Totally. As far as split-second decisions go it doesn't seem crazy to me. Killing him and taking him away seem equally likely to help the others. And turning the Beast, a rape victim, against an evil god, a rapist, seems logical to me. Book readers know what they (think they) know, I guess, but I think we're a number…

It didn't strike me as an intrinsically villainous decision either. Maybe not the right one, but not inherently unreasonable in the circumstances.

I was thinking that that might end up being their winning play. *Presumably* Alie 2.0 wins, because she was designed to win.

"Simpleton" is actually the nicest thing I've seen anyone call Mike Huckabee for quite some time.

Except that's why Titus tried to kill Clarke. It's not why Lexa died. She died in a freak accident that nobody wanted or intended. Narratively unsatisfying. She might as well have had an aneurysm or fallen down the stairs, everything in the aftermath could and probably would have been exactly the same.

… except her death had nothing to do with that? For me that's what made it a little ugly. It was just a stupid random thing that didn't mean anything. Quite unsatisfying.

Yeah. I mean, criminal law is my field and I actually believe quite strongly in a system that protects the guilty. The problem is that the ordinary power dynamics are inverted in most sexual assaults, and how to account for that is a genuinely thorny problem. Ultimately the minimum we can do, though, is work on the…

I agree that it's tough. For random famous people I don't think much is really required of you. I personally lost any stomach for Woody Allen films a few years back. But I wouldn't say that even if you believe as I do that he molested his step daughter that I think you're thus morally obliged to avoid his films. But…

"I don't know that it's true that most reported rapes that do not result in conviction actually happened." Well, luckily for you I do know, and I am telling you that this is the case. And only a minority of sexual assaults are reported, but that doesn't mean they don't happen either.

You don't "assume" someone is innocent until proven guilty. Presumption of innocence is a legal principle that places a burden of proof on the state to prove guilt before imposing a criminal sanction. It's a high standard, for principled reasons, but implicit in setting that bar high is acceptance that we will not be…

Funny, I couldn't disagree more. I found the rapid unravelling of Quentin and Alice's relationship was realistic and honestly a welcome contrast to the narrative trope of hardship bringing people together. The reality is just as often the opposite, and here that really rang true for me: they're a pair of mid-20s kids…

This is good news.

Well, I have some good news and some bad news for you.

I have! It's the only state I've been to where the racism is sufficiently advanced to detect my mixed racedness. I was standing next to a blond friend and a well-meaning acquaintance had to let me know that no matter how many dirty looks we got she didn't think any less of us just because we were an (ominous whisper)…

I'm about 95% certain those scenes were filmed in the UBC botanical garden, and which in places really is a weirdly vast and empty series of statue-studded plazas (though maybe not precisely the statues highlighted here). I haven't read the books so I can't comment on the fidelity, but in the real world it's a…

The difference is that the Syfy side-shave is actually an attractive, versatile, easy to style and maintain haircut.

Love it.

I was thinking about this last night after I posted, and maybe (while we're giving the show more credit than it deserves) we could suppose that by the 20th century this Vandal Savage is in many ways in the twilight of his career? Those first couple of millennia he conquered and dominated and enslaved and so on, but at…

I kinda liked that, to be honest. It (and bear with me on this one) in some ways makes Vandal Savage as portrayed in this show less ridiculous to think of him as someone who sometimes spends years/decades dicking around making monsters. If he's been trying to take over the world full time for 4000 years, he's a…

I don't think it's about moral kudos, but I think there's a moral lesson in this episode so clear that even someone as dense and self-centered as Bellamy can't miss it - Kane is dying because Kane decided not to kill him. And moreover, this is a quality Bellamy implicitly knew about and took advantage of by stepping…