David Dubrow's Blog, page 57

Shirtgate: Four Things to Consider

Everybody knows the story by now: Matt Taylor, a British scientist, was part of the team who landed a probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  In a recent interview, he wore a shirt that made some people very upset, subsequently apologized for it, and is now more famous for the shirt than the remarkable scientific achievement for which he is responsible.  Here are some takeaways from the story.  If they offend you, ask yourself why:

The shirt was designed by Elly PriZeMaN [sic] and it depicts women in skimpy outfits holding guns.  If you click the link, you'll see that Ms. PriZeMaN is a woman.  Also note that the shirt itself doesn't show violence against women; indeed, if holding a firearm is an implicitly violent act, then the women depicted are themselves engaging in violence.  The shirt is in poor taste.  But Dr. Taylor obviously wore it because he very much liked it and wanted to show off his female friend's work.There's very little difference between radical feminists and small children. One thing you learn early on with small children is that you get the behavior you reward most frequently.  Small children act out.  They can't help it.  But you don't reward them for acting out: you use the appropriate tools available, including ignoring the bad behavior, removing the child from the situation if he or she becomes destructive, or distracting the child with something else.  To a radical feminist, the best thing that can happen is getting attention, even negative attention.Dr.Taylor wasn't forced to apologize.  He didn't have to apologize for wearing a shirt that a tiny group of very loud people found offensive.  The only reason why this became such a big deal is because he apologized.  He rewarded bad behavior, and as a result, not only failed to mollify an extremely angry subgroup of individuals whose very existence is predicated on anger, but also brought scorn on himself from people who would otherwise have supported him.  Had he stood up for himself, or, better yet, ignored the screeching, he would have been known for his achievement, not his sartorial choices.This story hits the bullseye on two important issues: a misplaced sense of proportion and political correctness.  If this guy's shirt elicited so much anger and tears, it's clear that radical feminism no longer has any major issues to address, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history the way John Birchers have.  Also, everybody hates political correctness, but nobody wants to take responsibility for it.  Apologizing to the eternally offended increases political correctness.  Some questions remain.  I added the leavening adjective "radical" to feminist in this piece, but are the people so offended by this shirt actually radical feminists, or do they represent the mainstream of feminism?  If not, why not?  Will Dr. Taylor have a career after this?  Does an attention-seeking subgroup of a subgroup have a right to tear the spotlight away from people with actual accomplishment to further an agenda supported only by them?  How many times will this have to happen until someone gathers up the courage to fight back?

On the Night Crew - Three Pieces of Flash Non-fiction

For over ten years I worked in supermarket retail, doing various jobs.  I worked my way through high school and later through an indifferent college career and beyond.  There were parts of it I very much enjoyed, and parts I loathed, which is pretty much typical when it comes to working.

Night crew was a blast, despite the hours.  Most of us were young and strong, and the work was very easy.  We got time and a half on Sundays in those days.  Because it was a union store, we weren't paid on performance, only longevity.  It's very difficult to get fired when you're in a union.  Here are a few night crew highlights, which I'm calling flash non-fiction so they just won't seem like dumb little stories of things that happened:

Howard was an older man: moved slowly, talked very little, and had more seniority than the rest of us put together.  This is meaningful when you're working in a union store.  A likable enough fellow.  He would start every ten to six shift with two two-liter bottles of Seagram's wine coolers, and over the course of the night would polish them both off.  Every shift.  None of us commented on it when he was around.  That was what he needed to maintain.  Howard was, in our parlance, hard-core. Some of us did whippits.  Not all the time, but when you've done all the work allotted to an eight-hour shift in four hours, you need to fill up the rest of the time.  There was a trick to it: if you shook up the bottle, all you'd get was whipped cream up your nose.  So you had to get one that hadn't been shaken up.  We used the store brand whipped cream, but not because the nitrous oxide in it was any better; it was on the bizarre premise that people expected a poor product from the store brand versus the more "premium" Reddi-Wip.  Nobody got addicted that I know of, and nobody died, at least when clocked in.Turkey bowling was a thing, but not as much fun as you'd imagine.  They didn't wax the floors more than once a month in our store, and if you skated a frozen turkey across a waxed floor, you'd start scraping the wax off the tiles.  That would create grooves for dirt to get into which made it difficult for the other guys to clean.  The unwritten rule was to have fun, but not make more work for anyone else.  So we had to do turkey bowling in the dairy aisle, which had grouted, unwaxed tiles.  The rough "alley" made for a difficult game, and we only did it just to say we did it (turkey bowling and stories of it have been around at least since the 1980's).  
Those were the days.

Forbearance and Who We Are

I'm going to wade into the ugly lake of politics here, but not in the way you might think.  What follows might upset you.  If it does, ask yourself why.

I was lucky enough to find Sonny Bunch's essay on the concept of forbearance in the Washington Free Beacon.  If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it as an incisive piece, something that you can find yourself nodding along with as you absorb it (or, as my little boy says, "think about it with your brain").

[image error] There's a lot to it, but one takeaway is this: just because someone throws you a pitch, you don't have to swing at it.  Even on social media.

I'm as much into politics and current events (the two are inseparable) as anyone, and more than most.  My political/philosophical viewpoint has been honed by personal experience, research, and careful reflection.  Regular readers of this blog know that I like to strip away euphemism to get to the heart of things.  To dig deep.  You grow when you're made to feel uncomfortable.  I like to write fiction, but I won't live it.

One of the reasons I write this blog is to stretch myself, to write about things I hadn't before, like short stories/flash fiction, or war stories from my past employer.  But I'm also here to create that all-important writer's platform: a place where people can find me online and learn about my books.  The dirty little secret nobody in writing wants to tell anyone is that the vast majority of writers don't want to blog, Facebook, or get involved in any kind of social media.  They just want to write their books, and they want you to buy them.

Honestly, I can't stand Twitter.  I loathe it.  But it's a social media box to check, so I'm there and I participate.

With all that in mind, I have strong, informed opinions about the issues of the day, but I won't communicate all of them here. This blog, first and foremost, is about building a relationship with you, my readers, and if I tell you exactly what I think about, say, the recent election returns, half of you will be turned off.

So despite that I want to talk about what's going on with Ebola in the US, what happened a week ago on Election Day, and other such things, I can't.  I shouldn't.  I...forbear.  Even though controversy and disagreement get attention.

See, I'm not this guy:

Huge amounts of snow in Maine yesterday! Republican voters should probably stay home tomorrow, safe & dry! HAHAHAHAHA.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) November 3, 2014

As jokes go, it's weak sauce, and even King himself saw that, hence the HAHAHAHA.  However, I'm quite familiar with his other non-fiction pieces, and I know for a fact that he thinks that people to the right of him politically are not only stupid, but actually evil.  He's allowed.  Just as I'm allowed to find my horror literature elsewhere.

I understand that it's very difficult to forbear when you're certain that the people who disagree with you are actively trying to destroy the world.  It's like making friends with a murderer.  The idea, however, that refusal to invest in failing green energy businesses means that you're in favor of ruining the planet with global warming is a false equivalency, and descends into the lack of a sense of proportion that I already talked about.  Achieving that sense of proportion and combining it with forbearance create a grace we used to have before instantaneous, semi-anonymous communication changed us into, well...take your pick of rude words.  We've changed as a culture, and not for the better.

Just because we disagree, even on the important things, it doesn't mean one of us is an evil idiot.

Forbearance is very much a prized quality, more so for its rarity.  It's something to work on, because it inspires grace and civility, even in the most heated communications media.

War Stories: Little Melvin

We had gone to Maryland to shoot a martial arts video with someone you might have heard of; he'd been an actor on the show WMAC Masters , and had once been featured on an A&E program about former felons who had gotten their lives back on track.  I'd worked with him on a project ten years earlier, and found him to be a very strong, fit, and decent man.  So when it came time for us to shoot another video, I jumped at the chance.

On the morning of the first day of shooting, we'd driven into downtown Baltimore to film an interview with him and a pastor who'd helped him turn his life around.  At the time, on-location shoots were done with a crew of two: me as the director/producer/sound engineer/lighting expert/1st camera/location scout, and another man who helped with all of these tasks.  As we were packing up the equipment after the interview, the author of the video said that there was one more interview he wanted to do, and asked us to follow him in our car.  I asked where we were going, and he grinned and said he didn't want to tell us, but it would be worth our time.  
Soon, we were driving through an extremely bad part of Baltimore.  My alma mater is Temple University, so I know what bad neighborhoods look like.  This was about as bad as it got.  The car we were driving was a black Suburban; our heavy shooting schedule had permitted us a free upgrade from the minivans we usually rented.  As comfortable as it was to drive, it attracted attention, though not as much as the author's Hummer.  
We eventually pulled up at a large building suspiciously free of graffiti, and spent the next several minutes hauling camera bags and Pelican cases from the SUV to the building's entrance.  A smiling man in white greeted us with handshakes, and we went inside the darkened building to the back.  It was then that we were introduced to Little Melvin.
Melvin Williams, AKA Little Melvin, was the real-life inspiration behind the Avon Barksdale character in HBO's show The Wire .  He was tall, with muddy brown eyes that had something very sharp going on behind them.  I'm not trying to be literary or melodramatic: you took a look at him and knew that despite his mild demeanor, he took in everything.  At the time, I hadn't watched The Wire, so I wasn't at all starstruck.  I was just there to do a job.
The video's author conducted the interview and talked about Little Melvin's interest in martial arts and how it helped him in his career.  It didn't take terribly long, and we were soon packing up to go to the next location: the author's dojo.  
As we packed up, I chatted a bit with Little Melvin and his friend, a man whose name I've forgotten but struck me as a nice, personable guy with a sense of humor.  They kidded us a bit about how we stuck out in the neighborhood a bit.  Little Melvin told us a few stories about how he'd been railroaded into prison, and how even the rumor of him being angry about his portrayal in the film Liberty Heights had scared director Barry Levinson into almost canceling the movie's release (Orlando Jones played Little Melvin in the film).
My colleague got a picture with Little Melvin and his friend while I finished packing up. 
On the way back to the dojo, we turned on the radio.  It's very likely that we were the only people in that part of Baltimore listening to Jimmy Buffett.  To this day, I don't know if the video was ever released.

Breadhead Friday: Lean Artistry

I picked up Richard Bertinet's Dough not long ago and got some very good ideas on kneading and shaping bread dough.  His kneading process is different: you slap the dough on the counter, fold it over, pick it up, and slap it down again.  Over and over.  This puts air into the dough and helps it get the big holes you want in the simpler, lean breads (a lean bread is one that doesn't have sugar, fat, or eggs to enrich the dough).

The epi is on the right. It's supposed to look like a wheat sheaf
Having done breads only with my trusty KitchenAid for the last several years, I was skeptical, but willing to experiment.  My experience working with wet doughs was helpful: I knew that the soggy mess I was flopping around would eventually come together, and it did.

Great oven spring. The epi is a bit lumpy
One tool that I'd disdained as unnecessary has turned out to be vital in the process: a plastic dough scraper.  If you want to keep air in your dough and get that light, airy crumb, you need one.  It cuts without letting air out, and helps with both mixing and shaping.

I got the big holes in a baguette!
Across the board, I'm happy with the results.  The mini-baguettes, while not perfect, have great holes in the crumb, the best I've gotten with baguettes.  And while the fougasses may be a little clunky, they were also airy and nice to eat, and with practice, I'll get better at them.

These fougasses are not fugazi
The breads pictured here were my own recipe: a 75%-80% hydration lean dough to ensure lightness in the crumb.  I highly recommend Dough as an excellent bread primer with plenty of good techniques, ideas, and recipes.

Short Fiction: A Pennsylvania Haunting, Part One

Part One

     They were all alike, so why should she hate them any differently? Men had defiled her, taken her life, and doomed her to an eternity of torment. She had been young and beautiful and raped and murdered, and for what? Because her cretinous buffoon of a father had chosen nebulous colonial liberty over solid English nobility? If Heaven had opened its gates to the likes of him, she preferred Hell in this house.
For years she prowled the halls, slamming doors and kicking cabinets as if such petty tantrums could scratch the surface of her fury. It was she who had overturned the lamp that burned the first manor to the ground. What did it matter if children lay abed upstairs, with their stupid cow of a mother choking on fumes mere feet from their door? Where were they when King George’s men ravished her first with their cocks and thence with their bayonets? ‘Twould have been better for the woman if she hadn’t married at all.
The very notion of cleaving oneself to a man forever chilled the ectoplasm in her veins. Innocents aside, she’d only killed a boy and his disgusting, oafish father. Hardly a settling of the account. So even with the house charred to ruin and her lonely corpse blackened to sticks in the cellar, she remained.
Oh, the fun she’d had with the foolish man who’d sought to rebuild, a German with dull blue eyes and fishbelly pale skin. He’d styled himself a mason, and while his family lived in Reading, he cleared the debris and dug a new foundation, tossing away her bones with the refuse. She watched him for days, getting to know his habits, and then slowly drove him mad with misplaced tools, spoiled mortar, and hours of whispered obscenities in his ear. She would caress him while he slept and punch his stones before he finished, making every night an agony. Finally, exhausted, he fell off the ladder one morning and broke his back on a heap of bricks. As he writhed and screamed and begged for help, she let herself be seen, flaunting the bloody horror King George’s men had made of her sex. It was his last sight on this Earth.
Eventually, though, the house was rebuilt.
Unwilling to endure years of boredom with nothing to feed her hatred but the recollection of past evils, she learned a form of subtlety. It would be foolish to destroy the house when she could simply ruin the men who lived inside it. Years passed, and she became expert at inflicting a thousand invisible cuts, licking the blood for nourishment. A twist of the faucet to make baby John’s bath a scalding cauldron here, a close of the flue during a snowstorm’s roaring fire there. Impotence was an easy thing to inflict: the smell of rotting flesh in bed, a terrible sobbing only he could hear, the sight of her furious, loathly face before his eyes at every stir of his manhood. Some of the men took their frustrations out on their wives, others on their children, but none felt a moment’s comfort.
The house went through a dozen owners, each determined to raise a family, make a home, live a dream. All failed. Breads never rose, milk always curdled. As the men wept and raged and finally fled from her invisible, endless mischief, she laughed, fulfilled. Why murder when she could torment?
The piano left with one family, its owner made elderly in his forties through a year’s worth of petty tortures. With the new family came a radio, which she made certain could emit only crackling hisses. They had been stubborn, and she wound up pushing their youngest boy down the stairs in a fit of rage at their stupid faith in a God who had never shown His face. When they’d brought in a priest to exorcize her, she cleverly hid, giving no indication of her presence.
Soon enough a new family arrived, replacing the radio with a large box that showed colorless images on an oval screen. That was when she learned how to draw out her tortures, allowing the men to experience occasional moments of pleasure rather than unremitting misery. He could watch his stupid baseball games, but never without frustrating moments of static. She allowed him to cook his meat on the outdoor grill during the summer months, but when his back was turned she fanned the flames to scorching.
She also discovered that men were quick to assign blame if an obvious culprit was offered. Thumbtacks in his shoes could be easily traced to his son, who endured beatings as a result. A roach in his food three dinners running could only be the malicious work of his wife. Drinking followed. Screaming fights. Infidelity. Divorce.
And now, what was this? After three years of emptiness, workmen had arrived with cans of paint and bundles of lumber. Another family to ruin? Though every fiber of her insubstantial body ached to push them off their ladders, she held off to let them finish their work.
It was worth the wait. The new man who’d come to live in her house was weak. A soft midsection and heavy glasses. Receding hairline. In tow, a fragile-looking wife and two teenage daughters with their faces stuck in looks of perpetual disapproval. Perfect.
By next winter she’d have them cutting his throat.

War Stories: Keys Are for Pussies

During my tenure with "the most dangerous press in America," I got to see a lot of very interesting things, talk to some fascinating people, and take part in activities the average person rarely gets to witness.  All of it legal, of course.  When it came time for me to describe some of what I learned in the books The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse and, to a lesser extent, The Blessed Man and the Witch , my younger brother told me, "When I read your books, I know that the fight scenes are realistic."  I appreciated that; it's very difficult to show real-world combat tactics through fiction in a way that makes sense to a reader regularly exposed to media representations of violence.  What follows is an example of an experience I had that would be considered atypical.
We were in the production phase of a shotgun video intended to take the viewer from firearm selection to the penetrating power of various rounds (slug vs. birdshot vs. buckshot) to bare-bones shooting tactics.  Across the board, it was a great instructional video, and arguably the best of its kind.  
Near the end of the first day of production, we drove to the on-site shoot house to show the power of a door-breaching round on an exterior door you'd find on a typical suburban home.  Most people won't ever have to blow a door open with a shotgun, but we had the ammunition and door, and part of the video was about exploding various shotgun myths (like the notion that you can just stand in a doorway and blow scores of people away with one shot).  So we went for it.  
The problem was that we'd forgotten to get the key to the shoot house.  A shoot house (also called a kill house) is a purpose-designed building used for teaching close-range firearms tactics.  Depending on your budget, it might be furnished (to give the trainee a more realistic experience), have a roof, and even video cameras to record the training.  This shoot house was about as good an example as you'd want to train in and included a grate-style ceiling on which the trainer/RO (Range Officer) could walk and observe the drills being practiced.  
But we didn't have the key.  It was back at the main building.  
Rather than go through the rigmarole of getting into the truck and driving the onerous two minutes or so to get it, one of the men with us said he had his lockpicks in the glove box of his car.  In less than a minute he had the lock open and we were setting up our cameras.  The man who'd done it wasn't a professional locksmith or super-secret spy: he was using skills he'd learned and practiced over time to solve a problem.  Most, if not all, of the other men there could have done the same thing.  It wasn't a big deal.  Just thirty seconds with a rake pick and tension tool.
Typical Monday. 

Two Mini Horror Reviews for Your Halloween Pleasure

Happy Halloween!  From its pagan origins to its crass commercialism, it's a great holiday for both kids and adults. Think of how strange it is: children dress up in costumes and go door-to-door demanding candy from strangers.  A kind of forced fellowship with one's neighbors until November 1, when we can go back to politely ignoring each other. I love it.
Breadhead Friday's canceled because of Halloween and the nasty cold I've gotten as a Samhain present from my little boy.  I'm at that apex state of the cold where my head's full of stuff and everything tastes terrible and I feel like hell, but it's Halloween, so I'll eat a lot of chocolate, not taste it, and put up the last few decorations outside.  We're going with a skull and skeletons theme this year.  
Yesterday, I felt too awful to write.  So for the first time in years, I sat, did nothing, and sucked on the glass teat all day.  It's not an experience I want to repeat for a myriad of reasons, but I was at least entertained.  This is what I watched:
V/H/S Like all horror anthology films, this one was a mixed bag.  It was entertaining for the most part, and had some particularly creepy moments.  The unifying plot (Tape 56) of getting some secret VHS tape from the old man was kind of silly, though.  It could have been done better.  The best segment was Amateur Night: nothing in it was terribly unexpected, but it was done well, and had some horrifying moments.  Second Honeymoon had two particularly disturbing moments that saved it from its pedestrian execution.  Tuesday the 17th tried to turn the typical slasher theme on its head and utterly failed: it was easily the weakest of the segments.  The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger tried too hard to create a twist ending and ended up overcomplicating itself, but was pretty watchable.  10/31/98 was good: the characters were realistic, the situations were frightening.  Overall, V/H/S/ is worth a watch.
Hemlock Grove I watched the first two episodes at my wife's request so we could watch the rest together.  I quite like it.  There're some story elements that have so far elevated it above standard vampire/werewolf tropes.  Lili Taylor isn't annoying, but Famke Janssen's English accent is.  I'm looking forward to the remaining episodes, once this rhinovirus lets me stay up past eight.
Have a fun Halloween!
Oh, I almost forgot.   is still free until tomorrow, so get it while supplies last. Free shipping!  Thrills don't get cheaper than this.

Kathleen Hale the Stalker: 4 Things to Consider

Kathleen Hale is a writer who, after having gotten a bad review on her book, stalked the reviewer online, in person, and on the phone.  Hale wrote about her experiences in The Guardian , and the story has elicited a great deal of comment in both writer and reviewer circles.  As usual, I'm a bit late to the party, but I figured I'd make my thoughts known anyway.
There's an expression that I love when it comes to commentary on situations like these: moral preening.  Or, if you prefer, burnishing your moral bona-fides.  In short, you should get no points for taking the moral stand that's self-evidently right, even if many people have taken the opposite position.  There's no bravery in pointing out an obviously wrong thing and saying, "Hey, you shouldn't do that."  With that in mind, it's clear that Hale was completely batshit crazy and shouldn't have stalked the reviewer.  She shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, she's an entitled lunatic, etc. etc.  We know that, so let's move on.This is an interesting piece, if only because it hits the most overwrought high points and completely forgets how unbelievably small the respective author and reviewer pools truly are compared to the population of actual readers.  The vast majority of readers don't give a shit outside of the drama Hale's story has created, which is itself interesting reading.  If all the book bloggers/reviewers went on strike, people would still buy and read books.  Even indie books.  Note also terms like "systematic devaluation of female voices" in the actual piece and comments from readers that include "it all seems to me to be part and parcel of a trend toward silencing women".  This from an opinion piece that does more than just reference a woman writer who stalked a woman reviewer.  If female voices are being devalued, some of the blame must fall upon women, right?  The expression about one's only tool being a hammer and every problem resembling a nail comes to mind.  If everything's about women's issues, nothing's about women's issues.  This isn't about women's issues.I care about reviews: most beginning writers do.  Reviews affect business.  Obviously, I only want honest reviews from people who read the book (no moral preening here).  If the book's great, tell me so.  Tell everyone how great it is so they buy it, too.  However, I ache for the time when none of it will matter so much to me.  It will require a great deal of work to get there, so I just put my head down and write.  When it comes to bad reviews (anything less than 3 stars is a bad review, and even a 3-star review isn't good), they hurt, but you suck it up and move on.  If the reviewer has something pithy to say, you go back and see if the criticism is valid.  Improve where you can and move on.  One thing, though: I reserve the right to hate you a little because you didn't like my book.  Just a little.  I won't act on it.  But it'll be this thing between us.  And you might have forgotten it, but for me, it's always there.  For some writers, the hate is bigger.  For some unhinged writers, there's a need to act on that hate, hence Hale.  Goodreads is where the dastardly attack on Hale's good name was perpetrated.  I dislike Goodreads.  Most authors I speak to feel the same way.  It's tailor-made for the passive-aggressive set, with its context-free rating system that doesn't require that you've read anything further than the blurb to use.  Many Goodreads reviewers love to write long, vicious attack screeds about the books and authors they hate, and these reviewers have gained reader followings for those screeds.  Self-important internet book-tyrants stake out fiefs on Goodreads, and woe to the fool who makes the mistake of expressing a different opinion.  Luckily, Goodreads isn't representative of the reading population.  Hopefully it isn't representative of humanity in general.  Like every other form of social media, it's high school.  It's small.  It's not the real world.  But writers have to acknowledge it.  All the successful writers I respect say the same thing: ignore the reviews.  Write.  Improve.  Market.  Repeat.  It's what I intend to do.

Right after I check my Amazon writer page to see if anyone else has reviewed my books yet.

American Horror Story Season Two: Impressions

Over the course of the last few weeks, I watched the second season of American Horror Story after having been assured by its fans that it was better than the first season, which featured Dylan McDermott crying and masturbating in the early episodes and was generally mediocre.

Unfortunately, I found the second season about as mediocre for similar reasons.

The writers did absolutely nothing to make you care about any of the characters, including Kit Walker, arguably the only "good guy" in the show.  None of them were likable.  You have to like the characters to care about what happens to them, and in horror, very bad things are supposed to happen to them.  One gets possessed by the Devil, one gets raped, many get killed horribly, etc, and it wasn't the least bit affecting.  The reporter character was simply venal and without charm; sister Jude lacked pathos despite piddling late-season efforts to achieve it; and Bloody Face, once unmasked, lacked menace.

It was a mishmash of horror themes that lacked a single unifying thread.  Alien abductions, demonic possession, Nazi experiments, and serial killers: all thrown against the wall, and none of them stuck.  Wouldn't it be interesting to see what the Devil thinks about Gray aliens kidnapping people and experimenting on them?  You won't find it here.  Despite that the story took place, for the most part, in an asylum, they barely touched on an extremely important theme: perception vs reality.  Crazy people and people on drugs often perceive reality as different from what it actually is.  That idea could have been used to show insanity.  It didn't.  There was very little madness in the madhouse.

The show suffered from some very clumsy storytelling elements that should have been taken out.  When the reporter character escapes from Bloody Face, she just happens to get into a car with a crazy, suicidal man?  Really?  That was the best way the writers could think of to bring her back to the asylum?  Didn't make sense.  The subplot with Ian McShane was entertaining, but only because Ian McShane was in it.  Certain characters just dropped off the face of the show for long periods without rhyme or reason.  Story arcs ended abruptly.  We don't get closure in real life, so we want it in our fiction.  Unfortunately, we didn't get that here.

The ending was banal and without surprise or tension.  While it was nice to see Dylan McDermott with his clothes on, his character lacked menace, and it was obvious what would happen to him in the end.  The alien kids end up becoming a lawyer and a doctor, respectively. The Nazi self-immolates.  Kit gets beamed up.  By then, I didn't care.

The show did have one bright spot: the Angel of Death.  She was awesome.  I loved every scene with her in it, even though she was underutilized as a character.