments were trimmed down, or cut out completely, leaving just a framework of action-driven set pieces featuring people we know (or care) little about.

Although incidental characters are killed off (with no lasting emotional impact on the main characters), Roland is frequently injured (but seems to shake it off within a scene or two), and Jake does get captured by Walter, there's no real sense of jeopardy and grand scale in the goings-on.

There are moments where the action is quite thrilling, and Roland's various bullet tricks are neat, but the story never really engages beyond a superficial level, even with such talented and charismatic leads as Elba and McConaughey.

This is not the opening salvo of an epic to rival Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars that we were promised.

I understand that Mike Flanagan is currently pushing on with plans to develop an (unrelated) The Dark Tower series for Amazon Prime Video, but there's generally been tumbleweed on the news front as far as that's concerned lately.

At least, horror maven Flanagan has opted for a reboot, presumably learning from the mistakes of this movie, and returning to the source material that's held in such high esteem by legions of Stephen King fans.

TALES FROM THE VAULT: The Flash # 179 - Fact Or Fiction? (May, 1968)

A Silver Age classic, The Flash #179: Fact Or Fiction? from May 1968 is notable for being the first time DC Comics used the idea (although unnamed) of Earth-Prime (or 'our' Earth) as a destination for superheroes.

The Flash - Barry Allen - is having problems with an energy beast, The Nok, that has escaped from the spaceship of an alien beast-hunter (who'd landed on Earth to repair his ship).

The Nok appears to feed on Barry's "speed force" (again, it isn't called that) and ends up pushing The Flash to new velocities, which carry him to an alternate world: 'our' world, a world where his adventures are recorded in the pages of DC Comics and his secret identity is known by every small child!

People mistake him for a party-goer in fancy dress and he realises that the only person who will believe he is who he says he is is DC Comics Editor Julius Schwartz!

This is a wild story, from the mind of Cary Bates, as it had no precedent at the time. The only parallel world Barry (and the DC readers) knew of was Earth-2, where the Golden Age heroes hung out.

The Nok (pictured on the cover above), and the alien hunter, are rather bland Silver Age pulp sci-fi constructs, but the story itself really opened up a Multiverse of possibilities.

And, at the end of the tale, left Julius Schwartz with a working Cosmic Treadmill in his office! I wonder if that was ever revisted?

I picked up this landmark issue on eBay for the surprisingly low-cost of a couple of quid. It was just a random recommendation the site threw up for me and the cover caught my eye, so I Googled the story and couldn't believe this wasn't going for more.

It's not a perfect copy - but the listing made that clear  - but it was still a bargain for such a key story in the history of DC's Multiverse.

The comic  has since been framed and hangs in our lounge, with a selection of other books that are special to me.

It could well be the oldest, original comic I currently own (being only couple of years younger than me!)