Defenders has a huge point against it in that its chosen villain, the Hand, have failed to set the world on fire (basically, the Thanos problem, but without the movies' CGI budget). If I'm right and Iron Fist was designed to ramp up to Defenders by moving the Hand from a background presence to the foreground, then…

ABC? They're certainly putting enough money into it.

The embargo for pre-release reviews of Iron Fist lifted today, and oof. As someone on twitter noted, it's not just that the reviews are all bad. It's that they're almost entirely uniform in identifying the same flaws in the show. I've been asking for a while what Netflix's goal with this show is, since all the…

Not to mention, the moment where Charles reaches out to Logan and tries to apologize/offer forgiveness, he ends up talking to X-24, who can't understand him and immediately murders him. And it's doubtful whether Logan's desperate assurances that "it wasn't me" are understood by a dying Charles.

SHIELD is coming off its best-reviewed episode in ages, one that got it a lot of attention even from sources that lost interest in it (io9, for example, dropped recaps of the show this year, but wrote one for this episode). Obviously the next step is to put the show on hiatus for a month and let whatever momentum it…

She said the father wasn't a random dude - he's an old boyfriend that she's been on and off with for a while.

I call complete and utter bullshit on Gregson's chummy reaction to Kitty. The same man who sucker-punched Sherlock and basically wrote him off as a human being for years (I think they only get back on an even footing after Sherlock's relapse) for non-fatally stabbing a personal enemy would not be hugging and grinning…

Do any of those things make him suddenly not be an accessory to murder and attempted rape?

In fairness, Jonathan had been around for longer than either Andrew or Warren, and had been pretty well established as troubled but fundamentally OK (he doesn't want to kill anyone else in "Earshot", he gives Buffy back her power in "Superstar"). And, on the other hand, while Andrew gets an ark in S7 in which he's…

Jonathan watched Andrew magically roofie his ex-girlfriend (in fact I believe he provided the means of that) and plan to rape her. He was making jokes with Andrew about "taking a turn". Then he watched her get murdered and helped to dispose of her body by framing another woman for it. And after all that, he still…

That's a trick question. Each member of the trio is just as bad as the others. Some of them (Andrew) do more awful stuff than others (Jonathan), but bottom line, they're all entitled, whiny boys who think the world owes them something, and don't stop thinking that even when people suffer and die as a result.

I definitely think you could make an argument for Buffy being the most influential of those shows. There's hardly a corner of pop culture it hasn't touched.

I'm not watching this season, but the idea that Quinn had a relationship with Dar Adal is not entirely out of the blue. At the end of S5, when it looks like Quinn is about to die, Dar tells Carrie that one of the reasons he recruited Quinn as a teenager was that he was "pretty" enough to be used as a honeypot with…

Well, it still feels like a lot, especially when so much of it is just OK.

I haven't been watching a lot of TV recently, mainly because at the end of last year I realized I'd watched something like 600-700 hours of television over the year, and most of it was only adequate. So I'm being pretty picky about what I watch these days. Which, on the other hand, means I've been going to movies a…

Hidden Figures is pretty schlocky, but it's worth watching for its energy and for wonderful performances from the three leads. Also, having read the book and other commentary about the women involved, it's really not the sort of biopic where a warts-and-all approach would be warranted, since the three women it…

Maybe, but the rule that Middle Eastern actors only get invited to audition for terrorist roles was true for some time before that. I'm pretty sure the guy with the name Siddig El-Fadil gets fewer auditions than Alexander Siddig - see also Chloe Bennet getting work as soon as she stopped being Chloe Wong.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the real reason was less benign.

Good fucking grief.

Well, a movie by and about black people won, and a black woman and black Muslim man won the supporting categories. Obviously none of that could be because these are all great artists working at their peak. It must be the Academy and Hollywood trying to poke Trump in the eye - because rewarding black people is…