* A mentality by which one can see both Her and 12 Years a Slave and judge the former superior to the latter is a very foreign mentality to me. I’m grappling with that a lot tonight. There’s obviously an element of self-congratulation in preferring the horrifying historical drama about slavery to the twee portrait of an unlucky-in-love copywriter and his smartphone. And there’s an element of voyeurism, too, one only heightened by seeing the film in a packed theater full of middle-aged and elderly upper-middle-class white patrons from my preposterously segregated home of Long Island. Roxane Gay’s essay on the film for Vulture, for all it’s undergirded by presumptions about cinema I don’t share — I find brutality, spectacle, and decontextualized visual stylization, all of which she rejects at least as far as this movie is concerned, often inherently valuable in terms of conveying meaning; director Steve McQueen is proficient and profligate with all three — also makes the point that 12 Years a Slave furthers the idea that the movies about black people worth making involve their historical/political suffering at the hands of American white supremacy. All those caveats aside, I still found this film enormously compelling, as a story and as a political statement and as cinema, in ways that completely crush Her, which is routinely topping it in critics’ best-of-2013 lists. And that’s a gulf between me and other viewers that I’m thinking about a great dal.

* Crying in a crowded theater is difficult to do, for some reason. I wound up with tears streaming down my face consistently but without the usual sobbing and heaving — just a few sniffles. I’m embarrassed to say I was embarrassed.

* Stuffing your film with famous actors in bit parts is frequently a dubious proposition — remember Ted Danson in Saving Private Ryan? Yet the effect McQueen generated with that tactic here was invigorating, if menacingly so. Each time a new familiar face popped up, I found myself thinking “Oh Jesus, what’s this one gonna do?” Michael K. Williams, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, Alfre Woodard, Garrett Dillahunt, Bryan Batt — each managed to be intimidating by virtue of simply being there, all famous and shit. By the time Brad Pitt showed up, an aged Golden God whose role in the narrative and his part in getting the film made in the first place combined for a sad and knowing take on the White Savior, the cameos moreover gave the film a true labor of love feeling, a “let’s put on a show” urgency.

* Though the film was written by an African American, its director and star are two black men from England, and it co-stars two more men from England as the lead character’s primary enslavers. I felt there was a unique fury brought to the material from those four outsiders’ perspectives. The crimes of an neighbor content to excuse or ignore them are often best exposed from next door. “I’m So Bored with the USA.”

* Chiwetel Ejiofor is actually better than you’ve heard. Long, lingering close-ups the first time he sings along with a spiritual, or on the day he entrusts the sympathetic white hired hand played by Pitt to write a letter to his friends back home to plead for rescue, are asked by McQueen to do nothing but allow the audience to linger in Ejiofor’s emotional and physical company as intimately as possible. He’s just remarkable.

* Lupita Nyong’o, the film’s female lead, is required to spend essentially all over her screentime in some form of extremis — the object of brutal scorn and even more brutal affection from her masters. Even during a brief respite at the brunch table of a neighbor who herself had been elevated from slave to “Mistress” thanks to her owner’s romantic inclinations, there’s a panic in the extension of her pinky finger she affects while taking tea. Her body is ultimately the tableau on which the film’s climactic act of violence is performed: the makeup effects are among the most physically upsetting I’ve ever seen, which given my predilections is saying something, but I used “tableau” because that’s what she is made to be, a canvas on which the emotions of her slaver, his wife, her fellow slave Solomon, and her own self are painted in blood. Hugely complicated, hugely upsetting. A goddamn highwire act is what it is, and she invests that character with such urgent sadness, right down to her final out-of-focus fall from the story.

* In the scenes where we see Ejiofor’s Solomon Northrup interact with his wife and kids as a free man in New York prior to his kidnapping, much of the antiquated formality of his and the other characters’ speech throughout the film, preserved from the autobiography which forms the basis of the film, necessarily falls away. Replace the horse-and-carriage with a car and the formal attire with t-shirts and jeans or whatever, and his last happy goodbye to his family (off on a business trip without him) could come from the opening of any Hollywood movie in which a good-natured family man gets fucked over by sinister forces. Which is important. Sounding like regular, everyday people by stripping away dialect, even just for a scene, goes a long way to conveying that Northrup was a regular, everyday person, until America’s nightmarish racist dystopia — a regime so repulsive and constructed on lies so preposterous we’d have a hard time accepting it as science fiction had it not actually happened in our actual history for hundreds of fucking years, were not television networks making money hand over fist by marketing its apologists as cuddly curmudgeons, were not cackling dimunitions and dismissals and denials of its horror repeated every day with the tweet of a #tcot hashtag, were its legacy not seen everywhere from voter registration laws to the lily white neighborhood i myself live in right this very second — swallowed him whole.

Her is a movie in which a nebbishy dotcom writer named Theodore Twombly dates Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, and Olivia Wilde and falls in love with a computer voiced by Scarlett Johansson. I promise you, I fucking promise you, no matter how many five-star reviews and best-of-the-year lists you come across: Whatever picture you have in your head of what such a film will feel like, that picture is correct. None of the film’s strengths — most of which, from Joaquin Phoenix’s feature-length Michael Stuhlbarg impression to some cute 120-minutes-into-the-future costume, game, and tech design, are minor; one of which, its frank and explicit treatment of sex as a component of love, is mitigated by pretty goddamn goofy voice-overacting; only a few of which, namely a small handful of its many many many conversations about falling in and out of love in the context of long-term relationships, have any heft behind them — make it worth seeking out before it winds up on Netflix Instant, or pretty much watching at all if you suspect you’d rather just rewatch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (scripted by director Spike Jonze director Spike Jonze’s collaborator Charlie Kaufman) instead. Its biggest problem is baked right into its premise: Samantha, the computerized “her” of the title (which weirdly forefronts this computer program’s nature as a nonspecific and inscrutable female, which should set off alarm bells for you right there) is a creature of pure thought and speech, so nearly everything of note in the story is told rather than shown. With the ironic exception of a single, memorable, lengthy cut to black, the film basically never allows its visual component to do any heavy lifting. All the pretty colors, the L.A. cityscapes, the fancy simulated operating systems and video games — it’s all window(s) dressing.

Or Introducing Bruno Delbonnel, stepping in for MIA cinematographer/genius Roger Deakins and (re)creating the grey winter awfulness of New York City so convincingly it felt less like a lighting scheme and more like a ceiling you might bump your head on. Inside Llewyn Davis, for all its subwaying and roadtripping and general peripateticism, is a claustrophobic film, a film about how having no commitments can root you to the spot just as surely as a square life. It can be seen as the third film in the Coen Brothers’ Trilogy of Calamity, with Barton Fink and A Serious Man, but here the calamity is ongoing, not a new thing that starts with a move to Hollywood or the sudden caprice of Hashem. (I suppose you could even squeeze No Country for Old Men in there too if you want, but again, no stumbling across drug money.) Llewyn Davis has been in a folk-scene funk for some time, a depression he shows no signs of exiting. Indeed, a clever bit of editing that could be taken as showing us a pivotal sequence out of order is ever so slightly recut so that we could simply be witnessing subtle variations on the same unending cycle — Sisyphus, Groundhog Day, the Möbius. Certainly the presence of a key figure at film’s end indicates Llewyn’s career will only go so far. The funny thing, the different thing, is that he’d more or less resigned himself to it by that point anyway. He’s not a delusional man, nor does he react to his plight with especially outstanding rage. He’s difficult but not impossible, cruel at times but only when driven to exhaustion by the failure of kindness to produce amicable results. He’s neither a delusional hack nor a tortured genius — he’s a talented guy who knows the limits of his talent but hopes to catch a lucky break. None is forthcoming. Joel and Ethan Coen have made much blacker movies than this one; Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers at their greyest.

There’s an invented scene in Peter Jackson’s second Hobbit movie (SPOILER ALERT, I GUESS) where Thorin & Company fire up the forges of the Lonely Mountain while dodging an awoken and enraged Smaug the Golden. River-like torrents of molten gold pour into a mold of (presumably) Durin, the ur-Dwarf, that’s about the size of a medium-sized office building. Smaug stares at it enraptured until the heat causes it to break form and gush golden death all over the dragon. Wealth, weaponized. Find all the metaphors for a three-film Hobbit adaptation you like in that scene, go ahead, knock yourself out. Certainly this film’s herky-jerky rhythm, and its need to surround every emotional turning point with an invented ten-minute action sequence, will give you plenty of fuel for the fire. But ultimately Smaug rises again from that lake of fire, bellows a mockery of the Dwarves’ attempt at revenge, flies up into the night sky gilded with real actual gold, shakes it off into a million droplets like a sheepdog drying off after a bath, and flies off toward Laketown to burn it to ashes while shrieking “I AM DEATH.” If I get to see something like that at the movies, Peter Jackson can melt down all the rivers of gold he wants.

Wolf was more fun than Good, and I say that as someone whose favorite Martin Scorsese movie is Casino. One of the reasons it feels a bit light in the end is that we never meet any victims of the penny-stock scams at the heart of the thing, just the scammers and their trials and tribulations. In a sense, that’s Scorsese’s approach with GoodFellas and Casino as well, but in those films the characters frequently turn on and kill each other, so you’re made to understand that the criminality has real-life consequences even if only on other criminals. You see victims; they just happen to be the victimizers as well. This, on the other hand, is just DiCaprio and Jonah Hill being really funny for three hours, with tons of naked women and quaaludes. Which I liked, don’t get me wrong, but it’s almost like Scorsese and Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire impresario, hence a couple of notable BE castmember cameos) went out of their way to reduce the working-class schlubs DiCaprio and his merry men and women stiff to disembodied voices on phones. (EDITED TO ADD: The major exceptions are Belfort’s toddler daughter, whom his inebriated behavior terrorizes, and his second wife, whom at his nadir he physically and sexually assaults; but the rhythm of the sequence in which that occurs is such that its impact is diluted first by her turning her own rape into a way to best and humiliate her husband, then by a transference of Belfort’s threat from her to the kid. Moreover she’s portrayed as so slight a person — no Karen Hill, no Ginger Rothstein — that it’s weirdly unclear how much she’s ultimately fazed by it.) Still, as I said, really funny. A lot of it is a love letter to the grossness of Long Island, which I enjoyed, and of course the idea of just doing a one-to-one transfer of his mafia-movie style and story structure over to Wall Street is scathing and hilarious. Rob Reiner’s introductory scene had me convulsing with laughter, which I’d forgotten is a thing. Jon Bernthal erases the stink of The Walking Dead every second he’s on screen, so wholly does he commit to his ridiculous Jewish-goombah drug-dealer character. There are close-ups of Hill’s face, and an entire ‘lude-dosed fight scene, that could have come straight out of Tim & Eric’s Billion-Dollar Movie. It’s a pleasure to see Scorsese work with DiCaprio in full charismatic movie-star mode versus the aging-babyface anger he forefronted in, say, Gangs of New York and The Departed. And he’s making an argument that the best sociopaths extend their little reality bubble outward to a few trusted associates — do that and you can get away with almost literally anything. Wolves hunt best in packs.

Over at The Comics Reporter, Joe “Jog” McCulloch and I talked about the year in the alternative comics business (as opposed to the art form) with Tom Spurgeon. Note: The end of the interview was cut off—it should read “we cannot get out. The end comes soon. We hear drums, drums in the deep. THEY ARE COMING”

Go ye and listen to the landmark 25th episode of The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, in which Stefan Sasse and I discuss the recently released preview chapter for The Winds of Winter. War, huh, good R’hllor y’all, what is it good for?

I wrote about two of my favorite comics from 2013, Heather Benjamin’s Exorcise Book and Josh Simmons’s Habit #1, for Zainab Akhtar’s year-in-review series at Comics & Cola.

I’ve started a tumblr called Badge where I’ll be aggregating incidents of police brutality/overkill/overreach in America without comment.

I reviewed Homeland‘s season finale for Rolling Stone. An exercise in undercutting what little value the show still had.

I think I’ve neglected to mention it for a while now, but my comrade Stefan Sasse and I have resumed episodes of our podcast on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. You can find the new episodes here — the one that went up today discusses Martin’s new novella set 200 years before A Game of Thrones, “The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens.” Enjoy!

All my Vorpalizer posts about comics and genre art are now housed at http://seantcomics.tumblr.com and http://seantculture.tumblr.com . Thanks.

A limited number of copies of Flash Forward, my new minicomic with Jonny Negron, are available via Jonny’s bigcartel store. If you’d like one you can buy one for $4.

I wrote about the Ceremony/White Lung/Perfect Pussy/Sleepies show I attended last week for Cool Practice, my music tumblr.

Michael Hawkins and I have completed BIEBERCOMIC, our comic about Justin Bieber. You can read the whole thing on one page at the link. We hope you enjoy it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Homeland for Rolling Stone. Juuuuust about had it with this thing.

Fantagraphics is the greatest comics publisher of all time. No company, in any field, has made products that mean more to me than Fantagraphics’. Their co-publisher Kim Thompson died too young and took a lot of counted-on revenue with him, so they launched a Kickstarter that’s in its final hours right now. The rewards are almost parodically plentiful, varied, and worthwhile; I’ll be getting a customized pair of Chuck Taylors, naturally. I urge you to give if you haven’t already — it’s basically shopping, not giving, but either way, the company that basically created alternative comics could use your help.

PictureBox is the greatest comics publisher of the 21st century. Any one of several projects published or edited by publisher Dan Nadel would make him and PBox a publisher for the ages: the work of Japanese experimentalist Yuichi Yokoyama or prescient Providence art-comics collective Paper Rad, editing the canon-disrupting classic-comics collection Art Out of Time or the paradigm-shifting magazine of alt/genre comics criticism Comics Comics. PBox also did a huge service for alt/art comics by situating them in the larger context of visual culture — in publishing collections by everyone from Richard Kern to Hipgnosis to the Hairy Who to Destroy All Monsters in addition to the best-ever books by, say, Brian Chippendale and Renee French, Nadel was making a case for commonalities that might otherwise have gone un-remarked upon. Now Dan’s closing up shop to take a more stable full-time job in the book world, so PictureBox is having an inventory-liquidating 50% off sale on everything it sells. I put together a quick list of some of the publisher’s more narratively straightforward works for a friend who was looking for recommendations along those lines.

POWR MASTRS: I suspect this seminal CF series is destined to be forever unfinished, at least in terms of its original conception as an eight-volume epic or something, but it’s basically an NC-17 Adventure Time.

COLD HEAT: Another Unfinished Symphony, though much less dramatically so; in fact you’re better off skipping the final double issue, which makes this weird huge tonal shift away from the rest of it, the rest of it being “What if someone transformed Loveless by My Bloody Valentine into a young-adult fantasy?” Co-creators Frank Santoro and Ben Jones were tentpole PictureBox franchises.

KRAMERS ERGOT 8: In some ways this is the least innovative of the super-duper-influential Kramers anthologies edited by Sammy Harkham, even the least successful, but it’s the most straightforward in terms of the emphasis on nice lengthy narratives from the contributors, and the most thought-provoking in terms of trying to suss out what was included and why, and the coolest-looking in terms of that far-out ’70s science-textbook look.

NEGRON: A great little showcase of the comics and pin-ups of the postmillennial Vaughn Bode.

EVERYTHING TOGETHER: This is a collection of all the short stories by Sammy Harkham, an alternative cartoonist in the grand Fanta/D&Q tradition.

GARDEN: There’s no story here, per se — it’s just a bunch of people in strange costumes navigating an enormous manmade amusement-park-like garden complex and discussing what they see. But Yuichi Yokoyama’s art is just super super appealing to me — he makes every movement seem as dynamic as a Jack Kirby spread, and the overall effect is like going on a strange guided tour of a depopulated Super Mario Galaxy.

It’s worth contemplating how the death of Kim Thompson forced Fantagraphics to crowdfund its continued existence, and how a life change on Dan Nadel’s part shuttered PictureBox entirely. The alt/art comics infrastructure depends on the heroic efforts of individuals; lose them and the loss can rarely be weathered, with the recent shift of the Brooklyn convention currently called CAB to an exclusively Gabe Fowler-run enterprise from one he shared with Nadel and Bill Kartalopoulos being a rare counterexample.

That said, altcomix is very good at rising from the ashes. Tom Devlin’s Highwater Books, the most direct aesthetic antecedent for PictureBox in terms of their books’ high-end design flourishes and signal-boosting of the Fort Thunder/Providence scene, spawned any number of publishers after it folded: Secret Acres and Bodega Books were both founded by former Highwater employees, Devlin himself went on to partially Highwaterify Drawn & Quarterly, and so on. Dan keeping the doors open at PBox long enough to place as many of his artists and projects with other publishers as possible tells you an awful lot about the quality of his character as well. So, we shop, and we hope.

I reviewed last night’s Homeland for Rolling Stone. The dictionary definition of “mixed bag.”

* I think there’s long been a sense that Chalky White, and Michael K. Williams, and by extension African Americans, have been underused on this show. From what I gather from post-finale interviews with Terence Winter, he realized this was true at some point, and this season was conceived in part as a corrective. From an in-world perspective one solid way to demonstrate the vitality of this character is to have him sneak back into town with a small handful of strangers and quietly level the entire defense force surrounding Nucky Thompson’s beachfront redoubt. Like, by rights this episode should feel elegiac regarding Chalky, and to an extent it does — it’s his last best failed attempt to retake the throne. But he remains formidable until the moment Richard Harrow pulls the trigger.

* “So he your nigger now….So you HIS nigger now.” Chalky’s spite is righteous, even if misdirected.

* “Wearing another man’s clothes,” he spits, complaining of his situation. No, this isn’t a guy who’d take well to usurpation.

* THE NEXT DAY in big block letters was my thought when we cut from the standoff between Nucky and Chalky to Knox’s meeting with Hoover in DC the following morning. It let us know that the two of them lived through the night, no matter what else its purpose was. A curious choice, but that’s kind of how the show works.

* I love the audible sneer quotes Hoover places around “organized crime.” I’m actually quite excited to see if Hoover becomes a major character, since in the end he’s easily the most dangerous and destructive person historical figure we’ve encountered so far. (I suppose you could make a case for Lansky & Luciano, but that would require extending a lot more kindness to Hoover than I’m inclined to impart.)

* Are we to take it that the state used a prosecuting attorney with a facial deformity in part to normalize star witness Richard Harrow? Or is the purpose more extradiegetic, a reminder that there are a lot of Richards out there in one sense or another?
.
* “They keep my face on.” Gasps from the crowd. Richard must be miserable being the center of attention like that. Even as a sniper he operated from a remove from the target audience.

* “I was in love! I was tricked! How can that be right? I’m not allowed to speak. I’m not allowed to live. Why does a man get to do anything he wants!” Cheering! Gillian Darmody, proto-Solanis.

* “You have a brother, Knox? Whatever fuck your name is. Family?” “That’s none of your business.” “Fuck you. You too, you smug son of a bitch.” There’s really no better Eli than end-of-his-rope Eli. Remember when he beat that ward boss to death in his garage when the guy started wimping out of the anti-Nucky conspiracy?

* “Weiss. With Bugs Moran and Schemer Drucci. Sure, after that O’Banion thing? Who else could it be?” One thing I really enjoyed about this episode is that by the time the smoke clears, it’s no clearer who was responsible for the various assassination attempts on Capone and Torrio than it was at the start — to us or to them. I mean, you can read that final scene in the hospital as Torrio and Capone basically acknowledging they’d each tried and failed to have the other killed, they feel bad about it, and Torrio’s bowing out gracefully. I mean, as best we can tell from history that’s not in fact what happened — the North Side mob really did try to hit them both. But look at this as a more effective version of the sleight-of-hand the show pulled last season with Luciano and Lansky trying to strike out on their own as heroin suppliers and Masseria and Rothstein colluding with corrupt cops to teach them a lesson. You can color within the lines of history but still use an unexpected palette.

* This just occurred to me: ex-lawmen Nelson Van Alden and Eli Thompson are going to be two of the gunmen who dress up as cops to perpetrate the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on Al Capone’s orders, aren’t they.

* Sign #1 that Nucky was wise to Eli: Eli knew nothing about Nucky’s trouble with Chalky the previous night.

* LOL at Mickey Doyle giving Richard the hairy eyeball.

* If somehow an anonymous source were to disclose to the authorities the whereabouts of Jimmy’s body, what would you do for that anonymous source.” “I would do whatever you asked.” I’ll tell you what, the awe in which all these seasoned killers hold Richard Harrow’s ability to kill strikes some very deep chords in me. That is such a menacing, magnetic dynamic.

* “If that’s Darmody, then who’s the other one?” I love when Boardwalk does the anonymous-reporter-voice-in-a-crowd thing. And Christ, that overhead shot of the burial site, the path worn through the field. Our final glimpse of Jimmy Darmody is one of people feeding off him.

* “I’m the mayor.” “I’ll change that if it’s the last thing I do.” Poor Mayor Ed. Backed the wrong horse, guy.

* “Endings have been attempted, have they not, on all sides.” I was just about to say “I’m gonna miss Narcisse,” but I’m not, am I? He’ll be back.

* “I don’t have friends. I have partners.” Nucky sums himself up. And yet…

* “I don’t ever want to worry about that spook coming at me in the dark again. Do we understand each other?” “We do. At long last.” We know this isn’t a legit sellout of Chalky because Nucky doesn’t talk that way.

* “That singer. He says he knows where she is.” That’s the kicker.

* “What are we, paupers? I want artichokes for Christ’s sake.” Been there, Johnny! And then another nice Godfather-style hit, just to scratch as many of your itches as this show can. Fuckin’ Boardwalk Empire works really hard for your ungrateful ass.

* Knox is nervous with the bug in the room. He’s getting bugsy, if you will.

* “Pop! Pop, it’s Uncle Nucky!” “We should walk in together. Present a united front.” The saw-playing. Willie eyes the phone. Marvelous stew of sights and sounds in that one little plot-advancing phone call from Nucky to Eli.

* Richard has a brother-in-law now, lol. I guess the sister settled!

* “Tommy. I love you.” Oh no.

* “I will see you in three days.” Messiah!

* Eli walking up to the camera and past it to go to Nucky’s house.

* “Hello? Nuck?”

* “I’m leaving town. Heading to Cuba with Sally. As soon as I finish what I need to do. I intended to tell you now. There is no meeting. I saw to that. There are names on a hotel register with three empty rooms, and you, and me.” Eli, you really do suck at this and always have.

* “Nucky, I–” “‘Nucky I’ what. ‘Nucky, I’m sorry?'” “What’s it matter what I say?” “You have a lot to lose.” “Me? I don’t have anything. Sooner or later you wind up taking it all. Can’t help it. I’m ready. Are you?” Re-reading that dialogue…you know, I wasn’t sure another Nucky/Eli confrontation, or another season-finale facedown between Nucky and someone he once loved and vice versa, was going to hit all that hard. But it does, doesn’t it? There’s a weariness to it that we in the audience can feel along with the brothers precisely because we have been here before.

* I do wonder what would have happened had Willie not burst in. I wonder what would have become of all three of them.

* “Nothing will fill that hole you got inside. Don’t you know that yet?” And maybe here we see what separates Nucky from, let’s see here, Tony Soprano, or Walter White, or Don Draper, or Jaime Lannister: He’s not tortured inside. He’s unhappy, but his response is to try to make himself happy, not to wallow. And that’s how Eli gets his number here.

* Hahahahahahahahaha NO MEETING FOR YOU, KNOX, NO MEETING FOR YOU, YA PRICK! “You’ve been duped, Jim. Let’s face it.”

* “How you feelin’?” “I’m okay.” “Never heard you say that before.” Aw, Al and Johnny, you lovable mugs ya.

* “This is a young man’s game. I’m not gonna fight. It’s yours, Al. Take it.” “Take what?” “The whole operation.” “You win, kid. I’m outta your way. It’s Europe for me.” Al kisses the ring. What I’m curious about is whether we see Johnny again. The show aged him up considerably — though he was indeed Capone’s boss and mentor, he wasn’t yet 40 years old when prohibition started. But eventually, in real life, he took on an elder-statesman role and helped broker the alliance that eventually became the Commission, working closely with Luciano in the process. I hope he sticks around for that, which is what I kind of assume the whole show is building to.

* Here, in their entirety, are my notes about the fight between Eli and Knox:
My partner Agent Selby. He thinks I’m crazy. Do you think I’m crazy, Eli?
I’ll
Playing the saw,
Eyeball
MY SON MY FUCKING SON
DADDY PLEASE DADDY PLEASE

Sort of the show’s Dan Dority vs. Captain Turner, wasn’t it. Breathtaking.

* “Stay rightchea and don’t raise no fuss.” “Don’t like it.” “Not meant to be liked.” Chalky has a lot of confidence in the plan.

* “A daughter for a Daughter.” “I understand I rocked her right. That was some sweet jelly.” “Behold the noble savage.” “That me. Bankroll in one pocket and pistol in the other. And all the rest? I never did give a fuck.” “A nod from me and she’s gone. I’d say that makes us even.” These right here are two men who haaaaaaaaate each other. Narcisse is to Chalky what Gyp Rosetti was to Nucky: a force of nature our hero had the misfortune to attract and aggravate. The only difference is…well, it’s Richard, isn’t it?

* My notes on the sniper sequence, in their entirety:
There’s richard.
DO IT RICHARD
DO IT
DO IT
DO IT
DO IT
Oh shit.
Richard.
Richard.
Richard.

Even if he were to survive, Richard would not survive this. Chalky, a man who couldn’t stand wearing another man’s clothes, likely couldn’t weather this either. And Maybelle White, a character I was just two weeks ago saying could have been fascinating, is lost to us. This was an ugly scene.

* Narcisse arrested. Everyone’s getting rolled up because Eli killed Knox — and Hoover’s using it to come at Marcus Garvey, not any of the world-historical criminals tangentially involved in the murder.

* “Truth is what those in power wish it to be.” Lord Valentin of House Narcisse, ladies and gentlemen.

* “I am a businessman and a follower of Christ.” Beneath Narcisse’s narcissism is a deep-rooted need for these things to be true, of course.

* “Yes…sir.” Now that’s a comeuppance.

* “Your father is safe with friends out west….He’s your father. My brother. And I’m not the person you think I am.” Or that I thought he was, for that matter. Once Eli popped up in the next scene I knew where he’d be and who’d be picking him up, but until he popped up I figured he was dead. Nucky surprised me.

* Eli and Van Alden, together again. Gillian’s nicked. Rothstein shows Margaret to her lush new apartment hahahahaha. Sally stood up. Chalky out to pasture. Daughter singing in some shithole. And Richard’s on the train, thank christ
oh no.
no, please.

Took me about 17 hours from when it aired, but I cried my fucking eyes out over the death of Richard Harrow. Thank you for bringing this magnificent character, responsible for my all-time favorite line of dialogue and my all-time favorite TV action sequence which ended with a shot that made me instantly cry harder than anything I’ve ever seen in a show or film, into my life, Jack Huston, Howard Korder, Terence Winter, Boardwalk Empire.

* This is a very, very, very, very, very good show. See you next year.