I take Yara’s attitude less as a sign of overconfidence than as a clear and sure statement that she’s goin’ down with all guns blazing. She must know that her chance of winning the season is essentially nil: she’s 37 and allegedly has few social media followers, which is a statistic that apparently means something to…

Big Freedia wipes the floor with Carson and Michelle, look-wise.

Ra’Jah is a delight to watch, though, and this is my main motivation for staying as long as she is in.

Yes, but WoW can push out yet another album -- and all the royalties that goes with that -- by encouraging the queens to put out the tracks. That’s free IP and advertising, remember, as the queens sign their rights away when they agree to appear on this show.

But I think the show jumped around a bit on what it was actually about.

I hope we’ll see a lot more of Mj Rodriguez.

The first season of Pose was probably its best, because it was fresh and exciting and had a wider range of interesting characters. Was it a tad grim? Yes. Was it great viewing? Absolutely.

I think that’s why this final season suffered from tonal balance and pacing problems: the writers tried to give everyone and every plot an equal amount of airtime, but forgot that not every subplot was compelling, and that it was to the detriment of its main narrative arc that had been built around Pray Tell and Blanca…

How Blanca all of the sudden seemed to be leading an Act Up meeting years after the organization was founded and it never having made an appearance in the show was baffling and did a disservice to the real people that fought those battles.

For the life of me, I cannot understand all of the positive reviews I keep running across for this show’s final season. Are critics so completely starved and grateful for a show featuring trans actors that they completely disregard the things they should be critiquing?

I agree, and think that Kate Mara’s character elevated that entire plotline beyond its exploitative ”coming out” framework. I can see why the show thought that a more limited focus on its central characters would work better with its stated purpose, but this complexity helped to make Seasons 1 and 2 great. It also…

No, I get that, but this entire plot feels like it was written from a contemporary gay male perspective of marriage (and let’s be honest, a white gay male perspective of marriage), and not through the lens of a member of the trans community in 1994. Not that I’m a member of that community, so maybe this was a valid…

But I think it’s worth pointing out that the happy ending for these characters is one that, is, well, more heteronormative than the goals for these characters seemed to be in earlier seasons. This strikes me again as typical of a lot of Ryan Murphy shows,

Did any trans people, before it was (somewhat easier to) get their gender on their ID changed really manage to get marriage certificates due to someone not seeing their gender status?

The biggest disappointment for me has been the distance from which Pose has drifted from its original premise. Seasons one and two soared when they explored the lives of a group of people marginalized by their own queer community, and celebrated their lives and the families they created through ballroom culture.…

There also seems to be something...anachronistic about the entire wedding plot. I was in my early twenties in 1994, and I don’t recall, really, any political or emotional energy being expended over the thought of marriage equality at the time. I mean, that year I was dating a man who couldn’t visit his partner at the…

The froth is fun, but I think that the show missed the mark in moving up the season’s B Plot — the wedding — into the foreground and at the expense of Pray Tell’s storyline, which has really grounded this series. The show could have shown the natural symmetry built right into the plot, I think, between Pray Tell’s…

but she didn’t make the money through hard work and perseverance, she made it by laundering blood money for the worst people in society.

No, this was actually a plausible (if not probable) legal scenario for the era. In a strange twist of logic, a number of courts in the U.S. held that trans applicants (and specifically, post-operative litigants) could be legally married to a partner of the opposite sex. So it’s possible that this could have been a…

I did giggle at the sight of Blanca’s apartment being redecorated — with the wicker chairs and all of those pastels — like the set of the Golden Girls.