It's simultaneously something that's very in character and something we haven't seen all that often.

I know exactly what you mean about this episode. I got to the end and thought, "Well that was really great…Time to do something else now."

I mean, Arcade Fire obviously owes a debt to U2's earnestness and stadium-sized anthems. But their music has never sound that similar in its instrumentation. But "California" has some instrumentation that sounds much more like Arcade Fire than anything U2 have done in the past.

I dunno. The stadium fillers off the last few albums have felt so calculated and lifeless that I'm glad this album has less of them. (Although "Every Breaking Wave" wants to be a stadium filler but doesn't achieve it.)

I don't hear "No Cars Go" specifically, but it's definitely cribbing from Arcade Fire in general.

I had the misfortune getting really into U2 as they started to decline in the 2000s. So the more that got into them, the less interesting their current material was getting. So listening to the podcast now, it reminds me how much I used to love those first two decades of music.

I love how Scott and Scott have done more to bring respectability to U2 than anything the band has done in a decade.

Funnily enough, the only one that actually looks at all well framed is the Gorn one, which is also the most badly photoshopped.

This is gonna be a 21st century Batman and Robin. I can feel it in my bones.

It came up organically!

I don't know if it was the rush to talk about "Tracy Does Conan", but I'm still kind of surprised how little of the "Jack Meets Dennis" review is given over to the Beeper King himself. Dennis is one of the great recurring 30 Rock characters. Just a brilliant meeting of writing and performance.

Dress to Kill is probably my favorite stand-up film ever. It's also the only one that has an intro that I don't want to skip through. I could watch a whole hour of Eddie Izzard riffing over random documentary b-roll.

Honestly, the Doctor's whole modus operandi is self-important. He lands on worlds and fucks with them because he knows best. Just the whole idea of it reeks of self-importance.

I never found "The Big Bang" two-parter hard to follow in the slightest. It all made sense to me the first time through and it still does.

True, but most of the time (especially at the Pandorica) Eleven is trading off his name and past deeds when he does that in order to puff himself up to seem more intimidating. 3 or 9 wouldn't really need to do that.

"Grumpy and self-important" is a description that I would apply to many incarnations of the Doctor.

I think his performance is too iconic to mimic directly, though I'm sure that it was influential in more subtle ways. I don't know if it was intentional, but David Tennant's "Well…" owes a lot to Tom Baker's "Well…". In fact, for all the talk of Tennant borrowing from Peter Davison, I see a fair amount of Tom Baker's…

Definitely. I think one of the reasons that Tom Baker's portrayal feels so definitive is that he's able to embody both sides of the character.

Yeah, the spoon thing seemed very Eleven, as does the musing on the Doctor as a story and ideal.

Yeah, both Doctors seem to have the least use for mannered eccentricities and instead run on determination and imperiousness. The only difference is that 12 is 3 with a shot of Johnny Rotten.