Man On The Street is the episode Dollhouse watchers have been waiting for. In between interview footage of people talking about the urban legend of the Dollhouse, Ballard finally tracks down Echo at her latest assignment (that was easy, wasn't it?) and Langton exposes a handler interfering with Sierra. Oh yeah, and there was that little bombshell about there being a Dollhouse in virtually every major city.

I laughed out loud when the interviewer described the Dollhouse as "a Big Foot for the big city". The idea that this urban legend is real, and the Dolls are running around amongst 'real people' incites a range of emotions from the public. Some are disgusted, others are outraged at the human trafficking, others like the idea of ordering someone to perfectly fulfil their fantasies and a few want to know how they can sign up!

Have you been wondering what the newest enemy of The Doctor will look like in the Easter special, Planet Of The Dead? Well, wonder no more!

The handsome fellow pictured above is a Tritovore, a humanoid shaped, boiler suit wearing creature with a fly's head. After having spent Saturday night looking back at videos of the old Cybermen on YouTube, I view the Tritovore with mixed feelings: the detail on the head and pincers(?) is brilliant, but the overalls are a bit nasty, aren't they?

Pictures of the location filming are circulating thick and fast at the moment, but you'll want to check out the galleries at The Medusa Cascade for more pics from Planet Of The Dead. They really do have some excellent images over there.

As if we really needed the confirmation that those American Idol group performances are lip-synched, Justin Guarini gives us the inside scoop:

Every single year, we cannot stand the group performances. I know they can’t stand it either. And, I think what makes [the group performances] it even worse now is that they’re lip-synched. They’re really pre recorded now.

And you see them kind of do this with the microphone [he pretends to hold a mike away from his mouth] and they’re not even holding it to their face and they’re laughing.

Part of me loves the cheesiness of the group performances: it's nice to see all the contestants singing together on the stage. Yes, it's bare-faced obvious that they're all lip-synching, but do you really care?

The Examiner takes a look at the pressures the American Idol contestants face, which might give some idea as to why the lip-synching is done:

TV writer Ken Levine makes a wonderful case against those far-too-long American Idol results shows. He's not alone - I've read loads of bloggers complaining about the length of the results show this year.

Ken's analysis is a wonderful, witty series of observations about how blatantly the producers are stretching out the show:

AMERICAN IDOL is pre-empted Tuesday night by the President. Fans might be upset but the show’s producers aren’t. This year more than any other they have made a concentrated effort to draggggggggg outttttttt the season as long as they can. After all, this is FOX’s one big cash cow.

I especially loved this bit:

Results shows used to be a half hour. How long does it take to say, “Sanjaya, go away.”? Now they’re an hour. More “Up With People” production numbers with the candidates massacring the Motown catalog, more career CPR performances by Neil Diamond, endless audience shots of friends and family members who look like the cast of DELIVERANCE, and increased Algonquin Table level badinage between Ryan Seacrest and Randy Jackson. Thank God there are those 37 minutes of commercials to break up this tedium.

Sarah Connor is having trouble sleeping. Which is funny, because if she had to sit through the monologue she gave at the start of this episode, she'd nod off within minutes. That rambling intro could match one of Mohinder Suresh's duller introductions in Heroes.

To get some rest, she checks into a sleep clinic. But, in the tradition of Plugin <em></em> Not Found, she walks straight into a SkyNet experiment. The sleep center which is monitoring the sleep states of its patients is also surreptitiously recording brain data for some strange reason.

In between times, Sarah returns to the nightmares she's been experiencing. Except they play out in a linear pattern, giving a story within a story. Here Sarah confronts the man she shot in the desert factory a few weeks back.

Is this year's American Idol nudging towards an Adam Lambert/Danny Gokey final? An interesting comment on this blog post says:

This season, is toast. The producers want an Adam vs. Gokey final, and they'll get it. You should watch The Amazing Race. The producer contrivances are upfront and more people have an actual chance of winning.

If you consider that Adam and Danny have both had massive performances and were given the crucial show closer spots during their respective Top 36 nights. Does it look like they were favoured by the producers?

Lambert is proving a risk-taker. With his exotic twist on Ring Of Fire last week, he could easily have been voted out. But something in the camera angles and stage lighting seemed richer than what the other contestants got for their more conventional performances.

There's no doubt that Dollhouse is improving incrementally with each passing week.

In True Believer, Echo is imprinted as a blind woman and sent to infiltrate a religious cult that's under investigation. She has a potentially dangerous operation to redirect all her visual inputs to the Government agency monitoring her, which has the unfortunate effect of blinding her for the duration of the assignment.

Oh, and by the way, the irony of the Dollhouse doing work for the Government while the FBI are trying to confirm the existence of the Dollhouse did not escape my attention.

In other news, Victor/Lubov is getting a boner for his fellow Doll, Sierra. Unfortunately, it's Topher who discovers this, resulting in a whole lot of juvenile crap about him not being able to say erection and substituting 'man-reaction' instead. Seriously, this guy rewires people's brains?

I had to laugh: The winner's wife on Chris Tarrant's quiz show The Colour of Money, saying how she was 'so proud of him' and she 'knew he could do it' etc. And I'm thinking - hang on, it's a game of pure chance isn't it? He hasn't put in years of training to stand in front of a glorified fruit machine and shout STOP!

For the real deal, it was an emotional catch up with the group on Beyond Boundaries. Seeing Adi leave his wheelchair behind to literally drag himself up a Nicaraguan volcano, an awesome display of guts, determination and bravery - nothing to do with luck. Now that's something to be proud of.

Okay just thought I'd give Irish viewers a round up of my opinions on the Top 50 Singles Chart in Ireland as of 20 March 2009.

50. Breakeven-The Script: Okay, clocking in at number 50, we have The Script with Breakeven. Nice ballad we have here with some smooth vocals from Danny O' Donohue as usual. You can actually hear the emotional anguish in Danny's voice when he sings and I think it's one of their best singles yet. ****

49. Thinking Of You-Katy Perry: To be honest, I thought this song would do much better but it has so far only peaked at 38 and will probably fall of the chart within the next week. It's a shame cos Ms. Perry actually shows she has talent under all the attention seeking garb. She wrote this song by herself and has this longing emotion running through it. Many people have commented that she sounds like a strangled cat in this song but I disagree, I think her voice is very rich and distinctive. ****

I've never watched anything with Dave Gorman before and wasn't completely sure this show, moving from Radio 4, would change that. How wrong can you be? I was laughing out loud quite early on (just at the unfurling the email address - I'm easily pleased) and the addition of Catherine Tate as the 'expert', with her anecdote about cutting off an alcoholic ex-boyfriend's hair while he slept (and telling him in the morning that he'd come home like it! Genius indeed.)