Sunday Night TV

Packed night of TV, and my Battlestar Galactica talk goes on forever. Sorry. Highlight to reveal spoilers:

• The Simpsons: It seems like The Simpsons takes longer and longer to get into the meat of the plot. They almost always start off with unrelated stuff, in this case fire safety (with a great "Scent of a Wookiee" joke), but usually the second part becomes the main plotline, here re-enacting major events to replace a lost photo album (with the source music montage that now appears in every single episode). Or at least that becomes a B-story. But they ditched that quickly and went with Homer as a paparazzo.
  
  They didn't seem to take a position on the press/celebrity relationship, with Homer clearly victimizing the famous folks, but when he stopped they all turned completely evil (as evidenced by the hilarious montage at the end, with Tatum snorting Secretariat's ashes, Side Show Mel eating an American flag, etc). This episode was decidedly average up until that montage, but the sequence lifted this week's installment all the way to pretty good.
  
  A few guest stars this week: Betty White had a random cameo as herself, J.K. Simmons was great (parodying his Spider-man role of J. Jonah Jameson... "This one has 'page one' written all over it!"), and Jon Lovitz as Enrico Iritazzio was ok.


• King of the Hill: Lucky goes "stumping," leaving Luanne feeling lonely. To make matters worse, she's spending all her time at work doing hairstyles for prom season, reminding her that she never got to go to hers. So while Lucky recruits Hank and friends to help him take on the Moby Dick of stumps, Luanne talks a lonely kid into asking her to the prom. As usual, everything ends on an unusual, but sweet note, with Lucky and Luanne dancing to "25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago, which is indeed an awesome song (though the only Chicago song I actually like).
  
  Best line of the episode: "Everyone goes to the prom now. Even the crippled and the gay!" Not a great episode, but not bad either. The scheduling has been so weird this year (not starting until late January, doing two episodes after the Super Bowl, and then taking over a month off) that I felt a little lost.


• Family Guy: Any footie pajamas-related story is great by me. "Are you telling me I could be pooping and warm?" The whole restaurant storyline was weak, but it served as setup to the pretty good (if completely weird) Crippletron segment, and Peter's wheelchair experiences.
  
  
  As usual, the story is all over the place, so the quality of the episode depends on the cutaways. It was about 50/50. Tyra Banks on America's Next Top Model turning into an iguana, Mexican Super-friends, the extended Maude theme, the M. Night Shyamalan commercial, and Dumbo Ben Stiller (twice) were all pretty lame, while swapping vocal chords with Patrick Stewart, Quagmire tearing up Lois' carpet, exploding cupcakes, and the M.C. Escher rap video were all very funny. Average episode overall.


• American Dad: A CIA drill gone awry sends Stan fleeing into the woods thinking there's a nuclear attack coming. Since the family has been calling him a boob behind his back, he doesn't tell them when he finds out the truth. This story got really weird and wasn't very funny.
  
  Roger, meanwhile, is left behind, and in an effort to get a blender in time to make his special Grey's Anatomy-themed cocktail (weird that Family Guy ended on a Grey's Anatomy joke just before this), goes on jdate to get a desperate woman to marry him so he can put a blender on his registry. I think the Jewish family was Elliott Gould, Liz Sheridan (Jerry's mother on Seinfeld), and Lisa Edelstein (Cuddy from House).
  
  Things wrapped up very neatly in the end, but the episode just wasn't funny. For a while, American Dad was better than Family Guy every week, but the past month or so, FG has raised its game, and AD has turned back into the uneven show that I considered never watching again during the first season.


• Battlestar Galactica: Those were some loooong previouslies. We pick up with a few relationship droppings, with Adama and Roslin sharing a morning phone call, and Anders hooking up with Tory (and getting caught by Seelix, who he'd been starting up a relationship with). But that out of the way, we get to the meat of the story, which was especially meaty.
  
  I think Gaeta perjured himself because he still feels guilty about the whole thing, but I'm not really sure.. Weird though how Lee was feeling the hate for the old man last week, but refuses to sell him out for prejudging the case. And then makes a great case for everyone hating him. But it's a good speech, and sums up how I've felt about the trial myself. Though at the end, stepped on one of my most hated conventions of acting/screenwriting: repeating a phrase for dramatic effect. It shows up in movies and tv shows constantly, but who does that in real life? No one. No one.
  
  When the judges adjourned to consider the verdict, it honestly sounded like those scenes in South Park where the angry mob goes "rabble rabble rabble." I was thinking that since a lot of the speech was directed at the Admiral that it'd either be 4-1 guilty or 3-2 not guilty, with Adama on the not guilty end either way. "Not Guilty is not the same as Innocent" was a great way to sum up his position, but you can tell Roslin is seriously pissed.
  
  Lampkin's blue suit was weird. Somewhat pimp-like, complete with the cane which was apparently an affectation. Was that for court, or somehow to win Lee over? Either way, this guy was unbelievably cool, and I hope this isn't the last we see of him.
  
  Baltar really had the crazy eyes (pictured) working for him early on as he vehemently opposed a mistrial. But then after I had been feeling sympathetic for him of late, he instantly turns back into a cocky jackass the instant he gets out of the courtroom. Awesome. As I suspected last week, Keegan Connor Tracy reappears. She's taking Baltar off "to his new life." I hope she's a major character next season, because she's a pretty good actress (and also I think she's really hot). And certainly they wouldn't tease us with the Baltar as a religious icon hints they've been throwing out for a while.
  
  With the trial wrapped up and the episode not close to over, the instant Adama gives the order to jump to the nebula, you had to know it was going to be a disaster, most likely in the form of a cylon attack. The attack happens, but not before everything goes completely crazy. The power goes out, and then we get a series of unexpected plot developments.
  
  Earlier in the episode, we learned that Roslin, Athena, and Six are all having the same hallucinations involving Hera at the same time. But we see Six go back to hallucination-land, this time without Athena or Roslin in the vision. I guess they could be seeing it, but as far as we know it was just Six. She, Baltar, and Hera look like they meet the final five, though once again we don't see their faces. The song turns out to be "All Along the Watchtower," which is nuts (but cover version that played over the last few minutes was pretty awesome). Tigh, Galen (who I don't remember hearing the music last week, but I might've just missed that), Tory, and Anders seem to think the music means they're cylons (though I think that might be too easy). Even if he is one, Tigh still hates the toasters, so he convinces everyone to go do their jobs.
  
  And just when I think we're about to get into battle, we get the big reveal. It would've been silly to kill one of your best characters off for good, so I was fully expecting Starbuck back. I'm glad that her return is more than a little mysterious though. I guess that stormy thing Starbuck dove down into is supposed to be a wormhole that lead her to Earth? Or she's a cylon and died and resurrected and is going to feed them a wormhole story. Or, and ooh, this one just popped into my head, the cylons used the eggs they harvested from her back on Caprica to build a new model based on Starbuck. Well I'm not good with theories, but anyway this is exciting.
  
  The wait until 2008, or until the between-seasons movie if that happens, will be brutal. They've been billing this as the best show on television, and while I'm not sure about that, it's episodes like this that keep those claims from being outrageous.

Fox's preview for On the Lot actually looked kinda interesting. But I wonder how similar it'll be to Acceptable TV.