Jim Rash is outstanding. He moves from silly to creepy to sympathetic to pathetic to sincere all in the space of 22 minutes.

I thought it was a pretty chilling thing to do, gloating to someone as they die choking on their own blood. Yeeesh.

I'm sure others have remarked upon this, but Raylan sure is stone cold delivering that last line to Daryl as he chokes on his own blood. Holy shit.

How many ten-gallon buckets of Vaseline does a young superhero need to make it through super-puberty?

"The look on her face when she hears that sentence suggests she doesn't even begin to know how to react." Kudos for your ability to read different emotions on Katie Cassidy's face.

I see what you're saying, and I agree that Bruno had a mystical/Neo-Platonist view of his faith, but I do think there is a difference. I think Galileo, a contemporary, is of a very different sort of mind. Mathematical. Observational. Bacon might qualify in this way, too. Kepler, despite his passion for astrology, was…

Wow, you guys sure are defensive. No one is defending the Church. All that was said is that it's bad politics to alienate those who might be helpful at some point, especially when your stances are controversial. Pointing out a shortcoming does not imply that someone "deserved" anything, except in your own mind.

Ironically there were many commercials for "Noah" in our area…

I don't think it's beside the point. Losing one's patrons and friends when one is a well-known intellectual can be a serious problem when one is in trouble with an overarching authority. Blasting your opponents in letters and in published manuscripts with ad hominem attacks, especially when a few of them happen to be…

No, that isn't why I "dragged" Galileo into it. I'm simply pointing out that heliocentrism wasn't a heretical offense on the order that Tyson would have us believe it out to be. I've studied Bruno, quite a bit, actually. He was into a lot of things (especially astrology and Hermetic alchemy), He made contacts with a…

No one said anything about bringing it on himself, or that anything justifies it, but a person who spurns the goodwill of colleagues at a time when a major institution is rooting out heresies doesn't end up with many friends. The major point is that he didn't get burned at the stake for Copernicanism. No one did. Not…

I'd encourage you to read Galileo's letters and other source material that is still available from the time. There's a lot more to it than he "held an opinion" and everyone got a sad face. The dude was a major prick, and he burned through a lot of good will on the part of those Church mathematicians and astronomers…

No, it isn't glib, it's a fact. Believing in a heliocentric model is not listed as a heresy in any Inquisition manuals used during the period. Copernicus may have faced censorship, public scorn, and intellectual isolation, but there's nothing conclusive to demonstrate that Copernicus' model would have been grounds for…

They burned him ALIVE, too, a death which was, despite popular conceptions to the contrary, reserved for very special enemies of Church doctrine.

I couldn't agree more. This show is obviously not the place to explore the social history of science with much complexity, and given that, I found it a little too simplistic in its narrative of seamless scientific progress.

This has probably been said earlier, but I have always loved the way Greendale instantly goes to hell in a hand basket at the slightest provocation. Things get dark really fast.

This show just keeps cranking it up. Kudos.

The trailer looks cool, but I don't know anything about the comics. Are they also funny and/or ironic, or is this a particular take on absurd elements in the comics?

Ah, very nice. Laurel gets revenge by becoming a super villain?

The only way forward I see for Laurel is for Sara to go out in a blaze of glory in the finale while saving Oliver and Laurel from Slade's nefarious scheme. That provides a catalyst for Laurel to get off her ass. Maybe Laurel even gets Mirakuru so that we can suspend our disbelief about Cassidy's lack of physicality…