No, it's a real argument, one made due to the poor way evolution has been described by its opponents. If you say "man is descended from apes", there is the image of all the apes slowly turning into men. If this only happened to some, why? And why aren't the apes still here turning into men?

The answer, obviously, is that we're not descended from apes, but both humans and apes have a common ancestor, but that's not how it has been described to these people.

Maybe someone had a plan to have a die-off on Earth to get the population down, and it's not working. "If we can get the population down to one billion, we can do something with the place. Deny them health care! Wait... you mean they're still reproducing, but now are just suffering a lot? Well, that's egg on our face!"

Original Trek was famous for that. They'd cut in reaction shots from other episodes if they needed one, the wrong colored shirt be damned. Often the people at the helm would change between wide shot and closeup, especially in season two when they used season one footage without Chekov.

Not that I know of. She likes plot. If something is just characters, she gets bored. She told the story of watching Do The Right Thing in college with some of her roommates. A half hour in, they looked at each other and said, "has anything happened? No. Is anything going to happen? No." and turned it off. The fact it was building to something was lost on her. A similar thing happened when we saw the musical 'In The Heights'. It has no plot, just two days in the life of this small NYC neighborhood. She was bored

If 'HER' wins the oscar, by definition it isn't science fiction.

(old author's joke: What's the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction? If you're paid over a certain amount per word, it's no longer science fiction.)

The best short film about mermaids, naturally, is this music video by Sirenia

If you want WTF, you have to see how the original TV series ended. The network, upset at the amount of violence, made them throw out tons of finished animation late in the season, but gave them no extra money. The final two episodes are mostly just text and voiceover. Makes no bloody sense and insulted every viewer (although I liked it at the time). All these countless remakes are a reaction to that.

I was in 3rd Grade when the old animated version of The Hobbit came out, which got me to read the book. Thanks to that, I NEVER pictured the elves in The Hobbit to be the same as the ones in Lord of the Rings. The Mirkwood elves were always these semi-evil drunk ugly creatures to me.

It is one of those phrases that sounds good, but there are enough exceptions it becomes somewhat meaningless. Some of my favorite characters did not start out with origin stories. The author instead dropped the reader into the most interesting part of that person's life, when they were who they were, and let us readers learn about them as they dealt with some problem. The Horatio Hornblower books, for example. There are prequels NOW, but if you read the publication dates you'll see we didn't get Midshipman Hornblower until the author realized he couldn't do much with the character as a 60 year old Admiral.

Or Miss Grapebatch's school production of "Close Encounters of the Third Grade".