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  • Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – second half

    Episode 4, Chapters 17 – 19

    Reading the book in parallel with the tv show is really fun for this part!

    I watched Smiley meet Herr Kretzschmar on TV first, then read about it the next day … and hugely enjoyed both!

    Chapter 17 – Now Smiley is in Lubeck Germany, on the bleak northern Germany road Herr K directed him to take to find Otto Leipzig..

    The road was as empty as the landscape.

    Just as I watched it on TV last night:

    • He finds the shabby house nestled in an industrial area.
      • He disturbs the obviously fornicating young couple …
    • … but he does get them to direct him to a boat in an even sketchier area.
    • At the boat harbor he is faces with the problem of getting on the boat.
      • So just as TV, he persuades an old man in a dinghy to row him out there.
    • Poor ole Otto had been tortured to death.
      • It was really gross on video, but only mildly gross in print.
    • He does find a packet suspended on fishing line off the side of the boat.
      • Marked with yellow chalk, which we by now recognize as the General’s tradecraft.
    • The scummy local derelicts trash his rental car like in the video and the book.
    • He gets the heck out of there in his trashed rental car to avoid meeting the police.

    The printed page is better here, because we get a nice internal dialog about how soon the German police are gonna come looking for him. He buys a funny hat and some extra clothes, just so ticket takers and direction givers will remember him a little differently.

    You can tell he’s too old for this shit. Those kids were creepy.

    It’s the weekend, and he determines that Herr Kretzschmar is at his house in the suburbs of Hamburg. He takes the train to there.

    They are having the German idea if an American suburban pool party.
    I loved it!

    Herr K doesn’t recognize Smiley because of the funny hat, so lets his wife welcome him!

    His wife is a leggy babe in Vegas pool clothes, the perfec embodiment of a bourgeois German idea of Vegas style. 🙂

    [In the video the funny that stuff happens at Herr K’s is different, but the drama when he hears that Max is dead is the same intense thing!]

    Smiley and the missus have pleasant conversation for a minute until Herr K comes and who Smiley is, and that he is distressed!
    They go inside and he gets the bad news about Otto.

    It’s a stark contrast, the carefree summer party outside and Herr Kretzschmar being genuinely grief-stricken over Otto inside.
    He really liked Otto, and he really wants to fuck up whoever did it!

    I came out of this episode with a deep admiration for Herr Kretzschmar!
    He’s a guy you would want to have on your side!

    Chapter 18 – Back to Paris, and Madame Ostrakova still in her lonely flat trying to survive.

    Recouperating on her divan.
    Facing the door with her ancient pistol clutched in both hands.

    She can see them out the window in the courtyard below. On TV, they are a cartoon version of Russian KGB agants, black coats, black hats and a menacing way of something as harmless as asking directions to her flat.

    264 Too many people are collected in the hallway to watch them as they knock on her door, so they leave for the moment. You know they will be back.

    FINALLY, Smiley arrives at that same barricaded door. The same concierge accompanies him upstairs.

    She tries to bullshitting Madame O, that Smiley is a doctor to get her to open the door.

    Smiley tells her the simple truth, that he has the letter she sent to the General. He slips it under the door …. she lets him in!

    Slap-stick interlude

    It’s funny to see one of these over-dignified brit dudes suddenly break a sweat and start hurrying! It’s a wonderful scene on the TV show and a great few pages in the book starting on p268.

    Our old friend Peter Guilliam (from the last book) is now Head of Station at British Embassy in Paris. He gets a call from his wife, who is French, pretty, and pregnant. She’s very agitated and says he has to come immediately!

    He busts into his own house, grabs the intruder in a headlock!

    It’s George Smiley … with Madama Ostrakova in the bedroom being ministered to by Marie-Claire Guilliam.

    This part is VERY video-friendly. It’s just another action scene on the page, but it’s Keystone Kops sequence on the screen.

    Episode 5, Chapters 19-

    Chapter 19 – George and Saul get together.

    Saul Enderby is a classic, central casting upper class British twit!

    He’s very easy to mock and bitch about, but over the next few pages he turns out to be a lot smarter than he acts. He’s actually good at his job. He DID replace Smiley as the Head Man after all… And the pro-Smiley crowd still has it out for him to this day. Bt he actually comes off as pretty good at the job in this book.

    pp 276-288 The next few pages are him rereading Smiley’s report, which is about the events of this book. It’s VERY enligthening, a look into Karla’s mind among other things.

    288-293 After Enderby helpfully recaps this complicated story, they get down to what Smiley wants, which is approval of a mission regarding Karla and the mystery woman who Karla wants a legend for.

    I secretly kinda like Enderby, even though he sets himself to to be very hate-able. After bitching at Smiley for a few more pages he gives him everything he needs.

    p 293 Their last snippet of conversation is about Smiley’s lighter!

    If you’ve read the whole cycle, recall that Smiley actually interviewed Karla in India many years ago. “Tried to get him to defect”. Tricky bastard that he is, Karla came out of that meeting with Smiley’s lighter. “An ordinany Ronson, they’re built to last”!

    Chapter 20

    We’re sort of at the beginning of the end game now.

    Smiley is in a weeks long holding pattern. We get impressions from Toby and others of how inward he is.

    300 He shakes his watchers and takes to train to visit Ann, his estranged wife! Recall that she is REALLY estranged because her affair with Bill Hayden …. which made that whole thing so much worse.

    307 Finally things are moving.
    Smiley takes a plane and train to Berne Switzerland.

    Chapter 21

    The chapter is very fun if you delight in the play-by-play on British spy-craft of the era (which I do!)

    309 Toby is briefing George about Grigoriev’s cover at the Russian Consulate in Berne. If you’ve lost track of who the hell Grigoriev is, he’s the other fellow in the sex photo with Otto Leipzig. The photo that seems to have gotten Otto and the General killed.

    It’s really fun how le Carre teases it all out, but Grigoriev a mid-level Russian foreign service hack, who Karla has chosen to implement his plan.

    George and Saul have a very funny back and forth about how Karla can’t use his regular VERY good spies for this because it’s off the books. So he chooses Grigoriev, who is pretty good at tracking the kind of off-the-books spending they’re asking him to do, but he’s a terrible spy. 🙂

    [I think the other reason is that he is basically kind man who treats the girl as well as you could hope for.]

    He’s the Russian they plan to “burn” in their lingo.

    So here we are, George and Toby and Grigoriev, who’s suddenly got enough money to buy his own Mercedes.

    310 “They like the guy George. You know how watcher are.
    It’s love or hate all the time. They like him.”

    And indeed, he is a very sympathetic likeable fellow in the BBC series!

    “What do you make of Grigoriev, Toby? What is he?“
    “A trained hood he isn’t, George. No tradecraft, actually a complete catastrophe. But he’s not straight either. He’s a half-breed, George.“

    Chapter 22

    Now we switch frames to the institution where they are keeping Tatiana (called Alexandra at the institution).

    She makes a weak pass at the doctor, just to relieve the bordom. Mostly we just get a few pages of her confused internal dialog. She is indeed a little cray-cray.

    And who can blame her?!

    This scene kind of bland on the screen, but what’s going on in her head is very intense on the written page.

    Chapter 23

    Back to Toby and George in a coffee shop, watching the bank where Grigoriev goes every Friday to get his cash.

    Here is why I love reading these books:

    322 George saw the yellow mail van parked boldly in the no-parking bay, and he knew it was Toby’s post. Toby had a life-long faith in mail vans; he stole them wherever he went …

    327 The second half of the chapter is Grigoriev doing the second half of his Friday routine, which is to to ride his bike to the institution (so no one sees his diplomatic plates) and visit Tatiana/Alexandra.

    He really is a nice guy. And the girl really is kind of a mess.

    Episode 6, Chapters 24 –

    Chapter 24 – We’re gettin there!

    337 Ten pages were devoted to finding the right time and right way to approach Grigoriev. I’m happy to say that the movie followed the written script very closely here and was delightful.

    Grigoriev sneaks off from his routine to watch a chess game in the park. This is the opportunity Toby and his crew have been waiting for to get him away from his Soviet watchers so they can abduct him.

    They do it very smoothly in broad daylight in a public park, and bring him to Smiley.

    Smiley plays his part as a disapproving Soviet commisar perfectly, and soon Grigoriev was singing like a bird!

    354 Another scene that was charming in the book AND the show, Smiley makes him call his wife and be authoritative with her. He loved it! And all the watchers loved it and cheered him. It was very sweet.

    Chapter 25 Still with Grigoriev.

    357 Grigoriev still telling his is story. He is taken to meet Karla.

    Chapter 26

    The final meeting took took the last twelve minutes of the final show. It was very suspenseful. Toby was so wired up he could barely form sentences!

    He and George and Peter G watch the little man in a workers overcoat walk across the checkpoint bridge between East and West Germany and turn himself over to the watchers.

    Lotta stuff going on in the eye contact between him and Smiley.

    He dropped Smiley’s lighter (which no one but Smiley noticed?!).

    I’m pretty sure Smiley just walked away and left it there.

    This was very hard on me, because I would have HAD TO pick it up if it were me….. 🙂

  • Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – first half

    Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – first half

    Fifteen pages in I can tell that I am going to have a LOT of thoughts about this book.

    Many of these are regarding parallels between the Trump Adminstration’s manner of speaking and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

    Watching the TV Series at the same time:

    I noticed a few weeks ago that the BBC TV series for Smiley’s People is here on YouTube right now! So my new plan is to re-watch the BBC series at the same time I’m re-reading the book!.

    Characters vs Cast:

    • The book Wiki lists the Characters
      • e.g.: Otto Leipzig – “The Magician”, Estonian small-time crook who works with Vladimir
      • or: Oleg Kirov alias Oleg Kursky – an agent deputed to find a suitable legend for Karla’s daughter
    • The tv Wiki, lists the Cast, which is the same book characters along with people who are playing them:

    For the first, “Small time crook” sounds so trivial compared to how Otto fits in Madame Ostrakova’s imagination (“the Magician!”).

    For the second, Oleg Kirov is a minor character in the drama, but the bit about ‘Karla’s daughter‘ in the book description is something we puzzle about for most of the story, so it is a bit of a spoiler for this point.

    The 2000 (new) Introduction:

    As another side note, Le Carre (real name David Cornwell) wrote a new introduction to this edition of Smiley’s People in 2000. It is a perfect little gem of quality prose itself!

    The neatest part is how much he loves Alec Guiness as Smiley (“an actor playing one of his characters to perfection“).

    Then comes the downside:
    Guiness played Smiley so well that the public kind of took him over.
    He wasn’t Le Carre’s character any more.

    • This happens to me all the time at the other end of the media food chain:
      • Toby Esterhase for instance will forever be Bernard Hepton in my imagination.
      • Ian McKellen IS Gandalf … Nobody I know would challange that! 🙂

    Le Carre also says that he intended for there to be 10 or 15 Smiley books, “covering all corners of the globe, constituting a kind of Comedie Humanaine of the cold war“.

    (He’s way too fancy for me, I don’t even know what that is, but it sure sounds cool!)

    Episode 1, Chapters 1 – 5

    We open with a memorable and sympathetic character, Madame Ostrakova!

    As discussed above, the visual medium rules for us casual readers:
    She is forever burned on my heart and mind as being the actress who plays her, Eileen Atkins!

    Anyway … she is waiting for the bus to take her home from work when she is approach by a creepy, obvoiusly Soviet-type dude. He tells her the Soviet Union would like to reunite her with the illegitate daughter she had with “the Jew Glickman“, who she took up with after her husband “the traitor Ostrakova” was banished from the Soviet Union.

    She knows this is utter bullshit, but she can’t let go of the chance that she might see her daughter. She doesn’t know what to do.

    There’s an almost legendary person known to the emigre’ community as The General. She tracks down his address in London and sends him a letter.

    He writes her back and say to wait for a visitor who has the other half of a torn postcard.

    The General was known to be an incorrigible ladies’ man. The secretary where he had a desk in London clearly had had a thing with him. She was so good-looking that I looked her up. She was Ingrid Pitt, a semi-famous actress in the 60’s and 70’s. Her biggest hits were vampire movies. Simply from the fact that her dowdy blouse looked like it had pillow stuffed in it I now have a little bit of a thing for her..

    The other postcard half is slipped under her door the next night. Ostrakova talks the night away with the courier who she calls the Magician!

    Some kind of trade-off happens on a ferry in Hamburg. Something is being delivered to the General via a not real bright Estonian long distance trucker named Villem.

    Chapter 3 – Smiley gets summoned by the police to Hampstead Heath to view a body that turns out rto be the General (I hate this part, the General was cool!).

    The Superindent of Police is there. Clearly he was told by unseen powers to bring Smiley in and give him the run of the place.

    Smiley asks to see his face. It was gross enough to make the policeman retch! (see a few paragraphs below)

    Chapter 4 – Smiley goes straight to an un-named “safe house” to meet one of the really hatable civil service types that Le Carre despises, Lacon Strickland and a likeable young fellow names Mostyn

    Smiley’s stirring defense of the General is really fascinating:

    • .Born Estonian
    • Changed his name from Voldemar to Vladimir to join the Russian Army.
    • “Fought like a lion with the Russians against the Germans.

    Chapter 5 – Mostyn tells the story of the General’s last day.

    We eventually find that he was shot with a soft-nosed bullet in the face, which I guess looks really disgusting, hence the retching above..

    The video is much better on the General’s last evening and the minutes before he was shot …. which makes sense since those are more cinematic events.

    I do appreciate that BBC did NOT show the actual murder. American TV would have made a bloody spectacle of it. One second the General is hobbling through the woods to get away from whatever was out there, then the next second the police chief is leading Smiley to his covered body. That’s the way to do it!

    The book gives a lot more details on the dialog at the safe house.
    Whatever happened to the General is unknown to them.

    Episode 2, Chapters 6 – 10

    Chapter 6 – Madame Ostrakova is living her normal live in Paris. The bad guys waylay her on the way home from work and run her over with a car.

    It was striking how closely the TV scene followed the book descruption.

    • One man had been pretty much exactly 30 feet behind her for a ling time.
    • Now there is another man on the other side of the street keeping pace with her.
    • Now guy 1 comes up to be next to her, and guy 2 cross the street to be on her other side.
      • There was a detail that guy 2 was walking in the gutter so he be next to her, and they faithfully did that on the TV!
    • Now there is a car matching their pace.
    • They grab her.
      • The car speeds up.
      • She belts one of them with the heavy iron she was carrying for just this purpose.
      • They throw her in front of the car.
    • We leave her badly injured and go back to England …

    Chapter 7 – Back in London, Smiley searches The General’s shabby flat on the top floor of his building.

    Not much to show for it. He does recover a taxi receipt whose amount indicates a long trip taken two day ago (unusual on the General budget).

    On the way out he asked the postman for any mail for that apartment (“save you a walk up the stairs“). There is a brown envelope postmarked Paris.

    Chapter 8 – Smiley goes back to Paddington to re-trace the General’s last steps.

    This was another very cinematic scene (i.e. perfect for the screen).
    Smiley poring over the pathway looking for anything the General might have stashed when he knew he was in danger.

    And it pays off! He spies a crumpled packet of Galoise cigarettes high up in a tree.

    “High up” to Smiley, who is short 🙂
    It was within easy reach for the General. After some struggles, Smiley’s gets it.

    Next Smiley wants to run down that taxi receipt. Clever fellow, he calls the taxi company and asks for that driver specifically for an important fare immediately.

    When the driver shows up, Smiley lays 10 pounds on him to tell him where he took the General.

    Chapter 9 – Smiley gets his car and drives himself out to the place … in the Charlton area of Southeast London which seems like a depressing, grimy place.

    The address was an Orthodox church on a street with the memorable name Battle of the Nile Street. You bet they kept a cool name like that in the TV show!

    In the book we get learn how Smiley feels about cars:

    If it had not been Saturday he’s have taken public transport … he lived on terms of mutual hatred with the combustion engine.

    He’s there to meet another Estonian. We’ll call him by his birth name Villem. He is of course the fellow that did the hand-off on the ferry in Hamburg way back in the first episode.

    He’s a big-hearted young kid who just wants to please everybody. Now that he’s home, he wants to please his older wife, who calls him William and just wants him to be a good Englishman and stay the heck away from Smiley and the General and all that dangerous foreign intrigue.

    The other thing that recommended him to the General is that he drives a long-distance shipping truck that makes regular trip to the Continent!

    Over the next 20 pages Smiley teases it out of him that he was in Hamburg two weeks ago.

    So Villen sort of ties the first third of the book together.

    • Madam Ostrakova gets accosted by a KGB guy who gives her negative of someone he says is the daughter
    • She later gets a visit from someone she calls the Magician.
    • He tells her to write the General.
      • She does and Smiley snags the letter!
    • Separately, something described as “the second of two events that brought Smiley out of retirement” happened.
      • It was an odd tableau where a young fellow left a bag oranges on a specific seat on a ferry in Hamburg, left the area, then came back 2 minutes later and pick the bag back up.
    • More we bounce to England, where the General turns up dead on Hampstead Heath, pretty leary a KGB hit.
    • Smiley investigates and eventually ends up at Villem’s.
      • He was of course the young man witht he bag of oranges.

    Chapter 10 – Smiley’s next stop is the Free Baltic Library.

    In case you are ignorant about the Baltic States also, the Baltic States are:
    Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

    The Baltic States were absorbed by the Soviet Union during WW2 and regained their independence in 1991. Here in 2000’s they are just three cute little countries in a row next to Russia on the Baltic Sea, but back in the middle of the 1900’s, having the Soviet Union NOT gobble them up was a big part of the whole Cold War drama!

    Here we meet Mikhel and Elvira, an odd couple if ever there was one!

    She pretty clearly had a thing going with that old dog the General. She’s devastated by his murder. As an aside, Elvira makes a dowdy old librarian’s outfit, a lacy blouse buttoned to the neck, sexier than I would have thought possible.

    She is actress Ingrid Pitt. I just looked her up. I think I looked her up last time I watched this a decade ago! I am enchanted by her.

    Smiley has a lot of dark thoughts that maybe Mikhel is the one that sold the General out over Elvira and got him killed. So he grills him pretty hard! It wasn’t much fun for Mikhel, but he does give Smiley a lot of background information:

    • The General didn’t have a passport
    • Since he couldn’t travel he used good ole Villem to do his messenger work. This of course could cost Villem his sweet upwardly mobile job, and which is why Villem’s wife hates them all for asking.
    • The General wanted maps of major cities of the Baltic area, which includes Hamburg.

    Episode 3, Chapters 6-

    Chapter 11 – Madame Ostrakova is home from the hospital and holed up in her apartment with her husband’s ancient gun in her lap. She is a wonderful character! She intends to survive this.

    Chapter 12 – Smiley goes back to the Savoy, where he had stashed Vladimir’s treasured cigarette packet.

    He takes it home. There is a very entertaining few pages where he develops the photographic negative himself while thinking about the professional film shops (“10 minutes away”) under contract with the Circus who could have deveoped this film much more quickly and with better quality, but Smiley is old-school. You get none of that detail in the video version of course!

    Then for some reason, his wife Ann, who we have heard about for so many books, calls him out of the blue, … because she’s feeling lonely and wants company.

    This brings up a lot of complex feelings for our hero.

    In case you’re not up to speed here, this is Book 3 of a trilogy of books about Smiley and the strange world he lives in. The first book, Tinkor, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about Smiley being betrayed my his mentor and boss Bill Hayden … who was his best friend and mentor (and of course…) and also Ann’s lover.
    It was a really good book, and a pretty good movie!

    [For the record, the second book, The Honorable Schoolboy was also a good book, but not did not become a BBC series. Wiki said it’s Hong Kong location was too expensive.]

    The Ann thing made him have a lot of negative thoughts about what he’s up to here.

    After he calmed down he got down to the business of studying the General’s photos that he just developed. They are of two European-type fellows having sex for money with two young, healhy-looking girls. One fellow is big and kinda flabby,. The other is a little guy, ferret-y.

    For some reason Smiley starts daydreaming about the time they had Karla prisoner in Germany. Smiley’s job back then was to chat with prisoners whose time was up and were scheduled to be handed back to the Russians, so see if they might want to work for out side when they went back.

    Episode 3 Chapters 6-

    Chapter 13 – Smiley visits Toby Esterhase.

    p 170 “you trying to pin me down George”
    “I suppose I am. Yes.”

    172 Toby’s work name is Hector … Smiley wants to know why the General said “is Hector no good?”
    172 “Fear is information without the cure”.
    176 Smiley says something that pisses Toby off (possibly on purpose)
    “eyes, cheeks coloured,, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake“
    177 We hear about Otto Leipzig – “the Magician“. He will turn out to be the little guy in the picture.

    Another fellow called Kretchmer comes up, few pages later. He is NOT the big guy in the sex picture, rather he is the guy who was taking the picture! Kretchmer runs a sex club in Hamburg called the Blue Diamond. Smiley will go there.

    Chapter 14

    But first! Smiley drives out to visit Connie Sachs, retired spy, and a brilliant, weird person.

    200 He’s mining her brain for recollections of little Otto Leipzig and fat Oleg Kirov (the other guy in the sex picture).

    Chapter 15 – Smiley and Connie get to the bottom of it!

    208 These little phrases. like “a waiter’s anger“. Smiley’s thought that more than once when he was thinking about the little guy (Leipzig)’s feelings about the big guy (Kirov). So evocatibe in a strange way.

    215 origin story for Karla’s mistress (Tatiana’s mother)

    “He found her as a child, wandering a burnt-out village in the war.
    Adopted her, fell in love with her    .” …
    “Educated her, played Daddy, played lover, played God.”
    Then he bumped her off.

    Why?

    “She went soft on the revolution. Wanted the state to wither away. He told her to shut up, she wouldn’t. He had her shoved in the slammer. It made her worse“.

    216 “There was a child“

    217 A don at Leningrad University was ordered to take on a special child Tatiana. She was raising hell but couldn’t be touched because her daddy was a big deal. She tried to seduce him (the Don), told him “Daddy had Mummy killed for showing insufficient faith on the historical process” (Love that!).

    He ran into a bullet.

    That’s it for Connie. But sh’s basically given us a road map for the rest of the book!

    Chapter 16 – Smiley hops a plane for Hamburg.

    He meets Herr Kretchmer at his club and brings him the sad news that the General has been killed. They both agree that Otto is in danger also. After some sparring he tells Smiley how to find Otto on the houseboat where he is living.

  • Dark Winds – Season 4

    Season 4

    • S4 E1 Shootout at the Diner. Bernie’s almost back!
    • S4 E2 Bernie is all the way back! Shootout at the Diner again.
    • S4 E3 Albert dies at his grandfather’s place. Killer has a thing for Joe!
    • S4 E4 Joe, Bernie, Chee all go to LA to look for Billie. Chee is still pissed.
    • S4 E5 LA hi jinks
    • S4 E6 Very confusing
    • S4 E7 They think Leroy is back on the rez.
    • S4 E8 German captures Joe. Chee has his ceremony. Joe doesn’t retire.

    E1 A blond lady all decked out like a paratrooper shoots up a diner with a Indian guy and a girl in it. Despite her fancy outfit, she’s not very good at it, because she has the element of complete surprise and her target was only lightly wounded.

    • The season opens with Joe all by himself out in the desert setting up for some kind of smoke lodge ritual.
    • When he goes home we realize Emma is still gone.
      • She left at the end of last season. Bummer.
    • Bernie is back on the rez, but NOT back on the force!
      • She spends a lot of time at Chee’s.
      • They can’t keep their hands off each other. It’s kinda cute!
    • Joe runs into Gordo in the side of the highway fixing a flat (small world).
      • Gordo’s wife has Alzheimers.
    • Joe visits Bernie at Chee’s house, breaks the news to her that he’s retiring
      • … and he thinks she should take his place! (not Chee!)
      • This puts Bernie in a really uncomfortable spot.
    • The couple that was the target in the diner at turns up at the trading post.
    • The girl a runaway from the Catholic Girls School.
    • The creepy blond lady that did the shooting shows up at the trading post soon after.

    Joe visits his mother. What a strikingly beautiful woman she is! A feeling of calm comes over me when I see her.

    I liked her last season. I really like her right now with Joe’s dad not around to take up all the oxygen with his drama. He’s in Flagstaff doing guy things. When she starts telling Navajo stories in the Navajo language (Dine) it’s so moving!

    Joe visits the girl’s guardian, a long-suffering cool old guy. 🙂

    The girl (Billie)has run off with her neer-do-well cousin Albert Gorman.
    He went off to LA to be a tough guy.

    Bernie burns her Border Patrol outfit. Pretty heavy symbolism there. It must be a Navajo thing.

    She put’s on her Navajo Police outfit.
    BIG cheer when she shows up at the station.

    Turns out Bernie went to the Catholic Indian school that the Billie disappeared from. It was apparently a miserably place. Bernie hated it too. They all hate it.

    E2 starts with the real-time version of the shootout that started the season. It’s pretty rough the second time, because I really liked the kindly diner waitress, and she was killed first thing.

    Gorman takes one on the shoulder, but he and the girl get away.

    The blond lady may not be an efficient killer, but she sure is good with cars! She repairs the gunshot hole in her radiator and changes a flat tire all by herself in the middle of the desert!

    The girl Billie Tsotsie, gets caught trying to steal medical supplies from where Emma used to work.

    Albert makes it back to his grandfather’s hogan, where he dies.
    Blond lady folllows and kills the grandfather. I did not like that!

    Chee goes into the grandpa’s death hogan and it gets weird. Nose bleeds and hallucinations.

    E3 The uncle was given a half-assed traditional Navajo burial by the blond lady who just killed him in cold blood. Why????

    Chee has the hallucination/bleeding thing again back at the office.

    Chee and Bernie are having cute couples-time that evening back at his trailer. Things are going SO WELL … then she feels like she has to tell Chee about Joe’s plan to promote her but not Chee.

    Boy does THAT destroy the mood!

    • To recap:
      • the plan is not only for Joe to retire, but to
        • pre-ordain Bernie as the new Chief of the substation.
        • Not Chee, not both of them, just Bernie. (“Chee’s not ready”)
    • Chee doesn’t take it well.

    Joe is usually a MUCH better manager of people than this.
    He put Bernie in a horrible position and pretty much guaranteed Chee would explode.
    IMO this was poor script-writing.

    Joe, who is almost always gloomy, shows up in the morning in an unusually good mood. Mainly I think to play off of Chee who is still pissed off.
    Chee says awful things to Joe.

    The blond killer lady has a thing for Joe … which make NO sense.
    Very odd sequence at the end of the episode,

    E4 Blond lady in the cool van is back in LA. She kills a office worker dude in a very complicated way so it look like suicide? The victim is the partner of the guy who is running her from his prison cell.

    Joe, Bernie and Chee all drive to LA. The dynamics aren’t great. They go to the Indian Center. That’s where Chee went with his mom way back on the day. Chee has flashbacks.

    Chee also keeps having those weird bloody noses. Also how did he get the ugly gash on his side?

    The blond lady has a hideout with a whole apartment hidden in the basement where her demented Nazi grandpa lives. (a real Nazi!) [Joe calls her “the German”, so I will too!]

    Chee meets an indian dude and goes to a gang party with him. Joe and Bernie surveil it. Billie turns up there, because its a small world. FBI is there too, they jump Joe.

    E5 Joe meets FBI the hard way. They beat him up and throw him away.

    Joe goes to the Indian Clinic and gets fixed up by Emma, just like old times! 🙂

    FBI is also looking for Leroy. The Navajos and the FBI sort of work together. Their idea is that the Navajos can have the girl, and the FBI can have Leroy!

    Chee is hanging with his new best friend, a sketchy native guy (not Navajo!) that he met at the gang thing. He’s Sonny Bear Heart.

    I will be interested if they can make this all make sense before we’re done, because I don’t like it. It’s like they’re run out of good ideas, so just throw in some random supernatural sh-t instead of a coherent plot line.

    Billie meets a distant relative, nice young native girl. She says Billie’s mother is alive!

    Chee and Sonny are in a shootout. Chee is still bleeding.

    Sonny has like 8 lava lamps in his living room. I love! it!!

    E6 They are back at Joes place and discover that the German has bugged it.

    Joe visits McNair in prison. I saw Titus Welliver in the credits … McNair is BOSCH!!

    FBI guy that got killed in his house in the hills was named Upchurch

    Chee passed out and ended up at Indian Health with Emma as his nurse of course.

    FBI gets Sonny killed.

    Chee hallucinates his dead mom.

    Emma diagnoses that Chee has Ghost Sickness. Tells him to go back to the rez and deal with it

    Billie finds her mom in Hemet! She doesn’t take it well at first.

    She’s kidnapped by the German (whose name is Vaggan).

    Super intense

    • Chee comes clean with Bern about family stuff that’s been making him sick
    • Emma tells Joe she’s not coming back to the rez.

    E7 End of last episode they thought Leroy is back on the rez masquerading as a guy we met in the second episode. But Joe figures out he’s NOT Leroy, Leroy’s been dead for weeks!

    Everyone’s back on the reservation now.

    Vaggan has captured Joe and Billlie. She’s holding them in an underground where she wants them to be the family she never had. (After meeting her grandfather I can see why she wants that. 🙂

    It takes most of this unpleasant episode, but Joe gets them busted loose.

    Vaggan ends up horribly disfigured in a gas fire. The producers make sure we linger over every disgusting detail. No a fan of the gore.

    Chee ceremony was cool, everyone was there

    • billiee and her mom
    • everyone from the station
    • everyone from the trading post
    • even that big guy from last season that use to hate Chee!

    The Navajo stuffis really cool, but this season wasn’t really that good, IMO.

    Why does the German lady obsess for Joe and want to have a family with him.
    Chee sickness was bullshit.
    They love to show gross things, like the disfigured lady.

    So many things are just shoddily done.

  • Dark Winds – Season 3

    Season 3

    • S3 E1 Chee is back. Bernie is gone to Border Patrol. Missing Navajo kids.
    • S3 E2 One kid is dead. Creepy things are happening at the border.
    • S3 E3 We see George, then we don’t. Another body. It’s BJ Vines!
    • S3 E4 Hippie gone wild up north. Bernie gets nosy down south.
    • S3 E5 The two timelines combine. Bernie and Ivan get sexy.
    • S3 E6 Useless episode, Joe is on psychedelics or something!
    • S3 E7 Bernie’s going to crack the case. Joe and Emma problems.
    • S3 E8 Bernie does great. Emma leaves. FBI lady leaves.

    E1 The opening scene of this season is really spooky. I won’t hang around too long on this season if it has much more of this creepy sh-t.

    The show settled down to regular cops and robbers stuff after that!

    • Jim Chee is back to being Joe’s second in command.
    • Gordo un-retired. He didn’t get any smarter or younger, so he’s back but still too old to be doing this stuf
    • Mood switch to the Mexican border 280 miles away.
      • Bernie is on her new job with the Border Patrol.
      • She apprehends a mother and child, and gets kind of obsesses with them.
      • The child draws a figure that turns out to be the logo of the local oil drilling company!
      • (You get the feeling this will be important!)
    • Joe goes to a anthropological dig where the missing kids sometimes worked.
    • A clueless white lady who is an FBI agent from Washington waltzes into Joe’s life. She takes over a corner of his substation as white ladies from Washington are apparently entitled to do in the Navajo’s turf.
      • She’s there to investigate BJ Vine’s disappearance.
      • People disappear all the time down there, but a white guy with a lot of money and friends on high places gets noticed.
      • Of course we get the eerie music every time Vines is mentioned, since Joe has Things to Hide!!

    Chee and Gordo are out looking for the kids. They find a culvert that stinks like something died in there. Joe crawls right in, then Gordo crawls in after him.

    That seems really dumb. They’re both old, Gordo is REALLY old, and they crawl into the sketchy place with no back up.

    It got too creepy so I turned the sound off, then disgusting maggot covered body started falling out of the roof, so I stopped watching entirely.

    E2 This episode opens with a gratuitous nightmare scene also. At the end of the last episode a smart Mexican trucker suffocated a dumb American trucker. You can watch the dumb trucker scream as he gets buried alive if that’s your thing. Not for me thank you. I turned the sound off and put a paper in front of the tv till it was over.

    One of the Navajo kids is dead. He was the body in the culvert at the end of the last episode. Joe goes back to the archaeology dig. The head scientist is there this time. He didn’t do anything wrong, but he is super creepy anyway.

    The lady scientist is super bummed about the kid being killed.

    Meanwhile back at the Mexican border…. Bernie is surveilling the oil company with the tricky logo, and meets the owner. This is where being a super-fine woman in a uniform pays off. He could have told her to eff herself, but instead he gives here a personal tour of the facility!

    Now the episode is almost over and ther was TILL no reason for making us watch this scene.

    Bernie is stuck on night duty, inspecting the oil tankers. The shit job of shit jobs. Probably because she annoyed the rich guy who owns the oil. Turns out one truck has an extra driver riding along. which Bern notes in her little book.

    It’s the evil guy who suffocated the other guy at the beginning of the episode. Nothing happens, but the guy is trying to mean-mug Bernie to death. It’s kinda scary. [His name is Budge we find out in the next episode]

    There’s one last bit: Chee gets Shorty Bowlegs to take them to where he kid probably is, and Joe has another episode where he sees crawly things and a scary spirit being.

    I’m not sure I’ve mentioned yet that a hallmark of this season is creepy trails of ants appearing in unlikely places, to creepy music that makes Joe mildly hallicunate. It keeps happening!

    E3 These very cute kids find a body in an arroyo. It’s just a “normal” dried out vermin-eaten body, but with scary music and scary camera shots it’s still pretty disgusting.

    Joe and Chee are searching the area near Bowlegs’ place and come across a nest of hippies! It’s almost kind of funny except it’s not. They do a terrible job of not acting suspicious.

    The FBI lady is digging into the new body. She’s pretty sure it’s BJ Vines, and she’s right!

    Bernie is at the Oil Rigs – she just can’t let anything go!

    Emma Leaphorn is starting to wear on me. No matter what Joe does she’s all over him for bad energy or some such nonsense. She badgers him into owning to arranging the death of Vines. Then despite the fact that Vines killed the only child she will ever have, she dumps heavy stuff about evil spirits in their house on him. I couldn’t watch it..

    Meanwhile back at the border … Bernie thought she was getting ready for a date with her budding love interest Ivan. But imagine her surprise when it’s the very evil Budge fellow instead. Not sure how that happened, and I was sitting right here! She goes with him to a Mexican restaurant in Mexico. Very odd.

    E4 Meanwhile up north, the little blond hippy girl (Suzanne) had given Joe probably cause to call in the state police to seach the hippy stronghold.

    Again, it’s all very mysterious. There were 15 people there lasttime,but the are all gone, except Suzanne who’s near death and the hippe head man (Halsey) who blast out of there in the one truck that works, and which they had failed to secure during the search … sigh…

    After Halsey switches cars, Joe reminds us he’s a crafty Native American by making a mental image of the tire tread of the new car, then later looking for that tread on every small compact car of a certain age.

    This season has another creepy thing, the crappy 1970 fluorescent lights they have in all the building keep flickering in a really headache-inducing way. Joe doesn’t like it.

    E5 We are tying our threads together – Bernie’s BP mug shot turns up at the hippie compound. Apparently they’re running drugs and Tom the nice rich guy up north who showed Bernie around is the kingpin!

    This brings Chee and Bernie together, which somehowleads to Bernie giving the new guy Ivan the night of his life!

    Joe and Emma have annoying domestic drama about Joe Jr’s murder.

    More flickering lights at the police station and Halsey gets murdered in his jil cell. More gratuitously grotesque violence. I’m not sure I’m gonna do Season 4.

    I have a lot of questions about this. Joe can’t sleep (Emma) and goes to the office in the middle of the night. He sends the night guy home then all this crazy stuff happens.

    Shoulda taken him up on that plea deal yesterday Joe.

    Oh now they’re advertising Season 5!! That will involve Joe going to New York and other stuff that none of us asked for. Yuck

    E5 The DC lady is closing in on Joe.

    Bernie gets Ivan to go to Mexico with her to investigate. Bernie gets to be a LOT sexier.

    Lotta tension on everybody.

    Hearing another dude at Bernie place makes Chee get shitface drunk. He ends up at his old enemy’s Shorty Bowlegs trailer. Shorty is all right it turns out.

    E6 Joe finds George Jr but the all-knowing evil spirit find them also.

    I’m halfway through this one and it’s been pure psychedelic nonsense so far.

    There is a school-play version of the Navajo Creation Myth going on that is very cute, but it’s all would up with Joe tripping about the messed up life he has right now.

    E7 After E6 we are thankfully back in the real world, with these plot lines

    1. George is still alive and Joe wants to find him
    2. Emma is still having every kind of crisis regarding Joe and the FBI lady.
    3. The FBI lady is 100% Joe did the crime, but she can’t prove it. Eff her!
    4. Joe thinks the arrowhead in the dead kid’s mouth is from the archaeology dig what we haven’t heard from for a few episodes
    5. Down at the border Bernie thinks she’s figured out the cocaine scam

    E8 Last episode, time to tidy up the loose ends.

    The assistant Archarology lady doesn’t clear out fast enough and gets dead.

    Everybody knows that George has been stealing to get enough $$ for a train ticket to Reno where his mother is. [Who doesn’t want to go to Reno?!]

    So the whole first half of the episode is at the train station. 10 cops looking for the evil Professor and for George. They stretch it out for 20 minutes or so, but in the end, OF COURSE George is found by the evil killer, NOT by Chee or Leaphorn or Gordo or Natalie (who’s plainclothes today) or and of the other professional law enforcement officers.

    But they do save George and the bad guy forces the to kill him.

    In the second half, Bernadette saves the southwest from cocaine smuggling all by herself.

    FBI lady leaves and takes her bad karma with her!

  • Dark Winds – Season 2

    Now that I’ve started Season 2 it’s clear that THIS is what I watched years ago and remembered snippets of. Everything is familiar. The Navajo hippie, the creepy blond guy and his unfortunate childhood, the even creepier slithering evil of BJ Vines and his creepy corrupted wife, last but not least the weird goat! 🙂

    Season 2

    • S2 E1 Explosion in the parking lot. Chee gets shot. Joe Jr’s belt buckle.
    • S2 E2 Blond guy kills Tomas Charlie. Joe has to tell his little boy
    • S2 E3 Blond guy tries to kill Chee at the hospital.
    • S2 E4 Raid blond guy’s trailer. Really grim episode
    • S2 E5 Solar eclipse. Joe interrogates. BJ Vines is People of Darkness
    • S2 E6 Blond guy dead, BJ Vines gets justice, Bernie leaves, Chee stays!

    E1 Chee and Bernie think they’re gonna arrest a fellow, a creepy looking blonde guy, but he outsmarts them.

    • Emma’s working at the hospital when an old Navajo’s truck is blown up by a bomb.
      • The Navajo is Emerson Charley,
    • He’s the dad of Dillon Charley, the main dude with the Children of Darkness from last series.
      • His son is Tomas Charley.
    • 32:05 Chee is hired by BJ Vine’s smoking hot but damaged wife (Jeri Ryan) to find a stolen box.
    • Chee goes out to talk to Tomas Charley who tells him “BJ Vines IS Children of Darkness” which is pretty ominous.
    • Tomas draws Chee a map how to get to the site.
    • Chee meets Joe on the way out. They go back inside to ask Tomas more questions, but in that short little time, he has disappeared (also ominous!).
      • The creepy blond guy is shown lurking, so you can guess what happened!
    • They use Tomas’ map to find the site.
    • Chee gets shot.
    • Joe finds his son’s belt buckle

    E2 The belt buckle has Joe all worked up. He son died in an explosion two years ago, and this season started with an explosion, so we are allowed o start thinking maybe the blond guy does explosions!

    • Joe visits BJ Vines, gets a bunch of double talk from him.
    • Joe visits the Sheriff, who tell him to visit his dad.
      • Joe evidently has issues with his dad. He doesn’t want to see him.
    • 20:20 Bernie visits Chee at the hospital.
      • Chee has emotions, Bernie not so much 🙂
    • 22:00 Joe does visit his dad.
      • Now we see why he didn’t want to.
        His dad is kind of an asshole, especially to Joe.
      • Dad takes the opportunity of this rare visit to dump all his baggage from the old days.
        • He wanted Joe to leave the rez and “make something of himself”.
        • But Joe loved Emma and stayed.
      • -> Joe’s dad doesn’t like Emma,
      • He does finally tell Joe something useful for the plot, namely that he should talk to the old lady Margaret Cho about People of Darkness.
    • 38:00 Bern has applied to the Border Patrol.
      (Remember how that used to be an honorable profession before Trump).
      • She sure looks pretty when she talks to Joe about it.
    • 42:30 They find Tomas Charley’s body.
      • Joe has to tell his cute little boy. 🙁
    • The evil blond guy has sent the kid an exploding doll. They stop it!

    E3 A bomb at the hospital

    • 10:00 Blond guy is doing something sketchy in the hospital electronics.
      • Chee recognizes him in the hallway, tells Bern.
      • But then Chee rushes off and leaves the phone on the open line with Bern.
      • So the bad guy walks right up and finds out everything. DUH.
      • Some of the plotting here is pretty weak!
    • 11:50 A real dramatic scene for the characters:
      • Joe tells Emma this is the guy who blew up our son.
      • Joe gets called to the hospital.
      • Instead of her usual whining about bad energy and such, Emma gets his gun and hands it to him.
        • So I guess she’s bought in on nailing this asshole! :))
    • The bomber dude chases Chee for a while, then Joe comes and he becomes the chasee instead of the chaser!
    • Bad guy escapes by taking a running jump out of a second floor window and breaking his fall on the smooth, wide hood of a 70’s Pontiac 🙂
    • 37:00 Much later, the bad guy is still messed up from that jump.
      • He stumbles onto an old lady’s hogan. We expect the worst, but so far so good.
      • I can’t believe they’ll have him kill the kind lady.
        • I am happy to say they do NOT.
      • She’s very kind to him and feeds him and treats his wounds, while yapping a mile a minute in Navajo.
      • It’s really very sweet, but ominous since he’s so creepy.
      • He steals her horse but does not (I think) kill her! Yah!
    • Emma delivers Sally’s baby and has emotions.
    • There’s a connection with BJ Vines and the Drumco site but they can’t figure it out yet.

    E4 The first three episodes were the back story, I guess.

    Now we are starting E4 with the same footage that started E1 except now we know what’s going on, we know he killed Joe’s son. They bust blond guy’s trailer but he’s not in it, he’s outside with a repeating rifle!

    • Chee+Bernie sneak up on the trailer
    • They see the lights inside go off
    • They bust in, no one’s home
    • He had a secret door that you think they would have thought about.
    • He shhots up the trailer,no one is hurt -> Big chase
    • They corner him, he jumps off a cliff into the dark.
    • Joe jumps off too, because “he killed my son”.
    • Bernie goes for help
    • Next day Joe catches up to bad guy.
      • They are both really effed up, no water, no bullets.
    • 22:30 Switch to Chee’s tacky motel room.
      • BJ Vine’s wife (Rosemary) shows up, seems really upset that Tomas Charlie is dead(I?)
      • 28:00 Vines tries to hire Chee to spy on her!
    • 30:00 Back to Joe and blond guy. He has a funny squeaky voice!
    • 36:00 It starts snowing – just what they need!

    The whole thing is pretty brutal, you could skip it and not miss a bit of the plot.

    In the last few minutes:

    • Sally has a big scene where she hates everybody, even Emma. It’s rough.
    • There’s a scene at BJ Vines house where we get some history on him and Rosemary, and how the family money somehow came from her sister. He starts acting really creepy to her. Like most of this season it was seemed unpleasant just to be unpleasant.
    • Meanwhile, the blond guy and Joe have just about finished each other off. Bernie finally catches up to them and they get him locked up.

    E5 Blond Guy is in jail.

    Emma is having a hard time. Her desire to help Sally has backfired. Sally feels more angry and un-empowered than ever, the precise opposite of what Emma intended! Sigh…

    I don’t remember the books being this dark and depressing.

    A little reminder of the era. The kid Dean who is always getting in trouble has his draft number come up! He’s supposed to go to Phoenix tomorrow to get put on a bus and shipped off to Vietnam to be cannon fodder.. Yuck

    Chee slow-talks his way into Bernie’s trailer for the eclipse. She’s really pretty with her hair down. The eclipse is a nice little interlude so everyone could celebrate being Navajo for a moment.

    Who is the blond dude? Is he Carl LeBeck? No, he killed Carl LeBeck to get access to the mine so he could set the explosion that killed Joe Jr.

    Chee is following Rosemary, she leads him to a People of Darkness service/meeting?.

    E6 Joe gives up the blondie to Gordo against his better judgement, and we quickly see why. Within an hour he’s escaped becaues he stole Gordo’s pen.

    How did Gordo live this long being such a dumbass??

    Blond guy stumbles to Vines’ house. Yes, Vines is the mastermind. And he IS a devious SOB. He gives the blond guy $$ and a set of jeep keys and sends him off, then shoots him in the back … then takes back the money and the keys back and buries him in the desert..

    On the bright side, the blond guy finally gets his.
    He is finally dead.
    Joe is still trying to nail Vines for the Drumco explosion.

    • They arrest Vines, but he’s let out the same day.
    • After his dad’s goading, Joe’s finally had it with “white man’s justice” and dispenses “Indian Justice”.
    • He leaves Vines out in the desert.

    This will be the primary plot point of next season, so pay attention! 🙂

    • Sally and her baby leave at dawn.
    • Bernie visits Joe to tell him she’s taking the Border Patrol job.
    • At the exact same time Chee shows up in his tribal police uniform so signal he’s staying!

    That’s it for Season 2!
    We’ve got some personell matters to clean up in Season 3! 🙂

  • Dark Winds – Season 1

    It turns out I watched Season 2 years ago …. but NOT Season 1!

    There wasn’t much familiar about S1 except the bit players who lingered into next season … many of the Navajos and BJ Vines were familiar, but the storyline was not.

    Season 1

    • S1 E1 Armored car heist in Gallup. FBI arrives. Jim Chee arrives.
    • S1 E2 Flashback to Leaphorn’s son’s death. Chee is FBI.
    • S1 E3 Bank robbers lose the money, kidnap Mormons, get it back.
    • S1 E4 Looking for the helicopter. Nice kid gets killed.
    • S1 E5 Bernie learns about Chee. Love is on the rocks!
    • S1 E6 Busy episode! Dirty FBI agent, robbers get theirs, Mormons are saved!

    E1 We are slowly introduced to all the back story we need through flashbacks. We starts out with an armored car heist in Gallup. Some old fellow is feeding his sheep and marvels at the getaway helicopter flying low over his head. He turns up dead an episode later.

    Jim Chee is the new guy assigned to Leaphorn’s substation. Shortly thereafter the FBI shows up. The FBI guy and Leaphorn have a total lack of respect for each other. Leaphorn calls him “Highpockets” which is better than his name, so that’s what we will call him. Nobody is surprised when it turns out that Chee is actually FBI, assigned to keep track of the armored car investigation.

    E2 starts with flashback to “Three years before the Armored Car Heist”. The indians are having a “Native American Church” ceremony and the nice black fellow that runs the Trading Post attends. Not sure what the ceremony was about, but the punch line was that the Master of Ceremonies with the memorable name of Dillon Charley warns Navajo Guy Atcitty to say home from work tomorrow.

    Guy Atcitty is the dad of the dead girl. He worked at the explosion site and has a lot of bad history with Leaphorn.

    Guy stays home, and the next morning there is a big explosion at the Drumco Oil drilling site which kills Leaphorn’s beloved only child, Joe Junior. This super-sad event drives the whole season!

    Then we get the introductory credits and are back to the present day.

    Leaphorn is suspicious of the water run-off at the old dead guy’s home.

    We spend more time in this episode with the other one of the main good guys – Bernadette Manuelito. She is the tall, lanky sergeant in the substation. I imagine she was second honcho in the station before Chee popped in, but right now she just sitting at a desk while Chee gets all the “come with me” assignments.

    I am not crazy for her as I was for the Grantchester women. She’s very pretty and likeable and a great character, but that ole ZING just isn’t there. Probably just as well, concentrate on the show 🙂

    .. later … They do a lot camera shots showing her excellent bone structure and a charming little wisp of hair that gets loose all the time.

    We have the first annoying plot device of the season. The robbers pull off this brilliantly executed armored car heist. Then for some reason they stash the very large stacks of $20 bills behind a cheap painting which ends up for sale at the trading post where it as bought by an impossibly cheerful Mormon family. Duh!

    After buying the ugly painting for some reason, the Mormons are on the road for 5 minutes before they are the ditch by a scary native dude. He takes the painting and the $$ and imprisons the Mormons in the bad guy’s cave / hideout.

    Not we’ve got three mysteries going:

    • the armored car heist (officially FBI jurisdiction, not Navajos)
    • a dead grandpa and young girl
    • now a missing family. Their Chrysler sedan is found empty on the roadside WITHOUT the family of four that was just at the trading post an hour ago.
      The local stoner thinks they clearly were abducted by aliens!

    Joe finds a preggo girl at the murder site. She fits in somehow, but I forgot how. I like her a lot as a character though…

    Joe is having a flashback for some reason:
    He is at Guy’s hogan, and Guy’s (murdered) daughter appears at the door in Joe Jr’s letter jacket.

    There’s a little bit at the end of this episode worth mentioning. Joe’s wife Emma is counseling the preggo girl.

    Emma says that the reason she didn’t have more kids was that the government doctor tied off her tubes after the first baby.

    That make my blood boil when I heard it, then again when I typed this, and yet again right now as I am proof-reading. That is seriously eff-ed up!.

    E3 No flashback this week!

    We open at the used car lot of Devoted Dan, “a degenerate missionary and used-car dealer“. That’s his bio in Wikipedia!! They are usually kinder than that, so he must really be a degenerate 🙂 He is played by Rainn Wilson, who everybody out there who is not very young remembers as Dwight from The Office! I expect him to be comic relief, but it turns out he is involved in money-laundering the heist $$. Just seeing him makes me laugh, but he’s not funny here.

    “I am the sun bearer“. That sent me back to the google machine. That was Bernie’s way to tell Chee to stop hitting on her. Her specific reference wasn’t clear to me, but the general message of back off was pretty darned clear. 🙂

    Most of this episode is about Leaphorn’s niece’s Kinaaldá — a sacred four-day Navajo coming-of-age ceremony marking a girl’s transition into womanhood. The women’s outfits are gorgeously colorful. Tal, lanky Bernidette looked especially awesome. They spend a lot of time on shots of the young girl running “towards the east”. It was strangely moving.

    Not sure how it advanced the plot, but I don’t care, it was really cool!

    The fake priest dude does a great job of projecting evil just walking into a room. Maybe it’s the creepy music and the lighting, he scared the young woman into a premature birth just by talking to Leaphorn in front of her

    E4 We replay the heist flashback of from E1 with more details on what happened. The creepy fake priest and big scary guy did the heist. They killed the guards, then they killed the pilot and rolled the helicopter into the pond…

    … And the first thing they do back in real time after the flashback is kill the nice kid who was diving for the wreckage. I didn’t like that at all.

    A lot of things happen in this episode. Bernadette went to the swiming hole looking for the kid. We got to see her skinny native butt as she stripped to swin out to his raft. The bad guys figured Leaphorn is on to them and plot to kill him, but Bernie hears the shots and saves him!

    The big scary guy is “Frank Nakai who will never die” 🙂 He and the FBI are well known to each other already, so he spills the beans about it to Bernie. Uh Oh … trouble ahead.

    The FBI moves in to dive the pond. Chee gets his FBI promotion and shows up in his regulation FBI shirt and tie and really pisses everybody off.

    There is a bit of the supernatural going on here also. Wanda the “bad indian” who painted the terrible paints that hid the money is almost killed by a spider bite that happened because the actual scary native sorceress put a spell on her.

    Bernie falls asleep on the job because of a spell. Don’t quite get this.

    E5 starts with flashback to “Two weeks before the Armored Car Heist”. We learn how Devoted Dan became a money launderer. After the first few minutes, DD just melts away, never to be heard from again, I think.

    We have a flashback to before the armored car heist, where we find that Highpockets (the FBI guy) had cut himself in on it. Nakai and the creepy guy with the glasses stay holed up in their cave where they’re keeping the Mormons.

    The creepy medicine woman has hexed Bernie, but her and her house full of evil charms burn down, which seems to fix that problem!

    E6 The bad guy’s plan seems like a terrible idea from the start:

    • They will free the Mormon dad so he can drive to Flagstaff and hook up with Devoted Dan who will give him a camper-van.
    • He will drive the camper-van back back to the hideout.
    • The bank robbers will hide in the back of the van.
    • The Mormon family will be able can drive right through all the checkpoints the FBI has set up to catch the bad guys, because they are a wholesome Mormon family!
    • What could go wrong?

    The dad is so rattled that he only goes about 10 miles before he crashes the car into a ravine. Guy and another Navajo fish him out of the wreckage.
    So much for that great plan!

    • Highpockets and Bernie head to the cave.
      • Chee talks Navajo her on the police radio to warn her that Highpockets is dirty!
    • Bernie runs away while Highpockets is taking a leak.
    • Highpockets shoots Chee, but doesn’t kill him.
    • Highpockets kills a bad guy in the cave, the other guy escapes.
    • Highpockets shoots Joe also!
    • Highpockets is about to finish off Chee for the second time when he is shot by Guy, who as appeared because the Mormon dad told him there was trouble and he came out to investigate..
    • Chee and Bernie meet up and decide to drag Highpockets back into the cave so Guy can go home and not be involved.
      • Explaining why a Navajo killed an FBI agent might not go well.
    • Joe tracks down the other bad guy with the thick glasses who eventually kills himself for some reason after having a lot of emotions.
    • … time passes ….
    • Chee is staying (because of Bernie)
    • Joe confronts him because he knows something funny went on back at the cave. But no resolution….

    That’s it for Season 1!

  • Grantchester – Seasons 10, …

    Season 10

    • S10 E1 Murder of the Easter Bunny!
    • S10 E2 Murder among the Professors.
    • S10 E3 Murder at the strip club!
    • S10 E4 Murder at the orphanage
    • S10 E5 Murder at the Police Station!
    • S10 E6 Murder at the Fascist rally
    • Season 11 in 2027!!!

    E1 – The season starts with a community party again! This time it’s Easter, and the guy wearing an Easter bunny mask is killed!

    It gets complicated – his new wife, his old wife, and his new wife’s old husband are all milling about.
    Spoiler alert! The new wife thought she stabbed her asshole first husband (who kinda deserved it!) but the dudes had switched masks so she stabbed her beloved new husband… Harsh!

    Also, Alphy meets a cutie at the Library! I think we will be seeing a lot of her, and just calling her “the librarian” will get old … so her name is Margaret.

    E2 – High tension in the lecture hall. Two professors are competing on a project, and they hate each other’s guts.

    The cute lab assistant for one of them is murdered. The old white guys all think the Indian professor did it. Everyone else thinks the other (white, pretty obnoxious) professor did it. Spoiler alert, neither actually did it! But their unhealthy competition, was the second order reason the nice girl was killed by some other hapless cog of the machine. So there you go!

    Alphy’s cutie, Margaret turns out to be the daughter of the Bishop! No one saw THAT coming! An epochally uncomfortable scene ensues, and absolutely nobody is happy about how it turns out. The season is young however. 🙂

    E3 – This was a fun episode! Alphy and Margaret decide to try again. She comes over for dinner. The first problem is getting Mrs C to leave them alone and go home.

    The stingy, unpleasant proprietor of a local strip club has slumped over dead at her table!

    The visualization of what an early 60’s British college town strip club is like is worth the price of admission to this episode!

    For reasons too complicated to explain, everybody from the murder scene ends up at the vicarage where the young couple was still trying to have a quiet, intimate dinner! Along with the strippers and the doorman and Geordie and Larry there was the inevitable Mrs C and for some reason Leonard, who’s have a tough time this season.

    And finally there was the annoying curate from the next town over who almost stole Alphy’s job last season. He turns out to have been obsessed with one of the dancers – the skinny white one.

    For this hour, I was pretty sweet on the other dancer, a generously proportioned brown lady who I thought was just swell! For about five minutes late in the episode we were made to think she was the murderer, but I am happy to report that she was not!

    Leonard may have a drinking problem. Geordies 10 year-old son is acting like he may be gay(!) Geordie is absolutely NOT emotionally able to handle this.

    E4 – We learn that Alphy is a foundling, an orphan. His story of having a middle class upbringing in Rumsford is bogus, who he wishes he was! He was raised at the Rumsford Orphanage.

    While he is back visiting the kindly old curate who was his de facto dad back in the day, an orphan kid of right now dies in mysterious circumstances at the orphanage. Time to call Geordie in to help even though it’s not strictly his jurisdiction.

    No Margaret this week!

    E5 – This one opens with Leonard getting drunk as a skunk at the pub. He gets obnoxious and throws a drink on Larry and gets himself arrested.

    At the station there’s a lot of interaction with the jailer. The Chekhov’s gun rule comes true again, because 10 minutes later that jailer is the body of the week! He is found dead on the floor of Leonard’s cell!

    This episode spends a lot of time with BOTH of my favorite women of this series – hooray!!!

    Geordie’s wife Cathy rules the first half and Miss Scott rules the second. I am pretty much mesmerized by both of them when ever they appear on the screen.

    In the first half, Cathy is hanging out with Mrs C helping her get Leonard sorted out. The two of them are together because they are hatching a plan to show the men how it’s done and start their own dress shop. Cathy shows the tiniest hint of boob in the proper English dress they have her wearing this week, and it’s got me kinda hot and bothered 🙂

    In the seond half of the show, Cathy has gone home, Now Larry and Miss Scott take center stage!

    Turns out Larry has proposed to her AGAIN, and she has turned him down again! He lashes out and says mean things to her. He makes Miss Scott cry if you can believe anyone would be capable of such a thing! In the last part we have a lot of close-ups of Miss Scott pondering her future. She looks real good in close-up.

    The upshot is that she decides that she does like Larry enough to marry him, but does NOT want to quit her job to stay home and raise a brood of kids that she doesn’t want to have anyway.

    And in that society at that time I don’t thing could keep her job if she was married.

    She finally accepts by the end of the episode.

    They of course plan to elope. Sneak out in the middle of a Tuesday, get a civil marriage at the courthouse and be back to work before anybody notices.

    Geordie of course sniffs that out and so of course they they end up getting married by Alphy in a lovely ceremony at the Grantchester church, attended by all our favorite characters. Yay!

    E6 Georgie has on his own tracked down Alphy’s (possible) mother, and told everyone BUT Alphy. That last part doesn’t last long, since everybody blabs everything to everybody in Grantchester. He’s pretty pissed at Geordie.

    Daniel’s mom visits, and surprise, she’s a terrible homophobe, who says terrible things to Leonard. Daniel says he never wants to see her again … oh well.

    The dress shop is a smashing success. Given that they had the successful grand opening on the last week of the season, we get to carry that happy image with us until whenever in 2027 they release the last season! 🙂

    Season 10 is the current season. The internet says that in 2027 we will get the 11th and final season!

  • Grantchester – Seasons 8, 9

    As I write this and watch MSNOW in the background (February 2026), they are doing yet another segment on the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mom.
    I mention this here because the missing mom bears a striking resemblance to Mrs C! (Tessa Peake-Jones).

    Season 8

    • S8 E1 Motorcycle Club has a race. Kid is murdered.
    • S8 E2 Will kills a guy on his motorbike.
    • S8 E3 Painting is stolen, porter is killed
    • S8 E4 Murder at the Halfway House
    • S8 E5 missing
    • S8 E6 missing

    I’m still processing the “married Will” thing…
    Just three episodes back, Will barely knew Bonnie.
    She was Cathy’s widowed sister with a neurotic 9 year-old, just come totown to help Cathy out with her four(!) kids since she’d kicked Geordie out of the house for being such a dumbass.

    Now over the course of about one episode Will has gone from most eligible vicar in England, banging the police chief’s betrothed, to an old married vicar with a visibly preggo wife, asking other grownups how to manage the lovable but neurotic 9 year-old he has married into. That’s a lot of change for we viewers (and Mrs C!) to accept.

    Leonard has for some reason given up on the coffee house, and is now running a halfway house. I’m not a fan of the switch. I loved the black turtlenecks and the beatniks! The half-way house is grubby and depressing. One-half episode in they are already having alcoholic relapses and all that rehab stuff! I guess it DOES have a lot more drama-rich possibilities for the Grantchester writers though.

    E2 This one’s going to linger for as long as Will stays around. Will’s pissed off at his lovely wife, … because he’s always pissed off this season. He’s in a bad mood riding his moterbike around the countryside and he hits and kills some fellow.

    Recall that lately we have had a police chief! Unlike most years where Geordie does what he wants when he wants, this year he is constantly being reined in by the Chief.

    Because of the unfortunate affair where Will broke up his engagement, the Chief still hates Will’s guts. This bike thing is a good excuse to send him to prison but Geordie saves his ass. Turns out the dead guy was running for his life and over the course of the episode we get all that sorted out.

    Will already spends all his time feeling guilty about something (anything!). This episode he really does have something to feel guilty about.

    E3 was more fun. Women’s lib comes to Cambridge University!

    A nudie painting is stolen from a professor’s study and a college porter is killed. Turns out the painting was stolen to cover up the killing rather than the reverse! The fun part was three student women stripping for Women’s Equality!

    E4 A very grimy episode. Guilt-tripping ex-cons, a guilt-tripping Will, even a guilt-tripping Leonard for gosh sakes! There was a LOT of tedious soul-searching that I eventually fast-forwarded through.

    I find that the rest of Season 8 is not on my Youtube TV!
    I’m not too disappointed, since I was considering skipping it anyway    .
    I’ve had enough of Will.

    Season 9

    • S9 E1 Murder at the circus.
    • S9 E2 Will finally leaves. Murder in the hotel hallway.
    • S9 E3 New vicar arrives. Murder in the countryside
    • S9 E4 Murder at the cocktail party
    • S9 E5 Murder at Esme’s office
    • S9 E6 Murder at the archeological dig!
    • S9 E7 Murder at the University satire rag!
    • S9 E8 A man going to meetings at Leonard’s recovery place falls out his window!

    A new season, and we still have Will and his perpetual unsatisfied-ness. I had sorta hoped they had already swapped him out for the Asian guy in the episodes I missed, but no such luck. It’s gotta happen soon though because we are runnning out of episodes!

    E1 – The new season opens at the circus! All our favorites are there! Geordie’s four kids are a year older. The oldest Esme is a young woman now! Bonnie is no longer preggo. She has had Will’s baby.

    Geordie’s second, Larry is hot for Miss Scott. Who can blame him! I am hot for Miss Scott!

    At the end of the episode, Will says he will accept a new posting to Newcastle, so maybe I will get my wish!

    E2 – Well, they are packing the car to drive to Newcastle! Geordie isn’t taking it well. A young woman abandons her new-born in the church, and the hotel manager gets killed, and it’s all the doing if the woman’s domineering aunt. So complicated!

    E3 – Grantchester does NOT initially welcome the swarthy new fellow, but by the end of the episode he’s charmed Geordie and most of the church and show regulars that he needs to charm (in particular, Mrs C). Rich families are squabbling over a piece of land and one is murdered.

    E4 – Alphy gets invited to the rich persons house. Chauffeur is killed. Lesbians are involved. Speaking of which, looks like Leonard and Daniel are headed for a rough patch, the hints as to why are there all along, but we later find out it was this sketchy dude Sam who’s horning into Leonard’s action at the halfway house.

    Esme moves out. Cathy is acting weird.

    E5 – Things are getting spicy for Alphy. The Bishop wants to close down the Grantchester church.

    Alphy eventually confronts him and accuses him of choosing Alphy for the job specifically because it would be easier to fire a brown guy than a nice white boy. The look on the Bishop’s face is eloquent.

    The curate from the next town who is slated to absorb the Grantchester congregation is a flaming asshole.

    Haven’t head a peep about Leonard’s romantic problems this week. The big deal this week is Esme leaving home and starting a real job. It’s rough for a single young woman out there! The place she started work at is of course where the body turns up!

    Miss Scott is the sleeper star of Season 9 so far with her deft handling of all the asshole men in every workplace and her counseling of the other women in the show on their men problems. This week she even goes undercover and finds the accounting fraud that basically solves the case! She’s so cool!

    She’s not an official policeman, so she took her vacation week to infiltrate this other place!

    E6 – Cathy goes to the doctor and gets prescribed mood-altering pills. Since it’s the fifties, god knows what’s in them.

    Leonard’s beau Larry has come under the influence of this fellow Sam.

    The actual murder and solution are almost side shows. The assistant archeaologist is a nice-looking Iranian-ish woman that Alphy flirts with for a minute.

    This the same episode where he gets picked up in a bar and has passioniate sex with very hot stranger. Seems like he is having a moment! 🙂

    E7 – The woman Alphy spent the night with goes missing … turns out she worked on the satire rag where the body turned up.

    Leonard pisses off Sam and we get a glimpse of his bad side.

    E8 – Mrs C gets Cathy off the pills. She’s normal again! Yay!

    The mysterious defenestration of the fellow from Sam’s discussion group means everyone is suddenly taking a close look at Sam, and what they find ain’t pretty!

    It all ties together at the end, Sam did it all. Sam instigated the satire rag murder, and Sam set up the hot girl to seduce Alphy.

    There is actual gun play – very unusual for Grantchester. Leonard is injured and Larry takes a bullet! … which has the VERY happy effect that Miss Scott will now pay attention to him, the good kind, not the laughing at kind he is used to getting from her. :))

  • Grantchester – Seasons 6, 7

    Season 6

    (there are two extra episodes this year for some reason…)

    • S6 E1 Murder at Merries. Everybody’s on vacation! Host gets murdered.
    • S6 E2 Adoption agency murder.
    • S6 E3 Councilman murder
    • S6 E4 American from the Air Base murder
    • S6 E5 A armored car robbery and BIG trouble for Leonard
    • S6 E6 Leonard’s in prison
    • S6 E7 Murder in prison, Leonard helps unmask the chaplain
    • S6 E8 New curate. Geordie has a rough streak, Burma flashbacks

    E1 The first episode was quite fun! It seems that our entire beloved cast has gone on vacation together at a very English “fun park” called Merries! Maybe there was an explanation of why they’re on holiday together, but I missed it!

    Cathy wears these well-tailored sun dresses and flouncy party dresses and 50’s bathing suits, and I am entranced by her fine self in them. The camp photographers is a repressed gay guy who snaps pics of Leonard and his beau. He’s gonna cause trouble.

    E2 was the most feel-good episode on quite a while. Even the murder was more of an accident than a murder. Geordie has a great monologue on raising kids (he has 3 girls and a boy 🙂

    There’s a complicated plot with the lower class guy stealing his son from the adoptive parents, and it actually works out really well for concerned in the moment. Who knows what it will look like 10 years from now, but it was great to have a happy ending now.

    E3 was a bummer. The repressed gay dude from E1 rats out Leonard to the Archdeacon, who we all know has a stick up his butt and is super formal and proper. There are some really hateable people in this. Not the murderer oddly enough, he seemed like a nice guy.

    E4 involved drag-racing Americans from the air base. And Will’s very cute half-sister. A pretty complicted plot, but Geordie made sure the spoiled brat American bad guy got punished.

    E5 It was all fake! It was masterminded by a hot librarian, who roped in the armored car driver and a not too bright kid. It woulda been good clean fun excelt the kid killed an old lady excaping the scene.

    As of the end of E5, Leonard is screwed. That little photographer weasel from E1 ratted him out to the dioceses, and they had a full-on moral-depravity trial. He’s had to move out of the parsonage. Everyone is quite upset.

    E6 Bad time for Leonard. You can tell Geordie’s old Army is gonna be trouble, we just don’t know how yet.

    E7 Leonard busts up a homo blackmail ring run by the Prison chaplin of all people! Geordie forgets his wedding anniversay and shows up falling-over drunk at the surprise party (thanks Army buddy!)

    E8 Leonard good deed in E7 gets him early release!! Too bad for the other inmates, he was a great success running the prison church service replacing the corrupt chaplin.

    Geordie gets sucked into helping his old war buddy, which turns into covering up a murder. Tough times for Geordie.
    Cathie packs his suitcase and tells him to move out!

    I’ve had enough of this vicar. He’s such a self-obsessed fuck. A really attractive self-obsessed fuck according to how the show is written, because all these really excellent, high-quality, very fine women keep falling for him and he keeps leading them on and getting a little nookine from them before deciding YET AGAIN that he’s really married to the church … Every season has at least one of these poor suckers, and I’m over it

    Season 7

    • S7 E1 Leonard opens his shop. New boss at the station. Will meets a hottie.
    • S7 E2 Cathy and Margaret get drunk! Will gets laid (again).
    • S7 E3 Dead vagrant in Leonard’s shop door.
    • S7 E4 All the charity ladies a’re all getting blackmailed by the same guy.
    • S7 E5 Murder at the old folks home (eek!)
    • S7 E6 Another dead vagrant. Series ties up a lot of loose ends (for now…)

    E1 Is a very convuluted tale of the heir to the estate promising the world to a local grl then going off to war and never coming back. Until now, when his sisters kill him to keep living on the estate.

    Leonard opens his shop. New boss at the police station, he’s a pompous ass.

    Will meets a hottie. She is elusive. Geordie can’t seems to stop being a thoughtless jerk to Cathy.

    E2 The dead guy leads back to prostitutes. Will breaks up with his hottie.

    Geordie sents Margaret from the station to spy on Cathy, and they hit it off. They have a lot in common, being oppressed working women who both know what a doofus Geordie can be.

    Mrs C has cancer.

    E3 The dead guy has a book of Tennyson poetry in his pocket. A traces back to the University and a student who hears voices. Geordie’s sister and son come to visit, Will hits it off with the boy. Mrs C won’t tell anybody about her cancer and starts acting weird(er).

    E4 The charity ladies are great fun until we find their dark secret. The husband of one has seduced the other three and blackmails them to keep the sex going. Somebody had to kill the bastard. Geordie’s sister wants to bang Will, but in typical fashion he acts available until she gets excited then goes cold. I am SO over his routine.

    E5 Murder at the old folks home! As a person living in a modern 21’st century old folks home, this one cut a little close for me. Not in a bad way, really! 🙂

    E6 Anohther dead vagrant. The guy they put in the loony bin in E3 wasn’t the guy! It gets complicated after that. It real psycho-killer is the calm, nice next-door roommate from the college, who’s been talking to Will about becoming a priest. He ends up stabbing Will in the gut!

    So the gang, who were all already at the hospital to root for Mrs C’s cancer recovery, add semi-recovered Mrs C to their number and troop down the hallway to root for Will to wake up from his stabbing.

    He does wake up, and and makes a miraculous recovery to stagger out of the hospital to the train station to tell Geordie’s sister to not leave, she must stay because he loves her (eye-roll emoji!!)

    Soin the last 10 miutes of the last episode of the season we have:

    • Will gets stabbed
    • We get the bad guy
    • Mrs C recovers!
    • Geordie moves back with Cathy (He was a fool to ever mess that up!)
    • Since Geordie’s coming home and Will is still being a jackass, sister Bonnie is going to leave.
    • Will miraculously recovers, so …
    • He can jet to the train station to stop Bonnie
    • Will and Bonnie get married., everybody’s there!

    How’s that for tidying up?!

  • Grantchester – Seasons 4, 5

    Season 4

    YouTube TV let me down. I get three different PBS channels, and between them, none showed S4 E1 and S4 E2 within the last year?? What’s the world coming to? Fortunately I will have this blog post to remind me which ones I missed.

    • S4 E1 missing
    • S4 E2 missing
    • S4 E3 Murder at the Computer Lab! New vicar shows up.
    • S4 E4 Murder at the Mennonites. More awful people making each other miserable.
    • S4 E5 New vicar (Will) is from the upper class! We spend an episode at their lovely-but decaying house in the country because a murder.
    • S4 E6 The Cathy situation gets sorted. This week’s body is a kid from Esme’s school. Teddy Boys are involved. I had to look them up!

    Sydney is long gone. I really need S4 E1 and S4 E2 to get the deets on how it went down. The new guy is named Will.

    Previous vicar Sydney listened to Sidney Bechet and was pictured madly pedalling his bicycle everywhere. New vicar Will tinkers with his noisy motorbike and listens to loud rock and roll. So the times they are a changing!
    Geordie, who can’t even talk to his wife about her getting hit on at work is having a hard time with it all.

    E3 has so much unhappiness about gayness. The episode is gay from top to bottom! Geordie, who can an a-hole sometimes, felt compelled to expose a married guy’s gay affair with the guy who turned up dead. The two women at the lab were having a lesbian affair, which seemed to throw everybody off WAY more than all the male affairs that seem to pop up everywhere.

    Then to top off the theme of spousal unhappiness, Cathy gets nearly raped by her boss at the department store (guess he’s just a classic British twit and not gay after all!). Everybody (including her and Geordie) are too repressed to do anything about it.

    In a nice little reminder of how much the 1950’s sucked for women, Cathy finally gets up the courage tell her big boss about the predatory actions of her immediate boss, and his response is to tell her the guy is a very valuable employee so she wants to keep her job she should be a team player and suck it up and let him molest her! I am a huge Cathy fan, and seeing these rotten middle-aged men make her sad every day was really quite upsetting to me.

    Ah, E6 tidied up all the Cathy situation. Cathy and Mrs C conspired to get her asshole boss fired. He SO deserved it!!!

    Season 5

    • S5 E1 College girl found dead in the pond. Will’s mom has issues.
    • S5 E2 Hit and run right in from of Geordie. Cathy’s scary mother visits.
    • S5 E3 Murdered projectionist. Fallout from the partition of India!
    • S5 E4 Murdered streaker (on LSD!) Cathy’s mom gets scarier.
    • S5 E5 Trouble at Will’s gym. Ellie is worth a thousand Wills.
    • S5 E6 Murder at the convent. Leonard’s dad comes.

    This season started out more fun than last, but ended in a morass of terrible things as always.

    A waiter from the E1 party turns out to be around for the season, Will hooks him up with his gym. Surprise, that turns out badly also.

    Will starts up a thing with Ellie, the hard-charging reporter who I like a lot!
    Spoiler alert: He does his usual thing by leads her on, they noodle around a bit then he makes her sad by deciding to stick with Jesus not her.
    So annoying….

    A theme this season seens to be unfortunate relatives. Leonard’s dad visits and makes his life miserable for an episode. Cathy’s mom has a full-on psychotic episode and has to be taken away. Will’s mom is so unhappy she’s about to marry a real flamer by the end of the season. Why do we even bother with relatives? 🙂

    E5 was upsetting to me. Sometimes this series seems as if it were plotted by somebody not trying very hard. This boxing gym guy had been Will best friend and mentor for years. Now it turns out he’s been molesting boys for years also, and it just doesn’t scan for me. If he was that guy, Will shoulda picked it up years ago. I’m just not buying it!

    E6 was kinda cool. Will bangs the fake nun! Maybe now he’s be able to not be a jackass to Ellie!