"We're just like rats in a habitrail to them. They are conducting incredible experiments our puny little minds can't even begin to comprehend."

Haven't seen the pilot, but plan to after reading this review. Just wanted to point out one reference that jumped out at me. The episode title, "Gone in the Teeth," is from the Ezra Pound poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which is (mostly) about a civilization that the author sees as decaying and falling apart. This…

On the earnestness of TNG
I've always thought of TOS as America and TNG as the UN. TOS was much more our-way-or-the-highway and, frankly, reckless in its diplomacy, as personified by Kirk, while TNG was self-consciously multilateral and multicultural. That's one reason TNG is such a show of its time. With the cold…

Yeah, I had a feeling 10 times was an undercount, but couldn't find a video of it on youtube. It is pretty over the top.

The gleeful violence was something that kind of bothered me when I first saw the movie. It seems like Verhoeven wants to have his cake and eat it too with violence — in all of his movies, violence is very fun, almost slapstick or Looney Tunes-esque. You never really feel that people actually suffer from violence. …

Someone should write a book
about all the technical comedy things NewsRadio does so brilliantly. Your analysis of the pile-on was great — maybe you could expand it into chapter 7 in "Screwball in a Nutshell", by Paul Simms with Donna Bowman.

When the New York Times got NewsRadio so, so wrong
Thanks, Donna, for starting up with the entries again. Reading this reminded me of something the NYT published about the show a few years ago that made me very angry at the time, and since I didn't write a letter to the editor then, I'll share it with you now:

How it should have ended
Enough complaining about how it did end, let's talk about how it should have ended. My vote: Vincent eating every last person on the island in a Cujo-esque rampage. The final image: him happily wagging his tail surrounded by a field of skeletons. Oh, and a close-up on his eye closing.

An idea
What if, in the last three episodes of "Cheers", we went back in time to an ur-Cheers that existed on the shores of New England thousands of years in the past, where an ur-Sam and an ur-Diane engaged in ur-banter, which establishes ur-sexual tension and an ur-will-they-or-won't-they dynamic? We could even…

Umm… South Park _is_ important
The writers may not like it, but there are lots of people who are influenced by the show, and on important issues, too (Outpost Manbearpig, anyone?). I think the Daily Show had a similar conundrum a few years ago, and Jon Stewart said something like, "Why are you trying to hold us to…

I stopped watching …
because, and I'm not joking here, pee grosses me out. Just like it does Kyle. At a certain point I thought: "you know, seeing and thinking about pee this much is just not a rewarding experience. I think I'll watch basketball instead."

Any opinions on the Slate article?
This is not about tonight's episode specifically, but did anyone catch the Slate article on 30 Rock's supposedly conservative leanings? http://www.slate.com/id/221…

"There's no weird third thing that could happen!"

As far as being awake at 4:30, a devout Muslim _would_ be up then for morning prayers, which are usually around 4:30 a.m. A quick internet search told me that today's prayer time in DC was 4:40 a.m.

"Errand" as anti-Vietnam message
This seemed like a case where we weren't meant to empathize with Kirk at all — he was the bad guy, just as much as the Klingons. The things that normally make him so admirable — his sense of adventure, aggression, competitiveness — made him into an imperialist in this episode. …

"He tasks me … he tasks me …
But I shall have him!" There are a lot of great Moby Dick allusions in Wrath of Khan. One of my favorite parts of the movie is how they set up that Khan has been locked in a tiny room for years with only a few books to read, and his continuous reading of Moby Dick fed into his obsession…

Let's just say I disagree that the characters in the space ship are the same as the characters in the 70s — unless it's in a very oblique, metaphorical way. There was a lot made about how all the male detectives had very retrograde 70s views about all sorts of things, how they weren't too sophisticated…

Has this ever worked?
Has there ever been a "this was all a dream" ending that has been at all satisfying? Newhart I guess did an OK job, although it didn't take itself too seriously so the stakes weren't very high. This ending made me feel like they summarily shot and killed every single character one after another…

You're point about the uncertainty of the situation is well-taken, but wasn't the President considering nuking or otherwise bombing the compound? And weren't Navy Seals involved in the raid anyway? I don't want to belabor this point, but it seems like they decided to use some military force, just not very much, and…

But is this really a law enforcement capacity? A 1500-man army with biological weapons? If Canada decided to send 1500 men across the border with similar weapons, it would be lawful for the US army to shoot back, right? Starkwood is not a sovereign nation, but they're not bank robbers either.