Previously on Westworld: Ford had a partner named Arnold who wanted to create consciousness; Ford’s working on a storyline about a white church; Teddy got a new storyline to explain his mysterious backstory; The Man In Black (Ed) kidnapped Lawrence to help him find the maze; Elsie found a man in the desert who smashed his own head with a rock; Maeve started to have memories; Dolores finally learned to shoot a gun, then collapsed in the arms of Gallant.
Previously on Westworld: Goofus and Gallant showed up to the park to make mischief; Bernard told Dolores she’d changed; Dolores dug up a gun; some dude murdered a bunch of people with milk and it was totally freaky; Daddy: Original Flavor got retired, and Elsie worried that it was contagious; Bernard thought it might be sabotage; Maeve woke up during surgery and saw a dead Teddy in a giant tank full of temporarily dead androids.
Cue the credits, which are super long—a thing I normally approve of, being nostalgic for the days of almost-full-length theme songs (remember “Searchin’ My Soul”? “California”? That song about God being one of us from the late great Joan of Arcadia?) but Westworld doesn’t show the actors in the credits, or actual clips from the show, so it’s more artsy and less tugging at the fannish heartstrings than other long theme songs which I have loved in my youth.
When Gilmore Girls came out in 2000, young women were in desperate need of positive female role models. In an era when society designated the explicitly post-feminist Ally McBeal as the show that best articulated the internal conflicts of women (it didn’t), Lorelai and Rory Gilmore were godsends. Intelligent, funny, quick-witted, independent, well-read, and wholly original, they fulfilled a hunger for well-rounded female characters who had their own dreams, goals, and opinions separate from the men in their lives.
The groundbreaking nature of the main characters and the focus on female relationships made one uncomfortable fact much easier to miss: Gilmore Girls is not particularly feminist. It might be considered feminist for the time period, when stacked against actively misogynistic shows like Ally, but on the whole, it doesn’t even achieve the “flawed but as feminist as we could expect for the time” status, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It had a disquieting penchant for gay panic, slut-shaming, and casual racism (which I will explore in depth in another post), and when it wasn’t being politically incorrect, it was often pointedly apolitical. Case in point: Gilmore Girls is a show about teen motherhood that literally never utters the word “abortion.” Continue reading →
Previously on Westworld: A lot of things, but just to run down the cast of characters: Dolores and Teddy are androids living in a park that caters to rich visitors who fantasize about the Wild West; the Man in Black, or “Ed” as we’ll be calling him, totally scalped a dude to find out the deeper levels of the game; Bernard is a mild-mannered scientist who works on the androids under the direction of fierce corporate exec Theresa and the scientist who apparently started it all, Ford. Also, Dolores’s dad has just been seamlessly replaced by a new android after the last one started to question the nature of his reality, and Dolores just slapped a fly, which she’s not supposed to be able to do.
Maybe you don’t have a Hulu account. I would allow that, but really, Hulu has enough network shows that you should dump your cable TV subscription and replace it with $7.99 a month at Hulu. No, I wasn’t paid to say that [although if someone at Hulu does want to pay me to shill for them, you can reach me on Twitter @adversioned].
If you do have a Hulu account though, no excuses. You should be watching Casual.
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.
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.
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 →
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.
If there’s one drawback to the fact that this is the golden age of TV, it might be the fact that it can spark discontent with regular old network TV shows, where the pilot introduces you to the whole cast of characters in broad, archetype-inspired strokes and people express their feelings by stating exactly what they are feeling.
Designated Survivor is one such show. In the beginning, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman is lounging in jeans and a sweatshirt to watch the State of the Union from afar. One minute he’s a meek, minor Cabinet member about to be fired from his job; the next, the Capitol explodes and he is sworn in as President. The first ten minutes, in between explosions, serves as a series of not-so-gentle reminders that you are not watching Jack Bauer. He is meek! He wears spectacles! He cooks breakfast for his kids! At one point, he even defers to the President’s opinion! Basically he is everything Jack Bauer is not! But when he is thrust into a situation that requires strength and leadership, will he be able to rise to the role? WHO CAN TELL?! (My guess is yes. Otherwise this show would be on HBO.)
Adversion 