Using crossbows on horseback is probably the worst single idea anyone could possibly have.  Sure, you fire that first bolt off, but good luck reloading, since you usually have to stand still, holding the crossbow down with your foot, to recock the string.  And that's assuming you don't need to use a crank or something…

You still beat me to the episode by four days, apparently.

Also, it helps that it was like seven or eight years ago in show.  That the story effectively started with "Do you remember that Turkish ambassador who died here all those years ago?" reenforces this—it's so far in the past that it's kind of hard to really get that angry, especially since he'd seen Mary grow so much…

@avclub-b70761d1088bdf7d7607e1e02bca3dd2:disqus —It was basically a supply/demand issue.  The UK had a lot of titled nobility in need of money, while the US had a lot of rich heiresses whose nouveau riche families wanted the legitimacy of nobility.  Marrying the daughter of a UK industrialist might theoretically have…

It's funny, at the beginning of the episode, I turned to my wife and said, "If he just admits it, they'll give him a suspension rather than disbar him because it was so long ago and they don't want to have to prove it." And then they basically offered that deal, at which point I said he should try to negotiate down to…

Honestly, it just needed a different director, one who paid some attention to the non-CGI actors and thought about why there was a ten minute underwater fish chase scene.

Just that *talking* dog.

@avclub-7aee1b75b527e215f31e20a5c4e7a768:disqus Babylon was in present-day Iraq.

Well, it is true that many of the pages have unmanageable comment sections.  I might think I have something worth saying, but if there are more than, say, 100 comments, there's no way I'm going to read through all of them to see if someone had already said the same thing.  And god forbid your comment end up on the…

Yeah, and I almost mentioned that.  But calling to say, "Hey, sorry I ratted you out to my mom; she's totes on her way there" isn't quite as useful as not ratting her out in the first place.

Going back to my initial thoughts when I saw it, I also assumed everyone was a ghost, except for John Hannah, who was still alive (he's the only one you saw during the day), but was maybe stuck there for some reason.

Remind me—does he basically get drunk and fall into an open mine shaft or something?

Honestly, I'm waiting for the showdown between Amber and Hattie over this.  Hattie totally ratted her out to her mom/sorta boss, which was just not cool.  And you could totally tell immediately that she regretted doing it.

@avclub-222afbe0d68c61de60374b96f1d86715:disqus - I somehow doubt Kubrick himself won for visual effects; the point here isn't that no film Hitchcock or Kubrick directed ever won anything, but that they themselves never won for best director and that their films were generally ignored for best picture.

Watching on DVD no doubt makes a huge difference.  If you had to wait week-to-week, it seems forever until anything happens in Season 1.  At this point, it's three weeks after the show premiered and we know very little more than we did from the first episode.

SPOILERS CONTINUE

On the bright side, @avclub-ad8fd4291fac0d1d7dbfe8d4c83c467e:disqus , Dora Mae's death does lead to some great characterization of the rest of the Dreyfus clan.  Though, yeah, it would have been great if they'd used her a bit more in the prior couple of episodes so that the audience was as shocked by her death as the…

Pretty much everyone I know who's seen the show has the same general thought: Season 1 starts really slow, so it's easy to lose interest; it then starts to get really good near the end of the season, and things keep going strong in Season 2 (which is sometimes critiqued for having too much happening, for being too…

Well, Iris pretty clearly has some sanity issues of her own.  And, if I remember correctly, it was eventually revealed as "I did this horrible thing in order to make you even more famous, so you could help far more people than just these few!"  But I didn't remember anything this early to set up that it was Iris—I…

I don't have a cite for this, but I thought Brother Justin was more or less directly inspired by Father Coughlin.  Obviously a different character, but Coughlin seems the inspiration for the idea of a fire-and-brimstone radio preacher who really wasn't on the side of good.