Bring back "Thunderbolt" Ross as perennial Bourne favorite, "Man yelling exhortations at roomful of people using computers."

It's an irony that in a popular culture that is ever more obsessed with celebrity and famous people, the age of the "mega star" has largely passed.

@treylatrash:disqus Canadian here:

I know it gets addressed a little in the Marvel one-shot but I find it tests my suspension of disbelief that a billionaire mogul like Justin Hammer who regularly played golf with US Senators would be sent to a max-security privately-run prison in Georgia.

Agreed. It always bothered me when I was a kid reading Marvel comics that in a world just like ours except thronging with mutants and super-powered beings of every stripe, conventional forces like the NYPD remained completely unchanged.

When you're super strong and basically invincible, violence without extreme provocation is closer to the act of a bully than a hero.

Lana and Futurama's Leela have a lot in common. One of those things is being difficult to write for sometimes, I think. By being fundamentally decent, responsible and moral (with lots of asterisks in Lana's case, of course) they can be relegated to "the scold" role.

Right, exactly. If they'd wanted to make the synthetic huge and threatening they would have made Yaphet Kotto a secret robot and had him act like Kananga from Live and Let Die.

Why can't Maggie Q get a role on a good show? Is she cursed? Did she deny a loan to an old gypsy woman?

I think the 20+ episode format is why procedurals so often flourish on network TV where almost every other type of drama tends to fail.

True enough. The closest I can think of is Shrek, which ends with Fiona becoming as ugly as Shrek (but he loves her anyway! Aw!)

Mom needs help around the house, so as a six-year-old mechanical genius (a trait which will never come up again) I built a bog-standard protocol droid that speaks ten million languages but can't bend his arms or walk properly.

I broadly agree Ep. VII was a retread—and kind of a nonsensical one at that—but I still think it was a smart move to make it so deeply familiar.

It would be sort of boring, like playing Doom with cheat codes. If you're strong enough to lift a car and bullets bounce right off you, being up a bunch of goons might be necessary but it wouldn't be exciting per se.

Eh, I disagree. She's clearly not a bimbo or a clown—on the contrary, she's a smart police detective with loads of agency.

One detail I actually enjoyed is that, while Luke's obviously big and fit, he's not ridiculously-comic-book-8-pack shredded in the way you might expect.

To be fair, I also struggle with that—there are many dozens of characters, some of whom we don't even see for years.

New York is pretty well-known for having cabs as a way of life. Nearly everywhere else in North America they're an expensive, unreliable indulgence and Uber is eating their dinner.

Well, she is the Pelé of Anal.

I chalk it up to a combination of things. The fact that Democrats spent eight years in the wilderness under W, then seized both houses under a man that (for a while) embodied all the Left's hopes and dreams under Obama. Taken together, that covers nearly two decades of American political history.