Peter J. Mello

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8

Denis Villenueve. A solid lineup. A different take on first contact. I loved Sicario but went in expecting a cerebral epic sci-fi.

That was a mistake.

Good things:
- Some really nice visual scenes
- Interesting aliens Calligraphy aliens!
- Clear theme of communication is omnipresent
- A neat score that might be awesome in a different movie

Bad things:
- The acting
- The lack of emotional reaction to ALIENS! The students asking to turn on the TV, all of the main characters
- Lack of useful characters Only the aliens and Louise actually did anything the entire movie.
- Supporting characters are very stupid in an attempt to foil the main character slightly
- Very clumsy exposition. Genre-typical news reports, voice-overs, dumb characters asking stupid questions.
- Very slow pacing. This worked in parts of Sicario, but didn't work in this movie because there was no tension. The main characters never seemed remotely threatened.
- Lousie showing up at school thinking everyone will be there after aliens arrive and there's a state of emergency
- Why can't you translate alien language like you can translate Farsi. This is a paraphrase but in the spirit of what Colonel Weber was saying.
- Useless love interest when the costars have no chemistry.
- Ultrasecure military base lets someone steal a ton of explosives and put it in an ALIEN SPACECRAFT without anyone noticing.
- Many unbelievable plot points
- Poor dialogue Let's make a baby - real quote
- Poor handling of the major plot points Looking through time seems to undermine the fact that the aliens need help. Why did one have to die if they could see the future? Why did only one die when they were right next to each other?
- Very heavy handed moral messaging that didn't align with the rest of the movie.
- Why couldn't Ian also see into the future as he studied the language, or any of the others?

Overall extremely disappointing. I'm honestly surprised critics or general moviegoers like this. The premise was very good. It's a real shame the execution failed so miserably.

I do like the show, but it's not Star Trek. If this was just a new sci-fi show that existed in its own universe, it would be incredible. However, the fact that they've tried to pass this off as Star Trek when it's clearly not sullies the experience.

If it wasn't already apparent, Paramount and CBS have no idea what made Star Trek great, and don't care either. The simple explanation is that the world of Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic; this is pessimistic. And I do enjoy pessimistic sci-fi, but there's so much of it, and to see one of the few optimistic sci-fi worlds turned into something pessimistic is a shame.

Fortunately, we now have The Orville, which is doing Star Trek better than anything has since Voyager ended in 2001.

The show is supposed to take place between Enterprise and TOS, but the technology is very different. For example, there are holograms everywhere. Why try to do a prequel again? Why not set this after Voyager? That would make a lot more sense, and they'd be able to add whatever technology they like, and not be constrained by existing continuity. Fortunately, it's not too late for the showrunners to say "hey, we made a mistake, this actually takes place X years after Voyager".

Last, they fucked up the Klingons. For almost 25 years, they had the look of the Klingons figured out perfectly. They're iconic. But this show (and the reboot movies) messed them up and made them look like generic sci-fi bad guys. What happened to their hair and beards? Also, the costumes are ridiculous, and their ship interiors look like they're made of coral. I do like the idea of having an albino Klingon though.

And I applaud their desire to use the Klingon language on the show, but it's pretty annoying having every Klingon scene subtitled. The previous shows used a common sci-fi conceit: the actors speak a language that the audience understands, but it's accepted that they're really speaking a different language. The viewer effectively has a universal translator so they can understand what's being said.

Also, it looks nothing like Star Trek. Once again, The Orville got that right, and this didn't.

All of that said, I do like the show. The characters are interesting (especially Doug Jones), I've enjoyed each episode, and I think the storyline is pretty interesting. But goddamn it, why did they have to try to make this Star Trek when it's not?

I've watched this series from day one and loved it until season 4. When season 5 started, with their major plot changes, I wanted to quit this show but this episode made me loathe this show to the point where I would literally beat up Martin for giving HBO the rights to change the story line this much. I'm personally disappointed with HBO for killing of such a lovable and adorable character in a way that it wasn't possible. Stannis would NEVER agree to such a thing (and if you remembered in the last episode, he turned down Melissandre without thinking twice). Why did the TV show drop in quality? I was ready to bear the fact that Lady Stoneheart wont be in the show (even tho she has a MAJOR influence in the books) but not this major flaw. Stannis is a weak man, unable to endure the seduction of a witch and the only thing that was able to cancel her manipulation was Shireen. For god's sake Selyse had second thoughts, the woman who hated her daughter more than anyone in the world but Stannis didn't, the man who showed so much love and pride in her daughter.

I'm rating this episode 1 because this is the last episode I will ever watch of Game of Thrones. I was able to survive "The Red Wedding" and Oberyn Martell because I knew this was coming but this... THIS... I'm disgusted.

EDIT: If the actress didn't wanna act in the series any more they (HBO) could have at least killed her via Ramsey Snow's 20 men sneak attack or something. This was utterly revolting. :/

On the first season, See presented and explored a post apocalyptic world where the civilization lost their ability to see. This concept opened up many interesting questions, but the series gradually degenerated into derivative storylines with weak writing ("I want to pray"). Nevertheless, I watched all the episodes on the merits of 3 characters: Boba Voss (always charismatic Jason Momoa), Tamacti Jun (bad ass Christian Camargo), and Maghra (beautiful Hera Hilmar) and expertly staged action sequences.

The second season pivots the series to Game of Thrones-style backdrop. Multiple factions and/or characters are vying to unite and rule the civilization: Edo Voss (recasted to Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy), Queen Kane, Maghra, and Harlan (fantastically played by Adrian Paul).

My favorite scene is the goodbye exchange between Baba and Kofun.

Baba: Kofun. Kofun. My son.
Listen to me.
Your and mother and I...
we raised you to be beautiful, not a warrior.
I don't want you to have to fight the way I had to.
I never imagined a life for you away from the Alkenny.
And I failed to prepare you.

Baba: After a touching farewell, he goes on a Ned Stark-style impossible mission to rescue his daughter Haniwa from his estranged and enemy brother Edo.

Wren: She tells Haniwa that while those who can see are not viewed as witches, Edo and his people will execute them. That begs the question. Edo employees a seeing child to find Baba, reinforcing Wren's discriminated victim arc. I am guessing she will turn to Haniwa's side.

Harlan: A great new addition to replace the best character, Tamacti Jun. He has shades of Little Finger, planting seeds into Maghra to betray Queen Kane (who is probably not as dumb and impulsive as she appears).

P.S. I don't like the new opening theme. Full orchestra score and busy graphics diminish the first season's atmospheric theme which perfectly encapsulated the series.

[9.0/10] It’s just supposed to be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. You don’t get sentimental. There are practical reasons to do this thing, reasons that, coincidentally, involve your continued safety and freedom.

But then you look at the person standing across from you, a person whose joy or pain matters to you, and suddenly you can’t pretend that this is all just a ministerial act, just a necessary concession to the gods of bureaucracy or the legal system. Instead, it becomes something meaningful, something personal, that has an emotional import and connection that makes it more than just business as usual.

So yeah, Kim and Jimmy are married now. After fans reeled from last week’s cliffhanger, it turns out their union isn’t a last desperate act of mutual self-immolation or an impulse borne of bad family lessons. It’s a means of protection, so that if Kim is implicated in Jimmy’s lies once again, she can never be compelled to testify against him as her husband.

And yet, my favorite moment in an episode not short on great moments comes when the two of them face one another in some dingy courtroom, enduring the world’s least romantic wedding ceremony and, against all odds, they’re both moved by it. It’s an outstanding piece of acting from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who hardly say a word in the scene, but whose faces and subtle changes in expression let slip that however much these two people themselves this wedding is a practicality, it is actually a fleeting moment of romantic transcendence for two people who, whatever their problems, do genuinely love one another.

It sets the tone for “JMM”, an episode where people try to keep things professional, detached, and calm, until it’s contrasted with something much more personal, much more piercing, that wins out.

That’s certainly true for Kim. The episode doesn't spare us the aftermath at Mesa Verde in the wreckage of Saul’s stunt last week. “JMM” involves Kim and Rich low-key groveling before a miffed Kevin Wachtell, all but ready to fire their firm. The partners do the respectful, deferential thing, evincing the sort of demeanor that’s expected between lawyers and their clients, and take responsibility for the failures that led to Wachtell and his company getting fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars by Saul. And all it gets them is a dismissive, perturbed kiss off from Kevin, along with the admonition that Kim can do better than her shady beau.

But after walking out the door, Kim decides that she won’t take that lying down. She barges her way back in and is frank with Kevin, about how she really feels, in a way her deferential act wasn’t. She tells him that time and again they advised him against every step that led down this path, and he rejected their advice and barged ahead. It’s not entirely true (or at least omits how much fuel Kim threw on the fire), but she challenges Kevin, approaches him candidly and directly and, most important of all, personally. He respects that and, with a terse but telling response that he’ll see her on Thursday, lets her know that she’s keeping the business.

That directness matters. It builds on a frankness, a realness, that Kevin respects in Kim far more than all the fancy degrees and smarty pants advisors he low-key loathes given his faux-blue collar roots. Truth and honesty gets to him in a way that the usual routine in this situation doesn't and wouldn’t.

There’s a similar contrast between the professional and the personal in Gus’s part of the episode. His first appearance in “JMM” is in a bland boardroom meeting, where fast food CEOs are golf clapping over quarterly percentage increases and plastically delighting over the unprecedented advent of spicy curly fries (which, in fairness, do look pretty tasty).

But the tenor of the conversation changes when we see Gus, Lydia (!), and Peter Schuler behind closed doors. Breaking Bad fans will remember Herr Schuler as the Madrigal exec who had an...unfortunate reaction to the DEA’s investigation. “JMM” plants the seeds for that fatalistic response to external pressure. Schuler is deep in the muck on this, helping to fund Gus’s operation and far enough into it to know and worry about the threat posed by Lalo and the cartel. He’s panicked over auditors, desperate not to get caught, and ready to throw in the towel.

That is, until Gus makes it personal. I don’t want to speculate too deeply about the friendship that Gus and Schuler share, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy to their interactions back at the hotel. Gus persuades his benefactor to stay in the fight by holding him by the arm, looking him (and by extension, the audience) in the eye, and calling back to a shared history together. It’s that gesture, that remembrance, that keeps Schuler mollified enough to give Gus a little more rope, a little more time, far removed from the practiced smiles of the boardroom.

It’s personal for his mole too. Nacho ends up helping Gus burn down one of his own restaurants, under orders from an imprisoned Lalo, to keep the pressure on for the Salamancas and to keep up appearances for Fring. It is, as always, a cool and cathartic sequence on this show, and Gus’s chicken slide grease explosion (which he cooly walks away from, naturally), is a visual highlight.

But for Nacho, however cool this may be, it is something he does not out of loyalty or anger or a sense of rivalry, but because it’s just his job. It’s the necessary evil to protect the thing he actually cares about -- his father. In his meeting with Mike, he tells his new handler that he wants out, that he wants to whisk his dad away somewhere that the cartel can’t get him, because the separation from his “career” and his family is getting thinner by the second.

At the same time, Mike is finding peace on that front. If it weren’t for Kim and Jimmy’s strange but endearing wedding, Mike’s interludes with his granddaughter and daughter-in-law would be the sweetest thing in the episode. He reads to his son’s little girl. He reminisces with Stacey about his boy’s elementary school age antics. And he tells her that he’s better, that he’s accepted what his professional situation is and doesn't want to fight it anymore. More than anyone in the show, Mike is able to find equilibrium by accepting the “hand he’s dealt” in his job, and enjoying the private, personal things that job (hopefully) exists far away and apart from.
He does, however, still have a job to do, and right now that means getting Lalo out of prison so that Gus can force him south of the border where it’s harder for Lalo to call the shots. (And hey, if it gives Gus a chance to take the guy out, all the better). That leads to Mike crossing paths with Saul for the first time in a long time, feeding Saul the dirt (which Mike himself created), to get Lalo out on bail and back to Mexico.

Jimmy is genuinely conflicted about it. As ready, willing, and able as he’s been to represent the, shall we say, less than reputable members of the community, becoming a “friend of the cartel” is a horse of a different color. He says as much to Kim in a heartening moment of honesty and candor between them. He thinks about the money, “ranch in Montana” money, but when she asks him if it’s what he wants, he says no. It’s about the thrill of the chase, and about making a life for and with the people he cares about with Jimmy, not necessarily the size of the bankroll. Money’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself for him.

Still, Mike shows up on his doorstep, notes a mysterious benefactor, and between that and the intimidation of a scary crime lord telling him it’s better to be in front of the judge than the cartel, he does what’s expected of him as a zealous advocate and professional. He uses the info that the prosecution’s star witness was coached by “some P.I.” to cast the judge’s ire on the state, and deploys a phony wife and family to show ties to the community. It works! Despite facing a murder charge, Lalo receives a bond and can afford it despite a hefty price tag.

But something’s eating at Jimmy through all of this. In contrast to the fake fiance and moppets he scares up to sway the judge, Jimmy looks across the aisle at the real family of the victim. He sees a poor kid’s mother crying in the courtroom, where he’s helping a cold blooded killer evade justice. Even when it’s done, he peaks at them from around a corner, with his reflection on the marble helping to represent the duality of him in this moment.

It’s too neat and clean to divide this man into Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. There’s elements of each in the other. But there’s always been a side of the man whose born initials are “JMM” that wants to win at any cost, and a side of him that genuinely cares for people and can feel their pain. There are so many exit ramps in Jimmy’s life, so many places where he could have changed directions and not become the shyster we met in Breaking Bad, and this moment, where the palpable, deeply personal pain felt by this poor family cuts through his typical mercenary craftiness is one of them.

But it’s not to be. Howard Hamlin intervenes, revokes his job offer, and calls Jimmy out for his recent antics with bowling balls and prostitutes and other schemes to mess with Howard’s life. To say that Saul reacts poorly is an understatement. He lashes out at Howard, accusing him of killing Chuck, declaring that a job at HHM is beneath him, loudly and publicly promoting himself as a god, whose stature and grandiosity are so great as to make Howard’s piddling little offer to him infinitesimal.

That’s the thing about Jimmy. He didn’t become a lawyer because of a supposed deep respect and admiration for the law like Chuck. He didn’t do it as a way out and a way forward like Kim. His reasons were always personal. He wanted to impress his brother. He wanted to make Chuck proud. His business life and his private wants were always mixed and matched.

Only here, that motivation has changed. There’s still good in Jimmy, the impulse to gaze at the mournful expressions of a victim’s loved ones and have it give him pause over whether he’s doing the right thing. But the polarity of the personal has changed for him. He’s no longer just in the legal business to earn Chuck’s respect or make a living or fund his dreams with Kim. Now he wants revenge, to show Chuck’s ghost, and every living manifestation of the people and institutions and norms that have made him feel “less than” and looked down upon his whole life that he’s better, and more important, bigger than everyone who once thought less of him.

For Jimmy it always starts out as business, as a transactional thing he does without real consideration. Then, time and again, he has that moment of pause, that moment of restraint, when he thinks about the emotional impact of his choices. But then, inevitably, his personal grievances, his perceived slights, the personal baggage he’s carried for so long, shoves him back toward being Saul Goodman. No deep look into someone’s eyes can change that, however much we might want it to.

This show need to stop trying so hard. I don't know how it gets so many things wrong so often. This kid talking about his podcast like it matters is just off.

Finally having a group meeting is one of the smartest things they've done. I really don't think they needed a traitor element in the first place but we'll see.

Also in pro news the kids are apparently transferring houses. Between mom and dad. Which does respect his fatherhood status even if it might mean complications for the kids.

Honestly this episode is much smarter than the last episode. Even with the cheesy podcast stuff.

Like this "Holy Grail" thing where everyone is like "yeaaahhh right". As if no one has ever used the "holy grail" to mean something important before.

and then just like that an episode that started off rocky, was going smoothly then nosedives ruining a 6/10 episode to 3-4/10 territory. Lady Cop blames an amnesiac for beating his wife when the guy can't even remember his name. As if that makes any sense. At the family house young Olive invites her new-Daddy home to eat dinner to cheer up her mom because children understand complex adult dynamics either 100% or 0% depending on the episode and when real daddy summoned by his son via text shows up real-Daddy and new-Daddy get into a fight over the dumbest thing ever. You're ADULTS. act like it. Even if you wanted to yell who gets into a fist fight? No wonder Jordan Peterson thinks he's a genius he's learning everything about manhood not from historical cultural myth but television. But just everything about that scene is stupid.

"It doesn't look like a happy reunion" - what? You literally just walked into the house mr "Who is this man and why is he in my house that I'm exiled from"

"You are the whole reason this family is messed up" - WHAT??!? The dude disappeared in an airplane. He didn't mess up his family. Someone else messed up his family. He's literally innocent in all of this.

Olive sucks. Olive sucks worst than her mother and her mother SUUUUUCKS. Everyone on this show sucks to a little degree. But good grief.

And we have the second episode with a couple cheating to get back together (You 1x07-08)

This episode like so many of this series had the potential to be solid. Ending it by having white guy do the podcast is silly. Except plot twist.. good plot twist it's an insurance policy something the podcast host is too dumb to understand. Then finally having other people's callings show up is brilliant. Everything about this ending is compelling enough to make me want to see what happens next. If only the middle didn't just suck donkey balls so frequently.

I have a bit of a mixed opinion about the show. It still looks nice. Perhaps a bit too clean (does Bronwyn really always looks like she's about to attend the Met Gala? All other peasants are wearing rags and she's sporting a clean and sexy dress. Really?). But that's apparently where the budget went to. I feel that they neglected characters and stories though. They jump from location to location but I'm not sure we learn all that much character-wise. And the best described character Galadriel is strange. I would even call her a bit childish and immature. Isn't she supposed to be wise, composed and clever? Although I know very little of the LotR lore, I always thought the elves don't behave like humble humans (the worst example of this was of course last episode's Baywatch-horse scene). I mean, I get it: the first season is used to introduce the various locations and characters. Given the sheer number of different locations and people that's a monumental task already and in this snail speed they need more episodes to create believable characters. Thus, I'm afraid, most time of the remainder of this season will also be allotted to this rather boring introduction. And boring it is: all the character building via dialogue is mediocre. Plus, over the course of the first season, they want us to show the slowly growing threat to this mostly very peaceful world. So they can't have too much action w/o the stakes having reached existential levels. I'm okay with that. They should take all the time needed to have a credible climax later, but surely this is another factor why this episode doesn't feel exciting.

Something is simply off. I watch this episode and I profoundly enjoy the locations, costumes, props, wigs and make-up, but the story just passes by. I don't really care too much. Why should I pay attention? It's very one-dimensional and very black and white. You know exactly who is good and who is bad and who will forge alliances with whom (after some initial reluctance). There's still some mysterious aspects left (primarily surrounding the orcs, their handler and the comet guy), but it's not really important to pay attention: Orcs are bad, the comet guy is good and he will help the elves and their allies eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if the essential parts of season one's story can be summarized in one short paragraph. And all the fantasy babble feels tailor-made to true fans of the LotR franchise - it's not made for people like me. It's just a bit dull and unsophisticated story telling with unnecessary pathos and it's way too dragged out. Tbh, this is totally in line with the movies in the LotR franchise.

[9.8/10] What an episode! It's hard to imagine an hour of television that could draw out the differences between Jimmy and Kim better than this one.

In the wake of Howard's death and all the sins she committed and enabled, Kim numbs herself in a colorless world of banal conversations and empty experiences. Everything about her day-to-date life is colorless and dull, resigning herself to a sort of limbo as both penance and protection from inflicting anymore wrongs on the world. And even there, she won't make any decisions, offer any opinions, as though she's afraid that making any choice will lead her down another bad road.

Until Gene intervenes, balks at her command to turn himself in, and tells her to do that if she's so affronted by what they did. And holy hell, she does! If there was ever an indicator of moral fortitude in the Gilliverse, it's that. The courage of your convictions it takes to have gotten away with it, lived years away from the worst things you've ever done, and still choose to return to the place where it happened and accept your punishment, legal, moral, or otherwise, is absolutely incredible. Rhea Seehorn kills it, especially as Kim comes crumbling apart on an airport shuttle, amid all the hard truths she set aside for so long coming back in one painful rush. It's a tribute to Seehorn, and to Kim, how pained and righteous Kim seems in willfully choosing to confess and suffer whatever fate comes down, unlike anyone else in Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad.

It makes her the polar opposite of Gene, who finds new depths of terribleness as the noose tightens around him. As he continues the robbery of the cancer-stricken man whose house he broke into in the last episode, he finds new lows. Even when this risky excess has worked out for him, he pushes things even further by stealing more luxury goods as time runs out. He nearly smashes in the guy's skull with an urn for his own dead pet. He bails on Jeff. And when Marion finds him out, he advances on her with such a physical threat, a dark echo of the kindness to senior citizens that once defined his legal career.

The contrast is clear. Kim will turn herself in even when she doesn't have to and has excuses and justifications she could offer. Gene resorts to ever more cruelty, fraud, and craven self-interest to save himself from facing any of the consequences he so richly deserves. Kim is right to tell Jesse Pinkman that Saul used to be good, when she knew him. The two of them will understand better than anyone else in this universe what it's like to attach yourself to someone who sheds everything that made them a decent human being. Jimmy lost the part of himself that was good, or kind, or noble, even amid his cons. But Kim held onto her moral convictions, and it's what makes her not just Jimmy's foil, but the honorable counterpoint to the awful person he became.

EDIT: Here's a link to my usual more in-depth review of the episode if anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-season-6-episode-12-recap/

Everyone keeps suggesting there is a paradox concerning the 5D future humans and their ability to save humanity in the past. It's really not a paradox at all. Everyone assumes humanity survived to ascend to the 5th dimension but how could humanity exist in the future if not for the actions of Cooper.. who was guided by future humans (begin endless loop).

Did anyone ever consider the other important character in the movie? Amelia Brand carried on with the rest of her mission (thanks to Cooper). I postulate that Brand used the human seeds as intended and set up a colony. A colony that would thrive and eventually evolve beyond human. Thus Earth is of little importance, and may have indeed died. These colonists, and the generations that followed, would have been told the story of a great man (Cooper) who saved them from extinction. With the ability to manipulate space-time, they would pay homage to their hero "God" by helping him in the past so he may fulfill the mission most important to him, to once again see his daughter. Plan B worked beautifully. But the 5d humans, having the power to bend space-time, decided there's no reason why Plan A had to fail.

[8.0/10] Easily the best episode of the series so far. I really enjoyed the glimpse we get of Will and Deanna -- happy enough that it feels like a nice grace note to their story in TNG, but with enough loss involved to make it something other than a wish-fulfillment happy ending for them.

But what I like even better is that this stop is more than just fanservice with some familiar faces. The show uses Picard's connection to his old officers, and Soji's budding bond with their daughter, to make the Riker family a bridge between Picard and Soji. Reminding Picard that he needs to be patient and kind to earn someone's trust and that fighting the good fight is what keeps him feeling alive, while Troi and Kestra show Soji that she has value regardless of whether she's "real" and that he can be trusted, is a really great way to use these cameos.

The Jurati/Raffi/Rios stuff back on La Sirena is a lot less successful. If nothing else, I appreciate the plot mechanics of Narek being able to track them using the pill Jurati takes in the flashback. But I'm still super confused as to the shape of Jurati's motivation here. I get that she's afraid of a Synth uprising thanks to the mindmeld, but why and how does that lead her to kill Maddox and what's her objective? It also feels a little dumb that Raffi and Rios don't really catch on. Still, there's intrigue in the idea that she's willing to go into a coma to try to detach herself from her Zhat Vash handlers now that she's having second thoughts.

The weirdest part of the episode is the Elnor/Hugh/Narissa stuff. The fight was pretty cool (even if I'm still tired of Narissa's hammy Bond villain routine), and the show piqued my interest with the quick rapport between Hugh and Elnor. But then why the hell did the show (seemingly) kill off Hugh five minutes later? It's another disappointing and abrupt end for a legacy character. (Justice for Hugh and Icheb!)

Still, the Picard/Soji/Riker family stuff is so good that it makes up for the other parts of the episode. Picard's scenes with each members of the family are great. His and Riker's dynamic in particular is so warm and familiar in the best way. And holy hell, Marina Sirtis gives her best performance in all of Star Trek here! The layers to her conversations with Picard and Soji are so good!

Overall, this one has its problems away from Nepenthe, but when it's at the Riker homestead, things are really good and nicely manage to make a feel-good TNG cameo into something more meaningful and relevant to this show's characters and the story at hand.

6.7/10. The idea of “Election Day pt. 1” is a great one. Taking the time before the election returns really kick into gear to explore the relationships between the characters, reflect on what come’s next, and show how many of these people, Josh especially, only have one mode and don’t know how to function when they’re not in it, is a canny choice for the lead up to the finish. The problem is that little of it is especially good, and much of it feels fairly scattershot.

The most prominent through line in the episode is that latter point – the idea that Josh and Bruno and the cadre of people who work for them have been so focused on election gamesmanship that they don’t know how to turn it off when there’s not much more to do. It’s a nice parallel when the episode shows the two of them freaking out about the same exit poll numbers that each swears can’t be right. And we get little details like Josh and Lou wanting fifteen different versions of Santos’s end-of-the-night speech to cover every possible contingency, Josh micromanaging the setup of the ballroom, and dealing with changes to the speech from the transition team.

The upshot is clear – all Josh knows is crisis, and when faced with a situation in which all these contingencies are already planned for and there’s nothing more to do, he tries to create one out of whole cloth because he can’t stand sitting on his hands. In a show that almost always has a Crisis of the Week, that’s a bold choice, and the most solid part of the episode. The problem is that the episode hits that same note over and over again without much variation or intrigue. Josh’s freak out toward the end of the episode is fine as an exclamation point on that theme, and his failed “inspire the troops speech” is a good signifier that he can only see more problems to fix, not successes to be proud of. But at some point you just want to say, “We get it! Josh can’t relax!”

Or maybe he can. After years, years of teasing it, The West Wing finally pulls the trigger on Josh and Donna. After a scene where every member of the Santos staff is basically paired off (and even Bruno is using his current position to hopefully get himself into another), the last two folks left in the room are Josh and Donna who, after so much fumfering around, get together.

So we do the awkward morning after thing. And it’s fine. To be fair, I don’t know how you pay something like this off – which the fans desperately wanted but which doesn’t make a lot of sense – in a satisfying way. But the development is kind of underwhelming, with the standard post-coital awkwardness and neither knowing how to approach their friendship or budding relationship afterward. There’s the occasional fun moment, like Donna telling Josh she already knows how he likes his coffee, but for the most part it feels like The West Wing briefly turned into an episode of Melrose Place with an odd amount of focus on everyone’s romantic lives.

After all, even “Congressman Casanova” and Helen Santos find a productive use of the first bit of time off they’ve had in weeks. We get a scene of Lou and Otto, where the Otto is a bit more sentimental about their dalliance than the prickly (and frankly pretty mean) Lou is about it. And, of course, we get another scene exploring the relationship between Will Bailey and Kate Harper. There’s the noteworthy reveal that Kate voted for Vinick, and I appreciate the show depicting the senior staff as not so monolithic in their political preferences, but for the most part, it falls into the same Melrose Place territory. Will talks about going off to run campaigns in California again, and Kate talks about sticking around to serve whoever the next president is, and the pair try to navigate the awkwardness of their undefined relationship, which is about to face a big transition.

That’s the other major thread in this slack tide episode – what comes next. The staff of the Santos campaign, the Vinick campaign, and the White House have poured their lives into something that basically comes to an end on this very day. Two-thirds of these folks are going to have to find something else to keep them busy not long after election day, and while most of this facet of the episode ends up feeling pretty meandering, it’s a nice note to hit for the characters at least.

That idea works best with Charlie and C.J. (who are, admittedly, two of my favorite characters on the show, which biases me). We haven’t seen Charlie in a while, and when we do, he’s pressuring C.J. to start looking at other jobs for when the Bartlet administration ends. She, of course, is still “living out the first line of [her] obituary” and doesn’t want to focus on anything beyond what’s in front of her. But then Charlie says something undeniably sweet when pressed on why he keeps pushing this – he admires her, and wherever she goes, he’d like to keep working for her. In an episode that spends so much time and energy on romance and relationships, the most heartwarming and compelling moment in this episode is one between colleagues, not lovers.

We also see Matt and Helen Santos thinking about what will happen tomorrow, whether their lives will, perhaps, go back to normal, albeit with a crushing loss to contend with, or whether they will change forever. After the hustle and bustle of the campaign, the thought of raking leaves in the backyard doesn’t sound so bad. And Bruno, who’s asked by Bob if he wants to go into business together, politely declines and says he’s done when this is over. Bruno’s not an old man, but you get the idea that he has a little more self-awareness than Josh about this. When he’s this close to the flame, he can’t help but stick his hand in the fire, and his only salve is getting himself the hell away from the conflagration.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in “Election Day pt. 1”: the calm before the storm that leaves everyone anxious for the thunder to start rolling, the summer camp romances that inevitably emerge when you throw everyone on the same bus for six months, the ruminations on what happens after this is all over. It all fits together like somebody jammed a bunch of play-dough together rather than feeling like a well-oiled machine of an episode. But maybe that’s intentional. In a show, and for a set of characters, who are constantly moving forward, it’s ambitious, if nothing else, to show what happens when nothing’s happening, so they can’t help but reflect on the past, wonder about the future, and find the oldest way to pass the time in the present.

(And, for those of you waiting with baited breath, I'll talk about the events of the very end of the episode in the write up for the next episode.)

[8.7/10] It's a stellar season premiere. I really enjoyed three themes in particular that flitted throughout the episode.

The first is the notion of homecoming. Arya beckons all the Freys to return to their family home in order to slaughter them. Jon returns the family homes to the survivng members of the northern families who betrayed him, and last but certainly not least, Dany returns to the place where she was born. There is a sacredness in return, in where a person is from, that GoT recognizes and plays around with.

The second is the notion of guilt, something that comes through in Arya's conversation with the run-of-the-mill soldiers she meets in the Riverlands. One of them speaks of hoping his wife had a baby girl, because girls take care of their fathers while boys go off to die in another man's war. There's a look on Arya's face, one that seems to reveal a lament that she'll never get to take care of her father, and that her victims may just as easily be lowborn who no more wanted to fight and die than Arya wanted to see her family killed.

There's a parallel with The Hound's portion of the episode there too, where he sees the corpses of the farmer and child he mugged back in Season 4, and can't help but feel guilt at the actions that if not caused, then at least contributed to their demise. This is a different Sandor Clegane, one who buries the people he did wrong, who believes in things, and even if he doesn't know the right words, gives them a eulogy that serves as an apology.

The third is the idea of perspective. Most of the players in the episode are concerned with who will sit on the Iron Throne. Jon is wrapped up in fighting the Night King. And Arya's on her rooaring rampage of revenge. But when Sam is caught up in the same struggle, the Archmaester (Jim Broadbent!) cautions perspective, that this too shall pass, and that there are certain things worth preserving, certain projects worth pursuing, apart from the worldly concerns that consume most men.

It's a rich episode, full of colorful scenes and potent themes. Exciting to have GoT back!

EDIT: I changed my mind. Looking back, I liked this show more than I say I did. The cast are fun and likeable, even if I never fell in love with their characters.

Hey, everyone, I made it! I got through my least favourite Star Trek show for the first time after numerous attempts. And I have to say, I didn't completely hate the journey.

But, this is how it ends? That's it? What a thoroughly disappointing way to finish things. The finale introduces some random new plot elements that really don't work and just come out of nowhere (Tuvok's disease and the Chakotay/Seven relationship - which did have some hints but they were completely from Seven's imagination, so this feels jarring), and worst of all we get no proper resolution to so many things.

Voyager arrives back home and there's zero emotional payoff; we don't get to see their welcome back or any reunions with family and friends. Tom's father is on the screen when they make it back and doesn't acknowledge his son sitting right there. What's going to happen to the Maquis crew members now? B'Elanna gives birth but we don't get introduced to the baby or even find out what they name her. Seven asks to have the Doctor perform the procedure on her which will "unlock" her ability to feel the full range of emotions, but we don't even know if he actually does that. In just the previous episode, the Doctor declared his love for Seven but that's not addressed at all.

Instead, the final episode decides to spend its time on another dull Borg story that feels like it lacks any impact. Voyager has defeated these guys so many times now that it feels pointless for them to keep encountering them (and this time they have convenient future tech). Yes, it's nice to have Alice Krige reprise her role as the Borg Queen, but the episode doesn't actually do anything interesting with her. The entire bullheaded mission of future Admiral Janeway is dubious at best and depicts her as extremely selfish.

The entire show was a missed opportunity to do something interesting, and it chose to stay as safe as possible all the way through. Any time the series did do something good, it was forgotten about and not mentioned again (remember when Seven's nanites were discovered to be a cure for death? Sure would have been useful to do that again. Remember the previous episode when the Delta Flyer's communications were destroyed so Janeway transmitted a message through the deflector? Why hasn't that been used in the uncountable times communications were down?).

The show had some really good characters, though. The Doctor was the standout by a long way and the introduction of Seven was a good move. Captain Janeway is inconsistent in her actions and motives, but Kate Mulgrew was never less than fantastic in the role. I just wish everyone had some evolution across the show. Harry, Tom, Tuvok, Neelix, Chakotay: they really never changed their personalities (and this even applies to the Doctor and Seven). There's an argument that everyone became a better person, but I say that nothing about them actually evolved. The fact remains that I just don't care about characters like Tuvok or Chakotay, because they never felt like real people.

Still, it is an easy and entertaining watch and in the end it is Star Trek and delivers a lot of the storytelling and universe that makes me feel cosy. I just probably won't watch it again (hmm... maybe if it's given an HD upgrade and released on blu-ray). I know the show has a lot of fans and if you like it then that's great, but I don't think I'll ever quite understand why.

Oh no, we lost 11% of our energy reserves! Janeway's gotta give up coffee to save power, but using the holodeck is totally fine? (And apparently even more fine when that figure doubles.)

Convenient that Chakotay happens to have his medicine bundle even though his ship was destroyed in Caretaker, isn't it? I don't remember the Maquis crew members exactly getting a chance to salvage their belongings before that Kazon ship took their shuttle in the flank…

Based on the deck layout in Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, Neelix turns left out of the mess hall right into a dead-end when he's heading off to argue with Janeway. Turning left got him out of the shot faster, I guess.

Someone in effects should have checked the script. Those nucleonic beams were very much not parallel to the ship's central axis.

OK, nitpicks aside, I'm of two minds on this episode.

On the one hand, it does a lot of great work establishing elements of the series that I really do love (if only for nostalgic reasons, in some cases). We get a hint of the Doctor becoming more independent ("A hologram that programs himself…"). We get jokes about Neelix's cooking. Tom is already establishing himself as a holodeck wizard of sorts (even if he does write his female characters like a chauvinist).

But we also get some of the bullshit. The whole premise is just a bit hokey, and the Neelix/Kes relationship is all the more awkward when you start the series already knowing that she's two years old and will be dead by age ten. (That kiss? So uncomfortable.)

Still, Voyager was my first Trek show. I can't help but like it despite myself.

Ahh, the sound of the nattering naybobs of Trekdom furiously trying to clap with one hand. You see, unless a program meets the narrowly specific parameters of what they will accept as "proper" Star Trek lore. Reminds me of those YouTube videos of entitled 16 year old's getting a new Lamborghini or BMW, and then pitching an absolute fit because it wasn't the color they desired. "This is NOT the Trek I was looking for"...... OK Obi Wan Kensnobby you win, we'll all go sit in the basement and watch reruns of the original series, or better yet, just the SPECIFIC EPISODES in each series that meet with your awesomely discerning taste. They rest you may send to the cornfield!!!!

Personally, I thought the producers and writers did a pretty good job of giving us a brand new crew, a brand new ship, an at least interesting situation as far as the story arc, while maintaining the connection to traditional "Trek" with appropriate amounts of fan service and character call backs. The animation, stylistically, is light years ahead of what is offered on "The Lower Drecks, er...Decks", and, the storytelling is aimed more toward the dramatic rather than the comedic. If that's not your thing, cool, but, neither should it be dismissed out of hand.

Personally, I found the amount of tension, thrills and FUN just about right, and the mix of immediate story and long arc balanced enough to hold my attention and leave me wanting more. Again, for a show aimed at the Nickelodeon demographic, that's no small feat IMO.

So yeah, I plan to continue watching it, and, it will be interesting to see if this version of the "Trekverse", can go where the others haven't gone before, or if the naybob's will be successful in stirring up enough negativity to eject the warp core and leave the crew stranded.

That last scene was amazing. I love that we are getting huge battles more than once a season, probably because they have more of a budget per episode. Drogon is a total game changer, one second Jamie thinks he can hold off the Dorthraki. The next he is just about shitting his pants. Bronn did show that they are mortal and can be hurt. Jamie charging at Daenerys while Tyrion was watching was great. Tyrion still cares, at least a little, for Jamie and wants him to live. It not often we see two main characters directly fighting each other. Glad to see Daenerys get a win and Jamie not dead, hopefully.

Jon and Daenerys are getting closer. They seem to start to like each other more every scene they have together. Jon finding the cave paintings of white walkers was convenient. Hey look at this giant rock we are going to mine. Oh, look over there, there are old paintings of white walkers. Told you there were real. Jon still won’t bend the knee but he doesn’t want to be the king. A little stubborn, like daenerys too. Someone is going to have to give.

Another stark reunion only this time it didn’t feel as special. Maybe it's because we have seen a lot of reunions lately but it didn’t seem like they were that excited to see each other. Then Sansa’s like, Brans home too. Why did littlefinger give that dagger to Bran? Will Bran find out who tried to kill him with it? Was it actually littlefinger himself, he said he “lost” it to Tyrion. But hey at least Arya now has some valyrian steel.

The Arya and Brienne fight was fun. It crazy to see how well Arya was trained as an assassin by ’no one’. She still is a little girl that can be kicked down by Brienne but still very deadly. Sansa is seeing it for the first time too. I’m sure she is wondering who her sister has become fighting like that and having a list of people to kill.

I love how Davos introduces Jon. "King Snow, isn't it? No that doesn't sound right. King Jon?" Personally I like King Jon Targaryen.

That last scene was awesome. Too bad Euron couldn't of waited five more minutes for Ellaria to "invade" Yara. That drawbridge smashing someone was a perfect start to a big fight. RIP two of the three sand snakes. One of them cut Euron, did she poison the blade like Oberyn did to the Mountain? If he is poisoned and gets back to King's Landing fast enough maybe Qyburn can save him and turn him into an undead zombie too. So the gift is Ellaria Sand? It makes sense since she killed Cersi's daughter. Also poor Theon, Ramsay has ruined him for life. That cockless coward. The look Euron gave Theon and that laugh makes him certified crazy, right?

Daenerys plotting how to take over the Seven Kingdoms was fun. I'm glad they started right where they left off last episode. It is interesting to see all the women in power at that table. Daenerys calling out Varys was needed. He always seems like he is out for himself. He made a convincing argument but I'm not sure how much is true. Tyrion seems like he has the right idea with taking King's Landing with Westeros armies and Casterly Rock with the Dothraki. Too bad it doesn't look like that is going to happen. Will Daenerys take Olenna's advice and act like a dragon?

So is Melisandre going to be staying in Dragonstone and supporting Daenerys? Does she think the prophecy says Daenerys could be the one to bring the dawn or does she think that is Jon? It was also nice to see Missandei and Grey Worm finally show real feelings for each other. It did cross my mind that this is a sex scene with a unsullied.

Cersi trying to recruit is sad. Didn't seem like many came to her when she called and they aren't all convinced. Jamie talking to Randyll Tarly to become warden of the south but he still isn't sure he is on the winning side. So Cersi has a big cross bow that can go through an old dragon skull. I don't think they will kill any of the dragons. The only way I see any dragons dying is if they are fighting the white walkers. Then the Night King will bring it back and we could have a zombie dragon. Now that would be trouble. Would it breath fire or ice?

Jon leaving for Dragonstone is exciting. Daenerys and Jon meeting will sort of be a family reunion, because you know, Daenerys is his Aunt even if they don't know it. Sansa just keeps undermining Jon in front of everyone so might as well just put her in charge. Littlefinger is now on both Sansa's and Jon's shit list. I wonder how much longer he stays there or if he decides to turn on them?

We finally got the reunion we all wanted, HOT PIE and Arya! But seriously I'm glad someone told her and winterfell so she can head home. Too bad it looks like Jon will be gone. Another reunion with Arya and her direwolf Nymeria was short lived. At least she got to see her pet was still alive even if she has to let her go live her own alpha wolf life now.

That Jorah Greyscale scene was gross. I'm guessing Sam isn't going to get it to work. He was writing a letter to khalessi. Maybe he will try to go to Dragonstone before he loses his mind and maybe the dragon glass could cure him. Stannis' daughter was cured and they lived on Dragonstone, it could happen?

Good episode, things are moving pretty fast.

Patrick Stewart spins around the wrong way after Brent Spiner "hits" him in Engineering… No wonder that particular fight call seemed extra cheesy.

Both times Graves transfers his consciousness, the implied mechanics leave major plot holes. Who turned Data back on? How did Data get on the floor? Who unplugged him?!

While I wouldn't necessarily call this a great story—it has a lot of elements that were common in science fiction up to that time, and the plot holes are awfully big—it is a great watch. Brent Spiner doing just about anything makes for a great watch.

I'm a bit disappointed to read that a scene where Data was to riff on Picard's bald head, after his attempt at a Riker-like beard failed, was cut from the script. That would have been hilarious. But maybe it would have included another instance of Deanna making some excuse to avoid laughing in front of Data, who is an android and would not feel insulted by it, so… maybe it was better left out. (That bit was very out of character, I thought. Troi shouldn't feel the need to hide her reaction from Data. He'd find it useful feedback, if anything.)

Besides Spiner's usual obvious fun-having, there are some nice little writing touches to think about.

IMDB pointed out (because I haven't read Dickens in forever) that the disease Graves had is probably a reference to a character of the same name in A Tale of Two Cities, which is pretty great.

Graves' name itself, while not really a literary reference per se, is still funny. A man trying to cheat death is named after the thing in which he does not want to end up (a grave). Har har?

(I also realized early on this this episode why Dr. Pulaski must be so dour… She's played by Diana Muldaur, who practically has "dour" in her name… but that's a cheap shot, I guess.)

It's interesting how, out of an entire 45 minute episode, one single scene that explicitly addresses they/them pronouns has got a certain type of viewer bent out of shape. Apparently this equates to the episode being riddled with nonsense, all the more ridiculous since the idea of inclusion and acceptance is so against the Trek ethos...oh wait.

Anyway, sadly this was another weak episode. Normally I'm Georgio's biggest fan but I have to agree with Andrew Bloom's review that her combative quips in the early part of the episode were generally quite forced and poorly delivered. In fact, the script for this episode was noticeably clunky in terms of the incidental dialogue between the cast. Also, while I appreciate the show finally fleshing out Detmer's character after three seasons, I feel like they've possibly miscast her. The actress isn't bad, per se, but her performance comes across as a fairly meek individual rather than someone who ought to be helming a starship. In fact the general calibre of the performances this episode was a bit wonky. The actress playing Osyrra was quite wooden in my opinion, as was the actor playing her nephew.

After a strong start to the season, these past few episodes have rather dragged. I'm hoping the closing third of the season is a return to form as some of the plot points start getting resolved.

[6.0/10] Oh man, what a crock this is. It is so full of cheats and shortcuts and self contradictions that it's hard to take any of it seriously. Suddenly, we've pivoted to the prospect of mortality and self-sacrifice as the most important theme of the season, despite the fact that those have been, at best, tangential to the ideas the show was exploring up until...last week.

And it's totally contradicted by what the episode actually does! Picard trying to "give his life" to prove to Soji that organics is good would have more weight if we hadn't seen him jump into death-defying situations throughout the season. What makes this one any different? And when he "dies", it's not because the Romulans blast him or really anything to do with his grand stand. His brain abnormality just acts up when it's dramatically convenient, with no apparent connection to his attempt at self sacrifice.

Then the episode just wipes away that sacrifice anyway! I can't tell you what a cheat it feels like to have Picard die, learn a very important lesson about the beauty of life coming from the fact that it's finite, only for him to then immediately cheat death! Then the whole bending over backwards to try to explain that even though he has an android body now, he'll age normally feels contrived and bullshit as hell. It's a dumb plot choice that immediately contradicts the episodes laudable themes about accepting mortality as something inherently human.

It's not all bad. As deus ex machina as Riker's arrival, it's still a cool moment. As weird as Data looks in the "quantum simulation" (oh brother), his death and appreciation for Picard's love is moving. And even if Jurati feels like she's from a different show, her quips and jibes got a chuckle out of me.

Everything in this finale is just so rushed and glancing and ultimately unsatisfying. There's some good ideas here, but they're all shortchanged for a meditation on death that feels out of step with the show's ideas to this point, and a bunch of easy plot fixes and character relationships that haven't actually been developed.

On the whole, this season was a real missed opportunity. Assembling this kind of talent and deploying it only for this wobbly mess of a season is a big shame. I'm a sucker, so I'll be back for season 2, and I hope they'll work out the kinks But after this, I'm not terribly optimistic.

Riker calls for emergency attention from security, so who shows up? Worf, with Geordi. Neither has a phaser. La Forge isn't even part of the security division—at this point in the series, he's the helmsman. But Dr. Crusher happens to bring along a phaser when called to a medical emergency onboard the ship… because that makes sense. (We'll try to ignore how Worf and Geordi play along with Admiral Quinn's lies about what happened to Riker. That's also bad.)

That chair Remmick is sitting in looks an awful lot like the one used for Admiral Jameson in "Too Short a Season". That's because it was the same prop, redressed.

Not a nitpick, but doesn't fit into the review proper, either: I had no idea Captain Rixx was a Bolian. This is the first appearance of the species in Star Trek, and I guess I'm used to the later makeup design—which uses a much more saturated blue. Bonus trivia: The Bolians were named after Cliff Bole, who went on to direct a total of 42 Star Trek episodes across TNG, DS9, & VOY. He also directed on numerous other well-known shows like MacGyver, The X-Files, Baywatch, and Charlie's Angels.

Some background information on what was happening in the television world at the time explains why this episode wasn't as good as you might think it should be. After all, it's clearly meant to be a taut thriller about the possibility of Starfleet being seized by aliens. It's obviously meant to be part of a larger story arc—that started several episodes back, when Quinn gave Picard that warning.

The writers' strike of 1988 was ultimately responsible for this letdown. This "Conspiracy" plotline was meant to be intertwined with the Borg, who were to be introduced at the start of season two. But the writers' strike delayed the rest of the Borg storyline several months, and this piece of it was dropped. That's why nothing ever comes of the "homing beacon" Data reports.

It's too bad. Aside from it being entirely too easy for Picard and Riker to win against the "mother creature" (in Remmick's body), I enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, but "Conspiracy" as part of something bigger would have been better than what ultimately happened: treating this like any other incident-of-the-week—essentially, pressing the "big reset button" and pretending like these events never occurred.

[8.7/10] The close of “Something Beautiful” makes me think of a scene from “Nailed”, the penultimate episode of Season 2. In that episode, Chuck McGill confronts his brother and Kim about his suspected switcheroo with the Mesa Verde files. He impugns Jimmy’s character and says Kim should open her eyes. And he tells Kim that Jimmy did it for her, that it was a “twisted romantic gesture.”

But Kim defends Jimmy. She admits that he’s not perfect, but essentially argues that he’s a good person, a person she pities for how much he wants his brother’s love, a love that he’ll never get. She chastises Chuck for denying him that and judging him, for threatening to inflict such consequences on Jimmy, denying his theory as crackpot. But when she’s alone with Jimmy, she betrays her true feelings. She punches him in the arm. She expresses her frustration, because she’s no fool; she knows he did it, and she knows Chuck’s right -- he did it for her.

So when Kim returns to the offices of Mesa Verde, the crown jewel of her ill-gotten gains, and sees their vaunted “models” of their expansion plans, it’s overwhelming for her. The camerawork and editing is tremendous, zooming in on this miniature world and making it larger than life, especially with Kim’s place in it. She sees a tiny man and woman in front of the building, the sounds and the feelings rush back, and she can’t help but remember how this all started. It started with this man that she loves taking revenge on his brother on her behalf. That’s not something Kim Wexler can shake as easily as Jimmy seemingly can.

Sometimes you start something, and you don’t know how big it’s going to get, or the difficult places it’s going to take you. “Nailed” is also the episode where Mike knocked over one of Hector’s trucks. In a bitter echo of that scene, “Something Beautiful” opens with Gus’s henchmen recreating that tableau with Nacho and the dead body of Arturo, to make it look like the same goon who attacked Hector’s soldiers before have struck again. It is, in keeping with Gus’s M.O., a meticulous job. No detail is left unattended, and to complete the cover-up, they shoot Nacho in the shoulder and in the abdomen, leaving him to bleed in the desert with nothing but a phone call to the twins to potentially save his life.

There too, the scenes are beautiful, but harsh, as director Daniel Sackheim uses Nacho’s injury and rescue to show both the efficient brutality of Gus’s plan and his goons as Nacho is left to bake and bleed under the desert sun, and the impressionistic resplendence of the flashes of night-lit faces he sees on the operating table of the same veterinarian who associates with Mike and Jimmy.

After that vet gives Nacho his diagnosis and medical advice, he leaves Nacho with one last instruction -- “leave me out of this.” The vet says that the work with the cartel is too hot for him, and he wants out. It’s another bitter irony, because Nacho wants out too. He told his father he was trying. He wanted to keep his family from getting involved deeper with the Salamancas, deep into this morass. But like Kim, he’s too far into it now, and he’s suffering the physical and mental consequence of something he can’t escape from, that’s happened because of him.
And yet, as much as Nacho desperately want out, there are those who desperately want in. Gus, ever the mastermind, has made it so that the Salamancas are without leadership and supply on the streets is running thin. He gets to play the reluctant subordinate to Don Bolsa, agreeing over feigned protest that, if he must, he’ll find an alternative supply of meth with the Salamanca’s pipelines shut off for the time being, a contingency he has clearly been planning for some time. His almost undetectable smile while on the phone with Don Bolsa betrays it. While everyone else is scrambling, in too deep, Gus knows how to play the hand he’s dealt.

But this new situation requires him to go Gale, the latest Breaking Bad alum to appear on Better Call Saul. Gale is as delightfully geeky and puppy dog-like as always, singing along to a rondelay of chemicals sung to “Modern Major General”, reporting his results from the tests that Gus had him run, and practically begging for Gus to let him be the official Pollos Hermanos meth cook.

Gale is one of this universe’s more endearing inventions, to the point that his presence is a welcome little joy in an otherwise fairly heavy episode. It even makes me forgive the show’s increasing, and frankly kind of cheesy, willingness to dip back into the Breaking Bad pool. But here that crossover quality works, because we know Gale’s fate, and what lies in wait for him on the other side of that desperation to join up, the harsh realities that Nacho is facing as he wants out of what Gale wants into.

Sometimes, though, that life on the other side of the glass is just too appealing. That seems to be the case for Jimmy, who returns to the sort of small time hustles we saw him running with Marco back in the day. This time, it means replacing the secretly valuable hummel figurine owned by the copier salesmen he rejected in the last episode with a common, otherwise undetectable replacement, and pocketing the profits.

The ensuing sequence -- where Jimmy’s hired goon tries to make the swap, and inadvertently gets trapped hiding from the company’s owner, who’s in the doghouse with his wife -- is one of the funniest in the show so far. (It had echoes of “squat cobbler” with its absurdity.) The humdrum, almost cliché problems of the owner buying his wife a vacuum cleaner, listening to self-motivational tapes, and ordering pizza in the middle of the night while the would-be thief hides under a desk is a brilliant and hilarious setup, made funnier by how much patience Better Call Saul shows with it. And the coda, with Jimmy misdirecting the owner and rescuing his accomplice with little more than a coat hanger and a car alarm, is the icing on the cake.

But there’s more going on than just comedy here. Mike recognizes that when he turns down the job. He realizes that Jimmy’s after something else, something beyond just an easy score, and that’s a complication Mike is smart enough not to want to get involved in. Unlike Nacho, and unlike Kim, Mike knows when he’s walking into a briar patch he might never walk out of, and he’s been reminded recently enough that few things in the circles he runs in are as clean or “in and out” as he might hope. There’s warning signs going off about Jimmy, and though we know they won’t keep Mike away from the once-and-future Saul Goodman forever, they’re enough to keep him away for now.

And maybe that’s the same sort of realization that Kim is starting to have. At the end of the episode, Jimmy sees the piddling distribution Chuck left for him, reads a mildly condescending but still genuine and heartfelt letter from (so Jimmy knows it’s really from Chuck), and yet he’s nonplussed. Yet again, something that would seem to provoke some outpouring of emotion from Jimmy gets bupkus, while it’s Kim who breaks down and tears up and needs a minute.

Chuck’s letter talks about he and Jimmy’s bond as brothers, about the connection they share despite their differences, about the resilience and hustle Chuck admires in his younger sibling. And there’s two ways to take Kim’s wounded reaction to that.

One is a sense of guilt for having been the thing that motivated the rift between the McGills. Chuck told her it wasn’t her fault back in “Nailed” but he also told her that Jimmy did all this for her. As I’ve mentioned before, part of the larger story Better Call Saul has told thus far is of Kim slowly but surely replacing Chuck as the major person in Jimmy’s life. Maybe being reminded of what led to her getting Mesa Verde, of the bond between brothers that was severed on her account, is too much to bear.

But the other is that she realizes she picked the wrong side. The last time Kim was in Mesa Verde’s offices, she told her counterpart that all that had happened with Chuck at Jimmy’s disciplinary hearing was the tearing down of a sick man. In that scene in “Nailed”, Kim took Jimmy’s side over Chuck’s. Whatever the truth was, she believed that Jimmy’s heart was in the right place, that he was the victim, and that he was a good man.

Now, in the wake of Chuck’s suicide, maybe she’s starting to see his decency, maybe she’s starting to reevaluate the set of events that led her to this place, and her choice to be with a person who seems fine with them all. In “Something Beautiful”’s final image, we see only half of Jimmy’s face, the other half obscured by Kim’s closed door, and there’s symbolism in it. As perceptive as Kim is, she didn’t see the whole picture with Jimmy; she didn’t see the whole picture with Chuck. Now that it’s coming into focus, she finds herself so immersed in something awful, so bound up in it, and all she can do is buckle and try to bear it.

Breaking Bad has already shown us the fates of so many of these characters, how Jimmy, Gus, Gale, Mike, are all sucked in and battered by this world. But Better Call Saul leaves us people like Kim and Nacho, who we can only hope escape this terrible orbit in better shape than Chuck did.

8.6/10. When I think of The West Wing, I think of going big. The series has never been especially subtle, and when you think of its most iconic moments, the ones that most often take place in season finales, they tend to hew toward bombast: assassinations, explosions, nominations, kidnappings, and grand declarations and recriminations in ornate cathedrals.

That’s why the most impressive thing about “Tomorrow,” The West Wing’s series finale, is how damn small it is. Despite Wells & Company's probable inclination to stick with the show’s usual M.O. and go out with a bang, “Tomorrow” takes a more contemplative stance, one that speaks to the small details of the transfer of power, the prosaic issues that emerge as one administration ends and another begins, and the quiet, human moments of the people who are passing the baton.

Even the crisis of the week is small. President Bartlet and the senior staff can’t get out of the office without pouring water on one last fire. This time, it’s a train derailment thanks to a New England snowstorm. We get an abbreviated version of the ol’ West Wing block and tackle, with what remains of Bartlet’s advisors giving him a rundown of the situation, and the President himself getting a pair of Governors on the phone to resolve this minor cross-border dispute. It’s a nice last gasp for these daily issues that were the show’s bread and butter, which serves as a grace note for the style of storytelling that once dominated the series.

But what’s really striking about the episode is its restraint, the way it doesn’t belabor points that the show might have gone to greater lengths to underline in other circumstances. While Will Bailey notes that the train derailment incident may have been the staff witnessing the final act of governance of the Bartlet Administration, it’s not Jed’s last act as President. Instead, after hemming and hawing and mulling it over for much of “Tomorrow,” he signs a pardon for Toby, only to rap his knuckles on the desk in frustration immediately after.

It’s an incredibly well-done subplot that helps pull the series across the finish line, one that draws strength from how reserved it is. We don’t even see Toby in the episode (something that, I admit, makes me a bit sad). We don’t hear Bartlet vocalizing how he’s conflicted over whether to bail out his longtime friend with whom he’s still clearly perturbed. We don’t have C.J. engaging in a spirited colloquy with the President over the pros and cons of the pardon, or a vigorous defense of her friend.

Instead, the episode takes on a “show, don’t tell" ethos. The fact that the President added Toby’s name to the potential pardon list but-- without having to detail his internal opposition--keeps delaying the signing of it, saying he hasn’t decided what to do yet, tells us all we need to know about how Bartlet feels.

In the same way, the show lets the actors' performances tell the story here. The scenes between Bartlet and C.J. are great bits of nigh-wordless acting, with Allison Janney in particular going a great job at showing how C.J. is trying to stay detached and objective about the issue, so as not to influence the President, but how her affection for Toby and her hope that the President will absolve him subtly bleeds through. Martin Sheen, as always, holds up his end of the bargain as well, communicating the internal struggle going on in the President's head, and his mild regret and frustration but ultimate resoluteness when he does sign that pardon.

The episode uses these same techniques to circle back to the idea of the Inauguration being a day of change for everyone, about the quiet end of one administration and the semi-humble beginning of another. The clockwork rhythm of the portraits and knickknacks being packed up and replace, the “you can do it” speeches offered by C.J. and Deborah Fiderer (who is fantastic here) to their successors, the way that the spirit of Leo McGarry hangs over the episode, all helps to mark the ways in which the new class is starting, and the old class, the one that we came to know over seven seasons, is walking out the door.

Most of the members of the old class get a moment in the sun here, however briefly. In the episode’s most heartwarming scene, the President passes his father’s constitution on to Charlie. Again, he never needs to say that Charlie is like a son to him, and the two don’t hug or anything, but the gesture says so much, and whatever’s left is said by the looks of affection and sincere gratitude on the pair’s faces. Afterward, Charlie, Will, and Kate find themselves with nothing to do for once in their lives, and decide to go to the movies in an amusingly quotidian touch. Finally, in the episode’s most blunt scene, C.J. walks out the White House gate and responds to an inquiring passerby, with some relief and appreciation, that she does not, in fact, work at the White House.

And in the end, we see President Santos sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He’s flanked by Josh, Sam, and Bram (and it should be noted that for a campaign that had major contributions from women and people of color throughout, the only senior advisors we see in the room are a trio of white guys), and suddenly there’s a new daily crisis to be fixed. There’s a real sense that the dance goes on, that we take these little pauses to stop and appreciate that a big change is upon us, but then, at least we hope, things flow into business as usual once more, even with (some) different faces conducting that business. Despite the scenes we witness of the Inauguration, the pomp and circumstance of the occasion is undercut by the episode’s focus on the undeniably small and personal and even logistical in the midst of all this ceremony.

That extends to the way the episode treats the incoming and outgoing Presidents here. As The West Wing has done often in its later years, the episode employs a certain parallelism between President Bartlet and President-Elect Santos. Most of what we see from Santos takes the form of little moments shared between him and Helen, where he admits his nerves at the monumental task ahead of him, and they joke around to ease his mind a bit. It’s Santos at his most relatable and authentic. Rather than the perfect candidate who has the right answer for every question, he’s just a normal guy who’s still somewhat shocked that he is where he is, confiding in and having a sweet rapport with his wife, hoping that he’s up to to this incredible challenge.

And on the other end, much of what we see of Jed Bartlet is him reflecting on what he accomplished and what he failed to, confiding in Mrs. (Dr.) Bartlet in the same terms. The show didn’t always utilize Stockard Channing’s talents to their full potential, but the Bartlets as a pair were always one of the show’s great strengths, with an earnestness and honesty between the two of them that always served the show well. It’s nice to see this episode lean on that strength here, showing the ways in which Abigail understands her husband, can pierce through his various fronts, and even seemingly read his mind and reassure him as he steps away from the biggest job he’ll ever do.

But the parallels don’t end there. At the end of the episode, we watch as both Santos and Bartlet unwrap something, and we see their reactions. We never get a glimpse of what exactly President Bartlet wrote to his successor, but in another superbly understated moment, the way that Santos reads it, smiles, and even tears up a little, says more than any dialogue, read in voiceover or otherwise, possibly could.

In the same way, one of the show’s last images is of Jed unwrapping a gift from Leo's daughter Mallory, something that she thought her father would want him to have. It turns out to be one of this series’s holy artifacts – the “Bartlet for America” napkin. And while Jed is wistful and seems even a little regretful about what he left on the table in his time in office, about this incredible time in his life ending, the way his face lights up upon seeing that gift is incredible. In an instant, you can see all the stories of the show, the years of crises and setbacks and victories and moments great and small flash on the now former President’s face, as he warms himself with that thought, allowing him to look fondly on the days to come.

There’s no grand oratories in “Tomorrow.” For a show known for its loquacious bent, we don’t get to hear Santos’s speech, there’s no big monologue from Bartlet summing up his time in office, and there’s not any charged exchanges of high-minded principles. In place of these things, The West Wing’s series finale offers a series of quiet, deceptively complex, achingly human moments among the people who are ending this journey and beginning another one.

The real world of politics is typically not nearly so grandiose as The West Wing's depiction of it. It's as full of bean-counters and pencil-pushers as it is visionaries and operators. But the beauty of this series, and its finale, is the way that it could balance the big work of government--the levers and pulleys and boardroom debates that we imagine when we think of governing--with the stories of the people who were pulling those levers and having those debates. In “Tomorrow,” everyone who orbits the West Wing, including the Presidents themselves, are shown to still be human beings, as impacted by the enormity of these occasions and these changes as anyone, which shows in little moments, little gestures, and little ways.

[9.1/10] If you graphed Walter White’s transition from mild-mannered science teacher to Heisenberg, there would be a few peaks and valleys, but it would pretty much be a straight, diagonal line. There were always these inciting events, these decision points, that pushed him further and further into becoming the man he eventually became. But the line between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman isn’t that neat. It’s more like a series of deepening parabolic arcs, where time and again, he reaches the brink of giving in, of becoming the shyster running cheesy ads on daytime television and linking up with criminals, and then he pulls back.

Because Jimmy has been fortunate enough to have wake up calls, to have people who pull him toward the light. Whether it’s Marco’s death or Chuck’s episode or Kim’s crash, there are moments that tell Jimmy he’s gone too far, that he needs to feed his better nature rather than settle into his Machiavellian talents. Those have been enough to keep him in the realm of the (at least mildly) righteous. Each time, some setback emerges that prompts him to gradually drift back to his flim-flamming ways, but time and again, he has the presence of mind to recognize that he’s in a bad place and hold back.

That’s one of the nice things about “Lantern,” the finale of Better Call Saul’s third season. It doesn’t overplay its hand on these sorts of moments. Kim doesn’t have some big monologue about how she’s been pushing herself too hard and it’s all Jimmy’s doing. Instead, she responds to Jimmy’s apology by declaring that she’s an adult and chose to get into the car. She comes close to jumping back into the breakneck schedule that brought her to that point and chooses to rent ten movies and actually relax and convalesce instead.

By the same token, Jimmy doesn’t have any long, drawn out confession or apologia. The look on his face, the held hand between him and Kim, the way he dotes on his friend and partner, says it all. “Lantern” plays the remorse, the realization, in Jimmy’s actions, not in the words he uses so often to bend and blister the truth. After fighting so hard to keep the office going, Jimmy immediately has a change of heart and says it doesn’t matter, setting that dream aside after seeing what it did to the woman he loved.

There’s a good deal of repentance to Jimmy here. He tries to make amends with Irene, to set things right with her and her friends, and continually comes up short. Until he reaches a strange epiphany. He admits to Kim that he’s only good at tearing things down, not at building them up, but then realizes that he can fix things by turning that quality against himself. So he uses that Jimmy McGill cleverness, this time setting up a ruse (that takes us back to chair yoga) and hot mic so he can stage a confession with Erin, the young Davis & Main associate we met back in Season 2. Jimmy applies that same manipulative quality to his own detriment, and it proves to be a clever solution to his attempts to correct his mistakes.

It’s not like Jimmy to be self-sacrificing, to make a move that will not only make him look bad, but effectively screw up the elder law niche he’d carved for himself in Albuquerque. That has the benefit of foreshadowing how Jimmy will need to find a new racket whenever his license is reinstated, but more importantly, it shows the lengths Jimmy is willing to go to, the surprisingly selfless moves he’s willing to make, for Kim and for Irene, in an effort to straighten out and fly right.

(Amid all of this fascinating, unexpected, but largely internal drama, it’s notable that Nacho’s portion of the episode is downright straightforward. The episode pays off the dummy pills it set up in “Slip”, and Hector’s debilitating infuriation at having to put his lot in with “The Chicken Man” established in “Fall”. There’s some minor tension in the scene where Nacho’s father seems poised to stand up to Hector but relents (with a great performance from Juan Carlos Cantu), a bit more when Nacho shows himself willing to train a gun on his boss rather than risk Hector hurting his father before his pill plan works, and the knowing look Gus offers after Hector succumbs. But for the most part, this is where the show simply dutifully knocks down what it previously set up.)

It ties into the symbolism that the episode is steeped in. “Lantern” opens on a young Chuck McGill reading to his brother by lantern light. He’s still supercilious (and it’s a great vocal mimic from the young actor), but the whistle of that gas lantern symbolizes the connection between the two siblings, the fact that despite Chuck’s issues, there is a light still burning for him.

That’s the difference between Chuck and Jimmy. Chuck manages to systematically alienate anyone and everyone who cares about him, from pride, from overconfidence, and from self-centeredness. We don’t know exactly what happened with Chuck and Rebecca, but we know that Chuck pissed away a promising chance for reconciliation rather than admit his condition. We see him push away Jimmy, the one person who really loved Chuck, giving him the devastating pronouncement, “you never mattered all that much to me.”

And when he goes to shake Howard’s hand, with the expectation that he will be welcomed back with open arms, Howard not only rebuffs him, not only sends him off from the firm he helped start, but he reaches into his own pocket to do it. He is so ready to be rid of Chuck, so tired of his crap, so devoted to the good of his firm, that he is willing to pay personally to be done with his erstwhile partner.

That is a wake up call of a different sort of Chuck, one that severs his last connection to the world, that sends him on a downward spiral away from the progress he’d made on coping with his condition. In “Lantern”, Jimmy admits that he’s not good at building things, only tearing things down, a pathology that seems to affect both McGills. For Chuck, that becomes more literal, as he methodically tears his own house apart trying to find the source of the electricity that is driving him deeper and deeper into his insanity.

“Lantern” revels in this, taking the time to show the escalation in Chuck’s madness when he realizes he is truly and utterly alone. It starts with simply shutting off the breakers, then checking the switches, then tearing at the walls, and finally ripping the whole place apart. We’re back to “Fly” from Breaking Bad, an unscratchable itch, an unattainable goal, that stands in for deeper issues the character can’t bear to confront directly. Better Call Saul holds the tension of these moments -- the threat that Chuck will fall off the ladder in his light-bulb snatching ardor, that he’ll electrocute himself grasping at wires buried in drywall, that he’ll cut himself on the shattered glass or sparks of his smashed electricity meter. Instead, it’s Chuck’s own deliberate hand that seemingly does him in.

The last we see of Chuck is him sitting delirious on in his torn apart living room. He is in a stupor. The whistle of the gas lantern returns. And throughout the scene, there is the knock, knock, knock of Chuck kicking at the table where it rests. Chuck’s descent is a straight line, a gradual peeling off of all the people who would give a damn about him. The lantern symbolizes his connections to other people, the quiet hum of the other lights in his life, that he continually had to snuff out to make sure his shined the brightest. That is, in a symbolic and more literal sense, his undoing. The distant crawl of flames that ends the episode sees to that.

And yet, once again, he is right about his brother. That’s the inherent tragedy of Better Call Saul. There’s room for decency in the parts of Saul Goodman’s life we never see in Breaking Bad, but whatever strides he makes here, whatever changes he commits to, we know that eventually, he backslides into becoming the huckster who helps murderers and criminals take care of their problems by any means necessary.

Before he descends into his mania, Chuck offers one last, unwittingly self-effacing assessment of his brother. He asks Jimmy why express the regret, why go through the exercise of pleading remorse and trying to change. Chuck tells his brother that he believes his feelings of regret are genuine, that he feels those feelings, but that it’ll never be enough to make him change, that he will inevitably hurt the people around him. There’s the irony that Chuck himself is scelerotic, that he is just as un-self-aware, incapable of overcoming the lesser parts of himself, but he isn’t wrong. The audience knows that and knows where kind-hearted Jimmy McGill ends up.

That’s the idea this season opened up with, and maybe the theme of the whole show -- you cannot escape your nature. Cinnabon Gene has every reason to keep his mouth shut when a young shoplifter is taken in by local cops, but he cannot help but yell out that he should ask for a lawyer. There are parts of Jimmy that he will never tamp down. Maybe, if his brother had truly loved him, had helped him to channel those parts of himself in a good direction, he could have used his charming, conning ways in service of helping old ladies with wills or other injustices. But there is a part of Jimmy always ready to slip, always ready to go to color outside the lines, to go to extremes, to get his way.

When he does that, people get hurt, people like Chuck. Jimmy is not to blame, at least not solely to blame, for his brother’s (probable) death. Chuck has brought more than enough of that on himself. To paraphrase Kim -- he’s an adult; he made his choices. But Jimmy had a hand in the catalysts for what happened to Chuck, in the things that drove him apart from Howard, that threw a monkey wrench into Chuck’s recovery, that made it impossible for him to return to practice and the life he once knew, the prospect of which seemed to energize and inspire him.

That is going to haunt him. The one thing Jimmy wanted almost as much as his brother’s love was his brother’s respect. Chuck’s likely last words to him will be essentially that he never really loved Jimmy and that he’d only really respect him if he embraced the harmful person he is deep down, and owned it, rather than fighting it. Jimmy won’t learn what happened to his brother and wake up the next morning as a fully-formed Saul Goodman, but that final thought, that warning and proclamation, will linger with him, eat him, even as he makes these grand gestures in the name of being a better man. It’s Chuck’s last awful gift to his little brother.

The changes that happen to people as they grow and evolve are rarely as neat or clean as Walter White’s elegant descent into villainy. They are an accumulation of little moments, stops and starts, peaks and valleys, until another person emerges from the slow tumult. Few people turn into monsters overnight or have one grand moment where they change completely. Instead, for most, it’s just that little by little, moment by moment, person by person, the light goes out.

I've seen some gripes that people like Better Call Saul, but that sometimes it feels like it's two different shows hot-glued together. It's true that there's a particular storyline focused on Jimmy's trials and travails with Kim and his brother, and another with Mike getting mixed up with Salamancas. While the leads of each story bump into one another from time to time, there's not a strong plot-based connection between the two of them.

Despite that, in episodes like "Nailed," there's a strong thematic connection between the two of them. In the episode, both Jimmy and MIke have pulled a con of some kind, in the hopes of protecting someone else but in a way that benefits them. Jimmy's adventures at the copy center in "Fifi" led to Kim winning Mesa Verde back, and Mike's road obstacle is intended to draw the cops' attention to Hector and keep him too otherwise occupied to threaten his family, but also leads to Mike pocketing a nice quarter-mil. And each has the added bonus of this windfall coming at the expense of someone they have beef with. For Jimmy, it's a chance to get back at his brother, and for Mike, it's a chance for him to stick it to Hector after causing him such a headache.

And both Mike and Jimmy are pros, so they know how to cover their tracks. Jimmy is meticulous about transposing the address (as Chuck points out, he was never lazy), and removes the evidence of his forgery while Chuck is out of the house. Mike, meanwhile, wears a ski mark, blindfolds the Salamana associate he's ripping off, and makes sure he's neither seen nor heard.

But despite the fact that each of them is absolutely careful not to leave behind any corroborating or identifying evidence, each gets figured out because of who they are, because people who know them know what their M.O. is, and even if there's nothing that ties them to these crimes that would necessarily hold up in court, each incident has the trademark of the man who incited it. Chuck knows that this is what his brother does, that this is who he is, and that lets him piece together what happened. For that matter, Kim knows Jimmy too well to buy Jimmy's pleas of ignorance either. He is a huckster, and the story Chuck tells is perfectly in line with Jimmy's usual methods and motives. By the same token, even though Mike doesn't leave a trace on the road to Mexico, Nacho is able to figure out that it was him who hit the ice cream truck, because only a guy like Mike would have the stones to pull off a heist like that, but would expend such effort to avoid taking life.

And then each of them suffers an incredible setback due to the law of unintended consequences. One of the most striking parts of "Nailed" is how, for once in his life, it seems like Mike is happy. The reliable grump uses his newfound wealth to buy a round for the entire bar, and more notably, he actually smiles in the process! He flirts with the waitress at the diner, and he actually laughs! It's not a sour sarcastic laugh; it's a laugh of incredulity, of relief, that maybe things are going to work out, that maybe he can finally put all of the stress and strain he'd had to deal with since the events we witnessed in "Five-O" behind him.

Then he gets that phone call from Nacho, and as always seems to be the case in Better Call Saul and its predecessor, there's some contingency, some way that the cookie crumbled, that didn't work out just right. A good Samaritan helped the driver that Mike hogtied, and not only did it throw a monkey-wrench in his plans to take Hector off the chessboard, but that good Samaritan was shot and killed for their trouble.

Mike's moral code exposed him to Nacho, and their exchange reveals that for all the effort he went to not to have to kill anyone, not to cause anyone any harm that he could avoid, his choices still led directly to someone being killed, and because he tried to avoid killing a crazy drug lord, or that crazy drug lord's much more calculating uncle, he let a completely innocent life perish. The look on his face when he hears that news shows that it wiped away whatever joy he possessed in the rest of the episode. It's replaced with an expression of utter loss, of failure, of the best laid plans leading to the one thing he was trying to avoid.

And Jimmy has the same experience, albeit in a much different way. Jimmy seems legitimately happy when he and Kim are just palling around, painting their new office and enjoying that joking rapport that makes them feel right for one another. While his feigned surprise is not particularly convincing, there's also genuine glee when he hears that Kim got Mesa Verde back. But there's two things he doesn't count on, and each of them comes back to bite him in a particular way.

The first is that Kim figures out what happened, or at least buys that even if Chuck doesn't have the whole story, or doesn't have things 100% correct, that he's right that Jimmy tampered with Chuck's work in such a way so as to benefit her. After how clear Kim made it that she wasn't comfortable with Jimmy's methods, that she wanted to do things her own way, sink or swim, she understandably feels betrayed, even if she's not yet ready to break things off with Jimmy, let alone give up her client or expose him to the risk of being disbarred or going to jail. Despite that, the scene of the two of them in bed together, and the palpable coldness between them, feels like a mirror image of Chuck and his wife sitting in bed, similarly disconnected, in the cold open to "Rebecca." Chuck's wife isn't in the picture anymore, and we do not yet know why, but that visual rhyme, and Kim's demeanor, suggests that she may not be in Jimmy's life for much longer either.

But there's a more severe unintended consequence for Jimmy as well. Jimmy loves his brother. He hates him a little bit, but he loves him. He doesn't want to hurt Chuck; he just wants to take him down a peg, to stop him from keeping Kim from what she's owed the same way that Chuck did to him. But Jimmy's actions go further than that. They torture Chuck. He begins to suffer under the electric hum of the banking commission's offices once the alleged "discrepancy" is exposed. The blistering buzz of the florescent lights at the copy shop start to take their toll on him. Chuck's clearly at the end of his rope. He's right, but feels like the world is gas-lighting him. And he's right. All at once, it's too much for Chuck, and he cracks his head on the table and crumples to the ground. Once again, Jimmy has plied his trade as best he knows how, never meaning any real harm, but someone he cares about ends up getting seriously hurt in the process. Let's hope that Chuck fares better than Marco did.

In truth, there's a great deal of coincidence and convenience at play in "Nailed." How is it that Kim gets the call to come pick up the Mesa Verde boxes from Chuck's so soon after she wins Mesa Verde back? Chalk it up to narrative convenience. Why would she bring Jimmy along to what is already likely to be a delicate situation? Maybe she knows he's there to gloat and doesn't want to deny him, but figures he'll be on his best behavior. How is it that Chuck not only realizes that Jimmy sabotaged him, but is able to almost preternaturally piece together exactly how he did it? Welll, Chuck's a smart guy, and the show tries to handwave it by having him bring up Jimmy's fake I.D. scam in high school.

So how does Kim obliquely bring up that Jimmy needs to cover his tracks just in time for Chuck to show up to the copy shop when Ernesto just happens to be there? How is it that he just so happens to have the copy shop empty except for him and the clerk with enough time for him to lay out his bribe and his story? How is it that he has the nigh-perfect vantage point to see and understand all that's going on in the shop once Chuck rolls in? Beats me.

The episode, the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the plotting, the themes, and the show are all just too damn good to care. From the wry-edged sweetness between Jimmy and Kim as they're setting up their new apartment, to the perfectly-constructed and tension-filled hit by Mike in the desert, to the hilarious scene where Jimmy talks his way into filming on a school playground, to the frenetically shot and edited final scene where Chuck loses it, to the blistering, incredible moment where Jimmy, Kim, and Chuck are laying it out on the table for one another, there is simply too much greatness in too many modes from this show to be especially bothered by any bit of narrative convenience.

That last scene in particular is an all-timer. In "Pimento," the penultimate episode of Season 1, Jimmy confronted his brother in that same room, with a similar inflammatory atmosphere and tone to their hashing things out. Here, once again only a single episode away from the finale, the show doubles down on that concept. The tables are turned -- this time it's Chuck exposing the double cross, and for that matter, "Nailed" throws Kim into the mix, both to have the other major presence in Jimmy's life represented and exposed to this, but also to stand out as the person who sees each of these misguided men for what they are.

The anger, the betrayal, the pride, the sense of pleading in Chuck's voice as he lays this all out is remarkable. He has been betrayed by the brother whom she had just thanked for looking after him despite their issues with one another. And he has Kim there not just for the boxes, but because he wants to tell her not to make the same mistake he did, of trusting Jimmy. He knows that Jimmy did it for her, but that Jimmy will eventually do the same thing to her--betray her trust, if not twist the knife in quite the same fashion--because he can't help himself. He wants to Kim to see Jimmy clearly, without the lens of affection that's blinded him and which he thinks is blinding her.

But unbeknownst to Chuck, and for that matter the audience, Kim already knows. It's hard to tell at what moment in that scene that Kim believes what Chuck is telling her. Maybe it's Jimmy's less-than-convincing denial. Maybe it's Chuck's declaration that his brother did it for love. Maybe it's just her piecing it together in the space between the accusations and the pleas of innocence. Rhea Seehorn and Kim Wexler play it close to the vest, not letting the viewer be sure what she thinks or what she understands until the moment when her frustration erupts and she punches Jimmy's arm in the car.

Before that though, she offers the frankest, truest, and saddest assessment of the McGill boys that the show has allowed us to witness. The show commits to the feint when it has Kim pushing back at Chuck and telling him that one typo by lantern light is far more likely than Chuck's accurate but paranoid-sounding account of what happens. But then she speaks the absolute truth. Chuck made Jimmy, or at least pushed him this direction. As I've said before, Jimmy idolizes his brother, and if Chuck had returned that affection, returned that trust, just a little bit, who knows where Jimmy's talents might have been put to use.

Thus far, Better Call Saul has seemed to posit that there is something essential about Jimmy that cannot avoid taking the occasional shortcut, that cannot completely suppress his conman ways. But he toiled in the mailroom long enough to make something of himself. He dredged up the Sandpiper case not through pure dishonest trickery, but by using his resourcefulness for good. Maybe Chuck will always see his brother with a law license as a chimp with a machine gun, but with a little guidance, a little help, maybe he could at least be aiming it in the right direction.

That doesn't absolve Jimmy, and neither does Kim. She's right to be sorry for both of them, that each has made awful choices to hurt the other and, meaning to or not, her. For Jimmy, those choices led him to potentially losing the woman he loves, and have left his brother in need of an ambulance. For Mike, those choices have left him with blood on his hands once more. Jimmy and Mike never cross paths, not even for a moment in "Nailed," but by the end of the episode, they're in the exact same place.

Ugh. Where to start? I'm embarrassed to admit that, as a teenager, this was one of my favourite episodes when it first aired. I though the concept of being trapped inside a board game was really cool. And yes, the idea still is pretty great, but when it's executed like this it just makes you want to turn away in shame.

The concept of the episode isn't the problem, it's the poor writing and absolutely horrendous acting involved, from both guest stars and the main cast. Alexander Siddig again comes off the worst here, I can only assume that it's a mixture of him following direction and having very little experience. Falow is way too over the top, and the Wadi in general are a stupid design in all aspects. The less said about the hopscotch scene the better, you can almost feel the embarrassment the cast members were experiencing.

The only ones who come off well here are Quark and Odo. Odo gets a fantastic scene with Lt. Primmin (we won't be seeing him again), mocking him about Starfleet procedures. Quark has a funny grovelling scene in which Armin Shimmerman doesn't hold back chewing up the scenery. And the writing of the episode itself isn't a total loss, the opening scene with Sisko and Jake is just a beautiful father/son piece.

To make matters worse, the episode drags. The final sections in the cave just seem to go on endlessly. This is a really weak moment for the show, but for all that I think I still prefer it to the terrible previous episode ('The Passenger'). There's at least an element of silly fun to be found, but for God's sake don't show this to anyone you want to introduce to the show or sci-fi TV in general.

What an absolute perfect ending, and I say this while admitting this ending didn't go the way I expected it to. Like honestly, how many of us actually thought Picard was going to survive this episode? I didn't, but I'm damn sure glad he did, even if we never see any of these TNG characters ever again, which I honestly doubt we won't given the ending. This was an emotional final send off however for this crew that honored and respected each of them throughout the season, every single one of them got their grand moment to shine, Riker with his asteroid, Geordi with his ship, Worf with his rescue, Crusher with her contraction discovery, Data defeated Lore, Troi rescued them in the end with her love for Riker, and Picard saved his son. And how about that borg queen, holy absolute hell was she horrifying looking or what? Anyway, what a beautiful ending that they all deserved, and one last poker game for the sake of it all. Am I excited about the future with Q showing up to tease the next series with the Enterprise G? Sure, but not as happy as I am that the old timers I grew up with got their swan song and somehow, someway, all survived. And if you didn't burst into tears when Riker and Worf decided to stay back to find Picard, basically sealing their death, then damn it I don't know what will satisfy you in life. Was this show perfect? Fuck no. Was the 3rd season without flaws? Bahaha, no! But if you can't appreciate what this really was meant to be here, I don't judge you, I just feel sad you couldn't feel the raw enjoyment the rest of us felt, because this was fucking awesome.

Overall, funny but offensive in some ways that are important, in others just mean. I also find it frustrating certain things seem to get more public attention than others. But the comments in general about trans people come off as the "crazy racist uncle" trope of yesteryear who Chappelle himself would mock when they'd excuse themselves by parading their one black friend as if it was an excuse.

I won't even attempt to excuse his mean spirited jokes about the trans community. Whilst his friend may have loved them it's still the sort of thing that wounds people enough to drive them to what I hope he doesn't wish on anybody else.

Some jokes didn't land at all for me, the "antisemetic" joke for instance. I don't get what was funny or offensive about it, probably because I just simply don't get what he's referencing, neither did my Jewish husband. Either way it seemed odd and out of place among everything else. It just made no sense to me at all.

All in all, my viewing experience is probably very different to that of someone who is trans. So I can't and don't think anybody other than trans people should be saying whether it's transphobic/offensive or not.

I'm very conflicted about this as I love Chappelle and feel awful about what happened to his friend. But I know that if he were a white man making the same kinds of jokes about a black person I would be upset, too.

[9.8/10] One of the ways you can tell that a show is great, not just good, is when it’s engrossing even when there’s not anything particularly exciting or notable happening. It’s easy to be engaged, even giddy, about Better Call Saul in the midst of McGill-on-McGill courtroom combat, in the middle of another of Jimmy’s capers, as Mike Ehrmantraut is springing another one of his traps, or when another little Breaking Bad easter egg pops up. But the mark of a great show is that it can be just as transfixing, just as mesmerizing, to watch Chuck have dinner with his ex-wife, the moment laden with hopes and expectations, with little more happening than a conversation between old friends.

Better yet, that flashback to a time when Jimmy and Chuck were using their scheming in concert and not against one another isn’t simply a flight of fancy to contrast their later antagonism, or a simple pleasing vignette of the early point of Chuck’s condition. It’s a character study, a set of scenes that never comes says anything outright about Chuck McGill, but tells us so much about who he is, how he reacts to obstacles and difficulties, and quietly sets up the bigger fireworks to come.

It shows that Chuck is a prideful man. That’s not much of a revelation, but what’s striking about the flashback are the lengths that he goes to hide his condition from his ex-wife, Rebecca. He concocts a story about a mixup with the electric company (poetically enough, involving transposed letters on an address), and tries to keep it all under wraps.

When Rebecca uses a cell phone that causes his “acute allergy to electromagnetism” to flare up (featuring superb camera work and sound design to convey his perception of it), he throws it out of her hands. But when called to account for his behavior, he doesn’t come clean about why he did it. Tellingly, he not only comes up with an excuse, he not only turns the blame onto Rebecca herself rather than accept it for be honest, but he frames it in terms of propriety, in terms of what’s “right,” in terms of a decorum that he sees himself as adhering to and chastises others for not meeting his standard. It is a defense mechanism, a self-preservation method, one that in that moment and in the future, causes him to mask his frustrations in grandiose notions of propriety and principles rather than face his own failings and prejudices.

But most importantly, even when Rebecca is effectively storming out, an act that would thwart the elaborate lengths he went to under the clear purpose of winning her back, he keeps Jimmy from telling her the truth. Even though Chuck seemed on the cusp of making a breakthrough with a woman he clearly still had feelings for, he could not bear to be thought of as sick; he could not bear to be though of a lesser; he could not bear to be thought of as crazy. Jimmy McGill knows that, and though he clearly takes no pleasure in it, it’s how he takes his brother down.

In just five minutes, Better Call Saul gives its audience a snootful of character detail and foreshadowing that establishes and reestablishes every hint and bit of shading to make the series’ peak drama at the end of the episode that much more understandable and meaningful. It’s a sign of this show’s virtuosity, and the way it understands tension, character, and storytelling like no other show on television.

And that’s just the first five minutes! “Chicanery” goes full courtroom drama in a way that BCS, despite being one of the best legal shows to grace our television screens, hasn’t really done before. The show sets it up nigh-perfectly, laying out witness testimony, objections, and grants of “leeway” that make sense in context while also providing enough wiggle room for the major characters to be a little more theatrical that would be typical for a disciplinary proceeding.

That extends to the episode’s supporting characters as well. Kim Wexler, who is Better Call Saul’s secret weapon, is not only sharp and decisive in the courtroom, but amid all the intra-McGill squabbling, gets a big win. Rather than relishing in her success, Kim distinguishes herself from both McGill brothers by coming clean to the representatives from Mesa Verde about all this ugliness, only to have the head of the bank brush it off and call her the best outside counsel he’s ever had. It’s subtle but important way that Kim and Jimmy fully win here, and that the blowback from Chuck’s machinations do not sink the client and the work that Kim has put so much effort into.

It also extends to Howard, who, while frequently a cipher on this show, continues to offer some of the most pragmatic and complex approaches to these situations of anyone. He is clearly on Chuck’s side, and clearly interested in preserving the good name of his firm. But he is also firmly honest on the stand, complimentary about Jimmy when he doesn’t have to be, frank about how his rise and fall within HHM, and cognizant of Chuck’s limitations and liabilities in a way that Chuck himself simply isn’t.

What ensues is an incredible chess match, a battle of wits and wills, between Jimmy and Chuck. Chuck carefully rehearses his testimony, again careful to couch his attack on his brother as not coming from a place of affront or weakness in himself, but to an abstract, platonic ideal -- the law. Chuck is out to show that he does not hate his brother; he cares for him, wants what’s best for him, but also wants what’s best for the legal professional he claims to hold so dear.

“Chicanery” subtly undercuts the sincerity of Chuck’s words not just by their rehearsed nature, but in the selection of detail that precedes them. He professes to love the law because it guarantees equal treatment to everyone under the same rules and regulations, and yet he is driven to these proceedings in a jaguar, pulls up to the courthouse in the presence of reserved parking cones, and saunters in as the concerned god on high, blameless for his own misfortunes and ready to direct judgment at those he sees as at fault.

But Jimmy is ready, as always, with a plan of his own, one that is not completely above board. His official goal is to not to dispute that it’s his voice on the tape or that it was tampered with, but that he said what he said because he was concerned for his brother’s wellbeing and more importantly, his sanity. In that, he hopes to convince the disciplinary committee that he did not undertake the elaborate, “baroque” scheme to disrupt his brother’s dealings with Mesa Verde that Chuck alleges, but that he gave into Chuck’s paranoid fantasy so as to prevent his brother from slipping further.

And like the best of Jimmy’s lies, it works because there is a grain of truth to it. We know that Chuck isn’t wrong that even if there was no hard evidence of it, Jimmy unleashed an elaborate ploy to trip up Chuck. But we also know that Jimmy means it when he says he would say anything to make his brother feel better, to prevent Chuck from slipping back into his aluminum foil-lined nightmare. Jimmy may have been admitting what really happened rather than telling Chuck “whatever he wanted to hear,” but coming from Slippin’ Jimmy, that is the truest sign that he genuinely would have said anything, even the god’s honest, to make his brother feel better.

That’s also what makes it so tragic, so impressive but sad, that Jimmy will now do anything to show that his brother is insane. Better Call Saul is tremendous at muddying the moral waters in complex, unassuming ways, but Jimmy’s plan to provoke Chuck may be the apotheosis of an act that is clever, resourceful, full of Jimmy’s trademark showmanship, understandable, and yet also more than a bit diabolical. It’s easy to root for Jimmy, particularly in the shadow of his brother’s superciliousness, but it’s one more case of Jimmy covering up one dirty trick with yet another.

While Jimmy normally revels in that sort of gamesmanship, in the razzle dazzle that makes him as effective as lawyer as he was a conman, he seems to take no joy in it. He reveals that he had Mike take those photographs of Chuck’s apartment to lure Rebecca back, something that he knew would put his brother off balance. But when he stands by the vending machines (which create a subtle buffer to prevent Chuck from confronting him about it) he does not have a wisp of glee at his plan coming to fruition, just the hurt resignation that it’s come to this.

Jimmy, however, is not done. In his final act meant to prove to the disciplinary board that his brother is unbalanced and thus untrustworthy, he resorts to some of the titular “chicanery.” He employs Huell(!) to slip a cell phone battery in Chuck’s pocket, and what follows is one of the best scenes in the show’s history.

It involves a back and forth between Jimmy and Chuck. Jimmy seems to pulling every rabbit out of his hat that he can come up with to expose his brother as a nut. He shows pictures from inside Chuck’s house. He gestures to Rebecca in the audience and even garnishes an emotional apology from Chuck to her. He plays “commit and contradict” with Chuck about his alleged illness, trying to establish for the disciplinary committee that Chuck’s issues are psychosomatic, and getting his brother to affirm that he is not feeling electromagnetic waves from anywhere in particular in the room.

It’s then that Jimmy takes out his cell phone, presumably expecting a reaction from Chuck to prove that his brother would respond to it on sight. Instead, Chuck, appearing wise to Jimmy’s machinations, determines that the phone is without is battery, and it seems, for a moment, like Jimmy’s stunt has been foiled, more fodder for Chuck to demonstrate that his brother is a two-bit huckster, not a lawyer. Instead, Jimmy plays the magician, revealing the final element of his trick -- the battery that Huell slipped into Chuck’s breast pocket.

That is what sets Chuck off, as he pulls the battery out like it’s radioactive and tosses it on the floor. He goes into a deranged rant that ought to earn Michael McKean an Emmy. He howls about his brother’s irresponsibleness, about how Jimmy’s billboard stunt had to be staged, about how defecating in a sunroof, about slights going back to childhood. The camera zooms in slowly on Chuck as he digs himself deeper and deeper, each word making this crusade seem more like the childish vendetta from a mentally-disturbed man against the imagined slights from his little brother than a high-minded mission to uphold the law. As more and more of his angry, pontificating face fills the frame, he stops, and the ensuing shot of the disciplinary board’s reaction says it all.

Jimmy has done it. In front of the state bar, in front of their partners, in front of the women they love, Jimmy exposes his brother as a mentally ill person ranting and raving, not the dignified legal lion he tried so hard to present himself as, in the courtroom and in that dinner with Rebecca way back when. The episode cuts to a far shot of Chuck, seeming so small, so defeated in the frame, as the buzz of the exit sign looms large next to him. This is his Waterloo, the terrible culmination of two brothers’ issues with one another, laid bare in a court of law for all the world to see.

Chuck, more than Hector or Howard or the cartel, is the villain of Better Call Saul. That makes it easy to hope that Jimmy overcomes him. But in that final moment, Jimmy again mixes fact with fiction. His brother is telling the truth. As paranoid as it sounds, as childish as it is to hold onto certain grudges and resentments, Chuck is correct in all of his assessments. And yet, as the opening scene tells us, he is a prideful individual, unwilling to admit to his illness, to his difficulties, as anything that would make him seem the lesser or not in control. That is his downfall, the fatal flaw that not only keeps him from carrying out his plan, but from what we see in this episode, which costs him the love of both his wife and his brother. That is unspeakably sad -- the story of an individual, even a villain, coming so close, and losing everything worth having in the end, when the worst of him is put on display.

I don't really know how to put in words my love for this show. This was a very satisfying finale and the description could not be more perfect.

We got the answers we needed but its up to us whether we want to believe them. I believe Nora but it doesn't matter. This has always been a love story between two very broken people. Kevin realizing he has been just running from his life and just keeps coming back (see the end of every season). He becomes obsessed about finding Nora and him coming up short for all those years is truly heartbreaking. Nora finding her children and realizing that she is not needed. Spending all that time to just look at them from a distance and see them one last time. They fixed their problems the best the could. In the end, when they finally get back together, they are honest with each other and can be happy together, no more bullet proof vests and bags over the head. The last shot was beautiful with the two of them in a house and the messages of love coming back home. This was a surprisingly happy ending to an overall very depressing show and I'm ok with that.

This is one of, if not, the greatest TV shows ever.