I’m a big fan of Lore. Anyone reading this who’s interested should check it out, at least through the first handful of episodes. (#2 in particular is great.)

I don’t have too much to say about this one on a point-by-point level, but I agree that this was easily the best episode yet, simply because no other show on TV today is really equipped to tell a story like this, in this way. Or rather, they could — once. But only this show is equipped to do it every week.

I thought that last week, but by this point the repetition is working for me as a joke. Especially since Nori is getting slow-mo’d while doing increasingly mundane things, like describing her dad’s card collection.

Alex/Maggie: *Several minute heart-to-heart regarding both wedding planning and abandonment/daddy issues*

On the plus side, it’s a perfectly cromulent statue of Tig Notaro.

If we can’t show people getting shot on TV within a week of a real-life mass shooting, then I guess no one will ever get shot on TV ever again.

That really bugs me, too. The way I see it, a skit is something that 12-year-olds perform on the last day of summer camp, or that middle management performs for the staff at a corporate retreat.

On paper, giving Huey, Dewey, and Louie distinct personalities is a good idea - and I still think it is - but these last few episodes have made the dilemma it causes pretty evident.

I mean, the Inhumans on SHIELD are being used in exactly the same way that mutants and the X-Men are used in the comics, to similar effect. So it’s not... that difficult to replicate. And the royal family has literally no bearing on what those Inhumans are doing, so our lack of sympathy for them doesn’t harm that…

The problems with Inhumans are almost all in the execution. If you summarized these two episodes to someone, beat-by-beat, they’d probably say it sounds okay for a pilot. A (substantially) bigger budget and writers with a better handle on dialogue - especially exposition - could have made this a genuinely…

R.I.P. The Joke

Why does Kevin Roberts have friends and a storyline!?

If I saw that the 28th episode of The Following got a B+, I’m not going to drop everything and go watch that series from the beginning. I would already know from other sources (including, in all likelihood, the main body of that B+ review) that the show is terrible.

That’s certainly closer to being workable, but you still run into problems. Beyond ‘making its audience laugh,’ Rick and Morty and Bob’s Burgers (or even Rick and Morty and Archer) are trying to do very different things. And what would you grade, say, Daredevil against? Another Netflix binge drama like House of Cards? …

If you’re reviewing Mad Men on Sunday, WWE RAW on Monday, The Big Bang Theory on Thursday, and Star Wars Rebels on Saturday, you need to grade internally. Otherwise 80% of what you’re giving out would be Ds and Fs. Either that, or everything gets a C across the board because every possible criteria is equally…

As much as I hate rehashing this point, AVC’s grading system is weird. Shows are not graded on a standard criteria. They’re graded against themselves - more specifically, against their own potential. An A doesn’t just mean the episode was good, it means (or used to mean) that it was perfect. Meanwhile, an F doesn’t…

Still, though. Nine episodes into the season and it’s gotten 8 As and one A-. Shit, you have to go back to mid Season 2 to find something that’s even in the B RANGE.

The whole point of the szechuan sauce joke was that Rick was A) the only person in the entire multiverse who actually remembered it and wanted it back, and B) almost preternaturally committed to getting it. And in that regard, it was fantastic.

I had a totally different read - namely, that that was the point. Kingsman say that they never put another’s life in danger unless it’s deemed absolutely necessary, and yet the definition of ‘necessary’ proves very flexible. Almost every character in the film claims to abhor violence - because that’s what good guys…

I am officially filing a motion to halt the needless addition of ‘gritty’ to every instance of the word ‘reboot,’ as if it were a kind of snarky shorthand.