TheBingeAddict

After 'Manifest' showed that perhaps the show's writers struggled with how to bring Cottonmouth's story to logical and satisfying conclusion, I'd hope it was just a fluke and this would pull things back on track. Unfortunately, killing off what might be the show's best character well ahead of where his potential lied has clearly affected the show's trajectory, and not in a good way.

Mahershala Ali's brilliant acting in Cottonmouth has been replaced with the stilted campiness of Willis Stryker, AKA Diamondback. It's as if the writer's realized halfway through the series that this was technically a superhero show, and ultimately superheroes have to solve things with their fists. On paper, this makes little sense considering the level of power Luke Cage has shown thus far would prove any physical confrontation futile, but for the sake of plot, Diamondback is suddenly able to punish Luke with relative ease using only his bare hands and a lead pipe, mere minutes after it was established that Luke's skin was still impenetrable despite the Hammertech bullet sitting inside is abdomen.

On top of all this, the episode ends with a pointless reveal that Diamondback is actually Luke's brother. Considering we as an audience have little to no indication as to who Diamondback really is, and the only time we've had to connect with him or see his motivations has been a badly choreographed 5 minute fight scene, this reveal has absolutely no weight. I was left thinking, "Okay?" and more bothered by the fact that that garbage truck driver somehow didn't hear that gunshot.

Away from Luke Cage's powers being reinterpreted, entire characters personalities and motivations are being retconned as well. The previously calm, collected and intelligent Misty Knight is suddenly falling prey to violent outbursts and flip-flopping on motivations faster than you can say "plot hole". Am I really to believe that a call about bloody gloves that are clearly planted in Luke's barbershop was enough to convince Misty that he's guilty, despite the previous scene showing that she is 100% adamant that Cottonmouth's murder is being covered up by an entirely different party?

Hopefully this is just a weak transition period as the show finds it's footing and can put the pieces back together before the finale, but at the moment I've gone from excited to see each next episode to wary of what's to come.

9.0/10. Not all families are happy ones. It’s an unfortunate truth. Orel’s certainly isn’t. His brother(s?) have behavioral problems that his parents ignore; his mother is clearly unhappy and unhelpful, and his father is a font of bad advice and neglect. And yet, through some mystery, the same type of mystery we are encouraged to embrace in our religious paths, Orel manages to have a happy family of his own despite his lack of a blueprint for one.

Moral Orel is a dark show, full of unrelenting looks at the way people have been failed and fail others and may thoughtlessly crush the spirits of someone as happy and bright as Orel. But the series finale doesn’t lean into that darkness; it embraces hope. It embraces possibility. It embraces the chance that Orel will one day marry Christina, be a better father to his kids, and enjoy the love that Clay never had or earned.

Clay is a horrible person, but also someone wounded, destined never to have the things he wants. That includes Coach Stopframe, who is aghast to see Clay making out with Miss Censordoll to prevent her from unseating him as mayor. Clay’s repressed homosexuality doesn’t exactly line up with the ways in which we’ve seen him act like a cad, but it’s an interesting look at the ways in which the repressiveness of Moralton have forced him to deny who he is, and lose someone he genuinely seems to love in exchange for a life he hates, one that brings him to cause pain and misery to a family he didn’t really want.

That’s why it’s hard for Orel to honor his father, as the bible commands. He can’t find what’s good about him. He turns to Coach Stopframe, who acts more like a father and is there for him on Christmas in a way his own parents have never been. Coach Stopframe tells him that the good thing Clay has done, the thing that makes him worthy of honor, is helping to make Orel, of producing someone with such kindness, such optimism, and such a good heart. Orel hears from someone who loves his Dad that he’s worth something, in the spirit of the season, a son who redeems. He sees that life can be something other than what’s within the walls of the Puppington household, and he gets to enjoy a Christmas where, for once, he feels at peace.

There’s little bits of peace parceled out throughout the finale. Rev. Putty and Stephanie are spending X-mas together, and Rev. Putty seems happier, or at least more content with his life. Orel enjoys the family activities with Coach Stopframe that his father never really engaged in. Even Blobberta is visibly excited at getting to sing with her family, something she was denied by her own mother. Clay doesn’t get peace though. He just gets the realization that it’s too late for him, too late to have the things he hoped for in this world and a measure of happiness. For someone who is this show’s greatest villain, there is a measure of pity and empathy offered him in that, the idea that he was not always such a wayward soul.

But the happiest thing about the finale is that Orel is able to break the cycle. He does not repeat the mistakes of his father or his mother. He has a Christmas filled with joy and love, something so sacred and missing from his childhood. Morel Orel is a decidedly strange series, one that started out with a series of formulaic, not especially subtle larks, that evolved into much darker, rawer, and profoundly weird material, but one that also had a strong emotion throughline from the beginning to the end of the series. It’s a story about Orel slowly but surely realizing that there’s a different path than the one that’s been instilled in him in Moralton, that he need not be what he’s been told to be in his father’s study so many times, that his father is not the source of wisdom and compassion he imagined, and that he too can find happiness outside the myopic strictures set by the Puppingtons and the community that spawned him. The fact that he gets out, the fact that he moves forward, is the greatest gift the series could give to him, and to us.

9.5/10. There's some episodes of this show that work like little short stories away and apart from the rest of the series, and this is a great example. Sure, it helps to explain where Clay came from and why he became the way he is, but it's also just an interesting little tale about a how different people deal with the idea of death, how it can drive families apart, and even mess people up for good. Seeing Clay as a coddled, more innocent young man who's adored by his mom and tolerated by his Dad is something of a revelation.

We see that, like Bloberta, Clay didn't have good parents to be role models for him as a husband or a father. Clay is understandably messed up by the fact that it was his own boyish prank, after being upset that his mother had several miscarriages before he was born and thus he was not her "only ever," to play possum that stopped his mom's "weak heart." That part of the story is well set up, with little details about his mom's heart condition and the photobook reveal of his parents drifting further apart with each miscarriage. The follow up, with Clay's dad blaming him for his wife's death, and Clay acting up to get slapped because in his bent and childish way it's the only way to make him "worth it" in his father's eyes is incredibly sad and pathos-ridden. There's even some of the show's great satire in Clay's mom claiming he's a miracle and crediting her prayer for allowing him to be born when so many of his would-be siblings hadn't made it, when she was praying so much that she didn't have time to smoke, drink, or go horseback riding.

Clay is often the show's biggest monster, tormenting Orel, giving him terrible advice, or just generally being neglectful to his wife and children. But in this episode, we get to see a little of what made him that way, and it gives you a little sympathy for that man staring at his own reflection in a glass of whiskey. (And having it backed by one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs, "Love Love Love," doesn't hurt the emotional quotient of the ending either.)

Sometimes it's hard to remember that our real lives are distinct and separate from our online lives. Take it from some guy who enjoys his "likes" and hits from writing reviews more than he'd sometimes care to admit, it's all too easy to become consumed in our online presence to the point that we forget about our lives away from screens, away from the things that give us meaning and insight and the inspiration to post anything to social media.

Which is why I think I'm okay with the tack "Skank Hunt" takes. (Now that's not sentence I ever expected to write.) Look, online bullying driving people to suicide is a legitimate issue, and even if it's not widespread, making it the source of fun admittedly makes me a little uneasy. And yet, I think it's in service of that point, that kids and adults alike treat their online personas as their entire being, and that we as a culture and a society overinflate the importance of the digital part of our lives. The grave, faux-solemnity with which South Park treats the idea of someone quitting Twitter is not, in my estimation, an attempt to make fun of people driven to suicide (though it's certainly meant to be envelope pushing as the show always is), but rather an attempt to make fun of how big a deal we make over something as slight as social media in the first place, to where quitting Twitter or Facebook or god help us, Trakt, can be treated as such a cataclysmic event.

This is as good a time to mention that one of the ways South Park achieves this is in "Skank Hunt" is with some unexpectedly good design work, music, and cinematography. Even in it's construction paper cut out days, the show had a certain visual experimentalist quality to it. But in "Skank Hunt," the show goes a step further to drive home the faux-magnitude of what's taking place, whether it's the pan up to the sky as a little girl drops her phone into the river, or the leering shadow of Gerald as he wages war against a Scandavian olympic athlete, or the slow shots of what looks like a massacre as the South Park Elementary girls deliver break up letter after break up letter to the boys. This episode did a great job of using the "camera" of this still semi-crudely animated show to help convey mood and heighten the feeling of these scenes.

Throw in a ridiculous sequence sent to a Boston tune that subs Gerald's typing for tickling the ivories, a similarly goofy sequence of Gerald celebrating his notoriety to the silly strains of "Steal My Sunshine," and the swelling music that back the break up sequence, and you have a show that's using more than just its superb writing and bent premises to make its impact.

But the story and themes are still the core of Skank Hunt. The seriousness with which everyone treats a classmate quitting Twitter leads to the interesting point about the outsized importance we place on social media, but also does a nice job of driving the story, from leading the boys to kill Cartman...'s online presence, in a series of scenes the show mostly plays straight to hilarious effect. The story between Mr. Mackey and Scott Malkinson (who we haven't seen in forever) is South Park's humor at its darkest. Well, maybe not its darkest (see: Scott Tenerman), but still, only a show like this one could wring the humor in a beleaguered guidance counselor growing tired of comforting his "suicidal" student and wishing that he would (more or less) just off himself already. It's hard to call it well-observed exactly, but there's the germ of humanity in the scene to someone becoming strained even with one of the most noble duties there is, in classic exaggerated South Park fashion.

And then there's Gerald himself, who in a Heisenberg-esque twist, is enjoying his double life as a troll too much to avoid dropping hints to his wife and son. There's commentary in his role in the episode as well, with once again, everyone in South Park, from the children to adults, treating something as ridiculous as an anonymous person on the internet spewing profanity and photoshopping lewd images with such seriousness. That seriousness seems particularly interesting in contrast to how Gerald is just doing it to "stir the pot," because he thinks it's funny. There's a disparity between how the rest of the world responds to this, and Gerald's less than grandiose reasons for it. It's clear that he's just doing this for the fun of it, and also for the notoreity of it, and that by taking trolling so seriously, the people of South Park are actually just enabling and encouraging him.

There's more to unpack here, from the idea of collective guilt and collective punishment, to the continued presence of the member berries, to the promise of more storylines in the future stemming from Cartman's wrongful "death," and Gerald's attempt to troll the untrollable. But on the whole, "Skank Hunt" is an episode about how easy it is to treat our online lives with the utmost importance, and treat anything that impugnes them like a horrid, deplorable attack on our very being, when neither our silly online posts, nor the dumb screeds that they may engender in response, deserve that level of attention, importance, or concern.

Quite possibly one of the most amazing episodes of any show I've seen. The humor throughout, addressing/explaining the depression the way it was done towards the end, Jimmy having his own mental fight over which decision to make and then making the less selfish one. Acknowledging that he truly does care for her, and loves her. Right after having said to her what he thought it would be like in ten years with her. He saw the car and it reminded him of all the good times that she was there for & with him, just so much going on throughout the whole episode.

Most importantly for me though, was when he built her a "box" to separate her from the rest of the world. He got in it and took care of her. Saying, without words, that he's there for her no matter what and she is his life now, she is everything he wants and he'll go through any amount of hell for even a moment of heaven with her. Aya Cash's acting, particularly at the time she said the line, "You stayed?!" - so many surprise feels.

I've recently started dealing with depression issues that have been undiagnosed for a number of years. I'm still learning about it & myself, and my amazing wife is learning with me and helping when I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel or when I can't see how I've become. I can never explain it to her and this show has helped to give a voice to something I can't understand enough to explain. Every bit of this season, and the end of this episode, was incredible, witty, funny when it should be, serious when it needed to be. Perfect balances all around. Nothing I've watched in a long time has evoked as much emotion for me as this episode did. My wife & I watched the ending SEVERAL times.

9.5/10. If you'd said to me, "Hey watch this short film that's a cross between Lost in Translation and the opening act of Wall-E," I'm pretty sure I would just look at you funny. And yet that's pretty much what this was, and it worked beautifully. The undersea world BoJack found himself in, where he couldn't eat the food, couldn't engage in his usual vices, and most of all couldn't speak or understand the local dialect, captured the experience of isolation and confusion that can come from visiting a foreign country through a distinctively BoJack lens.

But it also created a great atmosphere for a format-bending episode. Offering a nigh-wordless half hour of comedy in a show that makes its hay from its dialogue could either be gimmicky or bold, and thankfully this episode tended toward the former. It helped to put the viewer in BoJack's shoes -- only able to communicate and express mood through non-verbal cues like gestures, body language, and the score.

And in the absence of dialogue, Bojack Horseman reverts to a certain Looney Tunes-esque vibe where BoJack finds himself inadvertently responsible for an adorable little seahorse moppet. (I had flashbacks to the "Buttons and MIndy"segments of Animaniacs and a dozen other classic cartoons.) The design and personality of the seahorse baby struck the right balance of adorable and mischievous, and it created a nice opportunity for BoJack to be caring, brave, and as always, eternally frustated.

But this being Bojack, of course there's a quiet strain of melancholy through the whole thing. When Bojack returns to the seahorse babe to its father, the dad is mildly grateful, but mostly blase, and the baby doesn't even wave to him when it's time for BoJack to say goodbye. They went through this experience together, through shark attacks and taffy explosions and being stranded, and the moppet is too little to even look up for his soup or appreciate what his equine friend did for him. There's an emptiness there, a sort of existential realization that all that effort, which was quite noble in and of itself, feels a little hollow without someone to share it with or to appreciate it.

So through this experience, BoJack finally finds the words to apologize to Kelsey Jannings, noting that grand acts are nice, but that accomplishments, even ones far more important than winning and Oscar like returning a child to their parent, can seem like building a sandcastle, inevitably fleeting and meant to be washed away with the coming tide. But that those connections between individuals are what sustain us and give us life and reason to go on in a world of sandcastles.

Again, this being BoJack Horseman, those words too are washed away before he can get them to Kelsey in any sort of readable fashion. To add insult to injury, he realizes in the end that he could have talked this whole time, which is the right combination of sad and funny. But overall, this is a wonderful episode that uses some great Warner Bros. silent capering to further the show's project of examining its lead's attempts to find meaning in his life, and finds an inventive way to convey that experience.

9.8/10. Again, I think "ambitious" is the best word to describe this season of Moral Orel. This is the type of episode you can only do after you've had a couple of seasons under your belt already. As much as I want to see the aftermath of "Nature", I'm enjoying the continuity nods, and how the series is telling stories in a non-linear fashion that connects with prior episodes but also fills in meaningful gaps.

But the height of greatness in this episode is the meta-commentary of everyone in town realizing that any time they give Orel advice, he takes it the wrong way and it leads to trouble, possibly even God's wrath. The way that everyone from Clay, Rev. Putty, Orel's teacher, and Coach Stopframe tie themselves in knots trying to avoid giving him any advice whatsoever was hilarious. And the fact that it not only led him to misconstrue their recommendations anyway (combining the innocence of children a la the Children's Crusade with the innocent blood used by the Christeins to decide he needs to cover himself in virgin blood to stay innocent) but actually leads nicely into the timeline of the prior episode is great.

It's not quite Moral Orel deconstructing itself, but it's definitely one of the more meta episodes the show's done, and making the various authority figures of the show self-aware with respect to the series' formula lead to a really creative and entertaining episode.

Pardon my explicit language here, but wow, that was fucked up. It made me think of Todd Solondz's Happiness, as both that film and this episode focus on a series of lonely, damaged, and arguably depraved individuals fighting through their bizarre, pitiable hangups.

There's a big theme of children in this episode. In addition to Rev. Putty's sermon, Nurse Bendy is basically playing house like a little girl (and her dialogue is unnerving in its childlike approximations of adult life). Ms. Sculptham had/is having an abortion or is pregnant or something (that part of the segment was pretty weird and unclear). And it's revealed that Ms. Censordoll had a hysterectomy (or something along those lines) when she was an infant.

It's also clear that each of these women has been abused in some way. Nurse Bendy, despite her previous blase attitude, privately feels abused by Principal Fakey, hence her horrifying reaction to her teddy bear husband falling on her while she's bent over. Ms. Sculptham was apparently raped by a serial killer and either enjoyed it or is scarred by it or is horrifically confused by having what, according to that newspaper clipping, was her first moment of sexual pleasure tied up in such a violation. And Ms. Censordoll had that surgery forced on her by her mother at an age when she couldn't consent, and it clearly messed her up, explaining both her egg fetish(representing the life she cannot make herself) and her holier than thou position since she views herself as unblemished and "immaculately conceived."

Again, like much of this season, it's incredibly bold stuff to delve into. It's pretty disturbing, and not especially pleasant, but I think that's pretty much the point. It doesn't always work, and I think there's some refuge in vagary and weirdness in places, but I admire the ambition and the depths of darkness and mental harm the show has shown itself willing to explore this season.

7.5/10. Well hey, one way to get me on board with your episode is to tie it around one of the best Mountain Goats songs ever, so "Numb" has that going for it out of the gate. Apart from the episode's sonic stylings, I appreciated the episode's focus on Bloberta as a kind of alternate story to the events of "Nature." We haven't really gotten much more from her than the usual background stuff relative to Clay, and it's nice to see that her staid demeanor isn't just a lack of imagination on the part of the show's creators, but rather gets tied into a sense that she, like seemingly everyone else in Moralton, has made herself inured to the pain inflicted by the world.

That's the not-so-subtle theme of the episode. Whether it's Bloberta's pills or Clay's liquor or Coach Stopframe's callous disregard or Dr. Potterswheel's jaded lack of concern for human suffering after having seen so much of it, everyone in the episode has let go of caring in one way shape or form. Bloberta is desperate to feel something, something real and human, which takes a pretty uncomfortable turn when she begins satisfying herself with a mini-jackhammer. That oddly forms the basis of a connection between her and Dr. Potterswheel, where her injuries seem to feed his sadism fetish and Bloberta is more than welcome for the attention.

Of course, in a tragic and poetically ironic twist, that attention causes Bloberta not to have to need to harm herself to feel anything anymore, which in turn makes her no longer interesting to Dr. Potterswheel, to the point that he can't even look at her anymore, leaving her back where she started. It's the cruel hand she's been dealt, and despite her gentle demeanor with Orel (as witnessed from Clay's POV), she steps out into the hallway and breaks down. She is deeply hurt and hurting inside from all of this, from what she's left with, a sham of a marriage and a deadened soul. So both she and Clay return to their separate beds and sit blankfaced, each embracing the numbness that prevents them from having to face their pain.

It's a horrifically dark turn, which seems to have become the show's M.O. now, and a little blunt at times, but also a powerfully little human story of suffering.

Few things are more heartbreaking than seeing innocence broken, optimism shattered, and the enchantments of youth blotted out beneath the boot heel of human cruelty. In the second part of "Nature," *Morel Orel offers its own self-deconstruction. Gone is the cartoonishly terrible father and his blithely cheerful son. In their place is a caustic drunk who doesn't care about his son's happiness or well-being, and a young boy who comes to see his father for what he is.

Orel had an illusion about his dad, that Clay was someone to be admired and looked up to. Instead, he sees him at his most cruel, careless, and vicious: blaming Orel for Clay drunkenly shooting his son with his rifle, tearing Orel's favorite lucky shirt to create a makeshift tourniquet, and sleeping off his hangover rather than getting his son medical help. Those illusions are shattered. The end of the episode, where Orel asks his mother about Clay's drinking, is on-the-nose, but it offers a startling truth for a young child -- the side of his father that he sees when the bottle is out, when his father at his harshest and most reprehensible, is who his father really is; the half-decent family man is the facade, not the other way around. That is a devastating realization, and the way the show has Orel stew in that knowledge at the end of the episode is heartrending.

But that is only half the tragedy. After Clay passes out, Orel is forced to shoot an approaching bear who smells the dog that Clay had been roasting on the spit. It's the last little betrayal on this horror of a trip. Orel has no desire to be at war with nature, only to be a part of it in peace. Instead, because of his father, he is forced to take a life, to bloody his hands, and to do the act of a man that he abhors. Orel tells his father one lie and one truth -- the lie coming when he tells his father that it was Clay who shot the bear, not him, a means by which Orel can deny his father even the tiniest of victories, and the truth coming when he tells his father that he hates him. It's an almost shocking moment from a child who's impossibly good-natured, and demonstrates the limits he's been pushed to, the trespasses (yes, Clay, trespasses) that have been visited against him, to make him admit such a thing.

Clay, however, doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything anymore, except himself -- not his wife, not his family, not the son whom he treats like an anchor rather than a blessing. More tonally consistent than the prior episode, the second part of nature pulls no punches in depicting the ugliness of Clay and people like him, and the tragedy of their "loved ones," forced to suffer their negligence and wrath in equal measure. "Nature," is not a typical episode of Orel. Orel doesn't misinterpret a sermon; there's no fractured commandment at the end; and there's very little that's funny. Instead, it's the sum of all that came before it, the genuine, hideous truth lurking beneath the comedy, the germ of awfulness that undergirds the show's satire, laid bare in its demoralizing glory. It's as avant garde a way to end a season of a mostly silly, sometimes cruel little puppet show as I could imagine. And it's an experience, not a pleasant one exactly, but an affecting and worthy one nonetheless.

Nary a laugh to be had, but the first half of a pretty jarring little psychodrama. The most striking image of the episode is Clay, bugs crawling across his face, bathed in red light, in a religion-focused show, looking for all the world like the devil. In some ways it's an uneasy marriage in this episode, the loonier parts of the Morel Oral vibe like a suddenly appearing hall of weapons or the cartoonishness of an adorable deer coming up to lick Orel with the raw blackness of Clay's rant against the hell of his life. But there's a contrast between the angelic Orel and soul-blackened Clay here. One is at harmony with his world, embracing the animals and seeming at peace with his environment, and the other restless and cruel, attacking nature and attacking himself in the process.

The only problem is that, true to that uncertain mix, there's a broadness to things like Clay shooting someone's dog or making a tent for his liquor bottles that doesn't quite square with the unnervingly down-to-earth qualities of his self-loathing, vitriolic speech he offers before the cliffhanger where he shoots Orel. The tone is shaky, but there's such a realism, a boldness to Clay's exchange with Orel at the end there that it works as one of those starkly disconcerting pieces of art that gets some of its power from the contrast between the cartoonishness of its setting and typical M.O. with the scarily accurate depiction of the darker side of father-son relationships.

I will be writing about Episode 1 and 2.

This season premiere was perfectly paced and very atmospheric. I think the general theme of the episodes and also this season is illusion. Mr. Robot talks about how reality is just an illusion, Phillip Price talks about how the government creates an illusion and Elliot tries to build himself an illusion of a normal life. This illusion equals normalcy and routine. There is this IT-saying: "Never touch a running system". And i think Mr. Robot (the show) tries to transfer this proverb to the real world. You should never touch a running system, even if you can improve something, because it causes disruption. That is what government and the society is about in general (in the thinking of Mr. Robot). But what does a hacker? He/She touches a running system. Sometimes to cause harm and chaos, but often hackers hack something to improve it. Lifehacks become a whole new meaning in this context.
The second part of this illusion-theme is the connection to magicians. The show confirms this magic connection in the QR-Code Easteregg, which leads to http://www.conficturaindustries.com/. If you google Confictura, you get to a handbook for stage illusionists . I remembered what i learned about magic tricks from The Prestige: There are three stages. The Pledge, where you set up the trick ("Look at this bird. Just a normal bird!"), the Turn (Bird disappears) and finally the prestige (Bird reappears). I think you can see this three stages in the season one finales and the two episodes in season two. Tyrell Wellick meets Elliot in the season finale (The Pledge), Tyrell disappears (The Turn) and at the end of episode two he reappears (The prestige). . Maybe we see more magic tricks in this season.
Some other observations: I really liked the acting, specially of Rami Malek and Portia Doubleday (Angela). Angela turned full American Psycho, i was amazed by her powerplay in the PR department. I would like to see her rise to a corporate power woman (and then her eventual fall). Rami's pivot of acting was the scene where he started laughing at Mr. Robot. That was a Joker-worthy performance. It really frightened me. We are also introduced to FBI-Agent Grace Gummer. I think she will be the counterpart to Elliot and fsociety in general. I liked her performance (Anyone else thought of Elsbeth Tascioni from The Good Wife?) and i am looking forward to see more of her.
To sum it up, this season beginning was fantastic and shows how good Mr. Robot is. Pacing, Atmosphere, Acting: It all was on pint and although the series is often slow paced it never gets dull.

9.5/10. Not as many laughs in this one, but instead we got a quiet, but surprisingly deep character piece. This show can be incredibly blunt in its points at times, and I wouldn't say this episode hid its message exactly, but at the same time the idea that Reverend Putty asked God for a woman, and got one, but not in the way he was expecting, was handled with grace and managed to be just a bit touching. The idea that he was a virgin hoping to get laid, and instead got something approaching a miracle -- something approaching a virgin birth, and that it took Orel for him to realize that it could still make him happy if he's willing to accept instead of trying to be miserable, to seek out one of those other "F-words," is surprisingly effective and affecting. While the incest angle was a bit creepy, it was nice to see Stephanie on the show again, and using the darkness of the series to lead to a moment of optimism and, dare I say it, hope was a pleasant surprise. Calling it Mad Men-esque is probably a sketch, but I feel like this episode was aiming in that direction -- someone broken and unhappy finding a road to something better, but not necessarily where they were looking for it. Impressive stuff that I didn't see coming from Moral Orel.

There's a scene in The Simpsons's episode "Lisa's Substitute" that I've always loved. In it, Lisa is smarting from the unexpected loss of her mentor, Homer was boorishly insensitive about it, and came up to Lisa's room to make peace after she's clearly devastated at losing the male figure in her life who inspired her and not all too pleased about the one she's been left with. Despite Homer's clumsy (literally and figuratively) attempts to start the conversation, a funny thing happens as the two of them find their groove. Homer admits in a roundabout way that he doesn't really get Lisa, that he is, in a shocking bit of self-awareness from the Simpsons patriarch, a pretty provincial guy, and he realizes that his daughter is different and bright and has a future ahead of her that will take her to places he can't even imagine. Despite that, he loves her, he supports her, and he wants that future for her, and it gives the two of them a connection at an emotional level even if they may never connect on an intellectual level. There's support even when there's not understanding, and that means a great deal to a young woman struggling with what to do.

There's a similar scene between Bob and Tina in "The Hormone-Iums". When Tina is struggling with whether to follow her (literal) dreams of becoming a soloist in the Hormone-iums, Wagstaff's preteen issues-based music group, even if it makes her the poster child for a point she doesn't believe in -- that kissing is wrong and dangerous, a development that affects her social life, Bob is there to listen. And like Homer, one of Bob's trademark qualities (and the one that makes him a good dad even if he occasionally, by dint of narrative necessity, brings his kids along on some pretty dangerous adventures), is that he loves and supports his kids, even when he doesn't really understand them.

Tina's still kind of a mystery to Bob. There's only so much that a middle-aged man and his preteen daughter are going to have in common, or that's even going to be comprehensible to them. But Bob knows that Tina is in pain; he can tell that she's struggling. And he may not completely get why, but he tells that he knows the Hormone-iums are important to her, but so is doing and saying what she believes. With the wisdom he can muster, he tells her that even though he's the adult, and even though it may annoy many other adults, they're her lips and she gets to decide what to do with them, whether it's sing in a puberty-based school choir, tell her fellow students the truth about mono, or implicitly, kiss boys at her friend's spin the bottle party. Bob may not always understand his daughter, but he can tell when she's hurting, he knows what she cares about, and he believes in her and her happiness. That goes a hell of a long way.

Which is good, because Tina needs that help. The episode does a nice job at drawing out the way Tina is legitimately conflicted by her circumstances. There's something inherently funny about Tina, because on the one hand she is a very passionate young woman with big dreams and unabashed interests in certain things, and yet Dan Mintz's subdued tone and the character's somewhat reserved demeanor wring the humor out of that contrast. But there's also a sweetness there, to a kid whose ambitions and hopes outstrip their abilities to make them happen just yet. It's easy to root for Tina, and it's easy to feel for her here, because she has to choose between what she wants and what she believes, and as small as the stakes are, that's a big deal when you're thirteen.

On the one hand, there are Tina's dreams of stardom. Her opening musical number fantasy about singing an ode to pimples to her fellow Wagstaffers, replete with top hat and sparkling lights, and her subsequent dream about how becoming the soloist in the Hormone-iums will give her not only fortune and fame, but respect and romance from her peers, establish what this play means to Tina. Here is her chance not just to be in the spotlight, but to express herself and move her up a notch in the social standings that she's constantly laboring under.

On the other hand, the episode adds the twist that the play would cost her, rather help her position within that social standing. Sure, it's the magnified drama of middle school, but there's real pathos for Tina when she's disinvited to Jocelyn's party. Tina hoped that "Mona-nucleosis" would be her ticket to earning the respect and admiration of her peers, and instead, it's threatening to leave her as a pariah. What's even worse, it's for a cause she doesn't believe in.

Tina bristles at Mr. Frond's scare tactics. His scared straight musical about the dangers of adolescent kissing have the patina of a commentary on abstinence-only education, but more importantly, its runs counter to what Tina herself feels strongly about when it comes to kissing boys. So she's put in a difficult position. Does she sacrifice her beliefs and her social status in the hopes of pursuing her dream or does she give up the chance to be permanent soloist like she's been dreaming about in order to stand up for what she believes in, and stand against her fellow students being misinformed?

Episodes like "Tina-rannpsaurus Wrecks" have shown that Tina is a young woman of principle, and that portends the path she ultimately chooses here. But what's enervating about this episode is that it shows she can also be very brave. It's incredibly endearing to see the reserved-yet-bombastic Tina push back on Frond by declaring that kissing won't cause mononucleosis, to see her prove that with a live demonstration, and to see her belief in herself and commitment to her principles be rewarded by a reinvitiation to the party she was so concerned about.

Tina doesn't have the same similarities with her parents as exist between say, Bob and Louise, or Linda and Gene. But that doesn't mean she doesn't have a closeness with them. And though Bob may not completely get his daughter, he gets when she's in pain and gives her the approval and support she needs to follow her heart. It's wonderful to see Tina encouraged and accepted like that, and even better to see her rewarded for being true to who she is.

(Oh, and Linda's wine shoe idea, and the pitch to the Fishoeders is much more slight, but still a fun sidetrack and an opportunity to bring in a bevvy of the show's superb side characters to bounce off one another.)

8.3/10. I've said before that I appreciate all shades of Adventure Time, a show that can have a very different tone and focus from week-to-week, but there's something I find very affecting about Finn's relationship drama. The idea of this essentially decent kid stepping and stumbling his way through feelings he doesn't quite have a hold on is a compelling one, and while Huntress Wizard is a new player on that front, she adds an interesting wrinkle to the ongoing saga of Finn's journey on that front.

To that end, there's an odd subtext to the story told in "Flute Spell", of Huntress Wizard basically chasing after her ex-boyfriend, and Finn helping her because he has a crush on her and thinks that maybe it will bring the two of them together. But there's also a certain resigned quality to Finn here. As much as he denies to to Jake (who is adorable here, both in his "my life is awesome" song/montage and his cheering Finn on) that he likes Huntress Wizard, there's a sense that in reality, he's just been burned so many times when it comes to his feelings for girls (literally and figuratively) that he plays it close to the vest and tries to convince himself that it's no big deal, that whatever happens happens, even if it means he's on a fool's errand.

That's what makes it a little tragic when Huntress Wizard kisses him but tells him that they can't be together because even though they're both fierce creatures, it would make them soft. Finn is mature about it, and not the devastated or pushy kid he had been in the past with his prior romances. Finn is prepared for this, he's been clenched from the beginning, and while it's nice to see him take things easier this time around and recognize that "affections pass," I'm still there with Jake, hoping he finds the right person out there for him. I don't know if that person is Huntress Wizard, but I hope it's someone.

8.5/10. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for the Banana Guards, and they brought a lot of laughs here. The "infiltration" by Finn and Jake during the changing of the guard (replete with Banana cream pies!) was a Three Stooges-esque delight, and their affable, loving stupidity tickles my funny bone every time.

But what I really loved about this episode was how it played on the way different people see Princess Bubblegum. Finn sees her as "cool," and can't shake that image of her, which is why he's kind of upset when he originally sees the graffiti. Jake sees her as just a part of the continuum, which is why he appreciates the art and is able to look past who it's representing. The Banana Guards in general look at her as an object of worship, as a benevolent if frightening persona whom, as PB herself points out, they both love and fear. Banana Guard 16 in particular sees her as a cold and unknowable deity, with the way she destroyed candy people and tampers with their minds and their very beings. And Princess Bubblegum sees herself as "just a person." The leader of Ooo has had a lot of shades added to her over the years, and her acceptance, or at least attempt to vindicate the idea that she's no longer a god on high, but a part of the community, on the same level as her creations, is a nice grace note to the opening of the season where we see her bitter and disappointed at having been ousted by the candy people.

Because at the end of the day, she accepts and loves them. She's not the same PB who would mess with Banana Guard 16's brain; she's the one who recognizes that these big yellow dopes she's been frustrated by and indifferent to have special talents that she may never have imagined (and which, in a kind of weird sequence, drive Jake crazy). The idea that Finn and Bubblegum see that in them, that but for a few genetic bumps in the road, they can be different and unique and just as valid, thinking and feeling being as anyone else in Ooo, is a nice little breakthrough for the show. It's wonderful to see Adventure Time still adding wrinkles to its characters and its world as it closes out the show's seventh season.

(Also, Banana Guard 16 was giving me mild flashbacks to "Princess Cookie.")

What a great episode, likely edging out the previous X-mas episode as my favorite of the series so far. The basis of the satire being that these two families are so much alike, and yet a simple disagreement over the proper translation of one word of the Lord's Prayer makes each treat the other like heathens is pretty perfect. It reminds me of the "People's Front of Judea" bit from Life of Brian, but this episode take's the ridiculousness of that premise and grounds in Orel's human response to it.

This show tends to go pretty broad, but little details like Orel being compelled to say "debtors" instead of "trespassers" at the encouragement of a girl he likes, only to quickly feel guilty about it, was a very honest little moment, and the idea of a "repressional" while admittedly a bit on-the-nose, is a good way to dramatise the way people are encouraged to just try to ignore the things that are bothering them. Aside from satirizing the ridiculousness of religions and cultures or all kinds dividing themselves based on, what Bart Simpson once described as the "little stupid differences" instead of the "big stupid sames," which the episode very much succeeds at it, it also does well at showing the human cost of that.

Orel's little romance with Christine (the most amusing joke of the episode was the description of her as "little tiny Christ"), felt like a thumbnail sketch of the challenges people from different religions and cultures face when they're attracted to one another, and it was legitimately affecting when they had to wave goodbye to one another as her family moved away. The fact that Shapey and his other-family counterpart switched without anyone noticing (and Clay shrugging it off entirely) was the satirical cherry on top. Best ep of the whole thing so far.

Update 9/22/16: This was the episode Tatiana used as her Emmy submission and won with.

So my fave ship from Season 1 is finally reunited. Propane (Rachel x Windows), how I've missed thee. Never part again.

And, of course, if something is given, something has to be taken away, so apparently this is goodbye to my dear Beth. I have to say that this season's Beth arc was easily one of my favorite things that has happened on this show. It gave this show the much needed boost it needed after last season's Castor debacle. Sarah seeing Beth again while on the bridge near the train station broke me. When Beth said "We need you." I almost lost it.

The main two questions I need answered now are: Where the hell is Helena? I can understand why she left, but that doesn't explain why we haven't seen her. The woman is pregnant with twins and I need to know she's okay. And of course, is Delphine alive or not? It's been 7 episodes since she was shot and all we know is that Krystal saw someone pick her up and she was still alive at that time. If she is alive, I bet she shows up in the last seconds of the season finale or Cosima gets some phone call from her at the end of the episode.

This season is jockeying back and forth with Season 1 in the favorite season department. Actually, I think when the season is over, I'm going to watch Season 1 and Season 4 back to back.

Sometimes you have to cross a line. Sometimes, you do everything right; you do everything the way you believe that it should be done, and you still lose. Your forbearance, your good deeds, your extra effort to do the right thing, only enabled the bad guys, only let them profit from their misbehavior. So you have to make compromises. You have break some of the rules yourself; you have to sully yourself by playing their game; you have to be like the bad guys to beat the bad guys, for the greater good.

These are the thoughts motivating Mike Ehrmantraut as he wraps his hands around the rifle he'd previously shied away from. But they're the same ones going through Chuck's head as he tricks his brother into incriminating himself on tape.

Mike has a code. He doesn't want to kill people. His shaky hand after his run-in with Hector's henchmen shows he doesn't even want to hurt people. And he certainly doesn't want an innocent person to come to harm because of a choice he makes. But as Asimov explored in the short stories involving his Three Laws of Robotics, sometimes these principles conflict; sometimes they pull a person in different directions and force them to make some hard choices.

The eminently capable Mr. Ehrmantraut tried to abide by his no-kill policy, and still deliver a blow to his erstwhile rival. He tried to exact his vengeance on Hector in a way that would take the crime boss out of the picture, but also keep the innocents out of harm's way, and insulate himself and his family from the Salamancas' reach. Instead, it all goes sideways. Bad luck keeps the cops off of Hector's trail. A Good Samaritan loses their life in the exchange. And the man Mike went to great lengths to leave still kicking is summarily executed in the desert.

Mike tried. He tried very, very hard to have his cake and eat it too, to earn the money that he thinks will help him buy his soul back after the death of his son, to dip his toe in the mud without getting too dirty. He tried, and he lost anyway.

So it's come to this -- a sniper's nest overlooking a Salamanca hideout in the harshness of the New Mexico desert. His silent vow not to take a life, his distaste for snuffing out another man's existence, have to be put aside. More harm will be done--at least in the final tally--if he doesn't violate that code. He buys the sort of weapon he turned down the last time he considered killing a Salamanca. He sets up from his far away vantage point, to where his enemies seem to be in miniature -- tiny lives off in the distance. He lines up his shot. And he waits.

Then, that pesky moral code comes back again. At the moment of truth, Nacho stands between him and Hector. The greater good says do it. The pure utilitarian says that Hector will continue to inflict misery and pain, that Nacho isn't exactly an angel himself, and that a semi-innocent man will be killed regardless of whether Mike shoots or doesn't, so he may as well take out the real bad guy in the process. The retributivist says that Hector deserves it, for threatening a little girl, for ordering the death of an innocent person, for having a man killed who may not be nearly as innocent, but whose only crime in Hector's eyes was succumbing to Mike's scheme.

But Mike can't. He just can't. It's the reason he caught a beating instead of taking a life in the first place. It's the reason he gave Nacho half of his money for taking the rap for Tuco. It's the reason he's spurred on to right this wrong in the first place. Only the people who kill the innocent--Hector Salamanca, Matty's murderers--deserve to die, and Mike just doesn't have it in him to stomach the collateral damage that would come along with preventing Hector from hurting anyone else. The moment passes; another undeserved death takes place, and Mike waits once more.

Until the sound of his car horn calls him away. He finds a branch lodged between the seat and the steering wheel, calling his attention to a note with a simple message -- "don't." Someone is smart enough to know what Mike is up to, and has a different plan. Who is that someone? [Speculative Spoilers here -- an enterprising redditor found that if you take the first letters of all the episode titles in Season 2, they make an anagram for the phrase "Fring's Back."] We don't know for sure yet. But it's someone who wants to stop Mike from going through with it. Mike is ready; he's been pushed past his limit and he's ready to do what needs to be done, but his conscience and outside forces keep him from crossing that line.

Chuck has no such limitations, either from within or without. But the episode's cold open gives us a window into what drives him, what's shaped the way he looks at his brother. Chuck has tried to be an upstanding man, at least from his own perspective. While Jimmy is reminiscing about a crazy time at their mother's birthday party, Chuck only remembers everyone else having to clean up Jimmy's mess, literally and figuratively. While Jimmy strolls off to grab a sandwich, Chuck waits dutifully with his comatose mom. And when he's alone, he breaks down. Chuck may seem heartless at times, but he is still a man of feeling, and his quickly recovered demeanor when the nurse comes in suggests that, like Hamlin, he may put on a mask to project the image he thinks he needs to uphold, regardless of how he really feels.

Then his mother lurches back to life for just a moment, and Chuck is captivated once more. But with her final breath, does she call for the son who stayed by her side? The one Who made something of himself? The one who was there to help his parents rather than exploit them? No, she calls for Jimmy. The hurt, the jealousy in Chuck's eyes looms large. This is the final insult, the last thumb in his eyes that for all Chuck's good deeds, for all his effort to do right, to be right, everyone, even his own Mother, loves the personable Jimmy McGill just a little bit more. Chuck keeps their mother's final words from his brother--better to keep him from enjoying the fruits of his misbegotten labors--but their sting lingers.

(Incidentally, it's a great little swerve to show Jimmy waiting beside at the hospital, only to then reveal his brother sitting next to him, letting the audience know that this is a flashback and not the aftermath of Chuck's incident at the copy shop.)

That's how Chuck processes these events, and that's what's lurking in the back of his mind when he realizes that Jimmy has sabotaged him. Jimmy can't be allowed to him win. He can't continue to prosper and benefit from stepping outside the lines just because he knows how to work a crowd. He can't be a bad actor and still be rewarding by living so large and so well on the back of so many lies and cheats and shortcuts. As Jesse Pinkman so memorably put it, he can't keep getting away with it.

To prevent that, to expose Jimmy for what Chuck thinks he really is, he has to take a page out of his brother's playbook. Chuck's plan to entrap his brother into confessing his misdeeds on tape is nigh-Machiavellian, but also feels like the sort of scheme that Jimmy himself would cook up.

One of the interesting things about Better Call Saul as its developed over the course of two seasons is the way it's explored the idea that as different as Chuck and Jimmy seem on the surface, there's a great deal of common ground between them. Chuck's shown a certain duplicitousness before -- in how he's used Howard as his hatchet man or pushed his partner to punish Kim as a way of getting to Jimmy. But this is something different, something more elaborate and even sinister. The layers to to Chuck's ruse, the misdirection, the orchestration, the cleverness in how he pulls it off all reek of Slippin' Jimmy. The younger McGill brother may be more personable, but there's a craftiness that he and Chuck share. Chuck may not have his brother's golden tongue, but he still knows what buttons to push when it comes to the CEO of Mesa Verde, and he knows how to pull off a plan as meticulous, manipulative, and perfectly-calculated as any of Jimmy's.

What's ironic about is that at the same time Chuck is becoming more like the man he misguidedly believes his brother to be, Jimmy is doing the same, but in the opposite direction. "Klick" may be the most overtly moral and upstanding we've ever seen Jimmy be. He rushes into the copy shop and starts directing traffic to get his brother some help, even though it will expose his attempt to cover his tracks. (And kudos to Michael McKean, who was amazing throughout the episode, but was especially good in his wordless but meaningful reaction when he sees Jimmy as he regains consciousness.) He stays by his brother's side throughout Chuck's recovery. He draws a line in the sand that despite everything that's happened, he won't commit Chuck, because it's not what he brother would want. He agonizes over subjecting Chuck to those tests even if he believes it's in Chuck's own best interests. He gives up his temporary guardianship even if it would leave Chuck, as he puts it, right where Jimmy wants him. He has a look of guilt when he watches the commercial he worked so hard to make and realizes he hasn't quite lived up to being the paragon of honesty and virtue he presents himself as.

And in the end, he confesses to his brother. Jimmy comes clean when he believes that the chain of events he set in motion caused Chuck to retire and dive even deeper into his psychosis. Jimmy may not believe he's really risking his career or his livelihood by doing so, but he is exposing himself, making a sacrifice by playing into Chuck's image of him. Jimmy absolutely loves his brother, and after all the effort he put into covering up his misdeeds, the lengths he went to in order to prevent Chuck from confirming his suspicions, the thought of his actions wounding his brother deeply motivates Jimmy to lay it all out there for him.

What's so tragic and deplorable is that Chuck is taking advantage of that. He's using his brother's love to hurt him. In a way, he's making the same choice Jimmy did when he obtained temporary guardianship over Chuck and forced him to take those tests at the hospital. He's taking the choice out of his brother's hands, because he doesn't trust him to make the right one. But it's also cravenly manipulative. Chuck is playing on Jimmy's own deep-seated concerns for him in order to undermine him. There's something especially cruel in the poetry of that, something that feels particularly wrong about turning someone's care for you against them in such a cold and calculated fashion.

It can be hard to explain what makes Better Call Saul great because so often it comes out in the little things. It may be the direction and editing, which convey Chuck's disorientation by flipping his perspective upside down beneath the hospital lights, or communicating Kim's pride in Jimmy by putting her beaming smile in the frame as his commercial plays. It may be the small but significant performance of the doctor who looks after Chuck, who manages to be a steady and caring voice of reason between each of the mercurial McGill brothers. It may be the little bits of dry comedy in an episode as significant as "Klick," from the "no offense," "none taken," exchange between Mike and the arms who wipes his prints off the rifle, to Ernesto's beleaguered wish that he was back in the mail room. Or it may be something like the quiet moment where Ernesto explains to Jimmy why he lied on his behalf -- for the simple reason that Chuck seemed out to get him, and Jimmy's his friend.

That, more than Chuck's fierce intelligence, more than Jimmy's golden tongue, more than one brother's pride and the other's lack of shame, is what truly distinguishes the McGill brothers from one another. When Jimmy plies his trade these days, when he employs a little subterfuge, he's usually trying to help people -- sometimes himself, but also the woman he loves and people like the seniors at Sandpiper. When things go awry, when it looks like people will really be hurt, he doesn't sit on the sidelines; he acts to rectify his mistakes, whether it's by talking Tuco into commuting the death sentences of his twin collaborators in the desert, or by admitting his actions to his brother to prevent Chuck from giving up his life and his sanity. Jimmy is far from pure, but he cares and he tries, and people like Ernesto see that.

But Chuck only uses those same skills to hurt people. Sure, he justifies it by seeing himself as an agent of morality, as it being part and parcel with his self-given duty to uphold what's right and just in this world. And yet even if he thinks what he does is for the greater good, when push comes to shove, Chuck uses that craftiness to deny his brother the seat at the table that he'd earned, to punish Kim for Jimmy's transgressions since she was the only one within reach, to wrest away a client when someone more deserving had done the legwork, and to incriminate a brother whose confession he was only able to wring out because of Jimmy's love and concern for him. Jimmy serves individuals; Chuck serves some greater sense of righteousness, and unlike Mike, he cares little for who's caught in the crossfire.

Chuck has a very personal, very exacting moral code, and it leads him to hurt the people who care about him the most. Jimmy's ethical mores are much more fluid, much more apt to let the ends justify the means, but he means to do good, more or less, and to help people, especially those close to him. And Mike is somewhere in the middle, intent on protecting the most important people in his life, trying to live up to the high moral standards he sets for himself even as he gets his hands dirty, and most of all trying not to hurt anyone in the process. "Klick" wraps its characters in these little moral conundrums, and teases out the connections and distinctions between its heroes and its villains as each tries to find their way out of them, and the lines they are and are not willing to cross to do it.

I absolutely did not understand this episode but...I still liked it? Does that make any sense?

I often find myself tempted to delve into symbol hunting and interpretation when trying to unravel Adventure Time's headier episodes, but that can leave me removed from how an episode made me feel. And that, after all, is the ultimate goal of art, right? To provoke some kind of response, some sort of emotion in the watcher?

So here's what I got. The entire episode, Finn is trying to find a way out, to hang onto something, "breadcrumb" style to where he can go back the way he came. This whole dungeon is a puzzle that he keeps trying to figure out, and every time he thinks he's got it, every time he believes that he has an exit, it sucks him back in.

So after dozens of different methods, he eventually stops trying to backtrack and just lets go. He kisses Jake goodbye. He gets a thread caught, a way to go back the way he came, and he gets rid of it; he gets rid of all his clothes and says "no egress."

There's a big part of me that wants to compare it to Sartre's No Exit, another instance where the main characters were trapped with no escape. And I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some connection there. But more than anything, there's a firmly present idea that it's only when Finn is able to let go, to stop trying to find a way back from what brought him to where he is, that he's able to move forward.

As I recall, there was a similar message in the doom train episode, that the adventure was a way for Finn to avoid confronting his feelings. This seemed to be a different shade of existentialism, some kind of idea about blocking it all out, and then finding some kind of enlightenment at the end (a place that matches up with Finn's map), before finding oneself again.

The episode made me feel Finn's loss, his sense of inevitably, that no matter what he did, he could either keep his eyes closed forever or let go of his attachments until he found his way back for real. Again, there's a lot to unpack, but there was something tragic about Finn's wandering and something unbelievably joyous when he breaks through. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something, but more than that, it was an interesting, mind-bending episode that has hints of inscrutability, but also of profundity, and I found myself captivated even when I wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

It's difficult to build tension and stakes in a prequel to some degree, and the problem is magnified the closer you are to the familiar part of the timeline. If you already know who lives and who dies, who has to reach a certain point of the larger narrative unscathed, it can deflate some of the excitement and intrigue of a particular storyline.

On the other hand, it can also heighten the tension in an episode, by spotlighting the mystery between the known beginning and the known ending. As Better Call Saul sets up Nacho calling a hit on Tuco, we know that Tuco lives; we know that Mike lives, and thanks to the opening scene, we know that Mike gets ridiculously roughed up, presumably in the attempt. It all raises the question of how we get from A-to-B. Does the hit go wrong? Does Mike beg off from Nacho and get a beating for his troubles? In true Breaking Bad fashion does some unexpecting intervening factor come into play that throws the whole situation out of whack? We don't know, but we want to know, and that's just part of the masterful job that BCS does in using its prequel status as a benefit and not a drawback when it comes to holding the audience's attention and interest.

It also does so by firmly establishing its characters' motivations without making them feel obvious or blatant. The closest "Gloves Off" comes is Nacho explaining why he's trying to take out Tuco. It takes a little prodding from Mike, but Nacho explains why he would want to be rid of the notably mercurial Tuco in a satisfying way that coheres with what he already know about him. Tuco is unpredictable. Beyond what we've seen in Breaking Bad, he has to be talked down multiple times in the desert with Saul, and it's perfectly plausible that he would be even more temperamental when using, which lines up with what we know of him from his run-ins with Walter White. Temperamental is bad for business, and it makes sense that somebody who seems cool, collected, and perceptive like Nacho would want that unpredictable element taken out of his calculus and his livelihood.

And then there's Mike, who is increasingly feels like the most down-to-earth incarnation of Batman there's ever been (and please, someone cast Jonathan Bank in a The Dark Knight Returns adaptation while there's still time). At some point, Mike Ehrmentraut's moral code, and his supreme ability to assess a situation and find the best option could hit the implausibility button a little too hard. But for now, it's a joy to see him listening to Nacho's (fairly well-reasoned) plan for Tuco and then poking holes in it before coming up with a better one, and eventually, an even better (if both more and less costly) one after that. There's a world-weary certainty to Mike, a sense that he's seen this all before and he knows the angles before anyone else does.

That's why the moral element to his storyline is vital and captivating. Taking a life is rarely something that's treated lightly in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. One of the most interesting aspects of Walter White's descent in Breaking Bad is the way that his killing escalated, from self-defense with Krazy-8 (who cameos here), to his failure to act to save Jane, to his more active vehicular activities to save Jesse, until making deals with neo-nazis and calling hits of his own.

But we know Mike's motivated not to do that, not to reach that point, and also that he will eventually. He doesn't have the "Mr. Chips-to-Scarface" transition that Walt does--we've already seen that he's killed the dirty cops who took out Matty--but there's a different between that and doing random hits for a big payday from various drug dealers, something the audience knows he eventually makes his peace with.

I bring up the Batman comparison with Mike because despite the difference in tone of their source material, they fit surprisingly well together. Both are gruff, both are uber-capable, and both, at this point at least, have a code against killing. There have been a lot of different interpretations of The Bat's reasons for this, but one of the most persistent is the idea that if he crossed that line, he wouldn't able to stop himself from killing every two-bit punk who crossed him, that it would be the easy solution to too many problems that required a more measured response.

But one of the interesting things about "Gloves Off" is that it comes close to positing the opposite for Mike. When Mike's going over his rifle options with the arms dealer we first met in Breaking Bad, he comes upon an old bolt-action rifle and makes clear that (in addition to his expert knowledge of rifles) that he's used one and is more than familiar with them. The scene intimates that Mike fought in Vietnam, that he he's seen the horrors of war, and likely bitten off more than his fair share of it. It's not a far leap to think that Mike killed people in war, that he was probably damn good at it, and that despite the avenging impulses that spurred him to take out Matt's killers, he has no taste for it.

When Nacho pays Mike and asks him why he would give up twice the payoff for a tenth of the effort, we already know the answer. Mike has a code. But he isn't Batman; he's already crossed that line and seen and felt what it does to a person, and that reminder, a symbol of that time, is enough to make him earn his money the hard way to avoid having to dip his toe into those waters once again. The sequence where Mike provokes Tuco, with his corny payphone accent and road rage argument is fun and it's clever and it's brutal. But it's the cumulative result of all Mike's seen and done, of who he is, and it makes those bruises we see him packing frozen vegetables onto more meaningful and important, both to the series and to the character.

It would be too much and too far to call Jimmy's story an afterthought in "Gloves Off", but his is clearly the B-story of the episode, despite the pretty significant fireworks between Jimmy and his bosses, his girlfriend, and his brother. The chickens have come home to roost from what we witnessed in "Amarillo". Jimmy is on incredibly thin ice with his employers, and also with Kim, who's been shunted down to the basement as punishment for his sins.

These scenes tease out a great deal of the core of Jimmy's character as well. One of the things I love about Chuck McGill as a character is that he is often wrongheaded or petty or unduly harsh, but there's a germ of truth to most of the things he says, even if he bends that truth to suit his needs. Chuck's not wrong when he tells his brother that he always seem to think that the ends justify the means, that if Jimmy can get the right result, what does it matter how he gets there? It's a striking moment when Clifford Main disabuses Jimmy of the notion that the partners' anger is about the money spent, or that the success of Jimmy's plan mitigates what upset them in any way.

Instead, it's the fact that he circumvented them, that he knew (despite his protestations to the contrary) how they were likely to feel about it, and rather than confronting them directly and trying to argue his case, he went with the mentality that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. That mentality blew up in his face here, and not only did the blowback threaten the promising position he's lucky to have here, but it hurt someone he loves. Jimmy cannot help breaking the rules, and his golden tongue has almost always offered him a way out of any real consequences. Here, that doesn't fly, and his bad behavior takes down Kim with him.

"Gloves Off" ties together the three big factors we know motivate Jimmy: his inability to color within the lines; his desire to be with and do right by Kim; and his jumbled up resentment, love, and desire for approval from his brother. The scene where Jimmy and Chuck confront one another, like most scenes between them, is dynamite in how it teases out more of Chuck's perspective and personality, and leans into the tremendous, complicated dynamic between the two brothers.

Is it too much to suggest that Chuck might be playing sick, or at least embellishing how bad he feels once Jimmy arrives? He seems surprised that Jimmy is still there in the morning, and it's hard to say whether Chuck is above using such tactics to avoid uncomfortable confrontations he could undoubtedly see coming. Better Call Saul has yet to dig into what specifically led Chuck down the path of his electrical sensitivity, but it would not surprise me to see it as a reaction to, and a way of avoiding, stress or trauma or something unpleasant in his life.

That's the crux of the confrontation between Jimmy and Chuck. Chuck still sees Jimmy as a shyster, as someone who bends the rules, who gooses the system, in order to get what he wants, regardless of what the risks are or whether other people have done it the hard way. And Jimmy confronts Chuck with his hypocrisy, that Chuck can't outright say that he wants Jimmy out of the legal practice and that he'd leverage Kim to put pressure on Jimmy to that effect because that would be extortion and that would be against the rules. But even if he can't say it out loud, or admit, even to himself, that that's what he's doing, Chuck has his less than savory ways of getting the result he wants too. He uses Hamlin as his proxy and hatchetman; he subtly undercuts his brother and puts the screws to him and the woman his brother cares for, all under the guise of keeping things proper. And yet, he sees himself as quite above the fray.

There's more than a bit of Jimmy in Chuck. There's a sense that Chuck too knows what levers to pull, what buttons to push, to make things happen, but while Jimmy, to some degree or another, owns what he is and not only acknowledges its utility but can't escape it, Chuck is in denial, and convinced that he is a saint simply trying to keep order with an agent of discord who's threatening to topple the applecart and make a mockery of all he holds dear. And in between them, Kim is willing to fall on the sword, even when she'll be hurt by the result, because it's the right thing to do, and despite her extracurricular activities helping Jimmy con Ken Wins, the right thing comes far more naturally to her than to Jimmy, or even the petty Chuck.

Even though they never interact, "Gloves Off" draws a contrast between Mike and Chuck here. Mike knows what his goal is, sees what it would cost to his soul in order to get it, and without seeking praise or understanding, suffers more to get something less, but to keep something greater. Chuck, on the other hand, won't do the dirty work. He won't demote Kim himself; he won't be direct with his brother, because he can't suffer the minor indignities even as he's trying to bring about what he sees as the greater good. Mike acts with honor even when he's on the wrong side of the line; Chuck can't let himself be the bad guy even when he thinks he's in the right, and Jimmy is stuck in the middle, trying to figure out his place in a world where he's punished if he breaks the rules, but worries that he can't succeed without doing so.

Better Call Saul is great when it comes to contrasts, especially when it comes to its two most significant characters (who are, incidentally, its two legacy characters from Breaking Bad). "Amarillo" shows Jimmy as a man trying to do the wrong thing, or at least the underhanded thing, and being pushed to do the right one by those closest to him. It also shows Mike as a man trying to do the right thing, the right way, and having him pushed back toward crime and the seedier side of his new home because of those closest to him.

We know that Jimmy McGill tends toward the con, toward the misdirection, toward the razzle dazzle in an "ends justify the means" sort of way. So when we see him pay off a bus driver from a local Sandpiper nursing home in Texas (with a beautifully shot opening of our hero dressed in white against the Lone Star State's flag painted on the side of a building to boot), it's par for the course. There's something intoxicating for Jimmy, and for the audience, to see him work his magic on that bus full of seniors. Sure, there's something a little underhanded about it--even part from the payoff, it feels like he's manipulating them more than a little bit with his "send your nephew to talk to the manager routine--but he's so damn good at it! If there's one thing viewers love and admire, it's talent and competence, and Jimmy is a talented, more than competent client outreach specialist.

I promise, at some point I will stop comparing this show to Breaking Bad, but it's hard not to see the parallels between Walter White and Jimmy McGill here. I'm not suggesting that there's the same sort of pride or evil lurking within Jimmy that there was as Walter slowly let Heisenberg out of his cage. But both Walter and Jimmy are very good at something (making meth and talking their way into/out of anything respectively) and that makes them each loathe to give up plying their trade even when the rules make it a dangerous proposition. Each knows where their talents lie, and know what got them to where they are, and each is unhappy, if not afraid, of the idea of letting go of that and risking ending up back where they started.

Besides, when it comes to Jimmy's situation here, what's the harm, right? It might not be totally above board to walk the line between following up on a mailer and soliciting, but he's not taking advantage of these people. He's trying to help them! Sure, he's helping himself at the same time, but there's no real victim here.

Then, we run into Chuck, sitting across the table from his brother and pouring cold water on Clifford and Jimmy's good news about the number of clients Jimmy managed to sign up. It's a wonderful sequence in the episode, and one of the things that makes it interesting is the way that Hamlin and Clifford both realize this is a family feud and try to stay neutral, diplomatic, and supportive of both sides in the argument.

And it's quick, but it's a hell of an argument. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister once describes his own sibling as more than capable of using true feelings for something false. In that vein, I love situations like the one presented here, where Chuck is 100% right about the concerns he expresses about Jimmy's outreach efforts, and yet not exactly for the right reasons. Jimmy's brother isn't wrong when he points out that any questions about the way their legal team obtained their clients, especially with seniors, leaves them vulnerable in a way that could torpedo the case. And he's also not wrong to be suspicious of Jimmy wrangling 20+ clients while following up on a single mail-in response, particularly given what he knows about Jimmy's past behavior and what he (rightfully) suspects about his current behavior.

It's a risky, arguably foolish thing that Jimmy did. And Chuck's rightfully pointing that out, but coming from him it feels petty. Chuck's made it clear that even if it's bound up with his own sense of pride in his work and accomplishments, he can't shake his skeptical, dismissive view of his brother. Chuck may very well be legitimately and earnestly concerned that Jimmy is going to poison this whole deal. Maybe Chuck even thinks that given Jimmy's financial stake in the outcome, he's saving his brother from himself on that front. But it also can't help but feeling like he's trying to just knock a brother he doesn't believe in down a peg, to try to show that he doesn't belong here. The contrast between those two things--asking the right questions but for the wrong reasons, with so much bad blood there--makes it an endlessly interesting little scene.

Jimmy, of course, uses the same skill he did his fellow attorneys that he did with those seniors. He comes up with a plausible story; he sells it to the assembled with little trouble, and a despite the uncomfortable air between them, he managed to shut his brother up. But Chuck is, no doubt, unconvinced, and neither is the only other person in that room who knows Jimmy well enough to smell his B.S. In contrast to the last time the two of them were in the boardroom together, Kim moves away from Jimmy's advances under the table, because even if she doesn't say it, she agrees with Chuck.

And as sorry as I am to go back to the well of Breaking Bad, it makes me worry that she'll receive the same kind of reaction that Skyler did. Without delving into the thorny issues of sexism, at base, people don't like to see their protagonists thwarted. Jimmy is the main character of Better Call Saul. We get the show through his perspective, and that means that, consciously or unconsciously, we're psychologically on his side. We're with him on this journey, even if in the back of our minds we can acknowledge the actions that he takes as morally questionable. Storytelling is constructed to make the listener sympathetic to the person the story's about. That creates a risk that someone like Chuck, with sketchy motives, comes off worse despite the legitimacy of his concerns, and between this and the end of the prior episode, it risks turning Kim into something audiences like even less -- a scold.

Kim has more or less replaced Chuck as the cricket on Jimmy McGill's shoulder, as the person in his life who keeps him aspiring to be better and do better. Chuck's admonition at the table doesn't move Jimmy; it just gives him cause to strike back. But Kim's response causes him to interrupt and emphasize that yes, in fact, all of his client outreach will be above board.

And when we see Kim push back against Jimmy after the meeting, she offers a damn good reason for why she took Jimmy's news with the same skepticism that Chuck did. She put her neck out for Jimmy. He is, if not a nobody, than a hustling public defender who would have otherwise had to spend years in the pit before he ever had a chance to so much as sniff a partner track job like the one Kim finagled for him. She put herself out there for Jimmy, with her boss, with her colleagues, and with her own reputation and prospects at stake. She's absolutely right when she says that everything Jimmy does in this job reflects on her and her judgment, and that Jimmy doesn't just have himself to worry about when he's scheming and flim-flamming his way into more clients.

There it is. Suddenly that incredibly amusing, downright charming scene with Jimmy on the bus seems a little more sinister, a little less harmless. While adding more wronged individuals to the class seems like a good thing on the surface, if it's done in a way that doesn't pass muster, it could mess up a good portion of the case and leave the HHM/Davis & Main team playing from behind when trying to pursue justice for these people. And if it goes wrong, if Jimmy is chastised for stepping outside the lines, it could also screw over the person who stood up for him and put him in a position to have a seat at the table, the person whom he seems to love.

But what's great is that the show does the opposite with Mike. Mike is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. He's trying to do right by his son, by his daughter-in-law, by his granddaughter, and that, ironically, pushes him to use his skills and talents in a way that he's not necessarily inclined to -- to help criminals. Mike is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

And what's so striking about it is that Mike knows he's being taken for a ride. When Stacey left a pregnant pause after telling Mike about her money troubles back in Season 1, it was a nod toward the idea that she wanted support from him, but there was enough ambiguity as to whether or not she really meant it, whether she was specifically trying to guilt Mike or, rather, just venting her anxieties to a sympathetic ear without any ulterior motives.

But that wiggle room pretty much goes out the window in "Amarillo". The question now is whether Stacey is deliberately and intentionally playing on Mike's guilt, or whether it's merely something subconscious. But the phantom bullet mark, not to mention the token resistance she puts up to Mike's suggestion that Stacey and her daughter come live with him before immediately agreeing to it suggest the former rather than the latter.

That makes Mike seem noble even as he slowly but surely starts heading down a path that we know will lead him to "big time jobs for big time pay." He doesn't want to be a criminal, at least not at a lethal level. What's more, he knows he's being taken advantage of in some sense, that, at a minimum, Stacey isn't just being straightforward with him and asking for help and support, but laying on guilt trips and making up stories to get him to intervene, with the knowledge that he's too broken up about his role in what happened to Matty that he can't resist. So Mike compromises some of his principles. He steps back into a world he seemed to be trying to avoid, all in an effort to do the right thing.

Nobility comes less naturally to Jimmy than it does to Mike, but poked and prodded or not, he too tries to do the right thing. It's heartening to see Jimmy using his creativity to succeed within the rules rather than to find clever ways to get around them. Again, his idea of a targeted commercial, based on his intimate knowledge and diligence about the schedules of the folks at Sandpiper, is fairly genius and perceptive.

When we see him constructing the commercial, it shows his innate understanding of human nature, of how to affect and have an impact on his target audience. The fact that he's channeling it into something legitimate, that he's succeeding even when boxed in a bit, is an encouraging sign. By the same token, it's hard not to feel proud for him when Kim watches the commercial, put together by Jimmy and a couple of college students, and walks away impressed with him. She is, after all, a big reason why he's doing this rather than continuing his less-savory ways of finding clients, so her approval is big.

It's also heartening to see him try to work his magic on the phone system, just like he did when sequestered in the back room of the nail salon, and see the results of his work roll in. There's such a great bit of tension in the air in those moments where we wait to see whether Jimmy's ad-buy scheme is going to work. His frantic dissecting of the gameplan with his subordinate conveys how anxious he is about the whole thing, how much is riding on this play for him. That makes the moments where the phones start lighting up, where it all falls into place, that much more exciting, for Jimmy and for us.

But that excitement is short-lived. Even when Jimmy's doing right; he's doing it wrong. He doesn't run the ad by Clifford. He thinks about it. He comes close. But at the end of the day, he just can't face the risk of failure or rejection. He can't face the possibility that he has this brilliant thing he put his heart and soul into, and that someone could tell him no. That's Jimmy's game -- do whatever you think needs doing, and bet on the fact that the results will justify whatever actions you took to get there.

The problem is that Jimmy isn't just betting on himself here. He's gambling with Kim's reputation, with his brother's I-told-you-so's, with whatever ethical rules for attorney advertising he may or may not have paid particularly close attention to when making the ad that could, again, jeopardize the case as a whole. Jimmy is trying. He is trying so hard in the best way he knows how to both keep things above board but achieve at what he sets out to do, and that's why he's sympathetic but also complicated.

And yet even as he tries, there's a piece of Slippin' Jimmy still left in him, a part of him that thinks the best way to show Kim and Chuck that he's worthy of their love and respect is simply to succeed, and that the ends will justify the means. The tragedy is if that effort, motivated by a desire to show those close to him what he's made of, is what drives them from him, and turns him into the relatively scruple-free huckster we come to know down the road.