You know, it's not even that I disagree with what Oliver said to Thea: that what she did to Susan was wrong, and that it was straight out of Moira Queen's playbook. But Oliver is the one who decided to play the secret identity game and dragged most of the people closest to him into it. If he doesn't like how dirty…

The first season concludes its story quite well. There are some dangling threads going into season 2, but since the main one of those is also the first season's weakest storyline, it's not heartbreaking not to get to see the conclusion of it.

Bah. I had issues with the first season, and some of the combinations of serious issues and teen soap really didn't work. But the core of the show was strong, as were the characters, and it was by far the most original and thought-provoking handling of this issue on TV. In a pop culture landscape in which every…

Oh, is Luisa sad that she's not allowed to see her nieces and nephew? How terrible! And all she did was continue to be involved with the woman who killed her father, kidnapped her nephew, and killed her nephew's stepfather!

I don't see how either one of them could hope to catch up to SHIELD in the "worst-run secret organization that ends up creating most of the problems it then has to solve" contest.

And by "least glam" you mean a designer top, heels, and more makeup than we've ever seen her in? Even by TV standards of casual-wear, she was dressed to the nines.

Definitely agreed with the conclusion of this review, that this is a perfectly valid and even interesting story to tell with Felicity, but that the execution was lacking, both because her actions aren't sufficiently motivated, and because it's hard to see how her behavior is any different from Oliver's except that the…

I sadly find it very realistic that a good salesperson would be able to keep their job even after multiple instances of creating a hostile work environment. Especially since the victim in this case is not someone who could count on a court or a jury to be on her side, given how society tends to treat sex workers as…

I'd just like it if shows committed to being one thing or the other. No more shows that want to be serialized but feel obliged to deliver standalone episodes in order to draw the viewers in. Those always end up sucking, because no one involved with the show knows how to do them well, or cares to learn how.

I was reading about this the other day. That monument apparently memorializes an attempted takeover by white supremacists of the biracial Louisiana government during Reconstruction. If you're wondering why a historically black city like New Orleans would memorialize an event like that, you've just hit on the entire…

I really want to give this episode props for loudly and repeatedly making the point that Nazis are awful and you should be ashamed to be even slightly associated with them. But then it turns around and performs this show's trademark deep-throat fellatio on the NYPD. God bless Genevieve, she always tries to give this…

Yes, the way that the season leaped directly from "there was something fishy about Frank's family's death" to "he's not guilty of things we saw him do and which he freely and proudly admits to" was utterly bizarre. It really seemed to want us to think that wanting justice for your family not only justifies…

Clearly, the reason that Claire can't be in Punisher is that she wouldn't put up with Frank's self-serving, psychopath bullshit for longer than ten seconds, and she'd certainly never let Karen hear the end of it for attaching herself to said self-serving psychopath. You can't establish a character as the voice of…

One upvote was not enough, but alas, it is all I have to give.

From what I've read, foreign tourists are very carefully corralled and directed so that they only see the things the government wants them to see. I don't think there's any way to visit the DPRK without essentially colluding with the government and its oppression.

The handling of mental illness is really quite bad - just gets worse the more you think about it. And yes, beyond that I'm not sure what the show has - I guess it's notable for doing something different with the superhero genre, but that's a pretty low bar.

I spent yesterday rewatching Legion in preparation for something that I want to write about it, and I have to say that this is not a show with huge rewatchability value. When you know what the deal with David and Lenny is, it gets a lot harder to tolerate how much faffing about there is before the show actually…

It's not just that the sequel is taking so long to materialize, but to my knowledge there's been no para-literature of the kind you get with Star Wars, Star Trek, and comic book movies (which are, of course, para-literature for their own source material). Nothing has been done for eight years to keep the world or the…

I had more of a utilitarian reaction to that scene: what is the greater good here? By allowing the cure to be tested on him, Blaine potentially saves the lives of 13 people (most of whom are probably only zombies because of him). But by taking the cure, Blaine risks sliding back to the kind of person he was before…

That's the thing, though. Powerless should have been Better Off Ted in a world with superheroes, but instead it's a generic workplace comedy that occasionally has superhero-related stories, but actually places more of an emphasis on things like Alan Tudyk's character's antics (which I find incredibly annoying, by the…