Banner had the Mind stone, right? I really don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to imagine that he used it to smooth over the trauma of the five-year gap, the disjointed experiences between the vanished and the survivors, and to make the whole thing feel a bit like a crazy dream that everyone can just forget about…

I think that even the idea of “meriting absolution” is honestly still kind of perverse, because it turns the whole thing into a transaction. “If I perform X services of contrition, you’re contractually obligated to forgive me and put it behind you” is a terrible message to send to people whose trauma may never fully…

Well, being on Fox News in the first place is an automatic 4,700 point deduction, so he’s kind of screwed in the numbers game. But hey, aren’t we all?

Given how many people really thought we were going to get extensive backstory on Snoke and find something out that made him incredibly interesting despite all the available evidence, a zero point score beats the heck out of the -1,000,000 we could have had. :)

Except that he didn’t ruin anything. He salvaged a disastrous (fun, but still disastrous) start.

I can’t agree. There’s absolutely nothing that says that Kylo wanted to be redeemed. He felt bad about some of the things he did, sure, but even in TFA, he made the conscious decision when confronted with the possibility of redemption to instead murder his own father. It makes perfect sense that he decides to take…

I’ve described Pence in the past as “a gray waste of a man who doesn’t have the courage of his horrible convictions.” Nothing about this changes my mind.

I think you’re selling Rian Johnson’s realization that Snoke was a boring Palpatine ripoff and the best thing to do with him was bump him off midway through Act Two way short, here. :)

I think a lot of it is that bizarre, surreal imagery of the snakes and spiders swarming out inside the Halloween mask (and they’re very good masks) to kill a child. It’s not like any other horror movie death I can think of, and combined with the ending—sure, it’s a bog-standard “hero fails” ending in a lot of ways,…

The thing is, the problem with Act Two is always Act One. If Abrams had a good, compelling answer to Rey’s parentage, it would have been a huge exciting thing and Rian Johnson would have been thrilled to use it (or would have been told to use it by Kathleen Kennedy). But it seems like it was just, “Oh, we’ll set up…

I was going to say, “You find this even less plausible than the flying saucers sparing humanity because of a Chicago housewife?” But, y’know... eh.

But if they accept objective reality, then that means accepting that they’re propping up a nascent fascist dictatorship and are horrible human beings. And they know they’re good people, the salt of the earth, true American patriots. So reality must be wrong. It’s the only way to preserve their sense of self!

I think you have it backwards. It’s not “Trump is obsessed with controlling the narrative and that led him to Twitter”, it’s “Trump found Twitter and that gave him a place he could control the narrative”. Trump pre-Twitter was that old guy who had a cameo in one of the ‘Home Alone’ movies.

The only reason I disagree with you is that Trump clearly enjoys having a forum in which it’s ambiguous whether he is speaking in his capacity as citizen or as Commander-in-Chief. “Adam Schiff should be arrested for treason”? That’s just Trump offering his personal opinion, he can’t be held responsible for that.…

...right, but so is “being alive”. It’s going to be hard to get past this, regardless of donations, because people who vote for a Presidential candidate want to know that they’re not actually voting for that candidate’s VP.

I really cannot imagine how weird this one must have been to watch for fans back in the day. Like, you tune in to an episode of Doctor Who... but the Doctor just never shows up, and the poor supporting cast is massacred by the Daleks. And then next week, the Doctor shows up in Ancient Greece and nobody even mentions…

...not significantly more? I mean, not in the same way that adding more mass to it would. Let me put it this way, which would you rather be hit by--a bullet moving twice as fast as normal, or a car moving at the same speed as a bullet?

Oh please. First, there is no evidence that he’s capable of understanding anything less intuitive than Twitter’s “type until you’re out of characters and hit the button” interface. Second, Whitehouse.gov is a government platform, and anything he says there is subject to vetting and regulations. Twitter is valuable to…

We’ve also seen an A-Wing take out a Super Star Destroyer, but those were clearly lucky shots that took out something vital. The asteroid didn’t do anything like what Holdo did to Snoke’s ship.

“RIP to them but I’m different” is how the young people are putting it right now, I believe.