Black Knight

Lottie...or Shauna? I felt the girls' being frozen had more to do with Shauna than with Lottie. Tai especially had a "I hate this, but I think Shauna needs this outlet" look on her face. And Natalie is pretty much the ultimate anti-Lottie person in the cabin and she didn't step in. The Autostraddle recapper mentioned something amazing, that the phone number at Lottie's compound is a real number you can call. It's 607-478-1033 - have fun!

It was so awesome to have all the adult survivors (that we know of) together at last, and I really enjoyed some of the one-on-one interactions in addition to the big group interactions. Seeing all the women together in that setting made me feel quite conflicted about the environment Lottie has created, wondering whether it's a good thing or actually a bad thing. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle. For instance, I do think it's a good thing the women are starting to talk about what happened in the woods, after spending years pretty much avoiding the subject completely. But I had mixed emotions about seeing them actually hanging out around a campfire in a forest - so much like back then. Is that really a good thing for them, or will it cause them to fall back into old, potentially unhealthy, patterns? How much was Tai kissing Van influenced by the nostalgia of the setting, for instance? The contrast of Lottie's "therapies" for Shauna in past and present was interesting. In the present, Shauna is given an innocent creature to care for. (And, because she's clearly watched the same TV show I have , she initially assumed she'd have to kill the goat at the end of the day. Heh.) In the past, Lottie let Shauna beat her to a pulp in a scene that was disturbing in itself and doubly disturbing because the show did not have the beating stop at just a few blows like so many shows would. Side note: In this episode, past Shauna was wearing Jackie's shirt. I don't think I've seen that shirt since S1, since all the girls have been so covered up for the winter weather. But in this ep they made sure to have Shauna's coverings open so that we could see what shirt she has on underneath. Another interesting contrast was between Misty's fake meltdown with Mari and Akilah vs. her sincere meltdown with Ben. I never would have guessed Misty would end up saving Ben, although I still don't think he's long for this world. She went through every manipulative tactic she could think of to get Ben to step away from the edge, and then she broke down and that sincerity was what got through to him, I think. Also notable that two of the girls were hoping Crystal would be dead so they could eat her - so another line has been crossed in this episode, edging the group closer to murderous cannibalism - and that Misty was repulsed by that. I'm sure she'd still be ok eating other dead people! I wonder where Crystal's body is. So Lottie has been out of the sanitarium for about 10 years. Picking that point in time makes sense for the other survivors' reaction to Lottie being out. That means she was in the sanitarium for around 13 years, so I can see where the other survivors just finally assumed Lottie would be in there forever and stopped paying attention. The therapist being revealed to be in Lottie's imagination was great because of the way they did it, first showing the Antler Queen - talking about violence and the hunt, I need to go back and listen to that line again - and then the empty room. Poor Lottie. I'm still sorta suspicious of her, but I also have a lot of sympathy for her now. Simone Kessell has completely won me over. (Also special shoutout to our other casting standout this season, Lauren Ambrose, who is just seamless as the adult counterpart to Liv Hewson.)

True, hindsight is 20/20. I see most of the professional graders acknowledging that it takes a few years to know who's really a success and who's not. But one thing you can do is look at whether the reasoning was sound, even if it didn't work out. I think this is sometimes a hard thing to accept, that a decision can be a good decision and yet not have the desired outcome. And similarly, a decision can be a bad decision and actually work out. The outcome is not really a reflection on the quality of the decision itself or the acumen of the decision-maker. In terms of odds, people who consistently make good decisions are going to have a better overall track record than people who consistently make bad decisions, even though not all of those good decisions will have good outcomes and not all of those bad decisions will have bad outcomes. In other words, the grades we see now are about the decision-making (sometimes the graders do have particular axes to grind or other biases at play). In three years, the grades will be about the outcomes.

No, Pip married for love. I think once he accepted that Estella was never going to love him, he was able to move on and really appreciate Biddy. Biddy had made clear that she wasn't going to just be the second choice, so her agreeing to marry him shows that he was in love with her by then. I think the way he looks at her, and kisses her, and what he says to her in French all support that. Book spoiler of sorts: Yes. It's very Dickensian. So his novels may not be for you!

When Emily was googling her sister's murder, there was a mention of Clive going to jail for drug dealing. So it's an important part of his backstory at the very least, and raises a lot of questions about how that happened since the last we saw, Edwin had decided to leave Clive out of it. Did Clive approach One-Eye Mike on his own? Did Edwin change his mind and bring Clive in later, as muscle or because he hoped that One-Eye Mike would be more interested in Clive than him? Did Edwin not change his mind and then somehow Clive took the fall for him? It might also have something to do with wherever Edwin is now and what he's doing, if Edwin is still alive. I'm so curious to know what happened to Clive and Edwin in the years since the murder. It also tells us more about Edwin and Clive as characters. I haven't read the book, but the TV show clearly has a broader focus than Alison's murder and, in particular, is fleshing out the Indigo Bay locals and making Clive and Edwin equal leads to Emily and Alison. The information about Sara helps with explaining her relationship with Clive, and Edwin's reactions to Sara are interesting and maybe hint at something. I like all of that.

I binged all three episodes yesterday. In for the duration. It was wise of Hulu to drop these three at once, if they weren't going to drop the full season at once (which I wish they had, because I really want to know what happens next in both timelines). I read a review that thought it an odd choice not to have Alison's murder in the first episode (aside from the shot of her body early on), but since that happens in the second episode which was dropped at the same time, it felt like one episode anyway. It was good to give us a lot of time with her first before getting to the discovery of her body. And then the third episode ending with Emily plotting to befriend Clive to find out the truth was a great hook. I think they've done a really good job with the characterizations for all the main characters - Alison, Edwin, Clive, and Emily. They all feel three-dimensional and very human. They've also done a good job showing why Emily is so affected by her sister's death. Their parents were neglectful of her even before Alison died. Alison was the one in the family who really paid attention to her sister and spent time with her. Poor Emily. I'm very curious where her parents and Edwin are in the present day. There's quite a suspect list for Alison's murder. Edwin and Clive, of course. But also there's the Yale preppie, his rapey dad who thinks girls need "convincing", and the cheating husband. My guess is that Edwin and Clive didn't do it but know who did, and that's why they were so quiet in the police car. I'm currently leaning towards the rapey dad. He has the money and the power to scare Edwin and Clive. Plus Edwin probably took a payoff. Ugh.

It's all about advertising revenue. The TV networks do not want tonight ending sooner than they've planned for - which is about 3 1/2 hours. The teams understand what they're supposed to do, which is take their time, try to rev up the drama, and make sure the event does not come in short.

It was just one night at a local museum. I'm not surprised younger kids were included. It helps them associate museums with fun in their minds. In my experience, what you speak of is for something more extensive, like several nights away at a place that requires some distance to travel, and even then it's not so much about being a reward as it is just that for something like that, the kids need to be older because younger ones will get too homesick and have difficulty with their routines being thrown off for so long.

I would still read WoW, and any remaining volumes, if they ever appeared. My closest fellow reader feels the same way. But we came to the books well before the TV show came along, and while we both liked the TV show quite a lot until the final episodes, we still want to see how it plays out in the books. Even if Bran the Boring is king in the books too, it's sure to have been done better than on the show. But I'm sure there are people who are no longer interested in reading. It would be interesting to know if there's a split there between people who were fans of the books before the TV show was ever even dreamed of and people who came to the books after they started watching the show, or if it's pretty much the same percentage of both groups swearing future books off. I believe Fire & Blood Part I did well enough sales-wise to show that even with people falling off, there's still enough interested readers remaining. And of course the HotD show has been quite successful. If WoW ever gets released, I expect it will be a bestseller.

I'm so disappointed in Yeun. I'd never heard of Wong and Choe before this show came along, but I've liked Yeun since his TWD days. He knew about this shit, as did Wong - the two of them cast Choe because they are friends with him.

And now that he has a TV show to keep ahead of again, I'll be surprised if he manages to write even one more D&E novella. How many times has he said he doesn't do well with deadlines?

Magic Johnson is part of Josh Harris's group. So he will be one of the owners if the deal goes through as expected.

In the U.S. unless it is a special election to fill a seat that became vacant midway through term, it typically is weeks or even months before an elected politician actually starts their term of service, so I assume that’s what is going on in Tai’s case. She’ll be sworn in at the start of the new legislative term for the state senate.

That makes sense. I could see Tai had to go a far distance west, so I was figuring Pennsylvania. But Ohio's just a bit beyond that. That makes a lot of sense. Natalie said in the series premiere that when she left the woods, she lost her purpose. And then she found a mission last season, spurred by the postcard, which then led to her finding Travis's body and wanting to learn what happened to him. Now she needs something else to live for. Poor Natalie. Despite her exterior, she really had and has the best heart of them all except possibly Laura Lee. That's probably why she's had the overtly hardest time out of the woods of the main leads. Tai dissociated, Shauna went into sleepwalking mode (ironic that Tai sleepwalks physically but Shauna did so mentally), psychopathic Misty is untroubled. Natalie lacked the coping strategies of Tai and Shauna and unlike Misty has a conscience, so she turned to drugs and alcohol instead. More and more I can see why Tai was willing to pay for her most recent rehab even though it was like the third time Natalie had gone and there wasn't much reason to think this time would take.

I need to rewatch - the problem with waking up at 4am to watch is that I definitely miss stuff - but mostly what I remember her saying is that Lottie needs to ask herself why she's seeing these visions now. That part seemed reasonable enough, especially since it was reminiscent of Adult Shauna asking "Jackie" last season why she was there. Shauna knew this wasn't a real ghost, rather a manifestation of her subconscious. And the other thing I remember the therapist saying to Lottie is that the more she tries to suppress, the stronger it bounces back. That's also in line with standard psychology. You have to acknowledge and confront things in order to lay them to rest. (Hmm, "confront and acknowledge" - was that said last night or am I thinking of another show I just watched?) Lottie is already on medication, so I can understand the therapist being reluctant to just up the dose and potentially overmedicate Lottie, when maybe what Lottie needs is to do some self-examination. I think it's especially pertinent advice in that Lottie keeps seeing Laura Lee, who was the most important to her of anyone we've seen. It's reminiscent of Shauna seeing Jackie. It could be Laura Lee's actual spirit, or it could be that Lottie's subconscious has simply chosen Laura Lee like Shauna's has Jackie. That would make sense since Laura Lee had tremendous influence on Lottie just as Jackie had tremendous influence on Shauna.

They'd be able to track him easily in the snow. I assume that's how the search party found Lottie; they just followed her tracks. But you do bring up an interesting point in that respect. In one of the real-life stories of exploration parties freezing to death near one of the poles, I remember an anecdote where one man just said something about going out to get something - an obvious lie - and going off to freeze to help boost the chances of survival for the others. I also vaguely remember something about it being a tradition in some ancient people's cultures that at times of extreme starvation the old people will go out to die of exposure. Ben may choose to go out, not to save his body from being eaten - there's really nothing he can do about that, unless he managed to get all the way to the gorge and throw himself off it, or to the lake and break his way through the ice and fall to the depths like the moose ended up doing - but so that he doesn't have to die around people he's kind of repulsed by/scared of now. And if the group realizes he's gone out to die, and decides not to bring him back inside in time to save his life, that would represent a slipping down the ladder of what is ethical and moral. It would make a lot of sense as a middle step before they start actively murdering people in order to eat them.

However, because of the need to ration without having any idea of when the next food might come along, they were only eating tiny portions of the bear meat. We saw that when Shauna brought the tray in to them in the season premiere, and she ate Jackie's ear at the end of that episode.

GRRM has now posted about this on his blog, and doesn't this paragraph just induce such a sense of déjà vu?

So I ended up waking up early to watch YJ, and then go back to sleep, despite my previous vow not to do so again. The resulting dream wasn't too bad this time though! Adult Misty had her own cult and all her cult followers had their hair cut, colored and styled to look exactly like hers. Now that we have Javi back, I'm curious to see if that means the reddit theory that he was the one pooping in the pee bucket, and in this episode stealing bear meat, was right. So we got confirmation that the white moose was real and not some sort of supernatural entity or even a figment of Natalie's imagination. I felt for her when it slipped away into the depths of the water. The choice to make the moose white now seems like a Moby Dick reference. We learned some useful information in Lottie's therapy session. First, that she doesn't believe that her visions are real. Second, that she is on her meds. That scene is the first time I really saw the Lottie from the woods coming through into Adult Lottie, which is what I needed to make the casting fully work for me. I burst out laughing when Lottie found the hatch, because the way it was done, with her first encountering the plane and Laura Lee's bear, meant I knew right away that the hatch wasn't real. There's no way that was an accident; the showrunners wanted to have that shot in the previews just so they could troll everyone and then be like, "Psych! This show is NOT Lost!" I felt for Mari, who's been pretty much an antagonist up to now, when she asked Akilah the second time to help her look. I fear Akilah's new pet is coming to a bad end. And what about Steve, presumably alone in the house while Tai is off on her trip? I was kind of impressed with Ben for just putting it out there and asking if they'd eat him. But it also put me in mind of Jackie's error last season. I had enjoyed her trying to smack some sense into the others, but all the same it was the wrong call and a failure to read the room.

It wouldn't be so bad if he was just being a producer on the new show. "Producer" can mean almost anything from vanity title to involved in every detail. But he's writing the show. I've already accepted we're not going to see ADoS or the real final book that he's been insisting won't be necessary but his wife says will be (and given his established track record of being really bad at predicting how many pages he needs to tell his story - the Red Wedding was originally supposed to take place two-thirds of the way through AGoT! - I'm going with his wife's assessment). But can we at least get WoW? Sigh.

ONE patty. One single, lone, solitary patty. It wasn't even a big one. That was probably the most amusing part about the entire thing, heh.

The iron is a non-supernatural explanation for last season's incidents of the wonky compass and red river, and the birds in this episode. Iron messes with magnetism.

They're not even in the right country. It would have been an American rescue effort searching in America. We always knew the Yellowjackets were actually in Canada, where Canadian authorities had no reason to be searching, but after the season premiere we found out just how far north in Canada they are. They're not at all close to the border with America; they're closer to the Northern Territories, which are so sparsely populated over such a vast area that they don't get to be an actual province of Canada. It's not that clear how rich Lottie's parents are; Lottie mentioned in the second episode of the first season, the one where we saw the immediate aftermath of the crash, that her dad didn't opt for a bar cart because it was cheaper. They have money, certainly, but there's money and then there's money. They're likelier to be millionaires - with much of that in their home and their stock holdings and spending most of their yearly income - than billionaires. Whatever they were willing to put towards search efforts would have been blown well before they got anywhere close to where the Yellowjackets actually were.

I agree with sistermagpie that it works on both levels. The overt reference was to covering up the manner of Jackie's death, which was two months prior and completely unrelated to the cannibalism. It allows Ben some plausible deniability should any of the girls take offense to the subtextual reference to the cannibalism, i.e. you probably don't want people to learn you ate a dead teammate's body. Primetimer put up a good analysis of Misty's monologue. It's been many years since I last saw the movie, so while I remembered the gist of the scene I didn't realize just how accurate Misty's recreation was.

I think it's been established that the survivors never admitted to cannibalism. In the pilot, Shauna told Jessica Roberts that they starved and scavenged and prayed. Tai echoed that, minus the "prayed" part, to the donor she was trying to get in good with. And Jessica Roberts asked Misty if they ate each other, and Misty wouldn't answer. It's so interesting that the idea to start lying about who died when and how originated with Ben. He didn't participate in eating Jackie. But I think he was worried about how the way she died would make them look, particularly him as the adult in the group. It would be reasonable for Jackie's parents to criticize him for not going out and bringing her back in where it was safe. They didn't know it was going to drop to freezing temperatures that night, but with wild animals in the area it wasn't safe for Jackie to sleep outside. It wasn't all that long after a sleeping Van had been attacked by a wolf as the group slept by a fire. So the idea of the adult not stepping in when the teenage girls got into a fight and one went outside for the night wouldn't go over well. We saw how Ben had lost all his authority by that point in the season, but it would be very hard to explain that to people who weren't there and didn't see it.