Ah, I'm sure you're right. Still, I'm curious to find out what's been going on in Jack's head.

Uh, no, it IS a typo.

If Jack is in on Will's scheme, the phone call may not even have happened…

-_-

How do we know Kendal DIDN'T shoot Art? In which case Raylan's gambit will backfire horribly, sending the kid away for 40 years instead of 3.

I'm biased because I know the guy, but it pains me when overviews of Portlandia fail to mention co-creator and director Jonathan Krisel. The show is (believe me) every bit as much his vision as it is Armisen's and Brownstein's.

Interesting as well to consider it in light of the striking similarities between the 1975 Tom Baker serial "Ark in Space" (which also has a shaft-crawling sequence!) and the first Alien (1979).

I think the first episode's flash-forward montage ruined this episode for me a bit. Much as I enjoyed some of the dialogue (Is "chinese-y" an insult, Ron? "Not to a Chinaman!") it felt like we were killing in time in a Tunt Mansion bottle-episode while they finish drawing backgrounds for the more exotic locales.…

Re: Special effects, the old series has a kind of teleplay-like quality, which I think makes the shoddy effects much more forgivable. Often, they're almost more like signifiers for special effects than anything really convincing in themselves. The new series (increasingly as it goes on) is aiming for a more seamless,…

I think there's definitely an element of "science-is-the-new-magic" for Leela, but I also think that's a legitimate first step for converting to a more rational worldview — being with the Doctor, she's seen what science can DO, and it far exceeds the supposed effects of magic she's witnessed. Perhaps she doesn't…

I picked up the notion somewhere that diet pills from the 50s and 60s basically WERE speed.

The end of the explanation scene (watch it again) casts doubt on whether Sherlock is really telling the truth, and suggests he is possibly just screwing with the Holmes-truther. To me it seemed deliberately ambiguous.

Yes, I understand that. But whether it will change hands and whether it would benefit from changing hands are two entirely different things.

I don't think they're charlatans, but any given writer only has so many ideas. And for me, after watching the full run (to-date) of Moffat's Doctor Who and the first two Sherlock seasons, their handling of characters begins to feel wearyingly similar. I wouldn't mind at all if either or both were handed off to…

Without really knowing what I'm talking about, I wonder if the emphasis on home life is simply an aspect of modern British TV that the NuWho naturally picks up? It seems to me (again, limited sampling) that a lot of shows from the UK are more realistically grounded in the characters' day-to-day lives than the American…

Me too.

The sequence in which Ian climbs into and controls the empty Dalek shell brought home the full horror of the Dalek concept for me. The fact that a full-size human can both fit within and operate a Dalek casing fills me with claustrophobic terror. And yet, this is essentially how Daleks began — as humanoids squeezed…

No… I'm pretty sure it was an intentionally humorous bit of misdirection.

I've finally started catching up on these after growing up with reruns of Doctors 4 & 5, and I think they made a number of smart decisions wrt building on top of the older series without being overly-reverential. But you know what was flat out brilliant? Keeping the right SOUNDS. Not just the theme (even though it's…

I don't think it's well-explained, and maybe not well thought out. As I said in the reply to Alasdair above, were it not for the episodes title I might suspect the link between the Jagafress and Daleks' was decided between this episode and the finale. As it is, I wonder if the decision to fit the story into the arc…