☆Certified Adult™☆

“All of us don’t have the same eyes” is my key takeaway here. This is 100 percent correct.

not going to lie i hope we never see irina in the show. i think not seeing her, allowing her to haunt the narrative and be represented through ilya’s necklace, makes her absence more potent for the viewer. we know what ilya has lost and that it fundamentally changed the course of his life. if s2 is faithful to the long game (which we can only assume it will be), we will know even more about how irina’s death continues to have ripple effects in ilya’s mental health and relationships. i don’t need to see her on screen (in flashbacks or dreams or even in photos) to understand that. her absence is a presence!!

no because i'm not done actually. i think there could be something very powerful in us as audience members grieving for irina in the way that shane does: ilya loved her, she made him who he is, and we never get to meet her. we never get to see that relationship, and can only imagine it based on what ilya tells us in the narrative. ilya's memories of her are what keeps her present for him, but also create an image of her for shane and for us as viewers. it's tragic but it's beautiful.

if they're gonna remake The Princess Bride, it should open with a kid sick in bed scrolling on his phone. his grandpa arrives with a gift--it's a DVD player with a disc already inside. grandpa hooks it up to the TV and presses play. and we all just watch the original 1987 film again.

it was a stroke of genius to give James T Kirk a bitchy flip phone in the 60's, truly amazing to watch him slam it shut like a pissed off socialite girl in 2000's teen shows

having a multi year long character obsession becomes like a abstract thought experiment at some point