Enginerd

I've only watched on Netflix and Amazon, so I hear it all uncensored and it's less noticeable than constant censoring (which just draws more attention to it, especially when you can totally tell what they're saying, so I don't know what the network is hoping to achieve), and I too have noticed that they are cursing A LOT to the point it seems like they're forcing in way more than would be natural, like you said. I have no problem with language as long as it isn't bigoted slurs, so I don't care, but it does come off rather like kids who have just discovered naughtiness and are trying to make a show of their rather than just talking and using words naturally. On the other hand, these characters are college-age and I don't think that's entirely unusual for people that age, in my anecdatal experience. Are we supposed to be into Elliott's pending marriage to the King of Loria, or think Elliott at least is into it? Because they have these sort-of romance scenes, but they're tepid, and Elliott generally oozes appeal. To me it seems like merely another politically strategic marriage that's only slightly better for him in that this one is a dude. But they don't seem like a great match personality-wise, nor do they really seem that into each other. The split second of Elliott and Quentin kissing was more passionate. Although we barely know Mr. Lorian King, so maybe he's got great attributes we just haven't seen yet.

They can't kill Penny. He's my favorite eye candy. I assume the hiatus in his magical ailment will give them time to find a solution. How does magic work when it's turned off and then back on? Does everything reset and have to be restarted, i.e. would old spells be null and void? Or is it like how everything is still on your DVR after a power outage? I assume Julia still has traces of pure magic from Reynard's sperm and/or having carried a demigod embryo, so isn't totally dependent on wellspring magic. This episode was too short. It needed to be a double episode to not skip so many steps, or else I'm just not quick enough to catch everything and need to watch it all again. Or maybe they just left a million loose ends so I will go crazy waiting so long for the next season. Did we find out whether Elliot's limitations on philandering were still in place? Where the heck is Penny? Is Mayakovsky going to die at Brakebills South without the usual magical supply chain? Is there any fallout to the disappearance of a prominent senator? Is Quentin's dad near death? Why were there so many breaker boxes for the magic? Does that mean that potentially there are other magical circuits out there, and if they traveled to other locations, they could still access magic?

He was! Can't Francis come back as a ghost and stir up some shady dealings and sexy shenanigans? Just because the guy had to die for the story to progress is no reason we should not continue to enjoy his pulchritude and chemistry with Mary on our screens.

Continuing in this vein...I think perhaps Jane went there in the novel because on some level she wishes she'd been able to have her fun with Rafael without all the guilt and expectations Alba put on her, yet still have ended up happily ever after with Michael. Book character got to have the convenient excuse that made it okay in her fictional moral system but Jane wouldn't have been able to justify for herself with crushed flowers analogies in her head (though I will repeat that in real life, drunkenness is not consent).

The little fragments we get when Jane is writing never sound very well written. I know most of them are junk she's deleting, but even then, her phrasing is often junior-highish. Shouldn't her education have cured her of a few clichés and taught her "show, don't tell"? Maybe the writers are having a laugh by portraying their own general field as inaccurately as most jobs are portrayed on television? We know THEY can write...or maybe they would also struggle when the words on the page would be the only way the story is conveyed. I'm still not clear on the staffing issue at the fundraiser. Petra supplied the room, but the school would have had to pay for staff? They opted not to pay for bussers? So were they expecting to let glassware pile up all night, or the waiters were supposed to take them and put them in the dishwasher? Normally waiters, bussers, and dishwashers are three different jobs in a venue of any size. The dishwasher broke. But the hotel had other kitchen and service staff on duty, right? Their regular lounge and room service were still operating as usual. Someone would have been running the dishwasher. So why couldn't one or two of those other people have been shuffled to help wash glasses? Ni modo; we got to see Rafael's excellent dishwashing skills.

I loved the olde-tymey novel scenes, but again with making Rafael the villain, Jane?! I mean, I loved watching it, but after she said his old self was shady, greedy and immoral last week, rather out of proportion to the actual dastardliness of his deeds, I'm surprised he loves her book so much the way he's cast. Is this a grief thing, where she needs to make Michael into a saint and Raf into a villain in her head to respect Michael's memory and prove to herself that she loved him enough? And yet, in the novel she lets her character get drunk and actually have sex with Rake, seemingly not feeling violated about it. I know she had to do something different since artificial insemination wasn't really so much of a thing back then (was it? Were people using turkey basters?) but I'm a little surprised she didn't somehow keep Josephine from any actual intimate contact with a man. Although maybe the fact that she was drunk and not sober enough for actual consent preserves the virtue enough and makes drunken Raf even more villainous. Whatever. New editor/publisher is trying way too hard to be a dudebro. Yet he openly loves Jane's "hella good" olde tyme romance novel. And now I'm suspicious that Raf, or perhaps Rogelio, paid him to give Jane a book deal and show great enthusiasm, but make it a normal enough contract so she'd believe it. LOL at the card included in the burn book package, with the elaborate 3D Marbella. So anonymous! Or do they carry those in the gift shop? Even so, who else would use a nice card?

Amen to that. It was such a soapy drama, all shenanigans and intrigue and attractiveness. Now we get conversation after dreary conversation about not being able to trust anyone. The most compelling action is a game of bocce and a dance that, frankly, didn't convince ME that anyone was hot for anyone. Mary and Gideon have no sizzle. Even Catherine isn't doing much besides whining at her son and not caring that he looks like a junkie on a bender. None of the new characters have made me care about them at all yet. I miss Bash so much. He was my favorite. I think he would have pointed out to Mary and James that Knox is unlikely to tell his wife anything and thought of a better strategy. Heck, living with Catherine for years should have given Mary more of a clue and more ideas for espionage.

Seriously. WTF? I didn't know she had that low an opinion of him. Naive and prone to bad decisions, sure. But he's never been particularly villainous. Mostly just strayed off the moral high ground a few times, but in an attempt to service overall moral goals. Unless I'm forgetting something major. A little witness fabrication here and dithering about inherited stolen art there wouldn't warrant too long a stay in purgatory. If he'd been really greedy and amoral pre-linen-pants, he would have sold all that stolen art. I've come around to thinking I don't want Michael to reappear. The dead should stay dead. Worst case scenario, for me, would be that Jane eventually is ready to move on, falls in love with Rafael again, and THEN Michael is resurrected and we're back to the triangle. No, thanks. Though I don't want her back with Rafael, either. They're better as friends. New hot, smart, kind guy, please. What is The CW for if not to provide an endless stream of eye candy?

The way he went about it was way sneaky and a little shady. Why wouldn't the police department have already taken Michael's notes? He wasn't some lone avenger; he was a police detective working on that investigation on the department's behalf. Surely his notes belonged to them after his death? I guess I don't really know the rules of police work, but it doesn't make sense that detectives' notes on cases would be considered their personal property. Why wouldn't he have handed them over when he left the job? Even if he had additional notes that weren't part of the official case file, why wouldn't Dennis just ask Jane for them? It does make it seem like he didn't entirely trust Michael and/or Jane.

I like Dennis. I hope he doesn't turn out to be evil. I hate it when shows drop all the main character's friends and their social world shrinks to only convenient cast members, but in Jane's case it actually makes a lot of sense that they'd drift apart. Jane's a widow and a mom and was in a very demanding job. Lina and probably most of her other friends are in a different phase of their lives and Lina especially did not seem at all into the kids thing. She's into going out and having fun, and Jane has been probably not in the mood most of the time she's been grieving, plus doing kid stuff a lot of the rest of the time. I imagine Lina checks in and spent a little time comforting her bereaved friend, but she's not a person who would have a LOT of patience for sorrow and mom life. The spin class was really funny. I loved the narrator's reality check when the instructor was like "we're at the top of a mountain" or whatever and he said "actually, a sweaty room in a strip mall" or something like that. I'm surprised he didn't give a more meta level of reality check on Hawai'i/Miami Beach/actually California. Looking forward to Rogelio's new Gulliver's Travels telenovela.

7. Luisa introducing her "new" girlfriend to Rafael, and Raf is skittish because "her ex killed my dad". And Rose-as-Not-Rose says "that's only if you believe that death is finite." Foreshadowing a supposed death that isn't finite?!

I'm becoming more and more convinced Michael isn't really dead, for the following reasons: 1. Telenovelas need DRAMA. Coming back from the "dead" is DRAMA. 2. How would his heart condition not have been noticed in his long hospital stay and subsequent physicals? 3. The several days of feeling off, with no prior symptoms, make me think he was being slowly poisoned. 4. The other people at the exam didn't even attempt CPR, that we saw. What is wrong with these people? Plants who weren't really there to try to get into law school, but to take him out? 5. Sin Rostro changes people's faces. Rose could have had some other victim who was given Michael's look and then killed and swapped in for Michael. It's a slick enough operation they could have managed this shenanigan in an ambulance or at the hospital. If Rose wanted Michael for some reason, she'd take him alive. He is effective at the detective work. Maybe she wanted to use his skills for her own purposes and is keeping him captive by threatening Jane and Mateo if he doesn't cooperate. 6. The phone call to tell Jane he was dead. It's weird to call and bluntly announce it rather than having the family member come to the hospital, and it sounded weird. Like a "Your husband is dead of [insert condition here]" autorecording. Who would give the news that way?!

Hey, Petra, I think I know how the property line screw-up happened: you hired some totally hack design team operating in the last century, possibly in a time warp from before the current property lines were established. Who in the Hades uses BLUEPRINTS anymore?! I haven't seen any new ones in decades. Construction drawings are printed in normal black on regular large-format printers, and have been for some time, except maybe some weirdo small shop somewhere that insists on being retro for whatever reason. Even little firms that can't afford their own large format printers send their drawings to a print shop. Blueprints. As if. I love Raf's new linen pants, er, I mean zen attitude. He's much better when he's relaxed than when he's angsty. Jane needs to let Mateo experience real consequences for his actions instead of goofy discipline systems. He obviously does not care about thunderstorm stickers. Missing the party all the other kids are attending because they don't like him because he's mean might make more of an impression on him. I loved the Marbella before and hate the new kids' club. It's cheesy. I hope we won't have as many kid scenes in future episodes. Shrill children running around are not that exciting to watch; I don't need them on my TV screen. I'm definitely suspicious of the pirate and the parrot, though. Seems like an obvious route for a Sin Rostro plant. Why is Xo still with Bruce 3 years later? He's such a nonentity. To each her own and all but I do NOT see the attraction. Does he even have a personality?

I'm with the show on that one. It was a little over 30 minutes when Jane and Michael drove there in the middle of the day with little traffic. At rush hour or if there's a wreck, it could take two or three times as long. They both work in the city. The Marbella is in South Beach, which is all the way PAST Miami. So they'd be doing that long commute every day. It adds up to a big chunk of your life spent in the car, plus a lot of gas money. If you have no other option, or if you're determined to have the biggest possible house and yard, of course you do it, but I think it's much better to be closer if you can manage it.

The new apartment seems nicer than the house, and only slightly smaller and without their own yard. Is someone else secretly subsidizing this? Rogelio? Rafael? Or did they move to a cheaper suburb or are they just suddenly really lucky with finding a place? Also, how did they get unpacked and everything arranged and hung and organized so fast? Did more time pass than it seemed like? I think Catalina is definitely up to something other than meeting her relatives, but I can't decide yet how nefarious I think she is. The constant name-dropping and mentions of how fabulous she is, combined with the little put-downs by which she totally for sure means no offense, combined with snaking her way into a relationship with someone close to Jane, remind me a lot of a former frienemy of mine. AVOID. Combined with the way she showed up at their home unannounced and readily agreed to stay with them, while they were in the middle of a move no less, I'd say at the very least Cat has no respect for appropriate boundaries, and people who push boundaries are aggravating even if they don't do anything outright illegal or blatantly harmful. Rogelio's celery diet looks miserable, although the shots of the craft services table were funny. Anyone else think his scene is going to get cut from the film? It was sweet of him to do a fro-yo ad to get Xo a good price on her studio. And I ALWAYS love a dance-off. I also love that these two are the GRANDPARENTS in this show, young grandparents, but still, not The Youths, and yet they get to have these dancing scenes and actually be good at it. I didn't even mind the HBO stuff; it was done humorously enough. It cracked me up the way the product rep kept referring to "The Honey Bunch" as though that's an actual place. And at least it was product placement for a cereal that's actually good. It would have been worse if Rogelio had to massacre the otherwise pristine historical accuracy of Tiago for, say, Mary's Gone Crackers (truly the most vile crackers I have ever tasted).

Petra is really misdirecting her anger. Does she actually expect Rafael would ever realize much of anything? Bless his sweet handsome heart, he is not the sharpest knife in the block, and he has a solid history of gullibility, and she knows that. She uses it against him often. Plus, with both Rafael and Jane, Petra changes moods and attitudes and personalities all the time. She swings drastically from friendly to vulnerable to villainous to seductive to whatever will suit her purposes at the time. Plus she's been influenced by her mother and by postpartum depression and the threat of poverty and being blackmailed...is it any wonder they don't know who she really is and can't identify her true persona? I'm also hoping her rage will burn out in a few episodes max and she'll be more rational. It's understandable that she's angry and hurt that he thought Anezka-as-Petra was a better mother, but Petra is very smart, so I hope eventually she'll realize that hurting him won't help her. Maybe she'll also put some energy into BEING a better mother rather than being furious at him for expressing something she herself acknowledged to be true. Did she ever really take care of the depression issues?

They were fighting over lattes when they were trying to come up with another $1000/month in rent. Now that they've decided to move to a less expensive place, I guess she figures there's room in their budget for splurges and donations again.

Great funny plotlines and relationships that continue to evolve in interesting ways without love triangles and after the lead gets married! I love telenovelas, but one of the things I HATE about them is the convention of keeping the lead couple from being functional and stable and happy together until the very end, as if it is the only possible source of drama and plot and there is no major story to be had other than the will they? won't they? (they will. they almost always will) and a wedding is the be all and end all of satisfaction. So I'm REALLY glad Jane the Not-Virgin veered sharply from that. I'm generally heart-eyed over Rafael, and only wish that gif had been available for meditative use 6 days ago, but I think he could ease up a little on the gym. I'm sure Justin Baldoni cares less than zero about my personal opinions on male pulchritude, but when a guy is so ripped and veiny that he looks like he'll pop if he bumps into a sharp object, it makes me anxious. I don't know whether I'm on Alba's side or Jane's. On the one hand, awful sister. But on the other, all those cousins who weren't at fault. Jane should be able to get to know them! But on the third mutant hand, new family members are almost never good news on this show. But then Rogelio was a newly found family member at one point, and look how that turned out.

I'm confused about something. Back when Jane and Michael signed the lease, Petra said when she talked to the agent that she OWNED the house. This bit was repeated in the previouslies. But now there's some theoretical $2000/month rent that isn't being collected and the agent is trying to kick them out and get new tenants? If Petra owns the house, then the rent she was charging (secretly, through the agent) would be the real rent even if the market rate or mortgage if one had to get a mortgage was twice as much. Or was that just an error on either her part or the writers', and she was really only subsidizing their rent? Another reason that what Jane and Michael believe to be true about living in a smaller place until they can afford a bigger one might not happen is that once they rescue Petra and she's awake and in charge of her affairs again, she may insist on continuing to keep them in that home.

Maybe Jane and Michael will decide to embrace the Tiny House movement. Or live on a boat. That would be entertaining! Or maybe housing prices will continue to climb and their careers will stagnate and they'll have other expenses and just never have enough money for a big place. Flamingo party! I love it. I want Petra rescued ASAP, and then I want Rogelio to help her recover. He has actually been held hostage in real life, if not completely frozen inside his body, so that plus his acting method skills means this has to happen. Those two need some serious screen time together. But I also want Rogelio to continue his friendship with Rafael, because that is gold.

I also love how they work in political commentary on immigration.

So many things to love in this episode: The horrible wallpaper and everyone's reactions to it. #anezkatized The Statue of Liberty poem judging. I love all the completely warped versions of historical events and I hope he sticks with this show for a LONG time. Rogelio in his olde-tymey apparel. Rafael being funny and relaxed and saying what he really thinks instead of trying to please Jane and pining over her. Magda's giant clunky black market prison cell phone. Anezka catching two rabbits. Michael lying in a hospital bed recovering from a wedding-night gunshot wound by an assassin who is still on the loose and very seriously listening to Rogelio's super tragic stardom woes and giving him sage advice. Xo, Jane, and Michael's convo on the bed. The cruise ship honeymoon in the bedroom, and that Michael made a honeymoon playlist. Jane and Rafael being forced to reconcile with a preschool audience and coaching. I loved it all. I like that secrets and shenanigans don't get dragged out to an absurd degree like they would on some shows. Like Xo keeping the abortion secret from Alba. She fretted about it for awhile, but in the end she told her instead of going to wacky extremes to keep it hidden. Things come out and they move along. For that reason I don't think Petra will be Petrafied for much longer. Poor woman; people think she's carrying on with SCOTT! Of all nasty people! I think Scott is an opportunist above all and would have sex with anyone if it would get him something. I want to know what dirt he has on Rafael. What could there be that we don't already know about?

Yay! Michael's alive! I love that he pretended to have amnesia, but just for a moment. He's picked up a few things from watching telenovelas with the Villanueva ladies! I hope Sam returns, but not as a love interest for Jane. Maybe he could work at the hotel and be Rafael's friend? Raf desperately needs a solid friend who has never betrayed him and with whom he shares no children. I also like the new cop who was suspicious of Anezka. I hope he sticks around. Of course Rose has a submarine with an extremely cushy bed. If they're going to keep going with this whole Sin Rostro thing, I hope we get more background and insight on Rose. It might keep it more interesting. I find the string of villain tricks somewhat entertaining, but after awhile I want more of a behind-the-scenes look into the evil empire.

I agree. Rafael is so tied in to the rest of the cast and plots, they can let him move on from Jane and he'd still have a reason to be around. And I have never seen compelling evidence that he's lifelong hopelessly in love with Jane and can't move on. He likes the idea of having a solid loving family. I think if meets someone else who is authentic and principled and a dreamer in similar ways to what he likes about Jane, he could love that woman just as well. Especially once he believes that his kids aren't going anywhere just because he's not romantically involved with their mothers. Although Anezka seems intent on making a play for him while pretending to be Petra.

I genuinely do not see the bad acting or lack of chemistry that other see in Rafael. I believe you all that it's what you see, but eye of the beholder and whatnot, I guess; I just want to point out that it isn't a universal opinion or a fact. I see a good portrayal of an introvert, which I appreciate because I often think introverts are underrepresented on television. I enjoy his exchanges with the other characters. I think he's an empathetic character, in the way he's been so mistreated by his family and friends but clings to his happy family fantasy. But I also see a lot more chemistry and entertainment value when he steps out of that restrained I particularly loved when he and Jane were in therapy and imitating each other, and when he's being a sleazebag in flashbacks, and in the campy fantasy scenes.