Things are heating up on Reign, as Francis’ utter inability to do anything right begins to backfire on him, and Protestants take to the street after making a martyr out of a man Francis refused to make a martyr of. It’s beautifully dismal. And even if there were something he could do to improve his situation, perhaps by alerting Catherine to it – but oh, what a wild dream that is!…

Last night, literally everything that could possibly happen on an episode of Reign happened. Over at the AV Club, I ding it for being overstuffed, even though I give it points for trying to have an episode overtly about women negotiating relationships based on limited choices, even if it ended with Narcisse standing over the body of his wife and confiding in Lola, who I swear has gotten more romantic bounce-around than literally anyone else on this show.…

Guess who had their big day last night! An iffy tactician and her husband! Don’t get me wrong, her strategic scrambling has come together this season as an actual through-line and not just a series of awkward decisions enacted at random. The entire second season so far has been great; I wrote up why over at the AV Club, including asking why Francis is not wearing French blue, because the one thing this show remembers historically is that red is an English color and Mary literally wore it one time to be political.…

So, this was actually a great episode, in that my major complaint about the show (its tendency to drop subplots and characterizations without a second thought, so for example Catherine’s use of a python to suggest Nostradamus not leave town was never really ever addressed, and by that I mean they barely interacted for the rest of the season – not because he was avoiding her, just for plot, and even then there was none of the snake-related tension you might expect) was addressed.…

Welcome back to Reign, the show that doesn’t care harder than any show has ever not cared! I’m lucky enough to be covering for Caroline at The AV Club for the opening few weeks of the season, which means the bulk of my commentary will be found over here, all official-like, for the moment.…

Because I could not ignore this show no matter how much we all wanted to, I have reviewed STALKER at The AV Club. I don’t know if the title is intended to be in allcaps all the time, but it suits the tone of the show, so we’ll leave it. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect, except with more explicit discussion of why a man’s justified in staring at a woman’s chest, which was certainly an unexpected B-plot for a pilot, but there we have it.…