This whole episode felt too "by the numbers" for me. I still enjoyed it, but almost everything felt like a trope.

You could be right, but that wasn't at all clear to me, especially compared to a lot of other TV/movie fights. This felt more like a back-and-forth fight where it was never clear that either had the upper hand. Neither was clearly put on the defensive. Even when Dottie had a baseball bat (that was rather random), it…

To me, Watchmen felt more like "Here are some other possibilities about how superheroing could play out in real life", rather than a nuanced and balanced look at why it would or wouldn't work.

I was mostly speaking about this sort of situation in a general sense.

Yeah, the Palmer stuff has been kinda weird - especially this episode - but I kind of assume it's going to make sense in the very near future.

Yeah, to me it's almost a coin toss right now either way. At least if it was deliberate on his part, that means that his security isn't so terrible.

Unless it was deliberate. You don't kill the guy you're going to offer a new job to

I feel like part of the point was that Diggle knew.

Good point, but there are some important differences. These were soldiers in the field, during war time operations, who were dosed at full by a gas that I believe the Army knew didn't even work. Whereas in that case, it was diluted concentrations, it was post-war, and we didn't know exactly what it would do.

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Sometimes I think villains are made too evenly matched with the hero's physicality.

Of course I do. Unfortunately, it turns out that Black Widows are REALLY good at faking those things, and I just don't have the resources to sniff them out

Even shooting them in the leg is illegal in that sort of situation.

Because it's illegal to shoot them.

What kinda bugged me is when we first saw the ring, it seemed to take a lot of time and patience for Faustus to win the trust of the victim, get to know their background, and slowly weave his magic. And it was interrupted when someone walked in, when he was trying to put Chief Dooley under. Then by the finale, someone…

One of the things that kinda bugged me is that Winter Soldier happened so soon in the MCU, SHIELD hadn't had time to be established. In the comics, they were long-established as being really effective at a lot of things for decades. Thus, them being taken down from within has a lot more meaning.

Haha. Even if it means that - unlike Natasha - she's still loyal to her trainers, and you'll never know she's a Black Widow unless she's going to kill you?

I feel like they knew it didn't work (the Army had taken Stark's notes), and you don't test something like that out on hundreds of soldiers in the field unless you absolutely HAVE to - and maybe not even then.

Yeah, I was kinda thinking that Peggy and Dottie felt too evenly matched.

I'm pretty sure you're allowed to assume your neighbor isn't secretly a Black Widow type operative, and that doesn't make you misogynistic.

Yeah, there's certainly plenty of reason to be skeptical. I'm just not ready to say they're guilty yet… =p