To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated the "aphasia" gimmick… until I read UMD's theory about it being a harbinger of universes merging. That idea, I like.

1000 quatloos on the genie theory!
That is the first logically-sufficient explanation for Lost-as-a-whole that I have heard proposed, that isn't Battlestar-Galactica-style religious to the point of revulsion.

Jim Aparo will always be my favorite. He was the first comics artist I knew by name and could recognize by style. His work on "The Brave and the Bold" gave him to opportunity to portray just about every character in the DC universe, and his take on each of them was purely his own. (I think he drew Etrigan the Demon…

Speaking of that broken ladder…
How is Sawyer supposed to get back up the cliff with that one ladder missing? Is UnLocke going to go Smokey and "gently" carry him back up?

Noel — Recap still says "The Rules state that he can't kill Jacob", not "can't kill 'him'".

@Gooseberry Johnson - Thanks for the Lawnmower Man reference! What a craptastic film. I hope Brett Leonard still gets razzed at his family reunions about that.

"There's one freakin' timeline." Not in a time-travel story; time travel necessarily implies multiple parallel realities. (Or eigenstates, if you prefer.) Time travel with "one freakin' timeline" would result in logical paradoxes, like going back in time and killing your grandfather in his crib… but then you'd never…

"Seriously, however, giving your magic a gloss of technobabble doesn't make it any less magical. They're still dragons."

Magic was retconned out of the Star Wars universe when they introduced "midichlorians". ("Midichlorians" always sounded to me like they should be the inhabitants of some obscure little province in Italy… between Nordichloria and Sudichloria perhaps.)

I'm pretty sure the Laughing Man was behind it.

what's blue and drops dead
in the shower? can you guess?
brittany smurfy!

@alurin — "Someone has never read Anne McCaffrey." And I'm pretty sure it's you. McCaffrey's dragons aren't magic; they're just lifeforms native to Pern that happen to look like mythical Earth dragons. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… )

I was right.

Strunk and White asked me to tell you
"[T]he show's showrunners" is unnecessarily redundant. (You see what I did there?) "The show's runners" would be enough; and "the showrunners" is also adequate (since it's clear what show you're talking about).

Someone can't subtract 1979 from 1986? WHAT A COUNTRY!!@!

I'm enjoying the write-ups so much, I'm afraid to actually watch the show for fear it might not measure up.

@Douchenozzle — FTW!

@JammerJim — You're in luck; Wil Wheaton is still cranking out his TNG reminiscences, but in convenient take-along book form: http://www.wilwheatonbooks…. Volume Two wraps up the rest of TNG Season 1. No word on whether he'll go all the way to "Journey's End," Wesley's last appearance in the TV series.

Can't it be *both*?

I think those categories are too broad to be meaningful… What SF element wouldn't count as "something strange" when you place it in our present-day world? That covers anything from "Fringe" to "The Six-Million-Dollar Man" to "My Favorite Martian" — unless you meant to restrict it to the "Freak of the Week" genre.