What also makes it fun, though, is that while comparing your own suffering to Christ's is indeed seriously over the top, and that while Richard does have a certain flair for theatrical self-pity, he's nevertheless getting at the heart of early modern views of kingship. Political theology in Shakespeare's day, after…

Visually, Goold failed to find a way to represent that division, since there are no crowd scenes to speak of

As much as I love this production — and I love it a lot — I really disliked the decision to have Aumerle kill Richard. It doesn't really feel any less out of the blue than the way it happens in the original text (I actually think that the randomness of it is thematically important). I can imagine a version where it…

And Tatiana Maslany for Joan of Arc!

So he's like O'Brien, only really, really annoying?

Yeah, but the mental picture of Klingon Gordon Ramsay is pretty brilliant.

There’s something else, too, something that might just be my
imagination…
You push past all that take of communion and one-ness and peace and
tranquility, the Founders start to sound less like an enlightened race,
and more like a cult. And cults don’t let anyone go.

It's like those old anti-drug PSAs! "Just try to tell your resistance leader that you're madly in love with that you didn't disable the alarms because you were getting stoned. She'll understand."

You can't give your main character a title as hilarious as "rear admiral (lower half)"!

That and that BIG SPOILERY THING that happens a couple of episodes down the line have always struck me as very King Lear-like…

Oh, I also think that Hiddleston's performance in the Henry IVs is improved a lot by the fact that he has Irons and Beale to play off of — he's not a bad actor by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not sure that he successfully carried Henry V on his own. Again, partly directorial — despite the fact that Henry…

Roger Allam is the greatest Falstaff I have ever seen. Although it's hard to achieve that kind of performance off without a live audience — this I think is the biggest pitfall of productions of the Henry IVs. It's hard to give those scenes the right energy in a studio (although Orson Welles pulls it off in Chimes at…

Cardenio or GTFO.

It's the part he was born to play, baby.

I dunno, I thought Hiddleston was a pretty good douchebag as Hal, but I agree that his Henry V is far too nice — I'm not sure it's entirely Hiddleston's fault, because the cuts to the text were pretty inexplicable and there were some highly questionable directorial decisions. I don't care if it's different, there's a r…

@avclub-13d7df3c17502af69aafccc758195f96:disqus  The Henry VIs are fantastic onstage, though (and they do have some characters in common with Henry V; Henry's brothers have fairly significant roles although they'd obviously have had to recast them). My suspicion is that they're not doing them because budget and…

It may not count, since it was bleeped, but I do want to put in a word all the same for JOHN FUCKING ZOIDBERG.

I always wondered if Weyoun maintained his love of Dabo from his first post-fragging appearance…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's been the point of pretty much every Klingon ep since "Sins of the Father" — and [VAGUE SPOILERS] it gets spelled out explicitly later in the series!

You suck!