TheAvod Goes to Toronto!

That's right, the show went to Toronto this week, largely so I could live out my life-long dream of meeting Lance Henriksen (and buying his autobiography, which I encourage you to do)!

So, if you'd like to hear about that, various episodes of financial malfeasance, and some fun news from Tim Sullivan, download it by right clicking here!

The Sixty-Seventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

This panel, which features members of the Purple Trio dressed in drag and as a baby, speaks for itself. Something interesting occurs if you take a look at the rest of the story, however-

After failing to protect the fake baby, Warren and Rocky return to the millionaire's apartment where the scheme was hatched. Then, for reasons that I won't hazard to guess, and despite the fact that this is where he got changed in the first place, so his clothes are there, Warren remains in the Nanny's outfit to run upstairs and thrash the kidnappers.

And then continued to wear the dress long enough for the newsreel crews to show up and photograph him in it.

Huh.

Tales From the Darkside 221: Strange Love

This week's episode is about classy people. How can we know this? Who else but classy people smoke a cigarette in this manner:

Like I said, classy. Also, he's wearing a tuxedo while hanging out in his apartment while his (presumable) wife dances on the balcony in a gown. Pure class. Then she falls off the side, which is admittedly less classy. This development leads to the involvement of Doctor Carrol, perhaps the only doctor in town who's sitting in a private office in the middle of the night.

Two questions about this image. 1: What year is this taking place? He's got a cabinet full of glass medicine bottles, and his phone is ancient. 2: Are the classy guy and his wife vampires? Because he's wearing a cape over a tuxedo, which is basically code for 'I'm a vampire'.

Terrible Moments in Taglining: Alien

“In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream”

While that's technically accurate - sound can't travel through a vacuum - it's not really +relevant to movie, which takes place inside a spaceship, where lots of people scream, and lots of other people hear them. Due to the artificially oxygen-rich environment.

The Poor Moral Lessons of the Film Eclipse

Having recently watched the film Eclipse in order to craft a drinking game based around it, I had the opportunity to notice something peculiar about the characters' arc over the course of the film. Namely, that the inaction of the Cullen family reveal them all to be fairly horrible people. Even for vampires.

Okay, I suppose that's a bit of an exaggeration - vampires are supposed to be horrible, and it's not like the Cullens are as bad as the throat-rippers from Near Dark. They're not a whole lot better, though, is the thing.

No, while we're told time and again that the Cullen clan is supposedly noble and pure and decent and everything you'd want from an adoptive family, their actions paint a completely different picture. While they appear pretty, polite, and positive, they demonstrate no characteristics that anyone could consider 'heroic' or even 'admirable', and through their self-centered inaction, they allow dozens of people to be murdered.

Let's examine it chronologically-

Criminal Minds 511: Retaliation

Lee Tergesen ("Oz's" Beecher!) runs through the woods, chased by the Criminal Minds team. He's caught easily. So easily, in fact, that I begin to wonder if this episode is going to take place in flashback.

I also suspect that no one told the camera crew that if they simply turned the camera around 180 degrees it might hide the fact that this chase is happening in the LA hills, as opposed to the small New York state town where it's set.

There are no flashbacks in the offing, though - Lee's being arrested for kidnapping his daughter and killing a woman (not the mother, though). Seems like this would be the end of the line for him, but he's rescued when another car crashes into the sedan taking him into custody! When freed by his accomplice Lee murders the driver (A Martinez!) but leaves Prentiss alive, largely because she's in the cast, and this is an American TV show. Big question 1 for the episode - why was the car all alone on the road? Don't major operations like this generally move in convoys?

What's Lee up to, and who's he working with? We'll find out after the opening credits!

Stupid Things About Torchwood: Week 7

Just three more of these left. Thank god.

1 - Gwen Cooper: Coward, Villain.

When we left Gwen, she'd just discovered that, due to her own incompetence, her family had been grabbed by the evil conspiracy responsible for the Miracle. She's asked to bring Jack to the villains, which she immediately does. That's right - Gwen is faced with having to choose between betraying Jack and putting the whole world at risk, or putting her family at risk and working with Jack to get her family back another way. Her immediate reaction? "Screw the whole world, I'm looking out for me!"

So if you were looking to associate that behaviour with a certain archetype, would it be the hero, or the villain?

TheAvod Pre-convention show!

Check it out, everybody - to compensate for the likely terse episode detail out trip to the convention which will be posted next week, DM and myself put together a bonus-length episode this time around, offering comprehensive looks at Insidious, Priest, and Exorcismus - reviews which prove surprisingly positive! Less positive is our treatment of Conan, which I didn't actually see.

Commence this week's downloading process by right-clicking here!

The Sixty-Fifth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

It's not that I don't appreciate diagrams. I obviously do. It's just that this scheme is in no way complicated enough to warrant a complicated, Rube Goldbergian explanation.

Tales From the Darkside 220: A Choice of Dreams

Abe Vigoda is, as usual, a mob boss who's getting the worst news of his life. It's terminal cancer, and he'll be dead in a matter of weeks. Abe is the capo di tutti capi it seems, a man who everyone fears, and now he'll be facing down his own ultimate end! A fine point is put on this by the doctor dropping off the news, who makes no attempt to hide his contempt for Abe, going so far as to announce that he only delivered the news in person so he could watch an evil man squirm. Which is an interesting idea, but I've got to say - perhaps not the smartest move. After all, Abe now has no reason not to kill you.

Abe is miraculously able to restrain himself, however, and the doctor is free to go on his merry way - with his medical career being shattered, of course. Abe and his henchmen share a good laugh at the doctor's expense, which quickly turns into a violent coughing fit, as is the wont of men with terminal lung cancer.

Terrible Moments in Taglining: Paranoid Activity 2

“You can't beg for your life when you can't see your killer.”

According to the distributors of Paranoid Activity 2, blind people are (legally?) prohibited from begging for their lives.

Paranoid Activity 2 - Brilliant Fake Documentary?

In a surprisingly rare departure for these 'found footage' horror movies, the main character of Paranoid Activity 2 claims to be an actual 'documentary filmmaker', rather than an A-hole who just happens to have a camera on him when awful things start happening. So, if this is a documentary he's making, what is the documentary about?

Removing the labels from bottles before a party!

Setting ineffective tripwires!

And, of course, vomiting!

Also, theoretically, there are ghosts. But not actually.

Criminal Minds 510: The Slave of Duty

After last week's episode, it occurred to me that I've now written well over a hundred of these things, and my point - that the difficulty that writers have coming up with stories about psychology helping solve crimes reflects the real-life uselessness of profiling - has been made a few dozen times over. That's not to say I'm giving up on the show, I've obviously developed a fondness for it, and I'm interested in continuing to score it, if nothing else - I will, however, be writing less exhaustive reviews of each individual episodes. Rather than going plot point by plot point, from now on I plan to offer a broader overview of the episodes, pause to detail some of the stupider things that happened each week (including the Prentiss Award, if applicable), and then score it at the end. Really, pretty much the same thing, only (hopefully) a little shorter.

So, with that in mind, let's start with the first post-Reaper episode of Criminal Minds!

Things start off with Greg's wife's funeral, where we learn that she had no friends or family, apparently.

It's not that I'm ever unhappy to see Nicholas Brendon, but what's he doing carrying the casket? I'm pretty sure they never met.

Oh my god, it's that guy again - the one I'd never seen before who kept getting lines last week! Is he joining the cast or something? Why is a minor FBI functionary carrying the casket?

There's a terrible line in Greg's eulogy, where he references the fact that she died 'protecting' their son. It's not really bad writing, I suppose, since he'd want to put the best spin on the situation, but in point of fact she passively allowed herself to be murdered, and had the Reaper been more interested in murdering Jack than he was at arranging a tableau to shock Greg, their son would be dead as well.

The overall dramatic arc of the episode is 'Will Greg go back to the FBI or not' - of course, since we all know that he's going to return, it's difficult to get too worried. I'm sure there'll be a character-based explanation at the end.

Of course, this isn't Magnum PI, we're not going to have a whole episode dealing with personal stuff, there has to be a murder as well - this week it's a serial killer in Nashville!

Stupid Things About Torchwood: Week 6

I've reached a point where I can't imagine how Torchwood became this bad. Did no one see this happening, what must have been a slow-motion, months-long train wreck and feel compelled to intervene? How is that possible?

Just four unbelievably bad things this week, since I doubt I could take thinking about any more.

1 - Two wasted weeks.

That's how long we've been dealing with the completely unimportant concentration camp storyline. Sure, the show's not over yet, and I can't say definitively that burning people isn't part of the aliens' master plot, but even if it is, these two weeks have been wasted. Why? Because the team was looking to expose something that WASN'T A SECRET.

The team went looking around a concentration camp, checking to see if something evil was going on - here's a hint: it's a concentration camp. So yes. Last week built up to the discovery of the crematoriums, and this entire week is spent with them trying to get away from the camp after the doctor is murdered. In the end, they escape and reveal that the camp director murdered that doctor.

But that's the only secret thing they reveal. The government had every intention of revealing the crematoriums - why wouldn't they? Two days ago the governments of the world had every non-responsive person legally classified as dead. The only next logical step would be to do something with the bodies. Does the team think they were going to be hidden away from the public, and all the people who came looking to see their relatives would be taken in by lame excuses?

The government's spokesperson insists that they have nothing to be ashamed of except for that murder, which was the lone act of a crazy person - and he's not wrong.

Two weeks out of a ten-week miniseries and all the team accomplished was to get one of their own peopel killed.

2 - That's not how economics work.

Ernie Hudson, playing a higher-up at the evil drug company, announces that the people behind the scheme aren't involved with Phicorp, they're just manipulating the world's economic systems. What about the drugs, then? Ernie explains that five years ago production would have been increased based on market share projections, and then the drugs would have been shipped and warehoused over a course of years, nothing suspicious about that, right?

Somehow, Jack is placated by this explanation, despite the fact that Ernie's theories in no way jibe with the actual things we've seen on the show.

This wasn't a case of a company projecting that their marketshare was going to be larger five years in the future. This was a company stockpiling billions of tabs of an experimental, may-never-be-approved-by-the-FDA drug in secret underground warehouses in the middle of major cities, so that they would be in a position to distribute them super-fast when the 'Miracle' happened.

Someone, somewhere up the line ordered it, and Ernie should be able to find out who that was - or is this simply a case of the writers wishing that they'd written the third episode differently all those weeks ago, and now pretending that they did?

3 - Apparently Esther has forgotten that she's wanted for treason.

Or at least the writers have, anyhow. Upon fleeing the camp, during one of the frequent crying jags, she announces the reason for her being so distraught - she can't believe that she's been compromised by given the people at the concentration camp her real name!

Um... remind me, why did you give them your real name again?

I know I discussed this last week, so I won't stress it too much here, but seriously, the show seems to have forgotten that Esther and Rex are wanted for treason.

4 - I hate you, Gwen Cooper.

Now, in point form, I'm going to track all of the ways Gwen Cooper has put herself and her family at risk this past day.

- Made our with her husband in an airport after flying in under a pseudonym, demonstrating her need to be undercover.
- Talked loudly about who she was in a government/corporate camp, even though both of those groups were out to get her.
- Didn't warn her husband not to get a job at the concentration camp under his own name.
- Didn't insist that her husband, mother, and baby go back into hiding the way they were at the beginning of the show BEFORE anything dangerous was after them.
- Wanders around a concentration camp with no credentials/reason to be there, assuming that no one will stop her. And no one does.
- Has her husband break her father out of a concentration camp with literally NO PLAN for what he's supposed to do next. Were they just supposed to go home?
- She sticks around to blow up some natural gas tanks, in the hopes of delaying the crematoriums for up to 48 hours - and public takes credit for the act, ensuring that she'll be publicly branded a terrorist.

"Call for 'International Terrorist' - Is there an international terrorist in the airport?"

- Answers a courtesy phone call in LAX under her own name. Not the name she's flying under, her real name.
- Has the gall to be shocked when all of these actions lead to her family being kidnapped and threatened.

This is the main/audience identification character for the show, and she seemingly has an IQ somewhat south of a Chia Pet.

Remeber that scene in Lethal Weapon 2, when after they're attacked by a dozen South African commandos and a helicopter Martin Riggs takes his date home as if it's just another night out, and they wind up grabbed by the bad guys? This is a thousand times worse than that.

This episode doesn't even have Lethal Weapon's excuse, namely that the action sequence was a reshoot designed to get a little more gunfire into the movie, and in the original cut, when he takes the South African woman home, he doesn't know that there's anyone after them.

Torchwood, by comparison, has, on a week-by-week basis, built stupidity upon a foundation of nonsense, until we're presented with a towering monument to some of the worst writing in recent memory.

TheAvod Likes Video Games!

Or at least movies based on them, anyhow. I've played all the games that were spun off (or adapted) into DTV animated films this week, so there's plenty of insight on display if you'll just right-click to download it.

A few other things come up in conversation, such as the upcoming Lone Ranger movie, and what an unbelievably bad idea it seems to be!

The Sixty-Fourth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

I've got to ask - was there a time in American history when monkeys roamed so freely through the cities that mobsters could be this blase about seeing one?

Tales From the Darkside 219: The Last Car

It's the middle of the night, and a woman heading home from college for Thanksgiving is waiting for a train. It's the last train of the night, and she's waiting by the sign indicating where the last car is going to stop. Just in case all this wasn't ominous enough, the exit sign picks this moment to come loose from the doorway:

And fall to the ground below. Tales From the Dark Side: For all your thuddingly obvious metaphor needs.

One Question About the Simpsons

Mr. Burns runs a nuclear power plant in Springfield, North Tacoma, USA. He's literally been in the Atom-smashing game his entire life. Even if he had some consular business with Prussia, why would he have to do it with their outpost in Siam?

Of All Exit 33's Problems-

I'm just going to point out one. Kane Hodder traps people at his gas station by giving them bad fuel from one of his pumps, ensuring that their car will break down on the side of the road a mile away. If he wants them to die, he has them go to pump 9, if he wants them to continue on, they're sent to pump 3.

What's wrong with this?

There are four pumping stations in Kane's yard. The ones marked 1&2 have two pump nozzles each, the ones marked A&B have just one - making a grand total of 6 “pumps”.

So how could there be a 'pump 9'?

Criminal Minds 509: 100

Previously on Criminal Minds:
There's a fake Zodiac Killer out there, and he loves killing like Garfield loves lasagna. For some reason, the country at large doesn't seem very interested in this fact. Seriously, he was able to disappear into the aether with no trouble at all. Try to wrap your head around that - the entire city of San Francisco was obsessed with the Zodiac, and the country was largely aware that it was going on. Now imagine a killer exactly as famous, only everyone in the country knows his name and what he looks like: how long would that manhunt last? Twelve hours? Twenty-four?

John List murdered his family and then disappeared for 18 years, living a whole other life as Robert Clark, without anyone getting especially suspicious. He was featured on an episode of America's Most Wanted, and less than two weeks later he was under arrest.

What I'm saying is, there had better be one hell of an explanation for how this guy managed to avoid being caught.

Alright, so - on to the show!

Things open with huge numbers of police and FBI agents convening on a house in the suburbs of California!

Okay, it's probably not supposed to be in California, but come on. Look at those trees. Anyhoo, the cops seem disgusted and shocked by what they've seen inside, so this is going to be rough, no doubt about it. On the upside, though, Reid's not wearing the leg brace any more! Good for you, actor!

Inside a few cops huddle over a body lying at the corner of a room - it's already covered by a sheet, and there doesn't seem to be any blood around:

So this can't be the shocking death. Next we follow bloody footprints upstairs, where a second body lies next to a bed. But who is it? The show doesn't let us see, but this paramedic:

Seems stunned by the sight. Actually this guy gets like four seconds of slow-motion screen time. Weird.

Now, while the credits are running, let's try to figure out who the bodies are! One of them is obviously the Reaper. He's not getting a fourth episode, I'll state that right now - add common sense to the fact that this is the hundredth episode of Criminal Minds (oh my god I've reviewed 99 of these? Seriously? 112 if you count Suspect Behaviour? I am known primarily by my poor life decisions) and you've got a perfectly dramatic opportunity to wrap up a storyline.

So one of the corpses is Reaper, and the other isn't Greg - he's pointedly not in the slow-mo sequence, but I know he survives since his name came up on SB - so obviously they want me to think the other body is Greg's son or Greg's wife. Well, obviously his wife, since this show isn't killing Greg's son, come on. I don't think it's the wife, either, and I'll tell you why - D.B. Sweeny is playing the Marshall handling her move into the witness protection program. Like I said when I first saw him, you don't put an actor that familiar in such a throwaway part.

So that's Sweeny dead, and the family's fine. I'm calling it now, Cirminal Minds - you didn't fool me!

We'll find out if they fooled me after the opening credits!

Stupid Things About Torchwood: Week 5

This week Torchwood continued its race to the bottom with such a high quantity of utter nonsense but I'm forced to cut this preamble short just to be able to fit all of it in this post.

1 - Are they wanted criminals, or aren't they?

After ridiculous introductory sequence in which Gwen and Rhys meet in an airport and have a jolly old time joking about how she had to fly under an assumed name, (what with the Phicor Corporation and many of their government associates wanting her dead) Gwen travels to the concentration camp where her father is being held, identifies him by name, and then yells to everyone within earshot that she is his daughter.

Now, were you part of an evil conspiracy with far-reaching, nearly limitless powers, and you needed very desperately to find someone, wouldn't keeping an eye on their next of kin be a good idea? Yet in the hours after Gwen shows up trying to spring her father from the concentration camp, absolutely no one shows up looking for her. Because the conspirators are just as bad at their jobs as Torchwood is, apparently.

TheAvod's Koontz Hour (+)

This week, doctor Avod spins the way-back dial and gives us a chance to reminisce about some of the team's fondest 90s experiences! Including Dean R. Koontz novels, the movie Warlock, and literally nothing else. Well, okay, another movie comes up, but it's profoundly not worth discussing here.

Anyhoo, if you'd like to check it out, just right-click here to download the episode!

The Sixty-Third-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

The Purple Trio put enough effort into that costume that I'll allow that the goons have been convinced that the midget is a 'moimaid'. What possible excuse do they have for thinking Davy Jones is some shirtless guy in red pants and leather shoes?

I just realized something else about Criminal Minds 508

Sure, I could go back and edit the actual article, but how honest would that be?


Anyhoo, the point is, even in a show where we're expected to believe that every single serial killer is a spree killer, this episode stretches the plausibility of that conceit to the breaking point. Why? Well, like the killer in Red Dragon, upon which the plot of this episode was based, this week's murderer did a lot of research on her victims before committing the crime.


She seeked out families living in her city who were demographically similar to her own, then managed to figure out when the fathers had gone overseas entirely based on the pictures they sent to photobucket, and only once that had happened did she target them for murder.


If you're only killing one family a year, this kind of research is plausible, but are we really expected to believe that she had two other families ready to go for the spree section at the end of the show? The entire profile of her personality was based on her having a psychotic break once a year, driving her to kill a family like her own.


That's all well and good, but it's behaviour that's completely incompatible with her having a whole wide variety of families just waiting to get murdered. But hey, god forbid anything interfere with the formula, right?

Tales From the Darkside 218: The Old Soft Shoe

As the episode begins Paul Dooley (who famously played Claudius in Strange Brew) is on the telephone, assuring his wife that despite the fact that he's a travelling salesman on the road, he isn't making time with a cheap floozy. So what's the first thing he does when he gets off the phone?

Comes on to the first cheap floozy he sees. Of course, she's not as cheap or floozyish as he'd hope, and wants none of his attentions. When Paul finally gets around to trying to check in, he's told that there are no more rooms - despite the key still hanging on the wall. It's the manager's policy never to rent that cabin, probably because it's haunted - not that he says anything, I'm just assuming. They take a moment to discuss a bizarre turtle that sits on the desk-

No, you're not seeing things, that is, in fact, a candle mounted on its back. Apparently this is a memorial to the manager's father, who was famously pro-turtle.

Something I Only Noticed Just Now on The Simpsons

During the 'Lisa Becomes a Vegetarian' episode, there's a sequence where she fantasizes about being surrounded by meat eaters. The first two images are actually from the episode-

Chief Wiggum eating a burger-

Homer and Bart fighting over a pork chop. Things then move into the realm of fantasy, with her imagining Marge chopping away gleefully with a cleaver-

And Kent Brockman pausing during a news report to feast on a drumstick.

It's this last fantasy segment that I'm suddenly fascinated by. Why? Because, after seeing this episode literally dozens of times, I've only just recently noticed what he's saying when the report is interrupted by snacking.

“-your windows” (CHOMP) “The next-”


If that seems oddly familiar, it's because the random broadcast that appears inside Lisa's head is from the next episode, when Kent Brockman offers a wrapup on the whole 'giant monsters attacking' thing.

“Lock your doors, bar your windows, because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family!”


So, what's stranger - the fact that Lisa's fantasy involved a news broadcast from a fantasy that hadn't happened yet - or the fact that when they edited the line into this episode rather than recording a new one, they put the 'CHOMP' over the word 'because', rather than having him pause and then continue speaking.

Archie Presents: Valuable Economic Lessons

In these trying economic times, it's hard to know exactly where to look for solutions. I, for one, have decided to turn to Archie, in this story from 1975.

That's the setup, and here's the pitch:

From there the story spirals off into a standard gag about Archie wanting a raise in his allowance, and his father shooting him down. Whatever his motives were, however, it's impossible to ignore the wisdom in Archie's economic theories.

In a country where ten percent of the workforce sits idle and the rich hoard their money like so many covetous dragons, who can deny the necessity of supporting increased production through consumer spending? Archie's bold prescription of protectionist trade policies and favoring domestic manufacturing seems untenable in today's corporatist climate, but perhaps it's time to follow his radical lead, and put American prosperity first!

What does it say about America's current, profoundly out of touch mass media that if you want to find direct, powerful statements supporting workers you have to search out children's comics from thirty-six years ago?

Criminal Minds 508: Outfoxed

There's some serious cross-cutting going on in this week's episode - while a mysterious killer murders a family as they cower in their home, the mother begging for the lives of her children, Reid attends a lecture on the Neurobiology of serial killers given by a man so non-telegenic that he can only be an actual expert in the field.

It's the scientist's theory that simply by looking at a brain scan he can tell is someone is a psychopath - basically his assertion is that all psychopaths share the same inborn brain damage, one that makes them unusually willing to resort to violence, and unable to be satisfied by the simply pleasures of life that we all take for granted. It's all very fascinating stuff, and I'm sure the guy's TED talk would be a great hour, but I'm fairly sure that it's not going to work into this week's plot, given that nothing like real-life psychology ever has anything to do with the killers and their incredibly neat and tidy motives for killing that have little to do with genetic predestination.


Perhaps the goal of this speech was to distract us from the fact that the show is doing some pretty stupid things here in the first scene. A:) They expect us to believe that someone could fire a pistol five times inside a suburban house that isn't soundproofed in any meaningful way (there are french doors in the room the gun is being fired, for god's sake) without alerting the teenage girl swimming in the pool behind the house that her family is being murdered. Which, you know, come on. Even wearing swimming earplugs, you'd still hear that. As would the neighbours, who would be calling the police ASAP.

B:) They want us to not notice that the killer is obviously a woman - or possibly the spindliest man in the world, with unbelievably tiny feet. But since Reid has an alibi (he's at the guy's talk), it must be a woman.

This is Reid going to investigate the death house. Please note that the house next door is merely thirty feet away from it. Just saying.


Turns out the deaths were in a military community - the father's in Iraq, the rest of the family were murdered by a crazy woman. Who dug graves and buried the family out back without anyone noticing. Seriously. The murders were early enough that the teenage girl was swimming out back, yet no neighbours noticed half a dozen gunshots, a violent drowning in a swimming pool (that's how the teen went), or a woman digging a mass grave and dragging four bodies out to it?


Yet they were alerted by the sound of a dog barking and scratching at the mound of earth? Yeah, let's just check out of this episode now, plausibility-wise.


Turns out that this is the second mass murder - almost exactly one year ago another military family was murdered in exactly the same way! Which leaves the team with just three hundred and sixty days to save the next family!


I'm kidding, of course. I'm sure another family will die around the twenty-minute mark, with a third family being saved at the last possible moment. Let's find out if I'm right after the opening credits!

Stupid Things About Torchwood: Week 4

1 - You're in the CIA!

The episode opens with Esther, a CIA analyst who's currently on the run from her own government, swinging by her sister's house.  This isn't one of those secret sisters who she left off her job application, like in The Firm, no, this is her one living relative, and if you were an evil government agency trying to find her, this is the one place you'd go.

Which is exactly what happens. Later in the episode someone will yell at her for being so stupid as to make this mistake - but yelling isn't enough. There's literally no way someone could both have her job and be stupid enough to do something like this. Just two episodes ago she was conning her way out of the CIA building and changing identities, and now she's publicly visiting the only place on earth where people will be looking for? Inexcusable.

TheAvod's request hotline!

In this special all-request episode of TheAvod, DM and myself take a look at a variety of movies suggested by the Schlockmeister! They include The New Kids, Evilspeak, Looker, and no other films! If you right-click here to download the episode, you can also find out about my feelings towards a certain prominent crime comic book writer.

Spoiler alert - I'm not a fan any more!

The Sixty-Second-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

"The John Martins". Sure, the lady taking form out of a candle's flame is strange enough, but that archaic way of describing a family is the weirdest thing about this panel.

Tales From the Darkside 217: The Shrine

Offering a Bulwer-Lytton-y start to the proceedings, we begin on a dark and stormy night as a woman naps in her kitchen as another woman bangs away on the door. Christine, the woman outside, uses a spare key to let herself into the house, then finds her mother acting strangely. Not just 'haven't seen you in six years' strangely, but decidedly off. Why are they finally seeing each other after more than half a decade? Christine had a nervous breakdown and they've been awkward for some time since.

The awkwardness only amps up when Christine finds out that she'll be staying in a guest room, since hers has been transformed into a storage area. Despite this entirely plausible claim, when they get to the top of the stairs a light shines from underneath the door in Christine's old room. Could there be someone inside? Mother says no and ushers Christine away, right before the sound of a little girl's voice fills the hall…