Mind you, they're a highly authentic tribute band: treating a key band member like a salaried employee is a very Rolling Stones thing to do.

Yes - Bill Hayden, 21st Governor-General of Australia, 1993-1996.*

Why does anything exist? Why are we here? What is reality?

"… in the early days when everything was Skittles and beer…" I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure those aren't the skittles we're meant to be thinking of.

Yes, 1958's "The Colossus of New York", apparently.

I don't recommend it. I've been non-stop binge-watching original Doctor Who like this, and I haven't been outside in six months.

Yes, it felt like his attention was wandering for the last couple of stories - I can't say that the tale of the haunted mopeds (or whatever the heck was going on there) did much for me. Anyway, looking forward to whatever's coming up next.

Oh, I got beaten up plenty of times, just not at school (i.e. my older brother was the culprit). At school, the bullies used to leave me alone, mostly - until my final year, which was when the bully in question chose to do his thing. I used to wonder why I wasn't more of a target (seeing as I was a total nerd), but I…

Ha! No, very much a state school.

Well, for various reasons, it wasn't as bad as I made it sound - more embarrassing than anything. I would rather he'd punched me, to be honest.

I guess I missed out on that particular rite of passage, because I never got punched / punched anyone while I was at high school in Australia. The school bully did try to strangle me a couple of times, however.

Yes, exactly. Funny-looking hand aside, It seems "bad Photoshop" is being used here by Dowd as a kind of shorthand for "boring movie poster consisting of floating heads and movie stills, assembled in Photoshop", which is not the same thing.

"Despite her prominent placement on the badly Photoshopped poster…" What does this mean? It's not a very interesting poster, but I can't see any evidence of egregious Photoshop mistakes.

I'm quite a fan of Linda Park's performance in particular, which is why I noticed that she hadn't earned a mention. But I do agree that she was given nothing to do (though if she had been, and if they'd stuck to their original conception of her - which I gather was that she be the "relatable", normal, non-spacefaring…

OK, it's taken me a few hours of randomly glancing at this post as I scroll through the comments, but I finally got the joke.

Star Trek: The Next General Meeting of the Advisory Board of the State Textbook Commission

I guess Alasdair was so unimpressed by the characters/the actors who played them that they weren't even worth mentioning, which seem s a bit unfair.

I would say the 100 other minutes actually add up to a pretty good movie. The only problem is that it's basically the same pretty good movie that Woody Allen had already made about ten years earlier.

True enough. (Also: this has been about 1,000% more time spent thinking about James Corden's facial hair than I set out to do this evening.)

How about sculpted stubble, i.e. the mullet of facial-hair choices? At least he hasn't elected to go down that path.