Having worked at both, I disagree. At shitty office jobs, you're not sharing the environment with lots of people who don't work there but are stuck there anyway and basically at your mercy, even if it feels more like you're at their mercy.

Oh sure, of course it's deliberate— that whole environment is brilliantly, seamlessly unbearable.

Especially because the first half is so uncomfortable and restrained. I mean, the first half is great, but the world it creates is so unpleasant— the first time I saw it I was thinking "Oh my God, I don't know if I can take a whole movie full of this," because it was too much like nightmares I sometimes have of being…

Wow, I am honestly surprised that anyone thinks insufficient mistrust of people with learning disabilities is a significant problem. As long as we're just trading hypotheticals here (although if you have any evidence to back up the part about what women are "known to say", I'd love to hear it), who do you think is…

In what universe are people being somehow "damaged" by an unrealistic belief that they'll be killed by an intelligent serial killer? You seriously believe someone is going to ignore an obviously violent person because they don't think they should be scared of anyone who isn't cool and collected?

I always liked that book a lot, and it's the kind of thing that could actually benefit from an adaptation since it has lots of nifty images but not a whole lot of story. I have no great hopes for the TV version, but it might at least be a different twist on TV fantasy, especially if they keep the 1960s setting and the…

Fine, we saw it differently, whatever.

The actor for Crashdown was perfect in every way. Even the shape of his head somehow gave off a vibe of infuriating panicky stolidity. I also loved how thoroughly they scratched and bruised him up— besides being a plausible consequence of having been in a shot-down spaceship, it was a visible reminder of how fucked-up…

Yes, I know. I'm fine with that— I don't think seeing more variations on a split-personality-sleeper-agent would've added much. All I'm saying is that the few vague things we know about Sharon, and about Cylon life, can be interpreted in different ways and "she's just programmed" would be the less interesting way.

That was a really brutal and interestingly staged fight scene, especially since Starbuck and Six aren't fighting in the same style… not that I really know anything about fighting, but they at least made it plausible that these people are different in every way (something that always bugged me a little about Buffy:…

I didn't have any problem reconciling Boomer's "sleeper" behavior with free will. The Cylons were consistently portrayed as being soldiers who acted out of a sometimes fanatical belief in their cause, so I thought of it this way: Boomer, as a conscious Cylon, volunteered to put herself into this delusional state with…

It's manipulative as hell, but it's done by being all sensitive and intuitive and pulling this instant mysterious intimacy out of nowhere, which is classic Baltar— it's how he seduces some people, and gets other people to see him as a harmless flake, and half the time I don't think he even knows whether he's…

I don't think it's at all clear that what the Cylons are worshiping is in fact "the" god, or that it's communicated directly with them, or "tacitly endorsed" their actions. They developed a monotheistic religion, like lots of other cultures have done (actually, although of course the writers didn't have this all ahead…

About the VP nominee, I think even if you didn't want the job, it would still sting pretty badly to be told "I know I said you were the best person for this job, but actually I'm going to go with this other guy I don't respect at all, because people really like him and no one likes you. Also, I don't want it to be too…

He's more like… well, I can't say without spoilers, but there's a different character who at one point later in the series gains a whole lot of weight, and kind of wanders around a lot looking confused. The cardboard box I mentioned is actually only "very small" relative to the cat.

That, plus I think by that point with all the shit everyone has been through, it's not so much "this is what this guy was like all along" as "everyone's becoming the most extreme and fatalistic version of themselves."

Well sure, it's pretty manipulative toward the audience since there was no other reason we couldn't have been allowed to eavesdrop, but you said "everybody in the room" so I thought you meant the characters.

Also, I can't help cracking up at any "out of the box" dialogue, not just because it's a cliche I've heard 10,000 times in office jobs, but also because I have a cat who likes to stuff himself into a very small cardboard box and then sometimes let just his head flop out over the side, so he's "thinking out of the box"…

I also like that Elora isn't super-devout right from the start— when Roslin starts talking prophecy and Scripture, her first response is basically "You're fucking with me of course, you just happened to read that stuff."

And that's addressed directly in dialogue, isn't it? Roslin says something like "Why'd you keep everyone in the dark?" and Adama says something like "We don't know who to trust."