Equals: Patricia Kalember

Welcome to Equals, the ongoing column that takes a surprising amount of interest in guest stars from Edward Woodward's 1980s series The Equalizer.

Actor: Patricia Kalember

Role: Carlene Randall

Episode: Pilot (1985)

Best known for: Georgie on Sisters (1991-96)

Currently playing: Kate Egan in Power

Has she appeared on Law & Order?: Hell yes. She played "Leslie DeSantis" on an episode of Special Victims Unit in 2001 and went to appear as "Judge Taten" on nine more episodes from 2004-2010.

Robert Urich check: Kalember and Urich appeared together on Final Run (1999): "A new computer-controlled train loses control due to an error in the system and speeds out of control while Urich attempts to stop it." 3.9/10

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These days, television pilots have an unseemly amount of work to do. There's a world to build, characters to introduce, and a plot that will keep audiences interested for at least a season. Even the flimsiest network procedurals have to Wire up their game or risk being blown away in the blizzard of Peak TV.

Welcome to the '80s, people. The Equalizer has no time for your medieval slashfests or superhero support dramas. In the pilot episode alone, The Equalizer, aka Robert McCall (Edward Woodward), helps not one but two people (he even squeezes in time to repair his relationship with his estranged son). The first mystery functions largely as a device to drag in McCall's buddies from The Agency and establish his bona fides as an International Man of Mystery. The second mystery establishes him as a Man of Honour who likes to protect women and children. Enter Patricia Kalember as successful Manhattan single mother Carlene Randall. She's being stalked by a floppy-haired hipster named Steve (Scott Burkholder).

Steve doesn't have the internet to stalk his prey with, so he resorts to analogue methods: phone calls, hanging out at her grocery store, breaking in and leaving messages in lipstick. The police are unhelpful, so she turns to The Equalizer for help.

For a one-off character, Carlene gets nearly as much screen time as McCall, and their paths don't even intersect for nearly half an hour. This gives us plenty of opportunities to watch Kalember to go from calm to unhinged in the space of a second. The acting is theatrical by modern television standards, but my god does she go for it. There's nothing quite like watching her scream "I'll stab you in the heart!" in the grocery store checkout line as the nefarious Steve the Gaslighter General looks on in feigned befuddlement. 

The treatment of Kalember's character is not what you'd call woke. Although she points out that her situation is a basic nightmare ("Why should I have to change my whole life? He's the one who's destroying it"), the responsibility for dealing with Steve is handed off to a paternalistic McCall. "Look at me, Carlene. Look at me," he commands. "I. Will. Protect you." 

In today's television arena, Carlene would have taken a course in self-defense, spent some time in the gym and beaten the living snot out of Steve. But since it's 1985, she spends most of her time weeping and throwing herself at The Equalizer, who brushes off her advances. "I'd like to get you know better," she says. "No you don't," The Equalizer replies dangerously.

Kalember also popped up in season two for "Coal Black Soul" as Dr. Stephanie Davis, in which she plays a potential love interest and therapist for McCall. Here's hoping she turns out to be an evil mastermind in the vein of Root.

Logan and the Monster Trucks

"Come on, Logan," said Pierce, his cybernetic finger snaking around the trigger of his rifle. "This ain't about you. We just want the tire."

"You can go to hell," Logan growled. Blood dripped from already closing wounds on his face and chest.

"Come on Logan!" said Pierce. "What do you want with that tire anyway? What's it to you?"

"I have to get this tire to a monster truck rally outside Dayton by Sunday," Logan said. "Otherwise my favourite monster trucker won't be able to compete."

Pierce's finger slid out from the trigger guard. "Who's your favourite monster trucker?"

"Duane 'The Unslain' McKenna," Logan said. "He's slated to face off against Truckzilla."

"You mean that truck that looks like a big metal T rex? The one that breathes fire and eats trucks for breakfast?"

Logan spat out a tooth. He could already feel its replacement beginning to push down into the empty space. "The very same."

Pierce raised his gun and turned to his band of Reavers. "Gentlemen, we have a new mission. We've got to get this tire to Dayton by Sunday!"

"Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" the Reavers called out.

Pierce swivelled back to Logan. "If I do this - are we square?"

"Hell no," said Logan. "But get on my shoulders, I'll give you a piggyback ride." 

A Dubstep Remix of the Ghost In The Shell Theme Should Ease Your Fears

Fans of the Ghost in the Shell franchise have been worried that the upcoming big-budget live-action version of the story may not live up to the standard set by the original work. Put your mind at ease, because the latest trailer combines the cerebral and somber music of the 1995 anime with, uh, dubstep.

Let that bleed into your earballs for a little bit. Clearly we're in good hands here.

Possible Hot Takes on Logan

Logan Is Really About Water Usage Rights. And It's Wrong.

From the Back of the Limo: Top 12 Slightly Lousy Dystopias Where Middle-class White People Would Still Do Just Fine

Does Logan Signal a Death Blow for the Adamantium-enrobed Skeleton Industry (And What Will Big Skeleton Do)?

Sure Logan Was Great, But How Much Cooler Would It Have Been with a Pan Flute Soundtrack?

Should the Titular Role in Logan Have Been Given to Danny Glover? Well How About Donald Glover? Okay Then, What's John Glover Up To?

Logan Depicts Human Experimentation on Children Like It's a Bad Thing. It Isn't.

7 Movies Where Heroes Protected a Giant Tire (#3 Will Surprise You! Because it's Goodfellas)

Okay, Maybe Not an Entire Soundtrack of Pan Flute Music, But What if Caliban Played a Pan Flute and Used it to Soothe Professor Xavier to Sleep Every Night?

Logan Proves that Shane Would Be a Much Better Movie if The Boy Had Been a Screaming Mutant Child with Metal Claws

It's Time to Reassess Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn

Let's Talk About a Version of Logan where Caliban Dresses Up in Green Velvet Robes and Occasionally Interrupts the Action to Sing About the Plot and Play that Pan Flute We All Agree Would Make a Great Addition to the Movie

Logan Is So Good That It's Not a Comic Book Movie. It's a Movie for Every Dying Superhuman Mutant who Has to Take Care of Patrick Stewart in an Upended Water Tower in a Dystopian Future.

No Spoilers, But We Have Got To Talk About That Scene Where a Senile Professor X Tries to Play a Pan Flute, Gets Frustrated, Unleashes a Psionic Wave that Obliterates Nevada

Alien: Covenant Will Not Be Scary

Here is the new trailer for Alien: Covenant.

It is not scary.

It is not scary because Alien: Covenant, the movie, will not be scary. It may be tense, gory and gross, but it will probably not do the most basic thing you can expect of any horror movie, which is to scare you.

The first trailer delivers more of the goods, if only because it refuses to show us the slobbering monster that's skittered around our nightmares for the last 38 years (the one glimpse of that iconic eyeless mug happens in a shower, which put me in mind of the up-close confrontation between Ripley and the alien in Alien 3 - a terrifying moment in a largely fright-free film). The new trailer gives us a view of egg sac, face hugger, xenomorph and even a shot of a neomorph, which is all-new for this movie. My only hope is that it won't resemble the monster baby from Alien Resurrection.

But the trailer's candor is not what neutralizes its power. Instead, it's the discovery of a shaft of wheat on the alien planet.

"This is wheat," says someone, fingering the wheat. "What are the odds of finding human vegetation this far from Earth?" Someone then steps on some kind of spore-bearing pod plant thing, suggesting that wheat coexists nicely with alien murder fungus or whatever that is. "Human vegetation" is an apt phrase, though, because the clumps of wheat look like the stuff we know and love, with long stems and lush heads. It looks like the carefully cultivated product of thousands of years of human tinkering.

What's modern wheat doing on this planet? I'm sure there are answers, but frankly, who cares? Because it means that we've dug our furrow into the world of Prometheus (not scary) instead of Alien (scary). We're wheat-deep in Ridley Scott's absurd Chariots of the Gods-inspired mythology, in which giant humanoids that looked like angry marzipan statues created humanity, possibly sent Jesus down to us* and got so upset when we killed him (which, if Jesus looked an angry marzipan man, is hardly a surprising outcome) that they decided to destroy humanity altogether.

You may recall that in Prometheus, a faith-addled astroarcheologist (?) rockets to the stars to find those big white almond-paste gods, only to discover that they were destroyed by the horrific bio weapon that they had intended to use on the teeming hordes of Earth. The film was visually lush, unpleasant, a bit gruesome, and too ridiculous to enjoy. It also took the horror trope of "dimwitted people enter a spooky house" to ridiculous extremes, letting a gaggle of incompetent scientists loose into a Giger-esque nightmare of snakes and worms and black goo.

Alien, on the other hand, is one of the scariest horror films ever made. There's no grand mythology, no Baby Boomer-catnip cod mythology, no marzipan men smacking Old Man Memento around. There's nothing but a vast, indifferent universe with a monster at its heart. A group of people floating through the galaxy discover that they're just bits of meat in the life cycle of another organism. There are certainly a few mysteries - What was that ship doing on that planet? What's the deal with the Space Jockey? How much does the Weyland-Yutani corporation know about the alien creature? - but they function mostly as a way of deepening the horror, of presenting puzzles and withholding them at the same time. Would you like to know what's really going on here? No, too bad, an alien is chewing on your head.

Alien: Covenant is probably going to billed as a "return to the roots of the franchise". But will it be scary? No.

*In an interview, Ridley Scott said that the alien Jesus idea was a bit too "on the nose" but went to more or less confirm that sure, Jesus was a big dopey guy made of marzipan who came down to complain about the Roman Empire, why the hell not.