Three major points of note, in ascending order of importance.
1. Yay Chloe! The way things are going, I fully expect to see Nina return next week with a haircut that I wouldn't be caught dead with.
It's rather amazing, though, how such an annoying character from a forgettable season has endeared herself to me this season in the face of the exceedingly shallow and one-dimensional characters of this season (even though Curtis is One Bad Mother, he's still flatly drawn). I've written a separate paper on how in wrestling and reality television, audiences relate to characters relativistically -- generally, one contestant/wrestler is the villain so fans know that the opponent is the good guy, and this model now seems to apply in a slightly modified form in this case. (Ask me nice-like, and I'll send you the paper. Ask me with some cookies and I may even read it out loud to you.) A lot of Chloe's prickly attitude has remained fundamentally the same from the prior season, though the big difference is that she was opposed to characters whom the audience quickly identified as annoying (Sarah and Driscoll, primarily), and so when she antagonized them, the viewers suddenly swung to her side. All characters function in their roles (Heroes, Villains, not-quite-Villains-but-they're-there-to-aggravate-us-anyway, etc.) on a relative basis, which is how audiences perceive and relate to these characters.
2. Hahah Behrooz you affectless piece of suck, you're an orphan now! Which is the only upside of Dina Araz getting popped; otherwise, her death is just another example of the cavalier disregard for non-principal characters (though I should note the hells that main characters go through: not just Jack stabbing himself, but Tony having to wave his newly acquired gut in our faces). Bad ideology -- bad!
3. Anyone in a stable (permanent?) position of authority gets to do the POWER WHISPER. It started with either Tony or Jack, but now that Michelle is the Dominant Cheese... POWER WHISPER. Even Habib Marwan (just as with Sayed Ali, the other Middle Eastern baddy, you always have to say his full name when referring to him. Cos you can't forget! He's Middle Eastern!) goes with the POWER WHISPER. My guess is that the POWER WHISPER is meant to signal an understated gravity in a series that generally feels the need to make character points very obvious.
Looks like I was wrong about the ascending order of importance.
But one way or another, BEHROOZ LOSES AT LIFE.
Indie rating: The Legendary Pink Dots - The Whispering Wall
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