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But I realize that he gets tested all the time and would have great doctors to watch over him...but he could get it if he isn't taking the right precautions.  Boris Johnson is significantly younger and appears healthier (I've seen pictures of him on a bike and on a jog and that's more than I can say about Trump) and he ended up in the ICU.  He's in several of the high-risk categories (heart disease, age, potentially pre-diabetic). 

I'm not saying.  I'm just saying.

That's what been sorta frustrating about "Earth Prime" - it existed and obviously had deviations...but the deviations don't matter because everyone that matters (sorry Pied Piper) has had their memory of Earth 1 (or 36) corrected.

It would be fun to do a "Tales from Earth Prime" episode to show how things were different.  How did Kara and Flash meet?  It can't be the same way it was before.  I assume Superman would've been a part of every "crossover event" and probably a couple of other events. 

Supergirl is another big change.  Some of their storylines were done with the idea that they were on their own.  Did all her storylines happen on Earth Prime?  I mean, heck, is the Obsidian Platinum stuff happening in Central City or Gotham?  It doesn't seem to be happening if it is.

Well, I wonder if Trump is actually trying to appeal to his base here.  Even though Trump himself has been emphatic about this virus, a good deal of his base still thinks that the virus is a hoax.  Or just like the flu (again, Trump has repeatedly said it isn't).

So I wonder if Trump has to downplay his response to it so that he doesn't lose the people who think it's a hoax?  As I've said before, Trump can't lose a single 2016 vote if he has any chance of winning.  He has to try to figure out a way to save the economy (his only accomplishment) while also doing something to fight the virus while also not doing too much to fight the virus. 

I think it's why Trump doesn't wear a mask.  It's also certainly narcissism, but Pence doesn't have that level of narcissism and didn't wear a mask.  I'm guessing he did it to appeal to the people who think it's no big deal.

Well, I can think of another way to make it work - bring a plague into the Arrowverse.  Make it an event.  Someone, a minor villain maybe, comes in and spreads some sort of metahuman virus (so wearing a mask wouldn't help and where Kara/Barry could even get it at super speed).  Suddenly, the whole Arrowverse has it.  All the shows can be about how you can be a hero without touching someone.  How you can stay connected while apart.  Stuff like that.

But even then I don't think it'd work.

I cannot understand what women go through and all I can really do is empathize.  Whenever I try to put myself into the mind of a young woman who feels vulnerable and scared and powerless, I struggle with the idea that I'm either using hyperbole or not going far enough.  I can walk to my car in a dark parking lot with a reasonable amount of likelihood that I'll be okay.  It wouldn't even occur to me where to park for highest safety, who to walk out with, or who to smile at.  Whenever I think of the female experience, I tend to think about the societal benefits of being a woman - free drinks and meals, the ability to wildly change/improve appearance with ease, what I consider to be deeper connections with other people and themselves, etc.  The rough stuff either doesn't occur to me (bad) or is too scary to consider (bad).  Having a daughter helps, but when I think about her, it scares me way too much to even consider letting her out into the world (luckily she can't even crawl so I have some time to get over that).

All that being said to say that I want women to feel comfortable coming forward, and I want society and the authorities to take every account seriously and perhaps even operate on a "true until proven false".  The problem being - how do you prove a "he said, she said" item true or false?  Barring physical evidence, it comes down to a simple "what you believe".  People can give heart-wrenching accounts, but we know that there are people who can perfectly pretend to have certain reactions and plenty of real stories to capture. 

Tara Reade could easily be a scared woman who is finally facing her assaulter.  She could also be a Putin fanatic who is making up a story for Russian money to help Trump get elected.  Heck, both could be true.

What sucks is that women need to believe her because if she's lying, it hurts all women.  We can't weaponize sexual assault for political gain because it hurts all women and gives powerful men an escape clause to get away with it.

When I sat down to write a spinoff/sequel series to Earth 214 (which I never got passed a half-written pilot and a plan for season 1), one of the ideas I liked was the idea of putting "satellites" in the wormhole to communicate from world to world (with the idea being that wormholes are a river connecting two worlds but that there's a bigger "ocean" that connects them all).

Might be a dumb idea, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in the continuity of Sliders to allow them to communicate with each other no matter where they are.

Yeah I was going to say the same thing.  They've already established that time moves differently on different worlds and that people can be the same person and look differently.  It can be a complete reboot in every way and still be part of the continuity.

It depends on what's happening:

Is Jerry instrumental in getting it done?  If so, I think Jerry is going to want to star in it.  He's going to want to be Quinn.  Making him Quinn's dad wouldn't be enough for him.  Maybe you make him Arturo?  I don't know if that works.  I think in that case, you do what Halloween did, what Terminator did, and what Jurassic Park did - the sequels didn't necessarily happen.  You pick up with the four sliders who have been sliding for 20 years or they've settled somewhere.  The Pilot happened but the rest of the adventures aren't important or didn't happen.

If Jerry isn't involved, I think you do a full reboot.  Get the original four to do cameos (like in Ghostbusters 2016) but no other attachment.  But, and it comes down to this, doing a full reboot of Sliders is needlessly expensive.  If you're going to do a story about people going from universe to universe, Sliders as a brand has too much baggage and not enough cultural power.  You don't have to deal with rights or fans.  Make Coasters with Danny, Jake, Annabel, and Dr. Whitman.  Change enough not to get sued and you can do whatever you want.

That's what's so stupid.  It was coming whether they lied about it or not.

I just don't get this either.  He's a liar and an adulterer.  You can like that he fights against abortion, but I don't know how people can say that he's a godly man.  Just admit it.  He's a bad person but he "stands for" what you stand for.  Him being in power makes you feel safer or makes you richer or you like that the president looks like you and not Obama.

Well, as someone in Texas, I can tell you that we're sorta relaxing.  You have to remember that while the state as a whole is conservative, all the cities are not.  Even after the governor declared that we're slowly opening things up, the city of Dallas (near where I live) declared that you have to wear a mask outside your home.  I don't know anyone who's protesting and haven't seen any evidence of it happening near where I live.  There were protests in Austin, but again, Austin is a very liberal city so it's doubtful that it was people in Austin.  Probably from the more-conservative rural areas.

I know people love to rag on Texas, but the state is changing and the cities more-than lean left.  It's just a very big and diverse state that has traditionally been more conservative.  I live here and my sister lives in Florida, and I can tell you that we're taking it more seriously than they are.

And from my understanding, the "opening" of the state involves allowing pickup from stores and opening parks back up.  I haven't seen anything about going back to work, and my work has told me we aren't going back for "a while"

Jordan Peele is great.  Whether it's his horror or his comedy, I feel like there's a sort of liveliness and creativity in his work.  It's why I was so shocked at how dull and lifeless it was.  Even the episode he co-wrote (with Dark Phoenix writer Simon Kinberg) doesn't really do or say much.  The episode he's featured in outside of being the narrator doesn't do much more.

Now maybe Peele just performed as an actor in Blurryman with no writing input (like John Cho did, like Kumail Nanjiani did, like Zazie Beetz did, etc), maybe he just did enough writing on Nightmare at 30,000 Feet to get credit and the hit-and-miss Kinberg wrote most of the story, and maybe he had nothing to do with the writing of the other 8 episodes he narrated on.  It certainly feels like it.  But if he did much more than that, Twilight Zone is his first major screw-up in Hollywood after quite a few hits.

Yeah, I don't know how much Peele was actually involved in the Twilight Zone.  He's listed as a writer on Nightmare at 30,000 feet, he's the narrator, and he's a supporting actor in the final episode (Blurryman).  But the episodes were so lifeless that I can't imagine he was involved even with story development.

There's an episode about a kid running for president.  It has John Cho and Jacob Tremblay - good actors.  The premise itself is silly, but there's tons of satire that could be done with something like that.  But they don't inject any life into it.  They don't work hard enough to sell this idea either in a crazy alternate world, and they don't make any effort to make it make sense in our world (the writers don't seem to know or care that he's not old enough to be president).  The "twist" (if you can even call it that) isn't surprising or scary.  The lesson is "don't let an 11 year old be president" - it's just dumb.

The finale wastes Zazie Beetz by just having her run around with something chasing her for 20 minutes and some lame imagery from the original series.

The Twilight Zone has a ton of episodes that could either be remade, reimagined, or even just reshot.  The Adam Scott remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet does a decent-enough job of updating the material for today.  The Forrest Whittaker version did a good job of updating The Monsters on Maple Street for a post-9/11 world.  There's a lot of things we could say about the world, and they only touched on some big issues (race, gender, class) in the most surface way possible.

If you can't make your own content, just borrow what Serling did.  Even if you mess that up, it'll still be better than what you gave us.

I've been watching some Biden videos to get a good idea of who this guy is.  I watched the Bernie endorsement video, and I saw what everyone was talking about.  Biden looked slow and tired.  He looked a bit lost at times.  Bernie is older but was much more lively and seemed to be leading the discussion.

Then I watched a town hall that Biden did yesterday with some essential frontline workers.  He seemed much sharper.  Much wiser.  A couple times it seemed like he might be struggling, but he seemed on his game.

I guess that's sorta what we're going to get from Biden.  He's going to be slow some days and sharp some days.  He's going to look weak and old sometimes, and he'll look experienced and decisive at others.  And, you know what, I think that's okay.  Despite what Trump thinks, I don't think the president needs to have total authority.  Having a president who needs to rely on his cabinet on certain days might not be the worst thing (and is the direct opposite of the current president who doesn't seem to listen to anyone not related to him).

I also watched Obama's endorsement of Biden, and it made me sad that none of the candidates resembled Obama at all.  I happened to watch a video on youtube of Obama and Trudeau from a few years ago.  It was inspiring and made me hopeful.  It'd be nice to have a guy like that to vote for.

I always thought they had their built-in explanation for the mutations - Hulk's snap.  He brings everyone back, but some people come back changed.  You could even blame it on Hulk's "mutation" messing with his mind when he thought about bringing everyone back.

For the vast majority of the X-Men, I think it works.  Most of them are kids/adolescents and they'd already have to deal with coming back several years younger than the rest of their classmates.  Now they have the ability to freeze or burn stuff on top of that.

For Charles and Erik, maybe you have them be powerless friends who get a second chance after the snap.  Charles was an inner city schoolteacher who came from money but never really used his family fortune to help anyone because he was too depressed about the accident that cost him his legs.  Erik was a former Black Panther who finally gets the power he needs to even the score.  Their powers are new, but their baggage isn't.

It wouldn't work for everyone.  Wolverine is a big problem unless you make huge alterations to the character.  Same with longtime mutants like Apocalypse.

But I think you could fix all that by saying that there were a very small number of mutants before the snap.  Charles, Erik, Logan, and a select few of the X-Men, but the snap made it where they were impossible to hide anymore.  Maybe you rationalize it by saying that Hulk was researching mutants in between Endgame and they were in the far reaches of his subconscious when he did the snap.

What a doofus.

Yeah, I can see that.  We've mentioned it, but the plan originally was to do two movies. The first movie would've been about the X-Men fighting the Hellfire Club (bringing things back around to First Class) and showing the team working together.  From what I understand, the movie would've culminated with Jean getting the phoenix force, which would be the main problem in the second movie.  So, yes, you'd get more team building and character development.  The way I think it was proposed was to have the audience fall in love with Jean in the first movie and then break their hearts in the second one.

But like so many things (the Seer included), asking for a two-part X-Men movie at this point was a little crazy.  They might've been able to pull it off after First Class or even Days of Future Past, but coming off the clunker that was Apocalypse and coming up on the sale of Fox to Disney, it was crazy to think they could get a two-part movie greenlit. 

With all that being said, with Fox's waning interest and Kinberg having to edit a two-part movie into a one-part movie, I think the fact that the movie is as coherent as it is impresses me.

Yeah.  I agree with Bernie on a lot.  I've actually been (mostly) converted to believing in Medicare for All.  I think young Americans need help with student loans.  I like a lot of the Green New Deal.  But I think asking for all of that is too much right now.  Let's CTRL-ALT-DELETE on the government, get a fresh start with four years of Biden, and then we can try and do better on some social issues.  I think Biden can stop the bleeding on some key areas (including some social stuff and climate change), but I think it's just a little greedy to try and get a facelift while the doctors are trying to save your life.

I think Bernie walked so that someone like AOC could run.  But it was just the wrong time.  Bernie had almost 80 years to do a revolution.  He waited too long and, like Grizzlor said, didn't compromise enough.

Exactly.  People that can will know they need to plan ahead and early vote.  People that can will know they need to get their mail-in ballots way ahead of time.  People that struggle with getting off work to early vote can try to make some sort of arrangement to get out early.  People that can't do any of that will need to plan ahead.

Ugh, all this doom and gloom.  I don't know why, but the left is really prone to hyperbole. 

Democracy isn't dead.  And if it is going to die, it won't be because conservatives won.  It will be because, without a major shift in ideology, it will be virtually impossible for a conservative to win an election.

I don't consider myself Democrat or Republican.  I'm disappointed in both parties.  The Republicans have sold their soul in a desperate attempt to hold on to whatever time they have left, and the Democrats have shown themselves to be woefully impotent.  I don't know why the Republicans got in line behind Trump, many of whom seemed to hate him a couple of years ago.  Lindsay Graham said that Trump would be the end of the Republican party, and now he supports him.  I understand why they want to consolidate their efforts and be one cohesive unit, but they had a chance to dump him and get behind a true conservative (Pence) and they didn't take it.  Maybe they thought insurrection was more deadly than lies.  I don't know.

But I don't think everyone was pied pipered.  I don't think people like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham changed their tunes.  I think, as always, they're playing politics.  And I think when this is all said and done, a lot of people are going to have massive regrets.  But we've given our politicians so much power and so much wealth, and they're doing everything they can to hold on to it.

Both parties have made massive mistakes.  The Republicans have refused to change.  They only appeal to middle class+ white people.  For a long time, that was enough.  Help the middle class and upper class whites stay on top.  But demographics are changing.  I'm not kidding when I say that Texas will go blue and very soon.  And when the Democrats have California, Texas, and New York, it's over.  There's no path to victory for any Republican.  And as demographics continue to shift, I think it's realistic to say that Republicans will get fewer than 100 electoral votes in every election without a major shift in ideology.

The Democrats mistake was thinking that the shift already happened.  We saw it in 2016 https://www.newsweek.com/will-republica … ain-483751 - this was a real thing.  And I think that's why the Democrats didn't take 2016 seriously.  It's why they just got in line behind Hillary and didn't do anything to 1) stop her or 2) help her.  Hillary was determined to get the presidency and no one got in her way.  But who cares?  The Republicans couldn't win.  So let Hillary have her day and they could move on in 2024.  The shift was done, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.  That's why they didn't even campaign in certain states that flipped.  Why go for the safe victory when they could humiliate Trump instead?  Why campaign when you can just throw lavish parties and hang out with Jay-Z?

If the Democrats want to win in 2020, they can.  They just need to get their head out of their ass.  Stop infighting.  Vote for the candidate that wins the primary.  And the Newsweek article will just become a fact.  And once that happens, the Republican Party is going to have to do some soul searching and realize that their ideology sucks and needs to be re-examined.  There's nothing wrong with conservatism, and unchecked liberalism isn't what this country needs.  But it can't just be a white party and have any hope of winning.

Hillary was a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign.  And she won by 3 million votes.  It's virtually impossible for the Democrats to lose the popular vote, and soon enough, it will be impossible for them to lose the electoral college.  So stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop looking for crooks and cheaters, and just do the work.

Unfortunately, COVID19 is going to delay the Supernatural finale for "a while" - and even though the CW is picking return dates for the rest of their shows (many of which won't get a true finale), no return date for Supernatural has been announced. 

Do we think maybe they'll save all the remaining episodes and air them as a "mini-season" to prep for the finale?

*

I think we're all missing the key point here - there's no undecideds.  This isn't a normal election where any of the issues, any of the debates, or any of the campaigning is going to matter one bit.  Trump could walk out on to the debate stage on a dog leash carried by Vladimir Putin, and it won't dissuade Trump voters from voting for him.  Biden could spend the debates in a medically-induced coma, and anti-Trump voters are still going to vote for him.  It doesn't matter.

What does matter is the math.  And despite wildly different candidates, Hillary and Obama (in 2012) got essentially the same number of votes.  Trump had a couple million more votes than Mitt Romney in 2012.  Those two million were essentially the difference between an Obama rout and a Trump victory.  And Trump needs all two million of those people if he wants to win.  I think there's risk that some of the Bernie Bros are going to jump to Trump (or a 3rd party/write-in) over Biden, but I think it's the same number of people who jumped to Trump (or a 3rd party/write-in) over Hillary.  This campaign has still left Bernie people feeling disenfranchised, but I don't think there's as much vitriol this year.  So I think the Bernie Bros are static.

Where this election will be won isn't "who do I vote for?" but "will I vote?" - obviously the the Trump hardcores will vote no matter what.  But how many of the 60 million Trump votes were hardcore Trump believers?  I think the consensus is that every Trump voter is alike, and I think that's just a product of the media.  I think there are people who regret voting for Trump and hoped that he'd be something different.  I don't think there are people who voted for Hillary and have been wildly impressed by Trump enough to switch.  Again, I don't think there are undecideds.

Trump needs 100% of the people who voted for him in 2016 to vote for him.  I don't even think he can survive with 99.9% as those 600,000 votes could be critical in several critical states.  He needs fiscal conservatives to vote for him even though the economy will be down.  He needs every Bernie Bro that jumped ship to stay "Bernie or Bust".  He needs every "#NeverHillary" Republican and Democrat to be just as hardcore about "#NeverBiden".  He needs every disenfranchised poor white to still believe that Trump is going to help him even though he's just as poor and disenfranchised as they were under Obama.

And I just can't imagine that all of those people still believe in Trump.  Biden doesn't need to do anything.  The Democratic voting base has been remarkably consistent in 2012 and 2016.  The people that voted for Obama and Hillary will vote for him.  He doesn't need to inspire people or unite the party.  And he doesn't need to court Republicans.  All he needs is for a *very small piece* of Trump's 2016 electorate to reconsider.  And I think enough of them already have.

* All of this is dependent on the turnout being anywhere near the same as 2012 and 2016.

Man, I don't see any path to victory for Trump.  None.  Maybe I'm crazy (well, not maybe), but this whole mess is going to destroy him.  He'll keep his loyal evangelical base, but you have to remember that the Republican party, while much more united than the Democratic one, still has sensible people in it.  And I think, for the reasons you're saying, there are going to be enough people on the left side of the Republican party that are going to see Biden and think "Yeah, I can live with that."  Even if that's 0.1% of the people who voted for Trump, that could be significant. 

Then there are the people who vote purely on the economy.  No matter what happens, they're going to look at Trump with skeptical eyes.  Again, even if it's just 0.1% of people, it could be significant.

Then you look at the other side.  Even if the Bernie Bros revolt at the same rate they did in 2016, there are *tons* of people who stayed home because they didn't like Trump or Clinton.  A lot of those people were African Americans, and Biden does *very* well with them.  Add in the fact that you'll probably get more enthusiastic campaigning for Biden over what he did for Clinton, and it could be enough right there.

I think one of the most underreported aspects of 2016 was how many people voted for Trump simply because they hated Hillary.  Nothing to do with Trump's policies or his record or his white supremacy or his businesses or even her emails.  They just hated her as a person and didn't want her to win.  Even if "spite voters" were a super small percentage, we're not talking about large numbers of votes.  Clinton crushed Trump in the electoral college, and that's with a Republican party that was 1) fully unified and 2) highly motivated to vote against a Democratic party that was 1) highly fractured and 2) at least moderately unmotivated.

If you have a very vulnerable Donald Trump with a bad economy coming off disastrous leadership against a "Republican" who will appeal to at least some sectors of the Republican party?  When Biden just needs 14,000 votes in Michigan, 28,000 votes in Wisconsin, and 69,000 votes in Pennsylvania, I don't see it for Trump.  He'll get every evangelical vote from sea to shining sea, but I don't think that's going to be enough.

#FreezingColdTakes

Oh I'm voting for Biden.  Don't worry.  And if the economy stays stalled and Trump keeps getting people killed, my Texan vote might even matter. 

I agree that looking for a savior is wrong.  But the idea of "anybody with a pulse" is also wrong.  We've turned the presidency into "the best of two bad choices" when it should be the best of us.  Someone we trust completely with the prospects of nuclear war, with taking care of our most vulnerable, and to leading the nation through crisis.  We shouldn't have to choose between two old men who may or may not be going senile.  This wasn't the intention of the office.

The problem is that politics doesn't attract our best people.  It attracts used car salesmen.  It attracts the corrupt.  So it ends up being the least slimy of two slimeballs.

*********

I still don't understand why anyone sees Trump as some sort of criminal mastermind.  If you watch his press briefings on COVID, he's so clearly a moron.  And not a Boris Johnson "I'm pretending to be a moron so you'll let me get away with stuff."  Trump is the opposite - he's a moron who is trying so desperately to look smart.  He's constantly trying to come up with things that sound clever.  He wants to be seen as smart.  But he's just so clearly an idiot.

Oh I was trying to accentuate your point.

That'll be an interesting one.  I might have to join.

Oh, I don't feel bad for him.  I just feel like he felt like he found something on Legends and it sucks that he's going to have to re-define himself again.  Maybe not permanently, but I think, from what you'd described, Ray Palmer really filled a gap in his life.  And the writers sorta ended that part of his life.  I'm sure he'll be fine and will recover better and easier than when he lost Superman, but it's a weird thing.

What's funny is that I think Ray would fit on pretty much any of the shows.  I think he'd work well with Kara on Supergirl, he'd fit right in on Team Flash, and he'd be a welcome injection of fun on Batwoman.  This is, of course, assuming they did a different ending for him.  This one is hopefully definitive because I'd like Ray to live happily ever after.

Not necessarily.  There's a town in Italy that essentially shut down for two weeks - the people that had it were quarantined and recovered and the ones that weren't stayed away.  Transmission is down to zero.

We can't exactly shut the country down, but if we can get the transmissions to slow down even a little bit, get the tests out there, then we could get back to normal in a couple of weeks.  The problem now is that there's a lot of confusion, no tests, and we're still in cold and flu season (so symptoms can be confusing).  When we get into spring, some of that will have worked itself out, and hopefully the medical community (with or without Washington's help) will be better prepared.

I worry about that, but he's so incompetent that he'd screw it up.  He'd try to postpone after the election was already over or he'd delegate to the wrong person and they'd screw it up, or he'd forget to do it.

COVID-19 was his big chance to show that he's capable of strong leadership, and he screwed it up.  He has no idea what to do with power, and he doesn't have any idea how to use it.