So, yeah. Terrific. I'd forgotten how much I missed it; I probably had to forget how much, just to make it through.

I had to laugh when, in this week's Hannibal walkthrough, Bryan Fuller reassured everyone that "[w]e would never actually kill the dogs."

That Fuller & co. manage to make the best-looking show on TV with a comparatively shoestring budget is incredible.

See, I liked this episode a great deal (what can I say? the species-dysphoric killer worked for me as a metaphor), and the thought that someone would give the courtroom episode (for me the absolute nadir of the show thus far) an A or A+ is flat out incomprehensible to me.

It really is a bit much. I used to love P&R's willingness to punctuate its humor with moments of sincerity and sweetness; at some point, though, they stopped being punctuation marks.

If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then you're a perv, too.

The scene in the book is obviously less disgusting than what we just saw on this episode. Had the latter been intentional, would it have been worse — I mean morally worse, not aesthetically more unpleasant — than the token resistance? I don't know; I don't think either GRRM or the showrunners have earned a lot of…

So, first, the showrunners clearly didn't intend for it to be a rape. The scene obviously doesn't get that intent across. But when there's never any repercussion or even recollection of the fact that Jaime raped Cersei in the rest of the series, this is probably an important thing to bear in mind.

It's exactly what GRRM was trying to depict, and it's plenty nasty in its own right. If it were the case* that the showrunners wanted to strip that scene of its thin veneer of 'niceness', … well, I don't know. I don't know if I'd be more OK with it or not. It would certainly be a major change in the character arc, but…

If that's the case, it's the worst of all possible worlds. And given the Sepinwall interview where they don't even seem to realize how unambiguously the scene came across as rape, it's probably the most likely one.

Yeah, that's probably true. But you have to have characters be more outspoken when you're not inside their POV, so that feels more like an artifact of translating his character to the screen rather than an alteration.

If that was the intent, then the scene was just an utter and complete failure. (I mean, I don't think I'm going to be a fan of it under any interpretation ….) I'm just kind of flabbergasted to read that.

Oooooooooh.

ARRRRRRGH.

The Sixers were appropriately abysmal (though gotta tip my cap to the Bucks; well played! [And by 'well' and I mean 'terribly'.]), but at least they book-ended the season with wins over Miami.

Boyd Crowder bursts into the Bemidji police station, his arms spread wide: "Your savior has arrived."

I was less surprised by this than I was by Hannibal, but only because FX has as good a track record as any network on TV, whereas NBC's is … not as good as any network on TV. I mean, I'm not going to believe for a second that their Rosemary's Baby isn't going to be a steaming pile of horseshit, no matter how much I…

He's a little more … impish than Chigurh, but there's definitely some spillover of the whole 'antagonist as personification of metaphysical evil' thing from No Country.

The moment Lester killed his wife, and the way the whole scene was shot (which Todd describes really keenly), convinced me that this is a show worth watching. There were some, uh, narrative short-cuts (everything about the sheriff, e.g.) that put my guard up, and I was just at the point of wondering if the show was…

Oh, shit, I didn't know she's going to be part of the cast. That's excellent news.