WalrusGirl

Yeah, I liked Joan, but each time we’ve focused on her I’m also skeptical she’s actually ready for anything potentially serious yet. So her daughter had the c-section (and a difficult birth/recovery) “15 days ago,” and this episode was labeled as the beginning of week three. I don’t know how long before filming they cast the women, with COVID delays, but *truly* unfortunate timing for Joan when production did start. (Also, could she even have seen her daughter and grandchild yet? That’s pretty tight.) Yeah, I thought Theresa was just being clueless with and to a friend, in her eyes, and going on about it to her show-friend because she was feeling insecure about his other dates. This was the most I’ve liked April, though! Have to give Kathy a bit of credit for not naming names to Gerry, though instead she just pointedly poisoned everyone, but Gerry wouldn’t have known it was Theresa if (production hadn’t sent him towards her upset conversation with Faith and) he hadn’t heard enough from her to put it together. I haven’t rewatched to check, but I don’t think Theresa ever knew that night that Kathy had told him anything about it. But then Theresa lost me when she went right back to “he came to talk to me in my room” the second they seemed to maybe be ok-ish again. Like now you’re just being inexcusably clueless and inconsiderate, since *now* you 100% know talking about Gerry and yourself to her is a very sore spot. Sigh. I can still do without Kathy, but Theresa lost my relative pass there at the end. Poor Ellen’s eyes behind them. 👀😂

The patient from the helicopter crash (Teddy/Owen/Amelia/Link’s patient), and Carina (formerly a recurring/regular as an OB on Grey’s but now a 19 regular) with Bailey opening the clinic, and Ben and another 19 firefighter at Mer’s house. I did finally give in and start watching 19, but I’m grateful the “crossovers” no longer require watching both to get the plot - they’re stand-alone shows (…also far better for Netflix and streaming/syndication) with just character overlap. It’s so jarring to be on ancient episodes sometimes and hit one where wait, what’s going on, and you have to go find a summary or the right episode of the Private Practice episode that served as Part I. I think it was “tragedy strikes one of their own” (the house 😭), but one 19 character did end that episode with a head injury and no one to find her and I’m sincerely hoping, but less optimistic since it didn’t happen on Grey’s already, that she might be killed off.

Um, I got CBS All Access (then) JUST out of excitement for Picard, and liked the first season - it was different and certainly a better viewing experience binging multiple episodes at a time, vs one per week - and LOVE Q and de Lancie, so desperately wanted and expected to enjoy this season similarly to last season - sure, it'll be different and better binged, but whatever. But a lot of this season was just legitimately bad, and I damn near couldn't make it through one episode and actually asked myself, alone, out loud, several times what the *hell* was was watching, and really had a hard time powering through that episode without turning it off. Point being it isn't that I hate new trek. 🤷🏻‍♀️ There were some really enjoyable scenes for me this season, the problem being *scenes* rather than *episodes*. It seemed to have even more filler than season one, and as far as I'm concerned the "blatant filler" parts to any show need to be massively watchable/entertaining. I don't think they had 10 episodes worth of material, or needed 10 rather than five episodes to tell this story well, in which case do it in five and give us stand alone or a second arc for the rest of the season. And I sort of just can't with Brent Spiner playing a billionty different roles, but fine, that's a carry over from TNG/ENT that every single Soong ancestor looks exactly like him, fair enough. But casting additional series regulars as totally different characters (it's at least Spiner, Isa Briones, and Orla Brady) because they can't figure out how to work the latter two into their story gets to feeling actively gimmicky, watching Briones as a totally new, unrelated character still be Not!Data's daughter, etc. I don't want them killed or written off, and Brady certainly had a much better role this way and I really enjoy both of their work, but when you have something like a third of the cast playing totally new characters, without even being under prosthetics (like, this isn't a Jeffrey Combs situation) so they LOOK IDENTICAL, felt extremely cheap and like it was going for a vibe or effect that never happened (because the other 2/3 of the cast were still their regular characters/roles), on *top* of a lot of very repetitive crap. de Lancie was amazing this episode; that scene with Picard, their farewell, that look on his face/in his eyes, and the sound effect of that last snap definitely got me. We didn't need an awful lot of what we got (super repetitively, again) to get there, but the plot actually moving along this episode, and Q, really worked for me. They don't need to save "pertinent things actually happen" for the finale. Ideally more than five minutes of story would happen each 45 min episode. But this episode certainly helped to cleanse my palate, and I'd be less frustrated with the show had I watched it in 2-3 chunks rather than going episode by episode the second half of the season to avoid spoilers. Other shows do season-long stories so, so, so much better, and have been for two decades now, so it's frustrating to me, the pacing and poor decisions as to where to start and stop episodes, etc. This style of television isn't new and experimental. 😞 Oh! And Wil Wheaton/Wesley showing up also thrilled me, that that TNG actor has been included in Canon Picard, so was a really great surprise. He and de Lancie's performance, along with Tallin's storyline this ep, had me really pretty fully enjoy this one. Finally. This continues to really bother me too. Yup, Teresa and Ricardo just left Not!Laris's apartment and, what, hopped a flight then rented a car to the chateau in France? Presumably Picard went back to the apartment to use the transporter (...and maybe clean up the tech there? But fine, I can accept her supervisors/superiors handle that kind of thing), but Teresa and Ricardo were definitely gone from the apartment. But hey, Picard was cool watching the ship fly off last ep without having any idea what had gone down or was going on, but apparently was magically in the know, so 🤷🏻‍♀️. I didn't read it as Seven's field promotion being permanent, but circumstantial while in the field for this. Picard's back in Starfleet (head of the academy now, right?), so as admiral outranked the rest and basically just put Seven in charge of leading the current task. I really didn't interpret it as "and now you have a permanent commission to captain." But that it was frankly only even phrased the way it was for the sentimental value/"payoff" after her recent reveal that she'd tried to join Starfleet after Voyager but been rejected. (We'll presumably see in season three, but my read wasn't at all that any of them expect Seven to just be a Starfleet captain now. She was just put in charge of the ship and officers/decisions, as acting captain, for THIS endeavor.)

Presumably Dad entirely leaves out that Jean-Luc let her out that night. I mean, it really wasn’t a child’s fault (though *obviously* that kind of guilt would be…wow); Mom could have easily hung herself while locked in that room anyway, without being out and about (and good grief, that would have been kinder and far more conscionable as a parent than giving into the urge *after* convincing your kid to unlock the door, so they’ll always feel like they allowed for your death), and if Dad was worried about her hurting herself, a) he or some other adult should have had actual eyes on her all night, or stripped the room of anything she could use for that purpose, which he had not, and b) Dad left the key to the bedroom literally right outside the bedroom and poorly hidden. Not saying it’s Dad’s fault either, but he was an adult not handling it perfectly, so it’s certainly not the child’s fault, who’s a) a child, and b) has no understanding of what’s really going on or of concern. But Robert wouldn’t have had to know the detail that she’d been locked in a room to wonder how she got elsewhere to take her life to start with. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Ya know, if Picard and Not!Laris hadn’t stood around chatting in the solarium (would have also been an easy time for Soong to lean back out and shoot them both), maybe they could have gotten to the ship in time to help before it was too late. Which is partly why unresolved trauma gets you disqualified from combat/active service. I’m reading it as his clearly unresolved, clearly trauma over the circumstances being what should have disqualified him. Not his mother’s medical condition or the existence of trauma - it’s the not having worked through it. The man would have had psych evals by Betazoids and I know they tried to cover themselves with the line from Therapist/Dad about some people lock it away so deep not even a Betazoid can detect it, but I’m not buying that from a human versus, say, a Vulcan, or that a Betazoid wouldn’t detect *something* in the mother’s-suicide area (which would have come up in an initial eval), even if they couldn’t tell what because JL had repressed the what. But he clearly HAS remembered enough of the day for the seeds to have been there for a Betazoid. And he spent an awful lot of time with one, including after multiple service-related traumatic events. It wasn’t just you - her implants looked horrible, like soft flexible plastic. (Like the makeup actually was.) They’ve gone with a less-industrial metal look for the Borg, but that seemed way too far. Icheb was taking Academy courses on Voyager while they were still in the Delta Quadrant, but after they were in regular contact with Starfleet (Tuvok had been an instructor at the Academy already). Since Janeway also addressed him as “cadet” after an oral exam/presentation, again after monthly contact with Starfleet was occurring, I think they’d already approved/accepted Icheb. (Losing the braintrust - Borg-related and otherwise - of Seven seems a major tactical loss - I can’t *imagine* why they didn’t do everything in their power to keep her in a tech division, as a consultant or full-time contractor, etc - but her history did give them *plenty* of reason to doubt her ability to function in a chain of command and follow orders. While most, not all, of the most egregious incidents were in her first year, some were not.) LOL, it was far more watchable to me, given the interminable flashbacks were at least far briefer at a time. I’d figured he opened the door and she took her life (though she could have done so just as easily still locked in the room we saw Young Picard enter and join her in), so was glad they finally got to the point. (Not to be heartless about her condition or suicide, but I’ve been so over these repetitive flashbacks since episode one.) Icheb was never part of the collective - he was assimilated while sedated as a child and the Borg on the ship self-destructed in relatively short order. (His species bred him with a genetic virus to fight the Borg, and when he was young his parents sedated him and sent him out on a ship as bait for the Borg. That genetic pathogen destroyed the Borg on the ship that found him, and he was only ever - and briefly - in a collective with a handful of other juveniles, as the maturation chambers protected them from the pathogen. Though after being reunited with his parents, they promptly sedated him and sent him out on a ship with a false Borg-bait warp signature to be assimilated again, so certainly trauma and trust issues, but he never experienced time in the collective. Picard presumably had to pass psych evals re working through his assimilation/Wolf 359 trauma. Though honestly, Seven post-Voyager, as we last saw her, would have passed those Borg trauma related evals better than I think we saw evidence Picard would have, and he apparently did. I’d guess it was the combo of post-Dominion war issues within Starfleet and her rampant history of disobeying direct orders. (If we’re looking for legit reasons, she had them, though prejudice seems more the conclusion we should draw from the episode. And that doesn’t seem at all unlikely given being immediately after the Dominion War, either.) Yeah, I agree that Seven was absolutely in a different situation than either Picard or Icheb. Though arrogance hardly seems to be disqualifying, her rampant disobeying of orders on Voyager seems pretty legit. Just almost criminally egregious that they didn’t do everything they could to keep her in the braintrust and fold, if not as an officer who’d need to follow consequential orders she may disagree with on the regular. (Like as a science/tech NCO, contractor, consultant, researcher, whatever she wanted. But within a good working relationship with them.)

THIS. I actually asked “what the hell is this” a few times and damn near turned it off, too. I don’t tend to go for inner-mind metaphor stories (except for Miles and Julian buddy cop-ing inside a dying Section 31 agent’s mind, so maybe I’d have tolerated it better were it Seven and Raffi and, uh, not some prince/queen/monster/dungeon fairy tale crap), but if I need to explore Picard’s innermost secrets and trauma, I want to see Patrick Stewart acting the shit out of that, not two actors in characters I have no connection to and don’t really buy as Kid!Jean Luc. (ETA I’m sure the child actor did fine work, but I hated the entire premise and dungeon shit and this part of the plot anyway, and don’t connect to him as young Picard.)

He was also a 29th century Starfleet officer on the timeship Relativity on Voyager. 😊 I was happy to see him too! Picard’s brother Robert was the older brother, and I’ve been wondering if the writers forgot he existed. Ok, that logic helps me, thank you! Memory Alpha says that the script for TNG’s “Family” had Robert as 6-8 years older than Jean Luc, so while that isn’t on-screen canon, it’s close enough. I remember the actor looking older than Patrick Stewart, and the actor playing him in Family was five years older.

I just went to their social media, wondering what I’ve missed, and, uh, I’m thinner than Jinger. While I am underweight (and trying not to be; so much ensure, etc), I’m definitely not aneroxic, nor do my doctors have any questions or concerns beyond yeah, ideally put on a few pounds. She doesn’t look alarmingly thin, just thinner than her more-average weight years ago. She could look that weight and have an eating disorder or look her current weight and *not*. 🤷🏻‍♀️ But she definitely doesn’t look unhealthily-underweight, if she’s underweight at all; sorry.

I didn't go back and rewatch (I watched this morning on Discovery+) to see *for sure* how they phrased everybody testing before the party - or if it was everybody coming tested (Janelle's, Christine's, Meri). When her family tested post-nanny-positive, Kody answered the person at the test site that yes, it was their first time - but we know he had tested before after Janelle's mom's funeral in December. So either the rest of Robyn's family hadn't tested before (ie, didn't test before the party because their rules are so ironclad) *or* he was answering specifically about the saliva-spitting test, so yes they'd need instructions. Meri said she'd had both types, nasal swabbing and spitting, in the last week, so clearly their area was using both at the time. But I wouldn't be surprised if Robyn's household didn't test before the gathering and only required it of everybody else. I'm also thinking back to January 2021 and thinking that had Robyn's family tested the morning of the party, if it were *me* I'd have likely said in my video submission that "but our household tested negative that day, so hopefully even if we were exposed we didn't pass it onto the rest of the family." I'm just not sure that's 100% clear one way or the other. Right, and we know Kody had tested in December between the funeral and returning to Robyn's prior to 10 days being up, and he (I think it was him?) still answered "no" to testing before without qualifying it as "some of us haven't." So it could have been that they needed instructions for that type of test.

Ooh, any idea where, or can you find the link from your history? Seems like most of them claim not to watch it, even recently. My guess by then (Jan 2021) is that it was primarily more that all seven of them in her household were potentially incubating or infectious at the party due to that Thursday exposure. Though given they’re supposedly wiping everything down, mail included, who knows how worried she was about every surface too. I was really struck by that too. <3

RIGHT?! I thought, with his head down and face hidden by his visor, he was at least retroactively, briefly, feeling like crap as realization hit him - like his too little, too late "probably should have gone for Ysabel's surgery" talking head. Then he tells the camera - like, way later in a talking head, not even in the heat of the moment - that he was PISSED?! You've had some time to mull over the interaction by then, maybe roll with the more generous interpretation of you felt horrible about realizing this failure of communication/parenting? And yeah - I'd LIKE to think Kody went to her mother's funeral for Janelle (historically their relationship would certainly have him doing so, though at this point in time he's clearly pretty pissed so I could see him passing and blaming COVID), but her mom was also his mother's close friend and sister wife, so it also would have been grossly obviously not supporting his mother *or* his wife of 25-ish years. I mean, I agree with where he landed, this was more important and you just do the best you can (...the same was even more true with his teenage daughter's major surgery, but I digress), but then to *tell the cameras* his big concern is Robyn never forgiving him if he got COVID and delayed their children's Christmas? 🤦🏻‍♀️ It might make for raw tv, but your other kids can see this, so shhhh with the quiet parts you aren't supposed to admit out loud... I admit that it would be to Robyn's credit to do this, and maybe that she married into a polygamous family changes what I'd normally think somewhat - she's supposed to consider herself a mom to all these other kids too - but in general, this is on Kody. He's their father and has been a father for decades, he shouldn't need reminded and pried into acting like a father and maintaining a relationship with his other children, *especially* the minor children. So yeah, I'd give Robyn credit for doing whatever she could here (but can see that impulse, if it ever existed, waning when those kids were calling to yell at her about the rules), but no matter what she does or doesn't do here, this is Kody's responsibility, not hers. (And I'm NOT giving her credit for maybe trying, to be clear - I suspect Ysabel being Christine's (and caretaking for her being a threat to her own children's time with Kody) and Gabe likely being one of the boys to call and yell at her quashed any impulse she might have had versus, say, Mariah, or Maddie the favorite daughter. But just that Kody's actions and lack thereof are primarily on him. She could and should do better and push for all the kids' best interests with their father, but it's first and foremost his responsibility and failing.)

I don't think they're with the camera crew inside - everything that's professionally filmed is outside. I believe last season, one of the placards inserted into the episode mentioned that the talking head interviews were filmed remotely - the Browns had the lighting and camera setup, but the TLC operator/interviewer wasn't in the actual room with them. I doubt they've changed that this season, since they were working it fine and they've continued to self-film indoor footage and only have professional cameras outside. Yeah, my household/family was/is uber-careful, for cancer/immunocompromised reasons, and that we're *able* to. I already had a solid stash of N95s before they became unobtainable in Dec 2019/Jan 2020, so they got reused/alternated quite a bit before turning over to a new one. I've been wiping down the groceries of my mom's that I purchase since her outpatient bone marrow transplants (got in the habit when she was neutropenic and it was easy enough to continue, since a cold lands her in hell or the hospital for a week and the flu could kill her), and I'd been doing that with everything for my folks that I couldn't quarantine for 4-5 days for the first months of COVID, but by this time (November 2020), I was back to only doing it as usual for my mom's stuff. Which was more about cold and flu risk than COVID risk from the surfaces. I'd long stopped insisting my dad do the same by that time, and we were well past changing shoes at the front door. (And I still don't understand wiping down mail with alcohol. It doesn't particularly work - I tried early on. Instead I just tossed the junk immediately, opened the rest, tossed the envelopes they'd come in, and washed my hands.)

I'd love to know via their social media (though I don't follow them regularly, so would know from it being referenced here or in an entertainment article about them), but in terms of knowing on the show, this is still late October/early November 2020 - the very first vaccinations were in December 2020, a month or so from now, and none of the Browns would have been eligible until February 2021 at the *earliest*. (I don't know how Arizona tiered it, but military and those under 65/70/75 with various pre-existing conditions were stage 1b at best, not 1a, and quite possibly 1c or 2a depending on Arizona's specifics.)

The hardware was planned (to attach the tethers to the vertebra), but he had to do things (rib separations?) in more places than expected to restore as close to ideal as possible spinal position - in terms of the stiffness of the curve/spine, correcting individual twisted/turned vertebra, re-creating the *normal*/correct spinal curvature that's often destroyed by severe scoliosis, etc. But the two screws in each vertebra were planned/expected. Kody is just a MF asshole painting it as worthwhile to have pushed the surgery off as long as they did, in a "well if it got us to this best surgery we can't regret that" kind of way. Uh, really not necessarily the case re narcotics, and they'd have prescribed as lightly as possible both nowadays and in a teenager. My guess is she's also on muscle relaxants, re painful spasms in the muscle cut through outside the ribs (though the back muscles were spared) and NSAIDS, which - in my parents' experience - helped more with muscle spasms than the muscle relaxants. Possibly something like gabapentin/lyrica/cymbalta depending on the nerve involvement where they separated muscle; that works better for nerve pain than any painkiller or NSAID. And multiple ribs were separated. I'm medical, and from what I know (which is hardly in-depth on these exact surgeries!), I would prefer this surgery for my own kid - whichever has the worse immediate recovery, it so far looks better to me long-term in terms of mobility. So I did notice that they were gone for six weeks - two weeks were the pre-op quarantine, then the hospitalization was expected to be five days and they planned to fly home another five days after that. So they stayed local an extra two, two and a half weeks to get her more able to travel, and near the doctors for follow-up and medication adjustment. I could also *swear* I saw, back at the time, one of the daughters - Mykelti? - say on IG that Kody was going out *after* the surgery, to only need to be quarantined from "everyone else" for two weeks versus the two weeks pre-op then whatever time post-op? I obviously didn't follow that too closely, but it was news to me that he didn't end up going out post-op after all. It isn't *quite* Flagstaff to NJ distance, but we rental-RVed one of my parents to their across-a-decent-chunk-of-the-US rare-cancer specialist repeatedly during COVID, as no one was wild about them in airports, and direct flights aren't an option so a decent layover is unavoidable. (We flew in N95s pre-COVID.) You do what you gotta do. As someone else said, Kody was neither deceased nor deployed, so there's zero excuse. Even before factoring in THE NANNY. The jerk literally told her she should be courting him to her last season, in the car. He absolutely wants it both ways.

I thought in this last episode, Christine said something about finding out ~9 months ago that the curve had reached the point of requiring surgery. It sounds like this episode took place in Sept 2020? (as some remember the surgery being in October 2020), so that would have put that news right at the start of COVID. Even with insurance in place, they wouldn’t have gotten the surgery scheduled for before the elective surgery shutdown in March. (Anything scheduled, not coming in from the ER and immediately, is elective - including this and cancer surgeries, which aren’t optional. So even if they’d had a surgery date by mid/late March, it would have been postponed due to COVID policies until elective surgeries resumed.) In their case, without adequate insurance lined up, there would have been a holdup in getting things going and getting her in as a new patient with a surgeon even with the most proactive parents, and without COVID. Obviously this is me going by their timeline, but if her curve really didn’t reach “time for surgery” until ~January 2020, the delay until Sept absolutely makes sense, given they likely didn’t already have a surgeon ready to schedule her. They *absolutely* should have been getting the finances ready to go or insurance sorted out, though - they had plenty of lead time there. Given Christine faults herself for failing some here, I wonder when surgery became an option but not yet absolutely required (if it could have been done, risk/benefit wise, at an earlier point - which one would regret if they got to having to do it anyway), or if that was all about the stupid contraptions, her daughter blaming herself when those contraptions didn’t work, and the insurance/financial holdups. Yeah, I’d imagine her sister had more room to put them up (free lodging would make a huge difference), and doesn’t have an infant and toddler like Maddie - it would be less of an imposition on her own sister vs daughter, and less/minimal guilt about the imposition.