PoI can do a *lot* better than this episode. Frankly, I found it to be a solid "B", maybe B-. Even Elias has had better episodes, his introductory one for instance.

There was a North American anime localizer & distributor, back in the days of single-disc releases of TV series, who for a period of about four-five years, every other release had at least one disc named "Secrets and Lies", usually the fifth disc out of six. Some cliches are just irresistible to production teams in a…

Everybody wants to write a Stringer Bell, but he wasn't prone to show-piece histrionic speeches, and show-don't-tell is really hard to pull off in a network-TV format, especially when you're mixing it up with paranoid SF and action-shootout antics and so forth. The interesting thing about Stringer was that he wasn't…

I love that movie, it was such a great, conflicted answer to the pious bullshit of Wall Street.

No, but I did suspect that the *juror* was having a stroke.

She finally fell in with a man with the most astonishing talent for turning gold into lead. She couldn’t use a word like love, or trust, or honor in his presence without eliciting clever mockery. Pornography was permitted; poetry, never.

The candle was one cliche too many, and then the guy with the guitar starts up, and they've crossed the line twice. I liked it, and generally I'm not a fan of the whole Finn-Alicia thing.

I think the point was to raise the stakes on her "joke" so as to make it more plausible and justified that people would be taking offense. They may or may not have been deliberately moving to make her look terrible. I certainly hope that was the intent.

Marvel street-level superhero, occasionally goes by "Power Man", hung out with Iron Fist. Sort of like Shaft with super-hard skin and… I forget what else. I don't know, Mike Colter is a bit polished for Luke Cage, at least the version I'm familiar with. Basically Cage is Marvel's somewhat juvenile answer to…

Also the exact same age as Bob Dylan. I *think* I was joking. Sometimes it's hard to tell around Neil Diamond, he's got this irony inversion field that makes jokes turn sincere halfway through their delivery.

They've made Bishop Stringer plus Davis plus The Greek. He's verging on the Marty Stu of respectable crime lords. I think he already met his Omar and Brother Mouzone, and they're rotting in unmarked graves two plots over from Kalinda's ex in the potter's field some Outfit entrepreneur runs inside a cornfield on a…

I don't know what it says about my state of mind that I followed all of that from the second or third malapropism - although I'm still not clear on this "freelance investigator" business, isn't Kalinda a salaried employee of the firm? And yet, the details of the B plot malarkey just sailed right past me.

Hey, no hating on Neil. Greatest songwriter of his generation. "Song, sung, blue, everybody knows one.."

Ehh, I'm feeling like they're straddling at this point. Bishop would have gotten eaten alive in Simon's Baltimore. He's too… comfortable. He's starting to feel like something out of Miami Vice. European operations, really?

Wait, I missed that - the note was never delivered? What? And Grace showed it around? I loathe this plot, it doesn't make any damn sense, it makes me feel like the dismissed juror,rearranging things in my head and trying to make sense of the arrant gibberish I'm hearing.

Wow, that Alicia B plot really took me out of the show. At this point, I'd vote for Prady. I try and try to resist this whole "Alicia privilege" thing, but *anybody else* would get raked over the coals for doing something like that. Adults do not threaten passing acquaintances - did the threatened teacher even get…

God, how bad have movie theatres gotten in Blue State areas? It's still in the ~10 dollar range up here in Red State Land.

1/2 for the lulz, 1/2 brainwashing? He's a massive control freak, so a broken-down Adalind would be from his viewpoint more reliable and trustworthy. She's been running rings around him for months, after all. His amore propre probably demanded some degradation and grovelling, titled noble shit that he is.

It looked like they were staging out of the carriage house, but weren't living there. Presumably they had one or more pied a terre somewhere nearby.

In this context, the writers. I forget where the phrase came from originally, but it used to be a shorthand among Buffy fandom in the old TWoP days, and probably elsewhere as well.