Anisky

Isn't that usually how TV shows work? The current episode is the person in their present, and in the episodes that came before it they are their "past selves"? I mean occasionally shows do wacky stuff with time but "Character X in earlier episodes was Past Character X" is the normal mode of storytelling, so I'm not sure why this seems unexpected to you?

OK, I'm confused by what you're trying to say here. When you say "you" can literally within a day make billions of copies, what do you mean by that? A person couldn't, just because taking a file, making changes, saving the changed file as a new file (which I really don't think the Doctor did, since he didn't retain any memories from the previous loops-- he just re-opened the original file at the end of every loop), then opening that new file, making changes... etc, takes time. Absolute best case scenario, with a computer that had excellent processing speed, it would still take several seconds to make each resaved copy, open that, and resave it under a different name again. There are only 86,400 seconds in a day. If a person spent 24 hours straight doing that, without eating or sleeping or going to the bathroom or taking a sip of water or anything, they would STILL have complete each loop in 0.0000864 seconds. If a computer were making the changes, that's still pretty fast, and the more the computer did that, the more likely that at some point there would be a blip or an error, and then all the subsequent copies would be faulty. (The same is true of a human, of course.) Plus when you're saving that many files on a computer, it will eventually run out of memory. (And the computer will start going ever slower as the memory fills up.) So... yeah... color me confused. *headscratch* Also, why would only a few days have passed? The Doctor was digging a hole through a diamond wall by punching it, and during each loop took time to go through a series of events to lead him to that spot; so each loop took a significant amount of time to complete, and he had to repeat it enough times that he could punch through a diamond wall. That... seems like it would take a really long time.

True, but several billion years is a really, REALLY long time for a copy of something (in this case, the Doctor) to remain on a hard drive without degrading. :P

YES!!! I was thinking exactly the same thing during the episode! :-D Except weren't all the Daleks in Series 1 of New-Who essentially half Dalek, since they recreated themselves using human DNA (specifically, Rose's)? Once they managed to create a "pure" Dalek it killed them for having human DNA and thus being impure, but that still means that it did, and therefore can, happen. Not to mention, Oswin Oswald was arguably half Dalek, half human. Physically Dalek with a human mind. It's an alternate timeline, but close enough that the Daleks allowing that there is pretty good evidence that they would do the same in the Doctor's current timeline. Come to think of it, given that there was apparently this myth/rumor thing for a long time about a half-Dalek hybrid that would destroy Gallifrey, shouldn't those Series 1 impure Daleks set off alarm bells in the Doctor's head? Not to mention, if we need a half-human, half-Time Lord hybrid, we have both River Song and Jenny, the Doctor's Daughter off running around the universe. I wonder why it doesn't occur to him it might be one of them? On one hand, I hope so because I really don't want it to be the Doctor. On the other, I was never quite clear on why the Doctor though Ashildr might be the hybrid in the first place. Isn't she just a human who doesn't age and die? I mean, that makes her different, but if she's only half human then I don't know what the other half would be? Unless I missed something... But in Amy's Choice, wasn't the Dream Lord just the Doctor hallucinating? Or was the Dream Lord something from Classic Who, and the Doctor hallucinated him because he'd already dealt with him as a nemesis?

It was! I was a Peace Corps Volunteer whose main job was girls' education (specifically math and health issues), so it almost felt like a personal shout-out. :-D

The only part of the episode I found genuinely creepy was the part where the computer wasn't letting that man (the characters were so unremarkable I didn't bother learning their names) through a door until he sang the "Sandman" song, and that was only because I thought the computer voice there sounded really similar to GLaDOS from Portal. I was like, "If he sings the song, will he get cake?" Besides that... well, the Doctor saying "This doesn't make sense!" all the time really summed up how I've been feeling about Who for a couple of seasons, now. I was like, "Now you know how I feel."

Huh, I guess I'm the only one who didn't really like the big speech. It felt very heavy-handed and anvil-y to me.

Hey, Hearst College! A Veronica Mars shout-out! :-) Nice to see Liv with the brain of a fairly normal, functional person this week. I didn't like the way she had specific knowledge about athletes, that seems like random info to have when she can only see the rest of his life through triggered flashbacks. But aside from that, I like the way they handled it this week. Most weeks, honestly, I don't-- I don't like when Liv is TOO MUCH a different person week to week, because then it doesn't really feel like there's a Liv at all, so who is this character we're supposed to care about? I think they should do it more like it was at the beginning-- her being influenced (but not completely overwhelmed by) ways of seeing the world, language fluency, natural talents and skills that have been so honed that it was second nature to the person, any mental illness and other psychological stuff; that sort of thing. It just stops feeling like Liv is a person with any continuity of personhood when she takes on more literal aspects of their personality, like completely changing her speech patterns ("bro" all the time, ridiculous Texas similes, etc), suddenly giving her backwards opinions when her intellect and experience should override that (OvertlyRacist!Liv, really??). I like it when she's influenced by the person, but not when she essentially BECOMES the other person. Especially since there are always brains in Liv's system, so there WOULDN'T be any point where she's "just Liv". But yeah, as I said above, specific sports knowledge aside, I did like how they handled her this episode. I liked her crazy pep talks that are things that she would have said anyway, but she was just WAY over the top and enthusiastic about how she said them. I also felt like the plan to get Major coaching that kid's basketball team was kind of Liv-Liv and CoachBrain-Liv coming together to form a great idea, which I really enjoyed. I also genuinely laughed out loud when Blaine was singing "Friday I'm in Love".

Agreed... any chance that Bay was 17 when the arrest happened? Were they at all vague about it? Because that could solve the problem... Bay could also just go places on a tourist visa and get paid under the table. It's not that uncommon. But I admit I have no idea how the whole thing works if one has been convicted of a felony and can't get the record sealed or expunged. For a felony conviction though, I think Bay's sentence was too light? I don't know about Kansas but in some states the definition of a felony is a crime that a first-time offender has to serve at least a yearlong sentence, right? Bay couldn't have done the community service / house arrest for more than 6 months, and even with a record they were only expecting Daphne to go to prison for 3 months, so this whole thing doesn't add up anyway (surprise surprise).

Yikes. They are what 19? I'd much rather them be out in the world exploring and learning about themselves than at home with their nephew. To say that about Bay because she chose to not be wherever Carlton is? Sorry but that's absurd. This, and also, they're not in college right now; that doesn't mean they won't go (or go back) to college. Daphne seems to be doing something that will look good on a resume or on med school applications (if she isn't actually in China through college anyway). Bay is getting the experience at 19 of living in a foreign country for nearly a year, having a job in that foreign country, and learning the language. That kind of experience will make her more attractive to colleges/art school. They're taking a gap year. A pretty damn good one. I don't see why that would be something parents would be ashamed of. Besides, even if they didn't go back to college, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. College isn't for everyone, and it isn't meant to be. Deciding not to go to college is not ipso facto a bad thing, evidence of bad decision making, or failure on the part of one's parents. If Bay, for example, decided to travel the world, living in different countries for a few years at a time, working in tattoo parlors, that sounds like a pretty exciting and fascinating life that she could enjoy a lot. I don't see why going to college and getting a 9-to-5 job would necessarily be a better life than that one. The former would be much more fulfilling for a lot of people. Not to mention, travel is very educational.

Honestly the show's gotten it's wires pretty crossed with this storyline. Here's a quote from Lizzy Weiss in an interview: But lack of affirmative consent isn't even the primary issue in the story they wrote! Bay was so drunk she couldn't remember anything the next day! Because she was so drunk, in most states she'd be considered incapable of consenting anyway, which is not the same issue as affirmative consent. Tank's problem starts waaaaaay before not knowing to get a "Yes" rather than not to get a "No", his problem was that he didn't know not to have sex with a woman drunk out of her mind. But apparently the show writers don't even see that. So, not exactly surprised that they didn't understand how that storyline colors what's happening now, because they appear not to even understand their own storyline to begin with. But, yeah given that he's a teenager who was very emotional and did something impulsive spur of the moment that wasn't violent and wasn't trying to do more than kiss and Bay didn't physically resist, it felt a bit harsh to say Travis had committed sexual assault. I do agree though that the show is just really not doing this well, at all.

Oh, also: If the police storming in and John being a little late for the baby's birth are actually the conclusion to the Eric-Will storyline... then that was a lot of build-up for nothing. That much build-up requires a much bigger climax, which is why, unfortunately, I don't think we've seen the end of this storyline and I think the phone call has something to do with it. Hopefully it's just about Regina's legal trouble and we won't actually have to rehash much with Eric, since I was not a fan of that plot line.

Well, because of stereotypes and assumptions and social roles and all that, of course. Which is useless as an answer because we all knew that, and the question is really, why do we have those assumptions and social roles, and how are they playing out in this situation, and is that good/bad/neutral? Obviously in a perfect world, where the genders really are equal and there's no wage gap and so on, there shouldn't be any difference in how we perceive the situations. But the assumptions and norms that would make us more accepting of “Will's Mother” in this situation work against women in a lot of ways. The most relevant way is that women are blamed for failing to protect their children to a much greater extent than fathers. So, there are laws on the books that criminalize failing to protect one's children. There have been a lot of cases where mother, father and child/ren live together, the father abuses the children and the mother, but when it goes to court, the mother gets a much longer jail sentence than the father. His crime is abusing his children (and his wife/mother of his children). Her crime is failing to stop him from abusing their children (even though she is battered and terrified herself). And yet juries come down much harder on the mother, because of the societal expectation that a mother should protect her children. So, while it should be equally on both parent's shoulders not to hurt their kids and to protect them from harm, Will's mother is generally, by society, expected to go above and beyond to protect him in a way Will's father isn't. We would be more sympathetic to her breaking the law to do so, but on the other side of the coin, we would probably condemn her more for not finding a way to take Will out of the situation than we would condemn his father for the same. Then there's just the fact that on average, men are larger and stronger than women, and men commit violent crimes with much more frequency than women. I think if we met Will's mother on the run from his father, we would be much more worried that if her ex-con drug dealer ex found her, he would hurt her and maybe even kill her. Whereas, with the mother, the main worry was that she would take Will, call the police, demand hush money. We expect different stakes. Yes, it's possible that Will's mother might have just come in and tried to seriously hurt or kill Eric, but we don't expect it as much and honestly, statistically speaking, it's a lot less likely. In a perfect world, yeah, we would see the characters the same way if they'd been gender-swapped. But unfortunately, right now, the stakes are different, the expectations are different, and the options are different, in ways that negatively affect both women and men in different ways. Huh. I didn't interpret it that way when I first watched, which is interesting because I normally notice those things right away. I think part of it is that Travis's emotions were also running very high. I mean, he told her loved her and she responded with, "That's ridiculous"-- definitely not what anyone wants to hear. I mean, he'd really screwed up and she was already really angry with him, but still, from his perspective, that's got to hurt. And she really was giving lots of excuses-- she *didn't* tell him she didn't like him, she just went with "Even if I did..." I think most of why it didn't set off my alarm bells first time through is: 1. I never got the feeling that Travis would try to keep kissing Bay if she pushed him away. It would have been over in a split second if she'd pushed him away as he started. 2. It also felt quite clear that Travis was not intending that kiss to lead to anything more physical. 3. His emotions were also running high. He's not exactly calm when he does it. He's vulnerable, desperate, and upset. Now, I do definitely agree that the *show* shouldn't have done this, that it sent the wrong message. I wish that Bay *had* pushed him away, or afterwards called him on how inappropriate it was to kiss her right then. THIS THIS THIS. When Mingo first said that Daphne already had the ticket, I was like, "And where did she get the money for that?!" When Daphne convinced Bay to come with her, "And where will she get the money for that?!?" I am a biiiiig travel person, and while there are ways to make travel fairly cheap, plane tickets are expensive, and you need some source of money. When I saw "10 months later" and Bay was working at a tattoo parlor in China, my immediate thought was, "What the hell kind of visa does she have?!" China is strict about Americans' visas. I don't see how she could be working legally, unless she's a student now and studying there and working at the tattoo parlor, like, part-time? Except then how could she already be working on actual people?

This is what mutual funds are for, JOHN AND KATHRYN! EDIT: How did he successfully run a business for so many years when he is so bad at handling money?! EDIT 2: I don't think it was brought up much in this episode, but I've found the focus on Daphne's scholarship and tuition pretty strange. She's not at Northwestern. I'd expect a school like UKMC to run somewhere around $10k/year, whereas the Buckner-type "best prep school in the city" schools tend to be more around $20k-$30k/year (and when the show started, the Kennishes had two students at Buckner and wanted to add a third). So Daphne's tuition is dramatically less than what the Kennishes were already used to paying, and just not having Daphne attend Buckner for those two years recoups her entire college tuition. If the Kennish's situation is really SO dire that they can't handle $10k/year (and even if they can't those would be manageable student loans), then doubly WTH on their whimsical investments. EDIT 3: Especially because they were expecting to have two kids in college at this point, and were probably expecting much more expensive colleges at that-- WUStL would be around $45k/year I bet, not sure about Pratt but I bet it's pricy. They didn't have a college fund set up for Bay and Toby? Or they're so strapped that they had to empty it (but can still invest in strip clubs and pole ballet)?? Like seriously wut.

Once again, Bay has to grovel and beg for any ounce of affection Regina might bestow. You're going to that recital because it's important to your boyfriend's son, Regina? And, to you, there's no question that his recital trumps the activity that is extremely important to your daughter? Said activity being a memorial dinner marking the birthday of her father, who died within the past year? Regina acting like Bay asking her to come to the dinner instead of the recital was totally unreasonble was bad enough, but when she was like, "Because it's important to Will," I nearly screamed, "AND THIS IS IMPORTANT TO YOUR DAUGHTER!" She was effectively saying that Bay is not a priority in her life. What is important to Bay not only matters less than what is important to her boyfriend's son, it matters so much less that Bay thinking otherwise is treated as completely out of line. Grrr. Anyway. Deep breath. When John and Kathryn were rich and shelling out money without thought, it at least made some sense when these characters were running off to the Galapagos Islands or whatever other educational or volunteer or just travelly things they were doing. But travel is expensive, and travel for education and/or volunteer work isn't actually any cheaper, unless you go for a really long stretch of time-- six months to a year at minimum-- or perhaps if you have specialized (usually medical) qualifications or get REALLY, REALLY creative*. It's not like these guys live in San Diego and can just drive down to Mexico City, this trip (not to mention Daphne's originally planned Spring Break trip) is expensive, especially with all these kids going last minute. (Do they even have passports? Melody got one at the beginning of the episode, and I guess Bay would have one since she went to the Galapagos, but what about Daphne and Travis ?) *Once I managed to make 9 weeks of volunteer work on the Thai-Burmese border not cost much: I helped lobby my university for a special grant for a group of students to travel to the Thai-Burmese border for two weeks. Those sorts of educational trips through the university usually cost thousands of dollars, but we managed to get the grant approved. It didn't cover food while we were there, but it covered the cost of a plane ticket, up to $2000. Students whose applications were approved to go on the trip were to buy their own plane tickets, which was reimbursed by the university. When I found out that school didn't care about the exact dates of the plane tickets, as long as they were to and from Thailand and arrived before the beginning of the trip and left after the end of it, I got a plane ticket that arrived two and a half months early. Because I was so involved in the Free Burma Project, I managed to find a little-known volunteer program that didn't cost any money once you arrived in Mae Sot; it flew under the radar because technically the work it was doing was illegal in Thailand, because the volunteers were teaching English to illegal Burmese refugees who weren't, in theory, allowed to be in Thailand at all. So seriously, making a short-term volunteering affordable requires a big combination of hard work beforehand and sheer luck.

No. She's not, and they're not. Bay Kennish and Veronica Mars are not people. They are characters on a television show, whose history, family, experiences, thoughts, words, actions, etc, are all determined by writers for the television show. You may think I'm trying to nitpick. I'm not. This distinction is incredibly important when criticizing and discussing how a television show is handling a charged story line, because ignoring this distinction leads to people thinking/saying things like this: Makes perfect sense when you're talking about a person. If an actual person had experienced what Bay had experienced and was acting the way Bay was, would I be claiming that she wasn't acting how she ought to? No, of course not. It's true that there's no textbook behavior for rape victims, and that people handle rape and sexual assault differently, and in a real-life case like Bay's it would be a good thing if she managed to move forward so much more easily than others in her position. But Bay isn't a person who just had this terrible thing happen to her. She's a character, written by writers who made a purposeful choice that they wanted to tackle the issue of campus rape. If they were going to trivialize it and portray it in a way that makes it seem like less of a big deal to the actual people who experience it, and fosters this whole incredibly rape culture "Oh poor rapist who didn't really do anything wrong and now his life is ruined while the girl just shrugs it off and isn't really affected" narrative that is already way too prevalent in our society? Then they shouldn't have done the story line. That's not tackling the issue of campus rape. It's being part of the problem and actively bolstering a cultural climate that allows people to be raped and for the perpetrator to get away with it, either because the victim is too scared of how they'll be viewed if they come forward, or because people won't believe the victim / won't think it was actually that bad. You say you don't think Bay was actually raped. Okay, I'll do the same thing as you and briefly suppose that's true. If the writers wanted to tackle the issue of campus rape, then why would they write a story line where Bay isn't actually raped, it is much milder than that, but people are calling it rape, and Tank was thrown out of college unfairly because of the belief that he raped her? What good does that do about the issue of campus rape? None. It just makes people who have watched Switched at Birth more likely to think that the women (and men) in real life who say they've been raped on college campuses are exaggerating their stories, or "just girls who had sex and then regretted it later and cried rape." That kind of thinking is incredibly common and incredibly harmful, especially since the best, most rigorous estimates say that only about 3% of rapes actually end in prosecution. Women and men who come forward who have been raped are often vilified, mocked, shamed, etc; and there is a huge stigma against them. If actual rape victims don't usually come forward, why would people who haven't actually been raped do so?? Logic suggests that that perception is completely off base, yet it is still widely believed and extremely damaging to the victims. If Bay wasn't raped in a story line where the writers expressly said that they wanted to explore campus rape, what is to be concluded but that the writers are trying to say that these campus rape reports are often exaggerated, and the "so-called victims" are ten times less traumatized than they would be by a breakup, and so we shouldn't take them that seriously? EDITED: Because 3% of rapes end in prosecution, not rape cases, which implies the rape was reported.

Is Bay having a full-on psychotic break? They're playing it like she's just upset about breaking up with Emmett and literally seeing him everywhere is just something she will get over with time, but guys, hallucinations are not a normal side-effect of difficult breakups! They are a symptom of schizophrenia, and Bay is at a common age of onset. I mean, I don't think this is where the plot line is going, but in real life what's happening to Bay would be a cause of much more concern than they show here. I think Lily is going to have a miscarriage. I just don't see how else they could handle this story line. I don't think that the baby having Down's Syndrome would make her abortion seem "better" at all-- in fact I think, as far as issues tackled on an ABCF TV show, it would open a whole can of worms that there's no way they'd be able to address properly. I also call BS on liberal, agnostic Daphne not even seeming to consider, let alone raise, the possibility of abortion. After hearing the litany of reasons Lily could not handle having a baby right now, especially after she just described her pregnancy as (paraphrase) "it will never be okay again", how does that not come up as a possibility? I mean, okay, if it were Nikki, that would make sense, but as far as I can remember neither we nor Daphne have reason to think Lily is particularly religious and against abortion. I also hate how they handled Bay's rape story line. We saw Bay experience very little trauma after being raped, which is only highlighted by how messed up she is over breaking up with her boyfriend a couple of episodes later. This breakup appears to be ten times more traumatic for Bay than having been raped. Can we say "trivializing"?? Not to mention, did we actually see Bay confidently proclaim that what happened to her wasn't her fault before this episode? As far as I remember she was still very confused and unsure and waffling, until this episode, when she brings it up purely as a reason to be mad at Emmett. So at this point, she's said that her being raped wasn't her fault only in relation to how it affected Emmett, and only while she was in the midst of saying extremely irrational things. First Bay's rape was about Poor Tank, and now it's about Mean Emmett. At the end of the episode, she comes to the realization that her relationship with Emmett was ending with or without "what happened with Tank". The idea of this episode was that she was stuck on that, and had to get past it. Let me say that again. In this episode, Bay learns that she was just using her rape as a way to distract herself from the truth about her breakup with Emmett. What. The. ACTUAL. F*CK???

I'd have been shocked if they'd actually used the word, even when just discussing the incident. For one thing, I don't know the exact laws for cable-stations-with-commercials, but one way or another I'm sure they wouldn't be allowed to use that word on the show. For another, yeah, even using it in a "neutral" sense is, in my experience, completely taboo. I remember when I was 15 and didn't really understand that, I unthinkingly used the word in the way you're describing as "neutral" in English class-- we were talking about Othello and I was commenting on how it seemed strange that Desdemona referred to her fiance as "the Moor", and that it was like if in modern times... I'm sure you can fill in the rest. The entire classroom reacted immediately, physically, vocally, it was just overwhelming, I don't think I could ever forget that moment. I was really lucky that I didn't get in official trouble and that the whole thing eventually blew over. Even the latter part is probably because the only black student in the class was very forgiving and actively stepped in to tell people to let it go a few times over the next week or two, and possibly that my best friend (who attended the same school) was black also helped a bit. (I mean, also that I didn't try to to defend my usage except to say I really didn't mean to offend, and just kept apologizing and cringing and throwing apologetic glances everywhere.) Obviously it made a big impression on me, because yeah, 13 years later, seeing someone on a message board suggesting that a character on a TV show might have used that word while discussing the incident kind of made me want to crawl under my desk. Ahem. Anyway. I'm also a lot more sympathetic to / forgiving of Lena than a lot of people here, for a few different reasons. First of all, because although it was her mother that Nate called the n-word, obviously Lena was there when he said it (it seems doubtful in light of this episode that her mother would have TOLD her about it otherwise). Well before her speech about how someone using that word hurts every black person, I was thinking that she probably felt that he had insulted her as well, that the word had been meant to apply to her as well as to her mother. It was something that happened to her, too, and the fact that her mother didn't acknowledge that probably made her negative feelings associated with the incident all the worse. Hard to get over something when your own hurt is minimized or invalidated, after all. I also have a bit of a different perspective on how she handled it. I think she felt very blindsided and then subsequently trapped, and that had a big impact on how she handled the situation. She thought that Nate had apologized to her mother, and that a major part of the dinner would be a discussion of what had happened. She agreed to have Nate over at their house based on those beliefs. Now, no question she shouldn't have assumed those things, but she was definitely genuinely surprised and taken aback when she realized that Nate had *not* apologized and that the entire incident would be swept under the rug. I saw the beginnings of panic from Lena at that point, actually. She seemed to me like she sort of began looking around, kind of hemming and hawing a little, trying to figure out if there was a way that they could not have the dinner at their house after all, but then her dad came in with the wine and it just seemed too late. It seemed to me that she really wanted to either cancel the dinner or change it so it was not at her house, but she didn't feel that she could, both because the evening was already in motion, and because she'd have to explain WHY to her father and her mother had just said that Lena shouldn't TELL her father about the incident, so how could she explain her change of heart? So, to me anyway, from that moment forward Lena seemed very flustered and unsure and had no idea what to do. She shouldn't have ambushed Nate, I definitely agree with that, but I see how the situation may have felt like it had snowballed out of her control. I mean, I guess also Lena's assumptions were based on the idea that her mother in some way might acknowledge that Lena is a black woman who has experienced and is experiencing life as a black woman in America, and that she would be hurt or offended by the things that a black person would be hurt or offended by. Which we know by now is a silly thing for Lena to think, because as if. So she probably should have known better. :P

Listening to Jonas speak about what "humans" are like-- the non-sensates, I couldn't help thinking: Oh! Jonas is Bester!

First off, I apologize, I can't seem to figure out how to say who I'm quoting when I quote a comment. No, never!... it's the law! :) Well, I guess that explains why she's been to juvie so many times! Wait... no... that doesn't work... she'd need to catch breaks first. :P I... I definitely see why she's feeling rejected and insecure. But whatever's going on with Mariana seems like more than that. I mean, apparently she quit her coding class (!!), wiped out anything else she might have been doing all summer, and hasn't even been seeing her boyfriend the week before he leaves, to devote ALL her time to her mother and baby sister when it doesn't look like anyone asked her to. That's weird and unhealthy. Not wanting to help and spending time with them, of course, but abandoning EVERYTHING else in her life to do it? I feel like there must be some other, underlying issue that drove her to act that way in the first place. Of course, Mariana feeling rejected and unwanted by her mother when Matt turned down sex with her (for extremely valid reasons) made her react much more poorly to that then she otherwise might. Twice unwanted in the period of a few hours... that does make it a little more plausible that she would decide to sleep with Wyatt, needing to feel like SOMEONE wanted her. She's definitely going to regret it though and that's sad. HAH! This. Absolutely, precisely THIS. Very well said. He really is the Special Snowflake of this show, isn't he? Gah. His problems are like the opposite of problems. I love them too. :) My feelings about that particularly storyline are a little weird though. I mean, I buy that Jude, at his age, wouldn't want to rush to label himself and would want to take some more time to figure everything out before everyone has him down as one thing. I also buy that Connor, having actually done what had before seemed impossible and CAME OUT TO HIS FATHER, would want to tell everyone. He was living in fear of this truth being discovered for so long, and now he doesn't have to be afraid anymore. I completely believe that Connor would want to finally be completely free from hiding. But, despite the fact that it makes sense, while I was watching the storyline play out, it just felt like they wrote it that way just for the sake of having the opinions be opposite of what we'd expect. For some reason, I kept imagining they said, "Oh, you'd think Jude would want to be out and Connor wouldn't, so let's do the opposite," and it felt ham-handed. I don't know. I'm probably just crazy. :P

I love that Farkle's answer, mathematically, was absolutely correct (in BMW, Minkus's was not). I doubt one in a thousand eighth graders would be able to even figure out how to set up that problem and use the correct approach to attempt to solve it... actually SOLVING it in, like, a second is savant stuff. I know, they played it for laughs, but I was a little annoyed at Cory when he was like, "Wrong," because I'm pretty sure he DOESN'T know the math involved in solving it nor know the correct "on paper" answer, and Farkle's answer was so impressive that he deserved better. "Yes, but no" or something of that ilk would have been more fair. Sorry... former math teacher and math minor here. :P

Fewer. (Sorry, I had to. ;-) )

This is the only land I know of that has multiple varieties of zombie. Fatherly chats of last week and this week: Stannis to Shireen: You got sick and I was heartbroken; everyone said you were going to die, but I wouldn't give in, I demanded everyone come from all over the world and never gave up until they managed to cure you, because you're my daughter and you're worth it. Me: Yay! 5/5, would "Awww" again! Roose to Ramsay: I killed your mom's husband and then raped her because they got married without telling me. B**** had the nerve to struggle, how dare she, she's lucky I didn't kill her too. She brought me to you and I was going to kill both of you, whatever. But then I noticed, you look like me, so yeah. Me: ... ... O.O ... *tiny voice* negative infinity million out of five but please don't kill or rape me please?

If in FTL villains never get a Happy Ending, and everybody KNOWS this, to the point where the idea of a villain getting a happy ending is SO insane and unbelievable that nobody believes that even the most powerful immortal sorcerer they know could possibly do it, then nobody would become a villain. Seriously! I suppose there is the occasional person, like a serial killer, who just does evil things for the sake of evil things. But the vast majority of bad people do bad things because they believe it will benefit them, and Disney-type villains are definitely of the second type. If they KNEW it was an immutable law of the world that villains don't get happy endings, then OF COURSE they would go about pursuing their goals in a way that was not villainous, for the same reason that people don't jump out their 5th story window because it's a quicker way to the ground than the elevator. And seriously, if they all want their happy ending and cannot get it, that would have to mean they could not be redeemed. So then why did Snow try to redeem Regina and give her second chances all the time back in FTL? Is it that villains CAN be redeemed, but they still don't get happy endings? If that were true, there would be even less reason to be redeemed than there would to become a villain in the first place (or rather, the same amount of reason: 0 = 0). So there's some author that controls their lives, who writes everyone's stories, and who could write different stories so the villains weren't villains and could get a happy ending. I don't see how this is in any way compatible with free will. In which case the villains didn't do those terrible things by their own volition, but were forced to do it. In which case the Author is the real villain, and as he has omnipotent control over everyone and everything in FTL, which would make him God? This really doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. I don't know how to care about characters who don't have free will in-universe. If they can't choose what to do and what not to do, then none of their actions have meaning anyway. It would mean Regina really WASN'T responsible for anything she did until they came to our land, which would finally explain what's up with the show's treatment of her, I guess, but it makes the whole show completely unsatisfying on the most fundamental level. I like watching Robert Carlyle act though. He is good.

I'd find that very realistic. Honestly, these girls have been stalked so much, they ought to be MUCH more paranoid than they are. After all they've been through, all of them should be having some serious mental health issues, yet only Spencer has, and it was a continuation of an issue that existed before all of this. NOBODY IS THIS MENTALLY STRONG, SHOW. We should totally be seeing more cracks in their sanity.