There's way too much witchcraft and straight-up supernaturality in the show to take the initial pretenses towards pseudoscience explanations too seriously. I mean, really, the hexenbiests are basically witches, and half the solutions to their problems involve bubbling cauldrons. Just because the cauldrons are small…

I won't argue that you should give the Americans another chance, since you gave it a whole season, but I found it to be the most politically honest thing on television. I'm a little wary of comparing it to the Wire in its hey-day, but it has that same detached, dispassionate coldness and willingness to let…

I will always adore her for the shooting-pigeons-with-an-air-rifle-while-smoking-and-wearing-a-sun-dress scene. That was the moment I realized the entire show was supposed to be a louche period comedy, and they were doing it intentionally.

He probably noticed the studied noncommittal of the staging and narrative voice. Which is somewhat astute of Duarte - one of the showrunners, Joe Weisberg, worked in the CIA for a few years - but from my point of view, it's a feature, not a bug. The USSR was a monstrously dysfunctional slave-state run by a criminal…

Matthew 10:37 - He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Is there enough of AIM in the MCU to extend it as a long-running villainous organization? They kind of pissed its potential away by making it a one-and-gone startup johnny-come-lately in IM3.

1) They pulled that gag with Garrett, then Coulson disintegrated him. I think they're following the "if there's a body, it's dead" trope faithfully here.
2) He was actually shot twice, center of mass, big pool of blood. That's usually code for dead as doornails.
3) He's not especially interesting as a character, his…

It's Marvel, long-running characters tend to go through a half-dozen different names over time.

I'm pretty sure that was a Vietnam-era joke that FMJ just re-told. I know I heard it elsewhere before 1987. A quick googling shows references back to 1974, ironically enough from my hometown newspaper. Probably where I first heard it, if it was in circulation in Pittsburgh in the early Seventies.

Well, mind you, I don't generally set out to watch shows like Dai Shogun. Everyone was talking up Space Dandy as the next new "quality" show, and its first episode was just so goddamn… ugh. I admit I didn't give it a second episode, but the blog coverage of later episodes never made me think I had made a mistake…

If you've actually talked to Sato, you've got more first-person experience of the man than I, I'm just going on his "why the industry is going to hell in a handbasket" speeches to the public, and the general "nails that stick up get hammered down" Japanese cultural attitude toward such opinionated brashness. (Combined…

Magic Users Club, Devil Lady, Shadow Star Narutaru (which has a lot of commonalities with Madoka Magica, btw). Did a lot of scripting for Bubblegum Crisis 2040, which I consider to have vastly superior scripting in comparison with the original OAVs. See here. Did a fair number of scripts for Princess Tutu, which is…

A surprising number of animation directors have died of pancreatic cancer. I wonder if acetone or some other chemical product associated with traditional animation is somehow associated with cancer of the pancreas?

Madoka was tight, but Urobutcher has penned too many vicious, audience-trolling trainwrecks for me to buy into this adulatory cult. I'll never forgive him for the squalid misery that was the back half of Blassreiter.

I, Claudius?

I seem to remember Lana being awesome once she married into the Luther family, and going full-Misery on her father-in-law for like half a season. But yeah, she was a horrible-idea magnet a lot of the time. And any excuse to watch Kristin Kreuk do, well, pretty much anything other than lesbian sorority vampire…

I dunno, that's about as douchy as "bucket list" talk if you ask me.

Everyone knows the "H" in HG Wells is for Helena.

I like to think that the island prison is self-servicing because of all the jungle critters that come crawling through the walls. 24 hour millipede and jungle-rat buffet!

Hell, I didn't really catch it while the show was running, but figured it out afterwards. The babymama plot wasn't exactly a major element of Arrow, and Ollie has been loved-and-left by more women than James T. Kirk. Boy is a hopeless man-tart.