Alice in Chains in particular was subtly a lot more interesting than a first listen might show. My girlfriend is a classical violinist (who quickly came to love AIC after I played them a few times), and she points out things to me all the time that I'd never noticed, like how unusual a particular strumming pattern is…

I'd hardly consider Soundgarden straight-up metal (they have way too much Led Zeppelin influence for that) but Slayer also isn't really the best example of what mainstream metal sounded like in the early 90s.

You're right. That makes the Reapers even weirder. "WE MUST ANNHILATE ALL ADVANCED ORGANIC LIFE—IN THIS ROOM." "What about over there?" "IMMATERIAL. THIS ROOM, AND THEN IN 50,000 YEARS, THIS ROOM AGAIN."

Outreach is literally the job he was given by the Democrats, and presumably that means reaching out to people who have very different values and aren't already Dem voters. But by all means, let's continue jerking ourselves off with purity tests.

I feel like this one had the least trope-defined characters of the series. I mean, for all that 2 was a great game, every single character was clearly built around a single idea. We have Dirty Garry, La Femme Miranda, Ghost Drell: The Way of the Samurai, The Tykebomb with the Biotic Tattoo, Classy Catburglar,…

I think that is overlooking how short ME:2 truly is, including literally killing a bunch of your kidnapped crew if you wait too long to go through the omega relay once the final act begins.

I mean, that may be exactly what the Reapers are doing, and hence could also be the reason for the Scourge: to render the area uninhabitable long enough for the Reapers to glance it over, go "OK, nothing to see here," and move on, leaving the Remnant vaults to reseed the planets.

None of the Dragon Age games really had that much in the way of consequences carrying over between games, because every game was set in an entirely different region, with an entirely different protagonist and 99% of the cast. It might determine which of two characters showed up to fulfill a certain role, or which of…

That's a strange example. Most fans of AoS consider Ward to have been among the best parts of the show, after the first half of Season 1.

The Kett are indeed a fascist society, but we don't really know much more about them beyond that. The Scourge was mentioned as being the creation of "The Opposition" to the Remnant, but it may well be complicated. Suppose it was created to temporarily make that portion of Andromeda uninhabitable in order to wait out…

They can't do another Milky Way story set after the Reapers without completely invalidating all but one of the possible endings of the original trilogy. And given how much bitching there was about those endings to begin with, I can understand their reluctance to pick only one to be canon and suffer the wrath of every…

I mean, their entire history has literally been destroyed, to the point that their only knowledge of anything earlier than the arrival of the Kett is from people who were alive when it happened. And, of course, their origin makes clear just why it might be this way.

I could not disagree more. He's got the most personality and backstory of any Krogan in the series, squadmate or otherwise. He faces declining health instead of being some kind of perfect specimen, encourages young Krogan to value things other than strength (Vorn, anyone?), is very paternal, and has a fantastic…

Are we ever going to get to see his Holocaust clown film?

Upon reflection, I'm pretty sure Baldwin only seems like he has chops because he usually doesn't get leading roles in films that have better actors in the cast. Red October is a notable exception—except that most of the film doesn't have him in the same room with Connery, and James Earl Jones is barely around.

I always like Joaquin de Almeida, as well.

Exactly. If he'd spent more than a few minutes on the screen, the fact that he was wholly outclassed by every other actor in that film would have been distractingly obvious.

I mean, it's no surprise he performs better than the rest of the cast, when there isn't really a high-level actor among the rest. They're perfectly fine for the material, and Tina Fey is a phenomenal writer. But he's a middleweight in a room of lightweights, there, and it shows.

Seconding The Ice Harvest, which I enjoyed. But as others have mentioned, Thornton was phenomenal in Fargo.

When it comes to this kind of partisan stereotyping it's interesting to note that liberals appear to be worse than conservatives when it comes to accurately predicting what someone of a different political position actually values, and how much they value it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go…