a) You have to actually ask questions. Chandra often did not. b) If you're going to something outside the witness's personal knowledge (the presence of cameras at some place he slept) you've got to establish some minimal foundation.

Yeah, I'm sure it happens from time to time IRL. But it's a pretty sensational element to introduce on a TV show that seemed to be trying for "grounded" in the first half of its run.

I've done a little work with a state disciplinary committee. My general impression is that all they do is rap people on the knuckles for fucking up their IOLTA accounting. They don't exactly have a staff of crack investigators at their beck and call.

Happens all the time.

She wasnt gonna get a plea and her boss wont want to waste money on a high profile for a 2nd time.

I guess. I felt like they were doing it on purpose last episode, and then this one they went the full Law & Order and threw all realism in the trash. I get that real trials are boring, but this show didn't shy away from boring in other aspects.

Unrealistic stuff that bugged me: Chandra's constant testifying instead of examining.

I had the same impression from some of the commentary, so I wanted to correct the misperception.

FYI, the victim was actually white.

The spirit of the novel is certainly intact.

Also, Chip Zien is a treasure. Where my Into the Woods fans at? (No, not that bullshit with Anna Kendrick and James Corden, obviously.)

I mean, a competent cross-examination should have exposed that. Like asking "How can you be certain? Is it possible this cut came from a piece of broken glass? What features of the wound lead you to exclude that possibility?"

No, but it was better than Kubrick's. Lolita is unfilmable.

If Kubrick just wanted to do a "Sellers dresses up in various costumes and does funny accents" movie, he should have done that. No justification to call it Lolita when it shares nothing but the skeleton of a plot with the novel.

Oh, yes. And casting him as Quilty and then turning over half the movie to his antics was one of Kubrick's biggest mistakes.

Also, Stanley Kubrick botched Lolita horrendously. Just an awful fucking film, easily the biggest gap in quality between a film and its source material. So.

Yeah, you don't want to do too much with your opening, but you don't want it to be instantly forgotten, either! Given what happened in the rest of the episode, I think they did that intentionally, to show that she doesn't really know what she's doing.

I looked into this for work a couple of years ago, and as you say at the end, the scale is tiny compared to the mortgage meltdown. Even if delinquencies rose a lot, the impact on the wider economy will be pretty small.

I think this was the weakest installment yet. I almost wish they had one more episode to play with, so that they could show more realistically the amount of time that passes between arrest and trial. The way they're doing it, the character material is crowding out the trial plot and leading to the weird choice to show…

I think it's a byproduct of the show's decision to seriously compress the timeline, which is causing various problems. Yes, it's ridiculous that Stone doesn't bother to investigate the obvious question of "Did anyone have a financial motive to kill Andrea" until after the trial had already begun, but if it were the…