There has never been a fictional wedding/funeral ratio more to my tastes, has there? The wedding happened on BATES MOTEL, which I covered for AV Club; you could not have picked a better week for me to drop in on a show than the week two characters with a deeply repressed slow burn have to marry each other for plot reasons and then trip over their feelings for the next forty minutes.…

So, I am recapping Reign at AV Club this season, which is very fun for analytical purposes, but I missed talking nonsense about the dresses and Catherine’s facial expressions enough to come back and check in. As usual, a lot has happened! I actually sometimes forget how much plot goes into an episode of Reign until I watch another soap-paced show—even Scream Queens (which I watched as a sub-in on AV Club; it’s essentially an essay on manufacturing camp, because that show is trying to do it harder than any show has ever tried to do anything) doesn’t hold a candle to what Reign can do.…

Okay, fine, Reign, FINE, I will finish Season 2 before the next season starts. It besmirches Catherine, but we all know that even besmirched she’s the best thing on this show by a factor of ten. And why not? In these two episodes alone Kenna almost married the general who then got caught and blackmailed into treason by Conde and then kidnapped the Queen and then got caught by Francis and turned AGAIN and then got hanged while Kenna and Bash made up but only because Kenna was PREGNANT whoops, which Bash’s pagan woods girlfriend knew all along, but didn’t take seriously as a threat to their relationship because she’s a very secure woman and was already using black magic to bind Bash to her anyway.…

Going three episodes at a time turns out to be a great way to watch Reign; you get all the bursts of action and a sense of an arc – in this case, Francis’ illness and Mary’s conflict as Conde slowly becomes the bad guy – and you can just ignore all the Leiths you don’t care about!…

Wow, I have been away from this show for a while! (So long was I gone that the show had an episode about a wine tasting called “Tasting Revenge,” which means this show feels way too safe without me. That’s a Xena title, show.) As it turns out, three at a time is the perfect dose in which to watch the show; the plot machine eddies once or twice and ends up actually moving a step ahead almost by accident!…

So, we haven’t had a Reign Report here for two episodes! Technically the first one is because I was heading to California for the DC Talent Summit, but let’s be honest, if the episode had been amazing I would have made the time. Instead, it was just a pile of awkwardness with a plot point on top.…