The extent of Hannah's conversation with Patti LuPone felt like a misstep to me, and as Todd points out, it also felt like a glaring device to rev up the plot's engine. Once the show established that LuPone's schedule was tight, it made little sense to have her throw away a chunk of time gabbing with Hannah about her…

I never really connected with Sylvia the way you seemed to. She felt more like a metaphor than a person.

Many of us are capable of giving attention to more than one injustice in the great big world. If you don't care about this one, you don't have to waste any thought on it.

He’s a loser who loses, and it’s cruel to see him suffer, and that’s why
it’s funny. The final gag […] just confirms the hilariously inevitable:
some people can’t win. And some people always seem to.

I'm impossibly old and decrepit —- old enough to have watched "Scooby Doo" in the 1970s, oh, imagine my frail and enfeebled dotage! —- and got every reference. But phew, this episode was resoundingly flat unfunny to me.

Fair point: you just reminded me that I laughed at least four times at last night's episode, now that I'm including the laugh at "various lengths of wire."

I missed it*, too, but it looks like "Gideon's Army" will re-run on HBO on the morning of Wed, July 5th.

Zack, I've been looking forward to this review, and I'm curious: from your phrasing, it sounds like this might be the first time you've seen "Little Girl Lost," is that right? If so, I'm pleased to know that it holds up when seen for the first time with an adult's eyes.

Yeah, there are still some obvious inserted breaks there, though I fixed many more. I don't usually compose in wp, but that little comment box suddenly felt constraining…

I'm impressed with the tonal differences between Will Graham's internal reconstructions of the crime scenes and the external reality of procedural scenes. Will's imagination is so richly colored, so warm and softly —- even romantically —- lit. But for Will, the day-to-day world is cooler and starker. The real world is…

I'm a little embarrassed by HOW VERY RELIEVED I am to see you liked "Nothing in the Dark," an episode that mesmerized me as a child and still does. It's worth noting that Gladys Cooper appears in two other "Twilight Zone" episodes [SPOILERS, I suppose] about the inevitability and unexpected gentleness of death: "Night…

Yes, I am DP's wife, which I mention only for transparency's sake. Of course, I have no input on the reviews except in the rare cases when he asks me a direct question about a small aspect of Norse material culture, and sometimes even those brief answers simply don't deserve space in a necessarily limited review. (If…

I was out of the room for that scene (and so didn't see the game board), but that was my first thought, too.

I agree that there's a potential for either some intelligent if challenging character-building or (and this is terrifyingly easy to imagine) a horrible dramatic and narrative mis-step to be found in exploring that issue: rape is repulsive, but it would have been culturally accepted by all of our protagonists, unless…

To be more precise, Mr. Perkins, I predicted that the second episode would show the raid at Lindisfarne, thus cementing the show's [as far as I know] then-unspecified date quite precisely.

There's also a little set-up in "Boys" (S2 ep6):

Viking to Viking, I'm gonna say: YOU TAKE YOUR LIFE IN YOUR HANDS WHEN YOU IMPUGN MY HERITAGE*. [Translation for not-Viking folk: "Hey, how's it going?"]

How about a Viking law procedural? "Lögrétta & Order: Mulct Exacting Unit," anyone?

My point, of course, is that even if it were funny to reduce a whole field of honored actresses to the body parts they displayed in pursuit of their craft, it's an even cheaper shot to crack wise about an involuntary, violating exposure.

The topless scene in Boys Don't Cry is the aftermath of a rape scene, and Monster's Ball is ambiguous about consent at best. (If the song had instead referenced, say, Swordfish, that would have been a different matter.)