nodorothyparker

I initially thought the sad "mother" vampire was maybe some version of the mad vampire queen Armand ushers into the fire as the Paris cemetery coven is breaking up, but I guess in the end it doesn't matter. She was their introduction to the kinder, gentler vampires Claudia has convinced herself must be out there somewhere. She was also an object lesson in what being a vampire alone in the world may lead to. Sort of like when they're all in about going on to Paris I just keep wanting to ask, the only old world or Parisian vampire you've met up to this point was Lestat, who warned you about monsters out there. What possibly makes you think anyone there is A. going to really be any better or B. not potentially have known Lestat? I promised myself I'd try to keep an open mind to this version/casting of Armand, but it's still really not landing for me.

That was I think an even longer tease with such a rushed payoff than Winter is coming, winter is coming, winter is coming, oops there it went. Eleven seasons of random black helicopter sightings on the mother show, multiple sightings on multiple spinoffs over multiple seasons, and it took them all of about 20 minutes to take the whole operation down once they made up their minds to do it.

I assumed they were around Yellowstone between the Wyoming signs and the talk about geysers. We know they jumped from the doomed helicopter coming back from a mission somewhere in the Cascades and there aren't any geysers in the eastern half of the U.S. I liked this mostly for seeing the Rick that we knew for so many years re-emerging, even if at times he seemed a little over compensating. If we're really going to watch them do a 180 now on returning to the CRM in what feels increasingly like a setup for a still unannounced second season, I guess it's better that it's almost entirely on Michonne's say-so instead of any more of Rick waffling about it even if the dossier as a motivator feels increasingly contrived. As far as anybody at the CRM supposedly knows, Rick and "Dana" died in that helicopter crash. If Jadis is also presumed dead when she doesn't come back, is anybody really going to care all that much about some file in among her things about some podunk place another dead officer came from? I could sort of see it if they were escapees known to be on the run, but now it just feels like a plot device to get them to reverse course after an entire episode of fighting and handwringing about not going back. So ramen, booze, and a deserted cabin to have sex in. As my husband snarked, Michonne and Rick just got everybody's favorite weekend college road trip. The calcified walkers were at least an interesting take. But guys, it's been something like 12 years showtime. Stop showing us hapless survivors who just can't fight or have any survival skills at all beyond halfassed robbery this far out. See also three hardened survivors apparently forgetting that the hapless survivors they just got killed would eventually turn and come back on them at just the right moment to set off the longest deathbed soliloquy we've been subjected to in awhile. About the only interesting revelation there is that Gabriel was apparently sneaking off from Rosita's harem and diaper duty from Father Not the Father's (thanks, Negan) kid every year to play confessor to a woman who pulled a gun on him repeatedly except for the five minutes she was trying to act normal.

She wouldn't know that though. More than one article I've read places the time of this episode probably around the same time as the mothershow finale before Daryl left or Carol would have eventually followed. Michonne wandered off in the middle of the Whisperer war. So she has no idea how that turned out. She has no idea about Daryl's sometime girlfriend's reaper group or the Commonwealth. For all she knows, happy fun time Uncle Negan is now raising Rick's kids. You notice she didn't mention that possibility to him.

While I generally liked this episode and thought it was a conversation that needed to happen instead of the endless tropes of not talking to each other and pushing the one you love away to "save" them, at times it also felt overlong and self-indulgent for such a short season. It also made me think that while Danai Gurira is obviously a talented thoughtful writer, this a great example of how giving one person this much control over the words literally coming out of these characters' mouths can lead to a point of fluffing her character as the ultimate savior of this piece while Rick Grimes, one of the greatest if sometimes wildly uneven protagonists on TV for a good decade, weeps about how he's nothing without her. I did like it. But I was also struck by how the building was dangerously on the verge of collapse except when they paused to rehash the same argument over and over or needed a well appointed place for a sex scene and then conveniently waited for them to be done before starting to collapse again. And how nice it was of the doomed off the gridders to leave the yellow hybrid of contrivance with enough fuel to get home! (From where? The Cascades? That's more than a bit of a drive back to Alexandria or even the Commonwealth they don't know about where their kids probably are in the current timeline.) parked right out front ready to go where they couldn't miss it. Michonne mentioning that RJ is almost 8 puts this roughly 9ish years after the bridge and the big time jump. So probably not an exact matchup but in the same general ballpark timeline as the other current spinoffs or Morgan from the FTWD timeline in what was obviously a setup for a possible crossover from his exit of that show. Both actors deserve full marks for going beyond selling this. I've always though the actors and performances in this franchise as a whole were a lot stronger than they were ever given credit for even as I get that they generally don't hand out acting awards for zombie genre shows. I do buy that Rick, who has always derived so much of his strength from being a protector and bearing the responsibility for the people he loved, could be broken and worn down by years of isolation away from that and repeated failures to escape his own personal Groundhog's Day as just another cog with walkers. Given where we first met him, you have to think waking up in another hospital where everything he knew excepting Jadis of all people was again gone had to have done a terrible number on his head. Which almost certainly didn't help. That doesn't make his dogged insistence on the same silly argument any less tedious though.

I'm enjoying this a lot but yeah, this is a bit of a sticking point. She keeps saying Judith is good and I realize what else can she say at this point, but it's been a year? two years? maybe longer since she left. And she wandered off in the middle of the Whisperer war when they'd already beheaded a bunch of other people's kids and didn't seem any closer to a resolution. That's an awful lot of faith to be putting in the rest of the cast who already haven't had the greatest track record at keeping kids not named Judith alive. I know, I know. True love and all that. We're apparently not supposed to think about it beyond that. I guess it really must be the real deal for Michonne to have not clocked Rick in the head with another rock yet after having gone through everything she went through to get there and let herself be dragged against her better judgment into this unending Hotel California with walkers and snazzy uniforms only for him to act out the least convincing breakup scene ever. Add me to the chorus of people who can't make out half of what Thorne says without turning the closed captioning on. All I can tell is that she's really damn impressed with herself for being let in on the Big Secret of the CRM and she's more than a little pissed off that nobody's taking the bait and asking her about it no matter how many times she brings it up. The more they add to Jadis's story, the less sense she makes.

This is proving to be a much much better series than I was frankly expecting as I'm rarely all that invested in big romantic pairings. But I admit that Andy Lincoln and Danai Gurira do have some pretty terrific chemistry and play well off each other. And we finally get some concrete answers to one of the longest teases in TV history in answer to what about the black helicopters. So I'm all in. I'm sorry to see Nat come and go so quickly as he was one of the better new characters we've seen across the franchise in some time. The actor was solid and the character felt pretty well developed for someone we just met. But because it's this franchise, we can't ever have nice things. The reunion was lovely and because it's been almost as long real time as it has show time since they saw each other, it mostly felt earned. But you could already see that Michonne was mostly powering through her happiness at finding him to the point that she was blowing past every red flag Rick was waving. Rick has clearly been cowed and beaten down by his time with the CRM and hasn't been able to successfully escape in how many years, but you're going to just smile and nod and go along with allowing yourself to be captured by people who tell you point blank you're never allowed to leave because oh, he'll figure something out? When she rightly clocks his mention of "one of my last times I tried" to get out, he's shifty and evasive in waving it away as oh they had him trapped but they don't have him now. Say what? Then why are we here? Mostly, I'm now just curious about what existing "deal" Rick has had with Jadis of the bad bowl cut. That can't end well.

He put his gun to his head in the very first episode of the mother show and probably would have blown his head off and ended all of this there had he not found the conveniently located hatch up inside the tank in Atlanta. I just rewatched the pilot episode with my teenager who was a baby when this franchise started and is now old enough to be getting into ZA lore herself. The parallels and callbacks to that episode are really strong. I liked this a lot more than I was expecting to because Rick was feeling really played out by the time he went trip trip tripping off that bridge and into the black helicopter in the sky. But while the franchise made some er, interesting attempts at world building, it never really recovered from the Rick-shaped hole that he left. So to see him step back into those boots as a Rick we recognize but don't quite anymore was lovely and a nice reminder that Andy Lincoln was sometimes a much better actor than he was given credit for. The show did a nice job of integrating the bits of story about government response and what little we knew about the CRM from the mother show and each of the spinoffs in a way that felt organically cohesive, and like the Daryl spinoff pulled off some really nice bits of cinematography as a reminder that this series started out as what was supposed be a couple of films. I of course have questions. All of the talk about secrets and saving the world was unsurprisingly vague, but this was a good enough start I'm willing to give it a bit to see how it plays out.

New trailer for May 12th. And Lestat's in this one.

I stumbled upon this last night. It felt ambitious in that it clearly wanted to tell a larger story about Western evangelicalism and colonialism and the place it occupies in the public imagination but stumbled over itself in trying to be overly sensitive and fair-handed with the religious nutters who either egged this kid on or at minimum did nothing to make sure he was at least somewhat realistic about what it was he was proposing to do. I think we were supposed to draw parallels with the older failed missionary who wasted years with the tribe in the Amazon thinking that if he just lived among them long enough and studiously worked on learning the language, they'd eventually embrace him and his message but if that's what they were going for, it was pretty muddled. We didn't get much more than our good missionary thought if he just rowed up to them with presents of fish they'd "accept" him and go from there as explanation for how he saw that playing out. Part of me suspects the kid didn't know either though, so there's that.

We've got a premier date of Feb. 25. It's not the originally promised three movies, but it is happening. And bonus that the Dumpster Diva will reportedly be there too.

And Forbes does not disappoint: ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Two-Part Series Finale Review: A DreadFul End To A Terrible TV Show

It's ... an ending, I guess. There were about 5 seconds in there that I thought (or maybe just hoped) maybe the show was going to go full grimdark and let everybody get eaten so close to the finish line as a result of Madison's unrelenting stupidity and awfulness. It's an ending that the original recipe mother show would have loved had it not gotten itself so publicly locked into multiple spinoffs before the final season even rolled. But then as it always has, it whiffed on doing anything other than retreading on some generic hopefulness and "something to believe in" in sending everybody inexplicably off to the four winds so they're conveniently positioned if the franchise ever decides to drag them into yet another spinoff on the apparently misguided notion that we might ever want to see any of these people ever again. But hey, they let Morgan exit stage left early so he'd be positioned for exactly that even though it's hard to imagine anyone's really clamoring to see more of the dithering bag of crazy Morgan became, so never say never I guess. Beyond that, the only amusing thing was how quickly the same people who'd been so happy to see Madison not dead became just over her endless me me me my kids selfishness and refusal to listen to anybody or stick to any kind of plan. But oh, she sacrificed herself again in some kind of nonsensical nonsacrifice, so oh well. Everything else was a lot of the usual blah blah blah second chances, have to kill XXX, have to save XXX, believe believe believe, Alicia's the mother, Alicia's not the mother, demon spawn waving a gun around, hey Alicia didn't you have just the one hand last we saw you, random kitty sighting, sure let's head off into what's surely a bombed out urban wasteland a dozen years into the ZA because it's what the ashes of Junkie Nick rattling around on the dashboard would have wanted. End scene. But then I actually stayed awake to see it through to the end, so what does that say about me?

A reasonable person might have thought the whole hammer to the head and being left for dead in an exploding dam would be reason enough for most people. I mean, Daniel managed to be rather pissy with Strand for shooting him in the face and leaving him for dead for quite some time. But for this crew, apparently not.

The Forbes reviews have been about the only entertaining thing about this final half season. Beyond that, who the hell knows? Geography still doesn't matter, we're obviously going to drag the mystery of what happened to Christ-lite Alicia now with her own cult following after the rafts drifted away until the bitter end, the acting is high school theater production terrible for even the most basic line readings, and we've dropped any pretense that any of these characters' motivations are at all consistent or make any sense. We have to kill the kid. We have to save the kid. We have to give her back. We have to keep her forever. Meanwhile I can only assume that whoever is writing this child's lines has never actually spoken to a child in real life or even heard how one sounds because it sounds like they're writing for a 40-year-old woman. All of the strum und drang (see Strand, I know a little German too) over the NotAlicia! walker still doesn't explain why Crazy Eye Troy is honked off at Madison over supposedly getting the demon spawn's mother killed. Something something no one's gone until they're gone, I guess in a callback to when they they thought they could save the world painting cryptic messages on trees or whatever. But really, show, arguing over who did what to who first a full five seasons and a reboot full of a whole other cast of terribles ago doesn't really land much as no one can possibly be expected to remember any of that. Never thought I'd be to a point of missing Strand doing his Idi Amin cosplay in his little great dictator hat, but they've almost got me there.

It's hilarious though that when she mentioned that her real name was Odessa, Dwight had no idea what she was talking about. The show devoted an entire episode in the first half of the season to the character and her backstory called, curiously enough, Odessa.

I love that now that we're down to the last handful of episodes the show is just basically "Geography? We don't need no stinking geography." Morgan can walk to and radio from Georgia and now Dwight can walk all the way back to northern Virginia and the rest of the crew had no problems packing up and following along. And having trekked all the way back there now they're going to turn around and head back to wherever we're supposed to be pretending we think Padre is this week. I want to at least give the show points for trying to honestly deal with the carnage that was original recipe Negan through Dwight and Sherry even if I don't think they ever actually said his name. Dead City seems to be trying but they're also hamstrung by the reality that he's the leading man there now and so at some point inevitably has to circle back to gee, he likes kids and puppies so he can't be all bad. Right? Right? Whatever else I may think of Dwight and Sherry at this point, I appreciate that the franchise is letting someone acknowledge that after all the messed up shit we've seen over a dozen years stretched across multiple shows some of these people are very much not okay without going all crazy eyes "You know what it is" Morgan. Beyond that, whatever. June was only ever really palatable as half of the John/June pairing and this episode she felt very much like that annoying person who vaguebooks that something is wrong but keeps saying "nothing" when you ask so you'll keep asking. I guess Strand has Troy's daughter now, who will probably inevitably turn out to be Madison's granddaughter by way of Alicia or there's really no point to any of this. Sigh. We're almost to the end.

I honestly forgot this was coming back to limp to a finish until I was flipping around last night. Kim Dickens has been fine in pretty much everything else I've ever seen her in, but she's awful here. And Madison continues to be awful. We get that your grief over Junkie Nick is still somewhat fresh as you never knew for sure what had happened to him, but the rest of these people have had whole lives to move on and develop new relationships with each other since then. Look, I can barely bring myself to care about any of these people but Charlie had a point that she was 11, freaking 11 years old, when everything went down and adults who should have damn well known better didn't behave any better. But sure, bring her back from her supposedly terminal radiation poisoning just so Madison can guilt her into getting killed to permanently alienate a much better actor off the canvas in the character of Daniel. Troy was actually one of the better characters from the early seasons when they were hanging with hardcore preppers who died the first second they were actually put to the test but I'm not really buying him as a big baddie who can get other baddies to follow him here. I have no idea what he's referring to about the mother of his kid either. The only thing I can honestly remember from that era of the show was the weird chemistry he had with both Madison and Junkie Nick where you were never quite sure if we were about to see the first mother-son menage a trois of the ZA. His "friendship" with Junkie Nick mostly seemed to consist of getting high on zombie brain without ever explaining how that was supposed to work. I assume the previous episode explained Strand's overly complicated for the ZA hairstyle but I don't care enough to go back and look. As least the silly little great dictator hat is finally gone.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon final Carol scene explained The most interesting thing about this piece is not the obvious Carol return but learning that even the scenes in Maine were shot in France, leading the French production team to have to figure out how to portray American rednecks on the fly. So they're apparently all in for keeping the entire production over there.

I readily admit I expected this spinoff to be the weakest and most nonsensical of the three announced. I mean, Daryl in France? Really? We've all had fun with that premise. But color me as surprised as anyone that premise aside, it's been some of the best and most affecting content the franchise has put out in forever. Which is probably why I have some mixed feelings about bringing Carol back onto the canvas. I love Carol. I think it goes without saying that she's probably one of my favorite TV characters of the current era. I'm genuinely happy to see her again sans the hippy granny wig. But some part of me is wondering how she will even fit into this show, which really isn't the same animal as the mothership or really anything else we've been shown so far. One of the things that's really worked here once you just accepted that he'd been plunked down in France for ... reasons was finally letting Daryl be a grown up, which I realize sounds ridiculous when talking about an actor in his 50s. But there were no shipping wars, no obvious fan service of a man who really just needs a bath tricked out in leather. Daryl's relationship and interactions with Isabelle were refreshingly adult and it was easy to see how it could lead to him finally finding a home and a family of his own that wasn't entirely predicated on his being everything to everybody, taking on everybody else's stray children and putting himself in harm's way over and over again just so he could feel like he'd earned his place among decent people. I was really taken aback to realize at the end with the seeming non cliffhanger on the beach how much I hoped he was going to take his fellow American's advice and choose a home and life for himself because it was what he actually wanted and not because he feels like he still has obligations on the other side of the pond. I guess we'll reserve judgment and see. Beyond that, it's been refreshing that Sylvie's sort of boyfriend didn't have to die horribly in front of her because no one can have nice things, or that the Nest turned out to be exactly what it was advertised to be and not a group of cannibals or evil square dancing mimes just for a cheap gut punch. Sure, it's a little cliche that at the 11th hour Le Grande Face Tattoo who's had no trouble killing nuns or anyone else he came across suddenly draws the line at kids, but whatever. France has been a whole character in its own right and the final gladiator fight if fully expected with this franchise was still really well done even if it raises more questions. What possible reason beyond staging gladiator style fights could anyone have for wanting to make the zombies worse unless there's a long-term plan afoot to use them as weapons of war? I like the actor who played Quinn and I liked Quinn as a morally gray character seemingly connected to everybody, so I'm a little sorry to see him go. But he held his own well and his death also made narrative sense as well as coming full circle to Merle also having to make that terrible choice all those years ago. The D-Day bit was nicely handled and a nice bookend to Daryl earlier channeling his angry father at Laurent in showing how loss and trauma can reverberate through generations. It almost made me forget that the most sheltered child in existence this far in the ZA was apparently able to tail Daryl for days without anyone noticing and that once Daryl did, all the walkers he'd battled his way through to get to the beach were content to stand around and wait to see how that was going to play out. I do love that it took all of six episodes for Le Kid Jesus to join the traumatized children of the ZA club in having to put down a parent or someone they cared about.

Continuing my catchup. Were we even supposed to be paying attention to anything Genet said her in big Eva Peron moment? I know I wasn't in trying to follow the parallel stories of Daryl on the ship vs Daryl in the arena. Something something a new France. Or something. I'm glad all the women have had time to keep up their coloring game in the French ZA. Yet another kid in this franchise does something completely destructive or foolhardy but they hug it out in the end because the kid had big feelings. I thought too we were seeing shades of everything we've heard about Daryl's father over the years, and yeah, while I'll never think Reedus is a brilliant actor or leading man, he rises to competent enough when he's not relegated to mumbling and has decent material to work with. My kid (who for perspective was a baby when the mother ship launched its first season and is now old enough to be watching with me) is fanwanking that Genet may be gathering up walkers from different countries for comparison testing and Daryl just managed to get caught up in it. It sounds as plausible as anything else and sort of supports his statement in the premier that he "went out looking for something and all I found was trouble." We can only speculate that Daryl making the ship go boom in his big escape wiped out a ton of research or resources or yeah, the nationwide manhunt for one escapee feels like a priorities thing, Le Grande Face Tattoo aside. I thought Carol sounded strained like she was trying to get Daryl to read between the lines that everything isn't quiet and fine, and I thought Daryl sort of thought so too but the radio cut out before he could suss it out.

Finally got the chance to watch this whole episode start to finish after just seeing bits of the last two the last couple of weeks. I'll join the chorus of not being entirely clear of the motivations of a lot of these people or how much it even matters. I may be overthinking this, which I concede is often the case with this franchise, but I was mostly left wondering if even Quinn knows what his motivation is. Is he Le Kid Jesus's father or is he just fucking with Isabelle to even make that claim? Does he care at all about the kid and what is he really hoping to get from Genet? He strikes me as one of those guys who will do or say whatever to keep on keeping on without really believing in much beyond his own survival and comfort. I did love that his female companion was just not down with the babysitting or whatever other bullshit he's up to. Yeah, he left me to watch this kid over my objections but you want him? Take him. I'm over here busy being French and fabulous in the ZA. I'm also not clear at this point why Genet is devoting so much effort to chasing Le Kid Jesus. I know she says something about not wanting to give people false hope or a rallying point, but is she also looking to pull a Last of Us on the kid and see if he has any unusual properties from a scientific standpoint? Daryl's vision of him parting the sea of walkers aside, we really haven't been given much to go on that there's really anything special about the kid at all beyond the asterisk of his birth and being precocious and ridiculously sheltered. Speaking of which, the underwater walker fight was gorgeously shot. It was one of the few times I might not have disagreed with talking heads about it that they're "making art." The flip side of that being that Norman Reedus filmed underwater makes it patently obvious that Norman Reedus is 54 years old. The mop of long hair doesn't fudge it at all there.

Parentheses. That's what the new title is still lacking. Parentheses.

Hey, at least they finally did away with the terrible somebody's hippie grandma wig they saddled her with for the last 3 seasons of the mother ship. That's something, I guess.

It feels like a very deliberate choice not to show us Lestat at all in any these previews, considering where they left the character at season's end. You notice this version of Armand threw Lestat's name out there to gauge Louis's reaction to it.