Jalyn

I don't think that it is a coma, when she flashed back she was up and looking in a mirror. It looks more like she's been taken somehow. I wonder how the casino employee that was beaten and fired over Dougie's winnings would feel about the Mitchum brothers having hearts of gold. So, Mr. C received the apparently incorrect coordinates from 2 people. Is that Ray & Jefferies? It sounds like Diane was the one that sent the correct ones. So, then, what was :-) ALL supposed to trigger for her? I doubt that Mr. C intended for her to confess everything to Cole and company and get herself killed. So what did he want her to do?

I hadn't realized how much hope I was holding out for Diane to being playing on the side of good until this episode. As Ray was explaining about the ring, I was almost certain that he was going to say that he got it from a platinum blonde and was crestfallen when he referenced a guard. Given that we had two specific instances where the timeline has been disrupted (Last episode had Dougie and Sonny Jim playing ball, but he was still with the Michum's and Bobby said that they found information from his father "today" when that happened back in episode 9), is there any place that has tried putting a possible timeline together?

Let me rephrase and clarify, actually. What we saw was absolutely as you state and the most likely way it played out. However, there was something about it that made me wonder if it was possible that Andy walked over the second time perfectly understanding how Lucy would react if he capitulated. I'm not sure what it was, he certainly looks, when Lucy can't see him, kind of hang dog and like he's giving up. Maybe it's that awful baby voice he went into when he told her she could get the beige chair. All I know is that scene made me remember the watch that he couldn't afford. Anyway, then I saw posts indicating Lucy had manipulated Andy and I thought "Wait, I read that as the other way around" when I really meant "If there was any manipulation at all, I thought it was the other direction"

I read the entire thing as a manipulation on Andy's part. He dug in his heels just long enough to let Lucy know his preference and then capitulated completely - which caused Lucy to give him exactly what he wanted. When you couple that with his expensive watch... I'm suddenly concerned for Andy.

That's what I was thinking through most of the episode, especially given that Laurie's apparent suicide wasn't even addressed. Nora died, her afterlife included seeing her children happy and content and leaving them to be. Years later, Kevin dies of the heart problem that he believes was fixed by a pacemaker and finds her in his afterlife. The only thing that doesn't work is the child is that Laurie is playing with during the call with Nora. If they are all alive, it's Jill's child. If not, I can't place it. Even if she'd somehow reconnected with the child that departed, everyone else is aging, so why wouldn't that child be an adult at this point?

Actually, as long as they had Sarah, they were fine at 6/5/1 (assuming Cirie doesn't "spice things up"). If they don't have Sarah, they are at 5/6/1 - meaning that her extra vote pushes them to a tie and they are at rocks. Basically, you are right that the even numbers is the best time to use an extra vote when ties send you to rocks, but because Zeke wasn't going to vote for himself and wasn't clued in on the Ozzy vote, they were actually at odd numbers. Of course, Cirie actually flipped all of that up with her Sierra vote, but Debbie would have had to have actually been psychic to call that one.

You're describing IT, not The Stand. The Stand is the super flu wiping out the world and what happens after. Both are particular favorites. I do agree that I enjoy bits from each of his writing eras. There's very little early King that isn't at least fun to read and The Shining, The Stand, It and Salem's Lot are all wonderful. I always liked Insomnia and found the Desperation/The Regulators experiment to be a success. In his later days, I think 11/22/63 is one of the best things that he's written. And, of course, I adore the Dark Tower, which spans most of his career.

Had Tony voted for Sandra and had an idol, she had a good chance of going home. Tony's votes are cancelled, Aubry & Sandra end at 1-1 tie. Tony has no reason to flip as he's immune and I don't know that the rest of the tribe would have been willing to put their game on the line for Sandra. If she wanted to assure her safety she needed one other to vote for Aubry. Either she had a pretty good reason to think Tony didn't have the idol or she hadn't thought through the new tie rules fully. She clearly knew that Aubry was going to be voting for Tony, (otherwise one vote would never have been enough) so all that that vote did was solidify in Aubry's mind exactly where she is in Sandra's pecking order.

It wasn't misreported viewing, but it also wasn't the case. Every piece that happened in the security center, other than Dolores talking to Arnold, happened in "Old William" time. Actually, the entire storyline happened in that time, it's just that host memories are imperceptible from current action to them. The "glitches" that were causing Dolores to retrieve stored memories (including the conversations with Arnold) as she traveled felt like present happenings to her.

What Roku did you get? I've had boxes for 2 & 3 and a Roku stick and I've never noticed that it was overheating. Certainly not to the point that it ceases to work. I would definitely suggest either taking it back to the store where you bought it (sans receipt) and see what they can do for you or contacting Roku directly and letting them know what you are seeing and asking if they have suggestions. You might also check the forums on Roku to see if anyone else with your version is seeing something similar, it might be a known issue with a resolution.

His inner voice - that he was confusing with Arnold.

I've been thinking more about Ken's decision. I didn't watch the actual scenes. (I said "Oh, fine, just vote him out for being an idiot" and hit fast forward.) Is there any chance that he thought that he was trying to protect David rather than himself? If Will is lying about him being the target, than he's probably not going to actually vote with them. He's thinking that David is the more reasonable target, so if he can suss out that Will's lying, they can make a different plan? It would still be a dumb move, but at least there would be a thought process beyond "My name came up?! Kill the messenger!" (Bias note, I never thought Ken was going to win this, because I would be shocked if he was strategic enough to vote out David as soon as he doesn't need him. I was, however, enjoying watching him and was interested to see if he could say anything but "loyalty!" at the final TC.) The other thing I thought of - Will killed his own big move. Had he gone back to the David's group and said "Hey, that was fucked up, but I'm still voting with you guys. By the way, they've switched to Hannah because now they are worried that someone will play an idol on Ken" Adam would have at least had a reason to think about the vote going their way. As it was, he appeared to want to punish Ken and the rest of the group for Ken's BS. Adam went in to tribal with no idea what Will would do so he made his own "big move." If you leave people unsure of what you are going to do, they will try to plan around you doing what they don't want. At least, the good players will.

I'm just happy that his reaction is that he knows he was out of line. Too many times the player doubles down that what they said wasn't that bad, or that we didn't understand the context, or that whoever they were talking to deserved to be ill treated and we just don't understand how annoying they were. I can understand snapping out something hurtful in the moment and even meaning it to sting. Once emotions have cooled, it's a sign of maturity and not being an awful person if you can recognize and regret it.

The bit that actually had me annoyed was Zeke's comment to Will that the other side would use him for his vote and then discard him like they did to everyone else. Huh? Let's actually look at who is on jury: Michelle and Taylor, who wanted to vote out Adam so you turned on them. David, Ken and Adam were not aligned with either of them. Chris, who you turned on when he decided to vote out David's close ally Jess. Jess, who was collateral damage to you turning on Hannah. (Granted, she had turned on you, but only because you made her choose between allies.) So, who uses people for their votes and then discards them? Who is it that "realigns all of the time?" The only vote that you could say that that group turned on before they were reacting to someone coming after them was Paul - and only Jess (who is no longer there) turned against him. I hope that someone pointed that out and it was cut for time, otherwise people are just missing obvious arguments. (Kind of like last week. The problem there wasn't "should they have gone to rocks" but "how the hell were they not all scrambling to find a 6th vote so that it didn't come up?" Did anyone tell Will and Jay that Zeke blew up their game over the Adam vote? Or that he was the reason that everyone knows a) that Jay has an idol and b) Will will, at extremity, sell out his friends? Did Zeke even try to pull Adam over? Or consider a target that Adam could get behind?)

The reason that Ken's move makes no sense is that, either way, he's safe. If Will's lying, then they are really voting for David. (And, as far as Ken knows, they can't do anything about it. Adam's idol was a complete surprise to him.) If he's telling the truth, it doesn't matter that the "other side" is voting for Ken because he has the numbers. And, yes, if Jess didn't call him a blockhead for doing it, she's much nicer than I would be in her place.

There are a couple of over the air DVRs. I'm using Tablo, which works well. There is a $5 a month charge for the guide that allows you to schedule recordings. It also only gets as good of a reception as you can get from a digital antenna. There are several others available now but I haven't researched any of them.

I completely agree that they missed so many of the relationship markers that they felt very superficial. Mimi, especially, was handled very poorly. Having her death happen off screen and just mentioned to Jake as an "Oh, um, sorry" moment was incredibly cheap. They also took away the moments that showed how much Deke cared about both her and Sadie and Jake. Removing his heroism from the attack on Sadie saddened me quite a bit. I never decided if the way that they handled the relationship between Deke and Mimi was cheap or kind of quietly brilliant. We saw subtle moments that made it clear that they were together, but they never discussed it with anyone. This meant that Jake was never brought in on Mimi's fears about the relationship, but it made it clear how quiet they had to be in that day, age and their social position. Deke and Mimi both liked and trusted Jake, but they still didn't feel that they could explicitly make their relationship clear to him. RE the red herrings. I don't remember anything jumping out at me (I didn't see Walker notice them, for instance) but that may be because I assumed that I knew generally how the story was going to go and didn't pay attention to items that didn't really fit that story. Back to Bill. There were several times in the course of the show where I noted that I just didn't like this Jake as much as the one in the book. They were almost all tied to his treatment of Bill. Jake just walking away from the phone while Bill was having a breakdown was both awkward and enraging. I think it was meant to show that he was overwhelmed by everything that had been thrown at him that day, but it read as a complete rejection of Bill and his pain. Then the next time we see them together, he's still using Bill in the same way and his rejection isn't mentioned.

Finally binged the entire series. It wasn't something that I'll rewatch, but they didn't entirely destroy the story. Using Bill as an ongoing character so that Jake has someone to talk to about the surveillance was a good idea, but they executed it poorly. Jake treated him so miserably that it ended up destroying his character in this adaptation. It makes sense that they needed to dispense with the character before the climax, but they could have done so in much better fashion. One of the easiest would have been to have him shot during the Walker stake out. Either have the police see him skulking away from the woods and shoot him thinking that he was the shooter or have Oswald shoot him (leaving it ambiguous to the audience if Oswald was alone or not.) Then have Jake REACT to his damn death. Have his interaction with George be over the top because he thinks he might have killed Bill. In addition, they should have made it clear that Bill is one of the people he checks up on after he returns home. Sadie needed to be the main focus of the end scenes, but it was like he jumped out of the window and we were supposed to forget about him. Perhaps just let the screen focus for a moment or two on a list of people that Jake wants to check. Have Bill, Deke and a list of the students that he connected to at the school. (Could have been a cool moment for book readers as well, seeing how many of them we recognize.) I'm not sure why they made the changes with the yellow card man. The fact that he kept trying to interfere with Jake meant that it didn't make sense for Al to think that he was not important. When he was tied to the rabbit hole itself, Al could reasonably think that he was just some drunk from the area. If he was following him around the whole time, he's obviously tied to the time travel. In addition, the book making it clear that Al and Jake were killing these people with the changes that they were making to the timeline gives a reason for him to allow Sadie to be even if the changes weren't causing earthquakes/destroying the timeline itself. I suppose they didn't want to leave the open thread that SK never tied up regarding who these men are and why they are trying to hold the timeline and changes in their head. Of course, they didn't tie up who the hell he was anyway, so they might as well have gone with the original. That leads to the problem with the ending. In the book, Jake has reasons to understand that he will almost certainly kill the new yellow card man and possibly destroy the universe if he tries to have the life that he wants. In the series, he's told that the YCM could never save his daughter, no matter what he did. He has seen, however, that he can make changes, he just didn't like the result. It's not set up that the reset is even problematic, let alone catastrophic, so there is no reason that he wouldn't try, at least once, to have the relationship. I wouldn't want to see a montage of all of the times that he tries to have the relationship and she dies, but him just walking away doesn't fit. I don't know if they were trying to keep the option for a second season open by not making it clear that massive changes to time can end reality, but they needed to have a better reason for Jake to sacrifice his desire to be with Sadie.

The whole world looked into it - we just called it the Chernobyl meltdown and chalked it up to an accident.

We're seeing Carol's decisions come back to haunt our characters. Her threats to Sam were certainly not the only reason that the scheme failed. Certainly, his mother should have been much more forceful about him staying at the church with Judith and Gabriel. However, the audience was very clearly shown that it had an affect and helped along the sequence that ended with Sam, Jesse & Ron dead and Carl maimed. At the same time, we're watching the situation with the Wolf and Denise. Again, this isn't entirely her fault. Most of the blame lies with Morgan. However, she was the one that chose to force the issue at the absolute worst time possible - which led to him not being properly guarded and able to take a hostage. Then she takes him out when he is in process of protecting Denise. If she hadn't been at least somewhat wrong about him, she would have gotten Denise killed. Denise was only able to get out of there because he continued to protect her after it was clear to him that she could no longer save him. That also means that she came within a hairs breadth of making sure that there was no one available to save Carl. I've said before, I think, that Morgan is still broken (and that his late teacher was as well) and that his no kill philosophy is a symptom of his psychological inability to cope. After half a season of seeing how Morgan's issues put people in danger, I wonder if we are going to balance this viewpoint by continuing to see how Carol's issues also put people in danger. Both of these people (hell, everyone that is still alive in this environment) are broken. They both recognize that the other is broken and causes problems for the group, but neither is seeing that they are just as scarred and crippled as the other. Morgan thinks that his code has caused him to heal from the obvious psychological break after his son died, not seeing that this is a step up but not an end. Carol thinks that she used to be fragile and helpless and that moving to violent, hard reactions to everything is her healing herself from the awful life that she had before, not seeing that this is also just a step. They both took what they knew to be their worst self and made a huge leap away, both going too far in that leap and missing the healthy center. In both cases, they are better than they were, but neither has gotten to an actual good place. I'm fascinated by where this could go. I have more hope, after how things fell out this episode, that the show is coming down on moderation rather than either one of these people being deemed "right."

I don't want new writers. They won't go outside the pool of "soap writers that have already failed at or outright killed multiple series" so it won't make anything better. It would just be bad in a different way. I am retroactively putting this opinion back to RC, at least he'd proven that he would occasionally write something that I found entertaining. Don't get me wrong, he drove me away from the show at multiple points. Sometimes, though, he gave me Scorpio spy thrillers, AJ returning, Michael turning on Sonny and Carly and Two Todds. All of these either brought me back to the show in question or made it fairly appointment viewing. I haven't watched since before Michael gave Avery back and deleted the episodes on the DVR and cancelled the recordings when you all told me that was going to happen. I keep watching these forums for something that actually triggers a desire to watch again and finding nothing. (Well, nothing long term. I was tempted to watch the Scrubs departure.) This doesn't mean I want RC back (I'm neither sadistic nor a masochist - and not watching any more I can't say that the current regime is better or worse) just that I don't think that his leaving fixed anything. It rather sounds like the show went from WTF drek to boring drek, which isn't an improvement.

Ask different conservatives. I actually enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, and have passed it on to others, but it's not particularly good story telling. The rest of Rand is uninspiring at best. It's definitely not where I would suggest someone start to get an idea of current conservative or libertarian thought. There are several current fiction authors that present a fairly libertarian world view without being Ayn Rand. I've generally referred to John Ringo as the sci-fi Ayn Rand with actual story telling skills. The Troy Rising series is wonderful, although I don't believe that he has finished it. The later works of Dean Koontz show his religious viewpoint more clearly - if you want to try them, I'd go with the Odd Thomas series. I've heard Clancy generally referred to as Conservative (though more in the Neo-Con tradition) but I don't know that I've ever actually read his works and the movies don't go into it. Unfortunately, I can't think of any non-fiction conservative authors outside of the sci-fi/fantasy world. I'm sure they exist, but I don't usually go into reading an author concerned about their political views and tend to ignore it unless they hit me over the head. If you are looking for non-fiction that does a good job of explaining the view point, I'd suggest Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny for mainstream conservatism. John Stossel has a few books out that go into the libertarian view point. If you want to go deep, Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia goes into philosophical reasons for a limited state - it's basically a response to Rawl's A Theory of Justice.

I will start watching this show if one of the following happens: 1. Michael reveals that this is a long con and that he's working behind the scenes to take down Sonny. All of the BS was to make sure that he let down his guard. 2. AJ is revealed to be alive but was unable to tell Michael that he'd survived for some reason (I am NOT down with Michael deciding that his father is evil again) 3. Sonny dies and/or is sent to prison off screen (not to be a bitch about the actor, but so incredibly done with this BS) 4. Jason gets his Quartermaine memories back and actively works to take down Sonny/Carly all PC mob BS in an extreme reaction to the fact that he was a brain damaged hitman. After finishing that, he tries to figure out how to atone for his own actions while being said brain damaged hitman. (I might take just the first part because a) hard to be sure where the storyline will end and b) I think it would be amazing to watch Sonny & Carly try to deal with Jason trying to destroy them.) Or if two of the following happen: 1. Anna gets a clue about Robin and actually saves her (at which point Robin can peacefully leave town however they can make it work), Anna then continues to be kick ass 2. There are 4 actual Quartermaine storylines happening (Michael does not, at this moment, count. Nik running ELQ also doesn't count.) 3. Jason gets his Quartermaine memories back and decides that he has to atone for all of the awful things that he did as Jason Morgan 4. Lucky returns (so long as it's a decent recast) Explain that he's been off trying to figure out the whole Jake is Jason thing to be sure Nik was telling the truth or something 5. They have an umbrella storyline that includes all of the Quartermaines working together to take down Nik. So, yeah, I'll continue reading here and deleting the episodes from my DVR once every few months without even looking at them.

I don't think either philosophy is meant to be palatable. The governor was obviously a maniac. When we've seen Rick going down similar roads, it's shown to be a bridge too far. The polar opposite, however, is also not reasonable. Sometimes it is necessary to end a threat - especially if there are other relying on you for their security. Sometimes, however, it is not. The real trick is figuring out who can be saved and who can't. Rick, in Eastman's position, would have killed someone who acted like Morgan. We all know that that would have been a mistake, because Morgan could be brought back to humanity. I don't think, however, that we would judge Rick for the choice. I think the entire point is that there are no good options and certainly no right options. One way to move forward, that might be reasonable, is try to avoid killing humans unless they are directly putting you, yours or presumed innocents in danger and there is no other way to stop them. If you have the luxury of trying to re-socialize them (as Eastman did with Morgan) without putting others in danger, it's a good thing to do. I don't think, however, that there would be a moral duty to do so. It all leads to the need for balance. You have to be willing to give at least some trust for there ever to be a society again. You also have to be willing to end threats to the society, either through restraining the threat or terminating it. We're seeing the same need for balance in the low key argument Daryl is having with Rick regarding looking for new people to bring into Alexandria. Daryl thinks that they still need to bring in people, both to help with the town and to help those that are still out there. Rick thinks that they should stop looking - I don't think he's said what they should do if people stumble across the town. I expect we're going to see Aaron, formerly on Daryl's side, change over to Rick's side in this argument after the picture debacle. I don't expect that we'll ever see a society get to the healthy, balanced philosophy because the show runners think that the extremes are where they can mine drama. (Although, if we do, it'll be a society that our folk join and they'll somehow bring an entire horde down on top of them and destroy it within half a season.)

I thought, while he was telling the story, that perhaps it was going to end that he died of starvation and then came back. Given that he didn't mention it and didn't know anything until he went back to town, either a) the collapse happened after Creighton died but before he had decided to turn himself in or b) they were separated enough from the rest of the population that neither was infected until after he went back into town.