ah so that was Ted talking about the vogue party and cocktails at his apartment. i thought they were organically introducing a new character, because i wasn't entirely sober, and because i thought Ted was trying to get back into family life or something.

where's Ted? and has Jim Cutler left?

after Gyp Rosetti, they were pretty much done giving the audience any victories for sympathetic characters.

yeah the show short changed itself. Capone was a bit player for a long time, but his portrayal at his peak is abbreviated. same with Luciano. i think AR, Luciano and Capone were supposed to collectively fill Jimmy Darmody's shoes, but the show's timeline was hindered both by the cancellation as well as the problems…

funny, Sea Change and Guero are probably the only Beck albums I'd still listen to. Odelay and Mellow Gold would just make me feel old, I never liked The Information much (though it was so long ago I barely remember much from it)

although i wasn't turned on to their music at all at that time (didn't hear anything other than Creep until college which was a few years after Hail to the Thief came out) I think part of the rift back then was about the dissipating wave of Generation X angsty cynicism giving way to complete despair and alienation in…

1) tbh i think a lot of them were in it because they wanted emotional porn, which those albums still delivered. on tkol, the band actually sounds happy throughout most of it. Mumford and Sons is my go to example of a band trying to repackage emotional highs from acclaimed sad-ish records of the 2000s.

i think tkol definitely has stature. Kid A was widely rejected when it was new as well- it's basically because of new generations of fans a few years later that the adulation the critics gave it became universal.

were i AR, i'd bet on voodoo

oh great, Not Fade Away for an entire TV season

cheaper to film

it's probably the new bodyguard's trademark, which is something they've felt the need to do with previous enforcers, like Harrow's face and voice and 1920s Facebook, Owain Sleater's accent and IRA hijinks and Darmody's self destructive melancholy.

there's homage, and then there's just being derivative and unoriginal. when Anton Chigurh, Brad Pitt's character from Burn After Reading and a pious Jew relating a very specific sort of non sequitur religious parable all show up in the same show, you start to wonder if Hawley just cynically banked on the fact that…

for some reason, Gus gets this epiphany that Malvo needs to die and that killing him is the only way to truly deal with the problem. that's as much a part of it as anything else. the cops would try to arrest Malvo or visually confirm I.D before opening fire, etc.

dude, she's pregnant…give the guy a break, he's gonna worry.

i do think it was kind of clever that he ended up under the ice like the deaf guy and the guy who looks like he should be in a Harold and Kumar movie had planned for him. it's like the first time he killed and caused deaths he came close to paying for it but schemed a way to get off the hook entirely. once he decided…

…the bag of money and the wolf?

bad writing?

they've been unnaturally kind to this clumsy ass show. sure the AV club is an enthusiast site with minimal snark, and doesn't bother to cover shows it doesn't like, but this show really sucked. It was entertaining enough, but like the 2000s feature film Crash, it comes across like it was written by a high school…

The Federal Bureau of Incompetence.