I went on a bit of a mini-rant yesterday on Twitter about assholes using the #falseflag hashtag immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, mostly because people who scream “false flag” are almost always assholes, because yelling “false flag” doesn’t really have anything to do with the plausibility of a conspiracy theory, but instead relies on the desperate need of people – and, let’s be honest, generally white dudes, because it is white dudes who comprise the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theorists – to feel victimized when something bad had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Like, we’re going way beyond “I got passed over for a promotion because I’m white” levels of victimization here. False flag theories are inevitably stupid – like, well beyond “the moon landing was faked” stupid. I mean, the fake moon landing theory you could feasibly pull off with about a couple dozen people (leave most of NASA clueless, set up a stage somewhere else and just hijack the radio signal with a couple of key inside guys, then get the astronauts to say “yeah, we did that” afterward), assuming nobody simply looked at the moon afterwards and noticed that the lander and flag weren’t there (which they are).

Compare this to the Newtown shooting false flag theory, which involves the Evil Black Helicopter People Who Are Directly Commanded By Obama (or whoever) disappearing an entire classroom full of kids, hiring numerous actors to portray Newtown residents, bribing or threatening dozens or even hundreds of journalists and local residents – this is insane. And it’s all the more insane when you remember that falseflaggers explained that the point of this supposed conspiracy was to get restrictive gun laws enacted – something everybody was grimly saying, right afterwards, would not happen because the gun lobby owns one party entirely and has deep roots in the second. (And what has happened? The most conservative Democratic Senator and a conservative Republican Senator worked “bipartisanly” to create a bill that requires background checks for some, but not all, non-gun-store sales of guns, and which incidentally also outlaws a federal gun registry and makes it easier to transport guns across state lines – and conservative Senators from both parties are refusing to vote for it because it’s too restrictive.)

And so we come to the Boston false-flag theorizing, which is even stupider because all that happened was that an asshole built a bomb and set it off to hurt people, which assholes have done before and will do again. But the falseflaggers are out to explain that, no, this was military-grade ordnance that was used (based on no evidence whatsoever) and that this happened because the Gubmint wants to put more restrictive laws in place to interfere with your civil rights. Of course, the government has been doing that for decades and they haven’t felt the need to bomb anybody because they know perfectly well that they can just restrict civil rights by passing laws and nobody will say boo to a goose, most of the times, because “it’s not my problem” trumps civil rights concerns for ninety percent of the population (just ask any black person about how nobody seems to care when their civil rights are trampled), but whatever, bombs away, am I right?

But falseflaggers don’t care because their theories aren’t about logic or reason or anything at all. Their theories are about making tragedies that happen to other people about them. It’s a fundamentally narcissistic response to tragedy – to not only ask “how does this affect me” but to twist the facts of the event to create a narrative so that you are more likely to be affected. It’s an asshole move, plain and simple, and falseflaggers deserve to be treated like assholes, because they’re assholes.

(And finally, can we again be pissed off once more at police departments who planted agent-provocateurs in protests, who all by themselves gave the entire false-flag belief far more steam than it ever deserved to have?)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Energy-Puking Boy (and others): Community Alignment Chart?

I’m not going to do what somebody else already did perfectly well just for the sake of doing it with my particular chart design. You can quibble if Abed and the Dean should be switched or if Britta and Troy should be, but it’s reasonably accurate. (If you want to see an awful Community alignment chart that rips off my design, here you go.)

Unstoppable Gravy Express: So is that Brad Paisley / LL Cool J song racist or not?

Ta-Nehisi Coates answered that better than I ever could.

Rbx5: re there any Big Two/Image titles you are, in fact, following, and why?

A fair amount of Marvel, actually. Avengers, New Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, Wolverine and the X-Men, All New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. The current F4 stuff isn’t bad at all but it doesn’t really grab me, mostly because after the Jonathan Hickman run on that franchise it just sort of pales in comparison, and Hickman is the reason I’m reading his two Avengers books – he’s currently my “I will read any comic he writes” writer, much in the way that Grant Morrison was such ten years ago.

I’m not buying anything DC prints new; given their current treatment of creators (this is not to say that Marvel is great shakes, they aren’t, but DC these days seems determined to actively fuck creators over in every possible respect) I try to avoid giving them money. I bought a copy of The New Deadwardians used and it was really good, and I am glad DC didn’t get any of my money for it.

Image… I picked up Sex, which is Joe Casey’s book about a Batman analogue post-Bat-life sort of a thing. It was okay-to-decent but the lettering was so distracting I gave up on it after two issues. I’m reading Saga in trades (it is very good) and The Manhattan Projects because Hickman, and I tried out Prophet which fell into the “it’s good, but not my thing” category.

switchnode: How long do you expect/intend Al’Rashad to run? Are we a significant way into a fast, hard-hitting story about a particular flashpoint, or still in the setup phase of something much longer and more sprawling? On a related note, do you think of it more as a webcomic, or as a comic book that happens to be on the web?

It’s going to run eight “issues,” with issue eight planned to be oversized (e.g. more than 28 pages, less than a full ninth issue). Currently we’re midway through book six, so you do the math.

And it’s a comic book that happens to be on the web. The fact that people keep complaining about things which get revealed 1-2 pages later probably should have been a big tip-off there. Davinder and I wanted to do a comic, and I don’t actually like the episodic/strip format of many webcomics for the purpose of a larger narrative. So there you go.

Murc: Any chance of maps at any point for Al-Rashad?

They’re definitely in the queue, although they might end up being bonuses for the print edition.

A frequent request when I do my mock-AMA posts is “why I should write She-Hulk, superhero lawyer” or commentary on legal issues in superhero comics. I will admit I am not terribly interested in the topic, for two reasons:

1.) The law is my job and this is fun and do you really want your job getting mixed into your fun?

2.) It’s a lot less applicable than people think.

Let me explain #2 for a bit because I think it might serve to illuminate. My daily duties as a lawyer are, of course, law-related, but more important in many ways is how I conduct myself as a lawyer – my provincial law society mandates that as counsel I be courteous, honest, and strive to uphold the law. (Matt Murdock, in particular, often violates the second of those mandates.) In American jurisdictions these tenets still exist but generally they are, I am given to understand, much more lax; here they are not. (Some lawyers will threaten you with a complaint to the law society when you make any comment that could be even construed as an insult. These people are pains to work against, to say the least.)

This is to say that although the legal system in Canada and America is adversarial, my experience with it does not lead itself naturally to superhero comics, where by definition the stories have to be very adversarial. She-Hulk’s Enemy Lawyer, by comics convention, has to be ruthless and efficient and probably not very nice, whereas in my practice I routinely give and receive compliments to the other side on their conduct. Law, done well, is the opposite of dramatic. You seek to make your preferred conclusion mundane.

But there is another aspect yet to why I would not want to write a She-Hulk series, which is that the law is fundamentally kind of boring in many ways. Dan Slott’s She-Hulk wasn’t about lawyering, when you get down to it: it was an adventure series using a relentlessly wacky law firm as a setting. Which is fine, it was a good comic, and the reason it was a good comic is because She-Hulk wasn’t doing hours upon hours of reading discovery notes and making a list of evidentiary points for and against her client, or spending hours telling a client how to conduct themselves upon the stand, or writing letters to opposing counsel promising to employ tactics which are thinly veiled legal threats but only if you understand why they’re threats. Super-dramatic courtroom moments are the exception, not the rule – even in court they’re still the exception. Court is frequently very boring to non-involved parties.

Practicing law, if you are doing it properly, is about paying attention to tiny details and assembling your client’s narrative in the best possible light for a judge (or other decision-maker) to assess: in short, it is leaving the actual climax of the story (the decision) to a third party. Which is how the system works, but that’s directly not what you want out of a good comic book adventure story: you want a story where She-Hulk makes her case so staggeringly obviously that holy crap, how could ANYBODY disagree with that? Which isn’t really about law, you see, and more to the point it should usually offer She-Hulk more opportunity to punch things, which is what we all want to read anyway.

So that’s why it’s not gonna happen. When I want to write comics, I want to write holy shit comics. Law is not about holy shit most of the time. Quite the reverse.

Mike From Nowhere asks: I have my ballot for the Liberal Party election and I’m still making up my mind. Thoughts on the candidates?

And Mitchell Hundred asks: Justin Trudeau is going to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (let’s be realistic here). Is this a good thing?

Well, yes and no.

Yes, because Trudeau is a smart, capable politician who nonetheless comes across as human – which many politicians do not. His “gaffe” about saying that Quebecers are better at running Canada than Albertans isn’t a big deal to anybody normal because Quebecers agree, Albertans weren’t going to vote Liberal anyway and everybody else doesn’t really care, but it reminded everybody that Trudeau is a for-real guy who occasionally says something a bit ill-advised, but everybody does that. All it did was remind people of his father (who was a famous mouth and which is a net plus for Justin). But getting back to the main point, Trudeau knows what he’s doing and will re-invigorate the Liberal party. His support for fossil fuel extraction is probably just cynical campaign noise so that he can be competitive in the west more than anything else.

No, because Trudeau has ruled out cooperation with the NDP, which (although this may only be a campaign tactic and he may change his mind once he is in power) means Trudeau has refused to deal with the central problem in Canadian politics, which is that the electoral national landscape is composed of one right-wing conservative party and three centre-left parties, which is why the fucking Tories keep winning fucking elections even though they will most likely never again get a majority of the popular vote. Until Canada’s other parties decide to engage with this fact they’re going to continue to be at a disadvantage, and it probably does not matter how smart and capable Trudeau is because if he never gets in power then who cares. Stephane Dion was ten times smarter and more capable than Trudeau is (seriously, Dion is like a friggin’ wizard) and he never got to be PM either.

For that reason and that reason alone, I would recommend voting for Joyce Murray over Trudeau, since Murray has openly campaigned for inter-party cooperation with the NDP and Greens and because she actually stands a (very small) chance at beating him. I don’t think she will, but if it takes Trudeau more than one or two ballots to win, hopefully he realizes the demand for actual, you know, victory for the left in Canada and changes his position.

Ask me anything and/or post requests today.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I’m watching ‘Babylon 5′ for the first time this year. (What can I say, it’s not exactly something you do over a weekend.) It’s funny, because I remember all of my friends and most of my acquaintances absolutely rhapsodizing about the series when it was on, while I kind of didn’t get into it because nobody really started talking about how awesome it was until Season Three, and all of them talked about how you had to get into it from the beginning to really understand what was going on right now and this was a pre-DVD era so tracking down the episodes didn’t seem worth my time right that second.

But what a lot of them wound up saying was that Seasons 2-4 were great, but that Season 5 was a big letdown and that while there were great moments, ultimately JMS’ goal of doing a single five-year long story told in episodic form had to be considered a failure, due to the ways he had to unexpectedly truncate the story out of fear that they wouldn’t get a Season Five, then just as unexpectedly elongate the epilogue when it got greenlit after all. (And I’ve also been told it didn’t help that Claudia Christian didn’t come back for Season Five. But the Cult of Ivanova has faded over the years, from its fever pitch of 1996.) Now, I will issue the caveat before I speak further, that I am currently getting ready to watch “Z’ha’dum” later tonight, so I’m not even into Season Four yet let alone Season Five. But knowing what I do know about the series that’s coming and the series I’ve already seen (which is actually quite a bit, since it’s not exactly easy to avoid spoilers for a twenty-year-old TV series)…can you show me anyone who’s done this better? For that matter, can you show me anyone who’s done it nearly as well?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit, since the question first occurred to me, and nothing’s coming to mind. ‘Lost’ and ‘BSG’ both have a legion of fans who will be quick to tell you how badly the series finales fared as actual summations of the show as a whole, not to mention how clear it became at the halfway point that these guys didn’t have a plan for the endgame and were just winging it. ‘Heroes’? They didn’t even have a plan for Season Two, let alone a potential series conclusion. ”X-Files’ tried, but was hamstrung both by its showrunner’s terminal phobia of revealing any of the series’ secrets, and by the departure of most of the cast by the end. ‘Fringe’, by all accounts, had some great ideas but a confusing and inconsistent logic in explaining key plot points. ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’, while good, never seemed to have a long-term plan…they were content to go it one year at a time, with some notions about down the road if needed. (Which is why Anya suddenly becomes a vengeance demon again…and then just as suddenly becomes human six episodes later, because those six episodes crucially fell over a season break.) ‘Stargate’ and its spin-offs, ‘Star Trek: DS9’, ‘Highlander’, ‘Hercules’, ‘Xena’, ‘Walking Dead’, ‘Fringe’, ‘Eureka’, ‘Warehouse 13’, ‘Doctor Who’…it’s not that these weren’t good series, but none of them even tried to do what ‘B5’ did. About the only series I can think of that’s consciously having a beginning/middle/end structure along these lines is ‘Game of Thrones’, and we can’t judge that until it’s over.

So, is it fair to say that the series that have tried to have long-term, overarching, series-long storyarcs have wound up illuminating just how tricky it is to pull that kind of thing off, and made ‘Babylon 5’ look all the more impressive by comparison? Or am I giving some of the shows above (or a show I forgot to mention) short shrift? Or am I going to be changing my tune once I see how Season Five plays out? Your thoughts below!

Jim’s WrestleMania post yesterday noted that “fans have been hoping that [John] Cena will turn heel since 2005” and he isn’t wrong about that. Well, mostly not wrong. I was perfectly content to have Cena be a face; he works as a face, after all, there’s no question about that. He drives ratings, sells merch, inflates ticket sales and generally gets the job done as top face in the promotion, even though half of the fans love to boo him (which he cheerfully acknowledges).

As late as last year, I was still of the opinion that Cena should have remained a face. Certainly when Cena was playing the principled face opponent to the surging CM Punk in 2011, he was doing it note-perfectly. But my opinion changed at about WrestleMania 28, because the Cena/Rock match was set up for Cena to be the de facto face (playing the “I’ve been here all along and the Rock takes off and goes and makes movies” card, which worked to make Rock a heel in his last major WWE run) and it did not work. Maybe it could have worked if the Rock/Cena feud last year had been done in anything more than the most perfunctory and slapdash way, but it didn’t.

Since then, Cena’s character has gotten more hypocritical and smug as the year progressed: openly bullying heels, calling out CM Punk (who was turned heel because, well, someone had to be the promotion’s top heel, and he’s good at that, and they weren’t going to turn Cena) in totally bullshit ways, whining about his “terrible year” where he main-evented ten of twelve PPVs despite not holding any titles. The boos have gotten louder and louder, and I don’t think they haven’t noticed that. I think, in fact, they were very delicately testing the waters for a heel run for Cena.

But there are more pragmatic reasons to turn John Cena heel at this time that did not previously exist. For one: John Cena is nearly 36, and the past year has shown that, despite nigh-magical advances in sports medicine and care on the WWE’s part to reduce injuries as time has progressed, that even Cena -legendarily an ironman performer – is starting to show the rigors of age. He is no longer in his prime. This is not to say he is bad or even lessened; he is simply more vulnerable, and that makes a difference. And it will keep on making a difference as time progresses. Assuming that Cena is wise enough to not pursue the Ric Flair route of “wrestle until you are dead because you blew all your money multiple times over” – which he most likely is – he’s probably got about five good years left in him.

That means the time to start finding the Next John Cena is now. Fans like to bandy about the usual set of names, but most of these names are wrong simply because they are too old to take over as top dog when Cena’s day is done. Alberto Del Rio is 35, Sheamus is 36, Dolph Ziggler 32, Randy Orton 33, CM Punk 34, Ryback and Daniel Bryan both 31. In five years’ time, they will all be somewhere along the pathway to retirement, or at least to part-time Undertaker-like status where they only wrestle rarely at WrestleManias and the like. That’s also most of the top half of the WWE roster. There are a few prominent names in their mid-to-late twenties – most notably Cody Rhodes and the three members of the Shield – but they are a distinct minority on the current roster.

This isn’t necessarily a problem – after all, John Cena took about three or four years to become JOHN CENA (although he started on the main roster at a relatively young age). But if you want to build a top face, you can’t have two of them. (The WWE tried to deal with this with their “split the RAW and Smackdown brands” idea, which never really worked in practice.) And this is the second reason to turn Cena heel: while he’s a face, building the next big face is more difficult.

But there’s also the third reason, which is that from a storytelling standpoint, John Cena is effectively out of storylines as a face. He’s literally done all of them. He can’t play the underdog role because he’s not the underdog and can’t ever be one again; he’s had his dominant championship runs; he’s feuded with the company, with top heels, with bottom heels, done stupid romance storylines, all of them. They weren’t all good, but he’s done them all. He is one year away from tying Hulk Hogan for “longest run as a top face” and there are no other companies to which he can realistically go to stay fresh because the WWE killed the last major opposition over ten years ago. (TNA does not count. Sorry, folks, it doesn’t.) And Hogan was staler than Cena was at the equivalent point in his face run. It was a large reason he turned heel, after all.

At this point, a heel run for Cena will give him new stories, allow breathing room for new top faces and would, I think, be enthusiastically welcomed by fans (who may boo him, but generally respect his abilities even if they don’t like the character). Even last year it might not have been the right time; now, I think it is. Of course, none of the factors that would make a heel turn click at this point are hard rules and Cena can stay a face forever and it won’t hurt business particularly. But there’s a solid case to be made that he shouldn’t.

Say this for World Wrestling Entertainment–by booking their schedule around big names who only appear a few times a year, they’ve turned Wrestlemania into a star-studded spectacle AND a show you can watch without knowing anything that’s been going on since the last Wrestlemania.  That might work out for them if they ever get going with their plan to move the rest of their shows to a proposed wrestling cable network.  Although, at $69.99 for the HD broadcast, they’d better hope the Rock and Undertaker don’t retire until they’re seventy.

THE ROCK vs. JOHN CENA

After Rock beat Cena at last year’s Wrestlemania, he vowed to win the WWE championship.  Which he did, so naturally Cena ended up becoming #1 contender.  This match only exists so Rock can give Cena his win back, so it’ll be big on spectacle and short on unexpected twists or innovations on the first match.  Keep an eye on crowd reaction for this match, because the internet has largely declared they didn’t need to see this again, and I’m curious whether the live crowd feels the same way.

Cena has done some interesting promos suggesting he’s gone Captain Ahab about losing last year, so many fans are hoping he’ll somehow turn heel.  However, fans have been hoping Cena will turn heel since 2005 to no avail, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

TRIPLE H vs. BROCK LESNAR

I was underwhelmed by their previous match at Summerslam, until I realized they were probably holding back to save something for this, the rematch.  The stipulation is that if HHH loses he will be forced to retire, but he was already sort of retired so that’s really a non-issue.

This is a classic example of a fake wrestling match being intriguing because the real writers are painted into a corner.  They’re paying Brock a lot of money–too much money to have him lose all the time–but Hunter is one of their most protected stars and it feels like it’s time for him to get his revenge on the bad guy.  I’m hoping this match will be a wild brawl that keeps me guessing as to the winner.

THE UNDERTAKER vs. CM PUNK

Undertaker spent the last four Wrestlemanias having match of the year candidates with Shawn Michaels and Triple H, so the pressure is on Punk to prove he can deliver similar results. Unfortunately, the storytelling headed into this match hasn’t been on par with Taker’s last four programs.  WWE ran “somebody steals Undertaker’s magic urn” into the ground about eighteen Wrestlemanias ago, so I am less than enthused about seeing it CM Punk do it.

Punk wants to break Taker’s undefeated streak the cheap way, by agitating him into a making a mistake or getting disqualified.  Undertaker wants to hurt Punk so badly that he’s stopped giving a shit about preserving the streak.  So the psychology of this match is going to be critical, in that each man is trying to make the other blink, which is fitting since both of them look like they have never slept in their lives.

ALBERTO DEL RIO vs. JACK SWAGGER

Del Rio is the World champion.  (See, Rock is the WWE champion of the world, and Del Rio is the World champion of WWE, or something like that.  It’s better than the BCS, so shut up.)  WWE really wants to have a heroic Mexcian wrestler to appeal to Latino markets, so they hired Del Rio and…booked him as a bad guy for three years.  But now he’s a good guy.  Yay!  Also Jack Swagger is an evil Know-Nothing who hates Mexcians.  Boo!

To give you an idea of how little fans care about this match or its participants, the main intrigue is whether the winner will immediately be challenged by Dolph Ziggler.  See, Ziggler has a magic briefcase that says he can wrestle the champion whenever he wants, without warning.  (Still better than the BCS!)  He has until July to use the thing, but if he doesn’t want to win the world title at Wrestlemania he has to be the stupidest character in wrestling since Kamala, the wrestling cannibal who didn’t know you’re supposed to pin people face-up.  So ultimately Del Rio vs. Swagger is mostly about whether Dolph Ziggler is an idiot.

RANDY ORTON & SHEAMUS & THE BIG SHOW vs. THE SHIELD

The Shield is the team of Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, and Roman Reigns, who exploded out of developmental last year to debut as a trio of badass ass-kickers who ambush and destroy anybody they want.  WWE’s new policy of introducing new wrestlers as actually being awesome has really paid off with these guys.  So they’re fighting the three tippy-toppest guys that didn’t make it into the main events, and I favor the Shield to win.

The psychology of the Shield’s matches is that they like to outnumber their opponents, but even when it’s three-on-three their superior teamwork overwhelms the other team.  The new factor this time is Big Show, so it’s more like three-on-three-and-seven-eighths.  Look for the Shield to prove that won’t help by doing some impressive triple-team attacks on the giant.

Fans have been speculating that Randy Orton will turn heel during this match, but fans have been expecting Randy Orton to turn heel since 2011, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.  (Fans sort of want everybody to turn heel for some reason.)

MARK HENRY vs. RYBACK

Mark Henry is my favorite wrestler right now, because he’s a big mean man who looks like Action Hank if he ate Clubber Lang and absorbed his super powers.  Ryback is the biggest, meanest man in WWE who is not currently a bad guy, so it made sense for these guys to have a short, explosive fight at this show.  I keep hearing that they’ve been wrestling each other on tour and reviews are not good, but the kind of nerds who review house show matches are not the kind of people who appreciate a good Mark Henry match, so screw that.

CHRIS JERICHO vs. FANDANGO

Fandango is a new wrestler who gets mad when people don’t say his name right.  And he dances.  That is his entire character.  Chris Jericho used to mispronounce his opponents’ names all the time, so I suppose these two are logical enemies.  I can’t shake the feeling that Jericho will win in thirty seconds to kill off the character, but I’m sure I’m in the minority on that.

DANIEL BRYAN & KANE vs. DOLPH ZIGGLER & BIG E LANGSTON

Last year Daniel Bryan and Kane both dated AJ Lee, and then after she dumped them both they went to therapy and became a goofy, dysfunctional tag team.  Now AJ is dating Dolph so he has to fight her exes.  Think of it as a fanfic as written by the WWE shippers on Tumblr.  Langston is involved mainly so the tag team championship can be at stake, and so we can call them “Ziggy and Big E.”  I don’t know who will win, but I’m hoping AJ splits with Dolph because she’d be better off dating Langston.  I call my pairing “AJ+E=<3,” in case you were wondering.

BRODUS CLAY & TENSAI & NAOMI & CAMERON vs. CODY RHODES & DAMIEN SANDOW & BRIE BELLA & NIKKI BELLA

Brodus’s team (the good guys) is two chubby guys and their hot cheerleaders, and Cody’s team (the bad guys) is two guys with weird facial hair and their bland interchangeable girlfriends.  When a match at Wrestlemania has more than six people in it, it tends to be a short, throwaway affair, so I’m not expecting anything out of this.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets bumped down to the pre-show.

WADE BARRETT vs. THE MIZ

This is already set for the pre-show.  They’ll be wrestling for Barrett’s intercontinental championship, which is such a prestigious accolade that the other twenty-six men on this show are all more important than it.  Essentially they’re both jobbers fighting to determine which of them is the King of the Jobbers, and is worthy enough to lose to Randy Orton on Smackdown every week.

I hereby declare this a thread for your favorite Ebert quotes.

The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

Yes, I’m posting about the new Doctor Who. Because if I do have a “thing” on this website, which I’m quite prepared to entertain arguments that I don’t, it’s that I’m the “Doctor Who guy”. And there’s a new half-season on, because the BBC is too cheap to fund more than about six episodes a year right now (I wouldn’t be so annoyed by this if the show wasn’t profitable as well as entertaining and popular and well-made–yes, it has a high production budget, but it makes it back and then some in merchandising.) And the first episode, ‘The Bells of St. John’s’, aired last Saturday. So let’s chat about it after the cut.

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