This post contains spoilers for the Nov. 20 and Nov. 27 episodes of Boardwalk Empire.

I apologize for the delay in writing last week’s recap, but in a sense I’m glad I get to consider both of these episodes, in their predictability and very strong moments together. I also appreciate a chance to highlight Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent essay on Boardwalk Empire‘s misplaced priorities when it comes to gender, privileging fairly conventional if convoluted gangster stories over the richer domestic dramas that the show mostly uses as pretty window dressing.

Working backwards, I agree with him that Angela’s death at the hands of Manny Horvitz, who has arrived in Atlantic City intending to kill Jimmy and shoots Louise, stealing a clandestine night with Angela, instead, was emotionally striking. Manny’s shock, and his recovery via the intensely cold like, “Your husband did this to you,” was one of the more precisely-executed emotional moments of the season. And yet, I’m disgruntled by the decision on two levels. First, it’s the equivalent of J.K. Rowling killing Remus and Tonks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a moment when a piece of art needs some deaths to winnow the cast and illustrate emotional costs, but its creators don’t have the guts to lower a truly devastating blow on the audience by killing a main character. Second, there’s something really distasteful about the show’s regression to the norms of the past, where gay relationships inevitably end in death. It’s of a piece, I suppose, with the show’s generally punitive attitude towards sex. But I resent both the specific decision to kill off Angela and with her, one of the show’s legitimately interesting avenues of social exploration, and the general decision to default to killing the depressed lesbian.

The decision to have one of Margaret’s daughters struck down by polio seems to come from a similarly vengeful place. Whether she needs to confess that she’s sheltering with the man who murdered the father of her children, or that she’s betraying Nucky, Margaret clearly believes her sin is responsible for her misfortune. But at least that plotline gives rise to a more interesting speculation: in living with Nucky, has Margaret lost not just the health of one child, but the moral direction of another? Teddy plays a cruel joke on her when he pretends he’s stricken, too, and earns himself a slapping for it, while a weeping Margaret tells Nucky, “God help me, but he has his father’s cruelty,” only to have Nucky insist that he just wants attention, and knowing that his sister’s hospitalized “isn’t the same as understanding” the true magnitude of what’s befallen his family. But on their father-son trip to New York, Nucky realizes that something deeper than genetics or the loneliness of a little boy may be at play when Teddy reveals that he witnessed Nucky burn his own father’s house down, a poisonous revelation that ends with a deceptively sweet, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell.” Maybe Teddy’s just a child. But maybe in Nucky’s house, he’s learned that secrets are powerful, that there is something to be earned by keeping them.
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I spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over the holiday, and saw two terrific exhibits: the reopened Islamic art wing, about which much more to come, and “After the Gold Rush,” a contemporary photography show. Two pieces in the latter exhibit struck me in particular.

First, Philip-Lorca diCorcia took his 1991 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used it to tweak conservatives who were hysterical over NEA funding for a traveling show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. He parceled out the money in small sums to male prostitutes and drug addicts, paying them posing fees and producing a series of tender, lovely portraits. In my favorite, a young man named Todd M. Brooks, appears washed in blue through a cheap motel window, framed in red window trim, and against a patterned blue bedspread. It’s not Picasso, and diCorcia’s approach isn’t a perfect solution to the problem of artists exploiting vulnerable subjects. But it’s a creative political stunt, with better results than usually come from those sorts of origins.

In the second, Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ll admit to having felt like this season of The Walking Dead has spent a lot of time with the characters, human and formerly human, stewing in the same juices: the endless hunt for Sophia, the secrets of Hershel’s farm, the insecurities of Dale, Glen, Darryl and Andrea, the question of whether Rick or Shane is better suited to lead and to love Lori. Fortunately, the stunning final scene of this episode tied all of those threads neatly together. After massacring the walkers in the barn, who they’ve convinced themselves aren’t human, one more emerges: Sophia, changed and ravening. And Rick finds a bridge between Shane’s harsh moral view of the apocalypse and Hershel’s idealism, shaped by isolation from the outside world, and shoots the girl in an act of self-protection and mercy.

I thought the scene did a wonderful job of giving everyone a human moment that addressed, if not resolved, their arc. Glenn steps up to protect Maggie, and she protects her father, grieving with him, but doesn’t try to stop her lover. Darryl, after rejecting Carol’s profession of affection with a brutal, “Leave me be. Stupid bitch,” earlier in the episode, holds her as she sees what’s become of her daughter, and as she witnesses her death. Carl, who told his mother, “I’m not leaving until we find Sophia…I was thinking, she’s going to like it here, this place. It could be a home,” who tried on a man’s cursing to go with a man’s hat earlier in the episode, is reduced to childhood by his friend’s transformation and execution, sobbing in Lori’s arms. Andrea steps up to the front lines with Shane, unaware that Shane’s emotions and his move to start the massacre are deeply engaged with Lori, who is off to the side here. T-Dog is, for once, unconflicted and part of the firing line. And Dale is late to the slaughter, protected from his own dehumanization by fate if not design.

So is the conclusion that Rick is right? Do the reasons you do things matter as much as the fact that you do them? Does Hershel’s determination to see the humanity in the walkers redeem the risks he’s taken, his denial of outside reality? Does the murder Rick commits out of a profound sympathy for the little girl his community’s lost mean something different than the brutal executions carried out by the other members of that community? And does Lori’s declaration to Shane that “Even if it’s yours, it’s not gonna be yours. And it’s never gonna be yours. And there’s nothing you can do to change that,” actually make it so? The Walking Dead is very good at posing moral questions, though I’m not sure it’s as good at knowing what its own answers to them are. Even if the show doesn’t reveal them to us all at once, I’d like a sense that they have a coherent and decisive worldview.

Maybe I should be less cynical, and we do love ourselves some “Party in the USA” here at ThinkProgress headquarters, but I’m not particularly moved by the sight of Miley Cyrus recycling a year-old anodyne girl power anthem and cutting it with a lot of footage from Occupy movements in a statement of radical chic solidarity:

I do think there’s some real value to Cyrus’ core audience seeing images of police brutality. But having a real context for that brutality would lift this video beyond generic teenaged stick-it-to-the-manism in a way that would be useful and specific. There are a lot of signs that show up in the footage: “Wall Street or War Street,” “Trust me—I’m a Banker,” “I Am the 99 percent,” “Separation of Corporation and State,” and “Don’t Destroy the American Dream.” Those slogans sound dandy, but they don’t actually explain why the people in the video or protesting, or why the police have been sanctioned to bring such violence to bear against them. Cyrus’ note accompanying the video, “This is Dedicated to the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in” is equally meaningless, a non-endorsement endorsement that can’t possibly rattle the cage at Hollywood Records.

I feel like such a scold about all of this, but Cyrus’s core fan group is exactly at the age where they’re about to start having adult experiences with debt and income inequality. If they’re applying for college, they may be taking on loans that they can never discharge in bankruptcy. If they’re getting their first credit cards, it might be good for them to know a thing or two about interest rates. A specific endorsement of the goals of the 99 Percent Movement might be uncomfortable for Cyrus, who was born into the 1 percent and has solidified her position there by making herself seem like a consumption priority for young girls. But if Cyrus is genuinely in invested not merely in the idea that free speech is good, but in the belief that widening income inequality is deeply damaging, there are more creative and meaningful things she can do than dust off her back catalogue and slap an Occupy sticker on it.

Editor’s Note: Apologies for the delay on this, due to travel and illness. And hopefully this open thread will tide you over until next weekend’s episode.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner is facing the military justice system again in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” as Will and Alicia defend Sgt. Regina Elkins, a young, female drone operator who is charged with 12 counts of murder when drones kill civilians in Afghanistan. Elkins’s parents are paying for civilian representation, and Capt. Hicks, who we first met in “Double Jeopardy,” comes to Lockhart/Gardner because he thinks they “would do the least damage.” Interestingly, though, it’s Kalinda who convinces Will to take the case: he’s reluctant, unsure of his own competence in the military court system, but when Kalinda tells him that the State’s Attorney’s investigation into him is winding down and that he should “do something nice for someone,” Will takes her at her word, and he and Alicia are back in military court. The judge is the same one Will clashed with during his last experience, so he does what he did when the British judge didn’t like him: He has Alicia talk in his place. Even though Will loves Alicia partially because she can hold her own in a courtroom, he persists in believing that she will come across to others as meek and kind to a fault. This play never really works, and despite Alicia’s compelling argument that Elkins’s accuser was sexist and that she was prosecuted as a scapegoat, Elkins is found guilty. I liked that, because the courtroom scenes have no tension if Will and Alicia always win, but I wish the show had taken this opportunity to delve into the questions it raised about civilian collateral in drone strikes and about the illegal use of drugs like Adrafinil by soldiers who must stay alert for long shifts.

It turns out that Kalinda had Will doing something nice under false pretenses, anyway, because her information was wrong. The investigation into Will isn’t winding down — it’s heating up. Peter assigns his old rival Wendy Scott-Carr as special prosecutor, and Scott-Carr decides to forget about Lemond Bishop and drugs, and instead go straight for Will and judicial corruption. (While we have no reason to think that Will is actually bribing judges, it is interesting that judges from outside his own system, like the British judge and the military judge, tend to hate him practically on sight.) Scott-Carr says it’s her own decision to make Will the focus of the investigation, but everyone, including Diane, assumes Peter is coming after Will because of Alicia. Diane knows the allegations against Will are unfounded, but her patience has run out, and she talks to him like a school principal scolding a wayward 10-year-old: “Stop it. Alicia. Peter Florrick is coming after you because you are sleeping with his wife. Don’t lie to me. It’s wrong. You are her boss. He is the State’s Attorney. Even if it weren’t wrong, it’s not smart. Stop sleeping with his wife. Do you understand me?” By the end of their confrontation, I’m ready to let Diane take over running the whole world, and Will looks appropriately chastened — though he never actually agrees to stop sleeping with Alicia.
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The bridge is yours.

-I really want to see how M will interact with the new Q.

-Rod Dreher on church architecture and Gaudi.

-Martin Scorcese on 3D.

-Critics, citizen curators, and gatekeepers.

-Gorgeous bicycle animation:

Remember Emma Sullivan, the Kansas school student student who tweeted, jokingly, that she’d been mean to Gov. Sam Brownback, noting “#heblowsalot”? The one who apparently so freaked out the Governor’s office that they reported her to her high school principal Regina George-style? Apparently, she’s vexed with Brownback because he eliminated Kansas’ public funding for the arts, forcing the state to sacrifice funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and shutting down the state’s arts agency. Apparently, Brownback doesn’t want to risk interfering with the delicate mechanics of the marketplace of ideas, unless the marketplace assigns an uncomfortably high value to the idea that he’s a less than awesome governor.

I, along with what seems like every other television critic in America, have been greatly enjoying seeing Happy Endings hit its stride this fall (especially paired with Revenge, it makes for a nice comedy-drama macaron). But I’m finding myself wishing that the show would take a bit more advantage of making Brad (Damon Wayans, Jr.) and Jane (Eliza Coupe) an interracial couple to actually talk a bit about race. I’d be really curious to hear them talk about how they want to raise their kids and what it will mean for them to be biracial instead of having their visit to suburbia be about breakfast-themed Halloween costumes and the perils of that particular holiday. And the show seems inclined to give them wacky marriage strains and fixes like weirdly peppy sorority sisters and improv obsessions, rather than finding a defining approach to more naturally occurring material. The show tends to bring up race more in the interacts between Brad and his friends — in the last episode, Dave kept posing at blackness and kept getting shot down by Brad. But while the episode did a nice job of shooting down Dave’s dorkiness, the show didn’t really have Brad say anything about what Dave’s attempts at bonding meant to him, or why they didn’t work, or why they were inauthentic. It felt like an incomplete moment, particularly since these guys are supposed to be close.

I think it’s in part because my new throwback obsession is Living Single, which I’m devouring off my DVR. And one of the things I like best about it is the way it draws its jokes and dramas from real differences of opinion and conflicts about race. The scenarios aren’t patently absurd, so the presentation has to be sharp. (It also, like many other shows of another era, assumes a much broader base of general knowledge than shows today appear to.) I loved, for example, the episode where Max’s mother, the always extremely welcome CCH Pounder comes to visit. When Max’s friends say they look alike, Max’s mother, who straightens her hair, replies that it will be true once Max, who wears her hair braided, grows up–and starts paying better attention to her hair. It’s not some invented, bizarre mother-daughter cruelty. It’s instantly recognizable, and lands particularly hard because of the force of Pounder’s delivery.

It’s no mistake that one of Happy Endings‘ best episodes is the one where Max (in this case, white and gay) discovers that Brad is blowing him off to spend time with an alternate group of friends composed entirely of black men. Both Brad’s need for a racially specific environment and Max’s anxiety about not fitting in with Brad’s black friends are realistic and draw their humor and pathos from things real people are likely to feel. Unlike, say, using couples improv to boost a fraudulent tour business. It’s similar to the way the show scored a hit with a fractured take on another common experience — Penny buying her dream condo, only to believe it’s haunted by the ghost of spinsterhood yet to come. I think Happy Endings is often very good, but I’d like to see the show trust itself a bit more to riff on what’s real rather than coming up with goofy substitute conflicts.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 27 episode of Homeland.

Homeland‘s had an incredible introductory streak, so I suppose it’s inevitable that the show would produce an episode that’s less than stellar. And I’m still trying to decide if this episode, which in one fell swoop made the plot more convoluted and saccharine, signals a derailment of the show or if it’s a mild aberration, necessary to the film’s larger themes.

First, there’s Brody’s backstory, which is about as straightforward as it can possibly get: it turns out that in his captivity, Abu Nazir had Brody teach his son English, and when the boy was killed by a drone attack, Brody dedicated himself to revenge, specifically on Vice President William Walden. There’s nothing precisely wrong with that storyline, and as usual, it’s well-executed: Brody’s face when he sees a bath for the first time after months of filth and captivity is a sight to see. But I’ve gotten used to seeing Homeland subvert our expectations, and so the cheesiness of Brody teaching Isa to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or bonding with him over soccer, of seeing the boy comfort the post-traumatic man by treating him like a son would treat his father felt like a letdown if only because it was so emotionally predictable. I want to resist the urge to demand that I be surprised all the time, because on principal, I do think fictional should operate by consistent internal logic rather than aiming to operate like Rube Goldberg devices in contravention of the logic we’re all governed by. I don’t want the show to get increasingly baroque. But I do want Homeland to continue its commitment to subtlety and emotional richness that doesn’t grow out of entirely predictable places. This story of drone strikes is entirely too emotionally and politically simple, it doesn’t make the case for using drone strikes. The show’s portraying Abu Nazir as a decent man and only asserting that he’s a villain. It would be nice for that work to go in two directions.

In addition to that saccharine interlude, the show’s writing also felt a little flat. I actually think it’s been to Homeland‘s credit that, in a season full of shows like Boss and Hell on Wheels that aim for rhetorical heights, the show’s stuck to plain language. The writing hasn’t overshadowed the emotions. But here, the writing felt a little flat. We’re stuck with an FBI stooge who says things like “Justice? What does that mean?” or “It’s his word against mine.” His snark at Carrie, “You people have rubber hoses, don’t you?” isn’t a bad slap at the CIA’s record on interrogation, but he’s got such wooden lines otherwise that the line doesn’t land very hard. Carrie isn’t elevating matters either with lines like “If your men made a mistake, you need to come clean.” I hate seeing this show feel like a cliche. Fortunately, there’s Tom Walker in the woods, joking grimy that he’s hunting “office supplies” before blowing away a hunter who has the misfortune to recognize him. Homeland is more fun when it pulls us into sympathy with someone whose head we don’t necessarily want to be in at all, much less feel in concert with.
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