Back during the GW Bush administration, I remember a lot of my liberal friends watching The West Wing and wistfully musing about how great it would be if Martin Sheen really was the president. I'd usually respond that he was — it was just that it was The Dead Zone's Martin Sheen instead.

I always point to this film as the one where Cronenberg really found his voice as a filmmaker. He'd always been a good, idiosyncratic writer with interesting ideas and a good eye for weird set-pieces, but this is where it finally all came together for him. If I were teaching a class on film directing, I'd seriously…

It said "Corwin" on the slate at the beginning of the interview. Corman would have been well into his directing career already at this point (in fact, he made Little Shop of Horrors the same year this episode takes place).

Not to mention the title's a reference to a movie about a sex doll. Truly we live in an age of wonders.

I dunno if it's specifically a Dollhouse ref: those are the NATO Phonetic Alphabet radio code words (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie = A, B, C, etc.) for the letters S and V, which is something the character would plausibly be using anyway. Whedon had already mentioned that the Dolls' code names were all taken from that…

"Forget about it, Jake, it's The Dome."

I mostly spent the first fifteen minutes or so thinking "I couldn't have been that drunk when I watched last season's finale, could I?

Also, houses that are constructed in some arcane way that's designed to call forth supernatural or extradimensional entities, such as H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House" or Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Before I Fall is pretty good. If you were to boil it down to a movie pitch, it's basically Mean Girls meets Groundhog Day.

Well, Family Guy did end once. They just forgot the stake through its heart when they buried it.

Upvoted, at least in part, for "lumberjacked."

I'm hoping that our airborne Robin Hoods' nemesis will turn out to be Pan Am's Kate Cameron: Sky Spy!, myself.

I think it says something about the writers' confidence — given that the show is centered around two manifestly horrible people, the easy thing would be to make those around them even worse in order to make the leads seem more sympathetic by comparison, but the show takes the opposite tack and still makes us feel for…

I loved the half-assedness of Russ and Lina's costumes (to the extent they can even be called that) at the end; it really nailed the sense that, yeah, it's annoying and they're only doing it for the kids, but they're still into the idea.

I always love how you can tell immediately when a film or tv show is set in New York but shot in LA because of the wine and liquor being sold in supermarkets and convenience stores. Hollywood's set dressers must either not get out of town much or they routinely throw great parties after shoots.

She's certainly intrigued by him. That sort of half-smile she gave at the end of the episode as Thackery got into his cab to head off to the opium den as if to say, "I've got your number now!" before pedaling off in the opposite direction was one of the few clearly readable expressions she's given thus far in…

It's time to fight back! Ben Affleck plays Jacques Brel! Adam Sandler IS George Formby!

Yeah, who'd have thought a movie about a guy with a Harry Reems moustache jerking off to his iPhone would turn out to be a better romantic comedy than anything Gerard Butler or Katherine Heigl has ever done?

In other words, if someone 30 years ago had said DeNiro would one day be the American Laurence Olivier, they'd have been right — just not in the way they were probably thinking.

Could be all his later directors just chose the wrong performance The odds are agains tossing a coin and getting ten heads in a row, but it isn't impossible.