#the episode ended on a cliffhanger

[undead-knick-knack]

I think Liliana's "Did she know?" wasn't about her, it was, "Did Imogen know that bombing me would also kill these children?"

Hey remember that time Imogen leveled a city block? Are you sure Liliana didn't just go boom herself?

Also we don't even know who's dead, including these "children" (the youngest of whom would be about 16 and are soldiers for an occupying force), so you're making a lot of assumptions there buddy

Maybe Liliana just got big mad that a group of people tried to kill her ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[24bughours]

I need these last two episodes to hurt

AND THE WAY THAT HALF OF EPISODE 8 WAS JUST NICE PETRIGROF MOMENTS I WAS ABT TO CRY IM SO EXCITED FOR EPISODE 9

[egophiliac]

Are you excited for Malleus to read us all his Fanfiction?

Malleus making a perfect dreamworld for all of us to live in like

[cool-thymus]

i saw your post on the ninken smelling obito, and also the post on the ninken being on the rin mission, and now i am thinking. au where... we combine those facts.

Ninken: boss, boss! girl-teammate is this way, but goggles-teammate is that way!!!

Kakashi: WHAT.

And Kakashi's brain short-circuited!

That would be such a curious plot bunny to chase! I do realize that teen Kakashi was already a perfect shinobi able to think fast and act efficiently in any situation on the battlefield, but even so... if the ninken mentioned Obito in "yeah he is totally alive" way, Kakashi would momentarily stop functioning. Adult Kakashi had a panic attack mid-battle when he saw Obito (although the impact of the reveal was doubled if not tripled by Obito's "i'm a villain now" attitude). Kid Kakashi is still going through the loss, and his shared-trauma buddy was kidnapped, and he couldn't prevent it from happening yet again. I can see many ways this situation could unfold: Kakashi might go find Obito first and then unite forces and save Rin together (reliving the same horror scenario yet again); he could send ninken to investigate bc wdym it's Obito! go find the source, it can't be him!; he could think he'd been trapped in a genjutsu and his dogs aren't real; or he might just simply freeze.

If it's the last one, it'd be a perfect moment for Pakkun and older dogs to act as Kakashi's guardians and get him through his episode and help him make cohesive decisions. He shouldn't ve been alone out there. He is still a small child with so much pain, fear, and grief trapped underneath his composure that he was bound to break.

[smoothriverrocksrock]

~~~ Forest walls and starry ceilings, Barren curtains that you're weaving. Like the stories that you keep inside your head ~~~

[mischiefbuckley]

will we finally get rid of buck’s loft this episode🧍🏻‍♀️

[chirpsythismorning]

Ya'll catch the final rose ceremony at the end of s4?!

[setmeatopthepyre]

I'm convinced Bobby Nash has to die. Now hear me out!! Cause I don't think he has to stay dead. In fact, it fits better if he doesn't. Here's the thing: Bobby believes he should have died in the fire that killed his family and all those people. It really seems there is absolutely no way for him to feel any closure on that, except, maybe, dying in/as a result of/in the vicinity of a fire after saving his family, aka Athena. A fire that burned down his now-family's home.

In Bobby Begins Again, Bobby is told You want to be punished? Your punishment is that you lived. Now make it worth a damn. And all this 'putting his affairs in order' stuff is kind of him double-checking that he really did make it worth a damn. For other people. Not for himself. He still doesn't believe he deserves any sort of happy ending. So, him dying and then living, just like Buck, would be another perfect little joke from his God, a sort of, You want to die for your sins? Fine. Now you have. Now live and be free of them.

Dying for your sins sound familiar? A little Jesus-y? Yeah, it fits right into all the religious symbolism we got in Step 9, aka the very Bobby-centric episode we just had! @exhuastedpigeon made a really good post about it.

In the previous episode, we saw that Bobby had his addiction practically passed down to him by his father, like an original sin. He wandered the desert, he carried his cross. In this episode, he had his last meal and though he didn't quite literally pray with his family, he did give Eddie a book of catholic prayers...

So if we're following that theme, if Bobby is to get the closure he has been wishing for ever since that fire happened, he might just have to die. But we all know Jesus didn't exactly stay dead either.

[monstrousorchids]

They have one episode and four scenes together and they immediately became everything to me. He literally stares at her every time with a conflicting mixture of impressed, amused, offended, and bewitched by her beauty. He literally could have killed Lucrezia right then and there, as she said, but chose not to because, although convenient, it's sloppy and bad politics and they both knew it. The choke wasn't even aggressive... He gave her enough time to move before he gently wrapped his hand around her throat... And the way she almost laughed when he rhetorically asked, "How does one drown a newt?" but stopped herself because she's supposed to be confronting an alleged murderer... There are scratches, dents and bite marks on bars of my enclosure.

Spoiler: Also, the two Neapolitan princes are interesting to me. They're both smart. One is known to be rude and mischievous but not enough to try to and kill his own blood, and the other is well-liked but is secretly mean and manipulative, so much so that he can further perpetuate his brother's reputation to his own advantage. Somewhat a tale as old as time but damn! If Raphael had stayed in court he'd have told Lucrezia "I told you so" and she wouldn't even say sorry because bad bitches don't have to.

The Borgias, S3E7: Lucrezia's Gambit

(@borgialucrezia dedicating this post to you because you get it.)

[sableeira]

the tension in that scene was breathtaking. The music in the background. The memories being projected not only on the background but also on Dazai himself. Dazai’s speech being interrupted by the sound of their abilities working together for the first time ever to transition back to the control room. The pause and Dazai’s expression while Chuuya is fighting for his life. Beautiful.

[leahthedreamer]

Season two coming in January, double cour which means it’s probably getting into volume 4 as well. Winter season matching the winter setting at that point in the novel oh Toho we love you

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[angelic-mp4]

WHAT THE FUCK

[motherfracker]

This episode.

First I need to talk about Henren and how I am absolutely heartbroken over them having endure more loss in their family. Like they are the best damn parents, stop taking their children away. And having all of those cases twisted on Hen like that as ammunition and evidence to take Mara away from her. Diabolical. Just a gut punch, I cried so hard.

There is so much about Bobby that I don’t even think I can get into it all. But I was so worried about him, I AM so worried about him. The beginning of the episode feeling like a goodbye, to him having to save Athena, and then having a heart attack. The emotional whiplash of it all. I’m so afraid to learn anything more about how that fire got started. The guilt this man has carried, and continued to carry without leaning on his wife for support. Still bottling it all up until it was too late. Just heart wrenching, and I feel for Athena, it is so hard to watch your significant other struggle like that and not know what to do but to just love them and hope it’s enough.

Buck, getting the chance to cook for the team from Bobby. He was so happy about it, so proud. And his moment with Bobby after shift was so sweet, they have come so far. He is going to be so gutted if anything happens to Bobby. That’s his dad.

And then Buck running into Kim like that, oh my god. And immediately going to Eddie’s to figure out what the hell he just saw and figure out what was going on (despite whatever his plans were for the evening). That kitchen scene was so great, they are so vulnerable with each other, so patient and understanding. Buck using the back door to be considerate of anyone else in the house because he knows how crazy and fucked up it all is. But he’s so calm and gentle with Eddie about the whole thing.

Which leads me to Eddie. My guy, you have come so far, but you are still so delusional. Shannon was not the love of your life, she was your first love. And there is a difference. Kim is insane for coming back to pretend to be Shannon to try to give you closure without all of the context, because Eddie you omitted a few key details in your retelling of your relationship’s history. And to get so wrapped up in this fantasy to allow yourself this weird moment of skewed catharsis and have Christopher walk in (with your girlfriend, which where were they without you?) and witness this woman in your life who confusingly looks like his DEAD mother. How painful for him. That kid has been through enough, and I can’t fathom how he will view you going forward and I am so scared for that. It’s so twisted. How do you explain any of this to your son? How?

I can’t stop thinking about it. 7x09, I wish you were longer.

[thegoldendaystrikesback]

One of the things that I appreciate about tsv is how it taught me not to binge listen to it

Whenever an episode ends with some kind of cliffhanger I don't have the impulse to grab the next one because I know that it most likely will focus on a different storyline

[mischiefbuckley]

season 8 mid-season finale ends on the cliffhanger of Eddie and Buck having a serious conversation in the kitchen and Eddie finally goes in for the kiss and they finally get together in 8x12 which is the 118th episode of the series and we get the season 9 renewal announcement during the mid-season break and the Buddie wedding for some reason or another it keeps getting pushed back and we get the wedding in 9x11 which again if they didn’t have Tim have the plane crash as the main opening disaster in September for Season 8 I think they will let it slide if they do a wedding for Season 9 Episode 11 of a show like 😭