#brian grubb

All this dope wants is for his miserable family to get along for one stupid day, just once, even if they are just pretending and don’t actually mean it. And yet! It’s the best. The man rules a kingdom and has dragons at his disposal and just wants to enjoy any of that for 90 uninterrupted seconds but every time two or more members of his family get within earshot of each other he turns into a grandfather at a Thanksgiving table filled with bickering siblings and cousins. To be fair, he did have a right to be a little upset here, seeing as his wife stabbed his daughter after threatening to cut out his grandson’s eye as punishment for his own son getting his eye sliced out after stealing a dragon, which is… kind of a lot, as far as family dynamics go. Also, his daughter and smirking brother got married after conspiring to fake her first husband’s death and ship him off to live in gay paradise with his lover. That’s another thing that happened on this show. The man has not had a quiet day in his entire adult life.

Not the most important thing in all of this but, man, what a tough stretch for Howard Hamlin. The guy started this series as a powerful lawyer and upstanding member of the New Mexico community and now he’s buried in a dirt hole with Lalo Salamanca in a drug lab under a laundromat and being painted in broad strokes as a cocaine-fueled maniac who had many deep dark secrets that led to his eventual mysterious ocean-based disappearance. And, like, for what? What was Howard’s greatest crime? Being kind of a putz? Listening to elevator music in a Jaguar with a NAMAST3 license plate? He deserved some level of comeuppance for being That Freaking Guy, I’ll give you that. I would not have been heartbroken to see him, say, get a bunch of cupcakes whipped at him by unruly teens, or get his house and car egged every Halloween. But this was… a bit much. I actually feel sorry for the doof. Which is really something. Imagine how angry you’d be if you were sitting at a traffic light and saw that vanity plate in front of you. This might be the show’s greatest achievement to date.

C – The Mountain, Game of Thrones Every team needs an enforcer, a goon to come off the bench and use his six fouls fast and hard to protect the smaller, more skilled players. The Mountain is our Charles Oakley. The only tricky thing will be keeping Arya from trying to kill him. This is why we have Timothy Olyphant in a cowboy hat. Lots of moving pieces here.

But then something incredible happened. At the end of season two, the show leaped forward ten years — ten years! — into a future where the human race was sterilized and somehow the only character who aged a single day is Mitch’s daughter, who was now extremely attractive. (And secretly pregnant!) Some of the characters became doctors. Some were in hiding. Mitch was floating in a goo-filled tank that was keeping him alive. Jamie? Jamie was now a bestselling billionaire author who flew around the world in the tablet-controlled science plane and spent her nights wearing leather and beating up secretive villains in dark alleys. The way I described it at the time was “like if J.K. Rowling was Batman.” It is my favorite arc any character has ever had during the course of a television show and I didn’t even tell you about the part where she also became a hacker, because everyone on Zoo is an expert at everything.

Euron Greyjoy looks like a guy who buys beer for high school students but charges them $40 for a case of Keystone Light and then shows up at the party.

Wakecation: The Panama Adventure - TEASER