#why women in these stories react to marlowe as they do

[cantsayidont]

August 1946. Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel THE BIG SLEEP, thought that Martha Vickers (top) as the debauched Carmen Sternwood, whose own father describes her as "still a little girl who likes to pull the wings off flies," thoroughly overshadowed Lauren Bacall as Carmen's older sister Vivian (the film's romantic lead); one of the reasons parts of the 1945 cut of the film were reshot prior to release was to build up Bacall's role. Curiously, both versions of the Hawks film omit Carmen's climatic scene from the novel, leading some unobservant critics to mistakenly assume that the film has altered Carmen's basic role in the plot.

Although the novel was published in 1939, the screenplay sets the action during the war, which provides at least a little justification for the film's silliest conceit: that every woman Bogart's Philip Marlowe encounters looks at him like a hungry cat who's just spotted a bird right outside the window. (Bogart is Bogart, but he's hardly Tyrone Power, or even George Montgomery, who played Marlowe in 1947's THE BRASHER DOUBLOON.) Hawks treats this as a running gag, relieving the skeptical viewer of the need to take it too seriously.

[Image ID: Three animated GIFs from THE BIG SLEEP. The first two show Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers), a teenage girl in a dark short-sleeve blouse and belted white skirt with small polka dots. In the first GIF, she shuffles back and forth as she looks appraisingly at Philip Marlowe (off-screen). In the second GIF, she says, "You're not very tall, are you?" with an expression intended to be both derisive and flirtatious. The third GIF shows Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) glancing down at the hat in his right hand while responding ingenuously, "Well, uh, I tried to be."]

The Big Sleep (1946) dir. Howard Hawks

[terpia]

Early Modern Drama Rec List (Non-Shakespeare)

So I just spend a year reading a lot of early modern drama and I thought I might as well put my degree to a good use and make a list of some of my favourite lesser known (i.e. not written by Shakespeare) early modern plays. All of these plays are in the public domain, so it should be very easy to find them online.

Comedies:

The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker - a fictional story featuring a dramatized portrayal of a real person, Mary Firth, also known as Moll Cutpurse. Moll was a notorious pickpocket, wore a doublet and breeches, smoked a pipe, cursed, and was generally infamous for her 'mannish' behaviour. And she's a character in this play!

It is open to interpretation how positive the play's depiction of Moll really is, but she does play a very important role in getting the main pair of lovers together and ends the play happily continuing to live her life the way she wants, which is in itself pretty incredible. Overall, just a really fun read.

Galatea (or Gallathea) by John Lyly - a 16th century play that is both gay and trans??? Sign me up! In a village where the fairest virgin needs to be sacrificed to Neptune every 5 years (or he'll drown everyone), two fathers decide to disguise their beautiful daughters as boys and hide them in a nearby forest. While wandering around the forest the two girls meet and, falling for each other's disguises, fall in love. In the end (spoilers for the ending, but this is not exactly a play you read for the plot, lol), Diana stops Neptune, the two girls find out each other's true identities and decide they're still in love, and Venus turns one of them (we never find out which one) into a boy so that they can get married.

As must be clear from this summary, this comedy plays around with gender a lot. To add to the gender cocktail, remember that the two girls would have been originally played by boys. Although the ending was seen as heteronormative by early queer critics, the emergence of trans criticism within queer theory has led to a lot of interesting readings of the play. Well worth a read.

(also, if you have a device on which you can play DVDs and some money to spare, consider buying a DVD of the Edward's Boys production of the play. Edward's Boys is a group that replicates the format of early modern boys' companies, with all roles in their productions being played by boys. I will admit, when I bought a DVD of their 2014 production of Galatea, I expected to watch a glorified high school performance, but it turned out to be so good. All the boy actors were amazing, way better at performing Shakespeare than a lot of Hollywood actors. This just straight-up felt like a professional theatre production, I highly recommend it.)

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont - I don't even know how to describe this play other than 'fantastic and fun'. A meta-theatrical city comedy, which starts with a pair of audience members (who were actually two dressed-up boy actors from the boys' company performing the play) jumping onto a stage and demanding to see a different play than the the one being set up. Things get only wilder from there.

A genuinely really funny play. I don't know of anyone who has read it and hasn't immediately loved it.

The Sea Voyage by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger - one of the least well known plays out of this list, which is unfortunate because this play is really fun. Short and sweet, it's a story of a bunch of (surprisingly honorable) pirates, who get shipwrecked on an island inhabited by a tribe of Amazon-like women. Predictably, hijinks ensue. An interesting look into early modern gender relations (apparently the main reason why living without men would be difficult for women is because of how horny they would get? I think Fletcher and Massinger need to take a lesson or two from Lyly).

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson - want to see three assholes con a bunch of idiots in increasingly ridiculous ways? Then this is the play for you.

Jonson's city comedies, which satirize the people of early modern London, tend to be much meaner in tone than Shakespeare's comedies and the other comedies on this list, but in many ways, that's what makes them fun. Viciously clever and at times really funny, there's an edge to the writing that makes it very entertaining. I had a lot of fun reading this (Jonson's Epicoene is also great, if you want a comedy that's even meaner and also has some very questionable gay stuff in it).

Tragedies:

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe - probably the most famous non-Shakespeare early modern play, and for a good reason. It has everything; pacts with the devil, a melodramatic anti-hero protagonist, homoeroticism (I mean of course, it's Marlowe), and a suitably gory and tragic ending. What more can you ask for?

The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary - this play is more interesting than fun, but I think it's still well worth a read. It's the first original play written in English by a woman. The play takes place in ancient Palestine. It looks at the way Mariam, a Jewish queen, reacts to the news of the death of her husband, the tyrannous Herod (yes, the baby-killing guy from the Bible). Most people seem to be relieved. Except oops, Herod is not actually dead.

A fascinating look at gender ideology in the early modern period, with the play centering around the conflict of a woman who tries to live up to the ideals of a perfect wife and woman, while stuck in a marriage to a tyrant. This play would also be a great read for anyone interested in how gender and sexuality intersected with race in early modern England, because this play uses a lot of racialized language to describe women.

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster - a classic revenge tragedy. A recently widowed Duchess wants to marry her steward, but her asshole brothers throw a fit. Intrigue and death ensue. At one point a fake wax hand and some fake wax corpses appear on stage.

This play basically reads like a good thriller. Fucked up in a way that only an early modern revenge tragedy can be, this is a fun and thrilling read.

The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley - speaking of fucked up. If you're planning to read it, be mindful that this play contains sexual assault. It's a story of a young noblewoman called Beatrice, who wants to get rid of her fiancé after falling in love with a visiting nobleman. To do it, she enlists the help of her villainous servant De Flores. Things end up going extremely badly.

This play can get very uncomfortable at times, but just like The Duchess, it's as gripping as any good modern thriller. Very engaging. The ending is as engrossing as it is stomach-churning, although probably not for the reasons it was originally meant to (reading criticism about The Changeling, it is genuinely shocking and disheartening to see how long it took for critics to start addressing the clear issues of consent in the play). The story also includes a bizarre virginity test that uses a potion which makes you drowsy or which makes you sneeze and laugh depending on whether you had sex or not, so hey, at least that's fun?

Antonio's Revenge by John Marston - ok, so this is definitely the least... good of the plays I've recommended so far, but listen. Do you like trainwrecks? Do you like violence so over-the-top that people to this day wonder whether it's actually supposed to be a parody of the revenge tragedy genre? Are you looking for a reading experience that will make you go 'what the fuck' throughout? If so, this is the play for you!

Very much in the so bad it's good category. Ridiculously gory. The only thing that makes it better is knowing that it was originally played by children (on a related note, I haven't seen this production, but I know that this play has also been played by Edward's Boys). If you like horrible, gory horror movies, you'll probably enjoy this play.

That's it for now! Hopefully at least a few of these plays catch your interest.

Btw, LibriVox, which is an organisation that makes public domain recordings of public domain texts, has most of these plays available as free audiobooks, if you're interested!

[laventadorn]

Part 1/2 I was wondering if you had any ideas/headcanons wrt Eileen/Tobias? JK doesn't really go into how they met, but given the little info he gives us its pretty clear the type of marriage they had. But, I was wondering why Tobias acted the way he did. Not that he needs a reason, but I love backstories. Do u have one for the Snapes? Personally, I sawa bit of parallel with how Seamus described how his muggle dad didn't know his mom was a which until after the wedding. I can sort of see...

I wrote one for my first HP fic, in fact! Heavily influenced by Jane Austen lmao

I would change some aspects of this now, but this was the version I dug up from my Ancient Writings: 

(readmore, y u no work)

Eileen’s parents’ marriage was arranged, as many pure-blood marriages are. The Princes were a very old, distinguished line, but impoverished, while her mother’s family was relatively new, in a pure-blood sense, but wealthy. Her parents set up the marriage with Mr. Prince, who was rather older than their daughter, but she agreed to it. However, within a short time she was unhappy, since her husband, raised to frugality, was rather miserly and she was spendthrift; and being younger, she wanted to do a great many things that it was not in his temperament to agree to. When Eileen was about five or six, her mother ran away, abandoning her child and her marriage, eloping to Europe with a lover. Her husband was so humiliated and enraged that he forbade anyone in the household to speak her name ever again. He destroyed all evidence of her existence in the house—the possessions she had left behind, the paintings they’d had commissioned, even renouncing her personal house-elf. Even when he learned, three years later, that she’d died in conditions of poverty and hardship, it didn’t soften him toward her; instead, he only believed she had got what she deserved.

When Eileen was seven, he remarried, this time to a widow, one of the Blacks, who had endured a childless marriage of some fifteen years until her husband was killed rather stupidly trying to learn how to ride a dragon. She had no wealth, but Mr. Prince still had his wife’s fortune, and Mrs. Black’s impeccable bloodline meant more to him in any case. She and Mr. Prince were rather meant for each other, however: both were nip-farthings, both joyless and cruel, and both rigidly traditional. They believed in duty, propriety, and unstinting obedience from their children. 

Mrs. Black, now Mrs. Prince, thought worse of the former Mrs. Prince than even her husband did. To her, a woman’s infidelity was the worst of vile sins, and she pitied her new husband for having married such a filthy whore. She was sorry that the former Mrs. Prince had left behind a little girl, since naturally the daughter of such a whore would turn out just like her. 

But Mrs. Prince was determined to do her duty by Eileen. She raised her to be a proper pure-blood wife—dutiful, obedient, graceful and silent. She beat into her the importance of propriety, telling Eileen how vital it was that she give no one any cause to say how like her mother she was, however much she would surely have the same sort of base, wicked urges as that slut. She also impressed upon Eileen the necessity of marrying into a pure-blood family of stature, since her mother was a fine example of the rubbish that rose to the surface of bad blood.

Within a few short years, the new Mrs. Prince had rewarded her second husband with twin sons. These boys had the benefit firstly of being boys, always a plus in pure-blood families, as well as the added bonus of not having a piece of trash for a mother. The practice of favoring the sons over the daughters was standard in pure-blood families, but the sins of Eileen’s mother worsened her lot. Nothing Eileen ever did was right enough or good enough or proper enough in the eyes of her family; and at school she had no friends, since the pure-blood daughters of Slytherin were fully aware of her mother’s story and had been forbidden from associating with her. Eileen was not pretty, and her home life was too miserable to make her good enough company to compensate for her other defects. Her father pretended she did not exist, her brothers teased and tormented her, and her stepmother ruled her whole life with a fist of iron. 

Eileen retreated into her schoolwork, into books and knowledge. In second year she did make one friend, a Ravenclaw named Constance Marlowe. Constance was a very tranquil person. Her mother was Muggle-born, and she would tell Eileen about her Muggle grandparents. Eileen had never met Muggles. Her father and stepfather loathed them, but they loathed Eileen, too, and loved her brothers and the pure-blood families who treated Eileen as if their cruelty was simply preempting every nasty thing they suspected she would ever do. 

Then in fifth year, while visiting the sea shore on summer holiday, Constance drowned. Eileen went to her funeral, to which many of Constance’s Muggle relatives had come. They looked like regular people, although they dressed funny. After that, Eileen hated the ocean, but realized that Muggles were capable of human thought and speech, which her family had always led her to believe they weren’t.

When school ended, she returned to live at her father’s house, since pure-blood women of her family’s stature did not get jobs; they got married. But with Eileen’s reputation, her looks, and her father’s desire to spend as little money on her dowry as possible, she received no offers. Her blood was not even decent enough, balanced as it was by her mother’s betrayal. So for more than ten years, Eileen lived in her father’s home, a companion to her stepmother, an object of mockery to her brothers and the children they went on to have.

By the time she was thirty, everyone, even she, was certain she would never marry. Her stepmother even came to relax her restrictions, since she had kept Eileen wrapped so tightly out of a duty to maidenly propriety. A thin, unattractive thirty-year-old witch was not likely to be prey to any lascivious attentions or whims. Uncaring now of the reputation she had so viciously guarded, Mrs. Prince let Eileen out of the house for longer periods of time … although she might not have, had she known Eileen was visiting Muggle haunts.

On one of these jaunts, when she was about thirty-one, Eileen met Tobias. She had gone, in fact, to the seaside town where Constance drowned, perhaps out of a morbid desire to torture herself. He was there, too, trying to get away from his life for a bit, since he’d just gotten divorced. 

He had married young when his girlfriend got pregnant unexpectedly. He’d done his duty by her, quitting school and going to work at the mill, but a few months before the day he met Eileen, his wife had sat him down and said she’d fallen in love with some other bloke, but she wanted to do right by Tobias because he’d always done right by her. She and he weren’t in love, hadn’t been since the very early days, even if they’d rubbed along together easily enough, and he said as long as he could keep seeing his girl, they’d be all right. So they divorced amicably, and she married the other bloke, who was a bit older and balding and sort of fat, but a jolly sort, which Tobias had to admit he was not. Lorraine’s new husband looked a bit like Santa Claus to Tobias, and he knew his daughter would like her step-father, if she didn’t already. And although as a young man he’d agreed to the marriage of necessity and had never really been bitter about it, happy enough with his wife and daughter for company, he had wanted more from his life than he’d wound up with at thirty-five: divorced, uneducated, in a dreary, pointless job.

As she was talking with him, Eileen realized she wanted more than anything to get away from her family. She realized how purely she hated them, as if the hatred ran through her blood. She decided to scandalize them utterly: packed up her marriage chest and ran away, to live with Tobias without marrying him, hoping to drive her father and step-mother both to an apoplectic fit, but at least one or the other if she could manage it. 

So she and Tobias simply lived together for a while, until Eileen got pregnant. She had been guarding against this, but the magical world had an old wives’ tale that wizarding babies wanted to be born so badly that sometimes, you couldn’t stop them. When she told Tobias, he wanted to get married, and although she didn’t really, she didn’t want her child to suffer the ignominy of being the bastard of a whore. So they were married, very quietly, only Tobias’ ex-wife in attendance with her family. Not wanting to give birth to a daughter that would live the life she’d had, Eileen mixed a very Dark potion to ensure the birth of a son.

So Severus was born. She put an ad in the Daily Prophet, hoping her family would see it, in case it would give them an aneurism. 

Before Severus was born, but when she was close to due, Tobias asked her if the baby would have magic. Eileen said, “It is likely, but he may not.”

“What happens if he doesn’t?” Tobias asked.

Eileen shrugged. “Then he doesn’t.” She wanted her son to be a wizard, but she was no longer in the magical world; a Squib child would not matter to her now. She had brothers; she was not even the end of the line. 

It was impossible to tell if babies had magic, so for several years after Severus’ birth it was a moot issue. Eileen continued to work spells, because Tobias said he didn’t mind, he actually thought it was pretty interesting. And then one day when Severus was about four or five, he worked magic, and out of nowhere Tobias blew up at the pair of them. Eileen was so shocked she actually flinched away, because although she knew Tobias had a temper, he’d never turned it on her. Severus burst into tears. And then Eileen pulled herself together and reacted, rage and hatred boiling up out of her through her wand, and she turned it on her husband, the way she’d always wanted to do to her brothers, her father, her step-mother, the children at school, and she blasted him across the room and into the bookshelf.

Severus screamed. Eileen stood frozen, looking at Tobias’ unconscious body slumped under an array of books. She blasted them off him and found he was bleeding from cuts all over his front. She hastily flooed them all to St. Mungo’s, where he was swiftly patched up. Although the Healers gave her funny looks, they did nothing to her because she was a witch and he was only a Muggle, and there weren’t legal protections in those days for the Muggle spouses of wizards and witches.

Tobias wasn’t the same after that. Eileen didn’t know whether it was the shock of her turning her magic on him, or Severus’ own magic manifesting, or even the trip to St. Mungo’s, because his face as he looked around the hospital as they left had been haunted. After that, he began to drink more. Although he’d always had a few on the weekends and even more on holidays, he was soon never seen without a drink in his hand or the scent of alcohol on his breath. He wouldn’t tell Eileen what was wrong, and it was impossible to get anything from the mind of a drunk person; even trying it made one disoriented. 

She expected him to leave them; expected to wake up one morning and find him gone, but for some reason he never did. They settled into a life where Tobias would go for days avoiding her and Severus, hardly speaking to them when sober, muttering when inebriated, with occasional outbursts of temper that Eileen would sometimes curtail, but at others simply weather out. As a young child Severus was at first frightened, then hurt, and once he grew older, resentful.

Once, when Severus was about seven, she did wake up in the middle of the night and find Tobias in Severus’ room, watching him sleep. Tobias was just drunk enough to be honest. He looked up at her with haunted eyes and said, “Do you hate that I can’t do it?”

“Do what?” she asked, bewildered.

“What you can do. What he can do. Do you hate me because I can’t?”

Eileen just stared at him. “Is that why you act like this?” He didn’t say anything, just looked back at Severus. “No, I don’t hate you. That would be like hating the sky because it’s blue.”

When he spoke, she almost didn’t hear him. “Sometimes I hate you, though. Both of you.”

It took Eileen much longer than it should have to understand what Tobias was really telling her: that he hated them for being able to do something he never would. He hated them for having the power of magic when he was only a Muggle. That look on his face in St. Mungo’s had been shock at an entire world he’d never guessed existed; and now that he knew of it, he also knew he would only ever be on the outside looking in.

But she had not understood this in time. She resented his drinking; he resented her powers; they resented each other’s resentment. And at the heart of it, they came to hate the other for a second chance that had turned to ash, just as the first chance had. 

Eventually Eileen realized that the same barrier that stood between her and Tobias had blocked him off from Severus, and she simply quit trying to bridge it. She drew Severus into the circle of her magic, eschewing any acknowledgment of the non-magical world he was half a part of. She had always meant Tobias to show him that part, and now Tobias would not. She taught Severus about his magical bloodline, the House of their family’s allegiance, the world he would enter once he was old enough, the powers he would wield. Although she punished him if he looked in her books without her permission, she taught him hexes and curses and spells that would get him respected among his Slytherin peers, that would receive him the notice of families he would need to impress in order to gain entrance into the society that should have been his—both of theirs, had her life gone much differently. She raised him more as she had been raised, in a manner typical for pure-blood daughters: with strictness and not much indulgence, because she’d loathed the men her brothers had become, alternately indulged and ruthlessly punished as they had been, as the beloved sons of two cruel, cold-hearted people. 

In teaching Severus about the world she had left, sending him off into the future he ought to have, Eileen realized she had never been happy in the world of magic. She had known the truth of that, lived it all her life, but never articulated it to herself. But she was not happy in the Muggle world, either; she did not understand it, couldn’t navigate it. It was too vast and unfamiliar for her even to know where to start. As she prepared Severus for Hogwarts, Eileen realized the only time she had been anything close to happy was in that seaside town when she had met Tobias, and she had believed, for a handful of days, that the future would be different from the past.

But it hadn’t been. Now Tobias was gone, and only Severus was left. And even though she had tried her hardest to make it otherwise, she realized that Severus was just as out-of-place as she had ever been; she, the daughter of a whore, the pure-blood wife of a Muggle with a wizard for a son. Severus was the child of two people whose lives had been wasted for them by others; sent as hardly more than a baby into the world of pure-blood politics with such a tiny arsenal of anything they would see as promise, in love with a naïve Muggle-born Gryffindor. If Severus wanted the Muggle-born, he would cut all his chances of entering good society; and if he got the Muggle-born, he would find himself in the midst of people who regarded his magic with jealousy and suspicion.

That was the true curse of the half-blood, she thought. You were always trapped between worlds that didn’t know how to claim you.

.

.

.

*Snape doesn’t have those uncles anymore cuz they died off somehow, and he doesn’t have contact with his dad’s first family. He doesn’t strike me as someone who has a large extended family he pals around with, although I’m sure they exist. I have 1 jillion cousins I know absolutely nothing about, not even their names.  

[oosteven-universe]

Forgotten Hymns #1

Forgotten Hymns #1 PMB Comics 2020 Created & Written by Andrew Guilde Illustrated by Isaac Perez Lettered by DC Hopkins Like most self-entitled corporate billionaires, the idea of owning up for wrong doings, especially crimes committed by their company, and dealing with the consequences, is utterly unthinkable.  Thus, when a scandal involving the company’s founder, who happens to be her father, threatens to rock the corporation to its core, Lillian decides to do what most powerful people do when they’re threatened: she’s going to cover it up. This was funded as a kickstarter campaign so keep an eye out for the second issues campaign.  Trust me it is going to be well worth it if this first issue is anything to go by.  The opening is interesting because we really don’t know what’s going on however, we do see enough that it makes us want to know more.  The intrigue factor here is extremely high and given what we know ahead of time it’s something I want to see so badly.  When we hit the main story things don’t really get any clearer but again that’s okay by me because it seems that these women and their tattoos are one thing and what we learn this issue while somehow being tied into that will come out in the wash. I like the way that this is being told.  The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information constantly moves forward extremely well.  I like how we see the events occur because they build the intrigue factor and add tension to the story.  The character development that we see is pretty solid stuff.  How we see the characters act and react to the situations and circumstances they encounter alongside the dialogue, whether its aloud on their own or to someone else, really has some great moments of seriousness and levity to make them feel more real.  The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the story and introducing us to the characters it creates a definite sense of doom is approaching. I am enjoying how this is structured and how we see various layers within the story emerge and grow already.  There are like five separate things happening here and they all tie together one way or another and right now you can sense it but half the fun will be in finding out.  How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow is extremely nice to see. The interiors here are spectacular!  The Black & White medium is completely unforgiving and will show every single flaw and that I couldn’t notice any is a testament to just how darn good the interiors truly are.  With the tattoos providing the only pops of colour making them stand out the way they do and that it isn’t overused really speaks volumes.  The linework is exquisite and how we see the varying weights and techniques being utilised to showcase this level and quality of the detail in the work is mindbogglingly stunning.  Backgrounds are an integral part of the story and to see them with the same kind zeal is phenomenal.  Because not only do they enhance the moments and set the stage but they also provide depth perception, a sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story.  The creativity and imagination we see is phenomenally represented throughout and whether that’s mundane places or the tentacles from the cover it’s beautifully rendered.  The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panel shows a masterful eye for storytelling. Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade eat your hearts out!  This really did make me think I was watching Turner Classic Films which makes it so easy to get lost in the book and the story.  Plus as that added bonus how much the reader is engaged in the story and its characters just makes me want more.  Folks this is why I promote Kickstarter books, why I tell you all to peruse artist alley and the small press section of conventions because if you miss out on this then you’re missing out on some bloody brilliant storytelling. ​ Right now you can go here

https://mailchi.mp/178ee5d5232d/rjixlrh07i for all the information you need to read this and sign up for the list and be notified when issue two goes live on Kickstarter.

[nottrampis]

Possibly the last questions I will answer

Here are answers to questions that some-one dumped on me.

Why did I start this blog?

I did write about Castle on my normal blog ( which is mainly about economics and politics) but I felt I wanted to write a lot more.I wanted to did deep into Castle which I felt was being missed by others I had read and I admit to being frustrated by most simply shrugging their shoulders when the consistent contradictions or implausible plot lines invariably came up. A small example of this was the attempted portrayal of Beckett as a rebel. This claim was easily demolished by continual examples ( the first in the very FIRST episode of Beckett readily acceding to authority.

What do I think you have no idea meant?

Marlowe made this into some wonder sexual techniques that only Beckett knew of and Castle had never experienced in Season 5 episode 1. does anyone really think Beckett would know more about sexual technique than Meredith. without that Meredith would have few acting parts!!

We need to remember Beckett starts reading Castle when she is 19-20 and it becomes a way of helping her get past her mother’s murder. It may well have exacerbated he desire to join law enforcement. I think Beckett had a crush on Castle as she read his books. When he was divorced from Meredith she dreamed of marrying him. When he was divorced from Gina and began his ‘ladies man’escapades she dreamed of changing his ways. Much more romantic don’t you think and would have boosted both the canon and story line of Caskett.

How would have the 12th Reacted to Beckett becoming Captain?

I want to broaden this whilst answering this question. There would have been a riot at the 12th. Imagine the first monday ‘executive’ meeting of the lieutenant, ?Sergeant and leading detectives. Every one of them would have believed that had more reason to be captain than Beckett. They all remembered her suspension, her sacking in Washington, Her been given her old job back when she returned in disgrace. the  lieutenant and robbery would have long memories of her behaviour to Tom Demming as well!

The whole NYPD would be in uproar over her appointment. Think of all the lieutenants she has bypassed on her way to being Captain. It would make a complete mess of promotions in future. Think about all the rumours about why and how Beckett got the appointment. In the end it would be a political headache for the Mayor.

Were 3XK and Bracken good villains and were their endings done well?

They were excellent villains but no they endings were poor.

Take Bracken first. It make sense he is in a position to take the money and it enables him to go into politics. It is for the ‘greater good’. Bracken can mange this as there are only a small amount of people involved and in essence he only has to worry an] bout Montgomery. however once he gets into money laundering and drug running there are a large amount of people who know of his involvement. He would have no political future. This part is simply asinine and very lazy writing.

3XK up until the very last episode is always ( pun intended) way ahead of Castle yet suddenly Castle outsmarts 3XK? I do not think so. Of course Castle ans Espo providing summary justice to 3XK would be very easy to see and thus charge. If they made it luck that they got him such as a blind suddenly going up or whatever it would have been believable.

What part of the Caskett backstory was believable and what was not?

Castle living with a woman at University and then Kyra on the rebound marrying Meredith and then Gina with Sphia Turnewr in the mix before Beckett was totally believable as Castle was almost pathetic in his hope for a log term relationship.

He wasn’t a ladies man and could not have been one given this period is in Alexis’s formative years. He could only have sex whilst she was at school and how many women could afford to take a day off work simply to have nookie with Castle.no-one but no-one goes to either a playground or museum with his daughter and picks up women.Imagine the reaction of the women when they realise he is a single father!

Nor does he have the time up until he meets Beckett to have many girlfriends. A girlfriend means a relationship. this takes time to develop and grow. you cannot have say 6 girlfriends in a year!

Beckett is only at University in California for a year. It makes no sense for her to live with anyone let alone a loser Rogan O’Leary. In Aussie Terms the man is a bludger. He would have been living off Beckett’s allowance. Let us assume Johanna cuts this off when she hears of this which is why she has to take jobs such as being a naked model for artists although thinking about this surely working at McDonalds would have paid better. Her marks would have suffered as well. does anyone really believe she had so many boy friends whilst at high school? 

Who scorned Beckett?  We do not know. We found out in season 3 she was drowning until she met Mike Royle but in season 8 she was outstanding? huh

Can Beckett’s modeling times be reconciled?

Nope. In season 2 it was in early high school and in season 6 it was later. The canon is completely stuffed because the writers did  not do basic research.

Any small changes to Castle you think could have changed the series?

Yes,

Castle would have a significant property portfolio so why does he allow Martha to live at the Loft . It is unhealthy for both.

Once Alexis is at Uni move her out. Have he living at Uni and get her to a Phd. she was supposed to be smart!

Castle is only married once and make it Gina. this means a different Alexis who now becomes attractive, Gina is not his publisher either. Given Gina’s beauty it sets up a number of jealousy episodes! 

Allow Jackson Hunt to become part of the family