Luckily, we had a show like Batman: The Animated Series, which wasn't afraid to show us Joker plots that were more about finding the right notary and less about blowing up Gotham. In the episode "The Laughing Fish," the Joker's big project is ... copyrighting something? That's literally it. No fiery reckoning. No breaking Gotham's spirit through forcing them to make terrible choices. The Joker just wants his residuals. And while it doesn't really work out in "The Laughing Fish," it shows that the Joker is just as interested in getting a check every month as he is in driving Batman insane.

Or look at "Joker's Wild," in which a billionaire creates a casino that's Joker-themed, and when Joker gets word of it, he plans to just take over and run it from behind the scenes. Does the Joker even know how to fill out a balance sheet? Does he know how to list his assets? That's gonna take a lot of time away from his normal routine of carving smiles into people's faces and inventing killer whoopee cushions. It's a ploy that will result in nothing but a manageable steady cash flow. That is the most boring outcome in the history of Batman. It's like making an X-Men comic wherein Professor X tries to organize a PTA.

Batman: The Animated Series was a fantastic show, and it managed to turn all of Joker's bland financial escapades into thrilling adventure TV. But even still, it's weird to watch something like "Joker's Millions," in which the Joker is broke, gets a massive inheritance from a deceased rival mob boss, and then it's revealed that most of the fortune was counterfeit and now the IRS is on Joker's trail. So maybe we were wrong in focusing most of our attention on the explode-y stuff. I think Batman can probably take it easy for a bit; the IRS is Gotham's true silent guardian.

But even when these zombies should seemingly be in short supply, every other episode of The Walking Dead, and every zombie movie, has that one moment when the main cast looks over some field to see hundreds more zombies. How? Shouldn't they all be fertilizer by now? Well, no. And for your answer as to why, look at your main cast.

The Walking Dead is not the only Walking Dead going on. And I don't just mean the other AMC show Fear The Walking Dead, which is like someone wrote The Walking Dead in the middle of a Xanax overdose. We've seen from countless pieces of zombie media that people want to stick together. They seek each other out, and form groups, and these groups grow more than anyone could have foreseen. They're having their own journeys, which are probably more interesting than what's going on during the journey that got the TV show. The pacing of The Walking Dead has gotten better, but I swear to god, half of the last three seasons has consisted of people frowning at each other from their respective porches.

And then one zombie comes in and bites someone, and that someone bites someone else, and so on. Suddenly you have a mint-condition batch of zombies out there ready to populate the world with more zombies. So the question isn't really "Shouldn't the zombies all be crumbly garbage piles by now?" It's more about the followup: "Where are they all coming from?" Every time the cast of The Walking Dead runs into a big number of them, they're seeing the end credits sequence of another version of The Walking Dead that just finished. As long as people stay in these huge unwieldy groups, there is always going to be the potential for a new zombie crop to sprout up. Plus, it's often more interesting when there are a ton of zombies to brawl with. Sorry to break your heart, zombie genre, but "random jerk who's somehow metaphorically worse than a million brain-chewing corpses" isn't always the pinnacle of storytelling.

So no, the Eagles should not be taking that ring to Mount Doom. They're magical animals, but more importantly, they're 30-FOOT MONSTER BIRDS. If Gandalf, who has things like willpower and talons that aren't as long as your torso, doesn't want to take the Ring himself, I don't think Plan B should be to give it to the pterodactyls. That would set you back a notch. If you give it to Frodo, you at least don't have to worry about his little Hobbit hands going on a decapitation spree if he gets an itchy ring finger. If you give it to the Eagles, you just add another book to the series: Fellowship Of The Ring, The Two Towers, Return Of The King, and Argh, My Eyes! They Took My Eyes!

Of course, the followup argument is "Just let Frodo keep it, but have him ride the Eagles!" Same problem. If Frodo turns, wouldn't you much rather have him on foot, surrounded by companions who could easily destroy him, rather than slapping him on the back of a gigantic Eagle? Not only would he be able to more easily escape his group, but now he commands a squadron of gigantic, and very possibly invisible Eagles.

Now that we've been presented with the frantic lightsaber fights of the prequels and the emotionally raw battle of Episode VII, the lightsaber contests in the original trilogy seem a little stilted. Especially the first one. They get smoother and more complex in Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, but the fight in A New Hope is particularly awkward. It looks less like the climax of a grudge between two old foes, and more like the first time you try out Dance Dance Revolution, when you're not sure of what your feet or your body is supposed to do, so you just step around and hope that no one at Chuck E. Cheese's is watching.

And I know that this could get explained away with "Well, Obi-Wan is old," but he's still Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was at one time one of the most talented Jedi ever, so why does he fight like he's trying to kill a bee with a mop handle? Because a bee and a mop handle are pretty much all he's had to work with for years.

Remember that little laser ball that Obi-Wan gives to Luke for practice purposes on the Millennium Falcon? Luke eventually does really well with that thing, and Obi-Wan congratulates him with the tone of a dad congratulating his kid for gluing some macaroni to a piece of paper. "Yeah. Uh-huh. So good. That's one for the fridge." But that's all that Obi-Wan has when it comes to staying prepared for his fight against the Empire. He went from steady training partners in the Jedi Order to having a little sphere shoot haphazard lasers at him until he gets bored.

So Obi-Wan's fight against Darth Vader isn't marred by old age or growing pains in a new movie series. It's caused by Obi-Wan not being able to do anything in his off season. He's not thinking "I'll valiantly sacrifice myself, become one with the Force, and it will drive Luke to defeat the Empire." He's thinking "How do you hold this thing again? Two hands or one hand? Oh god, it's Darth Vader. He doesn't look like a robot ball at all. Oh, man. I'm in trouble."