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I'm super-confused about movie ticket prices where you live. Alamo Drafthouse seemed to be charging $9.73 USD for regular admission but AMC was charging $12 USD for regular admission. I'm probably looking at the wrong pages. How much is the average movie ticket?

It looks like AMC Stubs would charge you $20 a month and allows you to see three movies a week, which means it could be worthwhile if you're someone who sees at least two movies a month. However, $20 a month, even for three movies a week, is a much bigger fee than $8 a month for one movie a month. https://www.moneydigest.com/1548760/amc … rth-price/

Tickets here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada tend to be about $15 USD if you buy them online (factoring in an online booking fee), and about $12 USD if bought in person, but who's going to do that? It's slow and it's reserved seating, so if you go to the theatre just in time for the show, all the good seats are probably gone (unless you're watching THE CROW in 2024, nobody wants to see it).

$15 USD for one movie as well as having to physically go to the theatre and park and enter and see it on their schedule makes me feel like they should be paying me for my time. I imagine a lot of people feel that way and elect to stay home and watch Netflix. $8 USD, however, feels like a reasonable price.

Thanks for sharing that, but the Pilot is not really an effective test case. The pilot episode was edited either on film or high resolution analog videotape. It already looked sharp and crisp because it was not subject to the blurriness and field mismatching issues of episodes 1.02 - 1.08 being on low resolution tape. Upscaling the pilot episode is shooting fish in a barrel for any upscaler whether AI or a simple bicubic scaler. A real test case would be a scene from the unusually hazy "Last Days" or "Luck of the Draw" with its blurriness and film judder.

How have the results been? I won't have time to try it until my EMPIRE cleanup is done.

I am not very optimistic that anything can clean up episodes that were transferred to low resolution analog videotape, but I'm always ready to change my mind.

The fan-produced 4K80 release is now out on specialist fan preservation sites. It's a 4K digital scan of the theatrical cut of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, made from a 35mm print and a 16mm print, cleaned up by fans to assemble the best versions of both prints and address the faded colour and recreate how it looked in cinemas in 1980.  https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

I've looked at the first version and it looks just like the non-special VHS version I remember in the 90s, authentic but dirty and with grain so high in some scenes it's like static baked into the frame. Other scenes have a natural level of grain. It looks like a medium quality 720p image (because a theatrical film print is several generations removed from the original negative).

While this is a theatrical print scan, the movie did not actually look this grainy in movie theatres in 1980. I wasn't there in 1980, but I know that the movie theatres of the era created a softer film image due to the film protector light being scattered when passing through film and then impacting the screen. This would have added a sheen that diminished the grain. In contrast, modern backlit displays on home HDTVs form a pixel-based image with black borders around each pixel that have the result of sharpening any and all grain.

I think 4K80 would be releasable on Disney+ if the video were downscaled to a sharper 1080p image and then run through AI grain filtering to tone down the grain. Then an AI algorithm could add a modest amount of grain back to each shot. The entire movie would then have a consistent level of AI-overlaid but natural looking film grain. If it's consistent, it's easy to get used to whereas the noise becomes distracting if some scenes look static-coated and others look clear.

Admittedly, for streaming services, grain is the first thing to be removed from digital files and then a grain texture is added back on during playback as an overlay.

I've downscaled the file to 1080p and I'm going to run it through Topaz AI grain refinement just to get the grain consistent. Then I will pass it along to my niece as the version of EMPIRE that her father probably saw in theatres. I had previously passed along to her a version of the DESPECIALIZED EDTION for EMPIRE (a fan-created hybrid of blu-ray footage and upscaled DVDs).

DESPECIALIZED looked okay at 720p, but on modern 4K TVs, it was looking very low-resolution for a lot of the DVD-sourced footage. I ran it through a Topaz AI upscale to boost it to a somewhat sharper 1080p, but 4K80 will look more consistent. Where DESPECIALIZED looks super-sharp in the blu-ray sourced scenes and slightly blurry in the DVD-sourced scenes, 4K80 looks moderately sharp throughout the entire film and the AI cleanup will also make it moderately grainy throughout as well. That said, I'm sure the film editors at Disney could do an even better job by going at it shot by shot.

The sabotage of Georgia's process for vote counting is scaring me.
https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/organi … ing-chaos/

The polls cannot be trusted. They couldn't be trusted when Biden was spiraling because slanted Republican polls were throwing off the averages, making a very close election seem like Trump was in the lead. They can't be trusted now because the enthusiasm of Kamala Harris reception and campaign means Democrats are more inclined to respond to polls and Trump supporters are less inclined to do so.

The likely situation is that the race remains close and competitive, and Democratic pollsters have warned that Kamala (as she prefers voters call her) has a lot of work to do.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/2 … s-00176065

That said, Trump clearly thinks he's losing. He's given up on impactful campaign events. He's stopped trying to build a coalition. His hope is to overturn or stall election results in court and with supporters in electoral offices.

I think you are confused. The James Carville Jr. you mentioned and quoted is the same person I quoted. Carville Jr. is not a Republican. However, Carville Jr. is also strongly opposed to the social justice focus of a number of Democrats, in particular Bernie Sanders.

I'm sorry it wasn't good for Grizzlor. I'd be curious to know what Slider_Quinn21 thought and if he feels the series is incomplete now cancelled.

I've sometimes wondered if STAR WARS will pull a bit of a retcon on the prequel-Jedi the way ENTERPRISE featured Vulcans as unpleasant, dour, miserable, unsupportive, and kind of useless, declaring the superiority and supremacy of their logic and increasingly isolationist attitudes-- only for a new showrunner in the fourth season to reveal that the Vulcans of Seasons 1 - 3 had been dealing with generational trauma and a pandemic with a mentally transmitted disease.

The situational, cultural and political strife had been worsened by how the original teachings of Surak, the Vulcan philosopher whose teachings of logic over emotion became the driving force of Vulcan society, had been distorted and misunderstood due to the loss of his guiding principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, a key tenet that balances logic with compassion and respect for all living things and cultures even if they do not devote themselves to logic.

Captain Archer restores Surak's full teachings to Vulcan society, setting the path for the Vulcans to become the open-minded and caring but emotionally aloof friends of the original STAR TREK series. I wonder if the Rey movie can maybe delve into how the failed, useless Jedi of the prequels were operating on a distorted foundation and rediscover the actual origins of the Jedi and the true role they can play in the galaxy.

My personal opinion on why the Jedi failed from an in-universe perspective: the Old Republic era Council and Luke's Jedi school were way too militarized. When you teach people that the Force is all about hacking and slashing away at armies to win wars, it creates a breeding ground for dark side tendencies because combat-first emphasizes power and dominance over compassion and empathy.

Ideally, Jedi training would be about Force sensitivity and applying that Force sensitivity to a profession or passion which does not have to be combat. In AIRBENDER, not every earth/fire/air/earth bender is a soldier: some of them run restaurants or build dams or transport or plumbing. The Jedi Council and Luke's approach to Jedi was to create supersoldiers, never creating any super-therapists or super-construction workers or super-doctors.

I recognize that as the franchise is called STAR WARS, screenwriters and directors will gravitate to combat, but if STAR WARS wants to present the Jedi as competent, then one path may be that the Jedi become less of an army and portrayed as an unintrusive religion where Jedi apply the Force in many areas of life and fighting is just one profession among many for Force users and maybe the term Jedi is broadened so it's not just warriors.

Rian Johnson offered a bit of a path to that in THE LAST JEDI: "The Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies -- it's vanity, can't you feel that?" I might suggest we say that the Force does not belong to Jedi soldiers.

The Bulwark: Trump will probably lose.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-g … e-probably

They point out that Trump has given up on trying to win more votes. His team is focused on winning the Electoral College, winning specific areas by a handful of votes, overturning specific areas where they lost in court. It's a narrow play and a lousy strategy. They emphasize that Trump will probably lose, but of course can't guarantee it.

I haven't really been in the mood to watch STAR WARS on TV, but I'm sorry that any show gets cancelled. The reviews for THE ACOLYTE on Den of Geek, a review site I enjoy, were poor to middling.

**

The Jedi being incompetent failures didn't originate in the Disney era, but in the prequel era, and George Lucas is absolutely responsible for that. I'm not sure if Lucas' authorial intent was to present them so, but note that in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Qui-Gon Jinn doesn't think it's his job to free slaves; in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the Jedi somehow miss the Republic becoming a fascist empire and Anakin didn't bother to free his enslaved mother for at least a decade (and he still left the slave trade intact). In REVENGE OF THE SITH, Anakin becomes evil because... something or other about how he loved his wife and Jedi aren't supposed to have feelings.

If Jedi can't free slaves, they are useless. I don't know if that's the take Lucas intended, but he wrote it and he filmed it.

In THE LAST JEDI, Luke notes: "Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if your strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader." He's not wrong.

The entire arc seems subconscious on Lucas' part: the great love of Lucas' life was Marcia Lou Griffin, whom he met in film school and adored and married. She was a film editor and script consultant; Lucas was a good director and awkward screenwriter, and STAR WARS came alive with Marcia (and uncredited screenwriters Gloria and Willard Hyuck) adding life and joy to Lucas' plot and setpieces.

Shortly before THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Lucas became obsessed with building up his own film studio and business. Lucas' devotion to Skywalker Ranch, Industrial Light and Magic, THX, Skywalker Sound while producing EMPIRE, RETURN OF THE JEDI and the Indiana Jones movies created entire industries -- but his interaction with his wife became near non-existent, and he dismissed her pleas that they spend more time together.

Despite this, Lucas claims he was shocked when Marcia told him she wanted a divorce and that she had fallen in love with someone else... and he responded by asking Marcia to wait until after the release of RETURN before proceeding with the divorce.

After Marcia left him, Lucas went on a long hiatus from filmmaking, obsessing over filmmaking technology over actually making films. THE PHANTOM MENACE is a pretty clear display of how Lucas creates when his ex-wife isn't there as a creative partner. ATTACK OF THE CLONES and REVENGE OF THE SITH show Anakin Skywalker foolishly daring to fall in love and destroyed by having feelings at which point he becomes a technological monster.

Lucas portrays Jedi in the prequels as distant, disengaged, oblivious, defeated by emotions, betrayed by romance, and the most prominent Jedi becomes a destroyed man in a shell of sci-fi armour. That strikes me as an accidental yet incredibly telling self-portrait.

Who would the Jedi be if Lucas had decided to drop THX and ILM from his repertoire and devote that time to his marriage, and if he'd written the prequels with Marcia Lucas as his creative partner and the heart of STAR WARS?

Hillary Clinton is an extremely controversial figure even among Democrats especially with her voting record on war and her fervent support of Wall Street and big banks. Anyone should be allowed to question her supposed commitment to democracy without being attacked.

Grizzlor is allowed to find speeches boring regardless of who is delivering them; that in itself is not racist or sexist. I think to call it that without more evidence is an escalation and a leap. I mean, nobody called you or me racist for hoping President Biden would stay in the race and not feeling ready for the very qualified PoC Kamala Harris to take the lead.

I don't think every show needs to run 100 episodes -- but every TV series should have at least 100 stories to tell or it's not a TV series. If a show can only last three seasons, it shouldn't be a show, at least not to me. (Mini serieses, I think of as a separate category.) To say LOST should only have run three seasons would be, to me, an indictment of LOST as a TV show. I think it probably had around five years in it, and they seem to have done well enough with six seasons if Slider_Quinn21 enjoyed it.

I wonder what Slider_Quinn21 thought of the DVD epilogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMjPzV2RvO8

I would say: my criteria for a favourite show is a highly personal list of attributes and others may disagree. I formed the list by looking at how LOST is Slider_Quinn21's favourite show. LOST was, judging from Slider_Quinn21's posts, a good product. It lasted long enough to become a part of his life; it didn't degrade or devolve to the point where it couldn't tell its stories or complete its narrative goals; it had a conclusion.

I recall watching LOST up to the point when Jack returns to the island and is met by Jin, at which point, I was looking for something more life-affirming out of TV shows and less... unnerving.

While I didn't watch LOST past Jack's return to the Island, it might be argued: LOST was an ensemble show touching on various lives and rotating through them, and LOST was about unknowable mysteries that might have no answer. Therefore, dropping or losing characters, blind alleys, and an emphasis on characterization over mystery is not necessarily the show becoming subfunctional/dysfunctional but rather an avoidable part of exploring its core themes, some less rewarding than others.

I can't speak to this definitively, but around the point I stopped watching LOST, I did feel that the mysteries of the Island would not become more meaningful if we learned that it's the site of a crashed alien spaceship that warps time and space and manifests anomalies based on the internal conflicts of the humans in proximity. That strikes me as reducing the unknowable to sci-fi technobabble terms, when the show does better by using the paranormal nature of the island to illustrate the character conflicts -- while leaving the exact means of manifestation unknown.

That said, isn't there some sort of DVD/Blu-ray short film that 'explains' 'everything'? Knowing LOST, I assume the explanations are as confounding as the mysteries.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/lost-epilo … -questions

**

I think, for me, ONCE UPON A TIME is my equivalent of LOST: a complex set of arcs and plots alternating between flashbacks and present day scenes, except ONCE UPON A TIME had the benefit of its mythology -- Disney versions of fairy tales -- already being established long before the show premiered. In contrast, LOST had to create its own mythology and had a much longer ladder to climb. I think ONCE UPON A TIME's whimsical, gentle, sweet tone proved a better match to my tastes and longings and insecurities and neuroses than LOST.

At the end of the day, what I want out of TV (and life) is BROOKLYN NINE-NINE: lighthearted hijinks from highly competent people working to make the world a little nicer one day at a time. (See also: PARKS AND RECREATION, ANIMAL CONTROL, THE ORVILLE.)

My niece would also point out that I have an obsession with TV shows about troubled women fighting crime (WYNONNA EARP, THE BLACKLIST, BLINDSPOT, CORONER, AGENT CARTER), but aside from WYNONNA EARP, I would have to call each one of them flawed favourites. I would have a separate category for flawed favourites, some of which are only flawed in minor ways and some which are catastrophic disasters. (I need to rewatch WYNONNA EARP to decide if it is a favourite.)

**

Why do I say a show needs to last four years to qualify as a favourite show? I think four years is the point where the show has become a part of my life. The Arrowverse was a part of my life. At three years, I'm still thinking that the show is a temporary situation; at four years, it feels long-term.

**

I didn't think about THE SIMPSONS, or SOUTH PARK, but I guess I think of those as being in a class of their own, separate from live action TV shows.

Well, as the article notes: AI is pretty overhyped. The artificial intelligence we have now isn't actually that intelligent, its outputs are inaccurate and unreliable and unstable, its capabilities are exaggerated, its use is limited, its applications are narrow, its productivity increases are small, it's hitting a plateau of advancement, it's dependent on human generated data that can be cut off.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-mon … telligence

The AI in our upscaling programs might be AI in terms of matching the algorithm to the image or video, but the actual algorithms for each element or texture in the image strike me as human made and human tested. AI still can't wrangle a decent version of the Season 1 episodes of SLIDERS.

I deliberately use low power AI models because (a) they're free and (b) they don't use as much electricity. I'm primarily using GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o Mini and Gemini 1.5 Flash right now.

GPT-4 was originally offered for free via Microsoft Bing (renamed Copilot), but due to the electricity cost of 0.0005 kWh per message, Microsoft had to put it behind a paywall and eventually discontinue it in favour of the cheaper GPT-4 Turbo at 0.00005 kWh per message.

Copilot has about 140 million users and each free tier user gets 100 messages per day, so Copilot on GPT-4 at 0.0005 kWh per message was using 7,000 MWh daily, enough electricity to power over 200,000 homes in America for one day.

GPT-4 Turbo was not as capable or powerful as GPT-4, but Turbo was faster and the fact that it only needed around 10 percent of the electricity used by GPT-4 (with 140 million users using the equivalent of powering around 20,000 homes in America per day) made it a sustainable free model.

From what I can tell, the current GPT-4o model uses around 0.000025 kW per message, but I use the free GPT-4o Mini which I think uses 0.00000214286 kW per message and also Gemini 1.5 Flash which I think uses 0.000000714286 kW per message.

If those models had 140 million daily active users, GPT-4o would be using enough electricity to power about 10,000 American homes per day, GPT-4o Mini would be using the equivalent power of 1,000 American homes per day, and Gemini 1.5 Flash would be using the power of about 300 homes per day.

I'm pretty happy with GPT-4 Turbo for searches, Gemini 1.5 Flash for analysis and GPT-4o Mini for more creative outputs.

Please note: aside from GPT-4, the power usage of the other models is not known, and these estimates above are drawn from noting that on Poe.com, resource usage is measured in "compute points" with GPT-4 at 3,500 points per message. GPT-4 Turbo uses 350 points, GPT-4o uses 175, GPT-4o Mini uses 15 and Gemini 1.5 Flash uses 5. The estimates are assuming a linear relation between points and electricity usage that may not be the case and is a simplification for discussion.

Honestly, a lot of this reads like magical thinking, just the assumption that AI technology advances effortlessly and exponentially. I'm not saying it couldn't, but it's still an assumption.

An interesting article about how Kamala Harris isn't at the mercy of the press in the same way Biden so often was: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 … vance.html

And the Hindenburg was a bit of a mishap.

I'm pretty impressed that the second half of PRODIGY's first season sets up a situation where Admiral Janeway is going to be hunting down the kids as terrorists, only to quickly ascertain that the kids are all survivors of slavery and child labour who have blundered into a bad situation and are in desperate need of help.

I don't remember Janeway being written this well on VOYAGER, but she should have been.

(I have set aside $5 for Greg as I have lost the bet.)

**

Why wasn't STAR TREK: PRODIGY presented as the flagship show it deserved to be? It certainly had the quality and mainstream appeal and entry-level storytelling to work for a general audience instead of only STAR TREK fans and only children. But it somehow became an unwanted artifact that became an easy target for a tax writeoff.

Divisions of Labour
The problem, from what I can tell: PRODIGY was divided between many separate parts of Paramount Global, necessary for a CG animated TV show of this nature: it was produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Brothers Hageman Productions, and CBS Eye Animation Productions, it was streaming on Paramount+ in October 2021 and then airing on Nickelodeon in December 2021.

This combination of money, resources and talent was vital for producing a high quality animated show of this nature. The need to have streaming alongside broadcast was part of situating PRODIGY as a children's show funded in part by a children's programming studio. It's what enabled PRODIGY to look as wonderful as it did.

Divisions of Marketing
But the result is that all profit is therefore split across all these highly involved companies, and there is no single corporate branch with primary control of PRODIGY. And with ownership and leadership split across Paramount+ for streaming, the Nickelodeon channel for broadcasting, Nickelodeon Animation Studio and CBS Eye Animation Productions, the marketing decisions were also split.

There was no corporate structure that would enable Paramount+ to see how great PRODIGY was and present it as their flagship streaming show: it was Nickelodeon's show too, and to be broadcast on their kid's channel while filling out the Paramount+ streaming catalog. Ultimately, the things that made PRODIGY achievable, the teamwork and collaborations that enabled PRODIGY to exist at all and look as great as it does -- they were also the factors that meant Paramount+ was in no position to market it as their flagship STAR TREK show even if the content would have justified it

Divisions of Profit
Due to the involvement of the Paramount+, Nickelodeon channel, Nickelodeon Animation, Brothers Hageman Productions and CBC Eye Animation, profit from PRODIGY would likely be divided among all five as well as with Roddenberry Entertainment.

This is in contrast to DISCOVERY, PICARD or STRANGE NEW WORLDS where the profit division is likely just between Paramount+, CBS Studios and Roddenberry Entertainment. PRODIGY's divided origins, despite being creatively spectacular, also meant divided profit -- and it could be that Paramount+ received a much smaller share of PRODIGY's revenue compared to their other shows.

Divided and Expendable
My hypothesis is: since PRODIGY was the TREK show where Paramount+ had the least control over marketing and distribution, the least ownership of the property and had the least claim to the profits, it was deemed most expendable for a tax writeoff.

Usually, too many cooks leads to a lousy meal. It looks to me like with PRODIGY, all the talents and companies involved produced an amazing show, but it also produced a tangled web of ownership, marketing and profit sharing that ultimately led to PRODIGY being orphaned as no specific branch could fully take the lead in selling the show to a wider audience for mainstream success.

Perhaps under different circumstances, Paramount+ could have seen how PRODIGY was something special and bought a greater level of interest in it to sell it to the world as a flagship show. Unfortunately, with streaming revenue hitting a ceiling, the stars simply weren't aligned for PRODIGY.

I feel that this post has made me understand my father better by explaining why war movies speak to the human condition.

Something you seem to have seized on: the special effects makeup for the original PLANET OF THE APES movies was not very convincing. However, you seem to note: this made the events and the ape characters and the war feel less real and more like an allegorical sketch as opposed to a violent reality. The primitive effects made these war movies seem more like an abstract impression of war.

I am guessing that WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES with its modern CG-enhanced makeup and costuming and prosthetics and motion capture presented a depiction of ape-human war that looked less like an illustrative approximation and more like a documented reality, and that crossed the line.

That's just my guess.

This is an area where I don't really know enough to comment, so I am grateful for your observations.

I hope we are all edified and enlightened by this perfunctory non-analysis of the PRODIGY brand that tells us nothing beyond where it supposedly ended up, offers no insight as to how it got there, and is given by someone who has never had anything but derisive disdain for PRODIGY sight unseen.

This person has nothing to say about PRODIGY beyond presumptions, assumptions, and a pathological need to voice their barely-veiled scorn for PRODIGY (which they have never even watched) at every opportunity. They need to reiterate that their scorn is shared by the people who funded it. They haven't watched PRODIGY, but any time it comes up, they really need to remind us that they didn't watch it and have total contempt for it in order to act out their incredibly obvious narcissistic personality disorder.

In reality, a lot happens before a show or a movie is viewed as something on which a streamer or a studio should take a writeoff, and to present PRODIGY's undermarketing as a tax avoidance measure is simplistic, trite, and to repeat this claim demonstrates a painful ignorance of co-production, demographic targeting, brand management, marketing, and distribution -- all of which contributed to PRODIGY's narrow reach, all of which happened before Paramount+ detached themselves from the series.

BATGIRL was written off for a lot of reasons beyond the tax dodge, which included WB realizing that whether or not James Gunn accepted the job of running DC, their original post-FLASH movie plans were not going to happen and BATGIRL was the premiere of a run of films that wouldn't go past BATGIRL.

And the PRODIGY writeoff was the result of circumstances that took place well-before Paramount+ washed their hands of PRODIGY. To claim all explanations are in the writeoff itself is simplistic and myopic. The writeoff itself does not explain what went wrong, it was merely one incident along the way to a Netflix burnoff.

I've been looking into this further and from what I can tell, part of the issue is the partnership between Nickelodeon Animation Studios and CBS boxed in how the show could be marketed. The expectation was that PRODIGY was going to be a niche-within-a-niche show; a show for STAR TREK fans who were extremely young STAR TREK fans.

But the show that ended up being recorded and animated ended up having significantly more mainstream appeal to all ages than was expected of a children's TV series.

The creators had underpromised but overdelivered, producing a show that, due to the quality of their work and the cleverness of their simplification/distillation of STAR TREK, could have as much appeal to a general audience as opposed to only children and STAR TREK fans.

Unfortunately, the show had already been assigned a marketing strategy that was treating PRODIGY like the animated JAMES BOND JR. of the franchise, failing to realize that this supposedly niche-within-a-niche series was actually good enough to sell as the flagship show. This unfortunate positioning made it an easy target for a tax writeoff.

There is more to explore on this and I'm eager to delve into it further, if only to reinforce what Slider_Quinn21 saw: PRODIGY is something special and turned out to be far more than what its investors expected it to be.

I am not qualified to review how the new economic developments are going to impact the election and am waiting on more news.

This was something Simon Rosenberg said, speculatively, on Twitter. I can't find his tweet now, but his view was that Trump has gained much of what he sought from re-winning: immunity and funding for his legal battles.

It wouldn't be up to President Kamala Harris to prosecute Trump; it's entirely on an independent Department of Justice. That said, I would expect that if Harris is elected, she'll fire Merrick Garland for incompetence and seek to appoint someone more driven.

Yes, we should all value a certain someone's valuation of PRODIGY after their incisive, analytical opinions on it so far.

And we should all trust an assessment of PRODIGY's brand and marketing potential when it comes from someone who has a laughably obvious prejudice and bias towards it without ever bothering to watch it.

Also, do you have an explanation for your bizarre response on August 13, 2023?

You wrote about the SNW musical:

I responded:

You responded with a truly peculiar remark:

Except the season finale... didn't change Chapel and Spock's breakup and merely had a tender moment of rescue for them before Chapel left for her new job with Dr. Roger Korby to whom she is engaged to be married by the time of THE ORIGINAL SERIES (and Korby has been cast for Season 3 of SNW). And Spock was still publicly humiliated before his shipmates. Which means the missive on Chapel/Spock was not rendered moot at all.

So what exactly were you trying to say a year ago? Was there any information or reasoning behind your response? Or was it just derision and scorn for the sake of it?

(I would like to wager $5 USD that any response will include at least one all caps passage, enraged ranting, and something or other about Wil Wheaton. Although to whom I'd pay the $5, I'm not sure... )

PRODIGY is really good. I don't understand how Paramount + could undervalue this show.

**

THE ORVILLE is indeed going to start production -- but not filming -- of Season 4 in January 2025:
https://bleedingcool.com/tv/the-orville … l-podcast/

But who will actually be in it? Who will write, direct and produce it?

At this point, the January start is merely to assemble crew, start on writing, finalize cast contracts, devise shooting schedules -- and given that Seth MacFarlane is working on another show, it's impossible to say when scripts will be ready and filming will begin. However, there will be a fourth season and Seth MacFarlane will be in at least a few episodes while overseeing all of them.