What I’m Watching: The Outsider

Miniseries on HoboMax based on a Stephen King novel; I haven’t read him regularly since Gerald’s Game, which I hated, so I’m not familiar, but if this is representative at all, which movies often are not of King’s books, I should get back on the train. It’s tangentially related to the Mr Mercedes series which I haven’t seen yet.

I do note, almost every shot is in darkness, lit with the minimal number of in-scene lights, and often tinted cyan/orange as usual. It looks like absolute shit. The sound’s worse, half the characters, especially the cop, mumble and slur their words, so you can’t really watch it without subtitles. Bar music is muffled and ump-ump-umping, with colored gels making the bad lighting worse. Once in a long while, they manage to get a shot in sunlight, outside, and astoundingly they manage to point a camera at it correctly, but mostly this is just incompetently shot and miked. I miss films being, you know, watchable? Put more than a couple little streaks of photons on film?

Also like 90% of the dudes look alike, heavy middle-aged honkie goons with short hair, short beards. I don’t know if this is bad casting or intentional? Since it could be anyone? But it plays hell with my mediocre face recognition skills.

The pacing in most scenes is somewhere between glacial and nonexistent, it could’ve been half the number of episodes with no loss.

On balance, the story being told just barely overcomes the drawbacks, but it’s the worst-filmed of King’s series and movies that I’ve seen.

The series starts like every crime drama, an old man with a dog out for a walk in the woods finds a kid’s body, abused and bitten(!). Killers, stop leaving your bodies there, you know you’re gonna be found, and then a detective with a troubled personal life will get involved and catch you. Well, this one maybe wants it.

So the cliché detective (small-town sheriff) with a troubled personal life arrests the person who looks good for it, with a bunch of blatantly out-of-character eyewitnesses and camera recordings, before the case starts falling apart badly.

Next a new protagonist, P.I. Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo, of Widows, Bad Times at the El Royale), goes looking for an explanation. She’s a Rain Man fictional autistic genius type, which makes her awkward to watch and utterly implausible as a person, but a good stand-in for a text adventure or RPG player character, willing to go anywhere, ask anything, assemble giant notebooks of clues until the problem is solved.

SPOILERS

















Right up front Holly brings up the stories of Doppelgangers, Fetch, etc., dark shadows of people who commit atrocities in their form, and whether they’re myth or just explanations for schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, etc., but misses my favorite, the Navajo myth of the Skinwalker, a witch that takes the skin of an animal (or in really dark variants, a person) and assumes their form. I’ve been expecting that since the moment Terry was accused and obviously not playing the same person as the killer.

So far we have no motive for the skinwalker, but everything in it leads that direction: Claude gets copied at the titty bar. Terry got copied by the skinwalker at the nursing home. Heath got copied in New York. Maria got copied there. If you’re a murderous skinwalker, NYC would seem to be the place to stay, nobody’d notice a few missing. Out in the boonies, anyone out of the ordinary is suspicious.

Aside, at one point in a back-story, a kid is scared by the movie Leprechaun (starring the inimitable Warwick Davis!), but the thing is, the leprechaun only kills those who steal his gold (or that he thinks did), so a kid might be squicked out by the gore, but shouldn’t be afraid of leprechauns. +5 for reference, -10 for missing the point.

And that’s relevant because later Holly’s theory is that it’s El Coco, here called “El Cuco”, or basically the boogeyman. Which also makes no sense because none of the victims were bad kids, and universally we know that the boogeyman only takes away bad kids. If monsters under your bed were eating good kids, parents would rise up in anger & torches & pitchforks, but if they take bad kids, silent sigh of relief and “oh no my dirty-faced angel is gone oh well time to make another”.

By episodes 4-5 it really starts to drag, there’s no plot advancement except a few minutes of investigation here and there. A lot of repeated scenes of indistinguishable honkie dudes being crazy, the cop brooding, Holly being nerdy at random people who have no reason to hear her out.

E6 manages to get back on track, with Holly explaining everything she knows, making the last few episodes redundant, and new investigation into the monster’s abilities.

Nope, E7-E8 are right back to moody nothing, a long car ride into nowhere, Ralph whining at his therapist but unable to even articulate the plot, Holly gets to be cool and stoic until she’s not.

Finally, E9-10 have a confrontation, a slow but somewhat tense shootout, and something like final showdown. Even that’s made dull, slow and methodical. And then excuses and lies to get the survivors out of trouble.

There’s a little post-credits scene, don’t just close it, but it doesn’t do anything.

I really want to like this. Every element it’s doing is clever, in competent filmmakers’ hands it’d be great, it’s just so incredibly badly told as a show, I can’t.

★★½☆☆

FUDGE of Holding

I like Steffan O’Sullivan’s FUDGE a lot. I’ve run a lot of pickup games in it for almost 30 years now, and some campaigns. Some people see the very loose rules and “pick whatever you want” as a toolkit that needs work, but it’s perfectly valid to run as-is, you don’t need to specialize the rules for a setting (other than picking some combat & magic options). That page describes FUDGE as “precursor of FATE”, but that’s kind of insulting, FATE is FUDGE with all the fun and flexibility stripped out.

But the thing is, FUDGE is free, and I much prefer the 1993 versionPDF archive, 73 pages with the 2d6 table instead of 4dF (“FUDGE dice” marked +1, 0, -1). This version has simpler & clearer core rules, and enough options in the back.

The Skill Resolution Table
Rolled:  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  | 6, 7, 8 |  9  | 10  | 11  | 12
---------|-----|-----|-----|-----|---------|-----|-----|-----|---
Levels:  | -4  | -3  | -2  | -1  |   +0    | +1  | +2  | +3  | +4

The 1995 version, 107 pages, is much more exhaustive, and kind of exhausting, with all the options mixed in with the core rules, and it takes away many of the weirder dice/trait ladder options. But if you’re picking up “one book”, this is a good option, and there’s Grey Ghost print copies still floating around.

Both of these are free, and one of the best RPGs made, at least for casual games. I don’t think the campaign play in it holds up, you really can’t develop attributes and skills much before you become superheroes, perils of a very coarse (few steps) and swingy (vast range of results!) task system.

I haven’t seen the 10th Anniversary edition (2003? 2005?), but 320 pages?! Looks from reviews like it has hundreds of pages of setting stuff and special case combat & magic rules that you would normally develop yourself. Still, maybe that’s worth the minimum price.

  • PSI-PUNK
  • HACK-N-SLASH
  • THE ORB
  • SURVIVAL OF THE ABLE

These all look terrible. I’m very sorry, they must be someone’s hard work, but whew, no. I especially do not want to run zombies eating disabled people post-medieval-apocalypse. What is even wrong with you?

The Level Up titles are 50% better:

  • THE DERYNI ADVENTURE GAME: Excellent sourcebook for one of my favorite fantasy book series, though the FUDGE adaptation of the powers is… workmanlike. Not ideal for play or simulation of the books, but it’s functional. You may just be better off with rereading a few of the novels and Deryni Magic, which is Kurtz’s own summary/theory book of their magic. Using the standard 1993 FUDGE Magic rules works fine for Deryni with a few adjustments.
  • TERRA INCOGNITA: Sounds from the blurb and the little bit on their site, like “Victorian adventures”, and I’m not exactly a fan of colonialist, bigoted English wankers. They aren’t “discovering” anything, they’re conquering & robbing people who are already there.
  • NOW PLAYING: TV shows as a setting? I’ve done that as a short joke game long ago, but it’s not a useful setting.
  • THE UNEXPLAINED: Cryptid/supernatural investigation sourcebook. This might be useful, there’s really not a lot of good ones; GUMSHOE is all railroaded plots, Conspiracy X is out of print, Delta Green is all guns-guns-guns-cthulhu-guns, Palladium will never finish their Beyond the Supernatural reboot.

The best supplement for FUDGE isn’t included: A Magical Medley, which has some more complex magic systems; the African Spirit Magic and Ars Magica Grammarye systems are especially useful. Maybe that’s in the 10th Anniversary, but it’s probably easier to get that book by itself, a print copy of 1995, and have a fully functional game.

The free rules are better than the cheap bundle. The Level Up bundle might be worth getting for two of the sourcebooks, and you get a 10th Anniversary e-doorstop as a bonus. But you can get a print book for not much more, maybe that’s the better plan.

Funk Soul Tuesday Music

  • King Megatrip: Free music. A dozen “year in the soul society” mixtapes of great to weird funk/soul music (with interstitial samples from Bleach, which is an absolutely idiotic anime, but anyway.) Older mixtapes are all over the place, some good, some trash.