347. “It’s over!”

Oh Brad, when will you learn. In the time it takes for Wesley to grab his fallen gun and turn it on Dalton while Dalton is distracted by Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s arrival, Doc has the chance to scream “No!” and Wesley himself gilds the lily by shouting “It’s over!” Which it is, but not in the way he intends.

It’s over because Red Webster, Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s uncle, has mortally wounded her ex-husband in order to save her (ex?-)boyfriend. That’s one more thing Wesley allows to happen because he’s too busy bantering to pull the goddamn trigger. It’s one thing to be chatty when you’re roughing up one of your own hapless employees; O’Connor isn’t going to put up a fight while you call him a messy bleeder, and none of your other goons is going to come to his aid.

But Dalton is a different story—a story of kindness, of friendship, of being the best damn cooler in the business. He’s made friends in this town. And though perhaps Brad Wesley can be forgiven for not expecting five of them to suddenly materialize in his basement, four of them carrying shooting irons, why take a chance?

346. The Arrival

The first of several unexpected visitors to the Wesley estate this fine morning—second if you count Dalton, but the goons were clearly expecting him—is Dr. Elizabeth Clay. This raises some questions. How did she know to come here? Did she know what she would find? Was she directed here by some staff member at the Double Deuce who put two and two together vis a vis the corpse on the bar? If so, why didn’t any of them come with her? Did Jack and Hank and Younger have better things to do? Were they just not on duty yet? Or did word spread through the town grapevine? How would that work, given that Dalton’s assault on the compound takes six minutes from start to finish? Did she arrive with the four village elders who will, a few seconds from this moment, murder Brad Wesley with shotguns? If so, why do they all enter the room from different directions? And how did they find out what was going on at the mansion? Was there a disturbance in the old-coot Force? Back to Doc for a second, what has she come to do? Stop Dalton? Stop Wesley? Stop them both? Did she blow right past the four dead bodies on the ground floor of the house, or did she stop to attempt triage and treatment before realizing she was too late? What is she feeling right here, right now, at this moment? Is she glad Dalton decided not to rip Wesley’s throat out, a decision he makes just before she arrives and thus without the need for her opprobrium to convince him? Is she worried Brad will take advantage of this lull in the action? Is she concerned, at all, for herself? If so, which man is she worried about? “You’re gonna save these people? Well who’s gonna save them from you?” Remember that? Remember her telling Dalton where to shove it when he attempted to convince her to leave town with him, earlier this very morning? What changed? What does Dalton feel when he sees her? Relief? Guilt? Gratitude? Shame? Vindication? And Wesley, what about him? Is he solely concerned with exploiting how Dalton has let down his guard? Does he wonder if Elizabeth came there to save him? Would he care if she did? Does he harbor hopes of a reunion once Dalton is out of the way? What are we to take from the fact that he only looks at Dalton in this moment, not at Elizabeth? Does he have his eyes on the prize, or is the real prize the one person he can’t bring himself to look at?

345. Hesitation

It’s finally happened. Dalton has gotten the drop on Brad Wesley, for good and all. He’s disarmed him, he’s kicked him into a chair, he’s pinning him down by the chest with his knee, and he’s left him with no place to move or hide. Instinctively, Dalton’s right arm pulls back, his fingers in a claw-grip position. You know what’s coming next—you’ve known it since you saw what happened to Jimmy, or heard about what happened in Memphis, or even when you saw Hank the bouncer tell Horny Steve the legend when Dalton first arrived at the Double Deuce. Brad Wesley is about to get his throat ripped out.

But this never happens. On the verge of a final, total, horrible victory, Dalton hesitates. He finds he cannot pull the throat out of a man who’s unarmed and helpless before him. He’s murdered five of the man’s minions and fought a pitched battle to get to this very moment, but when he gets there, there’s no Frodo claiming the Ring as his own for Dalton. He resists the temptation. He stays his hand.

Which, hey, good for him. One less murder to worry about!

But…look, I don’t want to come across as endorsing the act of ripping an unarmed man’s throat out to punish him for his crimes against auto shops and dive bars. That would be wrong. Still, I can’t help but feel that Dalton’s gotten this a bit backwards. Jimmy, Morgan, O’Connor, Ketcham, Pat McGurn: They were just following orders. Brad Wesley was giving those orders. He didn’t wield the knife that killed Wade Garrett, but it was his coin toss that decided the cooler’s fate. He didn’t plant the explosives at Red’s Auto Parts or Emmett’s cabin, he didn’t drive the monster truck over Strodenmire Ford, he didn’t personally start several vicious barfights, but he was the architect of it all, just as surely as he was the architect for the coming of the JC Penney.

And here Dalton hesitates? Here he develops doubt about the act of ripping a guy’s throat out? Is it truly a moral victory to slaughter five men but spare the one who put them in harm’s way to begin with?

344. “I just don’t have the time”

“I thought it would be fun to fight you, Dalton,” says Brad Wesley. “I really did.” He says this right after getting his knee smashed, which presumably made him reevaluate the relative fun-ness of fighting Dalton. “But now,” he adds, pulling his very small backup gun, “I just don’t have the time.”

Does this exchange sound familiar? It should: Jimmy pulled off a very similar conversational gambit at the end of his own fight with Dalton. “I’m gonna kill you the old-fashioned way,” he said, pulling his gun, before Dalton disarmed and murdered him.

And guess what happens to Brad Wesley next? Dalton disarms and…well, we’ll get to that, though observant readers already know what’s about to happen. But the salient point here is that he roundhouse kicks Wesley’s gun right out of his hand. Whatever time Wesley thought he was gonna save, I’m afraid he’ll have to spend after all.

Do you see the problem here, in terms of villainy and goonsmanship? Both Jimmy and Brad Wesley (his natural father in the parlance of A Song of Ice and Fire and in my own imagination) waste breath and time talking about how they’re gonna shoot Dalton to death when they probably would have been better served just, you know, shooting him to death. It can be convincingly argued that talking about it is precisely what prevents it from happening, in both cases. If only being a bad guy had its own set of three simple rules: “Be concise” might have been one of them, and it would have saved both men a world of hurt.

“His Dark Materials” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “The Daemon-Cages”

If there’s one phrase that sticks in the head after tonight’s episode of His Dark Materials (“The Daemon-Cages”), it’s “the tyranny of sin.” Uttered by one of the scientists who oversees the cruel, child-abusing “intercision” technique in the cold Northern prison known as Bolvangar, it explains nearly everything we’ve seen Mrs. Coulter and the sinister agents of the Magisterium do.

After all, if you truly believe that the planet is suffering under the boot-heel of original sin, is there anything you wouldn’t do to “free” it? Isn’t a sacrifice of the few for the many, as Mrs. Coulter puts it, worth the price?

The answer depends on whether you believe in the concept of sin to begin with. In this fantasy world, of course, the concept is equated with an actual physical substance called Dust, which in turn is associated with human souls in animal form, known as daemons. But what if you don’t buy into the notion that there’s something corrupt in the human heart, which only church and state can destroy? Then you can see Bolvangar for what it is: a facility for the torture of innocents.

It’s all very heavy stuff to wrestle with, and this episode is uncompromising in its depiction of the traumatized, zombified children left in the wake of the villains’ grand experiment. It’s also unflinching in showing us the excuses adults will cling to — sin, science, the need to follow orders — in order to justify their cruelty.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone.

Watching Watchmen with Struggle Session

I appeared on the latest episode of the Struggle Session podcast to talk to hosts Leslie Lee III and Jack Allison about the latest episode of Watchmen. Give it a listen!

343. “Give me the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone”

Discipline—that’s what you’re seeing on display here. Remarkably, Dalton has found himself on the losing end of a battle with a Korean War veteran wielding a spear. He’s been shot, he’s been mollywhopped, he’s exhausted from dodging each new swing and thrust. But never do his cooler instincts depart him, and why is that? Because he’s dedicated his entire life to being, in Frank Tilghman’s immortal words, the best damn cooler in the business. (Technically second-best—oh, wait, not anymore.) He is following his own rules. He is taking the threat presented by Brad Wesley, 7-Eleven impresario, very seriously. (“Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.”) He has taken the fight to the man instead of waiting for the man to come to him. (“Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary.”) He is aware of what time it is. (“Be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.”) And he is making use of one of the tricks of the trade—“Give me the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone.”

That is what it takes to lay Brad Wesley low: a blow to the knee, the same thing that enabled Dalton to make short work of Ketcham and allowed Wade Garrett to defeat Mountain. (Dalton may even have injured the knee of Jimmy against that tree during their fight to the death, though the angle makes it unclear.) A lesser man, having just incurred a gunshot wound after murdering four men and now finding himself being chased around a coffee table by a berserk mall developer in the taxidermy wing of his mansion, might forget that sort of thing in the heat of the moment. But when you’re a cooler, there’s no such thing as “the heat of the moment.” The cool is all there is.

“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “A God Walks Into Abar”

It’s only when the episode reaches its conclusion that it starts to trip over itself. First, it indulges in a cheap and easy Terminator-style temporal paradox: Angela tells Dr. Manhattan that her grandfather murdered Judd Crawford for being a closet Klansman and member of the Cyclops conspiracy, facts of which he goes on to inform her grandfather years earlier, causing him to commit that very murder in the first place.

Alan Moore wisely avoided these chicken-and-egg brainteasers when he wrote the character. Instead, he emphasized the way Dr. Manhattan’s quantum-physics experience of life would affect him emotionally. Passing messages backwards and forwards in time until reality becomes a loop is a lot less interesting than the idea of a man constantly adrift in an endless sea of memory, experience, and anticipation. One is a parlor game; the other is a story. It doesn’t surprise me to see the co-writer of this episode is Jeff Jensen, the former TV critic best known for his elaborate and always incorrect theories about what was really going on on Lindelof’s Lost. (Apparently Lindelof appreciated those pieces a lot more than I did.)

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen, about which I had mixed feelings, for Decider.

“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Ten: “410 Gone”

But there’s one thing I can’t quite figure out: the episode’s final shot. After numerous references to her insomnia, we finally see Dom fast asleep on the plane, Darlene’s empty seat next to her.

Why does Dom finally sleep the sleep of the just at this moment? Didn’t she run back to the plane because she wanted to reunite with Darlene? If all she wanted to do was break free of her responsibilities — to her family, to her job, even to Darlene — then wouldn’t she have done something else, considering she believed Darlene was on the plane?

At the very least, the music supervisor owes me an apology for getting my hopes up with that Jepsen song. But perhaps that disappointment was the point. As they used to say on “Game of Thrones,” life is not a song.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot (and its Carly Rae Jepsen music cue) for the New York Times.

342. Mad Brad

In the middle of whipping the shit out of Dalton with a spear, Brad Wesley makes this face. His eyes all but bug right out of his head. His mouth is set in some sort of weird battle rictus. His usually impeccably coiffed hair is just wild enough to look upsetting in context. All in all it’s probably the right way to look if you are Ben Gazzara, age 58, and you’re supposed to be a convincingly formidable adversary to a trained dancer/fighter/stuntman/actor 22 years your junior. Fortunately for us, director Rowdy Herrington agreed, and a lingering shot of this absurd face made the cut when this fight scene was put into its final form. It goes a long way toward selling Wesley’s end of the bargain.

For his part, Patrick Swayze spends a long time just dodging rather than striking, rolling around on the furniture, avoiding Gazzara’s swipes and stabs with the spear. When he finally gets back on his feet he’s hunched over, his bullet-wounded left arm pulled in toward his body, a posture that conveys the fact that he’s badly injured and possibly also just worn down from murdering four other guys in the past three or four minutes. After seeing Dalton go toe to toe with the likes of Jimmy and emerge victorious, Road House had yeoman’s work to do in order to convince us that Dalton’s battle against Brad Wesley would be anything other than an embarrassing squash, and by god the film almost pulls it off.

341. Spear

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over three hundred forty-one days of writing about Road House, it’s that “Famous bouncer impaled to death by spear thrown by deranged Fotomat enthusiast” would be a fitting end to Road House. Alas for Brad Wesley, it is not meant to be. The spear he grabs from his extensive spear collection and throws at Dalton sails leisurely past the target, gliding by as if suspended on some kind of wire before crashing into something in the background.

But there’s more where that came from, fortunately for Wesley, and he spends the bulk of this fight scene alternately trying to batter and stab Dalton with another spear. It’s a surprisingly effective tactic, as we should perhaps have guessed: It’s not like Dalton got a lot of experience defending himself against spears during his career as a bouncer. The fact that he gets out of this alive at all is a testament to his adherence to the First Rule: “Never underestimate your opponent; expect the unexpected.” A duel to the death with a spear-wielding 58-year-old Chamber of Commerce guy is the unexpected alright.

340. Battle of the Buffalo

I love writing about action filmmaking and cartooning, even if action is not my favorite genre in either art form. (Though I do like it a lot. Perhaps you’ve heard about my affection for a film called Road House?) Years ago now, one of my friends and colleagues at a comics-industry magazine I worked for said I was three critics in one: the horror guy, the fight scene guy, and the pervert. He was not wrong!

A sense of place, a sense of space, is what I look for above virtually anything else in an action scene. I want the fight to be rooted in its environment, making use of its unique advantages and obstacles. I want to be able to parse the spatial relationships between the combatants at all times, so I understand who is at risk and when and why. I want each movement to have tangible physical stakes and consequences I can parse against the spacial and environmental backdrop. From the “Duel of the Fates” sequence in The Phantom Menace to the alleyway slugfest in They Live to the beach fight right here in Road House, great fight scenes deliver in these criteria.

So I want to be clear about this: The beginning of Dalton and Wesley’s final battle makes no sense at all.

Wesley is walking through his trophy room, starting from base of the staircase. A POV shot reveals his surroundings: To his right is a living-room set, and to his left is a wall with a stuffed bear, a stuffed hyena, and a stuffed buffalo. There is a good deal of space between these animals. Behind them is a blank white wall.

Rather intelligently, considering that it’s the first place along Wesley’s route where Dalton could conceivably find cover, Wesley whips to his left and points his gun toward the wall immediately after passing the buffalo. There’s even a little sting from Michael Kamen’s score to dramatize the moment.

Unfortunately, Dalton is not there. Dalton is in fact behind the buffalo, as we can see when he slowly emerges after Wesley lets down his guard. Dalton kicks, Wesley shoots and grazes Dalton’s arm, and the game is afoot.

Do you see the problem here? Dalton was hiding in a place plainly visible throughout the course of Wesley’s patrol. Unless he quickly tiptoed from some unseen hidden recess behind that bear, taking care not to bump any of the animals or make any noise or emerge into the view of the gun-toting man about four feet away from him, it is literally impossible for Dalton to do what he does. Wesley would have seen him no matter what.

You know that part in Funny Games where the guy breaks the fourth wall and rewinds the action so that the outcome plays in his favor? Perhaps this is Road House anticipating that move years in advance. Perhaps the focused totality of Dalton’s bouncer powers enabled him to warp time and space around him so he could appear someplace he hadn’t been moments before, or rendered him invisible to Wesley’s eye until it came time to strike. Perhaps the invisible hand of Rowdy Herrington himself just plopped him there and let him loose so that the final battle could at last begin. Perhaps the three parking-lot scenes are designed to impress upon us the film’s almost ponderous understanding of physical space, so we don’t question it when it makes no sense at all.

Anyway, the psychotic JC Penney developer gets attacked by a bloodthirsty bouncer who was hiding behind his stuffed buffalo. And that’s all you need to know, son.

339. “This town is big enough for both of us”

Now here’s something you don’t hear everyday, even if everyday you’re talking to villains. “Now c’mon Dalton,” Brad Wesley says as he prowls his trophy room. “This town is big enough for both of us.” He adds an entreaty to “let’s talk about this,” but I at least was stopped short by his assessment of the size of the town relative to the needs of himself and his enemy here. Frankly, I’ve never heard a villain say that this town is big enough for both of us. I mean, that kind of abrogates the need for villainy in the first place, does it not? Just as there are no ethical billionaires, there are no villains dedicated to properly apportioning a town, of any size, to themselves and their rivals.

It’s a particularly risible statement in the context of Road House, in which Brad Wesley has repeatedly told Dalton his presence wasn’t “working out,” and even asked his ex-wife Dr. Elizabeth Clay to get Dalton out of town for him, in between having his goons attempt to beat and kill him. For his part, Dalton has thwarted Brad Wesley’s machinations at every turn, and in the past 24 hours has murdered five of his men, so we know where he stands on the issue of the town’s bigness.

“This town is big enough for both of us” is a desperation play, is what it is. Wesley has every intention of plugging Dalton the moment he gets a clear shot, and simply needs to stall by keeping Dalton off-guard until that shot materializes. The weakness of the claim is perhaps our only outward indication that Wesley realizes he’s in a real jam here. It’s the statement of a man who’s not sure how big this town really is anymore.

338. A man among boys

Brad Wesley doesn’t feel Dalton has much to complain about. “What’s this all about, anyway?” he asks as he descends the spiral staircase into his trophy room. “Your friend Wade? One old man? That’s what I call a mercy killing. I put him out of his misery. Now you’re not mad at me about that, are you?” C’mon, what’s the big deal? Wesley just ordered the murder of an old man, one who is younger than he is but whatever. Get over it!

But there’s another point Brad would like to make. “Hell, you took Jimmy,” he continues. “He was in better shape!” That should settle the matter—just a couple of murders between friends, no biggie, and Dalton clearly had the better of it.

And then he looks down and sees Tinker, trapped beneath a polar bear. For all we know in the audience, this has somehow killed him. That’s definitely what Wesley thinks: “Hell, you took all my boys!” he bellows good-naturedly, a broad smile on his face, arms outstretched in an aw-shucks wouldja believe it gesture. (And to be fair, how would you react to that?)

Jimmy, Morgan, O’Connor, Ketcham, Pat, Tinker—Brad Wesley’s lost boys are gone, to a man, all thanks to Dalton, and he reacts to this like he’s learned something no more significant than that they’ve decided not to participate in the company softball game. Is this where we see the practical limits of Wesley’s paternalism? When the worst happens, as it definitely has to his organization—who now to shake down auto parts stores, or to grease the wheels required to open a Dress Barn—he sees it as no more of a setback than a kid being a little bit too impish when you’re trying to get out the door to head to the supermarket. When everyone looks like a boy to you, a fatherly tut-tut-tut is your solution to everything.

Well, that, plus attempted murder, as we will soon see. Maybe that’s the key to Wesley’s downfall, which is only one or two minutes away from occurring: He could never integrate Brad Wesley, town father, with Brad Wesley, deathbringer. Those grins are like the soft patch in Smaug’s breast.

337. Trophies

“I see you’ve found my trophy room, Dalton,” Brad Wesley cries into the darkness. “The only thing that’s missing…is your ass.”

There is much to consider here, much to ponder, much to weigh to a nicety in the scales of our wisdom. First there is the trophy room itself, a genuinely obscene spectacle of severed heads and often entire animals, stuffed and mounted for the amusement of the man who murdered them. Put more simply, that’s a buffalo, that’s multiple bears, that’s a whole-ass giraffe in there. Brad Wesley shot and killed a giraffe, then had it shipped back home from safari and loaded, perhaps by the very goons whose corpses now join it, into his basement-level rumpus room. Dalton’s entrance into this forbidden chamber offers him one last and true glimpse of Brad Wesley’s mind. This is what the contents of the man’s brain look like: victims, always victims, always made to suffer and die, added to his personal collection of victories over those weaker, or worse armed, than himself.

Second there is Brad Wesley’s choice of words. The “trophy room” bit is easy enough to parse, as we’ve seen: Brad Wesley collects the dead bodies of his vanquished foes as keepsakes. But “the only thing that’s missing—” dot dot dot “—is your ass”? That is a giraffe of a different color.

Brad Wesley would hardly be the first man, or even like the fifth man, to sexualize his violent intentions toward Dalton by mentioning his body in such a way. (Arguably Jimmy would still be alive, and Dalton dead, had Jimmy refrained from the whole “I used to fuck guys like you in prison” thing and just snapped Dalton’s neck or whatever.) But there’s not even a double-entendre involved here in the sense that Brad Wesley is literally saying he’d like to have Dalton’s ass stuffed and mounted.

Not that way, no, of course he can’t possibly mean that way, not Brad Wesley. It’s just a figure of speech. The look of glee on his face when he says it, eyes widening, mouth stretching into a broad smile despite having witnessed the slaughter of his entire entourage? Just spoiling for a fight, no doubt. A few minutes later when he tries to impale and then beat Dalton with a spear? Mere coincidence that this was the only weapon to hand, I’m sure, nothing more to it than that.

But these are the stakes as we move toward the climactic confrontation, the final battle, The End of the Story. Brad Wesley wants to complete his trophy collection by stuffing and mounting Dalton’s ass. He said so himself. Wrestle with that.

“His Dark Materials” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “The Lost Boy”

There is something inhumane, in the most extreme terms possible, about separating children from those they love the most. It robs them of the kindness, care, and security that they need so badly in this cruel, dangerous world — or other worlds, for that matter. Any movement based on tormenting kids in this way, any system that uses the power of the state to kidnap and traumatize its youngest and most vulnerable subjects — that’s the stuff of fantasy villainy. The evil is so clear cut you can write storybooks about it. “It’s worse than anything,” Lyra says.

“It’s about control, isn’t it,” Scoresby replies. “Because if you can remove someone’s soul, you can do anything.” So it would seem.

I reviewed this week’s episode of His Dark Materials for Rolling Stone. It’s relevant.

“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Nine: “409 Conflict”

But even now, there are intriguing loose ends and charming plot threads not covered in a description of the main action. Take Philip Price, for instance. As played, brilliantly, by Michael Cristofer, Price seems to have known his time was almost up the moment he allied himself with Elliot to take down Whiterose. So when he realizes he has arrived at what is clearly meant to be his place of execution, he is resigned to his fate and spends the ensuing meeting getting hammered on champagne.

This leads to some of the night’s funniest lines. “You think I can’t survive being doxxed?” Whiterose shouts at him at one point after Darlene’s new video goes viral.

“I have no idea,” Price deadpans. “I’m as curious as you!”

And later, when the hack goes through and Whiterose begins to realize it, you can hear the laughter in Price’s voice as he asks, “Something wrong, old sport?” Price has the most dramatic death of all the main characters who’ve bought the farm this season; it seems fitting that he has the most fun on his way out.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “An Almost Religious Awe”

Do you see where I’m going with this? The art of this show doesn’t lie in Damon Lindelof’s nervous-breakdown interviews or contractually-obligated making-of mini-documentaries, or in the Peteypedia supplementary materials on HBO.com, or in finding just the right place to stop the chicken-and-egg cycle of racism and racism-induced trauma that led to the state of vigilantism and policing today. It’s in the pacing and the imagery, in that staccato strangeness that Lindelof has developed and unleashed in his Gibbons-endorsed, Moore-ignored homage to the original.

If that’s not to your taste, that is fine—even The Leftovers was Not For Everyone TV. But at least respond to it as a work of visual narrative, not a thinkpiece. At least reflect on and wrestle with where the art of the thing really is, not where you feel you need it to be.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Watchmen for Decider.

336. Polar bear

No one comes closer to killing Dalton than Tinker. No one. Not Jimmy, in all his beachside posturing and martial-arts prowess. Not Ketcham with his knife. Not Pat McGurn with his shotgun. No, way back when, when he and O’Connor travel to the Double Deuce to forcibly reinstate Pat to his bartending sinecure, Tinker opens a gash in Dalton’s side that it takes a hospital visit and medical intervention from Dr. Elizabeth Clay to close. A few inches to one side and this movie would have ended a long time ago, at Tinker’s hands.

Yet in the end, Tinker is a comical figure, a Pierrot in suspenders and a trucker hat. Why? Because he’s afraid of Brad Wesley’s extensive collection of stuffed and mounted animals, and Dalton exploits this fear by dumping a stuffed polar bear on him, knocking him out. But first, Tinker stammers and sputters and empties his gun into the thing’s inanimate carcass, as if he’s facing not just a living polar bear, but a spectral polar bear, a Tuunbaq, sent from the Arctic wastes to consume his very soul. Everyone else in the goon squad gets popped offscreen, or gets a knife to the torso. Tinker? He’s dispatched by taxidermy.

“You’re made for each other,” Dalton quips after toppling the bear onto his enemy, incapacitating him. This is a fat joke, most likely; Tinker is the most heavyset of the goon squad, ergo a big ol’ bear is his logical nemesis. But keep this in mind: Tinker is the sole survivor, after Jimmy and Morgan and O’Connor and Ketcham and Pat McGurn and even Brad Wesley are long gone. And what animal knows better how to survive in an inhospitable environment? Perhaps that’s the message Dalton intended to send: Survivors know.

335. You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile

Jimmy is dead. Morgan is dead. O’Connor is dead. Ketcham is dead. Pat McGurn is dead. Four corpses litter Brad Wesley’s mansion. And what is his response when he sees the men who risked their lives from him lying bloodied and mangled all around his house? How does he react when he sees O’Connor’s lifeless husk? He smiles. It’s the grin of a man thinking “If it’s not one thing, it’s another!” or “When it rains, it pours!” or “Ya gotta love it!” It takes a true sociopath to respond to mass murder not with horror or rage or resignation or even cold indifference, but with what Rifftrax’s Mike Nelson referred to as “wry amusement.” Ha! What a day, Brad Wesley thinks as he walks past one slain servant after another. Or as his enemy Red Webster once put it, That’s life. Who can explain it.

Of course, he never could stand a Bleeder, so there’s that too.