Betty has been absent for much of the current season, which makes me wonder if Weiner is slowly easing her out the door. I like Betty well enough—the episode where she wears the same dress for two days straight, looking like a sad clown, is one of my favorite sequences in the entire series—but at this point, she's…

I hate to say it, but for me, it's Sue Sylvester. I love the idea of the character and I love Jane Lynch, but the writers seem to have run out of ideas about what to do with her, to the point where I cringe a little whenever I see a Will/Sue scene coming up. It isn't too late to fix this, but they really need to…

Frankly, I'm not sure I would have recognized it either (although I probably saw that Murphy Brown episode back in the day) if the producers hadn't mentioned the reference, and made fun of how dated it was, in a commentary track. I believe that Mike Reiss says something like, "At the time, nobody thought The Simpsons…

Yep. The script even describes him as "a Behemoth from the Planet Harryhausen." I also believe that they intentionally made the effects look more like stop motion animation in post-production—in fact, it's really just a guy in a suit.

The episode is also a little vague as to the purpose of the government abductions, unless they're simply intended to perpetuate the idea that aliens exist. Lt. Schaffer himself dodges the question as to what the abductions are really about, saying that he's "just the pilot."

There's also the Murphy Brown joke at the end of that same episode, when Selma sings "You Are So Beautiful to Me" to her pet iguana. I don't think anyone born after 1990 has ANY idea what the hell is going on there.

@Todd: You really need to check it out. It's certainly his most emotionally detached script, but as a showcase for the man's ingenuity and intelligence, it's easily the equal of anything he's ever done.

Having just watched "Jose Chung" again, I agree that it doesn't have the same emotional punch as "Clyde Bruckman," but it's so beautifully written and structured that it vibrates with the same kind of intensity. The density of references, the visual and verbal "rhyming" of successive scenes ("It all seems so crazy."…

Well, there's always this one:

In-jokes
Darin Morgan's scripts are always full of inside jokes, but "Jose Chung" probably has more per minute than any other. Some of them are pretty well known by now ("Klass County" is a nod to UFO researcher Philip J. Klass, and Lord Kinbote is named after a character in "Pale Fire"), but there's another one that…

The Simpsons episode aired six months after "Jose Chung."

"See, normally, if two strangers drive into my garage, I tell them to get the hell off the property. But this time, I didn't!"

Chung himself
Also, in case it isn't obvious from any of the above, god bless Charles Nelson Reilly! He was so brilliant in this episode and "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" that I made a point of tracking down his old Match Game clips on YouTube, and even caught a showing of his one-man autobiographical documentary in…

When this episode first aired, some of my friends thought it was "dumb, like the Power Rangers" because Lord Kinbote was such an unconvincing special effect. I'm not sure I was ever able to convince them that this was intentional.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if the episode might have been partially inspired by "The Lottery in Babylon" by Jorge Luis Borges, in which a lucky draw brings wealth, "an unlucky draw: mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself."

"Roky! Roky! Be thou not afraid. No harm will come unto thee."

Yellow peril
I'm not sure I agree that "Hell Money" flirts with racism. (I'm half Chinese, by the way.) Yes, most of the Chinese characters here represent the weird, vaguely sinister Other, but it's also true that every other X-Files casefile seems to take place in some kind of creepy, closeted community, and I don't…

I think "Hell Money" is underappreciated mostly in that it doesn't suck and isn't utterly forgettable, which automatically puts it in the top half of all X-Files episodes. (And I'm a huge fan of the show.)

"In our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all alone."
I love how Mark Snow closes the episode, after Jose Chung's final monologue, with a few haunting notes from the X-Files theme. It's the first time, I believe, that the main theme was ever used as incidental music, and I can't even think about it today…

I love how Wikipedia notes that the song is properly entitled "Ewok Celebration," although it is also known as "Yub Nub," "from its incipit."