Yolapukka

I have so much disdain for the ending. Did Ivy actually manage to overpower Mark by biting his lip, then using her toothpick arms to slam his head into the wall? I keep thinking I missed something, like the taking of some sedatives, but I re-watched the scenes and nothing like that happened. What the hell? am I really supposed to believe he was immobilized while she undid the multiple locks, tottered down the fiery staircase and escaped the smoke-filled hallway after laboriously fumbling at the front door? I didn't understand why they needed to tie things up with that tribute to Jerry Bruckheimer when the house exploded behind her and her family miraculously swooped in minutes later to surround her in hugs. The worst part, other than the final few minutes, was the continuously snowballing incompetence of the police, especially the detectives in charge. The low point being the decision to block a large speeding van with a small car, thus ending any possibility of following him. It was a continuous parade of low points with those two. They were so unprofessional that I expected one or both of them to be pulled off the case early on. It beggared belief that the traumatized little girl would have had anything to do with a hairy injured detective simmering with rage because he spoke in a soft tone, or that her drawing was so useful that the police were able to pull up just in time to see Ivy rescue herself, thus rendering their miraculous pinpointing of her location utterly moot. There was a great deal throughout the series that was intriguing and drew me in, the performances were good overall, though the writing for the police detectives was so shabby, unlikeable and inconsistent that there was no saving those roles. What little we saw of Mark was disturbing, the manipulation, the gaslighting, the violence and it was believable that he had kept Ivy all those years. My take on the referencing of Ivy as "Alison" is he regarded Ivy as being so much his possession that she wasn't even allowed to keep her name, he renamed her like a dog he'd picked up at the pound. Ivy didn't exist, Alison was who he wanted her to be, the clean, good girl in a demure frump-frock who took her clothes off for him and was similarly obedient to his needs and did as she was told. (It was also convenient that she had a new name to answer to when he allowed her out with him.)

Ann's new home; https://www.cbc.ca/life/home/inside-the-home-of-real-toronto-housewife-and-soon-to-be-drake-neighbor-ann-kaplan-1.4314725

I won't be boycotting, that implies an active interest I've entirely lost. I will simply cease to watch it. I doubt I could be drawn back into it if Carl's death turns out to be another ridiculous fake-out, because I'm not really interested in a show that would repeatedly pull those kind of stunts either.

I'm reading this thread to spoil myself so I won't have to watch and waste my time with a formerly good show turning to absolute crap. I'm so glad I stopped watching out of disinterest partway through. I don't even particularly care that much about Carl as a character in and of himself, but his place in relation to others was important. (Especially with Glenn gone.) I'm actually kind of amused that Gimple is justifying the decision to kill him off in order to keep Negan stinking up the joint. So they're jumping left where the comics went right in order to honour a bad plot point from the comics. That is spectacularly brainless. Even if they hadn't decided to kill Carl off I'd have a hard time persuading myself to give the show more of my time after the past year. The writing has been So. Damn. Bad.

I not only forgot to watch this week, I could not even remember if I had skipped it. I had to come here and look at the most recent episode thread. Having read through the thread, I am now utterly confused as to whether I will attempt to watch on a later airing, eventually catch it ad-free on Netflix so I can FF when the stupid burns too much or just forget about it.

I think this would be a great, or at least improved, use of the character, No more blathering, just brief shots of Negan chortling, other marginally longer scenes where his laughter trails off into silence (glorious silence) until he yells something about "shitting pants!" and starts up again.

I think the episode, except for one dubious choice at the end worked really well for me. From a dramatic standpoint, Eleven/Jane hiding out in the cabin until she could be drawn back into the main storyline is not interesting. I wanted to see what would happen when she encountered her mother and was able to understand what Hopper meant when he told her she wasn't around anymore. I largely enjoyed the way it introduced Kali, though I'd be happy if the other characters in her storyline would disappear. I liked the fact that she had two very different opportunities to find a family and had the awareness to see why neither would really work out for her. As well-meaning as her Aunt is, it's not really in her wheelhouse to be capable of protecting Jane, she couldn't even manage to be appropriately discreet when she left a message for Hopper. Kali and co. are just big trouble. Kali is quite destructive (the name choice seems very deliberate) and is on a path that will probably lead her and those with her to death or, possibly worse, capture. I can't say I greatly disapprove of her mission to rid the world of some genuinely evil people, but, as Jane grasped fairly quickly, life is too complicated for something as simple as revenge to set things right. She's not a good person for Jane to be around right now, although I think Kali genuinely cares about her, she's too manipulative and angry to do anything other than put Jane in danger, both actual and moral. I think they are underlining fairly heavily that the older girl will have a continued presence on the show by emphasizing that they are sisters, especially with Jane's mother supporting the idea. No matter what Kali tried to claim, I don't think Jane's mother wanted to her to find her sister because she wants revenge. I kind of doubt she knows what the girl is up to, I do think she wanted for her to be alright and for Jane to find her because hopefully together, they could keep each other safe. I didn't see anything about Kali that suggested spin-off, her mission is not that interesting a premise and the characters she was with are dull and disposable. I could only remember the name of one and that's only because I heard it so many times with in the episode. Axel, AKA Mohawked asshole who seemed to have accidentally wound up in the wrong warehouse on his way to join Clarence Boddicker's gang. I was expecting and frankly hoping he'd die in a hail of bullets while screeching "Eat hot lead! Copper!!!" well before the end. He very nearly didn't disappoint. Almost as obnoxious was the ratted-hair loudmouth girl, and of the two remaining, large folded-arm guy, barely registered as a presence at all and only getaway driver chick seemed like someone capable of doing a passable impersonation of a decent human being with dimension beyond "lets wreck stuff, and take down the man, ma-aaan.". Kali's merry gang of miscreants can go away , never to be seen again, and I hope they do. Quite possibly that was exactly how I was supposed to react to them. I was intrigued by what Pruitt Taylor Vince's character said about Brenner. I think his death was fairly unambiguous, I really don't expect him to pop up as anything more than a figment of Kali's powers so I think the claim he's alive was likely nothing more than a desperate man trying to stay alive. However, if the upside down is a parallel dimension that is crossing over, could that meant that in a way the head Demi-gorgon is related to the evil Brenner put out in our world, that in a sense an aspect of him still exists? Even without that possibility, I thought it was interesting that Will referred to the main presence of the hive-mind as "he" as opposed to an it or even a she, as the head of a hive is usually female. My biggest problem with the episode is the point in the timeline that Jane realizes Mike and Hopper are in danger. At that point they are literally minutes away from a swarm of demo-gorgons launching an assault from within on the facility. She has to get to an intra-city bus, take the bus, make her way through town to the facility before she can even hope to help them. That seems like it could take a few hours. Even if she'd instead persuaded Kali's bunch to drive her with the pedal to the metal, it seems like an awfully long time would pass. It would have worked better for me if she'd realized the potential danger when it was a little less imminent at an earlier point in their timeline before it was obvious to them. I'm hoping the attack has a fairly long timeline so we aren't taken out of things by her arriving in the nick of time mere minutes after things go horribly wrong at the lab. This show is quite good about avoiding those sorts of sloppy writing mistakes, so it would be quite a shock if they drop the ball like that.

The conspiracy dude is such an off-putting sleaze that it made Jonathan and Nancy, who have an enjoyable dynamic, seem super gross to me due to the context. I hope the bedbugs didn't bite. His hovel seemed likelier to host vermin than the motel they'd bunked in previously. Nothing is going to come of those tapes, unless they mailed one to the National Inquirer. At first I thought Max and Billy might turn out to be numbers, like Six and Eleven. Otherwise, I don't know why he's there. He's so off in every way. I kept wondering if I'd misunderstood the relationship and he was the stepdad. Maybe he's a tribute to those teen movies where everyone looked thirty. or this;

The episode was much better than last weeks, which is kind of a sad thing given this weeks offering was a bit of a mess. The Walkng Dead has become a little too fond of disorienting the viewer at the expense of a coherent narrative.

I can see Maggie as a peacetime leader, someone who gets things done, manages logistics, has a quiet word with people, etc. I don't see her as anything more than a soldier when it comes down to a fight and when it comes to delivering "inspiring" words, neither the actress nor the character has the charisma to pull it off and I am bored by the stream of platitudes that the writers put in her mouth. Lauren is an enjoyable actress when she has someone like Scot Wilson or Stephen Yeun to play off of but her she does not stand on her own feet very well. Without a strong and giving scene-partner she's barely adequate and seems a little lost when she's supposed to carry a scene. As for her fucking pouf-less eternal pregnancy, the writers can just fuck off with how short the fucking timeline has been in the past several seasons. It looks ridiculous, not just because of the Carl factor, but also everyone, with a couple of exceptions have noticeably aged, in some cases drastically. The episode would have been a lot better if Rick had taken a successful shot at Negan and seriously wounded the fucker, instead of more of the same-old same-old. If they want the character to seem scary, being cornered and pissed off for an actual reason rather than just because he's a chortling bully would at least potentially work, unlike what they are doing now. Plus, this show is so big on using heavy-handed symbolism, wounding Negan would certainly underline what they were doing with the attack on his compound. Enough with the flashbacks, flash-forwards and dream sequences, if they are going to utilize them, it needs to add something to the narrative rather than muddying it. I often appreciate it when something like that is confined to an opening sequence and sense is made of it by the end, but what we saw was all over the place and undercut the momentum without adding anything more than filler to the episode.

I completely tuned out mentally for all the tedious speechifying, I don't think I retained a single word of any of it except for some of King Ezekiel's. At least his OTT staginess doesn't completely bore me (yet). The only reason I can think of for Father Gabriel to get out of the car was to create the plot point allowing weasel Gregory to steal it, because apparently that character needs to linger like a bad smell next to an outhouse. And then of course he wound up trapped in something not unlike an outhouse with some weirdo that kept chortling about wearing your "shitting pants". Gabriel, please; shoot him, stab him or grab some paper and force feed it down his throat, just please, please, please shut that blathering man up.

I'm not a huge fan of that whole "red-carpet" style of dress most of the ladies were wearing but Emily Kinney went horribly wrong in an entirely different direction when she showed up in that "People of Walmart" work-out wear. It made me feel visually impaired whenever I looked at it.

I did read the book but despite being at the time, very much a fan of Margaret Atwood, It is not my favourite of her works, though there were individual parts I did appreciate. I think part of my problem is the novel often echoed the writing style of the time period it's set in, but unlike those novels, there was never a point where the characters and story became so consuming that I no longer felt bogged down by the somewhat archaic style. I am not having that issue at all with the television production, unsurprisingly. The script and acting are wonderful. Grace can be a rather opaque character, very much an unreliable narrator, so even as I'm drawn in to her story, I'm never sure how much to engage with her. It's more her asides that reel me in and make her voice compelling, her answers to questions that do not directly touch on the crime, her words on quilts, beds and apples. The quilts themselves are mined heavily for symbolism, both the symbols employed in the designs and the act of quilting, taking scraps and piecing them to form a larger picture, and the fabrics used; were they always intended for that use? or are they repurposed from other things?

Mixed feelings about the lack of return, I enjoyed it a bit more than the Vancouver iteration, but I find all the Real Housewives shows get a bit too ugly after the first season, even with cast turnover defusing the feuds. I wonder whether the problem was Corus feeling they didn't get the results they'd hoped for, or the housewives themselves being disinterested. If you're a Kara or Roxy you look bad, rude and childish in a very public way or if you're an Anne or Joan it's probably not a lot of fun to present a distinctive persona, seem fun and amusing and hang on to your dignity (underpants notwithstanding). I suspect they all want to remain above the worst antics without seeming dull, like Grego and Jana, who are probably a lot of fun in real life. Actually, Grego seemed a lot of fun on the show, but it didn't lend itself to drama, and Jana played into the drama but it wasn't that interesting. Even though Kara was the worst shit-disturber, (close second goes to Roxy) I suspect she thought she was setting a proper standard rather than presenting an especially low one.

Am I pleased that it's cancelled? No, not really, I'd prefer that it had been a consistently entertaining show that received deservedly good ratings, not an absolute delight that squandered most of what made it noteworthy and bled viewers. Am I pleased that it was unsustainable after the production dropped the ball so badly in understanding what made the show work and swapped those qualities and characters out for bland roles and formulaic pap? Damn. Right. I'm. Pleased.