I absolutely agree, especially about the Death Star. Seeing it slowly rising over the horizon of Scarif as its crew coldly decide to sacrifice their own people give it such a weight of dread.

I saw SWs back in ‘77 - Rouge 1 is easily in my top 3 SW movies & Vader, first time ever looked like a real, actually threatening, Dark Lord of the Sith

Rogue One is a reminder that a movie doesn’t have to be flawless to be great. Up to the destruction of Jedha much of the dialogue is stilted and confusing, especially Saw Gerrera’s scenes. But once the superlaser fires it maintains its gripping momentum. You can forgive a lot for that much payoff.

Rogue One is the best Star Wars film. literally best written, best acted, best effects, and the best jokes. I’ve gone back to all the star wars films multiple times but Rogue One is the only one that I find excuses to go back and watch.

No, I don’t think you can do anything except bring back the Snapped. Generally, being alive is preferable to dead. The rest can be sorted out.

I vaguely remember an argument that Tony was being selfish by insisting they don’t mess with Morgan’s birth and I couldn’t disagree more.

Morgan is just one of millions of…

Here’s what I learned from the latest episode with Yelena;

just to note: wasn’t Black Widow originally supposed to be the first time we see Val? Pandemic changed the timeline. So that’s why Val just drops in to Black Widow, and gets more shading in Winter Soldier.

I’m not sure how credible it is in terms of inworld timing, but it’s what we’re led to think. Right after Kate leaves the penthouse, Eleanor leaves a voicemail requesting an urgent callback from an unidentified person. It’s possible she called Val, or Fisk or some other go-between, but I don’t think we’ve seen…

Although it’s fairly implausible that this was the reason, since she’d only learned that Kate knew Barton a few hours before Yelena showed up.  Much more likely that she’d already done it well before then, and part of the reason she so extremely wanted Kate to have nothing more to do with Clint was that she knew he…

I agree, but poor Clint got listed last on the Avenger Memorial plaque.

This is going to be hard to imagine, I know, but it’s pretty likely there’s a lot of bullshit misinformation out there about the Blip, including people who are cynically going with the worst possible explanations for money, political power or just social media clout.

Clint being the only one to return from Planet Red…

Yeah, that’s my read. Natasha made the decision that she should be the one to be sacrificed because she knew Clint had a family that needed him. (Natasha has a family, but it’s been shown pretty clearly that her family members are all BAMFs.)

I think it’s too early to assume anything. We have no actual motive for either Val or Eleanor wanting to take Clint down just yet. It seems obvious they’re setting us up to believe that Eleanor is the bad guy for a while, but less clear is why she’d be after Clint except that he’s been helping Kate investigate…

Yelena was following Eleanor because Kate planted that seed of doubt about Clint in her head. The hit wasn’t turning out to be as straightforward as it seemed and Yelena isn’t strictly speaking a Black Widow automaton/weapon anymore. 

Grieving people are not always immediately reasonable about the cause of that grief. And what the hell, throw in the trauma of suddenly skipping five years and finding out that your sister is dead, and for that matter the trauma of Yelena’s entire life before this.

It was stated as soon as Endgame came out and people started asking that question that Bruce made sure to return everyone to a safe spot (even if it didn’t remain safe for long, like that poor schmuck who gets whacked in the head as soon as he returns in Wandavision).

It’s not really. I watched it and just assumed Kate’s mother had put out a hit and JLD’s character tapped Elena to go do it. Whether that’s cos JLD is already working with her or trying to ingratiate herself with her I assumed would be told later in the long form story we haven’t yet finished... The assasain who…

This feels like a column in search of a problem. Was anyone really that put-off by the Black Widow post-credits scene? Is this week’s episode so significantly at odds with that scene that it needs this many words to make sense of it? Or are we feeding the SEO machine some Hawkeye content for the top of the search bar?

How do we know that Val wasn’t sent by Eleanor? It seems premature to assume this a re-write of the BW post-credits scene. There’s going to be some kind of connection. I’m curious if there is there kind of tie to the Falcon/Winter Soldier series since Val was recruiting John Walker last we saw her before BW.

Hollywood has come for the niche but hopefully lucrative college rowing crowd. It’ll be known as “rowsploitation”. And hopefully, it’ll be beautiful.