The notion that the secret to Wes Anderson's success was Owen Wilson increasingly doesn't hold water - not post-Fantastic Mr. Fox, not post-Moonrise Kingdom. Not even post-Life Aquatic, which is still my favorite.

I love The Darjeeling Limited. No, it's not his best, but it's way, way better than it gets credit for - owing mostly, I think, to the fact that it came out at peak-Anderson-backlash. Of all of Anderson's dysfunctional families, the brothers in that one might be the most spot-on and perfectly-sketched (you don't need…

Yes, of course Walt won. He got to pass his drug money on to his family; he got to tell off his old business partner and his ex one last time; he got to set things up so Skyler wouldn't go to jail; he didn't have to go to jail himself, or suffer the indignity of a trial, or be held accountable for his many, many…

It's the "having its cake and eating it too" thing that drives me nuts about the finale, and generally leads me to conclude that Gilligan and co. weren't spinning some grand morality tale, as the show's boosters have often claimed over the years - nor have they been trying to subvert the cult of the anti-hero, as so…

Screw you, with your free healthcare and your cheap drugs and your winsome indie bands!

Now, my understanding is that once the government is shut down, all laws will cease, the army and police will disband, and we will officially be welcomed into Thunderdome.

I'm basically going to link to Slate's review of this because it says what I want to say better than I can:

By the time they did the one where he destroyed an MRI machine by trying to do an imaging of a corpse with a bullet in it (surprise! bullets are made of metal!), I was thinking to myself, "hmmm, for an indispensibly brilliant doctor, House does a very good impression of a very firable stupid person."

BUT SHE'S SO ADORKABLE

I'm glad to see someone else was underwhelmed. It wasn't just that we were treated to one last Walter White master plan where everything goes off without a hitch (and I mean, absolutely everything goes off without a hitch - Lydia doesn't even switch tables or seats over the course of a year? Walt gets his hands on a…

Most of these aren't actual analogues - they're just characters with (very) superficial similarities to each other.

Oh, the poor, tortured existence of Roman Polanski - forced to live in villas in France for the last forty years! He has to shoot in Lisbon and pretend it's New York! Why, the lowliest creatures on the planet must look down on him in pity!

Hell, Charles Manson was abused as a child. Does he get the Polanski pass, too?

@avclub-1cdd3d1e53f96ae7894ff6d46f59f2e0:disqus - I think we understand the Founders' motivations well enough - they're explained for us pretty straightforwardly when we first meet them in "The Search." The changelings came to believe, based on their history, that peaceful coexistence with non-changelings was…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus - I have to disagree slightly on when the Borg changed character. It's true that the Borg we see in "Q Who?" is different than the Borg we see in "BOBW" - at first they're only interested in assimilating technology, and then later they assimilate whole species. But in…

Even the Borg - probably Trek's most alien aliens - got tripped up on Trek's need to turn everyone into slightly modified humans. When we first meet them, the Borg is a single mind with countless bodies; by the time we meet Hugh (and Lore gets involved, and then the Borg Queen, and Voyager, etc.), they're basically…

Why wouldn't changelings have a drive for sexual reproduction? We've seen a baby changeling before; we know that Odo was an infant. A hundred infant changelings were launched out by the Link on their kooky mission of exploration/intelligence-gathering. So the changelings in the link can make more changelings outside…

There is a whiff of drugginess about it, but it's so clear that the writers' intention is "Odo and Noseless Lady are having blob sex."

[SPOILERS obvs]

@avclub-515235f3d6aa8fc571384101101bf105:disqus  - That's yet another version of Britta that they tried, and just as quickly lost interest in. The "Britta as homemaker" thing only really would have worked if the show has ever bothered to sell us on "Britta as someone who is in some way morally opposed to being a…