Well! And Just Like That is back, now with 100% more strap-ons! The Lake gets even gayer in season two. Riese updated our mega Netflix streaming list. And also Riese shared 16 LGBTQ shows that have been removed by their streamers which makes me want to punch a hole through the sun! Also, Drew reviewed Blue Jean for you.
Notes from the TV Team:
+ The vibes are rising on The Rising! There was some hand holding this week; I don’t see how this can possibly have a happy ending, but I sure as hell am going to be enjoying the journey. – Valerie Anne
+ Stephanie and Harper shared another cute kiss on Gotham Knights but I still can’t bring myself to write a full blurb about it because this show is…not my jam. – Valerie Anne
+ Top Chef Season 13 alum Frances Tariga-Weshnak returns to competition cooking on Morimoto’s Sushi Master. The chefbian thrives in being able to combine traditional Japanese food and techniques with the flavors of her Filipino heritage. Frances remains the absolute delight she was on Top Chef. Also? Lyrica Okano — who you might remember as Nico from Marvel’s Runaways — serves as the show’s host.
Morimoto’s Sushi Master is now streaming for free on The Roku Channel. – Natalie
How I Met Your Father Episode 216: “The Jersey Connection”
Written by Valerie Anne
I hope we get to see a string of Ellen’s dating mishaps next.
This week’s episode is bittersweet because Rachel is finally back, but I fear it’s the last time we see her. But we’ll get to that later.
Rachel is back to hanging with the crew, but when Ellen asks her if she wants to head to a movie, Rachel makes an amorphous excuse about plans she has that she insists Ellen would hate; she kisses Ellen on the cheek and runs off. Ellen wonders what she’s hiding, and fears it could even be cheating, so Ellen, Sophie, and Sid decide to have a stake out about it. They follow her to New Jersey, where they also spot Jesse, so they split off and follow them both.
Rachel meets up with a woman at an apartment building and Ellen fears the worst but clings to hope it’s platonic and follows them into an apartment. In the apartment they find lease applications, and while they’re hiding they hear Rachel say she needs space from her girlfriend. (At first I thought she said FOR her girlfriend and thought it was going to be a cute ask-to-move-in plot…I was very wrong.)
Ellen gets busted before she can sneak out and Rachel apologizes but explains she’s having a hard time living across the hall from Ellen and thinks distance will help. Ellen says that no matter how many states away she is, Ellen will still be Ellen, and if that’s what Rachel is running from, maybe they should break up. So Ellen leaves New Jersey a single woman, sad about the end of her relationship, but excited to learn her brother has been embarrassing himself singing parody songs about his teacher peers. Goodbye Rachel, we hardly knew ye.
Even though I call bullshit on being able to take the Path train to NJ and back in the time a party of middle school teachers is still at a bar, everyone makes it back and Jesse makes up with his teacher friends, one being Megan Rath, who I love, and who starts flirting with Jesse, much to Sophie’s chagrin.
Class of ’09 Episode 108: “Graduation”
Written by Valerie Anne
Hour in this shot is my mood watching this finale.
In the disappointing conclusion of Class of ’09, Present Poet and Present Hour have a fight, because Hour is pissed the bureau stole her work and keeps using it wrong; she intended for her system to be a tool for agents, not meant to replace the human element, but it’s getting away from them. Hour admits she only stayed at the bureau for Poet, and asks her to help her change it, to keep it from going too far, and Poet accuses her of asking her to choose Hour over the FBI. Hurt that Poet is using her confession against her, Hour storms off, angry, and that’s pretty much the last interaction we see them have.
The rest of the episode covers the trajectory of this AI system, how it was meant to stop people of color being treated as suspects first, and in his quest for equity, Tayo swung too far and had EVERYONE being treated as suspects first, and even getting arrested for patterns of behavior suggesting potential future crimes instead of actual committed crimes. So in the end, after a heist in which they wipe the servers of the political exceptions they were forced to implement, knowing it would result in the powers that be calling for the system to be shut down entirely. They go back to a person-first method of training FBI agents, but theoretically with better sensitivity training and bias awareness, the newest class being led by Agent Poet herself.
And I won’t lie, specifically re: the Poet/Hour of it all, I feel a little duped. Even though the story of this show isn’t told chronologically by any stretch of the imagination, I thought we’d get a little more closure on this relationship in the Future. Alas. At least no one can ever take the chemistry Kate Mara and Sepideh Moafi have away from us.
Nancy Drew Episode 404: “The Return of the Killer’s Hook”
Written by Valerie Anne
I am trash for these two I’M SORRY
This week, Nancy is wallowing after her and Ace’s breakup, ignoring the calls from her supportive friends and family. But she’s ripped from her pool of self-pity by a scream, and runs out into the woods to find a woman being chased with a man holding a hook. She bops the man with a stick, only to hear someone yell “cut” and realize that she has accidentally run onto a movie set. (If I had a nickel.)
And not just anyone’s movie set! Queer actor Bethany Brown’s character Laci McAllister is back, upgrading her hustle from podcaster to director. She’s remaking an old slasher called Longhook, but making it better and Blacker. She’s had some spooky things happen on set, and she’s mostly fine ignoring it, but Nancy is desperate for a task, so she offers to help.
Bess, who is going to be in the movie as Victim #1, and Ryan, a huge fan of the original Longhook movies, decide to help her out on this one. The spookiness escalates, Including a fake hook being swapped to a real one, hurting Bess. Nancy comforts Bess in this moment, which does nothing for my ill-advised Nancy/Bess ship.
With some help from the Drew Crew, they find out that the original director was awful, and that the crew decided to get back at him and accidentally killed him. Well, sort of accidentally. After drinking tap water, Brie, who was on the crew of the original Longhook movie, realizes that her memories of a great time on set were false and planted, and drinking the water helped her remember the torment, and how she was there when the director died, and probably could have saved him in the end, but just watched him die.
As it turns out, the stunt crew on the current set also drank the water, and are doing a sort of haunted reenactment of the torture from the original set, just like Nancy did for the jock’s crimes. This ends in Laci being impaled, but luckily Nancy and Bess get to her in time. They use the supernatural stomach pump on the stunt crew, but unfortunately the pump breaks so they’re going to have to find another solution for future water-based crimes.
In the end, they learn that Brie’s father is linked to the judge and something called the Black Door, and they get Brie to step down from the town council in hopes that Nick can take her place.
Also the police chief, despite having been there for the zombie rising, comes to Bess about the dad who complained about her teaching children about the supernatural. Bess says it’s part of this town’s history and she won’t sit back and let it be erased, but the chief tells her to stay in her lane and “keep history natural,” which is a bit on the nose for this metaphor but sounds about right.
This week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (“Ad Astra Per Aspera”) had no canonically queer activity, but the queer subtext in it is about as subtle as a supernova. I should be free on YouTube next week. The episode stands on its own; you do not need prior knowledge of the series of franchise to follow it.
I was also disappointed in the last episode of Class of 09. Really no one got closure but thar scene with Poet/Hour just lingering in a finale. I guess we were to accept their fate episodes prior. *eyeroll* Poet just enjoys all eyes on her anyway I guess.
Bess has so much good chemistry with everyone on the show. I almost wanted her to pity make out with Ace at the end of that episode. Lol.
Agree with the comment prior on STSNW. That lingering hand hold. Helloooo!
I didn’t realize until the last episode that Class of 09 was a limited series. The Hour/Poet stuff was frustrating, but the rush of the last episode really left a bad taste about the entire show. I was interested in the different take on the law enforcement genre, but if we’re gonna interrogate the role of AI, I think Person of Interest did it better.