Chicago Redshirt

To be fair, anybody with connections and/or money could buy Stark stuff on the open market or the black market. Hypothetically, Killmonger could have bought enough Stark stuff for the ambush and to frame Stane, either on his own or through a connection like Klaue.

I mean, we know from the main MCU timeline that Stane was behind the attempt on Tony's life there. It could be that Killmonger was behind it in this universe and framed Stane, but there's no way to know for sure. Obadiah would protest his innocence in either case. And the "receipts" Killmonger claimed to have could be forged. I guess we will only know if we revisit this particular universe. Which I hope we do.

Even if we were to concede that it is the worst movie with the worst writing in the MCU (and as much as I'm not a fan of IM3, I think that Thor: The Dark World easily outdoes it for that title, along with possible others), it remains a canon example that Tony can and does have blinders on when a) someone close to him gets hurt b) it involves his SUPERIOR TECH (shout out to Marvel vs. Capcom fans in the house) or c) he doesn't figure things out that might be obvious to him if he took half a second. If we want to talk about other canon examples of Tony being overly confident/reckless/a dumbass in better written movies, I'll submit a few more examples: B. Another poster beat me to in Iron Man how in his testing he slammed himself into a wall and experienced the icing problem because he couldn't be assed with running tests. One could also add his not thinking through intervention in Gomira and nearly getting blown up by the fighter jets/destroying one of them and nearly killing its pilot. And on the political maneuvering side, there was that he had no clue that Stane had largely succeeded at locking him out from his own company by getting an injunction. C. In IM2, Tony underestimates Ivan Vanko and gives him an inspiration for improving Vanko's tech. He mocks Hammer and essentially goads him into making a drone army. He thought that the secrets to his tech was like a decade away for everyone else, but it was obviously far less than that. D. In Civil War, Tony lets Team Cap get away even though on paper, Team Iron Man far overpowers them, The only heavy hitter on Team Cap, Wanda, doesn't even have full mastery of her powers. On seeing that Rhodey got hit by a blast meant for Falcon, Tony blasts Falcon at point-blank range. On finding out that Bucky killed his parents, Tony basically loses it and gets his ass beat by Cap and Bucky (I submit) because of a combination of being emotionally overwrought and overconfident. E. In Age of Ultron, the whole situation with the Ultron is essentially Tony's fault for being too in love with the notion that a series of drones would answer the world's problems without bothering to consider what might happen if the AI went rogue, fell into the wrong hands, etc. F. He builds another global defense system governed largely by an AI despite the travesty of Ultron. Instead of entrusting it to his best friend and military vet Rhodey, his wife and COO Pepper, or even his security chief Happy, gives the key to this system to a 16-year-old child he liked and had a few adventures with. MCU Tony is simply not a guy with multiple layers of contingency plans, generally. He's not Batman. IM3 is the only time that comes to mind where he seemingly did much in the way of advanced planning for a situation he himself faced. He is a guy who generally thinks of a plan on the spur of the moment and executes it. Remember from Avengers, when Cap tries to stop him by saying "We need a plan of attack!" and his response is: "Here's my plan: attack." That to me often sums up Tony to a tee. Getting back to the scenario in What If?, Tony could have turned Killmonger over to the authorities with the evidence he had. He could have turned the evidence that Jarvis had collected over to the authorities automatically if something happened to him. He didn't. He wanted to personally make Killmonger pay for Rhodey. Normally an ordinary or even extraordinary human is not going to have much chance against a killer robot that's made of vibranium alloy. And this particular killer robot had an extra advantage in that its AI had a lot of info about how Killmonger typically fought and could thus theoretically counter his moves. Why would Tony not think that his robot could easily deal with Killmonger? The shotgun blast through the car is the same as in Iron Man, so to the extent that it was lucky that Tony survives, it's lucky in the source material. Black Panther and the Wakandans were lured to the site purposefully. There's no reason to think that Black Panther would have had ear protection for a weapon that was not widely used and he had no reason to suspect; even if he did, Killmonger might have had another way to deal with him. Killmonger had exact knowledge of how strong the drone army was because he was instrumental in building and leading it. He presumably had pretty good knowledge of how strong the Wakandan army was even in the short time after he "defected." He also had first-hand knowledge that a drone can be destroyed by someone using a vibranium spear because he himself did that, and he had to know that the Dora Milaje had a pretty much unlimited supply, plus that Wakanda had other advanced weapons. Killmonger also had some control of the drones still because he was able to re-activate them. He presumably could have de-activated them at any time. So it's pretty clear that he could engineer the battle for Wakanda to prevail ultimately. And hey, even if it might have been hypothetically closer or if the U.S. might have won, I'm sure Killmonger could adapt to that situation too.

What was not realistic about it? Could be that the drone didn't have them. It was early in the production process. Could be that the drone/Tony was overconfident. Real-life drones aren't powered by vibrranium nor made of vibranium alloy to be nearly indestructible, nor do they have a sophisticated AI controlling their moves, nor are they hive-mind linked. I assume that the Stark Liberators would kick the crap out of the drones shown in Far From Home. Iron Man sometimes flies in a Quinjet to save power or for other reasons. so even assuming that the Liberators can fly now (and remember, this is presumably in 2009 or thereabouts, in a reality where Tony didn't necessarily work on tech in the same way or come up with the same solutions,), it might not make sense to have the Liberator legion fly from the U.S. to Wakanda. If a foreign power came onto American soil and killed any Americans, particularly a hugely popular American, there would be similar calls for avenging. In fairness, only Shuri figured anything out and she then told Pepper. Pepper only had suspicions that Killmonger was sketchy but absolutely no evidence until Shuri showed her. And of course, Shuri is a genius. So it doesn't stand to reason that Nick Fury and SHIELD would have a clue that Killmonger was evil. Even after going through the crucible of his ordeal in the Afghan cave, main MCU Tony Stark could be an overconfident dumbass for a genius, billionaire playboy philanthropist. Exhibit A: his taunting the Mandarin to come at him, bro, and then failing to set up any defenses in case he did. I have no doubt that Tony could and would have thought his vibranium-powered, vibranium-alloy covered drone could easily kill a single person. And he would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for Killmonger having a pure vibranium spear. The only reason there wasn't blood was it was a cartoon. Obviously the wound went all the way through Tony and he would have to be bleeding.

I tried to put away my dislike for Kelsey as much as I could, and I actually managed to fool myself that they were potentially going to choose Suu or Autumn at various points. It seemed like Joe was jocking hard for Suu. And it also seemed like they found more stuff wrong with Kelsey's dishes other than the appetizer than they generally did either for other winners or for her in previous episodes. But maybe I was turning a blind eye to the emphasis on how much Kelsey sacrificed and how she's such a wonderful mother and to compete while pregnant means that she can turn water into wine. Oh well. There's always next season. Incidentally, Kelsey gives this post-win interview and this one. She doesn't say much exciting IMO. She quit her job as a physical therapist and is potentially looking to do more food TV stuff and is part of some sort of partnership with GrubHub. She does say she got Covid, so even I feel bad for her on that. Was I slow, by the way? I don't remember Autumn cooking a lot of Japanese stuff during the season. Her thing, it seemed to me, was always "I'm from Bahstan so I will make X" or "I'm Italian so I will make Italian food." Also, I assume the Viking appliance people were not so psyched about what I assume to be one of their ovens failing during the finale, even if it was not the fault of their brand.

Or the latest season of Flash turned off more fans than I would have thought.

To be fair, she definitely seemed to be limping, so she may have had some broken bones. Still and all, I agree it is a stretch that it wasn't the two-hit fight (tm The Breakfast Club) of Hourman hitting her, her hitting the floor. I could buy that the adult Sportsmaster and Tigress are experienced enough to have outsmarted/outlasted Rick especially because of Rick's overconfidence. And yes, perhaps some of it is due to Rick pulling punches. But Artemis took some brutal hits that should have left her unconscious or at least bleeding. And how did she get out of the bat cuff? My regret is as a nerd that Beth didn't get any licks in during the fight. Hopefully at some point they give Beth some capability to contribute during a fight. I don't expect her to be trading punches with Solomon Grundy or what have you, but between her and Chuck/real Dr. Midnite, maybe she can come up with some gadgets that can help or use the goggles to help support her teammates in finding opponents' weak spots. A propos of nothing, I don't remember what happened to Green Lantern's daughter?

Hey, watching this episode didn't feel like a chore for the most part, so...yay? I did virtually facepalm when the show explicitly talked about overthrowing the patriarchy and a life of "magical privilege." It is like the writers are determined to invoke every stereotype of woke Hollywood. The Lena is magic plot is, to borrow the term from Lena herself, "absurd." I don't like that it foreshadows that she is either going to play some role in stopping Nxy using her neophyte magic or that she is going to pit her neophyte magic against Supergirl or some other Kryptonian. I imagine that Katie McGrath was having Merlin flashbacks.

It would make sense to me that he has not started working for Ramsay because that would spoil the surprise of him winning. From this interview, it sounds like he's only now fixing to go and start at GR Steak.

I'm very curious what led to Kiya hating Trenton so much that it seemed like she wanted to diss him at every opportunity. I remember she was salty that she came in second in a challenge and Trenton took Megan or someone else instead. And she has previously talked about him being a jerk. But was there more to it than that? Also, is she right to hate Trenton or is there something else going on? Like she also put Brynn in there with her Trenton-hate, but I don't think the show had demonstrated any animosity from Brynn to Trenton. I'm pretty convinced that Kiya was tanking her tasks in order to sabotage Trenton. I sometimes wish that picking the brigade was not a straight schoolyard pick but a snake draft (i.e. Chef 1 gets pick 1, Chef 2 gets pick 2 and 3, Chef 1 gets pick 4 and 5 etc.) because oftentimes, the brigade overshadows everything. Here, I think Trenton had the better dishes (at least according to the judges), the better leadership, the better overall performance in the season and so it probably didn't matter.

I assume the fake drug bust thing was staged. It just seems ridiculous if you are either of the top two that you would think that a) anyone in the competition at all would bring two big ass stashes of drugs in from the start (as you have to know that there'd be no opportunity to bring the drugs in once filming has started) that they packaged in a peculiar way b) that now that it's just down to the last two, either someone booted off left said drugs in the dorms or they belong to your competitor c) Hell's Kitchen has security that had been unbeknownst to you does routine security sweeps that were thorough enough to find these drugs from wherever they were hidden and yet somehow were not noticeable until now d) that the drugs would have been a big enough deal that they would consider tanking the show right before its climax (as opposed to simply figuring out who the drugs belonged to and DQing that person, or sweeping things under the rug, etc.) and e) that the way they would have conducted an investigation into such a big deal would be for GR to personally investigate on camera (as opposed to the security people or a producer or what have you). I just can't see someone in the middle of the prank not being, "It must have been Trenton, Chef, because it's for damn sure not mine." Or "Chef, run that part back again about you going through our stuff all the time. That's kind of messed up." Then again, it's easy for me to see it as obviously fake and bizarre as someone older, cynical about how reality shows work, and not in the mix of it.

I will be doing virtual somersaults like Jake Blues in the Blues Brothers if she or Suu wins. But I'm pretty sure that there's no chance.

Even as someone who is triggered by Kelsey (see rant above), I have to admit that she has not really been shown to screw things up, Last week was the only time I can think of where she was shown to have gotten anything substantially wrong, and even that IMO was a stretch. The butter for her sole was not browned. Big whup, as we used to say. It was according to the judges her worst dish of the competition, but that doesn't mean it was an actually bad dish. She has yet to have been shown to make an actual mistake that would be worthy of sending someone home as far as I can recall. And you can take it to the bank that if she had, I'd remember and have posted about how they were playing favorites by letting her stay on.

Aliens seemingly flee to Earth for analogous reasons to why immigrants come to America: they are refugees from oppression or violence, they are looking for new opportunities and to build a better life, etc. etc. Of course, there are lots of problems with the show trying to make an alien=immigrant analogy. The first of which is while it seems transparently wrong to fear human immigrants as a group, there's pretty good justification to fear aliens with their various superpowers. A single alien not even at the power level of the Supergirls or Martian Manhunters of the world can and have done immense damage. The other is that there's little to no excuse for aliens to not make it on Earth. At a minimum, having access to or knowledge of the technology used to get to Earth would make them rich beyond most people's wildest dreams. Can you imagine how much a Jeff Bezos or a Richard Branson would pay for a trip to another habitable planet? Or how they could parlay their innate skills or technological know-how into devices Earth doesn't have?

My head may be is mush, but I think they have said on the show that the winner does get to be the head chef at GR Steak at one of the LV casinos. I think they are emphasizing "protege" because there is probably less of an expectation that the person will be the ultimate authority at wherever it is. To be fair, "bounce back" is probably something Gordon has been saying from S1, but it was striking how much more that poor Antonio was using that phrase. I totally agree that the Christina/Jason sabotages should never get through. One would think that you'd watch the food that the sous-chefs produced like a hawk. Even if you were just teleported into HK and found yourself expediting without having watched a second of the show, just being able to hear them getting caught sabotaging someone else should make you suspicious of everything they put up. Because obviously the sabotages are deliberate things. No one is going to confuse orzo for risotto rice or peas and zucchini by accident. So even if someone had no idea, like there should be no way that they get caught by more than one sabotage. I'm surprised that there aren't (more?) examples of people falsely accusing Christina/Jason of sabotaging stuff that was actually just fine the way it was. As well as that the producers/Ramsay don't enlist the other contestants to purposely tank things to see if they would be caught.

Cheryl had a crush on Josie and was sending her stuff as a secret admirer. Nothing says love like a pig's heart!

Freudian slip much? :)

We did see that Morgan Edge rewrote a piece that Lois wrote about him, and that he did arbitrary layoffs (or at least, I would consider any set of layoffs that would result in Clark Kent as an acclaimed journalist for about two decades getting fired arbitrary, I had speculated that Edge deliberately targeted Clark knowing he was Superman, but nope, Edge only found out the Secret midway through the season). But the fact that Edge did these things and was an evil alien might not affect the overall quality of the Planet. Also, the rankings could have been from before the reveal of Edge as an alien. Also also, the rankings could have been less a measure of actual quality and based on such things like buzz, reputation or clicks/circulation. In which cases, the Planet has a huge edge because Metropolis presumably has like 8 million citizens and because it pretty much owns the franchise on reporting on the Big Blue Boy Scout. I'm hoping that next season S&L will be more connected to the Arrowverse than it has been so far.

It is a test of endurance to see this series shamble to its finish, a zombified shell of itself. We have three pep talks, including a rare reciprocal pep talk in which Kelly boosts Kara about making change and Kara boosts Kelly about superheroing. There still has been no convincing reason given why Kelly, as an athletic but untrained woman with limited experience and whose only tech is a shield, would want to suit up to fight crime, let alone why she should be treated as an equal to four superpowered alien and a veteran agent. When James was Guardian, he had a mission that was in large part to fight the street-level crime Supergirl didn't always make time for. And so he did. There's nothing Kelly Guardian can do to address systemic injustice that Kelly as civilian cannot also do. I probably don't have to talk about how anvillicious the whole let's save the formerly incarcerated deal was. I hate that this show makes me embarrassed to be a liberal sometimes. I think it is telling that Supergirl was flummoxed by not being able to respond to the people who questioned her on her livestream about how Not-Amazon was going to make their lives better. Even if the subject were better executed, there's a fundamental flaw: the Superfriends have the capability to address both the individual cases of problems and a lot of the systemic problems with incarceration. There's nothing to stop Supergirl and co. from recommending truly reformed people for jobs, helping truly reformed people get on their feet, etc. To start off with, Lena is a billionaire. She could simply look in her couch cushions and set up affordable housing. Or she could hire Orlando in the smallest sense. The notion that Orlando, a walking EMP, cannot find better than minimum wage employment is laughable. As is the notion that things are so binary that Not-Amazon has to set up shop at the one place where the affordable housing initiative was set to take place. And then there's the Dreamer subplot. The writers tried to retcon that Nia wasn't taken completely in by Nxy by now saying, "Well, I was totally onto her, but I just figured that once I was trained I would be able to stop whatever nefarious scheme she was up to." Yeah, not buying it. She knows what imps generally are., and this one was claiming that even in a low-powered state, she could BRING BACK THE DEAD. How are you, even with total mastery of dream powers, going to stop someone on that power level if she goes rogue? Good thing for Nxy that Kara decided to blast the cryonuke with her heat vision instead of just hurling the bomb into space or just melting the lead casing so that it could be disarmed through conventional means. The notion of trying to amp up concern that Kara herself might be trapped in ice doesn't work too well when you are actively showing that J'onn can phase her and himself through solid matter.

Presumably, Supergirl initially blows Kelly/the hospital off, but then comes around and helps out in the end. Again, considering that Kara could within a few hours airlift the entire set of patients to hospitals across the country, or rebuild the imploded hospital in National City, or probably do a half-dozen things I haven't thought of, the notion that Kara is too preoccupied/busy to help with a simple task is not a great look. I don't mind highlighting issues, but would prefer that they didn't do it at the expense of either taking time from the main character, or making her look incompetent or indifferent, or sometimes all of the above.

There's a difference between cooking something good enough to wow a judge and cooking something that's good enough to beat the worst dishes in the competition. I am guessing if Autumn had flipped her dishes and served the creme brulee first, she wouldn't have been deemed safe for it for the same reason why Kelsey's soup wasn't enough to make her safe. The judging standards that they seem to use for Masterchef go something like: An ambitious dish well executed>a simple dish well executed>an ambitious dish with minor flaws>a simple dish with minor flaws>a dish with serious flaws>a dish with raw pork or chicken. The latter is the kiss of death as far as I've seen. Amber's simple dish had no issues with it. Kelsey messed up the butter for her sauce, which led to it seeming more like cafeteria food.

Well, I will give it to HK for surprising me by getting rid of the two most photogenic contestants they had left back to back. I said at least a few times that it was most likely that one of them would win since they were in shape and fit the mold of a "winner." That said, I would have booted Brynn over Steven and Kiya over Brynn, so what do I know? Let's see if I can bounce back from my prognostication failures: My prediction is that Megan wins it all. I don't think Kiya has a chance. Too coarse and unsophisticated. I think Trenton has obviously been doing really well. But the notion that he has apparently engendered this feud with Kya probably doesn't speak well of him.

I understand why Nia lacks confidence. That doesn't change that her lack of confidence or at least, going down this particular route to address her lack of confidence, is pretty stupid given what the show has established. The show has established that there are certain Naltorians who have the same abilities as Dreamer and have been for generations (and will be for generations stretching into at least the 30th century with her ancestor Nura). The show also established that there's a bunch of books that Nia's sister had been studying thinking that she would be the one to inherit the Dreamer powers. We have been given no information that Naltor has been destroyed or is difficult to access or anything like that. So among the sources of information that would help Nia potentially better control her powers that she would have potentially have access to and that would definitely be better than trusting a sketchy imp who your dream is yelling at you to distrust: 1. Her sister. OK,, let's say that the sister's jealousy and transphobia have persisted to the point that she won't help Nia. 2. The books that her sister had and presumably exist elsewhere. There presumably are other media that exist as a Dreamer Powers For Dummies that she could potentially access. 3. A number of currently living Naltorians who also have the power. Or even other Naltorians who don't have the power, but who have family members who have, or who have studied the ability, etc. As rare as the power might be, there have to be at least some other Naltorians besides her sister who could help. 4. Kelly. As a psychologist, she has (presumably) some grounding in dream interpretation. 5. J'onn. His general psychic abilities probably could help Dreamer better use her powers. 6. Brainy. Not only had he worked with Nura Nal in his future, but he has a goddarn time ship that could take Nia to a point in any number of points in the past/future that would let her learn directly or indirectly from Nia's mother, Nura, or any number of people with the powers. 7. Any number of aliens from other races who might be familiar with Naltorian dream abilities. Rather than pursue any of these or other avenues, Nia has fixated on her mother as the one route to get to better understand her powers. That's crazy. A lot of this just are problems created by the writers. Instead of showing us that Nia's got massive difficulties with using her powers or that Nia's wish to see her mother again is about grief rather than understanding about her powers, we get what we've gotten. Nia basically failing at the most superficial dream analysis possible. It shouldn't take Nia five seconds to connect the caged pink cat in her dream with the pink cat that she saw every day that she went to work at Catco, for instance. And when a dream owl tells her "don't trust others" you have to be super bad at dream analysis to be like, "the first thing I'm going to do is trust someone from a species I have been led to believe is untrustworthy, who is telling me exactly what I most want to hear even though I have no reason to believe it's possible."

In fairness, Kara had no particular reason to think that Nxy had hitched a ride and was also suffering from PTSD from her time in the Zone, so I can rationalize her not dwelling on the details of her time there. I would think that people would want to know about it, but also could see that they might not push until they thought she was ready to talk about it. Nia definitely should have gotten a clue that Nxy was up to no good. When the owl basically all but says "Nxy is a lying skank!"...The writers could have easily have made Nia look a whole lot less stupid if they wanted to. Make it so Nxy's manipulation of things was subtle, and Nia hadn't heard of imps to suspect that they are generally up to no good. I was under the assumption that the kids would be in the home with a better person -- perhaps even Kelly herself -- running the place. I could more easily buy the notion that James, a 6'+ person who had been getting into situations with Superman for decades, has some form of self-defense training and experience than 5'5" Kelly's training as an army psychologist. Not only does Andrea have a point, it would be singularly easy for Kara to whip out an article about what she and her friends like to do. For her to deliberately drag her feet on the assignment is kind of obnoxious. If she doesn't want to work at Catco any longer, and there's no real reason she should -- she can figure out other ways to make money, and she could simply write for her own blog or any other number of possible outlets in 2021 -- she should quit. Also, did I miss something? When did they get to be known to the world at large as "the Super Friends"? I know Dreamer had made a public debut and was covered in Catco, but when were Sentinel or Brainy mentioned? Hadn't J'onn kept out of the spotlight too? Part of the problem with trying to use aliens as a metaphor for real world problems is that sometimes it just doesn't work. I just will not buy the notion that an alien with an EMP power felt like he had no choice but to turn to a life of crime to feed himself and his kid brother, or to eke out an existence on minimum wage. Nia's whole problem is that she lacks confidence in herself and her abilities and she wants to be told how to handle them by someone else. Her dream owl is telling her something that she really needs to hear: that she needs to trust her instincts and not be so desperate to listen to other people. Obviously there's a point where ignoring advice from others is potentially as dangerous as following advice from random people, if not more so. But where Nia is now, she probably needs the "trust in yourself" message highlighted first.

Interesting concept. I doubt that the winner will be anything but Supernatural or Flash. Also it seems odd that it does not include Veronica Mars or the Gilmore Girls. Maybe it is just recency bias.