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You're probably right. Something I noticed, but forgot to mention in my first comment, were the little nods to Burn Notice. I found it fun and enjoyed the wink wink. I think, for my own self, I'm going to let "first partner" serve two purposes. As another nod to BN and Bruce Campbell, but also as a resolution of where Bernard ended up. 😆

Okay. Without a doubt there was a lot of suspension of disbelief. But that said? I LOVED this episode. It told a story I felt engaged in. There were some interesting twists that I was genuinely surprised by. I was actually left wondering a couple of times about the outcome (regarding Frank). We learned where Bernard went. The humor was on point, and the team felt like A TEAM. All of them, together. A+ episode for the reboot.

I'd give a cheer if they got rid of Maroun. I've tried to like the character/actress since Season 21 but to no avail. I feel like when they're not trying to frame up Saint Maroun, the episodes where she's not as heavily featured, the writing for Price gets better. But who knows what's going to happen with the writers' strike happening. That's going to throw a wrench into a lot of shows. Small thing I liked in tonight's episode was when Price was re-directing Lily on the stand. Usually he is back from the witness stand, working the jury box but this time he came up on the corner and placed himself physically between Lily and the defense attorney/defendant. It was a small thing but a sweet protective gesture all the same.

I think if Clement had done the 150 flowers with their white dot in the center and then painted on the branches it would have looked better. Clement was the one I wanted to win but as soon as I saw that cage of chocolate branches I knew he was done for, it just didn't look good.

We keep waiting and hoping!

YES!! Between last week and this week I am done with Saint Maroun. She is as sanctimonious as Saint Olivia and Jack feels like he’s just there to be her “yes” man.

Count me with the minority who likes Carson and has enjoyed his game play. He's not a physical threat the way Danny is and he (Carson) showed that he knows it, so he makes up for it in the puzzle work. Yam Yam can go, I don't really find him compelling at all. and I liked Danny at first but I'm over his arrogance as the game has progressed. Well done Survivor Editors. I liked Frannie and I'm sorry to see her leave. I would have been on board for a Frannie, Carson, Heidi final three. I think all three of them could have made compelling arguments for the jury and it could have been a close vote. I've never liked Carolyn and I still don't. I appreciate and respect that she has a very good read on the social aspect of the game and strategy, but I find her personality annoying; the constant screaming in challenges is old. She has become her own worst enemy in terms of her game play, but blames every one around her. To be honest, Lauren and Heidi have kind of been inter-changeable, which I blame on the Survivor Editors. I feel like I'm watching the same backstory / same game play from both of them. Jamie is a bubbly person and I have to give her personality really does light up the screen. But man is she a bad player of Survivor.

Eh, it's not about growing a spine and her situation is one where (in real life) stones shouldn't be cast. But for fictional world purposes. Providing testimony, the wife was reacting to the DAs office; reacting to the direction of and threats from the outside. Yes, she testified, but from a passive position, Price and Maroun dragged it out of her, she never walked into Price's office and said "Hey. There is something you need to know." She was never in an emotional or mental place where she was going to stand up to her husband directly, and given what he did to the doctor honestly I'd be hard put to blame her for being in fear of her husband's temper. If she 'grew a spine' out of the situation, hopefully it was enough of a spine for her to use the next 15 years to sue him for divorce, grab Taylor and run as far away from New York as they could manage.

You answered your own question. The husband was abusive. Maybe he didn’t physically beat his wife or his child but he was emotionally and mentally abusive and clearly the head of the household. The wife was obviously scared of her husband, which is why she went behind his back to give Taylor permission to resume the treatment.

I’m getting tired of the writers setting up St. Maroun who makes all the politically comfortable arguments, and then leaves Price to take the heat. I agree that the victims’s wife had every right to be pissed but she should have been yelling at Maroun or Jack. I get that as the lead prosecutor it’s Price’s job but I’ve lost track of how many times there is a moral / PC argument, Maroun convinces Jack of X position though Price argues for Y, they go with X and then Price gets lamblasted by the family/friends/etc.

I liked Aiden as a character more than Joe in the first four or so seasons he was in. I enjoyed the chemistry between BB and KD and liked Aiden's character. The last 4 seasons, the last 3 in particular it felt like the writers really shoved every character who wasn't Vera into strictly prop roles, which made Aiden pretty boring. Like I said in a prior post it seemed like the team was only there to make mistakes for Vera to shine as she cleaned up the mistake, and/or the mistake caused Vera to have the case cracking revelation. I think since Joe is from the books, the writers were always more faithful to Joe as a genuine foil/partner/balance to Vera than they were with Aiden. From that perspective I do like Joe and will enjoy seeing David Leon back with the cast. But I am going to miss KD and the character of Aiden from seasons 5 to 9.

My take, given the argument Maroun made for disclosure, is that since the doorman had priors for stalking, harassing women, the defense could have used the argument of "Well look here, here is this man who was also one of the last people to see the victim alive, and he has priors for stalking, harassing women. Maybe he's the one who stalked and killed her." It doesn't need to be an argument that makes a whole lot of sense, it just needs to sow the seed of doubt in the mind of the jury. Remember the burden is on the prosecution to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that someone is guilty, especially of murder. The doorman presenting another viable suspect could have provided doubt. That was why Maroun argued that the defense should be allowed to review the doorman and make a decision if they wanted to introduce him as a witness FOR the defense; "hey, here's this other suspect!" But Price held his position that it wasn't exculpatory and so he would not disclose that they (the DA) had located this additional witness.

Yep! The minute I saw him and got over my initial excited noises ( I loved Peter Burke and White Collar ) I knew who the suspect was going to be! I almost wish they'd written in a small arc for this story and let us see some cat and mouse between Nolan and DeKay's judge. But that would have required actual writers.

Oh. And also a criminal waste of Tim DeKay.

Okay. Now that I got my initial 'where is Jack McCoy and who is this pod person we had in this episode' a few more thoughts. Cosgrove, Shaw and Maroun all get a pass, but otherwise? Wow ... everybody on the Order side was on the wrong side of the ethics board tonight. No way Nolan should have been prosecuting this case. How the hell did Jack NOT know his lead prosecutor had found the body? Let alone the body of a public defender in a murder case with a JUDGE as the suspect? What rock was he under? He's the DA, the buck stops on his desk. The judge trying the case, should absolutely have recused himself. Again, how the hell did Jack hear about Nolan and the trial judge tangling over the judge's association with the case and JACK DIDN'T KNOW NOLAN FOUND THE BODY???? The clerk needs to be disbarred, at least. If you're going to start going corrupt early at least be more discreet my man. I was okay with suspending my disbelief, except for Jack. On the side of the good, any time Donovan and Dancy get to exchange back and forth I'm happy. It was irregular and ethically dodgy and all that jazz, but I enjoy Nolan interacting with Cosgrove and Shaw. I enjoy the chemistry between the actors. I just wish the writers would get their heads out of their ... LOL!!! Yeah, I honestly cannot recall any of Jack's predecessors being painted as so completely out of touch with the cases their ADAs were trying. Even back when the likes of Ben Stone and Jack McCoy were taking these wild risks. It's like the writers wrote the episode and were like "Oh wait, why didn't Jack blow the whistle on this BS before the case got this far?? Uhhhhhhhhh don't know. EUREKA! We'll just say he didn't know! Yeah, that's great!" I'm sorry but this cast of actors is way too good for these idiot writers. I started watching this reboot because of Donovan, Dancy, Waterson, Manheim and now Brooks ... but what a waste of a good cast.

Because Nolan skated a very sketchy ethical line in not disclosing the bell-hop witness to the defense attorney. Rachel was a public defender. A witness like the bell-hop would have given the defense a huge avenue to prove reasonable doubt. As a public defender she would have wanted that leverage, so what Nolan did would have been extremely distasteful. She wouldn't have liked HOW he won.

How the hell did Jack not know his ADA found a murder victim??? Not knowing about the prior relationship I’ll buy but not knowing about Nolan finding the body?? Especially on such a high profile case as this? Not a good look for Jack.

Jeff … enough with the crazy eyes.

The last couple seasons in particular I'd noticed this also. Not just Aiden but the whole team. It seemed their only purpose was to screw something up so Vera could have a great epiphany and make the connection.

And after Fear and Loathing gave a glimmer of hope, we're back to everything that makes the reboot so facepalm inducing. I know it is easy to point the finger at the actors/characters, and I do it myself with my dislike of Maroun, but I think the real culprits are the writers and directors. I'm saying this because the episodes where Pamela Wechsler is credited along with Eid and Wolf (Eid in particular) seem to be tighter/more balanced/more 'old school feel'. Not all of them are diamonds, but we tend to have more scenes where everybody is working together instead of this hard cut "okay perp arrested, we never see the detectives again, it's all the DAs". It's this hard stop "no more Law, all Order now" that seems to back the story into these convoluted resolutions, where if the DAs went back to the detectives and said "we lost X, we need to see if we can get back to Z without having to deal with Y" we'd have more balance. The episodes with Wechsler writing tend to have more instances where the DAs and the detectives work together to sort out the challenges that come up during trial, which in turn tend to be better episodes. Second comes the director. The Order side of the episodes seem very stylized. Like the director wants dramatic images, especially in and around the courtroom, and uses the actors the same as set pieces to get certain shots. Jack tends to escape this because we don't see him around the courtroom much and also because Sam Waterson carries a lot of good fan will, but Hugh Dancy seems to get the worst of it; example the 'studying the jury' shots from this episode. In "Fear and Loathing" maybe because he had quite a few scenes away from the courtroom, Dancy's Price seemed like a different character. It felt like the director let all the actors loosen up a bit and bring their characters more alive I'm thinking particularly the scene in the dinner with Dancy, Donovan and Brooks. There were so many little nuances that we've NEVER scene in other episodes that suggest to me the director said "okay, you three have this dialogue, here is your setting, do what you need to do to get from point A to point B" and then let them do their thing. There was more character development between those 3 in that one scene then we've seen in the entire reboot, because it feels like the director got out of the way and let the actors breath life into the characters. I honestly feel that bringing in new characters/actors wouldn't fix the problems we're seeing in the reboot, because the problem is with the writers/directors. The writers aren't writing entertainment, they're writing social commentary and the directors aren't directing entertainment, they're framing the social commentary against dramatic set pieces. You could replace all the actors/all the characters and you're going to end up with the exact same picture.

How will they know? There is no way to learn that until they try to play it. Since the producers shook up the idol/fake idol for each tribe.

It's early yet, but I feel like the judges are punishing contestants who are thinking outside the box, being creative, doing bakes that are not traditional true blue American way of doing things. And it can stop now. Also Jai's win tonight, especially compared to her win last week, felt patronizing. There were cakes who looked a lot better and sounded a lot more balanced than what she put up. Last week was absolutely solid win, no argument. This week, felt too contrived feel goody.

Getting the feeling I'm the only one who hits mute when Carolyn is speaking. I don't find her charming or amusing in the slightest, but that's the joy of the Survivor it takes all sorts of personalities to make a season.

He said so, didn't he? In the bar, I thought Jean-Luc asked him if he'd ever been to the place before and Jack said no. Then Jean-Luc said "you're what, 23/24" and Jack doesn't confirm. Granted, maybe Jack didn't share about having been to the bar so we could have the big reveal at the end with Jean-Luc remembering they had met and maybe he didn't feel like speaking to his age. Just speculating why the Changeling hierarchy is so interested in capturing Jack "The Asset" at all costs.

Speculation, not a spoiler. So. Jack's a changeling then? Probably a sleeper agent type? Didn't remember his exact age. Didn't remember having been to the bar before. Unexplained flashbacks.