Given that the only place I’ve ever even heard of Natty Boh is Barry Levinson-produced/directed films and TV shows (i.e., Baltimore-based media), how did you become familiar with it?

I can’t believe I need to write this on this site, but: you DO realize that anything Crenshaw said was WRITTEN FOR HIM BY THE SHOW? With maybe even Davidson having a hand in it?

There’s been Navy SEAL imagery everywhere for the past 30 years. That’s because since the 1980s at least the Navy has spent literally multiple times the amount of money on media outreach that all the other service branches have spent on media outreach combined. (That’s why, for example, you have multiple series about…

I don’t think military service should entitle one to any superior treatment, but I think a network TV show would generally be well-advised to avoid mocking a real life individual’s physical disability, with the only general exception to that being where the individual sustained the disability through some act of…

+1 on the Cultural Revolution parallels.  I really think that was primarily what the show was going for.

Given the immense changes to life in the North America and Europe many (most?) 20-year olds won’t have an alt-persona in the Nebenwelt. We could run a statistical model to get a the year when 99% of the troops could safely travel.

Are we all buying that Tamiko is just a chance love interest for Tagomi? Maybe this season has left me trusting nobody, but I kept having this nagging feeling that she is a plant/spy.

The GNR leadership is evil, but there are also clearly pragmatists in it too; that’s why Tagomi’s plan with the H-bomb test footage worked. To be confident of even getting half your invasion force through the anomaly would require massively depopulating the invasion target and, unless you have a traveler who can come…

this was more directly evocative of the actual nazi pogroms and rallies

I think that’s a fair read of Smith. He joined the Nazis because it seemed like the best option for survival once their invasion of North America was underway, but we haven’t seen anything so far to suggest that he was particularly pro-Nazi prior to the invasion. 

Himmler is a true believer (easy to do when your beliefs are running things), far from a cartoon.

Or Natalie mentioning one of her dresses was by Chanel.

I suspect major league baseball has been banned/abolished. Baseball played as a private sport still exists in the American Reich, but it’s considered somewhat degenerate. (I don’t remember the specifics, but in one of the previous seasons Thomas talks about baseball briefly and his father comments about how much…

Childan is also the only American who appreciates Japanese culture, if not spiritually then certainly out of respect for their sense of order and ritual approach to everyday routine, or at least to make a sale.

The trailer for Franklyn looked really intriguing, but I was seriously underwhelmed by the actual execution of it.

2015: Probably Age Of Ultron, but I’d like to see a write-up on Ant-Man.

You’re not the only one. I still consider TDK to be the Citizen Kane of superhero movies — it may not be the most fun (GotG), or the most flashy (Thor: Ragnarok), or even the one that I’ll watch the most often (Iron Man), but it is a truly great film with a depth that I would say only two MCU films have close to approa…

Gah! It won’t stop looking into my soul!!!

Counterpoint: Zero pickles. More onion. That’s the way rib sandwiches should be.