He's back!

He came back tonight, and even though he wasn't quite as bad as when last I saw that face, it was good to see him once again.

Well, he was pretty bad . . . just not so clever with the evil. I think that's it.

Peoria's a funny old town. You can be the first person into the opening night performance of a new James Bond movie by showing up a mere hour ahead and buying your ticket. We don't sell out of much here, and we have some pretty good screens, so you can really enjoy an opening night, which I did tonight with Spectre.

Bond was back, with so many familiar Bond-ish bits that I actually feared for a Diana Rigg ending to the film. But the one thing that occasionally took me to somewhere else was the presence of Andrew Scott as a very powerful figure in London, sitting at the center of his own spider's web. I think he was cast in the role specifically for a hint of Moriarty, making you think he's not-so-innocent from the start. But just a hint, just an Andrew Scott look . . . the rest is a different sort of character.

Of course, James Bond has his own Moriarty, so Sherlock's arch-nemesis can't be the worst thing in the British empire. And we can't have Irene Adler in a James Bond movie, because James . . . well, there's a power dynamic conflict there that I don't think we'd want to see . . . somebody would wind up losing their mojo, and I vote "neither."

"M" isn't exactly Mycroft, and Money Penny is no Mrs. Hudson. Though they operate out of the same town, Holmes and Bond are two very different fellows.

Yet for a couple of hours, they share a certain familiar face this week. And that is not a bad thing at all.