The week after a con is always a busy one, just scrambling to get back to where I was before I left. I don’t think I’m going to get any writing done this week. I have to read about 40 short stories by the end of the weekend for the contest I’m judging, so that should pretty much fill up my waking hours.
We had a strange shift in the weather. After many days in the nineties, the temperature dipped, going down to the low forties overnight. Today’s high is only 79°. For May, it’s unusual, but we’ll be getting back to something akin to normal in a day or so. Still virtually no rain, though.
Rob’s tribe on Survivor accomplished what rarely happens: the dominant group obliterated the one with fewer numbers. What usually happens is that someone waffles, doesn’t stick with the plan, and a strategic mistake is made to mess things up. Or the smaller faction starts winning immunity challenges or comes up with a hidden idol. The hidden idol hasn’t been much of a feature this year. Ralph wasted his, and Rob still has his tucked away and no one else knows about it. With his immunity win last night, that puts him in a pretty good position for the finals.
Poor Andrea gambled and lost. In her position, even though she thought she was safe, she made a play to win immunity and revealed her strength. That made her a double threat, so it was no big surprise that she went to Redemption Island. Though it looked like Steve threw the RI challenge, he said later that he gave it his best. I couldn’t believe that he still weighed 217 lbs when he made it to Ponderosa. He looked like a scarecrow. Does anyone believe that Philip has been pretending to be a nutjob for nearly a month? He claims that’s his strategy, but it’s hard to keep up a pretense like that for so long. Mike made an interesting choice regarding the “loved ones” after winning the “quadruel.” The wild card is who gets to go back after RI. If it’s someone from Zapatera, that person is going to have a lot of friends on the jury.
I was really glad to see Kynt and Vyxsin go on The Amazing Race last week. Kynt was beyond getting on my nerves. The search and rescue detour made me think of The Silent Land by Graham Joyce. Not sure I’d want Zev and Justin rescuing me based on the condition their dummy ended up in. Zev can be funny when he wants to. “I think there are too many cooks in the kitchen,” he observes when Flight Time (or was it Big Easy?) went off on Vyxsin. And bonus points for “Thanks, Captain Obvious” delivered to the woman who said the gnome was getting heavier because they were pouring chocolate into it.
I finally got caught up on last week’s Justified and watched the season finale, too. Wow. What a nice wrap-up. The aftermath of Raylan’s aunt’s murder was the first time Olyphant really reminded me of Seth Bullock from Deadwood. It was mostly in that dead-arm way he has of walking when everything’s bottled up inside. His scene with the prostitute when he was trying to find Dickie was pretty funny: Two pump chum. And I wonder how many people are old enough to get his reference to Quick Draw McGraw, who was one of my favorite comic characters when I was a kid.
Raylan’s musings at the graveside said it all: Under different circumstances, I’m certain plenty of people could have been happy here. And didn’t Ava look mighty fine in her funeral black?
And who would have guessed that Dickie would be the sole Bennett to survive the season? I thought for sure his days were numbered two or three episodes back. Then Raylan has a gun to his head and the end seems inevitable. The feud between the two families has been going on for the better part of a century. But when it came right down to it, Raylan had to honor the memory of his aunt, who sacrificed her life to raise her sister’s boy like he was her own so that he could live a better life. As he told Loretta later, everything would change with the pull of a trigger, and not for the better.
I was very happy with their decision to turn Loretta into the finale’s wild card. Things were hairy enough without her, but here was this independent-minded little girl dead set on finding out the truth about her daddy wandering through the mine field and walking right into the cavern of her enemy. (Funny, too, that her “taxi driver” was a guy who played Raylan Givens in Pronto.) “I’m tired of people telling me as much truth as they see fit,” she says after shooting Mags in the leg. She managed to avoid being hypnotized by Mags’ seductive monologue on the difficulties of holding onto a weapon and firing it for the first time, and had already delivered a Raylanesque line to Messer: “You make me pull my hand out of this bag, you might not like what it comes out with.” Apparently the writers weren’t sure how much Loretta would feature into the season beyond the first episode. A lot depended on the actress’s performance, and she was fantastic.
My favorite Raylan line, though, was the one he delivered to Loretta’s foster father, who didn’t want to reveal that Loretta had stolen his illegal gun. “Once you start lying to me there’s going to be a river between us with no bridge to cross.”
Doyle called his troops “knuckleheads,” and how true was that? When Loretta fired her shot, they just opened up and I have no idea what the heck they were shooting at. And Art got some of his best lines when he arrived on the scene with the cavalry. “Drop your weapons or you will be shot. Do you dumb peckerwoods understand English? On the ground, hillbillies.”
I’ve said this a bunch of times before, and I’ll say it again. The most threatening words that ever came out of Mags Bennett’s mouth were: “You thirsty, darling?” followed by “Do you want a drink?” I had a pretty good idea of what she was up to at the end and never for a moment worried that the spice had gone into the other glass of apple pie. It was a brilliant swan song for a terrific character, and if she doesn’t get an Emmy nomination there’s no justice.
What does next season have in store for us? Ava’s situation is unresolved, and what will Boyd think when he finds out that Raylan won’t be bringing Dickie back after “borrowing” him for a while. Will Boyd return to his old ways and run amok in Harlan County? And what will become of Harlan County when the coal miners arrive? (Will that even be important?) Winona saved Raylan’s bacon by going to Art, but will she stick around, especially now that she’s pregnant? I have to think that Glynco isn’t going to enter into the equation. “They’re always looking for guys like me,” Raylan says. “What, guys who shot people? You got that covered,” Art says. True dat.
