xqueenfrostine

I agree. And the show has gone out of its way to set that point up. That was the point of the scene between Ward and Simmons a few episodes ago where both were looking on at Mack and Hope. If the relationship between Mack and Hope could feel real and be moving to Simmons, someone who only had real world memories and looked at people inside the Framework as bits of code, it has to be a thousand times more powerful for Mack. He'll mourn Hope like a real child, if he ever makes it back to the real world. To him it'll be like losing his baby a second time.

My fan theory is that he had wanted the dominatrix for himself. She might have dropped him for stalking her outside of their paid sessions, and ended up killing her in a crime of passion. He then used the taped sessions of her other clients to punish the other men she had been with after she cut him loose.

At the beginning of the episode? It was the heads of the people that were killed during the raid Major's mercenary team was on. Waste not, want not seems to be the mantra of Fillmore Graves.

While I agree with you that would have been a better way for them to handle things, I also find it way more believable that they fucked that up than if they had handled it perfectly. Their friend had just come in on the brink of death, and while they knew that something like this was likely to happen someday soon, I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to be cool headed in the moment. This is more or less the same logic of why doctors aren't supposed to treat their own families. No amount of preparation, training or experience is guaranteed to keep someone clear minded in the face of someone they love in danger of dying, which can lead to mistakes that they know better than to make. I agree. It's notable that he asked Tanner if he wanted to be a zombie rather than just scratching him. We know he's not getting along with Angus's hired goon, and two episodes ago we saw him he was look kind of longingly at Blaine through the window of the lounge Blaine sings at. I think Don E's feeling lonely in his new life as Angus's lackey.

Another great episode! I'd been anticipating the probability that Mack would never leave the Framework willingly ever since Hope was first introduced, but that didn't make seeing him make that decision any less painful. Alphonso killed his monologue cataloging the ways in which Hope was real to him, in spite of what he had just seen. It made total sense to me that he stayed. I still hope they find a way to get him to come back to the real world (with or without hope). I'd really miss his presence on the team, and I don't want yet another season to end with me having to say goodbye to beloved members of the team. I still haven't completely gotten over the departure of Hunter and Bobbi! This made me chuckle a bit as I can't imagine how useful his pseudo-past as a history teacher will be given that it was shown that HYDRA was creating "alternative history" even within the framework. Who knows what kind of distortions of history Framework Coulson accepted as fact? I actually thought his last scene in the previous episode had a lot of finality to it and was a good closing for the character. I thought that was the point of his last conversation with Daisy, where they discussed the possibility of getting "his Skye" back. I think we were supposed to believe that he, like Mack, had a life he was content to continue on with in the Framework. I'm pretty sure she was human within the framework. A LMD body likely could have been repaired after a fall like that, whereas AIDA's framework body appeared to be permanently paralyzed after her fall. As for why she didn't die, I suspect that because she wasn't a real human in the real world, she had different limitations within the framework than the human characters. She, as an AI, wasn't programmed to experience death as we know it, and that might have made a difference in how her consciousness operated within the framework. The only reason I could figure was that she didn't think she could lie to him again because she was feeling pretty guilty about deceiving him into leaving Hope behind at the SHIELD base in order to get him to come with them to the exit point.

Given how little concern she showed about Major's impending memory loss last episode, it wouldn't surprise me if Peyton was told and just didn't stop by. She's never given any indication that she's given much thought at all about what this would mean for Major or even that she sees this as tragic. I'm starting to wonder if Peyton is one of those terrible friends who totally drops everyone in their lives whenever they've started a new romantic relationship, and we just never noticed before because her last boyfriend (Ravi) was already a part of Liv's social circle. Me too. Both actors really sold me on their relationship in that bedside conversation about their past. They have great chemistry together, and Major is just such a sweetheart. It was impossible not to root for their future in that moment, especially after Major said that the upside of losing his memory was that he'd get to experience Liv knocking him off his feet a second time.

Great episode! Definitely my favorite of the season, and maybe even one of my favorites for the entire series. First of all, it was such a relief to have a Peyton-and-Blaine free episode and to have Ravi back to his normal self again. That subplot is bringing down the show. Second, I loved that we got back to Liv being the center of the episode again. This episode felt like a return to form for the series, and it was nice. There was a good mix of crime-of-the-week and the larger story arc, and we got the treat of seeing Johnny Frost and Brandt Stone again! And Dominatrix Brain may be in my top ten brains. So much better than Stripper Brain and Romance Novelist brain. The visions were much more interesting, and Liv's "sexy" interactions with other characters weren't as cheesy. The Major subplot hit me hard in the feels. I love Major (and even love Liv and Major together), and it would have broken my heart if he had died. I got a little teary during everyone's goodbyes. I still don't believe that Blaine is faking his initial memory loss (though it's possible that his memories have returned and he's lying about it). I don't think the show would have gone to the trouble of having Ravi produce a memory serum that successfully stimulated memory if they don't intend for that serum to become a plot point.

I was less bothered by the fact that Bilquis used the internet as I was that she's now just a "normal" dater and not a prostitute. I had always liked that Bilquis had set herself up as a modern day "sacred prostitute." I could have lived with Bilquis using Craig's List to score clients, but just meeting guys on Match is a bummer. It may not have been explicitly spelled out until Chapter 4, but I think his identity was pretty clear from the beginning. At least assuming you knew the etymology behind the names for the days of the week. They didn't use the line in the episode, but in the novel it was blatantlly hinted through dialogue in their very first meeting that Wednesday was the god that the day Wednesday was named for. Wednesday = Woden's Day, and Woden was the Saxon name for Odin. I agree though that all allusions to Shadow's heritage should be avoided given that the TV series may not reach that part of the story until a later season! I think how much one enjoys Good Omens might depend on how much one enjoys Terry Prachett. From what I understand, Terry did a lot more of the writing on it than Gaiman did as Gaiman was pretty busy writing Sandman at the time. I'd have a hard time ranking my enjoyment of Gaiman's work other than saying Sandman and Neverwhere are at the top of my list. I've enjoyed everything else save Anansi Boys, which I've had a hard time getting into (though I haven't completely given up on it! Maybe I'll try it again after the BBC adaptation comes out). I've also enjoyed Gaiman's non-Sandman comic work. I have a soft spot for his Marvel 1602 miniseries.

They do have blood in their veins and they do have beating hearts. Not only did we see Ravi take Liv's pulse in the pilot (which was a very slow 10 beats per minute, but still there), we also see him take a blood sample. We've also seen zombies bleed, most notably in the season two finale. When Chief got shot by one of Mr. Boss's men in the head, we see his blood and brains splattered against the wall behind him, and the bullet hole in his forehead is red. Don E's shirt front also had blood after he was he shot in the chest. Same deal with Drake and Rita, and the other Romero zombies that were shot at Max Rager, though their blood was harder to spot since they had other blood on them already at the time they were shot. And, no, the zombies in iZombie are not dead. They meet every single biological criteria scientists use to determine if an organism is alive. A big part of being alive is having living cells, which zombies presumably do as they wouldn't need to keep redoing their spray tans if their skin cells weren't constantly shedding and replacing themselves. That's not something that wouldn't happen to a preserved and animated dead body. Neither would the flesh wounds we've seen Liv get over the course of the series have healed themselves if she wasn't made of living cells. And if their cells are not static and they are not actually dead, then yes, aging is at least theoretically possible. Whether or not it does happens within the iZombie universe remains to be seen, but nothing within the show has established that it doesn't. Maybe you're right and they do have eternal youth, but until the show says that explicitly or at least gives us stronger clues that point in that direction, I see no reason to treat that hunch as iZombie canon.

I don't think she is loading it with code to make bodies for any other character. I think everyone's just assuming that such a machine could be made to make bodies for people other than Aida and EvilFitz if they knew how to use it. Which is a safe bet, but I agree it that it seems unlikely that anyone else on the team except for the real Fitz would have the know how to operate such a machine. And I can't see RealFitz just making a body for someone from the Framework without good reason, which is a big part of the reason why I'm not expecting FrameWard to make it in the real world.

First of all, zombies aren't vampires. We have no idea if zombism prevents zombies from aging. That's not something that's been established in the show and no one's been a zombie for more than a few years so we don't have much reference to check. The closest we have is Blaine's dad saying that immortality suited him, but eternal youth and immortality are not the same thing. Second of all, we're talking about a barely tested cure for zombi-ism that was cooked up in a morgue and that has only be tested on rats and one adult. You cannot give that to children. I know people don't consider medical ethics too often when they're thinking about fictional miracle cures, but the idea that you'd essentially give children a cure that has a side effect of brain damage is madness. For one, it's only been a couple of months at most since Blaine was given the second cure. Who knows what the long term effects of such a cure might be? Second, the brains and bodies of children are not nearly as developed as the those of adults. There's no way of knowing if a cure that's reasonably safe for an adult is safe for a 9 year old, so any zombie child injected with the cure would basically be a test dummy. That's horrifying. It's a much, much better play to test the cure out on as many adults as possible and look for ways to manufacture more (maybe by giving a syringe or two to someone with more resources, equipment and expertise to reverse engineer its chemical structure than a medical examiner in a morgue!) if that cure hasn't killed any of the adults or produced any serious side effects in 5-10 years.

That may be the iconography they're using, but clearly they know that's not what zombies hiding among them look like. I don't think they've established yet that the zombie hating community knows that zombi-ism causes your hair and skin to turn white, but they do know that the "brain eaters" among them look like regular people.

I agree and I think it's notable that once FrameWard fully bought into the idea that he's living in a computer sim, he seemed more hopeful that he'll get his old Skye back once Daisy leaves the Framework than he was put off that he wouldn't be following the real folk back to the real world. And that makes sense. A happy ending for this redeemed version of Ward isn't to get a human body in the Framework, it's to be able to keep living his life with the person he loves (Skye, not Daisy) and defeat HYDRA within his own world. Trip seems like a more likely person to come through to the real world since he easily bought Simmon's story and has no apparent ties to this world, though I don't think he's coming back either. When the season ends, I expect EvilFitz will be the only person to have crossed over. But that begs the question of why Aida would need Fitz to be evil in order to get him to work on her machine. She needed Fitz to be in love with her, sure, but a good Fitz would be just as motivated to build a machine that could save the person he saw as the love of his life as a bad one. We know from the real world that Fitz would literally cross the universe to save a loved one. Aida doesn't need him to be evil to tap into that. Aida could have just as easily designed herself to be head of SHIELD as she was head of HYDRA, or head of a government or a immensely powerful multinational corporation, and the outcome would likely have been the same. After this episode, I still believe that Aida has shaped herself to fit the current Framework more than she's shaped the Framework to fit her. We haven't seen signs of her micromanaging the Framework while Daisy and Simmons have been inside (by, say, giving someone within the resistance the motive to betray Daisy and Simmons and hand them over to her), which reinforces my belief that she's limited in her ability to do so. I especially believe that now that it's been fully established that Aida is still bound by the programming Radcliffe built into her. That may also mean that she's bound to follow the basic rules Radcliffe put in place for the framework. Plus, I do think the show intends for us to believe the "one change in a person's life can change a person entirely" theory, even if it's been less than successful in convincing parts of the audience of that. That was the purpose of giving Radcliffe his "one sentence can change everything" speech last week. It was the writers using the character to speak to the audience as much as it was Radcliffe speaking to Skye. And as I said up thread, I think the parallels between Fitz and Wars are intentional, but those parallels would have no meaning if Aida handcrafted Fitz's evil.

No one's suggesting that's the case, but it does make her an incredibly shitty friend to have her hopes pinned on Blaine not getting his memories back given the implications of that outcome for Liv and Major. That's indefensible, especially given the state of Major's health and that he's currently risking his life by waiting to take the cure because he's not ready to face the loss of his memories.

Possibly. I assumed it was a reference to All The President's Men, though your suggestion ties in better with Ophelia's fall.

I actually don't believe Blaine's faking, because if the zombie cure doesn't have the consequence of memory loss, what will stop Liv from taking the cure? If Liv gets cured, there's no more series, so there has to be something plotwise holding her back from taking it. Ravi has too many syringes for the scarcity of the cure itself to be what makes Liv wait. Plus he knows Major is going to have to take the cure himself pretty soon and it'll be pretty obvious that Blaine was lying if he doesn't lose his memory too. I don't think Blaine would be hanging around this closely if he was about to get called out on a lie.

Another great episode! This has definitely been one of my favorite story arcs of the entire series. I liked the twist that in the Framework it was Victoria Hand and not John Garrett that recruited Ward from juvie. It produces an interesting parallel between him and Fitz. Both became monsters under the guidance of harsh father figures, but turned out to be better people when they had more maternal influences. I don't think that juxtaposition is accidental. Did anyone else catch Bakshi's furniture shopping reference? There's a news junkie in the AoS writers' room that's peppering in these little gems. Last week it was "Nevertheless, she persisted" and this week we get a reference to Trump's seduction tactics with Nancy O'Dell.

Are there people out there who actually enjoy love triangles? Writers always use them to drum up tension, but I can't think of a single trope in fiction that I like less. It makes all of the characters involved seem horrible and it's not enjoyable to watch.

I agree on those three, but I think Clive has had it really good. Major too, though to a lesser extent.

For the second week in a row: Ugh Peyton. Her explanation for why she was more invested in Blaine not regaining his memories than in Liv and Major having access to a cure that wouldn't wipe their memories was terrible. She's gotten used to them being zombies? Fuck you Peyton! Major is dying. He can't stay a zombie forever. He's waiting around not taking the cure, because he wants every last moment with his memories that he can, and she's hoping that Ravi's new cure won't work because Peyton would rather keep her former child murder love interest than allow Major to survive with his memories in tact. It's official: Peyton's the worst. Can we send her back to wherever she went after she found out Liv was a zombie?

Who have we directly seen her kill other than Radcliffe? She's coaxed other people killing for her, but the only person I can remember her killing herself was Radcliffe. If that's right, then her killing a person is not evidence that the Darkholde removed her limitations into her programming. She had to coax Radcliffe into basically giving her the go ahead before she killed him. That's Aida exploiting a loophole, not Aida throwing off her programming. I mean, I think it's also telling that she hasn't killed Daisy within the framework. Surely it'd be easier for her to just kill Daisy within the framework and then find and kill Simmons than it would be to get them to tell her where their bodies in the real world. But she's not taking that route. Why? I think the easiest answer to that question is that it's because she can't. I don't disagree with you that the deck is stacked in Aida's favor or that she's working to preserve her place within the framework, we just disagree with what kind of powers she has or how she's accomplishing that. I think Aida has molded herself to fit into the position she wanted within the framework, not that she's molded the framework to fit around her. She has near perfect knowledge of the "real" players within the framework thanks to the maps she and Radcliffe made of their brains, AND she knows what the algorithm is doing within the framework. That gives her a giant advantage without making it necessary storywise for her to be nearly omnipotent within the framework.

Yes they're using them for drama, but they weren't hovering in mid-air. They were back together in last season's finale (as confirmed during the dialogue between Peyton and Ravi last night, when she said that she had been so excited that they had gotten back together), Ravi's just fucked it up.

I think your memory of last season may be a bit fuzzy. Peyton lived with Ravi and Major for a good chunk of last season. I'll grant you that it was crazy cliche for Peyton to show up right when Ravi is hooking up with someone else, but I don't think it's weird that Peyton showed up. Ravi had just confessed he was in love with her earlier that day, so I don't think it's that "convenient" for her to drop by Ravi's house after having spent a few hours mulling over his confession. Especially since she and Ravi probably would have been together already had Ravi not gotten weird about her past hook up with Blaine. They were more or less officially together at the end of last season. Ravi stayed with her in her room when his and Major's house was an active crime scene when the police was investigating Major as the Chaos Killer.

I heard the past tense too, but decided past tense could also both work if Fitz's mother was dead or if she had just abandoned him in this version of reality. We don't know what happened, but I do think it's safe to say that she's been out of the picture for a while. Though, now that I think about it, do we know if Fitz's mom is still living in the real world? We've heard Simmons mention her parents on multiple occasions, but I don't remember Fitz talking about his mom as if she's a part of his present-day life. Is she really though? We've been given evidence this episode that Aida is not all powerful within the framework and that she didn't build the software herself (at least not entirely). Radcliffe said he built a backdoor into the framework and that Aida cannot get rid of it. That establishes that Aida has at least one limitation within the framework, and if she has one she likely has others. We have to remember that Aida is not a real person with complete agency, she's AI. That means she's constrained by her programming. She may be able to exploit loopholes to get around her prime directives, but she can't do so until that loophole appears (like when she killed Radcliffe). So while she may like to cheat, she's probably limited in the ways that she can do so. As I was alluding to above, I don't think we should assume that Aida is all powerful within the framework to the point where she creates reality exactly as she sees fit. She told Daisy that the reality within framework (and therefore individual persons' roles within that reality) was created using computer algorithms, and I think she means that. After all, if Aida was simply creating people's lives as she saw fit, what's the purpose of the Hydra reeducation camps? No one in that camp was a "real" person. They were all generated by the framework. I don't think Aida would generate a bunch of AI rebels for funsies, I think they're there because the algorithm create has created a realistic picture (or at least what the show sdeems realistic) of what the world would look like if certain events or certain people were different. Likewise, I don't think Aida just "let" Mace be an Inhuman/superhuman rebel, I think that's who the impartial algorithms running the framework determined Mace would be if he was the hero he always wished he was AND was living in a world where Hydra won the war against SHIELD.

Wouldn't have worked. He doesn't have super strength, so he couldn't have stopped the building collapsing before everyone got out. If he took over for Mace, the only person to make it out alive might have been Mace himself. Maybe this is just proof that she's being honest when she says she's not micromanaging the framework? Aida told Daisy that she didn't create this world to be this way, she said the only changes she made were to remove each person's greatest regret and that the framework algorithmically filled in how the world would have been different if X thing was changed. I know you think she's lying, but I do think the fact that Daisy was able to go under terregenesus again strongly implies that she wasn't. That's the only way that scene makes sense. The show has said that Papa Fitz was verbally abusive and left Fitz and his mom when Fitz was ten. Specifically, he used to tell Fitz than he was dumb and worthless. Even though Papa Fitz was a cruel and miserable jerk, I think it's pretty realistic that Fitz still would have missed his presence. It's not uncommon for abused children to internalize their abuse to the point where they believe that if they had been "better" children, their abusive parent might have given them the love they needed. Maybe the wish Aida granted Fitz was that he get a second chance to earn his dad's love and/or to show him he wasn't worthless. That could have set up a reality that left Fitz spending his teen and young adult years chasing his dad's approval and molding himself into someone his dad would be proud of. Also, it's not clear that in this reality that Fitz's Mom is still around. It's possible that in this new reality, Fitz's parents still split up but that his dad got custody of him. It's a bit sad, but to be fair, Simmons hasn't known him that long and we've never seen any evidence that the two were are friendly on a personal level as they were close on a professional one. Mace really really became a full member of the team that way. They definitely know about the juicing. The point of mapping the brains of people they were putting into the framework and/or into LMD bodies was to get access to all of their memories, personality traits and behaviors. So I would think that they'd know about his juicing, but I think they also knew that Mace wishes his superhero status wasn't fraudulent.