Yes, I really appreciated the show making a distinction between engaging in sex work because it's your unencumbered choice, and doing it because someone is forcing you. It was particularly powerful to have the same character experience both and make the point that they are completely different.

We're talking about a man who spent years having to demonstrate, again and again and again, the place of his birth. I have to believe that if there was anything to be found, it would have been already.

I don't know if it's even possible for BvS to fail at this point. You actually have to work pretty hard for a superhero film to be a flop - not even Ant-Man managed it. Especially with international markets, I suspect BvS will do well enough, even if it isn't a huge success. Wonder Woman and Suicide Squad are, I…

I haven't quite started making lists yet, but I think my favorite read of 2015 is going to be Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World. It's a found-document novel, which I tend to take with a grain of salt, but Hustvedt really nails the device without being cutesy or leaning too far into the mystery aspect. What the novel…

What I meant by "coast" was the show drawing significance from connecting its story to the films' stories. It's not like anyone walked away from Age of Ultron and said "great movie, but it really bugs me that I don't know how those hellicarriers were paid for." The only reason those connections existed was to make…

Loki is mentally ill, which is part of the reason why he's such a colossal loser - he's so caught up in his own sense of victimization that he never manages to see past the next step in "getting back" at all the people he imagines hurt him. Pretty much the only times he's managed to eke out even a partial win have…

I'm not sure anything about Loki - who led an alien invasion of Earth and is also the brother of one of the Avengers - would be considered obscure. But the point is that even if you only read the headline stuff, your worldview should be so completely upended that none of the show's assumptions about how people behave…

But does that mean that all of the Avengers will disappear into outer space for a year? Because honestly, that could work, especially for the TV shows where the question is always "if this situation is so serious, why aren't you calling the Avengers to deal with it?"

You know, I stopped watching AoS after S1, but I keep up with what's going on there, and I have to say, this whole notion of Ward as the Big Bad is utterly baffling to me. So you're a super-secret paramilitary organization with incredible technology, some of the most capable secret agents in the world working for…

For quite some time, I've been of the opinion that whatever is happening behind the scenes at Marvel is much more interesting than what they're putting out as entertainment. I'd take a tell-all book about the making of the MCU over Civil War any day.

I think it's for this reason that both AoS and the movies are studiously ignoring that bit. There's no way the AoS S2-3 storylines work in a world where everyone knows about superheroes, aliens, people with powers, and all the other weird stuff SHIELD dealt with and did over the years.

I definitely got the sense, when Marvel was chasing Benedict Cumberbatch to play Doctor Strange, that they envisioned the character taking over from Tony Stark as the lynchpin of the franchise. I think that's changed a bit since then, especially since Downey seems more amenable to sticking around, but I don't think…

Wasn't there a whole plotline in S2 about how Coulson was funding the hellicarriers that saved the day in Age of Ultron, and how it was his SHIELD who told the Avengers where the find the Hydra stronghold at the beginning of the movie? Sounds like trying to coast off the movie to me, especially since nobody watching…

I seriously doubt you could get Renner to guest on a TV show with middling ratings. Not to mention that there's a pretty big charisma gap problem when you bring these movie actors over to the show. They got away with it with Jackson because he only appeared briefly, and with Alexander because she was playing a…

We've already jumped at least three years, if not more, from the beginning of the show. So I think it may be happening in the future already - though honestly, probably even past Civil War's 2016 release date. Anyway, Captain America was probably used mainly as a reflection on Noah's self-serving dilemma, which is…

One of my favorite notes in Noah's therapy session was how obviously embarrassed Noah is now by Descent and its pulpiness. It's like he's gotten past the first thrill of being successful and realized that he did so by writing hackwork, and is now desperately trying to reach for respectability by writing about the…

The further we get into this show, the more I'm convinced that Noah's conception of himself as a good father to his kids with Helen was just more self-serving delusion, and that she did most of the day-to-day parenting.

I think it would probably have been very easy to blame the fire on a lightning strike - certainly after the hurricane there wouldn't have been much left for the arson investigators to draw conclusions from. And, as noted below, the odds that the new owners wanted the house rather than the land are pretty slim. What…

Given Cole's state of mind at the time that Alison got pregnant, and the things he was doing, I think she'd have to be nuts to tell him that he was the father of her baby (which she probably doesn't even know for sure, and is clearly working very hard not to find out the answer). If Cole, in the state he was until…

The other day we had a small celebration at the office in honor of one of guys' new baby, and another guy told a story about his friend, who had seven children and boasted about never having changed a diaper. Apparently his wife once left him alone with the baby, who needed to be changed, and he got one of his older…