You can tell that neither Trump nor anyone in his vicinity has grasped that he doesn't have the power to order civilians around - that he is, in fact, answerable to civilians.

Obviously the Rock is not qualified to be president or indeed hold any major public office. But he seems to be a genuinely kind, generous, and thoughtful person, and that would be such a massive improvement on Trump and his cronies that I'm not even sure why we're treating it as a joke.

The number of things - really basic stuff that is at the foundation of civil society - that the right has conceded to liberalism, just for the sake of being able to pretend that there's nothing wrong about Trump or his election, has been staggering. It would be funny if it weren't sad, and if I didn't know that as…

It honestly bothers me that we're probably never going to see Elizabeth's reaction to the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin, and most of all Putin. Philip I don't care so much about, but Elizabeth is such a fanatic, and I genuinely want her to see what became of her beloved revolution.

And the CW just renewed, well, all the shows you expected it to renew: the entire DCTVU roster, Supernatural, Jane the Virgin, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I'm guessing not a lot of people had the first five on their ballot, and if anyone bet against the CW's two most critically-acclaimed shows, I'm looking askance at…

Hey, the review of last week's episode was pretty positive, well in excess of what that dreadful episode actually deserved.

In fairness, we thought we were going to get that with Ant-Man and Edgar Wright. Waititi honestly seems like a more together guy than Wright, but I'm counting on nothing until the movie is actually in theaters.

I'm honestly bothered by the framing that sees gun ownership as a right that needs to be protected. I know that's how it's phrased in the constitution (or at least a plausible reading of the second amendment). But from a common sense perspective, the idea that you have a right to possess a lethal weapon is something…

Even better, the two actors who played Skye's parents have the same birthday. But he's twenty years older than her, because Hollywood.

The biggest problem with Tin Man was that it was so poorly done that its badness made everyone really dismissive of Alice, a similar trippy-children's-book-done-with-modern-touches miniseries from SyFy, which is actually pretty good and has never gotten the respect it deserves.

Which was a bit of a problem, because she hopelessly outclassed the actual main cast. The episode where she and Clark Gregg had multiple, intense one-on-one scenes really drove home the problem. And it's not even like they could pair her with Ming-Na Wen or Iain de Caesteker, probably the strongest actors in the…

I… honestly have no idea. Ask me in a week, I guess.

So some tweets I made on Sunday have gone viral - by my standards, but that still means ~900 retweets and 500 new followers. As the kids say, RIP My Mentions (no, seriously, I go away for half an hour and there are more than a hundred of them to get through, so I hope no one thinks they're going to have an actual…

Do we understand it at all? I thought it was more like, "we're going to theorize action at a distance even though we have no idea how that could be because otherwise there's no model of the universe that makes sense".

Atlanta is great. It's also not even remotely in the genre of shows I'm talking about, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.

When Jimmi Simpson's character was first introduced, I thought that was what the show was going to be - use different guests to highlight different aspects of the park each week. Alas, no.

As usual, the division into "hopeful" and "bleak" is simplistic and inaccurate (see also the way the DC and MCU movies are divided into "gritty" and "funny", even though there's more grit in an average five minutes of Jessica Jones than in all of the DC movies put together, and Winter Soldier is not a particularly…

Corollary to no. 7: get better at writing conventional, self-contained TV episodes, especially on genre and procedural shows.

Actually, I'd say the marketing department did its job perfectly. They were tasked with marketing a creepy, rape-tastic movie and somehow managed to spin it as a romantic night out. It was only when reviewers started watching it and realized what the story actually was that the wheels came off the bus.

I have to say, having learned the details of Xavier and his father's feud, I'm a lot less inclined to be forgiving than Xavier is. A lot of people who are caring for a sick or dying spouse end up having an affair to meet their own emotional needs, and I'm not in a position to judge them for that. But there's a huge…