Thanks again to BitTorrent and zany-fast Internet connections, I have witnessed the greatest piece of terrible television ever produced. NBC's two-part, four-hour disasterwank, 10.5, simultaneously follows all the rules for unremarkable, obvious drama and for stupendous post-modern comedy. I never liked Mystery Science Theater 3000, but watching that quake-fueled gorge follow along a curving railroad line, only to stop expanding just as it caught a distressed train, I so, so wanted some robots to jabber with.

Everything about the whole four-hour experience (well, three-hour experience if you're watching it via commercial-free download) is summed up in the last half-hour, as all hell breaks loose. A very important thing to keep in mind about filmmaking is that everything you see or hear is deliberate. Nothing happens by chance -- it's all planned. Everything that happens does so because somebody wanted it to. Which is why the extended sequences of extras running in circles, running in all manner of opposite directions, away from and towards nothing in particular, well, they were awe-inspiring. In a world crafted by the tightest kind of deliberation, these things made no rational sense. I imagine the director informing the extras that their motivation is to escape the giant chasm that is coming from the Pacific Ocean to consume them, and then telling them to run around in caffeinated ska circles.

In the early days of The Late Show, David Letterman liked to stop in the middle of his monologue and remind the audience that he was the only thing on CBS at the moment. Amazingly, I found myself mind-blown when I realized that Kim Delaney simultaneously detonating five nuclear warheads in order to fuse tectonic plates together was the only thing on NBC.