JyDanzig
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Posts posted by JyDanzig
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It's interesting that in a show that almost never has male victims, the guy getting castrated in this ep is the same actor who got raped by the gay sociopath in "Criminal Hatred." His characters do not have a lucky time on this show!
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11 hours ago, Misslindsey said:
I really dislike the real women challenge, especially this season with different sized models (though the models are probably more proportional), because some of those women really love their outfits. Then they get in front of the judges and the judges tell them they look awful. I would be fine if someone I was close to told me my outfit sucked, but on national television I would be embarrassed especially if I loved the outfit prior. I am probably not making any sense. I blame the wine.
This. I hate these "real women" challenges for exactly this reason, there's always that heartbreakingly excited one who is first having an exhilarated experience of feeling pretty, and then we have to watch them getting ground up as the judges go on about how tasteless and awful their outfit is. It's not fun to watch.
44 minutes ago, Ketzel said:A "woman on the go" challenge + a "woman who is not a professional model" challenge + a "dress a friend/relative of someone" challenge + a "make your own fabric print" challenge + a "design a print for use by a product sponsor that has nothing to do with clothing" challenge = chaos, bad temper and dreadful design.
And that extra element of them being friends & family of the crew was so weird! I was wondering, are these people actually your enemies? If you work on the show, you know the way this goes, why would you subject actual friends & family to this process?
13 hours ago, MinorL said:Now that I think about it, who was even in the top 3? They didn't like Batani, Kenya, Margarita or Michael.
Weirdly enough, Kenya was one of the top three. The "real women" challenge also seems to consistently make the judging go haywire. I feel like you have Heidi giving her highest score to something Zac is giving his lowest score, and then it all just goes sideways. Someone else pointed it out, but that moment from Nina was so telling, the pause when she was telling Michael he had to consider his model's body type and how this outfit needs a woman who is... taller.
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4 hours ago, GoneGirl said:
I think if you aren’t into this season because of no supernatural stuff you almost have to somewhat accept there is going to be more gore than usual. Every season has had gore, I’m not a big fan of gore and sometimes need to turn my head, but it IS AHS after all and I think the gore is expected. Maybe I’m wrong?
3 hours ago, Etta Place said:I am a big baby about gore (why do I watch this show? sometimes I ask myself that), and I looked away for a good portion of this episode. But of what I did see ... agreed that Ally is unbelievably dumb with leaving the lights on while she attempts to spy. It's like she's never even seen Rear Window.
I give it a 50/50 chance that Kai's story about his parents is true. It seems a little pat to me as far as an origin story goes. It is what you'd expect, and more importantly, what Beverly would expect. I'll accept it for now, but I'm not sold.
Watching this week, I had a moment of suddenly realizing how much this show has increased my tolerance for gore. I used to need to look away, I would flinch or get squeamish. This week, I'm totally at ease and looking straight at the TV for the whole thing, relaxed as can be. I didn't realize there was even a transition underway, until I suddenly arrived at this endpoint of casual indifference.
Re: Kai's story on his parents. I feel like it has to be true because of the POV of those flashback scenes -- since it's also functioning as the reveal of Cheyenne Jackson as the brother. Has Beverly even met him? If we're just seeing a lie Beverly is picturing, it doesn't make sense for that to be the vehicle that reveals this connection that's only meaningful to the audience...
(Though, of course, AHS only makes sense when it feels like it, so that could always be the explanation too)
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On 10/4/2017 at 11:21 PM, Laurie4H said:
Fin and Carisi finds stars next to the women the guy raped and there is one name they arent familiar with, and it just happens that they are able to stop it at the same time he find the list? Come on.
That did feel like a classic SVU moment, though. I feel like I saw the same exact scene played by Munch back around season 3-ish time...
They might as well have just done an insert shot of a "TO RAPE" list, with the first two victims names crossed out at the top and the next victim's name beneath. Just as plausible!
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1 hour ago, wknt3 said:
I agree with you on how painfully bad this is. However it has quite a way to go before it can be considered a serious contender for the worst creative misfire in the history of the whole L&O franchise. Or even just SVU. Once again let me remind you:
This is a Trash TV accomplishment for the ages! It's so perfectly gonzo. They were not intending to make a brilliant comedy with this hour, but they did, which is it's own success. And this episode is imminently rewatchable, I have seen it sooooooooooo many times. Honestly there's only three specific SVU eps I have deliberately watched again and again, and they are "Wildlife", "Guilt", and "Doubt."
Whereas this current Benson story... ugh. It's just so awkwardly and joylessly executed, it's not even campy fun.
28 minutes ago, dttruman said:It's the writers overdoing it again (maybe on the orders of Hargitay). They want the situation to be so dramatic, that viewers will be so sympathetic towards her. The only problem is, it loses it's realism. Viewers will only let the writers stretch their dramatic license so far.
One way they might save it is if it's revealed to be some dastardly revenge plan from a past enemy. That could explain how this total nothing of an "incident" is escalating so dramatically. That doesn't seem to be at all where they're headed with this... it really seems like just garden-variety bad writing of a dumb idea... but maybe! I live in hope.
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3 minutes ago, Dobian said:
Was there a supernatural element to Freak Show? I'm trying to remember and can't up with one. All the things I remember were freaky, but technically "natural".
There was Wes Bentley's Edward Mordrake character, and his supernatural Halloween night visitations with other ghosts.
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I'm a little worried about the quality split in these first two episodes! As others have mentioned, the rape story was a huge improvement over what we've been getting. I'm worried by how broadly written the incidental characters along the way were (the pick-up artist and the rapists mom stand out as particularly false and contrived), but I could put them in the "so bad it's good" category, so that's OK -- for now -- as long as it doesn't get worse in future episodes. But structure-wise, leaps ahead of where we've been. Like last week, they focused in the right way and told a story of the right size. Satisfyingly twisty but not overstuffed. The full squad involvement alone does wonders to help this show work better.
But this Noah thing! Holy hell, what an embarrassingly awful mess on every level!
I should stay that I don't have this aversion to the Benson personal drama that everyone else does. Benson personal drama is fundamentally in the DNA of the show, it's always going to be there. I've enjoyed it in the past and there's no reason they couldn't do a personal drama story well.
But this is a disaster. Terrible writing, terrible acting, flimsy idea that doesn't support a multiple episode (or full season?!?) arc. Every moment of character reaction from every player involved rings completely false. That Cassidy scene -- who knew one scene could be so incoherent on so many levels at once? This story is just painfully bad -- if it continues this way, it really has potential to be the worst creative misfire in the history of the whole L&O franchise.
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17 hours ago, ZoloftBlob said:
So we're five episodes in and upon reflection....
I'm worried there's not going to be any real payoff for any of these storylines.
Heh! I read this and thought: isn't that a well known risk of any AHS season? "Nothing may pay off" should be stamped on the opening credits, surgeon-generals-warning style.
I'm pretty happy with this as a mid-season point. Certainly much more so than I was last year, the first half of Roanake is easily and by far the worst block of episodes AHS has ever done. Cult is at that point where the seams in the storytelling are showing everywhere, at any minute it could all fall apart -- but it hasn't yet. And that's kind of what I want from AHS -- chaotic excess barely held together by some crazed, outrageous narrative.
I will say this has been the funniest season. There's always that strain of wicked humor on the show, but this year they've been leaning into that more and playing up the satire, to successfully entertaining effect.
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56 minutes ago, Florinaldo said:
After the excellent previous episode, this one was jarring and thus disappointing because I felt there were a beat or two that were missing in the progression of the cult coming together. Last time we saw Kai recruiting them and now they are already committing ritualistic murders together. After only a few months?
I don't think that even the followers of Jim Jones or members of the Heaven's Gate cult would have been ready to commit mass suicides (voluntary and enforced) after such a short time. I think the story would have needed a few more steps to show their descent into outright killings. Even the intense near-batshit crazy reporter needed a little more progression into violence, for me anyway.
This was exactly my issue! I can handwave the complicated plot mechanics of how specifically they would execute these plans, I'm willing to just go with a lot of things on this show, but I can't suspend my disbelief past basic character motivation.
That being said, with the fractured timeline, I started thinking we're going to fill this in from another POV later, so I'm reserving judgment and hoping that happens...
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I like that they're trying things and I appreciated the visual interest of a lot of the fan art, but this wasn't a successful experiment for me. I wish the story had connected to the changing look somehow, even just thematically, so it didn't feel like a gimmick laid on top of an unrelated story. Or maybe it would have helped if they just didn't change it quite so many times. As it was, the rapidly changing art just became distracting.
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It was odd to have all that explanation of what Cassidy has been up to -- retired, moved to Florida, now back as a DA Investigator -- given that when we left off with him he was in IA -- which makes perfect/more sense for this story they're trying to tell!
I kept thinking of how many episodes of this show (mostly during the Neal Baer years) have involved Benson discovering one incriminating fact, jumping to the worst possible conclusion, accusing someone of a heinous crime and completely ruining their life... and then they're exonerated, in a way that would have been easy to do at the start, if the squad had investigated more carefully and not just concluded this person MUST be a criminal. Is this Benoah thing some kind of meta-commentary on that?
Overall I was also mixed on this episode. There were plenty of seams showing in the storytelling (the rapist is about to get off scot free, but decides to sneak away from his own wife and attorney to go ask for favors from the woman he raped, mutilated, and pissed on? Oh-kay...), but the basic concept was interesting. It was appropriately scaled -- so often these shows just get overstuffed with incident to a degree that nothing gets properly serviced, but this was the right size of story. You don't always have to have a million twists, it's enough to just present us with a crime, and then get the drama and suspense from the twisty pursuit of justice, as obstacles are thrown in our characters way and they must figure out how to overcome them.
I do wish, for these old-case-coming-back-to-haunt-us episodes, they would use old cases that we actually saw! God knows there were enough of them that ended with the rapist getting away! The backstory from Rollins that this was one of her first cases at SVU and changed the way she saw the world was a bit much, given that we saw her whole arc of transferring in and adjusting to rape cases in her first episodes. But, OK, I'll go with it... we just skipped over the case at the time that had the biggest impact on her, that happened between episodes, sure, why not.
Production-wise it looked good. They did a nice job faking Cuba in Brooklyn. That scene in the WTC Oculus was fantastic, and I had a weirdly bittersweet reaction to seeing it in this context -- I had just been remembering how when this show started, the WTC was featured prominently in the opening credits. Now, all these years later, the same show is still around, shooting episodes in the reconstructed WTC transit hub. Law & Order winds through so much of NYC history at this point, in a way I find really quite striking.
Overall, it wasn't the home-run I was hoping for, but it was a solid start to the season. And it was easily better than almost every episode last year. I'm looking forward to next week.
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38 minutes ago, dttruman said:
If they want to impress me, I think they should introduce a character that is a police detective who is also Lenny Brisco's nephew. But all that is, is wishful thinking. The only way I think they would let this happens, would be if Benson would heroically save his life or something.
They had Ken Briscoe in the first 13! Played by Chris Orbach. I'm trying to remember what his exact relation to Lennie was?
He shot another appearance in "Manhattan Vigil", which was some milestone ep (400?), but it was cut.
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The thing that I don't like from that is the "broken woman" framing. Benson is the lead, there is going to be some kind of personal drama story for her -- that's fine, there should be, that's what the show is. Personal drama of the detectives has been a key component of this series since the pilot.
Where they've really gone wrong before is going overboard on the suffering and torment aspect of that. Who wants to see that? Going back to some area of severe, prolonged emotional brutalization of Benson is almost certainly a mistake, just because we've done too much of it already.
That being said, the smart move, as usual, is to reserve judgment -- they do a lot of strange framing in these press interviews, it's hard to interpret how it's actually going to play.
I love what he says about Rollins and Benson developing a true friendship where they're each others key confidantes -- that sounds like a smart evolution and something I'd like to see.
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On 9/25/2017 at 3:32 AM, starri said:
Am I the only one who really wants to know who or what that Daft Punk-looking person was?
Though I'm not at all a canon fetishist, I got so annoyed when I thought it was a robot. Apparently, it's supposed to be a female officer wearing a tactical helmet, which is better, but just such a bizarre design decision. I thought this was a visually stunning show, this dumb helmet might be the one detail that I couldn't stand.
On 9/24/2017 at 9:12 PM, azshadowwalker said:Then no gay characters. Canon is canon. Beverly Crusher said humanity would accept homosexuality better in the future in The Host. So, get that gay character mentioned in all the press releases outta here. Or just misogyny is canon?
Oh, come on. She says nothing of the kind in that TNG episode. This is the line:
Quote"Perhaps it is a Human failing, but we are not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can't keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can't live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, our ability to love won't be so limited."
She's talking about being unable to totally decouple her romantic feelings from her physical attractions. She's not saying there are no gay people, she's saying she can not change her own sexual orientation at will and can't pursue a romantic relationship with someone who is going to be regularly changing bodies.
Though obviously the "no female captains" thing is also absurd. You can be faithful to one line of dialogue from a mentally disturbed character in a single episode that is nearly 50 years old, or you can be faithful to the progressive spirit that has been the main point and most consistent thruline of the franchise for all these decades. It's pretty obvious what the right choice is.
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Also, whatever is going on with the budget, the money is being very intelligently spent. The show looks expensive, the money is ending up on screen. That hasn't always been true of SVU -- there were some years in the middle where the production values became garage-sale cheap. And then those WL seasons where every episode had at least one castmember inexplicably absent. I would like another detective in the squadroom, but not if they can't afford it... it's better that we get to see the whole core cast every week, however many members it has (the Barba absences are fine, since there are organic story reasons we don't need an ADA in every episode)
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The worrying thing in that article is doing an episode about passengers being dragged off planes. Ripping from the more tabloid-y headlines rarely ends well.
But a Charlottesville-inspired episode could be amazing. The L&O franchise is always at it's best when it's tackling actual issues of the day. This is exactly the kind of material they should be taking on. If this was Rick Eid giving this interview then, yes, obviously the resulting episode would be terrible. But as of now I have no reason to believe Michael Chernuchin can't pull it off.
What I REALLY like about that interview is that it seems we're going back to a greater diversity of topics, which is exactly what this show has needed for a long time. The latter Neal Baer years were a trainwreck, but the one thing subsequent showrunners should have kept is that NB episodes weren't afraid to use an initial sex crime or suspected sex crime as a springboard for a totally different type of story. There's only so many twists you can do on the same basic rape narrative.
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I also think it's crazy that you can't stream the mothership anywhere. I would stream that all the time, if I could. I would sign up to a service just for that. When they first got pulled from Netflix, I imagined it must be because NBC was planning to launch their own streaming service and wanted a lot of their properties to live there exclusively. But as the years have passed without even any rumblings of that, it becomes stranger and stranger to me that this huge decades-spanning franchise is mostly just not available anywhere in the streaming space.
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The Chicago shows are not streamable anywhere? Really? That seems crazy! I never realized that before, since I find that whole franchise... umm... I'm gonna go with "shockingly terrible."
Hey, I think I found one thing worthy of praise about the last season of SVU: no awful Chicago crossovers!
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56 minutes ago, Raja said:
Chicago Justice gave young Stone too much backstory. He was a Major League Baseball player before following his fathers path. It leaves little time to have also been a cop, much less work his way up to detective work. As an alternative, lawyers are one of those jobs qualifications that go directly to the FBI as Special Agents, only a Special Agent Stone has no reason or known specialty to be there like Special Agent Dr. Huang did.
I see what you're saying, but I just don't think these are things the L&Overse cares about. Aside from the ridiculous Alfred Molina DA/cop swap on LOLA, this is also the franchise that put Jeremy Sisto in consecutive episodes as a defense attorney and the new lead detective. Or Cabot turning up on Conviction with no acknowledgement that we'd last seen her leaving NY forever to hide out in witness protection. Or Goren and Eames just reappearing at their desks on CI, despite the fact that he'd been fired and she resigned. If Wolf Films wants the actor/character in the slot, they'll just put them there and give us one line to justify it -- if we're lucky ("I was attending the police academy while I was in basic training for the Cardinals")
But this is just me fantasizing about alternate cast arrangements I'd like, since they've already announced he'll be in the ADA slot. Though, of course, we did see Alfred Molina's ADA have a hard day on a case, walk out of the prosecutors office, and straight over to his new desk in the squadroom, so they could use that trick again...
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What they should do is the Alfred-Molina-on-LOLA gimmick. "Before I was a prosecutor, I was a cop! So I'm going to go back to that now, for some reason no follow-up questions just go with it" Then put him in the squadroom, which has felt shorthanded since Mini Dodds got killed. Not to mention, in need of exactly this kind of leading man type -- it's the first time they haven't had someone in the Meloni/Pino/Karl mold on the Detective team, and I feel the absence.
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13 hours ago, Proteus said:
No way is Barbara dead. I'm surprised everyone here thinks ER is really off the show.
9 hours ago, HoodlumSheep said:Yeah, she's totally not dead.
There's two competing imperatives at war in my mind.
1. In Gotham, death is almost always dramatically pointless and quickly reversed. If the death seems impossible to explain away, they just won't try, the person will just be alive again. This is a show that has no trouble repeatedly and directly lying to it's audience.
2. Of all the possible ways a story might go, the writers will almost always pick the worst and least interesting option. Killing the show's most consistently entertaining character would certainly fit the bill.
Is there an electricity-based villain from the comics she could be now? That could be literally the next scene, Barbara just getting up off the floor and finding she can now zap things. It was a magical electrocution in some way they will make no attempt to explain.
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How did they let a scene between Dark Lee and Crazy Barbara get away from them? That's a pairing that could have carried a half-season of story, and they don't even get ONE SCENE?
On the whole I thought this was a sloppily written mess, like most of the season, but I am somewhat interested to see who makes it back next year. Lee, Barbara, Hatter, Barnes, and Lucius all feel like they could be on the chopping block.
It's hard to tell in this universe of constant cop-out deaths, but Barbara's death felt like it might really stick. Which would be such a mistake, she's the one thing on this show that never disappoints, I always love a Barbara scene.
Now that there is an antidote that gives everyone a free pass for their virus actions, does Barnes get returned to normal and put back in the captain's office? Though my actual prediction is that we'll never see or hear from Barnes again.
I loved how Lee's letter referred to her as "getting infected", like it just happened. Just glide right past the fact that she injected herself! No one focus on that part, move along!
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12 hours ago, shapeshifter said:
Was this un-aired episode featuring a Trump-like character from this season or the end of the previous season?
Regardless, would it be included on the DVD?
Do we know its title?It was called "Unstoppable." From the beginning of this season. If I had to guess, I'd bet it will never be released in the US, but maybe it will someday be downloadable from an international airing. But who knows.
Here's the promo for it:
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1 hour ago, Gigglepuff said:
Can one really be deported within hours of being arrested and detained?
Yep.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/09/us/arizona-guadalupe-garcia-de-rayos-protests/
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S19.E03: Contrapasso
in Law & Order: SVU
· Edited by JyDanzig
Well, I'm at least glad I'm not alone! There were good moments scattered throughout the first half hour, but this episode really failed for me. It was so tedious how this setup leads, once again, to the powerful white man raping the pretty young white girl. We get it, show. Wouldn't it have been much more interesting to leave the rape as statutory and thus unprosecutable, and then have the case be about prosecuting the woman, and wrestling with what the just verdict is for her?
The closing arguments were so stupid. So stupid that I wonder if maybe it is me who is stupid and I just did not understand what was happening -- because it seemed to me that, OFF OF A POEM, the defense attorney admitted her client was guilty of the rape, but just said it would be unfair to punish him for it? Was that really it? Why not just go with the argument that this woman is crazy and made up the rape to soften her own sentence? Because they had literally mountains of evidence to support that!
But anyway, if this is the point they wanted to get to, a better route is showing us the woman's trial for the assault! It turns that what-is-justice argument inside out, in a way that a jury might actually go for. "This man raped her, and she has no chance of getting justice for it. She should not be punished for this assault, because she had no other recourse to punish him for the way he victimized her."
I feel like we should start a pool for how many times we're going to see the one/two scene Asshole Boyfriend/Husband this season. What better way to quickly engender sympathy for our sad, tragic victims? I'm going to guess... nine. Nine episodes this season will have versions of this character.
That "Rafa" came out of her mouth so awkwardly. It was clunky enough I was surprised they didn't loop it with "Rafi" or something. Retire this quick! "Rafael" was good enough!
As much of a drag as this is to contemplate, I assume it will become a key element in the custody case. "Detective Benson is SO unfit that she was recently investigated for ABUSE, and it was discovered that she allowed Noah to walk into oncoming traffic!"
That opening was a cruel tease! Sharp dialogue, strong character work, good locations, well shot, smoothly edited -- it really suggested a great episode ahead! And then the whole thing crashes and burns before we've even hit the opening credits...