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Shanna Marie

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  1. This reminds me of an Endeavour episode in which a woman had been complaining of damp spots on the walls of one of those council apartment blocks, and it turned out there was something wrong with the construction that led first to the damp and then to the whole building collapsing. Apparently it was based on a real event. I wonder if they might be setting up a story here that also uses that event.
  2. Depending on when they met, I could see Andor considering Han to be a frivolous lightweight, since Han goes for a glib act and tries to act like he doesn't care. Even at his worst, I don't think Andor ever tried to act like he didn't care about people. Han would tell Andor to lighten up. Andor is more of a planner while Han makes it up as he goes, so that would be a clash. But they're both highly competent and would come to respect each other for that.
  3. Considering that he's married and a minister, I think any relationship that happens with him and one of the nurses would have enough conflict built in without needing anything additional. It would be a soul-searching angst-fest on its own. This series hasn't handled cast departures well, in general. I understand British series don't have the kind of long-term contracts locking in cast members for a certain number of years that American series do, but they don't seem to plan for departures very well. If there was any inkling that the actress who played Lucille wouldn't be sticking around, then they shouldn't have had her and Cyril marry. Just let her go back home and leave the show so they don't have the odd situation of them being married but living on different continents, with no hint of how they're going to ever reunite. That's even weirder than what they did with Barbara, having her marry, leave for her husband's job, and then come back only to die, and then the husband ended up leaving, anyway. It must be tough on the writers when they aren't sure which cast members they'll have in the next couple of seasons, and they could marry off a character only to have them immediately split, while the actor playing the spouse wants to stick around.
  4. I just watched Tales from the Green Valley, and then Wartime Farm came up in my recommendations. I've already watched the Tudor Monastery Farm, and I've read a couple of Ruth Goodman's books. Now I need to look up some stuff on agriculture in Yorkshire because I wonder what they could have grown. My guess is that they have sheep and cattle because it's not a really hospitable place for other crops, so they may have had to pick up the meat slack for the rest of Britain. From the episodes I've seen so far, it seems like All Creatures missed some opportunities for wartime storylines that would have fit the series (I haven't read the books, so I don't know if this would have gone too far from the books to really deal with the war, but that doesn't seem to have stopped them on other storylines). It sounds like the government was all up in the farmers' business with evaluations and production quotas. Then there were Land Girls coming out to work on the farms, usually city girls with no farm experience. One thing that could have been fun was the pig clubs, in which a group would contribute their scraps to feed a piglet, then share in the meat when it was big enough to be slaughtered.
  5. For another documentary that might be of interest and relevant to this season and possibly the next one, there's a British series called Wartime Farm in which a group of historians and archaeologists try to live for a year on a farm as though they were in WWII, looking at how the government was trying to increase food production. One thing I found interesting was that they were trying to reduce the number of animals that were kept, since they could produce more non-meat food per acre than they could meat, so early in the war herds were culled. I'm surprised that didn't come up in All Creatures. They'd keep dairy cows, but the sheep, pig, and beef cattle population in Britain dropped drastically during the war. They were also encouraging farmers to use machinery rather than horses because there was a labor shortage and machines were more efficient. It seems there would have been less need for veterinarians. I'm only at the part where they're living like it's 1940, so they may have had to go back to horses later in the war if there was a fuel shortage. I found it on YouTube (possibly an unauthorized copy), but it may be streaming elsewhere. It gives me some of the same feels as All Creatures, with animals (a very cute dog) and the people working together on a project.
  6. I finally got around to watching this (the length was daunting, and I was skeptical about the concept) and I found it utterly delightful. I'm still not certain it was necessary, as the original is just fine. Most of the changes that worked were about the story, not the medium, and changing to a different medium didn't really add much. But the cast was excellent. Halle Bailey brought me to tears with just about all her songs because she nailed that sense of longing. I guess the main benefit from live action was that actual human actors are always going to be more expressive than even the best animation, and so a lot of the emotions hit me harder in this version. Plus, the wet, white Mr. Darcy shirt has a very different effect on a real human body than on a cartoon. I liked that Eric got more of a personality and even a song, and him having his own collection showed that he and Ariel really were kindred spirits. I also liked Ariel getting more songs because it always bugged me that the character whose main trait was having a gorgeous singing voice only got one song. That was the thing that didn't work for me. It was jarring to see these photorealistic sea creatures talking, singing, and dancing, while still looking like real sea creatures. There seems to be this paradox with animation in that the closer it comes to looking real, the less expressive it gets. They can do wonderful things with cartoony-looking humans, but when they try to do more realistic computer-animated humans, you get that dead-eyed, blank-faced uncanny valley effect. The more cartoony fish in the animated version or something like Finding Nemo are far more expressive than these, simply because you can't convey human emotion on a realistic fish or crab face. I found myself wondering if this might have worked better going closer to what they did with the live-action Cinderella, where it wasn't so much a remake of the animated version as it was a retelling of the same story with some Easter egg-type references to the original. She still had her mouse friends, but they were just mice who didn't talk, sing, or sew clothes. But the animated Cinderella didn't add much to the fairy tale (other than the talking mice). The Disney Little Mermaid was pretty much a complete rewrite of the fairy tale, so it might have been tricky to do a new version with a story that wasn't the Disney one or the original fairy tale. Sebastian and Flounder play a pretty big role in the plot, so it would be hard to cut out the talking crab and fish, and would we want this movie without "Under the Sea" or "Kiss the Girl"? You'd have to totally rewrite the lyrics to have a different character sing them. Maybe a mer-person friend trying to help Ariel? Disney heroines so seldom have supportive female friendships. I felt like the ending was setting up a sequel because they could have lots of other adventures. I also got the impression that she might be able to switch between mermaid and human (like the Once Upon a Time Ariel), given that her father wanted her to come back to the Coral Moon ceremony, and she'd have to be a mermaid to do that. Plus, there was the bit about Eric's backstory that seemed to be setting up something but that didn't go anywhere. Since they raised the point of him having been a shipwreck victim adopted by the king and queen and since he got interrupted when trying to tell Ariel about that, I thought it was going to end up being meaningful, like maybe it was his family that killed Ariel's mother and the shipwreck was caused by Triton's revenge. Generally, when a character starts to tell another character something and gets interrupted, that info ends up being important and causing trouble. But I guess it was just to give him empathy with Ariel. A sequel would allow them to find out who he is, who his parents were, find out where he came from, etc.
  7. For another show on the bomber crews, Ewan McGregor and his brother (a former RAF pilot) did a documentary called Bomber Boys that's streaming on Pluto, in which they interviewed some of the crews who were still alive (it was made in 2012), and then the brother got to fly one of the few remaining bombers (with Ewan in the nose gun position). They also went to Germany and interviewed some of the survivors of bombing raids. It was really interesting stuff that got into what it was like for the people in the air and on the ground. I don't know how it would affect someone as softhearted as James is, unless he was able to really distance himself from the idea of the impact of what he was doing, since what he was doing would mostly involve harming civilians, not opposing military forces.
  8. That got me, too. Surely vets would have access to a steady supply of stray or unwanted cats. If they were just going to give the girl a cat that wasn't hers to replace the one she lost, they didn't have to give up theirs. They could have found another to give her.
  9. Plus, she's earning a salary while having almost no living expenses, since she gets room and board as part of her job, so she probably has a bit of a savings nest egg for retirement that she can continue to add to. Once married, she likely wouldn't continue working for a salary (while probably doing the same work for her household), so she wouldn't have money of her own. She'd be dependent on whatever her husband had and whatever he left her if he died first.
  10. I never got the impression that he was wanting her to come as nursemaid and housekeeper or that she thought that was his motivation, but that probably would just be an accepted assumption in that era. When a woman married, she took on the household and whatever that entailed. Gerald had lived alone and seemed to be capable of fending for himself, but it would be highly unlikely that a man of his generation in that era would insist on doing an equal share of the housework once he got married. I'd think she'd be giving up more by going. At least with what she's doing now, she's doing it as a job and is being paid for it. This is her career. She's somewhat independent. If she gets mad at Siegfried or if he treats her badly, she can quit and leave. The odds are very good that she'd be doing exactly the same work she does at Skeldale House for Gerald and his sister, only she wouldn't be earning a salary for her work, and she'd be stuck. At that time, she wouldn't have been able to get another divorce just because she was unhappy. I doubt Gerald would be abusive, but it doesn't seem that Audrey has met his sister, and she'd have zero support network in the community. She'd probably have married him in a heartbeat if he'd been staying in town, but he was asking her to give up her entire life -- her job, her friends, her community, her "family" -- to follow him. She may be doing housework professionally, but it's still her career, so no different from if he wanted her to quit an office job she loved.
  11. I've never had the impression she was that deeply in love with him, though I don't know if that's because they're reserved Yorkshire people in 1940. She was fond of him, enjoyed hanging out with him, and was flattered by his attention, but there's a huge gap between that and the kind of love that leads to marriage, particularly a marriage that involved leaving her entire life behind. She'd have been living in another woman's home, and since that other woman is apparently an invalid, she'd have been doing there what she was doing at Skeldale House, serving as the housekeeper, doing the cooking, laundry, and cleaning, but without a salary. It would take a lot of love to do that. She realized she wanted to stay with her found family more than she wanted to go with Gerald. I'm not even shipping her with Siegfried, but she wanted to be there for Helen, she wanted to be there for the baby's birth, she wanted her household. I've heard it said that, particularly for middle-aged women, a man isn't so much competing with other men for a woman's affections as he is competing with her present life. If he's in direct competition, as in she has to give up everything in her present life, odds are he's going to lose.
  12. Did we get any kind of timestamp on this episode? In the previous one, weren't they talking about the Germans heading to France, and wasn't Tristan in France? Has Dunkirk happened yet? You'd think that would have come up and they'd have mentioned whether or not Tristan made it out. Helen barely knew she was pregnant in the previous episode and she was showing in this one, so some time must have passed, but enough time between the Germans heading to France and Dunkirk? Or was Helen pretty far along before she realized she was pregnant, so she started showing soon afterward? If the baby's due around Christmas, I wouldn't think she'd be that obviously showing by Dunkirk, so that must have happened between episodes. The Battle of Britain should be coming up soon, then. I don't expect this to be a WWII series or turn into World on Fire, but since the war is affecting them, it would be nice to get a little more grounding, like knowing what's up with Tristan when he was in potential danger.
  13. In fact, it could be dangerous for him if she doesn't want to risk him being around to remind her of her "obligation." She's ISB. She has ways of dealing with that sort of thing. She could have him arrested and questioned just for being there when she told him to stay out of it and stay away from her. She doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would feel at all bound by any life debt, and I think she was as freaked out by the fact that Syril was the one to rescue her as she was by her close call. Though she's probably mostly concerned by the fact that this riot happened on her watch and she's going to need to find a way to salvage her career. I suspect Syril is going to end up deeply disappointed.
  14. That reminded me in a fun way of Eleven's uninhibited dancing at Rory and Amy's wedding, but with much more control over his own body than the "drunk giraffe" flailing. It was like he finally had a body that was capable of doing what was in his heart(s).
  15. I found a Christmas movie on Amazon Prime that I hadn't heard of. It has a 2022 release date and Amazon wasn't listed among the production companies, so maybe it was a theatrical release. The movie is This is Christmas, and I found it really sweet and delightful. It scratches some of the Love Actually itches (London Christmas vibes, Christmas countdown, some voiceover, interconnected lives) but without the problematic relationships (dude, she just married your best friend, and no, you don't have to express every feeling). A man (the guy who played Dean in the Harry Potter films) notices that he sees the same people every day on the train as they commute to and from London and impulsively invites them to a Christmas party, then has to pull together a party that he's not sure anyone will actually come to. There's a romantic plot involving the woman from the train who volunteers to help with the planning, and then there are some side stories with other people on the train who begin interacting, including a really lovely story involving Timothy Spall as a grumpy older guy who bonds with an awkward young man. There's a kind of "stone soup" element as they find the various resources and talents of the people on the train that all can be applied to the party. In all, it's a heartwarming story that's mostly about community and connection. There is a tiny bit of the "it's not cheating if it's Christmas!" element (from the SNL skit about Hallmark movies) in the romance, but I think the fact that the romantic leads are both in relationships with other people is handled fairly well, as nothing much really happens, and the story is about them realizing they're not happy. There's some minor "not for broadcast TV" language, but not really any kid-friendly content, so probably not something to watch with the family, but it's clean enough to be safe to watch with your parents/older relatives without squirming (unless they're homophobes or bigots, as there is LGBT representation and there are interracial relationships).
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