"My motivation is schezuan sauce" is a funny gag but to me the whole point is that it IS a lame excuse Rick is using to disguise his emotional motives.

OK, "taken a further step down an abusive road" if you like

Sure, but he did nothing specifically to push him away from Beth (aside from being disapproving), despite what he said in his rant. That was Jerry's choice. And I think that's significant.

Of course there's the possibility that all the stuff Rick did to "win" the family back, and his evil rant to Morty, is yet another insane 5-d chess move on Rick's part somehow.

Rick has to come up with an elaborate intellectual excuse for anything he does that might resemble sentiment. Morty's the person who he cares about the most and comes closest to getting him on an emotional level (not a coincidence that he's also the dude who TRIED TO KILL HIM) so he has to scare him off.

Did we see Squanchy get killed? I thought he was still going when they booked it from the wedding too.

Someone made a cosmic tradeoff a year or two ago for "More great SF shows in exchange for President Trump"

They kind of had to get rid of the Council, though—having literally an army of other Ricks out there caused too many potential story complications, especially if they're going to start doing more continuity-based stuff.

Given my theory that the fake origin still had glimmers of truth in it (and given that the Federation surely would have done research) I'm landing on the idea that yes, that was Beth's real mother. To some degree. Maybe her whole personality in the flashback was a lie, but she exists and that was probably basically…

What I really wanted to see more of was Jerry as a loyal citizen of the Federation, since the Fed seems to just be an intergalactic political version of Jerry anyway.

Also: the dipping sauce is something he will go to insane lengths to get. Just like what he'll go through to win back his family and keep them under control. So he is motivated by caring about them, but in doing so he loops around to being evil again. Pretty sure that's the point of the final scene, jokes aside.

See, Rick being Rick he will ALWAYS have a super-secret extra-elaborate 8th-dimensional chess motivation for everything he does…but I think it's pretty obvious this is something he throws out to make sure no one ever suspects him of having, shudder, FEELINGS. Rick can't let anyone know that he cares for real. And if…

Given that the Berkeley protesters didn't harm anyone and caused less damage than the average sports riot, that seems like a pretty reasonable tradeoff to actually protect people.

Lost in a lot of the discussion about "platforming" is the fact that M. Y. *uses his platforms to hurt people*. It's not just spewing ideological hatred in a general sense; his university speeches make a point of singling out trans and undocumented students and making them a target of violence—doxxing them, basically.…

The thing is…America isn't ruled by Muslims, so the idea that fighting misogyny, homophobia, etc. should prioritize going after Muslims makes no sense. Institutional patriarchy in the US isn't coming from Muslim leaders, it's coming from white dudes who are either Christian or only a shade removed from Christian…

This is a pretty good summation. There are a LOT of actually damn great ideas in Nemesis, including a really good villain. They even come up with a fairly brilliant use of Troi—using her powers to detect the cloaked ship in a combat situation. It's the execution of those ideas that lets it down.

Oh, right, OK:

The thing I love about First Contact is that it's secretly a fictionalization of the making of Trek and the ongoing push-and-pull of various ideas in Trek fandom (and geekdom in general). Zefrem Cochrane is basically Gene Roddenberry. He's very good at certain things—"getting it off the ground" as it were—but…

There used to be a blog called "Bloggity-Blog-Blog" . No idea what it was about, but if it didn't exist someone would have to create it anyway.

Uh-huh. I love how, after working for them for decades, when Dan DeCarlo saw they were making a huge Hollywood movie out of his creations Josie and the Pussycats and asked for some of the profits, they FIRED him.