Talk:Ah, But Underneath/@comment-392210-20140107221720

Very, very good second episode. A great follow-up to the pilot.

Susan - Gotta love her. It's so easy to root for Susan in these early episodes. I really don't understand how she went from being America's favorite housewife to the series' most hated lead character. What a shame. Susan was, to me, always nice and likable, and Teri Hatcher was consistently fantastic in the role. The dinner sequence is such a classic. :P Julie remains great, and Edie is a joy to watch. The whole thing with Mike's "wife" is just... very confusing. Was Bongo Deirdre's dog perchance? Is it all part of Mike's acting? I don't like it.

Lynette - Lynette gets a filler storyline in this episode, as she does in most episodes of season 1, actually. The season for her is meant to showcase her distress in raising four children by herself, and mostly she lacks an overall arc, it's just all random events and mini-stories around that theme. But this one stands out because we know it's based on something from Marc Cherry's life growing up, so it makes it more personal and interesting.

Bree - I don't like how in this episode Bree criticizes Freud for growing up peddling a theory that the problems of most adult humans can be traced back to something awful their mothers did (I'm presuming no one really knows much about Freud's own mother anyway, maybe she wasn't as great a mother as Bree makes her out to be), and yet 12 episodes later, once Rex shows her the submission sex tape, she asks him what his mother did to him. Either it's irony at work, or one of the rare example of poor continuity in the first season. This episode is okay for the Van de Kamp couple, and I like how Dr. Goldfine (great recurring character, which he'd featured after season 2) makes Rex take a step back and appreciate that he can be a douche sometimes.

Gabrielle - The whole "single perfect red rose" thing is quite nice and lovely, and Eva Longoria continues to make this generally unlikable person a likable character. Ricardo's acting, however, is still a bit wooden. The ending is sad, how her appreciation is bought with yet another gift.

Mystery - It's a'ight. Creepy Paul, intriguing chest. Good developments. Don't really buy the whole thing with the chest just going underwater and then resurfacing though. Seems to me like some laws of physics were disrespected in at least one of those instances. But what would I know?