WOW: That's two urinary incontinence ads in one CBS Evening News commerical break. I guess we know who's watching legacy newcasts.

BLOG VS BLOG: The anthropologists vs. Larry Diamond fans thing had been one of the more interesting blogfights in at least a few months.

UPDATE: Jared Diamond. That's Jared Diamond. I'm sure somebody wants to fight Larry Diamond--just not anthropologists.

DEFENDERS #1: I won't get it until my comics come in the mail at the end of the month, but Neilalien actually goes to comics shops and he has a page-by-page review up. He really liked it. Ah, DC, you shall rue the day you killed Sue Dibny.* Rue, I say!

*And I know Giffen said they didn't leave because of that. Allow a poor fanboy his conspiracies.

LONDON "BOMBER" A BRAZILIAN?: This story's getting weird.

BSG: VALLEY OF DARKNESS: Let's do a little checklist here, since it will avoid critical thinking for a moment. Plots advanced this episode:

Billy & Dee
Baltar & Six and their mumbo-jumbo
Crashdown: Threat or Menace?
Chief: nicest guy on Galactica
Tigh: biggest dick on Galactica
Helo & Starbuck
Lee Adama, Our Hero
Laura Roslyn, Our Savior
Kat & Hot Dog Survive One More Episode

Plots not advanced:
Either Boomer. (Has one of the main credits players not appeared in an episode before? And Tigh and Chief need to ask their agents why they aren't in the main credits yet.)

And have you been reading Wallwriting's BSG reviews? They're quite good, and he gets them up there fast. I loved his conclusion for "Valley":

It wasn't a terrible ep. There were just so many contrivances. They run into D; and exactly how large a planet is Caprica? Thrace's apartment, the museum, the Cylon base, is it all in the same zip code? They all go to aft damage control. Good stories have events and the characterization and themes are demonstrated by how they work around the events. Bad stories have characters and themes and the events are contrived to work around them to make it easier for the storyteller. This was a bad story.

Yet, the characterization was so good that it's hard to dismiss this ep as a loss. In fact, in so many ways it was a roaring success. I am very glad that they have decided to shuffle which characters interact with each other. It's a great way to shake up a TV series without have to take the tired old route of adding a baby to the series, that always spells the jump-the-shark demise of... oh frak!

Yeah--even when the situations are somewhat contrived--or to put it charitably, when the drama demands the central characters constantly be put it in certain high-stakes situations--the characterization is usually amazing on BSG. And the characters did well this episode; here's more thoughts, in a list:

--Billy and Dee. I love these two--they're like refugees from a John Waters movie or something who keep wandering through this bleak post-apocalyptic show about genocide. It was completely contrived to have Dee be the only live one in a room full of corpses, and yet it gave Billy the chance to show concern in his own repressed, fumbling way. Their final scene, with Billy pulling the curtain on the camera, was cute as all bug-out.

--The Death of Socinus. That's what I thought while watching it--"This is the Death of Socinus, and it will be thought of in that way, with capital letters, as something important that did happen in the second episode of the second season of Battlestar Galactica." Chief arguing with the medic, reminding her that she wanted the medkit and what they lost to get it and now it's too late?--Crashdown refusing to deal the euthanizing dose himself--"He's your man, Chief"--Chief telling Socinus all matter of comforting lies, we not even knowing if Socinus heard them, Cally breaking down, as she always does, and yet continuing, as she always does--it was a great scene. Would that every redshirt got such a scene (and Socinus was essentially a long-running redshirt) they would perhaps fear less the inevitable untimely passing that comes with the shirt.

--Chief and Cally were good in the forest too: Cally comforting him, Chief ignoring her, Cally dropping the mother-frakker bomb, Chief looking back in mock astonishment ("Mother frakker? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?") and then the hug and the kiss on the top of the head. The Chief takes every death of a man he is responsible for personally, and cares for all the members of his little flock in his understated way (I think he think they're all, like Socinus, "tough kids"); he's like the Adama of the non-coms. He is the Adama of the non-coms.

--Lee's starting to wonder about what the hell he's doing--did you notice that? He told Jammer they'd have to roll a hard six (or was it eight?) and then had to admit he had no idea what it meant. "Just something my dad says." And his end wrap-up with Tigh at the Adama bedside, questioning if he was cut out for whatever it was he just did (shooting a charging Cylon in mid-flight--who is cut out for that?)--it's his brother's death still lingering, of course, but a new kind of self-doubt, one that isn't rooted in "my dad got my brother killed."

--Roslyn: will she embrace full-on messiah-hood or will she just keep letting others talk like she is? They keep teasing us.

--Helo and Kara: Okay, I dig the vibe they were going with the piano in the background and the idea of rest and reflection in the midst of the chaos of this episode. I was actually getting a Blade Runner vibe (the scene where Rachel was playing in Deckard's apartment), but I think I've mentioned before that I think the new Battlestar Galactica is a Star Trek vs. Blade Runner mashup, so I clearly can't be reasoned with. But, as Wallwriting points out:

Speaking of Thrace, it looks like we have an answer to the age old question: How little chemistry could two actors have together on screen? Katee Sackhoff and Tahmoh Penikett have the chemistry of an inert buffer and... something that doesn't react with an inert buffer. Look, that's the best I can do right now.

That was why Boomer and Helo had chemistry--they're both mild actors and mild characters. Starbuck and Helo are supposed to have had a relationship, and I can kind of buy it, actually, Helo being like a "safe"choice for Kara or something, and Helo looks like the kind of affable lug who is deluded by women on a regular basis. But Helo could barely pretend to be interested that Kara's revelation that she's not fighting to get back what she's lost--she fights because she fights. She's Starbuck, the Girl Who Fights. And Helo barely raised an eyebrow.

Wallwriting is dead-on with this, by the way:

I also can't believe it's coincidence that in last week's episode, Tigh had taken a similar assessment of a before and after period in his life and how he liked himself then and now. With Tigh, he doesn't really seem to like himself now. He didn't like himself back then either, but after his commission, something that he once felt would be the key moment where his whole life would come back together into a happy state, even after he gets what he wants, he finds he still isn't happy.

Meanwhile, here's Thrace, who is now doing her own before/after reassessment going all the way back to her knee injury. She knows she wasn't happy back then, but she is happy now. Thrace and Tigh are so similar. She's the self-destructive hot head he used to be, and he's the shell of a human and officer that she could become if she doesn't do something about it now.

And yet Adama loves and needs them both.

Anyway, yeah, this episode was as strong as any other episode of BSG in the characterization department. And that's what you watch it for, I think, and why you don't bother Tivoing Stargate: The Legendary Journeys or what have you. It's what sets this show apart.

DEAR MEDIA: It's possible I'm the only one who cares about this, but could you please point out that the word "Asian" means something different for Americans than it does for Britons? Asian in American parlance means East Asian and is meant to replace the old racist code word "Oriental;" Asian in British parlance means brown people of Indian or Pakistani origin. We don't have a blanket term for brown people, and they don't have a blanket term for yellow people.

That is all.

BSG "SCATTERED" THOUGHTS: You know--I was worried they were going to shove Sharon out the airlock. But not I'm thinking, if they do do that, it gives us a perfect chance to do a Cylon's-eye-view of stuff, as she'd just wake up in a new body somewhere. Maybe with her human self intact and questioning the Cylon way. Of course, Tigh remembered that killing her doesn't kill her just in time, since he had all the flashbacks to help him out.

Yes--Tigh got all the flashbacks, so this was kind of the Tigh episode, even though they hit on every subplot: Baltar and Six, Kara hates Boomer, Helo loves Boomer, other Boomer hates herself, Tigh's wife wants to take over, the President is the world's craftiest politician, Lee has issues with Adama and Adama is almost dead. Tigh got all the flashbacks and they were during moments where maybe you would think moments where Adama did something relevant to the situation Tigh was in were. And clearly, Tigh was trying to do what he thought Adama would do. But he kept flashing back to scenes of his friendship with Bill, not to any particular thing Adama would do. So they ended up being more a measure of his affection for the man, which Tigh sort of translated into making the command decisions he's always been crappy at making. So he ended up channeling Adama's leadership due to the personal ties he'd established with him. I thought that was nice.

Helo must feel like a sucker at the end of that brief scene. I'm kind of a believer in complex internal Cylon emotional lives, at least in the human models, so I don't think they'll go down the road that she was only using him, and I can kind of see her leaving since Kara wants to kill her and all. Still--Kara told him so. And until preggers Sharon comes back, she's right.

Let's see. They had the obligatory extra-cast-member death. (The guy with the slicked-back hair. In Star Trek he'd wear red....) They went through a whole space battle without a single cut to a cockpit, explosion, scream--I guess their pilots are getting better. I'm enjoying the breakdown of team order on....whatever planet they're on, with Crashdown being clearly overwhelmed and at the same time not enjoying The Chief knowing a lot more about what to do than he does. The undercast continues to be great: Calley, Gaeta, Dee; Billy hanging around the President's cell was a nice touch. That medic whose name escapes me. I do hope they don't turn Gaeta Cylon--you can't recycle a subplot that quickly, methinks.

So it was a Tigh-tinged subplotarama but it clearly wasn't a letdown, which is what I was worried about. And I was amused by the sudden reappearance of the bridge officer from the miniseries. I guess he was in the bathroom all first season.

GASP! PAGS JUMPS THE SHARK: I wish it wasn't so, but Wil Wilkinson makes a convincing case that everyone's favorite public intellectual has lapsed into "old-cooterism". Apparently she forgot that the Internet changed everything, as far as subverting all the old information channels. Odd for someone who got famous, or more famous, writing Salon columns.

MONGOLIAN WRESTLING: Check out Blockhead Dan's threadumentary on the DVDVR message board.

THE SCANDAL THAT KEEPS ON GIVING: Steve Clemons linking to Justin Raimondo. I do declare, Plame/Rove has something for everybody. It's the Summer Olympics of scandals.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME: Mac Thomason has this great online contest going in which 64 ESPN anchors/personalities are pitted against each other in an NCAA bracket-like tourament. Winners advance by being more loathsome than the person they're matched up against; for example, Stu Scott is a 1 seed, Scott Van Pelt is a 16 seed, and Stu is massacring Scott right now. Anyway, check it out and go vote.

MY OWN PRIVATE MORGAN SPURLOCK: Yes, I am in possession of a sheet of Arby's coupons that expire at the end of the month--why do you ask? I don't think I'll suffer quite like Spurlock did, McDonald's being America's nastiest fast food franchise and all. Nor will I receive any notoriety, as no one is throwing bricks through the windows of the Paris Arby's. ("Know what they call curly fries in France? Les fries de curles.") But I will eat cheap for the rest of the month.

And that, oh Internet, is the first point I've had to make in weeks.