Just to chime in late on the four-on-the-door issue, the main reason I was pulled out of the scene was I thought to myself "Oh no, not the TV cliche where there's a decoy at the door while the killer sneaks in the back!". The following scenes I kept expecting the killer to show up in the house.

So I'm not sure whether to feel: a) happy, because the writer was smarter than the killer-comes-in-the-back-door cliche, or b) sad, because the characters didn't appear to consider the killer coming in the back door.

All previous posts about possible complicated explanations for their actions are valid, but in the heat of the moment my brain said "somebody think of the back door!" and I saw nothing on screen to satisfy it :)

All in all, a pretty minor nitpick. I was pleased, though I think I liked last week's slightly better.

Here's a question for the (drunken) moment:

Do you guys know anywhere I can gush about this show, hopefully demonstrating my native intelligence, that isn't here or LJ? Nobody actually reads my livejournal, because I don't post much or interestingly, and everybody here is already a Tim fan. I need somewhere else to make my (in my shamelessly arrogant opinion) cogent, strong arguments for the true incedibleness of this show, which may well have already surpassed Veronica Mars as my favorite show of this past year. TWOP seems a lost cause, honestly, and I don't really care to fight the flood in an environment that makes a goal out of being difficult, but if there's any other major forum I could join to fight the good fight, I'd be interested. Though time may not permit as soldierly a battle as I'd like to wage, normally.

ETA: Allyson, please tell me we're not alone in our completely untempered total-and-complete love for this show? I was just reading the SA forums thread about it, and even the Tim lovers who started the thread don't seem to be loving the show so far which just makes me gawk in confusion because SO GOOD DO THEY NOT HAVE THE RIGHT SPICE IN THEIR BRAINS?

The Inside

Allyson, please tell me we're not alone in our completely untempered total-and-complete love for this show?

I'm not Allyson, but I think we are alone. I know of two or perhaps three -- four tops -- other people who loves the show who don't post here. It's heartbreaking.

I know of two or perhaps three -- four tops -- other people who loves the show who don't post here.

I guess I am one of those. Except I post here now. Apparently. So, yeah, hi everybody!

I had my doubts about Rachel Nichols in the beginning, but that ceased by the end of last episode. When she profiled the pre-filer, all doubts were gone. Even got my eyes a bit misty, to tell you the truth.

And that's the way this cookie crumbles. My love for this show is now completely untempered, total and complete. Plus, it makes me really wanna hug a Timmy.

I'm not entirely sure why The Inside hasn't grabbed a lot of people I know and love the way it has grabbed me, because I haven't asked. I have theories, but the folks feeling "eh" about it can chime in and tell me what's turning them off.

I think maybe there isn't much to hang onto right out of the gate. Rebecca seems flat, unlikeable, robotic, mostly. So it's impossible to want to grab her hand and see her through it in these few eps, she's little more than pain!girl right now.

I think it's a realistic protrayal of someone who was abused and has completely withdrawn. She's incapable of making connections with anyone. And so she can't make a connection with the audience. I'm looking forward to her gradual ability to make those connections.

The audience needs to be able to root for someone, or to have an entry point. I think the entry point for people right now is Danny and Mel, because they're the most lively humans, and seem to be the voice of the audience...there hasn't been enough of them in these three episodes, which are the most exposition heavy.

What I'm reading from around the net sounds a lot like how I felt about Firefly. Kristen called it "drinking sand" in a review, and that nailed how I felt about it. If I gave less of a shit about it, I would have been in a coma. Just when I was giving up, Out of Gas came along and knocked me right on my ass and showed me what the show was capable of.

I think the arc with Thief of Hearts and Declawed will do the same. They're not Rebecca-centric, but do show her to be more than pain!girl and it pulls the team together against a foil to save one of their own, in that sort of, "this is a fucked up family and we can't stand each other but if you fuck with one of us, you're fucking with all of us" kind of way. But we need time to get to that place.

I'm not sure what has been missing in terms of seduction, because I've been sleeping with the show for some time.

Personally, it has sort of been like meeting a cute boy on vacation and falling hard for him, then bringing him to dinner to meet my friends to find that they think he has a funny looking nose and an annoying laugh. And then I feel defensive both about the guy I've fallen for, and about my taste.

The follks at www.teevee.org devoted an article to a compare/contrast of The Closer and The Inside, and The Inside definitely came off better. Not an over-the-top glowing review, but good points all around (including a restatement of the First Impression Strategy from upthread!).

[Teevee]

I understand I've been more than a little, "The Inside likes carrots," for a long time, too.

For one thing, Agent Locke is seriously damaged goods -- the survivor of an eighteen-month abduction when she was 10. Her hallucinatory flashbacks of her abductor, a leering slimeball with a cowboy shirt and an ice cream cone, are skin-crawling. And what seem at first glance to be signs of Nichols' utter inability to act -- her stiff body language, wide Bambi eyes and robotic line delivery -- make perfect sense in the context of her character. The cool, lovely professional profiler is a thin porcelain shell Rebecca's built to protect herself. In her character's very worst moments, Nichols lets us see the outlines of something truly horrible fluttering underneath, trying to break through.

Hey, someone gets it! Cool.

The Inside is light-years better than the we're-not-even-trying conformity of The Closer, but it's hardly fun summer viewing. In his superb scripts for Angel, Minear could confront real evils under a protective layer of horror-movie tropes. Here, the abyss does a little too much staring back.

Ooh. Overall, a very good review.

Agreed on the Becky vs the viewers thing -- unlike most of whom I've talked about the show, I see her in the same way I saw George on Dead Like Me in the beginning minus a hell of a lot of the snark. She behaves like I would assumed someone with her background would behave.

Other bizarre things are that people can't look past the surface. Still, after these three episodes they bring up comparisons to police proceduals -- which seems wrong to me. The show's focus is on the characters, and very little is really about the case. It's much closer to the Angel detectives on a new adventure than CSI or Homicide.

Oh, the the thing I just Don't Get At All(tm): some people hate the Peter Cayote character because he "has no humour" and they want to know more about his background right now. Me, I think we've seen a lot of things that indicate a shady past and present, it's just never been spelled out. That might be the big problem, you have to really watch it closely and listen and think about certain things.