When Chris Brown, who in 2009 beat his then-girlfriend Rihanna on the way to a Grammys pre-party, got two performing slots at this year’s awards show, objecting to his presence there was relatively uncomplicated. His crime was relatively recent, and Brown seemed to have little sense that he’d done something wrong, throwing temper tantrums when asked about his assault in interviews and acting as if his Grammy win was a rebuke to the people who were unfairly judging him. And suggesting that he shouldn’t be given a high-profile spot, much less two, at the Grammys was a way of rooting for, or siding with, Rihanna. But in the time since, events have guaranteed that the state of their relationship will be a continued story—and suggested how complicated it’s going to be to find a way to talk about it productively.

First, the news broke that Rihanna had asked Brown to her birthday party. Then, she released a remix of her latest song, “Birthday Cake,” featuring Brown. If the pair aren’t dating again, it’s clear that Brown is back in Rihanna’s life. Which puts those of us who would rather not see folks in his industry bestowing their most advantageous opportunities on Brown rather than someone who didn’t beat a fellow artist so badly she couldn’t perform when she was allotted one of those slots, in a position of not being on the same page as the woman we’d really like to be supporting.

This is not an uncommon dynamic, of course. As Jaclyn Friedman points out, women who are trying to leave their abusers tend to go back, a lot, before they finally decide to either stay or leave for good. The dilemma between wanting to respect a woman as an independent agent while also being worried for her is not one that’s unique to celebrities. And it’s not a problem that anyone’s come up with a fool-proof solution for, or we’d be a lot better at helping women leave the men who abuse them, be they famous or simply our friends.

One sure way not to move the conversation in anything like a productive direction, though, is to challenge Chris Brown to a fight. Which is what C.M. Punk, a professional wrestler, decided it would be a productive thing to do. There’s really no circumstance in which a white man talking about curb stomping a black man is an elevating threat. And whatever Chris Brown needs, it’s emphatically not a beating. Punk could take a note from retired pro wrestler Mick Foley, who’s become an amazing advocate for victims of sexual assault. This isn’t about completing a cycle of retribution. And it’s not about teaching people about who it is or isn’t honorable to fight.

Mos Def, performing under his Yasiin Bey stage name, took a shot at turning “Ni**as in Paris,” the most recent single off Kanye West and Jay-Z’s joint album Watch the Throne, into a piece of biting social commentary:

I don’t necessarily think that “Ni**as in Paris,” which is pretty obviously about the distorting influence of wealth, needed a socially conscious-remix as an antidote. That said, the riffs on the original are pretty funny, turning a bathroom hook up into a parody of Cosby-like concern with how young black men present themselves; a joke about lesbians into a commentary on fast food and diabetes; and I pretty much lost it at “Prince Williams ain’t do it right if you ask me / If I was him I’d put some black up in my family.” I’m less compelled by the slightly apocalyptic stuff towards the end, but it’s a pretty comprehensive and clever inversion of the song.

And it’s also part of a noble semi-tradition of other rappers poking Kanye and Jay-Z about their politics. Kanye may have gone socially-conscious on his remix of his own song, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but the line that everyone remembers from that song is Jay-Z declaring that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It took Lupe Fiasco to drop actual knowledge about the history of the contemporary diamond trade and talk jewelry depreciation:

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California.

Given how much of the fourth season of Sons of Anarchy was about the financial vulnerabilities of, in particular, Clay and Jax, I started thinking a lot about how SAMCRO could function more effectively as an organization. Could the club start a fake pension fund as a way to explain the accumulation of its illict profits as legitimate proceeds of the auto body shop? Could it pay for the education of the club’s mechanics so they could get certification that would make them employable elsewhere? There are upsides and downsides to any potential solutions in terms of how much attention from law enforcement.

But in the end, I realized, the club will never give members the tools that would make it easier to leave. The Sons of Anarchy are a lot like the Republican Party: the MC is increasingly a vehicle for angry, white people to see their grievances legitimated even as it provides them with very little in the way of tangible benefit.

So much of the tension in season four is driven by the fact that, despite the large profits the club sometimes turns on deals, their members live rather financially precarious lives. Clay is drawn to the deal with the cartel even though it involves moving drugs, something that’s absolutely beyond what the club previously defined as the pale, in part because he sees the end of his ability to ride and work with his hands and doesn’t have a nest egg. Jax mires himself in Charming because, as he explains to Tara, he’s an only-decent mechanics with few other prospects for an honest, steady job outside the club, but he can’t accomodate himself to the prospect of living mainly on his wife’s income. As a viewer, it’s hugely frustrating to see Jax insist on an arrangement that places his children and his fiancee in continual danger for the sake of his pride, and that really seems to act as a bridge to a plot arc that renders Tara unable to support him, to provide a financial incentive for them to leave town. But I understand Jax’s desire to be able to support his family even as I’m angry at his insistence in boxing himself in to a dreadful situation.

The thing is, the club provides other things for Jax and Clay, and not all of them are jobs or collections of letters on philosophies of anarchist governance. It’s given both men positions of authority not just within the club, but in Charming itself—being part of SAMCRO gives them standing that without money or formal education, they’d be unlikely to achieve by other means. It gives them a sense of identity that’s written directly into their skin and can be used to negotiate their relationships with other people and other groups. And it gives them justification to pursue their grievances without restraint: if someone offends them, they’re free to pluck that person out. Those cognitive tools for identifying themselves and justifying even their worst behavior are powerful enough that even though the club is actively detrimental to their long-term financial security, their relationships to their families, and even their safety, people like Opie, Clay, and Jax are willing to stick with it. That loyalty is a testament as much to the poverty of opportunities for them elsewhere as it is to the power of the club.
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We’re at a moment when a cohort of actors who cut their teeth in hipster-friendly projects like Party Down and the Frat Pack movies are coming of age. Whether it’s Lizzy Caplan’s emergence as a viable romantic comedy star thanks to her wonderful turn on New Girl; or Adam Scott’s Parks and Recreation-minted heartthrob status; the wave of goodwill Jason Segel is riding right now after his successful reboot of the Muppts franchise; or Aaron Paul’s search for the role that will take him beyond his turn as morally conflicted meth cooker Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, these actors are all starring in romantic comedies this year. It’s fascinating to see what, if anything, is different about this well-worn trope as taken on by actors less invested in traditional Hollywood glamor than in self-lacerating humor. Mostly it seems that they’re just as invested in marriage and commitment as prior generations, but the obstacles to their happiness are different.

For the younger set, there’s Damsels in Distress, a decidedly odd-looking comedy about a group of college girls (played by actresses way too old for the setting) out to save their classmates from the scourges of depression and cads with donuts and tap-dancing. The movie’s quirky enough that I can’t tell if there’s an abstinence metaphor or there will be an abstinence subplot here. But there’s still something interesting about a college sex comedy framed around a very different framework and with characters who have very different priorities:

Then, there’s Save the Date, which doesn’t have a formal trailer yet, but is one of the movies from Sundance that’s stuck with me most closely. Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan play sisters Beth and Sarah, the former about to get engaged to Andrew (Martin Starr) a drummer in a rock band, the latter shaken by an unexpected proposal from Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), the frontman for that same band. When Sarah breaks up with Kevin, she embarks on casual relationship that turns into something more serious. To a certain extent, it’s a movie with very conventional themes: love can show up at surprising times! Marriages are more important than weddings! But it’s interesting to see those themes play out in a setting and with semi-bohemian characters who might have rejected marriage in another generation of movies:

Bridesmaids let it be known that sometimes women go a little crazy in the process of planning a wedding, even when they’re happy for the bride. Bachelorette, which also stars Caplan along with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher apparently goes much darker, exposing a group of women who get decidedly vicious when the least conventionally attractive of their number gets engaged before they do. I’ll be curious to see if the movie is honest in its darkness or an occasion to paint all women as catty, status-obsessed, jealous, and willing to tear each other up:

It’s incredibly striking to watch, Ralph Fiennes’ excellent new cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play about a Roman general turned exile and traitor to his people and himself, Coriolanus, in the midst of a race for the Republican nomination for president, and in the winter of the Occupy movement. To say that it’s a merely 99 percent movement movie would diminish it—and ignore Shakespeare’s intentions to the point of ridiculousness. There’s far too much going on—Roman mothers (and what a Roman mother: Vanessa Redgrave is spectacular as Volumnia), blood feuds (this one, between Martius and Gerard Butler, surprisingly good as Tullus Aufidius), citizens who are easily manipulated and men who think they’re too good to need to earn the public trust.

But Coriolanus is a striking illustration of Shakespeare’s ability to fill whatever space his words are set in. It’s hard to imagine another author who could write a scene of a Roman mother shaming her son into refraining from sacking his home city in an act of poisonous vengeance that would play as well in modern winter coats as it does in togas. And it’s striking to see one of his plays come alive, so vividly transposed to our own time, precisely at the moment that we seem to need it.

In the opening scene of the movie, a group of conspirators come together in a dingy apartment in a bad neighborhood. The First Citizen asks the others, in preparation for a march on grain stores held by the government, “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” They could be the General Assembly at an Occupy encampment (the movement could use their graphic design skills, to be sure). The First Citizen’s declaration of Rome’s elite that “They ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us,” is as perfect an articulation of the pains of rising income inequality today as it was when Shakespeare wrote it, and in the time that he imagined those words spoken.

The contempt the citizens meet with when they confront Caius Martius—the Roman general who, like many Republicans today appears to believe that the military are the only people who deserve a social safety net—is awfully familiar as well. “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues / That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, / Make yourselves scabs?” Martius spits at them. It’s hard not to imagine that America’s beseiged 1 percenters wish they could summon his eloquence in their disdain, though they might stop short at Martius’s diatrabe against popular government, his complaint that by trying to gain the consent of the citizens “we debase / The nature of our seats, and make the rabble / Call our cares fears; which will in time
Break ope the locks o’ the senate and bring in / The crows to peck the eagles.”

And the movie reminded me of something I think at least modern Shakespeare adaptations have in common that’s quite interesting: they’ve redefined banishment as a retreat to poverty. Banishment’s a hard concept in the modern era—as we’ve filled in the land, it’s harder to imagine what it would be like to be cast out of a city state without easy access to the kind of economic, social, or cultural life you once enjoyed within its walls. And it’s also difficult to imagine getting large numbers of people on board with shunning an individual and casting that curse down the years to disadvantage his children as well.

But I think both Coriolanus and Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo + Juliet did something fascinating in their depictions of exile: they made Martius and Romeo poor. When Romeo leaves Verona and ends up living in an isolated trailer: it’s ultimately a poverty of information that kills him when he rushes back to kill himself at what he believes is Julie’ts grave. After the people turn on him and he’s banished from Rome, Martius goes homeless, sleeping rough, hitching rides, growing out his hair and beard, and ultimately stalking his great enemy, Aufidius, to his war council. When Aufidius accepts Martius’s allegiance, and shaving his head, welcomes him back into citizenship, it’s a moment so charged, it’s almost erotic. The nature of our punishments may change. But Shakespeare’s words still have the heft and magnitude to express what exile, what inequality, what hunger mean to us across the years.

President Obama’s been making headlines for singing in recent weeks, whether it’s Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” or pulling out some soul to serenade his hometown with a rendition of “Sweet Home Chicago.” But just as Bill Clinton had his saxaphone, the current First Family, POTUS in particular, has made a regular habit of rocking out in public over the years, and I don’t just mean singing along to “This Land Is Your Land” at his pre-Inauguration festivities. So here’s a guide to the notable song choices and dance moves the Obamas have employed since the family hit the national stage for real. They may not be ready for The Voice or So You Think You Can Dance (having seen them do an Inaugural Ball shuffle, I can attest to this in person), but for a couple of middle-aged folks, the Obamas seem like a decent couple to bring along for a night of karaoke:

1. “If I Only Had a Brain,” Gridiron Dinner, 2006: Sadly, I couldn’t track down video of this, but the members of the Gridiron Club had Obama, then in his freshman term in the Senate, sing a parody version of the Scarecrow’s song from the Wizard of Oz, including these lyrics: “I’m aspiring to greatness, but somehow I feel weightless, a freshman’s sad refrain. I could be a great uniter, making ethics rules much tighter, if I only had McCain.”

2. “Chain of Fools,” Detroit, 2008: On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama busted out some Aretha in honor of the hometown diva. And man does he sound good:

3. “See You Again,” Inauguration Weekend, 2009: So it might not be what she would choose to listen to, but props to First Lady Michelle Obama for knowing the words to Miley Cyrus’s best song and rocking out along with her daughters at the new administration’s Kids’ Inaugural Concert. With any luck, Obama Karaoke can be a multi-generational affair.

4. “Happy Birthday,” Kennedy Center, 2009: He’s no sexy Marilyn singing happy birthday to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was undergoing treatment for cancer as he celebrated his 77th birthday. But it’s pretty funny to note that absent a podium, Obama has a tendency to conduct a pretend orchestra. Later that year, Obama apparently serenaded Armando Gomez, a Chicago businessman, with the same song at a Cinco De Mayo party at the White House.

5. Fiesta Latina, the White House, 2009: POTUS brought out some slightly more sophisticated dance moves when he was partnered up with Thalia later that fall at a celebration of Latin American music at the White House:

But seriously, someone’s gotta put that goofy head wiggle on lockdown before Obama’s ready for the bigtime:

6. “Move Your Body,” Alice Dean Middle School, Washington, DC, 2011: At least when FLOTUS pulls a out the dorky mom dance moves, she does it for a good cause. And there’s a limit to how dorky you can appear when you’re rocking out to a song that’s part of your partnership with Beyonce Knowles to get kids exercising.

7. “Let’s Stay Together,” The Apollo Theater in New York, 2012: Obama brought the Al Green a month before Valentine’s Day. Turns out speechifying has a tendency to turn you a little husky. Maybe Obama can take vocal cord care tips from Adele:

8. “Sweet Home Chicago,” Chicago, 2012: When he turns on his pipes, the President tends to choose soul or blues. It’s nice of his adopted hometown to provide him with a theme song that’s right in his wheelhouse.

The bridge is yours.

-Todd VanDerWerff on Glee. Even more than usual.

-Nuclear submarines are the new big pop culture trend.

-Ashley Tisdale and Louis C.K., because why not?

-Your visual cheat sheet to Hugo, which if you’re going to see one Oscar-nominated movie before this weekend, I recommend.

-Speaking of which, Oscar Etiquette:

On Monday, Ryan McGee laid down a marker in the AV Club, arguing that HBO’s success with shows like The Sopranos deemphasized the need to make individual episodes of television compelling as long as they served a larger narrative, and urged episodic shows to adopt at least the facade of long-arc stories even if they weren’t well-suited to do so. James Poniewozick at Time suggested that Ryan’s overstating the extent to which this has actually happened, and make a point that I think gets at a gateway that precedes Ryan’s piece. “It’s true that a TV series is not a novel,” James writes. “But it’s also not a movie. Every medium works best when it takes advantage of what’s distinctive about it. TV is linear and cumulative, allowing a story to unfold over weeks, months or years.” So what is it that makes it a distinctive medium? And how can we best nurture that?

To answer the second question first, there’s an extent to which television is the least flexible of the major media. While it’s absolutely true that the networks are becoming somewhat more flexible about season lengths—something like ABC’s found footage horror show The River is a good example of this—and cable channels and network do make miniseries, it’s true that the standard network season is 22ish episodes and the standard cable season is 13ish episodes. The episodes are of a relatively standard length: 22ish minutes for a sitcom and 42ish for a drama on the networks and non-premium cable channels, and closer to 30 and an hour on the premium cable channels.

Those are astonishing formal constraints for an artist, even a commercial one, to work under, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. Standard-release movie features features can run from 80 minutes to well over two hours, and you can make something substantially shorter or longer than that and still find mass-market distribution for it. Novels are bound by some constraints on what a publisher can physically bind, but there’s a great deal of range within those technical specifications, and within them, no one’s setting limitations on how long or short chapters have to be, or even what they’re expected to look like: David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Eagan have helped shake that up. And one can only imagine, especially given the rise of e-books that can incorporate video, graphics, or animation, that experimentation will continue. Most pop songs hover in the three-minute range, but once again, that’s not a formal constraint, and iTunes may have hurt the album but it also freed artists like Robyn from its limitations. Web television may yet shake the formal constraints of television, but we’re far from a paradigm shift. Television is the most restrictive popular art form in existence, and I’m constantly awed that people manage to fit stories neatly into the space allotted to them without too much filler or franticness. But those restrictions are more than some sort of technical exercise: this is a multi-billion dollar industry, not a writing workshop handing out a structurally tricky assignment to talented students.
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In the wake of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, much of the attention’s been on low-rated NBC’s efforts to right itself. But yesterday, the company made two big announcements about very different parts of its future. First, fulfilling some of the terms of the deal, Comcast said it’ll launch four new channels, two aimed at African-Americans (including one backed by Magic Johnson) and two at Latinos. And, investing in the technological future of viewership, the company said it’s starting a video-on-demand service that will include legacy television shows and movies.

Given the massive success of Univision, and the fact that the best networks seem to be able to offer Latino audiences is either Rob Schneider’s bumbling through the family his character married into on Rob or Sofia Vergara as a transplanted bombshell, it makes sense that someone would try to go more aggressively after that rapidly growing market sector. It’s hard to tell what El Rey, the first of those two channels, will offer: “a mix of reality, scripted and animated series, movies, documentaries, news, music, comedy, and sports programming” isn’t exactly descriptive. But I do think it’s promising that the network’s saying out of the gate that they’ll hire Latino producers. You would think that would be a given for programming aimed at a Latino audience, but I don’t exactly take it for granted. And I think that “BabyFirst Americas,” which is a truly terrible network name, could actually find an audience in households where the first language is English. Bilingual education is going to be a lot more important in the future, and quality programming for children in Spanish could be a great educational tool for parents who want their kids growing up with multiple languages no matter which one they themselves speak.

I tend to think the African-American focused networks are a bit less significant, if only because the networks made a strategic decision to abandon black audiences a long time ago, and BET, TVOne, and VH1 have been trying to pick up that lost audience ever since. That said, I’m at least mildly interested to see what the folks behind REVOLT mean by this: “REVOLT will be live, like all great moments in television history. REVOLT will also be immediate, like today’s social networks,” because it’s so goofily futuristic. I’d be more compelled if the marketing material said something about building out mobile-friendly products, given the role that mobile plays in bridging the digital divide. But we’re a couple years out from seeing what they develop.

And speaking of digital, the bigger news for Comcast is probably the announcement that it’s building a Video on Demand service to challenge Netflix. They’re not just pulling in content from the NBCUniversal family, which makes it a somewhat more aggressive move than HBO and Showtime’s construction of separate, Netflix-like portals for their shows and movies. Those investments by individual channels could be interpreted as negotiating moves to show Netflix they’re willing to hold out, or attempts to preserve the sense that their content is ultra-premium. But Comcast seems like they’re trying to provide a genuine alternative, even if the content library they’re starting out with is relatively small. But given that Netflix is in the process of renegotiating contracts, and has had to pay higher fees to reup, there could be room for a company with a serious cash library to stock up fast. And a streaming or VOD service could provide an alternative way to keep alive low-rated but passionately-loved shows like Community that might not be earning their spot in a network lineup, but could draw subscribers to a streaming service.

This post contains spoilers for the February 21 episode of Justified.

If shows like the Law & Order franchise hammer home how easy it is to get lost in the big city, or to hide yourself in it if you’ve got wickedness in your heart, Justified last night felt like it was making a reverse and perverse case for the ability of rot to flourish in the country. Limehouse’s holler is still the most fascinating place the show’s taken us this season, a little fiefdom anchored by history, tradition, and an absolute refusal to be uprooted by racism. But Delroy’s entrance onto the scene is a reminder that you don’t have to have good intentions to build an enclave. And Arlo’s reappearance in his son’s life at the time when Raylan needs him least is a reminder that neglect to relationships is not determined by geography.

Let’s take Delroy first. There’s no question that he’s a smooth talker, telling Ellen May “My parents raised me in a commune of sorts. I wouldn’t call it hippie, exactly. Mostly dope farmers. But strangely, we were a family. Looked after each other. Just like we do here…It ain’t easy looking after you girls. There’s doctors, and clothing and food, what-not. Porn don’t nearly pay the bills. It’s those pills that keep the roof over our heads…Like everyone else, you must be willing to make a sacrifice,” before sending her back into a situation that nearly got her killed. He may be a pimp, but telling Ellen May “It pains me to do this to you, truly. But you have to learn accountability, just like I had to,” before beating her viciously makes him sound more like a cult leader than a hustler. Ugly things can flourish in isolation, particularly when someone’s willing to pray on people who are exceptionally isolated, like J.J., who corrects Ava’s memory of her, reminding the other woman that Ava remembers her from “Middle school. I never made it to high school.” Justified can be a bit talky this season, but in moments like this when it hammers home the importance of education and the isolation of rural poverty, it delivers tremendous sermons with very few words.

Limehouse may rule his holler with a similarly iron fist, but at least he goes to the trouble of articulating and grounding a code. “Gold chains and champagne and hoes and shit,” he lectures a deputy who’s getting all Emiliano Zapata on him. “Oh, son. We have survived in these hills for 15 decades by staying among ourselves.” I can imagine that Limehouse will wield terrible violence before this season is over, but so far, his game of only giving when he’s got first, his insistence that “The people who bank with me are the ones who have access to the things I know” is a form of insurance. The question becomes what happens when people like Dickie Bennett stop trusting the bank. And while Noble’s Holler has held on to its independence by not challenging white folks directly, amassing power can invite investigation, and as we’ve seen in earlier episodes, interdiction.

Then, there’s Arlo. Alan Sepinwall pointed out that if Arlo’s not faking, “the idea of Raylan having to care for the father he despises — wondering all the time how serious his condition really is — could yield some terrific material,” and I tend to agree. It would be fascinating to see FX become the first network to seriously examine the relationship between middle-aged people and their aging parents, particularly when those adults are under severe pressure. But even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, Raylan’s relationship with Arlo isn’t something he can bury in the backwoods. Whether it was Arlo’s continued criminality or Quarles’ determination to ferret it out, some things can’t stay dead and buried, even in the backcountry.

It is, of course, a good thing for the American movie industry that China and America have resolved their dispute over market access, and the number of American movies released in China is set to rise from 20 to 14. That’s not huge overall compared to the number of movies that come out of American studios every year, but ut Chinese moviegoers spent $2 billion at the box office last year, and that number’s supposed to rise by 20 percent this year.

There are limitations, of course—those 14 movies all have to be Imax or 3D editions of movies. So the pictures that can make it overseas are somewhat limited by what the studios are already shooting in those formats or willing to convert, and that likely means more big blockbusters rather than small but clever indies. I’m torn between wanting to see more of that money come back to American moviemakers and knowing that it’ll likely increase the profit margins on precisely the movies that don’t need the extra proof that they’re successful. Maybe I can have it both ways, and those jacked-up margins will give studios a little more permission to experiment with smart original ideas because they’ll have more of a cushion to absorb those projects if they fail.

It’s also worth a reminder that at the same time that China’s opening up its movie market, it’s banned all imported television during primetime broadcasts and issued new regulation saying that no channel can have more than a quarter of its programming be imported. Abiding by one World Trade Organization ruling doesn’t mean that China’s given up on trying to protect the growth of its domestic entertainment industry. And it doesn’t mean the regime’s about to let in a lot of entertainment that might undermine the values it’s trying to promote. If I was trying to maintain a vaguely Communist economic system, I’d be a lot more concerned about the plucky entrepreneurialism of 2 Broke Girls than the loud and goofy fantasies of the Transformers movies.

By David Liss

Alcatraz, I am running out of patience. All you have to do is give me some reason to care about your main story and the characters who inhabit it, and I’ll be happy. Why is that so hard to do? This week’s episode is a big step backwards from last weeks’ mythology-builder, and instead we get something that is episodic and phoned-in, ignoring those the main thing the show does well – intriguing prison flash-backs – and replacing them with a generic and under-wrought generic cop show.

That said, last night, Alcatraz delivered its most literary episode yet – with references to Harold Robbins, Ovid and a character who is obsessed with Jules Verne as imagined by writers who have clearly never read him. All of which, it turns out, is in the service of nothing. Fox had teased that this week’s episode of Alcatraz was going to reveal some important back story, including information on why Tommy Madsen is so important to the show, but that turned out to be a bluff. Instead we get another wheel-spinning installment that drops vaguely suggestive hints at a larger story which it does little to advance.

Our returned psycho this week is Johnny McKee a serial poisoner, who targets people he has decided have it coming – plus those people who happen to be near by. He has a particular thing for bullies, and when we first meet him he is working as a bartender and poisons a quartet of men because one of them was being an over-the-top-dick. So, right away we get a sense that McKee has no sense of proportion. Just as I’m wondering how a guy from the past, who has no present-day identification, can get hired at all, he takes a job as a pool boy and is immediately confronted by more improbable assholery. One jerk throws a towel on his head, so he poisons everyone in the pool. Ultimately we learn why McKee can’t just take a chill pill. The one girl in high school who was nice to him was put up to it by the football team, who ambushed him and threw firecrackers at him, one of which – wait for it – blew off his testicles. I can see how that might make someone angry. McKee goes off, learns chemistry, becomes a wiz at poisoning people, reads lots of Jules Verne, and ends up at Alcatraz. When he was first arrested in the ‘50s, he’d killed more than 70 people, which I think would make him the most prolific serial killer of all time, no?

In Alcatraz he’s just another murderer, but when the local kingpin hires him to kill a rival in the shank business, McKee identifies the kingpin as a bully, so we all know who is going to be on the business end of his homemade poison. These prison sequences tend to be the highlight in an otherwise lackluster show, but this one felt phoned in to me. No real drama, no warden craziness (other than his loony introduction to prison movie night) and nothing that sheds light on the time traveling mystery.

Hot on his heels in the present day, we learn that Soto has the cell assignment of every inmate in Alcatraz committed to memory, that Hauser speaks Mandarin fluently, but without any understanding of tones, and that Madsen is perfectly okay with Hauser stepping all over her interrogations. This happens when Soto suggests they speak to Jack Sylvane, since he was McKee’s next door neighbor. Hauser refuses to let Madsen go to the facility where he is being held, won’t explain who the soldiers guarding the interrogation are, and doesn’t let Hauser answer any questions that don’t have to do specifically with Mckee – including the ones that might shed some light on her own grandfather. And she takes it all without batting an eyelash. Where’s the tough chick now? Given what Madsen has learned in previous weeks, why is she so willing to let Hauser hold back on her and not complain. There’s so much potential for drama and conflict here, and it’s all going to waste. Instead we get vague gestures toward character, such as when Soto goes to visit the hot coroner with a soft spot for golden-age heroes. She finds that fact that Soto doesn’t like dissected corpses oh so cute.

But back to the exciting manhunt. Investigations lead to an abandoned school house chemistry lab – which Madsen and Hauser investigate without backup – and then an 11th hour realization that McKee is plotting to gas a BART train. Madsen and Hauser head to the scene, again without backup. If more than one bad guy ever emerges at the same time, they are not going to have enough personnel to handle the crisis. In the end, the ticking clock is stopped, the bad guy is apprehended, and everyone goes back to not wondering what the hell is going on.

Framing all this is comatose Lucy. At the start of the episode, Dr. Beaureguard declares that he’s tried Lucy’s alternative techniques – which turn out to be more odd ball/new age and less super-secret scientific – than we’ve been led to believe. Shock therapy and acupuncture have had no success, and now Lucy is comatose but dreaming. Dreams later become suggestive throughout the episode. McKee claims not to dream at all, but historical Lucy knows he’s lying, and that his dreams hold the key to the truth about his secret of explosive castration. Sylvane reveals that one of the side effects of being post time travel is that he no longer dreams.

And then there’s the inexplicable business with the book. Beaureguard tells Hauser to read to Lucy, handing her a copy of a Harold Robbins novel, but Hauser refuses. At the end of the episode, Hauser picks up the book and it turns out to be a copy of Ovid’ Metamorphoses in disguise. The significance of dreams – and who has them and who does not – is never explained, and I feel like there is something going on when we see a work of classical poetry disguises as a potboiler, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. In the end, we get another episode with insignificant forward movement and little pay out. Alcatraz, you are on notice.

David Liss is the author of seven novels, most recently The Twelfth Enchantment. His previous books include A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) which was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2001 Barry, MacAvity and Edgar awards for Best First novel. The Coffee Trader (2003) was also named a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the year’s 25 Books to Remember. A Spectacle of Corruption (2004) was a national bestseller, and The Devil’s Company (2009) has been optioned for film by Warner Brothers. Liss is the author of the graphic novel Mystery Men and writes Black Panther for Marvel Comics as well as the forthcoming series, The Spider, from Dynamite Comics.

Today would have been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday, had he not committed suicide in 2008 after years of struggling with severe depression. I will admit to sometimes finding his writing off-putting: he could be anthropological about his subjects, particularly in his non-fiction, where on occasion, that distance shaded over into contempt. But sometimes, he applied that approach to a subject that truly merited it, and that was the case in “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub,” his report for Rolling Stone about John McCain’s struggle against George W. Bush in the South Carolina Republican primary in 2000 (the essay was later republished in one of his collections, and then an expanded version as a stand-alone book).

While of course there’s expertise that comes with covering the campaign trail, and the jobs of embeds are really hard, it’s also a setting that benefits from someone parachuting in occasionally and pointing out that hey, all of this is utterly ridiculous, and exhausting, and a spectacle. Wallace writes:

If this all seems really static and dull, by the way, then understand that you’re getting a bona fide look at the reality of media life on the Trail, much of which consists of wandering around killing time on Bullshit 1 while you wait for the slight meaningful look from Travis that means he’s gotten the word from his immediate superior, Todd (28 and so obviously a Harvard alum it wasn’t ever worth asking), that after the next stop you’re getting rotated up into the big leagues on the Express to sit squished and paralyzed on the crammed red press-couch in back and listen to John S. McCain and Mike Murphy answer the Twelve Monkeys’ questions, and to look up-close and personal at McCain and the way he puts his legs way out on the salon’s floor and crosses them at the ankle and sucks absently at his right bicuspid and swirls the coffee in his McCain2000.com mug, and to try to penetrate the innermost box of this man’s thoughts on the enormous hope and enthusiasm he’s generating in press and voters alike … which you should be told up front does not and cannot happen.

In any case, you’ll get told to read a lot of things by David Foster Wallace today. But this would be my vote for which one you should pick. It’s a fantastic piece. But it’s also a terrific reminder of how marvelous it would be to have him around for a presidential election that’s many magnitudes weirder than South Carolina in 2000. What a loss.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Live from Damascus” begins with a party at Lockhart/Gardner, as Will officially gets the word from Cary that the State’s Attorney will not go after him again. The celebration is short-lived, though, as Lionel Deerfield arrives with the news that the state bar association is pursuing Will’s disbarment – not because of judicial corruption, but because of the money he “borrowed” from a client in Baltimore fifteen years ago. Will ready admits that he’s guilty and seems ready to give up – “It never ends, does it? Once they have you in their grasp, they never let go.” – but Diane insists that he fight, and she’s the one who pleads for leniency. Because of Lockhart/Gardner’s pro bono work (which Will, of course, didn’t want to do in the first place), the board offers him six months’ suspension in place of proceeding with a disbarment hearing. Diane thinks he should keep fighting; she’s convinced that six months away from the law will kill him, which sounds a tad over-dramatic to me. Perhaps she actually means that she thinks it would kill her, or that she doesn’t know how she’ll function without him. Will decides to talk it out with Alicia instead, but Alicia barely has to say anything – Will decides to take the suspension as he’s telling Alicia what’s going on. When Alicia weirdly claims that she can’t imagine giving up the law for six months, Will points out that she gave it up for a decade, and this is a nice reminder that what’s seen as a cataclysmic event for a single man in this position is barely acknowledged as difficult sacrifice for a married mother.

Will’s final case before his suspension begins is against Neil Gross (last seen in “Great Firewall”), whose company made the software that the Syrian government used to decrypt emails and phone calls between protesters. They used that information to capture, torture, and kill people, and Lockhart/Gardner’s clients are the families of three dead American protesters. The judge keeps talking about his sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, and Gross’s lawyer Viola Walsh claims this must mean he won’t be objective, which is an interesting follow-up to the fake judicial corruption story. Much of the trial is spent going back and forth over whether Gross knew that the software, which was sold through a wholesaler, was headed to Syria, and Walsh distracts everyone with a picture that supposedly proves that one of the victims, Sara, is still alive. Will, who thinks he has nothing left to lose and, as Diane puts it, wants to “hit a home run with [his] last at bat,” is determined to get Sara back, and Kalinda uses her contacts and a little blackmail to find Sara’s location. Meanwhile, Will realizes that they key to the case is tech support: the Syrian government registered their software licenses but had to get help before actually using the software, so Gross’s company had to know what was going on and deliberately help them. By the time the dust settles, Lockhart/Gardner has won the case and Sara is safe at a US Air Force base in Germany – but Kalinda’s contact in Syria has vanished.
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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California.

Since you’re probably not one of the (very few) people who are watching Enlightened, HBO’s excellent, if uncomfortable show about a corporate drone who has a breakdown, followed by an epiphany, and begins living out her principals in all sorts of hilariously awkward ways, you probably don’t get the joke in the title of this blog post. But the Enlightened episode “Consider Helen” was one of the most impressive things I’ve seen on television in a while: a quiet day spent with the mother of the main character, who is grappling with private and unresolved griefs her daughter is too self-involved to acknowledge or understand. All of which is a long way of saying that until that episode of television, and until I started watching Sons of Anarchy, I don’t think I realized how thirsty I was for the perspectives of older women on television. Enough with the women who are meant to reflect me now or in ten years. I want a sense of the women I’ll become, the grand crones and the quiet ones, too.

One of the things I appreciate most about Sons of Anarchy is the way Gemma is allowed to have specifically female problems, and to have those problems treated as if they’re on a level with the hurts and angers of Jax, Clay, and the other members of the club. When, in the first season, when Cherry shows up in Charming after sleeping with Clay, and Gemma breaks her nose with a skateboard, the show could have decided to treat Gemma as ridiculous, as if she’s overreacting. Instead, we get that very funny scene of her and Clay hollering at each other in jail, Gemma refusing to be bailed out. Both halves of this late-middle aged couple are acting as if they’re teenagers. They are equals in their absurdity, both permitted to feel overpowered by their reactions to each other.

Similarly, after Gemma is raped (a plot that I think is handled better than almost anything else in the series), Sons of Anarchy deals with her sexual anxieties respectfully and in a way that insists that rape victims shouldn’t be treated as marked by their experiences. It’s terribly, terribly sad to hear Gemma tell Tara that “Clay’s never gonna… want to be inside something that’s been ripped up like me…Love don’t mean shit. Men need to own their pussy. His has been violated. He’ll find another. It’s what they do.” But the show insists she’s still wanted, first in Tig’s advances towards her in the wake of the attack—Sons of Anarchy probably spends more dialogue insisting that Gemma is attractive than any other individual character—and in her eventual reconciliation with Clay.

It’s tremendously moving to see Clay exceed her expectations of him, not just having sex with her again but seducing her, clearing off her office desk and declaring as only Ron Perlman can, “I want my wife.” Her hurt and recovery are couched in the language of ownership: neither Charming nor the MC are exactly feminist paradises. But even when Gemma puts off telling Clay and Jax about the fact that she was attacked to avoid hurting them and destabilizing the club, both of the men in her life make her recovery a priority when she finally does tell them. Later in the series, she may be marginalized as just an Old Lady, beaten for daring to step beyond that role, but at least in that moment, her husband and her son can elevate her recovery.
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The bridge is yours.

-The final word on Chris Brown.

-Ryan McGee on how HBO killed the episode.

-Get a track off Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” every day for the next nine days.

-Ah, the joys of a good old-fashioned public art controversy.

-The weirdest political endorsements by musicians.