I thought Bring The Sun felt like it really wanted to be The Seer's title track, but it didn't really justify its extreme length and petered out midway through. Otherwise, I thought the album was great and better sequenced than the Seer.

I liked the first half, though the second half seems to completely put the first half's story on pause so it can open up the rest of the subplots. Awkwardness aside, I'm interested in the rest of the season.

I was hoping for a sixth season if only because I figured NBC would be willing to send them out properly rather than giving us yet another "oh shit, we may be cancelled; better make this finale open-ended yet good enough as a series finale!" That and NBC doesn't really have shit else anyway.

I put it about on par with Panda Rape. Easily near the bottom for me.

counterpoint: it wasn't even a good Simpsons episode. Pick something from the first 9 seasons and they may've been onto something.

I thought the first part of the pilot was great, but I thought the second half felt a bit too much like a hamfisted way of opening up the other subplots of the season. I'm still interested in the rest of the series though.

Not sure if low expectations and not seeing the Lego Movie pushed this episode over for me, but I thought it was pretty good. I wouldn't quite go so far as an A- as I think even during the show's extended slump it's always done concept episodes reasonably well, though this one is better than most.

I don't know if others consider it bad, but I've never really liked it. Either way, this season was probably the first (at least in a long time depending on your views of the first season) where you could easily make the case that the show was starting to put out bad episodes.

I know few who hate season 9, but it is a pretty dramatic drop in quality from season 8 with some fairly bad episodes starting to show up (Krimson Tide, Trash of the Titans, and LIsa's Sax being some) where there wasn't any previously. Overall I would say it's their last good season.

I know I'll regret it, but I'll check in.

that part of the episode is really fucking weird, but I think the rest of the episode is generally rather good. Even then, I think they worked in Michael Jackson pretty well as opposed to just doing an elaborate form of name-dropping like they've been doing for over a decade now.

I don't know all of those, but I think Principal and The Pauper is much better episode than it's given credit for; though it does set the tone for later seasons to do similar ideas but much worse.

nah, they love to hamfistedly reference the classic episodes in each new episode!

I'd be more hopeful if this was a recent problem, but it's been going on for a few years now and is honestly much worse this season than it has been in the past. I think the addition of more commercial breaks has fucked up the show's pacing a bit, but while other shows have more or less adapted to that change, I don't…

Quality aside, I think the freneticism also leads to bigger problems the show is having, mostly involving uneven pacing. It frequently feels like the writers mostly forget the plot midway through or aren't sure which subplot is the A or B plot because they're too busy throwing out jokes that may or may not work.

It started off decent, but got weird fairly quickly. I'll give the episode credit in that it didn't feel like the writers completely lost the plot midway through like they normally do, but it seems like they really didn't know how to move the plot forward once they got Bart and Homer into the stable. The gay horse…

on the DVD commentary, the writers have admitted that longer couch gag = space needing to be filled. I think there may be a bit of both where it's now used to fill time and make some kind of pretentious homage, but everytime I see the even longer than they used to be, I mostly get annoyed because I know it's used as…

so were they counting on this season being the last..? This whole season felt like it was winding down and this episode definitely felt like a series finale. I like the episode, but how far along in production were they when the renewal was announced in January?

Am I alone in liking Hannibal (the show) more than any of the movies? I like most of the movies (I didn't think Hannibal Rising was that bad.), but I've never really been that excited for any of them. I think some of it comes from Lecter being the source of many bad parodies, so Hopkins as Lecter just seems a little…

Red Dragon wasn't bad, but it felt like it was faithful to the book to a fault (tiger ball fondling), yet the fleshed out Hannibal scenes just felt really out of place and largely ridiculous. Not bad, just kind of boring.