I think the article is being unnecessarily prissy about Alan’s attitudes. It’s a very fine line but he’d be a lot less funny if he was an out-and-out bigot (which they make a point of him not being - there’s an episode where he has an elderly ex-Olympian on who turns out to be a massive racist and he throws her off…

“Did you not read the book?” “No, I never read them...”

I think that the real problem with getting it over to America is that a lot of the comedy comes from the fact that Partridge is a failure, and I just don’t think you guys are as culturally geared to finding failure quite as funny as it is in the UK - it’s more shameful and has direr consequences.

The background reveal that she’s in some sort of wierd Evangelical cult is great - it makes sense in ways you never really thought you needed it to.

I mean I wouldn’t trust any list that put down any Star Wars film as the best movie of all time. There have been quite a lot of films, and none of the Star Wars ones really contributed much to the high art of cinema.

Well, if you can find me an example of him bloviating on youtube for hours about why this or that film is objectively bad, I would consider it. But you won’t because reasonable people don’t do that, this really is just you being reduced to some sort of rubber-glue argument.

Beyond is as close as the films ever got to anything that had the feel of the original series (although I’ve always felt like the Yorktown was something straight out of the Culture novels).

Yes, it’s almost as deep and respectful a gesture as Rey returning Luke Skywalker’s lightsabre to the place he hated and couldn’t wait to get away from, and then pretending to be related to him.

Jesus Christ - so if there’s a black person and a white person in a film and they don’t fuck, it’s racism?

I don’t think this is quite the case. Or at least, not for most people outside the wierd culture war stuff. It’s when people cross the line between ‘I didn’t like this film, and here’s why.’ and ‘Everyone who says they like this film is a liar, a dupe or a terrible person, and here’s why: (1/72)‘.

Yeah, I suppose I do. I quite like the revisionist ‘maybe you don’t always benefit from having a Han Solo type around’ idea. Finn feels somewhat underdeveloped, but that’s hardly a problem unknown to the franchise - it’s always been a bit thin, but has benefitted from its fandom sort of filling in the gaps over the…

The backlash thing was such a hilarious, wierd mess. Just an ugly, stupid flashpoint occuring at the venn diagram overlap of ‘People who have emotionally overinvested in a popular entertainment franchise to the point that they are somehow capable of feeling “betrayed” by it.’, ‘White guys who would be genuinely…

It’s by far the best Star Wars film, although if we’re honest with ourselves this is a relatively low bar in cinema history (I like them, they’re very entertaining, but they aren’t...you know...good films in any meaningful critical sense).

I recall there being loads of excitement about how Snoke would be revealed as someone called ‘Darth Plagueis’. It was bizarre - like, the number of people watching the film who knows or cares who or what a ‘Darth Plagueis’ might be is, to within a rounding error, zero. It would be utterly meaningless.

The other bizarre thing about that complaint was the sheer psychological immaturity of it. If you’re genuinely incensed by the idea that a man in his sixties might be very different from the same man in his twenties you are either a child, or have the mind of one.

He is under no more meaningful moral obligation to express a public opinion about the actions of the founder of a company he has become commercially involved with than the person who cleans their toilets - or, indeed, the person who runs the company that contracts with them to clean their toilets.

Two joke responses, and you are now your on your third multi-paragraph response, the essential tenor of which is that (again, follows red string about the place) that everyone who has done any kind of work for a company can be assumed to approve of every past and future action of its founder unless they explicitly…

Jesus Christ, there is little more irritating in the world of pop culture ‘fandom’ than nerd opinion entitlement. You people can’t simply not like a film, can you? It has to be somehow objectively, provably bad, and everyone who says they like it is a terrible person and/or part of some nefarious conspiracy.

Ah, I see that this is from the same dude who bought us his deathless analysis of the new Picard trailer, dropping another chunk of ‘I guess this new space bullshit probably involves a lot of that ridiculous stuff you nerds like, here’s a vague stab at what that probably is.’

Have a word with yourself, it’s a smutty comedy about vampires where the central conceit is that they’re all utterly clueless about everything because they have to be indoors most of the time. Was that paragraph really the best use of your limited time on earth?