DaveSumm

I guess I’m in the minority, but I didn’t love this one. But that’s kinda on me, it was as good a crossover between these two shows you could ask for. I just love the competence porn, and I’ve compartmentalised Lower Decks in my head to account for that. I enjoy it but I don’t take it seriously as an actual depiction of Starfleet. So this felt like a clash for me, and basically every scene involved someone being grossly unprofessional when it comes to temporal protocol. Mostly Boimler and Mariner obviously, but none of the crew of the Enterprise helped at all. Pike just gave up trying to manage the situation, Boimler was provoked to tell them more, and Spock outright asked him about his future. It all felt strange when two episodes ago, this exact problem nearly destroyed the Federation. The rest was quite neat, it was a nice touch to have the Orion pirate thing come full circle. But didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous two.

My assumption is that the trailer shows them struggling with swapping places every time, but the climax will feature them working seamlessly together and using it to their advantage, so each enemy gets a coordinated attack from all three; a punch from Captain Marvel, some phasing thing from Monica and a fake light thingy from Ms Marvel, all in quick succession. Kinda like how Dr Strange kept portalling everyone in Infinity War to attack Thanos. Which sounds like a cool concept, and if well directed it could make for some good action sequences. I’m not sure that the trailer really gives away much, we already knew the above from the ending of Ms Marvel and other than that, seems like your basic ‘there’s a bad guy, we need to stop her’. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I’m fairly agnostic on Cap, enjoyed Ms Marvel, not that enthused by Monica but we’ll see. Of course the trailer for Secret Invasion looked great, and that’s proving pretty weak. I just don’t think we can judge nearly as much from a trailer as some like to.

It’s having a great run, this show. They’re really threading the needle with classic Trek plots, but good character exploration on the way. One complaint here is that it was SUCH a classic Trek setup, that the first thing I thought was ‘is this aliens trying to communicate’ and it took a long time to actually get there. Then once they did, they seemed to sacrifice the technobabble for a moment of trust between Pike and Uhura, which is fair enough. But really all she was going on was the ‘burnt out receiver’ having a nice ring to it, and her contorting these visions into some meaning. She really wasn’t “certain” at all. I would rather have seen Kirk and Uhura puzzle out from what they knew, that organic substance X would be present if they were correct, quick scan, cool, blow up the station. Maybe I’m reading too much into it but did anyone think the conversation between Kirk and his brother went out of its way to establish this was the Prime timeline? “Our father WHO IS TOTALLY ALIVE STILL…”

It’s incredibly obvious that all this “Blue Beetle is the first character in the DCU” talk is just to salvage the box office of another film in a dead universe. If Superman Legacy flops then it’s a different question. I’d like to think Superman still carries a lot of weight and should bring people in. Especially if any of the shows before it are as good as Peacemaker and they can push the angle that this is all a new universe. But if it did flop? I dunno, maybe DC just admit defeat and give up trying to make a universe.

Maybe I worded it poorly, I don’t mean privatisation has no negative side effects. I mean that, it clearly isn’t true that everything would be better if we hadn’t privatised the water industry. The exact opposite trend across UK areas holds, the more nationalised, the worse the water. There’s absolutely a shit ton of money that goes to shareholders that could be put to better use, but the ideal solution there is that Ofwat takes a firmer hand on what money is allowed to go where and on what. I’m not here defending everything Thames does, the financial management has been absolute jank for far too long (although the previous owners are more to blame there tbh), but it doesn’t then follow that privatisation must have been bad; the initial argument in its favour was to improve water quality, and it’s done that.

Well, I was talking about water in the UK specifically … and my evidence being, the thread I / HoI linked.

That thread is excellent, and the previous one he links to at the end of that thread: I’d be interested to know the specifics of the Anglian boil notices (I work for Thames Water, monitoring drinking water quality), but my guess is cryptosporidium. It’s the one pain in the arse bacteria that chlorine doesn’t catch, which means you have to set up physical filters. And it doesn’t show up on chemical tests, which means you have to periodically (daily on some sites) send the filters back to the lab for someone to examine under a microscope and just plain old look for them. But it’s one of those things that you couldn’t possibly rig every treatment works to 100% eliminate, you have to work with the probabilities of finding it. If there’d been a sudden increase then I don’t know that Anglian could’ve done much, assuming they got the boil notices out when they should’ve. Just unlucky really. But yea, that thread makes clear that there’s really no adverse relationship between privatisation and quality, quite the opposite.

That’s very close to my ranking @Ran, although I’d put Revenge of the Sith below Phantom Menace. People seem to remember it as the one where all the cool stuff happens, but for me literally every one of those moments was a) inevitable so we can’t really credit the film for it and b) fucking terrible. Basically anything with adult Anakin automatically gets demoted to bottom.

How on earth anyone sits through a fucking hour of him doing that voice is beyond me. And I say that as someone who doesn’t mind their other stuff, I loved watching their Picard reviews. Cosmonaut Variety Hour holds the crown for prequel take downs for me. I’ve watched it like four times now, it’s like crack to me in a sea of “well the PT may not X, but at least they Y” (where X is the very basics of the first hurdles of making a coherent story, Y is some bullshit).

This list has it down to 10, with some bonus ones if you had more time: https://www.gamesradar.com/ahsoka-the-clone-wars-rebels-essential-episodes-star-wars/ Ahsoka (the show) seems fairly unique in that its entire premise is following on from Rebels, as close to a straight sequel as the Filoni stuff has done.

It’s a strange conviction everyone has that the sequels won’t enjoy the same reappraisal that the PT did. Why wouldn’t they, they’re better movies. Give it 20 years, when all the kids have grown up.

Nailed what though? Making something that existed? That was marketed, and so kids watched it, and now they have nostalgia for it? What are we praising him for exactly?

It was Aquaman, which did bafflingly well. This is still head and shoulders above all other reasons for me. DC is a confusing mess, and they helpfully flagged this one as one you definitely don’t need to see. (Paradoxically, this was the reason I did see it; I thought it would tee up the Gunn stuff far more than it did). It’s gonna be quite an adjustment for many people, that this is the first Superman movie to take place in any universe. Superman (78) was by itself, Returns was a sort-of sequel to that, Man of Steel was later turned into a universe but they never made a sequel once that was established. So we’ve never seen Superman rub shoulders with other superheroes in his own movie.

Well it wasn’t boring I guess. But damn that action scene made precious little sense. Thank god two old guys showed up in their H reg Land Rover with its spacious boot and remote door opening capabilities, armed with the same weaponry as the people already on the scene. Really turned the tide of battle that did.

Almost tempted to put this in UK politics, but did anyone see Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland? I’m embarrassed how little I knew about The Troubles. In my head I’d framed it as a bunch of terrorist incidents basically, when really it was fully fledged civil war on British soil. It’s insane. With the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, there’s always that option hanging over it of the US withdrawing. However politically unviable that may have been, it still sticks in your head as an out; “man, they should never have gotten involved in this”. But with the Troubles, yes Catholics should’ve been given equal voting rights. But beyond that, it’s just a fucked up situation that I’m not really sure that anyone could’ve done much about it. The population was just too segmented, too much history and animosity between them, for it to go anywhere good. Which isn’t to excuse any of the behaviour of the British, they certainly exacerbated things more than they needed. But actually averting this entirely? I’m not seeing how that could’ve happened once you got to the late 60s.

In fairness to Scot, it’s a commonly held belief about the Copenhagen Interpretation. And it persists because the theory doesn’t have anything better to supplant the consciousness notion; one might well ask “well if consciousness doesn’t define what a measurement or observation is, what does?” … to which a Copenhagenist replies *cough* …. uh, well … *trails off incoherently*. (I’m an Everettian, FYI)

Also, was that a £10 note that he put down to cover a full English and a coke in a central London eatery? Unlikely. And he started with the TOMATO for fucks sake, in case anyone in the place had any doubt he was a Skrull.

I kinda went easy on the first two, hoping it was building to something. But I have to admit defeat here, was that the dullest near-WW3 there’s ever been? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s like the cast couldn’t be fucked with this one and everyone seemed to be begrudgingly going through the motions. Don’t really care for this Talos-Fury relationship that we only learned about two weeks ago, and therefore don’t really care about the ins and outs of who’s to blame for what. I thought the same thing about shooting the guards, and didn’t notice they were Skrulls (which is fine apparently…?). They were called Icers in Agents of SHIELD, actually quite a clever way of saying “look, they look like guns but we’re A Teaming this, nobody actually dies”. They could easily have used something similar.

I liked it. Classic Trek premise, some good performances. It was a little odd how they almost mocked that Ortega hadn’t had an episode, teeing her up for one and then disappointing her. But then it circled back to … sort of being an Ortega episode? But I don’t think it counts. It’s only a little thing, but I love how they don’t fall for annoying tropes; La’an would absolutely have hidden that first instance of tinnitus back in the 90s and brushed it off. It shouldn’t be so refreshing to have someone say “excuse me, I just had some memory loss and I should really go to sick bay”.

Although it is hard to imagine someone creating the silo and wondering “wait, how will people see out of the viewer?” “How about this: we rig a helmet with this awesome AR capability…” Like … if you have that technology, don’t you have automated window wipers?

I thought Robbins did a good job there of splitting the difference, you could read his performance as not knowing about the door, or not knowing that she knew, or maybe neither. I’m kinda annoyed at myself that I didn’t figure out what was going on earlier, than it suddenly hit me when she emerged - how would a recording have ever made its way back to the silo? And it gives them a reason to clean. And far easier to fool one person temporarily than thousands perpetually.

It’s a great example of how much better the pacing is in SNW than the hyper-frenetic Discovery. In the time it took La’an to have a nice character moment like this, Disco would’ve burned through 5 pages of dialogue. And on the other end of the spectrum, this episode is basically the same premise as the entirety of Picard Season 2 and yet told a far more effective story in its single hour.

Yea did you notice she said “this was supposed to happen in the 90’s”? I guess they’re implying there’s been slight changes that shifted that forward, but that’s quite the can of worms there if Shatner Kirk remembers it differently to Wesley Kirk. Maybe SNW isn’t canon to TOS after all…

Yea this is the one wildcard, I have no idea how much this will factor in. Aquaman 2? Who the fuck knows. By rights it should flop as well, but why on earth did the first one make so much? Critics didn’t care for it, Aquaman had a rushed introduction in a terrible Justice League film. Still baffled by that one, so all bets are off for the sequel.

Any guesses on how well Blue Beetle does? It’s lumbered with the same problems as Flash (except one glaring one), doesn’t have Batman Flash or Supergirl, and features a superhero nobody had heard of until now. This could flop really, really hard.