#watching ellie beat in that fucking bitchs face cured me

[antidepressantswhore]

david rot in hell challenge

#emma rambles #tlou #david tlou #the last of us (hbo) #the last of us #tlou spoilers #pedro pascal #bella ramsey #watching ellie beat in that fucking bitchs face cured me #ellie was the HERO #my poor baby #my poor poor baby

[tanyaodebra]

You 2.1: A Fresh Start – The Bitch Is Back

Confession: I fucking LOVED Season One of You – so much so that I decided to write recaps of Season Two! What does this say about my feminism? JUST LET ME LIVE, OKAY??? Let it be known that absolutely no one asked me to do this. I recently moved back to Brooklyn full-time after finishing my degree in Northampton, MA, so I’m using my (hopefully brief) interval sans a jobby-job (please hire me) to write about a show that my partner detests, so now I “have” to watch it. Should I be working on my play or screenplay? Duh. Should you be doing your job or otherwise improving your own life right now? Duh. Let’s call a truce and just enjoy ourselves. Cheers to me and You.

This first episode is a very strong start to the season, and I’m genuinely psyched to watch the rest of the show. Right from the jump we can see that Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is back on his bullshit. A Class-A manipulator, Joe crafts the recap of his Season One misdeeds into a cozy quilt of blame and white knighthood under which he can forever smother the memory of his former lover/victim Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). At the end of Season One, I wasn’t sure if the reappearance of Candace (Ambyr Childers) was a figment of his imagination or the result of too many blows to the head, and to be honest I’m still not totally sure since dear Joe is so deeply delusional, but real or not, Candace has incited a cross-country move. If we can trust the public locale in the Candace flashbacks, it appears that she is real, and she is super pissed that not only did he tried to kill her, but he succeeded in killing someone else. Of course, Joe would rather be anywhere other than Los Angeles. A perpetual proctor for the purity test of life, Joe detests the vapidity he equates with LA, which is why it’s the perfect selection for his illicit hideaway. But even Joe Goldberg isn’t immune to the seductive qualities of LA in that perhaps even he might be given a fresh start. Wait… Did he just say his name is Will Bettelheim? Squeaky clean credit, no social media presence -- this will be a very fresh start indeed. And yet… whoever lived in the apartment before Joe/Will seems to have left under some duress – all the furniture is still there. I already have that no-so-fresh feeling. Also, am I sniffing glue or is Lonely Boy meeting cute with the landlady (Carmela Zumbado)? Do we have our next victim? Maybe, maybe not. But what I am sure about is that perv-y Joe shipped himself a huge fucking telescope, and he’s allowed himself ten minutes a day to creep. So, we’re definitely not turning over a new leaf. We’re just turning that very same leaf over and over in our dirty little hands.

This new season of You is a series of inversions and remixes of the life Joe had in New York. On the sunny left coast, Joe/Will has a new child sidekick in Ellie (Jenna Ortega), but instead of acting as the mentor, Joe appears to be the mentee. Unlike Paco (Luca Padovan) from Season One, Ellie has a guardian who cares, a fact Delilah makes crystal clear with her delicious threat to “vivisect” Joe’s “individual balls” if he lays a finger on Ellie. (If that was a hint at Joe’s future, I will be so happy.) And though he slips back into a job at a bookstore like a pig on a shit-hill, it’s at a joint with a backwards name: Anavrin (Nirvana). Here we have the first of the literary Easter eggs, the almost too symbolically on-the-nose copy of Crime and Punishment that lands him his gig. On his first day, Joe shelves books about chakra-clearing and the Akashic Record. Does this mean his karma will finally catch up with him? Perhaps it does in the sense that Joe’s new boss, Forty (James Scully), is basically a reanimated Benji. After a weird vegan showdown about Carl Jung, Lonely Boy once again has trouble separating real life from fantasy. He appears to be having a very steamy encounter with the actual meet-cute from the previous scene, but it’s all a very vivid day dream. In real life he commits the very fire-able offence of beating off in the stock room. (Let me just say – and I’ve been seeing your shit online, so I know you’re out there – I don’t know how any of you hoes think this guy is doable. He is the definition of a skeezeball.) Joe is a hetero-normative, lackluster Dr Frankenfurter, creating his own world where he can be a sexual king. He’s determined to not just dream it, but to be it. Make no mistake, both will kill to make their dreams come true.

Let’s talk about Love. Not the state of being, but the female character who seems positively manufactured to capture the attention of one Joe Goldberg. Is it me, or is she a honey pot working for Candace? Is Candace’s game so good that she set all this up before even meeting with Joe at the bookstore? Love (Victoria Pedretti) has the girl-next-door look he loves, and she seems to exist in order to fulfill his every whim. She appears out of nowhere to give him a hippy sunburn cure, she reads books he’d approve of had he read them, she takes him on what is basically the best date ever, a hunt to discover his favorite LA dishes, and ultimately she cooks a meal tailor-made for him. And then there’s her backstory. Her baggage is not a series of shitty exes. Oh, no. She’s a widow, which means she’s perfect in that her love can only be snuffed by death itself. Love is exactly who Joe is looking for. Or… Is she the karmic repayment this episode has been hinting at? Is Joe about to get a taste of his own medicine? She gifts him Joan Didion’s Play it As It Lays, which, according to Wikipedia, is a novel about an LA transplant from New York who goes crazy. But Love had only established at the beginning of the night that Will had never read Didion. When did she get this book? How could she have known ahead of time that he hadn’t read it? Come to think of it, what, precisely, killed her husband? We have nine more episodes to find out.

Even in the face of Love, I am so nervous about Joe’s relationship with Ellie, who is, frankly, a teen so cool I would be honored if she just gave me dirty looks all day. After a very gross exchange where he causes her phone to go careening off a rooftop, Joe apologizes with an expensive bouquet of flowers otherwise known as an iPhone. Men: do not, and I can’t stress this enough, give expensive gifts to teenaged girls. If you fucked up her phone, figure out how to replace it through her legal guardian. Ellie, savvy as she seems, is still just a materialistic child who doesn’t know better, and who is satisfied with the transactional token of being owed a favor in return for her social media tutorial. It sure looks like Ellie has got Lonely Boy’s number when she claims that the only reasons to post online are love and revenge. But Joe/Will does what he always does and lies, lies, lies, claiming those are not his motives. Later, Joe gives off very strong Humbert Humbert vibes when Ellie tells him to blow on her toenail polish. Lo and behold, captured using the very gift Joe gave her, an image of an obviously unwanted guest rests in Ellie’s hot little hands. Thus begins the final twist of A Fresh Start.

Rewind a clip. In an even more Jungian display than the junk pile jerk-off, Joe dreams of his mother leaving him alone at the beach. This is the first glimpse the audience has gotten of Joe’s childhood besides his time with old man Mooney. She is a mash-up of Candace, Beck, and Love – beautiful, charismatic, and a bit of a manic pixie dream girl. Here we find the origin of “you” as a moniker for Joe’s love interests; it’s what his mom calls him during a guilty turn of maternal love mixed with abandonment. She asks young Joe to build her a sandcastle, and in a sense that is exactly what he has done with his life – just don’t dig too deeply underneath, because that’s where all the bodies are buried. I hope we get a little more nuance if these flashbacks continue. It would be a real bummer if the audience ends up neatly being able to blame Joe’s mother, when Joe is actually the criminal.

Back to the final chapter of this episode. Creepy Joe is up to no good, as evidenced by the baseball cap he only wears when he’s creepin’. Turns out you can take the boy of the secret locked room in the basement, but you can’t take the secret locked room out of the boy. Everyone, meet the real Will Bettelheim. So, it wasn’t an identity Joe invented after all. And there was no real meet-cute with Love – he has been stalking her from the get-go. Neither was there a coincidence at the job interview – he planted Crime and Punishment in his backpack to land a job where Love works. The new Joe is the old Will, who just happened to be Love’s neighbor conveniently in telescope-shot of Love’s apartment. And just who is Will? I’ll never tell. XOXO, Gossip Girl. Not really. I’m totally going to tell as soon as I know. See You next time!

#you netflix season2 recap