You understand why I'm not paying for that pizza, right?

Warning...spoilers ahead for last night's Justified.

And also, last night's New Girl, and Glee, if you care. And maybe Monday Night's Alcatrazzzzzzz.

Sweet fancy Moses, it was good to be back in Harlan, KY. Some stray observations on last night's triumphant return of Justified:

 - I am still going to miss Mags terribly, but I think I'm really going to enjoy the new villains that are filling her sizable void. Neal McDonough plays icy cool extremely well, and he was ice COLD in this episode. I'm always a big fan of the soft-spoken, matter of fact, pragmatic/psychopathic bad guy, and that looks to be what they are going for here.

Plus , I can pretend that he is the same guy who had to leave the San Diego area because a certain low-rent PI and his partner put a stop to his underhanded real estate deal (RIP, Terriers).

And the Ice Pick guy...wow. Extremely charismatic performance, and gave the line of the night (which happens to be the title of this post). I sincerely hope that he's not dead, and I don't think he is...that shot seemed to hit shoulder, right?

Hopefully, we will also get a lot of Jere Burns this season as well, as I really enjoy the chemistry between him and Olyphant.

 - A random thing I love about this show...the gunshots are LOUD. Television guns are rarely as loud as real-life guns are, but the ones on this show make your ears ring.

 - You know how sometimes you get two characters who just make you sit up and really take notice every time they have a scene together (think Ben Linus and John Locke, as a good example)? Well, as usual, the screen just crackles every time Boyd and Raylan are on it together. Olyphant and Goggins are at the top of their game.

 - Just like my entire Twitter feed, I was counting the seconds from the time the attractive secretary showed up until her inevitable demise. She should have been wearing a red shirt.

 - So are you Team Winona or Team Ava? I have to admit a pre-existing affection for Natalie Zea, from her work on Dirty Sexy Money, but um....Ava looked REALLY good in those boots.

And a nice callback to her fried chicken expertise (referring to the events surrounding the death of her husband), right before she brained Devil with a frying pan, which was of course fantastic.

So...I'm torn, I guess. Team Winava?

 - I'm a moron, I guess, but I didn't pick up on the fact that Boyd got himself arrested on purpose in order to get at Dickey until I read it in a review this morning.

 - Really not too many hints as to what the overarching plot is going to be this season, unless I just missed it. Instead, this was just the show's way of re-immersing us into this world that they have built, and man...it felt good to be back there.

STRAIGHT GUYS, TALKIN' BOUT GLEE (COPYRIGHT TODD VANDERWERFF)
Good grief, what a convoluted mess that was. As per most episodes, there was some stuff I really liked, some stuff that was just weird/annoying/out of nowhere (or, as I call it, Just Glee Bein' Glee), and some stuff that was just unspeakably horrible.

Breakdown for last night is as follows:

Stuff I really liked: The Artie and Becky storyline (especially Becky's inner monologue being voiced by Helen Mirren...personally, mine is voiced by Ed Norton's character from Fight Club), The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the synchronized swimming coach.

The scene between Kurt, Finn, and Rachel at Breadstix hit on one thing that Glee has done well this season, which is the whole concept that this time in their life is a very specific and finite one, and it's going to end soon, and what happens after that? That theme has actually interwoven through a lot of episodes this season, which I give them credit for...in the past, it often seemed as though the writers didn't even bother to remember what happened last week, much less make an effort to worry about THEMES.

And, as always...every time Santana was on the screen. Naya Rivera is amazingawesomesauce, I don't care if her brother DOES play for the Hillbillies.

Just Glee Bein' Glee: Finn's dad is an overdosing loser, not a war hero, apparently. Sue Sylvester will NOT just pick a personality and stick with it (seriously...why was she involved in the little "rose walk" at the proposal...doesn't she hate ALL of these people?). This school is supposedly in a perpetual budget crisis, but they not only have a fully equipped Olympic regulation swimming pool, but....a synchronized swimming team?

Oh yeah...and Coach Bieste got married. Let's just mention that in passing, since that's really all the show did.

Unspeakably Horrible Stuff: Well, this week that was pretty much anything that had to do with one Will Schuester.

How was Will a creepy, horrible douchenozzle? Oh, let us count the ways...

 - He apparently no longer has any friends that aren't teenagers. He comes to them for advice, help on coming up with a proposal, really anything. OH, and even worse...his proposal is actually for their "assignment" for the week. Extremely professional.

 - To continue that theme...he asks his 18 year old student to be his Best Man, and puts him in charge of keeping him under control at his bachelor party (which I'm sure we will get to see at some point, and which I'm double sure will include only underage participants). Dude...that is CREEPY.

 - His apparent best friend confides in him that he is thinking about joining the Army after high school (a noble notion, by the way). So...Will immediately runs and tattles to Finn's parents, and joined with them to stage an Intervention, because God forbid we let that happen since Finn has SO MANY other more respectable options. (That whole thing ticked me off, incidentally...you would think that he had decided to join a kitten strangling gang).

 - Emma's Ginger Supremacist parents tell him that Emma is too coo-coo for cocoa puffs for him to actually think about MARRYING her....and not only does he AGREE with them, he TELLS EMMA THAT SHE IS TOO CRAZY FOR HIM TO MARRY. Jayma Mays actually does a fantastic job in taking what could be this cartoon character and turning her into an actual human being with actual damage, which made the whole thing even worse. How are we supposed to think that Will is anything but a fantastically horrible person? Why should I root for these people to get together? He actually ABUSES her emotionally in one scene, and then because he dresses up in a ridiculous white tuxedo and swims through a bunch of synchronized swimming prodigies (seriously...when did they PRACTICE?), I'm supposed to be happy that she accepts his proposal?

GAH....Will really pisses me off.

And the really sad part about is that when the show started, he was the character I related to the most. I was in a very active and well-recognized (locally) show choir when I was in high school, and I could relate to this guy's story of looking back on those years as some of the best of his life and trying to recapture that feeling somehow. But now...now he's just a creepy, pathetic, whiny, cruel, self absorbed person. Who, apparently, we are supposed to be rooting for.

Take Will out, and that's a B+ episode...but then it's only about 20 minutes long. That's about right, I think.

OTHER STUFF I WATCHED LAST NIGHT:
New Girl - Lizzy Caplan! Matt Besser! Rachael Harris! An episode focused on Schmidt, including the triumphant return of the Douchebag Jar! What else could you ask for? It's like they made an episode just for me!

Alcatrazzzzzz - Yeah, I'm going to keep making that joke. This....was....boring. I'm going to give it a few more weeks, because of the folks involved (a lot of the LOST team, including Hurley) and also because my Monday nights aren't as full of shows to DVR as some other nights. But if it's just CSI: Alcatraz, I'm going to be out pretty quickly.

WHAT TO WATCH TONIGHT:
Well, Idol is back, so there's that. I'm usually super stoked at this point, but this year I'm debating whether I'm even going to bother watching the audition episodes. Are any of you who have been around the blog for a while still interested in me doing recaps once the performance episodes start back up?

Also, the ABC comedy block: Suburgatory, Modern Family, Happy Endings. (that's chronological...in my personal priority order, it's Happy Endings, Suburgatory, Modern Family)

Crowdsourcing UGA basketball, Monday TV thoughts, more stuff

OK, it's that time of year again...football is winding down, tournaments start up in around six weeks or so...it's time for me to actually start paying attention to basketball. So, Dawg fans...what do I need to know in order to get caught up? I mean, other than that we apparently stink like last week's garbage. I want to know WHY we stink like last week's garbage. Were Trey and Travis THAT vital, that we go from a tournament team to one that may not win a conference game? And what happened to Gerald Robinson? I remember him at least being able to score pretty consistently last year, but during the limited time I've watched this year he seems to just be randomly hurling himself into the lane at breakneck speed, with no real intentions or ideas as to what comes next. Is Kentavious Caldwell-Pope living up to expectations, or is he (hopefully) really good but not good enough to be one-and-done?

So...educate me, Hoop Dawg fans!

MONDAY NIGHT TV:
 I watched the first 15 minutes of Alcatraz, before realizing that it was a two hour premiere and was going to keep me up WELL past my bedtime. It looks OK...I'm hearing from various critics (including Sepinwall) that it is mostly a police procedural, with a different "bad guy" every week, and only a cursory attempt at an overarching story. If that's the case, I will probably be out pretty quickly, but I will at least give it a shot due to its very strong LOST ties (JJ, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Bryan Burke, and of course Jorge Garcia (Hurley)).

Which reminds me...I think I am about ready for a LOST rewatch.

So, once I decided to put off Alcatraz, I watched the usual Monday night comedies instead.

First up was an episode of How I Met Your Mother that I enjoyed TONS more than anything else they have done all season. I was a late comer to this show, so I am not as emotionally invested as many fans are...I just want them to be FUNNY. And last night was definitely that ("We built Chip City...we built Chip City on ALL YOUR DOUGH...").

And then there was 2 Broke Girls. Like I said last week, I'm resigned to the fact that this is as good as the show will ever get...it's just a joke delivery system that delivers good jokes about 30% of the time and horribly unfunny and offensive jokes about 70% of the time. By that very low standard, last night was a pretty good episode...I think the jokes were actually funny about half the time, so...

...

WHY AM I WATCHING THIS SHOW?

I don't know...I think I watch it more because I am interested in the online reaction to it now, rather than because I actually think it's worth watching. But, hey...it's only 22 minutes when you don't watch commercials, and I don't have a whole lot else to watch on Monday. And Kat Dennings is hot, so...it stays.

WHAT TO WATCH TONIGHT
 Well....Glee, New Girl, and Raising Hope are all back from hiatus. That is prime Daddy-daughter time, so I will be watching those with the girls.

But the BIG news...JUSTIFIED IS BACK!!! YEEEEEE-HAAWWWW!!!

I just re-watched the last four episodes of last season again, and holy mackerel...I'd forgotten how TENSE those episodes were. I was still banging my head on the ceiling fan and screaming at the television, and I KNEW how everything was going to turn out.

Can't wait to hang out with Raylan, Boyd, Ava (hopefully), Winona, and the rest. I'll again point you to Sepinwall for his thoughts on the season...based on his description, I am really looking forward to what's coming up, even if I will truly miss Mags Bennett.

RIP, Mags...I tip my glass of Apple Pie to you.