She might have mentioned the child to Ethan in the first season, but her accent at the time was so incomprehensible that I missed out on at least half of her tragic backstory.

Yeah, I think he has a small but intense fandom for his work in History Boys and I feel kind of bad for them if they're watching this, because he really is just so gross and creepy and uncharismatic as Renfield. Which is totally appropriate for the character, but a bit harder to fangirl over.

Yep, "great fertile bitch of evil" was an amazing line.

Ah, cool! In that case, I guess slightly less credit to Dresbach for the creative intent behind the costume, but also more credit to Dresbach for historical accuracy, because damn, that really does appear to be the same coat.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this because I'm a huge fan of the musical, but did anyone else see the war council scene at the beginning as a nod to the opening of 1776? With a guy named John complaining about "twiddling our thumbs" instead of taking action against the British?

Right, on one hand I semi-agree that a lot of the shitting on Meyer is uncalled for, at least when it's rooted in the "teenage girls like this and so it must be dumb" mentality (there is also the other side that's like, "Twilight's regressive representation of gender roles is sending the wrong message to young girls"…

Oh, for sure, and that's definitely the way that I feel about, say, Meryl Streep's mugging in Mamma Mia; even with the more over-the-top expression of emotions inherent to the form of musical theater, every face and gesture she makes in that movie just feels like "look, I'm Acting!" rather than just a character…

It's a bit dangerous to go too deep down the vampire biology—in particular, the vampire sex mechanics—rabbit hole. Can they even produce any, ahem, other bodily fluids? If their hearts aren't beating, how is their blood even flowing to certain places? Etc etc.

I mean, protecting Ethan—whom Malcolm sees as a replacement son—and also some level of narcissism. The initial meeting between Malcolm and Jared last episode was essentially
Malcolm: You're a terrible person.
Jared: Dude, we're exactly the same, except for our accents.
Malcolm: No, I'm nothing like you, you bastard!
By…

Legit cackled at Ethan and Hecate chowing down while everyone just stares in stunned/annoyed silence at Ethan’s delivery of grace. We probably already knew this from Breaking Bad and The Americans, but awkward family dinners in prestige dramas = comedy gold. The grace itself was just so wonderfully hammy; like, I…

This is almost* exactly the type of query Google ngrams is made for. We can see from court documents that "fuck yourself" was certainly in usage in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, so it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch that it would have been in the U.K. in the 1940s.

Well, she does preface it with "I'm not sure you'll grasp the meaning of this…"
If you tell someone to fuck themselves with that delivery and in that context, I'm pretty sure they'll get the intent behind the words, if not the literal meaning; in that moment, Claire probably isn't thinking "hmm, what is the 18th…

Yeah, this is part of why it irks when people make such a thing of going after Clarke's eyebrow acting or Keira Knightley's jaw-acting. Real people express themselves non-vocally in so many ways that it seems weird that we only deem some of those ways to be "good acting." I mean, obviously there's a whole history of…

Admittedly, I haven't read/watched this, but I assume most of the people commenting to this in shock haven't either, so: idk, if it's handled well, that actually sounds like a pretty interesting and semi-novel ending?

I don't tend to read a ton of fantasy myself, so take that as you will in the credibility weighting of this recommendation: Sergei Lukyanenko's Watch series is pretty fantastic and would seem to fit your requirements. The first book, Night Watch, is probably about 400 pages, but not super dense; it takes place in…

Yeah, I both desperately want a flashback to their college years and am preemptively cringing at the amount of passive-aggressive sniping that that would entail.

I mean, given the lines about Ethan's older brother shielding him from his father's lash and his father enlisting him in the army to make a man out of him, there were probably some horrible things leading up to the enlistment as well?

I don't think the writing is implying that the army's and Apaches' actions are fully Ethan's fault, just that Ethan feels guilt over them. Which seems like a realistic enough reaction to that sort of experience, as irrational as it may be. You might as well blame human nature or religion/society's behavioral…

Last week's episode convinced me to finally read Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and wow, that was kind of underwhelming? And very much not the plot of the musical or even the more general story that has been filtered through pop culture over the past century. But the subsequent Wikipedia stalking of Robert…

Oh, see my initial reaction to the back-of-head introduction of dr. Jekyll was "holy shit, John Clare made really good time on foot from the Arctic. And I guess started using conditioner?" But unclear if that fake-out aspect was at all intentional or just me being a complete idiot.