HOST'S HEART STAYS WITH THE HEROES; HIS LOGIC 'QUIETLY NODDED' AT A PURPLE TITAN

This week's episode of On The Air, "Reflections on Our Dark Side," gathers three posts published in one week: Thanos on June 29, Darth Vader on July 1 and Fight Club on July 3. Our music desk believes this is the first recorded villain trilogy released on a weekly schedule.

The first post, "Villains As Mirrors," begins with the moment the host could not hate Thanos. By Endgame, he writes, "I wasn't a kid watching heroes save the day anymore. I was older. Tired. A little weathered." When the titan said "I am inevitable," his heart stayed with the heroes. "But my logic? My logic quietly nodded."

The reason, he writes, is personal. "Living with MS has forced me to face my own inevitability ... the slow erosion of what I thought I'd always have. Strength. Time. Certainty." This paper prints that paragraph without comment.

He lingers on the ending: the titan destroying the stones so no one could undo what he did, and becoming "just Thanos again. Alone. Unarmed. Still hunted." Then: "No applause. No redemption. Just silence. And a garden." Perry Adpiece, prestige-drama critic, called the garden "the best final shot in the franchise. I have said this at four dinner parties. I am no longer invited to dinner parties."

The second post, "Dark Side Whispers," rehears Vader's famous offer as relief rather than threat: he was trying to "spare" Luke the weight of always resisting. "We're not good people because we do good deeds," the host writes. "We're good people because we fight the darkness every day." He signs off with "From a certain point of view. (of course)" Oskar Bayte, awards-season critic, called quoting Obi-Wan in a post about Vader "the kind of casting choice that wins things."

The third is the club. The episode asks, as the Thanos post does, whether it was worth it, or whether "we dig a worse hole." The episode doesn't say. Neither will we.