Wednesday 28 June

Watching

Another double header of Breaking Bad - Buried and Confessions. Last week, Hank discovered Walt is Heisenberg, and could not hide his discovery from Walt. We also had a teaser to suggest not all goes well for Walt in the future: before the credits, we saw the family home in ruins, Walt stopping by to retrieve his ricin. Hank hoped that Skyler would tell him all she knows and thus be the lever he could use to get him, but he doesn't know the level of her involvement. No dice. She and Walt seem to be firmly in this together. There's a lot of shooting in Buried - despite her deal with Walt to sell exclusively to the export market, Lydia tries to have Todd become the chief chemist for the local distribution gang. When they refuse, she has them all killed. Two regular cops pick Jesse up, because he'd randomly thrown bundles of banknotes out the window of his car - when Hank hears of this, he wants in. Saul gets involved - lets the cops know of Hank's former involvement with Jesse, warns of trouble if Hank has further contact. It is an old-fashioned show down between good and evil, and it seems unthinkable that Hank won't win. But then Walt stitches him up badly: they have a really awkward family dinner trying to sort things out (impossible, I'd have thought), then Walt hands Hank a videod "confession", admitting that he has been cooking meth, but only because Hank made him. He plays being pitiful so well and is so good at manipulating details that people might buy it. But Walt has Jesse problems. He'd decided to get a new identity, had paid his money to Saul and was waiting to be picked up when he realised that Saul or his off-sider had picked his pocket, taken the weed he'd been carrying. This led Jesse to a discovery - that his cigarettes had been taken off him in a similar fashion, and this was the means by which Walt had given ricin to the boy Jesse got so wound up about before. This discovery led Jesse to go back to Saul's and basically go berserk. The episode finishes with him going to the White house and throwing a lot of petrol about (although we've seen that the house is still standing a year later).

We also watched Picket Fences - Nuclear Meltdowns: this episode took on the nature of love and religion. Max was on a quest to find out who had taken Elisabeth Moss's (yes, that Elisabeth Moss!) mallard duck. There's a dodgy bloke she suspects, as he has been implicated in other animal disappearances. He rapidly confesses to taking it, but says it was to feed his dying father, in the hope it would buy him some extra time. Carter's autopsy reveals the father has eaten no duck but there is a duck feather up his nose. Max goes undercover to their suspect's church for the funeral, but puts a halt to matters when a goat is about to be sacrificed, by firing her weapon and arresting everyone.

Judge Bone is not impressed with preventing goat sacrifices in the name of religion: half the blokes go hunting for sport, and animals are routinely slaughtered to be eaten. Then there is the right to freedom of religion. He does tell the fellow off for eating people's pets - that's not right.

Kenny finds love - he has to pull a woman over for going through a red light: she says she felt a compulsion to come to Rome, maybe it was to meet him? She persuades him to have dinner that evening and one thing leads to another. Meanwhile, Jimmy is on his way home and sees who he takes to be this woman pulled over, making all the sounds of a woman having an orgasm. It turns out there are two women, separated at birth and unaware of each other's existence - for some reason, they're drawn to Rome at the same time, and they finally meet. They're both into Kenny, and suggest they can both be his girlfriend - he's a little sheepish, but goes along with it.

More importantly, Kimberley's "best friend", who we've never seen before, is pregnant. Kimberley overhears her talking to her father, and decides he's the father of the baby. She confronts the friend, who basically pleads for her understanding and pleads for her to not saying anything. Of course, Kimberley tells Jill who is a bit outraged but promises to say nothing. This doesn't stop her telling Jimmy, who is determined to arrest the father. This all comes before Judge Bone as well, when it is finally revealed that the friend is 2 years older than she'd said, and not daughter but wife of the arrested man - who happens to already have a wife. Rather than throw the book at him for bigamy, Judge Bone has a bit of a spiel about the changing nature of family, tells the father than if he divorces the girl, he can still be her common law husband and the needs of the law will be satisfied.

I had the chance to watch SBS, and saw a couple of great programmes. The first was about the making of luxury cruise ships: fascinating to see they're built in modules, about 57 of them, which are then welded together to make the whole. I was doing other stuff, so when it finished, I didn't really pay much attention but I found myself dragged into a story about Rodriquez - featuring two South Africans: a journalist and a musicologist. They'd heard his music, heard he had died (by shooting himself in the head on stage) and wanted to find out more - who is he? Their way of tracking him was to follow the money - he was selling records by the million in South Africa, so the money had to be going somewhere. After some false leads (it didn't seem that had to me) they find the owner of the US based record label who licensed distribution in South Africa - he basically told them off for being worried just about the money, Rodriguez was a real person, a musician - but not one he knew. So the guys tried another tack, calling the producer of the record, which was more productive - for a start, they learned that Rodriguez was not dead! Then they get a random phone call from his daughter, who had Rodriguez give them a call. This movie is, of course, Searching for Sugarman - when I learned that, I switched the TV off, as I now plan to see the whole movie and to listen to his music.

Reading

I finished the Denise Mina book, Still Midnight. Alex, as expected, broke the case through good police work. There was talk at the beginning of her inability to be sensitive to minorities, but she doesn't really show any problems, less than her colleagues. Her off-sider (Bannerman) became worried that he wasn't going to be able to crack the case and so basically pulled a sickie and left Alex to do it, with the help of a couple of trusted junior officers. The kidnap didn't quite go as planned - Mr Anwar was able to kill the poor wee druggie Eddie left in charge while Eddie tried to sort out the money side of things. We learn quite a lot about Mr Anwar, while he's locked up and then when he gets away - particularly the awful way in which his mother secured their release from Uganda. She is almost a physical presence in his life now, and he considers himself unworthy of the sacrifice she made (I almost thought he wouldn't escape when he could). 

As the novel progressed, Eddie was closer and closer to the verge of boiling over. Things got a bit strange at the end for him - his Irish leader turns up, suggests this has been a test that Eddie has passed and promptly has a fatal heart attack. As for Joe, things are equally strange, but in a good way. He seems to have re-connected with his family but at the cost of being responsible for the money it turns out they lent Eddie for the operation. He and the girl had a connection when he was at the kidnapping - their eyes met through his balaclava and it was game on. Even though he (accidentally) shot her, when he visits her in hospital she obviously knew who he was but didn't hold it against him. Love triumphs! It is a bit more difficult with Alex - she's revealed as afraid to go home, more willing to be at work, so when she does go home, I was expecting something bad to happen. It didn't: she and Bruce largely glided around each other as if the other was not there. Later, it is revealed that their boy died, and that's created this huge gap between them, mutual uncertainty as to whether to persist. In an odd wee moment, they're in the car toghether, and one hand finds another and they're on the path back to each other.

Still on Sweetland. Moses has taken the money to leave the island, but "left" without telling anyone - he, of course, hasn't gone anywhere and is a little surprised to find a cross put up in his honour in the cemetery. He does a lot of recollecting, now that he's on his own - there have been a couple of chapters about him and Effie, the girl everyone expected him to marry. Still haven't got to exactly why they did not: she seems like a remarkable girl. There's an incident when they're riding out together in the cart and her hand finds its way into his pants: he chooses to tell her when they've finished that he's likely going to Toronto. I think it is after that that she says he's someone she would marry, and when he does go to Toronto, they write to each other - although he has virtually nothing to say for himself because he is only working. There's an amusing side to his preparations for living on the island - he can't go to the normal mainland towns to buy supplies as everyone would know what he is up to. Instead, he goes to Miquelon. I was a bit confused when he asked if Canadian money was any good, even more confused when he got his change in Euros and thoroughly confused when he is confronted by a customs officer, who won't let him leave without a full search of his provisions (his bullets are seized). Who knew there's a French territory 25 km from the coast of Newfoundland?