This episode gets an A solely on the first actually plot-justified use of Kerry Washington's vibrating cryface in years.

I've always considered Under The Pink to be her best record. Anyone who thinks she's just a New Age etherhead is not really listening.

Thank you. To be a fan of her's is to not expect a goddamn thing but the brilliantly unexpected.

A Woman A Man Walked By is a (very good) collaboration between John Parish and PJ Harvey; not Harvey solo. And "Black Hearted Love" doesn't really sound like anything on Stories. Regardless, everything she does is magical. Everything. A pox on your house, Zach Schonfeld.

PJ Harvey. She's been making records for over twenty years now; three of them are outright masterpieces and the worst one is very good. She's also one of the most thrilling live performers I've ever seen. Supergenius.

A Time To Shut The Fuck Up

Aw shucks, Pierce. :)

Yeah, pretty sure everyone involved does not want the world to know a goddamn thing about this. Maybe irony is the point of the musical choice? Like in Almost Famous when Kate Hudson was getting her stomach pumped and Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" starts playing over the sound of her vomiting?

I've said it before: it's not that Mellie's better than anyone else on the show, it's that she's significantly less delusional about who she is and what it takes to navigate power. All the hand-wringing and self-flagellation that Fitz and Olivia do, what with their moral relativism and bullshit Vermont reveries,…

We as an audience were barely reminded that they even had kids until, what, last season when one of them had to die for plot purposes? Neither one of them is winning any parenting awards. But their argument scene was a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of both characters. Mellie is never worse than when she's…

And how.

Best moment of the season so far: As Fitz ends his not entirely unwarranted tirade listing all of Mellie's abdicated responsibilities (and hygiene), she incredulously says "Sex tape?" Her silence after this had me thinking he may have finally gotten a W against his much smarter wife, but then: "She takes after her…

Insanely hot queer sex scene. Davis fearlessly killing it as attorney, wronged wife and unadorned black woman. Finally revealing the contents of the dead girl's phone. Perkins pointing out the benefits of Pilates while her sex tape plays in front of her entire staff. This felt like the series just starting to tap…

"The Other 48 Days" is one of the storytelling peaks of Lost for me; it stands as an almost unbearably tense individual episode and as an thrillingly edifying shift in perspective for the entire show thus far. It is both a diversion from and a deepening of the main narrative in much the same way my all-time favorite…

I see your point but I think the examples you used are not quite analogous with what happened to Dunham. This is a scenario where she said no to something (implicitly, yes, but requesting a condom clearly leaves her consent to unprotected sex off the table until she explicitly said otherwise) and it was done to her…

The potential consequences of unprotected sex in general (disease) and specifically with a man and a woman (pregnancy) make the stakes w/r/t removing the condom significantly higher than an attempted finger in the ass. Regardless, the more pertinent factor here is when consent was given or denied. In Hannah's case,…

Ouch.

Fair enough in that context. I just think sharing every one-night stand and drunken hook-up is generally pointless and probably counterproductive to a healthy relationship.

Aw shucks, Dylan. :)

I think anything less than heteronormative would be a problem for her moving forward, so bisexuality didn't merit a specific mention.