I agree. Slab Slapstone is top 3%.

That's an actual Sliders reference, you loser.

I love, love, loved the shape of the Annie/Hickey story - whatever about the pacing in the early stages, it built gags beautifully and was one of the most elegant stories the show has told.

'Aon Rud Pearsanta' means 'One Personal Thing'. So it's both misspelt and the opposite of what they think.

I think that Gregg's performance is super awkward; there are chunks of dialogue he's totally bested by. Partly his performance seems like an approximation of the kind of performance Whedon shows ask for rather than one that is in sympathy with the material and partly he seems bamboozled by how terrible some of his…

Thanks txtphile; that was proper kind of you.

May I set a challenge? I'd like to get into this but am a bit stingy with my time. What episodes are necessary viewing before every episode gets good? Also, to add to it, I'd like to cap the amount of necessary episodes that aren't strictly good at three.

I really enjoy Holmes' writing on Survivor (and generally - she's thoughtful and an excellent prose stylist) but her account of the events surrounding the duel gives the most thesis-supporting interpretation of what happened manageable and exposes a blind spot that's been present in her analysis from back in the day:…

I know this makes me sound like a crazy bag lady but: Cassandra would have won Fiji had it been a a two person jury as the players had expected up until the very end.

I thought the monkey bit was the laziest the writing on this show has gotten and that is saying something.

I think Chloe Bennet is giving the best performance of the lot; she's trying to smother the worst of the dialogue by underplaying it and wading through the rest of by bringing some physical detail to the performance so she vaguely resembles a person who might have thoughts and articulate them in the real world.

You're dead right, Outis. Candice would have had John and not another sinner if she were to return; Brad would definitely lose John as a player that considered him his closest ally were he to be reunited with Candice but Candice would have had no prior arrangements or relationships to pull John away from Brad with.…

The 'original' was meant to refer to both the original Firefly pilot 'Serenity' and the original Dollhouse pilot 'Echo' - I thought that Dollhouse was a bust from pillar to post but the scrapped pilot for it was elegant, perfectly paced to dole out the implications of the premise and pitched itself with a…

> Mo and Jed wrote Epitaph One and Belonging, two of the best Dollhouse episodes.

I don't think pilots are uneven by nature; there's plenty of examples that aren't. One thing common to great pilots is that they understand the advantages of having an audience ignorant of the characters and world being presented them and exploiting that ignorance for kicks; the one thing common to bad pilots is that…

I think it's one of the great straight-ahead pop rock records and I think Nina Gordon was a master of the form. A great grasp of dramatic structure, a very deliberate hand with unshowy oddness and a killer ear for melodies, both.

John looks like Jonathan Penner must have 15 years ago which is super odd given all the verb/noun weaselling betwwen Candice and Jonathan back in Cook Islands.

Yeah, I had the (very possibly wrong) impression Candice has a life that Survivor occasionally intrudes on rather than a life built around her appearances on it.

His contribution to Ciera and Vytas's conversations makes me think his social game, which he explicitly highlighted, is going to take him far.

Candice was on HvV too; this is her third go round.