The film-critic term for a movie that's anti-corporate (or anti-war), but difficult to watch, is "preachy." If it is entertaining and watchable, the term is "tonally inconsistent."

I always thought the point of this show was just making as simple an argument on behalf of integrity, and trying to make that argument emotionally compelling by dramatizing it. I kind of would class it with Breaking Bad in that sense. I didn't always find the drama of The Newsroom that compelling, and sometimes it…

I mean, just in terms of the way the story was set up, Don was perfectly within his rights. He didn't remove any agency from Sarah Sutherland's character. She still has the right to go on any news program and confront her attacker. He doesn't want to be the one to facilitate that. So he doesn't. He never had an…

Girls and Louie are two shows that trivialized the emotional damage done by rape.

It makes the same amount of sense in both cases.

The show leaves room for your interpretation! But also leaves room for the interpretation that she is looking at a normal ultrasound of her child and feeling run-of-the-mill anxiety about it.

Cool!

What I'm saying is, there's nothing in Laurie's reaction to say one way or the other whether she's reacting to a suddenly blank ultrasound, or just to the idea of being pregnant. There's not enough information to say one way or the other.

No, it breaks an established pattern. With Kevin's disappeared affair, and with Carrie's disappeared family, we see very clearly that they have suddenly vanished and it's confusing to the people left behind. And on top of that, it's confirmed at other points in the narrative that they disappeared.

She said her words were taken out of context, and edited to create a false impression of her. That seems a pretty reasonable thing to believe, given that the photo-shopped image contains straight-up lies about things she said.

I don't think her reaction really implies that something terrible happened. That wouldn't even be a normal reaction to a suddenly blank ultrasound!

I didn't get a chance to say this last week:

"The reveal of the 121st question boggles me, in the best way possible."

McCarthyism.

Hi, Erica. I like your interpretation of that last scene, too.

"And this, in an unsubtle show that is happy with an episode where a girl plays with fire, a woman talks about fire, and a dead crone is sent to burn in fire. It’s not subtle—it’s deliberately playing one note for one audience."

There's a lot of really accomplished German actors in the movie. Seems weirder to ask them to do American accents.

The scary thing is: THIS MOVIE IS NOT ABOUT COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN THE WAR ON TERROR.

The most troublesome thing about that clause is that it assumes that the so-called "criticism" that The Leftovers is making is coming from outside Christianity. That Tom Perotta and all the other voices that blend into an episode of TV are distinct from "Christians themselves."

Nah.