Lebanna

Did anyone really want The David Tennant Doctor and The Doctor Donna to go, though? Really? Basically we are all Rose now. We’ve all got what we wanted. It is truly such a total cop out, but you know… it’s nearly Christmas, and every now and then, very rarely, not often but sometimes… everybody wins. And the new Doctor seems absolutely wonderful as well. Can’t wait to see him running around the universe. Sometimes, if we are all very good, we get to have nice things. I’m happy.

I just saw this and found myself involuntarily whispering ‘what?’. Perry probably should have been the most beloved breakout star of Friends, the Bill Murray replacement of his generation. But he wasn’t and this is so very sad.

Maybe something (anything) will actually happen in season 4? *sigh*

I always thought having a mirror over the bed was a bad idea. But not for that reason.

To me McCallum with always be the best Man From UNCLE, (I’m not that old, they repeated it as a classic show when I was a kid). That show and the three main characters were so cute. It was just magic, especially for kids. Anyway, I’m so sad to see Ducky go, as well. McCallum always had serious charisma (it wasn’t really ever looks that made him special, it was always a certain attitude) and he really did carry every role he did off with such panache.

So nothing is ever really renewed anymore, I guess. Now that shows which have even been filmed are being cancelled and vaulted, I guess nothing counts as renewed until you’ve already watched the whole damn thing. Anyway, this is a waste. It was a good show and deserved better.

I found out recently that a bunch (3) of my great grandmas had their last kid at 47/48, so I could see that happening, especially as LTW’s previous kid is a lot younger than Rock. It’s unusual and I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t exactly work out, though. A story about making decisions as an older mother (I mean, there are a bunch of tests you would do, it might not have the answers you hoped for) would be fair, if a bit depressing, in a show like this. Although if she’s supposed to be over 50, that would be crazy. So, not everyone who is Jewish keeps kosher, and some people cheat on kosher at parties because they can argue that it’s not really their fault. I feel like that stupid storyline could have been way funnier and less stereotypical. Anthony and Giuseppe are also so stereotypical. I suppose someone (apart from Lily) had to be dating someone inappropriate in age. They are trying to balance it by making Giuseppe more knowledgeable about Anthony’s supposed Italian culture, but… non, grazie. And yes, Brady should be older than Lily and they should be 20-something. Making them younger was always crazy and this just lampshades it. If they were both 20+, this could have been cute. Miranda is still a gigantic snob and should be pleased her kid is at least working hard at something. She’s terrified that their kid will be just like Steve *gasp*. I could see her being pleased that he might marry Lily and inherit half of Charlotte and Harry’s money, though. Carrie is just way too rich. She can just buy a giant house with its own park in case she has step kids before selling her other place? She’s a billionaire. And even the great Isabel Allende apparently asked her living step kids if she could write about them before writing her memoirs (the answer was mostly ‘no’, if I remember correctly) and every now and then she really shares just about everything of her life, except about them, so I feel like Carrie probably should have known how that was done before anyone had to intervene. The cool answer would’ve been ‘no, of course not, not until they are adults and only ever with their express permission’. Job done. They made Carrie look stupid and unprofessional here. But I like Aiden’s ex way more than I like Carrie now and felt bad for her that Carrie might be mindlessly aiming for her kids to move away to Manhattan, to live in luxury, without even asking her. They are her kids as much as Aiden’s and having a great whole family relationship should be Carrie’s goal. Not just buying everyone’s love.

I feel like this show (like Discovery) is supposed to be a 5 year mission, just as TOS was intended to be. But… there’s no reason that this needs to just be 5 years not 7. Pike does his 5 year mission and then maybe, maybe, maybe, we just skip forward in the timeline three years and get the rest of TOS and their 5 year mission. So two years more with Scotty, Uhura, Chapel, Bones, Kirk and Spock and whoever else wants to stick around (to have come back ‘after three years away’) and whoever they want to add (Chekov, Sulu, Yeoman Rand, etc). Plus, they could even visit every now and then with Pike, just to show for real that his planet really is not such a ‘cage’. I think the only cannon characters who we know did the full 5 years together are Scotty, Sulu, Bones, Kirk, Uhura and Spock, our ‘film crew’, (not Chekov necessarily as he might have been there the whole time or not, ‘Wrath of Khan’ being confusing on this point) so there is leeway to gain or lose the others. I mean, that would be the dream, for those original fans who are still mad that TOS got cancelled back in the day (i.e. my mother, yes it’s personal!). Come on, those fans are all in their 60s, 70s and 80s now, it would be so cool to give them those two years back. Anyway, I can live with the cliffhanger. We know Batel goes out at some point, as we already know that she’s not who Pike ends up with. And as a half-Scot, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have a version of Scotty who is Scottish, finally. No more long diatribes on exactly which parts of the accent, slang, etc are wrong. Bonus! Although having said that, it’s so nice for Scotland to get some representation as well and I think all the actors who have played Scotty are a bit beloved. The character means a lot to many Scottish people and the pride they take in their cultural history of innovation, science and engineering. And, like those from Kenya, Russia, Iowa, Mississippi, Japan/California, etc, the idea that we all have a peaceful future together as friends in the stars.

Since this is a sci-fi show, I’ve been waiting for the inevitable filmed-in-Lanzarote episode and here it is. Forget Hari Seldon, every TV location scout eventually comes to thank the foresight of the visionary César Manrique. That little volcanic island has been so many worlds over the years. And is also a great place for a chilled out beach vacation. Plus, the Cactus Garden that you see in this episode is really pretty. So Poly is still around but he’s not doing so well. Poor kid, it’s a shame he’s ended up so disappointed after all his excitement last season. Has he been in hyper sleep too? How is he still alive? I was cheering a bit when the warden got cooked for his superiority but not so keen on writing cryptic messages on the vault. A bit tacky, Hari? No? It’s hard to know if Day’s new bride is too clever or too stupid at this point. She’s too… something. And did she kill off her entire family, because it sounds like she might have.

Time to skip the menu and just ask the waiter what varieties of food poisoning are available.

The only part of this analysis that doesn’t work was what always bothered me about Sex and the City and continues to bother me now; whenever a new date/hookup/boyfriend is described by Carrie, it’s nearly always in terms of their earning potential. It’s always like ‘Peter was an artist who had just sold sixteen paintings to Donald Trump’ or ‘Lucien was a banker who had just made sixteen million in the last year’, or ‘Bruce was an athlete who had just closed a sixteen year long sponsorship deal with Gillette’. Whatever ridiculous thing that made the man of the week sound important and successful. It made it super clear that the women were, in a lot of cases in the sex just as much for the money and prestige, as for the companionship and orgasms. So this is just an extension of that. ‘Look!’ the show seems to say ‘Look at what we won!’. And on the terms of the game they were playing throughout the original show, they have won. We can’t really hold that against the characters now.

They’re back, baby! Whenever this show comes back, I’m always fifteen again, watching it while sitting on my best friend’s living room carpet. And I love the now very elderly Slum worm and the fact that it really is 3023 and absolutely nothing has happened.

I’m glad for you, or sorry that happened?

I’m hoping this episode is a ‘Once More With Feeling!’ and less of a ‘Allamaraine, count to four, Allamaraine, then three more, Allamaraine, if you can see, Allamaraine, you’ll come with me…’ situation, but who knows? Anyway, everyone seems to be kissing everyone, so perhaps the DS9 episode it’s most like will actually be ‘Fascination’ where Lwaxana makes everyone fall wildly in lust with each other.

But she’s not pregnant, she’s not currently trying to get pregnant this cycle, she’s not had an embryo transfer and she didn't even seem to be sleeping with anyone at the moment. So there’s zero reason for her not to just live her life as usual. You definitely don’t have to give up drinking under those circumstances (or a lot of pregnancies would never have happened!). No idea what the show is trying to say with this but it seems very puritanical. I feel like a guy saying that they’ve never had a real female friend in their entire life should be a really bad warning sign, that is way worse than him smacking someone.

Helen is an idiot and she’s crazy to be practically apologizing to Ryan and feeling so bad for him for possibly not being able to have kids now that he left her hanging for years and refused to have kids with her and let her go through a miscarriage and IVF alone. This storyline is completely ridiculous. Of course she shouldn’t choose him, for the reasons that she should never have chosen him. Why are they expecting us to watch this nonsense again and have any patience for it. Also, I had forgotten what Cal even did last season and thought he must have practically killed someone. This show’s dialogue is like watching the Dawson’s Creek characters as adults. Everything is so important and significant. Complete rubbish. I am therefore totally going to binge this season and enjoy the awfulness.

I remember being about 12 when I suddenly realised that at the beginning of Back To The Future when the entire family, Mom, Dad, brother and sister are chatting with Marty like: ‘So you and Jennifer are going up to stay at the lake this weekend, huh’, ‘I never even parked in a car with a boy at your age…’ etc, that’s because he was supposed to have announced to everyone in the family that they were going to have sex that weekend. And that was 1985. So this isn’t new, nor necessarily bad writing.

This show is what it is. Everything happens for a reason. Nobody’s perfect. Take the good with the bad. You live and learn. Tomorrow is a new day. That’s just my personal opinion.

Nobody going through miscarriages and the the IVF process needs this. As if as an experience it wasn’t already awful enough. Yuck. Seriously, I know this show has done traumatic seasons before which fed on other people’s dreadful real life trauma (AIDS, anyone). But still. This also seems unnecessarily nasty and tasteless.

Meh. Double post. Delete, please.

Totally agree on the pill thing. I think, if family were that open about that stuff, that would have been arranged a couple months in advance, so she could be sure it was fully effective. Also agree that Che and Carrie’s friendship vibes were so much better than Che and Miranda, it was just weird. Why is Che likable with seemingly anyone else? Is this a behind the scenes issue? Anyway, really liked WidowCon as well, find Rock as a model annoying, didn’t have a problem with Charlotte’s parenting at all. Better what she’s doing than teen pregnancy angst. And the Steve thing was relatively well acted but seemed like a tick box exercise to get Miranda to the next step, which is obvious after the whole ‘cute pajamas’ line. Poor Aiden. That character doesn’t deserve this again. And the season is going to end with Seema’s Hampton’ plan, right? We are going to see that house.

I don’t think this was particularly a problem for the show, as I don’t think you could ever argue that the female characters were ever a male character’s main motivation on the team, at least not any more than their other teammates were, nor do I remember any romantic relationships between team members, as was implied (although never really explicitly shown) between Ethan and Ilsa. I know that the actors playing Rollin and Cinnamon were married, but I don’t actually remember the characters being together in the show. And female team members didn’t tend to die, they just disappeared every few seasons, just like all the guys, except Jim and Barney, did. As team leader, Jim never seemed to have romances with anyone on the team at all. And Cinnamon, at least, stuck around for several years and was supposed to be an independently wealthy fashion model in her spare time. I kind of hate to think that this film might have been more problematic towards female characters than a show from the 1960s, but…

Weirdly, considering how clear they made it in MI:1 the extent to which they were prepared to take a massive shit on the original series, this is actually accurate to what the series did. ‘Oh, we’ve got a new eccentric mask maker/muscle man/woman spy this episode/season.’ And then just carry on as if nothing had changed at all. It was kind of explained in that sometimes at the start after the mission tape would fizzle out, you saw Jim picking out the crew with laminated photos for each mission and sometimes he’d pick out someone else instead of who you expected, and that was it.

Although I really liked Ilsa’s character in the previous movies, I started laughing so much when she pulled out that bloody great sword. She had no way of knowing that her opponent exclusively fought with knives now and she was an excellent hand to hand fighter and sniper, so of course she brought a sword just so she could get killed as the actress is doing Dune now. Also, it was obvious Ilsa was dying once Ethan started saying in the club scene that he cared just as much about Grace as he did about Ilsa, even though he had met Grace, a rather similar character, about 24 hours before (if that). Nice one. Anyway, I wanted to be sad but it was just so stupid.

But that’s the thing, we all have these weird souvenirs lying around the house and hardly anyone ever asks us why. And our parents and grandparents usually did as well. The idea that, in this case, everyone just looked at this odd thing displayed in pride of place on the living room wall and assumed it was a holiday memento and never asked any questions, when it was a huge part of the mother’s secret identity, is so perfect and horrific and beautiful. It’s a lovely example of Chekhov’s gun, right there.