blerg did this first episode have some painfully bad, cliche ridden dialogue

I feel like the Rick in those last wordless moments of Auto Erotic Assimilation is always sort of there, under the surface. He's obviously not suicidally depressed all the time, but you see glimpses of that like, inescapable hollowness and inability to find things that make him truly happy, pretty frequently.

…and seems to think our Rick is the "only apparent surviving Rick" because the Council of Ricks was destroyed. I can forgive the reviewer for forgetting or ignoring the whole "a few thousand versions of me had the ingenious idea of banding together" explanation from Close Rickcounters, but forgetting a line like…

Vodka for breakfast!

Never has going to Blockbuster video seemed like such a positive and profoundly healthy life choice, and never has turning off a bedside lamp seemed like such a foreboding one. Oh Chuck, you poor, miserable, relatable monster. I felt physically sick when I realised the bumps were him kicking the desk to push the lamp…

Something about Laura saying she only knew how she died, not why, was moving to me. I also liked how it was sort of echoed in Wednesday's "people create gods when they wonder why things happen. Do you know why things happen? Because gods make them happen." speech.

My gut reaction to Elizabeth in the montage was closest to yours of any of those mentioned here, with the tiny difference that I felt as though she was thinking "oh shit, I kind of am…an American". I'm not saying she's changed sides or anything even close to that, clearly not, just that she's recognising that while…

Again, I don't think that's engaging with the show as speculative fiction and empathy makes a woman's experience of watching and reading The Handmaid's Tale at least somewhat knowable if you care enough to try, but on the subject of Mark Rylance we are entirely agreed. The way he delivered the line "…a person. The…

: )

I'm not capable of explaining the felt reality of being a woman and coping with the negative effects of sexism every day of your life, but if I could I bet you wouldn't find The Handmaid's Tale quite so "uproariously, hilariously ridiculous". Also, the book and the series are speculative fiction and it kinda seems…

Hey, I've been there. My bad, that was bitchy of me.

The idea of a society where women have no real power, status, access to resources, control over their own bodies or non-reproductive/sexual value is "hilariously ridiculous" to you? You watch women being ritually raped, mutilated and murdered and feel nothing because such acts are not "grounded in reality", according…

it really doesn't

me too

I experienced some pretty intense nausea the first time I saw the Mad Men episode Hands and Knees, specifically during the scene where Lane's Dad beats him over the head with a cane. I remember coming on here afterwards and being surprised the episode reviewer and other commenters weren't making a bigger deal out of…

The stuff Alexei was saying to Philip about how he and Pasha used to fight all the time but now Pasha is just quiet "like dog somebody beat with stick" and that Pasha is "just sad…sad…very sad boy" was heartbreaking. I remember working myself into a state of total despair over way smaller stuff that what Pasha is…

Yeah I am really surprised that anyone is looking forward to the guy who wrote The Power of Three taking over from the guy who wrote Heaven Sent.

I took his Chloramphenicol speech about the time "before the war" (assuming that was the Great Patriotic War) when "we were killing each other every day" as maybe being about the Russian civil war but maybe it makes more sense that he was referring to the Great Purge. I'm pretty sure he's referring to the Great…

For me it was his delivery of "He was nobody". Beat. "We were all nobodies".

Langella's voice when he said "no" in response to Mischa's "forget father?" was…I don't even know the word. Beautiful? Heartbreaking? Moving? At the start of the scene I was kind of pissed off that I'd spent all this time watching them build up to the Phillip-Mischa meeting and now it wasn't going to happen but by the…