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xiaolinhodown · 5 years

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here it is! a very long bio/info thing about my metalocalypse oc, hazel!!! read more at your own risk, its very long haha (also warning for short, non-graphic mentions of abuse)

Hazel Mae Parker Age: 27 When she first encounters Dethklok Height: 5’5 Birthday: April 8th (Aries) Gender: Female, she/her pronouns Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Personality: Hazel is a fairly quiet and meek girl, which shocks people considering the position she has at her job and the progress shes made in her career and in school. Despite this shyness, she does have a lot of motivation and was always very careful with her grades. However, she has very low self confidence and is always beating herself up about not being good enough. She’s also quick to do what she thinks she needs to do to please people, and is easily manipulated because of that reason. She has a lot of anxieties about herself and just in general, but as she ages, takes more care of her mental health. She enjoys working, and can easily overwork herself without noticing. She often relies on others to tell her when she needs to take a break, or she’d keep working forever.

Bio:

Hazel was born to a middle class family in the suburbs of a small town in Washington state. She was always discontent with her place in this small town, and wished for a bigger experience. As she went through grade school, she realized her passion for writing, specifically journalism. She joined her high schools news paper club and ended up as president of it in her senior year. In order to escape her small town, she went to college in California. Academically, she did very well in almost all of her classes. She joined the newspaper club on campus. This is where she discovered her love for writing about pop culture-related current events. She had always followed a path to write about world news, but writing for the pop culture section in the school paper taught her otherwise. The article that really started her progress in the journalistic world was a critical piece on the band Zazz Blammymatazz’s own Rockso the Rock and Roll Clown, who had recently been bombarded by a heap of scandals. The blunt and well-scripted article caught the attention of POP USA, a pop-culture magazine that was somewhat well-known. The manager of the pop culture section offered her an internship, which turned into a full time job once Hazel graduated college. She began living and working in her college town. Fresh out of college, Hazel met Marlow, who was a barista at the coffee shop that was embedded in the POP USA office building. They began to talk and eventually began dating. After a couple months together, Marlow began to become emotionally abusive towards Hazel. To her, it seemed like it was going in a physical direction. Not only was Marlow just an abusive man, but an insecure and jealous one. The core of his abuse stemmed from convincing Hazel that she didn’t deserve her position in the company- he couldn’t handle that he was a barista while she was a writer for the magazine.This abuse caused her work to falter. After about a year trapped in the relationship, Hazel’s boss, Jericho sat down and asked her about her performance. Hazel took a chance and admitted what had been going on. Jericho swiftly took action, and had Marlow fired. Although Marlow was away from her workplace, Hazel still held post-traumatic stress and anxiety that he was stalking her. About half a year after this occurred, things bigger than Hazel and the worlds biggest band, Dethklok, were happening. The Tribunal, eager to bring down Dethklok in any way they could, hatched a plan to plant a seed in the Mordhaus. They contacted the CEO of POP USA, and offered a generous sum of money to risk killing a journalist that would record data about Dethklok over a period of two weeks. The Tribunal had suffered loss after loss, and now believed that even petty information about the band members lives would be more helpful than dead recruits from the past. To make the mission as secretive as possible, the CEO kept the true purpose of this job a secret. Hazel was terrified when the CEO called her to his office, but ecstatic when he assigned her to essentially live with Dethklok for two weeks. Hazel was never a hardcore fan of the band, but she was obviously still excited to work with them. She was sent to Mordhaus to begin her mission, under the guise that she was doing a piece entitled “Life With Dethklok.” The band was confused by the sudden addition of a woman who wasn’t there just to have sex with or become a Klokateer. However they did enjoy her company, and of course, loved that she gave them reason to talk (brag) about themselves. Charles Offdenson was naturally skeptical. Through his own gut feelings and some private investigation, he discovered this was just yet another plan to destroy his bread and butter. However, after an intimidating questioning of Hazel (as well as more digging) he realized she genuinely had no clue about the true nature of this mission. He informed her about what was going on (vaguely, as in “there’s a lot of people who want Dethklok’s money and power, and uh, unfortunately you got caught up in one of those plans.”). He also informed her that she was welcome to stay in Mordhaus for a bit, so she and more importantly Dethklok would be safe. She agreed, and under Charles’ help and supervision, continued to keep contact with the POP USA CEO about the mission. Another aspect of her time in Mordhaus was hiding from her abusive ex. Fortunately, she was being heavily protected by Charles’ efforts, but she was still concerned about her name getting out. She gets fearful once she starts seeing Marlow at meet-and-greets, concerts, and signing events. However, once she brings this up to the band, they don’t hesitate to keep her protected as well.

Relationship Information:

Nathan: Hazel and Nathan had a very malleable relationship for the better half of 2 years. They started off having sex somewhat regularly, as Hazel’s interviews would turn into flirting, which turned into… you know! Hazel especially had no problem with this once she realized the true nature of her “mission”. Other than that, though, Nathan and Hazel share a strong bond over another thing - abusive exes. Once Nathan catches Hazel in a panic attack, she tells him her story and in turn, Nathan shares his about his abusive ex girlfriends that he so often seems to attract. Although Nathan is much less prone to showing actual emotion, he does open up a bit in order to help Hazel, and for Hazel to help him. Further into their relationship, they become very platonic, and eventually almost like siblings. Pickles: Hazel and Pickles essentially just co-exist in a friendly way. They don’t interact that often, but it’s obvious at times that they respect and care for each other. Pickles understands Hazels anxiety issues and helps her through those, while Hazel tries to help him through his worst drinking binges. She knows she doesn’t have the hold on him to get him to rehab, but she does bring it up and also shares that concern with Nathan and the others. Skwisgaar: HOOOOO BOY. Hazel and Skwisgaar. Of course, when Hazel first arrives at Mordhaus, Skwisgaar starts flirting with her, which she immediately responds to (again, especially after Charles tells her that this job is kind of a sham). Hazel gets a crush on Skwisgaar pretty early on, but because of her anxiety about relationships and commitment, she’s fine in the current set up and holds her feelings back. Where it gets complicated is when Skwisgaar, about a year into knowing Hazel, realizes he has feelings for her. He recognizes that they have had many intimate talks about their pasts, and all of their present concerns, and that he has never truly felt this way about any of his other friends with benefits. He didn’t just see her as a co-worker, but a friend and someone to confide in. However, due to his fears of commitment, he also held back his feelings. Things change after the events of Doomstar Requiem, where the boys face their own mortality, including Skwisgaar who is older and wiser at this point. He realizes that he, his friends, nor Hazel, are guaranteed life every day, and he finally confesses his feelings to Hazel, who of course, reciprocates them. Due to their combined insecurities, they make sure to take it slow with each other, and are forgiving of each others mistakes. The relationship works well because they both know how it feels to be scared, and are so understanding of each other and willing to help each other grow. They stay together for about 6 years before they get married. They end up having two children. Murderface: Murderface and Hazel also tend to coexist with eachother, but in a more hostile and passive-aggressive fashion. Murderface typically is a little rude to her and dubs her presence in the Mordhaus as intrusive, annoying, and claims shes just there for sex and money. Hazel kind of understood Murderface’s personality early on in their relationship, and therefore didn’t really get upset at his bad attitude. Hazel tends to try to help him as well, putting out good press for him when he puts the band’s reputation in jeopardy. Their relationship and understanding improves over the years, but it does take time. Toki: Hazel absolutely adores Toki, and often goes to him for childlike humor and solice when the cynical nature of the other four begins to get to her. Like Nathan, Toki has plenty of history with abuse, and tends to console in Hazel with that, as she does withhim. Neither of them are professionals, and therefore they just are there to listen to each other and say they understand. Toki, despite being the more childish one of the two, takes his role as being older than her seriously, and therefore can often be seen “protecting his little sister” from danger in and outside of Mordhaus. Hazel also often tries to soothe Toki when he enters his more violent state, and succeeds occasionally when he’s not too far gone. Otherwise she usually ends up getting scratched a little herself. Charles: Hazel is a little intimidated by Charles, but appreciates the protection he works hard to give her (even though he provides it for the band more than for her). They get along very well for the most part, other than the occasional disagreement or teasing from Hazel to Charles. Charles appreciates that Hazel is able to help the band’s image so well, and will often request for her to stage PR events when the band is in need of some good press. Charles also sees that Hazel does genuinely make the boys happy, and is glad to keep her safe and protected for that reason (not to mention its someone else for them to bother about things).

#metalocalypse #metalocalypse oc #art #ocs

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florrickandassociates · 6 years

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TGF Thoughts: 2x11-- Day 478

(This is the ep from two weeks ago; I am behind on recap writing. Aiming to have 2x12 up before the finale!)

What’s the strategy behind using previouslies on a streaming show? CBS must expect that at least some viewers will wait until all the episodes are up and binge them, right? I’d be shocked if they had a feature that skipped previouslies the way Netflix does. I mean, just now, I tried to open up the app and play this episode, and CBS played that insanely long Klingon scene that opens Star Trek: Discovery (no, I don’t watch it—just the pilot) for me three times before it let me actually watch TGF.

The static on the TV to rain falling is a cool graphic match.

Diane is waiting for a car at 710 N Hart St. It’s not a real address, obviously. But at first glance it looked like it said McHart street so I’m pointing it out.

Diane is waiting out in the rain. The point of this scene is what happens while Diane waits, but I would LOVE to know what Diane was doing that she’s waiting in the rain.

Her ride is initially supposed to arrive in one minute. Then it jumps to 10, so she and her not-at-all-wet hair run into a laundromat. Guys, her hair looks totally dry. She was holding her bag over her head, and her hair somehow looks perfect. Like, she’s been standing out in the rain and her hair still looks better than Alicia’s hair did for all of season 7.

(I was going to compare her hair to what my hair does when it rains, but y’all don’t know my hair and you DO know the awful Alicia wig.)

Now Diane’s car is 15 minutes away. #Relatable

OMFG, CBS, I PAUSED TO TALK TO MY ROOMMATE, OPENED THE APP AGAIN, AND WHAT DO I GET? KLINGONS. Fix this.

Diane hears grunting and fighting going on in the laundromat, so she goes to investigate. I thought she was going to get mugged in this scene the first time through, to be honest. It turns out that… wait hold on, Diane is wearing heels… she just walked through a puddle in heels?

As I was saying. It turns out that Diane has stumbled upon some sort of underground aikido class. This feels surreal, but I’ll roll with it.

“It’s beautiful,” Diane remarks. The instructor tells her to come back on Tuesday, but Diane says, “It’s not me.” “It is,” the instructor replies. “My life is pretty full right now,” Diane protests. “I know you think that. But it’s not,” the instructor counters.

I am resuming my rewatch, and wouldn’t you know? KLINGONS. I tried so many times I had to switch over to watching on a different device. Not a huge problem, but not a great user experience, especially on a service I’m paying for…

Diane’s phone rings. It’s Jay. He and Marissa have come up with a different suspect in Adrian’s shooting and now they think it’s a neo-Nazi. Even though last week Jay and Marissa believed the shooter was not targeting Adrian, this week they think he’s coming for Diane next, so she needs to be careful.

Diane goes back to watch more aikido. Aaaand credits.

We pick up with a two people on a date. This is A Choice. If there were ever a case that did not need a flashback illustration, it was this one. Unless these are memory pops and I didn’t recognize them as such—hell, even or especially if they are memory pops—this story does not need visuals.

The dude on the date is named RON, a giant subtitle informs us. Is it me or are some of TGF’s structural/storytelling risks verging on dumbing things down for the audience? I’m writing this after 2x12 and that may be on my mind because of 2x12…

Now the couple is at Ron’s apartment, making out. He reaches for a condom and she asks what he’s doing. “Can we just not do that… yet…?” she says.

The woman on the date is named EMILY.

RON and EMILY are in depositions, with Alma Hoff on one side and Liz and Maia on the other.

More flashbacks. RON makes a skeevy comment about EMILY’s age.

“She was laughing. There was no discomfort,” Ron says in the deposition. Yeah. Because Ron gets to decide how comfortable Emily was.

Now there’s a flashback of Emily and Ron kissing. I really don’t get what these flashbacks are supposed to tell me. I don’t want an objective retelling of this encounter because the issue isn’t what did/didn’t happen; it’s how Emily felt. An objective, visual retelling weakens her case unnecessarily. This episode makes it far too easy, I think, to wonder what the issue even is. I’m rereading the Babe.net article about Aziz Ansari, which this episode is obviously about, and there are some pretty striking omissions from the TGF version. In the account reported to Babe, Aziz is much more persistent than “Oh, are you really going to leave now?” and doesn’t give “Grace” clear opportunities to leave. He repeatedly moves her hand towards his penis (not just once while they’re making out) even after she pulls away. He follows her around the apartment and keeps making advances. When she says they can have sex “next time” he pours her another glass of wine and calls it their second date. She flat out says to him that she “doesn’t want to feel forced.” And he tries it again. And again. There’s also the weird fingers-in-throat-porn move.

What I’m saying is that the original situation is gray enough. It doesn’t need to be diluted even more. People already have a hard time buying Grace’s story as sexual misconduct rather than a bad date. Why remove all of the most troubling parts? The parts that best illustrate that this is about rape culture, not just rape? I’m reminded of Jill Filipovic’s opinion piece in The Guardian, which argues that Babe.net’s reporting was an issue with the Ansari story, because “instead of telling this particular story with the care it called for, it was jammed into a pre-existing movement grounded in the language of assault and illegality.” She continues: “As a result, we’re arguing about whether Aziz Ansari is a sexual assailant, and missing the more relevant conversation about sex, male entitlement and misogyny in the bedroom.” Sadly, The Good Fight misses out on this more relevant conversation, too.

(Ron thinks Emily is going to the bathroom to put in a diaphragm. Feels a bit outdated to me, but maybe not?)

The issue that’s brought all of these people to RBL is the blog “Assholes to Avoid” which appears to be the Shitty Media Men list but in blog form. I understand combining these two stories so there can be a legal case, but it feels like the show is conflating actual whisper networks (the Shitty Media Men list was a Google doc, not a blog) with an unknown news outlet sensationalizing a story for clicks. Both are controversial, but only one was meant for public consumption.

According to the Assholes to Avoid home page, you are not supposed to send the site to any men.

I have no issues with Emily’s explanation for putting her story on Assholes to Avoid: she wants to warn other women so they don’t have the same experience.

But Ron was fired (meaning he was penalized more than Ansari, whose face, gallingly, was still on my goddamn Netflix home page the day after the article ran) so now he’s suing the blog! He wants an apology and for Emily to make it clear it’s not true. Um, dude, I don’t think a LAWSUIT is the way to get her to do that. He has now tracked her down (because I assume she made the posting anonymously), forced her to relive a traumatic experience, and put a resource that has potentially helped many, many women avoid dangerous situations in jeopardy. And HE wants an apology from HER? He would’ve had a better chance if he’d just asked her to clarify that non-consensual oral whatever did not mean rape.

“How many male lawyers are at this firm?” Alma asks as she’s leaving negotiations. Liz doesn’t know. Alma continues that she finds it odd that “at a firm with 60% men, a female partner and a female associate have graced us with their presence.” You know what I find odd? That a firm with Diane Lockhart’s name on the letterhead—and, I would guess, Liz Reddick’s name—would take on this case. Does RBL have an identity? Or do they just take whatever cases seem like money and then not question them? (I’m still a little peeved about the fact that “being a defense attorney” on this show seems to mean the inability to ever make choices based on anything other than money.)

“I guess we can turn this into a gender thing,” Liz says. Oh please. Like it was actually unintentional that there were two women assigned to the case. As sure as I know that this show believes defense attorneys are amoral-because-pragmatism, I know that this show believes that lawyers always, always, always think about the optics.

“We can’t win this one. We need to let it go,” Liz tells Adrian, who is still in the hospital. Thank you. Adrian, condescending as ever, asks if this is about gender politics. SO FUCKING WHAT IF IT IS? SO WHAT IF IT IS ABOUT WOMEN NOT WANTING TO BE THE ONES ARGUING AGAINST SOMETHING THAT COULD, I DUNNO, GIVE A YOUNG LAW STUDENT A HEADS UP ABOUT HER STARFUCKING PROFESSOR? Adrian asks this like “gender politics” are silly, some kindergarten boys vs girls battle. Feminism is not silly.

“There is no defamation,” Diane says. Adrian says okay. He wants to be helpful, so he offers to reach out to Bishop and Sweeney or to help with the merger. Diane and Liz are like, “we got it” and that makes Adrian feel useless. “Waltzer went after our clients, so we went after his,” they explain. “What are you two, the Mafia?” Adrian asks disapprovingly, even though he would’ve done the same damn thing if it had been his call. “I didn’t approve of that,” he continues. I will excuse this only because I can understand someone who was just shot and nearly killed feeling like he isn’t needed and being frightened by that notion.

Marissa and Jay then present suspects for the shooter. They include Felix Staples even though they literally just said he had an airtight alibi. I know it’s too much to ask for consistency on timelines or Lucca’s pregnancy, but can we at least get consistency within an episode?

Adrian thinks it’s the neo-Nazi.

Liz casually mentions that the police had their client list and Adrian—TOTALLY understandably this time—freaks.

As soon as his visitors leave, Adrian gets on the phone with the litigation financiers and tells them to make a move if they don’t want the case against Assholes to move to a different firm. Dude, I know you want some power over your life but can you please find a way of asserting power that is productive and does not involve assisting rapists? (No, Ron isn’t a rapist. But if this goes public? Women would be afraid to share their stories, lest they be deanonymized and brought into a lawsuit. And those women might have stories about rapists.)

I find debate over the methods and the specific interpretations of the events interesting. I can see how there is room for debate there. Could Ron have misinterpreted Emily’s actions? Maybe. Could he have understood them but not understood that no means no, because so often in the media “no” means “just try again and then you’ll get the girl”? Sure. Are there reasons a public site like Assholes might cause more trouble than it prevents? Debatable. But Adrian is not debating anything, which is why I’m being tough on him. This isn’t a conversation. He is taking actions that have consequences when he could be recovering or doing something productive.

(I feel like I need to bring out the old “understandable =/= justified” line here because I am not criticizing the writing of Adrian. I believe that he’d do this shit. I just don’t think it’s okay.)

Jay and Marissa go to the police with their leads, and the police are being useless.

Back at the firm, Diane’s accountant Anthony Rapp is waiting for her. And also Diane rehires Jay “with a 10% raise.” “Liz and I approve. It’s done,” Diane says. Awww, Diane got her female-led firm. Kinda.

(My roommate and I got to 5x17 in our rewatch yesterday and she’s excited about the possibility of a Diane/Alicia firm. I’m not spoiling her, but I have so many thoughts about that partnership.)

(I think where I was going with that is that the Diane/Liz partnership makes way more sense to me than Diane/Alicia ever did, at least after I really thought about it.)

Marissa takes this as an opportunity to ask for a raise. Diane ignores her. Marissa’s stepping right into Kalinda’s boots, isn’t she?

Oh hey Lucca!!! Lucca’s on the phone with Colin. They’re on opposite sides of something, again. “OW!” she says loudly in the middle of the conversation. Whether it’s fake pain or real pain, she’s using it strategically. Maia rushes over and helps her. (And by helps her, I mean she helps her stand up and she helps her trick Colin. Again, Maia’s only strength seems to be tricking people via phone.)

As Maia and Lucca talk about how many weeks Lucca has left (four!) (but we all know it’s going to be two so she can go into labor in the finale, but also timeline lol), Colin RUNS down the stairs and into Lucca’s office. She’s shocked to see him. He explains that he was in the elevator. “You’re just fucking with me, aren’t you!?” he exclaims. Maia excuses herself from the argument, taking Lucca’s shoes with her. She doubles back once she realizes she still has the shoes, then leaves again. I wonder if that was scripted or if Rose just forgot to put down the prop.

The litigation financiers tell Diane, Liz, and Julius to keep the depositions going. The financiers are willing to put $2.1 mil behind this case because of a class action in the works.

When Diane says the name of the site, Jer winces because he doesn’t like swearing. “Well, neither do I, but that’s its name,” Diane says. Please, Diane. You fucking love to swear.

“This is Adrian. I know him. He is bedridden, and he’s trying to assert himself,” Liz says, correctly. Julius is tempted by the money. Diane is on the fence.

Lucca’s four weeks from giving birth and she and Colin are just now having a discussion—during the work day, of course—about how they’re going to raise the baby.

You know what I don’t understand about this Colin-wants-Lucca-to-move-to-D.C. plot? Isn’t it typical for congresspeople to keep their primary residence at home, where their constituents are? Even if just for optics?

Also ffs, Colin, Lucca is not uprooting her life because of your career. And unless we are doing season three of TGF in D.C., I’m gonna need Lucca to stay in Chicago.

“This law firm takes you for granted, and you know it,” Colin tells Lucca. Last season I wouldn’t have agreed with that, but this season, yeah, I see it.

“In D.C., you will be the significant other of a Congressman,” Colin says. I mean she would also be that in Chicago, and she already resides in his district.

“Am I broke again?” Diane worries when she meets with Accountant Anthony Rapp. I think his name on the show is Glenn. That is easier to type. “A year and a half ago you were,” he replies. “Oh, I know. I remember that meeting,” Diane responds. Hee. Apparently Diane is now “whole.” She made her money back—all of it!!!—and can now retire and buy her house in France and all of that. Glenn attributes this to Diane not losing as much as they thought (um, how), smart investments, and Diane saving money. And also Trump. I do not buy it for a second. You do not go from losing everything to being where you were after 40 years of work in one and a half years. That is silly.

Can I take another moment to mourn the Diane bankruptcy arc that never was? The writers could’ve and should’ve done so much more with that last season, and now it’s gone.

Kurt’s accountant (Diane is surprised such a person exists) has contacted Diane’s accountant, and the accountants have decided that it’s time for Diane and Kurt to make a decision about divorcing or not divorcing because finances. So… “I won’t be that woman” just means “this particular argument is over let’s go back to marriage limbo like I’m Alicia Florrick”? Coolcoolcool.

“Isn’t that what you want?” the accountant asks Diane when she seems surprised to hear the word divorce. What DOES Diane want? I don’t think Diane knows. (“I don’t know,” is Diane’s next line, as a matter of fact.)

A dude puts a swastika on Marissa’s latte, at her request, idk, it’s weird and kind of amusing. It’s also an effective ploy.

Diane phones Kurt and gets his voicemail. “I wouldn’t mind getting a drink tonight,” she says casually. She’s also unwrapping an aikido robe (is that the right terminology).

On her computer, there’s a story about Trump signing an order allowing “the planting of firecrackers in the rectums of grizzly bears.” This is not a hallucination—and that’s the best (and most affecting) part. The absurd stories could easily be true. Speaking of, did anyone else see @Poniewozik’s tweet? This week there was a very similar story… but in reality.

OMG CAN I RANT FOR A MINUTE ABOUT A DIFFERENT CRITIC ON TWITTER WHO KEEPS INSISTING THAT TGF HANDLES SOCIAL ISSUES WELL WHILE TGW NEVER DID? The Debate was one episode. Yes, TGF is doing a fantastic job capturing the absurdity of the Trump era. But this was TGW’s wheelhouse too. I think I will rant about this more in my 2x12 comments. It bothers me that he keeps saying (he’s tweeted it like three times now) TGW failed at this when being timely and topical was always one of the things critics acknowledged as one of the show’s strengths.

The neo-Nazi didn’t shoot Adrian either! Now Jay and Marissa think it’s time to work with the police. Marissa volunteers to look through case files, but Diane pulls her onto the Assholes to Avoid case. “I thought we were dropping that,” Marissa responds. “We got an injection of cash,” Liz explains. “Seriously? Don’t we hate this?” Marissa questions. (Good question. And nice use of “we” even though you’re a newly minted investigator talking to two name partners.)

“I wouldn’t say hate. We’re obligated,” Diane says. Ohhh yes this is a new pet peeve. Y’all are not obligated. You were not assigned this case. You chose to take it for the money.

Liz asks Marissa to look into Emily’s past dates. “So we’re blaming the victim?” Marissa rephrases.

“Why do you think she’s the victim? What about him?” Jay chimes in, unhelpfully. “Oh my God, seriously?” Marissa responds. I feel that, even as weird as this specific case they’re debating seems to be. I’m just pretending it’s the Aziz story because it’s so obviously meant to be.

Anyway this devolves quickly into Marissa and Jay fighting about consent. I believe it from Marissa—tbh I’d be shocked if she behaved any other way—but Jay is more of a stretch. I totally believe him taking the guy’s side but I don’t really see him picking a fight with Marissa in front of the partners.

“Marissa. Can you do this, or should I give it to Jay?” Diane interrupts sternly. “No, I can do it. I just can’t turn my opinions off as I do,” Marissa replies.

“What do you think about this?” Liz asks Diane after Marissa and Jay leave. “I think there’s gonna be a lot of strong opinions there,” Diane responds. I don’t get why this firm still has this case. Is $2.1 million really enough to get Diane and Liz to go against their principles (or at least what I thought were Diane’s principles), put RBL on record as the law firm that went after Assholes to Avoid, AND cause internal chaos?

It’s not like RBL isn’t doing well. DIANE JUST MADE BACK ALL HER MONEY, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. And the sketchy settlement a few weeks back—you know, the one the firm just had to take even though it kept corrupt cops on the force—gave them millions. If RBL is going to be LG, can they at least own it?

“We represent murderers and embezzlers but it’s always this stuff,” Liz says. Fair point.

“It was a bad date, that’s all,” Maia says to Marissa over coffee on the 22nd floor. Oh, Maia. I wish I could say I was surprised that Maia feels this way, but Maia holding this opinion is… consistent with pretty much everything about Maia. If Maia started quoting feminist writers, honestly, I’d be shocked. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Maia doesn’t seem like the type to question anything, especially not power structures or systems of any kind.

Anyway, Maia and Marissa’s conversation devolves into an argument among several lawyers, including some dude who calls warning other women against dating an asshole “revenge porn.” I know this is just an escalating nonsense argument but DUDE. DUUUUUUUDE. Revenge porn is posting private nude photos of someone you were once intimate with for the world to see specifically to hurt them. This? Is not that.

“It looks like she was trying to punish him because she was disappointed in herself,” Maia chimes in. Save it for the depositions, Maia. How the fuck did you get that?

Wasn’t there a Maia revenge porn plot last year? I can’t decide if I think it would make her more or less sympathetic to Emily. On the one hand, she’s been in a similar spot to Ron and could see him as a victim. On the other hand, what Maia did—literally just exist and date someone who wasn’t her asshole ex—is nothing like what Ron did (something beyond just existing), and what asshole ex did (revenge porn) is not really like what Emily did (an anonymous comment shared with a network meant for other women), so I could see her having a hard time empathizing with Ron, too. Oh, Maia.

“No, she’s disappointed in the whole fucked up dating scene where guys think they can get away with anything,” Marissa counters. And that’s the closest we come to discussing rape culture (again, that’s the thing this ep needs to be discussing). “He’s not getting away with anything. He can’t get a job,” the dude who was talking about revenge porn says. YEAH. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT. Women are sick of guys getting away with anything so they are coming together to say that no, men cannot get away with anything. That no, it is not acceptable to ignore verbal and non-verbal cues and signs of discomfort on a date. That no, you should not continue to pursue someone after she’s told you “no.” And so on.

Also: part of the point is that these lines shouldn’t be so blurred. Emily shouldn’t be afraid of losing her job if she rejects Ron’s advances. The way society thinks about “bad dates” is a huge part of the problem. A guy being too pushy is not a one-off “bad date.” That guy is probably being pushy because he’s been taught—by society, by the media—that guys are supposed to be pushy. THAT is a large part of what needs to change.

This is a bit tangential, but how many women, over the years, have lost out on jobs because men told each other the women in question were “bitches” or “crazy” or “cold” (in addition, of course, to flat-out misogyny and discrimination against mothers and all the various other reasons men with hiring power might not hire women)? Probably a lot, since it doesn’t take much for a woman to get slapped with one of those labels. I dunno if this is relevant here, but if we’re going to talk about men losing their jobs because women shared their experiences, it feels like we should also talk about how accepted it’s been for women to lose out on jobs because of men sharing their experiences. This is what I mean about structures being the core issue here. I don’t know what that means for this lawsuit, but I do know I am not a fan of anything that upholds sexist structures. And if Assholes to Avoid wins this lawsuit, that’s exactly what’ll happen. I mean, we know there’s a class action in the works. Taking on this case and fighting for Ron, against the website (not Emily!)? That’s not just about what Ron did or didn’t do. That’s about fighting to keep a system in place.

Liz goes to talk to Ian at the police station. She wants to know why the police think Adrian’s shooter was black when Adrian identified him as white.

Is dumpster a proper noun? I have come across three separate works (two books and the captions on this show) in the last two weeks that have capitalized it. Apparently Dumpster is a brand name and thus a proper noun.

Now Adrian’s doubting his recollection. Maybe the shooter was black.

Hey, Adrian and Jay are friendly again!!!! Yay!!!

Liz brings Adrian dinner (possibly not actually dinner but rather a cupcake? Or a parfait with whipped cream on it?) and they both lick frosting or whipped cream or whatever off their fingers it’s cute unfortunately this scene then turns into a debate about #MeToo and Adrian is very very wrong.

“How’s the Assholes case coming?” Adrian asks. “You really boxed us in on that one, didn’t you?” Liz responds. Didn’t you decide to take the money? But point taken. “Not intentionally,” Adrian says. What part of calling the litigation financiers so the case doesn’t get dropped was unintentional?

The litigation dudes are named TOM AND JERRY? Why didn’t I remember this?

“Maybe #MeToo has gone too far, Liz,” Adrian suggests. Nah.

“I think good causes start out being good and end up becoming mobs,” Adrian explains. He does not, however, explain in what way #MeToo has become a mob. “Like Black Lives Matter?” Liz counters. “No. I don’t understand,” Adrian replies.

“Women join together, and all of a sudden, men all over the world are worried about mobs or witch hunts, but you don’t have the same worry about Black Lives Matter hurting white people’s reputations,” Liz explains. Pretty solid point. (Would also like to add that I saw a lot of people complaining that #MeToo would become a witch hunt after the Babe article… but I saw much less, um, you know, witch hunting.)

“Liz. It was a bad date. Anybody could have a bad date,” Adrian deflects.

“Yeah. But we’re not just stopping at the date. Now we’re trying to destroy the website,” Liz points out. (Yep.)

“A website that destroys reputations,” Adrian counters. “Of men,” Liz adds.

“Don’t make me out to be some kind of cartoon male chauvinist,” Adrian accuses. Liz is doing nothing of the sort, Adrian. She is pointing out that you’re behaving like all the other well-meaning men who perpetuate a system that sees a man’s reputation as more important than a woman’s thoughts and feelings.

And then the argument cuts out. This episode’s point seems to be that this is a contentious topic that people love to debate and can’t agree on, but does it have anything more to say? (I know I obviously have strong views about this, but I’m not really sure why the writers chose to do an episode on this and ended up basically just saying that people disagree. How… important.)

Marissa’s interviewing other people who dated Emily, and another guy has a similar story (he also seems like he’s suggesting that if he buys a girl dinner she should fuck him). Marissa dismisses it as “bullshit gossip” when she relays the info to Maia. “She just seems normal,” Marissa says.

Jay has found another potential suspect!

Diane is back in the aikido class! I am intrigued but have very little to say!

Diane showers and then heads to a bar to meet Kurt. I like that her hair is wet during this scene—it conveys how comfortable she is around Kurt.

Kurt says “sorry about your partner” and Diane doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He means Adrian, and since Adrian is fine, Diane is fine. Funny how Diane’s been paranoid all season when she wasn’t being targeted and now her firm’s being targeted and she’s fine.

“So. Um. You want a divorce,” Diane begins the hard part of the conversation. “What?” Kurt replies. Diane repeats the information from the accountants.

“What do you want?” Kurt asks Diane. “Kurt. We see each other, what, thirty days out of the year?” Diane replies. “We’re both working,” Kurt says. “I know, but that doesn’t make for a marriage, so if you want a divorce, I’m fine,” Diane says. I don’t know how to read this. The first time through I was annoyed that Diane’s position is that it’s up to Kurt when Kurt is the one who cheated. But now I’m wondering if this line is actually Diane stating what she wants from their relationship: a marriage where they actually see each other regularly and support each other. I can see how the physical distance between them could lead Kurt to cheat (though I don’t think it’s a valid excuse), too.

Kurt asks if this is about Tully. I guess he knows about Tully now. Good. Diane says it’s not about Tully, “it’s about what you want.” But what does Diane want? Even if Diane is subtlety requesting that Kurt move to Chicago so they can live together full-time, she’s not saying whether or not she forgives Kurt (I guess the forgiveness is implicit?) or talking about the challenges they’ve faced. I do not understand why this is about what Kurt wants. Would Diane just go along with whatever? If Kurt came back and said, “I want to live in the middle of nowhere and fuck pretty young blondes while you live here and remain my wife” would Diane go along? Or does she think that giving Kurt space and choices is the best approach, knowing that if he makes a decision she doesn’t like, she’ll leave?

Kurt, wisely, replies: “Diane… I’ve been trying the past year to make things up to you, to… I’ve been a prisoner on probation. I’m tired.” “Kurt, that’s the most you’ve talked about it in two years,” Diane replies. Awwww, talking! “I’m not a big talker,” he replies. “Uh, I know. But I need you to be. I need you to tell me what it is you want. And if it is a divorce, then I understand, and if it’s not…” she says. “I’ve been telling you…” he starts to say, but Diane interrupts. “No, you’ve been telling me that we should spend the weekend together, that I should come to your cabin.” “That we should move in together,” Kurt adds. “As roommates. I’m too old to be a roommate, so if we’re divorcing, well, let’s just do that. I’ve spent too much of the last year drifting, letting events happen to me, and I’m not gonna do that anymore,” Diane says. “Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow. […] Because you want a real answer,” Kurt says as he leaves the bar.

As always with D/K scenes, I am not sure I understand what they’re talking about (Kurt’s felt like a prisoner on probation? Why? What Kurt wants is the most important thing? Diane has been drifting and wants to stop and wants a decision, but that decision is Kurt’s? Kurt wants Diane to be his roommate? Huh?) but I love that they’re talking. This reminds me of those Alicia/Peter scenes not in content but in the way that the writers had a knack for screwing up the build-up and then absolutely nailing the conversation, even if it came years too late.

A Mr. Rose is at the firm to see Lucca. “You are pregnant,” he informs her. “No, no, just fat,” Lucca snarks. He is a headhunter out of D.C., and he wants to find Lucca a job. “Colin called you?” Lucca asks. She also says she’s not moving. Mr. Rose gives her job offers from five firms. Damn, Lucca. I know she’s getting most of these offers because of her political ties, but just think: three years ago she was a bar attorney. (The more Lucca’s situation parallels Alicia’s the more I want Lucca to talk to Alicia. And y’all know I already wanted that badly.)

Lucca is walking around the office barefoot. Alright. I have not ever seen any of the pregnant employees at my office walk around barefoot, and my office is super casual, but OK, writers.

Lucca calls Colin, angry. But Colin didn’t call Mr. Rose. His mom did—or at least that’s what Lucca and Colin suspect. Guys, this sounds just like every conversation Eli ever had about Jackie Florrick.

Now a woman named Gretchen, who is supposed to be Moira Donegan but also supposed to be the Babe writer who sent that tirade to a reporter about “second wave feminism,” is in depositions. That’s a weird hybrid. She say the goal of her site is to get men to realize their behavior will no longer go “unnoticed and unremarked.”

“So your blog is about scaring men?” Liz twists her words.

“Look, this is not a man-hating site, Diane,” Gretchen says suddenly. “I didn’t say a word,” Diane says. “You didn’t have to. You’re representing the people suing us,” Gretchen says. Fair.

“So we should all just march behind you, right? Because only you know what’s best for all women?” Diane replies, weirdly. Gretchen may be a little arrogant—and, as she makes clear with her next line, she actually does believe she knows more than “second wave feminist” Diane—but I have a hard time hearing this line from Diane. I don’t have a hard time believing it, necessarily, I just think it’s unnecessarily harsh and it feels like the main reason Diane is being so confrontational is that Gretchen just named her personally.

“I know more than you second-wave feminists. You just want to get along now. Don’t hurt the men, they might hurt us back. You have made the way for the next generation. For us. Thank you. Now you can take a rest,” Gretchen continues. Nah. I don’t think that’s how it works.

Gretchen also accuses Diane and her generation of enabling Weinstein and Charlie Rose (who guest starred on TGW, for anyone who forgot!)

“You know your problem? You’re too busy name-calling to realize how much we agree with you,” Diane replies. “And you’re too confident of your feminist credentials to realize we don’t need you,” Gretchen counters. Please make this scene stop. I don’t know what the point of it is, except to make Diane look good by making Gretchen insufferable and ageist???

(That’s not to say this isn’t true to life—the writer at Babe basically said the same thing—but rather to say that I think the writers could have used this screentime to do something more interesting.)

Another woman shares her experience of her date with Ron. She says he was pushy, overeager, tried a move on her he’d seen in porn, and tried to use force (nice of the writers to mention this in passing at the 37 minute mark when they could have made these points in the flashbacks we had to watch.)

Now Maia gets to question! She asks this woman why she didn’t go on Assholes to Avoid. “If I wrote about every date that ended like that, there wouldn’t be any guys left,” she explains. That’s depressing!

But this woman also doesn’t blame Emily for writing about her experience—they just made different choices. Exactly.

Maia shares Marissa’s research (the research Marissa told her to dismiss, the research that obviously was not going to be dismissed because… I’ve seen this show) with Liz and Diane, then questions Emily about it.

Marissa’s suddenly in the room for this, and she’s disgusted. “I thought we agreed it was bullshit gossip,” Marissa accuses. Maia says she’s just doing her job. She is, and Marissa should know that.

Maia also says she’s “trying to show that there’s another side to the issue.” Sigh.

“You talked the same way about you and Amy. To me. You said that Amy was paranoid about you and Carine, that she was crazy,” Marissa fumes. OH GOODIE. Important conversations happened offscreen and Maia ranted about her gf being paranoid when Maia actually cheated. You have a Maia problem, show. If Maia were just unlikable, I could deal with that—I find unlikable protagonists fascinating. But Maia is unlikable, unintelligent, and boring all at the same time! Apart from her friendships with Marissa and Lucca and the dynamic she has with Diane (or supposedly has, since it’s never on screen), I don’t have a reason to care about Maia. And all the reasons I just listed? I’m sure this will come as a surprise, but I care about the Marissa, Lucca, and Diane halves of those relationships infinitely more than the Maia half.

“So when I’m being deposed, maybe they can use that against me,” Maia responds. Careful, Maia. You might not know it, but we know you were caught on camera…

Liz and Jay go to Ian with their new suspect, and then they find out that Detective Whitehead (the corrupt cop!) is highly involved in the investigation, and BAM, they instantly realize he’s guilty and he’s arrested on the spot! Alright. (I was obviously very invested in figuring out who did it…)

Diane is at another aikido class!

Split screen phone calls remind me of Lizzie McGuire so they feel weird on TGF.

Also, there are a few shots that were clearly filmed to be split-screened (exactly half of the frame contains nothing of interest, like on texting scenes on Jane the Virgin before the texts pop up on screen) and it bothers me.

The entire 22nd floor begins to argue about sexual harassment.

Lucca finds Rod Habercore (from 2x01!) in her office. He offers her a job! And then Lucca sets off the singing dog that’s still in her desk drawer! Heh.

Lucca asks if Colin sent him. He didn’t—he just knows others are after her. Lucca smiles after he leaves. The only reason I want Lucca to stay at RBL right now is that the show is at RBL.

So wait, Ron is suing Emily and the website?

Diane, Liz, and Maia choose this moment—as Emily and Gretchen are deciding whether or not to settle—to question their litigation financiers and what they’re actually doing here. A little late.

Diane is practicing aikido moves in her office. I love that Diane found a new activity that makes her happy!

Gretchen shows up at her office door. “My guess is you’ve never thought of yourself as a traitor,” she opens. “Is that a question?” “What do you think?” “No, I have never thought of myself as a traitor,” Diane responds. “I’m closing Assholes to Avoid. So, thanks a lot,” Gretchen reveals. “You’re welcome,” Diane says. “You know why this happened? Because we were adding one of your litigation financiers to our list. Jerry. Asshole to Avoid. And you did his dirty work. You closed us down,” Gretchen explains. (Wow, who would ever have thought…)

“You know what your problem is? Women aren’t just one thing. And you don’t get to determine what we are. Next time, hire a lawyer and do your list right,” Diane replies. Am I supposed to be cheering Diane on? If this scene is meant to show that a woman who is fighting against sexual harassment can also be arrogant and ageist, while a woman who can champion feminism can also side with men who harass women because she wants to make a profit, then I like this scene. Diane is right: women aren’t just one thing. But why does Diane get to be right? (And I think this scene, if it wanted to frame Diane as being right-yet-wrong, could’ve done a much better job of making that point.) How is Assholes to Avoid, as a site, saying that women are just one thing? Is it? And Diane hints that there is a legal way to create a list of assholes to avoid—now that’s interesting! Why didn’t we hear more about that? What is a way to make a site like this that doesn’t wind up with a defamation suit? No judge ruled that she committed a crime (this was a civil case!) and the only reason she settled was that she would’ve gone broke if she opened herself up to further lawsuits. I’m genuinely curious: what actions does Diane think she could’ve taken here that would’ve prevented this outcome?

When I watched this scene, I definitely saw it as a triumphant moment for Diane. Rewatching it, it feels less triumphant and more fraught. I am trying to imagine the scene I would’ve wanted instead, and I wouldn’t want something clean (these issues are complex), I wouldn’t want something unearned and out of character (like Diane dismissing Gretchen and then donating money to a charity), and I wouldn’t want something too didactic. Now I’m wondering if the problem is that Gretchen is written as being so unreasonable and aggressive while Diane is a familiar face, so the scene comes across like Gretchen is a villain and Diane put her in her place.

Diane watches Tom and Jerry high five, so I do think we’re meant to question her actions.

Kurt appears! “I like seeing that side of you,” he says. “I like showing that side,” Diane replies. “So where are we, Kurt?” “I have my real answer,” Kurt says. And his answer is that “we haven’t tried being married. We’ve tried balancing career and marriage, and we can’t. I’m getting a job with the FBI in Chicago. It means not traveling. It means staying here. I’m asking that you sell your apartment and we look together for a larger place and we move in permanently together. We stop pretending that we can do this part time. And we live together until we die,” Kurt says. SOUNDS GOOD! I love it when characters have conversations. And this sounds like what Diane and Kurt both want.

I would like a little more closure on the Holly of it all, but I’m also fine without it since I don’t really believe that Kurt cheated and I’m totally fine acting like the only issue is that Kurt and Diane were too distant from each other to make each other happy.

Diane then asks Kurt if he voted for Trump. He didn’t (yay!). Diane give him a huge hug. “I wrote in Ted Cruz,” Kurt explains. Heh. That’s not much better, but I’ll take it.

Adrian’s out of the hospital!!! Everyone welcomes him back to the firm. Maia is front and center. Why? Marissa I would understand, but Maia? Front and center?

Adrian announces that the firm is a family. (No, it’s not, but I’ll say awwww anyway.)

#the good fight #tgfthoughts

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pjtomyduncan · 6 years

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The Guardian | 20 March 2018 | Sam Wolfson

They work together, holiday together, even live on the same street – a duo, a twosome, that have outlasted all the defining partnerships of our age: Charles and Diana, Liam and Noel, even LMFAO.

Now for the first time in their near three-decade-long careers, they are stranded from one another. On Sunday, Anthony McPartlin was involved in a car collision and arrested on suspicion of drink driving leaving Declan Donnelly reportedly “devastated” at his best friend’s condition.

Even before the road incident, Ant McPartlin had had a desperately trying 12 months. In June, he checked himself into rehab for addiction to drink and painkillers. He said he started self-medicating after dealing with depression and chronic knee pain, telling the Sun on Sunday he was bingeing morphine and Tramadol “to the point of psychosis”. After a two-month stint in rehab he returned to host I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and seemed to have made a rehabilitation. Then in January, he announced he was splitting from Lisa, his wife of 11 years and childhood sweetheart.

Many wondered whether he would be able to return to TV so soon after the divorce and in the midst of recovery. I’m a Celebrity … mostly involves presenting links from behind a table, but with a series of ITV’s Saturday Night Takeaway lined up for February, McPartlin would be expected to prance around in dresses, perform dangerous live stunts and land gag after gag. Is it possible to be a light entertainer when life has become dark?

On the first show of the series he was unflappable: racing monster trucks with Donnelly and dressing up in the slinky white dress from Can’t Get You Out of My Head to dance with Kylie Minogue. There was no sign that anything was up.

Still, McPartlin’s strong performance did not stop tabloids running stories suggesting that the show was a disaster. The Mirror and Mail Online ran full stories about viewers’ concern for McPartlin’s wellbeing, both based on a single tweet by a random viewer who said he “doesn’t look right”. The Mirror ran a long headline “What a difference a year makes! ... The collapse of his marriage – coupled with his former addiction issues – have clearly taken their toll.” The story then positioned a professional studio photo of McPartlin in 2017 next to a low-res screengrab of him in 2018 to illustrate his supposed fall from grace. The death of Amy Winehouse was meant to have prompted media soul-searching as to how the press should treat recovering addicts – but it seems as if very little had changed.

From the viewers’ perspective, at least, things seemed to be back on track. McPartlin managed a further three episodes with no noticeable issues. Then, on Sunday afternoon, McPartlin was involved in a collision as he was driving home in his Mini Cooper in Richmond. After the incident, he failed a police breathalyser test and was arrested, before being released under investigation on Monday. ITV quickly announced that this week’s episode of Saturday Night Takeaway would be cancelled. The rest of the series is under review, but McPartlin will definitely not be in any episodes as he returns to rehab.

ITV bosses would be the first to say that McPartlin’s health is their priority, but they must be seriously concerned about the jeopardy this puts them in. Ant & Dec have been the most prominent faces on the network for over a decade – graduating from the critically acclaimed Saturday-morning show SMTV Live to host Pop Idol in 2001. Since then they have been the faces of almost every entertainment format the channel has tried: when the Saturday Night Takeaway series is over, Britain’s Got Talent, also hosted by the duo and normally the channel’s biggest show of the year, begins. They will have already recorded links for the early rounds of the show, but will it be in poor taste to broadcast them if McPartlin is unable to host the latter stages? The pair have always said they would never want to work without the other, so it seems likely that they will both disappear from our screens for a while, taking their first hiatus ever.

You might think it won’t be that difficult to find replacement hosts. But compare them with their nearest competitors – the 1,000-mile stare of Tess Daly as she tries to remember what excitement felt like, the rambling dissociative patter of Alexander Armstrong as he says “Thank you very much indeed” for the 562nd time in a 45-minute episode of Pointless – and Ant & Dec are in a different league, the De Niro and Pacino of Saturday nights. To see their magic, just look at the one who is not talking, always working twice as hard as the one who is; they have a reactive, emotional rhythm that has not been bettered. Perhaps a fair comparison would be the likes of David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon, but they host their shows for a relatively small late-night audience of cool kids; Ant & Dec manage the same shtick while taking Mum and Grandad along for the ride

Saturday Night Takeaway, in particular, is a greatly misunderstood show. Thought of as mainstream fodder, it’s actually an innovative, formatless show that pushes the boundaries of shiny-floor live TV. In the one episode of this series, for example, they did a bit called Games of Phones in which they took the phones from everyone in the studio audience and then told viewers that if they knew someone in the studio they should ring them. Suddenly hundreds of phones started to ring as Scarlett Moffatt tried to plug them in and identify which audience member they knew so the caller and receiver could split a grand.

In this series, they had organised a chartered plane to take hundreds of competition winners for a week-long stay at the Universal theme park in Orlando. They would dish out tickets through various means (they surprised three people who lived equidistant from the studio and made them race there while the show was live – the first person to arrive won) with a plan to film the final episode of the series from there.

Yet for all their patter and warmth, the pair have never found a register to talk about something as complex and unhappy as addiction or depression. They only know pure joy, or a sob story that quickly becomes pure joy. They have not done too many tell-all interviews; one of the most memorable was a 2013 episode of Desert Island Discs in which they said that the hardest moment of their careers was when they were wrapped up in the TV competitions scandal – people who were not entered into prize draws but still charged for their calls. A blip in their nice-guy act, perhaps, but realistically nothing compared with the current challenge.

During that same interview, they said the problem with making live entertainment TV is that you’re only as good as your last show. Once you are off the box, you are forgotten; a Michael Barrymore or a Matthew Kelly. They said they wanted to make a scripted comedy at some point, so they would leave behind something for the comedy canon.

But now they have been presented with a different opportunity to be remembered, and to do something they have never done before: drop the act. Who could be more important ambassadors for mental health than two people whose public personas are relentlessly chirpy. It won’t be easy. However bad your mental health, drink-driving – if McPartlin is found guilty – is not something that can be easily forgiven. But if they can find a way to work depression and recovery into Saturday nights, they could leave a legacy far more profound than a dodgy ITV sitcom.

#ant and dec #ant mcpartlin #dec donnelly #press #the guardian #mine #20march2018 #i know lots of people saw this already #but i thought i'd share #it's a very positive take on things! :)#give it some clicks #show appreciation for actual journalism #instead of the tabloid bullshit #!#here's something completely irrelevant: i laughed waaay too hard at the alexander armstrong joke :)

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cromulentbookreview · 4 years

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Binge! Part 2: The Re-Binging

I’m often put off by long book series - considering how often I complain about being suckered into the first book of a series, this isn’t surprising. However, sometimes I’m willing to put in the time to binge a whole series.

Like, for example, the Barker & Llewelyn series by Will Thomas.

So I binge-read the first 10 books of this series (well, 10.5, there’s a novella called An Awkward Way to Die ) in one long, dizzying binge last year. And, lucky for me, there’s a new book out: Lethal Pursuit! Pretty much exactly one year from the release of Blood is Blood!

But! If you haven’t read the first 10.5 books, here’s a review:

BOOK 1 - Some Danger Involved: Your average detective enquiry agent-duo origin story featuring brilliant detective and his new snarky Welsh sidekick!

BOOK 2 - To Kingdom Come: Barker & Llewelyn go undercover and build bombs for the Irish!

BOOK 3 - The Limehouse Text: Barker & Llewelyn face big trouble in London’s 19th Century Chinatown!

BOOK 4 - The Hellfire Conspiracy: Barker & Llewelyn fight human traffickers, secret societies and such!

BOOK 5 - The Black Hand: Barker & Llewelyn fight the Italian mafia!

BOOK 6 - Fatal Enquiry: Barker & Llewelyn fight Barker’s almost comically evil arch-nemesis!

BOOK 7 - Anatomy of Evil: Barker & Llewelyn fight Jack the Ripper!

BOOK 8 - Hell Bay: Barker & Llewelyn Present: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None!

BOOK 8.5 - An Awkward Way to Die: Barker & Llewelyn solve a case in, like, 20 minutes!

BOOK 9 - Old Scores: Barker & Llewelyn Present: Japonism in Late-19th Century England!

BOOK 10 - Blood is Blood: Barker is put temporarily out of commission by an explosion! Llewelyn must solve the case himself! Who should show up to help but Barker’s long lost brother??

BOOK 11 - Lethal Pursuit: Barker and Llewelyn are hired by the Prime Minister himself to transport an ancient manuscript to Calais. Sounds easy enough! Except Barker seems more interested in investigating the death of the man who brought the manuscript to England in the first place…

So! Lethal Pursuit! It begins with Hillary Drummond, recently arrived to England from Germany (somewhat newly united! Kind of!) he’s on the run from some blue uniformed youths after the satchel he’s carrying, which contains this book’s MacGuffin an ancient, and very valuable manuscript. Drummond almost, almost makes it to the Home Office when, gasp! He’s run through with a sword. Then he walks into traffic and is run over by a cab.

Or, as it’s known in London traffic: Tuesday.

Meanwhile! It’s January! 1892! Llewelyn is a happily married man, as he loves to mention roughly every two pages. Along with being a happily married man (did he mention that he’s married now? Because he is) he’s also now a partner in Barker’s Detective Private Enquiry Agency. Barker has been moving a bit slower since his leg injury during the events of Blood is Blood, but, instead of treating Llewelyn like a full partner, Barker continues to treat him like an assistant. Which rankles Llewelyn a bit but hey, at least he’s married to the love of his life Rebecca. Only they still live in Barker’s house - he’s renovated the first floor for them and everything. Anyway, Barker and Llwelyn receive a summons from Prime Minister himself! The British government has the MacGuffin, and they want nothing more than to have the manuscript sent off to the Vatican archives and forgotten. But Barker is more interested in the mystery of who killed Hillary Drummond and why. Rather than immediately deliver the manuscript to Calais like the Prime Minister asked them to do, Barker hangs onto it. See, this manuscript is, apparently, a new gospel. Which is important because...reasons?

OK, so after 11 books, I’ve noticed that the Barker & Llwelyn series involve a lot more religion than I know anything about. I mean, when it comes to the religious category on Jeopardy, my answer is always “Jesus.” I’ve never read the Bible the whole way through - I read Acts of the Apostles in high school for an assignment, for which I had to actually go out and buy a Bible because the one we had was a family heirloom that couldn’t be opened without falling to pieces. In my lifetime I’ve attended a grand total of two church services - one when I was baptized at the ripe old age of 7 (I guess from ages 0-7 I was naught but a sinful hellbeast) and once in Germany I attended an Easter mass in a thousand year old cathedral because it was literally the only thing open on Easter Sunday in the whole town. Upper Franconia is suuuuper Catholic, you guys. Anyway, I took communion at that mass just to see what the body of Christ tastes like (burnt toast, I was disappointed). Does that mean I’m Catholic now? Hurray for gold-plated everything and indulgences? I mean, I’m not even 100% sure what I was baptized as back when I was a 7-yr-old unbaptized hellbeast…Lutheran, maybe? I think? I do enjoy posting lists of complaints on peoples’ doors. I mean, I could check, but that would require getting up and I both don’t want to and really don’t care all that much. Anyway, long story short: religion is not my strong suit. I don’t know the difference between a Baptist and an Episcopalian and a Methodist. Perhaps I should but honestly…eh. My point is, when Will Thomas writes about a manuscript that might be a new gospel written before Luke or Matthew or whoever...I just sort of smile and nod and go "yeah sure OK" and have zero idea what that might actually mean or its religious significance. I just hear “1000 year old manuscript” and think “that sounds awesome, gimme.”

Back to the book: this manuscript is so valuable, the people after it are willing to kill for it. Which puts Barker & Llewelyn in an awkward position. Even more awkward is the fact that Rebecca’s family, who seemed so cool in the last book, have now decided to shun her for marrying Thomas, a gentile. As usual, Barker & Llewelyn are caught between a rock and a hard place. Can they deliver the manuscript safely to the Vatican? Can Thomas repair the relationship between himself and his in-laws? Will Rebecca ever learn how to make a decent Pain au chocolat? Will we ever, ever meet Thomas’s massive Welsh family? Will Rebecca ever demand to get to know her small army of brothers- and sisters-in-law? Will Barker ever propose to Philippa? Will I ever learn the difference between various sects of Christianity? Find out tomorrow in Barker & Llewelyn: Lethal Pursuit! Same bat time, same bat channel!

I love this series. I am well and truly hooked. Barker & Llewelyn are a more down-to-earth Holmes and Watson. There is just the right amount of action, historical detail, and mystery to satisfy any Sherlockian desperate for some 19th century English mystery. I don’t know of any other book series, save Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series, where I’ve stuck around past the 8th or 9th book. So many books! Not enough time for serieses! I mean, sometimes I entertain the thought of binging all 900,000 Discworld books, but there are so many other things I’d like to read, too…I wish I were a faster reader. Better yet, I wish I could be like the Doctor and just flip through a book and absorb all its contents at once. That’d be awesome.

Still. I adore Barker & Llewelyn - I will absolutely be there for any book they’re in, even if the series goes the full Anne Perry and goes on and on for like, 20+ books. I’m here for it. And I am on pins and needles for the next book. I really, really, really want Thomas to reconcile with his family in Wales. I want Barker to actually acknowledge that Philippa Ashleigh is his girlfriend. I JUST WANT MORE, DAMN IT!

OK, for lack of anything else to say, let’s fancast this thing.

OK, so Barker would obviously be played by Graham McTavish, aka Dougal from Outlander.

Admit it, he’d be absolutely perfect, right? Come on. I mean, just look at that face.

Thomas Llewelyn would be played by Taron Egerton because he’s Welsh and absolutely pretty and tough enough to be Llewelyn

Yesssss.

Mac would be played by Paul Ready because Paul Ready is beautiful and I love him and would cast him in anything. Plus, I could see him as the finicky perfectionist Mac. Plus, I still ship Mac/Thomas, and I think he’d play well against Taron Edgerton. By which I mean they’re both gorgeous and I’d enjoy watching them.

Jeremy Jenkins would be played by Adam Nagaitis because he’s awesome and he’d be perfect as the squirrley / drunk half the time Jenkins.

Ho would be played by Benedict Wong because he would be perfect, though I’m not sure if my fantasy BBC/ITV/Netflix series budget would have enough money to get Benedict Wong. He’s got Marvel money now.

Rebecca Llwelyn nee Cowan nee Mocatta would be played by Jessica Brown Findlay because, eh, why not. I’m still traumatized/pissed off about Sybil’s death on Downton Abbey.

Tchéky Karyo as expert chef Etienne Dummolard because I can seriously picture him going into a long French tirade and throwing shit whenever Barker disrespects his cooking.

Michelle Gomez as Philippa Ashleigh, Barker’s Girlfriend, because I would love to see her and Graham McTavish as Barker snipe at each other.

Gemma Chan as Bok Fu Ying aka Miss Winter, Barker’s ward, because she is the perfect combination of elegance and badass.

Gaten Matarazzo as Soho Vic because I’m absolutely sure he could pull off a British accent and annoy the shit out of Thomas,

And this dog as Harm. Look at this dog!

Awww!

RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone fond of a fun 19th century mystery-solving duo.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: People who dislike mysteries, detective private enquiry agent duos.

OVERALL SERIES RATING: 4.5/5

TOTALLY UNBIASED VICTORIAN MYSTERY / MURDERINO FANGIRL RATING: 5/5

LETHAL PURSUIT RATING: 4/5

RELEASE DATE: November 12, 2019

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR NEXT BOOK IN THE SERIES: Olympus Mons

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missmudpie · 7 years

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On Cliffhangers: Ones that Work, and Ones that Drive You Over the Edge

Wednesday night was a long night of TV watching in the Mudpie Household. In addition to the Season Finales of Arrow and The 100, it was also the two-hour finale of Survivor. Needless to say, it was hard to get out of bed Thursday morning.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about Arrow and The 100 - things that I liked, things I didn’t, but mainly I’ve been mulling over their endings. Both ended with cliffhangers. Both ended with the fate of the vast majority of the cast unknown and in peril, with the central protagonist facing the world alone, save for the company of a child. And yet, only one really worked for me.

And that was The 100.

For the past two days, I’ve been thinking a lot about these endings, about cliffhangers in general and, more specifically, ones from other shows that I’ve really liked. I’ve mentioned several times that writing is how I process things, so here we go - Cliffhangers: When they work, and Why the don’t.

(Warning: spoilers for Arrow, The 100, The Hunger Games, The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, Alias, Lost and Grey’s Anatomy ahead.)

First things first - What is a cliffhanger? TV Tropes defines it as:

A Cliffhanger ends [...] with some or all of the main characters in peril of some kind and the audience is made to wait for the outcome. [...] Typically the longer the viewer is made to wait, the larger the seeming peril. Indeed, this can be a Downer Ending to the part just finished — although many apparent perils and catastrophes are not as serious as they appear. It is a rare Cliffhanger that will cut back simply to watch 'em fall.

Which we all pretty much knew, right? We all know this; it’s part of the common language of media and stories. Small ones occur every episode, usually right before a commercial break. Larger ones, with greater and graver consequences, occur at the end of the season.

But I wanted to start here because I wanted to be exact about the type of cliffhanger I’m discussing here. Every show has to end its season with some type of tease, some thread left unresolved or the start of a new problem, to keep viewers invested during the long hiatus. But not all of these are what I would call true cliffhangers. One of the best ways I can think to explain this difference is to look beyond TV. The Hunger Games (the novel) ends with (SPOILERS) Katniss and Peeta returning home to District 12. This chapter of their story has ended, but the book ends with the feeling that there’s more to tell - specifically, what will the ramifications of their defiant win be? It completely wraps up the main thread of the book (surviving the Games) while hinting at what is to come next. To me, this isn’t a cliffhanger. Catching Fire, the second book in the series, however, does. Again, SPOILERS - In CF, Katniss wakes up to discover she’s been extracted from the Games by a burgeoning rebellion, her home has been bombed out of existence, and several of her friends - including Peeta - are now being held hostage by the Capital.

This isn’t the ending of a chapter. This is a gut punch. When I read the first book, I was intrigued but able to wait a few days before starting the next book. When I finished Catching Fire, I immediately started Mockingjay - at 11pm.

That’s what a cliffhanger is to me. It’s an almost visceral reaction to what you’ve just seen or read. There is no peace, no easing of the tension. A cliffhanger leaves you with a knot in your stomach, and the only way to ease that feeling is by getting your grubby hands on the next book or episode immediately.

For this reason, I don’t classify some of my favorite season finales as cliffhangers. They successfully end the main narrative thread of the season, and end with intriguing set-up for the next season, but there’s not that, again, visceral gimme gimme feeling. Probably the greatest example of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Season Five finale, The Gift. This is, of course, the one in which Buffy dies to save her sister, her friends, and the world. It’s a beautiful, tragic ending that somehow isn’t undercut by the fact that we all knew Buffy was returning next season (albeit on a different network). (Unpopular Buffy opinion: Sometimes I wish Buffy had ended with Season Five, not because I hated the next two seasons, but because the ending of The Gift was such a beautiful moment that did cleanly wrap up Buffy’s narrative - even if it did end in death.) . Season Five ends with our heroine dead and buried - but it’s not a cliffhanger, for me. It’s the ending of a chapter of her story, but it is, again, a clean ending. Likewise, I’m not sure I would classify the Season Two Finale, Becoming: Part 2 (my other favorite episode) as a cliffhanger, because it, again, cleanly ends a chapter of Buffy’s story (Angel is sent to a demon world, moments after regaining his soul) while hinting at a new story arc (just where is Buffy going on that bus, and how will she return).

Alias knew well how to deliver the kind of gut-punch finales I associate with cliffhangers, from Season One’s “Mom?” to Season Four’s “My name isn’t Michael Vaughn.” But nothing could top Season Two’s The Telling. After a brutal fight against her dead roommate’s secret doppelganger (”Francie doesn’t like coffee ice cream.”), Sydney passes out - only to wake up on the streets of Hong Kong. Her boyfriend, Vaughn, comes to help - only to reveal he’s married, and Sydney has been missing for two years. It’s the kind of WTF time-jump moment JJ Abrams would use again in the Season Three Finale of Lost, Through the Looking Glass, in which it’s revealed that the bizzaro flashbacks we’ve been seeing throughout the episode are really flashforwards, and that at least some of the castaways have made it off the Island.

Both Lost and Alias’ cliffhangers work because they raise more questions the more you think about it. Where has Sydney been? How did Vaughn move on so quickly? Where are the rest of the castaways? How, why and when were some rescued? Those who binged these series have it easy. These episodes were followed by interminable summers for those of us who watched live.

These and other cliffhangers ended with the fate, whether past or present, of the protagonist uncertain, but alive. Others put the actual life of the protagonist or other main character in jeopardy and doubt (See: Battlestar Galactica’s Season One, Kobol’s Last Gleaming Part 2, in which Adama is shot point-blank by an activated Boomer; Game of Thrones’ Season Five, Mother’s Mercy, in which we end on Jon Snow bleeding out in the, well, snow.). For some shows, though, leaving the fate of just one character unknown isn’t enough. For these shows, nothing less than putting the entire main cast in danger will do. I’ve always referred to this as pulling a Moldavian Wedding, but TV Trope has another name for it: the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, so named for the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which our heroes find themselves surrounded by the Bolivian Army and decide to shoot their way out. The odds are insurmountable, yet the action ends before we know if they lived or died (spoiler: they died). In the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, the majority of the cast is stuck in a situation - be it a shoot-out, a plane crash, or massive explosion - that puts all their lives at risk.

The tension in the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger comes from wondering who lived and who died. And it’s the answer to that question, in my mind, that determines whether the cliffhanger is successful or not. You need to trust that the writers and the show will follow through with the promise made that not all of the characters you care about are going to make it out alive. I repeat: not all of the characters that you care about are going to make it out alive. If the show doesn’t follow through with that promise, it can feel like a cop-out.

That’s exactly what happened in Dynasty’s fifth season finale, Royal Wedding. This is the Moldavian Wedding I referred to earlier. In it, most of the cast was gathered at the wedding of the Moldavian prince, when revolutionaries stormed in and opened fire. The season ended with everyone wondering who was still alive. The answer: Everyone. Okay, not everyone - a boyfriend and a girlfriend died, but no one from the main cast. That’s not good storytelling; that’s a cop-out.

You can contrast this with The West Wing’s Season One finale, What Kind of Day This Has Been, in which gunmen open fire on the President as he’s exiting an event. We hear the shots, we see various characters go down, and the episode ends with Secret Service shouting, “Who’s been hit? Who’s been hit?”

When we return in the Season Two premiere, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, it almost seems like we’re headed into cop-out territory - Bartlet is safe in the car, his daughter Zoey is puking in another car but fine, Leo is accounted for, Sam and CJ are alive and well at the scene. And then the President starts slurring his words and bleeding from the mouth, and a gunshot wound is discovered - right about the time Toby finds Josh slumped against a low wall with a bullet to the chest. Both eventually recover, although Josh has PTSD that is addressed over the next few seasons, and all the uninjured characters deal with survivor’s guilt in their own way.

This Bolivian Army Cliffhanger works, unlike Dynasty’s, because it’s revealed that there were actual stakes involved. True, no one died, but The West Wing wasn’t a show about people dying (until the end of Season Two; RIP Mrs. Landingham). The answer to the question, “Who’s been hit?” was two of our beloved main characters - two people we cared about - the event was not forgotten in the next episode, but instead impacted and changed these characters in real and lasting ways. In this, it’s comparable to the Season Eight Finale of Grey’s Anatomy, Flight, in which a large hunk of the main cast is in a plane crash. Lexie dies, and the fate of everyone else is unknown until the Season Nine premiere, Going, Going Gone, which occurs after a time jump and reveals everyone is still alive, except - Christina has moved to Minnesota and can’t get on a plane because of her PTSD, Derek’s hand hasn’t recovered yet, affecting his ability to do surgery, Arizona had to have her leg amputated, and Mark has been in a coma this whole time and is taken off life-support by episode’s end. Once again, characters we cared about were affected and changed in ways that will carry through throughout the rest of the series.

Which now, finally, brings me to the Season Finale of Arrow, Lian Yu, which is almost a textbook definition of the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to the point that, when it happened, I literally said to my husband, “This is the Moldavian Wedding all over again.” (And to which he responded, “Can we watch Survivor now?”) . And it just didn’t work for me, at all.

For the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to work, you need to have a deep emotional bond with the characters involved, and this is where Arrow first falters.

The Arrowverse has some great examples of fathers’ love for their children - biological, foster or found. Joe West is the epitome of this, loving Iris (the child he raised from birth), Barry (the child he fostered) and Wally (the child he discovered as a young adult) equally and fiercely. When Wally was introduced as Joe’s son, I had no trouble understanding and relating to Joe’s instant love for that boy, because the show has already showed us exactly the type of father Joe was. Likewise on Supergirl, it was easy to see the depth of affection J’onn J’onzz has for Kara and Alex; the three form a found family unit and will do anything to keep each other safe. My point is, if either of these men were in Oliver’s shoes, with one of their kids in danger, I would have been in tears.

With William, honestly - I couldn’t find it in me to care. Because William is still a plot point at this point. We have not seen Oliver be a father, although we got a glimpse of it Wednesday night. But I don’t know William, and he’s tainted by his parents’ lies. I don’t yet care about William, so the choice Oliver had to make did not resonate on an emotional level.

Likewise, there are a number of characters on Lian Yu who I like, but whose deaths would not devastate me - namely, Curtis, Dinah and Rene. Again, I don’t have anything against them; they’re fine as supporting players, but not essential to my Arrow-viewing pleasure. And if them leaving meant no more side storylines about custody hearings or talking over the smartest person in the entire Arrowverse, if their death meant more screentime for a certain former Army Ranger - then yeah, I’m good with their deaths.

There needs to be tension in the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, and there just isn’t any here. There needs to be faith that the show won’t cop out and save everyone, and I just don’t have that here. Look, Arrow has a problem with the followthrough. It kills off its central hero and then brings him back with penicillin tea. Hell, Arrow already pulled a Bolivian Army Cliffhanger back in Season Three, This is Your Sword. Remember the episode ending with everyone in the cast dying in a prison cell? Remember the reveal that they survived because Malcolm had secretly inoculated them with handshakes, and then Barry pulled a Deus Ex Machina and flashed them all back to Staring City? Because I do, and I have little faith that Arrow is going to offer up a better explanation for why everyone survived here.

Again, the characters you care about have to be in danger. We know Felicity, Diggle and Thea are not going to get killed off-screen (or even on-screen), so there’s no tension there. Lance could die, but I really doubt he goes like this; I think if he goes, he gets a hero’s death and a goodbye scene with Oliver. Malcolm died off-screen, but come on - he’ll be back midway through Season Seven. Slade could go, having redeemed himself, and while I would be sad to see him go, it would be a fitting end to his character. I don’t see how the show kills Nyssa. That just leaves the Newbies and Samantha, and honestly Samantha’s death would anger me the most because 1) It would mean Oliver becomes insta-dad and I don’t see how the show adjusts to having a preteen around full time and 2) it would mean they killed of the reddest of red shirts instead of someone with a stronger connection to the audience.

Of course, no one has to die for the Bolivian Army Cliffhanger to be successful; see, again, The West Wing. But the event does have to change them; it needs to continue to affect them. And since Arrow is a show with penicillin tea and micro-implants, I have trouble believing that this won’t be forgotten by 5x05. And that, for me, is why the Arrow finale didn’t quite stick the landing.

The characters you care about have to be in danger, and since I know my faves are safe, there’s no tension, just anger that the show thinks I’m dumb enough to spend my summer worrying about Digg and Felicity’s fates.

Meanwhile, The 100 finished its fourth season with probably its best episode to date, an almost-in-real-time race against the Death Wave to get the remaining Delinquents (and a couple Grounders) launched into space, where they planned to spend the next five years surviving on reclaimed water and algae until it was safe to return to Earth. The other half of the cast was safe, for the moment, in an underground bunker, where the 1200 people had enough oxygen and resources to last five years.

Of course, just about everything went wrong in getting the Delinquents back into space. Clarke had to sacrifice herself; Bellamy, in a moment that echoed the Season One Finale, had to decide to launch without her. The episode ends with Bellamy, Raven and the rest having made it to the Ark, safe for the moment, while Clarke seemingly succumbs to radiation.

Except - that’s not how the episode ends.

Instead we jump six years and seven days into the future. Clarke is alive, the Earth has recovered - and she hasn’t heard from anyone else since Praimfaya.

Again, as with Arrow, the fate of the vast majority of the cast is unknown. And yet I’m not angry about this like I am with Arrow. Unlike Arrow, I care about pretty much every character on The 100, and so any of those deaths are not going to feel like a red-shirt cop-out; they’re going to matter. By doing a six-year time jump, the show has also changed the question. It’s not so much Who has survived, but rather How and Why have they survived? And the Hows and Whys give way to even more questions. What has life been like on the Arc with only seven people? What about life in the Bunker? If 1200 could survive for five years, what does it mean that they’ve been down there for six? Have babies been born? Has the Bunker resorted to the draconian measures of the first Arc, or have the learned? When we left, these people were all teenagers; now, they’re in their mid-twenties, and Bellamy is close to 30; how has that changed them?

Oh, yes - And what the frak is that mining ship doing there???

This was a true cliffhanger, a visceral feeling, a gut punch. What the hell happens next? Why isn’t January already?

A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting, nay, needing the next installment now. You need to know if Adama will make it, you need to know who among the President’s Men and Women were shot, you need to know how and why your people survived a second apocalypse. It leaves you in suspense.

Both Arrow and The 100 ended their seasons on a cliffhanger, but only the latter succeeded.

#Arrow #The 100 #Arrow spoilers #The 100 spoilers

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cdntrustee · 6 years

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Canadian home financial debt situation: Introduction

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awesomesydneywebdesign-blog · 6 years

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medproish · 6 years

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With the great Elisabeth Moss leading the way, Hulu’s Emmy-winning breakout drama continues on a dark path even without Margaret Atwood’s plot to steer it.

For the past few months, since I started watching second season screeners from Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, whenever somebody asked how the new episodes were, my stock answer was: “Dark.”

That was inevitably greeted by a face somewhere between a wince and eager anticipation, an expression that perfectly encapsulated how many people felt about the Emmy-winning drama’s first season. People’s general willingness to rave about Elisabeth Moss’ performance, Bruce Miller’s solid capturing of Margaret Atwood’s themes and the glorious series-establishing direction by Reed Morano was almost always followed by, “But it’s such a hard show to watch” or “It hurts too much to binge.”

Part of why The Handmaid’s Tale hit as hard as it did when it premiered last spring was that it was a bracing splash of salt poured upon a collective wound felt by its target audience. We’re 12 months later and those wounds haven’t magically healed, and the news that the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale is “dark” amounted to slamming the salt shaker on the table.

Embargo now passed, I can add that in addition to being dark, the first six episodes of the new season are very, very good, something nobody could have taken for granted with Miller and company moving farther and farther from Atwood’s source material (and with Morano too busy with a burgeoning feature career to return behind the camera this time around). With Moss again leading the way, The Handmaid’s Tale continues to thrive in many of the same emotional, yet soaringly beautiful, ways it succeeded last year — though several key flaws remain unimproved and are sometimes even exacerbated because everything else around them is so good.

The premiere, hitting Hulu on April 25, begins with a sequence as harrowing as anything the show has done before. Offred/June (Moss) and a group of her fellow handmaids are transported, disorientingly, to a holding pen where they’re muzzled and herded by armed guards out into the middle of a Boston landmark, once beloved but now a staging area for a long row of gallows. Like many of this season’s best moments, the scene is almost dialogue free and sold on the flitting uncertainty in Offred’s eyes, at once terrified and broken and yet simultaneously fierce.

Were I to point to an early theme in this season, it’s the continued identity gap between Offred, enslaved and pregnant with a child destined for Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his menacingly angelic wife Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), and June, too long separated from daughter Hannah and husband Luke (O. T. Fagbenle), safely in Canada with June’s friend Moira (Samira Wiley). The more we learn about the protagonist in flashbacks, featuring Cherry Jones as her social activist mother, and in the present as Offred continues to look for avenues toward freedom, the more we see that there are consequences that come with being June.

The results are dark and often miserable, even when The Handmaid’s Tale offers fleeting glimmers of hope, and any time you think the descent has stopped, the show finds a new murky place to go, with the fourth and fifth episodes offering fresh levels of thrilling discomfort. That’s a lot of plot happening thus far in the second season, and one of the best ways to cut through the despair is for it to move at a fast pace, which so far it does.

Geographically, The Handmaid’s Tale is opening up beyond the ironically counter-revolutionary prison of what used to be Boston and the freedom of Canada. After it being discussed last season, the show takes us out of the city to the Colonies, which offer an interesting sort of relief, not because they’re happier than urban Gilead, but because directors Mike Barker and Kari Skogland take the opportunity to introduce a new visual language. The Colonies are a Gulag-meets-Deadwood arid frontier of big skies, a burnt-out color palette and new rules and structures to expand the universe.

The more places we see and the more people we meet, the more we see how the persecution of Gilead extends past women — how homosexuality and basic religious and intellectual freedoms have been curtailed, too. There’s an attempt to be intersectional, to break with some of the insularity of the first season, that’s admirably if not always smoothly handled. The Lost-esque (Or Orange Is The New Black-esque, if you prefer) flashback structure, filling in different backstories or histories with each episode, feels more obvious this season in the points it’s trying to make and the contrasts or comparisons it’s trying to underline. Fortunately, the advantage of limited streaming seasons is that The Handmaid’s Tale is still far from over-explaining the dystopic universe or its primary characters, but I can already sense the danger in demystifying the show’s high sci-fi trappings. The varied threats of Donald Trump’s America have already imposed a specificity and weight on what could have once been a catch-all allegory.

Moss is still a marvel, only improving as pregnancy and increased jeopardy heighten Offred’s circumstances. I think she’s directly responsible for the sparse dialogue of these new episodes as the writers have discovered that you don’t need to spell things out when you can just hold on Moss’ face and let conflict play wordlessly. The same is true of Alexis Bledel, like Moss a deserving Emmy winner last year, who gets to be the centerpiece of the scenes in the Colonies. I do lament a decrease in the voiceover-driven dark humor that was so integral to the tonal variety of the first season. It’s not gone entirely; it just feels reduced.

If Bledel and Moss were last year’s awards darlings, Strahovski seems poised to join them this year. Serena is such a complicatedly unlikable creature, an ice queen capable of both affecting softness and petty viciousness. The clash of Strahovski’s guarded menace and Moss’ open accessibility is always a pleasure to watch. Throw in Anne Dowd, also an Emmy winner last year and getting even more screen time this season, and you only slightly miss that the first six episodes are too light on Wiley’s Moira.

Criticizing the show’s men is tricky. On one hand, it’s not their story and keeping Fiennes’ Commander and Max Minghella’s Nick one-dimensional is a choice. They should feel grateful they have names. But man, they’re boring, and yet they keep getting screen time and every once in a while the show unsuccessfully asks you to care about what Commander or Nick is up to.

But even if those characters and performances are inert, those are the moments when you can just concentrate on what is probably TV’s most breathtakingly shot show. For all of the returning stars and writers and directors, cinematographer Colin Watkinson practically deserves equal billing at this point. There are composed tableaus in these first episodes that are purely painterly, examinations of color — the aquamarines and handmaid reds of Ane Crabtree’s costumes are the standouts — and space, dangerously tight close-ups or spatially challenging long shots, but sometimes I can just fixate on a stray shaft of light or the drifting particulate in the air for minutes at a time. Mark White and Elisabeth Williams keep finding new, exquisitely detailed sets for the show to occupy, locations that are familiar and yet alien.

The Handmaid’s Tale probably isn’t a show likely to win new fans. There are plenty of viewers who might dislike its heavy-handed politics or its literary liberties or that twisting in the gut that comes from so much internal and external suffering. For those wh enjoy the agony, just brace yourself for that return to darkness.

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Max Minghella, Ann Dowd, Madeline Brewer, Alexis Bledel, Samira Wiley

Adapted by: Bruce Miller from the book by Margaret Atwood

Premieres April 25 on Hulu.

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deweydguinn · 6 years

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A forward-looking history of link building

Source: First appeared at

Link building is still one of the most important aspects of SEO.

When other websites link back to your website, Google interprets this positively. Just how positively, nobody is sure.

The fact remains, you need high-quality links if you want to see success in your SEO efforts. But what are high-quality links, and what makes them so important?

To fully understand, we must take a trip back in time to 2005 when SEO professionals had the carpet pulled out from underneath them.

The Jagger update

Before September of 2005, link-building was in its most lawless phase of existence. SEO companies would create dummy websites with no content except hundreds, if not thousands, of links to external client websites.

Google’s algorithm at the time did not penalize this. Rather, this loophole-like tactic was widely exploited, making it simple for SEO firms to power link client sites to top rankings in no time flat. Of course, competition came in the form of other SEO firms vying for the same space, but this did little more than proliferate link spamming.

The tangled mess of backlink spam sites and reciprocal linking was a house of cards waiting obliviously for the first whisper of wind to knock every site down into ranking oblivion. Enter Jagger.

Jagger changed the way links were interpreted in a few ways. First, the anchor text of the inbound link was analyzed. Second, the content on the linking page was analyzed. Third, the speed at which links would come in from the linking page was analyzed.

Additionally, changes were made that would ultimately punish (harshly) any sites engaging in reciprocal link sharing with unrelated sites, purchased links, and sourcing links from farms.

As a result, many websites that were reliant on what would now certainly be considered black hat link building were forced to remove these tainted links from their pages.

Many sites also saw their position in the SERPs crash in a manner akin to the ’08 housing market bubble bursting. Optimizers cursed Google for treachery, and the entire SEO market was in jeopardy.

As with anything, though, SEO professionals who adapted to Jagger quickly were spared their business, and lived to link another day. That is, until Penguin came along.

Talk to SEO firms that were in business during the early Penguin updates and you can tell that they are still scarred from the experience. Some experts say that Penguin affected more than 3% of all English-language search results, penalizing sites for keyword stuffing and other extremely common optimization tricks.

The first Penguin update in 2012 was just the beginning, as is the case with most major Google algo updates. In future Penguin updates, Google would continue to crack down on web spam, over-optimization, and link building, and many SEO firms lived in terror of the next Penguin update.

Link building today

A lot of talk lately has been on the subject of link building losing value. These murmurs, it turns out, might have some validity, but are likely blown a bit out of proportion.

We’ve previously covered Google’s confirmation that the top three ranking factors are its search AI Rankbrain, content, and links. Whichever way you slice it, then, links are still a third of the equation to SEO success. So why are some people preaching doom and gloom for the role of link building?

The link building naysayers aren’t actually saying the strategy is dead, more that it doesn’t work like it used to. Now, instead of using tangentially related and lower quality links by the dozen, one inbound link from a serious player in the field is the better way to go.

This leads to atypical link building strategies like link outreach and cultivating highly linkable content as an asset rather than putting together a slapdash article and paying sites in a vaguely similar field for links.

What, then, does link building involve in 2018?

Creating linkable content

This doesn’t mean 370-word blog blurbs with little revolutionary content. It means getting down and dirty in the muck of your industry. It means sifting for informational gold over the course of a couple thousand words.

In short, it means crafting a piece of content that’s too good not to be linked. If any business wants to be the authority in their field, they need to be the authority in their field.

Helping reporters out

HARO is a platform for journalists searching for sources. Once you create that source, you can peruse HARO’s free website where journalists post the story they are writing, and the sources they are after. This can be seriously advantageous for the SEO guru in need of high quality editorial links on larger newspapers.

Seeking out industry leaders

Link outreach highlights the link building paradigm shift. One of the best ways to get high quality links is by looking for high ranking industry leaders that might be interested in your content.

Once you have a solid foundational understanding of their content topics, what their site might be missing, and what sites they already link to, contact them with a proposal to include your super informational, ultra-polished link in their next post.

This is link building today, and as you can see, it takes a much more public relations-like angle on creating links. You need to interact with other blogs and high ranking sites in a non-transactional way in order to cultivate the same link power you would’ve gotten years ago with paid links.

But before we launch ourselves full-force into the future of link building, let’s take a moment for a descriptive detour into the different types of link building.

The many flavors of link building

Becoming a link building pro is a lot like being a jack of all trades, within one oddly specific trade. There are so many different objectives link building can serve, and just as many different strategies for implementing those links.

Brian Dean at Backlinko provides an in depth look at some little-known backlinking techniques, but this should help you get started.

Links for traffic

What does every ecommerce website want more than anything? Perhaps they ultimately want to be ranked number one for all of their keywords, but the more honest and realistic goal is to get raw, unadulterated traffic.

More people equals more money. Getting links placed in a blog post, the comments section, forum posts, or even banner ads on a high-traffic site can make a huge difference in the number of page visits your website gets.

Links for lifting your SERP

Scaling the mountain to Google’s coveted page one is a huge goal of SEO. To do this, you need really juicy links.

Link juice is the amount of power an inbound link has in conveying to Google that your page should be higher on the results page. Sites like Forbes and The New York Times have a lot of juice, while unpopular blogs about squirrel fur are parched.

The thing is, juice can flow freely, or not at all. The deciding factor is found in do-follow or no-follow links. No-follow links are a way to link a page, but tell Google to ignore it when determining the linked page’s result position.

In order to get juicy links that will propel your site to higher search positions, you need do-follow links.

Links for your reputation

If your goal is to fill the search results for your company’s name with nothing but positivity, you will want to do a bit of reputation link building. This involves getting do-follow links that have your company’s name, or CEO’s name, in the anchor text.

These links can, and should, direct to your various social media platforms, your landing page, or to any website that you can ensure will present your business in a positive light. This strategy sounds a little like PR, doesn’t it?

Now that you have a more thorough (albeit far from exhaustive) understanding of link building in the past and present, let’s look with dewy eyes into the mysterious orb of the future.

Chasing tomorrow

The job of SEO professionals always seems to be, above all else, playing catch-up. Keeping up to speed with Google algorithm updates is a full time job, and it’s a job that everyone in the industry is working on tirelessly.

Though link building will still remain relevant for some time, the dissenters might be more than simple link building haters. They could, in fact, be a form of early adopters.

One thing all SEO folks should pay attention to, starting right now, is the Google’s new capacity for understanding and integrating linkless mentions into their algorithm.

Linkless mentions

With the death of Google’s once dogmatically-followed tool PageRank in 2016, the SEO world was left in the dark about where a page stood in terms of link juice and overall power. Since then, there has been an implied shift away from the importance of links as an SEO factor.

Rumors soon began circling that both Google and Bing possessed a mechanism to recognize the mere mention of a brand without the little ahref to go along with it. This was all but confirmed in late 2017 by Google’s own Gary Illyes in his keynote speech at Brighton SEO. In Illyes’ own words:

“Basically, if you publish high quality content that is highly cited on the internet – and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. Then you are doing great.”

This is a bit more than a nod to those conspiracy theorists that suggest Google has the capacity for implied link recognition. But does that threaten link building directly?

Not exactly. Many SEO professionals have a fully implemented link building strategy that works magnificently today. That said, this is a chance for those paying close attention to adopt new and more streamlined techniques.

For example, instead of contacting websites where your business was mentioned, but not linked, you can move on and spend your time elsewhere, knowing that Google has already seen this mention and accounted for it.

This brave new linkless world could mean changes in the way SEO is done on a large scale. Originally, link building was done as a way to quantify reputation, a strategy catalyzed by PageRank. Now that PageRank is gone, and there is no completely accurate way to get inside of Google’s algorithmic brain, it might be time to invite the PR pros into the murky realm of SEO.

If link building was just quantified reputation management, one might infer that linkless mentions (aka inferred links) are a form of unquantifiable reputation management.

All signs point toward adopting a new style of metric tracking and network building that focuses on the following:

High quality content. Creating those killer articles for people to reference becomes even more important. Now you aren’t just hustling for a link, but for the reputation of your entire brand.

Guest blogs. Not only do they offer great content, these blogs hold a good amount of weight. This is because you can guest post without ever needing to link. As long as your brand is mentioned, you will get Google’s attention.

Social media mentions. Having your name pop up on social media is crucial. This has been known for a long time, even outside of SEO, but mentioning a Facebook page that shares your brand’s name can signal Google for both at the same time. This compounds with the positive social engagement you’ll receive.

This is far from a conclusive image of the future, yet it does seem like SEO is trending toward a strategy that involves fewer links.

This might be scary to the deeply entrenched SEO gurus out there, but ultimately it changes very little about the way you’ll build links. Instead of blue underlined text, you will be able to shout out Hubshout without a single ahref to be found.

A forward-looking history of link building

0 notes

hotspreadpage · 6 years

Text

A forward-looking history of link building

Link building is still one of the most important aspects of SEO.

When other websites link back to your website, Google interprets this positively. Just how positively, nobody is sure.

The fact remains, you need high-quality links if you want to see success in your SEO efforts. But what are high-quality links, and what makes them so important?

To fully understand, we must take a trip back in time to 2005 when SEO professionals had the carpet pulled out from underneath them.

The Jagger update

The tangled mess of backlink spam sites and reciprocal linking was a house of cards waiting obliviously for the first whisper of wind to knock every site down into ranking oblivion. Enter Jagger.

Additionally, changes were made that would ultimately punish (harshly) any sites engaging in reciprocal link sharing with unrelated sites, purchased links, and sourcing links from farms.

As a result, many websites that were reliant on what would now certainly be considered black hat link building were forced to remove these tainted links from their pages.

Many sites also saw their position in the SERPs crash in a manner akin to the ’08 housing market bubble bursting. Optimizers cursed Google for treachery, and the entire SEO market was in jeopardy.

As with anything, though, SEO professionals who adapted to Jagger quickly were spared their business, and lived to link another day. That is, until Penguin came along.

Link building today

A lot of talk lately has been on the subject of link building losing value. These murmurs, it turns out, might have some validity, but are likely blown a bit out of proportion.

What, then, does link building involve in 2018?

Creating linkable content

In short, it means crafting a piece of content that’s too good not to be linked. If any business wants to be the authority in their field, they need to be the authority in their field.

Helping reporters out

Seeking out industry leaders

Link outreach highlights the link building paradigm shift. One of the best ways to get high quality links is by looking for high ranking industry leaders that might be interested in your content.

But before we launch ourselves full-force into the future of link building, let’s take a moment for a descriptive detour into the different types of link building.

The many flavors of link building

Brian Dean at Backlinko provides an in depth look at some little-known backlinking techniques, but this should help you get started.

Links for traffic

Links for lifting your SERP

Scaling the mountain to Google’s coveted page one is a huge goal of SEO. To do this, you need really juicy links.

In order to get juicy links that will propel your site to higher search positions, you need do-follow links.

Links for your reputation

Now that you have a more thorough (albeit far from exhaustive) understanding of link building in the past and present, let’s look with dewy eyes into the mysterious orb of the future.

Chasing tomorrow

Though link building will still remain relevant for some time, the dissenters might be more than simple link building haters. They could, in fact, be a form of early adopters.

One thing all SEO folks should pay attention to, starting right now, is the Google’s new capacity for understanding and integrating linkless mentions into their algorithm.

Linkless mentions

This is a bit more than a nod to those conspiracy theorists that suggest Google has the capacity for implied link recognition. But does that threaten link building directly?

If link building was just quantified reputation management, one might infer that linkless mentions (aka inferred links) are a form of unquantifiable reputation management.

All signs point toward adopting a new style of metric tracking and network building that focuses on the following:

High quality content. Creating those killer articles for people to reference becomes even more important. Now you aren’t just hustling for a link, but for the reputation of your entire brand.

This is far from a conclusive image of the future, yet it does seem like SEO is trending toward a strategy that involves fewer links.

A forward-looking history of link building syndicated from https://hotspread.wordpress.com

0 notes

kellykperez · 6 years

Text

A forward-looking history of link building

Link building is still one of the most important aspects of SEO.

When other websites link back to your website, Google interprets this positively. Just how positively, nobody is sure.

The fact remains, you need high-quality links if you want to see success in your SEO efforts. But what are high-quality links, and what makes them so important?

To fully understand, we must take a trip back in time to 2005 when SEO professionals had the carpet pulled out from underneath them.

The Jagger update

The tangled mess of backlink spam sites and reciprocal linking was a house of cards waiting obliviously for the first whisper of wind to knock every site down into ranking oblivion. Enter Jagger.

Additionally, changes were made that would ultimately punish (harshly) any sites engaging in reciprocal link sharing with unrelated sites, purchased links, and sourcing links from farms.

As a result, many websites that were reliant on what would now certainly be considered black hat link building were forced to remove these tainted links from their pages.

Many sites also saw their position in the SERPs crash in a manner akin to the ’08 housing market bubble bursting. Optimizers cursed Google for treachery, and the entire SEO market was in jeopardy.

As with anything, though, SEO professionals who adapted to Jagger quickly were spared their business, and lived to link another day. That is, until Penguin came along.

Link building today

A lot of talk lately has been on the subject of link building losing value. These murmurs, it turns out, might have some validity, but are likely blown a bit out of proportion.

What, then, does link building involve in 2018?

Creating linkable content

In short, it means crafting a piece of content that’s too good not to be linked. If any business wants to be the authority in their field, they need to be the authority in their field.

Helping reporters out

Seeking out industry leaders

Link outreach highlights the link building paradigm shift. One of the best ways to get high quality links is by looking for high ranking industry leaders that might be interested in your content.

But before we launch ourselves full-force into the future of link building, let’s take a moment for a descriptive detour into the different types of link building.

The many flavors of link building

Brian Dean at Backlinko provides an in depth look at some little-known backlinking techniques, but this should help you get started.

Links for traffic

Links for lifting your SERP

Scaling the mountain to Google’s coveted page one is a huge goal of SEO. To do this, you need really juicy links.

In order to get juicy links that will propel your site to higher search positions, you need do-follow links.

Links for your reputation

Now that you have a more thorough (albeit far from exhaustive) understanding of link building in the past and present, let’s look with dewy eyes into the mysterious orb of the future.

Chasing tomorrow

Though link building will still remain relevant for some time, the dissenters might be more than simple link building haters. They could, in fact, be a form of early adopters.

One thing all SEO folks should pay attention to, starting right now, is the Google’s new capacity for understanding and integrating linkless mentions into their algorithm.

Linkless mentions

This is a bit more than a nod to those conspiracy theorists that suggest Google has the capacity for implied link recognition. But does that threaten link building directly?

If link building was just quantified reputation management, one might infer that linkless mentions (aka inferred links) are a form of unquantifiable reputation management.

All signs point toward adopting a new style of metric tracking and network building that focuses on the following:

High quality content. Creating those killer articles for people to reference becomes even more important. Now you aren’t just hustling for a link, but for the reputation of your entire brand.

This is far from a conclusive image of the future, yet it does seem like SEO is trending toward a strategy that involves fewer links.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/03/07/a-forward-looking-history-of-link-building/ from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-forward-looking-history-of-link.html

0 notes

sheilalmartinia · 6 years

Text

A forward-looking history of link building

Link building is still one of the most important aspects of SEO.

When other websites link back to your website, Google interprets this positively. Just how positively, nobody is sure.

The fact remains, you need high-quality links if you want to see success in your SEO efforts. But what are high-quality links, and what makes them so important?

To fully understand, we must take a trip back in time to 2005 when SEO professionals had the carpet pulled out from underneath them.

The Jagger update

The tangled mess of backlink spam sites and reciprocal linking was a house of cards waiting obliviously for the first whisper of wind to knock every site down into ranking oblivion. Enter Jagger.

Additionally, changes were made that would ultimately punish (harshly) any sites engaging in reciprocal link sharing with unrelated sites, purchased links, and sourcing links from farms.

As a result, many websites that were reliant on what would now certainly be considered black hat link building were forced to remove these tainted links from their pages.

Many sites also saw their position in the SERPs crash in a manner akin to the ’08 housing market bubble bursting. Optimizers cursed Google for treachery, and the entire SEO market was in jeopardy.

As with anything, though, SEO professionals who adapted to Jagger quickly were spared their business, and lived to link another day. That is, until Penguin came along.

Link building today

A lot of talk lately has been on the subject of link building losing value. These murmurs, it turns out, might have some validity, but are likely blown a bit out of proportion.

What, then, does link building involve in 2018?

Creating linkable content

In short, it means crafting a piece of content that’s too good not to be linked. If any business wants to be the authority in their field, they need to be the authority in their field.

Helping reporters out

Seeking out industry leaders

Link outreach highlights the link building paradigm shift. One of the best ways to get high quality links is by looking for high ranking industry leaders that might be interested in your content.

But before we launch ourselves full-force into the future of link building, let’s take a moment for a descriptive detour into the different types of link building.

The many flavors of link building

Brian Dean at Backlinko provides an in depth look at some little-known backlinking techniques, but this should help you get started.

Links for traffic

Links for lifting your SERP

Scaling the mountain to Google’s coveted page one is a huge goal of SEO. To do this, you need really juicy links.

In order to get juicy links that will propel your site to higher search positions, you need do-follow links.

Links for your reputation

Now that you have a more thorough (albeit far from exhaustive) understanding of link building in the past and present, let’s look with dewy eyes into the mysterious orb of the future.

Chasing tomorrow

Though link building will still remain relevant for some time, the dissenters might be more than simple link building haters. They could, in fact, be a form of early adopters.

One thing all SEO folks should pay attention to, starting right now, is the Google’s new capacity for understanding and integrating linkless mentions into their algorithm.

Linkless mentions

This is a bit more than a nod to those conspiracy theorists that suggest Google has the capacity for implied link recognition. But does that threaten link building directly?

If link building was just quantified reputation management, one might infer that linkless mentions (aka inferred links) are a form of unquantifiable reputation management.

All signs point toward adopting a new style of metric tracking and network building that focuses on the following:

High quality content. Creating those killer articles for people to reference becomes even more important. Now you aren’t just hustling for a link, but for the reputation of your entire brand.

This is far from a conclusive image of the future, yet it does seem like SEO is trending toward a strategy that involves fewer links.

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/03/07/a-forward-looking-history-of-link-building/

0 notes