Journeyman: Christmas with Dad

Spoilers for "Journeyman" coming up just as soon as I find a black sweater that I can wear in any era...

And we're back! After a week off to try "Life" in this timeslot, "Journeyman" resurfaced, and it looks like the last two episodes will air next week (one on Monday as usual, the other in the "Life" timeslot Wednesday at 10). So there will be closure of some kind.

Another solid episode. The decision to include some kind of personal stake in every mission was a wise choice. I don't know if it's something that could be accomplished were the show to run five years ("Honey, you'll never believe who I ran into while I was back in 1983. It was my second cousin Frank!"), but in the short term it's made the time travel a lot more interesting than it was in the first few episodes. The trip back to the newsroom's '79 Christmas party was doubly important for Dan, as it gave him a chance to slightly alter his own history with his dad (more on that in a second) as well as a chance to save his job and other people's in the present.

Not sure I loved the blackmail resolution, though. Times are tough in journalism, and real newspapers everywhere are laying people off, regardless of who's in charge; can Dan really hold that secret over the publisher's head in perpetuity? And what's to stop the publisher from admitting that he was in the room while denying that he waited to call for help?

(Also, on a more nitpicky, Gen X-centric level, it was strange to see Robert Pine play the publisher in 2007 and the very shady-looking Anthony Starke play him in 1979, when any "CHiPs" fan worth his salt knows that Pine looked like this in '79. I'm guessing there's not a lot of "CHiPs"/"Journeyman" crossover audience.)

As for Dan and his father, what interested me wasn't so much that Dan was able to change something about his own life without personal consequence. Rather, I was struck by the fact that Dan didn't remember the revised timeline, even after he came back. The show has suggested this before -- Dan remember a conversation with Jack that he later erased from the timeline -- but never this directly. Some time travel stories adopt the theory that if you change the past, you only remember the events you experienced in the unaltered timeline ("Back to the Future"), while others suggest you either remember the new version only or somehow remember both ("Frequency").

Even though Jack is now openly helping Dan with research on his trips, it's interesting that Dan chose not to explain the role he played in their dad's confession. On the one hand, it might have been something they could have bonded over. On the other hand, this is ancient history as far as Jack is concerned; learning the truth behind it all these years later could freak him out, re-open the old wounds, maybe even resent or mistrust Dan again. If you're Dan there, what would you have done?

Finally, we got our first glimpse of Livia's life in 1948 -- and, conveniently, her period dress didn't look too out of place at a disco party. Here's something I wonder about Livia that I doubt the show will have time to address before it runs out of episodes: when she would travel into the '80s and '90s for long stretches to attend college and law school and to date Dan, was she gone for equally long periods in the past, or did she return not long after she left but much older? Either way, I imagine her life back then was a lot more complicated than Dan's is now -- though, as she explained a few episodes back, her trips got longer and longer over time, just as Dan's might if the show were to continue.

What did everybody else think?

Roddy White Hates Money

That is the only explanation as to why he would even bother to wear that shirt. (He also hates my fantasy team, but that's another story.) Because Roddy White is going to be fined a ton of money by the NFL. That is, if he isn't kidnapped late one night and never heard from again. White will probably wake up one morning with a pitbull's head next to him.

That's great that White and Joe Horn have Michael Vick's back, but where were these guys when the embattled quarterback really needed him? One of these guys should have stepped up and told Vick to shy away from the dog fighting. (Or at least go to the race-card and try to get out of this thing.) It is hard to believe that Vick's teammates were oblivious to the whole dog fighting thing and that -- at some level -- it didn't ring a bell that maybe this wasn't a good thing to do.

But Mike Vick instead goes to jail and all he got was that lousy T-shirt.

Yeah, I went there. BTW, when did Fuzzy Zoeller become the owner of the Falcons? No, you heard it right when Arthur Blank said that he hopes that Vick doesn't get fat on fried chicken. You can probably catch the video of that on Awful Announcing some time today.

But who was dumber ... Roddy White, Arthur Blank, or this moron?

HIMYM: 8 simple rules

Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I leap in slow motion...

On this season's "HIMYM" vs. Sitcom scale of 1 to 10, with 10 representing "HIMYM" at its most distinct (say, "How I Met Everyone Else") and 1 representing a leftover "Suddenly Susan" script with the names changed to protect the innocent (say, "We're Not From Here"), I'd have to put "The Platinum Rule" at a solid 9, maybe even a 9.5. Flashbacks within flashbacks -- with characters referring back and forth to the previous flashbacks to explain why they're reliving them -- Barney presenting another dating rule, a bit of meta main character mockery with the talk of how much Ted obsesses over his stupid hair, more anti-Canada bigotry ("What's the opposite of name-dropping")... Really, the only thing keeping it from a 10 is that I'm pretty sure Lily has never before sported the hairstyle she had in the neighbor flashbacks, even though those scenes would have taken place not long after "Slap Bet." That's the sort of continuity error the show doesn't usually make.

Then again, maybe "Platinum Rule" ought to score higher. There's a reason I've spent so much of this season harping on what is and isn't a "HIMYM"-y episode, and it's that the way Bays, Thomas and company play with structure is at least as important as -- and sometimes more important than -- the characters, or the plots, or even the jokes. Told sequentially, the three storylines here would have gotten repetitive and predictable in a hurry (Robin's in particular; the guy didn't remotely seem like an ex-hockey player, and overall they have yet to crack the code for giving her a good dating subplot), but the way they kept folding in and out of each other became part of the fun. Sequences like the three-tiered break-up, with Robin and Marshall/Lily trying to dump graciously while Barney was candid to a fault with Wendy the Waitress worked precisely because they were placed next to each other in that "Slaughterhouse Five" chronological style that "HIMYM" does so well.

I've liked some of Barney's previous rules better than this one -- Lemon Law's hard to top, and Crazy/Hot did come with a visual aid -- but there were enough amusing moments to compensate, whether Marshall performing charades for "We just go across the hall!" or the gang ordering Barney to marry Wendy the Waitress to keep from losing the bar. And Neil Patrick Harris had some wonderful slapstick moments, with both his slide across the apartment to prevent Ted's exit and his slo-mo leap to slap the taste of burger out of Marshall's mouth.

Meanwhile, I'm still undecided on whether "HIMYM" is going to make the cut for my Top 10 list for '07. "Slap Bet" and "Single Stamina," the high points of season two, both aired at the tail end of '06, and season three has been up and down. Since I'm planning to pair the Top 10 list with a list of great episodes (or even moments) from shows that didn't make the list (either ones that just missed the cut or ones that are usually not that great but had a transcendent show), I'll have room to mention "HIMYM" somewhere, but my question is this: if you had to pick a single episode of the series that aired in this calendar year as the best, what would it be? "Showdown"? "How I Met Everyone Else"? Something else?