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Nonfiction Catch-up Post: One Wedding and Nine Funerals

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andthentherewerenone blog
There has never been a fictional wedding/funeral ratio more to my tastes, has there? The wedding happened on BATES MOTEL, which I covered for AV Club; you could not have picked a better week for me to drop in on a show than the week two characters with a deeply repressed slow burn have to marry each other for plot reasons and then trip over their feelings for the next forty minutes. Naturally, I talked about tragedy the entire time. One of the great hooks of tragedy is watching people struggle after it’s too late. Bates Motel is a veritable playground of it—this is a version of the story whose earliest minutes turned out to be evidence Norman’s doomed, and it’s never stopped seeking out impossible things for its characters to rail against. This pall of predestination falls across the series’ of humor (sometimes balancing pathos on a knife’s edge of camp), across its noirish season arcs, and darkest of all across the house on the hill….This show is a tragedy; we know just how… Read more »

Reign: Season 3 So Far

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So, I am recapping Reign at AV Club this season, which is very fun for analytical purposes, but I missed talking nonsense about the dresses and Catherine’s facial expressions enough to come back and check in. As usual, a lot has happened! I actually sometimes forget how much plot goes into an episode of Reign until I watch another soap-paced show—even Scream Queens (which I watched as a sub-in on AV Club; it’s essentially an essay on manufacturing camp, because that show is trying to do it harder than any show has ever tried to do anything) doesn’t hold a candle to what Reign can do. In the season opener, it launched and torpedoed an English plot against Mary, established Elizabeth’s court politics and her romance with Dudley, reconciled Francis and Mary’s marriage just in time for him to admit he’s dying, tried to make fetch happen with Lola and Narcisse, had Greer woo and get dumped by a hot pirate, called Francis’ brother Charles back to try to be king, tried to make more… Read more »

Reign Report: “Siege/Burn”

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Okay, fine, Reign, FINE, I will finish Season 2 before the next season starts. It besmirches Catherine, but we all know that even besmirched she’s the best thing on this show by a factor of ten. And why not? In these two episodes alone Kenna almost married the general who then got caught and blackmailed into treason by Conde and then kidnapped the Queen and then got caught by Francis and turned AGAIN and then got hanged while Kenna and Bash made up but only because Kenna was PREGNANT whoops, which Bash’s pagan woods girlfriend knew all along, but didn’t take seriously as a threat to their relationship because she’s a very secure woman and was already using black magic to bind Bash to her anyway. Reminder: this is a single subplot. How does Catherine feel about all this? Sublime. Fuckin’ dark witches try to imitate her and can BARELY get there. Little Delphine and her bonding spell WISH. Sure, wine across your chest as you bang a stranger on Bash’s bloody shirt. Fine. Did… Read more »

Reign Report: “Reversal of Fortune,” “Abandoned,” “Fugitive”

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Going three episodes at a time turns out to be a great way to watch Reign; you get all the bursts of action and a sense of an arc – in this case, Francis’ illness and Mary’s conflict as Conde slowly becomes the bad guy – and you can just ignore all the Leiths you don’t care about! And don’t even look at me like that, because it’s not like I am alone in wanting Leith out of the picture. You know who else does? Yup. He proposed to Greer and she literally sat him down for a discussion about how having a booming 18th-century brothel was incredibly awesome and being his wife did not sound like it would be awesome at all, thanks for coming, bye. It was personally very satisfying, but also narratively smart; she is definitely happier now than she was when she was desperate to preserve her reputation, plus now she can afford to comb her hair, so you know things are looking up! She even fulfilled my dream and became… Read more »

Reign Report: “Forbidden,” “Tasting Revenge,” “Tempting Fate”

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Wow, I have been away from this show for a while! (So long was I gone that the show had an episode about a wine tasting called “Tasting Revenge,” which means this show feels way too safe without me. That’s a Xena title, show.) As it turns out, three at a time is the perfect dose in which to watch the show; the plot machine eddies once or twice and ends up actually moving a step ahead almost by accident! And, while I was gone, turns out the show was trying to woo me back by giving me the two things I have asked for the most! It’s very exciting! Sadly, not everyone is having a good time. In fact, it’s fairly obvious the sort of time everyone’s having Mary is losing her mother to illness, trying to get an heir to secure the throne (politics! Great!), but she’s also still trying to handle the godawful love-triangle rape-recovery plot, which is going more and more poorly for the show, since Conde is about as exciting… Read more »

Reign Reports: “Sins of the Past” and “The End of Mourning”

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So, we haven’t had a Reign Report here for two episodes! Technically the first one is because I was heading to California for the DC Talent Summit, but let’s be honest, if the episode had been amazing I would have made the time. Instead, it was just a pile of awkwardness with a plot point on top. Unfortunately, “The End of Mourning” wasn’t much better. We’re currently in a vortex of Mary’s feelings for Conde, so if you’re not interested in that (and I am not) then you will probably also not be interested in Conde’s older brother’s scheming for the French throne. I tried to explain the sheer parade of turning-around-and-cackling that was “The End of Mourning” over at the AV Club, but in the end, only Catherine is really holding my interest much these days. I should be interested in all this other stuff – cycles of power and court espionage, what’s not to love? – but I’m not! First of all, the prince of Navarre is essentially in a moustache-twirling cotest with… Read more »
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