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Let’s get this out of the way up front: this should be the antepenultimate episode of a seven or eight episode season, tops. For all the plot that this season has had to this point, every new twist and knot in Jax’s elaborate vengeance scheme, there really has not been enough story to justify the more than ten hours that the season has lasted so far. So regardless of how good or bad this episode is, the overlong path that brought us here results in unavoidable diminishing returns. Think, for instance, how much more impactful this episode’s opening scene would have been were it only the first or second time that we saw Gemma talk to Tara. This episode finally begins allowing the various conflicts that have been bubbling since the premiere to boil over, but the pot’s been threatening to boil over for weeks now.

But let’s forget that. Let’s pretend that this is indeed the antepenultimate episode of a season of more appropriate length, because “Suits of Woe” is for most of its runtime undeniably great. In fact it is pretty much the best episode of the season to date. Everything comes to a head, and more importantly, everything is laid out on the table. Color me impressed: the writers charge headlong into the fallout and aftermath of Abel’s revelation, rather than maneuver the plot into yet another contortion. The result is that the characters finally evolve in their current conflicts, rather than playing the same ones out over and over in varying configurations. “Suits of Woe” is essentially the Sons equivalent of “Ozymandias”, in the way it so totally changes the status quo for these characters. The entire episode is a protracted, inevitable reckoning, summative of the show’s emotional journey to this point.

These are the same qualities that made the season’s early episodes successful, and they are qualities that are nigh impossible to maintain over a larger number of episodes. But in bursts, in the small dramatic units they’re intended to compose, they can really work. As the extremely dour end of the second act, “Suits of Woe” works super well: the writing no longer has to stop just short of tragedy, and the actors give the material their usual best efforts. Gemma’s soliloquy that opens the episode is a final draw of the curtain, an ominous epigraph that precedes the (albeit overdue) fall of the hammer. Katey Sagal plays Gemma throughout the episode as a ghost, never more reminiscent of Lady Macbeth than she is here.

Really, every character is by this point a shade of their former selves, if not by the beginning of this episode, then certainly by its harrowing conclusion. Take Unser, whose bitterness to Jax is something to behold. Dayton Callie has played the role of long-suffering knight so well, even when the show has given him little and less to work with, so it’s great to see him get some real room to play around here. “If you gave a shit about Tara maybe you’d spend a little less time being a thug and a little more time being a dad,” is a sentence I’d nearly given up on hearing on this show, and it’s fitting that Unser is the first to damn Jax.

Even more fitting is that Juice serves the role of soothsayer, and watch how great Theo Rossi throughout this episode. First, when Juice murders Lin, he is nearly gleeful, and yet detached in a sociopathic way. Then as he details the night of Tara’s murder for Jax, he has a barely restrained grin that cracks his face, almost as though he relishes being the one to bring Jax crashing down, before he realizes finally that he has truly lost everything. Juice and Jax are so similar in this regard—both have idealized SAMCRO, made it the center of their lives, and the club has returned the favor to both of them in blood and tears.

Jax breaks down twice in this episode. First it is in listening to Juice. Charlie Hunnam is pitch perfect, allowing Jax to just completely fall apart, but then something clicks within him one last time, and suddenly Jax is more reserved than ever. He thinks for just a few hours longer that Gemma is just another problem to be solved, that he can keep everything held together and move forward with the club and his life even still. It’s only at the end of the episode, when he breaks down for good in Nero’s arms, that we see the full scope of the wreckage Gemma leaves in her wake.

If I weren’t so convinced that the next episodes will destroy SAMCRO that way that this episode destroys its president, I would be concerned that the episode is structured around the reveal of Gemma’s deeds, and her final decision to skip town and leave her damaged past behind. Everything might have spun from her lie, but that doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, absolve Jax from his sins. For a while it seems as though Jax will be let off the hook, but that last scene with him suggests otherwise. It’s not so much that Gemma is taking the fall for everything; it’s just as Juice said: “Gemma knows every truth, behind every lie, inside every secret. She’s the gatekeeper.” Jax may be a monster, but he’s a monster Gemma created. There’s no doubt at this point that Sons is aiming for a scorched earth finale and nothing less, but it all begins and ends with Gemma Teller.

This is an awesome episode, in the truest sense of the word. It deftly employs the show’s significant, weighty history, and as such the episode’s events have import. They matter. That’s been a rare quality too this season, and for a few seasons now. It’s pretty frustrating that it’s taken so long to get here, and that the road has been so inconsistent But this is the ending that Kurt Sutter began to hint at all the way back in season four, it’s been a long time coming, and now, after a lengthy final pause, it’s finally here. This episode is a powerhouse, and well worth the wait, even for lapsed fans, even for those who may have lost patience over this last season.

Stray Observations:

• Jimmy Smits’s Nero is yet another casualty of Gemma’s, and the scene where Jax fills him in is expertly shot and acted. We don’t hear Jax give the details, as they’ve already been repeated multiple times. Instead we just watch Nero, over Gemma’s shoulder, as he falls out of love with this woman.
• Let’s talk about tone: the jazz music scoring Jax’s flight from the police is completely absurd, some ridiculous, Dukes of Hazzard cool outlaw bullshit that has no business on the show at this point, let alone with Jax. The man is a violent criminal who is, finally, going to have to face down his actions. He is a tragic hero, yes, but that’s the only type of hero he is anymore. “Suits of Woe” doesn’t make many missteps, but this is a pretty big one.
• Annabeth Gish hasn’t really gotten much of a chance to do a lot with Jarry, but the character is kind of redundant, huh? When she and Unser go to meet Juice, she delivers a couple of prison rape jokes and some platitudes about needing Juice’s cooperation, but she’s filling a plot role only at this point. It’s Unser’s emotional involvement that matters now.
• Did Theo Rossi Show His Ass? He did not, but after he killed Lin and started unbuttoning his shirt, I thought for sure we’d get a gratuitous butt shot. There’s always next week!

As “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” begins, Rowan has gone off the grid following Olivia and company’s failed attempt on his life. Our intrepid heroes spare no effort in their attempts to find him; as Olivia so marvelously puts it, “As for my father, hunt him, find him and kill him.” But then Olivia is distracted, by my favorite case of the week of the season by far, and so it’s down to Jake to go on a solo quest to find and kill Rowan Pope.

There is an impressive, creeping sense of menace throughout this episode. Kudos to Shonda Rhimes and team, who create multiple instances of legitimate danger. There aren’t actually any casualties this episode, but that comes as a surprise, rather than a foregone conclusion. That kind of tension is difficult to achieve on television series, even ones as twist-prone as Scandal can be. So often characters are safe simply because they are the protagonists; we can always rest easy in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen. And if you do manage to achieve that tension, the quickest way to deflate it is to have everyone get away safely after all. “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” avoids both pitfalls, to its extreme credit.

But unlike the previous episode, this winter finale carries weight. These are not false climaxes, nor do they feel manufactured to create talking points. In fact, in focusing the episode on the intensely personal, rather than on spy games or sudden deaths, Scandal engenders a poignant, cathartic finale that, only in its final moments, becomes about the overarching conspiracies that make the series tick.

The episode’s biggest strength is in its focus on Olivia, as a woman on her own terms, but also as a reflection of the men she loves, and as a product of her parents. Now, common wisdom is that Maya Pope was a big drag on the final episodes of season three, but it’s easy to see why the writers would run away with the character in the first place. Khandi Alexander is really fantastic; not only is she impeccably cast as Kerry Washington’s mother, but she effortlessly provides a gravitas that puts Maya on par with Rowan.

Olivia has conversations with both of her parents tonight, and they are, at their core, conversations between a broken girl and the parents that broke her. She is a child of a broken home, a child without a mother and with a father she hates yet has more in common with than she can ever imagine. That’s why it’s so smart to bring Maya back into the picture at this juncture; she is a reminder to Olivia both of what her father could do to her, and of what she is becoming. His admonition to her as she points a gun at him is the most chilling, scariest thing he’s said to date: a simple warning, “Olivia. Watch yourself,” as though he is scolding an unruly child. Of course he is testing her, and of course he sees Olivia just so, as an unruly child who must be reined in.

This all is important because it firmly reframes (or, more accurately, it finally properly frames) these nine episodes as an inquiry into Olivia Pope’s character. It sheds most, if not all, concern for her love life. As she so triumphantly tells Jake, she’s not choosing him or Fitz; she’s choosing herself. This inquiry is why I’m so jazzed on the case of the week. The client is Cyrus Beene, and he needs Olivia’s help because Elizabeth North has leaked photos of him and Michael in flagrante.

Now on the one hand, this case is a way to bring Cyrus to rock bottom, only to reinvent himself, colder and more calculating than ever. But on the other hand, it’s a way to shed further light on Olivia, and her frequent inability to understand things in terms of romance—or, put another way, it highlights the considerable gap between her understanding of her romantic life and the reality of it. When Rowan accuses her of knowing nothing about love, that hits home. She’s caught between two men, and claims to love them both; she loves both of her parents, but they’re monsters. Olivia tries to be so many things with so many people, and along the way has lost herself entirely.

The best scene of the night does not feature Olivia, but it does set up an important character beat for her later in the episode. Cyrus’s resignation is touching, a really well-written, beautifully acted scene, some of the best work Jeff Perry has done on the show to date. He reacts with appropriate disgust at Olivia’s suggestion he fake a marriage to Michael (Olivia sees no problem with faking such a thing), and he’s willing to fall on his sword for the sake of Fitz’s presidency. It’s not until Olivia knocks some sense into him that he goes through with her plan. He values being Cyrus Beene, the man who tells the president of the United States what to do, over the condition of his soul.

But as Olivia is yelling at him she’s really shouting at herself, too, and we get the marvelous closing scene between her and Jake, dancing to Stevie Wonder. “I choose me,” is the perfect place to leave Olivia this season, a statement that not only wrests her from the control of either Fitz or Jake, but also frees her from the overbearing paternalism of her father. The montage toward the episode’s end, where Cyrus resumes his post, is bizarrely triumphant, with such upbeat music. Everyone is laughing, hard at work, having just the best time, and then Olivia looks in on Abby, Cyrus and Fitz in the Oval and sees a world that has gone on spinning without her. She’s lost herself over the past season or so, and tonight begins the process of finding herself again, not in relation to a job, nor to a man, nor to a family.

And so that cliffhanger ending is perfect. When Olivia untethers herself from everything in her life, she literally disappears. The plot question of where Olivia Pope is will mirror the character question of who Olivia Pope is. That’s brilliant, and it’s a wonderful note to end this half season on, adding context to what’s come before, and providing fertile ground for everything that is to come. I’m not sure that the specific plot machinations completely work—for instance I am not remotely convinced that the Winslow conspiracy leads to Olivia’s abduction here in any way that makes sense—but thematically “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” is as good as Scandal gets, and does the best work with Olivia specifically that the show has done all season.

Stray Observations

• Mellie’s putdown of Lizzie this episode is a thing of beauty, but overall she spends this episode on the sidelines, and that’s a shame. I really hope for Bellamy Young to get more to do in the back half.
• Huck gives his ex-wife the B-613 document (a gift from Charlie of all people) to help prove that he’s not a raving lunatic. This story has been stop and go all season, and even here it feels like an appendage to the episode, and the cliffhanger is not as effective here as it is with the episode’s main plot.
• Charlie and Quinn are gross.

Lo, my friends: John Landgraf giveth, and John Landgraf taketh away. In the very same week where Sons of Anarchy reinvigorates a flagging season with a stunning, emotional episode, American Horror Story comes completely off the rails, on the heels of a pretty good outing. After all my ballyhooing about how “Bullseye” brought focus to a show that desperately lacked it, “Test of Strength” is a scattered mess.

Much of the problem is that the show is all sprawl, without any real protagonist or core story for us to latch on to. When an episode (or even just a scene) features a more engaging character, whether it’s Elsa or one of the Motts, then Freak Show is consistently entertaining and occasionally even good. But outside of those characters there really isn’t anything to grab on to here. Too many of the other characters, even Bette and Dot, are too thinly drawn for the audience to actually care about them. Maggie is an utter non-presence. Jimmy Darling, despite Even Peters’s best efforts, is a bland hero-type, a sketch more than anything else. And these are the characters who have gotten significant screen time! As for Desiree or Ethel (whose name I just had to Google), they are summed up by their “freak” traits and not much else.

It’s one thing for these characters to be support, to be less well developed than the “important” characters. But then you get an episode like “Test of Strength” that abandons those characters entirely. Worse, it introduces yet another entirely new aspect, as Grace Gummer’s dad forks her tongue and tattoos her skin and, you know what, whatever. I can’t even get that worked up about it. Freak Show is a show where stuff happens and sometimes it is interesting but most of the time it is not.

Really, that is the worst sin of the season to date: it is so very boring. It does not even have the courtesy to be hilariously, mind-bogglingly bad. A big chunk of this episode is devoted to Dell and Jimmy having a “man to man” talk, and while I appreciate the time spent attempting to develop this relationship, and I appreciate the actors’ best efforts in this regard, I’m just not invested in it, and I’m not convinced that the show is, either. Their conflict is introduced and resolved in the span of one scene, to be tossed aside for the next outrageous thing. At least Dell’s murder of Ma Petite has the trappings of a horror story, and is a genuine shock in a real sleeper of an episode. But even that falls flat, because Ma Petite is here only to be a victim, and Dell is only here to be a villain; there has been zero attempt to complicate the former, and only failed attempts to complicate the latter.

The biggest disappointment is that the show thinks it has interesting things to say, but as always with Ryan Murphy joints, it falls well short of actually saying them. Between Stanley’s crusade to present all the freaks in jars, Dandy’s creepy obsession with Bette and Dot, and now Grace Gummer’s crazy fucking dad, there’s a really great thematic element here of commoditization and objectification, of how we view the Other in American culture, and simultaneously are repulsed by it and yet want to have control over it. But, as with Coven’s similar trappings of body horror and gender trouble, we never get quite so far as actually exploring these ideas. Ryan Murphy is content to skim the surface.

At the end of the day, “Test of Strength” is a formless mess, giving too much attention to dull, underdeveloped characters at the expense of the too few good ones it has. It gives way to the series’ worst tendencies, while failing to maintain the previous episode’s focus, nor to deliver on the potential of the various underlying themes at play. Things happen haphazardly: Suddenly Maggie is totally into Jimmy and wants to run away together. Suddenly Stanley is blackmailing Dell. Suddenly Grace Gummer is a fork-tongued tattoo monster. Or else the same damn things happen over and over again: did you know that Elsa feels threatened by Bette and Dot?

I hate to begrudge Freak Show its good qualities. I still admire the show’s willingness to work outside of the box formally, even if it’s in little ways, like the split-screen shot of Elsa reading her note to Dot. Even though she’s far too underused, Kathy Bates still gives a great performance, and her speech about Dell is moving even within the relative void of characterization that has been given Ethel. But there is just no core to this season, no spine to speak of. There’s no sense of the story moving anywhere, even though just last week, there seemed to be a way forward emerging. “Test of Strength” feels like a rug being pulled from beneath our feet, and now, with half the season already behind us, I wonder if there’s any way we get our bearings again.

Stray Observations:

• What exactly is the justification for a freak show where everyone singing all the time? Evan Peters’ rendition of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” is autotuned beyond recognition, as Freak Show becomes even more like Glee. It’s an unnecessary, illogical performance—and it’s almost certainly meant to fill out a Songs from American Horror Story: Freak Show album.
• The horrible squeaking sound that Ma Petite makes as Dell crushes her really is horrifying.
• “I wanna keep my balls.” In case you hadn’t surmised this already, Jimmy’s one of those dumb drunks.

“Aaron Brownstein Must Be Stopped” is just a great episode title, and happily, it accompanies a pretty great episode. Any time spent on Max is generally time worth spent, and this week is no exception. But the episode also achieves the remarkable feat of taking Crosby’s story, which has oscillated of late between boring and incessantly petulant, and invigorating it by allowing it to dovetail with Amber’s story, and to a lesser extent Drew’s as well. The result is an episode that deals with character absences in a much more successful way, as well as one that takes advantage of the show’s shared settings to increase interaction between the characters who do appear.

The action at Chambers Academy is the best use of the school setting yet. The school’s very existence may strain credulity, but when we realize that really, it’s only there to allow Kristina to take part in school stories with Max, it’s a forgivable lapse in logic. Scenes like those at the school this week are reason enough send the Bravermans on ludicrous business endeavors: so that they can all work together, learn together. This is simple character economy, sure, but it also plays to the show’s greatest strength, which is its ensemble of crazy talented actors and their chemistry with each other. Chambers is a device that allows Kristina to play both principal and mom, and to take an active role in Max’s school trials, rather than merely react to them once he returns home.

It helps that Monica Potter is a rock star. It can’t be said enough. She can do literally anything—her range as Kristina is astounding. She’s funny in the opening scene with Nora; she goes from confused to flustered to devastated in breaking up Max’s fight at school; in her last conversation with Max, she is tearfully resigned to the unique difficulties that Max will face, yet her priority is never anything less than Max’s safety and emotional well-being. Especially with Peter Krause out this week as well (Adam is “away on business”), Potter is left to do the heavy lifting here, and she knocks it out of the park. Max Burkholder is great as well, taking the histrionics of Max’s freakout and giving a very tragic, human edge to them. As always, the writing is careful to remain sympathetic to all characters involved, and to give deference to Max’s Asperger’s without becoming treacly. What he does is creepy. But he doesn’t know any better, and the way Kristina helps him through these emotions is inspired. It’s a scene that will surely make the Emmy reel for both actors.

The bulk of the rest of the episode revolves around the Luncheonette, another shared setting that can incorporate multiple characters. Crosby’s work woes are infinitely more interesting this week, and that’s because Jasmine’s voice is finally in the mix, as well. Jasmine even gets her own scenes, for the first time in what feels like forever. (Call it a hidden blessing of the cast scheduling gymnastics this season is having to perform.) The idea of career fulfillment, and of how to balance the need to make money with the need to enjoy one’s work, runs throughout Crosby’s story, and is paralleled by Amber and Drew. I think the show strikes a pretty successful balance here, but I wonder if Crosby isn’t let off the hook a little too, considering how immature he is with Jasmine and her mother. Then again, perhaps I, like Drew, am a total wet blanket about this issue—though even if that’s the case, Crosby’s need to bring pot to the concert is an absurdly poor decision that is swept under the rug, before it’s played for laughs.

It’s great to see Amber woven into this story, and to see a story that deals with her professional issues as well as her personal ones. Mae Whitman has great chemistry with Dax Shepard, and as their characters tend to be rather similar in temperament, there’s plenty of entertainment value in watching them try to score one for the Luncheonette, with Adam lurking over the episode as this horrible off-screen presence, raining awful singing cat ladies down upon them.

And then there is the Hank and Sandy show, which, while good, feels this week like an entirely different show. That sense is exacerbated by Sarah’s absence. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ray Romano and Betsy Brandt both, and they are so good that I almost don’t even care that these secondary characters are swallowing up so much of the show. But no matter how good the scenes are, they’re a constant reminder of stories we’re not seeing, characters we’re not spending time with, and that weighs everything down just a bit. The conclusion of the story is pure Parenthood though. Even though Ruby manipulates Hank in the worst possible way, and betrays both Hank and Sandy’s trust, the mean words, the fights and the lies, they’re just blips along the way, and no more. Other shows like this would turn this party into a big teachable moment, full of tearful apologies. On Parenthood there is just a game of poker. Life goes on.

The stop-start nature of the season’s arcs is too frustrating to look past: Zeek is absent again, Joel and Julia are nowhere to be found after last week’s cliffhanger, Camille pops in for a second to babysit and vanishes (but hey at least she’s alive!). But the individual components are all lovely, and the closer we get to the end of the season, the more I suspect we’ll start to get everyone in the same room once more. If we’ve a little longer to wait before that happens, at least it’s an altogether pleasant wait.

Stray Observations:

• I wonder if we are meant to compare Ruby’s behavior toward Hank with Dylan’s behavior toward Max? They’re each taking advantage of the Asperger’s, though in different ways.
• Last week I completely biffed on Sandy’s name and called her Linda, for some reason. Sorry about that.
• We need to talk about the cat song that Adam schedules for the Luncheonette, because it is just amazing. Drew: “It’s really bad, Amber, thank you, for your inviting me to hear this.”
• Seriously, it becomes hilarious how specific the show is about explaining these absences. Amber, mid-pregnancy episode, on whether Crosby should call Sarah: “She’s in Napa anyway, she can’t do anything.”
• Did Drew Holt Get a Haircut? Nope. It’s getting all tangly back there again.

The worst thing about the current structure of television dramas, which emphasize winter finales that require series plots to simultaneously escalate to a climax, while also forestalling any real progress until that climax happens. Such is “The Last Supper”, which makes much ado about the Winslow conspiracy, further complicates it by adding both Elizabeth North and the Vice President into the mix, all the while backburnering it in favor of Olivia’s war against her father. Everything ends in a last minute reversal that is meant to be a shocking twist, but really is a reversion to status quo, so that the real climax can come in an episode that normally would just be episode nine, but now carries the extra weight of being a “finale” that has to manufacture the type of urgency that normally would build naturally over thirteen (or fifteen, or eighteen, or twenty-two) episodes.

Is this preferable to the mid-season doldrums of a traditional (read: antiquated) twenty-two episode season? Probably. But this method of storytelling has an unfortunate tendency to reduce episodes to a series of OMG moments, scenes that are practically reverse engineered from an E! listicle. (Go ahead: Google “Scandal + shocking” and maybe throw “moments” in for good measure.) And so much of “The Last Supper” is composed of these moments. There’s great stuff in this episode, but there’s also too much that goes beyond the show’s normal heightened tone into purely ridiculous territory.

When the show remembers to treat these characters like people, and to ground everything with at least a toe in reality, it can be really good. Olivia and Rowan have a handful of exchanges this week that are mesmerizing. I love that the biggest piece of evidence is not the deceit or the murder—which are about on par with doing the laundry grocery shopping on this show—but the abusive, paternalistic way that he views Olivia, as not a woman with any agency, but as an extension of himself, as a possession he controls. Everything he accuses Fitz and Jake of is true, but he’s so much worse himself. This is a smart way to keep Rowan out of mustache-twirling territory, because at its core, the story is of a girl fighting for independence from her father. Everything else is just trappings.

There is another really great scene this week, this one between Cyrus and Olivia. Jeff Perry has been playing a broken man since James’s death in season three, but for the past several episodes Cyrus has fooled himself into happiness again. Now that the illusion is gone, he’s even more damaged than he was before. There are some particularly great shots here, through Olivia’s office door, that cause the image to literally fracture and duplicate. This isn’t the first time the show has employed this visual device on this set, but it’s a particularly nice one here.

I even liked Huck’s story this week! After a few weeks of random scenes that played almost as afterthoughts, Olivia finally learns that Huck has been catfishing his son, which brings the story into the rest of the show’s orbit a little more, as well as underscores the growing divide between the two characters. Ultimately the show is using Havi to question the morality of OPA’s work—after all, Huck kills a guy in pretty gruesome fashion while on Olivia Pope’s dime—and while this isn’t exactly new territory for the show, it’s still a question worth raising.

But then so much of this episode is a slog. The team-up between Jake, Fitz and Olivia takes all of three minutes to come back around, once again, forever and always, to Jake and Fitz measuring their dicks. When Olivia finally does take some initiative and comes up with a plan to entrap Rowan, the plan is so obvious that playing it as a fake out is a pointless waste of time. Ditto the closing double cross, which, while emotional affecting, is equally unsurprising. It’s another OMG! moment.

The client of the week is Elizabeth North, and while at first blush the idea of using the case of the week to draw the show’s many disparate threads together, in this case the disparate threads are Cyrus’s spy whore boyfriend, something about West Angola, and the Winslow conspiracy. Bringing all these things together to be about the same thing, and roping the Vice President into it as well, is just complication for its own sake, and worse, it’s complication without any clarification. I don’t know anything more about these stories. There is no additional mystery, no pressing need to know what happens. It is just a mashing together of a bunch of questions that I was lukewarm to the answers to in the first place.

So, I mean, whatever. Is it exciting on a soapy level? Maybe. But Scandal at its best can achieve those soapy heights, the verve of melodrama, without evincing such a tin ear for quality as is on display tonight. Scandal should never feel like a formula—in fact it can’t, if it wants to be the type of show it thinks it is—but this is Scandal by numbers.

Stray Observations:

• Help me with the twist that all of the B-613 files (which are actual files, because of course) are all blank pages. David Rosen has viewed the files, so somehow Rowan swapped them out without anyone catching on? Okay.
• Now I’m probably way too attuned to this, but this week, Cyrus gets vengeance on Michael by, you know, fucking him. Because something something bottoms. I’ll direct you once more to Bryan Lowder, who criticizes this nonsense way better than I can. (Also it’s pretty strongly implied that maybe Cyrus just killed the guy, so there’s that too.)
• Quinn whines all episode about how boring watching Kobiak is, which is perhaps not the best choice on the script’s part.
• Mellie sleeps with Andrew and does basically nothing else this week. That sucks.

It’s amazing what one good episode can do.

Freak Show is as insane as ever, but “Bullseye” continues on from “Pink Cupcakes” and gives most, if not all, of its insanity some context. Finally the characters begin to feel like they inhabit the same space, and the show overall is more of a piece with itself, rather than cobbled together from bits of various stories.

Specifically, it’s Dot and Bette’s disappearance that serves as the lynchpin that draws the rest of the show into focus. It’s a central plot event that touches all of the other characters on the show; it draws suspicion onto Elsa, sheds further light on Dandy’s dementedness, sparks Maggie into action with Jimmy. The more that these elements all achieve at least some sense of interconnectedness, the better off the show will be.

Everything is connected not just by plot, but also by an emerging central theme, which, generally, is love. Love is what Murder House and Asylum previously boiled down to, as well (Coven did not boil down to anything at all), but while the first dealt with familial love and the second with a kind of compassionate love, Freak Show deals directly with romantic love, and treats it as a passive act, something that is received from someone else more readily than it is given.

And so you have Elsa, who on the occasion of her birthday demands the love and attention of her sideshow family. She’s becoming thoroughly unhinged, in a way that gives the character a little more definition, if not necessarily more dimension. This is still very much the mode that all of Jessica Lange’s American Horror Story characters have been played in, but there’s no denying that it’s a mode that plays to her strengths. She goes from shrill desperation, to manipulative violence, to quiet longing, in the span of an hour. This is by far the best showcase Freak Show has given Elsa to date, and I’m looking forward to seeing where Lange takes the character.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is also a standout episode for Paul, who, as played by Mat Fraser, is the episode’s moral center. It’s Paul who is most concerned about the twins’ disappearance, and who begins to suspect foul play on Elsa’s behalf. He’s also sleeping with the candy striper from the premiere, played by Grace Gummer (I believe—I can never tell which Gummer is which), so he certainly doesn’t let his condition keep him from getting around. I like the idea of fleshing out some of the other freaks, and Paul is as good a place as any to start, especially with such a talented actor in the role.

Even in Dandy’s case, all he really wants is love. He’s decided he’s in love with the twins, though even this seems to be more because it is a requirement of the identity he’s constructing for himself than because it’s an emotion he’s feeling. (In fact I wonder at this point whether Dandy feels anything at all.) When he reads Dot’s diary and learns that she’s planning to fleece him for the money necessary to have Bette surgically removed, he reacts characteristically, which is to say that he flips a shit. I can’t heap enough praise upon Finn Wittrock, who has taken an utter cartoon of a character and made him the most compelling presence on the show. The scenes with the Mott’s are mesmerizing, candy colored fantasias that are more freakish than anything going on in Elsa’s camp.

We also spend some more time with Stanley and Maggie, and I’m less convinced by the show’s treatment of these characters. They’re very isolated from the rest of the show, sharing scenes only with each other for the most part. Maggie at least branches out a bit. Her romance with Jimmy, if one can call it that, falls flat, unfolding more because it is expected than because there is anything inherently interesting about it. What does work is her abandoned attempt to capture and kill Ma Petite, which stealthily becomes the episode’s scariest, most unsettling thread. This episode once more utilizes the flashes to murders that don’t happen, but does a better job of demarcating this than “Pink Cupcakes” did. They work, as another way of objectifying and dehumanizing the freaks. (It’s worth noting that Dot gets in on this action, too, imagining a future where she is no longer attached to her unwanted sister.)

After a slow start, Freak Show has really taken off. It’s nice to once again approach these episodes with more anticipation than trepidation, and as the season starts to pull into sharper focus (as opposed to Coven, which by this point had gone completely off the rails) the story promises to only become more enticing. If Ryan Murphy and company can keep delivering episodes like these, then Freak Show looks poised to become the series’ redemption.

Stray Observations

• I’m seriously with the Gummers, though. How does anyone keep the Streep-spawn straight?
• “I’m going to take my business to Woolworth’s. They’ve got ice cream.”
• Dell and Desiree both take the week off, and while I wouldn’t say that they aren’t missed, there was obviously no room for them this week. I’m more concerned with the continued underuse of Evan Peters, who seems to be getting the shaft again this season. (Although nothing will be so bad as his nearly completely mute turn in Coven.)

“The future is weird.”

That quote has defined The Good Wife since its creative resurgence last year. There was a period of time during 3rd and 4th seasons that the show fell into a pattern of stagnant stories and the case of the week format. While that worked for the series for a while, it became clear that some forward momentum had to be thrown into the mix, thus the civil war of Lockhart/Gardner was born. The reason I mention this now is because this episode so subtly moved the story of Alicia Florrick and the world surrounding The Good Wife forward.

“Trust Issues” was nowhere near a perfect episode. It was reminiscent of those season 3 episodes where they would pack 2 or 3 continuing storylines, with 2 cases of the week and just have a mess of a story. However, a lot of the good out weighed the bad. Cary continued to sit in jail as Finn continued his crusade against Lemond Bishop. However, unlike last week’s premiere Cary was not the emotional center of the episode. Much of that lifting was given to Alicia and Diane, but more on that later. The case became more interesting with the introduction of a rat among Bishop’s associates and with his various attempts to pay Cary’s bail, however like almost every storyline in the episode, it felt half-assed. As much as some people despise the A, B, C storyline structure, it usually allows for there to be some focus in the episode.

Another facet to the story came from Eli’s persistent attempts to get Alicia to run, going as far as to commandeer a White House insider to coax Alicia. The best part about this storyline is that it became intertwined

This episode also saw the return of Lemond Bishop, whose illegitimate businesses landed Cary in jail in the first place. While the character is always entertaining because of the thin line between his legal and illegal dealings, what he brings out in the other characters is one of his more interesting qualities. The majority of the characters on The Good Wife are fueled by a few things: money, power, success. However, their own morals are so rarely tested. That’s where the character of Lemond Bishop comes in. Even we as an audience are tested whenever the character is on screen. In this episode in particular, Kalinda is forced to make the decision of whether or not to give a man’s name up and most likely have him murdered. It’s this type of character dilemma that we don’t see often enough in the show that were a welcome addition.

Alicia was given back some of the emotional heavy lifting as she continued to defend her stance against running for State’s Attorney. With Eli, Castro, and even some random benefactors wanting to back her, it seemed as if she had to cave eventually. However, in the end, it was anger that took over. It was a fire that we wouldn’t have seen in the first season. As it is often said, this series will always be an education of Alicia Florrick and this episode was no exception.

It was a disappointment to see that the original emotional center in Cary was short-lived, but whatever reprehension I had quickly faded away when the focus switched to Diane’s departure from Lockhart/Gardner/Canning. The majority of her storyline was spent trying to rope her protege Dean Levine-Wilkins into her move. Despite setbacks involving construction, an awkward Robin (“we’re like a coffee shop”), and a shirtless man named Gunter, he ultimately decides to leave LGC and move over to Florrick/Agos along with several other department heads. As Diane stood in her office, it felt like an even bigger emotional jolt than in “Hitting the Fan” when Alicia left. We learned throughout the series that that firm was Diane’s child. The one that she never had. To watch her leave it was an emotional tug. As the seconds counted down, she simply picked up her bag, the picture of her and Hilary Clinton (a wonderful callback to the Pilot), and left the firm with a posse in tow. An elevator door close later and it was the end of an era and episode, right?

Nope. We of course had to save Cary. The convenience of the ChumHum storyline was a bit bothersome here, but because of the show’s strong track record with realism, I’m going to let it slide. The money from the settlement was used to pay Cary’s bail, just as the partners voted to become Florrick/Agos/Lockhart & Associates. After his release Cary and Alicia hug, apparently for the first time.

Something felt off about this episode. It was great in some parts and weaker in others. However, its greatest downfall was the neat little bow that tied all the storylines together and bringing us to a cute, but convenient ending. That feels like the word of the day: convenient. However, the best parts of The Good Wife continue to be those small nuanced directorial decisions that give the show its trademarked realism. The strong point of the episode was the directing, which made the constant juggling of storylines and ideas bearable. Although the episode tied up some of these storylines a bit to early for my taste, it excites me to see where they take this set up.