And it's not like it would be strange for the DOE to be locked up that tightly either. I mean, I suspect that in real life their facilities aren't, but it's implausible that people would assume that it would be.

They told her to repeat what he was saying back to them, but instead it came straight through the radio. That's why they looked surprised by it - not that she could do it but that it worked differently from how they assumed it would.

I can't imagine what research would disprove the claim, though: I mean, if you haven't been to a church where it worked that way going to a rock concert where the audience has a lot of serious fans in it will give the same effect. Singing or speaking together in a big group is a fairly central bit of how humans form…

The answer, as far as I can tell, is "yes". It does one, the other, or (very commonly) both depending on the kind of ritual and context. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head tend to be social-reinforcement ones, but that's because the churches I've been to tended to have a strong theological…

I couldn't help but flinch when he talked about overdosing and kept eating more and more adderall. That's not a good drug to OD on, whether or not you're actively suicidal!

More or less all organized religions have three things down in their foundations, independent of any theological beliefs attached to them. They're not usually explicit, or something people recognize or would endorse explicitly, but they're baked into the whole thing and necessary for it to work. They are:

I'm not entirely certain what his eventual goal is, but this is exactly right. What I think we're seeing in Angela is that what she really wants is to pass tests: almost every interaction with her involves him giving her a new, manipulative test and then praising her for passing it. And almost all of the ones we see…

I'm curious to see how Angela responds, but I do think it's fairly clear what the right answer would be. Price sets it up as "have compassion or take revenge", but his comment about leaving emotion aside makes me think that neither of those options is what he's really thinking about. After all, she can destroy…

I mean, there was a scene where - in the middle of what is clearly a high budget action movie - someone pulls out a "bazooka" that is, visibly, a camcorder taped to a pipe (dozens of different fancy guns in the movie and then… camcorder bazooka)*. But even if there wasn't there would still be this version of the…

The extent to which people missed that the original xXx was basically an updated In Like Flint is still amazing to me. How did people watch it and not recognize that the entire thing is being played for laughs?

That one's tame compared to most of the MK ULTRA ones, or Midnight Climax (good god, but yes) where the CIA paid prostitutes to lure men back to CIA safehouses where they dosed them with massive amounts LSD and filmed what they did from secret rooms none of that is made up. Most of the CIA mind control stuff sounds…

And even when the news reports on it it's usually/almost always a custody thing, but doesn't end up reported that way (until later on, maybe), which makes it worse.

The kind of awkward situation where one person is trying (very clumsily) to talk/influence someone else into doing something that that other person also very much would like to do, and the confusion when it's clear to them that (1) that manipulation in no way worked, (2) shit she completely saw through that and (3)…

When you need money getting it feels like a relief; when you don't it feels like a reward. Either way it's nice, though.

It was also a pretty cold thing for her to do. I mean, it's not like the Sheriff hadn't already made the connection but it had to really hurt when she threw it at him like that.

The references to MK Ultra that show up pretty early on in the show (I mean, I'm on episode three so if it's a spoiler it won't be one for long and it doesn't seem especially important so far) make a lot of sense of that. The CIA got/gets up to all sort of demented stuff and does their best to keep it very very…

And the answer would be "because that's about as common as getting hit by lightning"*. The child-abduction panics of the later parts of the '80s have a lot to answer for as far as their impact on how people raise kids.

My family lived overseas till I was eleven and when we moved back it was already pretty far along that path compared to where we'd been living before (which looked more like in this show). And cell phones existed at that point but it was well before were anything you'd expect someone to have on them, let alone a kid.

Culture has changed a lot since then as far as what suburban kids are allowed to get up to as well, which is part of it. I look back at plenty of my childhood and think "Oh, yeah that definitely doesn't happen anymore". Heck, I remember moving to a more suburb-y UMC professional part of the country when I was around…

Comparing his reaction to the kid's reaction in E.T. is also pretty pointed since if this is set in 1983 it's entirely plausible that Mike has seen E.T. as well.