* Now that was an episode! One thing I’d forgotten to mention about last week’s installment was that it was the first one I could think of to end on a series of cliffhangers in a long, long time. Because Gossip Girl moves at three times the speed of any other show, usually storylines more or less get wrapped up by the end of the hour, and then some tease-y thing is appended to the end to hook you for next week. But last time out, almost nothing was resolved. It was all gonna play out here. And it sure did!

* I can’t exactly remember the details anymore, but I seem to recall some elaborate scheme last season being screwed up by Vanessa’s ill-timed intervention. This time around it was down to Dan and Lily to blow up the spot. Which was frustrating insofar as it was repetitive, but also fitting: It took Dan’s self-righteousness and Lily’s status-fixated meddling and made them real liabilities for the characters.

* As far as the Lily end of that point goes, that was part of what made this such an effectively emotional episode. Kelly Rutherford doesn’t get a whole lot to do on this show other than be rich and MILFy, but I really liked the way she slowly revealed the various aspects of the investment-payback and get-Serena-arrested schemes to Rufus, as though with each new sentence she had to redouble her efforts to deny that what she was doing was completely fucked up.

* Lily’s go-along-to-get-along mentality also made her a more fulfilling antagonist for Serena’s scheme than what I thought was going to happen, which was Lily trying to get the police involved and Serena trying to dodge responsibility by taking Poppy and Gabriel down herself. Instead, the roles were reversed, and Lily was the sketchier of the two. Well done writers.

* Getting back to the emotional bit, Chuck and Blair’s exchange at the Russian Tea Room was interesting in that I really had no idea how it was going to go down. It was a good choice on Ed Westwick’s part to smile when he lied to her about it all being a big game to him, because for serious, does he ever really smile on this show? Seeing his teeth made it seem like this was a really unique moment, somehow. I’m not sure I buy his reasoning for letting Blair go, however. Doesn’t it seem like she’d be totally happy with him at this point, particularly if he was prepared to be honest and tell her he really has feelings for her, which is what he could have done at that very moment? The Missus and I were convinced he did it to spare Nate. I was really, really hoping that when Serena asked him “Chuck, why did you just do that?” his answer would be a gravelly whisper of “Bros before hoes.”

* So they played Georgina’s Jesus stuff strictly for laffs this time around, which is how I thought they were going to go the whole time. That’s fine I guess. A good excuse to paraphrase Pulp Fiction‘s made-up Ezekiel verse.

* Speaking of pop-culture references, there was much rejoicing in the Collins househould when Jenny distracted Lily by explaining the plot of Twilight. ‘Round these parts, you could keep me busy for a solid hour just trying to convince me that vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight instead of burning up. “Wait, they sparkle? You’re making that up.”

* Another Vanessa-less episode! Woo! Actually, The Missus rightly said tonight “I’m glad Vanessa slept with Chuck. I don’t hate her anymore!” It’s true! She became more interesting through genital osmosis.

* Meanwhile you’ve got a lot of other interesting characters floating around who you could work into the mix on a more permanent basis. Well, mostly Eric Van Der Woodsen, whose not-a-main-cast-member status is inexplicable. But Georgina and Gabriel both have potential in a reformed-villain and/or anti-hero kind of way. Like Hawkeye in the early Avengers, or Venom.

* I’ll give the ’80s flashback/spinoff a try, sure. But god help us was that No Doubt covering “Stand and Deliver”? Fuck that noise. Gwen Stefani isn’t fit to do Marco Pirroni’s make-up.

* I really liked Kiel Phegley’s three suggestions for how to approach Free Comic Book Day as a chance to have fun with friends and family.

* This is a terrific bit from Tom Spurgeon’s post on Drawn & Quarterly’s new Doug Wright collection:

The great thing about cartooning is that sometimes the texture and feel of the way cartoonists approach the form can be as important as the content of the narratives. That’s why, to use a famous example, you can look at an end table drawn by Charles Schulz and feel his entire world through its line.

That’s a crackerjack insight no matter what, but what makes it even better is that before I read the post I just sat and gawked for a bit at the Wright panel Tom chose to illustrate his piece:

I think different kinds of comic geeks geek out in different ways: Lately I geek out by marveling at things like just how goddamn well-drawn that dude’s jeans are. I’ll tell you what, you draw jeans like that and your comics have instantly earned a lot of credit with me.

* Here’s a bizarrely eloquent post on Wolverine by national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. I’m impressed by the way he unpacks the character as better understood through a series of small personality-based revelations throughout his publishing history than through a comic or movie that purports to be his “origin.” Also, it’s funny to look at Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X through a topical lens. Thank god we stuck with waterboarding and didn’t give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed an adamantium skeleton.

* I did not care for James Turner’s Nil, but I still think it’s an ugly and ominous development when the monopoly distributor of comics to the market system in which the vast majority of comics are purchased opts not to carry a book of obvious seriousness of intent and execution like Turner’s new project Warlord of IO from a publisher of long standing like SLG yet still makes room for Frog Thor busts.

* There’s nothing about Harry Knowles’s post on the Wolverine movie that isn’t totally hilarious at the expense of both Harry Knowles and the Wolverine movie.

* The Viggo Mortensen-starring adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has been pushed back from Oscar season 2008 to Oscar season 2009.

* They’re going to make a Hollywood movie out of Death Note. (Via Dread Central.)

* Artist Ryan Dunlavey reveals his part in one of my favorite things ToyFare magazine ever did: The Bearriors, an ’80s toy line and cartoon series starring anthropomorphized warrior bears…that the magazine invented from whole cloth as a hoax.

* Sea monster porn: a CGI reenactment of Predator X, the most powerful carnivore in the history of the world, in action. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I thought this episode was simultaneously one of the more predictable and well-acted eps this season. On the predictable front, I was pretty sure from the jump that Widmore was Daniel’s dad, and it wasn’t tough to guess that Eloise was grooming Daniel to his death all along in order to set other events in motion. And “predictable” isn’t the right word for this, but the heavy-handed “I’m putting personality-warping pressure on you, my child, because that’s what parents do on this show” scene between Eloise and piano-playing Tiny Daniel was straight outta similar earlier encounters between young Charlie and his parents, young Jack and his dad, young Miles and his mom, young Ben and his dad, young Sun and her dad, young Sayid and his dad, and on and on and on.

* But on the acting front, Jeremy Davies is yet another one of the show’s richly enjoyable performance discoveries, and he’s given more to do here than ever before. I was particularly impressed by the painful way he displayed his post-experiment mental disabilities in the flashbacks. He also made for a convincing long-haired science weirdo in the “guy in Val Kilmer’s closet in Real Genius” mode. His death was well played as well, with a great “I shoulda known” vibe overlaid upon his grief.

* I was also impressed by Elizabeth Mitchell’s work here. Her fatalism ever since the return of the Oceanic, uh, Four has been a lovely note for the show to play, and having all her fears confirmed in this dramatic fashion enabled her to do a lot with it. I love how she can flip an internal switch to make her beatific (okay, and botoxed) face segue from serene to devastated by intensifying the look in her eyes and twitching the edges of that ducklike mouth just so.

* This is down to the writing as well, but I was really grateful for the degree to which Sawyer went out of his way to apologize to her and comfort her. Mitchell and Josh Holloway have real, loving-couple chemistry in addition to the in-story connection between their characters, and I hope the show’s writers realize what a mistake it would be to re-involve them with Jack or Kate again.

* Regarding the central development of the episode as expressed in its title, “The Variable,” I’m of two minds regarding the newly advanced notion that maybe we can change the past. (Well, more or less “newly advanced”–Daniel’s implication in sending Desmond on his mission to find Eloise was that Desmond, at least, is able to operate freely in time, independent from the “whatever happened, happened” constraint.) On the one hand, I think Lost‘s great achievement in dealing with time travel is coming up with such a thematically elegant counter to the time travel paradox.

Back when I first watched The Terminator, it occurred to me that if Skynet sent a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, there wouldn’t have been time for adult John Connor to send Kyle Reese back in time to stop the terminator: barring Kyle Reese’s involvement, the terminator would have had no problem killing Sarah, which would have wiped John Connor from the existence, which means he wouldn’t have been able to discover Skynet’s plot and send Kyle back in time hot on the terminator’s heels. Then I was like “Whoa, wait a minute–if that’s how it worked, Skynet would never have needed to send a terminator back in time in the first place, because John Connor would never be born and there’d never be a resistance to send a terminator back in time to prevent.” And this is all without even getting into the idea that John sent Kyle back in time to be his own dad, or that Skynet in essence did the same thing by sending the terminator back in time only to have his design and circuitry inspire the creation of Skynet in the first place. Basically, in order to even have a story to tell with time travel working as it does in the James Cameron Terminator movies, you sorta just have to arbitrarily declare a cut-off point after which you’re not going to worry about the ramifications–you’re just going to tell the story, even though its own events dictate that the story could never be told.

By contrast, Lost argues that whatever time travelers do in the past is fixed. Nothing can change as a result of what they do, because what they do is more accurately described as what they did–by the time they were sent back in time, their actions while time travelling were already 30 years in the past. There’s one timestream, and in it, whatever happened, happened. The elegance comes in how that euphonious bit of sci-fi exposition resonates as philosophy, as a theme for a show that has long concerned itself with questions of fate, destiny, and free will.

So in that light, I’m hesitant to believe that this diktat is going to go out the window, and (as the message board types are theorizing) season six will be some kind of “everything has changed!!!!” Heroes/”Days of Future Past” scenario–not just because the creators have said they wanted to establish firm ground rules for time travel to avoid confusion, but also because it’s such a narratively and thematically satisfying approach.

On the other hand, it’s easy to picture the show wanting to make some kind of point about how we’re free, how we can break out of the roles imposed upon us by cruel fate or sinister puppetmasters or the relentlessness of space-time and change the world for the better. Just because the show hasn’t come out and done that so far–just because it’s been pretty rigorous in refusing to give characters like Jack, Locke, and Desmond an out from their destinies, frequently to their detriment–doesn’t mean it won’t, particularly as the finale nears.

* Okay, enough of that. Now some short but sweet observations:

* Eloise seems a little old compared to Daniel to be his mom, no? I mean, she was at the very least in her late teens in 1954–how old is Daniel supposed to be? I’m sure that Gregg Nations has the dates written down, but it looks weird.

* If, as it seems, Li’l Miles and his mom and Li’l Charlotte and her mom flee in advance of the Incident, does this mean that all the children do so, and does that mean that we’ll finally see Li’l Ben’s doll-making girlfriend Annie again? And would that also mean that the Incident has something to do with the Island’s infertility problem and its inhabitants inability to successfully reproduce afterwards?

* Radzinksy’s a great annoying bad guy. It’s too bad we know he lives to hang out with Inman in the Hatch and then kill himself, because I would like to see someone ice him.

* It sure was nice to see the whole gang get back together even if they immediately broke apart. I’m not quite sure why Hurley wouldn’t have gone with Jack and Kate, though.

* I bought Miles needing to explain the fact that the characters are all currently living in their own present to Hurley, because Hurley’s the audience-indentification character and therefore the writers have to make him stupid. But Jack is a very smart guy, so having him not be able to grasp how their journeys through time work and needing Miles to explain it to him (i.e. to us) rang false.

* There’s probably something else that I’m forgetting. Ah well. Here’s Todd Van Der Werff’s review.

* Here’s a bunch of information on Grant Morrison’s upcoming seven-issue series Multiversity, ripped from the pages of Wizard in what strikes me as a little less than fair-use fashion. There will be a Fawcett issue doing Captain Marvel in an All Star Superman style, a Charlton issue using the original Charlton heroes in lieu of their Watchmen analogues, the whole thing will be one of those “stand-alone issues that introduce a whole new world but interlock to tell a non-linear story” Seven Soldiers deals that will be full of amazing ideas that no one at DC will ever use again, etc. (Via JK Parkin.)

* The film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will likely debut on the SciFi/Syfy Channel in the fall. That’s not good. (Via STYD.)

* Tom Devlin talks up Marc Bell’s upcoming 272-page art book Hot Potatoe. I’ll be honest, I’d be a lot more excited about this if there were more comics content and fewer pages 85% comprised of doodled curlicues, but I guess I understand where the money’s at for the guys who straddle the fine-art/comics border. I mean, shit, Shrimpy & Paul and Worn Tuff Elbow were tremendous.

* If I were in Richmond, I’d go to this: Ron Rege Jr. art show opening tomorrow.

* I’m not gonna spoil it by posting both images here, which you really need to do to get the impact, but check out Michaela Colette Zacchilli’s cover version of Jae Lee’s cover for Spider-Man 2099 #36 at Covered. It takes a pretty striking image to begin with and adds an oomph that you can practically feel–made me LOL, it did.

* Speaking of rides on the LOLlercoaster, thank you for this, Eric Reynolds:

* Dirk Deppey caught that Diamond will stop distributing the venerable Classics Illustrated line due to its failure to reach their new minimum order threshold. I think it’s this story more than any other so far that illustrates what Diamond’s policy means for the direct market: In an industry as completely dominated by one genre as is North American comics, imposing a barrier based on sales is effectively synonymous with imposing a barrier based on genre. It’s not just the artsy likes of Crickets that will suffer.

* Tucker Stone interviews Frank Santoro about Cold Heat, sort of. (Via Dirk.)

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Rainbow of Lantern Corps is 100% pure awesomesauce, as is this pictorial guide to them.

* Quote of the day:

“Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion.” ~Jim Manzi

One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.

—Daniel Larison

* Oh reunited Goonies, how I loved you. How I daydreamed you would rescue me from bullies when I was in third grade. How I pined for Andy. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Marilyn Loves Kate: still killin’ it.

* Another illustration of the breakneck pace that makes Gossip Girl so satisfying a serialized-narrative experience despite having so much less going on than Lost, let alone your great HBO show of choice: Amount of screentime that passed between learning Gabriel was a double-agent last episode and having Chuck and Blair discover it in this episode? One segment. They didn’t even let a commercial break pass this ep before Blair snapped Gabriel and Poppy canoodling on her cellphone. When they keep things moving at that rate you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.

* Of course that also necessitates hitting certain beats over and over and over again, just because you need something to do. So by the end of the hour I was wondering if Nate and Blair would almost break up in every single episode.

* But back in the plus column, it means that predictable plotlines move along so quickly they don’t have time to get too annoying. It was easy to see that poor, well-meaning, ineffectual Rufus was gonna get rooked by Gabriel and further fuck up Dan’s chances at getting into Yale and his own ability to hang on to his art-gallery dreams, but I imagine all those cards will be on the table before the next episode is halfway over.

* I liked Georgina’s return, which surprised me! I thought they’d play it for too-easy laughs more than they did, but her conversion was treated semi-sincerely, and she actually articulated a rationale for her newfound faith that made sense given what her experiences were. Plus it makes her essentially a new character, and it should be funny to see where she ends up.

* The cast-wide team-up against an archnemesis teased in the promo for next week’s ep must mean we’re getting close to the end of the season, huh?

* What was in that six-pack Dan and Vanessa split that laid them both out like that, grain alcohol?

* Oh, there’s another case in point about the show’s speed: Vanessa coughed up the truth about her Chuckfucking right quick.

* Speaking of Chuck, Ed Westwick had some priceless reaction shots in this episode. I particularly liked when he orchestrated the big Gabriel-Serena-Poppy confrontation, then sat down on the bed to watch the show. But he hasn’t said “I’m Chuck Bass” in a long time, has he? I guess they don’t want to overdo it. He’s the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice.

* “Serena getting changed” scenes could fit alongside “Blair wears lingerie” scenes quite nicely. I’m just sayin’. Now we just need to add “Nate and Chuck finally make out” scenes to the mix.

* Just a couple more thoughts about the passing of Bea Arthur: The Golden Girls‘ Dorothy Zbornak is one of the all-time great sitcom characters. Her staunch, iconoclastic personal and political progressivism undercut by her actual lived experience, she was easily embarrassed by her own mistakes and shortcomings but never less than passionately proud of the person she had become–and her potential to become something even more–despite them. Her ability to acknowledge her flaws but power past them made her the perfect foil for Rose’s naivete, Blanch’s narcissism, and Sofia’s provincialism, all of which she parried with her own trademark characteristic: bullshit-deflating sarcasm. As The Missus put it last night while we were discussing Dorothy, “They took the ‘straight-man’ character and made her funny.'” It was a brilliant maneuver brilliantly handled by Arthur, and I don’t think any sitcom has done it as deftly. There’s more value in a single Bea Arthur Golden Girls reaction shot than in entire episodes of How I Met Your Mother. She was the real deal.

* Mark Waid names names (Levitz, Ross, Jemas, Alessi, DiDio) in this uproariously candid interview with AICN. At this point Waid’s been off the reservation so long I’m not sure he remembers where it was, but even so, these kinds of comments still offer the frisson of on-the-record smacktalking in an sub-industry whose professional class rarely indulges in that sort of thing:

The biggest challenge [of working on 52] was actually, wisely, kept from us by Steve [Wacker, the series’ editor]. EIC Dan Didio, who first championed the concept, hated what we were doing. H-A-T-E-D 52. Would storm up and down the halls telling everyone how much he hated it. And Steve, God bless him, kept us out of the loop on that particular drama. [Subsequent editor Michael] Siglain, having less seniority, was less able to do so, and there’s one issue of 52 near the end that was written almost totally by Dan and Keith Giffen because none of the writers could plot it to Dan’s satisfaction. Which was and is his prerogative as EIC, but man, there’s little more demoralizing than taking the ball down to the one-yard line and then being benched by the guy who kept referring to COUNTDOWN as “52 done right.”

Place your bets on which issue that was. I’ve got a hunch myself.

* Related, in some ineffable way: Tom Spurgeon on how the direct market depends on the buying habits of a small group of big spenders whose spending might be getting less big.

* Also vaguely related, by way of contrast: Tom Spurgeon (again) on the 10 Best Long-Running Comics Series of All Time. A tough list to argue with, especially when you factor in his runners-up. Mostly, as always, it’s just a pleasure to read a long post in which Tom holds forth about a variety of different kinds of comics in short order.

* I feel like this is related too, somehow: Dan Nadel mulls over the life and career of Rocketeer creator and Bettie Page cultural archaeologist Dave Stevens. Dan’s read of Stevens’s aborted autobiography-cum-art book is that Stevens died disappointed that his output failed to live up to his ambitions; Dan then argues that those ambitions were inherently proscribed by Stevens’s own artistic and aesthetic self-limitations, primarily driven by nostalgia for an outmoded illustration tradition, and further, that those limitations were ignored and their ramifications actively celebrated by Stevens’s subcultural fellow travelers. It’s a depressing series of thoughts. But you know what? I still see it playing out today. Creators who act as though they know better continue to play squarely within the aesthetic and financial playing field of the direct market’s clients, despite any number of other options available at this point in the medium’s history. And new order cutoffs be damned, Previews will still be crammed full of work by writers and artists who you just wish would take their brains and think bigger thoughts with them.

* Also also related: Chris Butcher liveblogs the April Previews. Headscratching and hilarity ensues.

* The final vaguely related link: Curt Purcells reviews Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics from the perspective of someone who enjoys reading comics but finds himself so baffled by their current state that he can’t honestly refer to himself as a fan.

* Monster Brains previews Johnny Ryan’s upcoming non-stop-action comic Prison Pit.

* They’re remaking Videodrome. Oddly, I’m…kind of intrigued by the prospect of a thoroughly Hollywoodized versions of David Cronenberg’s orificetravaganza. The world could use a little more high-gloss perversion.

* Robert Rodriguez talks to AICN about the Predator sequel he’s allegedly producing, Predators. I’ll believe it when I see it, as I say. I hope it contains the words “get to the chopper” in some configuration if and when it gets made.

* Jason Adams celebrates the swine flu pandemic as only someone with an extensive knowledge of postapocalyptic movies and a great love of screencaps can.

* Finally, a very happy birthday to TheOneRing.net, an amazing 10 years old today. That’s an uncountably long time in Internet years. And gosh, I actually remember checking the site out back when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were first announced in 1999, from the computer lab on Old Campus where I had to go to use the Internet because our ramshackle off-campus house didn’t have it. TORn was a trailblazer for franchise-specific fansites, becoming a genuine industry powerhouse as far as all things Rings are concerned without ever devolving into attention-whoring or the meanspirited aspects of fandom in the process. I’m grateful for it and wish them 10 more years of success.

Art by Matt Wiegle, color by the illustrious Rickey Purdin. Original comic here. Thanks, Rickey!

Dorothy just wrecked shop over and over again. Man she was wonderful on this show. I’m really sad she’s gone.

* I expect to get my computer back from the shop this evening, so that’s good news.

* My pal Kiel Phegley has a bunch of stuff up right now that’s worth your time: a two-part Ed Brubaker interview on Captain America and a collection of the best quotes from his year-long Q&A series at Marvel.com.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Hellen Jo’s fun Jin & Jam #1.

* “Now in Stock: Luba by Gilbert Hernandez.” The seven most beautiful words in the English language?

* Robert Rodriguez is “officially” making a new Predator movie called Predators, and now I can’t find the link but supposedly he’s also “officially” making a feature-length version of his Machete trailer from Sin City 2. Given Rodriguez’s recent track record (Sin City 2, Barbarella, Red Sonja, the long-gestating Machete) I’ll believe all of this when I see it.

* Yucky Tuna is a tumblr that’s a fun NSFW way to spend some spare time.

My favorite song ever?

Normally I don’t like to be disarmed by musicians but she’s pretty damn disarming in this song, which she uses to her advantage to say some weird things and sing them weirdly.

I’m really happy for Elbow’s success and don’t begrudge them for it one bit, especially since they’re really awfully good at the uplift for which they have rightly won renown, but I do wish they’d kept sinister in their repertoire. They were really awfully good at that too.

I’ve never understood why we were to believe the audience would stand stock-still for this song.

Something about the way the groove, the lyrics, and Zombie’s voice interact in this particular song has always hooked me. It’s confident, sexy, and a bit unpleasant at the same time. The way he says “living dead girl” is halfway between sneering condescension and mortal terror.

* I interviewed The Stand: American Nightmares artist Mike Perkins about the Stephen King adaptation’s upcoming all-Larry-in-the-Lincoln-Tunnel issue for Marvel.com. This is maybe my favorite Stand thing I’ve done, as it presented me with the opportunity to talk to Perkins about various horror-comic issues I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I hope you enjoy it.

* It had been a while since I read Cameron Crowe’s 1976 Playboy interview with Thin White Duke-era David Bowie, and I’d kind of glossed over just how amazing and hilarious it is. Seriously, it may be the best interview ever given by anyone ever. From homosexuality to Hitler, Mick Jagger to Elton John, the whole thing is one giant pullquote. It makes Grant Morrison sound like Billy Bob Thornton. I beg you to read it. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Bowie, Matthew Perpetua did a great little piece for New York on why it’s tough to love Lady Gaga. Unsurprisingly, I’ve given a lot of thought to Lady Gaga, and my take is basically the same as Matthew’s: She’s admirable, but the music’s not there. In many ways she’s comparable to Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, sans Bowie’s already extensive artistic past at that point (but complete with affinity for lightning-bolt face paint): a self-consciously arty weirdo trying to be subversive but also, equally importantly, determined to make giant hit records for the kids. Which is great! But the difference is, if you played “Hang On to Yourself” or “Moonage Daydream” to a theoretical me who didn’t know who recorded them and told me it was the Bay City Rollers, I’d still be interested, whereas if you took a Lady Gaga song and told me it was by Britney Spears, i’d get about halfway through and then be like “Okay, that’s enough.” I mean, they’re fine, but it’s her that makes them interesting, not the music itself.

* David Cronenberg on horror at MTV News. Covered: remaking his own movies, torture porn, Blair Witch, Scream. Via Jason Adams, who reposts some highlights.

* Here’s a semi-interesting interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, tackling 10 popular questions from the readers of Variety. Nothing you haven’t heard before, for the most part; what stuck out most for me is their continuing regret that they couldn’t do more with Mr. Eko due to the actor’s desire to leave the show after one season. (Via The House Next Door.)

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman reviews The Monster Squad. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, man.

* So maybe Sin City 2 isn’t sticking with the Weinsteins? Who the fuck knows. I can’t imagine years of will they or won’t they regarding the making of the sequel augur well for its future regardless. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Letterer Todd Klein’s posts on designing the Amalgam Comics logos strike me as pornography for a certain subset of my friends. There are more posts to come in the series, too! (Via Robot 6.)

* For a connection so obvious, this is underused, so I’m glad someone else made it, and even gladder they made it on a badass T-shirt. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Carnival of Horrifying Torture Revelations: Between the release of the CIA/OLC memos and the Senate Armed Service Committe’s report (conclusions here), we’ve learned that Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney and other all-the-way-to-the-top Bush Administration officials personally approved torture. We’ve learned that the United States implemented, as policy, torture techniques reverse-engineered from the program used by the military to train soldiers how to handle being tortured, techniques that were in turn derived from the torture techniques used by the Communist Chinese on American prisoners during the Korean War for the express purpose of eliciting false confessions. With that in mind, perhaps, we learned that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged torture specifically to produce “evidence” of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We learned that spiders were another phobia American torturers were encouraged to exploit Room 101-style. We learned that a galaxy of conservative stars openly applaud the use of torture and/or deny its existence, sometimes simultaneously and/or accidentally. I would like to apologize, once again, to everyone who read this blog from 2001-2004.

* Finally, let’s end on an up note: gorgeousness

and

gorgeosity.

From I guess Music for the Masses onward, the message of Depeche Mode’s music is that sex is the only thing cool enough to temporarily disrupt depression. That’s kind of an adolescent approach to these subjects, but also a mightily entertaining one.

* In this single episode alone, Serena got together with a guy, broke up with him, pretended to go out with another guy, “broke up” with him, got back together with the first guy, and got betrayed by him. In one episode! Similarly, Blair agreed to try to dupe Nate, decided against it, got snitched on, got dumped, and got back together with him. I don’t think Lost‘s entire five-season Jack-Kate-Juliet love triangle was this eventful.

* Speaking of Lost, the whole unnecessary-secret-keeping thing was taken to ridiculous new heights during that seder scene. I definitely felt Wallace Shawn’s frustration. Dan lied to his dad about working as a seder cater waiter (LOL), Lily lied to Rufus about why she brought him along, Serena lied to her mom about getting married, Serena lied to whatsisname about Dan being her boyfriend, Serena lied to Blair’s mom about why she was there…did I miss anything? And other than Serena not wanting to tell her mom about getting married, did any of it make sense? Less of that kind of ridiculousness, please.

* Wow, I did not expect them to address Chuck’s sexual assault on Jenny ever again. I really did believe it was akin to Batman shooting criminals to death in his early adventures, something that happened before the writers really had a handle on the character, which they’d chalk up to experience and simply move past. (Following that little righting-the-scales gag in season one where Jenny stranded Chuck on the roof in his underwear. Well, that takes care of that!) Bringing it up again is a very tricky thing. Obviously they still have to gloss over the severity of what occurred, and just how upset one would expect Jenny and her friends and family to rightfully still be, or the show wouldn’t work anymore. But nor can they make it some horrifying Rihanna/Chris Brown situation. What they seem to be doing is using it to help establish just how emotionally isolated Chuck is under his billionaire playboy exterior, which actually is kind of an interesting thing to do with a post-Blair Chuck, certainly more interesting than the My First Eyes Wide Shut storyline was. Now, is it just me, or did I detect some groundwork being laid for a Chuck/Jenny romance, though? Is that possible? Is Gossip Girl on some Comedian/Silk Spectre shit?

* I still feel like the show is pretty clumsy at introducing new viable non-Wallace Shawn characters. This clown Serena banged in Spain doesn’t seem to have much to offer personality-wise, and no, making him some kind of double-agent for Poppy, who is also underdeveloped, doesn’t help. Meanwhile Nate’s cousin still seems destined to disappear. I guess maybe they’ll try to do something with Jenny’s Monopoly buddy and his sister? I don’t understand why they don’t just make Eric a full-fledged cast member and build some more stories around him for crying out loud. (Admittedly I want to see some all-male make-outs on this show.)

* And hey, I didn’t realize until I wrote that last paragraph that Vanessa wasn’t even in this episode. She wasn’t missed!

* This was actually an oddly heartwarming episode of Gossip Girl, when you think about it. Serena made up with her mom. Serena made up with Gideon(?) (even if he’s a fink and a phony). Blair rejected Nate’s grandfather’s scheme. Nate seemed to have made up with his grandfather, at least a little. Blair made up with Nate. Nate made up with Chuck. (If only Nate made out with Chuck.) Blair and Serena snuggled. (See previous note.) Chuck apologized to Jenny. Rufus ended up in a pretty good place. Dorota is apparently in love (and royalty). Not even a bible-thumping Michelle Trachtenberg can take this moment away from us, friends.