possibilities

I can imagine that other fire camps would say they are already full, so they send everybody back to prison while 3 Rock is cleaned up. But I agree that Oxalta somehow being able to get Manny released makes no sense.

I think the formula for this show works best when we know what happened-- but we also see Elsbeth being unusual in how she solves it. When she does standard detective work and doesn't rely on her unusual questioning mode, it does seem much less satisfying. When she used her ditzy act and the way people underestimated her, it made her triumph even more satisfying, and made the pepetrators even easier to enjoy seeing taken down. Also, it is more understandable that they have her as a conultant when she does something special and doesn't act like a usual detective. It makes the Dept look ridiculously incompetent when they can't solve a cse with out her when all she's doing is what they would normally do. Columbo had the same detective/cop coworkers for the entire run of the show, I think (Randy and Captain SomethingOrOther), so they ought to be able to keep a relationship between Elsbeth and Kaya if they want to. I don't want to see Kaya held back. But they keep poairing her with other detectives, so it' sno tlike Kaya cna't be a detective and also work with Elsbeth.

I immediately thought of Vonnegut, but then I wondered if he was actually American. So then I wandered around other authros who might have meat related books, like Upton Sinclair, and then I ran out of time.

nevermind

I thought Robyn did a great job talking sense into Dee, but then when D got out of the car, LEFT THE KEYS IN IT MY GOD, and walked away, I was really frustrated and kind of decided she's a lost cause.It's lucky I'm not a parent because I don't have patience with that degree of teenage dysfunction. Weirdly, though, I'm enjoying the show more when it's about the family than when it's about the equalizing. I also liked Mel and harry working things out. I have been dangling by a thread with watching this show. I am tired of the big cases and wanton carnage.

Any kid whose mom died is going to have questions about it. Of course his new guardians, moreover his grandparents, would tell him about his mom. It's not a lie that she was addicted, and that she overdosed. I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea and I went online to learn more about it and discovered there are forums with 10 year old posts about obscure aspects of the issue, and I didn't spend a lot of time before I found them. I didn't read all of them, but I think it's easy to find old stuff on the internet, and especially if you are a kid who is on a quest to learn about what killed your mom and are spending a lot of time on it, I can easily imagining falling down a rabbit hole that turns stuff up. I find it less believeable that Belvin would make the post in the first place, but it's not the most outrageous thing I've ever seen on TV, either. We handwave people doing physical stunts no human could do, so I think we ought to be able to handwave bureaucratic ones sometimes. But I get the impulse to nitpick because I'm also doing it!

That was really weird about the other 8 people. They could have thrown out a comment to indicate that they had called another station to back them up and those folks were still looking, or had found, the other missing people.

No security on the airplane hangar. And I thought it was notable that they told everybody to go to the Town Hall, but Pressley didn't show up. I figured the son of POTUS would be exempt, but not her. The whole situation gives me horror vibes, like the Stepford Wives meets Brave New World. But the fact that Pressely seemed not to be worried about disobeying the order to go to the Town Hall made me wonder if they don't actually mean it to be that creepy. I don't really understand Xavier. He seems to take his job seriously, and at first I thought it was more like resignation and feeling like he had no way out of it, since he also clearly has his negative feelings. But he seems to want to keep doing it, not only from obligation or being trapped. Maybe he hates Sinatra even more than he hated POTUS. Maybe at least he knew POTUS was loyal to him, and Sinatra wouldn't hesitate to dispose of him if it was convenient. I also wnder why he trusts that other agent so much (the one who was was asleep on the couch during the murder).

The therapist said that relapses are common and can be triggered by random stressors. So, I guess Mel relapsed because of plot device necessity.

I knew this episode would be polarizing. If you've had visions, or even just really vivid flashbacks and nightmare, whether drug-fueled or not, they can be very transformational. And all season Joe has been struggling with his internal conflict about what he did about Vines. I thought this was a vivid illustration of how a corrupt, racist, or otherwise unjust system can force people to make choices among no good options. In ethics, it's called "moral agency under oppression". In popular culture, it's often referred to as "Sophie's Choice". Sometimes you have to act, your options are all bad, and not doing anything is also bad, so you have to make peace with it one way or another. Some people do it through dreamwork, some through visions, some through talk therapy. There are probably other ways, also. I think that, even if you're not comfortable with the near death experience as a way to let go of things, or the whole notion of visions or deamwork doesn't resonate, it was an episode that clarified what's been going on inside for Joe, and I also thought it was interesting to see how his internal process is with regard to Emma, as well as toward his work and his extra-judicial activity. He doesn't talk much, so this was a way to show rather than tell. From my own experiences, after something like this, you can feel a huge shift in vitality and creativity, such that I'm hoping it means that Joe will approach his marriage and the Vines fallout in a different way now. If there isn't some kind of healing fallout, and they just shrug it off as delirium with no consequence, I'll be very disappointed. I did initially think the abusive priest was out of nowhere, but it's true that often kids will "forget" about traumas that are too hard to process, until at a later time in their lives they have a stressful situation and it all comes back to them. So it's actually not really off-base for the show to have something like that. It's a shocking reveal, but it's the kind of thing that does actually happen IRL.

Regardless of whether Ellie got addicted one way or a different way, or even whether anyone else did, it is illegal and unethical to withold information the way someone at Jacobson Moore did, and that alone makes it a problem. They are using Ellie's death to illustrate the seriousness of this behavior-- it's not just a bureaucratic technicality, it can change the course of lives when the legal system is corrupt. If people want to shrug off the death of Matty's daughter, and say she's responsible for her addiction, that still would not exonerate Jacobson Moore for deceiving the jury of the facts in the opioid case they were defending. Whatever the case is, witholding information that is relevant and required to be disclosed is wrong and can lead to incorrect verdicts and that is wrong. Also, if we are going to blame Ellie and totally ignore the responsibility of the drug company and their lawyers, we probably should start saying that applies to a lot of other situations-- like "nobody forced you to buy that food where the ingredients were misrepresented on the label and it had peanuts in it and so you died" or "nobody forced you to live near that toxic waste dump that the company said was not a toxic waste dump".

The guest on Amber's "team" seemed very uncomfortable being there. I don;'t know who she is, but she clearly seemed to think she needed to not make any jokes or show any criticism of anybody. Did she have no idea what the show is about? It was kid of weird.

I like Joan's personality, but it's hard for me to overcome my reflexive reaction to her manner of speaking, which comes across ridiculous and fake to me. I know it's a deliberate choice to highlight her era, but it comes across ridiculous and fake to me in movies where it was the norm, also. So I kind of wish they'd given her a diffierent characterization.

It's hard to remember Mandy is in her 30s and Georgie is in his teens. She doesn't seem much more together than he is at all. It's kind of disturbing how much they've elevated him and diminished her. But yes, him wanting another baby was ridiculous.

They also seem to have made Jason's girlfriend disappear. I think it's two episodes in a row now, after they used her in every search for what felt like a long time.

Humans are scariest. But I have a great fear of ticks, as well. It's especially weird that they aired a repeat when After Midnight was new.

Well, I can't speak to the content of anybody's heart, but there are lots of shows where the main character saves the day, and a lot of them are highly rated. Tracker is one. I quit watching it for other reasons, but it's currently one of the highest rated dramas on TV. Equalizer is another-- though that one has two women of color doing most of the saving, so that's a nice change of pace and would seem to support the idea that there's an audience for it, even if not for Athena on 911. Do people dislike all the other 911 characters who save the day on the regular? Bobby did it this week with the infant in the exploding car. I think every cop and rescue show ever aired has people saving the day most episodes. I'm curious why Athena doing it annoys people, when it's actually what every character is doing and I thought it was why people watch these kinds of shows in the first place.

I do not like the "jokes" about how much Mandy and her dad dislike Connor. I thought him telling her he forgives her for her terrible behavior as his sister because "it made me who I am" and her reacting by saying "don't make me feel even worse" was not funny. It's abusive.

THIS. Why would they think diminishing the primary relationship of the show, the friendship between Elsbeth and Kaya, would be a good idea???? That drove me crazy. I also thought he should have destroyed the phone, not put it in the coffin. Smash it, take the card out, throw it in the river or incinerate it or something. I would like to see Elsbeth solve cases by being smart, not because her suspects are sloppy and stupid. Even if he planned to burn it in the crematorium, he was still being very sloppy. And even if you are comfortable around death, that's not the same as being cavalier about murdering someone. He was so casual about it, I had to think he'd done it many times before, but the show seemed to not be concerned with that possibility.

I thought the virus was airborne and Moira had engineered it to have a 90 minute incubation period, and Chimney only had a leaky mask. There were contrivances, but I think it was clearly not a bloodborne virus because if it was, they would not be worried about the kind of contagion to the population, and people would not be wearing hazmat suits inside the lab and acting so extremely worried about security to the extent they were even before the explosion. I think gender reveals are stupid. Maybe the kid will be trans and Jee will get a sister after all. Or maybe she'll be just as happy to have a brother. I don't think if the cake had been blue that she would have been pouting in disappointment-- not if they have decided she's adorable, and not with Hen's son also at the party. I always think it's surprising that people think Athena is being given too much heroism. Most shows cheer when their characters save the day. So having Athena catch Moira is not eye-roll-worthy for me. It's the same thing everybody likes in a movie like Diehard, for instance. I hope people who don't like Angela Bassett getting this character are not just hating it because she's female and Black. I suspect everybody who thinks Eddie will come back is right. He only went to be close to Christopher, and now that he and Chris are back in the father-son relationship they always had, and Eddie's parents are making both of them unhappy, they don't even need a reason. Just sell Eddie's new house and come home. I hope they don't kill Ravi. This show has consistently had its ensemble members survive the utterly unsurvivable, and I know it's ridiculous, but I don't want them to change that. It is more like them to have contrived this to engineer Buck and Eddie living together, but I have mixed feelings about that. I'm tired of the baiting of the Buck-Eddie shippers. I think they have made a really big deal about Eddie being straight and Buck not being attracted to him, even though they also have been making it seem like Buck IS attracted to him despite his denials. I think it's a mess and I'm tired of it. Ever since they had Buck and Tommy break up, I think they've botched the whole Buck coming out storyline and I don't think a Buck-Eddie storyline will fix that.

Kenan has been doing the same schtick for ages and he's still in favor with Lorne, Heidi has the same schtick with all her characters, too. I think it's just a case of some people like particular schtick and other people don't.

Zero for me. I knew James FenimoreCooper, but somehow misunderstood the clue to want the title of the book, which I could not remember. I also knew they wanted the Walk of Fame/Hollywood Blvd, but I couldn't remember the name of it. I could see it, and describe in detail a bunch of things about it... but could not remember the name. So... boohiss. Menopause brain strikes again!

Why did Birdie refuse to confirm that she's the bio mom? Was that part of the deal she made with his mother? Or was she doing it because she herself fears the connection? Brett? Is that the guy's name who works at the garden center and has the ex wife with the evil new husband? He should have calmly told her what happened, not gone in there hot and tantrummy. She still might not have believed him, but it would have increased his odds. Catherine went to her mother instead of apologizing to the people she yelled at in Grosse Pointe? I thought that was kind of weird. I get that she wanted to repair her relationship with her mother, but she also really did behave very badly to the other gardeners. It looked to me like they changed the color scheme at the garden-- all soft pastels and tall stuff. It looks nothing like what I remember them planting before. What's her name-- wife of artist-- is still hiding the pregnancy extortion, isn't she? He wants kids and she doesn't. That will doom a marriage. So will lying.

I thought Olympia kept shutting down talk about the daughter because she thought it was a lie to manipulate her into being sympathetic.

I'm afraid the show would be seeming to promote suicide, though, if they did that.