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The thing about the city-scale fights in AVENGERS, WINTER SOLDIER and AGE OF ULTRON is that the entire planet would have been destroyed if the Avengers hadn't intervened, whereas Superman didn't seem to make much effort to shift the battle out of Metropolis or Smallville in MAN OF STEEL. It's also a problem in BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN, where Superman is shown to be hovering above a flooded town but making no effort to save people, rescuing someone from a garment factory fire but not putting out the fire, standing in the midst of an explosion without any attempt to try to get a few people out of the blast and to the hospital.

The weird, weird, weird thing is that the MAN OF STEEL script treatment indicated that Superman tries to move the Kryptonian fights away from populated areas, but they keep knocking him back into the buildings. The dialogue in BVS makes it clear that Superman did save the people in the flood and attempted to put out the fire and tried to get people to the hospital -- but all these onscreen moments were apparently cut from the final edit, which is why Superman seems cold and indifferent.

In AVENGERS and AGE OF ULTRON, the heroes saving civillians was thoroughline connecting every action setpiece, although Informant is certainly correct to note that there is a certain weightless lack of consequence to the onscreen action of Marvel movies.

I don't really see the Marvel Cinematic Universe as realistic even with live action. I see the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Marvel comic book universe in terms of COMMUNITY's flexible, contradictory terms of realism, specifically the paintball episodes where everyone develops high functioning combat skills, Pierce can build a fort inside a day, the damage to the school is cleared away within hours.

While Dan Harmon himself would characterize this as parody, Abed would call it homage --and the Marvel Universe is an existence where that kind of absurdity is a daily fact of life -- which was a factor in why they hired COMMUNITY directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

One of the definitive moments of the Marvel Universe, for me, is when Nick Fury's old war buddies are in a bar when they learn of Nick Fury having been killed by the Punisher. A somber moment passes -- and then all of Nick's friends start laughing uncontrollably, joking to each other that they've all 'died' on multiple occasions ("Hey, aren't you dead too? "Naw, you the dead guy!") and none of them expect Fury to be dead for long.

In the CIVIL WAR comic, Peter Parker unmasked as Spider-Man; Flash Thompson observed that Peter was being a very good pal to Spidey to participate in this ruse, but that at some point during or after the Civil War, Peter and Spidey would be seen in the same place together and everything would go back to normal. Spider-Man is also friends with a talking duck named Howard.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely embraced this absurdity by hiring comedians like Downey Jr., Paul Rudd and Chris Pratt as well as virtuosos of deadpan lunacy like Joss Whedon and the Russo brothers.

That said -- part of the Marvel Universe's initial appeal was the illusion of realism in that all the stories were set in New York City with photo referenced landmarks and references to current events and celebrities. However, the Marvel Universe also played up the absurd factors that were totally at odds with real life such as Reed Richards' flying car. This created the amusing effect where the Marvel Universe and the real world would overlap; the MU would be relevant to the real world without being the real world.

This would wax and wane over the decades; the 90s were when the MU detached almost entirely from real world overlap as the stories began to take place in an exaggerated macho fantasy. In the 2000s, a new editor, Joe Quesada, made a number of interesting initiatives to move back to overlapping with the real world -- first through increased referencing to current events and celebrities, then with incorporating real-world situations like Captain America visiting Guantanamo Bay and Tony Stark in Afghanistan, the Red Skull renounced Nazism and declared himself a Republican.

The first was effective -- Spider-Man met Jay Leno and nearly got him killed, Tony Stark dated Shannon Elizabeth, Emma Frost told the X-Men trainees that their first telepathic assignment was to find the real truth behind Tom and Nicole's split, George Bush guest-starred in numerous issues as a cunning political strategist who liked to play stupid, etc..

The incorporation of real-world situations, however, turned out to be a problem for the editors who led this charge. Given that the majority of comic book readers were left of center, there was no backlash from the fans, but editors found it awkward to have Captain America fighting Al Qaeda one week and purple dragons the next.

It was awkward to have 9-11 treated as a monumental event in the Marvel Universe when the X-Men tear up the city monthly without any issues. The editors eventually decided that the comics were not a soapbox for their personal politics and moved towards apolitical allegory. Captain America would stick to fighting AIM and HYDRA, but they might use methods that resembled modern terrorist tactics. The heroes would debate the Superhero Registration Act instead of the Patriot Act. But Spider-Man was still allowed to declare that teachers are underpaid and to meet Barack Obama.

Informant's issues seem to largely center on how the combat in CIVIL WAR is not realistic. I don't really go to superhero films or comic books for realism. Superhero combat in comics has always been a hyperexaggerated escapist fantasy with the powers being forms of emotional expression, acting as metaphor and imagery for internal states of mind. A lot of your issues with CIVIL WAR and with the Marvel Universe in general are fundamentally due to the genre having never prized realism.

For example, the Hulk. He has never killed an innocent person in the comics. This is a central aspect to Bruce Banner's character because the second the Hulk kills an innocent and Banner doesn't find some way to off himself, Banner becomes a villain. In realistic, physical terms, this makes no sense whatsoever given how the Hulk would appear to be an uncontrollable, rampaging force of nature smashing through buildings and streets.

There are various cod psychological explanations for this. Most of them are that Banner has some small splinter of control over the Hulk and Banner's conscience prevents the Hulk from stomping on innocent people or harming them. Writer Dan Slott took the view that this may be crazy, but it would be far crazier to take a heroic figure created in 1962 and turn him into a supervillain in the name of a realism that is inherently alien to this genre.

Slott also pointed out that anyone who has been to New York City and seen the vast spaces between buildings and blocks would find it absurd that Daredevil can bound across rooftops with ease, something even the most highly trained Olympic level athlete would fail to perform.

There's also the collateral damage. Spider-Man, Iron Man and Thor have regularly smashed apart buildings and had battles across New York City in the course of their adventures. They have never been responsible for innocent people getting killed. That's ridiculous, as MAN OF STEEL would indicate, but again -- this is part of the nature of the superhero genre. Superheroes in the Marvel Universe rarely if ever kill no matter how bad the situation -- and that's simply an aspect of their fictional existence. It's also in the nature of superhero comics that characters engage in lengthy conversations while beating each other up, something that couldn't happen in real life because no fighter would waste their breath on chatter.

There are other aspects of non-realism to the Marvel Universe. The technology created by Reed Richards and Tony Stark should turn the Marvel Universe into a futuristic wonderland, but it's always the twentieth to twenty-first century.

The floating timeline is absurd; Hawkeye, Iron Man and the Black Widow were contemporaries, but while the Black Widow's Communist origins have been maintained with a retconned immortality serum, Spidey and Iron Man have been relocated to the present day -- yet Black Widow's origin story is inextricably tangled up in Hawkeye and Iron Man despite them having been born years after her origin.

The shared universe aspect of the Marvel Universe is at best nonsensical. For some weird reason, the superpowered X-Men are seen as freaks and outcasts, but the superpowered Avengers and Fantastic Four are regarded as beloved celebrities. The constant deaths and resurrections stagger even the most willing sense of disbelief; Spider-Man and Captain America seem to die and return two or three times a decade.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has allowed its heroes to use lethal force now and then, but the Marvel comic book universe has never been able to wrap themselves around that narratively for whatever reason. The Hulk was briefly given a body count, but the editors, for the reasons above, decided it was a mistake and to reverse that entirely.

Ultimately, this is the Marvel Universe. A world where nobody ever really dies, where the Hulk has never killed an innocent person, where fighters can chat while battling -- and ultimately, a world of escapist comfort. I find that you're taking issue with the Marvel Universe being the Marvel Universe.

This is of course your right and I will defend your right to express your disdain for the superhero genre -- but to me, it's a bit like saying ONCE UPON A TIME is a stupid show because fairy tales are lame.

But not to worry. Your BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN DAWN OF JUSTICE re-release is coming soon enough. The ULTIMATE EDITION, rated R and retitled DAWN OF JUSTICE VERSUS APOKALIPS OMEGA SANCTION WONDER AQUA FLASH SUICIDE BAT. Mixed with Extra Grimness where every moment of Henry Cavill grimacing has been extended by 40 per cent just to get just a few more frames of misery into the movie. Augmented with Additional Nihilism in which Ben Affleck will not only declare the brutal murders of his parents as a vital life lesson, he'll also narrate a slideshow about the nature of radical self-interest. Enhanced with Supplemental Horror in which instead of just hearing about the drowning horses, we'll get to see them drown while intercut with Jonathan eating cake! Uplifted by a new sequence in which Superman sits in the ash and dust of incinerated human corpses after the bombing. And a closing scene where Kenny Braverman, the lead bully from MAN OF STEEL, visits the Kent farm to rob Clark Kent's grave only to be accidentally pulped by Superman hitting him while flying out of the coffin at top speed.

.......................

I suppose we could mock the Marvel movies in much the same way, just to be fair. I'll do that tomorrow! :-D

I agree. Now that the whole story is out, it's clear the ARROW writing staff decided to kill SOMEONE and then chose their victim afterwards. It results in a story that feels artificial and unnatural because the writers have decided someone will die before knowing if they've set up a story that actually justifies or requires a death. They also engineered a situation where it was impossible for that death to come naturally from the story because they didn't settle on who would die until as late in the season as possible.

The weird thing is that I don't think they were far from getting it right -- if they had decided from the first episode that Laurel was to die, they could have built up an entire run of episodes where the conflict between Laurel's legal exploits and her vigilante exploits is building to terrible consequences and those consequences turn out to be her death. Instead, all that stuff was abruptly thrown into one episode because it was only with this one specific episode that the writers had finally made a choice.

I disliked the Laurel character intensely in Season 1 but came to appreciate her reworking in Seasons 2 - 4. I don't object to the death or even the circumstances of her death -- I just disliked how, because of the improvised, open-ended approach, there was nothing to make sure that Laurel's story and Laurel's death dovetailed until the very episode in which it happened. It's kind of artless. On some level, I think the writers were operating from the view that death is often random; there aren't always clues, there isn't always build-up, so it'd be fine. But it makes the story feel like it's being engineered from the outside in and without much thought or care, specifically due to how the random nature of the writing is reflected in the random feel of the storytelling.

I don't hate it as much as you did, but I certainly can't defend it.

One of my favourite comic book serieses is WITCHBLADE. It's also one of the worst comics ever made -- or it was until the publisher finally hired an actual writer to script it. WITCHBLADE came out during the comic book bad girl craze, featuring a homicide detective, Sara Pezzini, who finds a magical gauntlet called the Witchblade which responds to her thoughts, forms organic armour, fires blades and flames, can telepathically link to others and form various constructs (weapons, shields, climbing apparatus). It was mostly a fetish comic written for an audience who liked to see half-naked women and tormented, long-haired men whining about shallow emotional problems in juvenile prose.

I'd dismissed WITCHBLADE as empty fetish material until Ron Marz, one of my favourite writers, started scripting the series, at which point I went back and re-read all the (awful) material before his debut. In the pre-Marz issues, the comic attempted to create some buzz by allowing readers to vote in a death pool where they could vote for characters to be safe or to potentially be killed off until only one unlucky character would be left in the pool. There was no storytelling function served by teasing a death and letting the audience vote on it, nor was it originated from the stories themselves -- it was simply to create empty hype. What it did, instead, was communicate how little the people writing this comic cared about their stories or characters in any way.

I'm watching MR. RIGHT, written by Max Landis, and the invincible hitman played by Sam Rockwell who can pull knives out of mid-air and never loses a fight and wins Anna Kendrick's heart in 30 seconds makes me suspicious of how Landis is totally okay with hypercompetent, indestructible characters so long as they're men.

.....................................................................

To be fair, Anna Kendrick's civilian character who has never been in a fight is also revealed to innately possess the same knife-catching superpowers, so maybe Landis doesn't mind women being awesome so long as he writes them.

Also to be fair, this is actually a pretty fun movie.

LAURIE: "You will not believe what he did at the movie, Mom -- "
HENRIETTA: "What'd he do now?"
LAURIE: "There was a guy texting in the theatre -- " (jabs a finger at ireactions) " -- and he threw dimes at the back of the guy's head until he put the phone away!"
ME: "That's not true. I did not throw dimes at anybody. I would never do that."
LAURIE: "You fucking liar! I saw you! And you say you do it all the time!"
ME: "I throw pennies, not dimes. I know how to budget."

Unbelievable, Slider_Quinn21. I can't believe you're so determined to characterize Informant as someone who just hates FUN AND can only enjoy joyless exercises in grimdark. It's bad enough you clearly hate old people and women, but anhedonia is a serious condition and poor Informant is clearly suffering and in need of our compassion and understanding.

;-)

In all seriousness, Informant's criticisms of SUPERGIRL are pretty legitimate and reasonable. They're just criticisms in areas that I, personally, consider irrelevant in the face of how SUPERGIRL makes me feel.

No one betting against Jim Cameron's ginormously budgeted gambles has ever won. That said, past performance is not necessarily indicative for future results.

Dean Cain is reportedly a very nice man. Sexually, he's a very intriguing figure in that he has had sex with a lot of women including Brooke Shields, Pamela Anderson, Mindy McCready, Denise Richards, Samantha Torres, Ami Dolenz, Gabrielle Reece and possibly Teri Hatcher and I suspect the full count of women is near the triple digit figure if it isn't already.

It's intriguing to me because Jerry O'Connell's sexual history is numerically similar -- yet, all of Jerry O'Connell's ex-girlfriends have come out to the press describing Jerry as a philandering, unfaithful, lying, sociopathic traitor while 99 per cent of Dean Cain's exes have nothing but praise for Dean's conduct.

Dean's exes have talked about how he was very romantic and sexual, but also extremely clear that because of a busy TV schedule, he was only dating casually. Friendship sometimes led to sex and then went back to friendship, but he was honest about how serious he was and honest that he was seeing other women. He didn't tell women he was their boyfriend and then cheat on them (as Jerry did with Giuliana Rancic) or hook up with women and then ignore them (Jerry and Melissa Joan Hart). As a result, the only woman who has been negative about her relationship with Dean is the mother of his child and that was in a venomous custody battle where she accused Dean of being a drug addict and alcoholic, to which he responded by volunteering himself for regular blood tests that led to him winning sole custody of his son.

His career also cooled rapidly after LOIS & CLARK and, like Robert Floyd, he was frank about why: he was offered a lot of work, but he turned down a lot of it to focus on raising his child.

My point is that most people with Dean Cain's sexual exploits have nasty, unpleasant reputations like Jerry O'Connell's, so to have both Dean's sexual history and the reputation he does, he would have to be every bit as affable and respectful as Clark Kent. There is very little 'acting,' although there is still a great deal of skill to achieving naturalism and ease on camera.

Which makes it all the more intriguing that Dean Cain decided that Clark Kent is a virgin...

I don't have an opinion of Hillary Clinton yet. I'm doing my research. I did write her as a one-term US President running for mayor of San Francisco in the fhird SLIDERS REBORN script, but that was a random detail of alt-history. Also, Slider_Quinn21 feels I have been rather hard on him lately over his opinions of Rey and Ben Affleck as Batman which I've (jokingly) characterized as hatred towards women and old people, so even if I disagreed with him (and I currently lack the knowledge to concur or dissent), I would probably sleep on it for a few weeks.

Setting aside any discussion of quality --

That's the financial situation as well. Warner Bros. was sure a Batman and Superman film would easily hit 500 million domestic and 500 million foreign within two weeks, likely make at least $1.5 billion by the end of its theatrical run, and leave any competition in the dust. They put nearly half a million (estimated) into the project, expecting to make about $900 million in profit.

But three weeks in, it's made $300 million domestically, $500 million in foreign sales and ticket sales dropped 70 per cent with the second week, and now they'll likely make about $278 million in profit.

That makes superhero movies a lousy investment; they cost half a billion dollars to make and their profit margins aren't high enough to justify the risk and funds especially when sequels inevitably see diminishing returns. Warner Bros. has to ask themselves: why are they spending so much money to earn a 55 per cent return on investment that inevitably gets whittled away by continued costs of operating? In order for the studio to see a significant gain, they need to see a profit of at least 100 to 300 per cent of what they invested.

So, the issue isn't that BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN isn't earning money; it's that it isn't earning money to entirely validate the money that was spent. If BVS had cost $250 million to produce and market, the current earnings would be fine.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think casting Ben Afflect was likely more expensive than BVS's earnings justify; I'm guessing he was paid anywhere from $30 million to $40 million. The second expense was filming locations -- Detroit and Chicago and Yorkville might have been best replaced entirely with soundstages, Vancouver or Los Angeles, and the use of second unit filming and computer recomposition to create the illusion of the actors being on location, much as HEROES created locations with stock footage and digitally merging it with newly filmed material.

Another insane use of funds was extremely poor preparation that is fairly common to studio films, sadly. They hired Jena Malone and filmed extensive sequences that aren't in the film, so they paid her for nothing and paid the crew to film all those scenes for no reason. At a midpoint in editing, the film had an additional two hours of additional scenes -- not extended moments, but additional scenes -- that were filmed and ultimately not included, which means that Snyder and the producers exercised poor judgement when deciding to spend money filming script pages that weren't used. It really is not difficult to sit down over a weekend, read a script and identify what scenes will likely be cut.

Setting aside any question of quality, all of Marvel's films have been unquestionably profitable and the disappointment over AGE OF ULTRON at Marvel Studios was because it cost more $30 million more than AVENGERS but earned about $100 million less -- it was a hit, but it didn't move the studio to a higher level of financial prosperity beyond where AVENGERS had already put them. It wasn't an improvement, financially. But Marvel movies tend to operate like DC's TV shows -- they're on a budget where even if the earnings aren't spectacular, they're still pretty solid and aren't cause to question the value of the superhero cinema.

I think that's an area where DC's slate could benefit -- they spend way too much money without control, attention or frugality. When Batman is the star of your movie, you don't need to hire a movie star to play him. You don't need to pay for actors and sequenecs that will ultimately be cut. Location filming is wonderful, but this is not the 1990s anymore and the 'bottled' look of SLIDERS on Season 3 - 5 soundstages can now be dodged with craft and skill, allowing a location look for less cost while still having money for Superman and Wonder Woman to fight Doomsday. The movie side could learn some things about cost effective creativity from the TV side.

"Strange Visitor" is another intriguing episode that's attempting to figure out: how do we threaten Superman? This episode has Bureau 39 and Trask target Superman by investigating him, pursuing leads that threaten the exposure of Clark's secret identity.

Once again, Deborah Joy Levine and her writers experiment with the format and while the episode has its strengths and weaknesses, LOIS & CLARK is clearly engaged with the Superman concept even if the writers are unsure and attempting different things.

This episode really makes it clear that Lois is silly, goofy, flighty, self-centered and in some ways stupid, but she is a force to be reckoned with. Her dying wish being to kiss Clark Kent is ridiculous until it's revealed as a feint. Her infatuation with Superman is hilariously skewered as a shallow crush when working with the sketch artist. She describes Superman's face in mythic, reverential terms and then describes Clark's identical features as bland and mundane.

But then, the closing scene of Superman and Lois indicates that Lois' love for him has depths as well. She tells Superman she respects his mission on Earth to help others, that she's horrified that a black ops division is reacting to Superman with suspicion and violence, and she wants to help him. The scripts do a splendid job of adding weight, dimension and power to Lois' role while still frequently playing her for laughs.

Dean Cain's performance remains a revelation as Clark Kent and an ungodly mess as Superman. Clark's terror during his interrogation is marvellously performed, and the earnest, hopeful wonder at finding artifacts of his spaceship are very well done. He has excellent chemistry with his parents again this week as Jonathan confesses that he did not destroy the spaceship. But when Cain is in costume, it all falls apart. Superman's scene with Lois features another awkward performance; Cain is clearly not comfortable in the costume. He crosses his arms stiffly, he shifts his weight clumsily -- he has no idea how to come alive as Superman even as he makes his performance as Clark truly effortless.

The strange thing is that Cain is so first rate in every scene where he's wearing normal clothes. He plays his scene in Cat's apartment beautifully; he is in no way attracted to her charms, but he likes how she's willing to dress down. His exasperation with Cat spreading rumours about him is hilarious and Cain has a note-perfect reaction when Lois describes his affair with Cat as his only meaningful secret. The vulnerability Cain shows in this episode contrasts well with the small moments in which Clark exhibits his powers, from digging up the hole where the spaceship was thought to be hidden to casually diving out of a plane. He completely makes it work that a god would clock in at the Daily Planet and be afraid of Bureau 39.

However, being a 1990s script, it suffers from poor research as did the Pilot in accidentally declaring fortune cookies to be Chinese. Perry delivers a memorable line to Clark about steering clear of Cat: "If you want to be the king, you gotta listen to the colonel." This quotable line completely fails to account for how Colonel Tom Parker formed a hideously codependent relationship with Elvis in which he overworked the man, ignored Presley's serious drug problems and forced him on a heath-destroying tour schedule while always making sure to pocket more than half of Elvis' earnings for himself. I guess it was harder to Google this stuff in the 90s. I'm a little surprised that Tom, the music guy, didn't call the show out on this.

"I'm Looking Through You" makes another attempt to develop a manner of working Superman and Clark Kent into the story. It's not a huge success, but it's a worthy attempt. For this episode, the writers create a villain/victim of the week with whom Clark strongly identifies. Alan, the invisible man, feels ignored and diminished by his lack of regard, just as Clark feels ignored and diminished by the same. Unfortunately, the story doesn't come together for a variety of reasons.

The first is that Clark never helps Alan with his problem of feeling invisible, nor do their situations line up in any appreciable way. Alan's invisibility is described as a vague detachment; Clark's issue is being overshadowed. Clark and Alan can't connect, nor do their stories sync at all. The second is that our villain of the week is, despite a gruff demeanor, totally unthreatening. Barnes is so undefined by anything except the actor's menace that he never comes off as a threat.

Trask and Luthor nearly broke the concept of Superman; Barnes, at best, offers a nasty scowl. Robbery is simply not a crime that creates any tension or danger for the characters. The episode visibly gives up on trying to build any menace when Lois and Alan get locked in a large vault with the absurd claim that they'll suffocate in two minutes. I'm glad Tom and Cory liked this episode, though.

Lois thinking she can bid on Superman for a date is delightfully delusional and I'm disappointed we don't get to see Superman on his date with the socialite. However, this episode features a few decent Superman moments from Dean Cain. His discomfort during the celebrity date auction works well and there's a certain earnest charm to Superman telling Lois she doesn't need to bid for his attention. There's also a very nice shot of Superman smashing through a wall.

With "Requiem for a Superhero," we have the writers attempting to threaten Superman in the most straightforward fashion -- cybernetically enhanced wrestlers with super strength. This effort is a complete and total failure. LOIS & CLARK attempts superhuman combat in this episode and the budget and direction simply aren't up to it. There is insufficient funding for Superman to be smashed through walls or to exchange blows, so quick resolutions and a humourous Superman finger flick are all that can be done. Dean Cain is hopelessly out of place in the fight scenes, although his defeat of this week's villain with his index finger is extremely funny.

As is normal for this show, Dean Cain puts in a spectacular performance as Clark, especially in the scene where the bullying wrestler attempts to intimidate Clark. Clark is shown to be cringing, retreating, fearful, alarmed -- Lois and the wrestler read it as fear -- and it is, in that Clark is terrified that the wrestler striking him will break the man's hands. Cain finds exactly the right note where the audience knows it's concern for another person while the characters read it as fear of injury.

I really liked Tom and Cory noting, as I felt, that the poker game is the scene where he realizes that Superman stands for something that makes him unwilling to use his powers to take advantage of people. It's weird how it doesn't actually connect to anything else in the episode; the baseball game teaser and the punching bag tag don't seem to connect to the rest of the story as well. It is indeed baffling.

Cory's also right to note how it makes little to no sense that Clark has never previously been invited to a poker game at which the players are... the regular cast. One wonders who it was that cancelled.

Almost as though surrendering on the Superman front, the episode has most of the episode focus on Lois. And it's really nice. The actor playing Dr. Sam Lane has a nice sense of confident detachment; we can see where Lois' solitary singlemindedness comes from; we can also recognize the goofy humour as damage borne of neglect from her father. Dr. Lane is Lois without the jokes, without the pratfalls -- without which Dr. Lane is rigid, cold and indifferent.

This episode is also a brilliant showcase for Lex Luthor, who has what are essentially three monologues where he talks to himself and John Shea makes it into a convincing conversation. The scripting is sharp and nuanced, identifying how Lex's egotism and self-absorbed nature know no limits -- he has a man murdered and describes it as disappointing because it reflects a lack of imagination on his part. Also unnerving is how Luthor, despite his obvious regard for Lois, has no compulsion about endangering her father or engineering situations where Lois has a gun put to her head.

The way Luthor compartmentalizes his internal thoughts to excuse or justify himself is on the razor edge of total sanity and total insanity. It is a tribute to how LOIS & CLARK's writers are consistently excellent. They may not make excellent episodes, but that is due to the challenges of writing for an invulnerable protagonist rather than any shortage of imagination, talent or commitment to the series.

I also love Tom and Cory noting that Lois poisons her plant with coffee.

I don't know if the public knows Daredevil is blind or not. From 1964 - 2002, his identity was a secret and Daredevil presumably having sight was often used to hide Matt's identity. Batman figured out that Daredevil was blind within a few minutes of meeting him, however, based on how Daredevil's body language reacted to noise and how he angled towards sounds of interest.

In 2002, Daredevil's identity was outed by an FBI agent who sold his story to the Daily Globe newspaper. Since then, Matt has been in a state of publicly denying his alter-ego identity with barely anyone believing him, even after Iron Fist made sure Daredevil and Matt Murdock were seen in two different places at the same time.

However, due to a recent cosmic event called Secret Wars, nobody except Foggy Nelson and Matt know the truth anymore. It's not clear what the current situation is.

When Cat Grant said that Harrison Ford was a philanderer trying to cheat on his wife with Cat, I had a brief moment where I feared SUPERGIRL's creators might get sued.

I wondered if they would eventually get the range so powerful on the Death Star that it wouldn't need to move. But the books declared it had hyperdrive, so I always went with that. To be honest, I'm not entirely clear if ships in STAR WARS can even move faster than light -- off the top of my head, the characters only refer to going at "light speed" but then the use of hyperspace suggests that reaching light speed lets them enter a realm where ships can 'jump' to a farther location without travelling that distance.

According to the various technical manuals, the Death Star had hyperdrive -- but all the books before April 25, 2014 have been declared apocryphal. They are now labelled as STAR WARS LEGENDS. So now, it's kind of a gray area.

**

In other STAR WARS news -- well, in February (so not news, really), fan editor Peter Harmáček released version 2.5 of his DESPECIALIZED STAR WARS. These are versions of the original trilogy where all the SPECIAL EDITION changes have been removed -- and they're in high definition.

Very neat stuff. Harmáček received a variety of donations to make this happen; fans calling themselves TeamNegative1 tracked down 35mm prints of the unaltered films and did scans and restorations and gave some of their stuff to Harmáček. Harmáček took the SPECIAL EDITION blu-ray versions and mixed them with the 35mm versions and the unaltered but low-res DVD footage to recreate the original films.

He used rotoscoping to lift the original effects and put them on top of the SPECIAL EDITION video, covering the CG additions. For example, the SPECIAL EDITION STAR WARS created a new Leia hologram; Harmáček kept the HD version but covered the new Leia hologram with the original. He also recreated all the edits so that shots removed or altered in the SPECIAL EDITION have been restored to the DESPECIALIZED version. The original sound mix has been reinstated. All blu-ray colour alterations (designed to make the original films' tan, low contrast image match the bright, high contrast look of the prequels) have been undone.

Harmáček also restored errors. He recreated matte lines, scanlines, incorrectly placed matte paintings and visual artifacts, aiming for historical accuracy. It's called DESPECIALIZED, but that implies there've been changes; these releases are STAR WARS (1977), EMPIRE (1980) and RETURN (1983) as shown in theatres. Fans no longer need George Lucas to sign off on unaltered HD releases; they've made it themselves.

Earlier versions of the DESPECIALIZED version did not have material from the 35mm prints available. Harmáček made do with other sources: a 16mm print scan of STAR WARS, the low-resolution DVD release of the unaltered trilogy and a few 35mm sequences here and there as they came in. Harmáček also received film cells that he used to create matte paintings to restore original backgrounds to shots.

Sometimes, the unaltered materials were of a very low resolution and had to be upscaled to blend with the HD blu-ray footage. In some cases, it was no big deal -- for fast motion scenes, the original effects could be blurred to blend; for the space battle scenes, there was so much movement that the absence of fine detail wasn't an issue.

In others, you'd have a sharp and pristine shot suddenly becoming jagged and rough, or there'd be a low resolution effect on an HD shot. These were isolated instances, but enough to distract -- such as the final scene of RETURN OF THE JEDI where Harmáček removed Hayden Christiansen, but the Anakin in the shot was low resolution where Yoda and Obi-Wan were in HD. With version 2.5, areas where the visual quality dropped have been replaced by 35mm material, sufficiently cleaned up so that mismatches, while noticeable if you pause to examine, are invisible during normal viewing.

I like some of the SPECIAL EDITION changes. I think it's ridiculous to alter scenes to insert CG slapstick comedy like robots in Mos Eisley fighting each other or amp up the space battle sound effects so much they drown out John Williams' award winning score or recolour the films so badly that all shadow detail is lost.

But there are some things worth doing -- like correcting special effects errors where planets show up inside asteroid fields or redoing the glow effect on the Millennium Falcon to look consistent or adding more stormtroopers to the Death Star hallways. Changes that don't make the movie look like it was filmed in 1977 but only got edited and received special effects in 1996.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, if you set aside the crushed blacks and bad colouring, is a pretty good example of what a SPECIAL EDITION should be. The changes are minimal; the airspeeder windshields are now completely transparent where they were translucent and bluescreen artifacts are removed. Cloud City has windows digitally inserted to make the place seem bigger. The Falcon exterior hatch, once a vague, white space, now has mechanical texture and detail. It's not obvious what has been put onto the film after the fact; these changes are unintrusive while additive.

The SPECIAL EDITION versions of STAR WARS and RETURN are unwatchably schizophrenic for me. I'm glad Peter Harmáček has released this new version which isn't even new at all. Crazy how much work he had to do when Lucas could simply have new transfers made.

He put his 2.5 releases up on Torrent sites, merely stipulating that anyone downloading them should first buy the SPECIAL EDITION releases.

The comics changing Wally struck me as a mis-guided but well-intentioned effort. DC has given no official statements on why they got rid of Wally West and brought back Barry Allen, but the reasoning seems self-evident to me. Wally West was too complicated a character for film and TV.

Wally's origin: Barry Allen is a police scientist who was doused in chemicals struck by lightning that gave him superspeed and then Barry's nephew was struck in a similar accident and became Kid Flash and then Barry died and Wally became the successor to Barry as the third Flash because there was actually a first Flash and who the hell would bother with any of this crap for a TV show or a movie?

All adaptations either used Barry's origin with Wally West's name or just used Barry. DC, realizing that it was only a matter of time before the Flash became a TV show or film, decided to get in line with what would be the most widely seen version of the Flash -- a Flash who is Barry Allen, police scientist. CSI with superpowers. Barry was brought back to life. His absence since 1986 was compressed to a year or two and explained with a cover story of him having been in witness protection.

This left them in a quandary of what the hell to do with Wally. They attempted to simply background him: he's the Flash of Keystone City appearing in group shots and back-up stories while Barry is now the focus of the FLASH title in Central City. But due to deadline issues and the writer getting stretched too thin, the back-up stories were never written. Then, with a company-wide reboot, it was simpler to just make it so that Barry was the Flash, period. At this point, there was a wish to bring Wally back -- but to adjust the character so that he was defined not as being Kid Flash or the third Flash -- but simply as Barry's nephew, hence all the alterations.

In retrospect, it probably would have been best to just not use Wally at all or put him on Earth 2 with the post-reboot Jay Garrick and Alan Scott (the first Flash and Green Arrow). But it wasn't meant with malice. Repiloting is tough, man.

What I find is that cinema is full of characters who are tragically orphaned and more powerful than anyone and every supporting cast member is a willing love interest for these characters with genius level intelligence, Olympic level athleticism and incredible good looks matched terrible angst that only makes them more attractive especially when these characters are hypercompetent and earn implacable loyalty and demonstrate the ability to win no matter how much the odds are against them -- and while that's an acceptable template for Tom Cruise, Batman, Jason Bourne, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Sherlock Holmes, it's apparently implausible and questionable if even a portion of that template goes to a woman.

Which is why I simply don't buy the claim that the male version of Rey would receive complaints about competence and ability. Rey is no more implausible than any heroic figure of cinema, but because she's a woman, it's an issue.

A lot of the problems cited with Rey -- which I don't really see as problems to begin with -- are really issues with STAR WARS.

Well, despite her competence, I definitely got the sense that Rey was in trouble and turmoil in many points of the movie such as when she struggled to buy enough food to live on and found it difficult to pilot the Falcon and nearly crashed it or was overwhelmed by the Force vision that caused her to flee into the forest or when she fought Kylo Ren with a blaster and was promptly disarmed or when he mind-raped her or when even a wounded Kylo dominated her in a lightsaber fight until she finally tapped into the Force and beat him.

Because she saved his life through the (insane and accidental) release of the monsters aboard the ship and also (inadvertently) retrieved the Millennium Falcon for him and (coincidentally) was willing to help Han find his old war buddy who had gone missing.

Han also offered Luke a job in STAR WARS.

Maz specifically says she can feel the Force in Rey -- which is also especially present because Rey is telepathically drawn to the lightsaber that Anakin and Luke carried. Ah, the Force.

Leia is Force sensitive as well (first established in EMPIRE when Luke reaches her telepathically) -- she felt Han's death through the Force (as shown in an insert where after Han's stabbed, Leia reacts) and felt Rey's reaction to Han's death through the Force. Admittedly, Chewie was likely grieving more, but Leia could actually feel Rey's sadness for Han and feel it mirror her own.

This just just how the Force works and has since 1977. I think the real issue, then, is the core weakness of STAR WARS -- the use of the Force to connect disparate events and direct characters in a fashion that, without the Force, would be implausibly nonsensical and random. The use of the Force to make characters possess knowledge and skills they haven't earned in precognitive bursts.

At its best, STAR WARS highlights use of the Force as self-awareness and awareness of the world and acting calculatedly yet honestly to others and to one's self and achieving harmony in both. At its worst, STAR WARS uses the Force as an excuse for narrative malpractice.

Nevertheless, to me, complaining about Rey's psi-powers and precognitive gifts is the equivalent of complaining that Batman is too good at fighting or Iron Man is too good at fixing machines or that Superman can fly. It also ignores numerous scenes where Rey is clearly in trouble. All Force users have demonstrated that their superpower is using the Force to very suddenly become super-talented at something they'd never touched before.

That is the universe this movie is set in, for better or for worse. Anyone telling STAR WARS stories either embraces it -- or finds a more logical franchise. It seems silly to criticize STAR WARS for using the Force. One might as well complain that DEADPOOL is unrealistic because the character is aware he's in a movie.

I was just reminded that the first prequel has a nine year old boy defeat a fleet of spaceships in addition to winning a pod race and that didn't engender a flicker of protest. Which I think really underlines Landis' contempt for Rey. How dare a GIRL be competent, talented, capable and strong? Women can't be good at things, they're things to be owned.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone would raise these concerns with the Rey character if the character were a man and played by Jesse Eisenberg.

Landis was not born an arrogant asshole -- he seemed to become one after CHRONICLE's success went to his head. He is super-talented, but when he became famous and successful (well, famous), he developed some very peculiar issues with women. If you are a successful filmmaker or  Hollywood leading man (like Jerry O'Connell), women will throw themselves at you in the hopes of fame or work and sex will be an underlying part of the bargain. However, the mistake is to see this one subset of women -- women willing to trade sex for work or fame -- and assume that the mindset of these women are the mindsets of all women.

Landis, in a particularly appalling 2013 interview, doesn't even see women as self-actualizing beings of self-determination. They're just extensions and reflections of his ego and someone like that would naturally take issue with a woman being her own person with her own independent ability to survive. He's done good stuff -- AMERICAN ULTRA was fun and unfortunately released in the cinematic dead zone of August with extremely poor promotion that didn't show what a wonky blend of genres it contained.

But he has serious problems with 50 per cent of the human population and I can't see how that isn't a factor in his absurd claim that Rey beat a super-experienced Force user while deceitfully leaving out the fact that this Force wielder (a) just killed his own father (b) had psychologically imploded upon himself (c) had been shot in the stomach by Chewbacca (d) was periodically punching himself in the gut to numb the pain and shove his internal organs back into place and (e) so weak that he struggled to beat Finn.

As for Luke -- he's captured by a flesh eating monster in EMPIRE. He uses the Force to escape the creature and it's only once he's escaped does Han find Luke. Luke doesn't use the Force in the Battle of Hoth, but he does come up with the idea of typing up the AT-AT walkers with harpoons and tow cables and, even after getting shot down, he takes down one AT-AT using a grapple hook and a grenade. He's not incompetent, although he doesn't really use the Force outside of training and, when facing Darth Vader, only uses telekinesis now and then.

That's part of the critique Yoda makes; Luke is not in tune with the spiritual / plot-driven side of the Force -- and when Luke does use it, he sees Leia, Han and Chewie in Cloud City and rather than assessing the situation, he charges right in, finds Vader despite having never been to Cloud City and having no idea where Vader could be, gets his ass kicked  and he telepathically signals Leia to rescue him later.

He's expressly presented as a flawed hero who proves Yoda right that he was not ready to go to Cloud City and was also not even needed there. But he demonstrated Plot power in that he knew the action was on Cloud City through the Force. Darth Vader also uses the Plot power of the Force quite significantly in luring Luke to him as well as  in one scene where he instinctively knows the Rebels are on Hoth even though the officers protest there's no evidence to single it out among all the possible locations.

In RETURN OF THE JEDI, Luke's Plot powers are even more in evidence (an awareness of Vader, realizing his presence in the forest moon ship was a mistake), but his main use of the Force is to feel Darth Vader's internal conflict and capitalize on it. Ultimately, that's the Force in the classic trilogy; a Force user gains awareness of the story they're in and begins to manipulate the story with this knowledge, but their awareness is sporadic, unsustained and does not lead to omniscience.

Rey is a very different character who has grown up in a harsh and unyielding environment with no real support structure or guardians, eking out a living on scavenging mechanical parts and having to defend herself on all fronts. Luke had clearly never been in a fight in STAR WARS. Rey has clearly been in lots.

STAR WARS made it quite overt that Luke's Uncle Owen manipulated Luke's life to prevent him from ever needing his Force sensitivity -- farm work, no physical dangers, no threats -- whereas Rey has had to survive on her own and has been using the Force to survive even if she doesn't know it. Her understanding of the Falcon's systems are driven by the Force as presented in first three movies: bursts of precognitive instinct that forward the plot, with Kylo Ren inadvertently unlocking that gift entirely.

I'm afraid that until SLIDERS REBORN is complete, any other SLIDERS project will have to wait. Hit me up again in 2017!

This is one way to read it. Another way to read it is that Han would not have chosen to go out any other way. Which is not to say he hoped his death would come from being impaled by a lasersword wielded by his own son

But Han, even knowing his son was very possibly and probably going to kill him, had to give his son one last chance to redeem himself. He felt that, being Ben's dad, it was his obligation to give his son this final opportunity that nobody else would ever extend to Kylo Ren. And there is a certain symmetry to how the climax has a father reaching out to his child and the final scene is a child reaching out to her father -- all the grief and loss and loneliness and pain of abandonment on her face, salved by a small sense of hope.

But you can also look at it from the viewpoint that caring about your family can get you killed. It's probably both!

This is very true. However, it leads to another question -- how much time, attention, thought, consideration and effort would SLIDERS require if the show had stayed in Vancouver, done 5 - 7 seasons with the original characters and then ended with a two hour finale presenting a final adventure and a happy ending?

One of the reasons SLIDERS REBORN is delayed -- I decided I had to find a way to work Mallory into the series (preferably without altering the story already in place). It was simply wrong to have an anniversary celebration without a role for Robert Floyd. If SLIDERS hadn't been run so clumsily and unprofessionally, would any of these extensive mental gymnastics and online story conferences be necessary?

(Hilariously, Rob personally assured me that he would not be offended by his exclusion from a piece of fan fiction for a television show he worked on for one year over a decade and a half ago -- and it STILL bothered me.)

But that's just the fans. From an unsentimental and economical standpoint, there is no real upside to remaking SLIDERS. You'd have to give up large amounts of profit and control to the rightsholders and creators, whereas if you made your own parallel universe series -- like PARALLELS -- you could do what you wanted. And if you don't bring back the original cast or if you're determined to do a NEXT GENERATION -- then aren't you basically doing PARALLELS? An new TV show with new characters that might not even benefit from having the SLIDERS legacy behind it?

I've enjoyed Laurel's arc. Season 2 put her on a hilariously self-destructive path from becoming the Arrow's archnemesis to her totally justifiable rage at Sarah for faking her death and returning to a happy homecoming. Season 3 was neat where she sought to honour her sister and spare her father the pain. Throughout all of it, I liked how Laurel kept it prominent that Oliver was not born a driven, hardened crusader against evil but was a shallow and unfaithful little creep and how she didn't truly realize how much he'd changed.

I never found her interesting on her own, but she was an interesting figure in how she related to Oliver. I never felt like Laurel was less than what she needed to be; she was written as a civilian and an office worker, not a superhero, and when she became a superhero, it was in a somewhat misguided effort to keep her sister alive in her heart. I thought they did a nice job. I was quite relieved that the romance was dropped after Season 1 and Laurel had her own motivations and goals even if they were designed to bring complications to Oliver's life rather than Laurel's life. No complaints on Season 2 - 4 Laurel for me.

I guess for me -- while I have some issues with the soap opera of the show and some of the plots -- I don't find the problems as glaring as the problems I had with Season 1, and I thought Season 1 was terrible. So, the show didn't really start in a great place for me and I see no gold standard that it's failing to reach. I find it as flawed as ever, except the flaws have migrated to areas that don't annoy me as much as they annoy you.

Moving onto the shipping wars, which haven't really been in evidence around here and hopefully never will -- Laurel has been problematic since the first episode. In the comics, Black Canary is essentially a more feminine version of the showboating, arrogant, activist Green Arrow. But the actors they cast and the scripts they wrote bear almost no resemblance to the comic book characters.

Stephen Amell's The Hood/Arrow/Green Arrow is a driven, angry, troubled, resolute, solitary veteran of war, nothing like the adventurous thrillseeker of the comic books. Katie Cassidy's Laurel Lance is not the goofy, daring, fun-loving, high-spirited heroine who was Oliver Queen's partner in lunacy. In the comics, there's a very natural sense of two like-minded spirits who are head over heels in love. In ARROW -- you can see why the playboy Oliver might have dated Laurel and admired her, and you can see why Laurel might have had fun with the playboy Oliver -- but there is absolutely no sense that the two of them are partners in life and lunacy or could ever be.

If you ever read the GREEN ARROW comics, the idea of the spontaneous, random, eccentric Dinah Lance being a lawyer or a district attorney would be completely unthinkable. And the idea of Oliver Queen being a nightclub owner is so utterly alien to the comic book incarnation that it's funny; the Oliver Queen of the comics would prefer to go fishing and camp out in the mountains.

So, right from the start, there was this expectation that Oliver and Laurel would be the couple of the series based on the comics -- and it was an expectation the writers didn't seem to keen on themselves as they made Laurel hostile and hateful towards Oliver and made it clear Oliver was too racked with guilt and grief over his crappy behaviour towards Laurel to go near her like that, especially when she was dating his best friend. By the midpoint of Season 1, it was pretty clear that the characters as scripted didn't make a good couple and the actors as performing didn't have a lot of chemistry.

There was also a serious problem in the way they'd written Laurel Lance -- she was incredibly one-note as nothing but the love interest for one man or another, and with Season 2, the writers tried to course correct by giving Laurel a lot of personal problems from addiction to hatred of the Arrow to her sheer loathing for Sara Lance.

It was a tough road, but it finally dimensionalized Laurel and by Season 3, it was possible to see Laurel as a partner, ally and comrade to Oliver -- but there was no romance there. However, years of SMALLVILLE had apparently created a vast audience of superhero fans who weren't deeply familiar with the source material but were certain that the defaults of the source material as the knew them -- Green Arrow and Black Canary are a couple -- would be the eventual default of the show as well.

Ultimately, ARROW went its own route and I give them a lot of credit for that. But it's unquestionably where a lot of the shipping rage and wars come from -- for whatever reason, a certain segment of fans have a bizarre sense of entitlement that they justify by claiming that killing off Laurel is an unacceptable divergence from the source material.

In terms of content, the Sliders Rewatch at http://rewatchpodcast.podomatic.com and the Sliderscast at www.sliderscast.com have certainly given fans a lot to enjoy and discuss. Every couple years, some fan looks up Tracy Torme's phone number and calls him to talk about a potential reboot. There's a 20th anniversary special over at www.earthprime.com/reborn with one final chapter to go. But the biggest draw to this board appears to be superheroes. We get really enthused discussing the DC Extended Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC shows and I often suspect it's because the sliders are, in fact, superhero characters.

I think, also, SLIDERS had fans like Temporal Flux and the Expert who found all the behind the scenes info for why casting changes were made and why certain stories were told. In an Internet era, most shows see all their behind the scenes stuff out in the open, often revealed in the cast and creators' social media accounts or in audio commentaries. With SLIDERS, fan experts had to dig, but the result is that SLIDERS can be discussed in its behind the scenes context just as extensively as any modern TV series -- whereas other 90s shows like SEAQUEST and EARTH 2 and MANTIS and LOIS & CLARK will never have their secrets known as wholly or exhaustively because those shows did not luck into investigators as capable and resourceful as TF and the Expert.

But I think the reason SLIDERS is still actively discussed with all of us demonstrating a shocking skillfulness in bringing any discussion of any film, novel or TV show back to SLIDERS -- SLIDERS was an anthology series with a regular cast and any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story. (That's not to say it would be a GOOD story.)

ME: "So, I think the solution is that Mallory isn't actually in the story. Quinn is alone hallucinating and near-death and he sees Mallory -- who is actually his subconscious survival instinct as played by Rob Floyd. I got rid of the psychics and mind control and voodoo so you won't hate it."

MATT: "You're wrong. I already hate it. The moment you removed voodoo from the equation? Me equals out. But why does Quinn end up in this near-death situation all by himself?"

ME : "Because I want the story to be largely Quinn and Mallory onscreen talking."

MATT: "Okay. So why is Quinn all by himself? Because you have to have a better answer than that."

ME: "Arrogant overconfidence."

MATT: "Wrong. You're going to be wrong every time. The answer is he doesn't go in by himself."

ME: "I have come up with an explanation for why Quinn goes in alone. It could even be considered insightful."

MAGGIE: "Mallory, you sure you don't need backup on this one?" 

QUINN: "Maggie, come on. This takedown is going to be the most boring thing to happen since Wade dated a robot."

MALLORY: "Interesting move there. No shortage of friends. A crack squad of commandos and Marines who stand at your side. But you came here alone. Every choice. Every crossroad. Always alone."

QUINN: "I thought I had this." 

MALLORY: "You always do -- and you're proven right time and time again -- until you're facing off against a tornado or worse."

QUINN: "I needed a word with alone with Mr. Holt. One more word. I needed to convince myself.. convince him -- that he shouldn't give up."

MALLORY: (looking at Holt's body) "Good job there."

MATT: "Blegh. Stop referencing shitty Season 3 plots. I'm telling you, it's odd without the other sliders."

ME: "Oh, the others show up at the end. But Quinn gets himself into this mess, he gets himself out. Mallory isn't really there."

MATT: "With this rationale, why not swap in Colin?"

ME: "Because I FUCKING HATE CHARLIE O'CONNELL."

MATT: "That mindset doesn't serve the story. It serves ego."

ME: "This is not ego. This is a tribute to a good man and a wonderful actor who treated my show with respect and dignity. Rob deserves to be in SLIDERS REBORN. Charlie O'Connell... uh, he can have my bowling membership card. The real issue is working out a situation where Quinn is near death but can escape because Mallory points him to some tiny, minute piece of information that Quinn and his genius dismissed as irrelevant but turns out to be critical to get out alive."

MATT: "Blegh. That is the sound of personal bias overriding story. By your own admission, you are writing toward the scene you want to see, but you're not planning anything. You will put whatever will justify, to you, the scene between Quinns."

ME: "I'm not writing a script, just bullet points, because I don't quite know how to get to The Quinns aside from knowing it has to be the first scene."

MATT: "I know. That's why you hit me up with this bulletproof write-up, correct? So I could shoot some bullets in it?"

ME: "I was kind of hoping you could apply some wax and polish to it as well."

MATT: "I couldn't plot this stuff. It's so dense."

ME: "Do you mean dense as in stupid or dense as in overly layered or are you cleverly meaning it both ways?"

MATT: "You have good ideas. They're just overly complicated."

ME: "So, in your logical, flights of fantasy free version of this story, what would happen?"

[Ten minutes later]

ME: "Well. I see now that the labyrinth of a manufacturing complex being flooded with explosive hallucinogenic gas by an industrialist who's enslaved his workforce for reasons unknown may have been a little too convoluted."

I read the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN script during its filming -- and then I sadly lost the PDF in a computer failure, which is to say I failed to copy all my files to my new computer and sold off the old one. There's probably a netbook floating around this city that has the PDF on its hard drive.

My memory's a little fuzzy, but in the draft I read, Uncle Ben's murderer goes uncaught -- and that was the central arc of the film. Peter becomes Spider-Man for revenge, but he learns more about his father through Curt Connors, Peter realizes his dad buried his research to prevent it from being used to make weapons. To protect people.

Peter stops searching for Uncle Ben's killer, instead searching for people to help. The sketch of the killer, at the end, simply meant that Peter would keep an eye out for this man, but Spider-Man was no longer about settling the score. But Sony cut almost all of Peter's discoveries about his father. In doing so, they cut this arc.

On a side note -- I think the idea of a Spider-Man cinematic universe was really stupid and I follow Spider-Man religiously. Spider-Man has a great supporting cast and a terrific rogues gallery, but I can't imagine them being sufficient to lead their own films without Spidey in the main role.

In the comics, Spider-Man's world is populated by the Avengers (who regarded Spidey as an ineffectual child playing superhero until recent years), the Fantastic Four (who regard Spidey as a child except for the Human Torch, who considers Spidey an equal), the X-Men (who scare the hell out of Spider-Man with their dark futures and soap opera) and the Silver Surfer, Thor and Loki (whom Spider-Man would prefer to avoid because they're out of his league).

Restrict the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe to characters tied into the Spider-Man rights and you have mostly villains. Villains, by their nature, are not designed to be lead characters and Spidey only has one strong anti-hero antagonist (the Black Cat). SINISTER SIX and VENOM are film proposals where you'd be expected to cheer on the bad guys, an unlikely proposition for the superhero genre. The thing about most SPIDER-MAN comics is that the best tend to be comedies and his villains are meant to be a bit silly.

I don't think you can base an entire film on the Shocker and Hammerhead and the Gibbon and the Spot. And heroes from the Spider-Man rights -- I guess you've got the Rocket Racer, Frog Man, Puma and the Slingers? Most of these characters were designed as jokes to reflect some aspect of Spidey himself; they depend on Spidey as the lead.

Sony wanted a cinematic universe because everyone else seemed to be doing one; the fact that Spider-Man tends to be about Peter Parker was something they tried to ignore and I think it cost that regime their jobs. Not that the new regime is any better based on their new Sony Pictures chariman, Tom Rothman, and his track record of X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.

What should Sony have done? Personally, I would have used the cinematic universe elements that were suited to what was available -- which is cross-platform storytelling. I would have used AMAZING SPIDER-MAN as a big screen pilot for a streaming series.

The series would be computer animated using the pioneering cel-shaded format developed by the MTV series but using motion capture and voice acting from Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. I would also have a series of video games that used the same visual style.

This way, SPIDER-MAN would continue as a series between films. I think with three or four 13 episode seasons, the characters would have come to mean even more -- and then Gwen's death in ASM2 would have meant something as opposed to being a discordant note. ASM2 could be designed to work for both people who've watched the series and people who didn't and be a big live action season finale to kick off another run of animated episodes. This format would be very focused on spending time with likable characters with movies and between movies.

Sony seemed obsessed with copying Marvel -- I think they should have, instead, drawn inspiration from Lucasfilm and CLONE WARS.