The Craig Finn thing is kind of easy to understand given that for much of my college career, no band was as important to me as The Hold Steady. However, their graph has been trending downward, unmistakably so in light of the uneven and bloated Heaven is Whenever, and a Finn solo record held the potential of a palate cleanser or perhaps a bold new step. But Finn isn’t one for boldness and Clear Heart Full Eyes sounds like The Hold Steady drained of its scope. It is an intimate album and its best songs, specifically “Jackson,” sound more personal than Finn has sounded in years. But they also sound like acoustic performances of Hold Steady songs, Finn’s storytelling remains idiosyncratic but a touch underealized and that sin was easier to ignore when it was covered up by the band’s boozy festival field scope. Clear Hearts Full Eyes has none of the Springsteen scope or Replacements rambunctiousness of Finn’s best work, its subdued, singer-songwriter vibe may be more mature but is far less satisfying.

Listeners looking for some of that old Hold Steady swagger, but with more than a touch of Clear Heart’s lilting Southern drawl would do well to turn to the newest record from Heartless Bastards. On Arrow, Heartless Bastards do little to change their heady, classic rock direction nor do they need to. This is the genre of music that Erika Wennerstrom’s voice was basically created to sing and she doesn’t let it down. Arrow cuts between heavy riffs and introspective slow cuts with ease and while the album struggles to match the highs of “Parted Ways,” that song is more than enough to fuel your Dazed and Confused reminiscing.

Tennis is probably the most embarrassing of these three records, after all it is the follow-up to a breeze-pop record about buying a sailboat and sailing along the Atlantic coast. It is indie at its Vampire Weekend bougiest and, to top it all off, this album is produced by one of the Black Keys guys and man do I fucking hate the Black Keys. And yet I can’t stop listening to Young and Old, even when I should be giving my attention to the perhaps too thought-out new Sleigh Bells album or the more complex Grimes record. Part of that is Young and Old simply makes itself so easy to listen to. I’m not even sure which song is the single because they’re all so brisk and joyous. The band added a light folk touch to their first record’s traditionalist pop bent and the result is a kind of generic brand Grizzly Bear (albeit lacking in the dense, exacting production, lush instrumentation, or intricate songwriting that we’d need for such a comparison to make any sense at all) that would fit almost as snuggly in the 1930s as it does on Spotify.

Over at Gawker, Brian Moylan has had enough of waiting for TV shows to become good:

That’s the problem with these slow burn shows, especially ones with fancy pedigrees backed by highbrow channels like HBO or AMC. We can’t imagine how they could not be good, so we keep watching, episode after boring episode, all the while waiting for some amazing payoff. And sometimes, like a skilled horse coming from behind, it pays off. But remember: For every The Wire there is a Treme, and for every Mad Men there is a The Killing

…

Sometimes slow isn’t good. Sometimes slow is just drab.

This is an interesting point and one I’ve thought about from time to time. Are you getting tired of “prestige” shows that promise payoff down the line but ask you to invest a lot upfront?

However, for me, I’m not sure that Moylan is looking for the same things out of TV that I am. Is all TV inherently about some sort of “payoff?” To put it another way, I think its damaging to look at TV shows in terms of a cost-benefit analysis and assume that the time you’re putting in should be rewarded down the line.

That is not to say that shows shouldn’t continue to get better the deeper and more intricate they become. TV has the luxury of time, a luxury that no other visual medium really has, and that allows it to set up more intricate ideas and play with different modes of storytelling. Take Treme, which, according to Moylan, is an utter failure because it did not adequately reward his time. But Treme is not a show about plotting and payoff, it is more of a low-key, character based drama about people living their lives. The stakes are much lower and the payoffs will be much smaller than on The Wire.

But Treme never pretended like that wasn’t the case. From the first episode, it was clear that we weren’t dealing with the life-or-death, all-in-the-game world of The Wire. Treme has gotten deeper and more involving, its characters more complex, but it is the same show that it was in the first episode. On the other hand, The Killing isn’t a bad show because it never told us who killed Rosie Larsen; it is a bad show because it took a bunch of hollow, uninteresting characters and drowned them in a sea of red herrings without ever giving us a reason to care. It didn’t take 13 episodes to realize that show wasn’t going to be good.

Of course, shows change and improve over time and there are programs that you have to invest some time in at first to be truly rewarded by them. But they also have moments, even early on, that make you want to invest in them. The Wire was puzzling at first, but it still had the chess scene and the “fuck” scene in the first four hours. Mad Men was gripping from its first moments. Shows may be paced slowly, but that doesn’t mean they’re uninvolving. Moylan brings up Boardwalk Empire as an example of this problem but BE just finished its season with about as big of a payoff as it could have possibly done.

It is important that the shows that are usually held up as an example of this form, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, are shows that people usually caught up on after they aired. If an episode was disappointing or somewhat unsatisfying, you didn’t have a week to stew about it and increase the pressure on the next week. All of which is to say that if you are watching a show because you need it to vindicate itself for making you watch it, then it is probably time to cut the cord. Whether that takes two episodes or two hundred, it is up to you. But it isn’t a TV show’s job to turn itself into what you want it to be so that you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted your time.

Somehow, we have reached a point where M.I.A. can play the Super Bowl Halftime show, where she made an appearance along side Madonna, LMFAO, and Cee-Lo. Somewhere, in 2005, 18-year-old me just had his head explode. Anyway, M.I.A., as she is wont to do, gave us all the finger, predictable people responded predictably, and it turns out that anyone who would be inclined to listen to M.I.A. probably didn’t care too much about this whole thing to begin with. Now let’s watch the hilarious, hilarious Bradshaw touchdown and never speak of this again.

Like everyone else, my favorite new show of the season has been Showtime’s Homeland. Homeland is kind of like 24 for adults, a counter-terrorism thriller with strong characters and more of an emphasis on realism. The show is about Carrie (Claire Danes), a CIA analyst who believes that a POW (Damien Lewis) who was recently recovered in Iraq is actually a double agent. Here’s a few thoughts/ideas I had about the show, while mainlining its first season a few weeks ago (spoiler alert for the whole season, so maybe don’t read this until after you’ve watched the show?)

Terrorism:

For a show about terrorists and the people who fight them, Homeland is actually at its least interesting when engaged with issues of national security. While I don’t agree with Pamela Aucoin, whose article suggesting that Homeland validates and slyly supports the excesses and abuses of the War on Terror, I do sense an ambivalence towards the War on Terror in the show. It balances between different notions of how to fight terrorists before, in the end, pretty clearly endorsing the empathic mode used by Mandy Patankin’s Saul and, eventually, Carrie. Saul gets important information, not through torture or illegal surveillance, but by just spending time getting to know the suspect and understand her reasons. Similarly, Carrie saves the day in the season finale because she knows Brody and his family well enough to know how to reach out to him.

But this all can’t help but feel a little tired. In the ten years that we’ve had the war on terror, there’s been plenty of entertainment raising questions about the exchange of liberty for security. Homeland doesn’t have much to add to the conversation, but it also doesn’t seem too interested in that, either. I appreciate the matter -of-fact way that it deals with all of the tactics its characters use to fight terrorists, whether its Carrie’s illegal wiretap or the illegal airstrike that ignites much of the plot. It presents these as things that happen and generally trusts the audience to make its own decisions about whether it is right or not.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a clinical term that refers to when a person tries to manipulate another person into thinking they are crazy, like in the film Gas Light where a husband tries to gain possession of his wife’s jewelry by convincing her that she is crazy and having her committed. As depicted in this essay, gaslighting is something that happens to women a lot, and this same problem forms the spine of Homeland.

Carrie’s illness is not imaginary; she is bipolar and, towards the end of the season, has a manic episode that gets her fired. However, despite her illness, she is the only person who recognizes that Brody is a terrorist from the beginning. She figures out a large part of the case and even saves the day in the end. But as a reward, she is fired from her job at the CIA, everyone dismisses her as crazy, and she ends up having electroshock therapy to try and fix her illness.

Carrie is the only woman we really see involved in the CIA but her voice is marginalized and dismissed as crazy. This seems important. Would she have to go to such great lengths to hide her disease if she were male? Would her colleagues dismiss her as much? Homeland’s approach to Carrie’s gender is interesting and makes the show much deeper.

Television

In the end, however, I wonder if Homeland’s primary concern isn’t the medium of television itself and the relationship between it and its viewers. After all, Carrie spends most of the first four episodes watching TV: her surveillance footage of Brody and his family. She wears her pajamas and sits on the couch and eats snacks, just like a lot of the audience watching Homeland is doing, I imagine. However, as the season goes on, the walls between Carrie and her TV go down. She meets Brody in the real world and they end up hooking up. Carrie, in many ways, is living out the dreams of every television viewer: she gets to become a part of the action.

Several studies have shown that watching television has the same affect on the brain as forming friendships. Homeland, in some ways, is about the peculiar mix of voyeurism and loneliness that seems to cause that effect. It implicates its audience by making Carrie’s surveillance, so similar to our own, illegal and intrusive. It also questions what we’re getting out of it; Carrie isn’t able to stop the terror attack until she steps out of her living room and actually gets to know Brody as a person. And it shows the psychological cost of this surveillance, by ending with Carrie getting electroshock treatment. In the end, Homeland asks some interesting questions about television as a medium and what viewers get out of it.

Musician, mogul, throne-watcher, and Donda CEO Kanye West is finally returning to his roots as a filmmaker. According to the New York Observer, Ye is in the Middle East to shoot a follow-up short to “Runaway,” which, of course, was so good that it cured world hunger. This time, Yeezy has his sights set even higher, according to his reps:

“His reps seemed genuinely enthusiastic about creating a piece which highlights the culture accurately,” our source explained. “There’s a lot of preconceived notions and stereotypes about Emiratis and Qataris, which Westerners often play up. They discussed how Kanye is looking to bridge the cultural divide and break misconceptions.”

Yup, the film will indeed finally create peace between the West and the Middle East, so we have that to look forward to, along with Ye’s eventual Nobel Peace Prize (and subsequently shoving Philip Roth off the stage to demand the Nobel Prize for Literature should go to Haruki Murakami instead). Of course, its always possible that this is just a ruse to cover up the fact that Kanye is finally beginning work on The Jetsons movie, so more on this story as it develops.

Yes, after 9,000 months of campaigning and preliminary awards, today the Academy separated the contenders from the pretenders and announced who was up for Oscars. There were plenty of surprises, both pleasant and otherwise. Support for Terrance Malick’s masterpiece The Tree of Life was stronger than a lot of people expected, as the film garnered Best Picture and Director nods. Best Actor contained two surprises, as Gary Oldman’s soft spoken spy from Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and Demian Bashir’s illegal immigrant from A Better Life edged out expected frontrunners Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Fassbender. Melissa McCarthy got a well-deserved nomination for Bridesmaids, but unfortunately Albert Brooks got ignored for his work in Drive. Oh and you guys will love this, 9/11 exploitation-fest Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close somehow got nominated for Best Picture. Predictions and analysis to come, but let’s all remember one thing: the Dean from Community is now an Oscar nominee.

One of Breaking Bad’s finest aspects is its tendancy to play fair with the audience. It doesn’t put off plot movement out of the need to fill time, it doesn’t cheat its characters out of their next logical move, and it doesn’t underestimate its audience. We’re smart enough to know where Jesse stands with Walt and Gus, that Hank wouldn’t march into the DEA headquarters without something concrete, and that Gus wouldn’t be cowering in fear of the cartel if there wasn’t something very serious going on. It is so good about this that when it does take a little narrative indulgence, as it did tonight, it has more than earned the right to do so.

This week’s episode largely belonged to Jesse and Hank, connected as they are. The former remains haunted by his demons (as we learned in this week’s bang-up opening, complete with a camera attached to the end of Jesse’s light gun) while the latter is exorcising them. Gus and Walt’s maneuvering has landed Jesse square in the middle of this conflict, after Walt learns from Saul about Jesse’s encounter with Gus last week. Walt tries to talk Jesse into killing Gus but it doesn’t matter because Jesse seems ready to do it anyway.

Walt, for his part, is more on the fringes of this week’s episode, but he remains driven to ridiculous extremes by his powerlessness. Rather than returning Junior’s car, he sets it on fire (incurring $52,000 in fees). He finds Skyler growing increasingly distant (see the awkward peck on the cheek) and he even offers her an out when he seems surprised about the amount of money he had (I have to admit I found this part a little bit of a stretch. Did this really never come up? Especially given Walt’s warped sense of pride)

So, anyway, Walt gets to work on a Breaking Bad standard, the odorless, flavorless poison (long term viewers will remember him trying to give the same thing to Tuco in Season 2). He gives it to Jesse, who hides it in a cigarette but is not sure when he may see Gus again. It turns out that he would see him the next day, as Mike takes Jesse to serve as muscle for Gus’ big meet with the Cartel. Jesse has a chance to poison Gus right then and there, and then again could just shoot him in the head, but both times he doesn’t do it. It seems like Jesse might be thinking seriously about Mike’s suggestion that his loyalty is to the wrong person.

Or it could just be Jesse’s deep and powerful self-loathing. The latter drives him back to NA where he runs into one of the lifers from last time (who we last saw harassing Raylan Givens on Justified). Jesse flirts with confession, telling the people that he killed a dog but when a woman in the group turns on him, Jesse turns back on himself, lashing out at the group and admitting that he started there to sell them drugs. The episode leaves Jesse even worse off than before. He’s slouching more and generally seeming disconnected from the world around him.

On the other hand, Hank finds himself taking control of his life and the episode reflects that in his physical improvement. Not only is he walking around without help, but he goes from a walker to a cane in the course of the episode. In his first scene he slyly takes Junior to Los Pollos Hermanos, getting some face time with Gus Fring and even a free refill hand delivered by the man himself (and look at how smooth Gus is in this scene. Not only does he laud Hank but he offers Junior a part-time job, which would also happen to give him more leverage with Walter, without ever once dropping his “upstanding businessman” act. The guy is cold-blooded.)

Gus is very good, but Hank is even better, and he shows the lengths he has been going to when he finally sits down with his former colleagues in the DEA. He backtracked a serial number in Gale’s apartment to a company that sells the kind of tanks that would be useful to someone looking to make a massive meth lab. Then he connects the company to Pollos. All of this is circumstantial, and the DEA guys dismiss it as much, until Hank drops his bombshell. He found Gus’ fingerprints at Gale’s house.

For an episode that was mostly about table-setting, this week’s Breaking Bad was still superb. The parallels between Hank and Jesse were brilliantly drawn, as was the tension (this show sure does poison really well). The tension has gotten so hard to bear that a lesser show would have brought everything to a boil weeks ago. Here, however, things just keep getting worse and worse, and the ways out keep getting narrower and narrower.

Jonah’s Score: 89
TUiW Grade: A

Other Notes:

-I didn’t touch on the bit of narrative indulgence I alluded to earlier, when we found out that the Cartel is after something very specific from Gus. I’m not sure if I was the only one who was assuming that the Cartel was simply mad a Gus for his direct actions against him, but that took me by surprise. Any guesses about what they’re after? The obvious guess would be Heisenberg, but the Cartel seemed happy to let the Cousins kill him last season. Maybe they want Hank dead? Either way, frustrating as it was, I’m sure there’s a good reason why we didn’t learn that piece of information this week.

-Really great work by Aaron Paul this week, especially in his big scene at the NA meeting. In fact, between him, Dean Norris, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jonathan Banks, there are enough good performances this year to totally overwhelm the Best Supporting Actor category at the Emmys.

-I would like to see more of how Hank’s newfound sense of purpose has changed life at home for Marie. She certainly seems happier. Am I the only one who wants to see a scene with just the two of them to confirm it?

Walter’s complete powerlessness has continued to manifest itself in bizarre and increasingly destructive ways. At the rate we’re going, I give it a couple more episodes before he makes a very violent, very big mistake.

And Bryan Cranston’s performance has been phenomenal. For weeks he’s been so good at playing the flounder, weak Walter that his recent lashing out has seemed all the more violent and shocking. His drunken rousting of Hank was one thing, but his powerhouse monologue to Skyler (where, among other things, he said “I AM the danger” which is one of the most amazing lines in television history) revealed the layers of deception under the surface. Walter’s claims about supporting his family or trying to make the right choices no longer hold. At this point, it is all about ego, which makes his total futility in the face of Gus that much more damaging.

But for Skyler, it seems to rip apart the final shreds of justification for her. Her first reaction, upon deducing that poor Gale was a cohort of Walt’s, but it quickly melts into something else when Walt tears into her. In that moment she got her longest prolonged glimpse of the true Walter, the violent angry man who needs power and control, and she didn’t like what she saw. For weeks, she has been concerned about his safety, never for once realizing that Walter has long passed the threshold of that being a viable concern. Walter’s pride, let alone his own level of culpability, makes going the police all but impossible at this point.

But Walter is getting it from all sides this week. Skyler skips off without saying a word to Walt (she winds up at the Four Corners and, in a moment I think we’ll all look back on at the end of this with regret, opts to go back home instead of bailing on Walt and heading for the greener pastures of Colorado). That leaves it to Walt to take the keys to the car wash and meet face-to-face with his old boss for the first time. Bogdan wastes no time challenging Walt’s manhood (which, as we know by now, is the key to his existence), and Walt takes control by exacting a small, petty measure of revenge. Him taking Bogdan’s dollar and spending it on a Coke was a wonderful bit of character business in an episode jammed full of them.

Ironically, Walt can see things clearly, but he just can’t help himself in making it all about him. See his one scene with Jesse. Increasingly the two are acting like strangers and Walt wastes no time in deducing what, exactly, is going on. In order to eliminate Walt’s strongest bargaining chip, his alliance with Jesse, Gus has attempted to indoctrinate Jesse in the organization, by setting up last week’s bit of heroics. But the way Walt tells Jesse, cruelling ripping away the first thing that has given Jesse meaning and made him feel like a human being, was maybe not the best. It only serves to widen the gulf, as Jesse finds himself gravitating to a role model whose gentler touch contrasts nicely with Walt’s smug derision of everyone around him.

(Incidentally, Jesse’s increased confidence manifested itself more tangibly this week, as he used his methhead experience to break into the house with the stolen meth. We may not have heard Mike’s answer to Gus about Jesse’s performance, but Gus’ encouragement to Jesse outside the diner would seem to indicate that Mike is starting to warm to his new protege)

So Walt lashes out at his boss and naturally hurts people in the process. Without Jesse to clean (note that the problem this week is cleaning, not moving heavy equipment around the lab), he pays off a few workers to clean the lab. I’m not entirely sure what Walt thought would happen, but Gus quickly dispatches Tyrus to send the workers out of the country, but not before Tyrus stops to reassure Walter that Gus blames him.

Which brings us back home. Walt, in his transparent attempt to get Junior back on his side (and points to Flynn for recognizing it and using it to his advantage) (“if you’re going to buy me off…buy me off”) has bought him a flashy new car. Skyler comes home and tells Walt to sell it. Walt falls back on his default posturing: “I should be able to give him what he wants” and “I have to protect this family” but Skyler sees through that now. With nowhere left to turn, Walt can’t resist threatening his ex-wife, telling her that Junior will blame her. But Skyler has an answer for that too, and it is the reason why she decided to go back home instead of running away. “Somebody has to protect this family from the man protecting this family.”

Jonah’s Score: 92
TUiW Grade: A

Other Notes:

-Sorry I missed last week’s episode; I was bogged down in moving. Like every episode, I thought it did a good job of warming the pot further while filling it with a nice load of character moments. Perhaps the most stunning thing about this show, and this season has been especially good about this, is the way that it has managed to load all of its tension and violence into seemingly tiny character moments. That is some subtle writing.

-The cartel is becoming a bigger problem for Gus, who has set up a meeting with them. I’m not sure where this is going, but I imagine that some kind of opposing force to Gus could provide Walt with the way out from under Gus’ thumb that he has been looking for.

-That said, given the way things have been developing lately, I wonder if we aren’t setting up for some kind of Walt/Jesse conflict in the end. Given the nature of their relationship, it makes a kind of sense that the show would end with them as enemies.

-Speaking of which, in case you missed the news, AMC has officially renewed Breaking Bad for 16 more episodes, which will be the last 16 ever. Obviously, I have mixed feelings about the announcement of an end to my favorite show, but I think it is obvious that for Breaking Bad to continue to excel creatively it needs a point to build towards. Fortunately, the forces aligned to make that happen.

Among Breaking Bad’s best attributes is the way the show manages its pace. When the show moves slowly, like it has the last few weeks, it never feels like it is stalling. It doesn’t put off plot points or create artificial obstacles to stop the next obvious thing from happening. And yet, it lulls you with this pacing so that when things finally explode and suddenly people are staring at death, you can’t help but wonder how we got here and how things go so wrong so fast. Just like Walt himself.

This week’s Breaking Bad felt almost like it was split in two. After another rousing Mike Adventure (this time with him getting part of his ear shot off), the first half settles in on Skyler and Walt telling Hank and Walt Jr their new cover story for the first time. For Skyler, lying to family members and building cover stories is still a new thing, and she wants to make sure she has as much control over it as possible. There’s plenty of humor in this scene (especially meta humor, like when Skyler talks about emphasizing the cancer part of the story at first to make Walt more sympathetic), but at the same time there’s an undercurrent of desperation. Skyler, for her part, is grasping for control anyway possible over something that is way out of her league right now (like the way she bitterly tells Walt that she’s not as good at lying as him). Walt, for his part, continues to be disgusted with himself for bringing Skyler into this and also resentful, since Skyler makes the script as much about punishing Walt as telling a convincing story.

But he’s not nearly as disgusted as he is at Hank’s, where he ends up spending a little more time with Gale. Gale, it turns out, is an accomplished karaoke singer (ascot and all), in addition to being a meth cook. It looks like working on Gale’s investigation has helped Hank get some confidence back and the show didn’t waste anytime in letting Walt see Hank’s file on Gale. Hank’s pet theory right now is that Gale was Heisenberg, and Walt works around the W.W. that was in Gale’s journal, but Walt knows that any sort of investigation only makes him and Jesse more of a liability to Gus.

For Walt, the problem is a lack of professionalism, as he vents to Saul. Mike is punching him, Gus is cutting people’s throats open, Skyler is no longer in the dark, Jesse is disconnected from everything, and Walt feels like he is running out of options. Is it time to cut his losses and make a full escape? Saul suggests a person who can make Walt and his family disappear, but Walt refuses. As usual, he seems to feel he can think his way out of an impossible situation instead of getting out while he can.

As for Jesse, things continue to spiral worse and worse for him, not because he doesn’t understand his situation, but because he does understand it and doesn’t care. Unlike Walt, he’s already thought about the police and isn’t worried about it (if they had his fingerprints, after all, he would already be in jail) and he is less impressed with Mike’s display of power with the guy who stole Jesse’s cash. Jesse is pushing out the world and anything he might still have connections to in it (like Walt) and Mike, Walt, and Saul can all tell that something is going to break.

But even with all of that, the ending is a whopper. Jesse doesn’t show up to work and Walt goes to get him, only to find an empty apartment and Jesse’s cell phone. That’s because Jesse is in a car with Mike, heading off to parts unknown for reasons that are unclear. Jesse’s such an important character that my brain tells me he’s probably safe, but Breaking Bad is so successful at building tension and making it seem like anything is possible that, well, it is going to be a stressful week.

Jonah’ Score: 81
TUiW Grade: A-

Other notes

-The cold open was pretty badass. My favorite show was the one of the two hitmen flying out the back of the truck.

-As always, great work from Bob Odenkirk, who managed to show real concern for Walt even underneath the layers of sleaze.

-Finally, I don’t know if you keep up with or care about the business of the show, but apparently negotiations between AMC and Breaking Bad had gotten strained and there was talk that the show could finish on another network. However, it looks like that may be resolving and to me, the most interesting thing is that all of this talk has revolved around the next season potentially being the last of Breaking Bad. As much as I love the show, I think ending it in a season or two is a great idea, if only because I don’t know how much longer Heisenberg can continue to cheat death.

Sorry about missing last week, everyone! I’m in the process of moving so things are kind of crazy right now. On a plot level I didn’t miss that much, as we instead explored Jesse’s continuing emotional breakdown, Skyler’s attempts to buy the car wash, Hank and Marie’s dire domestic situation, and Walt’s half-brained attempt at getting to Gus.

So on to this week, directed by 30 Days of Night and Twilight (yes, really) helmer David Slade. “Open House” was a largely Walt-free episode, marginalizing him a little to focus on the people around him. Chief among them, Marie. It is nice to see Marie finally getting a juicy plotline and Betsy Brandt did a fantastic job this week. On the one hand, the stress and constant berating from Hank has pushed Marie back to her kleptomania, but at the same time her visits to the open houses were as much about finding some kind of escape from her own depressing life and pretending for a few minutes to be in any other situation but her own. It was not to last, however, as Marie got arrested and had to call Hank to bail her out (great work by Dean Norris in that scene).

Marie is not the only person trying to escape from herself, but Jesse is even more desperate and his reality is even worse. Despite what he says, even Walter can pick up on the desperation in his eyes when Jesse sees if he wants to go go-karting. His own house party has turned into a crack den and Jesse passes the time throwing money at the addicts. Wherever this is going, it is not good.

Meanwhile, Skyler became even more determined to buy the car wash, enlisting Walt’s sense of pride to help her case and pulling off a rather clever con to change the owner’s attitude (without resorting to violence or accusing him or terrorism). But, more than that, the reality of Walt’s career is really starting to sink in with her. She freaks out about his bruised eye (Walt, amusingly, claims he didn’t hit Mike back because Mike is much older), wants him to go to the police, and makes him promise to tell her the moment he finds himself in real physical danger (the time for which, of course, has long since passed). By the end, she’s focusing on making the details of the lie work (something that Marie also knew) but the question is whether Skyler can adapt to the criminal lifestyle and what she will do if she finds out just how serious Walt’s problems have become.

Jonah’s Score: 85
TUiW Grade: A

Other Stuff:

-Hank reading Gale’s notebook was interesting stuff, but mostly table-setting for future plotlines. Hank has come close to unraveling the identity of Heisenberg a couple of times, but with the show getting closer to the end, how far will he come last time. And how will his history with Gale’s killer play into this?

-Gus remains absent, but his presence is felt (just like in the first 40 minutes of “Box Cutter”). This time, it is with the camera that Walt rebels against in his own amusing, and ultimately impotent way.

-Last week saw Deadwood vet Jim Beaver as the gun salesman and this week had a couple of actors from The Shield, as the actors who play Tyrus (the replacement for Victor) and Hank’s buddy had small roles on that show.

-Bob Odenkirk, as always, totally killed it in his lone scene tonight.