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Mike: E.T. has retained this “feel-good” albatross over nearly 35 years, reflected not only in a host of imitation “lost creature” movies from Mac and Me to Free Willy, but also in how we view Spielberg as a Hollywood huckster placing raw emotional manipulation over craft.

E.T. bears a stunning amount of emotional heft. Consider our human hero, Elliott: the middle child in a frayed single parent household, too young to bond with his older brother and too old to relate to the younger sister. Henry Thomas’ portrayal of Elliott is often wounded and intense in a way that no photocopied children-in-peril drama has been able to touch.

Elliott’s (and the audience’s) meeting and bonding with E.T.—a bond that extends to a literal psychic connection—is put through the wringer. Can you imagine, say, Beethoven, the movie where a St. Bernard constantly owns Charles Grodin, featuring a literal death scare for the dog? And yet E.T. (temporarily) dies with E.R. intensity! There’s real doctor crosstalk and Drew Barrymore’s little sister jumping in fright as defibrillator paddles shock our alien hero. And it works, because we’ve been given so much time to appreciate E.T. as a character.

At the dawn of nu-Who, when Russell T. Davies was still the head writer, Steven Moffat’s name under the “written by” credit felt like a special occasion. If RTD was your reliable father, Moffat was your fun uncle who maybe hit the sauce a little too hard at holiday parties. In small doses, Moffat’s concept driven, spectacle heavy approach to the series provided a necessary counterpart to RTD’s occasionally staid, repetitive structure. Episodes like “Blink” and “Silence In The Library” felt so revelatory precisely because they always came sandwiched between more standard fare. Ever since he’s taken the show over, however, things have felt exactly as they might if your drunk uncle had to actually raise you on a regular basis, not just sit you on his lap and recount slurred, but stirring tales of bullshit.

Kayleigh: I have definitely been won over by Jerome. Playing Russian Roulette while discussing the finer points of comedy is a great scene, and I like his “demented theater kid with a chainsaw” antics. I hope the show doesn’t kill him or write him off as a red herring; if nothing else, I’m really intrigued by the idea of a Joker origin story that has nothing to do with “Jack Napier” or The Killing Joke.

Max: The Jerome character didn’t work for me at all in his season one Gotham appearance, but this episode he gets like three actually great Joker moments. I kinda hope he isn’t unambigously The Joker, but I’m also at the point where if they kept him around in that capacity I’d be into it? This episode was like a Greatest Hits of Joker gags between the cheerleader thing, the bodies with letters written on them, and the cop disguise.

Matt Damon does a superb job of playing Ares mission member/botanist Mark Watley—he confronts his plight with good humor and inventiveness, treating every moment he remains alive as a blessing and narrating it to his camera for some future expedition to find. He’s an idealized protagonist, which is fine for this kind of movie, because he’s what every engineer and armchair engineer wishes they could be. The emotion in his triumphs and successes is felt by the audience (in- and out-of-universe) as nothing more or less than as a surrogate of humanity. Well-worn space movie tropes like his grieving family at home or his regret for past mistakes are thankfully eschewed. Goddard understands that the book didn’t need such additions.

Sure, Drake maintains the upper hand in terms of pure clout (it’s his thermonuclear popularity that’s going to propel this thing to a gold plaque in a week’s time), but Future steals the show at every turn. The dichotomy between their dual approaches to the genre calls to mind the infamous interview that allegedly got Future temporarily booted off of Drake’s “Would You Like A Tour?” tour back in 2013. At that time, Future shaded Nothing Was The Same by saying Drake had hits, but that the album didn’t make listeners feel the way Future’s own music did. He was 100% correct. In a lot of ways, Drake is like mid-90s Shawn Michaels, an undeniable talent whose relentless calculation sullies any connection he makes with his fans. Future’s more like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. There’s something (forgive the pun) Honest about the way he presents himself that makes his relevance organic and less forced. On tracks like “Live From The Gutter,” Future finds new ways to obliquely address his struggles with drug addiction and savagery that dwarf any amount of hurt bitterness Drake can muster (even with the latter’s beyond-petty outro on standout cut “Diamonds Dancing”).

Beyond Beaton’s amusingly esoteric choice of subjects, SA,P highlights how she’s grown as a satirist with recurring characters like the boogieman-esque The Straw Feminists and hardcore absurd action babe squad Strong Female Characters (the end-result of a contest to create the worst character ever between Beaton and two other artists). These are probably the best, most pointed series of comics in the entire 160-page collection, and they’re hysterical. It’d be easy to pigeonhole Hark! A Vagrant material as “comics for English majors,” but that’d be a disservice to Beaton’s manic weirdness and ingenuity.

-- Max Robinson on Step Aside, Pops

Rick and Morty is easily the best show on Adult Swim right now. It’s relentlessly daring, with a mix of high concept premises and goofy, improvised dialogue, and it’s generally only gotten better in its second season. So when they run a weak episode, it stands out, and this week was the weakest episode of the season, and maybe of the entire show.

“Look Who’s Purging Now” finds Rick and Morty stranded on a planet of cat-people who live in an Amish-style community free of crime or conflict, because they annually hold a festival in which murder is legal, explicitly similar toThe Purge. R&M has done some clever movie homages in the past, but those always brought out either new elements of the characters, or looked at their premises in new and interesting ways. This was just a slog, reiterating the same cynicism as Morty’s attempts to do right backfire that we saw in the superior “Mortynight Run.”

-- Joe Stando on Rick and Morty

Max: Kudos to Bruno Heller and co. for turning last season’s biggest problem into potentially its greatest asset? Barbara’s amazing this entire episode, start to finish. I like how weirdly competent she is inside Arkham, but then we get her super clumsy attempt to get Gordon and new girlfriend Leslie to turn on each other? Barbara, at her core, is a mean child trapped in an adult woman’s body, and Gotham is finally embracing that.

Kayleigh: Erin Richards is pretty great now that she has material she can actually sink her teeth into, instead of just being the bland, worried girlfriend who inexplicably never leaves her apartment. Everything in Arkham made me cackle, including  “Make me a sandwich,” and Black Mask and Barbara acting like bored rich kids in study hall when “Zaardon the Soul Ripper” walked in. The only thing that would have made the phone call scene better would be if the camera panned down to reveal Barbara was just talking into a toy Flintstones Phone.

As with every installment in the Metal Gear Solid series, the game’s gender politics are pretty screwy, with every cool, interesting female character offset by something offputting or outright gross. For example, Paz Ortega is introduced as an angel of peace, practically defined by her youth and innocence. So, naturally, this is the character whom the player—in a series first—gets to court and eventually bang inside a cardboard box.

That she is, at best, twenty-two years old (or at least claims to be; the revelation that she’s a double triple agent muddies up the backstory a bit) and Snake is explicitly a year shy of forty, and that the dating sim element is introduced rather suddenly after hours of treating Paz more like a child than an adult, makes the whole thing pretty creepy. Badass scientist Strangelove is a pretty cool new character, though her homosexuality is thrown out the window at the last minute so that she can hook up with “Huey” Emmerich. The series’ saving grace in this respect continues to be The Boss, who even in death remains the most interesting character in the franchise.

That’s actually what surprised me most about Tokyo Ghost: It’s a love story. Sure, it’s set in a cyberpunk future that’s peppered with a hefty amount of violence and social commentary, but at it’s heart, the real tragedy and meat is the relationship, or lack thereof, between the two leads. Led is presented as an addict of sorts, only semi-sentient, and while he’s disconnected emotionally, he’s still present physically – able to drive a motorbike and beat up a perp and therefore still function as a constable. Despite his inability to even acknowledge her, Debbie is still very much in love with Led and promises to get him to the Isle of Tokyo, where it’s rumored to be green and lush and without technology. There’s a push and pull relationship between these two characters, and Sean Murphy seems hyper aware of that in his artwork, constantly juxtaposing Debbie’s tiny frame with Led’s hulking mass as they physically interact with each other. And that’s all they really do, physically interact, as Debbie can’t seem to get through to her lover in any way.

-- Sarah Register on Tokyo Ghost