The “deadline” is in April — see Kris Bryant, when he got called up after the first week or so in his rookie year. The May deadline you’re thinking of is the Super 2 deadline, which gets a player more years of arbitration (four instead of three), making them more expensive, but not getting them any closer to free…

Many of these events are bad — some abysmally so. For my money, though, you can’t get worse than The Crossing, in which it is revealed that Iron Man has been a sleeper agent for Kang since the beginning of the Silver Age. And not only is Iron Man a (brainwashed) traitor: about a decade before he became the rock the…

I feel for Hank, I really do, although I’m more worried the show will make Sirena out to be a real villain — not just a girlfriend who made a bad choice but a temptress trying to turn the brothers against each other. I like Sirena as the kind of girl who would have a relationship with either of the brothers; if she’s…

E.T. gave me nightmares, I can tell you that. A kid finding a penis-shaped alien in a shed, then having that extraphallus terrestrial steal the kid’s candy and get him drunk seemed all too plausible to 8-year-old me.

I enjoyed Doc’s success and his laissez faire attitude toward human testing. Part of what has limited him is his lack of patience, his inability to put in the time-consuming, frustrating hours needed to succeed, and cutting right to human testing (a la the Joy Can in Season 1) is a Grade-A Dr. Venture move.…

Herbie Popnecker is an excellent comp for St. Cloud, but I disagree that he has no powers — seemingly inexhaustible wealth is a hell of a superpower.

I saw the TV Reboot Machine once.

The same pros and cons come up in the early Hardy Boys books. The cons becoming terrifying in The Hidden Harbor Mystery, in which a racially stereotyped African-American servant leads a secret society, kidnaps a mentally ill man, and has such power that he keeps an ol’ timey Southern feud going. Plus, when the lynch…

I haven’t gotten that vibe, although I see your point on the color scheme. But he might have a crush on his brother’s girlfriend, and if anything can continue the Venture family tradition of botched fratricide, that’s it.

Another outstanding episode. It’s been quite a while since this show has had a bad episode.

Frankly, you should be, and if you’d read whatever book they base their beliefs on, you’d already have known that.

If Willie Nelson had never written and recorded an original song, he’d have been able to make an impressive career based solely on covers. My favorite of his is “Blue Skies”:

The question is whether he’s hot enough that the Blue Jays trade him and can get out of paying for the $12 million they owe him for next year.

Not elaborate, but you’ve got the idea right. In Season 5's “Bot Seeks Bot,” Rusty sees Vendata (actually, Brock in Vendata’s costume) and says, “The metal murder man from my nightmares! He was real!” Nothing past that, however.

It’s a good defense.

The villain for the Venture Brothers pilot was Otaku Senzur, a ninja, not Doctor Z. Doctor Z doesn’t show up until Season 3's “The Buddy System,” I think.

Jonas’s death was never explicitly explained before this season. In Season 3's “Orb,” Kano said he took a vow of silence after killing a “great man.” Since Kano was Jonas’s bodyguard (Blue Morpho hadn’t ever been mentioned), Brock asked if Kano killed Jonas. Kano didn’t reply, perhaps not wanting to go into the actual…

It could be more years, but I don’t think so ...

And it had slipped my mind that we finally found out who the “great man” Kano killed (and took a vow of semi-silence over), from the Season 3 episode “Orb.”

I suppose you’re right — those lines, in an unapologetically comic-book universe like the Venture Brothers are in, means they could come back. But if they do come back another time, I doubt it will have quite the same punch as these unexpected returns.