By Todd VanDerWerff One of the things that draws me to the medium of television is the way a series can show the process of doing something. Think of how Project Runway gives you a quick shorthand to the process of coming up with new fashions or how the best procedural cop shows take you inside the ...

By Todd VanDerWerff “Rough Edges,� written by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer and directed by Dan Attias, just plunges forward, pell-mell, not terribly concerned with if it makes a lot of sense (that Woodruff letter storyline still feels dropped in from another series entirely, Mormon content no...

By Todd VanDerWerff One of the smarter things I heard about the film Rachel Getting Married, my favorite of last year, is that in a lot of cases, most of the things that people who strongly disliked the film disliked about it are the sorts of things those who really liked the film liked about it. It...

By Todd VanDerWerff As if making penance for the last two weeks of limited Juniper Creek storylines, Sunday night’s Big Love, “Fight or Flight,� written by Patricia Breen and directed by Adam Davidson, was probably the most Juniper Creek-heavy episode of the season, if not since Season One. So...

By Todd VanDerWerff Every season, Battlestar Galactica does a Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) episode, which delves into the character's motivations and her dark past. How much you like these episodes usually hinges on how much you like borderline melodrama and how much you like Sackhoff’s performance, ...

By Todd VanDerWerff I’m sure ten million Lost fans have made this joke already, but “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham� was essentially The Passion of John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). Not for nothing, apparently, did the last episode prominently focus on Jack’s (Matthew Fox) role as the doub...

By Todd VanDerWerff So let’s talk about God. I mean, He’s arguably the most important character in Big Love, even if we never directly see Him, even if we never are sure how He feels about the Henricksons. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) is always so concerned about how the two of them are getting...

By Todd VanDerWerff For the first time this season, I feel completely stymied by Lost , and I sort of don’t know what to say about it. It did a lot of the things I wanted it to (using the tale of the Oceanic 6 returning to the Island to delve more deeply into their characters), and it had a bunch ...

By Todd VanDerWerff Genre fiction requires the infodump. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point in a science fiction, fantasy or horror work where you need to lay out, exactly, the rules everyone’s playing by. The One Ring to rule them all corrupts absolutely. Dr. Jekyll’s potion lets out ...

By Todd VanDerWerff If Lost ’s greatest romance, the one between Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) and Penny (Sonya Walger), is all about a couple that is always connected by some sort of deeper link, even when time and space conspire to keep them apart, then the show’s other fine romance, that of Jin ...