The Bus belongs to the Bad Guys now, right? She could be the anti-Skye. That would work.

YES!

It came with a free cassette of Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling."

No, any episode Mark Sheppard is in is the high point of that series.

I thought Leon was taking care of him. Wasn't that a throwaway line a couple of episodes ago? When they went to Washington?

Not necessarily. If he's going to be stuck running at the back of the pack with only a few lines, and it takes away months of his life that he could be getting other roles that would build his career, it makes good sense to turn down a small role in a big picture. Actors have a limited time to exploit their youth…

I'm hoping it's Simmons. Imagine what that would do to Fitz. Plus it would make her unbearable cuteness a sham, and the actress could team up with Ward to be the Evil Antagonists of next season, a kind of vicious Nick and Nora. That would leave unSHIELD with Coulson, May, Trip, Skye and a brand new bitter,…

Yes, but look what they did with her. They made her the Girl and her character arc went from being terrified to being unconscious. I'm a huge Acker fan, but she was criminally wasted in that role. You cast Amy Acker, give her some layers to play. Fred may have been terrified in the beginning, but she had layers;…

I think it's also that within in any kind of story, unrelieved tragedy just becomes one-note. You need to build in hills and valleys, not comic relief but places where the protagonist is not sunk in unrelieved gloom. Yes, he has a terrible back story, but this is now not then. Yes, things look grim, but the idea…

There are romance novels with that plot, too. Other plots are equally realistic, just not for you (which is fine, that's not a slam, I swear).

If you don't have much time, I'd suggest reading the spoiler posts here and then jumping in around Episode 16, End of the Beginning . I stuck with it for the first eight episodes and just really hated it, came back for Sif and thought that episode was lame (yes, send the men up against Lorelei, that makes sense), but…

Exactly. It's not just the changes in the character herself, it's the way the world sees her now that she female not male. And that can make for some really interesting stories.

Oh, I didn't mean you thought that women could only be in romances, I knew you weren't saying that. I mean that love stories weren't necessarily something women were stuck with, that they're often really powerful narratives. But I also knew that your comment wasn't romance-bashing; I just wanted to defend the love…

H.G. Wells is a great example for this. When I saw her first episode, I thought they'd play it just for the plot twist and leave her as a kind of joke, but they kept her smart and tough and still female.

That's not the same thing. Most people don't look at characters in stories and say, "I could do that." But a lot of people look at characters in stories (any kind of stories) and become that character for the stretch of the story, experience the story and achieve catharsis by identifying with the protagonist. If…

I think it's because of the new insights that gender-switching can give into a character. It's obvious why she does this or that, but why does he? It opens up new possibilities.

"I think that the intent of creating alternate forms of existing work is about valuing other things besides creating original content."

I agree with your post, so no intention here to start an argument. Well, not to start an argument with you; I'm sure somebody else will show up to fight.

Your argument only works if it's a choice. "Should we spend this money saving this lion or a sick child?" There's no evidence that if they hadn't saved the lion, a child would have been saved, or that because they saved the lion, a child wasn't saved. It's a simplistic argument that ignores the complexities of the…

It's a really difficult argument.