I think the end of "Star Wars" pulled off a nice diversionary tactic where it's never suggested that Luke is a better pilot than Darth Vader, but rather that Luke's both favored by fate and has friendship on his side. The equivalent in "Force Awakens" would be if Rey were trying to accomplish some separate goal while…

The problem here is that the movie's actually impressed upon us that Kylo Ren, inferiority complex or no, wounded or not, is incredibly skilled in ways we've never seen before from any character in the movies: he stops a ray-gun bolt in mid-air, he knocks Rey out with a sweep of his hand, and so on. He's also been…

The way I figured it, the next generation of folks is just plain more powerful from the start for some reason, hence Rey pulling other tricks like perfectly-targeted long-range telekinesis and specific mind control that we wouldn't see Luke even attempt to perform until he got at least some training, as well as Kylo…

I think it's fine but if you saw the original trilogy with its extensive emphasis on training as the means to harnessing the heroes' magic (it's pretty much the entire reason for the story of "Empire Strikes Back", likely still the best-regarded movie in the entire series) then this particular part of the movie raises…

The impression I got was that the newest generation of Force-… people… are natural talents above and beyond their predecessors, with less need for training to realize their abilities but with greater inherent danger for the very reason that they can manifest them without the "proper" training.

"overly defensive"

that the first Guardians was as much a mosaic of beautifully crazy space scenes and pure fun, as a story or plot structure.

Bendis has learned the trick to maximizing his script output for Marvel: assume every character already has the motivation to perform any action.

"Kids will watch anything." —me, in the comments for this story

Kids will watch anything.

People don't really sit around and "remember" VHS as being lousy, besides the former A.V. club. Out in the real world, we talked about VHS until it became obsolete, then we pretty much stopped talking about it.

There was really no universe where this wouldn't have ended with sounds of a scuffle in an upper-floor office somewhere and then Aronofsky walking out of an elevator to the strains of "Christmas Time Is Here" from the Peanuts special. (See also: Aronofsky's Batman movie, Aronofsky's Wolverine movie…)

"Squire" works masterfully by ratcheting up the tension in its final act before springing its farcical "ultimate beings" on us in the episode's resolution, but "Arena", while still entertaining, suffers from unintended tonal whiplash that ends up feeling like the writers penned another "Squire" without intending to do…

The only thing that made the, yes, sitcom-ish opening to "Captain's Holiday" bearable is how ahead of its sit-com contemporaries it seemed at the time: people keep trying these little tricks on Picard to get him to admit he needs a break, or to make him think he's choosing that option himself to avoid some fictional…

"I had the story all planned out except for all the important parts."

This was always intended to be a kids' movie.

That little information about George is available—she was born in California and lives in New York

Spock's the one who says something like that, which is even more depressing given how often they use Spock saying something to mean that it's definitely true—certainly the intent there. In fact, he's offering it as a stone-cold guarantee based on the Enterprise's records of the time.

I would like to hear more about this.

That's some purple prose you got there. It shades into comedy around the point where four of the six words in a clause demonstrate alliteration.