Nobody other than Ava is really looking their best this episode. But yeah, Walker's got some sort of chest rash going. Maybe it's just massive beard-rash, and he's been goosenecking enough to abrade his throat and chest with a new beard?

Damn straight. Often the building is just a shell around the massive battleship-strength steel block of the old vault. They literally would have to demolish the buildings to remove those old vaults.

Except he'll be riding some damn rail through the southern California brush, like Jim Beaver on the lam.

Buddy Garrity was never particularly young. But yes, his color was alarmingly high. Looked like he was going to stroke out at any moment.

Eh, his turn in Life didn't grab me. It was a bit too… polished villain with an accent. It was like he was playing a Mel Gibson villain, except with a Russian accent instead of upper-crust English accent.

I'm a little proud that I twigged immediately to the used-to-be-a-bank thing. I knew some former co-workers who a couple years ago were renovating an old bank into a lawyer's office, and the lawyer of the pair was showing me around the place, including the good-goddamn-huge old-tymey walk-in vault, complete with old…

Paying cash for land is the fastest way to draw the attention of the authorities. Real estate is just marbled with inspectors, title insurance parasites, assessors, bank regulators, and assorted nudges and hangers-on looking for their cut. If some gang of shady types breeze into a morbund county like Harlan and…

I'm sure the landlady would be touched. She could pose him in the lobby with a sign around his neck!

Is that a metric or imperial fuckton?

There's some story about Thompson and his service we haven't gotten yet. He looks too shifty when it's brought up, the Iwo Jima thing strikes me as… Liberty Valance-esque.

See this article on the death of the big bands and swing music and the rise of bebop. Short version: punative wartime cabaret taxes destroyed the "big band/night club" ecology.

He lost the leg to compartment syndrome from sitting too long at his typewriter in the secretarial pool somewhere deep in SHAEF.

I expected her to rip his head off for his obnoxious attempt to use poor-me class-prejudice against an Englishwoman - mid-century America wasn't a paragon of equality by our lights, but by world-standards it was, well, the world-standard for lack of class distinctions (as opposed to racial distinctions, I grant you). …

I thought it was a great illustration of how integral women were, and are in maintaining the set of cultural roles known as "patriarchy". Social roles are continually negotiated in any given milieu, and sideways enforcement is as or more important as bottom-up and top-down enforcement of social mores; it's a big part…

Very Beaker and Bunson Honeydew.

This is a world in which Hydra set up its own little super-Nazi state in the midst of the German spring 1945 west-front collapse. I believe the mundane details might be a bit "spongy" - enough for them to work them around enough to not do too much violence to necessary continuities.

It's not as if he's Waldo or Hitchcock. He usually gets a line. At least this one wasn't obtrusive or wall-breaking. (The one in Winter Soldier was particularly improbable - who is going to keep a security guard in his nineties on the payroll?)

I was disappointed that he only waved vaguely at the "I hate spunk" speech, instead of committing to the scene and just straight-out quoting it. You can't sneer at spunk in a newsroom without making your obeisance to Ed Asner.

Maybe i wasn't paying close enough attention, but was there somebody in that booth? It looked empty, like they had retrofitted it to be automated and they just didn't take down the old station.

Will Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million be on the syllabus?