Black Knight

In the pilot episode when he was helping her with her luggage as she departed, he told her that he was busy in February but had time in March. Then she wanted him to come to London that time and he said no, for her to come back to Italy. That wasn't the first time she'd visited, either, as in that scene he also complained about how she always brings too much luggage. I vaguely recall some dialogue in another earlier episode between her and Terry that indicated she'd visited him multiple times. That said, she really should have known after his freakout at her on the phone that he was done with her. Particularly since he then ignored her calls. Terry was right. The initial part of the discussion about substituting a word reminded me of the big argument in Dear White People (and there, the opposite sides were taken by the involved parties).

I think it was just laziness. It was easier to generate tension by simply turning Steve into Miranda's polar opposite instead of keeping him as someone who had things in common with her but also differed from her in ways that were complementary. The writing for Charlotte/Harry was better in this regard.

It does seem like for a 10-episode series at least one of the women needs to be single. Maybe that's where the talk of recasting Samantha (no) or bringing in a new character to fill out the foursome came in. But I think it will end up being Carrie.

Hope has 100% been wronged and Liam and Steffy are assholes. But I also think Hope is too stupid to live. Liam the king waffler wasn't even the one who really chose the last time around - Steffy got fed up with his indecision and told Lope to get married. Didn't she even practically propose to Hope for Liam and stick the engagement ring on Hope's finger herself? How Hope could marry him in such circumstances was beyond me. What a surprise, the husband who didn't actually choose between them before marrying her is still hung up on the other woman and can't handle her being with another man and blows up his marriage as a result. This was inevitable from the day Lope got engaged at Steffy's behest. But hey, as soon as Hope and Thomas get together Liam will come sniffing around for the same reason, even if he does end up having a second baby with Steffy, because once again Liam won't have chosen, Hope will have chosen by divorcing his ass. Liam won't be any better about Hope/Thomas than he was about Steffy/Finn. And I don't expect Hope to be any more resistant than Steffy was. She won't cheat but she will go back to Liam. None of these three are allowed to have any permanent character growth.

Snort. Of course the Spectres leave Mrs. Coulter alone. I know she said something about hiding her humanity, but I think it was simply professional courtesy. From one type of soul sucker to another. Boreal was an idiot for not noticing the contempt she had for him simmering just below the surface. And really, she's not wrong.

Agreed, with an additional complication: We learned in S1 she's compartmentalized daemons from humans. Instead of seeing daemons as an exterior manifestation of humans' souls, she believes daemons drive humans into sin, hence her big plan to have all children severed from their daemons, thus keeping children pure into adulthood and eliminating sin from the world. She blames her daemon for the sin of her affair with Asriel, which is actually correct in the sense that her daemon is her, but she doesn't accept that. Her belief is that daemons are a manifestation of original sin, rather than the manifestation of a human's soul. So she hates her daemon in two ways: The one she acknowledges, that daemons are basically exterior agents of Dust responsible for their humans sinning (in her opinion); and the one she doesn't acknowledge, where she hates her daemon because she hates herself and the daemon is herself. Deep down, does she know she's full of shit and that she's the one responsible for her sins? Probably. But she's so good at compartmentalization and self-control that that knowledge is buried under so many layers of deluded rationalizations that I'm not sure it could ever actually come to the surface of her awareness.

Honestly, Hunter Tylo turning religious and insisting that Tridge be written as a couple who didn't divorce (or whatever that stipulation was) wasn't the worst thing ever from a storyline standpoint. It forced the writers to spend some time on one marriage instead of marrying and divorcing Ridge from one or the other woman in the ToD every 2-3 months. One of the three actors stuck in the current ToD needs to think about pulling a Tylo. Otherwise, as long as both women are on the show, Liam's waffle ways will always continue.

Once they had Grace and Sylvia chatting in the park about what Grace wanted her to do without us getting to hear the conversation, I figured she was setting up Jonathan. I guess Sylvia fed her prosecutor acquaintance all the right stuff to ask. But even though I knew then what Grace was up to, the courtroom sequence was still extremely gripping and, for me, worth the time of watching the series. I did find the ending somewhat OTT silly - especially with Grace and her moneybags father following via helicopter (wouldn't the police have serious issues with that?) - and I kinda wish they had let Jonathan fling himself off the bridge, but okay. Jonathan attempting to pin the murder on Henry seems to be what ended Grace's doubts. Understandably so. Haley thought it was the fact of the weapon itself (and I'm sure that didn't help), but to try to put it on Henry made it clear that Jonathan wasn't just a murderer, but also a total narcissistic sociopath. Most guilty people would still take the blame themselves over pinning it on their minor child. And on a related note, in the debate of whether Nicole Kidman was purposely giving a blank affect or just has too much Botox to be able to move her face, I'm coming down on the side of the former. Her facade really broke then and she had forehead wrinkles, etc. The show wanted us to not be sure what Grace was really thinking throughout the show since her courtroom turn was coming. Poor MIguel. I knew Haley would be as gentle as she could because it's obviously a terrible look for the defense attorney to be mean to a child, but it was brutal for him to endure nonetheless. And that poor daughter of Jonathan and Elena's. I hope in time Fernando can find it in himself to love her, since she will already have the issue of her father having murdered her mother to deal with.

It'll depend on how they use the 70 minutes. I'm glad to read that it's 70 minutes because I do think it has to be that long if they're to address all the questions and weird moments. But if instead of doing that, it's lots of time spent on Grace walking around, well...

I've thought about it too. There have been hints that Elena was sleeping with someone else too. Both she and Sylvia could be bisexual. All we know about Sylvia is that she's a single mother, and she certainly appreciated Elena's breasts. The only reason I say bisexual instead of lesbian for Sylvia is because of the likelihood of her being Jonathan's one-night stand. Although! With the point brought up earlier of casting Annaleigh Ashford for what has been an extremely brief part, maybe she'll be the one revealed to be Jonathan's one-night stand. That would certainly be a surprise twist since it seems pretty much all of us have assumed that it must be Sylvia since the show took pains not to give the name and she's (seemingly) the only woman around. Which leads me to the other theory I've been ruminating on this morning: What if Franklin, who has told Grace (and viewers) what a constant horndog he was, is the one who is the father of Sylvia's daughter? Their friendliness has always raised my eyebrows a bit. (Grace and Sylvia are over a decade apart in age, so this is not an instance of her having been Grace's best friend since childhood or even college, which would have explained her interactions with Franklin in a more innocent way.) Or what if he's the other one who was sleeping with Elena? As you pointed out, they have an interest in art in common. Maybe the reason he's always looking at that one painting now is because they first met by looking at that painting at the same time. Hell, what if he's slept with both Sylvia and Elena? (Okay, that probably is too out-there for this show.) I'm excited for tonight. There are so many questions I have that need answers!

I just binged all five episode, and I am so confused. Sylvia knowing the prosecutor has to pay off somehow. And with that whole thing about the camera cutting away before Jonathan gave the name of his previous fling certainly makes me think it was her, since there really is no one else on the show it could be. But I don't see how Sylvia knowing the prosecutor matters to any of this - unless the prosecutor is willing to throw the case for Sylvia's sake? Then there's Grace and Elena. We had one flashback already that showed them interacting more than we saw originally, there is still the issue of the painting, and the question of how well Grace knew Elena was just dropped. And is Grace just imagining certain moments or are we actually seeing them through her eyes because she was really there? The other thing I find odd is Grace being fine with her husband's lawyer making the jury suspicious of her. I know she tried to thread the needle with her son that it was really just that the lawyer showed that the police lied, but anyone reading about this or seeing it on TV is just going to think that Grace is a real suspect. Henry. It could maybe be him - the DNA thing bothers me - but the theory my friends keep espousing is that if it is him, his father is covering for him, but Jonathan has been concerned about repeatedly telling Henry multiple times that he, Jonathan, didn't do it. If Henry did it and Jonathan knew, Jonathan wouldn't need to tell Henry any such thing. Unless he thinks Henry killed her and then blocked it out? But of everyone on the show, I feel less like it's Henry than I do anyone else, just because it was this episode's cliffhanger and this seems like the sort of show that will reveal its killer only in the finale. And I think at this point Jonathan thinks Grace did it. Also, is it just that casting really liked the actor who plays Henry, or is the fact he doesn't look like Grace or Jonathan a plot point? He looks more like Elena than either of his parents. Jonathan. We heard several times from Sylvia that "it's always the fucking husband" (though maybe Sylvia had her own reasons) and we had the anvil of a speech from Grace in her patient's therapy about seeing what you want to see, basically, in your husband. I also feel like we spent a lot of time on the cheating patient of Grace's whose reasons for cheating don't seem to match Jonathan's unless there's more to the story of Grace and Jonathan. In any case, I feel like if Jonathan killed Elena, it was because she was sleeping with someone else. It couldn't have been because she potentially threatened to expose his cheating ways, because obviously killing her guaranteed he'd be exposed for all his lies. He wasn't even trying not to be, since he pulled that disappearing act which made him 100x more suspicious. Then there's Franklin. Is the painting he's always staring at a clue? I tend to suspect him just because he's Donald Sutherland. Plus there was the sobbing breakdown he had where he said that if he had just told Grace about Jonathan asking for money, maybe "that woman" would still be alive, and he doesn't really seem the type to be upset by the death of a woman who was his daughter's husband's mistress. Fernando is the only one who I feel fairly confident didn't do it (now watch it be him after all). He has also seemed concerned about some other secret of his wife's coming out in court, so there's something there too. Someone else she was sleeping with? One last thing that I have no idea matters or not: In the scene where the auction committee meets, one of the women mentions they don't have anything from the art world to auction. Of course later we find out Elena is actually an artist, but she certainly doesn't speak up in the meeting about it, when she could have offered an art lesson or one of her pieces. Was that just to let us know her entire claim about wanting to help blah blah was bullshit so she could wave her baby in Grace's face, or does it tie in somehow? Ugh. I'm kind of impressed by this show, because it's a small cast and therefore a small number of suspects, and yet the killer isn't obvious to me. The one thing I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is that the show has taken some pains to establish that Sylvia and Franklin are really friendly. Soooooo...my final guess before the finale is that Sylvia did it, just because the show has had Sylvia be connected to everyone in some way: She's Grace's friend, she was the one Jonathan asked to represent him and is almost certainly his previous affair, she's friendly with the prosecutor, she's super friendly with Franklin, she admired Elena's breasts quite a lot, and she's got a daughter while wearing no engagement or wedding ring and we've had no explanation about her personal life. I don't know how all this fits together, but I'm going with Sylvia.

"People take shots at each other all the time" is a general statement. The monarch and the Prime Minister, on the other hand, are two very specific individuals, and rules can be different when it comes to specific individuals. As one example, if I take shots at my boss, how long could I reasonably expect to stay employed? If I take shots at my spouse, how long I could I reasonably expect to stay happily married? And so we come to another set of specific individuals, the Prime Minister and the Queen. It was noted multiple times in the episode that in the instance of Elizabeth and Thatcher, it had the potential to create a constitutional crisis. That's why generally this kind of thing Is Not Done by the monarchy, because they don't want to create a constitutional crisis, partly out of a sense of responsibility to the country and partly out of the knowledge that they would end up the losers at the resolution of the constitutional crisis. They are unelected, members of a monarchy through pure accident of birth, while the Prime Minister is elected, and consequently they are expected to be show ponies only. Elected people can be voted out, so the populace has final say there. Unelected people cannot, and so if they are to continue in their positions, they are expected to stay out of politics. It's easy to cheer if Queen Elizabeth should have an opinion one agrees with (though I'll point out again that at no point did we see her actually taking a stand against racism - sanctions wasn't even, by her own words, an issue of importance to her, it was an issue of importance to other people whom she counted as friends), but just imagine if she gave an opinion one didn't agree with.

I took it as Camilla being relieved to have an excuse to give Charles instead of having to tell the truth, that she loved her husband and they were happy enough together that she didn't want to leave. She and Andrew had an open marriage with no hypocrisy. It wasn't like Charles and Diana's marriage in which Diana had affairs because she felt driven to have them. Camilla and Andrew were two peas in a pod, really - they liked being married while having sidepieces. The showrunner said that the pandemic caused the show to lose two weeks' worth of filming. So some of the missed things that have been mentioned may have been part of the scenes that were written but never shot. They tried to edit as best as they could so that the omissions wouldn't be too glaring.

She really wasn't sharing her popularity with him. The audience looked at her and applauded her for a long time. They weren't thinking about Charles. She didn't make any effort during the dance to look up where he was, she only threw him a brief gesture after it was all over and then turned back to the crowd's applause. It's very different from that scene in the earlier episode where Charles and Camilla told a story together to the party at the house. We can see how Camilla knows how to be an active participant without pulling all the focus from Charles, and in return he gives her some of the best lines of the story. They're a team in the way they tell it together, they both shine, and it's apparent why they were popular in their social circle. Someone mentioned upthread Megan's dance for Don on Mad Men. Don hated it too. I'll say this for Charles, who has truly behaved badly: He's not the kind of person to privilege youth and beauty above other considerations. Youth and beauty fade, after all. Some get around that by trading in their partners for younger models every few years, but he's never done that either. Under different circumstances, that'd be praiseworthy. It was amusing to think of Charles's remark to Andrew in the last episode about how he'd never be king, and then Charles nearly dies in an avalanche, which would have moved Andrew up the line in the succession. One just can never know for certain; see Elizabeth I of England. But for all Charles's flaws and sins, the Royal Family's lucky that it's still him and not Andrew who's first in line.

Knowing Thatcher, I don't really believe that if only her son's business interests had been in South America or Germany instead, she would have agreed to sanctions. It was a contributing but not necessary factor. Her opposition to sanctions was entirely in keeping with her political principles. Elizabeth's final argument to Thatcher was pretty weak. It boiled down to, "This is an issue important to personal friends of mine and so I'd like to make it happen for them." There was really very little throughout the episode of Elizabeth approaching the issue from a moral standpoint. She spoke a bit about compassion, but certainly nothing about racism, colonialism, or the brutality used against the protesters. Perhaps the writers knew they couldn't go that far with it given what was happening in Ireland, Thatcher's own point that some of these personal friends of Elizabeth's were responsible for human rights abuses themselves, and the history of the Royal Family in general. Thatcher's position is appalling, but Elizabeth's was closer to supporting the right thing for the wrong reasons than being truly the hero to Thatcher's villain.