* Poor Marten Weiner as Glen Bishop. The Sofia Coppola in Godfather Part III of Mad Men.

* Fun fun casting for Megan’s parents. Career European Ronald Guttman as her philandering Marxist intellectual father? Bien sur. and of course you knew something sexy was gonna happen the moment you recognized Julia Ormond as maman.

* Roger’s ex-wife looks GREAT. I guess he’s not the only Sterling getting a second wind.

* “No, pervert, this is about work,” Megan tells Don when she comes into his office to tell him her great idea for the Heinz baked beans campaign. “You’re good at all of it,” Don tells Megan as they leave the dinner meeting with the Heinz guy where they were supposed to get fired but ended up securing the account because of Megan’s quick thinking and her and Don’s intellectual and emotional rapport. And those two lines in a nutshell are why I insisted last week that Don and Megan are not dysfunctional, not the way Don and Betty were, not by a million miles. (That part of last week’s post got me more “just writing to say I agree” responses than anything I’ve ever written about a show, maybe because so few other people out there seemed to agree?) The sex stuff that seems so powerful and even dark in the moment is something they playfully joke about when the office door is closed, just something else they share along with great ad ideas and Don’s secret identity and Megan’s parents’ dysfunction. (Now that’s a place to use the d-word.) Megan’s good at all of it — working the room, coming up with ideas, delivering them in compelling pitches, adjusting to the facts on the ground, being pretty and supportive, being sexy, soothing Don’s melancholies, mothering the kids, having a mind and personality and drive of her own. They’re great together.

* Or they would be, if not for the soft underbelly Megan’s dad pierced at the banquet. The signs were there already, of course. There was her discomfort when her Hail Mary pitch is celebrated at the office the next day — seriously, I literally stood up, pumped my fists, and cheered when the Heinz guy okayed the idea, let alone the characters in a world where this actually happened, but Megan just seemed to struggle with the knowledge that she should be happier than she is about it. “This is as good as this job gets,” Peggy tells her, and means it as a compliment; Megan reacts like she’s smelled a fart, like being told you’re a young Peggy Olsen is like being informed you have a chronic medical condition.

* But it was daddy dearest who really shattered the dream of Don and Megan. I was hoping that his line of attack that Megan had given up on her dreams to follow Don’s career footsteps was just a bitter man lashing out because he can’t stand happiness in others when he has so little. But one look at Megan’s total deflation after he tells her she’s given up shows he absolutely nailed it. We’d never really seen this side of Megan before — last season she told Don she wants what he and Peggy have and it seemed sincere, and her mentions of her failed acting career seemed as good-natured as such things could get. Frankly I was surprised to see how effective her dad was in dismantling her this way. But now I’m just really alarmed for her future with Don and his family. I don’t know how you paper that big a problem over with Draper pitches and kinky sex. It never worked for Don himself, after all.

* Speaking of which, those ads for that show The Pitch are unintentional comedy gold in the context of the show during which they’re airing. Jesus, could AMC have missed the point of Mad Men any more spectacularly? (Granted, I say this despite having hollered at the screen like a baseball fan during the World Series when the Don-Megan tag-team pitch landed. Maybe AMC knows me better than I know myself.)

* Peggy getting man advice from Joan feels like she used a time machine to do it. And because it started in that way, that throwback to the mores of the ’50s way, you knew it’d end in tragicomedy. But the comedy was funny. I loved Peggy watching Peggy realize what she’d just said when Abe asked her if she wanted to order and she replied “I do” — the facial-expression equivalent of the sad trombone. And I loved Mrs. Olsen’s inflection as she greeted Peggy’s boyfriend. You don’t have to have grown up Catholic to find hilarious the way a disapproving middle-aged Catholic woman would pronounce the name of her daughter’s live-in boyfriend if that name happened to be something like Abraham…but it helps!

* An adult content warning 3/4 of the way through the episode? Now we’re talkin’!

* Who Killed Donald Draper?

* Seriously, the total devastation of the underpinning of Megan’s marriage to Don by her dad was actually surpassed in dreadful revelatory power by Ken’s father-in-law Ed Baxter, played by the eternally incandescent Ray Wise, telling Don that his career as adman for the powerful is basically over. Again, there’s no way past having made yourself publicly, spectacularly, even proudly untrustworthy in the eyes of the people whose trust you need to survive.

* Like Game of Thrones, which this week took 12-year-old Maisie Williams and put her one on one with Charles freaking Dance because that’s just how good the kid is, Mad Men knows what a resource it has in the form of gifted child actress Kiernan Shipka, and rewarded her and us this week by putting her up against John Slattery’s Roger Sterling. Roger was just what she needed — an adult treating her as one of them — and she was just what he needed — a zero-pressure opportunity to work all his charm muscles without his livelihood and self-worth rising and falling on it. They’re both obnoxious people in a lot of ways, but they’re also both magnetic and funny and interesting, and that’s the side that comes out when the two are juxtaposed. What a pity it ended the way it did. Sally’s a woman of the world to an extent — you have to assume her late-night phone calls with Glen have tackled some taboo topics, I know mine did at that age. But seeing Megan’s mom polishing the sterling did more than expose her to the act itself: It showed her the truth of what all the play-acting about being Roger’s date and implicit equal entails. You wanna be a part of a successful man’s life, being squired around to fancy-dress banquets and becoming his partner in securing new business and all of that? Here’s something else you’ll be doing. That’s a lot to swallow, and oh jesus I promise you I didn’t think of that pun before I wrote it.

* I loved how that scene ended: with a goddamn tableau. You want on-the-nose, critics who distrust art making its artifice apparent? You got it. Ditto the crash cut to black after Sally pronounces the city “dirty.” Pardon my French twice over, but FIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.

* Finally, I want to take a moment to salute the single funniest thing I’ve seen on TV all year, when Megan’s dad tells Don that one day, “your little girl will spread her legs and fly away.” It’s not even the dad’s comment that does it, despite its turducken structure — a bitter swipe at Don in the form of a dirty joke disguised as a possible trans-language malapropism. Nope, it’s Roger Sterling cracking up about it, laughing loud and hard despite how completely inappropriate and uncomfortable the comment was for everyone else in the room. I was dying, just dying. Roger Sterling’s the Fool, the Joker, the Comedian, and getting the joke is its own reward. Laugh and the world may not laugh with you, but hey, at least you’re having a good time!

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 15, please visit Rolling Stone.

* And likely final. When your zeal for making your characters contemptible extends to not bothering to make them interesting to watch, ya blew it.

I understand how exciting it is to see yourself and your peer group represented on a show run by your peer group, and I like to think I can at least see what that would mean in gender terms from where I’m standing as a dude as well, though obviously I’ll never fully feel the impact of the gender disparity in pop culture the way the people on the losing end do. And I’m legit excited about the abortion storyline making it on to TV the way it did. But that’s about all this has going for it, best I can tell.

Lena Dunham aims for warts-and-all and winds up with all-warts, to the point where the characters are incoherent, and not in a Whitmanesque containing-multitudes way. That poor square virgin character, for example, reacts to the news that Hannah’s getting an STD test by saying “Fun!” and meaning it, at least until her friends talk her down. This is something no actual human being would ever say or think, but she does because we’re meant to find her ridiculous, and for Dunham any weapon to hand will do. Ditto whatsername, the one who’s not Hannah and not the British person and not the square virgin — she’s upset that she hasn’t had an unplanned pregnancy? How does that square with wanting her boyfriend to be less of a milquetoast? Or with, you know, being a recognizable human person? Comedy is obviously about exaggeration and distortion — see also the opening sex scene with Hannah’s grotesque fuckbuddy, which stacked the deck horrendously and wasn’t funny but which at least stemmed from familiar human behavior. Hannah’s friends, on the other hand, are just a collection of tics and neuroses and random embarrassing things (moving to New York because of Rent). That in turn made me less forgiving even toward the understandable caricaturing of the bit players.

Most fundamentally, though, once again I found myself sitting through a half-hour comedy during which I could count the laugh-out-loud moments on one hand with fingers to spare (for the record again: “What if I want to feel like I have udders? This woman doesn’t speak for me.” and “When they pull out, it’s fucking mayhem.”) Whatever else they’ve got going for them, whatever else they bring to the pop-culture table, horror is supposed to be scary, smut is supposed to be sexy, and comedy’s supposed to be funny. So, pass.

* It’s normal to just wave your arms around and cheer in delight several times during an hour-long television episode, right? Happens all the time?

* Big big cheer when I (finally? not sure how I stacked up vs. most viewers) realized what was happening with the narrative. I’d gotten pretty worried when we had that brief glimpse of an obviously distraught Don at a payphone in the middle of the night, asking Peggy if she’d gotten any calls in a cryptically unspecific fashion, hanging up in the middle of her mea culpa for the Heinz debacle. (I realize now that part of what worried me is that the last time I saw a quick cut to an alpha male at a pay phone we never saw him arrive at, telling a woman with whom he has a relationship rife with sublimated parental and romantic feelings about something bad that had happened off-screen, on a show Matthew Weiner worked on, I was watching a Sopranos episode called “Long Term Parking.”) But the next time we see Don he’s cheerfully rebuffing Roger’s attempt to turn a trip to an upstate Howard Johnson’s into an old-school Draper/Sterling debauch (Don: “I love Howard Johnson’s…” Roger: “We’ll try and stop by!”), inviting Megan along instead, so everyone I was worried about while watching that phone call — Don, Megan, Roger — seemed squared away. It wasn’t until the beginning of the third, Don-centric segment of the episode, when we saw conversations repeated from a different perspective, that I understood. And marveled!

* Peggy’s soundtrack was ambient. (Both ambient music and ambient noise — thank you, stereo surround system purchased for us by my college friends as a wedding present for the low bass thrum from the street below as Peggy had her first drink.) Roger’s was found music (including “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” LOL MAD MEN MUSIC CUES). Don’s was traditional orchestral scoring.

* One of my little cheers was for me, I admit, for identifying the role of the color orange on this season early and often, just in time for a metric ton of payoff during the Howard Johnson’s sequence. “We’d have rolled out the orange carpet!” The battle of the orange sherbet! Those gorgeous, ridiculous HoJo-noir night shots against the glowing orange roof! Not since the Godfather movies has orange been such a portent of doom. It was easy for me to believe that something really had happened to Megan, that this was the last Don or we or anyone else would ever see of her, simply because she had a salmon dress on.

* Roger and Jane are advised to look at their acid trip as a boat ride. Don looks around the parking lot for Megan and finds a boat. (Pretty sure that was salmon-colored, too.)

* Roger’s trip (band name alert!) was maybe only the second-most Sopranos thing to happen in the episode, thanks to that Don phonecall, but god was it a great reminder of what made that show so great. Both shows give images the time to play themselves out and then leave you with them, little emotional depth-charges you might not even understand in the moment — lots and lots of shots of the women at the party lying down, crawling, faces obscured, just for example. Both don’t mind being frightening and silly within the same scene, or letting dream logic infect everyday reality. Neither is afraid of taking a message and punching you right in the face with it, because after all, sometimes you really do get punched in the face with a message about your life IRL. What, are they not gonna have Roger fixate on an old-young man in an ad, or reminisce-hallucinate about the Black Sox scandal in a way that makes him seem like a creature from a wholly different century than his young wife? If you were Roger, wouldn’t you?

* Speaking of silly-frightening drug stuff, I caught a heavy “Revolution 9” vibe from the sequence despite it predating that song by, what, two years? I mean, maybe it was just Don whistling “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” later in the episode — and jesus, how’s that for a pop-culture moment, Don Draper Meets the Beatles — that put me in mind of the comparison, but seriously: the full-blast snippets of grand orchestral music, the overlapping and disconnected conversations, the songs played one on top of the other, the occasional goofy sound effect — heck, eventually Roger and Jane became naked!

* Roger hears the words of his guide and sees Don. I think that’s a lot more complex a hallucination than the “haha he idolizes Don” sight gag suggests. He idolizes Don, he fears Don, he envies Don, he likes Don…but he also made Don. Don exists because Roger thought him up, essentially, saying okay, this guy has some talent, let’s see what he can do. The hallucination is, quite literally, a reflection of that reality. And since Roger’s the elder, he can never acknowledge any of these feelings, not to anyone else, not even to himself without the help of LSD, without violating a tremendous taboo against being less self-sufficient than the generation that follows you. That is some magnificent burrow-deep-down drug writing right there.

* I’d pretty much accepted the implication that Jane simply didn’t remember her decision to divorce Roger during the trip, but it occurs to me now — it’s just as possible Roger hallucinated her entire side of the conversation, isn’t it?

* The irony there, while we still have the dawn of Roger and Don’s relationship on our minds, is that it began under similar circumstances. The morning after their first liquid lunch, Don shows up to work, telling an amnesiac Roger that he hired him the day before.

* “I say we postpone this conversation until after we turn on.” I laughed hard at that.

* Shit, this is a sexy fucking show. Peggy’s movie-theater handjob may be top dawg. “Just watch the movie.” Yowza.

* Peggy awoken by the Dawn.

* Regarding the super-fake car rides: This is a show that could make car rides look convincing if it wanted to. This wasn’t them trying to shoot perfectly natural-looking car rides and failing.

* Ginsberg born in a concentration camp? This revelation dropped into the middle of a story about being a Martian from which he never breaks character, peppered with portentous quote-unquote jokes like not being able to find any others like him and receiving the instruction simply to stay where he is and wait? Peggy gets her Jewish reporter boyfriend to fact-check the story during a booty call — she’s nothing if not efficient — but it’s not Ginzo the person within this world I wonder after, it’s Ginzo the device within this show. Mad Men‘s just given him an origin story that echoes Don’s in nearly every particular — both orphans raised by a non-biological parent, both shaped by war in a formative way — but trumps it over and over. He’ll see your whore and raise you a Holocaust victim. He’ll beat your army-grunt identity switch by never having been known by his original identity. He’ll take your Korea and give you a World War Fucking II. Who is this guy?

* I’ve already talked a bit about how plausible Don’s morbid ideation about Megan’s post-fight fate were made to seem by the filmmaking in the episode, but of course the other half of that equation is that all of us have gone on similar flights of terrifying fantasy any time our significant other takes too long getting back from getting prescription filled or whatever. I’m pretty sure I don’t talk enough about Jon Hamm as an actor, but good lord did he nail the moment when he discovers their apartment’s been locked from the inside — that moment when some little thing, the tip of a vast iceberg of relief and gratitude, tips us off that our loved one is safe and sound after all. The shuddering release of breath, the momentary jellyfish-jiggle as your nervous system hits the “she’s okay” button as hard as it possibly can.

* This is why I think it’s a big mistake to view Don and Megan’s relationship as dysfunctional, at least as I understand it. Look at the way the fight ends, with Don clinging to her like a life raft — not to their life, not to the idea of her, not to what she represents as a signpost of the life he’s made for himself, but really to her, to this person named Megan. Look at the way her look and touch absolves him, accepts his apology, expresses regret as she comes to understand how upset he truly was. I don’t wish to deny how titanic and terrifying as the fight’s climax was, with Don chasing her around the apartment like a madman — that’s not romantic, that’s threatening, although I don’t get the sense that Megan felt truly in danger, just that she in that moment was horrified by the prospect of being close to Don at all. His actions “diminish” what they have, she says. They do not fight well, that’s clear; their fights are tied into the May-December sexual kink they share and thus can ricochet off in hugely inappropriate and hurtful directions (Don’s chase is just an ugly goes-to-eleven distortion of their earlier dom-sub shenanigans) unless the combination is calibrated exactly right. But the way even the nastiest, scariest, most rage-fueled fight dissipated into near-nothingness the moment they realized how hurt they both were rang very true. In that moment the immensity of their love dwarfed their anger at one another, so they just swatted it away. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that depicted on film before.

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 14, please visit Rolling Stone.

The amount of demimonde-establishment crammed into virtually every line of dialogue in the premiere episode of Girls makes Game of Thrones‘s worldbuilding look dashed off and noncommittal. Perhaps it’s the shock of recognition talking here, the fact that I instantly grokked nearly every deployment of descriptive specificity because these lives are, if not my own life per se, at the very least visible from the one I’m living. But holy jeez, from “He was in Prague that semester” to “Will you get me a Luna bar and a SmartWater and a Vitamin Water?” (did they steal my wife’s shopping list?), I suddenly understood everyone who complained about actors being made to cough up Baratheons and Winterfells and Khal Drogos every time they spoke to one another. Writer/director/producer/star Lena Dunham could literally have animated comic-book word balloons reading “NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY” emerging everyone’s mouths and it wouldn’t have been more utilitarian than what we actually got.

But Girls‘s pilot is hardly the first to creak under the weight of its own need to serve the purpose of communicating What This Show Will Be About. Mad Men‘s period references were never clunkier than in its first ep — I remember the very smart writer Zak Smith/Sabbath wondering aloud on twitter if every episode was going to be characters shouting “IT’S THE SIXTIES!” — while both The Sopranos and Breaking Bad played as broad black comedy the blend of irony and violence they’d later refine into something far more vicious and terrifying and unpredictable. Girls‘s avalanche of detail may have been suffocating, but there were flashes of Interesting twinkling throughout that vast Brooklyn-twentysomething landslide.

The casting, for one thing, in which everyone felt…achievable, if that’s the right word for it. Jemima Kirke played the superhumanly worldly “British cousin” Jessa like a dressed-down version of Gossip Girl‘s Serena Van Der Woodsen, her bohemian-branded effortless perfection tempered/complicated/enriched/take-yer-pick by a less superhuman physique, and cast-off clothing the knowingly awkward fit of which was still, y’know, awkward. (Plus peeing, plus pregnancy, plus shitting her pants on coke.) Adam Driver, playing Hannah’s crush/fuckbuddy Adam (the inevitability of Adams being another pointedly true Brooklyn touch), combined what could be charitably termed as “unconventional” looks with a gym-honed physique, an obvious overcompensation that I wish the show had left uncommented-on rather than trotting out the high-school fat-kid origin story. Meanwhile, I live on Long Island and and married to someone who studied and teaches voice, so seeing Zosia Mamet (Peggy’s delightful lesbian friend on Mad Men) show up in a pink tracksuit and speak in the vocal fry register for sentence after sentence gave me the thrill of seeing two of my long-standing pet peeves embodied and ridiculed in a single scene.

These are the kinds of things I wish the show had taken more time with, rather than never letting 15 seconds pass without another LOL BROOKLYN. The nervous, cramped editing and framing didn’t help — I understand it was a deliberate choice, but that doesn’t make it a good one. And I could count on one hand the times I laughed out loud, (for reference: Peter Scolari’s earring; “Will you get a condom?” “I’lllll consider it!”; “Let’s play the quiet game”; Hannah spitting her opium tea back out a la Alvy Singer sneezing into the cocaine), so in the future it’d be nice if the ostensible purpose of a situation comedy weren’t crowded out of said situation comedy. But Girls is nothing if not self-aware — “All my friends get help from their parents,” Hannah says in the very first scene, telegraphing her own hugely sheltered and unrealistic experience of the world in terms so blunt I’m almost surprised that half the Internet missed it anyway — and my hope is that that self-awareness will extend, eventually, to making something less self-conscious.

* If last week was Mad Men at its most David Lynch, this week was Mad Men at its most David Chase. (Which makes me hope that over the course of the next two eps the show will homage David Simon and David Milch, thus running the table on Great TV Davids. Tell me you couldn’t get a great systemic-failure-of-politics episode out of Henry Francis, or that Duck Phillips couldn’t return to the office and tell Don “God is not mocked, you son of a bitch” before stabbing him in the gut.)

* From the opening sequence of scenes — a dialogue-free scene juxtaposing a character watching portentous film with a fixation on a figure of untouchable feminine beauty and youth, segueing into that character being bedeviled by a literal leak of unpleasantness into his life via the house that symbolizes and embodies his supposed success — forward, goddamn was this a Sopranos-y episode, and that’s always a good look for Mad Men. Specifically it reminded me of the Season Six Part II premiere, “Soprano Home Movies,” which like last night’s MM ep was co-written by Matthew Weiner — and it did so during that sweaty, awkward dinner party in a relatively rural setting, quite before we got around to the equally awkward fistfight between two people who had no business fistfighting. Other Sopranos ingredients: the group trip to a house of ill repute, the Tony-esque lament about an ineffable decline from an idealized past (“Things seem so random all of a sudden. Time feels like it’s speeding up,” says Pete’s driver’s-ed Lolita prior to reminsicing about those happy golden bygone days of, like, two years ago), the liminal presence of real-world atrocities from the news, car rides, a high-school setting that recalled “The Test Dream” (I actually thought the initial high-school scene was a dream until we returned to the setting later in the episode). Shit, man, if you worked on the greatest television show of all time, wouldn’t you tip your hat to yourself now and then?

* I suppose the big difference between Mad Men and Davids Lynch and Chase is that the threat of violence here remains an un-serious one, to be sublimated into dreams in the former case and slapstick in the second. (See also Betty shooting the neighbor’s birds, Duck and Don’s drunken swing-and-a-miss-fest, the lawnmower man.)

* Not to be outdone, Stanley Kubrick continues to exert an influence on this season on an atomic level: the black/white/orange color scheme just gets more and more prominent, and it’s joined this time around by lovely lovely Ludwig Van.

* My first thought upon the quick cut to Lane’s ridiculously British pub celebration: “I can’t wait to hear what the Mindless Ones think of this.”

* Kenny on the move? His previously unmentioned pact with Peggy to take her with him if and when he leaves is our most dramatic sign yet that things aren’t going well at SDCP — more even than the no-new-business meeting, I think.

* I am deeply, deeply delighted by the return to the fore of Ken Cosgrove’s writing career, and was so excited by the fact that he’s writing SFF I literally cheered. For one thing, in terms of doing thoughtful work in a frowned-upon field, he’s Game of Thrones. For another, I always find myself…moved, I guess is the best way to put it, by mid-century science fiction — men and women toiling in unappreciated obscurity (or anonymity!) but absolutely drunk on the potential of raw imagination and cutting metaphor.

* Don’s Don, Roger’s Roger, Pete’s Pete, but to Joan, Bert’s still “Mr. Cooper.”

* I’m a huge huge sucker for moments of genuine cooperation and compassion between adults in fiction, so the presentation of Pete and Trudy’s baby to the group had me near tears, for real. Look at Don’s beaming, beaming face when he sees li’l Campbell: He is genuinely delighted by the kid and thrilled for Pete (for Pete!) and Trudy. Then look at Pete’s face, his emasculation by the exploding faucet (“it just blew in my face!” LOL Trudy) and Don’s effortless handling thereof completely evaporated by the pride he takes in his family, the love he feels for them, the gratitude he feels for the obvious affection and admiration shown to him by his coworkers and friends. You put enough scenes like that into a show, you can get as nasty and cynical as you want, and we’ll never feel like you’re saying none of it matters, because you’ve shown us that it does.

* Of course this scene was also essential to setting up Don’s obvious disgust — disappointment, even — over Pete’s behavior at the brothel. There were elements of sanctimony and hypocrisy here, sure, and Pete’s quick to point that out, but ultimately that line of attack rings hollow. Whether or not Don should have appreciated Betty and what he had with her and the kids more back then is irrelevant to the question of whether Pete should appreciate what he has right now. Moreover, we viewers know as well as anyone — better than anyone, most likely — that Don really was unhappy by the time he reached the end of the road his infidelity set him on. Why wouldn’t he try to impart that hard-earned wisdom to this man with whom he’s developed such an unlikely affection?

* Finally — I mean, tangentially but also finally — Don’s apparent fondness for Trudy Campbell and his comparison of Trudy not to Betty but to Megan was a quietly funny reminder that Don Draper has fine taste in brunettes.

* Great episode for ugly jackets, no? This is sort of what I was getting at in my post on the season premiere: As the fashion gets uglier, it’ll be harder for people to cling to the fashion in lieu of confronting the ugliness.

* I’m not going to do a good job commenting on this without sitting the episode and simply transcribing every word out of Roger’s mouth, but that was wonderfully well-written material he was given. After several episodes watching him alternately coast and flail, we not only get a hefty dose of his wit and charm in his instructional interplay with Lane, we also see just how good he was at his job, how important that wit and charm were to what he did and how talented and invaluable he was at doing it. We also get one of our first-act-of-Casino-style glimpses into the process that makes the ad agency work, and the efficiency and flexibility with which Roger can size up a potential client, in effect getting them to tell him exactly what they want from him without ever tipping his hand, is glamorous and enticing just as all of the show’s displays of professional hypercompetence are. Then we get to see that he’s well aware he’s past his prime: “professor emeritus of accounts”; “When this job is good it satisfies every need — believe me, I remember.” Doctor Phil tells me that you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge; I’m not sure Roger will be able to change, but at least he acknowledges that he probably ought to.

* Not that that stops him from bon-motting it up during the Pete/Lane rumble. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course!

* It feels a bit declasse to comment too much on a dude fingering a girl in a high-school driver’s-ed class, but I’m sorry, that was a magnificent little bit, and proof once again that Mad Men does sexy sex better than any show that could throw bare asses at you all the live-long day. He lowers his hand; she parts her legs and leans into him. It’s all about sending the signal that you want someone, and then that person giving themselves to you. No wonder Pete’s crushed by it: He can never have what he wants, since the only thing he ever wants is whatever he can’t have. “Nope. Nope. Okay.”

* What a great episode!

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 13, please visit Rolling Stone.

* Yeah, Episode Four: The premiere counted as two, apparently.

* Twin Peaks debuted 20 years ago today. Mad Men just started celebrating one day early is all.

* Seriously, what a treat to see Madchen Amick, who like all Lynch veterans takes his numinous energy with her wherever she goes. (See also Jimmy Barrett.) Even though it was reasonably clear that her continued presence in the episode and in Don’s apartment was a facet of a fever dream (otherwise why have the fever stuff going on in the first place, right?), her ability to disrupt Don’s life with her ever-increasing bluntness and directness had an uncanny air to it that went beyond “oh, it’s just a dream.” She literally only entered the story due to a physical separation between Don and Megan; she disappeared from Don’s apartment through a crack in the wall — that Gothic staple, a secret passage, one which may or may not exist in real life; she gave Matthew Weiner the opening for his most direct riff on David Lynch yet. (I ended up a little disappointed that the show hadn’t cast Sheryl Lee herself, and I half expected Don to start shouting about Missoula, MON-TANA!!!!!! Also did I detect some Angelo Badalamenti homages in the music round about the time Megan showed up in a halo of light?)

* Also, y’know, any excuse to look at Madchen Amick.

* The actual murder scene made my jaw drop and kept it that way for quite some time, even though I knew on some level — even just a narrative-television level — it couldn’t possibly be real: This wasn’t the sort of thing they’d do about three-fifths of the way into a fourth episode, involving a character we barely knew, in which the whole scene elapsed in what couldn’t have been more than two minutes. But it worked as well as it did nevertheless, in large part because we’ve always suspected Don has this in him. Remember the bit of business in the first season when he goes to his brother’s hotel room and you think he has a gun?

* I do feel like bluntness is Season Five’s stock in trade so far, for whatever that’s worth. Personally I’m not sure it’s worth much. Okay, it’s blunt. Okay, we get that Don telling hallucination-Madchen that she won’t ruin this for him, then strangling her, is his subconscious saying this same thing to the part of himself that cheats. (Although it’s important to note that he cheats first and kills later.) Okay, we get the connection between Madchen under the bed, Sally under the couch, and the survivor of Richard Speck’s Chicago nurse massacre under the bed. Okay, we get the connection between Time magazine being all “Enough with the riots already, this nurse massacre has some juice” and Peggy being freaked out about the massacre but oblivious to the potential and much more real violence Dawn could be facing. Okay, Peggy’s self-congratulation for helping Dawn out and for having been in a similar (but not really comparable) position of frowned-upon uniqueness at the office in the past is belied by both that obliviousness and her instinctive temptation not to leave the cash-filled purse around Dawn. I didn’t feel like I was being made to work too hard to put any of that together, but nor am I terribly tempted to complain about that. Is there such a thing as blunt elegance? Because I think that’s what this show has. There’s something to be said for making a clear point, but making it well.

* I do wish the connection between The World’s Most Intrusive Accordion Player and Joan’s own prowess with the squeezebox (pun intended lol) had gone unspoken, however. And “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” was the most on-the-nose music cue in all of recorded human history.

* I find myself fascinated by Joan’s mother precisely because she’s not “fascinating.” (I realize this runs counter to my point about bluntness being okay, but whatever.) Compared to the nightmarish mother figures we’ve seen on this show, from Betty Draper to Don’s dead prostitute birth mother and cruel stepmother to Henry Francis’s steamroller of a mom to Peggy’s standard-issue loving-but-cruel outer-borough Catholic widow, Joan’s mom is…reasonable, basically. Which is weird on a show like this! They butt heads some, yes, but no more than you expect two adult members of a family to butt heads; there’s obviously some unresolved issues regarding Joan’s service-member dad, yes, but not to a degree that cancels out her advice regarding Joan and Greg, I don’t think. When she tells Joan that Joan’s plan to greet Greg with their (“their”) baby was the right one after all, I internally cheered. A lot of moms on this show could not be persuaded like that.

* Loved the actual filmmaking in this episode. Quick cuts (my favorite was right up front, when without having first gotten an establishing shot, we’re suddenly just looking at Rizzo with pantyhose over his head) and more of the Kubrick influence from last week (Sally Draper as spooky little girl who should not be there is as direct a reference to another film/show as I’ve seen on Mad Men so far).

* And all that salmon and orange! This is quickly becoming this season’s hallmark, and one of my favorite things about it to boot. High point in this episode: Cutting from Joan in her apartment to Peggy in hers, Joanie’s orange walls collapsing from the periphery into the center of the frame in the form of Peggy’s pajamas.

* I laughed when Joan and her cleavage came out of the bedroom and asked her husband, mother, and son “What are the three of you up to?” Joan must get that question a lot.

* With all the horror stuff going on in this episode (btw, good to see Don and Henry’s mom both acknowledge the haunted-mansion vibe of the Francis’s house), I couldn’t help but see Joan’s exquisite moment of catharsis against Greg — dumping him, throwing him out, mocking him with how much effort it’s taken her to make him feel like a man, directly denying his inherent goodness, citing his rape of her as Exhibit A, god it was glorious — as Joanie’s revenge, the last-reel triumph of a horror-movie heroine against her antagonist. Joan was the episode’s Final Girl.

* Quick question about Greg: Greg says the Army makes him feel like a good man, contra Joan’s initial assessment. Does this mean he’d previously suspected he wasn’t good? Or has his life remained unexamined and this is just him patting himself on the back? I’m honestly not sure.

* Great zinger by Dawn (who through her disappearing act the morning after is the episode’s real Final Girl, I suppose), leaving her impeccably polite note right on top of Peggy’s purse. (By the way, I think Peggy’d drunkenness played a big part in her racist fear that Dawn would steal her money. This is someone she works with, who moreover she has all the contact information for, not some catburglar or mugger. What was Dawn gonna do, take the money and run?)

* Once again we see that Megan’s got moxie that few of the other women in Don’s life possess. She will run head-on into the infidelity issue, for example, but not with moralizing — with an “okay, I get that that’s a part of you, but it’s not a part that’s going to work for us, Don, do you get it?” attitude that’s refreshing both in its candor about the problem and its vulnerability in acknowledging her concerns about it.

* Crackpot theory of the day: Megan and Michael Ginsberg? Something about the way Ginzo’s been framed so far makes me wonder. His introduction was given a prominence that’s hard to explain. He’s the only non-Don person the show’s described as a genius. Megan said in the premiere that she’s concerned by her co-worker’s cynicism; Mike literally flees the room rather than share cheap thrills over the crime-scene photos. (Critic Deborah Lipp suggests some hypocrisy in the juxtaposition of that reaction with Mike’s darkly sexual Cinderella pitch to the shoe company, but lots of people can draw that kind of line between real and imaginary behavior.) Then there’s stuff that suggests the pairing on an almost subliminal level: Mike’s key line, “She wants to be caught”; the shoe exec’s suggestion that the woman in the ad be French; the direct address of infidelity in the Don/Megan marriage in the same episode where Mike gives his Draperesque spiel. Am I crazy? (I also think Roger’s going to die this season, but enough about me.)

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 12, please visit Rolling Stone.

The other boiled-leather boot drops: I’m doing a weekly series of Game of Thrones video review/recaps for MTV News! It’s a roundtable with host Josh Wigler and the intimidatingly dapper Lucas Siegel of Newsarama.com, with weekly special-guest appearances by Elio & Linda from Westeros.org. I’m quite pleased with how this first episode came out, given that it was indeed our first episode. I’m also quite proud of my t-shirt. Take a look!

* Where do you come down on Fat Betty Francis versus Fat Peggy Olsen and Fat Lee Adama in the Fat Versions of Characters from the Great Post-Millennial Dramas? I actually think she ranks at the top, but we’ll see where things go from here.

* Heh, nice to see that the show’s not above a little DIRECT CONTRAST BETWEEN THE MRS. DRAPERS GETTING DRESSED. Megan could have turned to the camera and winked and it wouldn’t have been any less subtle. In fact, that was just the first of several moments that felt a bit too on-the-nose: Roger actually saying the words “When’s everything gonna get back to normal?”, about four quarts of sad string music poured all over all of Betty’s scenes, particularly the (otherwise beautiful) scene with the boys running around with sparklers on (I presume) the Fourth of July, and a death-dream that would otherwise have been creepy as hell. It’s okay, Mad Men, you can trust us!

* And then there’s Michael Ginsberg — excuse me, MICHAEL GINSBERG!!! I will say the following things about him here and then move on:

1) I find that schticky mid-century New York Jewish wiseacre accent fun to listen to.
2) The character is talented, and this show does good things with the idea of talent.
3) We went from his elderly European Jewish father blessing him in Hebrew to a showtune sung by a Nazi in under two minutes.
4) The jury is very much still out on this guy — however strong he came on in this episode, this is a show that hasn’t bellyflopped yet, not to a significant “new character developed over multiple episodes” degree anyway, and I’m willing to see where they take it. I mean, why would you watch a show if you weren’t?

* Is it just me, or are the scenes in Pete and Roger’s offices being shot in such a way as to complement their Kubrickian decor and color scheme of orange on black and white? Keeping everyone low in the frame so that the big fields of white can show?

* Dawn and Don, haha! I noticed that before it became a topic of discussion for the characters themselves, perhaps because I’m married to someone who isn’t from New York and for whom, therefore, the pronunciation actually would be confusing. (Where I’m from, Mary, marry, and merry are pronounced three different ways, which has blown many a non-tri-state-area mind.)

* In the Rolling Stones episode, Betty asks the doctor for a mother’s little helper. LOL

* If Director Jon Hamm’s primary visual contribution to Mad Men is the unusual use of fades between scenes, then put him in the director’s chair more often. I’m not sure what meaning we’re supposed to draw from, say, the fade between Betty in the bathroom and Betty in the clinic, and I’m glad of that. It feels gooey, somehow, like the link between the scenes isn’t neat and precise at all.

* Have we seen many, or really any, scenes with just Roger and Peggy before? They seem to have developed a rapport almost like Roger and Don.

* Something about Don in a public, dressed-down setting makes him seem menacing. Visually, he’s so different from the Rolling Stones fans at the concert it’s like he’s dangerous.

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 11, please visit Rolling Stone.

(Yes, the official numbering of the episode is “Episode 11,” picking up directly after the ten episodes of Season One. Kinda neat.)

Now it can be told: I’m covering Game of Thrones Season Two for Rolling Stone! My first piece just went up:

Get Medieval: The Seven Most Awful Things People Did on ‘Game of Thrones’ Season One

Starting off with a bang! The tone for this piece is black comedy, yeah (except for item #3 — there’s really nothing funny about it, as I was reminded while watching that scene traumatize my poor wife during her ill-fated attempt to watch the pilot the other week). But in all seriousness, these instances of truly abominable behavior set the tone for the show (and the books) in three ways:

1. It’s challenging to make memorable, moving art out of atrocities without it seeming exploitative or shallow. When you pull it off, you throw the talent of the cast and crew in even sharper relief.

2. In several cases, these incidents overturn our understanding of how this genre, or how heroic narratives, work. Much of Martin/Benioff/Weiss’s revisionist project rests in these moments.

3. And they have a thematic impact too, not just a narrative or generic one. They communicate the material’s view on war, the aristocratic system, and the unique plights of the poor and the young and the female in this system. It’s not shock for shock’s sake at all — it’s central.

So enjoy, if that’s the word for it, and watch this space for more exciting STC/GoT news!

SPOILER ALERT

* Mad Men Addresses Civil Rights (capitalized for the critics who wanted it to be addressed in capital letters like that, as if race’s liminal presence on the show wasn’t Matthew Weiner and company doing exactly that already) in the most Mad Men way possible: a bunch of happy asshole ad execs dropping water bombs on a picket line. This sets off a chain of events culminating in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce integrating because of a prank that people who aren’t Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce actually took seriously. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward Joan Harris.

* My first big laugh of the night — and there were many, many more; this show’s hilarious, and after a few weeks of immersion in Game of Thrones I really appreciate that — came when Roger explained schadenfreude to Pete while they discussed Young & Rubicam’s PR black eye: “They stole the Ponds account, and now they’re a laughing stock. Makes me feel better!” It’s telling that Roger derives such satisfaction from something with which he had nothing to do, given that he doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything anymore.

* Pete looks like hell — disheveled collar, ugly tie, puffy face. I feel like his receding hairline became much more noticeable about halfway through the episode — when someone cracked a joke about him going bald at Don’s surprise party, I had no idea what they were talking about, but at some point after that it was like “whoa!” Hausfrau is a good look for Trudy, I think, despite what Pete says to his train friend (surprise: Alison Brie looks good in almost anything!), but suburban fatherhood is wearing very poorly on Pete himself, in physical terms alone.

* Civil rights was not the only c-word to crop up in a newly noticeable way: I’m pretty sure that the ill-fated Heinz baked beans meeting was the first time a client has requested that SCDP make an ad “cool.” Actually it may be the first time anyone’s used that word on the show at all. That’s a sea change in itself.

* Sally Draper wanders around Don’s weird new apartment like it’s the hotel in The Shining, then goes home to a house that looks like the Bates Motel from Psycho. I wonder if Sally will continue to be one of the show’s main vectors for the Weird — from fearing that her baby brother is the reincarnated ghost of her dead grandfather to the masturbation storyline, she’s provided Mad Men with some of its by-TV-standards strangest material. A great way to use a great child actress. (Here’s where I admit to my moment of shock when she opened her mouth and Kathleen Turner’s voice came out.)

* Did Joan select the color of her apartment walls to complement her hair?

* Bert Cooper arguing Vietnam with Peggy’s beatnik boyfriend was a magnificently funny moment. Either one may as well have been speaking Klingon for all the other could understand him.

* The Roger/Jane exchange at Don’s party — “Why don’t you sing like that?”/”Why don’t you look like him?” — will get a lot of attention and deservedly so, but for my money the real killer laugh line was their brief conversation when Roger gets up early to go to Pete’s fake Staten Island rendez-vous with Coca Cola: “What time is it?” “Shut up.” Now there’s a couple that’s comfortable with their contempt.

* Watching Don’s party unfold, with its Austin Powers aesthetic and soundtrack, I realized I’m quite happy the Rat Pack shit’s dunzo. I like to think that contemporary audience members out to ape Mad Men‘s retro-cool style without considering, uh, pretty much anything else about the show, or indeed supplanting the show’s critique of its era with an implicit endorsement, will have a more difficult time of it now that the styles are a) more garish; b) more directly associated with a time of political movement toward the left.

* Lane Pryce and the gun moll! God I hope that was Paz de la Huerta on the other end of the phone. Also, kudos to commenter Collegeboy on Matt Zoller Seitz’s review for noting that the woman’s name was Delores, which perhaps accounted for Lane’s resulting Haze. I’d already thought Jared Harris was James Masoning the living shit out of that conversation, but I hadn’t made the direct Lolita connection.

* Speaking strictly as a longtime guide on Don’s Tour of the Great Brunettes of the ’60s, I take this episode as a thorough vindication of my early Megan support. And not just appearance-wise either, although jeez. Megan may be struggling with Don’s propensity to shut himself off behind a black curtain, and that may be a generational thing, even just by a few years: she lumps her nominal contemporary Peggy in with Don during their conversation about cynicism at the office the following Monday, after all. But in general, it seems like she can hang, don’t you think? She’s made his darkest secret into something they joke about in bed. She’s chosen to stand up to all the potential and actual opprobrium thrown her way by becoming both his wife and his colleague/employee on the agency’s creative end. Most strikingly, in this episode anyway, she’s integrated Don’s many many many hangups into their sex life with real lacerating heat. Her anger during the underwear/cleanup scene was real and everything that led up to it was real, but as her and Don’s language became more and more dom-sub, my jaw dropped: these were not words, and this was not a dynamic, arrived at by chance in this moment. This was sex born out of experience with the stuff that turns them both on, and dark stuff at that. In the past Don could only get that out of his more sordid assignations, including the prostitute he paid to hit him during sex this time last season. Now he’s sharing this with his wife, who also shares his home, his family, his office, his creative life. Neither Betty nor Faye nor any of Don’s affairs ever hit for the cycle like that. Megan’s a force to be reckoned with.

* Which is not to say that their argument wasn’t legit, or its fallout (again!) very funny. “Haveagoodday.” “‘Kay.” Been there, bro!

* Joan Harris, human gif.

* I’m quite proud of myself for remaining almost entirely unspoiled about the entirety of Downton Abbey to date. What little I did happen across told me less than nothing. A TV Guide cover asking whether Mary and Matthew would marry only asked the question obvious to any viewer from the pilot on. And hey, when was the last time a PBS show ended up on the cover of a supermarket checkout-aisle magazine anyway? I was more happy for the show than irked at the TMI. More troubling was the season-finale review headline I saw in the sidebar at XOJane: “A Happy Ending No One Wanted,” it read, so at least to an extent, I knew where things were headed. (Once I figured out it wasn’t part of this Julieanne Smolinski piece on handjobs, that is.) But it was more cryptic than revelatory: Was it referring to an ostensibly positive outcome the characters nevertheless didn’t really want? Or did it mean the show had served us something it expected us to like, but we didn’t? I wasn’t spoiled, I was intrigued. (Having seen the ending, which was the happy ending I wanted thankyouverymuch, I still can’t figure out what they must have meant.)

* Rather, what I’d heard about the second season, from a comment here, a tweet there, was that it wasn’t as good at the first, and that this dimunition in quality was tied to an increase in the soapiness of the storylines. And indeed, as reported, Series Two was some sudsy shit. The evil ex returns! An imposter! Rejected by Father after marrying across the tracks! Pregnant after a night’s indiscretion! The climactic all-hands-on-deck natural disaster that threatens them all! Random and unexplained yet somehow reassuring flashes of the paranormal! The doctors say he’ll never walk again, for god’s sake! Each and every one of these plots was featured on The Young and the Restless over the past year, folks. Each and every one!

* But to be blunt — who cares? The show is a soap. It’s about romance and family among a huge cast in a fixed geographic location. Why not embrace, and enhance the production value, of as many soap tropes as possible? At any rate nothing here was more outlandish than Lady Mary’s first sexual encounter ending with the death of her lover in flagrante, for pete’s sake. All of it was handled with the wit and skill and beauty I’d come to expect from the show. (God was it beautiful to look at at times — the misty Christmas morning, the red afternoon light in the library as the family watches the touring war-hero general play a game, the swirling camera when Anna first spotted the secretly returned Bates down in the village.) And frankly, no one who watches Breaking Bad has any right to complain about any show being over the top or hard to swallow.

* For me, the show this season was notable as a showcase for a handful of the performers/characters, and for World War One.

* Rob James-Collier’s Thomas was certainly a grower this season. For starters his is the most underrated of the show’s Great Speaking Voices — the stentorian tones of Carson, the silken waveform of Lady Mary, the bedroom rasp of Lady Sybil, the posh perfection of Lord Grantham. Thomas’s voice sounds like it’s only slipping out of his mouth partway, like it’s hiding something in there somewhere. It sounds like it’s squinting.

* Aside from that, though, I think we got a lot more evidence that he’s more than just some Evil Queer stereotype. His homosexuality is treated with enormous, actually rather heartbreaking sensitivity this time around. (Granted, I thought so the first time, too — there was something crushing in watching him flail to get past that sleazy aristo played by Charlie Cox to get at the burning love letters that were to be his ticket to the top, crushing both in Thomas’s desperation and his lover/victim/victimizer’s swagger in physically overpowering him.) You can’t help but sympathize deeply with a man you’ve watched break down and cry over the suicide of the one person to whom he’s even come close to confiding the truth about himself over the entire course of the series. That that person was a badly wounded, blind, depressed stranger shows, I think, what Thomas truly thinks of himself. He’s a bully because he’s been bullied, overtly at times I’m sure, but also in a thousand ways large and small by the strictures of the heteronormative society to which he has no choice but to conform. Internalized oppression.

* But even his bullying was humanized. He unilaterally disarmed from his grudge match with Bates, and advised O’Brien to do the same. He was shown to display real fear and, I think, regret and shame over the results of his actions — when his attempt to become a black marketeer ended in ruin, say, or when he realized his dognapping had gone tits up. Like O’Brien when she looked in the mirror and saw a person who’d just attempted to injure a pregnant woman, I get the impression he wasn’t nuts about what he’d seen in himself, even if, in the end, his final scheme was rewarded.

* What’s more, his decision late in the season to be more cheerful, friendly, helpful, and productive may have been just an attempt to ingratiate himself with Carson and the Crawleys now that his prospects had dried up, but the fact of the matter is that, well, he became more cheerful, friendly, helpful, and productive. In the same way that his platonic folie a deux with Evil O’Brien in the first season helped incentivize bad behavior, I like to think that the new status quo, the new reactions and rewards he’ll receive for being a decent person, can’t help but steer him in that direction. The fact of the matter is he has a great smile, and he can be very charming and win people over just as easily by actually being decent as by faking it. Being a dreary, nasty fuck has very strong headwinds, and perhaps his new course of action will help him see there’s another, less unpleasant course he could set.

* In a similar vein, I came to internally refer to O’Brien this season as (to borrow a term from comics fandom, as I am wont to do) Nu’Brien. No, she wasn’t quite able to shed her old self — egging Thomas on with his black marketeering and shady attempts to get in Lord Robert’s good graces, making mischief with Mrs. Bates. But for the most part, she used her powers for good, not evil, even when her conception of “good” was as narrowly defined (PRESERVE AND PROTECT THE HONOR AND HAPPINESS OF LADY GRANTHAM) as possible. Like Thomas she had her moments of genuine regret — the atom bomb that was her realization that she’d essentially aborted Cora’s baby for nothing had its fallout, as did her poorly thought-through decision to alert the genuinely awful Mrs. Bates to Mr. Bates’ return to Yorkshire. And moreso than did Thomas, she was able to express concern and sympathy for the other servants, from William to Anna to, eventually, Bates himself. There are few things I value more in fiction than when characters overcome their differences to be kind to each other, so I found Nu’Brien rather moving.

* But even more than that, I just found her interesting. When you find out that in real life she’s pretty much a dime piece, you start not just to appreciate but to marvel at actress Siobhan Finneran’s physical comportment on the show. Unlike…well, every other character, I think, O’Brien reveals nothing with her face or voice. She’s like an automaton compared even to Thomas, let alone comparable women characters — Mrs. Hughes, say, or Mrs. Patmore, or Anna or Jane or Ethel or even Shore. That kind of control of one’s face and voice and body is admirable in an actor. She’s kind of the inverse of my beloved Mickey Doyle in Boardwalk Empire, her buttoned-up weirdness a contrast with his showy weirdness, but both of them every bit as watchable and pleasurable.

* So Lord Robert’s midlife crisis was provoked by an actual crisis! That’s smart writing, especially given how out-of-left-field his unfaithfulness to Cora would have felt were it not rooted in his deep disappointment in himself and in the system over his helplessness during the War. Of course there was the subtle and simultaneous strain of dissatisfaction with, even dislike of, Cora herself — her inability to meet his emotional needs or even recognize that he had any during Downton’s wartime period, her pragmatism-cum-coldness over the various interpersonal crises that developed during that time, particularly regarding Mary and Matthew. And his impotence over the War was echoed by his loss of control over the fates of Mary and Sybill, and even over Downton itself. All told, you had a guy who’d been raised all his life to be the center of his world suddenly discovering that a) he wasn’t, and b) in a lot of ways it wasn’t much of a world to begin with. He asked Jane, his ersatz paramour, if she ever wondered what it was all for. Can’t get more direct than that.

* But even before that, he had an exchange with Cora I wrote down verbatim: “I don’t think you’re a fool, isn’t that enough?” she asks him. “No,” he replies. “Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.” It struck me then as an astute take on how frustrating, even confusing, it can be to us when we find ourselves unable to take succor from our significant others and life partners despite the abiding satisfaction we receive from them in every other respect. But now I see it as the roots of a crisis of confidence, in himself and in the institutions that shored him up. Thus he went from a character I didn’t even mention in my discussion of Season One, during which his stalwart reliability rendered him a prop more than a player, to one of my favorite characters on the show. Hugh Bonneville rendered him utterly likeable throughout.

* The main “She’s Leaving Home”-type story here was Sybil’s, of course, and her runaway romance with the Bono of the motorpool. But I was more profoundly moved by Edith’s story, how she quietly came into full personhood as she took on the responsibility of providing for the wounded officers in Downton’s care. As everyone always said, there was little doubt that her sisters would find their place in the world, even if they never defied convention as Sybil did. By contrast, Edith is a prime example of the true cost of the sex and class system, which walls off potentially productive members of society on both sides of the divide from finding their true calling and making the contributions they’re truly capable of making. Only the apocalyptic upheaval of the Great War enabled Edith to do something other than wooing lower-upper-class suitors. When you think of Oscar Wilde imprisoned or Alan Turing killing himself, when you think of centuries of potential giants of politics or literature or science toiling unthanked on Mississippi plantations, when you think of half the population of Saudi Arabia forbidden even to drive cars, think of what these people could have done for the classes that oppressed them, of whatever stripe. The loss of the oppressed is far more grave, but it’s not just the oppressed’s loss, is what I’m saying.

* Am I the only one who started singing “How do you solve a problem like Lavinia?” to himself the moment she looked a little ill at the dinnertable? The show (I know, it’s all written by one dude, but “the show” is a hard habit to break) wrote itself into a corner with this lovely, pleasant, selfless lady — certainly more pleasant and selfless than Lady Mary even at the best of times! — and solved it in a manner I found rather crass, whatever its realism. It’s not as though she’d been allowed to develop into anything but the remotest corner of the Matthew/Mary/Carlisle/her love quadrangle, so while her loss illustrated both the reach and the caprice of the Spanish Influenza epidemic, we really only felt that loss through the other characters, not through Lavinia herself. This was the second time I thought the show grabbed real-world catastrophes and clumsily wielded them as two-bit storytelling tools — the other, and more egregious, being the time that both the Great War and the Troubles were reduced to farce in Branson’s wacky assassination/protest-by-prank mix-up.

* These were all the more striking in light of how well the show dealt with the War itself most every other time. Downton Abbey was never going to be an explicitly antiwar show — it’s just not a political beast, and at any rate a show that values loyalty and honor and courage as much as this one does is going to be fairly helpless in the face of the choice to depict cowardice as either a moral failing or an act of sanity against the insanity of the war itself. (Which I suppose is a political program, disguised as apolitical by centuries of morals established by the masters of war.) But that doesn’t mean that the show couldn’t use its focus on the complexities of familial and romantic relationships in the context of the old class system to shine a spotlight on war’s costs where those concerns intersected.

* I think my favorite example here is a simple, physical aspect of one actor’s performance: The black, angry, piercing depression in the eyes of Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley after he’s paralyzed. He displayed an intensity (and a handsomeness, not incidentally) he’d never been able to before, and the rupture in the presentation was sufficient to convey just how bad things really were for him, and by extension for everyone.

* But really I liked all the major war storylines: William’s slow death and its impact on Daisy, lingering even after he’d gone; the tale of two war widows with Robert’s beloved Jane and the shunned unmarried Ethel; Thomas’s million-dollar wound; Matthew and William’s painful goodbyes, and their bizarre it-was-all-but-a-dream returns from the front before inevitably heading back into the breach; even the craziness of the False Patrick, with his burns and bandages and Anthony Perkins voice.

* My one regret is that Molesley’s shirking never went anywhere. Between that, his doomed run at Anna (thwarted by Bates), his equally doomed run at becoming Lord Grantham’s valet (also thwarted by Bates), and his drinking at the Spanish Flu dinner, I thought he was headed for a full-fledged Character Arc, with said arc bending toward villainy, but the light comedic business with him getting drunk was the last we saw of him. He was the dog that didn’t bark.

* A few more observations:

* Good Lord did sleevelessness become Michelle Dockery. I found myself awfully glad Lady Mary was stuck with the one dress for the duration.

* What better time to cheat on your spouse or fiancée than when she’s laid up with a pandemic that’s killing millions worldwide?

* Just about the only thing that could make the Dowager Countess more entertaining was to have her start laughing at her own jokes, so thank goodness they did exactly that. “I do hope I’m interrupting something” and “I don’t expect you’ll see me again”/”Is that a promise?” are lines for the ages by the way. Also, any time I really look at Maggie Smith’s eyes, I think to myself that she’s got a truly great villain role in her somewhere, if the right part comes along. I mean a David Lynch-type villain, a villain who radiates menace. The Dowager Countess is a pussycat compared to what’s potentially in there.

* What a pleasure it is to watch a show during which the problem for the actors is that time moves fast rather than slow. I’ve been watching The Vampire Diaries (it’s fun! It’s like True Blood without the intentional camp factor, so it’s like this super-serious exploration of sexy young vampires and witches and werewolves taking their shirts off and literally ripping people’s hearts out on-camera), and at some point during its third and current season it hilariously revealed that not even a year had gone by since the pilot. Characters had gone from “la-di-da, cheerleaders, football players, popular girls, blah blah” to “my entire family and circle of friends has either been murdered by or turned into vampires” between the start of junior year and the Fourth of July. Lost is probably the best example of a show where each episode spanned a single day or so, at least for a while. Yet in comics like Love and Rockets, or in shows like Battlestar Galactica, we see just how rich for the storyteller and pleasurable for the audience taking advantage of the swift passage of time can be. I’m not 100% convinced that Downton Abbey has sufficiently aged its performers to account for, what, the passage of seven years of story time over the course of one year of real time, but it’s a challenge I find myself glad they’ve accepted.

* Most poignantly, I found myself pretty profoundly moved and disturbed by the scene in which the family and staff gather round the clock to honor the war’s end, because it reminded me of the now-quaint notion advanced by another of the Great Post-Millennial TV Dramas: “Wars end.” Ha, remember when that was true?

Here are links to all my Downton Abbey posts. Enjoy!

Season One
Season Two
Season Three Cheat Sheet
NOTE: All episode numbers are for the US version.
Season Three, Episode One
Season Three, Episode Two
Season Three, Episode Three
Season Three, Episode Four
Season Three, Episode Five
Season Three, Episode Six
Season Three, Episode Seven
The Best Dowager Countess Quotes from Season Three
Five Big Questions for Season Four
Season Four, Episode One
Season Four, Episode Two
Season Four, Episode Three

More even than being good, Downton Abbey is endearing. That’s apparent by the end of the very first episode, when despite having been introduced to approximately forty thousand characters in the space of 90 minutes, I realized I could place names to faces to personalities in nearly every case. It’s apparent at the beginning of episode two, when I reacted to once again hearing John Lunn’s marvelous theme music — a heartrending swirl and swell of emotion of a sort that the show itself isn’t even aiming for — with pavlovian enthusiasm. It’s apparent every time I laugh at one of the Dowager Countess’s understated overstatements like I was watching Holy Grail for the first time. It’s apparent in my forgiving the show for using as its central sex scandal a plot device swiped from The Golden Girls; or for making its one gay character a conniving, gossiping, backstabbing, predatory, vindictive creep, albeit in such a way as to suggest that these traits predominate and would do whether he was gay or not; or for never delving deeper into the hideous and hidebound class system than presenting it as a sort of culture-wide Stockholm syndrome, mutually agreed to by the benevolent dictators of the ruling class and the loyal, stand-up guys and girls in the servants’ quarters, before time and tide and the inevitability of change softly sweep it away, no harm no foul. It’s a show that makes itself easy for you to watch, and to enjoy.

Given how I’ve spent the past few months, that’s good enough for me. The way everyone went on about Downton Abbey, I expected it to be a searing examination of the relationship between the aristocracy and their servants. I was almost (not quite, but almost) relieved that I wasn’t getting, I dunno, The Wire with tonier accents, or Mad Men with even nicer suits. Instead it’s a soap. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I never miss an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless, so soapiness doesn’t bother me even at its soapy soapiest.

And this wasn’t that, after all. It’s a magnificently shot show, for one thing, with a remarkably firm grip on itself — its fast-paced yet crystal-clear editing rhythm and deft steadicam shots were present from the first minute, no growing pains here. Downton’s richly appointed rooms are almost always shot in such a way as to establish both their presence and the presence of a human being or two within them, not just driving home the perceived indissolubility of that relationship, but suggesting the influence these lavish spaces must have on those who inhabit them day in and day out. And pretty much no matter where you are, indoors or out, you’re looking at something that’s been beautifully lit — the lovely, torchlit country fair scenes couldn’t have looked and felt more likely a nice summer evening with friends if that’s what they actually were, just for example.

It’s a well-cast show, too. I don’t know why I tend to think of ensemble television shows first as a matter of casting rather than acting itself, but I do…I suppose it’s because so much of it comes down to the nature of the actor’s instrument, the way they look and sound, in addition to what’s done with it. Here you need look no further than Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess. She looks like Large Marge post-wreck, or like some evil anthropomorphized insect; indeed her visual and aural resemblance to Lokar, Potentate of Thug Locusts is uncanny. But beyond the show’s Omar Little figure, you’ve got Carson’s Asterios Polyp profile, or Matthew Crawley’s astonishingly blue eyes, or Lady Sybill’s luscious lips and raspy voice, or Mrs. Padmore’s central-casting cookishness, or Mr. Bates’s stoic half-smile, or Lady Cora’s well-practiced beatific smile, or Lady Mary’s dark eyes that can sparkle with warmth or wit or cruelty depending on the needs of the moment, or the way Lady Edith smiles like someone who’s always vainly hoping to be something more than an also-ran, or Anna’s plain prettiness, and on and on and on.

All these details matter, I think. They’re a big part of what invests you in these lives, since nothing particularly earth-shaking is going on most of the time. They’re what make the behind-closed-doors meetings between Carson and Mrs. Hughes, a butler and a head housekeeper, feel less like middle managament and more like Commander Adama and President Roslin bonding on the Galactica. They made that pretty goofy sex scene between the handsome, horny Turk and mean-girl porcelain princess Lady Mary actually sexy, despite the silliness of it all. I’m pretty sure the hateful visages of Thomas and O’Brien — his smirk, her unsmilingness — are at least as responsible for our antipathy toward them as anything they actually did. (Thomas and O’Brien are the best character work on the whole show, by the way — a masterful depiction of how much worse two bad apples can be for the bunch than just one, how two malcontents or hatemongers can support one another and egg each other on until they become a nexus of poison at the heart of it all; I guarantee you you’ve seen this happen somewhere yourself.) They’re the reason that when Mary and Matthew finally kissed, I started clapping as I sat there watching it on the train. To reach a sum greater than the whole, you need the parts.

Here are links to all my Breaking Bad posts. I’ve added the special features I’ve written for Rolling Stone to the list chronologically, so that once you’ve read the preceding review post, it’s safe to read that feature as well. I hope you enjoy them!

* Season One
* Season Two, Episodes 1-3
* Season Two, Episodes 4-6
* Season Two, Episodes 7-12
* Season Two, Episode 13
* Season Three, Episodes 1-3
* Season Three, Episodes 4-7
* Season Three, Episodes 8-13
* Season Four, Episodes 1-6
* Season Four, Episodes 7-10
* Season Four, Episode 11
* Season Four, Episodes 12-13
* Season Five, Episode 1: “Live Free or Die”
* Season Five, Episode 2: “Madrigal”
* Season Five, Episode 3: “Hazard Pay”
* Q&A: Anna Gunn
* Season Five, Episode 4: “Fifty-One”
* Q&A: Laura Fraser
* Season Five, Episode 5: “Dead Freight”
* Q&A: Dean Norris
* Season Five, Episode 6: “Buyout”
* Q&A: Jesse Plemons
* Season Five, Episode 7: “Say My Name”
* Season Five, Episode 8: “Gliding Over All”
* Walter White’s 10 Lowest Lows
* Breaking Bad’s 10 Most Memorable Murders
* Season Five, Episode 9: “Blood Money”
* Q&A: Dean Norris
* Season Five, Episode 10: “Buried”
* Q&A: Betsy Brandt
* Season Five, Episode 11: “Confessions”
* Q&A: Bob Odenkirk
* Season Five, Episode 12: “Rabid Dog”
* Q&A: Steven Michael Quezada
* Season Five, Episode 13: “To’hajiilee”
* Q&A: Lavell Crawford
* Season Five, Episode 14: “Ozymandias”
* Q&A: R.J. Mitte
* Season Five, Episode 15: “Granite State”
* “Granite State” bonus thoughts
* Season Five, Episode 16: “Felina”
* “Felina” bonus: Bloggingheads.tv discussion with Alyssa Rosenberg

* I finished Season Four and am all caught up with the show. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW.

* All I know is I’m glad I never googled “Gus gif” for any reason prior to finishing this season. (I just want to note that that final episode was called “Face Off.” Rimshot!)

* I’ll admit it: When that drug dog (hilariously!) popped out of Steve Gomez’s partner’s SUV at the laundry when they went to check it out in deference to Hank’s hunch, I was positive he had ’em. I didn’t count on Gus, Walt, and Jesse’s prideful fastidiousness, however. Then again, I also didn’t count on Hank’s after-the-fact deductive genius. Goddammit, the guy found probably the one tell-tale detail in all the photos Gomie took, the extra electricity running into the laundry. He had ’em dead to rights! One day he’ll get his reward, I hope…though I suspect that the final season will be Walt vs. Hank to the death. That seems like the only way it can go.

* I wish the brief scene between Skyler and Hank when she was checking to see if he’d spotted anything unusual in Gomie’s photos wasn’t brief. Have those two ever been one on one before in the whole history of the show?

* Jesse’s race to get the information about ricin to Andrea in time to save Brock’s life was the most “gasping/squirming/covering my gaping mouth with my hand on the train”-worthy moment the show’s served up in a long time, and as I seem to always be saying, that’s saying something. Heartpounding.

* The whole bomb sequence with Walt and Gus in the hospital parking lot — heartpounding as well. Not that I wanted Walt to blow Gus up, mind you! Gus’s conversation with Jesse in the hospital chapel — expressing ignorance as to how Brock could have been poisoned, backing down and giving Jesse a full week off to deal with his young friend’s medical crisis — made it pretty clear to me that Gus wasn’t involved in Brock’s poisoning after all, though at that point I hadn’t sussed out who was. It just didn’t square with the man’s respectful and trusting treatment of Jesse all throughout their Mexican odyssey, either. So no, I didn’t want Walt to blow him up. But nor did I want him to spot Walt on the roof across the way, which a single telltale gleam from his glasses or binoculars or (I thought the poetry would be fitting here) his bald head would have ensured. In the end, you just can’t root for the death of your protagonist. Or, y’know, so I thought.

* Anyway. I sure enjoyed my little private eureka moment when I realized that if you can ring a bell, you can press a button on a detonator, too.

* I enjoyed the cameo from Peggy Olsen’s mom as well.

* And I enjoyed our brief glimpses of the old, funnier, in-over-his-head Walt — the Walt who’d look like he was about to threaten or even attack Saul’s put-upon receptionist, only to pause and finally say “…I’ll be right back.”

* But then Jesse said “Lilly of the Valley—it’s some kind of flower,” and I wrote, in all caps, just like this:

OH

MY

GOD

WALT

POISONED

BROCK

I’ve done some googling since finishing the season, and discovered that the plot Walt related to Jesse in the second-to-last episode, the (bogus, as we come to find out) idea that Gus poisoned Brock knowing Jesse would blame Walt and kill him for it, was poorly received by many in the audience. They thought that required way too many coincidences, way too many instances of things going exactly the one way they had to go for it all to work, for a man like Gus to feel comfortable relying on. And of course, they were right. (This guy in particular, who figured out what was going on even before the finale made it clear, which is pretty amazing.) This wasn’t some master plan by Walt, it was a last-ditch plan by Walt. Like stripping naked in a supermarket, it was the only thing he could think of that could possibly save his hide. And it was so crazy it just might work. And it did! The horrible, horrible man won.

* I call him horrible despite my belief that however it was that he administered the poison to Brock, he did so in a way he knew would ultimately not kill him. It’s still horrible to inflict suffering on a child, and his family, whose suffering and fear is just as real as Walt and his family’s.

* But mostly, I call him horrible because I now realize why he spat Gus’s offer of clemency back in his face in the desert. Walt himself may not have even truly realized it. Perhaps not until he cracked in that crawlspace, letting forth an insane man’s peals of laughter, did Walt himself realize it. He has to protect his family, yes. But he has to win while doing it. Walter White has to be the smartest guy in the room at all times. Even more than wanting to remove the threat Gus posed to himself and his family (and Jesse — I do think he still would prefer Jesse not be killed, or he’d have killed him when they destroyed the lab) once and for all, I think it was wanting to beat Gus that drove Walt to do what he did. Not for Jesse, not for his family, but for him. That makes Walt worse than Gus. Gus’s hatred of the cartel and his desire to defeat them was born from the love he felt for his friend that they killed. Walt’s desire to kill Gus, to put himself and everyone he nominally cares about in harm’s way if that was the only way to do it, was born from Walt’s love for himself. That’s what makes him so easy to hate, now.

* More google treasure: Creator Vince Gilligan says part of the impetus behind doing Breaking Bad was doing a show where the protagonist slowly became the antagonist. Explains a lot. (That link comes via this Chuck Klosterman/Grantland piece, and you probably have feelings about that sort of thing, but note that Klosterman also sums up the ultimate limitation of The Wire (a show of politics rather than philosophy) as well as anyone I’ve ever read.)

* So what happens next season? Walt and Jesse have no real antagonist at the moment. Oh, I’m sure they can stumble their way into a new one in pretty short order — the whole history of the show, from the pilot onward, is the story of Walt and Jesse making life-or-death enemies at the drop of a hat. But the deaths of Gus, Tyrus, Hector Salamanca, and the entire leadership class of the cartel leave a massive, massive vacuum. I assume Gus’s mysterious past as some kind of untouchable big shot in Chile will play a role. I assume Mike will play a role. The great critic Matthew Zoller Seitz (whose reviews of shows like these I look forward to reading after I finish a series almost as much as I look forward to the actual act of finishing the series) points out that the mysterious German conglomerate that bankrolled the laundry and the air filtration system (I couldn’t help but notice some kind of HVAC was involved in the “guy who can disappear you and your family” service Saul tried to connect Walt with) will likely play a role, too. Seitz also notes that there’s a laptop full of surveillance footage sitting in Gus’s office at Los Pollos Hermanos, just waiting to be decrypted. We’re not done hearing about the death of Ted Beneke either, I’m sure. Saul and his goons could crack about that, or about their involvement in Walt’s poisoning of Brock. As I said, I think Hank will be the Final Boss. And in the end, there’s Walt vs. Jesse, which is just another way of saying Walt vs. Walt.