#we already know what mixed reviews mean S3 was full of them

[gingergofastboatsmojito]

Source: RCFA

Michael, ILY❤️

[theclaravoyant]

i’ll give it to someone special [david x patrick]

AN ~ a belated prompt fill @just-a-funny-little-brain and @schittposting, ft. shameless fluff, mutual pining, Mariah Carey, and a slightly warped UA timeline for S3 because i do what i want. enjoy!!

"You made me a Christmas playlist but it’s just Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you”. I can’t tell if you’re hitting on me or if it’s a joke." and "I was putting up Christmas lights, and I literally fell into your arms" from this OTP Advent prompt list

Read on AO3 (~2300 words). David x Patrick, David & Stevie

i’ll give it to someone special

When decorating, it was no secret that David Rose was an advocate of “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” This went double for the holiday season; with bright, clashing colour schemes in abundance, there was too much potential for a garish, tasteless disaster for him to allow an amateur to take over. He had a business and a reputation to maintain after all – plus, it was either this or the end-of-year budget review, so really, the jobs divided themselves.

At least, they did until the bell rung.

“Patrick!” David called, so that he wouldn’t have to be deterred from his process, not to mention make the inelegant descent from the stepladder in front of a member of the public. “Pat– oh, it’s just you.”

Stevie fixed him with a sardonic glare.

“And a happy Hanukkah to you too.”

David rolled his eyes, and made a point of turning his back to Stevie and continuing to thread out the fairy lights as she made her way further into the store. But he couldn’t quite turn all his attention back to the task at hand – especially not once she passed the counter behind him, and made a curious humming sound.

“What’s this?” she wondered, and David pretended he couldn’t hear the scandalous intrigue in her tone.

“Patrick and I exchanged some small gifts,” he explained matter-of-factly, “to celebrate our first holiday season together – as the store.”

“Uh huh.” Stevie was audibly unconvinced.

“Excuse you, Christmas is a busy time for retail,” David scolded, whipping around and rocking the step-ladder – damn, he’d forgotten it was missing a foot. But he pinched a nearby shelf, righted himself, cleared his throat and did his best to continue as if his blunder had never happened. “It’s important to keep up morale.”

Somehow, Stevie kept a straight face. “Morale.”

“Yes.”

“So, Patrick made you a mix tape… for morale?”

“… Yes.”

“Great! Let’s listen to it then, shall we? For your morale.”

Stevie’s eyes were fixed on David’s as she pulled the CD slowly from its case and slipped it into the side of David’s computer. David knew she was challenging him, but what could he do, object? She already knew he doth protest too much when it came to Patrick, but if he had any chance of coming out of this relationship – by which of course he meant this business relationship - without a broken heart, he couldn’t afford to stoke the fire. And apparently, there was no way he could so much as flinch on this infernal step ladder without shaking the whole damned thing and giving himself away, so though his heart clenched with a dizzyingly cruel hope that the mix tape might open with some kind of confession, he stood stock-still. Waited. Until those precious, familiar xylophone tones began to chime.

“I-I-I-I… don’t want a lot for Christmas…”

His heart almost buckled with relief. Stevie smiled slightly.

“The man’s got taste,” she praised. More sarcasm? David wasn’t sure.

“He’s learning,” he replied, and turned his back to her again to continue with the work she had so rudely interrupted. If he had to press his lips tight to keep from smiling, so be it.

-

“Patrick!” David called from the front room. “Pat-“

He cut himself off, falling to a mumble that was too muffled by the distance and the walls between them to make out. Whatever he had said was met with a flat, but equally muffled reply from what Patrick had long since learned was Stevie’s voice. Part of him wanted to pop out and say hi, but their Q4 turnover was hard to keep up with… and then, any hopes of getting up the courage to leave the back room fizzled when the first notes of All I Want for Christmas started playing.

Patrick took a deep breath, and tried not to think about David. Tried not to think about his hearteningly curious reception of the CD, or the way he had spent most of the morning checking that every Santa hat in the store was quirkily off-kilter by just the right amount, or how much Patrick longed to watch his shy and uptight business partner let loose and belt out some Mariah already.

No, he wasn’t thinking about that. They might not even be listening to his CD. Maybe they had just pulled up the song on Youtube or Spotify or something; surely, it was a Rose family staple after all.

Patrick, well, Patrick was just inputting the numbers. Into the spreadsheet. Putting that number… into that box… or- wait – was it that number? Was it that box? The data seemed to swim before his eyes as his heart began to race. The first rendition was ending and��� yes, there it was, beginning again.

He got out of the chair and began to pace. His mind turned irretrievably to David. To the moment he had first realised he might have begun to like David. To the early mornings in his car letting the freezing air in to try and shock his system into figuring this damn thing out. To the hot flushes he got when he thought about wanting to kiss those pouting lips, or linger in a hug, or pull one of those damned sweaters over David’s head and lift up his shirt and –

And, well, he had to start somewhere, and for some ungodly reason the Spirit of Christmas had inspired him to pick here. With a plan that now that he thought about it, couldn’t have been any more impossibly vague if he’d tried. He could hear David and Stevie talking now under the music. Were they figuring it out? Were they wondering if it was a glitch? A mistake? At first, he’d thought being able to play this thing off as a joke would have been an advantage. Now, the thought that David might not understand – that he might have another… however long, to wait, before he got up the courage to reveal himself again in a more obvious way – if he were being honest, it was kind of killing him.

“Maybe I should just tell him,” he whispered to himself.

It didn’t sound that ridiculous out loud.

-

“Okay,” Stevie announced, when the song began for the third time. “I love ya, Mariah, but three times is too many.”

“My store, my rules,” David corrected.

“My finger on the play button,” Stevie pointed out, and pulled up a new playlist in the online search bar. The synthesiser intro of Wham’s 1984 pop classic Last Christmas started up and she smiled as David groaned out loud.

Then she peered at the track list of Patrick’s alleged ‘mix’ CD, scrolling all the way down, and noticed – “Hey, I think this whole thing is Mariah Carey.”

“Of course it is. Because she’s amazing, and Patrick is very attentive.”

“No, I mean, every single song on here is All I Want for Christmas. There’s like… fifteen of them. Look.”

She picked up the laptop and carried it over to David, frowning. David glanced over her shoulder toward the back room. Could Patrick hear them? Did he know? Had he done this on purpose?

“Maybe it’s like, a mistake. The CD’s glitching or something,” Stevie suggested. “How up to date is your software?”

“Maybe he’s… making fun of me.” Something felt hollow in his chest at the thought.

“That doesn’t sound very Patrick-y,” Stevie pointed out. “Maybe… he likes you.”

“Oh, pfft.”

“I mean, come on, a mix tape?”

“Um, I don’t think so. We’ve been over this, remember? He’s a baseball-playing, denim-wearing, straight, guy, okay, and I’ve developed enough crushes on straight guys to know how this works.”

“Did… any of those straight guys give you a mix tape full of Mariah Carey singing about how much she wants you?”

He couldn’t even will up a scoff to retort to that, and Stevie raised a confident eyebrow.

“’cause, I mean,” she continued, “most of the uh, ‘baseball playing denim wearing straight’ guys I know don’t like Mariah Carey. Or at least, they wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to another human being that they know who she is.”

“That’s not-“ David blundered, “Music doesn’t- Patrick doesn’t-“

But he couldn’t get out of his head, how deliberate Patrick was. The man thought about everything, and when he wanted something, he went for it. Researched intensively, but went for it. David admired that about his business acumen, as well as for general personality-having purposes – it was one of the reasons they balanced each other out so well – but more than anything, that told him it wasn’t a mistake. Patrick liked music, and he liked genuine connection. He would have sat there all night if that’s what it took to put together a CD, Christmas-themed or otherwise. And if the CD was glitching, the track list wouldn’t show every song the same. And if it was a joke, Patrick probably would have got David to play it in front of him, maybe tried to make him sing along.

And if none of this meant anything, Patrick wouldn’t be standing in the doorway on his way from the storeroom, trying to look determined and yet shaking like a leaf.

“Da- David,” he managed at last. “Can I talk to you?”

“That’s my cue,” Stevie murmured, and pulled back to escape the conversation. In her haste, she caught herself in the string of lights that was currently knotted between David’s fingers, and pulled. He yelped and pivoted to try and keep up and she panicked as the step ladder began to fall under the rapid change of weight. All of a sudden it was too late to untangle and there was no way of helping David without sacrificing the laptop, not that she could think of fast enough anyway, so Stevie cowered out of the way and clenched her eyes shut and hoped it wouldn’t end in disaster.

It didn’t. At least, the crashing sound wasn’t quite as horrendous as she’d thought and wasn’t followed by the string of cursing she expected from the upturned David Rose. She cracked an eye open (maybe he was fine, but maybe he’d cracked his head on a display table, was she ready for that?) and found –

And found Patrick had rushed forward at the last minute, and David had all but face-planted straight into his arms. David’s feet were still not quite under him, and he gazed up at Patrick with big, wide eyes in bewildered, vulnerable admiration. Patrick, for his part, was looking down at David in a stunned sort of silence, with a blush so furious it was colouring his ears, and yet there was tenderness in his expression and his hand on David’s back was so gentle and soft, Stevie could hardly look. Did they even know she was still here?

“Uh… thuh… thanks,” David managed at last, once his tongue started working again. His heart hammered against Patrick’s chest, and Patrick’s was hammering back.

“No problem,” Patrick said, and there was more, so much more on the tip of his tongue. His lips struggled to form the words. I like you, I want to kiss you. I want you right now. It sounded so childish, so far short of capturing the overwhelming feelings that seized him. And maybe he would have gone another however long without saying anything at all, if it weren’t for the fact that David chose now of all moments to ask –

“Was there, um, something you wanted to tell me?”

He looked… hopeful? Patrick hardly dared hope back. But David was smiling. He knew.

And when Patrick took a chance and seized his jittering confidence with both hands and closed the distance between them, David kissed back with a yearning that had been screaming to break out of his chest since the moment they’d met. Patrick could hardly believe the energy of it. It felt… like fireworks. Like a moment suspended in time. Like everything he’d ever been told this moment was supposed to feel like.

Then David’s lips were suddenly falling away from his. He’d tried to move his arms, forgetting that his feet weren’t yet on solid ground, and now the string of curses fell from his lips as he tumbled to the ground, hit his elbow with a crack on the nearby table, and rolled onto his back.

“Mother…” he groaned.

And yet still, he was smiling.

Because Patrick had caught him. Patrick had kissed him.

Patrick.  

David opened his eyes, and looked up at the poor man, who had blanched white as a sheet as his somehow-perfect moment had come crashing down around him.

“Um, so, I- I like you,” Patrick explained. “That’s what I wanted to say.”

“Yeah, no, I got that,” David agreed, reflecting on the breathlessness in his chest. He could do that again. A few dozen more times.

“Can I help you up?”

“Yeah. Yes. Let’s do that.”

David tried not to stare at Patrick’s shoulder as Patrick offered a hand, and lifted him to his feet. He didn’t try very hard, to be fair.

“Can I buy you dinner?” Patrick asked.

“I would like that.”

“Huh.” Patrick smiled. He was on a roll. The whole thing felt rather dizzying, but it was all so much easier than he’d expected. Although, he wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. Kiss David again? They were at work, and he hadn’t exactly recovered from the first time. But he couldn’t go back to the spreadsheets now. Sure, they were important, but they weren’t like this. He had way too much energy all of a sudden, and a craving to run up a mountain.

But a quiet clearing of a throat interrupted his grander plans. Both Patrick and David turned to the sound, to find Stevie standing gingerly amidst a tangle of fairy lights, which seemed to tie her every movement either to the stepladder, or to the two large bookshelves on either side of her.

“Uh, congratulations and all,” she said as meekly as possible, “but before you guys split, could you help me out?”

[sol1056]

the bar was already so damn low it was practically underground

Well, I guess I’ll start with this quick correction, with thanks to @jeannettegray, who pointed out I mixed up days (for S1-S6) and weeks (S7) which would explain why it felt wonky when I was looking at it. Here’s the corrected chart of time in-the-tail versus not-in-tail: 

I included S8 in this version, but without a season coming after it, the only thing to track is the tail itself... and unless something truly wild happens between now and tomorrow, we’re already out of the tail. S4 and S5 had tails lasting 14 days each. I guess S8 isn’t the worst, since its tail looks likely to be 17 days. Yay, three more days of elevated viewership than the two worst seasons. 

Unfamiliar with the expression ‘long tail’? Here’s a reference image showing the rise and fall of a season’s viewership stats. More info in this S7 post, or you can just check my data-cronch tag. 

Or for a more pointed visual, here’s the past six months: S6, SDCC, S7, and S8... the last of which shoots up and comes right back down. Like a rock. 

For S7, I included IMDB rankings per season, and the range was wide enough I had to take good/average/bad and split it into four: great, good, okay, poor -- and S7 had more episodes in ‘poor’ than any other. That’s what I mean when I say the bar was so low the damn thing was underground... and yet amazingly, S8 utterly failed to hop over it.  

In fact, S8 did worse. Much worse.

viewer feedback via IMDB

Here’s all eight seasons, with their respective episodes averaged into each season’s value. It’s... well. Look for yourself.

For comparison, I also did a breakout, where the full seasons got split into 6 and 7, so we're comparing apples to apples with S3-S6 split seasons. The  pattern is pretty consistent, between first-half and second-half, in that the season-half (or half-season) with the ‘finale’ is usually the one with the higher score. People like big finale set pieces, and those tend to get highest ratings. 

Unless, of course, you’re season 8. Then people hate you. 

S1, S2, S5/S6 (as a two-part season), even S7, all have higher ratings for the finale-containing half. And then there’s S8. I usually try to avoid a word as strong as hate, but... there’s really no other word that fits when the difference is that stark. People really, truly hated S8, in case the Rotten Tomatoes score wasn’t enough to tell you that. 

Given the scores for S8, I had to create a new, even lower level to see how the seasons broke out in terms of ratings per episode. Now we have great (green), good (blue), okay (yellow), poor (red), and... terrible (maroon). 

Yeah. So. There you go. Remember when I said last season that The Voltron Show had lost its title as worst episode ever, unseated by the Feud? 

Well, the Feud has been unseated... by ten episodes in S8. Take your pick, there’s plenty to choose from. As of the time of this posting, the current three worst episodes are The Zenith (5.2), Uncharted Regions (5.3) and Clear Day (5.5). I’d list the ten worst but then I’d just be listing all but three episodes from S8, anyway. 

However, it’s interesting to see the pattern form when you put the split-seasons back together. You can see how in some ways, there’s a certain level of audience approval gradually building, I guess as people got used to the story’s vagaries, err, style.

The number of ‘great’ episodes (8.6 or higher) slowly climbs; the number of ‘okay’ episodes gradually declines. S7 breaks that pattern, with only one ‘good’ episode, a few ‘okay’ and the rest at poor. S8, well. Yeah. 

Okay, moving along, to the IMDB traffic. This is another viewership-style stat, since a site’s page tends to get hit the most when people want to know about the show they’re watching. 

The color-dot indicates the ranking for the week of release. S6′s biggest interest was the week it released, which tells me people were going direct to IMDB on the day of release or the next day. When that happens, it seems to correlate with viewers coming to rate every episode, often with a strongly positive slant. They want to get right in there and make their happiness known. 

S7, the leap upwards came a week later, and the utter wildness of the rating (plus the delay) seems to be related more to rubbernecking and controversy, rather than viewers reporting in. S8 not only debuted lower than the previous two seasons, it also had a delayed reaction (indicating more controversy)... and it dropped right back down, in one of the biggest post-peak drops I’ve seen yet.

viewer feedback via twitter

About six hours after S8 appeared on Netflix, I caught this sentiment analysis of the twitter stream for ‘voltron’ as a keyword. This is from midnight California time (point of release) to about 6am California time.

This is the tracker where I can’t review sentiment, and judging from the other tracker I use, the negative is higher... but more negative than positive is never good, no matter the totals. 

Twelve hours after release, I checked the other tracker. Traffic overall was pretty low compared to previous seasons (and nowhere near what S7 had prompted, not even in the same county). Sentiment was running about 3:1 negative --- that is, for every for-VLD tweet, there were three against. 

(If it makes anyone feel better, #Allura was the center of the maelstrom, with Shiro a not-quite-close second. No, despite the impression on tumblr, people weren’t sitting back and accepting Allura’s fate.) 

But seriously, the response was otherwise pretty subdued. This is a general traffic pattern + predictive, for #voltron as of two days after release:

Which is pretty much... nothing at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think no season had been released at all. It shouldn’t look that flat when a season drops, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be predicted to fall within the week. 

And back to the sentiment analysis, showing the trends over the first week and a half after release. It’s continued to fall in a semi-regular pattern, so this is a fair-enough idea of what it looks like. (It hasn’t changed much; it just keeps gradually dropping.) 

24 hours after release, negative-to-positive was nearly 1:1; since then, it’s stayed pretty consistent with two positive tweets for every one negative. Which, okay, you might say, two-thirds of people expressing an opinion seem to be somewhat okay with things, right? 

Except I think there might only be like a few hundred of them. I mean, the peak up there, of total mentions? Maybe 1200, total. Sure, it’s great that 510 people had something nice to say while 498 were unhappy, but... that’s practically three people in an empty auditorium, if you go by twitter’s usual traffic levels. 

And no one’s sticking around, either. Once again there was a post-release bump thanks to the simmering controversy... and then everyone hung up the phone, left the building, went on vacation, but they sure checked out. 

That leap upwards? That’s not the week of release. That’s the week after. The week of release (second bar from the right) is flat for just a bit, before spiking upwards. And just like the wiki-extrapolated viewership stats, it falls promptly afterwards. Like a rock. 

(I so want to crack a joke about rocks fall, everyone dies, but... #TooSoon?) 

There’s one last chart to explore, but this one’s a bit of a doozy to explain. Once you see what it’s saying, though, hopefully you’ll find it as interesting (and illuminating) as I do. I’ll leave it here for everyone to ponder, and get into it in the final S8 installment. 

Coming in the next few days.

[truthbeetoldmedia]

The 100 5x10 "The Warriors Will" Review

(image credit: Terra @getsomesleep on Twitter)

Hello, fans of The 100, and welcome to another review. The last time you all heard from me I had the opportunity to write about Episode 6 of Season 5 “Exit Wounds” and this time I get to review what amounts to yet another filler episode in a season that has thus far been chock full of them. Episode 10, “The Warriors Will”, had huge potential, but it fell flat for me. As in my previous review, I’m going to abandon my preferred paragraph formatting and use lists. Without further ado, here are “The Ugly, the Bad, and the Decent.”

The Ugly:

1. This Seems Familiar

For the fifth episode in a row, we are again watching those in the bunker plot to get to Shallow Valley. It’s something they’ve done in every episode and we’ve finally come full circle (which isn’t a good thing). Just as in Episodes 5 “Shifting Sands” and 6 “Exit Wounds” in particular (although, as stated previously, every episode has given us the same dilemma), we are treated to Wonkru believing they have no alternative other than to go to war with the crew of Eligius, being shown another option that could work, doubting Octavia as their leader, Octavia destroying their possible sustenance and the Grounders believing they have no other option than to go to war.

“The Warriors Will” feels like an episode that should have happened much earlier in the season (perhaps even as early as Episode 6). Don’t believe me when I say we’re watching the same episode repeatedly (like we’re stuck in a demented time loop)? Have some proof:

We have someone presenting Octavia with proof of vegetation to prevent a war and Octavia destroying it.

We have Abby continuing to struggle with her drug addiction (with no real end in sight — because a drug addiction takes more than one episode to clear up and we only have 3 episodes to go).

We have Monty (and Harper) once again refusing to fight because there must be a better way than constantly murdering people.

We have Bellamy and Octavia sparring (with words this time) and Octavia not wanting to kill Bellamy but also still threatening his life.

Sandworms in a desert?

We have Clarke Griffin, our leading lady, appearing as a guest star in her own show.

Nothing is new this season. We’ve been facing the same dilemma, from the same characters, with the same motivations and no real plot movement since the midway point. Now that we’re about 80% of the way through the season, it’s really starting to become evident that there were a lot of big ideas in The 100 Writers’ Room, but no real way to stretch them out over the course of 13 episodes. Episode 10 of The 100 ends with Wonkru in the exact same place they were in Episode 5 and I don’t think I should have to explain why that’s not great.

2. Motherhood Doesn’t Make You Stupid…

But The 100 would surely have you believe that it does. Over the course of this season we’ve seen how devoted Clarke is to Madi, the Grounder child she met in her initial foray into the newly irradiated world, and it makes absolute sense that the two would be close as they only had each other for six years. Clarke has adopted Madi as her own child, fed her, clothed her, sent her off to school with water and more; no one is questioning that their bond is real.

The problems with their relationship (and therefore Clarke’s character development) only really show up when you bother to look at Clarke’s actions. Nothing she does (even under the pretense of protecting Madi) is logical or is even truly reflective of things that a real mother might do. It seems that Clarke’s intellect has fled the building (as has her previous desire to ensure that everyone stays safe, not just her own people — I’m looking at you especially, Season 3 and 4 Clarke) when she makes the decision to simply toss out the sandworm larvae she finds in the back of the rover, even though she is fully aware that the worms are capable of growing and surviving in the desert — she was the one who had to pull the worm out of Octavia’s arm in Episode 5 of this very season.

The smarter move would have been to ensure their destruction, but I suppose that wouldn’t work with the pretty obvious need to have the worms make a reappearance in the desert in Episode 11 (likely in a “turnabout is fair play” moment for Octavia — wherein the worms she plotted to use to level Diyoza’s army wind up leveling her own), but there were other ways of doing this without sacrificing your lead’s intelligence.

More, Clarke continues to try to bend Madi (a 13-year-old with full awareness of the choice that she made) to her own will because of her own fears. She even goes so far as to physically wrestle with Madi and later, she threatens Madi with the activation words for the Flame (something that makes Madi flinch away from her). As a mother myself, I understand loving your child, but I will never do so to the point of physically forcing them to do things my way. I understand we’re meant to see this as a lesson in how far gone Clarke is now, how much her priorities have shifted, but having children doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, at least not the way the show would have you believe it does.

It doesn’t help that Clarke herself seems unaware of the lessons she’s been teaching Madi herself. When Madi slits the miner’s throat Clarke looks horrified (and I’m tempted to believe she thinks Madi’s new ruthlessness is inspired by the Flame), but it’s Clarke herself — with her continued murdering of guards in front of Madi under the guise of “There are no good guys” — who has created this monster. Will the show finally have Clarke realize she might have gone overboard? At this point, I don’t know.

3. Sometimes a Villain…

Can just be a villain. I’ve never been Octavia’s biggest fan; even in Season 1 she didn’t appeal to me the way she did to the masses, and perhaps that’s because she always felt too well adjusted for someone who was forced to live under the floor with no human interaction outside of two people for her entire life. Her actions in later seasons only forced me further away from her (beating her brother, her mentor, her lover, telling Grounders about their culture, etc), as it felt like the show was still trying to make me see her as someone who was capable of redemption.

Season 5 seemingly threw redemption out of the window for Octavia and leaned full blast into her apparent psychosis. This is who Octavia should have always been: unbalanced, with a yearning for power (caused by her own years of helplessness) and a desire to keep it by any means necessary, but “The Warriors Will” felt like an odd mix of redemption and further destruction for Octavia. When she cried after meeting with Bellamy and almost ran the piece of glass across her own wrist, it seemed as if we were supposed to feel sympathy for her. When she begged Indra to show her another way, when she pleaded with Monty to speak with Bellamy about Indra’s weakness and reminisced about the good times trapped in their room with Bellamy; all of these moments felt as if we were supposed to be seeing Octavia under the guise of “Blodreina”.

Unfortunately for the show, I’ve already spent four years understanding why Octavia is who she is, and I didn’t need any more explanations. Yes, I can see that each of the “softer” moments I’ve listed above were then flipped on their heads by Octavia allowing Blodreina to creep out when people didn’t bend to her will, but a villain as bad as Octavia has become in those six years under the ground doesn’t need to be humanized further. This was always going to be her destination, because Octavia was doomed from the moment of her birth.

I hope that the writers fully give in to Octavia as a truly broken and destroyed individual, someone who has truly “died” on the inside, but Octavia has had a metaphorical death every season and I have no faith that the writers are finally ready to commit to the villain they’ve created.

The Bad:

1. Where are the Grounders, Who are the Grounders...

Why are the Grounders (love and miss you Dax!) written as so ridiculously idiotic? This show is full of MacGuffins (plot devices) but I can’t believe that an entire group of people are functioning as one. I cannot understand how an entire group of reasonably intelligent people are still following Octavia’s orders after she has betrayed them twice in one episode.

We have seen the Grounders turn against their Commander before (that was the entire plot of the front end of S3) and know that some will even resort to assassination attempts if necessary. We know that, in the first few months in the bunker, the Grounders didn’t respect Octavia as a true leader, likely because she isn’t a Nightblood and does not hold the Flame, and we know that dissent has been growing amongst them since the bunker was opened.

In this very episode, we see the Grounders lead a chant of “No more Blodreina” for almost a solid minute after the discovery that she’s been lying to them about the existence of food (and a way to grow their own sustainable plant life outside of the bunker), but after Octavia burns that very same sustenance to the ground, the Grounders are once again ready to march to their deaths for their Red Queen.

It’s just not realistic. No group of people is truly this stupid. Not when dissent was already beginning amongst them as early as “Exit Wounds”, not when Octavia doesn’t fit their idea of true Commander anyway, not when she continues to prove how little she values their lives over her own need for power, not when they know that they have a true Commander out there waiting for them (and at least half of the army believes in Madi) — and all of this is made even more offensive by the reminder that Grounders are coded as indigenous peoples.

2. Too Many Serial Killers…

Makes the show a bit dull. As much as I enjoy the inner turmoil that has boiled over in the Eligius crew, McCreary and his merry band of thieves and murderers don’t really bring the same punch when they aren’t facing off against fan favorites Diyoza and Zeke Shaw. The scene in the woods with McCreary murdering the defectors had absolutely no emotional impact (or even an impact on the overall plot) because the audience has no attachment to the characters he murdered.

I assume it was meant to show us once again that McCreary is a ruthless killer, but we already know that. He was on Eligius for a reason and it wasn’t because he handed out candy to crying babies. The scenes with his crew guarding Abby were also unfulfilling because, again, we didn’t know those miners, and because I didn’t know them, their gruesome deaths at the hands of the obviously cannibalistic Vinson (probably foreshadowing for next week’s episode, “The Dark Year”) fell flat as well. The filming choice for that scene was also atrocious as a viewer. I understand that we’re supposed to be “seeing” through Abby’s eyes, but a shaky, blurry camera doesn’t make for a good viewing experience.

I had to consistently force myself to pay attention to the action on the screen during these moments, and even in my rewatch I found nothing of note save Diyoza’s notebook (which mentions the Sword of Damocles — an allusion to the ever-present peril faced by those in power and the title of the two-part finale), which clearly foreshadows the use of the element mined all those years ago later in the season. I would have been more interested in seeing McCreary and his crew hunting for Zeke and Diyoza (as opposed to simply torturing defectors for information) interspersed with the escapees trying to get to safety or coming up with another plan of attack. Instead, the fan favorites were all missing this episode (Zeke, Diyoza, Raven, Murphy, Emori) and what was left was…not great.

3. Let the Past Die

Not to quote Kylo Ren (because…gross), but it’s just not a good thing to continue to harp on the Season 3 actions of one character and one character only. Yes, if you haven’t guessed by now, I am discussing the second mention this season of Bellamy’s participation in the Pike sponsored massacre. We are constantly framing this one moment as the defining moment of Bellamy’s character arc, all while ignoring that Pike actively used Bellamy’s PTSD as it relates to Grounders to coerce him into participating, that Bellamy immediately showed remorse for his actions (in trying to stop Pike from murdering the wounded and later his body language and facial expressions upon entering Arkadia) and that it has, in canon, now been six years since those events happened. It doesn’t help that each time that moment in Bellamy’s life is mentioned the camera pans slowly to his face and Bellamy always must look guilty for a few moments, so we can understand that he did “a bad thing”.

If we are going to dwell on the Bad Thing that Bellamy did in Season 3, why is that we don’t also focus on the Bad Things that almost every other character did in Season 3? Why don’t we ever discuss Octavia brutally beating her brother while those who were supposed to be Bellamy’s friends watched in silence? Why don’t we ever discuss Clarke abandoning her people to relax in the shade in Polis for two weeks under the guise of ambassadorship? Why don’t we discuss Monty being on Team Pike just as much as Bellamy was and even helping to lock the gates to prevent Pike defectors from leaving Arkadia? All of those actions have been excused by the narrative as OK and yet, six years later, we are still dwelling on one day in the life of a character who is meant to be one of our heroes. If Bellamy has grown past his actions and has matured into a head and heart leader, let the others around him do the same.

To be clear, this isn’t a problem that Bellamy alone faces, it’s simply that his actions are the only ones portrayed as negative. Here I’m discussing the show’s continued pandering to Lexa kom Trikru fans. Despite Lexa’s death six years ago, Clarke still holds onto to the memory of her lost love (which is fine! I want to be clear that I have no problem with Clarke being curious about Lexa and Madi’s ability to “commune” with her if you will). My problem here is that we now have a show that has stated that Clarke was canonically willing to allow her best friend (again — canon confirmed) to die for placing the Flame in her child’s head (something just last episode Clarke was referring to as a “thing”), but now can’t bring herself to destroy the Flame because, even six years later, she still believes Lexa is actually residing within it, even as she believes the Flame’s existence to be a clear and present danger to her child.

You can’t write Clarke as being fanatically protective of Madi, to the point where she will allow her best friend to die over a device, I cannot emphasize enough that Bellamy is her still-living best friend, and then turn around and have her use her daughter to inquire about a woman that she loved who has been dead for over six years now. We get it, you want us to understand how important Lexa was, but you should not do that at the expense of what has been deemed the “foundation of the show” by the showrunner himself.

The Decent:

1. Don’t Mess with Gaia…

Kom Trikru, that is. I have been a Gaia stan since her initial introduction and the religious warrior hasn’t let me down yet. Her every action for six years in the bunker has been done with the faith that one day a true Commander would return to them and lead the Grounders once more. In the interim period, she made sure to ingratiate herself to Octavia, becoming a trusted member of her group which allowed her to continue to protect the Flame and operate mostly unquestioned. I admired her plan in this episode, her staunch refusal to murder her mother or Bellamy and even her attempted assassination of Octavia. Now that Gaia knows Madi is out there, she will stop at nothing to place her in her rightful place.

Equally as exciting is that there are people who believe in her as well. Gaia’s faction of the faithful seems small now, but I have no doubt that as we get closer to the end of the season we’re going to see that number increase. It won’t be easy to walk through fifty miles of desert, especially not once the sandworms make their appearance, and the further they walk the more cracks will appear in Wonkru, and I have no doubt that’s when Gaia will strike. I believe in her mission and I hope that her faith will be rewarded.

2. Always Bet on Green…

Monty Green, that is. It comes as no surprise to any of us that Monty, who has been pushing for a peaceful solution since he got to the ground and realized what has become of the bunker, found a way to save the day. He knew he could regrow the hydrofarm, he said as much to Kara only a few episodes prior (in 5x08 “How We Get to Peace”) and he’s managed to do just that and more, expanding his idea into the ability to create sustainable flora even outside of the bunker, with the hope that perhaps they could create their own Eden. It’s a genius solution, one that wastes no more lives and, while it might take a few years to truly bloom, it was one that was workable. In fact, that shred of hope might have given the bunker group enough time to work out true peace with Eligius.

Instead, all of Monty’s hard work is burned to the ground by literal dictator Octavia, and it is heartbreaking to see Monty sitting outside the ruins of Polis, holding on to his last bit of algae. Monty’s one hope was that death could be avoided. He didn’t want to return to Earth if it meant having to kill to live, he didn’t want to march on Eden, and I believe that his words about “deserving Earth” will come back to haunt a few people. Monty’s algae in small doses was enough to put both Murphy and Octavia in a coma, in a large enough dose I fear it could prove lethal. The camera focus on the jar and Monty’s insistence this season on peace (and death before war) tell me that the facilitator of irradiation in Mt. Weather, the boy who killed his mother twice (one time for Octavia herself — methinks he might regret that now) might be planning something, and I don’t think it’s going to turn out well for everyone.

3. A Mother’s Love…

As much as I’ve bemoaned the presentation of motherhood on The 100 in general and this season in particular, they finally got it right with Indra. I have never been more in awe of her than I was when she told Octavia that Gaia would be walking out of that pit and that she would kill Bellamy to ensure it. There was no hesitation, and finally I saw a mother’s love that I recognize. Indra’s willingness to sacrifice herself (and everyone else in the ring with her) is exactly what motherhood is all about. What makes the moment even better are the facts that:

Indra considered Octavia a daughter and loves her still, but is unwilling to continue to allow that to take precedence over the continued survival of Gaia, and

Octavia truly believed that Indra would choose Bellamy (and thus Octavia herself) over Gaia, only to hear Indra reject her.

Just as Bellamy is Octavia’s blood, Gaia is Indra’s (and more — flesh of her flesh as well). There is no stronger bond than that of motherhood, no greater love than that of a mother for her child, and I will rewatch the moments that Indra told both Blake siblings that her child would be the one walking out of that ring alive until my DVR recording refuses to allow me to rewind again. There is true strength in motherhood that does not run from problems but faces them head on and when it realizes that the only option might be death, does not flinch. I love Indra kom Trikru, she deserves the world.

In conclusion, “The Warriors Will” was another filler episode that had little to no impact on the overall plot of the season. It’s beginning to seem as of the six-year time jump, which could have had huge emotional impact across several relationships, was only created to force a divide between two characters, as no other aspect of the show has changed. Octavia is darker, absolutely, but she was already dark. Abby has a severe medical condition, but she already had one of those. Kane is operating as a goodwill ambassador for Eligius, but he’s always done that. The Flame is still a MacGuffin that does whatever the plot needs it to, it’s always done that.

I believe an opportunity for actual character-driven plots (as opposed to the characters continuing to react to the plot) was missed and, with only 3 episodes left in the season, I have no idea how the show can successfully wrap up every loose end it’s created and also shoehorn in the introduction for next season. I hope the show can prove me wrong.

The 100 airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

April’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... The Leftovers (S03E02) Don't Be Ridiculous Airdate: April 23, 2017 @hbo Ratings: 0.776 Million :: 0.34 18-49 Demo Share Score : 9.5/10 **********SPOILERS BELOW********** First off... Let's get one thing straight... 'Wu-Tang Clan ain't nuthin' to fuck with!' Second... It's true that at one time I was huge young fan of 'Perfect Strangers'. My mother and I still refer to Mark Linn-Baker's costar Bronson Pinchot's 'Balky's ridiculous line, 'Well feed me garlic and call me stinky!' That line was fed numerous times throughout the ridiculous number of 151 episodes of the 8 Season run that lasted 7 1/2 years. Sometimes we need 'ridiculous', sometimes 'the ridiculous' is what keeps a smile on our face, a stupid joke running for far too many years, it keeps us from cracking under the incredibly immense pressures of life. Nora has very much evolved from S1 to S2 to this very point in S3. Nora has lost everything and now clings on to The Garvey family, as they do to her... They need each other, it's comforting to know that they're just there, but anything beyond that is hollow. You know that moment after 'The Honeymoon' phase of a relationship is over and you wonder... 'Am I just here because I'm scared of being alone?' 'Are we together because I don't know if the grass is really greener on the other side?' After so much loss, so much grieving, and so much sadness... You finally put all the pieces back together again the best you can... And viola, something tests you. Something tests what you've built. The house of cards you built is barely holding up on a windy day, and you'll do anything to fight that seed of doubt... You know those days right? That's the kind of day Laura is having when she gets a ridiculous call from the only star left on earth who played a major role in 'Perfect Strangers', Mark Linn-Baker. He offers up Norma a 'ridiculous' proposition. Show up in St Louis, where he'll be for the next 24 hours, and he'll give her an opportunity of a lifetime... To see the family she lost, the one she has already accepted that she'll never see again. Absolutely ridiculous, right? Nora thinks so, but seeds of doubt always grow faster the harder you try to ignore them... And as 'ridiculous' as it sounds, what if it true? Of course it isn't, right? I mean, this isn't about that, not admittedly... This about uncovering a group taking advantage of those that were left behind and incinerating them. That's the most logical answer and logical always beats ridiculous, especially when all the faith that was left inside of you has been ripped to shreds by a proverbial pack of wild wolves. It's all so ridiculous... On her way out after a strange meeting with Mark Linn-Baker, Nora makes a quick detour to see Lilly, who doesn't even remember her. The sight of Christine scares her away. It's all too much for her to face. The family she attempted to create from the ashes of her own will never truly be hers, ever. Incinerator or not, could Baker's theory and thumb drive full of testimonials really reunite her with everything she had already accepted to be gone forever? Too heavy... Might as well stop by Erika's house on the way back in to town, show off her new accidental Wu-Tang Clan tattoo (Respect, 'Killer Bees sold 50 Gold, 60 Platinum!') and have a ridiculous jump on Erika's ridiculous new trampoline to ridiculously sick Wu-Tang beats. Is that ridiculous enough for you? Back to Jarden, Texas. Nora is having a ridiculous fn' day, After being stopped by Tom coming back into town, browbeaten for stopping in to see Lilly (Christine has apparently called), having every electronic device she cane across betray her in the most personal way possible a computer can betray or insult a human being. Oh, and let's not forget she walks in on Kevin killing himself and bringing himself back to life, a ridiculous little trick he does... She marches up to the now deceased Pillar Man's alter where people are treating him like some sort of divine being... His lonely wife, Sandy (Brett Butler) involving Matt to keep his 'fake departure' a secret to keep some sort of ridiculous faith going... And against all recommendations and pleas, she posts the picture of the Pillar Man's dead body for everyone to see. No one will be able to hold on to their ridiculous notions of faith, or believing in something greater, in believing that they too can be saved... Because that's just fn' ridiculous. Personally, I would've ended the episode right there. It was perfect, ridiculous, but perfect... Did I mention that it was ridiculous? Well, can't have an episode titled 'Don't Be Ridiculous' without some sort of over-the-top ridiculousness. Back in Australia, four women on a horse look for a Chief of Police named Kevin. Clearly there's a mix-up. This isn't the Kevin their looking for... They'll find that out later when they drown him and he doesn't survive. Ladies, as ridiculous as it may sound... The Kevin you're looking for is halfway across the world, but don't worry, he's on his way... Led by Nora & a ridiculous idea brought to you by 'Perfect Stranger's Mark Linn-Baker. Ridiculous, indeed!

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 9: Strange Fandom Space

I suck at sleeping at the right times in general but especially this week so I didn’t watch 4x02 until just now and I don’t have time to write up thoughts because like...work exists tomorrow unfortunately. I’m gonna just start indiscriminately closing order lines like whatever.

Wrote this earlier though so it’s kinda long but is not proof of me staying up late to ramble on tumblr I swear. Will write some sort of reaction tomorrow. Quick quick version: I liked 4x02 a lot. I’m quite pleased.

*

Yesterday when my mother was giving me her cryptic spoiler-free review of 4x02, I realized that the only couple whose canon status I'm waiting on is Bellarke. Like the only non-canon couple I both ship, and expect to be canon, is Bellarke. Which surprised me for some reason, though I don't know why. Maybe because I low-key ship so many people? I don't know, it probably shouldn't be a shock as I'm so out of step with the show romantic-pairing wise lol.  

(This came up because she said there was a romantic development I would like, and I guessed Kabby sex scene right away. We'd just been talking about Bellarke in a way that made me aware she wasn't talking about them, so I knew it had to be a development with an established couple. I don't have any not-quite-canon ships beyond Bellarke. And other convo had already made me aware it wasn't Miller/Bryan either. Thus the choices were really narrow.)

I just often feel like I’m in a totally different place re: thoughts/feelings on couples in the show, versus like the rest of fandom. And I think part of the reason for this is that I'm very used to using fandom to fill in gaps in canon. So, when the canon is giving me a couple, and giving me everything I want out of the couple, I lose a lot of interest in them, or at least a lot of fanon interest. I start enjoying the show (or whatever) in much the way that casuals do.

This plays into a larger theory of mine that I fall into fandoms particularly for the transformative aspects and thus don't get heavily invested in shows or other pieces of media that I'm perfectly content with—that fandom participation for me is basically a form of mixed adoration and criticism.  

This means that it's hard for me to understand a lot of things in, at least, this fandom, possibly current fandom trends more generally. For example, the focus on definitive truths, which includes expanding the sources from which definitive proof is found—for example, the idea that an interview could be canon. The more you accept as canon, and the more importance you give to canon, the less room there is for debate and interpretation because certain avenues are closed off even if there's nothing in the text to close them. Or the occasionally virulent hatred people receive if they question any aspect of the show, as if being a fan of something meant you cannot criticize it. Or even the weird way that people just like latch onto a random pairing because it's there and it's canon now and there's no room for saying a canon-ship doesn't make sense because it's canon lol so like you're obviously wrong. (Guess who isn't bitter about guess which mystery pairing.) (No one's ever said this to me I'm just bitter and paranoid.)

Or, perhaps most noticeably, the intense focus on whether or not something (usually a couple) will become canon. The derision fans receive if they like something not-yet canon. The ugly debates. The defensiveness (understandable given the derision though.) And just the investment in canon status.

On the one hand, as someone who's had a lot of non-canon OTPs I dearly wanted to become canon, I do get it. When you see all this evidence that A+B should be together, of course you want to see that come to fruition. Clearly. This happens to me a lot because  I (usually) need there to be some sort of canon-basis for a relationship in general to start shipping it. Very rarely do I ship people who've never interacted in canon, for example, and most of my big ships and OTPs are ones that I think should have been canon, given the evidence/foreshadowing.

But then on the other hand it's becoming pretty clear to me that, as I said, I lose interest in a couple in rough proportion to the degree that the couple is canon. Maybe it's because I've pretty much never gotten a canon ship before that I'm only realizing this now, but apparently when a Really Obvious Ship crosses the line from almost-there to actually-there, I start tuning out of the fandom.

For example, on The 100, I have followed along neutrally with some canon ships, like Finn/Clarke or Wick/Raven. (At some point I would have said I actually shipped Wick and Raven but...IDK fandom pretty much ruined that pairing for me and given that I didn't miss Wick when he was gone, I think in retrospect I was just having the sort of reaction a casual viewer would to it: I picked up the hints the story was giving me, enjoyed when they lead exactly where they were supposed to lead, but was never so invested that I focused on the couple in fanon or felt a loss in the show when they off-screen broke up). Even Lincoln/Octavia is probably in this category, as I enjoyed their relationship on the show, but never thought too deeply about it (because you can't, or it falls apart right away lol); I enjoy/ed them as a background couple in fics but have never sought out fic that features them as the main couple. That sort of thing.

I'd say I actively ship Jasper/Maya in the sense that I'm more-than-average invested in them, but again, the narrative gave me everything I wanted from that pairing so I very rarely spend any sort of fannish energy on them.

Miller/Bryan is a canon ship I actively ship (and have even written for) but they only had a handful of scenes in S3, we barely know Bryan's personality, etc. In other words, even though they're a canon couple, the narrative isn't/wasn't giving me everything I wanted about them, so fan works fill/ed the gap.

And Kane/Abby...they were never a big ship for me but I would say I pretty actively shipped them pre-S3. Now I passively ship them. I like them, I look forward to their scenes and their relationship developing, but a lot of my excited fandom feels just disappeared when they became canon.  

Even Bellarke is a little bit like this to me, only in the sense that I think it is super obvious they are going to be canon/endgame and I so trust the narrative on that point that I have no reason to ever think about their canon/not-canon status. It'll happen eventually. I'll enjoy it. But it really doesn't matter to me if it happens next week or next month or next season. Honestly, I really don't like feeling this way. I envy people who can get excited about their imminent canon-ness or even who can debate just how imminent it is. I just have no passion about it personally.

And...everyone else I ship on this show is very clearly in the Never Going to Be Canon category.  

I think there's sorta an argument to be made that canon Raven/Clarke could have been a thing... I mean IDK canon Cl*xa happened on less build up than Raven/Clarke had in S1 so I mean reasonable people can disagree I think... but not anymore. What with the damage in their relationship, the clear disinterest in the writers in developing even the friendship aspects, and the super bright signals that Bellarke is full steam ahead at this point, I don't see any room for R/C and in fact if they did veer off in that direction I'd be confused and annoyed even though I do ship them. Every other ship of mine is like...maybe if hell freezes over lol. In some cases, making a fanon-ship of mine canon would literally involve raising the dead but tbh even when both parties are still alive it's still just about as likely. And my point is that I'm okay with that.

I don't know what the overall point of any of this is except that being in this fandom is really making me re-evaluate the whole concept of fandom to me. What I want out of it, what other people seem to want out of it, and so on. My interest in the show itself is falling so low that sometimes I cannot fathom why I'm still in the fandom—I don't think I've ever felt like this about the source material before without actually leaving. I really thought S3 was bad, and I think S4 is better, so far, but if this were S1 I'd probably drift away before mid-season, it just doesn't match up with my interests very well. And yet I'm still here and I like being here, and it's because the core idea of the show, the universe, the first two seasons, the characters, and the stories I've put them in within my own head, are all so dear to me that I remain actively invested in something. It isn't the source material, isn't the community really (I'm an unknown that's all I mean, and I don't interact with people really bc I'm shy—this isn't an insult to the people in fandom). It isn't the fandom in the sense that stuff-that-concerns-the-fandom-as-a-whole doesn't concern me. And yet, for whatever reason, I'm still here. My very niche fandom interests keep me around. And it's just so bizarro to me.