There’s not really going to be an end in the sense that the virus will never disappear. There will always be a lot of unvaccinated people in the United States and some of them will always be spreading this virus. Maybe at significantly lower levels than today, but they’ll be there.

That’s a great point, there was a lot of room for nuance here in introducing a rival character (possibly a white fat bald man) to act as a foil and demonstrate the ubiquity of mob involvement in NYC small businesses in the early 90's. But none of that’s here!

Eh it’s a fair point, the episode presents Elektra’s newfound wealth as an empowerment fantasy, but she didn’t make the money through hard work and perseverance, she made it by laundering blood money for the worst people in society. It’s cathartic to see Elekta order mobsters to intimidate and rob that cartoonishly…

One reason GoT was able to raise the bar in later seasons is that they were re-using physical sets and costumes and digital assets from the earlier seasons. They only had to build the Kings Landing and Winterfell sets once. While the budget for each season did tend to go up, season 8 only cost a bit more than double…

It’s not clear that the female friend (which is the relationship worth salvaging) is actually buying her ex-boyfriend’s story. The boyfriend is just a manipulative and/or delusional asshole, but the LW seems much more concerned with working through things there, even though there’s no wrong to right. The female…

I think Dan’s point is that lots of categories of service workers are disproportionately young and attractive, and that limited social access to young attractive people is at least part of the point of the economic transaction for customers. I think there may be something to the idea that there’s a spectrum that runs…

Eh, the voter base just got this wrong. I haven’t seen The Father, I’m never going to see The Father, but even without seeing it it’s clear that 10 years from now nobody is even going to remember that film while everyone will remember that Chadwick Boseman got posthumously screwed on Oscar night.

Yes, ratings fluctuate over time. The outdated idea was that anyone named the host of a network talk show should automatically get 3 to 5 years to see if any of their competitors will tousle a dictator’s hair and become unpopular.

NBC gave him a fair chance! Conan’s argument about how he “needed time to build an audience” was based on very outdated assumptions about the industry. He behaved as though there were still three broadcast networks, each with exactly one time slot at 11:35 for an hourlong comedy-variety talk show, and Conan was the…

There appears to be a significant change in philosophy between the pre- and post-Disney+ MCU content.

Forky offered a satisfying enough explanation for the cosmology of the Toy Story universe that I never had to think about it again.

There are elements of The Sopranos that don’t really hold up after a full 20 years of serialized television that followed its playbook (my personal issue is the way lifelong members of the mob are constantly just popping up unannounced with the explanation that they were down in Miami or off in prison), but the…

My issue with Burton as a permanent host is that he’s already 64. Alex was able to host the show for nearly 40 years because he was fairly young when originally hired. I see the role of permanent Jeopardy host as being similar to the Tonight Show gig (except for, well, the whole Conan blip), where people grow up with…

I thought they went too far in the direction of *overpowering* Sam. The Wakandan tech (and the magic vibranium shield) makes him far more powerful than an ordinary gadget-dependent superhero like Batman.

The series was kind of about recontextualizing what the Captain America mantle really means. No matter who is carrying the shield, they’re making a political statement about American ideals. When that person happens to be a handsome white man... that’s a political statement, too. In his public debut as Cap, Sam…

In my head canon, Steve thaws out his younger self in 1947, and they both marry Peggy, with old-Cap having her on even days of the month and young-Cap having her on odd days of the month. And then every Leap Day old-Cap gets mad about this arrangement because young-Cap gets Peggy on both February 29 and March 1.

Yeah I think we (and the Russos and most fans) totally agree on this point. But the Endgame writers disagree!

The Russos said that, but Endgame writer Christopher Markus said this: “We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline. So I reject the…

It’s definitely not helping matters that they’re being deliberately vague about Steve’s fate in the alternate timeline because they want to leave the door open to future projects involving Chris Evans.

I think this was a good example of when being off-the-nose would be detrimental. Prior to this series, I don’t think anyone in the MCU ever mentioned that Sam was Black. As viewers we understood that both Anthony Mackie and Sam Wilson are Black. But it never came up in conversation! Not even from the two characters…