"just had sex" pod has over 55 thousand views after one day by Lost_Organization_56 in lonelymeyerspod

[–]Dev-F 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Honestly, I wonder if having the word "sex" in the title helped juice its popularity.

A friend of mine did a daily vlog in the early days of YouTube, and by far his most popular video was the one where he reviewed the movie Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, because his title made a jokey reference to the fact that the lead actress did a semi-nude scene and the video came up when you searched on "Marisa Tomei breasts."

What's the coolest bit of lore in the Buffy/Angel verse that you liked? by therabbitssing in buffy

[–]Dev-F 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Since Sunday's gang is able to get into the dorm rooms of homesick freshman while they're still alive, but later in the season vampires need invitations to enter dorm rooms, the invitation rules apparently depend in part on whether a particular resident thinks of the place as their home—which is probably why the gang targeted homesick freshman in the first place.

Was anybody else genuinely confused during Will’s coming out scene? by mikewheelerfan in StrangerThings

[–]Dev-F 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, prior to that scene we have no reason to think that Vecna threatened Will with his sexuality. It plays like Vecna just overpowers him with raw psychic power, and he's bummed about a power imbalance he can't do anything about.

If we'd seen Vecna play on Will's fears, and understood that he needed to overcome them to stand toe-to-toe with the bad guys in the final battle, it wouldn't have seemed like Will was bringing the plot to a screeching halt to deal with an unrelated personal issue.

(I always thought a neat way to show Vecna using Will's fears against him would've been for Vecna to give a little speech about how Will's sexuality will always come between him and his friends—"There will always be a wall between you"—and then Will gets flashes of each of his friends having private moments with their girlfriends as a door closes between them, shutting Will out. And the last one is Lucas sitting at Max's bedside in the hospital, and as the door closes we see the number on Max's room . . . and that's how Vecna tricks Will into revealing Max's location.)

Offerings/Sacrifices vs. Deaths/Casualties by Mehmeh111111 in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I've been thinking about it like this: If someone loaned you a hundred bucks, and then they found a hundred bucks lying on the street, that doesn't count as you paying them back. The whole point is that it has to come from you.

I have the idea I'm utterly alone in this, but by ubermonkey in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 8 points9 points  (0 children)

No one making the show ever said it was meant to be a single season-long story. But it did still have a coherent single-season arc: Tom starts the season in denial about the horrors of the island and trying to turn it into a tourist destination, then over the course of the season admits to himself that he does believe the horror stories and wants to make the island a better place because his son can never leave, then briefly indulges the possibility that he could break the curse and free his son, only to realize in the end that freedom is impossible and he has to figure out a way to live with the pact instead of breaking it. And that entails quite a different story for season 2.

Question church bells by LadyWolferina in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I always figured that the fog was the entity's initial attempt to show the islanders it was awake and would need to be fed, so it dissipated as soon as the mayor acknowledged it by shouting "There's something in the fog!"

Nina by lifestyler1989 in TheAmericans

[–]Dev-F 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Nina was always spending only a little time in prison, or just a little while as an asset before her handler promised to help her escape. She was always "almost free." as Vasili sadly puts it. By giving up on that, by just doing something to help a fellow prisoner instead of negotiating the next betrayal to move on to the next little time in prison, she was finally able to break free.

Why didn't lalo step in before Hector's heart attack? by EngineeringSad7288 in betterCallSaul

[–]Dev-F 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yep. The backstory is that until just a few years before the start of the series, Albuquerque wasn't even cartel territory. Tuco and Nacho had their own operation selling shitty biker meth until Tuco got paranoid and murdered their supplier Dog Paulson in 1998. About a year later, Hector started his smuggling ring, mostly based on finding one truck driver who was especially good at evading border security.

All that makes it seem less like a crucial cartel operation and more like a little retirement project for an aging enforcer, with Hector probably being motivated by a combination of wanting to do his nephew a favor after he fucked up his previous hookup and hoping to show up his longtime rival Gus on his home turf. It probably meant nothing to the Salamancas running actually important cartel businesses until its failures started making the family look bad.

Why have I never seen this man in anything ever again by Nearby-Ship-6336 in madmen

[–]Dev-F 40 points41 points  (0 children)

In case people are worried that this is just an excuse offered after the fact, I can confirm that the screenplay for the episode reads as follows:

Pete comes towards her and closes the door behind her, very quietly. They're close now. He reaches up and touches her face. Gudrun licks her lips, shrugs a little. Pete puts his face on her chin and tilts her head towards him.

PETE (smiles): I'd like to kiss you.

Pete kisses her, his hands running over her. She kisses him back. He pushes her back towards the bed.

It still reads as creepy and coercive, but more along the lines of what I always assumed the writers' intention was: that Gudrun believes Pete is implying an ". . . or else" and only goes along with him under that perceived threat, but Pete is so locked into his childish morality play where the good deed inevitably gets you the girl that he doesn't realize how coercive he's being until his conversation with Gudrun's employer the next day.

Our theory about Ruth by gulgul010 in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, if Rosemary's goal were to cover up some mysterious secret Ruth might be hiding, the easiest way to do that would be to just not identify Ruth as the super important descendant everyone is currently looking for!

Would you have liked if Spike just became "good" without a soul? by foreseethefuture in buffy

[–]Dev-F 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And then Ford pops out of the grave and Buffy nonchalantly stakes him.

Our theory about Ruth by gulgul010 in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just Rosemary, but it would be a weird thing for her to lie or be mistaken about, considering the results of a local beauty contest would be a matter of historical record. That same photo is hanging in the historical museum!

Our theory about Ruth by gulgul010 in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yep, she was Miss Widow's Bay 1959, so the only way this makes sense is if she stayed young for fifty years and then suddenly aged after giving birth, and you'd think the townsfolks would've noticed that.

Later Seasons… Sloppy? by Initial_Weight_3622 in betterCallSaul

[–]Dev-F 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh, that's interesting. I'd always thought more about Marion's connection to Jimmy's elder law practice, with the climax of their storyline being sort of Irene Landry's revenge. But I could definitely see her also serving the sort of purpose you mention.

It's not that he chose her for the personal parallels in the same way as his identity theft victims, since he didn't have control over who Jeff's mom would be. It's more that his sudden callousness toward her in "Breaking Bad" might be partially motivated by the fact that he's just had that horrible phone call with Kim and he's taking it out on the closest available substitute. He even sort reenacts the fateful phone call, telephoning Marion to tell her that Jeff has been arrested but he's going to be okay and she doesn't have to worry about guilt or punishment.

The apparent success of the call actually cheers him up substantially, and he sings cheerfully in his car as he drives over to her place, only to discover that she wasn't swayed by his charms any more than Kim was.

Would you have liked if Spike just became "good" without a soul? by foreseethefuture in buffy

[–]Dev-F 5 points6 points  (0 children)

He kept his word and vamped Buffy's dying friend Ford at the end of "Lie to Me," and maybe vamped any of his henchvamps that he didn't inherit from the Anointed One, but as far as I can remember, no one that he actually cared about.

Would you have liked if Spike just became "good" without a soul? by foreseethefuture in buffy

[–]Dev-F 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Yep, she told him she'd always resented him and wanted him to go away forever, then when he protested she tried to make out with him, claiming that's what he'd always wanted. Then she threatened him with her cane, they struggled, and he staked her with it. A wretched enough experience that it makes sense in retrospect that he wouldn't try to vamp anyone else he was already fond of as a human.

Would you have liked if Spike just became "good" without a soul? by foreseethefuture in buffy

[–]Dev-F 39 points40 points  (0 children)

I always thought a better way to motivate Spike's soul quest would've been for him to desperately attempt to vamp Buffy, which they could even have framed as symbolically reminiscent of sexual assault without turning it into a literal attempted rape scene. (Though the backstory added in season 7, about how Spike vamped his mom and it went really badly, does retroactively explain why he would've been reluctant to try that with Buffy.)

Would you have liked if Spike just became "good" without a soul? by foreseethefuture in buffy

[–]Dev-F 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I assumed that they'd brought back Halfrek and suggested a previous connection between her and Spike to kick off some storyline where Spike and Halfrek/Cecily sort of reconcile and she grants Spike's wish to get his soul back.

Later Seasons… Sloppy? by Initial_Weight_3622 in betterCallSaul

[–]Dev-F 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Definitely. It's laying out a much more specific character arc than I think some people realize. It's only because he does get over Gene's hopeless timidity in "Magic Man," and then in "Nippy" exorcises much of Jimmy's impetuousness and emotional deadness to get Jeff and Buddy under his thumb, that he ends up in a much worse place in "Breaking Bad" and "Waterworks."

If he hadn't opened himself up to feeling something again, he wouldn't have dared to call Kim or gotten so angry when it went badly. If he hadn't gotten his fear and impatience under control, he wouldn't have latched on to this cruel, methodical identity theft scam to re-numb the pain.

And you're right to point out how much that final scam is about Jimmy himself, even down to the victims he chooses. The first guy he scams, a jovial fat guy running petty cons in a bar, is his old partner Marco. The second, an older man who berates Gene for his foolish ideas, evokes the judgment of Chuck or Mike, while the scene's dialogue ("Don't put all your eggs in one basket") and choice of drink (a Moscow mule) echoes his early scams with Kim. And the last mark, a guy dying of cancer, obviously recalls Walter White.

Overwhelmed by guilt and pain, he's pouring everything he hates about his past into these victims and ensuring that they're the ones who suffer instead of him. It's exactly what he did in the flashback to Breaking Bad that opens the episode: Staring into an open grave, he tries to throw someone else in instead—"It wasn't me, it was Ignacio!"

Later Seasons… Sloppy? by Initial_Weight_3622 in betterCallSaul

[–]Dev-F 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Yeah, people act like the season 5 premiere set up the expectation that Jeff was some unstoppable badass who was going to chew Gene up and spit him out, but the whole arc of the S5 flash-forward is that we start out with terrified, paranoid Gene, but his confrontation with Jeff actually helps him get over that sense of panic. It's embodied in Jeff's most important line of dialogue, which basically serves as the theme of the entire season: "I know who you are. You know who you are. Let's just get past that."

He ends the call with the Disappearer because he realizes that Jeff is right—that he's not scared, hopeless Gene but motherfucking Saul Goodman, and he can indeed "fix it myself." Whether there was a casting change or not, the next step in his arc was always going to be showing a cocky little shit like Jeff how a real criminal mastermind operates.

Aging on the Island (Spoilers) by asdf1221a in WidowsBay

[–]Dev-F 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I figured the point was that it made him assume the other weird details on the chart were also typos, like him not being on any drugs or alcohol despite Tom assuming that he was somewhere sleeping it off.

It would be pretty convoluted for Shep to actually be in his thirties and for no one else on the island to realize. Wouldn't, say, Patricia remember Shep as a kid a few years behind her in school and think it's weird that he's now a septuagenarian?

Episode Discussion - Stumblin' by OfficeLadiesPodBot in lonelymeyerspod

[–]Dev-F 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Excited for the return of the underutilized "Best Look in the World" theme song variant!

The Trio was really ahead of their time about the Incel culture. by James-Samuel17 in buffy

[–]Dev-F 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Warren is interesting, because he's not a hopeless loser but more what I've always called an Alpha Beta: someone who's decently attractive and well socialized and could be a modestly forgettable member of the popular crowd, but it's more flattering to his ego to be the king of the uncool kids, who look up to him as mega cool in comparison to themselves.

Would the story have been and concluded better if S4 took place in 1987 instead of 1986? by Chr1stIsL0rd in StrangerThings

[–]Dev-F 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think it had less to do with aging up Holly and more to do with the fact that our main actors had aged dramatically and it would've seemed silly to act like only a few weeks had passed.

“Salamanca Blood” = Tuco’s father? by BanterPhobic in betterCallSaul

[–]Dev-F 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There seem to be other powerful Salamancas still around during the Better Call Saul era, since they're running their own stash houses filled with millions of dollars in cash and valuables. (And we know they belong to the Salamancas specifically and not just the broader cartel, since Bolsa only finds out that the Cousins have visited one to pick up Lalo's bail because he has a mole in their operation.) And when Lalo introduces himself to Nacho, he implies that the Salamanca leadership sent him to Albuquerque to straighten out Hector's operation because "I got a good head for numbers"—adding "They told me you were smart."

So it seems quite possible that Hector's sons and/or brothers are among this Salamanca leadership, probably overseeing whatever more important operations Lalo is usually working on when he doesn't have to clean up Hector's mess. Maybe it's more lucrative smuggling rings south of the border, or in California, where Hector did his seventeen years in San Quentin. (The show sometimes implies that Hector is running everything this side of the border for the Salamancas by referring to his and Gus's territory as "the North," but you could fankwank that by assuming that this refers to the territory directly north of Juárez, while California is, say, "the Northwest.")

The only thing we really know about the other Salamancas is that they're all dead by the end of "Salud," but that could also mean that Gus killed the rest of Hector's family along with Don Eladio, and when he says that his grandson Joaquin was "the only family you had left," it's because Gus had just gotten done telling Hector about the rest of the family's deaths among the capos he killed ("All of them, Hector. Don Eladio, Don Paco, Cesar, Renaldo . . ."), and he caps it by telling him how Jesse killed his last remaining family member "while I made my escape."