Maybe. But there's a strong "this has been done before and might be done again" vibe to all of this - and more practically, I don't think the show is going to depict Maeve in the outside world. I bet her rebellion is doomed to failure.

So they fire everyone working there, say they're taking the park "off-line" for a while. Re-open it later with a new staff, who doesn't know any better or anything about Bernard.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bernard came back with a different cornerstone memory, and possibly even a different name. Ford is economic with his Hosts, after all, and Bernard still has a lot of potential use.

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Americans! Please don't talk about politics at the dinner table - we've got 300+ days to do it, so we might as well keep this day peaceful.

Which one is the closest to "Arbor Gold"?

I hope they bring in a different director at some point. Yates is alright, but he was my least favorite Harry Potter movie director.

It was pretty mediocre, too. Something-something "liberty by law", a final battle that looks really small and weird because of the camera angles, and an unintentionally hilarious ending.

They were pretty clean, albeit not as clean as we are now. They tried to bathe regularly, most towns had requirements that you keep the street in front of your house clean, and so forth. The filthiness came after the Middle Ages, because of the supposed health benefits of not bathing - and the whole "sewage in the…

We already had a gritty take with the last Robin Hood movie. It was super-mediocre.

What do you think the odds are that they'll ditch the bandanas and beards mere weeks after the show stops filming?

It's depicted with a great deal of cynicism (and I don't think this is what Heinlein saw as an ideal society - he liked to experiment with different sociopolitical stuff), but I do think the Federation as described is fascist. The highest morality is serving the country, the government grew out of military veterans…

I don't quite buy that going back towards the novel is promoting fascism. They could do the storyline from the novel, but then put a more cynical spin on it - make Rico's connection to the MI and the Federation more complex. It already sort of is, if you assume that Rico's not a totally reliable narrator and he's…

"Taking a chance" is the wrong word here. This has happened often enough to say it's the likely outcome.

That's . . . probably true. There are exceptions, but space shows tend to suffer from the curse of high production costs and middling ratings, and that's a big problem for network television. It's different for a subscription model, where you're trying to create loyal subscribers instead of selling ads to as many…

Grocery list? It's a 2000 page description of the feasts at a traditional Valyrian wedding, complete with cooking instructions and incredible visual detail for each dish.

I'd love to see the conflict between the Rhoynish and the Valyrians done in animation Avatar: The Last Airbender style.

Blackfyre Rebellion, HBO. You could even call it Game of Thrones: The Red and the Black!

There you go. Even that could be a trap - Theresa might not be having an affair with him anymore, but she still feels for him and trusts him.

"Thirty Minutes over Tokyo" is a good episode, although not really because of the Japanese stuff. The first half of that episode is golden, especially the whole "33 cent store" bit.

It wasn't bad, just kind of mediocre for the most part as you said. I think it's at least a "B"-level episode, though, because for once it didn't try and over-explain the joke (or implicitly ask you if you "got it"). Late Simpsons has a tendency to do that, overdoing the jokes rather than letting them go out and…