Bob's Burgers - 2x08 - Bad Tina

    Tina falls in with a girl who is a bad influence at school.  While this does get her a little closer to Jimmy, Jr., she's getting in trouble with her parents, and her siblings are blackmailing her.  When she tries to break it off with the girl at school, the girl blackmails her.
    I jumped ahead to watch this one, since I really like Tina.  Her awkwardness is endearing.  And I wasn't disappointed.  This was a pretty fun episode.
    Tina gets some great scenes, and her fascination with writing erotic fan fiction is realized in the perfect way.  Her sensibilities are peculiar, but surprisingly non-sexual.  Her preoccupation with butt-touching is as far as it goes.  The inclusion of zombies seems mostly irrelevant, but it adds more of the horror fandom of the act.
    Her new friend is something I wouldn't notice, but I really liked how that character was written as well.  Having worked in high schools for about a year and a half, I feel confident in saying that they nailed exactly what the kind of girl is like.
    The other characters don't get huge plots.  Bob gets fascinated with a Blue Man Group-like show that focuses on pattycake.  It's not hilarious, but it's a nice side plot, and it doesn't take up too much time.

The Big Bang Theory - 6x03 - The Higgs Boson Observation

    Sheldon hires an assistant to look through all of his old notebooks to see if he's made an important discovery that was overlooked.  Amy gets a bit nervous about Sheldon working with this lady, until she sees her flirting with Leonard.  This forces Penny into having to admit her feelings for Leonard.  Howard is still on the space station, and is breaking down.
    I was a bit more indifferent to this episode than I expected, but it's not bad.  In fact, it's usually better when the show doesn't try to find a plot or a task for every character to do.  Raj only has a few lines, but they're all fairly good.  The plots are usually more concrete when they focus on the girls.
    I'm getting tired of Howard in space.  Something seems very forced about the whole plot, and it was actually more fun looking forward to the event than actually seeing it happen.  Shouldn't he have plenty of work to keep him busy?
    I like seeing Penny be forced into making decisions.  She's been too fluid a character, changing her opinions and her relationships to fit whatever the writers feel like, and giving her character a bit of humanity - and weakness - goes a long way to making her more interesting and useful.  I'm always a bit annoyed with the way she treats Leonard as being some kind of pet.

Mission: Impossible - 5x21 - A Ghost Story

    The team wants to get a man to reveal where he buried the body of his son, who was contaminated with a new nerve gas, in order to prevent the formula from falling into the wrong hands.  In order to accomplish this, they want to make the target think that he's being haunted by his son's ghost.
    A good episode, especially near the end.  There are a few twists that weren't needed, but they redirected the ending just enough to make it not predictable.
    I think I had a few reservations about the technology in this episode.  In one case, they use two lasers to create some illusions.  The lasers have been integrated into the target's bedposts.  While the replacement posts are identical, they have a shiny, glass lens instead of a curved wooden surface at one point.  This seems sloppy for the team.  I suppose that the audience needed to know it was there.
    I also felt like the villain wasn't sufficiently established.  I'm not sure why that was.  We see him kill his son at the beginning of the episode.  Then he talks about how his son needs discipline.  But most of it, he's not continuing his pattern of evil as strongly as I would like.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - 4x18 - Identity Crisis

    Years ago, Geordi was part of an away team, investigating the disappearance of everyone from a research station.  Now, almost everyone who was part of that away team have been acting strange, and eventually disappearing.
    This is an unusual episode, since it centers on Geordi, but it isn't an engineering related plot.  It's one of the medical mystery episodes.  It also doesn't use the other characters too much, which makes it seem like something is missing.  Even Picard doesn't do much in this one.
    The direction that the episode takes is a little far-fetched.  An alien that reproduces by rewriting a host's DNA?  The brood changes that are needed aren't as plausible.  The moment where we're supposed to discover that there's an invisible life form on the planet doesn't work well.  The shadow isn't obvious at all, and this just leaves the viewer puzzled about what it is that we're supposed to be seeing.
    By the end, the story is kind of fun, but something isn't right about it.  It doesn't stand out in my memory very well.

American Dad - 8x02 - Killer Vacation

    The family goes on a tropical vacation.  Stan tells Francine that he won't be distracted by work while they're away, and she wants to do all the activities the resort offers.  Steve is persuaded by another guy's accent to follow on a dangerous trip to peak at a nude beach.  Roger disguises himself as an elderly lady, and develops a senior romance.  And Hayley and Jeff are disenchanted with their sex life, and want to rekindle things.
    This is a busy episode.  None of the plots are strong enough to drive everything along, but there's always something fun going on.  I usually like Steve's plots more than the other characters, but here, it felt a bit thinner than I'd like.  But everything was being cut thinly, and jumping between the plots made a some lesser material much more enjoyable.
    AV Club gave this a C+.  That seems a little harsh, considering that nothing actually did badly.

American Dad - 8x01 - Love, AD Style

    Roger opens a nightclub in the attic, and hires Hayley to sing.  This causes Roger to have a possessive crush on her.  In the meantime, Jeff is off filming The Deadliest Catch, and Stan tries to sell his old SUV for 15K, so that he can afford to switch to a new SUV.
    Not a bad episode, but it gets a little grisly at the end.  I don't mind that, and I've come to expect a certain amount of darkness and gore.  I think what I find unsettling is that Roger is actually too unpredictable.  He's too willing to do outrageously violent things on a whim, and his motivation for doing these things is never something that you can see coming.  That does make for broad storytelling possibilities, but it also raises the possibility that you'll see some horrific violence unexpectedly.
    I didn't care for either plot specifically, but I did like many of the gags that appeared in either story.  The inflatable tube man attacking Stan, Hayley's singing, Steve's muscles.

The Simpsons - 17x02 - The Girl Who Knew Too Little

    A stamp museum is being constructed just past the Simpsons' backyard.  After protesting it, the stamp museum is moved, and instead, a huge cemetery moves in.  This is very scary for Lisa, who has trouble getting past her fears.
    I like this episode a lot, even though it feels a little aimless.  I like that there's a lot of creepy designs, and clever work with shadows.  And there are some strange sidebars with Eddie and Lou and Chief Wiggum.  The overall message that shows up at the end feels a little less like an eventuality, and more like something they needed to insert to give the episode the appearance of being complete.