nodorothyparker

LOL. Last season gave us a mashup of LOTR and old Westerns. Between the Roman legion hardware and the boats and beaches, this year appears to be paying homage to early 2000s Russell Crowe movies like Gladiator and Master and Commander. If the zombies or Whisperers break out in selections from Les Mis, I really am out of here this time.

From the article: Seriously? Are they kidding with this? This far in, nobody's paying theater prices to see a Rick Grimes movie. Isn't this part of the greater AMC all zombies, all year long plan they've been promising with two shows and now a third in the works?

I just saw this. While a lot of it just makes me tired -- Negan further integrating into life at Alexandria like he's a normal human being and NOT a dangerous psychopath, "shittin' pants," Alpha's continued atrocious "accent" -- Michonne! Michonne and Zeke! Michonne with the bat! Carol! Carol's "bitch has to die!" Carol with a reasonably human looking wig! Every time I'm convinced I may be finally done, they show me at least a couple of things I really do want to see.

What a fantastic balls to the wall episode. The pacing was just fantastic. "His rod will be his ruin" indeed. I know Lydia Quigley is a monster who's done some terribly monstrous things, but I was totally rooting for her and Catherine during the big breakout. These people are going to a madhouse to gawk at the unfortunates there being tortured and they're horrified just horrified to catch the good doctor with his pants down with one of the patients, really? Because she's Lydia and she was already on the loose, I worried for a moment that she would try to make her own break for it and leave Catherine on that table, but for once she didn't screw over someone taking one to help her. Granted, Catherine was the one snagging the keys and letting the other women out of their cells helped create more confusion during their escape, but it was still fun to see her on the right side of things for a change. With Charles as the male relative of record who had her locked away also in trouble and on the run, is anyone even going to care enough to go looking for her? I could well imagine that's one of those things where Bedlam will just officially ignore that she's gone missing unless she forces someone with power to notice that she's on the outside again. The heist was also all kinds of terrific. All the moving parts of the women working together were great, although North really ought to know by now that both of his girls are just pig-headed and impulsive as their mother is and that it was unlikely they were going to be content to sit and wait for him to figure something out. Charlotte and Isaac/Not Theon Greyjoy have chemistry to spare, and while yes, he's done his share of throwing threats around and being an all-around prick, he doesn't quite read as truly evil either. Last episode, he was talking to Charlotte about how he'd grown up poor in the streets as a way of trying to relate to her, and right now he's reading more as scrappy and trying to use what he can to make an easy pound off people who will roll over for him. It's clear he didn't expect the kind of pushback Charlotte's been giving him and doesn't know how to respond to that. I also get the sense he's really attracted to Charlotte beyond just transactional sex and wants her to like him even as some part of him is fully aware that burning a woman's house down and threatening her is having the opposite affect on her. The actor's reading of saying he was sorry before he realized she was playing him felt sincere. Of course I do realize I'm giving the character a fairly generous read at this point because I like the actor so much, but we'll see. Loved Isabella rolling up to the smoke-blackened house and protesting just a little too much that they probably had bigger things to worry about than her problems but then proceeded to dump them on Nancy anyway. It amuses me that the character can be oblivious to the point of thinking they're all just hanging out waiting to solve her problems even as I appreciate that she wasn't afraid to throw her much heavier social weight around to benefit them in the end.

Well, that answers that question. Kristen Johnston promoted to Season 7 series regular

The karaoke scene and the afterward of it between Jimmy and Chuck when they were drunkenly talking about practicing law together in Winner was new. There was also a flashback in an earlier episode when Jimmy and Kim were both low level employees at HHM. Kim was trying to chat up Chuck about a big win he'd just gotten and that was when we got the reveal that Jimmy became a lawyer to impress her as much as to make Chuck proud of him.

While I'm not much of an awards person I'm happy for them. It was a good season with a lot of good acting turns. I do think Rhea Seehorn turned in a couple of tremendous performances this past season and should have gotten similar acknowledgement, but we apparently have to nominate everyone and their CGI dog too from Game of Thrones on their way out the door.

Inside ‘Harlots’: A Rousing Celebration of Sex Work—and Women’s Sexual Power Pretty good interview with the show's creators about their thought process behind the show and their expanding vision for it. This one's a little spoilery both in text and pictures. Harlots season three – smutty sex-trade drama is a feminist triumph

Something something mountains. And the nuclear plants. That's the closest we've ever gotten for an answer as to why they can't take the seeming 5,000 vehicles they've found and just convoy back to their starting point.

It is almost comical at this point how hyperfocused this group is on the idea that everybody can be saved that they're not even asking basic common sense questions before inviting strangers to join up. Does anybody besides maybe Alicia have any idea at all just how nutjob crazy Morgan once was or how far he's gone trying to overcorrect in the other direction that's also led to shoddy decision making? When Morgan first saw Dwight, there was a moment of tension where Dwight appeared to feel obligated to try to explain himself and Morgan immediately waved it away. Have not one of these people wondered at all about that? I know we've joked about how nobody wants to watch Dwight go through a detailed explanation of what went down with Negan and how he lost his wife in the first place, but they've gone so far the other direction John thinks he's looking at a situation similar to his when June disappeared on him. It's fairly obvious something happened where they both came from that sent them both running. But no, they're all so busy navel gazing at their own misdeeds and wanting to make up for it to be heroes to somebody that they can't think about that at all to do even basic due diligence like checking to see if hey, are the guns you've been pointing at us loaded. It's like this show has managed to become the bizarro version of the mothershow.

Strand in his skinny jeans pied pipering a bunch of walkers into the wreckage of the beer bottle hot air balloon and later trying to emote some reaction when those same walkers suddenly splattered on the other side of the silk was about as entertaining as this one got. I feel like I say it every week: I like most of these characters. I want to root for them. So why does the show make it so incredibly difficult and dull to do so? Look, Alicia, I know you've got issues. But when a group goes to a significant amount of trouble to do zombie arts and crafts projects involving stringing them up with their intestines to keep people out, maybe let them go? We're too many seasons in for both shows to still be dithering around on trying to save people who clearly don't want to be saved. It was mildly interesting the first few times we saw it, usually with much better actors. Now it's just a lot of rinse and repeat, and in the case of this show, long strings of monologue delivered via walkie talkie. What should have been a fairly significant reveal that John kept the kiss-off letter from Dwight, thus negating the last year and change he's spent chasing a woman halfway across the country in the worst game of Where's Waldo ever, also fell curiously flat. Part of it was that is required us as viewers to have ever been invested enough in the neverending Negan story on the mothershow to care whether Dwight ever found his wife, and part of it was that for all practical purposes on this show, she was Schrodinger's Wife. We never saw her here. She could have been alive or dead and it would have made no difference on this show beyond Dwight's ability to sell us on why it even mattered, and even in that they've had to so heavyhandedly try to make it parallel John and June as if they were the same thing. That Dwight couldn't manage much more than a "huh, well then" reaction to being told that he's at the trail's end or that this one decent guy who's taken him under his wing unilaterally decided he shouldn't know that feels anticlimactic at best. The show could have gotten the same result by simply having Dwight show up in this timeline and announce to Morgan that oh, "she died and I kept walking." I'm still not convinced radiation or the whole irradiated walker thing works the way the show seems to think it does.

Dwight took it surprisingly well. All that drama and almost no reaction.

Again with the long pep talks via walkie when they have other stuff, like oh getting out of there, to do. The show seems to want me to care if Alicia gives up. I don't.

Dirty girl has a point. They want everyone to pile into a plane they've already crashed. Zombie arts and crafts time is over.

This franchise still hasn't figured out that watching people who don't want to be saved gets old fast. "I'm going to save you whether you like it or not." "Fuck off." "Well okay then."