No, the proto-Alien is on purpose by the Engineers. The “real” Alien is further on purpose by an annoyed robot with daddy issues.

I thought the characters in Prometheus were acting very stupidly long before I saw anything about it on youtube. That aside, I enjoyed it (and Covenant) as much as I could.

Those nice sleek looking ships, if any survived, are owned by really rich people by the time of the OT. Princess Leia’s get blown up offscreen on Alderaan. Every other character is either scrabbling to make a living, or hiding in a Rebel base with whatever vehicle they can get their hands on, or is a space fascist…

The novelisation addresses the food issue even as the film ignores it. The crew discovers that the Alien has broken into the food stores and has been gorging on them. That explains how it gets so much mass within few hours from being “born”, ready to attack Brett at full size.

My first thought was “Did David Fincher direct Nightmare on Elm Street (1980s)?”

“If the answer is because auditioning is how you network, then wouldn’t sabotaging an audition leave a negative impression?”

• As we know from Rogue One Cassian later aligns himself with a witty KX droid who’s defected to the rebellion. Safe to say his first experience isn’t a positive one.

I don’t read “mercurial” as wrong or a positive in this context. “This guy can be deep down unpleasant, but this is something obscured by his public persona and manic/unpredictable behaviour”. The latter isn’t really a positive, and in most (non-funny) people described like that would be pretty exhausting to be…

An accent colourfully described by P.J. O’Rourke for his American readers as like “a goose being buggered with a car horn”.

Which is why there is so much focus on Meadow trying to park the car. Members Only has been instructed to kill Tony only when the whole family is present, as payback for Leotardo.  Meadow's crappy parking is the only thing keeping Tony alive at that point, and neither has any idea. 

The advantage for Dune over SW prequels is that character motivations make sense, sequences haven’t been added purely to sell video games, and no annoying CGI sandworm clown arsing it up to keep toddlers entertained.

They won’t merge Rabban and Feyd, because they finished the Harkonnnens on the scene where the Baron tells Rabban to squeeze every last cent out of Dune to pay for the attack. That’s the set up for Feyd to drop in as the face of mercy.

As a UKer I genuinely loved The Shield, as did anyone I could convince to watch it.

That aligns with my memory, it’s been a few years. I read Dune as a young teenager, I think that was the first time I had seen the subject in a work of fiction (sheltered childhood, plus it wasn’t part of the kinds of stories I read). Even then I thought it wasn’t really acceptable to make it as a character trait of…

“one for Shai-Hulud on his dark throne...”

Well her character was around at the time, so it makes sense.  It was either her or Elrond.

Does it come up much (so to speak)?

When reading LotR, skip the Tom Bombadil chapter, along with any and all songs wherever they appear. It’s a great read without them.

Why? He’d just a Regular Human Bartender after all, and definitely not a vampire.

“That counts as defamation??”