Bedelia!

Who is Achilles in this parallel?

And... Damn, Will. Way to make Jack the bait.

The Elementary finale was very tell, not show.

On the other hand, the "tell" was about events, the "show" was about character. So I did not hate that aspect. What did not work for me is what has not worked for any Buffista: Mycroft. He was miscast. To play the Mycroft they were going for, they needed an actor with more charisma or at least sex appeal. No way I can believe Joan finds him attractive. Also, they have done very little to show him Holmes' equal in deductive ability and manipulation, let alone his superior as in the Doyle canon. Mycroft is badly written as well as badly cast.

Mycroft is very tall. Put a not particularly handsome mug on great long stilts of legs and for some reason, to some people, it really works. I went to my high school homecoming dance with a guy who was a foot taller than I. We wrote Dr. Who fanfic together before Dr. Who was cool, I'd have gone with him anyway. But he had much more interest from other girls than can be accounted for by his looks or their nerdiness alone.

Hmm - this actor seems to have the opposite of charisma. He seems to radiate "you would never want to have sex with me". Maybe that is just me. Don't really appreciate men as sex objects much. But I can usually see the appeal of men the Buffistas kvell over. But I see no appeal in this guy. (To be fair, there has been no kvelling.) Again, though he is not well written. He does not give the impression of being contained or still or lazy or anything. Nor does he give the impression of great intelligence. The former may be on the actor, But the latter is totally the fault of the writers.

Not just you.

Stuttering streaming finally let me watch all of last night's Hannibal -- this show has left the universe of reality-based procedurals so far behind it's ridiculous. And beautiful. I know the finale will be all A-plot showdown and endgame and the Verger siblings may not appear at all, but I dearly hope we get more of both of them next season. Michael Pitt is so deliriously horrible in all his manic Grand Guignol giggly madness. I love him dearly (love as in would run away and never stop screaming forever if I ever came within a mile of him in real life, but admire him hugely as a carefully crafted and balls-out acted vision of batshit evil).

More than anything, I love how purely entertained he is by discomfort, and how extremely gifted he is at causing it, and how utterly catholic and universally appreciative his taste for it is. The tears of an orphan? Tee-hee! My therapist's mouth pinching up just a bit as I slap my butt in his personal chair and my feet on his desk? Yay yay yay! My very own searing agony as I carve up and chow down on my own nose? Everything is awesome!

And Margot, so deeply wronged, all the worse for his having no capacity for any real understanding of what he's done and continues to do to her, and so self-contained and controlled and self-protective and at last with some meager amount of actual power over him.

And I guess there was also, like, a serial killer and some FBI people and Gillian Anderson and Winston. Big severed thumbs up to all of it.

Who is Achilles in this parallel?

Maybe Jack is Patroclus and Will is Achilles?

That is why serial-killer narratives leave me cold, possibly. My new definition of insanity may be watching Dexter as a Simon acolyte.(they make enough mistakes in procedure that "Fuck the bosses!" me can tell. That is a lot, ftr.)

Not just you.

Nope. And I like Rhys Ifans as an actor, but he's just not Mycroft. Nor was Mycroft written well for this show. It's hard to beat Mark Gatiss, but his Mycroft is also superbly written (wonder why???).