“Ted”

I have one major qualm with “Ted,” a generally entertaining MotW episode with some solid emotional underpinnings. That qualm is this: Even though Buffy’s innate sense of danger sets off alarm bells when her mom starts dating the too-good-to-be-true Ted (played by John Ritter), she’s still way-too-hostile way-too-quick to the idea of her mother having a romantic life. I’m sure Buffy loves her daddy, and still dreams of getting the family back together, but while she herself realizes that she’s being childish, that doesn’t make her knee-jerk negativity any more credible.

On the other hand, it does lead to lines like Buffy’s mediation on vampires: “People are perfectly happy, then vampires come along, making mini-pizzas.” There’s an awful lot of cute in “Ted,” whether it be Buffy forlornly calling, “Here, vampires…” when looking for some ass to kick, or Xander and Willow debating whether The Captain or Tennille had the real power in that duo. Not to mention the one laugh-out-loud moment in the episode, when Jenny tries to come to the rescue of a vampire-fighting Giles but instead shoots him in the back with a crossbow, leading Giles to quip that he was saved by his “layers of tweed.”

The Jenny-shooting-Giles moment is fairly typical of an episode with some unexpected twists and turns. While I guessed that Ted might be a robot (if only because of someone’s offhand The Stepford Wives joke), or an autocrat (because of the occasional nods to one of my favorite horror movies, The Stepfather), I sure as hell didn’t expect Ted to hit Buffy and then for Buffy to accidentally “kill” him, with only half the episode done.

Buffy then decides she can’t excuse her involuntary manslaughter—“I’m the slayer…I had no right”—which means much of the back half of this episode has to do with her guilt, leaving little time for revelations or explanations regarding Ted’s robot-itude. His backstory is left for a closing walk-and-talk, and I wish he’d gotten a little more play. (Question: Can Ted, you know, “do it?”) Or maybe it’s just that I miss John Ritter. After all, nobody beats The Machine.

There’s also a lot of business in this episode regarding something Angel says at on point: “Loneliness is about the scariest thing there is.” That’s what has Giles still fumbling to reconcile with Jenny, and what has Xander and Cordelia still getting their smooch on in any dark corner they can find. In Xander’s case, his attraction to Cordelia can be partly explained by a comment he makes about Ted’s opiate cookies: “I sometimes like things that are not good for me.” As for Cordelia? I’m still figuring that one out. I’ll say this though: I’m starting to think Cordelia leads a more interesting double life than any other character on the show.

“Bad Eggs”

Much as “The Dark Age” was practically a post-script to “Lie To Me,” so “Bad Eggs” offers a lighter, more action-packed take on the themes of “Ted”—so light and action-packed in fact that at a certain point it just lets the themes go and becomes a fairly conventional horrorshow. (And a pretty good one, in my opinion.)

Continuing on with the question of what makes a good parent, “Bad Eggs” offers the spectacle of Buffy, Willow, Xander and Cordelia toting around eggs, in order to learn about adult responsibility. Trouble is, these eggs ain’t full of yolk; there be mind-controlling beasties inside. (Actually, I think any parent will tell you that this is a fairly accurate description of pregnancy and child-rearing.) Soon the egg-slaves are working hard for a mother Bezoar, while Buffy is simultaneously fighting off the Gorch brothers, two cowboy vampires who rode into town looking for trouble.

I don’t have a heck of a lot to say about “Bad Eggs,” because it’s not an episode begging for intense analysis. It’s a very tightly plotted 45 minutes, full of “Oh no, look out for that tentacle creeping out of Cordelia’s teddy bear backpack!”-type thrills and “Isn’t it just like Xander to hard-boil his egg?”-type humor. In a way, the primary function of “Bad Eggs” is to ease away from the themes of parenting and guardianship and ease into the major theme that the next two episodes are so smartly going to explore. Or put more plainly: This is an episode that introduces the idea of sex. Not in a giggly, Xander-makes-a-joke-about-being-horny way, but in a gee-these-kids-are-spending-an-awful-lot-of-time-together way. And while most normal teenage couples are relatively cautious when it comes to jumping into bed together, after a long stretch of boyfriend/girlfriend status, a certain level of comfort is established, and, well…these kids are only human, you know. (Well, most of them are.)

So in the middle of the action, there’s Xander, commenting to Cordelia that “there could be a closet” they could explore. And then there are the eggs, meant to remind us that sex has consequences. Not necessarily the consequences of creating new life—but the consequences of destroying your old one. As we’re about to see.

“Surprise”/“Innocence”

And then something fell.

The two-part, two-night event that the whole of Season Two has been building up to definitely lived up to the hype, and if I was too short in my reviews of “Ted” and “Bad Eggs,” it’s partly because I wanted to hustle on down here and talk about an intense pair of episodes with a lot going on: Drusilla and Spike reassemble an unstoppable beast known as The Judge; Willow and Oz have their first date at Buffy’s surprise birthday party; Xander and Cordelia’s secret romance gets revealed; Jenny Calendar confesses that she’s a member of a gypsy clan and has been sent to Sunnydale to keep an eye on Angel, and to make sure that her people’s curse still holds; and oh yeah, Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, which causes Angel to lose his remaining humanity and turn evil.

Let’s start with the sex. It’s a longstanding tradition in horror fiction that sex equals death, and while Joss Whedon and company have tried to steer away from that kind of horror convention in the past, here they embrace it in an unusual way. Not only does the teenage girl have sex with her boyfriend and then witness him turn into a murderous beast, but she’s also hounded by one of the other women her boyfriend has seduced in the past: poor, deranged Drusilla. “Surprise” and “Innocence” really play up the rot and perversion of vampirism, implying that an initiation into the world of decadent pleasure rots the soul and isn’t the least bit lovely. (A word of praise here for Juliet Landau as Drusilla, oozing menace and madness.) It's bad enough to think about all the lovers your significant other has had before you, but it's worse when they hang around like a walking, talking cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, it’s a longstanding tradition in romance fiction that sex signals the end of mystery, and subsequently the beginning of the end of a relationship. “Will he still respect me in the morning?” is the recurring question of such anti-sex hand-wringing. I can’t imagine a moment more painful for a young woman that encountering the man you’ve lost your virginity to the next day and having him say—as Angel does to Buffy—that you really weren’t worth the trouble. Ouch. Mega-ouch.

The brilliance of this two-parter though is that the broken trust doesn’t end with Buffy and Angel. Giles feels almost as betrayed by Jenny, and when Buffy demands that she leave the room while they prepare for their assault on The Judge, Giles rather coolly snaps at Jenny to “get out.” And then there’s Willow, learning that her best friend (and secret crush) since elementary school has been sneakily snogging their sworn enemy. “Don’t you remember the ‘We Hate Cordelia’ Club?” she asks Xander. “Of which you are the treasurer?”

These two episodes were especially satisfying for Willow fans, starting with her reacting to Oz saying he’s thinking about asking her out by chirping, “I’m going to say yes, if that helps.” (Oz’s reply: “It does help. Creates a comfort zone.”) I also appreciated the way Willow understands that Buffy has had sex with Angel before anyone else catches the hints Buffy has dropped, and I loved the way Willow tries to wound Xander’s pride by noting, “Oz has a van.”

It’s also worth commenting on how funny that “you are the treasurer” line is. I don’t know why that’s funnier than “you are the president” or “you are the vice-president” would be, but it just is. And for all the tension and shock of “Surprise” and “Innocence,” the episodes are hardly punishing from start to finish. There are wisecracks galore—I like Buffy mentioning that in addition to dreaming about Drusilla killing Angel, “I dreamed that Giles and I opened an office supply warehouse in Vegas”—and some clever audience misdirection when it looks like Jenny is leading Buffy away from her surprise party but is actually driving her to it. And man, what a way to dispatch The Judge. “No weapon forged can stop me!” he bellows in a shopping mall, just before Buffy challenges him with a rocket launcher. (“What’s that do?” he asks before he explodes.)

Obviously, the repercussions of “Surprise” and “Innocence” are going to inform the rest of this season and my remaining blog posts, so there’s no reason to speculate on what all this means just yet. I’ll just that this 90-minute hunk of story all-but-perfectly realizes Buffy’s ambition to tie horror clichés to real-life teenage fears—in this case fears that intimacy will lead to disgrace and personal pain. “Did you have fun?” Joyce asks Buffy, referring to her birthday. “I got older,” Buffy mutters.

Indeed she did.

Overall thoughts:

As I mentioned way back in my first Buffy post, one of the reasons I’ve had trouble getting into the show in the past was that I couldn’t get my wife interested. Well, after watching Season One by myself, I’ve been forcing Donna to watch Season Two with me. This week, when we got to the end of “Innocence,” she asked, “Can we go ahead and watch the next episode?”

I think she’s hooked.

Stray observations:

-After a while, every non-school, non-home set on this show starts to look like The Bronze.

-I love that Ted’s office featured a couple of those big containers of snack mix and candy that you can find at any Office Depot. Or maybe I just love that grazing food qualifies as “office supplies” here in the states.

-Xander defies comedy tradition in “Ted” by not going along with the “we have that thing to go to” excuse.

-I’m sure this wasn’t on anyone’s mind at the time, but I couldn’t help being distracted by the fact that Buffy and Angel’s big showdown at the mall played out in front of multiple posters for the long-forgotten animated feature Quest For Camelot.

-Wait…wasn’t Buffy grounded for life at the end of “Bad Eggs?” Joyce seems to have forgotten all about that an episode later.

-How badass is it that when Angel chomps down on a smoker’s neck, he lifts his head up and exhales?

Top three lessons learned from this episode of Project Runway:

1. Models really, really like satin. Especially chocolate brown satin.

2. Natalie Portman likes droopy brown satin bow-tie details but does not like the "whole...asymmetrical...thing." (Take note, Zac Posen!)

3. It's really great using green fabrics. It's just really great. It feels so great to use them and whatnot.

That last lesson was the one most hammered home tonight, because, in case you missed the endless loop of contestant soundbites about it, this was the green episode judged by noted Vegan shoemaker and remarkably tiny person, Natalie Portman. (When she was standing next to Heidi on the runway, it was like a life-size brunette Skipper doll standing in the shadow of Barbie.)

I'm happy to report that this episode didn't feel as--what's the word?--deflated as the first one. It's episode two, and despite the unchallenged idiocy of many of the contestants (Jarell, I'm looking at you), as well as the plethora of plastic characters (Blayne & Suede should challenge each other to a calculated quirk deathmatch), things are already humming along. Even though the challenge was a bit of a recycled one (See the amazing wedding dress challenge from Season 1), having the models be the clients is a fun element that deserves to be recycled. Why? Models are crazy and often have no taste. In addition, the twist of having the models be responsible for purchasing the "green" fabric for their dream cocktail dresses was even more fun. Why? Again, models are crazy and often have no taste--and nothing is more entertaining than watching the designers submit to the whims of their crazy, taste-free clients.

In this challenge, that craziness and lack of taste manifested itself in one form: Satin. Most of the models chose organic satin in hideous hues--chocolate, champagne, only one girl had the restraint to choose black--to bring back to the workroom. Why are models so drawn to satin? Are they unaware of its bridesmaid connotations? Do they wish that life was just one big prom? Are they mezmerized by the sheen? Clearly, this isn't just a coincidence. Someone should do a study. And chocolate brown satin? Literally any color would be more attractive: Purple, Aqua, Hospital Green.

Still, despite the aesthetic stab in the eye that is brown satin, some of the most hideous dresses to come down the runway didn't contain any of that inherently awful fabric. Really, it was a parade of ugly. From Keith's droopy, window-treatment-via- Forever-21-club-wear-section halter, to Daniel's black satin dress with marsupial pocket placement, to Stella's one-shoulder, Sharon-Tate-gone-stripper bridesmaid look. Clearly, models should pick the fabric for all of the future challenges. Never has there been so much hideousness in one place.

Of course, the models can't be blamed for poor design and/or awful fit. No, that blame rests at the feet of a few of this crop of designers who were obviously cast for reasons other than design ability. Case in point: Jerell. The mere existence of that blue peacock-feather and lace mini cocktail dress is an insult to the word and the concept of "dress." So spectacularly wrong. And it didn't even fit his model: the thing was so twisted over to one side it made her look like she had a broken hip. Then there was Emily's cocktail-dress-as-swimsuit-cover-up. I say this as someone whose sewing ability ends with hemming and mending, but I could make that dress, and it definitely wouldn't take me 12 hours to do it. The braiding looked like the most difficult part, which means that any girl out of 3rd grade could probably make it too.

But Emily and Jerell somehow escaped being in the bottom three. (I blame Natalie Portman, but then again the judges could have all been too blinded by the brown satin to see properly.) Not that Wesley's crinkled brown satin shift and Leanne's overdone brown satin nightmare didn't deserve to be in the bottom--they did, and Wesley's was certainly the worst of the bunch. But Korto's inside-out, winged dress was out-uglied by several others. Including, in my mind, Suede's bleeding mummy ballerina dress. Suede gets points for Suede's courage in the face of the satin Suede was given, though. And Natalie Portman said she would wear it, oblivious to the fact that that dress would eat her alive. So, naturally, Suede won! Suede is so excited for Suede and Suede's mom! Let's all go to bluefly.com right now and reserve our very own bleeding mummy ballerina dresses. Everyone has a costume/cocktail party coming up, right?

Grade: A-

Stray Observations:

--Keith owns a bandanna and a white tank top and tats, everyone. He wanted you to know that.

--Stella's accent is so thick I thought her model's name was "Candle," until I saw it spelled out on the bottom of the screen as "Kendall."

--Speaking of Stella, her leather fixation seems not only authentic, but hilarious and kind of charming--which is why Blayne was making fun of her. He's obviously envious. It must be hard to see someone who can be a colorful character so naturally when you're trying so hard to make "licious" happen.

--Does anyone watch "After The Sew"? If so: What is it? Why is it?

--Re: Blayne's use of the term "Darthlicious" to describe Heidi. That doesn't make any sense. I hope one of the other contestants finds the notebook where he wrote down all of his quips for the whole season and buries it in the fabric stacks at Mood.

--"You're certainly an enthusiastic bunch," Tim corralling the models at Mood.

You can’t be a film critic and not feel melancholy about the passing of Ebert & Roeper, yet another sad milestone in the imminent death of film criticism. It is truly the end of an era. Ebert’s always been a hero and an inspiration. At the risk of sounding disingenuous, it was an honor just be rejected as a guest critic on Ebert & Roeper. It really was. So I couldn’t help but feel a little wistful when today’s kick-ass episode of SCTV opened with “Gene Shalit’s Critic’s Special”, a variety-show spoof where the owner of the world’s greatest walrus mustache and caterpillariest eyebrows mugs and sings his way through songs and sketches alongside Dave Thomas’ Roger Ebert, Joe Flaherty’s Gene Siskel and Catherine O’Hara’s Rona Barrett.

It’s a pitch-perfect spoof of both tacky variety shows (that trickiest, most elusive of satirical targets) and soundbite-driven TV film criticism. Plus, it offers the beguiling spectacle of Siskel & Ebert doing the robot while dressed in sequined hats and what appears to be Mork from Ork’s discarded wardrobe. In honor of Siskel and Ebert and, oh what the heck, Roeper, here’s a clip:

Catherine O’Hara’s Lola Heatherton has always struck me as a bit of a one-note character, a screaming, pill-popping, catchphrase-spouting (“I love you so much it’s scary!”, “I wanna bear your children!”) spoof of ditzy nightclub/variety-show glamour girls like Joey Heatherton and Lola Falana. Ironically, if people today know Heatherton or Falana at all, it’s probably as inspirations for O’Hara’s desperately sad, outwardly ecstatic show-biz monstrosity.

But today’s episode, “Bouncin' Back To You”, invests a glib caricature with remarkable depth and sadness. Though there are plenty of other brilliant sketches, like “Jake Lamotta’s Raging Bull-B-Que” and “The Nobel”, the show really belongs to O’Hara’s signature character. O’Hara’s Heatherton’s downward spiral begins when she gives a drugged-up, deliciously manic-depressive interview with Dave Thomas' Bill Needle to promote her upcoming special, "Bouncin' Back To You", that veers from her usual psychotic cheerfulness to paranoid, druggy despair.

An alarmed Guy Caballero cancels Heatherton's special after she pops pills on live TV. “You cancelled my special like you cancelled our love!” Heatherton bleats, leading to a genius sight gag where Cabellero thinks back to the good times he once shared with Heatherton. We then flash back to Heatherton running deliriously towards Cabellero in an open field in a flashback filmed with a Vaseline-smeared lens that reduces Heatherton and Cabellero (rolling through a field in the wheelchair he uses “for respect”) to smudgy abstractions. “I had to cancel our love. It wasn’t doing well in the overnights” frets Cabellero.

Rumors of Heatherton’s downward spiral rock the studio to the point where Eugene Levy’s Earl Camembert goes on the air to deliver an amusingly insulting eulogy for Heatherton, only to be informed by Flaherty’s Floyd Robertson that Heatherton is sleeping in her dressing room. Heatherton eventually gets her special but is taken off the air when she goes off script and starts railing against Guy Cabellero and every other man that ever loved and left her. In a perfect capper to one of the more tight, compelling narrative arcs in SCTV history, the show concludes with a loving parody of Wizard Of Oz where it’s revealed that Heatherton had been dreaming in her dressing room all day, and Johnny Larue was there, and Earl Camembert and Guy Cabellero and Auntie Em and even little Toto. The Lola Heatherton story is funny but it’s also surprisingly poignant. She’s a good time girl whose good times always seem to end in loneliness and heartbreak.

I haven’t written enough about O’Hara, a phenomenally gifted, eclectic actress with the looks to convincingly play sexpots like the wife from Raging Bull (in this episode’s awesome Jake Lamotta parody) and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (in Polynenesiantown) and the guts to play creepy, desperate monsters like Lola Heartherton.

The episode’s “Movie Of The Week” is a genius parody of the crazed 1966 showbiz melodrama The Oscar (which I bought on Ebay after watching the sketch), another half-forgotten bit of pop-culture ephemera perhaps best known today for inspiring a great SCTV sketch. Fun fact: The Oscar was co-written by Mr. Harlan Ellison. The SCTV gang has enormous fun transferring the boozy, sordid shenanigans of Jaquelline Sussan-style inside-showbiz pulp to the rarified world of medicine.

All that plus The Tubes visiting Gil Fisher, the Fishing Musician and a fake coffee ad featuring Rick Moranis’ rage-filled John McEnroe. I loved this performance so much it’s scary! Since I’m doling out long-overdue props I’d also like to praise SCTV’s make-up and costume department. They did a fantastic job transforming a handful of actors into a dazzling array of celebrities and comical characters week in and week out. Huzzah, sayeth I, huzzah.

Today’s episode worked on a micro and a macro level, with great sketches, a strong overarching plot and lots of wonderful character moments. I’ve only got one more episode left to cover this season, then I’ll probably be moving on to season three of Saturday Night Live. Here’s my question for you, dear reader: should I return to cover future installments of SCTV for TV Club after I write up SNL’s third season? Man, am I going to miss this show.

Grade: A

Stray Observations—

—Flaherty doesn’t really nail Siskel’s very distinctive, almost hypnotic delivery but I like his performance all the same

—The make-up is especially on point in the Raging Bull-B-Que sketch, where Candy, Moranis and O’Hara very convincingly look like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty

—How perfect is Levy as Gene Shalit?

Let's subtitle this week: "A Study In Contrasts." Because the whims of the two-at-a-time schedule have thrown up a draggy, dreggy episode and a solid near-classic for our consideration, we can put them side by side and see what separates the winners from the losers.

Plotlines

"Friends": The building security guards won't let Bill upstairs without his ID; the temp hired to help Beth organize the files is her old nemesis Sandy, who imitates everything Beth does.

"Bill's Autobiography": Bill has been approached by a publisher to write his autobiography, but now realizes his life is completely uninteresting. However, when the rest of the staff finds out about the project, he has to pretend it's going swimmingly.

Analysis: The two stories in "Friends" are Standard Sitcom Fare 101 -- or at least, that's true of Beth's Doppelgänger. Bill vs. Security Guards might be better termed Seinfeld 101. There's a distinct "can we do a whole episode while they wait for a table in a Chinese restaurant?" feel to Bill's antics in the lobby. By contrast, "Bill's Autobiography" has no B-story, and springs from Bill's braggadocio -- from character, in other words, instead of situation.

Guest stars

"Friends": Tone Lōc makes his first appearance in a recurring role as the building's security guard. Bebe Neuwirth is Sandy, the Beth disciple.

"Bill's Autobiography": None.

Analysis: It's not that Newsradio couldn't do great things with guest stars -- we've seen it before and we'll see it again. But Tone gets outplayed by Toby Huss as his sidekick, a familiar character actor whose low-rent Jeremy Davies thing is far more interesting than Tone's standard-issue heavy. And Bebe -- for the record, I'm a huge, huge fan -- is just misused here. In her heels she's so much taller than Beth and Dave that you'll notice she actually slumps in some of the scenes they have together. Her shiny purple micro-mini suit, all va-va-voom and Velma Kelly when she first enters, is just bizarre by the third act. Yes, it's fun to see her come on to Matthew when Beth drops the hint that she's interested. But she was tapped to guest star because of her familiarity to NBC viewers as Lilith on Cheers and Frasier (I can almost reconstruct the episode promos in my head: "And look who's on Newsradio -- it's Bebe Neuwirth from Frasier!" followed by cheers and wolf whistles), and while she's playing against that type, she's not fully immersed in her Broadway persona either. She's dressing the part, but isn't allowed to let go since she's supposed to be aiming at Bethesque ditz.

Ensemble work

"Friends": Small groups. Bill is away from the main cast for most of the episode, seeing them only in passing as they enter and exit the building. Beth interacts with Dave and Lisa, then with Sandy and Matthew, while the other characters stop by occasionally.

"Bill's Autobiography": Full-on. Bill's autobiography is revealed to the entire staff in the opening act, and he spends the rest of the episode playing the great writer for them, while confessing his desperation to Dave and Lisa in private.

Analysis: Here's where the relative strength of "Autobiography" becomes clear. As soon as I saw the staff gathered around the conference table after the cold open, I let out an audible sigh of relief. After the fragmented, dissipated energy of "Friends," just the sight of all the actors together was a confidence builder. And "Autobiography" builds on that promise relentlessly, having Bill switch his pretense on and off with increasing rapidity depending on who he's with. By the time he's standing next to Jimmy James' promotional idea -- a lifesize cutout of himself holding a book labeled "Title Coming Soon" -- the storyline is written all over his face: shallow bravado barely staving off naked fear of failure.

Maintaining Conflict

"Friends": Beth tries to tell Dave and Lisa that Sandy is imitating her, but they always arrive just too late to see it. Bill continues to argue with the security guards.

"Bill's Autobiography": Dave lets the staff in on the secret that Bill hasn't written anything, and everyone tries to build him up by telling him how interesting he is.

Analysis: The whole Snuffleupagus thing with Beth never quite works -- it's half-hearted at best, since by act 3 everyone sees the imitation and Beth's claims are vindicated. And that's the problem with "Friends": it dashes through several iterations of "what makes this situation funny?" without committing to any of them. But "Autobiography" builds on its premise organically, yet surprisingly. Nothing seems like it's been purchased off the sitcom shelf, even though every particular piece of the puzzle has a classic pedigree. It's fleet and twisty, but the turns in the road are taking us somewhere, not just marking time.

Resolution

"Friends": Bill never gets in, after he foolishly tears up his ID thinking it's expired. Sandy confesses her parasitism to Beth.

"Bill's Autobiography": Dave and Bill stage a scene where Dave refuses to sign the waiver allowing Bill to write, even though Bill's broken through his block.

Analysis: The end of the Beth's Doppelgänger storyline is distractingly flat. After a lifetime of following in Beth's footsteps, Sandy suddenly admits that she has no personality of her own, under what seems like very little pressure (except for the meta-pressure of ending the episode). And again, maybe it's just my sensitivity from several years of office work myself, but I feel too sorry for Bill in the lobby. Rank injustice isn't very funny for me, at least not in this unadorned, hey-that's-the-whole-gag! guise. Maybe that's why I responded to "Autobiography" so strongly -- the episode has compassion for Bill in his plight, even as we enjoy seeing him hoist on his own petard. We don't want him to be humiliated, and we're happy that he is able to resume his place in the office without being exposed as a fraud. And we're even happier that someone else (Lisa) is in on the scheme, layers upon layers of little kindnesses through playacting and mute witness.

Grade: "Friends," C+; "Bill's Autobiography," A-

Stray observations:

- Saving Grace #1: Jimmy's Pal Shredder provides some of the only real Newsradio-style comedy in "Friends," from Beth gathering donuts in the office ("anything that would look cool in little pieces") to the delicious irony of the instruction booklet ("shredding the instructions for the shredder ... dare I?").

- Saving Grace #2: Vicki Lewis's performance, although hampered by being pushed out of Beth's element, nonetheless is a vintage example of her importance to the show's first seasons. "All hail King Man!" she yells with facetious anti-feminism when Dave posits that Sandy once stole her high school sweetheart, leading to Beth's consuming hatred. Followed immediately by: "But yes, she did steal my high school sweetheart." Another thing Sandy stole: "My eclectic, some say daring, sense of style." And of course, no geek could be unmoved by Beth's impression of Michigan J. Frog.

- Saving Grace #3: Matthew's tone-deaf response to being hit upon by Beth and Sandy. When Sandy praises his strong hands, he responds, "Oh, that speckle -- I used to have the Michael Jackson disease."

- People carefully repeating numbers wrong: one of those comic tropes that never fails to amuse me. Here it's Toby Huss trying to dial Bill's extension as Bill feeds him the number: "2441." "1 ... 1 ... 4 ... 4 ... 2 ..."

- The staff's rapid-fire brainstorming for the autobiography's title: "Give Me 12 Minutes, I'll Give You The World!" Followed of course by no one being able to reconstruct the ideas they ended up liking. (Bill's choice, of course: "I Suck: The Bill McNeal Story.") This is a bit that works as well as it does because the whole ensemble is playing along, and they're not worrying about timing it to leave space for audience laughter, but instead about timing it to make the bit build. Also see: "We're playing some kind of game where we can't look at Bill."

- I hope someone with better transcription skills than I will post the whole monologue where Bill pegs each staff member's type (Beth's "go-nowhere job," Joe as "a two-bit hood manqué").

- Matthew's perky answer to the question "Who killed himself?": "Bill!"

- Phil Hartman gives a monumental performance in "Autobiography." His desperation as he waits for inspiration that will never come, listening to the empty tape recorder ("this is the part where I get so depressed that I swerve into oncoming traffic"), is so deep that it verges on hardboiled.

- What is Dave's obsession with "A Horse With No Name"?

The problem with a jam-packed, game-changing episode like last week’s Weeds is that it’s tough to rebound from while maintaining momentum. It's like soda pop: After you shake it up, it needs to settle, but when it does, it usually falls flat.

This week’s episode didn’t fall entirely flat, but it did suffer a bit from having to explain how the expanded Botwin clan (now essentially comprising Celia and Doug as well) is going to operate now that Nancy is the Official Tunnel Guardian. After she discovers the tunnel under her store, she goes snooping—further evidence that Nancy has turned into a total danger junkie—and, predictably, gets caught. She’s later abducted by henchmen for a strange face-to-face with the handsome jefe, who turns out to be moonlighting from his job as Mayor Esteban Reyes (mayor of what, I’m not exactly sure). The stage is clearly set for a tryst between those two, unless I’m misreading Esteban’s offer of a spanking as punishment incorrectly, which I’m not. In the meantime though, it seems Nancy is indeed languishing in retail purgatory, along with a remarkably content Celia.

Of course, Celia can’t be content—what would her character do if she didn’t have any motivation to booze it up and make catty comments? Thankfully, such motivation arrives in the (increasingly slender) form of Isabelle demanding asylum from Dean, who’s about to run off with her to Detroit. The fact that Doug’s around to antagonize her certainly helps as well, as evidenced by that box of wine she was chugging from. Welcome back, Celia.

About Doug: He’s been the wild card these past few episodes, in the sense that he really has nothing tying him to the Botwin household other than Silas’ good bud and a pretty severe depression. After Nancy kicked him out last week, it was unclear exactly how he would continue to factor in. Well, thank God for zany schemes: Andy’s experience last week has prompted him to start a coyote business transporting illegals over the border, an endeavor he invites Doug in on. While I can’t imagine those two mustering the cunning necessary to evade the authorities on a regular basis, I look forward to the wackiness that is sure to ensue, if for no other reason than it means Doug will be around to mess with Celia.

As for the boys, Silas seems to have found himself a cougar in Lisa, the mother of Annoying Brad. While this unfortunately probably means even more screen time devoted to that little twerp, it also probably means more Shirtless Silas. A trade-off, I suppose. Shane, meanwhile, showed off his increasing business savvy by racking up over eight grand selling off Bubbee and Len’s stuff. Last week, during her dinner speech, Nancy praised Silas for stepping up and helping the family, and promised she’d be there more for Shane; but it seems like Shane is doing more to help the family these days than Silas, who hasn’t done much besides grow some weed and kill a few rogue bees, and Nancy still doesn’t seem to have spoken to either kid one-on-one since arriving in Ren Mar. I know things have been kind of hectic, what with the whole evading the law and mysterious tunnel things, but I’d like to see a little more emphasis placed on the Botwins’ home life. Earlier seasons of Weeds dealt more with little familial trials in addition to Nancy’s illicit activities, but that balance has shifted away from the family stuff during this season and last, sending Nancy, Andy, and Shane/Silas off on separate plot paths that rarely converge beyond a tossed-off comment or two.

When broken down into plot points, a lot did happen this episode, yet it felt stagnant compared to the forward momentum of last week. Everything that happened this week felt like it needed to happen in order to justify last week’s shake-ups: Nancy needed to discover Esteban to ensure that her retail stint isn’t as humdrum as it looks; Isabelle needed to show up in order for Celia to have something to do besides hang on Nancy and glower at Doug; Andy’s coyote scheme gives him an outlet for his newfound badassery and sympathy for the plight of the immigrant, and gives Doug something to do besides wander around in a daze. It felt more like pieces were being put in place so that this new setup can move forward; last week was the shuffle, and this week was the deal. Hopefully next week, we’ll actually start playing the game.

Grade: C+

Stray Observations:

—There weren’t a lot of big laughs tonight, but most of them came from Doug and Andy, as usual: Andy pitching “the Jet Blue of Coyotes,” Doug’s attempt to distract Lisa from Silas by throwing something at her, and Doug’s sudden infatuation with “Maria Mermex” to name a few good moments.

—Nancy seems to have a thing for mayor-types; first Sullivan, and now (presumably), Esteban. I hope this doesn’t mean the return of slutty Nancy.

—Showtime seems to have given up on promotional images in favor of video clips, so I'm gonna give this fancy embedded video thing a go.

"The Substitute" aka "Oh Captain, My Substitute"

"He's an adult that I can look up to. Finally." --Angela to her parents about the toothpick-chewing, mismatched-sock-wearing, honesty-advocating English teacher, Vic Racine.

When I first saw this episode of MSCL, I had an almost instinctual distaste for it. Granted, at the time, I was a creative writing student at an arts high school who was spending most of her time reading Anne Sexton, John Ciardi, Jim Thompson and others, studying forms, scansion, and meter, and writing based on daily assignments--so I had an aversion to anything that made writing seem like something anyone could do if given an inspirational teacher and a few candles, as well as anything that reduced good creative writing to something that "does better than make sense. It makes you feel." A trope like that was something that we, superior art students that we were, would have called "too sentimental," in addition to "cutesy, banal, synthetic, appalling"--the exact words Mr. Racine used to describe the "domesticated animal" and "greenery"-heavy work of Angela's English class.

In watching the episode now, however, I think my former opinion of it, clouded as it was by heavy doses of art-school superiority, couldn't have been more off. Yes, there is a musty whiff of Dead Poets Society about the episode, and the writing-and-changing-lives montage is more than a little cutesy, but Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets Society is never revealed to be a phony, and a little cutesiness here and there can be forgiven if it's undercut later on. Overall, this episode is a solid, often subtle, and emotionally-complex one--even if it does essentially begin with a English class chaos set to the tune of TLC's "What About Your Friends."

When you first see Vic Racine, substitute teacher, with his toothpick and mismatched socks, telling his students that they can leave if they want to but, "we will be discussing you in your absence," and then dramatically throwing their old work out the window, it's easy to see why high school students would fall for him. He's provocative and cool, so much so that Angela has to tell Rayanne about him, and Rayanne tells Ricky, and pretty soon everyone in the school is sneaking into that English class to worship at the mismatched socks of Vic. He tells them to be honest in their writing. "Don't worry about spelling, or words. Don't make it sound like writing." All of which is fine, but it's hard to talk about honesty so much without coming off like a phony.

The first hint we have of the real Vic, is when we see him sitting under a blackboard that reads, "Question Everything." That command was directed at the viewer as much as it was Vic's students. The second is a few seconds later when Patty, scandalized by the juicy sweetness of "Haiku For Him," comes to see Vic to tell him she won't print the poem in the school's literary magazine. Vic leers at her, half-chewed toothpick in mouth, and says, "[Your husband]'s a lucky man," before calling Graham "fragile." Following a funny ("I sense you're angry? Are you angry?" "Yes." "I sense that.") exchange Patty relents in the interest of "kids who aren't afraid to put their hearts on the page," and agrees to print the Lit.

Of course, that issue of the Lit is only available for the most fleeting of everyone's-reading-it! montages, before the principal confiscates the magazine, essentially outlaws its distribution, and orders Mr. Racine to his office. The next we see of Vic, he's running down the school steps, pausing only to offer a hollow fist-pump to the kids who are yelling his name out of the window. "All that crap about honesty and truth," Brian says back in the classroom, his blond curls shaking with rage, "He didn't even teach." Jordan, poor illiterate Jordan, counters this Vic attack, "Yes he did. He was the best teacher I ever had."

Angela, Rayanne, Sharon, and Ricky run downstairs to catch Vic, but apart from spouting something about "injustice" and reminding them to "Wake up!" he doesn't offer them any explanation for his leaving. Soon, though, Angela finds out from Graham the real reason why Vic left: Vic isn't who he says he is. His name isn't even Vic. He's a guy who left his family who has a warrant out for failure to pay child support. So Angela goes to the weird construction site/apartment complex where her one-time hero lives to confront him. Vic, in return, tells her that there are a bunch of truths about his situation--then throws every cliché he can muster at her: His family is "better off without him," "Get out before it's too late, Amanda," and "Leave that mind-control factory they have you in," etc. Angela, perhaps tipped off to Vic's phoniness by the fact that he can't even remember her name, tells Vic , "I don't think leaving high school is the answer. I don't think leaving anything is."

It's a bittersweet note, and one that the episode could have ended on. Lesson learned: People aren't always who they seem to be. Heroes aren't perfect. Etc. But the show goes further, to the next day when Angela decides to take it upon herself to copy and distribute the Lit. As her "Oak Tree" poem is being lauded by the new, totally clueless English teacher ("It should probably be re-typed."), Angela is furiously photocopying the outlawed literary magazine and handing it out in the hallway. She is caught, of course, which is what she wanted: to stand up for this principle she believed in, no matter what the consequences. But then there are no consequences. The bow-tied principal lets her off the hook that she very much wanted to be on, because she's a good kid, and this isn't her. So in the end, Angela made a decision (Stand-up against censorship!), only to find out that things had already been decided for her (You don't really mean this, Kid). It's the powerlessness of adolescence in a nutshell.

Grade: A-

Stray Observations:

--Another reason this is a good episode? It's a nice breather from Angela's inner dramas. There's nothing about her crush on Jordan, or dealing with her parents. It's just Angela learning to separate the lesson from the teacher.

--"You know what we need? A wife." Zing, Patty!

--Yet another reason this is a good episode? Brian's never-ending angry jealousy: "Is there, like, anyone's car you won't get into?" "Yes. I live my life to annoy you, Krakow. You're like my world."

--Also there's this: Teacher: Where are you supposed to be?

Brian: [halfway between sassy neck-snap and boredom] Computer.

Letting go is never easy. The end of a relationship is the death of the life you thought you had, and even under the best circumstances, it's a rough time. You can fill the void with drinking, with friends, with sitting in the dark in your apartment watching The Usual Suspects till three a.m. because it has nothing to do with anything, but whatever way you choose, the hole is still going to be there. The only way to get through it is to move on, and the worse you feel, the harder it gets.

The Monarch is feeling pretty terrible in this week's Venture Bros, "Tears Of A Sea Cow." At Dr. Mrs. The Monarch's urgings (from now on, she's Dr. Mrs.), he's accepted the Guild's reassignment for new arching, but his heart just isn't into it. Doesn't help that the arch, Dr. Dugong, is about as lame as they come; a human sized marine mammal devoted to discovering the "secrets of love and caring." Desperate to get her husband to commit, Dr. Mrs. tells him to pretend Dugong is Dr. Venture—but that only makes things worse, when Monarch snaps and blows the inoffensive bloviater away.

At the Venture Compound, Hank and Dermot are hanging out and making (terrible, terrible) music together. Dean interviews them for his newspaper, Venture Home News, before bragging that the paper has a circulation well "into the teens." Turns out, Monarch and Henchman 21 count themselves as loyal fans, 21 for Dean's advice on romance and the Monarch for the teen's naïve willingness to give up hard data on the compound's layout and security system. When the Monarch learns that the Ventures will be out of town for a science conference, he decides to re-ignite the flame of his hatred and return to doing what he does best; creating minor inconveniences and icky moments for the man he loves to loathe.

After last week's plot acrobatics, "Tears" is straightforward enough; most of the episode takes place over one night, centering on the Venture brothers, the Monarch and henchmen, and their eventual interactions. For all the debaters out there, Dermot is (sort of) claiming that Brock is his father—there's still the possibility he's lying or misinformed, but it's fuel for the fire at least. Dr. Mrs.'s moppets (the "Pupa Twins") continue to be nasty, leering little monsters, a fact even she notices when they offer to stick around in her bedroom while she changes (back into her Jackie O. outfit!), and the conversation between the three of them where she manages to dodge at least three direct questions about the Monarch's motivations managed to wink at fans without being too precious.

But back to the Monarch et al. Hank's conversation with 21, where 21 tells him he can't be killed ("I'm like the Highlander?"), managed to be both funny as hell and somewhat disturbing, especially during those brief moments when you think 21 actually killed Hank again. I think another Venture brother death at this point in the series wouldn't really work, as it would seem too mean-spirited even if the Doc can just re-clone them, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Especially considering that Hank now thinks he's invincible.

And what in the hell is up with Monarch? His vast rage at Rusty has been well-charted on the series (favorite episode quote: "I wanted to build an empire to house the machine to kick his ass!"), but it always danced at the edge of stalker-dom, and in "Tears" it seems to go over the frickin' cliff. Dean catches him screwing Rusty's guard robot—a robot with a monitor that displays the Doc's face—and while the Palpatine-inspired fake-out that follows was great, I couldn't get the image of the Butterfly Man's naked ass pounding away at his supposed worst enemy. Is Monarch's obsession tipping over into something else? Or is he just so mucked up that he can't even be a reasonable super villain anymore?

In "Atonement With A Bucket," Fat Guy Stuck In Internet actually has an A and B plot this week: in former, Gemberling meets with the mysterious webmaster Linux at the urgings of a phantom, decapitated Bit, while Chains meets a bunch of really small people with the misfortune to mistake him for a Chosen One. Things go about as you'd expect on both sides, as Linux turns out to be a thoroughly gross Yoda knock-off, leading to some not-entirely-unpleasant Empire Strikes Back nods, and Chains behaves like his usual self by being lazy and easily led.

Picking on this show at this point just seems cruel. The usual complaints hold—the writing is cheap, and Gemberling himself is a terrible, terrible actor (smirking does not equal staying in character)—but I did like some of the production design here inside Linux's house of garbage. Oh, and the sequence where Byte rips off Bit's head wasn't bad. But it's still lazy and flat, and only funny in that after-midnight, my expectations are so low that I'd even laugh at Becker kind of way. Ah well, at least the light show was fun.

Grades:

Venture Bros, "Tears Of A Sea Cow": A

Fat Guy Stuck In Internet, "Atonement With A Bucket": C

Stray Observations:

--Sorry this is so late. We lost power for a few hours last night, and I missed my usual posting window.

--I know I mentioned doing some classic Venture this week, but I just didn't have the time. We'll get there, though.

--Almost forgot; saddest moment of "Tears"? Hank and Dean's desperation to go to public school.

“These men are living out here on rice and beans, sleeping out in the cold in these rags… these are some fuckin’ hard men. You ladies bitch if you get an MRE without a fuckin’ Pop Tart.”

There’s so much to talk about in any given episode of Generation Kill that it’s hard to know where to start, but the quote above struck me as one of the more keen observations of the series so far. The line is occasioned by a group of soldiers coming upon a small encampment, and one of them pissing in a basket of rice, under the logic that he’s “denying the enemy.” It’s a juvenile thing to do, and his superior officer’s response touches on a key theme in the series in general: That the war is being waged against some desperately poor people, and that it asserts American wealth and privilege over the fate of the less fortunate. The quote also suggests the ambiguity in some soldiers’ minds about who is and isn’t the enemy; the rice-pisser may see them all as a bunch of “Hajis,” but others are more capable of nuance.

This bracing piece of perspective also comments on another persistent issue facing the Marines in this series: They don’t have the tools they need to do the job. No matter how much righteous bitching they do about going into battle without enough batteries for their night optics or without the armor they need for their Humvees, those complaints, however legitimate, shrink in comparison to the nomads who live off rice and beans in the open air, unprotected from sandblasts and the bone-deep cold of desert night. These Marines represent a country that has, in the words of one, “created a system of so much excess that even poor motherfuckers are fat.” For a young man raised in such a place, the realities on the ground in Iraq must seem surreal.

After a lot of anxiousness from soldiers wanting to “get some,” the men finally got their wish this week, as they cross the Euphrates and enter into Mesopotamia, the “Cradle Of Civilization.” The circumstances are less than ideal: Rather than cross the river into Nasiriyah, the First Recon has to sit around taking fire from enemy mortars across the river. The ROE (Rules Of Engagement) permit them to shoot at anyone with a weapon, but it soon becomes clear that unarmed spotters are targeting them for mortar fire, and it takes a casualty or two before the ROE changes and they can shoot down any suspected spotters. Still, they can’t go across the bridge yet, so they spend most of the day on the defensive.

Once they reach Nasiriyah, their commanding officers direct them to stop right in the middle of a perfect spot for an ambush, with buildings hemmed in tight on both sides of the street. They’re fortunate not to get lit up—though the erratic Captain America turns an SUV into swiss cheese in a bid to “deny the enemy transportation”—but it’s a early indicator that they will eventually be placed into danger unnecessarily and have to scrap their way out. When Godfather decides to take the fight directly to the enemy in the next town, rather than to bypass it on the road to Baghdad, he again throws his Marines right into the middle of an ambush and they have to scrape and claw to punch through without taking significant casualties.

The big skirmish towards the end of the episode is thrilling to watch, especially when you recall how clumsy the street battles in The Wire were, when self-styled gangstas with guns angled sideways could never shoot straight. (The most violent such conflict in the series took only one life, and that was from a stray bullet hitting a child through his bedroom window.) It’s a reminder that these Marines are professionals, much like the Major Crimes unit in The Wire, and they’re capable of doing their jobs well despite dubious orders and a lack of resources. When it’s all over and they’ve come away unharmed, they break out into a well-earned celebration. The only sobering note comes when the gunner who took down a building shrugs off the back-slapping by saying, “It goes a little different and we could have all got killed today.”

As expected, “Cradle Of Civilization” is loaded with funny and sharply observed little anecdotes, since so much of a soldier’s time is taken up by those pregnant pauses where all he can do is shoot the shit with his buddies. The journalist Evan (Lee Turgeson) laughs out loud at his good fortune in riding along with Ray (James Ransone), whose diarrheatic monologues about topics ranging from patriotic songs (“Fuck man, eagles fly in Canada, too”) to motivations for being a Marine (“Brad probably saw the commercial with the knight who fucks up the dragon who turns into a Marine”) to Iraqi hotties (“I thought they all were camel-faced hags”) never cease to amuse or enlighten.

And through it all, they still have to worry about their “moostaches,” even after their triumph in the field. The official story for why they have to “scrape that hippie shit off their lips” has something to do with the possibility of mustachioed Iraqis infiltrating the Army, but upholding the grooming standard is a particularly sick joke after staring death in the face. My brother-in-law once told me that he believed the drinking age should be 18, because if you’re old enough to die for your country, you should at least be able have a beer. By that same token, if you’ve just been ambushed in an Iraqi city block, you should have the right to groom yourself like Rollie Fingers.

Grade: A

Stray observations:

• Some pretty scary stuff involving Captain America: Blasting away at the SUV with his AK-47 is one thing, but shooting an unarmed man in the back portends some disturbing developments. And since he’s in charge of these missions, nobody can put him in his place: “You didn’t see what the captain saw” is the most hopeful excuse they can manage.

• “I interpret what he said as ‘Facial hair is not going to be our focus in the next 24 hours.’”

• Some harrowing shots of the Marines passing charred-up bodies on the side of the road. One of them callously refers to a bombed-out van as a “Halloween funhouse,” but by the time they pass a little girl with legs blown off at the knees, they can only recoil in horror.

• Last line, about having to track down a superior lost in the dark: “Fucking officers will be the death of us yet.” I believe that’s what they refer to in the business as “foreshadowing.”

There's water, water everywhere in "Episode 73" of Bleach. Ichigo and Renji meet Uryu and the others outside the hospital after seemingly losing the Bount twins Ho and Ban, but the situation keeps getting worse because the city is in the middle of a rainstorm—and Ho and Ban can do some very nasty things with the puddles covering the parking lot. Ichigo tells Chad and Orihime to get Uryu clear, and he, Renji, and Rukia try and fight back the water dolls; it doesn't go well. The only reason the three aren't drowned is that the twins decide to persue Uryu instead, and seeing as how Uryu's powerless, and neither Chad nor Orihime are as strong as Ichigo or the rest, things aren't looking particularly promising for the feverish Quincy.

It's tricky following up a strong cliffhanger, because you've got to resolve a problem that had to appear as insoluble as possible without leaving the viewer feeling cheated. (Cue Annie Wilkes' "dirty bird" rant here.) "73" does a solid job here. There's the clear sense that Ho and Ban's water dolls are even stronger outdoors than they were inside, and each of the attacks that Ichigo, Renji, and Rukia had tried earlier are no longer even good enough to buy the heroes time to escape. Even better, there's more exploitation of the aqua-danger, as the twins have an attack that actually injects contaminated liquid into their victims, making use of the fact that the human body is largely made up of water.

Ho and Ban's defeat is a logical one. Chad figures out that the two can't maintain their attacks if they're separated—attacking the water dolls themselves is futile, since there's always more water for them to rebuild with, but their controllers aren't nearly as well-designed. There's a great sequence when Noba, one of the mod souls Udahara created to help trained Ichigo, starts transporting the twins short distances apart; close enough they can still see each other, but not close enough for them to maintain concentration. Still, it isn't until Ganju and Hanataro, two Soul Reapers who've been spending time working at a local convenience store, show up with enough fire power to defeat the final doll that the day is saved. The twins turn to dust, so that's one threat resoundingly defeated. And a good thing, too, since the end of the episode introduces a whole new group of Bounts preparing for the attack.

A couple weeks ago, during Light's break down at the end of Death Note, one commenter complained that his freak-out was over the top. Given how tightly wound the character has always been—the sheer level of control he has to maintain to keep his schemes in the air and never let on a moment's weakness—it's not surprising that he'd get twitchy when his systems start breaking down, and in "Confrontation," episode 2 of the series, we see the seeds of madness in him from the very start. Light is taking his new duties as self-appointed God of Justice very seriously; when he outlines his day to Ryuk (get up, go to school, come back home, murder thirty people, brush teeth, get good night's sleep), there's a clear sense of someone who's not only used to planning his life down to the minute for maximum efficiency, but also of a guy who couldn't exist without that schedule to adhere to. He's the ideal student, someone who can and will achieve every goal laid before him. The problem is, because of his excellence, he lacks any sense of his own limitations. He decides he can fix everything because it never occurs to him that he couldn't.

But while everything looks to be going to plan—Light's "god" even has a new name, Kira, on websites across the world that call out for His justice—there's an x-factor that not even Light could've prepared for in L, the greatest detective in the world, a man so brilliant that he can command the police forces of the entire world without ever revealing his true identity. During a televised police conference, L calls on Kira by pretending to show his face as one Lind L. Tailor. Lind promises to catch the one responsible for the murders, and Light gets upset and takes the bait, killing Lind; but it turns out Lind wasn't the real L, just a decoy L had used to assess Kira's powers and figure out his geographic location.

You get the sense that Light isn't used to having people balk his will, even before he had the power to kill anyone with a pen—he rants and raves about L's arrogance, before finally declaiming that he will defeat the detective because he, Light, is justice; L makes a similar claim from across the city. Both men (fairly young men) are absolutely convinced in their own righteousness and their abilities to see that righteousness to its conclusion. Definite irresistible force meets unmovable object time.

Oh, before I forget, I really love the way Light booby traps his desk to protect the Death Note once he realizes that anyone who touches it can see Ryuk. The trap, which involves a false bottom in his desk drawer as well as wiring and a bag of gasoline that will set the notebook on fire if the wrong person tries to grab it, is ingenious and speaks well to Light's talent for seeing every possible outcome of a situation. It's a talent that would eventually fail him, but for now at least, his hunters have their work cut out for them.

If "Confrontation" revolves around confidence, than "Shirley At Gunpoint," this week's Code Geass, is all about the other side of the coin. After attending Shirley's father's funeral, Lelouch finds himself faced with an unfamiliar emotion: doubt. Up until now, his every choice has been driven by a lust for revenge and the logic of warfare, but having to actually confront the results of his actions seems to push him to a place he's not comfortable with. When the Black Knights learn Cornelia is planning another move on the Japanese Liberation Front, Zero plots his next move with the same cold cunning he's always shown, but could he be losing his commitment to the cause?

Er, no. Not really at all. Apparently, a moral and spiritual crisis for Lelouch means not just re-committing to your values, but damning yourself to them. In a ruse that fools nearly everyone, he destroys the JLF ship that Cornelia's team is attacking, thus egging on his own troops and catching the Princess off guard. The plan nearly succeeds, but once again Suzaku and his Lancelot step in before Zero can finally defeat Cornelia. The Lancelot makes quick work of Zero's robot, forcing Zero to crash; and while he struggles to regain consciousness, someone holds a gun on his head.

Lelouch isn't the only one with doubts. Valetta, one of Lord Jeremiah's friends and an earlier victim of Lelouch's Geass abilities, confronted Shirley after her father's funeral with the news that Lelouch might be involved in the Black Knights. A conflicted Shirley follows Lelouch to the docks, where she witnesses most of the attack from afar—it's only when Zero crashes right in front of her that she has an opportunity to pick up the gun at her feet and find vengeance for her father's death. But before she can pull the trigger, Zero's mask slips…

Not bad, eh? Zero's choice to essentially kill the very people he's supposed to be working with—a choice that, if it's every revealed to his team, will ruin him—puts him beyond the pale morally, but raises the stakes for his quest. It was nice to see Kallen struggling with her own doubts as well, before responding to them in the time-honored tradition of giving herself so completely to the cause that she no longer has to think. And I'm liking Shirley's involvement. Zero may be "chaos incarnate," but Lelouch is still flesh and blood, no matter how much he may wish otherwise.

Hey, a bit more Action Bastard on Shin Chan! In "Action Bastard Says, 'I've Got You, Crabs,'" Bastard is laid low by the Crab (and if you were thinking there would be a lot of VD puns at this point, you would be right), but Lollipop saves the day by turning into her super-hero form, Sailor Moon knock-off Jailbait Poon. The change inspires Penny enough to try and play Action Bastard with the boys the next day, but no matter what, everything goes wrong, mostly because of Shin. When Penny's official Jailbait Poon scarf gets tossed in the mud, the kids leave her to mourn her misfired attempt at breaking into the boy's world of super-hero adventuring.

Then it's some time with Shin's dog Whitey, in "Whitey Flight." Mrs. Nahara has a coupon for a free shot, so it's off to the vet's for Whitey, Dad, and Shin. Only Whitey's not having any of it; he runs off at the soonest opportunity, only to get suckered back in by the charms of his one true love. And then it's fun at the park in "Fragile Rock," where Maso and Boo have a falling out during what starts as a friendly game of Show & Tell. Georgie and Penny try to run damage control, but they keep involving Shin, which just seems like a bad idea.

Nothing particularly thrilling here; apart from the usual throwaway inappropriateness, all three segments could've come off an episode of Rugrats. But it's nice to have some more Action Bastard, and watching Penny's hopes and dreams deflate is always swell.

Grades:

Bleach, "Episode 73": A-

Death Note, "Confrontation": A

Code Geass, "Shirley At Gunpoint": A

Shin Chan, "Action Bastard Says, 'I've Got You, Crabs'/Whitey Flight/Fragile Rock": B

After last week’s Donna-lite episode “Midnight,” we get its opposite number. The Doctor barely makes an appearance in “Turn Left” but he’s conspicuous by his absence in an episode that’s essentially about his absence. Tricked into playing host to a reality-altering insect that looks like it’s on loan from David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation, Donna spends the hour wandering a universe in which she and the Doctor never had their Christmas rendezvous and, consequently, the Doctor died. It’s a variation on a Christmas favorite, It’s A Wonderful Life, only with the total destruction of London in place of Zuzu’s petals. Christmas comes early, and repeatedly, this year.

In a setup reminiscent of Sliding Doors, it all comes down to a single element of one day’s commute. Specifically, the moment when Donna decided to stick with her temp job downtown, which eventually lead to her meeting with The Doctor in “The Runaway Bride” and saving his life. Good thing, too, since without the Doctor we get a hospital disappearing into space and returning with a lone survivor, a Titanic-shaped spaceship crashing into Buckingham Palace, and a bunch of fat-focused aliens deciding that the U.S. would make a better breeding ground than a devastated U.K. (I could have told them that would be the case even without the devastation.) We also get a Great Britain that descends into fascism as if it were just waiting for an excuse. Why is this fear so prevalent in British science fiction? Three’s a trend and I can immediately click off V For Vendetta and Children Of Men as the other examples. And I’ve got It Happened Here out from Netflix. So there’s another.

Saving the day, grimly, is none other than Billie Piper’s erstwhile Rose, making a welcome return. She seems as focused and dark as she was when last we saw her those many seasons ago, although Piper sounds like she’s picked up a bit of a lisp. (Or was that just me?) She helps the alternate universe Donna—let’s just call her Bug Donna—make a decision to travel back in order to save the proper universe, even though it means her death. But is it just Bug Donna who dies or is Rose referring to some future sacrifice from Real Donna? (And no spoilers. We’re taking these episodes at Yank pace even if a bunch of you are already in the U.K. or, like me, using Internet magic to see episodes not shredded by Sci Fi.)

This episode felt like a lot of table-setting for the big two-part finale to come, but I liked it. The references to past episodes, for one, were clever and had a point, even if that point about the interconnectedness of events is a bit familiar by now. But Catherine Tate’s performance really made it work. I didn’t care all that much for “The Runaway Bride” as an episode or her performance therein but Tate won me over right away this season. She’s a different type of companion than we’ve seen before, at least in the modern era. Her relationship with the Doctor may not lend itself to the furious ‘shipper speculation of Rose and Martha, but it’s driven by a genuine, collegial love. Where Rose and Martha’s partnerships seemed destined to burn out or explode into passion after a while, Donna could stick around for a while. (But before we leave ‘shipper speculation behind: What was with that long pause when Donna asked Rose about the nature of her relationship with the Doctor?) She’s not an actress of great subtlety, but here there’s no mistaking Bug Donna for Real Donna. She’s much less confident and much more petty. But in the end, she rises to the occasion, suggesting she had the potential for greatness in her all along.

So, yes, in the end, nothing happens in this episode, which pretty much takes us back where we started. But we learn a lot about Donna that she may not even know about herself. Now on to this year’s version of the end of the world.

Grade: B+

Before we get into things, a little damage control. I, as you may have noticed, am not Keith Phipps. You can blame my parents for that one. But despite my utter lack of Phippsiousity, I am going to be taking over X-Files coverage from here on. Before anyone says anything, this is not because Keith got too close to the Truth. Nor did he get abducted by aliens. Nor is he leaving to start an abortive movie career, only to return for a few random guest spots and a final episode that raises more questions than it answers. And that whole "auto-erotic asphyxiation" thing, I have no idea what that's about at all.

Whatever the reason, you guys are stuck with me in all my Robert Patrick-esque glory. If you don't mind me saying, I'm pretty psyched about it. The X-Files is one of the formative series of my youth, the first show I can remember being engaged with at the same time it hit big on the cultural map, but it's been years since I revisited it. Watching earlier episodes now is like playing a game of "Spot The Thing That Stuck In My Head For A Decade." (And if it's any comfort for you Phipps fans, Keith passed the torch to me because of rampant busy-ness, but he'll still be popping up in the comments section.)

"Beyond The Sea"

It's no secret that X-Files owes a debt to Twin Peaks, and the cold open of "Beyond" wears that influence proudly—not only do we meet Scully's father, who happens to be played by the late Don Davis (best know to Peak heads as Major Garland Briggs), but we also get an overtly Lynchian sequence, when Scully wakes up on the couch to see her father sitting across from her, lit from above, and moving his lips without making a sound. It's an eerie, discomfiting moment that only gets worse when the phone rings—and Scully learns that Dad, who she said goodbye to only hours before, has died of a massive coronary.

Growing up, Mulder was always my favorite character. He was funny, smart, and a bit weird, all things I could relate to; but re-visiting the show now, I find myself more inclined to take Scully's side of things. Which is curious, since Scully is so often wrong. It's a standard complaint that the dynamic between the two leads—Mulder's wide-eyed gullibility against Scully's skepticism—becomes too much of a crutch over time, with Scully's unwillingness to accept the paranormal more like a conditioned response than a reasoned scientific approach. I think that criticism is somewhat exaggerated, especially considering just how nutty Mulder's theories tend to sound, but regardless, Scully's level-headedness fascinates me because it means that each episode is as much about a struggle for her belief as it is about tracking down beasties or getting proof of alien intelligence.

That struggle is one of the centerpieces of "Beyond." The main case centers around a pair of kidnapped college students; the kidnapping has the same M.O. of an earlier abduction/murder, which means the FBI doesn't have much time to save the pair before their abductor bumps them off. Enter Luther Lee Boggs, a convicted murderer up for execution who claims to have psychic visions that will help find the kidnapper and his victims. For once, Mulder is the unbeliever; his profiling helped put Boggs in the hot seat, and he believes that Boggs is orchestrating the whole crime from the inside, using it to save himself from the gas chamber. Scully initially concurs, but during Boggs' interrogation, Scully has another vision of her dad—this time dressed in Boggs' prison orange, singing the song that was playing during her parents' wedding. She follows Boggs' clues and finds evidence that he was pointing in the right direction after all, which only confirms Mulder's suspicions. But suspect or not, Boggs' is the only lead the FBI has, so they follow his word to a lake house; Mulder, disregarding an oblique warning from Boggs, gets shot, and only one of the kidnap victims is rescued, leaving Scully to solve the case and deal with her own rapidly unwinding psyche in the face of overwhelming evidence of the paranormal.

"Beyond" has a lot to recommend it. Brad Dourif plays Boggs, and unsurprisingly, he's unnervingly intense. The scenes where he switches characters while in the grip of his "gift" are excellent, as is his recollection of the experience that he believes gave him that gift; his first trip to the gas chamber, which ended in a last minute stay of execution, put him under a pressure that made him vulnerable to outside influences.

But we never get a real sense of what those influences are. Boggs isn't faking, you can tell that much, but it's uncertain if he's psychic, able to communicate with the dead, some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Dourif sells it because, well, he's Brad freakin' Dourif, and it's not like the show has a habit of giving clear answers. But sometimes the uncertainly feels a little bit lazy.

The ep's main flaw, though, is its handling of Scully's moral crisis. Having her character front and center is a great, especially once Mulder is sidelined—without anyone else she can trust, Scully is forced to stand alone, despite her still intense grief over her father's passing, and the fact that this one case in particular seems designed to exploit that grief.

I just wish the ep didn't make her look quite so weak. Of the two leads, Scully has always been the rock—she's more rational, more mature, and I always got the impression that if you were going into a combat situation, you'd rather have Scully at your back than "Spooky" Mulder. While it's good dramatic sense to see that confidence shaken, "Beyond" goes too far; having her break down in front of Boggs feels forced even if she did see a vision of her dad. The worst is in her final scene in Mulder's hospital room, when she starts rationalizing everything she's gone through. Mulder asks why she can't believe in what she's seen, and she says, "I'm afraid to believe."

I don't buy that, and I think it stacks the cards too heavily in Mulder's favor. Scully's logical approach to the world should never be presented as a failing on her part; the show works best when it agrees as much with her in spirit as it confirms Mulder in fact. By having her confess that the only reason she doesn't completely give in to the supernatural is fear, the ep makes the same mistake of all those movies and books that treat atheists as people who are just really pissed off at God—it turns a philosophy into failing. Anderson does a terrific job throughout "Beyond" at handling Scully's grief and rage, and her final line about already knowing what her father wanted to tell her ("Because he was my father.") is beautiful. It's just frustrating that the rest of the ep doesn't quite live up to her.

Grade: B+

Stray Observation:

--Did anybody else get another Peaks vibe when Scully picked up the necklace off the factory floor? The glove and lighting looked a lot like the final shot of the pilot…

"Gender Bender

Friggin' Amish. I mean, what the hell, right? Living with no electricity, working off the land, coming into town and being all-too-perfect ice cream targets, seducing our valuable Harrison Fords with their simple, god-fearing ways—I've had it up to here with this crap. And to find out that certain similar sects also have the ability to seduce people with a thumb rub, kill with sexual intercourse, and change their gender at will, well, that's just the final goddamn straw. Something needs to be done about this. Something involving fire, a lightning storm, and a whole lot of pitchforks.

The stalk-and-slay cold open is a time honored tradition on crime and supernatural shows, and "GB" at first seems standard; it's only in the final few moments, when the femme fatale becomes significantly less femme, that things start getting weird. The weirdness increases when Mulder and Scully get called in to investigate. It turns out the killing has an M.O. that Mulder's seen before, and that our Crying Game assailant has been leaving quite a path of bodies as he/she makes his/her way south. At this crime scene, forensics identifies a kind of white clay in scratches in the victim's back, a clay that's only found in Steveston, MA, where a group of Amish-esque farmers calling themselves "The Kindred" use it to make pottery and crafts.

Before watching this again, I'd automatically marked it in my mind as one of the standard MotW eps that, while solid, didn't really distinguish itself. The premise of a psycho who seduces and destroys his targets was a non-starter to me, and the whole Mennonites angle seemed more clever than actually involving. Plus, Scully getting the whammy put on her by some jug-eared dude had an uncomfortable whiff of fan fiction; I wouldn't be surprised if there was some badly written prose floating around the web featuring Dana macking on a geeky, pimple-faced pubescent with halitosis and magic fingers.

But man was I off-base. (Although not completely about the seduction thing, which we'll get to in a moment.) "Gender Bender" is great, a perfect mixture of scientific theory, unsubstantiated rumor, and memorable visuals. The club scenes are somewhat predictable (and hey, look, it's Krycek!), but the time Mulder and Scully spend with the Kindred, from getting surrounded in the forest to an awkward dinner, to some truly bizarre barn-based funereal arrangements, "GB" is the platonic ideal of what the X-Files, at its best, is really about; sane people brushing briefly against the vast madness of the world, and escaping in the end with only suspicions and the certainty that there is more going on that anyone could ever know.

Even the look of the ep represents a step up. As The X-Files went on, it developed an increasingly cinematic visual style, but much of the first season has a flat, bland appearance. "GB" is a comparative feast for the eyes, between its excellent production design—the underground hive Mulder discovers is wonderfully organic and womb-like—to a number of strikingly composed camera shots. This was director Rob Bowman's first episode; he'd go on to direct a number of X-Files classics, and it's clear to see he's got strong sense of what works right out of the gate.

The Kindred themselves make for an enigmatic threat, since in a literal sense they aren't really threatening at all; given multiple opportunities to attack Mulder and Scully, they prefer to simply glare and stand aside, but that doesn't make them any less freaky. One of their number, Brother Andrew (played by "Hey it's that guy!" character actor Brent Hinkley), takes a liking to Scully, and tells her the truth about the killer she's hunting; it's Brother Martin, a former friend of Andrew's. The two found a pile of magazines while out walking one day, and Martin was immediately seduced by the sensuality of the outside world. The Kindred are "different," Andrew says. One gets the impression that Martin's murders are more an act of indifference than intent—he/she just wants to get laid, no matter what the consequences. But the Kindred have their rules, and in the end, even though Scully and Mulder track Martin down, it's his people that take him home.

My only problem here is, again, Scully's treatment; the whole "thumb-rubbing" thing with Andrew is all right (it's probably more dramatic if Scully is the one who gets her boundaries broken, as I'd bet Mulder's a cheap date), but there's this moment at the end when Scully has Andrew in her gun sights, and she orders him to stand down—and he keeps walking towards her—and she doesn't fire. Maybe she's not shooting because he seems peaceful, maybe she has doubts, but the hesitation also appears connected with the mojo he put on her earlier, and that just seems wrong to me. I'll buy that Scully can be vulnerable. It's part of what makes her such a bad-ass. But that she wouldn't regain her professionalism almost immediately strikes more as narrative convenience than anything character based.

Grade: A

--I kept flashing on the Angel episode, "Lonely Hearts," about a demon that body jumps from lover to lover. Boy, it's almost like the pursuit of romantic connection makes for easy-to-exploit drama, huh?

"Lazarus"

During an abortive bank heist, two men are gunned down: Agent Jack Willis, Scully's mentor and former lover, and his target, loose cannon and fugitive Warren Dupre. The two men are rushed to the hospital, where Dupre is pronounced dead, but Willis is ultimately revived. Something is wrong, though. When Willis wakes up, he leaves the hospital without telling anyone, but not before breaking into the morgue and stealing Dupre's wedding ring. And then he starts trying to re-enter Dupre's life, going back to where Dupre had holed up with his wife Lula, visiting Lula's brother Tommy. Is Willis having a breakdown? Or is it something more—something to do with the way Dupre's tattoo is slowly fading onto Willis's arm …

I seem to have gone for a bit longer than intended here, but fortunately, "Lazurus" doesn't really warrant a whole lot of discussion. It's not terrible; Christopher Allport does good work playing Willis and the Dupre/Willis hybrid, and the relationship between him and Lula is well-handled. But really, it's a matter of structure. Instead of having Willis's transformation be a surprise, we in the audience know what's going on almost immediately, which makes it doubly curious when Dupre/Willis comes back to the bureau and tries to pretend that he is who he appears to be. He does a much better job of this than Dupre on his own could have, and there is some ambiguity as to how much of Willis is left in Dupre/Willis's head, but it doesn't ever really go anywhere.

In "GB," the ambiguity works to the episode's overall strength—we never know exactly what the Kindred are, or how the gender switch works, but that makes them seemingly more real. Here, the ambiguity is istracted and undercooked. Dupre/Willis only really comes into conflict with himself in the last ten minutes or so, leaving the tragedy of the situation largely unexplored.

Plus, the hook itself is shaky. With a show like this, you either need one strong premise (like "Ice," with it's anger-management worms) or two good premises that combine for a cumulative effect (like "GB"—hey, you got your sex-changing serial killer in my alien Amish! You got your alien Amish in my sex-changing serial killer! But you know what? It tastes great). "Lazarus" just has the one idea, a vague connection between near-death experiences and body jumping, and it doesn't resonate. A stronger push on Willis's obsession with tracking down Dupre would've been helpful, maybe implying that a pre-existing link between the two made Willis more vulnerable to take over, but apart from a couple of dialogue lines and a taped interview near the end, there's no real thematic resonance to what happens.

Grade: B-