Paul Levinson

A fast-moving episode 1.7 of Emergence. I hope the rest of the season continues at this pace.

Emergence checked in with another strong episode — 1.6 — and brought us to two surprising revelations. Both concern Kindred.

The bears took center state in episode 1.4 of His Dark Materials last week. If this is starting to sound like a three-ring circus, that's because it is, but the menagerie in His Dark Materials is far more diverse and intriguing than any you'll find in any circus, or, for that matter, to use another place where the Bears appear, in any football game.

I thought I'd review episodes 1.6 and 1.7 of Watchmen together, since they're both episodes of Nostalgia — the powerful drug that makes Angela relive her family's memories — and I thought two episodes might make a little more sense than the one. Which they do. I think. (Again, with the proviso that I never read the comics or saw any movie, and knew nothing at all of Watchmen before I started watching the HBO series.)

I'm enjoying His Dark Materials, most of all the nature, behavior, and variety of the Daemons. As I understand them, they're some sort of external manifestation of the humans they're connected with, including their human sensibilities, with perhaps some other things that Daemons have on their own.

That was the best thing about the insane episode 1.5 of the insano Watchmen on Sunday—"Some Enchanted Evening"—sung first by Sinatra at the beginning of the episode and at the end by some group unknown to me. But my favorite rendition of the song that Ezio Pinza first sang in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific all those years ago has always been this one by Jay and the Americans.