Not piety, I’d argue; piety can be (and is supposed to be) quiet and sincere. Virtue signalling is sanctimony — per Wiktionary, “A hypocritical form of excessive piety, considered to be an affectation merely for public show.” 

Quibble: “The Doctor Dances” is part 2 of a two-parter, the first being “The Empty Child.” Which is possibly the scariest (and most thrilling) pair of NuWho episodes until the first one with the Weeping Angels. So you’ve gotta watch The Empty Child.

I like both Oona and the evil magician couple who sent Luci as a wedding gift. If you’re a minor character on a Groening show, in the early going pretty much all your dialogue is going to be jokes:
“We’ll need chairs.”
“_Dark_ chairs.”

And that’s what I’m here for.

Nothing like watching my old MST3K tapes and remembering a time when the entire U.S. economy was seemingly based on long-distance call services (10-10-whatever), EXTREME sodas, and Flooz.

I think the comparison with Little Miss Sunshine is apt, in that both movies create a great deal of buildup around a performance piece -- dance, in both cases -- that winds up utterly deflating that buildup by being complete camp (in the John Waters sense of “tragically ludicrous/ludicrously tragic”) but played with…

To be fair, in John Wick 2 or Dark Matter, good acting would have stood out like a sore thumb.

Slack makes a pretty good platform for a D&D session — a friend of mine coded a dice-rolling chatbot for our campaign, which is really all you need if you’ve got a good DM — and there are also tools like Roll20 (https://app.roll20.net/sessions/new) if you’re playing an edition that absolutely has to have maps.

But in episode 219, you said that you really enjoyed shows that were faithful to continuity, and that it showed the creators cared as much about their craft as the audience did!

For the benefit of you whipper-snappers who weren’t on the internet in 2005, we present the greatest movie trailer ever created:

I don’t hate it either, but after watching I dunno how many dozen episodes over the course of several years, I started to find it exhausting and had to jump off the train.

Also, I feel like the newer episodes have been kind of treading water creatively, cycling through the established tropes of the show — celebrating…

I saw the film as part of an AMC double-feature event — so pretty much a smallish audience of die-hard Marvel fans --  and the Snap Coda™ provoked one such gentleman to bark “Fuck you!” at the screen.

I don’t have a whole lot of experience with the term, but from asking much the same question of a friend who lives in Los Angeles — prompted by me discovering there’s a “Cholo Ln” in my town — apparently the connotation in Mexican Spanish is not a mestizo Hispanic, but a rural/country bumpkin type. (How much of an…

A moment of appreciation for the perfectly Marc Maron/Sam Sylvia moment of Britannica’s storybook entrance in a beautiful white wedding dress, riding a white unicorn, and his immediate reaction being “That horse better not take a shit in here.”

I had enough of smug fuckin’ robots talking in circles with a not-so-secret agenda of “kill all humans” when it was called Battlestar Galactica 15 years ago.

“Hey mang, I don’t feel so good, it’s kinda like when my cousin Chuy was out buying a watch a  n  d .  .  .  .”

Hot take endorsed. Unlike some of the finicky TV critics here (and elsewhere), I don’t demand that every episode of a show stand on its own. Increased serialization and more complex narratives sometimes require that an hour of your run-time be devoted to moving the pieces around the chessboard, and as long as that can…

As someone whose familiarity with Jamaican culture approaches Mariah’s characterization of it (later) as “Marley, marijuana, and gang wars” I have to say I appreciated the subtitles rendering much of their dialogue into Standard American grammar. My ear for accents isn’t bad for a white dude, but it would have taken…

As a life-long Chicagoan, I appreciate the Detroit-specific references as a kind of ersatz cultural tourism. And Sam Richardson is a national treasure.

In terms of favorite quotes, I’m partial to: “[S]omewhere in some town there really are the best waffles in the world. So delicious, and rich, and golden brown that anyone who tasted them would decide never to leave that town. Somewhere those waffles exist. Why can’t it be here?”

Maybe it wasn’t carved, but molded.