The instances cited for this week didn't bother me so much because they were fairly small things. It does bug me when they lift entire sequences, such as last week's march into the woods for execution, capped off with "Danny Boy." It's times like that when it feels like the show crosses a line from winking reference…

That's right. I forgot all about that.

Did I hear correctly that Dodd told Peggy he had four daughters? Have we seen any of them besides Simone? Maybe hanging around in the kitchen or at Otto's funeral?

They managed to make Hanzee both terrifying and heartbreaking this week, the way he just wanted someone to acknowledge that he was a war hero, but no one cared, and then the perfect inflection in his voice when he says he just wanted a glass of water. He may not be a nice pperson, but damn, you felt every indignity…

To say nothing of the fact that Wolverine managed to find the only polar bear in Antarctica and killed and skinned the miraculous creature.

I want to try the Ethiopian stew from Better Off Ted. It's hearty, but simple - like all you bastards.

I somehow stumbled into a personal tradition of watching entire runs of short-lived, unloved shows on holidays. Last New Year's Day I yawned my way through That 80s Show on Hulu. Not very good, but a young, yummy Chyler Leigh makes anything watchable, and a pre-Philadelphia Glen Howerton was serviceable enough as the…

Yeah, that was a weird observation that seems to reveal more about the writer than it does the show.

This show is making great use of Wilson's ability to seem peeved by everyone else's inability to keep up while never coming across as an asshole. That's become his defining trait as an actor, to me anyhow.

Yeah, that irritated me, too. The show is perfectly able to stand on its own feet at this point, so when they stage a sequence that is so blatantly "Hey! Remember this scene from X Coen movie?" it's disappointing. The show doesn't need that crutch, and it especially didn't need to whack the audience over the head with…

Completely agree. A lesser show tackling the topics this episode did would be shrill and preachy, while this one managed the tricky alchemy of making outrage unpredictable and absolutely hilarious.

Was High Fidelity released in 2000? I was thinking 1999, but I'm probably wrong. Yeah, he was great in that.

Amen to that. I hope this gets him an avalanche of job offer. And Hell, while we're at it, let's give a shout out to Anne Cusack from the first episode, too. One scene and she turned in the best performance of any Cusack so far in the 21st Century.

Hogan is perfectly cast as Otto. He has so damn much presence that even playing semi-comatose, he commands the screen any time he's on it and you can read his entire history on his face, even though you may not know the exact details.

I can't figure out if the AV Club just doesn't employ editors for the music/books review sections at all anymore so there's no one reading these things to see if they make a lick of sense before they're posted, or if they have editors who are lazy and edit for space by removing every other sentence from well-reasoned…

I'm really puzzled by the statement that this is the "final death knell for the synth nostalgia movement." How so? Are people not going to want to use synths anymore after hearing this or something? Or is this another example of the AV Club's ever-widening and puzzling definition of synth-pop? And what does any of it…

I think it's the same principle as the myoclonic jerk - you're almost asleep and suddenly your body jerks and wakes you up, and your mind feels obligated to offer an explanation, so people generally think they're falling. I always think I'm tripping over a crack in the sidewalk on Euclid Avenue in St. Louis (it's very…

It ain't fun. I've only experienced it twice, but that's plenty. The first time it happened, my mind did the whole succubus thing and i literally could see this hideous (but bizarrely sexy) woman clinging to the ceiling staring down at me. It's very freaky how the brain supplies an appropriate hallucinatory…

The entire rabbit scene seemed to be a tip of the hat to Kumiko.

What the hell? My cable had a rerun listed for tonight, so the DVR didn't record it and I didn't watch it.