Listen. I love things like this. It’s like a fun epilogue, one that perpetuates my belief that TV characters have lives beyond their series. I thrilled whenever ER mentioned Doug and Carol after their departure(s), and when the Rosses actually showed up in the farewell season? Be still my beating heart.

But in this cameo, things are apparently not great for the Montgomerys, who contemplate both divorce and suicide in the span of one 46-second drop-in. It just leaves me wanting more context:

1. Why are they moving from San Francisco to Malibu?
2. Didn’t Dharma get pregnant in the series finale? Where is their kid? I Googled [did Dharma get pregnant in the series finale of Dharma and Greg?] and results were inconclusive, but did include a surprising amount of fan fiction. PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THIS.
3. Are Stinky and Nunzio still alive?
4. Why did Dharma get that haircut?
5. Am I really still so Lost­-obsessed that I’ve had to fight the urge to write “DHARMA” five times in just this one post?

I guess what I mean is that it would’ve been nice to check in with them and know that everything turned out okay for those crazy kids. It makes me sad to think that after everything we went through together, they couldn’t work it out. Maybe they still will. Ugh. I am distressed.

The newest Glee promo is the first to feature new footage from season four, and it contains a big spoiler: Will and Emma are together! It’s presented super-casually in the promo, and Michael Ausiello reported on their togetherness as if it was already old news and not a huge scoop.

Maybe it’s just everyone’s collective enn-Glee (that’s Glee ennui, for those not up on their French-English portmanteaux), but this is big news. The question is — how did this happen? I mean, are those lunchboxes they’re holding? Are they making lunches together? Like, in the morning before work?

Sure, they were back on good terms by season’s end, but there was no indication that they were about to spend their summer getting cozy. Brad Falchuk confirmed that a Will/Emma scene was deleted from “New York,” and there was a rumor that went around that there may have even been a kiss in said scene. So here’s what I think went down:

Will was humbled at Nationals, both because of New Directions’s shame-ridden defeat and his embarrassing performance of “Still Got Tonight.” (By the way, I had to Google the name of that song, because my instinct was to call it “Waiting for Tonight,” but I knew that wrong. Now there’s a song that Glee should cover!) When he gets home, he tells Emma that his real dream is here, with the kids and with her. Bonus points if he actually said, “I came back for you.” So he is back, and he is ready to be in a relationship with her whenever she is ready to be in a relationship with him. And maybe in that scene, we find out that she is probably not ready right this moment, but she could maybe spend the summer getting ready! Perhaps there was even a chaste kiss full of promise, but I’m not really buying that rumor.

It would have at least set the stage for the lunchbox kissing. As it stands, the lunchbox kissing seems super-surprising. But, hey, you don’t see me complaining. You know what else is super-surprising? That Will seems to have gotten a pretty drastic haircut, but he still looks vaguely like a sexual predator.

Glee season two DVDs come out September 13, at which point we may finally learn the truth about what happened to Will and Emma in the finale. There’s also the possibility that we will just NEVER KNOW, and that’s okay, too. Whatever. Enn-Glee.

yay. or something. // tnt promotional photo

After ten episodes, the first season of Falling Skies has concluded. And although the series has been bringing in solid ratings for TNT, it never quite made the jump to watercooler-worthy. So what’s the verdict on this show?

I think it’s fine for fun, summer fare, but let’s face it: this show is no Lost. It’s no Walking Dead. It’s no Torchwood. Throughout the season, I waited for two things. I waited for a reason to really care about these people, and I waited for some risk-taking writing. Neither really came.

In the finale, I didn’t care when Rick sold out the 2nd Mass to the Skittery girl. I didn’t care when Tom kissed Anne. I didn’t even care when Tom let the aliens beam him up into their spaceship. The reason, I believe, has to do with stakes.

They relied on the fact that an alien apocalypse brought high stakes in and of itself. But where shows like The Walking Dead excel is by making the human stakes even higher than the zombie stakes. Falling Skies never sold the Tom/Anne relationship, or that the aliens were actually all that dangerous, considering all the characters of note survived. (Rick’s dad, Mike, is the only good guy whose death I can think of, and he was killed by a human.)

Sure, the whole kids-getting-harnessed thing was pretty scary, but Torchwood did the aliens and children storyline so much better with 2009′s Children of Earth. (Seriously, watch it. It’s on Netflix.) Lost did group dynamics better. Maybe it’s rude to compare, but when this aired two days after Torchwood (SPOILER ALERT!) set a likeable main character on fire, it’s hard not to think that Falling Skies could have taken more risks.

It’s been picked up for a second season, so maybe there’s hope that season two will be a little gutsier.

And, hey, at the very least, it’s better than Dance Moms. September can’t come quickly enough.

it's possible i love you more than you love each other. which is a lot. // fox promotional photo

Where We Started: At the beginning of a crazy ride. Fauxlivia had just made the journey back with our hoodwinked boys, one of whom fell right into her grody vagenda. Meanwhile, original-recipe Olivia was staging a breakout on the Other Side—which turned out to be even harder than anticipated when the brainwashing kicked in. We were also introduced more formally to Agent Lincoln Lee, a Fringe Division agent in the red universe who turned out to be … well, keep reading.

Where We Ended: Where didn’t we end? The universes traded back for their own Olivias, but that just kicked off chapter two. By the end, Fauxlivia gave birth to Peter’s baby (unbeknownst to anyone over here), we flashed forward 15 years (newflash: the future sucks), and Peter was erased from the time/space continuum as a result of some machine-related mumbo jumbo. Walter reached a sense of acceptance with his role in the universes’ entanglement, Peter and Olivia fell in love, and Broyles tried LSD on accident.

Outstanding Episode Along the Way: Is there anything better than “Marionette”? The three plots of the episode beautifully overlap to form one cohesive hour that serves both as a stand-alone creepfest and brilliant forward motion on the season’s long-term storylines. Do you mind if I just…:

“I understand the facts. I know that she had reams of information about me and about my life and about the people that were close to me. And I understand that if she slipped up that she would have a completely reasonable explanation for it. And I guess to expect you to have seen past that is perhaps asking a little bit too much. But when I was over there, I thought about you. And you were just a figment of my imagination. But I held onto you, and it wasn’t reasonable, and it wasn’t logical, but I did it, so… why didn’t you? She wasn’t me. How could you not see that? Now she’s everywhere. She’s in my house, my job, my bed, and I don’t want to wear my clothes anymore, and I don’t want to live in my apartment, and I don’t want to be with you. She’s taken everything.”

Gnuhhhhh. This gutted me when it first aired, but it kills me now, thinking about the implications it might have for Olivia going into next season, now that the expectation of remembering is solely on her shoulders. She claimed she’s a holding-on pro, but now those skills will really be put to the test.

MVP: Since I made up a rule that I can’t pick everyone, I’m going with Lincoln. At the beginning of the season, back when Fauxlivia was completely untrustworthy and everything on the other side seemed angry and bad, it was Lincoln who humanized the red universe and made us think … if this guy is in love with that ginger skank, she can’t be completely evil, right? That blossomed into a sweet love story, an interesting glimpse into his blue-side doppelganger, and the promise of much, much more, now that Seth Gabel is a series regular. At least for me, he was the bridge to liking Over There, a critical part of appreciating season three.

Best Payoff: Olivia, Fauxlivia, Walter, and Walternate sharing space in the Bridge in the final moments of season three. It’d be a ticking time bomb of emotions (You stole my son! You stole my boyfriend! You tore a hole in the fabric of my universe!) no matter what, but now that Peter’s out of the picture, there’s no telling what’s going to go down in that crowd. After an entire season of watching them deal with each other’s choices without actually interacting, it’s a thrill to see them share the screen.

Quote of the Year: I could go for funny (“Fauxlivia ruined U2 for all of us.”) or shippy (“I’ve seen what the two of us together looks like, and it’s beautiful.”), but ultimately the quote of the year was from the Observer: “It must be very difficult, being a father.” It had implications for Peter not only as a son—whose father was grappling with the possibility of losing him—but also, teasingly, as a father to then-fetus, now-nugget Henry Dunham.

Worst Storyline: This is HARD. The only thing I can pick out as less than awesome is Peter’s whole vigilante shapeshifter justice storyline, but only because there was never really any outcome after the shapeshifter story was dropped midway through the season. Did Peter ever learn anything super-meaningful about the shapeshifters? Did Olivia forgive him after being Bell-exorcized? And now that they’re trying to fix the fabric of the multiverse … are shapeshifters still a threat?

Spend the Summer Wondering…: How will they get Peter back? What will the mood be in the Bridge? If they can restore Peter and Henry into existence, what will happen when they learn of each other’s existence? Will my weirdly specific prediction for episodes titled “Henry” and “Peter Bishop Returns” come true? What’s going to happen to alternate Charlie now that Kirk Acevedo’s on NBC’s Prime Suspect? Most importantly, HOW AM I GOING TO SURVIVE UNTIL SEPTEMBER?

i miss peter already. // fox promotional photo

So it’s old news that Seth Gabel is joining Fringe full-time next season, but it’s taken me this long to really digest that fact and do some serious thinking about the role that Lincoln Lee might play in season four.

See, my first thought was just pure giddiness. Lincoln is the treasure of Over There, a character who’s immensely enjoyable as an agent, as a boss, and as a stand-in father for precious nugget Henry Dunham. Getting to know him better is something that many Fringe fans had been hoping for, and I know my fingers were crossed for the possibility of the producers trying to get Seth Gabel under a bigger contract.

Once you start thinking about that in the context of Peter’s absence, however, things get a little more complicated.

I was reminded of this quote, which Gabel said on a press call around the time “Stowaway” aired, the first (and so far only) episode in which he appeared as this side’s Agent Lee:

“There’s a butterfly effect and you get to see who that person becomes a completely different person. In Lincoln’s case, Peter was in the world over here and became what Lincoln would have become… So Lincoln has been off doing something else and accidentally bumps into these people, which raises the question about fate and destiny. Are there certain people you’re karmically intertwined with?”

Delicious, right? I think it’s safe to assume that, now that they have access The Bridge, we should plan on seeing both the Blue and Red universions of everyone, including Lincoln. And considering that Peter is absent, I think it’s probably a safe guess that Lincoln will play a role on the Fringe team on this side. Will he still be the sweet nerd we met in “Stowaway”? Or will his involvement with Walter and Olivia have turned him into a version of himself more aligned to the burny-face alternate version we’ve grown to love?

The show has to take some caution here. Make the world too different without Peter and they risk disconnecting the audience from the characters we’ve followed for three years. (Who is the grown-up version of the little girl in the tulip field if she never found the Bishops?) Make the world too similar, though, and they do a complete disservice to the character of Peter and the many choices we have believed were made around him. I mean, the mere fact that Olivia and Walter are still standing there suggests that Agent Dunham was able to finagle Walter out of St. Clare’s without a next of kin, which upends the entire premise of the pilot. (Unless we’re to believe that without Peter, Elizabeth never killed herself and/or Walter never went crazy, so the whole “check Dad out of a mental hospital” was never an issue to begin with.) Anyway, that’s a conversation for another blog post or a doctoral dissertation.

Of course, what I want to know most is … will he be involved with Ourlivia? There are two sides of this argument.

The “Yes” Side. The show wants to demonstrate just how different things would be without Peter, and so they put Olivia in a relationship with another character, who we love, to play up the bizarre nature of the situation. It would make his absence all the more palpable, and his sudden extrication from their lives even more jarring. Joshua Jackson would love this, and would go around talking about how it’s obvious that Lincoln is Olivia’s soul mate. Also, they just want to screw with our minds in a meta way. (More on that later.)

The “No” Side. There’s an argument to be made that without Peter, Fauxlivia and her Lincoln would still be strictly friends, with no acknowledgement of deeper feelings. Considering that Lincoln only admitted his feelings for Liv while she was giving birth to little Henry–and that the pair seemed to grow closer once Henry was in the picture–it’s possible that even the alt versions will be extremely platonic in a Peterless world. Also, my shipper heart has to believe that Olivia’s going to be busy dealing with THIS EMPTY FEELING SHE CAN’T EXPLAIN and thus will not have time for boyfriends who actually exist.

What really gets me is the meta take on this whole thing. How is it that there are two versions of one character (Olivia), played by one actress, and yet it will BREAK MY HEART if either of those two versions ends up with the wrong guy? Lesser shows would never be able to sell me Fauxlivia/Lincoln, because I would never allow them to sell me ANNA TORV next to anyone but JOSHUA JACKSON. Yet they’ve done such a good job of separating Olivia and Fauxlivia that you really believe that they would be all wrong with the other’s boyfriend. I’m all for showing us the consequences of choices, and I support Lincoln playing a role in the It’s a Wonderful Life-type situation they’re setting up for season four–but hopefully it will underscore how important Peter is and always has been–as the man Ourlivia is destined to marry, and as the father of Fauxlivia’s son–rather than set up a dual-universe love quadrangle.

::Shudders::

Where We Ended: Scott-less and a little uneasy. With no clear direction for next season (and no decided-upon successor to Steve), The Office feels like it needs a strong captain. Also, everyone accepts now that Ben and Leslie are the new Jim and Pam.

Outstanding Episode Along the Way: “Garage Sale” was perfect. The first 27 minutes led us to believe that Michael and Holly were going to get a heartbreaking ending, with him timing a proposal so badly (even for his own standards), she’d have no choice but to say no and move to Colorado. The resulting conclusion—not only did she say yes, but she didn’t even have to ask him to move to the Mountain Time Zone—was one of the greatest television moments of the season. (Also, randomly, I loved “WUPHF.com.”)

MVP: Is it weird if I pick Erin? I thought she was so great during her phase of Holly-hating: “I’ve looked her up online. There’s nothing about her. She’s made no impression on the Internet.” Over the course of the season, she’s become much more than the sweet-but-annoying receptionist. In the finale, when Andy suggested that Erin wasn’t really that great, I was INDIGNANT. Jerk.

Best Payoff: I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to “The Dundies” since the first trip to Chili’s aired in 2005. (2005! I am old!) And even if Michael and I were hoping it would be more like The Godfather, Part III, it was fun to revisit the “tradition.” It only loses points for not explaining why it is no longer hosted at Chili’s—obviously, Pam is still not welcome there.

Quote of the Year: “Your wife becoming, will be I.” Favorite Office proposal ever. Yes, I mean that.

Worst Storyline: Anything involving Gabe. Is he really moving to Florida? If so, season eight is already looking up. He’s a soggy toast creepster, that guy.

Spend the Summer Wondering…: … when they’re going to officially hire Nellie Bertrum. “I think I’m her best friend.  She’s not my best friend.”

Please be my best friend.

oh, tammy 2. it's hard to even fathom your predecessor. // nbc promotional photo

I’ll go into detail about the season finale of Parks and Recreation later this week, but today I want to focus on one question that’s been on my mind since last Thursday. Nope, not “What’s gonna happen to Ben and Leslie??!?!” I am desperate to find out who’s going to play Tammy 1.

And I’ve got a few suggestions.

My ideal candidate for Tammy 1, and the human being who should act as the model for the character, is Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of The View and known crazy. Ron would have been drawn to her conservative values and her sassy attitude, but would ultimately have run away in fear. She’d be a different kind of crazy than Tammy 2, but nonetheless terrifying.

Problem is, we all know that’s not actually possible. Even though Hasselbeck’s View co-host Sherri Shepherd moonlights as Tracy Jordan’s wife, Angie, on 30 Rock, a similar night job isn’t feasible here. For one, 30 Rock films in New York, as does The View; Parks and Recreation films in Los Angeles. Sherri Shepherd has a sense of humor and a comedy/acting background; Hasselbeck’s history is as a contestant on Survivor.

But using her as a guidepost, I started thinking about other women who could play a character like that. I also factored in that she should probably be very different from Tammy 2; ergo, as Tammy 2 wields her power over Ron in a very sexual way, I imagine that Tammy 1 is a frigid, withholding ice queen. Nicole Kidman comes to mind, but I assume she’s busy. Anyway, here are my real ideas.

Lisa Kudrow. Although she played the more-or-less carefree Phoebe for ten seasons on Friends, it’s her role as Valerie Cherish on The Comeback that proves she can play an edgy kind of crazy. You can imagine her going toe-to-toe with Ron on sexual and community matters. Plus, considering that Kudrow and Megan Mullally were Thursday night tentpoles on NBC for years, it’d be fun to see them together as mortal enemies.

Judy Greer. Epic Flail loves her. She deserves so much better than, like, the last three shows she’s been on. Her style and sense of humor is a perfect fit for Parks and Rec; I actually just IMDb’ed her to make sure she hadn’t already been on. (Don’t worry. She hasn’t.) She, too, can toe the line between sweet and insane, and I feel like she’d just be really fun to watch. To be honest, I think she should just be on this show all the time. For all I care, she can play Ann.

Connie Britton. She hasn’t done a sitcom since Spin City, and she’s gearing up to do Ryan Murphy’s F/X pilot because no one ever listens to me, but I wonder if she’d have time to pop over and guest on Parks and Rec. She definitely has the school principal attitude down, and you get the idea that she wouldn’t be nearly as patient with Ron Swanson as she is with Coach Taylor. Actually, you know what? Can we just have a crossover situation next season, where the Taylors move to Pawnee for a job coaching high school football? (That whole Braemore College thing didn’t quite work out, I guess.) And the football team is so poor that they have to play on a public field, which means LOTS of liaising with the Parks Department. You’re welcome, Michael Schur.

Hear me out on this one. Jennifer Garner. She takes those kids to school, like, every day, so I know she’s not busy. She could just pop over, film some scenes, and be home in time to take Violet to the petting zoo. Also, she and Rob Lowe co-starred in 2009’s The Invention of Lying, so obviously they are best friends, and all it will take is for him to call her up and she’ll agree to do it. (Right?) It’d be a pretty obvious act of stunt casting, but I would still approve. Acting-wise, she can totally handle this. She has the polite demeanor of a public school teacher, but at the end of the day, she will mess you up. Double points if they somehow work in a martial arts background. Quadruple points if they can reference this finale cliffhanger from Alias: