Bastet

I think Lecy and John worked particularly well together when Becky and Dan were at odds. Lecy did a great job showing Becky's awkwardness and hurt when Dan gave her the silent treatment -- after she and Mark took an unauthorized ride on his motorcycle and then again when she came back home to get her stuff after eloping with Mark.

You should watch with me; I have actually sat on the couch yelling, "No, you have too much stuff!" at the TV when HHs say, "We don't have enough storage space." Ugh. A societal problem, I understand, but this show sure does shed a light on it. On a similar kids and privacy note, another of my pet peeves is the proliferation of parenting HHs who freak out at the thought of the master bedroom being "too far away" from the kid(s)' bedroom. The years during which everyone is going to want privacy will vastly outnumber those in which it's convenient for the child to be in the room next door.

Holly announcing she "quit" as Blake's mother was one of my favorite things ever. But there was also some really nice stuff in there with Holly trying to get Roger to understand he was doing Blake no favors by always swooping in to clean up her messes. And I love that, while his primary emotion was disgust that his daughter was sleeping with a man he hates, Roger was also genuinely pissed off on Holly's behalf that she'd been played for a fool.

Oh, my; that became such an integral part of my vocabulary I had completely forgotten where I'd picked it up. I also tend to use, "Are you nuts? Are you just some nutty nut person who's nuts?" (I know it's "girl" in the original quote, but, unlike Sorkin, I don't use that word to refer to adults.) And I dole out the sage advice, "If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you." Much of Jeremy's The Hungry and the Hunted monologue gets used when anyone speaks of hunting for sport. I'm also on the look-out for more ways to include "I told many, many people" in my conversations.

I think Christine Elise is attractive, with a cool attitude, and I liked Emily at first. But retconning her as the love of Brandon's life just because the two actors had since fallen in love was annoying.

I like the one where they do Ray Charles' Night Time is the Right Time even better, thanks to Rudy.

And thank heavens for that, because people having carpet over my house's original hardwood floors for decades meant that when I pulled it up I had mostly undamaged 1938 hardwood to enjoy. I prefer hardwood floors both aesthetically and because it can be kept so much cleaner, but as I said above I enjoy seeing HHs who prefer carpet just because they're far more rare a species on the show than they are in real life. I had a couple of repeats on in the background yesterday, and it struck me anew how much my definition of a small - or should I say "tight" - room differs from most of the HHs'. Simply saying, "I wish this room was bigger" instead would annoy me less.

I enjoy just about any take-off on Agatha Christie's Ten Little [insert Pejorative of the Times Here], and that episode is no exception. It has a nice cast of characters, and I like their discussion about him arranging it so they'd be sharing a room, rather than just letting things happen. (He certainly didn't learn his lesson that if he'd stop manipulating, they'd be sleeping together.) I also like "Somebody else saw the movie" when faking "Myrtle's" death doesn't work. "Believe me, Laura, I'm not trying to sleep you. I'm just trying to sleep with you." This is one of my favorite instances of their going undercover. "Someone is going around killing bachelors." "In that case, Laura, will you marry me?" I love this one, too, and his broken leg - then, legs - do make for some wonderful comedy. I love when Laura returns to his apartment not knowing the ditz is gone and misinterprets the sounds she hears coming from the bedroom. At first, she quietly leaves, but then she comes bursting back in. Ha! Another one of my favorites. "Mr. Steele, you're not Mr. Steele" is one of the series' best lines. And the scene in the hayloft is certainly worth the price of admission. Vintage Steele is my favorite, with Red Holt Steele an extremely close second. No coincidence they're both Laura-centric. I also love the Descoine episodes, and Dreams of Steele. In fact, while I also quite like Elementary Steele, I think Dreams of Steele should have been the season two finale, since it calls back to the pilot. Plus, it has Judith Light, one of TV's most underrated actors. Another favorite is Beg, Borrow or Steele. I just love them getting progressively ripe and frustrated. There are so many nice moments between them and so many funny lines (the entire "We seem to have misplaced Miss Holt's urn" scene is perfection) I completely wave away how stupid it is the bodies were conclusively identified and how their reported deaths didn't bring an hysterical Frances into the mix. In other falsely reported deaths, I also really enjoy Premium Steele.

I can't believe how unsympathetic they make those people. I get it, most people hate the IRS, so it's the default bad guy in this scenario, but taxes pay for the things we as a society need; people - and corporations, ahem - not paying their share matters. How about advertising that someone unknowingly failed to pay taxes because of someone else's mistake or deceit, and now X company has helped them work out a payment plan they can afford? Instead, it's just a bunch of braggarts grinning about X company helping them get away with paying a pittance of what they owe.

I wish some of the Tide commercials with Dad doing the laundry would show a wife in the background, indicating he's doing the laundry simply because it's as much his responsibility as it is hers, not that he's doing it by default because there is no little woman there to do her job.

Van never having to take responsibility for what he did do - instead focusing on the line he didn't cross - is unfortunately pretty typical of films of that genre and vintage. There are so many classic films I love in spite of the ending, and this is one. Although I find this one of the lesser offenders on that score.

Here is the transcript of the entire episode.

I'm partial to Cry, Cry Again myself, but the young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk comes in a close second. "So you cry, and then when you see the dancing, you cry again."

She'll always be Margi from the X-Files episode Syzygy to me, but I just looked her up on IMDb and, yes, she was in that episode of Mad Men. And it's not as if she didn't have four years of practice at going to school with affluent kids. The wasted opportunity that was Brenda's freshman year storyline is one of the many reasons I stopped watching the show. Brenda was pretty much the only character I still liked by that point, so there was this fundamental disconnect in watching the show because while I was enjoying her all the characters were dumping on her. Including her parents, whose first reaction to their upset daughter dropping out of college and running home is to worry about how Brandon will react to having to give up his "bachelor suite."

That was written by Susan Baskin, my favorite of the show's writers, and she said on the DVD commentary that her dentist brother or brother-in-law mentioned tic douloureux and she just knew that had to be part of an episode. I love that episode, too, for so many reasons, not the least of which is MaryEdith Burrell as Frances.

Yes, of course; I had Bad Blood on the brain from gushing about it, I guess.

Okay, between the Clue pick-up and the Remington Steele username, I'm in love. :-)

If PMP had, like Small Potatoes, simply acknowledged the rapist character was a rapist, I'd likely have an entirely different outlook. I'd still find it rather silly, and part of the trend of Chris Carter's gimmick episodes being all hat and no horse (e.g. Triangle), but I wouldn't be profoundly offended by it. That he instead puts forth this "they got babies out of it, so it's all wonderful" crap ... I hated it so much -- flames, flames on the side of my face. [/Clue]

This was the first season I didn't love, and even now when I do a rewatch I tend to stop after Detour and think, "Do I really want to get into the rest of this?" While Gillian is perfection in them, and I like Kresge - and totally invent side trips to San Diego in my mind for Scully to later get her groove on with him, such as when she goes to the field office during Arcardia - I have a hard time with Christmas Carol/Emily. And I loathe Post-Modern Prometheus with the heat of a nova, although I do love to watch that dance just by itself. I think Kitsunegari is a terrible follow-up to a wonderful episode, and Schizogeny is just sort of there. But when things pick back up, hoo boy, do they pick back up, because I love Chinga, Kill Switch and, especially, Bad Blood. (Like Gillian, I consider that my favorite episode of the series. Unlike Gillian, I can quote the entire thing verbatim.) But then we're back to episodes I either don't care much about or actively dislike (Travelers, I am looking at you). So this season ranks pretty high on my list, because of how heavily weighted Bad Blood, Kill Switch, Detour and Redux II are, but if you took those out of the equation it would be a fairly low-ranked season for me. It's when I really lost interest in the mytharc, and although I still watched faithfully every week, I stopped being so excited about it.

On my "Mulder, It's Me" mix tape that I made in, I think, season four, that dialogue - "I came here to tell you that if he dies because of what you've done, four days from now nobody will stop me from being the one that'll throw the switch and gas you out of this life for good, you son of a bitch!" - led into Luscious Jackson's Daughters of the Kaos. To this day, when I hear that song, I immediately get my Scully on and say that line ... and usually not just in my head. I find Roland okay, but think its suffers from TV's usual patronization of those with developmental disabilities. I also find it irrationally annoying they have Scully in a blouse she would never otherwise wear - and we all know season one Scully wasn't too picky about her clothing, so that's saying something - just so Roland can have something to count.

I like that they make out in front of Skinner in the finale. That's all I've got.

This is the season I quit watching, although I don't remember specifically when I threw in the towel altogether. I had long since been over the mytharc, David Duchovny had been irritating me in just about every interview for a while, the characters seemed to be sleeping together - and certainly should have been by this point - but it wasn't addressed, the resolution of the Samantha storyline was stupid ... some good stand-alones just weren't worth the investment of my time and energy anymore; it was okay, but it wasn't the show I had once loved. I think I eventually saw almost all the episodes from this season, and I'm more charitable towards it this far removed from the original experience, but I still almost never pull out this DVD when I get in an XF mood. When I do, it's pretty much only to watch The Goldberg Variation or Je Souhaite. (And it is decidedly not to watch First Person Shooter or Fight Club.)

Season three really fires on all cylinders for me. I really enjoy most of the MOTW episodes, and am also actually interested in the mytharc at this point in the series. I usually skip over The Blessing Way and go right from Anasazi to Paper Clip (and could not love the three-way standoff in Mulder's apartment more than I do) and I don't like The Oubliette, Teso dos Bichos, Avatar or Hell Money, but otherwise I really dig this season's episodes. I even like The List for reasons I cannot explain. "I only get five?" I recently babbled on at TWoP about my foray into Mrs. Scully's head when she gets the call her daughter has been shot, arrives at the hospital to find it's the other daughter, etc. as it's such a surreal space. And poor Scully. That shot of her alone in the empty room packs a punch. As I posted during said babbling, if Melissa had been killed in a car accident or something, Scully would be handling the mess of paperwork they have to complete before leaving the hospital, telling her mom "You call Bill, I'll call Charlie" and otherwise going through things with Mrs. Scully. Instead, Scully is alone in that room with her grief and guilt, and Mrs. Scully is alone in some administrator's office trying to process the fact one daughter is dead because of the other.

Was it FedEx or another delivery company that had the commercial many years ago with a French driver sitting in a cafe sneering about the "bourgeois businessmen waiting for their packages"? Whatever company it was for, I loved it. In my family, we will still adopt a bad French accent and use that line at random times.

The scene in the pilot where she's sitting on the bed before Mulder asks if she wants to go for a run with him -- she looks about 16 years old to me. I generally love Scully as a scientist, and did from the pilot. "The girl obviously died of something. If it was natural causes it's plausible that there was something missed in the post-mortem. If she was murdered it's plausible there was a sloppy investigation. What I find fantastic is that there are any answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look."