“It just means we all have to start over,” says one of the daughters halfway through the debut season of Amazon’s tender and gentle Transparent, a drama centering on a Los Angeles family who evaluate their lives after their father comes out as a transgendered woman.

The ideas of gender, femininity and sex dominate Transparent’s 10 episodes. The bitchy wailing from more conservative viewers can almost be heard immediately while watching Transparent’s overt sexuality being played out on screen—“No one has that much sex!  The content is too graphic!” While Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman is the center of this great, sunny series, almost all of the members of the Pfefferman clan are searching for identity in one way or another. Self-discovery and self-proclamation may lead to bad decisions.

The process of coming out as transgender is an incredibly personal thing, and the first few episodes focus on Maura coming out to her three grown children: unhappily married/hungry Sarah (Amy Landecker), image conscious (and newly jobless) record producer Josh (Jay Duplass), and listless, daddy’s girl Ali (Gaby Hoffman). Their mother, Shelly, is played by Judith Light, and she lives with her sick second husband, Ed. In a flashback, Shelly argues with her husband (back when he was Mort), and she exclaims, “I want you to be a man!”  She says this before she is even aware of what Mort is hiding from her, and the singular line resonates for the rest of that episode.

When Maura begins her coming our process, she first tells Sarah, and she immediately is in his corner. Ali discovers her father’s secret while tripping on an acid-like drug and affectionately begins calling her “moppa.” Maura has the most trouble coming out to Josh, but the three Pfefferman children are a tight-knit trio. They get together and smoke pot and talk about their parents and how Maura is selling their childhood home—a sprawling, open Palisades property. Their lives are all spinning out of control. Sarah begins having an affair with the lesbian that got away, Tammy, and she’s imbued with a strong cockiness by Melora Hardin. Josh gets one of his most promising acts pregnant even though she doesn’t really want anything that serious. She has an abortion without telling him. Ali still takes checks from her father and seemingly latches on to anyone who can make her feel good.

Transparent is wise to begin personal and work its way out. Connecting with Maura is very easy; Tambor is quiet and shy and his fear is a reminder that we can go through extreme life changes at any point in our lives. That sort of fear never really leaves us. Maura doesn’t face any adversity from the outside world until the third or fourth episode when a loud soccer mom protests to Maura using the women’s room in a shopping mall. He then has to stand up to Sarah’s estranged husband, and Maura expresses the main theme of the entire show: “I’m just a person…and you’re just a person.” The notion that everyone has the right to be happy with themselves gently hangs over every episode.

This is Tambor’s opus. He’s an actor whose career has spanned decades, but he’s allowed to be more vulnerable and open as Maura. Her interaction with every character is so breathtakingly varied—from his eventual disappointment in Ali to his early days of cross dressing and cavorting with his partner in crime played by Bradley Whitford. There is an episode told entirely in flashback where we get to see Maura’s discovery of the open trans world at an outdoor camp. Michaela Watkins plays an unusually supportive wife of another camper, and she’s never looked to effortlessly beautiful.

The Pfefferman children also support Tambor just as much as they support their father. Sarah wants her father to know how much she is behind him, and she doesn’t showboat it.  She simply wants to be there. Duplass’ Josh is frustrating in his stubbornness, but his romance with a female rabbi (Kathryn Hahn) makes you really start to like him. Ali reminds everyone how underused Gaby Hoffman really is. She’s been coming around a lot more lately, but she is like a cross between Lena Dunham and Jenny Slate. Ali is still looking for her own path, but she doesn’t seem to be concerned if time is running out.  As Shelly, one might think that Light is wasted. She barely interacts with her children until the second half of the season, but she delivers a monologue about feeling wanted that puts you right in her corner.

The opening credits are these fuzzy memories committed to home video recordings. There are weddings and parties, but it’s kind of a time capsule of revealed public femininity. There is a boy playing out with a bikini top on and we also see men in dresses dancing with each other. As I learn more about the transgender community, I keep getting told that every single experience is completely different. There is no one blanket story or path that is truly identical, and it is even reinforced by the opening credits. No one’s memories are the same and neither is everyone’s future.

Transparent wasn’t solely created to teach. It’s a warm series that makes you laugh—you just might learn to be more tolerant and accepting along the way.

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment – I want my environment to be a product of me.” On the surface, the opening words to Jack Nicholson’s monologue as Frank Costello might not mean much, but as he keeps talking, and as Martin Scorsese uses clips from the street riots of the late 60’s and 70’s, the message becomes clear, and it matches up what the late Roger Ebert had to say about the Oscar-winning crime drama, but more on that later.

There’s much going on in episode three: there’s a mysterious vigilante running around, hooded and masked, dispensing his own brand of justice towards the criminals and the corrupt of Gotham. He has the powerful scared about who is next, and the fearful believing there is hope on these mean streets; that someone is looking out for them. No, it isn’t the Dark Knight – he’s too busy being 11 years old and getting into arguments with Alfred Pennyworth over searching for evidence that may lead to the capture of the culprit responsible for the death of his parents. The vigilante is really someone named “the Balloonman” and his stunt of having a cop on the Gotham PD payroll killed has Bullock and Gordon assigned to bring him down.

Elsewhere, Gordon’s past returns to haunt him as Oswald Cobblepot comes back to the city to start sowing oats within the crime syndicate by becoming a dish-washing boy at an Italian mafia-owned eatery (This show might be a cut above the standard cop drama, but some clichés never go out of style!), and staying clear of alerting his re-emergence to Fish Mooney. A note on the use of the characters, for a moment: If there’s one aspect of the show I’ll just have to get used to, it’s the fact that some characters, depending on the script, will mean more or less to the plot during that week. Some nights, I’ll see Jada Pinkett Smith have an absolute ball playing the up-and-coming power player in the Gotham crime syndicate, and other days, she’ll be regulated to one or two scenes where it’s just her doing her thing, whether it’s her flirting with Gordon, or her ordering hits on cops and former lovers for being too soft and protecting herself from Don Falcone’s wrath. Like last week, we saw Camren Bicondova’s Selena Kyle take center stage in the middle of a kidnapping ring, and this week, it’s just her leading Gordon to the spot where the person behind the murder of the Wayne’s took place. If the character matters to the plot, they’ll be featured more, and that’s just going to be the end of it.

I keep harping on how good the acting is on this show, and Monday night’s contrast between Donal Logue’s Bullock and Ben McKenzie’s Gordon on how they go about doing their jobs is no exception. On the surface, it really is the standard good cop-bad cop routine. Jim Gordon is a straight-laced idealist who firmly believes in the law. Harvey Bullock sees this city for what it is, and adapts to it like a second skin – if he has to beat the snot out of a suspect to get answers, so be it. And if Falcone asks him to whack Gordon if he doesn’t put a bullet in Cobblepot’s head, he’ll do it without question. Watching these two constantly argue and debate about their jobs is really good stuff to watch, and McKenzie has really convinced me that he is Gordon three episodes in.

But it’s the climax of the episode that has me really jazzed, and where my comparison to Scorsese’s The Departed comes in. Hell, I go one further and add Taxi Driver. You think I’m insane, right? Allow me to explain: Thought the long and rich career of the legendary filmmaker, you can see that he explore similar themes of moral decay, the existential nature of one’s identity, and finding the saints in sinners, and the sinners in saints, just to name a few. When I see the Balloonman explaining his actions to Gordon, I couldn’t help but hear Travis Bickle’s statement bow how he stood up to the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth and the shit that’s infected New York City. Bickle kills pimps and thugs because, in his (warped) mind, no one else chooses to stand up and protect the innocent, so he takes it upon himself to do the job no one else will face. The Balloonman kills crooked cops and men of the cloth who take advantage of young boys because he can; because someone, anyone, needs to make an example of those who prey on the fearful; to show that there’s at least one person in this town who won’t take it anymore.

But I also hear Nicholson’s Frank Costello, and his monologue about warping society to fit his image, and how he succeeds in making it a reality. His influence took root in young Collin Sullivan when he first paid for his groceries and recruited him to work in his garage. The toxic seeds bloomed when he rose through the ranks in the Massachusetts State Police, eventually making to SIU as a way for Costello to cover his tracks and keep in out of prison. Gordon confesses to his girlfriend, Barbra, that the city is sick, not just from the inside as he originally believes, but sick from the roots down. In the past three episodes, the creators paint a Gotham city as one where the devils and the disciples rule, where the cops and the mayor are doing deals with the mob to keep the lifestyle going, out of fear of getting on their bad side. The wealthiest ignore the plight of the downtrodden, leaving the rest to look out for no.1 and survive by any means necessary, like Selena Kyle. The environment of dog-eat-dog and looking out for number one is a product of the mob, and not the other way around. Good guys don’t exist in this town, and if they do, they’ll have their eyes opened and soon get with the program, or end up in jail or buried six feet under. Gordon saw the actions of a vigilante who needed to answer for his crimes, because that’s what the law requires. For the Balloonman, he understands his choices are damned if you, damned if you don’t, and he’d rather take the former than continue to side with the latter.

Allow me to sum up this excellent episode by paraphrasing the late Roger Ebert: “This episode of Gotham is like an examination of conscious, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?”

There is an image from the premiere episode of American Horror Story: Freak Show that made me physically recoil on my big, comfy couch. A young couple are making out in a field. He leaves her to run to the car, and, out of the bushes, comes a paunchy clown, his garments filthy and a HUGE, disturbing smile across his face. He delights the young woman with tricks and then clubs the young lovers after the boyfriend returns. She wakes up to find the clown stabbing her boyfriend to death, and she takes off like a shot. The camera then switches to her point of view and the clown sets his sights on her (you can almost hear his neck click into place) and he begins chasing after her in a frenzied run that I honestly don’t think I will be able to shake for a long time.

The color palette of Freak Show seems lighter and more, dare I say, welcoming than past seasons? The trailers featured crimson reds and pale blues, and the two balloons that Elsa Mars (the incomparable Jessica Lange) carries as she stalks the halls of a hospital in 1952 are pink and a pale teal. She talks her way into seeing a “monster” admitted to the hospital, and she discovers Bette and Dot Tattler, twins born to one body. “How lucky to have a sister…” Lange coos in her playful German accent.

The Tattler twins are both played by the underrated Sarah Paulson, and this is probably her most extreme AHS role to date. Bette is a dreamer who has a burning passion for movies and fame (“I want to see Singin’ in the Rain, mama! In glorious TECHNICOLOR!), but Dot is silent and observant. They can speak to each other internally, and Dot is wary of Elsa’s intentions before they are whisked away to become the headlining act in Elsa’s freak show (the strange murder of Bette and Dot’s mother convinced Elsa to track them down).

Fraulein Elsa’s Cabinet of Curiosities has seen better days. Not only does it feature Kathy Bates as a Bearded Lady of Ceremonies (an homage to John Travolta’s Edna Turnblad?), it showcases Evan Peters’ Jimmy Darling aka Lobster Boy. Jimmy has a reputation for pleasing the ladies of Jupiter, Florida with his strange hands, and the look on Peters’ face is reminiscent of Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands. The only people that show up for the show (even with the headlining Tattler twins) are Gloria Mott (Frances Conroy) and her son, Dandy (Finn Whittock), a petulant twirp who shouldn’t be able to wrap his mother around his finger and pull off a sweater that tight.  Gloria tries to even buy the Tattlers from Elsa, but she balks at Gloria’s offers.

Then that damn clown keeps showing up. The residents of Jupiter are being kidnapped and slaughtered in their sleep, and the clown keeps emerging from the shadows. It’s like Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck read all the message boards about fans being afraid of clowns and amped up the presence of this painted ghoul. A policeman tracks down Bette and Dot from the posters Elsa placed all over town, but before he can arrest the twins for the murder of their mother, Jimmy intervenes and kills him. Jimmy gives an impassioned speech about how they will all act like monsters If society sees them as so, and then the troupe participates in dismembering the policeman’s body…as the clown looks on menacingly behind a tree. If that wasn’t enough, he pops up again riding the carousel at night. He’s terrifying.

If Lange is actually leaving at the end of this season, Murphy is giving her a fond farewell. During a performance, Elsa sings David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” and it’s just as weird as you’d think it’d be. It’s sort of a triumphant moment, because it shows that Murphy can still take us all by surprise. Elsa Mars might be a faded star, but that doesn’t mean that she will stop acting like the diva that she know she can be (“Stars don’t pay,” she tells a waitress before slowly stalking out of a junky diner). Last season, Lange’s Fiona Goode was only concerned about her diminishing physical beauty, but Elsa Mars is worried about her legacy. Lange is serving some Norma Desmond in the final scene, but the kicker comes at the very end. I’m not sure a lot of people would have guess what Elsa does in the final scene of the premiere.

The brightness of the setting gives the horror an even bigger oomph. Murder House, Asylum and Coven all featured dark aesthetics, but Freak Show pitches a tent in our mind that scary things can happen all around us. Who knows is Murphy can keep it up—he has a tendency to let it all go to hell—but he definitely has our attention.

Just don’t take a balloon from that clown…

Watching the pilot of Mulaney was not unlike going to see your crush perform at a talent show and realizing that they take too much creative advice from their friends.

John Mulaney is incredibly likable. He is the kind of comic who manages to tell a slightly dirty story but remains self-deprecating and adorably affable. If you’ve seen his stand-up routine New in Town on Netflix, you are probably a fan. The problem is that if you are a fan of New in Town, you will recognize a lot of the jokes in Mulaney since they are the exact same jokes used in his act.

Surely, a lot of comics have recycled their own material. Mulaney is an Emmy-winning writer from Saturday Night Live, so I assumed he wanted to show more of his voice. I was particularly excited to see this guy dole out a nice, bite-sized comic morsel every week even though the phrase “filmed in front of a live studio audience” induced cringes immediately.

John Mulaney plays…John Mulaney, a comic writer who lands a gig working for Martin Short’s Lou Cannon, a comedian turned game show host. Mulaney (the show, not the man) wants you to believe that Short is this crazy, over-the-top loon, but the show doesn’t allow to go as bonkers as we might like him too. Perhaps the creators were just deathly afraid of Short running around on set (anyone who saw him as a player on Hollywood Game Night knows Short can be slippery to take grab hold of). I was hoping for some Stark Raving Mad-level difficultness, but maybe I am the only person that remembers Stark Raving Mad.

Nasim Pedrad and Seaton Smith play Jane and Motif, John’s roommates who are WHAAACKY! as well. In the pilot, Motif (also a comedian) tries to get a joke off the ground (I guess he tries his material one punchline at a time), but it’s Jane’s introductory storyline that is a bit concerning. The first time we see Jane, she slams the door closed behind her and exclaims, “I’m not crazy!” She then goes on to explain that it’s socially acceptable for a man to be branded as crazy, but “she’s crazy” is a two word phrase that changes the entire perception about a woman (“There’s a rumor that Katharine Heigl is difficult, so she’s, like, DEAD!”). Jane spends the rest of her time in the pilot running around and acting incredibly irrational over her ex-boyfriend.

When Mulaney (the man, not the show) is allowed to perform rants, he’s funny, because it’s like he’s on a stage by himself with a microphone. When he actually has to act with some of the other actors, he can come across wooden and unfunny, but that can be remedied over time. Pedrad is adorable, but she deserves better material. Did she really leave SNL for this? On SNL, she was never singled out as being a weak link, but she’s more exposed on this show. She’s game and fun, though. Elliot Gould randomly pops up as Mulaney’s gay neighbor (limps wrists and all), and Zack Pearlman plays Mulaney’s pot dealer. On a complete side note, I am personally calling for a moratorium on schlubby, stupid male characters this fall season. Pearlman is one and A to Z’s Henry Zebrowski is another. They aren’t real people, and they are wasting everyone’s time with their “look how outlandish and loose I am” presence. It’s insulting.

The recycled jokes feel lazy, and the entire show feels dated. I want the best for John Mulaney, because of my not-so-subtle crush on him.  I only say this out of love: work harder or your show will get the axe. For everyone else out there, fire up your Netflix and watch New in Town.

Showtime’s Homeland returns in its fourth season a show reborn. Gone are the repetitive, overlong opening credits, sullen Dana, and Brody family drama. Risen in its place, at least over the first two episodes, is a taut, focused, and compelling drama series that is reminiscent of the series’ first season.

This is the Homeland we should have known after its first season, second season at the most.

In its first of two episodes, Homeland returns the action to the Middle East where Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), based on information obtained by her station chief Sandy Bachman (the great Corey Stoll), approves the bombing of a farmhouse where a target is known to reside.

Initially, it appears to be an unfortunately standard beginning. The bomb run happens while the crew in operations holds a birthday celebration for their “Drone Queen.” The operation, however, managed to wipe out several members of a wedding party, a tragic event played to the hilt by Pakistan media.

The series wisely introduces Aayan Ibrahim (Suraj Sharma) as a Pakistani medical student, the nephew of the bombing run’s target, as he reacts to the murder of most of his family. He happened to be filming the wedding party when the bombs struck, and his video is leaked to the Internet, inciting mass outrage in Pakistan. His is a well-drawn character that puts a human face on the side effects of warring nations.

The situation escalates, culminating in a shocking scene at the end of the first episode (which I will not spoil) that I honestly never saw coming. And that’s a very good thing for a series in its fourth season to be doing.

The second episode deals with the fallout of those events and features Carrie and Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) back in the United States facing the wrath of Andrew Lockhart (Tracy Letts), the new director of the CIA. You get the feeling, though, that Carrie would much rather be dealing with CIA wrath than face her own daughter, Brody’s daughter, that she has all but given up to her sister to raise.

In a different kind of tension for the show, Carrie spends an afternoon with her daughter, proving to herself just how terrible she would be as a mother. After having barely fed the baby, Carrie straps her into a car seat, puts her in the front of her car, and drives her first to stare at Brody’s former home and then to interrogate a fellow CIA castaway. She also nearly drowns the baby while bathing her.

Naturally, Carrie finds a way to return to Pakistan and rekindles her bond with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) who is wasting away as a security contractor but sees an opportunity to return to power after Lockhart’s presumed failures as CIA director.

Overall, the fourth season start is a very positive indicator of a return to quality for the series. I doubt we will see the same level of Emmy glory bestowed upon it, though, aside from continued love for Danes or Patinkin. That’s not a comment on the series, per se, but more of a commentary on the fickle nature of the TV Academy. If they love you, then they’re likely to love you forever, but once you fall out of their graces, it’s very difficult to get back in.

Still, after a dreadful third season, it’s a welcome return to form for the series. Just hope that, in whatever direction the series takes, we continue to steer far, far away from the sexting, suicidal Dana Brody.

The highlights of last night’s Sarah Silverman-hosted second outing of Saturday Night Live were few and far between. That’s bad form for SNL as the noted comedienne surely attracted a broader audience than your average host, and the episode bitterly disappointed her fans, this one included.

Silverman’s opening monologue probably featured a significant clue to her downfall. She felt unnatural and forced, referencing her troubles in finding material that would make it beyond the NBC censors. It could have been a gimmick, but, given what followed, I suspect there was truth there. Her best monologue material employed past footage of her brief stint as a featured player on the show.

The episode offered a great deal of content, seemingly more than the average show. Despite the overall content, most skits felt short and focused. What we were given, though, simply wasn’t funny. But let’s start with the best of the night.

I did find this week’s movie parody, The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything, quite amusing because it so completely nailed the look and feel of the original film while skewering it mercilessly. Nothing was sacred, down to the feel-good platitude employed as the slogan: “Because you can’t quarantine your heart.” Good stuff.

A fake commercial, Whites, also delivered some laughs. Referencing the presumed timetable when Caucasians will become the minority in the United States (somewhere, as the ad says, around 2050 or 2060 at the latest), the commercial featured partying whites celebrating their last few years in power. What was on the agenda? Things like camping and hiking, more camping and hiking, and bad dancing to the Train song “Hey Soul Sister.”

And that was largely it for quality in the episode. I suppose you could say the Joan Rivers in Heaven skit had some merit, particularly in the inspiring imitation of Rivers by Silverman, if only Silverman had been able to accurately remember or read her lines. None of the other celebrity impersonations really registered save Adam Levine’s brief but somewhat inspired Freddie Mercury impersonation.

The remainder of the show had the reliable SNL failures we’ve all come to expect: an unfunny political open (side note: SNL hasn’t skewered politics amusingly since the Tina Fey Sarah Palin days, and that’s largely due to her inspired performance. Why do they continue to even try at this point?), the now officially dead zone Weekend Update sequence lead by the personality-free Colin Jost and mysteriously unpracticed Michael Che, and a back half of the show that was dangerously lethargic. One of the main problems of the episode this week is that they didn’t seem to know how to use their biggest assets in the cast: namely, Taran Killam, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Vanessa Bayer, who, historically, has provided great laughs (particularly as Miley Cyrus) but felt completely missing from the show until the very last skit: a weird commentary on the “Keeping up with the Joneses” suburbia mentality called “Vitamix.”

The remainder of the show had the reliable SNL failures we’ve all come to expect: an unfunny political open (side note: SNL hasn’t skewered politics amusingly since the Tina Fey Sarah Palin days, and that’s largely due to her inspired performance. Why do they continue to even try at this point?), the now officially dead zone Weekend Update sequence lead by the personality-free Colin Jost and mysteriously unpracticed Michael Che, and a back half of the show that was dangerously lethargic.

One of the main problems of the episode this week is that they didn’t seem to know how to use their biggest assets in the cast: namely, Taran Killam, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Vanessa Bayer, who, historically, has provided great laughs (particularly as Miley Cyrus) but felt completely missing from the show until the very last skit: a weird commentary on the “Keeping up with the Joneses” suburbia mentality called “Vitamix.”

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Due to eastern skirmishes that are sinking the shipping freights, cocaine is in near-absent supply from NYC area hospitals, including The Knick. As goes the cocaine, so goes Dr. Thackery.

Having seemingly addicted Nurse Elkins to the drug during their lovemaking, Thackery (and his body itself) is desperate for the drug, and he physically and mentally deteriorates through the episode, culminating in his inability to perform a surgery. During all of this, Thackery is upstaged at a medical conference by a Jewish doctor who invests an early scoping device that allows doctors to see inside a patient. He ends the episode in an opium haze, trying to escape from literally everything that has recently plagued him.

Last night’s episode, “Working Late A lot,” wasn’t as engaging or intense as last week’s riot-based outing. Instead, it focused on character development and the various life-altering challenges they all face.

Cornelia Robertson continues her love affair with Dr. Algie Edwards seemingly undetected, although one wonders how long that will hold true given the fact that she takes taxis (or what passes for taxis in this era) to Edwards’s less desirable address. Her recent victory in helping apprehend Typhoid Mary is about to be undone, however, as Mary sues and obtains her freedom in court. The judge presiding over the case failed to understand Mary’s unique position of being a carrier of the disease without suffering from it.

NYC health inspector Jacob Speight, a crass vulgar man who relished tracking down Mary, issues an amusing directive as they leave the court, basically pleading for Mary to begin washing her hands after going to the bathroom. He just used much plainer language than I did.

Grimly, Mary is allowed back into the job placement system under another name and, as history tells us, will undoubtedly continue to spread her disease.

Dr. Thackery’s two assistant surgeons also continue to face significant challenges in the episode.

Having recently lost his infant daughter to illness and nearly lost his wife due to grief-stricken madness, Dr. Gallinger works with Sister Harriet to adopt a recently abandoned little girl, roughly the same age as his dead daughter. He tries to force the child onto his wife, but the results are not positive. By the end of the episode, the child is seen crawling around their dining room in a filthy diaper while his wife knits a wool cap for their dead child.

Bertie, or Dr. Bertram Chickering, Jr., as his father would have you call him, continues to forge his own way at The Knick in working with Thackery on papers illustrating their recent success with a placenta previa surgery. However, Bertie is faced with deciphering Thack’s withdrawal-induced ramblings while his father continues to hound him about abandoning The Knick (really Thackery) and either joining his father’s practice or, if he must, working for the Jewish doctor who, earlier, upstaged Thackery.

Bertie confesses his love for Nurse Elkins to his father while completely unaware that she does not share those same affections. Elkins likes the bad boys while Bertie is just too nice (re: boring) for her.

While the episode doesn’t see the highlights and visceral thrills of last week’s outing, it’s still a very accomplished character study. We are given several well-considered scenes of character development and insight into their psyches – particularly in Nurse Elkins’s discussion of her preacher father and its hint at why she so readily jumped into the relationship with Thackery.

You get the sense that, eventually, all of the characters are going to rudely crash the way Thackery does and that, when it eventually happens, there won’t be enough cocaine or even opium to go around and ease the pain.