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I thought Bernard said her real self wasn't in the Sublime but she was a hastily-made copy, meaning someone he created to be his Maeve in the simulation. Though this completely breaks the premise that he could foretell the future by simulating all possible permutations of it if key players were imperfect partial copies he made, possibly tainted by his bias, rather than doing exactly what their real selves would do. As for William's plan, a (copy of a) sociopathic CEO would be likely to embrace a nihilistic "everyone for themselves" scenario, esp one where it's rigged because he knows what's happening, he's not under the impulse to just murder everyone he comes across, and he's got a gun. The basis of the series was always leading to hosts-vs-humans, which is where the 70s movie started. The rot in Westworld was there from the first episode, from the MIB to that random couple who got a thrill from killing Hector and Armistice mid-monologue. Then the whole first season established that the hosts were gaining real consciousness and even William/MIB who suspected it was happening still had no moral qualms about being a sociopath while in the parks. To be honest, where I get lost is in understanding why there is a Dolores (or Halores) vs Maeve and Bernard conflict. I understand what you mean, but a lot of "hero" movies involve a lot of violence where the story has let the audience off the hook morally because the audience avatar is doling out justified violence. I don't even mean superhero movies. Any cop movie, any vigilante movie. Westworld starts off that way -- the couple in the pilot shot bank robbers, not random innocent villagers like MIB did later in s1 -- but people get jaded. Or take SimCity. How many people have never triggered the natural disasters for fun? It's different because the violence in that game is so abstracted but the key is dehumanization. (Which is fully rational when playing SimCity, to be clear!) It's the same basic factor that lets us cheer when nameless hench goons get beat up or killed by the protagonist in movies, or esp when it's the player character in games. And in the Delos parks, guests were told that the robots weren't really sapient, so: dehumanization. The sense of triumph through violence is easier to accept if we can justify it.

Ah true. Caleb's escape was all a giant game Halores set out for him so I guess the drones were just playing dumb. Part of the impetus for Westworld the show is because the creators were interested in how gamers could be when playing a single-player game with nearly endless license to go on a rampage. From 2016:

That's true of the comics too and they just kinda handwave it.

haaaaaaa, finally an explanation for the brain copying! I knew "observing the choices they made in Westworld" or whatever they said in s2 didn't make sense. A brain copier hidden inside the hats does. Given that horses and wolves were hosts back in the original Delos park, there really was no need for Halores to make her drones so humanoid, and esp that they only see out of the front of their blank faces. They don't even have visible eyes! Give them 360 degree vision! Host Caleb is basically "save scumming", though instead of perfect knowledge of each of his previous attempts at this "game" -- which BTW strongly indicates that this is a challenge Halores has set up rather than a real prison break -- he has to guess what to do next based on hand prints his previous versions have left. (Do Halores & co clean away the hand prints and old bodies of the paths they don't want Caleb to follow?) ... Ah, so I was right. Halores could have gotten this done a lot faster in real world time if she put Caleb in a simulation and had sim Caleb run the gauntlet a few dozen times. Plus it wouldn't have had any chance of sending a radio transmission out to real world Frankie. This plan made no sense. Why have the outliers been using cars when they had a quadcopter flying car available? (or even if they stole it, why would they take it all the way back to their hideout instead of ditching it back in the city?) My first thought about the imposter problem the outliers have is that they should run everyone by the mirror scanner upstairs. Presumably Delos never wanted those things to scan hosts, so that should do it right there. Unless the imposter was just hit with a booster dose of black fly brain goo rather than replaced with a host. OK, so Jay was replaced. Seems reckless for Halores to have done that without a brain scan of Jay for fidelity. Or did they? He said Frankie was always talking about her dad, but then if host Jay knew all that, why would he get the dynamic between Frankie and real Jay so wrong? Esp considering the flashback where Jay was rescued heavily invoked the Matrix! This is how that premise has unfolded! As I understand it, the 1970s movie was about robots running amuck, and then this show decided to start by showing why they ran amuck. The whole point was that the park was incredibly morally unjust, and the hosts-vs-humans war has very logically followed out of that. If anything, s3 was a pointless diversion, putting a third faction in the mix: hosts vs humans vs an infallible supercomputer.

One thing many post-apocalyptic movies gets wrong is the idea that the few remnants of humanity left can scavenge old gasoline for at least the rest of their lives. They can't! Gasoline oxidizes. Even with fuel stabilizers and airtight storage, it can't possibly last for years and years.

The GOTG Holiday Special and Halloween Special weren't mentioned at SDCC 22 but we know they're coming. I think a lot of the rest have been either announced in some form or have pretty solid reporting that they're coming. (I was gonna say maybe not Nova, but apparently there's been news about that too. The fourth Spider-Man with Tom Holland is definitely up in the air as I don't think there's been anything solid yet. My personal speculation is that Sony will want to do it but they might want to see if their "SPUMC" (or "SSU") can lower Holland's leverage. Anyways, that one's the least confirmed of anything on this. I know there's some untitled Wakanda D+ series and there's news about an Okoye series. I vaguely remember reading the two were not the same show, but I can't find any news story saying that right now. Also, Spider-Man: Freshman Year will be outside MCU 616 continuity as it will be set in an alternate universe. X-Men '97 will continue the continuity of the 1990s cartoon and thus also be outside MCU 616 continuity. (Also true of What If and Marvel Zombies.) He's a third stringer, but then again, so were GOTG before they got MCU movies. I couldn't have told you a single thing about GOTG before the movies and I'm a medium level MU fan. I hope they go super meta with Wonder Man.

Haha, Iman said in her Reddit AMA that she'd often be in a Sith Lord style cape before shooting to hide from the paparazzi, and she had that going into the AvengerCon set too. I'm really blown away by how much was built for the show. And I'm impressed that the Aisha-Hasan flashback scenes were shot in between storms, because those scenes never felt like they were shot amid bad weather. It's also been really moving to see how many of the crew and cast cared so much about telling this story. Did anyone spot the Karachi Circle Q in the show? Did I miss it? Or was it cut/never shot? I've also been low-key curious about the various moments from the trailer that I don't remember seeing in the show. Oh hah, re her powers differing from the comics: the VFX supervisor said "I think there was a conscious effort to not have her feel like Mr Fantastic or Elastigirl".

Makes sense, but I'm such an MCU stan I back-burnered Obi-Wan as soon as Ms Marvel started.

Marvel just announced She-Hulk will debut on Thursday the 18th. Sounds like it’s a permanent move to Thursdays.

I think the writers really wanted to do something with the India-Pakistan Partition and the Clandestines were probably easier to put into that framework than a half-bird clone of Thomas Edison.

(nerd alert:) This was also covered slightly in the 1986 comics reboot, where Superman felt it was easier to lift heavy objects while flying. I think in-universe scientists later suggested he extended some kind of psychic power (telekinesis or anti gravity) to stuff he was holding. This is also the canonical explanation for how Connor Kent (a partial clone of Superman) manifests super strength: various applications of "tactile telekinesis", meaning TK that only works on something Connor is physically touching. Bonus: both Clark and Connor also power their invulnerability this way: a psychic force field, which has the neat effect of making any skintight clothing basically indestructible because it sits within their force fields. This also eliminates the conceit that Kryptonian fabric is itself invulnerable., or at least it is under a yellow sun. It also meant that his cape didn't sit inside his forcefield, and would often get shredded, because the writer-artist who made this change happened to like drawing ragged capes. They quietly ditched this later and went back to having functionally invulnerable capes because subsequent artists weren't as fond of drawing shredded capes. The comics officially changed that saying just last year.

unaffiliated cinematographer on claims in the news that Andor didn't use The Volume: (he continues:)

The multiverse adopts very different rules as necessary: the same person in a different universe can look totally different (see: the three Peter Parkers in NWH) the same person in a different universe can look almost exactly the same except for style (see: Wanda in 616* vs 838, also Strange in every alt universe we saw) and in Tobey's universe, at least three different guys look like Bruce Campbell. I guess also Stan Lee exists in pretty much every universe and many different times and places in 616. (or, apparently, that was all one guy.) * or 199999 if you want to be a huge nerd =)

One of Steve's first appearances in public was to sell war bonds or something! Admittedly that was an ad for his employer at the time rather than a contract gig, and also it was war, and also (advertising wise) a much more innocent time. And then post-thawing, the public got used to Steve doing super mundane stuff like those educational videos seen in Homecoming.

Esp for Sam, who literally started the show doing a rescue mission for the US military, so either he should be part of the armed forces somehow or at least a contractor. But apparently he just did that job for free. (Who pays for the fuel for the jetpack then?????) And why is he not pursuing some name/image/likeness (NIL) endorsement deals if money is tight? I've appreciated that the MCU has mostly ditched secret identities, which have just gotten less plausible these days, but they haven't thought through all the ramifications.

post-finale interview with Iman Vellani:

You mean penguins? the Atlanteans here are probably influenced by feathered fish, though:

If Halores’ goal is to guide hosts to “transcendence”, why hasn’t she transcended? Does she tell everyone she’s Moses, unable to enter the promised land?

He's gotta be a host. No way I'm buying that some random human ended up looking exactly like Teddy and talks (elliptically) about having been in the Westworld park. The show has been playing fast and loose with the science of hosts since the very beginning. If I remember right, even back in the first season they said the original plan was to use more traditional android robots (electro-mechanical motors, etc) but for cost-savings the park had switched to basically 3D printing bodies structurally identical to humans, except for how the brain works. But then, the show also implicitly claimed that even modern mostly-biological hosts could stay in the poorly maintained warehouse floors indefinitely, without food, or movement. Westworld should send a check to the Wachowskis for how much this episode riffed on The Matrix.

That's already outie Mark who had it in his storage. Dr Casey only had it in her office because Cobel stole it and planted it there in the severed floor. I think she was trying to jump-start reintegration, not forestall it. (I went back and checked -- in the first appearance of the wellness room, ep 2, there's no candle.) I have no theory for why Cobel said "no" when smelling and stealing the candle.

The release window is winter 2023, and it has been renamed from "Agatha: House of Harkness" to "Agatha: Coven of Chaos". From Collider.

My theory: Franchesca -> Frankie and Franchesca -> Chesca -> 'C'. Which would make the Sublime at least as invasive as Rehoboam ever was. Nolan already did the prescient supercomputer in Person of Interest and this show's season 3; why is he going back to this well again??? The events of season 2 ended up destroying the "Cradle", the automatic site-wide wireless backup system that provided for host resurrection with full knowledge of everything that happened up to their death. But given Serac/Rehoboam's own tech seen in S3 (which could plug a pearl into a fully convincing virtual reality), there probably exists tech to manually/physically copy a pearl's contents into a new one.

Call me a sucker, but I greatly enjoyed the reveal that Delos had incorporated the Wyatt malfunction into a version of the narrative as an Easter Egg where advance players could go into a /fake version/ of the park underworld, staffed by hosts playing humans who work on regular hosts... or possibly hosts playing hosts. I've never bought that a supercomputer could accurately predict the future that well. Even modern day supercomputers can't predict the weather past two weeks or so, because small perturbances (or even just numerical inaccuracy) piles up due to chaos theory. I guess we have to set that aside since it was the entire driving force of s3, but I could never fully suspend my disbelief, and now Bernard in the Sublime basically did that same kind of prediction??? Ughhhhh. (Also, wasn't the whole thing about human re-creations as hosts that they could work inside a virtual reality, but were usually unstable in the real world because the real world can't be fully simulated?) Akecheta's nonchalance about the outside/real world kind of doesn't make sense considering the Sublime requires real-world resources (a datacenter and a generator to power it) and doesn't seem to have redundant distributed servers. Robot Heaven is nice, but nice enough to ignore that the outside world going to hell might break Robot Heaven as collateral damage? Making Westworld was one thing. (and Shogun World and War World and the Raj were probably equally rural/wild with small villages.) Making Prohibition-era Chicago, even a cut-down version*, is several orders of magnitude more ambitious. * the 2018 Spider-Man game has a truly incredible digital recreation of Manhattan, but if you look closely, a lot of it is geographically compressed -- multiple blocks are compressed into one, esp anywhere there isn't a landmark building. I liked that the safe heist was scored to a jazzy "Enter Sandman" instead of another take on "Paint It Black". WHERE DID THE DESERT LASERS COME FROM?

In the comics, DD and Spidey go together like peanut butter and chocolate. They usually either tone DD down or have Spidey appalled by ol’ horn-head’s tactics. It is very weird that Marvel is explicitly positioning this as MCU canon when it breaks canon (or at least punches big holes in it). One: introducing Doc Ock makes it much weirder that Peter didn’t recognize an alternate universe’s Ock in NWH. Also, Scorpion, when Homecoming established that Gargan still hadn’t yet become Scorpion.

With 8 minutes added!