The Horror at Gallery Kay
The Silence
Different Kinds of War, Different Kinds of Peace
Banquo's Test Flight
Spotlight: Charles Payseur
So How's Work?
So Where Can We Find You?
Signing Off

(This piece was originally published last week, but contained incorrect spelling and pronoun use. Many thanks to Abe Goldfarb for helping correct this and apologies to the cast and crew for the mistake).
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Petra and Olive are breaking up. Petra (Maine Anders) is driven, focused and no nonsense. Olive (Rosebud) is intensely sweet and endlessly flakey. As a last ditch box ticking exercise, they visit Bozill (Brian Silliman), a relationship therapist. Olive is convinced it will work. Petra is checking her watch. And Bozill's phone keeps ringing...

Directed and edited by Abe Goldfarb from a script by Mac Rogers, The Horror at Gallery Kay is the sweetest body horror movie you'll ever see. Or it's the gooiest rom-com. Or the most politically insightful and angry story about the secret history of New York, true love and what happens when we become 'we' you'll ever see. Anyone familiar with Rogers' superlative work on Steal The Stars will have an idea what to expect here. True love, cynics whose hearts are melted, the price for that and something alien and vast impressing itself onto the world around the lovers until you can't tell if they're doomed or saved or both. However, here Mac is, if anything, on stronger ground than with Steal the Stars. Instead of the head on collision between private security and UFOlogy, we get two people fighting to save their lives, their relationship and slowly realizing that neither matter in the way they think they do. In fact. they matter much, much more. It's sweet and angry, tart and pugnacious writing that throws those glorious turns of phrase Mac excels at towards you ever few minutes. Rosebud, especially in the second half, uses Mac's dialogue like a Judoka uses their opponents' lapels; constantly putting the movie and you exactly where they need you to be. A space, by the way, infinitely larger than the small office and gallery the story itself plays out in.

That sense of scale and scope is landed by the other primary team members here. Goldfarb cleverly uses slow motion and modified lighting to heighten the reality of Bozill's office as we begin to descend into the story. Later, the stark lights of the Gallery double as a canvas for the oddest session Bozill has ever led to play out across. The claustrophobia of horror is harmonized with the soaring massive scale of Olive's love and the city that she and Petra discover they can both access. This is a story where love really is the answer. And, like the best answers, it leads to even more questions.



The cast help answer those questions with fierce and witty aplomb. Rosebud is the standout here, flowing effortlessly from a well-meaning and mildly ineffectual hippie to someone far more regal and alien in the second half. They get a lot of the best lines, some of the best laughs and manage, along with Kristen Vaughan's wonderfully chipper turn as a terrifying receptionist, to make the vast and otherworldly present in a small room. Anders is just as good in different ways, and Petra's journey here is from the comforting cynicism of life to the horrific realization she has everything she wants and what she has to do about that. Silliman impresses too, especially in the second half. No one has fun at the gallery but Bozill has the least fun and Silliman does his best work as a somewhat maimed, thoroughly pissed off and still deeply sweet therapist. Poor Bozill, and he only took the session as a favor too.

Ultimately Gallery Kay is a movie that arrives at the same place however you look at it, but takes different routes to get there. it's a story about New York's biggest secret, discovered by two people trying to figure out if they should stay together. It's a story about sacrifice as impediment and sacrifice as enhancement. It's a story about how we become less than we were and more than we can be. It's angry and tearful, hopeful and brutal, funny and disturbing. It's also the perfect double bill with Us, and in this newly Twilight Zone-enhanced era, deserves to find that exact audience too. It's just as rich and strange and far sweeter than you might expect.

The Horror at Gallery Kay is currently on the festival circuit. Find out more about the movie and where you can see it here.

 

 

The original Mercury Seven, and another semiotic ghost that's haunted my career. It's the cover of a formative album for me, as well as the basis for a short story about the missing eighth astronaut, whose death mirrored the profoundly disturbing urban myth of the lost cosmonauts. And now, it's cycled back around to appear over the shoulder of Captain Christopher Pike.

Pike as played by Anson Mount has been a season highlight on Discovery this year. Throughout, we've been able to convince ourselves that the terrible fate coming for him wasn't going to be touched on in the show. Mount's Pike was too jovial, too much of a relaxed, confident, fundamentally kind figure to be broken like that. Last week's episode put the lie to that hope. In doing so, it showed us something harder and better. 

All the way through the season, Mount and the show's writer's room have explored Pike's survivor's guilt. Sequestered away during the Klingon war, ultimately because he and the Enterprise are essentially Starfleet's King Arthur, Pike is consumed with the need to do the right thing. An early standout moment sees him almost panic at the thought of not being able to rescue a fellow officer. A later episode sees him put himself in harm's way to prove a point. Crucially it also sees him admit that fact. Coupled with the knowledge his initial posting at Starfleet was as a test pilot, and Mount's instinctively straight-arrow, endearing performance, it re-casts Pike as something more nuanced than we've previously seen. This is a profoundly honest, compassionate man who is aware of his faults even as he steers into them. He backs down from nothing and welcomes the chance to do good with the time he has. He's Captain America in a Starfleet uniform. He's the original astronaut ideal, projected forwards into a future where his profession means what so many hope it eventually will. And he would fit right in on that photo.

Mount, in the excellent interview in the interstitial above, talks about this being a chance to see 'Act 2 Pike' transition to Act 3 Pike and he's absolutely right. An officer who has been conditioned by his own experience to believe there is almost nothing he can't solve is faced with an unsolvable problem. How could he say no to that? Plus this, unlike the war, is a bullet he can choose to step in front of, knowing full well the good it will do. The fact his future is notably kinder than he knows at this point is irrelevant. What matters is the Captain thinks aloud and knows exactly what conclusion to come to. What matters, in the end, is the right stuff. And Christopher Pike, especially this version, has that by the bucket load.

Star Trek: Discovery airs on Netflix in the UK and CBS All Access in the US. It somehow, as I write this, has two episodes still to run despite the vast stakes of the last couple of weeks.

Pike and the Enterprise's mission during the Klingon conflict will be detailed in The Enterprise War, by John Jackson Miller, released later this year.

Produced with Branan Edgens, Anson Mount's podcast The Well is fantastically good. Go check it out, especially the Ileana Douglas episodes.