You’re exactly right: the interactions between Joel and Ellie are the best parts of the show and the episode. I love in the beginning of the finale when Joel is so clearly trying to draw Ellie out, taking on the role that she played early in the series as the chatterbox. Pascal does some work here that I cannot even…

If Craig Mazin wrote it, I would watch eight seasons of Joel’s Sheep Farm and Guitar Lessons. And I bet that shit would be compelling.

I can’t believe that wasn’t mentioned in the body of the review (although glad to see it made it into the bullet points). For me, that moment was the thesis of the episode for Joel. It explains all of his actions that follow. 

Hugh Grant is a lot like how Alec Baldwin used to be: kind of a known crank, occasional jerk, who built up enough goodwill being charming/affable to occasionally get away with being a crank. I once heard a comedian refer to it as “Asshole Credits,” wherein some celebrities build up goodwill by being charming, and…

Can confirm. A friend in the industry (not someone famous, someone behind the scenes) says the only things worth going to are the ones that serve alcohol. And even those can get tedious. 

If you have an Asian grocer around, you’ll likely get canned coconut milk there that is still cheap but is of vastly better quality than what you’ll get at the dollar store. Canned coconut milk is one of those things that I think does make a big difference what you buy. For my money, Arroy-D is the best out there for…

I was at a taping for a Netflix special last year, and while I knew that specials get edited, it was really interesting to see how that played out live. I guess I didn’t realize how often in tapings comedians stop and take a line again. It probably happened 6-8 times in the hour-long taping. I recently went back and…

Yeah, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It’s grown into itself over the course of the season. It has more heart than I thought it did at the outset. 

It’s so good. I’ve recommended it to so many friends and none of them have watched it. It bums me out. I’m like, “Have I ever steered you wrong?!” And yet, they don’t watch. It’s a shame. 

Rennie deserves to be better known. He’s been excellent in everything I’ve ever seen him in. He has a very watchable quality. 

The first season and maybe the second, too, were interesting to watch for the way it used Joe’s perspective to deconstruct a lot of tropes about TV romance. Basically, they took a lot of the “good guy” moves from TV and film, and showed how toxic and dangerouse they can be when enacted, or when they take root in the…

I really struggled with the first set of episodes, too, for a lot of the reasons you say. Penn Badgley is great in the role, but this season does feel a bit like they dropped Joe in London and did a little “Ta-Da! He’s restarted!” It seems really far away from the Joe in season 1 who does horrible, horrible things to…

I didn’t use the IRS’s free tax filing for years for two stupid reasons: 1. The names of the companies the IRS uses for free filing sound really shady, like EZTaxUSA. com or some shit. And 2. Because “it wasn’t that much” to use the basic service from TurboTax.

Buyer beware. This thing is absolute junk. The outer plastic shell is so brittle it cracks within the first few uses. I bought one for a friend for Christmas last year and it broke almost immediately. The two replacements that the company sent also cracked within the first ten uses. Don’t waste your money. It’s a cool…

Buyer beware. This thing is absolute junk. The outer plastic shell is so brittle it cracks within the first few…

Don’t waste your money. I bought one for a friend of Christmas last year and it cracked the second time she used it. Got a replacement shipped and it did the same thing within two weeks. The third was the same way. After three in a row cracked, we gave up. This thing is junk, seriously. Check out the Amazon reviews…

Don’t waste your money. I bought one for a friend of Christmas last year and it cracked the second time she used it.…

If you haven’t read Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, I highly recommend it. I think it’s an even better book than A Spy Among Friends. 

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a trope in zombie fiction specifically (that’s not my area of popular culture studies), but it is a pretty common trope in the larger genre of dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives. But I would say it’s more commonly seen in the types of post-apocalyptic narratives where a disaster…

There’s also a lot of scholarship that pegs upticks in zombie narratives in books and films to social anxieties over race and immigration. Take, for example, George Romero’s zombie horror movies. In Dawn of the Dead, at one point the battle between police and zombies moves to a public housing complex. One of the…

I’m guessing they couldn’t use Western Colorado University since it’s a real university, whereas the University of Eastern Colorado fair game. That’s no excuse for locating Eastern Colorado in Boulder, though, I agree. 

The idea that they’re hunting people is implied in the code that David and James use to talk about their food supply. James talks about having a week of food left and David asks what they have, and James haltingly says, “Venison, elk, rabbit.” Then he says, “Josiah and Martin think they spotted some deer the other…