I'd love to see more Kai, but I agree with the reviewer that he really ought to've had more time this season, given how key his role was in the end (and also given how much wasted time there was in the back half).

That bugged me too, though I think it was as much because he's just so gross and awful. But on reflection, I'd say we can do a bit of handwave for narrowly avoided apocalypse, and even (come to think of it) finding out definitively that her sister is dead and who did it… you can see how that might throw a girl for a…

Mm. I definitely will regardless — the Lem connection alone probably ensures that. I do like Southland Tales more than it deserves, and The Futurological Congress definitely has a similar sort of utter insanity (with the bonus feature of being, y'know, coherent)… so I'm interested, regardless. But *less* interested…

Shame. The book is excellent, and would be very well served by a relatively faithful adaptation.

Honestly, I thought this was about as good as it could have been, given the rest of this season. Hit the few good notes it had to hit, didn't make any of the terrible missteps it could've made, had a few more good lines than average this season… fuck it, I'll take it.

She looked pissed. I'd be pissed. All that work preventing the robot apocalypse, all the time travel, decades of her life, and nobody once thinks to warn her that there's an alien apocalypse that's going to end up wrecking the place.

Random tidbit I just learned that I'm leaving here 'cause, sure, why not — many of the actors are "naturalistic" in this film because they're not actors at all, they're real people being posed this question and filmed (and then maybe in a few cases brought back for actual scenes, specifically while they're…

I don't think that's entirely fair. Nolan's not much, but the daughter thing is at least a fillip on the archetype, and stubbled white male protagonists are almost always mega boring. Stahma and Amanda are both strongly written and interesting (and both arguably as important to the show as Nolan, along with Irisa and…

This all jives with my sense of that writing room. I'm sure there are individually talented people who work on this show, but whatever the process is that produces these scripts is fucked, and at least some of them are clearly goddamn morons.

Like many (though certainly not all) things with this season, you can totally see how it could've made sense in the bones of the script: Hoyt has an intense connection with this random chick that he claims not to even know, his girlfriend is threatened by it, Jessica shows up, things go south. But because this show is…

Agreed. I think a lot of works portray what they think of as (and sometimes tell us is) True Neutral, but really end up with something more like Chaotic Good; antiheros who don't give a shit about the rules and might even actively desire the dissolution of normative society but who have impeccable personal moral…

I've been liking what they've been doing with Nolan — I'd label it a "reframing" rather than a rethinking. We've always known he's a rough and tumble badass with a talent for violence and is a pretty big softy once you get on his good side… but fiction often backs away from the fact that people like Hans Solo are…

I agree that I think his hopes for the New Caprica-style thing definitely seem to be colouring his enjoyment of the show otherwise, and to an extent where I'm not especially interested in reading him rehash the point again… but conversely, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to criticise a show by saying that it…

I didn't mind Kenya and thought Mia Kirshner did a fine enough job with pretty marginal material in this episode — I especially liked her last couple of scenes where I felt like I could actually see the alien personality surfacing…. but yes, agreed, Stahma's scenes in this episode were the highlight, both for comedy…

For me, at least, it's hard to take in Pottinger's scheming without him being crazy as a bag of weasels. And I can handle that as a plot point, but it's not super interesting to me — I was much more interested in him and his plotline (which may also be the A-plot of the season?) when it seemed like it was going to be…

Upvoted for actually solid advice. And 'boring reality'.

Ugh, you're so right :( Still, I'd be pretty shocked if F'lar shakes Lessa when he's angry at her in the films (or if she lives in a state of near-constant terror of him), which indicates that *something* as changed. We're less tolerant of straight-up physical abuse, at least. Progress!

Yeah, agreed, I don't think they're a *particularly* shameful chapter in SF — they are what they are, the product of a specific era and a not especially forward-thinking writer, and there are definitely good points. Lessa has significant problems as a character, but at least she exists, right? No sarcasm, it's really…

Well, she's dead now, so at least we don't need to worry about her throwing her money at the tea party or whatever. As a person, though, she was by all accounts a bit of a nightmare.

I think there are better things you could be doing with your time, to be honest. I loved them as a kid, but going back to them recently I found them a little weak all around. Fairly flimsy plots and characters, unimpressive prose and dialogue. Not awful or anything, just… not great.