#I love undercover episodes

[canadachronicles]

"Oh... no. No, never! (...) No, no, we've never dated. No, there's no need to be jealous."

--Sarah (Mayko Nguyen) to Micheal (Andrew Bushell), when he wonders whether she and Charlie (John Reardon) are exes because they "were so in sync at the casino"!

It's true they are not (sigh!) exes, but both Rex (Diesel vom Burgimwald) and I reckon the lady doth protest too much!

[kagoutiss]

his divinely induced hyperthyroidism

[tsuyoiqueen]

forever mourning the fact that we never got to see loki in their female form. i'm dying to know what kind of actress the producers would choose, a tom hiddleston duplicate? someone entirely different? the possibilities are endless. never forget what they've taken from us, my friends.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s2 episode 10 thoughts

woohoo! this episode has "museum" in the title and i love museums! but it also talks about cults in the description and i'm less keen on those

update: there were no real museums :( i feel lied to and cheated

we open on some cows. i was admiring their cuteness and their wonderful sounds by writing "moo" in my notes before we get a JUMPSCARE to a beef processing plant which. augh. unpleasant. i do not care for meat related story lines.

we see this woman working at the processing facility and she comes home to her kids and no husband in sight (a single mom who works two jobs, who loves her kids and never stops, iktr)

and she's getting in the shower but we see some fellow with glasses is WATCHING her. the question is from where and how?!? oh very creepy!!!

then the older brother leaves and we find him in the morning stripped to his underwear in the woods and whimpering. and his back is covered in writing.

so naturally my first thought was "what does this have to do with the meat? or did they just jumpscare me with unrelated meat imagery?"

(we later learn that it is, in fact, related. but this all happened before the title sequence even aired, so i was a little suspicious!)

cut to our beloved duo. mulder says this waking up in the woods with writing on the back and no memory thing has happened to a bunch of other kids. and scully's like "but why does this interest you?" and he says the sheriff claims they're being possessed which does seem up his alley

they're in the car with the sheriff and mulder was a gentleman and let scully sit in the front <3 he said my queen, you have endured so much, and motion sickness shall not be one of your troubles

at this point i realized the earlier meat scenes WERE related because the sheriff is introducing this new religious cult, who are vegetarians and bought a ton of cows to keep as pets. cows are cute but a bit large for pets in my opinion.

next they SHARE AN UMBRELLA on the way to the church's sermon thingy

okay so the leader is typing while someone reads his words which is certainly a presentation style. they all wear red turbans. and scully says she doesn't think they seem like the type to get involved in all this. she wanted them to be innocent so she could pet their cows. i'm onto you.

mulder hears a few lines of their chanting and says that these are "walk-ins'', which means the people think enlightened beings are controlling their bodies. okay theological king!

they go to talk to the boy who was in the woods in his underwear and man. we get this shot of mulder in the back. and his coat. is so comically large. i had to pause. take a deep breath. and remember the origins of my url.

the teenager says he thinks he was maybe possessed by an animal spirit or something, he doesn't know, and scully's sleuthing around the house when she discovers a child (the teenager's brother) and they are having a chat (again how much of this work involves talking to children) but SOMEONE is WATCHING THEM and it is CREEPY!!

cutscene to the pair eating ribs together and scully has sauce on her face and mulder wipes it off for her. and i squeaked. a squeak emerged from my body. look what they've driven me to. i am a woman with dignity squeaking over a rib date.

and why did they both look so good? but i was especially admiring mulder, in his silly little rib eating fit, explain the cult's reasoning behind a new spirit taking over the bodies of those who lost hope. i was embarrassed at myself for how attractive i found him. but then i remembered there are a lot of people who have probably been in a similar situation. so thank u for following this blog so i feel less alone in that manner.

oh nooo a bunch of kids are being mean to one of the church members on the side of the road... mulder gets up to intervene and tells them to gtfo (we love a man that stands for morals and justice)

the lead bully is ANGRY and sees scully come out and says "why don't you run along with the little wife" in her direction which is exactly what i have been saying but no one listens to me.

(neither of them seem to care that this happened which makes me think it's not the first time such words have been tossed in their direction)

and he's all "my father will hear about this" because the girl notices scully has a gun and gasp. he's the sheriff's son! so mulder's like "yeah i think he WOULD like to know about this" and they beat it

there's a moment where scully says it's hard to know who is in the wrong without having a scorecard, implying that keeping up with small town drama is impossible, and mulder is gazing at her. like GAZING at her. i think he heard the wife suggestion and was seriously mulling it over.

then the sheriff's son is making out with this girl for a time i considered far too long. but she goes back to where she lives and she sees a dog! a very cute dog! she appears to know this dog and goes to visit when BAM! dog-related kidnapping occurs :(

she ends up down to her underwear in the woods and she's hallucinating a giant crow eating her and also being swarmed with bugs which seems deeply unpleasant

scully does a check up on her because she is a DOCTOR and you had best not forget it! she seems fine... except... weird chemical in blood... a chemical you'd need to be some sort of doctor to know about... and we see the cult leader used to be a doctor before getting kicked out of the doctor world... it's not looking great for him

they pay him a visit but he won't let them enter his place because they will defile the sacredness of the space with their meat-eating aura. and then all of the members of the church swarm our duo's car and OHH it was creepy. but they manage to bring him into the station for questioning.

they're trying to ask him about the weird chemicals and he's going on about the injustice of eating cows and at this point the sheriff starts screaming at the guy. and mulder has to escort the sheriff out and tell him to be normal.

he says something about the guy starting a lot of trouble for being a holy man and i was thinking to myself. famously holy men DO cause a lot of trouble. this is perfectly on brand.

so then the rest of the church members were protesting outside of the bbq restaurant where our besties recently ate. and the sheriff's son comes out and throws COW BLOOD on them. he took his notes from carrie i see. the sheriff is PISSED and wrangles him up.

while all of this is going down, a strange man is beckoning to scully. and i am of the opinion that strange men beckoning to women should be avoided, but this is what separates me from the fbi agents of the world, because she goes over and he says he wants to show them something

at this point, the score to the show was going hard. i was jamming out. it was really getting dramatic as they rode over to some place and then got out of the car.

this strange man is talking about how he used to own this land, but he sold it and got rich, and he's saying that the new people inject the cows with stuff. i felt as if this episode was trying to make me a lil vegan.

scully's talking about how growth hormone is safe but the guy is not buying whatever the government has to say on the subject. and yeah like scully the government did just take you for a while so maybe they're actually lying? who knows. she went to med school and i didn't. frankly i don't want anything extra in my cow

we see the glasses of the man who was watching them earlier doing some cow injections! the amount of red flags here is staggering...

at this point, our regularly scheduled plot is interrupted by an excellent (and by that, of course, i mean entirely unrealistic) CGI helicopter crash that had be yelling at the screen. i LOVE 90's CGI it always fills me with whimsy. like sorry i know this was a serious scene but it looked funny and i laughed!!!

the two people on the helicopter are dead, and one of them was a doctor, who was found with a briefcase full of cash and a mysterious liquid... hmm..

mulder enters the room. "scully? you're not gonna believe this"

YESSSS! he said the LINE! i had seen it meme'd into my vocabulary far before i had ever decided to watch this show, or even had any idea what it was referring to. i would just mumble "scully, you're never gonna believe this" to myself whenever i learned any surprising information. for at least the last 5 years or so. so this felt very full circle to me. he did it.

he also proceeds to say something that scully can, in fact believe, because she already figured it out herself

so here's the situation: the doctor was treating a bunch of kids, including all of those who had gone into a frenzy in the woods. but what is the through-line here...?

we see glasses man again and then a RANDOM FARMER IS SHOT DEAD!

they go back to the house of the mom and the kids, and she's like yeah my son was getting vitamin shots from that guy. man i hate to tell you but i think there was more than vitamins in those shots. but mulder is... distracted by something.

there's a light coming from the bathroom mirror and he realizes there's something behind it. so he wraps his hand up and PUNCHES IT (bad luck be upon him for 7 years)

he finds what he refers to as a "private little movie studio" with a running camera and a TON of vhs tapes... nasty!!! not good!!!

cutscene to the sheriff's son, who has undergone a kidnapping and has not woken up! sheriff is naturally in deep distress. it turns out that he was actually murdered.

the car of our duo passes that of the gunman who shot that random farmer and scully realizes she knows that face... and i'm thinking that it did not look familiar at all. maybe it's someone she went to school with?

mulder is interrogating the video man, and he's getting real rough with him. he smacks him on the head, which is justified considering he was filming people in their home, but i do worry that mulder's interrogation violence will someday get him fired. the dude swears up and down that he did NOT kill them, but he did do the kidnapping and writing, because the doctor was experimenting on those kids and turning them into "monsters"

scully makes a connection... the gunman she saw before... was the FELLOW THAT KILLED DEEP THROAT???!!!! she has to excuse herself from the room at this revelation

mulder is deep in interrogation mode and the glasses slash video guy is saying that the doctor paid people- himself included- to inject the cows with a mystery substance, and that he must have been doing it to the kids he was treating as well

scully's back in the room and her and mulder are so close. so close. there is no reason for them to be that close. but here they are.

she says the stuff in the bottle was unidentifiable. that's actually not what she says, she said something about the number of proteins it had, and that means nothing to me but mulder goes OFF. he takes her outside the room and starts yelling at her about this meaning something.

here, at this moment, is where i realize what was happening: deep throat had mentioned to scully how they were dealing with people so cruel that they injected alien dna into kids. and i was putting 2 and 2 together JUST AS our main characters were. which honestly i feel like i should have picked up on that earlier but i hone in on character details and not alien details so sue me.

anyway mulder is absolutely gagged. he's yelling about "deep throat dying for this", and scully looks super super scared. he tells her to head out and that he wants this gunman taken alive

next we see him knock on the door of the... cult leader?!?! yes, you heard me right! mulder explains that he KNOWS it might offend this dude's religion, but he needs help. and so all of the kids and the families involved with the secret alien injection are taken to the barn where these people worship. tensions are boiling.

scully asks the sheriff where mulder is and he says that he left because he thought he knew where the gunman was. and this was not part of the plan, the splitting up and going to an undisclosed location! but i can imagine that this was deeply personal for him on the levels of 1. having lost deep thoat 2. having lost his sister and requesting any information pertaining to aliens and 3. these were the folks that kidnapped him at the end of s1 so. he had some scores to settle.

he goes to the beef processing plant, where he finds a TON of gasoline poured all over the floor. now, if i were mulder, being both deathly afraid of fire and also generally concerned with my life, i would have gotten tf out of there. but i am not mulder, and he keeps going on his quest to find this man.

gunman launches a sneak attack from behind a cow. which is not a bad place for a dramatic stakeout/fight scene but boy i'd hate to be there irl. and things are looking tough for mulder, who gets off his feet, only to be locked inside the building while this dude gets his lighter. he's about to drop it when...

scully walks in! with backup! she's got her gun pointed at him and he's wavering but the sheriff shoots him like 800 times. because he was the one that must have killed his son, so it was deeply personal. he's crying while doing this.

mulder stands over his body so sadly, knowing that he will never get the information he wants

scully concludes the episode by writing her case report, talking about how the kids who were infected have started getting sick. none of the kids from the church were infected, so it seems they were a control group. so in that case, the cult leader would have to have been in on this whole thing! oh, it's dramatic

but wait! if our duo had so recently eaten the infected meat, does that mean they are susceptible to aliens in their blood? and who knows who else ate the meat that was shipped out all around the country! aliens could be running rampant!

(i don't think that is actually the case- i'd have to imagine eating alien protein once is a lot different than getting it injected in you regularly for your whole life. but still. could complicate an already complicated situation. i mean, they've already endured evil cocoon bugs, exposure to that fungal virus, scully's coma... their doctors must be baffled at their medical history)

anyway, pretty good episode! i wish i could explain the joy that crossed my face when he said the line. and when they had a little rib date. oh man i needed that. that was good for me. i'll pass on meat imagery, like always, but it was interesting how they built this episode out of that one line in the s1 finale- or that they had planned it that way from the start. i didn't think we'd ever see what that whole process looked like! and it's good to get more info on our late friend deep throat. i still don't fully believe he's dead. you have to keep some suspicions on these things in sci fi.

[mortalscience]

ten caps per episode - Law and Order Criminal Intent - s01e12 - Crazy

Goren: Nobody's reasonable when they're in love. That's the whole point of it!

[pimento-playing-hopscotch]

All those times Jake Peralta mentioned his restraining order from Taylor Swift and he got to play her boyfriend in a sketch -

[whatsagirltoblogabout]

This moment. This damn moment. I love this moment so much that I'm back on Tumblr because I need to gush about it. I learned how to make a gif just so that I could capture the full glory of this moment. This moment drives me absolutely nuts in the best way.

Spoilers ahead for the Alias season 2 premiere.

Okay, so she's got a bullet wound in her shoulder from her mom shooting her when they were reunited for the first time after Almost Thirty Years™. It's been sore all episode, she was rubbing it while talking to the CIA-mandated therapist, it's a whole thing.

Now Sloane, Mr. I'm-evil-but-I-also-care-deeply-about-you, is trying to comfort Sydney by giving her a gentle shoulder squeeze. Normally this would be completely incidental and unremarkable, just a casual bit of contact. But here, he's causing her pain by squeezing her bullet wound. All while telling her how much he cares about her! And of course, she's hiding her pain from him, a reinforcement of the continuous theme of her hiding things from him that's existed throughout the whole series so far.

It's a brilliant piece of blocking and performance. The subtlety of it, the depth of the characterization conveyed in this one moment, it's all so good. Notice how she doesn't react the moment he touches her shoulder, but waits until he squeezes. And he squeezes mid-line, specifically on the word "care." Genius, the whole thing is absolute genius.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. See, my latent script supervisor brain has been keeping track of which shoulder is the injured one ever since attention was drawn to it by her fidgeting during her therapy session early in the episode. Way before this scene with Sloane, there's another character who interacts physically with her shoulder in a way that's intended to provide comfort: Weiss pats her shoulder as he's leaving their meeting in the warehouse pre-France, and he pats her uninjured side. This episode deliberately has a direct parallel to this moment, demonstrating which characters genuinely care for her and which one just thinks he does. Or, well, he probably does care, just in his own unique way. Not enough to realize which shoulder he's squeezing. And that's so cool. I freaking adore bits of visual storytelling like this.

[mrakyvkafi]

Workplace distractions. They were great. You grab a drink, tell a joke, play a game. And somehow, all the awful things you saw and heard that day seem less awful. Franks called her a workplace distraction. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. I didn’t know he said it until later. She usually didn’t repeat things like that. She said she needed to get out. Back then, I didn’t know what she meant. Later, she told me she felt like she was in a box. She told me she felt like the box was getting smaller and smaller. She told me she felt trapped, and she hated herself for getting that way. But I never saw her as trapped. I only saw her as always, always busting out of the box.

NCIS: Origins (2024), S01E06 Incognito

[just-spacetrash]

🌟

[bumblingbabooshka]

Watching episode one of Voyager is like watching the first act of a horror movie

[nonbino-chaos-fox]

Sometimes you just gotta watch a show and talk to your friend about the stupid shit that is happening during it and then they get a batfam fic idea out of it

[karihighman]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????!!!!!!!!???!?!?!?!

IT LITERALLY CANNOT BE TIM. I REFUSE TO BELIEVE IT.

Since he & Lucy are going back undercover as Dim/Jake & Juicy/Sava then maybe sadly…I’m wondering if it’s Jake they find, but obviously since we know he’s Tim’s doppelgänger, then everyone thinks it’s him. They just simply cannot do that to us or to the Chenford ship. (Plus Eric fucking loves this show to pieces so the king is not leaving)

Here enjoy a Chenford GIF I made instead (:

Also idk why but Tumblr’s doing that thing again where it doesn’t let me link it below or apparently link it on the page so go to @therookieabc on IG for the full promo!

[swiftsuburbanlegends]

You know what I appreciate that the writers on s5 went, Eddie's being an avoidant bitch with his feelings and Buck is drunk kissing the girl equivalent to himself while he's dating someone else, let's have an entire episode devoted to Maddie Buckley's emotional and mental state. As a treat.

[unloneliest]

jam i have a question. who is eliot spencer... where is he from. what makes him ur number one blorbo and what do u understand abt him that no one else does <3

partridge thank you so much for this ask i need you to know you made my entire morning. eliot spencer is. my specialest guy my blorbo of all time i love him so so so so much. he's from the tv show leverage, which aired from 2008-2012* and isn't immune to the downfalls of that era of tv in general but that. honestly does a comparatively outstanding job to ME. it holds up and also the premise is "what if these extremely competent hot thieves ruined shitty rich people's lives and helped the people who'd been victimized by the rich people and created a found family together after all having various levels of sad backstory? and there was an ot3 made as canon as the showrunners could possibly make it in 2012?" i'm getting ahead of myself though.

*there's a sequel currently airing but i have yet to watch it & there's certain aspects about it that i refuse to accept as canon (this is a part of me being the most right about eliot)

i am putting this under the cut because. well. this got long

to start with context. having my brain rewired by supernatural and captain america: the winter soldier when i was a teenager is a huge factor in like. *waves hands vaguely* everything. when it comes to how i came to love leverage and eliot specifically. i got driven away from spn because (to simplify things) the showrunners hated the fans so bad and the characters were fighting the narrative but unable to escape it, and i loved the version of the characters that was actively being opposed by the show. and that was just plain not enjoyable for me. and marvel is marvel and continuity of emotional and interpersonal arcs doesn't matter at all to them.

and the thing is i took a sociology class in 2017 and it was making me so upset learning about white collar crime. and @canis-la-trans was like. we are watching leverage now. to remedy this. and i'd tried watching it with him before but this time around it just clicked. and the biggest part of what clicked is eliot. because listen. eliot is in somewhat of the same category as my earlier favorite characters but the thing about eliot spencer is that all of his best qualities are canon, not fanon. he redefines the category. he's incomprable. to me.

the thing about eliot spencer is he's the punchboy. he's the hitter. it's his job to get in the fights and protect the team. and he does his best to come across as grumpy, as not caring about people, does his best to fly under the radar as just another unintelligent lackey with a short temper who's particularly talented at violence.

but that's a performance. canonically that's a performance. and he has the best work/life separation of the whole team. he's not his job - he's very good at his job, and it's what he does and that is a part of him, but where some of the other characters view their job as an extension of their selfhood, eliot doesn't.

he cooks. he cooks so well that he could do that professionally. he grows all his own produce (allegedly). he's one of if not the best person on the team with kids. he loves so wholly so fast. he's the first person to call the team a we. within team dynamics he & sophie, the grifter, protect the other 2 from the worst of the team leader's dysfunction.

eliot's done bad things in the past. and he views himself completely past saving. like. from commentary on the show: he knows he's going to hell. like. his self worth is completely abysmal. i know he would die for the team. in s2e2 there's an episode where the team isn't succeeding at the con, and he takes the fall on purpose. and in a conversation about that he says "i'm not diving on a grenade. i'll be all right" but he says that so readily that i Know he's thought about it. and he would. for the team he would. for parker and hardison he would. he's in love with them. and they're in love with him too and i have to cut myself off or i'll go an entire separate rant about them!!!!

he has long hair. which he straightens. and he looks great with blood on his face. he doesn't use guns. he never throws the con for personal reasons - only ever does to protect kids. he grew up in rural oklahoma and he enlisted to get the hell out of dodge and he got in such a bad argument with his dad the night before he shipped out that he got disowned. and he can't even talk about it until nearly the end of the final season of the show. he never once mentions his mom. and i just know he got disowned for coming out, intentionally or not. he's never had an environment he could be his full self in without fear until the team.

parker, the thief of the team, is intentionally written as autistic; the hacker, hardison, is so likely written to have adhd. and eliot is autistic too, to me. it makes the level of performing masculinity to closet himself so much more insane to me. bc it's also masking. and adding that context to eliot and parker's relationship makes me unWELL.

the thing is is that eliot is a character who's hiding, who's actively doing his best to be unnoticed. and so many people who watch the show fall for the act, even if they don't fall for the whole act they fall for parts of it, and like. They Are Wrong About Him. i have an entire complex backstory thought up for eliot, because i think the only thing sadder than him missing out on the kind of connection he finds with the team is him knowing what he's missing because he had a queer best friend as a kid, & the two of them were closeted together, but he lost contact with her over the years.

the thing is that eliot spencer has SO MUCH GENDER and i know if he and parker and hardison adopted a kid eliot would be ma. never dad. and i don't think he'd even be able to start exploring that for himself until the end of the series.

the thing is eliot spencer would listen to the mountain goats. and there's a couple other people out there who are right about that and it makes me so insane 100% of the time.

and i love him and this is just a list of facts about him and the most important thing about eliot spencer to me is that. he exists in motion. trying to capture a still image or static description in words never works. but he's my wife and i love him so much. and i always will. and i'm writing a fic where i'm going to blow him up. just a little bit. for his own good. this is my "eliot made himself a mountain goats mix tape about knowing he's willing to jump on a bomb for parker and hardison & never telling them that in advance" playlist from that universe.

all of leverage is availible for free streaming on imdb tv & here are thee best leverage fanvids of all time:

& this last vid is abt the show in general, not just the ot3:

i would add all my fave eliot pics i have screenshotted but this is already so long . i still might rb and do that anyways he is Everything to me

[mortalscience]

ten caps per episode - Law and Order Criminal Intent - s02e03 - Anti-Thesis

Goren: When I met you, you wanted me to know who you truly were. How smart, how funny, how charming you were. You wanted me to know you, Nicole Wallace, the sparkling little girl who survived horrible abuse with her wits intact... Nicole.

[baronessblixen]

Sorry to be all up in your tags, but re: the Dick Van Dyke post — Scully for sure knows he picked the names from the show. That’s what this exchange was about. (The ‘not like the dish’ pronunciation is how it’s said on the Dick Van Dyke show, in case you’ve never seen it.)

SCULLY: Rob and Laura Petrie?

MULDER: "Pee-trie."

SCULLY: Mulder, if we ever go undercover again I get to choose the names, okay?

MULDER: Fine.

You can always be up in my tags! Thank you for mentioning that cause I'm not sure I've ever seen an episode and if I have, I'm sure it was in German.

I still wish there was a fic with them discussing the names and why he picked them. Why is Scully so annoyed with the name? It's so cute!