Have you ever been subjected to a Friends rerun in a hospital waiting room? The laugh track rings mockingly hollow, the characters all seem like petty idiots; it’s all just so annoyingly fake. And as Americans sat somberly in collective triage, trying to figure out what order it should deal with its grief, fear, and…

Better now than mid-development, anyway.

This was some Canadian-assed Canadian pastiche sc-fi, but hey, sometimes just having a space ship and reminding people of other, better shows - and a cast that can mostly pull it off - is all you really need. Three seasons is nothing to sneeze at, either, I suppose.

Well, the former is a major plot-line that she spent a whole season working through, and the latter are all bits of lore from at least 8 years ago. Can’t exactly blame her for which one she focused on in 140 characters.

Most likely they’re just more accustomed to being in front of the public eye, although I wonder if there’s an extent to which being on a dumber show helps everyone relax a bit more.

While Olenna is the obvious counter-example, she’s also... the only counter-example. Although that in itself is the rare case where I’d chalk it up to being “contextually accurate”, I guess, in that more of the men are snarky jerks because, well, they can afford to be.

LUSTY FISHMONGER

I think at least in part, the point is that Trek/Wars/LOTR/Buffy might have been similar in function, but not in form. A different target audience meant the fallout was shaped differently, and the sheer scale of the impact meant it set a tone for following fandoms in the way that the relatively cloistered Holmesian…

Perhaps I should clarify - I was invoking Kinja because it - and by extension, its users - *doesn’t* seem bad enough to lower the level of discourse to that point. I just found the initial comment quite baffling. Sorry if that didn’t come across.

The problem with that is everything we know about Littlefinger himself tells us he’s not the kind of guy to lurk outside of a room in a potentially hostile castle eavesdropping, let alone any indication that that’s what he was doing here. He finds people who are going to be in the room and pays them to tell him…

“Hey, this season-long storyline has been kind of weird and poorly explained, should we leave in this brief scene that at least makes the ending vaguely understandable?”

That’s literally been his entire function since he came back to Winterfell. He’s just been presented as an absolutely useless exposition dump, making it doubly stupid.

I realize the viewership has shifted somewhat post-Kinja, but do we really think AV Clubbers need to be told to see Seven flipping Samurai, of all movies? Is this what we’ve been reduced to?

It at least has the saving grace of being set up as intentionally wrong in these movies. It’s more sinister counterpart is the “men and women can’t be friends” mantra, which rom-coms will let go of only when it’s torn from their cold, dead hands.

How? Why? To what end? There was no reason for any of that to happen the way it did other than a tepid bait-and-switch on the audience at the very end. Not to mention that by any standard other than narrative convenience, publicly slitting his throat without trial is the worst possible way of getting rid of him.

Theon: “You always do the right thing”

Delivering on all the things everyone’s been expecting was fine, but once again, letting scenes breath really does do wonders for this show. That said, the conclusion to the Arya/Sansa/Littlefinger stuff still makes absolutely no sense, given where things were last episode. Did they just have a massive conversation…

Binary Domain is a bunch of fun. French robots! Exploding robots! Sexy Robots!

Forcing viewers to spend a non-trivial amount of time figuring out how any of this goddam site even works is how they filter out the bots and trolls! Flawless design!

I vote that Jon ends up with Meera Reed, if only because that seems like best chance of bringing her back into the show in any meaningful capacity.