This was one of my grandma’s shows when I was a little kid, so I was sometimes forced to watch it with her when we visited. It probably says something about its distinctiveness that I still remember some of the characters after thirty-odd years: good-hearted ingenue Brooke, feuding brothers Thorne and Ridge, campy…

Yeah, the DLC is a weird combination of really brilliant ideas and moments of baffling incoherence. It feels to me like they had the whole thing carefully plotted out and then they realized there was a giant plot hole or something, and they had to scramble to retool a bunch of things at the last minute.

People also overlook the fact that Booker and Elizbeth initially inhabit a universe where Daisy Fitzroy and the Vox are less violent and more sympathetic, and they deliberately transit to a universe where the Vox are in open rebellion because in the more nuanced universe their mission runs into a dead end. The idea…

The point wasn’t to “erase all other Bookers,” though; it was to destroy Comstock at the very moment of his awakening, the one point all Comstocks had in common—and thus the one moment where it would be possible to extinguish that branch of the multiverse altogether.

Oh, it’s definitely not defensible as parody—no one would interpret it as offering fair-use commentary on an unrelated funny song that most people in the audience have probably never heard of. (What would the intended commentary even be? Are they, like, parodying the idea of a parody song?)

It’s definitely in the same inspirational gospel style, and maybe the same key (my music theory is rusty), but it doesn’t sound like the same rhythm or melody to me. Intellectual property in music doesn’t really extend to “Three words sung on descending notes,” even when it’s not the same descending notes, right?

I mean, the trailer seems to go out of its way to indicate that his character’s father was not killed on 9/11 but died in an unrelated fire two years later, so I’m not sure why one would read this as “milking 9/11" and not “continuing to wrestle with his own father’s death.”

Yeah, but there’s a difference between “a bit of a delay” and a sixty-year delay, which is what we’re talking about in this case. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, things seem to fade slowly as they become improbable, and then fairly quickly once they become impossible, but at no other point do the characters…

It kinda seemed like there was a Democratic president, though more than that it seemed like a guy like Trump wasn’t president, because how could the show have predicted something like that?

The way it seems to work is that things from the future gradually start to fade away as your actions make them less and less probable, but disappear fairly quickly once you’ve made them impossible.

II just bothers me because as soon as Mary and Jennifer go into the future, they cease to exist in 1985, so how the hell can they interact with their future selves?

I think people assume that it was supposed to be some kind of time loop, where Marty knows the song as a classic rock tune written by Chuck Berry, but it turns out that he was the one who taught it to Berry in the first place. But, obviously, that makes no sense, because the whole point of Back to the Future rests on…

It fits the geopolitics, sure, but the execution is still really goofy. State-sponsored terrorist sleeper cells are dressing up in taqiyah and keffiyeh to do a drive-by in their beat-up Volkswagen?

Correct about the original version lacking the “To Be Continued,” and I believe the filmmakers when they say the ending wasn’t really intended as sequel bait, just a cute final gag.

“It’s from the ‘Now You’ series. You don’t think we know how to make movies? Fucking step off. Let the people in, they’re trying get in to see a good movie, motherfucker, you fucking jaded piece of shit. Fucking ‘Now You’ is in session!”

It’s probably not intentional, just the interplay between the CGI artifacting in the source and the compression artifacting in the video. Like how if you scan a printed image and reprint it, the original dot patterns can interact with the dot patterns of the new printing to produce the illusion of wavy lines running…

Sure, I don’t disagree. I’m the one arguing that Mike wasn’t displaying “magical hypercompetence,” after all.

And he failed at what he was actually trying to do, which is to take out the bandit so they could steal his truck and his water. Flipping the car instead might’ve looked badass, but it was completely counterproductive.

Except that it was the single most important glimpse of Saul’s backstory Breaking Bad ever gave us—it’s his explanation for why he believes that “it’s a cruel world” and Walt needs to “grow up” and understand that the people who love him will betray him. If there’s one single line it would be most meaningful for Better…

To be fair, it’s only the early episodes of Watchmen that flirt with the idea, quite in keeping with the themes of the original graphic novel, that Robert Redford’s left-wing authoritarian government would be just as poisonous as Nixon’s right-wing authoritarian government. Eventually the genuinely aggrieved racist…