Stefan Sasse and I are back with an all-new episode of our A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour. This time out we’ve brought along a very special guest, Amin from A Podcast of Ice and Fire, the grandaddy of ’em all. We’re discussing “Southron Ambitions,” Stefan’s provocative essay for The Tower of the Hand on a certain conspiracy theory advanced by one of the characters in A Dance with Dragons. Read up, then listen up.

Finished Season Three. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* This is going to sound like an insult, but in a weird way it’s a compliment: This show is so much less intimate now. Bigger players, higher stakes, wider scope. Walt’s no longer a lone man trying to keep his head above water — an entire infrastructure is in place for him to keep going. Largely estranged from his family, the intensely personal domestic drama has largely been abandoned in favor of…I almost want to say a mythic story of a man entering the dark forest, likely never to return. The show’s doing this very, very well.

* And like The Sopranos, the darker it gets, the funnier it gets, too. This stretch of episodes contained two of the show’s lulziest moments. I laughed hard when Walt was forced to sit there and make small talk with “Mr. Fring” when he showed up to the hospital with free wings for everyone, ingratiating himself with Walt and Hank’s family, and of course sending Walt “Now you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know” vibes like a motherfucker. And I cracked the hell up when Skyler was relating her bubbemeise about Walt’s high-stakes gambling to Marie and got to the moment in the tale when things got super-illegal: Skyler leaned forward to whisper the secret, Marie leaned forward to hear what it was…and so did Walt, on the edge of his seat to find out where the story, his story, was headed. It was a scream. I mean, heck, the show’s not above bringing Jane back for an “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit” joke. Right on, Breaking Bad, right on.

* This back half of the season also saw the show solving the problem of its own planned obsolescence. When I first described the idea of the show to my wife, she was like, “Wait a second—how is it still on, then?” “Well, I guess he gets better” was my response (this is back before I’d watched any of it), but when you think about it, that only solves half the problem. If he beats the cancer, that explains why he’s still alive for four seasons, but not why he’s still making crystal meth. Skyler holding Hank over his head, insisting he pay to heal the injuries Hank never would have suffered but for Walt, is an shrewdly organic way of continuing the storyline.

* Though it’s not quite as striking in this regard as its sister show Mad Men can be, Breaking Bad is absolutely smarter than me at times, which is so much fun. For example, Walt twice figures out Gus’s machinations and devises solutions to them way before I did: First when he deduces not only that Gus sicced the Salamancas on Hank to keep them away from Walt and that he then tipped Hank off in hopes that he’d take them down, but also that there was a financial motive for all this: Using the ensuing increased law-enforcement attention to weaken the cartel and cut off its access to America, leaving Gus the sole provider of meth for the entire region. Later, he not only senses Gale’s positioning as his replacement almost immediately, he also senses his own indispensability to Gus if Gale were out of the picture, and keeps that plan in motion even with guns to his head. I love feeling like the characters I’m watching are streets ahead of me. I mean, I was simply excited to figure out that Walt won’t get sold out by Gus after his three months are up since no one’s around to sell him out to.

* Bonus from this section: Walt tells Gus “I respect the strategy,” echoing his earlier mantra: “The chemistry must be respected.” The spice must flow, folks.

* “What world do you live in?” “One where the dudes who are actually doing all the work ain’t gettin’ fisted.” I wish that were so, Jesse!

* Even though I enjoy virtually all of the performances on the show, it’s not one that I’d consider particularly well cast, if that makes sense. Like, if you consider the gestalt of a performance — how the actor looks and sounds as a person, plus what they do with the character as a performer — I tend to think that Mad Men, for example, is minor miracles from top to bottom. If it were a comic, you’d praise the quality of line. You know what I mean? By contrast, Breaking Bad‘s cast takes more getting used to, I would say. It took me quite a while to warm up to Hank, for example; Marie I’m still not quite sold on, though she was beautiful and mischievous in the scene where she gave Hank a handjob in his hospital bed, and that helped a lot. That’s why when those moments of “wow, that’s good casting!” come along, they really stand out: Michael Shamus Wiles as tall, stern, twinkle-eyed, mustachioed ASAC Merkert looms like some J. Michael Straczynski law-enforcement-totem of the Cop God, while Jere Burns’s earth-toned, owlish, kind, sad counselor seems like he wandered in from a show he’s holding down all on his own.

* And then we come to the bottle episode. After the intriguing opening sequence, which was just extreme close-ups of a fly soundtracked by Skyler singing “Hush Little Baby” and which made me think “Wow, they’re not even trying to give these weird quasi-abstract cold opens a story purpose anymore, now it’s all texture,” I must admit I was disappointed when I realized, oh, sigh, it’s a bottle episode, especially given that Walt’s sudden fly obsession felt like a really flimsy rationale for one in addition to being a kind of phony character development. But even in these diminished circumstances the show can impress: with the cringe-inducing suspense of Walt and Jesse riskily climbing to the rafters to catch the fly; with the unique and compelling use of sleep deprivation and sleeping pills to put Walt in a physical and mental place his character’s never been before; with dancing him up to the edge of confessing to his involvement in Jane’s death, but pulling back because he now has developed the self-control even under the influence that he lacked in the inadvertent hospital-anesthesia-cellphone confession he references in this very scene; and most importantly for my purposes — those of weirdness — by creating the image of Walter White, Lord of the Flies. Izzy Ruebens, call your lawyer.

* Speaking of the weirdness, I love the show’s reliance on coincidences. Love it. Jesse stumbling bass-ackwards into the story behind Combo’s murder is a textbook case: On a subtextual level it reinforces the perception that what he and Walt are doing is a violation, because the way life normally works is kind of violated in return by these portentous coincidences. But lives really are driven by out-of-nowhere flukes and coincidences, oftentimes. Mine certainly was: My wife and I met when I was 15 years old at a wedding reception for one of my cousins, three hours from where I live, because used to live next door to them and because at the reception itself we were the only people who knew how to do the Time Warp. I only became a writer — got my first professional writing gig — because I bumped into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years while wandering around the Lower East Side looking for a party that was in fact in Brooklyn, and the friend offered me a job. I absolutely believe that Walt could sit next to Jane’s dad at a bar, or that Jesse could seduce the sister of the little boy who murdered his friend.

* Badger and Skinny Pete, the world’s most adorable junkie gangster wannabes. I love the bluntness with which Badger described the idea of selling meth to people in a recovery program: “It’s like shooting a baby in the face.” I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the show chose to articulate this idea in this way given Walt’s attachment to Holly and Jesse’s seemingly quite sincere, profound, and unshakeable concern for children, either.

* Saul Goodman, top of his class at the University of American Samoa. Another LOL moment. (I guess he’d changed his name by then?)

* So now we have some more clues as to “What’s in it for Gus?” A very nice modest rich person house, for one thing, and a much nicer casual wardrobe than his fast-food-manager tie and dress shirts would lead you to believe. I’m still not quite sure how these aren’t things he couldn’t get without becoming a druglord, though, or how his apparent family factors in. Perhaps his smile on he phone as he listens to his former cartel partner get killed indicates that the object of power is power, as the fella says.

* I’m really enjoying the music at this point, both the found music and the score. Wendy the meth-head prostitute was the beneficiary of two of the show’s finest moments on either side of that divide: the gloriously black montage of a day in her life set to “Windy” by the Association, and the increasingly ominous and effective industrial score by Dave Porter during the conversation in which Jesse instructs her to execute her dealers on behalf of the children they’ve wronged. (Loved the dancehall “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” a few episodes back, too.)

* Speaking of Jesse, though I think the show ties things together well enough by the end of the season finale, his post-Hank storyline this season felt a little left-field, a little ad hoc. I mean, it was clear in the end that it was all done to move him into opposition with those other dealers and set up the kill-or-be-killed finale, but to get there…stealing from the lab, selling in small quantities with dudes who’d quit or been pinched in the past, selling at NA meetings, a relationship with his fellow addict that couldn’t help but feel tepid compared to his well-developed, doomed amour fou with Jane last season, the Tomas revelation, the showdown with the dealers, Walt’s intervention, their apparent total rapprochement, becoming an unwilling assassin…it was a lot to swallow for what felt like a series of random developments.

* Here’s a way that this whole storyline was useful to us, though: It established Jesse’s bright line. Jesse has a bright line — he cares about children — and he won’t cross it. Similarly, Hank has a bright line — he’s appalled by his own brutality — and once he does cross it, he refuses to put himself in a position where he might do so again. By contrast…Where is Walt’s bright line? You’re tempted to say “his family,” but he’s shown no compunction about bullying Skyler and deceiving his son into being his back-up. He doesn’t want them to die, or to go broke, but it’s very, very, character-revealingly important to him that he be the one to prevent these things. By the end of the season it seems like maybe “Jesse” is his bright line, but he’s broken that in the past and may well do so again, as happy as it made me to see the two of them so concerned for one another. (Jesse telling Walt to go to the police, knowing what it would mean for them both but still so scared for his friend? mentor? that he wanted him to do it anyway, was truly touching.) I wonder if Walt even has a bright line.

* “The moral of the story is that I took a half-measure instead of going all the way. [pause] I’ll never make that mistake again.” Oh, did I not mention that Jonathan Banks as Mr. Fix-It, whose name turns out to be Mike, when I was listing the casting coups? Because holy. Shit. As much as I like his menacing moments, or his casual awfulness, I think my favorite part of this chunk of episodes — during which he really came into his own as a main character — came from the same scene from which I took the line above, his monologue about the wife-beater he kept collaring back when he was a beat cop. (Which, yikes, but regardless.) It’s in his description of that half-measure he took, when he decided simply to warn the wife-beater instead of just killing him: “‘If you ever lay a hand on her again, then so help me, I’ll blah…blah…blah.'” The resigned, cynical, self-loathing way he dribbles those “blahs” out of his mouth, the indictment that carries for his empty threats, the knowledge that contains of what was no doubt to come…brutal and crushingly nihilistic. (And what a voice on that guy, jesus.)

* Nothing really much to say about these points: just wanted to say that the way they blurred Jesse’s head when it snapped back after he snorts meth for the first time in preparation for attacking the drug dealers was beautiful, that I loved the flattened perspective and silence as Walt waited for and then walked toward Mike, Gus, and Victor’s car, that I was thrilled by the return of the Heisenberg Hat, and that I wonder how wise Gale was to what Gus was up to with him (wiser than I suspected at first, I think).

* And now, at long last, we get to the big moment of the season for me: When Walter got out of the car he’d used to run over the dealers, picked up the gun, and shot the surviving, crippled dealer in the head, I started to cry. I didn’t cry, I just started to, I just got that sensation that part of your brain behind your face has been poked, and my eyes welled up and my mouth contorted and my brows lifted and my mouth opened. It was in that moment I realized how very, very bad I felt for Walter White. He had in many ways revealed himself to be a bully, a creep, an opportunist, and a narcissist, but here I watched him volunteer to do something truly heinous because he had gotten himself into a position where he had no choice but to do it himself or let someone else who deserved better do it. I felt like I was watching someone die. And not the guy who actually did die, either. It was an awful, awful feeling. It was watching a suicide.

Mark Pellegrini of Adventures in Poor Taste reveals that publisher HarperCollins has replaced Stephen Gammell’s quite literally unforgettable illustrations from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. (Via Rob Sheridan and io9.) The reason this is a terrible idea is quite easy to grasp: These are the best chlidren’s book illustrations I’ve ever seen. My wife and I are in our mid-30s and came across these books well over two decades ago, yet Gammell’s art (and Schwartz’s strong prose, too, but mostly the art) are so effective that she and I were still discussing them in reverent, slightly panicky tones just a few days ago, well before I’d heard about this ill-advised bowdlerization. When I pulled my Scary Stories Treasury off the bookshelf to show her a particular illustration, she literally made me put it away. That’s how freaked out a grown woman was by Gammell’s art. Which, I suppose, is why HarperCollins is getting rid of it — but it’s also why the books are rightfully considered classics, why they’re worth re-publishing 30 years after their initial release to begin with. I hate to think of generations of children robbed of one of the most intensely pleasurable frightening experiences they’re likely to ever have, in favor of pleasant but toothless “spooky” stuff.

I reviewed the Scary Stories Treasury a couple years ago, and discovered that it had lost none of its power. I advise you to get your hands on the original versions by any means necessary lest you lose the ability to make that same discovery.

* My friend Matthew Perpetua invented the mp3 blog when he launched the mighty Fluxblog ten years ago. He’s celebrating the anniversary with a series of his trademark, massive “survey” mixes, each one a multi-disc affair spotlighting the best music for each year Fluxblog’s been around. Here’s the 8-disc Fluxblog 2002 survey mix. I’m particularly gratified to see the big response in the comments for the Azure Ray and Doves songs — two of my all-time favorites.

* Fantagraphics will be publishing Ron Regé Jr.’s The Cartoon Utopia! That’s a big vote of support for a risky artist. Good for everyone involved.

* Ross Campbell is sorta semi-serializing Wet Moon Vol. 6 on his website, along with a bunch of bonus materials. I know he was bummed that Oni couldn’t fit the book into their publishing schedule until next Fall, so I’m glad they worked this out in order to get the work out there sooner.

* This interview with the Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor about his and Jim Rugg’s soon-to-be-re-released graphic novel about a leftist art-rock band One Model Nation reminds me that Taylor-Taylor is one of the great rock and roll talkers. Of all the interviews I’ve ever done, I probably think about stuff he said the most frequently. You’d be amazed how applicable a passionate endorsement of seeing Cinderella perform live is to any number of situations in everyday life.

* Tucker Stone reviews a couple dozen comics for The Savage Critics, i.e. more comics than I’ve reviewed in the last four or five months. Lots of gems in there, with two caveats: 1) He’s dead wrong about Garden being worse than Travel; 2) The impetus for the post is that these are comics he “couldn’t find the time (or space) to write about in a more ‘professional’ capacity,” which means that no website or publication out there is making it worth Tucker’s while to write about Acme Novelty Library or Kramers Ergot 3 and so on, which is a crime.

* Terrific review of Habibi and Paying For It by comiXology’s Kristy Valenti, who refers to them cheekily as “Dick Lit.” It’s hardly as dismissive a piece as that would make it out to be, though, and it’s stuffed with why-didn’t-I-think-of-that observations: Seth and Joe Matt as the Charlotte and Miranda to Chester Brown’s Carrie Bradshaw; the highlighted, isolated, orderly beds upon which Chester and the prostitutes he hires have sex as an operating theater. And by focusing on sex and love as the driving force behind Habibi she points the way to just how interesting it ought to be to see Craig Thompson do an out-and-out porn comic, as he apparently plans to do.

* Kate Beaton is signing off of Hark, a Vagarant! for a while, which is a bummer but an understandable one given the whole world throwing itself at her feet and all. I just hope she keeps getting to draw people’s hair, eyes, and hands.

* That’s a gorgeous Jillian Tamaki illustration is what that is.

* And Kali Ciesemier ain’t no slouch either.

* Yeesh, this is quite a page from Geoff Grogan’s Nice Work, which he’s begun serializing on his website.

* Mark P. Hensel interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. And Ao Meng also interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. Saving these for when I can read them back to back.

* Saving this for later, too: Amypoodle’s Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! annotations, part two. Any post on Batman comics that kicks off with a Oneohtrix Point Never video is okay in my book.

* At the always excellent Comics Grid, Peter Wilkins writes about the wonderful heartachey North No. 2 piano-playing interlude in Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto.

* I look at the villain mini-figures for Lego’s Lord of the Rings line and can see nothing but the hours and hours I will spend smashing them to bits in some future Lego LotR video game.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to the latest Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* Finally, D’Angelo presents the feel-good clip of the year, if you’re a D’Angelo fan. Try not to grin like an idiot during this. (Via Pitchfork.)