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aenea

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  1. When the show first started airing, the character of Donna was a bit younger than I was. She seems to have skipped many years without aging as much as I did, but she seems to be younger than I am, and older than my daughters. I know that she was there to ask the "stupid" questions, and clarify issues for viewers. But her attachment to Josh always seemed a bit sad to me- there was a lot of room for her to grow in the earlier seasons, and ways for her to have a real life apart from her job, but she was always just fixated on Josh, who really isn't a good candidate for a life partner. Banter and barely sexual desire might seem fun in your early/mids 20s, but it can get old very quickly. I know that at some point she and Josh have sex- I know the general outline of how their relationship goes over the course of the series, but it doesn't seem to end up in anything resembling happily ever after. I don't think that marriage should be the end goal of every relationship, but , but, it seems like she's regularly missing the opportunities for a 'real' relationship. Kudos to her for for at least picking something to be loyal to, but Josh isn't really a prize as a partner (at least as far as I've gotten in season 5). Maybe both of them make big changes in their lives later on so that they would be good partners for each other, but as she's been written as far as I've watched, she just seems a bit sad. She usually focuses on individual stories rather than a 'big picture', which, while it may be admirable, might not be a plus for someone who's portrayed as a competent secretary. Loyalty is great, if the person you're loyal to is worth it, and if being a subordinate to someone else is your life goal. I liked the Gaza episode as it seemed like Donna was out on her own for a bit, and making choices that weren't dependent on Josh. She was doing something on her own- there were the requisite emails to Josh, but she was having experiences and making contacts that didn't depend on him. And I think that the episode highlighted that- her makeup and lighting was completely different than anything we'd seen before. You see her freckles, her exhaustion, and also see her reacting sexually and intellectually to someone that's not Josh, in a way that speaks to her strengths as a character, and not just another cheap will they/won't they TV trope. Josh doesn't really seem to be that much of a prize to me, re-watching the series when I'm 50, and not 30. It's like the Sam and Diane thing from Cheers, or the Carol/Doug thing from ER- the characters are incredibly mismatched and wouldn't last 2 minutes in the real world, but there's no way not to get them together when a series has run for a long time. I liked this episode because it showed Donna out on her own, making reasonable choices, that didn't depend on Josh. She was an afterthought on this mission, and while she didn't really know what she was doing, she added some complexity to the discussion. I'm still on my first go-round of the later episodes so I know vaguely what's going to happen with her and Josh, but I wish that the series might have given her a bigger role that wasn't dependent on her relationship with Josh.
  2. Watching Season 5, Gaza (for the first time- I'd stopped sometime after season 1 when it originally aired, and I've now been plowing my way through them since Christmas) . Boo on Fitz :-( He was one of my favourite characters in the entire show. And while I am not a Donna fan, this is the first episode where I've understood why other people like her so much.
  3. I did. I have no idea where the Sweeney thing came from :-)
  4. I started watching/re-watching over the Christmas holidays- I'd watched the first season when it first aired, and I think most of the second, and then just stopped watching for some reason. I like it both more and less than I did the first time around. The pilot wasn't as great as I'd remembered it, with the exception of Barlet's entrance, and a reminder of just how long I've been an Alison Sweeney fan. Post Hoc was a much more satisfying episode for me, and more how I remembered the show. Most of the cast seemed to be really finding their rhythm together, and Tim Matheson always knocks it out of the park as Hoynes. I think that the Bartlet/Hoynes relationship is one of the most interesting in the show, and it's great to see it. I'm not really a fan of the Sam/Laurie storyline- he certainly does come off as self-righteous, obnoxious, and patronizing to her. Mandy was just a mistake in the show, I think. No offense to Moira Kelly, but Mandy's so self-involved, immature, and just plain miserable that I don't find her fun to watch at all. It takes a special kind of person to whine to her assistant about how poor she is, and ignore it when the assistant brings up the idea that she actually needs her job to pay rent. The interactions between her and Josh made me dislike him for quite a while- not only because there never seemed to be any attraction between the two of them, but because they act like they're in middle school. And a small thing that I've really been enjoying are the clothes. I love the trench coats, scarves, suits that fit or are even a bit big (I hate the trend towards men wearing suits that look 2 sizes too small), the 'office wear'. That's probably just because I'm old :-)
  5. Geeks in sideshows were a regular attraction- I can't imagine being entertained by it, any more than I would be by dog fighting or bear baiting or ratting. But it was a very common 'attraction'- Meep was just doing what a lot of other performers had been doing for decades, and given that he wasn't apparently playing with a full deck, I wouldn't necessarily call him evil.
  6. "Being affiliated with Stanley" was pretty bad. She may not have wanted to commit murder herself, but she could have prevented some of them if she'd given Stanley up much earlier than she did, and saved Ma Petite and Ethel, and Jimmy's hands. Instead she chose not to say anything, so I felt very little pain for her when she started feeling guilty.
  7. I was fully expecting Dandy's cop for hire to become the manager at the show- I was surprised that he didn't show up. That was a million dollars ill-spent. But that's not as weird as the total disinterest of the actual police force in anything resembling catching criminals. Two cops get killed in Jimmy's escape, and they search the tents once and then go away forever? Even if they didn't know about the freak deaths, there's been a pretty big body count in the town since the show arrived- you'd think that at some point they would have just told them to move on.
  8. I'd assumed that she was one of those 'everything but the vag' virgins, but her lack of kissing skills and the ability to form sentences with a prospective partner makes me think that she might actually be telling the truth. I'd be a bit afraid to kiss her- not just because of the whole "I am going to suck your face off" thing, but because she's apparently not aware enough of how bodies work when you're making out to realize that paying attention to things like being very high off of the ground, without a railing, is a good thing to pay attention to unless you want to end up splattered across the hotel courtyard.
  9. At least the finale continued the 'this really sucks' theme of the season- points for consistency to the producers/writers. I started working my way through the show in December, specifically to get to Freakshow- I'm a circus history buff, so it sounded great. But when you watch all of the seasons together, Freakshow certainly did suffer in comparison (and I say that as someone who wasn't a big fan of Coven). I still can't figure out why TPTB veered away from the Twisty/Dandy storyline. Yes, Dandy did a lot of damage in the finale, but he was considerably less scary and interesting than he was in the first half of the season. After so much buildup about "OMG Dandy has control of the freaks and that's very bad!", he goes around shooting them? That's something that anyone with a magically reloading pistol can do (especially since even though the fairgrounds are dead quiet, people are apparently too stupid to pay attention to gun shots). It's not something that the Big Bad is supposed to do. I was momentarily startled when Dandy shot Paul, but after that he seemed like he was just throwing a temper tantrum rather than being 'evil'. And aside from early Dandy, Twisty was the scariest and saddest part of the season (at least for me), and I felt a bit cheated when he checked out so early. And then there were the odd storylines, that either didn't make sense, or were interesting storylines or tidbits and only lasted for an episode or two. Penny's forced sex at the orgy in the first episode. The police in Jupiter are apparently morons with a very short attention span. How the freakshow keeps going without any customers, in a remote area. The museum storyline was beyond stupid- not only because it's apparently a teleportation centre that people can travel to and from instantly, but how are we supposed to believe that a well-known museum in the 1950s has a never-ending flow of new acquisitions, with no questions asked? In the 1850s that might have been believable, but it certainly wasn't in the 1950s. Dell certainly cycled through storylines at a great rate. He's great, he's competent, he's a bit kinky, he's gay, he's abusive, he's a murderer, he's struggling with father issues and not being a freak. Angela Basset's storylines changed so rapidly that I can't blame her for just going over the top with her performances. Stanley's penis was apparently a red herring (or a red anaconda, from the sounds of it), and after taking up a lot of screen time over the entire season we never find out what happens to him. Is he still in the cage, did Dandy kill him, how did he not die from so many amputations? Jimmy must be the least bright of Evan Peters' characters on the show (which takes some doing, after FrankenEvan)- after a while I just didn't care. The one really great thing that he did this season was to (very kindly) tell Bette and Dot that he didn't love them- that didn't last long. I didn't hate Chester (I've got a lot of tolerance for NPH), but why bring in a new character at the end of the season who doesn't really add anything to the show? I'd hoped for a scene in the final episode where Sister Mary Satan walks him to an isolation cell beside Ian McShane in the asylum. Elsa's storylines were just a mess. Out of all of the 'films' of her that the studio could have seen, it was the 'maiming film' that turned up? Why did the network even allow her to do a Halloween show? Supposedly Hedda Hopper's expose had already run, so she wouldn't have been allowed on TV. I'll watch Jessica Lange do just about anything, but given Elsa, I'm not sorry that she's not coming back next season. I do think that a lot of the actors gave stellar performances, which were a real pleasure to watch. Michael Chiklis was fantastic, and Finn Wittrock blew it out of the park. I do think that Evan Peters has had bad storylines for the past two seasons, but I'd be fine with Finn becoming the male lead. Frances Conroy was as great as she always is, and I'd love to see Mat Fraser and Amazon Eve in just about anything. I'm not going to be sad that Sarah Paulson is on the court show, or that Jessica Lange isn't coming back. I just hope that the producers/writers concentrate on writing a good series, and less on stunt casting or going off in odd directions. On the upside, we didn't have any antichrist/odd babies this year, so that was a plus :-)
  10. I'd agree, except that she also said that his 'mental deterioration' started around the time that she found out that she was pregnant, so there were warning signs many months before the baby arrived. I was a hormonal basket case for a few weeks after my kids were born, and my pregnancy wasn't a picnic, but the clip of her talking about it made it seem that she'd just ignored it to the very end. Very big kudos to her for getting herself and the baby out of there, but why on earth didn't she call 911 and say that there was a suicidal person with a gun? The way that she's been edited makes it seem like she's a nice person, but part of being in a partnership is stepping up when your partner can't do that for themselves. Mental health issues aren't any different than diabetes or cancer or having an ear infection- they're just something that you sign up for in a partnership.
  11. You're not alone- there's something about the hooded eyes and the lack of lips that creeps me out a bit. But I also agree with whoever said that Britt looks like a Bratz doll, so I must be strange too. I didn't mind most of that episode though- I'm not usually a Kimmel fan, but it's good to see the show sending itself up. If they'd really crashed the wedding I would have been pretty horrified, but it wasn't the worst date I've seen on the show. I absolutely loved the Costco date- Chris seemed pretty pouty about it, but you'd certainly get to know each other more quickly fighting your way through a Costco than you would bungee jumping.
  12. Paul's reaction was really the scariest and saddest part of the episode for me. In the context of the show, the freaks really can't do anything to make their lives better. Elsa's freak show has a high body count, but much less than they'd face on the outside. They can kill the odd person, but they're dependent on the show to give them a fairly safe space to sleep and eat. When Dandy waltzes in with the deed to the show and starts posturing all of the freaks look at him like he has two heads, but as soon as Dandy says "I want a drink", Paul takes a deep breath, and then gives a short bow and runs off to get him one, because he has no choice.
  13. It didn't do much for me either. A lot of it was just odd- how was Chester planning to fit the twins in that box? After all of the build-up about the twins (and the amount of soul-searching/blathering on they've done all season), why not show their reaction when they find out that their true love has a body count? Why wouldn't Elsa have sold the show to Dandy in the first place? Loved Dr. Arden, but while electricity to the danglies was pretty bad, I kept thinking that the Axeman was lucky not to have run into him after he'd started his genetic experiments. I felt more sorry for NPH than anything- I wasn't sorry to see Maggie go, and he was a lot less evil than just ill. I do have hopes for the finale- we know that Elsa becomes a Hollywood star (unless they're showing her old porn films on Friday nights), but hopefully Dandy will get back to being Dandy.
  14. I was hoping for at least one round of 'ONE OF US!'
  15. I'm mostly a first watcher- I'd watched Season 1 when it was first airing, and a few episodes in Season 2. I think that was the time when I just stopped watching TV completely for quite a few years, and the West Wing got caught in that. I've been thinking about starting it up again for a while, mainly when my girl crush on Alison Janney bloomed again because of Masters of Sex. I tried to watch Mom, but I'm not a sitcom person :-) Then we got talking about the West Wing over New Years, and here I am- I just finished Manchester 2. Watching the first season again was a lot of fun, although I did like some characters less. I'm more in love with CJ, Toby, Leo, Charlie, and Abby. Still a fan of Josh and Jed, although not as much as I used to be (from what I remember). It's a real pleasure to watch Rob Lowe, but I remember Sam being smarter, and not being as much comic relief as he seems to be this go round. I'm incredibly glad that Mandy's gone- I didn't remember disliking her quite that much. Donna is still nails on chalkboard to me, but I knew going back into it that she's the price I pay for everyone else :-) Season 2 for me was even better than Season 1- it just hit on every level. I particularly liked The Stackhouse Filibuster- I've got autistic kids, and I was just cringing about how they were going to handle that. And I loved the new cast additions- Ainsley, Tribbey, Oliver Babish. I may have annoyed my family because I watched 40 some episodes in a week or so, so I'll be slowing down a bit now. I am very much looking forward to the rest of Season 3.
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