- Little Bayar takes a stand on the Mongolian steppe in Babies
In this epsiode:
- That adorable Babies documentary (see photo)
- That (according to Cynara) objectionable sci-fi Timberlake vehicle In Time
- That unforgivable thing Seth Meyers did on Saturday Night Live wherein he dragged the blameless and pure Kermit the Frog into his mire of fatphobia
- Childhood anecdote about cows
- Metaphors involving breasts
Previously: There are walkers in the barn. “They’re not people.” Carol appreciates Daryl. Shane sacrificed a man’s life. Dale suspects this. Lori is pregnant, and she also had an affair with Shane.
Note: my recap of this episode is not going to be as exhaustive as previous ones have been, because I just haven’t had the time this week. BUT! I did put some general review-type thoughts at the end.
Everyone is gloomily hanging out at the campsite, eating and sharpening knives and stuff. After exchanging a look with Dale, Glenn, with only, “So, guys” by way of preamble, announces that there are zombies in the barn.
Cut to the barn. Yes, there are zombies in there. The group discusses the situation. Shane wants to either kill all the barn zombies or leave the farm. Rick and the others do not want to leave because they have not yet found Sophia. They all spend the rest of the scene loudly fighting outside a rickety barn full of zombies, which doesn’t seem like the best idea.
Bear McCreary’s Strings of Doom and Destruction. Credits.
read more…
Previously: Glenn and Maggie got naked. Shane and Andrea cleaned guns. Lori got Glenn to fetch a pregnancy test. It was positive! Andrea grazed Daryl with a bullet thinking he was dead. Glenn found the zombies in the barn.
Lori and Carl feeding chicken. Let’s take a moment here to acknowledge that this show has the same problem that Lost did after its first season — the inexorable aging of child actors. Chandler Riggs has grown a lot in the time elapsed since last season, which in the show is a matter of weeks but in the real world is about a year and a half. Lost had a similarly slow in-universe passage of time, and it had two child characters — preteen Walt and baby Aaron. You can always recast a baby (or a Bobby Draper), but a preteen main character is a little trickier. Lost solved this problem by writing Walt and his dad off the show for all intents and purposes. Given that [Highlight for comics spoilers] [[Carl is still alive as of issue 89 in the book]], I would be pretty surprised if they offed Carl any time soon.
Wait, Walt wasn't the one who lab-brewed the best coffee...
We didn’t really have a solid plan for this week’s episode, but we are so dedicated to consistency that we forged ahead anyway and ended up talking about Breaking Bad for half an hour. Timely! But seriously, it’s on Netflix Canada now and so Jenny’s watched the first three seasons and it turns out Cynara was up to date all along. If you haven’t watched the series yet and plan to, don’t worry — we keep it SPOILER-FREE (or very, very, very spoiler-lite), talking about the themes of the show rather than the plot points.
Also on this week’s show:
-TVtropolis, home of the Roseanne rerun. Has any other sitcom in the last 25 years so deeply explored topics of class and real-life money concerns?
-On the flip side, today we have Up All Night, which has an amazing cast (Will Arnett, Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph) but puts its new-parent comedy in a highly-privileged, wealthy setting.
-The Talk is unsurprisingly disappointing. Sharon Osbourne says troubling things. Cynara resembles every fat woman you know. Guess what? there’s a double standard between the genders on aging for TV news anchors! BREAKING NEWS.
Nearly Shirtless Shane and his buddies run for it. (Photo: AMC)
Previously: Sophia ran off, Rick talked about finding her, Darryl actually looks for her but finds only flowers, Lori wants a pregnancy test, Maggie and Glenn get it on, Lori gets her pregnancy test and it’s POSITIVE.
A backed up roadway, full of cars and people and car horns blaring. Flashback? Shane is scanning the radio bands. Sophia and Carl play checkers, sitting on a tailgate. Helicopters are heard. Sophia’s Angry Abusive Dad (AAD) is there, too, so definitely flashback, because he’s dead from zombie now. Sophia asks if they can go soon. Carl is hungry, Lori says they all are. Carol says AAD is a survivalist, so they have tons of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, per the US Armed Forces). She goes to get one for Carl, but AAD is not OK with this, or even with Carol mentioning the MREs, because now everyone knows they have them! AAD goes on about “operational security” and Carol folds like a card table.
4:25 – Mindy Kaling’s first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Sadly, Jenny cannot offer a ringing endorsement of the book because it’s front loaded with a lot of body/weight talk that’s somewhere in the same zip code as the place known as Trigger Town, USA (at least for those of us who prefer not to hear their comediennes define obesity as “unhealthy overweight.”) Which isn’t to say the book isn’t worthwhile. Just that you might want to skip the first couple chapters.
14:30 – A detour to talk about the specific pressures faced by actresses who are not Hollywood-standard size 0. Christina Hendricks most recently, but also Buffy‘s Amber Benson back in the day.
18:30 – Sidetrack: the difference between being the 20s and 30s; how age affects the way you perceive yourself and how strangers interact with you. ~It gets personal~ Also, Jenny draws a parallel with the Dog Whisperer, LET HER FINISH. Plus: an hilarious Cynara blue hair anecdote.
40:20 – A nice show on Discovery called Oddities, about weird people bringing weird stuff to a weird shop in Manhattan. Books bound in human skin, anyone? How about a “horaffe”?
58:15 – Jimmy Kimmel’s YouTube challenge where he got parents to convince their kids that the parents had eaten the kids’ candy. The kids do not react well. We explain why (it has to do with the economics of childhood), and also explain why lying to kids is NOT COOL, OK?
PLUS: Why hasn’t Amy Poehler written a book? What is the name of Tina Fey’s baby? Why does Cynara tell weird iguana stories?
Links:
YouTube Challenge – I Told My Kids I Ate All Their Halloween Candy [YouTube]
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns by Mindy Kaling [Random House]
Oddities [Discovery Channel]
Sarah Wayne Callies as Lori and Steven Yuen as Glenn in The Walking Dead
Watching The Walking Dead this week, I was overcome with an urge to write a recap of the episode. This is probably because The Walking Dead is currently balancing on the fence between quality dramatic television and paint-drying dullness, so a viewer has to fill in the entertainment blanks on her own. Episode four is a weird place to start recapping, I know, but we’ll see how this goes.
Previously on AMC’s The Walking Dead: Carl got shot, Sophia wandered off, people looked for her, Shane shot a good guy to save his own ass, Carl was OK, Shane shaved his head.
Pastoral countryside. There is an old barn. Near the farmhouse, everyone is gathering firewood or something near when up drives a caravan that consists of Darryl on his motorcycle, plus a car and the RV. At Carl’s bedside, Hershel assures Lori and Rick that Carl’s fever has gone down. Carl regains consciousness; asks about Sophia. Rick lies and says she’s fine.
Everyone greets the newly-arrived caravan. Dale asks after Carl, and the Grimeses report that he’s fine, thanks to Hershel and, of course, Shane, who heroically retrieved the needed supplies. Carol, T-Dawg, et al. are relieved; Shane is guilty in the corner.
There is a funeral for Otis. It turns out they weren’t gathering firewood earlier; they were gathering stones, which they have put in a huge pile, presumably as a cairn to substitute for the fact that they don’t have Otis’s body (given that Shane left him to be torn apart by zombies in one of the worst death scenarios possible).
Hershel is the ersatz preacher now, with the funeral God talk. Shane is flashing back to Otis’s death, and then everyone insists that he say a few words because he was with Otis at the end. Still flashing back, Shane concocts a complete fiction about Otis offering to take up the rear and dying as a result. The strains of Bear McCreary’s Ominous String Orchestra rise as Shane puts a final stone on Otis’s cairn.
Title credits. Which I think are quite eerie and cool, actually.
Prancing Gosling
This episode is mostly about Ryan Gosling.
1:00 – Drive. The new Nicolas Winding Refn film starring Ryan “Hey Girl” Gosling. Jenny liked it, Cynara looooooooved it. Of course, that might be because she read Ryan Gosling’s character as a lesbian.
24:00 – The Ides of March. Cynara is not pleased with the film that shares a name with her birthday.
32:00 -TV Talk: Once Upon a Time and Grimm — two new network series mining the public domain. One is slightly better than the other.
37:00 – In brief: Jenny’s adventures in Netflix — Agora, Unstoppable, No Strings Attached.
50:00 – New Muppet movie! Jason Segel!
References:
End clip: “Pass It On,” from A Muppet Family Christmas.
Feminist Ryan Gosling [Tumblr]
And we’re back! Sound quality is not so great on this episode. We apologize.
1:30 – Community! Rough start, strong third episode.
12:30 – Blink and you missed it (and not a moment too soon): The Playboy Club. But we talk more about how muscled arms are “in” for women these days, or at least “in” as long as you’re femme.
15:20 – Rosie O’Donnell has a new show. Cynara realizes she basically blocked out everything Rosie has said and done since the end of her ’90s-era daytime talk show. Also, Cynara is not really impressed with how Oprah now goes on TV and analyzes people who were on her old show in the past, but this time they’re not there to defend themselves!
25:05 – Zooey Deschanel. Jenny actually likes her new sitcom.
31:00 – The Eli Gold Show, um, we mean, The Good Wife. Jenny is bored of Will/Alicia. Also, did you know there is at least one person on this planet who thinks Hugh Laurie’s American accent is crap? There is!
40:00 – Jenny and Cynara need D/s lessons for friendship. This branches into a discussion of Don Cherry and Ron McLean and how Ron defended bullying as a practice on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. And how neither Cynara nor Jenny is a hockey fan, yet we speak conversational hockey-talk. This is Canada, for you.
Tina Fey in a promo shot for her May 2011 hosting appearance on Saturday Night Live
00:52 – Fabulous girl-driven action flick Hanna. We discuss all the reasons we loved it, while trying not to spoil it too much because you might not have seen it and we want you to!
16:00 – Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants. Again, we give all the reasons we like it and also some advice as to whether you should pick up the hardcover, ebook or audiobook.
37:12 – Chaz Bono embracing the role of most famous transperson on the planet with a documentary, book and mainstream media experiences – specifically a two-segment one with David Letterman. Talk of how much we (surprise!) admire Chaz and also, via David Sedaris, talk about how scripted Letterman’s interviews really are.
53:20 – Nardwuar the Human Serviette, National Treasure. If you didn’t know about him before, it’s probably because you’re American and it doesn’t matter anyway because now you DO know.
Links:
Chaz Bono appears on The Late Show David Letterman [YouTube]
Nardwuar’s talk at TEDxVancouver [YouTube]
Thee Official Nardwuar the Human Serviette Web Site [nardwuar.com]
End Audio Clip:
Nardwuar vs. Snoop Dogg 2002 [YouTube]
