Dowel Jones

I thought it might have been Fort Jefferson in the Tortugas, but that's a really long way to go for a couple of scenes.

I think in S1 there was a comment made about other cities being walled off also. I can see an ongoing discussion back in AlienWorld about the walls: "This is completely unworkable. These things are going to bankrupt us. (wait for it....) Who is going to pay for it all?"

Without getting backup or setting up a perimeter, of course.

Leanne did say "We don't have a chaplain", but I guess you could take that two ways. The alternate meaning, I thought, could be "We don't have a chaplain, we have a doctor - you." I would think any hospital would have a chaplain at least on call if not on premise. I'm glad you got the run of the menu, so to speak. I was in the hospital for a foot infection recently, and the only non-medical person to come by the room was an administrator asking me to sign the Advance Health Care form, presumably if I crashed at any time. Thanks, guys.

Because, as we all know, major league criminals always keep their actual SSN for life. When they were in the locker room of the gym, looking at the basketball bombs, I was saying "Those are rubber balls with explosive gas inside. Evacuate the gym and let them go up. The way they're laid out, nothing really bad will happen except some windows might get blown out." Patterson's explanation of the code went by so fast that all I could say was, "Okay, sounds plausible".

I was thinking along the same lines watching Katie drive through LA streets that were full of cars. What? Wait a minute! That, and the satellite tv in the bar. As is my wont, I did a quick Google Earth check and they filmed the alien scene at the Sepulveda Dam in LA. Which would explain why the aliens are so combative against the earthlings, seeing as how they had to fight the 405 traffic everyday. Interesting reveal on the wall construction. Still, it leaves open the question of blocking off the harbor and how the population will be sustained. We'll see. Looking forward to this season.

I get that the entire apartment sequence was a buildup to Reddington's hiring of a new clean up crew, and I loved the realtor whispering "Can't he just drink in the kitchen?", but here's an (admittedly over the top implausible) alternate theory. Red has had a change of heart, and wants to do right for his murdered comrade. After taking care of Liz and Tom and setting the world straight, he now lives in an all-white apartment. He has acquired enough points. Reddington has gone to The Good Place.

One of the baddies did mention that he had a source downtown, but was not specific. Who knows. This crowd of FBIs probably put it out on a department-wide email. Yeah, little Maggie seemed to know a lot about geographical details and office decorations. Maybe the FBI should put her on salary. Until the new crew showed up I was almost ready for Mr. Kaplan to come through that door. That would have been awkward. And where is this story with Dembe v. Reddington going? It doesn't look good. Poor Aram. Cooper always has to drag him back to the task at hand, and he never really gets to reminisce.

I'm drawing a blank on Dr. Dixon, Guthrie's name for his younger self. Is or was there such a character on the show? I think they brought Malaya back only because Dr. Guthrie imagined her, so as to throw a curve to the audience. It worked on me. Immanuel: "I'm having trouble with my daughter." God: "If raising children was easy, I might have had two." Game, set, match.

I realized that, but I was taken aback by the fact that Jack had apparently never told his father he was getting married. That's some serious familial separation there.

Oh, for the days when I thought $200/month was a lot to pay for a rental. Now you have to pay that much just to drive by the place. I would like to point out to Jack that, with the bedrooms on the second floor of his new house, they will still be dragging infants up and down a flight of stairs all day, every day. And you have only six months to finish the remodel, working on your own free time? The question was raised early on about the mention of people dying on the show and the foreshadowing of it. I seem to remember that the play that Kevin is still rehearsing is about a man conversing with his dead wife, which would account for the dialogue we heard. I got that same feeling when Jack is driving around the city, but I realized that he's present at the maternity ward later on, so, relax, okay? How much did Dr. Major Dad get paid for his appearance on the show? Nice work when you can get it. Yes, Toby, it was just an arrhythmia, not a heart attack. That's like saying it's just soldiers shooting at each other, not combat. My first thought when Jack slipped his wedding ring back outside his dad's house was, does his dad even know he's married, or was he trying to imply that they were separated because of the the gambling habit? It seemed like a strange thing to do.

Just as an aside, out here in CA, EJ means (to me) Ernest and Julio, the Gallo winemakers. Never could get by that throughout the episode.

Mr. Soon To Be Living the Rest of His Short Life in Agonizing Payne definitely got what was coming to him. Why would Memphis use the convoluted "She's in Russia" rather than "She's in the Russian Embassy"? It serves no real purpose and would only confuse BLS even more, and she would have to explain it to him anyway. And kidnapping a US citizen into the embassy will not bring you any goodwill from either the US government or the Russian Ambassador. Not a practical move.

I will assume that The Good Place is a metaphysical construct (by what or whom might not be relevant), rather than a physical location, and thus is not limited by the rules of physical environments. Perhaps The Bad Place is a tenement building with thin walls, no water, and Trevor in the "penthouse".

As always, networks are about making money. Quality, as it occurs, is often a secondary concern. Putting your strong show up against someone else's strong show and managing to still pull in decent ratings (I don't know if this actually occurred) shows that your show will always be a strong pull with audiences, and the advertiser then needs to pay more money to be seen. At least, that was the pre-DVR theory, which explains why the ratings companies are still struggling, as I understand it, with quantifying DVR viewing. On to the episode. Great scene in the bedroom when Noodle brings in the dress. Bess utters an enthusiastic but noncommittal response, and then surreptitiously slaps Henry's leg to bring forth and equally enthusiastic, but noncommittal, response.

I'm not invested enough to watch again to be sure, but I thought that, after killing the people in the immediate vicinity of the chips, they bum rushed everyone else, i.e, the actual processing staff, out the door before destroying the facility.

Occupied was a pretty good, if underplayed, show. I think it probably appealed more to Europeans for the characterizations of the principals in the show. We're so insulated here in the US that tv really has to struggle to convincingly show how the rest of the world thinks, because we get so many two dimensional portrayals. That being said, I found it difficult to believe that the rest of NATO, even without the US, would not somehow come to Norway's aid during the invasion. They should be able to see the imminent danger.

To answer a question above, the chips were the software to a missile guidance program that would avoid Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Hence the entry of Mossad into the mess. The processing plant was the NMB front (No little fishies were harmed in the making of this episode! At least until the cast dinner.) I rather agree with the FBI in the drone problem. Bullets go where they are pointed, not where they are aimed. If they miss the drone, the bullet comes down somewhere in town, possibly with fatal results.

I have side with Campbell on the helicopter issue. Medevac ships are not like rental cars; there's not a warehouse full of them to be parceled out as needed. The fact that one crashed meant they had to take another one away from some other location, and then it leaves on an unpaid "Uber mission", as he put it. Hospitals typically lease the copter from a company and pay them flight time, which is recovered from the patient's insurance company, if possible. 400 miles round trip would be an astronomical cost to the hospital. I'm sure the Board of Directors will be persuaded.

So it's okay to toss electronic waste into a waterway? Hmmm? The writers better watch out. Tech advances may mean that they will be replaced by robots who compile plots and characters according to complicated algorithms that maximize repetitive, easy to understand episodes with a minimum of twists and turns, that fit into a 47 minute window. Wait a minute...

Or they might all decamp for Panama to investigate a plot plan for the canal.

Presumably the brewery has a forklift, as the kegs got up there in the first place. Why not lift the pallets off of the klutz and extricate him, then call the FD? I would hope that DCFS would do a lot more investigation into the leak of Louie's adoption procedure. The lady looked very offended at the mere mention that the information might have come from them.

Pre-pre-emptive strike: Make sure W is on the edge of divorce, so that he can meet the new nurse next episode and James will get shanked again.

With Flynn's luck, he will return to find out his wife is in charge of Rittenhouse, Inc.

Does anyone know if the lobbying law in Ohio is an actual fact? Because the way it was explained, I thought, would prohibit the lobbying of US Senators/Representatives on upcoming legislation too, which is a routine occurrence in DC. Oh well, stretch out the election drama one more week, at least. Poor Russell. I thought they wrapped up the Israel/Iran deal way too fast, almost in a Hallmark Movie kind of way. That sort of thing drags on for a long time in real life.