I have just one episode to go in Season Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* It’s been an eventful four or five episodes since last we talked, but in terms of Walter and Jesse’s business, the noteworthy thing for quite a long stretch there was how uneventful it was. Up until (let’s say) Jesse hired Badger, Combo, and Skinny Pete to work for him, our dynamic duo’s career really was, as I’ve said before, pretty much just a series of calamities flowing from Walter’s initial request to do a ride-along with Hank. But once Jesse and Walter go into business for themselves, you finally start seeing what I thought the show would be all along: a status quo for the science teacher-cum-meth dealer. There are bumps in the road, to put it mildly, but for the most part they’re no longer stumbling into kill-or-be-killed situations within half an hour of meeting someone else in the game. Skinny Pete getting mugged and Badger getting pinched really were just the cost of doing business, as Jesse always put it. Even “death by ATM” could have gone a lot worse for Jesse, and for a while at least it actually made his and Walter’s lives easier. (I’m not convinced it won’t come back to bite them if someone thinks to trace the bills from the machine, but we’ll table that for now.) A season and a half into the show, we finally got to find out what “business as usual” would look like.

* I think this is why the bottle episode in which Walter and Jesse get stranded out in the desert, as enjoyable as it was in the moment, felt so much like a throwback to the in-retrospect less-interesting first season. For one thing, it was in miniature what the whole series had largely been: Walter and Jesse careening from one catastrophe to the next. For another it required the two of them to drop down several levels in the competence they’d begun to display. (Although perhaps this was necessary to help set us up for Jesse’s drug-induced flameout of self-pity and resentment of Walter later in the season.)

* Though the show looks like it’s gonna slowfoot any involvement with the cartel, they gave the concept a big enough introduction to enable themselves to pay it off at any point down the line more or less at their leisure. A full narcocorrido music video (I thought I’d accidentally skipped to a bonus feature) threatening “Heisenberg”‘s murder followed by the memorably Boschian image of Danny Trejo’s severed head attached to a tortoise rigged with explosives is more than enough to establish the outfit’s deadly bonafides. The bomb sequence in particularly was beautifully shot, edited, and recorded — truly like hell on earth.

* And once again you have to grudgingly respect Hank, who despite his twin poles of bluster and panic had the presence of mind to run back into the fray, whip off his belt, and use it as a tourniquet to save his fellow agent’s life. It’s perverse that he’s so good in these life and death situations that are making him sick.

* Took me a while to get used to seeing Bob Odenkirk in a drama, even if he’s the comic relief. I kept waiting for him to sing the praises of Cinco’s new bowel-irritating gel or whatever. But he’s perfectly ridiculous in that role, and he’ll forever make me wonder if any of the ambulance-chasers whose commercials I see during episodes of Judge Judy are secretly some gangster wannabe’s consigliere.

* Shoulda seen Skyler’s storyline coming, I suppose. I mean, I guess I did — you knew the moment she asked to see Ted Beneke that she and this guy had some kind of history, and that her present circumstances might lead to history repeating itself. But I didn’t anticipate some of the particulars, like that history being a) sexual harassment, and b) a secret she kept from Walt all these years, which makes me wonder if c) it wasn’t sexual harassment at all, although d) you’d think it would have been addressed in one of their private conversations if it had been a fling and the harassment story was just a bowdlerized version Sky told her sister. At any rate, it’s the details that stick out here: Skyler’s quiet but unmissable reliance on a cleavage-centric wardrobe; the fact that Ted actually does seem like a prototypical “nice boss”; the excruciating “Happy Birthday, Mister President” song at Ted’s birthday; Ted watching Skyler walk back across the parking lot after she decides to stick it out with him despite his tax evasion. And of course, as it turns out, Hank’s not the only one in the family who’s pretty good at their job of ferreting out wrongdoing.

* As awkward as Skyler’s birthday serenade was, the sequence leading up to Combo’s murder was tense. I haven’t felt that way watching TV in a long time, that sickening dread when you know at any moment someone’s going to pop up and shoot someone. I’m easily spooked enough by loud noises to turn down the volume in situations like that so that when the inevitable gunshot rings out I don’t jump in my chair. The weird thing? I love feeling this way.

* Despite how awful Walter has become in many ways, I still beamed and clapped and “yesss!”ed when he got the good news about his cancer. Didn’t you?

* After more or less stopping for a third of the season or so, those ominous black-and-white opening flashfowards hinting at an unspecified, explosive disaster at Casa White returned with a vengeance — and two body bags — in the very same episode where Walt starts tinkering with the water heater and the floorboards. Clever of the show to tease us with a possible “way out” of these grim prophecies that doesn’t involve a meth-lab explosion or an attack by a psychotic rival. Extra high-school English class points for the “something’s rotten in the Whites’ foundation” metaphor, too.

* Jane was a toughie for me. For the longest time, she just rang a bit false. There were some too-writerly bits there — the tattoo artist who refuses to get any tattoos because it’s too big a commitment is like something out of a lousy Vertigo comic — but mainly the problem was this: What on earth would this lovely, sardonic, canny person see in a goofball loser like Jesse? Only the tackiness of her tattoo design gave us any indication that she’d ever give Jesse the time of day.

* It was only as time went on, not even when we find out she was recovering addict but only after she fully relapses and becomes a real cutthroat junkie, did it become apparent that her attraction to Jesse was at least in part her addict self’s compulsion for self-destruction. On some level this was a deeply unhappy person just aching to fall back off the wagon. Renting to Jesse, befriending Jesse, sleeping with Jesse — all stepping stones to the inevitable other side.

* A little too inevitable for me, alas and alack. Basically, I did a full-on Lando Calrissian “Hello, what have we here?” when I laid eyes on Krysten Ritter (I’ve mentioned my thing for pale dark-haired girls, right?) and couldn’t resist looking her up on the Internet. So I ended up spoiling her eventual fate for myself. It wasn’t so bad, though. I mean, it was clear that that would have been a distinct possibility the moment she turned back around from the door of Jesse’s apartment and joined him for a smoke in his bedroom. Plus, it gave her dad Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s decision to give her till tomorrow, and his conversation about daughters with Walt in the bar later that night, an absolutely crushing weight of sadness. (I’m almost worried to watch the finale because I don’t want to find out how the poor man takes it.)

* But the big thing is that fortunately (? if that’s the right word for this), I didn’t know anything about Walter’s involvement in her death. That still hit me like a bus. Once again, I sat on the train watching the show on my laptop, utterly, physically aghast. It was a brilliantly acted scene: When he sees that she’s choking, Walter instinctively runs over to her side. But then we watch as he weighs the life of this girl who’d been awful to him against the lives of Jesse, his daughter, his son, his wife, and, yes, himself. Simply thinking about the decision was a decision, in this case.

* The filmmakers expertly toyed with our sympathies throughout the whole episode leading up to Jane’s death, too. She’d been a pretty sympathetic character, and a crushable one too, but her drug use brought out a really ugly side, and by the time she was on the phone with Walt threatening to burn his life to the ground, those crime-drama “aaaah! kill her!” audience instincts kicked in. But between Walt’s affection for his daughter and Jane’s Dad’s affection for Jane, it became impossible to root for her demise for every long, even after she choose to taunt Walt when he drops the money off instead of joining a contrite Jesse in assuring Walt that no further blackmail is forthcoming. And the way she died ended up being one of the most horrendously intimate death scenes I’ve ever seen. It’d be tough to root for Tuco going out like that, let alone Apology Girl. And it was next to impossible to root for Walt standing there and letting it happen.

* By the end of the scene I realized that Walt and I had had the exact same physical reaction to what he’d done: we both watched it unfold slackjawed, hands over our gaping mouths.

* Everyone else noticed that Jane said she was gonna kick tomorrow, right? She don’t mean no harm, she just don’t know what else to do about it.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

* I took a break from Breaking Bad during the holidays — my train-commute viewing time was no longer a going concern, after all. Looking back, I think I skipped out on writing about the last episode I saw prior to the break, S02E04. From what I recall you had some pretty intense rock-bottom character work in that: Jesse gets thrown out of his aunt’s house and ends up crying on the floor of the RV, literally covered in shit. Walt lies to Skyler just about as brutally as he possibly could — lying about having no idea what he’s supposed to have been lying about; those living-room confrontations are pretty much always dynamite. And Skyler smokes a cigarette while pregnant, testing our tolerance for bad behavior even on a show like this (it’s pretty amazing what audiences will and won’t forgive) and exercising a shitty form of control over one of the few aspects of her life left for her to control.

* But even with all of that filed away in my brain, I was unprepared for how disorientingly good the show was right away upon returning to it a couple days ago with episode 5. (This is the episode where Walt and Jesse decide to go into business for themselves, while Hank has a panic attack following his promotion to the El Paso bureau.) And I think “disorienting” is the word that occurred to me because of the actual filmmaking, the way in which the show took images and abstracted them. The overhead shot of the river as two immigrants swim across it and a shot swooping down the hospital exterior as Walt exits following his last round of chemo were the most dramatic examples at first.

* But throughout the episode, inanimate objects became near-abstract containers of information, a la this David Bordwell essay. Lingering close-ups on the glass cube with the teeth inside, on the endlessly long bill printed out at the cancer clinic, on the pack of cigarettes Walter retrieves from the toilet, on the “hope is the best medicine” button he receives, on the food prepared by both Skyler and Jesse in separate attempts to pass off an abnormal situation as anything but — all of these items mean something to the narrative simply by existing, and all the show needs to do is show them for us to understand what that meaning is. Thoughtful and fun filmmaking.

* Nice character bits in this one too, of course. I really loved the question mark added by Walt when he says “thank you?” to the woman behind the counter at the clinic after she wishes him well, for example. And I loved “Jesse Comes Alive,” which is how I mentally referred to his competent, enthusiastic, clear-eyed behavior at the meeting with his meth friends when he directs them in the logistics of the new operation, in contrast to how pro forma all the “word up, yo” talk between all of them felt beforehand.

* But then.

* I want to be clear here: I was not IN ANY WAY prepared for that poor little boy to appear in the next episode, when Jesse raided the meth-heads’ house to get his money and meth back. Not in any way. I can’t recall the last time a show so dramatically raised its stakes, transforming a really well-done crime thriller into a brutally depressing meditation on the central crime’s effects at the drop of a hat.

* Oh wait, yes I can: “University” from Season Three of The Sopranos. Seriously, that wasn’t a rhetorical device just then — I realized at this very moment that really was the last time I felt the ground open up beneath a crime show that completely. Not even the best moments of Boardwalk Empire season two pulled it off like this, because those moments felt personal, not directed at, more or less, all of humanity like that beautiful little red-headed boy covered in filth did.

* The fact that he looked a bit like my daughter in terms of his facial features? I’d be lying if I said that didn’t have anything to do with how knocked out I was by this episode. By the end, as Jesse raced to round up his money, call 911, and rescue the little boy before the cops came, I had my hands in my hair, staring bug-eyed and slackjawed like a Brian Bolland drawing of the Joker. That was enormously powerful television. The business with Walt unleashing decades of fury at Gretchen was just icing, as was the fact that he’d essentially ordered a pair of murders the episode before. Suddenly the show proved itself willing to look something very, very ugly right in the face. Thrilling.

* Though I think I’ve only ever played the original and Ocarina of Time, I love that Legend of Zelda continuity is so convoluted and contradictory that people theorized it must involve divergent timelines; I love even more that they were right.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates has what ought to be the final word on the vices and virtues of Louis Farrakhan Ron Paul. I don’t know why I never thought of Paul advocacy in messianic terms before, but of course that’s what’s going on; the support of noted Great Man enthusiast Andrew Sullivan, who appears to have retracted his recent retraction of his slightly less recent endorsement of Paul for the Republican Party presidential nomination, is surely evidence of that. The problem is with seeing individual politicians, with all their flaws (and in most cases “flaws” is putting it mildly, whether you’re talking about States’ Rights dogwhistler and gold bug Ron Paul or indefinite-detainer and non-due-process-assassinator and Skynet-activator Barack Obama), in memetic-engineering terms — “If we support this person we’ll change the conversation and steer the nation toward the good” — fails to consider the systemic nature of successfully implementing change, and dismisses a host of hugely problematic issues with any given candidate in a rush to paint an Alex Ross version of their portrait. And again, no one’s forcing anyone to endorse anyone; doing so as an act of supposed bravery but downplaying your candidate of choice’s problems is in fact an act of cowardice.

* Related thought triggered by Coates’s material on Farrakhan: All religions are completely crazy in terms of their “supernatural history,” if you will; it’s just that we’ve been hearing about the major ones for so many centuries that receiving celestial instructions from a brushfire or rising from the dead and then flying up to Heaven no longer seem quite as crazy as more recent developments like the Angel Moroni or Intergalactic Warlord Xenu do. That said, I feel like between Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam, America has cooked up some uniquely science-fictional cults-cum-full-fledged-denominations, and I wonder if anyone’s ever stacked them up side to side as such.

* Jim Henley wrote a song for America; they told him it was clever.

* I hadn’t been super enthused for Ridley Scott’s yes-no-maybe-probably-yeah-definitely Alien prequel Prometheus, because it’s 2012 and it’s Ridley Scott. Then I saw this trailer. Any knucklehead can make a compelling trailer, but pacing and music and title font treatment aside, you simply don’t see scary cosmic monoliths like you did in ’70s SF anymore. Seeing that giant whatever-it-is on that alien planet was like coming home.

* In case you missed it, my favorite fantasy franchises gave us several Christmas presents:

** Here’s a sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter. (SPOILERS, of course!) The great Elio & Linda of Westeros.org discuss it here.

** Here’s a trailer for Season Two of Game of Thrones. Everyone looks great and Stannis sounds great.

** And here once again is the trailer for The Hobbit, which I suppose I should get used to calling The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the purposes of this first film. The chills I got when the Dwarves started singing their song! Straight-up outreach to everyone who was raised on the Rankin-Bass cartoon, and successful outreach at that. BTW, I saw a lot of talented artists complaining about what they perceived to be fussy, overly toyetic, off-brand Dwarf designs, but let’s face it, the filmmakers had to help the audience be able to differentiate between thirteen axe-wielding beardos, because it’s not really like Tolkien himself even tried!

SPOILER WARNING! SPOILER WARNING! IT’S A SPOILER WARNING

* Aw, y’know, I really don’t have a lot to say about this episode that isn’t self-evident. It was a gutsy, “My god, they’re really gonna do it” hour of television, and between this episode and the last it’s really taken on a horrific new life of its own. It seems to me that Nucky’s final act against Jimmy was as much the show embracing its identity as Nucky doing so. I imagine it has to be really, really freeing to be a show willing to do what it did last night. What have they got to be afraid of now, creatively speaking? This is going to be a magnificently dark and wild new thing if they keep at it.

* I’m also struck by creator Terence Winter’s willingness to admit (“admit”) in the various interviews you’ll find online that Jimmy’s murder by Nucky wasn’t planned from the beginning — not even from the beginning of this season. Hell, not even from the middle of this season! It’s nice to see that nerd culture’s insistence that the execution of a blueprint is the highest form of fiction can still go unheeded in some quarters. Try to imagine, say, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse saying they winged something of this magnitude at any point after Lost Season Two, or the writer of a major superhero-comics event eschewing “we’ve been planting the seeds for this for four or five years now” in favor of “three issues ago we just figured ‘what the hell.'”

* Matt Zoller Seitz is on to something when he says that this episode was Boardwalk Empire embracing its own lack of depth, but only in a sort of backwards way. The other day I wrote the following about the artsy genre-based comics available at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival:

…the genre work and genre pastiche on hand felt neither safe nor slick, hiding behind the safety net of retro or “coolness.” It felt raw, a little ugly, a little exhibitionistic, even a little unpleasant. The closest comparison I can think of is the early short stories of Clive Barker: impressionistic, sexualized stuff that re-awoke the horror in horror. To dismiss it all as shock tactics is to make a pretty big mistake, I think.

And this is sort of what Boardwalk Empire reminds me of now, too. I think that when genre material gets sufficiently dark or weird, when its tropes become a form of sinister spectacle rather than just hitting the marks required by convention, that’s a depth all its own — a way to communicate the emotional and philosophical themes more commonly articulated by plot and dialogue, if at all. Boardwalk Empire the balls-to-the-wall engine of gorgeously shot death that perverts and slaughters its characters in periodic fits of nihilism is saying at least as much as some theoretical Boardwalk Empire the meticulously drawn character study, or Boardwalk Empire the rigorously developed allegory for contemporary political issues.

* I’m going to echo everyone in wishing that this could have happened without eliminating Michael Pitt from the show. That guy was magic in this role; I’m not sure I can be any more articulate about it than that. Just look at the way he commanded the camera, and our emotions, simply by standing there being silent — looking out the window and smoking a cigarette, watching with tears in his eyes as his son rides a pony while his mother waits nearby, standing unarmed in the pouring rain in front of an unfinished war memorial while men of the generation that sent him to kill and die in the trenches gather around to execute him. His limp is already one of my favorite things on any TV show.

* But! Think of all the oxygen this move frees up for the show’s other characters. It’s clear the filmmakers realize they struck gold with Jack Huston’s Richard Harrow — now there’s nothing stopping them from making him as big a role as Jimmy was, if they want. The major organized crime figures — Chalky White or Arnold Rothstein or Al Capone or Luciano & Lansky — will have more room to breathe. The attractively repellent sidekicks Dunn Pearnsley and Owen Sleater can get their days in the sun too. Eliminating Jimmy, Angela, the Commodore, Lucy, and a couple of the aldermen this season ought to enable the show to reshuffle things according to its more recently developed strengths. (I was briefly convinced/concerned that Van Alden had ridden off into the sunset as well, until I read interview after interview in which Winter said it was no coincidence that he’d “retired” to the Illinois town that is soon to be come Al Capone’s stomping grounds.)

* My one complaint about the finale is that in screwing Nucky over by giving away his highway land, Margaret gave it to the one organization less sympathetic than that of organized crime, the Roman Catholic Church. I get the sense that that act is meant to be a period for that whole plot thread and not an ellipsis, and thank god for that because in addition to being less sympathetic than the mob, the Church is about forty seven thousand times more boring. What I’m really curious about is whether this augurs a new Lockhorns model for the Nucky/Margaret marriage, or if this was one last fuck-you she had to get out of her system after his transparent bullshit about the deaths of Neary and Jimmy, and now she’ll be less adversarial but more canny.

* Nucky, Lucky, Jimmy, Mickey, Manny, Waxy, Chalky, Tommy, Lucy.

* There was something truly awful about that final flashback to the trenches. For one thing it implies that even in death Jimmy could not escape the war. But worse is that we never actually see the horror Jimmy experienced. The vision ends when Jimmy climbs over the lip of the trench. What he endured can never be shared with anyone, not even the audience watching omnisciently as he dies. As someone once said, “In the end, you die in your own arms.”

* Finally:

Don’t stop believing. (Via Bohemea.)

* There’s a new teaser trailer for Game of Thrones Season Two. It centers on one of the new characters being introduced this season, which puts me in mind of several other shows that have introduced major new antagonists after their debuts and how they’ve positioned them relative to the preexisting players.

* Related: I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this, but my A Song of Ice and Fire tumblr All Leather Must Be Boiled has a whole lot of ASoIaF/GoT art/fanart on it. Today I posted this grim painting of the Riverlands by Rene Aigner, which says a whole lot about the series.

* More BCGF: L. Nichols flips the eff out over the show;

* and PictureBox stocks up on many of its highlights and hidden gems for its online store.

* More Jerusalem preview pages from Guy Delisle. This is shaping up to be a really lovely book.

* I don’t think there’s an easy way to link you to all of it, but sniff around Benjamin Marra’s Traditional Comics tumblr for a lot of art from his series of American Psycho tribute booklets.

* The Comics Journal presents a look at four prominent alternative-comics retailers by Patrick Rosenkranz. The amount of thought and creativity they put into promoting the comics they sell and attracting the audience that buys them is both inspiring and a little depressing, in terms of how much time and energy you need to invest if you wanna make a go of this sort of thing.

* Entertaining speculation about the evolutionary origins of monsters in the human mind, the idea being that early man’s brain combined features of all the animals it was worried about getting attacked by into creatures like dragons and such, as a kind of shorthand for “LOOK OUT, DANGEROUS ANIMAL!” (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

I finished the third episode of Season Two today. SPOILER WARNING

* Three episodes into Breaking Bad Season Two and it already feels almost like a different show. A better show, for sure. Tighter, quieter, more serious.

* A whole lotta factors go into that. For starters, this story arc — call it “Travels with Tuco” — isn’t just technically the payoff for the work done in the seven-episode season one, it’s literally the intended culmination of that work. As I found out from my illustrious commenters after I wrote my post, Season One wasn’t that short by design, but due to the writers’ strike. So if I got to the end feeling a bit uncertain about what the show had said, there was a good reason for it: It hadn’t gotten the chance to finish talking. Here, it did.

* The funny thing about that metaphor, though, is that what it said, it said pretty quietly. Each episode began with a wordless interlude of pure sound and vision: a charred pink stuffed animal and its severed eyeball floating in the Whites’ black-and-white pool as approaching sirens wail; Jesse’s bullet-ridden lowrider mindlessly hopping up and down in the middle of nowhere; a worm’s eye view of Jesse and Walter burying a gun, then trudging through the sun-soaked wilderness. The first two openings warn of impending doom (we still haven’t seen how that first glimpse of the future comes to be); the second is two guys stranded with their thoughts and their consciences, just putting one foot in front of the other in hopes that they’ll get somewhere eventually. It all seems pretty apt.

* Each episode also had a goal-oriented plotline. Walter and Jesse needed to survive their meet-up with Tuco now that they’d seen him kill a man. Walter and Jesse needed to escape Tuco’s clutches now that he’d kidnapped them. Walter and Jesse needed to get home and get clear of the law now that they’d been traced to Tuco and potentially involved in the events leading to his death. This didn’t just keep me focused from moment to moment — it kept them focused, which in turn kept Walter from getting too absent-minded professor and Jesse from getting too juggalo. It was a leavening influence on their behavior that I appreciated, besides being a heck of an incentive for me to keep watching.

* There are many examples of this: The tense moments as they stand around with Tuco while his minion takes care of the body; Jesse and his prostitute friend’s interrogations by Hank and Gomez; Walt’s dealings with his doctors; Jesse’s attempt to get Tuco to snort the poisoned meth. But the best example of this? Tio Salamanca and his tell-tale bell. I’m always happy to see that cadaverous-looking assassin guy from Scarface, and this was a wonderfully awful use for him — a way to coax mounting dread out of Walter and Jesse, and mounting anger and frustration out of their captors, be it Tuco at first or Hank and Gomie later on. And again, it shows how good Breaking Bad is at using film’s aural dimension. (I forgot to mention this during my Boardwalk Empire piece yesterday, but I think a big reason why I was so fond of last week’s episode was that it did things with sound that favorably reminded me of BB.) Edge of your seat stuff, often triggered by just the slightest cues: a look in the old man’s eyes as Tuco wheels him to the dinnertable, a disembodied “ding!” and a knock on the interrogation room door from Hank.

* And hey, let’s talk about Hank, too. When he’s broad, he’s very very broad, even now — the jocular racism, the macabre trophy from his big kill. But in these episodes we saw dimensions of him that may not quite compensate for these lapses in character, but at the very least flesh him out so he’s not just some grinning macho buffoon. As we’d previously seen in the intervention scene last season, it’s clear that Hank really does love and care about Walt, and that’s really endearing. He’s not just trying to find him to placate Marie and Skyler, he obviously really likes the guy and wants him to be okay. Just the force of effort it must have taken him to gain Jesse’s mom’s trust rather than bluster her defenses down is proof of that.

* Moreover, this is a guy who’s actually pretty good at his job, and that brings out some of his best and most interesting qualities. He’s dogged, focused, and intuitive in tracking down Walt — he’s able to turn off his bluster in order to win Jesse’s mom’s trust, which surely took some effort, and he’s able to jerry-rig a way to track Jesse down simply from hearing what kind of car he has. When we see him reviewing the break-in at the chemical plant or attempting to piece together the connection between the burglary, the new pure varieties of meth going around, and the deaths of Crazy Eight and Tuco, you can see he’s thoughtful, curious, attentive to detail, able to see the forest for the trees. Whatever his other shortcomings, and whatever the wisdom or morality of the drug war generally, it’s appealing to see him behave in this intelligent, competent, likeable manner. (He’s friendliest with Gomie during these interludes, too. And hey, you figure Gomie puts up with him for some reason despite all his piggishness, which also helps humanize the guy.)

* Ultimately, my main takeaway from this opening arc is that I might have had the wrong idea of what the show is even about. Going in, I really knew only the bare bones, a la “mob boss goes to therapy” or “plane crashes on a mysterious island”: “dying science teacher sells crystal meth to make money.” I assumed that meant that after seeing his initial decision to do this, we’d spend some time with the “new normal”: He’d make meth and sell it and keep it all a secret from his family and friends, and this would be the status quo until the end of the season or so, when something would happen. That’s how these things typically work: the cops and dealers on The Wire, Tony and friends on The Sopranos, the men and women of Sterling Cooper on Mad Men — not to mention the mobsters in GoodFellas and Casino, from whence all these shows can be traced via Scorses’s influence on David Chase — did basically their normal thing for a while, until something sends them off the tracks. But Walter never got on them! From the moment he decides to cook meth, he’s simply careened from one catastrophe to the next. He kills a guy in the first episode! And it’s been a series of cascading disasters ever since. That’s a very, very different way to approach this subject than what I expected — and I feel like in these last few episodes, the enormity of Walter’s situation is stripping down the show’s occasional goofiness quite a bit. When stripping naked in a grocery store and being taken to the hospital for neurological and psychiatric evaluations is your protagonist’s best-case scenario, you really don’t have time to monkey around. The seriousness of purpose really suits the show. I hope it keeps it up.

SPOILER WARNING, SPOILER WARNING

* Though I’ve been watching Boardwalk Empire faithfully since the series premiere, I’ve only written about it a handful of times. I think that’s because my enjoyment of it is a pretty simple thing. It’s a sumptuously shot, dressed, and acted gangster period piece, featuring increasingly savage and memorable outbursts of violence, and starring real-world organized-crime pioneers like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Al Capone as “playable characters.” In that light my fondness for the show doesn’t require a great deal of explanation. Moreover, the growing pains of a young show striving for greatness, an occasional shaky hand with character development, and (particularly this season) some visible discomfort with its women characters (usually where the rubber meets the road for the really great TV dramas) would seem to defy attempts to delve any deeper.

* Until now. My my my, but that was a magnificent episode the other night. I was actually a bit scared to search for reviews afterwards, since I knew without looking that any episode that took things as far as this one did would be a make or break one for many viewers and reviewers. Put me in the “make” column for sure.

* It was the dreamlike power of the episode that did it for me. By “dreamlike” I don’t mean amorphous, illogical, or surreal, at least not in this case. I mean the heightened reality of dreams, in which words and objects are freighted with meaning through their proximity to the strangeness or momentousness of the events of the dream. It’s gonna take me a bit to explain this, so please bear with me.

* It reminds me of the tail end of Grant Morrison’s big Batman R.I.P./Batman and Robin/The Return of Bruce Wayne storyline, in which the presence of certain artifacts in Bruce’s life — his mother’s pearls, her murderer’s gun, the bell he used to summon Alfred to save his life on the night he decided to become Batman — cast shadows through time, affecting him again and again.

* It also reminds me of an astonishing episode of Little House on the Prairie I happened to get stuck watching while feeding my baby with the remote control out of reach months ago. I found out later that it was the two-parter that served as the finale for Michael Landon’s final season with the ongoing series. Landon’s character’s adopted son gets caught in the crossfire of a bank robbery and is rendered catatonic. Desperate for help, Pa Ingalls rides off with the son to seek a doctor, and the show becomes this series of sweeping vistas as he goes deeper and deeper into the wilderness, until finally the horse dies (I think) and they’re trapped where they’ve stopped, and so thinking they’ll die he builds an altar of stones to pray for divine intervention, and in the middle of a thunderstorm an old man appears to them to help them…It was all image, all emotion. It led with raw power and let the plot draft on its slipstream.

* In this episode’s case, that meant a few things. First there was the repetition of lines, fraught with meaning: “Jimmy, I have to go.” “I’ll remember! I’ll remember!” “There’s nothing wrong, baby. There’s nothing wrong with any of it!” “Then finish it, goddamn you. Finish it!” (Eyes Wide Shut used this same technique.) Other lines were repeated as actions: the bayonet Jimmy told the army recruiter he wanted to shove into the Kaiser’s guts became the knife he used to stab the Commodore in the stomach. Actions were repeated and inverted as well: Jimmy beats his professor for assaulting his mother, then attacks his mother years later. Music cues stretched across scenes, plotlines, and timeframes. Fades to black brought us in and out of flashbacks and simply from moment to moment. Textbook Freudian uncanny doubling. It’s as if all these things operated on a slightly higher level of existence than everyday reality, less fixed in time, playing themselves out on a different scale.

* People seemed more…vivid as well. I don’t want to say mythic, because these days that’s a loaded term indicative of self-conscious Joseph Campbellization. (I know, I know, the show went full-on Oedipus here, so they brought it on themselves, but this felt more raw and real than “modern myths” nonsense. The Commodore didn’t just attack Jimmy with anything, he stabbed him in the back with some kind of spear. And he emerged from nowhere, a towering furious mute Bad Father. Jimmy’s guardian Richard Harrow had similar trouble speaking in this episode — he was a dark angel quietly disposing of the slain father and drawing the curtains on Jimmy’s consciousness with a nod. Van Alden tells us of his life as a living indictment of his parents’ most deeply held beliefs, and ends the episode by fleeing like, I don’t know, Frankenstein’s monster, rejected by his creator. The vulpine priest continued to hover over Margaret, benevolently preying on her guilt in his collar and cassock. Even Jimmy’s increasingly pronounced limp (to my eyes at least), and the way he cloaked the wounded half of his body from his sleepy son with his black jacket like a human yin-yang or the Phantom of the Opera, lent him a monstrous quality as he went about his monstrous work in this episode.

* Objects took on a numinous quality too. Agent Sebso’s gun and shoes are presented as an indictment of Agent Van Alden in and of themselves, dredged up from the river and the past. Margaret’s daughter’s leg braces embody her painful future, and provide the support needed for Margaret and Owen to have the conversation that they’ll both instantly regret. Margaret views the subpoena she receives as literally a divine calling to account. Angela’s white dress and Gillian’s torn dress are loaded with messages for Jimmy. The nearby railroad track, the clanging of its gate bells, gave the passing of time itself new urgency — each moment received its own soundtrack.

* So yeah, just a ton of powerful images and sounds, all of which feel like half-understood things to me, their impact primarily emotional. If you can construct a story out of that stuff, you’ve achieved something pretty special.

* And the episode pretty much could have coasted on the Jimmy/Angela/Gillian material, but in addition, it was Nucky Comes Alive. I’ve read writers I respect (Matt Zoller Seitz, I believe) argue that in retrospect, Steve Buscemi, as enjoyable as he is in the role, was ultimately miscast. But if I had to pinpoint one reason why I disagree, it would have to be scenes like the one in which he more or less threatens to have Margaret, the woman he loves (and I don’t doubt that he loves her!), murdered if she decides to testify about his role in the death of her abusive late husband. It reminded me of an earlier Nucky highlight from this season: His slowly revealed rage at Eli as he pulls the rug out from his own “apology accepted” and browbeats his penitent brother out of any hope of rapprochement with his “get on your knees” speech. The fury in Nucky’s eyes in both these moments! Buscemi spends most of his time as Nucky in more or less harmless emotional modes: gladhanding politician, avuncular friend/father figure/husband figure, “heavy hangs the head that wears the crown” man at the top. But when you really press him, when you do something that strikes at his core — and I don’t even mean run-of-the-mill confrontations with adversaries; this is basically limited to betrayals by family — suddenly the teeth get bared in such convincing fashion that it looks like he could tear someone’s fucking face off. And I have to imagine that this is what the other characters pick up on in a world with Buscemi/Nucky calling the shots. It took a lot to stand out in an episode this epic if you weren’t part of the Oedipal drama at its center; Buscemi and Nucky had what it took.

* The episode also tied in with any number of plot threads I’d enjoyed, and even more interestingly that I hadn’t enjoyed, from the season so far. Take the status of the black workers, for example. During Nucky’s conversation with his sharp new lawyer Fallon, I marveled at how candid they felt comfortable being despite the presence of a third person in the room, Nucky’s butler Harlan. The black servant class is invisible to these guys until they’re needed for something, I thought. But then Harland pipes up at Fallon’s request…and suddenly he’s made himself an indispensable man in two of the longest-running plotlines on the show, Nucky’s corruption charges and Van Alden’s incipient psychosis. It’s like finding out that the last piece of the puzzle was in your hand all along.

* It was nice for Angela to get a last turn in the sun. Her murder by Manny Horvitz last week was appropriately awful — I was hit pretty hard when she begged for mercy on the grounds that she has a little boy — but at the same time she’d been so underutilized all season long that it felt less like the end of her story and more like a page from Jimmy’s. “Women in refrigerators,” in other words. I couldn’t help but feel that in eliminating a character that the show appeared to have little use for anymore, Horvitz was serving as a proxy for the writers. But Jimmy’s flashback also served as an origin story for a character who really needed one. How did a relatively free-thinking lesbian end up with a dude like Jimmy, even given societal pressures of the day? Well, she was a college-age kid discovering her sexuality as she went along, and anyone who’s been that age can tell you how many roads that can take you down before you find the right one, including roads that cut you off from where you really ought to go. In her case she was trapped like a fly in amber by her pregnancy, knocked up and affianced to a guy she likes a lot but probably didn’t and could never really love, pressured against ending either the relationship or the pregnancy by societal stricture, probably guilt about betraying a man at war, possibly fear of what he’d do when he got home given what she witnessed the night before he enlisted. It’s weirdly gutsy of the show to give us its best Angela episode of the season after the one in which it killed her.

* I’m also glad to see Van Alden reemerge. I have nothing against having a baby as a plotline for a fully grown-up character in a drama — it’s not like when you’re a few seasons into a comedy or soap about young people, the writers run out of ideas, and suddenly a character or two gets saddled with a bun in the oven that necessarily closes them off from all sorts of romantic and comedic possibilities. (Cf. this season of Gossip Girl, if you dare.) But the execution of Van Alden’s baby storyline has been every bit as limiting and stultifying as the worst such sitcom. He’s just been completely closed off from the action, existing almost on a show within a show. Gone was the Wrath of God figure from Season One, the guy who made me more nervous every time he was on screen than anyone else. Even to the extent that he threatened Nucky, it was at a remove, as a potential witness Nucky heard about third- or fourth-hand. (Of course, it could be worse — he could be Lucy Danziger, whom the baby storyline granted several mightily creepy-sexy nude scenes and then chased off the show entirely.) But now…but now! What the hell is he gonna do now? He’s a freaking fugitive murder suspect! He foreswore his oath, to be all Game of Thrones about it. A suicide run against Nucky as the architect of his downfall, a Travis Bickle attempt to “rescue” Margaret from inequity — who knows what comes next? That’s some delicious uncertainty is what that is.

* Circling back to the doubling I discussed earlier, although this time in far less uncanny fashion: Two of my favorite developments this season provide a direct compare-and-contrast in terms of styles of criminal leadership — and no, it doesn’t involve Nucky and Jimmy, but Chalky and Eli. I’m gonna spell his name wrong I just know it, but Dunn Purnsley, the charismatic chatterbox (played with silver-tongued malevolence by Erik LaRay Harvey) who threatened Chalky in jail without realizing who he was and then paid the price for it with a beatdown from Chalky’s grateful subjects, is subsequently recruited by Chalky as a valued henchman and the pointman for the strike. Which is great in and of itself because Purnsley’s a wonderfully entertaining character I’m happy to see stick around, like Richard Harrow last year, but also because of the way it demonstrates Chalky’s thoughtful and magnanimous approach to power. By contrast, poor Deputy Halloran is repaid by years of loyal, silent service to Eli with a beatdown of his own, followed by a genuinely menacing but ultimately idiotically transparent attempt at intimidation by Eli himself — all over a treason Halloran was undoubtedly far too stupid to even contemplate, much less commit. And all Eli’s thuggery earned him was precisely the betrayal it was designed to prevent. If you want an illustration of why Chalky’s at the top of his world while Eli’s a perpetual also-ran, look no further.

* I’d also like to sing the praises of Mickey Doyle, believe it or not. One of the weirdest performances on a show full of weird performances, Paul Sparks’s unctuous, nasal, giggling bootlegger has become a favorite occupier of screen time for me, for no more complicated a reason than that he’s funny and strange, moving and sounding like no other person on television. Take it where you can get it!

* Women-wise? This was a step in the right direction. Angela we’ve already talked about, but however predatory and loathsome she may be, it’s abundantly clear that Gillian was broken by the Commodore all those years ago. Her seduction of Jimmy was train-wreck awful but also pitiful — the way she had to repeat to herself that there was nothing wrong with “any of it” could only be referring to the whole freakshow of her life, whether or not she’d ever admit it. Ironically given the circumstnaces, it took some of the archetypal Jocasta out of her and made her into a human being we could understand.

* And while there’s virtually nothing I find more boring in a drama than Catholicism, I can almost appreciate its use in Margaret’s storyline. I think we’ve learned enough about her to understand that this isn’t a real religious awakening in her — it’s a lighthouse as she drifts in the fog of her own guilt over everything else in her life. As she convinces herself that this is the only outlet for her emotions and the only way to right the wrongs she’s committed, she could become as problematic as any legit fanatic.

* So there you have it: An episode that might could represent the moment Boardwalk Empire became Boardwalk Empire — an a-ha episode akin to “College” for The Sopranos, according to conventional wisdom, or “University” for The Sopranos, according to me. And it sets up quite a finale: As best I can tell, Chalky is still gunning for the KKK, Manny Horvitz is after Jimmy, Jimmy has got to be after Manny, Richard seems even more likely after Manny, Mickey Doyle could be up to no good, Van Alden could be up to god knows what, Nucky and Owen might come to blows…

* So yeah, Gareb Shamus has resigned from Wizard. By their works ye shall know them.

* Tom Spurgeon’s BCGF con report is the most thorough you’re likely to find. His assessment of the show itself centers on the caveat that (like all shows) it’s not a show for everyone. I’m really curious as to how deeply that analysis takes root, because most everyone I spoke to at the show was almost deliriously happy with it (myself included — yes, I talk to myself), but it’s easy to see how the narcissism of small differences among comics people could lead someone whose conception of “good comics” doesn’t quite overlap with BCGF’s, or has almost nothing in common with it at all, could really hate that show from afar or even up close. But I think this is the extent of my desire to discuss the show through this lens, because I don’t think I really discuss anything by saying “some people who aren’t me might not like this that much.” And BCGF is an amazing fucking show. Just ask ADDXSTC fave Geoff Grogan, who I can’t remember ever penning this effusive a con report before — doubly surprising given that in the past he’s been at loggerheads with the Kramers Ergot aesthetic that is the show’s backbone.

* Among the many, many, many, many, many books Closed Caption Comics debuted at the show were Conor Stechschulte’s The Amateurs and the Noel Freibert-edited anthology Weird.

* Emily Carroll got herself a big NYC publisher book deal. Well deserved.

* Geof Darrow’s lost Superman cover will show up in print after all. Hooray!

* Isaac Moylan presents “The Mirror.”

* I feel like I’ve written these exact words before, but Jesus Christ, Renee French.

* Uno Moralez continues to tap directly into my underbrain.

* Apparently I never properly subscribed to the RSS feed on Geoff Grogan’s new site, because otherwise I’d be linking to pages from his terrific book Look Out!! Monsters all the time.

* Kate Beaton’s Wonder Woman comics are terrific.

* Finally, now that I’m embarking on Breaking Bad, I want to go back to a couple other shows I wrote about this fall and highlight a pair of reader comments I got a lot out of: Alan on Mad Men Season Four and Hob on Boardwalk Empire Season Two. Spoilers ahoy, obviously, but Alan’s thoughts on a certain MM-late-S4 character contrast that hit home with him on a personal level opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing the show’s central family dynamic, and what Hob said about the link between nihilism and sentimentality smacked me right between the eyes. Thank you, gentlemen, and thank you to everyone who comments on my TV posts — pretty much no matter what show I’ve written about, you’ve been a consistent, collective delight and reward.

I watched all of Season One. SPOILER WARNING

* Breaking Bad started off a lot broader than I expected. And I’ll be honest, it was hard not to hold that against the show, no matter how many times I reminded myself that The Sopranos spent two seasons as a black comedy about men trying to kill each other over cunnilingus and things like that.

* Mind you, the core family was fine the whole time. Bryan Cranston exudes the air of an actor who knows he has the role of a lifetime every moment he’s on screen. R.J. Mitte portrays Walt Jr.’s disability exactly the way he should, like an otherwise normal teenage kid dealing with one extra layer of crappiness. And though Anna Gunn’s Skyler is written a wee bit too pointedly oblivious to what’s really going on with Walter now and then, she’s certainly believable as a basically happy person suddenly being made to struggle with issues that threaten that happiness, financial and physical alike.

* But everyone else? The bulldog back-slapping brother-in-law, with his off-color remarks and gung-ho DEA attitude? The unbearable sister, meddling and judgmental and prone to referring to people as being “on marijuana”? Jesse Pinkman, a Slim Shady caricature who says “what up, biatch?” on his outgoing answering machine message? Various ésé-spouting Mexican-American gangsters blaring generic hip hop out of their cars and stereo systems? Nuance is hard to come by here.

* Then I started struggling with Walter’s actions, too. There was something too pat about the way he approached, say, disposing of a body like grading a quiz at work. I know that that’s what movies tell us that mild-mannered people suddenly drawn into life-or-death criminal enterprises would do, but a nervous breakdown seems like a far more likely result. The fact that that storyline devolved into splatstick with the bathtub full of dissolved body parts crashing through the floor didn’t help matters.

* I did buy the way he went about figuring out to do with the imprisoned Crazy Eight — basically coming right out and saying that he was bonding with him in an attempt to prevent himself from being able to kill the guy. And I bought the little touches in that storyline, too, from giving him hand sanitizer to use after he relieves himself in the bucket, to the way he wished aloud that Crazy Eight hadn’t hidden a shard of the broken plate to use as a weapon when he first discovered that it was missing. But after the deed was done, it seemed to weigh no more heavily on his mind than the secret of his cancer diagnosis, or whether or not to go back into cooking meth, or whether to accept money from his old lab partner, or whether or not to forgive Skyler for tipping the guy off about the situation in the first place, or whether or not to get treatment…I just had a really hard time swallowing that killing two people, including one time by hand, wouldn’t totally eat him alive.

* But a couple of moments toward the end of this short first season sold me on it enough to keep going. Well, that’s not quite fair — I’d probably have kept going regardless, it’s a perfectly entertaining show. But these moments made me think that maybe it could go from perfectly entertaining to hanging with the big boys.

* The first was the intervention scene, when Walter’s family tries to convince him to get treatment for his cancer. In particular, you could feel the actors playing the in-laws reacting to this material, much better than what they’d been given so far, like drowning animals getting their first big gasp of saving air. The sister was suddenly allowed to show both genuine compassion and express a viewpoint that didn’t conform precisely to our received wisdom about What Assholes Think and Do. Skyler’s benevolence, her facade of creating this safe space where everyone could speak their minds freely, was complicated refreshingly by her simple desperation to keep her husband alive. (Understandable! But not saintly, and that’s the point.) Walter was finally given the chance to truly hash out and articulate how crushingly unfair he felt the cancer to be in a life already proscribed and fenced in by things he never quite felt within his control. Even the buffoonish cop brother had a chance to visibly struggle with his own inability to express complicated, serious ideas in a fashion commensurate with their complexity and seriousness; by the end of the scene, he was quietly crying, though neither the filmmakers nor the actor made a big deal out of it, to their great credit. It was a beautifully done scene, one that convinced me that these were people who contained more than was visible on their surfaces, and/or that the filmmakers were up to the task of showing that to be the case. (There was a parallel track in that episode that, while not quite up to the intervention’s standards, helped flesh Jesse out in a similar fashion: His ability to convincingly clean up for a job interview, his crushed hopes when he realized what he’d be relegated to doing if he were to get the job, his lack of comfort with falling right back into his old ways given what he’d been through, his disappointment in himself for not being able to live up to the standard he and Mister White had set.)

* The second came a couple of episodes later, after Tuco beat Jesse up and stole his meth and money, when Walter goes to Tuco’s place to steal it back. When he gets back to his car after blowing up the room and working out the deal with the stunned but impressed Tuco, he lets out a primal growl of exhilaration, pumping his fists and pounding on the steering wheel. And suddenly I could understand why the murders didn’t destroy him like I thought they would — like I thought they ought to, frankly; suddenly his fun but kind of cheap outbursts of vigilante justice — roughing up the bullies in the clothing store when they made fun of Walt Junior, blowing up the loudmouth Bluetooth guy’s sportscar at the gas station — seemed less like “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we ended the episode like this?” and more like signposts on a road to a destination. The destination being “Walter White is actually dangerous inside.” For whatever reason, some innate tendency toward risk-taking, thrillseeking, intimidation, and violence that had never had a chance to express itself until now was out, and the mild-mannered science teacher was now a bald-headed suicide bomber growling out his triumph with a lap full of hundred dollar bills. When they called the show Breaking Bad, they didn’t just mean going bad in terms of breaking the law — they meant that some rough beast was slouching toward Albuquerque to be born.

* And that’s the fundamental difference between Breaking Bad and all of the other shows I’ve watched that I’d consider to be the Great TV Dramas. The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, Twin Peaks, even the less self-consciously Great Lost or the flawed Boardwalk Empire or the very young Game of Thrones were basically stories about men and women dealing with the consequences of moral codes they’d formed long ago and adhered to for years. Even in cases where circumstances recently changed for them in such a way as to force them to confront those consequences much more urgently or directly — a new sheriff in town, a new Hand of the King, a plane crash on a mysterious island, interplanetary robot genocide — the value systems we saw them working with were already in place before the cameras started rolling. On Breaking Bad, however, Walter White is becoming a changed man before our eyes. At times it’s just as baffling to us as it is to poor Jesse. In the end, I suppose it’s no surprise that I finally cottoned to the show when I felt like I’d gotten the lay of the land for what he’d changed into, and how he’d behave from now on. Suddenly the show had become the kind of show I’m familiar with as being prone to greatness.

* The show really lucked out in this respect: What a fucking transformation from Bryan Cranston simply by shaving his head! From “Dad who enjoys his daughter’s soccer games” to “police still have yet to identify several of the bodies found in the crawlspace” with the glide of a hair clipper. Years of closely reading comic books and learning to take every aesthetic quality as an intentional vector of story or tonal information has left me really fascinated by the impact a character’s mere physical appearance can have on the story he’s in, and this is as good an example of that as Jon Hamm’s prodigious handsomeness making Don Draper bearable.

* It also paid more attention to the aural dimension of filmmaking than probably any of the shows I listed above save, I dunno, Twin Peaks? The drones and buzzes in Walter’s head when things are going really badly for him are a totally effective tool in their arsenal. I don’t know why more shows wouldn’t go for that kind of thing.

* And let’s be honest, I’m predisposed to appreciate any show that uses its lead character’s relative willingness and ability to slip it to Anna Gunn as a barometer for his state of mind. (Although is it really a barometer of anything but whether or not he is a living heterosexual male with a functioning penis?)

* Anyway, I thought the very last episode was a bit anticlimactic. I like that Walt’s thinking big with the meth operation, and again, I’m deeply okay with rogering Anna Gunn. But the main takeaways from this episode — that Walt can go toe to toe with a druglord and that said druglord is an enormously unpredictable and violent meth-addled lunatic — were already established with much higher stakes in the previous episode — instead of hosting tense junkyard meetings, Walt blew up Tuco’s office; instead of proving Tuco’s propensity for violence by beating up some unnamed underling, the show proved it by beating up Jesse. But even still, I’m excited to see if my armchair psychoanalysis of Walter holds water in the following seasons. What up, biatch.

* Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” column on the work of Grant Morrison was worth the wait. It’s a terrific capsule guide to the most important superhero writer of the post-Moore/Miller era. The “Avoid” section in particular nails it, although I think it’s way too early to call it a day on Action Comics — Morrison’s the first to tell you his new series tend to start off shaky. (And I actually like Action so far anyway.)

* I don’t think I linked to this yet, and I know I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to diving into Hayley Campbell’s interview with Anders Nilsen. It’s great to see all the Big Questions covers in one place like that, too.

* Michael DeForge showcases the four comics he’ll be debuting at this weekend’s BCGF, including a collaborative effort with Benjamin Marra! And lest you think he’s getting lazy in his old age, he’s got the latest Ant Comic up as well.

* And Ryan Cecil Smith is rolling out a three-part SF Supplemental File #2, with part one debuting at BCGF as well. Damn, look at this printing job!

* Matthew Perpetua talks to Tony Millionaire about his new book of illustrations, 500 Portraits, with a strong selection of said portraits accompanying. This is probably the best drawing of Art Garfunkel ever.

* Well lookee here, it’s a page from the best single comic I’ve ever seen, Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset.”

* Looks like Renee French is posting her art at her Posterous site nowadays, so update your bookmarks.

* Outsider graphic novels (by “outsider” I mean people operating totally independently from the comics-making industry as we know it) are a fascinating arena of discovery. Comics is such an oddball medium that when people arrive at expressing themselves using that medium on their own, it takes on an almost miraculous quality. For example, check out Brad Mackay’s piece for the Comics Journal on Bus Griffiths’ 1978 paean to his career as a lumberjack, Now You’re Logging.

* Gorgeous post-it note art by Theo Ellsworth. Longtime readers of the blog will understand why the one below is my favorite.

* Johnny Ryan is a national treasure.

* Sam Bosma draws Solomon Grundy.

* It’s tough to beat Uno Moralez.

* A whole bunch of Hieronymous Bosch-channeling drawings by Salvador Dali called Dreams of Pantagruel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I really like this painting of Jack Kirby’s Darkseid by Daniel James Cox. As you scroll down to see it, at first it appears like it’s some giant monument with fires burning in the eyes as the evening sun shines through the retreating clouds of a summer thunderstorm.

* I thought Dan Harmon’s obsessive-compulsive sitcom Community got off to a really rough start this season — way too much Chang, way too much emphasis on the unpleasant aspects of the characters’ friendship given that that was the focus of the end of the previous season too, and frankly not enough actually funny jokes. But I caught up on the season this past weekend, and the two most recent episodes were both hilarious, with the character stuff tipped back toward “these people bounce off each other in unpredictable and occasionally destructive but ultimately funny and rewarding ways” from “ugh, stay the fuck away from each other already,” and the more outlandish bits actually connecting (the entire karaoke/hallucination/drifter serenade sequence was a scream). So I’m now joining the rest of the Internet in being bummed out that the show’s in limbo after midseason, and in celebrating gratuitously insular stuff like a Beetlejuice gag that took three seasons to complete.

* Finally, here is a picture of Kristen Stewart, who is attractive.

* I feel like every moment of my marathon run through all four seasons of Mad Men was leading me to this: A five-hour interview with series creator Matthew Weiner. This is heaven, absolute heaven. Everyone who created a work of art I enjoyed as much as Mad Men should be interviewed about the entirety of their life and career for five hours. And Sopranos fans will absolutely want to watch this as well, as he talks about his involvement in that show at length, and makes an argument for its greatness. (And reveals that he is the Peggy to David Chase’s Don.) My favorite thing about it is Weiner’s good humor and streak of genuine humility/self-deprecation. He’s not needlessly hard on himself — obviously he’s quite good at his job, it’d be stupid to deny that — and nor is he an egomaniac. If you know any talented successful creative people that you personally are friendly with, he sounds like those people. What a treat!

* Great googly moogly: Vince Clarke and Martin Gore are reuniting! This makes me happy in my heart. When I watched that BBC documentary Synth Britannia a while back, I was struck by how a dude like Clarke who made such warm music ankled the rest of Depeche Mode in such a cold way. These were his friends from school, and he ditched them because advances in technology had allowed him to do everything he needed to do (except sing) by himself, so his friends were now superfluous. So glad to see two of my favorite synthpop songwriters working together again, even if it’s for a minimal techno album.

* Five new B.P.R.D. miniseries next year! Way to take advantage of the apocalyptic 2012 zeitgeist.

* I’m bummed to see the very good Panelists group blog shutting down. I’d actually been wondering about this, seeing as how co-founders Craig Fischer and Charles Hatfield have columns going at The Comics Journal. But hey, there’s your silver lining, innit?

* Interesting: The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008. Curious to see what this looks like.

* Fantagraphics: minicomics publisher!

* “With Great Power Comes No Responsibility.” Tattoo it on your forehead, America!

* Wizard’s Gareb Shamus is blogging and tweeting and quietly shutting down his digital magazine.

* Amazingly, Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants interviews Michael Fassbender and never once asks to see his penis! He doesn’t even hint around at it! Jason, I’d like you to know that whenever I think of him now, I mentally refer to him as Fassy, without fail.

* Happy 71st birthday to Cardinal Fang Terry Gilliam, one of the very best people.

* And congratulations to Anders Nilsen for his book Big Questions‘ deserving presence on the New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year list. As you can see from the review-link sidebar on my blog, I’m its biggest fan, although I have yet read the collected edition. But then I have yet to read a ton of promising comics that have come out this year. I’m hoping to reorganize my life to make that possible again. It’s so important to me to have my hands in these things. It makes me feel better as a person and happier in life. Do you know what I mean?

* Recently on Robot 6:

* The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has announced its programming slate. Phoebe Gloeckner’s spotlight panel and a Tom Spurgeon/CF/Brian Ralph three-for-all are the highlights for me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Tom talk about CF at length, now that I think about it…

* Related: AdHouse is gonna have a hell of a show, by the sound of it.

* And here’s a BCGF debut: Zack Soto and Milo George are (re)launching Study Group Magazine, with a killer initial line-up of comics and journalism that includes work by ADDXSTC faves Chris Cilla, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, as well as interviews with Eleanor Davis and Craig Thompson.

* Does Koyama Press have the coolest publisher backstory ever?

* Inspired by a quote from Chris Mautner’s excellent interview with Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus in which Spiegelman explains the pain of having such horrifying and personal subject matter at the heart of his career for so long, I defend Art Spiegelman against his “what have you done for me lately?” detractors.

* And inspired by Nadim Damluji’s excellent interview with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi (although I must warn you not to enter the ensuing comment thread unless forced at gunpoint, and even then you might want to consider taking your chances at disarming the guy), I defend Craig Thompson against criticism to the effect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on in his own work.

* I’m really enjoying Ben Katchor’s increasingly explicit anticorporatism.

* Top Shelf is going digital in a big way, with a couple of comics apps. And damn, the price is right on the books they’re launching with. Clumsy for two bucks?

* At last! Image is releasing a collected edition of Brandon Graham’s much-lauded King City in February.

* John Porcellino has a new King-Cat coming coming out on Wednesday!

* So this is the cover for Jonny Negron’s Chameleon #2. That make sense.

* The Matthias Wivel-edited Nordic comics anthology Kolor Klimax sure looks good.

* Here’s a long and excellent piece by Zom on the horror of Uno Moralez. It’s a rare feat to analyze what makes something mysterious and horrifying with this kind of accuracy but with no intention of deflating the mystery and horror.

* Fear Itself ate itself, basically. This certainly isn’t the first time a major event comic involved elements of planned rapid obsolescence — it was the knowledge that they’d be wiping out Spider-Man’s marriage and with it whatever other aspects of his history they wanted to fudge that enabled Marvel to unmask Peter Parker for a mainstream-media bounce during Civil War — but it’s really quite unusual for three epilogue one-shots branded with the event’s name to undo the three biggest status-quo changes of the event, within three weeks of that event’s official conclusion. Still more unusual is that in all three cases Marvel’s clearly better off having undone them.

* Tucker Stone’s interview with Mark Waid about Daredevil is really entertaining on both sides of the tape recorder.

* Wow, they are dropping a lot of characters from A Clash of Kings in Game of Thrones Season Two. In some cases I understand both why they’re doing it and how it’ll work. In a few cases I’m kind of unsure how you do certain things you need to do at all without them. But when you think about it, the challenge faced by GoT the show is unprecedented. It’s one thing for The Sopranos to take bit parts and grow them into main characters at some point down the line — you’ve simply taken a presumably grateful character actor and given him the material of a lifetime. It’s still another to know up front that you’re casting a role who’ll get maybe five minutes of screentime this season but will turn into an opening-credits role in three, four years. What do you do, tell the Shakespearean actor you cast this past summer to clear his calendar for 2014? The answer will likely be not to cast such characters until the big stuff is happening, which of course will mean doing things differently than they were done in the books.

* Can you imagine having a sex ed class in which physical and emotional pleasure were valued and discussed? The clitoris, orgasms, the importance of making your partner feel comfortable emotionally, and being made to feel comfortable emotionally yourself? I can’t remember when that particular lightbulb was switched on in my head, but once the idea of such a sex ed curriculum was introduced to me, it became something that made me just shake my head in disgust that that’s not how things are. That’s absolutely how things should be. And in this New York Times piece about such a class in a school in a Friends’ school in Philadelphia shows you how it works.

* Speaking of the Times, unfortunately: Everyone I know thought Occupy Wall Street intended to shut down the New York City subway system yesterday, because they heard it on the news. I heard it on the news and so it’s what I believed. My in-laws, who are visiting us from Colorado, canceled their usual day in the city yesterday because they heard service would be disrupted on the news and so it’s what they believed. After the shutdown never materialized, today my co-workers said that OWS had simply failed to pull it off, because they’d heard of the plans on the news and so that’s what they believed. It turns out it was total bullshit, invented by Fox and the New York Times. But I heard it on several other outlets besides those, up to two or three days in advance, complete with responses to the supposed planned shutdown by NYC authorities. And it was all horseshit. As I’ve been saying on Twitter, it’s really rather amazing to watch all the organs of a body politic afflicted with terminal-stage capitalism work to expel OWS from the system. And this memetic inoculation against it — “protest Wall Street if you want, but once you start making it impossible for regular working people to get where they need to go…” — will likely never go away.

* Another case in point: The truly routine violation of protesters’ rights by the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD. The impunity with which they assault people, illegally arrest and detain them, illegally spy on them for their political beliefs, and so on is breathtaking. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates (via whom the aforelinked article) always says, we’ve got the police force we want, basically. If we didn’t want it, there are many ways in which we could make sure we didn’t have it.

* To end on a happier note, here are a few music links I enjoyed:

* Mark Richardson on freaking the fuck out over My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Man, we’ve all been there. I think my favorite part of listening to the album is when you get to that end section of “What You Want,” right before the final song “Soon” kicks in, and it’s so lovely you almost can’t bear it.

* Jaimeson Cox has been writing about Drake’s new album Take Care all week, and it’s been great. Actually, that album has coaxed great writing out of a lot of music writers. Off the top of my head: Brandon Soderberg, Zach Baron (the bit about the title track’s a must read), Ryan Dombal, Hua Hsu (terrific point about how disconcerting delivering similar sentiments via both singing and rapping can be). It’s early yet, but I think this may be my second-favorite album of the year after Kaputt by Destroyer? There’s just so much to talk about in the music especially, which is why I may inflict a post about hip-hop on you all in the near future. You’ve been warned.

Here are links to all my Mad Men posts. I hope you enjoyed them!

* Season One, episodes 1-4
* Season One, episode 5 through Season Two, episode 3
* Season Two, episodes 4-7
* Season Two, episodes 8-11
* Season Two, episode 12 through Season Three, episode 2
* Season Three, episodes 3-6
* Season Three, episodes 7-13
* Season Four, episode 1
* Season Four, episodes 2-6
* Season Four, episodes 7-13
* Season Five, episode 1-2: “A Little Kiss”
* Season Five, episode 3: “Tea Leaves”
* Season Five, episode 4: “Mystery Date”
* Season Five, episode 5: “Signal 30”
* Season Five, episode 6: “Far Away Places”
* Season Five, episode 7: “At the Codfish Ball”
* Season Five, episode 8: “Lady Lazarus”
* Season Five, episode 9: “Dark Shadows”
* Season Five, episode 10: “Christmas Waltz”
* Season Five, episode 11: “The Other Woman”
* Season Five, episode 12: “Commissions and Fees”
* Season Five, episode 13: “The Phantom”
* Bonus: Season Five, episode 13: “The Phantom” with The Mindless Ones
* Season Six, episode 1-2: “The Doorway”
* Season Six, episode 1-2: “Seeing Mad Men Through Its Ads” column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 3: “Collaborators”
* Season Six, episode 3 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 4: “To Have and to Hold”
* Season Six, episode 4 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 5: “The Flood”
* Season Six, episode 5 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 6: “For Immediate Release”
* Season Six, episode 6 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 7: “Man with a Plan”
* Season Six, episode 7 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 8: “The Crash”
* Season Six, episode 8 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 9: “The Better Half”
* Season Six, episode 9 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 10: “A Tale of Two Cities”
* Season Six, episode 10 column for Wired
* Taking stock of Season Six: Bloggingheads.tv chat with Alyssa Rosenberg
* Season Six, episode 11: “Favors”
* Season Six, episode 11 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 12: “The Quality of Mercy”
* Season Six, episode 12 column for Wired
* Season Six, episode 13: “In Care Of”
* Season Six, episode 13 column for Wired
* The Self-Destruction of Mad Men (an essay on style for Esquire)
* The Great Don Debate (debating the role of Don Draper with Hazel Cills for Netflix)
* Season Seven, Episode One: “In Care Of” (for Wired)
* Season Seven, Episode Two: “A Day’s Work”
* Season Seven, Episode Three: “Field Trip”
* Season Seven, Episode Four: “The Monolith”
* Season Seven, Episode Five: “The Runaways”
* Season Seven, Episode Six: “The Strategy”
* Season Seven, Episode Seven: “Waterloo”

I’ve now finished all four seasons! SPOILERS AHOY

* The back half of Season Four began with two of the series’ very best episodes. First there was the surprisingly innovative decision just to take the series’ two lead characters and have them talk to each other for an episode. Duck’s arrival added some emotional and physical pyrotechnics to the proceedings, but for the most part it was simply a pleasure to watch Don and Peggy hash out the depth of their relationship to one another, first angrily, then drunkenly, then with the genuine hand-holding tenderness that reduces me to a misty-eyed marshmallow anytime the show goes there. This episode was, in its way, the payoff for Peggy’s newfound openness with Don at the beginning of the season. And as much as a part of her resents it — not because she wants it any different, but because, well, would the possibility really have been that difficult to entertain — it’s also nice for Peggy to offer proof that Don can have a platonic, loving friendship with a woman other than the one whose husband’s life he stole. Seeing that glimmer of a good man when Peggy’s around is sort of like the audience reaping a reward Peggy earned through years of hard emotional, creative, and intellectual work. It connects us to her.

* Next up was an episode with the evocative title of “The Summer Man,” which wasn’t just one of the series’ best episodes but also one of its most…experimental? Tactile? Sensuous? I’m not sure I could sit here and tell you what really happened in it, necessarily; the more important thing was the parade of sensations it presented us with. Don’s new hobby of swimming, the sound and vision of his body swimming through the cool and pristine water of the pool, was contrasted with the slow-motion muted-sound shots of booze being poured into an endless succession of glasses as Don realizes he needs to dry out, at least in part. Don began keeping a journal, so you had his mellifluous baritone actually narrating the episode — a first — providing not just a rich and pleasant sound, but a series of ruthless insights into his life and the lives of those around him. “I bet she was thinking of that line all night,” he writes of his date’s farewell after she blows him in the back of a taxicab. Brutal. But hey, let’s talk about that blowjob, too, another example of the show understanding how crucial and sexy the initial stages of a hook-up are: Bethany smiling at Don as she unzips him, him smiling back as he realizes what’s up. Let’s talk about the summeriness of it all, too, particularly the shot of Don exiting the athletic club and watching young women and couples (to coin a phrase) go by dressed in their summer clothes. And let’s talk about the show soundtracking Don in all his glory with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” which made me think of nothing so much as the writers having a eureka moment: “Holy shit—we can show Don walking around to ‘Satisfaction’!!!” Indeed they can! What an episode. I’m almost afraid to google for reviews.

* Just before we got to that episode and discovered what I like to call Conscious Don, I got to thinking about the challenge it must have presented to Jon Hamm and John Slattery in particular to play characters who are in a state of perpetual inebriation. After a while you no longer notice it, but when they go into someone’s office, and I mean pretty much every time they go into someone’s office, they drink. When they get home they drink. When a meeting ends they drink. Certainly when they go out to dinner they drink. Might the actors forget about this too, or do Hamm and Slattery always remember to play Don and Roger as self-possessed guys covering up a slight buzz?

* If I recall correctly there was another strong pair of episodes in there, basically a girl episode and a guy episode back to back. In the first, Peggy’s would-be boyfriend gives her guff about her gig, Joan has sex with Roger after they get mugged, Sally runs away from home and Betty comes to claim her, Faye whiffs on trying to soothe Sally, and Miss Blankenship dies. In the second, Don is nearly found out by the Defense Department, Pete has to take the bullet for Don by canceling the agency’s aviation gig, Lane confronts his father, and Roger learns both that Joan is pregnant and that Lucky Strike is leaving. I’m not sure that either of them stands out as cohesive units, but as a demonstration of how many balls the show can keep in the air within a short stretch of time, they’re tough to top.

* While the sequence with Lane’s stiff-upper-lip father and his Playboy Bunny girlfriend rang as false — okay, not false, but at the very least broad — as anything on the show since Peggy and Rizzo’s nude brainstorming session, the portrait it painted of Lane as an overgrown boy was one I really appreciated. I had already found myself returning repeatedly to the way he chose to explain to his wife what he liked about living in New York: “I’ve been here eight months and no one has asked me what school I went to.” That line’s obviously loaded with centuries of English class bias, but it also speaks to how fundamental his time as a schoolboy is to Lane’s conception of himself. And from the dutiful employee of PPO who resigned himself to transferring to Bombay in under 90 seconds, to the rebellious son who couldn’t wait for his father to disapprove of his new relationship, you see it repeatedly.

* “It’s like drinking a hundred bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits.” Man, Midge sure makes heroin sound more appealing than Lou Reed did, and I don’t even have tits! Ah well. It was nice to see the first of Don Draper’s Great Brunettes of the 1960s reappear, if only for a sordid attempt to extract cash that was skeevy enough to make my arms itch. As I write this paragraph I realize that it was actually a rather well-played scene given how shopworn the fallen-idealist junkie thing could be. The contrast between her and her husband’s jocularity and their obvious desperation was an engaging detail from writers and actors alike.

* Speaking of pale brunettes, big Megan fan here, obviously. But that aside, I appreciate how the show slowly seeded her in, first with a standout role in Faye’s focus group about Pond’s cold cream, then by making her a tourist attraction for Peggy’s bohemian friends at the front desk, they by having her step in for the late Miss Blankenship, then by making her the control group for Faye’s failure to connect with Sally, then with a seemingly random shot of Don staring at her at the end of the day as she touches up her makeup to go out. You can certainly detect Matthew Weiner’s background with The Sopranos there — the best show ever at organically building up bit parts into major players. (Cf. Jaime Hernandez in Love and Rockets too.) And yeah, my initial reaction to their initial hookup was “Oh no!!!!”, a reaction that received some confirmation when Faye shows up at Don’s apartment later that night revealing that no, she had not in fact dumped him after all. But that wasn’t on Megan, who really legitimately seemed to be okay with things never going any further than that, even if it would be nice if they did. And I really really loved that they had her directly address her big teeth. She’s endearing and attractive and intriguing, with enough of a hint of potential “sees an opportunity and takes it” no-bullshit-ness that if she sticks around at the agency next season, she could make for a multidimensional foil for both Don and Peggy. And Joan! And Jane! So yes, thumbs up for Megan.

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like grown men cooperating and treating each other with kindness, especially when they have all sorts of incentives not to but do it anyway. So when Pete went out of his way to take the blame for North American Aviation dropping out, and when Don secretly paid for Pete’s share of the agency’s collateral with the bank, I all but audibly said “Awww.” When Don told Pete he could run the agency if Don had to skip out? My heart’s swelling even now. I think it’s not just that I value cooperation and kindness so much — it’s that the two of them started on such bad terms. They hated each other! So to see Don trust Pete like that, and Pete sacrifice for Don like that…I don’t know, it’s almost like it gives me hope for the world. People can change. And that’s a place where Mad Men differs from The Sopranos in a big way.

* The season’s final arc took the Season Three finale’s pulse-pounding heist storyline and stretched it out into a slow-motion trainwreck. Instead of a race against time, it was an attempt to arrest the agency’s downward momentum before they crashed into the bottom. It was a series of “oh-no”s. Oh no, the Defense Department! Oh no, Don’s sleeping with another co-worker! Oh no, Faye didn’t dump him after all! Oh no, the Lucky Strike asshole is about to tell Roger they’re leaving! Oh no, they’re going to lose two huge accounts at once! Oh no, Glo-coat’s dumping them too! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn again! How many times can the bottom drop out of your stomach, you start to wonder. This has the effect of creating a genuine sense of dread where perhaps none need exist, too. I spent several episodes convinced that at any moment, Betty would truly beat Sally, or that one of the kids was gonna drown in that pool out in California, or that Faye was going to out Don in retaliation, or that Lee Garner Jr. was going to coerce sexual favors out of Roger, or or or or…It was grueling. Fitting, then, that rather than the spectacular saves that capped off the first three seasons, this ordeal was ended with Peggy and Ken securing a small account — a relatively minor turnaround for a comparatively spectacular downward spiral.

* If you take the two previous items and combine them, you have some sense of why I’m also so happy that Don and Betty’s final scene of the season worked out the way it did. I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of, that Betty would snap in some profound and even dangerous way, or that Don would try to sleep with her again. Instead they shared a drink after Don procured both a bottle and a genuine laugh from Betty, and Betty reacted to the news of Don’s engagement with a congratulations that, while not happy, at least didn’t sound like she was lying through her teeth. This season Betty emerged as one of the show’s most fascinating characters, taking her shady Season One shrink’s diagnosis that she has the emotional life of a child and running as hard and as fast with it as she could. Consumed with the same kind of rage that troubles her daughter, insisting on seeing a child psychiatrist, driven into paroxysms of life-altering jealousy when Sally befriends the kid she herself once inappropriately confided in, and overall refusing to take yes for an answer from anyone. Not to repeat myself again, but January Jones is absolutely perfect in this role, a Hitchcock blonde playing Jimmy Stewart’s Vertigo role. My hope for Betty is that now that Don’s moved on, she can find a way to do so too.

* So there you have it: Mad Men! I’ll take your recommendations for things to read/watch/listen to about it in the comments, if you’d be so kind…

Today I finished Season Four, Disc Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* Heh, every time I start one of these posts there’s a moment of trepidation. There’s always so much to talk about!

* So, the supporting-cast bloodbath I worried about last time around wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. Ken Cosgrove appears to be returning, which actually solves a bit of a mystery for me — though I don’t know who played who, I did figure out that three of the names in the opening credits track to Ken, Paul, and Harry, and for those first few episodes I couldn’t figure out why two of those three actors were still listed even though Harry was the only character at the agency. I must say that he appears to have weathered his abandonment by Roger, Bert, Lane, Don, Peggy, Joan, and Pete a lot better than I would have. This goes double since he had recently been promoted over Pete when the exodus went down, so he had to have taken his exclusion as a commentary on his character or loyalty rather than a matter of dollars and cents. I’ll be interested to see if his ability to take a bite out of the shit sandwich Pete made a point of serving him upon his return to the fold means he can actually swallow the whole thing.

* Also returning, if only for a while: Allison the secretary. Her ill-fated dalliance with Don was an instructive storyline for two reasons. First, holy moses was it sexy. Their breathy, clothes-on quickie was all about desire and arousal in the moment, the simple physical acts necessary for the act of fucking, and the smiling newfound intimacy of two acquaintances after the fact, that sense of a shared knowledge, of pleasure experienced together. I’m really having a hard time thinking of a show that’s been this thoughtful and thorough in exploring what makes sex sexy.

* Second, it was our clearest demonstration to date of the negative potential of Draper Unbound. It’s not that Don’s cruel, per se. I mean, he can be — the way he mocked poor alcoholic Duck Phillips and that simultaneously hapless and overbearing cousin who interviewed for the copywriting gig in the award-show episode is proof enough of that. But he’s not a sociopath. When his bad behavior is brought to his attention, his remorse is real. The point is that it has to be brought to his attention. He’s clueless on his own! So in a moment of drunken lust he has sex with his secretary. Then, because he is aware on a conceptual level that that is a thing that can cause problems and is probably a Bad Idea, he cuts off any kind of collegial relationship with her whatsoever. But he never makes an effort to think ahead of the problem, to try to ease her out of the idea of a potential ongoing relationship with him, to make her feel comfortable working for him again (let alone to not have sex with her in the first place). Even when her misery becomes too obvious to ignore, he still whiffs on obvious partial solutions like personally writing her a very nice letter of recommendation. Problems pretty much literally need to be thrown in his face for him to really understand that they’re problems at all, and that he’s responsible for them.

* So he’s stumbling from one crisis to the next now: He makes dates for when it’s his turn to have the kids, and thus Sally is left alone by the babysitter for enough time to chop off her own hair. He gets drunk off booze and his own reputation, and thus unwittingly plagiarizes some doofus’s crap copy while showing off for a client. He gets deep enough into his own drinking habit to have a full-fledged lost weekend, miss out on a scheduled visit with the kids, infuriate his increasingly unhinged ex, presumably embarrass himself in front of the award-winning advertising person he slept with earlier in the weekend, and unwittingly reveal his real name to some random waitress he took home. Draper Unbound is more like Draper Unmoored.

* Related: It takes a village to raise Don Draper. In the season premiere, I was struck by the directness with which Peggy Olson told Don that everyone at the agency just wants to please him. Besides being the outright articulation of three seasons’ worth of subtext, it also served a plot purpose in that it spoke to the more intimate, casual, and free-wheeling nature of the new agency, an agency where Don’s improvisatory genius is built right into the DNA, both in its name and partnership structure and in the fact that it was his fast thinking that made its creation possible in the first place.

But this admirable openness about the staff’s desire to live up to Don’s reputation and expectations cuts both ways. Peggy, Pete, Allison, and Joan especially are willing to work extra hard to protect Don from himself, but this can have the effect of enabling him. With their safety net in place, he has yet to learn how badly a hard fall can hurt. I’ve got a feeling we’re headed in that direction, though. Allison’s defenestration was the first taste of that, and the Clio Award weekend the second. The last thing I saw at the end of Disc Two was Roger staring resentfully at Don as he traipsed down the hall, award in hand, then flashing back to the day Don first showed up for work after Roger (maaayyyybeeee) hired him during a liquid breakfast paid for by Don himself. If that’s any indication of what’s to come, those two brushes with disaster won’t be the last. Compare and contrast with Season One, where as I’ve noted before, Don’s work life was pretty much peachy. You’ve come a long way, baby.

* The show is going about the business of showing us Don’s vulnerable underbelly in some fairly non-obvious ways. Frankly I don’t even know if this is intentional, but I never find Don more pathetic than when he flashes that heavy-lidded half-smile at some woman when he’s on the make. In those moments, where he really opens up the charm firehose and drunkenly leans in to try and plant one on the girl Roger and Jane set him up with, or Anna’s collegiate niece, or Allison, or whoever he’s targeting, he’s revealed to be not some godlike avatar of success and confidence, but just some horny dude trying to seal the deal. It’s like seeing his hair messed up, only far more intimate.

* The show also makes its point about Don’s tumultuous life by juxtaposing his competence and incompetence in its most direct fashion yet. The buildup to the Clio Award doesn’t just feature all of the major characters explicitly expressing their anxiety and excitement, it includes the series’ single most endearing and adorable image yet: Don, Joan, and Roger sitting at the show, secretly holding hands under the table. You love these characters in that moment, because they love each other — they worked really hard on something, they want other people to like it, and they’re afraid that people won’t, and they’re clinging to each other in the face of all this. And then they win! Woo! Don is now the acknowledged master of his domain! …and then he breezes into this meeting with the Life cereal people, looking disheveled and stifling belches, comes within inches of destroying the whole relationship, embarrasses his coworkers, and only pulls the rabbit out of the hat with the help of unconscious plagiarism. From elation to “eeeeesh” in the space of two scenes. Brilliantly done.

* While we’re on the subject of excruciatingly awkward meetings, how ’bout a hand for Roger Sterling and his anticipatory reenactment of the “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers with the Honda reps? When he walked into that conference room and said he hadn’t been told about the meeting, “but then again I know how some people like surprises,” I nearly lost my shit. But beneath the black comedy, may I suggest that the show is suggesting that war can deeply screw up even a happy wanderer like Bonnie Prince Sterling?

* Let us return for a moment to the Mad Men Sexiness Highlight Reel: If it’s possible to have a full-on Tex Avery bugout over a line of dialogue, then that’s what happened to me in the flashback where Roger gives Joan a mink stole at the beginning of their hotel-room date, and she responds by telling him that every time she wears it, “I’ll think of everything that happened the night I got it.” AROOOOGAH! AROOOOGAH! There’s more delight packed into that one-line promise than in a lifetime of Christmas mornings.

* Also super-duper sexy, but problematic for that very reason? Peggy Olson’s nude-off with the obnoxious new art director. Now, I’ll admit that that kind of casual yet still very highly charged nudity is where my bread is buttered. (Boola, boola!) So it’s entirely possible that there exist dudes who would be more discomfited than aroused by that kind of situation — or if Rizzo’s eventual surrender and retreat behind the closed door of the hotel bathroom with the shower running is any indication, both discomfited and aroused, at any rate. But something about the scene didn’t ring true to me even when correcting for my own fetishes, because…well, let me put it this way. When a woman resolves to triumph in a particular battle of the sexes by taking her clothes off, that’s what we in the penis-having industry call a win-win situation. I get that Peggy’s spontaneous, confrontational nudism was a way to shut this asshole up, to make him realize that he’s not the free-thinker he imagines himself to be, and thus to gain the upper hand in their work relationship. And perhaps back then a woman taking charge of her sexuality outside the framework established by men — a woman who can “stare back,” to use Peggy’s phrase about the Playboy models Rizzo spent the evening ogling — really was the shock to the system Rizzo took it as. Certainly that’s implicit from the contrast with Hef’s fantasy factory. But for the modern viewer, and presumably for the modern writers and filmmakers too, it’s Peggy Olson-slash-Elisabeth Moss taking her clothes off on camera, and having a jolly good time doing it, too (which is admittedly very important). And as a guy, the last thing that made me was uncomfortable.

* That said, it’s been fun watching the writers and directors make the most of Peggy’s ever-growing comfort in being demonstratively herself, even if it happens where no one else can see. Between her headdesk moment when she finds out that Trudy Campbell is pregnant, and her Glenn Quagmire creeper routine when she peers over the divider to spy on Don after Allison’s blow-up, she’s an animated-gif machine. Switch on the subtitles and you can add her bit about how her boyfriend may not own her vagina, but he is renting it. And of course there’s her ability to speak truth to Draper, both positive (everyone’s there to please him) and negative (he’s got to fix his own mistake with the Life cereal situation). She’s a hoot.

* But perhaps the most revelatory character work so far this season — ironically, given her relative lack of screentime — is with Betty Draper. The big discovery here is that her problems don’t all stem from a combination of her victimization by Don and the limits placed on women by her time and place, or by her time and place as personified by her parents, i.e. a general culture-created patheticness. No, many of Betty’s problems stem from Betty herself. This person has an entitlement streak as wide as it is mean. What’s happening now is that she’s gotten everything she wanted. Now that she’s divorced, she can no longer fall back on blaming society for not allowing her to pursue what she wants in defiance of tradition. Now that she’s free from Don, she can no longer pin her problems on his philandering, secret-keeping, and emotional unavailability. Now she has the house, the money, and a doting husband — who genuinely seems like a decent dude, even! Henry repeatedly makes statements against his own interest, telling Betty that as much as she and he might hate him, Don is often right about things like the house and the kids. He talks her down off various ledges rather than reacting with Don-style rage that she’s unhappy to begin with. He seems to keep a protective eye out for the kids, especially Sally, recognizing the danger the mother-daughter relationship is in. And he seems crazy about Betty, both emotionally and physically. And guess what? The tiniest crack in the surface of this world still sends Betty into paroxysms of rage. That’s not on Don, or her dad, or her mom, or her brother, or Sally, or Henry, or society — it’s on her. And hey, good for the show for handling it this way. Making all of Betty’s problems the fault of men, or of Men, would infantilize her just as surely as those men/Men have done. (And they have, to be sure. But yeah, there’s more to it than that.)

* Finally, I just have one thing to say about Sally’s storyline: WHOA. Uh, I did not expect to see a ten-year-old girl masturbating as a major plot point on an American TV drama! Of course it was handled with the show’s charateristic intelligence, the balance between restraint and directness, the multifaceted commentary on individual characters and the characters who shaped them and the society that shaped all of them. But probably more importantly, and maybe more impressively, was that it was handled at all.

* Your must-read of the day: The Comics Journal’s excellent Habibi roundtable, featuring Charles Hatfield, Hayley Campbell, Chris Mautner, Tom Hart, Katie Haegele, and Joe McCulloch. Savor it.

* Tom Spurgeon sounds off on people who approach acclaimed comics angry about their acclaim. Comics has a near-terminal case of “You think you’re better than me???”-itis sometimes. I’ve been there!

* I pulled out the superhero-related quotes because they were the pithiest, but Alex Dueben’s interview with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden about the Best American Comics series was a top-to-bottom fascinating look at their process, particularly the thinking behind the “Notables” section at the back of the book. Abel and Madden are two of contemporary comics’ most stealthily influential figures.

* Legendary will be publishing a new edition of Paul Pope’s The One-Trick Ripoff that will also serve as an omnibus of his non-THB work from the bulk of the ’90s, including his lost manga for Kodansha.

* Ganges #4 is out! This is a great comic book.

* Closed Caption Comics news: Did you know that Ryan Cecil Smith has a blog (via Shit Comix), or that Conor Stechschulte came out with a new comic called Fountain at BCGF last year? Because I sure didn’t! CCC folks: You realize I’m your target audience, right???

* Frank Quitely talks shop. I feel like that’s a rare occurrence?

* Chris Mautner didn’t think much of DC’s New 52.

* Rub the Blood is a noisy-alt tribute to the Image Comics of the early ’90s. Could be a pip, could be a pip. I mean, surely you want to see Victor Cayro take on Shadowhawk or whatever the case may be.

* Joe McCulloch on Yuichi Yokoyam’s Color Engineering. I’ll admit that Yokoyama’s painted style leaves me cold compared to his line art, but he also rarely disappoints, so I’ll certainly be reading this.

* Hooray hooray, Tom Kaczynski’s drawing pretty girls again.

* It’s always good to see new work from Tom Neely.

* Meanwhile I think we should take all available opportunities to look at the art of David B.

* Ben Affleck is maybe directing a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, and is definitely directing Matt Damon in a Whitey Bulger biopic written by Boardwalk Empire‘s Terrence Winter. And that is two more interesting Ben Affleck stories than I expected to read this week.

* I sure hope this means Kevin Huizenga will be drawing characters from every book in his unsorted pile.

* Yeesh, King Con.

* I’ve gotten an awful lot of enjoyment out of Nine Inch Nails’ cover of U2’s “Zoo Station.” It’s interesting to see how those two bands’ post-’90s activities have affected conventional wisdom about their (mutually excellent) ’90s activities.

* Speaking of: I’ve listened to the freshly reunited Orbital’s new song “Never” probably thirty times today. I haven’t been this delighted by the comeback of a band from my youth since I heard Portishead’s “Machine Gun.”

* So it was the side effects of the cocaine! (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I remain completely amazed by how bad Netflix is at being Netflix. I really have never seen anything like it, this string of necessary changes handled as badly as possible coupled with unforced errors of spectacular proportion. Read the letter to shareholders excerpted at the end of the article at the link and marvel at the tone-deafness and inattention to detail (typos???).

* Real Life Horror: Heads on sticks. Greenwald is right: That line in Obama’s speech about killing Bin Laden that said it’s proof that America can do whatever we set our minds to weirded me out as deeply as anything in politics since the introduction of the previously unheard-of term “Homeland” as a descriptor of American territory. There was something very bad about each of these ideas, and I recognized the latter even in the depths of my unpleasantness.

* When it comes to the reason why you can never do a google image search for any of the Simpsons with the safe search filter turned off, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Michael DeForge is now part of the problem.

I wanted to bring up a few things I forgot to mention in my Season Three wrap-up, and to talk about the first episode of Season Four. SPOILER WARNING

* Lane: When I first started writing about Season Three, I quickly noticed how many people seemed so excited by my mentions of Lane Pryce that it was like he was an old friend who came back to town. Though he seemed like a nice guy as a character, a decent man forced into a semi-indecent job and punished with abuse for his reliability, I wasn’t quite sure what the fuss was about. Until the Season Three finale. A “Well, gentlemen, I suppose you’re fired” here, a “Very good, Happy Christmas!” there, and suddenly his decency was complemented by that most delicious of traits: vengeance! The good guy won that one, and I’d imagine won many viewers hearts as well.

* I also suspect that the show modeled that behavior by welcoming Lane into the Bert/Roger/Don fold in that episode. If they can put his name on the wall, so can we, right?

* Sal: Well, I guess we’ve learned the limits of Don’s tolerance. With a simple “you people” directed at poor blameless Sal, he revealed that while he would in no way ruin a guy for behavior that didn’t impact on him, he’d cut the guy loose in a heartbeat the moment he did. Outing or ostracizing Sal would be an unforgivable breach of decorum for Don, but in his view, so too is Sal allowing (“allowing”) what he is to affect Don in any way. Don’s tolerant of anyone, to a point. After that, he’s pitiless.

* Sal’s departure from the show was one of the very few spoilers I’d stumbled across going into the series, couched in glimpsed headlines about Bryan Batt’s unhappiness with this, I believe. Seeing him in a cruising spot payphone telling his wife he loves her as our last glimpse of him was an appropriately heartbreaking goodbye for a character who was just a blast every time he was on screen. (Please don’t tell me if he comes back or not.)

* Speaking of departures, uhhhh, is Season Four the wholesale cast-change bloodbath it seems to be? Ken, Paul, Mr. Hooker, Kurt, Smitty, Allison, Lois the Lawnmower Woman, and all the other bit players at Sterling Cooper have been wished into the cornfield now? That’s harsh, man, and knowing what I know about AMC I have to wonder (and I mean have to wonder — I ain’t googling shit until the credits role on the Season Four finale) if costcutting was involved.

* My squeamishness about that aside, this was a fine start to things. The hilariously over-the-top swingin’ music cue when we first entered the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office was just the first sign that this is a faster, looser, more informal operation; see also the fishbowl conference rooms and offices, the lack of a table, Peggy and the new artist’s non-stop in-joking, the presence of guys like Pete and Harry among the bigwigs, and on and on.

* Another break from the past: The show’s most explicit sex scene yet, with a dollop of sadomasochism on top. Based on everything we know about powerful men’s predilections, this fetish makes a lot of sense for Don, but it’s still a place I didn’t think the show would ever go.

* In this episode we had yet another case of the show teaching both us and the characters what’s wrong and how to fix it all at the same time. After a taciturn Don gives an interview to the Ad Age guy that’s quickly used against him, it’s easy to interpret his blow-up at the bathing-suit company reps who don’t want a sexy ad as typical Don Draper petulance. That’s clearly how Pete and Roger see it, it’s how Peggy would see it based on her earlier confrontations with Don over the ham-fight PR stunt, it’s how we’ve been primed to see it, and it may even be how Don sees it…at first. But when he turns around, goes back into the conference room he just stormed out of, and orders them to leave, there’s suddenly a method to the madness. If business is hurting because Don is too aloof, because the gap between his outsized success and his cipher of a personality is too huge, then by god he’s going to narrow it by becoming the swaggering champion everyone already expects him to be. And click! Like that, a series of character and narrative developments stretching back to his early, tense relationships with Pete and Peggy, his unease around Roger, his failure with Conrad Hilton, the formation of the new agency, and the Ad Age debacle all snap into place, leading to this moment: Draper Unbound.

* Now, I can’t imagine this ending well for anyone, of course…or at least I couldn’t if Don’s work situation ever ended badly for him. But so far it hasn’t. At the end of Season One, he unexpectedly triumphed over Pete by calling his bluff. At the end of Season Two, he unexpectedly triumphed over Duck by calling his bluff. At the end of Season Three, he unexpectedly triumphed over PPL by calling their bluff. Maybe Superdon will crash and burn, but if the show really gets serious about it, if it has him truly damage or ruin his career, I’d actually be quite surprised. That’s just not a place they’ve been interested in going so far. (Again, please, no hints, no “keep watching”s!)

* One last carryover from Season Three: Pete and Peggy are getting along great, apparently, answering my question about how the revelation of their child together would affect things. Seems like they’re both perfectly happy to act like it never happened. Which, you know, is really fine. I’m sure the kid is much better off with Peggy’s sister than he’d be in a shotgun-wedding family consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Pete and Peggy Campbell, or with a resentful Peggy on her own. They managed to be civilized about it.

* So as you might have heard, I wrote a Spider-Man comic and annotated A Game of Thrones.

* On the latter score, Elio Garcia of Westeros.org has posted his own announcement of the project. Elio calculates that he and I and Anne Groell wrote over 1,000 notes on the book between us, which both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me at all given how into it we all got. I’m telling you, it’s a really rich vein to tap. Elio also notes that Subtext is working on a web version, so you non-iPad users out there, take heart.

* And this was a daymaker: An effusive write-up from big-deal SFF site Tor.com, and one that quotes extensively from me at that. I mean, get a load of this praise:

“this definite guide is interactive, comprehensive, ever-expanding, and most of all, made with the fans in mind….The annotations aren’t idle theories, rather, these are insights from those who know this world better than anyone else in the world, save George R. R. Martin himself.

Who am I to argue?

* My chum Rob Bricken of Topless Robot notes how useful the annotations will be for those readers who can’t tell the players without a scorecard. He also touts our bonafides as experts, which apparently I will never get used to.

* And a special tip of the hat to the Chief, Dan Nadel, who very kindly congratulated me for the project on the blog of the estimable Comics Journal itself.

* As for Spidey, I’d like to thank three of my favorite comicsbloggers, JK Parkin, Tom Spurgeon, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, for pointing their readers in my comic’s direction. Same for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s done so. Thank you all!

* And as noted, I spoke with my co-writer J.M. DeMatteis about all things Spider-Man for CBR.

* Meanwhile, I’m still making my way through Mad Men. Latest post on the end of Season Three here, archive of every MM post so far here.

* As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse #2 for TCJ.com.

* Over at Robot 6, Eddie Campbell, Leela Corman, and I defend Craig Thompson’s Habibi against accusations of Orientalism.

* And Ron Régé Jr. says “Fuck Other Forms of Art.”

Just finished Season Three. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS

* The Season Three finale was Mad Men‘s ultimate competence-fantasy moment, and kudos to T.J. Dietsch to tipping me off as to how and why: It’s a heist movie. Heist movies are always a competence fantasy, a narrative centered on pulling off a difficult job with efficiency and style, against authority, with a huge payoff. But in this episode, Mad Men goes even further. The usual beats are there: the “one last heist” set-up for guys like Bert and Roger; assembling the right team based on their specialties; watching the plan click into place as obstacles are overcome by equal parts hard work, moments inspiration (“Fire us”), and physical force; the efforts to conceal the planning, juxtaposed with the flamboyance of the successful execution’s aftermath. But the stuff that gets stolen by the men and women of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is incidental, of course. This heist’s target is talent. The best creative director, the best account men, the best copy writer, the best administrator, the best office manager. They use all their skills in order to be able to use all their skills. It’s a competence fantasy in which the item being stolen through their competence is their competence. It’s brilliant.

* But there’s another reason why it successfully hits my buttons. I’ve said before that my favorite thing to see depicted in fiction is competence, cooperation, and decency — in tandem. And that’s what this is. In order to pull this off, Don and Roger had to forgive one another and recognize one another’s indispensable talents. Don and Betty had to cease their incipient warfare. Don had to apologize to Peggy for mistreating her. Peggy had to come to terms with her gratitude to Don. Roger had to give Joan the respect she always wanted. Don and Roger had to assure Pete that he was valued as a worker and a person. Pete and Trudy had to come together on behalf of their shared future. (And based on the return of the Clearasil account, it sounds like they had to make amends with Trudy’s dad, too.) Bert had to acknowledge Harry’s vision and encourage him not to let it go to waste. Harry had to act like a man of vision in turn. Lane had to free himself from the abusive culture of PPL that had hamstrung him and his family for years. Don, Roger, and Bert had to acknowledge Lane’s talent, and his basic decency despite having been hired to be an overseer and hatchet man. Lane had to admit how much he admired the partners and enjoyed working with them despite their conflicts. In short, everyone had to be genuinely kind to and appreciative of everyone else. If you can think of a better feel-good moment in recent television memory than Don coming out of the bedroom in the new agency’s makeshift “office” to discover Bert, Roger, Lane, Peggy, Pete, Trudy, Joan, and Harry happily working, eating, and talking, I want you to program my DVR.

* But every rose has its thorn, and you don’t get much more direct than having Don dissolve his family in one room, then walk through the door to join his new work family in another room.

* If the first half of Season Three was Mad Men at its most Sopranos, the back half was Mad Men at its most Sirk. From Betty and Henry Francis’s fraught, unconsummated affair, to the newly suburban setting and “back to nature” purity (dancing around the maypole as Don’s fingers brush the grass; gathering outside to look at the eclipse) of Don and Suzanne Farrell’s affair, to lighting so lush and dramatic as to rise to the level of expressionism, Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic fingerprints were all over this. It gave these last half-dozen episodes a strong visual identity and cohesion.

* Indeed, this stretch contained a few episodes that are among the show’s tightest and most striking on an individual basis. Even in the moment — during the opening flashforward sequence in fact — I was floored by the structure and triple focus of the episode that starts with Don wounded, Peggy in bed with an unidentified man, and Betty glamorous and languid, then slowly reveals how they all got there.

** In Don’s case, I’m always a sucker for dramatically portentous strangers (cf. this past week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire), and thus loved the draft-dodging pot-smoking pill-popping couple he unwisely hooks up with.

** In Betty’s, I’m endlessly moved and fascinated by how her tightly wound way of life forces her to act out only in childlike, petulant ways, like buying a couch her decorator can’t stand.

** In Peggy’s, I’m still scratching my head over the erotic appeal of Duck Phillips, and wondering if he wasn’t simply a way to work out her issues with Don just as Pete warned her he was. Surely it was no coincidence that Don was forced by Bert to sign a contract in the same episode that featured the return of the guy over whom Don triumphed precisely because he didn’t have a contract.

*** Alas for Duck, Peggy’s sojourn as a Duckfucker appears to be coming to an end as she joins Sterling Cooper Draper Prce — you can sort of see it in her teary eyes when Don makes his last-ditch attempt to woo her in her apartment. I doubt Duck will take kindly to being duckolded like that.

** Plus, Bert showed the sharp teeth lurking beneath the Cheshire Cat grin by blackmailing Don with the unspoken specter of “Dick Whitman.” Surely this was the Emmy submission for something or other.

* Re: Suzanne—On a personal level, I must say that after the dyed distraction of Bobbi Barrett in Season Two, it’s nice to see Don picking up where he left off with Midge and Rachel in Season One and resuming his tour of the Great Brunettes of the Early ’60s. I got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I’m hot for teacher.

* George Hearst in Deadwood, the Commodore in Boardwalk Empire, Conrad Hilton in Mad Men…Should I ever become a man of godlike wealth, influence, and power, please remind me that I need to go gray, lose my hair, and grow a mustache. Gotta watch out for those menacing mustache men! (Note to Weird Al: Please make “Pictures of Mustache Men” happen.)

* Actually it’s a bit tough to know what to think of Connie from where I’m sitting. Perhaps the best way to think of him is as a Grant Morrison-style doppelganger/double/reflection of the hero. As his presumption to father-son dynamics would indicate, Connie is Don writ large. From similar diminished circumstances, he rose even higher than Don. From similar personal alienation, he has developed an even more impressive bulldozing business style, coupled with an even more charming personal style. And in a similar guise of being a straight shooter, he’s able to be even more capricious, self-indulgent, and cruel than Don at his moodiest and most mercurial. When Hilton calls Don on the carpet for not putting together an add campaign for the Hilton chain’s entirely imaginary hotel on the moon, that’s the moment when the by-golly gives way to something approaching terror that this madman has the kind of power he has. There but for the grace of God.

* However, we did learn in the finale that Hilton served one other purpose: teaching Don that he needs Roger. Gladhandler and heel though he might be, sometimes gladhandlers and heels are required! But more than that, presumably Roger would have seen Hilton’s capriciousness coming and put the brakes on. That’s required too.

* What I like best about that particular revelation, though, was that it was revealed to us at the same time Don articulated it to both himself and to Roger. The wheels click into place, and suddenly, “A-ha! So that’s what the writers were up to!” exists in a spot where there used to be only uncertainty.

* The show did it again several minutes later, when Don makes his pitch to Pete: He needs Pete not for his portfolio or his skills as an account man, but because he is, of all things, a forward thinker. Teenagers, aeronautics, “the Negro market” — beneath his bluster and petulance, Pete has basically seen the entire ’60s coming. But I never saw that he saw it, and I don’t think most of the people at Sterling Cooper saw it, and I’m not sure Pete himself saw it either, not until Don articulates it this way at this moment. It was another “A-ha!” Really, really smart writing.

* So how did we feel about Betty’s discovery of Don’s secret past and their marriage’s subsequent dissolution? I wonder if I’m focusing so much on the work stuff because, as was the case with the earlier episodes in the season, Don’s romantic and family life felt less essential to the story this season. Ironically, perhaps, given that he and Betty had a baby and then broke up, but there you have it. It also proceeded in pretty much the way I expected, lacking only a really thoroughgoing breakdown on Betty’s part upon the initial discovery: finding a key, finding the box, debating whether or not to tell, confronting Don, Don’s emotional collapse, an attempt to be honest and bridge the gap, a subsequent rejection, angry words leading to the unspoken threat of violence, the split, a slight rapprochement. Other than the gasp exhaled at the moment Betty opens the drawer, none of this came as a surprise.

* But it was impeccably executed, mind you. Jon Hamm’s an extraordinary physical actor, and made it so that watching him fumble and drop his cigarettes was somehow as bad as him pissing his pants. Later, his drunken, rageful confrontation with Betty over Henry Francis was a concise blast of all his money, class, sex, mother, and father issues right in her face. When he tells her she’s a whore, it’s an indictment of anyone and everyone he thinks just laid around collecting other people’s money rather than going out and making it themselves — Betty, Roger, Henry Francis, his dead mother.

* January Jones…you know, okay, I see what people’s problem with her is. She’s stiff. But whether or not that’s by choice, isn’t it perfect for Betty Draper? Even a Betty Draper in extremis? Whether we can thank the casting director or Jones herself, playing that role that way makes Betty a character unto herself rather than a type.

* I worry about Sally Draper. The loss of her grandfather, the assassination of JFK and his alleged killer, and her parents’ divorce, all at once. Authority’s crumbling all around her, and the instruction she does receive from it — Gene slagging her mom, her mom’s pretty messed up ideas about romance — aren’t going to help. Again, Kiernan Shipka’s a fine young actress, so I hope they go somewhere with all this.

* JFK. That was handled about as well as I can imagine anything handling it. The initial broadcasts, the cacophony of ringing telephones suddenly silenced, the huddled groups of whispering and crying people, the days spent staring in disbelief at the television, the narcissistic but totally understandable resentment of how one’s own plans have suddenly been upended…it was horrifying, heartbreaking, scary, and all too familiar.

* Two lines from that episode stand out: Don’s genuinely stunned and baffled “What?” when Betty tells him that Oswald has been shot, and a confused Bobby naively asking Don whether they’d be going to the President’s funeral. I teared up at that last one, because I know the truth about Don’s reassurance that everything’s going to be okay. It never was. It never is.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I’m really admiring Boardwalk Empire‘s narrative audacity this season, from a structural perspective. Last season’s cliffhanger was that Jimmy, Eli, and the Commodore were conspiring to take Nucky down. My assumption, and everyone else’s I assume, was that we’d spend much of Season Two watching this happen. It’d be a slow race toward the final coup attempt: the conspirators working to keep their plans secret before the trap is sprung, Nucky working to stay on top and get to the bottom of the setbacks that would surely start to befall him.

Instead, the coup happened in the season premiere. It turns out Nucky’s too big to take down in one fell swoop, but that aside, he learned that his brother, mentor, and protege had all betrayed him; that the city bigwigs were backing his enemies; that he was all alone, with his money and clout in serious danger. Instead of whether the coup would take place, the season is about what happens afterward. Smart stuff.

So too is the arrangement of the warring parties. In a battle between Nucky and Jimmy, there’s no default for the audience’s sympathies. Nucky’s the guy in the credit sequence, but the story we were really sold from the beginning is the story we’ve seen many times before — the hungry young man on the make. In other words, there are two protagonists, and after watching them work together for a full season (albeit with some hiccups), we’re now watching them become one another’s antagonist. Who do you root for? What’s more, their primary allies on the criminal end of things are the show’s two most compelling such characters, Chalky and Richard. We’re obviously to root against the conniving, child-raping Commodore, and the politicians on both sides aren’t worth spit, but there really is no easy way to take sides between the primary players. Obviously there are plenty of big prestige cable dramas who at least attempted to split audience sympathy between rival factions, but for the most part there were still clear good guy/bad guy lines established initially, regardless of where things went from there — sheriff versus crime boss, cops versus druglords, stern but kind Northerners versus arrogant, hedonistic Southerners. Boardwalk Empire has really split things down the middle, and I’ve got no idea what side I’m gonna come down on. Mostly I hope for a rapprochement. Don’t you?