First of all, full disclosure: I hate Glee. Glee has experienced a bit of a backlash over the past year or so (due to a dip in quality, I hear — considering how bad it was at its peak, I shudder to think). But I hated Glee back when the entire rest of the human race was lapping up Ryan Murphy’s Kool Aid (or Slushee, I guess).

So I was pre-disposed to dislike The New Normal just as much or possibly moreso, both because of Murphy and also because the concept itself seemed such a desperate bid for pats on the back from a very specific demographic — to the extent that it should have been called either Hey, Liberals — Watch This! or Shove It, Republicans. (Not that I am vehemently opposed to telling hardcore right-wingers to shove it.)

It’s impossible to treat The New Normal as just another fall sitcom. Even its title aggressively pushes its politically-charged agenda. We live in a time where it’s finally okay for a high-concept network comedy to feature a gay couple as leads, but do not yet live in a time where a network comedy can feature a gay couple as leads and not make a huge deal about it. You can sense the meticulous attention paid to every single minute detail, from how “gay” the characters are to whether or not we see them being physically affectionate. For many of us, The New Normal is hardly new — covering territory also explored in Modern Family and The Kids Are All Right, or hell, even The Birdcage. None of those felt the need to shove it down America’s throat, so to speak, the way The New Normal does. But for a lot of the casual viewers who stumble across this show, this might actually be as “new” as the title suggests.In the pilot, we meet Bryan (Andrew Rannells of The Book Of Mormon), an effeminate quipster who likes to shop, and David (The Hangover’s Justin Bartha), a gynecologist who watches sports — because gay people watch sports too, conservatives! (Well, only a few.) The New Normal covers its bases by featuring both the familiar sassy gay and the elusive (on TV) more “masculine” gay (but not too masculine — he does burst into tears once). David is very clearly the “Will” to Bryan’s “Jack.”

Bryan is essentially the exact same character as Glee’s Kurt (Chris Colfer), which is fine. The New Normal does a pretty good job of making Bryan a gay stereotype who’s believable and funny, rather than a gay stereotype who trots out the same stale jokes we’ve heard spewed from virtually every other sarcastic gay on TV. This being a sitcom, you can’t really blame Murphy for going for the obvious caricature, since he does provide the show’s funniest moments.

We are also introduced to Goldie (Georgia King, the “Grace”) and her tell-it-like-it-is/older-than-she-looks grandmother Jane (Ellen Barkin, the “Karen”), as well as Goldie’s precocious bespectacled daughter Shania (Bebe Wood… the “Rosario”? Okay, I’ll just stop with the Will & Grace comparisons). Jane is a bigot — a racist homophobe so right-wing she pulls a gun on Goldie’s cheating husband. Wise-beyond-her-years Shania says things like: “You know, this whole thing just when live streaming on Twitter?” and knows what an “extremist Christian cult” is, but is unaware that you can’t drive to Hawaii. Technology references are usually dated within a week, so let’s hope the writers cut that out pronto. (Especially since it’s impossible for anything to be live streaming on Twitter?) Anyway, to make a not-that-long story a bit briefer, Goldie decides to become David and Bryan’s surrogate, hilarity ensues.

Goldie’s a bit too simple and sickly-sweet to be compelling or realistic, and her decision to carry someone else’s baby seems like it might require a bit more consideration. David  and Bryan also jump into parenting without much thought, but whatever, it’s a sitcom. Barkin fulfills the Jane Lynch role nicely, just bitchy enough to be fun without toppling over into total cartoon. Bartha is just fine as David, but the real secret weapon is Rannells, who finds just the right note for a character who could easily come off as a shrill, annoying caricature. Most surprisingly, there are a couple of moments of real, genuine sweetness, all involving his character. 

Naturally, there are a few cringe-worthy moments, like when The New Normal breaks form to have a dwarf, a deaf couple, and an aging ex-whore speak directly to camera about how they, too, can raise children! It’s like an after-school special by David Lynch, and it’s a train wreck. Is this comparison necessary? Is this really the category NBC places the gays in — the “elderly deaf homosexual midgets who used to prostitute themselves” box? I know there are viewers out there who would do so also, but they probably turned this show off once they realized it was not just about two “roommates” named “Babe” and “Sweetie” who are looking to raise a baby together. This is exactly the sort of tone deaf pandering moment I half-expected the whole show would be — but fortunately, they’re few and far between.

You can certainly sense the network’s hands all over this. They’re obviously trying to calibrate everything juuust right to appeal to the widest possible demographic — inclusive and inoffensive to gays, but broad and accessible to appeal to fans of Two And A Half Men. (Yes, such creatures exist… somewhere.) So we get a handful of preachy moments that hit the show’s thesis squarely on the head (as if the title didn’t do it enough). “Abnormal is the new normal!” “You can be whatever you want to be!” A few lines of dialogue seem to be lifted directly from Facebook memes. Bryan even has a bitchy black assistant, because gays love their bitchy black women!

So there are a lot of reasons why The New Normal shouldn’t work, and almost doesn’t. It’s at its worst when it’s trying to calculatedly Send A Message, because sitcoms aren’t really meant for that. At least, not so directly. But this being the pilot, I imagine future episodes will be shorter on the soap-box moments, longer on the character-based comedy. And even if I wish there was a show on the air that didn’t have to try so damn hard to please everybody, at least there’s this one.

Here we see two men kissing and holding hands and calling each other pet names on a network sitcom every week, and except for one very misguided deaf/midget/whore comparison, it isn’t condescending or offensive. That’s progress! After all, Will & Grace was responsible, in large part, for normalizing America’s understanding of what gay life is — more quips, fewer whips — and now The New Normal takes that a step further. (Provided it doesn’t get canceled after three episodes like 98% of shows that debut every fall.) The New Normal is obviously not going to instantly convert anyone opposed to same-sex couplings to go march in a Pride parade, but even if they don’t watch the show, they’ll see commercials and billboards. The image is out there, and just seeing two men and a baby with the word “normal” stamped on it is bound to have some kind of trickle-down effect.

Best of all, no one spontaneously bursts into a Kidz Bop-esque version of a Top 40 song. Not even the really gay one.So. If HBO is that cool bisexual aunt who bought you lube for your fifteenth birthday, then NBC is our straight-laced grandfather who loves golf and mallards and never gave homosexuality a second thought until his grandson came out — and now he’s trying really, really hard to prove that he’s on board with that. Awkwardly. Emphatically. At times inappropriately. But hey — he’s trying.

And NBC is trying, too, in their blatant, somewhat forced and overtly politicized way, and don’t we have to be at least a little bit grateful?

(Originally posted on JustinPlusSix.com.)

*

(Originally posted on Justin + 7.)

I figured I’d be writing something about the Oscars today, as I normally would do a few days before the big show, but since I have been covering them since the nominees were announced anyway — and particularly heavily this week — I have almost nothing left to say. (Plus, I’m still in denial about a few of the big winners.)

So let’s talk about TV. TV? Well, it’s sort of TV. Now movies are being released on VOD, meaning you watch them on television. And Netflix released House Of Cards Season One in its entirety all at once, like a movie. So what’s the difference between movies and TV anymore? Is there one? Or is House Of Cards just one long-ass movie?

Either way, Netflix’s sizable investment in this original program has clearly paid off, at least buzz-wise. House Of Cards is the first high-profile show to dump an entire season on us all at once, and also to bypass what we currently think of as “TV” completely. It’s a big deal… and yet, not, because anybody who is remotely forward-thinking has already realized that our current mode of television consumption is going the way of the dinosaur. (Extinct… and then resurrected eons later on a remote island somewhere near Costa Rica.) I say good riddance to TV in its current incarnation — 95% of these channels are clogged with reality junk I’d never dream of watching, like Real Housewives Who Hate The Color Of Their Toilet and Amish People Doing Handstands In Berlin. And yet, I’m paying for practically all of these channels, because I want to watch… let’s see, about three shows… on two channels. Someday, we should be able to just pay for the channels we want, as I do for HBO, which gives me Girls, Game Of Thrones, Veep, The Newsroom, and Enlightened, plus an occasional movie. Very bang-for-buck-worthy. The rest of cable gives me Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and… wait, why do I pay for cable? Note to self: look into that.

Cable providers are still, for the time being, hell-bent on screwing us into paying for masses of content we don’t want or need; meanwhile, we the consumers anxiously await their demise. Enter Netflix. Netflix has made a few missteps in the past, like when they tried to separate their streaming and DVD service into different companies and then said, “Just kidding!” when everyone predictably hated that idea. (I also find their website rather dysfunctional… but that’s another topic.) I’m willing to forgive these transgressions in light of Netflix’s current forward-thinking tactics, which bypass a lot of unnecessary pains we normally have to deal with (cable subscription, repetitive advertisements, pop-ups) on conventional television and give us just what we want: everything, right now, easily.

Netflix could have raised their overall subscription rates. ($7.99 isn’t too shabby.) They could have asked subscribers to pay an extra premium for original content. Or forced some kind of advertising. It’s possible they will in the future, but for now, House Of Cards comes just as conveniently as any other show streaming on Netflix, and TV junkies are binging on it. A number of people have already finished the show, which debuted February 1, with all 13 “chapters” available simultaneously. It would’ve been a smarter business model to roll them out more gradually, I think, maybe 2-3 per week, to allow people to hunger for it and necessitate a longer subscription to complete the series. But whatever.

House Of Cards is the rare show that is more notable for how its being distributed than it is for the actual content. It has the buzz and prestige of an HBO or AMC series, but in quality and execution feels more like it belongs on FX. Which is fine. House Of Cards is glossy, soapy, compelling, and, ultimately, rather empty… from what I gather based on the first three episodes, at least. (I’m less a binge-watcher than many of my peers… out of time constraints, if nothing else.) It’s a political show on the one hand, since it takes place in Washington D.C. and concerns a congressman who gets screwed out of his rightful position as secretary of state by the president elect. But it also could care less about politics. The setting is merely a juicy hook, one that hasn’t been overdone on TV the way hospitals and law firms have. It’s supposed to feel a little transgressive, that a “respectable” congressman might secretly be fucking with everybody. Rather than display his outrage, our protagonist does the more politically savvy thing and plays nice, while secretly undermining the new president and his allies and pulling strings to make sure Washington plays by his rules, whether they know it or not. It’s sort of an exaggeration of the way the political world actually works; I doubt many politicians take such devilish delight in pulling strings, or do it so knowingly, yet I imagine the results are the same.

It’s a fun premise, because bad (or at least, somewhat naughty) characters tend to be more satisfying than goody-goodies — and, after all, House Of Cards is modeling itself after Breaking Bad, Mad Men, going all the way back to the grandaddy of premium cable antiheroes, Tony Soprano. Kevin Spacey seems to be having some degree of fun playing Francis Underwood… at times, a little too much fun, perhaps, since his Southern accent wavers between “nonexistent” and “high school production of a Tennessee Williams play.” Not helping: his character’s penchant for breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to camera, which lends it a jokey theatrical quality I’m not sure is in the show’s best interest. (This gimmick almost never works on TV… which is why Sex & The City wisely jettisoned it in Season Two, and became an infinitely better program for it.) The dialogue, too, feels well-suited for a play, though that works for the aesthetic House Of Cards aims for — decadent, conspiratorial, and larger-than-life. The performance simultaneously reminiscent of Spacey’s roles in The Usual Suspects (the wheeler-dealer), American Beauty (upper-crust husband who could stand to be in better shape), and Margin Call (maybe only because he suffocates an invisible dog in the series’ very first scene… never mind about that).

Robin Wright plays his Lady Macbeth of a wife, a compelling and unusual character who always seems to be up to something, even if we have no proof that this is the case. She sure can be ruthless when the situation calls for it, and yet it’s never clear just what agenda she’s pushing. (That’s not a bad thing, but an intriguing one.) If I had to give one performer in House Of Cards a gold star and a cookie, it’d be Robin Wright.

One interesting sidenote here, though — though she is fiercely loyal, their relationship is apparently sexless, and Underwood displays no real attraction to women at all. Is this foreshadowing? Merely an oversight by the writers? Or somehow a result of Spacey’s homosexuality? I’m sure one way or another this is resolved in future Season One episodes, since traditional TV logic would suggest more flirtation between Underwood and the cute young reporter he befriends, but so far he shows a curious lack of temptation. Given how unsubtle most of the rest of House Of Cards is, I have a hard time believing I’m being teased and assume it’s just a weird omission.

I’m also a fan of Kate Mara — I have been for awhile, long before her sister Rooney popped up on the radar. (This pilot is directed by David Fincher, the man who essentially put Rooney on the map, which I doubt is a coincidence.) She is given the relatively thankless role of Zoe Barnes, the eager-beaver reporter who wants to start a politico gossip blog (oy!), which starts her character as a pesky cliche. (Trying to include blog culture in TV and movies seldom works, and will immediately date it.) Luckily, the series has a few more interesting ideas in mind for her. She forms an (unlikely) alliance with Underwood and soon becomes the hot-shot she’s always wanted to be, earning both admiration and scorn from her superiors and rendering her pretty cocky. Like most characters, it’s still pretty unclear where exactly her morals lie, but the newspaper scenes are fun even if we’ve seen such scenes dozens of times before. Both politics and journalism play out in the most “TV” way possible in House Of Cards, but I doubt it ever yearned for documentary realism.

House Of Cards is like The West Wing‘s sourpuss cousin, cynical where Aaron Sorkin was idealistic and patriotic. It may even be a smidge more realistic; it’s absolutely more formulaic. It feels borne out of a pitch meeting rather than the mind of any individual. The characters, thus far, are wholly one dimensional, and though they sometimes behave badly, it’s a pretty “safe” kind of bad; it’s basic cable mischief rather than HBO-level depravity. Netflix clearly doesn’t want to alienate viewers who might find more controversial hijinks off-putting. House Of Cards always feels like it’s playing it safe, checking all the right boxes — and it doesn’t take any risks. Its very inception feels almost… well, political.

Perhaps the most crucial mistake — for me, anyway — is that although Underwood gets slighted at the beginning of the series, we the audience never particularly feel it. We don’t particularly care whether he’s secretary of state or not, so his quest for revenge feels hollow. We get precious little sense of who he was before House Of Cards‘ opening — was he a good guy? A bad guy? Has he always had it in for his fellow politicians, or was this the moment that changed? Three episodes in and I’m not that invested in what happens to him, or to anyone. House Of Cards is much ado about nothing — we see a lot of work done on an education bill, on Mrs. Underwood’s clean water charity, on the ousting of one secretary of state and the nomination of another. But to what end? The audience isn’t given enough information or emotional involvement to form an opinion on any of these things. They just happen, and we’re neutral all the while.

Of course, House Of Cards was designed that way — to go down as easily as possible, to turn off the least amount of viewers. To be binge-watched. Mission accomplished. I suspect that the fact that it could be consumed all at once has led some to overpraise it; what’s better than one great episode of television? How about thirteen pretty good ones? I quite enjoyed the pilot (even if Fincher’s direction was surprisingly just serviceable), was marginally less keen on the following episode, and dug the third. I could easily watch more, and probably will. But if this aired week to week on FX, would people go so crazy for it? So far, House Of Cards is nowhere near the caliber of the very best cable offerings — which, granted, is a very high bar. All its boldness is in the way it’s been packaged, rather than in the show itself.

Any criticism I have of House Of Cards might go out the window depending on where the show is going, though, which is exactly what makes Netflix’s release strategy frustrating for anyone trying to review it. You wouldn’t turn off a movie a quarter of the way through and sit down to write a full response; TV, as we know it, is meant to be digested in segments and discussed on the same timeline as everyone else who’s watching. This distribution model makes it hard to talk about House Of Cards until you’ve seen the whole damn thing, and if you wait too long to do so no one will care anymore. So get it while it’s hot!

See, now here I am again talking about the way we’re watching House Of Cards rather than the content. In that respect, I can’t help but feel that Netflix’s Machiavellian machinations are even trickier than anything we’ve seen from Francis Underwood, trying to beat TV at its own game by changing all the rules. For good? For evil? Or just for fun? As with Underwood, it’s probably that last one.

But fun it is. I’ll give House Of Cards that. It’s the best TV show that’s never been on TV.

Yes, I’m talking about it too.

If you’re a twenty- or thirty-something with access to the internet, I find it hard to imagine that you’ve escaped hearing anything about Orange Is The New Black, the newest Netflix Original Series that has, as per the service’s M.O., dumped all 13 episodes of its first season online ready for immediate binge-watching. And oh, how that binging has occurred.

I saw a billboard for Orange Is The New Black and shrugged it off. Female prison dramedy? Sounded rather Lifetime-y. Then came the word-of-mouth. “Have you seen Orange Is The New Black?” Once… twice… not uncommon. But then it just kept coming. One person informed me that they had binged all 13 episodes in one day. Even people whose opinion I respected were proclaiming their love for the series, and this was a mere day or two after its July 11 premiere. Suddenly I had a monumental decision to make — watch Orange Is The New Black immediately and join the conversation, or shun it stubbornly and refuse to see it at all.

That’s how we do things in 2013. You either jump on the bandwagon or get left behind, and they aren’t giving us more than a day or two to decide which it is. Arrested Development? I jumped on. (Technically, I’d already boarded years ago.) House Of Cards? I stayed off. Netflix’s buzzy original House Of Cards was heralded by many as a show that met the standards of some of the best series of the last decade; I gave it four episodes and got bored. I still somewhat intend to finish it someday, but do I care if I ever get around to it? Not really. I have, however, already consumed all 13 episodes of Orange Is The New Black.I’m betting that Orange Is The New Black ends up being even more of a game-changer for Netflix. House Of Cards certainly made Netflix a formidable player in the swiftly transforming television landscape, and its recent Emmy nominations mean that the world is ready to accept internet as the new television, Netflix as the new HBO or Showtime or AMC. House Of Cards could have been a fluke, but its binge-watchability means that it largely came and went from the public discourse within the space of a month or so. When Game Of Thrones or Breaking Bad go off the air, they leave a little more of an aftertaste; House Of Cards was no such phenom. I haven’t seen House Of Cards T-shirts or GIFs. I’ve never heard it quoted. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t out there, just that they aren’t widespread enough to reach someone who hasn’t sought them out. But Orange Is The New Black is inescapable, and it’s only been available for streaming for less than two weeks.

In other words, Orange Is The New Black really is the new black. It’s here to stay.

I’ve already seen a GIF featuring Taystee, a sassy black character who is not merely a token sassy black characters, because there are a lot of black characters on Orange Is The New Black and nearly all of them are sassy. But then, practically every other character is, too. “Sassy” is a good word to describe just about anything that comes from Jenji Kohen, the creator of Weeds, and Orange Is The New Black has a similar zip and zing while also dealing, somewhat lightly, with some pretty heavy issues. Orange Is The New Black is not Mrs. Oz. It’s not gritty, it’s not depressing, and it’s only occasionally realistic. Yet it does shed light on a number of aspects of life in a federal prison that we probably didn’t know about; it feels fresh and vaguely educational, a show you can feel kind of good about yourself for watching despite its more superficial conceits. It’s both trashy and thought-provoking, slight and deep, smart and soapy. It’s probably already better than Weeds. (Sorry, Nancy Botwin.)

Orange Is The New Black is the story of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), whose lesbian relationship with an international drug smuggler (Laura Prepon) catches up with her a decade later just when she’s getting her life in order. Suddenly she’s sentenced to 15 months in prison for a crime she committed years ago; she’s now a luxury soap-maker, AKA not exactly Public Enemy #1. But the law is the law, and once Piper gets behind bars, she’s no better than any other criminal in the eyes of the state. Piper’s the pampered white girl with no clue how to handle herself in these waters — and yes, that makes for good television.

Though Piper is our way in to the show, and its primary focus, her self-righteousness can be a bit grating. Sometimes we want to reach into our TV screens and throttle her and scream, “Toughen up, bitch!” Her romantic melodrama makes her particularly unsympathetic (but not necessarily in a bad way). See, Piper’s drug-moving ex Alex is in prison with her (awkward!), which makes for a lot of juicy verbal catfighting. Orange Is The New Black is pretty smart in the way it handles the sexuality of Piper and a variety of other characters, ranging from full-on lesbian to dabblers with nothing better to do behind bars. It certainly doesn’t shy away from the sapphism — Orange Is The New Black probably has more gay females on screen at any given time than any episode of The L Word.

But it’s not just homosexuality that Orange Is The New Black deals with so freshly and adeptly. Orange Is The New Black has female characters from all walks of life — seriously, all of them — and gives each more than just one moment to shine. It wouldn’t surprise me if this show had one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse casts ever assembled, and that feels about right, given that it takes place in a prison. (Though Asia and the Middle East aren’t much represented.) There’s a transgender character, a mute character, a prison guard who lost a leg — and this might feel cheap and maudlin, except that even the most minor of characters are given a level of respect and attention to detail that is rare in television. Sure, some of them are stereotypes — perhaps even most of them are — but few are just stereotypes. (Even the character dubbed “Crazy Eyes” eventually gets her due.) The show deals quite frankly with racism — the ways in which birds of a feather flock together in “tribes,” and the judgments these groups make about each other. (The scene when Piper first walks into the cafeteria plays like Mean Girls with shivs.) Orange Is The New Black is certainly not color-blind, and given the subject matter, that’s good. When it comes to calling out racial stereotypes, it’s an equal opportunity offender. Everyone’s got their prejudices, from one guard’s obsessive lesbian phobia to undercurrents of misogyny that crop up in virtually all of the staff.

Orange Is The New Black is a well-conceived series, thoughtfully developed and cast in a way that seems to rather closely represent the population of a real female prison, overall. The first few episodes in particular take a jarring look at the (supposed) realities of incarceration, and characters who seem one-note at first glance end up having rich and complex backstories. Orange Is The New Black flashes back to a different inmates’ pre-prison life in each episode, including a depiction of how they landed in the pokey in the first place. Less necessary are flashbacks to Piper’s past; the ones detailing her relationship (and illegal activities) with Alex are solid, but less compelling are the ones about domestic bliss with her fiance. In general, we see a bit too much of Larry (Jason Biggs, forever masturbating on screen) in Season One — he and Piper’s drama comes off like a lot of White People Problems in a series where most of the supporting cast is given much grittier and juicier material.Is Orange Is The New Black somewhat uneven? Certainly. The other inmates’ flashback screen time seems cut down to a bare minimum, while a little of Piper’s waffling about doing the right thing can go a long way. Sometimes the show seems to be too self-consciously equal opportunity; almost every hardened bitch is revealed to have a heart of gold underneath. Curiously enough, the flashback sequences make nearly every female’s imprisonment the result of something a man coerced her to do; I’m not sure that’s accurate or a strong statement for feminism — can’t any of these bitches just be bad? (I guess there’s a reason this isn’t set in a maximum security penitentiary.) One inmate stole to pay for transgender surgery, another attempts to pay a store back for what she stole; another kills a man after he abuses a young girl; and so on. But maybe every woman in prison had good intentions somewhere down the line.

Given the sensitivity to most stereotypes, one sticks out like a sore thumb — the “villain” of the piece, Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, a radical Christian who makes Piper her sworn enemy. Tiffany is the kookiest of Christians, with a handful of devoted followers who seem just as deranged — none of whom are given the treatment the rest of the diverse cast is allowed. (Her backstory is the only one we see in which the crime is in cold blood.) I don’t fault Taryn Manning’s performance, but the character feels too broad and arch for a show that started off in a more realistic place — one downside to binge-watching is that it’s much easier to feel a show go off the rails when it veers from realism to camp in the space of just a few episodes. (Another villain, the sadistic prison guard “Pornstache,” is also broad, but in such a kooky, off-beat way that I didn’t much mind.)

These are minor complaints, because through it all Orange Is The New Black is compulsively (perhaps obsessively) watchable. It has just enough dramatic weight to feel nourishing to the soul, but not so much that you need to pause and take a breather between episodes — I watched it in five days. (I wouldn’t recommend marathoning Breaking Bad or Mad Men in this way.) We spend so much time with so many characters that there isn’t time for any of them to wear out their welcome, except Pennsatucky and Piper from time to time. (Eventually, you stop blaming the rest of the population for bagging on her.) Orange Is The New Black draws from the same well as Weeds — a pampered white woman in over her head amidst criminals — but after a few seasons, Weeds wore out its welcome with characters that got less and less appealing, until there was absolutely nobody to root for or even care about. Orange Is The New Black may make its inmates a little too warm and cuddly at times, but at least that gives us something to latch onto.

Orange Is The New Black has a rather enormous cast, and all of them are up to the task. Standouts include Kate Mulgrew as Red, the tough-to-please kitchen “mother,” a scarlet-haired Russian who starves Piper for insulting her food; Danielle Brooks as Taystee, the sort of exuberant (but slightly undereducated) black girl you’d expect to find on reality TV, who is allowed to be more than just comic relief as she faces release; Natasha Lyonne as a rich girl-gone-junkie who is as lesbian as they come (unlike the dabbling Piper); and Yael Stone as Lorna Morello, the lipstick-loving romantic with a killer Long Island accent who holds onto the dream of an upcoming wedding even though her fiance hasn’t contacted her in months. But there are also compelling storylines featuring Laverne Cox as the transgender Sofia, who has a predictably complicated relationship with her wife and son, and a surprisingly sweet flirtation between new inmate Daya (Dascha Polanko) and prison guard John (Matt McGorry, the sole likable male in this bunch), that quickly grows uber-complicated.

Come this time next year, the Emmys’ Best Supporting Actress category should be overstuffed with votes for a half dozen of these players, which might unfortunately end up ruling them all out. (Can we add a “Best Supporting Actress From Orange Is The New Black” category, Emmys? I promise, there’s plenty of competition.) Kate Mulgrew probably has the best shot at actually nabbing one, since her role is meatier than most and she has name recognition working in her favor (to Star Trek fans, anyway). Orange Is The New Black is an hour-long dramedy on the internet, so let’s hope it doesn’t end up competing in the drama category opposite shows like Game Of Thrones. If Girls is a comedy, then so is Orange Is The New Black, regardless of its running time.

Season One ends on a nicely dark moment, a bit of a cliff-hanger, guaranteeing that fans will be clamoring to get their next fix. Given the level of buzz it has generated in less than two weeks, it seems pretty clear that it can only get bigger. It may be the first streaming-only TV series to truly compete with the best of the best, water cooler-wise. Internet is the new TV, Netflix is the new Showtime, and Piper Chapman is the new Nancy Botwin. And I say it’s not a moment too soon, because I’m tired of paying for 4,000 cable channels when I only watch two. The faster Netflix forces its new competitors to change their outdated models of entertainment delivery, the better.

*

“Tread lightly.”

One episode into the new season (okay, technically, new half-season) of Breaking Bad, we’ve already got our latest lingo from AMC’s stellar series, the one I’d claim is the best currently on television. The series occasionally gifts us with such turns of phrase — “I am the danger,” “I fucked Ted,” “the one who knocks,” “magnets, bitch!” and so on — that end up becoming a kind of shorthand for fans to communicate with each other and hashtag and meme. “Tread lightly” may not sound like much out of context, but you can bet we’ll be reconsidering those words a few episodes from now, or whenever the Walt vs. Hank showdown reaches its inevitable boiling point. Up until now, Walt has treaded lightly enough to avoid detection, but is Hank capable of doing the same? Is it really wise for him to do so? Or could it get him killed?

Breaking Bad itself is a show that treads lightly, all things considered. Rather than explosive confrontations, characters speak in code. Hank and Walt have a key interaction in this episode, but if “Blood Money” was the first episode of Breaking Bad you’d ever watched, would you have any idea what the dynamic between them was? Unlikely. “Tread lightly” is as much a threat as Heisenberg needs to give the DEA agent who’s been doggedly hunting him for a year now, not the sort of explosive outburst you’d expect between a criminal mastermind and an agent of the law in any standard crime thriller.

But Breaking Bad is a light treader, trusting its viewers to pick up on and relish in the less-is-more approach to suspense and drama. It is one of few shows that rewards careful watching and rewatching, that demands a faithful and intelligent audience, that refuses to dumb itself down for anyone who might be flipping channels and stumble upon the greatest show on TV. Somehow, Breaking Bad manages to tread lightly and still leave maximum impact. The lighter it treads, the more we’re on the edge of our seat, just waiting for it to all come crashing down as we’ve always known it must.

And with just seven episodes to go, it’s finally going to happen. Soon.

Breaking Bad‘s eight episode denouement kicks off with “Blood Money,” a curious title — because there are several episodes of this series that could just as easily be called “Blood Money.” In fact, you could retitle the entire series Blood Money and it’d make perfect sense. It’s Jesse’s storyline that informs the title, as guilt and boredom gnaw away at him until he rashly decides to relinquish his fortune to the survivors of two of Walt’s victims — Drew Sharp and Mike the Cleaner. Yes, Jesse has put the pieces together and guessed that Walt offed Mike, and even when Mr. White lies to his face and swears that The Cleaner is alive and well, it doesn’t look like Jesse’s buying what Walt is selling anymore. Of course, Jesse’s plan to buy his way out of culpability is half-cocked — Mike’s granddaughter has already lost her future millions twice, and there’s not much Jesse can do to get the money to her now. And Drew Sharp’s parents don’t want a few million dropped in their laps, they want to know how and why their little boy disappeared. If Jesse really wanted to redeem himself, he’d find a way to tell them. (And maybe, just maybe, that’s where his character is headed — turning himself in to bring down Walt and company.)

Clearly Jesse wants to get rid of this money more than he cares how it disappears, which is how he ends up driving down a street in a bad neighborhood and throwing cash into strangers’ yards. Jesse effectively got himself out of the meth-making business and returned to a meaningless life with his doofy buddies, whiling away his hours getting high and staring into space in a poorly-decorated house. It doesn’t look like he’s spent a single dime of that money, because what does Jesse Pinkman want anymore? Deep down, he’s kind of a sweet guy and arguably the moral center of the show, despite some obvious flaws and transgressions. But he’s got nothing. Left to his own devices with too much freedom and a hefty load of emotional baggage, he’s wasting his life. Maybe we want to see Jesse reach some kind of happy ending by the series finale, but the careless Jesse of “Blood Money” isn’t really a guy we can put much stock in. If this is the best Jesse can do with himself, do we really care if he survives?

“Blood Money” begins with another flash-forward, even more tantalizing than the one we got at the beginning of Season Five last summer. Walt returns to the White residence and it looks like a century has passed (really, it’s less than a year) — the place has been closed up and turned into a makeshift skate park for restless teens. Most tellingly, someone has spray-painted “Heisenberg” on one of the walls inside, so now it’s clear: the world knows. (Walt’s neighbor Carol sure does, as a bunch of bruised oranges will attest.)

So it all comes into focus. The last eight episodes of Breaking Bad will unveil how the world finds out who Heisenberg is, as Walt’s public persona and secret identity finally merge. Only a handful of characters have been privy to both so far, and only Skyler really had to reckon with that dichotomy. (Jesse was witness to the gradual creation of Heisenberg, so there was no moment of realization.) Of course, Hank is the major player to spell trouble for such a revelation, and we knew at the end of last season that he’d put the pieces together. I surmised that it would take two or three episodes for Hank to work out the clues and be confident in his unmasking of the legendary meth-maker, but Vince Gilligan & co. clearly know that they don’t have much time to fuck around, and “Blood Money” gets right to the confrontation we’ve known was coming ever since that very first episode. (Because you don’t create a show about a drug kingpin with a DEA agent for a brother-in-law and then not pay that off.) It’s the sort of showdown that, theoretically, might not have occurred until the very last episode, but the show’s writers love milking every last ounce of suspense out of such a storyline. So the cards are finally on the table between these two. (Brilliant moment: Walt throwing up at the very same toilet that played such a prominent role in “Gliding Over All,” and realizing his Leaves Of Grass is missing.)

Hank knows. Walt knows that Hank knows. And in that final scene, Hank knows that Walt knows that Hank knows. It would have made some sense for the two to have a fight to the death right there, but Breaking Bad prefers to — yes — tread lightly. And so this show will bide its time until it can surprise and delight us at how these two move against each other from here. Will Walt make an attempt on Hank’s life? (We know he hasn’t used the ricin as of that flash-forward, so he’d need to get at him another way.) It’s unclear how Hank will proceed — even if he has enough evidence to convince the DEA that Walt is Heisenberg, could he admit to being so incompetent that he had his sworn enemy right under his nose this whole time? My guess is Hank will attempt to resolve this without the aid of his employers, and that will end up being a mistake. Last season Mike was the character in the Breaking Bad universe with a target on his back, and look how that turned out. This season, it’s clearly Hank.

If there’s one obvious flaw in Breaking Bad‘s current trajectory, it’s Skyler. Last season’s finale jumped forward a few months and gave us Skyler White smiling at her murderous, money-grubbing tyrant of a hubby. The same man she desperately wanted to hide her kids from. The man she half-heartedly attempted suicide to escape from. The man she explicitly said she wanted to die of cancer at his birthday party. Yes, Walt quit his sinister business, but he still did a whole lot of bad things — some of which Skyler knows about. That she could sweep this under the rug so easily feels a bit incongruous with how hard she took the news in last year’s episodes, and how terrified and repulsed she was of him. We didn’t get enough of a glimpse at how she managed to overcome this revulsion in order to buy her transformation into a woman who seems pretty well-adjusted to a post-criminal life.

Walt and Skyler wear beige to work, looking like the least threatening people on the planet; if this visual is to be believed, they’re a team now. Skyler even shoos off the skittish Lydia in a delicious little interaction after Lydia tries to pull Walt back into her hellish trade. Skyler’s not having that. She apparently believes the worst is behind them, because she isn’t aware of all the loose ends we know about. She’s seemingly fine with blood money so long as the blood’s not being shed anymore. (Unlike Jesse, still haunted by the red all over his green… thanks to their blue.) And Walter? Well, blood money’s just fine for him. He no longer sees the blood — to him, it’s just money.

“Blood Money” also confirms what the first half of the season hinted at — Walt’s cancer has indeed returned. It’s probably the reason he allowed himself to quit while he was ahead as meth manufacturer, and why he won’t rejoin Lydia even though she promises more of his favorite thing in the world — money. (Well, his very favorite thing is probably an ego boost, but when was the last time anyone paid him a compliment?) Irony of ironies, it may be Walt’s cancer that saves him from the consequences of his many nefarious actions; as he tells Hank, he may not live long enough to ever see the inside of a jail cell… so what’s the point of busting him? Yet as we see in this episode, people will find out who Heisenberg is, and if next-door Carol’s reaction is any indication, he won’t be seen as a meek cancer patient who made a few wrong turns, but as the cold-blooded killer he is.

And that’s pretty interesting, because while we’ve often wondered what would happen if various characters found out the truth about mild-mannered Mr. White — Skyler, Walter Jr., Hank, Marie — we haven’t so much thought about what will happen if everyone knows who he is. More than anything, Walt wants respect and admiration. He told Skyler that he wanted to be feared, but does he really? Does Walter White see it as a victory when a kindly neighbor drops her groceries in terror at the mere sight of him? I don’t think so. It’s a nice case of “be careful what you wish for,” and also a paradox. To the criminal world, Walt wants to be Heisenberg, the badass who can’t be fucked with, the killer of Gus Fring and anyone else who stands in his way, porkpie hat and all.

But to everyone else, Walt still wants to be the hero. A loving father, a devoted husband… a good man. Walt’s never been willing to give that up, and now that he’s facing a likely (or certain?) death at the hands of his cancer, his legacy must be forefront on his mind. Is that what he’s fighting to preserve now? Will he take Hank’s life merely to salvage what’s left of a good reputation? So that his children will never know their father’s true, dark colors?

Well, as that flash-forward indicates, it’s unlikely that anyone in this show will end up not knowing the truth about Mr. White. He’s got his guns, he’s got his ricin… and yet it’s unclear what he’s fighting for, since he’s lost his family and his good name. He can’t be fighting for his life, because the cancer has taken that, too. So what else is there? What means enough to Walter White that, at the end of this series, he still has some unknown enemy out there to kill? Is it an act of self-defense? Or, more plausibly, one of revenge? Maybe even an act of heroism, if someone who once mattered to him is in peril?

We’ll see as the next seven weeks unfold. Until then, “Blood Money” is a satisfying opener with a killer flash-forward and a hell of a showdown between Walt and Hank at the end, however lightly it treads. The stuff in between is solid, if a bit unremarkable — we’ve seen guilty and inert Jesse so many time in this series, his role in this episode didn’t really break new ground, and I’m still not sure Skyler from Season Five Part One really connects with Skyler from Season Five Part Two. Before the series ends, I’d really like to see both Marie and Walter Jr. break out of their shells, so to speak, since these characters have changed so little over the course of the series. I want to see something new from them, and with so few episodes to go, I can’t help but be a little impatient at seeing them playing the same old beats here.

That isn’t to say that I’m disappointed in this episode. Just that, when it comes to jaw-dropping Breaking Bad moments in Season Five, I think the best is yet to come.

Grade: B+

*

“Am I under arrest?!”

We had no idea what we were in for with the final half of the final season of Breaking Bad. Well… we had a pretty good idea of a few things we’d see — Hank confronting Walt about his meth-making, Marie learning the truth about her brother-in-law, Jesse pulling further away from his former mentor — we just didn’t know when these things might happen, or exactly how.

It was a surprise to many viewers in last week’s “Blood Money” that Hank and Walt’s conversation got as heated as it did, laying all the cards on the table — Hank knows without a doubt that Walt is Heisenberg, and Walt knows that he knows. Breaking Bad is a series that often teases such things out over multiple episodes or even seasons, rarely giving us the explosive confrontations we expect, but rather finding clever ways around conflicts we think are coming right up. One example? The death of young Drew Sharp. His shooting at the end of “Dead Freight” was one of Breaking Bad‘s signature “Oh shit!” moments, and many of us thought the subsequent episodes would have a major fallout from that. Would the boy’s death lead the police to discover the methylamine heist and connect this crime to Heisenberg? Would it cause the group to turn on Todd? Or would Jesse and/or Mike turn on Walt?

As it turned out, there weren’t many direct consequences from the death of a little boy. It was certainly a factor in Mike and Jesse abandoning ship, but not the factor. And so far, the police are in the dark. (Though that could change now that Jesse is in custody.) My point is, Breaking Bad often delays or even avoids the consequences we imagine will follow a major event. Walt’s first half-assed attempt on Gus Fring’s life (trying to walk up to his front door and shoot him) was not immediately followed by Gus attempting to take him out; Ted’s injury did not immediately lead to a change of heart from Skyler or some power play from Ted. Fittingly, Breaking Bad is all about the slow burn… or has been, up until now.

With only a handful of episodes left, the return of Season Five has wasted no time in getting right to the showdowns we always knew were in store. “Blood Money” gave us Walt versus Hank, whereas “Buried” is essentially all about Skyler. Here she has a lot to answer for with Hank and especially her sister, and she gets a meaty scene with each of them as the ugly truth is finally dug up for (almost) all too see. Like her husband, Skyler White is all about appearances — being good isn’t as important as looking good to the outside world. Aside from her children, no one’s opinion matters more than Hank and Marie’s, and Skyler really blows it when it comes to defending herself in any way as she is asked to explain with the twisted knot of deceit she concocted with her husband. (Suddenly that “script” she wrote in “Bullet Points,” designed to fool Hank and Marie into thinking Walt was a gambler, seems extra calculated and cruel.)

Hank truly gives her the benefit of the doubt, even if Skyler correctly assesses that he’s more concerned with nabbing Heisenberg than he is with his sister-in-law’s well-being. Skyler probably could have played the sympathy card, pleaded innocent, and at least saved her own good image (since it’s far too late for her husband’s). She might even have been able to get away with money laundering if she claimed that she thought that gambling story was true… especially if Walt went along with this and took the fall. (Something he might actually be willing to do. Discuss.) Instead, Skyler has one of her amazing Tourette freak-outs, repeating “Am I under arrest?” at an increasing volume until she has alerted the entire diner that something is not quite right with the lady in beige. Granted, Skyler is competent enough not to give Hank a recorded statement (or any information), especially not without a lawyer present. (Better call Saul!) But the way she leaves certainly won’t work in her favor; instead of trying to buy some time and at least keep Marie in the dark, she runs off and leaves her fate in Hank’s shaky hands.

Hank, then, returns to Marie and tells all. (Off-screen, unfortunately. I might have liked to see that.) Marie goes to Skyler looking for a denial, but instead gets basically the same silent treatment Hank did. But Marie is quicker to assume that her sister was complicit in Walt’s scheme, much more complicit than Hank believed. That Skyler’s secret nearly got her husband killed is the tipping point for Marie, who slaps Skyler in a nice moment of decisive action for a character who has for so long sat on the sidelines. I expected her to take a little knick-knack on her way out of the White residence, but instead her kleptomania flared up in a bigger way and she tried to take Holly. It was a teriffic display of Skyler’s transformation over the past few months — not long ago, she was the one desperate to get Holly over to Hank and Marie’s because she felt this house wasn’t safe. “Buried,” then, is the episode when Skyler White finally plants herself on the dark side. Just like when Walt learned he was in remission and no longer needed his meth bucks to pass on to his family, Skyler can no longer claim to be a victim in this. She’s making a choice to stay with Walt.

But why?

It’s hard to say precisely what is running through Skyler’s mind here, because for an episode that centers around her, she doesn’t say much. You can see her struggling to speak, especially in that tense confrontation with Marie, but she gets so few words out. The explanation is — drumroll, please! — “Buried” inside her. We see so many excuses trying to fight their way out, and yet Skyler knows that each of them is hollow. At every turn, she made the decision she felt was best for her family in one way or another. But now that she’s confronted with them all stacked up, looking at them in hindsight, it doesn’t seem like such a smart way to go. But she made these choices, and she’s stuck with that. After Walt collapses from his post-money burial fatigue, Skyler delivers a speech that is reminiscent of Walt’s words to Hank in “Blood Money,” suggesting that their best course of action is to “stay quiet.” (Or is that “tread lightly”?)

Skyler has clearly become a Lady Macbeth, and the way she takes care of Walt shows that there’s still a lot of love left for him despite the hatred she displayed in the first part of the season. I’m not sure that Breaking Bad has really bridged the gap between fearful, desperate-to-get-out Skyler from a few months ago and Skyler now. After you’ve told your husband you hope he dies of cancer, it’s hard to come back from that. When, exactly, did Skyler flip that switch? Sure, Walt is all she has now, and if she doesn’t stick with him, she may very well land in jail alongside him. But this Skyler doesn’t seem that torn. She isn’t a woman who would rather come clean, but can’t because she’s afraid. She seems relatively content to stand by her man, and never even flirts with the idea of turning him in. Now the show has drawn a divisive line — it’s Walt and Skyler vs. Hank and Marie. We didn’t expect all this to happen so soon, but there’s still a lot of story to tell this season.

“Buried” also unearths storylines for two other major players, Jesse and Lydia. In an episode in which Walt literally buries millions of dollars (the title’s most literal source), there is a continuation of Jesse’s “Blood Money” joyride that saw him tossing stacks of money out his car window like a paperboy who just won the lottery. One old man finds many of the spoils and then finds Jesse himself, spinning on a merry-go-round like a demented toddler — he’s going ’round, though he’s anything but merry. It seems success doesn’t agree with Jesse Pinkman — he was much happier as a low-life loser. Money has ruined him, as it has done to Walt and now Skyler. If this show has a villain, maybe that’s it: money.

Walt and Jesse once coveted money because they didn’t have it and felt they needed it — now it’s an unwanted burden, as both have more money than they can spend. Jesse’s is “blood money,” something he feels guilty about, while Walt’s is more of a nuisance — evidence against him and Skyler, if found. He makes Skyler promise to keep the money so that his “empire business” wasn’t all for nothing, but of course, it was. It must be assumed that Walt Jr. will find out about his father’s legacy, and even if he could somehow get his hands on that money eventually, do you think he’d take it? It’s the same gift Mike wanted to leave behind for his granddaughter, but it’s hard to imagine these kids growing up and actually wanting this money. (Not to mention that millions dropped in a young adult’s lap are not likely to be saved and spent wisely.) I imagine a spin-off show 18 years from now, with Holly White and Kaylee Ehrmantraut buying a mansion in Beverly Hills together. Mike, Walt, and now Skyler seem to be completely on the wrong page about what children need from their parents. Blood money isn’t it.

So Walt’s whole reason for doing this — greed — has basically yielded a lot of money that nobody can use and nobody wants. For the time being, Walt is a legitimate car wash owner, but that doesn’t mean Heisenberg’s product (or a cheaper facsimile) isn’t still moving, which is where Lydia comes in. Wearing a blue coat that aligns her with that deadly product, Lydia drops by to “check up” on the operation and ends up wiping out Declan and his men with some help from Todd and the neo-Nazi bunch (while she hides in a “Buried” bus). So Lydia’s officially a badass bitch — albeit a badass bitch who can’t stand the sight of a dead body.

And with Declan out of the way, are we led to believe that future Walt needs his heavy artillery to fight of the very neo-Nazis who proved so helpful to him in “Gliding Over All”? I’m not sure who else he’d be fighting, since it’s hard to imagine Walt in a police standoff. This means that Lydia could be Walt’s nemesis in the final episodes, if she has the white supremacists in her corner. Of course, for now, she’s going to be in the market for another cook, though Walt has turned her down once already. Hmm…

“Buried” isn’t an episode that immediately stands out as one of Breaking Bad‘s best. While a number of moments are satisfying — Marie slapping Skyler, Lydia’s ruthless massacre, and the final scene with Hank about to confront Jesse in hopes of getting the dirt on Heisenberg — none of them quite achieve water cooler status. And that’s fine. The more I reflect on “Buried,” the richer I find it, mainly because Skyler’s choices in it are so fascinating. It’s very reminiscent of “Fifty-One,” thanks to its focus on a near-catatonic Mrs. White, but it’s a radical departure in terms of where Skyler’s loyalties lie. This is a character who has struggled with her morals for so long, and now she finally makes some peace with where she’s landed. It’s almost touching, in a way, to see her stick with Walt in a moment when she might just as easily walk away. Of course, it also might be sealing her fate in a bad way.

Hank and Marie’s discovery has long been a promise we knew Breaking Bad would deliver on, and now that it has, perhaps it’s only natural to want a little more out of these scenes. Hank hit Walt, Marie slapped Skyler, but at the moment, the Whites are still out of harm’s way and out of jail. Walt Jr.’s reaction is on the horizon, but despite some emotional confrontations, the status quo has been maintained.

We know that won’t last — the family pool becomes a skate park roughly nine months from now — yet I can’t help but feel that there could have been a little more juice in “Buried,” given that there are now only six episodes to go.

Then again, the fact that the series got such long-awaited confrontations “out of the way” so early means that there’s room for plenty more excitement that we don’t know is coming.

Grade: B+

“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?”

Hoo boy!

The final season (okay, half-season) of Breaking Bad is officially underway. There have been two pretty solid episodes so far, “Blood Money” and then “Buried,” both of which gave us scenes (and moments of hand-to-face contact) that have been a long time coming. This was good TV.

And yet… and yet… it wasn’t flat-out, no-holds-barred excellent TV, like the very best episodes of Breaking Bad. Most shows don’t air a single episode that can be called “excellent” (by my standards) in their entire run, but Breaking Bad has had several. There is not a single bad one in the bunch. (Even The Sopranos had a weak hour or two. That Christopher Columbus episode? Yikes.) I hate to nitpick Breaking Bad, but the show is so good that those chinks in the armor stand out all the more. At the beginning of this week’s episode, “Confessions,” I was all ready to gripe about how there may be too many cards laid out on the table now, because we’ve had so many scenes with angry people talking. But Breaking Bad isn’t a show about people saying what they feel — it’s about people who hide it. And we usually know so much more than the characters do, which is part of the fun.

That dynamic has shifted, though, now that the cat’s out of the bag with Hank and Marie. The Schrader vs. White confrontations were good, but I was starting to miss the way Breaking Bad so nimbly danced around any actual confession of what Walt’s been up to. There’s a lot of lying on this show. In fact, before “Blood Money,” when was the last time two characters interacted in which both of them had all the facts regarding the subject they’re discussing? It’s been a long while, I’d bet. As “Confessions” began, it seemed we were in for another round of the Schrader vs. White standoff, and I couldn’t help but feel that everyone was being a little too direct.

And then I continued watching the episode and had to shut the fuck up about that.

“Confessions” is the name of this episode, but it could also be the name of this season (okay, half-season) so far. In “Blood Money,” Walt and Hank found each other out. In “Buried,” Skyler was added to Scharder’s Most Wanted list. After four and a half seasons of secrets, secrets, and more secrets, this last string of episodes is when everybody found out everything about everyone else. And “Confessions” continued that trend. (And how!)

The series’ biggest built-in suspense factor has always been Hank as DEA agent, Walt as drug lord. We knew these courses would collide eventually, and then they did. In early seasons this was much more calculated and TV-ish, with Hank sniffing around Walt’s trail without quite putting the pieces together; in later seasons, it got a shade more complicated, especially when a drunk Walt put Hank back on Heisenberg’s trail just when he was ready to assume Gale was the mastermind behind everything. Walt and Hank’s garage confrontation in “Blood Money” was satisfying on one level; same with Marie delivering a much-deserved slap to Skyler in “Buried.”

At the same time, it wasn’t fully, absolutely, 100% satisfying to me — not by Breaking Bad standards — because this show has blown my mind on multiple occasions with twists I never saw coming. So far, the confrontations this season have taken place in a reasonably predictable fashion — which isn’t to say they weren’t well-written and well-executed, with superb acting as always. I was surprised that Walt was so direct with Hank so soon, surprised that Skyler so readily sided with her husband rather than hopping onto the moral high road alongside Hank and Marie. Yet none of this was truly blind-siding — it was, more or less, the kind of stuff we saw coming.

Early in “Confessions,” Hank interrogates Jesse, hoping he’ll spill the beans on Heisenberg. What a misleading episode title! The “confession” here is not Jesse Pinkman’s at all — he’s seen too many people die at Heisenberg’s sly hand to believe he’d get away with snitching. (The man has made it clear he can kill in prison.) Jesse doesn’t say a word, so Hank is free to join Skyler, Marie, and Walt for the unhappiest would-be meal of all time at a local Mexican restaurant. Have you ever seen four more miserable, sorrier-looking faces than the four at this table? Even their waiter realizes all is not well in this quartet.

After two episodes in which various Schrader vs. White scenarios played out, both couples reunite for what is likely the last of many dinners together — this one unlike any we’ve seen previously. Everyone here has an agenda. Hank wants Walt to confess, Skyler wants everyone to move on, Walt wants to ensure that he gets away scot-free… and Marie wants Walt to die. Marie has so often played the happy-go-lucky “normal” one in the family, representing a certain oblivious middle class mediocrity. Here, she finally gets to spit some venom, suggesting that Walt kill himself to get this all over with. (Her sister also wished death upon Walter not so long ago, though she’s changed her tune.)

Of course, Hank thinks that’s too easy a sentence for Heisenberg’s crimes, and we agree. Plus we’ve seen Walt go to such great lengths to preserve himself — we know he wouldn’t do that. The Whites are again in neutral, beige-y colors, just like all the rich folks at Elliot’s party way back when — Skyler’s even wearing a turtleneck, covering up the maximum amount of skin (and lies). She doesn’t say much throughout this, as has been her trademark in recent episodes, but the look on her face is enough. This is a juicy scene, fraught with tension, as four characters who have constantly lied to each other finally show who they really are. No one’s truly hiding anything here, though Walt is again using his children as an excuse for why he shouldn’t be punished. Because it might hurt them. (As if getting into the drug trade in the first place didn’t cause enough suffering.)

I loved this scene — perhaps more than any other scene in the past two episodes — and yet, still, I was left wanting more. Breaking Bad has always flirted with near-discoveries, the entire show built on what people didn’t know. It made many otherwise ordinary scenes so very tense. And now that these characters all know so much, I wondered if Breaking Bad was losing its way a little. Would the rest of the series really just be people talking about how angry they are? Would it be so direct? Would there be so few surprises? When Hank interrogates Jesse, he comes out and says it: he knows Heisenberg is his brother-in-law. It felt like a missed opportunity for a cleverer way to reveal this — since it is a pretty big revelation. It seemed symptomatic of a difference this season compared to those prior — the writers being less coy and careful, as if the looming deadline of a series finale caused them to abandon what makes the show so brilliant in the first place.

It was only a minor, nagging thought in the back of my mind. Still, I needn’t have worried. In the very next scene, Walt’s previously-recorded “confession” did exactly what I needed it to — something I never anticipated. Something that never even entered my mind. That Walt could somehow find a way to pin all his crimes on Hank? Unthinkable! And yet, in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Hank’s the one with the inside info. He’s an intimidating blow-hard, especially when compared to Walt, the meek and bumbling cancer-stricken chemistry teacher. Suddenly Hank’s obsession with bringing Heisenberg down doesn’t seem like a guy just doing his job, but becomes a bit… curious.

Vince Gilligan and his writers aren’t big pre-planners — they don’t always know where a given season ends even when they’re beginning it. (Even Season Five isn’t quite as pre-planned as you might think.) Yet Walt threatening to pin Hank as Heisenberg feels like something that’s been worked into the show from the very beginning — it was Hank who suggested that first ride-along in the pilot, and Hank has been so close (but so far) to catching him ever since. With Walt’s “confession,” could the DEA really buy that Walt was right under Hank’s nose the whole time, and Hank didn’t quite piece it together until recently?

No. Walt’s mad genius strikes again, and strikes big. How else could he really escape his inevitable fate behind bars? What plan could be more devious than this? No one dies. No one gets hurt. (Except, obviously, emotionally.) It’s so obvious now that Walt’s dreamed it up, yet blaming Hank never for a second crossed my mind before he suggested it. Because who but Walter White could even think of such a thing? I somewhat doubt this was on Vince Gilligan’s mind all along, but now it feels like the show has always been building up to this. Like the very best moments of Breaking Bad, it’s inevitable and yet wholly surprising.

It’s a flat-out brilliant twist, one that sinks Walt into an even further depth of shittiness and still is consistent with all that came before. Walt again plays the victim, a role he plays very well when need be. He’s twisted his own evil around and attributed it to his well-meaning brother-in-law, in such a way that it actually is more believable that way. The lie is more convincing than the truth. Walt has rewritten his life before — notably, in the “script” he prepared with Skyler to explain his sudden riches in “Bullet Points,” and also when he used Skyler’s affair with Ted to make her the villain in their marriage. Walt has a knack for pinning the blame on other people, and something about him lets him get away with it almost every time.

I say “almost” because, as dynamite as Walt’s videotape is, it occurs less than halfway through an episode that isn’t nearly finished dropping bombhells. Walt may have wormed his way out of Hank’s clutches (for now), but past guilt trips are catching up to him. Walt once blamed the poisoning of a young boy on Gus Fring — a vicious killer, no foul there — except Jesse believed him, and thus Walt further abused his trust. Jesse almost caught Walt, but slick as ever, Walt managed to use “logic” to explain why it was Gus’ devious mind, not his own, that was responsible for Brock’s poisoning. In “Confessions,” Jesse finally calls Walt on his bullshit (which he’s been increasingly hip to), knowing that Walt dispatched of Mike before he was able to take that nice little vacation to Belize — and believing that Walt will do the same to him if he doesn’t disappear.

Yet Jesse stills takes Walt’s suggestion that he use that mysterious contact of Saul’s — the one who can help you with your Hoover Max Extract Pressure Pro Model 60 dust filter, or build you a whole new life if need be. Jesse knows that Walt’s suggestion is in his own best interest rather than Jesse’s, but Mr. White is right that his protege has no reason to stick around Santa Fe anymore. In fact, it’s best that he clear out while he can.

It’s nice to imagine Jesse living a brand new life in Alaska — starting a family, as Walt suggests ironically, given that he’s the one who scared Jesse away from the family he was starting with Brock and Andrea — but of course, it’s hard to imagine a particularly happy ending for any of these characters. When rightly accused of his manipulation, Walt merely embraces Jesse in a rare display of outright affection — and it’s to the show’s credit that you’re not entirely sure he isn’t about to shoot him in the gut right then and there. But no. Walt’s hug is genuine (I think), and though it is intended as one kind of good-bye, it ends up being another kind. For they will see each other again, quite soon — but the teacher-pupil dynamic is officially over.

Jesse is about to ship off to Alaska when his missing baggie of weed reminds him of another time something disappeared from his pocket in Huell’s presence. And he finally. Puts it. Together. (Which is almost too bad, because I’m curious about that guy who makes people disappear. Maybe he’ll pop back up when Walt finds himself in need of escape… to New Hampshire.) I thought Breaking Bad might actually say goodbye to Jesse for the next few episodes, but instead he gets wise to just how destructive Walt has been in his life (though still unaware of the Jane incident) and marches off, bent on revenge. The episode ends with him dumping gasoline all over the White residence. (Which we know can’t be too badly burned, since it’s still standing in the flash-forward.)

“Confessions” continues this season’s trend of laying the cards on the table, with Jesse finally finding out Walt’s biggest manipulation of him. Though Hank and Marie’s discovery of Heisenberg was inevitable, there was no true guarantee that Jesse would learn just what a shit Walt has been to him, yet now he has. And he isn’t taking it lying down. Three episodes in, Breaking Bad has seriously upped the ante, making this the first truly excellent episode of this season. (Okay, half-season.)

“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?” Hank asks Jesse when he’s seeking a confession. Neither, at this point, has any idea just what a number Walt has done on poor Pinkman. Their farewell scene shows that there is still some love in this complicated relationship, and it mirrors an even earlier scene in which Walt manipulates his actual biological son. Walter Jr. has never wised up to Walt’s bullshit, and he’s easily toyed with here as his father “confesses” that his cancer’s back just to get him to blow Marie off. (Poor, good-hearted Walter Jr.! How can things possibly end well for this kid?)

It took Jesse a while to catch on, too, but he finally did, and there’s more genuine feeling in Walt’s interaction with Jesse than there is with young Flynn. Walt has betrayed everyone in his life time and time again, and now almost every single one of them knows it. Skyler’s by his side for now, but she thinks his meth-making days are over and is still in the dark on the nitty gritty details of Walt’s double life. Will she really stick with him? Following that guacamole-free dinner with Hank and Marie, she goes briefly back to her catatonic state from earlier this season. She knows she’s lost her sister and brother-in-law for good. But Skyler clearly has limits, and there are places she may not be willing to follow Walt. (Such as New Hampshire.) It’ll be interesting to see just how and when Skyler reaches a breaking point, since we know she isn’t with him nine months from now.

“Confessions” begins with a follow-up to Lydia’s murder rampage from last week, though Lydia herself makes no appearance. (Travesty!) Instead, it’s Todd and his thuggy relatives in a prolonged diner sequence that seems to have little purpose except to inform us that these guys are headed to New Mexico. Todd tells the story of the train heist, ending it before the part where he shoots an innocent child — and later, there’s another callback to “Dead Freight,” with a tarantula crawling through the desert. (Remember, Drew Sharp had one in a jar when he stumbled upon our antiheroes.)

Is “Confessions” reminding us of Todd’s cold-blooded actions in “Dead Freight” for a reason? Will the boy’s death finally be of consequence? Or was this just another random bug for Jesse to stare at, as he so often does? (Beetles, cockroaches, flies… you name it.) It’s becoming near-clear that Todd’s family will face off with Walt in the final episodes, yet this diner scene didn’t do much to build them up as antagonists, which seems like a missed opportunity given the amount of screen time we spend on this tertiary storyline. They’re still nowhere near as intimidating as Gus Fring. (Yet.)

But that’s my only gripe with an otherwise stellar episode, one that does nearly all of what Breaking Bad does at his best. (There aren’t really any quotable tidbits in this one, a la “Tread lightly” or “Am I under arrest?”) Walt has proven even slippier than we thought possible, Hank is stuck without the possibility of turning his brother-in-law in, and Jesse is royally pissed at his onetime mentor — in such a way that their fractured friendship may never be mended. The episode title itself is a clever wink, since Walt has never fully confessed to anything — he’s always spinning lies with just enough of a kernel of truth that they’ll be believed. Here, he may have outdone himself. In his breakdown for the camera, Walt sheds a tear and says he feels so bad for what he’s done to his family without admitting to actually being at fault, and it’s all so very disgusting. How can such an amoral man be so sanctimonious? He’s doomed every important person in his life and yet can still play the “family values” card and get away with it. Now, at least, we have Hank and Marie to shake their heads at his bullshit along with us.In an alternate universe, much of “Confessions” could have served as a series finale. Jesse and Walt say their goodbyes while Walt figures out a surefire way to silence Hank. These conflicts have reached their conclusions — or so we think. But the show’s not over yet.

The last two episodes had me thinking “But there are only six episodes left!” and now I think, “We’ve got five whole episodes to go!” Because where can Breaking Bad go from here? How can it sustain this? Will Walt and Jesse be mortal enemies from here on out? What will Hank do now that he’s been painted into a corner? It’s hard to imagine how these storylines will resolve, but if we could figure it out on our own, we wouldn’t love the show so much.

Breaking Bad is a series that rarely goes the route we’re expecting, preferring to torment its characters rather than let them find an easy out. “Confessions” tightened the screw just a little bit more, giving Walt one of his most masterful schemes yet and promising some epic Jesse vs. Walt action next week. This is Breaking Bad reaching that sky-high bar it set for itself, giving us every reason to believe that it’ll go out with a bang we haven’t seen coming.

Grade: A

*

“Mr. White’s gay for me. Everybody knows it.”

Possibly the biggest question mark surrounding the second half of Breaking Bad‘s fifth season pertained to Walt and Jesse’s relationship — it’s been a tense one over the years (or months, if we’re using the show’s timeline). They’ve been friends and enemies, back and forth — from gruff master and reluctant pupil to a genuine partnership, albeit one in which Mr. White was clearly the puppeteer, pulling strings Jesse didn’t even know about.

We’ve become so used to these two sticking it out through thick and thin together that one could imagine Breaking Bad ending with these two up against an outside opponent — a rival in the drug trade, a former ally turned foe, perhaps the DEA. A more formulaic show might have gone this route, but Breaking Bad is more interested in the many follies of Walter White, which means isolating him from the things he holds dear. Already he’s lost his extended family, the Schraders, and the flash-forward to his 52nd birthday seems to indicate he’ll lose his more immediate family, too. Will he lose Jesse as well?

The climax of last week’s excellent “Confessions” hinted that this may be the point of no return for this duo — though they’ve come back from other precarious points in the past. There was no guarantee that Jesse couldn’t be roped back in under Mr. White’s spell after last week’s revelation, except that it would have been bad storytelling after Jesse already called Walt on his bullshit once in that episode. This week’s “Rabid Dog” makes it pretty clear that there won’t be a lot of happy tears and hugging in Walt and Jesse’s immediate future. It’s possible that coming events will necessitate that they join forces again, but it certainly won’t be like it was. Jesse Pinkman and Mr. White are officially over.

In Season Four, an emotional Jesse poured his heart out at rehab regarding a “problem dog” he had to put out to pasture. Of course, he was really discussing his guilt about killing Gale. The episode was called “Problem Dog,” and now, in this week’s “Rabid Dog,” Jesse himself is the troublesome canine that nearly everybody wants snuffed out. Jesse has often been seen as a loose cannon; he would’ve been euthanized a few times over if not for Walt’s intervention. Say what you will about Walter White, but he does have genuine feelings for his pupil — and has been willing to stick his neck out on more than one occasion to ensure Jesse’s survival.

But Jesse isn’t so sure that Walt is looking out for him these days. Mr. White could kill him at any moment, because that’s what he’s done with others who got in his way — most notably Gale and Mike, both of whom Walt owed some degree of loyalty to. Jesse doesn’t see any difference between him and them, but there is one. In “Rabid Dog,” killing Jesse is not an option for Walt, even when everyone else seems to think it’s the best way to go. Saul compares Jesse to Old Yeller in another of his “colorful metaphors,” Skyler assumes “talking to” Jesse is a euphemism for offing him, and Hank thinks Jesse is expendable as long as it helps him bring Heisenberg down. Jesse truly has nobody watching out for him anymore, which is a sad, strange irony — it’s true that Walt led Jesse down a terrible path (though not necessarily more hopeless than the one he was on already), and certainly he has abused his trust a time or two. But Walt truly does care about Jesse — his betrayals were only meant to keep Jesse close. Now everyone but Walt wants Jesse dead, while Jesse thinks Walt is the one who’s out to get him — and as such, acts out in such a way that only means Walt will have to take Jesse out. How’s that whole lily of the valley scheme working out for you now, Walter?

“Rabid Dog” picks up with Walt breaking into his own home again, searching for a very angry Jesse. His protege has doused the house in gasoline but, for some reason, hesitated before lighting up. The “master criminal” sets about on one of his lamest cover-ups yet, assuming a heavy carpet cleaning will get rid of the smell of gas (it won’t), even bumbling his hiding of the evidence because he can’t figure out which trash can to throw it away in. The White family ends up in a posh hotel, finally enjoying some of that hard-earned blood money — Skyler treats herself to the minibar while Flynn partakes in premium cable in his own suite. Walt sneaks off to meet with Saul about the “Old Yeller” situation, spinning more bullshit upon his return — which Skyler handily sees through. Walt is completely unaware of his wife’s transformation over the past few seasons — he still treats her like the clueless harpy she was back in Season One.

Then we’re privy to the reason Jesse elected not to obliterate the White house, and it’s not a change of heart as Walt surmised. It’s an interruption from Hank — who tries again to get Jesse to make a confession, and this time has asked for it at the perfect moment. Given their rocky past, Hank and Jesse make for an unlikely team, but also an inevitable one — and Marie’s reaction to their new houseguest is priceless. But Hank is just using Jesse in an even colder way than Walt ever did — he still won’t see him as anything besides a meth-addicted burnout. He tapes Jesse’s confession — which made me wonder if this would be a counter-threat to Walt’s tape from last week — then sends Jesse into the fray to meet Walt. Both Hank and Jesse know full well by now that the nefarious Heisenberg could have something up his sleeve to dispatch of rabid Jesse. Jesse sure thinks so, and we can’t be sure that he’s wrong — yet with everyone egging him on, Walt could come out and say that he wanted Jesse gone if he did. Instead, there’s a rather paternal concern in his voice every time he calls Jesse.

(Minor nitpick: the episode glosses over Hank telling Steve Gomez about Walt, which seems like a big deal. Gomez has been on the show since the very beginning, so some consideration of his reaction is warranted. Has he seen Walt’s tape? Did he buy Hank’s story from the get-go, or did it take some convincing? I’m also curious about what Jesse copped to in his confession — did he truly spill the beans on everything? Even his point-blank execution of Gale? It seems unlikely that the DEA could get him off scot-free for something like that, and it’s not really in Jesse’s nature to be so forthcoming. I wish “Rabid Dog” had spent another few minutes on all this, maybe in lieu of some of Walt’s gas can shenanigans.)

Walt is still operating under the assumption that their bond is strong enough to withstand even this, and why wouldn’t he believe so? It’s worked every time leading up to this. Walt genuinely thinks they can talk even this out — but he’s has never been very good at gauging the emotions of those he’s closest to. (He’s better at anticipating the actions of an enemy.) Walt’s still feeding Skyler bullshit she’s way past buying, still trying to appeal to Jesse’s emotions. Wrong approach, Walt. Jesse doesn’t take the bait, instead threatening Walt with an ominous plan for vengeance that is apparently even worse than wearing a wire and ratting him out to the DEA. Walt, in turn, places a call to Todd, enlisting the services of his uncle once again. (Does taking out Jesse Pinkman really require the big guns?) And that’s our show.

Yes, this is Breaking Bad, but still it’s surprising how much of a bloodlust there is in “Rabid Dog,” which strips the core characters down to their very ugliest selves. Jesse’s dreaming up ways to hurt his former mentor, even while that mentor is fighting for a too-late way to save his life. Hank callously uses Pinkman as a pawn in his scheme to take down his criminal brother-in-law, and if Jesse gets killed in the process? That’s just two birds with one stone in Hank’s eyes. Marie fantasizes to her therapist about poisoning Walt — and the fact that she chooses an untraceable poison at all is something Walt would approve of. And Skyler (or should we call her Lady White?) sinks to a new low after her home is sloshed with gasoline, asking, “What’s one more?” regarding that “rabid dog.” (It’s a brilliant piece of acting from Anna Gunn, who consistently finds new and surprising shades of Skyler. My favorite moment of this episode.) Basically, the only person who isn’t out to cut a bitch in “Rabid Dog” is Flynn, and even he asks Walt to stop lying. Did Flynn finally wise up? Alas, no — it’s a fake-out. Flynn just thinks his dad is covering up a fainting spell from the cancer. He’s the one figure on this show that has yet to see through Walt’s crap, now that everyone else has long since grown sick of it.

Last week’s “Confession” contained one of the most miserable meals ever filmed — if you can call it a meal at all, since no one went for that guacamole. It was the first scene to reunite all four adults in the White and Schrader families following Hank’s revelation on the porcelain throne, and this week’s “Rabid Dog” finds them clearly divided again. All four retreat to separate corners to lick their wounds — Walt scrambling to cover up Jesse’s aborted arson, Skyler coping with her guilt via copious amounts of booze, Marie giving her shrink the vaguest possible outline of what’s troubling her (besides the new parking arrangement at work), and Hank burying himself in work once more — teaming up with an enemy to bring an end to an even greater nemesis. These four are in a lot of pain, all handling it in their own way, and “Rabid Dog” takes them to some very dark places. Marie, Hank, and Skyler all want someone dead — how far we’ve come since Season One, huh?

“Rabid Dog” isn’t likely to make us feel warm and fuzzy about any of these people. Ironically, it’s Walt himself who is most sympathetic, insisting that Jesse merely changed his mind about that whole fiery revenge thing. Walt is trying really hard not to send Jesse off to Belize — ironically, he’s the only one who does not want someone dead in this episode. For once, Walt is the one pushing for a peaceful solution while everyone else just wants what’s easy and convenient — at any cost. Here, Walt is the only key figure not acting according to his basest self-interest, and that’s a novelty. No, Walter White has not turned over a benevolent new leaf, but he has limits. He is motivated more by his love for Jesse than out of self-preservation in this episode, hoping for the best and unaware that it’s too late for that. Walter White is used to getting what he wants, particularly from Jesse, and so it’s both love and arrogance that allow him to believe in a non-Belize solution to the Old Yeller problem. It’s not until Jesse declares war on Heisenberg that Walt realizes one of them has to be put down and goes back to his main M.O. — covering his own ass.

“Rabid Dog” is a somewhat strange episode of Breaking Bad — darkly comedic, as two wives (Skyler and Marie) reluctantly go along with their dueling husbands no matter the price. Skyler has come unhinged after sacrificing both her morals and her sister, slinging drunken barbs at Walt without a trace of the fear she once had of him. Meanwhile, Marie is so chipper at the idea of taking Walt down that she’s willing to play hostess to the nefarious drug dealer she previously had zero sympathy for. Taking the White family out of their unimpressive suburban domicile and into a luxurious hotel reminds us how far they’ve come — made clearer by the fact that Skyler has now devolved into the amoral, vodka-guzzling Lady Heisenberg, a crass rich bitch stereotype that should be beneath her. (But it’s fun to watch for an episode or two, at least.) It’s truly starting to feel like the third act of this story as new (and faulty) alliances are formed, old alliances are broken, the status quo is upended, and everyone is having a really shitty time of it.

Todd, Lydia, and the rest have been all but out of the picture in the latter half of this season, because unlike the days of Tuco, the cousins, and Gus Fring, there’s not much need for an external evil as the series winds down to the bitter end. It’s become clear that these characters are their own (and each other’s) worst enemies, and instead of raising the stakes with an impossible villain, it’s putting the core cast together in the ring to fight each other. Nobody’s on the team they would have expected, and there’s no way to predict how things will shake out from here.

Only one thing is certain after this episode: neither Mr. White nor Jesse is gay for each other anymore.

Grade: B

*

“Baby, I got him.”

There isn’t a single episode of Breaking Bad that doesn’t advance the story and the characters in intriguing, insightful, and surprising ways. This show does not waste any of our time.

For so long Breaking Bad has teased us in the most delightful manner, often dawdling when it comes to the big showdowns and revelations, meandering when we expect it to cut to the chase. This isn’t a problem for most Breaking Bad viewers; this show’s tangents are more fascinating than most series’ biggest moments, and Breaking Bad is a bolder, better show for it.

Now, though, we’re finally getting all those major payoffs we’ve waited so long and patiently for. It’s a little jarring. How many times has Walt almost been caught by the police? How many times have Jesse, Hank, and Walt faced death and oh-so-narrowly escaped? We’re so used to the big moments almost happening that this latest batch of episodes feels quite different from the first four and a half seasons — like another show, almost. That’s not a flaw — of course Season Five is going to tie up all those loose ends that have been fraying, fraying, fraying for these past six years.

And yet episodes like “To’hajiilee” are all the more shocking for how directly they deal with the show’s central conflicts. The old Hank vs. Walt battle, the much newer Jesse vs. Walt face-off. Hank and Jesse have been so in the dark for so long, and only recently stepped into the light regarding the devious depths of Walter White. After six years, we’re used to that. We’re used to near-misses, brushes with death, and an intricacy of long-con suspense that would make Hitchcock proud.

What we’re not used to is everything that happened tonight.

Like “Confessions” from a couple weeks back, “To’hajiilee” plays like a scrapped version of the series finale. The show could have ended this way. Walt’s folly finally gets him caught red-handed. Hank gets his man. I’m not sure how satisfying that would be, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Back in “Confessions,” Walt pulled a rather ingenious trump card, leaving Hank seemingly powerless against the great Heisenberg as he plotted to frame Hank for all his crimes should he ever tried to turn Walt in. Hank ultimately didn’t back down, of course (when has he?), which is how ”To’hajiilee” finds the tables turned completely, with Hank in full control and Walt cowed and vulnerable — even defeated.

But first, we check back in with Todd, Lydia, and that gang of white supremacist badasses as they try to determine the blueness of Todd’s cook. (Ultimate conclusion: it’s not very blue.) When there are this many cold-blooded villains in a room together, an audience has to be on their toes, and I feared for Lydia a bit when she politely demanded that her meth be blue. (Blue like her jacket, the same one she wore when taking out Declan in “Buried.”) It’s probably Walt’s near-poisoning of Lydia back in “Gliding Over All” that has me nervous whenever Lydia sips her signature tea, not that Todd is savvy enough to use ricin. Like his extended family, Todd doesn’t do subtle when it comes to dispatching of a nuisance. He’s a point-and-shoot and asks questions later type. Fortunately, the scene took a sweeter turn, if you can call a child-killer’s schoolboy crush “sweet.” Todd has a thing for Lydia, and she seems to know it. It’s almost cute, until you remember who these people are. If there were ever two black souls who deserve each other, it’s Todd and Lydia, sitting in a tree, K-I-L-L-I-N-G.

The real reason for another cold open that checks in with these tertiary evildoers — besides the reminder that some people on Breaking Bad are still cooking meth — is to see the other end of Walt’s phone call to Todd at the end of the last episode. I didn’t particularly care for this — it was implied at the end of the last episode that Walt was employing Uncle Jack to get rid of Jesse, and hearing it said directly didn’t add anything new. In fact, it took away from the suspense. (He might have been calling for some other, more clever reason, for all we knew.) The exchange was rather on-the-nose, as if it had been written for viewers who somehow missed “Rabid Dog” last week.

Another mild disappointment — Jesse’s “genius” plan from last week turned out to be rather obvious, and rather flawed. Yes, Walt loves his money, and no, we can’t expect Heisenberg-level machinations from Jesse Pinkman… but still. Jesse admits he doesn’t know where the money is and it’s Hank who comes up with a twisted plan to find it. This involves a rather cruel trick on poor Huell, who spills the beans pretty easily thanks to a photo fakeout of Jesse’s death. (I was hoping that photo would eventually find its way to Walt, so he could grapple with his guilt and sadness.) I was expecting something a bit more devious from Jesse at this point, but he takes a backseat to Hank in this episode and lets the DEA do all the work. There’s a little Walt vs. Jesse action here, but not as much as we were expecting after last week.

Walt comes up with a solid plan to get Jesse’s goat — he pays a visit to Brock and Andrea, the source of their dispute in the first place. Brock doesn’t look too happy to see Walter, which forces us to wonder exactly how he got the kid to ingest that lily of the valley in the first place. Brock’s more skeptical than terrified, while Andrea is one of few cheerfully oblivious parties left on this show. (She and Flynn might get along.) It’s unclear whether or not Walt’s plan would have worked, since Hank is intercepting all calls to the Hello Kitty phone, leaving Jesse unaware that Walt is potentially spiking Brock’s Froot Loops with more lily of the valley. I was briefly worried for Brock and Andrea when Walt arrived, yet it quickly becomes clear that his scheme is benign. (Except for the part where Jesse gets shot in the back of the head.) As with Jesse’s plan, it was a shade disappointing that Heisenberg hadn’t come up with something a bit more Machiavellian to ferret him out. Neither of these two is exactly bringing their A-game to “To’hajiilee.”

Meanwhile, Flynn is having a less-than-A1 time at the car wash under Skyler’s supervision, at least until a local celebrity shows up. That’s Saul, who does his best to play the greasy slimeball from his TV commercials for Flynn’s sake before completely unraveling in front of Walt. (Seeing Flynn geek out over Saul is the comic highlight of the episode. It’s nice to see RJ Mitte away from the breakfast table.) Saul talks to Walt without a shred of the weaselly confidence he so often displays in the face of crisis — he’s a broken man at this point, wearing a bullet proof vest because poor, gullible Huell is MIA (thanks to Hank’s rather lame attempt to keep him from calling). Saul has generally been a problem solver and comic relief rather than a character whose fate we’re invested in, but at a time when all the core characters are coming undone, Saul’s downfall is right in line, too. These are dark times for just about everybody, even the goofy lawyer.

The first three-quarters of “To’hajiilee” are serviceable but unremarkable. Then things get interesting. Walt is at the car wash, staring out the window (framed in such a way that the blinds look like prison bars — fitting, for what happens next). He receives a photo of one of “his” barrels of money, supposedly retrieved from his lottery ticket coordinates in the desert. He dashes out past Skyler and Flynn without even dropping one of his trademark excuses (“gee, I think I left a burner on…”), and the ever-observant Skyler knows shit is getting real. (It’s an otherwise Skyler-light hour, and Marie also makes just a brief cameo. Not a big episode for the wives of Breaking Bad.)

Despite the shortcomings of his planning, Jesse’s instincts were right — when Walt’s money is threatened, he flies into panic mode, and his usual Heisenberg craftiness takes a holiday as he makes not one but two epic, incredible, life-ruining mistakes. Walt goes on one of his infamous high-speed joyrides to the titular To’hajiilee reservation, not thinking for a moment that he’s actually leading Hank and Jesse right to the money. This is totally in keeping with Walt’s character — the whole reason this hellish journey began at all is to provide for his family, and he begged Skyler to make sure Flynn and Holly get their payday so that it wouldn’t “all be for nothing” just a few episodes back.

So it makes sense. But it’s also a tad disappointing, after all this time, that Heisenberg can be brought down so easily. We’ve seen Walt be sloppy before — he’s sloppy as often as he’s chillingly precise, actually — so, again, this isn’t out of character. But when Walt finds himself in a jam, we’re so used to watching him slip out of it somehow, and the series goes on, we thought he’d get more careful. Instead, he makes a rookie mistake.

At this point in the series, I’m not sure who I’m rooting for anymore. Not so much Hank. Not so much Jesse. I don’t exactly want to see Walt get away with his crimes in the end, laughing all the way to the bank, but I suppose I do want to see him outsmart Hank and Jesse the way he’s outsmarted his other enemies. Walt outwitted so many other foes — for him to fall for this scheme, from the not-so-dynamic duo of Schrader and Pinkman — it’s fine. It’s fitting. It’s a little ironic. But it’s a hell of a slip-up after five seasons of brilliant maneuvers.

Walt ends up making an even more fatal mistake than just leading Hank to the money — he also confesses to some of Heisenberg’s most heinous crimes, finding it unfathomable that his former student might be in cahoots with his brother-in-law. (Earlier, he defends Jesse even as he’s ordering a hit on him, vehemently denying that he’s a “rat.”) And that’s it. Hank has all the evidence he needs to put Walt behind bars; Walt realizes what he’s done, but much too late. Walt has escaped some near-impossible scenarios before, including several when it was almost unthinkable that he wouldn’t be discovered. But “To’hajiilee” finally takes him further, to a true point of no return. Walt is fucked. A stupid lapse of judgment made in a moment of extreme duress finds his entire empire undone, like it never happened. The money will be whisked away from the Whites, Walt will go to jail (before he can even pass on his coloring secrets to Todd), and Hank will be a hero. Truth be told, it’s probably dumb moments like this that get most criminals caught — but at the same time, don’t we expect a little better from Heisenberg?

Maybe that’s the point. No criminal mastermind is flawless. Certainly not Walter White. As he sees two of the people he cared for most working together to bring him down, Walt does something he does not do easily — he gives up. He surrenders. He allows himself to be humbled while Hank savors every moment of the arrest. It’s worth noting how clearly betrayed Walt is at seeing Hank and Jesse together, and the show’s complex web of emotions has us pitying him while at the same time asking, “Well, what did you expect, Walter?” Walt decided to kill Jesse — Jesse antagonized him to this point, because he thought Walt had already decided to kill him — so for Walt to feel betrayed is a bit hypocritical. Yet “Rabid Dog” made it clear that Walt was protective of Jesse until the bitter end, and that carries over into this episode. He does not take Jesse’s death lightly. It’s Walt’s immense disappointment in his former partner that causes him to finally throw in the towel and surrender here after fighting so hard in the past to avoid this very fate.

As Jesse notes, the climax takes place in the very spot where Walt and Jesse first cooked together, which again makes this feel like a series finale. (But it would also be much too neat and tidy a series finale for Breaking Bad.) Hank calls Marie and gloats: “Baby, I got him.” (Reminiscent of Walt’s “I won” call to Skyler at the end of Season Four.) Of course, this is Breaking Bad and there are still three more episodes before the series is over, so we have a pretty good idea that Todd and friends will show up despite Walt calling it off, and we are correct. Walt uselessly tries to warn Hank what’s about to happen, and even more uselessly tries to get Jack to call it off. Instead, it’s a shoot-out, and since no one has apparently been hit by the end of this episode, we have to wonder why Hank, Todd, Uncle Jack, and the rest are all suddenly such terrible shots.

“To’hajiilee” takes an interesting course of action, and an unexpected one. The shoot-out itself is not overly shocking, but Walt’s behavior is. He tries to save Hank. Previously, Walt has always erred on the side of self-preservation, and though he has drawn the line at having Hank killed before, it’s now quite literally Walt or Hank that’s taking a fall, and Walt would apparently rather be carted off to prison than see his brother-in-law shot down. Does that redeem Walter White? True, this is an episode in which Walt orders the death of his beloved partner, but even so, both “Rabid Dog” and “To’hajiilee” have gone out of their way to re-humanize Heisenberg. I’ve always been enthralled and invested in Walt’s character, which isn’t to say I’ve always rooted for him in the long run. But at a point, I expected it would be impossible to truly feel sympathy for him again.

In “To’hajiilee,” it’s hard not to. He’s betrayed by his partner, outwitted by his brother-in-law, and everything he’s worked so hard for throughout the series is suddenly taken away. There will be no pony at Holly’s Sweet 16. Nothing that happens here erases the many nefarious acts he’s carried out in the past, and no one can say Walt didn’t dig this grave himself. Just two episodes ago, in “Confessions,” Walt reached a new level of treachery as he threatened to pin all of Heisenberg’s evils on Hank, and now? I expect viewers will have a variety of reactions, but my heart went out to Walt in this one. It’s surprising primarily because we expect Walt’s journey from ordinary chemistry teacher to criminal mastermind to be at least somewhat linear. Walt can be a real son of a bitch, but Breaking Bad has never suggested that he is or ever could be outright evil. It isn’t hard to imagine a parallel universe in which the writers are just having fun with this final season, letting Heisenberg be the ultimate badass. If he’d wantonly decided to dispatch of Hank and Marie back in “Buried,” we would have bought it. He could be killing people left and right.

Instead, there’s a lot more moral complexity, especially since the series has taken pains to make everyone but Walt unlikeable lately. Marie’s looking up poisons on the internet, Hank finds Jesse expendable, Skyler’s decided she’s fine with “one more” murder, and Jesse’s on a vengeance bender against his former mentor. (I know a lot of people are on Team Jesse; I love the character, but I don’t find him all that easy to sympathize with, given his many unsavory acts in the past. Especially in “rabid dog” mode.)

Here, after so much selfishness, Walt finally makes a sacrificial gesture and decides to go peacefully and quietly. It’s true that he doesn’t have many other options, but he also doesn’t try other options. And when one of his miraculous “lucky breaks” surfaces in the form of Uncle Jack, Walt isn’t pleased or grateful. He tries to stop it from happening. After slowly stripping away our empathy for Walt over the years, Breaking Bad spends a surprising amount of time in Season Five earning it back. There’s a brilliant irony here — no matter who lives and dies in this shoot-out, it will end up looking like Walt orchestrated it intentionally. He tried to warn Hank, but it won’t be remembered that way. It’ll be viewed as another of Heisenberg’s masterful “get out of jail free” tricks… and if something happens to Hank, Skyler might very well change her tune about that “what’s one more?” business. It won’t look good. Walt has reached a point where he doesn’t even have to execute a genius escape plan — it will be attributed to him anyway. He’s created a monster, and even if he does all he can to keep Hank out of harm’s way, he very well could be remembered as his killer.

That is, assuming Hank dies. Now that the show is in its final four episodes, all bets are off when it comes to a shoot-out. Anyone besides Walt, really, could die before the series finale. And “To’hajiilee” insinuates that Hank might be the first to go. His phone call to Marie smacks of a final goodbye, though that could be a tease from the writers. Poor Hank has already cheated death twice in the past year — first in El Paso, when his anxiety attack spared him from getting limbs blown off via tortoise bomb, and then in his shoot-out with the Cousins. After all that, could Hank go down in another firefight?

It’s hard to say. On the one hand, it would seem strange for this episode to end with nobody getting shot (not even one of Uncle Jack’s lackeys!), and then kill off a major character (or a handful of them) at the beginning of the next. If Hank dies, it would seemingly be a better end to “To’hajiilee” than it would be a beginning to the next episode. If Hank doesn’t die, it would be strange and redundant to have him wind up in the hospital again with another few bullet wounds.

On the other hand, if either Hank or Gomez survive the gunfight, it’s game over for Heisenberg. From the flash-forwards, we know that Walt is eventually discovered, so this is a distinct possibility. But Hank’s death would explain so much about the future — why Skyler and Walt parted ways, why Walt went on the run to New Hampshire (supposedly), why he’s notorious enough that someone would graffiti “Heisenberg” in his house (and why neighbor Carol is afraid enough to drop her oranges at the mere sight of him). Walt has done some terrible deeds, but perhaps none are quite terrible enough to warrant the big finale we know is coming. Hank’s death could change that. It’s all speculation at this point, but even the promo for next week’s episode played pretty coy.

Regardless, despite a cliffhanger ending, “To’hajiilee” contains a lot more closure than we’re used to from this series. Hank caught Walt fair and square. Walt is officially busted. Jesse spitting in Walt’s face seems to close the door on that beef, too, for now. And Walt shed a tear and (sort of) redeemed himself, which makes parts of “To’hajiilee” feel like the series finale. At this late stage in the game, we’re trading narrative slyness for those Big Fucking Moments — with ”To’hajiilee,” it definitely feels like we’re nearing the end. This is the point of no return, folks. All or nothing. Where does it go from here?

We’ll find out next week. Until then? Have an A1 day! Grade: B+ 

*

“The reaction has begun.”

Leave it up to Breaking Bad to kill off one of the four leads in an episode and have that not be the scene everyone is talking about.

Last week’s “To’hajiilee” was, for me, a mixed bag. A mostly good bag, but with a few questionable items mixed in. I didn’t like its cliffhanger-y conclusion, which felt very safe and very “TV.” (Breaking Bad seldom actually feels like TV, in the classic sense.) We’ve all seen shows that put one of the heroes in mortal peril at the end of an episode, only to immediately arrive at a miraculous conclusion at the beginning of the next. It’s very Batman — Adam West version, not Christian Bale. I trusted Vince Gilligan and company not to stoop so low on this show, but that didn’t change the fact that I felt dissatisfaction more than I felt suspense about Hank’s fate.

I knew I’d need to see this week’s episode to really know how I felt about that ending, and I still think there are a number of ways “To’hajiilee” could have ended that would sit better with me. If we had seen Hank shot in the leg. If we saw Gomez die. Or if we cut out before the first shot was fired. These are a few possibilities, but there are more.

However, the fact that “To’hajiilee” didn’t end to my liking doesn’t mean that just about everything in “Ozymandias” isn’t flawless. It’s one of the best hours of TV I’ve ever seen. Also, one of the tensest and most wrenching.

A surprise from Breaking Bad? Not exactly. But still, this show really outdid itself tonight.

We’re now officially in the home stretch. All the original tensions of the series are gone. “Ozymandias” obliterated them. Directed by Rian Johnson (a fact I forgot until just now, because I was so invested in watching), who has helmed some of the series’ most memorable hours — “Fly” and “Fifty-One” — “Ozymandias” kills off Hank, ending his increasingly dangerous dance with Heisenberg. That isn’t a total shocker to anyone who watched last week, though his death wasn’t a total given.

Except… it was, wasn’t it? Hank knew immediately that there was no way he was getting out of To’hajiilee territory alive once Uncle Jack and the gang showed up. Those guys are real criminals, hardened and remorseless, at least when it comes to the DEA. Walt tries to argue that Hank is family, but does Uncle Jack care? No. Uncle Jack has his own family, and Todd’s respect for Walt is the only reason he isn’t in that ditch with Hank and Gomez. He knows he’d lose his nephew if anything happened to Walt out there — another family-based decision. But why should Uncle Jack care about Walt’s family? Walt’s victims had families, too, yet he always did what was best for his. Uncle Jack is no different in that respect. Walt erroneously expects that when it’s his family on the line, exceptions will be made — remember how he tried to talk Jesse out of burning the money with the same logic? — but no. Uncle Jack does what’s best for his own family, which is to kill Hank and leave Walt alive. Walt is getting a nasty dose of his own medicine now that it’s his loved ones on the chopping block.

As it turns out, the rest of “Ozymandias” is also all about family in a big way. But I can’t move on without saying “R.I.P.” to poor Hank — and Gomez, too. It’s a brutal scene — Gomez is already dead when we return to the shoot-out. This periphery character has been on the sidelines since the pilot. He knew Walt well enough to show up at the White residence for birthday parties. When a recurring character who’s been with us for five seasons dies off-screen, his body lying motionless in the background at the beginning of an episode, you know you’re in for a big one.

I might have liked a little more from Gomez either here or, better yet, at the end of last week’s episode, but of course there are bigger fish to fry in “Ozymandias.” Hank is shot in the leg — a cruel twist of fate, since he already has trouble walking — and once again makes a last-ditch effort to grab a discarded gun with less success than he had with the Cousins. Seems you can only be lucky once in such a situation. It’s obviously hopeless for Hank, despite any question last week about whether or not Breaking Bad would cop out and let him escape unscathed. (There was essentially no way that could work, with Hank having cheated death twice already.) He’s majorly outmanned and there’s no way Uncle Jack can show mercy, even if he wished to. (Doubtful.) Hank refuses to give up his pride or integrity, preferring to go down like a man rather than beg, plead, wheedle, and barter for a safe trip home.

It’s Walt who makes a foolish bid for Hank’s life — he’s even willing to part with his many millions — but there are some things money can’t buy. Walt is always trying to make a deal, and here, it’s a very bad one — but give him sympathy points for effort, since he shows himself to be a slightly better guy than we would have guessed. He may have talked and acted tough when he and Hank were grappling for power earlier this (half-)season, but now that it’s down the wire, we see a lot of love flowing in at least one direction between these two. (Hank, I’m sure, feels differently.)

Hank’s death is agonizingly drawn out, and then, when it comes, shockingly quick. (It’s also tastefully written and directed, not lingering on gory details.) Again, brutal. Lots of TV shows kill off major characters, of course, and sometimes it packs an emotional wallop, but I can’t think of a TV death as harrowing as this — not even on The Sopranos — perhaps because it feels so realistic. This isn’t an operatic moment or even a cinematic one. It’s senseless and cruel and cold-blooded and efficient. It is so directly a consequence of our protagonist’s doing — not one mere action, but every single thing he’s done since the beginning of the show. It’s all lead to this. Walt set it in motion long ago (as we see in flashback), and now that the end is here, it’s easy to see that of course things had to happen this way. How else was it going to go? “Ozymandias” isn’t a single episode of TV; it’s five seasons of a house of cards, stacked bit by bit, card by card, now finally tumbling down.

So Hank is gone, without a lot of fanfare — considering. Both Jesse and Walt’s fates are uncertain at this point, since it would seemingly behoove the gang to get rid of Walt, too, while they’re at it. (Thank God for Todd!) Now Walt has given his precious money to a bunch of goons for no reason whatsoever, but luckily Uncle Jack has at least a little class and spares $11 million for Walt — still more than he can really use — and takes off with Jesse. But before he goes, Walt manages to tie up one last dangling loose end by admitting that he let Jane die. Bombshell!

It’s a final “fuck you” to Jesse, a way to come out on top. Despite his agony over Hank’s death, Walt has no remorse left for his former pupil, which is understandable after the way Jesse gloated last week. (Bad move, Jesse!) Technically, Hank and Jesse were equally against Walt, but it’s Jesse who was a true traitor. Hank never changed sides — Walt knew he was a good guy from day one, and even though that makes them sworn enemies, Walt still respects and admires that. Jesse’s betrayal, on the other hand, is something else entirely. After seeing Heisenberg at work time and time again, he should have known better. (And he did… he just didn’t take his own advice. Walt’s luck wins again.)

I’m still undecided on how I feel about this blow being dealt at the beginning of an episode, rather than the end. It has a wholly different effect, which I’m sure was at least part of the intent behind why Hank didn’t die at the end of last week’s episode instead. We expect stories to be told a certain way. It’s the end when the good and/or bad guys die, then there’s relief when it’s over — perhaps even a grieving process. “Ozymandias” doesn’t allow us to exhale after Hank is shot — we don’t get to stop and process it. There’s no catharsis. It keeps right on ticking, as life does, without mourning Agent Schrader. All in all it was probably a good storytelling decision, but it also made “Ozymandias” a difficult watch. Breaking Bad has never exactly been the easiest, breeziest show, but this episode? As amazingly crafted as it is, it also feels a bit like a punishment for liking it in the first place.

As Walt finds his way out of the desert with a barrel of money, Marie shows up at the car wash, unaware that her hubby’s been iced. I figured Marie was showing up to gloat (Marie does love to gloat!), but instead, she’s making an honest and heartfelt attempt to set things right with Skyler. Upon hearing that Walt’s in cuffs, Skyler goes catatonic again and bends completely to Marie, who now holds the power between these two. (For a limited time.) Marie has a couple demands, not least of which is telling Flynn the truth. Skyler tries to object, but Marie’s right — he’s going to find out anyway. Shouldn’t it be from them?

Initially I was disappointed that the bulk of the confession happens off-screen, because I thought Vince Gilligan and company were short-changing RJ Mitte (as often happens). He’s been so clueless for so long that I wanted his moment of revelation to be a huge one. Sitting down and having a little chat felt too easy by this show’s standards, and then, we get only some disbelief and denial before Flynn is out the door. Had “Ozymandias” left us with that as Flynn’s “big” moment, I’d have cried foul.

But. What happens next is…

Insane.

Hank’s death was, somehow, not the most intense scene in “Ozymandias.” That belongs to the showdown between Walt, Skyler, and Flynn at the White household. And by showdown, I mean knife fight!

“Ozymandias” opens with a flashback scene that foreshadows a couple of this episode’s highlights — a shot of a phone and a knife block (reminiscent of Scream!), both of which will become important later, and also some discussion of baby names. While I suspected these knives might come into play later, I figured the baby talk was just a random conversation. As it turns out, though, this is Baby Holly’s biggest episode yet!

First, Walt is in full-on panic mode (understandably), trying desperately to get his family to pack and move out. Trouble is, Skyler knows that Hank arrested Walt and Flynn knows his dad’s a drug dealer. All this time, Skyler has been trying to protect her kids from knowing the truth — now that’s gone. Suddenly, going along with Walt’s increasingly crazy schemes isn’t such a brilliant idea. There’s no point anymore.

So Skyler, who flirted with becoming an ice-cold Lady Heisenberg in the past few episodes, plants her feet firmly back on the right side and finally, finally, finally stands up to Walt the way she probably should have all along. With a knife. She’s not fucking around, either — she slices his hand open as he steps near. (Marie’s talk about how there’s still hope for goodness in Skyler may have awakened her inner fighter.) This calls for a knock-down drag-out fight that is almost unbearably tense, especially once Flynn intervenes. Breaking Bad has already killed Gomez and Hank — I wouldn’t put it past them to have Skyler accidentally stabbed as she wrestles Walt, too… or maybe even Flynn.

Fortunately, no one else is stabbed, but Flynn saves the day as he protects his mother and calls the cops on his dad. (A nice switch from when he hated Skyler for wanting a divorce.) This whole scene is a great showcase for RJ Mitte — erasing any doubts I had about his  earlier scene being a little on the weak side. Finally, Flynn joins the fray — now he’s as troubled and unhappy as everyone else on this show.

The tragedy of Breaking Bad is turning out to be that Walt’s actions were all for nothing. And Skyler’s, too. Walt wanted to provide for his family’s future but instead got them branded “the Heisenbergs.” Skyler wanted to protect her kids and instead, there’s a knife fight in the living room. Breaking Bad proves that crime doesn’t pay — or if it does, it pays so much that it becomes a problem, and eventually takes it all back again… with serious interest. Walt foolishly loses most of his money trying to barter with criminals for Hank’s life, and the only reason it happened is because he moved the money out to the desert in the first place. If he could have left well enough alone, he and Skyler would be the only ones who knew where it was. But he panicked and decided he didn’t trust her. Walt may be a smart guy in many ways, but now his follies are showing through big time, and even Skyler can see that he’s not in control anymore.

Now Walt is fighting for the same thing — his family’s survival — without realizing that his family has fallen apart right in front of him. Skyler has wised up, Flynn knows the truth about dear old dad, and everyone is about to find out what Heisenberg has done to Hank. Walt thinks they can start over, but it’s a little late for that. (Try explaining that to Flynn — along with why he’d never hear from Aunt Marie or Uncle Hank again.) This episode finds Walt scrambling to clean up messes that are long past fixable — until he gets back into Heisenberg mode and snatches Baby Holly from the house. (Not the first time someone’s tried to make off with that little girl this season.) It’s both a “fuck you” to Skyler for throwing him out of the house and a desperate ploy to keep at least some of his family — the member who is too young to know better. He could still, in theory, raise her to love him just as much as Flynn did until recently, and Holly would be none the wiser.

Everything about this sequence is so tense and exhilarating that my jaw was dropped all the while. It’s probably the most shocked I’ve been by this show since the plane crash in “ABQ.” Going into “Ozymandias,” I had a feeling Hank would die and that would be what led Walt to run off for the next several months, until we catch back up in those flash-forwards. I did not, however, foresee a White family knife brawl culminating in a Holly-snatching. This level of intensity is hardly ever found on a TV show, but then again, that’s this whole episode. (Given the level of agony Skyler experiences here, I’d like to propose a special ceremony at which every actress who has won an Emmy for the past five years must publicly apologize to Anna Gunn and hand theirs over. Seems fair, don’t you think?)

The final few moments find Walt playing daddy to Baby Holly and perhaps realizing how much more difficult a getaway is with an infant in tow… and how a man dying of cancer is probably not the best person to raise a young child. He can be a criminal mastermind or he can be a father, but as this episode proves, he cannot be both. So Walt gives Skyler a call — a nice echo of a much happier conversation in the flashback, when he was only beginning his elaborate lies — knowing the police will be standing by. Is he getting his revenge by making it clear that she knew all along? Is it another “fuck you”? Or is he doing her a favor by making it clear that she wasn’t directly involved (and omitting the details about her money laundering)?

I’m still not sure what his intention is with the second half of that call — Walt makes himself out to be a dangerous badass, but to what end? This feels calculated rather than a mere stroke of the ego. I’m not sure what Walt gains if the police think he had Hank killed intentionally, but I suppose we’ll find out next week. In the meantime, Walt destroys yet another cell phone (which happens so many times on this show that I feel it should be called Breaking Phones), leaves Holly in a fire truck for a safe trip back to Mom, and meets the mysterious man who can make people disappear. (I’m very curious about him.)

Meanwhile, Jesse has been tortured and now, apparently, is Todd’s new Mr. White, as the two protegees will cook together. (Is this another spin-off in the making?) I wasn’t entirely convinced that Jesse would survive “Ozymandias” either, even if Jesse would seem an integral element for the true series finale. (But seriously, how many episodes lately have felt like the last episode?) The last shot features Walt riding off into the sunset, toward an unknown future, as a dog darts across the screen — seemingly random, until you remember that there’s still a “Rabid Dog” running around out there. That’s Jesse.

Seems Jesse is about to cause some problems for Mr. White, which could very well be what draws him out of hiding. Next time, Walt won’t make the mistake of hiring Uncle Jack to do his dirty work… he’ll come for Jesse himself.

All in all, “Ozymandias” is a stellar hour of television. For all its dark dealings, Breaking Bad is often a “fun” show to watch, even if the fun at the expense of a grounded story with real consequences. But there’s not much room for fun in “Ozymandias,” not even when Walt rolls that barrel of millions across the desert with a jaunty tune on the soundtrack. (It’s too soon after Hank’s death to take any pleasure in this.) It’s is a hard hour to watch — “Ozymandias” begins with a beloved character dying and gets even darker sets the mood. “Ozymandias” reminded me of the previous “oh shit, everything is falling to pieces” episode “Crawl Space” from Season Four, one of my very favorites. It’s similarly grim, though, this one pushes even further. It can do that, now that we’re so close to the finale.

As of this episode, though, the show could end now and I’d be satisfied by the journey. Of course there are a few loose elements yet to be tied, and I’m ecstatic that there are two more episodes — but in many ways, emotionally, the story now feels complete. These characters have gone to such emotional extremes — especially in this episode. Hank chooses a noble death, Walt despairs over his brother-in-law’s demise, Walt condemns Jesse to a long and painful death, Skyler learns that the jig is up, Flynn is told that his father is a drug dealer, Skyler realizes that Walt killed Hank, Skyler chooses to turn away from Walt at last, Walt kidnaps his own daughter, Walt takes ownership of a heinous act he didn’t even want to happen in order to be feared and reviled.

These are all unthinkably huge moments in their own right, but combined in one episode? Well, that’s just fantastic television! The final two episodes could be pure garbage and I’d still say “Ozymandias” is a fitting culmination, a fantastic payoff to so many storylines we’ve invested in over these years. (I knew an episode named after this poem and directed by Rian Johnson would be major.) I could write a whole college paper on just how perfectly written and executed this episode is, but instead, I’ll leave you with a poem to chew on.

“Ozymandias” is named after the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which reads as follows:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Grade: A+

*

“Why don’t you just die already?”

For once, the Sunday night television conversation was centered around a different series last night — Dexter, and how utterly disappointing the finale was.

I’ve only seen the first season of Dexter, but I know that the show has disappointed fans for the past few seasons, and it’s for the very reasons that Breaking Bad hasn’t (as Entertainment Weekly pointed out). Breaking Bad is spending its final episodes tightening the screws, dealing with the consequences of our antiheroes’ actions, and killing off a few important figures in this world. After last week’s wrenching dispatching of Hank in the masterful “Ozymandias,” there’s another death in “Granite State,” and while the deceased party isn’t exactly as much of a fixture on Breaking Bad as Dean Norris was, in her own way, she’s integral.

Dexter‘s series finale occurred on the same night that Breaking Bad won a well-deserved Emmy for Best Drama, and an equally well-deserved award for Anna Gunn’s acting, which has always been phenomenal but has really kicked into high gear for Season Five. (Her stellar work in “Fifty-One” has now been matched by “Ozymandias.”) After six years, Breaking Bad has evolved from hidden gem to water cooler phenom and, finally, Emmys champion. It’s particularly poignant that the show has found both its largest audience and the pinnacle of its critical applause right at the bitter end — but better late than never, right? As the show itself is starting to prove in these grim final episodes, sometimes justice does get served, even if it’s too little, too late.

Ironically enough, Breaking Bad‘s Emmy win aired opposite one of the least Breaking Bad-y episodes of them all, a willfully offbeat our following the climactic “Ozymandias” and preceding the true finale next week. Last week already took care of the major tensions on Breaking Bad, so whatever happens from here is icing on the cake. I had no idea what to expect of the limbo episode “Granite State,” except that it would take Walt to New Hampshire at some point and probably catch us up to the flash-forwards. “Granite State” is a cinematic episode — even in a rather cinematic series like Breaking Bad, it stands out as being more like a movie than a TV show. The major characters are all separated — notice how we don’t see any of the show’s original cast members in a scene together, even once? That’s rare on TV.

Instead, we get a rare “special guest”-type appearance from a movie star, Robert Forster, and glimpses at the rest of the surviving cast, but once again, this show is focused heavily on Walter and Jesse — albeit in different states and very different places. Both are isolated in a prison-style environment — Jesse’s in an actual cage, while Walt fenced is in with the knowledge that leaving the safety of his new home means he’ll be caught by the police. Neither can contact their loved ones — at least, not without consequences. There are few environments more opposite to New Mexico’s desert landscapes, so ingrained in Breaking Bad‘s visuals, than wintery New Hampshire, again making “Granite State” feel like a “very special episode.”

So what do we get here? First, we pick up with Saul’s disappearance at the hands of the vacuum cleaner salesman with a set of skills entirely unrelated to cleaning carpets. (Though you could see his knack for making criminals vanish as sucking them up so that they’re never seen again.) He’s played by Robert Forster, the kind of star who isn’t too distracting to pop up on a show that really never relies on familiar faces, and a guy whose baggage we know from a lot of other crime movies. We can infer that this guy has seen a lot, though he does admit that Walt is his “hottest” client ever. He’s just one element making “Granite State” feel like Breaking Bad: The Movie.

Saul is planning a move to Nebraska, and in further un-Saul behavior, his best advice for Walt is to turn himself in. The man who has a cockamamie way to slip out of every jam is finally schemeless. Walt attempts to threaten Saul but is interrupted by a cancer-fueled coughing fit, rendering him much less intimidating. None of the old rules apply anymore — Saul is finally able to stand up to Heisenberg with a simple, “It’s over,” and Walt isn’t in a position where he can do much harm in retaliation. The chipper, skeezy lawyer from those TV commercials has finally been broken.

So Walt travels up to New Hampshire via propane tank — not exactly the first class travel you’d expect from a multimillionaire — with Robert Forster planning monthly visits with supplies. As soon as he’s gone, Walt is ready to ignore the vacuum salesman’s wisdom and head directly into the nearest town, Heisenberg hat and all… but changes his mind when he gets to the gate. There’s no hurry. He’ll go tomorrow.

And then months pass… and…

Meanwhile, Jesse is currently an involuntarily guest at the Hotel Uncle Jack, spending his days cooking that infamous blue meth and his nights trying like hell to escape. Todd tends to Jesse, treating him like a shiny new pet, and even when Uncle Jack wants to get rid of him for being a rat, Todd is desperate to keep him alive. Uncle Jack guesses that it’s because Todd is sweet on Lydia, but is that the only reason? As Uncle Jack points out, this crew of lowlife Nazis is now richer than they could have imagined, so selling meth is now an unnecessary liability. (Besides, haven’t they been witness to enough to realize that it’s not a particularly wise enterprise?) Perhaps Todd still wants to make Walt proud, or maybe he just isn’t very good at anything besides killing people and needs a hobby. Regardless, this is the episode where Todd finally comes into his own as a character — a character complicated and unique enough that he could probably carry his own movie or TV show, actually.

While Todd does a lot of creepy things in “Granite State,” the one I found creepiest was taking up tea-drinking to emulate (and possibly impress?) Lydia. The two meet in the cafe Lydia favors for all her shady dealings with meth manufacturers. She refuses to sit opposite Todd, which must be a blow to his fantasies, opting for the much more conspicuous back-to-back “talking to an empty chair” meeting. Lydia has decided the risks are too high to continue working with Todd, but when she hears that his cooks with Jesse are yielding meth in the 90% purity bracket, she pauses.

The interaction is another reason “Granite State” feels cinematic — Todd and Lydia are new characters, so to see them alone, moving on with business as usual while the rest of the cast is stuck between rocks and some very hard places, widens the scope of the show beyond any of the original cast. Next week will likely put a stop to Todd and Lydia’s empire, but for now, it feels like the story could continue on without Walt, Jesse, or any of the rest. As with Gray Matter, Walt helped to create something and now it has taken on a life of its own; he is all but forgotten by those who are taking it to the next level. I haven’t seen enough of The Wire to make an apt comparison, but from what I’ve heard, this is kind of what it’s like — if there were another season of Breaking Bad, we’d see how Walt’s actions from long ago affect a whole new set of people with a whole new set of problems.

But for now, we’re still dealing with Jesse Pinkman. As it often does, Breaking Bad corrected a possible shortcoming with a past episode in the latest — I felt that “Rabid Dog” glossed over Jesse’s confession to Hank, which seemed like a pivotal moment for both characters, as Jesse had to wrestle with the evil that he’d done while Hank discovered more of Walt’s monstrous actions. One question left hanging was exactly how much Jesse told Hank — we had no reason to believe that his confession actually confessed everything. But apparently it did — here, we see Jesse cop to Gale’s murder, which was his most cold-blooded act (and the most likely to get him sent away for a very long time). He also gives the police details on Drew Sharp’s murder by Todd — which has us wonder, now that Hank and Gomez are dead, if that case is still unsolved.

Oh, and villainy alert: Uncle Jack and his crew mock Jesse throughout the entirety of his confession, drawing a distinct line between their criminality and Walt and Jesse’s. (Though Jesse was more sensitive, Walt didn’t take death as lightly as Uncle Jack either.) While Uncle Jack has never been an endearing character, this scene made him all kinds of revolting, and if anyone on this show needs to take a trip to Bermuda next week, at this point it’s clearly him.

Neither Uncle Jack nor Todd has been fleshed out enough to approach Gus Fring-level villainy, but they certainly are despicable, as “Granite State” makes an effort to prove. Not long after bringing Jesse multiple flavors of ice cream, feeding him like a pet, Jesse tries to escape and Todd shows him what happens to a bad rabid problem dog when it tries to run away. Its girlfriend gets murdered. (Wait, what? Harsh!) And so we say R.I.P. to Andrea, who has never been even a Jane-level presence on the show, and yet, as a symbol, means even more. Walt has long claimed that he’s in the “empire business” for his family, and along the way, Jesse also adopted a surrogate family that he came to care about as much as Walt cared about his. In Jesse’s case, though, he actually made efforts to protect them, isolating himself from Brock and Andrea so that they wouldn’t get hurt.

Like Andrea, Brock is more of a symbol than an actual character — Walt poisoned him, and when Jesse found out about it, it was the last straw in their tense relationship, turning them into enemies at last. Jesse has been abandoned by his biological family and manipulated and betrayed by his surrogate father, but as long as he kept Brock and Andrea out of harm’s way, there was still something pure that he cared for in this world. When Walt talked Jesse into letting Andrea and Brock go in the earlier half of this season, he may have been acting out of selfish interests, but he was also right. Brock and Andrea are Jesse’s weakness, and when evildoers find out about it, they’ll use them as leverage. Meth is poison, after all, and Andrea herself decided to use it long ago. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have met Jesse Pinkman. And she wouldn’t be dead. Even this minor character is, in a way, an agent of her own fate, even though many others had a hand in it. Though he came to love her, Jesse’s initial intention was to get a recovering Andrea to buy his product. It was a malicious intent, and now, at last, he has paid for it. (With interest.) No bad deed goes unpunished on this series… even if it takes a while for the consequences to come a-knockin.’ In “Granite State,” Jesse and Andrea both paid for what they started way back in Season Three.

And speaking of reaping what you sow, Skyler also finds herself punished for some poor decision-making, first giving the police her best Catatonic Skyler and then passing her time with booze and cigarettes, as she tends to do when she’s particularly upset. Now, with Walt out of the picture, she has no one to blame but herself for the mess she’s in. (I wonder how those breakfasts with Walter Jr. are going now.) Like Jesse and Walt, “Granite State” finds Skyler in a prison, of sorts, without putting any of these characters jailed in the traditional sense. She has the police outside, watching her every move, and then Todd and friends drop by in ski masks, threatening harm to Skyler and/or Holly if she were to mention “the woman at the car wash” to the police.

It’s a chilling scene, one that makes it clear that Skyler will probably never feel completely safe — there’s always a chance she’ll find masked men in the nursery, and always will be. But she handles it smartly, telling Todd what he wants to hear (and presumably following through). Skyler handles these situations better than Jesse, better than Walt. She doesn’t make waves. She doesn’t let her emotions get in the way. She makes only tiny motions, the kind that are least likely to get her killed. She’s able to follow orders when she knows that doing otherwise is likely to end in punishment. Compare and contrast to Jesse, who should have known that a botched escape would mean death to Brock and/or Andrea. Skyler doesn’t even know Todd, but she’s smart enough not to cross him.

And while everyone else is in New Mexico, facing the direst of consequences for what Walt has done, he’s made a safe getaway to another “New” state — New Hampshire, the “Granite State.” Granite is a hard, tough substance, a crystalline rock — and this is one tough episode, finding all of these characters in a granite-like state. Walt, of course, gets off easiest, considering, though he’s suitably miserable in his isolated cabin in the woods. He offers the vacuum cleaner salesman $10,000 to play cards with him for two hours. (The tough negotiator wheedles it down to one.) A man with such big ambitions now having to pay a virtual stranger for an hour of amusement is tragic enough on its own, and again, this could have been an ending for the series. Like so many episodes, a few tweaks could have made “Granite State” the series finale. Can these characters possibly be punished further? The cancer, too, is taking its toll on Walt, largely untreated.

Finally, Walt gets the brilliant idea to mail a box full of cash to Walter Jr.’s friend Louis, foolishly believing that his family can somehow use this money without attracting the attention of the police. Mike’s attempts to save a nest egg for his granddaughter already highlighted this folly, and a phone call to Walter Jr. confirms what we already know — Walt’s family has no want for this blood money anyway. The phone call between the two Walters is one of the episode’s highlights, proving to Walt that he has indeed lost his family. Walt flirts with the idea of turning himself in, again, and sits down at the bar for a final drink. And that’s when “Granite State” takes a thrilling, brilliant turn.I hadn’t expected to see Gretchen and Elliot again. The idea never even occurred to me. But of course Breaking Bad has to come full circle, and what started it all? Walt’s banishment from Gray Matter. Gretchen and Elliot appear on Charlie Rose, dismissing Walt’s contribution to Gray Matter (and giving us a taste of the rest of the world’s reaction to Heisenberg). Walt’s squeezed napkin is enough to tell us that he won’t take his reputation being slighted like this. The police show up, but too late — and the show’s theme music gives the final moments a distinctly cinematic touch, like when we hear a familiar movie theme in the sequel. It’s that “Aw, yeah!” moment where we know things are kicking in to high gear. It’s the kind of thing that would happen in Breaking Bad: The Movie.

So that’s what finally sends him racing back to New Mexico, on the lam, with a firearm in his trunk, to get his ricin. I had previously guessed that it was revenge on Jesse, reacquiring his millions from Uncle Jack, and/or finding out his family was in danger. I didn’t guess that Gretchen and Elliot would motivate it.

It’s still unclear whether Gretchen and Elliot will be major players in the series finale — it’s not likely that they’ll have a lot of screen time, given that they’ve only appeared in a handful of episodes and it’d be strange to spend too much of the finale with them. But, like Andrea, their importance to the motivations of a major character outweighs the number of episodes they’ve actually appeared in, so it feels exactly right that Breaking Bad should find a reason to include them in the final hour. Walt now has two businesses he’s started that have moved on without him, and since patching things up with his family seems out of the question, he now appears to be ready to go out with a bang. Or multiple bangs, perhaps. Uncle Jack has to go down, Lydia must be dealt with, and something’s going to happen between Jesse and Walt, because it’s the series finale. As for what will happen, it’s anybody’s guess. What state of mind is Walt in now? Will he want to redeem himself, or make his name more notorious than ever? Either way, I’m delighted that Gretchen and Elliot are a factor.

Rather than bide its time until the season finale, Breaking Bad went in a much more interesting direction, spending the last six episodes dealing with stuff that a show like Dexter would have saved until that last episode. Now, in the seventh an penultimate episode, Breaking Bad allows for the kind of offbeat episode you rarely see on television. It’s grim, and it doesn’t tread water the way TV episodes do. TV plots move forward, of course, but they can only go so far — usually they have to reset things to the status quo. Hank and Marie have to remain in the dark, Skyler must be obedient and keep quiet, Walt and Jesse must find reasons to cook together, because that’s the show. Except… not anymore. Breaking Bad has, bit by bit, broken down every expectation we have from an episode of Breaking Bad, and now, in “Granite State,” it’s totally free of the TV shackles, and instead moves forward the way the plot of a movie does.

It’s jarring to see the lives of these character finally unravel in a cinematic way — not slowly, but with the pace and urgency and stakes of a film. “Granite State” is a creative risk at this point in the series’ run, and I’m guessing that many fans may not have liked it. “Ozymandias” was a tough act to follow, but I’m glad there was a more ponderous episode before what I can only imagine will be a breathless finale. Yes, these people are all being tortured in ways that may feel excessively cruel, given what they’ve gone through already. Perhaps the last season should have been called Breaking Even Worse.

But it’s also exciting to see these characters in such wildly different places than we ever could have expected — Jesse, locked up in a far worse prison than the federal one he’s always narrowly escaped; Walt, isolated in icy New Hampshire; Skyler, a single mom ravaged by the press and occasionally threatened by masked psychopaths who stop by in the dead of night; Walter Jr., the kind of kid who tells his dad to die after fighting so hard to save his life in early seasons. Who would have guessed?

I have no gripes with “Granite State,” a quietly brilliant episode that isolates the core cast members in various prisons. Walt is the only one with the ability to escape his, even if this escape will likely end with him in an actual prison (if he doesn’t die first). My one qualm is that it gives the short shrift to Marie, who didn’t get much time to grieve over Hank in “Ozymandias,” and here does almost nothing. Sure, we all know that Marie is heartbroken at the loss of her hubby, and whatever’s going on with her probably isn’t as pressing as what we see in “Granite State.” I do hope, however, that she gets a big moment or two in the finale, because she’s the one character who hasn’t quite had her due in this final season. Her arc isn’t quite wrapped up the way everyone else’s is.

But as the Emmys wisely confirmed last night, Breaking Bad is television’s best drama. It has certainly lived up to that in the past few episodes, and there’s no reason to think that we aren’t gearing up for one seriously epic series finale on every level.

So take that, Dexter.

Grade: A*

Hey dude.

Sup?

Looking?

That’s the 21st century equivalent of wandering into a bathhouse or the obfuscating brush of a city park at night. Most gay men I know have never gone to either of these places trolling for sex — the word “cruising” is more likely to bring to mind poolside piña coladas and possibly a host of costumed Disney princess than it is a sexual encounter. It’s 2014 now, and gay life isn’t relegated only to the dankest, shadiest corners of the world anymore — nobody has to go “looking” in such places anymore, though some small segment of the population still chooses to (mostly leftovers from previous generations).

HBO’s Looking begins with its protagonist, Patrick, fumbling through the beginnings of a hookup in a public park, which is a winking method of making its audience roll their eyes and murmur, “Ohhh, dear.” Moments later, without fanfare, the encounter ends, and Patrick is laughing it off as a joke, an experiment, and we can relax. At least Looking is smart enough to know that this brand of dalliance is a thing of the past.

The show focuses on a trio of gay men in San Francisco — yes, San Francisco, which already feels a little on-the-nose. But so would New York, and so would Los Angeles, so let’s set that aside for now. Patrick is a level designer for video games whose longest relationship clocked in at under six months; Agustín (Frankie J. Avarez) is an artist who is about to move in with his boyfriend Frank (O-T Fagbenle); Dom (Murray Bartlett) is a server rapidly approaching his forties who still lives with his ex-girlfriend Doris (Lauren Weedman) and is still hung up on his psycho ex-boyfriend, so clearly he has issues with moving on. The pilot, “Looking For Now,” introduces minor complications for each of them, but mostly it’s just a slice of gay life in San Francisco, without aspiring to make any grand, sweeping statements or bold revelations. It’s apolitical, which is the shrewdest political stance to take at this moment in time.

Looking has an understandably high level of buzz, given that it’s premiering on HBO, which is still the cream of the crop as TV networks go. It’s no sudden miracle that the premium cable outlet that brought us The Sopranos and The Wire is gay-friendly; HBO has had a long line of shows prominently featuring gay characters, from Sex & The City to Six Feet Under to Game Of Thrones, and let’s not forget last year’s uber-gay TV event, Behind The Candelabra. Still, an all-gay show from television’s most prestigious taste maker is still a vote of confidence in gay audiences — it’s not an insignificant endorsement. Looking signals the normalization of gay culture in the TV space without literally calling that out, a la Ryan Murphy’s nobly-intentioned but failed The New Normal, which was the network sitcom equivalent of a screeching queen in cutoff jean shorts shirking, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” in people’s faces. Looking isn’t trying nearly so hard, and it shouldn’t have to. The new normal doesn’t have to announce itself, because it’s just normal.

Two comparisons most immediately spring to mind as Looking makes its debut. The gay soap Queer As Folk bowed on Showtime nearly fifteen years ago, so in a way it’s surprising that it took this long for HBO to catch up to its premium cable competitor (which also gave us The L Word). And of course, it’s easy to look at Looking as HBO’s gay answer to Girls — until you examine the differences. Last night’s Girls saw Lena Dunham’s Hannah celebrating her 25th birthday; I’ve often wondered why the show is even called Girls, since it places a fair amount of focus on male characters, too, but the girls of Girls are absolutely girls, in the sense that they’re immature and not even close to grown-up. Looking is not just HBO’s Boys, then — Patrick is 29, Agustín is 31, Dom is 39, and they’re all somehow supporting themselves in one of America’s priciest cities. If anything, Looking is HBO’s Men — and it has the facial hair to prove it.

One episode in, Looking is already a lock for Hairiest Show On Television. (There’s an Emmy for that, right?) As beard after beard whizzed by on my TV screen, I felt like I was witnessing Sons Of Anarchy coming out of the closet. Either HBO is trying to keep costs of the show down by banning razor blades on set or Looking is the first TV show in history attempting to appeal exclusively to users of the Scruff app. (It worked.) And yeah, I get that this show is set in San Francisco, and that even if it wasn’t, facial hair is kind of a thing right now, but seriously — there are so many beards! Aside from Jonathan Groff’s clean-shaven Patrick, everyone on this show is hidden under layers of fur. Thus I think my favorite character is Lauren Weedman’s Doris, mainly because I can see her face when she’s talking.

Curious as to why Looking seemed to have such a thing against shaving, I stumbled across a photo of series creator Michael Lannan, which suddenly explained everything.

So, yes, the facial hair on parade is my problem, we can agree. In its initial outing, Looking does get a few things right. It isn’t as drenched in sex as we might have expected from the network that airs Girls and Game Of Thrones. Gay men have enough sex thrown at them as it is, because sex sells. Title aside, it’s nice that Looking doesn’t immediately feel the urge to appeal to the lowest common denominator — there are not really any cheap thrills to be found here (though there likely will be at some point, let’s be real). We had the shallow and soapy Queer As Folk for that. Looking is a little more now, a little more contemporary — it’s a much more diverse cast than Queer As Folk‘s lily white ensemble, though star Jonathan Groff is about as white bread as they come. As in last year’s film C.O.G. (based on a David Sedaris story), he’s a smart but socially awkward guy who hails from the upper crust, unable to shed the shackles of parental expectation. In C.O.G., Groff’s character was condescending and abrasive; here, he’s just kind of… there.

That’s the main problem I had with Looking (besides the beards). It doesn’t do anything too wrong, but by the end of the episode, I wasn’t sure I liked or even connected with any of these characters. Granted, this is a half-hour long pilot, and you can only expect so much. Agustín and Frank have a spontaneous threesome, which is a predictable and unexciting development for a gay couple that is moving toward making a larger commitment to one another. I guess that’s fine, but so far we have zero investment in them as a couple, so it doesn’t seem to matter either way. Meanwhile, Dom is nearing forty and growing frustrated with the fact that he’s still a waiter and the gap between himself and his intended sexual partners is widening to the point that a cute co-worker shrugs off his advances. Looking might eventually use Dom’s character to explore the arrested development of many gay men — what happens when middle age finally hits and you find yourself still living the same life you had at 25. But it isn’t there yet.

And what can we make of Patrick? One episode in, he’s still a bit of an anomaly. It’s not quite clear why he’s even hanging around Agustín or Dom, since their friendship is the least-explored aspect of the show. None of these guys seem to have much in common, but surely we’ll see more of that in future episodes. (By and large, though, gays of a feather flock together.) Patrick half-seriously attempts a hookup in a public park, scours OKCupid for his next true love (if he has one lazy eye, that might be okay), attends the engagement party of an ex he probably still has some feelings for, and goes on a bad first date with a high-on-his-horse oncologist.

Patrick’s date ends up dismissing him because he’s immature and not serious enough about a relationship, and maybe we’re supposed to read that as Patrick’s shortcoming — he did unwisely mention that cruising incident in the park — but the guy he’s out with is such a bore, we certainly don’t feel like Patrick’s missing out on anything. Who asks if someone is “driving disease-free” within the first few minutes of a conversation? (Or at all, using those words?) Who expects a 29-year-old to be ready to commit before the first date’s even over? Some wonder at how Patrick could be attractive, educated, and reasonably successful without ever finding himself in a serious relationship that outlasted a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but this is actually quite common for a young gay man in an urban location.

Through a chance encounter via public transportation with an aspiring hairdresser (please, let him eventually trim away some of Looking‘s excess hair!), we learn that Patrick has likely spent his time “looking” in the wrong places — he’s gone after guys who are just like him, when apparently he should have been looking on BART in a rougher part of town. Richie, played by Raúl Castillo, will be in every episode of Looking‘s first season, so we know this relationship is heading somewhere, but I wish the interplay between them had had a little more chemistry. So Patrick takes a chance on a scruffy Latino — so what? He’s already friends with one. From the title, we might assume that Looking is attempting to explore the brave new world of online dating and hookups, but it doesn’t really. We don’t actually get a sense of what any of these guys are “looking” for. Dom Facebook stalks his supposedly violent ex-boyfriend; Agustín and Frank have a threeway and then wonder if they’re one of “those” couples, with a shrug; Patrick meets a dull, rich jerk on OKCupid and then has a chance encounter in the real world with the flirtatious Richie.

I’m glad that Looking isn’t all about quick and meaningless sex, because we’ve seen enough of that elsewhere, and it’s about time other aspects of gay life were explored with the casual attitude of a show like Girls. It’s about time for a show that doesn’t try too hard to be “that splashy new gay show” or position itself as a political statement. No AIDS, no DOMA, no questioning, no coming out of the closet. This is a show about people — people who are gay, that’s all — and though they probably look just fine naked (I’m sure we’ll find out before season’s end), we do not have a poster full of abs as our primary motivation for watching it. All that is admirable, and it’s the reason why I’ll continue watching Looking for the foreseeable future.For now, though, these characters are not the reason I’ll continue watching, maybe because in trying to make these gay men so relatable, Lannan really just made them ordinary. To Dom I want to say, “Grow up and stop talking to your ex!” To Agustín and Frank I want to say, “Maybe try the commitment first without having a threesome?” Patrick I was to shake and say, “Why are you out with this lame guy if he’s not even buying your wine? Can’t you do better?!” These are not particularly compelling conflicts, and the show is not funny or unique enough to get away with its characters being such obstacles to themselves in the way that Girls pulls this off. Groff is a fine actor, but both here and in C.O.G., he’s come off a little too smug and self-satisfied for me to really feel any sympathy for him. I’m not really on Patrick’s side yet, and that’s a bit of a problem.

Looking is sometimes written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who brought us the fantastic film Weekend, which is what gave me higher-than-expected hopes for a show called Looking. (Because I guess HBO’s Wanna Fuck? seemed a little too forward?) That movie explored a casual encounter between two (scruffy) men that, in a short amount of time, quickly developed into something more — and that “something more” is sorely missing from Looking thus far. As of now, Looking hasn’t said anything particularly new or novel about gay relationships in the 21st century; it’s fine, but I wouldn’t call it funny or moving or all that much fun. Every episode contains the word “looking” — future episode titles hint at a mixed bag, including “Looking For Uncut,” “Looking For $220/Hour,” and “Looking In The Mirror.” I hope that it goes further toward developing these characters and strays away from the salacious. I hope that it avoids the expected pitfalls and predictable tropes of so much gay entertainment. And I really hope that, in an episode not too far from now, someone decides to pick up a razor.

“Looking” is just an updated term for “cruising,” after all, and it’d be nice if not every gay show had to be about that. Some gay men may use “looking?” as shorthand for sex, but like a wham-bam-thank-you-man in the park, such crude encounters are growing antiquated. Which is not to say that casual sex itself is a thing of the past — just that it’s no longer relegated to back corners of dark clubs and steamy saunas. We can use our words — more than just one — to find whatever we’re “looking” for. Not everyone does, I know.

So last night, I had a casual encounter with a new HBO series. He was decent-looking, if a little too hairy for my taste, but I was willing to overlook that. The conversation was fine, less scintillating than I’d like, but not as stilted and forced as it could be. He had an okay personality, but unremarkable. I saw some potential, but not a whole lot to get excited about. I think I’ll see him again at least once, just to see if it gets at any better. I’m definitely not ready to commit yet. I’m intrigued and open to possibilities, but not fully satisfied — as usual, I’m “looking” for more.

*

Sup?

U looking for now?

Hello?

Dude?

U there?

For a show that’s not terribly exciting, Looking sure has generated a lot of scintillating conversation.

HBO’s new half-hour drama premiered last week with a lot of buzz and a decidedly mixed reception. Some found it up to snuff with HBO’s other properties, a refreshingly low-key look at a small segment of gay San Francisco. Others thought it was a snore. I was on the fence — relieved that it wasn’t just a soapy, sexed-up revamp of Queer As Folk, but also underwhelmed by the half-baked characters and their quarter-baked storylines.

The internet was jam-packed with commendations and criticism of the show, which is amusing because a series about heterosexuals dating and bantering in such a muted way would receive no attention at all. The real debate around Looking is in asking the question, “Are we ready to be bored by gays yet?”

Episode 2, “Looking For Uncut,” decides to liven things up a bit from “Looking For Now.” We get our first semi-explicit sex scene in grand, gratuitous premium cable fashion. There is discussion of ass-licking and uncut penises. Also, in an early scene, the guys go up a really big hill in their car, and then go down really fast. Exhilarating stuff here.

I’m being snarky. “Looking For Uncut” stays on the same course set by the pilot, for better or worse. Early on, there’s some light banter between the three central characters, who I still don’t entirely buy as a trio of gay buddies — for some reason, I can buy that the various pairs of them would be friends, but not all three of them together. Their dynamic feels a little too forced — for whatever reason, I’m failing to see the similarities and the bond between them. As Augustin moves out to Oakland, Patrick and Dom chatter about Agustin and Frank’s threeway and question whether or not monogamy is possible (not just in the gay community, but for all humans) before they break off into their separate storyline spheres and abandon Augustin in the quiet tedium of Oakland.

“Looking For Uncut” has one Latino man moving out of Patrick’s life just as another is moving in. I wish Looking had given some more time to actually developing some connection between Patrick and Augustin, because while Patrick is supposedly broken up at losing his roommate, Looking‘s audience hasn’t really invested in the relationship between these guys yet, even if we are engaged in the three as individuals. (And that is only true for some of us.) The scenes featuring all three of these guys are somehow the least convincing, while their interactions outside of each other are more grounded in reality. Dom’s relationship with Doris is a hell of a lot more convincing than his friendship with Patrick; Augustin and Patrick have a friendly phone chat that gets it more or less right, but it still falls short for me. (But is the threeway dynamic of the show’s leads working for everyone else?)

Instead, the main story follows Patrick as he heads out on his first real date with Richie, the scrappy Latino he met by happenstance on the train. (Who may or may not still think he’s an oncologist named Benjamin.) The date with Richie follows the exact same trajectory as last week’s date with Dr. Benjamin — Patrick drinks too much, makes a frankly sexual comment anyone should know better than to bust out on a first date, and the evening abruptly ends with Patrick being told by the gentleman in question that they’re “looking for different things.” Maybe this is to make a point about how Patrick’s bad dates are a pattern, how there’s really no difference between a stick-in-the-mud doctor and a charming hair stylist in training when Patrick’s just going to get drunk and run his mouth anyway. (Patrick, the problem is you.) But also, it kind of just feels like lazy writing.

Patrick and Richie’s date is more interesting than last week’s with Benjamin, because at least Richie is a reasonably appealing person who might be worth Patrick’s time, and Richie’s discomfort when Patrick laughs at seeing his (circumcised) penis is entirely justified. (No matter the reason, no one wants the removal of their underwear to be met with a chuckle.) The date is sufficiently real, just awkward enough for us to know it’s not going that well while the characters are still willing to see how the night plays out.

Yes, this week, Looking takes us out on a mediocre date and even gets us into the bedroom, though we’re not really sure we want to be there. As often happens in life, it’s hard to tell yet if the tiny spark of chemistry between Patrick and Richie is romantically promising or fleeting and fading as they get to know each other. This aspect of the series is done reasonably well — but unless Jonathan Groff is playing Patrick as having a minor case of Asperger’s, his cluelessness and naivete are awfully hard to buy at times. Patrick’s big story this week is trying something new — not just a non-Caucasian, less educated guy from a very different background, but also an uncut penis. And even if we are to buy that Patrick has never seen (and practically never heard of) such a thing, is this ever such a big deal? It feels more like a rejected Charlotte story for Sex & The City than one fit for a gay San Franciscan pushing thirty. I’m not saying Looking needs to push the envelope too far, but the fact that this episode is titled “Looking For Uncut” signals that the writers thought they were being daring and naughty. Is it, though? Even the women of Sex & The City probably would have thought this debate was beneath them.

The underlying problem is not the lack of risque gay sex, though — it’s the inconsistency of Patrick’s character. He’s ostensibly the prude, but is he really? Just how much experience has he had? It might make sense if we established that he’d been in a long term relationship for the past eight years and thus off the market, but his longest relationship is less than six months! He’s 29! What (and who) has he been doing all this time? And why doesn’t he know that he should keep his cruising in the park and internet research on uncut Latin cocks to himself, at least until a second date? It feels like the writers have yet to get a grasp on this character (or maybe it’s Groff’s take on him). It’s interesting that Patrick is willing to take Richie for a test drive as a potential fuck buddy, but still can’t think of him as anything more of a hookup, because he’s not the type he typically goes for; but again, Looking is just grazing these issues rather than truly confronting them.

Regardless, nothing terribly dramatic or exciting happens between Patrick and Richie, so critics who find Looking boring still have plenty to complain about. The episode ends on a comedic note as Groff wolfs down a squishy bowl of homemade mac and cheese (while claiming it’s a salad… a kale salad… with chicken), which is funny in a broader way than most of the show’s sporadic, understated humor. (It might behoove Looking to continue in this direction, since the dramatic end of things has been such a non-starter.)

Meanwhile, Augustin’s big scene is a night on the couch with Frank, eating pizza and watching YouTube videos. (Yes, that’s seriously all that happens.) Frank wants to hang Augustin’s unicorn artwork in their new home; Augustin does not. (Oh, the drama!) We have now come to the point in pop culture when gays interior decorating is a legitimate C story. So… rejoice? Augustin’s storyline is clearly veering into the vicinity of being bored with a domestic, committed suburban life in Oakland, yet as with all of Looking‘s storylines thus far, it’s really only dipping a toe in and testing the water, as if to say, “Yeah, we might get around to actually exploring that in an episode or two. For now, please enjoy this absence of conflict.” At the moment, this is a mere suggestion of a future storyline, and a rather wishy-washy one. You’d think last week’s threeway would come after the subplot about Augustin and Frank moving in together, and Augustin craving more excitement. This week, it’s just redundant.

So that’s two out of three storylines this week that culminate in food. Thank god for Dom.

Dom is the most promising of Looking‘s trio so far, if only because he’s a shade more fucked up than Patrick or Augustin. He meets up with his formerly methed-out ex, who is now doing well for himself selling real estate in LA (and drinking Refresh tea in lieu of caffeine). He’s still a douche bag, and by the end of the episode Dom seems to have made progress in actually getting over him — which is good, because we don’t need a long, drawn-out arc between Dom and this “meth-head motherfucker.”

Dom’s telling-off of Ethan is the most “TV-ish” moment on Looking yet — something actually happened! Yelling and conflict! Drama! It’s the supposed closing-off of a loose end in a show that otherwise is reluctant to truly begin storylines, let alone finish them. In “Looking For Uncut,” Dom arranges a Grindr hookup (after an uncomfortably long stare at his intended partner’s picture, probably the longest anyone has ever looked at a single Grindr profile) with Alex, a downstairs neighbor. It’s a reasonably graphic and totally unnecessary sex scene, announcing Looking‘s arrival in HBO’s tawdry pantheon of series that show us sex because it’s premium cable and they fucking can.

Less expected is the end of the sequence, where Dom and Doris make fun of Alex while he sings Wicked show tunes in their shower. Why is he showering at Dom’s if he lives downstairs? When did Doris arrive, and why isn’t her presence more uncomfortable for all three parties? How long was this hookup, anyway? Six hours? None of this is plausible, but at least it’s an appearance by Doris, who always seems like she’s about to retreat to her bedroom to write a think piece criticizing these characters for their stupid choices and immature behavior. (Basically, she’s me.) Doris the smartest character on the show, the only one of these people who is truly self-aware. It’s strange and potentially troubling that the most dynamic figure on this series about gay men is the straight woman, but let’s just embrace it. Looking‘s prescription for success: more Doris. Have her interact with Patrick and Augustin. Have her tell them what they’re doing wrong. Or, whatever, just let me do it.

Even moreso this time around, Looking feels like an instructional video for heterosexuals whose exposure to gays thus far has been limited to salons, Virgin America flights, and Ryan Murphy series; we debate monogamy versus open relationships, chatter about penises, witness a Grindr hookup, and tag along on the dance floor for an awkward date at a gay club. That about covers it, right? (But wait, over here we have some gays eating pizza and watching YouTube, too, so they’re just like us.) In its broadest strokes, “Looking For Uncut” feels shallow and too specifically calibrated, especially in comparison to the pilot; even when individual scenes play well, as a whole it doesn’t hang together. There’s nuance and wit in little moments, but the overall concept isn’t so clever. It’s ironic that a show about looking for one’s place in the world is also still searching for its own purpose.

Compare and contrast to last night’s Girls, which has had the advantage of three seasons now to find its footing, and in a way is still yearning to find its voice with every new episode, because it so constantly shakes our expectations. Girls is not a flawless or fully satisfying series, but even in its missteps, it is challenging of TV norms and thought-provoking. Last night’s episode centered on the death of a supporting character, Hannah’s editor David, who went completely off the rails last week at her birthday party. The episode (tellingly titled “Dead Inside”) was willfully callous as Hannah had a purely selfish reaction to David’s demise, without feeling even a drop of sadness for anyone but herself. Most shows would ease up at the end and let their heroines give in to tears, but “Dead Inside” doubles-down by having Hannah fake a cry for her boyfriend, recycling a sob story his sister made up to test whether or not Hannah had a compassionate bone in her body. (She doesn’t, apparently.) It’s actually rather chilling, which is not a reaction I quite expected from Girls.

Lena Dunham revels in making Hannah nearly impossible to like, and this is her least sympathetic episode yet. Clearly Dunham knows what she’s doing — she’s been egging on critics since the beginning, many of whom missed the point early on and thought they were supposed to like Hannah Horvath. But no. “Dead Inside” goes a step further by making all of its titular girls hardened in their reactions to mortality — Shoshanna shrugs off a high school friend’s death in a car accident because it improved her social standing, while Jessa pretends to lend a sympathetic ear but has forgotten Shoshonna’s would-be woe a minute later. Adam’s sister Caroline makes up that sappy story about a disease-ridden cousin to test Hannah capability to feel for Adam, then laughs off her coolness.

Interestingly, the boys of Girls all feel much more deeply on the subject — Adam, Ray, and even Laird have “appropriate” emotional responses, while the girls are all numb. Is this where we are now? Dunham might be suggesting that the men and women of her generation have switched places from their traditional gender roles, and now it’s hipster twentysomething males who wear their hearts on their sleeves, while women have developed a thicker skin. Surely there’s at least some truth to that, and where but Girls has such an observation been made? (It’s like an extension of the gender politics of The Hunger Games, but that’s another discussion for another time.)

In this episode, at least, Girls has a distinct point of view — something explicit and unconventional to say. You could argue that Dunham (and co-writer Judd Apatow) make the point too bluntly, but it’s near-impossible not to be challenged by it. You’re forced to mull it over. Looking is, by nature, a different beast; the world may not be ready for a gay show that’s as challenging to the norm as Girls is, and that’s okay. But it would be nice if Looking had a point of view, or a premise, or at least more insight into its characters.

“Looking For Uncut” is a step down from the pilot — not a steep one, but also not headed in the right direction. Like Ethan, the writers of this show are substituting Refresh tea for coffee when what this show really needs is a jolt of caffeine. The pilot “Looking For Now” may have been slightly underwhelming to those with high expectations, but it was also more at ease with itself than “Looking For Uncut,” which may be trying too hard to please too many audiences, thus pleasing no one at all. Watching both episodes for a second time made me appreciate the pilot more, which had a lot of subtle smartness bubbling under the surface. “Looking For Uncut” circumcises away all that gentle ambiguity and amiable breeziness. No foreskin here, folks. What you see is what you get.

So last night, I had a second date with Looking, and I can’t say I didn’t leave it a little disappointed. He repeated himself on the same issues we talked about last week, and even though he made me laugh a couple times and things got a little more sexual this time and he’s even less hairier than last week, which I really appreciate, I’m really starting to wonder where this is all going. I’m not sure he’s being perfectly honest with me, and starting to question how comfortable he is with being gay — like maybe he’s afraid that if he’s truly himself, he’ll isolate straight people. Other people seem to think Looking is sweet and charming and totally appealing, though, so why isn’t it clicking? Am I being too critical? Am I doing that thing where I’m not ready to open up to him yet, in case I commit and get burned down the road? After Looking and I ended things on an awkward note, I went to hang out with some Girls, who made me think and feel so much more — what the hell does that mean?

I mean, it’s not that I don’t like him — it’s just that I was expecting something different. I wanted us to connect more. I wanted to feel like he and I were like the same person. My expectations are always so high, though, and if we have a reasonably good time together, does it even matter? Can’t I just enjoy myself without picking apart his every flaw? Or should I be wary of wasting my time? There are so many other shows out there that could be better for me… but I don’t want to just give up after two episodes! Am I over-thinking it? What’s wrong with Looking? Why isn’t he just perfect and amazing right out of the gate?

Oh god — is it me?

No. No. It’s Looking. Let’s see how he does next week.

*

“I did it for me. I liked it.”

And so it ends.

Can I now safely say that Breaking Bad was the best TV drama there ever was? Not without watching a whole lot of other TV dramas I haven’t caught up with yet, and not without stirring up a heated debate. There are a good number of other series that would vie for that title — the closest contender being The Sopranos, probably, in terms of popularity, critical kudos, and game-changiness. Unlike that series, Breaking Bad had a modest beginning, capturing the attention of only a handful of television viewers (including myself). It took three or four years before I could say, “Breaking Bad is the best show on TV right now” without being met with a blank stare.

Over the past six years, though, it has developed into a major pop culture staple — not just a flash in the pan, I think, but one that’ll be here to stay for years to come. There are all kinds of Breaking Bad memes out there; enough merchandise you’d think Walter White’s saga was a Disney movie; and if you happened to glance at Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter last night, you probably had your fix of chatter about this finale.

Best show ever? Who knows? Who can say, yet, so definitively? There will never be a consensus. This season, though, I’d venture to say that Breaking Bad achieved a level of pop culture relevance not even enjoyed by The Sopranos — you’ll see more Breaking Bad Halloween costumes out there than you would ever see from The Sopranos. This is, in part, because the show is viewable by more people thanks to Netflix and its home on AMC rather than HBO, and also because social media has made sharing our thoughts on pop culture a much bigger “thing” than it was a decade ago.

But it’s also because Breaking Bad is, like, a really good show, you guys.

Before I go overboard with my praise and suggest Walter White’s face be added to Mt. Rushmore, let’s talk “Felina,” the series finale. (A brief Google search uncovers that “Felina” is an anagram of “Finale,” and “FeLiNa” contains the periodic symbols for iron, lithium, and sodium.) In my eyes, Breaking Bad has essentially had two series finales already — “Ozymandias,” the climactic episode in which Walt lost everything he’d been fighting for all this time, and last week’s “Granite State,” which saw everyone reaping what they sowed in a seriously bummed out state of mind.

It was a clever tactic on Vince Gilligan’s part, because this way, everyone gets the Breaking Bad finale they needed. You want nail-biting suspense and jaw-dropping moments? “Ozymandias” has that in spades! Do you prefer grim drama and nearly unbearable loneliness to punish these characters for their wicked ways? Try “Granite State”! It has gloom and doom to spare! Or maybe you’d like some Tarantino-style revenge killing with a dollop of redemptive heroism in the end? If so, then “Felina” is the finale for you.

A tweak or two and either “Ozymandias” or “Granite State” could have sent Breaking Bad out fittingly. They were both terrific episodes in very different ways. But they also would have ended the show with a somewhat sour taste in our mouths — Hank freshly killed, the (even badder) bad guys winning, Walt facing the music for his crimes without any upside whatsoever. All for naught. That’s all fair, from a narrative standpoint, but would we really be satisfied? In its final hour, Breaking Bad lets up on the misery porn and allows itself to be fun again, having punished Walt, Jesse, Skyler, and the gang enough for one lifetime. Now it’s time to punish the people who really, really deserve it.

It’s not like Skyler and Marie are suddenly doing high-kicks in sequined outfits while Flynn warbles a ditty about the most important meal of the day, but compared to the last few episodes? “Felina” is like an episode of “Glee” next to “Ozymandias.” In the series finale, the people we want to die do and those we don’t, don’t. There’s some fan service here, but just the right amount — it satisfies without feeling like a cheapo cop out, a betrayal of everything that came before. Breaking Bad is not, never has been, and never wanted to be The Wire; though it has gone to very dark, dirty, and despairing places, what separates it is the lightness it manages to find between them. The show has always found a quirky, dry sense of humor even amidst shocking squalor and depravity; you wouldn’t think it’s funny, but it is.

Breaking Bad is many things, but above all, it’s a good time. To end on a pitch black note would not exactly be wrong, but it would drastically alter the way we felt about the show after it’s over. Imagine it ending with “Ozymandias.” Now imagine it ending with “Granite State.” The entire series feels different with each of those endings, right? After seeing “Felina,” I can say that it all feels of a piece; the tone of this last episode is about the same as the tone of the first. In fact, “Felina” may be the lightest hour of Breaking Bad we’ve seen in ages — which I know is a strange thing to say about an episode in which multiple people are gunned down and the final shot is of the hero’s dead or dying body. But really! “Felina” ends on the lightest note Breaking Bad could have ended on.

That is, without Hank popping up with a wink and a “gotcha!”, a reveal that Mike, Andrea, Drew Sharp, and the rest really did just take a trip to Belize, and that aforementioned musical number about breakfast.

Following last week’s distinctly cinematic “Granite State,” “Felina” is most definitely an hour of television, wrapping up (almost) all loose threads methodically and episodically. We watch as Walt makes his way through those flash-forwards (which are now the present) and check in with significant surviving characters like Skyler, Marie, Flynn, Badger, and Skinny Pete. The (very) cold open is a clever and foreboding bit of Breaking Badness, as police come to a stop outside the snow-covered truck Walt is hiding in… and then merely drive off again. (Snow wouldn’t have been able to save his ass in New Mexico.)

It’s another depiction of Walt’s curious luck, which allows him to escape near-catastrophic predicaments but only for a matter of time, until he is placed in some even graver danger; Walter White is the poster boy for that old cliche: “Out of the frying pan and into the fire.” This time, though, it’s pretty obvious (since it’s the final episode) that we’re about to see Walter White’s last stand. Luck is on his side for only a matter of days now.

Walt gets himself a machine gun and then heads home to collect his ricin, as we’ve seen. (Carol is unfortunately a no-show this time around, however.) We get an unnecessary and somewhat awkward flashback to the pilot, which may have just been a way for Dean Norris to make an appearance — it steered dangerously close to a “clips episode” moment, something Breaking Bad should be above. (I’m rarely a fan of flashbacks to scenes we’ve already seen that exist primarily to tell us what a character is thinking.) From there, Breaking Bad is officially moving forward in time after our first flash-forward in “Live Free Or Die” more than a year ago.

Posing as a New York Times reporter, Walt finds his way to Gretchen and Elliot’s new mansion in a masterful sequence that is also quite narratively tidy. Last week’s cameo from Gretchen and Elliot was a major surprise to most Breaking Bad fans, motivating Walt’s decision not to give himself up to the police at the last minute. We knew he was returning to New Mexico with some heavy artillery (the machine gun) and some light artillery (the ricin) — would one of these be used on the Grey Matter moguls? It was somewhat unlikely, since Walt has never killed in cold blood with such premeditation; he’s not pure evil. Heisenberg going all homicidal like that would have been a bit of a shark jump.

Instead, it was likely that Gretchen and Elliot’s appearance merely motivated Walt to return to New Mexico to reclaim his legacy somehow; his ego demanded that he go out on a Heisenberg-y note rather than as a sickly old man in a remote cabin in the woods. We had no guarantee that the Schwartzes would appear in the series finale. But as it turns out, they did. And Walt’s reason for visiting them was more practical than we anticipated.

Before we learn what it is, though, Breaking Bad teases us brilliantly, demonstrating exactly why this series has been such a fascinating ride. Here we are, in the series finale, and we have no idea what the protagonist will do to these people. If he pulled out a gun and shot them point blank, we’d be surprised… but we’d believe it. Even this late in the game, Breaking Bad can tease us with whether or not the main character is a homicidal maniac, which is impressive. Walt creeping around the Schwartz house is as unsettling as anything you’ll see in a horror movie because it’s really not clear what the fuck he’s doing there; he doesn’t even have to make a threat to be completely terrifying. Apparently, by reputation, he’s achieved that. Gretchen and Elliott have the same reaction as neighbor Carol at the mere sight of him. The word has spread — Heisenberg is bad news.

And yet — this is a weak middle-aged man with just a matter of months to live. Like Gus Fring, he’s intimidating because we know what he’s capable of. And the Heisenberg name has gotten far bigger than the man, since these days Walt is suspected of far more malice than he actually intends. The reason for his visit turns out to be much more linear than imagined — at the end of “Granite State,” he tried and failed to send money to Flynn; he saw Gretchen and Elliott on TV and thought, “Hmm… I know a way I can get him the money!” But we all thought he was there for a more nefarious purpose, didn’t we?

In this sequence, Breaking Bad has its cake and eats it too. Viewers love Heisenberg as a villain. The last few episodes have been leaning toward a more redeemable, less reckless Walter White, one who refused to murder his DEA agent brother-in-law, fought to save Jesse for as long as he could, tried to clear Skyler’s name with the police, and safely returned baby Holly to her mother before running off cross-country. Of course, it’s always possible that he snapped and decided to kill all his old enemies, regardless of their innocence, which is why this suspense sequence remains full of foreboding. In the end, though, this is a scene depicting a sick man leaving money for his son… a sweet, well-intentioned gesture that we’re not entirely sure won’t end in a bloodbath.

After requesting their help in setting up a trust for Flynn, thus ensuring he gets a piece of the pie after all, Walt waves his arms in a genius Heisenberg-y moment and suddenly, Gretchen and Elliot have lasers trained on them. His threat is utterly convincing, both to the Schwartzes and to us — even though, moments later, we learn that Badger and Skinny Pete are the “snipers.” It’s all just another Walter White con. The scene satisfies the piece of us that revels in Heisenbergian badassery while ultimately allowing Walt to remain the good guy in this final hour. Not an easy feat, but one Breaking Bad has always excelled at.From there, Walt crashes Lydia and Todd’s tea party, a surprise that neither is too keen on. We expect Lydia to freak out when anything looks even mildly suspicious, but now Todd, too, has turned on his former mentor. Lydia’s tea with soy milk and Stevia makes a notable appearance — the Stevia might as well have spelled out “R.I.P., Lydia!” as she stirred it into the cup. It’s so obviously the ricin going into the tea that it can’t possibly be the ricin going into the tea. It is, though — as we learn at the end of the episode, with Lydia feeling a bit sniffly as Walt explains why.

If I have one gripe with “Felina,” it might be this — Breaking Bad is usually so masterful with misdirection, it’s strange that Lydia was killed so obviously. Walt almost pulled the old ricin/Stevia switcheroo way back in “Gliding Over All” last year; you’d think they wouldn’t return to that same old well a year later. I thought it was a red herring — that the ricin would pop up elsewhere after we’d been faked out about the tea. But like I said, “Felina” is a fan service episode, and so many fans were waiting for Lydia’s death by Stevia that, I suppose, it had to be done. I found it mildly disappointing, along with the way Walt spelled it out to her (and us) on the phone. Surely there could have been some surprise there.

Notice how we’ve gotten this far in the finale and not seen any of the core cast members besides Walt? Now we finally get to Skyler, who has relocated to some rather, um, modest digs… and, happily, reconnected with her sister. Marie calls to warn Skyler that Walt is back in town, and we see that despite her grief over Hank’s death, Marie hasn’t changed in the slightest. She’s still a busybody. She still believes that the forces of good will triumph over the forces of Heisenberg. (Another bit of fan service: Marie confuses neighbors Carol and Becky, which many Breaking Bad fans also did when Carol appeared in “Blood Money.”) Trouble is: Walt is already standing in Skyler’s kitchen.

After ensuring his money will get to his son, Walt now gives Skyler the gift of a lottery ticket leading to her brother-in-law’s remains. (Gee, thanks, honey!) He thinks she can use it as leverage to get herself out of whatever legal trouble she’s still in, and while that probably isn’t as enticing to the DEA as other leverage she’s possessed, it may be enough. It’s all Walt has to offer at this point.

The scene is reasonably brief but also on-point; it’s an interaction between married people who know they’re done with each other. There’s obviously still some affection here — even, I think, on Skyler’s end. (She doesn’t run screaming out of the place, at least.) What’s done is done, and Skyler seems to know that Walt finally has his head and his heart in the right place… or at least, the rightest place they can be after all that’s happened. Walt finally admits that his actions were selfish, motivated by ego and greed, and not for the family. Apparently all that time alone in New Hampshire taught him something after all. It was only getting away with murder that helped him realize he actually didn’t want to get away with it at all.

It’s surprising to see Skyler takes such a small role in the finale — though she’s had plenty to do this season, and certainly quite a showcase for Anna Gunn’s Emmy-winning acting chops. Flynn doesn’t even get a line of dialogue in this episode, instead observed from afar as he comes home from school — but wasn’t enough said last week? Once you’ve said “die already!” to your father, where can you go from there? I enjoyed the fact that we see only as much of Flynn as Walt does; Walt has sinned too greatly to earn more. Flynn is lost to him.

I’m slightly saddened that Marie didn’t have a larger role in the last few episodes, though; she was always essentially an accessory for Hank, not exactly a pivotal character. But still. That’s probably why I wanted her to have a bigger moment, something unexpected. Every other character — even Flynn — got a scene or two of reckoning and closure, one that really cut to the heart of that character. Marie didn’t even get any screen time to grieve for her presumed-dead husband. I wanted a little something more from her at some point in these last three episodes; instead, all of Walt’s former family plays a pretty minor role in “Felina.” Just as they play a pretty minor role in his life these days.

And then comes the big showdown, a scene featuring the show’s two key figures (who haven’t spent much time together this season). Walt deliberately steps into the trap Lydia and Todd set for him, finding himself on the other end of Uncle Jack’s gun just as Hank was a couple episodes back. This time, however, Walt manages to buy some time, identifying Jesse as Uncle Jack’s “partner” and setting the old Nazi off in a fit of prideful rage to retrieve the prisoner.

Jesse has, at this point, been enslaved for the better part of a year — even seeing Walt can’t elicit much of a reaction from this ghost of a man. Walt pounces on Jesse, seeing how broken he is, feeling some of that old sympathy — and probably guilt, too, given that he’s the one responsible for these months of torment. The machine gun in his trunk pops up to conveniently wipe out Uncle Jack and all his men. It’s a bit of Breaking Bad magic that’s a little hard to buy if you think about it — so don’t. On this show, such things happen. Walt’s lucky, remember?

Todd escapes the shower of bullets, but not Jesse’s wrath. Andrea’s death and months of captivity are avenged as Jesse strangles Todd with his shackles, ensuring that Todd has served his last bowl of Americone Dream. A barely-alive Uncle Jack tries to negotiate with Walt, offering info about his money. Too little, too late — Hank’s death should have proven that that money is no last-minute life saver. As was done to Hank, Walt blows his head off mid-sentence, demonstrating that it’s finally no longer about the money for Walt. Lesson learned.

Walt passes Jesse the gun. Jesse raises it. Walt wants to die now, and wants Jesse to make it happen. Not much is said — it’s a minimal interaction, since most of us what needs to happen between these two has happened already. Suffice to say that in this episode, each man spares the other’s life, which is about the most kindness we can expect at this point. Jesse thinks it over and refuses, gets into a car, emitting crazed laughter and a howl of relief/disbelief as he heads for… Alaska? Or wherever Brock has been crashing? It’s pretty unclear what’s in Jesse Pinkman’s future, since he’ll surely face a lot of trouble as he tries to reestablish a life for himself. (Hooking back up with the Vacuum Cleaner Salesman is unlikely.) This way, it’s up to the audience to imagine an ending for Jesse, be it happy (playing father to the orphaned Brock in the Alaskan wilderness) or more realistic (prison). (Without Hank and Gomez around, is he still a wanted associate of Heisenberg, or has the trail gone cold?)

“Felina” is very much the Walter White Show, with the supporting cast appearing only briefly. We see mere glimpses of the fates of Marie, Flynn, Skyler, and Jesse. Where they end up — and how happy they can ever be — is up for debate.

The fate of Walter White, however, is far from ambiguous. After Jesse refuses to add one more death to his kill list, Walt takes a stroll down to Todd’s meth lab and dies of a bullet wound anyway. It’s a semi-heroic ending, as he has saved Jesse, taken out the remaining bad guys (who still posed a threat to his family), and finally stopped evading the cops. Nearly everything Walt does in “Felina” is “the right thing,” and that’s somewhat surprising after six years of watching Mr. Chips become Scarface, as was Vince Gilligan’s intent.

For such an atypical show, Breaking Bad ends, perhaps, a bit more typically than we expected. Walter White is redeemed rather than crucified. It’s the kind of ending we’ve seen in plenty of movies — a Hollywood ending. It’s not controversial or ambiguous by any means. It’s not perplexing or challenging. It’s one that’s meant to satisfy the largest number of people, the kind movie studios and TV networks aim for. Is that a good thing? Or did Breaking Bad owe it to its fans to remain unpredictable and unconventional right up until the bitter end?

Like I said, anyone who wanted Breaking Bad to end differently essentially got their wish in “Ozymandias” and “Granite State.” Vince Gilligan was probably smart to end on a high note, giving fans exactly what they were looking for. The bad guys die in an over-the-top explosion of payback violence, the protagonist sacrifices himself, the women and children are safe at home, and the sidekick rides off into the sunset. When you break it down this way, Breaking Bad turns out to be remarkably traditional, very black-and-white. The detail and nuance we saw along the way help it to stand out, but now that it’s one complete story, with this particular beginning and end, it doesn’t seem so daringly different after all.

And so it’s over. Breaking Bad fans are collectively saddened and satisfied. There’s a palpable disappointment in the air, because a great show went out with a bang and there’s nothing comparable out there to entertain us anymore. This series started strong and ended even better, with every single episode between providing an exemplary hour of television. It never hit a false note or took a wrong step — how many shows can say that? Even The Sopranos had at least one truly bad episode.

In ending this way, Breaking Bad feels more like a complete work than just about any other show I can think of —the episodes feel more like individual chapters of a book than hours of television. Vince Gilligan never had a crystal clear vision of the end, but it feels like he knew everything that was going to happen, every step of the way, for all 62 episodes. It’s one complete story. Iit’s a work of art. And now that we know how it ends, we’ll rewatch those episodes and perhaps see Walter White and his actions differently than we did the first time around. It’s not the story of a man becoming a monster — it’s the story of a man becoming a monster becoming a man again. That’s a more optimistic outlook than many of us were expecting, especially once Season Five went down such a dark path.

Like any work of art, Breaking Bad will take some time to process now that it’s complete. It has almost certainly raised the bar for TV drama — expect plenty of imitations popping up on other networks, none of them as good. Breaking Bad a unique entry into the pop culture canon, so let’s take a moment to be grateful that this dark and moody little show, populated by (then) little-known actors, managed to not only find an audience but also to become the talked-about show on TV. An Emmy winner, a game changer. And all the while, remaining true to its original vision.

It’s rare that TV — or, well, anything — is quite this good these days, but as long as we live in a world where Breaking Bad is possible, I’ll hold out hope and find a reason to go on, even if my heart is a little heavy after losing so many of my fucked up TV friends last night. This finale wasn’t quite Breaking Bad‘s strongest episode — I prefer unpredictable, gut-wrenching, “Ozymandias”-style drama — but it didn’t need to be. I’m satisfied that everyone else is satisfied. I’m glad that my favorite show of recent years became everybody else’s favorite, too. And I know that these characters will love on in the public consciousness for years to come.

We’ll grapple with Walter White’s actions and debate just how good or bad he really was, how weak he was, or how capable. Was he the legendary Heisenberg or the meek and pathetic Walter White? Was he heroic for saving his family and Jesse in the eleventh hour, or a devil for placing them in danger in the first place? There may not be any more episodes of Breaking Bad left, but this show isn’t over until you can rewatch all the episodes without asking such questions. It’s a rich enough series that it will be remembered long after its gone, its impact felt like a ripple effect. Walter White would certainly be pleased that his name will live on in this way.

Grade: A

*

And now it’s time to talk TV.

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, compared to the average American. The number of reality shows I watch regularly — or ever, unless I’m a captive audience — is zero. (Yes, this includes all housewives from any given location, dynasties related to any fowl, and anything that could make me hungry.) I don’t currently watch any network dramas — I gave Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a brief whirl, but only because Joss Whedon’s name was on it.

So am I the foremost person to put forth a definitive list of the best television of 2013? No, but I’m doing it anyway. And before you complain about their absences — I don’t watch The Good Wife. I’ve seen only the first two episodes of Scandal. I have yet to check out Masters Of Sex. And I have no interest in The Walking Dead. Have we covered your faves?

Still, I like to think that the cream of the crop pretty much rises up to wherever I am. If it’s really good, I’ll find it. I do subscribe to HBO, by the way, so you’ll find a disproportionate amount of their programming in my year-end list. (Then again, that’s true of most TV kudos. HBO is just good!)

So. From red weddings to blue meth, from black orphans to white girls in orange jumpsuits, here’s the best of 2013 on TV, according to me.

10. HELLO LADIES

Ladies first! (Since we’re going backward.) In the grand tradition of The Office, Community, Veep, The Comeback, and plenty of other recent comedies in which the protagonist is not wholly embraceable, here is Stephen Merchant’s comedy about an average guy (let’s call him a 5) who dreams of finding himself on the arm (and between the legs) of a perfect 10. To accomplish this lofty goal, gawky Englishman Stuart Pritchard will throw any and all of his pals under the bus — which nearly always ends up biting him in the ass.

Hello Ladies is a savvy satire about superficiality in Los Angeles, with Stuart and his actress roommate Jessica (Christine Woods) simultaneously struggling in their own ways for attention and affection from all the wrong sources. Neither is a wholly admirable character, as both are driven primarily by shallow goals to be the envy of their peers. But there’s something relatable and even slightly sympathetic about their egocentric behavior, since it really stems from insecurity. (It’s especially resonant for those of us familiar with the entertainment industry and drenched in LA culture.) The best of these moments might be the episode in which Stuart and Jessica hit up a prissy party in the hills, only to find themselves ousted once Jessica humiliates herself with an old tap-dancing routine and Stuart tells increasingly homophobic jokes that don’t land well with the gays in attendance.

The end of Season One gets particularly strong as Stuart and Jessica have a bonding moment just before each gets closer to achieving their dream (at least temporarily). Let’s hope HBO doesn’t pull a Comeback and decide to cancel another smart and awkwardly funny industry-centric comedy focusing on a self-centered, try-hard buffoon. Hello Ladies has all the ingredients to become one of the most sophisticated comedies on TV.

9. MAD MEN

From Ladies to Men. Was this Mad Men‘s very finest season? Perhaps not. But when is Mad Men ever less than great? Season Six saw Don Draper return to his philandering (with a neighbor lady played by Linda Cardellini), Peggy working under Ted instead of Don (in more ways than one), and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy as we move later into the 60s (and further away from the societal trappings and gender dynamics we began the show with). At this point, Don and Peggy and Joan and Roger and even Betty and Pete feel like old chums. It’s nice just to spend time with them, no matter what they say or do. These characters are so compellingly drawn, the actors so settled into these roles, that a little narrative meandering can be easily forgiven — and sometimes, totally welcome.

Mad Men mirrors real life better than almost any other show out there. People come and go the way they do in the world, not according to the sensational methods of prime time television. We seldom catch Mad Men being “written,” and in a way, that’s more true of Season Six than any other. There was no specific narrative momentum, with Peggy’s somewhat soapy flirtation with Ted providing the clearest season arc, while Don was in a hazy no man’s land story-wise, displaying some of his least sympathetic moments to date. (He really was pretty nasty to Sylvia.)

Season Six’s most distinctive episode was the offbeat “The Crash,” which found these men going literally mad for once, as the whole firm tripped out on a “stimulant” that left Ken tap-dancing and Don flashing back to his childhood in a whorehouse — just as his own kids were engaging in an equally trippy interaction with an elderly thief in their apartment. It was a clever way to shake things up in a season that, previously, had been treading some familiar waters. (But again, they’re such good waters… who cares?) 8. AMERICAN HORROR STORY: COVEN

Witches and zombies and minotaurs, oh my. A better title for this (or any) season of Ryan Murphy’s macabre miniseries would be American Horror Story: Everything But The Kitchen Sink. (But then he wouldn’t be able to include a demonic kitchen sink, too.) This season is only sporadically about a coven of witches (actually, two covens); it has also taken detours to explore a ghostly axe murderer, an order of witch hunters, and several forms of zombies.

Yes, it’s problematic the way the show keeps killing off characters as if it’s still shocking, only to predictably resurrect them the following week. Murphy has proven that anyone can an will be brought back from the dead (it’s not even that difficult!). Both in terms of story and character, the show is all over the map; as with many Murphy series, it seems the writers of different episodes have no contact with one another, making up the rules as they go along on an episode-by-episode basis. Don’t look for continuity anywhere in this witch’s brew.

Complaints aside, though, Coven is compulsively watchable, filled to the brim with campy performances, punchy one-liners, and gruesome water-cooler (or should that be cauldron?) moments. The acting and writing can be hit or miss, but a few performers always deliver — Emma Roberts as a bitchy young witch, Jessica Lange as a bitchy old witch, and Angela Basset as a bitchy black witch. (I specify that she’s black because Coven never lets us forget it. The show hits racial themes so hard, they must be borrowing Thor’s hammer.)

With Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad currently off-air, Coven is the closest thing to Event TV on the air at the moment — the rare show that must be watched live, lest you be spoiled. For better or worse, that means cliff-hangers and gotchas galore. In recent weeks, Coven has paled in comparison to its more cohesive early episodes, its plot sprawling, introducing new characters we didn’t need, since we started off with so many in the first place. Here’s hoping the series comes back strong in January to finish these bitches off with a bang.

7. BEHIND THE CANDELABRA

It doesn’t get any gayer than this. Steven Soderbergh has vented his frustration with studio movies — and understandably so. Behind The Candelabra was pitched as a theatrical release and roundly passed on before HBO picked up the slack. The film has two major stars and delves into the popular musician biopic genre — no-brainer, right? Though to be fair, it’s also one of the gayest movies I’ve ever seen, and it’s easy to see why no studios thought this would play well across the board.

But it’s fabulous and fantastic. Michael Douglas is Liberace, and oh, what a Liberace he is. The man won an Emmy for a performance that captures many of Lee’s eccentricities without devolving into caricature. His Liberace has a soul, even if it’s a rather dark soul for most of the story. And Matt Damon gives it his all as Liberace’s man-candy, Scott Thorson, who also hits some unsavory places over the course of this movie. Rob Lowe pops in for a hilariously over-the-top supporting role as Liberace’s plastic surgeon of choice — and he really does seem to be made of plastic. It’s fun to see these normally serious actors camping it up, yet it’s never condescending. That’s a hard balance to strike.

Behind The Candelabra is startlingly honest about the dark side of gay relationships (well, some gay relationships) in a time where pro-gay “they’re just like us!” / “we’re just like you!” messages are trendier. No, not every gay coupling will follow Lee and Scott’s tragic trajectory, but many of them did (minus many of the sequins and sparkles). Behind The Candelabra doesn’t make these famous figure more sympathetic than they need to be — they’re not martyrs. They’re vain, materialistic, flawed men whose lives are far from enviable, once you peek behind the curtain (or candelabra). It’s gay romance at its worst.

But the movie is Soderbergh at his best. The opulent visuals are to die for, while the end manages to be truly endearing despite the judgments we may have of Liberace’s shallow, self-idolizing lifestyle. If you somehow missed the TV movie event of the year, do yourself a favor and seek it out. It’s a lot of surface and a little bit of substance by design, but overall, it’s a good time.

6. THE GOLDBERGS

Believe it or not, the networks did the unthinkable this fall and released a whole bunch of completely watchable sitcoms. There’s the offbeat police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the oft-winning Trophy Wife, the odd-couple pairing of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Robin Williams in The Crazy Ones, and the amiable (but uncreatively titled) Michael J. Fox Show. (There’s also Mom, Dads, and Sean Saves The World, but the less said about them, the better.)

Are any of these must-watches? Probably not. But one diamond shines in the rough, and that’s The Goldbergs — which is kind of like a Jewish version of The Wonder Years.

In this case, the adult man flashing back to his past is Adam F. Goldberg (played by Sam Giambrone as a child, adult version voiced by Patton Oswalt). The show hews closely to Goldberg’s actual childhood in suburban Pennsylvania (obviously, not even their last name was changed). Goldberg’s actual home movies from the era (of which there are hundreds, apparently) are thrown in at the end to prove that, yes, his family really was this crazy.

The series follows the usual domestic hijinks of any sitcom, but in a funnier and more heartfelt way. Jeff Carlin and George Segal co-star as Adam’s father and grandfather, respectively, with Hayley Orrantia and Troy Gentile as his night-and-day siblings — she a popular girl, he a freak. The series’ MVP, though, is Bridesmaids’ Wendi McLendon-Covey, who provides most of the heart and laughs as the well-meaning but meddlesome matriarch. The eighties nostalgia works in the series’ favor, allowing it to be so much less cynical and canned than other sitcoms, which tend to wink at the audience. There’s nothing particularly ironic about this one — it wears its heart on its puffy, too-colorful track suit sleeve.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about The Goldbergs, except that it’s a fresh and likable network family comedy you can feel good about watching. Which, these days, actually is pretty remarkable. 5. GAME OF THRONES

Two words: red wedding. For anyone who hasn’t read George R.R. Martin’s books, it was the most shocking TV event of the year. Or the decade. Or maybe ever? Game Of Thrones has never been shy about killing off likable, popular characters — decapitating the ostensible hero near the end of the first season — but this reached a new level of brutality on episodic TV. The Starks were the closest thing to “heroes” we had, by far the most relatable characters in this sinister, pseudo-magical world. Plus, they’d already suffered the loss of patriarch Ned, so killing off so many more of them in one fell swoop? It’s merciless storytelling. (Seriously — haven’t these people been through enough?!?)

Game Of Thrones is a difficult series to critique. Raise a concern about a plot point that’s dragging, and someone is bound to tell you, “But it’s from the books!” The production values are so high, the language so flowery, that it’s easy to get lost and think that it’s your fault certain characters or scenes don’t connect. Still, there were storylines in Season Three we spent a lot of time on with little payoff. John Snow’s romance with Ygritte took up more screen time than it needed to, and I don’t care how many people tell me Bran Stark’s storyline is gearing up for something major — almost every one of his Season Three scenes was a snore. (And there were so many!) Westeros is populated by so many rich characters with such potential that it’s a shame to waste so much of an episode on filler. And, after the shocking events of “The Rains Of Castemere,” the season finale was (predictably) a bit of letdown.

Yet Season Three still had a number of highlights — the awkward engagements of Cersei and Tyrion (and their priceless reactions), the strange friendship (courtship?) between Jaime and Brienne (it’s always fun when a bad guy goes kinda good), and almost anything involving Daenerys or Margaery. (Plus any scene featuring Diana Rigg as bitchy old Olenna is an automatic winner.)

It takes a bold show to not only go through with the Red Wedding, but take it to an even further extreme (poor Talisa!). It was, quite frankly, a landmark TV moment that tested what extremes a TV series can even go to in terms of cruelty toward beloved characters (and the audience). Game Of Thrones isn’t the same show it was before that moment, yet we hear from those pesky book-readers that it’s only the beginning…

4. ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

The long-awaited return of Arrested Development was supposed to be Netflix’s big triumph of 2013, but instead, the buzzy Bluths were trumped by original series House Of Cards and Orange Is The New Black. I gave House Of Cards a try, but it couldn’t hold my interest; Orange Is The New Black, however, hooked me the way it hooked just about everyone else I know. Within a week, I’d devoured the whole first season and was left wanting more.

Orange Is The New Black could have gone wrong in so many ways; the very same ways Weeds started going wrong a few seasons in. (They share a creator, Jenji Kohan.) As in Weeds, we follow an upper-class white woman into a world we don’t typically see upper-class white women in, and watch as her polite personality conflicts with a harsher, meaner populace. This provides plenty of fun, particularly in the first few episodes, and Taylor Schilling’s performance as Piper is not to be overlooked. Yet it’s this show’s colorful supporting characters that truly make it must-stream TV — most are not “types” as we typically see in comedies (though Orange Is The New Black is a dramedy); they’re fully fleshed-out, even if they only have a few minutes of screen time.

Smartly, each episodes tends to focus on a supporting character whose history somewhat mirrors what’s going on in the present. There’s a rather sprawling collection of women in this penitentiary, the best of whom are Taystee (Danielle Brooks), Sophia (Laverne Cox), Lorna (Yael Stone), Daya (Dascha Polanko), Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) and Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba). Whoops, I just named half the cast, didn’t I? The supporting players of Orange Is The New Black truly do come from all walks of life, with a wild variety of races and sexual orientations that is probably unprecedented in any series. And yes, there are a couple potent male characters to provide an even balance.

If the show has a flaw, it’s in making the villains a little too big and broad — I’m thinking of Pennsatucky and Porn Stache, mainly. The tone of the series is nothing if not uneven, but somehow it all works. We laugh and yet we feel for these people. We’re invested in what happens to them.

To date, this is the internet’s best offering in terms of original content, proof that the future of TV is online — to hell with those pesky cable companies and their outrageously high prices. Orange Is The New Black isn’t like network TV at all, and isn’t trying to be; it’s not even exactly like cable. It is refreshingly, zestily original, which is exactly why it became such a sensation, and hopefully we’ll get more daring, out-of-the-box creations like it in the future. Out with the old, in with the New? Yes, please.

3. ORPHAN BLACK

It’s been a spell since American TV really nailed the thrill-a-minute suspense genre, but our neighbors to the north got it right with this one. Orphan Black is one part Alias, one part Dollhouse, and all parts amazing. Our heroine is Sarah Manning, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks orphan who encounters a woman named Beth who looks exactly like her — seconds before she jumps in front of a train. Sarah decides to assume this stranger’s identity — but that Ringer-like set-up is only the jumping off point for a much more ambitious story. Sarah soon encounters a number of other doubles, some of whom are more malevolent than others.

Orphan Black is compulsively watchable, a lot of it thanks to lead Tatiana Maslany’s incredible performance(s). She inhabits a number of different roles flawlessly. Each is so different, there’s never a question about who is who (unless there’s supposed to be). Some of her characters are comedic, others disturbing, others warm, others badass. Maslany’s versatility between genres is pretty astonishing — and puts Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow to shame. Sarah is a terrific protagonist, but she’s made better with the help of Maslany’s other characters — namely, the chipper but lethal suburban housewife Alison and the geeky science nerd lesbian Cosima, not to mention Season One’s mentally unstable villainess, Helena.

And let’s not forget the characters not played by Tatiana Maslany — such as Beth’s hunky boyfriend Paul (Dylan Bruce) and her BFF foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris), a drug-dealing prostitute. Fun!

Orphan Black‘s second season will debut in 2014, so it’s easy to jump on board now with the first ten episodes. Season One is virtually flawless, particularly in the earliest episodes and the riveting season finale. If you’re not hooked by the pilot, you may not be human.

2. ENLIGHTENED

There were actually two horrific killings on HBO series this year — one being the epically gruesome slaughter of the Starks on Game Of Thrones, as well as the axing of Enlightened. For as much love as I’ve given HBO on this list, they also made one of 2013′s most epic mistakes — pulling a Comeback and cancelling a brilliant but offbeat half-hour series before its time. (At least they gave it two seasons, as opposed to Valerie Cherish’s precious one.)

While most of Season One was spent setting up Laura Dern’s fascinatingly flawed Amy Jellicoe, on a plot level, the show meandered. (It was very good meandering, but it was still definitely meandering.) Season Two, however, finally took Amy to her logical conclusion, as she made big steps in taking down the corporation that screwed her over (which she happens to still work for).

Enlightened is about the pursuit of happiness, following a heroine who truly believes that thinking positively and doing the right thing can get her there — even when it’s clear from the reactions of the people around her that she may be doing more harm than good. Amy can be a difficult person to like, because we have to wonder if all of her caring and sharing isn’t really just a brittle facade or in service of her revenge. But in the end, we have to admire her, especially as she truly does become the David to Abaddon’s Goliath.

Season Two brought such memorable developments as the surprisingly tender romance between Tyler (Mike White) and Eileen (Molly Shannon), crazy Dougie’s unexpected involvement in the quest to take Abaddon down, and Amy’s would-be relationship with an LA Times reporter (Dermot Mulroney) who is quite possibly just using her to get a sensational story. (But she’s kinda using him also.) Kudos to Mike White, who wrote every episode, and Laura Dern, whose thoughtful performance anchors the show. Enlightened ended on a high note, and a dramatically satisfying and complete one — but I’d still like to know what happens to them all after this.

R.I.P., Amy Jellicoe.

1. BREAKING BAD

And R.I.P. Walter White.

If you thought there was even a chance I wouldn’t list the final season of one of the greatest TV shows of all time in the #1 slot, you clearly have stumbled upon this blog by mistake.

What’s left to say that I haven’t said already? The stakes were high as Breaking Bad wrapped up its final season; it was watched my more people than ever before, thanks to great word of mouth (you’re welcome) and Netflix streaming. It could have been a disappointing disaster, as some final seasons are, but instead it was possibly the strongest season of AMC’s Emmy-winning drama yet. (Yes, this series finally got its Emmy due — as did a very deserving Anna Gunn.)

“Ozymandias” alone is one of the greatest episodes of television of all time — we waited years for the confrontation between Walt and Skyler to erupt in violence, and still it unfolded in a way none of us could have predicted. We also had to say farewell to one major character a few episodes before the end — it’s useless to avoid spoilers at this point, but I’ll do it anyway. The long-gestating cat-and-mouse games built into the series from the beginning finally paid off, with the mice now aware of who Walter White really was at his deep, dark core — and each character, from Hank to Marie to Walter Jr. and even Jesse, had a distinct reaction.

Ultimately, Walter White wasn’t exactly redeemed, but he didn’t go down the darkest path available to him; he remained human, as did they all. Breaking Bad could have gone for pure sensationalism — outrageous shocks and explosive violence. Instead, it delivered all that while remaining true to these characters, true to the original vision of this series. Somehow, it truly did feel like Gilligan had planned out every step of this story from the very beginning. (But that wasn’t the case.)

The final season of Breaking Bad was by far the bleakest, even in a show that ended Season Two with not just one but two planes raining bodies down over ABQ. By the time we got to those final four episodes, this series had a cold vice grip on our hearts, yet somehow Vince Gilligan and his team of crafty mad geniuses delivered absolutely every kind of payoff we could have wanted. “Ozymandias” was merciless and jaw-dropping and intense; “Granite State” somber and reflective and punishing; “Felina” clever and cathartic and yes, even fun, wrapping the show up as neatly as possible on a narrative level without being morally tidy. This is how you do TV, people.

Breaking Bad, we already miss you. There’s still no one to replace you on our TV screens. And yet we cherish the times we had together, the ups and the downs, the laughter and tears. (And meth!)

You are gone, but not forgotten. Thank you for doing your part in making 2013 a very good year on TV.

*

It only took three episodes for Looking to get around to having some actual conflict.

And… maybe… a point.

The third episode of HBO’s much-discussed Looking introduces two new characters and decides it’s time for things to finally happen to the ones we’ve already met. It’s probably the strongest episode of the initial trio. In “Looking At Your Browser History,” Patrick, Augustin, and Dom all find their jobs in various states of jeopardy. Dom’s looking to quit his waiting gig and open a chicken place (okay…), Augustin gets fired for poor performance, and Patrick hits on his boss before he knows he’s his boss and then catches flack for using OKCupid and Manhunt at work. (Who does that? How is he not aware that employers monitor internet usage?)

While we’re on the subject of Patrick, allow me to say that he is one of the more inconsistent characters this side of American Horror Story. Sometimes he’s shy and demure, and sometimes he’s leering at men in sailor costumes to their faces. He’s never seen an uncut penis, but he’s on Manhunt. He fairly brazenly hits on the handsome British man who seems out of his league, but also feels undateable and aloof. He’s constantly eating and even makes a joke about his big thighs, but he’s Jonathan Groff. What gives? My biggest problem with Looking remains that I still don’t really know who our protagonist is, and I’m not sure the writers do either. Maybe every writer in the room has a slightly different take on their lead character. Maybe they don’t want him to be a “type.” I suppose you could admire that, but it’s also frustrating when you’re trying to latch onto an anchor in this series, and Patrick remains so elusive.

Though Patrick remains a bit of an anomaly, his would-be dalliances remain awkward and entertaining. Patrick’s new-boss relationship with Kevin could have been predictable if there was an actual threat of romance between them, but instead it’s one-sided and pleasantly uncomfortable (for us).

The biggest revelation in “Looking At Your Browser History,” though, is the arrival of Scott Bakula as Lynn, who meets Dom in a bathhouse shortly before Dom jaunts off to hook up with a stranger. I’ll set aside my criticism of the bathhouse scene itself (but really?), since in his few minutes of screen time, Lynn already has more depth and gravitas than any of the show’s leads. I’m not sure what happened there, but it’s nice to contrast the way things used to be with the way things are, and the episode actually makes a poignant point. (“We still had sex, but it was friendlier,” Lynn says of the past.)

Less promising is Augustin’s post-firing flirtation with CJ, a cocky hooker who claims he’s great in bed and not ashamed to make a living at it. Either Augustin is contemplating a career change or he’s about to cheat on his boyfriend with a prostitute, neither of which is an entirely promising storyline. Both Augustin and Patrick are still rather elusive as characters, without many defining qualities. (At least, defining qualities that they don’t contradict a scene or two later.) With its lead characters still so hit-or-miss, it’s nice to have some promising fresh blood on Looking, though now I kind of just want a whole show about Scott Bakula.

Whatever he’s lived through, it sounds a lot more interesting than what Patrick and friends are going through now…

  *

When I first heard HBO’s new gay show would be set in San Francisco, I thought it was a bit strange. A gay show set in San Francisco, really? What is this, 1985?

As it turns out, the creators of Looking really do seem stuck in 1985, and thus, in “Looking For $220 An Hour,” the inevitable occurs. The boys head to the Folsom Street Fair for some leather-clad fun.

Like most gay men these days, Patrick and the boys see Folsom more like a particularly naughty exhibit at Epcot Center than a celebration of an actual sexual proclivity. None of these characters, I gather, is actually into the leather scene — certainly not Patrick, who has to be coaxed to take his shirt off and wear only a leather vest, even though he’s built like Jonathan Groff. This is, again, the disconnect between the writing of Patrick and the performance of Patrick — men who look like Jonathan Groff take every opportunity at an event like Folsom to go sans shirt, yet Patrick acts like some ginormous Buddha belly is going to come popping out when he removes his T-shirt.

It’s like the entire first season was written with the idea that Louie Anderson would be playing Patrick, and then when they recast the role with Jonathan Groff, no one bothered to update the dialogue. Four episodes in, and the lead character still doesn’t make any sense. But whatever.

Folsom is a big deal in San Francisco, even for men who prefer their leather relegated to belts and boots. So it makes sense that Looking would capitalize on the event. But on the other hand, the episode takes a very touristy approach. We don’t see any of the actual leather scene or raunch that accompany the festival, so what’s the point? I’m not saying we needed a scene where Patrick decides to give fisting a whirl, but “Looking For $220/Hr” is almost maddeningly chaste. Why not give us a taste of the real Folsom Street Fair? If only to show us what our lead characters are not into?

It’s also strange that the one character on Looking who seems like he might actually get into leather — Dom — skips Folsom entirely, so he can hang out with an older gentleman who runs a flower shop and talk about chicken. Because if any of these dudes is going to go shirtless in a leather vest with shades and maybe some handcuffs dangling from his leather pants, it’s the 40-year-old with the mustache who likes to hang out in bathhouses. Even Doris goes to Folsom! (Since when have we even established that Doris even knows Patrick and Augustin, anyway?)

That’s the oddest thing about Looking. Despite the modern lingo of the title, the show is obsessed with relics of gay culture that have become all but obsolete. The series began with Patrick cruising in a park, last episode had Dom hooking up in a bathhouse, and now we’ve got Folsom. It’s not like the show’s creators are saying that all this is trendy, hip, and now, but why are we seeing so much of gay culture from 1985 and so little from 2014? We’ve officially spent more time this season in bathhouses and public parks than we have on Grindr. I suppose it’s legitimate to give a nod or two to the past, but that only works if there’s some present tense to contrast it with. So far, it feels like what these characters are really Looking for is a time machine.

At least “Looking For $220/Hr” has a few interesting developments. Scott Bakula’s Lynn represents the ghost of Gay Pride past in a way that actually makes sense — because he’s, like, kind of old. He’s already engendered more sympathy from me than any of the leads — like when he had to clarify to Dom whether or not their interaction was a date, when Dom really only wanted some fatherly wisdom (and daddy money) from him. Burn!

I hope Looking is using this relationship to explore Dom’s conflicting feelings about aging more than it is looking to use Dom’s Chicken Shack as an actual plot point. I’m always leery when TV characters decide to build their own businesses from scratch, because it’s boring, and since they’d never be able to raise the capital on their own, some tertiary character always ends up swooping in with half a million dollars to save the day. Lynn might just be that character, but there’s something interesting about the fact that Dom is in the midst of his mid-life crisis, and suddenly he latches onto an older guy so that he can be the lusted-after “twink” in the relationship. That’s sad and pathetic, but also pretty realistic. (Hooray for realism!) I’m still worried about this chicken place, though; Dom was the one guy on this show who had a non-cushy, real-world occupation that he hated. I’m more interested in Dom, the single and frustrated middle-aged waiter who hates his life than Dom, chicken shack owner extraordinaire.

Which brings me to Augustin, who has seriously failed to interest me in the slightest over the series’ entire run so far, and continues to do so in “Looking For $220/Hr.” I’m not going to argue that there aren’t plenty of people like Augustin out there, so maybe hating him is the point — Patrick calls him out on his erratic behavior in this episode, so it’s intentional on the part of the writers, but still. Having him fawn over some he-bimbo hooker at Folsom is pretty annoying, especially when the guy is going to charge him $220 an hour just to participate in whatever “art” Augustin has in mind.

Maybe that’s the problem with all these beards — they set up our expectations that these men will act like men, but really they’re all silly little boys. If that’s intentional, it’s not exactly coming through — we need Doris (or someone) to call it out, because these people are maddening! And frankly, I don’t find the studly, self-satisfied hooker CJ all that convincing, because few escorts are quite that together. Where’s the gay snarkiness? The minute after leaving his presence, Doris and Patrick and their anonymous ginger friend would have been ripping that douche bag a new one, and Augustin would be like, “Yeah, you’re right, maybe I should not spend $500 on a hooker after I just lost my job, and instead go watch YouTube with my boyfriend in Oakland. Thanks for being a friend.”

(And don’t even get me started on that bathroom scene.)

One final plot development of interest seemingly resolves itself — Patrick’s dashing boss is trying to have his cake and eat it too, by which I mean have his boyfriend and eat Patrick too. Or at least eat Thai food with Patrick when he should be home with his lover. It’s a little sad to see Patrick volunteer to work the weekend while his boss runs off to meet his boo, but it all pans out when Patrick finally grows a pair and tells his boss that he’s going to go hang with his friends instead of have an awkward office non-romance with a taken guy who clearly just wants some attention. (Sidebar: those guys are the worst.) So far we’ve really only seen Patrick throw himself at guys who probably don’t deserve him (though whether or not Patrick is such a prize, I can’t be sure). So it’s nice that he showed a little self-respect and went off to meet Doris and the boys… and… Richie! Unexpectedly.

(Well, not that unexpectedly for the audience, who are probably guessing that there’s more to come in the Patrick And Richie Saga.) Richie confirms that he’s still circumcised, Patrick kind of apologizes for being a jerk, and they dance! It’s sort of cute, and the more everyone else on this show annoys me, the more appealing an alternative Richie seems.

In “Looking For $220/Hr,” Augustin contemplates being a whore, Dom hits up a potential sugar daddy (or, perhaps, a sugar grandpa in his case), and Patrick tells the man who’s paying him to suck it (“it” being his boyfriend) while he goes to hang with his friends. It’s all about money… kind of!

And leather, I guess.

   *

Okay, here we go.

We’re now officially more than halfway through Looking‘s first season, and we’ve finally gotten the series’ first pretty great episode.

Sure, Looking‘s detractors can still complain that nothing happens — in fact, even less happens on a plot level in “Looking For The Future” than does in previous episodes — but that’s by design. Looking cuts out all the side characters to focus exclusively on Patrick and his developing romance with Richie, finally giving us some insight into the show’s lead.

It’s no coincidence that “Looking For The Future” was written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who was one of the series’ most promising elements in its inception. Andrew Haigh also wrote and directed Weekend, one of the best “gay” movies in recent years, and also one of the best romances. Up until now, Looking displayed only a few of the qualities that made Weekend so great — whereas “Looking For The Future” seems like a specific and self-conscious attempt to replicate that movie’s charms precisely.

Original? Not really. But it works.

The episode finds Patrick and Richie in bed together, at some point after their chance meeting at Folsom. Patrick tries to shower without waking Richie, but instead finds himself serenaded from Richie’s bed with a bass. They chat and cuddle, Patrick says he really has to go to work (about five times), and leaves… then promptly returns to Richie’s apartment to play hooky. It’s Patrick Murray’s Day Off, everybody!

Patrick and Richie spend their day mostly wandering around, eating, and checking out the sky in an observatory, underneath the “stars.” Along the way, we learn that Richie’s last boyfriend was HIV positive, Patrick has “bottom shame,” Patrick is perhaps more cautious than the average gay, and that he also had a preteen crush on Sean Astin in Goonies. It’s typical early-date stuff, until Richie convinces Patrick to see a psychic who uses eggs to read the future. (They leave before the actual reading.) Looking has previously depicted dates going awkwardly awry, but it’s harder us a date that’s actually going really well, yet we can see on both Patrick and Richie how much fun they’re having. We, by extension, are also having fun, like we’re right along on that date with them.

As in Weekend, most of the pleasures of “Looking For The Future” stem from our witnessing two men genuinely falling for each other, which is still a pretty rare thing in film and television these days. In all the noise about coming out and hooking up and marriage equality, that initial connection between two gay men often gets lost in the ether, but that‘s what it’s all about.

And that, I daresay, is what Looking should be about — not bathhouses and public parks and antiquated sexual practices, not developing a crush on a hooker and deciding whether or not to be one yourself, and not about uncut penises. All that is fine, I guess, but what has always been missing from Looking is what we finally find in “Looking For The Future” — a specific sense of who these characters are, and some actual chemistry between them. We learn so much more about Patrick through Richie than we ever learned in his reasonably hollow interactions with Dom and Augustin (a friendship trio that still doesn’t really make sense to me). I’m not sure it’s quite enough to make Patrick a fully likable leading man yet, but I liked him just fine in this episode.

It’s the sort of information that we probably should have had in the pilot — I don’t know that something like “Looking For The Future” really could have worked as a pilot episode, but it has the warmth and ease and charm and specificity that has been missing so far for so many of us. Looking has largely been a disappointment because gay men wanted to see themselves represented on TV, and instead we got some strange bearded folk from the 80s that didn’t really represent us at all. Who are these people? we wondered. We kind of recognized them, but found only a fraction of ourselves in them. It was all so hesitant and tepid, especially for a show on HBO. And that’s not really the gay way of doing things.

“Looking For The Future” isn’t necessarily more titillating or splashier than preceding episodes; in fact, it’s far more intimate. But it’s bolder in the sense that it’s unlike any other episode of TV I can think of. The sex scenes aren’t attention-grabbing or “hot”; it’s an actual depiction of what’s going down between two guys who really like each other, which is a lot more daring than a three-way or a Grindr hookup or a bathhouse dalliance or whatever else Looking has been depicting this season. Queer As Folk already did that stuff, and it’s been done elsewhere too. Looking can get away with some of that sexy stuff, but ironically, it isn’t that that feels like a revelation. It’s the stuff two men talk about on their second or third date. It’s the moment they realize they’re both former fatties. It’s one man sharing his love for his favorite movie, and the other admitting he hasn’t seen it. Sounds like mundane stuff, but Andrew Haigh is typically very good at making the mundane feel insightful. This is what Looking‘s audience is likely to connect to.

There are fewer emotional obstacles in “Looking For The Future” than in Weekend, and the characters are still a little less developed, and also contrast less. Patrick likes Richie, and Richie likes Patrick, and there’s nothing exactly stopping them from being together. But sometimes it works like that. The pilot episode was titled “Looking For Now,” which I guess is what Patrick was doing then, stuck in the present and not open to changing up his options in hopes of finding something unexpected; now, in the aptly-titled “Looking for The Future,” this show is finally going somewhere.

(Sidenote: it was a good night of TV on HBO, with a rather stellar episode of Girls, too, that also ended up being pretty gay, with Andrew Rannells reprising his role as Elijah and bringing a cadre of gay boys — including Danny Strong — along to the Hamptons. There’s even a musical number!)

I find myself looking forward to the future of Looking moreso than I have in the past, and yet I also know that Augustin and Dom will be back next week, and so will the traditional format of the show. (Episodes of TV shows that focus exclusively on a few key characters and cut out the rest of the cast always feel special, and are usually very good.) I worry that “Looking For The Future” is just an anomaly, and next week we’ll go back to having no real grasp on who these people are. Do we need an all-Augustin episode, too, to see that there’s more to him than being a silly bitch? (If there even is…)

Regardless, “Looking For The Future” gives us some indication that Looking can actually be the show it should be. That it can form believable connections between people. That these characters actually have layers and more on their minds than meets the eye.

For once, the future of Looking is actually looking pretty bright.

*

Last week’s “Looking For The Future” was the first time in Looking‘s still-brief run that the show actually took a narrative and creative risk, allowing a single date between Patrick and Richie to sustain an entire episode. Some found it the epitome of the show’s nothingness, its willingness to let the mundane create drama.

Others, like myself, proclaimed that it was by far the best Looking yet, because it’s not that it matters so much what happens on a show, but how we feel about it. Looking‘s first four episodes similarly didn’t have a lot going on plot-wise, but they also kept the characters a bit of a mystery. Are we supposed to feel sorry for Augustin amidst all his self-entitled whining? Can I really sympathize with Dom’s moping about the Big 4-0 when he’s still gallivanting around like a fresh-sprung twink? (Answer: no, and not really.)

Now, with “Looking For The Future,” Looking has less to prove. We know it can be heartfelt and insightful, but will it be, ever again, from here on out? With “Looking In The Mirror,” we (kinda sorta) have an answer.

“Looking In The Mirror” opens up with Patrick and Richie, appropriately, since that’s where we left off. Patrick’s about to introduce Richie to his friends (already!), so Richie asks the questions we’ve wanted to know all along about how these guys know each other. (Still not sure these friendships makes sense, but oh well, I’m over it.) Patrick (accidentally) drops the B-word — “boyfriend” — which causes Richie to ask, “Who said I was your boyfriend?” (Ouch!)

Of course, Richie is only giving Patrick a hard time, because of course he wants to be Patrick’s boyfriend. All gay men can safely assume that the guy they’ve been on, like, three dates with is completely ready for a steady relationship! Right? It totally works that way.

Okay, so, no — I don’t believe that someone as self-conscious and relationship-averse as Patrick would so casually drop the B-word, even if the last date was a whole day long and took place partially in a planetarium. (Note to self: plan more dates in planetariums. Addendum to note to self: plan more dates.) And no, I’m not on board with it being quite so easy for Patrick and Richie to get this important talk out of the way so early in their courtship. In real life, it takes weeks and months of agonizing and hand-wringing and self-doubt before the B-word is broached, following many, many more dates (seldom in planetariums) and then an awkward phase where you realize all you do is eat Thai food and watch sitcoms with this person and you still don’t know if they’re sleeping with other people. (They are.)

Yes, okay, sometimes you find someone who’s super special and you just click and know that they’re as into you as you are into them, and then you barely even have to ask that question — because you’re soul mates! But that’s always shortly before said “soul mate” applies for a restraining order. (I mean, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.)

So initially, from this opening scene, I was already fired up about how the show had gone downhill again so fast. How dare Looking allow Patrick and Richie to be happy? I only watch shows where the main characters are significantly worse off than I am, which is why I watch Game Of Thrones and True Detective and American Horror Story instead of, like, Nashville. Only miserable people allowed on my TV screen, thank you! (This is also the reason most of my paired-off friends are dead to me.) Luckily for me, Patrick and Richie’s newfound boyfriendship takes a nosedive later in the episode. But we’ll get to that.

Meanwhile, Dom is spending more time with Lynn and his snooty, well-to-do friends, hoping said snoots will invest in his chicken shack or whatever (perhaps because one of them is black). Lynn ends up being a lot more impressed by Dom than his friends are; Dom dreads the stroke of midnight because it means he’s officially entering his fifth decade of life (and swiftly exiting his relevance as a sexual creature in the eyes of the young men he goes after). What Dom doesn’t realize is that he’s decrying his old age to a man who is roughly twenty years his senior, which results in a delightful verbal bitch-slap from Lynn, who says he spent his own 40th birthday doing mushrooms in a canoe. Dom is suitably put in his place. (Go Lynn!)Elsewhere in the city (Oakland, to be exact), Augustin is having a snit fit because the scantily-clad photos he took of a sexy hooker are somehow not “artistic” (who would have guessed?). Augustin defends CJ’s profession yet again as Frank displays a saintlike level of patience and understanding about his boyfriend spending all of his spare time with a narcissistic prostitute, sometimes in a state of undress. And this is before Augustin bags on Frank for being the black guy who wants to bring Cheetohs to the party, which is just rude. Moral of the story: Augustin is a whiny child, a terrible boyfriend, and an outright bitch. Are we seriously supposed to like this character? (More on that later.)

Doris and Dom talk about Lynn on the way to Dom’s birthday bash in the park. Doris is insightful enough to see that Dom’s feelings about Lynn run deeper than he’s letting on, which is confirmed later when a youngish Grindr guy goes untexted while Dom jaunts off to Lynn’s house unannounced.

But first: Richie is introduced as Patrick’s boyfriend, which has Augustin all miffed for some reason. Patrick does a prolonged and surprisingly offensive imitation of an effeminate gay man that really makes him seem like an asshole, just when some of us were kinda-sorta starting to like him. It’s odd that no one calls him out on this, given that nearly all gay characters on this show are reasonably masculine — are the writers unaware that gay viewers may see this as further evidence that Looking is, if not exactly homophobic, a little leery of coming off as too gay, just as many gay men are? (It goes hand-in-hand with the beards.) I’d wager that this moment didn’t play well with some of Looking‘s harsher critics, and seems like a fairly egregious misstep as written. (Looking could certainly shed some light on the masculine-versus-feminine debate, but this wasn’t the way to do it.)

Patrick’s uncomfortable sissy-boy imitation is interrupted by his boss Kevin, who has arrived with his studly Caucasian sports medicine-practicing partner Jon (Joseph Williamson), who is the counterpoint to scruffy Latino hairdresser Richie, who Patrick pointedly does not introduce as his boyfriend. (Danger, danger!) At this point, I was back on board with “Looking In The Mirror,” because if it isn’t going to explore the extreme awkwardness of the Boyfriend Conversation in a naturalistic fashion, at least it can explore the Boyfriend Omission in a realistic way. And aren’t there moments, early in a relationship, when you’re not sure how someone you know will react to your significant other, so you kind of don’t feel like getting into it? Patrick makes something up about Richie wanting to open his own salon (he doesn’t), which is ascribing his own upper-class ambitions onto a boyfriend who’s pretty happy to be who he is.

CJ shows up to the party (seriously, did Augustin have to pay for his attendance?) and is all over Augustin in front of Frank, who again doesn’t really mind because CJ is kinda all over him too. Lynn has flowers delivered to Dom. (Aww!) Then “Looking In The Mirror” cuts right into the meat of it when Augustin flatly accuses Patrick of slumming it in his relationship with Richie. Richie, unfortunately, overhears. Fortunately Richie has the cojones to stand up to Augustin, who backs down immediately, though Patrick doesn’t put up much of a fight. Richie’s just scoring all kinds of points lately, isn’t he?

The scene suggests that there’s a widening rift between these old college buddies, which makes sense because they don’t have much in common, and sometimes friendships go that way. Someone who used to be great can eventually become a sniveling little bitch like Augustin, who takes his own frustrations out on well-intentioned people like Richie to avoid looking in the mirror. (Ohhh, heyyy there, title of the episode!) Usually, said friend should be dropped immediately, but that’s unlikely given that Augustin is a series regular. Patrick calls Augustin out on his hooker bullshit, while Augustin at least does have a point about Patrick slumming it since Patrick couldn’t introduce Richie as his boyfriend to his boss. (Then again, that’s also because Patrick is attracted to Kevin, which doesn’t bode well.)

And suddenly it hit me — maybe we aren’t supposed to like Augustin? I mean, like, at all. That’s a strange choice for one of the three leads of a drama (at least one in which no one is a serial killer or meth dealer), but it’s much easier to accept Augustin’s whining and moaning and childish behavior if I don’t feel that the show’s writers are asking me to sympathize with him at the same time. Because I don’t. At all. Yes, he does remind me of guys I’ve met, just not guys I’ve liked, and in a way his arrested development is even more striking than Dom’s, and is perhaps an insightful look at 30-year-old men who still act like 15-year-old girls. (But at this point, only perhaps.) So there you have it: I am giving up on Augustin. I don’t like him. I won’t like him. And in that way, I may actually get some enjoyment out of hating his character.

But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Aren’t the supporting characters supposed to be the ones we love to hate? Aren’t we meant to side with our protagonists more often than not? That’s the super fucking strange thing about Looking — so far, the three leads’ love interests (Frank, Lynn, and Richie) are so much more likable than Augustin, Dom, and Patrick are. When was the last time a TV show did that? (If the answer is never, there’s probably a good reason.)

Now, for the first time, all of the Looking lads are finding themselves in or at least close to a significant partnership. Yes, Lynn rebuffs Dom’s rather desperate birthday lip-lock advance, as well he should — because Dom is not as ready as he thinks he is for a stable, mature guy like Lynn. (Though it was Lynn who said just a few episodes ago that he mourns “friendly” casual sex.) I highly doubt we’re seeing the end of Dom and Lynn’s flirtations, though. Lynn makes a proposition for a “pop up” of a different kind, offering to finance a one-night only chicken shack extravaganza, which we all kind of knew he’d end up paying for. I call bullshit on Lynn truly caring about this business partnership — does he really think Dom’s chicken restaurant is that solid an investment? No. He wants to be Dom-inated, he’s just being smart about not rushing into it.

At the same time, Augustin’s relationship is veering toward collapse as he invites CJ over for a (paid?) threeway, which they decide to film. This being 2014, naturally they film it on an iPhone — or perhaps a webcam, right? Oh, wait, no — I forgot that Looking takes place in a bizarro version of 1985, which is why Augustin films it on some sort of old-fashioned movie camera. (Is this “art,” too?) Augustin doesn’t look pleased that Frank and CJ are getting so intimate, which is a good reason not to bring a charismatic, chiseled hooker into your relationship. The episode ends with Patrick and Richie somewhat in a state of limbo after Richie legitimately wonders if Patrick can handle his rough-around-the-edginess. Patrick stands in front of a mirror naked (as you do), soul-searching while wearing only the necklace Richie gave him (that Augustin bitchily mocked).

Symbolically, I imagine the writers intended viewers to think, “Oh, look, Patrick has shed everything but this new identity as Richie’s boyfriend, and is ready to move into a new chapter in his life, away from his old pitfalls and values.” Most probably thought: “Hey, look! It’s Jonathan Groff’s ass!”

All in all, Lynn is fantastic, Frank is a saint, Richie is pretty awesome, and… the show isn’t really about them, is it? Is it time for a spin-off already? “Looking In The Mirror” had legitimate conflict, pushed the dynamic between two lead characters, and (I think) advanced the overall story, in an episode that’s all about how none of our three lead characters deserve the men who are into them. That’s enough to rank it as probably the second-best Looking episode, which means in the latter half of its inaugural season, things are Looking up…

*

There’s only one episode left in Looking‘s first season, and unless they really fuck it up (which is entirely possible), it will go down as a lop-sided debut, with the first four episodes getting off to a wobbly and largely disappointing start, while the final four gave us something that was much more promising.

“Looking For A Plus One” continues last week’s trend of our three leads behaving like jerks to love interests who deserve better, but the stakes are even greater this time around. More “happens” in “Looking For A Plus One” than all of the other episodes combined, really, in terms of conflict between characters.

Yeah — conflict! Who knew Looking had such a thing in store?

The show opens with another scene of the core trio drinking beer and smoking bud in hoodies, firmly reminding us that this is San Francisco (though it could also be Portland or Seattle). Things are less harmonious this time, as Augustin bitches about his latest “art” project while Patrick takes the opportunity to gently suggest that taking sex pictures of your boyfriend being effed by a near-stranger is not inherently artistic. “How dare you, sir!” Augustin says (but not in those words), miffed at being called out in such fashion (the truth). Dom goes to get another beer, and so does most of the audience, because it seems like we’re in for plenty more of Augustin’s self-righteous whining.

The next day is a big one — Richie is to meet Patrick’s family at a grand Murray wedding. The early scenes expertly capture the high drama of getting ready for a major life event, during which you will inevitably spill a dark liquid all over yourself (Richie) and/or get a parking ticket (Patrick) for such a minor infraction as not turning your wheels. (There are two other moments in this episode during which Patrick is also in danger of getting a parking ticket, another reminder that the show is set in San Francisco. Ironically, I have never identified with Patrick more or had deeper sympathy for him than when he despaired at that ticket.)

Patrick is a little manic in anticipation of the wedding, which is perfectly understandable. Richie tries to fix his bow tie while they’re driving over the Golden Gate Bridge (reminder: this is San Francisco!), and Patrick freaks out, and Richie makes him pull over on the bridge, and Patrick does pull over, but not on the bridge, and Richie tells him to smoke some weed, and Patrick yells at him for bringing marijuana to his sister’s wedding, and Richie storms off all handsome and smooth-faced — because homeboy shaved for the big event! (And Looking becomes about 25% less hairy! At this rate, they’ll all be fully body-waxed and hairless by the series finale. Hooray!)

And, okay, I have to say I’m on Team Patrick on this one (for, like, the first time ever). First of all, it is annoying when people distract you while driving, as Hannah and her cousin discovered in Sunday night’s Girls, and if someone is asking you to stop tying their bow tie while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, well, you should stop it! Second of all, it is completely fair to ask your boyfriend to not be high as a kite while meeting your entire family at what seems like a reasonably conservative wedding, or really, any occasion. Patrick might have handled this better, but it’s a big day for him! This is one moment when Richie could have been the bigger man, sucked it up, not smoked it up, and just gotten back in the car to meet the Murrays. Patrick was legitimately a jerk last week when not introducing Richie as his boyfriend, and is kind of legitimately a jerk to Richie behind his back later in this episode, but it’s not totally one-sided. C’mon, Richie! Did you shave off all your good boyfriend potential along with that scruff?

Before we get back to Patrick being a jerk, though, we need to check in on Augustin being a jerk and Dom being a jerk. In this episode’s slightest subplot, Dom is stressed out about his big chicken shack debut, which is happening in a rundown Indian-Chinese fusion restaurant in about 28 hours. Dom snaps at Lynn (and everyone) because his entire future depends on this chicken being fucking delicious, which causes Lynn to abandon ship when Dom doesn’t care about his flowers. (Dear Dom: never dismiss Lynn’s flowers again.) Dom and Lynn’s interactions have always been one of Looking‘s strongest suits — until this week, because I still think it’s way too easy for Dom to suddenly start his own chicken business, even if it’s a one-night-only chicken extravaganza rather than a full-fledged restaurant.

Didn’t they just have this idea last week? Don’t they need more time to market it, and find people to actually cook this fabulous chicken? And if Dom doesn’t make the chicken himself, what exactly is he doing? So far, Dom has done nothing to convince me that he can or should open his own chicken place. Once again, the show is redeemed only with Doris speaking the truth in one succinct line of dialogue or sometimes even just a look. I propose a spin-off called Doris in which Lauren Weedman wanders onto the set of other TV shows and tells the characters all the bad things the audience is thinking about them. In summary: Doris continues to be awesome.

Meanwhile, Augustin is being the biggest jerk of all when he decides to bail on his art show because Patrick was right about how taking sex pics of your boyfriend getting it on with a prostitute isn’t really the kind of “work” that needs a home at a gallery, and is probably better suited for something like Snapchat. (Though I’m sure plenty of websites would display it happily.) Augustin confesses to Frank that he bailed on the gig — and that he paid CJ $220 an hour to seduce and destroy his boyfriend, which has Frank justifiably pissed that his man paid a hooker to have sex with him and neglected to mention it. Especially considering that said man isn’t even paying rent in their sweet Oakland pad! (Blowing all your money on secret hooker threesomes? Not the greatest plan, Augustin.)

Frank and Augustin have a reckoning during which Frank decides Augustin needs to move out, as well he should. Augustin has displayed a grand total of zero redeeming qualities as a boyfriend (and a human being, for that matter). But let’s not leave Frank totally blameless here — he knew that CJ was a hooker, he just didn’t know CJ was a hooker currently being paid for his services — and really, isn’t any situation that brings a hooker into your relationship pretty volatile and fraught with complication? Isn’t that basically always a harbinger of doom? Neither Augustin nor Frank should be surprised at this outcome, and neither should we. At this point, I’m all for storylines about Augustin’s suffering, especially since Dom and Patrick have it pretty easy these days. Moral of the story: don’t pay a whore to have sex with your boyfriend — or, if you do, tell him about it.

Now, back to the wedding. We meet Patrick’s mother Dana (Julia Duffy), who we’ve heard plenty about, and a twist of fate has Kevin and John, of all people, attending the ceremony! (Patrick and Kevin sure do randomly run into each other a lot, don’t they?) Kevin gets drunk and tries to kiss Patrick in the bathroom (naughty Kevin!), which Patrick ends maybe a little sooner than we’d expect him to (good Patrick!). The kiss is all kinds of complicated, because we don’t know precisely what flashes through Patrick’s mind at that moment. That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because of John? That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because of Richie? That he shouldn’t kiss Kevin because he’s his boss? Probably all of these — but in which order? It seems Richie’s absence has Patrick longing for him enough that a cheap affair with his boss is not so appealing, which we know because Patrick uses the word “totally” in his apologetic voicemail to Richie, which is what he does when he’s nervous.

The episode ends with Patrick having two distinct interactions with his parents. First up: that awful moment when “Love Shack” comes on and you don’t have a boyfriend to dance with you, so you end up chatting with your mom. Patrick tells Dana that she wouldn’t like Richie because he’s an unambitious Mexican hairdresser, and with an introduction like that, how could she? Patrick has failed to list any of Richie’s good qualities — he’s leading with the negative, turning his mother against Richie before she has a chance to do it herself. Dana isn’t having it — she tells Patrick that Richie’s absence at the wedding is not her fault. And she’s right. It’s time for Patrick to stop blaming mom for his relationship failings and take some ownership of his own choices. But also: Dana is munching a pot-infused Rice Krispie treat, which means she and Richie might get along just fine after all.

The episode ends on a different note, as Patrick has a brief conversation with his father, who bemoans the $40,000 dropped on this joyous occasion and asks Patrick, “You’re not going to want one of these, are ya?” It’s not the question Patrick wants to hear after his first major fight with his brand-new boyfriend, and it’s especially ironic coming at the end of an episode in which three gay partnerships of varying types are jeopardized. Patrick and Richie, Dom and Lynn, and Augustin and Frank are all at a crossroads that could very well lead the better halves out of our trio’s lives for good, because gay relationships often do come with added complications that heterosexual ones don’t. (Even Kevin and John could face a rocky future if John ever finds out about that kiss.) “Looking For A Plus One” has Patrick, Augustin, and Dom all “minus one” instead.

There’s no more hetero institution than a big ol’ wedding, after all, and “Looking For A Plus One” subtly explores how awkward that can be for men and women who only recently obtained the right to have a wedding themselves (in some places), in a world that isn’t quite used to them having that right yet. The inner workings of gay relationships are still a mystery to many straight people, while straight relationships are the norm, the institution, the standard to live up to (or fail trying) — we all know how that story is supposed to go.

Patrick’s father isn’t being mean-spirited in suggesting that Patrick might spare him several grand by neglecting to follow his sister’s matrimonial footsteps, but in the end, it seems the question only causes Patrick to realize: Yes, I do want this. Which might mean wanting Richie. However, the question might as well have been posed to the gay faction of Looking‘s audience: do we want this? A true partnership? Love and commitment and stability? Tuxedos and cake and “Love Shack”? (Well, of course we want “Love Shack.”) Or do we want to be the sole proprietors of our own enterprises, perpetual bachelors pursuing, um, chicken? Do we want to pepper our monogamy with the occasional hooker, risking all we’ve built together in the process?

Are Patrick and Richie done? Not likely, but it’s the third twosome that ends on an iffy note this week. One hetero union comes together while multiple gay ones fall apart. Gays haven’t had hundreds of years to get used to such partnerships and establish their own marital traditions, so perhaps Patrick and Dom and even Augustin can be forgiven for this week’s sins. Or perhaps not. But Looking is finally generating some suspense, at least, its plot actually moving forward — since Augustin and Frank actually do seem done.

Can we keep Frank instead of Augustin? I doubt it. But we’ll see what happens in Looking‘s Season One finale next week.

*

And so we’ve come to the end.

Of Season One, anyway.

And it’s time to think about what we’ve been Looking at all this while.

Looking began with a would-be hookup in broad daylight in a public park. It was a bit of a fake-out — a nod to the gay past — but still. It set a strange tone for the show, a series that wanted to be not about sex but still kinda sexy, about a group of gay men who are all over the place in terms of age, race, their sexuality, their facial hair, and where they are in life, but still somehow are meant to be friends. Supposedly they’re a tight unit, but we saw a lot more of them as individuals in their own lives than we saw of them together. And when they were together, they were mostly bitching at each other’s life choices (valid) or listening to the messy fallout of a vegan eating meat in the bathroom (totally not valid because no one does this).

We started off not really knowing who these guys were. Then, through a promising all-day date with Richie, we figured out a little more about Patrick; eventually we realized that Augustin is just a bratty jerk, and we don’t have to like him, and maybe that’s okay. The Season One finale “Looking Glass” borrows its title from Lewis Carroll, an homage to the topsy-turvy craziness of Wonderland. In a show as muted and low-key as Looking, I guess this is about as fucked up as it gets. Which is still not that fucked up, by HBO standards; I mean, last night’s Girls finale had Hannah in a blonde wig, donning a variety of accents, pretending to be a married woman cheating on her fictional husband with her actual boyfriend, with her tits out most of the time. That’s a level of fucked upedness that Looking has never broached (and likely will never broach). That’s fine. In comparison to the lackluster and eventless first few episodes, “Looking Glass” is positively wacky with conflict. Compared to most TV series, though? It’s still rather tame.

“Looking Glass” begins with Patrick stopping by Richie’s work, where he’s met with a cool “Can I help you?” Richie is still pissed that Patrick wouldn’t let him bring weed to his sister’s wedding, I guess. (I know, I know, it’s more than that, but that was the tipping point.) Richie asks for “space,” which is never a good sign, unless he means the kind of “space” that you find on a cute date at the planetarium, but we’ve been there and done that. And that’s not what Richie means at all.

If Richie and Patrick are left up in the air at the beginning of this episode, Frank is very clear about the status of his relationship with Augustin: finite. Splitsville. Dunzo. And a good thing, too, since Augustin is truly in need of a comeuppance. Frank adds insult to injury by telling Augustin that he’s not a talented artist and never will be — a scorching burn that also holds a lot of truth, since we’ve seen what Augustin’s vision of “art” is. And that’s real life. A lot of people enter adulthood thinking they’re artists; many fewer end up making a living that way. Augustin is going to have to figure out something else to do with himself now that he’s got no man, no job, no artistic cred, and no place to live — it’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for him, until I remember what an obnoxious child he was in the last seven episodes. And then I just say, “Haha, you got told, Augustin.”

Does this mean no more Frank? I’m not that attached to Frank, though he’s clearly the better half of the Augustin+Frank=4ever equation. Patrick and Dom can’t exactly hang out with Frank now that their bud has dumped him, and the relationship seems over enough that there won’t be a “Will Frank take Augustin back?” arc in Season Two. (Or at least, not for a while.) Assuming this is it for O-T Fagbenle (what a name!) on Looking, let us say: so long Frank! We hardly knew ye.

(But we hardly know any of the characters, really.)

Meanwhile, Dom is still freaking about the Great Chicken Shack Experiment, or whatever they’re calling it. Lynn is MIA after Dom snapped at him (and made an unwise “daddy” comparison) in “Looking For A Plus One.” Yes, all three of our boys have been spurned after last week’s outbursts, with Dom’s being the least dramatic but perhaps also the most poignant. Again, I must point out that Looking‘s idea of high drama is having Lynn show up slightly late to Dom’s pop-up chicken restaurant; Macbeth this is not. There’s no yelling, no Lynn demanding his money back, no Lynn not showing up at all. Lynn does show up with a very San Francisco-looking (read: bearded) stud he claims is “just a friend,” but that can never be taken as gospel. After all, we met Lynn in a bathhouse.

Dom acts all jealous and Doris has a terrific scene where she practically begs Lynn to go easy on Dom’s heart, telling Lynn that he’s “worth it.” Then again, this episode also has a moment where Doris says she wants Lynn’s date to sit on her face, then corrects herself and claims she should be the one sitting on his face, but doesn’t sound too convinced; either way, I’m down to watch a Doris spin-off no matter who is seated upon whose visage. HBO’s Face-Sitting is bound to be more eventful than HBO’s Looking, especially if it stars Lauren Weedman, who I still say needs her own show (and, perhaps, her own country).

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like Lynn is taking Doris’ words to heart — I mean her words about Dom being worth it, since I don’t think he overheard that bit about his pal sitting on her face — until Dom desperately pulls him aside and apologizes like a grown-up, rather than the petulant teenager he was impersonating last week. Meanwhile, Lynn is really, really anxious not to keep his “friend” waiting, which is why I suspect he’s more than a friend, because real gay men don’t care if they keep their friends waiting. (Especially if it’s only for a few minutes.) Dom goes for the kiss, and this time, Lynn seems to like it — but we don’t know for sure because that’s the last we see of Dom and Lynn this season. I think we can feel reasonably confident that Scott Bakula will return to Looking next season… unless Face-Sitting somehow snaps him up instead. (Even better!)

Augustin decides to take (unspecified?) drugs, which actually make him a more tolerable character, as I suppose they do with a lot of people. He and Patrick stop by the One-Night-Only Chicken Shack Spectacular to show their support, where they discuss their respective breakups and Patrick cops to a surprising and somewhat alarming armpit fetish. (I thought Patrick was a little too vanilla for that?) Augustin must already have been aware of Patrick’s penchant for pit, because he doesn’t react at all; or maybe he’s just too fucked up on his drugs still. (He’s functionally eating chicken, so he can’t be that far gone.)

Then Patrick gets a call from Kevin demanding his presence at work. (Patrick is way more agreeable about working nights and weekends than just about anybody on the planet.) Augustin and Patrick leave the chicken shack with full glasses of wine abandoned on the table, which is another reminder that Looking is fiction, because real gay men do not leave full glasses of wine on a table. Ever. (Especially if they’ve just been called in to work.)

But just joking — Kevin didn’t call Patrick in to work, he called him in for a beer and another rapey kiss, because apparently last week’s “no” screamed “Yes!” when translated into British. Being called into work late at night and being forced to make out with one’s boss would be hell on Earth for 99% of Americans, but because he’s rather cute and from England, I guess Kevin gets away with it, because despite some feeble protests, it’s not long before you-know-what is happening…

And now it’s time to say our second good-bye this episode. Farewell, Patrick’s supposed bottom shame! We hardly knew ye, either!

Following that naughty office fuck (and, presumably, some armpit-licking), Kevin says he “doesn’t know” what this means for Patrick and Kevin in the future, which is probably code for “I’ll never text or call you again, I’ll avoid eye contact whenever I see you, and in six months or so I’ll find a lame excuse to lay you off when what I really want to do is forget all about this little episode. But thanks for bottoming!”

Patrick returns home to find Richie (of course!) waiting for him outside his apartment, which is something people on TV still do… because texting “hey can I come over?” and not getting an answer is too undramatic, even for Looking. (Have you noticed how people on TV are always dropping by unannounced? Seriously, no one in real life does this. TV characters are the only people who have six hours to spare to wait in front of someone’s apartment, just hoping they’ll find their way home eventually, without bothering to call or text.)

Patrick is understandably guilty about his naughty office fuck with his all-but-married boss, which is basically a porn-level escapade — and technically, he did kinda cheat on Richie. (It wasn’t exactly clear whether or not Richie’s “space” included a room to fuck one’s boss in.) Rather than confess, Patrick hears Richie out, and Richie says he’s “this close” to falling in love with Patrick (which is heartwarming) but he won’t, because he doesn’t think Patrick is ready (which is heartbreaking). Patrick’s unpreparedness for Richie’s jelly has just been confirmed on a sofa at Most Dangerous Games, so it’s time for Patrick to say his tearful good-bye to Richie and his armpits. (I, however, will bid neither Richie nor his armpits farewell, since this ends on an uncertain enough note that I’m sure Patrick and Richie’s saga is ongoing in Season Two.)

After that unhappy confrontation with Richie, Patrick returns home to find Augustin’s severed head impaled on a spike in his bedroom — ahh, sorry, I was just fantasizing about what might happen to Augustin if this were Game Of Thrones. On the less decapitation-happy Looking, Augustin is curled up asleep (in a drug-induced coma), snoozing to an episode of Golden Girls. Patrick picks up where Augustin left off, which is both a sweet moment and also a reminder that the tremulous gay bonds of friendship and occasional minor half-smiles engendered by Patrick, Augustin, and Dom of Looking are nothing compared to the pals, confidantes, and outright chuckles of Dorothy, Sophia, Rose, and Blanche. (But that’s a pretty high standard to live up to.)

The season finale of Looking essentially resets Season One back where it began. Patrick is single once more, Augustin is (probably) living with Patrick again, and Dom is (probably) still having age-related issues, except now he’s dealing with them by hooking up with a much older man instead of a much younger one. I imagine, with that Golden Girls theme music playing us out, that Looking is trying to be all about the friendship, and I still think that eight episodes in, these friendships seem totally arbitrary. We haven’t had any truly meaningful interactions between the three leads. Doris and Dom manage to have a poignant scene in nearly every episode; if the show were about their bond, I’d buy it.

But Patrick has not impacted a single one of Dom’s storylines. Nor has Augustin. Nor have Patrick or Dom had any significant hand in either preventing or provoking Augustin’s meltdown. Augustin had some effect on Patrick and Richie’s courtship, but it’s Patrick’s boss Kevin who ended up being the bigger threat (along with Patrick’s insecurities). These characters exist in this same universe, but only occasionally interact. Their friendship is not integral whatsoever to the show, and that should probably change if the show’s writers want to keep using Golden Girls as a reference. Would anyone have watched Golden Girls if all the old ladies were just off in their own corners, hanging out with other people every episode, barely seen together?

And that’s our show. Looking took a while to warm up to. I still wouldn’t call it appointment television. Girls was extremely sharp for the majority of this season, and True Detective was a much richer and more enticing HBO debut. I’d rate them higher than this one. But I will say that several Looking fellas (not necessarily the core cast members) made their way into my heart this season, and I do want to know what happens to them next. Will Lynn and Dom give it a go? How long will Richie’s armpits go unlicked? Whose face will Doris sit on? I guess you could say I’m Looking forward to the second season, more for the fringe benefits of the supporting characters than anything relating to Patrick or Augustin. But that’s still something.

So. I’ve seen him eight times now, and that’s a lot. After our first three or four outings, I was unimpressed, but I must have seen something to keep me coming back. Some… potential. And then there it was. On our fifth date, I witnessed something truly special. I felt something. Granted, it wasn’t something I’d never felt before — in fact, it reminded me very much of something I’d seen a couple years back — and it was better and fresher then. But still.

After that fifth date, I was willing to cut him some slack. He still frustrated me at times. I wanted him to go further; he was always holding back. It was like he was afraid to go too far, so he kept moving forward mere inches. And after so many weeks, I wanted more. I wanted to love him! Instead, I only liked him a little. But there were moments, little sparks, that made me believe he might be worth putting some more time into. And so I did.

Now he wants to take a break. I don’t know when I’ll see him again. Sometime next year, maybe? And who knows how he’ll change by then? Or how I will? I know there will be others to help me while away the hours in the meantime; soon, I’ll barely think of him. But when he returns, I’ll be glad to see him again, ready to pick back up where we left off. I wasn’t sure at first, but after these past eight weeks, I guess I’m ready to make a commitment.

Looking, I like you. I certainly don’t love you… yet. Maybe I never will. Maybe this is the peak of our… relationship? You are nice, and sometimes a little bit funny, and slightly sexy, though not nearly as promiscuous as I was expecting you to be. You are genuine, and at times endearingly awkward, and it takes time to get to know you. A lot of my friends didn’t like you when they first saw you, but I kept hoping for the best.

I didn’t get the best. I got you. And I suppose that will have to do.

*