Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Daily Motion.
This week, the hospital becomes a very sad place.
Episode 4.8 “Watch the Skies”
(Dir by Bethany Rooney, originally aired on November 27, 1985)
Mr. Zapata (Frank Ramirez) comes to the ER complaining of stomach pains. He tells Dr. Fiscus that he doesn’t have time for an examination. He just needs something for the pain so he can go back to his job on the loading docks. Fiscus calls in Dr. Westphall, the most depressing man on the planet, for a consult. When Zapata faints, Westphall diagnoses him as suffering from malnutrition. Zapata is an immigrant from El Salvador, and all of his money goes to paying for food for his kids and younger siblings. When he’s given food at the hospital, he insists that his sister, Morena (Edith Diaz), be allowed to take it home for the family.
It’s a sad story. Of course, Westphall makes it all about himself and his struggle to get the Hospital Board to approve his social outreach programs. For the thousandth time this season, he tells Auschlander that he thought people would automatically agree to all of his ideas. Westphall is the only character I know who can meet a man who is starving and turn it into a pity party for himself.
Speaking of sad stories, Colonel Cochrane (David Ackroyd) is informed that, even if he does regain the ability to walk, he will probably never be allowed to ride in another space shuttle. NASA feels that Cochrane’s religious fervor would make people nervous. (Really?) Cochrane’s wife gets frustrated with him always talking about God and leaves him. Cochrane has yet another vision of himself floating in space. He falls out of his hospital bed and nearly breaks his neck. Dr. Morrison tells Cochrane that God would not want him to destroy himself.
Poor Dr. Morrison. He spends this entire episode getting physically ill because he’s so worried about taking his third remedial exam. It’s actually kind of amazing that Morrison is being allowed to treat high-profile patients (like the astronaut) when he really shouldn’t even be allowed to practice medicine in the first place. (Last season, in case you forgot, Morrison confessed to getting his medical degree from a fly-by-night medical school in South America.)
When Dr. Turner’s ex-husband (Charles Weldon) comes to the hospital and asks her to consider returning to her hometown in Mississippi and serving as the town’s doctor, Chandler gets jealous. Turner informs Chandler that he’ll never be a good doctor unless he learns how to care about other people. Then she dumps him.
At the insistence of Bobby Caldwell, Ehrlich is kicked out of his plastic surgery rotation and assigned to gynecology. Meanwhile, Bobby continues to be a sleaze who hits on every woman in the hospital while obsessing over his new facial scar.
Nurse Rosenthal gets into an argument with abrasive Nurse Lucy Papandrao (Jennifer Savidge). Rosenthal accuses Lucy of being “autocratic.” Lucy accuses Rosenthal of being a suck-up who brings all of her personal problems into the hospital and whose “bratty kids are calling up here all the time.” Rosenthal slaps Lucy. Somehow, Rosenthal does not lose her job, which kind of supports Lucy’s claim that Rosenthal gets special treatment.
Seriously, is no one happy at St. Eligius?
Well, there is one happy couple, and their identity might surprise you. When Dr. Craig comes into work, he finds Gene Galecki (Ramon Bieri) waiting for him with Dr. Craig’s infant granddaughter, Barbara. Gene explains that Yvonne seems to be reacting well but that she still has a long way to go in her recovery. Gene says that he and his wife are going to have to devote all of their time to taking care of Yvonne. He asks Dr. Craig to look after Barbara. Dr. Craig agrees. When he calls Ellen and gives her the news, she’s overjoyed. For that matter, so is Dr. Craig.
So Mark and Ellen Craig end this episode happy. Who would have guessed? Personally, I’m happy for them. Watching this show, it’s easy to get used to the idea of Dr. Craig as always being sarcastic and prickly. This episode reminds us that Dr. Craig is just as compelling when he’s in a good mood.
In the end, there’s a lot of sadness in this episode. Fortunately, there’s some happiness too. That’s a lesson for us all.
Last year around this time, I was sitting poolside at a resort in Maui when I wrote about Charles Bronson’s career in the 1950’s. A year later, I’m sitting on the beach in Perdido Key, FL, and it seems like the perfect time to write about Bronson in the 1960’s! Holy hell… a guy just caught a shark!!
Random Beach Guy with Shark – He released the Shark back into the ocean right after I took this pic!
Back to Bronson, the 1960’s were a pivotal decade in Charles Bronson’s personal life and career. As the decade started, he was headlining his own TV series, MAN WITH A CAMERA, although that show’s run would end in 1960. He would also have a memorable supporting role in the classic western, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960). His portrayal of Bernardo O’Reilly would be one of the most heroic of the film. This type of supporting performance would come to be a staple for Bronson throughout the 1960’s.
Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)
For the most part, it seems that Charles Bronson’s career would settle into a series of important co-starring roles in both television and in major motion pictures. The most important of these movies were his excellent performances in classics like THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967). He also had important supporting roles in popular films like KID GALAHAD (1962) with Elvis Presley, THE SANDPIPER (1965) with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED (1966) with Natalie Wood and Robert Redford.
Charles Bronson and Natalie Wood in THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED (1966)
On TV, he was performing in prominent “guest star” roles in classic TV series like ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, BONANZA, GUNSMOKE, RAWHIDE, and THE F.B.I. He also had turned into an actor who would join a TV series already in progress to help class it up some. He would provide that service to EMPIRE (1962-1963), starring Richard Egan and Ryan O’Neal, as well as THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE MCPHEETERS (1963-1964) starring a young Kurt Russell. While he seemed to be everywhere, and there were some exceptions, it seemed he was always the guest star and never the star. This was very frustrating for an actor who had already spent over a decade providing strong support to bigger stars, while his contemporaries like Steve McQueen and James Coburn were headlining their own films. But things were about to change in a big way for Bronson, in both his personal life and professional life.
Kurt Russell and Charles Bronson in THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE MCPHEETERS Television series
First, his personal life… Charles Bronson had been married to Harriet Tendler Bronson from 1949 to 1965. He met Jill Ireland on the set of THE GREAT ESCAPE in 1962 when she was there with her then-husband David McCallum, who was also starring in the film. Legend has it that Bronson told McCallum that he was going to “marry his wife,” but who really knows what’s fact and what’s fiction when it comes to Hollywood. Regardless, Bronson and Ireland would both get divorced in the sixties and marry each other on October 5th, 1968. They were a true Hollywood love story and would be inseparable until her death from breast cancer in 1990.
Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland
Jill Ireland turned out to be crucial in the success of Charles Bronson’s career. She was able to convince him to accept some of the offers that he had been receiving to go to Europe where he could finally be the “star” of his movies. The first of these films was FAREWELL, FRIEND (1968), where he would co-star with international superstar Alain Delon. Delon had specifically requested Bronson based on his strong performance a decade earlier in Roger Corman’s MACHINE GUN KELLY. Bronson would steal the film from Delon and it would be a huge box office hit across Europe. Suddenly, Bronson found himself to be a sex symbol across the continent. When I was a kid in the 80’s, this movie was only available on terrible VHS tapes under the title HONOR AMONG THIEVES. I didn’t fully appreciate how important it was to Bronson’s career until decades later.
Charles Bronson and Alain Delon in FAREWELL, FRIEND (1968)
Bronson’s next film would turn him into a true international stud when he would play Harmonica in Sergio Leone’s ultimate masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968). His incredible screen presence would dominate a film that featured excellent performances from Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and possibly the most beautiful woman on earth, Claudia Cardinale. Leone had wanted to work with Bronson for years, including all three films in the “Dollars” trilogy, but it had never worked out. While their film was butchered for its American release, it was a monster hit all across Europe and Bronson would be one of the biggest stars on the planet for the next decade.
Charles Bronson in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
The 1960’s turned out to be a great decade for Charles Bronson. He married the love of his life and became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, even if he wasn’t fully appreciated in his home country yet. But we’ll get to that next when we discuss the 1970’s, his most successful decade of all!
“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”
Warhammer 40,000—usually shortened to Warhammer 40K, 40K, or simply Warhammer—is a science-fiction miniature wargame and one of modern pop culture’s largest shared fictional universes. Built around the famously bleak promise that “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” it imagines humanity in the 41st millennium: still alive, but reduced to a decaying, fanatical, militarized empire fighting an endless conflict against aliens, demonic powers, and its own self-destructive instincts.
What began in 1987 as a strange, punk-inflected tabletop release has become a global entertainment property spanning miniatures, novels, comics, animation, video games, audiobooks, collectible figures, apparel, and planned screen projects. Its strength is that it works on several levels at once: it is a tactical game, an art-and-modeling hobby, an enormous science-fiction mythology, a cosmic-horror setting, a military epic, and a satire of authoritarianism pushed so far that it becomes monstrous.
From Rogue Trader to a Global Hobby
Warhammer 40K emerged from Games Workshop’s earlier success with Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Founded in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, Games Workshop began as a hobby company concerned with mail-order games, tabletop role-playing games, and miniatures. After the release of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 1983, the company developed a science-fiction counterpart: Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, released in 1987. Games Workshop identifies that launch as a major turning point and says the game rapidly became the world’s most popular wargame.
The original Rogue Trader was far stranger and less regimented than modern 40K. It was part skirmish game, part tabletop role-playing game, and part open-ended science-fiction sandbox. Players might command a small expedition of explorers, mercenaries, aliens, mutants, pirates, or Imperial agents rather than the large armies associated with the game today. The rules encouraged improvisation, scenario-building, character creation, and the invention of bizarre corners of a hostile galaxy.
Its titular Rogue Traders were Imperial explorers and licensed opportunists: merchants, colonizers, diplomats, archaeologists, and private adventurers granted authority to travel beyond the Imperium’s established borders. That concept captures early 40K’s loose, exploratory spirit. The setting was a collage of pulp adventure, cosmic horror, war fiction, medieval religious imagery, dystopian bureaucracy, science-fiction clichés, and black comedy.
As later editions arrived, Warhammer 40K increasingly became an army-scale miniature wargame. Players began building forces around recognizable factions, leaders, squads, vehicles, and monsters. They buy unpainted plastic or resin kits, assemble them from separate parts, customize their weaponry and colors, paint them, and deploy them on terrain-filled tables.
A game may involve infantry formations, tanks, artillery, giant psychic creatures, alien swarms, aircraft, war machines, and genetically engineered super-soldiers. Dice resolve shooting, melee attacks, armor saves, morale, special abilities, and unpredictable battlefield events. Rulebooks and faction codexes provide the mechanical framework, but the miniatures remain the true center of the hobby. They are game pieces, collectible objects, art projects, and physical embodiments of the fiction.
A Universe Built From Influences
Part of Warhammer 40K’s longevity comes from its deliberately hybrid nature. It was never built from one source, genre, or artistic philosophy. It is a science-fantasy setting assembled from decades of literature, comics, horror, military fiction, mythology, history, tabletop gaming, heavy-metal album art, and British satire. Its most distinctive achievement is not inventing every ingredient from scratch; it is fusing familiar influences into a universe with an immediately recognizable voice and aesthetic.
Frank Herbert’s Dune is among the clearest and most consequential influences. Dune supplied a model for science fiction that felt ancient, religious, feudal, ecological, political, and mythic all at once. The 40K Emperor shares obvious conceptual territory with Leto Atreides II, the transformed ruler at the center of Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune. Rick Priestley has explicitly compared the Emperor to Leto, noting the shared notion of a ruler defined by long-term sacrifice and an individual transformed into a reluctant or burdensome deity.
The influence appears throughout 40K’s structure. The title “God-Emperor,” the use of “lasgun,” the importance of interstellar navigation, the dangers of psychic power, and the notion of a galaxy shaped by feudal houses, religious institutions, and decaying imperial authority all evoke the imaginative territory Herbert helped popularize. The Imperium is not a direct copy of Herbert’s Imperium, but it channels the same sense of vast history and civilizational exhaustion: humanity has conquered the stars, yet has become trapped by the systems it created.
Dune also helps explain why 40K feels less like sleek technological futurism and more like a medieval empire projected into space. The Imperium has spaceships, energy weapons, genetic engineering, and interstellar travel, but it is socially structured around dynasties, priesthoods, hereditary institutions, sacred relics, and ritualized warfare. A starship captain can wield authority like a feudal noble; a machine-priest can treat a computer system as a holy object; an entire planet can be governed according to rules that resemble an exaggerated mixture of medieval monarchy, colonial empire, and religious absolutism.
Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers also looms behind the setting, especially in its militarized future, armored infantry, planetary invasions, and questions about citizenship, duty, service, and the relationship between soldiers and the state. The Space Marine may not be a direct lift from Heinlein’s mobile infantry, but 40K shares the image of heavily armored future soldiers descending into hostile worlds as humanity’s elite warriors. The major difference is tonal. Heinlein’s novel is explicitly invested in debating civic responsibility and military service; 40K turns militarized citizenship and state power into a far more excessive, terrifying, and baroque nightmare.
The roots of Chaos reach deeply into the work of Michael Moorcock, especially the Elric stories, the broader Eternal Champion cycle, and Moorcock’s recurring tension between cosmic order and cosmic chaos. Priestley has said that Realm of Chaos, a foundational early Warhammer supplement, drew inspiration from Moorcock’s fiction. Moorcock’s influence can be felt in Warhammer’s willingness to treat Chaos as more than generic evil. It is a metaphysical force of mutation, temptation, instability, transformation, corruption, and destructive freedom.
The Chaos Gods of 40K are not simply demons waiting outside reality. They are entities shaped by mortal emotion and civilization’s psychic debris. Rage creates Khorne, ambition feeds Tzeentch, despair strengthens Nurgle, and obsession empowers Slaanesh. That fusion of cosmic mythology and inner human failing is distinctly Moorcockian in spirit, even as 40K develops it into a universe of its own.
Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is another key lens through which to understand the Imperium. Miller’s post-apocalyptic novel imagines a future in which religious custodians preserve fragments of lost knowledge after civilization collapses, often without fully understanding what they have saved. The Adeptus Mechanicus—the techno-priests of Mars—operates on a grandiose science-fiction version of that principle. It preserves ancient technologies, treats machines as sacred, seeks lost artifacts, and often turns scientific understanding into religious ritual.
The Imperium’s relationship with technology is therefore central to its tragedy. Humanity possesses equipment advanced beyond anything available in the present day, yet much of that knowledge has been forgotten, distorted, or rendered taboo. A machine can be repaired through liturgical procedure. A blueprint can be treated like scripture. Innovation can be regarded with suspicion because it threatens inherited dogma. A Canticle for Leibowitz offers one important ancestor for that image of civilization after knowledge has become relic, ritual, and superstition.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost also echoes through 40K, most strongly in the story of the Emperor, his Primarch sons, and the Horus Heresy. The broad outline has unmistakable Biblical and Miltonic flavor: a father figure of immense authority creates near-divine sons; his favored son falls into rebellion; a vast heavenly order is split by betrayal; the resulting war reshapes creation; and the remnants of the fallen become demons or devils waging eternal war against their former kin.
Horus Lupercal is not simply Satan, and the Emperor is emphatically not a straightforward God figure. 40K is too morally compromised for that kind of clean analogy. The Emperor can be visionary, tyrant, savior, manipulator, father, failed reformer, and imprisoned god all at once. Yet the emotional architecture is Biblical: the fall of beloved sons, the tragedy of betrayal, the creation of a false church around a broken father, and the transformation of rebellion into eternal damnation.
British comics are just as important as canonical science-fiction novels. The influence of 2000 AD—especially its anarchic, darkly comic, satirical approach to dystopia—helps explain 40K’s original voice. Judge Dredd offered a future city-state defined by absurdly authoritarian law enforcement, brutal social control, violence, and exaggerated fascistic spectacle. The comic’s writers and artists mixed dystopian science fiction with satire and a distinctive, sometimes savage sense of humor.
That sensibility can be found in 40K’s hive cities, the planet-sized urban slums and industrial nightmares where billions live under crushing conditions. It can be found in the Adeptus Arbites, the Imperium’s heavily armed enforcers; in the Inquisition’s secret-police authority; and in the setting’s fascination with rules so vast and convoluted that they become a form of madness. If Dune helped give 40K its mythic science-fantasy scale, 2000 AD helped give it its dystopian absurdity and its willingness to make political cruelty both horrifying and grotesquely ridiculous.
The Grim Darkness of Humanity
The universe of Warhammer 40K is set roughly 38,000 years in the future, during the 41st millennium. Humanity once spread across the stars during a technological golden age, but that civilization collapsed under the weight of war, artificial intelligence, psychic catastrophe, isolation, and rebellion. By the present-day setting, human worlds have been reassembled into the Imperium of Man, an unimaginably vast empire that is too decentralized, bureaucratic, and dangerous to be fully governed.
The Imperium is humanity’s main shield against extinction, but it is also one of genre fiction’s most oppressive regimes. It is a theocracy governed through censorship, terror, war, forced labor, religious obedience, and endless sacrifice. Its authorities routinely destroy entire populations to stop the spread of Chaos, mutation, rebellion, or alien influence. Its citizens are taught to fear difference and accept death in the Emperor’s service as the highest possible duty.
At the center is the Emperor of Mankind. Long ago, the Emperor was an active psychic ruler who attempted to unite humanity under a secular, rational Imperium. Following the catastrophic civil war known as the Horus Heresy, he was mortally wounded and placed upon the Golden Throne, a colossal life-support device on Terra—the future Earth. Ten thousand years later, he is physically inert, sustained by immense sacrifice, but is worshipped as a literal god by trillions of Imperial citizens.
The irony is crucial: the Emperor’s earlier project was hostile to religion, yet the civilization founded in his name has turned him into the center of a fanatical state faith. His dead or dying body has become a symbol that justifies absolute obedience, endless crusades, censorship, and the persecution of anyone defined as impure or disloyal.
The galaxy is connected by the Warp, a parallel psychic dimension used for interstellar travel and communication. But the Warp is unstable, dangerous, and shaped by mortal thought and emotion. It is home to Chaos, a supernatural force embodied by four great gods:
Khorne, the god of rage, war, slaughter, blood, and martial violence.
Tzeentch, the god of change, sorcery, mutation, ambition, manipulation, and conspiracy.
Nurgle, the god of plague, decay, despair, entropy, and grim endurance.
Slaanesh, the god of obsession, pleasure, excess, perfection, sensation, and self-destruction.
Chaos is both an external threat and an internal consequence. It feeds on the fear, pain, rage, greed, and desperation of sentient life. The more brutal and hopeless the galaxy becomes, the stronger Chaos becomes. This makes the universe a self-perpetuating tragedy: the Imperium commits atrocities to preserve itself, but its cruelty produces exactly the despair and violence upon which its greatest enemy thrives.
Fascism, Satire, and the Imperium
Any serious account of Warhammer 40K has to address the politics embedded in the Imperium of Man. Its authoritarian, fascistic, xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, and theocratic character is foundational to the setting. It is not a decorative aesthetic applied to otherwise uncomplicated heroes. The Imperium is a nightmare-state built from state violence, militant conformity, religious terror, permanent war, enforced ignorance, and the idea that collective survival excuses every atrocity.
The Imperium’s language is full of concepts familiar to real-world authoritarian movements: purity, loyalty, unity, sacrifice, tradition, enemies within, enemies without, obedience to sacred authority, and extermination of the “other.” Aliens are not merely rivals but existential contaminants. Mutants are treated as proof of corruption. Heresy is not a disagreement but a disease. Citizens are expendable resources in a war machine. The state is sacred; doubt is treason.
But that is not an invitation to admire the Imperium. Its grotesque political logic is part of the property’s original satirical foundation. The early Rogue Trader era was shaped by the same punk, anti-establishment, dystopian, and satirical energy that ran through much British genre culture during the 1980s. Its creators were working against the backdrop of Thatcher-era Britain, a period of profound political conflict over nationalism, policing, class, militarism, organized labor, public institutions, and the treatment of dissent.
The broader Warhammer line occasionally made that influence explicit. The 1986 campaign The Enemy Within, written for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, included Empress Magritta/Magraritha as a pointed satire of Margaret Thatcher, while its title echoed Thatcher’s notorious rhetoric about “the enemy within.” It would be simplistic to reduce the whole of 40K to a single anti-Thatcher allegory, especially after decades of expansion under many writers. Yet the setting’s foundational instinct was to take authoritarian rhetoric and imperial fantasy to ridiculous, horrifying extremes.
The Imperium is the ultimate in-joke about the bankruptcy of those ideas. It asks what would happen if every authoritarian fantasy—racialized or species-based purity, sacred hierarchy, militarized masculinity, obedience, nationalism, fear of outsiders, religious certainty, and expansion through force—were granted total control over a galaxy for ten thousand years. The answer is not a stable civilization. It is stagnation, paranoia, ignorance, endless violence, and a government that can preserve life only by making life unbearable.
This is why far-right and fascistic bad-faith actors who try to claim the Imperium as an ideal are missing the point, whether unintentionally or deliberately. They see its armored soldiers, skull-covered banners, huge weapons, slogans about purity, and worship of the God-Emperor as an image of restored order. Yet 40K frames the actual consequences of this “order” as horrific: worlds burned clean, populations sacrificed, dissidents tortured, knowledge lost, and humanity spiritually hollowed out.
Games Workshop has directly addressed real-world prejudice and fascist appropriation in its community. It stated that it would “never accept nor condone any form of prejudice, hatred, or abuse,” described the Imperium as driven by hatred and extreme xenophobia, and declared: “The Imperium is driven by hate. Warhammer is not.” The company also stated that people displaying real-world hate symbols or behaving in discriminatory ways are not welcome in official stores, events, or the Warhammer community.
The satire can become complicated because Warhammer 40K is made to be visually spectacular. It sells massive armored warriors, cathedral-sized starships, gigantic tanks, heroic last stands, and grandiose military imagery. A Guardsman defending civilians or a Space Marine holding a city against monsters can still be brave. Individual courage is real within the fiction. But the heroic action of a character should not be confused with moral endorsement of the system that character serves.
A good way to understand the setting is to distinguish people from institutions. A soldier can be selfless; the empire can remain monstrous. A Space Marine can save a planet from Tyranids; the Imperium can still be a fascistic theocracy. The tragedy is that many of the setting’s protagonists have been born into conditions where brutality is taught as necessity and alternatives appear impossible.
Factions, Heroes, and Horrors
The most famous force in Warhammer 40K is the Adeptus Astartes, better known as the Space Marines. They are genetically engineered, heavily indoctrinated super-soldiers created from the genetic legacy of ancient demigod generals. Organized into independent Chapters rather than massive unified legions, Space Marines are the Imperium’s elite shock troops—the “Angels of Death.”
The Ultramarines are disciplined and highly organized warriors with Roman-style military and civic imagery. The Blood Angels are noble heroes afflicted by a hereditary thirst for bloodshed. The Dark Angels are secretive knightly warriors haunted by ancient betrayal. The Space Wolves use Viking and Norse mythic imagery, while the Black Templars are crusading religious zealots who embrace the Imperium’s faith with particular intensity.
The Imperium is much more than Space Marines. The Astra Militarum, also called the Imperial Guard, consists of ordinary human soldiers confronting impossible threats with rifles, tanks, artillery, discipline, and numbers. The Adeptus Mechanicus are the cybernetic techno-priests of Mars who preserve and worship ancient machines. The Adepta Sororitas, or Sisters of Battle, are armed warrior-nuns who serve the Imperial faith. The Inquisition hunts heresy, alien infiltration, rogue psykers, and Chaos cults with nearly unlimited authority. The Adeptus Custodes are the Emperor’s golden-armored bodyguards, while the secretive Grey Knights specialize in combating daemons.
The main human enemy is Chaos, and its most iconic servants are the Chaos Space Marines—the descendants of legions that rebelled against the Emperor during the Horus Heresy. The disease-ravaged Death Guard serve Nurgle. The occult Thousand Sons serve Tzeentch. The berserk World Eaters serve Khorne. These factions illustrate one of the franchise’s recurring themes: virtues such as courage, ambition, loyalty, knowledge, and strength can be warped into fanaticism, cruelty, obsession, and self-destruction.
The xenos factions are equally essential. The Orks are massive green war-addicts who find genuine joy in combat, making them one of the setting’s strangest blends of comedy and menace. The Aeldari, formerly called Eldar, are an ancient psychic species divided among multiple societies, including the nomadic Craftworld Aeldari and the sadistic Drukhari raiders. The Necrons are ancient machine dynasties awakening from tomb worlds to reclaim a galaxy they believe belongs to them. The T’au Empire is technologically advanced and organized around the “Greater Good,” but its rhetoric of unity also hides coercion, surveillance, and imperial expansion.
The Tyranids provide the setting’s purest form of cosmic horror. They are an extragalactic hive species controlled by the immense Hive Mind. They do not want land, gold, ideological victory, revenge, or diplomacy. They consume worlds for biomass. A Tyranid invasion strips a planet of plants, animals, people, oceans, and every possible usable resource. Their advance is often prepared by Genestealer Cults, which infiltrate human societies, breed hybrid populations, incite rebellion, and prepare entire worlds to be devoured.
The Horus Heresy and Mainstream Rise
The foundational historical event in Warhammer 40K is the Horus Heresy, a galaxy-wide civil war that occurred ten thousand years before the main setting. In humanity’s earlier period of expansion, the Emperor launched the Great Crusade, a campaign to reunite scattered human worlds beneath a secular Imperium. To command his armies, he created twenty Primarchs, superhuman sons and generals whose genetic material was used to create the original Space Marine Legions.
The Emperor’s favored son was Horus Lupercal, whom he named Warmaster. Horus was manipulated and corrupted by Chaos, then led roughly half of the Space Marine Legions in rebellion against the Emperor. The father-and-son imagery echoes Paradise Lost and Biblical tales of rebellion, but 40K gives it a brutally ambiguous twist: the Emperor is not a blameless divine father, and his rebellious sons are not united by a coherent moral cause. The war is a catastrophe born from pride, secrecy, ambition, manipulation, and the failure of a ruler who tried to shape humanity’s future through absolute control.
The Heresy ended during the Siege of Terra. The Emperor confronted Horus aboard the traitor’s flagship and destroyed him, but received mortal wounds in the process. The Emperor’s survival on the Golden Throne saved humanity from immediate collapse, yet it also ensured that the Imperium would spend the next ten thousand years worshipping a broken relic instead of realizing the future he claimed to seek.
The Horus Heresy became one of the franchise’s largest literary projects through the expansive The Horus Heresy novel series, and its ancient battles now form the basis of the dedicated tabletop game Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. Its impact explains nearly every major feature of modern 40K: the division of Space Marines into Chapters, the hatred between loyalists and traitors, the divinity of the Emperor, and the Imperium’s permanent paranoia about betrayal.
For decades, Warhammer 40K was huge within hobby culture but comparatively specialized in wider popular culture. Its mainstream growth accelerated through video games, online miniature-painting communities, audiobooks, social media, and increasingly polished adaptations. Relic Entertainment’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War helped establish the setting as a major PC strategy property after its 2004 release. Later games such as Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 made the franchise accessible to people who may never have collected miniatures.
Black Library, Games Workshop’s fiction label, also made the setting more accessible by turning its lore into character-driven stories. Eisenhorn works as a detective thriller and political mystery centered on the Inquisition. Gaunt’s Ghosts follows ordinary soldiers through the machinery of Imperial war. Ciaphas Cain brings a more comic, self-aware perspective to the setting. The Horus Heresy transforms the franchise’s oldest backstory into a vast tragic saga.
The move toward television and animation marks the clearest mainstream expansion yet. Secret Level featured a Warhammer 40,000 animated episode in 2024, while Amazon MGM Studios, Blur Studios, and Games Workshop are developing a larger animated project connected to the Deathwatch. Henry Cavill is attached as an executive producer and is also associated with Amazon’s developing live-action Warhammer 40,000 project.
Ultimately, Warhammer 40K has endured because it is not merely a franchise about powerful soldiers and giant battles. It is a gigantic, flexible setting that can support military tragedy, gothic horror, cosmic horror, detective stories, religious dystopia, dark comedy, political intrigue, space opera, and apocalyptic adventure. Its most enduring insight is that a civilization cannot build genuine security through hatred, obedience, and endless war. In Warhammer 40K, those ideas do not create order. They create the grim darkness from which no one can escape.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly watch parties. On Twitter, I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday and I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday. On Mastodon, I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 1971’s The French Connection!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, find The French Connection on Prime, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there happily tweeting. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Thank God It’s Friday is admittedly not a great film but it does have a few fun moments. One of my favorites is Chick Vennera’s exuberant dance scene. Here he is, using a bunch of cars as his dance floor.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 64th birthday to David Fincher! It’s time for….
4 Shots from 4 David Fincher Films
Seven (1995, dir by David Fincher. DP: Darius Khondji)
Fight Club (1999, dir by David Fincher, DP: Jeff Croneweth)
Zodiac (2007, dir by David Fincher, DP: Harris Savides)
Mank (2020, dir by David Fincher, DP: Erik Messerschmidt)
This video was directed by Martin Scorsese, who was frequently described as being one of Robbie Robertson’s best friends. (Robertson is also credited as having been the music supervisor for many of Scorsese’s films.) This was Scorsese’s second music video to direct, following Michael Jackson’s Bad.
Appearing with Robertson in the video is Maria McKee, the singer who may best known for “If Love Is A Red Dress (Hang Me In Rags),” which appeared on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Hunter, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1991. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!
This week, things are getting hot!
Episode 1.18: “Fire Man”
(Dir Tony Mordente, originally aired May 11th, 1985)
Somebody in Los Angeles has got a military-grade flamethrower and is using it to set fires all over the city.
When a homeless man perishes in a burning warehouse, Hunter and McCall get involved. Their first suspect is a nervous man named Jack Lachman (William Russ, giving a better performance than the material probably deserved), who always seems to show up in the crowds that gather to watch the flames. Jack swears he’s innocent and that the arsonist is instead a former Special Forces operative with whom he served in Vietnam. Jack also claims that the arsons are connected to a war crime that Jack and his fellow soldiers covered up.
Also getting involved is Matt Gold (Mark Schneider), a reporter determined to get the story and unconcerned about whether he messes up the investigation in the process. At first, McCall thinks Matt is harmless. Hunter does not. Not surprisingly, Hunter turns out to be right: the media gets in the way of solving and preventing crimes.
This episode was all about visual style. The plot wasn’t terribly complicated, but the shots of the arsonist setting his fires were disturbing, as were the images of the flames quickly consuming anything they touched. The scene in which the arsonist takes out a witness was disturbingly violent, even by Hunter’s standards. At the same time, the song that seemed to play whenever the arsonist appeared quickly got old.
As violent as the episode got, there was something reassuring about Hunter and McCall once again stopping the bad guy and saving the city—and doing it while trading quips. It’s a scary world out there, this episode seemed to be saying, but luckily we’ve got Hunter and McCall to take out the trash.
Through the Shattered Lens 