This post contains spoilers through the January 15 episode of House of Lies.

While I don’t always think it hits its marks, one of the things I find intriguing about House of Lies is the way each case illustrates a different idea about people with extremely large amounts of money. I don’t think this week’s case, clearly based on the incredibly nasty divorce between Frank McCourt and his wife that’s put the fate of the Dodgers in doubt. In this case, it’s the idea that people will do almost anything, even fake their way through an irretrievably broken marriage, to hold on to vast amounts of money. But I also think this case, unlike the last one, revealed one of the central problems of the show as a half-hour comedy: in that amount of time, it’s almost impossible to spend time both developing the backstory of the main characters and really digging into the motivations of their clients.

That was particularly clear since we got our first glimpse of one of Marty’s colleagues’ inner lives tonight (and no, Doug having some Cat Deeley-related airport ejaculation problems doesn’t count as an inner life). I adore Kristen Bell and want only good things for her, and I thought this was nice, if a little slight. Looked up by an old acquaintance, Jeannie decides they’re going on a date. I thought this episode did a nice job of capturing the uncertainty of this kind of scenario, whether it’s Jeannie just not being sure what she’s walking into, or her seeing the earring and the hair flipping and deciding that she’s going to try to be interested anyway. When it turns out he’s paying her a very different kind of compliment, Bell sold the disappointment—sometimes you don’t always want to be loved for your mind. And in her sad report back, where she explains “He was a fucking headhunter,” Clyde’s “That’s funny, because I’m constantly looking for head, also,” encapsulated the ways in which he’s a jerk and the team may not be a great environment for Jeannie.

Speaking of sex, that opening scene between Marty and his wife was convincingly uncomfortable, but I’m not entirely sure to what end. If we’re going to see a lot of them having sex or waking up in the morning afterwards, I’d be interested to hear more about what binds them together, even though Monica is competing with him for work and is pretty awful to Roscoe, who appears to be the emotional center of Marty’s life. That’s much more interesting, or rather, primary question than whether divorced couples have the same rules about consent during sex. And it’s probably one we need answered before we can intuit what it means to Marty to get choked during sex.

The one area where we have clarity, and that not coincidentally works better than anything else in the show, is Walter’s relationship with Roscoe. Early in the episode, we see him run down Roscoe’s Principal Gita, who says things like “A group of the class parent body wanted to put a stop to Roscoe’s unrestrained and joyous disregard for the gender-specific, crossdressing,” and “I wonder if in the future we could speak in less militaristic terms.” But when he’s confronted with Roscoe’s pain directly, he can’t bully anyone, he can’t be belligerent. As they’re playing video games, Roscoe asks him “Hey dad, what’s a fudgepacker?” You can see Marty absorbing the hurt his son doesn’t even know he should be feeling—and Roscoe retreating into silence when he recognizes that he should be hurt. “Did somebody really call you that?” Marty asks. Roscoe’s silence is more eloquent than any of the adults’ dirty talk.

Harold Meyerson’s upset by the prospect of a Chinese government-owned bank buying a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers:

In their defense, the Chinese certainly have plenty of money to put into the team if they see fit. But if it was harder to root for the Dodgers under Murdoch than under the O’Malleys, and harder still under McCourt than under Murdoch, imagine rooting for a team owned by an authoritarian government that jails its citizens for organizing unions or worshiping the wrong gods, and depresses its currency to decimate what remains of American manufacturing.

Over the last 30 years, the financial whizzes who dominate this country have sold off our industry to China in return for some quick and huge returns, never mind that they were wiping out the American middle class in the process.

It’s too late to stop the sale of our industrial might, but the proposed sale of a team in which millions of fans have invested their dreams for decades may be the moment when Americans say they’ve had enough — that the claims of the many, which matter so little in the normal conduct of American big business, should at least this time outweigh the interests of the few (particularly when that “few” is really just Frank and Jamie).

I’m not sure I can get quite as irritated by this as Harold is. It’s not like the Dodgers would be the first team to be under corporate ownership, or even under foreign corporate ownership. The Seattle Mariners are owned by Nintendo of America, the Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media, and the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media. Individual owners are entirely capable of doing noxious things. When Ted Turner owned the team, he tried to nickname a player with the same jersey number as one of his stations Channel as an effort in cross-promotion. In the National Football League, Dan Snyder is a poster child for both poor management of a franchise and general terrible person-ness. It’s a bit of an odd hierarchy that we prefer ownership by fabulously wealthy individual Americans to ownership by corporations to ownership by foreign corporations.

To paraphrase Annie Savoy, baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a big, big business. There have been long-standing efforts to spark interest in baseball in China after Mao’s ban on the sport expired, and in 2003, the Chinese government asked Major League Baseball for help—the league actually pays the coaches for China’s national baseball team. And if we’re going to treat baseball as a major symbol of American democracy (which may be a sentimental overstating of the case but none the less an appealing myth), maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stoke Chinese interest and emotional in a quintessentially American game. Either way, the ownership of the Dodgers may be an important symbol, but it isn’t necessarily a substantive intrusion of corrupting capitalism and foreign influence into a game that’s already plenty impure.

I’m a longtime Red Sox fan, but this statement by David Oritz and calls for players to boycott the All-Star Game over Arizona’s immigration policies absolutely demands to be singled out. It’s a glorious illustration of the fretful wishes of millionaires who, because they’re unaffected by laws, can fall back to hoping that things that make them feel uncomfortable will vanish without them being required to exert any effort or go to any inconvenience about it. He told the Boston Herald:

Baseball is not related at all to politics…I ain’t Jackie Robinson. Sometimes, but remember that was something massive — not only one guy can go out there and act like he knows everything. That’s something where you work as a group. MLB always comes out with the right idea and I’m pretty sure that if there’s something MLB can help out with, they will…There’s nothing baseball can do about it right now, you know what I’m saying? Everyone’s focused on going to Arizona. It’s not baseball’s fault, or MLB’s fault, that that thing is going on in Arizona. I personally think it’s not fair. You can’t really be that hard on [immigrants], so hopefully that thing goes away and everything goes back to normal.

Charming. And makes me glad I don’t have any Ortiz gear in my (rather considerable) collection.