I keep hoping Llewyn Davis will liberate it or maybe return it to the Gorfeins.

I think you're dead right. Everyone is bored and jaded except for Chandra (who's just green). Every exchange is loaded with contempt. Hostility among neighbors is seething. This entire series has been one long Debbie Downer.

To be honest, more than a month passed between my viewing of Eps 1 and 2. While I remembered the hearse driver, I'd forgotten about the biker until reading the comments here. But this was the first time someone connected 'The Motorcyclist' and 'The Stepdad' for me.

Next week maybe Naz will get "The Other Side of Midnight" tattooed on his other arm. The series could end with Naz convicted of murdering Susan Sarandon.

Thanks! Looking forward to next weekend's discussion. Campai, Akira K!

It IS a slippery show: easy to like, hard to love. I streamed the pilot episode on HBO NOW before it officially debuted and found the tension (not to mention Naz's boneheaded decisions) too unpleasant to warrant an eight-week commitment — even as a big fan of both Richard Price and Riz Ahmed. Then I read somewhere…

Excellent observation! I rewatched that scene and it's a classic case of intentional misdirection. We're focused on the knife on the dashboard in that shot, then on Naz's nervous attempt to conceal it. If we were paying proper attention to the motorcyclist, we'd wonder why he's wearing a tinted helmet at 3:30am and…

Interesting observation. Were Andrea's nails already painted when she was playing the hand-stabby game with Naz? (There were at least two close-ups of her hand, one palm-down and one palm-up.) If not, bingo.

Good calls, Everyone. I, too, just rewatched these scenes and can confirm that the broken gate squeak is significant. It's part of the sound montage that opens Episode 2 as Naz hazily recalls sounds and images from Andrea's house. That brief sequence plays like jigsaw pieces btw — clues that we didn't know were clues…

I think the cat cured his eczema, whether it's psychosomatic or magical chemistry. He got the cat around the same time he got the Chinese herbs.

And come to think of it, "Don't Look Now" would probably have a shitty ending if Roeg had made it in the late '80s. Poor test screenings changed many a film's ending in those days (usually from imperfect to disastrous). I guarantee you no American research audience in '88 would've tolerated the human-rodent ending…

It helped that Huston's assistant was played by the sublime Jane Horrocks (a/k/a "Bubble" a/k/a "Little Voice") in one of her first movies. That she went on to make "Life Is Sweet" right after this was astonishing. What an underrated talent.

I'm not 100% positive, but I think the official movie ending was a studio-mandated reshoot. A crew member pal loaned me a VHS copy of Roeg's work print in 1988; "The Witches" got released theatrically in 1990. Although the VHS tape contained the revamped ending, that was the only section of the film missing the…