kieyra

Ah, that's a whole little fantastic vignette I keep forgetting about, where it seems like the subtext is: Hotel guy: "So, eh, sorry about your Mom's death. We'll comp the room, but don't go blaming us because, you know, she drank a lot." Beth: "Yeah, she mentioned the shitty quality of the liquor, so maybe you did kill her?" Hotel guy: "Yeah so um we'll comp everything, call if you need help bye."

I don't think so; and their metrics are super weird. e.g., if you watched at least x minutes of y episodes of a show it's considered a viewing, even when x and y are very small numbers.

No. I think they both had a fair amount of ego invested in the speed chess matches.

I think it was to show us how similar they were—equally aggressive, competitive and egotistical. Benny just had the upper hand.

There’s a scene in episode 3 where Beth has come home from the teen girl party, slammed some pills, and is doing her thing of staring at her ceiling in the dark. While that “you’re the one that I love” song is still playing, the shadow/silhouette of a chess piece—also the queen—slowly rises up and engulfs her. I think we’re at the unpopular opinion table, but I agree with you on this. It seems to have worked for a lot of viewers, but I found it jolting. I needed Jolene’s character to have more development on the back end, OR a single mention in the intervening episodes, to understand why she felt compelled to come rescue Beth, who seemingly had never so much as once written Jolene a letter. (Despite this, this is still the best limited series I’ve seen since Chernobyl. I think I’d argue that it’s better than Chernobyl.)

Props to the actor playing Charles, because I eventually had to start fast forwarding through his scenes. I couldn’t stand another second of his man-baby stinkface any time he had to be in a room with Diana or talk about her. I’ve never been particularly taken by the Diana mythos, but this portrayal certainly makes me feel for her.

I guess Uptown Girl must have made an unusually large impact for an American pop song in the UK in the 1980s? This is the second time I’ve seen an English 80s period show throw it in along with all the actual homegrown tunes of the time. (The other show that comes to mind is Ashes to Ashes, which actually did a dream sequence of the music video. That show had a top notch soundtrack, but I can’t think of another American artist they included besides Cyndi Lauper.) (I know from googling now that Diana’s dance to the song really did happen.)

He invites Beth to his hotel room. As is typical with this show, a lot of stuff is left unsaid, but in the hotel room things get ... creepy or intimate, depending on your read, without getting particularly physical. And at the peak of the creepy and/or intimate tension, a guy in a bathing suit walks into that hotel room, which he is clearly sharing with Townes, side-eyes the two of them, and pointedly reminds Townes about their dinner plans later that night. Some dialogue makes it clear that Townes did not expect the guy to be back at the hotel room so soon. Later in the episode, Beth makes a brief, salty remark about (guy’s name) and blows Townes off.

IIRC they showed Diana faltering from exhaustion at Ayers Rock/Uluru, and then Charles bitching about it to Camilla on the phone later. It seemed like the episode was structured in a way that Diana was sad and exhausted and overwhelmed until she was reunited with William, and then also began to bask in the adoration of the huge crowds. Add in the temporary reconciliation with Charles and she perked right up.

Purely as a TV show watcher and not that well-versed in the Royal Family ... the wounded stag “stalked” by the royals as a metaphor for Diana was a bit heavy-handed.

Had no idea. Just registered to me as "tall woman with an interesting voice". Thanks for this. Looks like she (Rebecca Root) also has a gig in new Doctor Who as a companion.

I loved it. The show had us side eyeing Mrs. Wheatley at first, much like the dread I felt that Beth would be taken advantage of by a predator at the orphanage or maybe Mr Wheatley himself. It’s so refreshing to see them go with different ideas than I expect.

Yeah ... I’ve watched this whole thing a few times now and Jolene’s appearance gets more discordant and tropey each time. I get that she represented Beth’s need to face her past, I just don’t think it worked. We see Beth in all these complicated, nuanced relationships, first with her adopted mom. Then with her male peers who are both helping her with chess and also trying to get her to take care of herself, and she blows them off. I just don’t understand why Jolene showing up and dropping dialogue anvils is what makes the difference. Or rather, I don’t know why they didn’t define Jolene’s character beyond “person who shows up in the nick of time with cash and some really clunky dialogue”. I think they either needed to develop Jolene’s character and Beth’s relationship with her more in the beginning (and give her way more nuance at the end), or cut the character loose entirely. I feel like we could have gotten to the same place with Beth seeing Mr. Shaibel’s funeral notice in the paper. My only complaint about what’s been one of my favorite dramas this year.

I’m probably doing too much clothing math, but I had been leaning towards the idea that Beth and Cleo didn’t actually have sex, because it would mean that afterwards, Beth got fully dressed just to climb into the bathtub and pass out.

I can’t be the first one to point this out but I haven’t read all 100+ pages... “Person doesn’t realize that they are hemorrhaging blood from whatever orifice.” Very popular on House MD, where people bled from everywhere without noticing. Eleven on Stranger Things never wipes the blood away. Ears, eyes, nose, mouth, etc ... people don’t feel the blood, taste the blood, feel the trickle of blood out of their ear ... I can think of multiple examples of miscarriage scenes where the woman doesn’t notice the blood but someone else does.* (*going by my own anatomy and awareness of what’s happening downstairs. This seems like the kind of thing where someone might have a counterexample, though. I’ve also never been pregnant.) One of those miscarriage scenes (with a LOT of blood) just reminded me of this.

Huzzah! Hulu's The Great renewed for season 2 This happened months ago but it’s been a weird year.

The editing and music in the central tournament of this episode (building up to Benny vs Beth) equals anything that’s been done in Better Call Saul.

I’ve rewatched this too many times now, caught a little error: In episode one’s opening flash to 1967, when Beth climbs out of the bathtub and answers the hotel door, she says (in French): “I’ll be down soon,” followed by “yeah?” in English. In episode six, when we catch back up to that scene, we see the door opening from a different angle, and her French words are the same, but followed by “okay?” in English, and clearly a different audio take. Strange for such a detail-oriented show to miss this.

We're also rewatching. I had forgotten the stuff about the space shuttle Columbia in season one. Oof. That was hard to watch. As a result of rewatch, I also discovered that Aaron Sorkin apparently doesn't use twitter. (I looked, only found one tweet from 2014.) Can't say I blame him. I tried to briefly tell my husband how Sorkin got into it with viewers on TWOP back in the day and came out looking ... not great (for the pre-social media times) ... but the husband worships Sorkin and was not having any of it. It's hard not to watch young Elisabeth Moss through slightly jaded eyes now and be super unimpressed with her acting. (That early scene in the Georgetown bar is also pretty silly in general, in terms of how long Zoey remains physically blocked behind the two cartoon villains.)

I'm not old enough to know the songs from the time, but I always enjoy 'vintage' songs from television and movies, and have a collection of them in a playlist. (I also worked at a fifties-themed diner as a teenager, with a lot of jukebox classics). ... and I still had never heard the vast majority of music used in this (aside from obvious stuff like Venus), which was really nice. I'm shocked I'd never heard the song the girls were singing along to at the sleepover, that's the kind of thing that would end up in my "Vintage" playlist immediately.

I think there was something in there about someone working in a mine. That’s literally all I’ve got. Some (most?) of the monologues in HHH worked really well and kept my attention, with the exception of the caretaker dude. My absolute favorite is when Not sure if it’s the same writer here, but yeah, zzzz. I think the actress also uses a bit of a lulling monotone.

I rewatched this for Halloween and to try to give it another shot, but it just doesn’t hang together for me. There’s something wrong with the way it’s edited together and paced (as many people have said, the Viola story should have been at least teased throughout), and there are so many plot holes. I still feel like the Viola flashback scenes looked cheesy and cheap and in B&W. Jamie telling the kids their own story still made no sense. I came away with more appreciation for the child actors, and for Hannah and Owen, but with an even worse impression of Peter Quint and his unintelligible evil pirate mumbling. They had to have Hannah exposit multiple times about how terrible it was that Rebecca would fall for him, even though we weren’t shown any particular reason she did in the first place. He was always a smarmy butthole. I know a lot of people liked it for the Jamie/Dani love story, but it felt like a lot of the development of that relationship happened offstage or something. (I know Jamie at one point gives Dani an insanely long monologue about her life, but my attention has wandered every time I’ve tried to get through it.)

This is fantastic, thanks.

Finally got around to checking out Amazon: Kindle edition is ten bucks. USED paperback can be gotten for about $13. I still don't 100% understand how Audible works, but I recently signed up for yet another free trial and it says it's included 'with my membership'. https://www.amazon.com/The-Queens-Gambit-Walter-Tevis-audiobook/dp/B07KX49PDT/

Rewatched the final hotel room scene. It does read as friendship to me, both textually and otherwise. I suppose one could ask why he stayed in her room, but this seemed to be an era of people crashing on each other’s sofas and whatnot. And I think if we were meant to read the scene as post-coital, she wouldn’t be in buttoned-up pajamas, and he would be shirtless. Just my take.