There’s a strong case to be made the Rise Of Skywalker was the shit-show it was because Carrie Fisher died. The idea for the trilogy (as little of a plan as there actually was) was for the first film to centre Han, the second to centre Luke, and the third to centre Leia.

Then Fisher died and they had to rework the entire film without any change to the release schedule. And they reanimated her corpse in the most unconvincing and disrespectful way.

I’m not saying the film would have been good - because it probably wouldn’t have been - but I don’t think it would have been the silly, incoherent mess that it actually was. And it’d have been nice for Fisher to be able to give Leia a proper send-off, especially as the character was what catapulted her into stardom in the first place.

Pop Culture Detective has a video on a trope he calls “born sexy yesterday” about female characters who are extremely naive (often because they’re newly-created, or somehow new to Earth/human society) and how this allows a thoroughly mediocre male character to impress her mightily by having very ordinary knowledge that she doesn’t. A couple of examples given are how the alien in My Stepmother Is An Alien is incredibly impressed by the idea of putting extra cheese on microwave mac & cheese, and how the lead in Alita: Battle Angel is similarly blown away by a guy introducing her to chocolate.

It’s a way to have the fantasy of an incredibly (physically) attractive woman fall head-over-heels in love with you without you actually having to do anything. Just having the same knowledge that everybody else does is enough, because you’re the first person she met.

Of course the issue here is what people do or do not consider “good” varies from person to person.

The most likely candidates are Pete McTigh and Kate Herron. McTigh is the most probable, given that he’s showrunner of the upcoming Sea Devils miniseries and has had his name linked longer than anybody else.

Both of those names would be new blood (even though they have both worked on the show). Unless Moffat or Chibnall are going to come back again (and they’re not), then the only Fitzroy Tavern regular left who’s qualified is Mark Gatiss, and he said long ago that while he’d have been interested in the 00s he’s very much not interested any more.

That’s the closest we’re going to come to a new take, realistically. One thing’s for certain - nobody is going to take it back to any pre-JNT era.

How about the bit in Hackers where the bad guy hacker is being overpowered by the good-guy hacker, so another bad guy hacker steps in to help, with both of them typing away on the same keyboard?

That film truly is a masterpiece.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of “character & audience already know something and which is about to blow the newbie character or one-episode character’s mind”.

Two examples: I could never get tired of someone entering the TARDIS for the first time. Or things like the episode of Buffy where one of the crew asks if she’s in the right line of work and she casually picks up an iron girder, slings it over her shoulder, and asks where he wants it moved to.

We know the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. We know Buffy has super-strength. But that character doesn’t, and it’s always satisfying to see them learn it for the first time.

Worth pointing out that that “Target figured out a girl was pregnant before her father did” story is almost certainly untrue: https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/target-really-predict-teens-pregnancy-inside-story/3566/

I agree with the article that getting ads on a device you’ve already paid for with no hint that there would be ads is intrusive and a sad sign of how tech is going (in the same week that it was announced that Apple are going to be adding ads to Maps, too). But I also can’t help but wonder - who the fuck wants a smart fridge? Like, legitimately, what is the advantage over a normal fridge?

My favourite thing about this post is that it doesn’t explain what Stop Killing Games is, and links to an article which also doesn’t explain what Stop Killing Games is.

RTD will need to be involved for at least a little bit.

The problem, as stands, and the reason why RTD is back at all, is it’s an incredibly difficult show to make. Same budget as something like Midsommar Murders, but you’ve got to go somewhere completely different every story, with new sets, locations, and cast. And you’ve got plenty of bespoke objects & scenery to create, and VFX.

So the person running the show has to be a really good showrunner. And there’s not that many people in the UK with that much experience. And fewer who’d want to take on a huge franchise rather than do their own thing.

That’s why you’d almost certainly need someone to shadow RTD for a year or two before they could take over. Even if they’ve been a showrunner before, they’d need experience running Doctor Who.

Yeah, Prey was fantastic, and by itself justifies all the other sequels.

DC Extended Universe. So the DC films from Man Of Steel to Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom.

The irony in it being mentioned as something that needs to end is that it did end 2 years ago.

The most recent Superman film was a reboot of the franchise.

I’m pretty sure that was a comic, and would have been a film if not for a rights issue

When we watch Godzilla we know that’s just entertainment, we know a giant lizard creature isn’t walking down the street.

Wait, what?

It doesn’t need to end. It just needs new blood. For the last 20 years it’s been exclusively run by a group of people who all used to hang out in the same pub in the 90s.

Let’s have a year or two of someone young and talented shadowing RTD to learn all the ins and outs of producing such a difficult show, and then let them loose.

I mean, the rules kept changing, because the big idea behind it all was that it was being consciously controlled by God. And a little by Sam.

But, really, the biggest point is that the finale wasn’t intended to be the finale. They thought they had another series, but then got cancelled.

I had a problem with it, but not the ones that you’re highlighting. I was delighted by the religious stuff, and the angels in particular. Not because I’m religious myself - I’m not - but because it’s directly taken from the original series. I never thought they’d go there.

My problem with the finale - the last few episodes, in fact - are twofold, but both stemming from the same thing: the writers had the ending and weren’t afraid to contort things to fit.

The first isn’t a big deal, but why did they send the Galactica into the sun in order to live like cave people? Not for any reason that makes any kind of sense. They just needed the cast to be the ancestors of humanity, so they couldn’t have any technology.

But the second? They made people act completely out of character. Zarek is the worst offender. Throughout the series the whole thing of his character has been that he’s not evil, he’s just standing up for his people, even though that brings him into conflict with the people who are nominally our heroes. And then…he starts murdering everybody while twirling his moustache. He was completely unrecognisable as a character.

If you build your series on your character work, then you should make sure that you don’t then completely change their personalities for the sake of the plot.

I personally think it’s a great ending, even though it was intended to be a cliffhanger for the next series before cancellation, but a lot of fans didn’t like the ending of Quantum Leap where it was said that Sam never made it home.

Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.

And “too far away” is generally about 10 paces

Doom: Infinite is pretty cool. It turns it into a roguelike. It’s amazing as is, and is still in beta.

Portal is basically a Half-Life 2 mod. It’s still got the fanboat asset. You can use the console to bind spawning a fanboat to an input, so there’s a speedrun category where you’re not allowed to use portals, but younare allowed to spam fanboats. Literally called fanboat%.