I thought he was also kind of reluctant to pass it over to Lou ("you better be as good as you say you are")  - I totally get it about Leon. I don't think Finch would want to spot him a nickel.

Disclaimer: I missed the first 10 minutes of this episode.

Unrelated to this specific episode, but it's a little hard to believe that we're already 2/3 of the way through this season. Has CougarTown been picked up for a season 5 as part of the initial TBS deal? Wikipedia shows a lot of audience erosion in recent weeks, and I'm not sure how important that is to renewal…

Unfortunately, this was a pretty weak episode especially once you compare it against Tearjerker. This one just wasn't as fun - the call backs and continuity was ok, but Black Villain didn't even seem as crazy as Principal Lewis.

How could Ms. Cantwell be a bookworm and not realize that Lisa is the same? Big plot hole. Also, total waste of Tina Fey's voice talents - don't they want their guest voices to be funny?

@avclub-eac75edc18b8546c46893fe4b75ab995:disqus @avclub-7aee1b75b527e215f31e20a5c4e7a768:disqus That's pretty reassuring - it's hard to believe that they would have produced that many episodes already. 
If the rumours about season 25 as being the end for The Simpsons, then a tied demo for a fresh episode of The…

@avclub-a17bf70c7cfc521094e5cf8bc02bc04a:disqus @avclub-bc011d00bcc91da3b8b3cb43ca0bcd73:disqus I should have guessed. He's a perfect choice - he's basically a villain 90% of the time anyways, so I look forward to seeing how far over the top he goes.

That's true - I just don't want them to get any ideas to put some new program in the primetime and exile BB or AD to 7:30 pm or, worse yet, Futurama it. More for BB, which I fear doesn't have enough buzz to survive an extended hiatus.

My displeasure isn't with The Cleveland Show as much as it is with Fox and the erratic scheduling. Also they cancelled one of their new sitcoms, which doesn't help.

Sweet. Can't believe they can say "Sexpun T'come" at 7:30 pm. 
I hope that Black Villain is another Rogers persona - they actually covered almost all of the main characters in the first part.

Why all the experiments? Isn't it obvious? If you put it between The Simpsons and Family Guy, some people won't bother changing the channel so you get a bump at 8:30.

Root is definitely more informed about what is going on compared to Linus, and it certainly seems unlikely that Root is being manipulated in the same way Linus was "manipulated" by Jacob. Some of the parallels about the similarities in the roles, goals and methodologies are interesting.

@avclub-d72f705337e5adcf7e33ec0381c5f5b2:disqus Thanks - I'm just glad to have a chance to talk about the show - it's got a great mythology even though no one who I know really watches it. The discussion this week has been really great.

That's a good question - I don't think it has been answered directly in the show. A lot of this discussion is comprised of assumptions based on the dialogue and plot. I think it's an answer we will get in the future, but all we've seen is bits and pieces through flashback. We know we get to a point where the machine…

Did we actually see that or was it implied? If it was implied, that would be some pretty weak editing.

re: Nathan. I'm pretty sure that I've heard Finch say that he was the one who programmed the machine to give him the numbers. I guess the implication is that Finch added that after the machine went live, so he had to use Nathan's backdoor to add that. It's not 100% clear exactly the order of events - we don't know if…

@avclub-ffc3460c431f41282064dc7acdd70797:disqus There's also the genius-coder high-school student from earlier this season who has Harold's number - he's another candidate to help. I'm not sure if Root needs a redemptive arc in the same manner that I don't think Elias needs to be a good guy. Our heroes need the…

That's a great analysis of Ben's Lost arc - thanks for posting that.

I think the glitches are manifested through the numbers which look like junk on the screen. It looked like the blue and grey monitors were just feeds that were down cause of the storm - I think different video systems have different colour outputs when they have no signal; what was interesting was that you could see a…

They don't show up together in the field as much in the first season, but they still have some great bantering. Bringing Harold out in the field along with having Carter and Fusco on the team was one of the great improvements in the show.