He’ll just swipe one from backstage

That said, Schwarzenegger's career in the 80s (inc the OG Running Man movie) was built on him being someone who would not only murder you, but then make a joke about murdering you

No violence either aside from the time another well-known but less highbrow critic started screaming at me for "using my phone" during a screening when I was clearly holding a paper notepad and half the critics there had to calm him down before he tried to strangle my knee or something

Fortunately none of it is all that sexy apart from the one well-known highbrow critic-lecturer who would always bring his young female students to screenings and wouldn't speak to me when I was standing next to my then-critic GF (who he would speak to) and she told me he had trouble speaking to men

Yeah I went though a run of all the TOS movies not long ago, even the bad ones still had a good cast and the good ones were pretty darn good. Shame they can’t figure out how to make them any more (or decent TV Trek, aside from Lower Decks and… maybe 1/2 to 2/3rds of Strange New Worlds)

Time for another thrilling 100,000 word discussion on whether the transporters in Star Trek vaporise your original body and create a totally different one or merely convert it into some kind of energy being that is then fired at the destination like a laser

I expect Pluribus to hold together on *some* level, even just as one woman's personal journey towards discovering she needs other people; considering pretty much all US SF TV that goes beyond one season follows the Westworld model of not having any idea what they're trying to do, that's a win

The real point of difference is that Vince Gilligan has repeatedly proven himself capable of bringing long running series to a dramatically and thematically satisfying conclusion (to some extent), whereas Severance went off the rails in the second half of s2 and may be completely different in s3

The Severance comparison is a good one, because Severance (in its first season) wasn't SF so much as a workplace sitcom mixed with The Backrooms-style creepiness where much of the drama was "are we the same people outside work as inside" (also "workplaces are their own weird world").

That said, I never expect television SF to make even the barest of sense (and movies are rarely better), it's a medium built around character and human drama where the best series rely almost entirely on people struggling with personal problems, which is not always something SF handles well

I suspect Pluribus would have worked better for some people if it had simply started with Carol being dropped into the end of humanity, but the opening scenes explaining the virus' origin were clearly there to get that stuff out of the way so it need never come up again because it's not about that

I think the problem with trying to make a 60s New Wave style SF series (which I tend to think Pluribus is, that or a Twilight Zone ep) is that audiences, especially in the USA, have been primed by decades of puzzle box shows to demand answers to anything that even looks slightly like a mystery

Then there are those who are increasingly annoyed that the show isn't just a D&D manual explaining every aspect of how a planet wide human hive mind works. We need an episode on how individual units connect to the whole! Do their brains broadcast radio waves, is it scent-based or are psionics real?

Also features my favourite gag, where a bad guy would rather jump to certain death than face our insanely murderous hero