"Black Box" Is a Reference to the Protagonist's Enormous Vagina

Does the Other Woman on Black Box (who was also the Other Woman on The Blacklist) have to be a psycho stalker? Ali Larter and Idris Elba did this shtick better. Why can't she just be cool?

I'm glad there are bipolar women on television now, but Carrie Mathison and Catherine Black have some things in common with each other that they might not have in common with some of their mentally ill viewers. Both have high-stress jobs, and they have to keep their disorder a secret.

What about a bipolar bowling lane attendant whose boss is like a sensei to her? The Bowling Boss knows about the disorder and understands she has to manage as best she can. He helps by teaching his protege to bowl. I guess they could also solve mysteries, but who the fuck do you know that solves mysteries?

I'm just not sure I care about any of these totally unprofessional people on Black Box. Everybody's fucking each other in every crevice of the hospital all the time. They always do this on hospital shows. If the staffs of real hospitals got up to as much fucking on the premises as they do on television it would cease to be a titillating taboo. Hospital shows wouldn't have to use this tired old device anymore.

They'd use it anyway because now it would be "true to life."

Not-Larter is Not-Elba's subordinate at work. If the show has said whether they fucked in the restaurant or someplace else, I cannot remember.

The acting is really broad and the dialogue is not often clever. Lydia from Breaking Bad is doing her best. Good Lydia is high-strung like Bad Lydia, but she's not a liaison for an international meth cartel. What does Good Lydia do for a living? Did the show say? Anyway, she's lovely to look at, but I kind of want the zombies to eat everyone on this program.

If it does not step up its game in the next week, this show will not be a priority.

Damseling Amy Acker

Am I the only person who thought "the Cellist" would end up some Level 11 S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, or CIA or something? When I heard Amy Acker was playing her I was sure of it. And they fucking damseled her. A better actor than all the actors on the show combined (and that includes you, Paxton. Please do chew scenery in every mediocre series on television, because you are a joy to behold, but we both know Acker is a rare and glorious specimen) and they damseled her.

This woman does Shakespeare! This woman can play anyone. And you, Jed Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen, fucking damseled her. Write more musicals and fuck off with this shit. I am disappointed in you.

Next week Adrian Pasdar will return with his ridiculous lip caterpillar. I hope there's a scene where he rips it off while cocking his brow and saying something hilarious. This will not happen because Whedon the Younger and Tancharoen fucking suck right now.

How could you waste Amy Acker like that? God damn it.

The Walk-Back

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro.”

Around the United States, hard right sphincters snapped shut. The backlash against the backlash will come soon, as it did when Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson made similar comments about the happiness of African-Americans in days gone by, but for now, the conservative media and the politicians they unquestioningly support dance a little two-step called the Walk-Back.

The Walk-Back is a time tested method of disavowing a person whose views or cause one previously buttressed. In very rare cases, one also can use the Walk-Back to admit that a person’s views were not as horrible and radical as one had assumed, but that never happens anymore. Typically, and with increasing frequency, hyper-partisans shake a leg to the Walk-Back when the subject of their adoration espouses views so extreme that it will hurt their party’s election prospects.

Here is the part where I mention that this is not strictly a conservative problem. Liberals do it, too, although most of us are more interested in tearing down outdated rightwing dogma than lifting up progressive “heroes.” We can talk about Obama’s drone program or about government spying on citizens all day if you like. Most liberals of my acquaintance will condemn the current administration for continuing Republican policies in these areas, but the liberals of my acquaintance are far more leftist than any Democratic politician has been in decades. It is difficult to discern whether or not the average Democratic voter actually agrees with most of these policies or is holding his or her nose while voting for the best of a ridiculously conservative bunch. The Overton Window is a bitch mistress.

Politicians, the media, and just regular people need to still themselves for a moment. Take deep breaths. Look at the people with whom you ally yourself.

Bundy’s fans marched into a community of 12,000 people with their rifles and shotguns, ready to use women as human shields to prove a point about property rights. Property rights. Is this not one of the conservative stalwart points? Land can belong to someone, is the conservative cry, and should someone violate those rights, it is within the owner’s purview to use any means necessary to protect that land.

But this is not about Cliven Bundy, conservative ideology, or even the rule of law. This is about the media and politicians blindly and gleefully idolizing people who will eventually prove themselves lees than heroes.

Do your homework. Pay attention. Stop pretending that because someone votes the same way as you they are your ally. Cliven Bundy is in this for himself and so are those who now dance the Walk-Back. To do a better job, we all must remember that sometimes the enemy is living in our campground rather than the other.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro.”

Were you really surprised?

Hello, Blog!

Two years since I looked at you. You seem well. No comments on old posts. Forever alone, are we? Poor, neglected thing. Like a devoted house frau whose husband no longer notices her. Not as if you've been trying. Girl, you need to realize you can't just let yourself go like that. You have to keep him interested. What a fickle beast is man.

 I can touch you, if you want.

Blahg

I guess I took January off from blogging. Whatever. If anybody read this thing, maybe they would have reminded me to post every once in a while. That's right, Nonexistent Reader, it is YOUR fault.

Maybe one of these days I'll give a fuck again and post something of substance.

All Your Hitch Are Belong to Us

Christopher Hitchens is six days gone, and his corpse has decayed just enough for the ghouls to find irresistible. As they devour him, they compare him to C.S. Lewis and G.K. Bloody Chesterton, those eloquent old godders, to whom, it should be noted, no one compared Hitch when he was alive. As the hungry foragers dig their fingers into Hitchens’s desiccating body they chirp that perhaps the man who wrote God is Not Great changed his mind about the whole Jesus thing at the very last minute, and if not before death, he certainly did when he turned up in Hell, what what? God is LURVE.

Please piss on his grave. Hitchens was a notorious grave pisser. This was my favorite of his qualities. The world needs talented grave pissers to continue that tradition. Talk about how 9/11 brought out his inner warmongering douchebag. Arch your eyebrow and try to replace him*.



Please do not pretend he came around to Jesus in the very end. The only deathbed conversion having to do with Hitchens was his conversion from a living person into a cadaver. Hitch predicted the vultures would feast, not because he was clairvoyant but because the scavengers for the Holy Ghost are so fucking predictable.

Stop lying for your meat, hyenas. Hitchens was a godless Horseman, not a Christian soldier. He was neither a secret nor an honorary Christian just because his name had the word Christ in it or because militant Islam seriously freaked him out. About the resurrection of Jesus, Hitchens said the following:

“Having no reliable or consistent witnesses, in anything like the time period needed to certify such an extraordinary claim, we are finally entitled to say that we have a right, if not an obligation, to respect ourselves enough to disbelieve the whole thing.” (God is Not Great, p. 143)

Hitch was a war pig, but he was our war pig. You don’t get to claim him, Ross Douthat, now that he’s too deceased to tell you to fuck yourself. A lie about a dead infidel is still a lie.



Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

*Try hard, won’t you? My heart aches for a Hitchens obit of Kim Jong Il.

Morgancest

SPOILERS throughout for shows featuring incest tropes.

The budding incest subplot on Dexter is making this TV addict a little grumpy. I thought about leaving the show if they follow this through, but you know I won’t because we’ve been together so long, baby. Maybe you think my visceral reaction is attributable to cultural taboos and my own squicks and hang-ups, as at first I thought it was. But then I examined it a little deeper and realized that this irritation is not about incest. After all, I did not mind Octavia and Octavian in Rome or Cersei and Jaime in Game of Thrones. Jimmy and Gillian in Boardwalk Empire freaked me out for a minute but that was just because I didn’t think the show would go there until a bit later.

So, what is the problem? The problem is two things. The first thing is that the incest trope has been done on each of those HBO programs I just mentioned. On True Blood as well, when Vampire Beel banged the bejeezus out of his great-great granddaughter. Did the big men at Showtime notice a correlation between HBO’s incest subplots and its Emmy nominations and issue an order to Scott Buck? 100 percent more sister-fucking than that damn vampire show, or it’s curtains for you, Buckaroo! The decision seems tacked on, a conclusion to an emotional arc that never existed before twenty seconds ago.

Which brings us to thing number two: this development is not a logical progression for these characters. Octavian was always into Octavia, and her seduction of him made sense in the context of their story. Cersei and Jaime were fucking from day one; their sexual relationship is an important part of their characters, and it ties into the larger narrative. The implication that Jimmy and Gillian had such a relationship came early in their series, so when the setup got knocked down, it was inevitable and meaningful to Jimmy’s character and to the story.

When, in Dexter’s five previous seasons, has Debra’s behavior ever indicated sexy feelings for her brother? Debra justifies the delusion that she has always been into him with the men in her life, whom she says are either just like Dexter or nothing like him at all. So, either your boyfriends have stuff in common with your brother, or they don’t, and that’s your case for brother-fucking? Let’s see if this adds up.

Biney the Mad Prosthetist is Dexter’s biological brother, and the two of them lived through the same trauma, the chainsaw murder of their mother. They have a lot in common, and I’m positive that this will be the writers’ primary piece of evidence in their defense. There was that dude she met at the gym, who IIRC was just a nice guy. Deb sabotaged that relationship because she was still fucked up from the Biney thing, and who could blame her?

Lundy, I think, is the great love of Deb’s life, and it is he who disproves the case for brother-love. Sure, Lundy had things in common with Dexter—an eye for detail, intense curiosity, passionate drive—but the old man was his own man, a lion for justice. Debra, Lundy, and Dexter had one thing in common: they hunted murderers obsessively. Deb likes men who have the job in common with her because it is convenient to get the nookie this way; this does not make a case for brotherly love. If anything, Lundy is a better example for daddy issues (another post altogether).

Then there was Anton, who was another nice rebound dude. I guess the writers will say that Anton has nothing in common with Dexter and that’s why she dated him, because brother-fucking! But seriously, you can’t have it both ways. Deb likes to rebound with the teddy bears, who salve her wounds until she is well enough to fuck up the relationship. After Lundy died, Deb ended up with Quinn, who satisfied part of the teddy bear thing and part of the convenient partner nookie thing. Quinn and Deb were good for each other; they brought out the best in one another. That the show runners decided to break them up so Deb could feel sexy feelings at Dexter is a betrayal of her character.

It seems to me that, for five years, the writers were very careful to not imply incestuous emotions between the siblings. Even when Jennifer Carpenter and Michael C. Hall were a real-life couple, there was zero sexual chemistry between them onscreen as these characters. Their relationship was something I really loved, because it illustrated how an adoptive relationship can be the same as a blood relationship. Now the show runners seek to undermine that idea, and for what? Isn’t the revelation that her brother is a murderer enough to propel Debra’s character through the next couple seasons?

You made a bad decision here, Buck. I hope you realize that before next season, and Brother Chuck the psychiatrist and her subplot posthaste.