I enjoyed seeing Dwight make Jim sweat in this one.  While Jim obviously wasn't going to get fired, it was fun that thanks to his own actions, Dwight had him on the hook for most of the episode.  It makes their dynamic a little more interesting.

Another complication in the character of the leads - one that makes them more interesting - is their relative affability.  Brother Justin can be forbidding in his sternness, but overall he appears as a warm and welcoming man.  To most, anyway.

All of that does pretty much square with Samson's monologue at the beginning of "Milfay".  In a few years the land of mysterious frontiers will be gone, the stressed-out nuclear superpower arrived.

Palance, man.

Hey if Harvey Pekar is hoisting a gun, I'm not getting in his way.

And they're all delicious!

The show does seem to have found its footing after a couple of really off years.  Tonight's episode was a little too much the Adams hoping and caring hour, and Annable isn't quite crazed enough to make the character's optimism entertaining.  Still, she's less annoying than Thirteen (usually) was, and House's lecture…

Downtown Abby?  Isn't that the Sesame Street spinoff where Abby Cadabby is a tough-as-nails police sergeant?  I'd actually heard good things about it.

I liked Homer telling the Persians, "When people ask who swindled you, say 'the Christians'.  Remember that name."

Just think of the episode as Jeremy Irons putting a new set of tires on his car.

Quite right.  Serling pitched it as a sitcom and filmed a pilot.  When the network rejected it he folded into the TZ.  As things turned out we basically just remember White as the Maytag repairman.

I have to wonder how Victoria West thought things would go down when she got to her lawyer's office.

*cough* Kevin James *cough*

The passage of time and evolution of social mores has given this one a different feel.  His initial choice of perfect mate is a perpetually coked out drag queen, but with genuine lady parts.  Then he decides he'd rather have a domestic sex slave.  And the fact that he can't score with either one outside his own rather…

Yeah, and they were both in the original cast of Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight" too.

I thought of that too.  "The Ghost Network."  Fringe likes to do these little callbacks - and big callbacks - so I wouldn't be too surprised if the parallel were intentional.

She was so sweet it was hard to believe she was a teenager.  In retrospect that was probably an omen of something too.

Well she could have copied that from last night's 30 Rock.

I'm pretty sure there wasn't supposed to be romantic chemistry between Sisko and Dax.  She was his mentor in another body.  The whole thing would be too weird for him.

Everyone hated the Cardassians.  That was one of the great running themes.  Their history with other races was so fucked up that even decent representatives of the race were pariahs.