Oh, and as for Debbie: Is there a reason she couldn’t get back to Chicago and ask Fiona or Lip or Ian to get her the morning after pill? Or is this setting up some kind of custody thing wherein this arrest is used against her?

Fiona’s apartment building is starting to feel like Lip’s time in college. A character has finally achieved something that represents advancement, but the show doesn’t know how to deal with that because that would be the happy ending in a story about people who live in poverty. The writers are struggling to make it…

I don’t really think that the time loop has a whole lot of implications here, since Claire didn’t realize her role in Geillis’ death until after it occurred. Stories about self-fulfilling time loops usually require intent.

It’s too climatic for Kayla.

They did explain that Claire used gemstones to steer, though that is being deliberately understated because of plot points that come up in the later books/seasons.

You seem to have very little patience for pure mood-oriented pieces in fantasy narratives. Why do you assume out of hand that the dancing sequence wasn’t meticulously researched and carefully created? Not everything that is viewed through the eyes of a story’s protagonist is automatically a racially-motivated white…

The more I think about it, the more I feel that ASP overtly switched from wanting to write a show about a charming small town to wanting to write a comedy of manners about lovably goofy rich people. The stories about Yale/the Huntzbergers/the DAR have such a weird throwback feel to them, and in that context I’m not…

Even though Gilmore Girls has a bit of a hardscrabble side wherein Lorelai and Luke are successful business owners who started out with very little, this isn’t a show that understands much about how one goes about getting a job. This is yet another show who treats internships with a gravity that a freaking college…

TV has a way of making terrible people look deep and soulful by making them more charismatic than characters who are unambiguously decent human beings (though casting accounts for a bit of this too). Lost is an obvious example of this. Sawyer is a straight-up murderer, but people liked him better than Jack, whose…

Except that Rory screwed up an interview at a blog site even though she basically had the job in the bag. And then she became the editor of her hometown’s newspaper, which was framed as a failure for some bizarre reason. Why didn’t she say, “I don’t need the money. I’m doing this as a labor of love”? She also…

Everyone on this show has murdered someone. Considering the ideological landscape of a show like Game of Thrones, Stannis had one of the most careful political minds combined with a decent sense of military strategy. Tyrion is clever and witty, but this past season proved over and over that his reach exceeds his…

Until Shireen’s death, I viewed Stannis as something of a tragic character (at least in the context of a show like Game of Thrones). He was the proper heir to the throne following Robert’s death and probably would have been a good, pragmatic ruler. He just didn’t have the charisma to make people like him. I couldn’t…

I still think we’re going to see Hot Pie on the Iron Throne.

The Kev/Vee/Svet storyline bothers me because they’re kind of burying the lede. Kev and Vee are somewhat successful business owners, though the show has shied away from examining what that means for a South Side family. (I do think it’s best that the Alibi hasn’t been presented an an automatic fix whenever a Gallagher…

Yep, I’ve had Lost or Fringe or Game of Thrones theories I was SO SURE about, and they ended up not coming to pass. Such is the nature of talking about crap on the internet. However, I think it’s especially dumb in this case, since we just spent a whole bunch of episodes hanging out with the person who is described in…

Yes, there is something to recognize, and there are inklings throughout the narrative that Geillis recognized her. In the books, Geillis definitely got a longer look at Claire and Brianna together, and that matters.

I think that Gabaldon partly wants to poke some holes into time travel fantasies in general. She doesn’t just give us romantic notions of handsome warriors and riding horses on the windy moors. She shows us the reasons we should be glad that we don’t live in the past anymore. I’m not saying that she always does this…

Plus, if you reconfigure the timeline a bit in your head, you’ll realize that Geillis probably recognized Claire when Claire first arrived at Castle Leoch. Claire would have looked 20 years younger than when Geillis last saw her, but Geillis sidled up to her for a reason.

I somewhat appreciate that the show isn’t falling into the “my best friend is black” trope and acting like her friendship with Joe makes her 100% perfect on the race front. The slave subplot is meant to show that her actions led to her friend being born 150 years later. It’s clunky and it’s not much better in the…

There’s an element of the Fiona/Ian/overall South Side issue that the show isn’t confronting and I’m not sure it ever will. It’s just so uncomfortable but...if you’ve grown up on the “wrong side of the tracks” and then you get away from it, you see how your former way of life isn’t sustainable and is often unsafe.…