There’s no way in hell this show was going to reveal that Mateo isn’t the real Mateo this late in the game, but this episode is all about going deeper into the crime genre to intensify the narrative as we head into the final three-episode stretch.

They’ve done studies that show that trailers that spoil more are more effective at attracting audience interest.

I’ve always wanted to see more interactions between Jane and the twins, so I really enjoyed their little subplot here.

If they were going to use the Blip to introduce a new, bigger name actor playing Cassie, they’d have done that in Endgame.

I’ll be interested to see if the next season sticks to the yearly time jumps that have been the norm so far (Season 1 was 1983, Season 3 was 1985) or if they take more time, since the longer lags between production cycles as it becomes more elaborate has started to cause the teen actors to age faster than their…

Except that the “chaos is a ladder” speech was terrible, and part of their overall terrible handling of Littlefinger.

This show is three for three with the season climaxes; it’s continually impressive to me how smoothly they knit everything together.

Steve’s latest fan-pleasing character trait is being the accepting best friend of a new lesbian character. As if he needed to be more popular than he already is.

The harshest part of the ending of Zhivago is Lean’s expertly framed shot of Lara that pans to settle on a big banner of Stalin, while Guinness notes that people disappeared all the time in those days.

I often find it hard to write in depth about this show because the overall quality level has been so consistent episode after episode, year after year.

Obtaining an army was a self-interested motive in the beginning, alongside the humanitarian one that grew when she actually got to Astapor.  But the liberation agenda pretty much immediately overtook other considerations thereafter, to the point where she refused to leave Slaver’s Bay multiple times because she…

Daenerys did have goals beyond her claim — such as, most obviously, liberating the population of Slaver’s Bay, something Cersei would never have done because Cersei never cared about anybody but herself, and never hesitated to harm people for no reason beyond spite or envy.

Cersei was the embodiment of the toxic Lannister ideology, and took great pleasure in harming others and grasping at power with no goal beyond her own egotistical fulfillment.

That was not what the prophecy said.

Madeline clearly never told her daughters that loose lips sink ships.

Hepburn was, as the author notes, an effervescent screen presence, but one that Hollywood often had no idea what to do with, especially in the 1950s. She made way too many movies cast opposite male leads much too old for her — My Fair Lady is probably second-best of those, after Charade, because the fustiness of…

I find it fascinating that these guys were ever considered some sort of menace (or “public enemy”, if you will) when one of their two most prominent members dressed and acted like an Adam West Batman villain.

Yeah, I had misremembered it as them trying to say there was no fight and Perry’s fall was a complete accident, which at least would differentiate the scenarios a bit.

That “previously on...” montage was arty to the point where it would have been no help at all to somebody who hadn’t watched the first season.

A lot of the media coverage of the petition seems to treat it like something the signees actually think might happen, as opposed to it just being a way of phrasing their belief that Season 8 sucked.