I’ve only seen the first episode so far, and I liked it. I’ll have to catch up sometime!

I think the Prequels weren’t nearly as bad as so many have claimed.

I must say that for me the superlative SW Rebels blunts the impact for me concerning the new SW #7 so far. The second season is going to be bigger than the first. Too bad Star Trek hasn’t gone this way. An excellent means of going into more detail.

That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think that they are very much alike, but it seemed like the show was trying to imply that they were, or that they could be, if Matt wasn’t careful not to slide down a slippery slope.

I don’t know that they are “two sides of the same coin”, nor is there any real equivalence. They are two approaches to a similar goal – Matt’s is, “I want to reduce/eliminate crime”, Fisk’s is “I will do anything to erase the stuff that made my childhood a horror”. They both want to make Hell’s Kitchen a better place, but Fisk wants to do so by basically removing it entirely – extreme gentrification via the old, “we had to destroy the village to save it” route.

Also, I do really like that the show plays with some moral ambiguity, by giving Matt a bit of a dark side and making Wilson’s ultimate goal the betterment of the city. But any attempts to imply that Matt and Wilson were two sides of the same coin, or to suggest that Matt was on a slippery slope to being as bad as Wilson just didn’t work for me. Wilson was willing to flat out murder anyone who got in his way, even that’s a sweet old lady who just wants to keep her home. Matt may use extreme methods, but he only goes after criminals. He’d never do anything to endanger civilians. So that equivalency just doesn’t ring true at all.

He’s like one of those guys who peaked in high school, and now he hangs around the school in his Camaro, wearing his letter jacket. 😉

It was a bizarre situation where the creator of the franchise was the absolute worst person to be its caretaker. It was as if Lucas didn’t understand why people loved his creation. When he started going off the rails with the Special Editions and prequels, it almost felt like a betrayal. He was taking away this thing that we loved (the fact that he stubbornly refused to make the uncut original trilogy available makes this literally true).

When Episode 1 came out, I wanted it to be good so badly that for a while I was in denial that it was a huge turd. After I realized how crappy it actually was, and after he failed to make up for it with the next two, I was pretty hesitant to get my hopes up for the new one. And it’s not that I’m completely convinced. I’m not as excited for the new Star Wars as I am for the new Avengers, for instance. But my hope for a worthy successor to the original trilogy is growing.