Sandman

To be honest, getting the leadership to file shift reports and then go over them in detail one-on-one does seem like micromanaging to me. (But then the glimpses we've seen so far of Pascal's imploding personal life don't fill me with confidence in his judgment, and Stella doesn't have that kind of information.) Also, could we dispense with the B-plots where the secondary characters act like sophomoric wiener-heads, please? This show's been on for a billion years, and the antics are getting older than Hermann's kids -- the rank-and-file chuckleheads need to grow up already.

Yeah, this felt like a pile-on. Although I must say I was really moved by the conclusion of the story of the mother who couldn't recognize her kids. (Full disclosure: my own mother had a severe stroke about 20 years ago, and I was definitely feeling some emotional parallels.) Not the best pilot I've ever seen but not the clankiest, either; I'll stick with it a while, at least.

I agree. I also have great sympathy for Wolf in having to deal with his insistently undermining mother -- I don't think he has "Mommy issues," I think his mother has no concept of personal or professional boundaries. (If it turns out that his mother has some degree of narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder, you can colour me unsurprised.) It seems Oliver was unwilling to work at his mother's hospital for a very good reason. I mean, I'm glad to have Donna Murphy back on my tv, but, come on! Also, show, bump up the lighting budget -- it feels like a haunted hospital in a Ryan Murphy show. (And no, that's not a good thing.) And yeah -- Teddy Spears is totally playing Dr. Spiky Future Love Interest.

I ended up re-watching Last Stand last night, partly to see if it was as bad as I remembered. It was worse. Everyone is pissy and awful to each other (except possibly for Hank) and Storm seems particularly out of character. (Maybe the “hurricane spin” (WTF?) move she does in this movie gave her some sort of TBI.) I get that the cure is supposed to divide the community, or whatever, but I just ended up hating everyone. And Pyro needs to shut all the way up forever. Dark Phoenix is whacked out, but even it’s not the deranged mess that X-Men: Wolverine’s Last Manpain is. Oy gevalt.

The secondhand embarrassment I feel for Dermot Mulroney just keeps growing worse. So, Severide finally gets to be a Fire Cop, is what I take away from all the Damon-drama.

Am I the last one to notice the code in the episode titles? This one is so oddly worded (in a “Somebody really wanted to name the organization ‘SHIELD’” way) I looked at all of them. In sequence, the first letter of each word in the episode title spells out “The Saint is the true sinner.”

I think Liljana’s so deep in denial about what a user Pawel is that she has no choice but to believe him when he blames other people for his behaviour, including Dr. Charles and Ripley. On some level she knows he's a liar and a cheat, and yet ...

Voight's never seen a mandatory requirement he couldn't ditch, I bet.

Michael Bradway (playing Damon) bears a fair resemblance to a young Treat Williams. Nice work by the casting director there. Pascal's dynamic with his wife was weird. And kind of icky. That's ... pretty much all I got.

I watched Black Widow, and I enjoyed it; I loved the Hawkeye series (and Yelena). There were things I enjoyed about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but USAgent/Capt. ‘MurricaFkYeah and the aforementioned Allegra were a huge misfire. I doubt I’ll watch this one. It looks like a drag.

So how much would I have to pay Disney to make Valentina Allegra de Don’tcare Wossname just go away? I can’t abide this character. (It isn’t nice to make me find Julia Louis-Dreyfus annoying, Marvel. Stop it.)

I guess that would depend on how long they kept you on the phone. … I’ll see myself out.

How I love this movie! Rickman and Juliet Stevenson are both wonderful in it.

Sounds like those goats are going to have to stay sharp!

I agree; I think both of these observations are well made.

There's almost no one in the show who is very sympathetic, and some characters are not sympathetic at all. For me Sol comes closest. I believe Sol truly killed Aniseya by mistake, and he had no way of knowing (as far as the audience could tell) that her changing form did not represent an overt threat. The young version of Mae seemed more than a little unbalanced to me -- filled with rage at her sister's "betrayal" (i.e., wanting a choice of her own). I found it harder to feel for her. It's not just the Jedi who behaved like jerks. None of the adults told the children the truth, as far as I could tell. I still don't know why Osha agreed to be trained by Smilo (hee! -- better than the "Darth Underbite" I was working on) -- other than to take her sister's place. The motives of the Stranger (as the captions call him) are at best unconvincing, even if I find the Jedi's insistence that repression is the path to wisdom insupportable. I don't really care that he thinks he should do whatever he likes with power. That makes him a bully; it doesn't make him interesting. (The further we move away from the original trilogy, the more sure I am that no one has ever actually sat down and worked out logically what the Jedi stand for and why they train their apprentices the way they do. "Emotion is Bad" seems like a wilful misunderstanding of Buddhism, at best, and adding details like Midichlorians to give a scientific-sounding basis for Force powers feels like contempt for the audience's intelligence.) I agree that the sisters' motivations often seemed to change as the plot required. The series could have been tightened into 3 or 4 episodes -- it felt padded and the pace was the best in the pilot episode(s). It must be said that some of the dialogue is just amateurish here; I caught basic errors of grammar and syntax. ("Above is the stars"? Come on, writers.)

THIS. OMG THIS. But also this.

I thought this multiple times throughout the movie. I finally got around to watching this, and I don't understand why it didn't do well. It was charming and fun, and the stakes were high enough to have me invested in the outcome, and Iman Vellani is adorable. Giving Carol a team, and a family, to play off of brings out the best in Brie Larson's performance. (And if I don't get to see Zenobia Shroff's Muneeba again, I'll be sad.) Okay, so, having the Fluerkens swallow the evacuees whole was goofy, but it made more sense than 84.3% of Ant Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. (Seriously, someone has to sit me down and explain Kang to me like I'm 5. But, er, not here, obviously.) But probably not their feet, hurhur. (See the "Liefeld's" sign in the teaser.)

Well, now I'm a little verklempt.

Did I forget, or did the TVA Handbook not exist last season? In other words, is the Handbook retconned (in-show) into existence, or did we just not see as much of it last season? (I also love Casey's fanboying over OB. My nostalgia for Short Round makes such enthusiasm seem only right and necessary.) "No timeslipping inside the TVA" seems, like most time-wimey stuff in this show, a rule that's negotiable at best. The show talks about branching timelines, but OB's having memories in the future of a past as it's being created seems to argue against the "rules" stipulated in Endgame that you can't alter your past by travelling in time. (And ... now I need to have a little lie-down. Again.) Hilarious, infuriating and kind of sad, all at the same time. One more thing: does anyone else think the Loom look more like a spindle? I guess The Drop-Spindle of Time doesn't sound so awe-inspiring. It's not confirmation bias; it's extermination bias. :: rimshot ::

Yeah -- CameBackWrong!Al would be a fearsome thing; far more disturbing than HypovolemicShock!Al, I would guess.

I was genuinely surprised to see Hypovolemic Shock!Al show up in Voight’s head. Not putting Elias Koteas’s name in the opening credits to preserve the surprise was a good decision. I think I was disappointed only that Al didn’t get to snark to his old partner about how “getting shanked sucks, don’t it?” That probably makes me a bad person. I think the writers basically painted themselves into a corner with Upton, so there was nothing else to do with the character— but the father/daughter dynamic that the episode kept telling us existed was a poor retrofit to what previous seasons actually established between them. It felt slapdash to me.

Was this the season finale? Felt like it. We knew there was going to end up being a giant fustercluck firefight. But I found myself actively hoping Oscar’s getaway car would blow sky-high.

Oh, agreed. Or, to put it another way, how is Oscar STILL a thing? Matthew Glave has never been my favourite actor, and it would take a performance exponentially more entertaining to make this character work for the kind of mileage they’re trying to get out of him. “Fl — flames. Flames on the side of my face!” So. Much.

Jubal does seem saddled with more than his fair share of idiots.