vaguerant

I think this one's pretty fun. The one disappointment for me is that the story sacrifices all its complexity by making the Gelth generic evil monsters. The moral question of reusing the bodies of the dead is an interesting one that the episode ultimately doesn't have to bother reckoning with because it turns out the Gelth really suck. It's the rare twist that makes the story less compelling. It's already pretty twisty to do a zombie body snatcher plot where it turns out the snatchers aren't evil, so pivoting back to them being evil again is just a bit boring.

Otherwise, I like how the episode makes good use of a historical figure. They can sometimes feel a bit hit and miss, but Dickens makes for a good one-off companion who doesn't suffer a major character assassination, etc. It is mildly weird that we have two episodes in a row where a one-off companion burns up (Jabe last week, Gwyneth this week). I wonder if more thought goes into episode order in later series, just to avoid stories echoing each other's plot points. It's not really a problem, but you wouldn't want to turn it into a pattern.

All right, we've come to my least favorite episode of the entire series. We have a character throughout the episode who has for years been dosing the people around him with date rape drugs. The worst reaction this gets from anybody on The Orville is "Aww, come on, mate. That's a bit rude." There are zero consequences for any of it. This one plot point taints my feelings about everything else in the episode.

I'm not in the mood for any of the comedy material--in fact, it's even worse on a rewatch. On first viewing. you don't know about the serial date rapist until the reveal. On a rewatch, the foreshadowing is peppered in right from the start with Darulio insisting on a handshake with Mercer. The dramatic plot of the episode also ends up tied in to non-consensually dosing people. Overall, just very unpleasant stuff. Not a fun watch. I'd rather have "Majority Rule" on repeat for 24 hours.

"It really tied the room together."

There's already several comments saying "depends on the beliefs and how important they are," and obviously there's that.

I'll add that there are beliefs people don't immediately think of when talking about religion. There's religious humanism, which is a secular religion based around behaving ethically which also has a bunch of traditions similar to spiritually-based religions, minus the spirituality. Adherents (can) attend church and hear sermons on ways to be a better person, etc.

I'm not a religious humanist but they sound like they're probably decent enough people. They're quite different to my generic fediverse atheist/irreligious views, in the sense that I don't have any desire to attend congregations of people who identify as religiously ethical, but I don't harbor any strong objections to their beliefs.

Personally, I understand it more as something that might be nice for people who have left spiritual religion but still want the trappings of a place to go and be with a community of like-minded people, but that's not my experience. Ultimately, that's probably about as far as I'd be comfortable, where we have roughly equivalent spiritual views but highly divergent religious views.

I see it on the other end: https://sopuli.xyz/post/29094211

Maybe it just took some time to get across?

Aha! Got it, thank you so much.

I understand why this is wrong (order of operations dictates the division happens first, so it's really 25 - 1 = 24), but why is it funny? I don't mean "This isn't funny," I think I'm just missing the joke.

This is a tough question because it's like asking "What's the most forgettable game you've ever played?" I can remember some of the best and worst games I've ever played, but mediocre games are explicitly not interesting.

That said, the first one that came to mind for me was Starshot: Space Circus Fever for N64. It's just a very generic late-'90s collectathon platformer. It's hard to be mad at it, because it's not terrible or anything, there's just no reason to play it. If you've got an N64, there's Mario, Banjo, Rayman, even B- and C-tier stuff like Gex and Chameleon Twist. There's hidden gems like Space Station Silicon Valley or Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

That last one is the only reason I played Starshot, I saw it clearanced at a used game store and was like "Oh yeah, I remember hearing this game was good," but it turned out I was thinking of Rocket. That game actually is good, while Starshot is just fine.

Signing in from the "traumatized by Cassandra" brigade. Even knowing how this one ended, I still spent most of the episode worried somebody was going to trip over and tear right through her.

It's funny to see this episode starting out being thrifty with the budget (opening with a time travel montage where we only see the inside of the TARDIS) and then very spend-y a few minutes later (CGI everything, needle drops from Soft Cell and Britney Spears). I don't know if BBC has any kind of special deal to use music for broadcast, but even if they do, it probably doesn't apply to streaming or home releases, so this episode has probably remained expensive.

According to Doctor Who Confidential, this one was deliberately high budget, as a showcase for what it can do at the top end of the scale. I'm not really sure what to make of it. High-budget Doctor Who is always a bit of a mixed bag. The most iconic villain is an upside-down dustbin, so how much does it stand to gain from a cash injection? The strongest stuff in this episode is in the smaller scenes, when Nine is chatting with either Jabe or Rose, or even when we're watching solo Rose contemplate mortality.

I don't dislike the episode, it's just not really doing what I expect to see from DW, which is a compelling story told for about six bob, using a bit of theatrical creativity and strongly written characters. Still, I guess it's good that it sets the bounds of what you should expect to see from the series: it's either people in mannequin suits or an effects extravaganza. If you haven't seen something you liked yet by this point, the show probably isn't for you.

A lot of great performances, absolutely. And the long-form presentation is really what gave Summer Glau room to do the kind of "robot becomes human" work that is not really possible in the movies.

I agree that the ending is kind of too specific to be satisfying. I don't mind ambiguous or open endings that leave you wondering (maybe forever) what will come next, but the ending we got told us too much and not enough at the same time.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I'm not a big Terminator-head, only seen half of the movies, but that was the version of Terminator I really got into.

I did read it. The Tumblr blog is what was reported to police, leading to his arrest in 2018, roughly a year after the offending began. The original commenter was under the mistaken impression that his offenses went undetected until 2025, or roughly eight years. I corrected a misunderstanding about years.