They had tapes!

Actually I feel like I can pinpoint the moment the floodgates opened on this…when Palin was giving her snarky speech. I remember watching in utter shock that cheerful slander seemed an acceptable approach for her national debut. I feel like discourse went straight downhill after that.

I'm not sure his disdain for his dad was for being "too straight," it always struck me as disappointment that his dad couldn't somehow be more strong against the forces conspiring against him.

If I remember correctly, he's also got some serious emotional baggage, too, and self-loathing for not pursuing his own path in life. He's definitely more complex than his slick veneer may first indicate.

Ha, you're lucky. In my workplace we had crazy deadlines and a need to be highly professional for our clients but that sure didn't stop the drama. It wasn't until I stepped away and started getting so much done on my own as a freelancer that I realized that 90% of my days were spent babysitting and only 10% getting…

Yes, I agree his abrupt and thorough insinuation back into their lives was highly suspicious. I was thinking the ladies would definitely catch on that he was up to something. Even his rigged bingo game, with Irene winning so immediately, was about as unsubtle as it could be.

That's a great point. I kept thinking the spots on her face didn't look exactly like sun damage but maybe they were physical evidence of travel to the other side. That's the most compelling evidence I've considered so far, thanks.

I still think there might be something to #1. And it's not as simple as she remembered her kids were annoying so she decided not to reunite with them. I feel like that scene in the kitchen might speak to a possible ambivalence about motherhood she may (or may not, I acknowledge) have had. At the moment they departed…

Maybe. I still think there's a reason they focused on her anger and exasperation with her kids right before they departed. It's like she finally stopped romanticizing them and remembered that she could also dislike them. Granted those moments of disliking your kids aren't enough to make you stop loving them…

Yes, I feel like when Nora "flips" her thinking to focus on the 2% instead of the 98%, it finally clicks that she can let it — and them, her family — go.

This is what I think. And I don't think of it as lying as much as it was issuing a challenge to Kevin — will you still believe in me/want to be with me even when I say something as outlandish and unbelievable as this? Her story of her journey to the other side and back was metaphorical, not literal, and Kevin…

"For the 'she changed her mind' case to work she would have had to have changed her mind and then suffered some type of mental break that would have allowed her to live at peace with her decision for years into the future until Kevin found her as an older woman."

I tend to disagree. I think she thought deeply about what happened to her family as she prepared to go into the machine and came up with that narrative as a way to justify her decision to accept that the kids were lucky to be with their father —wherever they might have gone — and that she should "just let the mystery…

I agree. I can't figure out why her face looked so different, whereas Kevin's aging looked realistic but much less dramatically different than whatever they did to her. I found it extremely distracting.

Actually, I thought her flashback to the moment of the Departure showed that she might have changed her mind about going to see her kids. She clearly had guilt about being so angry at them when they departed…and I got the feeling that maybe the vivid memory of her anger and impatience and exasperation with them made…

Agreed. And honestly you could be describing Lost as well.

Yes, I work with preschoolers and interestingly we have a set of twins whose family speaks English and Polish at home. One twin has the strongest Polish accent it sounds like he wasn't born here and the other twin doesn't have a trace of any Polish inflections.

They do offer Fresh Air as a podcast. As for Brits doing American accents, in early seasons of Bates Motel Freddie Highmore struggled sometimes to keep a lid on his natural accent. But it came out, especially when he yelled. By the last seasons, you wouldn't know he was British. Such hard work but it must get a bit…

I heard an interview with him on Fresh Air not long ago and he talked about how incredibly hard it was for him to do an American accent. He said that in Season One he felt constantly bewildered and behind the rest of the cast because he had that added burden/learning curve. That said, I didn't even think to compare…

I guess I should be grateful that my company never sugar coated their expectations for 14 hour days or softened the blow with things like free food or foosball tables. "Fun" paint colors and mod furnishings are about as far as they went with the lipstick on the pig, so to speak. Bastards.