TV | by Aidan Morgan

Greetings. Who wants to feast on the carcass of television with me? We can be ravens together, grabbing at the flesh with cruel coal-black beaks and wearing our super-cool raven cravat and spats ensemble. I’m telling you, raven outfits are lit.

It Was The Best Of Games, It Was The Worst Of Games

I will be spoiling Game of Thrones in this column, because I am a bad person.

On April 14, after two or maybe 20 years of waiting, Game of Thrones returned to television. Presumably you were glued to your screens watching it all go down. Or maybe you went straight to the latest Dr. K’s Exotic Animal ER (the episode title was “Thinking Outside the Fox” in case you missed it)? I won’t judge.

At any rate, here are the highs and lows of the Season 8 premiere of Game of Thrones.

BEST MOMENT: The episode starts with a little boy running through a crowd of scruffy Northerners, looking for the best possible vantage to see Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen march into Winterfell. My god, I thought, they’ve inserted us into the show. All of us, craning our necks in impatience to take in the immense spectacle in all its filth and grandeur.

Later the boy is murdered horribly, his corpse transformed into the centerpiece of a gruesome mandala of human limbs. He’s the first victim of that other audience surrogate, the implacable dead hordes shuffling southward from the frozen north to destroy all life, move to the suburbs and start YouTube channels devoted to complaining about Game of Thrones.

WORST MOMENT: Jon and Dany go for a ride on the dragons together. No one cares about your weird incestuous airborne frolics. It was like the scene in Superman where Lois and Supes fly through the night sky together, except Lois isn’t Superman’s aunt or half-sister or whatever.

The Zombie Trots

Speaking of the dead coming back to say hello and murder you, Netflix debuted Black Summer, a fast-zombie show from the people who brought you Z Nation. The series spins up a few months into the undead epidemic, which gives society just enough time to dissolve into a libertarian hellscape but not enough time for the yards to get overgrown. Maybe the zombies are mowing lawns in their spare time?

Handheld camerawork and sprinting, screaming zombies provide some cover for the repetitive nature and limited dramatic possibilities of the genre (Who are the real monsters? Dun-dun-duhnnn), but there were enough satisfying moments in the first few episodes to satisfy zombie fans, including a gruesome transformation scene that features plenty of internal gurgly sounds. Future horror filmmakers, take note: gurgly sounds rule, filming zombie apocalypses in the Calgary suburbs drools.

Aidan Morgan is the strange crackle that sometimes flashes in the corner of your TV screen.