slothgirl

Oh please producers... shine a light into what is becoming an increasing dark and depressing world and let us have this one little bit of joy... AUF THEM BOTH!

I agree that neither Torres or Reeves would have been put in charge of the team either. Where I disagree is the notion that ANY of these junior agents would have been put in charge of the team. They would have been reassigned to another team leader or a senior agent assigned to them. The would most likely have been split up. It's always been a pet peeve of mine that the entire Naval Criminal Investigative Service agency and work seems to be handled by so few people. Does Abby ever do work for other teams? Is there a whole different lab for the forensics needed by other cases, and it is staffed with ALL the other forensic scientists who work there since none of them are allowed in Abby's lab (or just don't want to deal with her preciousness)? Does Gibbs' team get ALL the cases resulting in dead bodies so that Ducky and his one assistant never have other autopsies to cover or crime scenes to go to making them unavailable when Gibbs needs them? I know they have other agents... I see them wandering around the orange room. Gibbs' team gets center court in the room, but there are bullpens for other teams to each side. Those other teams must only deal with insurance fraud and jaywalking or something. The cyber division group that Mcgee was transferred to when Vance 1st arrived had more people working in it than autopsy and forensics combined! I like Reeves. I like Quinn. I like Torres. I like the characters and I like the actors. But for some reason I don't like them all together. I never cared for Bishop. The cast just doesn't mesh anymore. I'd enjoy a show about Vance and Gibbes going all Rick and Renault (Casablanca) more than I enjoy the ensemble now. (the episode where they "rode together" because Vance's job was on the line was awesome) Or do a spin off with Coast Guard chick and Delilah. Something. There's just no chemistry creating cohesion in the team, maybe because it's too large with too many newbies added at once. Use Jimmy more. Get Joe Spano back. Add more humor back in, especially for Gibbs. In earlier seasons, the cases weren't all so earth-shatteringly significant and it allowed the focus to be less on the case itself and more on the people working it. That gave the characters a chance to establish dynamics. I'm not just complaining that just this ep was lacking, because that wasn't the nature of the episode. But it has been steadily becoming drearier for awhile. It's no longer "must see' tv for me.

No kidding... how many months was Gibbes gone? Another more senior agent would have been assigned to supervise the people remaining. Or they would have been shuffled off to another team. Bishop taking over was so unbelievable as to almost ruin the episode for me. Best scenes were Gibbes and McGee by far. And what's with everyone going to Mcgee's house? Dude's been away from his pregnant wife for MONTHS... give them some private time to be together, at least for the 1st night for pity's sake! You can party with them in a day or so. Was Jimmy in this episode? Did I blink and miss him?

They actually foreshadowed this plot point when the other detective refused to go searching the woods with Ambrose because he didn't want to catch Lyme disease. Since they told us JD had Lyme, we were supposed to be intrigued enough by this bizarre explanation of JD's limp to go "Ah HAH... maybe JD was in those woods!" But I just didn't care enough to pay that close attention, and you can get Lyme pretty much anywhere up here in the Northeast When was he ever the bad guy? He seemed to support her through the whole ordeal except for not visiting her immediately after her arrest. Frankly, if my spouse went full on psycho-killer out of the blue and hacked someone to death in front of our kid, I think I'd take a time out too rather than go rushing off to the prison to visit! No s*#&. Worst detective work EVER. No one bothered to verify the family's story about the death of the sister, and as another posted mentioned... her doctors just accepted the idea that such a sick girl who had barely even ever left the house ran off and nobody cared? Mom was more interested in condeming them for being bad, and Dad was probably relieved to have them gone. You have to wonder why he even stayed with his wife once the girls left. Or why he stayed while they were there... if he didn't care enough about his daughters to override Mom's weirdness about looking for them, then why would he have stayed with such a crazy woman in the first place, cause it wouldn't have been for the kids. Or if he stayed for the girls, why did he stay once they were gone? Seriously... the whole story of the parents actions makes no sense even in the context of the mother being a whack-job.

Seriously... the big plot hole. Ok... they ALMOST explained why the parents didn't immediately panic and file a missing persons reports the night Cora and Pheebs didn't go home. But to never pursue it when Cora was found they way she was? I'm not buying it.. Mom would have been LIVING at the police station trying to find her Precious. Telling everyone that she died 2 months after Cora disappeared? Why? That whole part of the story was badly handled. Otherwise, I'm ok with the resolution. They could have made this a 3 hour movie. Maybe 4. Dragging it out for 8 episodes (with an insane number of ad breaks) was annoying and unnecessary. That's 8 hours of my life I won't get back Thanks, Show.

I can believe that someone so controlled, abused, and demeaned by her mother from an early age would be emotionally flat/numb and easily controlled by others (including her "helpless" sister, remember). Survivors of abuse can have a "flat affect". The problem is that the actress is trying so hard to give us "flat affect", that she's not giving us anything else. In order to tell the story and make a complex character, the performer needs to let us into the inner world SOMEHOW even if all the emotions are stunted. Small nuances of expression or body language. SOMETHING... ANYTHING. If it is played as completely flat as it appears to the average person in casual real life interaction with someone like Cora, it just looks like bad acting. Biel needed to be cheating on the flatness here and there to show us what was going on in her head. The writers sure weren't going to help out with that. She didn't take her sister to JD's house. They went to that fancy hotel/country club/whatever. She had no way to know there would be an orgy or squatters (the squatter being the most like-able person present actually, and I'm including both Cora and Phoebe herself in that comparison). If she were smart instead of drifting along, she would have guessed that there would be more drugs or maybe she didn't care.. who knows? Like I say, we got NO insight into Cora's mental process. She did try to get her sister to go home. In the long run, her sister isn't a child (despite looking 12) and is considerably more worldly and self-actualized that Cora. She manipulated Cora at every turn, but somehow you expect Cora to suddenly take charge of the situation? ANY situation? Not gonna happen. She didn't even step up to the plate in her own defense until Ambrose went to bat for her. This could have been a really interesting character study. Instead they went for manipulative suspense and titillating hints at sexual deviance. The actress isn't skilled enough to add the character study element to the weak writing. Pretty much every character (likable or not) is more developed than Cora, including Abrose' dominatrix, and any extras who walked through the background of the scene in the bar!

Frankie wasn't at the club so he didn't witness any of that.

An excuse based on the past is one thing. (and Cora didn't try to make an excuse. She hasn't shown much inclination to escaping justice... only finding out what happened to her). A complete psychotic break where the murderer doesn't know right from wrong, and may even think she is acting to save the life of another because in her mind, her own victim is a danger to someone else... that's textbook legal insanity. (almost so textbook that it's as though the writers read the same law book I am quoting from below in order to craft a perfect scenario that would allow them to have her acquitted) Legally a person could be deemed "not responsible for criminal acts if as a result of mental disease or defect, he did not understand what he did or that it was wrong, or if he was under a delusion (but not otherwise insane) which, if true, would have provided a good defense". This is the M'Naghten Rule. There have been several modifications and changes to verbiage in the laws in actual use (Durham rule, ALI test), but I can't manually transcribe the entire text from the book. A google search for these terms would give more in depth results. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, but I play one at home on the internet haha... ...because I have some of my father's law books, and I love to look stuff up when I watch tv to see if they are just making s$&t up. ;) In actual practice though, legal insanity is a very narrow definition compared to medical diagnosis, and is probably less commonly applied than tv would have us believe. The truly mentally ill are the least likely to have good representation or a fair trial, and are probably encouraged to (or intimidated into) pleading guilty and rushed past the courts and into the prison system. (they are also far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators)

Yes, after season 1 of The Killing, I am leery of shows like this. I was so disgusted over the non-ending of The Killing, I didn't even care about tuning in for season 2 to find out more. I was like "Show.. you are dead to me! DEAD!" I'm going to feel that way about this one too if they try to hold over significant resolution for season 2. However, with a couple of movie stars in lead roles, I can't imagine they'll go that route. Pullman seems to work consistently, although he really hasn't aged well (unless it;s all padding and makeup).

Unrelated to the plot, there have been several references to Lyme disease in this show. Aside from JD supposedly having it, one of the cops won't go searching with Ambrose because he doesn't think it's worth catching Lyme to follow up that tip. I think there was another. Yes, Lyme is an issue in this region, but the fact that it's been brought up in several ways makes me wonder if it has some significance, or if a writer on the show just wants to call attention to it for reasons unrelated to the story itself.

I'm going with the theory that Pheebs didn't die that night. It doesn't make sense for the bus body to be hers. There's no way with all the investigation, that it wouldn't be known to the police that Cora had a sister who went missing and whose body was never found. If the body turns out to be Phoebe, then that's a poorly thought out and executed plot twist. If nothing else, that annoying FBI agent would be all over the possibility that the body was Cora's long lost missing sister. I can't remember how they came to identify it as Maddie, but if it's Phoebe, quite a few someones REALLY dropped the ball on investigation and background, not to mention IRL screenwriting. On the other hand, there was that unidentified blonde in the backyard at JD's that could have been Maddie, so.... Both Frankie and Cora's parents talk about Phoebe beyond the night of her birthday. Frankie's recent girlfriend says that Frankie was involved for a couple of months with someone who changed his life. Her parents say that she died a few months after Cora left. I can believe a scenario where Frankie gets Phoebe to a hospital and she survives for awhile. I can also believe that if she never leaves the hospital, that Frankie would be able to continue to see her because she's over 18 and her parents can't dictate who she allows to visit in the hospital. No crime was committed against Phoebe, so Frankie wouldn't have been known to the police through the incident, especially if neither were tested for drugs. So that just leaves what happened to Cora for that time. Given that the whole captive sex-slave on the floor, chased by hunters through the woods, weird masked jailer, etc have all turned out to be different from what they led us to believe. I'm thinking that no one kept her prisoner at all. Maybe she was in a facility and had amnesia and the facility couldn't identify her and then she ran away from there. Maybe her track marks weren't from heroin, but from other medicines being given constantly IV. Maybe she did become an addict, but she wasn't a prisoner of someone... it was just her trying to forget her sister "died", and since she went off the grid, she never knew her sister was saved (temporarily). After all, she was unconscious from getting hit in the head with an ashtray at the time. Maybe she forgot how to do an injection the same way she forgot everything else from that time. Or maybe her parents kept her locked up as punishment and she escaped THEM. Maybe they were hoping she would die so they could use her as an organ donor for Phoebe. Maybe the line from JD about doing 3 guys on the floor will be a dropped plot point (there were only 2 in the sex we've seen) or maybe there's more crazy sex to come. To be honest, as much as a jerk as he's been, JD doesn't strike me as the type to keep someone prisoner for months. He's more about manipulating people to do what he wants of their own free will and that type of control. But Todd might be. Maybe JD was counting Frankie because Cora kissed him. Maybe in the excitement to get Phoebe help, Cora got kidnapped by Todd. My bet is on Todd as the one who killed JD to keep him quiet. We also don't really know who the burly guy is/was. (the one who had the mask on in this episode). The show hasn't really given us "throwaway" characters, so he must play a bigger role in events than just "nameless guy who happened to have on the mask".

But we had to have that useless time wasting scene of him (and maybe us) thinking she had bolted on him when he uncuffed her and didn't watch her. Well the whole episode was just using time to stretch out to the 8 episodes. The next one better not be filler!

Your post is 100 times more entertaining than this show. I'm beginning to suspect some form of Munchausen's. Whether the normal variant or by proxy, I don't know. But this family is just screwed up enough that either seems plausible. On the other hand, the poster who asked if we've ever seen the sister in a scene other than with Cora... now that's an interesting observation. Cora having MPD would explain a lot, although I'd hoped they come up with something less "done". It was the first thing I thought of in episode 1 and with all the other crap they've been throwing at the wall, I forgot about it. There was a scene where the Dad carried Pheebs into the bedroom, but I don't remember another. I had been thinking that Phoebe died (IF she died) while Cora was missing. That she was there when Cora left for that night, and the fact that she never came back is what killed Phoebe and why her parents blame her for Phoebe dying. CAuse of course, they think it was her choice to stay away.

I was wondering if anyone knows a way to find out more about the inspiration for the title Operation Willoughby? My father was good friends from childhood until his death with a man named Willoughby who worked for SecNav. I know NCIS sometimes has "inside jokes" or meanings to little elements in the show. Given Mr Willoughby's resume, and the rarity of the name, it seems possible that they named Operation Willoughby for him. Both Mr W and my parents are deceased now and despite being around the same age, I never was close to or in contact with Mr W's children. From his obit: After beginning his career in 1952 as a mechanical engineer for the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, he became an engineering program manager for a defense contractor in 1958. Seven years later, he took a job with NASA as director of Apollo reliability, quality and safety. When Mr. Willoughby joined the Navy Department in 1973,, he brought with him an expertise in administering reliability programs to improve safety standards and to increase quality control. In 1985, Mr. Willoughby was named director of reliability, maintainability and quality assurance in the office of the assistant secretary of the Navy. He later became director of product integrity in the office of the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. In those posts, he was responsible for the reliability, design and manufacturing quality of materials procured for the Navy's shipbuilding and logistics operations. He retired in 1995. His other honors included the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award, the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Gold Medal.

It took me awhile to figure out how Leila could just declare herself president too. I finally rationalized with the following "logic" behind her action: Fauzi has fled the country and withdrawn from consideration Her coalition running mate is dead. There are no other candidates. Barry suspended the lawful election She was the likely election winner (being the only one left) Therefore, she is the "de facto president-elect". She proclaims herself the "winner" (although no election was held) and establishes a government in exile. Technically I guess Fauzi could also claim to be the head of a government in exile, but we all know that he's totally unsuited to be president. Not that anyone else really IS suited to it, but in the best of peacetimes, Fauzi is a big mushy bowl of ineffectual and uncommitted goo.

Anyone else think the best moment of the show was when Heidi sensuously ate from the chocolate fountain, coolly calling out "5 Minutes!" while all hell broke loose around her?

Thunderous Applause!

Yeah.. I want more looniness with the animals (Oh wait! They could actually use LOONS! And then Mitch could make a joke about the loons acting loony like when he called the lions "liony") Less purporting-to-be-meaningful interaction between the humans, especially when it doesn't fit their characters much. To me this show is a farce or a cartoon. It's more fun when the humans are caricatures too, all while playing it straight.. When I'm asked to take them seriously, get too involved with them, and care about them, it ruins the whole thing for me. I don't want to mourn Chloe's passing because it's sad for us or for Jackson.. I just want to miss her over-the-top bug eyed reactions. I don't mind that whassername is a poor imitation of Sanchez from Aliens. I love that Jamie has a higher body count than she does. I don't watch Zoo for character development. There are other shows that do it so much better. I'm watching for animals that are not normally fierce wreaking havoc on humanity and the world, The show needs some killer Chipmunks. Giant Rabbits (and then Mitch could channel Monty Python). More sloths. Mutant kitten rainstorms. Lightning bugs blinding people. I would like it however, if the basic premise of the mutation, mother cell, gas, cure, etc, was clear. I don't care if it's outlandish.. I just want it to be clear. ok, these 2 sound vaguely like sex toys or acts.

I'm sure there are some Les Miz adaptations that would work. "Do You Hear the People Scream?" (Maloof) "On Your Own" (Barry to Dahliya) "Bring Her home" for Emma. Especially poignant with many meanings for the line "She's like the son I never had". "One Day More" : the fight against cancellation "I Dreamed a Dream" . Pick any character! Especially good for Nusrat. "Who Are You?" Sung by the audience to Molly the list goes on and on!

I guess we remember it differently. As I remember it, Barry and eyeliner opposed the arrest, and Malloof said quite plainly that it was the price for having the support of the military for Barry's presidency. At that point, it seemed clear that Barry would always have to bow to their will. Of course, then the whole truth and dignity commission thing meant Leila and Ahmed got OUT of prison, but that never made sense to me even at the time. It was a complete reversal of what her enemies had insisted on. And I couldn't credit Barry with forcing the issue, because they had just shown us by their arrest that his power was limited on any issue opposed by Maloof. But then consistency has never been this show's strong suit.

I assume you mean Maloof, not Chris Noth playing "Big-Goes-to-War." The clue was back when Barry and eyelinerguy couldn't prevent the arrest of Leila and Ahmed because the army refused to stand behind Barry without their arrest. The general was calling the shots and Barry had to go along. Barry only succeeded in ANY of his plans with the support of the army. My only objection was that the general's overall stance or policy position didn't seem consistent. But it has been consistent that Barry had no power of his own.

Well she seriously channeled Eva Peron in the final shot after her speech, so.... I half expected her to break out in a rendition of Don't Cry for Me Abuddin

Here's a potential plotline for another season... the whole show is retooled to appeal to teenagers by.... Skipping ahead ANOTHER 5-10 years when a bunch of randy teens discover the hard way that they are in fact NOT STERILE because they were still in the womb at the time of the gas and unaffected. Oops! So much for casual hookups! )but of course, we have LOTS of casual hookups before anyone is the wiser) Issac repopulates the earth with the best looking cast of legal age teen girls you could find in Hollywood, all of whom work at a regular zoo just so there's a tie-in for the title.

The whole "no more kids" thing is going to wreak havoc on Social Security. I hope our madcap heroes sold that planasaurus for some serious cash. I just realized (yeah.. I can be slow sometimes when senseless drivel infects my brain) a weird potential plot hole (yes, I know.. one of many, but this one undermines the entire point of the show) If the gas was intended all along to sterilize humans. But the Shepherds were helping the zoogang develop the cure... What was the point? The animals were doing a great job of eliminating humans all by themselves. They didn't need sterile humans to wipe out mankind, and they didn't need the cure. Did I miss something along the way that the crazy animals were themselves sterile? Or that they were a threat to themselves somehow? I'm still trying to make sense of the scene where they realize the 1895 formula was the same as ... something... I thought it was the gas. Maybe I was wrong? If it was the gas, I guess they needed the animals cured so that sterilization thing wouldn't work on them, but there was no explanation of why it DID work on humans who weren't infected if it was the exact same formula as before. Or on a more basic level, why the Shepherds couldn't just let the animals continue the takeover they already had underway by being all mutated and stuff. I think they are going to steal the plotlines from Wayward Pines for next season's 10 year olds.

If this ends up being the series-ender, it was worth it for the awesome smackdown of Bassam by General Maloof. Barry has been an idiot ever since the general arrested Leila way back at the beginning of the season. Barry really thought he was calling the shots. So did Molly in her own way. The army has been calling the shots from the moment Jamal got shot. FINALLY something realistic happened on this show!