I think even if it took a convoluted explanation, the drug money - medical bill connection is pretty damning. $177,000 from a dying high school teacher? It absolutely would look like Hank knew his brother-in-law was illegally bringing in huge quantities of money and cooperated with him. And there's zero chance anyone at the DEA believes the "gambling" story (or believes that Hank would fall for it).
And Walt's Fring / Salamanca story is well backed up by evidence, as Hector asked specifically to visit with Hank immediately before returning to the nursing home to blow up Fring.
I imagine even someone loyal to Hank like Gomez might give more credence to Hank being the master mind that ineffectual Walt. He seemed suspicious of him this episode for the Pinkman thing. As viewers we can understand why Hank had a blind spot for so long / was gullible about the "gambling money," but to anyone else...
"Ri¢hie Ri¢h Goes Galt" really took the franchise in a dark direction. Granted, as a child I didn't fully understand the subtleties of the 50 min monologue Richie delivers mid-film, decrying all the poor, minority friends me made in the first film as moochers.
She was a victim for a long time. That's certainly how Hank and Marie are still viewing her. But, anymore, I don't think Skylar is a frightened just trying to find a solution to save herself and the kids.
That scene after Walt collapsed in the bathroom, when she told him that Hank had no real evidence, she looked almost defensive and proud of Walt. Marie trying to take the baby made her really want to circle the wagons with her husband and "win" this thing.
The early seasons of BB always emphasized how emasculated Walt felt, especially compared to his DEA action star brother-in-law. But Skylar had to harbor some of that same bitterness toward her sister. Beneath the pain of hurting her family in this episode, she seems to have an element of pride that her husband is a criminal mastermind who made millions of dollars for his family.
I heard the blogs be in great debates all the time
About who's the best MC — Stu, Patrick M, and werttrew
FLW, Winwood, chris trash, the rest of y'all
New monsters just new monsters, don't get involved
And I ain't rockin' no more Delahaye shit
Kelly and 'More Sand,' this is Conaboy autonomous
I'm usually homeboys with the same monsters I'm jokin' wit
But this is Videogum and them monsters should know what time it is
And that goes for neverabadidea, art dork, koko
manners, garbitrary, old man fatima, specialk
nastyemu, caemen pistaccio, steph, Mac Miller
I got love for you all but I'm tryna murder you monsters
Tryna make sure the Ball never heard of you monsters
Not one more best caption or comment from you monsters
This is a movie that probably loses a star and a half in my estimation if I'm not watching it four rows back in a large movie theatre. But I DID watch it four rows back in a large theatre. And it had me saying "holy shit, that is a big robot" and "oh wow, it punched that huge monster really hard" for two hours.
That's a genuine compliment. We get about ten of these $200 million CGI noise machines a year, and I kind of figured I was dead to feel anything about them. With Pacific Rim I feel like they put 90% of their focus on "how can we make the scale of this really impressive." From isolating the fights mostly in the water outside of the cities to putting people right next to them all the time for scale, it worked.
Also, cutting constantly to people in those cockpit getups getting rattled around with the robots went a long way to giving it a physical believability that a lot of "big animated thing fights another big animated thing" movie scenes lack.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best and his take on Trayvon is also probably the best I've seen.
"It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn't come back from twenty-four down."
Right. I don't agree with Gabe that it was an emotional bummer, at least by comparison to where the last two seasons have taken us. Sterling with Kevin at Thanksgiving, Pete's new start, Peggy behind Don's desk, the look between Don and Sally in the last scene: all a little bittersweet, but not the total bleakness every other episode has ended on.
In terms of harebrained theories, a few weeks ago I did mention a theory I liked: that the season was building up to them "killing" Don Draper persona. And, while we didn't literally see him going by Dick again, it was exciting that that is kind of what happened.
For part of last night it looked like Don was headed back to the heart of the Don legend—California. That was the solution to his problems, he figured: to double down on his Don-ness and reinvent himself again. Sometime during that conversation with Betty, though, seeing the path he has sent Sally down, he finally realized he has to reconcile with his Dick Whitman past, as he can no longer pretend that he's succeeding at being Don. Between presenting the two Hershey's stories back-to-back, he seemed to putting the Draper mystique to bed, maybe for good. The closing scene, him finally bringing his children into his past, left little doubt.
(Also, and this is almost certainly a stretch, but they did draw attention to the fact that Richard Nixon, who's nickname was Dick, won the election.)
There has been a growing backlash to the Redskins name lately (about a century late, but still). Unfortunately, their POS owner Dan Snyder* and the POS commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, insist on writing letters to Congress defending the "proud heritage" of the name.
*for you non-sportsball people, all you really need to know about Snyder is that he's besties with Tom Cruise and you can fill in the rest of his charming personality from there.
They come from a blog (http://slaughterhouse90210.tumblr.com/) that pairs screenshots from modern TV shows with thematically related quotes from literature.
It got tumblr famous, and it looks like Videogum has Maris doing one just for them at least once a week. I always find them impressive; she makes some really unexpected but dead-on connections between wildly different characters and mediums.
Hmmm, I have no book knowledge on this, and I see what you mean on the racial optics...but I would be surprised if the Daenerys as pure-intentioned liberator trend holds up much longer. We've been trained to cheer for her as she kicks one chauvinist ass at a time for three seasons, seemingly while maintaining some moral bearings re: slavery.
But she's also hellbent on conquering Westeroes and being the queen of everything? It feels inevitable she'll be in a position of having to decide to kill a lot of (innocent) people. Doesn't seem in this show's nature to have her follow a purely heroic arc.
Not really. Someone in a non-reader recap had figured it out (the big "X" being the giveaway) a few weeks ago, but Bolton just wasn't a major character in my mind pre-Red Wedding so it didn't matter that much. Everyone seems to be related to someone else in this show. Now that we know the designs they have for Bolton ruling the North and the benefit of having Theon captive, the connection is interesting.
There were episodes this season where I worried that keeping in every plotline from a 1000+ pg book was starting to work against the show. Aside from the main stories, it felt like a lot of treading water when we ventured away from King's Landing for a couple minutes at a time to remind us that so-and-so was still hiking through the woods / having body parts severed in a dungeon somewhere.
But then I watch this season finale and realize just how many great characters there are and how strangely invested I am in so many of them. Samwise! After dropping in on about 20 campfire conversations between him and Gilly this year, so heartwarming when he finally got to Castle Black. Ser Davos! A whole season of him basically just sitting in prison learning to read pays off with him using the Magic of Literacy to save his own skin. The Hound! Proving himself a better protector to the Stark girls than their parents ever were.
Primer felt like it was intentionally created to be nearly impossible to untangle. That was the central concept, almost.
Upstream Color doesn't put the pieces together for you either, but I think it was constructed as a puzzle with a correct answer that can be figured out with a small amount of connecting the dots afterward.
It also has three very different acts, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the final one. Lots of pigs. Lots of hazy montages of people running their fingers along the sides of walls (it's like Terrence Malick in an office). Even if it doesn't all work, the movie did have a way of staying in my head.
Oh yeah, that was the other thing. When they first arrived at the party Don specifically looked at a brunette woman getting out of the pool that looked a lot like Megan, but was also clearly not really her. They made a big point of showing that for a couple seconds. My interpretation was that during the hallucination it very well may have been that same woman, now seen by him as Megan in his drugged state.
Right, it seemed a leap to say the soldier was really dead. Given all the Vietnam protests on TV in this episode, the soldier's appearance was likely just Don processing that angst via a memory of someone he associates with the war.
Plus, the Uproxx theory treats that whole sequence as if it happened while Don was 'dead' in the pool, when we actually here him falling in and Sterling yelling about it only at the very end of the hallucination. The whole hazy sequence was him making his way toward the pool before he fell in for a few moments.
The idea from the Uproxx article I actually like better was that they might kill off the 'Don Draper' identity, (with him going back to being Dick Whitman I guess?) at season's end.
Not that I've seen a ton of evidence for it, but in that hash fueled hallucination, there was a moment where the blond woman called him Don and he said "That isn't my name." Followed a couple minutes later with him looking at himself dead in a pool.
Another subtle nod could be the agency name change, that includes the Draper dropping out of SCDP to become SC&P. Maybe?
Don/Dick attempting to reclaim his self-identity after another season feeling adrift vis that kind of symbolic move would be an interesting place to take things. Shed the suit of Don Draper on the beach and walk right into the ocean.
Never would have guessed Froggy was such a facilitator on the court, but damn, Lob City out there. And get out the way when the Moneymaker goes to the rim. Lethal.
Right. When all the book readers just couldn't help but drop hints again and again that something big happened in book 3 / end of season 3, you knew it meant someone big died. And Robb made himself the clearest target one reneged wedding and decapitated ally at a time.
To be honest, if someone major had to get offed at the point in the series, I was hoping it would be the generally dull Robb—Daenerys is venturing into iffy territory, Tyrion keeps pissing of Tywin and Joeffry; I want them around as long as possible, and hopefully this buys them time.
All that said, Catelyn has had to watch awful thing after awful thing happen to her kids and husband for three seasons, so it was pretty stomach churning to watch it go down like it did. On the plus, I've got a new go-to song request for wedding DJs!
On the topic of trailers showing the entire plot, I vaguely remember a director saying he only let the trailer editors use footage from the first 1/3 of his films. At least for dramas and thrillers, that should be a standard rule; that opening 30-45 minutes was already designed to draw people in, introduce the conflict, etc. Just recreate an abridged version of how the film introduces itself and call it day without taking us through all three act changes in three minutes.
Unless you spent $100 million on a big finale of robots destroying Chicago; then maybe feel free to hint at that in your trailer.
Mild spoilers ahead:
It DID feel like it was building to more of a climax at Cinco de Cuatro. Once a character's major episodes were done, they kind of fell away, which makes sense, but still. Plus with the circumstances of this season being kind of a one off, I probably expected more closure. But seasons 1-3 all ended similarly. And they're obviously intending to lead into a movie; the whole Michael / Ron Howard plot was a meta setup for that.
2 & 3 were the low points of the season.
Honestly, I've gotten almost as much enjoyment since finishing all 15 from reading threads online of people pointing out subtle running jokes, possible clues regarding certain unresolved plots, etc. The 30+ min runtimes do feel bloated in a lot of the episodes, and the editing (timeline gymnastics aside) is much slower than previous seasons—but in review, this was an incredibly dense season in terms of gags, visuals, references in dialogue, etc. You could tell they had 7 years worth of jotted down ideas they wanted to drop in there.
I also thought they balanced referring to season 1-3 without overdoing it. There may be a couple passing "I've made a huge mistake" allusions, but on the whole they moved to a new (and funnier) gag when GOB has an epiphany.
There is a Buster episode toward the end and it's one of my favorites. It looks like Tony Hale may have had some of the biggest scheduling issues, as he doesn't factor into other episodes nearly enough, and his individual episode is a little more divorced from the rest. But it's worth it, with several of the best moments of the season.
I would never say this to his face, but Chris Trash did an amazing job organizing everything. The bar worked out great and was very accommodating, with staff occasionally peeking in to watch the compilation of classic YouTubes Chris put together.
And also: KCC posters, custom drink specials (The Gwyneth and The Topher Grace), CVS Bangers, people flying from both ends of the country to attend. Good job, all.
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