Seven episodes into this first season and so much has gone down.
The mysteries of the town are loading up. I feel like I need to start writing on the walls.
For a couple of episodes I wondered why they dropped the plot point of Victor digging the graves as he was doing at the end of episode 4. Boy, did they pay that one off.
Strange things going on. How can there be electricity in these houses without cords with wires in them? What a weird detail. Plus, does digging a giant hole in your basement lead to that answer?
I never guessed that Father Rudra Khatri would be killed this quickly in the series considering he seemed to be a vital role.
Sarah, Victor and Jade feel different from others in the town. They all have some kind of contact or delusions happening to them… way more than anyone else. Jade is such a douchebag so far though that I wish it were anyone else but him. However, I do believe that he is a vital piece to this puzzle.
Where do these monsters come from at night. They seem to be just normal people, who turn deadly. I was yelling at Kevin as he was letting the girl in to make out with. That dumb f**k deserved what he got, but, because of his stupidity, a bunch of others got killed as well. He did not deserve the good name of ‘Kevin.’
Then, as if Boyd does not have enough troubles, Parkinson’s Disease? Geez.
I am curious about who these people were that they wound up stuck in this town. I wonder if we will eventually get flashbacks to them prior getting trapped in this place.
This absolutely reminds me of an amalgam of LOST and The Walking Dead. From has been tense and scary as well as thoroughly riveting.
Denny Crane’s wedding highlighted the first of these two episodes. Denny cheated on his new wife Bev at the wedding, in the coat check room. Ironically, that is where Denny and Bev first had sex.
The “divorce” is the heart of the episode “…There’s Fire.” Denny had a piece of dirt on Bev that allowed him to settle the divorce without Bev getting half of everything.
Denny returned to all his glory in the next episode taking a case of a man who caused an intruder to be electrocuted by setting up booby traps at this house.
Shirley has a problem in Shock and Oww!” as some tasteful nudes of her came out after a photographer she once had a fling with died. Shirley needed to recruit Alan, and he accepted with joy.
Paul’s daughter returned, and Paul worried that she was back on drugs. Paul asked Brad to find out the truth in whatever way he could. Paul ended up searching her bathroom and finding a needle. This led to a dramatic showdown.
Season two has been very consistent and fun, with some solid stories to be told by the lawyers at Crane, Poole, and Schmidt.
I wrapped up two Linda Cardellini TV shows in the same day. I finished “DTF St. Louis” in the Sunday Morning Sidewalk, and then I watched episode 8 of Crystal Lake on Peacock.
The finale of the series really nailed it, bringing the backstory to an exceptional conclusion. Episode seven was indeed Pam telling Lee and Briana about her life before Crystal Lake and she told them about the attack on her by the people from Bellflower, and the subsequent events following it.
Lee took her to the station, promising to protect her, but not doing a very good job of it. Elias and his men from Bellflower showed up and kicked off a violent showdown at the police station. Lee was wounded, but Dorf came through big time. The one thing about the finale was that we did not revisit Lee and it left his fate up in the air. I am not sure if the character appeared in the Friday the 13th movie or not.
The ending of Crystal Lake was great, with Jason making his appearance known and saving Pam from Elias. The crushing of Elias’s head was especially gruesome.
And Linda Cardellini’s final lines of the episode were perfectly unbalanced and crazed. I believed her psychosis completely, and Cardellini delivered them with a wild unabandon.
This show has done a great job of making me interested in rewatching the Friday the 13th movie. That is obviously a huge success.
After an up-and-down season, I had been feeling momentum building over the last few episodes. I was excited about the story, and then I watched this mess.
The first thing that happened was they retconned the ending of episode 12, and Cordelia and Queenie are just back alive again. This was after the Devil killed his old form in the bed when it reached 99.9 years old…just short of the 100 years they had waited for. Why? Not sure why?
Then Ben and Madison were in bed and, oops, the condom broke. Oh, she’s pregnant. The baby grows inside her in seconds and then she gives birth. The baby seems to be stillborn, but Satan showed up to save the baby.
Then, Mallory goes into the timeline to try and discover a way to beat Satan. It was so melodramatic and Cordelia begged her not to go. Then Mallory was back after a couple of commericial breaks.
The ending came out of nowhere as Ben sacrificed himself to help Cordelia and Mallory to imprison Satan in the Last Supper painting as Judas.
How can you spend 12 episodes building to a finale and still have it feel rushed?
I thought this was so anti-climactic that it truly disappointed me. I was looking forward to this episode after the last several, but this was just a waste of time. Very disappointed.
“No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street”
I finished the series this morning on the Sunday Morning Sidewalk, and it gave me all kinds of emotional feels.
What I was dreading came to pass. Floyd himself had spiked his Bloody Mary drink with the full bottle of the medication Amphezyne in it. This was not a murder, but a suicide.
The show does an admirable job of setting everything up. I believe that Floyd had been suffering from depression for some time. I believe that he has a difficult life and that his own self-image played a massive role in the end of his life.
I just have a hard time believing that Floyd would kill himself. I understand that depression is an insidious thing and that it can lead terrible situations. I just have a difficult time believing that Floyd would take that choice. He knew how important he was in Clark’s life, and he had told him that he was there for him…only to kill himself?
I told myself that it was going to be a tragic scene with Richard, who the episode had been setting up as our latest suspect. He had rode the bicycle to school for his first day and had a great day. He was so happy when he got home, and the new stuff that Carol had bought him went great as well. It was when he discovered the DTF St. Louis website on Floyd’s computer that led to a freak out.
Richard saw Floyd and Clark in their whitey-tighty underwear dance, making the assumption that they were having an affair. Richard could not comprehend the depth to that conversation between friends. I thought maybe Richard would have gone back and blasted Floyd and that is what broke the camel’s back. However, Richard just approached the window, made eye contact with Floyd and then turned away in disgust. Floyd pounded on the window and gave Richard the “I love you” ASL gesture, which Richard misinterpreted as “rock on.”
But Floyd did not know that Richard misunderstood him and I find it hard to accept that Floyd would kill himself with the issues between Richard unresolved.
Maybe that is what the series is saying. I learned to love the character of Floyd Smernitch over these seven episodes, with the heartfelt portrayal from David Harbour, that I can’t accept that the character would feel flawed enough that he couldn’t see the tragedy suicide would be. That I could only see the man whom is so caring and loving, but a man who was damaged beyond what he could possibly repair.
In the end, Clark was left very much alone, with his wife and kids gone, Floyd dead, and the affair with Carol, that had led to much of this, over. The final scene of Clark sitting alone on his swing set was heartbreaking.
Then, with Carol, most of the season was spent showing that she was an unlikeable character who appeared very selfish, only for the finale to completely switch that up. She went from being a prime suspect to just a loving mother who was trying to do her best for her family.
The episode is amazingly poignant, beautifully written and shot, with some fantastic acting. I don’t want to suggest that my difficulty accepting the result of the show meant that this was not exceptional TV. I found this episode thoroughly enthralling and deeply tragic. It is a sad end, but one that has all kinds of vitality. David Harbour absolutely deserved the Emmy Award that he received. The limited series received seven Emmy awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Linda Cardellini and Best Supporting Actor for Harbour.
Starting next week, the next show for the Sunday Morning Sidewalk will be Amazon Prime’s Carrie.
First of all, Pam goes crazy and she was just butchering hippies left and right. Just because she is stabbing all of these hippies, it does not mean that she can’t take some time to manipulate Grace. One hippie did get away, but it was not the one that wound up with a machete in his head (Thanks Jason!).
Pam’s mysterious connection to the Bellflower organization came into view more in episode six as Briana discovered info about Pam’s past. She took it to her brother the Sheriff Lee Brooks. They confronted Pam at the end of the sixth episode and it sure sounded as if Pam was coming clean.
At lest, with part of it.
Episode seven was a full on flashback episode where we see Pam and everything that led to the birth of Jason and the origin of the entire situation. I can understand why Pam left her husband and took off with Jason. It makes sense as well why Jason turned out to be like he is.
How did Bellflower end up creating a couple of mass murderers in the Voorhees family? Lots of experimentation and injections seems to be the correct answer.
The seventh episode was all in flashback so I assume that this is what Pam was telling to Lee and Briana and that when episode eight kicks off, they will see how rough her background was. Will they be taken in and start to believe that Pam is not the person racking up a body count in this New Jersey town?
This has been a great series so far and I am curious to see what we get in the finale.
I saw a post on X about It: Welcome to Derry dropping a surprise new episode on HBO Max. I did not believe it. There are people who post this type of post on X or Facebook or wherever that does not have any basis in reality. I hate when the clearly inaccurate posts show up.
However, this one turned out to be true.
A new episode of the show appeared on the streamer, dealing with a story about the native Americans who had been the ones to originally entrap Pennywise with the 13 pillars… what we learned about in season one of It: Welcome to Derry.
It was just a half hour episode, but it was fun and the special effects with Pennywise (way before he was a clown) were just terrifying.
What an awesome and unexpected treat for fans of this great show. It was a fabulous way to celebrate Halloween with an origin of Derry.
Two fun episodes of the Muppet Show, with two distinctly different performers. Jean Stapleton and Alice Cooper.
I actually found the Jean Stapleton episode one of the better written episodes of the third season so far, but I was not a huge fan of the duet at the end with Crazy Harry.
Then, what an odd episode with Alice Cooper, but equally awesome. I mean, it had Alice Cooper trying to get the Muppets to sell their souls to the Devil. Dark.
Both of these celebrities were real good sports with the show. Both were actually written a little crazy, and they both seemed to embrace the roles.
Robin the Frog broke up the weird Alice Cooper episode with a sweet version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
We also learned that Jean Stapleton’s favorite Muppet was Crazy Harry. Who knew? She also speaks mock Swedish, though what she spoke did not sound anything like the language spoken by the Swedish Chef.
Miss Piggy was very funny in the melodrama skit. Her disappointment was palpable. Her using the train tracks to hit Kermit was some funny slapstick bit that just never fails to gain a laugh from me.
I love the fact that I watched the Alice Cooper episode on Halloween Eve. It was very fitting.
So we discovered that all of the people from the town were driving from places all over the nation. Obviously, this is some kind of magical place. Maybe they all wind up going into some kind of dimension or something of the like.
There are also trees that apparently can teleport people or items to different locations. Victor showed Ethan how it worked with a rock with a smiley face on it.
Victor and Ethan have some issues too… or at least with Ethan’s father, Jim, who is angry with Victor’s attention to Ethan.
The end of the episode showed Victor digging graves outside of the Colony House. That was very creepy.
We learned that Jim and Tabitha were planning on getting a divorce after this trip. Julie knew about it and she confronted Tabitha about it. Julie seemed to be bonding with the Colony House patorns.
Boyd was dealing with his guilt over sending Frank to the box. Father Khatri confronted Boyd about the leadership role in the town. Frank lashed out at Khatri about his role in the decision to send Frank to the box.
Lots of stuff going on in From and it is a wild rides so far. I am involved with the show.
So much happened. We started the episode “Firewall” with Ultron in control of Vision’s body and trapping him and the other AIs in the same “prison” that Vision had stored Ultron for all these years. Turnabout…
We ended with Ultron and Jocasta together, readying to turn the world’s humans into something more.
We had a sensational showdown between Vision and Paladin with Thomas’s life in the balance. In Madripoor of all places. When we went to Madripoor, I really thought that maybe the Power Broker was actually going to be involved. That did not happen though.
By the way, I am now even more certain that the person who originally hired Paladin to reclaim Vision was Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch.
We had a shocking appearance by a character that we haven’t seen since Iron Man in 2008. Raza, as played by Faran Tahir, a man connected to the Ten Rings, arrived in Madripoor in hopes of collecting the Vision body. At first, I thought he was the guy who hired Paladin, but it turned out he had not. It was an amazing cameo from out of nowhere.
FRIDAY is out of the house, unhappy when Vision dropped the firewall allowing Ultron to escape into the weird matrix stuff. She went into it too, and I am not sure exactly her part in this.
Jocasta, with Ultron at her side, sent a miniscule bot into the eye of Lisa, transforming her into a synthezoid being. Vision stopped her, but I am not sure that he will be able to save her.
The whole Jocasta/Ultron pairing is extremely unsettling and it makes me very scared for what the future of the series will hold. James Spader is, once again, spectacular and had tremendous chemistry with T’Nia Miller.
The first episode this week was shot in such an astonishingly creative way, that I truly enjoyed the journey they were putting us in. The whole Ultron/Vision conversation on the prison phones was amazing writing.
I was completely enveloped by these two episodes. Where as last week, I liked the VisionQuest episodes (especially E4), these two were just a brilliant work.
Next week there is only one episode, but it is over an hour in length. I have loved the length of these episodes and the manner in which Disney + has released them.
I was surprised by this episode because I am not as familiar with the first Friday the 13th film as I should be. I was thinking that the death of Claudette and Barry would be something the series would build towards, perhaps to be a scene from Crystal Lake’s finale. However, it is episode 5 and they supposedly did a shot-for-shot recreation of the murders.
But the show had the highly drugged out Grace who stabbed the pair because she thought she was saving Jason from drowning by stabbing Claudette and Barry. Pam showed up right as the stabbings were done and she talked Grace down, taking the knife from her and finishing off Claudette herself. Claudette had confessed to Pam that she was having sex with Barry in the boathouse when Jason had died last summer. Pam creepily told the girl that Jason should have been watched at all times, as she plunged the knife into her side again.
Jason’s spirit seems to have already returned, and he was responsible for skinning the girl Willow, who Dorf had discovered last episode hanging in Crazy Ralph’s cabin. Ralph was as shocked as anyone when he saw the dead girl so he was clearly not the killer.
The camp reopened in this episode as a bunch of kids show up, only to find that there was not going to be much that they were allowed to do, causing several of them to complain noticeably. I know that whining from my own classroom. Of course, the mention of a nearby dead body was not the best way to handle that.
This series is making me want to revisit Friday the 13th and see how it compares. Linda Cardellini has been exceptional as Pam Voorhees and she almost makes you want to root for her… and not just when she is offing a long snake with a cleaver.
Emotions are on high as the new arrivals have to choose where they live in a process called Choosing Ceremony.
Jade, who finally awoke, thought this whole town was a set-up by Toby as a complex “escape room” type situation. He was acting extremely obnoxious about everything since he did not believe the story of the town to be true. When he was shown Toby’s body, he finally came around to the reality of the situation.
Meanwhile, the Matthews family chose to live in Town… except for Julie, who throws a huge curveball and states that she wants to live at Colony House. The surprise move upset her family, but the rules were once picked, you do not change.
Speaking of rules, we learn about the Box, which was constructed by Sheriff Boyd to punish those whose choices lead to the death of someone in the community. They had never had to use the Box before, but Frank’s negligence led to the death of his wife and daughter, and he was to go into the Box that night.
Boyd was having a deep, moral question if the Box was a fair thing to do. He even tried to get Frank to leave, to go to a cabin on the outskirts of town with a totem. Frank refused to do so and he wound up in the Box and is killed by the monsters.
I am very curious about what these nightly creatures are and where they come from. I am hoping that this is a mystery that the show will delve into with more detail as the seasons move on. I do not just want to accept it as a way of life in the town.
Why can no one leave the town? That is another fascinating mystery that I hope the creators of From have an answer to and it is not just a plot element to make the show work.
The fourth episode of Crystal Lake is surely setting up Pam’s next victims with a crew of hippies that have gotten Grace pulled in. However, it is the one hippie that apparently can speak to spirits that is going to get them all killed off. She spoke with Grace’s mom and she attacked Pam because, as we know, Pam killed her. This really spooked Grace.
Earlier in the episode, Pam had sex with Chief Lee. I’m not sure if this was done to set up an alibi for the burning of the diner or if she really wanted it… or it could be both.
Things are looking bad for Crazy Ralph as he is the leading suspect for the death of the two men that was once believed to be a bear attack. When Dorf went to find evidence at Ralph place, he found a hippie strung upside down and skinned. She arrived at the episode’s beginning and we see her get trapped in one of the bear traps.
Pam tossed her machete into Crystal Lake when it was discovered that one of the bodies had a wound resembling a sword. Is this going to be Jason’s eventual weapon of choice?
We get some intriguing background on Chief Lee from a former co-worker. We learn that Lee took the fall for a group of cops who were crooked in some case. This was a surprise to me as he has always seemed to be above board.
We are halfway through the season on Peacock so far. It has been an interesting show that I will definitely finish.
I found these two episodes that were designed to set up the finale to be extremely intriguing and satisfying.
The arrival of Ben at the coven in New Orleans was great. Ben being more than just an evil son of Satan is a fitting twist as this is what I would have expected from this character that we have met this season.
Making Ben and Madison a thing worked well in episode 11. I found them to be a cute couple.
However, the best part of these two episodes was yet to come. Ben brought Myrtle Snow back to the witches of the coven, pulling her from Hell.
Myrtle revealed to Fiona that she was the daughter of Satan and that she was a twin- separated at birth. Her twin- Constance Langdon. Then, she told the story of their mother, Sister Judy Martin from the Briarcliff Manor asylum, thus connecting the three characters of Jessica Lange from Murder House, Coven and Asylum together.
I found this to be a genius move. Seeing the connection between Fiona and Constance was one thing (a great scene with the pair of Jessica Langes together), but to tie Sister Judy into this was such a exceptional move. There was even a name drop of Pepper, from Asylum as well.
However, things do not end up very hopeful as at the end of the episode, Ben, Cordelia and Queenie (also back from Hell thanks to Ben) went to start off their plan to trap Satan, and both Cordelia and Queen get killed, making next episode’s finale totally a free for all.
I found both of these very strong and I am ready for the finale of the 13th season of American Horror Story.
The penultimate episode of this HBO Max limited series opens up what might be the final resolution to the murder of Floyd Smernitch. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Clark’s story explained the Tiger Tiger bit as he revealed that Clark had set up the whole Tiger Tiger thing, hoping to pull Floyd out of his funk over the failed sexual encounter Floyd tried to have with Carol. Carol had told Floyd that she discovered that she did not him on top of her.. that she felt like squirming out from under him. It was a brutal moment that affected Floyd deeply.
I am worried that I am not going to love this series finale next week. They are implying that Floyd may have given himself the overdose of the drug Amphezyne, and I am not sure that I can see him committing suicide even with what the show has done to him. He just feels like someone who loves life more than that. Plus, I am not sure if he would do that to Richard.
Yet, I am not sure that someone out of the blue would be better. It feels that Carol being the killer is more acceptable to me than either of those other outcomes.
Yet it really feels like they are setting this up to say that Floyd makes this choice, not only after Carol told him about the squirming, but the perceived betrayal of Clark with the Denny’s Plan.
I wonder if the restaurant Denny’s paid money to be in this episode, and, if they did, did they know what it was going to be used for?
