Every week we’ll go over the best and worst parts of this week’s Designated Survivor episode, lavishing special care on all of the times Kirkman is inexplicably ignorant about the world.
Month / October 2016
Westworld Recap: 1×01 “The Original”
Welcome to the pilot of Westworld. The opening credits for this show are pretty amazing. To the tune of eerie music, in black and white or diluted color, we see a skeletal hand playing a player piano, human pupils, instruments putting together robotic humans and horses, among other striking images.
“Bring her back online,” a deep male voice says as the lights come up on a naked blonde woman sitting in a chair. Her voice apologizes for not being quite herself in a Southern drawl, and the voice crisply tells her to lose the accent. The woman’s body itself stays motionless, even as a fly crawls over her face, and even onto her pupil. She tells him she’s in a dream, and that she’s terrified. He assures her there’s nothing to be afraid of, as long as she answers his questions. Has she ever questioned the nature of her reality? No, she says.
Links We Loved This Week — 10/7/16
Mindy Kaling wrote a short piece about the season premiere of Mindy — check it out at The Cut.
Emily Blunt discusses her role in Girl On the Train, which is very different from her own personality–and how she objects to the need for female characters to be “likeable.” (At Hollywood Reporter.)
Did you get to go to a pop-up Luke’s this week? Luke himself showed up to the one in Beverly Hills! (USA Today)
EW interviewed the cast of That Thing You Do! for a twentieth-century retrospective. Can you believe it’s been 20 years since the O-need-ers?
You wish you cared this much: The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge
Lorelai and Rory Were Geniuses for Going to Luke’s Every Morning
When I re-watch Gilmore Girls every month or so, I’m always reminded of a few pet peeves. In addition to the obvious–Rory getting into Harvard, Princeton, and Yale with almost no extracurriculars, Dave’s unceremonious disappearance, everything having to do with Logan and that stupid Birkin bag–I always think to myself, “How on Earth do Lorelai and Rory always have an entire day before I would even be awake?” Continue reading →
A Poetic Society
The wind is blowing, blowing over the grass.
It shakes the willow catkins; the leaves shine silver.
Where are you going, wind? Far, far away
Over the hills, over the edge of the world.
Take me with you, wind, high over the sky.
I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind.
–Richard Adams, Watership Down
I’m rereading one of my favorite books, Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits travel a great distance to found a new society. In the middle, they encounter a society full of strangely sad, yet remarkably well-fed, rabbits: and they encounter art for the first time. The melancholy poem above is the first poem the heroes have ever heard, and it both mystifies and unsettles them. As, perhaps, any good poem should.
Designated Survivor 1×02: “The First Day”
In Designated Survivor’s second episode, a second (Republican party-)designated survivor makes her appearance as Kirkman learns that his first presidential address didn’t inspire confidence in anyone; there is an outbreak of racial profiling that leads to the death of a teenager; Kirkman visits the site of the attack only to have violence erupt there too; and the shiny-haired, mumbly FBI agent played by Maggie Q tries to prove a theory that an undetonated bomb is a plant rather than evidence that terrorist group al-Saqqar committed the bombing.
Read on for a rundown of the highlights, and the moments that made us shake our heads.
Adversion 