When I was growing up, there were a few small Batman stories that featured things like Alfred walking into Wayne's room and he's still in costume, passed out on the bed, with the piss beaten out of him—like a butler walking on a rich kid who is a furry and had a hard night at a seedy BDSM event. I always thought that…

You buy Hinds as the kind of guy who could be sort of arty but rule a coalition of man-eating savages with an iron fist. West would easily be clubbed to death by the second or third time he smirked at the wrong person.

Death and resurrection/rebirth are big literary/storytelling themes going back to the start of agriculture and the show has been foreshadowing that those themes will come pretty heavy-handedly for a some time. I think Jon Snow dying and "coming back" not quite the same is something Martin and the show runners will use…

Ontologically, no, not the same person/character. The only way for a dead person and a resurrected person to be the exact same person is if there is some continuity, i.e. if something survives death. It's pretty clear from all the "nothing" talk that, in Game of Thrones world, an immortal soul doesn't exist. Once…

Both Martin in the books and the team on the show seem to think death is always permanent, i.e. that, even if a character is resurrected, the resurrected character is not numerically identical to the character who died. So I think that's how they will frame their answer to that question—that Kit Harrington is back but…

Yes. The fact that the basic, non-Spider-Man-specific design choices in the costume match the design choices in costumes we know Stark made for the Avengers also point to that.

No, he's going to see something like he described plus this. They've said that Spider-Man already exists in the MCU—with a makeshift costume—we just haven't seen it. (The rumor is that those official Spider-Man hoodies at least hint at the design of it.)

Yeah, I think we're going to be on different sides of this. Affleck's costume is basically the only thing I've seen from BvS that I actually like. And that's precisely because it's the first time we've seen a modern movie Batman that actually looks like Batman from the comics.

I like it. It seems to be consciously going for a movie version of the original, Ditko design whereas all the other movie version have either been different combos of that, the McFarlane version, and the Alex Ross version—the Raimi films and Amazing Spiderman 2—or just fucking weirdly horrible original takes—Amazing…

I'm wondering if the flayed dude being torched in the trailer is Ramsay, given the way Roose is looking at him in the trailer.

Nah, the Boltons can't make it to the end. They're too obviously set up to be the big bad for the story of Jon's rise.

Now, now, Europeans can be prudes, too.

Yeah, given that they've established the motel is in a classic small town where everyone knows everybody's business, there's no way you make him consistently crazy as he is in this episode and have the actual events of Psycho make any sense.

Unless they fudge the timeline a bit and do their version of an adaptation of the novel for the last season, I doubt they'd kill off the real Norma before the final season of the show. Unless they do do an adaptation of Psycho, her death is going to be the dramatic climax of the series.

I just don't know what is going on here. It's like every casting agent in Hollywood has a note on this type of role consisting of a Venn diagram where one circle is labeled "everything representative of white supremacist sexual insecurities regarding black men" and another labeled "everything representative of…

Why is Wendell Pierce typecast as a sleazy sex addict? It's the most weirdly specific typecasting I've seen. Waiting to Exhale? Sleazy sex addict. The Wire? Sleazy sex addict. Treme? Sleazy sex addict. Etc. Etc.

I think it's more of the way these characters are dramatically framed. In Mad Men, for example, we are shown EXACTLY how and why Dick Whitman became Don Draper. And I think that's where the audience empathy for him comes from. People have a hard time saying 'yeah, so-and-so is a complete dick" even when they merit…

Yeah, lots of Mad Men viewers also didn't get that they were supposed to think Don was a piece of shit, either. It's an issue in general with these shows—less of an issue with The Sopranos.

No, no. Chuck earns the hate. People hated Skyler because they weirdly and creepily went beyond recognizing the story was about Walt to taking his side.

It would be nice for a version of the prediction that Chuck's mental illness leads to his death to come true. I'm just hoping it ties into his entitlement issues somehow—more of a proper tragic death by hubris than just rooting for a mentally ill asshole to blow himself up.