Stowaway

I'm never proud to have youtube clips on hand. . . it always seems like a sign I should get a better hobby. But here's Trixie's absolute best dance move.

I went back and checked that last shot. Based on height, skin tone, and tattoos, I think we're missing Milk and Thorgy. This also tracks along the salty/ bitter/ peevish axis.

I was genuinely confused by the judging of the soup can challenge. It was like trying to judge a contest where people fill in a coloring book, and no one goes outside the lines, and everyone colors the sky blue and the plants green. Like, OK, some people were better than others. . . but not meaningfully so. I kind of hated all of them.

Do you recommend it? I read parts of it years back, when my brothers were talking about it. But I decided to give it a pass for admittedly superficial reasons (e.g. the author's offensively redface style choices).

Playing that whole song was a hate crime.

Mark Hofmann's forgeries shook my father's faith in Mormonism so much, they were probably the main reason I got away with leaving the Church as a teenager without getting thrown out of the house. Regarding LDS-adjacent true crime, the really "good" stuff comes from the early days of the Church, especially the 13 months when Utah Territory was in open revolt against the US government. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is possibly the most famous atrocity of that era. It had Mormons dressing up like Paiute Indians in order to divert blame when they attacked convoys of settlers on their way to California. The Mormons slaughtered anyone older than eight (the LDS "age of accountability"), but the younger children they took home and raised themselves. 120 emigrants were killed. There have been books and movies about it, but there's yet to be a good one. I get fatigued by stories about polygamists. It's always the same narrative, writ in different scales: a malignant narcissist uses religion as an excuse to abuse either a few children or a lot of them, repeat decade after decade. (Side note: the Outlaw Prophet link is currently going to the Vanity Fair article about Natalie Wood.)

"Snatch Game" is like Saturday Night Live: it was always better in the old days -- except it wasn't, it was always uneven, and always at least as much cringe as funny. For every Chad Michaels as Cher, there has always been a Snooki want smoosh smoosh. I'm in favor of some deep cuts and bold choices, but it should be a mix. And I'm with the people saying Ben was the best only by virtue of everyone else being worse. After sleeping on it, I've decided the saddest thing about the episode is that no one seems to love Trixie enough to tell her the truth.

I think you're probably right about that, but I also think it's just too deep a cut for a general audience. That was a problem pretty much across the board this episode. . . you don't want to have to explain to the kids who you're impersonating.

I like Trixie, but Shangela blaming the internet for her delusions was some scalding-hot tea. And that elimination gag? Thank you, Shangie, for saving the episode from such a mediocre Snatch Game.

I was very much Team Bunting during that Nonac vote. I can watch entire episodes of sitcoms I actually like without laughing once (see: The Good Place), but just hearing clips from Arrested Development's worst episode made me laugh several times.

A lot of people were speculating on social media that they would keep Milk's elimination for next week, for the drama of her mentor/employer/friend (Marc Jacobs) being there as a judge. I'm so glad this theory was wrong. Milk has brought the whole cast down these three episodes, and Snatch Game. would have just been an amplified version of what she did to Trixie this week. Next week's episode cannot come soon enough! Bendela and Kennedy both have iconic Snatch Game performances to live up to.

That is shady. It looks like bad meme photoshop. I like that All Stars has a tweaked format from the regular version of the show. It's the right amount of "the same, but different." Maybe they should bring immunity back, just for All Stars, so the queens have something more direct and tangible to lipsync for. In Ben's place I would have been trying to thread that needle between good and not too good, for the same reasons. But if she also had the chance to get immunity for next week, it might have been enough to light a fire under her.

Same. And I haven't disliked someone as much as I now dislike Milk since Serena Chacha. It's not entertaining villainy, it's just tedious self absorption and unearned confidence (or insecurity pretending to be confidence, it's hard to tell).

It's hard to resist my nerdlinger impulse to "ehrm, ackchyually" whether The Flash counts as a remake, a revival, or a third thing having to do with franchises and spinoffs. So I'll concentrate instead on this thing where Grant Show and Grant Gustin roll around together in a grave. It sounds like a worthy project and I hope someone manages to make it happen.

If I had to bet my life on a Voyager canon submission, I think I would pick "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" and pray for the best.

I thought about this all through the presentation. The conclusion I came to is that yes, there probably is such an episode, but it would be difficult to figure out which one it is. The trick would be to go against the natural impulse to find the "best" episode of Voyager, and concentrate instead on finding the least annoying one. (For example, there's no way in hell Sarah or Tara would vote in an episode that ended with "and that's why none of this ever even happened in the first place," as so many of the fan-favorite Voyager episodes do.)

One thing worth knowing from the tea spillers at reddit: apparently Milk said at a viewing party that Chi Chi injured her hand the day of the show. What had been rehearsed as a baton routine with a little dancing became a last-minute dance routine with a little baton. I'm not sure how much that really explains (e.g. the shoes), but I definitely didn't think she would be the one to bomb like that.

Morgan McMichaels is the Cobra Commander of drag. She just ended a week of messy Facebook drama about another queen stealing her dress by having to admit that she got blackout drunk and forgot she gave the dress away. So it's not too surprising she's not as effective a villain as she thinks she is.

DAE Kate Mulgrew is to Katharine Hepburn what Christian Slater is to Jack Nicholson? Her line readings always sound like she's playing a character who's playing a character. Yet she was still the best thing about that show, which is why "Threshold" will always be worse than "Profit and Lace" for me. Neither of them are the nadir of Trek, though. There are still worse episodes out there.

Not to take pleasure in y'all's pain, but it's always good listening when you're so mad at the show you sound like you're mad at yourselves for watching it.

Would watch Toobin Crime Story.

Wuornos and Cunanan were both gay and both sex workers, but I'm not sure I buy many similarities beyond that. Her childhood was the very worst of what America has to offer its white citizens; he grew up in relative affluence, and had the privilege of dropping out of a good college. (Not that his childhood was easy -- he seems to have inherited his Cluster B personality from his father.) Orth is caught between explaining the murders as a sociopathic extension of his sexual interest in S/M, and a narcissistic drive to be famous at any cost, for any reason. As for the title, it's an improvement on Vulgar Favors, which sounds like the middle book in a series about sexy southern vampires.

I feel like even in Dave's endorsement of it, The Network is being unjustly maligned here. They didn't want to kill a "very large portion" of the human race! They wanted to kill as few people as they had to in order to set off a worldwide vaccination panic, leading to mass sterilization. The plan is elegant because it is so humane.

That is ambitious! I always hated on "Fringe" how you could tell the parallel universe scenes were just Vancouver.

I honestly thought that was Enrico Colantoni playing Versace up until about a week ago. It's strange to hear you two refer to the case as something you barely remember. I met Cunanan a couple of times, about 8-10 months before he started killing people. We had mutual friends, several of whom were sources for Orth's article/book. Not that I have any special insight into him or the murders; I actually had to be sat down and forced to understand that the person on the news was someone I'd seen at parties. I'm not sure if I'll be able to stomach watching the show, but I feel that way going into every Ryan Murphy project, not just the ones I feel a weird personal connection to.