I'm in the business as a sound designer and about 16 months ago I started working on all these cheap horror movies and they all had these incredible ariel shots… I was fooled too at first.

The opening helicopter shots (though perhaps just stock footage) indicate we’re operating at a realm of higher budget and competence than the baldly cheap, badly assembled first film.

You only wonder where it all went… There's some truth to the fact that the Lucasfilm enterprise, from the mid 1990s on, was really just a behemoth visual effects house with a boutique production arm attached.

Exactly, Protestants are just Catholics who moved to stage 3. Modern Catholics are just Catholics who stayed at stage 2. Monkeys have been around longer than humans, it doesn't follow that monkeys are more or necessarily at a higher stage of development.

"certain book series" is a link, sorry the AV Club's stylesheet makes anchors hard to see… But yes. Hornblower.

Surprise, Benedict Cumberbatch was Jon Lovitz in a red smoking jacket all along.

Max Weber identified three stages: if the founder is still alive, it's a cult, or a "charismatic" sect. The the founder is dead but the people who knew him personally are still alive, and they claim authority based on that, it's a "traditional" sect. When they die, or their (or their successors') authority is no…

"…we were sent for…"

Both Star Trek and Master and Commander are acknowledged, conscious ripoffs of a certain book series.

Also her voice kills everything in its path, including non-corporeal beings. Like in real life.

See also: Star Trek, feature films, production of. Cross-reference: Bennett, Harve.

"I heard that Adams wanted Marvin to be a golden man (basically just a guy in make-up) "

Kali-fal is a well-known Romulan Ale varietal- it's like a Belgian dubbel.

Dee hair is dee hair, vat is to be don?

It's established in TOS that there are Federation ships that are all-Vulcan. No explanation for this has ever really been given, aside from the fact that Vulcans are founding members of the Federation, had warp travel before humans, and are a little bit racist against humans, an attitude that is more or less…

At the risk of speculating or getting too far into the weeds…

I don't think it has a uranium core, it looks like a Crookes Tube. It's a vacuum tube that generates X-rays just from high voltage.

If it takes the machine an hour to fog a photographic plate, even an orthochromatic 1900s-style one, I can't image it's very energetic.

Not days later, not even today can they do that. I assumed he wanted HIS tooth back out of some sense of pride. Though what he probably could have done is have a dentist make a bridge out of it, it wouldn't be attached to him anymore but his smile would be repaired.

It was unnervingly like watching two guys work on a car.