gesundheit

It's mind-boggling but this is precisely why she and any children cannot give valid consent. And he brainwashed her much younger.

Agreed, playing an idol for Elie would've been a fast backfire on her. Elie was understandably upset about Sami & Owen ratting her out to Gabler, but she handled it by lashing out instead of trying to smooth things over. She found out she was a target and made herself a bigger one in response. Going straight up to people and essentially saying, "You are now on my shitlist, but also you better vote with me now" is never a good move!

This was a fun other-POV episode, but it kind of highlighted one of the biggest problems for me with the series. It feels like we're steered to dislike anyone who's against the Murder Club, but to any logical and decent human observer, they are all horrible, awful human beings. (And really, they kind of are in the sense that they will do any shitty thing SS demands of them, no matter how cruel or destructive, to protect themselves from having to tell the truth.) So basically they've all agreed to be cartoonishly horrible people in exchange for their secret being kept, and apparently with no end in sight. Essentially seeing it from the outsiders' point of view has made me even less sympathetic to the protagonists than I already was. And sure, maybe that's the point, but I'm skeptical this show is working on that level of sophistication! This show also suffers from "People Who Do Not Follow Up On Things Any Human Would" Syndrome. Zero chance Janae wouldn't have sat down with the others and come up with some explanation for the murder board to offer to Vanessa. Zero chance they'd just let her walk away and shrug it off after finding out Simon Says is blackmailing her too. I really thought this was going to be the episode that brought Vanessa into the club fold, but nope.

Yes, plus in the school break episode where everyone went back home, wasn't Lydia the friend on whose behalf Lucy punched that guy?

So the chatter at the wedding made it seem like Drew is no longer living, right?

Even older, my minimum wage college job paid far less! Also isn't Stephen supposed to be so charismatic? Surely he could charm the country club members!

Oh, I thought we were meant to see the knuckle tattoos -- did he already have those in 2007? I thought the same thing about the no-ring too, but then the tattoos stood out, plus he immediately dangled a fiancee.

This episode was quite the placeholder. We pretty much knew exactly how it would play out at the moment of the inciting incident. Seriously every beat of it -- we knew Bronwyn would sing something sexy and look and sound really hot and confident while doing it, we knew somehow Kris would soften, we knew Janae would have their gender ambiguity affirmed, etc. And we definitely knew something would miraculously keep them from turning themselves in, and that something would be extremely unconvincing. Also, great idea to cover yourself in glitter and get drunk immediately before turning yourself in to the police! I'm sure that would go great!

Correct me if my memory is off, but in the first episode we heard Lucy say it had been FOUR years since the whole thing with Stephen came to an end, but the wedding is eight years after this season. So even after this finale, the Lucy/Stephen back-and-forth continues for another three years? Good God. Seems like Stephen is just as much of a snob as he accuses more monied people of being. He's so far above a front desk job! But it's only because everyone else is so classist! In a way Stephen being engaged to Lydia feels like a heavy-handed mitigating factor that kind of lets Lucy off the hook for banging her good friend's boyfriend (i.e., "look, all of these people are the worst, Lucy's hardly any more awful than almost everyone around her!"). What was up with the XO tattoo on Stephen's fingers that he went way out of his way to display to Lucy at the wedding? I think the most frustrating thing for me is that even in a serialized drama, you want some major arc to fully conclude at the end of a season while obviously leaving some new threads for the next. But we didn't get any kind of ending, this could've just as easily been a mid-season episode. I guess in their minds revealing to us what really happened the night Macy died was an arc conclusion, but it's retroactive and not one single character found out, so the actual story we were watching play out didn't really do much?

Yes. I tried to adjust the motion smoothing to no avail. But not every scene is like that? It's odd.

This was definitely not a show interested in the perspectives of its female characters. Which could be fine, it wasn't about them, but at the same time you can't hang your ending so heavily on Shoshana and Candace if the work on them hasn't been done. Edited to add: Dani's post that went up right above mine while I was still posting describes this far better, so... What she said!

Yeah, that just felt anticlimactic. All that, just so he could send a nice letter to his adult children? And it's not very meaningful that Sam has shackled himself when obviously his mother is totally willing to free him at any time. Oh well! Some good episodes and a hell of a gripping start. Obviously not a happy ending kind of series, but still just kind of... there.

Cracked me up that those two were literally going to get it on in the motel room they'd broken into and were supposed to be casing. Geniuses!

Fin's line about crime going up and the sound of gunshots now being the city's soundscape or whatever it was? Jesus. I know the writers room isn't in NYC, but production is so it seems like they'd know how laughably inaccurate that is! I know the tourism board has probably been pissed at SVU for decades, but wow, talk about jumping on the media propoganda bandwagon and perpetuating nonsense. And what, two episodes after some nice tourists get raped and murdered on the subway? I agree with everyone who was dumbfounded by the unnecessary "twist" of burying the truth of who shot the guy, a situation that absolutely was an easy case of completely justifiable homicide and would have been critical for that girl's mental health to be clarified so that she could get psych treatment for the trauma. Ooo, what did I miss, who did she want fired? ETA: Nevermind on that last question, I didn't see the double negative ("she could not get the higher ups to not fire...," whereas I thought it said she couldn't get the higher ups to fire someone)!

The recap of last season they aired at the beginning didn't even scratch the surface. I can honestly barely remember anything from the first season. What was the deal with Maeve? I can't even remember what her whole involvement was or what the problem is now.

Wow, literally just finished it, rewatched the end, and still didn't catch that. Oops! Guess my attention span ain't what it used to be.

My reaction journey watching that first episode was almost identical to everything said in this discussion, so I have little to add! Buuuut... 100% on both. I'm going to wait on the direct address and give it a chance. It took me a while to really see/believe(!) that this character was fun, so I think now that I really get that lovely surprise, I might be able to adjust to the direct address. As for the teenager, I pray that her disgruntledness was just a premiere-episode arc and the rest will be more like the playful banter she and her mother had at the end of the episode moving forward. Wait, what was the reveal at the end of the episode? I don't remember one. I didn't read up at all on what to expect so imagine my surprise that they just went ahead and solved the crimes instead of it being a season-long mystery! That was surprising.

Quite deliberately so, too. I wasn't sure quite what they were trying to say in that moment, and then I got to wondering if something happened with that son that I'd forgotten from the doc or that wasn't in there, and this is foreshadowing -- but luckily if it was in the doc I forgot, so I'm following discussion rules! Just saying that I wonder if it's portentous. My guess is that the answer is two-fold: (1) Mormons and (2) the 70s. I have seen her in a lot, and I'm afraid the answer is "not really!" She's very pretty and can be a kick in comedies. That's all I got. (In my opinion the Oscar wasn't really warranted, but they built a beautiful film around a kid and made that kid look good by that and rewarded the kid. It wasn't really a sign of magnificent talent in bloom.)

SO MUCH, that's the crazy part! Yeah, I got extremely thrown by that. It hadn't been long enough, and even though MG's Jan is only 13 in this episode, she looks every minute of MG's 16 years. When the year came up on screen I'd already lost track of the timeline of everything else so I got a bit lost. While I think both parents and especially Mary Ann were reckless fools on many levels, I don't think they knew the level of Jan's brainwashing. At this point they think she just likes B, but not that she thinks they're each others great loves or that her parents are obstacles to saving lives. She's doing a good job covering that, so I assume they thought she was fine to leave at home with the younger kids since B wasn't anywhere around. (I can't believe I'm defending them in any way because my GOD they're awful, but on this one point of Mary Ann letting Jan watch the younger siblings, I can see the rationale... just on virtually nothing else) Mary Ann's sister cracked me up. "Wow, sorry your husband's ditching you, that's a real loss and your life is basically ruined, sucks to be you!" Ah, the comfort of family!

I'm hearing both of these episodes are basically remakes of Cruising, so it sounds like I need to rewatch Cruising this weekend for the first time in decades because I basically remember nothing (other than undercover Pacino, S&M clubs, serial killer).

It's such a bummer -- the first couple times I saw her in something I was really excited, but it turned out she just fit those parts perfectly with the Just One Thing she does. And wow does that Just One Thing not work for most roles, especially this one. (Okay, and the ten prior.) This episode just deflates whenever it shifts to her.

That cracked me up -- however, it was the scene that promised us this really is AHS and not just a serial killer story! I'm pretty sure it's double episodes every single week for the full season, yes. I don't understand why. But at least episodes are on Hulu by morning now instead of the endless wait it used to involve. FX re-airs episodes a lot, too, so you might be able to find a rerun of the 2nd episode before next week if you're just dealing with the cable schedule. Unrelated: I love Jeff Hiller, so it's fun seeing him get to play a bad guy in this (Whitely).

That and his whole "Thanks a lot, now I'm one of those guys with a body in the basement" line a few episodes back gave us a little sense of his humor, which I appreciated. But I like that he's generally such bore, since real-life serial killers usually are (despite the exciting, captivating ones of cinema). Can't even re-tell a simple joke. Tedious man. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

I know, but planning and orchestrating that is full psycho!

I don't know how that man expects to get through life when "meeting the girlfriend's mother" causes him to go full psycho