I don't think there's much arguing with Conspiracy, but The Neutral Zone wasn't a bad way to end the season, mostly just because the new warbirds were so … bad … ass. Sure, the new Enterprise had been stolen already, nearly destroyed by its own hallucinatory captain, made the plaything of an omnipotent smart-ass, etc.…

"One of Us" also isn't that bad. Preachy, sure, just a bit, but the chorus is kinda catchy and Osborne's voice is pleasant enough.

"Cleopatra's Cat," Spin Doctors

a licky boom boom down

Eh, I don't know about "punk rock cred," but "Santa Monica" remains a really, really fucking good song and _Sparkle and Fade_ a damn listenable album even after 15 years and Alexakis's total artistic bankruptcy. I won't blame anyone for hating Alexakis, but his 15 minutes wasn't totally unearned.

The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain could not possibly scream "agonizingly sugary, painfully quirky Brit-comedy" any louder.

I was going to have a jibe at your "Whorf" typo, Cap'n, but then I realized it's probably an inevitable Freudian reaction to your place of employment. Sorry.

"Lonely Among Us"—as St. God called it last week, "a goddamn travesty of an episode"—gets my vote for the worst ep of Season One. I can at least somewhat handle early-season Trek nonsense if there's stuff actually going on—Crusher and Picard making drunken googly eyes in "Naked Now," bimbos and himbos running around…

Getting back to alurin's comment about whether transportation is a productive concept for the show, I think the approach Trek should have taken was the one taken by—Q forgive me—Galaxy Quest. Yes, you can have transportation, but only in emergencies, it can only be used by hyper-trained personnel, and there's an…

Patton Oswalt
OK, so this is being posted a solid three weeks after the column came out and no one will ever, ever see it, but the record MUST show that in 2004 Patton Oswalt—on this very site!—listed a series of 16 things he would rather vote for than G.W. Bush. The final punchline was "John Kerry", but also making…

I've always enjoyed "The Royale," which has a lot of hamminess but also comes up with a pretty sweet explanation for that hamminess—and illustration of the cost of that hamminess if you happened to be imprisoned in it.

I'm with Cattivo: "Naked Now" is awful, but at least it's awful in a not-boring, kinda-goofy, McFadden's hot/Data's drunk/whoa-they-had-no-handle-on-these-characters-at-this-point kind of way. "Code of Honor" just bores me to tears.

Sirtis is, unfortunately, not a great actor for all (the episodes) we know. Her character was balls, true, but I never thought she brought a thing to it. Maybe a little, in the final couple of seasons when she gets a real uniform and hooks up with Worf, but I'd rank her acting dead last amongst the TNG crew.

The best part of that callback is that Riker doesn't even say "Minuet" when he sees her on the fake video screen—he says "Min." As, like, a pet name. For the fake hottie from the holodeck. Who, apparently, he's been carrying a torch for for years. To the point where he's given her a pet name.

Peter's Mom
We don't have any confirmation what happens to her, do we? I'd assumed she'd died of something somewhere along the line after raising Peter and speaking Greek to him, but has the series ever definitively explained why she's not around in present-day Earth-1?

"Quirk" that includes the best dialogue of the decade, page after page of legitimately laugh-out-loud humor (humour?), and Jehovah's Witnesses. Oh, and the phrase "Fuck you, you fucking fuck."

The Gaslight Anthem, please
Sorry, but all the daring artistic statements and post-rock avant-garde arrangements you like don't take half the balls of standing up in this critical day and age and writing achingly earnest, heartbreakingly sweet songs about throwing rocks against your girls' window, the time your best…

Junior Boys
"In the Morning" alone is reason enough, but there are others. Surprised they haven't been mentioned more often in this thread.

Honestly, going by the standards hip-hop dancers have set for hip-hop on this show, Kevin wasn't even worth the fawning over the judges gave him. He's good, but you compare what he did in that routine to what the Twitches, Hoks, Joshuas, etc. have pulled off when they did hip-hop—not to mention Legacy Week 1—and it's…

Tyce had several good routines last season, actually—his "Send in the Clowns" group number, the season finale number for Kayla-Brandon, the "Hair" routine for Melissa and somebody I forget (Jason?). And Cancer Dance. It was his best run of form in a while.