Yeah, Kate O’Flynn as DC Lancing was so, so fantastic. If this is British Fargo, the replacement of fundamentally earnest small-town investigators like Marge Gunderson, Molly Solverson, Lou Solverson, and Gloria Burgle with the world-weary, sardonic, resting-“I can’t believe I have to put up with this shite”-face Emma…

Exactly, this is clearly and intentionally British Fargo. They even do the “This is a true story” thing where the “true” fades out, which was used in the opening of the third season of Fargo in which Thewlis stars.  That can’t be an accident.

Yeah, Tom in real life would be among the worst people I ever met.  In this show, sympathy is always relative.

Yeah, obviously we do not yet know what else they have planned, but that easily stands out to me as one of the most distressing moments I have experienced watching not just Succession, but TV in general, this year. So it would definitely have been a worthy climax to the season.

I saw the trailer for Landscapers in which they used the bit where it starts saying, “This is a true story,” and then the “true” fades out, which was also used in the opening of the third season of Fargo, in which Thewlis stars.

I mean, she may not love Tom, but she does love him . . . .

Roman coming back from a bathroom flirtation with a neo-Nazi convinced he had found the next President of the United States, and possibly being in a position to make it happen, is arguably the most objectively horrifying thing that has happened on a show full of horrors.

If Kendall had ANY idea of how to manipulate his father, he would have told them there was no way he would ever, ever cash out, and then maybe would have gotten to the point of a binding contract he could sign.

Yeah, in the show he mostly seems like a pretty typical “Spanish Inquisition (non-Python version)“ character, which is not terribly interesting but also to me an acceptable archetype for a minor character serving as a plot-advancer.

So Valda was of course right—right about Egwene being able to channel, and right that torturing Perrin would force her to confess. In that sense his methods, from his stated perspective of someone who thinks it is inherently evil to channel or to be in league with those who channel, were logical. I also interpreted…

My guess is this was intended to raise the stakes for when Aes Sedai are in jeopardy, not least Moiraine, by making us feel the reverberating consequences of such a loss, not just to Stepin but on to Lan and such.

For good or ill, what I have gotten so far in terms of the show’s position on gender relations is as follows.

I saw a grimace futilely trying to hide the existential despair the eyes still revealed.

Highlander II: The Quickening.

I don’t know why, but seeing Fellowship of the Ring ranked behind Ocean’s 11 (a movie I quite enjoyed, incidentally) was where I completely lost it.

Straight to hell.

Random aside, but I was thrilled to find out The Americans was actually a family drama for much the same reason.

I think part of why that attitude is common is there is a reasonable case that life for many people in, say, the United States has not gotten significantly better since the 1990s, although even that has some rather notable exceptions.

“I roll my eyes, because being too cool for everything lasts forever.”

I think part of it is Shiv’s “limousine liberal” shtick proving completely hollow, which I suspect many in the audience find particularly galling. But I also think part of it is the sense that Shiv endured less childhood abuse than Kendall or Roman.  I think it is clear she by no means escaped unscathed, but I suspect…