Duchovny's standard deadpan makes it way more effective when he occasionally shows a reaction. The crazed puppy-yelp from this episode is pretty great (I bet there were some even weirder versions in the outtakes)— also every time he gets pissed off and insults some guy who's beating him up and/or holding him at…

because I'm too lazy to look this up on the Internet…
Does anyone know which came first:
1) Mulder's theory in "Jose Chung" that the Men in Black use celebrity look-alikes (or, possibly, the real Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek) because that's so ridiculous that it'll discredit the witness's story, or
2) The Simpsons…

"Morgan seems to hold Mulder in withering contempt"
I don't get that at all, at least in this episode. When we see Mulder acting like an obnoxious loon, it's through the eyes of super-unreliable narrators; I don't think we're supposed to take that as his real behavior, any more than we're supposed to think Scully…

"improbable"?
Todd On "Avatar": "I've always felt that the actual explanation for how the crimes were happening was a little improbable"

More things to love about Pusher:

I can actually imagine Shiban doing OK with Torchwood. His monster-of-the-week episodes were cheesy for sure, but with a particular flavor of cheesiness that that show sometimes does pretty well with, and I kinda liked his non-monster-oriented episodes about mean people with scary technology (The Pine Bluff Variant,…

Yeah, there's no way Gilligan didn't get that from Firestarter. Of course the idea of that power has been used a zillion times, but King was the one who named it "pushing", and his character also had a slowly falling-apart brain (although it was because of him using his powers, not the other way around; King used the…

I can't speak from experience, but if the evilest-looking guy in Mississippi had just kidnapped me… and sent my lover off to be killed… and was now menacing me with a hot poker in a house full of vampires and werewolves… him telling me "look at this vague file folder, don't you feel betrayed now" really might not make…

I don't think that subplot was written particularly well or anything, but I really don't have any trouble believing that people could do something so stupid with their lives and convince themselves that they had no choice. People do even worse things all the time even if a cost-benefit analysis would tell them…

I thought the point of the mace was that it's the thing you'd pick if you were really, really, really, really, really angry at someone.

nice bit in the Viking scene:
A monster that knocks, and then kills you when you answer the door— this is how the Grendel/Beowulf story got started, right?

You could argue that, sure, but those are in a way more apocalyptic vein: we "grow up" by being basically destroyed as human beings and moving on to some other cosmic level.

** WARNING: NERDPICKING NITFEST AHEAD **

In the Days of the Comet
Todd: "In The Days Of The Comet is probably the least essential: It starts with some interesting ideas, then turns them into a boring tract"

AmazingThor & Prince Joffrey: Know any writers? I don't think Martin is going "la di da, I'll finish the book whenever, but I feel like editing this other book, producing this TV show, and going to a con today." The guy works for a living, and it's really unlikely that he could live for 6 years off the advance for his…

Pontifex: I believe that you didn't need that, but you're overruled by the much larger number of people who did need it.

Dr. B: a universe with a surplus of fecal matter, and their attempt to foist it off on the next universe, was a major plot point in Chester Brown's insane comic book "Ed the Happy Clown" (synopsis: http://everything2.com/titl…. My brain is now slowly exploding at the thought of an Ed/Fringe crossover.

I, on the other hand, deserve to win an award for most uses of "kind of", "sort of", "basically", "really", "actually", and "more or less" in an Internet comment.

Faucette's essay…
"The Road to Black Science Fiction" is a really odd, kind of sweet document; it's really not the kind of "they're all against me!" lament that I kind of expected. (I mean, I expected it not because he's black, but because it's in a self-published book by a guy who sounds like kind of a crank.)

Mike, could you also email me (see website in my profile) if you see this?