A few episodes back, on Jimmy's first (unauthorized) visit to her
apartment, he comes across the kitty and says "She never took you back! Do you miss books?"

"It's an expanded short story" does kind of explain why the puppy takes up so much space in the trailer I saw in front of Sin City. I like puppies as much as the next guy, but he appeared so many times I kind of expected to see him billed next to Gandolfini on the poster.

Agreed! I've since caught the episode, and the guy can act. I mean, I wouldn't give him a sitcom just yet, but as a recurring foil on someone else's show or a mini-boss in some brainless action flick, you could do worse.

I feel like the show does a decent job of giving them an amount of screen time commensurate with their acting talent (although I haven't seen last night's ep yet). J.J. Watt's episode last year was a bit more than just a ten-second punchline, but he acquitted himself well, IMO.

To be honest, if you skipped that one and watched this one, you don't really know that much more than we do. The "previously on" bit showed you all the things that actually happened; the other 40 minutes of the show were spent establishing mood.

The whole cellphone conversation at Amy's office had me musing that it might be a fun parlor game to hold an ordinary conversation in portentous, vaguely menacing tones for as long as possible. Last one to crack up wins.

The sad thing about Dio is that he was, on rare occasions, capable of putting together a couplet that was pretty damned awesome. The bridge of "Holy Diver", mentioned above, begins with one example: "Between the velvet lies / There's a truth that's hard as steel." But 90+% of the rest of the lyrics are a…

The scene where Frain suddenly appears on the beach holding a sand dollar, dressed all in black, reminded me of nothing so much as…Soultaker.

I was prepared to deduct major points for Hurting Of Kitties (the US version of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo lost me, and was never going to win me back, after that) but ultimately the sheer unbelievability of the scene softened the blow.

I had exactly the same reaction when I first heard about it, and then someone said "replace 'video games' with 'golf'." And I had to concede the point. I will never understand it but that doesn't mean it's not an idea worth millions.

Photo caption: "Not a brass far'ving!"

This question was settled over a decade ago, conclusively.

You can be a sociopath without being 100% lacking in remorse and emotional attachment. It's a spectrum, like most character traits.

I agree with your reads on both Pottinger and Yewll; maybe Rowan's need for Pottinger to be hard-core bad news stems from a rush to get into the E-Rep resistance plotline (it's only going to take a maximum of two episodes to evict them, so obviously those aren't going to be episodes 8-9) and his crush on Doc Yewll…

Regardless of the end result, rich egomaniac spends millions to explore the unseen > rich egomaniac spends millions to lobby for lower taxes on himself.

I'm a sucker for the scene when Robin Williams is getting ready to go diving to commit some act of sabotage or other (that one watch on HBO was a long, long time ago) and discovers he's actually strapped helium tanks to his back.

Guest voice Alexandra Fowler as Orrhn was endearingly game in the puppety sex scenes, I thought. She had great chemistry with Hardy.

A modest proposal: stop burying these reviews on Sundays! Farscape is one of my favorite shows of all time, but I don't read AV Club on the weekend for the most part, and thus I forget about these (cogent, well-written) reviews for weeks at a time, which is robbing them of page-views and comments that are rightly…

I saw a trailer for it in front of Guardians of the Galaxy yesterday which didn't make it look like a drama at all. (Especially if, like me, you mistook Brendan Gleeson for Robbie Coltrane.)

Speaking of simplistic and inaccurate portrayals of Middle East politics, I got a chance to see 300: Rise of an Empire in the theater on Monday. I thought I recognized Ashraf Barhom as one of Eva Green's Persian generals, but the film's stylized cinematography, makeup, and hair (plus my unfamiliarity with his other…