American Crime Story: The People vs. Fatty Arbuckle.

Not natural or logical in any general sense, but the natural, logical endpoint of the specific type of "heroism" Veidt and his fellow superheroes represent. At least, that's the argument Watchmen seems to be making; one can disagree with it while still acknowledging that it's the thrust of Moore's story.

Sure, they're similar in the sense that they're both flawed, but they're flaws of an altogether different kind. Being selfless and caring but thinking that someone has to step up and do the tough things for the good of humanity isn't what a supervillain does; it's what a superhero does.

I'd argue that the main difference is that Luthor is motivated by a desire for power and admiration, whereas Veidt genuinely cares about people and wants to make the world a better place. That's what makes the character so horrifying — he's not a hero who strays from his calling; he's a hero who takes his calling to…

I think Snyder's ending makes sense from a "plot economy" perspective, but the story loses something thematically if the threat Adrian plugs into is a real person rather than an imaginary monster created by artists and writers who thought they were just making a movie. Snyder's film is still an indictment of superhero…

Ayep. And the real issue isn't that making Adrian an obvious supervillain gives away the ending; it's that he's not supposed to be a villain at all. Snyder seems to think the point is that Ozy destroyed half of New York City because he's not as wholesome and decent and all-American as he pretends to be, but the real…

Yep. And as the Variety article points out, in season 1 the series benefited from following The Walking Dead, whereas this season it's anchoring its own night. Apples to oranges all around.

Yeah, that's clickbait bullshit from Outside Scoop journalists who don't know how ratings work, in particular how important Live+ ratings are for shows like this. Variety, on the other hand, characterized the season 2 premiere as "Pack[ing] a Ratings Punch for AMC."

No, I think he had two tapes of the same commercial: a regular VHS tape, and a Betamax version to send to the studio. Unless I'm mistaken, Beta was still the preferred production format in the early 2000s.

Oh, I don't think latinum is like a silver certificate, where the currency corresponds to some valuable material. It is the valuable material — that is, the liquid pressed inside the gold bars is the unreplicatable replicator component. Like if you could squeeze a dollar bill and wring out a dollar's worth of oil from…

(shrug) I figure it's like oil sitting in barrels in a petroleum reserve. But I don't know anything about the oil economy, so maybe that analogy is stupid.

I don't know if it ever made it into an episode, or maybe one of his noncanon books, but DS9 writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe used to theorize that latinum was an unreplicatable material that was necessary for the production of replicators.

I figure Spock was just saying that his (human) mother was a descendant of Arthur Conan Doyle.

It's not included in any of the online transcripts of the film, nor was it in the script excerpt that was posted on some other site recently. And I don't remember it being there myself — though I read the book after I saw the movie, so it's possible that I just glossed over it in the film and then it hit me super hard…

The moment in the film is very similar, but it omits Ma's line at the end.

I figure Old Nick changed the passcode periodically to keep her from guessing it. He could also have had a silent alarm rigged up to alert him when an incorrect code was input.

I do love the ending of the movie, but I wish they'd kept one moment in particular from the book scene, which I found just heartbreaking:

Well, it's more like a movie that suggests that there's a sinister secret cult that has nothing to do with Jews at all but plays on people's bigotry and fear to persuade them to blame the Jews for the crimes of which the cult itself is actually guilty.

I saw this at Sundance last year, and I'm surprised at the number of reviewers who take the film as an endorsement or a validation of Salem-type paranoia. Sure, the film's premise is that witches are for reals, but it also makes it pretty clear that they're enabled, not thwarted, by paranoid witch-hunting bullshit.