30 Rock: Can we have our money now?

Was the above just a dig at product placement, or was it a coded message from the WGA? You decide. "30 Rock" spoilers coming right up...

Whatever episode followed "Greenzo" was almost certainly going to suffer in comparison, but "Somebody to Love" did as a good a job as one could in the shadow of that genius. The Jack storyline was the only one that was consistently brilliant, but it was enough to carry the rest.

Nearly every word out of Alec Baldwin's mouth last night was gold: "After all, your hair is your head suit," "I assure you, John McCain is very real," "You must have grabbed it by acciden after our night of doing it," Jack's description of CC making love like an ugly girl, etc. The best, though, and the one that was most quintessentially Jack, was his response to CC's mention of Hilary and universal health care: "God, I want to kiss you on the mouth to stop you from saying such ridiculous things." Jack and CC's absurd blind loyalty to their respective political ideologies was marvelous to behold, though it makes me think back to Al Gore's line last week about Jack being a former liberal; will we one day get a flashback (possibly starring Billy Baldwin) about how and why Jack switched teams, or was that meant to be a throwaway joke, never to be referred to again?

Not that it should be a surprise to anyone who laughed with her on "The Sopranos" (I have one word, and only one word: "Marco"), but Edie Falco was very light on her feet and played well off Baldwin. (The "Tennessee sorority girl" line was a particular highlight.) I look forward to more CC -- and, if possible, more snippets of her Lifetime movie with Kristen Wiig.

The rest of the episode was more uneven. I liked Liz's evidence of her non-racism -- "Remember, I asked that black guy if he had seen 'Sideways'" -- and the eventual reveal that Fred Armisen and his brother were making an "Amazing Race," audition tape, but it felt like a lot of effort to get to that punchline. (The story did, however, work as something of a thematic parallel to Jack's, showing that liberals can be just as hypocritical and tempted by the other side as Jack was being.) And, especially compared to the amazing, "This earth is ruined!" payoff from the end of "Greenzo," the Northrax/maple syrup conclusion to the episode just fizzled.

(On the plus side, is The Rerun Dance ever not funny? Though Tracy doing it wasn't as brilliant as Bill Haverchuck doing it.)

And Kenneth's quest to buy Jack new pants felt both predictable (did anyone not assume that Jack had a dozen identical pairs?) and too brief. If it hadn't been the distant third story of the episode, maybe it could have built up some momentum, with the pranks progressing from merely gross to genuinely dangerous, but there wasn't time for that.

But I can't complain much about any episode with this many Sheinhardt Wig Company references, can I?

What did everybody else think?