Yeah, I guess Sweeney brings out the judgmental postmodern Puritan in a lot of reviewers. That's what he's for, after all - the flamboyant lightning-rod that distracts from whatever else is actually going on. I'm surprised people haven't started using him and his parties to get up to all sorts of boring, sordid…

And he's a *good* antagonist. His version of Prolethianism has some… intellectual weight to it, he's less of a hur-hur-hur religious nutjob stereotype, and he's actually capable of holding up his end of the debate with the Neolutionists. Good villains are the heart of long-term serial fiction, and they've improved…

Not note-perfect, though. Rachel dropped a 'yeah' in conversation with Cosima where I'd expect a Sloane Ranger like her to say 'yes'. Made me wonder if it was't actually Rachel, until I realized it was just a missed step.

If we ever see the progenitor, I think they'll probably use Maslany in heavy makeup. But Kennedy could certainly be a close relative - sister, probably. They have the same coloring and similar facial structure.

Not really. This is about the time they were finding out that the new Moscow embassy building was so hopelessly, structurally riddled with listening devices that it was functionally impossible to be used as anything other than a blatant postoffice:

The sermon, the youth-group dynamics, and the image of Christ in place of a cross or crucifix places it pretty firmly on the left side of the aisle in the low-church section. Probably United Methodist, too small to be one of the non-denominational mega-churches who were just then starting to take off. The pastor's…

Every show shot in NYC this winter, I've been taken out of the story to think "damn, look at all that snow". The weather really has lurked like a photo-bombing bum stalking film crews, looking to inflate his IMDB page…

Yeah, but whose tree is it? For a few episodes, I thought they were going to tag the murders on some other set of illegals running around the Washington metro area - Israelis, or Chinese, or who knows what - but Mossad tripped right out of the narrative with their prize, and there's not enough time to introduce the…

What's great about Peter is what's wicked about the Peters of the world: we're hard-wired to admire and hero-worship these tribally-protective hardass, predatory bastards, even though what they do is intrinsically destructive to civilization and any morality above that of "me against my brother, my brother against my…

Yeah, now that I've read the article… I can't get behind it. The Wire was so ruthlessly embedded in Baltimore, between the actual filming, the appearance of actual street characters as bit players, Simon's two-decades supply of city lore as a reporter for the Sun, and the basic purpose of the series, that comparing…

They also just stone-cold dropped whoever was stalking the Florricks in the early seasons, the insinuation at the time was that it was some sort of preparatory spookery by some un-named agency.