HBO has released a new trailer for the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, which the cable channel will premiere on Saturday, January 7th at 8:00 PM ET, 7:00 PM CT.
Month: January 2017
No Tomorrow Season 1 Episode 11: No Woman No Cry Recap
Flashback, Southwest Washington University 2008: Evie and Timothy wake up together in the dorm. Timothy had an amazing dream about he and Evie taking their kids to an amusement park. Evie was still hot in her mom jeans. Evie suggests they become Face Page official. Timothy thinks that would be tight. They are deliriously happy and cute together.
Fast forward to the present day, and Evie wakes up alone. Xavier knocks on the door before long. He shares the story of his adventure with his dad last week, then introduces her to his mother, via the floor lamp her energy now resides in. Personally, I think a lady as cool as Xavier’s mom would have picked a more attractive lamp shade, but whatever. Evie is very rude to mum, and tells Xavier she kissed Timothy. Xavier confirms that she kissed Timothy on purpose, just to be clear. Evie says she needs time to sort her feelings out. Xavier points out that he’s done the difficult emotional work she asked of him, but now she’s moved on. She tries to get out of it by saying it’s not really about them, it’s about her, but it generally does feel personal when your girlfriend leaves you for someone else, Evie, and saying it’s not you, it’s me, doesn’t change that. On the other hand, they are broken up, and she technically didn’t owe anything to Xavier. He had no right to expect her to wait a whole week for him to get his act together. I mean, she said she was in love with him, but feelings change, right? (Okay, I’ll stop now.) Xavier takes his mother and her ugly lamp shade and leaves.
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Travelers Season 1 Episode 9: Bishop Recap
The opening scene of this episode might be one of the best scenes of the entire series. Secretary Hayes and his wife are jogging through the woods when he gets a phone call. As he takes the call, he stops to sit on a wall overlooking a steep drop down to a bay. He’s boasting about pushing a pipeline through despite ethical and environmental objections. When Hayes hangs up the phone, he complains that he’s sweating, and that the exercise is going to kill him. Mrs. Hayes pulls a towel out of her waist pack that’s way too big for the size of the pack (traveler magic? 😉 probably an extremely tight fold) and replies, “Oh, honey, don’t be silly. That isn’t going to be what kills you.” Hayes looks confused as she shoves him off the wall, down the steep drop, to his death. She looks around to double-check that she wasn’t observed, then starts crying and calling for help. Well-played, Mrs. Hayes, well-played. Who of us hasn’t had that fantasy about someone?
Cut to Marcy and David enjoying a cup of relaxing, snobby, organic morning coffee. They are in Seattle, after all. The sexual tension has finally gotten to David, so he asks Marcy to find her own place. But he feels really, really terrible about it. Marcy must have lost her subsidized apartment when Ken found out the truth about her, because she had her own place when we met her.
Baby daddy Jeff is continuing his hobby of harassing travelers. This morning it’s McLaren’s turn. Jeff shows up at the FBI office to warn McLaren off his woman. The guy’s got some balls for a beat cop. Aren’t law enforcement agencies a bit territorial, and prone to pulling rank on each other? Showing up on McLaren’s home turf is nervy, either way. Next he’ll go straight to peeing on Carly to mark his territory. Great guy.
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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 2A Review and Analysis
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — “Where Is Josh’s Friend?” — Image Number: CEG201a_0010.jpg — Pictured: Rachel Bloom as Rebecca — Photo: Scott Everett White/The CW — é2016 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — “Where is Josh’s Friend?” — Image Number: CEG201a_0151.jpg — Pictured (L-R): Vincent Rodriguez III as Josh and Rachel Bloom as Rebecca — Photo: Scott Everett White/The CW — é2016 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Rebecca’s peddling as fast as she can to avoid taking a good look at herself. She doesn’t have Josh, Greg, or Paula to keep her relatively sane any more. She has her new girl group, but neither Val, nor Heather are likely to go as far down the obsession path with her as the other three did. Val shares her obsession with Josh, but has too much self-respect to take the stalking too far, I think. We’ll see. Even if she does, I doubt it will affect the other parts of her life.
Rebecca was seeing “signs” everywhere, right from the pilot on, and Paula encouraged it. It was literally a giant sign pointing to Josh that told her to move to West Covina. That makes the negation of the signs that much more meaningful. Greg was the anti-Josh when he refused to give the “danger” sign credit for his decision to leave instead of staying in West Covina with Rebecca. He took responsibility for the decision, and told her that straight out. The acknowledgement of Josh’s love kernels was also a step in the right direction for Rebecca, but she still had to ask Greg if he loved her. She’s still too caught up in seeing what she wants to see in people, rather than seeing what’s actually there. She’s been forced to face that Josh never really loved her, and the results have been difficult for everyone, and will probably continue to be.
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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 2 Episode 4: When Will Josh and His Friend Leave Me Alone? Recap
Sadly, Rebecca, Josh’s friend is about to leave you alone for a long time, possibly forever. This is Santino Fontana’s last episode, since he only wanted a one year contract. While this is great news for Greg the character, it’s sad news for fans who enjoyed watching him every week. I’m going to believe that Greg, and Santino, will be back eventually. He’s too close to too many people in West Covina to leave forever, as Greg himself said. My shipper heart will keep hoping that Greg and Rebecca will get their happily ever after, even though I will try to stay open to other possibilities. But, if Glee can bring Jon Groff back for its last two episodes to give Jesse St James and Rachel Berry their HAE, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend can do the same for this pair, once they’ve both worked out all of their issues separately.
On to the actual recap…
We pick up where we left off last week, as Rebecca catches up with Greg at the airport. He’s about to fly off to start college at Emory. She begs him to stay, but he can’t. They’re terrible for each other, a shit show, in fact. He didn’t say goodbye to her because he loves her, and he wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to leave if he’d seen her. He walks off into the sunset gets on the escalator to go catch his flight. There goes the man of my dreams (in addition to my husband and my other 10 TV boyfriends and girlfriends, of course).
Agents of Shield Season 4A: GhostRider Review
I knew I’d miss Grant Ward and his ability to instigate both plot and relationship events when Agents of Shield killed him off at the end of season 3, but holy cow, it’s like both dried up completely when he left the building. He was a complex character with an ability to draw different groups of characters together. He was one of my favorite characters for that reason, but I didn’t think the show would suffer all that much from the loss. It’s a show full of interesting characters, with a comic book universe to draw more from.
Except, for most of this season, all of the returning characters have been separate, chasing random macguffins and/or being chased most of the time, or becoming or dealing with “ghosts”, who turned out to have no plot significance whatsoever long-term. It feels like we took 8 episodes to say wow, we’ve got a guy who’s head catches fire, the movies have magic so we get to have it too, especially this extra evil book, and the world hates inhumans even more than they used to. That looks like an episode or 2 worth of plot to me. We didn’t need any of the red herring distraction of Eli’s accomplices. We could have gone straight to Eli, although even his plot was cut short and explained in very broad strokes.
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Travelers Season 1 Episode 8: Donner Recap
All three male members of the team are talking to prostitutes online and I am very confused. McLaren, in particular, has both a wife and a girlfriend. The man must be insatiable. Ooooh, it’s a mission. And the sex workers end up dead, because that’s what always happens on TV. Wouldn’t want to appear to condone prostitution. It has nothing to do with misogyny at all.
So, anyway, all three male members of the team are chatting up online prostitutes for purely platonic purposes. Philip is giving the prostitute a hard time about intimacy, but she just asks if he’s hard. Maybe Ray was on the right track when he asked if Philip had a boyfriend. Or maybe Philip isn’t interested in cybersex with a girl who’s about to die. McLaren gets told he’s “dad hot,” just to yank McLaren’s (and Eric MacCormack’s) chain a bit. Trevor gets lost in listening to his assignment’s happiest memory. Once again I wonder just how old a soul Trevor is.
The death countdown clock hits zero and the travelers enter the prostitutes without a hitch, but a minute later their feed is lost. The bomb that killed them wasn’t defused by a fourth traveler, Donner, like it was supposed to be, so the three women are all dead. Once again, I wonder why the director cuts these transitions so close.
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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 2 Episode 3: All Signs Point to Josh…Or Is it Josh’s Friend? Recap
We start this episode with the season 2 theme song, to remind us that Rebecca is a girl who’s obsessively in love, and she’s not going to listen to what anyone else has to say about it. And everyone has something to say about it. The theme fades to Rebecca’s fantasy of a polyamorous relationship between her, Greg, and Josh, complete with pizza in bed and arm wrestling for sex. It’s as wholesome and adorable as the Brady Bunch.
It turns out Rebecca’s explaining this fantasy to a real polyamorous threesome, who burst her bubble immediately. Poly relationships aren’t the same as love triangles, Bex, and aren’t a way to get out of choosing between the two guys you’ve been bouncing back and forth between. Nice try though, and nice little positive speech about what poly actually is.
Travelers Season 1 Episode 7: Protocol 5 Recap
Protocol 5: In the absence of a mission, resume your host’s life.
I’ve wondered before if any of what we’ve seen so far has been hallucinations, especially in Room 101. The characters definitely hallucinate in this episode. But, thankfully, no one puts their best sniper in the body of a frail old woman, then tells her to aim at the ground, before letting her and the chief engineer of their crucial mission die before the mission is completed. This is a much better episode than Helios 685, as long as you don’t mind character-driven episodes. I love character development and interaction, so I’m good.
The main characters aren’t so good. Their hosts’ lives feel mundane after working several exciting missions since their arrival. Marley is flat-out bored. Original Marcy didn’t have a very exciting life. Traveler Marcy is a doctor, so the obvious solution to her boredom is to do minor surgery on herself to remove her com, turn it into a Vagus Nerve Stimulator to help her seizure disorder, and then reinsert it under the skin in her chest. While bleeding all over David’s apartment. David is understandably disturbed when he gets home and finds Marcy looking like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. They have a long talk about their relationship and Marcy’s mental health, which somehow ends in David doing a spinal tap on Marcy. That guy is really in love, if an invasive medical procedure felt like a sane compromise in that situation.
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A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 4: Captain America: Civil War from Lagos to Berlin
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Five
This is the fourth part of a five part series on romantic StuckyNat. It tells the story of the MCU versions of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff from the point of view of all three characters as if they were in love with each other. This part covers the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, from the mission in Lagos, Nigeria to Bucky’s arrival and imprisonment in Berlin, Germany. Part five will cover the rest of the movie. The series is canon-compliant.
Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff had worked with their new recruits, Sam Wilson and Wanda Maximoff, intensively for the last year. They’d become a cohesive team. Wanda and Sam had earned the right to call themselves Avengers. With the rest of the Avengers busy with other projects or semiretired, the four of them had begun going out on missions together.
They’d been tracking Brock Rumlow for a few months when they became aware of the Lagos op. Steve and his team gathered what intel they could, then continued surveillance at the probable site. Once Rumlow’s vehicles had been spotted, the team pursued and intercepted the terrorists Rumlow was working with. Everyone remembered and used their training, working together and taking down an organized attack force. But then Rumlow caught Steve off guard, and manipulated him into overlooking a goddamn bomb strapped to Rumlow’s chest. Steve might not ever forgive himself for putting Wanda in the position of having to clean up after him. A position she wasn’t ready for yet, and which had terrible consequences.
The Lagos mission wasn’t a complete disaster, though the rest of the world acted like it was. Steve tried to remind himself of how much of the mission went right, before Rumlow played him so easily by invoking Bucky’s name. They’d worked well as a team, they’d stopped the theft of a bioweapon, and the new maneuvers that combined each person’s unique talents went off without a hitch. If only he hadn’t allowed himself to become distracted at the thought of new information about Bucky, grasping at any possibility, after so long without leads. Now Wanda, and all of the casualties in Lagos, were paying the price for his mistake. As a soldier Steve knew that mistakes were going to happen, you just had to keep going, and try to do the best you could with the situation. It was so much harder to cope with failure as an Avenger in the 21st century than it had been in his time. Now there were cameras everywhere and 24 hour news waiting to pounce and place blame. Somehow the Avengers never really got to tell their side of the story.
Wanda had become like a daughter to him. They had so much in common, with them both being science experiments who had lost their soulmates, homes and families. Training her was a joy that finally brought some of the meaning back to his life that had been missing since Bucky fell. He was damned if he was going to let one accident, something that happened during the course of saving countless lives, be used as an excuse to put her under government control. She was a person first. It was time the world stopped thinking of human beings as weapons. That was no better than thinking of them as property. Wanda, Steve, Bucky, Thor, Bruce, and all of the other enhanced individuals belonged to themselves, not to any government. Bucky had already spent 70 years as property. Enough was enough.
That was his real problem with the Accords. He didn’t like that a government agency was taking control over their activities again, either, but they could negotiate on that. It was Ross’ attitude toward the enhanced, and the way he slanted and twisted his arguments to hide his real motivations, that made up Steve’s mind.
He saw how the sides were falling. The regular humans, and Tony’s creation Vision, on the side of government control. Steve and Wanda, the two enhanced, and Steve’s close, loyal friend Sam on the side of freedom. He was sad to see Natasha side with Tony. Steve understood and agreed with some of her reasoning, but he couldn’t risk what he knew the accords meant for people like himself, Bucky, and Wanda. He’d seen the concentration camps in Germany, and the Japanese internment camps in his own country. He’d seen what had been done to Bucky. Steve just couldn’t allow the potential for that type of abuse of power to become legal again. People’s fear of someone more powerful than them was not a just reason for imprisoning or owning others.
Then Steve got the call that Peggy had died, and every other thought left his head. He knew this was coming, but still, he was devastated. God, he missed Bucky so much. He was desperate to have Bucky by his side to say goodbye to Peg. She was almost his last link to the past. Bucky was the only other person he knew who would remember her, if Bucky even did remember her.
For the 3rd time in his life, he cried until there was nothing left in him. He cried for Peggy, for Bucky, for the future together they’d all lost. Peggy had told him, after he’d woken up in the 21st century to find attitudes about sex and sexualities very different from what he remembered, that she’d always known that he was in love with Bucky, too, and that Bucky was in love with him. She said she knew Steve loved her, and realized that he was probably bisexual. Peggy confessed to being bisexual as well, and having been in love with a woman before she settled down and married her husband. Steve was relieved to hear that Peggy was so accepting of the truth about him and Bucky, and grateful she was willing to share the truth about herself. Then she dropped the biggest bomb of all. Peggy told Steve that she hadn’t wanted to take him away from Bucky. Instead, she had a solution that might have worked for all of them. She and Steve could’ve gotten married, and Bucky could’ve been a 3rd person in their relationship, living with them equally, but appearing to be a roommate who’d never married as far as the rest of the world knew. She hadn’t said anything during the war because it didn’t seem like their relationship was at that point yet. She was waiting for the end of the war, when they could all actually get serious.
This, of course, floored Steve, since he hadn’t even realized he was in love with Bucky at that time. He had no idea how he would have reacted to the idea at first, or what would have happened in the long run, but it sounded like absolute heaven to him now. He was keeping it in the back of his head, should more miracles occur. Maybe he would get Bucky back, and wouldn’t lose Natasha in the argument over the Accords. Having a relationship with both Bucky and Nat would be his dream, if they were both open to it. He didn’t know how he’d even begin to bring it up, but he’d worry about that after those miracles occurred.
Metawitches 
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