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I wonder if having a dumb nemesis is slowly lowering Hiram's ability to be a super villain. Like, maybe before this show started, he was actually a criminal mastermind, but now he's so used to having Archie and Veronica tell him all their plans that he's losing his ability to scheme.

Oh, I forgot to ask this about Archie because he's so boring: what awful embarrassing name do you think he'll give himself and Jughead? They don't have enough people to be a circle. Also, do you think Jughead's going with him because it will somehow complete his quest and let him ascend in the Gargoyle game?

Okay, so now G&G is a metaphor for being on drugs? And the proper way to help someone withdraw from drugs is to chain them to the fridge and peace out? The funniest part of this to me was that Hermione saved every file she ever opened to her desktop, and the whole thing was such a mess that apparently Hiram could hide a bunch of videos there and trust that she would never know the difference. It's like when my parents hid my Christmas presents in my room because they knew I'd never clean it up. I know I log in every week to say that Riverdale can't make sense of some trivial real world thing -- like how tattoos are done, etc -- but... they don't understand email attachments, or file transfers either. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if they purposely approach every situation saying, "How can we make this abnormal?" or if the series is directed by an AI that's never lived in the world and is just trying to describe it based on data. Yeah, that's what I got out of it, too. That was actually a pretty good homage to Scream all around, and it was either a brilliant way to tell us not to trust FP or else it means nothing at all.

I'm confused or I missed something -- how did Archie's escape from Fight Club alert the outside world to the existence of Fight Club? On an equally serious but probably not-to-be-answered note: did he seriously not have visitation with his lawyer during all of this? We've speculated before that maybe Riverdale is a story Jughead wrote... maybe it's his RPG. O_O Yeah, I feel weird about the way this show sets that stuff up -- this and the Betty/Veronica kiss in season one, and the thing where everyone randomly made out in the hot tub for reasons I don't remember. If you want to tell a story with lots of kissing, you can do that without making it weird and fake and random. I feel like it's kind of missing the point of Riverdale to scold it for not taking its characterization seriously... but it would be nice to take it a little bit seriously and give us something to hold onto through all the crazy plot twists. I'm okay with it. You see the only other openly gay boy in Riverdale, you chase after him, Kevin. Don't let him out of your sight. It's a better look for her, but now that you bring it up, that reminds me: why did Betty dress up like Young Alice to do the prison break?

Yeah, I was disappointed that the actors didn't try harder to do an impression of their "adult" counterparts -- or, if they did, that it didn't work very well. I love Camilla Mendes as Veronica, but Hermione gives off a very different kind of energy and has a different way of speaking that didn't come across at all. I am grudgingly willing to be interested in the idea that some psychopath invented G&G as a deliberate programming/brainwashing tool, but I still wish the story wasn't about this. I love that, in the short time it took her to spend an evening hearing about her mom's high school days, Jughead went from Not At All Involved in G&G to The Most Batshit Stan for G&G That Ever Was. Like maybe FP was right and Jughead does not have the constitution to read the rule book for this game. (I also think it's really funny that the two of them have decided to turn this gross, haunted bomb shelter into their love nest and that he's now ruining it by having people over to play a tabletop RPG). And yet part of me thought, "Well, they're not actually brother and sister, so that's better than I expected it to be?"

It was a dumb thing to do, but I liked that moment because it seemed genuinely cult-y to me. Share all your secrets while everyone's being safe and accepting, then find out it's ammo to use against you if you try to leave later. Also, apparently it's too dangerous for Jughead to read the rule book for the Gargoyle game, but when he takes over as leader of a biker gang it's cool. Which reminds me, did Veronica take FP's job? I can't remember seeing him at the soda shop lately, at least not when he's working.

You know where you do take the subway, though? A speakeasy. Because it's secret. And its whole reason to exist is to serve illegal alcohol, Veronica WHAT. I was expecting sexual abuse, so I guess this is a nice surprise? Though I don't understand how the Warden's able to keep this going if he drags half the kids in his prison into a fighting pit every other night. Surely some of them talk to their lawyers at some point and/or get released at the end of their sentences? If they all died that would also be a noticeable pattern that would have people asking questions. I get that the show doesn't care about reality but, then, why not lean all the way into it? Just don't try to explain anything or bother with the scenes where Fred's trying to get Archie out of prison or whatever. Just have him be in an alternate universe where it's Fight Club / Foxcatcher / Shawshank all the time and don't tie it back to anybody else. When Alice and FP were freaking out this episode, I suddenly realized how I want this story line to end: there's no conspiracy, there's no cult, there's no murder, there's no Stephen King's IT, there's no Evil Jumanji -- the whole reason the adults want everyone to shut up about the game is because LARPing is for nerds. That would please me more than any other outcome. I saw some video where the cast was answering questions and the actor who plays Kevin is so funny and charismatic that I'm now doubly sorry that his role consists of leaning into the shot to remind us he's there.

Maybe the guards took their cell phones at the same time they gave them permission to do a cheer routine on prison property? Also maybe they've dropped the plot line about Mr. Lodge wanting to open a for-profit prison and now whatever's left over from that has been recycled into this? Is that what's happening? I don't know. :(

Oh, man. Catching up on two weeks at once. I guess this show already didn't understand high school, or journalism, or contract law, or organized crime, or gangs, or conflict of interest, so it's not totally surprising that it doesn't understand the justice system, but can it not even understand how tattoos work? Also, after his awkward, privileged speech about how playing football will redeem them all as men, I kind of want Archie to get beat up by all the other prisoners. And, why the frick is Veronica working as a waitress if she still owns Pop's? Oh, man. Catching up on two weeks at once. I guess this show already didn't understand high school, or journalism, or contract law, or organized crime, or gangs, or conflict of interest, so it's not totally surprising that it doesn't understand the justice system, but can it not even understand how tattoos work? Also, after his awkward, privileged speech about how playing football will redeem them all as men, I kind of want Archie to get beat up by all the other prisoners. And, why the frick is Veronica working as a waitress if she still owns Pop's? Yeah, I don't understand the shift in this show where we're supposed to feel contempt for Ethel. That's not how it started out, but, at some point last season, I guess she wrote a mean letter or something and now she doesn't deserve to exist? The part where Betty was hyper-focused on how Ethel's "boyfriend" wasn't really really her boyfriend in the midst of a murder investigation seemed really weird and mean to me -- even if Ethel was exaggerating their relationship to make herself feel better... why does that matter? How is it helping anyone to try to make her admit it? Also, I'm not just saying this to be contrary -- it seems pretty clear that Ethel should be the student council president now. She's the only one who filed all the paperwork to be a candidate and then didn't either drop out of the race or get disqualified. Why is their principal acting like it's totally fine for the popular girls to decide this amongst themselves? I'm really looking forward to Sabrina, but I didn't need this show to also be Sabrina, and I'm shocked that that seems to be what it's doing. I would have been perfectly happy for Riverdale to be detective land and Greendale (or wherever Sabrina is) to be witch land and not have the two things cross. Does anyone have a Southside Serpents tattoo, or does FP just gently brush them with Halloween makeup while they sit outside and pout?

I don't know why I always forget that something awful's going to happen at the last minute to wipe out most of the tertiary characters and/or reset the whole story, but I forgot, so I was honestly surprised that they nuked the valley they'd been fighting over all season and had to go to space. I'm interested to see what happens next season, and I thought this was actually a nice send-off for Harper and Monty, considering the characters had outlived their usefulness. It would actually have made more sense to me if they had just had a conversation where Harper and Monty volunteered to be the people who stayed awake and monitored everything for ten years because they missed being on the ring, but maybe that was cut for time and it was faster to have everyone be surprised that they'd stayed awake? One thing I genuinely like about this show is that the team of "good guys" is so malleable, and keeps picking up people from different groups each season. We now have mash-up of the original 100, plus Ark survivors, plus grounders from different clans, plus Prison Kru, and that's kind of cool. I remain worried about Kane. I'm glad he didn't die outright, but I feel like they're leaving his fate open-ended since there was talk about putting him in stasis for an indefinite-sounding period. I really, really like the actor playing Octavia, and I enjoy watching her performance, and I'm glad she has a job, but I feel like the character's finished and it would have made a lot more sense, and been a lot more poignant if she had died on the planet. First one to the ground, assimilated into the ground culture, became who she was always going to be, went too far into her darkness, was destroyed. I don't know what they can possibly do with her now. I'm confused about how old Jordan is and when exactly he went into stasis. My gut instinct is that he would have stayed out of stasis until his father died, and then put himself in stasis after, but that should make him middle-aged, I think. I couldn't tell if his hair was gray or the lighting was just weird. The planet is completely uninhabited and wonkru still finds a way to start a war. I actually didn't even know who Harper was until the story line where she and Monty got together, and then I realized from other people's comments that she'd been in the show for a long time before that. In this case, I remembered that Clarke had wanted to exclude someone from the bunker list because of a genetic condition, but I had no memory it all that it was Harper until that dialogue. Which -- good choice to include that in the dialogue and remind me.

It's hard to pick my favourite moment, but I think it's this one: The moment where PrisonKru holds the radio up so Kane can hear "the sound of victory" and he looks all bummed out because he's never heard that sound before. Runners up: When Octavia tells that random kid Jaha would be proud of him and he immediately dies. When Indra's alive under a pile of bodies after once again surviving everybody's foolishness off screen. When Kane is bitten to death after he protested so hard against cannibalism. (In all seriousness, though, he had better survive). When we find out that the ghosts in Madi's head can choose what to show her at will, which means that Ghost!Becca chose to introduce herself by saying, "I WAS MURDERED." That's really efficient, and I get it, but I also sort of like the idea of all the young commanders getting the chip in their heads and then immediately having to hear Becca's story of how she got murdered. Like, congrats on winning your conclave I WAS MURDERED.

I feel like they're trying to sell the idea that Octavia is so determined to bring her people to the valley because it will retroactively make up for all their suffering, but I'd have an easier time going along with it if she hadn't also rejected several perfectly good solutions that don't involve a bunch of her own guys getting killed. Part of me is wondering if she wants them all to get killed in battle so that they can have warrior's deaths instead of wasting away from lack of food or something, but I don't know. One thing that seems a little weird to me: I know the show has turned Kane into the Wise Man of Peace, and I'm fine with that. I've always liked him and I like the actor's performance. However. Back in season one, he was the guy who was all about making a hard sacrifice so "our people" could survive -- just as much as Abby if not more. I know he wants things to be better on the ground, but clearly they're not, so I'm a little bit... disbelieving, I guess, that all of his pragmatism has left him over the course of this show, even though I acknowledge that they have at least given him a consistent character arc. I actually didn't find the food cubes that gross. I would kind of prefer them to look totally alien, because it makes it less like people. I think what's hard about this situation is not that they're eating people per se, but that these are people they know and would have had conversations with only the day before -- and, as someone mentioned above, there are people who are having to chop up the bodies and cook them, which is the worst possible job I can imagine. To me, that isn't conveyed super well -- it feels more like an abstract debate over cannibalism in principle which I think takes away from the horror and the moral dilemma. Me, too. Spacekru is, for me, the most interesting six year group, partly because we're able to see how close they've all become, and because it's knitting in some characters who seemed like they were on the margins before. The impression I got was that during year one a bunch of arguments broke out, including the blanket one, and Octavia started off being very reasonable about it. Then, when people tried to seize control of the food, she went on her Blood Queen "You are wonkru or you are an enemy of wonkru" killing spree and, from that point forward, the fighting pits were their justice system, and anyone who committed a crime against wonkru, no matter what it was, got tossed in the pit. (I also get the impression that Octavia was the law, so there wasn't really a trial -- it was just her personal judgement). So, the pits were there to maintain order, and then it just ended up being handy that there were a bunch of dead bodies. At least, that's what I think happened. Not totally sure. I think this is an interesting argument, and it convinces me a little bit more than the other arguments offered in the episode. By "forcing" people to be cannibals, she carried the weight of that choice for them so they could feel like they're good people but still get to survive. The comparison to some of the stuff Clarke's done, I think, makes sense in that respect, especially as the show's tried to position Clarke's choices. (FWIW, I was also inclined to think Octavia was right when she said when people got hungry enough they'd crack, and I think the show had Abby tell that story about how the people who refused to be cannibals on the Arc never recovered just to force the issue so Octavia had to do something right away, but fine.)

I... literally don't remember any of the lore about this show, or how Becca getting burned at the stake affects anything. Maybe it's supposed to be foreshadowing for something? Something I probably don't want? I don't know. Otherwise, I found it interesting to hear Clarke refer to Madi as her child. Like, I guess we got that vibe already, but I read it as more of an older sister thing. And then I asked myself why I read it that way -- if it's just because Clarke is so young... I don't know. Agree that it's weird for Lexa to be in Madi's head, but I also think there are a lot of parts of that relationship that are not purely sexual. There's a way of reading this where it's less "you are becoming like my dead girlfriend" and more "you are remembering the woman who would have been part of our family if she had survived." (I still kind of wish we had gotten the Dollhouse ending where Lexa just lived in Clarke's brain forever.) On Tumblr, people have made a connection between this lily pad game that Octavia and Bellamy played as kids where the first one to touch the ground loses, and one of the scenes in episode one where Octavia is the first person to step out of the dropship onto Earth. I don't know if any of that was in the writers' heads, but it's an interesting callback, even if it's just a fan-made one.

I'm a little bit taken aback by the posts in this thread calling for Fred to be punished by death and Serena to be punished by rape. Why did the sentencing turn out that way? I have a Serena Joy theory that's a little different from the normal one. I think what happened is that she believed she knew the correct way for everyone to live and that, if they could just be forced to follow her design, they would all realize that she was right and be happy. So, the people who got pushed into subservient positions would say, "I understand now that this is my proper place in life and I feel the peace that comes from embracing my destiny!" and the men she left with unchecked power would be fair and reasonable and just and make exactly the same decisions that she would personally make, and it would all be a happy society. (And, for what it's worth, I think that people who support dictatorship generally believe that the dictator will rule exactly as they personally would, and not do something awful with their power -- they neglect to imagine what would happen if someone had unchecked power and decided to be an asshole). Now, she's seeing that none of those predictions came true. The little people aren't happy being shoved into subservient positions, and the men she left in charge are not really following the blueprint she thought they would follow. So now, because no one's cooperating with her utopian vision, there's way more violence than she thought there would be and it's way less temporary than she thought it would be, and it's getting harder and harder to blame people like June for being too rebellious when it's clearly a systemic problem. I asked myself the same question, and this is the answer I came up with: The major theme this season has been religion, and specifically the difference between sincerely held religious faith (which we see in the Rabbi in the colonies, and in June, when she makes a memorial for the victims at the newspaper) and whatever the hell Gilead preaches (a bunch of rhetoric to justify political power structures and not much else). Eden was super Christian and tried to live her life according to Christian values, and tried to study the bible so that she'd know the right way to behave, and reached the informed decision that her faith did not forbid her to be with the person she loved. And none of that was good enough for Gilead, because Gilead doesn't care about Christianity. So, I think that seeing Eden executed for trying to do what a lot of these people would have seen as the right things to do only a few years ago is a bit of a wake-up call that maybe Gilead is not being governed by the bible after all, and maybe in a few generations, no one will have the opportunity to know that. (Just to be clear, I don't support theocracy, but these people do, and they're discovering that they aren't even in a theocracy after all). I also had this question, because she clearly knew that part of the bible by memory and it would have been safer for her to quote it instead of reading, but, in relation to the points I made above, I think I get why she chose to read it. In addition to just making a simple rhetorical point by being seen to read those words aloud, I think she was also making a bigger point that Gilead is supposed to be ruled by God and the word of God according to the bible (or at least in her mind that's what was supposed to happen, and that's what everyone's kind of pretending has happened, even though it hasn't). The whole point of going to the council and trying to get them to let children read the bible is that Serena's realized that the men in charge of the country are just making shit up -- so by specifically reading the passage about how THIS BOOK is the word of God, and not whatever random thing they say, I think she's hoping to shame them into realizing that they've strayed from the path. In that sense, I think she's being naively optimistic, but I can see how she would be. We've seen her struggling to admit that her big vision for the perfect society didn't actually work, so it's not totally surprising that she believes she can nudge them back onto the right path. She doesn't understand that they never had any intention of following her religion. Or, at least, she doesn't understand it until they cut off her finger.

I guess I'll wait to see how it plays out, but I have ambivalent feelings about this ending and about the whole second season. The part I'm least looking forward to is whatever explanation we get for why Gilead is okay with June staying chez Waterford again after everything went strange over there again. At this point, it's seriously like Bewitched or something. A bunch of crazy stuff happens, Fred tells and obvious lie, and everyone else is like, "Oh, I see. Nothing out of the ordinary. Carry on." I used to be on team "Just go to Canada" but then I changed my mind. I think what changed for me is the idea that I started to imagine how I would feel if I had to walk away from someone I loved who was dependent on me -- someone who had looked into my eyes and asked me sadly why I didn't try harder to save them -- and cross the boarder into a foreign country where I couldn't know for sure what would happen, or if the situation would be taken out of my hands, or if I'd have an opportunity to come back. I think I would feel like walking away in that situation would mean giving my loved one up for dead and failing in my responsibility to care for them, and I'm honestly not sure I could do it, even if it was dumb to stay. I'm not sure that I would be able to live the rest of my life thinking that I had left that person behind. So, I think, after that drawn-out scene between June and Hannah, I get it, on an emotional level.

There's a thing that happens sometimes when a show starts getting a lot of praise and attention where everyone becomes self-conscious and suddenly things that used to seem effortless seem really forced. I think that's what's bugging me about this season, and I didn't put my finger on it until I read your comment just now. I'm getting a sense from the writing and the directing and some of the acting (Ann Dowd more than anyone, TBH) that everybody went, "Oh, shit, we made an important show. What can we do to make sure the next season's also important?" I know that when people start paying attention to me, and I feel self-conscious, I also start fumbling with things I normally know how to do, so I'm not judging anyone. I just kind of wish they hadn't read their own press and had kept focusing on what was happening on set and not what everyone would say about it later. Agree. I think there's a way of reading that conversation where what she's saying is that Fred has asked an awful lot from her, and she's given it to him, whereas the only thing she's explicitly asked him for is to help her kidnap a baby, and he keeps screwing it up.

The addiction story line is just as annoying as I worried it was going to be. Firstly because, again, people living with chronic pain do need to take medication. But secondly because, even if we take all the other characters at their word and she's addicted to drugs for non-medical reasons... why do they immediately jump to deciding that makes her a garbage human being? Whether or not it's her fault she's addicted, addiction is not something you just decide to stop having all of a sudden. They all make it sound like, if she had a conscience, she could just stop taking the pills and it would be that easy. (Also, I kind of agree with Abby that the middle of their current emergency is not a great time to detox. Plus, I doubt that Prisonkru would be like, "Okay, cool. We'll just let our tumors kill us while you do that. Take all the time you need.") I did find it interesting that they paired her with Raven again, especially because Raven's whole story line is being in more pain in more ways than anyone can imagine, but I also thought Raven, of all people, might have a more nuanced view of the situation. I had the same thought about Monty. Yeah, he didn't want to kill Cooper but he didn't lift a finger to try to save Cooper either. He just went along with it and had a sulk. I bet Cooper really appreciated that support as the worms were tearing her stomach apart. I'm not sure what to make of Bellamy and Clarke. I like that the dialogue explicitly acknowledged that the "best" plan was to kill Octavia but that Bellamy had taken it off the table because he gives preferential treatment to the people closest to him, so that's why Cooper had to die in the most horrible way possible. But I also don't trust that the show is going anywhere with this moral debate. FWIW, I'm also not sure I disagree with the philosophy that you should look out for the people close to you before anybody else -- but I'm worried that the show is giving us this signpost just so we'll feel better about watching the two of them murder someone; not because it's really going to engage with that topic.

What's up with them that not one but two of their employees can be robots the whole time and nobody knows? The Bernard situation was always extraordinary because he looked and acted and believed he had the same back story as Arnold, but I was willing to go along with it and say maybe no one cared that much about Arnold. But, don't these people google each other? Don't they notice that Bernard and Stubbs never rotate out? What's going on? Or, remembering that what Delos is doing is almost definitely illegal and at least somewhat immoral, maybe they're looking for a certain number of people who have the "moral flexibility" Charlotte talked about. It kinda makes sense that a super shady business would hire super shady people. This. I love Memento, and it has a complex structure, but the structure is clear, consistent, and flagged for the audience (the forward-moving flashbacks are all black and white, the character's wearing different clothes, etc. The backward-moving main story always goes exactly one step backward and repeats material from previous scenes to tell us where it is in the timeline, etc). Season two of Westworld is just throwing everything in a blender. From the writer's room, where they probably have that chronological list of events we all want so badly, it's not at all a big mental leap to scramble stuff this way, because the signposts are clear to them. We don't have the same touchstones to reference, so it looks like chaos from here. Also, I think there's an argument to be made that, even though they sometimes conflict with each other, both of them are trying to help their people in their own way, so it makes sense for them both to try in case one of them fails. I think the writers put an arbitrary number of balls in the bag to leave their options open for next season, and no one knows for sure who it's going to be.

Well, I was a wreck in the scene where June's reunited with her daughter, even though I knew it was going to happen. Mostly because I think this is the first time I fully understood what it means to not only have your kid stolen from you, but to know that she's being raised in this horrible environment. Earlier this season, I was very much on team "save yourself, come back for Hannah later" but now I think I just feel in a much more visceral way how awful that would be to live with. Yeah, I also found it very suspect, especially since this was NOT on the list of natural methods Aunt Lydia suggested, and because it won't result in anybody getting pregnant. I'm sure there are men watching the show who get what's going on without needing that scene, but I'm with you. I read the interviews where the writer was explaining that they wanted to show that the ceremony is rape, no matter how quiet it usually is. I already knew that, and I find it weird that they're behaving as if it's not clear. See, this part I think I actually get. Serena wants desperately to be a mother -- and to do it through having biological children. But, for whatever reason, that's not a gift that was given to her. So, she's living out this morbid fantasy of having all of the experiences of childbirth, which is as close as she can ever come to her dream. In her mind, June would ideally accept that she's been "blessed" with the ability to bear children and want, joyously and wholeheartedly, to share that blessing with Serena, who's been unfairly denied the same opportunity. That's why she's so offended that June's "selfish" and "working an angle" all the time. I genuinely think this birthing ceremony stuff is really sad for everyone involved, even if I think the way the handmaids are treated is way, way worse. I think Eden would have been old enough that she would be aware that there was a massive, violent upheaval in the culture and suddenly things were different. She would have known that she was never raised with the idea that she'd be married off to some random dude in a state lottery. She might accept it now -- but, I don't know. This whole thread has me wondering WTF you would say, as a parent, to your fourteen or fifteen-year-old daughter when you have to send her out into the world that way, and it's not the way any of you lived a few years before. In general, that's an ongoing issue for me with this show: I think the writers try to have it both ways by acting like June and the other handmaids are foreigners and everybody else grew up in this culture somehow. They didn't. So, a long time ago, I remember seeing a news piece about a home invasion where the purpetrator's lawyers were trying to claim that he was delusional and thought the person who lived there wanted to be with him. There was a police officer being interviewed who was like, "No. He showed up with duct tape and weapons. You don't do that if you think the other person wants you there. You do it if you're anticipating resistance." That really stayed with me, and there's a lot about the way this scene went down that tells me that, even if Serena didn't necessarily anticipate resistance, she anticipated that this wasn't welcome. If she thought it was no big deal, the entire tone of that interaction would have been different, and she wouldn't have been trying to close her hand around June's wrist before Fred even approached them. Now, whether that's what was intended, or that's just how it came across because everyone involved in making the show knows it's not welcome, I don't know. One of the things I'm really interested in on this show is the triangulation between Jean and the Waterfords. It's three people with different degrees of power who don't like each other, but fluidly drift into two-person alliances when they see a chance to do something against the odd one out. In the scene in the greenhouse, you could almost see Serena's antennae pop up when she realized Fred was talking to her like it was them against June again. I'm also interested in the trauma bonding between Serena and June / Aunt Lydia and June. They've been through so much together, that's so emotionally intense and dramatic, that they have some kind of bond -- but it's a really, really messed-up one. And, in both cases, it's complicated because it's easy to confuse love for the baby June's carrying with love for June.

From a story-telling perspective, the thing I find most interesting about the finale is that the audience watched a bunch of characters appear to die (Maeve, Bernard, etc, etc) when they will almost definitely be back next season, and watched a bunch of characters appear to live when, if what we were told about robot heaven is true, they will almost definitely not come back again. I think that kind of messes up your reaction emotionally. Or it does mine. But it's interesting. I'm confused about what happened in the overall timeline this season and I'm looking forward to somebody writing a big long article explaining it for me. In this episode, specifically, though, I'm most confused about why Akecheta's wife was in robot heaven with him. The one story I do remember from this season is that his wife got decommissioned and locked in the storage room. Are we supposed to believe she came back as a zombie or a crazy person like Clementine and Abernathy and we were just never told about it? Or are we meant to believe someone downloaded her into robot heaven before this? If that's so, why didn't we see the other decommissioned hosts there?

Oooooh. I never knew that. It always seemed to me that the two characters were basically the same, and I didn't understand why they got rid of Anya just to replace her with Lexa. Makes more sense now.

This bugged me, too. Everybody crossing the border has a story about how the Gilead people tried to murder them and their families, kidnapped their children, raped them, enslaved them, etc, etc, but now there are letters and everyone's shocked? I get the argument that the influx of letters makes a strong case, but I also think that if Luke and Moira had gone on the news as soon as they knew it was Fred, specifically, who was the ambassador, that would have also made a pretty strong case. Also, speaking of Fred, I was totally wrong. I thought for sure he'd jump ship as soon as he could get out of the country, but I guess the changing power structures (that we don't understand) have soothed him? I seriously thought for a little while that the episode would end with Serena turning down the offer to leave Gilead only to discover that Fred made a deal for himself and sent her home alone. Hey, who knows. Maybe during Aunt training, everyone sat around Lydia in a circle and told her it was her fault. (That scene played really weird to me, and, in all seriousness, I thought it was kind of funny that, in addition to all the other reasons you would never ask Aunt Lydia to watch your child, she just randomly threw in that she killed her nephew or something). I also liked Nick this episode, but I still don't trust him. Partly because, when he described June as his "friend" it reminded me that they don't have a real friendship. He didn't know how to act around her during the brief period where she didn't have to be subservient -- their entire relationship depends on this weird medieval roleplay where she desperately needs him for safety. In real life, they would not be friends, and he wouldn't be able to hold up his side of a conversation. I'm not sure that this is coming across well, but the idea I get is that Serena is supposed to be famous as the spokesperson for this movement -- like, she is the Ann Coulter of the Gileads or something. If she wanted to bail and seek refugee status in Canada, or elsewhere, probably some people would be okay with it, but a lot of people would recognize her and have something to say about it.

In a way, William having a psychotic break because of Westworld's puzzles and riddles and games is all of us.

Multi-quote betrayed me, so I have to go by memory. Because this airs a few days sooner in the US than it does in Canada, I've started deliberately reading spoilers for each episode so that I am not blindsided and traumatized by whatever happens. I'm really, really glad for that this week. Serena isn't a very good person, but I don't think that even bad people deserve to be beaten or tortured, so there's no part of me that's happy about any of this. I do wonder how much she actually knows about the torture that goes on in the Red Center, or if she's just happily ignorant about it. Either way, her situation sucks, and as much as I wish she'd be a nicer person, we saw this week that the reward for being a nice person in Gilead is that you get punished. :( Re: Nick and Eden: They are also in a bad situation. I don't trust Nick, personally, and I still think he's the one who sold June out when she was trying to escape, but there is kind of no good way to be married to a fifteen year old in a dictatorship that controls your relationships, so he's doing the best he can. I got a vibe from him this episode that was kind of like an older brother who doesn't like his younger sister but is trying to be nice to her because he knows he's the adult in the relationship and it's not her fault that she's annoying. That's maybe the best we can hope for? Finally, because June going back to Fred was prefaced by her speech about how she now understands that there's no way to live in this world peacefully, I'm hoping she's going to kill him. Fingers crossed.

In general, that was really good and it made me wonder if there's more sci-fi out there from a similar POV. The very, very end was a little bit confusing to me. Meave can now talk to other hosts telepathically no matter how far away they are? Was that all she was doing or is the implication supposed to be that she was reprogramming him (I hope not)?