5 to 9 the episode's central character, "In "5 to 9," we get more face time with Cuddy, and she's less of a cypher than usual, but her true nature remains tantalizingly out of reach." Handlen commented that the episode had some good scenes, but ultimately did little to advance the show, grading it "B". TV Squad's Jonathan Toomey raised similar issues, noting that "'5 to 9' wasn't a bad episode (in many ways, it felt like a back-door pilot for Cuddy), but it was, in a word, pointless." Toomey wrote that "At the end of the day, '5 to 9' doesn't really
How Many Licks? on her blonde hair and blue eyes. They wrote that Lil' Kim would be remembered by "her participation in codes of pornographic descriptions of women" rather than her commentary on sexuality. Selected scholars compared the video to those released by other rappers. In his essay "Supa Dupa Fly: Black Women as Cyborgs in Hiphop Videos", cultural critic Steven Shaviro wrote that the videos for "How Many Licks?" and American rapper Missy Elliott's 1997 single "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" contain “stories of black female empowerment, in the face of deeply engrained racism and sexism". Feminist scholars M. L. Williams and