So I originally read the Buffalo guy's question to Mike, "who are you, Otto's kid by the maid," as just generic racism. "Oh so you're taking this over? You don't LOOK like a Gerhardt," but as a commentator above pointed out it actually was probably confirmation of my theory from last week that Hanzee was Otto's bastard kid and everyone knew it. If that really was Hanzee's mom that Mike let go in "act of mercy," I really wish we had gotten to see more of what it must have been like for her and Hanzee to live in that house all those years. I mean, we can imagine, but...
Poor Mike. Thought he was set to be King of the World, but he ended up one swingline stapler short of working in a cube farm. "Typewriters! They're not just for women anymore!"
I thought Peggy's speech in the squad car was meant to show us the extent of her delusion. All the societal pressures she described were and are very real, but she also never saw that the way she ended up where she ended up WAS through her own choices. Driving home with Rye in the windshield. Not taking Lou's advice to fess up, because the Gerhardts were coming. Stealing all that toilet paper from work. A woman who could taze Dodd Gerhardt and truss him up like a Christmas goose could have hit the road for California if she wanted to. She just never saw all the choices she was making as choices. And so people died.