Because selling them would be a short-term cash infusion. Getting a little money right now is always going to seem more attractive than getting a whole lot more money down the line. Like the marshmallow experiment.

That’s not a throwaway line. That’s Tahani encapsulating her entire personality into a single sentence. That’s who she is, what she is, and why she’s where she is.

And yet, later in the episode, he says just the opposite— that he’d rather simply BE tortured than actively participate in his own torture. Is it the inclusion of his own suffering that changes the stakes?

So... by choosing the Trolley Problem as the thought experiment du jour, they’re actually saying quite a bit about Bad Place setups and double binds, I’d say. Because you can’t win in the Trolley Problem. There is no ‘moral’ choice. You can choose, through action, to kill one person, or you can choose, through…

That’s because Nathan Lane— and I mean this in the nicest way possible— is constitutionally incapable of turning in a bad performance. He simply doesn’t know how to be uninteresting.

I suspect that when people hear the word ‘taxpayer,’ what they imagine is what they see in the mirror. Everyone pays some taxes, everyone feels like they pay too much, and everyone feels a tad resentful when they see ‘their’ money being used for what they consider bad reasons. Urban legends about $2,ooo dollar…

I commented in another thread that, given the Mudd/Tyler choice— ie, abandon the guy who is obviously slime and rescue the one with the flimsy cover story— there was no way in hell that Tyler wouldn’t turn out to be fishy. There’s no drama otherwise. Leaving Mudd in the slam to be tortured was, by definition, a…

I have been told— this may or may not be an urban legend— that the inclusion of that colorful metaphor was an ad-lib. Shatner was being... less than delightful that day, or so the story goes, and Nimoy, a bit fed up, replied in kind and in character.

Ghosted, please. I am legitimately *begging* you. Max can be dorky. Max can be awkward. Max can be puppyish. But please, please— let him be intelligent. That’s supposed to be his shtick. Making him such an over-the-top idiot is killing the show for me, because I’m spending half the episode being embarrassed for him.…

Well, as regards the ‘perfectly suited to torture one another’ shtick, that was a straight steal from ‘No Exit.’ (Which also had Hell being in a nice sitting room, but never mind that...) As to their time of death, are dates ever actually given? Maybe Michael was able to cherry-pick over the course of a decade or two.

I was intrigued by how much of a point they made of the ‘party’ torture. Michael can kvetch all he likes about how unoriginal and shallow it is, nothing like his multi-page masterpieces... but it worked. Even knowing beforehand what was supposed to happen to her, it *worked.* Is Vicki just better at this than Michael?…

Huh. When I was a kid and dinosaurs roamed the earth, half the fun was making up new sets of words. Duck, Duck, Goose would become Potato, Potato, Eggplant, then next round was Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Meatball, or whatever. And, of course, using taboo words like ‘poop’as part of the word set was just Swiftian in its…

One year? ONE BLOODY YEAR? For kidnapping and sexually assaulting a minor? He’d have gotten a harsher sentence for possession of a joint! ONE YEAR???

*Obviously,* if they’d been wearing clothing from Donna Karan’s fashion line, nothing bad would ever, ever have happened. So it’s their own fault, and they deserved to be harassed, for dressing like that.

Yes. That was the main problem I had with this episode— I don’t enjoy characters who never let go of the Idiot Ball. And it seemed that his entire purpose this week was to be klutzy, inappropriate, or just plain clueless. It’s a waste of a very funny actor and a potentially interesting character. They even lampshaded…

I’ll just say the same thing I’ve been saying for weeks now— if they would lay off the 20th-century pop culture stuff, I’d be a lot happier. It isn’t clever any more. We GET it; yes, ha ha ha, culture stopped evolving in 1998, and Larry David is basically Shakespeare now, tee hee. God knows me and my friends…

I enjoyed Yami no Matsuei— short version; death is a bureaucracy, staffed by dead people who, for whatever reason, weren’t ready to move on, and, unsurprisingly, have some rather impressive emotional issues. Focuses primarily on Tsuzuki, a cheerful long-time staffer, who, frankly, redefines the word ‘screwed.’ His…

Probably not a coincidence that there’s a new TV series glorifying ‘ordinary people’ using social media to catch bad guys. Setting up a surveillance state wherein people are encouraged to spy on their neighbors at all times is a *good* thing, right? Maybe we can arrange a system of rewards for every tip that leads to…

Right, then; what we had last night was ‘For The Jokes Are Hollow And I Have Missed The Point.’ It frustrates the *daylights* out of me that this show, which I want, very much, to like, keeps setting up interesting stories and whiffing. Religious tyranny— check. It’s bad. We get it. But what happens *after* the man…

More important than respect for people *in general.* Yes, they have little or no respect for persons of color, and certainly don’t care an iota about the police violence that was the initial stimulus for the protest. But who *do* they really care about? Making a fuss over inanimate objects and vague symbols is easy,…