I actually kinda like Thor. the movie, despite its many faults, just because it really does look like a Kirby/Simonson comic on film. And Hemsworth and Hiddleston are both amazingly fun to watch. There's no denying, though, that it drops the ball on what a Thor movie COULD be.

"Don't praise the machine" is quite possibly the funniest non sequitur of all time. It's nonsensical, yet somehow profound.

Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?

The Simpsons was just coming off of its peak popularity in 91-92, and Groening was the guy behind the Simpsons, so why wouldn't he have the clout to bury something like this? (Though a better question might be, considering some of the absolute crap merchandising the Simpsons produced under Groening's approval, what…

Much as I hate to admit it, Babylon 5 does cover the "angels and demons as forces of order and chaos, rather than good vs. evil" angle better than DS9. Of course, B5 didn't do THAT great with it either, but at least they explored it with something resembling nuance.

This is making me realize that Gul Dukat should have taken on the role in the show that Damar did. It would have been WAY more interesting and respectful to the character. Of course it would have played out differently, but that might have made it even more interesting.

This is actually something I've always wondered about. If you're Asian, and you see, say, a Chinese person playing Japanese, does that seem hilariously, obviously wrong? Or it is like, say, a British person playing a Russian? There are obviously going to be genetic differences, but are they so strong that an actor of…

SPOILERS OBV.

Voyager and Enterprise need to be done for continuity's sake, but I'm kind of intrigued by them too—in particular, I know Enterprise actually became a continuity wank-fest in later seasons, which is something I kind of want to see. And doesn't the Temporal Investigation Bureau show up again too?

Read C. S. Lewis's short story "The Shoddy Lands", which is basically an expansion on his thoughts about Last Battle-era Susan, and then try and tell me Lewis didn't have issues with women.

READING X-MEN TURNS YOU GAY

Clearly, it means you're a mutant.

I don't want to pick a fight with Harry Potter likers, but Space Pope is right. Yes, superficially, Rowling seems to have her heart in the right place, but the HP books still have the problem of most fantasy books about destiny and chosen ones, which is the idea that the hero is special because of who he is instead of…

I thought it was confirmed that Vargo Hoat was cast for this season.

I don't get why weird movies supposedly have to be watched under the influence of drugs. Isn't it the normal, mainstream movies that need to be watched under the influence of drugs, to make them more interesting?

I'm sorta hoping they're doing that to spread out the badass zombie attacks across the season. There wouldn't really have been time to do justice to it in this episode anyway. The battle can just as easily happen while they're falling back to the wall.

And maybe nobody said it was new and special to subvert Trek in 2013…but that does still seem to be the default mode. JJ Abrams may not have set out to subvert Trek so much as he wanted to add "cool" grittiness and intensity to it, but the results are basically the same. An optimistic future is implied to be something…

You're certainly right that subverting Trek's, and SF's, optimism was less of a trope in 1992, though it had been done before—I remember a space opera comic from the 80s by Peter David—"Dreadstar" I think—that cast pseudonymous versions of the Trek crew as bad guys who wanted to assimilate everyone into their version…

Well yeah, like I said, it wasn't exactly a show that let anyone dazzle the audience with their acting chops. But I thought most of the regulars did the best they could. I liked Garibaldi in particular, though he actually was written the most like a human being, so he had an advantage.

My problem was less the acting and more the very wooden, overwritten dialogue that they had to spout. That's another way JMS was clearly of the old school of TV writers—he was in love with his own voice on the page, and clearly didn't think much about how it would sound when spoken. (And yes, there's a place for…