aghst

DeAngelo very salty. He was not a good racer anyways. Almost got them eliminated in Cambodia. Good for him that he didn't need the money like other racers, including probably Gary. Maybe that's why he wasn't detail-oriented enough. He's competitive even after his years as professional athlete are over. But like the running back that he was, he kept diving in head-first without too much deliberation and thought or paying attention to details. He kept missing and missing details during the tile-making task. If he doesn't want to ever come back, not a big loss, I don't think he was that pleasant to watch because of his attitude.

I don't like how the collusion went down but they're completely within their rights to choose whom they will be competing against in the final leg. It could be because they like the other teams the best or it could be that they believe they can beat these other teams. Considering that each of these teams won at least 1 leg of the race, maybe 2 legs or more each, they were among the strongest teams left, so strategically it might have been better to have Gary and DeAngelo as one of the final 3 for the other two teams. TAR may not be happy if it alienates viewers and hurts ratings. Plus they can't use editing to make it seem like the last team was close to beating the next to last team. Thing is, twice Gary and DeAngelo were off just by one. Twice. I don't know if they were purely guessing or they weren't taking notes like many teams do. Usually the big memory task is in the final leg. Maybe this was it for this season? But they just gave up after the other teams left so they must have been guessing. Also when they do memory tasks don't they usually tell them how many items they got wrong? In this one they had no idea how many they missed but the Beards methodically knew at least two of answers. What the alliance teams did was shitty but it's also true that DeAngelo was a poor sport.

I didn't like it when the vets always preyed on rookies but not really feeling the BB alliance either. Actually the fact that CT dissed Kam made the BB alliance even stronger as she paired with Josh, one of the BB alliance of 4, which also has a deal with Cory and Nelson. So they potentially have locked up a lot of votes. If the pairs don't change up that much, then the BB alliance will just keep picking off others. And in the US vs. the World season, the elimination winners didn't change teams until towards the end so it seems likely that they won't flip around too much. The casting of course made this BB alliance dominance possible. I can understand wanting to get in new blood, younger cast members who fit the MTV target demographics better and CT and Wes are on the old side. But the BB alliance members are not really that telegenic or charismatic either. A couple of them are strong and/or athletic but beyond numbers, I don't know that their political game is that strong. I liked the 10 Skulls limit but I don't necessarily like that you have to defend it and hang on to it. That certainly guarantees that the strongest players are able to win one or more eliminations, to win the Skull and to defend it. Or you have a big enough alliance to protect you from going in more than once and you can pretty much determine when to go in and against whom. I liked the secret vote at first but it was done mostly for the drama of showing who voted for whom and then the Double Agents getting to see the votes. But it doesn't matter, the alliance voting patterns still determine how the vote goes. So the smart strategy would be to go in an elimination vs. players perceived as weak and then get enough people to protect you from being sent in again. Only problem is when you run out of the "lay ups" you're going to be fighting vs. other strong players. Again it depends on how often the elimination winners flip around to different partners. Fessy will be looking to dump Aneesa, who seems as big as ever. Blunt truth is that anything involved any kind of endurance will eliminate her. We know that in the Final there will be some of that, though they have had extreme endurance Finals like the time that Zack was blubbering like a baby because his big muscles shut down in a long run uphill in cold weather. In the previews they showed a wide shot from a drone of people running across wide open spaces. So I don't know if that's part of the Final or they will have a challenge like that at some point. Iceland is known for wide open, barren spaces so maybe they use the landscape to have some more endurance challenges. Lolo bounded up that hill like an antelope but too bad for her that it wasn't a physical race. I don't know if she has upper body strength like Natalie or the ability to perform and adapt under pressure but surprised none of the vet guys tried to get her. I guess they think strength is ultimately an advantage. You have to be able to run but you don't necessarily have to be able to run the fastest. But mass and strength does into play in elimination and that helped Natalie because I think Asheley wore down getting over that hump.

Premiere got good ratings. https://deadline.com/2020/12/bryan-cranston-your-honor-ratings-viewership-record-showtime-1234653475/

OK watched the special, they gave a lot of backstories particularly to the newbies. One major thing is there are only 10 Skulls to be won in the elimination and you need a Skull for the Finals. Lolo is a newbie. She briefly said her athletic ability doesn't necessarily help her because it's not like she knows what the event is and can practice for it, like she does with her track event. But she is expected to bring drama. BTW, Bill Simmons and David Jacoby will be recapping each episode on The Ringer podcast.

She has a bigger role than she had playing Shosh. Haven't seen her in anything else than Girls and The Flight Attendant. Annie is definitely different than Shosh, more confident, cynical.

Canberra - they met in college and then he joined the army and whatever job she had was subordinated to his deployments in different parts of the world and her having children? I wouldn’t have guessed that US military are deployed in Hanoi of all places. OK he agreed with her choice even if it meant a longer commute since the newer house was easier for her to maintain. She had to get him to agree that she wouldn’t be able to keep the pool clean with her pregnancy? They seem to like the house with the ghastly fake grass because low maintenance? Canberra doesn’t look bad but with all the other glamorous Australian cities, could be kind of a drag.

Hmm doesn't FaceTime have some specific watch together feature?

Wine snobs want a stream of wine to chug down their gullets? If you mean wine snobs who drop famous vintages and vintners but don't really appreciate the wines. I can see trying it once or twice since it's some tradition but did they really pack those giant decanters in their bags?

I'd try it but I don't want to eat like a decadent Tsar. Maybe if there's another brand which isn't for Tsar-wannabes ...

He was probably cast because he said he would try to bring a message. And probably encouraged to bring paper straws and foist it on guests and other crew. Also doesn't seem likely that he would think on his own it would be a good idea to go swimming during a shift or to go take a nap. It's like Rhylee, being prodded to talk about being a captain on the Alaska trawler all the time or aggressively confronting other cast except the captain.

Maybe they contrived the situation with the inhaler so that Adam wouldn't come across as an irresponsible kid who completely ran away to not face responsibility for what he did. For instance, if he was drunk or high and killed the other kid and ran off, there would be no sympathy for Adam or Michael who is trying to cover it up. Let's even say that Michael didn't recognize the father of the victim was a murderous criminal. Let's just say Michael was up for re-election to keep his judge seat but decided even an accident would be bad for his campaign. So they had to have these extenuating circumstances, like it was an accident and the kid was having a medical emergency at the time and in the aftermath could not call and communicate what happened to the 911 operator. Then the other circumstance is that if Michael turned Adam in, they would face violent revenge. Michael and Adam are doing the wrong things, illegal things, but they still have to get viewers to sympathize and root for them to get away with it, to be safe essentially and not have to face the consequences.

I’ve never watched any of the Harry Potter movies. In a way Pullman and this series is creating its own mythology like Harry Potter, an alternate universe of dust or dark matter which seems to be some kind of malevolent being. Will and Lyra were both chosen to wield these magical instruments but they just want to use them to find their fathers? Or does Lyra care to find Asriel again? I want to say they are being enchanted by discovery of new worlds and their own abilities but it seems the adults are also being moved by discovery. Or more likely, Boreal and Coulter is looking to control, dominate these new worlds using whatever powers and knowledge they can acquire. Boreal was not too skillful or subtle when he met Mary Malone, bringing up military interest in her dark matter research. That turned her off immediately yet was he being that obvious?

IIRC, last season, she would have inherited a home in Wisconsin, in some boring small town. He wouldn't go for it and lured her back to Chicago. Tammy is suppose to be a broad, not some girlie girl into froufrou coffees and fancy paint. But even if she suddenly developed pricey tastes, she has an okay job and Lip, did he lose the motorcycle repair job? He probably doesn't have the slightest regret that he blew that university scholarship, which could have led to a better job and provided a better life for his child and baby momma. Instead he's using his supposed prodigious brain power to grift the "love of his life."

$11 coffee? He grabbed a cup, which someone may have been drinking from, dumped the leftover coffee and then refilled with the coffee from the convenience store. $11 coffee would be a new thing for me. Probably $3-4 so he saved a couple of bucks.

Sorry, but the show has been out for a few months. So I thought the spoiler rules allowed for discussion of the whole season. Since there wasn't a thread already, I didn't think there was enough interest to have a dedicated forum with individual episode threads, which would have better prevented spoilers.

But is Adam any less sympathetic than Jesse Pinkman at the start of BB? I hope they explain more about the shrine. I thought that Michael stopped in front of the grave of his ex-wife when he ran through the cemetary? So why did Adam go into the hood for his little memorial gesture instead of to the cemetary? If Michael turned in his son, would they really be in danger from Jimmy Baxter? Their faces would be all over the news. Anything suspicious happening to them with point the fingers at Baxter, who seems to maintain some veneer of respectability with his home and upper middle class lifestyle which is very visible. He's kind of like the Tony Soprano of NO with a giant house and good kids, presumably not going into the family business themselves. So Michael knows Jimmy is a vicious gangster but NO law enforcement hasn't been able to bust him?

Episode 5 Learned Behavior. Eric tasks Harper to try to win back Felix, the big client who alone brings enough bus8ness to his dept. to cover payroll. Harper goes clubbing to get Felims assistant to set up a meeting but Felix isn’t interested, even though Harper offers to be the go between so that Felix would never have to deal with Eric again. There’s an expose by a former Pierpoint employee. All the grads read it but none of them are the least deterred at doing whatever it takes to keep employed there. Yasmin sexts Richard and then later they have phone sex, both masturbating to videos and photos of each other. Funny, one of those Echo speakers catches Richard moaning over Yasmin’s phone and Seb, the bf hears it. Later Yasmin finds him passed out while doing some cam girl sex session but she’s pissed at him? Later Eric is upset that Felix isn’t coming back. But turns out a Harper told Daria that Eric lost Felix because of personal reasons. Eric screams at Harper, makes her cry, reminds her that she lied about her background and that he “protected” her. She goes home kicks out her visiting ex when he sees that he’s stolen some vest with a bank logo. Yasmin sets up a wine and dine with Kenny, the SOB who’s treated her like shit, and some friends who have opened a hedge fund and may represent huge new business for Kenny’s dept. Kenny gets all drunk and they want a late night drinking place. There Kenny buys lap dances for himself and Yasmin, who’s grossed out by the stripper who grinds on her lap while her old friends look on horrified. She goes home only to see Seb passed out and the cam girl still performing. She crawls into bed with Harper. Suppose to be a sisterhood thing, how both had been let down by their men? While she’s been sending boob photos to Richard and masturbating to a video of Richard with her panties on his head? Would like to see where they’re going with all this sex and drugs. Even boring old Clement gets a tailor to fix him a syringe with heroin. It’s a cutthroat environment so everyone has to act out, let off a lot of steam? That’s kind of facile. Another facile take, the show is all about épater le bourgeois?

I yawned through most of it but this is going to blow up right, scamming angry Tammy? Previous seasons she pussywhipped him so bad but now he’s gonna run game on her?

I saw a preview where the mobsters wife talks about making an example. Jimmy the mobster is telling some underling about finding the person who was driving the car that killed his son. They could do worse than to make Jimmy some kind of an Irish Gus Fring in NOLA, threatening Michael and Adam. But can a local court judge go toe to toe vs. a gangster? For that matter, Jimmy looked like a doting father with an upscale home and family so going after a judge and son is probably risky, could bring a lot of heat. You wouldn’t think overt criminality would fly in this day and age but then again maybe it’s different in New Orleans.

I'd forgotten all that happened during the season, especially the end. So it wasn't really surprising to see Jules and Rue have some cozy living situation. But it should be surprising, since Rue was feeling abandoned at the end of season 1. Also the fact that she was living at home in season 1 so where did they get the money to have their own place? They're very affectionate so it seems all lovey-dovey. Then Jules leaves and Rue fishes out some drugs to take. Next scene she's at a diner with Ali on Christmas Eve and she starts out trying to say how there's great "balance" in her life. Ali sees right through it, sees that she's high, tells her she's going to struggle all her life with her addiction. He challenges her not believing in God (but his goal isn't to push faith on her) and says something about not having someone as a reason to fight her addiction. He talks a bit about his past too, tells Rue that she has nothing on him when it comes to the horrible things addicts do. Rue tells Ali that she doesn't expect to be around that long. Really intense conversation that takes up the bulk of the episode. Beyond the teenage sex and drugs antics of season 1, the characters, especially Rue is showing their raw selves, presumably. Inside the Episode, they said they were on the verge of starting to shoot S2 but then they were shut down like a couple of days before they were slated to start. Zendaya said she couldn't wait to start season 2 again. So this special is apparently an attempt to get something out that they felt they couldn't wait to have air. Sam Levinson (show runner) says the long diner conversation scene was their concession to the limitations of shooting during the pandemic. It might have been a scene or two in a season 2 episode but they decided to really expand it. So the goal is to reveal more of Rue and also Ali than we'd see in a typical episode.

So the judge (Bryan Cranston) is running all over the city training for a marathon but his teen son can barely go for a drive without gasping for air. BTW he has sex with his gf, is perfectly fine, but driving a car he can't breathe? Not sure why Adam, the teen son, takes a nice, framed photo of his late mother to the Lower Ninth Ward, to put it and some flowers in front of a dilapidated store front. Did she somehow get killed there? Soon some black men approach him after he placed the photo and flowers and Adam jumps in his old Volvo wagon and flees. He starts reaching for his inhaler but knocked it under the front right seat. He circles back to the storefront and see that someone had broken the frame of the photo and scattered the flowers. The young men approach him again, with some reaching back to seemingly pull out guns. So again Adam drives away and he's running out of gas and see a black SUV tailing him. So he's really panicking and then reaching for th inhaler again. Then he hears a crash and looks around, sees he's collided with a young kid on a motorcycle, which is now under his Volvo, while the kid is thrown like 40 feet away. He was gasping before the crash but he leaves the car without using the inhaler now that his car is stopped? The other kid is alive but unable to speak, his brains are on the curb where his head landed after being thrown from his motorcycle. Adam tries to clear blood from the mouth and tries to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation. Can you give mouth to mouth to someone who's not unconscious? He probably wasn't breathing too well but neither was Adam, as he couldn't inhale and exhale enough air to help the kid. The bigger problem was that his head was cracked on the curb with a big pool of blood around it. He takes out the kid's phone to try to call 911. But he can't speak! How convenient that Adam has respiratory problems. Adam goes back to his car to see if he can get the inhaler so he can make the call. But at some point, he decides to just drive away with the kids' phone, which he later throws into the river. There's blood all over his car and clothes but he puts on a hoodie to get some gas, leaves without paying for it, gets home, throws all the bloody clothes and his sneakers into the washer and dryer. He has a shitty car, no phone but the judge has a nice washer and dryer. Guess he didn't want to spoil him? In any event, the judge comes home, discovers the bloody clothes. He's going to do the right thing, which is to take Adam in to surrender but at the same time, he will lawyer him up. At the police station, he sees a couple comforting each other and he recognizes the man as a big time gangster. So he drives away with Adam, because the gangster, who had just gotten the motorcycle for his son, isn't going to understand that it was an accident. Judge Michael gathers up the bloody clothes, cleans up the blood in the Volvo and then takes a sack of the bloody clothes to a bridge, which remarkably has no other car on it, even though it was late at night. He tosses the bag into the river and when a cop comes by, he pretends to be urinating, to explain that he has prostate cancer with a PSA over 200. While Michael was cleaning up the Volvo, the family dog takes one of the bloody rags away and hides it under some furniture. There was another dog at the accident site who lapped up the pool of blood. Is this a real thing, dogs are drawn to human blood?

Translates as Duty/Shame. A Toyko cop is sent to London to find his younger brother, who may have ignited a war between the Yakuza in Tokyo by murdering one of the nephews of a Yakuza boss. Kenzo, the cop, seems like a world-weary father, husband and dutiful son -- his parents, including his very sick father, live with him and his teen daughter in an apartment. Turns out that Yuto, the younger brother, tried to rob a Yakuza bookmaker, got his friend killed and came crying to Kenzo. Kenzo covers it up, by killing the surviving bookmaker, make it look like the dead friend shot him. But Yuto gets recruited by a rival Yakuza boss. First thing that I learned is that the Yakuza dress up. So the boss orders some custom made suits, fancy Italian shoes. Yuto starts sleeping with Eiko, the daughter of Fukuhara, the boss. He gets her pregnant, tells the boss, who tries to have him killed because he didn't want his daughter to marry a gangster. So Yuto flees to London where he gets into more trouble. Kenzo's cover for London is an exchange program for detectives, taught by Sarah Weitzman, a London detective (they didn't say what her rank was) played by Kelly McDonald. Kenzo befriends Rodney, a half-Japanese "rent-boy" who helps Kenzo track down Yuto, who's part of a London gang now. There are moments when Kenzo has this strong, silent vibe of the heroes in Kurosawa films. He speaks English well and he seems to have no problems navigating London, either physically or being street-wise enough to find his brother. Ultimately, the actor playing him may not have the charisma to carry the show. Eventually Kenzo and Sarah fall for each other. While there didn't seem to be a lot of passion between Kenzo and Rei, his wife, I don't know that this Kenzo and Sarah pairing is that convincing. Sarah has been in a rut herself, hooking up for random, joyless sex with random men since she dropped a dime on her live-in boyfriend Ian, whom she saw making some corrupt move in an undercover case. The plots moves forward well, even with a lot of backstory pauses for 4 or 5 characters. Big confrontation at the end in the finale, after which there is this set piece of all the characters doing some pas de deux signifying the complicated relationships that each two of them had with each other and with other characters. Every "good guys" character survive and probably sets up future season or seasons. They let Yuto go and he goes to Paris, rather than back home to Japan to be with Eiko and his infant son. He would also be in danger because some Yakuza probably would try to kill him, though they kill the gang on that rooftop. Yuto doesn't go back home to Japan, at least not right away.

Probably just as well that someone like Craig and Austen not proffer opinions. They don't seem to be that into anything other than having a good time. But also, all of these members seem to know people around town who wouldn't be down with BLM, so they may not want to alienate them. I don't think any of them would display something like the Confederate flag -- they're more polished than that. But they may resent people from outside the state telling them they should remove the flag and other Civil War symbols.