Ironically enough, the album actually consists of songs Sia wrote for other artists but which were then rejected. That is why it's called This Is Acting, in Sia's words because "they are songs I was writing for other people, so I didn’t go in thinking ‘this is something I would say’. It’s more like play-acting." It's…

I love those tracks too and agree. I get the feeling this show mostly uses songs as elevator music, just throwing whatever melody sounds like it fits the moment under there without actually giving the lyrics any room to breathe or to complement the scene. I mean, we only ever hear two or three lines of every song,…

While I am generally in favor of condensed storytelling, I think the show could've used somewhat more time to establish the characters' place and trajectory for the season in this first episode. Now the sheer amount of beats the writers wanted to hit led to mostly caricatural storytelling (of which the sniveling…

I caught this episode on Hulu, and right after the face-slicing was done it cut to a lasagna commercial. Now I think I'll never be able to eat lasagna again.

This episode had so many good and earned laughs, like the going down line, Alicia just hanging up on Grace and her just casually namedropping Al Qaeda in the middle of a phone conversation. I was on the floor with that last one, Julianna Margulies is sheer awesomeness!

What did you think of the line before the loins one ("He's so bang-tastic, I want to suck him like a slushee!")? This show has child actors saying the weirdest things.

I thought it was fairly interesting they presented the pairing as an ideal outcome in Alicia's head. Choice is often seen as one of our greatest freedoms, and if a choice isn't made directly, we at least would like to have an option to make it at a later date. I think that if that possibility is taken away, it…

Part of why this episode worked so well for me was that the flashbacks felt a like pre-pilot story. I found it admirable they took us on a guided tour through Alicia's life and heavily reflected on her (inner) development over the years, as truly self-reflective characters are scarce these days. It's interesting that…

After the last couple of episodes I was afraid this would turn into one big backstabbing fest, but this episode pleasently surprised me in that it made the characters more nuanced again (for example, Alicia seemed more doubting and uncertain while still succesfully running her own firm).

It's awesome you mentioned The Wave—we also read that in school, but I totally forgot about it. Scenarios like this also bring the Stanford Prison Experiment to mind, but I wouldn't even want to see how that would play out at Greendale.

I loved that the elderly lady in the elevator was credited as "Oldest Woman In The World".

Or a spin-off about Bear in which it is revealed that he receives collar tags from the machine and is determined to save other pets.