DaveSumm

Looks like he was EP for Punisher’s excellent first season, but also it’s quite shit second season. Still, sounds like good news overall.

Am I remembering things correctly, did the Loki who saw Sylvie get out of the elevator in episode one get killed with the death stick thing? Or was that a change that slightly-older-Loki initiated? If it was the same, how did that Loki get back to his present? 

Sam Campbell is that great combination of funny, but also actually wants to win. I don’t mind Julian Clary but damn, he’s a contender for “most blatantly here for the pay cheque” of the whole show.

Did anyone notice how they very swiftly implied that the entire warp speed limit saga of TNG was just a hoax, and then moved on? 

3 hours ago, Rhom said:

Wasn’t he just exhausted and looking for escape at the end of last season?

Maybe, but even then, delivering the manual yourself and taking some sleeping pills seems like far less work than everything he did.

41 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I swear it said sacred timeline when Renslayer first arrived at the earlier time period, and then was a seperate timeline later on. I might be wrong.

Yea that’s correct, so leaving the manual was what created the branch. Although thinking about it, there’s no reason at all that the sacred timeline has to be the one that HWR is from. So the sacred timeline isn’t a timeline that contains 1 Kang, it’s a timeline that contains 0. Now that HWR remains has been killed, it looks like he’s set into motion a sequence of events that opens up all these other Kangs (Ravonna leaving the manual), to presumably create himself again.

I still don’t really get why he didn’t just … not do everything in Season 1 (manipulating Loki and Sylvie to end up killing him), and just take the manual himself. Same effect, but he stays alive.

In fairness, I guess Majors has been told he may end up playing dozens of different Kangs so he needs to create space for it.

I enjoyed it too, although I still think the show needs to buckle down and explain what the stakes are and focus. You’ll notice the Worlds Fair stuff was all a branched timeline, implying this isn’t how Timely originally got so smart. But I assume the kid is ‘our’ Kang, that he’s always born in the 19th century. Hard to see how he would ever go on to become any Conqueror / He Who Remains without TVA intervention. 

I’m really hoping we don’t get the same idea we have with Lokis, that someone who clearly has different genes and a different name is just “a Kang” for some reason. 

5 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Pretty sure we've got a water company spokesperson here. I look forward to the justification. 

You’ll get no ‘justification’ from me, or for half the shit Thames does. But it’s the “therefore, privatisation bad” part of the logic I just never see evidence for. From Wikipedia:

Quote

In 2001, Welsh Water became a not-for-profit organisation with no shareholders. This differentiates it from all the other water companies operating in England and restores it to the same organisational status as water supply utilities in Scotland and the pre-privatisation water supply undertakings in England

So what is it we should do with Welsh Water exactly?

I’m pages away from finishing Lost Metal, then I’ll start the secret projects. It’s bonkers that I started reading the Cosmere just before Lost Metal was out, and he’s released 5 more books in the time it took me to read.

12 hours ago, dog-days said:

I checked out after ten minutes of Loki episode 2 to go watch Futurama instead. Mobius and Ourobouros are fun, but in general it's too frenetic – not enough time for character moments or building atmosphere. 

Should’ve stuck around for more than 10 minutes, there were plenty of character moments.

I was really glad to see others wonder if they missed an episode, I had no clue why they were hunting X5, or why they need to find Sylvie so desperately. It took me a while to realise X5 was the same guy from the first episode. 

The season is short on exposition but I think I read it as follows; the TVA always used to clip timelines before they had a chance to establish themselves as full Branched Universes. They thought this was to preserve the sacred timeline, but actually it was Kang preventing other Kangs. But now, the TVA all know that it was a ruse and have split into factions; Renslayer is off doing something we don’t know yet, that other women figured that bombing all of them was the best plan (clipping back to the sacred timeline, except this time it’s tragic because these are branch timelines and therefore everyone in them dies instead of being merged back).

I actually don’t think I understand what Loki and Möbius’s feelings are here? They definitely wanted to stop the bombings, but also definitely want to stop Kang…? So what’s their strategy? I’m also having to adhoc some logic about the flow of things; possibly TVA time is tied to Kang, so now that he’s ‘dead’, even though that’s the end of time, they share the same linear flow of time that Kang does so he’s also not overseeing things anymore? Or something.

I’ve seen a lot of people welcome this as good news but I can’t really tell. Either it was heading to be on par with the other fairly weak shows we’ve had, and they wisely shook things up. Or, it was quite good but a bit bold, and they Marveled it and bled it dry of any distinguishing creativity and it’ll turn out fairly weak. 

Hopefully they just get as much of the Netflix team back and make season 4. If this turns out as good as Daredevil’s weakest season, it’d be my favourite D+ show.

Yea really enjoyed that. I hope this season starts to pull together some threads so we can start building to Kang Dynasty / Secret Wars.
 

FYI there’s a post credit scene.

That was a pretty mental speech. I can only assume they’re trying to court the working class vote, and trying to sell the idea that two of their boogeymen (the Rich and the Woke) are actually the same? What? I was genuinely confused that I’d missed a section when she started talking about people who advocate for human rights “in their ivory towers”. I don’t associate woke with rich in the slightest. 

2 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

That doesn't necessarily mean much, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's a good idea to privatize in general.

That’s true, I just see UK water used a lot to ‘prove’ that it must be a bad idea when the stats don’t really support that.

2 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

Because ultimately 'making money' is not a good general goal for a company that provides a required service to people. This is true for utilities and it's true for healthcare. 

‘Saving money’ isn’t a good general goal for governments either. I think privatisation should be considered very carefully in all instances, but for me it’s more complicated than a blanket ‘bad or ‘good’. 

4 hours ago, Spockydog said:

In 2022 there were over 389,000 discharges of untreated sewage into UK rivers, totalling over 2.4 million hours of pollution.

See tweet 11.

4 hours ago, Spockydog said:

The UK is consistently ranked as one of the worst countries in Europe for water quality.

See tweet 17.

Anyway, I don’t wanna keep going to bat for this stuff, but to bring it sort of back to the thread: in this case I really don’t believe that privatisation is the root problem here. The government is entirely welcome to set whatever standards it wants for water companies, but if they were footing the bill then that’s a huge disincentive for them to raise those standards.

Water quality, both drinking and waste, has unequivocally improved since privatisation. 

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

@SeanF  Why did you all in the UK want to give up the rights and management of, o, say, your water resources, which has been done there, to the private corporations who now dump their private, untreated sewage and waste into them?  Do you really think private management of all aspects of public health well-being is made you better off?  Really?

Shared in the UK thread a while ago but I’ll share it again:

https://x.com/loftussteve/status/1659637753158545414?s=46&t=OTLdG0wwYT1_7Eb_nXeJlw

(Why some tweets embed and some do not, only God / Ran knows)

So this is how the last thread dies … with more PT bashing. 

Which I, for one, am all for. Please continue.

4 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

Having lines like 'this is how democracy dies - to thunderous applause' is a fucking banger of a line that is not a cute or kid thing. 

Anyone else hate this line? It thinks it’s a lot more clever than it is. All a bit r/im14andthisisdeep.

(Also it’s liberty fyi).

I’ve just barely heard of GB News let alone anyone on it.

6 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

 Why judge and shit on the entire trilogy just on that one character by bringing him up as a negative again and again, there’s a lot to love in those films (and dislike) One should acknowledge the good and the bad and not just be negative on them overall only. 

I’m happy to justify my negative take with these films because there is so precious little positive about them. They are, overall, terrible.

Jar Jar specifically, I think I agree with the Cosmonaut review I posted some threads back, I think Phantom Menace would be worse without him. He’s annoying, borderline racist, there to sell toys, but FUCK the movie would just be so lifeless and dull without him. At least he’s trying to emote something. Not like every other cast member who just flatly tells some other characters where the plot’s going to go next. 

54 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

So why is he held in such high regard? Is it just due to comparisons to Lucas and JJ that even a mild level of competence makes someone seem like a genius. 

Kinda I guess. As mentioned before, he did more work with Anakin in CW than Lucas did in three films. I think Mando Season 1 was excellent, the best Star Wars content since Empire. But I kinda agree the more plot it has the more bogged down it’s gotten. I certainly would’ve been interested to see his version of the ST, though I still haven’t heard a convincing story idea that anyone’s ST needs to exist at all. 

59 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

lmao come on. Are you really saying Filoni didn't use the character arc established for Anakin in the prequels,

But once again, we already knew this. We knew he was a friend and pupil of Obi-Wan’s, who fought in the clone wars, and then turned to the dark side. The grand total of his arc seems to be “he’s a whiny prick who then suddenly killed some kids”. Filoni was the one who actually bothered to include an arc, showing Anakin develop sympathies for more totalitarian politics, and actually trying to smooth over the two characters of Anakin and Vader.

59 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

create several plot arcs based around the Jedi Order

I mean maaaybe? I’m struggling to think of any critical details that Filoni really used as a jumping off point. They’re a bunch of stoics who sit around in a circle, there’s way less detail than we wanted to see. 

59 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

use Darth Sidious/Palpatine's presence based on the prequels

Again no, he was always going to figure in anyone’s version of the prequels. He’s the Emperor to whom Vader swears allegiance, he’s critical to Anakin’s story. 

59 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

use Order 66 as the ending point? 

OK, but it’s not like the entire series hinges on that. It ends up there, of course. 

Anyway the original point I was answering was that Lucas did something special that JJ/Disney didn’t, when really all he did was ask Filoni to make a series. Hence, a series exists. It could’ve existed regardless of who made the prequels, and would almost certainly be better for it.

38 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Seven seasons of Clone Wars on the one hand; Diddly squat post episode 9 on the other. 

Let’s not give prequel-era Lucas too much credit though, what does the Clone Wars series ultimately rely on? There’s a clone war going on, and there’s these guys called Anakin and Obi-Wan and Yoda fighting in it. I could’ve told you that in 1977. Filoni made a decent series, but I don’t see what ‘space’ Lucas provided other than what was already there.

9 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Do you guys feel that George Lucas’s ST story treatments would’ve given us a better trilogy than the Disney ST?

With him writing? Or directing? Fuck no. Let’s not forget that the whole reason Abrams was hired was because they wanted a safe pair of hands to get things back on track as the prequels were, quite famously at this point, utter utter dogshit.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t all this have been better if they’d never called it Episode 7? All it really was was a gimmick to get people excited. The sequels are a fresh trilogy in the same universe, and whenever they feel obligated to actually act as sequels to Episodes 1-6, they’re all the poorer for it.

56 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm still not opposed to the idea in the sequel trilogy, but still, the execution was poor and could have been done better regardless.  Why does the idea appeal? I think it feels very pulpy to have the big bad return when you think he was done for, and thematically I like the idea of the evil of the Sith being something that can't be dealt with as easily as just tossing someone down a reactor shaft. 

I maintain that there was simply nothing left on the table for JJ to do with Ep 9 that would tie it together as an actual saga, other than bringing Palpatine back. Regardless of where you land on Last Jedi, for me its worst crime is that it forgot to be part of the saga, it wanted to be its own movie and not a sequel to either TFA or anything that came before it.

Genuine question to those who hated Palps coming back; what would you have done with Ep 9 that would’ve been a fitting conclusion to the 8 films before it?