On the subject of inattention to detail-

As I do my best to investigate exactly when and how the Simpsons stopped being the vision of perfection that it was between its third and fifth seasons. There's the subtraction of heart from the proceedings, an increasing cruelty to the humour, the way shortened runtimes prevent the episodes from developing rich B-stories - all of these are decent avenues worth exploring. Today I'll be focusing on a minor scene from the seventh season, one that demonstrates another key flaw: The lack of attention to detail, coupled with underestimating the audience's intelligence.

While attempting to injuring himself in the episode 'King-Size Homer', something odd happens. After sliding on a patch of oil he dumped on the floor, Homer moves through a series of rooms without incident.

Finally he slides past Smithers' desk-

Through a doorway featuring one of the most bizarre uses of perspective I've ever seen-

Criminal Minds 609: Into the Woods

There's a full moon in the opening shot of this week's episode, which can mean only one thing: They're taunting us with yet another case in which the killer isn't a werewolf. Come on guys, would it kill you to do a Halloween fantasy episode? Goth rockers and vampirists just aren't cutting it!

See what I did there?

Okay, moving right along, a family is out walking in the woods, being watched by a nefarious figure in the trees. Turns out the figure is a black bear, and they come very, very close to being its dinner. In a happy turn of events (that quickly turns gruesome) the bear wanders off. Why? Because it's already had its fill of human!

 Oh desiccated corpses. You never look great.

It seems the child was abducted while camping a year earlier, then dumped along the Appalachian trail some two states over! The team rushes out of the office just moments after hearing about the case (seriously, why aren't they doing this on the plane?), but they're too late - two children have already been targeted, watched from the brush as they happily caper about on their family's camping trip!

Don't worry too much, though - except for that one time in the episode Reid directed, this show has never killed off a child we actually met. And that time we really only heard him talking through a wall.

There's a weird costuming choice when we see the team on the plane. Although at the end of the briefing Greg announced that they'd be at the ranger station within the hour (including trips to and from the airports? How short a flight is this? Could you not just be driving?), when they're on the plane everyone has taken the time to obtain and dress in sweaters and fleeces:

I'm confused - did they stop at the FBI gift shop on the way out of the building? I know they keep 'go-bags' at the office, but don't those generally just have a change of clothes and sundry needables? Why would they have clothes for a variety of different weather conditions? How big are these bags?

When they get to the Ranger station they immediately visit with the father of the dead boy, played by Justified's Johnny Crowder, sans wheelchair! In a suspicious coincidence, it turns out that Johnny stopped desperately searching for his son right around the time the ME says that the boy must have died. Johnny's explanation for this? The psychic connection he had with his child was suddenly cut off, making him sure the boy was dead. That's seriously all the explanation offered, and Greg accepts it.

Again, this is the same show that refuses to do a werewolf episode.

The Lost Simpsons Characters - Nelson's Dad

Now for another part in this semi-irregular series documenting the way The Simpsons has shrunken and devalued its world by casting off characters and plotlines.

We met Nelson's dad way back in season 4's 'Brother from the Same Planet'.

There he was the soccer coach who showed favoritism to his unpleasant son. You may also remember him from Season 6's 'Bart's Girlfriend', in which he reined Nelson in with a leash.

So, what happened to Nelson's dad? He disappeared. In later seasons Nelson would be assigned a generic 'neglected child' background, in which his father abandoned him years earlier, offering him an excuse for his behavior, as well as a reason to feel sorry for him. The show would then take it a step further, bringing Nelson's father back, explaining that he hadn't actually run off, but rather been kidnapped by a circus. Happy endings all around!

What was lost with the exclusion of Nelson's original father? Accuracy! I don't know how many people reading this have actually met a bully's parents, but Nelson's father being a smug jock who encourages his son's bullying is incredibly well-observed. Nelson's father may be one of the most true-to-life things the show ever offered, and he was removed so that the show could be more generic and cliched.

Thanks, Simpsons.

Dante's Inferno Craziness

I actually enjoyed the film adaptation of Dante's Inferno quite a bit, so I'm not going to pick it to death, but I thought I'd point out two things that I found humourously puzzling.

This is the man that Dante meets at the gates of hell. He announces that he lived in the time of the false gods, and Dante takes a random shot in the dark as to the man's identity - is he the epic poet Virgil? Amazingly, that's exactly who he is.

Somehow, neither man is surprised at how well that guessing went.

The second thing is an animation error that makes absolutely no sense to me.

Check out the man's shackles at fifty-seven minutes into the film. Now let's check in on them one second later.

Suddenly the chain is gone and his arms are overlapping the shackles. This one is just baffling to me. How do you even make a mistake like this? There barely any movement on the screen, and the chain was a simple overlay. This is Bakshi's Spider-man level of weird.

Other than that, however, perfectly fun film.

TheAvod gets Sequelitis!

That's right, it's time for three separate sequels to be covered on theAvod - here's the twist... two of them are the third entry in a series! Crazy, right? It would have been nice to get three threes in there, but sadly, it was not to be.

Anyhoo, download the episode by right-clicking here, and listen to DM and myself discuss the craziness that happens when series go on so long that they become good again!

The Eighty-Eighth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

"Like a ghost murder from fiction!"

It's my fondest dream to someday use that sentence in an appropriate context.

Tales From the Darkside 318: Auld Acquaintences

On the subject of Supernatural-

The producers of Supernatural do an excellent job of disguising their limited access to travel. Yes, from time to time it can seem like all of America is a giant pine forest, but for the most part the location scouts do an exceptional job.

There's one episode, though - season 6, number 17 (the Titanic Show!), which features a sequence set in what I can only describe - and anyone who's ever been there should be able to attest to this - as the most Vancouver location of all time.

I don't know if it's the planters, or the modern condos, the terraced steps with ostentatiously stylized railings, or the giant freaking mountain range in the background... when you put all of it in one place, it just screams southern B.C., to the point where claiming it's anywhere else seems patently ridiculous.

An important storytelling lesson learned by comparing Skyline to Thor

In Medias Res - perhaps the most overused dramatic device in modern fiction, it's impossible to throw a stone these days without hitting a movie that begins in the middle of the action. It's a daring move, or it would be, if most stories weren't using the weaker version of the device, in which, instead of starting in the middle of the story and trusting in the audience's ability to follow along, just teases the main action, then flashes back to explain how the characters arrived in the situation that starts the film.

While not completely inappropriate, this use of In Medias Res requires one thing - that the situation be unusual enough to require an explanation. If it doesn't, then all the film has done is wasted the audience's time. For examples of each type of flashback IMR, let's consider the films Thor and Skyline.

As Thor opens, a mysterious man has fallen through a wormhole and crashed into the ground. Who is he? How did he get here? This is pretty far from an everyday occurrence, so the next half hour of the film is spent detailing the amazing series of events that resulted in this absurd situation.

The film Skyline opens with the beginning of an alien attack - light beams down from the sky, and anyone foolish enough to look into it is drawn up to the spaceships far above. A few people staying in an apartment notice the lights, and one of them is captured. The the film then flashes back, not to explain the spaceships, but rather to let the audience know how a group of people wound up sleeping in an apartment. Since sleeping in an apartment at night is basically the least surprising thing that can happen, all the time spent establishing the series of events that led the characters to that point are a complete waste.

Also, apropos of nothing, you can't introduce a new kind of monster in the last minute of the movie, and expect us to just accept that's what the brains were for, Skyline.

Criminal Minds 608: Reflection of Desire

The episode begins with Penelope reading pretentious dialogue while doing her makeup in front of a vanity! Is she getting ready for a play? We don't find out right away, since Robert Knepper is busy murdering a blonde woman while another woman watches from the shadows. He's dressed as if this is a flashback set in the 40s, and the fact that he's making his victim watch an ancient film on a projector only serves to complete the theme.

He makes the victim re-enact the scene, but she's too freaked out to get her lines right. An old woman who can only be Robert's mother jumps out and finishes the scene with him, but luckily they're interrupted before the kiss. Sadly for the victim, the interruption comes in the form of her begging for her life, which only serves to set Robert off. He drugs her with chloroform, drives her to an alley in his Mercedes, then patiently waits for her to wake up before killing her with a plastic bag held over her head.

Yes, it turns out Penelope was in a play, something about her being a rape victim who now murders a rapist/killer. The most fun thing about the scene?

The detail that when she fake shot the guy with her starter pistol, she cheated it off to the side so that it would look good for the audience without being potentially dangerous for her co-star. That's a great observation, and suggests that people working on the scene had a theatre background, or at least believed in research. I'm kidding, of course, this could only mean a theatre background. Of course, that theatre background should have led someone to prevent Garcia from whispering her last line to her victim at a level that no one in an audience could possibly hear.

Still, the audience loves it, and gives a mostly-standing ovation. I can't spot Xander in the crowd, though, which is strange, since he seems like he'd be super-supportive of this kind of thing. She also hasn't told the team about her involvement, but she tries to let them know in a passive-agressive attention grab 'accidentally' letting some playbills slip out of a while running down the victim's details.

Speaking of the victim, post-death the killer cut up her face, removing her lips, and he also sent a glamour shot of her to the papers, dressed up like a star from the Golden age of Hollywood. At least the guy's embracing his theme, right?

One Last Thing about Bart's Girlfriend

Seriously now, on what planet do children get up super-early on Sunday so they can get some elaborate games of Cowboys and Indians in before church?

TheAvod Baffled!

How else would you describe the condition we were left in after watching this year's episodes of Sherlock? How could one show be so great? It has wound up being a show whose greatness is almost impossible to quantify, not that we didn't spend an hour trying. Right-click here to download the episode and join in the fun!

We also discuss the finale of American Horror Story, a show that's much easier to describe: so stupid and insulting to its audience that it's hard to hate, leaving its crazy scrappiness as something of an admirable quality.

The Eighty-Seventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Picturesque? Isn't that the ultimate example of an adjective you're supposed to show rather than tell?

Kick Ass 2 continues to worsen.

In issue 5 of Kick-Ass, three things happen. Just three things. Each one of these three things is stupider than the last. Somehow they requires twenty-some pages and costs three dollars.

Thing 1: The villain is told by his relatives on the police force that he can't expect any protection now that he's a mass-murderer.

Why is this thing stupid? The scene doesn't reflect the reality that by now everyone on earth would know the villain's identity, and every law enforcement agency in North America would be all over him. Everyone who'd ever met the villain or his father would be under total surveillance, or even held as material witnesses until they provided information leading to his capture.

Haiku! Starring Butchered!

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

At seventy mins,

Somehow it's the most padded

Film I've ever seen.