SPOILER WARNING–DON’T LET ME RUIN THE SHOW’S ELABORATE MYTHOLOGY FOR YOU

* Weaksauce. That episode felt like a contest to see which storyline could be the most boring.

* First of all, you return from this ungodly long hiatus, and your first episode back is the school play episode? Besides feeling ridiculous in that every character is required to perform in the school play, I just sort of liked it better when they did Hair on Head of the Class.

* Age of Innocence, yes, we get it.

* I don’t care if the pretentious artsy-fartsy director character was intended as the show’s self-parody of the pretentious artsy-fartsy visual artist from earlier in the season, he was still intolerable. During that conversation at lunch I actually had a Dr. Cox from Scrubs moment where I burst out yelling “OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE MOST BORING SCENE IN THE HISTORY OF RECORDED MEDIA.” The Missus turned to me and said, “Oh, I haven’t even been paying attention. Too long; didn’t read.”

* Also, you could see the stupid drama critic misinterpreting the crash-and-burning of the show, and the annoying director guy claiming it was deliberate, a MILE away.

* I did kind of like the nervous lesbian stage manager, though.

* When it finally cut over to Chuck I said “Meanwhile, on a better show…” but I’d forgotten that he was in the middle of a student production of his own, Eyes Wide Shut Jr., which ended as randomly and pointlessly and unimaginatively as it began.

* Was it me or did they keep on implying Dorota was leaking to Gossip Girl? Was that just a red herring? They seemed to resolve all that stuff by pinning it on Rachel. (I still think Dorota IS Gossip Girl.)

* Speaking of Rachel, the one bright spot in the show was the hotness of the Hot for Teacher storyline. Something about the girl they cast in that role is really realistically adorable, which makes it even hotter. I totally called “they’re gonna do it in the costume closet,” btw. Of course they then had to go and write her out of the show, when they easily could have begun a Blair/Rachel romance, goddamn them.

* Seeing the teaser for next week’s episode, I’m starting to wonder whether the show’s rapid cycling and recycling through all the possible main-cast pairings is actually the major structural problem we’ve all kind of joked that it might be. The more you mix and match Dan, Serena, Chuck, Blair, Nate, and Vanessa, and sometimes Jenny, the less rewarding it gets. (Unless you did something nutso like Chuck/Serena or Dan/Blair, which I would support fully and which I assume we’ll get to eventually.) Meanwhile, the show’s attempts to bring aboard outside love interests have been three-eps-and-done affairs from the get-go, whether lame (that horrible artist guy) or kinda awesome (Madchen Amick, Hot for Teacher). The outsiders can’t bring the weight that the main cast does, but the main cast can’t sustain the novelty that the outsiders bring, and around and around we go.

* Your first must-read of the day: Tom Spurgeon presents the best comics of 2008. It’s interesting to see how much emphasis Tom places on the importance of weighing works qualitatively against one another as a goal of criticism–I suppose that goes without saying when it comes to a year-end ranking, but even in that case, I tend not to place so much importance on qualitative distinctions myself. And again, it makes me wish I’d read as much about Acme Novelty Library #19 as I have about Final Crisis (which I liked!). Tom also takes his fellow critics to task for their lack of engagement with books like What It Is and Kramers Ergot 7, a bit unfairly if I recall correctly, but hey, it takes different strokes to move the world.

* Your second must-read of the day: At MCAD’s “MOMEntum” exhibition, the great Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics holds forth on the evolution of alternative comics from comic book to graphic novel, and what that means for young cartoonists like those in the audience. (As a side note, it always does my heart good to see Jordan Crane’s NON given credit alongside Sammy Harkham’s Kramers Ergot. Had more people been able to see it, I don’t doubt NON #5 could have had the impact of Kramers Ergot 4–it certainly did on me.) (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Speaking of Kramers, Dick Hyacinth reviews Kramers Ergot 7 practically story-by-story. I think my favorite thing about the review is the way his photos of the scanner-busting pages make everything look big enough to be hung on gallery walls. Elsewhere, Dick does the world the public service of creating an actual working Kramers Ergot 7 table of contents.

* Sopranos creator David Chase’s next project will be called A Ribbon of Dreams. It’s an HBO miniseries with a sweeping story about the rise and presumably fall of two producers from the dawn of Hollywood to the present day. Sold.

* Todd VanDerWerff all but takes a mulligan on critically evaluating the penultimate episode of Battlestar Galactica until he sees its concluding episode this week. Which, wow, that’s going to take some getting used to. Anyway, he tentatively likes what he saw this week, as did I. He also takes the time to unpack why Baltar’s cult/conversion storyline has been so frustrating, perhaps my biggest pet peeve of the show’s final two half-seasons.

* In the latest installment of his continuing, awesome series of posts on ’90s superhero comics, What Ifs?, and other extraordinarily geeky topics, Tim O’Neil explains the difference between the “alternate worlds” of What If? and the “analogue worlds” of Elseworlds. Some of you just shrugged your shoulders, and some of you aren’t even reading this sentence because you’ve already clicked over. He also continues to promise a review of Kingdom Come, which I’m looking forward to because I like that book.

* My pals at the Cool Kids Table throw decorum to the four winds and run down the Watchmen spinoffs, sequels, and prequels of their respective dreams.

* Speaking of Watchmen, will the film’s relative failure adversely affect the prospects for more full-frontal male nudity in Hollywood films? Given the really egregious and unnecessary Penis Panic that gripped critics both mainstream and geek-centric, to say nothing of modern geek culture’s bizarre, bullying hypermasculinity, my guess is that the answer is yes. What a country. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* “Tom Neely sure can draw” update: Tom Neely sure can draw.

* The last gasp of torture porn? Jason Adams gives pretty high marks to the remake of The Last House on the Left.

* Speaking of torture porn: Take some time, if you’re not some phony 24 tough guy and you don’t mind having your soul kicked repeatedly in its kidneys for a while, to read the International Committee for the Red Cross’s report on torture at America’s network of terror-war prison sites. It’s the involvement of doctors whose job it was to ensure that everyone was tortured just enough to not die (they weren’t always successful) that will be haunting me to my grave. And of course, the repulsive likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah–real-life horror stories themselves–never deserved the emotional martyrdom that their treatment now forces us to grant them.

* Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald wonders if the Obama Administration isn’t the new boss, same as the old boss in several important respects. Faith in good intentions, as we’ve learned (as I’ve certainly learned), is just not enough.

Great day in the mornin’!

As promised last week, here’s a very different “best of Nine Inch Nails” mix. The inspiration here was a comment I remember Trent Reznor making regarding the song “Only,” which is a great big bass-slappin’ monster of a dance song–he said something to the effect that he had to work really hard to overcome being embarrassed about releasing a disco song. I instantly thought, “But you’ve recorded TONS of them! And they’re GOOD!” So here’s a collection of Trent at his toe-tapping, head-nodding, floor-filling, ass-shaking best. (Titular parentheses courtesy of Matthew Perpetua.)

Let’s Go Dancing (On the Backs of the Bruised): Nine Inch Nails Dance Music

The Hand That Feeds (DFA Remix) / Head Like a Hole / Only / The Perfect Drug / Heresy / The Hand That Feeds / Sin / Closer / Ruiner / Discipline / Complication / Down In It / God Given / Head Like a Hole (Opal) / Ringfinger / Let’s Hear It for Nine Inch Nails

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Originally I’d planned on including either more or perhaps different examples of his groove-oriented work–I was thinking of slower almost-funk songs like “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, “The Only Time,” “The Big Comedown,” “Capital G” and so on–but I couldn’t figure how to make it all work together, so I dropped that stuff with the exception of “Closer” (because, c’mon, it’s “Closer”). Also, I could have included a lot of remixes, but I decided to stick with internally produced work, so the only non-Trent-produced song on here is the DFA remix of “The Hand That Feeds” (because, c’mon, it’s the DFA).

I hope you like this side of Nine Inch Nails as much as these folks did!

I FORGOT TO ADD THE SPOILER WARNING LAST WEEK, BUT I REMEMBERED THIS WEEK

I thought that was a strong episode, a very strong episode in fact. I didn’t see the flashbacks coming at all, and it was a very smart idea, tying these characters back to all they’d lost. Not that they were all note-perfect, mind you–again, we’ve gone to the bottomless grief reservoir quite a few times so seeing Roslin fall apart in a public fountain lacked the impact it might have otherwise; Anders’s ode to physics seemed a bit on the nose, even if it is the kind of thing I can picture a smart jock saying in an interview with a female reporter while reclining naked in a tub. But seeing Roslin with family, and seeing Zack Adama again, and especially seeing Baltar with his father and all the levels of discomfort and embarrassment that that meeting exposed in Gaius and Julius and Six…wonderful stuff.

Speaking of Gaius, his long, weirdly underdeveloped religious-cult storyline finally felt like it had a point, which was that Gaius was spending that time falling bass-ackwards into power once again. He kept it up because it got him laid, it got him attention, he’s good at it, it was some kind of emotional outlet, and Head Six wanted him to, but in the end it was all leading to this pivotal juncture where he ends up basically the most powerful person in the fleet as everyone else goes off on the rescue mission. Callis, who over the years became one of the show’s great pleasures, played the entire episode with a look of “what the fuck, man?” in his eyes. I’m a little concerned that without an antagonist still in the fleet his storyline might feel flat, but we’ll see.

Which leads us to what will apparently be the series finale’s big leap of faith, which is that the Admiral and President and stand-in President of the fleet would allow however many hundreds of key military and political personnel to take however many military assets they need and fly off on a suicide mission into Cylon Central in the middle of an asteroid field right next to a black hole. On a narrative level, this is Gandalf’s gambit at the end of The Lord of the Rings, where he, and all the surviving members of the Fellowship who could give the game away if captured and tortured, and the King of Gondor and the King of Rohan and most of the leadership class, strolled up to the Black Gates to be slaughtered because they believed that something very important and transcendent required them to do so. The thing is, that’s a lot easier for the characters and the audience alike to swallow in a fantasy narrative than it is in a science fiction allegory where people drive cars and smoke cigarettes and pretty much behave like normal people except for a few fantastic elements. What the story is asking us to do is believe that at this point, the fantastic elements in these characters’ lives are, perhaps, all they have left to cling to, that all these hundreds of people are going to risk it all because to not do so will just mean floating around aimlessly in space for a few more decades until they die out. If Hera means something, they mean something, so they’re going for broke. It’s a gamble on the show’s part, and if I were coming to it cold I don’t know if I’d buy it, but the show has earned a lot of goodwill from me by being one of the highlights of my life for a few years now, so gods-speed, gang.

* Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely are doing a new series called Batman and Robin, have you heard? “It’s like David Lynch doing the Batman TV show,” says Morrison, which phrase is, I think, to the Internet what “ZUR-EN-ARRH” was to Bruce Wayne.

* Look, normally I wouldn’t mind if They remade Stephen King’s It, because Tim Curry’s performance and make-up as Pennywise was literally the only thing the 1990 TV miniseries version got right. But then you hear that the new movie version is going to consolidate the 1958-to-1985 flashback/flashforward structure and all the ensuing and awesome period detail into the present day, and it’s like, fuck, why not just remake Killer Klowns from Outer Space instead? One day someone’s gonna take one of Stephen King’s really good books and make an HBO maxiseries out of it, complete with subterranean tween gangbang, and we can all be happy. Until then I’m going to want to throw my computer through the window on a regular basis.

* Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson as some Russian villain and the Black Widow in Iron Man 2? Well done, Marvel Studios. Everyone try not to stare at ScarJo’s Russian accent.

* Jog reviews Cold Heat #5/6.

* Jason’s Low Moon looks fantastic.

* John Hankiewicz can draw the bloody bejesus out of a sewing machine case.

* Spurge:

But yeah, if you liked Watchmen, you might want to try some of the books that are like whatever the heck you liked about Watchmen, and DC has certainly published some of those books.

LOL

* In light of the Battlestar Galactica series finale, part one of which airs tonight, this has got to be the quote of the day:

On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as “human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith,” according to Sci Fi.

Actually, no, wait: This is the quote of the day:

The panel will be moderated by “Battlestar” fan Whoopi Goldberg.

(Via the utterly gobsmacked Topless Robot.)

* I’m sick of Photobucket’s bullshit. Can anyone recommend a better image-hosting site that won’t yank Jim Rugg drawings of Doctor Manhattan because you can see his genitals? (Doc’s, not Rugg’s.) I don’t want to use my Flickr account as a random image depository.

* A few residual Watchmen review links first:

* Jim Emerson compares and contrasts the film with The Dark Knight, which in restrospect is the “visually realistic take on superheroes” film that a Watchmen adaptation had the potential to be in other hands but ended up emphatically not being; Emerson argues that that’s to Watchmen‘s betterment.

* Adrian de la Touche at The House Next Door praises the movie for aspects other critics have used to lambaste it–the on-the-nose music choices, that sex scene–and refers to Zack Snyder as “a talented—fuck it, I’ll bite—visionary filmmaker.” I kind of think so too! The Paul Verhoeven of the ’00s?

* And now some MMORPG geekiness:

* Man, is this ever right up my alley: Here’s a firsthand account of how the game Tabula Rasa used its real-world cancellation as grounds for an in-game apocalypse.

* On a similar note, Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders how player vs. player combat could be employed to affect the World of Warcraft storyline.

* Cold Heat #5/6 is out! I have a copy and hope to review it shortly.

* “Tom Neely sure can draw” update: Tom Neely sure can draw.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s review of last week’s lackluster Battlestar Galactica focuses on how difficult it is to properly evaluate individual episodes of a plot-heavy series, particularly toward the end of its run, without the context provided by the plot’s yet-to-be-aired resolution.

* The remake of Let the Right One In is in fact going to be called Let the Right One In, thank god.

The new U2 album, No Line on the Horizon, is pretty good I guess. It’s okay. My first-listen reaction is that it’s better than How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and much better than career-worst All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The lyrics get pretty dire, as you’d expect these days–Bono needs to ban the word “beautiful” from his repertoire for a while, just like there was a period where the band agreed they weren’t allowed to use “streets”–and the Edge’s rockin’-out riffs are kind of forced and gutless. Regardless, “Get On Your Boots” is stuck in my head pretty frequently.

Anyway I write this because I have a bad feeling that some people are going to refer to certain tracks on the record as “experimental,” particularly in light of the comparatively straightforward songs on the past two albums. Let’s not forget that we know what actually experimental U2 actually sounds like, from back when the lead singer of the biggest band in the world dressed in platform heels, gold lamé suits, devil horns, and kabuki make-up and called himself “MacPhisto.”

“Lemon” is my favorite U2 song. Interestingly, I really loved it and the rest of Zooropa from the moment it came out, way before I listened to electronic or dance music generally. I think that even then I was excited to see the band try something so very different, and even then I was excited to see them do it well. I also contextualized Zooropa as the Magical Mystery Tour to Achtung Baby‘s Sgt. Pepper–a denser, deeper, weirder, braver exploration of the territory they’d just opened up an album ago.

As a song, with its techno shimmer (when I first started hearing electronic dance music I called all of it “techno” and it’s tough to shake) and falsetto vocals that most rock fans instantly associate with disco, “Lemon” is superficially quite confrontational versus the rest of the band’s catalog–the aural equivalent of what the names Pop and “Discoteque” and the Village People costumes they wore in the video were a few years later. But like all the best of their ’90s material, “Lemon”‘s addresses the same kind of spiritual, capital-R Romantic yearning that the band’s big rock hits did, only fed through filters of uncertainty and self-consciousness. So, the lemon itself, the symbol that represents the magical mystery woman du jour, is big and bright and juicy and natural as one might expect, but it’s also sour and maybe a little blinding and associated with the sterile advert artifice of “lemon fresh” sloganeering.

The song describes man’s attempts to create art as guilelessly self-obsessed, his attempts at transcendence ultimately self-reflexive and driven by the usual preoccupations:

A man makes a picture

A moving picture

Through the light projected

He can see himself up close

A man captures colour

A man likes to stare

He turns his money into light to look for her

The motif is repeated:

A man builds a city

With banks and cathedrals

A man melts the sand so he can

See the world outside

A man makes a car

And builds roads to run them on

A man dreams of leaving

But he always stays behind

In both cases, the question seems to be whether the creative act is even necessary, whether we’re introducing unnecessary intermediaries into an observational process that’s really as simple as opening our eyes.

Meanwhile, despair (“I feel like I’m drifting, drifting, drifting from the shore”; “these are the days when our world has come asunder”) yields to hope of respite (“I feel like I’m swimming out to her”; “these are the days when we look for something other”); indeed, the latter is not possible without the former. This is perhaps best expressed by the epigrammatic “chorus” of the song: “Midnight is where the day begins.” The music itself ebbs and flows in a similar fashion, with the uplift of the chorus’s piano-plunking drifting back down into melancholy cello. But our final glimpse of the enigmatic “she” reveals that “she is the dreamer, she’s imagination/She had heaven, she wore lemon,” so maybe we’re right to try; maybe everything doesn’t collapse in upon itself, and there is something great out there waiting to be captured.

* I thought it might be nice to round up some of the Watchmen reviews I’ve gotten something out of, both positive and negative ones. This gives me an excuse to pointedly ignore the critics who used the film as an occasion to flaunt their ignorance of and antipathy toward “graphic novels.” (To quote Trent Reznor, you know who you fucking are.)

* For starters, here’s my review, if you missed it or avoided it before seeing the movie yourself.

* Of all the major critics, Roger Ebert is the most unabashedly bullish about the film. He’s followed up his initial review with a second, lengthier one based on a second, IMAX-derived screening. The latter is less a review than a rumination on Dr. Manhattan and a life lived by way of quantum physics. The pure geekiness of that, the “half-stoned and chugging Diet Coke at 3 in the morning debating the ending of Lost Highway with your college roommates”ness of it, is really delightful, and precisely the kind of response I was hoping a Watchmen movie would be capable of provoking. In terms of Watchmen‘s eventual status in the pantheon, which I care a whole lot less about, Ebert’s imprimatur is interesting in that he’s become sort of a patron saint of film fans who come at the medium from either a geek or buff perspective, rather than a cineaste/scholar perspective, if you will.

* Even more effusive than Ebert is the young-ish liberal national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. “Watchmen is a great film,” he says, which is not a statement I’m seeing made that straightforwardly even in receptive quarters (like this blog, for example). However, he serves up three quibbles involving three characters that I for one agree with: Ozymandias is too obviously sinister and his twisted altruism is too insufficiently developed; Laurie’s backstory is truncated and de-complicated, right down to the disappearance of her real, ethnic last name; Rorschach’s rightist, or perhaps fascist, politics are downplayed, except as the tics of a sociopath. I think Ackerman’s perspective is worth taking a gander at in that he represents a pretty common breed of geek: A guy who’s extremely smart, savvy, well-read, and cutting-edge in a variety of areas (politics, punk rock) but is pretty strictly superhero-based when it comes to comics.

* I haven’t been tracking the conservative political blogs for their responses, nor have I kept an eye out for which critic, Right or Left, comes up with the most hamfisted allegorical read regarding the film (“Obama and Ozymandias–they’re both effete liberals whose names start with an O, and they’re both destroying the world in order to rebuild it in their egomaniacal image,” that sort of thing. I’m sure Dana Stevens managed to compare the Comedian to Dick Cheney or something equally revelatory). But Andrew Sullivan says he thoroughly enjoyed the movie and I for one hope he posts about why. I guarantee you the letters he gets in response will be just as entertaining, no matter what he says.

* My longtime companion Jason Adams says something I’ve been thinking to myself while reading several negative reviews of the movie, which is that the massive planned Director’s Cut will likely fill out a lot of lacunae that people who didn’t like the film have been calling out; for Jason, this means giving fleshing out the vox populi in the persons of the newsstand owner and his comics-reading hanger-on. I also like Jason’s review because he says Rorschach’s last stand tugged a tear out of him even where the book itself didn’t–it did, for me, during my last read–and because he makes fun of the critics who didn’t grok that the airship sex scene was cheesy on purpose.

* Tim O’Neil basically calls it a bad movie he enjoyed. He echoes the pretty oft-voiced problem with the development of Ozymandias, says that the film’s Laurie Jupiter “looks like she’s made out of the same plastic as her costume” (killer line), and beefs with the super-ness of the non-super characters’ action scenes.

* Contra critics like Tim, who reference the film’s extraordinary fealty to Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ original comics (whether for good or ill), Joe “Jog” McCulloch, who did not care for the film at all, argues that the movie is in fact nothing like the comic, particularly in how it translates Gibbons’s visuals, character design, and grid-based pacing. I think he makes some rock-solid points in his treatment of such diverse “lost in translation” moments as the bloodstain on the Comedian’s smiley-face button, the damage incurred by the Comedian during his murder, and (most especially) the way the film reverse’s the book’s juxtaposition of largely bloodless run-up to extraordinarily splatteriffic climax; I don’t think that I’d even noticed the lack of bodies in the streets at the end until reading Jog’s review. (Elsewhere, he imagines Watchmen: A Film by Peter Greenaway.)

* Tom Spurgeon, the Perry Cox to my John Dorian, disliked the movie too. I really enjoy the way he calls out the lack of cohesion among the performances; how the increased violence in the “Dan & Laurie vs. knot-top muggers” kneecaps our ability to see Rorschach as uniquely dangerous and crazy; and the glossed-over fact that the climax’s megadeaths were caused by an American weapon. On the flipside, he also tips his hat insightfully, if that can be done, to the acting choices of Billy Crudup and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

* In his pan, Leigh Walton, my editor at Top Shelf, has a great line: “Snyder et al adapted Watchmen more or less exactly as they would have adapted Kraven’s Last Hunt or Emerald Twilight or Secret Wars II. ‘Here’s a great comic book story, and we’ll bring it to life on the big screen.'” The thing is, I really like Kraven’s Last Hunt.

* Over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, one of my favorite (if in this case inaccurately named) film blogs, Victoria Large calls Watchmen an “intoxicating, messy, tough-to-shake movie. It’s a film to think about, worry about, fight about, and I’m grateful for that. So love it. Or hate it. Or do a little bit of both. But please don’t dismiss it.” I’m not quite on board with the last few bits, but I have to say that otherwise this tracks pretty closely to my own level of appreciation for the flick. In a waym this doesn’t surprise me. My favorite film of 2008 was Rambo. Granted, I didn’t see any of the Oscar-bait efforts that year, and very few of the more legit critical darlings (Let the Right One In is probably the big exception). And granted, Rambo is in some ways a deeply stupid movie, and in others a deeply problematic, even troubling one. But it surprised, entertained, thrilled, horrified, and haunted me. I think Watchmen is Rambo with costumes.

Dick Hyacinth and I continue our discussion of Charles Burns’s masterpiece Black Hole over at The Savage Critic(s). Check it out!

(Via Pterodactyls)

Recently I decided to steal an idea from my pal Matthew Perpetua and upload an occasional mix for your listening pleasure. First up is this assortment of some of my favorite Nine Inch Nails songs.

Leaving Hope: A Personal Best of Nine Inch Nails

Pinion / 2 Ghosts I / Wish / 12 Ghosts II / 13 Ghosts II / The Fragile / Just Like You Imagined / The Becoming / Happiness in Slavery / Something I Can Never Have [edited and extended] / 10 Miles High (Version) / Burn / In This Twilight / 36 Ghosts IV / The Fragile [Still] / The Becoming [Still] / Gave Up / In This Twilight (Fennesz Remix) / Leaving Hope

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

This particular mix leans heavily on textured instrumentals, quiet haunted-house piano, abrasive guitars, and alternately melancholy or nihilistic lyrics–occasionally all at the same time. These happen to be among my favorite NIN songs, so that’s the main reason I selected them, but Trent Reznor is a pretty deeply unfashionable character at this point among smart-music circles, so I wanted to put together a mix that displayed some of his ambition, range, and skill as a composer and arranger. There’s another mix coming that showcases a completely different side of the band, so please stay tuned.

* Not a whole lot to recommend this episode, I don’t think. That’s unfortunate. There aren’t a lot to go!

* Things I liked: Fine little acting moments from actors that the show has pretty much abandoned, Jamie Bamber, Tamoh Penikett, and the still prominent but underused James Callis. Apollo shouting “Gaius Baltar?!?” in disbelief when one of the members of the new quorum asks what everyone’s favorite former scientific genius and collaborationist president turned sex-cult leader and paramilitary commander (?!?) thought of the potential abandonment of the Galactica was a hilarious moment of exasperation, not least because it mirrors my own at the notion that anyone cares what Baltar thinks in the world of the show.

* Penikett played Helo’s begging for permission to search for his daughter with just the right mix of sorrow, desperation, hope, and barely concealed rage at Adama’s obstinacy (and hypocrisy–he’s the admiral of the fleet and he abandoned everyone so he could sit around in a raptor and wait for the President to show up, remember?). And

* Baltar’s brief encounter with Caprica Six was one of the few emotionally true moments that character’s been granted in quite some time, since it sidestepped the season-long guessing game regarding his sincerity about his religious proclamations and dove right into something we know to be legit, his ever-present emotional turmoil regarding what happened between him and Caprica Six before the Cylon attack.

* I did wish that Head Baltar showed up for Six, though–was the implication that he doesn’t do so anymore?

* And since Baltar’s thought process during his cult-leader storyline has been opaque, it was impossible to figure out just why the fuck he outed Starbuck as some kind of revenant in front of the whole frakking fleet. Is it because he really believes what he’s saying about angels and wants to prove it to the world? Is it because he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying about angels and wants to convince himself that he’s not crazy or the victim of a Cylon brain-implant? Is it because he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, and doesn’t want to convince himself, and simply wants to increase his sway over the hoi polloi for his own selfish reasons? We have very little way of knowing.

* I did like that he didn’t even remember who Starbuck was despite fooling around with her a few years back. That’s the Baltar we know!

* We’ve seen Adama start doing something, then get more and more frantic about it, then totally flip out, then crash and cry, a few too many times for it to retain much power.

* I kind of liked turning Sam into a hybrid. Led to some nice visuals at any rate.

* The thing about the show’s shift of focus from “life during wartime” to “what’s up with the Cylons” is that it went from, well, a show about life during wartime to the kind of “sci-fi musings on the nature of consciousness and life and mortality and what makes us human and so on” that we’ve been seeing for nearly a century now. This morning when I woke up I flipped on the TV and there was an episode of The Twilight Zone on involving Jack Klugman as the captain of a spaceship that lands on some planet and finds the crashed remains of his own spaceship, and he and the crew start wondering whether they’re already dead or what. Sound familiar? Don’t get me wrong, that kind of thing can be very appealing, but it would have been just as easy for Battlestar Galactica never to go down that route, and since its execution of that kind of material has on the whole been less successful than its execution of the war material, there’s a bit of a let-down inherent in having the final episodes focus on that.

* At the Partyka site, Matt Wiegle draws a zombie attack!

And oh yeah, Dustin Harbin is this month’s Partyka guest artist.

* Paul Hornschemeier’s got an odds ‘n’ sods collection called All and Sundry in the pipeline.

* What we talk about when we talk about Dr. Manhattan’s dick.

* Speaking of, dig Rickey Purdin’s Watchmen sketchbook.

The mere act of naming this song “Marriott Cock Squat” alone is a stroke of genius. (Via Topless Robot.)