Latverian Diplomat

I've heard it played at wedding receptions as a goofy singalong, though that's mostly just for the chorus.

God was offended by the impertinence of Jesse looking him right in the eye. Since Jesse's eyes didn't burn out like they were supposed to He took a more direct approach. This God is something of a pretender, claiming to have power, wisdom, virtue He doesn't actually have. This take goes back at least to the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge, the fallible creator who mucked up by creating a flawed material world in the first place, requiring redemption through an emissary of the higher "real God". More recently, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials has a God who is extremely dishonest about creation and deeply flawed. That said, there are plenty of thoughtful critiques of his work that reach the conclusion that "Yep, Garth Ennis has issues." 🙂

This is not the UK we're familiar with. The Monarch still has some power. One more holdover from earlier times, like the stocks and the gruesome public executions.

Because love triangles are fresh and unexplored territory no one is tired of?🙄

Yes, they were named in the '80s (post Crisis) and Seyg-El is a tribute to co-creator Jerry Siegel. https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Seyg-El_(New_Earth) Ironically, the comic that introduces Seyg-El extensively alters the Silver Age depiction of Krypton as a creative and enlightened society (that Siegel had a hand in) to a more repressive and cold one.

Well they are presumably optimized for that type of attack, so they should be good at it. I get that they were going for a body horror effect, but it looked slow and clumsy and implausible. Ultimately, a fade in to the victim like they did for Izel might have worked better? My impression is that in Yo-yo's case, she has to make a conscious decision to speed up, and that decision making process takes place in a brain running at normal speed. She can be surprised or confused and won't necessarily realize it's time for some speed before something bad happens. The Flash has been written lots of ways in various media at various times, but I think typically his startle response will trigger his speed reflexively. (In his comic origin story he catches a dropping restaurant tray as one of his first acts of superspeed, almost without realizing it). So I'd say he has a bit of an edge in this respect.

I'm finding the latter half of this season much better than the initial half. Season one had the same pattern. I think 10 episodes is just too much for the amount of story they have. Maybe just 8 would be better? Also the Black Mercy never got its own book, but it's a much more interesting "villain" than Lobo in my book.

Perhaps his role in the rest of the series will be to express each new Fitzsimmons gadget as a belt buckle.

The comic does go after some Marvel characters eventually, the X-Men in particular. But the Justice League analogues are the ultimate adversaries because they are the most powerful and famous of the heroes in the comic's universe. FWIW, I found the comic wildly uneven, and therefore ultimately a bit of a disappointment.

I find the amnesia thing tiresome, so I'd like that. I just don't know how they pull off Myfanwey suddenly knowing a lot more than the audience does. We've been at the same level of knowledge as her so far. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Strong electromagnetic fields can affect the brain. And we've seen electrical effects like flickering lights in the bank and the fulgurites. Not that it makes it any better, and not a huge difference important, but I don't think the seduction was plan A. It sounded like they tried pain first, and when that didn't work, he noticed she was attracted to him ("transference" he called it) and they decided "hey, let's try that next".

I wonder what kind of shape the Zod Cape is in right now 🙂 With all the talk of Zod's new weapon being able to penetrate deeply buried and fortified bunkers, I wonder if it's going to end up misfiring into Krypton's core and being the cause of its ultimate destruction. In the post-Crisis comics, a Black Zero bomb did that, though it was deliberate on their part. I wish I had more faith that they can fix things in a way that is comprehensible and handwavium free.

Why was the guard looking over Jemma's shoulder when he was there to guard Sarge? "I don't think your math checks out, ma'am" "That's because I'm working in base 8, it's a game Fitz and I play, now back to your pos...oh dear, not again." Of course, the whole room was set up so that Sarge could escape with one weird trick. Daisy and Yoyo took forever to get to the secure room. Sarge and Izel had quite a long, shooty conversation. The choreography of Izel taking over people was a little awkward, sometimes she seemed to prefer turning and backing into them? Maybe her face fading into theirs looked better as an effect?

I guess I'm weird, but I thought this was the best episode so far. A few things actually happened. I thought the chase with Gestalt running interference and the auction, though both familiar types of scenes, were well done. Using an art auction as the cover story for an EVA auction is clever, I think. The discovery of the memorial park at the end was effectively creepy to me. Progress is still slow, but at least some progress, I think. They really need to let Myfanwy find out some significant stuff from her past in the next episode though. The amnesia stuff is already played out.

I got the impression that this is the official story, but Myfanwy is actually much more powerful than that. Speculation on my part, not a genuine spoiler, but I will tag it as such anyway:

FWIW, storage facilities have lots of security cameras and people coming and going at unpredictable times. Not that anyone is paying close attention to anyone else, but it's probably not the "ideal murder room rental" that TV would have us believe. I'm not so sure it has. A story like this, if you include the resulting multiple shotgun murders, would make major nationwide headlines. But, for two homicide detectives in Seattle, it's just another Thursday. I mean it's a genre convention I guess, but the Seattle of iZombie seems safer than the Seattle of The Inbetween. 😊

This episode seemed very stuck in the place that the whole season has been. Every character has one kind of punch line that each deliver a few times an episode. No one seems to have any motivations or goals that last longer than one episode; everyone is just hanging around, waiting for the plot of the week. It seems like quite a retreat from the complexity of the last two seasons. I don't know if they just decided to streamline their storytelling, or if they are over committed to the very episodic structure of the sci-fi shows they are poking fun at.

How jump points work has been left carefully unexplained. Whether different hyperdrives can make longer jumps than others is also an open question. Just the other side of the moon, apparently.

I would say so, with a dash of the sentient bomb from Dark Star thrown in. Enjoyed the send ups of "pouches" and low tech weapons being so favored by sci-fi bad guys. The succession of things they exposed Mr. Deadly to in order to give him the will to live was predictable but so well done I didn't mind at all.

It started before that. The only reason that guy was on such a long chain in the first place was so that he would eventually be able to use the chain as a weapon. How come an escaped prisoner can open the pod? And without setting off an alarm? Would the big guy's jacket portal have worked inside the containment pod? If not, he needed to be outside the pod briefly. But it was only chained up guy's improvised plan that allowed that. Why are prisoners dressed in their own clothes, as opposed to known safe prison uniforms? Didn't SHIELD go over that truck with a fine tooth comb when they had the chance. How do you hide a nuclear weapon equivalent chunk of energy from that? The list goes on and on. It's frustrating to see SHIELD dumbed down so much so Sarge's team can "win".

The oxygenators being tainted was completely predictable. They really had no way to test even a random sample of them for that?

I was a little surprised it didn't turn out Matt was the illustrator for the book that depicted Joan as a witch.

It's basically the same procedure, it's just a different word for it based on a different way of explaining it. I'm pretty neutral about the change (I'm old enough to have learned "borrowing" instead of "regrouping" and am fine either way), but I don't think the way math concepts are explained to students should be forever static for the sake of their parents.

The title card for the Tim toupee story misspelled "Emperor" as "Emporer". Was this just a mistake, or am I missing the joke?

Somewhere out there may be some person who dated George Costanza, was yelled at by Ross Gellar, got bad advice from Frasier Crane's call in show, and attended this commencement.

Yes there's a famous non-proof of this, that stealthily slips in dividing both sides of an equation by zero, it is often used for instructional purposes, I don't think it was ever viewed as a valid proof by any mathematician. However, one of the consequences of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems is that any logical system strong enough to do arithmetic cannot prove the logical consistency of arithmetic. So, a proof that the whole system has some deep contradiction embedded within it remains a (remote, IMHO) possibility. A short story by Ted Chiang (who also wrote the story that Arrival was based on) called "Division by Zero" is an intelligent handling of just such a proof being discovered. The story is, AFAIK, well regarded in mathematical circles. So, I think that's what the writers were stealing from paying a compliment to here. It was, in general, a terrible episode though.