Touché!

As MRobespierre2 said above… Plus, all of their detective work has been west of the Atchafalaya, but they seem to be within an hour or two drive of everything, including back roads. So they're clearly supposed to be somewhere central.

If I were Richie, I'd turn to him and say, "Yeah, I'm just putting myself through oncology school."

Yeah, the Frank and CJ thing was actually one of my favorite details of the episode: hitting it off at the party, then engaging in far more intimate sex (the look on Agustin's face during that sex scene was priceless… He knows he's the third wheel there.)

MVP of the episode: Frank, when meeting the escort: "So… you want some Cheetohs?" That Frank has better chemistry with CJ, and Agustin knows it, is just icing on the cake.

I think Andrew Lincoln is at his best when he's not talking

Nope, not at all. Issue of proximity and relative cheapness.

Quick points:

This, exactly. There are very few people on television who I'd be happy to just to listen to talk, improvisationally, and Ferguson's currently the best of the bunch. I've been to tapings of his show multiple times now (they're easy to get into: nobody goes) and he's ridiculously good at just hanging out and chatting…

I'd almost encourage people to start with this episode. I know that there's important information they won't get (like Patrick's lie about his job), but I think it has the biggest chance to hook casual viewers, and if it does, they'll go back and watch the others.

This whole thread is the best.

I don't want to overstate a point based on very limited experience, but I was shocked at how racially segregated DC's gay scene appears to be, the one week I spent time there with friends. Every place we went, there were highly visible dividing lines (and this was explained to me as "normal", which… yikes.)

Dear Scrawler,
Your absence has been noted in the Looking thread. Since you were distracted by Tom Hardy, we judge this absence: forgivable.
(Seriously, though: a bunch of us have this week's episode, and Brandon's stellar recap, already shortlisted for best-of-2014 status. It was awesome. Stop by and say hello!)

It helped to see how much baggage he's carrying around: now his awkwardness is grounded in some issues I can relate to. After the episode my husband and I were reliving some of our worst dating moments (including, on both our parts, having to work through our own immaturity and hangups when we first started dating.) …

The scapular is more straight-up Catholic though, right? We grew up with scapulars and lucky beans (dried, roasted fava beans from St. Joseph's day), so this stuff seems totally straightforward to me. Making frittatas with a fortune-teller, considerably less so.

No need to apologize for a difference of opinion.

I've had kind of the opposite experience down here in sunny LA: my circle of friends is somewhere between Patrick and Dom, age-wise, and only one is HIV+ (of course it's possible that more are, but we tend to chat pretty frankly with each other.) Could be a lot of reasons for that, but since representations of pos…

I liked the episode a lot (if a little less than Brandon), but I could see how it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. For me this was a greatly shot and edited hangout episode, and if you don't buy the characters or the dialogue, there's not much else there to hang onto.

Heh. I may or may not have cracked a joke about a chicken at that exact moment.

“What if she says I’m a bad person?” “Are you?” Cue Interruption Of Doom.