I have no pity to spare for thee...

Charles Rowland in every episode: The Case of Crystal Palace (1x01)

bonus:

Charles 'the dog' Rowland & Edwin 'the hunted' Payne

“Living in Bubbles” 🏡 by | Leo Thomas

They were designed in the late 1940s by Danish landscape architect C. Th. Sørensen who, when asked about the oval hedges, said (my translation):

‘Neighbours always argue about their shared hedges. How should they be cut? How tall should they be? Here, everyone gets their own hedge with a no man’s land in between. This way, nobody has to argue about it!’

- m/f ship between a nonblack man & a Black woman

- it's either canon (e.g. mel/jayce arcane, arthur/guinevere bbcmerlin) or entirely plausible (e.g. prism or coupé/robert dispatch)

- fanbase overwhelmingly pairs nb man off with another nb man and disengages from the Black woman character, shunting her into a background wise & sassy caretaker role (for which there is a name) or leaving her out of fanworks entirely

- fans who do this ^ claim it is an expression of love and admiration for the Black woman character, actually, bc the nb man (who may be her canonical partner) "can't handle all that" (he may be perfectly competent and engaged; she may be totally low maintenance; it has no bearing), she's just too wonderful (too much) and out of his league (lacking in flaws and interiority and fan appeal)

He's also said that the prize part just made it less fun. Which makes sense! It hurts the relationships between the players (even if it's just for that one episode) and it means that they're not just focusing on being entertaining. For me, some of the best Game Changer moments are when a player decides that they're not interested in winning and they troll instead.

Also it means that it doesn't particularly matter if somebody doesn't win, for the audience. Like I think Jacob should have won One Year Later, but the prize, while not as much of a gag as the others, isn't big enough to be particularly mad about like it might have been in earlier seasons. And I guess the lack of major prizes also means that the games can be more subjective without introducing any issues.

This is what a hero looks like.

Stories stall when everyone behaves. Real tension appears when someone:

• asks the wrong question • says something they shouldn’t • notices something uncomfortable • refuses to drop the topic • misunderstands something important • interrupts at the worst moment

They want something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but for some reason they can't ask for it -- or can't have it even if they did ask.

They don't notice something that the audience HAS noticed (like in a horror movie when the monster is sneaking up behind the protagonist, or if someone drinks a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak because they don't know about germ theory)

Takes a risk (or otherwise does something they "shouldn't" do) which the audience has to sit through for a prolongued period of time (e.g. slips away from the party to go into the host's private office and rifle through their papers before the guards catch them)

The Surgery (1979)