Sandman

And don't forget said menace contributing to origin stories: I presume Ms. Mooney's beatdown of Cobblepot is the source of the Penguin walk. I thought Pinkett-Smith pretty effective, too. And not necessarily more campy or genre-y than everyone else (except McKenzie, who's playing it straight down the middle).

Maybe it's the reference to her "almost extrasensory" level of perception, but I'm getting a (late-70s) Saturn Girl vibe from Ms. Mooney's getup in the image Kromm posted. I'm kind of meh on Pinkett-Smith, honestly. We'll see.

I like McKenzie, and he's most of the reason I'll be watching this show, but the word "iconic" is going to get thrown around a lot, isn't it? ::sigh::

Hahaha!

I know what you mean. I find Michael Scott unbearable and I couldn't watch The Office. Just could not make myself watch it. I found Carrell kind of charming in Crazy Stupid Love, though; and I have a secret love for Get Smart. (I guess I'll see myself out now.)

"Hey, so we got this big ratings uptick at the end the of season? Does anyone know what that would --" "Goran!" (or "Half-Nekkid Halle!" depending on, you know, the focus group results...)

I hated The Descendants, and I thought Woodley gave maybe the only good performance in that thing. I like Clooney well enough, but found his performance mannered and self-indulgent. The bigger problem was the script, since I don't believe that actual human beings behave like the characters in the movie. Speaking of mannered and self-indulgent, I don't know if I care enough about Nicolas Cage to muster up hatred for him, but I think he's lazy and self-regarding as an actor. Leaving Las Vegas is another movie I think completely undeserving of the praise heaped on it. Cage doing his thing in it didn't help.

Well, there's always "And then Molly the Pretend Astronaut woke up." Unfortunately.

The fact that I misread HalcyonDays' description upthread of O-Ring Odin as Julie's "bedbug" encapsulates my feelings on the character neatly.

So the "Katie" that was getting busy with Astronaut Victor (fine... "Sean") was really the offspring of Dead!Katie and the Killer Space Fungus? I didn't notice that Katie's corpse had the telltale "I had a alien burst out of me" trauma, but then I couldn't make myself look very closely. Do you all realize what this means?! The French have a reputation for rudeness on a galactic scale ... well, at least the writers think they do. Was E-than's smashing the window part of Molly's delusion? I thought we might see E-than defending his mom as part of the E-than vs. "My BABY!" slapfight this episode, too. Dammit. Killer sibling rivalry would have been some awesome cheese. And how the interdimensional hell did the aliens infect "John Woods" anyway? Once again, "John Woods" is written in a frustrating way: When he puts his work first, Molly needs to understand how important his work is, and why can't she treat E-than like a Real Boy ? When she tries to make choices than don't involve him, she's too hung up on her past, and needs to put him first. For a beige-y-first century scientist, his ideas are fairly nineteenth century. Poor Austronaut Victor.

Is it just me, or is "It's okay" becoming the creepiest catchphrase ever?

DeLurker, you forgot the solar flare.

I find it weirdly convenient that Miss Gummer forgets how territorial and protective she is about E-than (around "John Woods" and especially Molly) whenever O-Ring Odin is around. She barely knows him! He's more or less her stainless steel-lined booty call, and she lets him hang out alone with her precious even though he's putting out creeper vibes that Incomplete Lucy could pick up on. It's also convenient that Charlie's never around (I don't think) whenever O-Ring Odin turns up to sniff around the lab. Aaiiee, Rhetorica, feel better soon!

::raises hand sheepishly:: I kinda did, actually; but only because I remember Agent Ron Butterfield fondly, I swear! (Also: "dance remix of the previouslies"? -- ha!) Right? I am glad that Molly is finally beginning to recognize, sometimes, that "her baby" may not be exactly as illustrated. Every time she was holding forth about how her baby needs its mother, I kept thinking, "Yeah, sure -- and if you're really lucky, that means he'll eat you last." This show owes me the sparky, arc-lit offspring vs. childbot to-the-pain! slapfight that I've been speculating about since the first episode.

I feel certain space station guy's role wil be greater by the end. Enver Gjokaj is too good to waste in an extended cameo. Whether Astronaut Victor's having a snooty space-French hallucination or Katie's really alive, I don't know yet -- but I don't trust the Haitian, either. (Sorry, Jimmy Jean-Louis!) Some part of me wants to say that it's really Katie, and she somehow survived contact with the aliens. (Knowing how this show loves to pile on the sci-fi plot elements, probably because Katie has some until-now unrevealed psychic ability. ... What? It's pretty much the only trope we're missing.)

Oh; I thought there were two including last night's. Still, no sign of Revenge Sensei's history or motives or family until now?

I don't remember seeing any flashbacks to Mrs. Yasumoto before this week; kind of sloppy to introduce that kind of new motif in the next-to-last episode.

Well, considering the show has mind-controlling aliens, fast-growing fetal hybrids, toxic immortality meteor juice, robot children AND invasion conspiracies, not to mention icky space body horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the show is cribbing from every other sci-fi movie ever.

This episode had the highest level of WTF?s per minute of the series so far. So that was Not-So Evil Chandler Bing on the floor with his throat cut? I thought Molly spoke to him in the hallway immediately before she opened the door to the next room? I was just starting to like Kern. So Revenge Sensei is over a hundred forty years old, and he thinks he's made his peace with death? He seems ... vain. Also, O-Ring Odin still strikes me as more pervy than revolutionary. I'm assuming that he wants to blow up E-than and Miss Gummer for their presumption in tampering with the natural order, or some such blinding stupidity. Also, nice line from Femi Dodd, Robot-Hater, that "people" find chess complicated. I assume also that Miss Gummer and E-than will take her out when they access E-than's Badass Protocols. Don't die, Astronaut Victor!

We've seen flashbacks to Marcus -- and his death, now -- that suggest to me that Molly has not finished grieving for him, and they've come up at points when she's in a physical crisis, such as after knocking herself unconscious in her round of elevator-parkour. The fact that the alien's mind control ties directly into times of specific physical as well as emotional trauma makes her experience of that mind control different from Sparks' -- except I'm tempted to think that there are few apples missing from Poor Deluded Evil Doctor Agent Ron Butterfield's bushel basket anyhow. (Er. Thus the name.) Also: E-than, shapeshifter? Bwah! Wish I'd come up with than one myself. (Sidebar: is it not well known any longer that Julia Louis-Dreyfus's line from Seinfeld about the dingo is based on A Cry In The Dark, which itself is based on lived events? Huh. I'm old.) You know what? If Crazy-Ass Dr. Yeoman tells me we're pausing the hostage-taking for a pie stop, I'm not giving him a lot of lip about it, I don't think. Revenge Sensei sure has a lot of nutbars on the payroll. HR costs for Yasumoto Corp. must be through the roof.

I watch this show so rarely that perhaps my opinion ought to be taken with a bag of rocksalt, but I thought the African Jazz number had a pleasing athleticism, in spite of the weird cultural-appropriation collywobbles it gave me. The "Fernando's Hideaway" number charmed me -- a poster upthread mentioned Zach's fluidity (in another context) and I think that's a good description. The stairs were -- well, they were there, but having missed the routine on the broadcast, I heard the judges' comments about the difficulty of dancing on stairs and I think I was expecting something more extreme. I thought the dance to "Wind Beneath My Wings" was lovely -- physical grace and emotional meaning balancing each other.

Oh, my god, the offspring is a Landshark! ::knocking:: "Who is it?" "Bird-o-Gram!" "I'm not expecting any --- aaaAUUGGHH!"

Did the show really present Buffy's desire for a relatively normal life as something achievable? I'm not sure. "Doublemeat Palace" (sort of randomly) I would count as an episode against that theory. I think a lot of what happens in Season Six and after is actually about how destructive the tension becomes between the normal girl Buffy wants so much to be and the Slayer she must be regardless. In my more charitable moments I think the show wants to be about the gulf between a young woman's aspirations and society's expectations of her. But then I think, Nah... because Noxon.

Cold Mountain is the one performance of Law's I actually like -- he's finally behaving like a recognizable human being. But I think Dickie Greenleaf was the least interesting thing about The Talented Mister Ripley, and it's a lazy performance from Law, if you ask me, Oscar nomination or no. But I'll move to the Stars You Can't Stand thread if I have more to say about it.

The vision of grown-up Katie seems (in the scene in the incubation chamber) to be less effective at getting Poor Deluded Evil Doctor Agent Ron Butterfield to do what the alien wants, and so she's been discarded in favour of the younger version, I'd say. I agree; there has been no indication up till now that Ethan is physically more powerful than a human boy of his age and size. Mind you, I would have said that he wasn't any sort of computational whiz before we saw him break the code on the Seraphim's logs. I think the writers just pull out Ethan's "... because, robot!" powers as the plot requires. Or perhaps a flaw of being human? Odin's interactions with Ethan read like Chapter One of the Stranger Danger Manual. (I think naming the character "Odin" is somewhat clever, or perhaps accidentally brilliant, since the rune associated with one aspect of Odin in Old Norse is used as a symbol by some white supremacist groups. I can see Odin O-Ring as a particularly stunted "humanity first" kind of Luddite. The fact that he doesn't see how technology has actually improved the quality of his own life seems fairly true-to-lowlife to me. I would watch the hell out of Ethan and Sparky: Adventures Ten Minutes Into the Beige Future, as well as Kryger & Kern, especially if Actual Evil Chandler Bing with his even more untrustworthy hair had a guest starring role! Damn. Also, good call by the poster upthread who noted the similarity between Charlie and Lincoln Lee -- not something I picked up on at first, but it's right there. And quite frankly, I'm not convinced that "John Woods" doesn't have the IQ of a rutabaga. The show keeps telling us the man's a genius, but showing us how he actually behaves. Oops.