That’s pretty much his entire job: dying. As part of an intrepid expedition to colonize the icy planet Niflheim, Mickey is the colony’s sole expendable. His mind has been downloaded into a hefty techno-brick. And once his current body expires, the scientific team on Niflheim will just chug out a new one, using its handy-dandy organic 3D printer.

Mickey dies so that others might live. Or, occasionally, just for kicks.

Is this ethical? Heavens, no. Everyone admits that much. But Kenneth Marshall, a two-time failed senator on Earth and the colony leader on Niflheim, figures they might as well use the technology anyway. I mean, just the trip out to Niflheim was pretty dangerous, and who knows what terrors the planet itself might hold. A good, solid expendable will keep the rest of the colonists intact. As for Mickey, well, it’s just like the job title says: He’s expendable.

And so Mickey dies. Again and again and again. He’s died by radiation poisoning. By mysterious planetary disease. One time, he was shoved into the ship’s molten incinerator while he was still alive. Even if he survived the pathogen floating around in his bod, it was just easier for everyone involved—well, everyone but Mickey, I guess—to print out another one.

And honestly, the 17^th iteration was pretty much guaranteed to expire just like all the rest. He’d taken a tumble down a huge ice hole and found himself in the presence of Niflheim’s native residents: something that looks like a cross between a musk ox and a pillbug (and stands slightly bigger than a Range Rover) and all her many, many, many children.

Mickey assumes he’s a dead man—again. He’ll be quickly devoured by the mamma creeper (as they come to be known as) or slowly consumed by her offspring.

But instead, the creature drags Mickey out of the burrow and sends him on his way. And Mickey is a little offended.

“I’m perfectly good meat!” He shouts after the mamma creeper. “I taste fine!”

Meanwhile, back aboard the ship, Mickey 17 is presumed to be dead and eaten. And so they welcome Mickey 18 to the ship.

Won’t Mickey 17 be surprised when he gets back!

The post Mickey 17 appeared first on Plugged In.

He’s a hooded dude who’s been stalking loving couples on Valentine’s Day for the last few years. Then he butchers them (mid-hug, kiss or proposal) in the most brutally “romantic” ways: He might carve out their loving hearts with a machete. Or pin the lovebirds together with a razor-sharp cupid’s arrow. Or some other bloody atrocity.

That’s terrible and all. But frankly, Ally couldn’t care less.

While others are quivering on this hearts-and-flowers holiday, Ally has no fear of the killer in the least. You see, she just broke up with her ex-boyfriend. Then that louse instantly ran out and found someone else he could cuddle up with and plastered it all over his social media for crying out loud!

So, let’s just say that Ally is currently as stone-cold averse to all things lovey-dovey as she can be. If anything, she’s kinda thinking about the benefits of putting on a mask with cartoon hearts for eyes and doing a little beat-down on a few people herself.

Oh, and to top all that off, she just met this walking embodiment of a Hallmark card named Jay. He was brought in by her boss to prop up a failing advertising campaign that Ally had come up with. (Which kinda ticked Ally off, truth be told.)

Anyway, this guy just oozes “handsome” and “romantically sincere.” In fact, everything about Jay seems completely geared for some meet-cute rom-com scene. (Which makes Ally all the more angry.) And while she’s more than happy to turn her back on this gorgeous-looking lug, she has to meet him for a meal and discussions about the campaign. Argh!

But here’s the real issue.

From the outside-looking-in, the very pretty Ally and the strikingly handsome Jay make for a really adorbs couple. If you were an insane killer out scoping out a Valentine’s Day symbol to slaughter, this gorgeous couple might seem to be wearing the perfect heart-shaped bulls-eye.

Yup, I think it’s safe to say that Ally is having … a really bad Valentine’s Day!

The post Heart Eyes appeared first on Plugged In.

Grace is a misfit twin. She and her brother, Gilbert, lost their mother at birth. Grace’s mom was a malacologist, or, in Grace’s mind, a snail scientist. In a twisted sense of symmetry, Grace recounts how female snails must biologically die to successfully give birth.

From the moment her mother passes away, Grace has felt a connection to snails. In fact, apart from Gilbert, her pet snails are the only living things giving her life purpose.

Grace and Gilbert’s father, who had been an aspiring French street performer, sadly became a paraplegic due to a roadside car accident. He eventually passes away due to sleep apnea, which is a bitter example of Memoir of a Snail’s comedic tone.

Orphaned and separated from her brother in an unfortunate foster care decision, Grace ends up with a new set of parents more interested in joining a nudist colony than raising their foster daughter.

Moving through the badlands and suburbs of Australia, Grace ends up confined in her room, while Gilbert arrives at an apple farm that resembles a religious cult. Though they exist on separate sides of the Australian continent, Grace and Gilbert remain linked. Their story and hopeful reunion is recalled through future, older Grace’s narration, which is mainly focused on the cast of characters who wade in and out of her life.

Grace claims she’s an optimist—a perpetually glass half-full kind of girl. Yet as her glum disposition settles in, she becomes a hoarder, addicted to food, and reclusive to the point of sleeping entire weeks away with her snails and a local eccentric named Pinky as her only companions.

As Grace trudges through the doldrums of her life, she does her best to learn lessons from her snail friends. Admittedly, stop-motion animation provides an effective medium for the themes at play. Grace’s epiphanies arrive when she is patient, thoughtful, and measured. To face her life’s problems though, she’ll need to change who she is.

If only she could learn how to come out of her shell…

The post Memoir of a Snail appeared first on Plugged In.

Many soldiers have found healing from those unseen wounds in therapy. But that was never Zoe’s style. In fact, she told her best friend and fellow soldier, Merit, that if she ever caught Zoe in therapy once they got home, Merit had permission to kill her.

Unfortunately, it’s not really up to Zoe anymore, because well … she’s dead.

Merit knows this to be true, but it hasn’t stopped Zoe from living rent-free in her head. Sometimes Merit likes having this version of Zoe around—like when they’re singing along to their favorite songs in the car. But other times, it’s not such a jam fest.

Zoe likes to be the center of Merit’s attention, discouraging her from making new friends or even answering her mom’s phone calls. In fact, Zoe is so distracting that Merit accidentally dropped a forklift full of television sets onto a coworker, nearly killing the guy. The courts charged her with criminal negligence, but they also recognized that Merit was suffering from a form of PTSD. So, rather than being fined and imprisoned, Merit’s been court-ordered to attend group therapy for veterans.

But Merit can’t quite bring herself to talk about Zoe in therapy. Part of that is Zoe’s fault: After all, if Zoe didn’t like the idea of therapy when she was alive, she certainly doesn’t support it now that’s she dead.

However, the larger part of Merit’s reluctance comes from the simple fact that she doesn’t want to move on. And she knows that once she opens up about how she’s seeing her dead friend Zoe, she might lose Zoe forever.

The post My Dead Friend Zoe appeared first on Plugged In.

He’s got money. Connections. A secluded winter home in the forests of Maine. How exactly he came into possession of those things is a bit of a mystery. The type of mystery that you probably wouldn’t want to know the answers to.

Yes, Vincent has a questionable past. But, in his mind, he’s also got a certain future. He adores his wife, Sandy, 20 years his junior. His stepson, DJ, is an intelligent and considerate young man who will soon head off to college. They are a happy, healthy and wholesome family.

That is, until Vincent’s first family shows up. His biological son Rocco arrives with his very pregnant girlfriend, Marina; and his chaotic mother, Ruth, Vincent’s ex-wife. Rocco claims he only stopped by to celebrate the New Year as a family, and to tell Vincent that the older man was going to be a grandfather. But, as Vincent suspects, there’s more to it than that.

Vincent’s right. And that’s when his carefully manicured life starts to get messy.

See, Rocco killed a man. And not just any man. He killed the only son of mobster “Lefty” Hannigan. Sure, Lefty’s son attacked Marina, and Rocco only killed him to save her. But Lefty doesn’t care. He wants revenge. And he and his righthand hitman are hot on Rocco’s trail.

Rocco and Marina need to disappear. Sandy and DJ need to be protected. And Ruth—well, Ruth—she’s enough trouble on her own. So, what will Vincent do for family?

The post Riff Raff appeared first on Plugged In.

Not that Marvin is a cutthroat type of guy. Not in real estate, anyway. He smiles a lot. He bakes cookies for open-house events to give those showings that nice, warm scent of home. Marvin just wants to match his wonderful clients up with wonderful houses. Nothing wrong with making people’s dreams of home-ownership come true, right?

He’s one of the most successful real estate agents in Milwaukee—proof, it would seem, that nice guys can finish first. Sure, he’s not thrilled that someone’s drawing mustaches on all of his bench ads. But what is he gonna do—track down and kill the vandal?

Well, once upon a time, maybe he would have. But Marvin’s different now. The only killing he makes these days is through his very reasonable commissions.

But then a former colleague of his shows up, announcing his presence with a fist to the face. When Marvin comes to, he finds himself at his desk—one hand tied to his chair and the other harpooned to the desktop with a sharp, wide knife.

Seems his old life has returned. And it’s not at all happy.

Apparently, back when Marvin was mainly killing people for a living, his last hit was a purposeful miss. Knuckles, his boss and brother, told Marvin to kill a woman named Rose (Knuckle’s top lieutenant) for stealing from him. But Marvin secretly loved Rose, so he let her go.

But now, it seems, Rose is back. And she’s sending Valentine’s missives to all of her old pals.

And what unwelcome Valentines’ they are. Knuckles is none-too-pleased that Rose is alive. Merlo, Knuckles’ new top lieutenant, really doesn’t want Rose to start blabbing about who really stole Knuckles’ money.

And Marvin? He had hoped that Rose would stay hidden, that both of them could’ve started new lives free of crime and murder. Marvin had escaped: Why couldn’t she?

Plus, he’s got houses to show. Contracts to sign. And it’s awfully hard to do that when your hand is pinned to a desk with a giant Bowie knife.

Seems like Marvin will need to revert to his old self for a little bit—just until he can dislodge the knife and deal with The Raven.

Yeah, the real estate business can be cutthroat, all right—but nothing like Marvin’s old gig. And he’ll be giving a few folks a nice education in morgue-age rates before he’s done.

The post Love Hurts appeared first on Plugged In.

Well, maybe you can if you especially hate trips to the dentist. But for the most part, the disasters in our lives don’t follow much of a schedule. We do not pencil in “lose beloved Aunt Edna in fishing accident” between “parent/teacher conference” and “Take Tatiana to bowling lesson.”

But, at least, we can hope and pray that those sorts of tragedies don’t visit us too often, right?

Enter the Monkey.

Twin brothers Bill and Hal Shelburn dig the box literally out of a family closet—the closet where their mother stuffs all the gifts that their long-lost father sent home over the years. “Like life!” the box promises, which Hal figures is just a misprint. When he and Bill lift the lid off the box, they uncover what appears to be a toy monkey straddling a drum, two drumsticks in its hairy little hands.

“Turn the key and see what happens!” So the boys turn the key in the back of the Monkey.

The plush critter forms a toothy grin, raises its furry paw, a drumstick mechanically twirls in its fingers and … that’s it. Broken, the boys decide.

But that evening, when their babysitter takes the kids to a local Japanese joint, they take the Monkey with them. They leave it in the car. And as the chef flings knives and preps food tableside, the Monkey begins to drum.

Seconds later, the boys are in need of a new babysitter.

Bill and Hal suspect the Monkey had something to do with the crazy tableside disaster that befell them. It becomes an object of fear, of wonder and, perhaps, of possibility.

Even though Hal and Bill are twin brothers, Bill has always been a jerk to his three-minute-younger sibling, calling him all sorts of unprintable names and turning Hal into a target for a bevy of bullying middle school girls. Hal has long wished his brother would just, um, go away. And now, perhaps, is his chance to make it happen.

Turn the key and see what happens!

So Hal turns the key—asking the Monkey to turn his horrific talents on Bill, his brother.

But the Monkey is not interested in making Hal happy. He follows the beat of his own diabolical drum. The disaster he will dole out follows his plan, and his alone.

The post The Monkey appeared first on Plugged In.

For much of their history, the Jewish people have longed for home. They began as nomads, leading their herds across barely claimed lands. They spent centuries in Egypt, serving foreign kings who worshiped foreign gods.

And even when they found their Promised Land, it was not to last. The world’s greatest empires took their turns gobbling it up: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans. God’s chosen people were forced to wander again—across countries, continents, oceans. Looking for a place to call home.

It’s 1947, and László Tóth wonders if he’s found it.

He’d once been a famous architect—one specializing in the avant-garde Brutalist style—designing brave new buildings in his home country of Hungary. But World War II soon rolled across Europe, crushing millions of Jews along the way. László survived the Holocaust and, finally, made his way to a faraway land—a land of the free, so they say. A land of opportunity.

But that opportunity comes at a cost.

All the opportunity László wants is, for now, to live. Taken in by a cousin, Attila, László is put to work in Attila’s Philadelphia furniture store. It specializes in cheap, practical wares. “Not very beautiful,” László says when he sees them. Attila readily agrees. And when László designs a chair for the store—clean, sleek, modern, minimalist—it draws attention.

Soon, Harry Lee Van Buren, scion of a wealthy industrialist, comes calling, asking if Attila and Lazlo might freshen up his father’s library.

They do. Down go the heavy curtains, the dark wood, the thick rug. The library transforms into a mass of metal and glass, space and sun. One solitary chair sits at its center.

Turns out, the father, Harrison Lee Van Buren, hates surprises. When he returns home and finds László and Atilla in the house, he screams at them to leave. Harry refuses to pay their bill. And Atilla, believing that László has designs on his wife, kicks him to the curb.

But the library survives. And it’s a sensation.

Years later, Harrison—realizing now that he had screamed at a rare architectural talent—searches high and low for László Tóth, eventually finding him digging coal. Harrison shows him the magazine spreads written about his magnificent library. Then he shows the one-time architect more magazines, featuring his still-standing buildings in Eastern Europe. László, seeing them, weeps.

“It is no coincidence that fate brought us together,” Harrison tells him. In fact, Harrison has a job for him. He wants László to design a monumental community center for Harrison—a center so different, so new, so grand that it will take the world by storm.

And there’s more: Harrison just might be able to help László reunite with his wife and niece—both who are, miraculously, alive.

Home? Perhaps, after all these years, László has found one. But it, too, may come with a cost.

The post The Brutalist appeared first on Plugged In.

The 57-year-old woman relishes each performance. It’s a high-class spectacle, meant to wow the audience with “breasts and rhinestones and joy.” To Shelly, it’s a tasteful continuation of the French revue, where the showgirls are “ambassadors of style and grace.”

The far younger dancers with whom Shelly performs don’t see it that way. One young woman is just in it for the money. For another, it’s a way to break away from home. And none of them see Le Razzle Dazzleas anything more than another Vegas nudie show.

So when the venue’s stage manager, Eddie, informs the women that the act is closing in two weeks, it seems the rest of the world agrees with the younger women’s assessment: There’s nothing particularly special about Le Razzle Dazzle.

Desperately, Shelly clings to the meaning she finds in those final performances. She’s spent 30 years with the show in a line of work that emphasizes youth and beauty over talent and story.

And that’s in an industry happy to toss any woman aside once those fleeting attributes start to fade.

The post The Last Showgirl appeared first on Plugged In.

It’s not that big of a mission—they’re to escort a signals analyst to a malfunctioning radar unit in the Korean Demilitarized Zone so he can get it up and running again. In and out, it should only take 20 minutes. There theoretically shouldn’t be any risk. Still, Brockman groans when he’s assigned the task. He would much rather be back at the base.

Just hours later, he’s waking up, cut up and unconscious.

The blade of the helicopter he was in rotates dangerously close to his face. They’re on the ground—brought down by an unexpected strong storm. And after he’s free from the wreckage, he quickly learns that the chopper got carried deep into North Korea before crashing down.

They’re stuck behind enemy lines. And with the U.S. military unwilling to provoke a greater conflict, they’re told that they’ll need to travel towards a designated evac spot before they can get any help.

The last thing Sgt. Brockman wanted was to lead. But as North Korean soldiers close in around them, it’s exactly what he’ll need to learn how to do if he wants to bring his soldiers home.

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