gesundheit

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

I don't think anyone's car was over the edge in this episode, Stephen just went to the site of Macy's death

Yeah, "it's autobiographical" is a bizarre way to disprove plagiarism. I never used LiveJournal so I guess I'm clueless here, but considering she wrote it on her LiveJournal, it feels a bit odd that she couldn't prove that. "I don't have access to that email address anymore" is not really enough of an obstacle. I feel like we're not going to get much next week since it's the finale. No way they can wrap all this up and jump back to the 2015(?) framing scenes. I'm a bit annoyed. I'd be interested in a second season with a new story, but not another season of this story. I, too, was shocked that Stephen had enough feelings that he actually cried. (Not enough to garner my sympathy, of course!) Poor Pippa.

So disturbing. I'm struggling with Mary Ann, though. Anna Paquin does not seem like she's playing an actual person, just some sort of wind-up doll with either a blank face or a worried face, it's very artificial and one-dimensional. I'm really craving more of a perspective there and there just isn't one. I'm finding I wish Tipton and Paquin had been cast in each other's roles. Everyone else's acting is very believable, though, especially Jake Lacy. It's so funny that he's made a career of such extremes -- he seems to always be an absolute (charming) entitled creep, or the really genuinely nice dude who's never really been noticed or appreciated.

Oh, glad for that perspective because I'd definitely been wondering how this would've landed as a binge. Clearly better for relevant details like that, that's for sure!

I cracked up, too. Well done, show! But I also hadn't realized his father was still alive.

So next week is the finale? This didn't seem to really set that up -- it didn't have that "penultimate" feel, structure-wise, so I'm extremely nervous that the finale won't be any sort of resolution but just a cliffhanger hoping for another season.

That last bit was one of the most hilarious parts of the series, they just couldn't help themselves! The props department didn't exactly help with this one (though maybe on purpose? because so much of the "any normal person would..." about this show was definitely intentional, but I'm not sure what was or wasn't), but I think the camera-on-the-mailbox thing wouldn't work because these were actually meant to be coming through the mail, despite the lack of postmark in close-ups. So the camera would've only "caught" the postal delivery person. The lack of curiosity about the tunnels was also total madness, yes. "Oh, we just boarded it up, no biggie!" Brilliant move. Clearly no possible clues down there!

Oh that's the one! I was trying to remember which other campy crazy thriller streaming series I'd seen her in recently-ish (except that one wasn't campy on purpose, oops). Love her.