Rowsdower

It was Bob DiBuono. I attended the episode's filming, at which I happened to be seated to the right of his girlfriend. To her left were the actors who played the couple involved in Avery's altercation and Rema Webb, who played the nurse. (Those scenes were prerecorded and played back for the studio audience.)

Confusion has arisen due to ambiguous terminology used to report the facts, which actually are fairly simple: This season (not the revival as a whole) had a predetermined length of 13 episodes, irrespective of viewership. Additional seasons remain possible, but it's true that the show's Nielsen ratings performance has been unspectacular. No official decision regarding cancellation or renewal is expected until the spring.

He described Frank as "practically my uncle." This fictive kinship with Murphy's colleagues (to whom he refers as "Aunt" or "Uncle") was established in the 1992 episode depicting Avery's birth.

For the same reason why most of them were present in the first place — Murphy's characteristically indomitable insistence: "There's a lovely bowl of nuts on the table. They'll tide you over. I don't want anybody ruining their appetite before the three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar turkey comes out."

During the first six episodes, I never even thought about Pat's sexuality. Unlike Nik Dodani's character in Atypical (who frequently makes his attraction to women abundantly clear), nothing that he'd said or done seemed indicative of any sexual orientation in particular. I wasn't surprised to learn that Pat is gay (which occurred when I was in the studio audience for last week's recording of episode 10, Beat the Press), but I was surprised by his implication to Miles that this was obvious. I didn't assume that he was straight, but the dialogue left me wondering whether viewers were expected to assume that he was gay.

*Bowie

This week's main story undoubtedly was inspired by Jane Elliott's famous "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise, which is impactful on schoolchildren and adults alike.

Absolutely perfect. When Haley warned Joe that he wouldn't like it, he assumed that she was basing this conclusion on his age. "Fish Heads" was released in 1978, so the chronology wasn't really a factor. The song was simply bizarre (which was why I loved it). It's a legendary novelty song, given national exposure by Dr. Demento and reportedly becoming the most requested song in his radio show's history. It was recorded by Barnes & Barnes, a duo comprising childhood friends Robert Haimer and Bill Mumy (the well known actor). The music video, which debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1980, was directed by the late Bill Paxton and features appearances by Paxton and Dr. Demento (whose MTV/Comedy Central specials of the late 1980s and early 1990s invariably featured it among the top spots in the countdown). Very much so. And in case anyone needed further confirmation, the episode also showed Haley's They Might Be Giants Flood poster (and I hadn't noticed, but I understand that a TMBG Apollo 18 poster was seen on her bedroom wall previously). Again, just a perfect fit.

Following multiple episodes' off-screen private interactions between Joanie and Haley, the audience was privy to one. I recall speculation in this forum that Joanie had discovered compromising information about Haley and was using it to blackmail her. (This was before the issue underlying Haley's anxiety was revealed.) Last night's conversation painted a very different picture — implying that Haley confided in (i.e., came out to) Joanie, whose attitude toward her sister appears genuinely caring and supportive, despite tinges of envy.

After having a lousy couple of days, I viewed tonight's episode in the hope that it would lift my spirits. (In particular, I wanted to see Gordon reach out to Haley and mend their relationship.) Needless to say, this wasn't the escape that I sought. I realize that these are fictional characters, but I'm literally in tears as I type this. I need to lie down and close my eyes.

The skills that Haley is developing aren't inextricably tied to computers or the Internet. She could be laying the foundation for a career as a journalist, critic, writer, editor, etc. I see no reason to believe that "if she follows her current path, [she will be] seriously lacking in any skills outside of the computer world."

Both characters are intelligent and artistic, but I have to disagree on the similarities cited above. Firstly, Haley isn't a hotshot anything. Cameron probably thinks more highly of her own toenail clippings (and struggles to understand why the world refuses to stare in awe of their perfection and take in the profound secrets they hold) than Haley does of herself. Secondly, HTML is a simple markup language, as Haley herself noted. (She certainly has the potential to learn advanced coding, of course.) Her role at Comet has been rooted primarily in research, categorization and curation, not in coding. Thirdly, season-4 Haley has been the most likable character of the series from my perspective, which proves that she's nothing like Cameron. (I'm kidding, but not about my opinions of the characters.) This is what many people fail to consider. A liberal/progressive attitude toward LGBT people ≠ preparedness to learn that one's child is among them. It isn't a simple matter of acceptance or rejection. It's a sudden realization that years of assumptions were incorrect, followed by a chaotic flood of mental reframing, second-guessing, and anxiety about the suffering one's child has endured and struggles he or she might face in the future. Between sips of wine, she interrupted Joanie with a non sequitur consisting solely of a very specific comment that she failed to recall making previously. She was hammered, as Joanie immediately realized. It might even have been a life-altering moment, in a "Christ, is that what I sound like when I'm drunk?" sort of way. And that was before she went to the bar. She was pulled over on her way back. They showed closeups and extreme-closeups of Donna's face, shot with a narrow depth of field to blur everything in the background, thereby conveying the character's poor focus on her surroundings. Taken with the police lights and sirens that followed, the audience was given more than enough information to infer that she committed some sort of traffic infraction. They could have forgone the mood-establishing style in favor of a dull, sterile shot of Donna swerving or running a red light, but why was such a detail necessary? "I only had two drinks, I swear!" has been a go-to defense of drunk drivers since time immemorial. Donna was almost certainly lying to Gordon. They used a different angle in the episode (which looks more like a crane shot than an aerial shot). Here's a cropped screen capture: If anything, the height differences are even more apparent from this angle (because it's easier to gauge their relative spatial positions).

I haven't noticed any efforts to make Haley look shorter, irrespective of her proximity to others. Standing near Joanie, she looks about three inches taller. (Kathryn Newton is 5' 5".) Facing Gordon, they're nearly eye-to-eye. When Donna appears taller, it's because she's wearing high-heeled shoes. Girls typically reach their adult height around the character's age, so I don't know why this would even be an issue. By the way, here's an AMC promotional still from the scene that you mentioned earlier: The two characters in the shot who appear close in height are Gordon and Haley (because they are close in height).

It's my favorite episode of the series to date. I recall no previous instance in which I was so thoroughly engaged from start to finish. Poor Haley. She wants nothing more than to belong (without having to pretend to be someone she isn't), and Comet was the one place where she felt like she did. I was rooting for her before, and now I feel more invested than ever. Please, show, let this character make it out okay. If anyone deserves to go on to do great things, it's Haley. Perhaps you missed the scene in which she phoned the bar, confirmed that she'd left behind her wallet, and told the employee that she'd stop there that night to retrieve it. Huh? They've been building to it since the beginning of the season (also the beginning of the character's on-screen depiction as a teenager). The only question was what "it" was (i.e., what was troubling her). Is your argument is that the writers needed to explicitly foreshadow a revelation about Haley's sexuality (instead of establishing she was experiencing emotional turmoil of indeterminate origin)? If so, why? Anna Chlumsky is 5' 2", but Susanna Skaggs is 5' 8" (the same height as Kerry Bishé and one inch shorter than Scoot McNairy).

I don't have a problem with that part. I find it difficult to believe that Cameron needed only a month to replace a broken algorithm with a cutting-edge technology that apparently outstripped all of its competition. But the writers routinely treat her as the Jesus of computer programmers, so I'm not surprised.

...and performing technological miracles with the greatest of ease (transforming Rover's algorithm into an amazing breakthrough in a mere month, despite another coder's long-term efforts repeatedly falling short). Because of course she did.

The song was played only from the audience's perspective (not the characters').

As irritating as I find the character, I'm more annoyed by the the writers' insistence on validating her petulant behavior. Even when she's shown to be wrong about something, you just know that she'll somehow turn out to be right in the long run. And that only reinforces my instinct to root against her. Indeed, Joe's idea sounded more like Yahoo!. The scene in which he described it was the biggest eye-roller of the two episodes for me. After the browser endeavor fizzled, I was hopeful that the writers intended to move past the characters' Forrest Gump-like brushes with every major development in personal computing. How silly of me. My first thought... [That's purely speculative, but I'm erring on the side of caution.] He seems to be aging into Cotton Hill.

Agreed. Exaggeration and simplification are to be expected, but it's nice when the subject's essence comes across, more or less. The Goldbergs is a good example. Its stories are pointedly based on an unreliable narrator's fuzzy recollections of his childhood, a framing device that explains the extent to which artistic license is taken. The nebulous "nineteen eighty-something" encompasses the entire decade, with the events thereof conveniently jumbled and condensed as an episode's plot dictates. And while many of the precise details are far from accurate, the spirit of the 1980s remains firmly intact and unmistakable in the broad strokes that the writers paint. It can be frustrating when they get something slightly wrong (especially for someone raised near Philadelphia in the 1980s, as I was). In one episode, for instance, a program guide scrolling on a television screen in the background listed CBS series on KYW (channel 3) and NBC series on WCAU (channel 10). That's correct today, but the stations' affiliations were reversed until 1995. However, such nitpicking feels almost ungrateful, given the trouble to which someone went. They didn't have to use the real-life Philadelphia broadcast television channel assignments and call letters (and pair them with the titles of period-appropriate programs in their actual time slots on their respective networks), but they did, and they got almost everything right. More importantly, the nostalgia and humor came through.

I have too, but this series has come relatively close. The mere fact that Anna-Kat's condition has an explicit identification is refreshing. Sitcom writers often go out of their way to avoid this. One or more specific afflictions might be implied, but they want to leave enough wiggle room to vary the character's portrayal without regard for accuracy or vulnerability to criticism. So while this lapse was disappointing, it was the writers' willingness to attach an "OCD" diagnosis (and aspire to maintain consistency therewith) that enabled it. They could have labeled Anna-Kat "weird" or "quirky" and concocted all sorts of zany behaviors with impunity. (The Middle, which I regard as a very good program, is guilty of this.) They took on the challenge of depicting a child with OCD in a sitcom, so I'll cut them some slack when they fall short of the high mark that they've set for themselves.

The series has improved over the course of the season, which corroborates the theory that this weak episode was shot earlier in the production cycle and held for May (which was my presumption as well). For the reasons discussed, Anna-Kat's storyline didn't ring true. The writers barely even attempted to provide a logical justification. Note that I wrote "logical" (not "rational"). A sudden fear of water doesn't jibe with Anna-Kat's established character traits, encompassing considerable intelligence and a longstanding interest in historical catastrophes (including nautical accidents), presenting mainly as morbid fascination that evokes discomfort among others. The tenuous connection between death at sea and showering at home or swimming in a familiar pool was inexplicable. The sweeping conclusion that "water kills" is far removed from Anna-Kat's fundamental understanding of the world (and is especially jarring after the previous episode). Likewise, there was no reason for a single swim with her mother to assuage her fear. That was completely arbitrary and inconsistent with Anna-Kat's way of thinking. I can't help but wonder why the writers didn't base Anna-Kat's problem on her contamination concerns. (Ironically, an OCD sufferer's fear of contamination can provoke behavior that actually makes the individual or his/her surroundings less clean.) For example, she could have encountered a news report about chlorine-resistant cryptosporidium strains in tap water and swimming pools. That's the sort of thing that triggers a sudden aversion to previously acceptable situations. Some newly learned piece of information had to alter her worldview, which simply didn't occur at any point. (She merely read about disasters along the lines of countless others with which she was extremely familiar.) I speak from experience, as I was diagnosed with OCD when I was a just bit older than the character (and not long after, a news report about cryptosporidia in tap water led me to immediately stop drinking it). OCD manifests in different ways for different people (and I lack the idiosyncratic compulsions that Anna-Kat has demonstrated), but OCD-driven behavior always stems from some sort of underlying logic from the sufferer's perspective, even if it makes little or no sense. It needn't be reasonable or even rooted in reality, but it must be motivated by some perceived risk or benefit. In this instance, there was no plausible reason for Anna-Kat to imagine one. I want to note, though, that I've loved many of the recent episodes and been impressed by the character's depiction overall (and even here, the performance by Julia Butters was excellent, as usual). The occasional dud of an episode has little effect on my opinion of a series as a whole.

Anna-Kat mentioned that she was 5 ¾ when the promise was made. Based on the established timeline, that was shortly after the Ottos moved to Westport.

I'm still holding out hope that Fox will come to its senses and market an "I need a catchphrase!" coffee mug.

As I viewed Emergency Punch-Up, I couldn't help but wonder why its broadcast wasn't postponed. Then I learned that it was, but NBC waited until the last minute (thereby giving CTV insufficient notice to follow suit, apparently). Even a passing resemblance to tragedies in the news usually results in an episode's rescheduling, so one about a toxic gas attack should have been caught sooner.

I strongly suspect that NBC rescheduled Emergency Punch-Up because its plot bears an uncomfortable (albeit superficial) resemblance to a serious event in the news. To avoid appearing insensitive (or even exploitative, particularly among those who mistakenly perceive the timing as deliberate), television networks usually react to such a coincidence by substituting either a rerun or a first-run episode originally scheduled for a later date. For programming of U.S. origin, CTV and other Canadian broadcasters typically coordinate with their American counterparts on such matters (and mirror any scheduling adjustments made in advance). When an episode preempted in the U.S. airs in Canada as planned, this usually reflects a last-minute change (more commonly stemming from sporting event overruns and the like). In the case of Emergency Punch-Up, I'm surprised that the decision wasn't made sooner. I've seen programming pulled in light of parallels far less obvious than this one. In 2015, USA (a sister channel to NBC) postponed the season finale of Mr. Robot by a week because a single scene depicted an occurrence vaguely similar to one from real life. In that instance, I doubt that any sort of connection would have even crossed most viewers' minds, but USA erred on the side of caution (despite much shorter notice than NBC had this week).