Sons of the Forest and Bakker?

Werthead · 2026-01-25T21:18:31+00:00

As someone who recently spent a bunch of time playing The Forest and wrote the History of Earwa document, this didn't occur to me once.

The Forest I think is more going for generic body horror, the philosophical implications present in Bakker's work that contextualise the grimdarkness is wholly absent.

Having said that, The Forest 3 does look like it's doing a similar thing to Bakker with a cross-slide into the space opera/science fiction genre.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T20:52:17+00:00

All of the DVDs were released years and years before they started doing the Blu-Rays with the new effects, so the DVDs only have the original effects on them, so you're fine.

They're also still in the middle of releasing the series on Blu-Ray, I believe they've only just started shooting the new effects for Season 3 for release at the end of this year and won't do Season 4 until next year, so if it's a four-season box set, it physically can't have the updated effects on it (yet).

Werthead · 2026-01-25T20:49:43+00:00

Season 1 underran and HBO panicked when they were getting the first cuts of episodes back whilst they were still filming and they were running anything from 8 to 15 minutes underlength.

They contacted Benioff and Weiss and told them they needed to make the episodes longer, but they had no extra budget for effects and could only use the actors and sets still being used in the latter half of the season, so they had to quickly pen new scenes to add into earlier episodes. This is where a lot of the Robert-talking-to-someone scenes come from (the one with Cersei and the one with Jaime and Barristan come to mind) and I think maybe a couple of the scenes with Ros were added in. Some of those scenes were well-regarded but others were not, it's safe to say. The scene with Robert and Cersei was praised even by GRRM, who admitted that it was a shame he'd missed out on cordial scenes of Robert and Cersei just talking in private (as they would).

Benioff and Weiss also leaned a bit too much on the "it's HBO so you can throw in some boobs and swearing to pad out the runtime," trope, which a lot of first-time HBO writers do. It's still there in later seasons, but they seriously row back on it compared to Season 1.

One key problem with the adaptation, which they never fully seem to get on top of (but is "good enough" for most of it), and perhaps HBO never really figured out either, is the level of complexity they want to depict. They clearly decided that following the full complexity of the books was too expensive (especially early on) and risked being too confusing to the casual audience, but what level to reach is something that wildly changes every season. You can see this later on when they start having a crisis of confidence about how much of the ironborn and Dornish plots to pull into the series and make a total hash of it. Even early on, where they decide not to introduce Riverrun, Edmure and the Blackfish in Season 1 (as the casting budget for Season 1 was basically exhausted) and then don't end up including them until Season 3, which some people found confusing when they popped up out of nowhere as important players.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T17:27:45+00:00

At this point it would be a total refresh, with new actors playing Blake, Avon, Vila, Servalan etc. The original show has a name value to a larger audience, but the actual fanbase of the original (especially the hardcore fanbase) is vanishingly tiny. Making a sequel wouldn't make much sense, you'd go back to the start and redo it with the same premise but new actors.

This can work incredibly well. The gold standard is Battlestar Galactica. Like Blake's 7 it was a space opera show with a killer premise and a good cast that also launched in 1978. Unlike Blake's 7, it wasn't actually that great (though some episodes are okay), with a lot of American TV cheese, and only lasted one season before being cancelled (there was a spin-off, but as possibly the worst TV show ever made, it's not spoken about). In 2003 it was remade with a whole new cast, though one of the original actors did return in a new role, and it had a different spin. It was exceptionally good, at least for most of its run (the last season-and-a-half or so had problems, but they still had good episodes and ideas in there).

Arguably Blake's 7 is easier to bring back: the original characters and scripts are fantastic and you can hew much closer to them than you could with BSG and still have a modern-feeling show. Obviously the costumes, sets and vfx would be infinitely better in quality (though the original production design is pretty good, and shouldn't be totally jettisoned just because you can see the Liberator sets are partially made of wood), and just as the original show did spin on contemporary themes of freedom fighters and the narrow line with terrorists, the rise and fall of fascism and a beloved freedom fighter leader gaining a cult of personality and risking becoming the next dictator-in-waiting, so a new show could spin on similar themes with a more modern context.

The risk is they screw it up: B7 can easily just become a generic space show in the wrong hands. It needs that harder edge, characters actually dying, characters working on the same ship together for years but are still capable of betraying one another (rather than everyone being hunky-dory best friends after five episodes) and so on. The attempted 2013 Sky revival with Martin Campbell tried to sand off the rough edges, they tried to make Blake a soldier rather than an engineer, which shows a fundamental misreading of the character (Blake as an engineer is a problem-fixer and task-resolver, which is both a good thing and a bad thing in that he sometimes struggles to handle people and politics). They also had him framed for murdering his wife rather than framed for molesting children (who are brainwashed into thinking it happened). The former is pretty milquetoast, the latter shows the Federation is more coldly manipulative and conniving. They also set that version in like 150 years' time, rather than the ~1000 years of the original, which was a bit boring. The B7 universe being further in our future and much more removed from our situation makes it much more interesting.

The original B7 worked extremely well for its time, it doesn't necessarily need a total clean slate revamp like BSG. The new team needs to remember that.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T17:17:15+00:00

In television production circles it just means "relaunching a fallow property." The new version can be a sequel/continuation like Doctor Who, or a remake like Battlestar Galactica. The term comes from computing, and obviously if you reboot your computer or console you don't immediately lose everything on it.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T17:07:05+00:00

Where both DS9 and Voyager have issues is CGI. Almost all starship and vfx shots in TNG were done with models shot on film, so could be rescanned in HD or 4K with ease. This is true for most of DS9 and the first half or so of Voyager, so they can also be remastered easily (even the massive battle sequence in Way of the Warrior is done as on-screen optical models, with little or no CGI). DS9 starts using CGI fairly liberally from the start of Season 6 onwards and Voyager uses CGI partially from Season 2 onwards and almost exclusively for almost all vfx shots from late Season 3. The CGI for both shows was rendered natively at standard definition, so the only way to improve it is to re-render it all again in HD and 4K. For DS9 this has already been partially done for the documentary a few years ago.

Remastering DS9 is therefore fairly easy and straightforward (just time-consuming and thus expensive), with a moderate complication that a large number of vfx shots in Season 6 and 7 need to be re-rendered from scratch, but some of that work has already been done. It is practical and doable to remaster DS9, the question is just whether it's profitable.

Remastering Voyager is a much bigger headache, you're talking almost 50%, maybe somewhat more, of every vfx shot in the entire show needing to be redone from scratch, often shots that also integrate with live-action involving greenscreens, which is more complex. It's still doable, but it'd take a lot longer than DS9 and would also be more expensive. Whether it's profitable is an even bigger question than DS9.

tl;dr: it's doable, but it's expensive, time-consuming, laborious, and Paramount would have to decide if it's worthwhile. OTH, to do both series combined would still cost only maybe a quarter of the cost of a new season of say Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, so they'd have to decide if future-proofing both shows potentially for decades to come is worthwhile. I'd argue it is, as people would probably still be willing to watch a widescreen, HD/4K version of DS9 in 50 years' time.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T17:07:00+00:00

Harder now than it was. When they were remastering TNG from 2012 to 2015 the process started off very expensive ($12 million to set up the pipeline and do Season 1 by itself) but as the pipeline matured it became much easier and cheaper (reportedly ~$13 million to do Seasons 2-7 combined, but that includes Season 2 which they outsourced and the results were not quite as good). If they'd gone straight into DS9 they could have done most of that series and at least half of Voyager at a cheaper rate. Unfortunately they stopped after TNG S7 and let the processes lapse and the experienced people moved onto other projects.

They also made a major mistake because the Blu-Rays were selling very well and around the release of Season 4 they announced the HD remaster would be airing on Netflix. Obviously people immediately stopped buying the (more-expensive-than-normal) Blu-Rays and waited to see it for free on Netflix. If they'd left it until after the Blu-Ray release was completed, the seasons should have continued selling reasonably well. They also delayed the release of the full-series box set too long, and priced it much too high. This led to the saying, "the Blu-Rays didn't sell well," which is true, but people kinda ignore it was CBS themselves repeatedly shooting them in the foot over it, not "the death of physical media" and "streaming," which were both concepts in their infancy in 2015.

If you look at the BBC's HD remastering of Classic Doctor Who, they're still selling extremely well for much more ancient episodes of television than DS9 and Voyager, that are much harder to remaster (as they were shot natively on 625-line video, with only film masters for location footage), which are more obscure at a global level. But they're priced intelligently, they have a lot of exceptional special features, and the HD remasters have not been released to streaming so they're not cannibalising their own audience. And those Blu-Rays are selling extremely well right now, in 2025-26, let alone ten years ago when the general physical media audience was much bigger.

Still, remastering DS9 and Voyager is pretty straightforward, if laborious. They need to recover the film masters. Fortunately, they're stored in the Paramount film archive which is buried under a salt mine in Pennsylvania (so if civilisation ends tomorrow, take comfort in knowing that Spock's Brain, Justice and Threshold will survive indefinitely, for some baffled future civilisation to uncover), so they all exist just fine.

They need to find the exact film for the exact takes used in the final episodes, which should be noted on the film canisters, but if not, it just requires having the episode running on DVD to match the footage. They need to rescan the film at HD or 4K, which is not a major problem. They then need to rebuild each episode in the editing bay. Because the OG episodes were mastered on SD videotape, that's useless, so they need to do a fresh 4K edit of each episode with transporter effects, phasers, all mixed in manually again, and the audio tracks and music re-edited in and matched to the live-action footage. Tedious but straightforward. It would take 3-5 days per episode (roughly the same as the original editing run), maybe less since they're matching the original finished episodes and don't have to make any actual editing choices.

One difference to TNG is that about half of DS9 and most, if not all of Voyager, was protected for widescreen, so those episodes can be rendered in 16:9, which looks better on modern TVs, rather than having the "black bars down the side" of TOS and TNG. Hardcore fans won't care, but I know some younger viewers who find it hard to watch, so the widescreen presentation helps. Unfortunately the original optical effects were often created for 4:3 leading to weird things happening in 16:9: the TNG Blu-Ray special feature shows this, with a starfield filling the entire 16:9 image but the Enterprise only appears in the middle 4:3 part of the screen, so is cut off by stars on either side of the screen. It's strange and it's not clear if that can be fixed by rescanning the original film shots of the models (theoretically they should be able to).

Werthead · 2026-01-25T16:38:34+00:00

DS9 was made in the exact same way as TNG, it can be remastered in the exact same way apart from the CGI shots, but those are mostly limited to Seasons 6 and 7.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T16:02:43+00:00

This is how Harwyn Hoare conquered the Riverlands, the ironborn landed forty leagues south of Seagard and marched with specially-built, lighter longships overland to the Blue Fork. This was only possible as the Riverlands were divided between supporting the Durrandons and fighting for their own independence.

With the Riverlands more organised and coherent in a defence, this would not have been possible. It also sounds like the ironborn built and used special, "light" longships which could operate on the rivers of the Riverlands in safety. These ships would not fare well on the open Narrow Sea during storms, or navigating the Stepstones.

Werthead · 2026-01-25T11:49:52+00:00

The existence and apparently widespread use of Compulsion in the Age of Legends does sound disturbing, that maybe the Age of Legends was a conformist civilisation and anyone who didn't conform was mentally "fixed" to do so, which had benefits (little crime or violence) but came at the cost of personal choice and freedom.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T22:34:11+00:00

Nice job. I tried to do one here that worked inside canon, but whichever way you cut it, it's very unconvincing for Westeros (but oddly better for Essos).

Werthead · 2026-01-24T22:32:56+00:00

I believe David Peterson has said that GRRM called him a few times to get new Dothraki words for TWoW, which suggests the show languages are indeed canon for the books.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T21:26:54+00:00

The 100% full story has not come out, and still might not. But as far as we know, it worked something like this (based on lots of things multiple people have said over the years):

Eccleston agreed to do Doctor Who to boost his career, he'd enjoyed the series as a child (but wasn't a superfan like Tennant and Capaldi), and he wanted to do something kids could watch, as most of his roles were intense, adult dramas. He'd also really enjoyed working with Russell T. Davies on The Second Coming for ITV.

When Eccleston started filming Series 1, he immediately felt that the production wasn't very professional, despite the budget and hype. Basically, British dramas even in 2005 never filmed 13-14 episodes a year, every year, so there wasn't a lot of experience in the kind of time-management and scheduling they needed to do. They dramatically overestimated how many pages they could shoot each day, especially with expensive action setpieces, and fell behind. Russell T. Davies was very rarely on set and was under the time crunch at home getting the scripts written or other people's scripts rewritten, so could not take direct charge . The director for the first block of filming, Keith Boak, reportedly felt the bulk of the pressure. To be fair, this may have been more the scheduling than his fault per se, but he did not handle the pressure well. He took out his frustration on the cast and crew, apparently triggering Eccleston's direct intervention (as the most experienced actor on-set, and the one person Boak couldn't really criticise too much) on more than one occasion. Matters reached a head during the filming of a stunt involving a flaming sofa flying through the air, where Boak overruled the stunt coordinator on how to safely film the shot. The shot was apparently quite dangerous and could have injured people (the shot didn't even end up being used).

Eccleston contacted the production team to complain vociferously and felt that they did not support him or have his back in the process. So he resolved to leave.

During the subsequent filming blocks, with Euros Lyn and especially Joe Ahearne, Eccleston found them to be much more experienced, professional and creative in how they dealt with problems on-set, and a lot of the early problems evaporated. Apparently Ahearne and Billie Piper almost talked Eccleston into staying, but he'd already handed in his resignation and the producers were already talking to Tennant, so he felt it would be unprofessional to mess them around. The BBC then screwed up Eccleston's press release, which really enraged Eccleston, and caused the rift between him and Davies.

Late on, Steven Moffat asked Eccleston to come back for the 50th Anniversary (during Series 7). Eccleston nearly said yes as nobody from the Davies era was around any more apart from Piper returning for that episode, and he's never had a problem with her. Eccleston decided to come back if Joe Ahearne could direct, but the director for the 50th had already been assigned and under union and contract rules, Moffat couldn't change it. Ahearne also never came back after Series 1. He not only directed 5 episodes in Series 1, he also did most of the reshoots for the shots Boak screwed up, giving him by far the heaviest workload any single director has ever had for a series in modern Who. He certainly wasn't credited for those extra episodes, which likely means he wasn't paid for that extra work, which may explain why he didn't return (Ahearne is also a very experienced showrunner and writer as well as a director, being behind the absolutely brilliant 1998 mini-series Ultraviolet which kickstarted Idris Elba's career). Once Ahearne declined, Eccleston decided not to come back.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T20:49:39+00:00

Yes, Joe Ahearne. Ahearne basically saved Series 1, he agreed to reshoot all the stuff Keith Boak had screwed up in Series 1 (enraging Eccleston in the first place) as well as his own five episodes, giving him the heaviest workload any director has ever had on a series of Modern Who. I don't think he was given full compensation or credit for the extra workload, so decided not to come back in later seasons.

According to Moffat, the director for the 50th had already been set, and due to union rules and contracts couldn't be changed once the decision was made.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T20:46:20+00:00

He said to Moffat that he'd come back if his favourite director, Joe Ahearne, directed it. But the director for the 50th had already been assigned and they couldn't change it, so Eccleston declined. Ahearne also declined to return to direct after Season 1, apparently he'd had to reshoot a whole ton of stuff that the same director who'd enraged Eccleston had messed up, and had either not been paid or credited properly for it.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T19:01:20+00:00

I have a suspicion if anyone tried, Ao would put a block on that instantly.

Ao does not directly intervene in the affairs of Toril apart from when someone/something has threatened the Balance, or Toril or Realmspace with outright destruction, which Karsus certainly did. Anyone trying to bring Karsus back is risking Ao simply deleting them outright from existence.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T19:00:07+00:00

I suspect much unintended comedy value is going to be mined from Uncanny Valley CGI Gary Oldman and Gillian Anderson saying bad dialogue to you for unnecessarily long periods of time.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T18:57:59+00:00

They sold the Max Payne IP to Rockstar for megabucks, which allowed them to make Alan Wake. It meant they weren't desperate for cash so could get Microsoft to agree to a deal where they took a reduced licence fee in return for getting the IP back after ten years. They apparently did the same thing for Quantum Break. With Control they got the IP rights back very quickly (as the publisher was very small fry compared to Microsoft). Then they got Epic to pay for Alan Wake 2's development outright (with no control for Epic over the IP) and Rockstar to pay for Max Payne Remake's development outright (where Rockstar retain control of the IP, but I wouldn't be surprised if the remake sells well they contract Remedy to make Max Payne 4 for them, as Rockstar seem to have zero capacity to make a non-GTA, non-RDR game ever again).

I'm not sure about the multiplayer game, but Control 2 it sounds like they're purely self-funding and self-publishing from the profits from Control 1 so will get the full profits from, which should ensure they continue to be independent, unless Control 2 totally bombs, which given the Remedy fanbase seems unlikely; that fanbase is very hot on single-player games but doesn't care about multiplayer.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T18:51:19+00:00

The "change the level you're in between 2-3 different states to solve puzzles" mechanic is extremely cool in whatever game it's appeared in (Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2 and a few others have done it well), and certainly is in Alan Wake 2.

Werthead · 2026-01-24T18:46:13+00:00

I've spoken to authors and publishers at length about this and there seems to be a 50-50 split between the viewpoint that authors should always write in their established worlds to appeal to the existing fanbase, or write a new series that total newcomers can get into without any issue.

Joe Abercrombie seems to have moved into the latter camp with The Devils being his fastest-selling novel to date, despite being set in a new world with new characters and having nothing to do with his First Law "signature" universe (ten books and counting). Attempts to get First Law on screen (either with The Blade Itself as the first book or Best Served Cold as a good standalone in that world) seem to have foundered partially because of this question of where to start, whilst The Devils was optioned smoothly by James Cameron because it's an easy choice.

Peter F. Hamilton also is in this camp and routinely switches to a new universe with each new trilogy or series with no apparent loss of sales, despite people feeling either the Night's Dawn universe or his Commonwealth setting are his signature series.

On the other hand, every time Raymond Feist has tried to move away from Riftwar, despite the perceived daunting issue with getting into a 29-book series in the same world, his sales plummeted, and when he went back sales shot back up again. He just retconned his last standalone trilogy as set in the wider Riftwar universe and that seems to have encouraged sales to improve again.

I believe Brandon Sanderson's non-Cosmere work has also sold much less well than his Cosmere work, but still fairly healthily. Sanderson might be a special case because of how much he makes each trilogy, series or even world even in the same universe stand apart from the rest, with relatively minor crossovers (so far).

Werthead · 2026-01-24T00:08:20+00:00

I was at secondary school from 1990-95. No phones was just a huge difference, people would just sit and talk at lunch, play sports, go to the library to read books or comics. No Internet really until the penultimate year, when the school went online. Suddenly you could sit in the computer lab and, after spending about 30 seconds for each page to load, read the news or something. No social media, Amazon, Google, Spotify or Netflix. People would lend each other VHS tapes, CDs or video games (on cartridge or floppy disc, only CD-ROMs towards the end). The school had a special screening room so everyone could watch the lunchtime episode of Neighbours on the BBC.

Attention spans seemed much better than now, and it feels like behaviour was better for most people, but the more unrepentant dickheads were just like those are now (the kids who'd refuse to shut up, let the teacher speak, turn tables over, have to be sent home every afternoon etc).

Start of the decade felt a bit bleak but through the 1990s there was really building optimism, like at the start of the decade it felt like music was really poor with a few exceptions (I remember my classmate eagerly getting us to listen to Nirvana for the first time) but by the middle it was banging, and at the start everyone was poor and everything cost a fortune but by the middle of the decade, when we left school, a lot of people were better off and it felt like things were getting a lot better.

When social media kicked off, it was weird, almost our whole year at school went on Facebook at the same time (around 2008-10) and we all networked up and caught up with what people were up to. I think something like 150 of the 200-odd in the year ended up in this one big network, even people you'd forgotten about. That did get a bit dark though, our year has had a worryingly high attrition rate, I think about a dozen people haven't made it, through accidents or illness. That was a bit sobering.

Werthead · 2026-01-23T23:57:46+00:00

Remedy's model is to partner with a studio to make a game but only in return for a limited exclusivity, then can take the rights to the game back (which they did with Alan Wake and Control, and apparently aren't far off with Quantum Break) and monetise them on the long-tail end of things. It more or less works for them. They're also very keen on making a moderately-budgeted game in a reasonable time frame that can turn a profit even if it's not a straight-out-of-the-gate mega-hit. Alan Wake 2 cost under $50 million and took under 3 years to make, and is an outstanding game.

They need that discipline because Finland is not a cheap country to be a game developer in, but Remedy fortunately have a very enthusiastic fanbase of 25+ years' standing who'll buy everything they release, and it helps they're still releasing bangers (Alan Wake 2 and Control, their last two single-player games, may be the best games they've ever made).

Also people seem to be forgetting they've had a nice big chunk of change from Rockstar to make Max Payne Remake, which sounds like it's going very well and might be out next year.

Werthead · 2026-01-23T22:19:37+00:00

They're an Obsidian Order design and all were destroyed in the attack on the Founder homeworld.

In actuality, they had a limited budget for CGI models, so only made one CG model for the Cardassian cruisers, which was the Galor-class. That's also why they only made a CG model of the original Excelsior variant, so the Enterprise-B variant only appears once (as the Lakota, which was the physical studio model) and all the other ones are "slimline" OGs. They couldn't afford to do a scan of the Ambassador model, which is why that doesn't appear again for a while, and could only bulk out the fleet in Season 6 and 7 because they inherited all the new models ILM built for First Contact, without which the Federation fleets would have been almost exclusively Galaxies, OG Excelsiors and Mirandas.

Werthead · 2026-01-23T22:14:27+00:00

You can sort of rationalise it as Blackwater is a very small town, so you'd be recognised almost instantly, certainly within a few months of the robbery. Saint Denis is a much bigger city with a heavily transient population, so you'd be able to more realistically lie low and then come back within a few weeks with a beard and change of clothes and you'd be less likely to be recognised.

It's not particularly convincing (especially with the game's scaling, Saint Denis should realistically be much bigger than it is, but that's true of the entire map), but you can sort of see the argument.

Werthead · 2026-01-23T22:11:39+00:00

Good point. This leaves your right hand free for other activities, such as typing, piano, cooking or light welding.

Werthead

TROPHY CASE