West Side Story was real, and Rita Moreno became a nun (as seen on Oz) and is now slowly dying; Orange is her death rattle, her morphine dreams.

I didn't get them either. She runs too well? And therefore boys get discouraged? (as a comment on women having to downplay their abilities so that men can feel superior and get their egos stroked)

The two levels were indeed those: (1) appears to be a gang-up on Piper; (2) is actually a request for help.

Has an established author, as a fan of a second author, ever publicly dabbled in fanfiction? That might be interesting.

re: being hung like a horse: "You never know who'll get one."

Your second paragraph surprised me completely. I got no inkling of that at all.

I actually remember her most vividly from Remo Williams (more so even than Deep Space Nine Voyager) and in the pilot it was quite a shock to see evidence of the passage of time. She's great on the show. I wonder whether her back issues will come up again or if they merely existed to give Piper something to fix.

I always liked Anne Rice's depiction of God as an ordinary-looking man, perhaps for similar reasons. There's something about power-that-doesn't-bother-to-appear-powerful that makes it even more intimidating, the same way that whispering can grab the attention more than shouting sometimes.

Good list. And I agree that small is better. It's more sustainable and less likely to careen out of the writers' hands.

Obviously and unfortunately, someone in Marco's family will be kidnapped by the cartel on the US side or somesuch.

The killer's nickname is now making me think of a Double-Indemnity-type plot where the bridge's wife has him killed to collect the life insurance.

I think the bald FBI guy is Cuban(-American) or otherwise Latin.

That's like the bare minimum, those are living beings with their own inalienable right to be treated with respect. We can't behave like vicious cold-blooded beasts.

Re: the Spanish, I am impressed that they don't seem to be merely reverse-engineering the Spanish dialogue from an initial (merely functional plot-dictated) English script: There are flourishes of vivid Mexico-specific idiom. It makes me think it's being written in Spanish to begin with rather than actually translated…

It's some combination of being a completist, having OCD, and being a masochist, that I watched every single episode of that show. (And for a touch of the life-affirming/pathetic, holding out hope that it would pull itself up by its bootstraps and get good.)

The tunnel can be said to be a Weeds character too.

I'm ambivalent about it all: having Ted Levine and Marco and Sonya be the unheeded voices of reason is one of the most basic moves in the book, and effectively that's what the show did, despite some embellishment. (regarding the bar as drop site and failing to spot the clues Sonya ends up finding on the live-feed) The…

I hope it's something like that, now that you mention it. It takes away some of the abstraction that is present in the killer's announced motives.

I usually pounce on things like these (e.g., the show is making the killer too all-knowing; it'd be better if they make him more than one person), but I find myself agreeing with the review: I care more about the show in general than in the mystery of the killer's identity in particular. Luckily I care about the show…

I looked around a bit, too, after posing the question, and there are so many qualifications in the explanations I found (of a piece with what both you and @avclub-1cbfed64b042551c60661543fbb9ea51:disqus have posted) that what I basically got is "We, the human species, haven't figured this one out yet." It's weird that…