BingeyKohan

Can you imagine what Sheila will say (to herself) about Greta if she turns up bald? I thought Bunny’s reaction to Sheila leaving town for a few days was odd. But I love how delighted Sheila is with everything Tyler makes.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take them to fully get into 1986 territory and how interesting the intervening time might be. I guess you could argue once Sheila is the success she seems to be in 86 there wouldn't be that much story left - but I'm also not sure this will get another season given that it's not much talked about. (I am enjoying it, to be clear.) They almost gave themselves too much runway - or maybe they shouldn't even have flashed forward to her ultimate success at all. I wonder specifically what would become of Bunny and Greta by 1986. My guess would be Sheila has fully left Bunny behind (and her family drama from her home country has played out and she lives a very very different life, perhaps even with Sheila having a nefarious hand in that) while Greta has come into her own and is running Sheila's business.

not much traction here! which I get - the show is a little challenging, on not the hottest streaming service around. I think I'm in though given that my other tv obsessions are over and I like the production design. I never did even finish GLOW for some reason but the initial (superficial) comparisons are not really that apt anyway. I do think the writing here for Sheila's internal monologue is pretty banal to be so central to how we experience her.

Agree with the above. I kind of respect them for being like - listen, we gave you a basically decent, kind hearted, rootable character in Kate. We gave you someone a little spikier with Mallory, around whom mileage may vary. We are allowed to have Jeanette be a fairly bad person, own that choice, and in the end drive it all the way home!

I guess I would chalk up the following as S2 speculation, ultimately, but beginning with a mini rant about the nagging feeling I get when it can appear in retrospect showrunners didn't always know where they were going to end up with their stories (or changed horses midstream based on outside forces). When they introduced the snowglobe fairly late in the season as this very important talisman from Martin's house I didn't understand why it supplanted the stolen yearbook from Martin's previous school - something also in Mallory's possession, stolen by Jeanette, but never really referenced again. Why make it a yearbook from his previous school if it wasn't going to lead them to a clue later? It could have been literally any object if it was going to serve no purpose except as a symbol of a secret pact between Jeanette and Mallory. In general the show fell into the trap of dropped or seemingly retconned details that seemed earlier on like they were going to be more significant (a fairly minor offense in the big scheme of things). But part of me wonders if there was a point in the season where they realized they might need more story for a future season so they decided to hold back on anything related to Martin's previous school and what might have happened there with another student like Kate, and that's why they decided to leave the yearbook hanging out there and only make a veiled reference to a former student who came forward after Kate was found. In Martin's final scene (when Kate killed him) he was wearing a sweatshirt with the Widow Falls initials. And I'm still perplexed by the 1987 date stamp on the photo of Martin in the basement that the actor posted to his IG the day of the finale. All that to say I wonder if they are thinking of orienting season 2 as a kind of prequel exploring what happened there, maybe even including the drive to Key West he described. I could see the jumping-off point being Mallory the budding documentarian deciding to dig into it as a filmmaking project. (Not saying I want more Mallory but the yearbook is still in her possession...) ETA: this would be a complicated path forward because then they are basically centering the franchise on an abuser who is not even an 'anti-hero' worth following around like that. But I can also imagine them getting network pressure to keep the franchise in the same universe as season 1 and play to their storytelling strengths.

It's interesting though - they did make a point of Kate's mom snarking that Kate had chopped her hair off right before going on national tv (in fact that's almost all kate's mom even did in the finale) and I feel like that was edited close in time to Jeannette's home haircut sequence. It seems believable to me she'd be going for Kate length but by the time she kept having to cut more and more from each side to even it up that mess is what she ended up with!

Yeah. I personally think the writers painted themselves into a couple of corners here and there - one being the shootout thing. It would have been easy to have the news report go something like "Police gained access to the home where Martin Harris was shot dead" -- we the viewers could believe from that the police shot him but they wouldn't have to work their way out of a major tv-reporting error that definitely would have been clarified (on the Marsha Bailey show no less!) I almost feel like they changed their mind later and sort of retconned it. Also - with Kate saying earlier 'something had changed' with Martin and that's when she 'met Annabelle' - I feel like they wrote and filmed that without knowing what it was going to turn out to be and then had to come up with a reason 'something had changed' so they concocted the offscreen police drop-by that raises as many questions as it answers.

WAIT. Jeanette's home haircut was because she saw that Kate had cut her long hair off (before her talk show appearance)? I did not catch that before because well... one of them probably had professional help and the other didn't so the results weren't that similar. But wow. That's a good detail!

Sort of like 'the americans' using 'with or without you' in their finale -- the music here was a little bit on the nose but also so undeniably perfect I can't complain about that.

But imagine that whoever Kate was accusing had confessed (which in Kate’s mind would have been a possibility) and they admitted, yep I saw you - but you weren’t in the basement … so what was up with that? Kate then has to explain things she didn’t want public. ETA idk why I’m nitpicking I really did love the show

One hand-wavey thing I still get (pointlessly) hung up on is how, if Kate’s story was basement from day one, no one ever pressed her on the physical impossibility of locking eyes with someone through a basement window much higher than eye level? This never came up in the trial prep process? I can’t remember if Jeanette ever made an off hand comment about that detail making Kate’s story vulnerable, at least in the public mind.

Back to Jeanette jumping straight to dead body when she heard Kate had been found … umm she thought the gunshot was Kate getting killed? Damn girl.

The ending was perfect. All those creepy smiles all along were breadcrumbs. The deadly shootout thing didn’t seem like the writers playing fair. But it doesn’t affect the overall story that much so I will forgive it.

How can everybody in this town pronounce Berenice?? I was Cruel Summer years old before I learned to pronounce it!

Final finale spec: Annabelle is the nickname of the universal remote that controls all the devices in the media closet teenage girls keep hiding in. If they try to escape their punishment is learning to use it. Kate, Jeanette, and Mallory band together and form a feminist punk collective called You Go Grrrl. The whole show has been a cautionary tale produced by the 700 Club, designed to show teens the dangers that await if they don’t take a promise ring seriously.

I don’t feel like the reveal that Annabelle was a gun would be particularly compelling (also, it seems Kate would have phrased it ‘when he showed me Annabelle’ or at least ‘when he introduced me to Annabelle’ vs ‘when I met’ her.) However — looking again at the tablet where Kate writes the name over and over it looks like she is trying to replicate the way she saw it in type rather than just using her natural handwriting (and making it big and creepy for effect) So I wonder if the gun was inscribed with the name for some reason and that’s what the script looked like. (The little bird Kate also drew could either mean it was a hunting gun or it could just symbolize that Annabelle led to her freedom, in a weird way)

I reallly don't get why they made a point of showing Charles' daughter seeking out Liza for a sweet moment expressing relief she was back in their lives if the very next scene in that house would be Liza and Charles admitting it's over. Yes, the kids would have had a bit of a Liza to Quinn back to Liza then no one (even their father leaving for Yaddo) roller coaster even if they HADN'T shown the daughter scene - but that was just a bummer of a reminder of it, with no point at all since it's not like they established later it was a reason Liza would be ambivalent about closing the Charles chapter. It would have made sense if Liza and Charles stayed together but since they didn't all it does it sh*t on the children.

Their whole who’s paying for dinner thing was so dumb. Was it supposed to be cute? Cass made Maggie come all the way up to Harlem and had already established she was going to pay. Then she gives her way too little money, then indicates she will pay after all, then offers to venmo her even though she is paying. It wouldn’t be so maddening if it hadn’t taken up half their screen time together when they were supposed to be establishing smoking hot chemistry.

ITA! Thought that all along. Now a new pastor at a mega church I could see. It made me wonder if they intended it to be a church community at first then changed it to a school connection for some reason. Re the case wouldn’t Jeanette have to prove that Kate was not only demonstrably incorrect but made up the story with malicious intent? That’s such a high bar - her only standing (as far as establishing Kate motive) would be Kate’s resentment that Jeanette had taken over her friends and boyfriend. But then it would be in Jeanette’s best legal interests to keep that boyfriend through the trial to drive home her point.

It feels sort of like the Mad Men finale (but way way worse, hopefully that goes without saying) with Liza staying at the safe, established company (like Peggy) and Kelsey going out west (like Don).

I kind of enjoy Jeannette in the 93 TL (the others not so much). She had such housefire girl energy when she spotted Martin at the mall!

Jeanette’s Dad was actually kind of a creep himself in this episode for someone who purportedly shouldn’t suspect anything. Is that his *actual* away from home personality? lol. Can you imagine what it would have been like to film this episode? Seems like it would have been as suffocating to make as it felt to watch.

I know there's a lot more payoff (especially emotionally) that we'll get out of the finale than this ... but we have 1 week for final speculation on what or who Annabelle is ... am I remembering correctly Kate said she met Annabelle on the day she escaped? If so it doesn't seem like the 'warning' Martin appears to issue in the preview really dissuaded her!

Knowing Kate spent so long 'above stairs' (to get all Downton Abbey) puts a different spin on Martin's 'this part will be over soon' line when Kate was below stairs (and drugged). I wonder if he knew from experience there was the part where they are there willingly. Then there's the part where they are not. Then there's the part where they give up. (not to be bleak)

In some ways I am retroactively surprised that they didn’t know this was a series finale - it felt pretty satisfying to me. But from the sound of the BTS discord maybe the writers knew they just didn’t bother telling anyone else.