SPOILERS

Aang, prior to meeting back up with Bumi (Boomi? I'm not sure), even indicates that the resistance is so badly outmatched that further agitation amounts to suicide.

Wow!  First of all, thank you for keeping the community informed when you clearly did not need to.  But more importantly, allow me to express my utmost sympathies for what must have been a scary and painful ordeal.  I'm glad that you are recovering and hope that you continue to do well.

Don't spoil my illusions, man.

But on a more serious note:  I interpreted the whole vengeful plants thing as a self-conscious Tolkein reference (maybe not, the concept shows up pretty frequently) with a twist.  Yeah, it doesn't entirely work, but the idea had merit and was appropriate for this particular fantasy world.

The mouseover text on the screencap….

I am actively repressing my urge to tell you what happens!  All in good time :-)

Another incentive to just keep going is the fact that Legend of Korra may very well start airing before TV Club Classic gets up and running again.

To answer your Return to Omashu questions:

The show answers this question in Season 3.  But to sum up:  pulling water out of plants/manipulating water within plants is an adaptation of waterbending that appears to be highly specific to environment.  The main Water Tribes don't need it/can't really use it because they live on a fucking glacier.  Any waterbender…

I never noticed Mai's callousness toward her little brother's life, but perhaps that's just because I get distracted by her utterly impossible aim.  In pretty much every episode she's in, she is able to throw multiple stilettos and pin a person to a tree without drawing a drop of blood, so perhaps she was just…

"That's why they call it justice, because it's just us!"

That's why I often recommend Ursula Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness.  It's a wonderfully compact standalone sci-fi novel that nevertheless manages to convey a fully realized and immersive world.

As a teenager, I used to do an annual LOTR re-read, but I couldn't get past the first hundred pages of a Robert Jordan novel.

@the rationlist:  was that student the smarmy type who cranks up the earnestness and the charm in hopes that you'll bump his B+ up to an A when the end of term rolls around and then is SO HURT when you don't?  I find I can spot those students on the very first day, but I always feel like a misanthropic asshole even…

Yeah, I hear you. In my opinion, ANYTHING that aspires to cultural influence has to recognize certain responsibilities attendant on that influence—if not the responsibility to tell the unvarnished truth at least the responsibility to attempt to grapple with it in an intellectually honest way.

I can see your point here. I think however, that the argument this particular through-line is making is that its ok for Bartlett to own his intelligence and to even attempt to use it to his own political advantage rather than retreating behind a much safer but wholly inauthentic veneer of folksiness.

Ricky Gervais? I could have sworn from the previews that the dog was John Oliver.

Exactly. CJ's parsing of that comment at the end of the episode was a little on the nose, but his sly, wordless look at her was priceless.

I think that's setting a low standard even for entertainment. I get similarly irritated when I hear Jon Stewart disavowing his impact because his vehicle is a "comedy show." He gets a bit of a pass because he usually only invokes that when he's pointing out that news organizations ought to be held to higher…