30 Rock, "St. Valentine's Day": My mother! My sister! My mother! My sister!

Spoilers for last night's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I make a stew...

"I once claimed 'I am God' during a deposition." -Jack

"St. Valentine's Day" was, structurally and tonally, not dissimilar from last week's "The Generalissimo, which I was in the minority in really disliking. I liked a lot of this one, though, which means I expect to read a whole lot of comments about how stupid I was and how I must be uder the influence of some good flu meds.

Both episodes featured Liz and Jack in cliched, silly romantic entanglements, but the difference this time was that I believed most of the behavior within the farce. Nothing felt even vaguely real about the existence of Jack's gay Mexican telenovela doppleganger, whereas Jack and the poor priest who had to suffer his confession were recognizably human. When there's some grounding at the center, you can then do/say ridiculous things like Jack admitting to accidentally violating Dick Cheney while under the influence of the Gay Bomb, or Jack randomly inserting himself into the plot of "Malice," or Elisa ranting that Jack has offended "the patron saint of judgmental statues." (They've gotten progressively better and better at knowing how to use Salma Hayek, haven't they?)

Similarly, there was a nice logical progression to Liz and Drew's fiasco of a first date, starting with the innocent mistake about doing it on Valentine's Day and escalating it from there, bit by bit. I still don't feel like they're giving Jon Hamm enough to do besides being handsome, and I don't think they knew how to end that storyline (the jump from Liz about to tell Drew the truth about his mom to Liz and Drew happily walking arm-in-arm on the street didn't really track), but overall, I thought this was a much better effort than last week's Liz/Drew story, which really only had Hamm's delivery of "I don't know what that means!" to recommend it.

The Kenneth/Tracy subplot had the most tenuous connection to reality, but that's the way those characters normally roll, and there were enough amusing flourishes on the margins (the Grizz/Dotcom love triangle, Jenna's awful Michael McDonald) to mostly carry it.

One question: if it turns out that McDonald's paid for all the McFlurry references, would that make you like the episode less, or would it impress you even more that Tina Fey and Jack Burditt were able to make such an extended bit of product integration funny?

What did everybody else think?