Chicago Redshirt

It makes sense that the SITD would be a one and done thing to me too. But if it weren't, I don't think it would make sense to use it every week. Giving up your vote for a 1 in 6 chance to win is a pretty big deal. I don't think it would be worth it unless your back is really against the wall. I assume that production does not add dummy pieces of paper if multiple people take the SITD. It is probably better TV if the player gets a sealed parchment and does not know whether they are safe until they open it than if they roll the die and know if it has come up Milhouse or not. Danny chose to protect and the show revealed that choice as he made it. He also told the tribe the truth about his choice. Alex chose to risk and the show revealed that choice as he made it. He also told the tribe the truth about his choice. JD chose to risk, but the show did not reveal him making that choice. Show, you weren't fooling anyone into thinking JD went with protect. JD lied to his tribe and said he chose protect, but Ricard seemingly sniffed out that something about JD's story was fishy. I don't know if he thinks the whole story was a lie or if he correctly deduced that JD went with risk and has an extra vote somewhere. In retrospect, doing the prisoner's trilemma with Alex and JD, I would think it's particularly predictable that JD would go risk and there's a good shot that Alex would too. I also think there's a good chance of going home with a pocket extra-vote as well. I won't buy that Ricard on his own was stewing about "guys" and raised it as an issue. He had to be prompted by production so they could get their headlines about being a kinder, gentler Survivor at least when it comes to political correctness. My guess is that they tell the players just before the reading of the votes if a player is safe because of SITD and/or how many people tried it so that they can freak out about who it might have been or if the numbers have fundamentally changed. It seems to me that SITD is not the same thing as playing an immunity idol or an advantage. But I guess we'll see.

Lots to like about this one IMO: The planet of Ren Faire folks, the play on Lwaxana Troi, Jeffrey Combs, and Boimler getting the W again.

I wasn't clear. You don't get multiple bonus votes. It can be banked and used the one time at any of multiple tribals, as opposed to "You must use it at the first tribal council you come to." Which still makes the risk worth it, generally speaking. The first tribal is likely not going to have you at risk or have you so far behind the one vote isn't going to make a difference. But if you can save it only to whip it out when it will have the most impact, that could be pretty sweet.

I was inspired to go back to the first collection of the graphic novel and take a look for the first time in a long time. Some divergences so far:

Shot in the Dark seems pretty straightforward, but I suppose I could be misunderstanding something or there could be tweaks in how it's executed/revealed. If you think you are on the ropes at a Tribal Council, you can forfeit your vote to roll a six-sided die. Five of the faces mean you are still vulnerable to be voted out as normal. One of the faces, though, means that you are safe from being voted out. No one knows if you took the Shot in the Dark until Jeff reads the votes. So this way, players not only have to worry that their target might have an immunity idol, but also that they got that 16.7 percent chance of safety through the dice roll. There will certainly be scenarios where it makes complete sense for a player on the outs to take the Shot in the Dark. There will be scenarios where it makes sense for someone to lie about whether they plan to take the Shot in the Dark to get a majority alliance nervous and split their votes or target someone else. Remember, it's entirely possible that everyone in the majority votes for Jane, Jane wins the Shot in the Dark, and then presumably everyone's drawing rocks or something to figure out who gets booted. I guess there's an open question of how late the SITD will go for. Because it's kind of BS if you could ride it to a T4 or T3. We've only seen up to Day 3. I assume that by next week, people may well be feeling the grind of not having rice or other food provided for them, having actual punishments instead of just not getting rewards, etc.

Anyway, I missed the show. It seems like this time around they went out of their way to pick contestants who are slobbering over the concept of Survivor even more than the regular crew, and Survivor's PTB are patting themselves on the back with a lot of stuff. I kind of like the prisoner's "trilemma" with the vote risk (and am surprised that a lot of people were familiar with the prisoner's dilemma concept.) Any game theory people have a sense of what the optimal play is against two unknown opponents? I go back and forth. Since the game apparently involves gaining an extra vote that can be used for a bunch of tribals vs losing a vote at the next tribal, maybe the risk/reward calculus changes. After all, an individual vote is probably at its lowest value at a first tribal. Chances are high that either you are not going to have your name selected among your tribemates or if you are, your one vote is not particularly likely to save you. This is the first time I remember them showing Survivors in their natural environment apart from the show. Did the show do that before and I just missed it? Early favorites are Danny, Shan, and CJ. I assume that Shan has a musical sting means that she is going to be around for a while.

"Guys" is arguably a gender-specific term that gives undue emphasis to men. Like other posters, I think of "guys" in this context as gender-neutral, but there's the argument that would be my male privilege talking. Anyway, if he wanted to, he could have just started with "Come on in" or "Come on in, everybody" or any number of things without raising it, and I tend to doubt anyone would have noticed much.

I think part of the difference is that in first meeting him in Thor, Jane saw him as a rando crazy person who just happened to look like her ex sorta. Here, she saw him for who he is: a charismatic, smooth talking alien that she was more or less making first contact with, and who appreciated her for her genius. Also, it seems to me that Jane and Thor totally did it in this What If? whereas one can choose to believe that they had a chaste romance in the MCU. And I think that the first opportunity for them to have had sex would have been off-screen between Thor 2 and the "mutual dumping" referred to in Thor Ragnarok.

In the scenario from the show, though, the reporters and camera crews were literally right there when the goon swung on Orlando. In all probability, the camera crews captured the goon swinging first. There is no spinning that Orlando started things getting physical. At least, not without brainwashing people. And the scene illustrates more about how poorly written this ep was. The shittiest politician in America would have been able to deflect Orlando's criticisms with some meaningless platitude, talking point or empty promise. "I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. I pledge to do everything I can to make sure that National City General (or whatever the hospital is called) has the resources it needs to look into cures." Or "I promise we will investigate what caused this building's collapse and get to the bottom of why it has affected so many innocents." Or "I know I'm fortunate to have made a full recovery. And I'm pulling for everyone who was near the implosion to do the same." Even the weakest politician wouldn't put on stank face at being upstaged by a rando and feel like they needed to abruptly leave their press conference. As part of the further bad writing, not one of the at least two camera crews follows Councilwoman Karen and her goons after a masked vigilante and another guy show up and chase after them. What are they waiting for, an engraved invite to do journalism? And I suppose I should let it go, but it bugs that Kelly literally ripped out a bunch of Councilwoman Karen's hair like it was nothing when Councilwoman Karen bamfed away. Like it just doesn't make sense that Kelly would have grabbed her hair, that Councilwoman Karen would have bamfed away for no particular reason from a fight that she could easily win, or that in bamfing, she would have left behind all that hair.

I think there is a tension inherent in the premise that I don't know think the graphic novel handles too deeply or well, and it of course remains to be seen what the TV show will do. Namely, how much are we products of nature, nurture, circumstance, biology, culture, etc.? In our current society, relatively fewer women are violent. Is that because of how they have been socialized? A relative lack of opportunity? Because of their biology? Because we live in societies that make it relatively easy to get what you might want without violence? Would women attempt to innovate with new social structures if given the chance? Or borrow from what has worked in the past out of a sense of tradition/familiarity/continuity/other reasons? I think the writers try to answer somewhat but it sounds like the answer(s) may not be to your personal liking.

Except Chief O'Brien is unquestionably good at his job. Heimdall seems like he gets fooled/beaten more than he succeeds.

I think it was shade at the dudebros. Thor telling Carol to smile more was another example of it. I was scared that eventually the Thor/Carol fight would turn into a flirty, shippy thing. Thank Odin it didn't.

What I meant is that whole scenario was very artificial and implausible, created so that there could be a fistfight and we could see Guardian being a badass. In anything resembling the real world, a politician's goons would be unlikely to try to punch someone who does not pose a threat at a press conference. It seems like taking on either Orlando or Guardian would be bad for the public image. And similarly, Councilwoman Karen getting in a physical fight with Guardian when she could wish her into a cornfield or do whatever she wants doesn't make any sense.

The things that allowed the Super Friends to make the connection between the people of the Heights becoming sicker and Councilwoman Karen using her powers were: 1. obtaining the detection devices from the other branch of the DEO to track 5th Dimensional energy 2. The realization that there was 5th Dimensional energy in the debris, the Heights residents and elsewhere. 3. Scanning/seeing Councilwoman Karen and learning that she went from being weak to strong and that she had a lot of 5D energy. 4. Observing Councilwoman Karen using her powers and thus allowing the hypothesis/realization that she siphoning 5th dimensional energy from the Heights residents and thus harming them. 5. Brainy using the DNA sample from Councilwoman Karen to confirm that she was responsible. There is no real reason to think that a visit to the hospital or any form of earlier intervention by the Super Friends would have enabled them to put the pieces of the puzzle together sooner than they did. In particular, without knowing that Councilwoman Karen had her powers in the first place, they would not have been able to conclude the cause of the drain was her or likely do much about it. I'll stop going on in circles on this other point after one last repetition: Even taking it as a given that some of the team could and should have split off to address the situation at the hospital, it is unclear how Kelly wanted them to do more and exactly what they would have done. In the absence of a refusal to do some specific things and in the absence of evidence that their earlier intervention likely would have improved things, I find Kelly's attitude wildly inappropriate.

If an insane/insanely powerful imp with no sense of restraint or scruples trying to get even more power is not an all-hands-on-deck situation, then no such situation exists. The Super Friends could not know how long Nxy was going to be depowered for, if she couldn't make progress on the search for the MacGuffins while depowered, who Nxy might hurt along the way, etc. etc. We also keep running into that the Super Friends responded, from all indications, generally appropriately to the hospital situation given what they knew at the time. When they learned that the hospital was short on ventilators, Alex pulled strings and helped them remedy the situation. (Why the hospital needs her to do this as opposed to simply requesting on its own ventilators or shipping patients to hospitals that have them, I have no idea, But good on Alex for helping.) When they are told that Joey is not getting better, there is no real reason to think that there is something unusual going on at first. When they learn of a tie to the 5th dimensional energy, they jump to the conclusion that dealing with the debris will kill two birds with one stone. That is, it will enable them to track Nxy and (they thought) would likely cure any residual sickness. They did not know and pretty much could not have reasonably been expected to know that Councilwoman Karen was siphoning energy from the people who had been near the blast, and that was what was causing people to weaken. If Brainy had investigated early on, it's not a given that he would have been able to figure out what was making Joey and the others remain sick or how to address it any sooner. And once they knew what was going on, the Super Friends acted. So it doesn't seem to me fair for Kelly to act like she was abandoned or not listened to when she didn't have any specific requests, when the Super Friends were at least somewhat responsive and interested in the fate of the Heights people, and when prioritizing the search for Nxy makes sense.

The show very much wants viewers to think of Kelly's quest to help the people of the Heights as a noble crusade that was unfairly downplayed by the rest of the heroes, when it would have been a perfectly reasonable position for the Super Friends to explicitly say, "It's a sad thing that the 100 or so people are suffering, but they are getting the best medical care possible and the search for Nxy is a priority." The show implicitly portrays it as wrong that the rest of the Super Friends do not share Kelly's passion for focusing on the people of the Heights and that they didn't listen to her pleas to do something. What is worse IMO is that it's not really clear what the Super Friends were supposed to have been doing instead of looking for Nxy. Part of the trouble with the show is that trying to depict these socio-economic problems as if they were in our world just doesn't work when you have a set of protagonists who can basically solve most run-of-the-mill problems (or at least, the symptoms of the problems) through their powers, fame, tech and connections. Not enough ventilators at the local hospital? Supergirl can fly patients to hospitals around the globe where there aren't shortages, or fly ventilators from around the world to National City. Between LexCorp and Brainy, they could conjure up some magic tech ventilators that would solve the shortage. A shortage of affordable housing? Supergirl could build 10 apartment buildings in a matter of hours and raise the money for the land by various means, from digging for gold, squeezing coal into diamonds, performing super-tasks for rent, parlaying her celebrity into a fundraiser, asking her billionaire friend Lena for a loan or a grant, etc. Orlando can't find a job that pays more than minimum wage because he's an ex-con and an alien? Well I think a reference from Supergirl would go a long way. Not to mention that again, Lena could hire him. And there is also the inherent issue that they do have to pick and choose to some extent who they are saving. Every time they have a game night or mess around being Catco employees is time that they could be spending to literally save lives. I don't begrudge them downtime, but it remains the case that there is some picking and choosing of who to save. Helping these 100 people in National City means that they aren't helping starving kids elsewhere or doing any of a number of other options. There was a possible way that they could have presented both the let's-focus-on-the-Heights-residents and the let's-focus-on-the-search-for-Nxy points of views as reasonable even though they conflict. But the way the show portrayed things, it underplayed why finding Nxy was so important and had Supergirl apologize for focusing on Nxy, with no apology from Kelly for not seeing that it at least was understandable why Kara and co. prioritized finding Nxy. We the viewers had information that Nxy was depowered and having trouble getting the search for the MacGuffins started. This all stacks the deck to make Kelly's position seem better. As opposed to a situation where dealing with the Heights residents gave Nxy an insurmountable headstart in getting the MacGuffins, or where a powered Nxy was off wreaking havoc during the search. Neither Kelly nor the show really made it clear what the Super Friends were potentially going to do in the service of the people from the Heights other than generically pay attention to them, hear and see them. This is part of the writing fails for this episode. Kelly is popping off at Supergirl, who has proven herself to be a champion not just of all people, not just of refugee aliens but the Heights specifically. And it has Supergirl be the one to apologize when she didn't do anything wrong and when she's been doing right for years. For my money, Kelly came off as disrespectful, entitled, myopic, unfair and whiny in her viewpoint, as opposed to the strong guardian that the show wanted us to think of her as.

I get that Covid made it impractical to have, say, Melissa Benoist or Grant Gustin show up for a scene to represent Supergirl or the Flash. But if they at all wanted to have interactions to show they were in the same universe, they could have despite Covid. They could have had anybody they were willing to pay appear via Zoom, or talk to a S&L character on the phone. Or they could have had an Easter egg picture of Kara etc. in a given scene. Or they could have referenced Kara etc. in dialogue. The fact that they didn't, and that the writers are generally creative people who must have had these and other thoughts occur to them, suggests that they simply didn't want to include Arrowverse references they didn't have to.

I will try to be as positive as I can about this episode before tearing into it: I appreciate the recommendation of a couple books via Kelly's coffee table. I (and maybe some other readers) may check them out. The new Guardian costume is pretty cool. It's usually good to see Dig, and they seem to be strongly hinting he will become a Green Lantern at some point. So much for the upsides. Now for the down. This was the most anvillicious of Supergirl episodes and that's really saying something. It hurts to think about how hamfisted the show was at addressing real world problems like gentrification, disempowerment of communities, health care disparities, distrust of institutions, representation in media and on and on and on. Cramming all these concepts in and reducing them to buzzwords and giving them the least sophisticated treatment possible does nothing for anyone. People who are resistant or hostile to these messages in the first place aren't going to embrace them just because they are done at a high volume. And people who might be open to them are probably going to be less receptive when they are not done well. I hate that Supergirl is reduced to a guest-star in her own show. There was literally no Supergirl for like the first 10 minutes or so. I hate that a lot of the time when she was on screen, they twisted Supergirl's character to make the point they wanted to make about white feminists who make poor allies. Among the many problems with that is not who Supergirl is in general, and in this particular situation, where the building was imploded specifically to irk Supergirl, she 100 percent would have felt additional responsibility to those who were collateral damage to what happened in between her and Nxy. It made it worse to portray the situation as though only the person Kelly was boning could give two shits about all the people in the Heights, and that was to apparently call some friends and get some ventilators. I hate that the show portrays Kelly as being right that the lives of the, let's say 100 people who were being treated for a mysterious disease are automatically more crucial than oh, about the rest of creation in multiple dimensions who are threatened if Nxy manages to collect her set of Macguffins. Or even assuming that she doesn't, who are threatened that she might continue to wreak havoc if she just retains her ordinary power level. Part of the trouble with there being such a huge cast of superheros now is it undercuts the notion that they could not divide and conquer. Between Supergirl, J'onn, Alex, Nia and Brainy, surely one or two of them could peel off from the Nxy hunt to look into the hospital situation. Then again, Kelly does not have a plan of action for the Super Friends to follow in terms of addressing the needs of the people at the hospital, and that it's mostly generic talk about making the people of the Heights feel seen. Maybe if you had asked Brainy specifically to see what might be afflicting them and he was like "Nah fam," you'd have a point. But it seemed on the surface like the people at the hospital were in reasonably good hands. I pretty much couldn't take J'onn talking about how Jimmy and Kelly were treated like the real aliens in America, and I'm black. I hate that Kara felt the need to apologize for being focused on a dimension-threatening villain and trying to stop the future mischief and mayhem she might cause. I hate pretty much every appearance by Andrea and the notion that the once-mighty CatCo cannot simultaneously talk about the impact the destruction of a building has on people as well as it does on traffic. I hate that they took Councilwoman Karen (whose real name I am not going to bother to look up) who had the potential to be a three-dimensional character who has a reasonable but non-evil agenda of improving her constituents' lives by bringing in high-tech companies and turned her into a one-dimensional mustache twirler who literally was leeching power from the community. I hate that Guardian engaged her goons and her in a fistfight for no particular reason, and that despite having magic powers, Councilwoman Karen only fought Guardian to a stalemate while blathering some stuff. And then a short while later, she's more than a match for Supergirl. It is kind of sad that with the power to basically do whatever she wished, Councilwoman Karen's vision was so small. And I know we are told that Councilwoman Karen is going to jail, but it seems like it would be hard to make anything against her stick. What did the Super Friends see her do that can't be written off as her being a victim of strange energy. And I get the thing about Kelly being tired of fighting the good fight and I suppose for this show it was reasonably well-acted. But it seems very much out of place and premature. I might be missing some things in previous seasons, but as far as I can remember Kelly has taken the lead in like three or four crusades for justice: 1. better treatment for the alien foster home kids 2. help ex-cons to avoid recidivism (although it was really Supergirl who did the heavy lifting there) 3. help make Imploded Building a possible shelter for ex-cons and low income people and now 4. fight to have the people who were affected by the blast get proper medical care and other attention. All noble and exhausting efforts. But it doesn't bode well that she's already breaking down in tears about how hard the fight is. Wouldn't it be better to have her be resolute in the face of all these challenges and the many more to come? I also don't like that the people Guardian was guarding were basically just props in all this and kept in the dark. It could have been a different thing if Orlando and the rest took a more active role in helping themselves. I was half-hoping that Orlando's EMP powers would be used to nullify Councilwoman Karen's use/manipulation of 5th Dimensional energy. Even if Orlando had said, "Guardian, you've inspired me to run for Council" rather than having her suggest it to him and him be seemingly lukewarm to the idea. We come around again to it not making particular sense that to solve the problems Kelly wants to solve, being a costumed hero is not the way to go. She could set up a blog and publicize the situations that strike her as unjust. She could do actual activism, organizing the people of the Heights as a political force. She could run for City Council herself. I will pause in my rant but reserve the right to resume later after I get some sleep.

Add me to the list of people who would prefer to watch "Agent 355" and who would be all in for a prequel about her just doing badass stuff like blowing up racist terrorists. But I will take what I can get.

I see something of both characters' perspectives. It seems like it should have been obvious to Sammy that Hero didn't want to go to DC because she didn't want to deal with her mother, whatever issues that they might have had since childhood, and that she is now a killer. I can only imagine the pressure her parents put on her, given that mom is a longtime congresswoman and dad is a college professor. There presumably are class expectations that she has fallen short of by working in a blue-collar job. Just being expected to live up to the name "Hero" would be a lot. Adding to that she is a killer and a homewrecker. I can sympathize with Hero preferring to risk living on her own rather than undergo scrutiny from mom. And like you, I can sympathize with Sammy not giving a f--- about any of that personal drama and wanting to secure a safe place in this topsy-turvy world. I can even understand having blinders on to the clear signals that Hero has given that she wants no part of DC. I'm not pro-infidelity, but I can definitely understand how someone could be outraged and even violent after they just made passionate love under the notion that they and their lover were finally going to be together in the light. Discovering that the lover lied and what they thought was beautiful and romantic was basically sex under false pretenses would drive a lot of people at least a little crazy.

I think it is safe to say that 355 did not know or expect that the world's men were all going to die. However...

She has told him that she doesn't want to see her mother right now. Sammy's response is get over that bullshit. Which is perfectly understandable, especially assuming that Sammy knows that Hero's mother's the president. At the same time, I can see from Hero's perspective that it is easier to do passive-aggressive BS like staying overnight at the house or sabotaging the car than it is to just straight-up say, "Fuck you, Sammy, we're not going to D.C, period" or "Sammy, I'm just not ready to go to D.C. right now. Feel free to head there on your own." One way of looking at what the show says is that mommy issues are powerful enough to survive the apocalypse. As for killing her lover, a. I think that very few people aren't capable of killing someone under the wrong circumstances and b. it seems clear to me that her killing her lover was an accident as opposed to straight-up murder or voluntary manslaughter. They are en route to Boston rather than Boulder. And I could see the case for splitting Yorick and Ampersand up. It would be easier to keep monkey under guard and in a controlled environment, and you could avoid the possible problem with the conspiracy theorists thinking that Yorick was spared as part of a government plot. But I could also see the case for keeping them together so the same person could be studying them both, as there seems likely to be a connection between how both survived the pandemic. If it was real life, it would probably have made more sense to bite the bullet and admit to some level of the inner circle that Yorick survived, ask for their discretion and to deal with the fallout if anyone snitches.

Again, some women are trying to fix things. It's just that fixing things is not all that easy. Some women have taken to looting and/or strong-arming other women. It is an entire society that is hit with PTSD and with the fact that there are precious few who have experience with a lot of things, due to sexism. With so many fields being male-dominated, getting the right people in place would not be a simple task. Stores aren't abandoned just because all the men died. Some women looted the shit out of the stores (presumably) anticipating that it was essentially the end times, supply chains would be screwed and they better hoard as much as they could while they could. The show has specifically referenced sperm banks; just because they haven't said anything that I recall about frozen embryos doesn't mean that characters off-screen haven't looked into that or that characters in future episodes might not.

Well first of all, small is relative. In the case of the mob at the gates, it's probably (as shown) only in the hundreds. But it represents a larger absolute number. Even if only 1 percent of the remaining (let's say) 130 million American women believe conspiracy theories, that's a heckuva lot. Small can still be quite powerful, especially if it's indulged by people with power like the Republican women insiders we have seen. And of course, small can spread and become medium and become large. Not to dive too deep into real-world politics, but any number of real-world movements started off as fringe and then got to have mainstream influence/support. And compare how (at least in the U.S.) how people have been reacting to the pandemic. The response has been incredibly politicized and things were very disrupted with a virus a small fraction of as deadly and sudden as whatever caused the men to die. I'm not saying that it would take till more order is established for the secret to be out. I'm saying that once more order is established it would potentially be safer for the secret to be out. There might be a medical breakthrough that would allow human reproduction without men. And even accepting for argument's sake that there would not be, there's a perspective that it may be realistic to accept that the human race is going to have to die out after the current youngest generation. (which would mean that more like 80-100 years, assuming baby girls could live out the normal lifespan, no new advances in medicine, and sperm samples that exist are somehow nonviable.). It may be bleak and nihilistic, but coming to terms with that realistic prospect might seem the right call for some. FWIW, I am familiar with the graphic novel and thus have a general sense of where the story is likely to go. Of course, the show can and has IIRC departed from the story of the graphic novel in some ways. But everything I'm saying is spoiler-free.

Trying to fix the world involves deciphering what killed almost all males, why Yorick and Ampersand survived, if their survivability can be replicated. Trying to fix the world also means overcoming coup attempts and resistance to your efforts. And it's possible that some people are going to either think the world either can't be fixed after 4 billion died or that even if it could be fixed, it might be better for various reasons to just adapt to the way that it is now and will be for the foreseeable future.