As a long-time Dredd fan myself, I must partially disagree. Yes, things weren't as over-the-top as some Dredd stories (such as your excellent example), but they maintained a lot of the subversive tone in a many ways. In particular, Urban did an amazing job with Dredd's dry wit. Also, notice how in almost every violent…

I had completely forgotten how creepy those looked.

It makes me wonder if we are on the edge of just another such "phase transition" in modern human culture. All the social tools we've built up for the last few thousand years were created to deal with a very different set of societies than the ones we have now. Even setting aside concepts like a technological…

Okay, 2 new rules:

Funny thing is, I actually would be way more excited for a Captain America vs. the Serpent Society movie than a Civil War film. Civil War will be good, I'm sure, but it's going to be a lot of terse and turgid shouting and gritting of teeth and stuff, ending with the Joss Wedon finally killing Steve Rogers the way…

Fair enough. But the main point was that for most of human history a story of a man who travels through time would have required supernatural intervention for it to maintain an audience's belief. Now, we can do it with a lab coat.

*Clap*

fair enough.

Yeah, but the bat-nipples are a protrusion, this is textile engineering to create an indentation. Maybe she has a metal mesh from an old hernia surgery, and there's a magnet in the tights right over her belly button? The mind boggles.

Clearly that's what it's modeled after. But I still must wonder at the textile engineering challenge of making a bodysuit with a visible "innie".

I am left wondering just how tight an outfit would have to be in order to see someone's belly button.

I agree with your "Mad Scientist = Evil Wizard" reading of the use of scientific bad guys in genre fiction. However, I would like to go a bit further with that idea. Because we are now about a century to a century and a half in to the era when a writer could replace an evil wizard with a mad scientist, and this change…

I'm calling it now. We've just discovered the secret plot behind True Detective season 2.

What's worse, pondering the very question forces one to consider what making out with Jar Jar would look like in the first place.

Go here:

Oh, I understand, and I feel the same way. When her uncle came up it led to a strange pause in the conversation. You see, I had so many questions, but was afraid that any possible answers would cause a massive collapse of all the possible universes in which such an individual could exist.

Here's an odd bit of trivia:

2 things:

+100 Internets for Bueno Excellente

I remember that one! I forget if it was a primary plot for that episode or not, but the theme of hopeless, yet understandable, quests still resonates with the main themes of the show.