Yes. L.M. Montgomery had some... problematic attitudes. The Anne books had quite a few nasty comments about the French Canadians, who were always portrayed as shiftless and dirty, and there were a few throwaway comments about Italians and Jews. If you read her other stuff, though, she also uses the ‘n’ word quite a…

Well, let’s be fair here. ‘The Tudors’ is ostensibly history. Sexed up, yes, but it was supposed to be history. Never saw the show, but I get equally irritated with Phillipa Gregory’s books, so I get what you’re saying. ‘Timeless’ featured an episode where JFK comes to the present day and reads his own Wikipedia…

Figures. Genre TV—especially *intelligent* genre TV— makes the networks nervous. They never gave the show a chance—crappy time slots, no effort at promotion, and I swear they just don’t want to accept the fact that first-run live viewing simply isn’t the only way people watch TV anymore.

I don’t know if I’d say go *darker,* but I’d definitely say go *deeper.* At its core, the show is wrestling with the entire concept of free will vs preordained destiny, the definitions of good and evil, and the forging— and, more importantly, shattering and reforging of personal identities. If they could focus on that…

Yup. The name ‘Jesus’ is a Latinized transliteration of the Greek pronunciation of the Hebrew ‘Yeshua.’ Greek because that was the most common language of the day, Latin because that was the audience to whom they were trying to sell this new religion, and Hebrew because they couldn’t *quite* figure out how to…

No, KFC went from using their full name to using the acronym, just like IHOP did a few years back. No elements were really changed. If KFC had suddenly decided to change elements of their name— maybe they’d be ‘Arkansas Roasted Chicken,’ or ARC—there would be some serious paperwork to do. No, I think this is a…

This is bloody stupid on several levels. First off, replacing all the signage and menus and everything else will cost a non-negligible amount of money. Secondly, re-trademarking their new acronym will be a pain in the ass, even before you factor in all the people who will be confused ass to whether it’s still the same…

I suppose it’s not impossible that both are true— that Greatest Show featured that basic outfit two years before Incas, AND that they were inspired by the latter obscure film rather than the former. There really are only so many ideas in the universe to go around. ‘Red Dwarf’ is, in its broadest outlines, not…

People who don’t really want comments, I suppose.

I think this one is probably a lost cause. There are just too damned many people who can’t or won’t grasp the idea that the word ‘theory’ has a precise scientific meaning that is not really even similar to the more slangy, layman’s definition. It’s too ingrained in what passes for their brains that a ‘theory’ is a…

Thank you. I was waiting for someone else to notice that. Shakespeare in particular never worried too much about coming up with an original storyline or set of characters; pretty much everything he ever wrote was based on someone else’s work. Shakespeare was a ficcer!

In a way, we’re getting back to where we were before copyright existed as a legal concept— Cervantes, famously, inserted a snippy little line in the second half of Don Quixote to complain about the ficcers who’d been publishing unauthorized sequels. And let’s not even get INTO the many, many people who wrote Biblical…

I’m so damned fascinated by the ideas they floated this week, and I’m heartbroken that we might not get to finish the story. Lucifer, despite clinging to his free will like it’s all he’s got left... which it kind of is... has always struggled with the idea that Dad is pulling his strings. Maybe it was even comforting…

Okay, let’s see. Ankhesenpaaten’s crystal ball says...

Frankly, I think that’s most of the problem. People *don’t* watch TV the way they used to; people stream it, or record it for later, or binge-watch it, or whatever else. The old ratings system of calculating X number of households all watching first run programming at the same time just does not work anymore. The…

Yeah. Cain is good at making everything all about him— as is Lucifer, actually— and this time the writers aided and abetted. I wish they had gone a bit deeper into that relationship, too. No one watches this show for the stupid murders they solve every week, and for me at least, even the romances take second place to…

This, God have mercy on us all, is damned near anarchy. Trump, and his right wing enablers, has decided that treaties are meaningless. That elections are theater. That law is whatever he said it is in the last fifteen minutes. That there is never a need to work with allies— never a need to HAVE allies— and certainly…

My guess? Cain’s whole issue is that he only wants what he can’t have. When he was immortal, he wanted to die. Now that he’s mortal again, he wants his mark back. He had exactly no interest in Ella, probably because she was doing everything but a mating dance. Chloe became interesting only after it became clear that…

“If your show makes money for the company, it stays; if not, it goes.”

Wasn’t it Battlestar Galactica that coined ‘feldercarb’ to use as an outer space swear word? Goldfarb’s not so very far off from that. :)