Of ranting about the racial balance of fictional victims? Yeah, why the pattern?

He would be wonderful for those ghouls and he would not be too modest to say so.

No.

I agree with the A+. There were several convoluted strings to pull together, and (as someone who has not read the book) I thought the execution was magnificent. Norrell's sense of humanity and justice finally came to the fore; Strange didn't hold grudges; Childermass and Stephen both rejected their masters.

It looks as though 93 percent of the responders here think the cat IS the old woman. Granted, a majority opinion is not necessarily correct, but neither is a minority opinion.

Agreed, on the casting. (Cilenti as Childermass has caught my attention, as have all of the principle actors.) Carvel was the only one I was immediately familiar with, though. I never did see 'Matilda' live but he was unforgettable in the videos I saw. If you're interested in something completely different, check…

Thanks. I thought that was the case, given (iirc) "Allow me to take care of her," which, being a former "Sopranos" viewer, I knew could be taken in quite a different way, and Norrell would have been okay with that. But Childermass appears to have only curiosity about and compassion for her, no interest in revenge.

I don't understand how Lady Pole ended up with Segundus and Honeyfoot. They are, as stated, no friends of Norrell's. (Was that, perhaps, the doing of Childermass?) Still, I think she might well be in the best situation she could hope for.

I haven't read the book. My take was that, given that we know for a fact that time has passed, could Lady Pole's age be frozen at the time of her death?

I don't think Mrs. Pole is any more unhinged than Stephen is. I think people simply perceive her to be so because she desperately (and futilely) tries to explain. The one time that Stephen did, he also babbled nonsense. He knows how it will be perceived so he no longer tries.

I am almost certainly wrong on this. I haven't read the book and I've seen only two episodes. But I would love for Arabella to be the one with the greatest power. She already does, in many ways; she reminds me of Mina in "Dracula." Arabella was patient with Strange in his gadabout days. She quoted Lady Pole's…

So was Cliff Baur.

I would take exception to the Peggy-Stan bit were it not for how entirely in established character they were. Peggy was bluntly rude to Stan with that "I don't think of you at all" bit, but Stan _knew_ her. He kept listening, because he understood that she needed him as her sounding board to talk it through and find…

Same here. I also loved his insights into how the telephone calls were crafted.

Jon Hamm says:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytim…

Some have written that Betty and Sally asked Don not to come home; to stay away.

When Don said "I can't move," my mind flashed back to Betty's paralysis. He must have felt as powerless in that moment as she had earlier.

"Mother."

I'd be okay with that.

She is going to die, either way. It's not as though her vanity is a death sentence; the cancer is. I don't fault her acceptance — and as Kinch points out, it's no guarantee that she'll leave a beautiful corpse. I think she knows that. The truly vain path would be to commit suicide, but there hasn't been any…