Fandom on the Rocks

If you've ever wondered how money works in the Hale Family… well, keep wondering. Because Teen Wolf 4×02 "117" gives us more questions than answers.

Kate Argent, freshly transformed into a werejaguar, is still having trouble with her transformations and she's hoping to find a Hale Family heirloom to help her out. Unfortunately for the gas station attendant who tries to get Kate out of the bathroom, she still hasn't totally figured out her control, and he pays for it… yeah, it's gruesome.

Meanwhile, age-regressed Derek has been whisked away to the animal clinic, being watched over by Lydia (👀) and he panics—like y'do—when he wakes up in a strange place with strange people he doesn't recognize.

But, for all the tomfoolery of this plotline, this episode does bring out some heavy fandom hitters: Scott and Malia finally confront Peter for some answers ("Satan in a v-neck"), Lydia and Kira find what's left of the gas station attendant in Kate's wake, and Stiles and Special Agent Douchebag have a very special dinner with Dere—I mean, Cousin Miguel.

Oh yeah, and there turns out to be a Hale Family vault underneath Beacon Hills High School where Peter Hale has kept the entire Hale Family fortune of 117 million dollars… in bearer bonds… which Kate stole… and she needed Derek to get into the vault… so she de-aged him to a time when he still trusted her… for the money… Oh, brother.

xoxo,

Fandom on the Rocks

Turns out Glee might actually remember how to be Glee.

In 6x02, “Homecoming,” the alumni descend on McKinley to help Rachel and Kurt rebuild the New Directions, Blaine discovers that “tradition” is maybe not the compelling argument he thinks it is, and we finally meet some new-New Directions kids who are not simply photocopies of characters we already knew. Progress!

This episode, we’re talking:

• Blaine, Dalton, terrible plaid, and the complicated politics of Jane wanting to become the first female Warbler.
• Roderick, Spencer, the McCarthy twins, and why these new newbies already feel more promising than the Season 4 replacements.
• The return of the Unholy Trinity, because apparently Glee wanted to personally attack us.
• Sue continuing her lifelong mission to destroy arts education through increasingly elaborate and ineffective schemes. Sue, come on, just admit you love those kids.

We also take several completely necessary detours into Blaine’s hair, Dalton’s mysterious history, Dear Evan Hansen, Texas homecoming mums, and the eternal question of whether or not Emma Pillsbury-Schue is actually still alive. (American Horror Story: Lima, anyone?)

Against our better judgment, Season 6 is… kind of working? We don’t like being surprised either.

xoxo,

FotR

Season Four of Teen Wolf, baby! We’re back, we’re going to Mexico, Derek Hale is missing, and absolutely no one involved in this rescue mission seems interested in asking whether any of this makes sense. (It doesn't matter.)

Scott and the pack head south of the border in search of Derek, which means negotiating with a group hunters called the Calaveras, discovering that Kate Argent is somehow alive, and eventually finding Derek in an underground temple. Except he’s approximately sixteen years old now. Sure. Fine. Why not?

This episode, we’re talking:

• Stiles and Lydia traveling all the way to Mexico with $50,000 to rescue Derek Hale, because apparently Stiles simply cannot keep that man’s name out of his mouth.
• Kira and Malia’s extremely heterosexual nightclub dance, glow-stick nunchucks, and our continued campaign to LET MALIA BE FERAL.
• Scott actually getting to behave like a competent Alpha: making plans, protecting his friends, and taking every available electrocution so Lydia doesn’t have to.
• The return of Kate Argent, an impressive amount of retroactive continuity gymnastics, and approximately nine thousand questions required to make any of this plot work.

Somewhere inside this extremely messy premiere is a genuinely good scene about how Scott, Stiles, and Lydia each understand Kate through the person she hurt most in their lives. Unfortunately, it is surrounded by a lot of us asking, “Wait. How do they know that?”

Welcome to Season Four of Teen Wolf. Apparently we’re doing this.

xoxo,

FotR

We made it to Season 6 of Glee on the Rocks! But at what cost? Our sanity? An official Glee-boot? Apparently Rachel Berry’s Broadway career, Klaine’s engagement, several successful futures, and the entire state of New York.

In 6x01 “Loser Like Me,” Glee kicks off its final season by dragging everyone back to Lima and hitting the reset button with both hands. Rachel’s TV career spectacularly implodes, Sue has purged McKinley of the arts, Blaine is back where nature intended him—with the Warblers—and Kurt is about to discover that breaking up with the love of your life has consequences. Especially when said love of your life starts dating Dave Karofsky.

This episode, we’re talking:

• Rachel Berry hitting rock bottom at roughly age 20
• The triumphant return of Dalton, the Warblers, and one extremely beloved blazer
• The Klaine breakup, some genuinely excellent heartbreak, and Kurt realizing he may have made a terrible mistake (no duh)
• Karofsky. Just… Karofsky. We have thoughts. Many of them.
• Glee’s attempt to return to its Season 1 roots by erasing approximately two seasons of character development

There are flashes here of the Glee we loved: familiar sets, old dynamics, musical nostalgia, and characters finding their way back to the place that once gave them somewhere to belong. There’s also a lot of yelling “BUT WHY?” at the television.

The final season has officially begun. God help us.

Let’s overthink television together.

xoxo, Fandom on the Rocks

We made it to the Season 1 finale of 9-1-1! This week on 9-1-1 on the Rocks, we’re talking 1x10, “A Whole New You,” an episode where everyone is asking some version of the same question: who are you when the life you built suddenly changes?

Abby has spent years disappearing into caring for her mother. Buck has spent ten episodes trying to become someone worth trusting. Bobby is finally beginning to imagine a future he actually wants to be alive for. And Athena Grant is about to walk into a restaurant looking so good that Bobby Nash never stood a chance.

Naturally, 9-1-1 explores all of this the only way 9-1-1 knows how to.

This episode, we’re talking:

🧠 A stroke that apparently comes with complimentary British slang, a psychic whose dead client is extremely inconveniently still alive, and Season 1 reminding us one last time that subtlety is for other television shows.

🐟 Buck discovering someone has been using his face to catfish women and realizing that changing yourself doesn’t automatically mean the people around you will stop seeing the person you used to be.

✈️ Abby grieving Patricia, recognizing how completely she lost herself in caregiving, and buying a one-way ticket to Dublin while Buck stands outside those airport doors after believing he finally found somewhere he belongs. Cool! Great! We’re fine!

🏍️ One of the bleakest calls of the season, Bobby finally cracking under the weight of the job, and Athena doing exactly what Bobby told Buck to do last week: stepping into the mess with him.

And somehow, that’s Season 1: ten episodes of grief, bad decisions, questionable emergency medicine, deeply weird rescues, and a group of people slowly becoming a family before any of them quite realize it.

We made it through the grungy, messy, horny little first season. Now bring on Season 2. We're ready to meet some important new faces.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Everyone is trapped this week on 9-1-1: metaphorically, emotionally, and occasionally in a flooded elevator. Bobby gives Buck the advice that might quietly change the trajectory of his life: you can’t always pull someone out of the mess, sometimes you have to step inside with them. And Athena Grant is handcuffed to a bed, because Season 1 understood that television should be equal parts sad and horny.

This week we’re talking 1x09, “Trapped”:

🗑️ A garbage compactor, a flooded elevator, and a hoarder house that has apparently been designed by Jigsaw.

🔗 Athena’s extremely private 9-1-1 call, Hen proving herself the truest of besties, and one photograph that absolutely should have resurfaced at every birthday for the next nine years.

🎈 Buck planning the most aggressively romantic hot-air-balloon date imaginable, Abby being pulled back home by Patricia, and Buck learning that no amount of champagne and truffles can out-romance real life.

💔 Hen confronting Eva, the fallout from the full moon continuing to spread, and the painful reality that loving someone doesn’t necessarily mean you can break the cycle with them.

🌙 And Abby, Patricia, and an ending that turns the episode’s entire idea of being “trapped” on its head—because sometimes the thing holding you in place is also the thing that feels like home.

For all the literal traps this episode throws at us, the ones that matter most are the ones that nobody can rescue you from with a ladder or a Halligan: grief, guilt, family, love, and the lives we build around the people we just can’t quite let go of.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Karma comes for everyone this week, and apparently she has access to bullets, tanning beds, dump trucks, and one extremely motivated tiger. On 9-1-1, 1x08 "Karma's a Bitch," the universe is balancing its books — sometimes with satisfying absurdity, and sometimes with emotional devastation.

This episode we break down:

🌳 A bullet lodged in a tree, some deeply questionable DIY arborism, and perhaps the most elaborate “fuck around and find out” senario in Season 1.

🐅 A terrible dentist, a very good tiger, and the rare emergency where absolutely everyone is rooting for the large carnivore. Good kitty.

🩸 Chimney’s blood drive accidentally uncovering Bobby’s Super Magic Blood and, much more importantly, the horrifying reality of the bargain Bobby has made with himself.

🫣 And Hen discovering that when you sleep with your ex and spend an entire episode avoiding telling your wife, sometimes karma doesn’t bother with symbolism. Sometimes it just serves you custody papers. Yikes.

This episode is gleefully ridiculous on the surface, quietly devastating underneath, and maybe the first episode that really feels like the simultaneously completely unhinged and emotionally devastating 9-1-1 we've been watching for 9 seasons now.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Season Five ends the only way Glee knows how: with everyone making enormous life decisions, several timelines that absolutely do not add up, and Rachel Berry apparently deciding that the Broadway dream she has spent five seasons screaming about was actually just a side quest. This is 5x20, "The Untitled Rachel Berry Project."

This episode, we break down:

📺 Rachel’s sudden pivot from Funny Girl to television, the fastest pilot development process in Hollywood history, and the growing suspicion that we’re no longer watching Rachel Berry so much as a story about Lea Michele.

🚌 Sam achieving his specific, measurable, achievable dream of being mostly naked on the side of a bus — while the episode also drops him into a genuinely ugly modeling-industry power dynamic and then barely gives us time to process it. Because it's Glee.

💔 Sam and Mercedes somehow becoming the most emotionally mature people on Glee, loving each other enough to admit that love doesn’t always make two lives compatible right now.

🐦 Blaine lies to Kurt, Kurt chooses to trust him anyway, and two horny pigeons give us one of the most inexplicable pieces of Klaine lore ever committed to television.

Plus: Mercedes takes America’s malls by storm, Mary Halloran writes approximately twelve television pilots in a week, and “Pompeii” plays us out as everyone scatters toward Season Six.

Thirteen episodes left. We can do this.

xoxo,
FotR

The full moon is out over Los Angeles, which apparently means everyone is legally permitted to lose their goddamn minds because what is happening here. 1x07 “Full Moon (Creepy AF)” gives us synchronized yoga labor, a face-eating maybe-zombie, a deeply enthusiastic tapeworm extraction, and Henrietta Wilson making a choice so bad we would personally like to revoke her full moon privileges.

This episode we break down:

🌕 Buck Buckley, noted scientist, explaining that the full moon makes gravity heavier because he read it on the internet and being absolutely delighted when the night keeps proving him right (kinda).

👶 Prenatal yoga descends into complete chaos as babies start arriving like somebody hit the emergency childbirth button, while Bobby unsuccessfully attempts to maintain control of literally anything.

☎️ Abby listens helplessly as a woman is murdered, refuses to accept the easy answer, and proceeds to out-detect an actual homicide detective.

🪱 Buck pulls a tapeworm out of a man’s ass with the delighted concentration of a child opening a Christmas present, giving us one of the clearest examples of why you simply cannot skip Season 1.

This episode is gross, horny, creepy, genuinely upsetting at times, and extremely funny. So, basically, 9-1-1 discovering exactly what kind of show it wants to be. The moon may not actually make people crazy, but it sure gives them something to blame on this show.

xoxo,
Fandom on the Rocks

Love is in the air in Los Angeles, which naturally means fake plane crashes, emergency tracheotomies, a man superglued back together (yeah, we know), and possibly the most cursed welcome-back cake in workplace history. 1x06 “Heartbreaker” is where 9-1-1 really starts feeling like 9-1-1: wildly sincere, deeply ridiculous, and absolutely determined to turn every possible expression of love into somebody’s emergency.

This episode we break down:

✈️ A proposal so catastrophically ill-conceived it literally gives someone broken heart syndrome. Friends, if your beloved fakes an aviation emergency before proposing, run.

🎂 Chimney returns to the 118, receives a horrifyingly accurate rebar-through-the-head cake, and gets called the heart of the firehouse even though we’ve barely gotten to know him yet. We’ll allow it. We know where this is going.

💘 Buck and Abby finally go on a real date, Buck is immediately defeated by complimentary bread and Abby performs an emergency tracheotomy. Could be...worse?

🔪 Athena spends Valentine’s Day working because going home means confronting what’s happening in her own marriage and somehow ends up tied to a chair while someone plans to harvest her heart for a DIY boyfriend upgrade. Yikes.

Plus: our ongoing campaign for 9-1-1 to make a bottle episode and why holiday episodes are an endangered television art form worth protecting.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Eat the bread carefully, y'all.

xoxo,

Fandom on the Rocks