Every time The Insider comes on cable, I watch it. I remember when it came out, how boring I thought it sounded: A research scientist for a tobacco company gets fired, involved in a high-stakes lawsuit, and gets to be on 60 Minutes. But sheesh, the way Mann tells that story, it totally works. It's over two hours of guys in button-down shirts arguing about non-disclosure agreements, and I'm goddamn glued to it. It also has an epic verbal smackdown scene.

Very cool. The show is definitely rife with low-key callbacks and payoffs.

The dvd thing was terrific. I wish I could say I saw it coming. It's a good example of detail-conscious storytelling, too, the way it payed-off little things that were set-up long ago. It was all very surprising, yet very inevitable.

Ah hah, good catch.

Totally—my mental shorthand of cancer = bald was too presumptuous. It's the chemo, not the cancer itself that = bald. I believe you may have keyed into a key detail here: The cancer might be here to stay (I think Vince Gilligan has dropped a hint to that effect), and if that's the case it's a good bet that Walt will simply be forced to stop treatments when he goes on the lam. Shit those flash forwards fascinate me. It's pretty clever how they're using that device to show us Walt's future but not his ultimate fate, almost the way he might have a vision of his future without fully knowing how it will play out.

If the point is that it is itself alarming and sort of fucked-up that I've taken this long to hate Walt, then we agree. I've engaged in pro-Walt apologetics for far too long, no doubt (at the time, I even rationalized Walt's actions w/r/t the whole Jane Margolis thing; I was shameless). So, yeah, I plead guilty to being in love with the character from day one, hating the sins but loving the sinner. I have no excuse.

But I do think the kid-on-the-bike thing, which made me move from disapproving of Walt to hating him, marked a new low point for Walt: the utter lack of any human response, and moreover, the inability to relate to someone (Jesse) who was actually having a real human response to what happened. The Walt of even just a couple seasons ago would have been more affected by it, but the post-Fring Walt doesn't lose a wink of sleep over it. Of course, this viewer experience—one of constantly performing the moral calculus it takes to figure out just how much you want to root for a protagonist whose actions you find increasingly reprehensible, and even what that might mean about you—is something Gilligan and the show's writers have always seemed to be going for. They've done the whole anti-hero thing really well.

After the premiere, I said "That's it. I'm officially rooting for Hank. He's now my protagonist in this story." But after this latest episode, and his icky, self-serving diner discussion with Skyler, I'm not so sure anymore. He and his wife are both starting to lose their shit, I think. Okay, so Pinkman. I'll root for Pinkman. How can you not love a dude who drives around the neighborhood tossing cash out of his car?

The guy who played the coroner of Munchkinland was a hoot.

That character is either the fastest medical examiner of all time or a fraud. Within five minutes of the person’s death, he’s able to positively I.D. the body (which is pancaked underneath a house) and proffer an official death certificate written in calligraphy. He proceeds to claim that he "thoroughly examined her." Really? Thoroughly. In five minutes? Now it doesn't take long to pronounce someone dead, but the document is clearly a forgery created to impress the mayor. Take your eye off these Munchkinland civil servants for a split second, and they try to pull a fast one.

Yeah, I guess part of the reason we tend to find the here's-40-pages-about-harpoons sections tiresome is because if we, in 2013, want to learn about what it was like aboard 19th century whaling vessels, we have options. Google, maritime museums, college courses, the Discovery Channel. But when that book was written, the only way to know what it's like on a whaling ship was to go be on a whaling ship. Or maybe you'd run into some crazy-ass dude who'd been on one and is willing to tell you all about it. Or if you're lucky (and literate), you'd come across a book about it. Living in the information age allows us to know how big the world is, so to speak. But some barefoot doofus living in Wyoming in 1851, not so much. To him, 40 pages about harpoons might've seemed kick-ass. Hey, it beats staring at the wall. Or syphilis.

There's a cool scene in Django Unchained in which Jamie Foxx asks Christoph Waltz to tell him the German fable of Broomhilda. Foxx's character sits like a little kid, in rapt attention, mesmerized by the faraway tale. The scene captures how information-deprived a person could be in days of yore. If someone had a story you hadn't heard, or wanted to give you an lengthy treatise on harpoons, you'd lap it up. It's not like you had a spin class you'd be late for.

Wow, I haven't encountered anyone screwing in a movie theater, but I gotta say: as long as they're not filming it with with their iPhones, I think I might be cool with it.

Best. App. Ever.

I think Brian mentioned something like this during the episode, but, as a hard-liner against phones in theatres, there's a whole range of excuses/reasons someone could give for causing a disturbance that I would accept without complaint. Once, at a screening of Avatar, this person in front of me had her phone go off, and much to my annoyance, she proceeded to whip out her phone and respond via text message right there in her seat. When she hit "Send" her brightly lit phone made the sent-message sound—Laaaa-liiing!—and she swiftly put it back in her bag. All that probably took around 15 seconds. But then she turned around to us and whispered exactly these words: "I'm so sorry about that. I'm a doctor, and that was my hospital alerting me about a patient."

To which I said, "I understand. It's cool." Now maybe it was bullshit and she was really a temp at Dunder Mifflin who was texting her idiot friend about something trivial and she was too lazy to exit the theater to use her phone... But, you know, I'm just sayin' that I happily give a big fat pass to anyone who has a non-trivial excuse, provided the disturbance is brief and isolated. If someone's a pediatric surgeon who is being alerted about the condition of an 8 year-old who is seriously ill (for example), well then okay. I'd prefer you left the theater, but, you know, it's cool. So, yeah. You moviegoers whose occupations literally involve life-and-death situations for which you must always be on-call, y'all can leave your ringers on. (Conversely, if you're merely a commodities broker who just wants to keep tabs on NASDAQ while you watch Pain & Gain with your trophy wife, fuck you. Put the phone away.) I'd prefer vibrate, but if you actually are that hypothetical 8 year-old's surgeon, or something along those lines, I'm not mad at ya. I recognize that there truly are people who have jobs where the stakes so high that there's significant liabilities to turning off their phone even for a couple of hours. It made a huge difference, of course, that the (lady who claimed to be a) doctor immediately turned around, explained, and apologized.

Hey if the app/coupon thing is effective at keeping people from using their smartphones/alarm clocks, I'm all for it. They should also include a free e-book by Emily Post.

Oh hell yes.

Last season was definitely top-notch, but it did break my heart when