The hype was negative. Everyone more or less thought it was a stupid, pointless idea.

I think it's amusing to compare the pre-show hype for True Detective and Hannibal, because I think to a certain degree it informs the reaction to both.

People who slide into the "overweight" category because of muscle are outliers, pure and simple. I don't get why BMI gets a bad rap by some in this regard.

I anticipated this being my favourite episode ever, but boy does the Abed/Hickey plot bring it down. Just hugely overwritten. It could've been wittled down a couple minutes, and that probably would've been much more effective too.

I don't believe that Germany could've taken Moscow, regardless. Their plans were ludicrously optimistic from the start, and simply refused to deal with the logistical reality of the situation.

In my fantasies, this is the series finale.

Magic, apparently. I didn't do anything.

Have you seen the OSS 117 films?

Yeah, but the Lost Cause stuff popped up almost immediately. No credible historian today would parrot that kind of stuff. I'm talking just about the historical community here; obviously the general public follows its own (often idiotic) historiographical trends.

It depends on the subject, and the way events play out afterwards. To use the example of the atomic bombings, revisionism of the classic historic beliefs established immediately post-war didn't really come into vogue until the late '60s (there were some historians previous who dabbled, but Atomic Diplomacy was the…

I'd say it's decidedly the opposite, in fact. Distance calms the emotions considerably. I have a lot of experience with atomic bomb historiography, and it's pretty shocking how only in the last ten years or so have things calmed down enough for truly excellent work to come through. Certainly both WWI and WWII went…

The Marxist interpretation doesn't really work at all, though. WWI wasn't fought for the benefit of elites: more than any recent event, it destroyed the power of the status quo, bringing down all of the old monarchies of Europe with the exception of England. It was furthermore instrumental in breaking up the…

You can't use hindsight to evaluate how sensible a decision was at the moment. The decision in 1914 wasn't "do we sacrifice close to a million soldiers for 31 years of peace?"

Haig gets a bad rap. The war was so transformative in terms of scale, weaponry, tactics, strategy, etc. that anyone would have had difficulties in adapting.

He was to be replaced by Arthur Currie, I think. Monash was going to be Chief of Staff.

Ferguson actually thinks that the war was a terrible tragedy for Britain. Not because of the loss of life or human suffering, of course; but because it weakened the glorious British Empire.

The show does present a fairly inaccurate view of WWI. It's a great show, but it's dangerous to succumb to the idea that it somehow captures how it really was better than historians who spend their lives studying the subject.

What's your Czech/US prediction? I know odds are for the States, but I wouldn't be surprised at an upset.

Suck it, Switzerland! That's what you get for trying to play boring hockey.

I'm with most other people here in thinking that the True Detective hype train is a little over-earnest (even though I really like the show), but damn that episode was just electrifying start-to-finish. Great stuff.