It's twelve different women! One of each star sign.

I guess my point is that there are certain things that need to be in a continuity bible, and some that do not, and I use real life as a barometer for what is a legitimate continuity complaint and what is just wonk.

Sometimes I feel really glad there's no one in real life playing the role of continuity wonk. I can say "I don't really like Ethiopian food" without someone saying "Um, don't you remember in Season 2 episode 16 when you said you wanted to go out for Ethiopian food?" or I can shake hands with someone I'm introduced to…

Agreed, I thought that was the one big misstep of the episode. Moody remakes of perky pop songs are really overdone.

So… I'll say something that may be completely misread. I'm a Zen Buddhist, and I'm not saying this to get any kind of cred or to seem cool or speak with any kind of authority on the religion/philosophy of Zen.

HBO is obviously a business, and they make their decisions to ax shows based on their strategies for making money. I can't really fault that. And if their decision to stop production on one show means they have more resources to start new shows, it's possibly artistically for the best as well.

I'm not sure if you meant this comment to be read with Minnesotan musical elongated vowels, but that's how I heard it in my head.

I think the only flaw in using this as the intro episode is that it was funniest to me in the evolution from previous episodes. The tiny door/alligator seemed to start as a retread of the "rebate" scheme—but then it came back again in the insanity defense, which to me was funnier as a new twist on the previous joke.

Was that the complete answer? I'm still trying to figure out what the clue was. Was it just "The contraction in French for à plus le"?

As advice goes, that's not such a bad position to be in. I can think of a certain friend I often go to for help—not because he knows everything, but because he always knows someone who does. And making an entertaining column week after week calls for some variety.

"The FBI's counterproductive training program" is the best description of this show.

A few weeks after I've seen a movie with either Priyanka Chopra or Deepika Padukone in it, I can't remember which of the two it was. I'm not sure why—they don't look exactly alike or anything, just kind of vaguely similar, usually with similar hair and styling. But if I think about it, usually if the movie was…

"Now you're my friend, and friends share fries!"

Bollywood dance number in a police station? The adaptation of Othello has it. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

I think last season there were vastly different interpretations and massive disagreements over the meaning of The Departure, from people who thought it signified a bleak and tragic loss, to those who thought the Departed were heroes, to those who thought it correlated with eating too much sugary cereal. If the people…

Perhaps the distinction people are missing is two slightly different definitions of "mystery," which we could clarify by saying one kind of mystery is an enigma, and another kind is a "whodunit." Sure, it would be bad storytelling to write a whodunit where the answer is "I don't know, but it probably wasn't Richard…

It's a stark contrast to the usual short threads!

I think that's a genre expectation, and Lindelof and Perrotta want to subvert that. The logic—that if this takes place in a world where X is possible, then Y is also possible—is kind of an arbitrary expectation we have for genre piece but not really a real-world issue. No one in the real world has to believe the…

I'm assuming from the deleted comments someone was contentious about calling them "Taiwanese." As I understand it, the best analogy for this is Korea. There are two countries with "Korea" in their full name, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or South Korea and North Korea. People…

From what I read, there were lots of conditions to the "Guaranteed Affair"—they needed to show they were sending a certain amount of messages and replying, spending a certain amount of time viewing profiles, things like that. Considering that people were on the site for clandestine reasons, it seems unlikely that…