I thought last week that it would've been an interesting experiment to do an all-astromech episode told through sound effects and pantomime, like a silent movie or a Roadrunner cartoon. Dialogue-free storytelling is still done occasionally; CSI:NY recently did an episode where the whole first half was just visuals and…

I've got nothing against 3D animation in principle, but I love 2D animation too. It's silly to see one as a replacement for the other. Sculpture didn't replace painting. The flute didn't replace singing. They're different art forms and they both have a place. There's some great 3D animated filmmaking out there, and…

It wasn't a continuity reboot, which is the way fans tend to use the term, but it was a franchise reboot in the business sense — it took a defunct property and started it up again and/or updated it for a modern audience.

I think the fighters flying overhead at 0:08 are in the missing man formation. That would make the ceremony a Starfleet funeral.

The Maya didn't actually make a calendar that went up to 2012 and stopped. They made a calendar that, like all calendars, was cyclical and could be projected forward indefinitely. For the most part, they didn't bother to calculate the specifics for more than a few decades or centuries ahead, because they didn't need…

I agree — that looks like a suspended ceiling behind/above them, and the glow is from a light fixture. They're probably marching him down one of those drab institutional hallways that have those kinds of ceilings and lights.

Stargate? Fast-paced? I find it to be an extremely sluggish movie in which everything takes far longer than it needs to. The TV series usually managed to fit more ideas and events into the first act of an episode than the movie had in its entire two hours.

Right. In the novel, a 7- or 8-year-old Spock does appear and plays chess with the Klingon lead character Krenn. There's also an appearance by McCoy's grandfather. However, the book was presented as a work of historical fiction written within the Trek universe (and being read by Kirk in the framing chapters), so those…

Another omission Disney is indirectly responsible for: Filmation's '70s Tarzan animated series, which is one of the few screen adaptations of Tarzan that's faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs's books (aside from omitting the violence and possibly updating the period). Disney holds the rights to Tarzan in animation, and…

Moira is in her fifties, she is not a trained athlete or stuntwoman, and she fell onto hard pavement while probably tensed up from fear because someone was shooting at her. Is it really so hard to believe she could've been injured in the fall? Is this snarky condescension really necessary?

Reminds me of the origin of the word "ampersand." It used to be that the "&" symbol was taught to English schoolchildren as the 27th letter of the alphabet, pronounced "and." But they couldn't just say "...X, Y, Z, and and," so they taught it as "... and, per se, and" (i.e. "the symbol that, in and of itself, is…

The recent Castle episode set at a sci-fi convention was also great for a positive, non-stereotyped portrayal of nerds/fandom. Kate Beckett, the glamorous, tough detective heroine, was shown as an overt and unabashed sci-fi and comics fan (and has been before). The cool detective sidekicks had a conversation about…

Swirly thing alert!

When I read Starship Troopers, I came away convinced it was a satire of fascism (as the Verhoeven film was) rather than an endorsement. But then I was told by Gardner Dozois himself (on a BBS, not in person) that Heinlein had written it in earnest. So I'm not sure what to think.

I remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon where a similar zoning dispute got resolved much the same way, although it was a skyscraper rather than a road. And Bugs's negotiations involved lots of explosives.

He probably meant the fourth series regular, Hayden Rorke (Dr. Bellows).

Where are all the great women of science, like Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Emmy Noether, Henrietta Leavitt, Jocelyn Bell, Mary Leakey, Jane Goodall, Jill Tarter, etc.? This action figure line is almost as gender-biased as the Avatar: The Last Airbender action figures.

Maybe it's better to say that children are natural-born investigators — even experimenters. But yes, science is a more specific mentality than that, a system for focusing and disciplining that natural curiosity and directing it into producing meaningful and useful results.

Shouldn't it be "robocalypse?" That's easier to say.

Also, the vault was indoors, and turning solid matter to vapor in an enclosed space would cause a fatal pressure increase. (Heck, vaporizing the rubble outside as quickly as shown should've produced a significant overpressure anyway. Writers of fiction never appreciate just how huge the increase in volume is from a…