@rickay It had to be said. Surely they knew what they were in for here as well, teaming up both Jamie AND Tywin in the same flick so soon after Thrones. And to be fair, that fact alone was enough of a hook to grab my interest in watching this.
Shout by Greg
For me 1890 has the best story, followed by 2023. Didn’t like the 1941 timeline much yet.
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@gregorymurad It's interesting how different people's perceptions can be; for me it was the exact opposite. Both the modern and WWII-era storylines struck me as fascinating, with protagonists that seemed to be quite layered, while the 1890 storyline seemed to be no more than what meets the eye: another bigoted cop wandering the streets, making other people suffer for his lack of honesty and self-acceptance.
Do you ever feel like this country is just vastly too large to be viable in the long-term? You and I are countrymen, if our profile bios are to be believed, and yet I can't help but feel like we live in entirely different universes to arrive at such different conclusions. Do you mind sharing more of your take on the crooked inspector from the WWII-era scenes? I found it immensely satisfying to see no time wasted in exposing him for exactly what he was tacitly accused of being, and immediately getting what he deserved. I only wished that Sergeant Whiteman had been free to expose him in the process, but I'm also intrigued by his relationship with whoever appears to be pulling the strings here. I look forward to seeing what they do with the framework they've laid out so far. I honestly don't even have a working theory for what might actually be happening as yet.
Shout by Fabrizio Cirnigliaro
Hi, I was hoping to make it home for dinner, but things are very topsy-turvy at the office.
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I'm sorry to hear that.
I'm disappointed that all of Paul Wesley's singing moments weren't done as spoken word, as a tribute.
So, this was a mixed bag for me - It's very difficult to overcome my negative feelings towards musicals. I found parts of this quite entertaining, and there was also parts where I was cringing in embarrassment. I'm not sure it's going to have any rewatch value for me. I appreciated that they at least incorporated the songs into the storyline as a mystery that needed to be solved, but am never a fan of when they lean into the music as a way to dwell on a character's emotional state. Just move the damn story forward instead of sitting in a single moment for three minutes!
Some musical parts were definitely better than others, but this was always going to be a difficult one for me. There were just too many songs here, and they were too much in the musical theatre style. I didn't like the "finale" at all (the Klingon moment should have been hilarious but literally made me cry out "oh GOD NO").
At the same time, I really appreciate that Strange New Worlds is taking risks and experimenting. This is a thousand times more interesting than the super safe Berman-Trek, even when the results don't completely work for me. The problem is that we are only getting 10 episodes per season, so episodes like this can feel like a monumental waste of storytelling time.
The best stuff here was everything that dealt with character relationships - Chapel/Spock, Pike/Batel and La'an/Kirk.
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@vwfringe Oh, even though he's my favorite character of all-time, you can't leave Brent Spiner out of that crowd. Let this be a standing invite to all my Trakt peeps to stop by for a listening party; I could always use some company for the next time I roast a blunt and bust my eardrums with an ice pick while listening to the Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back CD I paid $25 for in junior high, LOL!
Shout by Marc Friedolin
VIP6For someone who has dug graves before he sure doesn't know how to use a spade...
Otherwise a fine Episode.Great cast and great writing so far.
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@player8472 Yeah, I saw that too and found myself thinking how stupid it would be if he spent so long digging that more trouble found him before he was even able to catch up to the wagons. A dumb premise for a show, to be sure, but nothing surprises me on television anymore. Either way, there's no excuse for not sinking a spade perpendicular into the ground as far as it'll go before applying leverage. We really need to spend a lot more time in schools on Archimedes' simple machines...
Moreover, was I alone in thinking that Claire was Faith Hill's sister rather than James'? Maybe I just incorrectly inferred it from how stoic Faith Hill was in the face of Claire's callousness and foul tongue, which to my mind conveyed the familiarity typical of siblings; the sisters-in-law I've seen in my life who had such mismatched temperaments have almost always displayed a lot more hostility and naked disdain. I suppose it was just a product of an age when people had a lot more time to grow accustomed to their in-laws within more closely-knit families...or I'm just related to a wagonload of mouthy wenches and men who tend to marry the same, haha.
Ward Cleaver is an asshole
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@jrbernardi I recall hearing somewhere that Hugh Beaumont perhaps wasn't the most enjoyable person to be around in real life, but are you talking about his character in the show in this comment? If so, make sure to give your Dad a huge hug and something expensive for Fathers' Day this year—some of us would've killed to have been raised by this "asshole" instead of our real fathers.
I'm not a father myself so I can only speculate, but it strikes me as a very demanding task that most perform to mediocrity and still many more are (I'll even go so far as to say, objectively) abject failures at. What I always admired about Ward was that even when "shit hit the fan" (or as close as they got to that for a 50's family show), he always kept some manner of composure. Contrasting that with mine own father who went to great lengths to dismantle the house itself anytime even matters of no consequence didn't meet his expectations, I'd give Ward Cleaver a passing grade in fatherhood just on that fact alone!
I'm genuinely curious to know if there are particular scenes or episodes that brought you to the conclusion you expressed. If so, please share them so we can explore this a bit more.
Review by Alexander von Limberg
They are going on a big mission. They may not return. Why not waste the first 15 minutes or so centered around that fact? I mean, can you be sure that we - the audience - otherwise understand what's at stake? No, 'cause we're stupid. Everyone needs to say goodbye, must explain why not coming along (or like in case of the two presidents why they come along), must confess their love to each other, deliver another sub-complex motivational speech over com (that screams Hollywood BS pathos) and so forth. Even after jumping to the galactic barrier Saru and the Good Doctor steal my time by discussing the universal concept of love in the most shallow and uninspired way you could ever imagine.
The barrier is strange and stupid as ever. Both from a visual and a cosmological point of view. Classic Star Trek. Brings back some memories.Discovery isn't to blame here!
The two engineers befriending each other is actually the better sub plot (it's easy to beat the actual main plot aboard the Discovery). Reminds me of the incarcerated Miles O'Brien. It makes his motives clear for the first time. This doesn't save this season but it's a piece that was always missing.
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@alexlimberg Holy [Ee'char](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ee'char), Batman! How did I not see the corollary there?!? Perhaps the better question is how it is at all possible that we are only a handful of weeks shy of 26 years since I watched [Hard Time (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode)](https://trakt.tv/shows/star-trek-deep-space-nine/seasons/4/episodes/19) on its first airing? There was indeed a lot of overlap between the two and, not unsurprisingly, it's in the places that Discovery deviates from the original recipe that we most acutely see it struggle to tell a good story. Sometimes I feel like it's Season 2 all over again with how they have everything they need to frame a really captivating story arc that's rich with character development, only to piss it all away out of an inability or unwillingness to leave the lesser bits of the script on the writers' room floor.
Whether they like it or not, they've invested in the Tarka character now to the point that his story is more interesting than 90% of the Discovery crew, even the ones that have been there for years. This story between him and the Fraidy Cat alien (sorry, the name escapes me) was more than enough for a standalone episode had it come just one or two weeks earlier in the season and not when they had no choice but to be staging the season finale already. Hell, even if they weren't willing to commit to it like that, parceling it out to us over several episodes, beginning with when Booker and Tarka strike up their alliance would've been acceptable too, as honestly this explanation for why Tarka is so desperate to get his hands on the DMA controller's power source is a lot more satisfying than the milquetoast lost love story that I'd been imagining as it unfolded.
You can't have everything in life!
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@ahmedhamdy90 It's true, you seldom can. However, if one finds himself backed into that particular corner, he should hope to have the wisdom and insight to say:
"To hell with my family and to hell with your future as an M.D., Dr. Foreman. I'm choosing the gorgeous, (and delightfully horny) young girlfriend, the one who didn't take shit off anyone this whole time, not from a cop, nor you, nor my lame, provincial parents, and who never once lost sight of the fact that my health was the only thing worth fighting over this entire time. My parents are little more than glorified carnival barkers who can't let go of the past, while you and your colleagues are stones in the capitalist mill that is American medicine, saving a handful from ruin while millions a crushed financially until they're grist only THEN to face death once their wallets run flat."
How is either future supposed to be the least bit appealing when behind door number three there's Jessy Schram straddling the kid in a bra and panties, looking at him the way a tigress eyes a plump warthog across the savannah like it's already a pork chop on a plate? :yum:
Only seven reasons?
Good episode. Odd that Sean’s patient wasn’t more forthcoming up front.
If a wife refuses to give a concession for life saving surgery; couldn’t that be manslaughter?
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@danio1972 I don't see how it could be, manslaughter being homicide without intent. Either the state produces a witness who heard the husband tell the wife he'd want surgery, in which case you've got murder II, or the husband survives without the treatment, and has a soon-to-be ex-wife. I seriously doubt they would have even been able to get a judge to appoint a guardian ad litem with just Claire's affadavit. They bluffed and won because most people naturally acquiesce to authority figures, even when they're operating outside their domain.
Strong woman, traditional man. The strong woman portrayed as heartless only to see the right way by being a proper wife.. What a joke; and it is not just because of "the times".
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@rolivaw Yeah, definitely not one of the better scripts that Hepburn and Tracy had to work with, it played more like an exercise on how to use serial clichés to get out of doing any real writing. I'm always frustrated by how the character of the Greek orphan boy is tragically underused, too. Anyone who's seen Captains Courageous knows how well Spencer Tracy can portray a paternal role to a young child, and it would've been a far more redemptive character arc for Tess to have come back to be with both of them than just Sam alone. Perhaps that too is an artifact of the times, no doubt it would've been a hard sell to that orphanage had Sam wanted to be named the boy's sole legal guardian.
In the end, the tragedy shown in the story almost perfectly mirrors the one experienced by the audiences who watch it: so much wasted potential, with no sense of what the true end of the story will be...
They should just rename this season, "No one is taking Littlefinger's shit anymore." Also, I'm pretty sure Game of Thrones just ruined chicken pot pie for me forever...
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@yngtadpole @millie_akers SOAB! Actually no, some of us managed to sidestep that mental association somehow...that is, until some people on Trakt had to talk about it and now it's ruined for me forever too. FML. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:
That said, I was impressed with how Sam just dived right into that shit. With all the gagging over the chamber pots I expected it to be a pretty tortured affair for them both. I couldn't have attempted something like that with even a tenth of his aplomb.
Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a theonomic dictatorship. A TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel. INTJ Keywords: Drama, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Dystopian, Apocalypse, Futuristic, Political.
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@freemynd78 I hate to be "that guy," but the adjective form of the noun theonomy is theonomous, not theonomic. Still, a fantastic choice to apply the concept here to describe Gilead; few other choices could be so exquisitely well-suited.
Shout by The_Argentinian
The "Behind Enemy Lines" slow motion explosions scene was so ridiculous. We all know nothing will happen to June. She has plot armor! And worst of all was the cover song of a Coldplay song. barf
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@the_argentinian Hey now, say what you will about the narrative shortcomings, but leave Coldplay out of it. The world can never have enough covers of Fix You, and thus one was really good! I was actually on my way to identify and pirate it when I saw your shout and felt duty-bound to respond.
For what it's worth, I liked the ending of this one. I thought the juxtaposition of the naked avarice of Aunt Lydia and Commander Lawrence with June's obvious relief at Jeanine's return was poignant and worked well, leaving a lot of empty space on the Etch-a-Sketch for the rest of the season.
Another great episode, but damn, getting quite emotional. Where is all the quirky humor? I love the show but it can't be only sad or heartbreaking, we need some relief from that. I hope that nothing bad happens with Shaun and Lea's baby, I'm sure that there can be many humorous moments with them and a baby.
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@strykar @thenightwolf Don't you feel that it's reflective of the level of character growth necessary to make Shaun's character believable, and ultimately, relatable? I mean a lot of the humour in the earlier seasons was borne of Shaun having very little skill with his new life in San José and the calibre of the collaboration and communication that his job as a surgical resident demanded. We were incentivized to come along for the ride by the promise that this guy wasn't your average human being (admittedly, we're something of a dumpster fire as a species, on balance) or even your average guy with an autism spectrum disorder, but someone with remarkable potential, who was worth taking a chance on.
I think we've seen Shaun live up to that promise in some remarkably inspiring ways, while also suffering greatly as the price of that growth has to be, for any of us. The fact that this isn't at all the same show as it was in season one is precisely why it still captivates me: it does a great job of juxtaposing the uphill battle real life always amounts to in the long run, just with a better mix of very smart and very broken people than I've yet succeeded in filling my own life with so far, hehe.
As regards its trajectory towards becoming a sad, emotional drama, an assessment which I essentially concur with and am mostly ambivalent about, I feel like the writers are just making the best of the cast they've been given, and also most likely playing to their strengths as well. I feel like there have only been three actors so far on the show that made me feel like their character had that spark of natural comedy: those that portrayed Melendez, Jared Kalu, and Carly. Whatever their reasons, that's obviously not the vibe they want on the show. I do miss Melendez a lot still, but
I don't see the fucking point of this show yet.
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@aya-bakr I could be completely wrong, but from what I can see the point of it is, in fact, the fucking.
An even more pressing question is: Who at FX greenlit this series, what were they smoking, and is there any left? :wink:
seems like George is falling apart rapidly
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@goutham3113 We've known all along that his fate was to die young, per TBBT, though I can't recall if a cause was ever canonicalized. Honestly, the way they've written the character lately, my money would be on suicide at the moment.
I feel for the guy, too: if I was married to Mary I expect I'd end up in the same headspace. Looking past the fact that her life is wholly consumed with motherhood and religion, that whole Goody Two-Shoes routine gets old quick, and at her age it's bordering on pathetic. He's got it doubly bad too considering how often he's around his mother-in-law who's got orders of magnitude more sex appeal than her daughter, despite needing to borrow Sheldon's telescope to glimpse her best years in the rear-view mirror.
Honestly, with the humor continuing to ebb from this series, I'd love for them to intentionally pivot into a full-on dysfunctional family drama rather than the current method of doing so only tacitly.
What movie are they watching the Underwoods in this episode?
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@khaled-123 Don't mean to sharpshoot you on an obvious typo, but for the sake of those who have yet to read this thread, the movie came out in 1944, not '94, obviously. Fred McMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, both punching above their weight classes, honestly, under direction from Billy Wilder.
It's honestly not one of my favorites from the era or the genre, but I love its selection here because it is 10,000% certain that it's the kind of movie Frank and Claire would both enjoy enough to want to turn into an Election Day tradition. With the naked avarice on display and the fast-paced dialogue that demands your attention, it's essentially a reflection of their own characters, plus who doesn't like a supporting performance by Edward G. Robinson? Beau Willimon can be kind of clunky with inauthentic dialogue at times, but when it comes to selecting little touchstones like this one and the mandala from last season, I struggle to think of anyone better.
The music is still too intense in this one.
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@kcador Van Morrison is too intense? Where's your musical comfort zone, then? Tiny Bubbles by Don Ho? :champagne: :laughing:
Oh no, we lost 11% of our energy reserves! Janeway's gotta give up coffee to save power, but using the holodeck is totally fine? (And apparently even more fine when that figure doubles.)
Convenient that Chakotay happens to have his medicine bundle even though his ship was destroyed in Caretaker, isn't it? I don't remember the Maquis crew members exactly getting a chance to salvage their belongings before that Kazon ship took their shuttle in the flank…
Based on the deck layout in Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, Neelix turns left out of the mess hall right into a dead-end when he's heading off to argue with Janeway. Turning left got him out of the shot faster, I guess.
Someone in effects should have checked the script. Those nucleonic beams were very much not parallel to the ship's central axis.
OK, nitpicks aside, I'm of two minds on this episode.
On the one hand, it does a lot of great work establishing elements of the series that I really do love (if only for nostalgic reasons, in some cases). We get a hint of the Doctor becoming more independent ("A hologram that programs himself…"). We get jokes about Neelix's cooking. Tom is already establishing himself as a holodeck wizard of sorts (even if he does write his female characters like a chauvinist).
But we also get some of the bullshit. The whole premise is just a bit hokey, and the Neelix/Kes relationship is all the more awkward when you start the series already knowing that she's two years old and will be dead by age ten. (That kiss? So uncomfortable.)
Still, Voyager was my first Trek show. I can't help but like it despite myself.
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@dgw Voyager was your first Trek show? Someone, I wish I knew who, owes you a serious apology, pal...you were done dirty.
Who else wanted to slug the "good Samaritan."
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@dewdropvelvet *stands up and hops up and down while waving both arms in the air* Me! ... Me right here!!! ... Ya see me??
Oh man, while I spent the remainder of the time watching this episode silently grumbling to myself that I still watch this paragon of entertainment mediocrity, that incident with:
- A. the "Good Samaritan" completely ruining the tidy ending to the kidnapping by making an unimaginably huge deal over a forgotten bag such that they had to waste the rest of the episode on that huge yawn of a storyline, and
- B. the police officer similarly taking things just as seriously when literally every cop I've known in my entire life would be rolling their eyes before she got the first word out and finding any excuse to bounce out of there,
had me cussing out the entire writing staff out loud and invoking the names of deities I don't even believe in to come down from on high to bear witness to something they'd never otherwise see. Thanks for letting me know I wasn't the only one. :thumbsup:
I know, I watch this stuff out of a desire to have someone else tell me a story, part of the appeal being that I never know what's going to come next, and in return I agree to suspend some/most of my disbelief when necessary. I draw a line, though, when it involves people acting like Old Testament saints absent any plausible motivation. Man it gets me hot when people rub my nose in the fact that the society we live in (in the U.S.) doesn't give us much of anything to be proud of, and that's exactly what this felt like.
WTF, there’s smoking in space??? Nonsense.
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@d0ndada I don't think that's even the most bizarre element of the very front-and-center placement of smoking in this series. Did anyone else have to retrieve their jaw from the floor during the first episode when we see Raffi refill her "e-cigarette" device? Because what I plainly saw was a crystalline substance being stuffed inside a transparent glass tube and heated to its vapor point in what seemed like an unambiguous reference to 24th century crack/methamphetamine. I still don't know whether it was intentional, emphasizing how deep of a hole Raffi's living in or just a writing staff too green and homogenous to have anyone who could recognize how the scene would play to a wide audience...
I'm not too sure how I feel about Olive's storyline. It seems like pointless filler that will hold no importance other than to potentially hook her up with Maxine and as a tool to have her do something, to have some focus on her as she is one of the main characters, all because she's now the only one in the family who doesn't have Callings. I hope it has some sort of positive, worthwhile pay-off, in the end, preferably resulting in her having Callings too. I don't see any other significant, worthwhile conclusion to whatever's going on with her. Now that Grace is having them, for whatever reason, Olive is being left out, and I hope the main purpose of her storyline is to result in that no longer being the case. Simply used as a plot device to give her a romantic partner would be immensely disappointing. I hope that route of things won't be taken. At the very least, I hope that won't be the only reason for this storyline of hers.
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@legendaryfang56 @Jim222001 Did I miss something? I don't remember any scenes where Olive laid down any foundation for being attracted to women. What little we've seen of her dynamic with Maxine so far struck me as animated by a desire to covertly manipulate much more than out of a nascent romantic/sexual attraction. That pamphlet she gave Olive felt like unsubtle messaging that the group was at least partly cult-like; who else but cults and the government spends their budget on glossy printed messaging like that?
Shout by dgw
VIP9MacGyver fat-fingered that file name. "GUIDANCE,PGM" would probably throw an error on a computer of that era. Filenames were meant to be no more than 8 characters with a 3-character extension, separated by a dot. Not a comma.
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@dgw Unless the underlying CLI framework was POSIX-based, in which case the character limit is 14 and the extension is optional. Though honestly it didn't resemble any interface I've run across, and considering how ill-suited they all are to TV storytelling, my money is on it being nothing more than a bitmap mockup that wasn't even interactive.
Shout by dgw
VIP9If you're gonna put a sequence in slow-motion, maybe film it with a high frame-rate camera?
Fun episode, but goodness are there a lot of technical plot goofs. Stuff that people who actually work on oil wells wouldn't miss. And I'm still trying to figure out who owns the land rights, since MacGyver's friends say their "lease" is up soon. Wouldn't the mineral rights (and therefore the right to extract oil from the property) go to the lessor, not the lessee?
It was neat to see Nana Visitor in this role seven years before she walked into Deep Space Nine's operations center, but I do wish the writing had left her a bit more to chew on instead of just "oh, what would I do if my man died?" That sort of one-dimensional female character is unfortunately very '80s (pre-2000s, if we're being honest), and MacGyver so far has been pretty full of them. I think the most fleshed-out female character in the show up to this point was the young girl in 1x03 "Thief of Budapest"…
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@dgw The absence of a high-speed camera is downright professional compared to their "breakdown" on the way back from the strip mine. Did no one on the writing staff know enough about automotive design to realize that if the "Lincoln" spring (is that even a term? I've always just heard it called the throttle return) broke the failure condition would be WOT (Wide Open Throttle, a/k/a "Pedal to the Metal") rather than loss of idle? Or did they just not want to use up that piece of plot tension up so soon, preferring to save it for 60 seconds later when there's a shallow creek around to arrest their momentum after the brakes give out?
Rewatching this show on Amazon Prime Video has been enjoyable, partly because it's made me feel lucky to have been a kid when MacGyver was on the air. Even more than being entertaining, it was inspirational to me back then, providing an image of a guy who could be a nerd without also being a "wuss." If this show had started airing even three or four years later I might have started seeing through their story/science gaffes and found it too corny for me to use as fuel to becoming an engineer myself.
Umm...
Who cleans glass or in this case a glass door with a scrub brush?
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@datbabyaintmine Yeah a razor blade would work for the glass itself, but the wrought iron over it definitely calls for a solvent of some kind. This show defies logic in a lot of memorable ways, not the least of which is having their "smart guy" character routinely behave dumber than a box of rocks. Really dumb rocks.
9.5/10. It's a crime that Richard Schiff didn't win an Emmy for this episode. It's a powerhouse performance as Toby, and it's kind of amazing that he's still finding new notes to play for this character six seasons into the show.
But it’s not just Schiff’s performance that wows in this episode; it’s the way the character is written. Toby has not only lost his brother, but he’s lost his brother to suicide, a fact he doesn’t share with anyone in the episode by CJ. It’s shameful in Toby’s eyes, that someone would give up like that, they would leave the fight before it was over, before the loss was truly set in stone. It’s cowardly, and that devastates him, mixed with the grief of losing someone close to him. It fits with what we know about Toby, that he hates compromise, that he hates doing anything but fighting the good fight til the bitter end. Suicide, giving up, is something that he just doesn’t understand, and so it means he doesn’t understand his brother, and is hurt and bewildered and angry all at the same time.
So he takes it out on Josh, because Josh his brother too. They never say it, and I’m glad they don’t, but the row between Toby and Josh isn’t just a professional one, it’s personal, it’s a betrayal. Toby and Josh, for all their various disagreements over the years, are close, in a way that makes their argument feel like a schism within the family. Toby is angry because two brothers have given up the fight, two brothers didn’t ask him for help; two brothers left him all to his lonesome to keep going and pick up all the pieces, be they children or government projects, that were dropped. But Toby can only express his frustrations to one of them. So he retaliates against Josh in the most Toby way possible, but passing his ideological tidbits onto one of Josh’s candidates opponents.
The reveal that that opponent, Senator Rafferty, is the woman Toby is talking to the bar from the beginning of the episode in a conversation we get interspersed throughout, is a brilliant move. I love the device, keeping the intrigue up by having the audience guess who this woman is, what her connection to Toby is, and what their conversation means. (Mrs. Bloom and I guessed: Brother’s mistress, prostitute, Rafferty staffer, but never guessed it would be Rafferty herself.) The reveal that what sounds like a romantic conversation is actually a professional one, and the little breadcrumbs dropped throughout the episode work really well to keep things flowing.But that fight. There’s so much mutual disappointment. Josh already feels like he’s been quickly forgotten by his own people, when he can’t get in the door, can’t see the President, and his best friend is feeding lines to the other side in a way that makes the press think Bartlet is “channeling” support. Both of them are sublimating, and it’s a charged scene that leaves bruises and hurt feelings all around.
And then it’s followed up with a quiet scene, where Toby admits his lack of understanding of what his brother did, he confides in CJ, the sibling who’s stayed with him, and he breaks down, trying not to abandon the fight himself despite being at wits end. (And his scene with Leo—where the old hand explains that he’s Goliath, not David now—is superb too.) In the end, he wants to stay in the fight, and he asks Rafferty to back down, trying to make peace with all of this. It’s a great performance and a great character story.As usual, there’s a lot more going on in the episode. In addition to dealing with Toby, CJ deals with Donna annoying former beau Cliff Calley, realizing that as pestersome as he is, Josh was equally irksome and they share an effectiveness despite (or perhaps because) of their ability to rankle. Kate puts herself back on the market after Charlie confuses what he thinks is a set up for an ex-husband checking up on Kate, but then she and Will check each other out and the show seems to be trying to setting up on that front. And Anna Beth feels like she should be on a different show, giving a broadly comedic performance after Will praises her.
But really, the heart of the episode is Toby dealing with multiple kinds of losses, and rolling them up into one big ball of misery that threatens to steamroll him. The show uses its cinematography to sell it, contrasting the slow, luxurious pace and almost sensual lighting of his scenes with Rafferty with the spinning cameras of the DNC gala covered with brightly twinkling lights. There’s a world out there, and Toby feels apart from it, but as frustrated as he is, he hangs onto his brother’s glasses, and tries to hold Rafferty off. Try as he might, he can’t let go of his brothers, either one of them.
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@andrewbloom You know how you can love something, really love it in a way you think can't increase, and yet find that love expand to fill new dimensions of itself after hearing someone artfully describe why they love it too? That's what I just felt after reading your review. It's not the first time either; the depth of your insights and the artful way you express them are among the best reasons to be on Trakt.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with all of us.
Wilson have Cancer, now House should be diagnosed with Lupus, and that would be the major irony of this show
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@vinik No way, if anything it would have to be the sarcoidosis to end all sarcoidoses ;-)
Love Denzel! One of the best movies that I have seen. Didn't see that ending coming.
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@thesafepro You sure you're not thinking of Inside Man rather than this movie?
