Today is my last day as the “older man,” for a while. Tomorrow my wife joins me in the fifties. Will one of her gifts be a rainstorm? Remains to be seen. They keep promising rain, but then they back off and act all skeptical. There’s a very real chance that this tropical system that looked so promising for us will skate off to the east. That would suck.
Cemetery Dance has a new partnership with FEARNet.com and I’ve agreed to write the occasional short piece for them. My first one went up today. I called it King of the eBooks, being a brief history of Stephen King’s experiences with electronic publication, which dates back farther than you probably realize.
We finished the first season of Breaking Bad last night. I’d forgotten that there were only seven episodes. My wife was sufficiently hooked for me to order the next two seasons. I also picked up Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection at a bargain price on Amazon. We saw the trailer for the reboot starring Maria Bellow at the movie theater on the weekend. We’re both fans of Helen Mirren and I remember seeing bits and pieces of this back in the day. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years or so since it first aired.
I’m also keeping up with the current run of Breaking Bad and keeping the episodes on DVR to watch again when we catch up. In general it’s Walt or Jesse who has his back against the wall on this show, but it now seems to be Gus who is in trouble. And if he’s in trouble, how much of that will roll downhill to his cooks? Remains to be seen. Gus had a sit-down with a representative of the cartel and it only looked like a negotiation was going to take place. He offers $50 million in reparations for whatever offense he is accused of. Instead, cartel guy told Gus the way it was going to be. Mike is worried enough about the situation to give Jesse a gun and offer to teach him how to shoot.
Meanwhile, Jesse’s hovering around looking for a chance to poison Gus, on Walt’s orders. (“What about Mike?” Jesse asks. “Please. One homicidal maniac at a time.”) Walt had floated the idea of hiring a hitman past Saul, who was horrified. He’s not the Craig’s List of Soldiers of Fortune, he says. This was after Walt trashed the car that he bought for Walt Jr after Skyler forced him to take it back…for an $800 restocking fee. Ended up costing him $52,000 bucks but it’s only money, right? He’s bringing in $275,000 every two weeks, much to Skyler’s astonishment. No car wash in the world makes $7 million a year, she tells him.
The interesting thing about Gus is that he’s made himself such a respectable member of the community that Hank’s colleagues are hesitant to believe Hank when he suggests that Gus might be involved in the drug business. His line of reasoning started with a receipt for a very expensive HEPA filter and a note in Gale’s possession on a Pollo Hermanos napkin. Gale was a vegan. What would he be doing at a fried chicken restaurant. Hank gets Gus’s fingerprints and confirms that Gus was in Gale’s apartment at some point. Intersting.
It seems like Brenda and Captain Raydor are working closer and closer on The Closer, no pun intended. They no longer seem like adversaries. And you don’t want to be Raydor’s adversary. Witness how handy she was with the beanbag shotgun, hitting the guy between the eyes from a good distance. I got a kick out of Brenda’s new lawyer, Gavin, played by Mark Pellegrino (aka Jacob from Lost). During the final scenes, Brenda used her reputation from the Tyrell case to browbeat one of the culprits into confessing, with Gavin watching. And I just realized that the guy who plays Sanchez was the crazy drug dealer Paco from season one of Breaking Bad. So, is there a mole? If so, who? Gavin seems less concerned about that than Raydor was.
Today’s subject line was uttered by Dr. Isaac Parish (Wil Wheaton) on Eureka after he found out that he wasn’t chosen for the mission and Fargo was. The series wrapped shooting its last episode yesterday.
More interesting developments on Torchwood.
Meanwhile, Rex and Esther’s old CIA peeps have tracked them down. First it was Friedkin (Newman from Seinfeld), who is in the triumvirate’s pay. He arrives at Angelo’s mansion to arrest the Torchwooders for treason under the Miracle Security Act. He’s really there to beat his boss Shapiro (John de Lancie, Q from ST:TNG) to them. However, Rex tricks Friedkin into confessing while he’s wearing Gwen’s special lenses and transmitting the video to the monitors in Angelo’s bedroom. Guess he figured out that Gwen was lying about them being unique to her. John de Lancie is a breath of fresh air as the somewhat self-important, obnoxious CIA boss. “People seem to be talking over me, which is fascinating and rare. And forbidden!” When he arrests Olivia he says, “Tell her to line up her lawyers so I can piss on them. Long and hard.” He doesn’t get along with Gwen at all, and after she bites back at him a few times, he asks Rex, “Did you sleep with her? Because most people that bitter you’ve slept with.” And, finally, his assessment of Jack: “Waht is it with you, Red Baron? Have you got Snoopy up your ass?”
The first big surprise of the episode is that Angelo dies, actually dies, in front of Jack. (“You’ve got the only corpse on planet Earth.”) Seems he’s rummaged up some of Torchwood’s old relics from Cardiff and he has a null field generator under his bed that cancels out the Miracle. Shapiro thinks that might be the way to rectify the global problem, but Jack tells him they’d need a device as big as the Earth to fix the planet. Shapiro threatens to and then carries out on his promise to deport Gwen when Jack doesn’t cooperate up to his expectations. Friedkin has one last trick up his sleeve (literally), blowing himself up and taking Olivia along for the ride. Jack gets Rex and Esther to help him escape, but he’s badly wounded in the process.
Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well for Oswald. Apparently he’s about to be classified as a Category Zero person, a new grouping reserved for people who are to be sent to the ovens for moral reasons. Oswald is outraged. People love me, he cries. “Television loves you. Different thing,” Jilly tells him. The CIA has planted an agent as Jilly’s intern and her first job is to get sandwiches. Then a redheaded hooker named Claire (an inside joke about Lauren Ambrose’s character on Six Feet Under?) who is willing to debase herself for her client but isn’t willing to pretend he’s normal when he wants to take her out to dinner. Oswald goes nuts on Jilly, slapping then punching her. Then her contact from the family comes along and offers her a promotion (after he shoots the CIA plant—what good is that?
If this were a three-act film, I’d say we were definitely at the end of the second act. The world economy is in crisis, which may have been part of the triumvirate’s long-term goal. Pension funds are going bankrupt because pensioners aren’t dying. Banks are closing. People are volunteering to become Category One, including Esther’s sister. They’re calling it a disaster of Biblical proportions. And Jack is in the back seat of Esther’s car bleeding to death. Fun times!
