If you wondered why Mad Men bothered to open its fifth season with a Civil Rights protest and to make the arc of the first episode the arrival of the first black employee at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, only to assign Dawn, the new secretary, a single substantive sequence for the entire rest of the season, Matthew Weiner has words for you:

One issue some thought would be explored more thoroughly this season was race. The premiere featured a civil rights protest and a black secretary was introduced, but after that, the topic was largely ignored.

“I feel like the expectation that introducing a black character means you have to tell the civil rights struggle is in a way racist,” said Weiner. “I use her character the same way I use all the characters on the show. She is there. I’m sorry if people were disappointed. Do I regret there wasn’t more of it? Yeah. All I can say is, it’s early. We have 26 episodes left. I don’t feel like in the history of the United States that 1966 was the year of civil rights; it’s early.”

This strikes me as somewhat disingenous. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to pigeonhole black characters, but it’s not as if Weiner’s Dawn anything close to a substantive role that fleshes her out as an individual. In seeking to avoid making her a stereotype, he’s largely treated her as a token, an acknowledgement that the world around SCDP is changing but that the characters within it are not always adapting successfully. That’s a fine point to make, but it feels like Dawn exists solely to serve other characters’ development, she’s a device, rather than a person. Weiner and the Mad Men staff have a lot of other tools at their disposal to illustrate Don Draper’s aging, Pete Campbell’s dissatisfaction, Roger Sterling’s lost touch. To me, introducing Dawn only to reduce her to one of those tools is not actually more impressive than telling her a Civil Rights story that gave her humanity and an inner life would have been.

Note: it’s impossible to discuss Prometheus in the depth it demands without massive spoilers, so I’ll revisit the movie on Monday. This review contains some basic plot details, most of which can be gleaned from the movie’s promotional materials, but if you want to go in blind, please defer your reading.

“How do you know it’s beautiful?” one character asks another at the beginning of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his science fiction landmark Alien, about futuristic truckers who find themselves burdened with a uniquely lethal cargo. “It’s what I choose to believe,” she responds. So have we, lured into theaters by the astonishingly gorgeous marketing campaign for the dark, futuristic blockbuster about religious scientists hoping to reconcile science and faith in one daring exploratory mission. But like those scientists, who followed a recurring set of pictographs across the galaxy only to find their expectations grievously disappointed, Prometheus is not the miracle we’ve been lead—or lead ourselves—to expect.

In place of the Alien movie’s scathing portrait of a corporation that’s willing to see a crew of humans butchered to capture the potential basis for a weapon, to talk a woman traumatized in its employ into facing the same thing that nearly killed her, to abandon a colony to its death, Prometheus has a nearly-bloodness corporate dynastic struggle. David (a terrific Michael Fassbender), the android who is maintaining the crew of the spaceship Prometheus while they are in hypersleep on their voyage to a distant star cluster, turns out to have been a surrogate son to industrialist Peter Weyland. Weyland’s affection for him is limited, though, shot through with a kind of species superiority complex. In a hologram recorded before his death and played for the crew upon their arrival, he explains that “He is unable to appreciate his remarkable gifts because that would require the one thing David lacks: a soul.” But whatever Weyland believes about David’s capacity for wonder, his casual contempt appears to have registered with the android. “I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind,” he informs the crew, a slight edge emerging from bland, uptipped lips. Later, he asks with that same lack of affect, “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?”

Weyland-Yutani’s willingness to betray its human employees to keep the Alien alive and exploitable set the company terrifyingly apart from the human race—in this universe, corporations aren’t people, they’re a predator species of their own. But in Prometheus, Weyland’s toxic relationship with his children is both more personal and more antiseptic than the grime of the Alien movies. The venom is contained to their cursed circle, the mission a pet project of Weyland’s rather than a corporate priority. Prometheus is willing to judge Weyland’s character, but not his company.

The movie doesn’t do justice to most of its other, more high-flying ideas, either. There are monsters and body-horror-inducing substances a-plenty, but for a movie that’s meant to answer an awfully specific biological question—Damon Lindelof told io9 he wanted to know “Where did that thing come from? It’s not really a practical organism if it needs a human to gestate. Was it invented by someone?”—Prometheus‘s science is designed more to provide a steady stream of horrific images than a satisfying evolutionary or bioengineering narrative.

Similarly, the characters make decisions so stupidly self-destructive and draw conclusions so counterintuitive that it becomes difficult to root for them. The more logical and plausible horror is, the more effective it is because it suggests that the monstrous could grown organically from the everyday. By contrast, I’m not particularly concerned about a pot-smoking geologist making spectacularly poor decisions that lead to the death of half of my colleagues. Prometheus‘s shocks may be sharp, but they generally fade quickly.

The exception is a sequence that transmute normal anxieties about rape, unwanted pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and birth into a powerful and lingering nightmare, and an opportunity for Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) to demonstrate her unstoppability: sucker punches have nothing on a blow to the cesarean section incision. If Ridley Scott can be said to be a feminist, it’s less for his advocacy of a world beyond patriarchy, and more for his conviction that women have the will to survive the unimaginable. Ellen Ripley was a response to the horror trope of the Final Girl long before Buffy Summers’ arrival in Sunnydale, and here, Idris Elba’s ship’s captain defies the death order preordained for horror-movie black men.

“Big things have small beginnings,” David assesses coldly midway through Prometheus. But for all its visual splendor and strong performances, Prometheus is a reminder that brilliant, low-budget beginnings can be more compelling than their monstrous offspring.

A year ago, when Charlie Sheen was melting down for fun and profit on his post-Two and a Half Men tour, Rolling Stone wrote this about him:

Staring failure in the face and calling it “winning” — that’s the closest thing we have to an American religion. It’s the native tradition, from Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick to Ron Burgundy in Anchorman. And if that’s our religion, Charlie Sheen is our Vatican assassin warlock. Lots of us can look back on ruined lives, lost jobs, squandered fortunes. But to look back on it all and shrug, “I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ frickin’ rock star from Mars”? That’s up there with Ahab threatening to strike the sun if it insults him.

Now, in the same magazine’s pages, in a Q&A that’s out in print today and that I’m looking forward to getting my hands on, he’s singing a rather different tune: “Clearly, a guy gets fired, his relationships are in the toilet, he’s off on some fucking tour, there’s nothing ‘winning’ about any of that. I mean, how does a guy who’s obviously quicksanded, how does he consider any of it a victory? I was in total denial.” Of course, he also says “I mean, the shit works. Sorry, but it works. Anyway, I don’t see what’s wrong with a few drinks. What’s your drink? Tequila? Mine’s vodka. Straight, because I’ve always said that ice is for injuries, ha ha.” And this week, he melted down, cursing out a security guard at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

I remain curious to see Sheen’s new show, Anger Management, if only to see if FX president John Landgraf, who said he accepted the pitch because he was convinced Sheen wanted to reexamine his life and his relationships with women, is right. But there is something wearying about this kind of cycle: a fall from grace, a spectacular burnout, a withdrawal, and a reemergence. As with Britney Spears’ return to music-making, touring, and now acting as a judge on the X Factor, Sheen’s semi-contrition tour feels like recovery as a product, as a means of restoring the value of a profitable franchise. I’m queasy about the repackaging of the wrenching, non-linear processes that are recovery and reinvention into a consumable format.

The morning after finale of the second season of Game of Thrones, I called up Bryan Cogman, the show’s story editor. We’d spoken earlier in the year about the third episode of the season, which Bryan wrote. This time, we talked about the full arc of the season, the emergence of important new characters who don’t appear in the novels, race and gender in the show, and the tension between staying true to George R.R. Martin’s sprawling series while adapting it for an entirely different medium.

I felt very vindicated by the emergence of Ros as a major character in the finale, and I wondered if you could talk about how she emerges from obscurity in the books to someone who Varys, the royal spymaster, sits down with because he sees her as a partner rather than “a collection of profitable holes.”

That’s a David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] special. She doesn’t even exist in the books. Ros was originally Red Headed Whore Number 1 in the pilot. In the very original [draft], Tyrion was in a brothel in King’s Landing as a way to introduce him and get a little download of information about Jon Arryn [the former Hand of the King who dies prior to the events fo the novel and the show]. For various budgetary reasons in the pilot, we chouldn’t shoot King’s Landing at all or have any King’s Landing sets, so what you ended up seeing where Tyrion has skipped out on the royal procession and tries to find Winterfell’s brothel…Ros the whore kind of emerged from that…

With season 2, there’s a character in the book named Alyaya, who we didn’t end up keeping. We knew that Ros would serve that function in the latter part of the season where Cersei thinks she’s caught Tyrion’s girlfriend but actually has caught Ros and doesn’t know who she is. We had that in place…it’s funny, it’s one of those things that kind of happened by accident. You’re finding different ways as you’re plotting the season to examine different traits and characters. There’s a throwaway line in the second book where Tyrion says “Oh, we should hire some whores for Joffrey, maybe that would let him calm down a bit.” And we thought, we have to see that scene. And what ended up emerging was that horrific, as horrific as anything in the show, scene where Ros and Daisy are made to abuse each other for Joffrey’s sick jollies. And then, the other thing that we sort of built into the show was the rivalry between Littlefinger and Varys…Ros seemed to be the perfect person for Varys to have an insider in Littlefinger’s company…she came to Littlefinger’s, trusted him, thought she had a rapport, and sort of had a rude awakening about who she is, and who she is in Littlefinger’s eyes.

Ros becomes this throughline in Westeros, she’s passed through not every character, but she’s had contact with most of the major players who tend to discount her as a prostitute. It’s as if she’s the secret main character and audience stand-in. She’s a focus for emotion in the show, and vulnerability and reaction, but she sees a lot more than anyone else gives her credit for.

Yes. I’m glad you see her that way. There’s a great divide in the fan community about Ros, which I think is pretty unfair to Esme [Bianco] who’s done an absolutely terrific job playing the part…In King’s Landing, for the most part, you’re seeing things through the eyes of the nobles, and Ros gives you a window into the class of people they take for granted. It was fun this season to sort of explore those people on the margins. The other whore, Daisy, also did a fantastic job. In a weird way, it’s a bizarro Sansa story. They both come to the capitol with big dreams and an idea of what it’s going to be like, a romantic vision. You see Daisy getting a little tour of the brothel and it’s as if she’s in Disneyland, she’s wide-eyed, “This is classy! This is a classy brothel, finally!’ And what she doesn’t realize is the classy brothel is probably the worst place to work. So that was kind of a sad little arc to play with.

One of the things I thought was interesting about this season is that in the novels, Tyrion’s affinity for sex workers is kind of treated as a symbol that he’s a nice guy: he identifies with women, with outsiders, with people who are considered untouchables by polite society. In this season, it’s suggested there’s a bit of naivete there. He sends Ros and Daisy in to calm Joffrey down and Joffrey ends up torturing them.

The thing that’s interesting to me about Tyrion, is Tyrion of all the Lannisters, has the most compassion, the most empathetic worldview. But he’s still a Lannister. He’s still going to keep the class below him at arm’s length…Being a Lannister, he still uses his position when he needs to, and can behave selfishly. He’s not necessarily a white knight kind of hero. I certainly think that yes, there is that kind of empathy and compassion for prostitutes, but there’s also a real distrust. He had his first wife, Tysha, who he found out was actually a whore, but he got emotionally invested in her, and had his heart ripped out. It made him want to whore all the more, but certainly, until Shae came along, he’s finding himself falling in love, deeply, all over again and it’s scaring him, because even though he feels and senses that Shae feels the same way, he doesn’t want to really believe that because of what happened in his past when his father informed him that the marriage was a sham and she was paid to love him. That scene in the finale, it’s a beautiful scene, where Tyrion breaks down with Shae, in my mind, I don’t know what Peter was thinking, that’s the moment where he accepts that Shae really does feel the same way with him. But he can’t run away.
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I’m normally of the belief that in pop culture, equality comes in two stages. First, members of a minority group, or of a group like women that are a majority but are poorly rendered in that space, get to be presented as admirable. Second, when they’ve achieved enough penetration into the culture, every portrayal of members in that group can stop being limited by the need to be admirable, to represent for everyone else. I tend to be impatient to get to the second half of that stage, because it’s often more interesting. The current Avengers continuity’s found ways to make Captain America melancholy and funny, but I’d probably rather spend time with Tony Stark.

Over at Women and Hollywood, Inkoo Kang argues that we still don’t have enough female action heroes to be at that second stage, and points out that at least some observers are still stuck on analyzing action heroines’ bodies rather than looking at their personalities:

It must be granted that many of today’s action heroes are largely immune from the moral scrutiny that accompanies the arrival of most action heroines on the big screen. People love Iron Man for being a self-absorbed grumposaur, but Katniss Everdeen has Manohla Dargis, arguably the country’s most important female critic, wringing her hands about how the actress who plays her might be too curvy. But a playful superhero figure like Iron Man comes after decades and decades of “role model” action heroes like Superman, Spiderman, and Captain America. Iron Man, Hancock, and their snarky ilk are counterreactions to the square, goody-goody “role model” heroes of yesteryear. Hence, contemporary male action heroes are, in a sense, excused from having to be role models, since so many other characters already fit that niche.

I wonder if part of the challenge here is that while male action heroes are heightened version of ideals and traits men are already supposed to aspire to—strength, decisiveness, acting as protectors. If you’re going to put women in those roles, you’re both having female characters take on male-affiliated traits, and then heightening them.

And that raises the question of if action heroines are supposed to be role models, what, overall, are they supposed to model? Should female action heroes just fit into the same sorts of slots represented by men, whether it’s the teenaged glee and snark of Spider-Man, the struggle for self-control of the Hulk, the patriotism and ethics of Captain America? Or should we argue that, just as action choreography for women would be more interesting and creative if it draws on different styles and acknowledges differences in strength between men and women, action heroines should model different behaviors and priorities, too? The Alien franchise got a lot out of portraying the redirected maternal force as a tremendously powerful force of nature. And in The Avengers, Black Widow’s the person to recognize when force is no longer the solution, and to use tact and cleverness to turn off the source of the attack at its spigot—violence is useful in that it helps her get where she needs to go, but it is not actually the solution to the attack. The Avengers don’t beat Loki’s forces: they out-manuver them. It’s terrific to model that strength and protectiveness are qualities that don’t belong solely to boys or men. But more thoughtful movies about what femininity brings to the table in fraught situations would make for more interesting storytelling, and more nuanced role models.

Edward Klein, the writer who makes a living alleging ugly nonsense like the idea that President Obama was born overseas, that Bill Clinton raped Hillary Clinton, and that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, has taken it on himself to start fat-shaming the Secretary of State.

“She’ll be 69 years old. And as you know—and I don’t want to sound anti-feminist here—but she’s not looking good these days. She’s looking overweight, and she’s looking very tired,” he said on Fox News in a discussion of whether Clinton will run for president in 2016. “I think she’s going to take some time off, get back into shape. And if her health holds out—that’s a big if, of course—if her health holds out, there’s no question in my mind she and Bill—two for the price of one—will run in 2016.”

I’m so glad to see that Klein, in a change from his normal slipshod gossip-mongering, sat down with Hillary Clinton’s physician to discuss her health or obtained her medical records. And it’s so nice of him to be concerned about the health of the most powerful woman in the American government. Who knew that being the Secretary of State was a stress-free position that doesn’t require a ton of travel? Or that when you’re in your sixties, you’re supposed to look the same way you did in your forties? This kind of insightful commentary is why Ed Klein is such a national treasure, and right-wing publishers Regnery are so courageous for making his ideas get out into the world.

The Fox host who had Klein on complained that Clinton “looks like she’s not trying, to be honest.” I’m sure that Clinton, now that she knows her job is to be eye candy for men who want to make sure that all women conform to their aesthetic requirements, rather than the representative of the United States around the world, will rectify that immediately, go on a diet, ditch the scrunchie, and start to spend hours in makeup. Because it’s not like there’s anything happening anywhere in the world that requires her time and attention.

Or she could rock a great pair of sunglasses and a scarf, and keep running the world like the boss that she is: