fishcakes

I think it's because Hai and Omar both understand that if they did a men's alliance that they would be on the bottom of it. I might be misremembering, but the initial discussions about it only included Rocksroy, Mike, and Jonathan, and their reasoning was that they were the big, strong guys who are always targeted. I kind of doubt they include Hai and Omar in that group even though both been impressive in challenges, but right now they're needed for numbers so "men's alliance" is a good way to sell it. If it got down to the five, though, Hai and Omar would probably be out unless they won immunity/won the F4 fire challenge.

This is hilarious to me that three different writers can remember that Monk has a crush on Joey Heatherton when so many other things on the show (his phobias, the timeline) are inconsistent, which I've just chalked up to different writers and an inattentive showrunner. Maybe Joey just has a psychosexual hold on all the men in that general age group.

Tori got an advantage that no one else had, in that she got to play her shot in the dark after she knew all the votes were for her. Everyone else who's played it has had to do so before the votes were revealed. So had she ended up safe, I do think Lindsay should have had the same opportunity to play her SITD as well.

It's interesting because going into TC, both Drea and Maryann needed to play their idols for game reasons. Drea was the main target and Maryann was the bounceback. (And the fact that Tori, whom everyone had claimed to want out since the merge, wasn't the bounceback, certainly speaks to the perception that Drea and Maryann ended up with once they saw Rocksroy on the jury.) By the end of TC, arguably neither of them needed to play idols for game reasons -- we've seen before people say they're playing an idol so that no one will vote for them and then not play the idol -- but at that point they both needed to play them for symbolic reasons. If they say, "I'm playing my idol because I want to break the streak of all the Black players going out in a row" and then NOT played their idols, the reaction would have been that they "played the race card" 🙄 as a game strategy and that ThIs PrOvEs ThAt ThEy ArE tHe ReAl RaCiStS. Not playing idols would have hurt them in the game on a long-term but not short-term basis, but it also would have made the audience devalue the very valid points they were making about privilege and burdens and having to hide your true self and feelings so as not to make people like Jonathan, for example, feel like you're being "aggressive." Their choices were to either hide their emotions and play their idols so one of them doesn't go out for game reasons, or don't hide their emotions but play their idols so they don't get accused of being manipulative. I think they made the better choice, but I hate that they had to make it.

They all have to be used at the same time, but if an amulet holder leaves the game before the amulets are used, then the remaining ones gain in power. From the Survivor wiki:

No, they did have a problem with Rocksroy. It was Tori that no one mentioned. After Romeo talked to Rocksroy, he went to Omar and then Omar went to Hai. Omar and Hai were upset with Rocksroy but moreso about Romeo freaking out. Then Hai went to Jonathan and got the vote switched to Romeo. When Mike was working on getting it switched back to Chanelle, he told Hai that he didn't want Rocks not to trust them and Hai kind of snippily said "obviously he doesn't trust us now." No idea if other people were mad that Tori had started the whole thing, but the only thing we saw on the show was Omar and Hai blaming Rocksroy.

I don't know why everyone said Romeo was causing chaos. He was scrambling, but it was Tori who started that by telling him that his name was being floated when there was no reason for her to do that. Of course he would go to Rocksroy to confirm, since Romeo knows that Rocksroy has no use for Tori and would be unlikely to tell her anything, but then Rocksroy got flustered or is bad at strategic lies and said he heard Romeo's name too. No wonder Romeo was paranoid. Tori is like a bad luck charm. She makes an alliance with Zach and Zach gets voted out. She makes an alliance with Swati and Swati gets voted out. She gives Romeo information and Romeo very nearly gets voted out. Everyone out there should just start running when they see Tori coming toward them. I had to laugh at the IC when Maryanne sits out, Lindsay sits out, Drea sits out and there's no reaction. Then Omar sits out and everyone is hugging and backslapping him. Any woman who's ever had a job is, like, well doesn't this feel familiar.

Does Chanelle know which game is checkers and which game is chess? All signs point to no.

I might be misremembering some of this, but I read somewhere that the way it happened IRL was that the request originated from the Sheriff’s Department. They routinely send batches of evidence destruction requests to the DA for closed cases. (This part sounds believable.) But according to Askey, the request on the Betsy Faria case was made in error, and then someone in the DA’s office — not her — signed her name. (This part sounds like pants on fire.) I do think Askey signed off on it, but whether she asked the Sheriff to send the request or someone there did it deliberately to coverup their bad investigation both seem equally likely to me. It wasn’t clear what happened after that, but apparently the evidence was not destroyed, so someone was alert enough to realize it was still an open case and they needed to preserve the evidence.

I don't disagree. It's a judgment call, and I think had anyone noticed it could have gone the other way, and I would have preferred that, but mostly because I think her reaction would be hilarious.

Oh, that's ... I mean, we were so close to getting rid of her. Argh. Here's a screencap: The I is narrower at one end than the other, and she didn't place them the same way. My guess though is that Jeff just didn't notice, but also, I think it would be hard to say which I is upside down there. I guess it would depend on how they were placed on the starting table. In the future, they should either make letters that look the same upside down symmetrical or Jeff should make an announcement that the letters have a top and bottom and they have to place them correctly. Here, I think Tori should have lost. Ben lost an immunity challenge in the HHH season because he placed a U upside down, so in order to be consistent, I think Tori should not have been called the winner here. I can see the argument on the opposite side, though, that it's not obviously upside down the way a U would be, but I've had enough of Tori, so I'm going with, nope, she's not the true winner.

If the instincts that made Askey prosecute Russ are the same ones that told her it would be a good idea to do a Dateline interview, then she needs to be George Costanza from now on and always do the opposite. It wasn't just all the sarcasm and defiant justification; she also flat-out lied at least twice. First saying that her theory of the game night buddies covering for Russ wasn't her accusing them of conspiracy in the murder, she just thought they were covering for him meeting up with his girlfriend as, she says, they had done "many times." But he had no girlfriend! It was just another story she completely made up. Then the trace amounts of blood on his feet, which she says they couldn't identify as belonging to anyone, so it was probably Betsy's. Keith Morrison: "in fact, it was Russ's blood." And her claim that in the second trial, they had so much more evidence that if they'd had it earlier, Russ would have confessed, but when Keith asked her what the evidence was, she named a couple of things that amounted to nothing: Russ's feet and a kitchen towel. And even with all this "new evidence" 🙄 she didn't win her second case. And the judge was even like, "um who investigated this case, were they higher primates or no?" When she said that her failure to investigate Pam in the first place and the murder of Louis Gumpenberger were unrelated to each other, I wanted to reach through the TV and smack her. One thing I noticed is that she never directly said that she still believes Russ is guilty. She's very careful to say that it was a valid prosecution based on the evidence that was "brought" to her (as if she had zero input in that investigation), and when Keith asked her if she still thinks Russ did it, she doesn't say yes, she just said something like, "I've never seen any evidence that points to anyone else." She's really weaselly about it, so someone may be advising her that if she continues to say he killed Betsy that Russ could bring a defamation suit based on that, and she wouldn't be protected by governmental immunity for statements she makes now. They kind of buried the bombshell at the end, though: three investigators saying Leah asked them to lie and a new inquiry into misconduct on her part. If the inquiry determines that she did try to get investigators to lie, a lot of people who were prosecuted by Leah are going to have their cases reopened. She didn't just ruin the lives of Russ and his family and the Gumpenbergers, she probably fucked over other innocent people. And guilty people also deserve fair trials, so if those prosecutions were corrupted by her, then they should get new trials too. Just hard to underestimate the damage she did. Haha, that was my reaction too.

Also most firefighters (at least in metro fire departments, where I assume he worked) are EMTs and a lot of them are paramedics. He almost certainly has a fair amount of medical knowledge too.

Those guys seem to win a minority of the time. In that category, I'd only put Tony (alpha), Mike (challenge beast), Yul (alpha, but he beat Ozzy, who was a challenge beast), Boston Rob and Tom Westman (who tick all the boxes, but neither of them won every season they played). What's wrong with Applebee's? (I mean, other than being an aggressively mediocre chain restaurant that forced us to sit through a commercial disguised as entertainment). They have a long history of abusive and discriminatory employment practices. They made a big show recently of firing an exec whose "ha ha this is how to best exploit our workers and lowball them on wages!" email (with the congratulatory high-fives from recipients included) got leaked on social media, but they've had numerous EEOC complaints and lawsuits filed against them for wage theft, sexual harassment, and racial and sexual orientation discrimination over at least the last ten years. I have no opinion about their food; I think I ate there once a long time ago, but that might have been a Chili's. And I certainly don't blame anyone on Survivor for pounding down a bunch of their wings and burgers after having almost no food for two weeks, but personally I won't spend money in one of their restaurants.

I'm going to have to watch it again to understand what exactly happened, but that was a fascinating episode. Drea, Jonathan, and Hai were like three royals trying to unite their kingdoms against the upstart countries of Tori and Chanelle. Then here comes Omar, as the Cromwell to Jonathan's King Henry, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, targeting an innocent to protect his own faction, but ruthlessly ambitious on his own behalf. On the other hand, are these people stupid or what? You can't have an alliance of eight people (which is really ten people because Jonathan and Drea are whistling nonchalantly when Maryann and Romeo's names come up). If it had gone the way they wanted, then the alliance would be finished after the next two tribal councils, which is what? Two days? As it played out, the alliance didn't even survive a full day intact. "Oh no Lydia is already targeting someone in her alliance." Of course she was; EVERYONE is in the alliance. wtf. Tori was entertaining, but I'm ready to see her go now. She was genuinely mad at Rocksroy for turning back time and seemed to believe her own BS about how she sent him to Exile to help him. She's so ridiculous. Watching her and Maryann talk strategy was like watching two kids playacting Survivor; Maryann spouts some inspiration poster nonsense and Tori's reaction is like, WHOA YOU ARE DEEP. Please don't eat at Applebee's.

Randall Park is a gem. He pokes fun at what (fictionally) happened to his own acting career every week, and he was shoveling in the ice cream sundae like he was going to the chair.

Real Pam looks like a beat down Martha Plimpton.

She said he got into the car with her and was waving the knife around, so she knocked it out of his hand and ran into the house. Then he busted the door down and got into the house. That would have been a ludicrous story even if the physical evidence matched it, but it didn't. The knife was neatly tucked between the seat and the center console and the door wasn't damaged. I also wonder if the real Pam was making a sandwich when the detective arrived, which normally I would think was far-fetched, but knowing the other stuff she's done and said, it just seems medium-Pam.

I don't think the families were denied anything by there not being a trial; in general victims' families find the trials excruciating, and it's enough for them that the person who committed the crime is punished. There probably would have been more satisfaction if she had pleaded guilty and had to allocute the details of her crime on the record, but Pam was probably never going to do that in a way that would be acceptable for the guilty plea to go through. I am a little surprised that the court allowed an Alford plea though; a lot of jurisdictions won't accept them in murder cases. It's amazing that the first woman got into the car with her based on the sketchy story of "recreating 911 calls for Dateline but you can't bring a wallet or phone or keys because they don't like clutter." She was suspicious enough to carry her phone and a knife, but in that case, why get into the car at all? Maybe she was in dire financial straits, but still ... I had wondered how clueless Pam's husband had to have been all these years, but now I think he knew what Pam was doing and just didn't care. I mean, he and his new wife are still living in the house where she murdered someone. I don't see how he could do that unless he was completely amoral.

I loved the dry cleaner. She had Mr. Monk as a separate line item on her price list. My least liked episode is probably Mr. Monk and the Big Reward, where he's looking for the diamond stolen in a museum heist. It has a slapstick quality that I didn't care for and the story itself is just irritating to me for some reason: Natalie forcing him into the job, the three bounty hunters following him around, the hostile cleaning lady, the woman who keeps confessing stupid stuff to Randy. The good part of it though is that it's one of the few episodes actually filmed in San Francisco. It's such a distinctive looking city that it's pretty obvious that the show is usually filmed elsewhere, although the exterior of Monk's apartment building always looks right. Still just #1 (Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse) and #3 (Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu). They both have similar plot points to the episodes Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing and Mr. Monk and the Badge, but are different enough that it's not like reading a novelization of the script. I've got the next few on my library hold list.

I'm so glad Production is letting the players have real clothes again. Glad for them because it must be miserable to walk around freezing in just your damp underwear for however many days, and glad for me because I am beyond sick of seeing the outlines of everyone's unpixelated reproductive organs.

Both Daniel and Chanelle are bad, unpredictable players and a danger to the other three, but I disliked Daniel more, so I'm glad he's gone. Chanelle will flip at the merge, but so would Daniel, and he's such a transparent weasel that he might have made a goat immunity run to the end. I had been thinking Jonathan, Omar, and Lindsay were the core alliance just bringing Maryann along, but now I'm not so sure. Twice now we've seen Omar listening with apparent sympathy as Maryann complains about Jonathan. And Lindsay, who's playing Let's Never Shut Up with Maryann, seems to be on the same page as Jonathan when he complains about Maryann, but I remember how she seemed to be completely in sync with Marya too, right before she voted her out. So I have no idea where the alliances really are on that tribe. I hope it's not Jonathan on the outs though because Maryann really lost me with the super-duper dramatics over how Jonathan almost amputated her foot in her workspace. Her workspace. Shut up. Rocksroy and Lydia both playing it exactly right at the Prisoner's Dilemma by acting like they knew nothing about their own tribe dynamics. Well, in Rocksroy's case, that's probably true, but I was impressed that he realized this means his social game is lacking. If he can adjust his stubbornly linear way of playing the game, he might do okay. Drea and Romeo still probably want to work with him over Tori, but it really doesn't matter since Tori has already said she's going to flip at the first opportunity. Rocksroy, Drea, and Romeo will have no choice but to stick together.

I think it's okay; if at some point Trudy had found out Molly was still alive, she would have wanted to raise her and then Monk would have been her stepdad. Presumably he functions in her life now as a second dad. It's a little odd, but then all of his relationships are. I don't think so. I've only read the first and third books (I know, it hurts my OCD too, but someone has book 2 checked out). I don't remember her being mentioned at all in the first book and by the third, she and the Captain are already separated, and there's no more explanation there than there was in the show. I doubt she figures in the second book because it takes place in Hawaii, so the Captain's probably not in it much either -- he's even kind of a minor figure in the third book. Really, since the books are narrated by Natalie, they feel like they're more about her than anyone. Yeah, by the time we knew the story behind her death, Dale the Whale was pretty superfluous. It seems like they originally intended for him to be the one who ordered Trudy's murder since he hated her and knew so many details about her death, but then they decided against it for some reason, probably something mundane like how much of a pain it was to put someone in that horrendous fat suit and prosthetics. Maybe that's why they kept switching actors too; it's supposed to take hours to get into that kind of costume so I could see why an actor would hate it so much they wouldn't want to do it again.

Leland was so in love with Karen, but it was funny and pretty realistic when he moved on so quickly. Some people just can't be alone, and evidently he's one of them. When Monk told him Linda was a murderer, his first instinct was to be more mad at Monk for ruining his "last chance" than he was at Linda for killing someone. I just discovered my library does not have all 19 Monk books; it only has 18. This is so wrong. If he worked in that library, he'd either replace the missing one or throw away the other 18.

I'm in Monk withdrawal and I discovered that my library has all 19 of the Mr. Monk books, which I didn't expect to be very good, and halfway through the first one, that seems like it was a good prediction. It's not terrible, but I can't see anyone who doesn't love the show reading these. They're written by two of the show's writers, and you can see why there were inconsistencies in the episodes (like sometimes Monk can ride in the back seat of a car and sometimes he can't, he's afraid of elevators/he's not afraid of elevators) because there are a lot of out-of-character things in the book. He's drinking milk, throwing trash on the ground, telling Natalie he's glad she's in his life; he would never do any of that. I will still probably read all of these though, heh.