Shanna Marie

I still like what they did with the live-action Cinderella, where they weren't trying to replicate the cartoon. It was merely a new telling of the same basic story, with elements from the cartoon woven in, rather than exactly the same movie, but with real people instead of animation. Different costumes, not trying to duplicate the hairstyles, and even the story being a bit different. On another note, I've been meaning to post about this for months, but I got kind of sidetracked by moving halfway across the country ... for a novel that has a good fairytale mash-up and that actually uses the Snow White and Rose Red story (which I recall a lot of people here putting on their wish list for the show to use), the novel After the Forest by Kell Woods just came out in paperback, and it was really interesting. It's a mash-up/retelling of Hansel and Gretel and Snow White and Rose Red, with some elements from the more famous Snow White story, as well as elements from a lot of other Grimm deep cuts. It's set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in Germany, with the main character being an adult Gretel. The events of the Hansel and Gretel story happened, but in a slightly different way. Gretel grabbed the witch's spell/recipe book when they escaped, and now she has a recipe for gingerbread that people can't resist. However, the people in her village are starting to get really suspicious of anything that might involve magic, and there's a new lady of the manor who may be up to something. I read the hardcover earlier in the year and liked it. There's a short story online by that author that's a prequel. I haven't read it all the way through yet (the tab's been open for ages).

I spotted a OUAT mention in the Washington Post, in an article about the impact of the Twitter blackout in Brazil on fan accounts, which highlighted the fact that so many of the "stan" accounts for a variety of stars and properties are Brazilian. At first it was all about the big ones, like Taylor Swift and various K-Pop groups, but their example for a niche interest was a fan account for Colin O'Donoghue, with the last few paragraphs of the article being about the account a Brazilian fan started about him, initially for OUAT but then following his career, and included a photo of her with him at a convention. This should be a gift link so it's not paywalled: https://wapo.st/3Z2oNZv

I had to bail because it was so stressful and unpleasant to watch. The "beautiful, sunny, vacation in Italy with soapy hijinks" doesn't mesh well with "fascism on the rise and the start of the Great Depression, and nothing seems to work out well for most of the characters, who are never allowed to be happy." I would have been all over a series about a plucky Englishwoman running a hotel in Italy, where her guests find love or find themselves, with maybe a bit of running drama among the staff and family and the occasional challenging guest. That would be perfect summer TV. I'm just not in the mood for unending misery, no matter how pretty the setting and costumes are.

I'm sure that not all young, single clergymen in the 50s and 60s were celibate, but surely there was at least one who didn't indulge in casual sex. At least we're getting some variety in Alphy not being wracked with guilt, but it might have been nice to have one whose only issues involved dealing with all the external factors he's faced with, like the potential failure of his parish as racism, but who is otherwise not self-destructive or dealing with inner issues and who is actually living up to the standards of his calling. It has struck me that this show has a tendency to do these extreme swings in tone. The very premise of a vicar who tags along on murder investigations is a setup for culture-clash humor, and some of the characters are comical exaggerations, but then the personal stories of the characters tend to go so dark. It swings so much between "ha ha, the vicar and the cop have totally different perspectives, and the overbearing housekeeper really runs the place for the hapless young vicars" and inner demons, substance abuse, oppression, mental illness, etc.

This is a problem for me. I'm not a fan of the too-easy, last-minute "redemption," but I like even less seeing a good character turn to the bad, with the show trying to justify that choice. I can see Osha feeling betrayed by Sol, but that doesn't excuse going off with the person who killed her friends, who had nothing to do with all this. I get the feeling that the show's creator has folders full of Draco/Hermione (or Harry), Spike/Buffy, and Kylo Ren/Rey fanfic. I'm still not sure why Osha had to go with Smilo to save Mae. I guess he was determined to get one of them, and Mae wanted out, so she was "sacrificing" herself? I don't have a problem with the Jedi being depicted as flawed. I felt like that was what they showed us in the prequels, even as they talked about them being good. I kind of like the fact that they're finally saying that the Jedi have issues. I didn't dislike this show. I just feel like there was a lot missing. It needed to be fleshed out better so we'd have more context.

I feel like there was a lot of blame to go around here, and it might have helped to have had a bit more context and explanation. Sol's initial obsession with getting Osha out of the coven is a bit unclear. We didn't see any sign from his perspective that she was in danger or being abused, so was there other information he had, like the history of this coven, or was it just the Force told him to do it? This was what set everything in motion. But then the disaster seems to have been triggered by the witches. While Torbin was whining about wanting to go home, it seems that having his mind messed with and the suggestion planted about him wanting to do anything to be able to go home ended up backfiring and making him do something extreme that would hurt the coven in order to allow him to go home. The plan was probably just to make him insist on going home so the Jedi would leave, not to make him want to kidnap Mae and Osha to get evidence of the vergence so they could leave. Then there's this: Shouldn't she have led with "I'm letting Osha go, she's packing and will be down in a minute" instead of going all ominous? Sol probably overreacted, but she was definitely being threatening, and oddly so, considering she was the one who planted the obsession in Torbin and she'd decided to let Osha go. Then there was spiny face mom urging Mae to stop Osha from going. I think Mae had a wee bit of a sociopathic tendency that made her go overboard in being cruel about that, then she realized too late that she'd gone too far and lost control. I figure the witches had it coming from possessing Kelnacca because forcing someone else to do their dirty work, especially when it involves forcing that individual to attack his colleagues, is dirty pool. So far, the Jedi who are more or less innocent were the ones to die. Indara was trying to be the voice of reason throughout, and I figure she was acting in defense of others when she broke the connection between Kelnacca and the witches (though it does depend on how much she knew about the consequences, still, not sure it would or should have changed her actions, given what they were up to). Torbin was a pawn who was manipulated and used by the witches, then was dragged into a conspiracy by the Jedi. He didn't deserve what happened to him. Ditto Kelnacca, who wasn't behind any of it and was possessed. Sol was the one who instigated all of it by being obsessed with getting Osha and then killed her mother and then promoted the conspiracy to lie about it all.

The whole saga has a really weird thing going on with the Jedi, where they keep showing them as fairly incompetent, oblivious, arrogant, and doing some shady things, but they keep telling us how awesome they are, and I'm not always certain this disconnect is on purpose. It goes back to the prequels (so you can't blame it all on Disney), where the Jedi were utterly oblivious to the fact that Palpatine was a Sith, even though he was right there among them, pulling the strings the whole time, and their policy about no attachments was part of what ended up isolating Anakin to the point he was easily corrupted (if he'd been able to talk to someone about his fears about Padme or if his mother had been around, he wouldn't have been so easily manipulated). But they don't ever seem to dig into the flaws. Maybe that'll happen on this show, where the Jedi seem to have done something truly wrong and that's being covered up.

That's what I figure. I'm cutting him some slack for now because he woke in a dark jungle from a stun after watching his whole team die and nearly going Dark Side, so he's not thinking clearly. If he continues falling for it, then we'll have problems -- assuming Mae doesn't reveal herself, and she was only going through with the ruse to use the Jedi to get her to some kind of sanctuary from the Sith. Still, it was cold of her to just leave her sister in the jungle, so even if this is a way of turning herself in, she's still the evil twin. I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of "everyone dies!" stories. Yeah, you get that shock factor in the moment, and there's the sense that no one is safe, which raises suspense, but it has the long-term effect for me of making me disengage from the story. If no one is safe, there's no point in caring about any of these people. They've now wiped out everyone but Sol, the Sith, Osha, and Mae. I just want to see the Sith and Mae defeated, and Osha has been a bit of an enigma. I think I like her, but she hasn't really been developed. All that's left for me to care about is Sol. And with everyone dead, there's no one for the characters to interact with. Unless it turns out that Yord is only mostly dead and can be healed, Osha's going to be on her own (I'm glad they made it clear she was alive because if the story had been that Mae killed her, and now there was just Mae as Osha, I'd really have been disengaged). They're going to have to introduce a new character in the last few episodes for her to have anyone to talk to. I'm a character-driven viewer, and if there's no one I care about, I can't get into a show. When they get rid of the character(s) I care about, I lose interest in the show. Having people I like is more important to me than shock, surprise, and suspense, so "everyone dies!" is a turn-off for me.

I think that's fairly consistent throughout the saga, though. There doesn't seem to be much change in this society over time. I guess there was the shiny, reflective ships in the prequels vs. the ships in the original trilogy, but nothing really changes in the 70 or so year span from the beginning of the prequel trilogy to the end of the sequel trilogy. People are wearing more or less the same clothes, the technology is the same, the ships don't seem all that different. There doesn't seem to be anything new, no new inventions that weren't there before. It's like their society was rapidly accelerated to where it is, and then it stuck there for centuries. But I would like a bit more worldbuilding, along the lines of what Andor gave us, where we saw how people lived at different levels of society and got glimpses of their culture.

I think that's the issue, that the audience needed to hear her thought process, so she had to talk to someone. There would have been no way of knowing that she'd changed her mind if she hadn't said something to someone, and there would have been no point in her telling some random person who wasn't involved, so it amounted to her telling someone who either was secretly the Sith or was likely to rat her out to the Sith. She did set him up in a trap that should have delayed him doing anything, unless he was secretly the Sith and the trap wouldn't have held him for long, but I don't think she was supposed to suspect him the way the audience does.

One of the Star Wars YouTubers with the "Osha and Mae are the same person with multiple personality disorder" theory didn't mention it when discussing this week's episode. They have a new theory that Mae will end up being redeemed and Osha will be the one who becomes a Sith acolyte. The other seemed to think this episode reinforced the theory, that Osha was Force projecting Mae the whole time she was walking through the woods, surrounded by and talking to Jedi. It took Luke deep meditation to project himself, and it used up enough of his life force that it more or less killed him. Ironically, this same guy tends to get annoyed if any character does anything at all with the Force without extensive Jedi training, but he's totally on board with a Jedi washout being able to unconsciously Force project herself without having to do anything, and with a whole herd of Jedi around her not sensing that anything is going on with the Force.

I think it was finding out that her sister was alive. She seems to have been on board with this mission largely out of revenge over her sister's death. Then she found out her sister was alive, and the more she thought about it, the harder it became for her to reconcile continuing to go through with it when she no longer had the revenge motivation. Why keep killing just to impress some guy whose motives she doesn't know or understand? A long walk in the woods is good for clarifying thoughts. The YouTubers with the multiple personality theory say this difference is just in how each personality sees herself, and the audience isn't seeing objective reality. There may be some additional reason given, but it may have been to show Mae she can't get off the hook so easily. Her not killing these people doesn't mean they won't be killed. Interesting that while she's under orders to kill without using a weapon, the Sith clearly used a lightsaber. I guess that was part of the message, like signing a work of art, make it clear who did it. It doesn't look like it was meant to frame Mae or make her look guilty to the Jedi, since the Sith showing up made it fairly obvious who might have done it. If the Sith hadn't shown up, then they'd have found Mae in the cabin with the still-smoking body and assumed she did it. Instead, once they've fought the guy with the red lightsaber, her denials will be a lot more credible.

My main amusement in this episode was imagining the reaction of all those Star Wars YouTubers who last week thought they had a brilliant theory that adult Mae and Osha were the same person with some kind of multiple personality disorder, so they didn't know they were the same person, and when Osha was cleared because Mae was seen while Osha was in Jedi custody, she'd actually Force projected herself. Their main evidence for this theory was that adult Osha and Mae are played by the same actress, while they used non-identical twins to play child Osha and Mae, therefore they were different people as kids, but whichever one actually survived also had the other one as part of her after the fire. (It couldn't possibly have been because there are restrictions on the amount of time a child actor can be on set, so having a single child actor play both twin roles would really slow down production). But here, we have Osha conscious and surrounded by Jedi at the same time Mae is present elsewhere, which I think makes it clear that they're separate people. It's really starting to bug me that the characters I'm intrigued by keep getting killed soon after they're introduced. I wanted to see more of Wookiee Jedi. I'm sure there will be more flashbacks, but still, the death rate of promoted characters on this show is getting ridiculous. So, does Sol get offed in the next episode? The journey through the forest and seeing the various local lifeforms gave me Alan Dean Foster vibes. He liked to create new and interesting creatures on worlds in each of his books, and that bug wrapped around the tree was exactly the sort of thing he did (does? I don't know if he's retired).

I think I'm going to like this. I like Osha and think the actress is doing a good job with the dual role. It feels like Star Wars, while also being different from what we've seen before (though that society seems pretty static if you can move around by a hundred years without seeing a big difference in tech and culture). Managing to defend against attack without breaking out of meditation may be the most Jedi thing ever. But was it just me, or was the sound weirdly muted? I was watching on the same setup I recently rewatched Andor on -- so same streaming service, streaming device, TV, speakers, in the same room -- and I had to crank the sound up significantly to be able to understand the dialogue. I noticed that the sound was also muted when they showed clips on one of those breakdown videos. The contrast between the narration on the video and the clips from other things and the clips from this episode was pretty drastic. It sounded so muffled.

He seems to get roasted by a lot of people. It seems to be some kind of running gag that he's a racist, sexist, elitist jerk who's a sexual predator. I get the impression that these jokes are more of an inside thing and are funnier to the people involved with the show than they are to the audience. I doubt this is the kind of humor that's funny because it's true because if he were that bad, he probably wouldn't be able to keep his job, and if he were powerful enough to keep his job in spite of being that bad, he could keep them from doing jokes about it. So I have to think that this is all supposed to be funny because it's the exact opposite of the truth, but since I don't know what Colin Jost is like in real life, it's not funny to me. I guess they figure that a successful straight white guy married to a major movie star is the perfect "punching up" target, and he seems to be a pretty good sport about it, even though he sometimes turns red and gets a bit flustered. I find myself cringing on his behalf during those bits.