Inspirational Lubricant Du Jour: I was going to list here the beer I drank last night (Sierra Nevada Hoptimum),  but I’m so nervous about tonight’s episode of BB that I just went out and bought not one, but two expensive bottles of top-notch brew. They’re basically the blue meth of beers. I may pound through both before the night’s out. 

1. Ballast Point Sculpin IPA

2. Firestone Double Jack Imperial IPA

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More facts, folks:

1) Last week’s episode cut to black in the middle of a bullet-ridden, honest-to-goodness firefight the likes of which Paul has played out in his head a million times. Somewhere between 0 and 7 people will be dead within the first 5 minutes of tonight’s episode. Or, more likely, Gilligan will troll us by starting the episode in some totally different place and not letting us know whether Gomey Pyle (!) makes it out alive. Ugh.

2) Tonight’s episode is called “Ozymandias.” I can only assume that Gilligan is referring to this poem by Percy Bysse Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ 

Does that sound like we’re in for something fun? Kitties and puppy dogs? Amusing Jesse faces? Hell fucking no. We’re in for pain. I don’t know what specifically the allusion refers to, but if I had to guess I’d go with “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” That sure sounds like our boy Walt. Or, more specifically, his WAlter Ego (!): Heisenberg.

I suppose it’s possible that he’s alluding to the Watchmen character, but it seems unlikely:

Chiseled-Jaw-zymandias. (!)

3) Tonight’s episode is the third in the BB world directed by Rian Johnson, he of the direction of Brick, Brothers Bloom and the tits-bang awesome Looper. He’s notorious in people-who-know-shit-about-movies circles for not fucking around.

The sound you’re not hearing is the sound of Rian Johnson not. fucking. around.

So – with all those horrifying facts in mind, I’m getting some seriously bad juju as we come up on T-1 hour to the beginning of the antepenultimate episode of BB. I think we’re in for pain. Red Wedding-style pain. And if there’s one thing my sort-of-live blogging venture has shown me, it’s that trying to be witty while watching one of the greatest stories of ever told on TV is a lot of fucking work. Plus, it’s distracting.

So guess what, kids? I have no choice but to bow the fuck out.

I’m tapping out. No live blog tonight. If I’m still alive at the end, I’ll try to add a stream-of-consciousness word-vomit of incoherence below. But if I’m dead (or Jesse is), then it’s been a good run.

No, I’m pretty sure somebody we love is going out tonight. And I’ll be tempted to respond to this Shelley masterpiece with an excerpt from another. In “Adonais,” Shelley crafts an epic lament based on the classical Greek model, for his recently departed probably-not-gay-lover friend John Keats. Keats died at age 23. I don’t know how old Jesse is, but his death would be similarly harrowing. You know, for me. So that I can look cool in case I’m right, here’s a premature lament for whomever is going out tonight, courtesy of my boy Bysshe:

Enjoy, peeps. It’s going to be awful.