Black Knight

Right, but the scenario under discussion was about splitting Janine's kids among grade level, and Gregory's not teaching that grade this year.

I don't expect much out of Purdy. I think fans really underestimate the amount of preparation that NFL defenses do for QBs. I've seen this movie so many times: Backup QB who's hardly played comes in and does well, fans immediately crown him the best QB on the roster, and then after a few games when defenses have tape, the backup QB crashes and burns and shows why he was the backup to begin with. Kinda the same thing with interim coach changes. Basically the safest bet in the NFL is that a team that has just changed coaches mid-season will win the first game under the new coach, for whatever reason. But 99% of the time the team goes right back to losing games (the Raiders last season under Bisaccia was a rare exception). There's just not that much a new coach can realistically do when coming in mid-season: the roster is set, the offensive and defensive systems are installed.

Gregory doesn't teach that grade level though, right? Melissa does, but of course this year she is teaching two grades simultaneously. And Ashley had been pulled already, so even Ava would know better than to give Melissa Janine's kids.

I really appreciated Flanagan putting up everything on his Tumblr. Even though it stabs me in the gut to know that we were supposed to get Remember Me! And probably Monster!

Yes, since I don't know anything about the family's history, I can't judge - it's a chicken-or-egg situation. Is he like that because his mom is overbearing and clingy, or is she like that because he's always needed extra help? Or the truth may be somewhere in the middle, where they have both contributed to the dynamic and keep reinforcing it. Whatever it is, they both seem like nice people and I wish them well in figuring it out.

I just watched the last two episodes. I think eliminating the doctors over Nick and Stacey was the right call. I just found the doctors' build really lacking compared to everyone else's. The brothers complaining initially about getting the jester annoyed me because that was one of the best possibilities - so easy to get lots of fun colors in with that one. But they turned it around and really embraced the concept, so good on them. I like it on reality shows when competitors don't want each other to totally fail; they'd rather win on their own merits. So I appreciated everyone rooting for Emily and Liam to get their build done. And they were able to at least get something presentable out there. Liam seems to need some help with emotional regulation, and I wonder if that's why people were so very kind to him during elimination. It's always interesting to me on the type of challenge that the Marvel one was that teams don't seem to take into account backgrounds when choosing. They get a bit carried away by whatever their personal favorite is. But those backgrounds have always helped make-or-break teams. I knew Dave and Emily were going to be top two just from which scene they had. But I also think maybe that's why the judges went with the brothers: they had the harder scene.

I saw that news too, but I had forgotten the name of the actress who played Christine and the article I read only referenced Supernatural, so I had no idea. That's sad. I didn't mind the character on first watch. I even kind of liked that she and Scotty dated, because it closed the door on what I felt would have been an entirely unnecessary romance between him and Lily.

Is Ethan the one who was a bit weepy about going home, and who didn't have a girlfriend? It may be that Ethan is the only one who's actually into Lego, and Dom is just the one person in his life who was willing/able to do the show with him. We've seen a few other teams over the seasons like that.

It comes out when he's around children. Which in a way is a nice touch on the writers' part, because Janine obviously really loves children and it's understandable that that would make Tariq attractive to her. He'd be a good father in terms of being able to connect with children. But obviously his freeloading and irresponsibility rule him out for being a good choice for a partner and co-parent.

I feel this is where the fact the judges watch the building and talk to the contestants to find out what they have planned works against contestants sometimes. If the judges hadn't seen the mousetrap team running late and having to rush, just saw the presented build with no prior knowledge, they might not have been like, "This was rough." The build fit a certain Lego aesthetic and so easily could have been done that way intentionally. It reminds me of a few weeks ago when a team, I forget which one, wanted to do power mechanics, but it wasn't working, so they had to ditch that element of their build. The team got dinged for it when they presented their build because they had told the judges there was going to be that element. But it wasn't a required element of that particular challenge, so I felt it was unfair to ding them for that. If the judges had not had that prior knowledge, they would simply have judged the build strictly as presented. I'm very glad the mousetrap team didn't go home. I don't see them winning, or even making the finals, but they're one of the best storytelling teams on the show and so I'm not ready to see them go yet. There are a few other teams, TikTok being one, that also aren't likely to make the finals, much less win, they can go first. Stacey's reaction to not being eliminated was hilarious - you could tell she was shocked, then overjoyed but desperately restraining herself from celebrating so as not to rub salt into TikTok's wounds. I love mini golf, so I loved this challenge. I see that next week we're back to "build the tallest/strongest/whatever" and then "destroy the build!"

Godfather and sloths were my favorites from the movie, so I'm happy to read that the show did well with them too! I need to watch and soon.

I finally rented Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte last night, so I just had to rewatch the two Feud episodes involving it today. It was really fun hearing the dialogue and seeing the recreations. And they should totally have listened to Davis about not starting off the film with two men, because I was thinking exactly the same thing when the movie started. Olivia de Havilland's entrance didn't have all the bits of business that Crawford's did. Was the latter what really happened? If so, then did de Havilland not do it because it was so difficult? Davis was so impressed by Crawford's work there. I also noticed that the big dinner confrontation between Miriam and Charlotte was shot outdoors with Crawford but moved to the indoors dining room with de Havilland. Again, was that what really happened, Crawford shot it outside in the heat?

I do too. In my experience, the character name appearing in subtitles tends to happen when the character speaking isn't being shown, like when they're doing a voiceover, or if there is some crosstalk happening. Basically whenever a viewer cannot tell visually who is speaking. People who can hear fine would be able to distinguish between voices, but that doesn't work for someone like me.

Oooo yes, this brings up a really interesting point for discussion. For most of the show, Buffy wasn't a flawed protagonist so much as she was a teenager. Now, as you know, the big turn came in the sixth season, after Buffy was brought back from Heaven. She turned self-destructive, had that toxic relationship with Spike, and so forth. And Willow that season had her whole arc with magic addiction (ugh), descending into dark magic and murder. When did that season air? It started in October 2001 and ran through spring 2002. When did Xena's series finale air? June 2001. Xena also premiered two years before Buffy did. In short, Xena paved the way. The flawed-female-protagonist wasn't the only note Buffy took from Xena; using a musical episode to actually advance plot/character in important ways was also taken from Xena. I agree The Price is brilliant. It's a shame that the show had trouble balancing and calibrating Xena and Gabrielle's perspectives as well in later seasons. (Like the Gab the Glorious period.) The episode is written by Steven Sears, who wrote many of the best episodes and also wrote both Xena and Gabrielle well, and it was a real loss to the show when he stopped writing episodes a little into the fifth season.

Walt/Skyler is a perfect example of what I mentioned. While individual people like yourself may have been equal-opportunity in regards to them, taking the fandom as a whole there's no question that Skyler came in for much more criticism than Walt did. I agree that Xena differs from later flawed protagonists in always trying to be better. It doesn't change how remarkable it was to see the show feature a flawed female protagonist of any kind in an era where that wasn't even common yet for male protagonists, to the point its own sister show was too afraid to do anything like that with Hercules.

I don't think it was a pivot. The Golden Brick was being given out in this episode in that weird twist of choosing blindly between two boxes, so it had to be a non-elimination by definition, to prevent exactly the scenario that the TikTok team tried to make happen. (Although their choosing Brendan and Greg for it was silly. Even if TikTok - clearly - didn't realize this was going to be a non-elim episode, they still should have realized that if nothing else, the show was not going to send home a team that had just won two straight challenges. Body of work does play a factor later on in the competition.) Now if the Golden Brick had simply been awarded automatically to the winning team, as in all previous instances, the episode wouldn't have needed to be non-elim. I agreed with Jamie and Amy - Brendan and Greg's camp did totally look like an amusement park, and this was something we specifically saw the judges warn them about while they were working on the build, so it's not like they had no warning. It was the roller coaster that did it. I know it wasn't actually a roller coaster in function, but it just looked entirely too much like one and coupled with the moving ride, made it impossible to overcome the theme park look. A roller coaster is just too iconic a theme park feature.

I'm not sure how it works when watching Amazon Prime stream on your TV, but I stream it on my desktop computer and it's really nice because it just takes a quick move of the mouse to activate the X-Ray, which instantly shows a dropdown identifying all actors and characters who are in the scene currently playing. Great for learning character names as well as placing that actor you know you've seen before.

X:WP wasn't afraid to write flawed characters (although it would go too far in the other direction as well - the "Gab the Glorious" period was exhausting), which is one of the things that helped the show be much better than its progenitor. H:TLJ would have changed Ulysses's characterization because it was that kind of show, but X:WP didn't have to play by the same rules, and usually didn't, starting with the protagonist. Even "reformed" Xena does a number of bad things that the show doesn't retcon away as her being framed or in someone else's control. It was also a good way to show Xena's ever-lingering darkness, because she couldn't quite help liking jerks like Ulysses more than a classic heroine would, even though she intellectually knew better. What of course is especially interesting is that, as you said, flawed protagonists weren't really a thing yet (though Sopranos owes a lot to Oz in that regard for paving the way), and X:WP was really ahead of its time in that not only did it have a flawed protagonist, the flawed protagonist was a woman. And refreshingly, Xena didn't get the treatment from viewers that so often flawed female characters get, which is being flogged ad nauseum while flawed male characters totally skate for the same or worse. TPTB seeing the positive reception of Xena as a flawed character and hearing the demands of viewers not to shy away from that or dark storylines really encouraged them to keep going in that direction rather than switching to H:TLJ style characterization.

Ulysses definitely has his place as "the wily one" enshrined in Greek mythology, but I agree that the show opted for telling rather than showing. They probably didn't think of it as "telling" so much as "reminding" though, expecting that this would be general knowledge to the viewers as much as to the characters. I do think the show somewhat miscast him, as the actor didn't really give off crafty vibes. I didn't mind his attitude about his wife. I mean, yes, it's unlikable, but it's also pretty true to the character, who spent umpteen years going around banging other women. His desire to go home was more about going home than it was to his wife. The "heroes" of Greek legends all tend to have unlikable things about them, especially through modern eyes. Basically you were a hero if you accomplished great deeds, even if you didn't do it for altruistic reasons or were otherwise kind of an awful person. Hector is one of the few exceptions (and if they'd had him instead of Ulysses dismissing his wife, I'd have been genuinely annoyed about it). Of course, what always irked me most about the Troy-related episodes is the continuity being thrown out of whack, even though I realize it's silly to complain about that on this show. But Xena lets us know in the first season ep "The Reckoning" that the Trojan War is supposed to have been over for a long time already: "Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon - they're long gone." Hector and Achilles died during the Trojan War, and Agamemnon was killed by his wife after returning home after war's end. (And "long gone" wasn't meant to be ambiguous and mean that perhaps they were all gone to to the Trojan War, because that part of the conversation is how Xena establishes that Ares can bring people back from the dead for her, which she uses to trick him into bringing back the people she'd supposedly murdered to testify that she was innocent.)

I'm sure they're instructed to show oversize enthusiasm to anything that happens. I was rolling my eyes. There was no need to destroy those builds. I could see a few of the teams wanting to take theirs home as souvenirs. There were some creative ones this week. The right team went home. I would have given the win to the Canadian team in the top two, but I don't have a big issue with Brendan/Greg winning again.

Super Bowl hangovers are a real thing, and if the Bengals had won the SB, I don't think we can assume that they wouldn't be as embarrassing this season as the Rams have been. Like you said, they're already not playing very well as it is, and if their desire for a Super Bowl win had been sated, imagine how poorly they might be playing without that motivation.

An union's position is typically that it's there to be an advocate for members and that making an appeal is playing out the "legal" process that every member deserves. That it's not the union's place to decide that this or that person shouldn't get the full representation they're entitled to as a dues-paying member. So even though Irving does happen to be VP, there's nothing surprising at all about the union considering an appeal. They would consider an appeal for any player whether he was on the committee or not. And usually the only thing that stops an appeal is if the situation is so cut-and-dry there really is nothing to argue, or if the player himself decides it's not to his advantage to appeal, either for PR reasons or because they would rather get the punishment done now rather than risk losing the appeal and having the punishment drop at an especially inopportune time. The union also has to consider the setting of precedent, which goes beyond any one member's case, and is a strong argument for appeal regardless of Irving being VP. I do think it's a fair point for an appeal that the Nets have chosen a couple of action items that they can be virtually certain Irving will never fulfill because he is so hard-headed, and so it's essentially their way of keeping him from ever suiting up for them again. It's always just a matter of time before he says or does something else, and the Nets weren't winning when he was playing anyway, so he's not worth the trouble in their view. That said, I ultimately don't think any of their action items are unreasonable and I would deny his appeal if I were the judge or arbitrator. But he and his union have the right to appeal and have that process play out, regardless of the ultimate outcome.

Probably because of DST ending. Yes, there's that extra hour of sleep, but it's still a longer day and later in the day especially people will feel that when the clock says 8pm but the body thinks it's 9pm and so forth.

And meanwhile Udoka hasn't been hired yet. It was being reported that it would happen yesterday. Maybe someone (Adam Silver?) talked sense into the Nets.

As soon as I read that Irving wouldn't meet with the ADL himself, and it was instead his father and stepmother/agent who met with them, I figured this was coming. He says he has an open mind and wants to educate himself blah blah, but refuses to hear what the ADL might have to say. Well, either that or his parents kept him at home because they figured he'd say something offensive during the meeting with the ADL. That might well be the case given his press conference today, which the Nets specifically cited as the impetus for the suspension. (Especially after the ADL rejected Irving's donation after said press conference.) It's clearly over as far as this team's chances this year are concerned, but the Nets aren't going to rush to trade KD. They will do exactly what the Sixers did with Simmons, which is wait patiently until they get an offer they like. He's their best asset and it would be foolish to sell low, especially since they now need to look towards rebuilding.