kieyra

Who's Phoebe? ETA post below: Dear lord, I hope so. I suspect that she's the only reason I've gotten through a couple of the more mediocre seasons of this show. She is brilliant.

I'm definitely starting to believe Lettie Mae staked Tara and they just telegraphed it way harder than they meant to. Nothing else makes sense with a major character's death occurring off-screen. Speaking of major characters, and their lack of screentime relative to secondary/tertiary/"who the fuck is that?" characters...I wonder if that's simply a thing where everyone involved knows the show is ridiculous and this is the last season, and so everyone who has enough clout to do is taking it easy. And possibly distancing themselves a bit now that they need new jobs. e.g., "No, I'm fine with only having five minutes of screentime this ep. I'll be in my trailer."

Thanks for the clarification that Eddie did in fact give her what seems to be a large quantity of narcotics. That...is insane, even for this show. Although I suppose it's why she slept with him again. I read Jackie's reaction to the money-bag theft as sincere, meaning I don't think she took it.

Did we see Eddie give her the pills? I might have blinked and missed it. I know he handed her what I assume were travel documents or something, and obviously he agreed to take care of Slippers (I've been expecting that dog to die at Jackie's hands somehow all season), but I didn't know he gave her the pills. Good call about them possibly being a red herring or something innocuous, though. It would also explain why she didn't seem concerned about having such a large quantity lying around willy-nilly in her suitcase. Also, those pills were colored, and don't we normally see her slamming generic white capsules this season? (I know the show takes great liberty with 'drugs' but I'm guessing there's a reason they looked different.)

Didn't watch this yet but was kind of counting on you guys to let me know if I should. No topic thread at 11:30 doesn't bode well.

With the focus on the hurricane that's been a background plot for a few weeks, I thought she was going to go down there and do volunteer work. In an early scene, the newscaster in the background was saying they needed medical personnel. And they showed Jackie desperately wanting to be a nurse/help people all episode. So I figured her big plan was to fly to the hurricane zone, volunteer, become a rock star medical hero, and get some sort of service award/media attention that would force them to take her back at All Saints next season because it would be great publicity. I was so sure this was where it was going that I 30-second-skipped ahead when she got back in her car, because I figured it was leading into the final scene of her being on the plane. And thus, I was confused when my skip ended in the crash aftermath. Well played, show. ETA: I love Zoey and Gloria. They do get played by Jackie, but they took no shit tonight.

I'm not sure if there was something to it or if that was just the hep-V killing her.Although with her dead and the Bon Temps "heroes" useless, it may be that Arlene having vamp-killing blood is their only ticket out. And I'm beyond tired of that basement. It was scary as shit when it was Lafeyette down there way back in S2, now I know damn well they're not killing Arlene, and I'm over it. ETA: I noticed Ginger was promoted to series regular, so I think she's alive.

Sorry if I'm explaining something that's obvious, or if I'm perhaps just plain wrong, but I think the 2011 date was the writers' weak attempt to remember their own timeline, what with the show's extreme time compression in the beginning and then time jumps later on. I know we've lost something like a year and a half to time jumps, but several seasons lasted only days or weeks. I can't remember the last time we saw Arlene's baby Mikey, but he was conceived in season one and I think he was still a baby in season 4.

Thanks for the Jessica explanations, although I guess I don't know when she gotten bitten. Side note: for those who, like me, vaguely thought one of the Fangtasia vamps might be Richard from Silicon Valley doing a cameo with some prosthetic facial hair...seemingly not. This show has felt like fanfic (bad fanfic, at that) since around the time Ball left. I think they rounded up a gaggle of fanfic writers and locked them in a room with a lot of weed.

What was the deal with Jessica's puncture wounds? I'm sure I missed something due to inattention.

Well, they sure dished out the fanservice during the teaser.

After thinking about it a few days, I'm sad to say that the "Tara's death happened off screen because we don't know yet Lettie Mae killed her" is making more sense. When the reverend was talking about Lettie Mae's problems, I thought it was a setup for LM having hallucinated Tara's death. Now I think it was the show subtly reminding us that LM is crazy enough to do something like that. Remember what Lala's mother thought of him, just for being gay. Meanwhile, I don't remember Sam getting that chick pregnant...was that a new actress? And it took me a day and a half of forum posts to realize that "Willa", and the actress playing her, were not in fact Eric's sister, although I wondered when she lost her accent. My memory's pretty flaky these days, but this *may* be a sign they over-cast just a wee bit.

Can't disagree, and I've been assuming that's one of the places they're drawing Joe's character from, but I don't know whether they stopped to consider whether the personality archetype would make a good TV show lead. I think maybe less-is-more would have been the approach. Make Gordon the protagonist, and Joe is still an evil madman pulling the strings, but in a more shadowy, off-camera way. With less screaming and destroying of objects, and less abuse of the mostly-feral Cameron.

I think I can answer a lot of questions raised in the last page and a half with a theory of my own: The writers do not maintain a show bible.

Yessss. Broken record from last week, probably, but I'm a female systems admin, and this episode gave me a lot of feels. 1) Donna is who I try to be, professionally, including they way she handled the male engineers. But 2) I could totally relate to Cameron losing her shit when she thought she lost the code. I actually couldn't watch some of those scenes, too much empathy. The only thing worse than a major technical fuck up like that is being a female who fucked up, since people are already sort of expecting you to be less competent. I was disappointed when Cameron decided to go be feral some more, but I think we had a genuine moment of character growth when she encountered the crazy guy in the living room and saw what white trash really looked like. I think it may be the beginning of an arc for her becoming an actual human. Maybe. But man do I loathe Joe. I don't think this level of hatred for the lead can be a good thing. Somewhat more invested in the show overall now.

Am I on reddit right now? So where do we think Eric is that shocked Pam? Also, original recipe Pam would have been just fine with feeding on a kid, I think...unless this was a very old callback to her dislike of Arlene's kids. But it didn't read that way.

And I remember hoping it might mean an improvement.

Wait wait, Michelle Forbes' character name is Marion? Wasn't her True Blood name MaryAnn? As in MaryAnn the evil maenad? Yeah, be afraid.

That bugged me, but then again how long has it been since Fangtasia was officially operational, at least under Pam? Wasn't there a time jump last season?

After giving it a little thought, I remembered the reverend's throwaway line about Lettie Mae hallucinating because of the vamp blood (I don't know why she drank vamp blood, wasn't paying much attention), and combined with other cues I think we'll find out Lettie Mae just hallucinated Tara's death. She clearly believes it happened so I don't think she's outright lying. But that was cheap.

I couldn't remember half of the ludicrous plotlines or tertiary characters still hanging around from the last two seasons, so not recognizing Jessica's boyfriend hardly registered. I did sort of like Sookie's final scene, it was a book Sookie thing to do. Hopefully the show will follow its pattern from the past where they dispense with a bunch of these plots early in the season and go do something different. (Not necessarily better, of course, but...different would be good. Because, really, fuck Violet. For fuck's sake.)

Overall, the finale was in keeping with the rest of the season: more concerned with individual moments than stringing those moments together into a cohesive story. This combined with too much audience pandering has burned a lot of my good will towards the show. I just picture the writers' room saying stuff like "You know what would be cool? Helena running away from a creepy religious compound...all bloody...in a wedding dress!!"...and then trying to work backwards from there instead of plotting out a realistic season arc for her (since they insisted on her unearned redemption). Ditto so many other "moments" this season. There were some inspired choices, such as Vic + Alison in rehab, but unlike season 1, they were few and far between. Also, they've done a pretty crap job with their antagonists this season. I still don't know what we were really supposed to think of Rachel, and they failed to move the bad-guy pieces fluidly w/r/t Leekie, Rachel and Adm. Cain.

Especially while talking about their son with an infatuated look on her face. Ugh, this show. I want to like it, but I was hoping they'd tweak things a bit in the new season, guess not. They obviously have a very clear vision and are going to stick with it; unfortunately the vision doesn't interest me much. I basically only pay attention when Stahma or Amanda are on screen. Irisa is interesting to look at, but she's more of a cliche than a person so far. And I literally cannot remember the lead character's name.

I lost track of which episode thread we were discussing Rosa's accent in, but I was saying I wanted to do an experiment with listening to her voice with my eyes closed (because she looks so strange in chemo mode, with no ethnicity cues). I just listened to the initial scene in this episode with the other chemo patient kid at about 00:29:00 this way, and she sounds hispanic to me, specifically like a Puerto Rican co-worker of mine. She even lays it on a bit thick at times: "I'm not gonna e'splain it to you". She just sounds very husky/gravelly, which I think adds to the disorientation a lot of people have with the accent (along with her otherworldly look).

I wondered earlier in the thread if non-book-readers would 'get' that Tyrion went to his father's room (and thus found Shae there). My coworker who is not a book reader not only didn't get how & where Tyrion ended up, he also missed the cue that Tyrion chose to go there. Meaning, he didn't realize that Tyrion specifically left the path of safety/escape and detoured to his father's quarters. He thought whoever had planned his escape specifically routed him that way. So yeah, I think they...under-directed the entire sequence.