Well, I definitely went for the low-hanging fruit with that example, but I feel like the whole piece is a mishmash of perfectly fair objections to minor story issues, and weird befuddlement at things that are not that befuddling. As with the thing with the older kids, he repeatedly gets all tangled up in asking…

Yeah, I can't fault Hulk for that, since I have the same tendencies. (For instance, there's a writing choice in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter that nearly ruins the movie for me, but I've literally never heard a single other person even mention it.) But in this particular case, I think it's more than just that he's…

I've never been a regular consumer of even the best news satire, so John Oliver was never gonna be a must-watch program for me, but I gotta say, when someone's pointed me to some devastating takedown of his, I've usually found it pretty underwhelming — choir preaching at its most didactic.

Dammit, critics, your only job is to give The Americans all the awards ever, and you blew it again!

Yep, if this election taught us anything, it's that you can't win the support of American voters by insulting and belittling people left and right!

It could be an emergent property of their core programming without having been designed that way, though. That's what the OP suggested, in fact — that Arnold didn't intend for them to become sentient, but when he realized they were, he "went with it."

So imagine the stupidest, most incoherent conspiracy theory you can think of, then multiply it by 12 more stupids. That's Pizzagate.

Interesting. That would actually explain something that's been bugging me about the show's basic premise — namely, that if the hosts have developed sentience because of some recent upgrade like the reveries, it should be really easy to completely reverse that process by restoring the hosts' software to an earlier…

They've got a long, long way to go to make up for #pizzagate, though.

One little touch I especially appreciated: The scene where Burr and Hamilton agree to duel is a direct visual homage to the same Burr/Hamilton scene in the very first Drunk History video — the two combatants starkly lit against a completely black background.

Plus, I'd assume that part of the point of giving the voiceover to Ian instead of Louise was to show how he'd been drawn into her orbit over the course of their research — that he was now doing some of the things that she had previously done.

No, I was complaining that the book absolutely guts Frank's motivations, by decreeing that everything he did was an inevitable result of the mechanics of time travel. But the fact that you keep taking my arguments for their precise opposite suggests that we may need to just agree to disagree.

No, precisely the opposite. I'm someone who doesn't give a shit about meaningless mysteries like "What are the arbitrary physical properties of a made-up fictional universe?" and would prefer for a story to devote its energy to fleshing out its characters rather than subordinating them to such masturbatory…

Well, for example, if you can't just consult the Philosophy of Time Travel pages about "The Manipulated Dead," there's room to speculate about the character of Frank and why he behaves the way he does. Do his actions say something about him as a person? About what it's like to face the sort of existential situation…

Well, but I'd argue that that's exactly how the film literalizes the symbolism — by creating overly prescriptive "physical rules" that turn everything that happened into something that had to happen simply because the rules say so, and not because they speak to some more nuanced truth.

Yeah, it's almost a George Lucas-level letdown — the revelation that the original cut was only as good as it was because budgetary and other practical concerns prevented the director from doing all the fucking shitty things he clearly wanted to do all along.

"Ah, rapping. To a rapper like me, it's top-notch."

Yeah, I doubt it actually made the difference, but the race was close enough that there's no way to know for sure.

To be fair, a lot of people did go through the leaked e-mails in some detail. The problem, though, is that when you dump something directly on a public that has no training or experience in how to read it, you get a lot of uninformed assumptions and crazy theories — for instance, that DNC e-mail titled "Video request"…

I'm seeing a lot of complaints that this is some sort of fawning paean to Clinton, and I don't get that at all. My read was that it was played as a tragedy — the lament of a well-meaning but fatally flawed candidate who just couldn't connect with people the way she needed to: