There are 24 goddamn days left until the election.

Yeah, agreed. I thought the character was terrible, but all due props to Erik Harvey: the script called for "insane blaxploitation overlord" and damned if he didn't fully and completely commit to that. I just wish they'd given him more to work with.

Right there with you. From "who the fuck is this guy" to "aaaaargh why isn't the album out yet?" in about 30 minutes.

Shades was smug because he was the only person in the entire rogues gallery smart enough to realize in advance that trying to trade punches with Luke was a waste of time.

It might even work better if you think of Shades as the real hero. All he wants to do is be a fully self-actualized criminal: he might need to beat a man down here and there, but he's neither working out his childhood issues nor trying to solve his problems in the most ludicrously over-complicated way. Everyone else…

Yeah, that episode was where I seriously came to love Shades. He desperately wants to be Parker in "The Score", he's even probably capable of being Parker, but Diamondback keeps insisting on being a comic book villain and it's killing Shades to have to put up with it.

Yeah. Honestly they should have just kept Diamondback as a name in the background for the entirety of season one. Between Cottonmouth, Shades and Black Mariah, there was more than enough bad guy to go around here.

Best part of Luke Cage: Shades, the veteran career criminal who is kept in a state of perpetual annoyance and exasperation by the fact that he's found himself in a comic book plot. This poor guy just wants to be a quietly successful mook from a Richard Stark novel, but he's surrounded by super villains who all want…

No, Diamondback is the weakest part of Luke Cage, by a long yard.

I'm sure he was involved, but major publishers are generally not in the business of risking millions of dollars by letting non-writers wing it on a book that they expect (and need) to be a holiday bestseller.

So is Simon & Schuster still insisting that there was no ghostwriter on this project?

Yeah, I specifically blame the LOTR movies for the popularity of bloated director's cuts. In their defense, the extended release of The Two Towers did a much better (but frankly still not great) job of explaining Faramir's motivations, but I think people took the exact wrong lesson from that, namely that it's okay to…

I'd add Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi to that list, but they seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.

British men are not noted for aging well. (Also that's a terrible fucking picture.)

The extended cut was an amazing preview of everything that was going to go wrong for Cameron as a filmmaker later on in his career. The man needed a good editor like nobody's business.

I think it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire genre of first-person shooter gaming was one long attempt to capture the feeling of being "inside" Aliens — it's not a coincidence that the first really popular "mod" for the original Doom was the Aliens mod.

It never retells the original story.

Got it in one.

It is to the eternal credit of my high school that they did just that.

Spell his name correctly: