This post contains spoilers through the November 6 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

It seems that giving birth has liberated Lucy, taken a literal weight off her body, and given her latent cleverness a motivating force. “Of course I fed her,” she snaps at Nelson, who assumes she’s neglecting their as-yet-named child. “What do you think I am?” And she’s blunt with him about the terms of their arrangement, telling him, “This is your baby. You bought it.” She’s more tender than that about the baby with Nucky, though, even if he starts their conversation by forcefully denying paternity. “I look like shit. She’s kind of cute, though. Ten toes and everything,” Lucy explains, setting up the scheme that will lead Nucky to try to blackmail Nelson with the knowledge of his illegitimate child. “Now, there’s someone else I’ve gotta make happy. And she’ll always be mine.”

In a way, there’s something sort of invigorating about seeing Nelson return from the land of hypocrisy to righteousness and stand up to Nucky’s attempts to weaken him further. But I’ll admit enjoying seeing him taken down a peg by Esther Randolph (the marvelously befreckled Julianne Nicholson) first. As the new lead investigator on the Nucky Thompson case, Esther’s a former radical who spent 10 years as “a public defender, representing draft dodgers and prostitutes.” And the collision between someone who’s been brought in to look unimpeachable and a man who thought he was unimpeachable and turned out not to be is inevitable and interesting. She’s less naive that he is — it makes sense that a woman who’s defended her clients against abuses of power would be less sanguine than the righteous man who works within the system. When Nelson complains that “the scales of justice are weighted down with graft,” she just raises her eyebrows and says, deadpan, “My, my. Isn’t that shocking.” But that flexibility also means that she’s prepared to help Nelson navigate his family problems so he won’t be vulnerable anymore.

And speaking of secrets, Margaret, it turns out, is stronger than we knew — if not actually who we thought we knew. “Would you have seen me off to the Magdalen Sisters and broken in the workhouse?” she asks her brother, who blames her for running off with his passage money to America and leaving their dying mother after she became pregnant out of wedlock. “The priests judged it fit correction,” he tells her, safe, if not prosperous, in his conformity. Later, he refuses her help, telling her, “I don’t hate you. I don’t feel much about you at all. I can’t accept the money. I don’t know where it’s from,” though he lets Margaret’s younger sister keep the gift of a novel from her estranged older sister. Who can deny a little girl who, after holding it in, bursts out “Send me books! I like anything with a horse in it!” And later, as if to reaffirm her commitment to make her own way, rather than living by anyone else’s rules, she does what she’s been wanting to do, taking Mr. Slater into her bed, a simultaneous rejection of her old country’s norms and embrace of the people created by them.

FX has announced that it’s making a dark comedy based on the experiences of drone pilots. This seems like an area that…demands sensitive handling. After all, drone strikes have directly impacted our relationship with Pakistan, and not for the better. Using them requires us to be willing to kill a lot more people than we would through more surgical strikes, and with a great deal less certainty about their level of culpability for terrorist attacks. The prospect of them getting viruses is pretty scary!

I don’t think this means that you can’t make comedy about high-stakes things: in fact, sometimes I think comedy is a necessary way to critique our behavior in high-stakes situations. Humor doesn’t end when you get PTSD as a firefighter working at Ground Zero, or when you fight in Iraq. But I do think, if you’re going to work in these circumstances, that you have to be thoughtful and precise about what you’re saying is funny. The fact that we kill a lot of people indiscriminately with drones is not necessarily that funny. The way people cope with that fact probably is a rich vein to mine for black humor.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 6 episode of The Walking Dead.

I haven’t felt exceptionally engaged by this season of The Walking Dead, but tonight’s episode raised two big questions for me. First, related to the actual events of the show, what’s really going on at Hershel’s farm? And second, at what point the show’s grossness disgusting for the sake of disgustingness?

Given that most American popular culture doesn’t take belief particularly seriously or delve into theology, I’m glad to see the show reveal Hershel’s faith slowly and to set up a genuine religious conflict between him and Rick who, as he puts it, is trying to stay out of the Almighty’s way. There’s an interesting symmetry to the episode, beginning with Hershel’s eulogy for Otis — who Shane killed to save his own life — in which he calls children like Carl “now, more than ever, our most precious asset,” and the end, in which it’s revealed that Lori is pregnant. Have Rick and company stumbled on a theocracy? Will Lori’s pregnancy be the subject of a tussle that brings their uneasy arrangement down? Hershel’s initially reluctant to let them stay, but after Rick appeals to his religious beliefs, telling him, “If you saw how it is out there, you wouldn’t ask,” he relents, on a trial basis, warning Rick that “If you and your people respect my rules, no promises, but I will consider it.”

And that raises an interesting, and perhaps corollary question: why is it that Hershel and his people have been able to remain unmolested? There’s a road that lead to their place. It’s not fortified. There are a lot of humans concentrated there. So what’s going on? What rules could possibly keep zombies out, except for the one living in Well 2? And how did he get there in the first place?

All of these questions are, to me, vastly more interesting than the site of yet another intensely grisly zombie death. When the bloated, shambling corpse breaks in half while they’re trying to haul it out of the well, it’s just disgusting, serving no other purpose other than to illustrate the futility of their effort. And then the show compounds the sickening nature of the scene by having T-Dog bash the zombie’s head to a pulp, a sequence that’s shot in typical detail, rather than a merciful dispatch to the head. I’ve worked hard to get myself used to violence, but I still tend to think that there ought to be some justification for extreme instances of it. And I can’t really see the point: this is pulping someone who was once human just because the outer parameters of the show permit it. I miss the moments from the first season of the show when the actors playing the zombies had a chance to impart a real pathos to their characters, to suggest a strange fragment of humanity remained beneath necrotizing flesh. Those kinds of scene lent a sense of horror, and of choice, to the violence the characters had to admit. Absent that sense of conflict — or a sense that poisoning this one well will have real consequences — scenes like this are just disgusting. They don’t actually mean anything about the dead, or the people forced to dispatch them a second time.

I’m intrigued, if not entirely convinced, by some of the arguments Erik Kain explores here about whether fantasy is an inherently Christian genre. He quotes D.G. Meyers on C.S. Lewis, who writes that:

Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise that fantasy depends on the idea of another world. Certainly there’s some fantasy that depends on escaping entirely to a parallel universe, whether it’s accessible at the back of a wardrobe or through a competitive, Ivy League-style entrance exams process. But another world is hardly a Christian concept: Islam has highly developed and debated visions of limbo, judgment, hell, and heaven.

And there’s also fantasy based on the idea that we simply don’t know everything about the world that we live in, that there is power that we can access here and now if we know where to look for it and are determined enough to exercise it, all of which give us plenty of hooks in Jewish and Islamic tradition. In the former, take the legend of the golem, the idea that by very hard work and access to esoteric knowledge, rabbis were able to summon protectors for the Jewish people from the earth. There’s also a strong tradition of Jewish mysticism and Messianism, which suggests a permeable boundary between realms and regimes. Judaism has a demonic tradition that includes creatures like Dubbyks and Mazikeen, just as Islam has Jinns, Ifrits, and angels. Christians aren’t the only ones to have fairy realms or ghosts. And in Judaism, the Reconstructionist drive toward human transcendence and elimination of oppression is a framework for an epic quest that can take place in the here and now.

I think the point is more that, as a modification of how Erik puts it, that the fantasy that we see on the American market is “not founded in Christian themes so much as it is rooted in distinctly Anglo-Saxon mythology. And not just the mythology of the Medieval, feudalistic period, but the pre-Christian myths of the faerie-folk as well.” That we see certain things on the market doesn’t mean that fantasy is limited to those things, or inherently grows out to those things. It just means that we’re reliant on old patterns. I don’t think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is perfect, but it is a rich illustration of the possibilities of Egyptian gods of death, of pre-Christian totem spirits, of Ifrits on the streets of New York for fantasy even if it doesn’t fulfill all of that promise itself.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner goes up against the U.S. government this week in “Executive Order 13224″ as they represent Danny Marwat, an American of Afghan descent who was arrested while working as a translator for a defense contractor in Afghanistan and is now suing the government for torturing him. The various government witnesses keep claiming that they can’t answer questions because of the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Diane repeatedly uses this to her advantage by getting the judge to agree that if the government says information about something is classified, they can’t also claim that it never happened in the first place. Diane is enthusiastic about the case because it’s “the right thing to do,” even if it means, as she says, “poking the bear,” but Will isn’t convinced that it’s right at all. His pragmatic worry that going after the government could make life hard for the firm is combined with his belief that Diane is “fighting an old war.” “Rumsfeld and Cheney are gone. They’re writing books,” he tells her, but she’s firm in her conviction that the government should be held liable for torture anyway. When they discover that Marwat has been lying to them about his connection to a suspected terrorist, though, Will and Diane agree to drop the case. But the Justice Department uses evidence uncovered in that trial to bring criminal conspiracy charges against Marwat, and Lockhart/Gardner is back in, this time to defend Marwat. Diane uses a similar tactic: A military officer refuses to answer questions about an interrogation because the information is classified, so the judge agrees that evidence from that interrogation is inadmissible, and throws out the case. Much of Lockhart/Gardner’s work on this case involves reading through redacted transcripts from secret military trials, and the show made very effective use of bleeping techniques during imagined reenactments of these trials to illustrate the extent of the redaction.

When the case begins, Glenn Childs invokes the titular executive order. Diane says it is designed to help investigate charities who are funding terrorists, but Childs says it also applies to terrorists who hire lawyers. The judge agrees with Diane that it’s a violation of attorney/client privilege, but concedes that it’s the law, so a representative from Lockhart/Gardner must meet periodically with Gordon Higgs, a monitor from the Treasury Department. Diane assigns this task to Alicia, and though Higgs assures her that there’s a Chinese wall between Treasury and Justice, Alicia immediately feels as though Higgs is trying to make her investigate on his behalf, especially when he asks her to report back if Marwat ever mentions the Badula Qulp region of Afghanistan. Marwat later mentions Badula Qulp, so in her second meeting with Higgs, Alicia tries not to answer the question, and Higgs threatens her with a large fine and jail time. He also advises her against getting a lawyer – not something a government representative is supposed to do. Alicia decides to fight back, “poking the bear” – the government – from yet another side. Will offers her a high-powered lawyer who is experienced in cases like this, but Alicia wants some distance from the firm and instead goes to Elsbeth Tascioni, one of the lawyers who worked on Peter’s case. Tascioni first comes across as scattered, a little ditzy, and almost amateurish, but she then uses these behaviors that are generally coded as “feminine” and ineffective to run circles around Higgs. Even Alicia doesn’t realize what Tascioni is up to as she gets Alicia to agree to help her with a case involving an insurance company – and then reveals that this insurance company covered Marwat’s company, so Alicia can’t answer questions about Marwat without it breaking the insurance company’s attorney/client privilege. She even throws in a hilarious bit about how the Supreme Court is very into corporate personhood recently and wouldn’t “take kindly” to Higgs infringing on the insurance company’s rights.
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The bridge is yours.

-An awesome comic about Bruce Wayne’s mother.

-MTV’s early days.

-The decline of vertical integration in television.

-Penn State University has a housecleaning coming, and it sounds brutal.

-You don’t need to wait for a biopic to see Steve Jobs in theaters:

Dollar for laugh, Louis C.K.’s show in Baltimore on Friday night was some of the best money I’ve ever spent on entertainment. But his set was also a great illustration of what a performer can do when he invests the time and energy to build the credibility that lets him take an audience to difficult places about gender, parenthood, race, and class.

Take his divorce. It could be incredibly easy for a lesser comedian to head directly for a bitter, ex-and-all-women-blaming place. And there’s no question that a deep well of loneliness runs through Louis’ jokes about being single. “There are things you get to do when you’re divorced,” he told us on Friday, “like put your feet up on the bed, and die alone.” That resignation is very funny, and very sympathetic. It’s not a Nice Guy shtick about how he deserves to be loved. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment of the truth that it can be devastatingly hard to get back out there, about the alternative priority systems we set up when the world seems too hard.

Similarly, I think a bit he did about how men think about sex is a bit of a broad brush — I don’t think that all men are more sexual than all women, or as he put it: “You’re a tourist in the land of sexual perversion. I’m a prisoner. You’re Jane Fonda on the tank. I’m John McCain.” But I trust that he knows that, and that his thinking on sex is biased in favor of respect towards women. So if he’s going overboard, he’s doing so out of a tendency to give women credit, rather than to suggest we’re frigid prudes.
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It’s great to see Dan Harmon acknowledge some of the problems with last week’s Community — and to stand up for the idea that being thoughtful about representation isn’t a matter of political correctness, but of quality:

In telling this story, we used the notion of a “gay community” as a tool. When you saw gay characters in the story, you weren’t seeing much of them. The two gay characters with lines were clearly gay, from the moment they spoke. The entire time they spoke, they were parts of setups and punchlines about gayness, and the surface never got scratched beyond that…

I cut corners. There was probably a way to do the same episode while somehow quickly and efficiently reminding the audience that gay people are just people that are gay and come in all kinds of flavors other than gay in addition to their gayness…I don’t think anyone that “complained” was asking for Community to be censored or for it to become a schmaltzy PC pile of shit.  I think they were asking me to stick a post-it note on my brain regarding the situation, which I can do without making the show any less brilliant or funny.

The larger point that I’m still not sure Harmon sees is that this kind of slip-up is particularly frustrating because Community hasn’t used gay people as anything other than instruments. The show is pretty consistently excellent on race because the diversity of the cast means that the characters are constantly negotiating their assumptions about race as part of navigating their friendships. The moment in “Interperative Dance” when Shirley asks Britta “What is it about being a single white slacker that makes you people so jaded?” only to have Britta reply “Ooh, you people? What do you mean ‘you people’? I cannot believe I got to say that!” is a great little moment, made better by Shirley’s “It’s the little things, isn’t it?” Community should aspire to a moment that great about sexual orientation. It’s smart enough to get there.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 6 episode of Homeland. And are they ever spoilers.

I moved up my plans to watch this episode when a TV critic friend emailed me in a lather to discuss it. And when we did, I told her I thought what was so striking about the show is that so far, it moves at the speed of actual humanity. In another show, two people who were attracted to each other would refuse to do anything about it until threatened with a fan revolt or a ratings decline, no matter how baroque their excuses were for staying away from each other. In Homeland, they do what actual people do: get drunk and made some poor decisions. On another program, secrets like the fact that one of the main character’s wives has been schtupping his best friend during his years of captivity and torture might last years. Here, they come out, because when a certain number of people know a secret of a certain size, it comes out. That’s exciting, because it makes me feel less like I’m going through a conventional process with the show, I’m not being manipulated by conventional formulas — and because if that’s true, I can’t predict what’s going to happen.

And I’m still not sure what I think happened in this episode! Does Carrie like Brody, or is she just going to have sex because it’s her go-to tool, as we’ve seen with David, with her date in the bar, even with Saul? What does she hope to accomplish by telling him the purpose of the polygraph? Does she want him to be guilty? Innocent? To test his ability to lie? Carrie’s not mentally healthy, so her internal logic may not be apparent to us, but I don’t think that means it doesn’t exist. And I think Brody’s ability to keep a secret, while it heightens Carrie’s suspicion of him, is also the thing that makes her powerfully attracted to him. It’s the one way a person can genuinely understand the way she structures her life. “How come when I met you at the safe house the other day, you pretended like we hadn’t bumped into each other at the support group,” Brody asks her as they start drinking. “You mean, like how that I’m not supposed to get help from the counselors outside the agency?” Carrie asks him, and he doesn’t run away, he understands keeping multiple layers of secrets. And he responds to the same thing: Brody can have sex with her, but not his wife.

Speaking of secrets, the show’s made it clear just how many people have them, but not what they mean. I thought the multiple polygraph exams were beautifully constructed. There’s everyone’s answers to the “are you married?” test question, from David’s “You know, I was married, but I cheated on her, so that kind of soured things,” to Saul’s “No, not really…I don’t know, Larry, okay? Maybe yes, maybe no.” Then, there are the questions that trip — or don’t trip — the (notoriously unreliable) polygraph: whether Carrie’s used illegal drugs since she joined the CIA; whether Saul gave the razor blade to the terrorist he said Kaddish for; whether Brody has ever cheated on his wife. We know what the answers are, but we don’t know if they’re true, and we don’t know what they mean.
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