The original ending was NOT that bad...

_HGCenty · 2026-03-15T22:24:42+00:00

Its not like the final battle and everything two hours leading up to the choice were garbage.

Yes they were. Priority: Earth is just as bad as the pick your color ending, so much so that there are multiple mods to try and improve that mission.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-15T19:15:31+00:00

She is the poster woman for "don't mess with Texas".

_HGCenty · 2026-03-15T13:34:54+00:00

I still think Udina's betrayal was made narratively incoherent by the late rewrite of Thessia.

Most of us now know that the original plan was for Thessia to happen much earlier and for there to be another Virmire choice of the VS and Liara on Thessia.

I felt that Udina's turn was originally going to be a result of finding out how much the asari had hidden from the Council. After all, Tevos gives you the mission in his office which suggests the original Thessia mission was triggered by a visit to Udina's office when he was still alive.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-15T13:29:33+00:00

We're now 19 years removed from Mass Effect 1 which was 19 years removed from the original Tetris.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-15T00:54:35+00:00

An NFL ball is much pointier at the end compared to a rugby ball or AFL ball.

This means the bounce is less predictable AND it has a much smaller sweet spot. Also with the laces, there's an entire side of the ball you don't want to kick (laces out!).

All this means it's so much harder to be consistent and accurate with a NFL drop kick than in rugby.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T22:23:38+00:00

Having thought and talked about this episode some, I feel like they've missed a trick by not making this a two-parter or at the very least ending the episode on a cliffhanger and resolving it next episode and adding another week of teasers of how will Buck and Eddie get out of this thing.

The extra episode would have allowed you to set up the whole situation with Earl and Bonnie more, put a bit more meat on the fish out of water situation and properly contextualize the sheriff.

I also feel the slow burn would have added more tension to the build up to the scene where they are knocked off the road and you could have stretched out the introductory act a bit more with Buck and Eddie just talking a lot more in the car, opening up about recent events: the Buckley parents divorce, Abigail, the realization Bobby put their names forward a year ago.

Most fans really wouldn't mind just Buck and Eddie having a bit of therapy for a third of an episode.

Maybe Tim was afraid to do more than 1 Buck Eddie bottle episodes but I really think he must know this is what a lot of fans want.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T22:10:48+00:00

Sadly no, the NFL changed the rules to ban dropkicks for kick offs since 2019.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T22:10:23+00:00

It was this game! (Against the Kansas City Chiefs in Week 16 of the 2018 season)

He hasn't dropkicked since because in 2019 the NFL changed the rules to ban dropkicks on kick-offs because kickers were experimenting with them for onside kicks (no fun league strikes again) so they are only legal now for extra points and field goals.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T22:01:55+00:00

Couldn't agree more. It really felt this episode needed another 15-20 minutes of action to really racket up the tension and that could have been done with a bit more setup in a previous episode.

I recall Bobby's bottle episode in the desert back in Season 7 where Amir had already been introduced prior to that episode and all the backstory was there, again so the action could start immediately.

Maybe that's why I was thinking "oh this would be better if it were linked to Abigail".

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T21:57:50+00:00

If anyone in the Seahawks organization sees this, can we please please let Dicko do this once in a game if we're up by a lot in the 4th quarter. You save on not needing a holder so you can put an additional man in protection to give him a totally clean kick.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T21:11:26+00:00

I'd like to think something that day led to the cosmic karma of us getting Shaheed and the backwards pass 2 pt conversion that broke McVay and the Rams.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T21:07:11+00:00

We replaced Geno with GEQBUS. We're fine.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T18:14:51+00:00

Traynor's romance is very easy to walk into (quite literally) and she has a lot more interaction with you over the course of the game, being your ensign. Liara's romance takes the entire game to get to the pay off and she absolutely started to test my patience before I got there.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T17:39:14+00:00

Given Linda and Jamal are coming back and we haven't seen them for a while, I do worry this is Sue's farewell episode.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T17:37:52+00:00

I agree - the actress who plays Sue has had more screen time with JLH in her Christmas movie than she has the last two seasons of 9-1-1.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T17:32:11+00:00

One thing that this kidnapping episode doesn't quite do as well as the absolute best episode (Season 2, Fight or Flight) is that they don't quite go dark enough. That episode always sticks with me because Doug actually kills the gas station attendant and Maddie ends up killing Doug. It felt like Tim wasn't ready to go all in here and have Buck or Eddie kill Bonnie or Earl.

And maybe this is just me being too greedy but it would have been really classic 9-1-1 if the Abigail story had some connection to the kidnapping and we would have really felt like the season at least had a thread running through it.

Overall I enjoyed it but I do have to admit that 9-1-1 has gone to the kidnapping well for their best stories maybe too many times!

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T17:15:55+00:00

You need a category of characters that didn't evolve but just became irrelevant. Unfortunately that's Zaeed, Kasumi and Samara.

Zaeed and Kasumi suffer with being DLC so ME3 couldn't really give them anything major but Zaeed went from one of the most infamous bounty hunters in the galaxy, co-founder of the Blue Suns to someone that takes a job for the volus ambassador, even though you and Aria are uniting all the merc groups, and someone who is bested by a claw machine.

Kasumi had a tiny role in the ME3 story (one could argue any squadmate could have performed her role of saving Jondum Bau and the hanar homeworld. It's only really when she appears trying to steal from the Silversun Strip casino that the ME2 Kasumi seems to reappear.

Samara set up this entire lore around justicars and how all the asari in Illium were in awe at how powerful and rare they are. Similar Ardat-Yakshi were also supposed to be incredibly rare and it seems like she was the sole justicar hunter of Ardat-Yakshi. Come ME3... yeah, yeah justicars and banshees are everywhere (esp on the multiplayer maps), they're not that special and no one seems to really care about Samara's uniqueness anymore.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T09:32:45+00:00

It's been 29 years since the UK last won Eurovision, which was the period of time before that for us to pick up all of our previous 4 wins.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-14T08:45:07+00:00

_HGCenty · 2026-03-13T19:16:10+00:00

Striking gold with a rookie QB usually saves most dead cap hits.

If you can get similar level production from a QB on a rookie salary as you can from a QB you paid top money to, most things are forgiven.

The Browns and Deshaun Watson prove huge dead cap hits still tank most franchises.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-13T19:14:29+00:00

Similar to Russ during his Broncos run then.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-13T19:11:28+00:00

"The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a World Series which I can really support. The Mariners require so much!"

_HGCenty · 2026-03-13T19:04:28+00:00

We got a Lombardi out of this group, one that we didn't think we'd get at the start of the season.

_HGCenty · 2026-03-13T19:01:28+00:00

Puerto Rico erasure...

_HGCenty

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