Thing is, I think what they've done with Jinder is a perfectly valid midcard heel act! I could totally see him doing good stuff with the US Title, and his anti-American schtick would even make sense there. If you swap the titles and keep everything else the same, SmackDown wouldn't be constantly arguing with itself in…

Afraid so. I'll still be mixing in some pop culture writing in my new gig, though I'm not sure how much wrestling writing I'll be doing. But I'll still be delivering my wrestling takes weekly on the Story of Wrestling podcast with Kyle.

I've never seen Maria or Mike in action, but I do remain quietly confident that they're going to be good once they're actually allowed to, you know, start doing stuff.

I think there's more to be gotten out of Tamina than we've seen so far — maybe not a crazy amount, but *some*, especially against Naomi where there's Team BAD history to build on — but it probably isn't going to happen when she's always one of five or six women at a time.

Your first point underlines why I just can't see the Jinder Mahal thing as anything but a failure. The WWE title is at best the fourth most prestigious men's singles title on the main roster. That sucks.

Potential teams in the SmackDown Trios Division:
1. New Day, obvs
2. The Kings of Strong Styles
3. The Fashion Police with their Perfect 10 new recruit
4. Jimmy and Jey Uso with Rikishi, who never actually tags in but glowers so hard from the apron
5. American Alpha tries to add Shelton Benjamin, but he's immediately…

Then just make it a trios team and officially redesignate the SDL tag belts for three-man teams. Print ALL the money.

Wait, did I just do whatever the opposite of self-owning is?

Heel AJ Styles dickishly cutting weight just to beat, like, Cedric Alexander for the Cruiserweight title would rule so hard.

Agreed on everything re the great John Hurt. Now I'm just thinking of how unbelievably good he was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for whatever reason.

Right, I agree that they've stated it fairly consistently. I just wish they had done more to show it.

Right, it *could* be Mondas, or a bunch of other places — but the source of my now super super super pedantry is that, if the current dominant line of speculation is correct and it's just before the regeneration in "The Tenth Planet," then this has to be Antarctica. If it's not set at that point in the Doctor's life,…

No one of John Hurt's stature is doing Big Finish for any reason than because they love to do it. "It" in this case needn't mean "being the Doctor" — could just mean the fun of acting in general — but yeah, there's no way BF could ever pay enough to make it anything other than a labor of love for the likes of Hurt or…

Big Finish has taken a similar approach with Geoffrey Beevers's and Alex Macqueen's Masters, though that's in part necessitated by Anthony Ainley's death meaning BF has to get creative if they want the 5th or 6th Doctor to interact with the Master at all. Either way, the Doctor and River's tangled timeline has made it…

If you count his Big Finish stuff — and you damn well ought to! — he actually ended up appearing in more stories than Christopher Eccleston. John Hurt was the fucking man.

I'm still deeply sad John Hurt died, though the only connection there is their mutual involvement as Doctor-like characters in the 50th anniversary, so I don't know if that would be who you're thinking of.

Same deal: I won't be reviewing Arrow here anymore, but I will keep writing Arrow reviews at Inverse.

I like Shearsmith fine, but what I had in mind here wasn't any more than him recreating the other end of the regeneration, so he wouldn't be doing more than lying there unconscious.

I thought Bradley was amazing as Hartnell but was different enough in his line readings to be jarring for me when playing the 1st Doctor. Now that he's not repeating specific iconic lines, he already works a lot better for me.

Yeah, I think it's mostly just a lot of gesturing toward "The Leisure Hive" and the bit about block transfer computation in "Logopolis" and hoping nobody remembers pretty much any of the others.