I’m genuinely kind of baffled by this and I can’t figure out whether it speaks to some lack of confidence in Whitaker and Gill’s ability to carry the series on their own, a belief (or a mandate from above) that there has to be at least one male TARDIS crew member, or whether Chibnall just wrote himself into a corner…

I think you can make a case that S11 showed some signs of improvement as it went along. If nothing else, E6 through E9 was all written by people not named Chris Chibnall and that helped a lot: Demons of the Punjab is probably as close to a “classic” as this era has produced, and all of the other non-Chibnall episodes…

Actually I wonder if in fact he was a last-minute replacement for Captain Jack due to John Barrowman currently being in a bit of a career time-out?

You, sir or madam or other as the case may be, are precisely my kind of chaotic good maniac.

Man.... I get that they wanted to clear the decks for Chibnall, but in some other, better universe Pearl Mackie stayed on for at least one more season to bridge into the Whitaker era.  

S11 had a ton of issues and the finale was terrible, but avoiding the classic monsters and staying away from “lore” reveals was absolutely the best instinct that Chibnall had and he should have leaned into that harder. Somewhere between Demons of the Punjab and It Takes You Away and even bits and pieces of some of…

For all that the Chibnall era has leaned hard on diversity as a selling point, boy was it ever the old white guy who had the closest thing to a believable, stable characterization and they had to fridge his wife and give him cancer to do it.

Rogue One would tell a war story about the expendable soldiers who died to make Luke’s triumph possible in the first place. That fucking rules. That’s hard to mess up.

Given that the “Timeless Child” throughline was by a long yard the worst thing about the last two seasons and that the few genuinely good episodes of this era have all been one-offs, the idea that Chibnall is concentrating more on a serialized plotline is the opposite of reassuring, as is the fact that he keeps…

Right?!!! He’s right there and it’s not like Disney doesn’t have his phone number!

It’s hard to think of a better example of CGI aging poorly than Uncanny Valley Tarkin. In 2016, this was the best that Disney could do by pouring literally millions of dollars into it. In 2021 basically any kid with a laptop could, if they wanted to, make a deepfake Peter Cushing that was 100X more convincing.

Somewhere in Australia, Wayne Pygram sits by his phone, quietly weeping.

Honestly I assumed once they announced that Cate Blanchett was playing Hela in Thor:Ragnarok, that they were going to tweak it so that Thanos was trying to get in her pants by butchering half the universe in her honor, and honestly I feel like that would have been a 100% believable motivation and would also have…

a running war of occupation

This.  All this article did was make me sad all over again that the pandemic killed GLOW.

Gift of Gab, too. :(

I’ve been saying for years: Just Make All-Star Superman Into A Movie You Fucking Cowards, and Gunn seems like he’d be an excellent candidate to do just that.

Lukewarm take: it’s fine. The movie answers a question nobody was asking (“What if Travis Bickle became the Joker?”) in an exceedingly cynical and unoriginal way, but the core cast (obviously Phoenix but also Zazie Beatz and Frances Conroy) is great and it’s competently made.  I remember we were all briefly concerned…

Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is a genuine classic with a baleful influence on the next 30 years of comics.

One could also argue that Gunn’s reasoning is a subtweet in the direction of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which added a scene where Joker was on Batman’s team in the post-apocalyptic alternate future or whatever, but we’re going to assume that Gunn had better things to do in 2020 than watch that movie.