Xantar

Yeah, I fully don't understand this argument. Lucy: "Why didn't you include the contents of my hallucination that has absolutely no verification behind it other than my statement which I made as a result of taking drugs and almost dying?" Are we really supposed to believe that is going to damage Lois' credibility? I think the writers really needed to workshop this idea a little more.

Normally 9-1-1: Lone Star is the show about stupid people doing stupid things in stupid circumstances, but in this episode they have truly outdone themselves. Whether it was breaking up with someone over a living situation or driving while in labor, everybody was at the top of their stupid game!

I know it’s what the show is about, but the “Doom Patrol goes on a mission and is confronted with their demons” is getting overdone. I was bored for the first time in this episode because I wasn’t getting anything new. Hopefully there is some setup here that pays off in future episodes.

Well that was gross. But it goes to show that the writers are willing to do pretty much anything. I do wonder why Rita didn’t lose form while zombified. On the other hand, it was good to see that the Doom Patrol is good in a fight. The monster butts didn’t even give them pause. Too bad a zombie butt seems to have gotten away…

I've been watching this mostly because I want to improve my French (I can only understand half of what people are saying, so I still have a way to go!). I found myself wondering about the differences between the French social system and the American one. It's well-known that France has a more extensive social safety net than the United States. I don't know what the foster system is like, though. As others have said, it was shocking to me that the girls were given back to their father after he was released from prison for beating and raping their mother. I really wonder what French audiences thought of that. It frankly makes Madame Prieur (the social worker) look incompetent, especially since even after the father loses custody, he's still allowed to keep meeting and re-traumatizing them. But maybe that's because of her overburdened case load? I happen to know one particular detail about the real Laëtitia Perrais which hasn't been shown in this series yet, so I guess that's coming in Episode 6. I'll be interested to see how the script deals with it. Up until now, the series has mostly avoided having characters stand up and say, "This is why it happened and this is the psychology of the people involved." It's left to the audience to come to their own conclusions. We'll see if that remains true in this case.

I laughed out loud at that and I’m not even ashamed. I totally knew that Maze was screwing with Dan by pretending not to see him. It’s been interesting to see that Dan is not a spiteful person at all and has actually grown a lot. I’m rooting for him to get out of his situation. So that’s actually Chloe and Lucifer’s daughter? All grown up? Is she from the future?

Call me old fashioned, but I like my stories to tell a story. Not just to act as setup for future stories.

I actually think Ella is never going to find out the truth. It’s a little galling how she’s kept in the dark, I know, but the whole point of her character is she has faith. If she actually saw incontrovertible proof of the celestial world, it would undermine her because then it wouldn’t be faith any more. I hope they find a good role for her to play next season, but she will be fine without knowing the truth.

I can't believe Mare is actually the one who looks the wisest and most reasonable in this episode now. Everybody else is just hiding things, sometimes unnecessarily. It's like they're all determined to make themselves look guilty even when they're not!

Wow, and there are still two episodes left? At least Katie’s mom is going to get her back, so there’s some happiness there. I also think the sudden death trope has been played out. It was shocking on a few seasons of 24, but that was over ten years ago. At this point, it’s shocking when everybody survives. Minor point, but I don’t think Lori’s husband is having “another” affair. I think it’s with the same woman as previously. Lori asked her son “is it with the same woman” and he nodded yes.

I don’t know much about hospitals, but are they just going to have a baby in a patient’s room crying his eyes out and do nothing? Why is there nobody at the nurse’s station to hear? What kind of college student drives a BMW SUV?? This show sometimes gets compared to Sharp Objects, but I like this show waaaaay better. Progress actually happens in each episode instead of characters just wandering around in the name of “atmosphere.”

I don’t think so. The station is identified as a Haverford College station (fun fact, I went to Swarthmore a few exits away from Haverford. And they also name dropped Bryn Mawr which is also nearby).

I did not see that last line coming. The theme so far seems to be about all the things people will do in the name of family. They may blatantly harass a detective (risking jail time for themselves). They may summon up a mob at a press conference to shout at the police. Or they may just straight up murder a kid. What is Mare going to do when she is faced with possibly losing her grandson? On another note, it was a nice tough when Mare made sure two other men were with her when she broke the news to Erin’s father. She knew he would blow up and it might not be safe for her. She knows her town.

I haven’t been watching recently, so I didn’t know that they’ve stopped with the celebrity guest stars. Wayne Brady’s tap dance number! Just...damn!

Wow! I thought they were going to do that explosion in CGI. Or maybe do it with a miniature set and composite John onto the foreground. But I think that was actually a real full scale set. The movement and physics of everything was too good. Making that all up in CGI would have probably cost as much as doing it for real. John really does enjoy spending HBO’s money.

I think a large part of the disappointment for me is how little all the sleuthing and legal maneuvering really mattered. The theft of the body? Didn't really come into play. The dental retainer? Perry refused to use it and thus demonstrated that he had honor, and maybe that's what convinced Paul Drake to go work for him. But it therefore had no legal consequence. Tracing the church elder? He gave Pete the slip and got murdered, so that didn't pan out either. Figuring out that the baby died due to feeding from an addicted woman? That also didn't get introduced into the trial. Basically, the only helpful thing Perry Mason & Associates did was uncover the church's finances, and that was genuinely significant to the case. But that's it. There was nothing clever about it. Perry failed to land any hits on the witness testimony, and arguably putting Emily on the stand didn't do much either. Fortunately, the prosecution's case was so weak that all Perry had to do was give a closing summary in which he reminds the jurors that the DA failed to meet his burden of proof. That's it? I realize that having Perry pull off some brilliant last minute legal stunt that saves the day on his first case would have been unrealistic, but these are highly paid writers we are talking about here. They couldn't come up with anything better than that?

For the record, I also thought Sharp Objects was a hack job. Infodumping everything in the last episode is not good writing. True Detective managed it by unspooling multiple timelines (at least in the first and third seasons. I didn’t watch the second.)

The case was really pretty straightforward, so I don’t know why the writers did such a poor job conveying it. In the threads for the previous two episodes, there were multiple posts from people asking what on earth is going on and why Perry is so happy to discover something in a ledger somewhere. Meanwhile, I noted in the thread for the previous episode that the church was turning out to be an irrelevant sideshow, and I stand by that. In all honesty, Tatiana Maslany’s role could have been excised in its entirety without any problem, and it really hurts me to say that. She was completely wasted. And while I understand that this season was going for a subversion of the climactic courtroom scene, the story still needed to have some sort of climax somewhere. This just went nowhere. Apparently the big climax was getting everything all set for Burger vs Mason along with the classic theme song. If you were a fan of the original series and you enjoyed that, then I’m honestly happy for you. However, I never saw or knew anything about the original Raymond Burr series. The music meant nothing to me. Hearing the name Burger didn’t mean anything to me. If the season couldn’t stand on its own, that’s honestly pretty lame. I’m probably going to watch the next season because I love the actors, but this show needs to get some competent writers.

None of that was revealed during the attempted resurrection. Most of the episode itself moved the plot forward pretty well. But the last ten minutes did nothing other than reveal that Sister Alice isn't Jesus.

Well that whole resurrection sideshow turned out to be a big waste of time.

Awwww man. No Gilbert Gottfried voice for Kushner this time?

"Hey OA, is that our guy?" "Yep. Sure is." "We're on the second floor and he's on the ground outside. Also, there's a barred window between us and him." "Sounds like the perfect time to pull out our guns and yell at him to stop where he is!"

My understanding is that four years ago, Alex was driving a car with Benny in it. Benny actually fired the shots that killed someone. Alex didn’t know that was going to happen. When the prosecutor pressed him to talk, Alex’s father told him not to give up Benny. That’s because Ramirez has threatened Alex’s father and his family and also assured him Alex would be protected. Ramirez is apparently somewhat high up in the gangs or something.

Watching that Vietnamese PSA video is so bizarre as a Vietnamese person. And it really does slap. So they ran a montage of mascots associated with Last Week Tonight and they didn't show ChiJohn? For shame!

I don’t want to get into a gun rights debate, but the mistake that grandma and grandpa made with the gun was having one in the first place. They clearly were not well trained enough to use it well, so even in the case of a genuine home invasion, the most likely outcome was they would have the gun taken away and used against them. It’s really not easy to use a gun in a high stress situation. There’s not much they could have done differently in that moment. I’m not sure they are legally liable for anything. The mistake was made long before that night.