Cranberry

Elliott was the only character in this episode with any sense at all. It's nice to see a Glee character who refuses to get involved in the stupid drama. Hearing him call Rachel out on how "best gay" makes him sound like a pet was great, too. She has been insufferable for at least two seasons now.

I'm sorry, I forgot to take my shipper goggles off before I watched that episode, and all I got out of it was that Simmons can't imagine her life without Skye. ...Oh, right, the G.H. thing was very interesting! What are we thinking, Mutant Growth Hormone, but with the "Mutant" dropped because they don't have the rights to it? Or are there creatures like that poor unfortunate blue fellow in the comics? My Marvel Universe knowledge isn't as vast as it could be.

I just realized that NONAC is Canon backwards. That took me far longer than it should have.

Well, Rachel and Santana were both acting like idiots, but at least they were in character, I guess! It was nice to see more of New York and less of McKinley. And... that's all I got. I don't even care enough to hate-watch this show anymore; at this point I'm just watching because I know the end is coming.

I think teenaged me would have enjoyed Pretty Little Liars. The show's got its problems, but unlike the teen shows I was watching at the time, it doesn't pit the girls against each other in contrived love triangle situations. It's one of the best shows about female friendship on the air. Plus it doesn't treat its lesbian (main!) character as a token; her relationships are given the same respect as anyone else's on the show (actually, her current relationship is one of the more stable ones). Teenaged me also would have enjoyed the first season of Glee, maybe the second. But in this alternate reality, the show would have been cancelled after that, because bleh.

I have to admit, I laughed at every single "cock" joke.

I obtained the first series of Look Around You after listening to those clips -- I grew up in the 80s (in Canada) and am familiar with those science videos, so I suspect I'll enjoy it very much.

Claire was the only character I even slightly cared about by the time I quit the show, and I can't see them getting Hayden Panettiere back. I'm also content watching her steal the show over on Nashville. I have no interest in this at all (well, besides an interest in seeing just how bad it is, I suppose).

Also, something definitely went down between Spencer and Alison the night Ali "died," right? We now know that Spencer had a drug problem two years ago (so the timeline works), and that when she takes these pills, she loses time/sleepwalks. She was outside the barn that night while the rest of the girls were sleeping. Her mother said she couldn't bail Spencer out again. Yeah, something definitely happened.

I started watching this movie at 2:30am not realizing it was three hours long! I enjoyed it, though. I'm not always big on narration, but I liked how Jordan talked to (and in some cases insulted the intelligence of) the audience, and I liked the scenes where we got to hear people's thoughts. I think my favorite scene was the one involving effect-delayed quaaludes and the poor Lamborghini. No clue why the Family Matters!

I found it scarily plausible. I liked how the movie didn't come right out and say much about what was going on in the world at large, but you could see that more and more people were becoming attached to their OSes and that all kinds of related services were springing up. You could see that the OSes were rapidly changing, forming groups, resurrecting the great minds, bonding more with each other as the human mind started looking too limited to them. I expected it to go to a much darker place in the end, although I was satisfied with the ending. And I'll never complain about two hours of listening to Scarlett Johansson talk.

I don't think the show is in any danger of cancellation. It's not the major hit the network expected it to be (I really think the biggest issue with this show is that people had too-high expectations for it in the wake of The Avengers), but it's doing fine in the ratings. I know this isn't really a Joss Whedon show, but it fits the mold in many ways, and Whedon shows usually start off a bit slow. I've actually been enjoying it all along, but I'm glad they're ramping up the action and tension now. I hope they play with story structure more in the back nine and also mix and match the characters more -- it was fun seeing Simmons and Coulson working together this episode, and Skye and Fitz too (and I enjoyed the Skye/Simmons and Ward/Fitz shenanigans in "The Hub"). I think this show works best as an ensemble -- unlike a lot of viewers, I actually like Skye and want to know more about her origins, but (like most people) I found Coulson's "Tahiti" storyline to be too drawn-out and anticlimactic. My favorite episodes so far have been this one, "The Hub," and "F.Z.Z.T." (because Simmons is my favorite forever) -- episodes that haven't had much to do with Coulson and Skye's mysteries.

I liked the structure of this ep, and it was fast-paced and exciting. The first half was funnier than I expected -- I enjoyed Fitz pretending to be American by asking about restaurants with big portions for affordable prices, Simmons and her overly detailed cover story/overacting, Ward and Coulson trying and failing to use the holotable, and May's usual deadpan snark. Always enjoy seeing May kick some ass, of course -- and Simmons also proved her bravery once again by basically throwing herself on a grenade to save Fitz and Skye. I was also moved by her breakdown at the end of the episode and by Fitz silently comforting her. And now we have to wait until March 4 for the next one. Sigh.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. I hope we find out how much they get, if they get anything. I'm interested!

Yeah, I don't know what to think. There are a decent number of similarities to the pilot, but both the New Girl pilot and Square One contain a lot of the usual sitcom tropes (I mean, doesn't every TV girl who suffers a bad breakup binge on junk food?) or do certain things as a matter of plot convenience (both groups of guys had a roommate move out and needed a replacement asap). Only a couple of things stand out to me as a little too coincidental (the roommates dancing to "You Shook Me All Night Long" and the ex being named Spencer in both shows), and even those things are within the realm of coincidence. As someone over on TWoP pointed out, a lot of the similarities only sound so similar because of how they're worded in the complaint. For example, although Cece and C.C.'s names look similar on paper, the Square One character is named Cat Cook and isn't referred to as C.C., and the characters themselves are nothing alike. And there's stuff like, "Jess has her first sex-only relationship with a guy named Sam in the second season" vs. "Greer has her first sex-only relationship with a guy named Dusty, a philosophical pro-race car driver." Sam was a pediatrician and was written as affable and goofy, not philosophical. And, "There is a 'mean birdcat' that makes an appearance in the 1st season, living in the loft. Schmidt is afraid of it" vs. "An ornery cat that an old roommate left in the bachelor pad has a bit role." That's reaching, and there are a lot of examples of that (page 77 here). I also don't see how they could block filming now, three years in. Even if they find that the pilot was eerily similar, The New Girl pilot kind of sucked and the writers course-corrected around episode five, "Cece Crashes." At this point, the characters aren't similar to the Square One characters at all. Financial compensation, sure. Blocking filming? Reaching.

I was going to call the topic , but I figured it'd be best to avoid spoilers in topic titles. Skye seems to be the most polarizing character on the show, and I'm worried that the recent revelations about her past are only going to make that worse. Personally, I come down more on the pro-Skye side of things, although I think the writers are going to have to be very careful about what they do with her in the future.

Ward seems to be written as "exasperated big brother" now rather than as a porcupine/"little poop with knives sticking out of it." I think it works better.

Even though she can ride into a heavily-secured compound on a horse and eliminate more than 100 heavily-armed mercenaries with only an M249 in each hand. That story's not exaggerated at all, right?

Getting the character threads started by splitting up FitzSimmons, muahahaha. (I actually love their relationship, and the portmanteau doesn't bother me, but I'm hoping that the show will continue to differentiate them and pair them with other people in future episodes. I really enjoyed Simmons and Skye's "bad-girl shenanigans" in "The Hub.") And look what just popped up: New article from Zap2it

Every season I swear I won't get caught up in the theorizing again, and every season I end up right back at it. My ultimate (and half-serious) theory is still that Ezra Fitz is tormenting the girls in order to get material for the next great American novel (which will probably actually end up being a trashy book series much like the one this show is based on). I will continue to subscribe to this theory even after the show "redeems" his character and finally ends.