I find this kind of reaction totally insincere. I can completely understand someone rolling their eyes and being irritated at what he said, but the piling on, the fact that it is a controversy, the fact that it's resulting in any ill-will towards him - this is just people wanting to sneer but dressing up that impulse…

This never tested my suspension of disbelief.

Yeah - Daisy Ridley's brilliant, but as written in TFA, Rey's a bit flat. If TFA was a book, without the benefit of Ridley's performance, Rey'd be the type of protagonist who's our window on the more interesting characters around her.

"Not just the second, but the third, and the fourth… they're like animals!"

The worm shows up in the movie - for all of three seconds one stares after BB8 after he escapes from the village. I have mixed, mainly positive feelings about TFA, but it was one of the little background details that felt really Star-Warsy - like the dragon skeleton in ANH or the Tattooine frog in ROTJ.

I think Luke's way better written than that - I think the film assumes we'll take Luke to care about Beru and Owen because they're his foster parents - we don't see him break down over them because of the type of film it is, not because they're not important to him. And remember, while he doesn't explicitly state it…

When I was a teenager (in Scotland) there was a stretch of about a year when if another male called you a wanker, the stock response was to say, 'Yeah, but so are you, (insult)'.

Luke loses constantly in A New Hope: he gets beaten up by sandpeople, beaten up at the bar, nearly killed by the trash monster, rescued by Leia in the prison, and saved from certain death three times in the battle of Yavin. They set him up as vulnerable in a way they only really do with Rey when Kylo Ren captures her.…

Luke had motivation connected to the plot: the Empire killed his family, his dad was a hero he wanted to live up to; he was attracted to Leia; he wanted away from his shitty life. All Rey wants is to get back to her family - she wants to get away from the story she's involved in - and, at the end, become a Jedi…

The 'both accomplish something miraculous' thing isn't really an issue - both Rey and Luke's victories are pretty well set up (Luke's a good pilot, Obi-wan''s telling him what to do, he has a lot of help; Rey's skilled with a staff, Rey's tapping into this new thing, Kylo Ren's injured, Kylo Ren's trying to persuade…

I really like BB-8: his cuteness sits pretty well with R2D2s dependable stubborness and C3PO's uptight intelligence.

The 'small million dollar loan' thing distracts from the much *more* support he got from his father: unlimited parachutes and safety nets, an incredibly rich guarantor, and massive inheritance.

Thrown into a real world in which he could make several company-destroying errors and still be parachuted clear.

Speaking a foreign language, engagement in one's local community, a good vocabulary, intellectual curiosity - these are bad elite traits.

Boo (-ombadil)! I think the entire climax - from Aragorn challenging Sauron in the palantir (Aragorn leaving Minas Tirith in the theatrical cut) to the fade after the eagles carry off Frodo and Sam - is executed perfectly.

The Hobbit films have few flaws that couldn't just be cut away: cut out Azog, cut out the warg attacks, cut out the Laketown intrigue, cut out Legolas, cut out the Kili/Tauriel romance, trim the non-Smaug action scenes by at least 50%, and voila!

Bakshi did adapt the first half of Lord of the Rings into 78 minutes - but it *was* shit. I maintain that anyone who argues it's better than Jackson's version is just trying to be contrarian, or is nuts.

When do you think the shift occurred? The last decade has all been pretty fantasy based, with Moffat's run at least using hard science fiction concepts - consciousness being uploaded, black holes affecting time, bootstrap paradoxes galore, nanobots, out-of-step timelines, literal-minded robots - where Davies usually…

Once you start thinking like this you really hamstring writers. Casting Michelle Gomez is a brilliant idea. Having a series where the Master is rehabilitated is a dramatically very interesting idea. Scrapping one for the sake of not being problematic would be a total waste.

Can you imagine how satisfying it would be if Obama or Clinton just offhandedly but publicly referred to him as 'fat-ass'? Just calmly and drily drop it in -