Loved the books (except for Order of the Phoenix, which I have never managed to re-read despite three different attempts). Loved a couple of the movies (Azkaban and Goblet of Fire) and liked the rest (except for Chamber of Secrets, which seems really boring and disjointed to me).

"Why doesn't my English/Japanese dictionary have 'muggle' in it?" (God forbid "nomaj".)

That's actually a fair comparison. There's a lot of just plain stupid-crazy in both of those.

It helps that they're still recognizably human, only with hints of surgery and automation gone horribly wrong. It's that humanity that makes the Cybermen an interesting villain when they're handled right. One of the reasons "Spare Parts" is such a great story is that it treats the Cybermen as human beings who make a…

Delgado and Ainley could both chew the scenery like crazy (although Ainley might be at his best in "Survival," where the Master was relatively more subdued but still a baddie). I never thought the bigness of his performance was Simm's problem, more that the writing never let him be quite the menace he should be. He…

That ad break was infuriating. Yeah, by that point I basically knew what was coming anyway but it was like a giant spoiler five minutes before the reveal.

Whether or not the Doctor is ultimately right about Missy, what he did here to Bill is so screwed up. She makes it clear that she wants no part of being a guinea pig in the "rehabilitate Missy" experiment but goes through with it because she trusts the Doctor. And then she just becomes a pawn in the Master's game. …

I had some problems with the episode but that pain sequence was creepy. The slow reveal of the volume dial and that their pain was just being muted, not taken away, was one of the more effective horror moments they've had in awhile.

While the Friday the 13th and to a lesser extent Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises mostly just played mix-and-match with what bits of continuity they were going to keep and which ones they were going to throw out, the Saw movies make a crazy, convoluted, arguably pointless attempt to make things sort-of…

I stopped reading the meal descriptions two books ago. They just go on and on. I know someday he's going to slip a massive plot twist into the middle of some endless litany of dishes but I can't make myself read them anymore.

I will own up to having read the novelization, mostly to figure out what all had been cut out of the movie, because it was incredibly obvious that lots of things were trimmed down or excised entirely. It's not a great work of prose by any means but it does sort of fill in the gaps.

I have a soft spot for Warcraft, despite its many flaws. But it tried telling way too many stories at once for any of them to land perfectly. If they had started out just trying to tell the story from one clear perspective that would have been more conventional but also maybe more coherent. Kind of like the…

Everything is better with Lucy Lawless. (Not a joke: I actually believe that.)

His character on Teen Wolf was an irredeemable jackass. Not love to hate, just hate. Although I'm sure he's a lovely person.

I've enjoyed Lord and Miller's work but it's hard to believe a producer as massively successful as Kennedy didn't foresee their obviously looser, partly improv style clashing with the well-oiled machine that Disney so wants Star Wars to be.

I've always thought of The God Complex as a snarky comment on the "power of love" endings. The whole danger there is believing in something too much - including a companion believing in the Doctor too much. Clapping your hands if you believe in fairies really won't help in that case.

Rewatching the first couple seasons of Teen Wolf, which reminded me that the version of the show I like is the one where Stiles and Scott's friendship is the focus. No love story the show has ever cooked up is better than the two of them together. Also forgot how many freaking slow motion shots there were…

The "people will accept anything if they believe it's been going on forever" thing was a much more interesting idea than the episode actually pursued. Maybe not a terribly original idea - that's essentially the plot of The Giver among many, many other things - but more interesting than "super effective in-brain cable…

That short scene between The Doctor, Missy, and Bill was great. She's mostly toying with her but there's just a hint of genuine (?) sympathy. Then, yeah, the ending was pretty much a dud despite good performances from Capaldi and Mackie in that tearful goodbye scene. Don't tell the audience the inevitable…

I was also surprised at how much I didn't hate it. The plot wasn't as convoluted as the third one, there were some decently funny sequences, and I actually even liked this edition of the series' endless very pretty, almost completely superfluous young lovers.