Stowaway

I said the same the last time there were Forcening minis. And I still agree!

I forgot about that! And wasn't vampire Elvis. . . simple?

Just as a side note: it's former competitors Raven and Delta Work nominated for the makeup and hair awards. In case you were at home, keeping track of whether or not drag will ever be mainstream.

If they'd given Brandon SORAS they could have replaced Jason Priestley with a full-sized adult actor.

There's also the season eight cast member who went on to win two Oscars. I think that's why they kept it to the season one cast only.

I'm curious about all the references (especially in Deadly Women) to Wuornos being "The Monster." Was that a term the media applied to her before the 2003 film? My vague memory of the movie is that the title was an "ooh, I see what you did there," in that it actually came from a carnival ride or something.

They gave one of the least exciting seasons one of the most exciting finales. . . but I doubt they'll repeat this format (at least not exactly). Whatever else it was, Season 9 was the season of the spoilers. They need to figure out how to plug their leaks, not do their most interesting moves in front of thousands of witnesses.

Great discussion, as always! Just to weigh in on an early part of the conversation. . . I do think the Zodiac killer looms larger in the San Francisco collective consciousness, at least if you're our age. Growing up (in Sonoma county, about 40 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge) we had a guy in our town who everyone said was the FBI's number one suspect for the Zodiac murders. When I went to college, I discovered that pretty much anyone who grew up in one of the nine Bay Area counties thought their local Boo Radley was the Zodiac killer. Buy comparison, the main thing people knew about Jim Jones was something that happened in South America. I personally didn't get what a San Francisco story it was until much later (when I read whichever Armistead Maupin novel he shows up in).

I'm not defending Kelly (never that!), but her AIDS "scare" was entirely believable. People had some idiotic notions about the disease even as late as 1996. Around that time, one of my college friends went through a "scare" when her high school boyfriend came out to her. They were both virgins when they dated, and the two of them never went all the way, but the mere thought that she had once kissed a gay guy gave her a freakout. This was a Berkeley student who was in med school two years later.

It's "She done already done had herses." I believe it was something Ru heard a woman say at McDonald's one time, and it just stuck with her. (I found out what it was by googling "RuPaul something something hair hurts," because that's what I first thought she was saying. . . Reddit filled in the rest.)

The thing that makes Sasha's performances genuinely different is her incorporation of video/projection, and the show never found a way to let her use that. Which means she never got to show the Drag Race audience what it's actually like to see Sasha Velour perform. I think that's why the judgments sometimes seemed like they were letting her slide. And there was really no way to fix it; the alternative would have been to have an A/V challenge where Sasha would have slayed and no one else would have known the first thing about what they were doing. Those are some damn smart people, and my very favorite queens are all in there. But in the history of Drag Race, most of the queens either didn't go to college, they dropped out, or they went to art or theater school. Sasha went to Vassar and then studied in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar. That's a genuinely new thing for the show. . . I cut her some slack for saying "smart" when she should have been saying "academic." And having said all that, and adding also that boy Sasha is basically a textbook example of my type, I didn't connect with her either. I was expecting to, and it didn't happen. And in the end, I don't care who wins either. Trinity won me over just like she did so many others, but not enough to root for her above the other three. I don't think the episode was a waste of time, though: it was an entertaining hour of television, and I may watch it again one day!

Yes! And yes! I know how pointless it is to armchair-diagnose someone whose week (lived in unusual circumstances) has been edited down to eight minutes of screen time, but I've pegged Nina for Borderline Personality Disorder since about week two. I become more convinced with every episode. I feel a huge amount of sympathy for her, but from the outside BPD basically just looks like clinical levels of brattiness, and it isn't fun to watch.

I'm surprised, with all the various efforts to make a Game of Thrones knockoff, no network tried a Guy Gavriel Kay adaptation.

I hate myself for knowing this, but Tiffani Thiessen and Jennie Garth had a big, semi-public falling out. I believe it was something that happened way post 90210, and for some reason interviewers (including Howard Stern) kept trying to make her talk about it whenever she did press for White Collar. My memory is that she kept it to "she knows what she did, and it's none of your business," so who knows what the beef was.

They may have been terrible actors; I'll take your word for it. But Christopher Mayer was how I figured out I was gay (don't tell Marc Singer's Beastmaster I said that). None of the other Dukes did it for me. I just want to say I've always been a big fan of the Forcening, going back to Mark 1. Since y'all seem to be pushing to expand your podcast offerings, I think this one is worth putting on the regular rotation. I could listen to the three of you "force" each other all day every day, but to keep your sanity you could do it as a rotating guests sort of thing. Just a thought!

It's always interesting when the panel goes against fan opinion in a canon submission -- I'm sure "In the Pale Moonlight" would come out number one in a DS9 Top 10 aggregator (even the Hollywood Reporter recently put it at number one). I agree with pretty much everything the panel said, but I tend to be a "best episode" contrarian, especially where Trek is concerned.

I sort of appreciated that they tried to treat ECT as a legitimate therapy, and not as a cruel punishment for nonconformity (the way it's portrayed everywhere else in all of pop culture). The writing was risible, but hey, it's 90210.

Is Donna doing the baby voice now too? Not that she was ever all that far from it. But. . . gross. I associate that voice with victims of early sexual abuse; it's so stomach-churning to hear it used in "bedroom" scenes. Seriously, who was the pedophile on set encouraging these grown-ass women to talk that way?

Makes sense to me. Luke Perry was (is? I saw the AARP magazine cover, I'm going to stick with was) a very handsome guy. What made him unappealing were his horrible scrawny body and his (his character's?) obnoxious poser personality. In these scenes his body is concealed and he isn't affecting any obvious James Dean-isms. Granted, in one he looks like he's on his way to class at the Barbazon Modeling School, and in the other like he's doing John Constantine cosplay, and both could be better. But we've seen him in worse. I don't get Jamie Walters. I never found any of the 90210 main cast attractive, but this guy looks like he won a walk-on in a fan contest, and through a series of mistakes and misadventures wound up in a major role.

Professors definitely don't compare notes about student papers. The thing professors hate most about their jobs (other than their colleagues) is reading student papers. A B+ paper isn't going to get talked about unless there's some other red flag that cheating is involved. In most cases, if you don't get tenure, you slink away into the night, completely disgraced. Sometimes you get a second chance in a couple of years, sometimes it means you're essentially fired and have to go away now; it depends on the institution. StatMom is right that lack of publications is reason enough not to tenure someone (assuming CU is UCLA; if CU has secretly been Cal State Northridge all along, publications aren't as big a deal, because the teaching load is 2.5 times higher). However! I'm almost willing to give the show credit, because anyone with a bully pulpit can make a stink about tenure, and claim that the reasons have to do with discrimination and not academics. If Angela Davis doesn't get tenure, people will know about it across the country, and there will be a controversy. A white male cult leader? I don't know, it could happen. Me too! Let it never stop!

I felt like this season/series suffered from the Project Runway effect, where the talent has basically been harvested, and the field needs to lay fallow for a while. By which I mean: I'm pretty sure any finalist from the last four seasons would have won against these three. I haven't been seeking out GBBO conversation this year as much as I have previously, so I don't know if that's a common observation or not. Excuse me if I've been trite! They all had some serious errors and missteps, considering it was the finale. I wound up rooting for Candice through the power of the Inevitable Edit, even though Andrew was the "me" of the group (but I so wanted to hug him, for all his fey ginger awkwardness). I thought it was going to be hard to say goodbye to the show as it moves to a new network and becomes a new thing, but honestly, I feel it's ready to go away for a while anyway, for the fallow-field reasons already said. I hate for a show this good-natured and homespun to do an "all star" season, but really, if the show were staying at the BBC, it would probably have been about time for that next time around.

You two are seriously ruining my fun. The secret game in any pop culture podcast is trying to guess people's ages based on the minutiae of cultural reference points. Now I know, and don't have to guess anymore! I'm 43, by the way, and my running assumption has been pretty accurate so far: Dave's a little older, Tara's a little younger, Sarah's about the same. So. . . Dave's 44, right?

I read the books when they came out, and my memory of them is next to zero (as opposed to the Hitchhiker's books, which I also haven't read in decades, but remain vivid in my mind). I want to say there was a Coke machine blocking a stairway at some point? That's about it. But I'm baffled by the idea that networks are still fake-adapting novels into TV shows. We live in a post "Game of Thrones" world. There's obviously huge added value in bringing book readers in (or at least not turning them off). If you're going to do an adaptation that has so little to do with the novels, why not just skip the licensing fee, change the names, and call it something new?

My favorite thing about this episode (of the podcast, not the stupid TV show) was when Kelly tried to be "flirty," and the four of us -- Sarah, Tara, Dave and I -- all said some variation on "Oh, gross" at the same time. It felt like AWT listeners around the world were saying it. "You can bang my gavel anytime." Seriously, show (the stupid TV one, not the podcast) go fuck yourself.

This is something I spend a weird amount of time thinking about while I listen to the podcast. I hated him so much when the show originally aired. Now he's the least objectionable thing on it. I think it's because, at the time, he was the character who most resembled a person I actually knew, and it was someone (/people) I didn't like. In retrospect, he's the only character who resembles any kind of person at all, so the fact that he comes across as a human being, and not an actor's jerk-off fantasy of him/herself, makes him the best character on the show.