So here I am in a battle of the blogs against some teabagger. While I would hope the post about my band could beat somebody like that, I thought I’d bring out the big guns, and by big guns I mean… well, you get the picture. See more of this Mad Men hottie’s Esquire spread here.

UPDATE: OK, the blog I’m against might not be a teabagger, but still, if Christina Hendricks can’t beat angry politics, there’s something wrong in the world.

During the TV writers strike a few years ago, I was inspired to do a short about it under the premise that the producers of The Office would hire some bad fan fiction writers as scabs and I shot this in a couple of hours with some friends. YouTube pulled it due to a copyright complaint from Sony which I cannot for the life of me figure out since there is no music and the characters talk about characters on other shows which is well within any kind of fair use. Corporate types, go figure! I think they didn’t like how they were portrayed.

So, without further ado, The Writers Room…

Last season ended badly for everyone. After Walt misses the birth of his daughter because he had to deliver a shit ton of crank to a truckstop, his wife leaves him. And then those planes crash into each other right over his house because the air traffic controller was all messed up over his daughter who OD’ed after blowing her sobriety dating Jesse.

Not much really happened in this episode. It was mostly setup for what’s to come. There will be spoilers after the jump…

The episode started with some strange pilgrimage thing going on in Mexico. People are dragging themselves across the ground to some voodoo-looking shrine. A Mercedes pulls up, two scary looking brothers in suits get out, crawl to the shrine, lay down a stack of money, light a candle and tack up a drawing of Walt in his Eisenberg getup. We don’t know who they are, but we know this can’t be any good.

While Skyler is talking to a divorce lawyer, Walt is sitting by the pool lighting matches. He dumps a stack of cash onto his barbecue, sprays it with lighter fluid, lights it up, realizes that burning the money isn’t going to make the guilt go away and dumps it into the pool.

So Hank, Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law, comes to help him move out of the house with some awkwardness, especially when Walt doesn’t really want to let him put the large duffel bag full of cash in his car.

There are scenes with Jesse in rehab and a montage of news about the air crash. Walt Jr is pissed off about his parents’ separation and has his dad pick him up for school where they are holding a grief counseling assembly about the air crash which has a bit of comic relief as one kid mentions how if your college roommate kills himself you get automatic A’s and how that should be considered because of this tragedy, and then Walt gives a very awkward bit about looking on the bright side and worse air tragedies and moving on.

Later Skyler shows up at Walt’s hotel to give him the divorce papers, he tells her he’s been manufacturing meth and she freaks out (duh!) and tells him that she’ll never say anything about it if he signs the papers and stays out of their lives. He tries to explain why he did it. If I thought I was dying and did something highly illegal and immoral to make sure my family was taken care of after I was gone, I don’t think my wife would understand either. Women, go figure!

So the episode wraps up with Walt going to meet his buyer to let him know he’s out of the business and turn down an offer for $3 million for 3 months work. Walt picks up Jesse from rehab and Jesse is clean and came to accept that he’s “a bad guy.” And then we see the mysterious Mexican brothers getting smuggled over the border and killing everybody else with them and blowing up the truck. We still don’t know who they are, but they are some bad mofos!

My predictions – obviously Walt’s going to get back into the business. He’ll probably go work for his buyer to get himself protection from the scary Mexican brothers. Jesse will mope and whine through the season. The buyer will have Hank killed since he did find out that he’s Walt’s brother in law last season. I have no idea what will happen with Walt and Skyler. What do you think?

So this episode starts with Bill and Joey driving down to Mexico to rescue Benny. Barb calls Bill up and he says that he’s off to Seattle to deal with a lumber distributor. Back on the home front, Nicki finds out she can no longer get pregnant, but that her mom, newly sealed to her creepy ex husband who is the polygamist version of the creepy governor he played on Oz and the creepy black ops guy he played on Heroes. She is none too pleased about it, and there is apparently something sinister afoot because Crazy Wanda has a scene of crazy face acting with her creepy brother who threatens her with exposing Joey for killing Roman.

Margene realizes that Bill’s plan to out them as a polygamous family is going to kill her business and sees a way to keep her business safe while keeping Ana from leaving the country with Bill’s new unborn baby by marrying Ana’s boyfriend to keep him from being deported and to give herself a legal marriage on paper. Barb is not happy about this.

And then we’ve got the loonie evangelical crowd picketing the casino, led by a character obviously supposed to real life theocrat douchebag Ralph Reed, using the excuse of free speech to torment and intimidate anyone who gets in the way of his theocratic plans. Barb has the line of the night when she says that at least Mormons would be polite about it. And it looks like their new lobbyist might be playing both sides.

So back in Mexico, Bill can’t get the local authorities to do a thing against the Greens, who make the Juniper Creek compound look like a bunch of peace loving hippies. Hollis Green is staging a kangaroo court for Bill’s mom, dad and innocent bystander Ben, and to show he means business, he has Selma take out the illegal bird seller and shoot him.

Bill and Joey are on their way to the compound when Joey shows Bill the arsenal in the trunk and tries to get him on board with his plan of going in with guns blazing. As the captives are about to be executed, Ben asks if there is an appeals process and Hollis allows them to file an appeal out of some twisted idea that he is some kind of legitimate ruler. And then his whole compound starts having a wild Mexican fiesta allowing Bill a chance to sneak in and free them. They almost get out when Joey shows up with a shotgun looking for Hollis and bringing all the attention on him and his escaping family.

Bill offers himself in trade for his family and just before Hollis can order him killed, Bill’s mom grabs a machete, hacks off Hollis’ arm and says “don’t you lay a hand on my boy” with her face splattered in blood and the craziest look she’s given yet. Between her and Crazy Wanda, there’s some of the finest crazy face acting I’ve ever seen!

So they get away and return home to let us wait for next week to see the fallout from Margene’s new marriage, the ongoing feud with the Greens, Creepy Albie and his dead gay trustee lover, and their lobbyist screw over.

I don’t know how they manage to keep ratcheting up the intensity on this show, but it keeps getting more and more intense as it goes on. I’m bummed to see Amanda Seyfried leaving at the end of the season, but she’s on to bigger and better things I suppose, and her TV hubby needs to get back to his job as a meth cook on Breaking Bad. I’m even more bummed at the lack of Harry Dean Stanton, though the version of Roman that lives in Albie’s head to taunt him occasionally is fun to see.

I’m still not quite sure I really like this show. It’s hard to think about it without thinking of Battlestar Galactica, and I wonder if it would really hold up independently. But I suppose I’ll keep watching it and since I have this new blog I might as well keep writing about it. Don’t go past the jump if you don’t want spoilers.

So this episode starts off in the aftermath of Amanda Greystone’s revelation that Zoe was part of the terrorists who blew up the mag lev train in the pilot episode. Things are not going well for the Greystones. The press are mobbing them, their stocks are tanking, their pyramid team players want to get traded, and Amanda, now referred to as “Terror Mom,” even gets a bottle hurled at her. Probably the best thing about this episode is the take on the media which, surprise surprise, looks a whole lot like our 24 hour cable news here. And their version of a Jon Stewart/Jay Leno hybrid is played by the great Patton Oswalt who we should be seeing more of in the next episode.

Daniel Greystone gets the frak kicked out of him by Sam Adama who is revealed to be married to a dude named Larry. I suppose this makes up for Gaeta’s man-fling being segregated to a webisode on BSG. The future (oh wait, it’s actually millions of years ago in a galaxy far far away, isn’t it?) is much cooler about not discriminating based on sexual preference than they are about monotheism. Of course, I’m sure that today’s monotheist culture warriors are all up in arms over the big bad liberal Hollywood agenda trying to make their kids catch the gay, but that’s not the kind of rant I’m going to get into here and now.

So Apollo’s gramps wants to get back into the virtual world to see his daughter’s avatar (or is it more than just an avatar?) again, but she’s not there because the Zoe/cylon/more-than-just-an-ordinary-avatar and Lacy let her loose into cyberspace. Uh oh!

The episode ends with Joe hinting to Sam that he wants Amanda Greystone offed since he lost a wife and daughter in the explosion and Daniel only lost a daughter. Are they really going to kill off a main character this early on? Of course, she could also end up as another cylon. We shall see.

A few weeks ago I read an article somewhere (and I gave up searching for it after a few minutes) about how there were a whole bunch of premium cable shows that were pushing the envelope in the sex and violence departments. The article mentioned Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a show on Starz full of swords, sandals, buckets of bright blood spraying in 300-style slo-mo and all the ancient Roman sexual depravity of Caligula. The one act of sexual depravity that the article went into detail about featured Lucy Lawless of Xena and Battlestar Galactica fame and her ancient Roman TV husband about to do the deed, using their slaves as fluffers. So of course I had to check that out, right?

And yeah, there’s a bunch of slo-mo blood sprayage, and plenty of naked body parts that were far more surgically enhanced than possible in ancient Rome. It became obvious early on that the main intent of this show is to be brutally shocking. These ancient Romans sure do like talking about genitals and bodily functions in graphic and ugly detail. And it’s not like I’m getting prudish here. I enjoy that kind of material when it serves a purpose other than to gratuitously show how shocking you can be. But this is like Deadwood without the benefit of good writing.

So like the lord of the gladiator ring, I give this show one big thumbs down. Off with it’s head! But not before every geek out there has had a chance to pause their TiVo on Xena’s naked boobies.