mamadrama

I wish the rest of the episodes would go ahead and get leaked so that someone could spoil the season for me. Because I don't know how much longer I can watch.

Well that was weird. I love Anne Dowd, loved seeing her acting in her backstory. However, I'm having a hard time seeing it in the context of the show. That's what I'm having trouble with period this season. I feel a real lack of consistency and it's driving me crazy. My son and I are currently binging LOST and though they managed to screw up a good deal of it, in the early seasons the flashbacks were amazing and gave the characters lots of interesting characterization. But some of the stories feel like they belong to totally different shows and different characters. June is seriously my least favorite character at this time.

This whole episode simultaneously bored me and had me enraged at June. The only interesting part was when Serena and NotBenson toured the house in Nazi fashion. That whole sequence was disturbing, but just seeing the baby's name ("Phoebe") over the crib was a reminder of how not even THAT would be allowed by Gilead's standards since girls don't read. I was half expecting some Marvin Gaye when NotBenson lead Serena into the master bedroom... I clearly remember living through the Elian Gonzalez fiasco and have no interest in watching it play out Gilead style with Hollychole. I'm still angry over the original. None of these people are making good or even interesting decisions. Looking into my crystal ball, though, I'm theorizing that one of two things will happen: June will get pregnant and have a baby for her commander to make his wife happy and, as payment, he'll get her and Hannah out of Gilead. OR Joe Fiennes will knock up Serena Joy and they'll bring June in to pretend that SHE is the one who's pregnant. As payment, he'll get her and Hannah out of Gilead. Neither one of these scenarios make any sense, but that hasn't stopped the story writers so far so...

I can't believe they had such horrifying images in this episode and yet STILL managed to make it boring. The whole Elian Gonzalez/Hollchole storyline is something most of us saw coming within minutes after Season 2 ended. It already feels old. I'm not understanding the timeline, either. They act like Gilead's been in formation for decades, yet Hannah hasn't aged more than a few years. Also, what are they going to do when all the current handmaids age out and can no longer bear children? Where's the next crop coming from?

The same for me. It's Yvonne's acting that I appreciate out of the role.

This is pissing me off. I'm not real happy with how they're portraying Fred, either. Sometimes he's a master manipulator, sometimes a bumbling fool. Sometimes it seems like he's actually trying to be helpful and caring towards June, other times it seems like he's just enjoying messing with her mind. I'm a writer, I get the point of having a well-rounded, complex character but sometimes this seems to go beyond that and is hovering right around poor, confused writing.

I know that Serena is an accessory to rape. I know that she had a heavy hand in the formation of Gilead. I know that she's done some terrible, despicable things and should be punished for torture or whatever when this finally blows up. She should get whatever the handmaids have received: a missing eye, a missing clit, etc. But damn it, my dislike of June is growing so strong that I actually find myself rooting for Serena Joy. Damn it.

When I see/hear about women wanting home births and all "natural" births, I feel guilty. Like, was I the only person not only asking for all the pain meds they could give me but also begging them to just give me general anesthesia until it was over? Doc: Do you want an epidural, morphine, or other IV pain killers during birth? Me: What do you mean by "or"?

My youngest son died in his sleep 9 years ago this July. In the child loss community, you're right in that "rainbow baby" means the subsequent child after loss (infant death, miscarriage, stillbirth, child loss in general). In all the support groups, a great deal of importance is placed upon the "rainbow baby". I never liked the idea, however. To each their own, and if it helps some women to think of it like that then I'd never pooh-pooh their manner of grieving, but I always felt like it put too much pressure on the "new" child. My subsequent child, a daughter, was awesome all on her own. I didn't like the idea of her "saving" us. It just felt like too much pressure on her, as well as on us. After all, we're meant to be completely fine now, right? We have our rainbow! 😏 Funny story, though...I absolutely refused to refer to her as my "rainbow." Nobody in my family did, either, because they respected my husband me. We had a name picked out from before we even got pregnant with her, and when I learned that she was a girl I was very excited. I didn't have a girl. We decided to name her after a popular Americana singer, kind of an older name that you don't hear much anymore. She was born, we named her, came home from the hospital...and then I looked her name up on the internet. Guess what it means? You guess it-"rainbow." Joke's on me.

Kelly-from-the-deli made those same leather overalls on Project Runway...4 years ago. They were cute on the model on the runway. In real life, however... Am I the only one who'd be afraid of making farting noises every time I sat down?

They did add some things to the MacNeill story so it wasn't a complete rerun. But damn...that guy was a nutcase on a whole other level. Any one of those stories would've been bad on its own: killing his wife, moving his mistress into the house as the "nanny", sending his adopted daughter back to the Ukraine, stealing his daughter's identity to give it to his girlfriend, falsifying school records...Put them together and it's a damn VC Andrews' novel.

Snipped for space... I agree that Libby is more or less a shit stirrer. I think she enjoys playing everyone against each other and relishes her part as martyr or innocent victim. While I can see a lot of what you said actually happening, it presumes a whole bunch of stuff that we don't know so there's no real way of knowing whether that's what's going on or not.

I keep trying to put this into perspective of other types of addictions. My husband's a smoker. He knows the risks, he knows I don't like it, he knows all the medical data that goes along with long-term smokers. Me simply telling him to "stop", however, hasn't led to much success. He's addicted. He has tried to stop, and has failed, many times. For people in Sean's position, Dr. Now can lecture him until he's blue in the face, but Sean had major issues. He wasn't just going to stop and, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be the kind of facilities and care that other addictions have available. His version of a rehab facility is Dr. Now's extended hospital vacation, but while Sean DID improve there, the on-going care just wasn't enough once he was released. No real support system. A couple of meetings a month with a psychotherapist wasn't going to do the trick. He was way beyond that. It's sad. I love Dr. Now but I do sometimes feel like his ideas about pain management and food addiction are, at best, outdated. Don't get me wrong-I love seeing him light into Schneee and all the others who try to play their little games with him, but many of these people have serious mental health issues. They're not going to just simply give up their addiction to food any more than a heroin addict is just going to drop the needle after a heart-to-heart with someone. It can take a very long time, with many starts and stops, to deal with the level of engorging that we're seeing with some of these folks. Unfortunately, most just don't have that time and for many it was too late a long time ago. Sean's mother should've been turned into APS.

This sounds terrible, I know, but growing up in a tiny Appalachian county, I was in middle school on the other side of the state before I ever attended school with an African American. Our county was not ethnically diverse. I was 4 years old before I'd ever met an African American in person and I was (apparently, according to my mother) really excited. We were in a shopping mall in another state and she says I acted like I'd just seen a movie star. I ran up to the family and was trying to invite them home with me for dinner...IF I knew any Jewish people when I was growing up then I didn't realize they were Jewish at the time. I was raised to be non-prejudiced, but I had few opportunities to put it into practice. This is one of the reasons why we thought long and hard about what to do with our kids when they started school. We definitely wanted them exposed to a more diverse group of people. Probably also the reason why I went into Anthropology. It's weird that there are still parts of the country where this can happen, but it does.

How in the world can a complete stranger state that it's obvious that Carly wants to be with her "real family"? We've not really seen her on screen since she was a baby. And hell, not even C&T see her. What are these nuts basing this on?

I think I'd have less of a problem with the photographer storyline if the show had done some actual showing instead of just telling. A few anecdotes here and there aren't really helping me "get" the extent of her abuse. When the model was talking about how she had to raise her arms so high for so long that she ended up falling, I kept thinking about all the ANTM episodes where the girls were put through extremely difficult photo shoots that often mirrored real life ones. Modeling sucks. I don't doubt that this woman isn't abusive, but as a viewer I'd like to see some of that. It's kind of storytelling 101. This show does a lot of that.

It's taken my husband with 2 college degrees almost 6 months to even find a part-time job at a retail place. However, we live pretty far out in the country and there aren't a lot of opportunities to begin with. Nicole does NOT live in a place that I would imagine had job scarcity. She's got zero incentive to change as long as she continues to be coddled.

He was super hot in RIVER. I envy the people who haven't watched it yet and get to go in blind for the first time. In a lot of cases I do believe that performing it in the native language adds something to the overall feeling. This time it doesn't bother me. A lot of the information is very confusing for me, someone who knows nothing about how the reactors and other things work, and I find myself watching each episode twice as is. I like that I don't have to read subtitles because I'd rather focus on the details of the scene.

He may be innocent, but his mother's antics are so crazy that it's hard for me to see said innocence. Her actions are clouding my judgment.

I kept thinking that editing must have cut that part out. Otherwise, why would someone on such a tight budget leave such an expensive and pricey item in the road? (And where it could possibly hurt another vehicle.) I've moved a lot and we've had things like beside tables fall off the truck. Little things that didn't cost a lot of money. We've always gone back and retrieved them, even when they were completely busted up. It's courtesy to the other drivers as well as to the environment. If we haven't been able to retrieve them because their location made going into the road dangerous, then we've called the police. The last thing I want is to cause someone to wreck because my coffee table decided to play Dumbo.

This bit of information actually makes me like the couple even more.

I feel you. I once got behind some seriously slow moving vehicles. I was in a hurry and I passed them...only to find that they were a funeral procession. Boy did I feel like a jackass. Am I alone in thinking that this couple was what we'd refer to as "low functioning" when I was a social worker? I started out annoyed at them, but then it became clearer that they weren't the average dingbats on this show. There seemed to be something "off" there, so I set the bar much lower for them. I'm actually rooting for them to keep it together. They seem like nice people and I feel like they're the kind of folks who need to be guided when it comes to their eating habit and weightloss journey. Hope they can stick with Dr. Now.

I hate that, too, and it's one of the reasons why I have a problem with FRIED GREEN TOMATOES (the book, not necessarily the movie). In the movie they're BFFs and have this solid, nonsexual bond. In the book, however, there's definitely a romance there. Sometimes I think that's a cop out. Women's relationships with each other can be very complicated and unique and sometimes the lines get blurred a little, even though neither is really sexually attracted to the other. Those kinds of relationships, when they're depicted well, are ones that I think are really interesting. There are lots of movies out there about the romance kind of love, but not as many exploring the other kind. I think there are lots of things that they could have done with Kat and Tia, but to just suddenly make Kat the magical lesbian sprinkling gay dust on her campaign partner is, I think, dull and even a little disrespectful to actual lesbians. I can't put my finger on WHY I feel this way, but something about it just makes me cringe.

My kids are trying to watch this with me. My 7yo had trouble understanding the whole Chernobyl/Pripyat thing so I showed her the movie "Chernobyl Diaries." Now she's watching the series totally confused, wondering when the mutant bears and radiation zombies are coming out. Seriously, though. This show is amazing. One of the scariest things I've ever seen and there's almost no action.

Same. Laci's the first contestant who I've really enjoyed in a long time. Jeremiah was good and I liked him, I just prefer Laci. At this point it really doesn't even matter who "wins." The REAL winner won't be the one the shows crowns-it will be the one who takes advantage of this opportunity to grow their social media audience and is able to capitalize on this attention. Sometimes it's even better if they don't win the title. That contract is rough.