Tabbyclaw

They chirp! As the description says it's a lot louder in person, but it's still a tiny sound and you'd be hard-pressed to confuse it with the sound of a small bird, let alone a raptor screech. My area has a big bat population and the park where I walk in the evenings has a major colony under one of the bridges, and even when they're flooding out by the hundreds just a couple dozen yards away they're not particularly loud.

Look, Media. I can accept that you're going to use the red-tailed hawk screech for every bird of prey of every species that crops up on a screen. It's just one of those things we've all learned to shrug our shoulders at because really, there's only so far we expect our entertainment to go for realism. But when you use it for a cloud of bats you can be damn sure I'm gonna give you the side-eye.

The title quote reminded me of Ben's response on Parks and Rec when Andy thought Buckingham Palace was Hogwarts. "Hogwarts isn't a real place. You know that, right? It's important to me that you know that."

Okay, I'm charmed and I'm in.

I've said before that Rose's Mara is a slightly shaky portrayal, but she is absolutely nailing the transitions between Mara and Audrey, and Audrey's disorientation and desperation.

Between him and Andy, I appreciate this show's awareness that demons are far less icky than creepy possessive guys. The reunions were the best part of this episode for me. Very little in this televisual world that I love more than happy hugs, especially platonic male/female ones. Rest of the episode didn't really enthrall me the way the first season did, but I think that was more on me and my sleep deprivation lately than the show. I'm still totally on board for the upcoming season.

First of this series, but there have been other webisodes during season 3. If memory serves, the only significant detail they gave was the full account of what happened to Dwight's daughter.

A new recipe tonight: porc hoisin et ses nouilles a l'ail. AKA hoisin pork and garlic noodles. Someone occasionally drops off French-language cookbooks at my local secondhand bookstore, and I have retained just enough high school and college French to follow an easy recipe. Mostly. I'll admit I'm relying on context clues for some of the instructions. Right or wrong, it still came out pretty tasty.

Whatever happens in the Barn to wipe the old personality, it didn't happen to Audrey. Yeah, we got Lexie, but she was more of a "patch" that William broke through pretty easily. Audrey was still right under the surface the entire time.

"We do what you're paying us to do, and we do it better than our competitors" is basically the message of every commercial ever, and they have a direct competitor that's famous for mishandling luggage. It's not like they invented a worry that nobody had before this commercial just so they could say "But we'll save you from this thing that doesn't actually happen."

Since it keeps coming up, I want to add my two cents about the breathing difficulties. My respiratory system is probably the healthiest part of my body. I was enrolled at birth in a study that's been tracking my respiratory health ever since, and at my last check they said my lung capacity was 111% of what was expected for my age range and overall fitness level. I have no allergies and no other conditions that would cause congestion. And yet when I have to breathe exclusively through my nose I start to feel uncomfortable and like I'm not getting enough air immediately. And what's the body's automatic response to that? Trying to breathe deeper, and if that doesn't work you start to tick over into panic mode. When you're trying not to panic you find something to focus on to ground yourself, which isn't an easy thing to do when you already spend your life compensating for the loss of one sense and have just had two more stripped away. So no, nothing about the way Nathan reacted struck me as false or stupid.

I wish we'd seen more of the bandaging scene, because I so love the mental picture of Duke berating Nathan with "When you've been shot, you lead with that information, jackass!" The impression I got was that Nathan wasn't on the ground because he was in physical distress, but because of the emotional and mental toll that the day was starting to take on him. He didn't need (for a "getting back on his feet" value of need, not a "continued health and survival" one) medical help so much as he needed someone to pat him on the shoulder and say, "That's rough, buddy." And as Duke pointed out, he knows a disturbing amount about getting shot and how much his body can take. Of course, more than anything else I think Nathan just needs to curl up with someone sympathetic and have a good cry, but like he's going to let himself slow down long enough for that.

It's going to be a year of "Oh, Duke" with the implication of 'come here and let me hug you' and "Oh, Nathan" with the implication of 'what are we going to do with you, son.' My final comment on this episode as I was watching it live was "And just when Nathan was about to not do the stupid thing." But, as I have said before, this show is really good at making characters do plausible stupid things that totally fit with their other actions, as opposed to shoehorning in moments of inexplicable idiocy to further the plot. I feel like "When I return, you shall be spared my wrath" is one of those lines that every actor dreams of getting to say one day, and as far as I'm concerned Emily Rose hammed it up the exact right amount. Mara isn't as seamless as her other personas -- there are definitely times when I'm seeing an actor rather than a character -- but it's still a fairly solid performance and I like watching it. As for Jennifer, dammit. I knew she wasn't getting found alive, but I was really hoping for "ambiguously missing and maybe we can talk the actress into returning at some point." But I suppose if they did that our characters would look pretty cold just abandoning any efforts to find her and bring her back And if her death was inevitable, at least they gave her a decent sendoff. I'd definitely be interested to see them do that; it would be a neat inversion of the beginning of last season when Duke was the one keeping Nathan on track.

I don't think it's strategy because she looked pretty confused as to why she wasn't pulling the trigger. "Other personalities are creeping in" seems like the most likely scenario to me right now, but whether it's just Audrey (because she was never "properly" wiped) or all of them I don't know. I'll also point out that some of Mara's needling of Nathan about Audrey was written and delivered very similarly to Audrey's trying to drive him off when she was pretending to be Lexie, so I wonder how much of it was tormenting him just because and how much of it was trying to convince herself that she's the personality in charge.

The myriad Clorox ads I've been getting on Hulu are all innocuous on their own, but taken as a whole they make me scratch my head in how little effort they seem to be making to sell their product to a wide range of people. Every one of their ads is based on one of two scenarios: a member of the household (always male) doing something on a kitchen counter that has no business being done on a kitchen counter, or a potty-training child (also always male) putting their waste somewhere other than in the toilet. And it's just, really? Those are the only two scenarios you can think of to sell people on a household staple?

It's my dad's birthday, and thus we are having the meal that accompanies every birthday and holiday in this house: Homemade marinara with sausage and meatballs, which has been simmering since this morning and making everyone in the house hungry.

I am all about fancy cooking and special-occasion food and challenging myself, but anything that involves repeated use of a ruler to get everything to line up exactly gets my "life's too damn short" response.

"Duke? I need to borrow a gun. Or three." "Oh, for-- Fine. But this is the last time."

When she's being particularly sarcastic, I'm seeing echoes of Colin Ferguson's performance in her.

Why would she want to destroy Haven? It's her playground and her battleground. The entire town is still ruled by its fear of what she created, and once she finds the aether she'll be able to control the Troubles even further. She's on her way to being the top of the heap again, which she wants for reasons that are as-yet unknown to us. She keeps saying that she and William still have work to do, that the Troubles have worked out the way they wanted them to and that they're going to get even "better." There's clearly a plan here, she's just indulging herself in tormenting the people she was "forced" to be friends with for the past year while she puts all its pieces together.

"Mara" and "Maura" (and "Moira," to muddle the pot further) are different names and shouldn't be expected to be pronounced the same. I had that thought for half a second, but they specified that the Troubles are now being caused by Duke, not the original families. So after all the times I've accused the show of weaponizing Eric Balfour's ability to play heartbroken, now they've done it literally.

Well, I'm excited. Don't really have thoughts right now -- it's been a bit of a brain-dead day -- but I have the excitement. Emily Rose is clearly having the time of her life and I'm loving it, and about every ten minutes something made me go, "...oh God." as a realization hit. So, yeah. Fascinated, anticipating what's coming next, and wondering why it's not next Thursday yet.

I am neutral on the knee itself, but Audrey's look of "Yeah, okay, that works" afterwards is one of my favorite things. Quoted for truth. I haven't been this gleefully bewildered about what's coming next since they locked the Doctor in the Pandorica. There is one thing that perked my ears up on second rewatch, though. In the flashback to William and Mara running away in the woods, William says that they've broken every rule there is. Rule, not law. Maybe it's nothing, but it implies to me that there's some other authority that they or their abilities answer to.

Yeah, I wasn't counting Nathan because it's not something that he grew up with (and not something he ever would have found out had Max not rolled back into town). But on the OUaT side I am counting "Emma's childhood was a nightmare and now she doesn't trust anyone becase she was a foster kid" and "We have to browbeat a guy who had a one-night-stand ten years ago and has no parenting experience into taking Hansel and Gretel, because otherwise they will go into The System and there is literally nothing worse than that." One of the many reasons I gave up on the show was its obsession with "real" families, which are always a man, a woman, and their biological children (and if you don't have children you're not a real family).

Chat logs. Television is a social event for my internet best friend and me. Another thing I wanted to mention, especially since this episode aired when I was really starting to get sick of how Once Upon a Time was handling the issue, was that I appreciate there being two adopted characters who are both happily adopted and only moderately curious/concerned about their origins.