BookWoman56

If I had to pick a single word to describe this episode, it would be "adequate." For me it was slightly better than mediocre but not quite good. I liked that the entire team was the focus instead of just one or two profilers and that they didn't immediately throw the new agent into the middle of the action. There were a few things that did not sit well. The impression I got was that the new agent was the first applicant that Hotch interviewed, although I could have missed something. Hotch's snap decision to hire her was all kinds of wrong. I've mostly worked in large corporations, not in government, but HR generally requires you to interview a few candidates, ask them the same set of questions and note their answers (and frequently have the finalists go through a second round of interviews), before you make the hiring decision. I'd imagine that a federal agency might have even stricter hiring protocols. With this, it felt too much like she got the job because she happened to be in the right place at the right time, and while I recognize that does happen, I'd hate to think the BAU works that way. Morgan was an idiot to go into the unsub's hospital room and essentially announce that he was going to go after the entire group of contract killers. If they're setting this up as a way for Morgan to leave, I could sort of understand; maybe he will be put on leave while they investigate whether he actually injured the unsub in the hospital room. I'd be fine with Morgan leaving because I hate the writers using him (and JJ) as the agents who actually resolve cases by kicking down doors/shooting people. His reaction here just seemed so OTT; other unsubs have tried to kill him and he seemed to accept that as just part of the job. So why is this one suddenly so personal? More profiling, less action, please. Nothing in Morgan's behavior and actions in this episode made me think that he is a good profiler.

I don't have an issue with dramas in general showing the personal lives of characters. One of the reasons I liked shows such as thirtysomething and Once and Again is that there was a good balance of work-related issues and personal issues. I wouldn't object to seeing more personal stories about some of the characters, especially Reid, if the writing quality was at the same level it was the first few years of the show. But I don't trust this group of writers to handle personal storylines well. Yes, I'd like acknowledgement that Reid has a life, and a happy one at that, outside of work. But given their treatment thus far of Reid's personal life (mentally ill mother, drug addiction, murder of girlfriend), I don't really want them to tackle his personal life because I don't want it to be show canon that his personal life is currently unhappy. As long as it's not specified, I can assume that he's doing fine outside of work. If they want to allude to Reid having friends, hobbies, a new love interest, fine, but I can't envision them doing well with anything more involved than just a mention that those things exist. ETA: I think Diana's mental illness makes sense for Reid's character as he was depicted in the early seasons. What I object to is they have given him that backstory plus the drug addiction plus seeing his girlfriend killed in front of him plus his previous mentor being murdered. It's as if the writers cannot come up with a single pleasurable activity or any relationship for Reid that is not loaded with angst, which again is why I would prefer they stay away from Reid's personal life, other than one or two lines mentioning he has one that is not horrible, because I have zero doubt that if they decide to devote any significant time to his personal life, it will be yet another arc that ranges from unpleasant to tragic. Reid is by far my favorite character and the one I find most compelling, and so while I'd like him to have more screen time, I would first have to see the writers be willing to make him contribute more to the cases on a consistent basis before I'd trust them to go near his personal life.

I occasionally use "No problem" but not as a substitute for "You're welcome." I reserve it for situations in which typically a colleague has asked me to do something above and beyond normal routine (usually when said colleague has procrastinated on a project and needs someone else to do part of it so the project is completed on time), and the colleague says something alone the lines of "I'm so sorry to have inconvenienced you/put you to so much trouble to do XYZ for me." I don't think it's rude in that context. However, it is a conscious choice to use NP instead of "I'm always happy to help" based on the nature of the request and who made it. For me, it's my way of signalling the colleague that yes, I helped you out in your crisis but please don't start assuming that I will always be available or willing to do this kind of thing,such as stay three hours later than usual. However, a pet peeve I'm glad I no longer have to deal with, because I'm now working entirely from home, is this: people who hog the group fridge in the break room. A few years ago I worked in an office with about 20 people, sharing one break room and one fridge. However, two people essentially took over the fridge. They had 12-packs of diet soda, large economy size bags of carrots and other munchies, and so forth to the point that none of the rest of us could stick our lunch in the fridge. When asked about it, their response was that they were diabetic and so needed the food there. And I understand the need to have some food there, but you're only going to drink one soda, max two, a day; you don't need the entire case of soda in the fridge. With the carrots,, etc., again, why not bring small bags from home so that other people can use the fridge? You're not going to eat two pounds of baby carrots in one day. That situation meant the rest of us had to bring coolers if we had something that needed to be refrigerated for lunch, or bring something that did not require refrigeration, or leave the office for lunch. I am also diabetic but I don't think it's a reasonable workplace accommodation for me to stick a week's worth of food into the community fridge.

While I don’t really regard Prentiss as being any better or more consistently defined than the other female characters on the show, I do think Paget Brewster infused the character with more appeal than Prentiss would have otherwise had. That said, season 1 Elle is probably my favorite female character, followed by Prentiss, Blake and Callahan all on about the same level, followed by JJ of the first few seasons and Seaver, with Garcia and later season JJ at the bottom. With the female characters, IMO the writers have made the characterization inconsistent by going to the same well in an attempt to make the character more “interesting.” With the female characters who have lasted more than one season, the writers essentially retcon the character to make her have some special background or skill that was not previously a part of her character. So, Prentiss transformed into a superspy, JJ evolved into a superninja off-screen, and Garcia morphed into a genius when previously she had simply been an expert hacker/IT tech (not that there has been much actual evidence of her expertise with IT security, given how many times the system has been hacked). Instead of taking the character and showing some organic growth or devolution, the writers just tack some new supposed backstory or skill onto the character with no regard to whether that backstory/skill set makes any damn sense whatsoever. Hence, characters who are all over the place. The single exception was that Elle’s spinning out of control seemed a more or less natural outcome of her trauma, but even that arc could have been handled better. Again IMO the same trend is there for the male characters, only with them, the writers’ stock answer is to insert personal tragedy. Gideon’s girlfriend was murdered in his apartment by Frank, who then also killed a former victim that Gideon had helped rescue. Hotch’s wife is killed by Foyet. Reid’s girlfriend is murdered in front of him. Morgan turns out to have suffered sexual abuse when younger. Rossi’s ex-wife died of illness but hey, at least it was natural causes. These tragedies give the characters the opportunity to display some angst, but from my perspective, anybody dating a male member of the BAU needs to think twice about the odds for survival. Imagine Reid on a date explaining the background to someone new: My former mentor’s GF was murdered, my boss’s ex-wife was murdered, and my former GF was murdered. New date: Oh, wow, look at the time. I just remembered I have to wash my hair tonight. And while I could make a case that the writers have done a marginally better job at taking these tragedies and showing how the male characters respond to them than they have of handling the so-called growth of the female characters, characterization remains a weak part of the writing as a whole. Ultimately my UO is that I really don’t want to see any more of the team’s personal lives unless it is an extremely brief reference to a spouse, SO or offspring who remains off-screen 99% of the time. I don’t trust the writers to handle characterization regarding personal lives and so I’d rather they concentrate on the cases instead. When it comes to characterization, the only thing the writers have been consistent about is inconsistency.

A friend and I both got persuaded by a mutual friend to read The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. It's an epic fantasy, which I normally enjoy. It has gotten good reviews. However, both my friend and I have the same reaction to it: the writing style in and of itself is fine, although a bit derivative of Robert Jordan. At least some of the characters are interesting. But the story itself? I feel like I've read the story a dozen times before, to the point where I could predict major plot points early in the book and sure enough, those events would occur. This is the first book in what is supposed to be a trilogy and so I read the second book just to see if the storyline improved or became original in any way. It's a formula that has been done many times: a disillusioned hero who has chosen to go undercover in a rural setting tells the story of his life, with the requisite items of being orphaned in a vicious attack, spending time living by his wits in poverty, going to a university to learn how to do somewhat magical things, and so forth. Of course he is the brightest student there in addition to being a wonderful musician; of course the only student who dislikes him is a rich guy who spends way too much time/energy giving him grief; of course there is a mysterious/elusive love interest, who will undoubtedly betray him, or be killed in front of him, or both, before this trilogy ends. The people who are listening to him tell his story are trying to convince him that bad things are happening once again, and they need a big damn hero to save the day. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don't dislike the book but it was hyped so much I had higher expectations of it, and it did not meet those expectations. I'm a completist, so I'll probably finish the trilogy. I just find the main character boring and predictable, and am now reading for the secondary characters.

I have to wonder if the customer service rep is required to use a script from which he/she cannot deviate, or if he/she is just that clueless. Bastet, your conversation reminded me of a similarly frustrating one I had many years ago at a movie theater. A friend and I were contemplating going to see a popular movie even though we both thought it was going to suck. One theater featured half-price admissions all day on Wednesdays, and so we decided that even though we weren't willing to pay full price to see the movie, we could tolerate the idea of paying half the normal ticket price. So, on Wednesday evening we went to the theater and this was the conversation with the ticket agent: Me: Two tickets for movie X, please. Ticket agent: That will be $## (full price for two tickets). Me: Your ad says you offer half-price tickets on Wednesdays. Ticket agent: Yes, we do, but that's only on Wednesdays. Me: But it is Wednesday. Ticket agent: It's not Wednesday in the computer. Me: But in real life, it is Wednesday. Ticket agent: I know that, but it's not Wednesday in the computer. Me (only in my head): Exactly what color is the sky on your planet? Me (aloud): Can you ask your manager to fix the ticket prices in the computer so they will be correct and match your ads? Ticket agent: Oh, oh wow. I guess maybe I should do that. I had to wonder if the manager was paying the ticket agent extra not to think.

In my universe, Alien 3 simply does not exist. It is not part of movie canon, ever. And I also liked Alien: Resurrection ok, obviously not on the level as the first two but it was reasonably well done. For me, a lot of movies evoke a response of wanting to rewrite the ending. It’s weird but at times I feel compelled to re-watch those movies, because apparently my brain thinks that maybe this time, the ending that I loathe will be replaced by a different ending. I look forward to the day when you can buy a movie and just reprogram it with the ending you’d like to see and that should have been there if the script had been better. One of those movies is Baby Boom, in which Diane Keaton plays a NYC exec who becomes the legal guardian of a baby when Keaton’s cousin and her husband die in an accident, leaving no other relatives. The baby completely disrupts both her personal and professional life. Her SO splits because he doesn’t want the responsibility; he’s not a dick about it but he just doesn’t like the lifestyle change a baby will bring. At work, she is less focused than previously, has to spend some time with the baby instead of working insane hours every week, etc. and her slimy assistant uses this as a way to make her look bad to her major client and himself look good. It’s not overtly stated, but all this looks to happen in the space of a month or two. This is pre-FMLA, I believe, so she doesn’t have the option of taking time off to deal with the changes brought about by essentially adopting a child. Her boss calls her in to demote her and she resigns rather than accept the demotion. Keaton and baby move to a place in Vermont, with an apple orchard, that she had been interested in pre-baby, and she tries to deal with loss of income, no work life, etc. and feeling sorry for herself. She starts using the gazillion apples from her apple orchard to make homemade baby applesauce, ends up selling it locally and then realizes there’s a serious market for homemade upscale baby food. She uses her business skills to market the brand, grow the business, and achieve enough success that her former major client contacts her former company because he wants to buy her out. She goes to NYC to negotiate the deal and of course, former assistant and boss are now kissing her ass. She takes off for a few minutes to consider the offer and as she’s walking back to the conference room, she decides (wisely IMO) that she would rather remain independent and run her own company than sell her company and either return to her previous job or be some sort of exec in her former client’s company. And up to this point, I’m completely on board. Then the entire scene is ruined by the stupid speech she gives, which essentially comes down to her saying she wants to stay in Vermont because of her new love interest. How about, you people treated me like shit because I needed a month or two to adjust to a major change in my life, completely disregarding all the previous successes I had had and the money I had made you? How about, why the hell would I come back to work for people who treated me like that when I can run my own company the way I want to? How about, if it had been a male exec who needed a month or two to deal with some personal issue, you’d have given him the time he needed and just gotten someone to assist him instead of acting as if his need to spend a little time each day at home rather than every waking hour in the office was some kind of betrayal? How about, your past behavior toward me demonstrated that I can’t trust you and I’m not enough of an idiot to trust you not to screw me over again? No, instead of all those perfectly good reasons for her to decline the offer, it comes down to her blushingly admitting that she has a new BF she doesn’t want to leave. WTFF? I have to FF through the ending to the credits because that speech makes me want to hurl things at the screen.

Two of my pet peeves have to do with grocery shopping, which I hate doing anyway so these situations just make it worse. Situation A: People who think that going to the grocery store should be a family excursion. I've been a single parent with an infant and unable to have someone babysit while I went to the store, so I have no issues when it is one parent with a kid. I also understand that as a child gets older and has more self-control, the parent and child need to practice going shopping so the kid knows how to behave in public. However, where I live, it apparently is quite the thing for both parents, plus all kids, plus possibly one or two members of the extended family to go to the store together. They don't just go there together; they stand as a group in the aisles, reading labels or discussing the pros and cons of cereal A versus cereal B and blocking the entire damn aisle. I occasionally read labels myself, but when I do, I make sure I am not blocking anyone from getting past me or from reaching whatever product they want. These families, however, stand there completely oblivious to the fact that other shoppers need to finish their shopping. On top of that, they will shoot you the glare of death if you politely ask them to move long enough for you to get your cart past them. Partly because of my irritation with situation A above, I try to do my shopping at off-peak hours, such as late at night. Doing so, though, brings me to: Situation B: Parents who drag their small children to the grocery store, Walmart, etc., at 10 or 11 at night, when those kids should be at home asleep, and then when the sleep-deprived kid has a meltdown, begin screaming at the kid. I understand that people don't want their kids having public meltdowns, but in that situation, it's not the kid who is at fault. It's the parents' fault for keeping the kid up that late, dragging said kid into a store filled with strangers, parading the kid past rows of candy and/or toys, and being stupid enough to believe that the result of those actions will be a pleasant shopping experience. Newsflash, idiots: it won't.

I'm familiar with the Peter Principle, but with my former manager, he didn't get promoted to the level where he reached incompetence. I don't think this guy was every competent in even an entry-level job. I firmly believe his manager keeps him around because he's generally not going to screw things up so much that he makes her look bad, but he's never going to be good enough to climb past her on the corporate ladder. I agree with this completely. As an atheist, it doesn't offend me if someone blesses me or whatever; I just regard it as silly, the same way I would if someone said that Zeus or Thor was blessing me. What does offend me is the double standard. Let's say I was a Satanist, and included the tagline "Hail Satan" in my email signature block. I can guarantee you the same people who would be saying, oh, what does it matter if someone tells you to have a blessed day, would be throwing all kinds of hissy fits that someone was bringing religion into the workplace. I'm not so extreme as to say religion should never be discussed at work; if you ask someone what their religious beliefs are or someone asks you and you feel comfortable expressing them, fine. But this reminds me of those ads I've seen mocking the parents who want to bring prayer back into schools. Okay, let's do that, and see how you like it when your kids are watching other kids drawing pentagrams. In the workplace, if you want to use religious sayings in your emails, then be prepared to receive sayings that don't reflect your own brand of religion. Bottom line for me is that I don't think it's professional. And don't even get me started on the people who somehow believe it's okay to proselytize at work.

Wait, you mean having ESP is not in your official job description? Seriously, though, the former lead TW in my soon-to-be-former group is essentially being demoted because manager asshat assigned him to a high-profile project in which manager asshat and manager's boss would give him vague direction to produce XYZ, decline every meeting he tried to set up to gather requirements for XYZ, and then bitch and moan that the XYZ he came up with was not what they wanted. And of course it's his fault for not being able to intuit what they want instead of their fault for not making their specifications clear. Is there a Bad Manager school somewhere that is producing these idiots? I have apparently been extremely lucky for most of my career to have very good managers who quickly discerned what I could do and then left me the hell alone to do it, and who were always thrilled with my work. That's part of why this past job has been so frustrating. Most places I've worked, if you demonstrate initiative, take on extra responsibilities, and perform at a much higher level than your peers, you are rewarded for those accomplishments. OTOH, with this manager, he consistently rewards mediocrity and has a well-deserved reputation for dangling job offers/promotions in front of people while they are working on some special project for him, only to yank the offer away at the last minute. This year the scores on the stupid Gallup employee engagement poll went up across the board for the company as a whole. For this manager, the scores on all 12 items went down, many of them significantly. I like the company as a whole, because they are very big LGBT supporters and support eco-friendly businesses, but this particular manager is the antithesis of the corporate values. His ongoing mantra at nearly every team meeting was don't do anything that would make him look bad, and to please do things that would make him look good. He is clueless that it's difficult to inspire your team to perform their best when you make it clear you care only about your own reputation..He's had an extremely high turnover rate in the last six months, and is trying to spin that as oh, these people just wanted to advance their careers a little more quickly than they could by staying put. Yet fully half of the people he has left are currently looking for other jobs and would be willing to settle for a lateral move instead of a promotion just to get away from him. I can only hope that someone higher up the corporate food chain eventually notices all this crap.

I’ve felt for the last two years that I was living in some kind of alternate universe at work, but will be returning to the normal universe next week. I’ve been a tech writer for over 15 years, with regular promotions, excellent feedback, etc. However, a couple of years ago I was ready for a change and so took a contract TW job at a very large company. Another contractor and I started the same day, and we quickly discovered we were in bizarro land. The lead TW had essentially no writing experience other than one-page reports and no knowledge whatsoever of basic grammar. He literally could not tell the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment. Over the next several months, I documented our internal processes. I got put in charge of revising a few 200-300 page publications because none of the other TWs felt comfortable doing that, and got rave reviews from the business for my work. Twice during my first few months there, the manager posted a regular full-time TW position, and neither the other contractor nor I applied for it. Manager (aka asshat) called me to ask why I wasn’t applying. I hedged, because there is no polite way to tell someone, two people on your team and a VP from a different area have all advised me that you suck as a manager. He finally posted a TW position one level up from the previous postings and dropped hints that if I didn’t apply for it, my contract might come to an abrupt end. I applied, only to be told that he had decided to go with a “stronger” candidate. By “stronger,” he meant someone who had been out of college for less than two years, had less than a year of any kind of writing experience, but who attended the same church he did. Note: the manager called me during the week he was making his hiring decision, and questioned me extensively about my religious beliefs, or in my case, the lack thereof. Despite being seriously pissed off, I felt I needed to stick out the contract for at least the full year. A few months later, we were in the middle of a huge project, which had pulled the lead TW into a separate role, so I was running the tech writing/publishing end of things. Manager decided to hire me full-time because he was afraid the publishing part of the project would crash and burn if I left. (Unsurprisingly, his last hiring decision did not end well; the guy from church left after nine months.) The manager also needed additional TWs for this project and so was contemplating hiring a former TW who was now in another department. Lead TW told the manager, if you do hire former TW, he needs to stay at the same level he currently is (one level below me and lead TW), because the quality of his work does not merit him being bumped up to the next level. Manager hired him anyway at the higher level. For the next year, I continued to run the tech writing/publishing end of things because the lead TW kept getting pulled onto other projects. The former TW had major quality issues; I kept getting vitriolic emails from people because he had screwed up their stuff when he published it. On a regular basis, I found mistakes in his work and had to IM him to fix them or fix them myself. Lead TW complained to manager about the quality of this TW’s work. Manager responded by pointing out that the other TW had the fastest turn time of any TW in our area. Manager: If you’re the fastest, that means you are the best. Lead TW: He’s going so fast he is making serious mistakes that we then have to go in and fix. Manager: But I don’t have any metrics for quality, so the only thing I have to go by is the speed report, and judging by that, his quality is fine. In the meantime, I had taken the initiative on several projects, my performance appraisal was very high, and in our required survey of feedback from our colleagues, my rating was a 4.9 out of 5. Other TW continued with sloppy work; if a revision came in to change word A to word B, he would make that change and ignore the huge glaring error (missing text, etc.) one paragraph below. Manager decided he was going to post two TW positions at an even higher level. I figured the lead TW would get one, and the manager called me to tell me that he was posting the position the following day, and for me to apply quickly. Now, maybe it’s just me, but when your manager calls you and tells you to apply for a position, instead of just announcing at a team meeting that a position has been posted, I take that as a sign that the manager probably has you in mind for that position. So once again, I applied, only to be told that he decided on a different candidate. Lead TW and half of the team IMd me to ask, WTF. The person who got the slot? Yes, the TW whose work is crap but who is faster than everybody else and is also yet another white Christian male. (As a white atheist bisexual female, I made manager asshat a little uncomfortable. There are NO people of color on his team, no other LGBT people, no other atheists. Coincidence? I think not.) I found out that a freaking month before he posted the position, manager asshat was already having discussions with other TW about his “new role.” And on top of that, I would now be reporting to this other TW, who a year ago was not considered by the former lead TW to be worthy to be at the same level the lead TW and I were, and whose work I have had to correct for over a year. Just … no. It was about two months ago that the hiring decision was made, but I have now had the enormous satisfaction of being able to tell manager asshat that I have accepted an offer at a higher level in a completely different part of the company. I start the new position next week. And yes, in a few weeks I will file a formal complaint with HR about manager asshat’s behavior. From what my colleagues have told me, I will not be the first person to do so and unfortunately will probably not be the last.

I would not object to having some focus on the personal lives of the team if only the show would return to the cerebral, analytic drama it once was. I began watching the show because of its focus on the psychology of serial killers and how the profilers could use their knowledge (or at least educated guesses) to figure out what was driving the crimes. As noted, that focus has largely disappeared, to be replaced by action sequences. I'd like to see the show focus more on the team, with each team member using the specialized skills he/she brings to the table to solve the case. My ideal would be to have most of the upcoming season use the entire team for most episodes, with no one team member being featured a disproportionate amount of time. In terms of personal lives, as long as they distribute those story lines evenly, that would be fine. What I don't want is to have one or two select team members solve every case, with the rest of the cast serving essentially as props who have been dumbed down to make the featured team members look better.

One of the reasons I generally go to Alamo Drafthouse is that I know I will never have to be the person asking/telling another moviegoer to be quiet or quit texting. In addition to serving drinks and generally decent food, they have zero tolerance for that nonsense. They will warn the person on the first offense, and after that, they will escort the person out. Because their policy is widely known here in San Antonio, and I assume at their other locations as well, I have never had a bad experience at one of them because there are no babies/young children who might be fussy, nobody giving nonstop commentary during the movie, and nobody texting. Obviously, some nutjob could still come in with a hidden gun, but that's a risk no matter where you are.

Normasm, how early of an age are you talking about? I grew up in Hattiesburg and when I started kindergarten, I listened to the other kids and decided I did NOT want to sound like they did. So at age 5 I set out to become a linguistic anomaly. Nobody I have met as an adult has ever guessed where I grew up, or even in what region of the country. Most people have thought I was from either the west coast or the Midwest, and after all those years of not speaking with a southern accent, I can't fake one for anything. Bringing this back around to CM, I cringed when watching Gabby, which is set in Hattiesburg. The accents were just ... off. There are people there who have definite southern accents, but Hollywood would have you believe that all southern accents sound exactly the same, which is nonsense. And Hollywood would also have you believe that everybody in the south lives in fairly run-down older houses. While Hattiesburg has its share of those, as does any city, there's a ton of suburbs that are interchangeable with suburbs in any part of the country. It grated on my nerves when I saw the footage, but I have since reminded myself that there are episodes set in Detroit or elsewhere that also focus on run-down parts of the city. I just wish that shows would be willing to use something other than cliches when it comes to accents and dwellings. CM isn't as bad about this as some shows, but I would really like for once to be able to watch a show set in that part of the country and think, hey, these people sound just like people I grew up with.and live in houses that look like my old neighborhood.

If the hint about a regular cast member leaving does turn out to be correct, then Reid is the only character whose departure would automatically make me stop watching. For the rest of the characters, my thoughts on their potential leaving are fairly neutral. Hotch: Don't care. I've never particularly liked the character and am ambivalent on TG as an actor. JJ: My only concern with her leaving is that the idea of having only male field agents does not sit well. If they bring in another female agent to replace her, then she's in the same category as Hotch. Rossi: I like Rossi, but prefer the snarkier version of him as opposed to the affectionate grandpa of late. If he retires, it's not a dealbreaker in any way for me, but would prefer he stay even if in a more administrative capacity. Garcia: I'm not rooting for her to leave, but the inappropriate comments need to go far, far away, as does her magical computer and her unwillingness to look at the crime scene photos, etc. Morgan: I have an active dislike of his character and so for me, this would be the best choice if an agent has to leave. Tertiary characters: Section chiefs, spouses, significant others, children, parents, siblings: don't care if they leave, with the exception of Diana Reid, largely because I enjoy seeing Jane Lynch in a dramatic role rather than comedy. It's really much less important to me who leaves or doesn't leave than it is that the show focuses on the team as a whole instead of singling out one or two characters to solve everything all the time, and that they return to more actual profiling instead of kicking down doors and shooting the unsubs. No matter how well the cast works together or doesn't, in its current state it's barely distinguishable from any of the standard procedurals.

To me, Anderson's interpretation of Bedelia is a refreshing change from the "over-emoting = good acting" school. I have known people who act and speak in much the same way as Bedelia; hell, I often act and speak like that myself in professional settings (maybe not always as slowly as Bedelia but definitely as guarded. Sometimes when people have been through very traumatic experiences, they respond by mentally editing their words before actually speaking. Let's just say that for me, and I suspect for Bedelia as well, doing a word association test is an exercise in futility because I'm never not going to edit my thoughts/words before responding, and will consider "If I say word X, what connotations does that have, and so maybe word A, B, C or D might be a better choice, but just to throw off the test administrator, let's go with word J.") Not everybody is a warm, bubbly personality and I'd be very taken aback if a psychiatrist with the experiences Bedelia has had were some outgoing, spontaneous, touchy-feely personality. In Bedelia's profession, and the same goes with Anderson's character in The Fall, many women deliberately choose to project a non-emotional persona because it's all too easy for people to interpret any emotional response by a woman as evidence that she's not "tough enough" or objective enough to do the job. And I am so, so tired of the trope that a woman who is "cold" is automatically evil. Being cold is not an indication of moral inferiority or superiority; it just means that the person is possibly reserved and not overly emotional. Nothing that Bedelia has done on this show makes me think she's evil or even a sociopath the way Hannibal is. She understands her instinct to crush but AFAIK, she's acted on that impulse only once, in a situation where Hannibal obviously set her up. I agree that she's a survivor and frankly to me her method of surviving seems healthier than Will's does, who apparently got obsessed and passionate about Hannibal despite having known already what he was. Going to Italy with Hannibal was a wonderful research opportunity for someone who wanted to better understand how he functions and what his vulnerabilities were. Her decision to go with him reminds me of the old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

I have assumed for a while that Bedelia's demeanor and precise enunciation are a coping mechanism she uses both for her profession in general and her life post-Hannibal. She seems to very deliberately project a completely flat affect, precisely because doing so means nobody (including Hannibal) can discern what her actual emotional/psychological responses are to any given situation. When she remarked to Will about his passion with Hannibal, that remark seemed to point directly to the contrast between her and Will; she does not display any passion, and it's very likely that seeming dispassionate kept her alive. It would be obvious to Hannibal during their time together that she wasn't going to panic and call the cops, etc. She seemed to have a more normal affect in her scenes with Zachary Quinto, which again implies to me that after that event, she chose to maintain the icy calm as a protective shield. FWIW, I've known a few psychiatrists socially who also use the flat affect technique in their therapy sessions; doing so prevents the patients from feeling that the psychiatrist is horrified/shocked/disapproving of what the patient says, and there are also patients who go into those sessions trying to provoke an emotional response from the psychiatrist. Using the completely detached, cold demeanor circumvents that process and can get the patient to stop playing that particular game. I also thought that Quinto's seizure/episode was something that Hannibal had programmed him for, as a test for Bedelia. She did at first seem like she was trying to help him; she said something about needing to clear an airway, IIRC. But whether she accidentally or intentionally contributed to Quinto's death is to me irrelevant; she would have realized instantly that Hannibal had set her up. She knows herself well enough to know that she does have the impulse to crush, but she also seems to keep that impulse in check. In many ways, she's probably safer if Hannibal regards her as a fellow sociopath; as long as he finds her interesting, he's less likely to kill her. Nor do I blame her for using her experiences to get paid for presentations; if I had Hannibal even slightly interested in me, I'd be putting together all the cash I could to prepare numerous fake identities and contingency plans for his inevitable escape from prison.

I have worked in large corporations for most of my professional life, so the first time my daughter watched this with me, she turned to me in horror and asked, "Is working in an office really like that?" I had to tell her that yes, it is. My stupid-but-rewatched-multiple-times movie is Evolution. Yes, the one with David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, and Juliane Moore that apparently only five other people on the planet ever saw. The science is total crap but there are so many, many scenes in that movie that I love. I giggle like crazy when Seann William Scott is practicing for his firefighter exam and performing CPR on a mannequin of some sort, and starts yelling "Don't you give up on me!" the exact same way people do in disaster movies. Duchovny and Jones as community college professors are both weirdly hot and hysterically funny. The movie never takes itself seriously and you can tell the actors were having a blast, so I don't care that it's stupid. If it comes on during my waking hours, I'm watching it.

That scene makes me angry for entirely different reasons. I loathe John Wayne movies in general, because the underlying premise of any male/female relationship always seems to be that the male is right and entitled to impose his will on the female, and the female is always wrong and needs to be taught a serious lesson, by being spanked, that her proper role is to always obey the male. In the case of O'Hara's character, if I'd had to live in a place I hated for 18 years or whatever, married to a man who paid no attention to the fact that I hated the place, and then noticed lipstick on him at a time when women who wore cosmetics were generally prostitutes, I'd have been bitchy as well and left him. Despite the plot element that she shows back up because she wants a divorce, in reality at that time she would have had virtually no way to obtain a divorce and so if she wanted out of the marriage, the only way out was to leave him. But even if I concede that she was being unreasonably bitchy and snobby with the other characters, for a man to spank his wife in public and subject her to that sort of humiliation is just not cool in any way. He had no regard for the fact that she hated the place; it was just, "Hey, I'm the husband and you will do as I say and live where I say to live. And if you dare to disagree with me, well, I'll spank you until you know better than to do that." Add to that the interaction in which another male chastises O'Hara's daughter for having a harmless good time on a ride with her suitor, essentially implying that she's on her way to becoming a slut, only to have her overreact and demand her father to shoot the guy, all of which serves to set up the male spanking the daughter to teach her a lesson, just... no. And of course the daughter falls in love with the guy who spanked her. If the roles had been reversed and it had been Wayne's character who hated where they lived and so left, the outcome and characterizations would have been quite different. Which is what more or less happens in another Wayne movie I hate, Donovan's Reef. In that movie, one of Wayne's BFFs is a doctor who has spent the last 20-something years on a tropical island providing medical care for the inhabitants. When his grown daughter shows up as a successful businesswoman, she is somehow the temporary villain for failing to understand that her father was a big damn hero for living where he does. The fact that she had never met her father, because he couldn't be bothered in 20+ years to go see her even once, is completely glossed over with a throwaway comment that he had felt he wasn't needed back in Boston and so decided to stay on the island. So his wife had died and his daughter had no actual parent in Boston to raise her, but he wasn't needed there. And of course this all culminates in her falling in love with Wayne's character, who proceeds to spank her while announcing that in their future household, he will be the one wearing the pants. I cannot watch either of those movies because I can literally feel my blood pressure rising from the rage I feel during those scenes. Hell, even in True Grit, there is a spanking scene in which Wayne doesn't stop another male from spanking a young female character until Wayne feels that the guy is "enjoying it too much." Wayne's objection isn't that the guy has no right whatsoever to punish the girl, but only to his taking pleasure in it. For me, just the presence of John Wayne in a movie is enough to anger up the blood, because he's always playng the same character, a self-righteous prick who thinks the entire purpose of women is to do as he tells them to do, no questions asked. So in the case of Maureen O'Hara's character, even though I don't really like her, I always find myself thinking that a day or two after the end of the movie, she gets Wayne drunk, and leaves him naked in a very public place, with a note that she has left him for good this time because he has such a small dick. If he was entitled to humiliate her in public that way, then she is entitled to do the same to him.

I can see that all those factors absolutely contributed to its also-ran status at the box office, but the title was just an epic fail. Seriously, "Tom Cruise Dies a Gazillion Times" could possibly have been a better title or at least a tagline that would have brought more people in to see it. That said, to me it's a sad commentary on the film/entertainment industry that a movie which is not the flavor-of-the-month in any way, but that is made well with convincing acting, compelling characters and a decent storylne, will struggle a bit while people will flock to see movies that are based on popular but cringeworthy books.

I have nothing against Tom Cruise and frankly don’t care about his personal life. Scientology doesn’t seem any weirder to me than religion does in general; if you are outside a particular belief structure, it will almost always seem strange whereas people raised within that belief structure accept it as normal. My hesitation in seeing this movie was because of Emily Blunt, who I had previously only seen in The Five-Year Engagement, which I loathed and which is responsible for the loss of any goodwill I ever had for Jason Segal, who co-wrote that dreck. (Blunt's performance was fine, but it was guilt by association.) So I was thrilled to see that in Edge of Tomorrow, Blunt’s character Rita Vrataski is more than competent and never made to feel guilty that she is a more accomplished soldier than Cruise’s character William Cage. And Cruise is obviously having fun playing the role of reluctant soldier turned badass warrior. Both Blunt and Cruise made the characters seem like real people, nuanced, flawed, not just some flat stereotype. There were a few plot holes/inconsistencies but nothing really huge. First, the general wants Cage to shoot footage of the invasion but then has him arrested and thrown into a battle unit without any filming equipment or way to broadcast the invasion news, so what was the point of all that? Are we supposed to believe that the general was so pissed off that he just decided to throw Cage into a situation where he very easily might be killed? Second, after Cage discovers the omega is not in Germany, why is Dr. Carter all shocked/dismayed when presumably, this would also be the first time he’s hearing where he had thought the omega was? It’s not like he would have remembered that he had previously come up with the German location and been disappointed he was wrong; Cage could simply have brought Carter and Vrataski up to speed about what they had already attempted and told them it was a dead end, so time for plan B. I saw it while it was in theaters but recently rewatched on HBO, and it has held up quite well. The first half of the movie alternates between the tension before and during the battle and the often hilarious scenes of Cage being killed repeatedly by an exasperated Vrataski despite his ongoing assertions that he’s really fine, his leg isn’t really broken, etc. The second half is less humorous but more gripping emotionally and psychologically, as Cage experiences both physical fatigue and emotional stress from the daily death of a woman he has come to know, appreciate, and care about. I pretty much despise too much focus on romance in any movie, so the one kiss they had while thinking they were both about to die for the final time was fine. I also appreciated Bill Paxton’s turn as the sergeant who absolutely refuses to believe Cage’s assertions even though he is obviously wondering how the hell Cage knows details about unit J. As others have noted, Vrataski is a physically and psychologically strong character whose gender is mostly irrelevant, which is as it should be IMO, and a welcome change from either the damsel in distress character or the 95-pound superninja. Her strength is less about muscles (although she has them) and more about the intelligence to use her weapons as effectively as possible and putting in the hours to be an efficient killing machine. The only real issue I have with the movie is its title, which I am firmly convinced is the reason this didn’t turn into a major hit. Had I not seen a trailer for this movie, I would have seen the title and assumed it was some rom-com or something of that kind and never bothered to find out differently.

SSAHotchner, a New Orleans accent does not sound like a typical so-called southern accent at all, and depending on what part of New Orleans the person is from, it can sound very much like a New York/Brooklyn accent. So the accents there didn't bother me; I remember being surprised that they were not the stereotypical generic southern drawl. Now, the accents for the CM episode set in my hometown in Mississippi did bother me; they were ridiculously overdone. Not everyone who is from the south sounds the same or even has what most people think of as a southern accent.. Thanks to Hollywood,nobody ever guesses where I grew up; they always assume I'm from the midwest precisely because I (and many of the people I grew up with) do not speak with the TV/movie southern accent.

What bothers me even more than the frequency of those instances is how mean-spirited the teasing/snickering is. There is zero sign of it being affectionate or anything that Reid would respond to in kind. I really, really miss the days when Elle could tell Reid never to go away again and be absolutely dead serious because she wanted/needed him there to help on a case. In the current CM universe, such a remark would be made sarcastically and with much eye-rolling, just to show that nobody needs/wants Reid around.

I also thought the show did a reasonably good job of depicting Haley becoming increasingly unhappy with the situation; it did not in any way seem to me to be a sudden decision on her part, but instead the logical conclusion of a long period of increasing unhappiness and disillusionment. Hotch did not seem shocked when he realized she had left; it was more like something he'd been expecting to happen, albeit dreading. And I don't think it's as simple as Hotch being an asshole for not being willing to give up his fieldwork. For me, it's more that their storyline is extremely realistic from what I've read about RL profilers. Hotch definitely comes across as a workaholic and while maybe Haley on an intellectual level could admire him for his dedication to tracking down serial killers, on an emotional level it can be the death of a relationship to realize that you are always going to take second place to someone's job. So I don't have an issue with a character agreeing to a spouse taking a dangerous/ demanding job, but after years of the reality of living with the partner's stress and long hours, deciding that he/she just can't deal with it any more. If the show had included additional scenes depicting Haley discussing the issues with Hotch, that might have made more narrative sense. But in real life, I've had an absentee spouse; I've also been the absentee spouse. If one or both of you are working crazy hours and frequently gone for days on end, when one or the other does get home, very often there's just no time or energy left to discuss relationship issues. It's very easy in those circumstances for one spouse to try to have those conversations but eventually just shut down emotionally when those attempts at communication fail. With Haley, I thought she simply realized over time that things were not going to change. When Hotch was in law school and then a prosector, she could have believed the long hours were more or less temporary. That's a whole different scenario from seeing that the crazy hours are going to be a permanent part of your spouse's life. So I don't really think either of them was entirely to blame, but there's a reason for the high divorce rate among law enforcement personnel. Not everybody can deal with that kind of stress and feeling lonely in a marriage, so it's not surprising to me at all that their marriage failed. It seemed to me that Haley tried to cope with the situation, became resigned to it for a while, and then just became miserable enough that she decided the marriage wasn't viable. I can't see it as a moral failure on her part to have accepted Hotch's decision to make a drastic career change but then eventually to decide that the resulting lack of family time is not acceptable, especially after having a child. Hotch to me has never been a partcularly compelling character, but I can take or leave him. IMO on his best days, TG is adequate in the role and on his worst days, he's just a block of wood. Of course, none of that is helped by the last few seasons, in which it seems that 95% of the time, TG could have been replaced by one of those Disney animatronic devices that would just say, "Wheels up in 30."

I agree with this observation in general, but to me there's a significant difference in someone transitioning from one profession to another where the difference might be in pay or location, as opposed to switching careers into something that brings the dangers of the job into one's personal life. But I also believe for any relationship to work on a longterm basis, there has to be give and take on both sides. Yet it seems to me that in that marriage, Haley was the one who had to make all the adjustments, dealing with a spouse who was frequently away for several days at a time, who worked excessive hours, and who as noted, chose a new profession that brought messages from psychos to her doorstep. I just don't see evidence that Hotch made any similar compromises for Haley; I can fanwank that he did but the writers didn't show it effectively. But regardless of the reasons Haley had for divorcing Hotch, she was well within her rights to do so. Even if she no longer loved Hotch, which did not seem to be the case, the fact that one person in a relationship no longer feels love for the other person doesn't make that person morally inferior. In the same way that you can't necessarily expect a spouse to have the same job in their mid-30s as they did in their mid-20s, I don't think you can assume that a person's emotions or needs are going to remain the same either. I just get tired of the sentiment (obviously not from you) so often expressed that "Haley divorced Hotch; therefore, bitch." It's interesting to see that kind of reaction from fans and consider that people can get so invested in a fictional character that they perceive anyone who causes that character emotional pain is somehow automatically at fault.