In a far off land, they hear tell of a very special baby, foretold to be the leader of an oppressed minority. The oppressor's leader decrees that any children that might be him are to be put to death. Terminator (1984). #AnythingIsAChristmasMovie

I'm fine with his Machiavellian tendencies and him being amoral and occasionally brilliant. But to start with her fully aware of his BS and the two of them hostilely on the way to divorce and then keep having her circle back to him as a lover with no indication of what she's attracted by ...

If you keep pulling rugs away, at some point you're going to end up flat on your face.

I struggled for ages with thinking I was growing into the Douglas Adams quote, but then we got NFTs and AI and I happily settled into the Skinner meme instead.

It's weird to remember that new tech used to make you go "Ooh that's cool". Not all the time, but fairly regularly.

But that is the show. This water is wet. But for me, this time, it's just a bit much. I want just one bout of Machiavellian shenanigans that come without a side order of teenage hormones.

Like both shows' first ladies: the West Wing acknowledged that the role was a political position with lots of power and responsibilities; The Diplomat makes it dull emptiness, which makes an interesting dynamic but ultimately then leads to more sexual sub-plots in a show overflowing with them.

There's a nostalgic thrill to having CJ and Josh back in the White House, but it just makes me compare the show to The West Wing's set-up in a way that wouldn't even have occurred in S1 because the shows are just doing different things.

I know this is complaining about water being wet, but does *everybody* have to be trying to fuck everybody else, in every sense of the word?

Around that were the kind of light b-plots you get in Trek - dash of comedy, smidge of moral judgement, all wrapped up and lessons learned in time for tea. In an era of series arcs and trauma, it makes the show stand out. It's good, inconsequential Trek. And that's grand.

This one veered instead into Freaky Friday and played up the idea that what we actually have here is a couple struggling to understand each other, whilst laying some pipe as to why we didn't see Nurse Chapel and Mrs Spock in TOS.

There's stuff you can say about the difficulty of coming from two cultures that can speak to modern audiences, but that undertone of there being differences at a genetic level that can only make the child unhappy are always there.

Last night's - Spock Amok - managed to be fun, although a little troubling just because the concept of Spock as half-human, half-Vulcan ties back to 1960s (mainly US) racist worries about Black men having children with white women.

The ending is distinctly unfeminist and a little obvious, the real villain being the only person left who hasn't been accused, but it is nice how they notice the last plot thread hasn't been tied up. It didn't set the world on fire, which worries me at episode 3. But let's keep going.