Margherita Erdman

I saw Stella, and saw her perceiving her own "clear purpose," as Rose enviously put it, as a protector and mentor of women, a role Stella saw herself as uniquely suited to fill in the male-dominated police force and a still-patriarchal society in which women and girls are especially vulnerable. My read of Stella's relationship to Spector throughout the series is not as her subterranean psychological shadow self or secret desire but more simply the personification of everything she fights against in her professional and personal life (since there is little distinction between the two). As an incredibly violent sexual predator with no conscience, he is her perfect nemesis.

Hated watching Robert Gossett die on screen for the second time this year. Found Dr. Charles' outrage about lack of consent baffling — does lack of informed consent by the patient or next of kin/designated proxy really take absolute precedence over life-saving treatment? Dr. Char.es certainly seemed to think the patient's problem was urgent when he was dressing down the ED doctor for missing the correct diagnosis. Also baffled by the mysterious comings and goings of Nurse YaYa's TB. Can it suddenly become an acute problem after a course of suppressive drug treatment? Has TB become chronic and incurable again, a relapsing/remitting disease? Why isn't she cured? If she'd been diagnosed with a drug-resistant strain she would have been subject to strict quarantine and much more intense treatment right? Ugh, the Noah & Halsted trapped in a subplot.

@lordonia, I only remembered to watch it yesterday because it popped on my home page as it has every Wednesday. Must have to do with my viewing choices. [Mindy has never shown up on my home page I don't think except maybe in a slide show spotlighting Hulu originals.] And did I miss something (nodded off maybe)? Was there a preview somewhere that there would be a death in the finale? Does it have to be only one? IMO they're all nitwits, ciphers, or paper-thin stereotypes (the abusive husband/dirty cop, the tough guy whose enigmatic is waaay too try-hard) — — except for the daughter, the therapist, and the assistant. They can stay. Wouldn't that be some kind of show? A middle-aged African-American therapist becomes guardian to a young teenaged girl after the tragic loss of the girl's parents. They are joined by a pregnant Asian-American graduate student in neuropsychology and have interesting adventures in forensic detective work.

You are right, I was dashing off a post and I should have been more clear that I was rating Daredevil only by my own lights. As I have had reason to discover, all of the Marvel Netflix shows are and will be rated TV-MA, but they have very different qualities, and because the Marvel name and cast of characters (and home-based accessibility through Netflix) are so attractive to the middle-school set, we parents of those middle-schoolers are trying to sift through the shows and decide one by one what we will let them watch. Just look at the reviews and recommendations on Common Sense Media (a site/app devoted to helping determine what media content is appropriate for what ages) for these shows and you'll see they range from ~11-18. I totally get why Marvel wants to keep its blockbuster movie properties mostly PG-13 (saying no to Deadpool was also an unpopular decision in our house) and then create a space for consistently adult content in streaming, but it is a pain in the ass if you have a kid who's not a little kid but not an mature older teen, either. So — Daredevil was a no for my son at first, just to be on the safe side, but then it became clear that most of his friends were watching it, not to mention a family friend was deeply involved in its production and to my Asperger's-type son it felt disloyal and hypocritical to avoid it (especially when said family friend has a son his age who had of course seen it all), so I finally caved and in the end decided that while violent, Daredevil is literally comic book violent, and the characters are drawn in pretty broad strokes, and there's no complicated sexual stuff, so, you know, whatever. [Yeah, yeah, awesome parenting, but I'm hoping that some of you either remember being 13 or have some experience parenting a 13-year-old and know that you pick your battles.] Jessica Jones was and is a hard no because of the intense psychosexual violence, as well as the sudden and arbitrary acts of extreme personal cruelty, depicted and implied. Luke Cage is a weird one. Like I said, I think the racial and social content is more problematic for a younger audience than the sex and violence. I have been having some interesting conversations about the show with my son and his friends who are watching it.

That was my initial reaction too, when I saw that Spector was well and truly going to succeed at suicide: super-frustrated with the storytelling and feeling like the whole season was for nought. However — ^ @WearyTraveler sums up the realization I had when Stella Gibson confronts Spector's corpse on the floor of the Foyle Clinic, and the pieces slid into place for me and suddenly the entire series felt like a story well told. Stella got smug and showed her hand to Spector when she told him why she said "we're losing him," and he deprived her of the justice she craved. She sees what he did, and she sees her part in it, as she has seen her part in everything else that has happened as the case has unraveled. IMO it's a credit to GA's acting and the staging of that scene that so much is communicated without words. I think there are many nuances and ambiguities allowing for interpretation in the denouement of this story, but the Telegraph's recap as you describe it is just way, waaay off in the broad strokes. The neuropsychologist specifically requested that Dr. Larson concur with her that Spector was malingering with regard to the amnesia, and everything we were shown or told about Spector indicated he was incapable of feeling guilt or shame or any kind of regret at all for his crimes or for the impact that his behavior had on those around him, like his wife and children.

Gracious! This show is boring. Even @saoirse knows it isn't worth the effort to post the episode summary ;) I also hate riddles. Usually a compulsive completist, I may have to go with assistant Christine on this one and take my leave early. The Palais des Beaux Arts was shot beautifully though.

Great rundown, but note to editors: "doff" means to take off, not put on. And the fact that's all I have to say makes me realize that I'm doing a lot more hating than watching this show. It's all about James Spader for me. Wrap him up with Dembe and Panabaker and Harry Lennix and whatever's left of Mr. Kaplan and maybe they could take the show on the road.

Funny you should say that! I just watched the documentary Code Black that apparently inspired this show (it's streaming on Netflix) and when the filmmakers started shooting in 2008, it was in the original LA County hospital building finished in 1932, which had an trauma and emergency department that was old and small and crowded (and not designed even to function as an emergency department, since such things did not exist as part of a fully-fledged, purposeful discipline until the 1970s-1980s (something I learned from the documentary). So in the old building, there actually was a "C-Booth" area just like "Center Stage" in the TV show, it looks like utter chaos, and the whole thing really looks a mess. The facility was so antiquated that the hospital had multiple waivers from federal, state, and county regulations governing privacy and all sorts of other things because the physical building simply precluded compliance. By a few years later, the documentary shows the relocated ED in the new building, everything shiny and new and HIPAA compliant, no more crowding and screaming and in everyone else's business. But that wouldn't make for anything like as good TV. Even the residents, in the documentary, who have come from the old building to the new sort of lament the loss of drama that drew them to the County-USC ED originally... That is definitely true, along with all the other absurdities you cite — but there is a tiny kernel of general truth in there that sadly, the vagaries of the healthcare economy have led to so many emergency dept and emergency room closures in the LA region that for many, including the poor and uninsured, County-USC is their only option.

Not just any mental illness! The blah-de-blah erotomania blah-de-blah De Clérembault's syndrome boils down to our hero was a delusional stalker. Because that seems highly sympathetic and curable! I think it's supposed to make the character more complex and his motivations more ambiguous but for me all it does is make him even more repellent and the last thing this show needs is more ambiguity.

The blouse with the flying geese was gorgeous, Joan Watson perfection. That's all I could like about this episode. Everything else made me sick to my stomach. Overwhelmed parents killing their special needs kids, that really happens, and more than once an adult child with aggressive behaviors has harmed or killed a parent. These are issues that divide the special needs and disrrability rights communities in really painful ways and could have provided material for a good or even just decent case of the week. Instead we get the (IMO) deeply offensive "Mother's Little Burden" — a weirdly disconnected Stepford mom unlike any autism mom I know online or IRL, who talks about her child as if he's an object right in front of him. That's not gallows humor (IMO) but a strange tone-deafness and willful ignorance by the writers. During the entire episode, each family member's perspective and pain was explored except that of Owen's himself. Everyone on the CIU team seemed shocked and horrified by the severity of his disability and relieved, honestly, by his absence in the present. Coincidentally, and related because I think it reflects the same embedded, unexamined assumptions, just this past weekend at my book group (all of us are special needs moms, most of us with kids on the spectrum — book club is a time to get together as something other than "autism moms"), we got to talking about Of Mice and Men and why it's still required reading in schools. I love Steinbeck, but I think it's telling that here's a perpetual American classic with an inexorable tragic arc leading to death for the person with developmental disability. There's just no place for him in society. That's certainly the message I took from it when I read it in high school. Back on topic: my son isn't aggressive, and he's highly verbal, but his manner is odd, and watching the actor playing Owen bounce on the yoga ball with his eyes averted, well, that could be my son, and seeing that story told in that way with the person with autism little more than a prop — it made my heart sink. So sad even Hayley Atwell's shiny hair couldn't redeem it for me.

Wow, judging from this forum (and my own struggle to stay awake when watching it), the show has aimed for noir and landed on soporific. I like Chance's grad student assistant. I wish she'd been brought to the foreground before this episode because she, along with Lisa Gay Hamilton, bring the show alive. Everyone else is such a drag, living, as Eldon himself describes, in places of existential dreeeaaad. Beckett this ain't.

With one new intern down already (sorry never learned her name), can Angus pull the plug for real on his brother (don't know his name either) and then we could have Christa & Neal back? We can keep Rob Lowe.

Yes! I kept thinking that's not the mole you have to worry about — a much deeper joke than this shows creators are capable of writing consciously! though I wouldn't be surprised if Spader ad-libbed the line and Dembe (don't know that actor's name) rolled with it on the freckle response.

I'm torn on this point. It's realistic slang. There's no need for code-switching when so few white people are around, right? And yet — my 13-year-old son has really been looking forward to this show (after being forbidden to watch Jessica Jones), and for his sake I was really hoping it would be a return to PG-13 like Daredevil. So far it looks that way except for the n-word. which encompasses multitudes he is not yet capable of understanding.

You had me at Beebus (definitely using that!) but then maybe lost me at Preacher. However, the corgi *is* a compelling tiebreaker in favor.