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Astronaut Howard Wolowitz that is. The snow-deciding choice of Caltech seems only marginally consistent with TBBT, where Sheldon broadcast is MIT distain by characterizing MIT as merely a "trade school." There was scant indication I recall in TBBT that that characterization was wholely based on where Howard Wolowitz went, though reading his characterization that way would make the two shows more consistent on this point. Also, I don't get how a peer-reviewed journal article could be published with a named author unaware he was to be named as a co-author, or even aware it had ever been written. What exactly was author Sheldon's contribution if he didn't even know the article had even been drafted, let alone submitted with his name as an author?

I questioned this too in a prior episode where Norma was angling to shoot someone with a revolver, and was puzzled why Norma, at least at this point, would still want to kill Maxime. Others pointed out that Maxime had been blatantly stealing Norma's stuff for months. That's of course true, but still didn't seem sufficient motivation for premeditated murder. I was more pursuaded by Maxime's seemingly genuine care and concern for Norma (with Maxime's self-serving motivation about Norma's estate still acknowledged). However, it's now very much clear that Norma is indeed intent on offing Maxime. In fact, that seems Norma's main goal in life at this point. What remains less clear is the full extent of why Norma is singlely focused on getting rid of Maxime. Yes, she never wanted the marriage to her nefrew, yes, she views Maxime as an undeserving unterloping hick who tricked her nefrew into marriage, and of course yes, Maxime has been stealing from Norma and distastefully "delacorting" about for months. There still seems to be more at work here. And in peak soap opera fashion, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone revealed to be an errant love child. The fact that Norma and Axel were deeply in love, and then Norma simply dissappeared for months, may be laying the foundation for a love child reveal, but who knows. But how any of this could relate back to Maxime is still hard to see. I thought the whale was going to save overboard Maxime. And while I appreciate many of the true and remarkable whale facts presented in this episode, I'm not sure a beached whale - especially one looking to be many yards from the shoreline - can simply "decide" to turn around and "walk" back into the water.

Bill was surprisingly supportive of this, and questioned whether Jillian was truly correct that this drug was bad for all all of of the time. This is also the first I recall of Bill ever expressing any sympathy for people with weight problems. Of course the basis of that seemed to be his own personal stoner "munchie" issues. Nevertheless, he agreed that for some, losing weight is a difficult challenge and not always an indication of poor self control. Based on this he seemed to push back on Jillian's view that no one should ever take this drug. Also, I know little about this drug, but if Jillian were correct that it essentially stops working after about 70 days, why are so many people taking it, and for longer than 70 days? Btw, lots of drugs work through mechanisms that are poorly understood, but we generally use them anyway.

A bit of googling tell me that at least 4 states do have a statute of limitations at least for the most severe class of homicide: Alabama, Indiana, Kansas and Virginia. Some other states (like Missouri and Montana) have an applicable statute of limitations for less severe classes of homicide. But the overwhelming majority of states (including New York) do not have any statute of limitations applicable to the most severe class of homicide. That was news to me too.

Apparently it is true that Florida has no statue of limitations for murder. I thought they made that up, but no. Nevertheless, as a matter of proximate cause, a twenty-year lag time is hard to sell for this "murder." You could almost just a plausibly blame a poor diet. I didn't quite catch what Norma was planning to do with that gun, though perhaps it's a simple as Robert jokingly(?) said, offing Maxime? Why would Norma be so angry with Maxine at this point? While she may never have wanted her nefrew to marry her in the first place, Maxine seems to be one of the few people, other than Robert, who truly care for her and show her some genuine kindness. What is Robert's deal anyway, and his connection to Norma? Is he some sort of secret love child of the Delcorte family or something?

Just as with its UK original incarnation, what works best for this reality show is that the competition seems gentle, cooperative and friendly. No one appears to be aweful, so you can root for just about anybody. I'd be curious about how many potential candidates passed through casting. They do seem to find basically nice and friendly people. There really can't be any truly objective measure of who should "win" most challenges since art is quintesentially subjective. Nevertheless, the artistic choices and talents of some do seem to exceed those of others. The chess sets episode confused me because in almost no one's set could you tell what any of the pieces really were. That is, no one's set was truly usable. I was surprised in the final episode that all three threw their spouts. More elegant, narrowly-tapered, and curved spouts can be pulled like a handles and then split in half, hollowed and rejoined. I do wonder how much happens off screen, like how they come up with their ideas (and whether at least some of that is fed to them) and how long it takes for them to draw what appear to be pretty detailed drawings beforehand. Also, I don't get why they use a "drying room." This show is not shown in real time so who cares if it takes an extra day or two to dry stuff. Studios I've used have "damp rooms" to slow the drying process, not speed it up. I suppose using a "drying room" may be a cost issue, to keep the filming process shorter to some extent? Keifer and Jenn's throwing skills seemed to rival those of Seth. I was rooting for Jackie and was sorry to see her go so early.

It was on the old invitation she found. Without actually reading the text from the invitation, I inferred that's what it said from the next scene where Maxime charges back home and demands to speak with Douglas right away. Moreover, this is the most strident and forceful we've seen Maxine so far, so that also suggested something quite serious. Also, on a somewhat petty note, at least to me, Kaia Jordan Gerber looks just like Rachel Bilson. Indeed, I thought her character was being played by Rachel Bilson, but was also puzzled by that. Though Rachel Bilson is still far from "old," at least outside of Hollywood (42), isn't she not quite young enough to play this part at this point? Kaia is 22.

Though this isn't as much of a "thing" as it once was since the novelty of a Prius as worn off a bit, but there has been a long line of TV episodes that used a Prius as a signal, or clarion for that matter, suggesting that the character driving it is virtuous and worthy of the audience's sympathy. Southpark did an entire episode about this years ago (they referred to it there as a "Pius" as I recall). Others that come to mind are Curb, Six Feet Under and Weeds.

The moon is not only objectively large for any moon, but by far the largest in size relative to the planet it orbits. That is, no moon in our solar system comes anywhere close to our moon as a percentage of mass of the orbited planet - here Earth. The part of this episode that didn't quite ring true was the premise that no one else other than team Aleida & Margo can solve this problem. Really? If these two don't team up, no one else, or no other group, in the entire world (or maybe even the world plus moon and Mars now) that can solve this problem? Also, is the Roscosmos head so thick that she's totally lost with her Margo earpiece? How did she get to her position knowing so little?

Because C.Z. Guest understood some things were better left unsaid when talking with Truman Capote. Maybe, but more likely because CZ was either left out of the infamous Capote writing, or portrayed more generously than the other Swans

Margo didn't rat him out. She only pointed out the error, not who made it. He took responsibility for that himself even though he personally didn't seem to have made that mistake but was in charge of who did (and he seemed to know of it too). Moreover, what alternative did Margo have? Should she have said "I can't find the mistake" to save some nameless Soviet bureaucrat she'd never met? What would happen to Margo if she did that? Margo was understandably weirded out by the whole affair because she was still the direct cause of the Soviet engineer's misfortune, even if she didn't know who he was, or what role he played in screwing up the English to metric translation. Moreover, in response to Margo's question about what would happen to him, the head Roscosmos gal promised Margo that his employment would simply "change." That appears to have been at best a euphemism (it's literally correct that going from "chief engineer" to "gulag prisoner" is a "change in employment"), but it more accurately seems to have been a flagrant lie. Margo was seemingly also upset because the one Roscosmos friend she seems to have made (who informed her of the KGB's kidnapping of the engineer) would drop Margo in a minute if that friend learned of Margo's involvement. Margo's demeanor appropriately displayed a mixture of fear, guilt and hopelessness.

Maybe, but there's really no way to know, or presume that it must be. While employers commonly require employees to agree that inventions developed as part of their employment belong to the employer (here NASA), this is not always the case. But employees can cut their own deals too, and Kelly is as far from a typical NASA employee as you can get - she's kind of "space royalty," and may have gotten some custom deal that gave her certain rights not normally shared with "ordinary" employees. Moreover, maybe NASA just didn't care. "Not caring" is more common than many might think. The very foundation of Microsoft is essentially due to a single fact: IBM didn't care about the rights to the operating system that Microsoft wrote for them because IBM was about hardware, not software. So when Microsort asked for those rights, IBM give that to them with little to no thought. While the Margo plot was tense and compelling, I found it confusing. Why does Margo need to keep her true identity and reason for being in Russia secret from the Russians themselves? Why didn't she just explain who she was? Maybe the thugs would have ignored that, but who was she protecting and why? If her "deal" with the KGB or whomever spirited her out of the US required her to keep her identity secret, we were never informed about that, nor why such a provision would need to adhered to under these circumstances. It just didn't make sense. It's not like she's in a witness protection program. She's in the foreign country for which she spied. In other words, she's on their side, and has no position with respect to the coup plotters or coup resistors. How and why would she take sides in that anyway? They can do that on Earth too. That's what the IRS does. Maybe the amounts shown so far (several thousand dollars) aren't high enough to trigger some inquiry, but there's no indication that he's mindful of this concern, and he should be. Compare his carefree attitude with that of say Carmela Soprano, who after secretly sealing some cash, was quite careful to open up multiple bank deposits so that no single deposit would exceed $10,000 because she knew that that's the deposit level that sets off IRS concerns.

I'd didn't quite buy her naivate about the presumed Soviet coup issues. She's been shown to be nothing but bright, and well enough attuned to emotional/social issues to secure the top spot at overly-bureaucratic NASA for decades. More specifically, she can read people and groups and navigate successfully around them (at least after being pushed by Von Braunto do that better). And apparently she's now fluent, or nearly so, in Russian (but with what seems to be a horendous still southern accent, however). How can she not get that this type of political turmoil is something best left unpoked? Even the baker knew to keep his mouth shut. Margo is presumably far smarter and worldly then he is. While she may not have grown up in a culture where people instinctively know to stay far away from certain kinds of trouble, she's certainly been there long enough to pick that up. That would seem to be a lot easier to learn than Russian. The Expanse was more attentive to scientific reality. The Expanse did not have people living for years on Mars' surface, unprotected from radiation issues. While For All Mankind mentions radiation issues and shows some radiation-caused damage (Molly's blindness and presumed death of the Dutch astronaut she saved), this show doesn't quite reach The Expanse's level of scientific authenticity. For All Mankind is also inconsistent with how it treats gravity issues, but it is still engaging and filled with interesting stories.

American beer is made to maximize sales and profits - that is, it's made so that people drink as much as possible of it. German beer manufacturers have other priorities. While many (maybe most) might agree that German beer generally tastes better, that's a wholly subjective judgment. On a flight from Zurich to NYC a while back, I sat next to a friendly Swiss gentleman who insisted on ordering an American beer. In his heavily accented English that to me was indistinguishable from that of someone from Germany, he explained he loved everything about the US (apparently including its beer) and was quite weary of anything German because he regarded the freedom enjoyed by Switzerland today as entirely the result of American support during WWII and resistence to Germany. Regarding the Sheldon's nameless roomate/frenemy and his computer science work on a Pascal compiler, I was surprised to hear that level of detail. Pascal is the first computer language I learned in the early 1980's and I continued to use it into the 1990s. I thought it sort of faded out by 1993 or so, but minimal googling confirms that not only was it still being used then, but work on various compilers for it was indeed also going on during this time. So, accuracy points for that. It's still around today, but it's sort of the betamax of computer languages at this point.

He has so much to confess, he'd hardly know where to begin. He only said he picked up a few words. That's believable enough after spending time there during the Korean War. No one - including Ed - tried to pass this off as "fluent," and he clearly had trouble with anything other than a few simple words. Too bad googletranslate doesn't exist (yet?) in this timeline. She was a compelling character, and will be missed, despite the inexcusable tryst with Danny. One of the things that keeps stories interesting on this show is the writters' ease with, and frequency of, killing off central characters. You can't count on anyone surviving, anywhere, any time. Just when you thought the Baldwins on Mars were are at the greatest risk of death or harm, the one on Earth gets blown up, and just before she can save anyone else (other than Danny's even stupider and more irresponsible brother). The most significant reason for this surprise is it really makes no sense at all. If any third country could be landing people on Mars, it would be China, or maybe India. But we have no information on what's going on in China in this timeline, or whether the USSR and China remain allied at all.