Bastet

I think they should be omitted, and we should stick with one-off villains (well, two-offs in the case of Pfaster and Tooms).

Oh, I say if we're going to do season by season, we toss in the villain from each MOTW episode that had one -- even if that villain is a computer, a bug, a fungus, etc. rather than a person or monster.

It sounds like a "most interesting villains" (thus encompassing those you sympathize with and those who creep you right out) elimination game is a go, so do we want to do one list all at once (based on nominations) or go season by season? Even eliminating the mytharc episodes, not every episode has a concrete villain, so some seasons might yield a somewhat short list. But there were a lot of MOTW villains over nine years, so doing a whole series game might either result in an unwieldy list or leave out some characters we'd have liked to vote on. I kind of like the idea of going season by season, even if some games are shorter than others, to see where the lowly villains wind up ranking with respect to each other. If we vote from among our nominations, we may find out how Leonard Betts ranks compared to Donnie Pfaster, which is certainly interesting to know. But if we vote by season, we'll find out how the spirit of Howard Graves ranks compared to whomever was possessing that creepy kid in Born Again. Heh. Which, to me, is interesting for its randomness. And it would also be interesting to note, as someone said previously, how an episode's villain ranks as an individual compared to how the episode as a whole ranked (e.g. Cecil ranking higher than Fire, the worms ranking lower than Ice). And then we can do an all-stars at the end, just like with the episodes. Or, if we'd rather not go through every season but do want to divide things up a bit, we could do humans and monsters separately, do creepy/scary and sympathetic separately, etc.

Some already listed: Dana Scully, C.J. Cregg, the main characters of Designing Women and The Golden Girls, Grace Kelly from Grace Under Fire and Clair Huxtable. Plus Laura Holt (Remington Steele), the titular characters of Cagney & Lacey, Murphy Brown, Roseanne, Rizzoli & Isles and Cybill, Stella Gibson (The Fall), and Rene Jackson (Any Day Now). There are specific things I loved about each, but the fundamental attraction is their status as, gasp, real people. They have ideas, interests and ambitions of their own, care about the world around them, and do not define themselves by the men and/or children in their lives. They are varying degrees of smart, some are professional, and all are resourceful, ethical and independent (regardless of their marital status), yet not at all perfect. I also love Edina Monsoon and Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous, even though they aren't quite so many of those things.

Again with the "I don't know which way to go" complaint about a split-level house. Who comes up with this crap? That house had plenty to legitimately criticize, so there was no need to toss in such a ridiculous complaint. If I made a drinking game of every time the wife calls her husband "baby" - making it a double if she does it in a babyish voice - I'd be out cold before the reveal. The HHs are both just a bit too much for me.

I ordered something from Amazon recently, so I added on two of those (one for me, and one for my mom). I haven't experimented yet to see if it seems to provide a more accurate measurement of liquids than do measuring spoons, but it's definitely more convenient when one needs multiple teaspoons or tablespoons of something. So, thanks for the recommendation. (And my mom has a dishwasher while I don't, so we'll see if either one of us wind up having the lines rub off.)

The Calypso going unanswered really surprised me. I thought Rena would be around longer, but Shane played a great game. Game conditions, brain farts, different people know different things and all that, but Puerto Rico was just a dumb answer in FJ. And did Alex really say taking visually-impaired kids white water rafting was evidence of a weird sense of humor?

Speaking of the Lunchbox booth at Lanford Daze, I love when Darlene scoffs upon learning Molly is also a vegetarian: "You probably just say you're a vegetarian because you heard somewhere that Shannen Doherty might be one."

Reading this instantly conjured up the awful taste of that stick, so it's not just you.

In thinking on it, season one has some really lame villains -- the computer in Ghost in the Machine, whatever the hell was going on in Space, whoever was genderbending, the Shapes werewolf or whatever, the salamander hand guy, etc. But it also gave us Tooms, Luther Lee Boggs, the Eves and Cecil L'Ively. And the Ice worms and Darkness Falls bugs.

I watched the show for the Mulder and Scully interaction, and for a while would have been fine with them not getting romantically involved; in fact, it would have been refreshing to see a man and woman work together on television without falling in love or into bed. But as time went on, I came to feel such a transition was inevitable for the characters and to refuse to acknowledge what was organically happening would be ridiculous. I'd say by season five I was watching with the mindset, "And they are not having sex because, why?" I'm glad they did finally become a couple, but the convoluted shenanigans CC got up to in his quest to delay that, then obfuscate its having occurred, made it difficult to properly enjoy. (And to be on with that coy bullshit even in IWTB is just so juvenile.) My eternal gratitude to GA and DD for making it work in spite of him. The above sounds so reasoned, I should state for the record that from the get-go I was tickled by any and all signs of UST and may have even squealed a time or two.

I was definitely using villain as inclusive of both humans and monsters.

We could even do villains by season, without needing to nominate characters to go on the list -- just list the villain for every MOTW episode (because I don't think having CSM, WMM, etc. in the mix is a good idea) from season one and play that game, move on to season two, etc.

They agreed to say it, making them fair game for criticism to me. I don't care whether a HH organically made an idiotic statement or agreed to make one in exchange for what passes for the proverbial 15 minutes of fame these days. In fact, I might think a bit less of them for the latter.

Amen to that. I think it's one of the least-interesting aspects of any person's life, so for it to be the primary focus of so many a fictional character's life is quite frustrating to me. But with XF, the good thing about CC's fear of sex is Mulder and Scully's most intimate moments aren't at all traditionally romantic. At any rate, I'd like to see the list of M/S moments be all sort of great moments between them - comedic, snippy, deeply at odds, etc. - rather than just moments of UST or romance. I think my favorite idea so far is best quotes, divided up by character. I also like the idea of voting on a favorite villain, because some of my favorites are simply creepy (e.g. Donnie Pfaster) while some are also sympathetic (e.g. Gerry Schnauz, Leonard Betts).

I don't care about either team in tonight's game, but something about Andrew Luck inexplicably yet deeply annoys me, so I was rooting for the Texans to complete their comeback.

I've rewatched most of the original three seasons recently, and reminded myself how much of my vocabulary comes from AbFab. I must take care to do this only among the right crowd, but I like to say, "If you won't let me [do X], I'll adopt a Romanian baby." A lot of television has come and gone since this aired, but the "25 years later" version of Eddy and Patsy that closed out what was originally the series finale remains one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Except daily groceries are easy to carry, while the fruits of a stock-up trip made every couple of weeks (or whatever) would be a pain to lug up the stairs.

Maybe for whatever category we'd be doing, each person could nominate three (three chosen based on the idea there are about 10 of us playing, so that could be adjusted) and then, eliminating duplicates, that could be the list on which we vote.

In the commercial where one woman knows a bunch of information - her high school GPA, her IQ, etc. - but not her credit score, the tidbit that causes an "Oh, wow [you know that?]" response in her friend is knowing her blood type. Really? I'm certainly aware there are people who don't know their blood type, but I hardly think knowing it is so unusual as to cause that reaction.

In the version of this game we played at TWoP, we did pluses and minuses: Each episode started with 15 points, and each round (every 24 hours), you could give two points (++) or take two points away (--) from three episodes. At some stage of the game - when a certain number of episodes are left, but I can't remember what that magic number is - plus votes are limited to one (+) while negatives are still at two (--). Or maybe it's the opposite; it has been a long time. Anyway, the first episode to get down to zero points is the last-ranked episode of the season, and so on until there's just one standing. I wonder if the ability to counteract each others' votes would make a difference in the rankings. With so few people playing, it's likely not worth it to find out, especially because even with a lot of people voting it's a protracted game - we'd be here until the New Year just getting season one nailed down - but it's something that popped in my head now that this is over.

Rena was impressive; I'm curious to see how long she sticks around. I reasoned my way into FJ by adding 40 to the birth year. I was skeptical so many modern Brits would still list him as their nation's all-time greatest enemy, but the timeframe made me stick with it as my answer. Grandma Moses was a surprising TS, and I think the classical music category was better suited to the first round in terms of difficulty level. But the writers on the periodic table category was made of win, and I join Alex in being pleasantly surprised by how well they did with it. I came up with all the initials, but with half of them was too slow to convert that to the element.

"I don't believe this, you guys are treating me like I'm Becky. I'm not Becky. I don't go to the mall like Becky, I don't do great laundry like Becky, I don't love school like Becky and I don't sleep with my boyfriend like Becky!" "So what's your point, Becky?"

Yep, there are another ten episodes I could easily sub in for six through ten: Irresistible DHDV Darkness Falls Memento Mori Leonard Betts Unruhe Wetwired Ice Syzygy Kill Switch

Well, that would be just my luck -- wait all these years to get a team back in LA, and wind up with the Rams.