In Which Marty Hart's Daughter Was The Real Yellow King

The Greatest Throne Of All

by DICK CHENEY

Morning comes, and the disappointment of last night's True Detective finale has yet to wear off. I can't shake the overwhelming sensation that the Yellow King is still out there somewhere — I was pretty sure it was going to be Marty Hart's eldest daughter, especially after she set up one of the crime scenes in her playroom. I believe that children, and to a lesser extent, toupees, are our future. Treat them well and let them have three-ways. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride.

Sometimes I think Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown's tendentious relationship was the only thing I have ever really cared about.

he didn't mention AIDS during this episode either

The show did reveal the centerpiece of the Carcosa myth, which is that it is a place you can go, a passage to the underworld. It is shrouded with branches and corpses, both of which made the lair of the YK one of the great television sets I have seen since the mill on Twin Peaks. The weird wooden statues are merely signs or guideposts to the passage. "There is only one story... light and dark," Matthew McConaughey muttered at some point last night, which caused everyone I watched the show with to burst out laughing.

I once tried to kill something that was attacking me. It turned out to be hail.

Before Rust entered the throne room of the Yellow King, he heard a noise behind him. He never identified it, or tracked down the source of the disturbance, but it could not have been the King himself, peeking out of the underworld to see what happened on Earth? Statues are merely signposts; the beings they indicate lurk nearby. Even a hospital is merely a marker for something else, some passage in and out of things.

it's like...a waypoint from the darkness into the light GET IT

It seemed like the True Detectives of True Detective knew where the killer was for over three episodes; they were so sure of their results that they had a mute guy mail them to local newspapers. Instead of taking the yellow king alive, they chose to eliminate him in his lair, possibly due to their worries he could be vindicated by Tuttle elements in the criminal justice system. Going to the evil lair of a killa with no Kevlar or satellite phones sounds pretty dumb, but then, clearing one murder case over a twenty-year period isn't exactly stellar work either.

this loving relationship could have had more screentime

I always believed I could solve any cold case purely from reading the wikipedia entry. JonBenet's killer is probably dead now, and can't be apprehended, but didn't someone once say the truth is out there (in her wikipedia page). The next season of True Detective will feature a killer whose calling card is posting the DOD of their victims on wikipedia as a sadistic, Adobe-flash based calling card. (In an ironic twist, the perpetrator will turn out to be a Brooklyn woman disappointed by sexism.)

I thought we had all retired light and dark as a metaphor after the Harry Potter series IDK

Murder, True Detective suggests, is the second worst crime. It is worse than treason or rape, abduction or corruption. The absolute worst crime is having an accent that sounds like dogshit.

actually nevermind the worst crime is that shirt

+

I have watched my last episode of The Walking Dead. The writers who could actually compose dialogue were fired and forced to write Mob City by Frank Darabont at gunpoint. Whoever is left over penning these awful episodes fell asleep during the part of writing class when they instructed verbs other than "to be."

a woman in her twenties who has never had a drink. In the south. That's likely.

Every line of dialogue now is the same, each conversation the identical meaningless pattern.

"I have to go."
"You don't have to."
"But I do."
"You'll be gone."
"I want you here."
"You have to be gone, don't you see?"

It is utterly maddening byplay. Worse even than the terrible dialogue, though, is that even the show's most taciturn figures to this point are now voluminous holes of un-vocabulary. Sure it was fun to cut the budget by killing off the The Walking Dead's most educated characters, but there has to be a middle ground between long Bible quotations and the dumbest pattern dialogue since Aaron Sorkin wrote most of Studio 60 on cough syrup and pure. That was bad, and this is worse. Action talks, bullshit walks.

cut out her voicebox with that knife please

A recent episode, which consisted of the impotent natterings of a blonde woman to a white power activist, soured the concept of an odd couple for me forever. If I hear one more word out of Carl about how he's capable of handling himself, I'm going to burn down Sanctuary. They should just keep hiring people from The Wire, since the rest of the show's cast can't act worth a fucking shit.

oh wipe the sad face off, if you loved your wife so much you never would have left her side

Let us not forget the scene where a man left two ten year old girls in the wilderness, stood them back-to-back and told them "you're going to be fine." This actually happened. And good lord, Glenn, grow up. She's just a woman, even if she is your wife. I am going back to watching Four Weddings and a Funeral every Sunday, enough of this shit.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Felicity having sex for her country.

maybe he was just annoyed by her

"Keep On Wanting" - The Fray (mp3)

"Wherever This Goes" - The Fray (mp3)

In Which We Continue To Move Half-Alive

Tale As Old As Time

by DICK CHENEY

The Walking Dead
creator Frank Darabont

Sometimes you can watch a piece of fiction that gives you a new perspective on your own life. Andrea (Laurie Holden) has engaged in a loving and caring relationship with the Governor (David Morrissey), the dominant villain on the third, interminable season of The Walking Dead. Her sex scenes with this one-eyed creature are among the best in television because they both appear requisitely lumpy, coming across less like a glamorous, evil couple than a couple of middle-aged people making the best of it.

After coitus, Andrea considers taking the advice of her friend Carol, who advises plunging a knife into the neck of the Governor to end the ongoing war between the two camps. Outside of Woodbury, and indeed outside everywhere, the undead continue to walk around. There are still zombies on the show, they are just completely unrelated to any of the actual drama.

holding a knife while nude brought down the Aztecs

Andrea moves towards the Governor's exposed neck where he sleeps, holding the knife with which she intends to take his life. Suddenly she stops and turns around, giving up on the murder. We are left with the why. Why didn't my wife take my own life many years ago? For example: one time I made her feed me out of a trough and then watch video of me playing tennis with Benjamin Netanyahu for over three hours.

I used to be intolerable, but now I am completely great. I even take out the trash, and I only use duct tape to seal the dog door in the winter. I can't do a push-up anymore, but I no longer laugh out loud when Lynne tries one. Over time, some of us improve like aged wine, and along the same duration, others just fall apart.

"listen lori...are you this strapped for other projects? that guy's youngest daughter kissed me on the cheek"

Rick (Andrew Lincoln) has lost his wife, and it has completely unhinged him. In this bizarre role, he is so much more entertaining than he was as a loving father and sort of husband, but in unmaking the central hero of The Walking Dead, the show has unraveled, losing the centrifuge everything else spun around.

One thing The Walking Dead does as well as any other drama is kill its darlings, a phrase meant to indicate that you should not give over to sentimentality, and so should remove the best part of anything. There is nothing worse than this expression, originally coined by Ernest Hemingway in a bathhouse. He didn't have any darlings to kill, what did he care if you murdered your own?

Carl u know what you must do

In this context it does not meant Lori dying during childbirth, since no one wanted to see her acting at any length and it was a mercy killing. It means that the Korean-Gentile relationship between Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) had to be sacrificed. I was in favor of turning it into a Bonnie & Clyde type situation and having Glenn go on to marry an older woman (Annette Bening) afterwards, but instead the couple shared a more unctuous conflict over near rape. Since the show has no idea how to deal with a topic so serious, they just kinda make like Glenn does and avoid it.

glenn demands that he stand and she sit for every long talk they have

The Walking Dead showed how inadequate it is at dealing with deeper issues between characters who know each other while trying to write dialogue between Merle and Daryl. I've never met two brothers where one is a racist and one isn't, except maybe if Joe Biden has a really open-minded brother.

"I just love that Ricky Rubio" "Same"

But yeah, Merle's amputation has become a part of his personality. Sometimes he's like really sensitive ("These people of color resent that I tried to kill them") and sometimes he's like, "Let's steal these folks' belongings," which frankly identifies him more with the far-left than the far right. I can already imagine the scene where Daryl holds Merle off of a stranded group of travelers' spoils by arrow-point as an allegory for tax reform.

"when rick shot my daughter in the face I was like damn son"

The Walking Dead is more fun when it is outright sinister, as when cynically setting up a romance between Carol and the likable ex-convict who resembles her in every way, and then disposing of their future romantic prospects so suddenly via a bullet from the Governor. Then again, most jokes on the show revolve around instantaneous death for a participant in the drama, so minus for creativity, and plus for surprise.  

eurasian

The obvious choice would be to focus more on The Walking Dead's best character, Michonne (Danai Gurira). You understand everything about who she is by how she treats the undead - like a determined, purposeful mother. It's weird to see her deferring to Rick but I guess that conflict had to be put on the backburner. It would be prescient to use her as the singular protagonist for a number of episodes, or why not just one singular flashback episode? Let's turn this into Lost, I want to be there when they explain that this is the central mystery of the show:

Fuck you all.

Take for example a common citizen in Rome. The empire is ending, some chap gets it in his head that a famous personage represents Sodom and the evil in his homeland. He doesn't have two swords; he never actually does anything about it; circumstances just crumble of their own accord. As the world ends, there is still a need to end a part of it yourself. The expression on Michonne's face tells us everything about what she feels about what happens around her.

go with it

The underlying message at the heart of The Walking Dead is that adapting to the circumstances you find yourself in is everything. The costume you find yourself is properly called a habit. It is what actually defines you - the vow that you make, not that you are the one that makes it.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Last Leaves of Autumn" - Beth Orton (mp3)

"Magpie" - Beth Orton (mp3)

In Which We Hate The Way We're Speaking To Each Other

Post Mortem

by DICK CHENEY

It's not polite to say who died on Downton Abbey. Most people don't even know. Their lives haven't changed as a result. We love people, especially wealthy individuals, in the specifics, since we sense we may become them. In the abstract, they disappoint us.

this guy

My other favorite show is Sons of Anarchy. Except for the Exorcist-like horror involved in watching Gemma Teller (Katey Segal) have sex scenes with Jimmy Smits, who plays a pimp on the show, it's fantastic. I spent the entire hour flexing my knuckles and lamenting that I'm too old to get on a bike. It would probably end more like this:

The first rule about Fight Club is that you never get on a motorcycle with someone wearing a Duke t-shirt. But we were talking about the death of Opie.

It's impossible to connect the phenomenon of a maudlin young motorcyclist (Ryan Hurst) dying in prison to save his boyfriend with the economy, except to say that watching the members of the MC mourn their large, closeted friend, all I could think of was how much money they saved on the funeral by having it themselves.

basically, your father is an idiot Lady Mary

I was gchatting with someone the other day who was telling me how boring they find scripted television. I explained that was probably because they couldn't see the sychronicity between Branson putting his wife between himself and the British government, and the president doing the exact same thing with Hillary Clinton.

She signed off in a huff and e-mailed me the entire Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade. Having friends on the other side of the aisle is like being married to Lady Mary (tell me when you tire of these comparisons). Everything they think of is completely without regard for the economic realities of the world.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to gchat with Matthew Crawley, probably like sucking on a tootsie roll pop that has asparagus at its center.

branson, you disgust me

No one has done more to diminish the cause of Irish independence than Julian Fellowes. I haven't been this mad since South Park eclipsed the boundaries of bad taste and did a storyline making fun of how Bane sounded in The Dark Knight Rises.

Sorry, my mind is wandering a lot lately. It's a function of old age, and the relentless attacks on Mormonism in the mainstream media. I really don't understand this. One group of people believes in a supernatural human being who is supposed to return to Earth and save the world, and another believes a slightly different version of this myth, but is absolutely crazy for thinking this way.

The only thing worse than that is how many times I'll be writing, "The only thing worse than that" in this essai. The only thing worse than that, though, is how every single joke on Mike & Molly is still about how fat the male in the relationship is. It's bullying, and I find it disgusting. That's his natural build.

buy a large bed please

Doesn't it feel like they're making the bed look especially tiny? My only real problem with scripted television is that every single person on it is completely caucausian. Last night I found myself rewinding the trailer for Alex Cross just to interject a little diversity in my existence. The idea of Tyler Perry as a hardboiled cop hunting Jack Shephard from Lost is beyond my dreams. It makes me think of a Jhumpa Lahiri short story, that's how completely amazing it is.

the answer to Lost was a bright light coming out of a cave. Never forget.

Once I was in a country club where the hazing ritual involved watching all of the Madea movies in chronological sequence while you kept getting messages on your phone saying, "They passed another tax on capital gains!" The fact that no one finds it the least bit strange that Matthew Fox could convincingly play a serial killer should tell us something.

"Brickleberry"

The mere idea of Lost usually reduces me to tears. To cheer myself up I watch this show Brickleberry, which takes place in a national park. The point of Brickleberry is to be offensive, and make jokes about subjects that other shows won't touch. In theory this is an interesting concept but (1) Family Guy has been on the air for over two decades and (2) 90 percent of the jokes are simple racism. (The black character is named Denzel. Haha. Get it? If you don't, you're a fucking square.) (The other ten percent of the jokes are about women and gays.)

You start to understand why my liberal gchat friend hates scripted television. That is, until you watch the finest show airing on any network, The Thick Of It.

Malcolm Tucker and Rebecca Front on "The Thick Of It"

You know how Parks & Recreation pretends to be a show about politics, but is really just a larger forum for the writers of the show to copy down all the funny jokes they read on the internet and have comedians act them out? I can't believe they did an entire election storyline with Leslie Knope, and then occupied her time with solving the obesity problem in Pawnee and feuding over a bathroom. Not even I have that little faith in government.

Ben and December

Here is what all the punchlines on Parks & Recreation revolve around: Leslie is energetic, Ron eats free-range meat, Chris is depressed, Andy is stupid, April is a bitch, Adam Scott has a large head for his body.

You know, it's okay to have a person who has more than one aspect to his personality. It's called a fully-fleshed out character; the show's writers might have seen it in passing during the ninety seconds a day they peel their heads away from their iPhones. The only thing more embarrassing than this season of Parks & Recreation is having to read pathetic Emily Nussbaum essais about how much she worships Amy Poehler or how she doesn't want Parenthood to get canceled. Grow up.

Peter Mannion's aides on 'The Thick Of It'

I guess now that I am "retired", politics just bores me. Art lasts for a substantial duration, blog posts slightly less long. Does anyone remember the Whigs? Or what a dick Andrew Jackson was? I can't muster the energy. It's easier to just look to television for escape. That's why there is no better place to rest your head than the considerable problems of the British.

Unfortunately, most of middle America can't understand a single word said in Malcolm Tucker's Scottish accent, so they watch The Walking Dead instead.
 

The only thing worse than that is. There are people everywhere, when I wake. I have no right to judge them. Wake me up after the election.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about intercourse between Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley.

"Fear Is A Man's Best Friend" - Field Music (mp3)

"Heart" - Field Music (mp3)