Cthulhudrew

I thought Jay Karnes was going to be a new Q. I guess I shouldn't be surprised he actually turned out to be some kind of law enforcement agent instead typecasting. I finally figured out what bugs me most about this season. It isn't its reliance on the overused time travel trope of "a single, fated individual's actions determine the course of history and our intrepid characters have to ensure they keep that person on track." (Although this is a pretty terrible storyline, and one that has already been used so, so many times in Trek and with Picard.) It's that if you're doing that kind of storyline, the fated person should be exceptional. We should see why they are so influential, and why their actions (or inaction) will have such a profound impact on the future. But in this story, Renee is a side-piece. We are told she's exceptional, but when we see her, she barely has any character, she is unremarkable and un-notable. She has absolutely no agency in the storyline. She's an enigmatic MacGuffin. In short, I don't really care about her, which makes the whole trip pretty meaningless. I get that this storyline is really about Picard (and, shortly to see, Q), but from everything we have seen thus far, that story could have been told without this pointless time travel shtick. Also, I think the Borg storyline is kind of dumb. The concept of the Borg Queen always kind of felt to me like it defanged the threat of the Q hivemind, and this particular Borg Queen seems to have much more concern about the fun of being a material girl than actually having the interests of the Collective at heart. They can redeem some of this storyline for me, though, if Jay Karnes' character turns out to be Agent Gale.

I'm just waiting for the inevitable reveal of the tyrannical clone ancestor named Khan Noonien Soong.

On the bright side, at least one isn't Blue and one Red. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And not following up on existing plot. I'm still waiting for them to address the elephant in the room of "Did Geoffrey arrange for Rashad's death?" b/c it seems like a pretty big deal to me. (In my head the answer is, no- it was just a coincidence unrelated to Geoffrey and Phil's attempts to shut the guy up, but Will will jump to the wrong conclusion and it will result in some episodic drama before the truth comes out.)

C'mahn, Lois. When your sister said that "they took my phone" your journalistic alarm bells should have been ringing off the hook because Clark already told you the only thing he found at her place earlier was her phone! Anyhoot, pretty good episode. Jonathan seemed to recover pretty quick from Townie (he looked like he had an arm broken/out of joint when he got off the street). Jordan was beaten up worse than he was. (Boy of Steel, Jaw of Glass?)

I drank to counted two "leveled ups" in this episode, though I'm sure I must have missed some. 🙄🙄 (Seriously, unless the Big Bad turns out to be called Video Gamer or Gamesman or something similar to pay off the constant video game references, enough already!!!!) Goldface is a pretty charismatic villain, even if his M.O. is pretty mundane. I like Damion Poitier: he probably doesn't have the acting chops to have pulled it off, but I'll never not think of him as the first Thanos. (And I still think it would have been better to have a live-action, non-CGI version.)

To me, I keep flashing back to his dialogue and his "it's a penance" line. A penance, to be sure, and he implies it is for Picard (or Picard seems at least to infer that). I can't help but wonder if it is a penance for Q somehow.

Someone's needed to tell Probst's makeup person to dial it back for a couple of seasons now.

I think I am in a different boat than most so far. I really like John De Lancie and Q, and enjoyed the heck out of S1, but I don't know if I can take an entire season of Picard: Back to the Future (or is it Star Trek: Flashpoint?). The one-off time travel shenanigans of the tv shows and movies were fine (mostly) but an entire season built around a premise where we know the ending (they'll restore things to normal and get back home, albeit with personal lessons learned) seems a little anticlimactic and lacking any real stakes to me.

I don't fully recall my Superman reading days, but I do seem to remember that Bizarro is sort of the opposite from Superman (not entirely). So green K powers him up, and he has cold vision instead of heat vision. I assume that since X-K empowers normal people that means it disempowers Bizarro. Or something like that. Anyway, RIP Bizarro.

Johnny's biggest drinking problem is his choice of American lager swill over the wide array of really good beers available.

Not for the first time, I have wondered why they didn't have Boba Fett's search for a "tribe" be the throughline of this story. From the moment he was born/cloned, he never really fit in or had family, and I thought that was a story that they should have explored when he was adopted by the Tusken, as a way of showcasing how he'd come from his bounty hunter roots through a near-death experience to his place in BoBF. Would have been nice to see some flashbacks to his BH days as well, as part of the storytelling.

I still don't understand Boba Fett's motives. He wants Jabba's criminal empire, for... reasons? But he doesn't want to engage in criminal enterprises like spice or slave trade (which leaves... smuggling and protection maybe? But his "protection" force is terrible). If he just wanted to go legit and become the sheriff/mayor of Mos Espa, there were better ways to go about it, although it looks like that may be what happened by the end. Fennec's motives are just as murky. She seems okay with staying with criminal trades, but shrugs it off and just goes along with Fett because she's loyal, I guess. Waste of a character/casting with Jennifer Beales, sadly. How does Krrsantan just shrug off half a dozen blaster shots? Super-dense flesh? Wookie dermal/beskar implants? All in all, a pretty sad waste of an excuse to get a couple extra episodes of Mandalorian in. Should have just given us a full season of Mando.

Well, it wasn't terrible, but it really wasn't great. I like Alan Ritchson, but I'd rather get another Blood Drive S2 than Reacher S2. Plus, I'm not sure I'd like to see it without Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe. I've got an idea for S2: Reacher, John Rambo, Kwai Chang Caine, Reno Raines, and James Dalton all stroll into the same town...

Sensing a tighty-whities joke in here somewhere.

I've always thought this argument is a lot of hogwash. By that rationale, every police officer, lawyer, and judge is also responsible for the deaths of anyone that they failed to put to death for their crimes instead of following the law.

How is Grogu going to get that chain mail shirt over his head? Does it have a zipper? He's definitely going to take the pebble from Luke's hand, and it will be time for him to leave. Cad Bane shot the sheriff and the deputy. And it wasn't in self-defense. Glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought the deputy looked like James Roday at first glance.

Could be, or maybe this is just her way of covering her own part in the operation by framing Peacemaker as a lunatic alien-conspiracy nutjob who went on a murder-spree and killed dozens of helpless citizens including a sitting congressman and his family. One thing that I was kind of surprised no one mentioned is that Murn-alien is apparently so committed to his mission (right or wrong) that he's prepared to die for it. After all, no "cow", no food, no more Murn-alien.

I think so, too. I also think that means she's going to be dead soon. 😯☹️

"I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid."

Maybe they're making Soylent Green.

I definitely didn't have Bizarro on my BINGO card.

I've been thinking about this "butterflies are not what you think!" statement by Judo Master, and how it is possible to write apparent body-snatching aliens as anything other than evil/threatening genocidal creeps. Unless they aren't actually body-snatchers. Maybe their "human" bodies are cloned/artificial "husks" that they use to blend in with a human population that otherwise might not have been so welcoming to essentially an alien immigrant group coming to Earth, particularly one as sizable as we saw in ep. 3. Humans (generally speaking) have enough issues accepting and dealing with other human refugees and internally displaced persons, let alone insectoid ones. Which suggests what others have speculated on: that this Butterfly hunt is more of an internal political struggle (perhaps one group wants to "come out" and the others want to keep things silent?). (Another possibility: the Butterflies are symbionts, entering into consensual relationships with their hosts.)

I don't think you are. As I recall, Fett had at least part of his armor then (his boots), and was still trying to recover the rest. I think they retconned that now. (I also think his new "look" is far inferior to his Empire look; at least give him back the leg armor plates). Fett had a weird turn of phrase this episode. When staring at the Sarlacc, he mentions to Shand something to the effect of "this is where the Tuskens found me all those years ago." I'm trying to reconcile this with the timeline. Were there really years between Fett and Jabba being taken down by Luke and Co. and the Rebellion subsequently taking down the Empire? Or was this just a poor bit of writing by the Fett writer's room?

I thought it looked like an epileptic seizure. Hard to say for sure what was going on, but it looked like maybe they got were fighting. Chris might have hit him too hard, his brother cracked his head, went into a seizure and died? Adrian's comment about the weak spots on the White Dragon armor resounded like the report of Chekhov's gun.