lavenderblue

First time posting in this thread but I hate-watched the whole season as it happened. It felt obvious with the redemption cookoff that they wanted Preston and Corey for that finale; after that round, it was even more weirdly clear that they really wanted it to be Corey for some reason. I couldn't stand Preston, but based on the critiques his dish seemed to be the only one they really couldn't fault, and it entirely showcased the zucchini. To overlook Corey's flaw (focusing too much on pasta), they could have equally done the same with the cherry tomato garnish or the missing fried eggplant. So Corey winning out in the head to head, after more arbitrary critiques -- Preston after all could only cook cabbage in the limited time he was given, and Corey's dish once again didn't really focus on his ingredient that well -- made me fear they had plans for his ultimate triumph. The final outcome was confusing from that perspective, unless they're trying to groom him to be a personality which.....good luck with that. I would also like to note that chef expert superior Corey pronounced bain-marie as "BAYNE-marie." Anyway, this show was a disaster. Either woman winning would've been okay but my investment was purely "who has annoyed me less than others this season."

As another of the Rollins fans in this vicinity, I was glad to see her back the last two weeks, but also ultimately annoyed by her usage. I don't really buy her in this new role (Huang absolutely would've been a lovely returning face), but it was also the most lackluster tease. "Oh let's have two scenes where she makes it clear how much she misses being a cop and can't tell Carisi! Anyway got those out of the way, Benson/Stabler luv time." I understand if they're considering finding a budget-friendly way to bring Giddish back on in some capacity and want to test those waters, but it just felt like this half-told storyline. At the very least throw in a scene discussing this with Carisi himself to round things out a little. I was very happy to see Muncy go and would be totally cool with Bruno and Churlish getting bumped up.

I didn't get Susie's reaction to the photo in the last ep, but between that, her weirdness during the conversation with Midge about Gordon's wife, and Gordon's repeated insistence that he and Hedy had an understanding, I guessed at the revelation that came at the end, so that was kind of rewarding. Good thing because the industrial show was the worst kind of self-indulgent ASP filler, though Susie's line about the little boy was the one bright spot. And roping Joel into the mob storyline would be an efficient use of him while moving things forward. For some reason I'm enjoying this season more than I have the last couple--I think it feels more focused in on Midge and Susie and the side plots aren't quite so....much--but the over-the-top Amazon Prime budget sprees remind me of why this show annoys me way more than I wish it would. Also, weird timing; something random made me think "you know, I hope Sophie's not returning" (not a fan of Sophie Lennon plots) and then she literally appeared in the next scene! Fine in that context, though. Also, Hedy's coat was stunning.

I feel like the writing this season -- the actual dialogue writing, not just the plotting -- has been incredibly strange, like people are auditioning first drafts of off-Broadway plays with some of these scenes. Everything feels off and just slightly more unnatural than even is the norm for this show. The therapy scene was particularly bad for this, but this kind of overwriting has been an issue with some of the suspect/witness scenes throughout the year. But the details in this episode were also just weird. The dad left 20 years earlier with the nanny (the son was 12 then and is 32 now), but they have a new baby? It's not impossible, but it was such a strange detail versus them having an older kid that it made me think a lot more than such a throwaway reference should have. Along with, as mentioned by @Ms Blue Jay above, Fin's "Was Carisi this cranky when he was a detective?" It might've been a quip, but a clearer line would've been "I don't remember Carisi being this cranky..." because as it stood, Ice-T genuinely delivered it like he didn't know, which makes no sense, Olivia's reply could've been humorous and equally could've been her providing information, and I had to wonder if the writers somehow forgot that they very obviously worked together. Also, I laughed at the dad being like "Oh yeah, I left because she tried to kill me in this explicit way that corroborates your investigation."

One of my favorite shows is 12 Monkeys which had a very causality and loop-based approach to time travel, so as Addison and FutureBen's date unfolded I was like "maybe the date is actually going to go the way the date always went because Addison always went out with FutureBen" except, clearly not. But given how low stakes the Addison/Ben relationship is for me, it would've been an interesting twist on what we know of this story's approach to time so far if something had suddenly been triggered in Hologram Addison's memory there. I appreciate the decision to presumably wrap the Martinez story, and in a way that was fairly logical, although I think the nuclear winter conclusion could've been set up a little better over the course of the season. Have a storyline where while Ben helps someone, there's a hint that he also created some negative outcome elsewhere. We can assume that's happened, and the government apparently decided that as well, but as far as the show's concerned they've gone with "Everything QL does is HELP people but now nuclear war and the government wants to destroy us, so unfair." Sure they're a scapegoat, but it would've upped the stakes to show the team realizing before now that there's been a cost to the project for some people's lives (and not just Ben and Sam's).

To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of my favorite books!!! I almost never encounter others who have read it! Anyway yes, the QL setup here in general is a bit Oxfordian, come to think of it. I'm glad they're finally getting somewhere with the new mythology building, and I hope Ziggy's motive is related to bringing back Sam -- saving Addison is not a compelling enough driving aim for this show for me at this point.

Thanks! That was about the most I could deduce and when every other detail is so filled out, it drove me crazy that this one thing was sort of left like "uh it happened, anyway, moving on."

I'm just about to finish my third run-through of the series and I have to confess there is one plot point that I still haven't gotten a handle on, and I don't know if it's addressed and I've missed it each time like an idiot, or if it actually is sort of a minor plot hole: where did the Messengers actually come from, genetically? We're first introduced to them as babies in 2015 that Olivia has some sort of oversight of. They're then adults in 2043/4, and one of course becomes mother to both Olivia and Tall Man almost a century earlier. But who were the Messengers' parents? There's no indication that in the show's universe of the 2010s, genetic engineering has advanced such that humans are being created in any ways other than those available in our own world, and even Olivia, as engineered as she was, still had parental donors (and had to become pregnant by a random dude in the '70s to produce her own child). Yet these babies just sort of show up and then become critical to the plot and it feels like a loose thread somewhere unless, as noted, I've totally missed something. Since I only first watched the show in 2021 I never interacted with any of the podcasts or anything, so if this actually did get addressed by the showrunners at some point would be happy to know!

I went back to rewatch the opening, which is what had prompted my thought -- my reference to Tuello confused things, sorry. I just took that later scene between he and June to indicate that the memorials discussed below were still for the mission, not in commemoration of any potential fatalities in the shooting: So from that I assumed they're still doing public services in addition to the private funerals Tuello is attending.

When they opened the episode talking about all the memorial services -- presumably, based on June's convo with Tuello, still for the Gilead mission, not for the shooting at the first memorial -- I, an American, really was empathizing with the disgruntled Canadians at that point because on what planet does a country hold multiple public memorials in a different country for a failed allegedly secret military mission against yet another country? Then June sees a truck clearly coming after her and decides "It's smart to just keep standing in front of it" because otherwise we'd have no plot developments I guess. The stupidity of characters in this episode truly was off the charts. The fear over Luke's consequences also seemed overblown -- he would be arrested, correctly, but there's probably a fair bit of evidence to demonstrate he was protecting June's life. The Rose and Nick scene was genuinely written like something from a bad romantic drama, like dialogue from a show Rose watched as a teen pre-Gilead, because it sounded nothing like anything a wife in this universe would say. That would actually be sort of an interesting way to look at it -- the people who came of age just as Gilead started up who still draw on these things they learned from the media at a younger age, but were too young to have experienced yet -- but it was probably just bad writing. I was spoiled by the Deadline leak, but the June/Serena reunion was the episode's highlight for me because it's the one thing that's genuinely up in the air to me (plus, like a few others here, it's the relationship dynamic that most interests me). The Gilead intrigues fluctuate based on whatever the showrunners need the world to look like from episode to episode, and characters tend to be pushed and pulled accordingly -- but I truly have no idea where they're taking this one thread, and that's kind of nice.

I was really kinda hoping the last scene would be Serena turning up at Tuello's doorstep, ready to make that deal, given his lines earlier in the episode about "Nick would be such a major get for us! A COMMANDER!" and the episode title. Sadly (for me) we instead got.....whatever that maudlin vigil and shooting was instead. I do wonder what Mr. Wheeler's deal is between both his nonchalance in the office scene and his "I think that's up to Noah! *chuckle*" about Serena nursing while Mrs. Wheeler lost it over the lack of a bottle. Are we just seeing what happens when the wife leads a Gilead-leaning household or is there something more to him? I've also felt a contrast between Serena-as-Mrs.-Waterford and Mrs. Wheeler, and it's that while I think there's probably reason to wonder what sort of a mom Serena will make, I always believed that she did genuinely want a child. She went about it in a horrible way, but I believed her desperation and believed that she enjoyed kids. Mrs. Wheeler really seems to disdain Noah, seeing a baby as a status symbol and maybe an "heir," and that adds another layer of why he needed to be freed from that house. It's too easy to imagine something terrible happening to him through her negligence or potential violence. Of course the mission was doomed, and of course such an OTT mission was embarked upon basically just to save Hannah. Sure, they threw in a reference to the other girls' parents, but I have little doubt that in the context of this show, they'd have gone in exclusively to save her while saying "sorry girls, have fun at tomorrow's gardening class!" Though it did make me wonder what they even knew of the other girls. How many plausibly would have had one or two birth parents in Canada or what remains of America? Many likely had mothers working as handmaids or laboring in the colonies, at best, and how many fathers made it out a la Luke rather than being executed years before? Lawrence's non-proposal to Naomi was a highlight for me and I don't even care that much about either character. The awkwardness was amazing, though. And "We're not your realtors."

First time watching this one -- this episode frustrated me on multiple levels. First, it seemed like Olivia was unfamiliar with the basic premise of an underground railroad to get women and children away from abusers, not just aghast at the potentially unsavory consequences of such a system, and that made no sense for a woman who's been working in SVU for twenty years. Secondly, I agree with @DaynaPhile that it didn't really seem like they intended to frame Jules's husband; the fake kidnapping set-up was certainly ripe for indicting someone for a crime, and so was not an ethically ideal plan, but none of the "evidence" they created pointed directly at the husband -- that was SVU jumping to some major conclusions, similar to how they did with the clown guy a few episodes earlier where the girl ran off with her music teacher/father. (And in that episode there was more evidence against the falsely accused!) He did have a legal case against the squad, but I don't think it's wholly Cabot and Jules's fault that the team reached the conclusions they did. But Olivia overall also annoyed me throughout. She's perfectly willing to go gray when it suits her cause of the week or to protect her own team, but in this instance, with her years of experience, she's convinced the legal system is a failsafe way to protect DV victims and there's no justification for disappearing, and she can't bear to be any vaguer in her deposition? Yeah, the show obviously presented her as somewhat wrong in the end by having Jules get killed, but that this is the time when she sees no moral ambiguity was bizarre to me.

I haven't watched new episodes of SVU since about 2014 or '15, so for the last couple months I've been catching up on the past several seasons as something to do on Hulu. I watched this last night, rolling my eyes at Benson's unwarranted but typical unprofessionalism with Stone and then the lunacy of Barba's final scene with Benson, and then came over here and laughed so hard at the similar reactions in this thread. Truly cathartic.

Related, there was also my favorite line delivery of the episode, when she's taken to the "exam room" and says something like "I...had no idea this was up here!"

I took Baltimore Betty's comment to mean the type of situation where a king would be killed in battle, say, and his child would rule and probably have an uncle or other male relative as regent, while his mother the Queen Consort, as a mere widow, might have limited political power, or where a female might be barred from the throne completely due to Salic law, but her sons could possibly then resume the lineage depending on the law's application. This is very much what I could see with a widow in good standing, and even the idea of remarrying her to another commander could introduce some wrinkles -- is this kid now to carry on that commander's name and legacy? etc. Similar to the fears of marrying off royal widows. The British example is somewhat different; before the law was changed beginning with William and Catherine's kids, a firstborn female child of a monarch would indeed be behind any younger brother(s) in the line of succession, but as with Elizabeth II, if she's the eldest female or only child, she was not only the heir presumptive to the throne, but also ahead of other male relatives -- her own sons as well as, if she's the daughter of a male heir/next in line, any uncles younger than her father (this was true for both Elizabeth II and Victoria, whose father was never king but was the oldest of George III's sons to produce a legitimate heir after the death of George IV's daughter). Though even this still feels too progressive for Gilead; the idea of, like, a grown-up Angela/Charlotte Putnam having more popular authority than some noob commander recently promoted from guardian seems unlikely. (I would be sort of interested in how this scenario might play out, though...)

Between this and Gilmore Girls, the Palladinos really love the theme of "a main character is prodded to write honest review, goes overboard in vitriol, must face confrontation from target." Too many scenes here felt 17 hours long.

I was today years old when I learned that Aaron Stanford played Ho-Ho the Jai Alai promoter in S3 of Mad Men and what an absolutely flabbergastingly bizarre crossover between two of my favorite television shows. This will add some time travel piquancy to any future rewatches of Mad Men, though.

Whatever the case, if she got pregnant after women were already miscarrying -- if I heard that correctly -- I'm curious what that means for the longer timeline. (Not that it matters if the show doesn't get picked up by someone else, granted....)

Okay, did anyone else catch what Jennifer's assistant (sorry, I keep forgetting her name) said about getting pregnant -- something like she went off the pill because so many women were having miscarriages and she decided to just chance it? So were XY fetuses being impacted even before the small animals that we saw as the harbingers in the Pilot?

Oh, I'm so glad I checked here. That Annie Murphy ad comes on during every freaking ad break on Hulu and I rue the inability to fast-forward every time. I'm also sick of seeing the rest of the Schitt's Creek cast at every other commercial break (did you need to sign that many endorsement deals, Dan? Did you?), but nothing grates on and skeeves me out like that one.

Also, that "Addison" line just to dig in how she's too insignificant to get her name right. Sam and Allison suck for cheating, but Jenn also kind of just sucks in her own right so any sympathy I have is purely abstract ethics. I thought it was an interesting little move that they coded Jenn as an enemy character in the sitcom realm with her New York sports fandoms.

I would need to go back for the context, but he also explicitly says that in regard to a kid as well in that episode at another point (rather than it being something cuter than him, as with the dog, it was that he didn't want anything whose needs would outweigh his). I made a mental note since I was curious if they'd explain them not having children. ETA: OH! I remember -- the Belichick hoodie was like a child to him, since he wouldn't tolerate having a real child around.

The June/Nick kiss in front of Fred also felt fan-servicey to me (like that earlier 360 degree spin kiss), because holy cow I cannot imagine that being a moment real people would contemplate in a real situation like this. Fred definitely didn't have the moral grounds to be sickened by that but on a narrative level, I felt him there. Ridiculous as Serena/Tuello could or will be, if it transpires, there was a fake rumor floating around that he'd be revealed as the father of her baby, so be glad we were spared that, at least! The more I think about the last couple scenes, the more confused I am. How much time is supposed to have transpired after Fred is killed? His finger's already arrived in the mail in Canada (presumably mailed from within Canada; I missed if June had slapped a return address on there). Serena is clueless at that point about his fate, but Luke knows something has happened. But how would anyone else know Fred's dead at this point unless June tipped people off? And does Tuello explicitly know this was happening, or was he only informed to the extent of "Fred's returning to Gilead and he'll be in Nick's custody"?

I.......hated it. June is my least favorite character, to be fair, so while thematically, sure, I guess this makes sense as a finale, it was just so much June and Fred and quiet talking and then grrl power murder montage. We knew Fred had an expiration date and while I'd seen spoilers suggesting the particution, for a moment during the scene with Lawrence and Nick, I was a little excited that maybe we were actually getting a more book-style outcome of Fred being hoisted by his own Gilead petard. But nope, not the show's way. As a finale, the lack of movement on any other plot thread also peeves. While it's great those women were saved, I'll admit I was hoping Lawrence would trade himself as intel, because that could potentially mean some sort of novel development next season. And the "just five minutes, OK" at the end -- that seemed more like June knew she was under arrest or something, not that Luke suspected she'd just killed a dude with her friends, so curious what all the Canada residents knew of what was going down with her crew.

Besides the possibility that Serena still has some fans in Canada from her pre-Gilead days -- who support the back to the home + pro-environment message and probably chalk up the negative info as lies -- the best analogy I could come up with for the Waterford supporters is the tankies of social media. There are unironic fans of regimes like North Korea's out there on Twitter, who will praise the government and everything they believe it's done for economic justice and a clean environment, claim anything bad said by refugees is Western propaganda, etc., etc. These same kids will absolutely never attempt to set foot near North Korea (or any other oppressive regime they may support on social media), much like the Canadian Gilead ubers are perfectly content to remain on Canadian soil.