zslane

A metacharacter standing in for Marvel editorial. I like it.

I basically feel the same way, Hermit. This show passes my personal test for whether or not I'll watch a show: if it has main characters I like enough that I'd want to hang out with them if they existed in real life, then I'll watch the show, otherwise I won't. I'd like to hang out with about half of the main characters on The Orville, which is more than I can say for a lot of other shows I've watched in the past (before I had my rule).

I think it is because people enjoy messing with me. Which is fine. That is preferable to the alternative, which is far less charitable in nature.

Really? Has Marvel ever done a full roster count of the characters that Thanos wiped from existence? I would be surprised to find it is even close to 50% of the characters that actually existed in the 616 continuity. Unless it was just waved off with exposition, like, "And with a gesture, 99% of all superheroes in the entire universe were gone."

Who knows, you might be right, pinecone. WB/DC retconned her backstory from BvS, so who knows what else they'll do as these movies continue. After only two appearances they're already rewriting her narrative to fix the stupid decisions they made only a few years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if, after Justice League, they retcon the whole first WW movie to allow the second one to tell a completely different Diana Prince story. WB/DC still doesn't know how to get out of its own way (creatively).

Every time I click on someone's "Like This" button, I feel I am contributing to the inevitable downward spiral toward the future "Majority Rule" showed us.

I hear ya. The thing is, MacFarlane has decided, for better or worse, to continue the Trek tradition of social commentary disguised as sci-fi adventure. And just like Trek, sometimes it is heavy-handed, and sometimes it is more subtle. But I feel that if he wants it to not be overshadowed by the sheer stupidity of the characters' decisions and actions, he's going to have to steer the humor away from "Look what dumbasses we are! And they even gave us a ship and a mission, can you believe that?" to something a little more sophisticated. I mean, that style of comedy definitely has its audience, and aiming for that audience is fine, I'm just saying that it is undermining his other obvious agenda, which is to be an affectionate Star Trek send-up, serious social commentary and all.

Ultimately we can't blame Lamar for being Lamar. But we can blame Mercer for a] putting Lamar on the extraction team, and b] not prepping the team properly for a clandestine first contact operation. The comedy side of the show wants to have its laughs even at the cost of court-martialable miscarriages of leadership and horrific lapses in judgment, while the drama side of the show wants you take it seriously enough for the social commentary to sink in and spread some insight. They need to do a better of job of keeping the former from completely undermining the latter.

I've only watched S2:E1 so far, and my only negative comment is that I wish they would not bombard me with the 80s music so hard. I prefer it to be applied with a bit more subtlety, not blasted at me during and between every single scene. On the positive side, perfect casting of Paul Reiser!

Trelane is not a member of the Q according to any canonical source. There are numerous nigh-omnipotent races in Trek lore that aren't related to the Q (e.g., Organians, Thesians, Metrons, etc.). There's no compelling reason to lump Trelane in with the Q apart from him being impetuous and mercurial like John DeLancie's portrayal of Q.

Oh, he wasn't that bad. He only wiped out half of the living beings in the universe. If you take a glass-half-full point of view, I'd say he let "pretty much everybody" live...

Sure, but the time period of this discussion is, well, today. If BDH is going to tweak the meaning and scope of the Astronomy skill for his campaign, I think it helps to have clear definitions of things.

Astrology isn't a science. For one thing it is based on an invalid cosmological model. The scientific method was the very tool that exposed it for the fraudulent "system" that it is.

Okay, but I presume Ninja-Bear wasn't talking about your ancient astrologers. Yours aren't con artists too, are they?

I think you mean Astronomers. Astrologers have never understood anything except how gullible the uneducated masses are.

Truth? Hell, most of the time social media doesn't even involve verifiable facts. (BTW, I'm pretty sure "unbiased truth" is a redundancy, which sorta denudes the snark factor a bit there, Spence.)

Yeah, it would have been easier and more efficient to simply filter out downvotes and inject fake upvotes. But that would have removed an opportunity to put a spotlight on how easily manipulated the masses are via social media.

I guess someone at Marvel decided that MCU Thor should act and sound more Norse than Shakespearean. It makes a certain amount of sense, though it would have helped for consistency's sake if Odin and Loki didn't always seem like they'd just stepped off the RST stage.

It felt like a really soft version of the Prime Directive. After all, they allowed the landing team to go to the planet without a single bit of knowledge or understanding of the people and society they needed to seamlessly integrate into. The complete lack of preparation, and the complications that followed, was about the dumbest thing I've ever seen on a sci-fi show. And while a part of me appreciated the biting social commentary, it occurred to me that 50 years ago this plotline would have made for a chilling Twilight Zone episode, but today it just comes across as satire. Moreover, your average viewer isn't going to realize that the episode was intended as a kind of cautionary tale; they're going to think, "Yeah, that's how our laws should work!"

Yeah, the total impenetrability of Darkness makes it unusable in this case. I guess CE is the best choice; it is like bringing in fog I guess, but instead it is bringing in sun-blocking shade to an area. If it works for you, BDH, it works for me.

I guess my point was that there are simply too many variations on Thor's look, power set, and power level to go by. The "traditional" Thor of the 60s and 70s is deemed too outdated for today's movie audiences, and so bits and pieces from more contemporary incarnations of the character have been thrown into the character re-design stew to arrive at the MCU Thor. It's a practice almost guaranteed to please few comic fans (since each has their own favorite version of Thor they'd like to see on-screen), and mostly geared to appeal to a general public unfamiliar with the character.

I suppose. But Darkness feels like the more direct application of Hero's design-for-effect philosophy since darkness is ultimately the effect desired.

It would probably have to be more like a hemisphere rather than a disk, and its effect would diminish depending on the angle to the viewer, with a pretty broad penumbra, producing a very gradual transition from light to dark. Simpler, I think, to just cast a megascale Darkness over an area and call it a day (for night).

Yeah, I'm disappointed that MCU Thor can't teleport (and bring huge objects with him), or that Mjolnir doesn't look like this:

Yeah, there's this simple concept called "escape velocity". I recommend googling it.