'The Office' has a baby: Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review tonight's hour-long "The Office" baby episode:

On tonight’s episode of "The Office," Jim and Pam are going to have a baby. "The Office" is in the midst of a disappointing season.

However tempting it may be to connect those two dots, it’s a coincidence, not a cause-and-effect situation.

You can read the full column here.

The episode itself is actually quite good, the first half particularly. I'll have a separate post discussing it in more detail going up tonight at 10.

American Idol: Healing Crystal

A review of tonight's "American Idol" semi-finals episode with the Top 10 women coming up just as soon as I tune up my Moog...

I generally don't do song-by-song breakdowns in the semi-finals, and shows like tonight's are why. There's such a clear separation between Those Who Can Win and Those Who Cannot that I really don't want to bother explaining why Haeley was better last week as a hot mess than a screechy bore, or why Lacey's likely to go home tomorrow.

So instead let's focus on the four Who Can Win, while allowing that a couple of other people could work their way into the discussion if they either get their acts together (i.e., Didi needs to pick her guitar back up, like, yesterday) or keep improving (Katelyn made much more of an impression tonight, even if the song was really slow). So here are the four with a shot, in chronological order:

Crystal Bowersox, "Long as I Can See the Light": You hear the song title and you think it's going to be one of those inevitable, predictable performances (even with Crystal coming off of her health scare), but the gospel arrangement was one of those terrific ones that made the song sound fresh without ripping the heart out of it. Crystal's vocal was great, with or without the health issues factored in, and she's by far the most assured stage performer of either gender so far. I'm still not sure how America will take her long-term, but right now, she's my favorite, if not the favorite.

Katie Stevens, "Put Your Records On": It's not even that Katie was that great tonight. It's that she's a more human-seeming upgrade on Diana DeGarmo, and the DianaBot made it all the way to a close second place in season three. What Katie needs to do is find a way to translate her goofy, non-robotic persona from the interviews into her actual singing. I suspect both speech and song are equally-rehearsed, but she connects when she's talking in a way she doesn't quite yet when she's on stage, even though she has a very good instrument.

Lilly Scott, "A Change Is Gonna Come": I'm not sure this legendary civil rights anthem is the ideal song to get Lilly's indie-cabaret treatment, but she still sounds great and, like Crystal, knows what she's doing on stage, no matter what the judges say. (If anything, Crystal performs with her eyes closed more than anybody.)

Siobhan Magnus, "Think": Right now, Siobhan is all power and no control. (Fienberg compared her to a relief pitcher with a very powerful but straight fastball; if she were a relief pitcher, she'd be Kyle Farnsworth.) The verses were limp and unremarkable, but when she hit the choruses - and, especially, when she hit the big power note that dropped Randy and Kara's jaws - she sounded remarkable. There aren't a lot of classic "Idol" belters in this bunch - or at least, not a lot of good ones - and if Siobhan can figure out what she's doing, she could be this season's big underdog story.

Anybody else you feel belongs in the discussion? And do any guys other than Andrew Garcia and Casey James have a prayer of outlasting these women?

Firewall & Iceberg podcast, episode 6: American Idol, Lost, Office baby, and why can't anybody cast a pilot?

The latest episode of the Firewall & Iceberg podcast has been posted, and now there are instructions on how to subscribe to a dedicated podcast RSS feed, whether in iTunes or not.

Sound quality much better this week. Joke quality less so. I blame myself.

American Idol: She-woman man-haters club

A review of last night's "American Idol" coming up just as soon as I rocks the onesie...

So the men and women had to switch nights this week to accommodate for Crystal Bowersox's ailment, and while I like Crystal enough that I wouldn't want to lose her from the competition for a non-voting reason, I also do wonder if the show would have gone to this much trouble for someone who isn't an obvious frontrunner.

But while I worried that the last-minute switch would be one stumbling block too many for the uninspiring field of male contestants, the guys didn't seem too hurt by having to push up their performances a day. Most of them were significantly better than they were last week, especially Alex Lambert, who used his guitar as a kind of security blanket to get over the uncomfortable stage fright he had last week.

On the other hand, none of them was exactly looking like the next "American Idol," were they? I expect Casey James and Andrew Garcia to go far in the competition, but mostly the improvement between the weeks had the guys going from awful to competent but bland.

And the judges aren't invested in any of them, giving them conflicting advice from week-to-week. Tyler Grady was awful last week and deserved to go home, but he had a point that the judges attacked him for doing the exact same thing they claimed to love in Hollywood. And I'm baffled by what they're doing to Andrew, where they're holding his Hollywood success against him in a way I've never heard them treat another contestant. Last week, they complained that they were already tired of his acoustic rearrangements - even though many viewers had never heard them before (and certainly not as often or as at length as the judges had) - and then when he switched things up this week, they basically told him to go back to doing more things like "Straight Up."

On the plus side, Ellen was much livelier and more willing to criticize than she was last week. Putting her in between Randy and Kara helped, because she always seems more comfortable when she doesn't have to lead off the discussion, particularly if they're discussing someone who was bad.

What did everybody else think?

Lost, "Sundown": A history of violence

A review of tonight's "Lost" coming up just as soon as I have an unfortunate incident involving a boomerang...

"You think you know me, but you don't. I am a good man." -Sayid

Dude, you tried to kill Baby Hitler. You might want to reconsider that statement.

"Lost" is all about eternal struggles - good vs. evil, science vs. faith, free will vs. destiny - and fundamentally about man vs. his own nature. John Locke wants to be a big man but can't overcome his own smallness. Jack Shephard tries to fix everything and usually winds up destroying it.

And Sayid Jarrah wants to be a good man free to enjoy the love of his good woman, but instead he's always the man brought in when people need killing.

Where the last two weeks brought us alternate versions of Locke and Jack who managed to break their emotional cycles - a Locke at peace with his disability and unremarkable life, a Jack reaching out to his son in a way Christian never reached out to him - we discover that Sayid in any timeline, in any locale, at any age, is always going to be the one called upon for a bit of the ol' ultra-violence. He doesn't want it, but he can't escape it. Alt-Locke gets a wife, Alt-Jack gets a son, and Alt-Sayid gets... a chance to put a couple of bullets into Keamy? And to watch his beloved Nadia raise a family with Sayid's brother Omar - the same Omar who needed Sayid as a child to kill the chicken for him, and who needs him as an adult to take care of his Keamy problem? Oh, and he gets a bloody, non-English-speaking Jin in a freezer? Where's the fair in that?

I still feel Cuse and Lindelof made a tactical error in giving us the sliding doors timeline without telling us in advance what it is, because until we do, they have all the weight and meaning of a dream sequence. But the more we see of them, the stronger my feeling grows that we're seeing the series' epilogue in advance. It may not turn out this way, but at the moment it seems the flash-sideways are where the castaways wind up after the war with Smokey ends, as some kind of reward from one of the celestial powers going to war over the island, be it Jacob or Smokey. Smokey does seem awfully confident in the prospect of letting Sayid see Nadia again, after all.

And if that's the case, the rewards seem mixed at best. Locke gets Helen back (and gets to live, for that matter), but is back in the damn chair. Jack gets a son, but also a life that's otherwise as broken as the one he had the first go-round. Kate is free of Marshal Mars, but still a fugitive. And Sayid has Nadia in his life, but not really.

But from what we know of these characters, and of their tortured histories, maybe this is exactly what they asked Smokey and/or Jacob for. Sayid knows in either timeline that he's too much the killer to deserve Nadia, but at least this way he gets to know her, and to have a pretext to see her whenever he can stand it. Kate isn't rewarded for her return to LA like she was as one of the Oceanic Six, but she's also not in a cell and for now gets to be around Aaron's mother. Jack has a means to address his daddy issues that don't involve his actual daddy. Dogen gets his son (and his life) back. Etc., etc. Not wholly happy endings, but the best anyone may feel they deserve.

Whatever the flash-sideways mean, they definitely work better when built around the show's stronger characters/actors - Locke two weeks ago, or Sayid tonight. Again, I'm not demanding answers so much as I am entertainment, and watching Sayid kick ass in two timelines, even as both versions recognized that they're doomed to be killers, was damned entertaining. Naveen Andrews is often at his best when Sayid is at his most despairingly self-reflective, and that moment when he fixed Ben with a grin and said there wasn't time for him anymore was one of Andrews' strongest (and certainly scariest) of the series. When all you're good for is killing, and yet the monster wearing your dead friend's face says that killing is the only way to get back the woman you love, how do you deal with that? On the list of things the "Lost" characters have had to swallow, that epiphany feels particularly brutal.

It had been a while since we got to see a good Sayid fight - the last one that strongly registers for me is the one he had with original recipe Keamy in the season four finale - and we got a real corker in his broom-handled throwdown with Dogen. And in 2004, we saw him cut through Keamy's goons(*) and then Keamy himself(**), not letting himself be fooled by the man's promises to clear Sayid's brother's debt.

(*) Were they all members of his mercenary team from season four? I recognized the bald guy, but wasn't sure on the others.

(**) He was only on the show for a season, and not featured all that much in that season, but Kevin Durand always made an impression as Keamy. Lots of actors might have his sheer physical size, but there's a sense of danger (insanity?) that you can't build at the gym, you know?

And while Sayid was showing off his hand-to-hand and small arms skills, Smokey was putting on a much grander show of force, and preceding it with a good old-fashioned campaign of terror, using Sayid to whip the Temple crew into a frenzy (and then to take out Dogen and Lennon) before doing his smoke monster thing that he does so well. Sometimes, all I need from "Lost" are the simple pleasures, and a good Smokey rampage is high on that list.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the Temple characters were, other than to stand around and be cryptic for a handful of episodes before Sayid and Smokey wiped them out, but we end the episode in a much more interesting place than we began it. Smokey is building himself an army, and one that includes the crazy (Claire), the converted (Sayid), the suspicious (Kate and Jin), the fearful (Cindy and the kids) and the don't-give-a-damn (Saywer), and he's currently carrying himself like a man certain of victory. Ilana and the rest of the gang from the beach finally linked up with some other character (even if Miles is the only one to actually stick with them). If Dogen never entirely had a point, at least we're done with him and the Temple.

And since the show skipped over the Sun-centric episode we might have expected given how all the previous episodes followed the air pattern of season one, we know that Lindelof and Cuse aren't going to just give us parallel drawings of early episodes.

A much, much stronger outing than last week.

Some other thoughts:

• So how does Alt-Jin go from being detained by TSA agents at the airport to being taped up in Keamy's freezer? I'm guessing the money the TSA was so interested in was a payoff that got confiscated, and Keamy wasn't interested in any excuses.

• I'm really hoping Andrews' more pronounced British accent - both in the Temple and as Alt-Sayid - is a deliberate choice with a meaning, and not Andrews just getting his signals crossed in the final season.

• Anyone want to set the over-under on how long before Crazy Claire gets Kate alone and tries to cut Aaron's location out of her?

• I'm not exactly where Dogen ranked on the Others' corporate hierarchy relative to Ben, but the two guys clearly attended the same leadership seminar, one that involves lying and torturing when the truth upfront would be much more useful - and that then puts you in a very bad spot when you suddenly need your torture victim to trust you. The Others need a better HR rep next time out, I think.

• Jack makes a brief cameo when Sayid goes to see Nadia and his brother at the hospital, and it doesn't appear that either he or Sayid recognized each other in the way that Kate seemed to know Jack, or Jack seemed to know Desmond, in previous scenes/episodes set in the LA X timeline.

• Did I mention that I loved the Sayid/Dogen fight?

What did everybody else think?

'Parenthood' review: Sepinwall on TV

I already wrote about the Asperger's syndrome storyline on NBC's "Parenthood," and in today's column, I review "Parenthood" itself. The verdict: thumbs up.

Because this is a busy week, and because I've already written a fair amount about the show, use this post to discuss the pilot episode after it airs tonight. When I get a chance, I'll bump it up to the top of the blog again if other posts get in the way.

UPDATE: Bumpity-bump-bump-bump. What did everybody else think?

HBO + 'Game of Thrones' = awesome?

Okay, I know I said in the previous post I don't write much about development, but I've been getting so many questions over the last year about HBO's attempt to adapt George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" that I figured HBO's decision to greenlight the series (which Mo Ryan has more details on) deserved a post of its own.

I'm not much of a fantasy reader, but Mo and James Poniewozik effectively tag-teamed me (during our pizza summit) to give the books a try at some point soon. Maybe after I finish the two combat diaries that "The Pacific" is using as source material? (And no, not all of my reading choices are based on what HBO is up to. It just seems like that some months.)