SeanC

Huh, colour me surprised. I figured given the comparatively short run-time that Arya was likely to miss another premiere. According to this interview, Alfie Allen more or less blabs the entirety of the early Sansa/Theon plot. If this is legit, the show really needs to staple Alfie's mouth shut. SECOND EDIT: This is legit, apparently?

Jane's such a neurotic worrier that was kind of surprised she didn't immediately think about postpartum depression when observing Petra. It was my first thought from her demeanour. Maybe it was the hair, but the actress playing the young Alba reminded me a bit of Jane in some of the shots. It's a mark of the quality of storytelling here that at no time during the episode did I think "wait, Jane and Michael can't move that far away from the rest of the cast; it would impede storytelling". Though seriously, I found the attitude toward Rafael's offer to pay a bit unsatisfying. I get that for Michael it's a bit awkward, but Rafael is Mateo's dad and by law Jane would be entitled to significant child support. I also thought it was slightly implausible that Jane would be so fine with moving that far away from her family -- even apart from how little sense that makes, frankly, given that they have a young baby and close proximity to so many relatives would be a huge advantage. I know from comparing my own experience (raised fairly distant from most of the extended family) versus those of my cousins and their children who were a lot more closely knit.

Paula got off pretty lightly for torpedoing Rebecca's friendships with Josh's family and her truce with Valencia.

Dany's Season 6 story feels like the one where we know basically all the major plot and character beats already (indeed, it's basically what people could have guessed even without any filming info). There are other stories we know a lot about too, e.g., Arya, but even knowing most of Arya's plot there are some things up in the air, like how exactly she comes to leave the Faceless Men.

Jon/Meera incestuous Targaryen marriage confirmed.

Superman thinks Batman goes too far, not that he's not hunting bad guys. And a convey with military grade weaponry is pretty damn suspicious. That he doesn't even look into it is dumb.

My choice for dumbest moment: Batman is chasing Lex's men through the city (Gotham?), having a brutal firefight. Superman shows up, trashes Batman's car and tells him to quit...and then does nothing to apprehend the bad guys.

For a long time I thought the dragonhorn was out, but having considered the apparent story developments this season, I'm now of the opinion it's probably in. I mean, Euron is in the show, and the horn is somehow a part of his plans, and now it looks like the Ironborn mission to Slaver's Bay is still on, but with Yara and Theon instead of Victarion. The mission can't be about ships, and it can't be character-specific as a result of the swap (Yara and Theon being rather different characters from Victarion, whose primary motivation is to marry Dany; hey, maybe that's why Yara is into girls now?), so that really leaves the horn. Plus, if Euron is going to be a threat to Dany, he needs to have some challenge to dragonpower.

Apparently Lois' photographer in her first scene was supposed to be Jimmy Olsen, and originally to be played by Jesse Eisenberg. I didn't hate this movie, but this whole article pushes me further in that direction. Like, you're telling me we could have had a traditional intimidating Lex Luthor played by Bryan Cranston, but instead we got whatever the hell Eisenberg was doing? This article is clearly meant to be a cool bit of trivia, but it's actually a catalog of a terrible decision-making process. And to top it off, the "joke" loses both of the things that were meant to make it funny/shocking, since Jimmy isn't named or played by a recognizable actor.

The villain of the Justice League film is obviously Darkseid, based on BvS. Not that that was surprising, mind you.

Okay, so: I award this movie my prestigious "not that bad" award. It's far from a great movie. Everything to do with setting up the Justice League movie make Iron Man 2 look like an exemplar of smoothly integrating worldbuilding into the story by comparison. It's like the plot stops occasionally so that Batman and Wonder Woman can look at YouTube videos for a few minutes at a time, or receive cryptic visions of the future (also, if Lex had all this information, why wasn't he doing anything with it?). There's some wonky editing in places. I don't understand why Superman can hear whenever Lois is in danger but can't find his mom even though she's in the same city, nor why Lex's minions don't kill Martha the second it becomes clear that somebody is here to rescue her (why keep her alive?). I expect the film's version of Lex will be very divisive; Eisenberg's tic-heavy performance is a bit much in places, and doesn't remind me much of the version of Lex I tend to prefer. For much of the film I was wondering why he was even trying to kill Superman, since the movie never really offered much of an explanation for that, but from his final scene he's apparently just Darkseid's witting(?) lacky -- though that it turn is kind of a questionable choice for Superman's main villain. The rest of the movie is, on the whole, a fairly competent execution of what it's trying to do. A lot of people will take a dislike on principle to a story about thuggish douchebag Batman becoming obsessed with killing Superman, which I can understand; that said, it tells that story fairly well, though them immediately becoming allies feels a bit like a turn on a dime. I like Superman and Lois' relationship, and Wonder Woman, while she doesn't get much to do here, looks cool. How much time did they have to spend rehearsing the blocking in that Lois bathtub scene to keep from showing her nipples, I wonder?

If anything, I would think his season's developments would suggest that's much less likely. Sansa (and Littlefinger, for that matter) are now firmly in the midst of the "realm is getting invaded by ice zombies" story; it wouldn't seem like going down to attack Casterly Rock would be much of a priority for her.

No way. Too much money on the table. It may mean a major revision of their plans, which always seemed overly ambitious to announce right out the gate, perhaps including the creative team.

Nothing, since he was following the law that governs lawyers. Lawyers are the only people in the world who are actively not allowed to say anything in that scenario. One of the key precepts of the legal system is that everyone deserves legal representation, and confidentiality rules are a vital part of the functioning of the system. Lawyers can't decide to forget them whenever the person is sufficiently unpopular, or the entire system collapses. A lawyer like MacLeish would properly be disbarred. I'm a lawyer, and legal ethics are often hard to follow, precisely because they often cut against what ordinary people would expect a person should do. But those rules exist for a reason.

Ahem, despite the song claiming that it would never be clear whether what Rebecca was seeing was a hallucination or actually magic, magic is the only explanation for how she could have correctly imagined all those people meeting at her apartment. Shenanigans! They tried to make Lil Rebecca's hair look more like Adult Rebecca's this time, which wasn't all that flattering on her, but Ava Acres is really good in the role. The recurring presence of the younger version is one of the things about this show that reminds me of Jane the Virgin. This week in the "the show doesn't really know what to do with Heather" chronicles, she's not even included in the group of people worried about Rebecca.

That was a mis-type. I should have said "film" (I don't know whether he did that in real life or not).

Properly speaking, what MacLeish did in the novel was highly unethical for his profession. Of course, trying to convince audiences of the paramount importance of client confidentiality to the legal profession is generally a lost cause.

With no other major animated/family releases scheduled until the end of April, Zootopia should have a lot of gas left in the tank.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie: This is a property that is so widely-known in pop culture that I was interested to go back to the original source (well, that would be the play, I guess, but the novel is the Barrie work that most people actually read). The most famous iteration of this story is the 1953 Disney version, of course, and when you consider how many of their adaptations stray wildly from the source, their Peter Pan is quite faithful, albeit toned down (there's quite a lot of killing here, even by John and Michael). A lot of details you would guess might have been made up, like the kids have a dog for a nanny, are actually from the book. Barrie's very active narrative voice is consistently fun. The final chapter, which hasn't made it into other media adaptations much, is intriguingly wistful, though at the same time the final paragraph of the preceding chapter is also very obviously written as if to be a conclusion to the novel. Also, yes, the "redskins" are pretty racist in the original form too. Though Tiger Lilly is a warrior in this novel.

Jon was never legitimized or named as heir in the show. Regarding some of the other spoilers:

He doesn't look anything like Ivan Ooze.

The action in this looks fantastic.