DigitalCount

Both Metallo and the Legion have appeared quite a few times in the current DCTVU as well. Not sure if that was mentioned.

I actually thought Madelaine Petsch was making some bizarre choices. Penelope has a slow, low, syrupy voice, in stark contrast with Cheryl's clipped, energetic, high-pitched voice. So of course, when she plays Penelope, MP is...clipped and energetic? It was the wrong choice IMO.

My pet peeve about this episode is the line where Buffy says "You don't know me. You don't even know you" to Spike, and SMG totally botches the delivery. Instead of saying "you don't even know you" she says (for some unknowable reason) "you don't even know you" and it's like nails on a chalkboard. I get that it's petty, but how could so many people not get the intent of the line?

I think they're trying to go with "Cheryl and Jason didn't share a blood relation." I agree, it's still off. My guess is, Jason is adopted and he's actually Mary's son. That would pay off the continual mentions of how Archie and Jason apparently looked alike.

I have to wonder if they're trying to say this is A Thing the Blossoms do in order to wash away the grossness of Jason/Cheryl, and one of them was actually not a Blossom to begin with. The problem is that they were raised as siblings and thus should still find it gross, but it felt very "let's retcon S1...again" to me. Also, what is Jughead's deal? He became obsessed with the game in even less time than he became obsessed with the Southside identity, which is saying something. Does he just have really low boundaries? Or is that just a testament to how addictive and dangerous G&G is? (Speaking of the 80s, wow the D&D panic is real, way to have your finger on the pulse of your audience)

As identified earlier, the law disagrees. They were active participants in the kidnapping of Katrina, and kidnapping is one of the basic "inherently dangerous felonies" that can turn an inadvertent death into second degree murder. The idea here is that Jonathan and Andrew did a felonious thing that they pretty much knew could or would end in someone's death, and since it's no surprise to anyone when it does, all the participants in the original felony share the blame for the eventual, easily predictable death. Most states with this rule list burglary, arson, robbery, rape and kidnapping as the inherently dangerous felonies, and California is one of the states with a felony murder rule.

I actually don't have a huge problem with how young she comes off, because she's interacting with people who she probably grew up with as authority figures and her superhero dad who she idolizes. My issue is her fish-out-of-temporal-water mindset. She's an adult 30 years in the future who acts like she's from 3747. The coffee situation rang true; whatever techno she was babbling at the crime scene with the Flesh Cube did not. (Also, just from a sense standpoint: "eureka, this technology we've spent thousands of dollars developing makes these simple latex gloves completely obsolete" doesn't work for me.) Still, I like her energy, even though she's sometimes bubblier than the much younger character she played on Smallville ten years ago. It is a bit odd that she takes so strongly after her father despite having basically no relationship with him previously.

Re: Iris not being able to react separately to the Barry news, I can't help but remember the scene on Arrow between Laurel and Quentin where she admits that bugs her more than everything else, more than a decade after the fact, when she already knew Oliver had cheated on her and was no longer in a relationship with him. It humanized her, it was some of KC's best acting, and I was fully in the corner of a character I despised. And wouldn't you know, there's a character on this show analogous to Quentin. Maybe they could have a scene where they talk about stuff? (Spoiler because I know not everyone watches Arrow) (Also, apologies to the mods if this doesn't have enough content regarding this episode; I guess I'm trying to say that I agree that Iris should have been able to react to that more/individually, especially since she also already feels alienated by her future daughter. So she ends up with a weird limbo-y Schrodinger's family--she has a husband and daughter, but also she kind of doesn't.)

I know that almost no one is around any longer, but if anyone is, I thought I'd contribute my thoughts regarding the downturn in quality that many people have observed. All in all, I think it comes down to not being genuine and cohesive with their story. One thing that I felt was a good indicator of cohesiveness was the villain story. I know a lot of people disliked Season 4, but for me the point where stuff started to feel unmoored was somewhere in the Traveler storyline. Part of this was because they felt very out of nowhere, and by that point most of the ties to earlier seasons had evaporated. I think that was a strong indicator that they were losing their grip on the story. There's a direct line of events between Damon coming to Mystic Falls in Season 1 and Qetsiyah's death in Season 5. The villains from Damon to Tessa are all--in their ways--part of an overarching mythos that established the nature of the supernatural as presented to Elena during that time period. Markos represents a stark departure from that line that's never really found afterward. A villain's goals and what that villain is willing to do to obtain them tend to drive a story, so if the villains are super lame or ill-defined, it's hard to care about the heroes. It doesn't help that we'd only just gotten a solid resolution to the triangle after Season 4 ended, which almost ate the show along with the Originals--again, as villains driving the plot they worked until they just started...hanging around, and they were too powerful to write around. (And I still maintain that Season 5 should have pitted the Mystic Falls crew against a similar group who demonstrated the same tribal mentality just to make them confront that sort of thing. Kol's death wiped out countless vampires, considering it finished Jeremy's tattoo while Connor the career vampire hunter hadn't even finished his yet. Any of them who traveled around could have had friends from a different bloodline who felt like our main group needed to be taken off the board.) I have more to say, but I'm on my phone. :/

Heckin' wow, Roulette sucked. The lady who played Victoria seemed a bit limited in her line delivery. I wasn't sure if she's just bad, or if she was choking on the script. But I just found all of it so hilariously bad. Also amusing was the ham-fisted direction. "You're coming back for me, even though I would have abandoned you?" Ugh. "You just had to find the hero inside! Now let me repeat that in case the audience didn't get it!" Really, there were a lot of stinkers as far as lines go, but the worst line ever uttered on this show may have been "it's a long story about Lois, laundry, and lacy things." I know they thought they were being artsy, but that's not Clark. Speaking of Clark and Lois, Fifi and I were watching this together, and during the movie scene she asked me if Allison was still with the show at this point. I said that if I remembered correctly, she had reduced her involvement. She responded "well, it just seems like Lois manipulated her way into [Clark's] life. They were never this close." Lol. I'm just glad that people with no horse in the race years after the fact can see that there was a hard shift regarding Chloe, Clark and Lois. It's absurd that at the time people were arguing it was character-driven and made sense. It's about as organic as a nuclear power plant. I thought the person behind the quackery was Tess until the point where we saw Chloe at a computer with her eyes shaded. Then my analysis was pretty much the same as Oliver's; who knew about the facts and could also do all the things possible to facilitate the masquerade. I didn't realize that we'd have offscreen Justice League, but Smallville is nothing if not an ad for its much more exciting unfilmed sister show.

I actually really liked the moment when Buffy said "Fire bad!" and then immediately ran toward it to rescue the people inside. That heroism is hard coded.

Agreed on the nastiness of it. I think they wanted the moment where Lois takes a bite and gives it to him, so they needed to come up with a reason why the one he gave her would have a bite taken out of it, and going backwards like that frequently leads to situations where people act like nonhumans to get to a certain point.

I had to admit that the maple donut thing in Echo was cute-adjacent. That moment where Lois bites the donut before giving it to Clark, especially because that donut looked huge, was a little bit adorable, bordering on adorkable. It's wildly out of character for Jor-El to give Clark a mind-reading power so he can save Oliver of all people, but I appreciated that Lex's murder was weighing heavily on him. Everything about Clark's telepathy made no sense, though. It also makes it dumb that he's being so indecisive regarding Lois. I accept that (out of freaking nowhere) he has feelings for her, but he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that she's into him too. Why so much hemming and hawing? The zombie episode is barely worth mentioning. I feel like I lost brain cells watching it.

Oh. Holy mackerel. Who is this monster? For some background, my fiancee and I are currently (re)watching this literal trainwreck. On the original run I bailed after Doomsday like so many others, but she knew that I watched it way back when and she had heard of the slash fanfiction it created, so I'm actually seeing new (to me) episodes of Smallville. Except I'm not, if the opening is any indication. Clark "The Blur" Kent is a jerk and the show has no heart. What I saw in Savior is a grim parody of what was once a sunny, hopeful show. Even if it was 2009 again instead of nearly a decade later it would be clear that this is a state of affairs TIIC intend to change over the course of the season, and yet I can't bring myself to care. The characters are unrecognizable. I know people used to theorize that Clark was someone else, but it honestly feels like Tom Welling is playing a different character. It's almost horrifying to see him interact with the rest of the cast, and that's before I get to the Clois retcon. I was right to stop watching; I think it made me happier. And yet I'll probably end up finishing out the series just because. I guess I'll try to keep an open mind...I guess.

We already had Kryptonian tech that neutralized Kryptonite in Season 2. Why didn't they go to the Fortress again?

The explanation I read (maybe from Cindy McClellan?) was that Sayid was a better man for Shannon than for Nadia, and his reactions to their respective deaths were why he ended up with Shannon instead. That's a fair reading, even though I don't know if I agree with it.

I feel dumb for asking this, but was the sailboat race ever legitimately clarified as an attempt to get to the Island? I remembered it only as a plot device for Desmond to prove himself, but was it ever solidly stated that it was in fact part of Charles' scheme to find the Island again? And if not...did something like that need to be addressed explicitly? I was thinking about the show recently and it just randomly snapped into place: it was totally a plan that one of the competitors would end up on the Island, though not necessarily Desmond.

Not sure if you're still wondering, but the song is Prelude 12/21 by AFI. (also as an aside; does anyone know how to get into contact with duckmilkproductions/savingpeoplething? The Chlark vs. Lexana video is one of my favorites and it's no longer on YT)

I love the meta references in this show so much. What would the ship name be for Julia/Josh? WickerMan is what I would go with personally; if the first names don't work then go with surnames or concepts like OUaT.

I thought he saw the Heart Cave from the finale, or at least a vision of it.

She was spiritual but not religious? Yeah, I got nothing... Also, no one will ever convince me that 2 For The Road was not due at least in part to DUIs. It's too obvious to me that at the least the timing was changed.

Well, he does have great luck, technopathy and telepathy among other things.

Well, it took me maybe a week or two to get through the first season of this show, which I now love. I definitely understand some of the issues people had with it, and I certainly didn't expect THAT to happen (I think I was expecting a none-too-subtle reference, like in Heroes; I didn't think they'd actually have it occur and for what felt like so long). Having as of yet watched nothing farther than this episode, it rang true to me that a) Julia would make a deal with the Beast for her own revenge, and b) Marina would come to Julia's aid when called. I can't be that mad at Julia, though in truth she set her friends up for failure once she took the knife for her own purposes. I'm having a hard time with her character in general, even though she reminds me of another actress/character that I adore. As far as the others, it's about the same. I like Penny and Margo unreservedly, and Quentin most of the time (hey look, it's the loser that is me on television!). And I like the others well enough for a suitable enough amount of the time that I'm hooked into their struggles going forward. Now for S2...

This is actually kind of my pet peeve; I'm not sure why, but it always bugs me when people say the Island was purgatory. Maybe it's because the show did so many things wrong that I want to defend the one thing they did right? The writers bent over backwards to establish by the end that the events we witnessed on the Island occurred during the natural lives of the survivors of the Oceanic Flight 815. In contrast, the "flash-sideways" of Season 6 was actually a giant leap forward, because that was what we would consider purgatory--it occurred after the characters had died. However, the end of Jack's natural life occurred in the finale, on the Island, years after the original crash when a second plane brought him back to the Island and he died from injuries sustained in a fight against a monster wearing the form of John Locke. None of that was a metaphor or a symbolic struggle after a presumed physical death on the 815; he lived through that, as did all the other characters we watched. I'm not saying this to scold you or nerdsplain the story, because it was a common enough misconception that obviously something else should have been done to combat it. But Christian's speech clarifies that Jack didn't die until we saw him die, and people like James, Kate and Claire went on to survive and live their lives in the world, with Hugo and Ben remaining on the Island in the roles Jacob and Richard had once held.

TBH I think the reason why as to "why Nazis" is because the first episode in the team-up was Supergirl, and, well, subtlety is no longer a concern over there. It's a way to address the current American political climate with regard to the acceptance of Nazis (I hope that doesn't run afoul of any rules on the board, because it seems obvious that this was the intention on the showrunners' part). I did like that certain characters (Felicity, Martin, and Jax in particular) seemed more horrified since they were more likely to be personally touched by this.