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I don't think the movie ever states that they'll be returned to the present day.  You've obviously seen it more recently than me, but Strange specifically says that they'll be returned home to die since it's their destinies.  That's why Peter is trying to save them - what's unclear to me (and from what I've seen from a lot of people) is how removing their powers saves them.  If the process itself (being drawn into the MCU) saved people, then what was Peter even doing?

You could easily argue that Osborn and Octavius needed Peter's help because something was causing them to be evil.  But Max seemed to like his powers and was being cooperative.  Same with Dr. Connors (for the most part).  Marko didn't seem to care either way.

If you're right, maybe removing their powers keeps them from dying at *some point* because, with no powers, there's no chance they'' *eventually* put them in a position where they'll die via their Spider-Man.  But that doesn't seem to be what Strange is saying - Strange is saying that they need to be put back in their own timelines.  So whether or not Peter takes away their powers or rescues them from insanity, Strange is still intent on putting them back in the reality *and timeline* where they belong.

I think there's just a disconnect with the logic of the movie.  If Peter is wanting Strange to simply not kill them by putting them back where they left, then the powers part is an unrelated side mission.  If Strange is unwilling to alter the timeline of other universes, then Peter succeeding in his mission is irrelevant.  And I don't think that conflict is resolved.

I mean, your way is happier.  But if Gwen is resurrected (because she's saved from death and put back in the "present" of the Garfieldverse), would Harry be resurrected and returned to the present but just still be powered/maybe crazy?  Would Venom?  Would Captain Stacy?  Would Spider-Verse Peter?

They opened some doors and I'm just genuinely curious what it meant.  If Andrew stopped pulling his punches, he's a murderer, right?  Or at least he's putting guys in the hospital.  I read some Superior Spider-Man, and I know Octavius brutalized some people because he didn't realize how strong he was.  So it'd be interesting to see a Spider-Man who may be a bit out of control and brutal.,  And then Tobey is probably in his 40s and still Spider-Man.  He has the back issue - I think that might be interesting in an Old Man Peter kind of way.

It opens the door for another movie with Tobey or Andrew.  I doubt we'd ever see it, but DC has multiple Batmen.  Raimi is back at Marvel.  I'd love to see it.  I'd even watch a Grindhouse-like double feature with Spider-Man 4 and the Amazing Spider-Man 3 where they do two mini-movies to wrap up their characters.

I wonder if they would've gone the route of Madame Web or something like that.  I don't know who has the rights to the Beyonder, but maybe even try to make into a Secret Wars situation?

I'm glad you liked it.  It was so much fun, and I thought they hit most of the major character beats.  My only real complaints:

1. The Andrew saving MJ scene was perfect, but the CGI when Andrew lands is wonky as hell.  I don't know if they fixed it for the home video release, but I hope they did.  It looked terrible even the first time I saw it.

2. I get that we are only focused on Holland's Peter, but it would've been nice to see all three Spider-Men swinging back in their home dimensions with their scores.  I think it would've made for a perfect ending.  So perfect that I honestly can't believe they didn't do it.

3. Since we will almost certainly never see any continuation of their universes, I wish they'd been a bit bolder with what had happened post Spider-Man 3 and the Amazing Spider-Man 2.  Andrew talked about stopping pulling his punches and Tobey alluded to things working out for Mary Jane, but I'm curious what all happened to the characters since we last saw them.  It would've had to be a re-write of the Spider-Men talking about their adventures, but I would've liked a little more.

I guess the Mr. Knight suit was popular, though?  It's being presented as the suit that people should be excited for.

I actually just started the Ellis run.  It became free on Comixology

Peacemaker was AWESOME, and I can't believe they pulled off (SPOILERS).  James Gunn needs to do more stuff.

Yeah they even have Wallis Day as Kate Kane.  But I agree that Javicia Leslie is good. 

The CEO stuff still bothers me.  If Wayne had three CEOs in a year (Kate, Ryan, and Marquis), all with no experience and all crazy young, the company would collapse.  I get that it's TV, but they clearly don't have any idea what a CEO is or what they do.  I think they should've just said "owner"

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Peacemaker is really fun and funny.  I'm really liking it.  I didn't think it was going to work after Suicide Squad (I thought Cena was good but that the character couldn't support a show), but it absolutely works.

Spoilers for the Book of Boba Fett

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I though the first few episodes of Boba Fett were really boring.  The flashbacks weren't interesting, and I didn't think the main story was all that interesting.  Then the story shifted to the Mandalorian and Grogu and Luke and Ahsoka and I was fully on board.  I even found Cobb Vanth to be much more interesting than Boba.

I've never found Boba Fett to be cool or interesting, but I was hoping this show would turn me around.  It hasn't.  I wish they'd just done some sort of show like this instead of just a Boba Fett show - a Cobb Vanth episode, a Mandalorian episode, a Luke and Grogu episode, an Ahsoka episode.  And if they wanted to do a Boba episode, fine.  But the show is significantly better without Boba, and he's supposed to be the main character.

I think the consensus thought is that the Democrats are going to lose both chambers of Congress.  Biden is not polling well, progressives feel lied to, Republican enthusiasm is higher than Democratic enthusiasm, and the president's party tends to lose at midterms.

I think there's plenty of time, and I think Democrats can maybe muster up enough "Democracy is on the Ballot" concern to get Democrats to the polls.  But I think the Breyer retirement is a signal that the Democrats don't feel good about 2022, just like the Barrett speed-confirmation was a signal that the Republicans didn't feel good about Trump in 2020.

I don't know if I've written about this here or not, but I have an idea for how I'd do James Bond.  They're going to redo it, and I can think of only three options:

1) Set in the 60s and tell fun, Roger Moore-like stories.  Gadgets and humor and fun.  None of Craig's seriousness.  Just a Raiders of the Lost Ark popcorn movie with James Bond every couple years.

2) Old Bond.  Like 60s or 70s.  Get some younger MI6 agents but Bond is more of a mentor.  We've seen "older" Bond, but we've never seen "I can't be in the field, but I can try to help".  We've never seen it but obviously it has a short shelf life.

3) My idea.  Which they can have for free if they ever see this.

A multimedia experience.  Since Amazon owns Bond now, you do a show on Amazon Prime with events in the movies.  You sign everyone for 8 10-episode seasons and 4 movies.  Two seasons.  Then a movie.  And you tell the story from beginning to end in multiple formats.  The show could feature flashbacks to Bond's youth, leading him from the death of his parents to him joining MI6 (like Arrow, taking him from the shipwreck to off the island).  Build up tension, build up character, and build up plot.  Then every two years, you ratchet it up to a movie.

The flashbacks can allow for the actor playing Bond to film the movies without having to take a ton of time away from the show.

We haven't seen anything like this, and Amazon is (fairly) uniquely suited to do it.  Like Game of Thrones, get mostly unknowns and lock them in for an epic that will take 10+ years to complete.

Haha, your money is no good here.  I'll get it done

Oh I know.  I'm just saying voter ID is a hot button issue for Republicans.  It's trending on twitter right now.  If you add voter ID to a bill, Republican voters will make sure it passes as long as there isn't anything overwhelmingly negative or socialist in it.  You have to give them what you want and make the rest of the bill clean and on topic.

But these days, no one thinks about the compromise even though, again, this is an issue that both sides say they want.  So do it.  And once the election is secure, you can worry about getting people IDs.  But if the election isn't secure, who cares about anything else?  You could get 100% of the vote and they'll legally overturn it.

Hahahaha, that's awesome.

Let me see what I can do.

I don't think 74 million Americans are alt-right or fascist just because they voted for Trump.  People could vote for Trump for any number of reasons, and I don't think it's all intertwined.  If you're very wealthy, voting for Trump would make you money.  You could hate the guy and still vote for him if it benefits you.

And while the Republican Party might not want voter ID, Republicans do.  So if the Democrats put out a bill for that includes the voter ID that Republicans want, I think the Republican Party would have to go along with it.  If the Republican Party doesn't want it, it'd be calling their bluff and it would make it very difficult to call voter BS ever again.

I've been disappointed in Biden in a lot of ways.  And the Democrats in general.  And I think, especially among younger voters, they're going to get punished.  What was the point of winning the White House and winning both Georgia Senate seats if nothing got done?  Sure, infrastructure got done, but while everyone likes infrastructure, no one loves infrastructure.  None of the hot-button stuff that people wanted has gotten done, and I think cynical young voters aren't going to have the same level of engagement.

I listened to a months-old Five Thirty Eight politics podcast that was essentially just an interview with Adam Schiff where Schiff had all these concerns about democracy.  The interviewer kept trying to get him to say what he's doing about it, and Schiff didn't have any answer besides passing HR1.  HR1 was written before 2020 and wouldn't solve all the problems.  Plus, it's entirely unpassable in this environment.  They needed to throw out HR1 and write a bill that actually fixed the problems that Trump was trying to exploit.

And I think it's easier than the Democrats are making it out to be.  It would just take compromise on their side, and they're already compromising on their side.  The Democrats are essentially saying that if the Republicans are going to make it harder to vote, they need to work harder to get people out to vote.  Well, okay...but you aren't getting anything out of that.  This needs to be codified, and I think there's a fairly simple way to do it.

Republican voters want election integrity.  Democrats want election integrity.  They just don't agree on what that means or who's doing it.  I think that's fairly simple to fix, though.  I think the Democrats needed to offer up the right compromise.  What I would've done is written a law that provides some sort of independent oversight to state elections - states get to choose how elections are done, but they don't get to choose who won.  I'd also do what I could to end partisan gerrymandering.

How would I pass it?  I'd give in on Voter ID.  It's a huge hot-button issue for Republicans that I think they'd have to vote for.  And instead of spending four years trying to get people excited to vote, I'd spend four years getting everyone voter IDs, which I think would've been easier and harder to exploit.  And instead of getting nothing in return, I'd either prevent Trump loyalists from messing with elections, and/or I'd get rid of partisan gerrymandering.  And if that doesn't pass, I'd see what I could get for national voter ID. 

I think this was an issue that they could've easily solved.  It would've been a win for everyone, just like when Cory Booker was so excited to vote for a rebuke to Defund the Police.  People agree on this, and I think it would've been really hard to get 40 Republican senators to vote against Voter ID, as long as the rest of the bill wasn't full of insanity. 

Plus, it wouldn't require ending the filibuster, which I think would be the most temporary of solutions.  You can end the filibuster, pass HR1, and there's a good chance that a Republican congress dismantles it before 2024.  It wouldn't matter.

Pass it legitimately, truly secure elections, and figure out how to work within the new lines.  I think in four years you could get voter IDs to everyone in the country, and if you do it right, maybe they never expire.  So it'd be a lot of work from 2021-2024 and then you're set for the most part.

Democrats don't know how to get out of their own way.

I've had several friends who all got the booster and all had very mild side effects.  My worst was a sore arm - I *might've* had a headache, but it might've been more my brain expecting a headache and making it feel like I had a really dull one.  No nausea, no chills, nothing else.  Now I got my shot strategically in the late morning so maybe I slept through the side effects, but I didn't wake up drenched in sweat like I did with shot two.

My wife got her shot while breastfeeding and, since it can cause lymph nodes to swell, it caused her to develop mastitis.  So she's hesitant to get another shot because of how rough her experience was.  Hopefully stories like mine will encourage her and others to get the booster.

Regarding the possible end of the pandemic, I agree and am hopeful.  I have a friend turning 40 this week and I'm going to skip his party.  I told my wife that if we hunker down for a couple months (our biggest risk will be our 2-year-old at daycare), we could start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  At least here in the US, we had a million cases the other day.  We've gotta be moving to some form of herd immunity / conversion from pandemic to endemic.

And once we're there, I've read that we might not even need the vaccines - that it might end up being lesser than the flu / more like a cold, and only the high-risk people would need a yearly booster.  That would be nice.  At the same time, if the science recommends a quarterly booster forever, I'm fine with that too.  My experience with the booster took 30 minutes from door to door, and that included 15 minutes sitting around to see if anything happened.

A book (and a movie but less so) that I like as inspiration is The Martian.  It shows what humans are capable of if we work together.  The book is a little more realistic (if I recall correctly) because the Chinese agree to help in exchange for something from the US/NASA.  In the movie (again, if I'm remembering correctly), they just do it in the spirit of humanity.

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.” - Andy Weir

Yeah and that's why I don't think it makes sense for *any* of the cast to return.  If Universal sees value in the Sliders brand following all the multiverse stuff, they should just do a straight reboot.  Hire a bunch of no name actors and don't bog the writing staff with a bunch of prior continuity.  And they can fill the cast with younger actors to try and draw in a younger audience instead of a cast that was young-ish 25 years ago.  You do need a mentor figure if you're going to follow the original formula, but there's no reason to hire Jerry unless the see value in Jerry.  You could just as easily hire Kelsey Grammar, who was allegedly a fan of the original series, would be a bigger draw, and probably makes for a better Arturo.

Shoehorning in cameos from the ghostbusters makes sense, but I think even those-level cameos would be a distraction for any audience that might check it out.

I'd love to get a passing the torch movie with the original cast, or at least an Afterlife-style sequel with cameos.  But, honestly, it doesn't make as much sense.  Trying to sell it as something new (a la Battlestar Galactica) with an all-new cast makes the most sense.

Don't Look Up on Netflix is a hilarious and terrifying look at what would probably happen if a comet was barreling towards Earth.  It's obviously a satire of some version of Trump 2.0 being in charge, but I could easily see some of the decisions being made the other way around.  It's satire....but is it?

I'd love to talk more about it if anyone else wants to talk about it in the Random Thoughts post.  Since my non-spoilery thoughts are primarily political, I thought it made sense to put it here.

I'll do real spoilers so I'll add the tag

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I think I liked it?  I really don't know.  I thought it was well done, and I think "the machines make the Matrix pop culture so that people would never believe it's real" is clever-ish.  I think I struggled with a lot of the plot.  It's almost too much like the Force Awakens - where it's both a reboot and a sequel.  It retreads so much of the Matrix without doing just a ton of new stuff.  A lot of the things I found most interesting were mostly ignored.

Like what is "Morpheus" - I don't understand.  Does he have any actual Morpheus in him, or is he just a combination of the game version of Morpheus with the game version of Smith?  Is he a program?  Why does he call himself Morpheus if he's really his own thing?

I don't understand enough about the truce that happened after Revolutions.  Was the truce just about Zion and the machines, and the Matrix was left alone?  If so, why did the Matrix look so much different afterwards?  If the Matrix wasn't affected, why did the Analyst need to change it?  Is there still a war going on, or is the truce still alive?  Are the humans not supposed to be trying to pull people out?  Is Io supposed to exist?  Are the machines that are helping the humans traitors to the machines or just part of the truce?

The more I think about it, it's a lot like the Force Awakens.  A bunch of things happened in the time between movies, but I guess none of it was all that interesting and we're just back to the status quo?

I think it'd be great to get everyone back, but you only need Quinn.  JRD is almost 80 and almost certainly wouldn't survive the fall from the vortex   Rembrandt is a great character, but I don't see how he fits into a "next generation" scenario except in some kind of non-science mentor situation.  Wade is another great inclusion, but could easily be included in a line of dialogue (like Jane Foster in most Thor appearances).

JOC is almost the same age now that JRD was when Sliders started.  I think the most organic Sliders story is a version where Quinn, following in Arturo's footsteps, is a professor.  If you want the story to be a true reboot, you can have a Quinn that never fully developed Sliding (and his student, instead of Smarter Quinn, is the one who finally solves the equation).  If you want it to be a continuation, you have a Quinn that slid for a while, settled on an Earth and started teaching.  You can either have him having found home or not, but if he's not home, it would add motivation to his character.

If Quinn was a slider, the cameos are easy.  Quinn visits Wade (whether they're married or not) and tells her about his student.  She can either support it or not.  He could visit Arturo for his advice on such a similar situation.  He could visit Rembrandt to see what happened to him ("don't let anyone drive into the vortex").  It could be a scene with all four of them or three separate scenes).

If Quinn wasn't a slider, you could do a cameo kinda like the other group of survivors in Shaun of the Dead.  Have a group of Quinn, Arturo, Rembrandt, and Wade cross paths briefly with the new group.  Either way, if Quinn wasn't a slider, you'd need him to interact with a double that is shocked that he never slid in his younger years, and Quinn can learn that he's kinda the dunce of the multiverse.

But kinda like No Way Home, I'd make the references to previous continuity played off as humor or vague enough that it could apply to anything.

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Quinn as Arturo is probably the easiest way to do it, but I actually convinced myself that "Rembrandt as the mentor" might also work.  Rembrandt jumps into the Seer vortex, gets to a close-enough Earth Prime, settles in, and has a family.  His son ends up being a Quinn-like scientist and develops Sliding.  Maybe the son discovers that Rembrandt never made it home and convinces Rembrandt to come along, or maybe Rembrandt comes along to protect his son.

But Rembrandt certainly has the experience to be the mentor character and could be a good source of knowledge.  You'd get a Quinn appearance via Rembrandt tracking him down for advice.

Hahah, no wrath.  You gotta do what you gotta do.

I feel very vindicated by making my choice to see Spider-Man in theaters since, based on how much comic book videos I watch, YouTube has thrown *tons* of *full clips* of the movie.  There's no way I would've made it 90 days.

I liked Hawkeye but feel like they really wasted (SPOILER).  I know that they might be saving some material for the Echo series, but Hawkeye was the biggest example (moreso than Iron Man 2) of the MCU sacrificing story for setup if that's the case.  I did like the interaction between Kate and Clint, and I thought the street-level action made it the best Disney+ MCU finale so far, but I was disappointed by some of the threads they brushed to the side.  I think it'd be really easy to edit Hawkeye into a really great 2-hour movie that ignores some of the other extraneous stuff.

Yeah, that's sorta what I was trying to do with my pitch.  Make a Nightwing show that gives the writers the Batman stuff they want (taking more elements of Dick's time as Batman), and allow them to make a Titans show without all that baggage.  Making a BATMAN WITHOUT BATMAN show and dragging all these characters that don't belong and giving them nothing to do is what caused problems.

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Armageddon was fine?  Episode 5 didn't really feel like the same arc, and was a bit of a letdown after Episode 4, which I think felt like more of a conclusion.

But they used the whole Arrowverse family (minus Superman & Lois) which is something that I've been asking for.  So A++

Oh geez, I'm so sorry.  I thought you'd finished the season and dropped two spoilers on you

That's the thing.  Did I ever like it?  Why did I just finish the second *spinoff* of a show that maybe I never liked?  I watched the first season of the Walking Dead when I was traveling for work and had nothing better to do.  And I guess I never stopped.

To be fair, I almost never "watch" it.  I just have it on for it's running time once a week.  I often have to read a recap of what I just watched and often will think "huh, I don't know that character.  I wonder if they're a guest character or if they've been on the show 3 seasons."

Ha.  I think LOST is the best show of all time, and I've watched it several times.  But I get it.  Lindelof has admitted that they had to spin their wheels in season 3 because the show was too popular to "wrap up."  I think there's still intrigue in season 3, and I didn't mind the infamous "how Jack got his tattoos" story.  I didn't even mind the inclusion of Nikki and Paolo as "background castaways" that got promoted to the A-Team.

But by season 4, they'd made an agreement with ABC for less episodes (so less filler) and a definitive end date.  And after that, the show was a lot stronger.  I still like the finale a lot, although I understand why people wouldn't like it.  Endings are hard.

The Walking Dead - the shows I watch for....some reason?

I don't know if I've loved the Walking Dead even going back to season 2.  And yet I've watched every season.

When they announced a spinoff, I rolled my eyes.  But then the promos came out, and it promised to show the beginning of the outbreak (when Walking Dead skipped it entirely).  That's the part of the zombie apocalypse that I'm most interested in.  How does society fall like that?  Walking Dead got repetitive because it's just our band of survivors going from fragile rural encampment to fragile rural encampment.  This is going to take place in LA!

So I watched.  And a couple episodes in, they had a time jump and we'd skipped through the parts that I thought would be more interesting.  Before too long, they were going from fragile rural encampment to fragile rural encampment.  And while the show got much better when they killed off most of the season one cast and brought in new characters (including Walking Dead alum Morgan Jones), it's....fine?  I'm still watching.

Then they announced *another* spinoff about kids that were raised during the apocalypse.  I didn't really care about that, but they announced that it would be 1) revolving around the mysterious Civic Republic that would certainly tie in with the main shows and 2) it would be a limited series - 2 seasons, 20 total episodes.  So fine.  I watched.  And it was...fine?  I watched all 20.

But there's a glimmer of hope.  At the end of the final episode of World Beyond, they had an epilogue.  I won't spoil it here, but it teased some cool stuff that we haven't seen before and maybe some answers about what happened in the first place.

Damn it.

Appreciate that!

I could be wrong, but wasn't it stated explicitly that Wayne Tower was abandoned, either in the crossover that introduced Batwoman or the pilot?  I feel like the introduction to Luke was him dealing with homeless people living in the tower?

And you're right about the way the Arrowverse treats jobs.  All the Arrowverse major players all live like they're upper class but rarely do any actual work.  Oliver was unemployed for most of the show but lives in a gigantic loft.  Barry was a cop and Iris essentially had a blog, and they had a huge luxury apartment.  The only Arrowverse characters I can think of as actually struggling were Rene and Roy.

And while I do think some of it is political, anti-corporation stuff, I once read an article about how most movies/TV shows struggle with real-life jobs because writers haven't really had real-life jobs.  Most of the jobs that people have are the ones that feel the most like writing.  Like architect - where you spend a lot of time coming up with a pitch, make your pitch, and then you get to build this super big thing at the end.  It's writing a script, pitching it, and then producing it.

Yeah, I just saw that.  I'm having fun with Batwoman season 3, although the corporate stuff is really dumb to me.  I'm sure there are mid-20s CEOs of major tech companies, but I think the fact that Ryan or Kate or Marquis are CEO of Wayne Enterprises would be impossible.  Especially since we never saw Ryan or Kate do any work as CEO - Ryan would've been CEO for months without even knowing it.

I know TV likes to think that these big-salaried CEOs don't really do anything, but having an absentee CEO would destroy most companies.  Their work probably isn't worth what they're paid, but they're paid a lot of money for reasons.  They're also usually the chairman of the board of directors, and I'm sure they'd have something to say about hiring an ex-con with no experience in business as a CEO.  Even if there was a clause that gave Bruce Wayne that kind of authority in absentia, and even if Ryan/Kate were turning down a salary, I don't think it would fly.

I think if they'd made Luke the CEO, that might work.  But even then, I think he's too young and not present enough for that.  I think it's just another example of TV writers having no idea how the real world works

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And I agree about Batman being too big for Batwoman.  I think even if he came back for a brief crossover only to go back in the shadows, it would be too much.  Whenever something big came up, we'd expect Batman to show back up.  I'll admit I've thought that about Supergirl a lot - when there's an extinction level event, shouldn't Superman at least show up as backup?

Now to be fair, since Ryan took over for Kate, the references and connections to Bruce have pretty much stopped.  The connections to *Batman* are bigger than ever, but I don't know if Bruce showing up makes a ton of narrative sense anymore.

This has bothered me since Batwoman started, as you know, but if I were running the show, I would've gotten a meeting with the highest-up person at DC I could get a meeting with and I'd ask for a direct answer - will I ever get to use Bruce Wayne as Batman on my show?  If the answer is no, I kill off Batman.  Having his ghost around is too much.  I'd also have his villains die too.  Maybe a Superman-level villain wiped everyone out in some sort of battle royale and then Superman fixed it.  Or Kara.  Whoever.

Because having Batman just out there not doing anything is too big of a shadow.  I also wouldn't have set the show in Gotham but that's a different argument.

If there's a chance, I'm fine with running out the clock until they let Batman be on the show.  Putting Superman on Supergirl didn't hurt Supergirl, and I'm sure having occasional Batman visits would be fine for Batwoman.

I also think it's dumb that DC has three Batmen currently (Pattinson, Affleck, and Keaton) but thinks that one on TV would confuse people.

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I think Armageddon has been really fun.