"going from a critically acclaimed indie to a high-profile superhero movie in only a few years is basically to be expected now from Coogler’s meteoric rise"
Not to disparage Coogler, but this is kind of the MO for big budget hollywood right now. Take a talented indie director and throw them in the big chair.

His entire last Album was a bombastic, bitter-sweet goodbye to his fans, the ones he loved, and the world he lived in. All of this is kind of incredible, an artist wrestling their own death into meaning. It's beautiful in a way only Bowie could ever really pull off.

There's very little research supporting the notion of the family as the central pillar of society. There have been tons of peoples, civilizations, and cultures which lacked a traditional nuclear family and did just fine. I'm not saying that family is completely unimportant, but I think the dogmatic and frantic defense…

"There is little doubt that she can get the Coke account. "

"What? It's a lot of money."

There's pluses and minuses. To pull off a great ambiguous ending relies on the foresight and skill to sprinkle symbols and other hints towards your intention throughout the preceding episodes. Take stuff like all the coke references, or Ted saying "every man has three women in his life", or the girl at the hippie…

6>5>4>7b>3>7a>1>2

Season 5's streak of Mystery Date, Signal 30, Far Away Places, and At the Codfish Ball may be the best single streak of episodes ever on television. Just four legitimate 10/10 episodes in a row right there. The season also finished incredibly strong with Christmas Waltz, the Other Woman, Commissions and Fees, and the…

Kodak had a real product named "the Carousel". Not an ad campaign per se, but in the show's universe Don came up with it.

Someone didn't watch the X Files or Dexter finales, then.

When she said "I don't think about you", my heart stopped. I thought she was going to shut him down.

Sure, you're allowed to comment on author intent. But you run into logical fallacy when you say that "author chooses to end their story in an ambiguous way==author is cowardly" as you would then need to classify many, many, many creators as cowardly, or exempt them from this criteria based on some arbitrary definition…

I disagree powerfully with this assertion. It's the easiest thing in the world to pull an ending out of your ass and fill everything in. I think you'll find that some of the greatest works of fiction are ambiguous to an extent. This is a thematic choice, not a lazy one.

The fact that you even mention the Sopranos is revealing of how powerful a finale that was. Ambiguity breeds discussion and interpretation. These kinds of things are Rorschach tests. I think Tony died. I think Don achieves comfort with his identity and returns to New York to actually live a fulfilling life with those…

*As he finishes writing, he looks up towards his poster of Nietzsche's "God is Dead" quote. He makes a rock on symbol with his hands and then promptly scoots away from the desk to get ready for school.

I think that is the intentional ambiguity of the ending. Surely Don goes back to make that ad, but was this epiphany the real deal, or is it another false positive like the last several? I think it's up to audience interpretation.

Am I the only one who thinks that Stephanie's crisis over whether or not to be there for her daughter was extremely relevant to what was going on with Don at that moment? When he tells her that she/her child will "move forward", he's trying to comfort himself as much as he is her.

I think that the message of the finale was that Don was chasing the wrong conclusions for the whole show. He's had false epiphany after false epiphany, and he thought that he'd find happiness in shedding his life as Don Draper to recapture his past as Dick Whitman, his "real identity".

http://www.magazineart.org/…

The "Golden Age of Television" is not an isolated episode of history, but will be a continuing trend. Television quality will continue to be quite high, through it remains to be seen if anything will reach the heights of the Sopranos or Mad Men from the current crop of great shows.