If I learned anything from Brothers & Sisters this season (in addition to the fact that vegan food gives Kevin the trots, of course), it’s the power of the henley: Robert (Rob Lowe) was slightly less douchey in my eyes any time he wore a blue one; I was not completely unhappy to see Tommy (Balthazar Getty) last night when he popped up in Mexico wearing a white one.
What we’ve always known about this show, however, is that any situation that activates a Walker sibling phone tree is acceptable. So what if Nora never would’ve gone to Mexico without asking Saul to go with her? It allowed Sarah to conference in the family after she got a frantic call from Nora saying that Tommy had gotten mixed up in some kind of cult. Justin understood that Nora being kept from one of her children could quickly escalate into an international incident and was immediately for the rescue mission. (I loved how Rebecca was in on the call at first, and then just sat there reading. That’s how many Walker family crises she’s seen — she’s bored now.) Kitty was in, too. Kevin, however, needed some convincing because he still can’t forgive Tommy for abandoning Julia and Elizabeth. Scotty, a.k.a. the best husband in the world, urged Kevin to go even if it meant missing their anniversary.
I have to say: Med school is already making Justin smarter. Or, at least his dialogue cleverer. When Nora came speeding into the center of town in a truck to pick the kids up, he deadpanned, "Ohmygod, they got her, too." Off to the spiritual retreat they went, where Nora explained that everyone there eats their meals in silence (Kitty: "No way") and does "selfless service" (Sarah: "I don’t like it"). I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who eagerly anticipated the Walker clan having to dine without talking. Sarah stole the scene by writing "I am back at Ojai" on a napkin, showing it to Tommy, then miming blowing her brains out. After the family spotted the $20,000 (!) watch Rebecca had gifted Justin on his wrist, Rebecca attempted to act out that he’d gotten into med school in a way that I would need to rewind to fully understand. (Nowhere as funny as that scene in the silent Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush" when Buffy mimed staking someone repeatedly. Do the motion, you’ll see the comedy.) The celebratory commotion got them kicked out of the retreat, and they ended up, where else, at a cantina.
HBO’s latest documentary series, The Alzheimer’s Project, was executive-produced by Maria Shriver, whose father, Sargent Shriver, has struggled with the disease since being diagnosed in 2003. Interestingly enough, both Shriver and many of HBO’s most celebrated previous docs — like Spike Lee’s Katrina exploration, When the Levees Broke, or George Clooney’s Darfur lament, Sand and Sorrow — share a unique strand of cultural DNA that combines the worlds of entertainment and politics to compelling effect. However, "The Memory Loss Tapes," the first episode of The Alzhermer’s Project, is definitively un-Hollywood and apolitical. It’s a bold, classy move, considering the subject matter of old people slowly losing their minds hardly has the lurid drawing power of the pimps, prostitutes, and anorexics that have come before them on the cable outlet. 
I’m lucky enough to have a mom (and a dad) who both have always supported my borderline obsession with pop culture. When all the other kids were outside playing basketball, I was inside watching Feds on HBO or Big Trouble in Little China on VHS for the 100th time. My mom didn’t judge me. One summer, my brother and I spent the entire break shooting no-budget horror films with our family video camera and even threw a life-size human dummy out our second floor window (it was an elaborate death scene and we couldn’t afford a stuntman). Again, my mom didn’t blink an eye. 
If you had to boil down a hundred years of science fiction — from H.G. Wells to Philip K. Dick, from Metropolis to 2001, from Robby the Robot to Darth Vader — to a single cautionary sentence, it might be this: In the age of technology, human beings, as a race, have become so ruthlessly intelligent that they’re threatening to turn into the machines they invent. It doesn’t matter whether the sci-fi character in question is a robot, an android, a cyborg, a rogue A.I. computer, a Big Brother on surveillance camera, or a giant-headed alien invader: All are metaphors for man evolved into Automatic Man, stripped of “feeling” in an age of cerebral overdevelopment. All are pop projections of a society built, increasingly, on the cult of mind over matter.
So, I’m assuming you’ve seen it by now, right? Otherwise, what kind of geek would you be? (The kind of geek that gets their credentials revoked.) 
From the U.K.’s 
