This post contains spoilers through the August 26 episode of Breaking Bad. I’ll be on vacation and may not have the ability to watch next week’s episode, though if I do, I’ll blog it.

Earlier in this season of Breaking Bad, Jesse asked Walter White if a meth empire was really something to be proud of. At the beginning of this episode, Walt’s belief that it was gave him a powerful tool to extract respect from the kind of men he once feared. By the end of it, he was beginning to realize the limitations of the thing he is the best at.

“I’m the man who’s keeping it,” Walt told Mike’s contact. “Yours is just some tepid, off-brand generic cola. What I’m making is Classic Coke…Do you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?…You’ve got the greatest, no, the two greatest meth cooks in America right here…You all know exactly who I am. Say my name…I’m the cook. I’m the man who killed Gus Fring.” All of these things are absolutely true: Walt’s meth is powerful, and pure, only he can make it, many people want to buy it, and he is a killer. But while Walt’s narrowed his universe to match that set of facts, and to construct circumstances in which those facts override all other considerations, not everyone has decided to join him there. If he’s Satan, he’s rebelled without being sure of his legions in his war on God, and conventional morality, and Grey Matter.

There’s Skyler, who is collaborating, but not shutting up. “Walt. What is this?” she asks him when he and Jesse come to stash the chemicals at the car wash. “Why are you hiding it here?…Who are you hiding it from? From the police? Or someone else? Someone who would kill for it?” Walt tells her to go back into the office, but her appearance there is marked by a subtler and more potentially important exchange: the first moment when Skyler and Jesse have been in agreement. “Hey, Mrs. White,” Jesse tells her, including her in the courtesy he’s always extended to Walt. Noticing her looking at the truck, he reads the name of the company: “Vamanos.” “I wish,” Skyler tells him, relying on a literal reading of the word. I’ve long wanted to see an alliance between Skyler and Jesse, who are both deeply entangled in Walt’s affairs, both increasingly angry at him, and who, between them, could paint the most complete portrait of Walt’s affairs of any characters who remain living.

But if that’s to happen, Jesse will need to extricate, root and branch, the hold Walt has on him. And as their bond slipped this week on the way to the events that must surely sunder any sympathy Jesse has for his former teacher, Walt resorted to an accusation even uglier than the ones that he’s made about Skyler. “Look at you. What have you got in your life? Nothing. Nobody. Oh, wait, yes. Video games and go-karts,” Walt told Jesse. “And when you get tired of that, what then? And how soon will you start using again? Look. Look I know how upset you are about what happened to this boy. I am just as upset as you are…Do I have to lock myself in a room and get high to prove it to you?” That Walt’s turned cooking meth into Jesse’s program of recovery is a sickeningly beautiful example of his inversion of conventional morality.
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The war isn’t over. But Deadline reports that the Paradise Lost movie that was in the works is dead, at least for now:

The big-budget film Paradise Lost, which was slated to start shooting in January but was pushed till early summer, has been scrapped, I’m told. The epic-sized Alex Proyas-directed film about the battle between good and evil inspired by the John Milton poem was to star Bradley Cooper as Lucifer, Benjamin Walker as the archangel Michael, Diego Boneta playing Adam and Camilla Belle Eve, with a host of other actors lined up for the action epic.

Legendary made the decision after trying to bring the cost of the movie down to $120 million, tops. The producer/financier spent low eight figures to get this far but had never green lit the film and therefore should not be on the hook for pay or play talent deals. It is possible that the film could return down the line, as Best Picture nominee Moneyball, American Gangster and some other pictures have done after being scrapped just short of a production start. But Paradise Lost might be halted for a while, until technological advancements in visual effects bring to a reasonable cost the task of creating a believable depiction of the celestial battles that are at the heart of this film. It was too rich for Legendary’s blood even though the company scoured every way possible to find a way to be grand but disciplined.

Now, obviously that “let’s just wait for better special effects thing” means they fundamentally don’t get Milton’s epic. But anything that staves off the day when Bradley Cooper gives us his smug prepster Satan is good news.

No sooner do I ask whether narrative horror’s viable on television than NBC greenlights an updated Frankenstein show by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner, the producers behind House.

I always get anxious when I hear about this kind of project because I worry that “modern-day take” on Frankenstein means grave-robbing in Los Angeles rather than London, and in a sleek lab rather than a dank basement, rather than any actual engagement with our contemporary anxieties about science. It’s pretty easy to forget that the dude with the scalpel is the monster, not his creation. I feel the same way about the news that Bradley Cooper of all people is starring in a Paradise Lost movie (incidentally one of the works Frankenstein’s monster finds most compelling), though whether it’ll be completely cosmic and fantastical or set in some version of the real world. Whether you think Paradise Lost is a statement of repentance for rebellion against the Crown or the work of a former censor who knew how to get the official approval he needed to publish the first edition of the work, it’s a monumentally compelling examination of what it feels like to find yourself on the wrong side of what appears to be God’s will that has no particular modern analogue. I actually think Torchwood: Miracle Day has the closest thing to a contemporary Satan I’ve seen in Lauren Ambrose’s impeccably-dressed-in-red PR hack, Jilly, who has absolutely no values except buzz and worships at the altar of the news cycle.

I do think there’s a chance that Fried and Lerner will do a good job with their Frankenstein, though. House, when the show was good as opposed to completely insane, was very good at exploring how someone like Sherlock Holmes would fare in an age where scientific knowledge was vastly more widespread and extreme anti-sociality was considered less charming and more diagnosable. House may usually be right about what’s ailing his patients, but the show is a useful modern rebuke to the idea that we’d be better off in a world where the rest of us are scientifically blind and a one-eyed man is king, or that there’s anything charming about misanthropes who use their genius to bludgeon other people. I only hope they come up with as useful a framework for their Frankenstein project. I’m glad to think about the interaction between scientific expertise and compassion, and about scientific ethics, but I do worry that it’s hard for pop culture to critique specific scientific practices without casting a skeptical eye on scientific endeavor as a whole.

-Are Nazis terrible movie villains?

-It’s not like I thought the Paradise Lost movie was going to be good, or anything, but this concept art looks uniquely unpromising.

-This is not a good week for video games moralism.

-Wener Herzog loves Comic Con.

-Snape says it gets better: