On the question of Mara: I also think that her comment about the baseball mitt is characterization in a different way than Nowalk is suggesting.

Count me as another Mara defender.  I think in general she responds fairly validly to the accurate sense that the events surrounding the Strike Team are out of control and are jeopardizing the sense of stability she's found with Shane.

I like the definition "extreme actions done for the sake of extremity," because I've always thought of pulp entertainment as entertainment that can be distilled to—and is often advertised as—a series of shiny objects/actions, where the text is satisfied with the existence of these things and doesn't develop or even…

This showing up may very well be the highlight of my day.

Benito Martinez should have won some sort of award just for his line delivery when he says he managed to fight the attackers off.  There's something particularly awful about someone who always relied on talking—to the press or in backroom deals—being put in a situation where nothing he says makes anything better and…

Brett Martin's description of The Shield there seems wildly off-base to me: there's a lot of deliberate coolness about the show, as Ryan freely admits, but I think the stylistic criticism here—the slo mo death shot in particular—is pretty ridiculous when viewed against the show's actual death scenes, which tend to…

SPOILERS

I'd noticed her observation of Hannibal's general lack of rudeness, but hadn't connected it to the spotless house—that is really suggestive, like you're saying.  We all know how persuasive Hannibal can be—I wonder if he found (and kept) a psychiatrist with his own ideals or if he somehow transmitted them to her?  If…

Really great article.  "Roiling nausea" is certainly apt for describing how the viewer watches Hannibal's toying with Will's life—I think another reason the show is so horribly effective at conveying the stakes of violence is this absolute commitment to portraying emotional violence as well as physical violence, and…

Abigail's story—that she did what it took to survive her father only to be toyed with and ultimately murdered by her second father figure, another serial killer—should be almost ludicrously implausible, and it's a tremendous credit to Rohl and to the writers that it comes across as believable, heartbreaking, and…

Speculation about Dr. Du Maurier: what does she know and when did she know it?

Shane wanting to back out of the Money Train Robbery—and Lem convincing him to go ahead with it—is one of those moments that's especially great on a series rewatch.

SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD AND THE SHIELD

Great movie, great scene.  This isn't the only film where we see the characters' chemistry, for lack of a better word, when they're apart, but it's the only one I can immediately think of where that same chemistry—call it a respectful empathy, an appreciation for each other's professionalism—works temporarily to keep…

It's a little bit unbearable for me to watch Hannibal expertly frame Will as a killer while Will tries, all episode, to do the right, compassionate thing: get justice (and dignity) for Georgia Madchen, connect the copycat killer crimes so those victims would have justice, and so on.  The irony that Abigail flees Will,…

Going back through these reviews, I'm always surprised by how many of the individual cases I can remember, even without a re-watch.  The Shield's rightly praised for its tight three-act structure: it's sort of incredible that it's able to combine such a strong overarching drive with memorable and vivid episodic…

That's like the combination of events you need to break out when you've decided you're just feeling too good about your life.

I'm so confused by this, is the internet broken?  Am I not looking at the internet right?  I want my sophisticated Shield-analysis!

Ugh, that line.  This show is doing an incredible job of making its smaller moments even more wrenching than, say, its vivisection scenes: last week, it was Will's clocks that were most terrifying for me, and this time, it was definitely that line, especially with Will sobbing and begging Hannibal not to lie to him.

I didn't expect that to make me cry, but it did, and not just because the other day I wanted a solid review of a movie I had out from Netflix and so pulled up Ebert's website.  Though that probably didn't help.  I'm just going to find a corner to weep quietly in.