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Only up to the end of the brownie segment but man what a cockup all around. I was thinking the whole time what Lottie said at the end there - if anyone had actually just made a damn brownie, they would have run away with it. Don't any of these guys know that the best part of a brownie is the top? Why smother that in buttercream? It's sacrilege!
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:16 AM on October 14, 2020

I'm going to be interested to hear comments from US viewers on the bagel recipe. The online group I watch with has quite a few members who are Jewish, expat-US or both, and the general consensus from them was that this was bagels done very wrong.

I live in NYC and actually, the example rainbow bagels looked pretty close to the ones I've seen occasionally in bagel shops here. I've never ordered one, and I'm pretty sure they're… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:59 PM on October 7, 2020

Eh... it's certainly not the classic way but I wouldn't consider baking soda instead of lye to be a major crime. Also I recently watched... whatever the series was that Netflix confusingly lists as "The Beginning" (series 3?) and one of the showstoppers was to make bagels, and I didn't see any lye there either, though I could have missed it.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:00 AM on October 8, 2020

So like what's the point?

To be fair, the technicals have often prioritized difficulty over tastiness - I'd rather eat a rainbow bagel than that damn tennis cake thing from a few seasons back. And dying a batch of risen dough five different colors, then binding it all back together, is a pretty difficult thing to pull off.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:35 AM on October 10, 2020

With the judges repeatedly saying that they "know Rowan can do more," I'm wondering if his application bakes were just hands-down incredible or something. But yeah he has used up his damn chances in my opinion. I don't find his doddering-old-fop schtick charming.

Did anyone else feel like the, "Ah crap, my chocolate seized," "Oh here, take mine!" moment was both quintessentially GBBO but also kind of shocking? It's one thing to… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:46 AM on October 4, 2020

OK I'm only nine minutes in but I have an enormous crush on Lottie already
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:32 PM on September 22, 2020

God, some of those head-cakes gave me an enormous case of the giggles. Once I started I just couldn’t stop. But actually, considering it was week one, they could have been significantly worse.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:42 AM on September 23, 2020

The cake bust challenge was just insanely cruel. When I watch the show I often ponder how I'd approach each challenge, but for this one my mind kept shutting down.

The most successful contestants picked celebrities with a few noteworthy and simple-to-render features, things that would indicate who the person was even if you stuck them on a smiley face. Personally I might have gone with Groucho Marx.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:58 PM on September 23, 2020

Super curious how this will work -- usually the bakers bring in weird shapers their father made for them, or their sister's backyard honey, or whatever local thing. How long did they have between filming episodes? Did they all get their own kitchen with any supplies they wanted?

It was two days on, two days off, and they did all get practice kitchens. This article has some info:

Producers set up practice kitchens… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:49 PM on September 24, 2020

Say, for the Brits in the room - is it typical there to top pineapple upside-down cake with whipped cream? I've never seen that done in America, and I'm wondering if it was just an added hurdle to mess with the bakers (since so many of them melted off), or whether it's just traditional.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:40 PM on September 25, 2020

ridiculousness of the baking challenges (that pita bread on an outdoor fire one? ugh)

I still think that would have been a great challenge if it had been in like week three, and if they had allowed them to make more practice ones. It was mostly just making it part of the final that felt unfair to me.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:29 PM on September 25, 2020

Though bubble gum and cream soda cake didn't sound appealing at all.

Yeah I wanted to yell "just because Nadiya got away with it doesn't make it a good idea!" Seriously, why do people still insist on serving the judges flavors that they have repeatedly said they hate? Even if you succeed, the payoff will be "this is less terrible than I assumed from the description" and almost never "this is actually good on its own merits.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 1:49 PM on September 30, 2020

Banoffee is banana and toffee. Much tastier than the alternative.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:29 PM on October 2, 2020

Is this the first time there's been major Afro-futurism in a big budget TV show? I'm thinking so but would welcome any correction.

Not a full TV show off the top of my head. But anyone who's enjoying Lovecraft Country should check out the Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond the Stars. It's a perfect companion piece for this show. The episode is mostly set in a 1950s flashback/alternate reality/whatever, and is about a Black science fiction author's… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:09 AM on September 29, 2020

Really interesting to see Tic's reaction to realizing what was going on with Montrose.

The second half of this episode was so packed that I actually forgot all about this, but I wanted to say (as a queer person myself) that I LOVE the decision to have Tic use that slur. A lot of shows wouldn't have gone there, because Tic is Our Lovable Protagonist (even considering the atrocities we now know he participated in) and you don't want to hear that word… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:49 PM on September 29, 2020

Enver Gjokaj (Victor) is an odd one - he seemed to have had a hard time getting jobs after this, when he showcased how well he could do impressions and range. He was gay-buried in Dexter as Ray Stevenson's character's bf after only a cameo. Nice to hear that he was a mostly (?) regular in 'Agent Carter' and then 'Agents of SHIELD' (which, I have not actually watched).

He's the main thing I remember about this show, which I watched with my family when… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:45 PM on September 25, 2020

I was confused because I have a several-years-old game which includes a labyrinth called Piranesi and has no relationship to this book. Turns out both are named after a series of prints by an Italian artist in the 1700s.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:15 AM on September 18, 2020

Yeah I definitely think this is meant to be a “seduction of the dark side” thing. I mean it happened right after our most important bad guy character told her that magic means doing whatever the fuck you want.

I didn’t like watching it either. But if she had just beaten him, or even just killed him (I was expecting staged autoerotic asphyxiation), it wouldn’t have played as such a turn to the dark side. And I wouldn’t be surprised if her actions wind up affecting the… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:40 AM on September 15, 2020

PS: was the woman Ruby turned into the same woman from the village in the second episode?
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:42 AM on September 15, 2020

I hated Montrose's storyline; it felt facile and unearned. Especially right after he murders Yahima, who it seems was entirely unnecessary to the story after all.

I kind of agree. I mostly just wish that story had been given time to play out over more than one episode. I've been seeing positive reactions to it but, as a gay person who has watched that same basic narrative in a lot of stories, it felt like the Cliff Notes version. At the least, I'd… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:20 AM on September 15, 2020

Secret tunnels that connect everything ... This is an occultist cliche that I'm not familiar with, yes?

Massive hidden tunnel complexes under buildings are very Lovecraft. There are a lot of examples but the first one that came to mind was The Rats In The Walls. Guy decides to restore his family's abandoned estate and

Upon investigating further, and through recurring dreams, Delapore learns that his family… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:01 AM on September 15, 2020

Oh, re: Ruby's whole turn-to-the-dark-side thing, I think it's very telling that one of Tic's relatively few scenes this week was all about how "this magic stuff isn't INHERENTLY evil, what could be so bad about protecting ourselves?" Like, asked and answered. I expect The Temptation of Tic to be a big thing in the latter part of this season.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:45 AM on September 15, 2020

I don't know if it's pure fanwanky wishful thinking to hope that Yahima is still alive, but... I thought it was weirdly anticlimactic and narratively unsatisfying to introduce this cool and interesting character towards the end of an episode, go to all the trouble of bringing them back to the "real world", complete with a plot setback in the form of magical voicelessness, only to abruptly and unceremoniously kill them off, and barely deal with the fallout.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:29 AM on September 17, 2020

Yeah almost this entire episode was just a bunch of people in a boring little room trying to explain what the fuck happened on the hit show The X-Files. I watched it for the first time after a full-series binge last year, and the worst part is, I hadn't realized a lot of the things revealed in this episode until I watched it. I can see the misguided logic if it was actually all a seamless puzzle that was just hard to follow over nine years, but if the puzzle doesn't even come together on a… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:50 AM on September 16, 2020

I actually admire the balls to end the whole series (as of then) on a note of "we failed, they're coming, we can't stop it." But the road to that point was just bleh.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:53 AM on September 16, 2020

Actually, to build on my first point: last year I watched all of Lost for the first time over about four or five months, and having heard over a decade of shit-talking about how all the secret plots were totally stupid and didn't come together at all... it actually pretty much all worked for me. I understand why people were disappointed by some aspects of the resolution, but it pretty much all felt, in the end, like a complete narrative. The X-Files - which I also had not completely finished… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:14 PM on September 16, 2020

William seems to be Christina in a magical disguise, but I (and the internet) could be wrong.

Someone theorized this in the last thread and with the theory in mind this episode, I’m pretty sold on it now. That scene where Christina goes around a corner and then William pops out two seconds later? But I haven’t told my roommates, who were speculating about what his deal is and haven’t thought of that possibility. I hope it’s true so I can see their… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:57 AM on September 7, 2020

PS: we’re watching on the Hulu HBO channel and this episode was available from Friday on. We watched it Saturday. Wondering if that was a mistake, or it’s going to continue being available there early.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:00 AM on September 7, 2020

Candelaria refers to Yahima with the pronoun ze, but it's unclear if that is canon or how the actor thought of the character or what. I don't know anything about Arawak and virtually nothing about Two-Spirit people, and so I couldn't even begin to speculate about what the best / least-inaccurate English pronoun might be.

I'n not Native and so I only know what I've read, but I believe the specific term two-spirit is a modern umbrella term encompassing… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:55 AM on September 7, 2020

However, one problem with that is that the hoodoo mezuzah on Leti’s door kept Christina out, but it seemed to me that William and Ruby had retired to Leti and Ruby’s house for their Adult Fun Times. If the magic kept Christina out, and William is Christina, then how does that work?

I'm actually not sure it was Leti's house. I thought it was at first, but then it's pretty goddamn rude to fuck in the lobby of a house you share with… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:22 AM on September 8, 2020

If that's the case, Christina/William may use spells to shapeshift into a more "acceptable" male physical form around non-family SoA members.

At the castle, did we ever actually see William in the same scene with anyone who wasn't one of Our Heroes? I'm wondering of her dad even knew the William persona existed. I could be wrong though.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 5:00 PM on September 8, 2020

After this past week this episode was everything I needed to see. Evil racist fucks harass you and the cops do nothing? Smash their goddamn car windows. They break into your house with deadly weapons? Cut their fucking heads off. That this is presented as the moral and correct choice is completely revolutionary, literally.

When the ghosts transformed back into their true selves at the end I just cried. This episode was an exorcism all right.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:34 PM on August 31, 2020

Am I supposed to understand why Christina set Leti up to buy the house?

She talked about the pages that were stolen from her father's book - they were stolen by the guy who owned the house and did the experiments. I assume she thinks the pages are still there in the house, and she knows she wouldn't have been able to retrieve them while his ghost still existed. And she knew, or hoped, that Tic would be able to help exorcise him, and getting Leti to… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:58 PM on August 31, 2020

the final scene seems to suggest that the estate agent whose office they were in was in Christina's employ and had been the one who sold the house to Leti

This is what I assumed. And given Christina's other abilities, I think there's a good chance she gave Leti some kind of magical nudge.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 12:12 AM on September 1, 2020

Instead, it seems to me, they've chosen to prioritise the show's breakneck pace - both within each episode and over the season as a whole. If that means just nodding to the odd bit of plot information here and there rather than spelling it out in detail,I think they're happy to accept that as a price worth paying.

I watched Romancing the Stone for the first time a few nights ago, and was struck by the similar approach to pacing. For example there… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 2:55 PM on September 1, 2020

Except that I felt like the thing with Christina at the end just ground the momentum to a slog. I find The Order the most boring thing, and the insistence that it's Important-With-A-Capital-I is Not Helping

Feels very X-Files-y. Sometimes you get a wacky mutant fish adventure and sometimes you get The Men In Suits with Their Evil And Convoluted Plot.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 8:45 AM on September 3, 2020

But I'm still unclear how or when Martha spent her middle or later thirds, or how Claudia spent her last third, or what the infinity child did for all of his non-rampaging years.

With Martha, as with Jonas, I think there's an implication that the loops we saw in the show didn't appear out of nowhere the moment the first loop began. I imagine there was a period of massive chaos that "settled out" into the basic pattern we see for most of the… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:58 AM on August 29, 2020

But I'm not sure I see much evidence for the "initial chaos" interpretation. The one consistent picture of time travel this show mainly sticks to is that there is essentially one timeline, or perhaps three timelines with a single moment of potential splitting on that day in 1986. I think that all the timelines are how they ever were, created wholecloth at the moment of Tannhaus's experiment, erased wholecloth at the "moment" when Jonas and Martha intervene.… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:42 AM on August 29, 2020

Poor Leyla is what would happen to 95% of us if we fulfilled our daydreams of joining the X-Files. I don't remember much about this episode aside from that, but I do always enjoy it when we're shown random FBI members' opinions of the X-Files (usually quite a bit lower than hers).
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:42 AM on August 26, 2020

(And apparently Leyla Harrison was named after an X-Files fan who died of cancer, so it's very sweet that they made her namesake also a massive fan.)
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:43 AM on August 26, 2020

I think it RULES that this show dispensed with a season’s worth of plot in an episode. We all knew basically where this whole creepy mansion thing was going from the end of the last episode - why draw it out? Now I have no idea where the show is going and that’s super exciting.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 6:36 PM on August 24, 2020

I loved the more realistic, dread-filled atmosphere of the first one, and would have preferred a depiction of magic/the occult more in line with that.

I was trying to figure out why this didn't bother me, because normally it would. And I think it's because a big part of both Tic's and George's characters* is being extremely aware of the tropes of the genre they have found themselves in. They accelerate events because they are too genre-savvy to allow… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:40 AM on August 25, 2020

That opening dream sequence was amazing. Talk about establishing your mission statement right away!

I was watching with my roommates and 30 seconds in, right when I was about to open my mouth to say "well this fucking rules," my one roommate said "ugh, I don't know about this you guys." There has never been a cleaner illustration of the massive, massive gulf between what she and I want out of television. That said, by the end of… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:15 AM on August 19, 2020

Also, who else things those shoggoths were never actually a threat to our protagonists? They acted as if they were, but I don't think it's a coincidence that they killed every one of the cops and were then called off before they put a scratch on Team Woody.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:23 AM on August 19, 2020

All the cast was great but I thought Jurnee Smollett was particularly electric. Could be biased though since I may have a tiny crush.

Those high-waisted shorts with the cropped tops... I needed a Gay Minute
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:13 AM on August 21, 2020

Tom and Lorenzo have a costume analysis up: The World-Building, Character-Defining Costumes of Lovecraft Country

The first thing we noticed about Lovecraft Country was the costume design. Not since Janie Bryant’s masterful work on Mad Men have we seen period mid-Century costumes that manage the trick of feeling like real clothes that real people wore while also having a highly visual and telegenic component that cause them to pop onscreen like the best fashion… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 10:04 AM on August 21, 2020

I liked it a lot, though between the arthritic knees, making plans with Hippolyta, and looking at an old photograph, I was definitely not expecting Uncle George to survive. And then Leti and Atticus joked about him not being able to run? Wow. If he survives this series I will be very pleasantly surprised.

That first scene with them in bed, just being in love and planning for the future, I was like "...fifty bucks says this guy doesn't outlive… [more]
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 3:50 PM on August 22, 2020

I’m not familiar with the book and I thought this was great! There were a few points of clunky expository dialogue (particularly the scene in Uncle George’s shop), but I chalked that up to pilot problems.

I love the character dynamics they’ve set up and I love how much of the horror comes from real life. When they finally made it past the county line only to find a new roadblock up ahead, it REALLY got to me.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 7:48 AM on August 19, 2020

PussKillian that same line got me good.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 9:57 AM on August 13, 2020

This episode was new to me when I finally watched all of season 8 last year, and honestly I love it. I think it's fantastically creepy and has real classic X-Files vibes. One of the best of the Doggett/Scully era.
posted to FanFare by showbiz_liz at 11:00 AM on August 11, 2020