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I figured it was Setrakian's wife or lover's heart.

I just don't understand Sandhya. I have the same confused feeling about her work that I had when the judges wet their panties over Jeffrey Sebelia's yellow plaid couture dress umpteen seasons ago. Even her portfolio mystifies me. Lots of weird shoulder treatments that go against the grain of the rest of the piece and about 234232544 simple silhouette A-line or maxi dresses with big color blocks interrupted by weird big prints. Designers like Christian Siriano I get. His stuff on the show was rarely straight-up wearable or commercial, but I could see where his designs could translate and inform the rack. Sandya's portfolio already is wearable and commercial--but it's also boring and it has all been done to death. Her jackets look like something Martika would have worn in the Toy Soldiers video. The prints do all of the work on her dresses. Take away the print and you've got something you could sew after a week in home economics class. I think she won this challenge because she had the only vision of the future that includes bold color and developed a "story" that appealed to the judges. In the future, women will not need to feel powerful by echoing or assuming traditionally male fashion cues in their own looks. Take away the story and I don't think the design stands on its own at all.

Whenever a certain friend of mine starts blathering on aimlessly I will interrupt him with, "You is talky meat. Don't make me come down there."

I actually kind of bought it, because I think Bassam is trying to subtly remind him that this leadership role was never a thing he really wanted. Jamal spends an awful lot of his free time watching news footage of a bloodied and doomed Gathafi. It didn't work, of course--Jamal eventually drank the familial Kool-Aid to devastating effect, so his decision to "help" the sheik in the bathroom wasn't too surprising. This show has some problems, but Jamal is definitely not one of them. I'm amazed at how invested I am in learning more about such a reprehensible creature. His character is far more layered and complex than Bassam's character has any hope of being.

How is that Sean Astin has only ever been good in a single role? I truly don't get it. It's like he was born to be a hobbit. Anything else is just too different from his actual personality to pull off. This show is mind-blowingly awful. Except for some of the interiors. The set designers have chops. Which is to be expected, I suppose, when Guillermo del Toro is involved. As cheesy as most of his movies have been, he's always had brilliant concept artists.

During the scene where Lexi lifted her hand and saw it covered in goo I looked over at my mom and said, "Next shot she's in she'll be in a chrysalis." Yep. So predictable, just like everything about this show now. The new showrunner is a disaster, which is surprising because he was a producer on Battlestar Galactica. That show had its problems, too, especially during the final season, but nothing on the order of badness that has infected Falling Skies. None of the characters are recognizable anymore, and the writers have eliminated some of the show's early problems by creating all new ones. The show's biggest sin, though, is the persistent reliance on the lack of communication trope. If everyone sat down and had an honest dialogue, most of the drama would disappear. Hal's appeal to Papa Mason is a perfect example of this. "Hey, dad, when the Volm cut open the veiny blood sack 12 of them were incinerated and the hatchling went violently nuts. Just sayin'." Instead we get a speech about protection and family and whatever. The Volm parcel out information like it's made of gold-pressed latinum and they've only got a few pieces to last them the next millennia or so. Anne never says, "Oh, hey, by the way, I had a memory nightmare that involved Karen inserting Espheni DNA into Lexi. So she's like, prolly not really yours, Tom." I miss my vaguely dumb-but-fun show. I think it's gone for good, though. Lexi is a disaster that could have been prevented by any halfway competent writer with even a passing familiarity with sci-fi cliches and tropes.

The ridiculous overreliance on polygraph results drives me absolutely batty. Polygraphs measure "arousal," which can be caused by approximately 13434 things, including medication, anxiety and anxiety disorders, hyperglycemia, stimulants (including nicotine and caffeine), substance withdrawal, various mental disorders, etc. etc. A polygraph examiner cannot reliably distinguish between arousal caused by lying or by any of these other things.

So Jamal is a terrible creature and obviously very disturbed. However, I couldn't help but have a lot of empathy for young Jamal. He was just endlessly browbeaten and not emotionally prepared for the role his father was molding him for. I don't know how anyone could endure such a childhood and not be psychotic. It doesn't excuse his behavior, of course, but I admit that I was a bit surprised that the viewers were offered the opportunity to empathize with Jamal at any age. I was honestly expecting this show to paint Bassam's family as enigmatic moustache-twirling villains, evil for evil's sake, the royal family just tyrant kings of a backwards, hopeless country. I assumed that Bassam would necessarily, as the self-created American, be the moral center of the show. That flashback with the shooting was completely unexpected. I'm not sure how on board I am with the portrayals of the Americans. Are we really that dumb? That uninformed? The show seems to think so, with Jamal's statements to Bassam about Oprah and hugging it out, not to mention Bassam's wife's insane naivete. If I were in an American visiting a Middle Eastern country whose dictator had just expired, I would want to leave immediately for my own safety. That would go triple if my husband was also a member of the royal family. The only American on the show who has a clue is Bassam's daughter. She mentions things like "patriarchy," tells her gay brother to be careful, and points out that there's "no traffic" because everyone in the area is being inconvenienced for their benefit. So she's kind of a brat, but she seems to have seen a television or a news-oriented part of the internet in the last ten years, which is more than I can say for mom or her brother.

I like my sci-fi shows to be just a little bit sly when referencing other things, be they true or fictional events. One of my major complaints about this show, from the very first season, is that I always feel as if the writers don't trust me to make fairly simple connections. Do they really think that the average viewer can't be trusted to identify the parallels between the Nazi Youth and the Espheni Youth without the ham-handed costumes and "aryan" features of the leader? Like many others here, I too have a huge problem with the decision to split up the Second Mass and tell the various portions of the "new" story through the eyes of its former members. The first episode was far too ambitious and the effort to fit some of the characters into their new plot arcs left them unrecognizable. Maggie's drinking the Kool-Aid? Anne could barely walk up a hill in the opening shot, but four months later she's a Billy Badass resistance leader to whom actual former members of the military defer even though she's doing a terrible job? Weaver is falling apart? Nope. Didn't like this at all.