And did they kill off Christopher Heyerdahl right away? Weird, how he seems to turn up on so many of the shows I watch.

She's the only character on Arrow that I like, except when she's fawning over that silly self-absorbed superhero.

I think you're right about that.

In that chase around the top of some building where Flash can't seem to catch RF - did anyone else think maybe he could have turned around and just run into him?

I agree. Penny Dreadful is a hard show to enjoy, in the usual sense of the word, but I enjoyed this one. Before this, Vanessa was a dark cartoon character. Now she has a story.

And actually my comment was probably more appropriate as a stand-alone - I just arbitrarily stuck it into the middle of a rape discussion - didn't really mean it as a specific reply to you. It was more of a comment on the review itself. (Just home from a little vacation, brain cells still on hiatus.) :)

Littlefinger will not provide Cersei with Sansa's head on a stick - he wants to be warden of the north and marry the widow.

I'm not certain how this story would be told if it were to eschew the act of rape in favor of political correctness. Rape can be considered a metaphor for much of the damage that we do to each other - rape of the land, rape of the mind are two that come to mind. In that sense, I don't see the rape scenes in GoT as…

I think you've got Campbell wrong. There's never a magic elixir. It's all about the story. We're all a part of the story.

Great review. Way back in 1960 or so, I wrote a high school essay in defense of advertising, in which I proposed that whether or not products ever did for you what they promised to do, sometimes they could help you feel better about yourself for a while. You put on a certain brand of lipstick (I gave up wearing the…

Just returned from California on the Coast Starlight and I submit with no evidence whatsoever that perhaps the scene could have taken place on one of the may indentations along the coast? At least it wasn't as bad as the sun coming up out of the wine-dark sea in the movie Troy! :)

She had watched her mother die. She knows, you don't die beautiful of cancer.

The Alicia/Kalinda scene reminded me of The Daily Show interviews, where I'm never really sure if the comedian is actually interviewing anybody because everything is a one-shot with a side of the back of the other one's head. No, it didn't seem real, and I think that knowing that the fans wanted to see a real goodbye…

This is true.

Yup. All of our romantic sensibilities make us tend to side wi' the Highlanders, but the truth of the matter is that, even given England's less than chivalrous victory dance, it's a good thing they lost. Bonnie Prince Charlie was never that interested in the throne of Scotland - it was his grandfather's crown that he…

Yeah, but if Claire knows it and if she really wants to warn the Highlanders, she can sing the verse that goes, "Many's the lad fought on that day well the claymore could wield, When the night came, silently lay, dead on Culloden field." :)

We didn't have time for Fort William - drove from Inverness to the Isle of Skye and then had to hotfoot it down to Glasgow so my daughter could catch her plane home, looking sidewise at Fort William on the map and deciding nope, no time. No money left for shops anyway. And apparently, to judge from the battle array…

I understand, but this metaphor doesn't work for me. Probably works for most folks, but being a fan of geography, those lyrics are a metaphorical pebble in my sandal.

Their search in the highlands reminds me of a day I spent there. I had tickets to take the ferry from John O'Groats to the Orkneys, but the wind was too strong and the boat didn't go (I got to go the next day) - so I spent the day driving through the highlands on little roads that turned into sheep tracks (I think I…

Same place Gary Trudeau got it from I suppose. For the purposes of full disclosure, I was 33 in 1979 when I read that cartoon, so yes, your use is quite appropriate. I was raised on old media. :)