I think in the case of Jessica Jones (which I haven't started yet, but it's pretty hard to miss the conversation about it) the comparison is particularly inapt, because it's explicitly a show about a traumatized PTSD sufferer trying to put her life back together. That's such a specific (and, let's be honest, unusual)…

A lot of those shows are not Syfy productions. In recent years, those include Eureka, Warehouse 13, Defiance, Helix, and 12 Monkeys. The last of that bunch was well-received around here (though I found the pilot underwhelming and didn't continue with the first season). The salad days of Caprica and BSG (which I…

But what about the 60 second rule? If Ned brings back a zombie, does the rule still apply that if they live longer than 60 seconds, someone else will die? Or will someone else become a zombie?

I thought "wow, she's staying in there a while considering she's clearly just found a dead body." I'm kind of impressed with the show for making that a plot point.

How many episodes are left at this point? It can't be more than two or three. I know the cancellation came as a bit of a surprise so I'm not expecting the show to wrap everything up, but it doesn't seem to be headed for a climax for the season either.

Well, if you ignore the whole subplot about how Dylan Roof is a misunderstood grieving father who just needs a chance at redemption, then yeah, it's not significantly worse than old Heroes. But that's precisely the point - old Heroes crashed and burned, and if you're going to resurrect a show that failed so…

No, I haven't. I haven't read much Carrol at all, in fact - even my reading of Alice is years old, and I suspect I leafed through it and concentrated on my favorite bits (such as "Jabberwocky") rather than reading it cover to cover.

Part of an editor's job is to decide what stories to run - they're nor required to run every essay with the word Star Wars in the title. If I were the editor of this site, I would not have run that essay as it was, because in that form all it could possibly have done was arouse outrage. The fact that it was…

There are a thousand comments here, so possibly (probably) this point has already been made, but I have some ideas about the significance of "Jabberwocky." First, it's a reference to Alice in Wonderland, of "we're all mad here" fame, and another way of stressing the theme of a world askew, where the normal rules and…

As I said above, he clearly doesn't intend it as clickbait (though that's largely because he's a bad writer and doesn't realize how needlessly offensive he's being). But whoever chose to run the essay on the AV Club couldn't possibly have been unclear on that point.

I imagine there might be edge cases. But I'm pretty sure that an article defending the Star Wars prequels on the grounds that the people who deride them are too stupid and brainwashed to recognize their brilliance is not such a case.

On the second point, it's kind of hard for me to believe the show doesn't mean for us to realize this. The passages Alison reads were decidedly Fifty Shades-ish. Maybe I'm giving the writers too much credit, but I think the people (women) involved would have to be aware of this double standard, and I wouldn't put it…

I used to be an editor of a website. Believe me, there's a difference between "people will find this entertaining and enlightening," and "people will get het up over this and we'll get lots of comments and clicks," and no editor who has been doing their job for longer than five minutes has trouble telling the two…

Yes and no? Clickbait is clearly a real phenomenon (and again, I believe that the AV Club's editors' choice to publish this article had to have been motivated by the expectation of lots of clicks, which has clearly been validated) but you're right that the use of the term has become indiscriminate, attached to a lot…

Am I the only one who found the revelations about Grampa Lockhart absurd and over the top? I mean, it's one thing for the family to finally acknowledge the legacy of abuse that has hung over them for generations. But to reveal that grampa killed a baby? Come on. I know that was supposed to be a serious, cathartic…

Especially an idiot who is about to have a baby. But then it's not a surprise that Noah appears to have given no thought to how this new baby is going to affect his life.

I think we may be misjudging just how literary Noah's book actually is. Not to be cynical, but books that are as successful as Descent appears to have been tend to be, at best, literary-lite. What we know about Noah's novel is that it's got a lot of sensationalistic stuff in it - the sex, the overwrought family…

A couple of weeks ago I complained that Itai, the supposed Israeli ambassador, talks like a stereotypical American Jew, not an Israeli. In case you were wondering what the difference is, this episode offered a sterling example of an Israeli accent… in the form of Carrie's supposedly Iraqi contact in Amsterdam. (The…

By the way, if you want a corrective to that article, Tor.com has a nice piece by someone who watched the prequels without watching the original trilogy, hated them, and was put off the earlier films because of that. She's just now watched A New Hope, and her essay is a nice evaluation of the film - not fawning, but…

A lot of people seem to fall into the fallacy that saying "the original films are stiff and awkwardly written" (which they are) is a meaningful defense of the prequels. Flawed as the original films are, there's simply no comparing their quality to the later works.