Based on their 4.4% retention rate at 30 days, EVE isn’t doing great by that metric either.

...at times?

Even better - I was initially going to use the NFL in my example, then I realized “the official beer of football” has different meanings in the U.S. and Europe! Plus more obscure ones in Canada and Australia! How the hell do you disentangle that in court?

And I hate to break those rose-colored glasses, but upping the swearing and T&A is not some magic bullet for making people care about the characters.

For all the stupid things he does, I’m pretty confident Vince would *never* let Hogan back in after WWE unpersoned him for dropping n-bombs.

Making simply moving fun is a major gaming achievement - especially in open world games.

Can a brand trademark itself the official beer of chess? Of bobsledding? Of vacationing?

I hadn’t heard of him, or this movie, before this article.  I’m 38.

And I think this lionizing of Harden as some dark messiah of New Basketball kind of falls apart given that the Rockets fell in the second round.  Yeah, Harden’s numbers are amazing, but his team isn’t, and the former seems to have come at the expense of the latter.

Just to open this discussion with a bomb, wouldn’t replacing penalty kicks with an NASL-style shootout get around most of these “jumped the gun” rules issues?

Yeah, the fact that everyone stopped caring about the very real and known danger of the Shadow King in favor of the largely theoretical danger of David is either Farouk’s mind control or the writers’ mind-blowing stupidity.

Moreover, his abuser was *literally* living in his head the whole time. The closest real-world equivalent I can think of is abuse by a compound-bound cult. And if someone was tormented by a Branch Davidian-style cult for the first ~25 years of their life, then freed for two years, *then* saw the same cult take over…

I buy Farouk as a character - he’s an utterly selfish person who’s so mind-blowingly powerful that he doesn’t need to fake empathy. But as you say, the Faustian bargain Division 3 has made with him hasn’t even been addressed as such...or at all.

“Was Farouk manipulating things a little? Probably...”

It would have been amusing to have him received like another Greta Van Fleet - acknowledged as good, but too mired in the past to be popular outside their niche.

Somehow, I don’t trust Farouk to come up with the proper way to deal with him.

I agree about the alternate Davids episode being a standout, and disagree that it was pointless. It developed the relationship between David and Amy, something that we had known about (they’re siblings, they love each other, she had him committed) but never really seen much of. To me, that’s what you should be doing…

I eagerly look forward to Deadspin’s inevitable writeup explaining how the “Hand of God” goal was the purest, most awesome moment in sports.

I’m all for less “bleed(ing) things out.” The second season’s biggest flaw before the finale was having damned little plot actually happen; you’d think that would have given them time to set up the *massive* heel turn of the finale, but nope.

I mean, if we bumped minor league wages up to a lavish $40k a year, do they really think players will say “nah, I’m good here, not really worth exerting myself to hit the bigs and earn a few million”.