@avclub-e5438bd5e7a11caaf7c625d9d5ab7b50:disqus Whedon was on the rise in a big way when Buffy, and Angel were going strong and Firefly was about to premiere. Then Fox screwed him over big time on the handling of Firefly, and Buffy's move to UPN was not the breakout hit they were hoping for, and his career took a hit.

I also liked the reversal of expectations about the truth serum. (Which was also the best part of Dalton's performance.

Alphas (which was great by the way) was more XMen than SHIELD.

She exists to call Coulson on his bullshit, as needed.

Pilots are hard to do well, and two things that make a pilot difficult are the need to introduce a large number of characters and establish basic relationships for them, and do so in a fantastic world of superheroes, high tech spies, and mad scientists.

It sounded like they are each somewhat unique with different specialized sensors, so giving them names is practical as well as endearing.

Whedon has a preference for working with young actors, but he backs that up with a real gift for identifying and developing real talent. His audition process must be very interesting.

We don't know where he recuperated exactly, but everyone agrees "it's a magical place"

@Ktowf:twitter I prefer geeks for what you mean here, but "nerds" are a lot older than you think. It's just that the Internet is harder to ignore than mimeographed fanzines.

@avclub-f14314bf4d4a1bd450664f089241fe86:disqus You can attack the problem with genetic sampling but you can also attack it with computer simulations and some assumptions about gene flow between populations.

That sounds about right, maybe even a little high?

@UWR:disqus Koalas are kind of evil (or at least ill-tempered) though, when they have the energy to be.

And that is why Diet Dr. Pepper is no longer available in the cafeteria at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Children.

I'm too much of a science nerd to be sure how to take the magnet Dr. Pepper can thing.

@avclub-33235e3d066bad95b6eea457826f7507:disqus @avclub-e129a878f7b0e5aa9ac09e0282f64ea6:disqus It's not quite that simple. Middle America also implies more "hearland" than coastal and more rural/suburban than urban. It's the slightly more conservative vanilla flavored candy center of the American middle class.

Virtually everything Frontline does is such a cut above all other regularly produced television "news" it's hard to see the point of a complaint like this. Democracy Now! does a lot of good work, but they don't have the resources  to match the investigative journalism that Frontline does regularly, nor does DN have…

Yes on the (perhaps unintentional) fetus==baby pro-life talking point fodder.

In that case, the planet wasn't much influenced, but the crew of the older ship was pretty much eaten alive by that planet's "legitimately parallel" culture.

Yes. And I thought that was a little implausible, but dramatically necessary.

One thing that ST:TOS did pretty well was show the consequences of previous interventions (as in "A Piece of the Action" or "Patterns of Force").