mainly about catching up
Jun. 15th, 2014 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessSo, I posted Nothing Stays the Same on Friday morning. It was my 'attempt to get into Edith's head between the Christmas special and series 4' fic. I started writing it in longhand before typing it up, because it's easier to edit that way. I also listened to the song of the same title several times and debated with myself whether the ending/whole thing was too sentimental or not. I think it's okay, given the subject matter, it's Edith and it's Downton Abbey! Despite the fact that I think I watch the show differently from most viewers, I do find I have fic I want to write about it.
Orphan Black 2.6 To Hound Nature in her Wandering
There was so much about this episode that was absolutely bonkers. That guy from Suits turning up and being Helena’s boyfriend for five seconds in a bar set-up that screamed ‘western’ was one. But it was also oddly sweet, even if you knew Helena was going to go mental at some point.
See also Vic and Allison bonding. In rehab.
To offset all that wackiness, there was also Sarah finding out that the clones were the latest in a long line of experiments, Cosima facing tough times, and Delphine finding out (or did she know) that the stem cells either came from Kira or another daughter (or a relative of the original???)
And then the show just made Paul a player – if I was reading between the lines correctly, it looks like he was someone the military deliberately put in place to infiltrate the Dyad. EEE.
Meanwhile Leekie is made out to be less weak than we thought. And I feel we’ve barely scratched the surface with Ethan, who had to be accountable to the clones. Meanwhile, Sarah understandably doesn’t trust Siobhan, even though ‘she’s the mother’ who will protect Sarah. While I’m more willing to give her story some credence than Sarah was, I think she’s going to kill those birds when they go on the run.
Donnie should be scared for when Allison gets out. I loved the reveal that Vic was being used by the cop and legitimately growing a conscience, even though I thought he was a waste of space, beyond being one more thing for the clones to deal with, last season. I’m surprisingly glad that they’ve found a way to use him better. The power of Allison!
The big underlying thread in the ep for me was female agency, though. Paul and Mark trading ‘their’ clones was chilling, Grace’s dismissal of her views mattering, while Helena chose ‘her babies’ (and that should be a preposterous moment, but it somehow wasn’t) (plus Allison was foregrounding the kids a lot) and Sarah making Ethan face up to her and the clones’ reality and the reality of Rachel, having agreed with Cosima that they and Allison needed to get back together.
As I said, bonkers, but enjoyable – which is a good description for Art and Felix ‘hanging out’ also.
The Good Wife 5.20 The Deep Web
Feels like a lot happened, but that’s mainly because of the breadth of characters? Well done, Cary for making Alicia take a day off, at which she was predictably rubbish, but predictably in need of for time to grieve and face up to her thoughts.
And she had to deal with modern day life from the remotes to the buffering. Meanwhile the case of the week was all about Actual BitCoin as opposed to Fake!BitCoin, the Silk Road (which I didn’t think the kid had set up for Doylesian reasons) and voice recognition software. It’s going to be fascinating how history judges this show as a reflection of the second decade of this century if nothing else.
And this ep had Diane and Kalinda teaming up (woo), Louis Canning and David Lee being smarmy and untrustworthy, and we were made to wonder about the client as long as possible.
Good acting from Goode (sorry for the pun), especially in the interview scenes, as Eli did his thing, unapologetically. Will he succeed in making Finn a politician? And what will that mean in the grander scheme of things?
Like her mother, you want Alicia to take things a little easier. I don’t mean for her to listen to that sub-Somebody That I Used To Know music! (I’m still hoping that they don’t go there with Finn because of the married thing.) But to let herself grieve and make the changes she needs to when she’s figured out what she wants. The stuff about her father was revelatory.
I also finally caught up with Revenge’s season 3 finale
3.22 Execution
While I applauded the final scene and killed off two characters, they pulled my joke twist FOR REAL. It didn’t quite feel as epic a finale as last season’s – there was too much going on and some of it really didn’t feel important enough for me to even remember to wonder what would happen next during the break. Plus, I thought it was a stupid time to actually introduce Gideon.
The best bit, apart from a few good shots was having Emily/Amanda mete out the treatment given to her mother to Victoria after everything. It felt like poetic justice and still, just about, kept her on the side of the goodies (replaying the clip of wee!Amanda being brainwashed about her father was apropos). Victoria’s great love for Pascal never had the resonance of Emily/Aiden or compared with wee!Amanda’s loss, and besides, it was mainly Conrad’s helicopter, so even before Madame quite coldly killed Aiden and delivered him as a gift, the balance of sympathy was on Emily’s side.
Finally, they killed off Aiden - I’ve been hoping for that for a season and a half, and really, what was he doing drinking tea without milk in it? Drinking anything from an associate of Victoria’s, assuming he could talk her down with one threat! Stupid arrogant man. In his favour, he did start calling Ems Amanda, but much of what Nolan was trying to comfort Emily with was rubbish, Nolan’s grief for Aiden felt like rubbish – he was kvetching about Aiden almost as often as I was - and it was more the case that Emily would need something like this for more revenging once her father’s name was cleared. Plus making it Emily vs. Victoria is a canny move. Although at some point, Victoria needs to face up to Emily/Amanda being the same girl as wee!Amanda.
They had little space to go to with Conrad narratively, so he was as obviously a goner, as Aiden was the moment he started talking about the future. But the very atmospheric scene with the mysterious figure in a hood was spoiled by watching it turn out that the show had gone there and had David be in hiding(!) after having faked his own death(!?) and not even twitching as it should have been obvious to him that his daughter was using his diaries to take down his enemies. Plus how will they square the man who taught forgiveness with the man who knifed Conrad? I kind of need to know Jennifer Jason Leigh is coming back in the next series for this to make any sense, but suspect that all they’ll have to offer is a flashback/video of the white haired man. Even if they’d run out of flashbacks with wee!Emily before she starts going through puberty, it’s yet another too ridiculous twist.
UNLESS IF HE IS A PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN TWIN!!! (But Victoria’s veiled comments about David not being who Amanda thought he was probably didn’t mean that.)
Poor Jack, worrying about Ems’s soul – I thought his reaction to her reaction to Aiden’s death was a little lacking in empathy considering he’d been there with Amanda. Anyway, he’s in trouble for carrying on to lie to Charlotte and trying to do the right thing during the daft abduction. Javier is yet another person who doesn’t really care for her – she stood him up because she was being abducted, but he didn’t care/was only wanted to continue Nolan’s subsubplot. I still hate watching Daniel manipulate Margiaux.
There were some brilliant bits, but some really ropey bits and the show is constrained as ever by trying to tell a story about these characters over such a long form. It can’t be ruthless enough, and is by now epically ridiculous. While they’ve just about kept Emily a sympathetic figure (and I’m expecting Emily/Jack endgame with non-disturbed Carl) most characters have been through such daftness and behaved so inconsistently, I really should give this up for the next series. Nashville is equally soapy but at has the constructive strand of women being creative and people making music. And shows like Person of Interest and Orphan Black are doing action and conspiracies much more entertainingly.
Orphan Black 2.6 To Hound Nature in her Wandering
There was so much about this episode that was absolutely bonkers. That guy from Suits turning up and being Helena’s boyfriend for five seconds in a bar set-up that screamed ‘western’ was one. But it was also oddly sweet, even if you knew Helena was going to go mental at some point.
See also Vic and Allison bonding. In rehab.
To offset all that wackiness, there was also Sarah finding out that the clones were the latest in a long line of experiments, Cosima facing tough times, and Delphine finding out (or did she know) that the stem cells either came from Kira or another daughter (or a relative of the original???)
And then the show just made Paul a player – if I was reading between the lines correctly, it looks like he was someone the military deliberately put in place to infiltrate the Dyad. EEE.
Meanwhile Leekie is made out to be less weak than we thought. And I feel we’ve barely scratched the surface with Ethan, who had to be accountable to the clones. Meanwhile, Sarah understandably doesn’t trust Siobhan, even though ‘she’s the mother’ who will protect Sarah. While I’m more willing to give her story some credence than Sarah was, I think she’s going to kill those birds when they go on the run.
Donnie should be scared for when Allison gets out. I loved the reveal that Vic was being used by the cop and legitimately growing a conscience, even though I thought he was a waste of space, beyond being one more thing for the clones to deal with, last season. I’m surprisingly glad that they’ve found a way to use him better. The power of Allison!
The big underlying thread in the ep for me was female agency, though. Paul and Mark trading ‘their’ clones was chilling, Grace’s dismissal of her views mattering, while Helena chose ‘her babies’ (and that should be a preposterous moment, but it somehow wasn’t) (plus Allison was foregrounding the kids a lot) and Sarah making Ethan face up to her and the clones’ reality and the reality of Rachel, having agreed with Cosima that they and Allison needed to get back together.
As I said, bonkers, but enjoyable – which is a good description for Art and Felix ‘hanging out’ also.
The Good Wife 5.20 The Deep Web
Feels like a lot happened, but that’s mainly because of the breadth of characters? Well done, Cary for making Alicia take a day off, at which she was predictably rubbish, but predictably in need of for time to grieve and face up to her thoughts.
And she had to deal with modern day life from the remotes to the buffering. Meanwhile the case of the week was all about Actual BitCoin as opposed to Fake!BitCoin, the Silk Road (which I didn’t think the kid had set up for Doylesian reasons) and voice recognition software. It’s going to be fascinating how history judges this show as a reflection of the second decade of this century if nothing else.
And this ep had Diane and Kalinda teaming up (woo), Louis Canning and David Lee being smarmy and untrustworthy, and we were made to wonder about the client as long as possible.
Good acting from Goode (sorry for the pun), especially in the interview scenes, as Eli did his thing, unapologetically. Will he succeed in making Finn a politician? And what will that mean in the grander scheme of things?
Like her mother, you want Alicia to take things a little easier. I don’t mean for her to listen to that sub-Somebody That I Used To Know music! (I’m still hoping that they don’t go there with Finn because of the married thing.) But to let herself grieve and make the changes she needs to when she’s figured out what she wants. The stuff about her father was revelatory.
I also finally caught up with Revenge’s season 3 finale
3.22 Execution
While I applauded the final scene and killed off two characters, they pulled my joke twist FOR REAL. It didn’t quite feel as epic a finale as last season’s – there was too much going on and some of it really didn’t feel important enough for me to even remember to wonder what would happen next during the break. Plus, I thought it was a stupid time to actually introduce Gideon.
The best bit, apart from a few good shots was having Emily/Amanda mete out the treatment given to her mother to Victoria after everything. It felt like poetic justice and still, just about, kept her on the side of the goodies (replaying the clip of wee!Amanda being brainwashed about her father was apropos). Victoria’s great love for Pascal never had the resonance of Emily/Aiden or compared with wee!Amanda’s loss, and besides, it was mainly Conrad’s helicopter, so even before Madame quite coldly killed Aiden and delivered him as a gift, the balance of sympathy was on Emily’s side.
Finally, they killed off Aiden - I’ve been hoping for that for a season and a half, and really, what was he doing drinking tea without milk in it? Drinking anything from an associate of Victoria’s, assuming he could talk her down with one threat! Stupid arrogant man. In his favour, he did start calling Ems Amanda, but much of what Nolan was trying to comfort Emily with was rubbish, Nolan’s grief for Aiden felt like rubbish – he was kvetching about Aiden almost as often as I was - and it was more the case that Emily would need something like this for more revenging once her father’s name was cleared. Plus making it Emily vs. Victoria is a canny move. Although at some point, Victoria needs to face up to Emily/Amanda being the same girl as wee!Amanda.
They had little space to go to with Conrad narratively, so he was as obviously a goner, as Aiden was the moment he started talking about the future. But the very atmospheric scene with the mysterious figure in a hood was spoiled by watching it turn out that the show had gone there and had David be in hiding(!) after having faked his own death(!?) and not even twitching as it should have been obvious to him that his daughter was using his diaries to take down his enemies. Plus how will they square the man who taught forgiveness with the man who knifed Conrad? I kind of need to know Jennifer Jason Leigh is coming back in the next series for this to make any sense, but suspect that all they’ll have to offer is a flashback/video of the white haired man. Even if they’d run out of flashbacks with wee!Emily before she starts going through puberty, it’s yet another too ridiculous twist.
UNLESS IF HE IS A PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN TWIN!!! (But Victoria’s veiled comments about David not being who Amanda thought he was probably didn’t mean that.)
Poor Jack, worrying about Ems’s soul – I thought his reaction to her reaction to Aiden’s death was a little lacking in empathy considering he’d been there with Amanda. Anyway, he’s in trouble for carrying on to lie to Charlotte and trying to do the right thing during the daft abduction. Javier is yet another person who doesn’t really care for her – she stood him up because she was being abducted, but he didn’t care/was only wanted to continue Nolan’s subsubplot. I still hate watching Daniel manipulate Margiaux.
There were some brilliant bits, but some really ropey bits and the show is constrained as ever by trying to tell a story about these characters over such a long form. It can’t be ruthless enough, and is by now epically ridiculous. While they’ve just about kept Emily a sympathetic figure (and I’m expecting Emily/Jack endgame with non-disturbed Carl) most characters have been through such daftness and behaved so inconsistently, I really should give this up for the next series. Nashville is equally soapy but at has the constructive strand of women being creative and people making music. And shows like Person of Interest and Orphan Black are doing action and conspiracies much more entertainingly.
