The 26 Best Lesbian Knifeplay Scenes in TV History

Update 3/3/22: In honor of Killing Eve returning for its fourth and final season (and also in honor of the fact that Autostraddle is recapping the show weekly for the first time!), I thought it was high time to update this very important work of cultural criticism and investigative journalism. As with the first time around, the definitions of “knife,” “knifeplay,” “gay,” and even “TV” are interpreted broadly. The only rule about this list is that there are no rules.

Whether Killing Eve’s Eve and Villanelle want to end each other’s lives literally by way of murder or just end each other, like, sexually is a complicated question because the answer is both and yet neither. What Villanelle and Eve have for each other is, in turns but also sometimes all at once, seductive and dangerous. Their knifeplay has birthed many a fanfic, and I should know, because I read them as if they were cute lil bedtime stories.

But while Eve and Villanelle may have recently popularized and perfected the art of seductive-scary knifeplay on television, they certainly did not invent it. Here are the other times gay knifeplay graced our televisions.

Villanelle gifts Eve lipstick with a razor hidden in it (Killing Eve)

So the first thing I knew I was gonna do when updating this list was add several more Killing Eve moments.

Villanelle holds a blade against Eve’s throat and says “will you give me everything I want” (Killing Eve)

Date night!

Villanelle coaches Eve in the art of ax-murder (Killing Eve)

The fact that Villanelle is this thrilled to watch Eve kill someone? The fact that this scene is closely followed by Villanelle saying “you’re mine”? Just murder wives doing murder wife shit!

Ruby and Scarlett’s whole thing (American Horror Stories)

At best, I think the Rubber(wo)man chapters of American Horror Stories are boring and uninspired. And at worst, they encapsulate tired and heteronormative ideas of kink, sexuality, and desire despite being about a young queer girl discovering herself but I digress! Anyway, here’s a pic of a makeout that also features a knife.

RoboSara holds a knife to Dr. Sharpe’s neck (Legends Of Tomorrow)

Thank you to Valerie for flagging this one!

Batwoman saves Sophie with a batarang and then Sophie saves Batwoman with a batarang (Batwoman)

What is a batarang if not a bat-shaped knife?

Kirsten and her knife (Station Eleven)

I have not seen Station Eleven yet (I know! I’m working on it!) but Drew said the following: “Station Eleven is all about a bisexual who is good at throwing knives but did she ever do so in a sexy way with a woman?” And Riese chimed in to say that indeed Kirsten is in a codependent relationship with her knife, so I’m counting it!

Taissa grabs a letter opener after making out with her wife (Yellowjackets)

Honestly, Yellowjackets as a whole has very Gay Knifeplay Vibes. In addition to this Taissa moment, shoutout to Shauna’s close relationship with knives as a teen and adult.

Below, you’ll find the original 18 moments that made the first version of this list in 2019!

Villanelle with a knife in Eve’s kitchen (Killing Eve)

Wow, just wow. This image really is Killing Eve in a nutshell.

Eve stabs Villanelle (Killing Eve)

Remember when we all thought Eve and Villanelle were going to have gay sex? But then instead, Eve STABBED her? In any case, as season two shows, Villanelle thinks Eve stabbed her because she loves her…

Tamsin pulls a circular blade out of nowhere on Bo (Lost Girl)

“You are more alive than anyone I have ever met.”

Nancy Botwin and Celia Hodes in Nancy’s kitchen (Weeds)

Okay, I’m going to need everyone with a Netflix subscription to go watch this scene right now. It happens in season three, episode 12, about three minutes into the episode. (If you don’t have Netflix, you can watch the scene here, but the quality is not great and trust me this is something you want to experience in HD!!!) Watch the scene three times. The first time, listen to Celia’s breathing. The second time, focus on Nancy’s hands. The third time, focus on Celia’s hands. The HAND ACTING that is happening in this scene is incredible and undeniably sexual. This is a sex scene, and you cannot convince me otherwise.

Faith uses her new knife on Willow (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)

Faith and her knife have almost as much chemistry as Faith and Buffy do.

Faith pushes Buffy against a wall (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)

“If you’re a screamer, feel free.”

Stahma poisons Kenya (Defiance)

Yes, technically poison is not a knife. But spiritually, this counts as knifeplay.

Root and Shaw and the iron that sparked a million fics (Person Of Interest)

Oh yes, another entry on this list that does not technically involve a knife. We’re not even halfway through here and we are spiraling out of control, but did you expect anything less?

Clarke holds a knife to Lexa’s throat (The 100)

I’M SORRY!!!!!!

Fen hurls a dagger at Margo (The Magicians)

Dagger-throwing is a commonly practiced form of lesbian foreplay.

Linda Cardellini just loving knives (A Simple Favor)

I know this is not a TV show, but clearly this list is playing it fast and loose with its own guidelines. I called Linda Cardellini’s character in A Simple Favor a Knives Lesbian in my review of the film, and I stand behind it. She collects knives; she paints knives; Blake Lively ruined her life. Knives Lesbian.

Helena Cain and her folding knife (Battlestar Galactica)

This knife passed from Helena to Kendra Shaw to Starbuck, which is both beautiful and gay.

Mona brought pie (PLL: The Perfectionists)

She! Brought! Pie!

Xena confiscates Gabrielle’s “breast knife” (Xena: Warrior Princess)

Gabrielle’s ACTUAL response to this? “It’s not like your breasts aren’t dangerous enough.”

Xena and Callisto’s fight (Xena: Warrior Princess)

This was a body-swapping arc, and body-swapping is gay.

Emperor Georgiou and Michael Burnham in the Mirror Universe (Star Trek: Discovery)

Michelle Yeoh’s top energy on Star Trek: Discovery is… too… powerful.

Rory and Paris’ fencing fight (Gilmore Girls)

In all seriousness, this is one of the greatest television scenes of all time.

Dylan pulls out a knife literally during sex with Helena (The L Word)

Somehow, this is like the most chill thing that happens in the series finale.

Spring/Summer 2018 TV Preview: All the Lesbian and Bisexual and Trans Women TV Characters Your Heart Requires

The time has come to talk about spring and summer teevee! Okay, the time has kind of passed to talk about spring teevee, but not by too much — all of these shows that started in spring are still airing! It’s been a pretty okay year for LGBTQ women on television so far. Very few deaths, historically speaking, and a decent amount of kissing and some critically acclaimed series filled out with queer women. Summer is always an exciting time for us because it’s when the genre shows rain down in full force and we’ve always had the most representation in sci-fi and fantasy. This spring and summer, though, there’s plenty of non-supernatural dramas too. Below is every show we know about that has a premiere date. We’ll keep this list updated as new premiere dates are announced, and you can bookmark this page or reference it from the Arts & Entertainment Menu at the top of your Autostraddle Website Page.

April 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres

It’s true, these shows have already begun — but they weren’t in our winter preview, and we want to make sure they’re on your radar!

Star, Wednesday March 29th (Fox) – Season Two

Star’s a soap opera about low income, teen girls of color reaching for the music superstar dreams. It has had an impressive slate of black QTPOC representation in front of and behind the camera — including Amiyah Scott as Cotton Brown, becoming the first trans actress to play a trans woman in a regular network TV role, and out actor Miss Lawrence as Miss Bruce. It also stars Queen Latifah and is produced by out gay producer Lee Daniels. One of the show’s lead protagonists is Simone Davis, a biracial, bisexual teen who’s in and out of foster care. She’s got an unbreakable spirit and determination to go after her goals. It wouldn’t be fair not to warn you that (SPOILER ALERT) Star buried one of its gays last winter. I still find the musical soap enjoyable, but it’s something to keep in mind. — Carmen

Siren, Thursday March 29th (Freeform) – Season One

A murder mermaid temporarily shed her tail and popped onto land for a while, learning the way humans do things and then tossing them aside to do what she wants. And sometimes that thing includes kissing a girl. The girl has a boyfriend but the boyfriend is into the mermaid too so we might have our first-ever man-woman-mermaid throuple situation heading our way on Freeform in this ten-episode series. — Valerie Anne

Famous in Love, Wednesday April 4th (Freeform) – Season Two

Bisexual actress Alexis is the star of her own reality television show this season, which means regularly negotiating the temptation to ruin the lives of everybody she knows and cares about in order to amass fame and the veneer of success! What an inspirational character for us all. — Riese

Imposters, Thursday April 5th (Bravo) – Season Two

The Bumblers, including our fave, Jules Langmore, are riding high after exacting revenge on the ex that betrayed them all but things quickly go sour and the trio are forced to regroup in Mexico. Season Two promises to delve more into Jules’ backstory, including introducing us to her sister, Poppy (Rachel Skarsten). — Natalie

Killing Eve, Sunday April 8th (BBC America) – Season One

Sandra Oh has finally booked the post-Grey’s Anatomy leading role she deserves, playing Eve, a spy tracking down a notorious bisexual assassin named Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Their obsession with each other is laced with sexual attraction. And even though it’s a spy thriller, Phoebe Waller-Bridge infuses this dark world with bits of unexpected humor that Oh and Comer bring out masterfully. Killing Eve is the sexy, queer spy thriller I’ve long craved. — Kayla (warning: due to the genre of this show, steady yourself for some gays to get buried.)

Supergirl, Monday April 16th (The CW) – Season Three

Supergirl took a hiatus to sort some stuff out and I’m really hoping that means great things for the back half of this season. Our resident lesbian, Alex, is still getting over her ex-girlfriend Maggie, so I doubt she’ll have any kind of lady love until Season Four, but hopefully the show continues to focus on her relationship with Kara, and remember that the show actually is about Supergirl, not her boring ex-boyfriend. Also if Alex wanted to go on a few bad Tinder dates just for giggles I’d be fine with that, too. — Valerie Anne

Westworld, Sunday April 22nd (HBO) – Season Two

When asked about exploring Dolores’s sexuality, Evan Rachel Wood said her character is “not either a man or a woman” and, furthermore, “All I can say is, yes, there’s going to be something. I wasn’t disappointed. I was like, ‘Yay,’ but that’s all I can say.” It is very difficult to describe Westworld at all in a little paragraph in a teevee preview — because LOL I barely understand what’s going on half the time. Still it’s some of the most exciting television on television these days, even if all the queer stuff has been either deeply buried/implied or very surface level. — Riese

Into the Badlands, Sunday April 22nd (AMC) – Season Two

Season Two came back both with and without a bang. That is to say, Tilda isn’t sporting her classic bang look anymore, but it’s because she needs her hair slicked back — the better to murder men with, my dear. It looks like she’ll be slaying enemies alongside her girl Odessa this season while she works out her mommy issues. We’ll also meet a new character who really upped the murder game; she has potential to really shake things up. — Valerie

The 100, Tuesday April 24th (The CW) – Season Five

I’ll be honest: It doesn’t matter how we do or do not write about this show, someone will get mad at us because we did or did not write about this show. So, here are the facts: The 100 still boasts a badaass bisexual leading character. The 100 also unrepentantly murdered a lesbian character that set off a chain reaction of activism that changed the landscape of queer TV forever. Whatever your relationship is to this show, it’s valid. We’re not telling you what to believe. What we’re telling you is that The 100, unlike Lexa, continues to exist.

The Handmaid’s Tale, Wednesday April 25th (Hulu) – Season Two

This show remains hella dark and chock-full of queer women — one of whom (Moira, played by Samira Wiley) has escaped to Canada where she’s dealing with Gilead-inspired trauma and another (Emily, played by Alexis Bledel) who has been sent to The Colonies to dig up nuclear waste until she dies! You can read my review of it here. — Riese

May 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres

Dear White People, Friday May 4th (Netflix) – Season Two

The black queer women supporting characters of Dear White People’s first season were super underwhelming, which personally hurts me because one of them was played by Nia Long — one of my oldest childhood crushes. Dear White People‘s based on the cult classic satire indie film of the same name about being a black student in a predominantly white university. The original film was produced by Lena Waithe and brought to screen by out gay writer/director/producer Justin Simien. Simien also helms the Netflix series and, according to the trailer, we can at least expect a Lena Waithe cameo in the second season! In her brief clip, she says “black lesbians” real slow and felt so good to my ears, I rewound it three times. — Carmen

Vida, Sunday May 6th (Starz) – Season One

I am so excited for you all to fall in love with Vida! Vida is about two Chicana sisters returning to their old neighborhood in East LA after their mother’s death. One of the sisters is queer. Both sisters are surprised to find out that, upon her death, their mother was married to a woman. Out non-binary actor Ser Anzoategui plays the butch lesbian widow. The show’s produced by an out queer Chicana, Tanya Saracho, and has a predominately queer Latinx writers room. It’s sooo, soo good y’all. It’s on Starz, which I know is not a cable channel that’s easily accessible for everyone, but I promise you that it’s going to be worth the effort to seek out! We’re going to be talking more about Vida in the upcoming weeks and helping you all find ways to support it — because we want you to have nice things!! And this is a really nice thing. — Carmen

Sweetbitter, Sunday May 6th (Starz) – Season One

Sweetbitter is the story of Tess, a 22-year-old who flees her old life for a new one in Manhattan where she immediately snags a job at an exclusive restaurant. Set in 2006, Tess serves an upscale clientele, hangs at an industry dive bar, learns a lot about food and wine and, mostly, learns a lot about people. One of her new friends is Ari, played by Eden Epstein, described as “a backwaiter by day and an adventurous lesbian and DJ by night.” The book was pretty good (although I was partial to it, having also been a young New York aspirant in 2006 and having waited tables in the city), perhaps the series will be even better! — Riese

13 Reasons Why, Friday May 18th (Netflix) – Season Two

I found Season One to be really f*cked up on just about every level including basic storytelling, and allegedly creators are taking this feedback into account with Season Two, which will shift its focus from Hannah’s suicide to a sexual assault trial. According to Netflix, “Liberty High prepares to go on trial, but someone will stop at nothing to keep the truth surrounding Hannah’s death concealed. A series of ominous Polaroids lead Clay and his classmates to uncover a sickening secret and a conspiracy to cover it up.” Furthermore, “Jessica’s recovery will also be explored as Yorkey looks to examine what it’s like to go from being a victim of sexual assault to being a survivor of sex assault.” Lesbian character Courtney Crimson will continue her role and sexually fluid Hannah will remain front-and-center.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Friday May 25th (Amazon Prime) – Season One

The classic 1975 novel about three schoolgirls who vanish from Appleyard College for Young ladies on Valentine’s Day 1900 has been adapted before — Peter Weir’s 1975 film “certainly picked up on the erotic subtext” of the story, but the new Foxtel series “takes the sexual undercurrents rippling among the residents of Appleyard College and the local townsfolk and makes them a tad more obvious.” Somehow, a wooden dildo is involved. Regardless, we’re in. — Riese

Queen Sugar, Tuesday May 29th (OWN) – Season Three

Details are scant about what to expect from season three of Queen Sugar but with a focus on the “journey of fatherhood,” we anticipate Nova Bordelon exploring her unresolved issues with her late father, Ernest. We’re also keeping hope alive that 20gayteen brings Nova a girlfriend. — Natalie

June 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres

Humans, Tuesday June 5th (AMC) – Season 3

Here’s what we know about Season Three of Humans: “One year after the dawn of consciousness, a decimated and oppressed Synth population fights to survive in a world that hates and fears them. In a divided Britain, Synths and Humans struggle to broker an uneasy peace, but when fractures within the Synth community itself start to appear, all hope of stability is threatened.” Pansexual synth Niska will be back, but her girlfriend Astrid isn’t showing up on IMDB as part of Season Three. I hope she finds somebody else to be queer with. — Riese

Pose, Sunday June 3rd (FX) – Season One

There has never been a show like Ryan Murphy’s Pose on TV. Ever. It boasts 50+ LGBTQ characters and the largest number of trans series regulars in American TV history. MJ Rodriguez, Indya Moore, Dominique Jackson, Hailie Sahar and Angelica Ross are all playing trans characters, and Janet Mock and Our Lady J are producing and have both been in in the writers room. You’re about to learn a whole lot about ’80s ball culture! — Heather

The Fosters, Monday June 4th (Freeform) – Finale Event

After five seasons, the Adams Fosters clan are ready to say their final goodbye. The three episode finale mini series takes place roughly four years in the future from the main body of the show. All of the Adams Fosters children have graduated from either high school or college and the entire family is coming together to celebrate Brandon’s wedding. I don’t care about Brandon Adams Foster, ever, and the trailer for the finale does little to assuage my worries. However, The Fosters really stuck the landing of their final season. They brought back heart to their storytelling and refocused their central energy on Stef and Lena. It’s enough that to have regained my trust going into summer. — Carmen

Younger, Tuesday June 5th (TV Land) – Season 5

This is a good show and I don’t care if you believe me! Yes, there’s a straight love triangle at the center. And no, resident lesbian Maggie doesn’t get as much screentime as she should. But each season gets better and better at developing her character and bringing her into the fold and the real story here is women and their careers and their friendships. The last time we saw Maggie, she was in Ireland bedding the mother of the bride of her best friend Liza’s ex-boyfriend. She also has an on-again/off-again thing with Hilary Duff’s pansexual best friend, Lauren. — Heather

Sense8, Friday June 8th (Netflix) – Finale

AHEM: “Personal lives are pushed aside as the cluster, their sidekicks, and some unexpected allies band together for a rescue mission and BPO take-down in order to protect the future of all Sensates.” — Riese

Claws, Sunday June 10th (TNT) – Season Two

Quiet Ann and the ladies of Nail Artisans of Manatee County are back using their salon to launder money for the mob, only this time, it’s for a female-led Russian mafia. As the ladies are asked to do more, they realize their own capability — they’re criminals and they are good at it — and start to think that, maybe, it’s time they became their own bosses. — Natalie

The Bold Type, Tuesday June 12th (Freeform) – Season Two

This show ended up being one of summer’s sweetest treats last year, and I can’t wait for more romance between bisexual social media maven Kat Edison and lesbian artist and activist Adena El Amin — including, apparently, a big meet-the-parents moment. I am ready to laugh, cry, and yearn for all of Jacqueline Carlyle’s power wardrobe. — Kayla

G.L.O.W., Friday June 29th (Netflix) – Season Two

When G.L.O.W. returns for its second season we will FINALLY get what we craved throughout its homoerotic first season: Yolanda, a lesbian wrestler played by Shakira Barrera. — Riese

July 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres

Heathers, Tuesday July 10th (Paramount) -Season One

UPDATE 6/5: THIS SHOW HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY FOREVER CANCELLED AND WILL NEVER AIR

The initial debut of this program was critically panned, and consequently withdrawn allegedly on account of the Parkland shooting. If they haven’t changed anything about the show since their first go-around, we’ll probably hate it.

Harlots, Wednesday July 11th (Hulu) – Season Two

We return to my favorite show ever about sex workers to find the city’s top madams in an even more dramatic feud than they were in Season One —Violet’s future in peril, her religious fundamentalist gal pal doing what she can to save her, and a new judge determined to rid his city of what he perceives to be “vice.” Liv Tyler joins the cast as Lady Isabella Fitzwilliam, a wealthy woman with zero personal freedom who has mad sexual tension with Charlotte Wells. — Riese

UnREAL, Monday July 16th (Hulu) – Season 4

Traci Thoms returns as Fiona, a power lesbian television executive, in the very uneven final season of this “Bachelor” send-up. Your favorite lesbian, Faith, does a one-episode guest spot as a therapist brought in to mediate a conflict between several contestants.

Wynonna Earp, Friday July 20th (SyFy) – Season 3

Season 2 was full of goo, babies, time warps, demons, and so many ladies kissing. It answered a lot of questions, and asked a whole lot more. Season 3 promises more mystery (Mama Earp?!), drama (a cult?!!), and, of course, quality queer content. At a recent panel, when asked about the gayness of Season Three, Emily Andras said, “What’s the straightest show you can think of? I feel like Season 3 makes Season 2 look like that straight show.” Yee haw. — Valerie Anne

Killjoys, Friday July 20th (SyFy) – Season 4

With Lost Girl’s Michelle Lovretta behind the wheel, it wasn’t really a surprise, but definitely a welcome turn when the main big bad of Season 3 ended up in a relationship with another running antagonist. Aneela and Delle Seyah are a unique pairing, to be sure, but they’ve made it clear that they’d risk just about anything for each other. Their fates were inextricably linked with Dutch, Johnny and D’av’s in the Season 3 finale, so I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of these murder girlfriends. — Valerie Anne

Orange is the New Black, Friday July 27th (Neflix) – Season 6

Season 6 of OITNB promises, somehow, that it will get even darker than previous seasons as inmates are shipped out of Litchfield following the riot and sent to other prisons. We follow the women who end up in Max, where they try to negotiate a new set of prison gangs, divided by block, and an investigation into what happened during the riot that puts Taystee in a precarious legal position. Adrienne Moore, who plays Black Cindy, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Toward the end of season five, there were some people that were agreeing to stick together, and there were some people that were looking out for themselves. We’ll see the repercussions of those decisions in this next season.”

August 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres

Insatiable, Friday August 10th (Netflix) – Season One

The coming out story of this pretty much universally panned series is apparently its only redeeming factor!

The House of Flowers, Friday August 10th (Netflix) – Season One

A Spanish-language comedy-drama program about a dysfunctional high-class Mexican family that owns a prestigious flower shop. Juan Pablo Medina plays María José, a transgender woman who has a child with her ex-wife, Paulina, who is still carrying a torch for María.

The Sinner, August 15th (USA) – Season 2

This anthology series returns with a new case and a mostly new cast for Season 2, including Natalie Paul as Heather Novak, a black lesbian detective put on the case of a boy who murders his parents for very unclear reasons in very strange circumstances.

Mr. Mercedes, Wednesday August 22nd (Audience) – Season 2

Breeda Wool will be returning as techie lesbian Lou Linklatter, according to Den of Geek. As the first season drew from Stephen King’s book of the same name, Season Two will be drawing from a few follow-up novels. — Riese

“The 100” Finale: Clarke and Lexa Reunite One Last Time

Well, it happened. Eleven weeks after The 100 killed off Lexa and gay lady fandom finally revolted, the finale reached our teevees, bringing Lexa with it one last time.

After a long journey, Clarke runs out of options for a new commander and decides to install the flame inside herself, with help from Ontari’s nightblood. Abby and Murphy help, but Alie’s army is knocking down their door. Clarke wakes up in the City of Light, and it’s present-day downtown Vancouver. This is the Grounder valhalla? Grounders didn’t even use electricity: they should probably ask for a refund. While Clarke tries to find the kill switch, she’s passed by absentminded yuppies trying to make it to their 9-to-5. But after a while, they begin noticing her presence and know she doesn’t belong. She’s bad code. So they chase her.

Clarke can’t fight all of them and just as they start to overwhelm her, Lexa swoops in in full Grounder gear and wielding two swords. Lexa quickly dispatches the wave of agents as Clarke lies on a set of stairs and reaches for Lexa. Clarke can’t believe she’s here. They embrace, but soon Clarke collapses; her body is rejecting the flame. Abby and Murphy work fast to make sure enough of Ontari’s blood transfers to Clarke, just as Clarke seizes in Lexa’s arms. As soon as she stabilizes and is able to sit up, Clarke kisses Lexa. And Lexa moves a lock of hair away from Clarke’s face. Their reunion is interrupted because Alie is changing the Matrix and they’re running out of time.

Why do I suddenly feel 60 percent gayer?!

You’re in Canada.

Lexa doesn’t know much about the City of Light, but she does seem to know it’s a program of some kind, and says things like “firewall” and “upload.” This is the same person who refused to use guns and used candles for light, but okay. Sure. So Lexa and Clarke have to find the kill switch in ten minutes, inexplicably because Clarke’s dad’s watch says so. A girl on a bicycle with the infinity symbol (Beca’s counterprogram to stop Alie) will lead them there.

When they reach the end of the trail, Matrix-Jasper, Jaha, and a ton of people wait to stop them. Raven finds a shortcut to lead Clarke to the kill switch, in the form of a hatch that leads to a virtual recreation of Beca’s ship.

Lexa will hold off the enemies and nods goodbye. Clarke grabs her and breathes, “I love you” (a thing was possibly added in post-production), and Lexa replies, “I’ll always be with you” before heading off to her final battle. Time was running out, but Lexa was on the verge of tears when Clarke was just going to leave Polis for a little bit. But when Lexa has to say goodbye forever, she doesn’t say I love you back? I don’t buy it. They should have fixed that in post-production too.

Anyway, Clarke meets Alie and Beca in this virtual ship. She has only minutes to flip the switch, but Alie informs her there are still leaking nuclear missiles that will kill everyone on earth. Again. Their only salvation is to stay in the City of Light. Clarke wouldn’t have to be a leader anymore; she wouldn’t have to bear this burden of guilt. Clarke is so unmoved by this speech it’s impressive. She flips the switch and wakes up in the real world, just as Alie’s mindless robots are about to kill everyone. Everybody who’s taken the chip is now fully feeling the memories and pain they’ve been shutting out. Clarke’s shoulders are heavy from knowing everyone is still in danger and Octavia finally kills Pike. This ending seems happy for everyone, except when I realized Octavia and Clarke don’t have anyone to hug in celebration.

When I was a kid, I saw episode of  the ’90s Nick cartoon Doug that I think about often when dealing with my anxiety. In the episode, Doug leaves a theater halfway through a horror movie because he’s so terrified of the monster in it. Afterward, he has recurring nightmares of this monster trying to attack him. At the end, he forces himself to watch the whole movie and he sees the zipper on the back of the monster suit. The monster isn’t real. In his next nightmare, he unzips the suit and sees just a guy inside, or three puppies stacked together. Something like that.

I felt this way about The 100 finale. I wanted to see Lexa, but I was so anxious about the speculation around it. I heard Clarke’s memories of Lexa were going to be erased and that we’d see Lexa die again. I was dreading watching it. But I forced myself to watch and I saw the monster suit. The plot was so thin that it was laughable and it ended with Clarke, again, making a decision that could potentially save and end lives. But this time it didn’t affect me. The only thing I’m happy to report is that Clarke was finally given some of the agency she had before: she was able to make a decision and didn’t apologize for it. Yet.

Of course it’s happening inside your head but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

Lexa might not have seen peace in her lifetime, but her legacy will be equality in representation, in defying the tropes, and in holding creators accountable for minority representation. In the billboards, the panel discussions at huge festivals, and in her own fan convention! That makes me happier than any two minute reunion scene. Lexa will never leave us. We’ll keep her alive inside us, just like Clarke will.

“The 100” Fans Once Again Remind The World That LGBT Viewers Deserve Better

So far, 2016 has been a pretty disheartening year for queer women who love TV. Our longtime go-to show, Pretty Little Liars, inexplicably did away with most of its gay content; Faking It got the boot on MTV; shows with lesbian and bisexual characters have been nixed before they even made it to air; and the deaths. Lordy, the deaths. We’ve lost 16 lesbian and bisexual characters this year, bringing us to a total of 156 dead gay women in TV history. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX.

One bright spot on this gloomy horizon has been the unprecedented and (honestly) shocking success of the LGBT Fans/Viewers Deserve Better movement that organized around Lexa’s death on The 100. In less than three months, queer fans of the show raised $125,000 for the Trevor Project, worked with TV writers and showrunners to create The Lexa Pledge, and forced the damaging effects of the Bury Your Gays trope into mainstream pop culture consciousness for the first time ever. Variety, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BBC, Vox, Salon, The Washington Post: Well-respected entertainment websites and magazines have sbegun talking about LGBT TV characters in a way they’ve never done before. Riese and I gave multiple interviews to various magazines, newspapers, and radio stations about things we’ve been writing about — but no mainstream publication has been asking about — for our entire careers. There’s even a ClexaCon on the way!

Tonight is The 100‘s season three finale. And just in time, LGBT Viewers Deserve Better have unveiled three billboards in Los Angeles, with a fourth one expected to go up in Santa Monica early next week.

I know I’ve said this at least 20 times by now, but I’ve never seen anything like the movement surrounding Lexa’s death. In eleven weeks, queer fans of The 100 have completely revolutionized the conversation about about how TV treats its LGBT characters, and they’re showing no signs of slowing down.

Our The 100 recapper, Karly, will be back tomorrow with some thoughts and feelings about tonight’s finale. Until then, Oso throu daun ogeda!

Pop Culture Fix: The Lexa Pledge Hopes To Change Queer TV From The Inside

This is your weekly queer entertainment news round-up, the Autostraddle Pop Culture Fix!

Teevee

+ LGBT Fans Deserve Better, the queer activists behind the revolutionarily successful campaign to stop the Bury Your Gays trope, are teaming up with TV writers and showrunners to instill The Lexa Pledge in writers rooms. The pledge seeks to shine awareness on the dangers of the ubiquitous cliche and to provide accountability for quality queer representation on TV. LGBT Fans Deserve Better joined with the creatives at Saving Hope to make their dream a reality, and are adding TV executives every day. They’ve also raised close to $125,000 dollars for The Trevor Project. I continue to be inspired, humbled, and awed by the women who are making a reality out of what seemed like a pipe dream less than three months ago. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and it’s only just begun.

+ Steven Universe‘s “The Answer” (aka The Greatest Television Episode of All Time) is going to be a standalone book! You know Mey and I are already clicking through to pre-order it.

Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar has announced a new children’s book that will be based on that episode’s story. Sugar announced the book on her Tumblr, and it will reportedly expand on relationship between two Gems named Ruby and Sapphire who fall in love and fuse together (it’s a metaphor) to form theSteven Universe character known as Garnet. The book, appropriately titled The Answer, will be available in September.

+ You can get suited by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner on HBO, if you want.

+ The Fosters‘ third season has finally arrived on Netflix and Flavorwire thinks you should watch it (because it’s good, not just because it’s about gay moms).

The fact that they’re a lesbian couple is a given, not an immediate source of drama. But the series is interested in the ways racial and sexual identity shape our personalities … I know this all sounds back-pattingly PC, but it’s handled with humor and grace, and it never feels like the show is trying to teach you a lesson. Lena and Stef go above and beyond with their foster duties (they eventually adopt Callie and Jude), but they’re not saints — they’re harried and stressed out, and sometimes they snap. But their home is a lovely place to spend an hour every week. The show deftly balances teen and adult drama, and despite often-heavy subject matter, The Fosters has a light touch, exuding warmth and love like a big group hug.

+ Santa is delivering a new season of Sense8 .

https://twitter.com/MsJamieClayton/status/725169924260257792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Movie Situations

+ Kate McKinnon’s got herself a whole other movie lined up after Ghostbusters. She’ll be starring alongside Emma Stone in Women in Business, “which centers on two competitive women who are sent on a business trip to Canada. There, they hire a third woman off Craigslist to act as their intern, which derails their trip.” It’s written by a woman and will be directed by one too!

+ Speaking of which ghosts:

+ The Case Against 8 got itself a female director, too!

+ Carol director Todd Haynes is adapting Brian Selznick’s masterpiece, Wonderstruck, for the big screen. It’s a story about two deaf teens, one of whom is named Rose. Her part of the film “will be presented as a silent film in both a nod to movie history and an aesthetic designed to capture her perspective” and will be played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds. According to Deadline, it will include “an unprecedented number of deaf actors in roles that would normally go to hearing actors.”

Queer People, Out And About

Gillian Anderson talked about the gender pay gap and her bisexuality with Andy Cohen.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “The 100” Buries Lexa and Maybe Itself

It appears that we lost two more lesbian TV characters on The Vampire Diaries last night. Heather is at the tail end of her vacation and will do the research to report back to you on in Tuesday’s Boob(s On Your) Tube. We’ll also see the return of Empire, a late but great peek at this week’s Grey’s Anatomy, and some much needed queer sitcom happiness. In the meantime, Lexa’s funeral happened last night, and the episode was even more abysmal than I imagined.

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

What’s under that cloth?

The 100. It died.

Lexa. Lexa. Lexa. Lexa.

The name kept repeating in my head. My heart pounding in my chest, blood pounding in my ears, sweat pouring out of my body, and adrenaline sitting in my legs with nowhere to go. This was a panic attack. My third in three hours. I’ve never felt them at this rate or severity before. They’d fade after 10-15 minutes and then return right when I let my guard down. That’s what it felt like at least, but of course it was completely out of my control, guard up or down.

This was six days after Thirteen aired. A few factors probably contributed to my attacks, but my brain-on-fire chose Lexa to repeat in a voice that didn’t entirely sound like my own. It sounded like something far away, like in that space between dreaming and consciousness when you don’t have any control of where your mind is going. Except I was wide awake. The next day after my attacks I felt so drained, but I also felt afraid. What has happened to me?

My life was in hyperdrive but Lexa hadn’t left my thoughts at all. I’m in graduate school full time, TA two classes, and I have another part time job in the evenings. And I was hurdling toward midterms. I wrote my recap for Thirteen in a one hour break between class and work, with little sleep and no food. In fact, in the days between the episode and my panic attacks I hadn’t eaten more than one meal a day, some days only snacks. I remember being genuinely amazed by this because I’m hypoglycemic: usually if I don’t eat every 4-6 hours, my blood sugar crashes and I become seriously ill. But I didn’t feel shaky or fatigued or hungry. I was in starvation mode. This was truly affecting me physiologically. It wasn’t until I had my attacks that I realized how much.

“Grief isn’t in stages, it’s continuous cycles,” a friend told me. And I felt them.

Yes, I was angry. Yes, I was sad. Sometimes switching back and forth, other times simultaneously. They won’t get me again, I swore to myself on my drive to school one day. They won’t fucking get me to buy into this again.

But I was also ashamed. How could I have had such hope? How can I feel so upset about a character? Why couldn’t I just cry then heal like I have with so many others before her?

When I tried to explain what was going on to my coworkers and family I couldn’t stop smiling because I realized just how ridiculous it would sound to them, and immediately felt uncomfortable. (And when I feel uncomfortable in social interactions, I smile). Thank God I have my friends online who understand. I can’t imagine how much worse this could have been without them. We went through this together.

Thankfully I was talking to my friends right up until last night’s episode because I was dreading it. It was the funeral and the first 13 minutes had already been released. I had avoided watching them, but heard what happened. But I knew I had to watch it. This may be triggering.

Clarke and Murphy have been held in Clarke’s bedroom for the last 24 hours, where Lexa’s black bloodstains still remain. The nightbloods have been summoned for the conclave. Titus wants to let them go, but Clarke wants to see Lexa. They go to the ceremony room. Lexa lies in a sheet, and Aden is performing a ritual, with all the other kids on their knees behind him. Clarke keeps herself from getting too emotional: she wants to confirm with Aden that when he becomes commander (he was Lexa’s favorite after all), that the SkaiKru will be safe. Aden assures that whoever is chosen will protect Clarke and her people; Lexa made all of them vow it. They loved her.

This tender moment is ruined by Ontari and Roan, who have returned from Ice Nation for the conclave. Ontari is a nightblood so she must be allowed to compete for the “flame” (the AI in Lexa’s neck). Ontari has no intention of competing fairly. Clarke doesn’t want to leave until she is certain Aden is chosen and tries to persuade Titus to make sure he wins. And while they argue, Ontari slaughters every single young nightblood, dousing herself in black blood. When the crowds are summoned to the ceremony room, Ontari shows them Aden’s head.

They do not show the murders, they do not show Aden’s head, but the violence of this act strikes deep because of how senseless it is. Just like Lexa, these children are murdered 90 seconds after they show emotion, the minute they express love and grief.

Later, Clarke reminds Titus of the nightblood who wasn’t killed at Lexa’s conclave. Her name is Luna and Clarke conveniently remembers that Lincoln knows where she is. Titus gives Clarke the flame and a book with the Ascension ritual inside. This is all neat and tidy storytelling and doesn’t make any practical sense. But it’s all for naught. Ontari realizes the flame is gone. Titus commits suicide and the camera hovers over it for way too long (who directed this episode?). Ontari just decides “tell the people I’ve ascended, they won’t even check.” Why has this never happened before, if this is an option? Ontari is the commander anyway and will attempt to wipe out SkaiKru. Good riddance, really.

In Arkadia, everything is still awful. Bellamy has had a change of heart and he has a hard time understanding why people are mad at him? Octavia chains him up with Indra while she attempts to rescue Kane, Sinclair and Lincoln from their executions.

While they escape, Pike announces on the radio that if Lincoln doesn’t turn himself in, all the grounders in jail will be executed. Lincoln can’t let his people be slaughtered, so he surrenders. He is led into the middle of Arkadia in chains, pushed down to his knees, and shot in the head. He was shot because he loved his people and wanted to protect them. Octavia looks on from outside the gates. She weeps leading up to the execution but after it’s over, her face hardens into steely resolve. Women have to suck it up, you know.

These deaths hurt because there is no hope. In the beginning, I believed the point of this show was that we have abilities inside ourselves, like strength, adaptability, pragmatism, wisdom, and capacity to love already that make us able to survive in a world like The 100. But not anymore. Now this show is trying to say that if you love someone, that if you have hope, it will be robbed from you. Is this the kind of story they really want to tell?

I still think of Lexa often. I still feel sad and angry at times, but it’s quieter now. I’m comforted knowing there are so many others like me, and I know now we shouldn’t feel ashamed. We contributed to some real good with the Trevor Project fundraiser. We’re holding creators accountable and gaining attention from so many mainstream sites. Our fight isn’t over. Ste yuj.

Autostraddle’s Ultimate Infographic Guide to Dead Lesbian Characters on TV

In the eight years I’ve been a lesbian TV critic, I’ve never seen anything like the response to Lexa’s death on The 100. As I noted in this week’s Pop Culture Fix, in a matter of three short weeks, The 100‘s queer fandom has raised an astronomical amount of money for The Trevor Project and, through broad and relentless social media activism, forced mainstream media outlets to acknowledge the larger cultural ramifications of the ubiquitous Bury Your Gays trope for the first time ever. That pressure even coerced an apology out of The 100‘s showrunner, Jason Rothenberg, yesterday afternoon.

Riese’s overwhelming list of 148 dead lesbian and bisexual TV characters has been instrumental in driving home the frustration and helplessness queer women feel when we’re subjected to this trope. As her list spread around the internet, so did the pleas from our readers to dig even deeper and provide more context and stats about Bury Your Gays, so, with the help of TV Intern Karly, that’s what I’ve spent the last many sleepless nights doing.

To make it onto the infographic below, a character had to meet two requirements: 1) She had to be on more than one episode of a show, and 2) the show had to be available to American TV audiences, even if it wasn’t produced in the United States. (Lost Girl, for example, came to U.S. TV via Syfy and Skins did the same through BBC America.) It took weeks to compile all of this data (years, really, because more than half of it is just stored in my brain), and we didn’t have the time or resources to dig into the full canon of international TV. Those two qualifications account for the differences between Riese’s list (which includes all characters, including single-episode ones, from every country) and this one.

I’ve been beating this drum for almost a decade and I’m going to keep on beating it until I am shot through the eyeball with a stray arrow. Story is, in the words of the late great Alan Rickman, an ancient need. We need it like we need food and water, we need it like we need to breathe. Just like early explorers stitched together stars to make constellations out of the night sky, humans are constantly grappling for unrelated points of light to make stories out of our own lives. Stories guide us, they comfort us, they inform our understanding of who we are and where we belong in the world. Stories give us a safe space to explore every facet of our identities, and to engage with the unknown and render it a little less scary.

Stories exist in imaginary worlds but they are consumed in the real world, where, just this week, North Carolina passed sweeping and unprecedented anti-LGBT legislation. And where three presidential candidates don’t believe gay people should have the right to get married. And where a gay person can be fired simply for being gay in most states. And where LGBT youth homelessness is rampant. And where LGBT bullying occurs with alarming regularity in schools.

We need hope in stories. We need light in stories. And we need stories to work their magic in the lives of the people who would oppress and persecute us because we’re gay. Stories are fatal to bigotry.

To care about story isn’t to ignore the darkness of the real world; to care about story is to put your hope in something that changes the real world, more than anything else. There’s a reason all religious texts are made up mostly of stories. There’s a reason the same-sex marriage approval rating in the U.S. rose in direct proportion to the number of gay characters on television. Story gets inside us and changes the alchemy of who we are.

Here’s Graham Swift, one more time, and then you can have this infographic:

“Man — let me offer you a definition — is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall — or when he’s about to drown — he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

I know it will be an impulse to snag this graphic and paste it everywhere but here. Please don’t. Please link it and visit it right here on this page at Autostraddle dot com, so we can continue to make money to pay our staff so we can keep doing this work that matters. And if our work these recent weeks in the wake of Lexa’s death has helped or empowered you, please consider joining Autostraddle Plus. It’s the main way we support ourselves!

Pop Culture Fix: Is Lexa’s Death on “The 100” the Beginning of a Lesbian TV Revolution?

Welcome to your weekly Pop Culture Fix, the place where we tell you about famous gay women and gay women on television, and sometimes there is a cute animal at the end of the post. (Spoiler alert: This time it’s a goat!)

LGBT Fans Deserve Better

In the three weeks since Lexa died on The 100, the conversation about lesbian and bisexual characters on TV has taken a turn I never expected. Bury Your Gays is a trope queer fans and TV critics have been fighting against for decades. We comprise such a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the total number of TV characters in existence, and continue to fight daily against stigmatism and oppression in the real world, so when TV writers casually toss another dead body onto the pile (that already includes 147 other dead lesbian and bisexual characters), it’s almost impossible not to feel victimized by it. Especially because one of the main things that makes us human is our need to project ourselves into stories and onto fictional characters to work out the narratives of our own lives. Queer women have so few quality stories to choose from, and when we find one that resonates, and then find ourselves on the receiving end of a stray bullet again, it starts to take an emotional toll.

The night Lexa died, Rachel and I brainstormed 100 stories in five minutes that don’t involve dead gay ladies to provide some lighthearted comfort and a critique of the laziness of continuing to lean on the cliche. Later that week, TV Intern Karly denounced the trope in her The 100 recap, and so did Stef this week in her The Walking Dead recap, and I even wove my frustration into my The Fosters recap. And Riese began her epic list of every dead lesbian/bisexual TV character in history to help drive home the cruelty and ubiquity of this thing. It’s what we do. It’s what we always do.

But something really different happened this time. Lexa’s death, and the way it was handled by The 100‘s creative team, drove queer fans to their breaking point. They turned social media into a hub of fandom activism, raising $65,000 (so far) for The Trevor Project, hoping to both help gay youth in crisis situations and to shine a light on the fact that gay youth are still struggling in big ways in the United States, to show that they need empowering stories to help carry them into adulthood. The same fans trended “LGBT Fans Deserve Better” worldwide during the following week’s episode of The 100. And, most impressively, and for the first time ever, they forced mainstream pop culture magazines to sit up, pay attention, and address the problem.

Variety asked “What Can TV Learn from The 100 Mess?” Entertainment Weekly springboarded from Denise’s death on The Walking Dead the following week to hop into the conversation with an article called “TV Kills Another Lesbian Character: What’s Going On?” Vanity Fair weighed in similarly:”The Walking Dead’s Latest Gruesome Death Is Part of a Troubling TV Trend.” Mega fansite Hypable contributed a voice. So did smaller pop culture sites like Blastr. And The Hollywood Reporter even brought in Dorothy Snarker to explain Why The 100, Walking Dead Deaths Are Problematic.

What The 100‘s queer fandom has accomplished in these last three weeks is pretty miraculous. By relentlessly compelling mainstream media to acknowledge the existence and danger of Bury Your Gays and to admonish TV writers to do better, fandom has added a level of legitimacy to this issue that we’ve never had before, which has ensured that no person working in TV can hide behind feigned ignorance about this trope anymore. I’m not delusional enough to think mainstream pop culture sites are going to become powerhouse allies for queer female representation, but in this moment their help has been revolutionary. It feels like we’re not just talking to ourselves anymore; the conversation has finally been amplified. In 2013, a series creator called me “infantile” for pushing back against his decision to kill a beloved lesbian character. The days of white male showrunners being able to talk to queer female fans and critics like that are over.

Teevee

+ Dustin Lance Black is producing an “LGBT-themed limited series” for ABC called When We Rise. Mary-Louise Parker will play Roma Guy and Rachel Griffiths will play her activist wife, Diane. According to The Hollywood Reporter:

When We Rise chronicles the personal and political struggles, setbacks and triumphs of a diverse family of LGBT men and women who helped pioneer one of the last legs of the U.S. civil rights movement, from its turbulent infancy in the 20th century to the once-unfathomable successes of today.

(Yes, it looks suuuuper white.)

+ Everyone is raving about Cameron Esposito’s debut comedy special, Marriage Material. It sounds like her gayest show yet!

Time and distance have afforded Esposito the ability to laugh at her own youthful ignorance, and she continues to get mileage out of it in Marriage Material. She spends a full quarter of the special delving into the special adolescent agony of having a best friend even she didn’t know she was in love with: “I knew I wanted [my boyfriend] to go home and I knew I wanted the same haircut as Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer,“ and that was it. There’s a horrifically awkward interlude in a swim team locker room, in which Esposito wrings maximum physical comedy from stuffing a mid-pubescent body into a very tiny swimsuit. And everything culminates in the particular tragedy of your friend group “experimenting” with everyone else but you.

Movies

+ Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State is going to be a movie, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood.

+ Jodie Foster, who is wearing Harry Potter glasses in this photo THR chose for her, will enchant audiences at the Tribeca Film Festival as she sits down with Julie Taymor to talk about her trajectory from child star to esteemed director. Probably I will go to this panel and report back to you.

Queer People Out and About

+ Your girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood makes a guest appearance in Nylon this week, in which she interviews genderfluid artist Illma Gore, who is responsible for that “Make America Great Again” naked Trump art that’s been making it’s way around the internet. The interview is hardcore. It talks about the Western relationship between the depection of genitals and power, the censorship of art, Facebook’s general bullshit, and of course there’s some existential nihilism floating around in there too.

First of all, I love the video you made to get the word out about your situation. You are so charming and adorable, scraping your feet on the ground, chipping paint off a wall, but at the same time dropping these truth bombs to show a really unique perspective on the subject.
I knew everyone was going to take the wrong idea from it and that was kind of the point. Now, I’m getting sued and they’re all going to know what the point is. So I’m just going to stand here and pick a wall and tell the truth.

+ Marie Claire would like to talk to you about your other girlfriend, Ellen Page; specifically about her new Vice series, Gaycation. It’s an exciting profile that digs deep into the cultural ramifications of the series, and sheds new light on how it came to be. It’s also awesomely, surprisingly intersectional.

Gaycation enters pop culture at a delicate moment for queer rights, both domestically and internationally. Not even a year out from the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling, the United States is still trying, and failing, to secure national employee protections for LGBTQ individuals. The result is troubling: You might be able to get married, but you could be legally fired for it. All the while, the United States is seeing some of the most explicitly transphobic legislation in our nation’s history, with 11 states proposing bathroom restrictions for transgender people based on biological sex.

This urgency is reflected in the series. Gaycation delves beyond the one-dimensional, often sanitized understanding of LGBTQ equality through same-sex marriage to expose the complex layers of enduring homophobia: queer youth homelessness, lack of financial resources, sex work, abuse and rejection in the home. These are the queer issues that define the current climate—and they aren’t going to be absolved by gay marriage alone.

+ Paribas Open CEO Raymond Moore said some stupid sexist malarky about women’s tennis last week, including that the women’s tour “rides on the coattails” of the men’s tour. Billie Jean King had some feelings about it, obviously. Moore has now resigned.

Disappointed in #RaymondMoore comments. He is wrong on so many levels. Every player, especially the top players, contribute to our success

— Billie Jean King (@BillieJeanKing) March 20, 2016

Also.Also.Also.

http://ghirahimapologist.tumblr.com/post/140902268028/there-was-a-goat-at-work

Pop Culture Fix: The Xena Reboot Will Be GAY GAY GAY

Welcome to your weekly Pop Culture Fix, your one-stop shop for television feelings.

Teevee

+ Xena: Warrior Princess really is getting the reboot everyone’s been speculating about and it is going to be hella gay. Here’s a little tidbit from Variety:

NBC has ordered a new Xena pilot from writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, architect behind the CW’s cult hit The 100, and he plans to be a little more forthcoming about the undeniable chemistry between Xena and Gabrielle with this updated iteration. During a Q&A session on Tumblr, Grillo-Marxuach confirmed that the two women would be lovers, no bones about it:

i am a very different person with a very different world view than my employer on the 100 – and my work on the 100 was to use my skills to bring that vision to life. xena will be a very different show made for very different reasons. there is no reason to bring back xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually in first-run syndication in the 1990s. it will also express my view of the world – which is only further informed by what is happening right now – and is not too difficult to know what that is if you do some digging.

+ Speaking of The 100, fans mourning the death of Commander Lexa have turned their sorrow into activism. They’ve raised an astonishing $43,000(!) for the Trevor Project. You can donate through their campaign here.

+ Variety also covered Lexa’s death on The 100. It’s the first time I have ever seen a mainstream site (especially one with real clout) push back against this trope. It’s a really good read that examines fan reaction and takes the showrunner to task for his obtuseness.

+ Her Story won Best Drama at Seattle Web Fest, a well deserved honor!

+ Soon you’ll be able to own Marceline the Vampire Queen and her true love Princess Bubblegum in Lego form! A fan actually created these things and made it all the way through the Lego Ideas vetting process!

+ This new Orphan Black season four trailer is so slick, y’all. I’ve watched it like six times since Riese sent it to me. It seems to confirm Delphine’s death, but I’m just going to stay in denial about that for a while longer.

+ Hey hey hey, CBS has finally given Person of Interest season five a premiere date! They’re actually going to show it on Monday and Tuesday nights, starting on Tuesday, May 3rd. Usually when networks decide to burn through episodes like that, it means they’re done with the show, but J.J. Abrams says a miraculous ratings event could turn things around. The season is a truncated 13 episodes and promises some intense Root and Shaw shenanigans. [Update: As of 6pm, CBS has official cancelled POI. No season six, after all. But maybe Root and Shaw will ride off into the sunset!]

+ How white, conservative, and male are Sunday news talk shows without Melissa Harris-Perry? Flavorwire has the answer.

+ TV Land is rebooting Heathers. Heather McNamara will be a black lesbian. One Heather will be “a male who identifies as gender-queer whose real name is Heath.” (So you mean they are a genderqueer person named Heath, TV Land.)

Movies

+ We’re giving away five Carol DVDs, have you heard?

+ Cannes will debut Jodie Foster’s new film, Money Monster.

Queer People In The World

+ Laverne Cox is set to appear on Jane Lynch’s Hollywood Game Night this Sunday night!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laverne Cox (@lavernecox)

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “The 100” Proves There’s Nothing New Under The Sun

Welp.

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

Stop watching right now, right at this moment, and never turn your TV back on again.

Well, I feel dumb. I feel dumb for calling Clarke and Lexa our bookend couple when their storyline is so reminiscent of so many tragedies from more twenty years ago. Things aren’t different. They’re so much the same.

But let’s start from the beginning. Murphy finally realizes that Polis is named after the thirteenth station, Polaris, which was destroyed when it didn’t join the coalition. As he pieces it together, we flashback to Polaris and meet Beca, the scientist who created Alie. After Alie gets onto the grid and fires the nuclear missiles, Beca sees her mistake. Alie didn’t value human life because she wasn’t biological. So she’s going to introduce Alie 2 to the united space stations. Alie 2 will be better because she’ll be grafted onto humans. Of course, Beca’s associates think this is a horrible idea. But Beca injects herself with black blood (nightblood! which I guess is synthetic) and sews the biological chip onto her brain stem and escapes in a pod to the ground. The badge on her jumpsuit says Commander.

Reading drawings on Titus’s walls, Murphy tries to explain that the woman they worship is actually from the sky like he is. Titus, of course, will not accept that their religion is a myth, or worse, artificial intelligence, and beats him even more.

Later in the ceremony room, the TriKru village leader, Semet, brings Octavia to Polis on the anniversary of Ascension Day. Who knew this was foreboding? Semet wants vengeance for the attack on his village. Lexa decides she won’t attack SkaiKru yet, but will enforce a blockade five miles outside Arkadia. Any Skyperson outside the blockade will be killed. Octavia is pissed off because she knows Pike will not abide by this. But I thought this was a reasonable policy. Clarke and Octavia need time to go to Arkadia and deal with Pike themselves before the 12 armies lay waste to their people.

Octavia finds Indra, who is not recovering well from her injury. Indra wants to give up, regretting that she didn’t die with honor. But Octavia needs her to get up and help her get revenge on Pike. Indra does her change her mind in the end and they march to Arkadia.

Lexa wants Clarke to stay of course. Titus warns Lexa that to be strong, she has to enforce the blockade. She can’t make exceptions for Clarke anymore. Love is weakness and that weakness may be used against her like it was in Costia’s case. Bringing up Costia was the worst thing he could have said. Lexa was strong in Costia’s case. The Ice Queen killed her and chopped off her head, yet Lexa still invited them to their coalition. She shouts “I am more than capable of separating feelings from duty.” Lexa can’t deny her feelings any more though, now that she’s so close to losing Clarke.

Your shirt.

DON’T.

But these women know that they are still leaders. Clarke meets Lexa in her bedroom to say goodbye, and visibly catches her breath when she sees her. She knows then she can’t walk away with a handshake. They speak to each other in whispers and Lexa starts to cry. They kiss like this is the last time they’ll see each other. They kiss like they are so hungry for each other and sad about the circumstances. I want to fall to my knees when Lexa lets out a strangled breath through her tears. They walk over to the bed and the screen fades to black.

Later, in Lexa’s giant bed, Clarke runs her fingers over Lexa’s tattoos and asks her about the one on her back. There are seven circles for the seven nightbloods who died on Lexa’s ascension day. What happened to number eight? Lexa doesn’t want to talk about it. And Clarke just wants to extend this moment of peace they have with each other before their duty pulls them away.

So Clarke leaves with Octavia to Arkadia, and Lexa deals with the unrest in Polis, right? No. Of course not. Instead, Clarke goes back to her bedroom and finds Murphy and Titus there. Titus intends to frame Murphy for Clarke’s death and pulls a gun on her. Titus has never fired a gun, so he’s firing bullets everywhere. Lexa enters and catches one in the stomach. Clarke wants to stop the bleeding, but Lexa and Titus know exactly what this means. Lexa isn’t afraid.

My problem is that instead of seeing Lexa die in Clarke’s arms, I see the strings around them. Instead of hearing “I don’t want another commander, I want you,” I hear “contractual obligations” and “plot device.” I didn’t even start to feel sad about Lexa’s death until two hours later, and still in a mixture of anger and hurt about what this means in the bigger picture.

Because we have to consider the bigger picture here. This is not a twist: it is only surprising how awfully familiar it is. We feel this in our bones. Science fiction television isn’t written in space: writers are just as surrounded by this media as we are. This isn’t new. There is a mass communication theory called cultivation theory that assumes there are common themes in all of television and hypothesizes that heavy viewers will begin to perceive reality as it is portrayed. What does it say when so many lesbian storylines end in tragedy? When the theme here is that lesbians must die to move a story forward. It has been cultivated in us for decades. The writers and producers have to acknowledge where their story falls in this narrative. And what effect can it have on us?

How to Get Away With Murder

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Sadie

You’re like lesbian Dumbledore, huh?

But with a sexy side of Slytherin.

It’s the week we’ve all been waiting for: EVE IS BACK! And I’ll get to that, I swear. We start with Laurel confronting Annalise about Wes’s involvement in the murder of his mother. Annalise says that he wasn’t involved and that an investigator messed up and ultimately it was ruled a suicide. Laurel points out that the police and the investigators lie all the time and that she thinks Annalise knows more than what she’s letting on. She tells her to mind her own damn business and if Wes wants to ask her something, he should ask it himself. Meanwhile, Wes is back at the therapist’s office and he’s telling her that he thinks Annalise killed his mom. Naturally the therapist, being a therapist, is more interested in Wes’s obsession with Annalise than she is a ten-year-old alleged murder.

Flashback: Wes and his mom are sitting on the couch when there’s a knock at the door. Immigration Customs Enforcement or ICE is there for Rose. Lo and behold! Who’s the lawyer for ICE? That would be Eve. Really dramatic music plays right here but even at this point I was pretty sure this was a trick by Annalise to get her to testify.

Back in the present Laurel and Frank go down into the basement to continue their never ending fight. Frank is all “you asked me to share so I shared” and Laurel was like “yeah but the thing that you shared is that you killed someone” and then get really mad about it which is a really self-righteous stance to take, considering she’s been part of nearly half a dozen murders herself. But who’s keeping score?

While the team stands around and debates about what to do next, another email comes in and this one is a video Michaela at Caleb’s house. Annalise demands to take the computer with her to the DA’s office and then she drops it on his desk. She asks for blanket immunity for her and the team in return for the email evidence that Philip is back in town.

Flashback: Eve shows up to Annalise’s hotel room, finally. So it turns out the whole immigration thing was actually set up by Annalise as a scare tactic. Eve feels rightfully skeevy about all this, but still wastes no time in hitting on Annalise. Annalise then reveals to Eve that she’s pregnant and Eve’s reaction to this kind of puts the nail in the coffin on the “it’s Eve’s baby” theory.

Back in the present the therapist is still obsessed with Wes and his maternal complex. I don’t really understand why he didn’t expect this. Wes says that he is going to go to the police instead and then storms out of the office.

Back at the DA’s office, Annalise calls the team and lets them know that the immunity deal could be coming through, but during the call she gets a tip from Nate who says they’re actually about to serve them with a search warrant. Like a total badass, Annalise knows exactly what to do. With the DA standing right in front of her she calls up the team and tells Bonnie to shred everything. Because they’ve got this kind of mind meld thing going on, Bonnie knows not to actually do this, but to put in motion the steps it would take to get the search warrant and all evidence obtained invalid. (Or “ fruit from a poisonous tree,” as it were.) Needless to say they get their immunity.

Flashback Eve is still in the hotel room and obviously bitter about Annalise being with Sam. (Aren’t we all?) Old white dude calls up Annalise and ask her about this whole immigration mess, and Annalise assures him she’ll show up for court.

Back in the presen,t Laurel tries to invite Wes to the team slumber party but he tells her he’s not interested and he’ll take his chances with Philip. Over at the slumber party, Asher is the only one prepared, wearing the appropriate dragon onesie. Frank and Bonnie opt to wait things out at a bar instead.

In the hotel room ten years ago, things come to a head between Annalise and Eve. Eve, like pretty much all of us, really hates Sam. Eve then does that thing that lesbians do sometimes do where she accuses Annalise of going with Sam because he’s the safer bet. Then Annalise does the thing some bisexuals (or at least myself) do where she doubles down and says that she’s not even gay and that’s why she left Eve. Man, they are really trying to hurt each other aren’t the?. This is not the reunion that I expected. Clearly these two have cleared up these problems between them in the last ten years!

In holding, Rose and Eve discuss the options, which are limited. Eve tells Rose without this testimony she will be sent back and Wes will be left in the US. Rose asks Eve if she could spend the night at home and Eve relents.

In the present Wes breaks into Annalise’s house and finds both the accusation that she may have killed his mother and he finds Eve’s name on the court documents.

In the past, Eve and Annalise make up and the Annalise has a minor maternal breakdown and Eve walks her back. Come on, Annalise! Just run off with Eve; you know you want to.

Wes has now convinced himself that he was the one who murdered his mother. His therapist isn’t so sure.

Back in the basement argument zone, Frank professes his love for Laurel… again… but still Laurel can’t get over the whole “strangled a girl on the roof” thing and she officially breaks it off.

Ten years in the past, at 2:02 apparently, Annalise gets a call from old white dude, who wants to see her in gis office. He begins to threaten Wes again and Annalise leaves to see Rose. At 3:20, she makes it to their apartment and she warns Rose of the threat against her son. Rose says, “You don’t know what he’s capable of,” in reference to old white dude. So was he the real killer? Is that why he’s so concerned with the outcome?

Rose then gives this amazing speech about how she will not be owned by the creepy old white dude. She then walks over to the sink and seeing no other way out, she turns and says, “Take care of my boy” and stabs a kitchen knife into her neck. Annalise screams and then begins to call 9-1-1, but doesn’t. And runs from the kitchen just barely missing Wes on his way in. So, this is what Eve and Annalise did to Wes.

The episode concludes with Wes traveling to see Eve and Annalise. He is not there to greet her but from underneath the bed Philips hand reaches out, and with Eve on the phone, Annalise calls out for help.

Wow. So here we are just two episodes left in the season and there is still more to be revealed. It looks like Eve should be here for the remainder of it!

Broad City

Thursdays on Comedy Central at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Riese

This week on Broad City, a new investor walked into Deals Deals Deals and consequently into Ilana’s sexual fantasies. Played by Vanessa Williams, hot Investor Lady pings Ilana’s pants (well, hot shorts, really) from the moment she strides into the office, hair aloft, scarf blazing in the AC, non-prescription eyeglasses concealing her penetrating eyeballs. “Flawless bitch!” Ilana exclaims, declaring that she’s not sure if she wants to BE Miss Hot Lady or if she wants to be INSIDE Miss Hot Lady.

This is probably similar to when I didn’t know if I wanted to be Shane or date Shane (it turned out to be the latter, but trying the former was pretty fun). Ilana’s wearing a dog hoodie, though, so there’s that to contend with. Ilana is totally transparent about the fact that she does zero work at work, but having her salad-finger on the pulse of the social media generation. Miss Hot Lady puts her in charge of social media, suggesting Ilana has been an untapped resource prior to this moment.

Then Ilana tweets a thing about a horse fucking a dude and gets fired. She tells Miss Hot Lady that she’s figured it out — she wants to be IN her — and the lady tells her that she has to leave and so she leaves. It’s okay! I think she’s gonna be working for the Hillary Clinton campaign soon which’ll be hilarious, I saw some sides! There are bound to be some more lesbos there. Oh, also she called Abi her wife. I really love that Ilana’s desire for men and for women are getting pretty equal play this season.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Clarke and Lexa Are Totally In Love, Pass It On

Welcome to the Friday installment Boob(s On Your) Tube. You’re here for Clarke and Lexa caressing each other’s thighs and hips, so I won’t ask you to linger on my words any longer than I must. (P.S. Billie Jean King guest starred on Fresh Off the Boat and it was a glory.)

Fresh Off the Boat

Tuesdays on ABC at 8:00 p.m.

Written by Laura Mandanas

This week, the two youngest Huang children bring home the results of a career test intended to tell them what job is a good fit for their personality. Although Jessica is pleased with Evan’s result (Surgeon General), she’s less happy with Emery’s suggested career: flight attendant. After Louis sits the family down to watch Michael Chang compete in the Australian open, Jessica is quick to encourage Emery down the (potentially) more lucrative career path of being a professional tennis player.

“You boys are so lucky to have an Asian pro athlete to look up to. It’s way more than I had,” Louis says, flashing back to a memory of himself cheering for soccer referee Jin-Ho. Which, I’ve got to say — just under the surface of that slightly hyperbolic joke is a Really Real Thing. It reminds me of my dad’s sudden, intense interest in basketball once Jeremy Lin made it big. My unquestioning adoration of figure skaters Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan. My younger brother’s pedantic insistence on reminding everyone he talked to about Tiger Woods’s multiracial Asian background. It’s A Thing. I appreciated it — just as I appreciated Louis’s earnest defense of tennis to his sons: “Are you joking? This is the greatest game known to mankind. It is a sport that is both aggressive and elegant, just like your mother.” So good!!

Even better, when Louis, Jessica and Emery go to the tennis court for practice, Billie Jean King is there! She’s in Orlando 183 days a year for tax purposes, and — after Emery dominates the Under-16 Regional Tournament and fires his parents as coaches — is willing to give free lessons to the emerging champ. The two get matching “success perms,” but decide to call it quits when Emery realizes that he doesn’t want to leave home just yet to pursue tennis as a full time career.

Grey’s Anatomy

Thursdays on ABC at 8:00 p.m.

Written by Aja

This week’s Grey’s Anatomy was literally JUST Jackson and April in a hetero cesspool of bitterness and divorce! I’ll be back next week when Callie, Meredith, and Bailey join the matching parka club.

How to Get Away With Murder

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Sadie

This week on How to Get Away From Your Boyfriend we delve deeper into what exactly is going on with Wes, and we see how many times Frank can say he’s Laurel’s boyfriend until we stop believing it. Let me start out by saying there’s no new Eve footage or storyline in this episode and I’m really sad about it. Alas, someday.

Flashback: Annalise was defending a man named Charles Mahoney — who was accused of beating a woman to death in his office — early in her career. Wes’s mom, Rose, had been called to testify on behalf of the defendant in that case. Her story seems totally sketch, making references to things like rain and very specific details that a person typically wouldn’t typically remember. Annalise goes to prison talking with her client and it’s painfully obvious that he is totally lying and she knows it. It turns out Rose is the alibi and has clearly been paid off or threatened in some way.

Back in the present Connor is showing the video from Philip to Annalise. She’s not impressed: “I’m not even in this!” But then Connor asks nicely for her help and apologizes, so Anneliese relents. (Always remember your manners, folks.)

Now back to this dramatic scene with Frank and Laurel still in progress from last week’s episode, when Frank confessed to killing Lila. Laurel refuses to believe him and continues to blame it on Sam. (I would have, too, to be honest.) Laurel asks Frank why he did it and because he can’t bring himself to say who it was for, she still thinks he’s lying. Frank says he had to do it and then his phone rings: It’s Annalise, in more ways than one. Laurel has trouble absorbing all of this and decides to dip out on this week’s misadventure with the team and go to Ohio with Wes instead.

Frank storms into Anneliese’s house asking to see the video; everyone is frantic trying to decide what to do. Should they try to find Philip? (Are they going to try and kill him?) Anneliese thinks this whole thing is a trap and suggests they just wait it out. “Let mommy take care of it, like she always does,” she says, which is kind of weird but also kind of badass.

A second email has come in and this time shows the remainder of the team. Along with the second video is a demand for a million-dollar ransom in order to keep the video from going public. This time Connor calls Annalise “Mommy” and it’s really just weird when he says it.

I want to take this moment to point out that the picture of Frank on her phone is shirtless, like one of those pictures you get from every single dude on Tinder.

Also, oh man, Frank’s hair in the past! Do you think that’s what it really looks like under all that grease? With that thought and Sam walking into the room, I completely glazed over during this scene.

In an attempt to literally run away from her problems, Laurel wants to sneak Wes to Ohio so they can go snooping around to find out more about his mom’s death. And we find out how Wes’s name was changed. Apparently Wes got a new name from his foster family? There is something super out of the ordinary going on there.

Fkashback: Rose is being prepped for trial. Frank sends a particularly harsh line of questioning her way and it nearly scares her off. Rose agrees to testify, but only under the condition that she won’t be deported and that she’ll be able to testify anonymously. The old white dude in the corner is not too fond of this plan, and makes a very thinly veiled threat against Wes (or, I guess, Christoph?).

In the present Frank covers for Laurel, after which the word “boyfriend” is thrown around like half a dozen times. They go to meet Pratt’s boyfriend, Caleb, to get the rest of that ransom money and find details or some sort of leverage on Philip. He visits his sister, Kathryn, in prison and she admits to killing her parents… kinda. It’s unclear whether it’s a real confession or a guilt thing.

Out in Ohio, Wes and Laurel dig up all of the old files pertaining to the Mahoney case. Luckily we get to experience this through flashbacks and endless hours of legal documents. The prosecutor describes Mahoney as having been charged with beating of a woman to death. Annalise calls the characterization made by the prosecution bad fiction. Rose was set to be anonymous witness G34, but she never showed up because she dipped out of the bathroom while Frank wasn’t looking.

This is clearly a huge setback, but Annalise tries to play it down when old white dude shows up and tells Annalise that he picked her solely on her color and gender, against his better judgment, and then goes on to say something pretty racist. I hope his son lost the case.

In the present, Bonnie suggest letting this all fold in. Putting an end to all of this, Annelise laments the fact that she now has to deal with five adult kids. Annalise, clearly hates everyone now, but tells them to enjoy the night anyway cause with this group you never know what might happen.

In Ohio, Wes convinces himself that the trial got his mom killed, that someone (possibly old white man) had her murdered because she didn’t testify. He’s convinced that Annalise has felt guilty about this all along, and that’s why she helped him get into college, and added the fifth spot on her team, and protected him after murdering Sam.

Now over with Caleb and Pratt at the Mansion. They’re trying to sort out the tension they’ve been having. Pratt says, “We’ve seen each other naked; I think that means we know each other.” Which, as someone who’s been to a fair number of sexual parties can tell you: this is not necessarily true. Regardless they make up and do some heterosexual kissing.

Next Bonnie breaks up with Asher, even though she says they weren’t really even dating. Bonnie is totally broken up over this, but I’d say it’s for the better. Next in this sequence of makeups and breakups, Annalise decides to cook Nate dinner, and Connor suggests moving far out of town. Nate feels pretty suspicious about this meal. He seems to think Annalise has ulterior motives and makes an ass of himself both at the table and with his sorry excuse for an apology. They proceed to have the kind of argument that at least on television usually ends in sex. If that happened, it was only alluded to.

Frank sends three “I love yous” and continues to call, but Laurel wants nothing of it. She breaks down in the car, saying that Frank is just like her father. Wes tries to comfort her as best he can, but that leads to more passionate heterosexual kissing. Awkward.

Ten years in the past Annalise confronts Rose and says she worries about what might happen if she doesn’t follow through. More public records requests, and Wes find his mother’s police report from the night of her death. The police report and the coroner’s report say that it was a suicide, but Wes is not convinced.

At Annalise’s place Nate agrees with her and says not to negotiate with Philip. Not to give him an inch because his threats are empty and he has no real leverage. At this point another email comes in and it contains video of Nate and Annalise from the night before.

Philip is stalking everyone! Laurel thinks it was Wes who killed his mother. There seems to be a total breakdown of the group going on. Not to mention: What happened to the baby? Where is Eve? Could this show get anymore dense?

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

Headcanons can race like the speed of light. Every Thursday I think “Will this be the day they kiss?” or “Will this be the day they sleep together?” But in reality, Clarke and Lexa still have a long way to go. They want to be together, of course, but Lexa still has to command armies and Clarke is inexplicably determined to protect her people.

So the episode begins with our bookend couple. Clarke sits in a chair and sketches Lexa sleeping on the couch across from her. Just gals drawing pictures of pals. Lexa has a nightmare and wakes up terrified. Clarke goes over to her and puts her hand on Lexa’s thigh. She probably doesn’t remove her hand for half the scene but I’m not 100% sure because the camera rightfully so zooms in on their faces. Lexa says she had a dream foretelling doom because she declared a cease fire. Clarke assures her with a smile that she did the right thing and her legacy will be peace. Lexa is soothed by this and gets up and sees the drawing. Her face is flattered, surprised and hopeful that maybe she didn’t swear fealty to a woman who will never love her. Clarke shyly looks up at her. And this moment is ruined by Titus, of course.

Titus stares at them like he just interrupted them making out. Seriously, he looks terrified. Guards carry in a giant wooden box. It is a gift to Clarke from King Roan. Emerson is inside, beaten and screaming. He throws himself onto Clarke, frothing at the mouth. I thought the Ice Nation had turned him into a Reaper, but he’s just mad with grief. They pull him off and take him out of the room. Clarke refuses Lexa’s comfort, and stomps away.

Clarke meets up with Lexa and Titus later in the ceremony room. They tell Clarke Emerson’s sentence is her decision because he murdered her people in Mount Weather. Lexa reminds her that blood must not have blood but Clarke is like “Oh no, he should be dead. I’ll kill him.” Lexa is so hurt by this and confirms my fear: “I see. Blood must not have blood when it’s only my people who bleed.” Clarke and Titus try to justify it, but Lexa won’t listen. Heda knows what Heda means. Clarke has until sundown to decide Emerson’s fate.

Titus visits Clarke later and warns her that Lexa is in grave danger by not vowing vengeance. He says Clarke has to convince her to change her mind, or they will kill her. Clarke will not abide this war because of her people, but she does seem a little conflicted when he mentions Lexa’s death. I’d like to think she says no to Titus not because she doesn’t care, but because she respects Lexa so much she’d never make an agreement without her knowing. Titus doesn’t understand how pragmatic Clarke is and leaves pretty pissed off.

But when the time comes after sundown, Clarke cannot go through with killing Emerson. They both will have to go through their days with the memories of their crimes. Clarke will have to remember that she killed men, women, and children (including Emerson’s two children) in Mount Weather. And Emerson will be banished from the lands knowing he killed 49 SkaiKru. But Clarke is still The Clarke Griffin because she smiles at him and says “may you live forever.” Lexa is just as turned on as we are, you know.

Meanwhile, over in Arkadia, Raven is back to season one Raven Reyes. No pain, no insecurity, and she is practically beaming at all times. She’s now pro-City of Light and Jaha is passing out chips to all the converts. Jasper is so close to taking one, but Abby stops him. Jaha explains that the chip grafts onto people’s brainstem and stops pain receptors from firing. It also may cause him to forget he had a son named Wells. Whoops. Abby takes all the chips away until she can study any other side-effects.

Octavia and Kane team up to spy on Pike. Octavia is the brawn outside the walls spying on Pike’s patrols, and Kane is the brains directing her through the radio. It is amazing. They find out Pike wants to clear a village to start planting corn and soy beans. So of course they have to kill everyone in that village. Monty, Monroe and Miller’s boyfriend reluctantly agree. But when they and Bellamy arrive in the village, it’s empty because Octavia warned the grounders living there. Unfortunately, they had set a trap with flammable toxic tree sap. Octavia tries to warn Bellamy about the trap but Monroe is killed. The grounders want Octavia dead, Pike wants Octavia dead (even though they literally went to that village to kill everyone there). All she wanted to do was keep everyone safe. Why can’t anything go according to plan?

Lastly, Jaha and Alie ask Raven to load up Jaha’s backpack into the mainframe so they can find another AI. It was Alie’s sister AI and she was supposed to be up in space while Alie stayed on Earth. But there’s no trace of it in the network of the 12 ships. Jaha reveals there was a thirteenth space station but they blew it out of the sky to encourage Unity Day. What was this thirteenth station called? Polaris. Or POLIS. We see the remains of the station in Titus’s lair as he beats Murphy senseless. He wants to know how Murphy got one of Alie’s City of Light chips.

So are the grounders descendents of the 13th station and not actually “grounders” at all? Did this second AI distribute chips to all the grounders so that their city of light is actually their collective unconscious/afterlife? Will Lexa and Clarke finally admit their feelings to each other and together kill the treasonous Titus?

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Murder’s Always Keeping Clarke and Lexa Apart

Monday night’s Grammy Awards were good for the hot takes cycle but bad for Tuesday’s Boob(s On Your) Tube. They preempted all the good TV. I’m so antsy! It’s been over a week since I saw what was going on with Luisa and Susanna on Jane the Virgin; either of them could be caught in an avalanche or stomped to death by grizzly bears by now!

I don’t know, maybe I’m antsy because MTV released the trailer for Faking It‘s third season and I hate how much I care about Karma and Amy. They pull me back in by the heartstrings every goddamn time.

I DVR-ed New Girl and we can talk about Clea Duvall showing up there in Tuesday’s column. In the meantime, here’s your Wednesday night and Thursday night good, quality TV report.

Grey’s Anatomy

Thursdays on ABC at 8:00 p.m.

Written by Aja

Meredith is fine, she’s FINE, you guys, and she’s got that ridiculously unpersuasive, bordering-on-patronizing smile on her face to show how fine she is sitting in a therapist’s office on Bailey’s orders. He reminds her that A Very Bad Thing happened to her, and she patiently rattles off her worst: Mom? Dead. Stepmom? Dead. Sister? Also dead. Husband? Super dead. Like all the way dead. BFF? Eh, might as well be. Her point? “Any day that nobody dies — that’s a good day.” Pretty grim, Mere. Pretty grim.

Karev faces off with a precocious 15-year-old bone cancer survivor who is so over it and knows way, way more than any dumb idiot resident in her presence, and certainly more than her own mother, who bursts into tears and has to be comforted by her own child at the slightest little flap of an x-ray film. The cancer is back and has overtaken the girl’s chest, but when Karev proposes the same exact “safe” procedure using titanium plates she’s already turned down at 30 other hospitals before this one, she goes rogue, firing him and enlisting Callie and Pierce in a super cool, bionic 3D-printed sternum-and-ribs getup that’s only ever been performed successfully on a single adult person. Penny and Callie run into one another in an empty corridor and hand to god, I totally forgot that they were a thing. Can you have below-zero chemistry? Well, they do. Penny is literally reenacting ambulance explosions and mumbling about oxygen tanks and cigarette butts and we’re supposed to believe that Callie finds this as charming and delightful as, say, a blonde goddess on roller skates with dimples that won’t quit?! I’m so sure. (Spoiler alert: They eventually make out in a stairwell, which means that I need to book a long lunch with Shonda Rhimes ASAP.)

There are SO MANY GREY-SLOAN HANGOUTS, try to keep up: Pierce adorably keeps hosting kickbacks for Meredith’s sake, even though Meredith thinks they’re crappy and doesn’t want them. Also having a no-chill get-together this very night? Jo, who keeps pushing Karev away after his proposal/moving out/moving back in. It’s all very mind-numbingly boring and so is being around her, because Tuck peaces out as soon as he gets a text from Bailey. On the lez side of the tracks, Richard picks Arizona up because he’s still her #1 wingman, hooray! (“How do I look, do I look hot?” “You’re very hot, can we go now?”) Guys, why does Arizona live with the rakish intern? Is he babysitting? What happened to Sofia? I don’t know what’s going on!

Also, they keep trying to make us care about Maggie’s dalliances with that rakish intern! Or about April and the unsigned divorce papers and how she’s relishing the opportunity to insert herself into someone else’s crisis, firmly planting herself inside of a Riggs-Hunt manwich! I LOVE NEW SOBER AMELIA. New Sober Amelia is sick of everyone’s bullshit and only does what’s best for New Sober Amelia. Hunt loves New Sober Amelia, too, because he at last confesses what we’d all suspected: His sister was in love with Riggs and died on Riggs’ watch, leaving Hunt with the crippling inability to use his words like a big boy. She gives him excellent advice: Get over yourself, manbaby. Have I mentioned that I love New Sober Amelia?

The tearjerker moment in this episode is when the precocious cancer teen stops Karev before her surgery to tell him to take care of her mom if anything happens to her. The young single mom, it turns out, isn’t useless after all, it’s just that she works two jobs to pay for all the hospital bills and keep the good health insurance and they’ve more or less been on their own for fifteen years. Both of them have had to be superhuman strong, but only one of them is the child with life-threatening cancer. Karev says appropriate and reassuring things and Jo realizes, “OMG, the past 48 hours of this patient meeting and firing Karev has taught me absolutely fuck-all about his potential as a marital partner and father, there’s no way we’re ready to get married.” JK, she tells him what a relief it is that her mom left her in a dumpster when she was a baby or whatever, and then she mounts him in the carpool on the way home while Meredith tries not to throw up a little from the driver’s seat. D’aw. Anyway, the girl makes it through the surgery with flying colors and lives happily ever after/becomes Meredith Grey in 25 years.

Speaking of, Meredith wrestled with some hard truths in her final therapy sessions, listing the many reasons she’s fulfilled and has moved on from the loss of Derek — like her kids, her class and her work — though she still self-identifies as a widow. But she isn’t any longer, her therapist counters, and asks her, “So what are you?” She doesn’t know; maybe she wants to be alone, maybe she doesn’t, but she cannot bear to be abandoned. It’s become easier to tell the two apart, but she still has no idea who she is, what she wants, or what to do next. At least now she’s asking questions, which is how you claw your way out of holding on for dear life to letting go and setting yourself free.

It looks like next week is going to be The Bachelor Tell All Special: Jackson Avery and April Kepner Divorce Live on Television! Woof.

How to Get Away With Murder

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Sadie

This week on How to Confess to Murder: The episode starts ten years in the past. You can tell because everyone’s hair is longer and Annalise is actually pregnant. Although ethnically similar, this team from ten years ago seems to be a lot more chipper than the current one. Perhaps they opted out of the first term murder coverup extra credit assignment. Bonnie is there, of course, but this time as a law student, and she is definitely not the same Bonnie we know in the present. She is more timid, less sure of herself, but she’s quickly gaining favor with Annalise.

We also know it’s ten years earlier because Sam is back. I’ll be be honest with you on this, I hate Sam. I think he’s always been creepy and he totally underlines that fact by talking to Annalise through her stomach almost exclusively throughout this episode. That’s all I plan to say about the guy and that’s about all he contributes.

Back in the present Annalise is cleared to go back to work, and she is totally not excited about it. At the same time Wes goes to the doctor to try and get a prescription for sleeping pills because it’s clear he hasn’t slept in what looks like weeks. The doctor isnt so convinced that’s what Wes needs and he gets up to leave. Either through slip-of-the-tongue or an actual cry for help on his way out, he says she’d be sorry if he killed himself. I want to point out the use of color in this episode: almost all of the scenes with Wes are heavily tinted blue, obviously insinuating sadness or depression. This subtly changes as the story progresses but I’ll get back to that. For now Wes is going to be evaluated and held on suicide watch.

Back in court, the whole team, sans Wes, shows up to help Annalise on her current plea hearing. Annalise wants nothing to do with them, or really anyone in this episode, and breezes by into court. As the plea hearing is underway, The mother of the victim does something incredibly brave. She wants the court to reevaluate the plea arrangement made with the DA in order to try and lessen the sentence against the defendant, Jason. Thats right, she wants a decrease in sentencing because she believes that one more person of color going to prison because of a broken system is wrong. I could only hope to hold my convictions so firm when faced with such a terrible circumstance. Annalise is not happy. This will mean a lot more work and a much greater risk when it comes to her client. Regardless, the restorative justice hearing is set and Annalise finally gets the team out of her way by having them prep Jason for the hearing.

It’s ten years in the past again and I don’t know if that really is Frank’s hair or just some awful wig, but oh man! And he is totally Annalise’s secretary. So his ten=year career path is secretary to assistant to fixer. Basically the same job with three different titles.

Back in the present, Lorel runs off to check on Wes while the rest of the team preps for the hearing. Totally “trying” to be the new Bonnie, Lorel cons her way into Wes’s room, but still clearly needing to finish that law degree because it’s going to take more than a little legal jargon to get Wes off this hold. Lorel reports back to Annalise what’s going on and confronts her about talking to Wes. Annalise, who clearly isn’t taking anything from anyone this episode, fires back and tells Lorel she already has a Bonnie and doesn’t need another one.

It’s ten years in the past and Bonnie and Annalise have a very touching scene. Annalise is having back pain and Bonnie suggests laying on her side. Here there is some vague dialogue between them about Sam, but like I said I don’t care about Sam. We then flash forward to the present and Annalise, in full IDGAF fashion, is in the kitchen with Bonnie and Frank discussing what to do with their current case while eating ice cream straight from the tub. She decides to kick everyone out so she can eat her ice cream in peace.

The team moves on to Oliver and Conner’s place and Asher makes a point in being the dudeliest dude out there. More fart jokes, crude bathroom humor, all that. But just as Asher reaches peak assery, the whole team starts talking about him while he’s out of the room. I assume this is leading into us actually feeling bad for the guy? I don’t know. I mean Asher has had a rough go of it, but I still think he is a tool.

Back at the hospital Wes is completely breaking down and I don’t know how I feel about this doctor. I mean she’s probably right in keeping him there and everything she is saying to Wes seems to be true, but I’m getting a very Stepford wives vibe from her; it’s like any moment now I expect her to start hypnotizing Wes.

Now in the hearing, the victim’s mother does an incredibly amazing thing and forgives Jason for everything, saying she understands where he came from. How he had little choice but to end up this way. If she wasn’t totally being played it would almost seem sweet. She puts herself before the court in order to defend actions that didn’t occur like she thought she did. And as It turns out those last messages sent to her by her son were actually from the defendant.

During Jason’s statements, feeling the overwhelming guilt of being forgiven by the victim’s mother, he slowly admits to everything. To shooting him on purpose, to texting his mother, to letting his friend die. After coming clean, the DA immediately withdraws the original deal and ups the charges to premeditated murder.

Even after all this, the victim’s mother stands by her conviction, her belief that the defendant should be let off with a lesser punishment. She truly believes that sending another young man of color into the system is the wrong way to go.

At the office this intrepid team of murderers discusses the finer points of what proper punishment would be for an admitted murderer. Annalise, again being over everyone’s shit, immediately says what we are all thinking and calls out the entire team on their hypocrisy. I mean, they’ve done countless horrendous things so who are they really to play the moral high ground. Subsequently Lorel drops the Wes bombshell and the team walks out.

Seemingly unfazed by all of this, Annalise goes into epiphany mode and lays out the case precedents to Bonnie and Frank and then in front of the court. Through all of this, the mother of the victim sits behind her hiding a smile. This would not have happened on an episode of Law & Order.

In the midst of all this court drama, the DA offers a plea deal of life without parole, and with little hesitation and against the better wishes of Annalise, Jason stands up and takes the deal, despite protests from the victim’s mother.

At this point Analise is officially over all this

Back in the hospital and the lighting has changed now, seemingly closer to that of the flashbacks, perhaps showing us that things are finally coming to light. Now ten years in the past we see Annalise offering Wes’ mom legal advice, and so now we know Wes’ mom and Wes are under the protection of Analise. There’s still more to find out before we know what’s exactly going on, but it’s clear now that Analise knew of them well before they met Annalise.

Back in the present Annalise finally decides it’s time for Wes to know everything. Everything she has been keeping from him his whole life. She drops the same envelope we saw in the past onto Wes’s doorstep.

After this we see Lorel confess to Frank that Wes shot Annalise (which is probably the fourth confession this episode) and then proceeds to break up with him for the lies and deceit that just seem to fly between everyone in this group. Frank takes this moment to then admits to killing Lila.

In setting up for next weeks this episode concludes with an anonymous email (probably from Philip) showing that someone knows about the events at the mansion and could plan to expose them.

The real question on everyone’s mind is: Where the hell is Eve for all this and what exactly is her connection? My guess is it’ll be a few weeks before we see her again.

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

Hey remember me? We were kids together, let’s get married! What? Oh sorry, just quoting that Robin Hood cartoon.

Having a third-person perspective can be so rough. One day, or 14 days in a row, you’re watching your faves fall in love by candlelight; the next you’re watching everyone make terrible decisions, make good decisions for the wrong reasons, and make bad decisions for the worst reasons.

But it starts out so great! Clarke and Lexa ride to Arkadia with the body of the Ice Queen on a cart behind them. They smile and adorably argue about who brought the most good to their people. But then it’s all ruined when they come across a graveyard of Lexa’s army. Indra is bleeding out from a gunshot wound. As Clarke tries to stop the bleeding, Indra tells them that Pike and Bellamy attacked the army while they slept, executed all the wounded except for her so that she could deliver a message. This land belongs to Arkadia now.

Bellamy takes at least a semi-pause about their methods when he learns that Pike intends to clear out a nearby village to secure a 15km border around Arkadia. This self-reflection lasts about five minutes until Pike reaffirms Bellamy’s greatest fears. This is the only way they can keep Arkadia safe, because there are bound to be retaliations. Pike has become quite the fascist. He is suspicious of Jaha who returns to spread the Good Word about The City of Light. Also, he takes all the grounders from medical bay and Lincoln, a dissenter, and puts them into internment. He literally uses the word internment, as if he never read a history book. Pike also keeps his massacre secret from the public, except for those closest to him. It’s all infuriating and scary and kind of on-the-nose.

Lexa, on her side, does want to retaliate. She wants to summon the 12 armies to wipe out Arkadia for breaking their coalition and the massacre. Clarke asks for more time. If she can speak to Bellamy and get him to convince Pike, everything will be fine. Even Octavia, who has snuck away to help, doesn’t think this will work. Lexa finally recognizing Octavia, I think, and it’s so cute. They should be war buddies.

But when Clarke and Bellamy do meet again, it is not a good reunion. She’s disappointed in him, of course, but knows he’ll do the right thing (argue for peace). Bellamy instead blames her. They’re already in a war, he says, they’ve been in a war since the grounders murdered 37 of his friends when they landed. Instead of Clarke arguing about the cold-hard math of it all, like I want her too, she feels really guilty. And, I’ll admit, she does need to reflect on her part in this too, but he can’t seriously blame her for all his bad decisions, can he? He does. He handcuffs her to bring her to Pike “for her own good.” There are few sentences that make me as mad as that one.

Octavia is there to free her, though! O takes out the guard, Clarke zaps Bellamy unconscious and they flee back to Lexa’s camp. Indra is recovering and Lexa is pacing in her tent. Unfortunately, Clarke doesn’t have good news. Lexa is ready for her vengeance, but Clarke pleads to stop the cycle of violence. If they’re to have true peace, she can’t march her army into another war. Then she makes puppy eyes at Lexa and Lexa agrees. She did vow fealty after all. She declares that blood must not have blood. My only question is what they’ll do (or not do) when Pike clears that village.

Meanwhile, Jaha is like a street-corner preacher with Alie whispering in his ear about who to recruit. This reminds me a lot of Six in Baltar’s brain in Battlestar Galactica. She’s even wearing a red dress, you guys. Jaha and Alie pounce on Raven, who is in unimaginable pain and has been benched from duty. She’s the most vulnerable, so of course Jaha hands her the magic pill to take her pain away. She does take it and immediately feels better. But at what cost?

Broad City

Thursdays on Comedy Central at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Riese

Okay even though Heather said Broad City is my favorite show, it’s actually not my FAVORITE show, but I sure do like it a lot. I like how Ilana and Abby are rude and gross and unapologetically horny and also have a stronger relationship with each other than with any dude. I love that the only main dude on this show, Lincoln, is like the only dude on TV that I don’t hate.
​
Season Three, like the two that came before it, is already weird and funny and controversial and sometimes offensive in a bad way and sometimes just gloriously un-PC in a good way. But one of the show’s storylines was especially present in “Two Chainz”: the story of a bisexual girl in love with her best friend. There was a reference to Ilana being bisexual in the Season Three trailer, but that clip didn’t show up in this episode. (A minor miracle, as often trailers tend to include the totality of queer references while pretending to set us up for more.) Regardless, the opening montage of what the girls have been up to in their bathrooms since we last hung out includes a post-Pride afternoon that finds Ilana necking with a girl in a Pride flag.
​

​When Ilana loses her bike-chain key in the gutter and decides to just fuck it and go to the warehouse sale, and then Abbi suggests that they pee first, Ilana is like, “Oof, smart and sexy. She is unreal, this girl.”
​
At the warehouse sale, Abby defends herself against a guy who’s opinion she wanted on her shirt who was like, “I have a girlfriend” by being like, SO DO I and pointing at Ilana. THE TEASE, ABBI, THE TEASE.

​

When Abbi rescues Ilana from getting chained to the back of a trunk, Ilana, washed over with relief and gratitude, comes out with:

Ilana: Let’s get married.
Abbi: What was that?
Ilana: What?
Abbi: You said something.
Ilana: I didn’t hear what you said.
Abbi: No you said — you said something.
Ilana: No.
Abbi: Okay.
Ilana: No.

Ilana’s been crushing on Abbi since before Broad City moved from YouTube to Comedy Central, most notably in their 2011 Valentine’s Day episode. This crush has been referenced from time to time throughout the last two seasons, including an episode where Ilana is furious to learn that Abbi kissed a girl in college after promising Ilana if she ever were to swing that way for a minute, it would be with Ilana. In Season Two, we even got an episode where Ilana fell briefly in love with her doppleganger, Adele, thus confirming Ilana’s bisexuality extended beyond her feelings for Abbi. (I loved that episode, you should read the thing I wrote about it.) But 301 laid the crush on THICK, y’all.

​”Tell me this isn’t sexual,” Ilana insists after Abbi has finally removed the bike chain from her body. Abbi rolls her eyes and tells Ilana she’s bleeding. That’s what hearts DO, Abbi. That’s what they do.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Shondaland Is Back And More Traumatic Than Ever

When I got my start writing for AfterEllen in the summer of 2008, we held all of our lesbian and bisexual pop culture news for our Friday column, Best.Lesbian.Week.Ever, and we wrote about non-gay things lesbians liked to talk about five or six times a day on our blog. Every writer produced a single story for our weekly column; it was a scramble every week to try to come up with something. The intense panic I felt on Thursday afternoons if only five lesbian/bi pop culture stories had surfaced and I hadn’t claimed one yet would practically have me breathing into a paper bag. Everything was news! Everything! Every celebrity who breathed the word “lesbian,” every time two women brushed their lips together on sweeps week. I will never in all my life forget the way my heart almost banged its way out of my chest when I stood in line at Kroger to buy Ellen and Portia’s wedding issue of People. Lesbians, in love, on the cover of a popular entertainment magazine! I cried so hard on the way home, I had to pull my car over.

The landscape of queer pop culture (and the internet) has shifted so drastically since then that the methods of 2008 are almost unrecognizable. News moves a hundred times as fast, is delivered through social media platforms more than anything else, and gay people are everywhere.

One of the most dramatic things I’ve ever watched is the evolution of queer women on TV over the last eight years. When I started writing about queer pop culture, there wasn’t a single lesbian or bisexual woman on broadcast network TV, and certainly there were no trans women. Now, it seems like queer women on TV are everywhere. On broadcast TV and network TV, on talkshows and reality shows. Shows that portray us well are nominated for all kinds of prestigious awards. And celebrities are out and about in real life, coming out on Instagram like it’s no big deal and kissing their wives and girlfriends all over the place.

It’s not just TV that has changed. When Television Without Pity closed its doors in 2014, it signaled the end of a culture of recapping that basically birthed the modern day internet. I remember thinking at the time that if a website backed by NBCUniversal couldn’t sustain play-by-play, scene-by-scene, exhaustive recaps written by some of the most skilled and celebrated TV writers the internet had ever seen, what hope did anyone else have? The way we write and talk about TV — not just “we” as in “queer women,” but “we” as in “the internet at large” — has changed almost as much as TV itself over the last several years. TWoP writers had a week to write a full recap of the shows they covered. A week. Can you even imagine?

What I’m building to is this: I have watched and written about a lot of really good queer TV over the past year. But I have also spent hundreds of hours watching and writing about TV that, in total, probably added up to about half an hour’s worth of quality queer content. Yeah, there were over 150 lesbian, bisexual and trans women on TV in 2015 — but only a fraction of those characters were written into engaging, feel-it-in-your-guts stories. We’re making solid strides, numerically. But in terms of quality, we’ve still got mountains to move. We need more leading queer women; we need more queer women of color; we need more three-dimensional trans women; we need more nuanced portrayals of queer couples; we need our sweeping, breathtaking, long-game Pam and Jim; and our short-game laughs-a-lot Cam and Mitchell.

And so we’ve decided that we’re no longer going to adhere to that old recapping model we inherited. We’re not going to write about every thing every character ever does, as long as she hinted at having a crush on another woman at some point in her life. We’re going to usher in the dawn of a new age of writing about queer women on TV.

We’re going write smart, exciting, critical analysis of queer things on TV. And we’re going to expand our coverage to engage in smart dialogue about feminist things on TV too. I can’t tell you how it pains me that I’ve spent ten hours watching Rosewood for five minutes of good gay stuff, instead of writing four awesome articles about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Person of Interest, and Supergirl. Feminist TV is about to have its day. So, going forward, you can expect to see at least one really solid, really timely, really informed TV piece per week on this website. And we’re going to write fun stuff that’ll make you giggle too!

I will be recapping Pretty Little Liars through the end of season six (and that will be the end of it, if the show doesn’t pull out of the nose-dive it’s in with Emily’s storylines), and I’ll continue recapping The Fosters. Riese will recap Faking It. And collectively we’re going to dig into Orange Is the New Black in a new way this summer. Boob(s On Your) Tube will hit our site on Tuesdays and Fridays; instead of covering everything every week, however, we’ll only be covering shows that have proven they have substantial queer content and are dedicated to being good and real with their queer audiences. We love our shows with queer guest stars, don’t get me wrong, but there are better ways for us to write about them. Shows with minimal queer content will be relegated to short round-ups in the final Boob(s On Your) Tube column of the month.

Our goal is to stop adding to the noise and getting distracted by the status quo, and to move the conversation forward so that we can move the culture forward. We’re not rewarding half-assed effort, dubious storytelling, or shows that are obviously just checking that “diversity” box. Queer TV’s getting good, we’re going to make it even better.

Grey’s Anatomy

Thursdays on ABC at 8:00 p.m.

Written by Aja

Well, it could be worse. I could be a lesbian living in Rosewood.

Meredith’s hair looks incredible. Better even than the night of the awful horrible unspeakable dinner party. You almost don’t notice the fading, still angry wound at her throat as she’s standing in front of a room full of residents, cadaver beneath her gloved hands. It isn’t just her eyes that are alert, it’s her entire body, her face; the kind of intensity most people would squirm away from. As she questions them, she narrates to the viewers at home:

“The female voice is scientifically proven to be more difficult for a male brain to register. What does this mean? It means, in this world, where men are bigger, stronger, faster, if you’re not ready to fight, the silence will kill you.”

And then we’re somewhere else, a horrific car accident with an overturned big rig has turned Karev’s carpool route into a parking lot. When a handful of fire engines and ambulances speed past, Grey and Pierce are out of the car and rushing toward the scene, with Karev shouting, “This is a bad idea” as he joins them. Seconds later they emerge from ambulances with broken patients at the entrance of Grey-Sloan Memorial. You almost miss it, but there are more terrible screams and cracking bones than usual in the ER, but it’s critical. Grey’s working on a patient in Trauma 1 with a handful of others; he’s an affable, middle-aged guy in town with his wife and kids to visit his sister, caught in the accident on the way to the Space Needle. He’s cracking corny dad jokes while they clean him up and wait for neuro, but a seizure takes him mid-sentence. After it passes, Grey moves quickly between performing tests on him, now unconscious, and making updates to his chart. Gradually the trauma room empties as the others go about their tasks, and they’re alone. Something’s off again, even though doctors are alone in rooms with patients all the time — the ambient noise never sounds like this at Grey-Sloan, but right now it’s terrifying.

The patient comes to while Grey’s back is turned, he’s silent and confused, and a temporary but violent fugue state overtakes him as she tries to calm him and guide him back to the hospital bed. It all happens seemingly in a vacuum; the room is surrounded by dozens of people who can’t hear the melee above the roar of a bustling ER, and while the ordinariness of a woman being assaulted by a man is chilling, the context is what sucks the air out of your lungs in this scene. It’s Meredith, whom we love, a woman who despite her faults and weaknesses is not ever helpless or not strong (or alone, for that matter), a woman devoted to saving lives, and she’s on the brink of having hers extinguished by a stranger in an act of senseless brutality. Only seconds ago they were doctor and patient, trading the warm and knowing smiles of doting parents, and suddenly we’re watching a scene unfold in which a white woman is viciously attacked by a black man twice her size.

Everything is unbearable when we return to Trauma 1. The patient is seizing on the floor a few feet behind Grey, who is beaten, unable to hear or move, whimpering on the floor. I feel actual anguish crumpling my brain into a ball and drop-kicking it off a cliff, it’s seriously too much, the dissonance of the scene with reality. Penny finds her, and in the next beat every surgeon is working over her, trying to assess her condition. Karev winces back tears with his hands on his friend. Webber is in expert crisis mode. Shepherd drops by thinking she’s just responding to a page and promptly slides down a wall to the floor in a state of shock, catatonic and broken while they slice Meredith open to drain her collapsed lung, her limbs dislocated and fractured, her brain concussed, her dislocated jaw cracked open.

(I’m weeping uncontrollably at this point and can’t get a hold of myself, so my wife makes me take a walk.)

Meredith lives. Her hearing is still lost so we, as the audience, lose ours as well. We see her self-medicate through a long and bruised recovery, her jaw wired shut, multiple casts, more surgery. She can’t hear them but she can see them all fighting around her; they argue about how to treat her, Amelia’s guilt sends her flying back into addiction, Webber plays gatekeeper and Karev keeps vigil by her side, day and night. Eventually, they take her PCA away. When Penny finally offers her a mirror, Meredith signals instead for her chart, which proves too grim for her to bear.

We find out her hearing’s returned when the silence turns to her sobbing. She improves steadily but too slowly; the patient who attacked her has already been released and wants to reach out to her, a visit from the kids is disastrous — they’re terrified when they see their mom’s mouth wired shut and Karev and Arizona reluctantly whisk them away. Desperate to be near her children again, Mere suffers a severe panic attack alone and clawing at her own chest, unable to breathe. When Penny once again finds her in distress, she takes the risk of cutting off Meredith’s wires right then and there, infuriating Avery. In what I hope is a pivotal moment in her arc, Penny roars back at him in defense of the call she’s made, in defense of her patient, and he backs off. After six weeks, Meredith is still bedridden and in a fixed rage.

On a sunny day, Webber wheels her into the light to speak of forgiveness and letting go. Mute, immobile, hurting, unable to run off again, she’s consumed with anger and despair and her own helpless needing, about all of it, everything: the attack, yes, but also Derek, Penny, Amelia, the acute misery of knowing you cannot protect your children from all pain and suffering, the relentless gift and indignity of life from a thousand shattered angles. She at last agrees to meet with the patient and his family; her wires come off and she can speak again.Amelia is 30 days sober and the two are reconciled; Meredith’s casts are removed and she is able to stand again. And after taking a moment to confront the horror of Trauma 1, Grey goes home again. She sends Karev back to Jo and holds her babies close in a messy, sun-filled pile of books and blankets on the couch, and leaves us with this:

“Don’t let fear keep you quiet. You have a voice, so use it. Speak up. Raise your hands, shout your answers, make yourself heard. Whatever it takes, just find your voice and when you do, fill the damn silence.”

How to Get Away With Murder

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Written by Sadie

What Would Slytherin Dumbledore Do?

It’s that time again, time to almost kind of sort of get away with murder. This week brought to you by feverdreams! Seriously, there is a good portion of this episode that may or may not have even occurred, so I’ll just get into it. Two weeks have passed since the incident in the mansion; Annalise is sleeping off her gunshot wound when a distraught woman who heard about how much of a badass Annalise was knocks on her door and basically shoves a baby into her arms. Annalise, being a recent gunshot victim and busy full-time attorney, declines to accept the responsibility of a child but the woman insists and runs away.

Annalise calls Bonnie to come and get the baby so she can finish her work. She hands them off to Bonnie and we see that i’’s just a clump of blankets. Womp womp! It was all a feverdream, or drug-induced hallucination, or perhaps Annalise stepped into a Pensieve without knowing it, it’s hard to tell. Bonnie decides to drug Annalise further in order to stop hearing about the baby and get back to whatever shady scheme she’ll be involved in later in the season

Meanwhile the rest of the team is business as usual, dealing with the aftermath of the event at the mansion. Asher is still obsessed with finding out what happened to his dad. Michaela tries some of her smoothest talking yet but fails because almost no one’s falling for any of the team’s BS anymore. And Annalise’s 911 call is thrown out of court, forcing her to testify.

At this point in the show it’s impossible to tell who is on who’s side and what the ultimate endgame is, but Annalise convinces the brother who then convinces his sister to take the heat and face a smaller punishment.

A not-all-together there Annalise stumbles her way into court and begins to do what she does best: manipulate everyone around her. It’s unclear whether or not it’s intentional but she fumbles over her words, appearing to almost lose the case and manages to get all of her testimony thrown out.

The sister then confesses to everything and it seems that we are done with these psudo-incestual lovers, at least for now.

Annalise comes home to find Wes laying in her bed, with a bottle of pills, contemplating taking his own life. Wes confronts Annalise and then comes at her, so she threatens him with a statue, which we all know in this universe is a pretty common weapon, so you know she means business.

Now we see ten years earlier: Annalise is pregnant and meets that same distraught woman from before. She is with her son, Wes or Christoph. So who’s baby was the women trying to give away? was it Annalise’s? Where is it now? How is Eve connected? Did Eve and Annalise decide to have a baby together (please be the case!)? Did any of this episode actually happen at all? Will we find out next week? Probably not.

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

Is she a woman or a warrior?!

Every day, she’s both.

The next day after Fealty Night, Lexa and Clarke are back in the ceremony room with all the other ambassadors sitting in their respective seats. Guards bring in the Ice Queen who looks at Clarke with absolute disgust. Titus wants to sentence the Queen to death immediately, but before he can, the Queen calls a Vote of No Confidence. When, in these hundreds years of surviving and building that giant tower did they learn Robert’s Rules of Order? One by one all the ambassadors vote. Except Clarke. If the vote is not unanimous, that means Lexa is safe. But the Queen challenges Lexa to a champion’s duel to the death. Her champion is her son Roan, who is inexplicably out of jail again, but Lexa won’t pick a champion: she will fight Roan herself. Clarke is rightfully horrified.

Lexa has some confidence and swagger we haven’t seen before. If she wins, everything is safe. If she loses, one of her Nightblood padawans will take her place. We find out that nightblood literally means their blood is dark as night, and that’s how Grounders know they’ve been marked to be trained for commandership.

Lexa has prepared for both outcomes, but she definitely thinks she’ll win. She’s hurt Clarke doesn’t have the same faith. But Clarke doesn’t understand not being afraid of death. So she pleads with Lexa to find another way, pleads with Titus to convince her, pleads with Roan to defy his mother, and eventually tries to assassinate the queen herself. “For her people” she says, yeah okay. Even though Lexa had one of her padawans, the best fighter from last week’s episode, promise to protect the 13th clan. Sure, Clarke.

Eventually, Clarke runs out of ideas. Lexa knows her, and knows she just wants to fix everything. But she can’t fix this. Lexa has to go through with it, and have faith that everything will go according to fate. Clarke refuses and refuses to watch her die. Lexa goes out on the battlefield and she and Roan take their swords. It’s an intense battle but Lexa is savage. She is not going to let this prince take her seat. It looks for a second that she might lose and Clarke, who showed after all, looks crazy worried “for her people.” Lexa knocks Roan down, but throws a spear through the Ice Queen. She says “The queen is dead, long live the King.” This is our Heda and I swear fealty a thousand times.

Would you be my Valentine … for as long as we both shall live?

That night, Lexa goes to Clarke’s bedroom and they’re both wearing really floaty nightgowns. Why do I have a tummy ache? You can see Lexa’s long legs and tattoos and I don’t know how Clarke can concentrate on wrapping a bandage around Lexa’s hand. Ahem. Lexa wants to thank Clarke (yeah she does) for having her back. Clarke repeats she did it for her people. But I think Lexa knows the truth because she smiles a little before saying good night to her “ambassador” and leaving. Lexa will earn a place back in Clarke’s heart, even if it takes a while. She can already see it happening.

In the dark ages of television there were only straight couples. Each show had one, and this couple would have “book-end” scenes. They start the action in the beginning and then sum up and recover from the action at the end. It’s still like this today.

For three episodes in a row, Lexa and Clarke have had a book-end scene. Never have I felt that a queer relationship has been given so much respect and importance in a mainstream show. This is our Book End Couple. It’s going to be a slow-burn, and I have been waiting for it for a really long time.

On another note, Arkadia is going through some shit. Pike and his Farm Station henchpeople won’t stop blaming grounders for the Ice Nation attack on Mount Weather. Pike quickly recruits a grieving Bellamy to his cause and they plan to murder a Grounder army Lexa sent to protect them. Strike them first before they strike, Pike says. Lincoln and Octavia could leave, but Lincoln wants to be the example of a “good Grounder.” Unfortunately, no one backs him up.

Kane and Abby stop the attack, but Pike has stirred up so much anti-Grounder fury that he is elected Chancellor instead of Kane. His first order of business is to destroy Lexa’s grounder army. I’m mostly disappointed and infuriated with Bellamy. He’s spent more time on the ground, he saw what Finn did, and he was literally patting Lincoln on the back weeks ago. But in the absence of true leadership (like Clarke for instance), Bellamy will follow anyone talking loud enough. And Pike yells a lot.

Lastly, Jasper has reached Peak Insufferability. Even Monty decided he wasn’t going to put up with this shit anymore. So hopefully Jasper gets it together. We finally meet Miller’s boyfriend for a second and he’s super cute. Let’s hope Miller and his boyfriend aren’t on Pike’s side, because I don’t think Heda and her Ambassador will put up with Pike for long.

New Boob(s On Your) Tube Schedule (For Now)

TUESDAYS

Jane the Virgin (airs Monday)
Scream (airs Wednesday, returns Apr. 20)
Younger (airs Thursday)
Top Chef (airs Thursday)

FRIDAYS

How to Get Away With Murder (airs Thursday, written by Sadie)
Grey’s Anatomy (airs Thursday, written by Aja)
The 100 (airs Thursday, written by Karly)
Empire (airs Wednesday, returns March 30, written by Carolyn W.)

ONCE A MONTH

Once Upon a Time* (airs Sunday, written by Kaelyn)
Black Sails* (airs Sunday)
The Walking Dead* (airs Sunday)
Vampire Diaries* (airs Thursday)
Grandfathered* (airs Tuesdays)
Arrow* (airs Thursday)
Legends of Tomorrow* (airs Thursday)
Code Black* (airs Wednesday)
Broad City* (airs Wednesday, written by Riese)

* When there’s queer stuff.

“New Girl” Joins The Exciting Trend of Meaningful Sexual Fluidity On TV

Once upon a time, the Lesbian Kiss Episode was an unfortunate trend on television. In the Lesbian Kiss Episode, a character previously thought to be straight would lock lips with some (usually) random woman who showed up only to then disappear almost immediately after. It happened on Friends, Sex And The City (twice), The O.C., Smallville, Desperate Housewives, Charlie’s Angels (the reboot), Heroes, Dirt, Alley McBeal and on and on. Hell, the LBK still happens to this day: On Awkward, Tamara’s brief and soon forgotten kiss with a girl while visiting colleges seems to fit the bill. Same with Bird and Madison on Finding Carter. And Barbara and Tabitha on Gotham. 

Lesbian Kiss Episodes are done entirely for the ratings (many examples coincide directly with Sweeps Week, an antiquated method of Nielsen ratings tracking). These shows aren’t interested in exploring sexuality or even in really including queer characters in their stories. It’s usally a stunt, and the characters who arrived suddenly and identified as queer were only around long enough to initiate the kiss and leave.

Recently, however, television has been moving toward a more inclusive and meaningful portrayal of sexual fluidity. This year, Annalise Keating kissed a woman on How To Get Away With Murder, and it meant something. Clarke kissed Lexa on The 100, and it was just the beginning of a whole world of queer possibilities for the post-apocalyptic drama. This week, New Girl similarly adopted a very casual attitude about sexual fluidity. These shows have all brought more depth and nuance to queerness than the majority of Lesbian Kiss Episodes have ever achieved.

New Girl recently hit its stretch of episodes that won’t feature leading lady Zooey Deschanel, who took maternity leave during production on the show’s fifth season. First, the show filled the Jess-less space with a revolving door of temporary new roommates, thanks to Nick Miller listing Apartment 4D on airBNB. Tonight’s “Reagan” introduces, well, Reagan, a New Girl new girl played by Megan Fox. In her first scene, we learn that Reagan is a smart, tough pharmaceutical rep. In her second, we learn that she is bisexual. Reagan also very casually informs us that she and Cece hooked up at the MTV beach house back in the day.

While Cece’s dating history has been briefly explored on the show, this is the first time New Girl has really dug into it with significant screen time. Reagan and Cece are very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Schmidt, Winston, and Nick are shocked by the news and are predictably gross about it. My guess is Schmidt doesn’t want to know all the details of any of Cece’s past hookups, be they with men or women. But Reagan is quick to call out his reaction as “boring,” directly attacking the heterosexist perspective Schmidt embodies in this instance.

The episode itself avoids falling into “boring” traps with this storyline. Schmidt wants to make a big deal out of the fact that Reagan and Cece hooked up, but Reagan and Cece don’t, and the episode doesn’t either. Instead, it’s presented as an incidental detail about the characters and their relationship to one another. “Reagan” doesn’t fixate on the revelation or present it as some crazy twist. Instead of being about this past hookup, “Reagan” uses the reveal to shed new light on Cece’s romantic history without being self-congratulatory about it.

The only real misstep comes at the end of the episode: The tag milks Cece and Reagan’s history for cheap laughs that appeal to Schmidt’s male gaze. It isn’t perfect, but “Reagan” still immediately struck me as an important episode of New Girl.

I freaked out when Reagan mentioned her past with Cece, for much different reasons than the guys did. Just two weeks ago, I got drinks with my friend Rohin and we started listing off all the queer Desi women on television we could think of (it’s a very short list). Now Cece, an Indian character played by Hannah Simone, who is half-white/half-Indian (like me!), has a sexual history with a woman. And for all we know, there could be other women from Cece’s past! The show leaves it pretty open, and Cece doesn’t downplay what happened between her and Reagan by saying it was a phase or an experiment. And I never got the sense that New Girl was trying to pull off a Lesbian Kiss Episode stunt.

For one, Cece and Reagan don’t even kiss in the episode. They simply talk about their history openly and move on in a way that felt more casual than dismissive. It helps, too, that Reagan is undeniably her own character. She doesn’t just exist in terms of Cece. Her storyline, in fact, touches everyone in the apartment. Reagan is more than her sexuality, and she’s more than her sexual past with Cece.

The reveal reminded me a lot of the second season premiere of How To Get Away With Murder, when Famke Janssen’s Eve was introduced as an ex-girlfriend of Viola Davis’ Annalise Keating. Though that storyline ended up being a little more significant than Reagan and Cece’s reunion, it unfolded in a similar way. We previously knew about some of Annalise’s relationships with men, including her garbage dead ex-husband, but the introduction of Eve was the first time How To Get Away With Murder acknowledged that Annalise has dated a woman. It seems that Reagan and Cece had a much more casual thing going on, but both storylines show just how easy it is to write queer storylines, identities, and experiences into a show: You just do it. Really. It’s that simple.

So many TV characters are assumed to be straight simply because heterosexuality is the default sexuality in the real world. Sure, up until this point, all we’ve known about Cece’s dating history is that she tends to date terrible men, but that doesn’t make it random for the writers to now give her this backstory with Reagan. Cece has never explicitly identified as straight or queer prior to “Reagan,” and she doesn’t explicitly choose any label in the episode, either.

Television writers shouldn’t necessarily limit themselves by always confining characters to fixed identities. Annalise similarly doesn’t make any definitive statements about her sexuality, but the rekindling of her relationship with Eve makes it very clear that she has feelings for her. Characters should, like people, be allowed to exist on spectrums. If one character has only had love interests of the opposite sex, who’s to say they can’t suddenly fall for someone of the same sex? And that doesn’t need to be some sort of twist. It can be as casual and unembellished as the reveals in HTGAWM and New Girl.

The CW’s The 100 pulls off this kind of inclusive storytelling on a much larger scale. The show’s heroine, Clarke, has had romantic, and sexual, storylines with men and women. The 100‘s showrunner, Jason Rothenberg, openly acknowledges the fluid sexualities of his characters. In an interview with Buzzfeed News, Rothenberg explained that Clarke likely won’t identify as bisexual because labels don’t really exist in the world he has created for the show. “I get that labels are very, very important in our world, and you should be proud of who you are, and you should be able to state it proudly, and, ‘Fuck you if you don’t agree with the way I live my life,’ but that’s just not the way it is in the show,” Rothenberg said.

Rothenberg isn’t trying to minimize the power that labels can have in the real world, and he admits that The 100 presents an idealized societal attitude toward sexuality. “It’s a little bit idealized, obviously, ’cause it’s not like our world, where there are still battles to be fought on those fronts,” he told Buzzfeed. “But the battle for who you want to sleep with, who you love, is over in my post-apocalypse,” Rothenberg said. “Nobody is giving you a hard time in the world of this show … No one’s parents are upset to find out their son is gay. That’s just not a thing.”

The 100 imagines a world free of homophobia, a world where labels don’t really hold meaning. Rothenberg has essentially suggested that any character on the show could be queer. Ship whoever you want! It’s all on the table! I don’t see the rest of television reaching that point any time soon — especially television that takes place in the real world and not the very queer world of The 100.

But there’s no real reason other shows can’t similarly allow characters to be fluid in the same way so many people in real life are. How To Get Away With Murder takes place in present-day Philadelphia, but the fact that Annalise doesn’t explicitly label her sexuality makes just as much sense as it does on The 100. Television doesn’t necessarily need to draw these lines in every case anymore. Labels used to hold much more significance on television when queer characters were more rare. They were an easy way to achieve visibility. But more subtle storytelling can be just as effective, as well as true to the way many people think about their sexuality in the real world — as long as writers are using it for meaningful character development, and not as a ratings grab or a way to tick the “diversity” check box.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “The 100” Swears Lesbian Fealty

It’s only Tuesday and it has already been a week for queer women on TV. You can read my full recap of The Fosters right here and an in-depth analysis of Jane the Virgin‘s season two queerness here. Last night, New Girl revealed that Cece is bisexual and has had a past relationship with Megan Fox, and we’ll have a piece up about that (and how it relates to How to Get Away With Murder and The 100) first thing tomorrow morning. In the meantime, let’s talk about all the other gay TV shenanigans, including Clarke and Lexa and their eternal love.

Younger

Wednesdays on TV Land at 10:00 p.m.

It was one of my least favorite kind of Younger episodes this week: All Liza and Josh, and no Maggie or Kelsey or Diana. Actually, Maggie did show up for a hot second, look super fetching in her lounging robe, to advise Liza not to go to New Jersey. Liza did not listen to her. She and Josh went to meet some of Liza’s old friends and she accidentally got high and I accidentally looked up a thing on Urban Dictionary I wish I’d never even heard of. One and a half stars. Needs more Maggie and Lauren.

Arrow

Wednesdays on The CW at 8:00 p.m.

Nyssa was back on Arrow this week! She broke free from her jail cell at League of Assassins HQ and activated a bunch of sleeper agents and murdered a bunch of butt heads, and then she be-bopped on down to Starling City to make a little deal with Oliver. You know how both she and Sara were came back to life from the Lazarus Pit? Well, Sara was resurrected like a whole bloodthirsty person but Thea was resurrected as a half bloodthirsty person and now she’s dying again. Nyssa’s got the cure and she’s willing to give it to him, for the bargain price of him murdering Merlyn.

Oh! And also she met and hung out with Katana for a little bit. Maybe they’ll fall in love.

Top Chef

Thursdays on Top Chef at 10:00 p.m.

Last week’s Top Chef was part one of Restaurant Wars. Karen was a team captain and her first choice was Marjorie, duh, and their strategy was to serve two delicious meals and let The Bros self-destruct on each other. It was a good plan. Marjorie was the front of the house for the lunch seating (which took place during episode one), and her only misstep was the first time she wasn’t at the hostess table was when the judges showed up. But also she did an awesome trick to get people to move from their tables so she could seat the second round of guests, by asking them to follow her away from their tables for a free glass of champagne. That trick also works on kittens with Whiskas Temptations when they won’t get off the bookshelf! My girlfriend clapped and giggled like a child when Marjorie said, “I like control.” Because when a woman says that it’s awesome because they’re going to get called a bitch for it and they do it anyway (and a man never has to say he likes control because of course he does and he almost always has it).

For her dish for lunch, Karen makes an Asian-marinated flank-steak that the judges thought was delicious and gutsy. Marjorie shut down all the clunky suggestions Isaac made for lunch and turned out a beet salad that was pretty okay, but maybe a little uninspired.
The Bros, as I mentioned, imploded in a cacophony of egos. It was beautiful.

And it was to be continued.

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

This was the best episode so far of the season and perhaps of the series. A week has passed since Clarke vowed to kill Lexa and she’s been stewing on her anger since. She’s pacing in her sweet prison aka very comfortable bedroom and Lexa enters and gives her a proposition: get the Sky People to join the coalition as the 13th clan and they’ll be safe. All she has to do is bow before Lexa. Clarke refuses because she knows that Lexa only wants Clarke to bow before her as a sign of strength, not unity. “Go float yourself” Clarke says. Lexa hopes this is a maybe.

Kane and Abby have gone to Polis for this Summit to negotiate a treaty with Lexa for long-lasting peace. Kane has grown a gray wisdom beard, or that’s what I imagine it is. He is respectful to the locals, has become fluent in Trigedasleng and all he can focus on is what this peace can mean. Abby is only thinking about getting Clarke home safe, and remarks that Kane should be Chancellor. Fine, but Clarke will always be the leader of SkaiKru.

At Arkadia, Bellamy, Raven and Bellamy’s girlfriend, Gina, head up to Mount Weather to work. Farm Station has moved in and they’re looking very comfortable. Shortly after Bellamy and Raven get settled, Echo, the girl who was held captive next to Bellamy in Mount Weather, is brought in by Arkadia guards. She says the Summit is a trap and the Ice Nation is going to kill everyone. Pike, leader of Farm Station and inexplicably taking control, decides Bellamy, Octavia and he are going to go to Polis while Raven arms the Mount Weather missiles. Why why why.

In Polis, Clarke meets the Ice Nation prince, Roan, again. He promises her that if she kills Lexa, Clarke can truly be free. At the same time, Lexa’s advisor, Titus, tells Lexa she has to kill Clarke to show the Ice Queen she’s strong. First of all, shut up, the both of you guys. Still, Clarke gets Lexa alone and holds a knife to her throat. But her eyes fill with tears and she can’t go through with it. Lexa apologizes for probably the first time in her commandership, and does only what she can, she says “I release you.” Okay that’s from Carol, but that’s what how the scene went truly.

Instead, Clarke decides she will join Lexa’s coalition as the 13th clan. There’s a really formal ceremony in Lexa’s tower. Lexa has hired a very beautiful woman to sing and up until that point, I think it’s the gayest thing Lexa has ever done. Clarke enters all in Grounder gear, with her face painted and a tattoo on her arm. She kneels before Lexa and the representatives from the 12 clans follow suit. Everything is going according to plan.

Until Pike, Bellamy and Octavia crash the party to save everyone from this “imminent threat.” Echo has abandoned them, obviously, because this was a diversion. Echo was actually leading Arkadia’s warriors away from Mount Weather, where an Ice Nation assassin has snuck in.

Raven was trying to figure out the missile codes but has a crisis of confidence. Sinclair reassures her like so many dudes have done in the past. Sigh. This tender moments means they completely miss this assassin stabbing Gina a million times and rigging Mount Weather to explode. Raven and Sinclair narrowly escape the bomb and report to Bellamy what has happened. The Ice Nation representative claims responsibility and Lexa has him and Roan arrested. There’s general chaos and, dammit, things were going so well.

The Sky People go back to Arkadia to deal with the casualties and secure their borders. Clarke stays behind to be a representative from the 13th clan (and to “make sure Lexa keeps her word” uh huh). Whoever blew up Mount Weather knew the launch codes for their missiles. We find out at the end it’s the Guard that was captured by the Sky People in season 2. Asshole.

So Lexa and Clarke are back in the ceremony room, except everyone else has left. Clarke is still a little confrontational when Lexa thanks her for staying in Polis. “If you betray me again…” Clarke warns. But Lexa assures her she will never. Then she kneels in front of a stunned Clarke and says my future wedding vows “I swear fealty to you, Clarke kom SkaiKru. I vow to treat your needs as my own and your people as my people.” Clarke reaches out and helps Lexa to her feet and they stand there looking at each other. The way Lexa looks Clarke as she speaks the words, the way she looks away when she touches Clarke’s hand, and the way we absolutely know she would never do this for anyone but Clarke still affects me the same way days later. I haven’t felt this moved by a scene between two women in a very long time. It’s too bad the Ice Queen is intending to kill them both but that’s a problem for next Thursday.

Legends of Tomorrow

Thursdays on The CW at 8:00 p.m.

I suppose it’s not surprising that Sara’s getting so much story and screen time in the early episodes of Legends; we did know her for a long time and pitch quite a collective fit when she was murdered on Arrow. This week’s episode treads a little bit of old ground, but for the first time on this show. Sara has the bloodlust, remember, from getting resurrected in the Lazarus Pit, and this week it flares up and she almost does a bunch of unnecessary killings. But! She does not, and more even than learning to control her murder desires, she actually convinces Rip that he needs a team and he’s gotta stop trying to do everything all by himself and she can help him — they can all help him — if he will just relax and give up a little bit of control and trust them. He decides that is exactly what he will do.

Next week they’re going to the ’80s, and I honestly cannot wait to see what Sara wears. The period costuming is excellent on this show. So cheesy and so fun.

Black Sails

Saturday on Starz at

Well, Max and Anne broke up this week. It was inevitable but also kind of sad. Anne’s in love with Max. Max is in love with the island. And also she doesn’t know it yet, but Eleanor is thiiiiiis close to reaching Nassau’s shores. Anne and Max have a really lovely breakup, though. Max shares a part of her childhood with Anne, about how she was a slave and she saw her father playing with and loving his “legitimate” daughter, and it made her so sad, and now she needs a hundred billion dollars in gold. Probably the sweetest thing Anne has ever done in her life is to tell Max that she trusts her to count out their gold and split it evenly between the two of them. Also it’s the saddest thing Anne has ever done.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “Younger” Goes All In On Lesbian Love In Season Two

Welcome to Boob(s On Your) Tube, now with 100% more Stef and Rachel and Mey talking about The X-Files! Also, for everyone asking where The Fosters was in this column last week, guess what: It has its own standalone recap again! Now on to this week’s TV.

The X-Files

Written by Rachel + Stef + Mey

Rachel:

The third episode in the six-episode “event” that is the X-Files reboot was wacky. Full of easter eggs and callbacks for longtime fans — the stoned teens returned! Queequeg was mentioned! Kim Manners got a headstone! — it also featured Drag Race drag queen Shangela Laquifa Wadley as a trans woman, Annabelle, who fends off a lizard monster with her handbag.

It’s not a great portrayal by any means — the character enthusiastically declares she’s “on crack,” and is maybe meant to be interpreted as a sex worker if we understand the scene to be a callback to episode “X-COPS,” in which a sex worker fends off a monster in a similar way. Also obviously not great is that she’s portrayed by a male actor — drag queens and trans women are not the same!

That’s not all though! Later on, near the end of the episode, Annabelle comes up again, when the previously mentioned lizard man says she “hit like a man” (ugh). Mulder replies that “that’s because she used to be one,” which, gross, but then Mulder also shares some much more accurate information than we’d expect from someone who once told Scully she was going to prison and “Your cellmate’s nickname is going to be Large Marge. She gonna read a lot of Gertrude Stein.” Mulder explains that Annabelle was transgender, that it’s “a very common medical procedure,” and that you don’t actually need surgery to be trans. He also explains to the lizard man, who wishes to change species, that the transgender experience isn’t the same as changing species, which is something of a relief when media so often thinks it can use transition as an “analogy” for something else.

On the whole, it could have been worse? Ultimately though all of this happened in an episode devoted pretty much entirely to zany hijinks (lizard men???), and the experiences of trans women are something to be taken seriously! So there’s that.

Stef:

Maybe in the 90s this episode would have been progressive? All things considered, the comment about Annabelle being on crack was probably the funniest part of the scene, which says a lot about how poorly presented it was. The way Mulder explained to the lizard person why the transgender experience was different from the were-lizard experience was particularly tone-deaf. It’s not that I look to The X-Files for politically correct, sensitive discourse, but it’s 2016 and surely they could have handled this slightly better.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to see Mulder and Scully and their incredible chemistry on screen again, but this episode was almost like a parody of the already-ridiculous comical monster episodes we saw in the original series. The show is so proud of itself, so impressed with its cleverness, that it’s actually less entertaining than it might have been.

On the plus side, Scully straight-up stole a dog.

Mey:

It’s good that it seems like the X-Files tried to do better with it’s depiction of trans women by having Mulder explain trans issues in a somewhat informed way. However there are enough trans women in TV and Movies and online who are speaking out about what good trans representation looks like that just trying to do better isn’t enough.  This episode of The X-Files was better than many TV shows when it comes to trans representation, but that doesn’t mean that it was good enough.

Younger

Wednesdays on TV Land at 10:00 p.m.

Every other bus in New York City has an ad for Younger plastered on its side right now, and it promises exactly what this show is delivering in its second season: An actual edge to TV Land’s scripted programming. (“Bolder. Wiser. Sexier.”) It was obviously an experiment last year when it arrived next to Hot in Cleveland and The Exes. What could the creator of Sex and the City do with a comedy sandwiched between reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond? And while the show did push the boat way out by TV Land’s standards, it was still exceptionally tame compared to most scripted TV on cable networks. Not anymore!

“Like a Boss” opens with Maggie and Lauren recovering from a romp, all breathless and sweaty. (A far cry from the closed-mouth kiss they shared for a nanosecond last season). Lauren kisses Maggie and bites her chin and is just so psyched to be sleeping with a 40-year-old lesbian instead of a 20-year-old man. (Hear, hear!)

Lauren: I have never been this sexually in synch with somebody before. It’s like you know exactly which buttons to push on my body, without me having to tell you; I normally have to be so verbal. Don’t you agree we’re so sexually in synch? And that’s why, last night, I decided to be gender monogamous.
Maggie: What? With me?
Lauren: Yes, from this point on, you will be the only woman I sleep with.
Maggie: You know, at this point in your life, you should really keep your options open.
Lauren: Why? I have everything I want right here!
Maggie: You know, you remind me of myself at your age. I was always crazy in love with someone. Usually the wrong one. But you need to learn to protect your heart.
Lauren: Why? You don’t protect your heart. You put it right here. [points at a tattoo on Maggie’s chest] Who’s Belinda? Were you very, very much in love?
Maggie: Enough snuggling!

I mean, “gender monogamous” is weird and Darren Starr doesn’t exactly have a great reputation for writing bisexual women, but I’m withholding judgement to see where this goes because it’s very sweet. Maggie actually is still at least a little bit hung up on her ex, who is married now with a bunch of kids who look exactly the same, posing in polos on a wooden fence on her Facebook profile photo. (“Pumpkin spice hell,” Maggie calls it.) So my guess is she’s going to make a guest appearance at some point this season. And Lauren is really, really into Maggie. She even agrees to help Liza with a work emergency if Liza will try to talk Maggie into dropping her prickly non-committal fling thing and actually give a relationship with Lauren a chance.

I feel really happy that Maggie is getting more to do so far this season, and that Lauren became a series regular; it helps fold both of them into the larger narrative of the show more seamlessly. One of my main complaints with season one was how fractured the storylines were between Liza’s work life, romantic life, and home life. This season has gone a long way toward remedying that issue. And it’s giving Maggie a story with real emotional resonance and actual stakes. There’s still plenty of SATC-style silliness, but the tone has evolved into something that’s really landing with me.

Top Chef

Thursdays on Top Chef at 10:00 p.m.

Karen! Marjorie! Karen! Marjorie! There are only two women left on this season of Top Chef, but Karen says she and Marjorie are going to sweep the whole thing. I believe her! This week’s Quickfire Challenge was to plate junk food in a way that looked cool on Instagram, and Karen crushed that one, winning immunity that she didn’t even need with a pink icing playground. The Elimination Challenge happened at an event called Beefsteak that was basically a thousand men in tuxedos sitting around eating meat off the bone and chortling about being cavemen. Marjorie made pickles and rolls, and Tom said she’s the literal best baker in the history of Top Chef. Do you want to know who she credits? My beloved Mary Berry from The Great British Bake Off! Both Karen and Marjorie survived the week, and I’m cheering for them to slowly pick off the male chefs, one-by-one, like the dynamic duo of Melissa and Mey from season 12. #TopMisandry

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

When I heard Lexa was coming back this week, I was looking forward to this episode with finale-level anxiety. But most of the episode involved Arkadia Sky People reuniting with the people of Farm Station (Monty’s mom!), who have survived by the skin of their teeth killing every Grounder they see. So that’s going to cause some tension when half the best people are Grounders.

We get a peak into The City of Light, which seems like a virtual reality like the Matrix. Jaha has gone full-on cult leader so Murphy and Emori (girl from the desert in s2) understandably flee. Listen, we shouldn’t have to explain to Jaha and his henchmen that none of these utopias have ever worked in any story. Okay, back to the best part:

Clarke is brought before Lexa by the Ice Nation bounty hunter who captured her, or Vane from Black Sails. I’ve only seen two episodes of that show, but I will continue to call him Vane. But in The 100, he is Prince of Ice Nation, son of the Queen. I can’t wait until we meet the Ice Queen. Lexa quickly dismisses everyone in the room to speak to Clarke. While Clarke is dirty, wild and pissed off, Lexa is clean, calm, and the most beautiful we’ve ever seen her. She apologizes for the secrecy, but she couldn’t allow Clarke to fall into the hands of the Ice Queen. Remember, the Ice Queen was the one who brutalized and murdered Costia.

Clarke, to put it mildly, is still mad about Mount Weather. She literally spits in Lexa’s face and vows to kill her as Lexa’s guards drag her away. If anyone else on this entire earth had done that, Lexa would slice them up like roast beef. But this is Clarke, and Lexa just looks disappointed about it as she stands on the balcony of her tall tower. Lonely is the head that wears the crown. Their reunion was not as romantic as I had hoped, but it’s only the second episode.

Legends of Tomorrow

Thursdays on The CW at 8:00 p.m.

My dear friend Valerie Anne, the world’s leading expert on Nyssa al Ghul, said that Legends of Tomorrow is a little bit of a mess, but a good-hearted one, and one that gets Sara “White Canary” Lance more than Arrow ever did — and, as usual, she’s right. Early reviews of Legends made comparisons to Guardians of the Galaxy, and that was right too. Rip Hunter, Time Master and former Mr. Amy Pond, assembles a ragtag team of superheroes and supervillains to dance around on the space-time continuum and keep everyone in the past and present and future safe from Vandal Savage.

A little push (and new costume) from Laurel helps Sara embrace her role as part of that team. Although, to be honest, if someone had told her she was going to get to wear different period-based outfits every week and ultimately make out with Ali Liebert, she probably wouldn’t have needed even a nudge in that direction. Yes, Sara is bisexual right out of the gate, no doubt about it, as she makes clear in the pilot episode when she says a female bartender is much more her type than the oaf who’s hitting on her. It was a nice piece of confirmation about whether or not Legends was going to completely ignore her past relationship with Nyssa and/or push the narrative that Nyssa was the only woman Sara was ever into.

It’s shaping up to be a new decade/villain of the week in an overarching season dedicated to a single Big Bad. Legends is still finding its feet, but it’s having fun doing it.

Black Sails

Saturdays at 9:00 p.m.

Damn, y’all. I forgot how bloody this show is. I also forgot how gay it is. Season three kicks off with a hardcore murder (by pirates of people who prosecute pirates) and also an impending queer love triangle. You’ll remember that Max and Anne have teamed up with Jack to get their hands on a quadrillion dollars worth of gold that’s being held in a fort they cannot penetrate. You’ll also remember that Eleanor, Nassau’s once and future queen, has been turned over to some vengeance-seeking asshats and is on her way to be executed. In the off-season, Anne fell more deeply in love with Max and Jack got even more jealous. Max’s main thing is the gold, and so she smooches Anne and coos lovingly in her ear, and then releases her to Jack because Jack’s not any use to her if he’s sitting around like a petulant clod. Anne is sad. But she’s Anne. Anne Bonney. She’ll do some murders and feel better. Out on the sea, Eleanor has been rescued by a dude she’s sure to out-Slytherin any episode now, and is, in fact, on her way back to the island where Max is still secretly pining away for her.

Whatever happens, it’s sure to be a bloodbath!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Scissoring Foreshadowing on “Jane the Virgin,” Actual Scissoring on “The 100”

Teevee is back! Teevee is back! Teevee has come home to our loving arms once more, to gift us with post-apocalyptic women kissing each other (and I mean really kissing each other), and resurrected time traveling queer superheroes learning their way, and real live queer chef repping women in Broville, and my beloved Jane the Virgin introducing a scissoring painting into the mix. Boob(s On Your) Tube is returning today, so you can catch up with all your gay ladies on the telly on Tuesdays and Fridays. Let’s do that right now.

Jane the Virgin

Mondays on The CW at 8:00 p.m. 

I always get a little worried about Jane the Virgin when its on one of its hiatuses because the formula that makes this show work is so weird and specific and I feel scared that the writers or network will mess with one of the components and throw the whole thing off — but nope! Every time it comes back, it just gets better. Last night’s winter premiere was all about parent/child relationships. Jane’s inability to let Mateo cry himself to sleep. Petra and her mom each trying to convince the cops the other one stabbed a hitman to death in their hotel suite. (“The murder weapon was my mother’s hook!” “Well, no one knows where that is.” “Because she had that one removed last month!”) Rogelio finding out his dad’s gay (and that his parents have been keeping it a secret from him for 40 years).

The gay dad storyline had the potential to invoke all sorts of gay panic tropes, especially because Rogelio is such a manly guy with a manly reputation, but no one in the family was upset to learn about it. Alba’s sympathy was with his dad because he had to stay closeted for so long, and she’s just glad he’s getting to live an authentic life now. (“I have a gay friend at church and he explained everything to me.”) Rogelio assumes, of course, that his mother won’t tell him his dad’s gay because she doesn’t want to upset him, so he stages a Big Gay Dinner with gay guests and the promise that Ricky Martin will stop by for dessert and a prayer thanking God for the food and also for love in all it’s various forms: men who love women, for example; and men who love men; and women who love women. It turns out, though, that his mom didn’t want Rogelio to know because she didn’t want it to really be true.

Luisa pulled all the themes of the episode together, for once! Susanna loses a coin toss with Michael, so she’s forced to go talk to Luisa about her mom and suss out more information about whether or not she’s the infamous Miami crime lord, Mutter. Michael calls Susanna Luisa’s girlfriend and she rolls her eyes, but then! When Susanna sits down to talk to Luisa, she holds her hand and opens up to her about her own sad childhood. Luisa knows Susanna’s trying to use her crush as leverage for evidence, and for some reason, calling it out actually has the effect of roping Susanna into the crush too! They sit real close on the couch and do some research about Luisa’s mom, and when they pull apart, there’s a literal painting of two women scissoring in the background. Seeing that picture made me laugh harder than I have in I don’t even know how long.

Later on, Luisa and Susanna smooch a little smooch with their smoochers, but Susanna pulls away and says, “I can’t.”

It feels good. You know how lots of queer storylines are just paint-by-numbers to meet that Diversity checkmark? This doesn’t feel like that. It feels good in my heart and makes my insides squirmy. It feels authentic and earned and sweet and doomed. I can’t wait for more!

(Oh, P.S. It’s Rafael’s mom who is actually Mutter; Luisa’s mom died in her sleep after living a quiet, peaceful life near a magical lake with glowing fish.)

Younger

Wednesdays on TV Land at 10:00 p.m.

Younger returned for its second season doing more of all the things that make it good (women being women with other women, talking about their careers and goals and hopes and dreams) and more of all the things that make it annoying (ha ha ha, 40-year-olds can’t use technology and 20-year-olds can’t use punctuation). Liza’s daughter returns from her trip abroad for a hot second, but gets super grossed out that her mom is dating a tattoo artist 14 years younger than her, so she bounces to New Jersey to live with her dad. Josh forgives Liza for lying about her age, but he doesn’t want to be involved in her scamming their friends, so he stops hanging out with them. And Kelsey works her way up to having her own imprint at Empirical. It’s aimed at 20-somethings and she handpicks Liza to join her in her, so they can take over the publishing industry before they turn 30.

So this season’s big dilemma is: When will Kelsey find out? I’m glad she’s the new Josh.

Maggie and Lauren are hooking up this season, right away! Liza finds Maggie and Lauren together in the kitchen after a night together in which Maggie “ripped open Lauren’s robe like a phone book.” We’ll be seeing a lot more of Lauren this season; she was upgraded to a series regular after last year, so fingers crossed for Darren Star getting bisexual representation much righter than he did on Sex and the City.

Top Chef

Thursdays on Top Chef at 10:00 p.m.

Whoo boy, this is one bro-heavy season of Top Chef. In fact, Karen and Marjorie are the only two women left in the kitchen (and riding in mini vans up and down the PCH in this California-themed season). Luckily, they are holding their own! Marjorie won last week’s Elimination Challenge by making seared halibut with grilled and roasted vegetables and green curry sauce as a rumination on how she was a very green chef ten years ago. Whole Foods was all out of lemongrass, so she grilled actual lemons and made her own lemongrass flavors (which she would not have done ten years ago, she says, but instead would have just cried). Karen won the Elimination Challenge the week before that by making duck breast with cocoa nib, beet purée, and ras el hanou to pair with a golden ale Pada concocted using ginger and tamarind and jalapeño. (Or, well, that Padma teamed up with Ballast Point to concoct. I’m sure Padma would be the best home brewer in history, but she doesn’t have time for that.)

The 100

Thursdays on The CW at 9:00 p.m.

Written by Karly

It has been three months since the events of the finale. Surprisingly, the Sky People have organized. Their home is now called Arkadia. By the way, “Arcadia” is the name of a harmonious utopia from Greek antiquity, and in the universe of The 100 can only foretell disaster (thanks for the info, Matie!). The “kids” are regular guard now. They spar, go on patrols, and hang out in the mess where they drink, barter, and play piano(?). It so reminds me of Battlestar Galactica season one. Bellamy has a very cute girlfriend, like so cute. Lincoln has been training with the Sky People and has a uniform and everything. Everything seems kind of calm.

It’s because the Grounders and the Sky People have a tense truce. They can protect their home and look for more fallen stations, but they cannot kill any Grounders. They’re also looking for Clarke. Abby is feeling worn down by being the only medical doctor in a camp of a lot more people, including more children than I remember in season two. Octavia and Lincoln are going through a rough patch. As Lincoln acclimates to his life in Arkadia with the Sky People, Octavia’s heart is full Grounder now, and she can’t reconcile the two. It’s amazing how they can catch us up on all this in ten minutes.

The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, Vol. 1

Bellamy rounds up Raven, Monty, Miller, and Jasper to go on patrol. Jasper has gone down the deep-end because of Maya; he’s cut off his hair and he drinks himself stupid. He’s even more annoying than before. They get in the giant armored SUV and head out to Sector Seven (the Ground is in sectors now). Octavia rides alongside them on horseback.

Jasper is brooding and he plays The Violent Femmes on the stereo. Everybody starts singing and smiling and I am immediately nervous. They are indeed stopped by their sensors going off: a beacon from a fallen ship is close.

They find the beacon in another sector. It is not with Sky People but is attached to Ice Nation grounders. It’s tense so Jasper does the best thing ever: he walks up and rips the beacon off a grounder’s belt. The Grounder grabs Jasper, holds a knife to his throat and demands to know where Wanheda is. Jasper just smiles as everyone aims their guns. Bellamy feels he has no choice so they open fire. All the Ice Nation grounders are dead, Jasper is dumb, and the truce is threatened.

They start panicking but Kane calls them over the radio to meet him in Sector Four. Bellamy sends Raven, Octavia, and Jasper back to camp while he and Monty head to meet Kane.

Shoulda been Movie Ginny Weasley.

Then we finally see Clarke! Her hair is red and she’s hunting a panther. We knew she was tough, but surviving three months in the wilderness alone is next level. She takes her kill to a trading post and the owner’s daughter, Niylah, definitely has the hots for her. She keeps asking her to sit, have a drink, stay for a while, and bang her on these panther rugs. Clarke is suspicious, especially when she sees that Niylah’s wearing an ark bracelet. Where are these Grounders getting all this Sky People tech?

Clarke relaxes a bit when Niylah gets rid of some Grounders looking for her. Niylah offers Clarke a drink again, but we know who the thirsty one is. Then Niylah offers to clean Clarke’s cuts from her panther hunt and asks her about Mount Weather. This woman is devilish in her tact! But it works: Clarke doesn’t want to talk. She kisses Niylah and they have awesome Grounder sex on panther pelts. I don’t know what to tell you, you guys. It was the hottest sex scene I’ve seen on network TV. Clarke is definitely an amazing kisser.

Would you like to do some bartering that turns into wild sex, or nah?

Back in Arkadia, Jasper, Raven and Octavia return. Jasper goes to medical to fix his neck and Raven stays on her horse and dismisses Octavia. She sits there awkwardly and finally Abby realizes Raven can’t get off the horse herself because of her hip. Raven accepts Abby’s help to dismount but refuses to answer any questions. They meet later at the bar. Abby wants to be Raven’s (girl)friend and talk about the pain Raven’s in, but Raven just wants to drink. Fine. Another slowburn ship. I’ll take it.

While they are drinking, Shawn Mendes sings and plays piano in an egregious display of promotion. I’m so sorry that you’re still a CW show, The 100. I’m glad Jasper freaks out and beats the shit out of him (…now, he might need some stitches). (I’m sorry, I had to).

In Sector Four, Bellamy and the boys meet Kane and Indra! Hi, Indra! Indra wanted to warn them that the 12 clans are hunting Clarke, aka (of course) Wanheda. They believe if they kill her, they will absorb her power. The most dangerous is the queen of the Ice Nation. Ruh roh. So they have to find Clarke first. Of course this is timely, because as Clarke is sneaking out of Niylah’s house, the Grounder from earlier was waiting for her, and he snatches her.

Okay, very briefly: across the dead zone, Jaha has been spending the last 3 months in the mansion with Ali, the AI who was responsible for the nuclear war and has gone insane. He apparently ascends to the City of Light in his head? Also, Murphy is still around for some reason. This obviously is going to become a big deal by the end of the season, but right now it’s the boring part.

I’ll be back on Friday with more queer teevee, including some new shows with queer characters, like Legends of Tomorrow; and some old shows that have added queer characters, like Galavant!

Fan Fiction Friday: You’re Getting Clexa For Christmas

by rory midhani

The holiday season always makes me think of fan fiction because the first multi-chaptered fan fiction I ever wrote was about my two favorite queer TV characters, Helen and Nikki from the UK primetime soap Bad Girls, getting married at Christmastime. It’s impossible to draw a straight line through our pasts to determine how we got to where we are at this very moment in time on this whirling planet — life is a spiderweb of little decisions leading in a billion different directions — but I can say without a second of hesitation that writing that fan fiction was the catalyst that led me to pursuing nearly every good thing I have in my life today.

The story was called “What God Has Brought Together (And All That)” and writing it allowed me to explore so many things I was feeling in my head and heart, in a safe way, with characters I already loved. Hyper-religious upbringing? Check. Terror of coming out to family? Check. Desire to settle down and create a home with a woman? Check. Just plain old sexual desire? Check, check. I worked out more of my own stuff in that story than I did in the years of therapy leading up to me writing it. I made a dear friend in the forum where I posted the story, a dear friend who would ultimately go on to save my life. And I gained confidence and skill as a writer by posting the story and engaging with the feedback people left me.

Not long after I finished it, I quit my office job, packed a backpack, flew to Europe, saw the world, and came home to pursue my dream of being a real writer.

What I didn’t know back then was that I already was a real writer. No, my story wasn’t great. No, I wasn’t getting paid for it. Probably only about twenty people read it, and I got in trouble by the forum admins all the time for misspelling things and getting all my British stuff super wrong. I was a writer because I was writing, simple as that.

This month, I asked five TV writers who work on shows with queer female characters to answer one question for me: Does lesbian fandom have any effect on what we ultimately see on our TV screens? Three of them said yes; two of them said no. As I thought through their answers, again and again, I finally decided the no’s don’t really matter to me. Eight years into doing this job, I somehow arrived at this idea that “visible endgame” is the ultimate fandom goal. (Maybe that’s because people yell at me the most about that on Twitter.) But as I think back over my own experiences, I realize that creatively engaging with queer stories in queer communities, however we see fit, is the ultimate fandom goal.

So many of the best things in my life — this career and the precious woman asleep beside me in bed right now and most of my best friends and my ability to think critically about the media and messages I consume — are rooted in fandom. Most of them can be traced back to the very first fan fiction I published. Albus Dumbledore was always right: “Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.” Always: “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

People often ask to read my first fan fiction and I just blush and say no, but it’s Christmas, and so here it is. I’ve come a long way as a writer, but I’ll always be proud of these fledgling words. I grimace when I reread them, but I always reread them at Christmas.

This month, I’ve got some Clexa fics for you because the new trailer for The 100 got me hyped; plus, a fan fiction news round-up; and answers to some TV questions you asked me.

Fan Fiction Friday: One Fish, Two Fish, Golden Retriever Goldfish

they take their shots but we’re bulletproof by nightshifted

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa, The 100
Plot: Delicious angst and longing, friends.
Length: 10,000 words

You See the Smile That’s On My Mouth (it’s hiding the words that don’t come out) by heartshapedcandy

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa, The 100
Plot: Clarke and Lexa smooch a lot and talk about their feelings a little.
Length: 48,000 words

fearless. by lordvoldyfarts

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa, The 100
Plot: Obligatory Clexa roadtrip AU.
Length: 30,000 words

Understanding by AbsorbingMisery, LilianaFox

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa, The 100
Plot: 100,000 words of pain and feelings!
Length: 118,000 words

Forged in War by RavenclawGenius

Pairing: Clarke/Lexa, The 100
Plot: Lexa loves Clarke and she’s going to wait and wait and wait until Clarke realizes she loves her back.
Length: 43,000 words

Listening to the news! Again?

Fandom in the news and around the world this month.

+ RocketJump hopes fan fiction can make geek culture less sexist. Their new web series boasts an episode called “Fan Friction,” in which “two proud geeky girls write a story combining their favorite fandoms.” From the series creator:

I really want to feature female stories in all of my work. The opportunity to have a story about two female characters and their friendship was really important, particularly because in geek and nerd culture there’s a lot of hostility towards women historically. So it was an important and deliberate choice to make it two female characters. The goal with the short was to make it a love letter to female fans of nerdy stuff. Ideally that will make them feel included into a world where they are often excluded from.

+ Anna Todd is creating her own empire! This girl wrote a One Direction-inspired fan fiction that sold for six figures and she got to keep her work on Wattpad.

Todd rose to fame through the online publishing site Wattpad, which allowed her to self-publish her story — a romantic tale between a Harry Styles-inspired bad boy and a sweet college girl — one chapter at a time online, and interact with Wattpad’s 40 million users who left comments to help her shape the next chapters. After her body of work hit more than 800 million reads in summer 2014, Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books won a bidding war for the publishing rights in a mid-six-figure deal.

+ Over at The Mary Sue, a series of interviews with fandom writers and artists: “Fanfiction and Fanart: The World Beyond Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Even with a modicum of acceptance, though, most fan creators find it hard to shake the eyerolls or even downright offensive commentary. With this new wave of legitimacy, I wanted to talk to leaders in the fanfic and fanart worlds to get a better sense of what inspired them to create, how they feel about the higher profile, and how they see their work being devalued—not just in the media but from within the assumed safe space of fandom.

Owl Post

A handful of answer to a handful of TV/movie questions.

Heather, what the hell! Carol was even better than you said it was going to be! How are we ever going to go back to mediocre representation after this? 

I think about this like five times a day! And I’ll tell you, friend. I’m not going back. Carol, Freeheld, Grandma, Tangerine: All in theaters in a single year. Three of those films racking up awards. Like. Annalise Keating is queer now, okay. Viola Davis is playing a bisexual character on a female-fronted show on ABC’s most watched night of television. Person of Interest is gladly going there with Root and Shaw, on CBS. Two now-queer characters exploring a relationship, even though they weren’t intended to be queer form the outset. They’re going there because their chemistry is so good and because lesbian and bisexual women are NORMAL. I’m not going back to the way the world was before this year. I just refuse to do it.

Do you know who dies in PLL 6B? I’ve heard some rumors and you seem really dejected about the coming season, which makes me think the rumors are true. 

I do know who dies, yes. I think you know too. You seem to know. And yes, I am dejected. Let’s talk it out once the 6B premiere airs and figure out what to do together, yeah?

What were your favorite TV shows that didn’t have queer women in them in 2015, HH? 

Awesome question! Supergirl, Master of None, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Great British Bake Off, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, and BoJack Horseman.

Help! I have three weeks off from school and I don’t know what to marathon on Netflix. I’m so far behind on every show with lesbian characters. 

I’ve got some good news for you: Riese made you a list!

I have finally had it with Once Upon a Time, Hogan. I can’t do it anymore. Help me. Help me get out of here. 

I’m sorry OUAT broke your heart. I understand. I have had my heart broken by TV much more than I have had my heart broken by actual human beings. But look, it’s 2015! There are more canonically queer female characters/relationships on TV than ever before. What you need to do is get yourself back out there into the world and watch some other things, see what you connect with, see what captures your heart and imagination; then, you can dig into those fandoms and find a new home. I’m going to suggest Person of Interest to you. I believe that is a very good start toward healing your heart.

Can you suggest a show similar to Defiance that I might like? I’m really sad it was cancelled but I’ve never been into sci-fi and I don’t really know where to start. I like Buffy. 

Oh! Firefly, then. Firefly is the next logical step for you. Hit me up when you’re finished and I’ll point you toward something else!

Pop Culture Fix: On “The 100” Clarke Goes Red and Gets Head From a New Lady In Her Furry Bed

Hello! Welcome to your pop culture fix, a stirring mix of pressing news from the annals of arts and entertainment, gathered for you by me and a bunch of ewoks.

New things for your eyes to see!

+ It’s a new extended trailer for The 100! It looks like Clarke and Lexa will share some intense eye contract and knifeplay, and all the heterosexual couples will definitely kiss for sure.

https://youtu.be/PKUuukxrbrU

According to TV Line, the “much-anticipated” Clarke and Lexa reunion “happens under unexpected circumstances, and Clarke isn’t so happy to see Lexa following last season’s betrayal.” According to TV Guide, however, there’s a new woman in Clarke’s life:

After three months living in isolation and in disguise, Clarke will seek solace in the arms of a compassionate, observant – and yeah, pretty sexy – trading post worker. But their dalliance is cut short when members of the Ice Nation arrive hunting down Clarke, who has become a near-mythic figure after the Mount Weather genocide.

But don’t give up, ‘shippers! Clarke will be spending a lot of quality time with Lexa (Alycia Debham-Carey) this season. But as the trailer makes clear, it won’t exactly all be friendly, let alone romantic.

Luckily, a dedicated fan has carefully analyzed the trailer and determined that they are 100% sure the lady Clarke hooks up with will be Niylah, a new grounder character played by Jessica Harmon.

+ New promotional pictures for the return of Pretty Little Liars, which we really hope will not be as offensive as the Big A Reveal!

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS – “Pretty Little Liars” premieres January 12 at 8/7c on Freeform, the new name for ABC Family. (ABC Family)

+ A new photo from the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters!

+ Speaking of Kate McKinnon, she apparently appears in the new Tina Fey / Amy Poehler project Sisters as “as one-half of a lesbian couple who provides the party with thudding EDM music.”

Transparent

+ Our very own Mey Rude spent a day on the set of Transparent and wrote about it for you! Don’t miss it.

+ Amy Ray of The Indigo Girls (MY FAVORITE BAND!) talks to Slate about being on Transparent, and her discourse with creators about how best to represent the Michfest-like festival on screen.

+ The siblings of Transparent talk chemistry and peeing underwater

+ Kathryn Hahn, the woman you thought was Ana Gasteyer, talks to Vulture about her role as Josh’s Rabbi girlfriend.

+ “She is looking around and she is wondering who she is—that investigation into herself is that that is both intellectual and also emotional, and psychological, but also psycho-analytical.” Gabby Hoffman talks to NYLON Magazine about Season Two.

+ Transparent’s 1930s Berlin flashbacks, explained

+ Flavorwire asks Who’s more dysfunctional, the Pfeffermans or the Fishers (of Six Feet Under)? I vote Pfeffermans, have I mentioned yet today that Six Feet Under is the best show ever?

+ How Transparent explores sexual taboos.

Also Relevant to Your Interests

+ The first trans black model had her face on the bottle of Clairol (we also wrote about this woman in our 100+ LGBTQ Black Women you should know post)

+ Congratulations to Jenny’s Wedding for scoring a spot on The AV Club’s Worst Films of 2015!

+ Todd VanDerWeff on “You’re The Worst,” a show that finally understands what it’s like to be in a relationship with someone who has depression. (Even more fun? Relationships with two depressives!)

+ Texts from Carmilla

+ 10 Things You Might Not Know About Samira Wiley: I actually knew all of these things already, I’m not sure what that says about me.

+ 15 Transgender actresses casting directions should consider instead of cis men

+ Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton reunite for Netflix feature film “Divanation”

+ Ruby Rose and Sophie Dahl broke up, sorry!

+ The TV writers of Autostraddle knocked our heads into each other’s heads, took some Aleve, and wrote up The Best LGBT TV Characters of 2015 for you.

+ Mey looks at the Top 11 Times Pop Culture Reminded Us That Kids Are Queer and Trans Too

+ Seven Sisters Music Festival is picking up where Michfest left off by banning trans women who haven’t had gender reassignment surgery from attending the festival. WHAT THE HELL.

“One Big Happy” Gets Axed, Ilene Chaiken Gets Crowned: How Lesbian TV Fared This Renewal Season

It is the best of times and the worst of times, a season of sweet relief and a season of crushing blows, it is TV renewal season and it has been quite a day. (It’s also May Sweeps, so really it’s been quite a week. Charlie, the lesbian character on Supernatural, was murdered; and Nyssa, the lesbian character on Arrow, was married off to a man.) We spend a lot of time talking about how we’re striding into this golden age of queer representation on television, and while it’s true that we’ve made astronomical progress in the last ten years, it’s important to remember that queer women are still wildly underrepresented on TV, and so every tiny scrap of representation matters. (See above, re: May Sweeps.)

Let’s run down the good, the bad, the unknown, and the whatever of this renewal season.

The Good

+ Y’all, Ilene Chaiken inked a two-year seven-figure deal with 20th Century Fox. She will continue to showrun Empire and she’ll also work to develop new projects. One boss over at 20th said, “Ilene is about as gifted a showrunner as there is in this business.” She’s always going to be the murderer of Dana Fairbanks and Other West Hollywood Horrors to me, but also there has never been a show like Empire, and I mean that in terms of race and sexuality and also, I mean, any person who is responsible for bringing more Cookie Lyon into my life is a kind of hero.

+ ORPHAN BLACK IS BACK FOR SEASON FOUR.

+ Black-ish, which featured Raven-Symone as a lesbian character last week — a thing we’ll talk about in Boob(s On Your) Tube on Monday — has been picked up for a second season.

+ Fresh Off the Boat, another show centered around people of color that gave us a really stellar gay-themed episode this year, has also been renewed for season two.

+ You know Grey’s Anatomy is back for a 12th season, nbd. ABC has renewed it through infinity.

+ The 100 is coming back for season three, so Clarke and Lexa can figure out what the heck is going on between them.

+ Jane the Virgin will for absolutely sure return for a second season, which is super amazing news, and not just because it features Luisa, a lesbian woman of color whose new girlfriend is a professional wrestler named Juicy Jordan. It’s also a show full of kickass feminism and so many women interacting with each other about so many amazing things all the time. It’s my absolute favorite show of 2015.

+ No one knows if this summer’s Rookie Blue is season 6 or season 5B, but whichever one it is, it’s back! Gail and Holly, hurrah! (Same for Under the Dome; it’ll be back this summer with its widowed lesbian mama.)

+ These awesome female-led shows that don’t feature queer female characters (yet) have also been renewed: How to Get Away With Murder, Agent Carter, Madame Secretary, and Scandal. (Thank you for being a friend, ABC.)

The Bad

+ NBC pulled the plug on One Big Happy after a shaky, but promising six-episode first season. Here’s hoping the Peacock understands that it wasn’t the lesbian lead that caused the show’s ratings troubles. And here’s hoping Liz Feldman enjoys all the success in the world in the future. She deserves it.

+ NBC also killed Marry Me, which featured “soft butch flannel queen” Kay, one of my favorite new lesbian characters of the 2014-2105 TV season, and one of the very few black lesbian characters on broadcast TV.

+ ABC passed on the Fortune Feimster/Tina Fey tag-team, Family Fortune, which would have been a multi-camera sitcom (co-starring Annie Potts!) about Fortune coming out to her family. I’m really bummed about this one not making it.

+ Fox cancelled The Mindy Project, Riese’s favorite comedy and the show that gave us a new lesbian character of color named Dr. Jean and Julie Goldman and Laverne Cox on our screens this year. But! There’s a very real chance Hulu is going to pick it up.

+ We also lost supporting queer characters on Parenthood, Heart of Dixie, and Red Band Society, none of which got renewed. Parenthood got a proper send off, at least.

The Unknown

+ One of the characters on Weird Loners came out as bi this week (which, again: we’ll talk about in Boobs Tube!), but Fox still hasn’t announced if the show will get a second season.

+ Person of Interest hasn’t yet been renewed for a fifth season and it needs to be because if I don’t get to see Root and Shaw make out some more I am going to LOSE MY MIND.

The Whatever

GIVE HER BACK!

+ Supernatural is coming back for season 11, but hey guess what? They killed Charlie the lesbian this week, so until they resurrect her, I don’t care.

+ The CW has given Arrow a fourth season, which I want to be excited about because Nyssa al Ghul is a lesbian woman of color who also is a badass motherfucker, but the show killed off bisexual superhero Sara Lance earlier this season and married Nyssa off to Oliver last week, so.

+ Gotham completely forgot Renee Montoya exists and played the Bisexual Psycho trope all over the finale with Barbara Kean, so until I hear about some serious progress on those two fronts, that show is dead to me.

+ The Good Wife is coming back but they messed up to bad with Kalinda in the end and now she’s gone and so I don’t care about it.

That’s all I know for now. I’ll update the unknowns as soon as they’re known.