DearEvette

Yeah, not my favorite of the series. I thought both Dan & Emma were so blind and deaf to all nuance. Cringeworthy and made me mad on behalf of Maggie. That said, the lemonade twins --- and their sticky hot tub (ew!) were a fun touch. And Emma's family must have money because a gorgeous lake house with water frontage is boo-coo bucks!

Playing House on USA. Probably doesn't technically fit this thread because I literally had no idea this show even existed before a week ago. And even if I did the premise just is so not my thing and I have never heard of the lead actresses before. But it came across my radar because Tvline did a little blurb on Keegan Michael-Key (whom j'adore) and a great scene he was in. And I was like what...? So I looked it up and binged all of Season 1 and am now up to speed on Season 2. Funny, charming, well written, well acted. Really Good show.

Truthfully? I think a lot of my satisfaction with the runaway success of Empire and Cookie is because of how pissed I was that POI killed off Carter. True or not, rational or not, I will always feel they jettisoned TPH to make room for Sarah Shahi & Amy Acker. So I watch and enjoy.

So.. what is the time jump between S2 and S3? The four-year thing is puzzling. Earlier spoilers suggest she headed off to Quantico after all the evens of S2. So did she meet him then, come back to SH and now it is four years post S2? Or are they now really retconning? If they are retconning one semi-plausible explanation could be that her trip to the past didn't 100% reset things to exactly the way they were and some very small changes did occur. And honestly, Abbie was changed through that travel because she met Grace and had that experience so things couldn't be 100% the same in any case. Information about anything S3 except new casting had been so stingy that it is hard not to latch in the tiniest thing and bug it to death.

I love that that actually looked like a Digiornio's pizza with that super puffy crust. Personally, I am a thin cruster all the way.

I too am a new convert to this show. Thank goodness for On Demand. I binged all of season one over the weekend. And have just caught up to date with S2. Things I loved about this episode: - Emma's Steve Harvey voice & Mark's reaction to it - Charlotte's expression as Mark was talking about their 'Third World water pressure' (actually I love all the little cut-aways to Charlotte's face. That child actor is ridiculously charming) - Mark: "That's my jam right there." when the Murder She Wrote theme song starts to play - Bird Bones prancercizing. Of course she'd have ankle weights. Things I Didn't love: - The unnecessary reminder that Emma & Mark are kinda maybe gonna hook up eventually. We know it will most likely happen, but the show has been so smart so far in how it has been handling everybody's relationships that this felt clumsy for the show. Which to too bad because Keegan-Michael Key and Jessica St. Clair have such great natural chemistry. They really feel like they've known each other forever so they sell it. I just don't want it to happen right now. I actually want Emma and Rabbi Dan to run a natural course like they let Mark & Tina did. I bet she does. I have a friend who works for a company that contracts with high end hotels to provide the soaps/shampoos etc. that you get in hotel rooms. She's single and has no kids. And she travels all over the world on the company's dime so she she has very little personal overhead. She bought a small house (for cash) as a home base only because she thought it was stupid to continue to rent an apartment and owning property was smarter tax wise. Her mom & dad keep an eye on her place when she is out of town. But for the most part she just socks her ridiculously high paycheck away in savings and investments. I don't know her exact net worth or anything, but she's worked for the company since we graduated college some 20 years ago and I'll bet she could quit right now and live comfortably for the rest of her life without having to work again.

Ooooh extra points to you for your Vorkosigan reference!

Oh, I loved that line, especially coming after her 'So pretty. So Smart.' line to Dutch and then handing Johnny her wine glass like he was a servant. His delivery was perfect. I got to thinking about Pawter's mother. She's keeping her supplied with Jaxx. If she really had written her off, then they wouldn't even be doing that. I wonder if her response to Johnny wasn't so much that she had completely disowned her daughter, but admitting any sort of connection to her & taking communication from her, from a complete stranger no less, would not have been politically smart. Especially since the Nine families are a vipers' nest and any weakness you show could potentially be used against you. And finally, I loved that last scene at the royal. Hills taking his drink, that old couple dancing and the sex worker sitting there with a resigned look on her face that clearly said 'Same shit, different day.'

Do you think they were just being experimented on? I thought maybe they were being turned into Level 6. Obviously the guy that was fighting Dutch at the Qresh party was augmented. As is Khlyen. And when Bellus said there were rumors of Killjoys disappearing. My feeling is that the Level 6 are all some sort of super soldiers all answerable only to Khlyen. And Dutch is supposed to become Level 6 too and somehow Red 17 is part of it. But yeah, this was a kick ass finale. All the little pieces from earlier came together to create more questions. But everything had a place. I was watching and ticking off all the players of the season so far who has made an appearance in the finale and was giving of hope of seeing Fancy and when I did, I was like.....Fuck. But I loved the reveal about Arkyn. And I like how so many characters had very interesting arcs that were allowed to play out some in this finale -- Pawter, Alvis (and his religion), that company guy, even Kendry who is the worst! I hope it gets renewed and I hope Khlyen stays around. He's a good bad guy. Or a Good maybe anti-hero with a murky agenda-guy. I also have to give Johnny big props this episode he delivered really big in key places and had a couple of great one-liners to boot.

OMG! That tvline interview with the Kings is unintentionally hysterical. It is like...like... incomprehensible word salad that boils down to the startling revelation that 'TV is just make believe!" LOL.

Exactly! The thing with the fingers with the 'captured!' lyric in the Tina Turner song slays me. Just slays me. Every. Single. Time! And yes, The Roots cracking up in the background is always fun to see.

I don't have much more to add than was laready said about this ep, but I did want to say I really liked a couple of scenes: 1- With Molly and Kinsey (I don't know his name on this show, only his name on Mad men) in the diner. I think Halle brought off cool, unemotional, get-shit-done very well. She is always required to be so highly emoitonal in her scenes that it is nice to see her be resolute and and hard. 2- The series of scenes with Melina Kanakaredes. I thought the whole thing played out really well. When JD was trying to explain to her why it isn't right to just turn over Adu just because he is an Alien we could see it was really just futile. She had to experience his humanity to really get was JD was trying to explain. And then in the end she just gave Molly the hug because the woman had just watched her son die.

I liked them going to the Mothership, so to speak. Yeah, how ironic that is was Johnny who set off this series of event with Khlyen reappearing by taking D'Avin's level 5 warrant in Dutch's name. Also D'Avin's been a Killjoy for like a nanosecond and he's so sure level six is a myth. Sure dude. The whole divorce proceeding thing actually felt like a divorce. I felt more sad during that then I did with last week's whole 'we're broken' episode. The RAC guy who 'questioned' D'Avin really does have a great head of hair. So long dude who thought he could hurt Dutch. We hardly knew ye. But seriously if you were smart of enough to realize she's special then you had yo be smart enough to realize shooting her was not a wise move. I loved the last shot Khlyen dragging him away. Speaking of hair, Khlyen's assistant was serving up some District One Realness with her purple hair. Speaking of more hair, I must say Khlyen is really attractive in a silver fox kinda way. He's also rather bad ass. I hope he sticks around and doesn't buy it in the finale. Unless of course he is shown to be unrepentantly evil, but his words to Dutch about needing her team don't actually seem to make that a possibility. Yeah, Dutch's back story really has been interesting. I am liking how we are getting it in dribs and drabs. No data dumping. Did anyone recognize her family name? I might need to go back and watch the Qresh episode to see if it is mentioned anywhere. I am not into immediately shipping pairs. I like to watch and let the chemistry settle in. So far though I am still not seeing it with Johnny & Dutch. And only marginally moreso with Dutch & D'Avin. If they had to give anyone of them a love interest at this point I would have hoped it would have been outside the team. Honestly I liked Johnny with Pawter. I think they clicked more than D'Avin & Pawter did. Maybe if the show is picked up they'll have a bit more budget to work with. Altho I must say they are making the most of what I suspect is a tiny budget relatively. Here's hoping the show does get picked up. All the prophetic rumblings about what is coming sounds like they have a long term plan and I am very curious about what it is.

According to IMDB It's spelled Khlyen -- you have the Y and the L transposed. Honestly I think most of us (myself included) have been spelling it wrong til now. LOL. So at least now the pronunciation now makes sense.

Yeah they made a point of saying that John created Lucy in the image of Molly. And it does make sense that all of the Hybrids would be POC because their human origin stock is Molly. What is really interesting is the decision to make the rest of the Humanichs to be white, and not just physical copies of Lucy. The optics of these white robots hunting & killing POC "others" (as many have stated) are just all wrong. But was this a conscious decision, with the producers knowingly making some sort of overt point? White men killing brown folks? Some sort of Nazi analogy with the Aryans & Genocide? Or just Network blindness?

I know celebrity lip-synching is a big thing now, but for my money the best will always be Paul Rudd doing Tina Turner's 'You Better Be Good to Me' on Jimmy Fallon.

Ha! This is sooo me. As far as I am concerned wherever I am facing is north. So to the right of me is east. Even if I turn 90 degrees I am still facing north. The only time I know direction is early in the morning or in the evening and only if it is a clear day that is because I know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

There was a poll on some site where they asked re: Breaking Bad "What episode/scene did you know you were really hooked?' For BB it was the 'fulminating mercury' scene, but for Oz it was Beecher shitting on Schillinger and screaming 'Sieg Heil motherfucker!'. My husband and I howled at that scene. Yeah we are twisted. Re; Eammon Walker. He will always be Said. Even now on Chicago Fire I subconsciously expect him to break out a kufi. It is always such a surprise when he is in interviews and speaks in his native accent though.

Oz had so many character actors in it, though, that to this day I still refer to them as their Oz character name whenever I see one pop up on a tv show. When JK SImmons won his Oscar last year I told my husband "hey Vern Schillnger won an Oscar!'

I gather that the Aliens are simply finding willing folks and getting it on. Kinda like the men that Molly picks up. I thought that first pregnant woman Molly & JDM interviewed had stepped out on her husband with someone she found on and online dating site? K So far it seems that of everyone, Molly might arguably be the one who is having sex against her will and without her consent since she goes into a fugue state and doesn't seem to be aware what she is doing until she snaps out of it.

Honestly, I think my issue was that I didn't think it was messy enough. Probably why I didn't care for the 'truth game' segment because it -- in a weird way -- was too pat of a solution this early in their dysfunction. It was like a one man intervention. But interventions don't generally happen until people become really desperate We never got to see any real fall out from the Dutch/D'Avin debacle therefore we never get to experience what leads to Johnny going there. Instead Johnny was put in the position of being the exposition fairy and gave us the five minute highlights at the top of the show. Like I said above, i think it would have been more interesting if we actually got to experience the lingering effects of Dutch's distrust, D'Avin's guilt and Johnny's resentment -- to see the slow crumbling of the team so that when we get to the point of fracture it is all the more effective. Even though I wasn't thrilled with the actual execution of Dutch/D'avin segments I am glad the team wasn't miraculously healed. i still love the show, but I just thought for a show that so far has been kind of effortless and smart in the way it is telling it's story & presenting it's three mains, this felt a little clumsy.

I didn't like the Dutch/D'Avin parts only because it seemed like a needle scratch on a series of episodes that have been chugging along quite well. I get they have to do some sort of follow up on what happened but I would have preferred them to work in denial until something epic kinda made it blow up in their faces rather than having Johnny engineer "Team Building" I also think it is terribly shitty of the show to passively/aggressively through the characters to suggest that D'Avin is culpable in what he did to Dutch. Sure Dutch acknowledged that he was a victim but by having the RAC handler punch him because of it and people kinda smirking & winking about it undermines all that. I get Dutch being leery around him. But would have preferred to see her watchful and alert, ready to battle again rather than skittering away everytime he is in the same room. And there is Johnny. He does have a legit beef with D'Avin because D'avin left him to a junkie mother. But that was true even before they found D'Avin and before D'avin became a part of the team. Why not confront those issues then? Why shit on him now when you clearly see he has also paid a price for that abandonment? This is a guy dealing with the fact that he had his brains fucked over and his free will taken away from him and was forced to do atrocious things to people he trusted and people who trusted him. And yet it seems like the collective reaction to him is to be mad at him for having his brains fucked over and his free will taken away from him and made to do things he has no knowledge or control over. And that doesn't sit well because it reeks of victim blaming. That said, I did like the Johnny parts. Not because I think that Johnny hangs the sun or anything, but because it was centered more on the stuff I like in a SFF show, the world-bulding and the larger plot. The continuing hints about how the society works. How the hard-scrabble Westerly people are trying hard to make onto Leith and following the rules of seven generations but that seems to be a false promise. And the more hints of something big coming and more info about a resistance force. I also liked the deeper look into Pawter's past. Jack sounds like a terrible drug if you can't even be weaned off of it.

Laura Spencer, who played Caroline on SH (RIP Miss Caroline), is one of the "squinterns" on Bones. I wonder if they'll play with that somehow?

In thinking of the dribs & drabs of news coming out re: S3, the only thing that I have really hated is Sexy Betsy Ross. It seems so out of sync with everything else we are hearing. - I love the idea of a time jump because I can not stand the thought of Ichabod mourning Katrina (and he would have done so if they were to stay true to the character) - I love the idea of Abbie becoming FBI feels like a logical move for her - I love the idea of Joe Corbin coming back. It is a tether to Abbie & Jenny's past that makes sense (also the Wendigo epsiode was the first one in S2 that felt like a S1 episode after 'This Is War') - I am intrigued by the idea of Pandora being the Pandora and her box of ills being released into the world (it is a smart way to do an overall arc and make it episodic) - I like the casting of Lance Gross - I am curious about the Crossover - Don't care that Headless isn't on this season. If Pandora's Box is the big bad, then Ichabod & Abbie are dealing with the ancient Greek God pantheon, not Judeo-Christian one which is what Headless has become connected with. If they make it to a S4 they could re-introduce him then... - And most importantly, the showrunner so far in his language, is clear that this is Ichabod & Abbie's show. Big contrast from Goofman who even in S1 was talking about the 'Katrina-ness of it all."

I know right? I'm all -- hey guys Cylons? Skynet? Even if it is a cliche, evolution theory kinda bears it out a bit. Science Fiction is littered with this trope because it is a plausible one. A stronger, fitter more adaptive species will inevitably wipe out a weaker species. Humans have caused the extinction of many strong, successful species. If you are creating something in the image of humans and you are giving the ability to evolve, adapt & think like humans, but are making them stronger than humans then what is the inevitable conclusion? I would have liked to see some doubt and trepidation on more faces than just Julie & Charlie's. I know the Big Bad Myopic Gov't types are also a trope, but it would have been nice for that one at least to have been subverted a bit.