The brilliant thing about the Fourth Doctor era was that Philip Hinchcliff and Graham Williams looked at Sarah Jane Smith and said, "Welp, that's the contemporary English girl companion done to perfection. Let's do something different now!" And we got Leela and Romana, two of the most unique and interesting…

Of course, considering this episode was based on a lingering plot point from 2010, we might we waiting a while.

Not even a little. This is a hardcore deconstruction of tropes that have been in play for the past nine years, or the past fifty, even. Without that past knowledge, it won't have nearly the same impact.

He reminded me of BOSS from the Green Death, actually.

This is America, we're not going to let a little thing like capitalization get in the way of our proud tradition of knee-jerk reactions.

I hear you. I tried and tried, but everything I came up with was just Sufi-eeble.

This just in:

Ben confides in "Locke" during the march to Jacob at the end of season five that he never expected any of the stuff that happened in the cabin to happen, he just brought Locke there to mess with him.

"After Shannon was killed, he turned away from vengeance, He turned away from violence"

Although, given how most of the characters cling to and obsess over something on the show, you can make the case that subconsciously Michael knows Walt will have a better life with his ex-girlfriend, and in that moment he recognizes it and lets his son go. It's the old Faulkner axiom about the heart in conflict with…

There are a bunch of different interpretations I've come up with:

"Everything you offer, every wonderous constructed dream palace, all turn to slips of paper in the hands of the audience."

I had another thought about this: like I said, this is Book of Job territory, where Jacob allows the Adversary to fuck with peoples' lives to settle their game.

" until Richard was all that was left, and he was a centuries-old lost child in distress, never understanding why everything always went wrong."

People complained about "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "useless flashbacks", so Lindelof and Cuse approached the network about hashing out a timetable.

I remember that interview. I love how the guy says, "Maybe I could accept it if there was some kind of Philip K Dick ending," and Lindelof looks like he just wants to strangle the guy and shout, "Did you miss the part where we stuck VALIS into the show?!"

Well, obviously it was there to mess with the audience. That's called "screenwriting".

I don't trust showrunners. I love them and their shows, but I don't trust them. Russell T Davies went on about how the Master was the worst Doctor Who villain ever, and then brought him into the show with undeniable glee.

People love to point to the sunken Island as "proof" that the writers changed their minds about what the flash-sideways world was, but there's a ton of little ironies and subtle clues, even in the premiere, foreshadowing the eventual revelation. One of my favorites is Sawyer watching Little House in "Recon", with an…

Don't worry, I've got plenty of actual, legitimate work to shirk.