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After scrolling for several minutes on Twitter and feeling nothing but agitation at what I see, I realize I'm starting to hate social media. Okay, that's a lie. I think I've hated it since this time last year when I, quite against my will, saw a man be shot to death up close in 4K. Let that be a lesson to anyone who still has video autoplay enabled on X.

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I had the supreme displeasure of having a reel do well on Instagram this week. Displeasure, you ask? Why wouldn't I want my social media post to do well (for once)? Because when the algorithm smiles on you, a lot of people you don't know come into your orbit for the first time, and it's not always the people you'd want.

On Tuesday evening, after my latest YouTube video went live, I posted a short clip from that full video as an Instagram reel. These clips usually get about 20 views, so I posted it and went on about my evening. When I checked it the next morning, I was notified immediately that I had dozens of comments waiting for me. Most of them were short and normal. "I loved this movie!" "I hate this movie! And I hate Rob Zombie!" "You look like 80s Bridget Fonda."

Yes, that was a real comment. Completely untrue, obviously, but I'll take it.

But then there was a cohort of comments that I blocked without responding to. They all said variations of the same thing. And no, it wasn't gross sex stuff. It was a bunch of edgy bois who wanted to tell me to calm down. That it's just a movie, and it doesn't matter.

Yes, I really blocked them for this. I'll block the next four, too, and anyone after them who shows up to tell me a story isn't worth thinking about.

It's not the disagreement that irritates me. I'll engage all day if you tell me my analysis is wrong. That I missed something. Or like one fine gentleman stated, that I just don't understand horror. No block for him, just a conversation where we agreed to disagree. My comment sections are full of people who think I'm wrong about Heat and wrong about Midnight Mass, and they're welcome to stay as long as they like, because they have an opinion of their own and they can lay it out to contrast against mine.

But if you say that the movie itself doesn't matter, that stories aren't worth examining or even paying attention to, then in all sincerity, you're in the wrong place.

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Tom Cruise Taught You More Than John Paul II

Yeah, I said it. And unless you're one of the three priests in my subscriber base (hello, Fathers) I know it's true. I've made the full case for why stories matter before, so I'll keep this part short. Most of us spent more of our childhoods in front of a television than we did in a classroom or a pew. Stories shape our morality more than our parents, our schools, or our churches do, because they get more hours with us and they live rent free in our heads full-time. They also teach us lessons without ever announcing they're doing so. Now that we're grown (and Hollywood has lost all its subtlety), we know we're being preached to. But when we were young, we didn't. And the world is full of kids now who are absorbing all the lessons the Disney writers room can throw at them. A disturbing number of adults too.

Fiction Makes the Culture

Bryan thought it was ridiculous, comical, that I would explain movie characters' motivations as if they were real. But the message underlying those fictional actions ARE real. Rob Zombie, the writer and director of the film, was saying something with his art.

I asked one of the commenters, a fan of the movie, if he thought Zombie would be gratified to hear that his movies "don't matter" and they're just "a fun time." You think script writers take all that time on something that doesn't matter? You think they spend months on a film shoot and studios spend millions of dollars on something they don't care about and hope you use as background noise while you smoke a bowl?

How 'bout no, Scott?

In every book, movie, tv show, and sometimes even music videos, somebody decided who you would root for, who would be punished, and what a good man looks like, and they made those decisions on purpose. When you watch, you take in their answers whether you meant to or not. Never think you're above that, because nobody is.

What I do here is a 400-level class. You don't need to have seen the specific movie I'm discussing or spot all my cultural references. It's my job to give you the needed background info. What is assumed is that you already accept that stories shape the people who watch them, for good or ill, and that you think those stories are worth examining for what they say about their creator and about us, the audience.

Even when posting short-form slop, I'm not going to start over from zero every time somebody new wanders into my comments section. You can walk into a senior seminar on Milton and announce that poetry is just words, but nobody in the room is going to mistake you for the smartest person there.

"It's just a movie, calm down" is the comment-section version of that announcement. It tells me you skipped the prerequisites, and you think skipping them makes you smarter than the people who did the work.

If it doesn't matter, why are you here?

If the movie doesn't matter, and my opinion of it matters even less, why did you stop scrolling to leave a comment? Short form video is the easiest thing in the world to move on from. The tiniest flick of your thumb moves you to the next reel. Leaving a comment, on the other hand, takes effort. Hit the comment button. Type or dictate your thoughts. Hit send.

That's how we all know that nobody comments on things they don't care about. You won't find me in the comments of a cooking video telling some woman it's just soup and questioning why she bothered with it. Because I'm not a lunatic.

No, people who do crap like this care very much. Something in that clip bothered you. You didn't like what I said, but you couldn't verbalize exactly why. I can guess at the reasons. Maybe you saw The Devil's Rejects once, back when it came out, and you don't remember it well enough to argue about it. Maybe you vaguely like Rob Zombie, or you liked his music in high school, and it felt like some woman on Instagram was talking shit about him. Either one would be an honest reason, and I'd respect either one more than what you actually wrote.

Some people did write some version of those things. And their comment got a heart rather than a block. Like yours did, Ashton. I'm especially irritated at Ashton because his bio says he's an Army veteran. I expect better. Even from Army pukes ;)

And yes, I'll grant the obvious. That reel was ninety seconds pulled from a forty-minute video. You didn't get my full argument, and you didn't get the parts where I give Zombie the credit he's earned as a filmmaker. If you'd written "I don't think that's what the movie's doing," or even "I'd need to see the rest of your argument," we'd be having a conversation, and I'd have been glad to have it.

Instead of telling me why you disagreed, you told me I shouldn't care. That's laziness, and more than that, it's malice, because the point is to make me feel stupid for having an opinion at all. On top of that, it's a pretense, because you're claiming not to care in a comment you took the time to write.

Every man who tells me it's just a movie has a list of movies that changed his life. The ones he watched with his dad and can still quote line for line. There's a book he read at fourteen that changed what he thought a man was supposed to be, and if I trashed it in a video, he'd be in my comments with a thousand words about why I'm wrong. Maybe The Devil's Rejects didn't make his list, and that's his business. He still knows what it feels like when a story changes something in him, and he knows I'm right that it happens.

Cringe on purpose

The worst use of "it's not that deep" is the deliberate one.

Gen Z gave us the phrase, and they mostly say it out of fear. Caring about anything in public risks being cringe, and they'd rather never commit to a take on a movie than get laughed at for one. Millennials picked up that phrase from the younger cohort and started using it on other people. They grew up treating sarcasm as proof of intelligence, and they learned that if you act like someone is embarrassing herself, she'll usually stop talking.

"It doesn't matter" is a shaming tactic. If you can convince the person arguing with you that caring is cringe, she backs off, and nobody's left to object to whatever you do next.

The same studios and critics who'll tell you a movie is just entertainment the second you object to its message have spent decades deliberately putting messages into movies. They know stories form people, which is why they work so hard to control them. Telling you it isn't that deep is how they get you to stop paying attention while they do it.

The thing is, I almost prefer the malignant cultural Marxists to the disingenuous prats who bloviate about how it's just a movie, it's just a kid's show, and it well and truly isn't that deep... even as they participate in social media trends showing how deep it is.

So yeah, I blocked them, and I'll keep blocking anyone who lies in my face and expects me to thank them for it. We were all formed by stories and they continue to influence us every day of our lives. Tell me I've got it wrong. You can even tell me I'm dumb or that you hate my earrings (first of all, how dare you). But don't tell me it doesn't matter. We both know that it does.

If you didn't catch my full video, Rob Zombie Hates You: The Devil's Rejects & Firefly Trilogy, is up on the channel now.

No matter how small a creator you are, there will come a time when someone will leave a comment saying something like, "Why don't you talk about [political thing that's in the current news cycle]. I know you [think a certain way]. Why don't you say something, you coward?"

Sometimes they'll add an emoji after calling you a coward, like they're kidding. But they're not.

It's startlingly common and I won't ever stop being surprised at how many people think "speaking out" actually does something.

Back in August, the thing in the news cycle was the WNBA and trans athletes and Matt Walsh calling Caitlin Clark the biggest coward in the history of sports.

I don't actually care about sports. Any sports. But I cared about this exchange because Walsh is one of those seemingly smart people who says things that piss me off. Because what do you mean she's the biggest coward in sports? How can you even think she's in the top 10?

Here's what Clark actually said: "It's for the leagues and governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions."

What was she supposed to do Matt? Scream into the microphone that she wanted a DNA test on every current player and nothing less than federal law against Y chromosomes in the WNBA? Threaten to quit, a la Dave Chappelle, should her demands not be met?

For starters, do you think that would have changed anything in the league, Matt?

As a secondary question, do you think it would have been beneficial for Caitlin personally (who is at the pinnacle of her career and relies on public good will to continue earning money)?

If you grew up on movies from my era, you absorbed a very specific fantasy about the truth. It's a persistent echo of the Reagan administration.

When you see something corrupt or just plain wrong, you, the good guy, get in front of the right microphone, you make the big speech, and EVERYBODY realizes they were wrong. Cue the slow clap.

Happy ending. And also you're rich and you got the hot guy/girl.

Except... that won't happen. We used to know that it wouldn't happen. Hell, even the movies told us it wouldn't. But then we all forgot.

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"Just Go to the Press!"

Way back in 1975, before Ronald Reagan came along with his Morning in America optimism and his Pax Americana cultural imperialism, Three Days of the Condor hit theaters. The film stars Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford, one of the only blonde men who ascends to smoke-wagon status. It's one of the best paranoid thrillers ever made, and unlike most of the genre, it tells you the truth about telling the truth.

Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA bookworm. His whole job is reading novels and magazines and looking for hidden codes and leaked plots. One day he runs out to grab lunch for the office, and when he comes back, every single one of his coworkers has been shot dead at their desks.

Turner spends the rest of the movie running from his own agency. He works out that a group inside the CIA ordered the hit, and he works out why. And then he does exactly what every movie hero is supposed to do. He goes to the New York Times.

Now if the movie had been made later (say, the early 1990s), that would have been his trump card. Sunshine is the best disinfectant and all that.

Except that's not what happened. The last scene is on the sidewalk outside the Times building with Turner telling Higgins, the CIA man who's been hunting him, that he's handed over the whole story. He thinks he's won.

Higgins, to his credit, is too polite to laugh at him. "How do you know they'll print it?"

The assured smile on his face tells us all the Times won't print the story. Because they've been told not to. And The Times (the "paper of record") always does as its told.

Your Voice Has No Power

Compare that to The Pelican Brief (both the book [1992] and the movie [1993]). It has exactly the same setup and gives you the ending you're most familiar with. Julia Roberts plays a law student who figures out who had two Supreme Court justices murdered and why, and the answer goes all the way to the White House. People around her start dying. To protect herself (lol), she goes to the press, in this case Denzel Washington at the Washington Herald.

Fine-ass Denzel gets his story, with receipts and everything. And the paper prints it. The president's chief of staff resigns and the president announces he won't run again. And Darby Shaw, the girl who exposed the whole thing, ends up sipping a drink on a beach with no one hunting her.

You got that, everyone? The White House and the intelligence apparatus, with assistance from billionaires, had two supreme court judges murdered. And the no-name chick who figured it out lived happily ever after because she went public. The American public believed everything she said, and the reporter's career was made.

I was in junior high when I saw The Pelican Brief, so it's no shock I found this credible. But I kept on believing it into adulthood. And perhaps most Americans believe it to this day.

But it's a lie. In reality, Darby would have "died in a car wreck while driving under the influence," or, barring that, she would have been arrested for an appalling crime. Perhaps having child porn in her house. Who knows? But Darby Shaw's name would have been made radioactive. And in no world would the story of the murdered justices have seen the light of day.

It's 2026 now, and we've seen this play out in public multiple times. It's harder to keep all the dirt hidden in the digital age. We know what happens when a regular person does, in fact, "see something, say something."

And it ain't pretty.

Study to Be Quiet

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the Serenity Prayer, the one you say at your "meetings." He asked God for the serenity to accept what he couldn't change, the courage to change what he could, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is the same man who wrote an entire book about how groups behave worse than the individuals in them and can't be shamed into behaving better. Niebuhr knew you can't talk an institution into growing a conscience.

Anybody who's spent time around the military or the prepper crowd knows the term "grey man." The grey man is the guy nobody notices. He doesn't draw attention, he doesn't escalate, and he puts his energy into the things he can actually affect.

People hear that and call it cowardice. I call it staying alive long enough to be useful to the people who depend on you.

And if you don't believe me, remember that Sophie Cunningham DID speak out, exactly the way Matt Walsh wished Caitlin Clark would. She got an elbow to the face for her trouble, and the refs called the foul on her. The league still has no rule. Nothing changed.

I've written before about sphere sovereignty, Abraham Kuyper's idea that the state, the church, the family, and the individual each have their own God-given jurisdiction.

Whatever you think my politics are, you’re wrong

Go back and read Clark's answer with that in mind. She told a reporter which sphere the problem belongs to. And Matt Walsh wanted her head for it, pissed off she didn't see fit to grab authority that was never hers and ruin her career in the effort.

Paul put it even more plainly. In 1 Thessalonians, he tells the church to "study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands."

Your business is your household. It's your marriage, your kids, your church, where you work (contribute your labor), and where you spend your money. Those are the places where your actions change something you can see with your own eyes. Everything else belongs to the governing bodies and to God, and both of them will get along fine without your quote-tweet.

So yeah, I have a lot of opinions about a lot of political things. But it's not often I'll speak on them publicly. Why? Because there's no point. We all know somebody who lost a job over a Facebook post about a policy they'll never have a say in. We all know somebody who blew up their church friendships over a fight being decided three states away. Neither of them changed a damn thing, and both of them are still paying for it.

Sorry, but it won't be me. And even if we don't know each other, I hope it won't be you either.

Frailty is a yearly rewatch for me and one that made me think deeply about what I believe. My newest video dives into faith, revelation, and who you owe obedience to.

No live-viewing notes this week because pretty much everything I wrote down ended up in the script. Enjoy!

This is a recitation of my personal morality and how it led me to a specific theology. I am not a salesman, and you are not my mark. So this is not an attempt at persuasion or conversion, only an explanation of my own point of view.

Thanks to my recent essay and video on forgiveness, I've gotten a lot of pointed questions about my faith. Both atheists and Christians want to know my specific brand of Christianity so they can more effectively tell me why I'm wrong. My upcoming video is on the movie Frailty, which has a lot of religious assertions, so I'm sure more of the same is incoming.

In light of that, I thought I would write a full statement of what I believe and what my non-negotiables are. The sad part is that such a full recitation is almost required. Because saying "I'm a Christian" isn't actually that clarifying, given that there are no fewer than 45 thousand denominations of it.

And for whatever reason, people also call themselves Christians when they actually aren't.

I see it frequently in the online slap fights between cradle Catholics and the (admittedly) zealot newly-converted Catholics. The new converts actually know what the Catholic Church teaches, and how it's different from being a Protestant, or an Eastern Orthodox. The cradle Catholics don't. Or if they do know, they don't care.

Because being Catholic is their team. Something they identify as without believing any of the very specific tenets of that church.

"No, the host is not the actual body of Christ. Yes, I have sex with many people I'm not married to and don't feel bad. God knows my heart. I don't need confession. Neither do you. There are many ways to heaven. All religions are equal. Yes, I'm Catholic and don't you dare say I'm not!"

These are exact claims I've heard from professing Catholics and they will never cease to baffle me. They've just described the Unitarian Universalist church down to the last comma, yet they'll fight you in a parking lot if you meekly suggest they're going to the wrong church every Sunday.

Why? Why do this? You live in a country where you're free to live as your conscience dictates. Nobody is going to jail you. So why go on describing yourself as a member of a religion whose central tenets you reject?

Having been raised Catholic myself (and spent many years debating being a nun) I understand the impulse better than I'd like to admit. I love the Catholic mass. The vestments. The tradition. And I love the people. I vibe with cradle Catholics much better than a lot of Protestants, and I suspect I always will. It's my culture. It will always be my culture.

But it isn't my theology. And it never was. So hard as it was to admit, I cannot be Catholic. And once I admitted that to myself, I had to figure out what I actually was. Which meant I had to start doing the thing I'd been avoiding since I was fifteen.

I had to start asking questions.

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I discerned religious life from about fifteen to nineteen. That's a polite way of saying I spent four years planning to become a nun.

It was always at the back of mind, even at the beginning of my Marine Corps enlistment. But by the end of my enlistment, I knew the convent was out. And by the end of college, I knew Catholicism was out too. That left me out in the cold. If the only "correct" Christianity wasn't something I believed in, then where did that leave me?

I had no answer, thus spending decades knowing only what I wasn't. Which is a spectacularly useless thing to know about yourself.

Why I didn’t become a nun

Talking to other people didn't help much either. Somewhere in the last fifty years, American Christians decided that denominations are basically flavors of the same thing, and that asking about the differences between them is rude, like asking a coworker what she paid for her house.

Except the differences between denominations are actually really important. They have competing claims about what God is, what a human being is, and what happens to you when you die. They contradict each other and thus some of them have to be wrong. And I had no interest in playing along with something demonstrably wrong out of politeness.

To find out where I actually stood, I decided to embrace Millennial entitlement. As a Gen Y/Elder Millennial, I don't often fit the stereotypes of my cohort. But just this once, I gave in. I got an expensive coffee prepared by a heavily pierced They/Them, and I wrote out my list of demands for a church I could belong to.

The Non-Negotiables of My Faith

• Recognizing the unknowability of the Almighty (by the human mind)

I will not suffer a church leader who presumes to divine God's intentions. No, Pastor Dan, I don't think my uncle died of prostate cancer for a good reason. Nor do I think I got this job because I am uniquely anointed. Making God out to be your personal wish-granting genie or your neighbor's malevolent punisher is a no-go. Churches like this are why we have Christians deconstructing in their 20s and asking "If God, why bad things happen?" He is unfathomable to us, and He left us a lengthy set of dumbed-down instructions so we might, to our best ability, know Him. The word is sufficient.

• A focus on truth of the tenets of the faith, not on eliciting emotional responses from the congregation.

Mega church concert services always rubbed me wrong. Hearing girls describe their emotions as they are listening to a worship song, their eyes closed and hands raised, was always a recitation of how I felt in the pit at a Korn concert. Adrenaline, then dopamine. Fellowship with the ones in the pit with you, experiencing the same thing you're experiencing. That's just music. Which comes from the Lord, yes. But it's not a reason to choose a religion, and it doesn't teach you about God or how to live your life in obedience to His word.

• Humans are bad. All of us.

A lot of atheists like to use the idea of hell or even judgment as some kind of a gotcha during religious debates. Since love and "niceness" has been the brand of American Christianity for a long time, they love to pull this one out. "So you're saying I should go to hell? That I deserve to burn for all eternity? That's not very loving!"

It's not a gotcha for me. "Yes, you deserve to roast in hell for all eternity. And I deserve to burn right along with you."

It doesn't matter what particular sin we're discussing. Maybe it's one I've personally committed. Or maybe not. But there are myriad others I have committed. Was this one sin of the atheist's somehow more damnable than mine? Nope. We both are filthy in our respective sins, with the only hope of being made clean in the blood of Christ, shed for us, quite undeservedly.

The absolute depravity rule was strangely the thing I found most attractive, because the alternative, the insistence that I am somehow special, has always struck me as manipulative. Why are you insisting I have some special quality that only God can see? I know what special means. And I'm not special. Some people are. By virtue of being special, they are by definition RARE. So how can we all be special?

We can't. This is the very human drive to elevate ourselves, to worship ourselves. Follow ME because I'm better than that person, or that group of people. Total depravity rejects this. The fact you didn't commit that particular sin doesn't make you better. You committed that other sin, and the fact no one saw you do it doesn't improve your case. The fact that you had different circumstances that didn't lead you to that sin doesn't mean you wouldn't commit it under those same circumstances. You would. You just don't know it. But God does.

The religion that best guards against sinful pride, the deadliest sin, is the best one. I believe that completely.

• Christ didn't die for all humans. He died for some.

This is observably true to me and I think a lot of other people too. We just don't like to say it out loud. But it doesn't take much looking around to understand we are not all the same. We are not equally loved. We're not equally imbued with the goodness of God. You can see that with your own eyes, which is why people love to ask "Could Hitler be in heaven?" That's the safe way to ponder universal salvation. Here's a less safe way, and forgive me for the nastiness of this example. In Africa, there are men who admit on camera to raping literal infants. They do this because they believe it will cure their AIDS. They say this straight faced and when asked about the baby, the men just shrug. "Yes, it's a bit of an inconvenience, how they scream. And then some of them die. But you can always make another one." Not only are they not sorry, they don't understand why other people think they should be. And when they realize that their AIDS is still present, it's entirely likely they'll do it again.

This is a human? This thing has a soul? And just needs some education and a communion wafer to make him the same as the best person you know? Sorry, I don't buy it. I think people insist on universal salvation because they want to be the one saved.

But we can't know who is on the list. Even if all outward appearances check out. We, mere humans, can only see what's in front of us. In the past, and right now. We can't see the future. We can't see inside someone's heart and mind. Which is why we can't point a finger and declare who is among the elect. We can have an evidence structure for who we want to associate with, who is best to have around to build the kind of society and fellowship God commands. But we, mere men, cannot know who is elect and who is reprobate. But the distinction exists. I will not be convinced otherwise.

• Humans are permitted to defend their lives and property. Nations are allowed to defend their borders. Compelled charity (wealth confiscation and redistribution) is sin. And tyranny. Suicidal pacifism is not of God, and I will follow no religion that encourages one group to give up their way of life for the benefit of another.

• The time of prophecy is ended and God no longer speaks directly to humans or sends his angels to directly interfere in human affairs.

I am firmly cessationist. Anyone claiming to hear from God personally is either mentally ill and needs treatment immediately or is evil. That's it. That's all. I will follow no religion that declares otherwise.

• Jesus is the only human who lived without sin. He could only do this because He is God.

Asserting that it's possible for other humans to live without sin (yes, even mother Mary) is heresy. Jesus being sinless (because He is God) is why only He could be the sufficient sacrifice to wipe away the sins of the elect, to make Grace possible. There is no free lunch, certainly not in the face of human depravity and the perfection of God. A price must be paid for all things and no human bearing the weight of original sin could pay it. To deny the sinlessness of Jesus or to assert it was not unique unto Him is to deny the blood price of Grace. I will attend no church that makes such a denial.

• The best religion is the one that works with the knowledge we have and understands human nature as it exists, not as our ego would like it to be.

We have centuries of scholarship. Going off vibes is not acceptable. That's why there are words for concepts like Pelagianism. We hear that and we don't know what it means. It feels inaccessible. But the word exists to describe a long-debated and long-rejected heresy, that all people are born as blank slates. They're morally neutral and can choose God without special Grace. It's such a common idea that keeps popping up and keeps being shot down, so of course there's a single word for it. But it's no longer in the common lexicon. Look into the claims of any "seeker-sensitive" or prosperity gospel church, and you will find a long list of confusing -ism words, all describing the very heresies these charlatans preach every week. A good church makes sure its congregants knows these words and what scholars have already discerned for us.

• Simple living is good, but not advocating hatred of wealth.

Abiding God's prescriptions is setting us up for prosperous, well-balanced lives. Asceticism is anti-human. Very often hard-line hatred of wealth is covetousness wrapped in rightousness. Or it's one con man advising frugality to the people he's fleecing. I will hear no commie nonsense from the pulpit.

What I Did About It

Once I listed everything out, it wasn't hard to see where I cleanly fell on the denomination chart.

There was no discovery. No, "Aha, here is the real truth that no one before me has worked out!" No, far from it. I read what other men worked out centuries ago and I recognized it, because it matched what I had already seen with my own eyes and never had a framework for. The observations of God came first, thanks to my parents, my education, and the various churches I've attended. The observations of humans took longer. My whole life, in fact.

The theology came last. It always does, for anyone honest about the order of operations. And the theology cleanly fits into Calvinism aka Reformed Christianity. Which is helpful for sorting out local churches, but not much else. Faith and religion should never be a team you play for. The stakes are too high. You have a country, a family, maybe a sports team you can swear allegiance to. But concerning our Creator and questions of eternity, your only fealty should be to the truth... as clearly as you can discern it.

My newest video is now live, and builds off last week's essay on Forgiveness and how it's best warped by modern feel-good Christianity. It uses the character of Negan of The Walking Dead as an exemplar of what an actually repentent man looks like and why it's important to see.

And for paid subscribers, keep scrolling to read the notes I took as I watched the episodes that went into this video. You'll notice my videos are more about movies than tv shows, and the time investment is why. But for this show, I loved every minute of it.

The Negan Watch Party

My real-time episode notes

Season 6 and 7 The Tyrant Introduced

6.16 "Last Day on Earth" — Negan's debut. Lineup. Lucille. The choice of victim left as a cliffhanger.

Until now it’s been “The Saviors” as the threat, and a formidable one. But Rick and Maggie are very confident they can (will) defeat them. No, we will not make deals with these people. Overconfident. Unimaginative. Cocky. Not sloppy exactly, but didn’t take the threat as seriously as they should have. Both Carol and Carl already reckoning with the burden of losing someone they love and trying desperately to avoid it. While the others genuinely think it won’t happen. The saviors use walkers as roadblocks. “You’d need a lot of people to chain up a red rover like that.” They dressed the walkers in Michonne’s and Daryl’s clothes. They’re in too deep now, even as they’re starting to realize that victory isn’t so sure.

Negan enters at the end. Their leader. And it’s only now, captured, bound, and at Negan’s feet, that they understand the depth of their own arrogance. It’s not even the bat that’s immediately terrifying. It’s his jocular, thoroughly unbothered joy at the people kneeling before him, knowing what’s coming next. The new world order: “give me your shit, or I will kill you.” Actually, that’s the oldest world order there is. Enjoying their agony as they wait for who he’ll pick. Everyone’s on the table. Even the kid and the sick pregnant girl.

Eenie meenie miney mo. “Taking it like a champ!” Fade to blood-stained black.

7.01 "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be" — Abraham. Glenn. Daryl taken. The episode that defines him.

Negan is amused at Rick’s threats. Leaves the ax in the RV where Rick can reach it. “Grab the ax and see how you do.” But he’s fast, unhurt, and has no trouble dropping Rick. The Saviors aren’t just strength in numbers. There’s a reason he built this “new world order.” Keeps showing flashes of the people on their knees, keeping us in suspense over who was killed.

Special effects on Abraham are hard to watch. He was defiant to the end. The sound as Negan keeps hitting him until there’s nothing left… disgusting. Daryl gets a punch in on Negan for trying to force Rosita to look at Abraham’s body. For whatever reason, he kills Glen as revenge rather than Daryl. And that’s even more horrible. And Maggie has to watch. And Negan not only has no trouble looking at Glenn up close as he struggles to breath, his skull crush into his brain, he’s enjoying it. “I’m sorry, I truly am. But I did say it. No exceptions.” Does he believe this is a matter of honor or is it part of the theatrics? And he just keeps hitting him, even after there’s nothing left of his head. Even for a fit man, that must be tiring. The kind of rage that drives him is only barely covered by the jokey veneer.

Cut Carl’s arm off. Or I’ll kill everyone, including Carl. And leave you alive to live with it. “Kid’ll be fine. We have a great doctor.” Now Rick breaks, begging. Negan is unmoved and now Rick understands. Carl tells him to do it. Because he understands too. Negan stops him. “You belong to me, right?” Rick says yes.

He keeps Daryl as insurance.

7.04 "Service" — Negan's first visit to Alexandria. The taking of beds, weapons, and dignity.

You can see the trauma flash in both Rosita and Eugene when Negan rolls up to the gate. Even at the sound of the trucks. 

The saviors enjoy their status as schoolyard bullies. Taking needed supplies. Dumping out Rosita’s water and taking her guns. “Don’t take too long.” All they have to do is submit to Negan and they get to bully everyone else. Sweet deal to a certain kind of person. Tough to admit but Negan is funny. Charming. Somehow I believe him when he says that widows of his victims go with him afterward. He likes Carl’s bravery. “I can’t help but notice you got a fat lady in charge of the rations…” I feel guilty for chuckling. They took all the mattresses. Michonne finds them burned and left. It’s just about making them suffer.

7.07 "Sing Me a Song" — Carl at the Sanctuary. The "wives" dynamic. Carl shaves him. Maybe the most revealing single hour for the Negan-as-domestic-tyrant texture.

Carl stows away on a supply truck, seemingly looking for revenge. Negan is not impressed. He’s quickly felled, though he takes two of Negan’s men down. Negan likes him, and jovially shows him around. The sanctuary has a whole pit of zombies just ready to be deployed as needed. As much as he revels in being feared, Negan finds it a relief that Carl isn’t scared of him. The people at the sanctuary kneel for Negan. They work for points, which gets them food and other perks. He has 4 or 5 wives that he keeps dressed well, something not often seen in the apocalypse. He doesn’t hit them. But there’s “worse.” They don’t like him. Maybe that’s part of the appeal for him. His young wife cheated on him. She’s allowed to leave, but not cheat. She doesn’t want to leave. She wants to stay. “You know what that means, right?”

He burns the man who his wife cheated with. “Rules keep us alive. It’s gonna be hard to watch. I don’t wanna do it.” Everyone has to watch. Including the wives. Funny thing, in later seasons, Maggie says the exact same thing as she hangs a man for trying to have her killed.

As punishment for killing his men, he has Carl take the bandage off his missing eye, something Carl is deeply uncomfortable with. Appropriate punishment for a teenager. “Its easy to forget you’re just a kid”

He prefers to break his enemies and bring them to heel instead of kill them. Deep control issues. 

7.08 "Hearts Still Beating" — Spencer. Olivia. Eugene taken. The mid-season punctuation.

He’s enjoying playing house with Carl. And not just because the accommodations are nice in Alexandria. Negan does not like weasels. “If you want to take over? Why not kill Rick yourself and just take over?” Negan kills Spencer. Perfectly predictable if Spencer would have paid just a little attention. It wasn’t even a surprise. But spoiled little rich boy doesn’t see other people. Just his own wants. And that’s why he’s dead.

7.11 "Hostiles and Calamities" — Sanctuary-side episode focusing on Eugene and Dwight. Negan present throughout, and you see how the regime functions when Rick isn't on screen.

Negan’s youngest wife wants to kill herself. She didn’t sign up willingly but to save her sick mother’s life. The other wives ask Eugene for help in letting her die. Negan sees people very clearly. He has to know. And he took her anyway. Actually, she doesn’t want to die. The wives were hoping to poison Negan, but Eugene figures it out and keeps the poison pills from them.

7.16 "The First Day of the Rest of Your Life" — Season finale. The Scavenger betrayal. War declared.

“Punishment is how we built everything we have.” A lot of projecting going on in Negan’s chastising for Rick. “You push me and you push me… you people are animals!” Hard to tell if he believes it. He doesn’t seem to be having as a good a time. The Saviors get the upper hand again, and now Negan intends to kill Carl, as it would be the most effective punishment for Rick. Even though he genuinely likes the kid. Maintaining control is most important. More important than any personal affection.

Lucky that Ezekial and his tiger come to the rescue. “You taste that, Simon? That is the taste of shit!” Even in defeat he’s funny. Can’t blame him for not expecting a tiger.

7.15 "Something They Need"

Negan stops Sasha from being raped. It’s against the rules. “You really crossed a line here.” He kills him. He really means it. Murderer, but not a rapist. Most if not all people can find a reason to murder. Rapists are a breed of their own, and reviled by all but their own. Which Negan is not.

Season 8 All-Out War

8.01 "Mercy" — Premiere. Rick declares war. Negan trapped at the Sanctuary.

“I’m not gonna let my people die over that shit. Like you’re about to.” He doesn’t act rashly. Though I don’t think he actually cares about his people. He only cares that they are representatives–extensions–of him. Negan’s leg is compromised in one of the explosions. The zombie hoarde arrives, trapping him inside the sanctuary. And Father Gabriel with him.

8.05 "The Big Scary U" — The Negan-Father Gabriel two-hander. He talks more about himself in this episode than anywhere else in the antagonist run.

Father Gabriel believes God trapped him in the trailer to take Negan’s confession. He fears a fruitless death, which Negan finds funny. Does he think all death is fruitless? “If my people think I’m dead, a lot of people are gonna die… because I’m not there to stop it.” He views himself as the savior, the only bulwark against humans ripping each other apart. He’s not entirely wrong. Most people look for a singular strong leader. They feel better with a strong man rather than some kind of bureaucracy. Cut to the advisor table talking… and Negan’s right. Eugene is the voice of reason. All people are weak, the only question is how. He views himself as bringing out the strength in people which makes the world strong. Control. Self-protection. “Don’t you want absolution? Forgiveness?” Father Gabriel asks. “All it costs is saying it out loud.” Well that’s not exactly true, Father. Asking about his first wife, before the dead rose, is a trigger. Gabriel will only help Negan fight their way to the sanctuary if he makes his confession. And he does. He tells Gabriel about Lucille. His only real wife. He couldn’t put her down after she turned. That is his weakness. And he is ashamed. Negan arrives just in time to stop a full scale riot. And Gabriel sees the power he has over the people.

8.08 How it’s Gotta Be. 

Carl volunteers for Negan to kill him for punishment to spare the families under threat in Alexandria. Negan is rather affected by the serious offer. Carl: “Was this the plan? Is this who you wanted to be?” Negan later tells Rick “This shit isn’t funny anymore.” So no, this wasn’t the plan and it isn’t who he wanted to be. 

8.09 "Honor" — Carl's death. Negan's reaction, in his absence, structures the second half of the season.

Sweet Carl reminds his father that he united with his enemies before. Stopped fighting, and made everything better. Including Carl. “It can be like that again. You can still be like that again.” Carl shoots himself. Not wanting Michonne or Rick to bear the burden. He was our son. All of ours.

8.12 "The Key" — Rick chases Negan. Negan captured by Jadis. Lucille burned and recovered.

Negan soaking the weapons with zombie guts. Damn that’s evil. Still insisting to Rick he saves people.

8.15 "Worth" — Negan returns to the Sanctuary, kills Simon, plans the final assault.

Funny how Simon doesn’t realize that quiet Negan is dangerous Negan. I’m surprised he was willing to fight it out with Simon before killing him. Respect for his years of service? To quell further uprisings? I’m not sure. Nah, choking him to death. This is as personal as it gets. Aaanndd… there goes Dwight too. He’s keeping him alive.

Michonne radios Negan. She reads the letter to him. He was deeply affected. “Is this what you wanted?” Negan realized Carl had already written the letter when he asked him that at Alexandria. Negan can’t just beat them. He can’t move on until he kills all of them. He never wanted this, but he feels like he has no choice. 

8.16 "Wrath" — Finale.

“Want’s got nothing to do with it.” Negan is tired and he wants it all to be over. The only way to make that happen is to kill them all. “Because that’s how things are.” As if he’s not the one making them that way. Hand is shattered by Eugene’s sabotaged bullets. He can’t swing the bat. Rick wants to extend mercy. “Give me 10 seconds for Carl” Negan hesitates, and Rick cuts his throat. “Look what you did. Carl didn’t know a damn thing” And then says to save him, much to Maggie’s fury. And all the saviors are there to see her grief, her anguish, and Rick standing firm in reconciliation. 

The time skips here. He doesn't appear in every episode.

Season 9 Imprisonment

9.01 "A New Beginning" — First glimpse of imprisoned Negan, time-jumped forward.

Gregory hanged. And Maggie gives a very Negan-like speech. Though she isn’t enjoying herself at all.

9.04 "The Obliged" — Maggie comes for him. He breaks down about Lucille and asks her to kill him. The first crack.

Michonne having trouble living in peace. Looks like Maggie is too. Jesus isn’t happy she’s going to kill Negan. But he’s already stopped eating. A few days in a row now. Michonne takes it for a hunger strike, but it isn’t. He mourns Carl. And his wife. They would have loved to have a kid like him. Being locked up is killing him. Being still makes him think. All that action, all that conquest and cruelty, just so as not to sit in silence and think. He’s desperate for his bat. Hearing that it’s still out there makes him cry. It was no surprise to learn that his wife was Lucille. Grief and trauma comes out in weird ways.

9.05 "What Comes After" — Rick's exit episode. Negan is part of the emotional architecture.

He taunts Maggie, but it’s not gleeful. He’s not amused. But he admits he was lying when he said he didn’t enjoy killing. And all this is to provoke Maggie. He wants her to kill him. He wants to be with his wife. He can’t kill himself and he can’t stay imprisoned. He can’t be alone with his thoughts. And Maggie doesn’t kill him, not out of cruelty. She sees he’s been truly punished. It’s settled.

9.09 “Adaptation”

He looks around Alexandria in wonder at how it looks now. All the growth and building. Judith catches him trying to hop the fence. She lets him go. Shovel tells me he's looking for Lucille. After his long imprisonment, and now being on his own, he’s not having such an easy time. He’s not strong anymore. He goes back to the sanctuary, now abandoned. Time and rats have worked through his emergency stash. Judith was right “There's nothing out there for you.” He goes outside to knock around some walkers. Knock the rust off. He goes back willingly. 

9.12 "Guardians" — Judith's visits, the relationship that rebuilds him.

He smiles as Michonne comes in to see him. He feels better. More like himself. He tries the ally angle with Michonne, but she ain’t having it. But she’s embarrassed that she’s losing control, even as she pretends she’s not the leader. Judith insists he’s not like that anymore, and that Michonne changed, so why can’t Negan? something Michonne does not take well. 

9.14 "Scars"

Michonne really doesn’t like that Judith tells Negan tells things that she doesn’t share with her. He reminds her that Judith is a person, with her own wants and thoughts. Negan really does like kids, sees them as full people which a lot of adults don’t. He mentioned he used to work with kids, but said he never had any of his own. Wonder why.

9.16 "The Storm"

He rescues Judith in the blizzard. The first publicly heroic act.

All hunkered together for the storm and Negan is happy, back to slinging crude jokes. Judith goes to get the dog. Negan goes after her. He takes his own coat off and gives it to her, as she’s fading from the cold. His leg is hurt from flying debris. But he gets her (and the dog) back. “No one ever thinks they’re the evil one.” Michonne looks relieved to be talking to Negan, weirdly. Maybe the only one who understands.

Season 10 The Whisperers

10.04 "Silence the Whisperers" — Negan free, complicated.

Negan is bonding with Lydia. He knows how it feels to be free… but disliked in the community. Daryl doesn’t like that at all. A bunch of people attack her trying to make her leave. Negan steps in to protect her. One of the attackers falls back and hits her head. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They throw him back in a cell, and he knows they’re out for his blood. Daryl knows it too, and isn’t sure how to feel about the fact that Negan is in the right. Negan escapes his cell. Lydia says she let him out, even though she didn’t. She’s in despair that she doesn’t belong there. She feels safer in the cage. 

10.05 - What it always is

Brandon followed Negan. He seems to have some kind of crush on him. Apparently the son of one of the saviors? He was obviously too young to really remember the Sanctuary and is blase. “I didn’t do that to Carl. I would never kill a kid.” Brandon seems surprised. He brought a bunch of Negans old stuff. Including the jacket and Lucille. Negan isn’t sure how to feel about it. He doesn’t like this little fanboy and it seems pretty clear he doesn’t like being idolized for who he used to be. He loses his patience when Brandon thinks about robbing about a lady and her kid. He tells him to get lost. Negan sits with the kid and tells him what it’s like to be on a plane, really paints a picture for him and makes him smile. He laments how much that kid will never experience because he was born after the dead rose. He really is a natural with kids. He hears his old whistle and all of our stomachs drop. He understands the fear he used to invoke in others when they heard that whistle. He runs back to see that Brandon came back and killed the mom and his kid. The little bastard thought Negan was testing him, standing over the bodies pleased as punch. Negan beats him to death. Good. righteous killing. He has the skills. It’s just a matter of using them correctly. He puts the jacket on, wields the bat, and makes noise so the walkers come. And the whisperers. 

10.06 "Bonds" — Carol and Negan together in Whisperer territory. The pivot begins.

Negan’s popping off, back on his game. Saying he wants to join. Beta doesn’t like the constant noise. But he says he knows all the secrets of Alexandria. When he kneeled, its obvious he's playing her. We know him too well.

10.09 Squeeze – Negan whispers in Alpha's ear

Silently watching and listening to everything Alpha says and does. Advises Alpha that she has a rat in her own camp, just like he had at the sanctuary. She threatens his balls if he repeats his accusation in the camp. “I will not have you spreading paranoia.” A wise move, but she heard him and tells Beta to watch the girl Negan insinuated was the leak (Thora Birch. Nice to see her again). She pulls Negan away from the group. He’s freaking out, Has a hard time shutting up. Is she going to kill him? Makes him disrobe. “I made myself into a monster because that was what the world needed.. I saved people. My name meant something.” She tells him to turn around… and she’s naked too. She’s giving herself to him as a reward for outing the spy. “You’re a crass man. I want to express my gratitude in a way you will understand.” He tells her to keep the mask on because he knows she’ll like that. They smash. Yuck. 

10.10 "Stalker" — Negan with Alpha after killing.

Gamma is taken captive. With Rick gone, their soft edge is gone and they aren’t about to give mercy. No Negan in this one.

10.11 "Morning Star" — Pre-attack on Hilltop.

He dissuades Alpha from attacking. Instead says she should get them to bend the knee, to join the whisperers. All the roads have trees blocking the way and the guards are hanged. Daryl recognizes it: “It’s Negan. He’s with her now.” As it turns out, Alpha intends Hilltop to join her… as part of the Hoarde, which is not what Negan expected. But he covers it well. 

10.12 "Walk With Us" — He kills Alpha. Reveal scene.

The whisperers have won. But Alpha wants Lydia. Negan sees her and goes after her. He tells Alpha he has Lydia and leads her to a cabin. But not the one Lydia is actually in. Negan tells Alpha about his wife. He didn’t feel much of anything after she was gone. I think he’s testing Alpha, to see if he can talk her out of killing Lydia. But no. He sees that there is no getting through to her. She can’t be redeemed like he was. He slits her throat as she opens the door, finding nothing. Lydia escapes her bonds where Negan stashed her and is able to leave freely. 

10.14 "Look at the Flowers" — Confrontation with Beta and the aftermath of Alpha.

Reveals it was Carol who let him out of his cell. “They’ll never forget what you did. Unless you give them something else to remember you by. So you bring me Alpha’s head.” Only Carol isn’t going back. But Negan can’t go back without her. She says for him to wait for her then. “You’re free now. Do whatever the hell you want. I need to be alone.” He goes back looking for Lydia. He finds Daryl instead. He tells him about his deal with Carol and Alpha being dead. Turns out, the whisperers view Negan as the new Alpha. He uses that to mess with Daryl for a little while. But he shoots the whisperers instead. And Daryl now believes him. 

10.15 "The Tower" — Whisperer war climax, Negan involved.

Lydia is avoiding him. He tells her that he liked Alpha. She did awful stuff but he liked her and he wished he didn’t have to do what he did. Lydia says she wished he had died too, which clearly wounds him. He’s lamented multiple times that he never had children. He keeps picking up substitutes. He tells Lydia to hit him because it will make her feel better. She needs to mourn or itll eat her up “just trust me on this.” She’s holding in her grief because she thinks she shouldn’t feel bad. She does hit him and he holds her while she cries, and he’s the only one she would do that in front of, which of course he knows. 

10.16 "A Certain Doom" — Original season 10 finale.

Negan tries to beg off the big assault, saying Beta and the rest are gunning for him but Daryl ain’t having it. If you wanna be on the team, then be on the team. I notice he’s still wearing the jacket. And he stays and tells Lydia to go, that they’ll never trusts her, even though he’ll stay. He gives her Alphas mask so she can walk among the hoards if she wants. Negan kills bet and lets the sicko get eaten by the zombies. Beta was famous? A singer or something? Lydia is happy to see Negans still there at the end. 

10.17 Home Sweet Home

Maggie isn’t happy at all to see Negan. Doesn’t spare him a word and he knows there will be trouble. Carol: “We were gonna lose everything. Negans the reason we didn’t” he watches silently as she comes into Alexandria with her son.

10.22 "Here's Negan"

His origin. Pre-apocalypse, Lucille's cancer, the men who detained him, the bat. Non-negotiable for a character study. Hilarie Burton (Jeffrey Dean Morgan's actual wife) plays Lucille.

Carol takes Negan to the cabin so he doesn’t have to be in Maggie’s face. Can cut the tension with a knife. Asks Carol to smooth things over a little, which she doesn’t answer. Council voted to banish him there. Or at least that’s what Carol says. I remember he said he could kill a man just as easy as look at him, but he didn’t like to kill women. So it might not be Glenn’s death that’s eating at him, but rather Maggie’s rage and grief. Alone and speaking with a younger version of himself, it’s clear this was a mask, an act he adopted that melted into his real self. He digs up Lucille at the spot where Rick cut his throat. We go back to 12 years ago, the dead have already risen. He’s stealing treatment for his wife. He’s desperate, not violent. Oh that’s how he met neck tattoo girl. He was a high school gym teacher. Weirdly makes sense. He didn’t even want to kill the zombies. He would rather wait for them to leave. He’s clumsy, not good at violence. Just a regular guy. He’s keeping her isolated until the last three treatments are done. But they needs gas. All the sources near by are picked over. She wants to be with other people and get out of there, but not him. They did good making him look younger, thickened him up. Probably with CGI. Truly in love. She got him the jacket. Or rather she retrieved it. She’d initially been angry he bought it for himself. He was unfaithful to her before the outbreak, and that guilt eats at him. She stayed with him because “I could always see the man you are, even when you weren’t.” Oh, he was fired from being a teacher for misdemeanor assault. The guy he beat up “had it coming.” So the violence was always there; he just suppressed it most of the time, until it exploded out of him. She was alone when she found out about the cancer because he was out fucking around. Poor girl. She assures him he made up for it. And she wants him to stay, not run out there looking for medicine from doctors who might not be there. He won’t stay. He won’t give up and “let” her die. He’s in denial that she is terminal. Laura gave him the bat to protect himself from the gang as he made his way back to his wife. He betrayed the doctor who was kind to him and gave the gang their location to try and save Lucille, to get the drugs back to her. She killed herself in his absence, and now she’s a zombie with a bag over her head, tied to the bed. “Please don’t leave me like this” written on the door. Gut wrenching. He can’t kill her, can’t bash her head in. “You are so beautiful” plays in the background as he pulls the bag from her head and sees her face as she howls at him. He just sits at the end of the bed. Medicine next to him in the cooler. Cuts barbed wire from his fence, wraps it around the bat Laura gave him. And burns his house down with his wife inside. The gang has the doctor and Laura, beating the doctor and threatening to hurt Laura if he doesn’t reveal where the “good stuff is.” The Negan we know is who emerged from that burning house. He goes back to the gang’s clubhouse and lays waste to those assholes. He calls Laura the doctor’s daughter, but she obviously isn’t. He assigns the paternal role. And it’s happened before in another season. Someone came in and just called Michonne “Your mom” when speaking to Carl. And later Negan himself called Michonne Judith’s mother. There’s no “step mom” or “your dad’s girlfriend” in this world. There is the family you cleave to, and blood don’t matter terribly much. 

Negan tells the story of the guy he got arrested for beating. He explains that “seeing red” is literal. The guy was the parent of some of his students. He was sued and got fired. There were consequences then. But there aren’t anymore, and boy is he glad. His victims, less so. Now in the present, Lucille is rotted from being buried for so many years. It breaks with a few whacks at a zombie. He burns the rest of the bat, apologizing to Lucille for letting his shame drive his actions. “I should have been there.” I love you and I miss you. And I’m gonna do your fighting for you. He goes back to Alexandria. “If you stay here, she will kill you.” He says Fair Enough. 

Season 11 Reapers, Commonwealth, Reconciliation

11.01 and 02 "Acheron"

Reapers introduced. He leaves Maggie to die in the subway.

Such is their desperation for food for the group that Maggie and Daryl push on despite very clear signs to stop, specifically the mass grave that Negan points out might still be in use. He’s not the first to note she’s bringing them on a death march. Specifically, she wants to use this as an excuse to kill Negan, and she’s endangering all of them to do it. Negan looks down at her as she begs him for help… and walks away. “No, she was in trouble and I didn’t help. She was just talking about murdering me and I’m the asshole?” She decides to let the kid die, trapped on the other side of the door because they don’t have the ammo to clear the hoarde coming after him. Her reasoning is sound but it doesn’t endear the group to her. They made it gory too so we all have to sit with that decision. Maggie tells the story of what’s out there, what the living are like. “I don’t feel anything when I tell you that… I lost something at seeing it.” She’ll kill and die to protect Alexandria because everything else out there is horror. 

11.03 Hunted: “I know theatrics and these people just told us exactly how crazy they are.” Maggie wasn’t there to see his change, and accuses him of lying to himself just as much as everyone else. “Stop pretending you’re one of us.” The Reapers appear to be a religious cult. Negan drags Maggie away as Agatha is ripped apart. Camera lingers on Negan’s bloody crowbar after braining a zombie, Maggie looking at the dripping blood. 

11.05 "Out of the Ashes" (skim only)

Negan light, Maggie/Negan tension still building.

They work well together. It makes sense they had the spinoff show together. “Why would I ever trust you?” Because you want to stay alive. If you don’t need me, why haven’t you put me down? “I ask myself that every day.” Gabriel makes it to the safe house just as Maggie and Negan are coming to blows. 

11.07 "Promises Broken"

Negan plays double agent against the Reapers using the Whisperer mask.

Negan demands of Maggie that if he continues helping, he won’t have to look over his shoulder anymore. She takes the deal, with the caveat they’ll never be square. She asks Negan to help them herd the dead as cover. With her assurance in hand, he starts having a bit of fun again. He says if he could do it all over again… “I’d have killed every single one of you.” He doesn’t say it to be mean, but because it’s true. You have to do whatever you can to protect your own people. It makes her angry, and he knows that. But he is assuring her of his honesty. He will never tell her pretty lies. 

11.08 "For Blood" — Reaper assault.

Satisfying that it’s Negan’s skill at herding walkers from his time in the Whisperers is what gets them to defeat the Reapers. Everything they have ever gone through led to that success. 

11.09 "No Other Way" — Reapers defeated. Negan walks away from the group on his own terms. Self-imposed exile begins.

Damn maybe Gabriel deserves his own video too. Maggie asks Negan if she should let the Reapers walk. Obviously he doesn’t think she should. But she does. Sans weapons. And then she shoots all three of them. Leah was only winged, but she took out all the men. And Negan watches her. She can’t forgive him, but he was right. He always was. And she knows it, through she can never bring herself to say it. They got the food. Dog is okay. Maggie goes back for Alden. He’s dead. Of course he is. But she takes care of him, sobbing at the weight of it. Then she buries him. And Negan is there. He says that regardless of her promise, she’ll do the same to him eventually. And he leaves, rather than trying to take her out first. Yeah, in hindsight he wishes he had killed all of them. But he didn’t and now things are different. So he doesn’t go after her. He just leaves. Lydia is the one to ask where Negan is, and is sad when Daryl says he left. Crestfallen. She looks at the horizon, hoping he’s wrong. 

11.13 "Warlords"

Returns with Annie, his pregnant new wife. The reformed-man positioning lands or doesn't, depending on how you read it.

He and Annie go to help Gabriel. He didn’t have to. But they have to leave Aaron. 

11.14 "The Rotten Core" — Negan and Daryl rescue mission.

When Maggie and Co arrive, Negan’s first smile is for Lydia. “Hey kiddo.” She asks why he left without saying a word. “It’s what everyone needed.” Negan saves Hershel, assuring Maggie that if anything happens to the boy, it’ll only be because he’s already dead. Annie has a moment with Maggie. Negan talks to Hershel, but doesn’t talk overly blunt to the boy. But he knows and points a gun at Negan. He doesn’t say that he deserves to live, only that the gunshot will reveal their location, and Hershel puts it down. Lydia doesn’t say anything as she takes the gun from Hershel, but maybe she realizes that yes, Negan had good reasons for leaving Alexandria. Tells Hershel when he’s grown up a bit, he can come settle the debt if he has a mind. Which Hershel does not tell his mother. It was Leah what stole the guns. Once again cementing that Daryl should have killed her. Negan. Was. Right. 

11.16 "Acts of God" — Negan and Maggie confrontation, this time unarmed.

Maggie says she is starting to trust Negan. At least with Hershel. He and Annie will watch him while Maggie fights at Hilltop. Daryl shoots Leah as she is trying to kill Maggie. Better late than never I suppose. 

11.17 Lockdown. 

Negan goes to Carol to help hide the kids to avoid them being used as leverage. Real recognize real and Negan knows Carol is the one to get shit done. He tells her about Annie and the baby. He’s letting her know he has skin in the game now, not out for himself. But I think maybe he wanted her to be proud of him, to see he was committed to someone, not just collecting human assets. 

11.18. A New Deal

Carol to Lydia (because she has a new boyfriend). “You take happiness wherever you can find it. And never be sorry.” She’s growing up, out of the shadow of her mother, and through her grief over Henry. There was a Reddit thread on the internet, wondering what happened to the father/daughter dynamic between her and Negan. Like it was an abandoned plot line. But it doesn’t seem to me that it was. She grew up. She moved on, though the affection remains, I’m sure. Annie’s baby is getting a checkup at the Commonwealth. He wants to stay there so she can have access to medical care. He’s yearned for his own child for so long. It was never said why he and Lucille didn’t. Or how long they were married before he got fired. But it seems like quite a while. Why did she never go off the pill? And did that hurt him? Make him feel betrayed and that’s why he cheated? He’s putting his aside his natural rebellion to make sure Annie and the baby are safe. 

11.21 "Outpost 22" — Forced labor camp. Negan and Ezekiel.

Annie and Negan are separated. Ezekiel ain’t happy to have Negan approach him. “Just so you know, I haven’t forgotten either. And for the shit I’ve done, I probably belong in here.” But Ezekial and the others don’t and neither do his wife and baby. He has to start over with everyone who he’s wronged and who has heard of his past wrongs. Negan knows how to lead people, and so does Ezekiel. 

11.22 "Faith" — Labor revolt. The Negan-Ezekiel dynamic crystallizes.

Negan is not impressed with or afraid of the labor camp leader. And Ezekiel is not impressed with him. “You don’t deserve a new life. You damn sure don’t deserve to be a father.” Negan was willing to take the bullet for the rebellion, but the warden adds Annie, which doesn’t sit right with Ezekiel. Or one of the guards. They all move to stand in front of Negan and Annie. The gerd defects, giving Daryl an opportunity to spike the Warden. They still don’t know where the kids are. 

11.23 "Family" — Reconciliation with Maggie and Ezekiel. The forgiveness scene, such as it is.

Judith talks about Lori and Michonne. They’re both “my mom.” Negan proposes he and Maggie go take out Pamela. Negan thanks Ezekiel for what he did. Asks why. As it turns out, he does want Negan to live a better life rather than die a martyr. That will help him live with his own grief and anger. Negan gave himself up because he wanted to leave behind a better legacy for his own kid than the one he has now. “You all are better than me. And if you think I don’t know that, then you haven’t been paying attention.” Oh damn poor lydia gotta have her arm chopped off. 

11.24 "Rest in Peace" — Series finale. Lucille thrown away. Where he ends up.

Negan goes to take out Pamela, so Maggie won’t die in the attempt. “When I was down on my knees last night, I finally understood what you must have felt. I am so sorry…” And she believes him. They go together. But Pam gets arrested. “Person like that, it’s worse than death.” Maggie shoots Pamela’s zombie son instead. At the end, she sits across from him. Thanks him for his words. But there will never be forgiveness. “Glenn was beautiful. I’ll never love anyone like that again.” She can never not see that bat coming down on his head when she looks at Negan. She knows he’s trying. And she’s trying too. Because she knows the hate will eat her up. And he is in pain. For her. Not disappointment or annoyance that she didn’t give him the absolution he wanted. Negan doesn’t join them for the dinner. But Daryl looks out, and nods. Lydia delivers a surprise to Judith. It’s the compass from Negan.

This article will NOT be discussing conspiracy theories regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk

I didn't know Erika Kirk's name until the day of her husband's memorial. I'd never seen her face and I couldn't have told you a single thing about her.

But when she walked out on the stage under a hail of sparkly pyros (for some reason), I knew exactly what she was going to say.

I knew she would speak warmly about her husband and what he meant to people. Of course. That's why we were all here. But then there would come the line. I knew she would say it. And I even knew how. I knew there would be a pause, a deep breath, her big blue eyes looking skyward, silently asking God for strength, and what came after it would be some version of I forgive him.

On September 21, 2025, in front of tens of thousands of people, she stood up and quoted Christ from the cross asking the Father to forgive the men who put him there. Then she said of the man charged with murdering her husband, "That young man. I forgive him." The stadium came to its feet. Every conservative pundit praised her, many with tears in their eyes.

She'd said her line. She'd done her duty. There was literally no other acceptable thing for her to say.

And no, it wasn't because she was the wife of a public figure, a man who very well may have been president one day. It was only because she was a Christian.

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Forgiveness Taken Rather Than Given

My video coming out on Tuesday is a deep dive into forgiveness, as demonstrated through Negan from The Walking Dead. I chose that example specifically because it showed the full cycle of contrition, repentance, and absolution. That journey is important to show because Big Eva and Megachurch culture (which I not-at-all affectionately refer to as Buddy-Christ Christianity) has warped the Christian teaching of forgiveness. And, in my opinion, it has turned followers of Christ into suckers.

A woman in south Wales, calling herself Grace because using her real name would put her in danger, told BBC News what it looks like when somebody weaponizes a Christian's faith.

Grace went through domestic violence for over a year, including being raped. And her attacker did what a lot of psychopaths like to do.

He came to church with her the next day and said he was sorry in front of the altar, and she thought that apologizing in front of God had to count for something.

It didn't count for anything. It was just something he did to get her to drop the charges and make himself look like the good guy.

"Come on love, forgiveness. Isn't that what you people preach?"

And it's not just abusers who pull this crap. There are well-meaning people (both Christian and not) who frame forgiving others as the best thing you can do for yourself. You are the one to give the forgiveness and you are the one who benefits.

“Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right, it makes you free.”- Stormie Omartian

“Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.” — Corrie Ten Boom

And yes, letting go of anger has benefits. Anger is draining. Dwelling in a sense of victimhood is, without question, bad for you.

But that comes only AFTER the wrong-doer has been dealt with as much as is humanly possible. That's the part that the biggest voices in American Christianity seem to leave out. And you have to wonder why.

The Thief Stays on the Cross

The thing about Erika Kirk's display of forgiveness is that her husband's accused murderer had not (and to this day has not) expressed one iota of remorse. All his behavior before the murder and after showed a premeditated killer who was delighted at what he'd done. The little shit's behavior during his trial only cements that.

Why are you forgiving "that young man" when he's not sorry and, by all appearances, would happily do the same thing again to any number of public conservative figures? Who told you that was your job? Your parents. Your pastor, probably. Almost certainly your late husband.

And they were ALL wrong.

Because it isn't even a staple of Christian theology. Not Catholic or Protestant.

The older Reformed and Catholic traditions both understood forgiveness as a two-party transaction conditioned on repentance. Calvin, Luther, and Cranmer all held that God's forgiveness requires faith and repentance from the sinner. The Catholic sacrament of confession builds the same sequence into its structure: you confess, you receive penance, then you're absolved. Hell, sinners used to don ashes and sackcloth and crawl on their hands and knees to demonstrate their contrition.

The idea that a victim owes automatic, unilateral forgiveness to an unrepentant offender would have been foreign to the Reformers and to the early church fathers.

The shift happened when American evangelicalism absorbed the therapeutic culture of the 1970s and '80s. Forgiveness got reframed from a transaction between two parties (offender repents, victim releases the debt) into a one-party psychological act the victim performs for her own emotional benefit, regardless of what the offender has or hasn't done.

The landmark text is Lewis Smedes' Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve (1984). Smedes was a Reformed theologian at Fuller Seminary, which makes the irony especially sharp: a man from the tradition that insisted forgiveness is conditional wrote the book that taught a generation of evangelicals it's unconditional.

Kevin DeYoung at The Gospel Coalition and Chris Brauns (who wrote Unpacking Forgiveness specifically to push back against this) both name Smedes and pop psychology as the source of what Brauns calls "therapeutic forgiveness": a unilateral, internal effort to get your emotions under control, disconnected from any requirement that the offender repent or make restitution.

Dennis Prager wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he was "appalled and frightened by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness." Maria Mayo's The Limits of Forgiveness (2015) traced how unconditional forgiveness became "presented as a Christian and Christlike obligation, putting disproportionate pressure on the victims of injustice or violence."

So the timeline runs roughly:

• pre-1970s, the dominant tradition (both Reformed and Catholic) held forgiveness as conditional on repentance.

• 1970s-80s, the self-help and therapeutic movement enters the church, and forgiveness gets repackaged as something the victim does for herself.

• 1984, Smedes codifies it in a bestseller.

• 1990s-2000s, it becomes the default pastoral response to everything from marital infidelity to child sexual abuse, producing the compulsory forgiveness culture.

Erika Kirk was born in 1988. Poor girl never had a chance. And neither did most of the Gen X and Millennials raised in the various American Protestant denominations.

What Extracted Forgiveness Costs

Grace got a conviction for her abuser. He was sentenced to nine years for what he put her through. Fabulous. However, she got eight weeks living between her car and hotel rooms, a lost job, a lost house, and a period when she thought about ending her life.

She's still a believer, which doesn't surprise me. She says she's closer to God now than she was before and has tried a few different congregations. But the church she'd called home, the one where she brought him, where he stood at the altar and performed his remorse... she couldn't go there anymore. Because she still feels shame for what was done to her. As if all this was her fault.

And the doctrine that made her such easy prey is still being preached. A few days ago, a clip of Pastor Steven Anderson went viral on X. Anderson runs Faithful Word Baptist Church out of Phoenix. He's been banned from thirty-four countries. In the clip, he tells his flock that if your husband slaps you down and you call the cops, you're evil. An evil broad. An evil woman. He also condemned wives who use cameras or recorders to document instances of their husband beating them or raping them.

His four oldest children recently came forward alleging years of domestic violence against their mother and physical abuse against themselves. His son told Protestia that Anderson used the same electrical cord on their mother that he used on the children. His daughter said she remembers praying as a little girl that God would kill her.

To be clear, this guy is a lunatic. An extremist. He is not representative of American Evangelicalism. But he is taking the doctrine of instant forgiveness to its logical conclusion. If marriage vows, or being this man's child, or being in his congregation, forever obligates you to take whatever he dishes out, forgiving instantly even if he doesn't ask for it, then it's not actually much different than what Erika Kirk felt obligated to do on that stage.

I have no idea whether she meant what she said. Neither do you. She may be a woman of rare and genuine grace who spoke a true thing on the worst day of her life, and if so, God bless her and I hope she's at peace.

But I don't think she did mean it. I think she–a former beauty queen and a polished public speaker–knew her lines and she delivered them for the audience.

If you haven't picked up on it yet, I don't agree with that. And neither does Christian doctrine. I don't expect other Christians to go through life as the kind of barn burner I am. But I do expect them to represent their faith responsibly if they use it as a public platform.

It is not your job to keep the peace in your family or your church community by publicly forgiving your wrongdoer.

It is not incumbent upon you to move on based on other people's timeline. And it's definitely not on you to extend grace to an observably unrepentant evil-doer. And I have no patience for any pastor or Christian influencer who says otherwise.

You are in error, sir or ma'am. You are wrong. And for that, you should repent.

Internet Moralist

In July, I announced to my YouTube audience that I was pivoting away from the writing and author space and onto something new, something I was more passionate about and (I hope) would make my viewing audience happy to hear from me.

The pivot is now complete, and my first video in the new style is now available on YouTube, diving deep into the 1995 movie Heat. If you haven't heard, they're making a sequel, which makes a lot of fans very, VERY nervous. So before we get wrapped up in the hype of Heat 2, here's everything I had to say about the original.

Enjoy!

Interested in all my thoughts, in real time, as I was watching Heat? Paid members, keep scrolling and read the notes I took.

Heat Watch Party

Raw notes from the viewing

DeNiro exiting the train, the first face we see

When we see Pacino, he's with his wife, that's his priority. Or maybe not. Wife takes pills. What are they? The daughter is freaking out; this isn't normal teenager stuff. She's not okay. And Pacino isn't there in any meaningful way, even as he criticizes daughter's birth father for not showing up to the scheduled visit.

I watched as a girl for Natalie Portman. There are only two scenes I remember. Al Pacino dragging Natalie Portman out of the bathtub, wrists and thigs sliced (vertically, as recommended by all the edgy girls) and Ashley Judd waving off the oh-so handsome Val Kilmer, protecting him from the police. True Love. I remember nothing leading up to or after those shots. We'll see how it plays out now.

First heist armored car. They're organized, prepared, They're looking for something specific, not the whole cache. New guy on the crew kills a guard for no reason. Now they have to kill all the guards, which wasn't the intention.

Pacino sees how good they are. Understands what hes up against.

New guy gets his full cut no waiting. Because De Niro is done with him. Once they're out of the diner, yeah he's a dead man. They have that perfectly orchestrated too. But he escapes because of a passing cop car distraction. Now there's an inside man on the loose.

Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd. Terrible, volatile relationship. He's a gambler apparently? I guess that makes sense. She threatens to take the baby, which makes him violent. Controlling.

Pacino comes in and drinks. He's late. Diane Venora isn't happy. Seems baffled about why he's mad about her ex not showing when HE wasn't there either. Tbf, the job is hard and it doesn't have regular hours.

DeNiro meets a girl at the cafe. He normally doesn't. No attachments. Neil. That's his name. Why so interested? Surely not because she's pretty. He's seen that before. Maybe because she's earnest. Maybe as simple as the Appalachian accent. lol he says he's from the Bay area. That accent is nowhere but New York.

Neil's signing on for a 12 million dollar score. Meanwhile, he's selling back the bearer bonds to the guy they stole them from. William Fichtner. He doesn't like that, and he's gonna do something about it.

Neil sees Chris sleeping on the floor. He calls the wife and asks what's wrong. He doesn't care about her. He wants to know what's going on with Chris, but she won't tell him. She doesn't like the intrusion. Yeah he's a gambler. Even with the big hauls, he's broke. Neil's worried about him being tied down with a family. "To me, the sun rises and sets with her."

Allstate guy. On parole. Treated like shit at the job he's referred to. I am assuming this is going to be our new crew member. He seems too smart and too proud to put up with being treated like a dog.

Neil sees Ashley Judd is cheating on Chris with Hank Azaria. He doesn't like that. She confronts her. He doesn't care if she's unhappy because if they break up it'll blow the job. "Right now, you will give him the chance. If he messes up again, I'll send you and the kid away. I'll finance it."

Tone Loc, Vincent's informant. Knows an ex con, calls everyone Slick. That rings a bell. Michael Cherino. First link in the chain. AND he has a distinctive tattoo. Damn shame Sizemore threw this career away over nonsense.

Michael has a wife and kids too. Older. They been together for a while. Neil isn't comfortable sitting there with his guys and their families. He calls Amy Breneman. Pacino and his men are watching as they exit the restaurant. They identify all of them. Except Neil.

The new guy is holed up with a hooker. Who he kills for no damn reason. Seems to be something of a pattern.

Vincent is called to the hooker's murder scene. 16 years old. "Beat her head in, same as the others." She had a mother, and the family is there, much to Vincent's displeasure. He stops the mother from seeing her and holds her. He hates this. A momentary blank eyed stare as the mother is led away. Dissociating. And keeps going.

Diane Venora doesn't like "being excluded." He doesn't want to tell her what he sees. She feels like she's getting leftovers instead of sharing. He's not going to talk. Not to her, not to a therapist. He is dedicated to his job. To the dead. To his prey. And she feels alone. But she loves him and can't leave.

Lilly, Allstate guy's girl, encourages him. "I'm proud of you." Clear eyed view of women in this movie. No gold diggers, no vapid airheads. They're all complicated. Some virtuous, some less so. But no cardboard cutouts, manic pixie dreamgirls, or the writer working through his resentments.

The stakeout goes wrong. There was the slightest noise, but Neil heard it. Vincent let them walk. The bank is worth the risk. So they abandon their other interests. "Van Zant is a luxury." He tells Michael to cut loose. He has plenty put away. He has a family. But Michael is looking to Neil. And "for me, the action is the juice." So he's in for the bank as well. I don't remember, but this gives me the ominous feeling that he won't make it out alive.

The famous switcheroo. "What are they looking at? The LAPD!! Is this guy something or is this guy something?"

Jon Voight does the research on Vincent. This guy is the real deal. But he tells him that Vincent respects Neil's skills, something that seems to please him. The haul is so big, it's worth the stretch.

Vincent comes home. House is a mess. Justine is dressed to go out. Without him. He leaves again. Doesn't even sit down or eat. Instead, he joins Neil's tail and pulls him over. "What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?"

The famous diner scene. They talk as people. As men. And right after, the whole crew shakes their tail and all the surveillance.

Waingro goes to see Van Zant, offering help. Van Zant is interesting because he's obviously so used to getting his way, and used to people being intimidated by him. But he shows his true self now. He hasn't been home. He's been sleeping in his office since Neil threatened his life.

Why hide at the office? A generous portrayal is in the hope of not endangering his family, if he has one. But that's not the read I get. Instead, he's holed up there because there's fewer access points. Probably better physical security and of course the presence of Henry Rollins, actual tough guy. He bit off more than he could chew. "People think they can steal my money."

If he was a good man, he would have called the cops when Jon Voight called him to broker the deal. Or just refused. He had insurance; he was paid for the value. But his ego made him think if he hired two gunmen, then he could "show them." Set an example. The problem is criminals have experience in violence and in the fallout of it. White collar douchebags don't. Something Van Zant knows now.

And here we are at the bank heist. Shock and awe. Sudden violence. "Did you know that this heist (specifically Val Kilmer) was used in training for law enforcement??" That's all anyone wants to talk about and the least interesting thing to me about this movie.

Vincent's CI calls in a tip about the bank heist so they're able to move quicker than Neil was expecting. Michael is the first to walk out. Then Neil and Chris. Like nothing happened. "Wait til they're all in the car..."says Vincent. But Chris sees the cops as he's walking and opens fire. All hell breaks loose. Cop dies (Ted Levine). We saw him at dinner with the pretty lady who clearly loved him intensely.

Allstate guy gets killed by friendly fire. Chris is hit. But not dead. Neil runs to him. Genuine friendship, not tactics there. Vincent chases them through the devastation. More die. Cops and civilians. Neil will kill as many as he needs to to get away.

Michael picks up a child as a hostage. A little girl. Just like he has at home. Jesus. Vincent caps him in the head. Perfect shot. Child is safe and unharmed. Vincent picks her up and carries her away.

Allstate guy's woman sees his face on the news as being dead. Silent devastation.

Jeremy Piven as the mob doctor who fixes up Chris. Chris tells Neil he won't leave without Charlene. Charlene calls Hank Azaria and tells him to come pick her up along with the baby. She's done. "God damn you, Chris. God damn you."

"Vincent's CI" Was Waingro. They tortured Trejo and Anna for information on the Heist. He can barely speak before he dies. His wife is dead. He can't remember if he told them about their escape plan. Trejo asks Neil to kill him. "Don't leave me like this." And he obliges.

Vincent calls Nate (Jon Voight) and gets the address he needs to after Van Zant. He's not going to let that pass. He'll make time. Vincent knows they're short on time for Neil to set up a new out. Van Zant went home. Guess he feels safe now. When he says he doesn't know where Waingro is, Neil shoots him to death. As it should be.

Hank Azaria brings Charlene to his apartment, where the cops are waiting. Bubba Gump is the shoulder for her to cry on. Sort of. He's nice and gently tells her what awaits her son if she goes to jail. Fucked for life. "If you give up Chris, you get off clean." And she agrees.

Thanks to Henry Rollins, they know about Waingro and they know where he's staying.

Amy Breneman is horrified and runs away. That's not what she signed up for. But he catches her. He still wants her to come with him. The feeling isn't mutual. "When will you let me leave?"

Okay so Diane Venora has a man over for the night. The man didn't know she was married and is apologetic. Oh, that's her house. Not his. Or more appropriately, her ex husband's house. She blames him. It's his fault that she didn't like the deal she was told of in advance. "And now I have to demean myself with Ralph just to get closure with you." Pretty sure divorce papers would have worked too, honey. WTF.

Chris went off on his own. He didn't stay at Nate's, which irritates Neil. Seemed to think Nate should have stopped him from leaving. Neil tells Amy Breneman she can walk now. Or she can come with him. "There's no point in going anywhere if it's gonna be alone. Without you."

She lets him hold her. Would she have acted different if she wasn't all alone in life too? Maybe that's why he picked her.

Chris shows up at the apartment and Charlene walks out as she is told to. He smiles as he sees her. Joy. Relief. But she signals. A subtle flick of her finger. And he knows. And leaves. She would not allow him to be taken. "It's not him. It's not Chris." Of course they don't believe her. So they stop the car from leaving. But he has ID and a clean registration under other names. The days before smart phones and 5G. Chris rolls on. Desperately sad that he can never see his beloved wife again.

With no movement at Waingro's hotel room, Vincent declares Neil is gone. They missed him. He's going back to his hotel room to sleep. When he gets to the hotel, someone is in his bathroom. He doesn't notice at first. It's Natalie Portman. She is in the bathroom. Wrists and thighs slashed. He moves quickly to try and resuscitate her. "Why have you done this?" Because you left her too, darling. Her dad left her. Her mom is high on xanex and pot and so interested in sticking it to Vincent that she didn't even know where her kid was. Diane Venora is at the hospital. Devastated. Unable to process. The doctors were able to save her. He holds her. "I'm here I aint going anywhere." He left work early. He gave up. And thank God he did, something I'm sure he thought to himself.

Nate tells Neil where Waingro is. And he's sitting there deciding whether to follow the plan or to make a stop. Amy Breneman is in the car with him. He can't let it go. He pulls a U-ey.

Justine asks if it could work between them. "She chose you." But he says no. He knows he isn't what she wants. "All I am is what I'm after." Better late than never on the self-awareness part. He runs off at the beeper. Knowing Neil is at the hotel.

Neil takes way too long to shoot Waingro in my humble opinion, but he does it. 4 shots to the chest. Good. Amy Breneman stays in the car as the swat teams arrive. Vincent sees her. And both men move toward the car at the same time. Neil sees Vincent. And backs away. Amy Breneman sees him decide to leave her. The look on her face...

Final confrontation with Neil and Vincent at the airfield. Vincent takes him down. Chris is the only one who gets away. The only one who actually followed Neil's advice. If you feel heat, you're gone. Vincent holds his hand as he goes.

When I first saw Heat in 1995, I was a thirteen-year-old girl sitting next to my dad on the couch. I was there for one reason and one reason only: to see Natalie Portman, who is nearly exactly my age, and thus I was sure that if Natalie and I ever met, we would be best friends.

You can imagine I was mildly disappointed by the movie since Natalie was in it so little and as an adult, I could remember exactly two scenes from a nearly three-hour movie. Al Pacino dragging Natalie Portman out of a bathtub, her wrists and thighs sliced open. And Ashley Judd on a balcony, waving off a very handsome Val Kilmer, protecting him from the police.

That was it. Two scenes out of 3 hours, and both of them belonged to the women.

An interesting quirk of memory since Heat is very much about men. That is not in dispute. I rewatched it recently, and had a lot of thoughts. So many, in fact, that I have an hour-long video coming out on YouTube about it next week.

But in the meantime, I wanted to focus on how this men's movie from the 90s does women. How they were portrayed struck me, especially looking back at 30 years of commentary on the movie. I've noticed that almost nobody talks about them honestly. The people who do talk about them keep asking the wrong question.

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The Wrong Question

Ashley Judd, who played Charlene Shiherlis, is now better known for feminist activism. But in the 90s, she was a hot babe who overcame bad men and very often had scenes where she ran through the woods. Surprising no one, she said in a recent interview that the way women were portrayed in Heat is "not okay."

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There's something about the phrase "coming-of-age story" that makes me scowl. It makes me think of sappy stories about middle schoolers who don't bear any resemblance to actual kids and parents who don't act like people at all. I tend to avoid them, even though I like the same classics that you do (Stand By Me, The Sandlot, etc.). All that to say, I had never heard of Mud (2012) and would never have watched it if I hadn't assigned it to myself to make my White Trash video on YouTube.

And yet I loved it.

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If you ask an American under 40 to define American culture, you may find yourself confronted with the world-famous Gen Z Stare. Many will stall out completely. "I mean, like, you know... it's whatever." If you get one who fancies himself a right-wing edgelord, he may be slightly more coherent. "It's based, man. We go hard, you know. Cuz it's either go hard or go home." But the majority, having been indoctrinated in our now-embarrassing public schools, will list off an inventory of sins, slavery being the first and foremost, followed by the lack of accommodation for disabled queer folx or whatever else their professor emphasized that semester. Native Americans might get a mention, but I'm not sure if that's fashionable this year.

Two full generations have been taught that cataloging America's failures is the same thing as understanding America, and the results are exactly what you'd expect. A cohort of dead-eyed idiots embarrassed and ashamed to be American while being unable to even explain what it means to be one.

In the wake of 9/11, journalist Leonard Pitts Jr wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald ostensibly addressed to the perpetrators of that heinous attack: Let me tell you about my people...

It was perhaps the last time in living memory when any American was treated to a positive and accurate description of who we are and why we are great.

But before that horrible day, a day we honestly never recovered from, we had a longer, more complete explanation of what American culture is and who Americans have always been. It came in the form of a 1995 Richard Dreyfuss movie about a high school music teacher.

Mr. Holland's Opus often gets filed under the category of boomer slop, mostly by the aforementioned right-wing edgelords. Boomers are bad; they have an overly rose-colored view of their own virtue, ergo anything taking place in the 60s and 70s is bad. That's the entire indictment, because a movie set in the past that likes its own people must be propaganda, whether for the country or the people who were young adults during Vietnam.

And I suppose in a way, it is propaganda. The movie had an agenda, alright: to remind young Americans of who we are as Americans, and how we, above all other humans, have the ability to be heroes, in ways big and small.

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A few years ago, the question of whether AI was a good thing was worth having. Even more worthy of discussion was whether AI output (specifically the creative/artistic kind) was any good. But it's 2026 now, and both of those questions are settled. No, AI creative output isn't and can't be as good as human-made content, and AI companies (with all their positive and negative effects) aren't going anywhere. They will only grow. That's it. That's all.

Now my opinions on AI center around the people who spend the most time talking about it, and those opinions have gone from mild distaste to full-on irritation. In short, I can't stand these fuckers.

A few months ago, a commenter on one of my YouTube videos accused the painting behind me of being AI-generated. First of all, why would you say that? What does that have to do with the video you just watched? And second, you're wrong. Strange how he didn't have a reply when I dropped the link to the artist's website.

If this seems like a one-off to you, it isn't. This is the caliber of person now policing the internet for AI usage. This man couldn't tell the difference between a print of an oil painting and DALL-E output, and his entire investigative methodology consisted of squinting at a screen and deciding it looked suspicious, which was apparently all the evidence he needed to appoint himself auditor of my decorating skills.

I've also had multiple comments on my videos over the years accuse my scripts of being AI. Which is weird, because it's only in the last month I started using scripts AT ALL. Since 2019, all of my videos were contemporaneous. I'd sit down with bullet points, talk, and that's the whole production. It's also why video editing took so damn long. Many takes, much stuttering, too much swearing. Dog barking. Yet still there were accusations of AI "scripts."

Well, now I am using scripts, the comments have tripled, and hear me when I tell you I have no patience for them.

You'll notice my responses are never short of snippy and that's intentional. It's not a loss of bearing or temper. It's a purposeful expression of disdain.

These accusers are illiterate, and I mean that precisely. They don't remember what text sounded like before 2014, before the internet flattened everyone's prose into the same algorithmic paste. I do remember, because I've been reading and writing professionally for a very long time, and I'm done pretending these accusations deserve a measured response.

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Finally! A "Watermark" to Catch the Cheaters!

What brought all this up again in my personal list of grievances was the explosion of anger at Anthropic's announcement that all Claude models launched on or after August 2 now embed invisible watermarks in generated text. The watermarks are applied globally, across every product surface and cloud partner, worldwide. Google has already implemented similar measures, all to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which requires AI providers to include machine-readable markings in generated content.

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From 7th to 10th grade, I lived in a place that looked like the world of Winter's Bone. I wasn't as poor as Ree Dolly. We had laundry machines, for instance. We also had meat that didn't come from the woods. But I recognized every single person in that movie. I recognized the neighbors skinning a deer in the driveway and the chained-up dog eating scraps from the fridge and the girl who knew, before she was old enough to drive, that no one was coming to save her. That girl could have been my friend.

It's a sharp contrast to how I feel when I look at young women on social media these days. Very often within just a few sentences from the mouth of an under-35 woman, I feel my lip curling. "Who are these people?" I ask myself. "How did they get like this? Who taught them this is what a woman is, or what she should aspire to?"

Having been a tomboy my whole life, I understand that the content these girls make is not made with me in mind. And the creators would happily agree. You know the kind: The sprinkle-sprinkle lady, the tradwife cosplayers, the "I'm just a girl" gigglers who brag about not being able to drive, manage money, or make decisions. It's all the same model of womanhood with different branding, and far, far from what I was raised with.

So it was strange to watch Debra Granik's 2010 film for the first time and resonate so strongly with how the women behaved. I had been reliably informed by every single review and thinkpiece about the movie that Winter's Bone was a feminist story about a brave girl defying a patriarchal system. But that's not what I saw at all.

Instead, this movie, taking place in a white trash meth town, showed a fully operational model of feminine authority, the kind that has been so thoroughly memory-holed by modern culture that most people watching this film couldn't even see it. And no wonder. Because if you go looking for femininity content on any social media site, the model of it you'll be presented with will look more like prostitution with extra steps than mature, independent adulthood.

I'm not girly, and I'm not rich, so I pondered for a moment if I had just missed out on what most girly girls aspire to. But it isn't; I see that now. I think the modern model of feminism/femininity is much more nefarious.

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Ree Dolly Ain't a Feminist. She's Just a Girl

The setup to Winter's Bone is simple in its desperation. Ree's father, a crank cooker, signed the family home over as collateral for his bail bond. Then he vanished. If he doesn't show for his court date, the bail bondsman takes the house, and Ree, her two young siblings, and her catatonic mother are out. She's seventeen, has no money, no father, and a mother who can't speak. The Army was her only way out, and she can't even enlist now because she can't leave the kids. Nor (as the kindly recruiter explains to her) can she take them along with her.

So she goes looking for her father herself. There's literally no other choice.

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When I announced I created my own curriculum for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I promised I would keep you up to date on how it was for me (in case you want to give it a try yourself). The honest version is... most of it was boring.

Self-Paced MFA Curriculum (1997-Style) | Project 2004

I don't mean that in the "my attention span is shot" way (even though it is). I mean boring in the specific, tedious sense of covering ground I've already covered. I majored in English Literature as an undergrad and I've been editing fiction professionally for years. Not to mention publishing my own. So when the Burroway textbook walked me through showing versus telling and the fundamentals of scene construction, I was basically sitting through a lecture I could've taught myself.

But I did the work anyway, which is the whole premise of a structured program. You don't get to skip the parts that feel beneath you, or make you pine for TikTok slop. Discipline is the only thing that separates people who talk about improving their craft from people who actually do it. So I read the damn chapters and did the writing exercises.

I apologize if that's an underwhelming update but what's true for me may not be true for you, especially if you didn't major in English.

The thing is, even the boring parts keep revealing truths I'd forgotten, plus fun literary references that remind me of what it felt like to be erudite and well-read. The experience also made me more excited for Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners in the second semester. O'Connor's thinking on the relationship between belief and fiction connects directly to the kind of moral criticism I'm doing on this site and on the YouTube channel. So I doubt that will bore me.

Of course Project 2004 has always been about more than the MFA. The original idea was that the older version of things was frequently better than what replaced it, and that hypothesis keeps getting proven everywhere I look. Including places I wasn't expecting.

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Everything Sucks on Purpose

I've been watching a lot of Zac Rios on YouTube lately. If you haven't found him, he compiles TikToks by theme, and two themes keep coming back because his audience can't get enough of them: the abysmal build quality of new vehicles and the equally abysmal build quality of new homes.

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Semester 2: Deepening Craft

Self-Paced MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction)

A 12-Week Curriculum Modeled on the 1997 Workshop

This is the second semester of the self-paced MFA. The foundations are behind you. Semester 2 shifts from learning craft vocabulary to deploying it with conscious control. The reading moves from short…

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Now that I've finished making "author content," the hubs and I got to give my backdrop a fresh coat of paint. Literally. I film in my basement, which is short on space and has terrible (overhead) lighting so I'm making adjustments to have a better visual presentation for the rebrand.

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