wilnil

It's possible we are expected to believe Sherlock doesn't know Clapton's name. In one of the first Conan Doyle stories (maybe the very first), Watson realizes Holmes thinks the sun revolves around the Earth and tries to correct him. Holmes replies something along the lines of "...and now that I know this, I shall do my best to forget it again," explaining to Watson that he believes there is a finite amount of information a person can retain, so he wants every fact he knows to be relevant to detecting. IIRC, Elementary had Sherlock say something similar early in the series.

That one. He relived being shot. Then as a bonus, he went straight from that into a nightmare within the nightmare, and that's the one that woke him up screaming.

It sort of sounds like that, but it didn't come from the comics world at all. "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" was the title of an old (1969) tongue-in-cheek essay by science fiction writer Larry Niven on the subject of "how can we ensure that new Kryptonians are born so they can take over for Superman when he gets old?" A lot of it revolved around the various difficulties involved with a superstrong, invulnerable man trying to conceive a child with a human woman. (Niven did briefly touch on the fact that there was a Kryptonian woman also on Earth, but only to point out that she was Superman's cousin, so "only a cad" would suggest that as a solution; he never got into the mechanics of the Kryptonian/human problem from Supergirl's perspective.)

This theory just popped into my head: Madeline kills Perry. Consider: Madeline's reaction in the car after hearing Jane's backstory. Her turmoil over the men in her own life, and the stress of having Abigail decide to move in with her dad. Celeste seems to be her best friend in town, and whatever else Madeline is, she's loyal to friends. Now imagine that on the night of the fundraiser Madeline finds Perry abusing Celeste, and there's anything club-like close at hand...

IIRC, when Kevin was trying to persuade Sophie to give him another chance, we found out from their dialogue that while they were married, Kevin had gone out to L.A. to look for acting work while Sophie stayed in the NYC area for the time being -- and that's when he started cheating on her. So Ron's offer practically re-creates that situation, or so it might appear to Sophie.

Seconding pretty much all the points in this thread. Also, I think to make this a little more realistic, they'd need to ditch many of the restrictions on what can be done in advance by the fugitives. I get that the show can only simulate a chase, but what they were simulating was "resourceful interagency task force of the kind that would be assembled to catch major federal-level felons" pitted against "felons too stupid to even pack a go-bag before they know they've been identified." Sure, restrict the amount of money the fugitives can start out with, but then let them access that money before they have to leave and use that fund in their advance setup -- buy burner phones, hair dye, maps, whatever -- with the onus on them to figure out how to make those purchases in ways that can't be reconstructed by the hunters in five minutes once the chase begins. (Though I think it would be fair to restrict them to buying such stuff in their home areas.) And for Chrissakes, let them pack their bags ahead of time! In this season, it appeared the only advance work they were allowed was setting up plans with friends/allies and doing general research.

Before the series started, I was assuming each fugitive team was going to be pursued by a bounty-hunter type. That would have made for a much better show than having them chased by the kind of team and resources that you'd use to catch somebody like the Tsarnaev brothers.

This was minor, but I was distracted by the implausibility of Earth's interplanetary missiles being launched from silos on the planet's surface. I think they were going for the cute Cold War parallel (let's open up the "nuclear football" briefcase, turn the two activation keys, etc.), but it would have been more realistic for the missiles to be stationed in various solar orbits so they could quickly strike any target in the inhabited system -- especially given that the target could be anywhere from "lined up" orbitally with Earth to being on the other side of the sun from it.

Yeah, HBO had it up on cable (On Demand) also.

William could be demanding, but I didn't have big problems with his actions either on the day he got Randall to take him shopping and driving or on the Memphis trip. Both came after he knew the chemo wasn't working and his time was running out -- the first was his last shot at getting some of his "bucket list" fulfilled, and the second was essentially going home to relive happy memories and die.

One thing that threw me was when Flynn suggested that his plan to bomb the '50s Rittenhouse meeting might endanger Lucy's existence by killing her ancestor(s). If he thought that was even a possibility, why would he have dared to mess with his own mother's past (in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission, IIRC)? It would seem, by the rules the show has implied, that at worst she'd return to a present timeline where she hadn't been born and thus no one but her traveling companions knew her. Not that I'm even sure he could've erased her birth. Given how little everybody's changes to the past have altered the present, I'm now thinking this is more of an "Elastic" time-travel model, where the timeline can be changed but only in minor ways because similar events happen in place of the original ones, so Lucy's family situation being different is about the biggest shift that's possible. At least that's the only way we can handwave away things like the untimely death of Cornwallis or there being no real fallout from the attempted sabotage of the first moon landing (which should've really heated up the Cold War).

I was a little too young for Vietnam, but the draft order was based on a lottery drawing, so a high number was the luck of the draw.

Last I heard, Westeros.

When Kevin first went to Sophie's place, I also thought the writers had just invented her character on the spur of the moment, but then NBC re-ran "The Trip" episode -- and on the tree where they'd all carved their names, there's a heart with (IIRC) "KP + SB" carved there. So now I think they had Sophie in mind even as they were setting up the Kevin/Olivia/Sloane triangle.

I kind of like the character of Kevin, so it's sad to say, but it would be pretty much in character for him to cheat on her, especially if he was already an actor at that point and meeting attractive actresses -- he'd crave the ego boost of having other women be into him even if not particularly wanting the extracurricular sex. Editing to add: I definitely saw the "Sofie" spelling on the note we saw in Kate's brief memory flashback. Might have been one of the other girls writing it and misspelling her name, though.

It's still Michael's project for torturing the four of them. They'll still be in the neighborhood, just with more "diabolical" soulmate pairings, and have to be destined to meet each other so they can get back to unintentionally tormenting each other.

Exactly -- she had to take the time to figure out what to write and where to put the note, and she had no idea when Michael and Shawn (IMDB's spelling) were coming back. Saying "Find Chidi" is the best short piece of advice -- even if she loses all the moral ground she gained the first time around, she can relearn it from Chidi once she finds him ... and that could give her the insight she needs to figure out the "Good Place" again. Re Chidi in Hell: My feeling is that all four of them, in their own way, were intensely selfish -- Eleanor and Jason in more typical ways (she with the "we're all in it for ourselves, and let's keep it that way," he with his dumbass form of total self-indulgence), and Tahani in the way we've all seen (fruitless efforts to appear as "good" -- actually as high-status -- as her sister, who probably isn't destined for a Good Place either -- the whole family actually seemed status-driven). Chidi is sort of like Tahani in that way: He was trying to live his life in accordance with what all his studies would label Good, as if he were trying to pass some metaphysical final exam, and never pulling his head far enough out of the texts to notice his effects on other people -- he, too, was all about himself. So not only was he trying to be "Good" in the wrong way, but he failed at it.

This is an excellent point -- they're definitely in a timeline where Flynn has already time-traveled, because they've detected his time and place of arrival, but if they believe it's a forking model, then sending back their own team would just create a new branch separate from the line of the Mason Industries crew that sent them. So Mason & co., whether correctly or not, must believe it's an overwriting model. Here's another bit of speculation on how time travel works here that might explain why the changes to the present day are always so minor even with, e.g., the death of Cornwallis. It isn't really logical, but then again, neither is the "can't travel to a time when you already exist" rule: Maybe the appearance of a time traveler in the past, while allowing change in/branching of a timeline, limits the changes to those that would still allow for the traveler to be born and the time machine to be built -- so that the traveler's own existence in the past remains consistent with the new/changed timeline's history. If this is the case, then Flynn's on a fool's errand -- the new timeline will always be one where something has driven him into an insane (literally, it appears) quest to steal a time machine and change the past.

I'm not worrying yet. Lucifer is getting middling ratings, true, but it's on Fox, which historically has gotten by with having a few ratings behemoths (e.g. Simpsons, Idol, Gotham, Empire -- some of which hold up for years, while some peter out) amid a schedule that's got more than its share of stinkers. So I think middling shows have more of a chance on Fox. Hell, they renewed Sleepy Hollow after even its biggest fans decided the network/showrunners had ruined it. Fox may just want something to give them a summertime bump as all the networks do these days.

A heads-up: At some point in the run-up to the show's return, Comcast On Demand has put up "extended cut" versions of many of the first nine episodes including scenes that didn't make the cut in the original 22-minute-or-so broadcast versions. Just discovered this while rewatching what came before this upcoming episode.

What's really bizarre is that they started down the path of "the timeline is fragile" right in the pilot with Lucy's healthy mom/nonexistent sister/stranger fiancé and since then have shown ever more inconsequential changes that amount to slight rewrites of history chapters or new movies, even when fairly major alterations have been made in the past (e.g., the belief that the Soviets tried to sabotage Apollo 11 should have had major political ramifications). And given everything that's happened In 1780, if they don't return to find incredible timeline changes, the show stops being internally consistent at all. I'm wondering if they had a change in writing staff since the pilot, and the new writers don't get where the original ones were going.

The idea was that he's from far enough in the future that he hasn't been born yet in the present. As long as he returns to a point in this time that he isn't already in, he's OK.

The Anthony thing has been brought up in other threads here, and two theories kicked around are that (1) the "real" rule is that you mustn't go back to a time and place where you already exist, or (2) Anthony himself is from the future and first built a time machine to get to our present. They still haven't explained enough for us to figure out how Flynn got Lucy's journal -- as far as I recall, they haven't said whether travel to the future is even possible -- but if it isn't possible, then maybe a future Lucy, after writing the journal, went back in time to the present day (actually, to some point before the Hindenburg mission) and gave it to Flynn.

Yeah, if they'd thought it through they would've made the rule "no time machine can return to a time it's already been to." It would've made as much sense and would've headed off the argument that (once Rufus has a chance to train backup pilots) Mason & co. should just send new teams until one gets the job done. It'll take them a lot longer to build new machines than train new teams.

Maybe it's an early Mission: Impossible clock that destroys the scroll if you don't open it the right way? (Of course, to be a true M:I clock it would also have to burn the scroll up right after Flynn read it.)