#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'

[the-eclectic-wonderer]

This is not prepared at all, so it's likely going to be messier than usual, but I was in the shower earlier thinking about the Golden Girls (as one does) and I drew a couple of conclusions on the topic of how many children does Blanche actually have? that I wanted to share with you all.

So, first of all, let me sum up the controversy. The issue lies with one of Blanche's statements in S3E3 Bringing Up Baby, when she's trying to convince Dorothy to keep the Mercedes she bought with the money they'll supposedly get after Baby's death:

"I want that car, Dorothy. I will give you anything. [...] I'll give you one of my sons. I have given this a lot of thought. I have had four kids, I have never had a Mercedes."

Ok, everything tracks so far. Blanche has had four kids, some of which are sons. We meet her two daughters, Janet and Rebecca, a few times during the series, so the natural conclusion is that Blanche has four kids, two sons and two daughters.

Which is great, except... her next line in S3E3 is this:

"What do you say? Which one do you want? Biff, Doug, Skippy? No, don't take Skippy, he's got asthma."

She names a Biff, a Doug, and a Skippy, so... three sons. Which, in addition to the two daughters we see in the show, makes for a grand total of five kids. Huh.

Alright, we know that Blanche wasn't the best mother ever, but I find it hard to believe that she forgot how many children she has, so: what's going on here? The obvious explanation is, as always, that this is a continuity error (although it's a really egregious one!), but you folks know I prefer to find a Watsonian explanation wherever I can, so let's see if we can figure out anything interesting.

One thing that struck me when I first realized this discrepancy is her use of the words 'I have had four kids'. Not I have, I have had. Why does she use the past tense here? The sentence flows better with it, but it doesn't make a lot of sense in-universe -- unless you think that she's using 'to have a child' to mean 'to bear a child'. If that's the case, then what she's saying translates to 'I have physically given birth to four kids, I have never had a Mercedes.'

I'm sure I don't have to point out the implications of this, do I? If the number of kids Blanche has given birth to is four, but her total number of kids is five, then that means that one of her kids is not hers in the strictly physical sense, i.e. one of Blanche's kids is adopted. This would solve the discrepancy without breaking the canon elsewhere (as far as I can tell, at least).

For a while, this idea remained in the back of my head to examine at a later date, because it still has a number of issues to work through. For one, why would Blanche (and supposedly George) adopt a child? They had kids of their own apparently without any issues -- why adopt another child, instead of, well... making another child, if they wanted one more? I guess it's possible that fertility issues might have arisen at some point, but that seems unlikely for a number of reasons; that kind of problem is generally genetic in nature, and it tends to be diagnosed upon first try, not after four successful pregnancies. So, then... why?

I was stuck on this point for a long while, until I suddenly remembered this conversation between Blanche and Virginia, her younger sister, during S5E11 Ebb Tide:

"I remember when you were 16 and didn't come home for Father's Day." "I was away at school!" "Oh, yes. The Good Samaritan Academy for the Knocked-Up. Two, four, six, eight, all us girls are three months late."

It seems Virginia got into a spot of trouble when she was 16, and was away 'at school' for a while to take care of it. While this might imply that she was sent away to have an abortion, there's also space to hypothesize that she was sent away to carry her pregnancy to term and actually have a baby to then give out to adoption. If this is the case... I wonder if this baby is the one that Blanche and George adopted?

While an adoption seems a bit out of character for young!Blanche (to me, at least: she wasn't interested in her kids, why would she agree to adopt another one?), I think there's some space to consider it. For one, George might have convinced her! We don't know enough about the man to draw clear conclusions, but he did send money to the one child he had out of matrimony (see S5E18 An Illegitimate Concern), so maybe he feels more responsible towards kids near him than Blanche did -- and, well, if he'd asked, Blanche would have agreed immediately, of course. I feel like Big Daddy might have also played a part in this scenario: he could have wanted to keep the child in the family (a Hollingsworth is still a Hollingsworth!), and asked the youngest married couple among his children to take on the responsibility, to shield Virginia from the shame.

Note that this theory has a few issues anyway. For one, while Virginia is Blanche's junior, according to Wikipedia she's only one year her junior, which would put Blanche at 17 when all this happened -- and we know she met and married George much later, when she was already a university student (see S6E9 Mrs George Devereaux). However, I can't find any confirmation for this difference in age in the show itself, so I feel like the hypothesis still deserves some consideration.

As for which of Blanche's children is adopted, well... we can for sure rule out the boys, since she mentions them all by name in S3E3. This leaves her two daughters, Janet and Rebecca. All throughout the series Blanche has a rocky and painful relationship with Janet, even more than she has with the rest of her children:

I would love to have a chance to raise David. I might make up for the mess I made with Janet. [S1E6 On Golden Girls]

Well, honey, I really do want to see you. I think we have a lot to talk about, Janet. I've been thinking a lot about you, lately. [S2E16 And Then There Was One]

"I just talked to my daughter, Janet, and she and my granddaughter, Sarah, are coming to visit in a couple of days. Oh, I've never been so happy!" "Janet? Isn't she the daughter who hates you?" "[...] She doesn't really hate me, Sophia. We just don't see eye to eye." [S7E23 Home Again, Rose: Part 1]

As for Rebecca, while we know they stopped talking for a few years due to a disagreement, she seems remarkably closer to her:

We were always so much alike, and so close, just like Siamese twins. [...] I have missed her. She's always been my favourite. [S3E14 Blanche's Little Girl]

Although Rebecca herself seems to have a different perception on their relationship:

You're not happy, Mama. You're doing it again, you're telling me how to live! [...] Nothing's ever enough for you. I had to be the prettiest, I had to be the most popular, I had to be the brightest... [S3E14 Blanche's Little Girl]

I think there's two possible theories here, neither of which paints Blanche in a good light (but hey, we love these characters because of their qualities as well as their faults, don't we?). If Janet is the child she adopted, I think it's possible she might have been especially neglectful towards her (especially in her first few years); she might have taken her frustration with being convinced to adopt her out on her, as a lack of affection when compared to her other kids. This would explain why the relationship between them is so fraught (certain wounds last a lifetime, I'm afraid).

If Rebecca is the child she adopted, on the other hand, she might have wanted to overcompensate for her abandonment and sort of one-up Virginia ('see, how well I can take care of your daughter? aren't I the better mom?'). She might have showered her with affection (and with expectations, judging from what Rebecca says!) to the detriment of her other kids, which would explain the issues in her relationship with Janet as well.

I don't know. It's obviously very clear that, for all her faults, Blanche adores her children and is deeply pained by her mistakes as a mother; she often expresses regret for her actions and wishes she'd been a better mother:

I realized, too late, that I'd put myself ahead of my children. I've never made up all the time I didn't spend with them. [...] deep down, I wish you were really mine. So I could try again with what I now know. [S2E16 And Then There Was One]

For all that might have happened in the past, it's evident that Blanche loves all her children equally and considers all of them her own, so she's clearly gotten over any issues she might have had -- but that doesn't excuse her past actions, of course.

There's a whole lot that could be said about Blanche's approach to motherhood, how it connects to the way her parents treated her as a child and to her own internal issues, but as for the question of how many children she has, I feel like this is a satisfying possible answer. It's not airtight by any means, and I'm sure there's other ways to explain the discrepancy (they might have adopted a child from George's side of the family, for one, which would change a lot of dynamics); this is just the one that occurred to me. As always, I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts, so do let me know your ideas about all this!

[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

[justanawesomeowl]

S3E3 the bear super stressful

[foxspirit1928]

Miss Fisher Snippets (99)

Ah, the paradox of pursuing a modern woman indeed. He couldn’t bear the constant worrying of her cavalier approach to driving, and to life in general really. Yet he would never dream of making her change her way as that’s what attracted him to her in the first place.

Of course, he ended up not “giving up” her and later in S3E3 Murder and Mozzarella declaring that they would “make do with each other”, but not until the end of The Crypt of Tear did he finally reconcile his struggles and profess that he just needed her heart. The heart that was wild and reckless at times. The heart that wanted to save the world no matter how many life times it would take. The heart that he knew cared deeply for him but could never commit. The heart, to his surprise (or not), had been given to him a long time ago that he either didn’t know or didn’t want to (was afraid to?) accept.

(Posted 07-Dec-2022)

[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

[enchantechante]

How did the fork table do?

Is that who Cousin was pouring water for??

this timeline is so chaotic 😭

[beeclops]

[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…