Counterpoint: no.

To be honest, I think that's the problem with the series as a whole, and the reason I'm extremely skeptical about the reboot (well, one of the reasons). It was very much of its era - the post-Cold War mid-90s, when looking for aliens and government conspiracies to conceal same was the only way to entertain yourself. …

The X-Files does X-Files better. Fringe was at its worst trying to do monster of the week stories, usually plumping for gross-out horror instead of the more philosophical bent The X-Files took. Plus, John Noble aside, Duchovny and Anderson can run circles around most of Fringe's cast, and were given more interesting…

Back when it was airing I remember telling several people that if they wanted to see what the right person could have done with the core concept of Dollhouse, they should read this book. It does a great job of imagining a world where personhood means something completely different from how we think of it now. It…

I find Morgan extremely variable. Altered Carbon is very good, and I would rate Black Man (published as Thirteen in the US) among the top SF books of the 21st century. But the second Kovacs book is so forgettable that I didn't even bother with the third one, and then he tried to write an epic fantasy that was…

Yes, but you also get scenes like the one at the beginning of the episode where Bobby deduces that a company is about to go south by, essentially, reading the tea leaves better than anyone else. So I think the show is buying into the notion that such a thing is possible.

I think Gregg can be funny, in a dry, low-key sort of way. Unfortunately, that's not what the show wants from him.

Coulson is also basically the same character as Agent Caspar on The West Wing - dry, super-competent, unflappable. And that works fine in the background. But if you want that same character to be a hero, and to emote dramatically over huge changes in his life and worldview, you need an actor with a bit more oomph,…

Yeah, I shouldn't have used the word "parentage." More that, as you say, the ancerstors from whom Henry VII derived his claim to the throne were illegitimate on both sides, and in a system that had already cast off Edward V for largely the same reason, that's very tenuous indeed. As you say, he benefited from being…

I think Daenerys is the Henry Tudor figure in this story - discounted as an afterthought and struggling to raise an army to reclaim a country that's more or less forgotten about her. Though of course, her lineage and claim to the throne are much stronger than Henry's.

Tyrion is a Richard-ish character in the sense that he's disabled (which is also used as a sort of meta-commentary on the Shakespeare play, because Tyrion is despised and considered evil for being disabled, and Shakespeare used Richard's disability to do the same thing in his play). But I'm a lot more interested in…

It was kind of amazing watching the first episode of Agent Carter after a full season of Agents of SHIELD trying to convince me that Clark Gregg was a leading man. Atwell just immediately commanded the screen, and reminded me that there's such a thing as screen presence, and some people just don't have it.

1. Dear Galavant: if you're going to make it an important point in a song that the singer has unshaved armpits, maybe don't design her wardrobe and the song's choreography so that we can clearly see that this isn't true? It kind of undercuts your claim to be dismantling antiquated gender roles.

So, first, I kind of thought everyone knew that Game of Thrones was loosely based on the Wars of the Roses. And second, the key word here is "loosely." You can kind of see the Starks and Lannisters as equivalents of the Yorks and Lancasters (and there are obviously several explicit parallels, such as the murder of…

I think at their core, the differences between the two characters come down to their situation (and the genre of their story). But they're both deeply unhappy women who suffer from depression and other mental health issues, and who act in irrational ways to change a situation that's become unbearable to them. …

Like I said, the show is so smart about feminist issues in other respects that I'm holding out hope this was a deliberate choice and that Winn is going to realize how wrong he was. I can sort of gloss over Kara's own guilt, because she knows that she does have feelings for James, and Winn was manipulating her. But I…

There's nothing wrong with feeling jealous that someone you like likes someone else. There's a hell of a lot wrong with acting like that feeling is the fault of the object of your affection, which is what Winn has been doing for several episodes. The episode in which he berates Kara for hugging James - supposedly…

continually treats her as second best to Barry

As the saying goes, it can be two things.

I definitely see some similarities between Rebecca Bunch and Peggy Blumquist.