QuincyAbeyie Sorry Quincy, but I really despised that film. Sexless English public school pornography, Matthew Vaughn doing Guy Ritchie. Speaking of which I think MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was better than it, though still bad.

QuincyAbeyie Womanizer Bond doesn't work anymore.

The womanisation is not quite the issue, it's more subtle. The character can no longer be portrayed without a certain "he's psychologically tough enough to love 'em and leave 'em" shock factor built in.

The successes of feminism have generated a heteromasculine ressentiment that makes this almost unavoidable. Today even when gender conservatives make deliberately revanchist, sexist films or novels, they make some form of concession to the problem just by celebrating "Look, we've got our misogynistic James Bond back" or similar. This creates a butthurt "crying wojak" vibe to these works that means they never fully satisfy the originary resentful manbaby urge.

Of course, the manbabies say they enjoy the works, but ultimately, no one wants to remember them. No one thinks the Snyder cut is any good.

It's a cultural variation of the second law of thermodynamics—we all know that women are politically equal to men now, whether we like it or not.

An animated Bond (ARCHER played straight), or Bond done as the video of a pop song, or a ballet could overcome this perhaps, that gets around the problems of the media with forced habits of richer psychological depiction.

So my suggestion to these people, if they really "want Bond back" would be: get Austin Butler to learn a public school boy accent, change the character's name to James Man, and film the whole thing as an action ballet in the Stahelski style, interspersed with Brechtian monologues derived from some fascist substack, and 8½ WEEKS style simulated sex scenes with currently leading OnlyFans girls. Unfortunately, Bezos will never approve such a vision.

You guys are late to the party accusing me of being a human who sounds like an LLM, I get that all the time. I accept it. It's a bit of a shame the bottom's really fallen out of the market for talking absolute shit lately.

Anyway, I think we all privately agree an animated, pornographic, epic theatre influenced, ultraviolent Wick-style action ballet James Bond ripoff called JAMES MAN with occasional fourth-wall-breaking monologues that sound like they're excerpted from Andrew Tate content—and to be clear, all played perfectly straight with no jokes or laughs—would be way, way better than whatever Amazon is going do with the "property".

I think around two or three episodes into this season, I was finding the main arc pretty padded, contrived and grating. The loss of conceptual momentum is felt in the decreased verisimilitude and increasing number of non sequitur and surreal moments. I don't find the Keir cult of Lumon compelling as a block of the overall rote world-building, and the majority of the antagonists are entirely uninteresting pantomime villains.

The show can't decide if it's a Kafka short or a self-consistent dystopia exploring salient social questions. But it certainly knows it's a big hit, so the resolution of a few seemingly very urgent plot developments, such as it turning out that Cobell invented the severance technology, is already held back for future padded seasons.

Innie Mark choosing Hellie R over restoring his outie self to Gemma should've been a good season ender, even if I think it's a misuse of the show's entire premise to narrow focus onto the main character's schizo romances. But the closing "Windmills of Your Mind" montage struck me as the showrunners admitting they'd cornered themselves with material they don't know how to land dramatically.

The sequence critics are all fawning over where Mark spoke to himself via camcorder was also poorly written and executed, for mine. And the Mervyn Peake stylings of the giants' battle between Drummond and goat lady was visually striking, but only contributed to the incrementally self-weakening preposterousness of the whole.

Asterix The gratuitous blood was fun though.

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I was thinking the stature of the actor who plays Mr Drummond was pretty wild, but it turns out he is only about 6'3", so now I'm wondering if the "side elevation" shot of Drummond next to Mark S in the corridor was digitally altered—there's only about six inches difference between the actors in real life. Or maybe I just got fooled … hmm …

I felt there was huge potential in this show after the first season, really loved it, but I'm disappointed with pretty much every single creative choice made in the second season.