Ho. Ly. SHIT — you just made my entire week. Don't know how many times I've tried to explain to people the gonzo berzerker awesomeness of JSBX in their heyday… this video sums it up perfectly.

To be fair, it's actually mentioned several times that this episode takes place a few weeks after the pilot (e.g., during her tree-chopping meltdown, Liv Tyler's character says "I've been with you people for weeks")

Man, I would watch the fuck out of that…

Speaking of jump-gates, does anyone remember the show's mythology of how they came about? I seem to recall it being mentioned that the Centauri claimed to have invented them (or at least this was what they told the humans after they made first contact with Earth), but in fact they're tens of thousands of years old,…

** SPOILERS **

Yeah, you're right that the S3 premiere provides the (pretty crucial) exposition on using jump-points as weapons. I guess I'm just thinking back to when the show was originally on the air — at the time, "Distant Star" was the first time *I* felt like I really understood how hyperspace was supposed to work (especially…

OP wasn't referring to the Nuremberg trials themselves but to the principles for international relations that were articulated to justify them. "War crimes" is a legal concept, so part of the work of Nuremberg was defining what constitutes a "crime" in that context. And the bedrock of the Nuremberg principles is that…

"A Distant Star" may be a bust in terms of drama (or even entertainment value), but I'd argue it's not skippable, simply because it provides the show's only comprehensive primer on how hyperspace works. This is more than just trivia — the logistics of which ships can jump into hyperspace on their own and which need…

Yeah, not sure if it was rosacea specifically, but that's how he looked back then. Ever heard the U2 song "Bullet the Blue Sky"? The lyrics "This guy comes up to me/ His face red like a rose on a thorn bush/ Like all the colors of a royal flush" are a reference to Reagan.

By "cultural artifact" I assume he means creative works (books, movies, songs, etc.) as opposed to celebrities/personalities. Different type of attention, different dynamic at work.

That's nothing — you gotta check out the original version of "Red Red Red" — so many magnitudes of better that the released version makes me cry in despair.

Oooops — sorry, didn't read the OP closely enough. Apologies for the needless correction.

Different album — "Hot Knife" is from Idler Wheel, "Better Version…" from the unreleased Extraordinary Machine.

Re: the "myth" that the label pushed the re-recording. At the time, it seemed very clear (based on her comments) that the Brion version (those arrangements, if not those specific recordings) was what she wanted to release. My impression is that her subsequent comments are more about not burning bridges with the label,…

Well, that and the fact that that wasn't the story at the time. There was like a year or so of "Free Fiona", in which it was made very clear (by her) that the label was refusing to release the album because they didn't think it was sufficiently commercial. It wasn't until after the new version was recorded and…

Well, agree to disagree, then. I for one LOVE the Brion-produced Extraordinary Machine, and find the released version to be dull, somnolent, and boring — with the exception of "O Sailor", which I'll admit is a significant improvement over the Brion arrangement. But the final version of the album commits such sins as…

"Detached from any reality." Have you not ever met a 22-year-old?

Yeah, I had occasion to a student event at CUNY Law School recently (a VERY liberal school in NY) and can report that the "fevered debate over identity politics" is indeed rabidly alive…

Did this series get abandoned? Shame if it did…

Did this series get abandoned? Shame if it did…