Both Noah and Cole project a hell of a lot on Alison. For both of them, she represents salvation and safety. No wonder she's so anxious.

Alison was antagonistic towards John well before she knew he was representing Noah or that Helen was paying him.

We know Cole pulled a gun on Noah because we saw it in both versions of the S1 finale (ETA: oh, and Helen remembers it too in last week's episode). Are you suggesting that both Noah and Alison invented it? Because that's taking "truth is in the eye of the beholder" several bridges too far.

One of those things is very much not like the other.

I also loved "I've given up gambling and replaced it with knitting!" And the fact that he spends the rest of the episode with knitting needles in this hands, implying that his gambling addiction was really quite severe.

So, "Clair de Lune": yea or nay? I can't decide. It's obviously very beautiful, but I can't help but think that it's kind of manipulative. But maybe that's just because, since it was written, "softly plinking piano with long silences that inevitably put you in a melancholy mood" has become a bit of a cliche.

It gets particularly bad on genre shows where the characters form a "team" that eventually becomes so insular that they're incapable of forming relationships with anyone outside their circle.

I can see the two Cams as extreme versions of the same person. He can be gracious and kind - and in this episode he's strongly motivated to be so, because he wants to impress Alison, and because she reminds him of his worst self and how he doesn't want to be that person. But he's also immature and prone to anxiety,…

They seemed to dislike each other quite intensely, and yet this was clearly their first meeting - he says "the famous Alison Bailey!" when she introduces herself. Which is suggestive, though I have no idea of what.

There's a scene in S1 where he asks Alison whether she's using birth control, which I guess implies that he knows things aren't safe on his end.

As I've said in the past, I find the dual pespectives device on this show frustrating at best, but this episode, with potentially the most extreme disconnect between its two narratives that we've ever seen on the show, actually left me feeling pretty OK with the device. That's because I'm basically calling bullshit…

Barry's only ever deliberately caused the death of one person

Beyond the fact that he's had such great character development, what I love about Major's story in this episode is that if you told it with a slightly different slant, he'd be the hero. Think about it: guy's fiancee leaves him mysteriously, he starts investigating and learns she's been turned into a monster, gets…

Beyond that, the point of the Bechdel-Wallace test isn't to evaluate whether any particular work is or is not feminist. It isn't, in fact, meant to be applied to a singular work at all. The purpose of the test is as a thought experiment, because as soon as you phrase it you realize how few movies actually pass it. …

I love how that particular trouble seems to be free-floating - there's no person associated with it who can be induced to end it. You know, the way every other trouble that has ever appeared on this show works.

The only one here with trouble accepting complexity is you. You're the one who keeps leaping to Fitz's defense by bringing up every other character on the show as if they in any way excuse his behavior (and, again, as if anyone but you was claiming that anyone on this show is a good person).

My guess is that the show will end with Fitz dying and Susan Ross being sworn in as president, but that would have to happen pretty soon, and I don't know if ABC is willing the let the show go.

Fitz is a selfish, immature boy, who wants what he wants when he wants it, is accustomed to having his every desire handed to him, and has never managed to think about anyone but himself for longer than a few months at a stretch. If that's who you want as a hero, have fun with it.

Fitz is the one making a big deal about telling the truth. I'm pointing out his hypocrisy.

Which is interesting because there's quite a lot more landscape description in Shelley's writing, though admittedly not 16 pages at a time.