The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

The Office: Catch Me, I'm Falling

Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't a big fan of last week's Office episode. I found Pam's reaction to Michael's relationship with her mother too shrill and out of character, and was actually so put off by the episode that I was thinking about removing the show from the blog rotation if things didn't get better.

 Now I'm starting to think the show works best in short bursts. I laughed harder at the Halloween opening than I did at almost anything in the main storyline (notable exception: Creed thinking Michael is paying too much for worms and asking "Who's your worm guy?"). And the show's latest webisode -- about Kelly and Erin forming their own girl group -- is hilarious.

Sons of Anarchy: Dinner With Mom

"Change won't happen without blood," Jax Teller proclaims early on in this week's Sons of Anarchy. By the end of the hour,blood has been spilled, but not in a way that Jax -- or anyone -- may have expected, and certainly not in a way that brings about any change.

 Things are even more worse off than they were after last week's brutal Jax vs. Clay prison fight. Gemma shattering the plate during that nightmare of a dinner scene was a nice way to illustrate the very real fracture that's hit the club.

 And we still haven't hit bottom. Zobelle is dancing around SAMCRO, which has virtually no allies left. Any victories achieved tonight -- like Jax, Bobby and Opie getting payback against Tom Arnold's sleazy porn producer Caruso -- were horribly short-lived.

Mad Men: Unmask, Unmask!

Mad Men isn't in the business of doing holiday-themed stories, so "The Gypsy and the Hobo" was about as close to a Halloween show as we were going to get.

 And how perfect was it that  Don's unmasking took place on the week leading up to Halloween? Scratch that. How perfect was this episode altogether? It was the type that reminds me what a great show Mad Men can be, and made me really anxious to see how the final two weeks are going to play out.

 Even without that wonderful -- and in its quiet way, brutal -- scene between Don and Betty that seemed to take up most of the second half, we got more of Joan (how we've missed her), more of Roger, and Joan and Roger together again (well, on the phone, but still...)

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Go With Your Gut

  "What's 'real' got to do with what we do?" Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David.

 What indeed? That line appears early on in "The Bare Midriff," one of the stranger Curb Your Enthusiasms I've seen, yet still something of an improvement over the last two episodes.

  It was an interesting mix. We spent a lot of time on Larry and Jerry's obsessions over social rules (Who should slide over in the restaurant booth when a third person arrives? How loudly should one honk at another driver?), but also saw some flat-out craziness (the flashback to 1963, the fake miracle, Larry getting arrested for stealing napkins, Lewis getting run over by Maureen's mom, Larry saving himself from a fatal fall by grabbing Maureen's belly).

 I said last week that I wanted to see more of the Seinfeld reunion plot, and we got that this week, sort of. It's clear now that Larry and Jerry are having as much trouble writing the reunion show as Jerry and George did with their pilot. (Although, judging by the white board in their office, it seems like maybe Jerry and Larry have too many ideas to work with, where Jerry and George had too few.)

 I'm looking forward to seeing the whole cast together again to actually rehearse this thing, which should go about as smoothly as Maureen's mother's honeymoon.

 Some other thoughts:

• This episode was pretty overstuffed with characters (Jerry, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Maureen, her mother, Richard Lewis), but it still would have been nice to see Jeff and Susie.
• I love how Larry David continues to push this idea that bald people are an oppressed minority.
• During the discussion with Jerry about honking, I'm surprised Larry didn't pitch his story about the Aamco commercial -- from waayyy back in season one -- as a plotline for the reunion.

 Tom Coombe

The Office: When Michael Met Pickle

The Office ended its fifth season with some of its strongest episode ever. But since returning last month, the show has been disappointing. Last season's episodes  -- at least the stretch at the end -- showed The Office at its darkest, its funniest and its most humane. Michael got a hard-assed new boss, quit to start his own paper company, and made a triumphant return to Dunder Mifflin.

 So far this year, I feel like I've been watching a cartoon. Last week, I complained that with Jim and Pam gone, the show was missing the two main characters that kept it in the realm of the rational. This week, they're back, and it's Pam who's acting irrational (with Jim sort of watching helplessly, until he comes through for her in the end). And it's not funny. Not at all.

Sons of Anarchy: Aid and Comfort

There was no way Sons of Anarchy was going to keep a large chunk of its cast in prison for more than a week or two. But man, did they make the most of the time they had.

 "Gilead" was yet another outstanding episode in what's been a really impressive sophomore season for this show.

 The term Gilead comes from the Bible, and it also appears in a number of hymns (like the one Kirsten and her school choir sing early in this episode) that talk about finding and providing comfort. Fitting, for an episode where nearly everyone was searching for some sort of comfort, whether it was Opie, who believes he's founded a fellow lost soul in Lyla, or Gemma, who turns to Eliot to help get the boys out of jail.

Mad Men: I'm the Man in the Box

Baby Gene, baby Gene...you've gotten your dad in a bit of trouble.

 Think about it. If Don doesn't hear the baby cry at that exact moment, he doesn't forget to put the keys to his desk drawer away.

 The keys don't wind up in his robe, which means Betty can't wash the keys with the rest of the laundry.

 If that doesn't happen, she doesn't hear them jangling around in the dryer, and she doesn't use the keys...

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm: "Everything I've Always Wanted in a Woman...

...except the walking."

That's a line from Seinfeld, spoken by Kramer, who was dating a disabled woman in "The Handicapped Spot," yet another episode from the show's glorious fourth season.

 Any TV show or movie that features someone dating a woman in a wheelchair  -- like the Seinfeld episode I just mentioned, or Sunday's Curb Your Enthusiasm -- hits home for me. My girlfriend of nealy eight years has spina bifida, which means she uses a wheelchair to get around.

 So I know what it's like to go to a restaurant and have everyone bend over backwards for you. Unlike Larry, I don't get that much of a charge from it. ("Oh, so that's the reason you're dating me," Megan teased me when I told her about this episode.)

 In fact, I spent much of this episode thinking about my own situation and how Megan would have responded to it. (I know she'd be more put off by everyone's pat-on-the-head attitude toward Denise and Larry's courtship than by Larry's shallowness. And what is it about Larry David being chased by people in wheelchairs? This is -- at least -- the third time it's happened.)

 Because really, there wasn't much to this one. There were a lot of funny ideas introduced -- Denise being disappointed by Larry's baldness, Ted Danson and the pie -- that didn't seem to go anywhere. More Seinfeld stuff, please.

 Tom Coombe

The Office: Nice Paper Company You've Got Here...

Anyone who needs to know what characters like Jim and Pam bring to The Office needs only to watch an episode like "Mafia," where their absence helped the show devolve into something too broad and cartoony.

 A quick recap: a pushy insurance salesman with an Italian last name shows up to sell Michael a policy. Michael, Dwight and Andy assume he's a mobster.

 Having the three most delusional characters -- aside from Creed -- function unchecked is never a good idea. As Oscar points out, there's usually a "coalition of reason" at work (and it's interesting that he thinks of it the way we do), but with Pam and Jim on their honeymoon, it's left to Oscar, and he's just not up to the job.

 There were some things that made me laugh, like the way the schedule Michael creates for himself sounds like that of a pre-schooler ("free play" and "creative space" take up big blocks of time), and Kevin's assertion that Jim's office is nicer than Kevin's house. And this line from Dwight was classic: "The only way to defeat a bully is to stand up to him. I know, I've bullied a lot of people." But overall, I want the coalition of reason back.

 Tom Coombe

Fringe: Crazy Eyes Killer

After all the cool (and momentous) stuff in last week's excellent episode -- William Bell! the creepy living head! shape-shifter Charlie revealed! -- this one was kind of a let-down.

 Actually, I'm starting to wonder if maybe Fringe is at its best when putting out mythology episodes rather than "monster of the weeks." In this case, there wasn't even a monster, just a mad scientist hi-jacking people's dreams.

 The end result was kind of freaky: the victims basically having waking nightmares, turning their hair white, their eyes cartoony-goggly and driving them into homicidal rages...before killing them from exhaustion.