Look out, Bilby! He's Irish!

I've always been fond of Martin because he is basically me as a child. (I'm a girl, but I was also as unpopular with the ladies as I was with the chaps.)

It works on so many levels!

I don't think any of them had ever seen Doctor Who. They did like Patrick Stewart though (and I actually love his Claudius, although my favorite Claudius is Derek Jacobi).

I remember seeing Europa Europa on two separate occasions in middle school, even though mostly what I remember about it is that it is primarily devoted to the effects of Nazism on penises.

I had a professor in grad school who used to show students Elizabeth (the one with Cate Blanchett) and make them write a paper outlining all of the historical inaccuracies in it…

I read 1H4 in high school and was completely hooked — I ended up doing a doctorate in English (warning: not a good career move) and a lot of my scholarship has focused on the history plays. As it happens, my high school classmates mostly didn't enjoy it, but whenever I've taught the play my students have loved it,…

I made my Intro to Rhetoric students watch Bowling for Columbine one year and got a lot of really torqued off analyses of it. Never have I had to write "'Fatass' is not an appropriate word for class papers" so many times.

The Hamlet I show newbies is the one with David Tennant — it's a filmed stage-production rather than a feature film, but it has realistic enough sets that that doesn't put students off. I showed it to my completely disengaged Intro to Lit class last time I taught one, and they were hooked.

One of the things that's always surprised me about this episode is that I've never seen this mentioned as an inspiration, even by the writers. It's a pretty close real-life parallel in some ways, though not others (the writers at EC were mostly white guys). You can read the whole story here.

There actually is one — it's called the Deggans Rule, although it's a little less exacting than even the Bechdel test, since it's about having more than one person of color in the cast in a show not explicitly about racial issues. (It also discounts actors playing aliens, but all of the Treks still pass, except for…

Avery Brooks looks great in that hat, I gotta say. He wears those '50s clothes really well. [/shallow]

I could picture that! I imagine his style would work a lot better onstage — sort of like Shatner. Shatner recorded a couple of Shakespeare speeches for his infamous album, and if you ignore the ridiculous background music they're actually pretty credible.

It's really amazing contrasting Spiner as Data with Spiner in pretty much every other role (including Data with emotions). He's really grating to watch when he's not Data, but Data's lack of emotions (or at least, human emotions, I totally buy the "Data has his own kind of emotions but doesn't realize it" theory)…

They actually offered him a spot in the main credits! Robinson turned it down because he felt it would be bad for the integrity of the character if they shoehorned him into a bunch of episodes on the grounds that he was billed as a regular.

It's a pretty common assumption in fandom — I've seen it all over the place. I think it's because a) Worf is the one we see the most, and b) there's certainly a lot to be said about Klingons (and other warrior-culture aliens in sf tv) being coded as black or racially othered in some way. (B'Elanna on Voyager is…

Meaney did a great job being retiring as Smiley in "Crossover," but I guess that's not really the same thing — playing beaten-down rather than shy. I dunno, maybe for an actor it kind of is. But yeah, pretty much everyone did fine with their roles, it just wasn't their story.

Azaria's line read on the "what"s is amazing, too.

The man never watched an episode of I Love Lucy in his life!

Oh, sure, I like the actual episode a lot. It suffers a bit from knowing where things go from there, but in and of itself it's very good.