QuantumMechanic

What I might do is wait for them all to come out and then pay for 1 month of the service and binge them. 5-6 hours (I assume the season is 10-12 half-hour episodes) for $5 isn't bad value. But there's no way in hell I'm gonna be an ongoing subscriber.

So is the “crypt” part of Agnetha’s basement outside the Hex? It was in the “real world” 12:5, not 16:9.

Season two of Good Eats: The Return will only be available on the new discovery+ streamer. AB announced this on his FB page the other day 😞

Only three episodes, but those total three hours! So the final 3 eps will have around as much screentime as the first six.

The flirting in Spanish also reminded me of the flirting in Italian and in Russian ("Dostoevsky!") in A Fish Called Wanda.

True. Wanda is merely a lunatic who is mentally torturing thousands of people. No reason to insist on neutralizing that or anything.

Are supposed to take anything from the sitcom being 16:9? 80s (and 90s) TV were of course 4:3. But the 16:9 was in turn different from the 2.8:1 "real world". Was it just that the producers (our world producers, not the sitcom producers 🙂 ) were just tired of being limited to 4:3 shots for the scenes they wanted to film? Was our "eye" supposed to be inside the sitcom this time rather than watching the sitcom broadcast? I guess so?

The only MCU movies I've seen are the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies and I'm greatly enjoying WV. Of course, as someone who grew up in the 1970s and 80s and thus has seen (even if reruns) plenty of 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s sitcoms just that part alone is a total blast. And the mystery part is fun. Though as a comics reader in the 70s and 80s and into the early 90s I do know a bunch of backstory from that angle (so I know about Hydra, the names of the twins didn't surprise me, I know who Harkness and Mephisto are if they indeed show up, etc.)

Heh -- guess I asked that at the right time! 🙂 Though...we still don't know if Wanda is voluntarily if subconsciously generating the sitcom frame or if some else is "encouraging" her to do that. But will we get a full sitcom, or will we just see snippets of the 80s sitcom from the people at the real-world S.W.O.R.D. base monitoring the transmissions?

More a question than a speculation, but since the answer might be considered a spoiler in an episode thread I'm asking here. Does anyone know if we're done with the sitcoms, or was this just a (very aptly named!) break? As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s I really really want to see what they do with 80s sitcoms before they ditch the sitcom format for good.

Minor thing given everything else in the radio scene, but did anyone else hear them change one of the chorus repeats from "Help me Rhonda" to "Help me Wanda"?

Not just the fake commercial but the "show" in general. At the end of episode 1 we saw someone in the real world (presumably, since it was in color and in widescreen) watching the "closing credits" of the "show" on a small black-and-white TV while taking notes. So what is making the commercials and the entire sitcom frame for that matter. It's one thing for Wanda to be making herself live in a sitcom life, but what's causing the opening credits, closing credits, etc. of the sitcom? Is that part of her delusion as well? Is she deluding herself into living an actual filmed sitcom? Or is something else creating the "show"?

I don't particularly like the Ewarts (though like with Billings, I am amused by them playing the heel), but that was a brilliant strategy and I was so sick and tired of Team Huge's whining. Instead of whining, perhaps Team Huge could have designed and/or driven Huge with more agility so it could have gotten to the side or rear of Hydra and nailed it. Or with enough power to drive Hydra back into box hazards instead of being weak enough to be constantly controlled by Hydra. Or designed a robot whose weapon wasn't constrained to the footprint of the robot. Or, or or.

Some changes I'd like to see (some have already been mentioned here): A team that gives another team the answer gets eliminated from the race. A team that gives a hint to another team gets a 2hr penalty. A team cannot play a U-Turn until after that team clears the detour (they have gone back to this several seasons ago, so just keep on doing that). Either eliminate Double U-Turns or else have each team that goes through remove their picture from the box. That way there's no more "burning" the second U-Turn. If they're gonna put everyone on the same plane, stagger releasing teams from the airport once they clear customs. Arrange taxis ahead of time with a cab company, and make sure all the involved cabbies know how to get to the various places. I am sick and tired of teams being arbitrarily fucked by taxi luck. Make teams drive themselves more. If it's a location where it's not a good idea for teams to drive themselves, then arrange for there to be drivers. However, the drivers can only act on instructions from the team on where to drive. The teams still have to navigate, even though a team member isn't behind the wheel. Add a penalty (15min? 30min? An hour?) for getting help (other than directions) from the locals. Or maybe only penalize getting local help on tasks where racers are supposed to figure out what the clue means. Have more tasks that can change the ordering of the teams. There are too many tasks which are "show up and do this totally deterministic thing" and so don't change anything.

So I noticed that the U-turn was after the Detour (where god intended it to be). When did they move it back to after the Detour again? For quite some time it was before the Detour which I always thought was ridiculous. You should have to earn making the U-turn by finishing the Detour.

We just started watching NIF this week. When we saw Ashton and Marco’s facemask look all we could think of were “men ahead of their time”. 🤣😭

The Imaginary Worlds podcast’s new episode is about TGP, with a Todd May interview. https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/making-the-good-places-better.html

I could have sworn that when Loney and the Master had their conversation that one of them said it would wipe out all organic life everywhere, so I was surprised when the Doctor said "on this planet". Anyone have that scene on rewind?

I see they canonized the pre-Hartnell doctors seen in “The Brain of Morbius”. I actually think that aside from the retcon there wasn’t much to the episode. So much exposition dumping. And then the buildup over Loney for all these episodes just for him to get TCE’d. I did like the scene with Graham and Yaz. And can we say what a pathetic cop out on pushing the button? Hey Doctor - you don’t get to be free of the moral blame by handing the button to someone who says he’s gonna press it. That said, that’s a dumbass moral quandary to have, Doctor. You push the damned button there and you don’t fall for the idiotic “you’ll be as bad as me if you press that” spiel.

FWIW, in the scene where Brendan is sick as a child, the closed captions say that if he gets worse “we’ll call the Doctor” — with a capital D rather than a lower-case one. Now to be fair, it’s not like captioners never make mistakes.

Yes, we knew all that. But that was before Chibnall got his hands on the show. It will be totally unsurprising if he totally ruins the Doctor’s backstory.

Hmm. Interesting thought from someone on GB: ”There were lots of hints that it might be something close to the doctor. All these thernes about being a policeman, the police building doors looking like the Tardis doors, a humanoid that ages but cant die. They seem to be going in the direction of the doctor was a policeman in a past life, the memories of which have bled through which is why the tardis is a policebox. Sonething along these lines.” And someone else wondering if Brendan was a Timeless Child somehow being drained to keep others young.

So why didn’t Ashad just go to that ship years ago and wake up the Cyber soldiers? Or if he needed the Cyberium to know about it, why not go right there?

In other words, cast for the same reason as every single other member of the cast.

I thought Thirteen was being pretty flippant about being so willing to bond with the Cyberium, after what happened with Eleven and Cyber-tech in "Nightmare in Silver".