Friends, Valerie Anne has heard your plea and they have watched and loved and written about Deadloch! It’s July and Riese has released the list of all the new gay things you should be streaming! AND! She made you a TV quiz! Kayla wrote about Jenna Lyons and The Real Housewives of New York, and also about Betty and Veronica hooking up on Riverdale. Heather recapped another weird episode of And Just Like That and also reviewed the perfect Nimona. And Drew wrote a moving, powerful review of Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate.
Notes from the TV Team:
+ The Lincoln Lawyer returned this week — Netflix dropped the first five episodes of the second season — and, after spending most of the first season driving her boss (and being his confidant) around, Izzy Letts is getting more to do this go around. She’s becoming more active in the firm, she’s hustling to save up to open her own dance studio and she’s reconnected with her ex-girlfriend, Ray. I’ll continue to keep tabs on the show and report back on any gay happenings. — Natalie
How I Met Your Father Episode 218: “Parent Trap”
Written by Valerie Anne
Me every week that goes by and we don’t get an Ellen-goes-on-wacky-dates montage.
This week on How I Met Your Father, Hilary Duff is going to parent trap Emily Prentiss and Agent Coulson. I cannot tell you how many ways that sentence is an alignment of my interests.
So yes, this week, Sophie decides she wants to get her parents together so she can have the two-parent family she’s always dreamed of. But when she gets to the dinner she planned with Val, she spots her parents have skipped right over her trap and are already making out. In fact, they have also been going on dates to all the places she imagined they’d go as a family. This stresses her out so she bails on the family dinner she planned. She hides under Jesse’s desk about it and when she explains to him why she’s so upset, he points out that she got exactly what she wanted; her parents are annoying her and she’s turning into an immature version of herself. That’s what being an adult in a two-parent family is like.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the same coin, Sid and Ellen are having roommate problems. Sid can’t get Jesse to take the hint that he wants him to move out before his wife moves back to New York, and Ellen doesn’t know how to tell Charlie she can afford to live on her own now. So they decide to roommate trap them, setting up a nanny cam and planting a bro bonding board game. But as they start to bond more and more, Sid and Ellen get jealous and they find out Jesse and Charlie were onto them and hamming it up for the camera. They all talk and hug it out, Jesse agreeing to move out and Ellen deciding to keep Charlie as a roommate, not because she needs help with rent, but because friendship.
Nancy Drew Episode 406: “The Web of Yesterdays”
Written by Valerie Anne
The vaseline filter is all well and good while you’re watching the show, but it makes taking screenshots a bitch, lemme tell ya.
While the Drew Crew figures out next steps in their creature feature, Nancy heads to the high school for career day, where she’s excited to tell the teens about how she turned her passion for solving mysteries into a career. But once she gets there, she sort of tanks, and Tristan Glass, self-declared “seafaring adventurer” steals the show. Afterwards, he apologizes for hijacking, and they walk down the hall together, through some streamers…and into the 70s.
They find themselves in what we learn is a Ghost Web, a recreation of a day in the past, in which they are Stacy and Bobby, and it’s prom night. On their quest for clues on how to get home, they end up back in Nancy’s childhood home, where someone offers her spider eggs as if they were drugs. Nancy says no, but he plops one in her hand anyway, so Nancy decks him. Alas, the damage is done, and Nancy sports a red, angry wound from it.
The pre-prom party is a bust, and the Historical Society doesn’t exist yet, so they decide to go back to where they entered…and go to Prom, something neither of them did during their first go-round at high school. Eventually they find the right streamers but Nancy’s spider bite prevents her from leaving, so just Tristan goes back to the future.
Tristan finds the Drew Crew, and they all work together and find the demon spider that made the ghost web, and a newspaper that says Stacy died after prom night from a spider EXPLODING OUT OF HER. Remember that one truly upsetting tale from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Like that but x1000.
The Drew Crew + Tristan manage to get Nancy out of the ghost web, and they break into the roped off Historical Society to perform a spider sac c-section. Bess comforts her like she’s giving birth to their child and they manage to get the sac out of her but it explodes into a thousand baby spiders that form one big megazord spider and it sucks but is eventually vanquished. I don’t even have any particular feelings about spiders on my TV and this was just…so many spiders.
Now, while they were on the hunt for Nancy, George rewrote Carson’s letter to be a little more forceful and Carson caught wind of it and called her unprofessional. But after the police catch the Drew Crew in the historical society and George decides she’ll be the one to face them, Carson comes to see her at the Claw and tells her that she’s off the hook; Bess confessed to breaking ito the Historical Society and says George was just there to stop her. Bess could be deported if she’s convicted, but George could have not become a lawyer, so Bess was willing to take that risk, especially with both Carson and George to help her.
Pixel games like getaway shootout are booming right now. They’ve hit the mainstream and regular folks are popping their heads into games nights, board game cafes and friendly local game stores to see exactly what all the fuss is about.