A classic pilot! And it’s actually a pretty good one, in the sense that, like all the best pilots, it’s a microcosm of the whole. This series premiere captures everything I admire, and exemplifies everything I find completely facile about Breaking Bad. Continue reading →
It would be a giant understatement to call this an “unpopular opinion,” but I just don’t like Breaking Bad. I don’t super enjoy watching it, which would be fine–there are a lot of great shows that I admire even as they’re not to my taste. But in this case, even the admiration factor is pretty low. Beyond simple enjoyment, I just don’t think Breaking Bad is that great a show. Continue reading →
This episode, as always, leaned in to the camp factor with toothy delight. And it also… maybe… got rid of my least favorite character, or at least freed Jughead from his clutches. All in all, rather fun if also bewildering.
We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
It’s the end of an era! This is our last recap, which means we’re coming up on one of the most tearjerking, weirdly perfect series finales of all time. But until then, we’ll be talking about this episode, which is–a valiant first try.
That’s right. This dumb, throwaway type of final-season episode, where Joey voiceovers at the beginning AND end, Joey and Dawson sleep in the same bed together without recreating that iconic shot from the pilot, and–most importantly–JOEY PULLS A KELLY TAYLOR AND CHOOSES HERSELF, was originally supposed to be the series finale. Under most circumstances, I’m all for women choosing themselves, but let’s be real–that would have been f*cking insane. Continue reading →
We’re rewatching all of Dawson’s Creek in honor of its twentieth anniversary. Will require some mind-numbing. Drinking game rules can be found here.
We’re in the Golden Ages! Joey and Pacey are officially back together, meaning they are unofficially talking about thinking about getting back together, as these characters are wont to do. Continue reading →
Previously on Riverdale: The grownups met to discuss a Pact they had regarding the Gargoyle King and a mysterious Night on which something bad happened; Ethel had a seizure after mentioning the Gargoyle King to Betty and Jughead; Ben killed himself to be with the Gargoyle King; Edgar’s creepy daughter Evelyn introduced herself to Betty; and Archie had a fight in the prison yard and was “tapped” by the warden to be the “new Mad Dog.”
The lights come up on Archie, who’s in some kind of isolation torture cell. The sadistic Warden comes to check on him and, when he’s still intransigent, leaves him there for another week.
Meanwhile, FP and Alice are totally post-coitally snuggling in bed! Whoa. Actually I kind of like it. FP says he’s happy that the farm convinced Alice to make out with him. Alice, in return, softly says that it’s been three weeks with no mysterious blue-lip murder. Not so good at the pillow talk is she?
I’m going to start off by remarking that watching this episode–in which Archie becomes the ringleader of an almost-all-white juvenile detention center with a gang problem and teaches his fellow inmates to reclaim their humanity with football–and then almost immediately going out to watch KJ Apa in The Hate U Give, a sensitive and honest drama about blackness and racism and police brutality–was a surreal experience.
I have to wonder what KJ Apa thought of this episode himself. There is just such a difference between his work in The Hate U Give — playing a white boy with a black girlfriend who is slow to, but willing to, learn about the racism she experiences — and this episode, which creates a fantasy blithely oblivious to the realities of mass incarceration, a world in which it’s all white kids in the jail and the key to their spiritual liberation is for a white boy to tell them not to act like animals. I mean, at least they didn’t cast a bunch of black kids to play the other boys at the center, right? Because that would be an overtly offensive white-savior narrative, whereas what they ended up with is “just” a bizarrely out-of-touch dreamworld–still, I think, a creation of white privilege, but just more subtly so.
