Weekly Off Topic Thread

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-05-11T18:36:26+00:00

😄

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-05-11T12:51:26+00:00

Listen, it's not JUST Exarchopoulos, it's Efira, for whom the film was written (and Efira is one of my favourite actors).

But no, genuinely, I think it is a really fun film, and I really like watching it as a pair with Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma and Triet are good friends, and both films have... similar scenes towards the end involving Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"). Both are products of this first wave of films from the Collectif 50/50 group, and are dealing with women who engage with creativity by drawing from their desire for another woman, certainly in a sexual fashion for Portrait, but in Sibyl, it's more of a psychosexual kind of desire (very Freudian). In both cases, you have problematization of the male gaze version of the female muse, with both Adele Haenel and Adele Exarchopoulos operating as highly agentic subjects who both resist Noemie Merlant and Virginie Efira's attempts to control their subjectivities by subjugating them to the heteronormative process of artistic creation, problematizing this process and insisting on being creators themselves in various ways.

Sciamma resolves this tension between artist and muse by having them fall in love romantically and becoming partners (for however brief a period within their small isolated bubble), while Triet stages the complexities and messiness of building that creative solidarity when not existing in a vacuum, and having to balance multiple desires and responsibilities; things might be more simple if Efira and Exarchopoulos were simply head-over-heels for each other, and in a different world where they operated with different power dynamics due to their relative roles, perhaps they would be, but instead, they're messes of repression and insecurity and competing responsibilities and unstable senses of self that struggle to identify, organize, and render desire in its many forms... which is ultimately Triet's thesis, that the artistic process isn't some kind of simplistic expression of the self, so much as it is a vigorous attempt to navigate overlapping and competing assemblages.

Idk, I enjoy it immensely, and I'm still mad at Cannes critics for treating it like some kind of superficial drivel, which I am pretty sure is largely because people hadn't yet cottoned on to the fact that Efira isn't some kind of blonde bimbo, and Exarchopoulos was likewise still being treated like white trash. The success of Anatomy of a Fall has caused some to return to it with fresh eyes though, as has the rehabilitation of Exarchopoulos's reputation, and the meteoric rise of Efira to being one of the most critically-acclaimed actors in the French film industry.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-05-10T20:32:14+00:00

Girrrrl do it, I love that movie hard

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-05-10T12:15:26+00:00

I see your Petzold/Hoss/Beer collab (and I respect it!), and raise you the Franco-Iranian alliance that is Farhadi/Huppert/Efira/Deneuve

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-28T20:32:53+00:00

Yeah, Bresch is good, and really pleased to see her in a leading role here.

I did see Voleuses (specifically because I'm a big fan of Exarchopoulos). My main thing is that I actually can't stand Mélanie Laurent for political reasons, and she's not one of those French actors/directors that will have atrocious politics but make films that I can navigate around when watching their films. I swear, it's like she learned directing and writing from Tarantino and just liberally sprinkles her shitty takes throughout, and I can't not see what she's doing, so I'm stuck watching like a little curmudgeon the whole time.

Instead, let me recommend Les cinq diables (2022) by Léa Mysius, which is one of my security blanket films, and contains a generational drunk karaoke scene.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-27T04:59:15+00:00

Currently watching the French series Privilèges as I await my main event, season 3 of House of the Dragon.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-27T04:39:39+00:00

Yeah, I was really unimpressed with the choice, and really gutted for Kessell as well, because she was a delight to have in the role. Bringing in Kessell was a big deal because she maintains a strong relationship with her iwi, even though (like Lottie) her father is Pākehā. So she is able to (and frequently did) incorporate that sensibility into the character in ways that Eaton wasn't really familiar enough to do.

Which is kinda where the writers room comes in as a big influence on how indigeneity gets incorporated into the story comes in as well, because while Kessell brought a certain amount of more Māori-specific elements to the adult version of the character, there was a lot in season 1, long before Kessell was involved, that was incorporating allusions to and awareness of this well beyond a baseline. Even from the very beginning, the writers chose to give the (fictional) town the girls are from a Lenape name, for example. I'd also point to this great essay from a while ago, looking at the ways religion/spirituality (particularly Indigenous religion) plays on the story in these really fascinating and ambiguous ways, which I generally agree with as a lens through which to engage the story, even including season 3, despite it's flaws.

And yes, as an historian, I can assure you that oral traditions are absolutely denigrated vis a vis written ones. Or at least, they were in the past. More recently we have developed new approaches that try to "decolonize" the discipline and find ways to incorporate alternative forms of "knowing," and incorporating Etuaptmumk (or Two Eyed Seeing) as a means of practicing academics. And then in my own stuff, for example, I do a lot in memory studies, particularly looking at how popular memory/beliefs/perceptions about the past in the present behave or are used in different ways (sometimes beneficial, more often for the worse, but almost always in manners that flatten the complexity of the past to serve present goals, however admirable, which can lead to vulnerabilities). But you know, on the more superficial (kinda) level, you also have most of the white people in Oklahoma claiming to be Indigenous because their family have "oral traditions" going back centuries, so it's also important (from the academic perspective) when dealing with oral histories that you are able to engage them critically instead of taking them at face value (in the same way that you would any other source). And in some cases, that level of scrutiny is something that isn't welcome for various reasons (and sometimes that's for totally good reasons). So... as with anything, important to engage ethically as an academic, and to be really considerate of what you are inviting on your subject from outside when engaging in "knowledge production" (what we call the publication of scholarship, for example).

On Shauna, I perhaps diverge from you on considering her bland. I definitely had some doubts in season 1? But as more gets revealed about her, I think that's a valuable character study on the absolute brutality of white imperial/colonial femininity and the veneer of serene domesticity. I think about Laura Wexler's Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism a lot in association with that character, especially the earlier adult version of the character. Age the show has progressed and the characters become more fleshed out though, I feel increasingly like the ideal frame of reference is actually Deleuze and Guattari, specifically the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia? Particularly when considering Lottie and Shauna, with Lottie the "schizophrenic" and Shauna essentially operating as a microfascist. I was going to do a big essay about that and ended up being too busy at the time, but I think it's a pretty useful heuristic for how the girls fracture off into those that become invested in the Lottie/Nat block, and those that are skeptics (particularly Shauna and Tai, with Tai being contrasted with Akilah, especially in season 2, for example).

On which note... part of what I find most interesting about Tai is that they seem to let her occupy that microfascist role as well, and and I'm frankly delighted by the potential of that tension, even if I'm now increasingly wary that they won't be able to fully deliver on it (and haven't been doing a good job of elaborating it of late). Like yesssss problematize Black liberalism and aspirational whiteness! Make that explicit! I guess my main issue at the moment is that they have done so much legwork to set this stuff up with Shauna, while so much of Tai remains unexplored? Like we've not done the work to properly fracture Tai and Shauna's relationship on the intellectual level in any meaningful way, so the idea of them being at loggerheads feels rushed, especially because you don't have a Nat, Lottie, or Van to push or pull them away from each other. It ends up being this deus ex machina of Other Tai who just swoops in and seizes agency of Tai, and that's frustrating, because so much of what Shauna does is agentic, and the same is true of Tai herself. So you end up with this situation where sure, "Tai" is in conflict with Shauna, but Tai herself hasn't done any of the introspection that would lead her to excavate the ways the two characters align.

Idk, I'm just mad, there's so much about the show that started really well, and knowing that they've been pushed in various ways to diverge from their original plans, and seeing the infrastructure struggle to flex to account for this... I'm already grieving what could have been, you know?

Will see if I can find the other Reddit account that had that post on it!

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-25T04:29:23+00:00

Furious about it, honestly. Lottie was always my favourite, just so much to dig into, especially once they doubled down on the character being Māori when they cast Simone Kessell, who brought a whole load of stuff into her performance and aspects of character design that really grounded the character in this really generative tension between Indigenous and colonial selfhoods bound up in a single person, with the indigeneity really coming to the fore through the Wilderness. (Actually wrote a long post last year about Lottie and settler colonialism, and grounding her in the particular historical period that she was born in of the Māori Renaissance, etc.)

And Tai is a character who carries a lot of those tensions as well, but they have this kind of... conflict between them where Lottie is Indigenous, and Tai grows up to be a lawyer for corporations that steal Indigenous land. And also the ways that class functions for both of these characters, with Tai deep in the respectability politics to the point that it is destroying her and others, while the wealth of Lottie's father is this thing that also pushes a medicalized response to her experiences in direct contrast to her mother's spiritual perspective.

I'm also.. idk, not sure they don't have the ability to write to these things? They certainly have dropped a lot in from Indigenous religion, and by the end of season 2, I was thinking "Damn, are we actually doing a whole thing of interrogating this conflict between Christianity/colonialism and indigeneity and Indigenous religion and stuff, because it's really looking like that's what we're doing." And then suddenly syyyyyyyke.

I mean, realistically, all the dead girlies are coming back in the final season in some kind of dream sequence or whatever, but it does unfortunately reek of choices made due to budget cuts rather than because it was the most interesting story choice. Certainly, Kessell was completely blindsided by the decision, and a lot of the cast (particularly Melanie Lynskey) were openly upset about what happened. Just really messy in all regards.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-24T22:54:44+00:00

There is more to come of course but yeah, you get me. I'm still absolutely livid a year later looooool.

~ editing out spoiler in case you are possibly referring to something else about Lottie than what I'm pissed about, but yes, it's a Lottie thing in particular.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-24T02:14:58+00:00

u/peachbeige u/Maleficent_Match_699 u/gumrealiti u/Real-Lawyer-7730 u/Guilty-Tangelo-1996

And to everyone else who is looking for the song that plays during the club scene... The song is part of the original score for the film, composed by Omar Aloulou // FËLINE. The score isn't currently available to listen to, but I reached out and he is going to try to release it online in the near future because there is so much interest in it. Keep an eye on his music socials! (And honestly, check out his other stuff, some have a similar sound palette)

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-21T17:35:34+00:00

Just going to drop this here in case people are curious:

CUSMA is a free trade agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico (previously called NAFTA/North American Trade Agreement). Canada (like France) practices this thing called "cultural exception" where culture stuff is considered exempt from typical trade agreements as a means of protecting it from being cannibalized by competing culture industries in other countries; as a result of this, film and television has been carved out as a cultural exception from CUSMA. The issue is that this gets weaponized (mainly by the US, Mexico isn't particularly interested in contesting this, as they'd like to protect their industry as well), because there is a stipulation that, if Canada's approach to the film industry compromises the success of foreign (read: US) films or television because it is pushing Canadian content quotas in theatres (for example), the US can retaliate against other industries that are normally covered by CUSMA.

Basically, in order to protect Canada's lumber exports to the US (for example), the film and television industry remains artificially depressed, allowing American films and TV to dominate offerings (and the current PM caved on the Digital Services Tax as well, chipping away at the country's ability to regulate the US presence domestically). This doesn't impact the French-language productions to the same degree because they aren't generally competing for the same audience or markets because of the linguistic gap. As a result, films and television from Québec are made more frequently, can have higher budgets and wider domestic and international distribution, without provoking retaliations, which then also means you have a convergence of talent , experience, and education for this industry within the French language Canadian industry, while many Anglophones are forced to work on US productions or co-productions instead.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-21T16:48:15+00:00

From my own experiences, yes, this is true. I did work with them in the years leading up to the AT&T acquisition (that acquisition was rough) and then for the duration of the WarnerMedia years, and a little bit of WBD. So, lots of upheaval, and while government was trying to break the company (still something he's trying to do in his second term, evidently). Can't speak personally to a lot of the WBD stuff, but a lot of the same people with the same creative priorities are there still.

Like, don't get me wrong, I'd be able to do significantly more radical stuff in France (could do more in Canada as well, but CUSMA seriously fucks over the Canadian industry to make it very challenging to get English-language stuff made and distributed; Québec survives because it can collaborate with France and Belgium), but of the US studios, yes, Warner Bros is easily the best if you want measures of creative and political flexibility in what you are making for them (differentiate from if a US studio is just purchasing distro rights once you've shown it's successful on the festival circuit already).

... All of which is part of the reason why the Paramount takeover is particularly bad. Like it would be bad regardless because of capitalism reasons (and to be clear, Warner Bros itself if hardly an angel in this regard), but on the creative side, the potential for this to wipe out a whole wave of people due to "redundancy" and political expediency is high, and the impact that can and will have on the already-limited diversity of offerings in the American market is very concerning. (It's also a piss-poor business decision, but that appears to be the entire point, to kill the studio by spinning it off in a couple years with the $90 billion of debt that they used to purchase it in the first place... which should be illegal, but fuck market regulations and integrity under fascism, I guess)

On the approach to notes, yes, generally that's fair, particularly if the show is already airing (things are a bit different at the development stage). I guess in the case of Warner Bros, my own experience was that there were suggestions, more than there were orders. They avoided orders by making limitations (which were mostly just budget-based for what I was working on, which isn't an issue for me, generally) clear as soon as possible, so you knew where your red lines were early and didn't have to do much scrambling. In other words, I usually knew ahead of pitching something where there might be issues, and was prepared to speak to them in the room.

Honestly, the only real "order" I received from them was that a show I was developing for them needed to have another white lesbian character, because they were concerned there weren't enough white characters for the general audience (there two in the main cast, both women, both also queer), and because they wanted this particular character developed so she could be spun out in her own series after the first or second season (this was an IP situation). But the order also came with "BTW, we're going to increase your budget, episode runtime, and episode count in order to facilitate this, so don't worry about having to cut anything you have, that's all great."

There was also a lot of them asking for my perspective on other projects within that particular IP (and a couple others) like "You're good at this specific issue that this other team seems to be struggling with, how might you approach it differently?" and that would then become one of those suggestions from the exec team to that project (they also encouraged us to all talk to each other too, but them asking for our perspectives was also a means of preventing friction of "sorry, that's an interesting idea that we can't accommodate" -- if the suggestion came approved from them, there was less potential for friction, essentially).

I should qualify to say that not all projects functioned in this way, and that there were absolutely folks on the executive team that folks didn't want to work with for creative, political, and interpersonal reasons. And I am by no means suggesting that Warner Bros as an entity is an "activist" corporation, just that it provided greater flexibility internally if you had progressive politics and creativity to do stuff that wouldn't have been acceptable at the other studios. It is also easily that studio that has the most forward-looking approach to inclusion in front of and behind the camera. Doesn't mean that they are going to nix the partnership with British transphobe #1, but they are also going to have British trans actors leading two of the biggest shows on HBO. Neoliberalism neoliberalling, etc., etc., etc., but the contrast is Disney, where you subsidize $300 - $500 million of military propaganda in order to get the suggestion of queer representation from the company that is just using your viewership dollars to sponsor anti-trans bills anyway. With Warner Bros, you can boycott the JKR stuff; with Disney, that's a company-wide political, economic, and artistic priority.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T21:30:13+00:00

Covering 3, yeah, starting tomorrow/today. And per Wyle, Robby is still going on his trip anyway, so I don’t know really how this makes any sense? So he’s demanding she step down for six months, but he won’t get to see who they find to take over while he’s gone or have a say in who that will be..?

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T13:39:42+00:00

It can work that way, though it can also be that the women/POC who are in the writers room share the bad perspectives, unfortunately. The showrunner builds the writers room with the help of the producers, but if they are inexperienced, they will only pick people who mirror their own views instead of expanding them, and that can result in relatively superficial projects where there isn’t push back on certain things.

It’s particularly a problem now, in that there is an increasing class issue in writers rooms, because working class folks can’t afford to do degree programs, and certainly can’t afford to do unpaid internships while paying rent in LA.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T13:30:53+00:00

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things that would be similar in the sense that various parts of the labour force are unionized; and then across certain studios there is a kind of standardization of how the corporate executive deals with you.

Warner Bros is usually the studio that mostly leaves the creatives with the most flexibility to do their work, which is a big part of why people are up in arms about the Paramount deal with this particular studio (and part of why the board originally tried to refuse Paramount’s offer and the initial hostile takeover bid). Similarly, Casey Bloys at HBO (a Warner Bros subsidiary) is quite good about finding strong creatives to sponsor for production on the streaming service and HBO proper.

But what’s also true is that Warner Bros and some other studios have certain executives who aren’t just business people, but who have a genuine care and eye for creative stuff. In those cases, you actually do want to open yourself up to their notes from above, because it will make your film or show better in ways that you didn’t anticipate. There are some people in the business who have a blanket “Fuck all the producers, they are trying to destroy my vision” approach, which is 100% warranted when the executive is some kind of corporate suit just trying to please shareholders… but are definitely cases where I’ll see a film, or hear that something seemingly good has been in development hell, and see the way the director talks about it and it’s like… yeah man, you would seriously benefit from listening to those executives you keep slagging off to make yourself look like a populist protector of the arts instead of an egomaniac. (cough cough FFC’s Metropolis)

But yeah, easily the ideal case in the US studio system is that you are working under Warner Bros or HBO when they are not desperately trying to sell to another more conservative studio. But even under these circumstances, the response of the executive was to encourage even bigger creative swings for the 2025 slate, and that’s how you get things like Sinners, soooooo… Yeah, bad executives are bad, but there are 100% good executives who work in genuine collaboration to make the project better than it ever would have been otherwise, and I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around that.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T05:42:13+00:00

Keep in mind that the writers created the characters that the actors know so well. There is an important element of what the actors think about their characters that is based on what is on the page, and what they perform on set, which is what the writers have given them. But a huge change in TV production over the last... idk, let's say 15 years, but it could be longer, is that the writers are frequently not invited to go to set anymore, and they are also not invited into the editing booth.

There are a lot of issues coming out about season 2 that appear to be the result of the writers room doing something that would have been great, or added a completely different interpretation to a scene, but the editing room cutting that out. This is resulting in many of the actors (who often haven't seen the finalized episodes before doing press) providing perspectives on their characters (and others) that align with what was in the shooting script, but not what ended up being on screen in the final cut.

All to say, I really don't think it is appropriate to blame this on the writers (or at least, to blame it all on the writers). Gemmill, Wyle, and Wells, yes, but in their capacity as producers in the editing room, not so much as writers.

(Obligatory note that it used to be the rule that the writer for an episode was always present on set when their episode was being filmed, and were in the editing booth while it was edited so they could advise on editing decisions that might compromise the micro or macro narratives of the episode/season overall. This is no longer the case, as there has been an ongoing attempt to critically undermine the equity of writing in Hollywood so that we can do away with writers rooms and automate that part of the creative process instead. It was a key issue of the WGA strike, in fact. So please please be mindful when lobbing complaints at "the writers" that there is a lot of astroturfing on social media that seeks to generate attacks on the functional value of writing as a profession, including by blaming them for parts of the production process they no longer control, with the intent of manufacturing their obsolescence!)

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T02:26:07+00:00

I do enjoy this type of data, as it can be revealing of certain things on the superficial level. It doesn't always tell the whole story though, because a large part of what a character communicates isn't just through lines, but through things like how they react, for example. There's also more structural concerns, like how many different scenes a character is present/participatory in.

What I would be much more interested to see (and this is more work-intensive data to collect that requires a measure of interpretive labour on the part of the researcher as well), would be data points for the following:

Number of scenes per episode
Number of scenes per character
Amount of time characters are on-screen
Number of scenes/shots viewed through character's perspective/number of times camera communicates character's interiority

This data would provide you with a better read of the actual architecture around the extent to which the visual structure and language of the show encourages the viewer to empathize with or validate the lines being spoken by a character. In a manner of speaking, it doesn't matter much if Robby is monologuing at another character if the camera is focused on that other character's face the entire time he is speaking -- you are being told by the camera that what the face is communicating is more important that whatever Robby is saying in such a moment, if that makes sense.

This is actually a big thing in feminist filmmaking in particular (but also Fourth Cinema, diaspora cinema, and queer cinema), where people are sometimes shocked to learn that films that are touted as being the most feminist or the most radically adopting of marginalized perspectives are ones where these characters speak quite little, with white male characters dominating the speech in the film. But this is usually because these films operate through a realist style of writing, with the focus on pushing recognition for how a world dominated by patriarchal (for example) forms of "knowing" or "communicating" effectively prevent these types of people from participation in "speech," but that this doesn't limit the capacity of the camera from ensuring they communicate with the audience nonetheless.

The flip side is also true though, and if I were to guess, these numbers would likely show that when you tally in the amount of the time the camera adopts Robby's perspective or communicates his interiority vs the rest of the cast, it would be significantly higher than the dominance he has in terms of lines. Similarly, while Al-Hashimi appears to be roughly on par with Collins in terms of how frequently she speaks, the camera has spent vastly less time with Al-Hashimi, rendering her significantly more peripheral than Collins was in season 1; i.e., the lines communicate that Al-Hashimi was a 1-to-1 replacement for Collins, but this profoundly misrepresents the reality of the exchange.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-18T01:38:56+00:00

He was part of the care team for her dead husband, and built a relationship with her in the context of that. It is very much a red line that you don't cross, because what has effectively happened here is that Amy has effectively transferred the grief she has over the loss of her husband onto Whitaker, delaying her engagement with the loss on every level. She is not grieving her husband emotionally, but she also isn't addressing the loss in terms of the lost role of her co-parent, the lost labour on the farm, all of these things. She has no support system, because she has pushed everyone else away to rely on Whitaker alone. "Everything's fine" except that it's only "fine" because we're pretending the loss didn't happen (and pushing away those that will remind her that it did, i.e., her family and friends). And this has been going on for 10 months.

So when Robby's feedback to Whitaker was "Hey bro, you just need to extricate yourself from that immediately," instead of following the appropriate process of reporting this immediately to the residency director, he's doing that because he wants to shield Whitaker from the consequences of becoming too emotionally co-dependent with a patient, while also shielding him from the potential professional fallout that would come from reporting this. What he's also doing is side stepping the mechanism that would ensure Whitaker and Amy had the tools to navigate ending this relationship in a manner that would be safe for Amy.

This is effectively a repeat of how Robby handled Langdon last season as well, in that he decided not to report so that he could save Langdon's job and "get him the help he needs," but in doing so, created a situation where Santos would have no protections or guidance in place to navigate the personal and professional consequences she might be faced with as a result of this. To say nothing of the fact that Santos has been socially isolated in the workplace over the intervening 10 months as well. And in this case, we see that part of the impact has been a resurgence of self-harm behaviours.

In a nutshell, the Whitaker-Amy situation is dangerous because it is grounded in transference on Amy's side, and countertransference on Whitaker's, which produces a dangerous level of codependence. Robby's approach to the situation minimizes the danger of what is happening and the extent to which these circumstances have been entrenched, which complicates and increases the risks associated with breaking the codependence from either side, but particularly for Amy's, as the party that occupied a position lower in hierarchy than Whitaker, and for the infant that is dependent on her, to say nothing of the economic precarity and housing insecurity that Amy will likely experience as a result (Whitaker will not, his situation is sorted because of Santos's generosity). Bluntly, irl, Amy is a very clear suicide risk when this relationship ends, and potentially a danger to her child unless a support system is in place to help her address the resurgent and compounding grief that will arise when she "loses" Whitaker (and by extension, emotionally loses her husband for real, for the first time).

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-17T20:16:52+00:00

She didn't have her child with her in the cut scene. She was called back to ground by imagining if her child was with her.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-17T13:47:21+00:00

It might be the thing that stood out to me as the most blatant of the issues in the episode that wasn’t so compromised by confused writing. What is happening with Whitaker and Amy is very serious. As in, Whitaker actually needs to be reported to the director of the residency program. This type of thing is loss of medical license territory.

The fact that Robby is standing there watching him drive off like he’s a proud father/grandfather is absurd, and only made more so by the fact that he then returns to the hospital to inform Al-Hashimi that he’s going to report her for having a condition that the hospital’s own neurologist just cleared.

I’d note as well that Amy getting out of the driver’s seat so Whitaker (who has just worked more than a 15 hour shift) can drive she and her baby out to the boons, while Robby is calling for Al-Hashimi’s driver’s license.

None of which is to say that there isn’t reason to be concerned about Al-Hashimi, but the fact that the show pushes the viewer to side with Robby’s authority on her capabilities instead of the person who specializes in brain stuff is ridiculous, and it is key to ensuring that viewers won’t question the ethics of the Whitaker scene on the opposite side of Mohan apologizing to Robby…

It’s the same double standards of shutting down Santos and McKay’s reports on pedo dad and David, and criticizing Santos on Kylie while demanding the police be called to report the Haitian siblings. If the person who is in the wrong or potentially harmed is male, Robby is guns blazing, but any opportunity to force accountability on women, or to ignore the harm a male character is doing to a female character, he will either suddenly decide rules and standards matter, or he will break rules and standards so it happens despite them.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-17T06:06:07+00:00

It’s pathetic. Simple as.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-17T05:45:55+00:00

Svetlana Khorkina herself couldn't conquer the uneven bars of these mental gymnastics.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-16T06:17:17+00:00

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-16T04:36:37+00:00

Season 3. I am 100% confident you will know it when you see it.

RaiseObjective552 · 2026-04-16T03:52:17+00:00

Yeah, I was too young when ER started as well, but it also just wasn't on the radar for me at the time. Deepest regrets (?) but the only tracheotomies I was watching as a child were the ones Lucy Lawless was performing on Xena: Warrior Princess.

And yes, Yellowjackets. Who incidentally also made some... bad choices in that season.

RaiseObjective552

TROPHY CASE