Tabbyclaw

Wow. Real life renders me useless for a while (really sorry about that, guys; new job is taking a lot more out of me than I expected it to) and I come back to this. I feel like I need that .gif of Troy coming back from getting the pizzas in the Darkest Timeline.

I don't think it was intentionally funny, I think it just came out that way.

That may have been excessive, but I'm not gonna pretend I've never wished a horrific fate on an obnoxious customer. In the case of this particular vision, at least, I think he was seeing the present. This is a good summing-up of how I feel, too, I think. I've liked the overall plot of this season intellectually, but it's not hitting me emotionally the way it should.

When Holt talked about being addicted to playing the ponies, my first thought was, "This show is nuts enough that I would be completely unsurprised if the flashback was of him buying massive numbers of My Little Ponies or Breyer figures."

That's exactly what was going through my head the entire episode. She's got the same clipped, brusque delivery. I enjoyed the entire episode, but for me the best part was the very end. Henry's chagrin was great, and Eliza's delight was so sweet and candid that it almost felt like I was watching an outtake rather than a scripted show.

Another possible callback that hadn't occurred to me at first is Audrey's old fantasy. She says in an early episode that when she was a kid she used to daydream that her mother would come for her in a big bus and rescue all the kids, not just her. If Charlotte has the ability to stop the Troubles, she's doing just that.

On the one hand, the "secret parent" reveal is one of the more played-out ones in television. But on the other hand, the very first reason Audrey had for staying in Haven, way back in the pilot before she knew anything else was going on, was to find information about her mother. This is the callback to end all callbacks.

I've been hearing Marshmallow World for years, but never knew that's what it was called until people started complaining about it here. I always just knew it as "that other obnoxious song that gets played constantly in my store and which I can't understand a word of." (To distinguish it from "that one obnoxious song that gets played constantly in my store and which I can't understand a word of," which I later learned to be "Christmas Wrapping.")

Oh, Tumblr. I can always count on you to validate my crazy.

When we first got introduced to Wendy's friends in the convenience store episode, I remember looking at Lee and Nate and vaguely thinking, "I could totally believe that those two have tiny crushes on each other and aren't consciously aware of it." I think this episode made me just a little bit more convinced of that. Mabel's conversation with Robbie had all my favorite lines of the night. I got a laugh out of her identifying herself as "girl DIpper," and then completely lost it when she 'affectionately' described Robbie as "human rat poison."

Voice-wise, I think he was closer to Motor Ed from Kim Possible. I was expecting him to end every other sentence with "seriously."

My friend and I have been chanting "Gaze upon death!" at each other ever since we watched this.

Cute little thing I noticed: The background music at the beginning of the episode was Bastille's "Flaws," which is a bit perfect. An excerpt from the lyrics:

As my Thanksgiving plans are all local and will take very little of my time (the overnight Black Friday cashiering shift, on the other hand...), I am fine with whatever schedule y'all decide on.

It really does. A lot more than the HD reasoning. (Look, I'm not trying to protect anyone out of insider knowledge, because the only living player whose alignment I know is me. I just really think the 'calm' thing is a terrible clue.) And in the interest of "we gotta go after someone" and this line of reasoning making sense to me, I'll go with it. 3 to David Lynch The Crazed Spruce (SVNBob, Dougal, Tabbyclaw); 7 to shout obscenities into the trunk of his car. 4 to David Lynch Halcyon Days (BizBuzz, writingdreamer, Silverstormm, The Crazed Spruce); 5 to rock you like a hurricane. Edited because it took me a long time to post and Dougal added himself before I did.

I have nothing to say about the crux of this episode -- I liked it and it intrigued me, but I have not been well this week and my brain is kinda too shot for in-depth discussion right now -- but I have two small thoughts: 1. I think they handled the idea of someone who's bigoted against the Troubled but completely fine with her daughter being gay with just the right level of "obvious without beating it into the audience." But I feel like that subthread would have fit better in an earlier-season episode. 2. Major props to the makeup department for making Audrey look just plain sick, and to Emily Rose for a viscerally upsetting, painful-sounding cough.

I'm going to be endearingly(?) pedantic in the way of English majors everywhere, but I think 'grace under pressure' calmness is as far from 'halcyon' as you can get. "Never let them see you sweat" is about deception, not tranquility. Although it is a little odd to see the phrase twice in quick succession like that. Maybe it's referring to someone whose username is backwards, showing the opposite of their true intentions?

That's it exactly! There's stuff goin' on, and we've already lost two heroes, and I don't want us to lose any more. I want to rally our defenses, but I don't know where to start.

Yeah, I got a pretty amazing amount of nothin' this time. Doesn't help that sleep has been aggressively eluding me lately.

The versions of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" by Placebo and Within Temptation. I don't like the original at all, but both of those are among my most-played songs.

As if we needed permission. Barkeep! Your finest hot chocolate, and don't skimp on the whipped cream!

Was it the word 'squirrelly' making you think of both crazy and trees? 'Cause I gotta admit, my brain went there.

The problem with this is that Kirk didn't appear to be changing the amount of air in the building, just its composition. Sticking your head out the window will get you an extra lungful (at least until the area of effect spreads, if it was going to), but it's not going to actually draw oxygen-rich air into the building because there's no vacuum to fill.

Got mine.

This one was a fun ride. Not quite the level of cascading-Trouble chaos that I was hoping for, but we did get some. I'm with those who're a little bit 'really?' about Pete's death deactivating the Troubles caused by the contagion. Potential further evidence for Charlotte being the new Troubles-whisperer: Dave's leg started improving after she dealt with it. Between what we've seen of his Trouble and Mara's comment about one of his ancestors taking a cannonball straight to the chest, it looks like bullets are specifically drawn to his center mass, not just his body in general, and I would expect that Dwight knows this by now. He, like Nathan, knows more than he should about getting shot. Hell, they've probably got a bet going about who can get shot more times in one day and keep on going. I'm also not going to complain about the magic kevlar being a bullet cure-all, because they've got that in common with every TV show ever. I'm enjoying Mara's manipulation of Duke, in that horrible way that I enjoy things that make characters I love suffer. Mara has enough experience to know how to find the cracks in people's armor, and enough of Audrey left in her to know where a lot of Duke's already were. She's basically going down the list of manipulation tactics with him: isolating him, pressuring him to confide in her, making herself look like the only reliable party, and now making him complicit in a murder. My Australian's current theory: Audrey is made of Aether that was pulled directly out of Duke, which explains both her lack of vitality and the fact that Duke hasn't needed to vent since she showed up.