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Hmm...

I'd probably do it without William. As I said before, I'd be fine having an agent who was connected to a past X-File as a child. Maybe Skinner would recruit that agent to work with a more by-the-books type of agent, who has a specialty in psychology (perhaps having worked with PTSD victims in the past, which could be interesting of his/her partner never really overcame their X-File experience).

The team could be fleshed out with more members, but that might get too crowded.

William has never worked for me, story-wise. Even baby William didn't work. So I'd just prefer to let him go with the old myth-arc.

Probably true. I just like the element of having a case (or cases) which aren't resolved in one week. Perhaps a killer that Mulder can't profile for some reason, and he doesn't know if the guy is human or supernatural. But the alien mythology type stuff, where they go out of their way to no resolve it, is probably better left out

It was an incredibly dishonest moment, in an incredibly dishonest scene, in an incredibly dishonest episode. At no point we're the characters driving the vehicle. They were simply there to speak Carter's words.

I'm not a father. I'm certainly not a mother. However, I am a human being. I haven't gotten over my dogs that died nearly a year ago. I can't even imagine how I would react if anything bad happened to one of the kids in my family, much less something as horrible as what happened to William (or so they thought). Scully's reaction made her look inhuman... Which she may be, given that she is a 54 year old barren woman, pregnant with her third child.

Hmm... I think I just figured out how I'd write the next season, if Anderson really didn't want to come back. It would explain this whole revival, and why each episode feels like it takes place in a different universe! And it could undo some bad decisions! And it's a really bad idea, but it would explain so much!

Scully is dead. Her cancer returned at some point, and she died a quiet death, without any action or drama, and without conspiracy. And this caused Mulder to break. He is an aging, reclusive, depressed shell of his former self, stuck in an endless cycle of what could have been. Him and Scully, together again, doing what they always did best.
But something happens. A young agent finds himself (or herself) in a situation that they can't navigate, because there is no training for it. Mulder is their best option, but he is a mess. To help matters, Skinner could bring in another agent whose life was changed by Mulder and Scully, back in the 90s.

Or maybe Mulder is almost killed and the delusion happens when he is near death. Maybe the arc of the season can be about who tried to kill Mulder, and why. And Reyes can help, because she was never murdered.

These aren't really good ideas. Can anyone else do better?

If I bit my tongue any harder, I'd need stitches.

I wonder if Anderson is really out, or if she is looking to get a huge pay raise after her last contract got so much press.

I don't have much to add to the finale conversation. I was just... All wrong. And Reyes. Wtf?

My Struggle, Part 153...

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Sigh

Jessica Jones, season 2...

SPOILERS
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The second season was better than the first. While it probably could have been tightened up, it didn't have some of the bigger problems of the first season... or, it probably did, but it was presented in a way that made a bit more sense.

In general, I'm not a fan of the "Person who was thought dead turns out to not be dead" trope, especially when that death is such a large part of the main character's story. And while bringing Jessica's mother back to life for this season did provide some emotional weight to the story, I'm still not sure that it managed to bypass my dislike of that trope.

Once it was done, I guess it worked out okay. There was definite struggle with Jessica and her mother, and it didn't feel illegitimate, given the circumstance. It made the arc between those characters really interesting in a lot of ways.

Jessica killing the prison guard... At first, I thought it worked and that it served a purpose, by making Jessica do the thing that she hates the most about her mother. However, when all is said and done, I don't know that that beat was played strongly enough to make the killing worthwhile. Yeah, she killed a bad guy and she felt bad about that, but nothing really became of it. Especially since the guy splatted on the sidewalk with the smashed side up, and no apparent cause for that injury.

Some parts of the season felt weird, in that they failed to reference The Defenders and Jessica's role in saving the city there, or the fact that she really could have used the help Luke or Danny at certain points, but never mentioned them. They do get points for having Foggy pop in and out really quick.

The whole combined MCU continues to be more of a distraction than anything else. They mention the Raft several times, which we saw in Civil War. But they also talk about being the most powerful women in the world, which probably isn't true (though, come to think of it, Marvel has really failed to build up female characters). Then you consider that we're also supposed to lump in Agents of SHIELD... it's just a mess. And needlessly so. It's not like they're going to combine the Netflix shows with AoS or the movies. At least, I hope that the Netflix characters won't appear in Infinity War, because it just doesn't fit. None of these properties feel like the same reality. And that's fine. It's good even. I just wish that the studio would stop messing around and commit to the fact that they're not the same world.

At the end of the season, I felt like the story with Jessica's mother was *ended* more than *resolved*. Trish just appears and shoots Jessica's mother, and then runs away, and the whole thing feels like an afterthought. The building conflict between Jessica and this problem that was her mother ultimately led nowhere.

Like I said, the season was better than season 1. I actually didn't dislike season 2. It just had some problems that prevent me from saying that it was actually good. It just didn't seem to come together in the end. It just kinda wound down.

They probably should have anticipated Anderson an Duchovny wanting less to do with to do with the series going forward, if the network wanted to keep it around at all. They had those other agents last season, but they were pretty much joke characters, too similar to Mulder and Scully. They should have established new agents that Mulder and Scully could work with and train. Perhaps even someone who had been part of an X-File as a child, back in the 90's. Even better if we know the character from an old episode.

This is also something that Supernatural should be doing, but they insist on killing off every human character who could possibly become a major recurring character.

Honestly, I think the need for critics like that are over. At this point, we can go online and see hundreds of actual viewers talking about the pros and cons, or we can go on YouTube and get the opinion of a movie reviewer who isn't tied to any big media politics (and I say "politics" in term of the politics within the media itself, not the political views of the media, which would be a whole different discussion)

I hate that it was an episode that involved two dead kids, but this week's episode was probably the best of the season, and of the revival as a whole. It remembered what the show is, and who the characters are. The episode reminded me of other occult episodes of the show, but didn't just copy and paste elements, as some revival episodes have done.

They even managed to throw in cultural commentary that wasn't delivered with a sledgehammer to the head, or acts of political contortion that could be their own circus act.

No forced romance. A few light moments mixed in with the severely grim story (Mulder's "I did not see that coming" line made me laugh). This is the X-Files that I grew up with!

It has the same problems as Civil War. The conflict is just there because the writers want conflict, whether or not it makes sense. Then they get into fights, shooting real weapons at each other, and then act super surprised when someone gets hurt.  It'd be great if it were done well, but it just hasn't, and it's annoying.

I'm not sure how Dinah and Curtis can act appalled by what Oliver did to Rene. Rene was literally shooting at the others, and those weren't exactly rainbows coming out of his guns. You don't shoot bullets at someone unless you're trying to kill them (despite the number of TV characters who stupidly aim for he leg).

There could be some legit conflict between the new team and the old team, if the new team grew more confident in their abilities and started to question Oliver's methods. However, they cut the legs out from under that story by having all of the new people go crazy and try hurting/killing people, while whining about how Oliver hurts and kills people.

On a separate note...

I'm also not entirely sure how Curtis managed to hack into Diggle's implant (since they always need to have a big machine hooked up to it in order to work on it), but it could have been interesting if he'd figured out a way of sending out some sort of pulse that would ping off of it, disabling it, but disclosing Diggle's location... not realizing that in doing this, he would also disable Felicity's implant. What he did to Diggle was bad, but the visual of seeing Felicity on the ground, unable to move while all of the action took place would have had some impact.

I was just reading about the new Death Wish movie, since I remember my father watching the old series of movies when I was a kid. So I checked out the Rotten Tomatoes page, and the difference between the critics reaction and the audience reaction is pretty hilarious. 14% critic score, 85% audience score. So the question remains, what is the point of a critic is they can't relate to the audience?

This week was obviously inspired by Black Mirror and its theme of technology going wrong. Not an original concept for The X-Files.

The episode wasn't horrible. It definitely kept my interest, but there were a couple of things that kept it from being a really good X-Files episode.

For starters, there was no X-File. Once again, the drama came to Mulder and Scully, ignoring the central structure of the show. The story would have worked better with them going to investigate a weird death before this all happened to them. As it stands, these characters didn't even have to be Mulder and Scully. Swap out any unfamiliar characters, and the episode remains pretty much the same.

Another thing was that the episode pushed beyond the subtle, creepy theme of technology attacking them, and just went too far with how these attacks took place, as though the writers felt a need to create action where a more subtle attack would have worked better.

And neither Mulder nor Scully seem particularly surprised by any of this crazy tech. I know that we live in the future and our tech is crazy, but we're not quite to the point where I'd come home from a robot restaurant, in my driverless cars, only to have my house try to kill me, all without being a little wowed by it all.

I liked the theme of the episode. I think the idea itself works, and it is fun to see Mulder and Scully at the center of this story. I could have done without the vibrator gag, not because I'm a prude, but because I am far less likely to sit down with my mother to watch this episode at any point.

It wasn't as bad as some of the episodes this year, but it definitely could have used some revisions.

I was just coming to post that link!

I am in no way surprised by this. If anything, I'm surprised that there's a Joss comment at all, because I still believe that he was let go as soon as his ex-wife spoke out. He was already very passive-aggressive toward Justice League by the time it came out, which is not the tone of a team player who is still working with the company. They probably just didn't want bad press for JL, so they waited until after the home video release to make the announcement.

Just my theory.

One problem is that Steve isn't really a character. It's just Captain America. Yeah, Bucky ties into who he was, but in a way that is entirely about Captain America.

But this is a problem for a lot of Marvel movies. They're built around the concepts for big action sequences rather than character. I guess that's their purpose, so it isn't a failure for them. It's just not how I prefer things.

Interesting. This video suggests the changes that we may see for season 2. But how many of these solutions will only deepen the problems?

https://youtu.be/4n5TlyBl5Cw

Okay, I've read the conversation! Most of the stuff, I don't need to comment on. So, here's what I do want to respond to:

People keep trying to figure out how to reconcile Star Trek with the fact that we already have a lot of this technology. I don't think it's necessary, if they just kept moving forward. It's not the history of *our* universe, it's the history of the Star Trek universe, which is a world where Eugenics Wars and WWIII happened, and where San Francisco became a sancua--wait, that happened.

I don't think many people think that Star Trek is a historical document. While it might be fun to figure out why the "future" in the 1960's series is behind where we are today, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the Star Trek universe was the story of that world, through different generations, always moving forward. Their past looks like our past. Their future looks like what we imagine our future will look like. By going back in time and pulling at all of those threads and altering the past of that story, they're destroying the foundation of something huge and beloved. And they do it without any care or a second thought.

Furthermore, by throwing this whole spore drive idea out there, they're essentially invalidating the central plots of both Star Trek DS9 and Star Trek Voyager. And why? Where did that story go? What ultimate purpose did it serve? It was just a Dark Matter rehash, but not handled as well.

I'm not letting Bryan Fuller off the hook so easily. He was involved with redesigning the Klingons, and no decision in that process was the right decision.

I do think that Star Trek is usually an ensemble (aside from TOS). Even if we view Picard, Janeway and Archer as the leads of their shows, there was usually a b-plot that explored the other characters. Or there would be an a-plot that involved them in trouble, but had a b-plot where the captain got to be human for a while. DS9 was definitely an ensemble. Discovery only used the supporting characters as a way to move Michael forward, and never really cared to explore them.

I did think about them possibly jumping into the future too, and either having to adapt, or find their way home. Or maybe explore the Star Trek multiverse, which would explain all of the different styles somewhat. But they didn't do that. Oh well.

It was fun seeing Clint Howard show up though.

Finished.

Ultimately, the series seemed... careless. Like the people making it didn't care about Star Trek and its history, and they also didn't particularly care about telling the stories that they put out there.

Before the show came out, people related to the show spoke about how they drew inspiration from our world and our politics, and played up the idea of these characters representing Trump supporters, or those characters representing North Korea. And that was bullshit. The writers didn't put enough thought into the motivations or the politics within the show for me to find any sort of meaning in it. Even when they put in the "Make the empire glorious again" line in the mirror universe, I couldn't be bothered to care about yet another Trump jab by people who love them some Nazi solutes (which I imagine is just part of the union agreements in Hollywood at this point).

When they did the repeating day episode, it was halfhearted. Like they knew that the audience got which trope they were going for, so they didn't have to put much thought into it. Same with most of the other storylines. They give us a quick reference to which story they're playing with, and then fill out the hour without really exploring the stories very deeply. A Klingon grafted into a human body... okay. Sure. I'll go with that... if they actually bother to do something with that story. But they didn't. They wanted us to feel the emotional reaction, but they never invested in the story or character itself. I still don't even know what the hell they were talking about. The "Klingons" opened people up, crushed their bones, chopped up their insides, and... what the hell does this mean?! The guy passed a physical, so he obviously doesn't have an actual Klingon living inside of him.
And it doesn't matter, because that story ultimately went nowhere. He threw a couple of punches, spoke some synthetic Klingon words, and that was pretty much it. That was the grand plan.
Oh... then he ran off with the woman who brutally raped him in ways that we can't even imagine (and apparently the writers can't either). Because that's totally reasonable.

And right around the time that we discovered that he was a Klingon mole type sleeper agent type thing, we also learned that Lorka was a mole for a totally different cause. So now this is like 24, and everyone is a damn mole. And the one human male who wasn't written off of the show is the only one who I actually wanted written off of the show!

The show has a lot of interesting characters. The problem is, they have no interest in exploring them. They do nothing to balance big action stories with personal stories in the way that Trek shows normally do. So now we have a show that is set during a war, which they don't bother to explore. With technology that is ultimately a dead end, story-wise. And characters who they don't bother to explore (aside from Burnham, though I still don't get why everyone blames her for the war. She committed mutiny, but her actions didn't cause the war).

Going forward, I'd love to see more of Keyla Detmer. They could have explored her reaction to Burnham being there a bit more, as someone who was severely injured during a battle in which Burnham betrayed her people and lied to them. Yet, they didn't do that. They showed an odd moment where Detmer was happy to see (the fake) Captain Georgiou return, giving us the impression that she didn't know it was a fake. Yet there was no payoff to that beat.

Airiam is another interesting character, despite the fact that she looks a lot like Nebula, from Guardians of the Galaxy. I'd like to see more of her too.

Is it weird that a lot of the characters that I'm the most interested in are just recurring background characters?

The mirror Georgiou is pretty much just mirror Kira. I wonder if the writers genuinely think that they're exploring new ideas here, or if they just think that we won't remember the 500 hours of TV that came before this...?

The show has some potential. Most of the cast is fine (when they're not killed off or sent to live with their rapists), but I just don't feel like the people writing the show or making the design decisions actually care about it. It's like the show is being produced as a way to hold onto a licence, but nobody actually had an idea for it. But then again, some of the bad decisions seem deliberate. They didn't accidentally recreate the entire Klingon look and culture. They chose to take one of the most developed, fleshed-out species in Star Trek canon, throw them in a blender, and then dress the resulting mess in the Pennywise costume from the new It movie.

I'm trying to make sense of what was put on screen, and I just don't get what the point was. I had the song "Going Through the Motions" from the Buffy musical episode floating through my head through a lot of it.

I don't know. I'm still trying to decide whether or not I think it's a worthwhile series, but I'm pretty sure that it's not registering as "Star Trek" in my brain. It's probably not something I'd gather the family for, like when I watched TNG as a kid.

Okay, I'm going to to back and read through the rest of this thread when I get a chance.

However many times it's said, I'm just happy if we can all agree to just go with it.

I've seen five episodes so far...

I'm a bit torn about it, honestly. The show doesn't feel like it was made by people who love Star Trek. It feels like it was made by people who want to cash in on Star Trek, and who are so unfamiliar with the Trek fandom that they think the only way to do this is to go backwards, time and time again. It is a massive mistake. And if they took out those throwback elements, the show would be so much better. Change the Klingons to a new species. Change Sarek to a different Vulcan (I swear, it feels like Vulcan has a population of about 6, and they just keep popping up). Change Mudd to a different character. Then set the series after DS9, because it already feels post-DS9. After all that, the series would work so much better. Even the idea of a Starfleet that is torn between soldiers and scientists feels like something that would come after the Dominion war.

The setting still hasn't been fleshed out enough, which is weird for Star Trek. They could change ships in every episode and I wouldn't notice, or care if it blew up. And similarly, the characters haven't been developed very well. It's a sad day when I think that Mayweather was a more developed character than most of the new crew.

That said, I really only wish they'd ditch one of the crew members this time (the engineer. I just don't think he connects with this world, and he doesn't handle technobabble well), so that's probably an improvement.

Whereas TNG suffered from an unwillingness to have conflict among the crew, Discovery sometimes has very forced conflict.

I don't hate the show. I think it's better than Enterprise, and even Voyager in many ways, but I think that some flaws are just strangling this series right now. I wish the modern decision makers would respect the full history of Star Trek, because many of us grew up with the later shows, and that is what we are fans of.

I think it's strange, how the Supernatural team have handled Adam. They act as though he is a mistake that should never be referenced again (like the Leviathans), but the fans have never shared this view of the character. To the home audience, it's always been baffling that such family-driven characters would forget their own brother, who also represents a massive failure for them. The characters don't even seem to remember him (when they're alive), which could make for a great setup for a story, but the time for that story was years ago.

I agree with all of that, but didn't they have a lot of those issues with the Skinner character throughout the series?

It's weird that the show isn't pretending that Mulder and Scully have been working for the FBI for all of these years, but they're still acting as though they have been. They wonder what they'll do if they lose their jobs. They are blamed for Skinner's career going nowhere for all these years. It's strange.

Yeah, I know that a lot of fans online are really psyched, but I'm not there. It didn't make sense. It didn't seem necessary. And after Castiel, Ketch and Rowena coming back, I'm just not happy with some of the decisions being made.

I like Jack. I even kinda like having Mary back. I still think that the stand-alone episodes are great and prove that the show isn't past its expiration date. But things need to change.

I just watched the Star Trek TNG 30th Anniversary panel, with most of the cast members, and Patrick Stewart said something pretty relevant to our conversation. He was talking about how fans react to the show, and connect with things that become really meaningful and personal for them, and he said that when those fans ask him questions about those things, he worries that they will walk away disappointed in the actors because they don't share that specific connection. They have an entirely different relationship and connection to that show, and he worries that the fans will be let down by that, or by the fact that he sometimes can't remember what they're talking about.

I think he articulated what I was trying to say (perhaps better than I did). The show means a lot to them and it was a huge part of their lives, and they love that fans connect to different things, but they simply cannot relate to the show on the same level. It represents something entirely different to them, and there is a chance that fans will be let down, or even insulted by that, but it's unavoidable.

Also, Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis totally almost got into a fight.

Are any of the characters on this show supposed to be likable anymore? This season has gone way off the deep end. It's worse than some of the crap that happened in the second season of Friday Night Lights.

It doesn't really *confuse* me, since this sort of thing isn't new to comic book stories. Even now, there are two versions of Superman and the Flash out there.

If they do this, they need to make the separation clean, as with film and tv. Maybe make this a streaming platform movie? I don't know. At least call it "DC Multiverse: The Joker" or something like that.

That said, this sort of multi-dipping is what made it hard for me to keep up with comic books, and why I stopped reading them. I'm not sure that copying that particular comic book element is a great idea.

Not bad this week. A standard X-File, with an interesting plot. Leaning a little much on the trope of the psycho US army dude in Vietnam, but adding a government conspiracy to explain it. The episode was shot well, and the characters were written well enough, for the most part. So yeah, not bad.

Question, going back to the politics of this season: these episodes take place shortly after My Struggle II, right? So we'd be in maybe April of 2016 by now? So there is no President Trump yet. I guess they're fudging the dates so they don't end up making a period piece when all is said and done, but this is a great reason why they shouldn't be doing political commentary.

As opposed to the great and thorough evidence that has been used to verify the ties between Trump and the Russians? And if you have some argument to debunk the validity of the claims made in the memo, I'd love to hear it. The reason why I copied so much of the memo is because Grizzlor didn't seem to be responding to the contents of the memo at all, and it hardly seems productive to comment on a document without bringing that document into the conversation.

Let me ask you this question... What exactly do you believe transpired between Trump and the Russians? What collusion do you believe took place? And once we have that answer, explain to me what evidence you have to support that claim.

Or do these things even matter anymore?

Okay, let's not pretend that it's just run of the mill nothingness. If that were the case, the democrats wouldn't have been calling its release dangerous or treasonous. They would have been like "Yeah, sure. Do that." Because the thing hardly reveals any matters of national security that could get us all killed. Especially if you think that it doesn't contain anything damning.

So, let's check out some actual bits from the memo. The whole thing can be found here : 
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents … ocument/p2

I just don't feel like copying and pasting the entire thing, though I think it's worth reading. It's only four pages long.

You don't believe that it's relevant to include information on where this dossier came from, especially when that information was bought and paid for by Donald Trump's political opponent? That information was deliberately left out of the application for a reason.

I highly, *highly* doubt that you would be cool with a dossier created by the Trump campaign as evidence against Hillary Clinton, for all of her many crimes. And I highly doubt that you would shrug off the omission of that information from a FISA application as being irrelevant to the investigation. Let's not pretend that you would.

So we have people leaking information to the media, and then using the reporting of those leaks as evidence to be used on a FISA application, and again, you see absolutely nothing wrong with this?

You're saying that Steele is a highly respected intelligence officer, but the evidence isn't supporting that at all. He has a clearly stated objectives and biases. He is being paid to deliver damning intelligence by Trump's political opponents. He is speaking with the press, leaving information. How can you possibly argue that he is too highly regarded to be questioned or criticized in this situation?

Yeah, I said I wasn't going to copy the whole thing, and I very nearly copied everything anyway. It's just hard not to, because there's no part of it that isn't damning. We're talking about agents within our government working with one political candidate to deliver damning intelligence regarding their political opponent, with the clear intention of swaying the outcome of the election. Leaking to the press. Omitting vital information from FISA applications. Basing an entire investigation on evidence that they manufactured themselves!

You want the definition of the word "conspiracy"? This is it. And if you can look at that and not have some very serious concerns, you're just proving what I said initially. Facts don't matter. Evidence doesn't matter. Reality doesn't matter. You picked your team and you'll cheer for them until the end of the world.

You're criticizing Trump's supporters for ignoring his misdeeds (and I agree that there are some who are way too fanboyish, and need to revisit reality at some point), but how are you not doing the same thing now? If there's evidence against Trump, I'm all for putting it out there and holding him accountable for whatever he has done. However, that's not where the evidence (or lack thereof) is leading us right now. Do you want an honest investigation, or do you simply want Trump gone at any cost?