I don’t think they’re trying to establish Nate has a mental illness. He’s just supposed to be the ‘quiet guy gone bad’ character, whose lack of reinforcement and support when he was young combined with his inferiority complex causes him to lash out. The visceral reaction to Nate’s heel turn in S2 I think was partially…

I don’t think it was really intended to go anywhere, honestly, or to actually imply Sharon is a really an alcoholic. Just a counterpoint to the previous scenes showing her seemingly miraculous ability to get through the team’s problems. Her kind of dorm living demonstrates she doesn’t have anyone around to keep up…

That’s not really going to work, insofar as the live-action adaptations are so close to the animated adaptations they’re not really creating anything new you can use to play copyright trolls when the 80s and 90s ones go public domain (in still the better part of a century.)

If you apply that to the real world, it’s like saying because the Covid vaccine doesn’t solve humanity’s problems, it wouldn’t be worth killing one person to save hundreds of thousands, if not more, worldwide.

Yeah, I find the back-and-forth about the scene since the game so tiring because the answer is everyone is wrong. I think the show’s changes are interesting in that they simultaneously made Joel out to be more of a cold-blooded killer (compared to the games where you Rambo through everything, the “I kill 10 guys…

Yeah, it’s a fair point. I think partially it was a function of the setting (Santa Barbara is a small city, yeah, but it’s in the middle of Southern California, whereas your random New England or Yorkshire town is a much smaller and more isolated community) and the fact that, as you mention, they’d regularly go…

Also, the alt-right is mostly buffoons? This isn’t to say they aren’t abhorrent and causing damage to real people, either through policies, harassment, or actual violence, but as the all those Capitol rioters proved, most of them are just losers.

That’s kind of the problem with these sorts of shows, which prompts the old jokes about how small towns are apparently infested with crime because that’s where Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple are constantly solving murders (or, more concerningly, basically the proximate cause of said murders.)

I read a book on this story that was lying around my dad’s house on a recent visit; it’s a really interesting case as it spends a lot of time examining the chummy boy’s club era of intelligence that would become the template for all the spy movies we know from James Bond on (obviously, caricatured beyond reality.) As…

Hey, mandarin collars are cool, though! I blame Star Trek TNG for making me wish they were more of a thing.

While Hsu’s character was an idiot, they set her up as someone with no impulse control so it was keeping with her character, and at least it’s another death that isn’t directly Charlie’s fault—that lady was heading towards a bad end regardless.

It’s interesting as a litmus test just because there’s a much more expansive take than the binary “he’s a hero/he’s a villain”, and that’s that he can both be sympathetic for facing issues everyone does and sometimes wishes they could rail against, while also being an example of someone going off the deep end in a way…

I’m wondering what that means for the current captain? I admit the first time I watched S1 I didn’t get what Isaac was doing there, but on a rewatch you see the small moments that lead to Roy giving him the role, and S2 they did a nice job expanding his role. It’d be kind of a shame if Isaac just gets sidelined for…

Yeah, I don’t think the show would decide that a character is beyond redemption, and I think people wanting that are kind of missing the point of the show entirely. But his specific heel turn (compared to something like Rebecca’s) is so motivated by a level of pettiness and anger towards people that have only been…

I have to say I’m not the major fan of the flashbacks. Sometimes they’re helpful, but sometimes they are just taking us away from the current narrative, sapping the flow, and showing us a lot of stuff we couldn’t be told quicker, shown in the here and now, or inferred through other means. There’s also a whole host of…

Funnily enough the film, despite its JJ Trek issues, was holding me captivated right up until the Khan reveal. The idea of Harrison being this rogue black ops agent and Starfleet creeping towards aggression and the loss of due process due to security concerns could have been a timely message, and it’s been fertile…

NPR types are going to naturally gravitate towards NPR types. People generally like watching people that are like them travel, especially if they can’t do it themselves since that gives them a surrogate.

I was really happy for the 6th and 7th episodes because like you said, it effectively broke a streak of Charlie directly precipitating the murders of her new friends. Those actors were going to kill the wife regardless of whether Charlie was there, and her snooping around didn’t led to more deaths; likewise the…

Yeah, that’s probably the most succinct way of putting it. It’s doesn’t really feel like a kid’s movie (at least to the degree of something like Coco or Turning Red), which I think is another thing that probably put off audiences.

Huh, this is timely, considering I just watched it for the first time last weekend.