I Like How Leverage Has A Genius Character And An Autistic Character But The Autistic Character Isn't

Sometimes a family is a sassy half fae princess, a lightning powered angel of death, a soft emo frat boy princeling, his jock and nerd best friends, a himbo merman and a totally confused wolf pup

So my older sibling jokingly said that the cloaked person in the flashback was the trickster (like the big dude with no eyes and scary teeth from Sarah jane adventures) cos we used to love Sarah Jane as kids but like the trickster is part of a group called the pantheon of Discord. The pantheon like Maestro. And if you go even further the beetle on Donna's back in turn left is part of the trickster brigade. And what was the beetle trying to do? Stop the doctordonna. And who has just come back? The doctordonna. And who caused the bigeneration? The pantheon. This theory is getting concerningly close to being true. If my sibling is right I'm gonna be so mad they will be insufferable.

I couldn’t put into words why that scene left such an impact on me but you just did perfectly and might I say OUCH.

THIS SCENE IS SO MULTI-FACETED AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH AND I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT IT!

Anthony being touch starved and Lucy touching him so tenderly like that affects him so much from the get-go obviously cuz it fulfills that need. It also highlights their quickly burgeoning feelings/connection with each other but in the CRUELEST way cuz the reason she's touching him is not because she wants to but because she's possessed.

But, its not only just that she is acting in love with him (making the connection between them so hard to ignore) when its not really her that hurts but she's acting as if she loves him while he (his role) is HURTING her. With Anthony's past being so traumatic, you just KNOW he internalizes that shit even though its not really even Lucy talking and its not even him she's talking about. It hurts him to have Lucy act in love with him but also she's acting as if she has to FIGHT to believe he's not hurting her. She's acting as if loving him is causing her physical pain and that's horrifying for him cuz the one thing Anthony absolutely believes is that he hurts the people he loves. So to be slapped in the face with his growing feelings for Lucy but in a way that pulls at all of his trauma strings in the harshest soul twisting way?

Right after that you have Lucy reliving how Annabel choked to death to seal the traumatic incident with a cherry on top, finalizing Lockwood's internal fear that he kills the people he loves and is left alone.

Not to mention as the series goes on we see that Anything absolutely cannot STAND the idea of having hurt Lucy or her being unhappy with him even though he makes stupid decisions. Almost as if this incident triggered in him a crippling desire to never hurt her... So she'd never look at him like that again. Like he's everything... But also as if he destroyed everything in her to the point she fears him.

So in quick summation we have:

Lucy acting in love with Anthony under possession of a ghost while he very much does have growing feelings for her; and the love the ghost in her playing out being an abusive kind, the kind you have to convince yourself isn't harmful, forcing Anthony to relive his trauma and self-depreciate even more about the fact that it's hard to love him because all he can leave behind for his loved ones is hurt. Combine that with the traumatic way she relives Annabel's death and Anthony's genuine worry of Lucy's possession being... well... dangerous as is.

This scene is so beautifully acted. Ruby and Cameron's chemistry is insane. The way they portrayed that much range of emotion in such a short but impactful scene early on.

EDITED TO ADD: I also forgot to talk about the costuming cuz its the softest we've seen Lockwood in the whole series. All three characters are in their pajamas but Lockwood specifically is in a simple gray hoodie. Something that invokes comfort and relaxation. He's tense during the scene because of the situation but he's completely vulnerable as well. There's absolutely nothing for him to hide behind. No witty quips will work when Lucy can't hear him and he's fearing for her life, no physical force can be used to fight her either... And his emotional barriers are all down too. Not only because of the unexpectedness from the multi-targeted assault on his emotions but because he didn't exactly have time to prepare for such a thing occurring either. @locklyleiscanon pointed this out i think but Lockwood uses his suit as an armor. And he's not wearing it. There's no weapons near him. He's completely defenseless when it comes to Lucy in this moment as well as all the warring emotions that are overtaking him.

The first time I watched the scene my first thought was literally how soft and vulnerable Anthony looks. I didn't even have reference for the rest of the show (that he wears suits almost always) but it was a striking detail. Not just the vulnerability on Lockwood's face but in his body language and clothing as well.

Here's an edit I saw that made it all easiest to visualize and word for me:

Props to the person who made the edit cuz the close up scene and the slow motion at Just the right moment makes this so plainly visible to see.

This incident is simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to Lockwood regarding his feelings for Lucy. It shows him early on just how much he needs her, but reminds him of all the reasons why he can't have her.

My pettiest and most tenacious gripe with supernatural is that when Lucifer is not taking a vessel but projecting his own image of himself, he should be played by Jared Padalecki. I know that for whatever mysterious reason they wanted Mark Pellegrino back but I just think this was a huge missed opportunity.

Lucifer considers Sam's body his rightful vessel, as much his own body as it ever was Sam's. In the cage he should have presented himself this way when he wasn't actively possessing Sam, and Sam's hallucinations should have been of his own cruel smirk. It's consistent with Lucifer's characterisation, his objectification of and entitlement to Sam. And it's impact on Sam would be so powerful.

After Lucifer, he avoids mirrors. Looks away from the impala's night-darkened windows lest he catch his reflection. His stomach turns at old photos of himself. He doesn't have many, but he's held onto some of his family. In one with Dean, his arm is slung easily around his brother's shoulder, both of them with beers in hand and matching smiles. It's a rare memory of peace, an image he's treasured for years, and when he looks at it now he feels panic crawling up his throat. He grits his teeth to hold back the snarl of "get away from him". He never looks at his hands any more, when he changes the car's oil or cleans the guns. He touches other people as little as possible. Everything's different. His body makes him an invader in his own life. He was born unclean, a soul tainted from the start, but now he looks into his eyes and sees a monster.

MAJOR DEAD RECKONING PART 1 SPOILERS

My second watch makes me feel much stronger about my theory about the Big Spoiler in this movie, and how Part 2 will follow it up.

At first I bought the movie’s basic reading, but now there’s no doubt in my mind it’s a fakeout: Ilsa Faust is absolutely alive.

I will fully be ready to look like an idiot if she’s not, because I’ve run down everything I’ve thought of that the movie could do to telegraph her death being a fakeout, without actually revealing it:

- establish the idea of IMF people successfully faking people’s deaths in general and Ilsa’s specifically ✅

- Have both plot and character reasons why Ilsa pretending to be dead would be necessary ✅

- Establish that the way she supposedly died wasn’t guaranteed to be fatal ✅

- Have a scene vaguely establishing that the IMF is getting ready to do a con, but not specify what ✅

- No last words or final moments for her character ✅

- Skip past what the IMF does immediately after she supposedly dies ✅

- No one in the IMF literally says “she’s dead” ✅

That last one is big: Christopher McQuarrie has gone on record saying “No one in the audience of a Mission: Impossible movie will accept something is true until Ethan Hunt says it”. He never says she’s dead, and the closest he comes is thinking of her in a montage with Marie (who we also never specifically are told is dead) and Grace (who we know is alive).

Meanwhile, when Grace says “she’s dead”, Luther says “No, you’re alive because of her, and that’s the truth”, which is very specifically calling attention to the beginning and end of that sentence.

People are angry at this decision, but McQuarrie has also gone on record as saying “We want the audience to think we’ve ruined Mission: Impossible”, and if you want ways to make people think you’ve ruined any franchise, randomly and cheaply killing the leading lady is an obvious place to start.

Why aren’t more people talking about them! They are everything to me right now. She is so smart and sassy. He is so protective of her and loyal. The Night Agent is one of my favorite things right now. Peter and Rose have my heart right now.

ooh what's lockwood and co about should i watch it?

WAS WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO ASK THIS HERE WE FUCKIN GO BROS

So Lockwood & Co is a netflix series based on a book series of the same name. Essentially it's about ghosts and ghost hunters, but with a twist: It's set in our time, but not our time as we know it.

Basically, around the 1970s, ghosts just like. Appeared. For no reason we've been able to figure out. People would die, and their malevolent ghost would come back, especially if they died in a particularly traumatic way. They called this The Problem. The thing about these ghosts, is that if they touch you, you die, and if you make eye contact with one for too long, you become Ghost-Locked, which basically send you into a coma. We're not sure what Ghost-Locked victims see in this coma but they always look horrified so we can assume it's not great. There seem to be 3 types of ghosts: Type Ones are what you normally picture for a ghost, Type Twos can make illusions and are more powerful, and Type Threes are incredibly rare and they can talk and communicate with certain people.

Then there are the ghost hunters. Now ghost hunters are always children, usually teens, because as you grow older you lose your Talent, your ability to sense ghosts/death. There are 3 types of Talents: Seeing, Hearing, Touching.

Another thing about this world is that there's no Internet. You can see in the theme song piles of old broken computers, and I'm not sure it's explained yet WHY the internet was never invented, but we assume it's because of The Problem somehow. But this means that the newspaper and news on tv is mainly how information gets around, and any research done has to come from a library and books.

So basically in this world there are companies that pay teens to hunt for ghosts and get rid of them. The companies are usually run by adults though, so it's fraught with awful shit, they often treat these kids like they're just tools and not like they're actual people. Often the kids don't actually get paid themselves, because their parents can control where their money gets paid to, so parents will send of their kids to ghost war and rake in the money safe at home. Capitalism god ahold of The Problem and figured out how to make hella money of of it, so a lot of these companies that are supposed to help people are actually super corrupt and awful to their employees.

Unless of course, you're Lockwood & Co

These dorks look at em

50 years after the start of The Problem, Anthony Lockwood, the guy on the right, is an orphaned teenager who decided he wanted to start his own ghost hunting company, and the "Co" part of the name includes the two on the left, George Karim and Lucy Carlyle. They run their own 3 person company free from exploitation from adults, which other companies (run by adults) really really hate. Lockwood has a Seeing Talent, Lucy has a Hearing Talent, and George has a Touching Talent.

Basically, these 3 kids are hired for a job getting rid of a ghost, only they find out that this ghost is one of a woman who was murdered, and not of a guy who fell down the stairs like they thought. They look deeper and deeper into this murder mystery and keep uncovering shit that other ghost companies do NOT want them to be uncovering. Things that go beyond exploitation of kids, more murders, weird artifacts, things that might even explain the origins of The Problem itself. So Lockwood & Co decide they want to figure it all out, or die trying.

This show is heartwarming, it's funny, its mysterious, it's got ALL THE FOUND FAMILY VIBES and I think it's a real hidden gem in the piles of TV shows on Netflix. It's been in the top 10 shows on netflix for a bit, but I've never really heard anyone talk about it, I just stumbled upon it when looking for something to watch one day. All in all, yes, you should definitely watch it please please please do it, I swear to god of Netflix cancels this show I'm going to riot

Please!!

Friends. If you do nothing else this week, please. Please stream Lockwood and Co as much as you can. The completed viewing hours matter so much and this story deserves a season two. The fandom has grown exponentially in the last three weeks, people are loving the show and finding the books. It has more than earned that renewal but Netflix needs the numbers to authorize it.

Let’s give them no choice.

Squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi I can tell that it's gonna be a long road...

Post-case night cab cuddles that were definitely happening off-page and Lucy just forgot to tell us about

There’s an underlying bitterness in Percy’s tone in this scene, despite the fact that he’s making a “joke,” that couples with the way he doesn’t look at his mom while he says it but kind of just stares distantly. And also the way his eyebrows go up and down in a quick, wry — and almost judgmental, even — way.

This one singular line hit me so hard as a neurodivergent person because it’s all you need to see the way that Percy feels about his own inability to do “basic” things, like pay attention. He’s making a joke that’s also a dig at himself for “screwing up” in some way and it felt so relatable.

And the fact that it’s basically setting up him the next scene when he tells his mom that he thinks there’s something “broken” in his brain?

It hurt in all the best ways that seeing an accurate representation of yourself in a series that’s been your comfort series since the moment you picked it up 🥲