Czanne

Good cop, bad cop: Sansa took the second role, because the issue she raises is important, and those two heirs need to realize they have very little latitude to f'up. Recall, the first idea is destroy the castle and everything and one associated. That's disastrous. Both Stark proposals are more merciful, and by Sansa taking the bad cop, it allows Jon to sound both strong and stern, gaining the loyalty of two children. If Alys and Ned were older than Jon and Sansa, it wouldn't have worked, but since they're children, they're less likely to begrudge the mercy shown to them.

They were married, but Luke was previously married and divorced and they started their relationship before his divorce was final. There's something in some extremist Christian groups called covenant marriage, which they try to push into law from time to time. The idea of covenant marriage is to make divorce almost impossible (witnessed abuse, proved abandonment, proved adultery) and to give full legal marriage status only to anyone's first marriage. So far, covenant marriage bills have all failed, but the fact that they get taken seriously enough to make it into and out of committee is disquieting. Thus the mechanism for Gilead to create the Handmaids' subclass -- declare all subsequent marriages null, thus the partners are "living in sin". Single mothers? Pull them, too. Eventually it comes down to "didn't get married in the right church", or "didn't look both ways before crossing the street."

A tangent, but I really enjoy that expanded universe extra, even as I utterly hate the smug, smarmy jackwagon who is still practicing erasure by focusing so much on the commander -- I have been on so many academic panels and at conferences with That Guy. I read HmT rarely, no more than once in five years; it's my personal emotional kryptonite, but I get something different out of each reading and interpretation. The Sex, Crime and Audiotape podcast did a radio drama version a few weeks ago, and I realized that I hated Luke for being a normal guy with unconscious dismissiveness and insensitivity. I'd never hated him before. This time it's with the academics. On the younger appearance of the commander and Serena: in the mid 80s, women of 45 or 50 usually looked that age --Dame Maggie is glorious in all things, but she was 40 in A Room With a View, and looked forty with a few wrinkles and bags and very thin looking skin. Same with Geraldine Page, at 50, in Trip to Bountiful. They're both beauties, but they both looked middle-aged. Compare to Nicole Kidman, age 50; Reese Witherspoon, 41, and Laura Dean, age 48, in Big Little Lies. In 30 years, our technological ability to erase or prevent the effects of time on women's bodies has progressed *fast*. Especially for someone formerly in a media career - like Serena Joy - with access to help and a reward system that insists she be perfect, she would cling to the illusion of youth and beauty. Men do it too, and men look younger for a lot longer these days. Serena could be late 40s, feeling she's out of biological time, even while not looking like it. And Serena did get shot - her assistant got killed, but Serena took a bullet; that injury maybe explains her limp.

being a smarmy, glad-handing, brown-nosing, corporate jargon addict? That feels like a pretty crappy downside to super-strength. I've been thinking about Daisy's eye makeup since the end of last season. There's a concept in the hacking world called "facial recognition dazzle" that takes the concept of dazzle (painting warships with high contrast, jagged lines as camouflage -- it worked really well before radar) that uses makeup and hair styles and some shapes of hats to confound the algorithms used to ID faces on surveillance cameras. In the real world, the makeup and hair are so far outside even avant garde/punk/extreme fashion that wearing the dazzle makes the wearer more likely to be noticed by humans, and thus defeats the purpose. The cameras might not catch you, but everyone you passed will remember. However, they've been trying to refine it, and one of the things heavy eyeliner and strong contouring can do is to change the match. If your file photo has natural makeup plus the dark circles under your eyes concealed, then wearing high fashion, high contour makeup with a heavy smoky eye and the dark circles emphasized will confuse the match. Which Hacker Skye would have known, or could have looked up, especially because she knows SHIELD's social media image scraping software. But the makeup artists for the show can't do actual facial recognition dazzle, because it doesn't make sense of you don't know the context, so Panda eyes/skate-punk was the compromise. On the ghosts: oh god, I hope this story wraps soon. I can deal with gross, mind control, parasites, vampires, werewolves, zombies, traitors, Hydra-Nazis, but ghosts are the thing that freaks me out -- they screw with the observer's sense of reality, make people think they're going crazy, don't necessarily have much physical power (though these seem to have some ability to interact with the world, at least near the reactor/cubes) but also there's no established way to get rid of them and these don't seem place-bound. (I know ghosts aren't real. Doesn't mean the idea of them doesn't make my skin crawl.) Hive as Satan vs everyone else who claimed the title: humans have a deep mythos about an ultimate, embodied evil that is cross-cultural, transcends religions and keeps enduring. Pretty much any creature who wants domination, destruction, mass enslavement, blood sacrifice, etc and who has done even a little bit of homework is going to play to that mythos. They were probably all at Woodstock, too.

This, plus another point. Sansa has had two of her suggestions fail -- the small Northern houses, and the Blackfish. She has to be uncertain of Littlefinger and the Vale army specifically on the basis of communication -- Ravens aren't email. One can send one out if the raven has been trained to go to its destination, but ravens can't be told to find a specific person. Thus why Lady Mormont had hers. The northern rebellion forces are on the move, so they haven't trained ravens to home on them. In theory, Littlefinger and the Vale army is also moving. Sansa's previous raven was more of a message in a bottle than an urgent text/voicemail/email. She has no way of knowing if she can actually get the Vale at all. Sansa has been humiliated so many times that I don't think she can bear much more, and to have her third military suggestion in a row fail may be more than she can afford to risk. Thus sitting on the information -- and especially once she knows that her strategic credit with Jon is getting thin and that he's committed to fighting Very Soon Now -- it's the emotionally safe bet. Because Sansa really wants -- maybe needs -- somebody's approval and Jon's what she's got. In that situation, it's better to delight and surprise than to fail and disappoint. Off that topic -- that kettling may have been the most terrifying piece of performance I've seen because damn, that was too realistic. I've been kettled, once, by a hostile but not actively murderous modern police force with a much higher level of jobsworth than a medieval-ish army. And with all of the protections of modernity, once inside the kettle, one gets really aware that this crowd is about this || far from panic and breaking into a stampede and crushing some significant fraction of the group. That high potential for panic is what makes kettling such a stupid and dangerous tactic for law enforcement.