1. Last week’s odd soliloquy worked as part of the teaser, but was dropped into the actual episode with all the grace of a flaming bag of manure.

2. This week’s fourth-wall-breaking was… jarring, to be kind. Vaguely condescending as well, which would be fine if it were Doctor-to-companion rather than writer-to-audience.

3. Hey, at least Missy didn’t show up.

(Capaldi, that is)

Early in this season of Doctor Who, those of us who found the reality not living up to the hype were scolded for leaping to conclusions without adequate evidence. Also reminding us that Smith had some real stinkers his first season.

Well, we’ve now got 11 episodes, and for the third week in a row, it’s Wednesday and I still haven’t gotten around to watching the latest one yet. In fact, it wasn’t until just now that I checked my Amazon account and realized that I was behind; I still thought the tree thing was current.

I’m still watching Doctor Who. In fact, I’ve watched five episodes in the past week: Aliens of London, World War Three, Dalek, The Empty Child, and The Doctor Dances. I’m just not the least bit impressed with this season. Capaldi has had a few moments where he really felt like the Doctor, but most of the time, it’s not working for me.

[Update: finally watched 11. Missy was just as annoying as her teaser appearances promised, and the Big Reveal elicited only a small groan of pain]

[Update: watched 12 last night. Reaction: meh. Seriously, that’s what they spent the entire season building up to, with Clara’s love life and the Doctor’s assholiness and Missy? Lame as fuck, and they don’t get a pass for referencing the Brigadier, especially after Osgood.]

1. Eccleston
2. Tennant
3. Hurt
4. Smith
5. Morrissey
6. Capaldi

The Agents of SHIELD series has been weak from the start, with actors not fitting into roles, characters not coming together as a team, and second-rate stories being told badly. And after taking a week off, they came back this week to show us that they knew how to make it worse.

I can’t even count how many ways this episode sucked. Most of the actors looked like they were playing their characters for the first time, reading their emotions off of conveniently-placed sticky notes. And whoever was responsible for Coulson’s green-screen driving scene should be banned from the industry for life. Was there anyone on set that day watching him frantically jerk the steering wheel like he’s riding out a storm on the high seas, while the projected background has him driving in a straight line down a perfectly uncluttered suburban street?

And there was nothing about any scene that involved flower-dress-evil-chick that wasn’t stupid from scalp to ankle.

Worse, the preview for their triumphant return in January made this episode look good by comparison.

(updated with Youtube embed, which actually works…)

You’re a very cute, very busty, quite popular, just-turned-18 member of a popular idol group, with numerous sexy photobooks and DVDs to your credit, and this is how they’re advancing your career? You’re not kidding? This is not a parody trailer?

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…is that he never made one. In all the outraged coverage of the incident, you think someone would have bothered to mention that little nugget of information.

I watched the clip everyone’s linking to. He made a joke that implied that a player for the Yankees (who is good-looking, quite successful, and has been caught fooling around in the past) left the field in the middle of the game and had sex with Sarah Palin’s daughter. The exact words were “her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez”. Not a single word about rape, and, in fact, one could easily reverse the outrage by pointing out that these people are insisting that sex between a light-skinned female and a dark-skinned male must be rape.

Letterman and his writers obviously thought they were talking about Palin’s adult daughter, an unwed mother who was knocked up by an athlete. They’re guilty of being too lazy to check which daughter attended the game, or perhaps of not even knowing that there was another daughter. But that’s all.

If you happened to know (as Letterman and his equally-clueless writers obviously did not) that the daughter at the game was 14 years old, you could interpret it as a statutory rape joke, but I haven’t seen anyone say that. Unless something’s been edited out of the clip (and I got it from a site that was feeling the rage), there’s just no rape in this “rape joke”.

Birds of Prey, on DVD. This is worth it just to ogle Dina Meyer. The storyline was cheese, but considering the quality of the actresses involved, it was smoked cheese. Astonishing that it took this long to reach DVD; there was a time when the words “Mia Sara shower scene” would have been enough to justify an immediate extended unrated multi-angle director’s cut box set.