Chicago Redshirt

Bonnie's car pulls up while Nate is in the midst of rooting through Sam's car. So she wasn't just lurking presumably.

Like I said above: Tom himself is screwed no matter what. If he did the "You gave me the order, Rowan," then Rowan is likely to have the chance to go scorched earth on all the people and things Tom cares about. Jake is relatively powerless to do anything. And now there's even a phone record of a conversation between Jake and Tom just after word of the investigation pointing to Tom. Rowan had Jerry killed for what I see as multiple reasons. The first is because Olivia begged him to use his power to keep Fitz in the presidency. With Jerry's death, Fitz got a sympathy boost that pushed him over his former VP. So sort of a "careful what you wish for" scenario. The second is because he probably saw it as a form of poetic justice -- you took my daughter away, I'll take your son. The third is by pinning Jerry's killing on Marie (aka MamaPope), he got Fitz to a) give him the resources to track down Marie and b) reinstall him as Command. I think we are to believe that the hack-fu that Huck employed somehow shut down all picture-taking functions of cell phones in the vicinity of the party as well as prevented people from phoning/texting.

^True, eventually they will print them out for classes that allow you to bring in outlines (some law school exams, in my experience at least, are closed book). More of what I meant was it's doubtful that Michaela would have had opportunity to steal a hard copy outline from Laurel's bag, since people are probably not going to generally be toting the hard copy outline out days in advance. I'd also say that those outlines looked to be humongous -- like easily 100+ pages -- and therefore of limited use in an exam because you probably wouldn't be able to find what you need in the 3-hour time frame you had for the exam.

I could buy that people in general do not think that they might want a lawyer at the criminal deposition. After all, despite 40+ years of Miranda rights being a fixture of television and movies, for some reason people don't invoke them. But the co-conspirators just had Pax confess to being involved and kill himself! That might have been a hint-and-a-half for them that there might be some evidence leading from Pax to them and that they would be suspects. Anyway, I have no idea how a criminal case deposition might work, but I assume there would be no attorney for non-defendant deponents unless those deponents chose to hire one. In terms of Annalise representing EP's character in her divorce, yeah, it's unusual for a lawyer to practice outside her area, and it makes little sense to me that million/billionaire would use her rather than an actually experienced divorce attorney. But it's not implausible. It seems to me the premise of the show is that these 1Ls are working with her as part of How to Get Away With Murder 101, rather than real-working with her. Yeah, it's silly but I think we just have to eat that premise along with other stuff.

Checking my DVR recording, Maroni is having the rant about wanting to hit Falcone where it hurts with Frankie at about 34 minutes into the episode. Oswald overhears, then gets brought to Maroni and promoted. About 44 minutes into the episode, Oswald calls Gordon and tells him that there's going to be a hit that Maroni has ordered of someone supporting Falcone's plan -- though he can't be certain of who the target is --and that is going down tonight. That prompts Gordon to ask about the police assigned to the protective details and to determine it's the mayor who's the target.

It's possible that Annalise had told Beth that she was getting her side piece to investigate her husband previously off-screen so that when she saw him rooting around in Sam's car she could put 2 and 2 together. Why Sam would buy the "I was just jogging and saw your lights on" excuse is beyond me. How did the guy know Sam was the owner of the car to initiate a conversation with him? Wouldn't Sam know that he didn't leave the lights on? Maybe the detective's subtle playing of the race card ("I wasn't trying to steal it") put Sam enough off-guard that he didn't think about these obvious questions. The guy with Laurel is Khan(sp?), an upper classman who is on Bar Review, which is to say, someone who is a top student in law school who writes for the school's journal. Pretty much every law school has a main journal, where students and professors write scholarly articles about various aspects of the law, and a number of specialized journals that do the same thing but concentrate on specific fields. Getting on the main journal is a prestigious thing and likely to impress future employers. They met like an episode or two at an event at a bar, and apparently have hooked up to a certain extent. I think they had Khan in the previouslies.

A few other thoughts about the latest episode: Michaela mentions that the Tillman outline came from someone who won the "Kepler Diploma" (or some such) three years in a row. That just sounds like words strung together to me. The 1Ls were grousing about having to prepare for their torts exam. In my experience, Torts is probably one of the more easy-to-understand 1L classes. Torts covers such areas as negligence, assault, defamation and such. And maybe this is my personal bias, but it was also more interesting because the cases tended to be much more concrete about Person A doing something to Person B and whether there should be liability and what should the proper remedy be. The Shooting Star/"I'm not the Shooting Star" thing was very Shondaland dialogue. I don't know if I ever experienced people having that sort of meltdown prior to exams. Like I think someone upthread said, after grades came back and a bunch of high-achieving people ended up getting less than the As they'd grown accustomed to, that happened. For those who don't know, law school classes are graded on a curve generally.

If Tom had tried to say that Rowan gave the order, Rowan would have effectively deflected and discredited him. "I gave the order? How could I give any orders? I was removed from Command at that time." Also, Tom knows how B613 works. Even if he successfully implicated Rowan, Rowan would have made sure to make everything and everyone Tom loves die a horrible, slow, painful death. So it's better for Tom to go along with Rowan's plan and pin things on someone else. I wonder, though, if pinning it on Jake is smart. Rowan previously told Fitz that Marie had Jerry killed. For it to actually have been Jake seems like a big blunder for Super Spymaster to have made, especially when rando Inspector General dude was able to uncover it with not much work. Presumably Fitz's anger that Olivia had been screwing Jake for two months in whatever island hideaway will blind him to the notion that Jake has no known motive for wanting Jerry dead.

Captain Essen called the other guy the Councilman's aide. But that could be a euphemism/synonym for bodyguard in his case. I think it's clear that Maroni hired Gladwell to kill the mayor at the end. We see him talking to one of his lieutenants, Carbone, about wanting to hit Falcone back for the hit Penguin caused at his place of business. Maroni says he wants to hit Falcone "where it hurts" and wanting to hit "the Mouth." A few scenes later, we have Gladwell going to hit the Mayor. This fits Maroni's desire to hit the mouth, since the mayor is basically a mouthpiece for Falcone. Whether Maroni was behind the first hit and Falcone was behind the second is more of a long shot. I don't think Penguin could have hired Gladwell because until after the restaurant robbery/hit, he didn't have any money to speak of. Assuming that Gladwell wasn't hired by both the Falcone and Maroni mob, the only reasonable culprit is Fish since she has the means (plenty of cash), motive (she wants to be on top of the criminal world, and by trying to get Falcone and Maroni fighting, she gets both of them to weaken their forces so she can take out whoever the survivor), and opportunity (she knows of Gladwell and had plenty of potential chances to contact him and get a contract for him.) It probably doesn't make sense that she would give the lead that got the cops on Gladwell's trail, though Maybe it's for plausible deniability.

Since I watched "Murder" without seeing all the million promos in Scandal (and presumably Grey's) first, I didn't have the heightened expectations, so I did find the final line was like "Damn!" At least some of the other 1Ls have been calling Wes "Waitlist." I don't think that Wes knew that it was Frank. In fact, it's unclear that he had even looked at the contents of the phone in any detail except to know that it's Lila's phone. Rebecca having Lila's phone and keeping it in a hidden place sure makes her sound guilty. Her confession makes her sound guilty. (And sorry, the two sentences that were in the video don't smack of coercion.) Of course, she's not guilty. \ In terms of Wes, someone in a previous thread said he looks exactly like C. Thomas Howell's character in the 80s movie "Soul Man," wherein a white guy poses as a black guy so that he can get a scholarship to Harvard Law. That person's not wrong:

The fact that she was under the influence of drugs and alcohol makes those two guys rapists. She clearly didn't have the capacity to consent. Seems to me that should have come up in Olivia's rant.

I haven't been keeping close track, but it seems like Connor's sexytimes and the hacking it has enabled has basically provided Annalise with basically every big break that she has gotten in her cases. Meanwhile, it seems like Laurel and Michaela have done pretty much nothing. I know we the audience know that the detective was looking for evidence connecting Sam to Lila's murder, but how does Beth know that? All she saw was that the detective was rummaging around in the car and got out before Sam could realize what he was doing. Knowing that Annalise and the detective were having an affair, there are more probable explanations for what he was doing in the car than he was looking for evidence connecting Sam to the murder. Heck, if I remember correctly, the detective lied to Annalise about whether Sam's alibi checks out, so presumably even she doesn't think he is looking for an alternative suspect. The CotW was only salvaged by the client being Elizabeth Perkins. Cause framing her character doesn't make much sense. It seems like it would be much smarter to use the insider info in a way that you wouldn't get busted for it and become rich.

So for the non-attorney/non-law students who might be hanging out in this thread, you may have been confused with the talk of outlines. The idea behind them is that people summarize the important cases in a class so that you can more easily commit them to memory. Since a lot of law school class exams are about applying sets of hypothetical facts to established rules from real cases, using reasoning similar to that in actual cases, it's important to know what the rules/reasoning of those cases are. Outlines are passed down from student to student not unlike what was in the show, at least in my experience. Even though many of my profs said that the benefit of outlines is actually working through the cases and doing the summaries yourself, it's easy to want to take the shortcut. That said, in 2014, people are probably not going to bother carrying around hard copies of their outlines, generally. They'll just have them on their computers. In fact, it would be fairly rare that anyone in law school wouldn't have a computer on class to take notes (or more likely, Facebook or otherwise surf the net). In the classroom scene there are definitely a lot of computers, but some people, like Wes don't have them. I do appreciate the show talking about it being unusual to take depositions in criminal cases. But in a deposition, you can't just set up a video camera and go to town. You're going to generally have a court reporter and a professional videographer.

Ward told Skye that Hydra brainwashes certain high-profile individuals. Presumably, Skye has shared this intel with the rest of the team. The notion of Agent 33 becoming Madam Masque seems intriguing to me.

Either Falcone and Maroni worked up the division of profits themselves to keep the peace and that's what they came to, or the mayor divvied things up that way because he knew it was Maroni who came after him and he thought that throwing him an extra bone was good for his health. (I don't remember the show explicitly saying who was going to get what part of things afterwards, though, and this is all speculation on my part.)

When Ward trapped them in the compartment, Fitz confessed his feelings and IIRC Gemma didn't explicitly say "We should just be friends" nor "I feel the same way." Her expression could have read either way. She just implemented the rescue plan.

"Gladwell" apparently is one of the better hitmen in town, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that both sides want to hire him. Bruce is suspecting that his parents' murder was connected to the two mob bosses competing plans for Arkham. Moreover, as another poster said, his parents' plan was to actually renovate the district and to give people in Gotham hope and change, to coin a phrase. Falcone and Maroni have at a minimum perverted that plan to line their own pockets. Maroni wanted to cut Falcone out of the profit to be gained from Arkham by turning it into a waste disposal site. Falcone wanted to have it be low-income housing, with no room for Maroni to get a piece. The mayor, deciding he didn't want any more hitmen sent after him presumably, compromised and gave both Maroni and Falcone a piece. So there are presumably going to be separate contracts for Maroni's people and Falcone's people. Since Falcone has been top dog for so long, this established that he is actually showing the weakness that Fish and others have perceived.

The thing is that Barbara isn't just his girlfriend. She's his fiancee. He wanted her to be his partner for life. Then he starts getting involved in stuff that could result in his life. Stuff that's way beyond the "officer can hypothetically get shot in the line of duty" that she walked into knowingly. We're talking about stuff that is apparently having him dance to the tune of Gotham's crime boss, to a certain extent. Stuff that could result in him being arrested and put in prison. Stuff that has had his life in serious jeopardy on at least three to four occasions (Mario Pepper, Gladwell, Fish, probably others not coming to mind. And stuff that is also putting her life at risk. I wish that the writing of the show made Barbara someone he could confide in about this, a co-conscience that helps him navigate the right path. Or even someone who was pragmatic and like, "If we're going to raise a family, we're might want to avoid pissing off the mob and take a little bribe money" or whatever. Having yet another love interest upset about secret and lies and basically kept out of the main plot is not something that sits well with me after "Smallville" and the rest of the series. And it speaks poorly of Gordon and their relationship that he has kept her in the dark about the fact that her life and his life are in danger, as is his sense of right and wrong.

As much as I've enjoyed post-Winter Soldier AoS, it seems like things have gone a little too far in the pro-Hydra direction. Right now, as far as we can really tell from the show, active SHIELD is now probably less than a couple dozen people: Coulson, May, Fitz, Simmons, Skye, Trip, Mac, Lance, Eric Koenig, a few lab guys and presumably some agents out in the field. By contrast, the number of active Hydra agents we've seen on the show are probably at least twice that, and of course the ones we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg. We saw an entire lab of people that Simmons works at, Whitehall, guy who was Fake Talbot, Agent 33, the two agents who tried to control Blizzard and who got iced, the strike team that accompanied Simmons and Fake Talbot, the strike team that went into the hotel in the most recent episode. Absorbing Man, probably some others. So while I think that the pre-Winter Soldier status of literally having thousands of men and trillions of dollars worth of resources at their disposal was overkill, they need to bring SHIELD to a place where it can't just be wiped out if someone bombs the Bus or their current base.

We haven't seen him lift anything or anyone unusually heavy. A person in average shape could probably fireman's carry the sort of Hollywood types we are likely to see on this show. And of course, lightning gave Barry abs. It's also to a certain extent plot-dependent. For instance, if he had super-strength, he could have pulled Multiplex up easily with one harm. Heck, even just with super-speed, he could hypothetically generate enough acceleration to lift him back up. But he didn't.

They can have Multiplex back for an encore if they want to. I mean, the show is based on a comic book. (Which is why Multi can apparently clone clothing if not guns). Team Flash's understanding of how the Prime works may be off or incomplete. The real Prime might still be out there and the one who dropped to his death is actually a Second (after all, why risk yourself when you can apparently control all your clones at a distance?) At the time of his death, the Prime's consciousness may shift into one of the approximately 200 Multiplex non-Primes that were still at Stagg Industries (wonder what the cops did with those, by the way). Or one of the 200 Multiplexes may develop into a new Prime naturally. Or someone could simply grow a new Multiplex like Team Flash did, except with a brain that can serve as a new Prime (perhaps by taking a DNA sample from Multiplex Prime instead of one of the duplicants). Even though Stagg is (presumably) dead, there are people at his company who would be interested in trying to derive whatever secrets his body holds, and they have ample opportunity to harvest DNA from all the duplicants around. Anyway, it seems like Flash should have been fairly easily able to defeat any number of Multiplexes by literally using hit-and-run tactics. Even if they swarmed him, he should be able to get up and run away fairly easily. It also seems like the "Hold on" cliche should not be able to work because even without super-strength, just by moving his arm fast enough, he should be able to whip Multiplex back inside. On first viewing, it seemed like Multiplex was trying to squirm free from Flash's grasp. As for Iris, it makes even less sense that a graduate student in psychology would take any sort of journalism class. And she did say she found journalism boring categorically.

When it gets to the point that criminals are trying to kill you on a regular basis, ringing your girlfriend's front door, it seems to me awfully selfish and foolish to not give Barbara at least some sort of head's up as to what the situation is. I would have to think that any reasonable person would take Penguin showing up unannounced at the girlfriend's door as a not-so-veiled threat that "I can get to you or her when I want to." And even if you take it at face value of him just being weird, wanting to help and not realizing what an invasion of personal space that is, one would have to figure that it means at a minimum that someone who does mean Jim harm could strike at Barbara. I could see if Gordon was doing allowing the breakup in some effort to keep Barbara safe, but it didn't seem to play out that way to me. Part of the issue is that Barbara has no independent personality or agency so far. All she does is be a love object for Jim and Montoya and worry about Jim. I will credit the writers for going this long without kidnapping her or otherwise damseling her, though that is almost certainly inevitable.

Lots to like about this ep: May going undercover, smiling, kicking ass, and looking sexy as hell. May and Coulson have nice chemistry. I'm totally convinced they did it back in the day. Fitz making a big step back to recovery -- he saved the day and spoke what seemed to be his first few non-stuttery sentences No Hannibal Ward -- we really don't need to see him every week Relatively minimal Skye Raina and Whitehall: is it me, or does Whitehall confirm that she is gifted and can confuse/mesmerize people?) A few more Whedonesque touches -- May just being like "F trying to flip through the laser grid" and a few of the jokes Mac -- he's the one new character that I like. Which unfortunately probably makes him another dead man walking The use of probably more spy tech than we saw in just about any episode last season (the chameleon mask, the retina duplicator, the plane sabotage device, the tracer/pain compliance thing) And call me naive, but I got fooled by "General Talbot." Things I'm not so psyched about: May and Coulson totally talking openly about their spy stuff while at the party I'm over the MacGuffin of the alien writing I'm over using icers in general and not killing people what's need killing. I know it's an ABC show and all that, but Fake Talbot and Agent 33 needed to be killed. Especially when now Agent 33 knows that Coulson's the director of SHIELD The notion that Hydra purportedly does not have any idea who the director is also bugs. Especially when there are only so many candidates. From what we were told, there were not very many high-level agents who even survived the emergence of HYDRA. One would think that Hydra would have some notion of who he was and who his team is.

I was definitely surprised at Stagg getting capped. I love the bonding between Joe and Barry. I hope that Barry tells Joe "Uh, Iris is starting to gather materials for an article about me. So this whole 'Don't tell her the secret' thing might not work out so well." Speaking of Iris, I am disliking the "Iris as reporter" turn because it's reminding me so much of "Smallville" Lois: not really interested in journalism at first, and shockingly unprofessional to the extent she is interested. 1. She needs Barry to help her understand science stuff for an article. Well, maybe you should try writing an article about something you understand. Or getting sources who are not mostly relatives. That, or give him a phone call when he fails to show. Or an e-mail. Being proactive might work. 2. When Stagg blows her off when she asks for a quote, she's like "Well, I'll just make something up." I don't think she was joking. In which case, she should know that fabrication is probably the foremost journalistic sin. If it was supposed to be a joke, it's kind of like joking about having a bomb while dealing with airplane security.

We have the advantage of knowing that Oswald is the future Penguin, and also how people in genre TV/comics are going to behave. I would guess that most criminals would be worried about someone who looks like Oswald being a threat to them. To each his/her own. I personally prefer the corrupt-to-the-core Gotham to one where the mob was only recently beginning to take hold. IMO it makes for more interesting viewing in terms of what Gordon does for him to basically be a solo act than if 50 percent, or even 20 percent of the department is competent, honorable and dedicated. It also makes Batman's struggle more poignant. Why would he not be able to root out the corruption in Gotham if it just came to be in the 10 years before he took up the cape and cowl? In terms of why Gordon doesn't just GTFO, I think/hope the show will establish it fully. It seems to be partially 1) promise to young Bruce 2) his fiancee 3) his family tie to the city 4) just an innate sense of justice and a never-give-up, never-surrender attitude. I mean, if he's almost getting killed on a weekly basis and constantly having him and/or Bullock having to kill people to stay alive, maybe it's not the job for you. I'll devil's advocate on the side of Barbara for a bit: she's been told by someone she once loved and trusted that Jim has killed one person as part of a mob hit, and framed another person who his partner killed. These are completely outlandish sounding claims. But when they are brought up, Jim doesn't say, "Oswald Cobblepot is a low-level mobster who I was told to kill or I would be killed, and I dodged that by pretending to kill him. That guy who identified himself as Peter? That's Oswald Cobblepot. I don't want to draw you any more into this because a) it'll put you in danger b) if the wrong people find out I didn't actually kill Oswald Cobblepot, I'll get killed and c) remember that one time when I told you something in confidence and you blabbed it to the newspapers? Yeah, that. By the way, being a cop in Gotham means that I'm surrounded by people who are lazy, unethical, downright criminal or sometimes all of the above and I'm putting my life on the line and my good-guy principles are being put to the test. So are you going to be ride-or-die, or what?" He acts shady as anything. What is Barbara supposed to think? Also, withholding the truth of a year-long lesbian relationship (and drug use, and presumably other things) is less than withholding the truth about "Did you kill someone on orders of the city's biggest gangster?"