There is no reason reviewers couldn’t be provided with more episodes. Either hold episode 1’s public release until the season is finished, or provide reviewers with not-quite-complete versions of the final episodes. If you explain that the effects in the finale still have a layer of polish to go through, professional…

working with Jason Aaron to tell the story of Jane Foster’s Mighty Thor

Wasn’t alive, not American, didn’t think. Mea culpa.

You know, I’m just gonna hold my hands up on that one.

The Twilight Zone wasn’t made in today’s incredibly polarised society.

A related, but slightly less cynical take:

I’ve seen it claimed that nearly half of that $200m budget is Phoenix, Gaga, and Phillips’ pay. Phoenix and Phillips apparently got massive pay rises as a reward for the first one’s frankly ridiculous financial success, which makes sense.

Apparently, there’s a serial killer on the loose named The Butcher and the police got a tip that he’s going to be at this concert.

If those are the options, I would say that art very much is a lecture. You can have a dialogue about it, but you can’t usually have a dialogue with it. Plenty of criticism has been laid at Joker’s feet, but it cannot respond, it has no counter-arguments, it simply is.

There’s definitely someone participating in this conversation who needs to check their understanding of the meaning of words, but it’s not who you think it is.

Pretentious is a very appropriate a description for the first film. It was a very superficial film that wanted to be treated as an “important” drama about mental health. Phoenix’s engrossing central performance is really the only thing holding it all together.

I struggle to believe that the morons at CinemaSins could possibly have come up with a line as succinct and accurate as that.

That approach didn’t hurt the original trilogy, or phases 1-3 of the MCU, or The Dark Knight trilogy (Rises has problems, but they aren’t as a result of not planning out the whole trilogy in advance).

My broader point is that, while Rise of Skywalker was terrible and deserves to be retconned, the only reason to actually do it is if the new story they come up with is dependent on events having played out differently than they did in that film.

If that’s the set up you want to achieve though, the only element that requires you to retcon Rise of Skywalker out of existence is Kylo. And no matter how well it’s executed, it will ultimately come across as “Somehow, Kylo Ren returned.”

That single page is his entire character though. Other than that he’s just a mouthpiece for the “evolved” version of genocide. Is a brief aside, in which he doesn’t interact with a single person, but thinks “dancing looks fun”, a personality?

The Children were basically personality-free ciphers — half of them wanted a violent takeover, half wanted a more subtle approach, but I couldn’t tell you anything more about any of them as individuals. And Cable and Bishop spent most of the series just bitching at each other, which was fun, but I’d hardly call it…

I just read his Children of the Vault (part of the “Fall of X” story arc currently running through the X-Men books) and if that’s anything to go by, his characters will mostly be blank slates, although there were a couple of dicks (Cable and Bishop, so that is the correct characterisation at least).

How was he not already the Spider-Man we knew before the end of No Way Home?

No, I got that too. She’s sure this is all part of his plan, and she’s almost certainly right. I hadn’t considered that it might be blackmail though, and I’m not sure I buy that — it’s perhaps more that she’s demonstrating that she has the intelligence to be a valuable ally.