This episode totally made up for the miss-steps last week. And pretty much explained the cold open of the season.

My sentiments exactly. 
Ever since they revealed Tate the main story went down the toilet and the secondaries are the only thing worth screen time. Things completely flipped since the secondaries used to be lame and the main plot was interesting. 
It's like they completely changed the entire production staff two weeks…

1. Totally agree, he stole the episode at his AA meeting… but then the plot went nutty by having Tate grab him in the parking lot with a comment that suggested he'd been in the meeting as some sort of master of disguise. And really how would he even know Frye was going to that meeting? Pretty thin plot around a very…

Really disappointed with how they've dropped Tate into a 1-dimensional revenge mode since revealing him. All of the political complexity of his motivations and side plots have completely eroded and vanished. Once they started down the road of his singular focus on Marco he got a lot less interesting. 
Oddly though the…

He had it since his teenage years. Moron never got it looked into. Probably helped bolster his erratic aggressive Napoleon complex.

I thought he was telling him to stop talking. Considering he gave him time to sign the Birthday card and in stead he was still trying to save his own life with his mouth.

I'm starting to wonder if they still know how to do a "comfortable" sex scene.

So now he has a Valet with a cane and limp due to being shot. Downton Empire++

Syphilitic madness will do that to someone.

Proper Shakespeare ending would leave a mentally damaged Marie alone and alive at the end.

Yeah, that adds to the entire bad contrivance that setup in the desert was. This is also after the show established that Walt is keen to GPS tracking… via hank.. and Saul who even showed him a better way to do it with the wand a couple episodes prior.

It's hard to get out of the back seat of an SUV when you're cuffed.

Comes across to me like a disconnected sociopath that never received an education. He is definitely the scariest person on the show, since he's probably a lot smarter than he knows, has no morality or empathy, and hasn't done anything but follow orders…. yet. Take away the outside influences and who knows what kind of…

After stewing on it for a day… I had to give this one a B-. 
It's the first of the runaway final season where things felt contrived. 
Everything was going well, but then the money phone call arrived. :(
Walt would have seen through that, the way hank saw through Andrea's phone call so easily, Hank's photo sucked. Even if…

oh, and someone should tell Ryan that buttoning too tight shirts all the way to the top without a tie makes you look like a serial sex offender.

Yeah to me it just looked like a man-dog but not wilfred specifically. As to suggest that there is a long history and wilfred is not the first of his kind.

at this point they mind as well put  4 8 15 16 23 42 on that statue

she was supposed to die with the rest, hence the improvisation.

how's Bruce fit in?

Migrants were most likely a setup for Childress, that killing fits his M.O. 
When the one girl didn't die he improvised.