What episodes did you watch? From about the episode 8 mark, the series really kicks up from the soap opera aspects that choke up the rest of the story in the beginning.

I like to think that SHIELD saw him talking shit on TV, and Fury was like, "Aight, let's see this rich SOB take care of it then," while waiting off-stage in case Tony dropped the ball.

Intentional. In the 80s, the whole concern was robots phasing us out. This one appears to be moving forward that we live in a much more technologically integrated society, and fear of the drones et al. lead OCP to wanting to put the man in the suit for the people to feel more comfortable with it. It's a clever take if…

Who put Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the microwave...?

Yup. I don't claim for a moment to agree with it, but it's the clear pattern in what I've seen. Either you deny there's any problem in the first place, which tends to be the case for the Dominionist Christians, or you just feel it's overblown.

The normal go-to line is that they feel it's not nearly so much of an issue we should ruin the economy over. They tend to assume the markets will solve all the issues readily enough.

More accurately, the utter lack of footnotes of any sort give away its non-Chick nature.*

True. Ironically, I think AoS is doing better when it's more of a spy show, anyway. I'd love to see something like AIM or HYDRA end up as a big foe for the team, but I don't think they need to be driving so hard into the paint as Arrow's been.

I think, given the talks about AoS meetings with Marvel, the current go is more a matter of over-cautiousness. It could be easy to toss in bigger Marvel cross references, but it risks removing the ability to developing the story of the team. The show looks to be the story of Coulson and Skye, which would be harder to…

Which is fair. From what I've seen, the people that stick with it most are one of two types:

I can confirm that. When I lived in San Jose, for years there was a station only reachable in the south part of the city that broadcast songs constantly, with no commercials or announcements of any kind ever cutting in that I heard. I'm pretty confident it was just a person hooking a computer music player to a…

Yeah, my friend reminded me that we haven't really seen that part of Ollie's past come back much lately. I feel like that's a beautiful plot point to sabotage the hell out of Ollie later this season. And KGBeast? Ermagherd...

I agree. Free military grade rifles for all students! That's a piece of mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to introduce:

Was there an explicit statement of them not casting anyone from the films? Granted, I don't much expect them to, but have they already closed off that door?

I have a feeling that by the end of the season we'll have that sort of revelation where Quentin basically knew who the Arrow was, but didn't feel like saying anything.

Clearly they should grind up the xylem into pure water, and dilute it several times over until the whole of the water as absorbed the cleansing essence of the wood. Now that's real science.

After this episode, there is now only one precise way they can end the second season. With the League of Assassins now well defined, we cut to their headquarters. (Bonus points: Liam Neeson is somehow bribed/drugged/etc. to playing Ra's for the show.) Looking over a Lazarus Pit, the water stirs, and then...

If it were a movie, or if the series was going to have more of a focus on the region there, I'd totally agree. If it's basically a one-off thing, though, I'm frankly a little surprised they even gave it the amount of attention they did.

Going out on a limb here, they probably cared more about screen presence and making sure they sounded "Chinese-y" to less knowledgeable Western ears. Since I don't expect they had much focus on HK for the series, they didn't have much need to devote more resources to that.