Tabbyclaw

This is a guy who was preparing to participate in mass murder of the Troubled on the orders of a dead man. This is a group that thinks Nathan, whose trouble harms no one but himself, is a dangerous freak. This is not a train that makes frequent stops at Logic Station "So just stop doing that thing" is not an option. To look at the wider picture of what's coming up next, It definitely was for me, given that I'd just picked up the show. Went through the first two seasons in about a month, and then had to wait and wait for the next one. It's also my favorite cliffhanger to date on this show, mostly because of the intensity of the acting in the last scene. (Have I mentioned lately that I love the acting on this show? Because I do. I'm not sure if I've made that clear.) The dead are coming back to settle old scores, and they're using the living to do it. It's so much of what's going on in this show, and I love that they devoted an episode to making it literal. And just in case you weren't completely picking up on the story they're telling, there's that lovely shot of Simon's headstone, showing that he was the same age as Duke when he died. Everything in this town is cyclical, and as Duke points out right now they're only finding temporary fixes.

Yeah, I'm putting all my other TV plans on hold for the next month to get through the last two seasons. But on the plus side, it'll encourage me to get on the treadmill more.

Having recently been exposed to Due South, I need to add a couple moment from that. Most of the background pop music was utterly unsuitable for the contexts they used it in -- look, I know it was a Canadian production in the mid-90s but that's still no excuse for using that much Sarah McLachlan -- but whenever they got the characters to sing onscreen it was a sight to behold and a sound to behear. And there were two exceptions to the general failure of the non-diegetic music: the use of Captain Tractor's Celtic-punk rendition of "Drunken Sailor" over the previouslies of the third season finale, and ending the series finale with a beautiful rendition of "Northwest Passage."

"Duke discovers a troubling secret." Leave the puns to the episode title guys, DVD box summary guys. Ah yes, the kissing episode, also known as the "It's a good thing Nathan doesn't smile like that more often or he'd be mobbed worse than Chris Brody" episode. Also the "Duke and Dwight really should talk more often" episode, the "Nathan chooses a side" episode, and the "What is your deal, every member of the older generation except Lucy Ripley" episode. There is just so damn much going on in this one, as befits what is essentially the first half of a two-part season finale in all but name. I sort of have a theory about the small box, but it's still percolating. as for the rest of the stuff with Simon, I don't even know. I have some more solid theories about his treatment of Duke, but they're way spoilery at this point. As for his visit to Lucy Ripley (I find myself incapable of typing just her first name), of all the possibilities out there the one I still think is most likely is "someone else claimed to be him for reasons as-yet unknown."

*screaming internally* *screaming externally for good measure*

Whenever my best friend and I are shocked by a brilliant plot twist on one of our shows, one of us will inevitably ask,"How did we miss that?" The only proper response is the Doctor's "Perception filter, or maybe we're just thick."

Hi, Alex Carter! You're not quite on a Mark Sheppard level of stalking me, but you do seem to pop up everywhere. This is a solid episode. We've got plot, we've got mystery, we've got violence, we've got Dwight, we've got people gettin' killed as needed killin', we've got an awesome Melissa Etheridge song, and we've got attractive people with guns. Really, is there anything else we need?

Chris Brody, so annoying they had to kick him out of town twice. For me, this episode has always had more than a whiff of "Whoops, this plotline isn't going to work the way we thought it would; better kill some characters." Evi's death doesn't even read like a fridging, it's just running out of ideas and making a character do something stupid. The shakeup and new leadership at the police department is even more absurd, a much-talked-up threat that lasts exactly long enough to kill one person, put everyone else in peril for a couple hours, and reveal Dwight's Trouble before the new chief dies and his people just...wander off, I guess? Like "The TidesThat Bind," this episode is a couple interesting ideas tangled in a plot that just doesn't really work.

Has anyone here tried the Starbucks sodas yet? I keep telling myself I'll try them out, but every time I go in looking for something other than coffee I get seduced by the new iced teas.

It was definitely made more disappointing by the price! But unusual food is one of my big hobbies, so splurging a little is a common thing for me. The real kicker is that I ended up not liking the taste of the meat itself, but I'm not writing venison off entirely until I have a chance to eat it as prepared by someone who knows better than I what they're doing. Aside from a few cuts -- including one that was made by a brand-new Cutco paring knife, so you can imagine how impressive it was -- the only cooking mishap I've had where the damage was to me rather than the food was last year. I was adding sliced onions to a pan of hot oil and lost my grip on the bowl, dropping all the onions in at once and sending oil everywhere, including all over the inside of my forearm. But I remained calm and remembered to do the most important thing first: I grabbed my mother and got her to come out and stir the onions while I tended to the burn.

Diet cherry 7-Up is my usual soda of choice, on the rare occasion when I drink it anymore. I didn't quit for any conscious reasons, I just got lazy about buying it and putting it in the fridge. I can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, especially the caffeine-free, which is the only thing I can have. When I have flavor options at a fountain, I go for raspberry whenever it's available and vanilla when it's not.

I live for the cherry ones in February. It's such an artificial taste, but I weirdly love it.

Oh, grilling. Yeah, I have a fun grilling story. I was feeling experimental and snagged a package of venison steaks from the Asian market. Two thin flank steaks, vacuum-sealed. Did some research on the best way to cook them, made up a marinade, the whole bit. Put them on the grill, let them cook for a while, went to flip them over... and discovered that there were four very thin steaks in the package. They'd been vacuum-sealed intensely enough that they'd stuck together. I tried to compensate on the cooking and turning to make everything come out even, but the ones on the bottom were already overdone and the ones on the top were totally temperature-confused.

New York strip steak with Trader Joe's coffee and garlic rub. Very...interesting. A surprisingly muted taste. Accompanied by stuffed mushrooms, because a friend of mine was asking for a stuffed mushroom recipe and Mom said she'd dig hers up for him, but only if I made some tonight.

Neither. Peanut butter.

D) I can't take it anymore.

My most recent attempt at making bread was an object lesson in "trust your instincts." Yeast smells weird, yes, but it shouldn't smell that weird. Yeast that smells that weird has ceased to be yeast in any culinarily-valuable sense. Yeast that smells that weird makes bread that doesn't rise, smells like cheap beer, and has the approximate consistency of a pan of brownies. Very dry brownies. Even my dad, who's famous for having no sense of taste, wouldn't eat it.

Tonight it's chicken in a peach sauce over rice. Awesome and easy recipe from an unexpected source: the back of a Heinz malt vinegar bottle.

This episode's opening scene may be the best of the series so far, at least in terms of making you go, "Okay, I'm intrigued." And then the rest of the episode follows through. I always forget it's one of the good ones until I rewatch it. This is one of the ones where the plot thickens for everyone. I love every second of Audrey's interactions with the copy. It was a great and unexpected way to allow her to talk out her feelings about her identity, and it's just so very her for it to have started as just a way to distract him before it accidentally became real. We get the Rev's first direct strike against Nathan, and Nathan's drunk reaction, and Duke's discovery of whose side Evi is really on. And as for Duke himself, I have so much headcanon about his teen years, and almost all of it is informed by how he reacts to Henry in this episode.

I feel the need to point out that sometimes when television characters say "literally," they really do mean it: