Ugh, I don’t know why broadcasters think previewing random episodes of a new show is a good idea. A few years back, Fox previewed its miniseries Shots Fired by screening episodes 1 and 6 (of 10) at Sundance. The first episode was fairly intriguing, but the second episode was confusing enough without the larger context …

It’s honestly hard to say. It is a lot of violence and tragedy to ambush the audience with all at once in the first twenty minutes of the movie, but it’s not out of proportion to the violence and tragedy of the rest of the movie. The whole film is an unflinching look at the bloody barbarism of colonial-era Tasmania,…

Having seen the film, I would say that it’s only “sensitive” in the sense that it’s clearly grounded in the pain of the main character; it’s not just using her pain as a cheap way of showing that the bad guys are bad. Indeed, part of the brutality comes from the men’s bumbling capriciousness; they’re banal evildoers…

I don’t see what’s so impossible about writing a satisfying ending to a story with as much meat on it as Game of Thrones. If GRRM didn’t give them enough to work with, they should’ve just made up a better ending their own damn selves.

I dunno, if I thought Dany’s ending was a foregone conclusion from the very beginning, I’d be pretty disappointed that the character underwent zero meaningful character development in the eight seasons we’ve been following her.

This was one of my favorite movies from Sundance this year, and of my favorites it’s probably the one most likely to hold up outside the hothouse atmosphere of Park City. In that environment I can get really excited about something like Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary, but a documentary about the weird…

I think your read on the situation the series left us with is correct, but to me it also illustrates how badly the show had gone off the rails by its final season. Yes, it put across the notion that Will had gotten a taste for blood and become, like, Hannibal’s murder soulmate—but that’s fucking stupid, because being…

Yeah, Heckerling’s role in the whole thing seems deliberately ambiguous. “I had no idea what Amy had actually said to Lorne, or how much was being assumed” is the kind of disclaimer I’ve occasionally had to ask my own authors to add to their manuscript at the advice of our lawyers, to make sure we’re not implying…

My theory is that Billy was intended as a mirror image of Will, another ambiguously gay kid named William whose father wants him to stop being a f*g and toughen up, but one who’s turned into a villain by abuse and self-loathing instead of being saved from that fate by the love and acceptance of his friends and family.

Absolutely. In fact, to me Mad Men is the ideal example of the kind of character-driven writing I’m talking about, because although a central point of the series is that people are who they are and attempting to run from that is just self-delusion, it’s only through constant development over the course of the series…

My only problem with that is that “Guy constantly loses everything” isn’t really much of a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s more of a circumstance, just sort of repeating itself until the series reaches its endpoint.

Ugh. I have as many complaints as anyone about how badly Game of Thrones has gone awry, but I wish people were more willing to accept that sometimes things suck and there’s just no recourse. The impulse to DO SOMETHING about every damn cultural affront is not healthy, and it’s probably helped fuel the impulse toward…

Even Miley Cyrus is here as a mightily popular, wig-wearing entertainer

And the younger, more beautiful queen who would cast her down and take all she held dear, which also just happened.

What if The Hound’s and Aria’s last scene was, you know, written? Like more specifically? Like if he actually convinced her with actual words to give up revenge?

Yeah, to me Kira is especially impressive in comparison to who the female lead of DS9 was originally supposed to be—Michelle Forbes as transplanted TNG character Ensign Ro Laren. With Ro, TNG was so clearly trying to create an edgy “strong woman character,” but those efforts were so half-assed: She wears an earring on…

Ha, I was pretty close, though (ENDGAME SPOILERS) I expected them to undo the post-Snappening timeline, not bring the snapped people back to life in the “five years later” time period.

I kind of figured they’re talking about one of the alternate-timelines Earths the Avengers created by mucking around in the past in Endgame, not some wildly divergent universe with a whole different history and cast of characters.

Yeah, it was always super weak, though a lot of casual observers mistakenly assumed otherwise, because they didn’t realize that all the details of Kessler’s script that the Duffers supposedly cribbed were themselves exact copies of the preexisting Montauk/Camp Hero conspiracy theory. It’s like if you wrote a movie…

Sure, she took the throne, and King’s Landing, but there’s nothing magic about sitting in an uncomfortable chair in one coastal city that makes you the acknowledged ruler of eight kingdoms. Her power derives from noblemen all over the continent deciding to pledge their armies to her, and in my opinion the series has…