Having knocked Shanna off her feet, Carol presses her advantage, striking at her opponent’s weakest point: her career as a fun-hating puritan, and the notion that such biases may be coloring her current investigation.

There’s a conversation worth having about our fiction addiction and the ways it can be unhealthy, and I appreciate the times that Shanna gives voice to that. And you might think her brand of sarcasm would find its own fandom; negative criticism is, as Anton Ego says, “fun to write and to read.” But until she actually spends time with the people she’s critiquing, she will always take that shit too far. That’s mostly due to some personal issues we’ll be getting into later.

Unfortunately for Carol, Shanna is used to being disrespected and condescended to. She may even thrive on it at this point. And it certainly isn’t going to distract her from the facts of this story.

Part of me gets depressed that popular culture has almost forgotten James Holmes, the mass shooter who slaughtered an Aurora theater showing The Dark Knight and called himself the Joker. I wish he still stood out as a particular example of depravity, but we’ve had too many mass shootings since. But on the other hand, people like that deserve to be forgotten, so.