You may have noticed a lower number on your gas station receipts. The average price of gas in the U.S. is now $2.55 per gallon, the lowest it’s been since 2009. We’re told to never question a good thing, but why are these prices falling?

Watch The Brief to find out why you’re spending less than usual at the pump.

Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine is just like the rest of us — in the sense that he would totally prefer singing R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” instead of literally any song by Maroon 5. (Seriously, when you’re at karaoke faced with the choice between R. Kelly and Maroon 5, you know you’re going with R. Kelly. Every time.)

And so, at a recent The Voice coaches concert, Levine performed one of his band’s songs, “Sunday Morning,” before launching into the real performance, the part that actually mattered. The R. Kelly part.

You probably think you’re going to hate this, but give it a chance, because it’s surprisingly good and kind of makes us want to go to karaoke with Adam Levine.

A 5-second teaser clip from Game of Thrones, Season 5, was leaked on YouTube Monday, despite HBO’s spirited attempt to keep the content securely within the show’s official webpage.

HBO invited fans to visit the show’s official webpage and sign up for access to the clip by entering their personal phone numbers. A link to the clip was then sent to the fan’s mobile phone, at which point the clip could be played just once, only on that mobile device, before it vanished into the ether. That is, until one crafty Redditor, spotted by Vulture, finagled a way to record the clip and share it over YouTube.

When I speak at law schools, I am always asked about the Colbert Super PAC “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” and its sibling 501(c)(4), “Colbert Super PAC Shhh.” Almost every time, someone asks, “How did you and Stephen Colbert plan the story line of his coverage of money in politics?”

The assumption at law schools, where law professors create a course by designing a complete blueprint for each subject, is that Stephen’s two years of on-air legal conversations on money and politics issues were planned and scripted in advance. Stephen certainly offered the American public a course in modern campaign finance law, but there never was a master plan for the discovery of the American campaign finance system’s peculiarities. Instead, our serial discussion evolved in wonderful spontaneity, appropriate to Stephen’s belief in the power of improvisation. One conversation simply led logically to another—unless Stephen got that wild look in his eyes and said “What if I did…?” (like “run for President of South Carolina”), and then the dialogue took an unexpected turn.

The 2012 presidential election cycle was a remarkable time in the campaign finance field. Campaigns evolved in real time as they experimented with the new political vehicles known as Super PACs and explored the gray areas of election law. Along the way, Stephen effectively demonstrated the absurdities and workarounds in our campaign finance system through the creation of several legal entities: a non-connected PAC to raise money to influence elections, a Super PAC to raise unlimited contributions from corporations and labor unions, and a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization used to launder contributions to keep donors anonymous.

Finally, he was able to show America the loopholes (or “loop-chasms” as he called them) in the laws designed to regulate coordination between candidates and supposedly “independent” groups. By having his own Super PAC and 501(c)(4), Stephen could evolve right alongside the campaigns—or often be a step ahead of them. His understanding of the possibilities inherent in the legal confusion was keen enough to discover and exploit absurd legalities before it became clear that actual candidates and political activists were doing the same thing.

Working with Stephen, I quickly came to respect his quick and sharp intellect, including that skill so highly prized by lawyers: the ability to ingest and intellectually digest a large amount of information on an unfamiliar subject, distilling it into key questions and insights. The fact that he could do this with unfamiliar campaign finance legal concepts always amazed me; that he could then boil it all down to a 4 ½ minute on-air discussion and make it funny was pure genius. I told him at one point that if he ever wanted a different career, he would make the world’s best Supreme Court advocate. After all, the highest paid lawyers master the factual record of their case, apply a nuanced area of law, and present the breadth of this material to the justices in a digestible and persuasive manner. The only difference is that Supreme Court advocates have 30 minutes and Colbert had 4 ½.

Stephen, if you ever decide to move on from the entertainment industry, I would be happy to refer potential Supreme Court clients.

Trevor Potter, Stephen Colbert’s “personal lawyer” for his SuperPac, is a former FEC Chairman and currently a member of the Caplin & Drysdale law firm and President of the Campaign Legal Center, a public interest law firm.

For Glee‘s sixth and final season, Rachel and Kurt are returning to McKinley High to reinstate the Glee Club. And from the looks of the trailer, that involves butting heads with Ms. Sylvester, running into The Dalton Academy Warblers and, of course, singing “Let It Go.”

But where’s Idina Menzel?

Glee‘s sixth season kicks off with a two-hour premiere on Friday, Jan. 9 on Fox.

This article originally appeared on EW.com

The Parks and Recreation crew just wrapped its final season, which will begin airing Jan. 13, and we’re starting to get a little misty-eyed thinking about saying our goodbyes to the great people of Pawnee, Ind.

The show’s cast and crew, of course, have also been getting pretty nostalgic about wrapping up the beloved comedy. On the last day of filming, they were tweeting photos and memories and all sorts of sentimentality. And then at the show’s wrap party, it seems the nostalgia continued.

We don’t know much about the festivities — though we imagine everyone was getting drunk on Snake Juice and Amy Poehler sang “Poker Face” — but we do know Chris Pratt took the stage (possibly in character as lovable idiot Andy Dwyer?) to sing “5,000 Candles In the Wind.” As you probably recall, that’s the song Andy’s band Mouserat performed as a tribute to Li’l Sebastian, the miniature horse who was basically the Beyoncé of Pawnee.

Oh man, all this nostalgia, but I’M NOT CRYING, OKAY?

A mother of two political operatives–one Democrat, the other Republican–called into a live debate between the brothers on C-SPAN on Tuesday to tell her sons to lay off the partisan bickering come Christmas.

Joy Woodhouse called into the show using the regular phone line. Within seconds, her right-leaning son, Dallas Woodhouse, recognized the voice.

“Oh god, it’s Mom,” he says, as the left-leaning brother, Brad Woodhouse, drops his head into his hands.

“I don’t know many families that are fighting at Thanksgiving,” the elder Woodhouse said over the air. “I was hoping you’ll have some of this out of your system when you come here for Christmas. I would really like a peaceful Christmas.”

The two brothers work for rival political advocacy groups, at one point broadcasting rival campaign ads in North Carolina, the News & Observer reports.

“Thanks mom,” one of the brothers can be heard saying at the close of the call, though neither one committed to holding a quiet, bipartisan Christmas celebration.

“Of course!” said Gandalf. … “You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar.

With those words J.R.R. Tolkien ended his book The Hobbit, which he wrote from 1930 to 1932 and which, when published five years later, introduced the world to the Middle-earth of Dwarves and Elves, humans and the small, hairy-footed Hobbits of the Shire. By 1949 the Oxford don had completed an epic sequel, published in three volumes as The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955. Without much doubt the great fantasy books of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings in its film-trilogy version became the first fantasy movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Spurred by that success, as well as by his connection to the material and his eagerness to expand on the CGI artistry pioneered by his Weta Workshop, director-producer Peter Jackson made three feature-length episodes of The Hobbit, concluding this week with The Battle of the Five Armies. And now, 17 years after the Hobbit-shaped director launched his quest to bring Tolkien to the screen — and supervising two mammoth shooting schedules, each of 266 days — it’s over. “I’ve sort of done the once-in-a-lifetime experience twice,” Jackson said recently. “But not a third time. There won’t be a third time.“

The three Lord of the Rings films (titled, like the books, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King) were essential, enthralling viewing. Jackson’s The Hobbit, on its own terms a satisfying rough cut of a very long good movie, could only be an ornate codicil to the thrilling endeavor of The Rings — however appealing the new series’ directorial vision, however robust its characters and tantalizing its emotions.

The plodding first act, An Unexpected Journey, released in 2012, was saved from terminal tedium by the encounter in which “Bilbo the Burglar” (Martin Freeman) steals the One Ring from Gollum (Andy Serkis). The trilogy sprang belatedly to dramatic life last year with wondrous set pieces in The Desolation of Smaug: a giant spider attack on the Dwarves, the escape from the Elves’ castle down a raging-rapids river, the siege of the humans’ Lake-town and Bilbo’s climactic confrontation with Smaug. A dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) as pompous as it is powerful, Smaug allowed Bilbo to outsmart it when he slipped on the Ring and disappeared with the Dwarves’ most precious treasure, the Arkenstone.

In the new movie, Jackson and his screenwriting colleagues Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens begin with a Smaug alert. Escaping his lair, the dragon flies to Lake-town for a sensational blitzkrieg defended by the episode’s unsullied human hero Bard the Bowman (stalwart Luke Evans). The tragic figure here is the Dwarf king Thorin (a splendidly conflicted Richard Armitage) who, having recaptured his people’s ancestral cave of gold, is tainted and maddened by it. Asked by the Elf king Thrandull (Lee Pace) if he will have peace or war, Thorin bellows, “I will have war!” and the five armies — Dwarves, Elves, men, Orcs and an unexpected fifth contingent — amass for a battle that consumes the last 45 mins. and nearly matches The Two Towers in its masterly visual choreography of sustained combat. (All hail Serkis, absent as Gollum but contributing his talents as second-unit director.)

Within the confines of a bustling war-movie — and, at 2hr.24min., by far the shortest film in either trilogy — Jackson is obliged to telegraph the moments of personal emotion. Yet the Elf princess Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) has time to make elevated love, and to go to war, with her Dwarf darling Kili (Aidan Turner). And in an interlude back in the Elven kingdom, the magnificent Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) fights off an unwelcome spectral guest with the intervention of Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and the still-beneficent Saruman (Christopher Lee, still royally charismatic at 92). So many plot lines need tying up, under the martial supervision of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), that the lone Hobbit is often in the background; at times you may ask, “Where’s Bilbo?” He proves his mettle and justifies the movies’ title by employing the resources of his heart and his cunning.

For all the craft and energy on display in Five Armies, few fanciers of the Ring cycle will mourn that, in Jackson’s words, “There won’t be a third time”: he means he will not attempt to wrestle a coherent story out of Tolkien’s sprawling, posthumously published The Silimarillion. Even Jackson’s longtime admirers may whisper “Thank goodness!” that the director of early splatter comedies like Bad Taste and Braindead, and the teen-girl murder romance Heavenly Creatures, can say goodbye to reverent fantasy adaptations and get back to his proper job of subversive satire in tones either gross-out or surreal.

Some might even see this three-part Hobbit project as an example of the greed that Tolkien defined as the cardinal sin in both of his grand fables. Love of gold drives Thorin to madness; and the One Ring debases all those who keep or covet it. (The abiding lesson of both stories: baaad jewelry!) Remember that Jackson originally assigned Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) to helm The Hobbit, which was planned as just two films. Then Jackson took over; he wanted The Hobbit for himself, just as he had possessed the Ring movies, and he decided it would be three features. Tolkien originally divided The Lord of the Rings into six books; if Jackson had carried more clout in the ’90s, when he started work on the series, we might have had a Ring sextet. (His sponsor, New Line Cinema, was already taking a $300-million risk in entrusting three features to a New Zealander with no hit movies on his résumé.)

The Jackson–del Toro backstory has a touch of the pathetic Gollum, who kept the Ring for ages and was corrupted by its possession before losing it to Bilbo and then Frodo. And why make a 300-page story into three movies? A potential billion-dollar worldwide gross for each! Next question?

But Jackson made good on his respect for the Tolkien books and their overarching theme of fellowship. These are tales about members of different species who become friends to achieve a single, near-impossible goal in time of war. Modern moviemaking is war by other means: acting on a bare stage in front of a green screen, and marshaling elements, real and CGI, that exist only on storyboards or in the filmmaker’s teeming brain.

If The Hobbit doesn’t equal the achievement of Jackson’s earlier Middle-earth movies — and, honestly, what could? — it is still, in sum, a thrilling effort, perhaps standing behind only Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy as the most impressive and intelligent multi-film action epic since The Lord of the Rings. As Gandalf might say: You are a very fine storyteller, Mr. Jackson, and we are most grateful for your Hobbit.