#the bear s3e3

[pureseasalt]

oh actually this is so SICK and TWISTED

[all-or-nothing-baby]

DYSTOPIAN BUTTER

[enchantechante]

i loved working dish when i was in food service

& seeing the breakable dishes stacked tall

is my new personal hellscape 😬

you dont even have space to disinfect?! 👌🏾 kitchen finna be 🤬'd.

[beeclops]

[solitudeandseclusion]

fak with the mirepoix I AM ABSOLUTELY DECEASED

[treblrebl]

Charting the Course of B&B : How It Began

For nobody's sake but mine, I have decided to chart out the progress of the B&B relationship through the seasons.

Seasons 1 to 3: Keyword - 'Trust'

The foundational seasons, where the ever simmering physical attraction kept smashing up against the wall of 'I just don't understand this guy/girl'. But more importantly, the seasons where both of them, much to their shock, find that their partnership bears immediate fruit. And that the walls they keep around everyone else somehow don't seem to hold up in front of each other.

The graph below charts their attraction and trust levels over the 3 seasons through pivotal points where their partnership either grew or retreated significantly. It's my opinion that fledgling romantic feelings were present during this phase, but neither of them were aware of it.

Representation:

Milestones considered:

S1 - Point 1: "I knew you wouldn't make me a liar" (S1E5)

S1 - Point 2: Rescue from Kenton/"Why are you so nice to me?" (S1E15/E19)

S1 - Point 3: "With each shot we all die a little bit, Bones"/"I know who you are" (S1E21/E22)

S2 - Point 1: "Tony and Roxie" (S2E8)

S2 - Point 2: "I knew you wouldn't give up" (S2E9)

S2 - Point 3: "Everything happens eventually"/Rescue from Gallagher (S2E16/E18)

S2 - Point 4: Zack leaves for the Army/Max gets arrested/Aborted Hodgela wedding (S2E21)

S3 - Point 1: "Making love vs crappy sex" (S3E3)

S3 - Point 2: Smurfette/"I love my gift Booth"/"You are a fully developed man" (S3E7/E9/E11)

S3 - Point 3: Baby Andy/Max's trial/Checkerbox pre-shooting (S3E12/E13/E14)

S3 - Point 4: Booth's 'death'/Zack as Gormogon apprentice (S3E15)

Season 4: Keyword - 'Emotional Intimacy'

This where things start getting COMPLICATED. They start off rough, with Brennan having her walls up again after the deception of Booth's death. But when the last of the walls fall by the end of Con Man in the Meth Lab, the emotional enmeshment is cemented. The UST is also off the charts.

By the time this season ends, the trust between them has reached it's zenith. The attraction has never wavered, but this season is where the romantic feelings start to make their presence seriously felt. It's quite obvious that Dr. Wyatt was referring to Brennan when he posited that one of them was clearly aware of their feelings and struggled with it daily. Booth was deeper in denial even though he had brought Brennan completely into his life, his family and his history. Writing the story at Booth's bedside was Brennan's way of coping with the strength of her feelings which she didn't have the courage to examine or name. Perhaps she felt that putting a label to how she felt for Booth in a fictional world would exorcise the turmoil in the real world. Perhaps it was the only way she had to admit to herself.

Representation:

Milestones considered:

Ep 3: "There's someone for everyone, Bones, you just have to be open to see it."/"What's wrong with a surrogate relationship?"

Ep. 5: "You know the reviews to my books Booth, but do you read them?" "Every single word."

Ep. 9: "My father drank."

Ep. 11: 'Look at my little boy there, with your dad."

Ep. 14: Gravedigger rescue. Needs no explanation.

Ep. 21: Sharing of metaphorical scars, adopting their baby duck. There is no going back for either of them now.

Ep. 25: Brennan's baby, Booth's sperm. "Something is wrong Booth, trust me!"

Ep. 26: "You love someone, you open yourself up to suffering, that's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart, maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks. That's the burden."

In the next instalment:

Season 5: Keyword - 'Devotion'

Season 6: Keyword - 'Inner Demons'

[mx-information]

These Are The Silt Verses: TSV, Media, and Narrative

Is this how you format a tumblr essay? I don’t know. Whatever. I’ve been thinking a lot about this series and you all are going to bear witness to those thoughts.

The Silt Verses, throughout its whole run, is a show that has always delighted and excited me with how intelligent it is, particularly in its approach to narrative and storytelling. These latest two episodes specifically have given me a lot to chew on and I really can’t think of anything that’s so just… smart in how it approaches stories and their sociopolitical relevance.

The Silt Verses is a story about stories, and that is eminently aware of itself as part of that (“These are The Silt Verses, and I name its disciples thus…”). We’re constantly reminded that this is a constructed narrative, and rather than treating that glibly (“Look how self-aware we are! Aren’t we so very clever?” Insert smugly assured winks towards the audience as you see fit), it instead uses that awareness to interrogate itself about what it means, where it fits into the literary landscape, and how the literary landscape in turn fits into the wider spheres of culture and politics.

The news broadcasts at the beginning of S3E3 offer one vision of narrative: as a tool of the neoliberal capitalist status quo. An endless deluge of gratingly sensible centrists (some 10 degrees to the left of center, some 50 degrees to the right, some pretending to have no inclinations at all) chattering on the radio, offering thoughtful debates and news hours and radio serials that all ultimately offer only the illusion of genuine discourse and serve one purpose: that of legitimizing the existing social order. 

Capitalist society relies on violence to uphold itself (in the world of The Silt Verses that’s the Greater Glottage Police Force, the Neshite Municipal Force, the militaries of both countries), but it also relies on a very specific narrative: that this is the way things are, and this is the way things must be. We can make minor tweaks to the system, adjust the dials, but when you peel away everything else, a god must feed, a god must be fed.

On the other hand there’s the Many Below, Paige and Hayward’s glorious revolution. This too is a cause in need of a narrative, and the lie of the Widow of Wounds serves well enough as that tool. But is it perhaps a faulty tool? That’s the question Paige and Hayward have to reckon with, because it’s a good story, but can you really build something new and better when your movement gains its power from a lie?

In a sense this is The Silt Verses, an eminently leftist series, holding the mirror up to itself and interrogating its own limitations. What can an invented story really do? The lie of the Widow, however useful, is killing Paige, it’s taking away her agency, reducing her to another heartbroken lover in the eyes of the world. It parallels Shrue’s version of the Promised Bride story in some very interesting ways, invented, crowd-pleasing widows. What does it say that those are the stories people are compelled by?

And yet, for all these questions, the best part of The Silt Verses is its continued refusal to give into easy, knee-jerk nihilism and declare snidely that nothing matters and we can’t change anything. That all the stories we tell are ultimately for nothing. Positive change is hard and unpleasant, but it’s not impossible, and there is power, for good and for ill, in a narrative. It never looks away or softens the reflection of our world it depicts, never shies away from holding itself to account and questioning its own use as a revolutionary text, but never compromises on its basic principles, its belief in the fundamental worth of people, either, never gives in to blind defeatism.

I think Paige’s budding nihilistic streak is, among many other things, a commentary on us as an audience. We’re conditioned by a thousand stories of revolutions failing or going too far or what have you to believe that unquestioningly. It’s one story with a lot of sway over our political discourse indeed. The idea of hoping for anything *beyond* the narrow confines of the neoliberal project? That’s almost sacrilege.

The Silt Verses being willing to carry that hope, through despair and bloodshed and our heroes fucking up and getting knocked down a hundred times, that’s not nothing. Being able to tell a story that is able to say “Yes, yes revolution is difficult and painful, yes we will fail at a dozen different turns, yes we will be lost and confused and we won’t know just what’s waiting on the other side. We won’t know if we’ve chosen the right path until it’s too late to turn back, and we won’t have a roadmap to tell us what to do along the way. We should do it anyways, we should at least try, because a society built on cruelty and suffering and neglect cannot be allowed to stand.” That’s a pretty radical thing.

The Silt Verses understands narrative like nothing I’ve quite seen before. A story is a limited, imperfect thing, liable to manipulation and recuperation, like the Promised Bride changed from a story of liberation into one of blind nationalism, unable to capture the full complexities of the world we live in. We have to tell them anyways, because if people can’t imagine a world beyond capitalism, if people can’t believe in that possibility, how are we ever supposed to make it real?

[modern-beatnik]

I just had such a sad thought while re-watching Killing Eve, but remember the build-a-bear style heart recording Villanelle left in Eve’s apartment at the end of S3E3? We don’t see Eve throw it away, so I imagine she still has it. And Incase you don’t remember the recording goes “admit it, Eve, you wish I was here.” And now all I can think about is after the events and ending of S4 when Eve eventually makes it home, all she does for a long while is replay that recording over and over again until eventually the battery dies and she’s left completely alone. Literally heartbreaking, just AHHHHHHHHH

[debestiez]

ok finished black mirror s3 here’s my episode ranking so far (just based on how much I personally like the episode):

1) S2E4 White Christmas

2) S3E4 San Junipero

3) S1E2 Fifteen Million Merits

4) S3E3 Shut Up and Dance

6) S1E3 The Entire History of You

7) S2E1 Be Right Back

8) S3E6 Hated In The Nation

9) S2E2 White Bear

10) S3E5 Men Against Fire

11) S1E1 The National Anthem

12) S3E1 Nosedive

13) S2E3 The Waldo Moment

14) S3E2 Playtest

[biblioflyer]

Raffis & Juratis: a Star Trek fandom personality test.

This take may strike the reader as overly baked, but there have always been aspects of the fandom that approach it with childish wonder and another side that recoils at the merest hint of a lack of genre savvy or illogic. Ironically it's probably the Juratis who love Raffi and the Raffis who despise Raffi for her total lack of composure and also Jurati for her cloying idealism.

I’m going to tell you how old I am without telling you how old I am. I was aware of and a poster on Mike Wong’s Stardestroyer.net before the prequel trilogy seemed to kill off any ability he and the rest of the “Star Wars scientific realism” crowd could truly feel any joy in Curtis Saxton getting “scientifically realistic” interpretations of how Star Wars technology should work, especially the firepower, clearly stated in Legends canon.

What does this have to do with Star Trek? Well besides the fact that there used to be an intense Star Trek vs Star Wars rivalry in which each tribe went to war constructing their own extremely specific interpretations of canon and tortured the scientific method in the effort to scrutinize special effects to extract ever more “biggatons” (if you are unfamiliar with that term, you’ve lived this long without knowing, just forget I mentioned it and go touch grass) this is a way of outlining how the Star Trek fandom has always had internal tensions over “realism.”

This conflict pits people with a fairly high threshold of tolerance for their immersion being broken against who struggle with characters who don’t behave “realistically” and world building that seems a bit too ad hoc at times. They’re rather combustible when writers get scientific facts wrong or invent multiple troubled siblings for Spock that he never talks about prior to them being written into the canon. Both are emblematic of a sort of “laziness” that harms “immersiveness.” 

Now to be fair, I don’t actually want to police other people’s capacity to suspend disbelief. 

I absolutely want to police the policing of other people’s capacity to suspend disbelief.

In service to that desire to police the policing of other people’s suspension of disbelief, it bears repeating over and over again: realism and continuity are often highly subjective. 

I’ll repeat that: realism and continuity are often highly subjective.

Now I have previously and certainly will again make arguments about whether or not this or that seems consistent with a character, organization, or other setting element’s previous presentation. (See also my exasperation with how Picard, Riker and Beverly were behaving in S3E3.)

This is also separate in some fashion from the “facts” of a setting, although not entirely. As I’ve described previously, I used to be Raffi. I used to be hung up on minutiae and continuity. As a reformed prior member of the “Star Trek is a History of the Future” side of the fandom, I don’t think these things are unimportant: continuity and consistency do matter! This ain’t the Twilight Zone, an anthology where stories have no real relationship to one another other than perhaps the reuse of certain actors and plot devices.

However, if we all allowed ourselves to accept that Star Trek is just a teeny bit like the Twilight Zone, I think we’d all be a lot more mentally healthy for it. Hence my gradual recognition of Star Trek, and all fandoms really, as being more like modern mythological traditions. 

Just like Aphroditie has no less than four document origin stories, sometimes things are going to get a little weird. Sometimes Spock is going to have a mysterious sibling he refused to acknowledge before that sibling became relevant to the story. Sometimes Spock is going to have ANOTHER mysterious sibling he refused to acknowledge before she became the protagonist of her own storyline.

Is this implausible? Is it tropey and fan fictiony? Maybe. Depends on your perspective.

I bet the Romans would have devoured this stuff like candy. After all, they made themselves into refugees from Troy who survived their own totally awesome Odyssey that involved confronting some of the same hazards Odysseus did before landing in Italy and founding a kingdom based on wolf’s milk and fratricide.

Humans are cheesy. We really are. We’ve apparently always been that way.

So this brings me back to Raffi. I love about half of what she says. I hate about half of what she says. The half that I love is frequently a meta-commentary on every security lapse and contrivance that happens, culminating in Raffi berating Picard for bringing aboard an entirely unvetted and unprepared computer geek and Jiurati being too bewildered by Raffi to even be mad as she replies: “Who are you lady?”

Raffi is us! Or at least those of us who boggle at how naive our heroes often are for the sake of having a story to tell.

Jurati represents those of us who love our heroes and are enchanted by their naive optimism and their flaws, both intentionally written into the plot and those that are there entirely by accident. Jurati is just happy to be in the room where it happens. 

And so am I. 

Even though my heroes are absolute dumbasses who couldn’t tie their shoes when the plot needs them to be.

[graphicpolicy]

TV Review: The Bear S3E3 "Doors"

"Doors" is the first great episode of The Bear Season 3 putting the strained relationships in a pressure cooker #thebear

This episode of The Bear was so stressful that I almost forgot that it opened with Marcus’ mom’s funeral with a beautiful monologue delivered by Lionel Boyce. However, after the lovely words and pretty flowers, “Doors” captures the utter dysfunction of The Bear from the balance sheet to waiter faux pas and especially, the kitchen. Director Duccio Fabbri takes the helm for the first time and puts…

[projectdivaar]

shout out 2 Mr O for having 2 put up w my shitty explain s3e3 of spn (even tho its been like a wk since i watched it so i def missed sum details 😔😔) . it was great thi thankssss. srry 4 saying Sammy boo boo bear thi i didn't mean thay

[lifewithaview]

Game of Thrones (2011) Walk of Punishment

S3E3

Arya may have found a new protector but one of her friends decides not to continue on their journey. Robb arrives in Riverrun for his grandfather's funeral but is not pleased to hear that his uncle Edmure failed to follow his orders and attacked Tywin Lannister's army. His plans to entrap the Lannister's army are now ruined. At King's Landing, Tywin Lannister relieves Baelish of his duties as treasurer and assigns the task to his son Tyrion, who openly admits that he has far more experience spending money than managing it. While collecting the accounting books at Baelish's brothel, Tyrion has a gift for Podrick. In Astapor, Daenerys decides to buy all 8000 of the Unsullied and offers one of her dragons as payment. North of the Wall, the surviving members of the Night's Watch try to stay alive. They stop at Craster's keep and Samwell sees that Gilly is giving birth. Jaime manages to convince his captors that Brienne could bring a hefty ransom provided she is unharmed and left with her virtue intact. His captors agree but Jaime is forced to pay a dear price...

*The song "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" plays over the closing credits. This song was heard in the Riverland scenes with Brienne and Jaime Lannister.

[enchantechante]

How did the fork table do?

Is that who Cousin was pouring water for??

this timeline is so chaotic 😭

[beeclops]

[meandmyechoes]

more thoughts on mandalorian s3e3

It's odd to insert a spy episode in the middle of a saturday morning cartoon. it's like mixing genres but ineffectively because Pershing had no connection to the main character. Not even a secondary cast.

It begs the question if they are trying to put out a "Weekly Star Wars Show". I enjoy Andor, I enjoy The Mandalorian, but certainly not as a mesh. But I almost feel like the marvelfication under Favreau is converging towards that. TBOBF is already pre-requisite to season 3, which subtract from either show. Are they more concerned about keeping monthly subscribers or are they focused on distinctive storytelling? I don't see how it is a good thing for Star Wars to be monopolised by action-adventure with witty banter.

Maybe a a part of the dissonace come from the fact that Mandalore was featured so prominently in the promotion. I was expecting this season's focus to be the clash of interpretations of "Mandalorian-hood" and revitalizing the planet, not an overview of the New Republic era. You have a main character that doesn't even know who Luke Skywalker is!

//

I wonder if The Mandalorian is adapting a 3-episode-arc structure this season.

//

I think Elia Kane, if that's even her real name (i don't think so because she lied about prefering red biscuits), is an Imperial spy. She befriended Pershing to assess if he is still loyal to the Empire i.e. useful. If not, destroy him and his research so it does not fall into New Republic Hands.

However I don't think it was conveyed very clearly in the episode. I went into the episode knowing she betrayed him, and I agree with Pershing that she set him up. My initial hypotheses was that she was a New Republic spy and bearing bad faith to the writers, it was another plot to portray a "just-the-same" government (which would've left a sour taste). I was startled when her motivation isn't revealed even until the end. She could've just been raging a personal vendetta against Pershing for all we know. Where does her loyalty lies, if she lies about every personal detail?

Or maybe she wasn't a spy? Just a loyalist hoping to find allies among the amnesty programme but failed? So disappointed in Pershing to the point of near-murder?

that story could've been wrapped up in the same ep if in the end to show her carrying an imperial communicator - but it wasn't, so it must carry on to the next episode? I can't see how the next one goes. Are they going to rescue Giddeon and make him the villain again?

//

Bo-Katan getting accidentally adopted is not something I foreseen