A little context also: HYDRA was introduced as run by an evil businessman in 1964, but only a year or so later was retconned into being led by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker who was even in the Marvel Universe an actual Nazi.

I thought this episode was pretty fantastic— though now that we know the Governors aren't related to UNIT (right? Was I reading this correctly?) it sets up a nice possibility of conflict there, one that could involve our Class in some interesting ways.

I think there's a lot of interesting things here, too (I haven't played the game, my original comment was more general). I would argue that one of the things that makes Superman a hero — and something that in the ones I have read so far (I haven't delved into as many super-books as I should) is insufficiently…

He wasn't drunk, just hung over. (Which in some ways is worse, because you have all the impairment of alcohol on top of a splitting headache and the I-wanna-sleep-now feeling). But really, Erica couldn't adjust the font size on the screen so she could see better?

Yes, I agree totally (and with @avclub-fc83ad3d76e063f48fb8a0c5a10a4e01:disqus ) that there's a seriously fascistic streak to TDKR. I'm old enough that I got copies when they came out, and remember at the time a nationally known figure was a certain Bernard Goetz. Miller's attitude at the time toward rehabilitation…

I'll offer that making Superman evil because of some tragedy is lazy writing. However, making him do evil because he genuinely thinks it's the right thing is another issue entirely and can be done well.

The Killing Joke makes that explicit. Batman says to the Joker (or a person he thinks is the Joker) "One day one of us is going to kill the other, and I don't want that." (Or something to that effect).

ALso, seeing that scene in the Empire Strikes Back again with Luke and Leia I have to think that somewhere the script said they were supposed to be potential love interests and the whole brother-sister thing was tacked on later. The actors are so not playing it as siblings.

I could agree with that. There was other stuff I saw in there too that looked like cut footage.

Not being a Star Wars uber fan or anything, some of the footage — Luke trying to show his friends a battle — I assume that was some cutting room floor footage from the original film?

I would rewrite this as a thriller/horror movie. My issue with many YA novels is that they make one character so over-the-top awful your sympathies go out the window. The mom sounds like a psychopathic control freak.

This. This.

I have to say Tanya's remark about white people optimism was to me a hell of a pleasant surprise. Doctor Who and its spinoffs have given rather short shrift to issues like that. I remember an episode with Martha (Freema Agyeman) as a companion and who was genuinely worried about being carted off as a slave, and the…

I agree with the analogy, though I was never a huge fan of the Dead (I really didn't pay a ton of attention until the 80s, when In the Dark came out, and then I started going through their older stuff). Maybe it comes from being a young kid in the 70s when their fans were still considered more "out there" and the…

Thought: I wear transitions lenses and they are polarized when they get dark, even when they only tint a little bit. I wonder if that can mess up some systems because the reflections have to come back through the polarized glass/plastic.

For some reason I kept thinking, "Somehow they were able to expense some nice wines in their grant budget. Did they go with the local Bordeaux?"

"Inseminoid?" This exists? It sounds like one of those movies in a popup ad from a porn site, all uncanny-valley CGI.

If I may, plenty of people take jobs that endanger them, and it's because they haven't got a choice. You think all those people who mine coal are like "wow I can't wait to go down into a mine where I have a pretty decent chance of getting killed?" (Mining is still kind of dangerous, plus the long term health effects…

Sorry I didn't see your comment earlier.

Snorting also gets it into your system faster. (Whatever drug is powdered goes across the mucus membranes, dissolving nicely into the blood vessels). The only more efficient way is to inhale (a la crack/freebase) but whatever the blockers are made of probably won't vaporize well. (Cocaine molecules will hold together…