Gene Hackman was gloriously scenery-chewing. And Leo was gloriously, intentionally smug and irritating.

To be fair, everybody has more chemistry than Barry and Iris.

So it has to be a character who is neither older than anybody (father like Joe) nor younger than anybody (younger brother like Wally). Not a friend, not comedic. Not sure how many white characters meet those criteria either.

Yeah but that's an automatic No True Scotsman!

Yay, a mention of The Quick and the Dead!

Atmospheric pressure isn't a problem, because a balloon (aerostat, skycity, whatever you want to call it) automatically floats where internal and external pressure are approximately equal, give or take the weight and any aerodynamic lift and whatever. It's very high-pressure lower down in the atmosphere, but that just…

And more importantly, it means that anywhere we want to go to is even more dangerous - a dangerous crossing is one thing, but long-term danger at the other end kills the whole thing.

The pilot left me thinking "yeah yeah, stunning, impressive, very clever, but is this really going to work as a series? Or is it going to be slow and pretentious and meandering and just Fargo-turned-to-11?" [I liked Fargo, but it did feel like repeating a certain schtick, and I think it'll have diminishing returns]

Yes, absolutely. The weight of our experience with these characters invests not only the big moments but even the little twitches with a significance and emotional importance that it's almost impossible for shorter works to emulate.

And The Americans will still be on.

Wednesday Adams is probably exactly what Odin would be like, if Odin discovered himself trapped in the form of a small girl with a creepy family…

Didn't Oliver and Sara date for a bit when Sara came back before she was pointlessly killed off before she was brought back to life again? Not very long, though so yeah, your point stands.

Exactly. If this were the 1950s still, that might actually be legitimate as a way of showing something that couldn't be shown openly. But in 2017, the fact that that sort of thing is still being presented as groundbreaking and important is in itself regressive and reactionary.

Well, I didn't know that, and find the idea of a world of native americans living in harmony with nature (like good noble savages) a little disturbing in its own right, but OK, yeah, if that's what it is in the comics then making her northern european is even more of a backward step.

Good point bringing it down to "seeing them making out". It's more complicated than that of course, but I think there's a basic split between what we're told and what we see. And personally, when it comes to having the feeling of a show being open-minded and liberal and encouraging to diversity, I think that what we…

One of the greatest resources of the superhero setting is that no matter how powerful our protagonist becomes, we literally never run out of potential bad guys who can still be a threat. I mean, this is a setting where you can bring in other mutants, you can bring in gods, you can bring in beings from other…

The thing is, even that could work, if they recognised the limitations of the chaacter and kept them on the sidelines. That needn't mean them sitting at home all day waiting for their superhero to come home for dinner - they can be off doing their own work on the side. But if they're at the periphery, or only…

Possible. But there's no actual reason why romance always needs to be a source of angst and tension - on many shows it just gets in the way - so I'd be really happy if Hawley stuck to "and they lived happily ever after (apart from all of the horrible things, but at least the romance bit was good)", or at least "and…

I think the big thing they ought to learn regarding romance is: give us a reason. With David, I can completely understand why he's not just attracted to Syd, but why he feels he needs Syd in his life. And I can mostly sort of see why Syd needs someone like David in her life. Mutal and complementary need results in a…

That makes sense too.
Given the relative difference in speeds, Barry running into Solovar's shield is effectively the same as you or me walking straight into a lamp-post… while we're looking straight at it.