It does feel very like chasing fumes of a thing - this features a frankly egregious nostalgic cameo that even I found hilarious in its audacity - even beyond the sense you get that the budget has been severely tempered.

It’s weird. Obviously “WandaVision” was a reaction to “Endgame.” But “Endgame” was, allowing for “Far From Home”, the immediate last thing in the MCU. “VisionQuest” is, five years later, even more a reaction to “Endgame” and a more intense follow-up to “Age of Ultron.”

Yep. There are a lot of… familiar elements here.

Lucky you.

Skydance, is the answer. Apple do okay with their non-mockbusters, like “Killers of the Flower Moon”, but their primary source for their films is Skydance, a studio with really bad taste and ability to match. (I feel great about the merger, why’d you ask?)

I do wonder if the studios embracing Comic Con, and courting “influencers” in these spaces, contributed to this sense of “ownership.”

And while you can point to the Snyder fandom as an example of this, I’d also argue the fandom pushing against Snyder count as well - they got him off a movie that was profitable. (Sure, “only” $200m, but most studios would kill for that today.) And the “Star Wars” crowd post-Johnson.

I do wonder if it is also that they felt more “empowered”, by people like Roddenberry, which I think is also a factor. I think these fights get so heated because people assume that if they “win” they will be validated.

Not really, alas. Still respect it, but don’t really like it.

To be fair, that strain was always there, at least in my own youth on “Star Trek” bulletin boards. It just felt more contained, and nobody really paid attention to it. (And the nature of a bulletin board makes targetted harassment a little harder.)

As somebody who really fell in love with comics reading Grant Morrison’s original proposal documents and sketches and other assorted extras in the back of their “New X-Men” run, I love a good collected edition that pays attention to how the run was made - and by whom.

I do love the care that is being put onto these collected editions lately. The back matter being more organised into a “making of”, more afterwords or forewords. The recent Ostrander omnibuses even have “issue by issue” commentary. It does feel like there’s care here.

This arrived today. Ram V’s “Detective Comics”, or “Gotham Nocturne.” It is comfortably the best “Batman” run of the past half-decade, one of the best “Batman” runs ever, and an epic I’m really looking forward to reading collected in this format.

It feels special when one of my heroes admires another of my heroes.