I'm not sure what's worse, that or having "Daaaaaaare to defy!" earworm you for a week and a half solid.

And presidential campaigns, that now run well over a billion.

I'm pretty sure the courtroom scene being completely law-show-cliche TV was entirely intentional. Especially with the choice of actor to play the prosecutor, the applause-laden Lucifer scene, and (I can't believe no one else has mentioned this!) Judge Judy. They hung a whole string of lampshades on it!

We're on our third and use it several times a week. It's good for cooking sausages, good for quesadillas, good as a panini press, and we often use it for grilling chicken breast to toss into a soup— saves the half hour of poaching, and I've never found the flavor to be lacking. I make a *lot* of soups, so it's a real…

No, he's just a Dominionist. I'd rather a bag of obviously bigoted internet trolls to the Christian Taliban. …oh, wait, we got them anyway with Pence.

I cracked up laughing, because I'm also a Silicon Valley fan and it recalls so perfectly Jared's attempts to make their two female developers befriend each other.

I interned at a small-to-medium city police department in college, the front door was definitely not locked. How else could someone come in to file a report? (Which people absolutely did, even in the middle of the night.)

I definitely had a "hey, wait a minute" moment with the show when that came on. I remember it came out my senior year.

I'm watching this on Netflix a year later, but had to comment on cults— you're right. No, not everyone is broken and damaged, but yes, people in major life transitions are common. It's a very common and very unfortunate misconception that only certain people join cults— unfortunate because, like the person you replied…

Catholicism itself, no. Unfortunately, the opacity of the Catholic hierarchy can and has given rise to little microcults within the larger whole. When you've got a head start on bad group dynamics, it doesn't take much to push it over the edge if it's allowed to bloom in isolation.

No. Ex-cult member here (not Scientology) whose healing journey has involved a growing interest in religious group governance has to say no. Some of the best leadership process I've ever seen has been in churches, in fact. Nor is it the case, as this thread seems to imply, that cults are all religious. You can have…

I don't know, I understood it when it happened without the show having to spell it out. Bellamy is a follower, "the good soldier", he needs someone to fight for. For a long time, it was his sister. But all O wanted is to take Lincoln and leave Skaikru behind— she made it clear over and over she hated it and wanted…

Bell lost both Gina and Clarke because of Grounders. He and Clarke murdered all of Mount Weather, and then Clarke left— the only person who could understand what trauma may have remained from that decision left, and ended up pledging loyalty to Grounders. His new gf died because of a Grounder attack. And yes, both…

Kendra is marginally better than… whatever the heck Hawkman's name was, but both of them bore me to tears and their plot contains some of the worst Egyptology I've seen anywhere.

Everyone did, it seems. But people don't seem to remember Nine treating Mickey like he was the dumbest thing that ever drew breath while treating Rose like some kind of grandmaster genius in the rough. I was thoroughly baffled— how is she so bright? I'm not seeing it.

+1 to Elizabeth Keen. She's similar to Rose from Doctor Who, except I'm odd in disliking Rose infinitely more with Nine than with Ten. The main male character keeps going on, in both cases, with how smart, amazing, incredible Elizabeth/Rose is, and the show just isn't showing it. Neither are *bad*, they're just……

The L Word was never a great show to begin with, and everyone on it had their moments of complete and total insufferability, but Jenny was the worst. From the first season on, she was a black hole of self obsession that more and more of the show disappeared down. She was so unwatchable that I've got a conditioned…

^^ This, in spades. It's still one of my top three favorite shows of all time, but the drunk, self-destructive McNulty scenes (especially s3) were a slog of heroic proportions.

Yes, there's a difference between a religion whose stories encapsulate %years of cultural context (and make a lot more sense if you knew the campfire tales and in-jokes of the place and period because just like Shakespeare's plays, religious stories have a lot of word-plays and in-jokes that would have made sense to…

That's very much not the case for folk (indigenous) religions. They're about passing on the messages and mores of the culture, not the supernatural bits. (Which are True in the sense that they convey important information, but aren't literally fact.) Christianity and Islam are in a different category as universalist…