Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep

I spent most of the weekend finishing and editing an essay for Screem magazine. I’m waiting for interview answers to finalize it. It’s currently at about 5200 words, plus a sidebar article that’s another 1000 or so.

I finished Fallen by Karin Slaughter this weekend. A good character-centric crime thriller. Reviewed at the hyperlink. Then I picked up Killer Move by Michael Marshall, which has been on my TBR stack for a while. A guy gets out of prison after serving nearly 20 years for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s not a happy guy.

We watched the penultimate Longmire and several episodes of Season 1 of Justified. Love the one about the guy who takes his guards hostage in the Marshal’s office and Raylan gets him out with fried chicken and bourbon.

Last night’s Breaking Bad was intense. The cold open was out of left field. At first I thought it was a young Jesse. Then I was sure the kid was going to find a body. Then I forgot about him altogether. Then there was Walt’s “melt down” in Hank’s office. I loved how Hank wanted to be the good guy, but he was terribly uncomfortable by Walt’s emotions. He gets up from his desk. He paces his office. He’s like a trapped animal. His voice goes up an octave. Finally he has to get out, allegedly to get Walt a cup of coffee. Walt knew how Hank would react: it was (all?) an act to get him out of the office so he could bug it. The bug, as it turned out, saved Lydia’s life. Mike was set to kill her after Hank denied any knowledge of the GPS on the methylamine. However, Hank’s a smart guy and he follows up with Houston, and his conversation is relayed via the bug.

Lydia’s still dancing as fast as she can. She knows about the dead zone in the route the train with the methylamine takes from the west coast. Mike says they’ll have to kill the crew. “There are two kinds of heist,” he says. “Those where the guys get away with it and those that leave witnesses.” After discussing various approaches, Jesse comes up with the winning strategy. Again. Dude must have been taking smart pills during the hiatus. That’s two clever ideas in five episodes.

The dead zone just happens to be in Arizona. Just happens to have a handy level crossing and a trestle bridge. Just happens that the trestle bridge is the right distance from the level crossing. Most of the rest of the episode is a caper, though the writers stacked things in Walt & Co.’s favor. The guy flags the train down at exactly the right spot so it can grind to a halt a few feet from the “stalled” dump truck. Apparently the wind is blowing in the right direction so the engineer and conductor can’t hear the pump, and never notice the people on the train. A bit of a stretch, but such is the nature of the caper. The joker in the deck was the good Samaritan (I described him that way in my head a few seconds before Mike did) with the big-ass truck. Down to the wire and a touch beyond, just like any good caper.

And then the punch line. They turn off the pump and there’s still a motor running. Did they forget something attached to the train, I wondered? No. There he is, the forgotten kid from the beginning. Tarantula boy. During their setup, Jesse had stressed to Todd that absolutely no one could ever find out about this robbery. No one. Ever. People had been speculating that Todd was a plant, an undercover cop. No worries about that. He took Jesse’s message to heart and made sure there were no witnesses. Alas, poor Jesse. I think he’s going to take that badly. He’s becoming the team’s conscience. He’s gone to bat for people a few times recently. It was his scheme, though, that got the boy shot.