Met

Paul Wells: How the latest works of one of Canada’s greatest living artists landed in the Great Hall of the Met in New York City

I rarely make predictions about episodes I haven’t seen, because I’m always wrong. But what the heck: when Craig Thomas says of Britney Spears’ second appearance on How I Met Your Mother that “her return answers a larger mystery set up earlier than in the series,” I’m going to guess, not having seen the episode, that she’ll turn out to be the mystery woman who was trying to ruin Barney’s reputation in “The Bracket.” Lily is the only one who saw the mystery woman, and I don’t think she met Spears’ character in that earlier episode (maybe she did and I forgot about it in which case this guess is null and void).

Back when Television Without Pity was called something else, first Dawson’s Wrap and then Mighty Big TV, and was a lot better than it is now (not everything is ruined by popularity, but Mighty Big TV was a lot nastier and funnier than what it’s become over the years), they specialized in vicious recaps of Dawson’s Creek, and, in particular, pointing out that the supposed hero was actually a colossal douche. The idea was that the stuff that the writers thought made him heroic, or interesting, or superior, actually made him seem like a self-righteous jerk. Another character like that was Brandon on 90210. If a character is acting in ways that would make you want to smack him in real life, the site asked, why is he the hero?