Maybe she's in The Book!

That's racist against formerly-Asian people!

To give you an example of the sort of outside-the-text reason that I'm looking for (though I'm not sold on this particular one): the reason for the inclusion of the dinner was to give us another potential suspect, in the form of the chef, as a sort of red herring for the truth guy. You see what I mean?

She might have been the pretext, but the writers' real reason to have Team Korra make the trip was to give us the fighting between the sisters (which allowed the flashbacks to young LBF and to grown-up Toph). I'm not questioning the in-text reasons for a proper goodbye—that makes sense. I'm just wondering about the…

Thanks for elaborating!

How would you characterize the problem the writers ran into with The Duke/Haru/Teo?

That makes sense, but the writers could also have postponed Opal's departure so it could happen offscreen, maybe around the same time Team Korra all left. Your explanation makes sense character-wise; my curiosity is mainly structural. Why include the scene? Why dramatize it?

Was Opal's goodbye dinner simply an opportunity for small character moments? It felt out of proportion to me, that a relatively minor character would get such a prominent (temporary) farewell. Either we'll see her soon, in which case the goodbye was unnecessary, or we won't, in which case the character is not…

I'm trying to think what other shows had rotating casts like ER—I don't think too many. One would have to start off with a large ensemble and also have a premise that justified the constant changes. It felt as though every few years we had a significant goodbye—and then some interloper moving in on the territory of…

I still can't think of Lucy Knight without losing it a little. We were big fans of the actress from her days on _Life Goes On_, with those cute red glasses.

The episode where they're in doctor-detention and he does Hamlet in Croatian was a highlight.

The chin and the easy, cheesy, big-ass smile make me wanna say Croatian Chayanne-from-Dance-with-Me.

I happen to be rewatching season five of _24_ at the moment, and Sandrine HOLT! was much less wooden and blank back then. I think _Hostages_ just brought everyone's game down.

There was that landmark case where the human couple, the Robinsons, tried to name their robot kid Danger Will. The RCLU did not like that at all.

Things that did NOT follow the predictable path:

I think SS is trolling us: planting obvious mistakes in her review so we'll talk about them here in comments. I'm about 30% convinced of this. It's otherwise really hard to reconcile the thoughtfulness that's in evidence in the rest of the review.

I have to agree about Halle Berry's acting. It's unlike anyone else's, but strangely engaging. Tonight in particular she had an outburst of emotion (when she realized brother-in-law was a hallucination) and for me it landed, despite being very weird on the face of it: objectively too strongly felt, but somehow still…

It's disheartening when, as a viewer, one clues into (the mechanics of) a show's moves—and realizes there's nothing beyond that—and you have perfectly summarized what this show does with Jamal. It's hard to get excited (sorry, J!) after that.

Al-afw!

They hardly seem the same person, Sonia who writes the sublime F-reviews of horrible shows and Sonia who gets lambasted on the reg for missing obvious things on "quality" shows. (The quotations because _The Leftovers_ has aspirations but the jury is still out…)