Month: January 2021

This is a spoiler-free review for Alan Tudyk’s Resident Alien, which premiered Jan. 27 on Syfy.

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While it’s already drawing obvious comparisons to Northern Exposure, Syfy’s new sci-fi dramedy Resident Alien reminds me a little of Dexter, the Michael C. Hall-starring show about a Miami serial killer hiding in plain sight. Stay with me here: That series was a divisive one given the inconsistency of its quality and the heavy-lifting that Hall did to carry the show’s appeal squarely on his back, with most of the supporting cast left as a bit of an afterthought. That lack of balance seems to be the case with Resident Alien too, at least in the early going.

Based on the Dark Horse comic series by Peter Hogan and artist Steve Parkhouse, the show centers around an alien disguised as a small-town doctor, played by the infinitely talented and likable Alan Tudyk. The show does well by its lead – giving him ample opportunity to explore our resident alien’s (aka Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle) many strange habits and overall confusion with humanity’s own peculiarities – but it doesn’t quite know how to utilize the rest of its eccentric ensemble.

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There’s a fair amount of potential that gets set up in the series pilot – a quirky hour of familiar but amusing fluff – only to be undercut by its more baffling narrative choices. For one: why is this show an hour long when it clearly wants to be a half-hour comedy? Like… Alan Tudyk playing an alien trapped on Earth pretending to be a doctor, whose only knowledge of actual doctoring comes from TV? Yes please, give me all that physical comedy – no other contrivances or plot twists needed.

Unfortunately, Resident Alien doesn’t give Tudyk much room to run with the insanity of the concept, since he’s too busy dealing with mounting narrative wrinkles and side missions, including a quest for his lost spaceship; a murder mystery in town; his need to stay ahead of some shadowy government types; and his scheme to murder the only person in town who can see through his disguise (who happens to be a kid, not that Harry cares) – and that’s barely scratching the surface. The show has more plot than it knows what to do with, but is at its best when it focuses on the characters.

Syfy has advertised the series as “the sci-fi, murder mystery, doctor dramedy Earth needs now” and that blend of genres, tones, and ideas is definitely on display – to the point where it doesn’t seem to know what it actually is or how best to deploy the considerable talents of its cast – it’s an everything and the kitchen sink approach that leaves Resident Alien feeling torn in too many directions.

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But the generic, slapdash way in which the series’ world is fleshed out may be its biggest problem. While the supporting cast members often steal their scenes with moments of dark, odball humor, the character archetypes themselves – the inexperienced town mayor and his bland wife, suspicious sheriff and his downtrodden deputy, flirty bartender, ominous government agents – feel copy and pasted from some worn-out “supporting parts” handbook that can’t hold a candle to Tudyk’s deranged central performance.

There’s also something oddly dated about the show’s setup – right down to Harry’s love of Law and Order: SVU. Though I could arguably watch Alan Tudyk do pretty much anything, his charm and relentless physical comedy skills can only take the series so far. Resident Alien is amusing enough, if half-baked science-fiction storytelling is your thing, but you can’t help but wish they’d settled on one idea rather than five.

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Update 3 (1/27/21) – The subreddit r/WallStreetBets is no longer private, and the mods have posted a message explaining the ever-changing situation they are dealing with how they plan to move forward and address its issues.

“We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep,” u/zjz wrote. “We’ve got so many comments and submissions that we can’t possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn’t allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven’t given us special access despite asking for it.

“We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.

“To add to this, people are co-opting our name on twitter. I won’t mention their accounts, but lots of handles with “wsb” and “wallstreetbets” in them are pretending to speak for us. They’re saying things that we don’t agree with, driving traffic to derivative communities and shitty pixelated merch stores, and generally making it harder for us to define who we are. There’s also too much political bullshit in a community that was never ever political. The only way I want to occupy Wall St is in a suit myself or rent-free in the mind of a blown up short.

“That is why I’m throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general. We need a way to PUBLICLY reach out to the staff of the infrastructure that is failing us so the world can see that we aren’t doing anything wrong here if they don’t respond. We need to be able to respond directly to a reporter that is lying to the world about our clubhouse. We can’t be expected to meet any expectations when we aren’t given the tools we need.

“That’s not to say I approve of every message or will even be in the loop for all of them, but it’s clear to me we can’t do nothing and we need a megaphone.

“http://twitter.com/wsbmod aka @wsbmod is the only Twitter handle whose statements are directly from some part of the team.

“We’ll do our best not to pretend to speak for you, but to try to speak with the volume our name now seems to command to get shit done for us.”

Update 2 (1/27/21) – The WallStreetBets Discord server has been banned, not because of “financial fraud related to GameStop of other stocks,” but because it has continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”

The subreddit r/WallStreetBets has also gone private, but it does not appear to be banned as of this writing.

Discord’s statement on WallStreetBets, as given to IGN, is as follows;

“The WallStreetBets server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation. Over the past few months, we have issued multiple warnings to the server admin.

“Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.

“To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”

Update (1/27/21) – Reddit has said it has resolved the issue.

Original story follows.

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Reddit is currently experiencing outages during the ongoing GameStop stock situation.

Reddit has acknowledged the issue and has said to check out redditstatus.com for up-to-the-moment updates.

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As of this writing, GameStop stock is currently trading at an all-time high stock price of around $350, but it isn’t due to a miraculous turnaround by the company, but a battle between short-sellers like Citron Research and others like the subreddit r/WallStreetBets.

Short selling is more or less a strategy in which investors can borrow stock in exchange for an IOU. For example, an investor can borrow a stock from a broker for $100, in hopes that the stocks price goes down. If that price does go down to $80, they can buy back that stock, but at the price of $80, therefore netting a $20 profit. It is basically betting against a particular stock.

GameStop isn’t the only stock impacted by this situation, as other companies like AMC are soaring following a new interest by r/WallStreetBets.

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Reddit will most likely be back up soon, and we will update this article with any and all future updates.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

We breakdown everything we know about Resident Evil Village to get you up to speed before the game comes out on May 7th.

After briefly going private, subreddit r/wallstreetbets is back up. Moderator user zjz posted a response to why the subreddit was briefly taken private alongside the account’s Discord server being banned.

“We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn’t allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven’t given us special access despite asking for it,” zjz writes. “We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad.”

They continue: “We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.”

Continue Reading at GameSpot