stagmania

I loved it, too, and I agree that it felt very real. The friendships you make in school are often more about proximity than compatibility, but there's a real attachment there that can sometimes drive you to hold onto them long after they've run their course. It's been several years since it became apparent that this particular group of girls wasn't meant to stay friends forever; the way they finally started to accept that tracks for me. I don't think she actually did have to seriously ponder it. She and Elijah were referring to her day as a "goodbye tour", they both knew her mind was already made up. I think she just wanted a day to wander and think and try to touch base with the people who had defined her life in New York, before confirming the decision she'd already made. That entire rant was hilariously on point. I can't tell you how much shit is smeared on the sidewalks here. So, so much. I found that scene really touching, even more so for not taking it too far and trying to pretend they were going to be friends again. They both get to move on in peace, but their relationship as they once knew it is well and truly over. This is the one thing I really didn't like about this episode. I don't think Shosh and Ray's sudden out of nowhere romances really ring true, and we didn't even get to see anything about her new guy. I would've liked to see her get more story time this season, and I'm a little put out that Ray wasn't at her engagement party and we are apparently not going to get any kind of closure on their relationship.

Ugh, trying to post here on mobile is the worst. Sorry for the double post!

Yeah, as an avid gossip reader, I wouldn't trust anything from that site. The posts don't really sound all that credible to me; they're the kind of stories that seem easy to construct based on existing knowledge of critiques of the show and a public woman who is already mostly disliked (which makes people extremely eager to believe any negative thing said about her). Even the description of the show strikes me as language an industry insider wouldn't use- Girls isn't actually a "hit". It has a tiny audience. I actually was just thinking about that, and I bet the answer is yes. After all, he did agree to come back last year. I definitely think it was a mistake for him to quit the show before he established himself or secured other opportunities. That said, I doubt he ever would've been as successful as Driver, because he just wasn't nearly as interesting a performer. I think getting cast in Girls was absolutely essential to getting Driver on the radar and into the right rooms, but his talent took care of the rest.

In order to buy your theory of Elizabeth here, we have to completely disregard the actual text of the show. How can one reasonably interpret her smiling and slow dancing with Phillip as her "aggressively seducing and fucking him"? We don't even know that they had sex in that interaction. As for seeing him as something other than her spy partner, that has literally been the basis of her entire emotional arc from the start of the show, and was more pronounced than ever during the Martha arc that you also referenced as another time she supposedly honey trapped her husband. I'm honestly trying to understand your perspective here, but it doesn't make any sense. ETA: thank you @sistermagpie for laying out so many clear examples from the history of the show, which I definitely did not have the energy to do. :)

I see no scenario in which Elizabeth would agree to murder Phillip's son, or in which Gabriel, Claudia, or anyone else would order her to. There are hard limits and even the Centre understands that. They've managed to do this twice this season, with both Phillip's repressed past and Henry's neglect turning into intentional plot lines. I trust these writers enough to give them credit for having planned this out in advance.

I loved your whole post; thanks for sharing. And I agree, poor Francie had the most thankless role in this whole thing. She had about five minutes of cumulative screen time, and all she got to do is sneer a lot and then be the bad guy who wants to go after women who protected each other from an abuser. Laura Dern excels at playing unlikable but somehow still sympathetic characters. Check out Enlightened if you haven't before! I never saw it, either. Each week when I would come here and see people talking about it, I felt like I missed something. I think the nature of the show just made everyone inherently suspicious of every male character. Just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who contributed to the thoughtful discussion in this forum and even shared some of their own personal experiences. The show ended up resonating with me a lot more than I expected, and I really loved enhancing the experience by coming here after each episode.

Yeah, I am sympathetic to Clay's reasons for taking his time. My issue with the pacing is more about what it necessitated from the other characters to pad out the time, and how it reflected back on Hannah. I'm so sorry to hear about your daughter's friend. I thought the show did an amazing job of showing the wreckage Hannah left behind, particularly for her parents. I hope no young people will walk away from this show with a romanticized idea of suicide; it seems that they really tried to make the audience feel how much it hurt everyone involved.

I didn't really have a strong reaction to this, but I thought it was a perfectly nice way to end the show. They've been losing steam for a long while, and they never fully recovered from their cut and run on the Nick and Jess story in season 3. After that, the show turned into a bit of a comfort watch for me-I was always happy to see the characters, but I lost all sense of urgency to watch the show and I wasn't all that invested in any of the relationships. I agree with @WhosThatGirl that I'm weary of them pulling more shenanigans if they have to fill another season, so I'd be content if it stopped here.

I guess I'll stand alone in my corner, because I really liked this episode and I'm not bothered by the slow pace of the season. I always prefer the emotional and existential episodes to the plot heavy ones, and there was lots of good stuff to chew on here. All your speculation about Phillips's memories being some sort of PTSD or functioning as puzzle pieces is really interesting; I think and hope it's leading to something bigger that will give us further insight to his character. His guilt over the bad kill, in conjunction with realizing he's neglected Henry and Paige is miserable, has him primed for a major meltdown. I expect that Mischa (and maybe Stan?) is going to be the final straw, however that ends up happening. I do think Elizabeth felt bad about their mistake, but in a different way than Phillip. For him, the pain is more existential-he doesn't want to hurt people anymore, he no longer has strong faith in their righteousness, and it's chipping away at his soul. Elizabeth, on the other hand, still has her cause and truly believes that what they're doing is for the greater good, and can view occasional mistakes as unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage. So she feels bad they killed an innocent man, but most of her concern was for Phillip and how she knew the knowledge would hit him. At this point, I think she understands that she's able to compartmentalize and cope with the nastier parts of their work much better than him, and it was a very generous thing for her to offer to take on his burden. Of course she wants to comfort him-I think the show has gone through great pains to show us her evolution in falling in love with him for real and trying to understand him better. I felt awful for poor Mischa; he seemed so child like and innocent in the scene with Gabriel. I don't think that story is over by any means.

Much of the supporting characters' behavior and words to Clay in the first 10 episodes made little sense, because they were designed to create confusion and anticipation about what was going to be on Clay's tape. If you go back and review the things they said to him, knowing what you do now about his tape, it's mostly nonsense (especially where Tony is concerned). Very sloppy work from the creators. Red herrings and misdirection are part of any mystery, but the smart way to do it is to have interactions loaded with ambiguity, not outright bs that falls apart in retrospect. Frankly, the fact that Hannah would let Clay believe she blamed him for her death for 11 tapes was more than a little cruel, considering how she felt about him. Though I think that may have been more of a pacing problem... The fact that it took so long for Clay to listen to the tapes, and that he essentially had a mental breakdown while doing so, makes Hannah seem cruel to him in ways that I don't think were intended. My understanding is that he listened to them all right away in the book, but that the show needed to stretch it out to fit their episodic format. There were some consequences of that choice that didn't seem all that well-considered, and many of them changed the way I saw the characters. They could've easily cut at least three episodes and made the story a lot tighter and kept the characterizations a little more intact. All that said, I liked this show and think there was some really great stuff underneath the unfortunate structural choices. Clay and Hannah were wonderful characters (played by very impressive actors), and the show managed to explore the small (and massive) cruelties teenagers endure and inflict on each other in a way that felt very true. Hannah's story was all too familiar while still feeling singular to her particular experience. And for that reason, I really hope they won't do a season 2.

I really didn't buy Sheri's freak out over hitting the stop sign, and the subsequent rush to flee the scene. She wasn't drunk, she didn't damage the car, and no one was hurt. Everything we know about her says she would've done the responsible thing and called in the accident. As soon as I saw the car wreck I knew someone else was dead, and quickly realized that it must be Jeff if it was another person who would matter a lot to Clay. Once I figured that out, I realized he'd only ever appeared in flashbacks. Well done, awful twist.

You can really feel the effort to flesh out the book narrative in these middle eps. Ryan and Zack's stories, in particular, don't feel meaty enough to sustain their own episodes, so the padding really becomes obvious. Also, how bad is Clay's gaydar? I mean, wow.

@sacrebleu I sympathize; I always had to be careful about where and how I communicated with her in case he was monitoring. I'm glad to hear your sister was able to leave eventually.

Critics were given screeners of the first six episodes. So yep.

Yiiiiiikes, that's even worse than I remembered. Seeing a male critic dismiss domestic violence, child abuse, rape, marital strife and the tension between being a mother and having a career as "a hot mess of issues" should be all the proof you need that misogyny is at play here, whether he realizes it or not.

There were quite a few prominent critics who initially reviewed the show as a soapy guilty pleasure, even those who liked it. There were also a few male critics who outright said they were uninterested in it because they perceived it as a shallow show about gossipy rich women. There was some push back against one critic in particular (Andy Greenwald) when his podcast listeners called him out for his (I'm sure quite unconscious) bias against a show centered on women. His show revisited it this week and he admitted he got it wrong and brought on a female guest to join in the discussion.

I agree, and I think the point of Hannah getting a few details wrong is just to show us that we all have our own biased perspective, and even if we don't intend to lie we may twist things in our own memories to fit the narrative we believe. She feels that no one cared about her, so in her memories, all the details point to that. But maybe she did pull away from Jessica and Alex as much as they pulled away from her, and maybe Zach did care about her but wasn't able to show her in a way she could understand. Ultimately, I don't think the small inaccuracies matter much except that they serve to enhance the tragedy even further-Hannah wasn't quite as all alone as she thought she was. What's important for storytelling purposes is that we understand Hannah's truth, and I think that's definitely what we're getting. Now that I'm past the halfway point, the sense of dread is definitely building. Something really bad is coming; I can feel it. The Hannah/Clay romance scenes are pretty excruciating, given the context of her death. I worry about his ability to survive whatever he's about to find out.

It really drives home the way people undervalue entertainment made by and for women. I think it was Emily Nussbaum of the New Yorker who pointed out that Big Little Lies deals with all the same themes as True Detective, yet one was automatically viewed as prestige TV, while the other was called a trashy soap and outright dismissed by some male critics. I really appreciate the thoughtful conversation about Perry here, and the nuances people have teased out, but I agree with this. Perry's remorse was only ever part of a performance. I think this is exactly what they intended, and they did a fairly good job of it. Even though I have experience with this kind of thing, I still found myself questioning how I was supposed to perceive Perry in the early episodes, and wondered if they were actually attempting to portray genuine remorse from him. But as the show went on, it became clear that he was just doing and saying what he needed to as a means to manipulate Celeste. Manipulating the audience along with her is a pretty interesting way to help us understand her perspective. It was a big fundraiser for the school, not a parent night. I assume there were some prominent community members (like the local theater director) who would be expected to come regardless of whether they had children at the school. Isolation can look like a lot of different things, because the abuser has to calibrate it to fit the woman's existing situation without raising too many alarm bells. My sister, for instance, is part of a huge and close family, so she could never be completely cut off from us without the cavalry charging in. Instead, her isolation took the form of not being able to be honest with us about anything, obfuscating and sometimes straight up lying about what was happening in her home, and avoiding too much contact with the more perceptive/pushy members of the family who would question her more frankly.

Wow, I don't see Adam this way at all. Adam Sackler, honor-bound and sticking to commitments? Perhaps it's just the intensity of his personality that gives that impression, but in reality he has shown himself to be someone who will selfishly drop his partner to follow a new obsession with no hesitation. The pattern started way back in season 2, but he was leaving Natalia for Hannah, who he loved, so perhaps we didn't initially see it for what it was. But then he did it to Hannah with Mimi Rose. Then he pursued Hannah's friend relentlessly despite knowing full well it would hurt her. Then he ditched Jessa because he became fixated with raising a baby with Hannah. This is not a guy who feels the need to stick to his commitments or who places a sense of honor over his need to explore his impulses. He likes to be needed, and it seems to me that once he realized Hannah didn't want or need him, he was okay walking away. Pretty sure Lena was referring to their past, which was definitely a love story.

I actually thought they did a great job of showing us that not all of the teens can keep up with the witty banter-Hannah was too fast for Justin, she had to keep explaining what she meant! And yet she was so into him anyway. So real. I'm definitely intrigued by this first episode and getting a vibe that this is going somewhere very dark.

It felt exactly the same to me, which is why I thought it worked. Adam came to her and said exactly what she was desperate to hear, so she just kind of went along with it and they fell into their familiar patterns without giving it much thought. As soon as reality caught up with her, she realized it wasn't what she actually wants, and Adam could read it on her face the moment it hit her. I thought the diner scene was great non verbal acting; it made sense to me. Maybe I'm just a sucker for Adam (I've always loved Driver's performance), but I found their scenes utterly charming even as I could feel the other shoe waiting to drop. But I also thought Adam was being incredibly selfish. What he said to Jessa about needing to explore this desire to help Hannah raise her child is almost exactly what he said to Hannah about Mimi Rose. And just as he did then, he went crawling back as soon as his fantasy fell apart. Did not see Ray/Abigail coming, but I was definitely charmed by it. I'm thinking my Ray/Shosh dreams are not meant to be, but this is a pretty cool alternative. I thought it was just the idea of them being married at all. It brought home for her how serious their discussion actually was, and kind of shook her out of the daze she'd been in with him all day.

I believe that all the beach stuff with Jane chasing and then aiming a gun at Perry was her imagining the culmination of her longtime dream/fantasy of catching and punishing him. That she quickly put that aside to defend Celeste said so much.

Just wanted to share this excerpt from Tom and Lorenzo's review, because it articulates a feeling I had so well:

It definitely read to me like he recognized her and realized Celeste knew about his other evil activities. That's when the last thread of his control snapped. It was especially notable in that scene because Madeline is so short. The contrast would've been funny if that scene wasn't so horrifying. It seems pretty clear that time had passed, and that the mothers have decided to protect not only each other, but also their children. I'm sure Celeste is getting Max help and they've built a network of support around the boys to keep them from becoming like their father. I have personal experience with abusers finally exposing themselves in front of others, so no, it's not unrealistic. You're not wrong that most abuse happens in secret and most abusers are very good at covering up their behavior, but there does sometimes come a point when everything is spiraling and they lose control. I bought this being Perry's moment; Celeste was leaving, one of his rape victims was standing in front of him, he had clearly been exposed, his life as he knew it was over. So he lashed out one last desperate time at Celeste. I don't think he believed he was going to make it out of that moment, and he was trying to bring her down with him.

That may have been my favorite moment in this whole thing. Three women who have come to know and trust each other so intimately that all it took was a few quick looks for all of them to understand exactly what was happening, and act. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the total lack of expository dialogue in the final sequences. We're as in tune with these women as they are with each other, and we don't need it all spelled out to understand.