I'm pretty sure the Santana reference is the only joke. Every weird phrasing in this article is a direct or paraphrased quote from the 1999 hit "Smooth" by Santana featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20

Yeah, I was thinking the very same. I think the theatrical cut nails it, because the audience almost unanimously feels that expectation, and then it gets subverted.

Yeah, they're definitely not protected by fair use or anything. They just skate by on being "just different enough" that they would be found to be legally distinct in a court case like this one.

I suspect anybody could just ask for some extra sauce, and they just know to bring him one because he's been there for a while.

Honestly, when they mentioned the idea of a crossover in this article, I just went back to picturing a Scrubs/Psych team-up. Which wouldn't necessarily make any sense, but I'd still like to see it. There'd be some real good mirror-world vibes if staged right.

That was a great episode, though one thing never stops bugging me: To establish Gus's boring-ness, they make a point that he's a model employee and has something like 100 unused vacation days. Which seems like a very good fit for Gus's personality, except the history of the show also means that he constantly ditches…

I still think, let's say if the 2018 midterm elections don't go well, big blue states like NY and California should create some sort of initiative to send carefully-calculated millions of democrats to build massive blue cities in red states, and just reverse-gerrymander the hell out of the electoral college

Honestly, I watched it, and it worked better than you'd think it would. But not by a huge margin, though. It was definitely still ridiculous.

Thaaaaaat's not so surprising. Vincent D’Onofrio is quite good in this show, and the rest of the cast keeps up, but the plot is all over the place.

I feel like if Mack gets his real memories back, the idea of going back and forth would get too painful, but we'll see

"Triplett is one option, though given Daisy’s urging for him to become the new Patriot in the universe of the Framework, that doesn’t look as likely as it might have otherwise been"

Richard was using it on his phone in the last episode, and I think they mentioned the app store at least once.

Bit of a shame, too, since Journey's End was a comparatively successful "victory lap."

Shield has been harboring marked potential-inhuman refugees this whole time… If they were capable of gaining access to the Terrigen, they probably would have an army of heroes by now.

I feel like there were a couple of simplish ways you could handle the interconnected shows during a multi-episode Flashpoint arc… Either quietly hint that the other shows are still in the "real world" and that, as far as anybody knows, Barry Allen has disappeared. Or if the other shows are in the Flashpoint universe,…

I think that was Lincoln, and it was something of a quasi-religious belief he got from Jaiying, so it may not be functionally true in the show's universe… but it is plausible anyway

His dialog about how "what we do here matters" regardless of the nature of the world felt like a throwback to Life on Mars, but could certainly be a coincidence

I liked how May's turn was developed. The episode highlighted her guilt about the death of the students in the Cambridge Incident early on, so giving her a moment where she's faced with echoes both of the kid she saved and the kids she didn't, where she's forced to choose a side, was fairly well done.

Neat! Nice to be rewarded for paying attention, and nice to see a bit of structure behind something as seemingly-arbitrary as the invention exchange.

I'm up to the same episode now, just got through episode 3.