Hunting for DDs in the first round is somewhat more situational than in DJ, but in a TOC, where every player is dangerous, it's even more important to get to them first. Yet the danger is that the clues are harder in Tournament play, and either a bad wager or a brainfreeze on a DD, especially late, might cost you the…

How to explain the appeal of Arthur? He came out of his corner swinging, for one; he'd clearly thought and prepared and devised strategies for winning, and for people like me who tired of subpar contestants and a puzzling lack of any gameplan from so many of them, it was refreshing. He mowed down opponents like a…

The Myth of Sisyphus is in clues all the time, mostly 'cause it isn't The Stranger.

I think the biggest reason it just didn't work is the MotW. Evil Nurse, while fine for any other episode (actually, she could have been great in a Irving-focused episode!), just served to provide an easy out (It was all just previously unknown villain's fault, all along!) for the climax of some pretty big emotional…

I took care to note just how unnecessary Indiana Poochie (it's already catching on!) was in the ep - as far as I can tell, the only times there even needed to be a third person was a few instances where one of the sisters needed some expository lines to bounce off in the absence of the other - "There's files in…

(…Man, my paragraph structures have been terrible today. I've been editing the hell out of every post. Sorry to anyone who noticed.)

The former is inarguable, and I am wholeheartedly down with any ongoing fencing of such quality. The latter I'd argue with: the jealousy is definitely there, though what seems like its absence is more rational - Root knows she can lay no claim to Shaw, though she does take opportunites to remind Sameen of her special…

I'm the complete opposite: it drives me crazy when contestants go top-to-bottom, especially in important late-game situations. And really, after a couple times it isn't that hard to follow; the hardest trick is remembering the categories, which in playstyles like Chu's it's often good to give Alex as minimal a…

Even though it was a typically tough TOC game, I actually seemed to know just about every single triple-stumper. (The fact that, were I a contestant, I would have run the Superman category in less than thirty seconds probably had a lot to do with that, though.)

I immediately thought of Charlie Baltimore as well. Also, Nick Fury needs to sing random pop songs while driving the Helicarrier.

It was so odd, having Aaron's work on Castle's origin story feel so much like a riff on the Saint of Killers - the Dillon art certainly didn't do anything to dissuade that feeling.

Taskmaster is definitely a late-Phase villain, though - he needs some well-established street-level heroes to work at maximum narrative efficiency, so we'll probably have to wait until the Netflix series are well underway.

I have never been a shipper - quite the opposite, I pretty much always prefer it when characters DON'T hook up. And my cynicism about network Standards & Practices is entrenched enough that I've internalized the fact that some things just aren't going to happen, just danced around. (Though I will say the networks…

Yeah, I feel as if POI is taking less risks this season than in any other, which is a downer coming off of an epic, ambitious season like the last. Every episode still manages to get in some interesting, clever notes, but mostly we're kinda coasting on the chemistry of the cast. Yet my reservations are leavened by…

In the comics she's always been a Quebecois separatist, and has been a dangerous metahuman (she can project explosive force from her hands) for most of her thirty-year existence. She was never a run-of-the-mill crook except in her one episode of JLU.

I agree with your points in theory - those are decent, if uninspired, directions for that relationship - but my problem is that those notes weren't earned. The writers pretty much just told us a bunch of character things happened without showing them happening -actually, at various points it seemed like they were…

BABY CART TO HADES

There's surprisingly a lot riding on this next episode - Jenny's been sidelined all season, Abby's losing her grasp on the show, and much of the character work has been shaky in general. It's their chance to pull the focus back on one of the key emotional foundations of the show, the complicated relationship of the…

I was loving that on one of my favorite network shows, out of its four leads, three were A-A. And not only that, they all had completely individual perspectives and motivations. Somehow they've managed to wipe away nearly all of that groundwork, which is boggling my mind. It's not unsalvageable: that work is still…

That was a great TOC FJ. Tough, but fair, demands both knowledge and deduction, and has a nice 'click' to it.