yellowfred

So, apparently, Gail Simone started watching Arrow. https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/643990364869689344 I wonder how far in she is. I'm guessing not very, since she tweeted around the same time that Arrow's Oliver is basically pretty much Batman.

Personally, I think the reason that "Pretty Bird" works in the comics (to the extent that it does, which is debatable) is because comics!Oliver is a lot goofier than show!Oliver. I can't imagine any scenario in which show!Oliver would call Laurel "Pretty Bird," regardless of the status of their relationship.

Ugh, same. I've been worrying about that ever since that tweet about how they'd have a reunion "of sorts." I'll be very unhappy if they end up going that route, but I'm holding out hope that they know better now than to pull something like that again. I mean, they're already having to go to some semi-ridiculous lengths to fix the mistake they made by killing Sara. Although, if Sara does kill her, at least the Lazarus Pit is right there...

I have to say, that trailer actually made me really excited for the next season, which I wouldn't have thought was possible after the back half of season three. I like that Oliver and Diggle's friendship being repaired and the after effects of Thea being put in the Lazarus Pit seem to be pretty front and center, as far as conflicts go. Also, while I'm not a huge fan of most of the team's costumes, I think the wardrobe department is stepping up their game on casual outfits, which should be commended. I'm happy that they put a few shots of Sara getting resurrected (also happy that they re-shot it and gave her clothing). It seems like there are definitely a lot of people in the room when she comes up. I think it looks like Nyssa is trying to stop them (which I think would make the most sense), but Malcolm doesn't exactly look happy about it, either, so I'm not really sure which side they're all on.

I agree. I do think Quentin was a lot harder on Oliver than he should have been, but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that he was grieving (again) and also realizing that he couldn't trust him. Like, honestly, I still have kind of a tough time forgiving Team Arrow for their role in the whole "Don't tell Lance his daughter is dead (again)," so I get Quentin's anger on that level. I also think that he seemed to hold Laurel more or less equally culpable, but Oliver was the one he had the means to go after. Not to say that I think he did the right thing or that he didn't cross a line, but I understood a lot of where he was coming from. The thing that bothered me more is how little Oliver stood up for himself in a lot of that. I get that Oliver was in a bit of a self-loathing place at that point in the story, but a simple "I promise you that I wasn't the one killing people and I'm obviously against letting Roy take the fall for me" would have been nice. I do hope that if/when Quentin and Oliver reconcile (which I'm still hoping for, at this point) there's a bit more honesty on Oliver's part and a lot more contrition on Quentin's.

I interpreted her answer more as "Laurel will no longer be getting beaten by average street criminals," not "Laurel will now be on the same level as Oliver, fighting-wise."

Yeah, it definitely looks like Felicity designed it, or someone designed it with Felicity's role heavily in mind. She's got a raised platform and a good sight line to all the other little areas. I wonder if the workout area will have room for Oliver to bring in a giant tire that he can repeatedly hit with a sledgehammer. That remains, to this day, my favorite of the random workouts we've seen him doing.

To me, the worst part of it was how bad it made Oliver come off. Protecting Malcolm and working with him to go after Ra's would have been a questionable enough decision if he was just responsible for the undertaking. Doing the same thing after knowing that he brainwashed Thea into killing Sara (which he supposedly did specifically so that Oliver would have to go after Ra's) was really stupid and then helping him be the new Ra's was just gross.

After re-watching some of this past season as they've been re-airing it, I feel new waves of bitterness over how much more sense most of Season 3 would have made if Ra's had killed Sara instead of Malcolm (using Thea as a proxy).

I imagine that they meant more that all the set up for Legends that's going to happen on Arrow will happen in the first seven episodes, not that the first seven episodes will be dedicated, completely, to setting up for Legends.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's Laurel's decision, completely on her own, to bring Sara back. Nyssa's the only one I could really see her going to for help, but I don't think Nyssa would go along with it, mostly because, if she'd believed bringing Sara back was the right thing to do, she would have said something back when she first found out Sara died.

They could call it "Ctrl+Z"

I'm sure there are a ton, but the four big ones (to me) are: 1. It doesn't make sense for the Boltons to want to piss off the Lannisters by taking in a wanted fugitive who's accused of murdering the King, especially when the only thing making them Wardens of the North is the fact that the Lannisters say they are and there aren't any Starks in a position to dispute their claim. 2. It doesn't make sense for Littlefinger to give Sansa over to people he doesn't know very much about and doesn't trust, especially given how much she knows about him (i.e., his role in Joffrey's murder). 3. It doesn't make sense for Sansa, as someone who actually gets a say in this plan, to go along with it. 4. It's not actually legal (or whatever the Westerosi version of that is) for her to marry Ramsey when she's still married to Tyrion.

Ugh, I did not enjoy this episode. The thing about this show, and the book series as well, is that awful things happen to people all the time, but you can usually take a step back and understand how things ended up playing out the way they did. Like, the Red Wedding was awful, but it made sense. Sansa getting book!Jeyne's storyline is also awful, but it's made worse by the fact that it doesn't make sense. Even in the little details, it's like no one really thought it through. Why are there no other Northern lords at the wedding? Why didn't they have a wedding feast? Okay, part of this complaint is that I'm still bitter about losing the Manderleys and the Frey pie (side note: where did all the Freys go?), but it seems like they just decided that the most important thing to include in this whole storyline was the rape scene, and that's incredibly worrisome. I was also a bit bothered by how Myrcella was depicted in this episode. Admittedly, there's not a ton a characterization for her in the books, but the way they showed her and her relationship with Trystane just felt off to me. She's described as being brave, smart, and confident while Trystane is the one who seems to follow her lead more. Maybe it'll change if we see more of them, but that isn't the direction they seem to be going in at the moment.

So, I finally got around to watching this episode and I really enjoyed it, though I didn't personally find it as tense or engaging as Asylum. I had more or less expected that the Machine's location wouldn't be one physical site, as it was previously, but the fact that it basically turned the country's electrical grid into one gigantic RAM drive was pretty cool. I think it'll be really interesting to see how they end up rebuilding Her and how that'll affect Her relationships with the team, especially since She won't have any memories. Watching Root drag Finch around for all those weird errands was fun. I particularly enjoyed Finch's increasingly wary, "what the hell is happening?" expression, which also gave his calm look at the end that much more impact. I also really loved his little interaction with Caleb (now I'm really curious about what "project x" is). It was a nice to see Finch get to come through in the clutch in a way that didn't involve shooting anyone.

Hmm, I'd put money on Garrison and, probably, Dominic. I'm a bit more iffy about Control (possibly because I really, really don't want her to die) and I actually had Floyd pegged as the one who's going to kill Dominic and take over the Brotherhood. I really feel like Harold's going to kill someone, and it seems like Greer would be the most likely option, but I could also see it being Claire. Grice is actually the one I'm most worried about, because, if they're killing off six people, there's a good chance they'll want at least one of them to be one of the "good guys." I wonder if they're counting the two people Control just killed in their six. It's probably just wishful thinking on my part, but maybe they counted them to bolster the number and make it sound more daunting.

So, I was a bit surprised, but I actually liked a lot of the changes they seem to be making from the book. I like the way they chose to introduce the High Sparrow. Having a more amicable first meeting between him and Cersei makes it a lot more sensible that she'd think she could use him. The way he was introduced in the books was more like a flashing sign saying "this is not a guy you screw with," and Cersei just kind of shrugged it off and tried anyway. I do wish we'd gotten a better explanation for why she locked up the old High Septon. I mean, I can imagine that she figured he wouldn't be very effective at his job after his walk of punishment, but throwing him in the Red Keep's dungeons was a pretty extreme move, even for her, especially if it's just so that she has a more pious and respectable pawn in her move against Margaery. I'm still a little split on the decision to send Sansa to Winterfell, which is surprising, since I was completely against it when I first found out. I think the main thing that will tip me one way or the other will be if they give her Jeyne's whole storyline. Like, I actually got chills when she got to be the first of the Starks to successfully return to Winterfell since the series started. Also, I think she, more than any of her siblings, will benefit from seeing the good will that her family has accrued in the North, to keep her from going too far to the other side (my hope for her has always been that she'd find the middle ground between Littlefinger's pragmatism and Ned Stark's honor). Plus, I think one of the major missteps of the books was having all the Starks (except for Jon, I guess) so completely sidelined in the main plots of the past two books, so putting Sansa a bit more in the action could be a good thing. At the same time, if this ends up with her in anything all that similar to Jeyne's book plot, I'll go back to being completely against it. On a side note, for me, even with the slight changes, Janos Slynt's execution was still just as satisfying as in the books.

I guess Martine never read the villain handbook, or she would have known that gloating almost never ends well. I will admit, I may have rewatched that bit more times than would be considered entirely healthy. For an episode that saw a lot of the protagonists (and protagonist-adjacent characters) suffer some pretty significant defeats, I'm glad they managed to include some triumphant moments. The little look of satisfaction on Root's face was completely priceless. I'm a little wary of where the Shaw thing might be headed, just because I pretty much universally dislike brainwashing storylines. At this point, I'm staying somewhat optimistic, because I don't think of Martine as a particularly reliable narrator, but I will be disappointed if the story really is just that they tortured her until she decided to completely turn on her friends. So, I would find it easier to buy Dominic as the guy who could overthrow Elias if, just once, he managed to even remotely out smart him. To me, he still reads too much like a kid trying to play gangster who thinks Elias can give him the cheat codes for running the city.

I think my favorite thing about that is that Stannis went from Dragonstone to Braavos, met with the Iron Bank, then went to Eastwatch (presumably), and rode to Castle Black, and he only got there a day after the Wildlings on the south side of the wall, who left before he did from somewhere near the Nightfort. I mean, sure, he had horses and ships with bonus wind from the guys they burned alive, but that still means the Wildlings are slow as hell.

I'm really not liking what they've done with Brienne's storyline so far. From what we've seen, Brienne's mostly just proven herself to be really good at accidentally tripping over the girls she set out to find and then killing their protectors. I wasn't exactly crazy about her book storyline, but at least I could understand why she'd think that she was doing the smart thing. She did things like pretending she was looking for her sister and hiding the sword that was really obviously from a Lannister. Here, it's like she hasn't even thought about it. I don't necessarily like what we've seen from Dany in Meereen, but I think they've definitely captured the feeling of frustration from the books. I don't think she necessarily made a mistake; I think she's just backed herself into a corner. She wants to be a Queen for the whole city, not just the people who put her in power. That means applying justice evenly to both factions, which, unfortunately, won't help her with either one. Admittedly, it's a situation of her own making, but there's really not a good way out of it, at this point.

See, my guess has been that they'd have to either take the Machine offline or let Samaritan think it destroyed the Machine, all while keeping a backup drive hidden away (presumably in the impenetrable briefcase), which would leave them having to fight Samaritan without the Machine's help. The title of the last episode this season seems to indicate that there's only going to be one God left by the end of it, and I doubt that Samaritan is anywhere close to falling.

Overall, I really liked this episode. It may have helped that I kind of forgot about the whole Iris thing completely (not even really on purpose; it's just a plot line I keep forgetting about when it's not on screen), so I wasn't thinking about how this might serve that relationship. I thought it was interesting to see Reese kind of realize that he misses Carter as much for what they could have had as what they did have. I also thought the hints of what we got from the gang war storyline were interesting. It seems like Samaritan is trying to up the body count in ways it knows the Machine won't be able to anticipate. I'm wondering if it's trying to escalate the Dominic/Elias conflict in order to draw out Team Machine.

I'd have to go with Shaw. On top of being well protected, hers would almost certainly have the best food. Besides, Root would probably show up sooner or later with, like, a truckload of shotguns and ammo and protein bars. Fusco would be my second choice. His camp would probably be a bit more lax about security, but Fusco's ability to somehow make it work should never be underestimated.

I've always gotten the impression that people get married under whatever religion or religions they follow and it's more or less recognized by everyone. Like, from what we've seen, Northerners who only follow the old gods don't seem to consider people less married if they only did it in a Sept and not also in a Godswood. From what I can tell, Littlefinger (and Sansa, by extension) is expecting some confirmation of Tyrion's death to come before the actual wedding takes place. I could see that putting them in a bit of a tough position, since I don't think they'll be getting that confirmation anytime soon, and they won't really have any excuse to push back the wedding without telling everyone who she is.

She was probably saving the rest for later. I'm surprised she wasn't more upset with Harold for wasting what was maybe a dozen assassinations worth of untraceable neurotoxin.