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Wordsworth

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Everything posted by Wordsworth

  1. I felt the same way. Then I remembered her first introduction to Dwight when she asked if he always sat when meeting a lady. He said he was treating her the same way he would treat a man for whom he would also not stand, except for the President or Judge Judy. Jo: (slyly) "I like that". So Dwight somehow managed to find all of her buzzwords....treating her as he would a man since we later find that Jo takes pride in competing in a man's world. Robert California is a clearly a scam artist. Scam artists will generally figure out how to read their marks and manipulate them. He must have found some way to identify Jo's points of weakness. I mean...she hired DeAngelo just because he saved her dog from a thief. Couldn't she have just given him cash? I can easily see California running a number on her, especially after his double talk managed to cause the entire search committee to recommend him.
  2. I stopped watching the special last night about an hour and fifteen minutes into it and, instead, played a bunch of "Sesame Street" clips on YouTube. I get that the special may not have wanted to spend the whole time running "The Best of..." segments, but some of that nostalgia would have been nice. They only interviewed Sonia Manzano from the original cast. Instead, we got a bunch of guest star memories and huge portions of the show devoted to how important it is to have an African-American muppet.
  3. I like Ken Jennings enough, but he doesn't have a good-enough host voice. His voice is a little on the thin side. Mike Richards is okay, I guess. He seems friendly. He has host experience. On the other hand, he's got to come up with another departing line. Cribbing Alex Trebek's final message to his fans every night is getting harder for him because he's having to go faster and faster. Last night, he ran through it like he was on the Academy Award stage and was about to be played off by the orchestra.
  4. I am growing tired of this show. * They should not boot out any contestant at the end of the first episode. * I would definitely like to see more of the technical aspects of cooking displayed. They rush through the demos and I do see contestants with notepads, but it seems like they don't really use them much during the actual cooking. I'm wondering if they just can't get down all the ingredients and the steps when taking notes. * The physical games are becoming less and less dignified. This show was definitely filmed during the pandemic because we saw Cameron trying to give food to the behind-the-scenes people who were wearing masks. That makes the cake-eating contest horrific...but it would be ridiculous even without the pandemic. No one needed to see the contestants in flannel jumping over obstacles. This is a cooking contest, not Double Dare. * The fake-out eliminations are becoming annoying. Oh, everybody's sad, but, Wait for It!, no one's going home this week! * And to have the two contestants about to be eliminated stick around for another half-hour in the finale only to base your choice of representative on the final meal prepared by the four chefs is inane. I would be furious if I had not been up for elimination in the penultimate episode only to get booted in the finale because one of the contestants that had been up for elimination was kept around to cook one more meal that happened to turn out better and got to go to the finale instead of me. Regardless of how that meal turned out, JJ was still slopping stuff on his plate and Cameron was still running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Neither of them should have been serious contenders for the finale. It's production decisions like that which make me wonder if there are other considerations besides cooking skills that go into choosing the final two contestants. * I still think it's a bit unfair for the final two contestants to be judged on a meal that was chosen by their team coaches. If the panel of judges doesn't think a side dish goes well with the entree, that's not the contestant's fault, that's Anne Burrell's or her fellow coach's for choosing it for the contestant.
  5. Camilla's arguments in this episode remind of things I've read of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. She reportedly wasn't as besotted with Edward as he was with her and didn't want him to abdicate. Apart from him no longer being a King, she knew that she would become the most hated woman in the Empire. And she was right. No, we can't blame the abdication for everything, but, as I pointed out in another thread, Edward casts a long shadow. The Queen's lecture was so wonderful to see, especially in light of the previous episode in which she only addressed Diana's straying. She made sure Charles knew that his future subjects know he's being unfaithful and that he's causing his wife untold distress. Labeling them both immature whiny attention seekers who are driving everyone else up a wall combined with a warning shot across the bow about him being King worked well for me. I did enjoy Prince Philip's attempt to give Diana another point of view. They are all periphery characters in this real-life drama that surrounds one and only person.
  6. If only "The Five Love Languages" had been out then... Those two clearly didn't understand what made the other happy. He was impressed by performances, but professional ones, not modern rock or musicals. Both performances gave me the impression of showcasing Diana instead of directing attention to Charles, though she may not have meant it to come off that way. She should've given him a book and her a grand gesture, as others have mentioned. No doubt Charles loved the boys. Remember in the early season when Charles reached out to shake his father's hand and Philip told him that they were alone, then got a hug. They were raised to be hugged, just not in public. My guess is that Charles expected the same procedure with his children; Diana didn't go along and regularly showed affection to her children in public.
  7. How difficult it is to watch Charles and Diana on this show. You just think that, if only they were of a closer age and shared some interests, it might have been better. That cringe-worthy scene of Diana embracing the Queen who couldn't think of anything to do but flail her arms impotently as if she were being mauled by a vengeful stag was heart-breaking. Diana just wanted to be loved; Charles just wanted to be loved. They were looking for it in all the wrong places.
  8. I really enjoyed this episode. Finally, we got some real quality time with Andrew (who I already knew was the Queen's favorite) and Edward. * Loved the callback to Gordonstoun school and its boorish bullying. By all accounts, Andrew and Edward did much better there than Charles did. * Loved Andrew's landing on the lawn; waking up Margaret who is still in bed at what is certainly no longer morning. * I jawdropped the whole "Movie about a much of older predators in a fancy house deflowering a teenaged girl". Did they really go there? Mr. Wordsworth was too busy googling the name of the movie and the actress to pick up on the reference until I pointed it out to him later. * The scene with Princess Anne was done really well, especially her remarks about how she does real charity work, but the press only cares about her when it comes to marriage gossip while they photograph Diana at the drop of a hat. * The scene with Charles was cringeworthy. Showing Mummy the gardens and how they will reflect him (I was thinking the whole time..."Not us? Just you?"). That lunch chat was perfect. The Queen showing that she was no fool, knowing exactly why he moved out to Highgrove and not shy about pointing that out. Her line about how Charles could possibly need cheering up when he's decorating this lovely house and gardens surrounded by sycophants working to celebrate his soul was delicious. And, too, her comment about perhaps supporting a struggling pregnant wife. * The Thatcher scenes were a nice juxtaposition to show that it's not just royalty that has problems relating to offspring realistically. Solidly middle-class Margaret indulges her rascal of a son while her daughter chaffs under her mother's clear disappointment in her abilities. * The Falklands issue was take or leave for me. I remember the incident, but it seems rather inconsequential now. I get that they were trying to muddle Thatcher's concern for her son by having her overreact to this problem. * Kudos to showing a little bit of Jared Harris in the old photos of the children.
  9. On Monday's episode, the minute the Final Jeopardy category popped up, I yelled, "Benjamin Franklin!". And, of course, that's exactly what it was. Did anyone tear up a little bit when Alex mentioned how quickly this year was going and how it is a week-and-a-half before Thanksgiving? I thought to myself, "Yep, when you filmed this, you didn't know you wouldn't be alive when this aired".
  10. This was a train wreck. It was so horrible and, yet one couldn't look away. * I really enjoyed Margaret's pointing out how interfering in the love lives of their relatives has cost the family a lot. I rather wish Elizabeth had urged Charles to make sure he was making the right decision rather than trying to bolster him by reminding him of how her rigid and frigid grandmother became more British than the British in order to make her marriage work. By all accounts, she and George had a good relationship, even if they were lousy parents. No doubt, Margaret wished she'd been given more leeway in her choices than she had been. * And I've never read anything to indicate that Bertie cheated on Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. I would be surprised if it were true, so I'm going with the theory that the Queen Mum was making a general comment about how the upper crust was known to hop bedrooms with the full knowledge of the spouses. * I didn't really think of Philip's attempt to balance Margaret's concern as "mansplaining". Speaking from the perspective of a man isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when the subject is about a man. I think the problem is that he was speaking as an older man with a decades-long marriage who had learned the value of having a spouse by one's side and appreciating the beauty and worth of that person even as she ages. He believed that Charles would eventually recognize how valuable Diana is to him and the monarchy and grow to love her as they spent more time together. Charles isn't at that place yet and would be unlikely to take anything his father has to say with any seriousness. * Yep, we saw the mouse run across the floor. It was the only thing we noticed about that scene. * That luncheon was cringeworthy, wasn't it? I don't know enough about how much the real Diana knew about Charles' relationship with Camilla prior to her wedding. I believe I read something about how she found out on their honeymoon that he was still in love with Camilla, but I could be wrong. Certainly, meeting an old flame would be awkward under most circumstances. As portrayed here, Diana didn't seem all that enthused about it. At the luncheon, Camilla is self-assured enough to order what she wants while Diana is intimidated and allows herself to not only order what Camilla is having, but also to gorge on it until she has to purge. Clearly, Camilla knows far more about Charles than Diana does and it's pretty apparent to everyone that the betrothed couple have little in common. * The perils of being a private secretary (is Charles' secretary a descendant of Michael Adeane's, btw? My closed captioning referred to him as "Adeane", but it definitely wasn't Michael) is that you have to keep your boss's secrets. The secretary obviously knows about Camilla. It was very sloppy of him to leave around drawings of the bracelet around, even though he couldn't possibly have known Diana would be aware of the Fred and Gladys pseudonyms. Oh, how Tommy Lascelles would have handled that. * They really seem to have set up Diana to have no support system here. A sister who uses her for low-paid cleaning, a grandmother who is more concerned about her fitting in than in being herself...we never see her father or brother or any other relatives. She makes a call to her girlfriends from the palace, but that's it. She can't even get a minute alone with her future mother-in-law in the same building. I think that if I were Martin Charteris and the daughter-in-law-to-be is saying she can't go through with the wedding, I'd make sure the Queen knew about it at least. * Did Princes Andrew and Edward do nothing during this time? Were they always at school? They seem to be nonentities here. Princess Anne is given some attention, but only as the commentator. Her marriage to Mark Phillips was not addressed at all last season and is barely addressed here. I'm surprised they cast anyone to play him, especially as her children seem to be invisible.
  11. Of the three episodes I've seen, this one is my favorite. I was in grade school when Thatcher became PM and I remember the hoopla over the first female Prime Minister. I don't have the same antipathy toward Thatcher as others do. I am finding Anderson's portrayal to be wonderful, though, perhaps, she doesn't quite have the same tone and pitch that the real Thatcher did (she's certainly much better than whatshisname who played JFK in season 2). I am loving the Thatcher marriage, stolidly middle-class people with more egalitarian ideals than the Royal Family. She unpacks his bags, fully expects to share his bed and commisserates with him. He seems perfectly content to read Balmoral hunting logs in Prince Albert's voice while his wife works. If only the Royals could come up with partnerships as good as this. In the first episode of the season, we find Elizabeth pleased with the idea of a female Prime Minister, then seems surprised that Thatcher has found many women too emotional to withstand leadership positions. It's an unpopular opinion, but there are some women who can't handle leadership positions; some men, too. Thatcher comes away with a better impression of the queen than she had - the queen is far more interested and informed about the government than she'd thought. Of course, that doesn't mean the two women are exactly alike. I did appreciate Elizabeth's attempts to downplay the Thatchers' faux pas. On the other hand, bringing someone to your home in order to haze them seems pretty immature so I can see how the PM would be put off by these so-called sophisticated royals behaving like middle school kids. As for why she didn't bring galoshes or hunting paraphernalia...well, she may not have realized she would be invited to go out with the family to hunt. The Diana stuff is obviously required, but I'm less interested in that than I would have been ordinarily. I lived through the Diana years, was 11 when they got married, so I remember what a big deal it was.
  12. I agree with you here on the Thatchers. I am finding the Thatchers' marriage a high point of the show. He's clearly not cowed by her and she obviously adores him. I knew what was going to happen to Uncle Dickie (Mr. Wordsworth was not and his eyes widened when the explosion happened, though he has seen enough shows to know that the montage indicated something was afoot). The juxtaposition of his death and his letter arriving while Charles is grieving certainly gives the viewer an impression of Charles as an unhappy man manipulated into settling for someone he doesn't really want. Furthermore, the theme of the Abdication being a watershed event for the Windsors is continued as, once again, the heir to the throne cannot marry the woman he loves, Edward VIII cast a long shadow even after his death.
  13. I just thought the finale was too busy. I was annoyed by the Q&A panel spending so much time on Jim & Pam and then pretending that Erin's search for her real mother was a significant storyline. It would have been nice to have Meredith or Kevin talk about the pitfalls of letting cameras follow you around. While David Wallace had a brief bit, I think him talking about the good and bad publicity a business gets from a show like that would have been interesting. It didn't have to be long, but the Q&A was just unbalanced. Otherwise, I suppose the wedding was okay and tied up the loose ends of Dwight and Angela's interminable saga. It had just about the right amount of Michael not to go overboard. Who gets in the most legal trouble: Ryan for child abandonment or Nellie for international kidnapping? And Jim & Pam still haven't resolved their communication problems. Pam's solution is to put the house up for sale without telling Jim? Really? They're still not using their words!
  14. Yes, I meant Darryl. Can you believe that I proof-read that thing again and again and still put Dwight instead of Darryl? Must be the stupid D's. Thanks for pointing that out. 🙂
  15. Oh, and can we talk about Darryl and Val which appears to have come about as a way to give Craig Robinson more to do on the show? So the warehouse employees win the lottery in “Lotto” and Darryl, bummed out because he stopped playing when he moved upstairs and because his ex-wife, Justine, is a gold-digger who isn’t interested in him anymore, costs his employer a client while failing to hire a replacement crew. In that episode, we are introduced to Val who is ultimately hired as a replacement foreman. In “Doomsday”, Gabe tries to court Val who turns him down because she has a (wise) policy of not dating co-workers. Darryl is clearly interested in her at this time, but decides not to pursue her. Until Valentine’s Day. In “Special Project”, Darryl gets a knitted beanie from Val and can’t decide if it’s a romantic gesture or not…then he sees that she’s knitted beanies for everyone…then he gets a phone call from a man wanting to send his “girlfriend” flowers… Then something weird happens. He sees the flowers, sees they’re from someone named Brandon and Val, who doesn’t date co-workers, tells him that deep-voiced Brandon is her mother. ???? Darryl is now getting mixed signals. He knows Brandon is her boyfriend. She knows he knows that Brandon is her boyfriend. What game is she playing? Two episodes later in “After Hours”, Brandon confronts Darryl in the conference room over texts that he’s convinced means that Darryl and Val are having an affair. Both Val and Darryl deny it, but the other employees are generally in agreement that Darryl’s texts do cross a boundary. “Free Family Portrait Studio” is the last episode of the season. When some of the previous employees return to the warehouse after squandering their lottery winnings, Darryl overdoes it praising Val to them, unaware that Brandon is in her office. Brandon once again confronts Darryl who finally admits that he is trying to steal Val away. Later in the episode, Darryl and his daughter, Jada, pose for what is intended to be a family photo and Darryl invites Val, still in her warehouse uniform, to be in the photo with them. Is that creepy or what? Isn’t that a little quick? Has Val even broken up with Brandon yet? What is poor Jada thinking? If you were a little girl, what would you think of some stranger jumping into a photo of you and your Daddy? At this point, my sympathies are with Brandon. We have no evidence that he has done anything to deserve his girlfriend and her boss making eyes at each other. As for Darryl’s assertion that he would praise Val all the time if she were his girlfriend… Ten episodes later…yep, about the same amount of time Erin and Andy’s final relationship arc lasted….Darryl is tired of Val. So much for all that praise. Since he’s interested in working for Jim’s new company in Philadelphia, he uses the complications of being separated to orchestrate a break up. Unfortunately, Darryl’s co-workers misinterpret his crocodile tears and harass Val to get back together with him. Darryl is quite clearly not enthused about this. So Val broke up with her boyfriend who, by all outward appearances, seemed to treat her well (sending her flowers on Valentine’s Day, etc) and who had a stable job running his own business (Sure, he appeared a little hot-headed, but one could argue that we only saw that side of him when he was provoked by Darryl’s attempts to break them up) in order to date a guy who pretty quickly gets tired of her and uses a potential job in Philadelphia for which he has not even interviewed yet as an excuse to end the relationship (to say nothing of the fact that this business is still getting off the ground and there’s no guarantee it will go anywhere) only to get back with him because three of his co-workers that she barely knows or even interact with nag her about it. We next see Val briefly in “Vandalism” when she blatantly ignores Pam’s yelling through the bullhorn about the damage to her mural by walking into her office rather than defusing a situation that eventually escalates. Clearly not the best foreman Dunder-Mifflin has ever had. I can’t imagine Darryl letting an office worker yell through a bullhorn at his workers. Finally, Val appears, again briefly, in the finale when she’s seen holding Darryl's hand as they attend Dwight and Angela’s wedding. Evidently, they stayed together. Did she move to Philly? Is she going to move to Austin? Did Darryl just bite the bullet and lie in the bed he made? What a waste of time and what a bad relationship.
  16. Andy likes Erin; Erin likes Andy. Andy and Erin get together. Erin finds out Andy dated Angela, hides in her hair and throws cake at him. Erin begins dating Gabe because she thinks she has to. Erin starts to like Andy again and breaks up with Gabe in public. Erin wants Andy to take her out; Andy turns her down. Andy starts dating Jessica; Erin tells the camera how hard it is to keep working with someone you used to date because you have to see them every day. Erin runs off to Florida because she can't have Andy; Andy loses his job after abandoning it to go after her (By this time, I'd stopped caring about them as a couple) and breaks up with Jessica publicly at a bridal shower. Erin tells Dwight that Andy can't perform and is surprised that this now becomes a conference room meeting in which literally no adult in that room, including the normally reasonable Jim and Pam, has the ability to stop. Less than 10 episodes later, Erin admits she's losing respect for Andy because of his stupid feud with Broccoli Rob. The next episode, Andy ditches her to go on a boat trip with his brother, stays away for many months so that Ed Helms can film movies and Erin falls out of love with him, starts dating Pete and makes plans to break up with Andy when he returns - which she does when it's clear he's a selfish jerk who only thinks of his needs. Andy doesn't take it well, tries to fire Pete who assures Andy that there was "no overlap" (despite Erin telling the camera at the beginning of the episode that "I saw Pete's butt") and both of them telling Andy to get over it (even though Erin has had three months to get used to this idea and knows exactly what it's like to have to work with an ex-lover). Andy retaliates by hiring both of their former lovers so they can feel as awkward as he does. That entire Andy-Erin-Pete storyline makes me tired and angry just thinking about it. It only slightly inches out Dwight and Angela's relationship for the Most Colossal Waste of Viewers' Time award by degrees. At least, Dwight and Angela got married at the end after she lied to Dwight for almost a year regarding the paternity of their child and being, overall, a very unpleasant person.
  17. And yet, Mr. Wordsworth and I giggled when I questioned the table, "Am I wrong?" I wish we'd seen more of the Jubilee, too. Troubled Marriage Sexytime is not our thing, but Margaret has been established as a major player in this show and you have to give HBC enough material to make her worth her paycheck.
  18. This. Mr. Wordsworth and I giggled through this. It helped that Elizabeth was really angry at Heath and, for once, really let it show in a way she hasn't since dressing down Churchill. The dry wit of Princess Anne just killed us this time around. The actress is a good fit for her.
  19. I think he was trying to reinvent himself for the modern generation. His generation valued duty; the new one valued love. His generation fought a war; the new generation protested against it. In this new generation, a king who abdicated in order to marry the woman he loved and tried to negotiate in order to stop a war might be seen as progressive in contrast to the stodgy Royals in Buckingham Palace. It rather reminds me of how some prominent German Nazis, like Albert Speer, promoted themselves as having been fooled by Hitler or having grown disenchanted toward the end of the war. I don't know how successful the Duke was at that rebranding, but that would seem to be his tactic for the interview and in this close relationship with a great-nephew that he barely knew. Did Charles and David write that many letters back and forth? As for his past indiscretions, I'm sure Charles was told about them, but...again...different generation. No Nazis to fight in 1970. The existential war England fought in the 40s had nothing to do with him or his fellow young adults so carrying on his grandparents' and parents' grudges may not have appealed to him. David was his mother's favorite uncle, after all, despite everything that had happened. I doubt everything he heard was bitter. And there were aspects to David that did not involve Nazis so I'm sure that any discussion between Charles and his great-uncle probably skipped that topic. Though Derek Jacobi is a marvelous actor, I was disappointed that they replaced Alex Jennings who seemed to embody the role. Jacobi doesn't have the Windsor look that Jennings does. I think the episode would have been more powerful had Jennings been back for David's swan song.
  20. I wish Tommy had been more gentle with Margaret when explaining that she and Elizabeth couldn't switch. This episode was pretty good. I'd watch Clancy Brown play Stalin, so it didn't really bother me that he was LBJ. His portrayal was pretty tame, too, compared to the real Johnson. I was distracted by the White House myself...it just didn't look right.
  21. In that case, he may well have stayed in Germany then and fought for the Reich. While it is true that we don't know and that Philip has had Open Mouth, Insert Foot incidents in the past, I think the word Nazi is thrown around far too easily these days without any real understanding of what a Nazi actually was.
  22. To the person who chose to marry the Nazi, yes. But my point is that Prince Philip has been labeled for decades as having Nazi sympathies based upon who his sisters chose to marry and where his father chose to send him to school, decisions that were made while he was a child and had no control over. Would you want someone making snide remarks about you as a human being based upon who your adult siblings chose to marry while you were a child? Prince Philip, despite his flaws, has shown no indication that he has/had Nazi sympathies, yet has had to dodge accusations of such for decades based on who his sisters chose to marry and on where his father sent him to school. My point is that children do not choose where their schools are located or who their siblings decide to marry. Neither did Prince Philip. The snide comments in the pilot were about his worthiness to marry Elizabeth based on his family history.
  23. Mr. Wordsworth puts this episode as his #1 on a list of "The Crown" favorites...not because he liked it, but because it gave him such a visceral emotional reaction. I could tell it upset him. He had to watch a couple of episodes of something funny just to improve his mood. I think Philip got this idea that many fathers get, "Football made me the man I am today" or "The Army made me the man I am today" and decided that what was good for him was good for his son, without noticing that Charles wasn't him. If Andrew and Edward did better at the school, it's because they were themselves and not Charles. One thing I did want to point out since it's been brought up more than once: why would kids at a boarding school pick on a prince, especially one that is a future king? Catrine Clay's marvelous book, "King, Kaiser, Tsar" addresses that issue when relating the experiences of young George V and his older brother, Prince Eddy, when they were at sea as lads. The boys were given little in the way of privilege over their lower-class shipmates. The other boys took advantage of them, sneaking off ship to buy sweets and letting George & Eddy hold the bag when it came to paying for them. They assumed that the princes had lots of money, not knowing that Edward VII and Alexandra didn't want their kids to be spoiled and so gave the princes only small amounts of pocket money. Clay explains that the lower-class boys, far from seeing what the future might hold were they to become close friends of the future monarch, realized that they would never be allowed to bully a prince as adults so made sure to get in as much as they could with George and Eddy while they had the chance. Likely, anyone who picked on Charles felt the same way, "I'm not going to be able to pick on the heir to the throne forever, right?" I would also state my agreement to those who refuse to pass judgment on Philip because of the decisions of his relatives. Few of us choose where we are sent to school or who our siblings marry, especially when these decisions are made when we are children. Philip did not choose to attend school in Nazi Germany nor did he choose who his sisters decided to marry. Those who want to attach the stain of Nazism on him because of the decisions of relatives made when he was a child are, in my opinion, unfairly making him guilty by association. I bristled in the pilot when there were snide remarks made about his Nazi sisters. All of us have relatives with different political beliefs than we have; would we want someone else to judge us by the opinions of a family member? I also agree with statements made on this thread about Philip perhaps blaming himself for his sister's death though it was not really his fault. I didn't get the idea, though, that he was impatient with his sister's fear of flying...it seemed more to me that he was trying to calm her by gently reminding her that it was just air. Far different was his admonition to Charles on the later flight. I could have interpreted that incorrectly, though.
  24. I recently finished all three seasons of "The Crown". Mr. Wordsworth and I enjoyed it and he knows virtually nothing about the monarchy or English history. This episode is in his top ten and is probably my #1 favorite episode. David and Wallis really were delightfully evil in the first two seasons. Mr. Wordsworth referred to them as the British Team Rocket (from Pokemon) with their snark and pretentiousness. When we saw the dog party at the beginning of the episode, we were so excited to have them featured again. Unfortunately, I knew what the Marburg files were and he did not so he had a surprise coming. It certainly skewed his opinion of the Windsors after that. I agree wholeheartedly that the final panels of actual photos did a lot to drive home that this wasn't just drama created for the show. However, it's important to note that, in the 1930's, German treatment of the Jews was, by and large, discriminatory, not homicidal. There were instances, such as Kristallnacht, that the German government portrayed as spontaneous mob violence, that were later determined to have been organized, but, for the most part, violence against Jews was largely blamed on fringe elements. The British (and, for that matter, the American) government didn't agree with it, but it was considered an internal German problem, not an international responsibility. Jews in both countries protested; the German ambassador to the US tried to pressure Roosevelt into silencing the protesters and FDR explained that we don't do that here in America. The German government retaliated by taking its anger out on the Jews still remaining in Germany. Concentration camps in Germany in the 1930s were bad, but they were prison camps, not death camps. Political prisoners and actual criminals were the bulk of inmates in the 1930s. People could, and did, die in them, but not en masse and there was no policy of systematic extermination of the Jews at that time. The German government's policy during this period was to get the Jews to leave the country. Jews that were arrested and detained in a concentration camp were often released after several months and encouraged to emigrate...after the German government fleeced them of everything of value. During a global depression, few countries were willing to accept large numbers of people who didn't speak the language, didn't have a job lined up, didn't know anyone and didn't have any money. The "Final Solution" didn't start happening until after the war began. So, if David visited a concentration camp in 1937, he would have probably seen political prisoners and criminals exercising, working, getting mail, etc. He would not have seen starving women and children and absolutely would not have seen gas chambers or crematoria. There's no doubt in my mind that he certainly was shown a sanitized version of a standard camp. David was probably bigoted against the Jews - a lot of people were in those days - but there's a huge difference between believing in the bigoted generalization that Jews hold a disproportionate position in the business world and wanting them all from cradle to grave to be murdered. By the time it was known in the international community that the Jews were being murdered, the war was on and it was felt that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war. Prior to the war, those who felt that Hitler could be negotiated with were numerous in the government and in the public at large. No one wanted another devastating war...except Hitler. That was the problem. They thought Hitler didn't want war. They thought by negotiating with him they could avoid it. David wasn't alone in this belief nor was he alone in thinking that the Nazis, with all their faults, would be a bulwark in central Europe against the violent athetistic revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Appeasement is a legitimate negotiating tool - it just didn't work with Hitler. As for the portrayal of Billy Graham, I thought his character was spot on and loved the conversations between him and the Queen. His simple Christianity appealed to her over the ritualistic Church of England with its learned, yet rigid, heirarchy. The Queen Mother's comments about him having been a brush salesman reflected the attitude that such a man could have had no meaningful theological education and, thus, didn't have any real spiritual authority. The final scene of David stuck in this pedantic life of parties and playing cards with Wallis' friends, looking at himself in the mirror certainly reflected a far different person than we have seen depicted thus far. I agree with JJJ's earlier comment that a prequel series with Jared Harris and Alex Jennings would be great. I'd love to see "The Crown" reinvented several times going back through the monarchy and setting the stage for this series as the decades go by. Wishful thinking, I'm sure.
  25. We binge-watched a bunch of first episodes last weekend. Mr. Wordsworth wanted to see the rest of this show because he was so upset about what happened to Marie. Unfortunately, there are men who kill, cheat, steal and lie. If women are the equal of men, it means that women are also capable of killing, cheating, stealing and lying. And women can and sometimes do lie about sexual assault. In this fictionalized version of the story, a vulnerable victim with virtually no support system behind her happens to get detectives that are willing to ignore binding marks on her wrists in order to get this case off the docket and medical professionals that aren't that helpful in treating her. I wanted to know why none of her counselors or even one of her foster mothers showed up for subsequent meetings with the police. It is very easy for a troubled teen to be dismissed, especially when a mother figure questions her credibility.
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