Consternation

There was a reason to introduce Rebecca. I think maybe she is still legally married to Chuck, and will have to show up and make some decisions.

I could not stop laughing at the flag shot. Epic! Jimmy should consider running for some sort of public office.

Is the cartel still smuggling coke? Can $250,000 worth of cocaine physically fit in the truck tires? Is it heroin? I'm one who took a really long time to warm up to Kim. I just could not care about her for the whole first season. But now all that has changed. I didn't see the head crack coming. I thought sure, maybe another hospitalization for severe electromagnetism, like last season. That looked so terrible. I can't wait to listen to the podcast so the show runners can tell a bunch of jokes about filming it to make me feel better.

That abandoned rail building with all the small windows that Mike met Nacho in at the end, that was in Breaking Bad wasn't it? I think it was but I can't remember what went on there. I'm not sure what's going on with the daughter in law. First I assumed the paper delivery station wagon just backfires down the street.

I'm still not sure she did. I was waiting for her to jump up off the slab the whole time. When the medics checked her, she would have been ambient temperature with no vital signs.

I think the kidnapping of Holden did not really happen in the same way we have seen. I just feel like, there would have been some witnesses if Lady Gaga had been standing around in full goth regalia, took a kid off a merry-go-round and wandered off down the beach while the dad looked at his phone for five seconds. It seems like an overlay or euphemism for whatever really happened. I'm also firmly on Team John Is Dead so if he can misremember his death he can probably do the same for some other painful experiences.

I am going to eat all of the food left on this ship before it sinks. I almost threw it in after last week, but I preferred this week. Last week just seemed stuck, but it has gotten a little more interesting now that more people are in on the ruse.

For all that I acknowledge the episode was objectively bad, I found a number of things in it to guiltily enjoy. It was pretty glorious how the bar singer just never STFU ever. Just when you think she's done, nope she is still singing. The stupid obviously never going to happen park meetup plan. Maybe that was Woody's idea that he remembered from Indecent Proposal. Frankenchrist Superstar, wandering the desert. A bigger role for Felicia!

It's true. I think a lot of us after last week jumped right to Jordan betraying Frank, just because otherwise we have wasted our time watching her.

I think the mayor of Vinci is supposed to live in Bel Air. He works in Vinci, and his son works with a lot of people from Vinci, throwing the parties which don't seem to be in Vinci. The daughter (does she have a first name? We have just been calling her "Andrea") has only ever been spotted inside the house, and around the corner at the dispensary as far as I know.

I've always (and by always, I mean a couple weeks or however long it's been) had some issues with the idea that the mayor's kids are the Ostermans from the jewelry store. The kids were old enough to remember the heist and would know they were adopted. The daughter talks about her real mother dying in the care of Rick Springfield. The son is so far into the conspiracy (way more than the mayor by the way things look now) that the idea of him exposing it for revenge by killing Caspere and doing whatever he is going to do with the hard drive seems far fetched. At the same time I have always (three or four weeks) thought that the daughter knows something.

Blake was still claiming this week that no one knows who killed Caspere. If not for the rubber bullet stunt, it would be unclear whether the murderer got the drive, or whether Caspere was tortured but did not reveal the drive's location and it may not surface forever. That might have actually been a more interesting plot, with each of the Catalyst-involved partygoers looking around at their co-conspirators wondering which one of them killed Caspere, whether they got the drive and whether they wanted it to destroy it or use it against one of the other club members. Some of that is still going on, except that no one really has to wonder who got the drive. I mean, you know what I mean. They don't know who it is, but they know it was the person who was waiting in the house who is likely to have executed Caspere, and that person definitely has it. Unless Ray lied about it, but we know he didn't and all of the characters have been able to see Ray neither murdered nor fled to Venezuela just yet. The value of the drive does seem to be increasing under the changes to the market conditions since it was last seen. Even underdog Frank could now get some corridor land parcels for it if he had it.

I figured that the masked man wants people to know that the hard drive is very much still in play. He left it in view in a house where he was waiting with a shotgun already loaded with riot rounds. He may not have known it would be Ray that showed up first, or who it would be. He just wanted someone to see the drive and live to tell about it.

Who the fuck was Paul? (Sorry.) I don't know what to say about this episode. They finally tried explaining some of what has been going on, but none of it was really any sort of a twist or anything. I mean, I guess it is surprising that Black Mountain is the new Catalyst security and includes the Vinci cops, but who really cares. The whole point of that just seemed to be that Vinci PD is killing everybody up in here, and also Paul did this to himself with his filthy straight lies. Someone killed Davis, I guess it was these jerks? Are Antigone's formerly repressed memories still in play plotwise? Is this BOB guy going to show up now? Or is this all we need to know, that she was a missing girl and now she remembers and can hopefully start to move on from the past? Sorry, but I think I'm going to have to give Ray and/or Antigone a one week prognosis. Paul's mom and girlfriend are trapped in the motel room forever. The only people they know are the pizza guy, Huell from Breaking Bad in the room next door, and possibly Nate from Six Feet Under from that miniseries he did about the motel room. I still don't understand who has the diamonds. Does Frank have them? Does he think the Russians have them and he's going to steal them? I don't even get it. And the masked man has the hard drive, and wants everyone to know he has it (was waiting in the house with a shotgun loaded with rubber riot rounds for someone to see it before he took it), but doesn't want anyone to find him or the drive.

I have no idea why Eyes Wide Shut is considered some sort of gold standard for depiction of orgy/sex party. I question it being run by some sort of High Priest who is speaking Latin and waving censers around. It would probably be more accurate to just picture all of your neighbors from your block/coworkers/whatever people you know and do not find all that attractive wandering around a house and randomly hooking up all over the place. There is probably some guy in the kitchen who got hungry and is now cooking tater tots and wearing a frilly apron over his junk in the front while his hairy butt is hanging out in the back. Other than the strange beauty standards applied to the women and the fact that the women are also supposed to be paid eventually apparently, this scene actually seemed more realistic to me. Some people are doing a poor job of hooking up in random corners of rooms while others look on awkwardly, all of that. The points that required suspension of disbelief for me were all related to how well things seemed to go for the True Ds. Happen to overhear the right conversation and grab the papers, happen to find the missing girl, have an uncharacteristic reaction to MDMA, get all the MDMA out of your system immediately the second you barf one time, manage to escape the scene with all of this stuff after shanking a dude.

Stan is the coolest person who ever lived. He is basically Tino from My So Called Life. Where would we all be today, were it not for Stan's contributions? I think we can write a bot to generate Frank's lines. I feel kind of bad for Vince Vaugn, somehow I just really don't feel like he is all to blame for this. At the same time, if he said that "time is a flat circle" everyone would just wonder what the hell he is talking about. I was proud of him for "Don't you fucking shoot me, Ray." That line was relevant to the scene that was actually unfolding before him.

It hasn't been Ray's day, Ray's week, Ray's month, or even Ray's year. But he'll be there for Chad, when the rain starts to pour...

Oh, David Morse is her dad? I have just been referring to him as Don Draper. Wait, I just googled him, wasn't he the cop on House that chewed nicotine gum? So was the molester guy from the flashbacks supposed to be the young version of David Morse? That is what I thought when I was watching it, but after reading this topic I am second guessing it.

I'd probably have to rewatch to get a better sense of the timeline, but I thought that Ray's personal party was days before the other party. Maybe the day after was the brief meeting of the three amigos where Ray seemed pained, and Antigone asked him if he had been working on anything and he said no.

I really enjoyed this episode. I laughed hysterically all through the scene with Ray partying alone in his apartment. Then twice as hard when he began to cry. My husband said, "You are probably the only one across the country laughing your ass off right now. It is pretty funny though."

I don't know why this season is so hard to follow either. Maybe I'll try watching the episode again with the closed captioning turned on. Seriously, does anyone know who the dead guy was? The masked guy who was chased through the tent city. Right after he gets away, Antigone is saying "That's the guy, that's the guy" or something. Does she mean he set the car fire? That seems kind of obvious. Does she mean he shot Ray? How the hell would she know?

This show keeps making me feel stupid. It took me about a day to realize that weird thing on the car seat in E01 was the crow mask. It was very mysterious at the time and I wanted to find out what it was, but it didn't even enter my mind while I was watching E02, it just popped into my head randomly at work today. I don't really feel too well connected to the corruption plot either. Something something central railway, Vince gets a bunch of money to put into it but then the dead guy had all the money for some reason.

Get it??? RAINS.

If the show is going to do something different than the books, they should either have Brienne duel the Hound, have Sansa find out that Bran and Rickon are alive, have Cersei slurp water off a dirty prison floor, reveal that Valyrian steel is effective against Others, or have the Others raise up a ton of zombies. Approved. Edit: or have a conversation between Dany and Tyrion.

My favorite character is now the woman who brings Sansa bathwater and cryptic messages of support. I guess she is supposed to replace the washerwomen who aren't washerwomen. Whatever, she can stay. Did I miss it or where was Melle Mel when Stannis was setting off for Winterfell? He promised to bring her on the last episode. I approve of the change where Dany feeds people to Rhaegal and Viserion. That is the first enjoyment those poor dragons have had in two weeks or two years or however long it's supposed to have been. Yeah, Aemon. "There is only going to be one Targ left" Jon: busts into the room like Lenny and Squiggy. I miss you, Arya and Cersei. (And of course Bran but I knew that was going to happen.)