The Effrontery of Sleeping

I saw this spider on the ground and I didn't realise it had started crawling up my leg while I was setting my camera to macro shot.

This was outside my landlord's office where I was going to turn in my rent. He told me he had good news for me, that my obnoxious neighbours from Dublin were moving out the next day (now to-day). I said I wasn't surprised, not only because I'd heard now about the scores of Irish and Brazilians who come to San Diego every summer to party and then leave, but also because in the past couple days they'd gone from being merely inconsiderate to being outright belligerent in a way that might have brought serious consequences if they still had to worry about things like rent and eviction. For the past few mornings they've been pounding on my door at 5am and running across the hall to slam their door. The first time they did this, I got out of bed and went across the hall and asked if they needed something. The door opened and a wave of marijuana odour and giggling met me along with Laurie, the blonde who looks about twelve who usually answers the door. She told me she was actually trying to sleep as well, her eyes having that glazed over quality they always have that tells me she lies to me not so much in the hopes that I'll believe her but because she doesn't consider me worthy of having an honest conversation with, not particularly caring if I believed her or not.

Two days later, when I got up I found they'd moved my door mat to in front of their door. I moved it back. The next day, yesterday, my door mat was just gone, this after they'd been pounding especially loudly on my door at 5am. Honestly, my door mat being stolen, especially the first time, just seemed silly, I even thought it was funny. I feel like they were genuinely angry with me, though, and were trying to get revenge. For what? I'd spoken to them directly four times, always to simply ask them not to make so much noise, to especially avoid slamming their door after 2am. Twice I'd called the 24 hour security guard on them, the second time I could hear him out there giving one of them a lecture and her tantruming a bit. I've said it before, it's really felt like I've been babysitting. I know I'm not the only one who's complained but I wonder if actually having spoken to them has made them believe that I'm responsible for all the complaints.

Well, now it's over and I can finally go back to going to sleep whenever I want. They were quiet last night, probably because they have a flight to-day. I was a little tempted to knock on their door at 6am and wish them a safe journey.

Twitter Sonnet #782

Talking car seats take notes for seraphim.
Medicine cabinets are incapable.
Pepto-Bismol conceals the thin dolphin.
Nature's television is tapeable.
Breakfast was hid behind sheets of smoked glass.
A questionable clergyman approached the field.
Construction paper planes made a third pass.
Shimmering daisy footage was repealed.
Sousa back pain lasts elder miners days.
Swearing foot shapes don caps at Wendt's supper.
Languid tentacle fringe traces always.
The lower teeth take gold from the upper.
Fallen squares in Tetris cutlery slip.
The toothless forks will never get a grip.

The Edges of Light

The human need for affection tends to vastly outstrip the pool of affection available, ironically in crowded cities especially, so the human mind tends to compensate with delusion. Wong Kar-wai's 1994 film Chungking Express gives us four people for whom the coping mechanisms for loneliness have grown far more sophisticated than the capacity for connexion. The film's insight into human nature is exquisite and intensely charming.

It employs a wonderfully strange narrative structure. Starting out from the point of view of a cop, 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), and a mysterious woman with dealings in the underworld (Brigitte Lin), the film abruptly shifts perspective entirely less than halfway through and becomes about a cafe worker named Faye (Faye Wong) and another cop, 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai).

With the exception of Brigitte Lin's character, all of them are similar in having rituals and routines designed to comfort them, to provide a consistent personality in the absence of the presence of human companionship. 223 has just broken up with his girlfriend named May so he obsessively buys canned pineapple that expires on May 1, telling himself this is truly when his love will expire. 663 talks to inanimate objects in his apartment, finding reasons to speak encouragingly to them, like telling a bar of soap how much weight it's lost since he bought it.

If any one character is more prominent than the others it's Faye. 663 becomes accustomed to seeing her at his favourite snack bar, she obsessively listens to "California Dreamin'" over and over and doesn't seem to take interest in 663 at all. When 663's girlfriend leaves a breakup letter at the snack bar containing spare keys to 663's apartment, Faye steals them and begins secretly living in 663's apartment while he's at work, cleaning the place, stocking his pantry with sardines, and making tiny improvements to the décor.

Faye Wong's performance is so great, so subtle. We have the sense in her few interactions with 663 that she feels a sense of ownership, that he belongs to her, but she doesn't do anything overt to communicate this. She barely even looks at him. The idea of having a real live person in her life is too intimidating, better to live around the edges.

This is the second Wong Kar-wai movie I've seen after In the Mood for Love and I'm again impressed by how much he manages to communicate by not saying anything directly at all. It's a pile of strange behaviour, the human nature implied entirely by the implications of the behaviour is invisible but unmissable.

Dead Men and Dead Habits

Often one doesn't need to do very much, or anything at all, to excite the bottomless hatred and disgust of an entire community. Histories of family members and probably even distant ancestors are enough to make Jennifer Lawrence seem a threatening presence in town when she has the gall to wonder why her father was killed in 2010's Winter's Bone. Based on a book by Daniel Woodrell whose works are on Wikipedia called "southern noir"--quite accurately if this film is any indication--the film is both a nicely raw detective story and a portrait of the inbred hypocrisy of U.S. southern culture.

Lawrence plays Ree, a young woman forced to take care of her two young siblings after her father runs off and her mother loses her mind in some unspecified way--we almost never see her throughout the film and she never speaks. Things change when Ree's father is released from jail on bail and disappears. Before long a bail bondsman comes around Ree's house telling her if her father doesn't show up her house becomes his property.

She knows her father's a lot of things, not many of them good, but she doesn't think he'd leave his family in the lurch like this so she starts asking questions. Circumstances continually define her identity against her will thanks to the built-in perceptions of the people around her. "Never ask for what should be offered," Ree tells her little brother when he suggests asking for some meat from the neighbour's recent kill. He doesn't ask and sure enough the neighbour comes by later and offers them food. There are unwritten laws about the importance of family and hospitality that sound nice in theory but can quickly become double edged swords when people have reasons to see things in certain ways. All Ree wants to do is save her home but a girl asking around about her father might look like a girl looking for justice to people or may have killed the man.

So this framework of decency designed to make sure everyone who's willing to honour the ways of society is able to live suddenly begins working to deprive a woman and children of food and shelter. Everyone gets quite ornery whenever Ree suggests there's something wrong with the way momentum is just being allowed to carry things to Hell.

Lawrence gives a very good performance in the POV role, wisely not overplaying her part, becoming a more or less neutral vessel, defined entirely by circumstance. Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer herself, also has a small part in the film, appearing in one scene as a woman who gives Ree a helpful tip.

It was rather nice seeing her again and considering how widely acclaimed her performance was in Fire Walk With Me I wonder that she hasn't gotten more work.

Debts to Shadows

One of the greatest pleasures in life is to see a beautiful actress paired with a great cinematographer. Here Douglas Slocombe shoots Diana Dors seducing George Baker, and us, from across a couple rooftops in 1958's Tread Softly Stranger. A good British film noir, this movie is sadly unavailable in any decent format.

The moral murkiness is wonderful. Baker plays Johnny, a gambler who flees London after owing too much money to the wrong people. He goes to his home town in Yorkshire where most people work in a hellish but brilliantly shot steel mill, including Johnny's sensitive brother Dave (Terence Morgan).

Dave, it turns out, is in debt, too, largely because he keeps buying gifts for his girl, Calico (Dors), who, as she explains to Johnny, may not love Dave but her exploiting of him isn't personal. "I have one talent and most people haven't got any," she says. It's a living and there's upkeep, in other words.

No-one's a villain in this film and the most innocent person commits the worst crime.

Chaotic piles of flats, smoky tunnels with long shadows, white molten metal in grimy black void, the visuals are beautiful expressionism. So it's especially unfortunate the only U.S. release for the film is part of a set of DVDs with miserable reviews on Amazon regarding quality. You might as well watch it on YouTube, which is what I did:

Twitter Sonnet #781

Dollops of scaffolding gird the cooked man.
Envy drips in cherry sun flares of pop.
Sunshades smell of sunscreens and rooftop tan.
Midnight jobs never repealed the bellhop.
Glowing mushrooms were waiting underground.
A golden strut raised technical questions.
Red and silver cables connect the pound.
Johann contained more Bachs than Sebastians.
Concrete rounds deliver games too quickly.
Violin crops provide stringy harvest.
Rooftop Mercurys may die quite slickly.
Breaded crowns teach in a grainy earnest.
Rainstorm blurred footage streaked across the tube.
Flowers with canine spirits dragged the rube.

God May Give Us Grace but the Devil Gave Us Grace Jones

Whatever you imagined a vampire stripper would look like, you probably couldn't imagine Grace Jones. In just a few scenes she single handedly elevates 1986's Vamp from mildly amusing After Hours clone to something beautifully weird.

Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler play Keith and AJ, a couple college kids trying to show off to their fraternity by going to the bad part of town to hire a stripper. Unfortunately, they end up at the strip club run by vampires.

Whether the staff is undead or not the more remarkable thing to me is how good the main attraction is, Queen Katrina (Jones), whose stylish routine suggests to me the club's clientèle must be at least partly art patrons.

I'm pretty sure this is not the stripper any actual fraternity would be looking for. But it's most certainly their loss.

I suspect Jones had her own costume and makeup people, nothing else in the film is half as visually striking.

Particularly not the cinematography which makes beyond excessive use of magenta and green colour gels, even in the sewer, giving the film a Super Mario Brothers: The Movie quality that dampens the menace of vampires considerably.

But at some point the college kids stopped annoying me and I actually got a little caught up in seeing whether Keith and the innocent waitress, Allison (Deedee Pfeiffer), would make it through the night. Also a bit entertaining is a wannabe Vegas lounge lizard working as M.C. played by Sandy Baron.

Another New Set of Veins

How does a mad scientist think? Here may be a prime example: if someone is frozen and successfully revived within an hour, that means the soul does not depart the body until at least an hour after death. If one can obtain an undamaged corpse of a recently deceased individual, then the soul of even a beheaded man or woman may be revived in the undamaged body. Hence, immortality. Such is the logic at work in 1967's Frankenstein Created Woman, the title being a parody of Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman but this is not a comedy nor does it bear very much in common with the film that catapulted Brigitte Bardot's career. Frankenstein Created Woman exists in a strange and sinister reality of obsession and revenge, a fascinating, morally chaotic horror film.

Consisting of two parts, the first introduces us to Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing again) and his assistants, a perpetually flustered and kind hearted Thorley Walters as Dr. Hertz and a young man from the nearby town named Hans (Robert Morris).

Following the success of Frankenstein's experiment where he had himself frozen and revived, they send young Hans into town to buy a bottle of wine. Since no-one among Frankenstein's group has any money, not even the baron himself, Hans is forced to barter his coat. Working in the tavern is a pretty young woman with a badly scarred face named Christina (Susan Denberg) with whom Hans is in love.

So when three rich young men drop in and start to verbally and physically abuse the young woman, Hans begins to single handedly beat the shit out of them until the police arrive to stop him. In a prologue to the film, we learn that Hans' father was sentenced to death for murder and people are quick to suggest Hans might be prone to similar behaviour.

The second half of the film focuses more on Frankenstein and the woman he more or less creates, taking advantage of a complex sequence of mayhem I won't spoil for you. She doesn't know who she is at first, constantly asking Frankenstein and Hertz to tell her. It's without their assistance, though, she eventually embarks on a campaign of cold blooded, murderous revenge.

Peter Cushing played Frankenstein in Hammer's three previous films, including 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein in which he and Christopher Lee made names for themselves playing the Baron and the monster, respectively. In Frankenstein Created Woman, Cushing continues to portray him as a man who could be ruthless and fixated yet also charming and, in his own way, compassionate. The film bears little resemblance to Mary Shelley's novel except that the baron continues to function as a nightmare realisation of the Bryonic hero.

Wikipedia quotes Martin Scorsese as having a fondness for the film, saying, "If I single this one out it's because here they actually isolate the soul... The implied metaphysics are close to something sublime." Of course, this perspective requires one to believe in the soul, a concept I've always found interesting but about which I am, as with God, agnostic. I'm intrigued by Scorsese's use of the word "sublime" to describe something that feels like a serial killer's self-justification, though in amoral madness perhaps there is a form of sublimity.

Come, Come, Red Coats

I really feel bad saying I don't like hoodies. I firmly believe in everyone's right to wear them. I certainly don't look at someone as a physical threat for wearing one. In fact, I think they're just so boring. There's something very default about them, like a uniform handed out to mark you as an average young person. I guess in that way they're not much different from the hooded mantles worn by mediaeval peasants. As much as I love the middle ages, I can't get behind hoodies. And yes, I think Ezio what's-his-name from Assassin's Creed looks like a chump.

Aside from the hoodie--and the t-shirt--I really like the Twelfth Doctor's wardrobe in the new trailer.

Especially the burgundy velvet coat which most people have been pointing out is reminiscent of Capaldi's favourite Doctor, Three.

There're several things I'm liking about the upcoming season, chief of which is the fact that every story is going to be two parts. That basically makes it like the classic series--well, it makes it exactly like the Sixth Doctor's first full season. But let's not look at it that way. For the first time since the new series premièred, the standard two hour-ish story format that emerged in the Fourth Doctor's era will be back. It's been sorely needed with all the episodes, like last season's "Time Heist", that felt cramped and rushed for all the characters and concepts the show attempted to make hay with in less than an hour.

Speaking of the Sixth Doctor, the only audio I had time to listen to this past week was the fairly unremarkable 2005 story Thicker than Water, which was more interesting for its fannishness than for any intrinsic story merits, featuring the Doctor going to visit an audio only companion, Evelyn, with a television companion, Mel, and a cameo from the Seventh Doctor where we learn a character from another audio was the mother of an audio companion of the Seventh Doctor's. And Thicker than Water features a return to a location introduced in another audio. So, if you've never listened to a Doctor Who audio play before, don't start with this one.

Twitter Sonnet #780

Shoulder pad plebeians predict dimples.
However harvest vacillates don't fall.
Inspectors nod out at the crime pimples.
Whoever kicks last offends the football.
Violet clockwork tambourine rangers strike.
No-one saw where moonless markers tallied.
An entire Italy's in a bike.
Briskly walking broccoli to lungs sallied.
A change of pocket pleased the nickel's groove.
The lint given to-day stops musket's late.
Bedclothes contain that what sleepers behoove.
A NyQuil body floats into the gate.
Force fed echoes degraded the larynx.
Living medicine balls broke the hammocks.

The Bride with No Blood doesn't Blush

One must always take care when travelling in Hammer's version of Transylvania. 1960's The Brides of Dracula is no exception, an entertaining and slightly lurid vampire film which, despite the title, has nothing to do with the vampire women who live with Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel.

Dracula's not in the movie either, the title apparently meant to be taken somewhat figuratively. The chief vampire here is David Peel as Baron Meinster.

The film essentially consists of two acts, the first having a wonderfully sinister build up to the Baron's introduction. Following the point of view of a beautiful young French schoolteacher named Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur), we're first introduced to the Baron's mother and servant, played by Martita Hunt and Freda Jackson respectively.

Marianne accepts the Baroness' invitation to stay at the castle despite warnings from the tavern keeper when she misses her coach. We can sense early that the Baroness keeps some terrible secret but it's not until after nightfall that Marianne discovers the older woman's son chained in another room.

The second half of the film introduced Peter Cushing reprising his role as Van Helsing from Hammer's Dracula. He investigates the vampires with cool precision, this segment of the film being enjoyable for far different reasons, mainly for Cushing's chemistry with Miles Malleson as a country doctor named Tobler who somewhat inadvertently becomes Watson to Van Helsing's Holmes.

Van Helsing goes about the vampire hunting with composure, gracefully indulging Tobler's unselfconscious superstition alongside his disbelief in vampires.

This is another movie where the vampires are extraordinarily weak, in this case being all but neutralised by a couple wooden poles held up to form a makeshift cross. This is also by far the shiniest Hammer movie I've seen, cinematographer Jack Asher seems to have really liked highlights.

Among other things, it makes the fresh paint on sets look very apparent. It gives the film a sort of Disneyland quality, though, that I kind of liked. It makes the wallpaper in Marianne's room in the castle look nice even though it looks like a prison yard spotlight is being shown through her window.

The Nightmare in a Styrofoam Cup

If ever a movie succeeds entirely because of its creature and makeup effects, it's 1985's Fright Night. The story is dumb, the protagonists are annoying, the villains aren't nearly as effective as you want them to be, and Roddy McDowall delivers the kind of misguided performance only an actor confident in his abilities can deliver.

Yet I was rooting for McDowall more than anyone else in the film. Playing a character named Peter Vincent, he's supposedly an homage to Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, but there's a lot more Cushing than Price in the veteran horror actor known for playing a vampire killer. Wikipedia says the filmmakers failed to interest Price in the role which makes me wonder why they didn't try Cushing. Cushing playing this guy straight would've been so much funnier, and scarier, than McDowall's gratingly broad bug eyes and double takes as he discovers vampires are really real.

His schlocky grandstanding when he adopts the vampire hunter persona is even worse. I hate when actors play actors with false notes in their voice even when they're supposed to be playing good actors.

Somehow the fact that he had a shred of Peter Cushing in him, though, made me like him more than anyone else. Certainly more than the main protagonist, William Ragsdale as the teenage boy Charley whom we're introduced to whining to his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse), because she won't have sex with him and then ignoring her when she takes her top off because he sees the neighbours bringing a coffin into their house. The fact that Amy doesn't care that the neighbours are bringing a coffin into their house makes her equally annoying and I kind of felt these two deserved each other.

The neighbour ends up being a vampire named Jerry Dandrige, played by Chris Sarandon, an actor I recognised only as Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride, though apparently he was also the speaking voice for Jack Skellington. Without the Dread Pirate Roberts of Inigo Montoya around, all the charisma was with Humperdink, so I wanted him to gruesomely kill the kids until he passed up one opportunity to do so after another and I lost patience with him, too.

I was about to write the whole movie off until the climax which suddenly treated me to some of the most amazing practical makeup and creature effects I've seen. By Richard Edlund and his team, I was particularly impressed by this wolf to human transformation:

Topped maybe only by this sudden ultra fangy reveal:

The Old Horse

Drawing takes too long, especially when it's hot. To-day I pencilled page seventeen of my comic, wanting to have finished page twenty four yesterday. Or something. Not that I'm comparing myself to Alfred Hitchcock but I'm reminded of hearing about him being on set of his films of the late fifties and later being bored out of his mind because he basically considered a movie finished once the script was done, the actual filming being a sort of formality. This makes sense of the fact that he's said to have hardly given any direction to his actors, like the famous story of Cary Grant walking through the hotel in North by Northwest and it being the actual hotel Grant was staying at so Hitchcock had simply said, he knows how to walk through this hotel, let him do it.

I wish my drawings would just act out my scripts on their own. I should just have to draw a character once and then let her do the rest. Maybe I should watch Cool World to-night, I've never seen it.

I've done so much work on this comic and still only a few people have seen it. What's weird is I'm a little reluctant to submit it to publishers, even though I think it may be the best looking art I've ever produced, because I can't shake the feeling that it would be read by less than half the audience in print form than it would be published online. Maybe this is an illusion created by the fact that I spend more time online than at comic book shops. But I envy people who get to perform in front of an audience, getting some feeling of rapport with an audience must be nice instead of spending months with your material in a bottle before you feel it's ready to be shown, and only then knowing how people will take something that you came up with six months or a year ago, nevermind the stuff you thought of last week.

I was tempted to post some concept art at least to-day but the time still doesn't feel right. Here are some doodles I did at university orientation last week:

I really need to review how to draw horses. I do find them a lot easier than most other animals for some reason.

I signed up for a pretty full roster of classes for fall--I'll be at school all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and most of the day on Mondays and Wednesdays. I'm hoping I'll still be able to make three pages of comic a week so if I do make this a web comic I'll probably release at a pace of eight pages every three weeks instead of my usual two weeks. At least the classes sound fun--I'm taking a class devoted to John Milton, a class devoted to Shakespeare, and another devoted to African Literature. That's for Tuesdays and Thursdays. Monday and Wednesday I'm studying pre-colonial Latin America and Star Trek. Yes, Star Trek. I needed an elective and all the more useful sounding ones were already taken. Anyway, I'm hoping I'll have more spare time since most of the classes I'm taking are things I already know a lot about.

Oh, you may ask, just how much do you know about John Milton? Well, maybe not as much as some but I have, over this past year, read all his prominent political pamphlets, his History of Britain, two biographies of him, several of his letters, and all of his poetry. So I guess I'll go ahead and tell you one thing about my comic--John Milton's in it. Here's some concept art.

So John Milton's one of the people I've been stuck inside with. I was vaguely planning on driving across country in August but I decided I'd be better off saving my money and staying in and getting some drawing done. Oh, but the outside . . .

Twitter Sonnet #779

Cable hair keeps the forest mind in town.
Jigsaw wedges complete the puzzle legs.
A steamer trunk full of acorns was brown.
Moving stacks of smoke fry the flying eggs.
Ribbon stilts'll buckle below the belt.
Accessory weight dampens the murder.
To touch the pen or hat is two ways felt.
There's protein in ev'ry Frank-N-Furter.
The yam finger says I am a starch thing.
A brain hits hard enough to enter skulls.
Quiet colludes like garnish to the bang.
Barnacle pin-ups glimmered on the hulls.
A chip has too much salt for the old block.
An incredible feat broke the tube sock.

We All Have Our Coffins

Is vampirism a lifestyle choice or a reflection of a fundamental difference of biochemistry? 1936's Dracula's Daughter presents us with this question, reminiscent of debates about whether or not homosexuality is genetically determined, perhaps appropriate since the film is deemed by many to feature lesbianism in thinly disguised metaphor. A nicely shot film, at its centre is a beautiful, tortured anti-heroine.

Gloria Holden plays Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula's daughter, with cool, querulous elegance, seemingly lost in the world after the recent demise of her father, she is repulsed by her own desire to drink blood. In an effort to control herself, she begins talking to a psychiatrist named Garth (Otto Kruger) who, without being told too many of the particulars of Marya's problem, recommends confronting her addiction head on by intentionally placing herself in situations where she might be tempted.

So she has her henchman, Sandor (Irving Pichel, looking eerily like Paul Muni), hire a pretty young girl off the street to pose for her as an artist's model. It's this one scene where it would seem a woman is trying to seduce another woman.

Marya drinks men's blood, too, so maybe the movie's more a metaphor for bisexuality? One might also ask, since Dracula drinks from men and women, why is Dracula's Daughter more of a metaphor for same sex relationships? Well, it's more about social context than whether someone is literally ravishing someone of the same sex. Marya is tormented just for being what she can't at the end of the day help being. Murder as metaphor for non-heterosexual orientations may seem too harsh but one has to consider that normal and Christian culture regards homosexuality with similar moral contempt, if not more.

Comparing this movie to 1970's The Vampire Lovers, I find I prefer the newer film as far as vampirism for unsanctioned sexual orientation goes. Based on the novella Carmilla from 1871, the 1970 film is told more from the vampire's perspective than the original story, it more strongly implies vampirism is a metaphor for homosexuality, but unlike Dracula's Daughter, Ingrid Pitt's character isn't ashamed of what she is, just sort of heartbroken that the people around her don't seem to want to accept her.

Dracula's Daughter does have the incredible, 1930s Universal horror film atmosphere, though. It's intended to be a direct sequel to the Dracula starring Bela Lugosi but the only returning cast member is Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing, continuing in the mysterious, decades long trend in films to avoid using the first name, Abraham, established for Van Helsing in the book. Marguerite Churchill is in the film as the sometimes annoying, sometimes charming Lois Lane-ish assistant to Garth.

Truth in the Bottle

I'm glad the second season of True Detective went out like the noir it'd been all along. That is, rather grimly. There'll be spoilers in this post, I hardly think it's worth talking about a final episode of something without spoilers.

Bezzerides and Velcoro at the beginning swapping stories about the roots of their self hatred was nice. Though I still think their sins are a little too innocent. I'd like to see next season maybe Pizzolatto giving us a protagonist who's done something unambiguously perverse. In fact, it would be kind of great if one of the villains of this season were the protagonist of next season, Burris, for example.

I was never especially interested Velcoro's story about his kid. Maybe if I had a kid myself I'd feel different. As it was it was hard for me to sympathise with him stopping to see his son one last time, though I didn't find it implausible. I just found myself saying to the screen while he was deciding, "Don't do it, don't do it, Velcoro, don't do it." The moment he got onto the off-ramp I thought, "Well, I guess he's going to die." But this adds that damning ingredient of free will to the sense of doom that hovered so well over the previous episode. As little as I was interested in his paternity story, I still liked it better than Woody Harrelson's plot in the first season.

Frank's plot was for me the best part of the episode, his and his wife Jordan's. I love the feeling of his identity disintegrating as he crossed the desert, moments that defined his persona manifesting as ghosts around him for his mind to cling to before finally losing his grip and falling away. This works especially well with a character like Frank who has such tight self control, has the steely principles of an idealised gangster. Of course he wouldn't give up his suit, presenting himself properly is that important to him, and it's another important element of free will added to the doom.

More than the first season, season two really felt like a complex machine with many small parts calculated to assemble a whole, very much like a single eight and a half hour movie. I suspect it might have been improved by a single director for every episode but the fact that season two feels more solid might prove again that television is at this time more of a writer's medium.