I was wondering how your comments would stand with the Australia episode, which seems to carry through with some of the notes re: parenting here, and then you noted that had watched it. I think both of these episodes are pretty packed as is so it wouldn’t have worked to combine them. I haven’t watched past Australia…

Eh, maybe the specifics of the plot don’t last anymore, but they don’t for lots of work that are as tied to the eras they were made as V for Vendetta is to the 80's.

V for Vendetta and other British pop culture made in reaction to Thatcher has been on my mind as I watch this show. The Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret” comes to mind.  

Right. Like she factually was doing those low-key jobs and living with flatmates in London before marrying Charles. I’ve also kind of had to reconsider what it means to be part of British nobility as she was before marriage- it seems like it meant her family had money/land (perhaps they were supporting her in London?) …

That kind of jibes more with my childhood memories, such as they are. Perhaps there was some distance to them even at first, but the behavior the show is dramatizing makes them (especially Charles) seem like social incompetents. Their first few interactions in the show were so charming. I can’t imagine Charles…

I watched the real life interview after the show and I was struck by how much more at ease and affectionate they were with each in real life then as portrayed in the show. Which is not to say the whole situation wasn’t a disaster from the beginning, but as much as I enjoy the show it makes me realize the artifice…

This is why I liked AotC’s speeder chase sequence, because we got a better look at what it’s like to live on Coruscant. The speeder traffic lanes, people loitering on the ground, a nightclub, how the Jedi talk to civilians- lots of great stuff there.

It’s really bizarre. Even if you wanted to be pretty loose and let the directors have some leeway in telling their own stories and sort of just eventually find your way to a saga, there should have been more veto power exercised over completely throwing out the previous guy’s stuff, as happened twice!

It’s annoying because I feel like he could’ve fixed the primary complaint about AoTC (the love story) by just putting them in more jeopardy and bringing it closer to the circumstances of the Leia-Han romance of TESB. He could’ve axed the droid factory fight to find the time to really flesh it out.

Like anyone who grew up with the OT and waited the 20 years for the prequels to come out, I had ideas on what all those hints from the OT meant for the Clone Wars and the Jedi and the rise of the Empire.

See, this is what I remember. Lots of enthusiasm at seeing the Jedi in action en masse, the Yoda-Dooku fight, getting some sense of what the Clone Wars was, Obi-Wan’s story, Jango Fett, even Anakin’s dark actions on Tatooine. Even then we bemoaned the romance scenes and that some of the action felt like a video game,…

The sequels were better in practically every respect except their vision. The one area I can point that the prequels were better is in its ambition to tell a story of the fall of a democracy and one of its heroes. Granted, it botched telling that story, but the sequels well documented shifts in plotting between…

Episode II is my favorite of the prequels, and I’m also sort of bewildered as to when the general consensus turned on it so viciously. When it came out, I clearly remember more pleasant discussions and reception towards it (as opposed to the confusion and deflation in the immediate aftermath of TPM) while still…

That images looks more like the skeleton we saw behind C-3p0 in Star Wars. 

It’s cute, but having so many things coming together that glanced the Skywalker saga, no matter how briefly or tangentally, makes Star Wars feel smaller to me. I like the easter eggs more when they reference stuff/concepts from the movies but aren’t the actual stuff from the movies (unless necessary for story reasons).…

The only visual reference we had for Krayt dragons previously, the skeleton behind C-3P0 in Star Wars, was not nearly as big as depicted here. This episode definitely brought them closer to sandworm territory.

Or the other not-Tatooine desert planets Mandalorian has visited during the last two seasons. 

I thought I saw the people being hit by it quickly disintegrating into nothing.

You are totally spot on with all your points and I was also a bit confused with the flow of that conversation and the ultimate reveal of what Mos Pelgo actually looked like.

And then a few years later Hanks and Spielberg produced Band of Brothers for HBO, which extended Ryan’s style of war movie into franchise television with The Pacific and the upcoming Masters of the Air. Feel like this film really started, or rather re-popularized, the dormant genre of war films, expanding it to other…