One of my favorite episodes. You know, the character going through the loop was played by Carol Burnett’s daughter, Carrie Hamilton. This initial association with Vince Gilligan (who co-wrote that episode) ultimately led to Carol Burnett appearing on “Better Call Saul”.

Something tells me that Mia will be the murder victim this season. She probably has more wide-eyed innocence than any other character, and generally good intentions, so she makes the perfect sacrificial lamb.

Everything you say is plausible, but it still doesn’t explain why Max gets offed while Gus is spared. Was it the pure vagaries of fate, or was there some method behind the cartel-psycho madness?

It was left pretty ambiguous, wouldn’t you say? It might have been homophobia, or it might have been purely practical— the cartel already had Max’s chemical formula, which made him expendable. But from their amoral perspective, it made sense to keep Gus around for his business acumen & distribution connections.

I gotta say, to me it looked like a more cold-blooded, gaslighting Kim Drexler than we’d ever seen before. She’s tying up loose ends, purely out of self-interest.

That whole closing montage was something else, wasn’t it? It reminded me of Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader in “Lord of the Sith”.

Somewhat fascinatingly, the Virginia Opossum is the only marsupial that’s native to North America. I’m pretty sure that South America has about ten or so species of opossum.

The opening-scene-telegraphing that BB and BCS are famous for was done especially beautifully, at the start of this episode.

I bought a cassette tape for that movie soundtrack around 1987, and wore it out completely.

I pity the actor who plays Aunt Carlotta in this adaptation. The character is such an awful villainess, a sort of mean-nun who will stop at nothing to prevent her relatives from reaching their witchy potential. To keep them all weak, small, and easier for her to control.

When you consider all the dream sequences, all the times that we saw Tony “travel to the other side”, there’s a certain Catholic preoccupation with death that permeates the entire series. The final scene is just the natural endpoint for that theme.

The best satires are always done with affection, wouldn’t you say? (See “This Is Spinal Tap”, or the explicitly-clownish portrayal of David Lee Roth in “Metalocalypse”.)

I’m a GenXer, and I’ve watched the whole series three times. Probably my favorite series, period, for its universal themes.

“’It’s been my favorite line because it’s about America and the fate of our empire as much as it’s about the mob,’ Taylor says.”