“...and the mysterious helicopter from the premiere is somehow linked to [Jadis]...”

You’ve Got some Real arbitrary capitalization Going On there, rita b.

Ike Barinholtz for the win.

You used “back around whence it came” as poorly as Gob Bluth. 

1. Lil Dicky is funny. His verse on “$ave Dat Money” about the bacon cheeseburger is hilarious. It doesn’t get much funnier than that, in rap.

So WHAT IS POE?

To your Occam’s razor I raise you Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

This episode was the most overt about it being “Robbin’ Season,” but I like the way the show has built in theft to every episode.

Episode 1: Mrs. Winner’s robbed by kids
Episode 2: Al robbed by his plug
Episode 3: Earn gets “robbed” by sexy-voiced strip-club scammery (having to buy the table AND the bottle that “comes…

I just rewatched this episode last night, and have to disagree with the analysis on the episode’s conversations and their length and importance. First of all, this episode is the strongest of the season, and I’d be surprised if it gets bested (I see now why the long New Yorker article on Donald Glover focused so…

Oh shit, sorry to double-post, but I just thought of the cover of Gary Numan’s “Metal.” That’s a spiritual kin to “The Background World.”

Right, and I think it’s totally unlike any song he’s ever done. I LOVE the way it goes to its furthest conclusion, instead of just having one or two minutes of a distortion coda. It makes me wonder, if physical CDs were still de rigueur, whether he would have just let the damn thing play until 79:59. The only similar…

Amen. I’m coming around to the idea that “The Background World” might be the best Nine Inch Nails song, period.

The episode title is “Dead or Alive Or.” Not “Dead or Alive.” Not “Alive or Dead.”

Rick Moody is one of those peripheral Great Authors you see get fairly undiluted critical acclaim, but whose works I’ve never read nor known any other human being who has read. Has ANYONE ever read Rick Moody?

One thing this show does extremely well is closure—specifically the kind described by comics philosophizer Scott McCloud when talking about gutters and transitions between panels in comics, how the audience is often left to fill in the spaces in between the boxes with contextual inference. The show takes a lot of…

Well...it DID, briefly. I don’t understand how, but Earn had tangible earnings from it, somehow.

Oh, absolutely! It’s one of the original joys of sleuthing. I loved it with the Britrock bands of the ’90s especially, who routinely hid their greatest songs in B-sides. And I have a maxim that EVERY album by EVERY artist has one B-side that’s fucking godawful atrocious, and one B-side that’s better than every song on…

A confused film, and one that doesn’t know what it wants to do or what it wants to say, that jumps from tone to tone and story to story erratically and strangely, without resolution or climax, and that still remains interesting to watch. Characters like Red Welby speak and behave like no human ever has spoken or…

Sheesh, what could those be??? I couldn’t imagine eliminating that much. Too much gold. Even on Disc 1 alone, I can only see MAYBE getting rid of “Reno Dakota,” “The Book of Love,” “How Fucking Romantic,” and “Punk Love” (definitely—that’s one of the few awful songs). That leaves 19 tracks, with both Discs 2 and 3 to…

I feel the same way, but also feel that’s a product of the zeitgeist. I rarely listen to any new albums much anymore, even the ones I really really like. Back in 1999, there was more time or incentive or something to really dive into an album and suss out all its mysteries. Now, it gets maybe one solid listen-through,…