AllyB

I agree with other posters on Chidi and Eleanor. I see no romantic/sexual chemistry between them either.

Desperate no, but Tahani and Jason had a relationship for half of S2 resulting in a heartbroken Janet nearly subconsciously destroying the neighourhood when they asked her to marry them. And creating Derek as a rebound guy. Tahani knew Jason as Jason all through their relationship but still wanted on some level to marry him. She also actually married him in their second life in S3, and even though that was largely as a way to share her money with him, there were hints of her being attracted to him.

I was just surprised to hear Frank refer to Dennis as his son so much throughout it. I'd sort of had the impression that once the Reynolds realised Bruce was the twins biological father that their familial relationship with Frank sort of petered out.

I loved the scene where Charlie and then Dee turn up late to Dennis and Mac's apartment and Dennis just wants to go to bed. Charlie, "What are you, in your 40s?" Dennis, "Yes. And so are you." Then with Dee, "Going to bed. How old are you?" Dennis, "WE'RE THE SAME AGE!" Maybe it's just because I'm also in my 40s but I laughed so hard at both.

Overall I liked this a lot. It dragged towards the end with the Ricardo/Dusty/Infinity plot going on just that bit too much. I also thought that the backlash against Payton was a bit too much and very easy to spin back into his favour. (Regardless of the fact that all the actors are clearly adults) Payton was a teenager who in the space of a couple of months, had his friend shoot himself dead in front of him, his girlfriend cheat on him, his dad tried to kill himself and nearly did die, he found himself under suspicion of murder because a girl ran away from home, discovered that his terminally ill running mate was actually victim of her grandmother's poisoning, survived not one but two assassination attempts and woke from a coma to discover his family had broken up and he was penniless and alone. His "crime" was that in the middle of this shit tornado he elected to tell his running mate what was happening to her so she could deal with it in the way that suited her, instead of going to the police and having it made public before she was ready. The result being the grandmother arranging the more successful assassination attempt. Sure he had a selfish motivation for telling Infinity over the police but he was in a hellish situation and he suffered for it while Infinity actually benefitted. The story could easily have been spun into the one where he was very much a secondary victim and a hero by James and McAfee. In fact I'd expected that to be episode 8, with the principal taking the blame for ignoring Andrew's warnings. I liked what did happen better obviously. Catapulting 3 years into the future to set up Payton going up against Bette Middler and Judith Light's VP candidate team is much, much more entertaining and I'm so looking forward to S2. But it did feel a bit silly that something that could so easily have been spun into a positive brought him down.

Did he care about that? In S3 Lawrence's main priority seemed to be Eleanor. Eleanor not having the strain of a Handmaid in the house and having the potential happy distraction of a child would be a much bigger motivator than some woman he didn't care about having an easier time for a few months.

Yes I know he didn't want a child but it was still incredibly stupid of him not to take one. Having a child meant not having to have a handmaid. And as much as he may not have liked children it would have been a lot safer to have a child in the house than risk everyone in the household's lives by having a handmaid while refusing to do the ceremony. It may also have helped Eleanor as she may have been distracted from the horrors of Gilead and it may have somewhat tempered her mental state. I know that her mental illness was largely exacerbated by the lack of her medication but she was enormously distressed by Gilead and a handmaid's presence in the house was a constant reminder in the same way that a child may have been a distraction.

I guess so. Daisy is told to smile for the waiting news cameras as she passes out. And when she comes to, she is told (among the other 100 things in a massive info dump) that they are all over the news "sisters defy odds" "Baby Nichole escapes Gilead." As is the microdot concealed in her tattoo. As is all the information on the microdot. It's not explicitly spelled out that they are celebrities but if you are the baby symbol of escape from Gilead for 16 years, then you go back to Gilead, find your sister and smuggle out a load of information that somehow brings Gilead down. And you do the final part on camera, dramatically collapsing live on tv as you reach safety. You are a celebrity. The sister by your side is a celebrity. Your two very different lives and reunion and daring escape to end Gilead are going to be mega-news whether you cooperate or not. Their newly reunited mother and fathers will not remain secret and anonymous, though they may avoid the massive level of celebrity that would be unavoidable for the sisters. And in fact if Gilead is ultimately ended by bad PR(?) the sisters being out there front and centre with a Mayday controlled narrative would be a big part of that. As is clear by the fact that Mayday arranged for all the news cameras to be there when the girls landed.

I finished the book this morning and am ultimately very disappointed. First off it's an entertaining easy read. I mostly wasn't bored throughout and wanted to keep reading. I say mostly because in the final chapters, the escape from Gilead, there was absolutely no tension because how these characters and their world would end up was made explicit from their first chapters. We mostly derided Bruce Miller stating that June can survive everything the plot throws at her because the story is told by her at some point in the future. But that was definitely the case here. There was never any tension for the two younger characters because their ending was known right from the start. So the chapters that might otherwise have felt tense didn't. Then one character goes to sleep and when she wakes up a multitude of major events have passed which she hears about over the course of about 5 sentences and then we're essentially done. The end was all tell (swiftly) with no show and I ultimately found that really unsatisfying. I also had some issues with a few of the major events in the book itself. Mainly with baby Nichole. Offred got in the back of that van in the early stages of her pregnancy. So early that she didn't actually know for sure that she was pregnant and Fred and Serena hadn't a clue about it. We know from there that she made it to Maine and made her tapes. And other than that was lost to history. Yet in this book Baby Nichole that nobody in Gilead knew about nor should they ever have had means to know about, was a big deal. A huge deal because her 'legal' father, Fred, who shouldn't have known she existed wanted her back. And she continued to be a big deal long after Fred was purged. This makes no sense. In the future, apart from her relatively anonymous tapes Offred is unknown and untraceable. Luke and Nick are unknown and untraceable. Yet their daughters are free celebrities who have given full testimonies that are a matter of public record. And all five are so publicly reunited that they declare it on a statue in a park! But nobody could ever work out what happened to Offred, who she really was and what happened afterwards? Nope, doesn't make sense. And lastly, Lydia's backstory. The original book and even the crappy tv series have always inferred that the creation of Gilead was akin to a slow boiled frog. Small changes, freedoms eroded a little at a time, so that by the time it was unpalatable it was too late. Yet in Lydia's backstory we are told that Congress was bombed, women lost control of their money, the constitution abolished and professional women (including the receptionist) rounded up in the space of about 3 days. That's not a slow boiled frog. It's a microwaved frog. She sits in the stadium berating herself for not leaving sooner, but what sooner? No more than 4 minutes passed between her learning that her bank accounts were frozen and the constitution abolished and her arrest. Even if she wasted no time after learning about women not being allowed money, she wouldn't have made it out of the building. It was lightening fast. The opposite of everything ever implied in the original book. Lastly, that Judd, and the other founding Sons of Jacob, would think that turning women like Lydia in the space of a couple of weeks and then handing her power of the kind the aunts, especially the founding aunts, would have is just stupid. The stadium treatment, followed by the carrot and stick approach of the Thank Tank and the Holiday Inn is an interesting idea. But not for turning modern women with no religious inclination into what is essentially the female leadership of Gilead. It's stupid. Gilead was well planned. There would have been 3 other women like Vidala who had been groomed for years and years in advance of Gilead in order to become those 'founding aunts.' The SoJ would not have been dependant on just one pre-prepared woman and 3 who they 'made' in a hurry. I could buy Lydia finding her way into the aunts as a means of survival and working her way up really quickly, while always trying to bring the system down. But not that Judd had earmarked her as a leader before the treatment, yet never, ever moved to work on her until the lightening fast take over and then he was so happily confident in his superfast brainwashing system that he gave her massive amounts of independent power immediately. It, again, makes no sense. The Lydia backstory on the tv show wasn't great but it made far more sense than this did. So overall, I think the book was a big step up from the garbage that the tv show has become but it's massively flawed in itself. It was fine as I read it, as I enjoyed the entertainment aspect of it. And Atwood is a lovely writer. But the more distance I have from reading it, the stupider it's becoming. And I only finished it a few hours ago. In this way it's reminding me of the first of the Kelvin timeline Star Trek movies. Entertaining enough while watching it that I ignored all the stupidity, but still so stupid that I wasn't even out of the cinema before all the 'but!!!!! s' started refusing to be pushed aside anymore.

Speedy for me anyway. I've goal of bringing my marathon time in closer to 2 hours but with winter on it's way, I'm just happy to get out for an hour or so when I can and just let loose. But pretty much anything with wheels or blades on my feet is my version of wonderful.

I may be a step towards forgiving this show for being so awful. I added Cloudbusting to my trail skating playlist after hearing it at the end of Liars. Most of that playlist is fast rock music to keep me moving fast, so I wasn't sure how it would work out but thought I'd try it. It came on yesterday evening for kilometers 21 and 22. I was skating hard, already high on adrenaline, skating alongside a lovely treelined canal, facing into the sunset. It was like a religious experience. Just beautiful. Obviously Kate Bush actually deserves the credit, not this terrible show, but I wouldn't have heard it otherwise, so that's something.

If Lawrence was so powerful and he really didn't want to take part in the ceremony rape a woman every month why didn't he make sure he was allocated a kidnapped child? Eleanor would have likely abhorred the idea of stealing a child. But if he'd gotten a child young enough not to cry coherently for it's family he could have lied to her about it's terrible home life and she'd have gotten attached to it before she realised the depths of the depravity of Gilead. Not ideal but better and far less risky than having to have a succession of pretend handmaids. The problem is that, once again, the writers have given absolutely no thought into how Gilead works. Commanders who were given the option to receive actual children would surely have been higher up the power ladder. Some may have preferred the handmaid rape option, but with Jezebels for all their rapey wants, you'd have to presume most Commanders would prefer a child, as having a child is a status symbol. Sons for the higher status Commanders, obviously. With younger children also having a higher value. Whoever got Alma's baby son, for example, would have had to have been a very, very powerful man. And on that kind of ranking, Matthew must be quite the rising star to have been assigned Natalie, a handmaid who had three babies for Gilead in 5 years. (Mega fertile Natalie being a total plothole obviously as the fertility issue is with the men. She could only have had three babies in 5 years and then gotten pregnant again, if she had miraculously been assigned to 4 fertile Commanders magical succession. Which is so statistically unlikely it's practically impossible. Or she was getting her sperm elsewhere which wouldn't have been in character.)

How many episodes are left? This felt like the penultimate one to me for some reason. I guess that unless we get a hint that he's somewhere else in the final episode, Wally is just plain dead this season. Perhaps this series will end with a hint that Wally isn't actually dead and then next season will focus on the original Team and maybe a few others like Bart and Jaime, maybe Barbara due to her relationship with Dick, searching for him. Granny and Gretchen as two separate women who are both the same person and not the same person, could be an introduction to an alternate universe. I like the current line-up just fine, probably because I only watched Young Justice S1 and 2 at the end of last year, so haven't been waiting years for my favourite characters to return only to end up with stories focussed on Violet and the Markovs. But I do feel that once this storyline is over Brion will need to return to Markovia. Tara will either be dead, mostly offscreen as a villain or with Brion. Violet will either be dead, somewhere off earth or with Brion. Apart from brief appearances their stories will be done and the show really should focus on the established characters rather than introducing more.

Ah guys, I really missed you all and my Wednesday dose of snark yesterday.

That's exactly what she tried to do with the "Freaky Tuesday" stunt. She got everyone to switch roles so the show would be a disaster in front of Sandy and she'd rescind her offer to extend their run. Debbie didn't want to do the show past that week and she tried to ensure that nobody else could either. It really was a despicable move on her part and it's why Bash was so furious. And the other women should have been too.