(No FB today.)

Usually, just admitting the flaws in your own writing and trying to spin them as part of a master plan doesn’t really work. (Much as I liked She-Hulk, the finale’s “No no, see, we were SATIRIZING Marvel’s bad habits” routine was not quite the subversive slam dunk that it wanted to be, and it wouldn’t have worked at all without a lot of clever secondary comedy and the ridiculously charming Tatiana Maslany.) But when it came time for us to address this plot hole, we found ourselves in a “two wrongs CAN make a right” situation. Tracking the brain activity didn’t make sense…but our readouts were kind of exaggerated from actual brain readouts anyway, so…HR was lying about this aspect of the Five’s situation from the start. Plus, it finally put to bed the few remaining HR loyalists who insisted he was the secret good guy of the series, just trying to liberate those poor deluded idiots from their tubes.

The rest of this page is mostly transitional. But I love the fact that Taro ends up forgotten. There are in-character reasons for it: Sundar’s a goofball, Rendar is a focused engineer, and Bandit is unconscious. But still, what a perfect way to end a narcissist: not by leaving him behind to die, but simply being too busy to remember he’s about to be killed.