stagmania

Yeah, I really don't get everyone saying this episode was dull; I thought it was hilarious. So many little moments of humor, and I laughed out loud a couple times. Phillip bombing hard with his mark, Matthew struggling to prove he knows Paige with "you like to read...", Phillip's amazing side eye when Elizabeth realized granola Ben is a cheater, Gabriel just cutting right to the point and telling Phillip he's losing it. I was thoroughly entertained.

I read a review that pointed out that the series basically began by Hannah "unlatching" from her parents, making this a kind of full circle ending. That hadn't occurred to me, but it's an interesting observation. Or they just like the show and think it's well made and has an interesting POV. Again, it's not all about Lena Dunham. A lot of people work on this show. Yeah, Shameless is supposed to be about living in poverty, and even they gave up on being realistic about money years ago; probably because it makes the plotting a lot more challenging. The only show I can think of that actually took the depiction of working class financial realities seriously was Roseanne (until that god awful final fantasy season where the family won the lotto).

Given that everyone's tip toeing around her and Kevin asked Jill if he should try to force her to talk about it, it certainly seems that whatever happened with Lily was traumatic for Nora. I'm dying to know where Erika went. I had the same thought. They can't really be shipping her off after one real scene. She's been stuck sitting silently for two seasons!

Yeah, they were gray cotton briefs, we saw her put them on and I thought they were visible in her pants-less scenes. You're not the weird one. I've long accepted it as part of the world of this show, but the characters are comfortable with nudity in ways I've never seen in real life, and have very few physical boundaries. I know some people are more touchy and open about their bodies, and if it was only Hannah that was like this, that would be one thing. But it's all of them. It's growing on me as an episode the longer I sit with it. I think I had some higher than usual expectations because it was the Series Finale, and that kept me waiting for something more. If I remove it from those extra expectations, I think it's a solid episode. What I meant was that the audience sometimes imagines personal grievances that may not even exist when they go looking for ulterior motives behind the writing. Sorry, that was my awkward phrasing.

Jia Tolentino wrote a great piece for The New Yorker last week about finally watching the show and being pleasantly surprised by it, and how her expectations were altered by critics who can't seem to separate their thoughts on the show from their thoughts on Lena Dunham. In some ways, the perceived tie to Dunham's personal life is to be expected given the level of artistic authority she maintained over the years, but as she said herself in a recent interview, Girls is a collaborative project, has a separate showrunner and a powerful executive producer and a group of strong writers. Nothing that happens on the show (be it amazing or terrible) can be attributed to Dunham's singular vision, and I certainly don't believe the story is fueled by imagined personal grievances.

*Michigan I actually saw some commentary this morning speculating that Judd Apatow's increased involvement in this final season may have contributed to the more conventional heteronormative place we ended up with Hannah. I have no way of knowing if that's true, but I will say that this messy parenthood/family ending feels very in line with most of his work, and he had a writing credit on this final episode.

Thanks for explaining the doves-I'm not particularly well-versed when it comes to the explicit religious references, so I always appreciate getting that extra layer. I like your theory about what Sarah is doing with the messages. It is so totally Nora to sabotage efforts to reconnect and rebuild, especially if she's experienced yet another huge loss.

I think last week was the finale, in the sense that we generally think about those. Each major character got their ending, the big relationship questions were resolved, we got one last fun party scene. This week was more of a coda, and I liked that Hannah is still Hannah. No sudden maturity as a result of giving birth; still selfish and bewildered and struggling to figure it out. That said, I can't say I loved this. It certainly didn't wow me, and I wasn't particularly moved by it. Not the highest of notes to go out on, but I'll miss this show.

This is such a deeply beautiful show, and I'm so glad it's back. When that familiar piano theme kicked in partway through the episode, I got chills. Lots of questions already about the whereabouts of certain characters and the time in between. I guess we'll be testing Matt's magical Jarden theories soon.

We have now far exceeded my knowledge on this topic. :)

My understanding is that you heat the key until it's somewhat malleable, and then stick it in the lock so that it will mold itself in the correct shape.

They never had any good choices at all once the Centre decided to recruit their children. If they didn't follow orders and recruit Paige into the cause, the entire family would've had to run. Maybe that's what they should've chosen, but either way Paige's choices and chance for a normal life had already traipsed right out the door, and Philip and Elizabeth made what they thought was the best of a menu of bad choices to try to keep their family and lives intact. It's a bit of an oversimplification to pin all of that on Elizabeth being "gung ho" about the cause, especially since she was depicted as having mixed feelings about it.

Another glowing review of the new season.

Yeah I think it was clear that Stan was mostly into Paige and Matthew dating because it gave Matthew incentive to spend more time at his house. He seems to want a good relationship with his son, but has no idea how to get it. Where do you get the impression that she doesn't care about Paige? Most of her focus in the last few seasons has been on Paige and her ever-changing emotional states. And I agree with Sistermagpie that the Henry stuff is pretty typical when raising a teenage boy, especially in the 80s when parenting was more hands-off. I wonder about this, too. Does the Centre realize that if they burn Philip, they have to burn Elizabeth along with him? I think Gabriel knows this, but I wonder if his superiors understand. I thought it was interesting that she singled out her baptism as the best moment of her life. That is a person desperately craving a belief system to cling to.

I'm confused-who is "they" here? Do you mean his treatment by the Centre, or his treatment by the writers of the show? I'm also not clear on what you mean by terrible treatment in relation to this specific episode. Philip is a KGB agent and a killer. I know he's easy to sympathize with because Matthew Rhys and all, but I can't say I think he deserves a better deal. I always assumed this was a directive from the Centre-they were to raise their kids as "normal" Americans and not get into political stuff with them. Of course, that doesn't really work out in the long run once they decided they should be recruiting the kids.

Philip has said he remembers almost nothing from that time. So it's very possible that other kids did say something, but he was too young to understand or simply doesn't remember it now. I don't think he was trying to comfort Philip so much as just tell him how it was. His father was no one special and didn't call any shots; he simply did his job in service to the cause, as they all did. Gabriel doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would make up some rosy story of Philip's father to try to make him feel better. Philip probably wouldn't believe him if he did. Philip has openly questioned the cause, has expressed doubts about their work numerous times and a sort of contentment with their American cover life, and reached a breaking point on the job that necessitated pulling him and Elizabeth out of rotation for seven months. That sort of thing isn't really tolerated within the KGB. It's only because he's so valuable, for all the reasons you mentioned above, that he hasn't already been taken out of the equation. Gabriel and Elizabeth seem rightly concerned that the Centre is watching him closely and will take action as soon as the hassle of keeping him in line outweighs the benefits of his work. It's interesting to think about in light of Elizabeth's changing feelings over the last two seasons. IMO, she's getting closer to being on the questionable list herself, but they don't seem to be noticing. She's much better at hiding it than Philip is, even from herself. I don't think she would ever outright betray Russia or give up her closely held beliefs and ideology, but she's burned out and probably shouldn't be doing this job for much longer.

Echoing everyone else that loved this episode. Phillip may be the one whose emotional instability is getting attention and causing alarm, but Elizabeth is having her own little breakdown over in the corner. She's much more contained and subtle about it, but wow. Almost coming out with her feelings to Gabriel, freaking out at the Mary Kay lady, sitting outside Young Hee's house, the look of outright terror on her face when Gabriel warned Phillip. This is basically her version of falling to pieces. If and when a choice has to be made between her work and her family (and I have to assume we're headed there eventually), I think she may surprise us. Side note: it was nice to see a brief reminder of Young Hee, especially since I just saw Ruthie Ann Miles on the stage last night. She's in the limited revival of Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway.

Absolutely, which is why I trust him more than other critics where this show is concerned. Most of them didn't like season 1 and came around as fans in season 2, but I'm on the Sepinwall train and was on board from the very first.

Great review from Alan Sepinwall on the new season. Critics have already seen 7 of the 8 episodes.

Except the show clearly wanted us to view her sympathetically. I don't need Hannah to be completely likable, but I'd like to understand her motivations and decisions without having to do a bunch of fanwanking.

Her wanting him to understand and hear her truth makes perfect sense to me; what doesn't track is the way she did it. Why make him think she blamed him? Why not tell him upfront that her reason for including him was different from the others? It comes back to the structure of the framing device and the need to create suspense about what was going to be on Clay's tape. They chose to undermine character to achieve it. It always bugs me when the writerly manipulations intrude into the story like that. I agree that she wasn't thinking all that clearly in the end, and she kind of made Jessica's rape all about her own guilt. Shitty, but easy enough to understand and forgive given her state of mind.

You're right, TES is too famous for a two second cameo, so I think that was a little Easter egg planting the idea for another season. And there has been a ton of press in the last week with cast and creators saying they're hopeful for a second season. Yeah, I think trying to turn this into a regular show with multiple seasons is a mistake. Everything that was unique about this will be washed away. I don't know that it would be a school shooting, necessarily. That final scene with Tyler in the dark room looked like he had assembled a hit list, so my assumption was that they were setting up more of a suspense plot where he'd try to pick off the tape kids one by one. I can't imagine them actually killing these characters, though. And I really have no interest in another story about an aggrieved white male lashing out with violence. That would truly be taking a show with an important underrepresented perspective and turning it into something very common. This has been bothering me, too. I don't understand why Hannah did this to Jessica, or why she put Clay on those tapes. These are cruel choices that didn't track for me, and I don't think the show did a good job of helping us understand why she made them.

That's a weird choice. That's probably why Lena Dunham I think she just looked like shit because she felt like shit. Jemima Kirke has the kind of look that is really easy to grunge up. I'm not sure why people were reading so much extra stuff into her scenes; I thought they were fairly straightforward. I don't think they were saying anything about the city being particularly dangerous, but the poop on the sidewalk rant was completely on point. I live in a really nice Brooklyn neighborhood, but I see shit smeared on the pavement on a daily basis.

I'll push back on that a little and say that when you move to the city and away from your family, your friends are your emergency contacts and you actually do make an effort to check in and get back to each other quickly. But Marnie and Hannah aren't really friends anymore, which I guess is part of the point. After she knew who was pregnant? Do you mean the scene last week? What was Adam's fanservice ending? Do you just mean that we saw him with Hannah again? And for this fan, at least, Ray falling in insta love with a random character and then disappearing without closure to his previous relationships feels like no service to me.

Ann Dowd, most recently seen being amazing on The Leftovers.