Noiseless Chatter Archive

Hello, everybody! Remember me? The guy who used to write stuff? Well, I’m not dead! In fact, three things have been occupying my time lately. I know it can get frustrating when I’m only posting Better Call Saul reviews and infrequent installments of Fight, Megaman!, but that’s really because it’s all I’ve had time to do lately. I’ll explain those reasons right now, but if you don’t care to read them, please skip to the last one. There’s something I’d like you to do, and it’s fun. I SAID IT IS FUN. Hail Storm: Some of you may know that a couple of weeks ago, the Denver area experienced catastrophic hail. That’s not me being dramatic (for once!); it was literally a catastrophe, doing millions of dollars of damage to homes, businesses, construction projects, and — of course — cars. It probably sounds silly if you weren’t here to experience it, but, sure enough, the hail storm totaled my car. Mine was just one claim Progressive was handling out of 11,000…due to this ...

“Expenses” may be the bleakest episode of Better Call Saul yet, which makes it a worthwhile point of comparison with Breaking Bad . See, that show was pretty bleak as well. On the whole, I’d say the agreed-upon bleakest episode is “Ozymandias,” and I’d have a difficult time putting forth any other forerunner. But what made “Ozymandias” bleak? Well, there were the deaths of major characters: Hank and Gomez. There was the kidnapping of our second lead, Jesse, as a result of our actual lead selling him out. There was the sudden empowerment of the show’s villains, who then seized the money Walt hid in the desert…the money that was, indeed, the root of all of Walt’s evil. There was the clear and unavoidable distinction between the desperate Walt who opened the series and the cruel, mindlessly vindictive Walt we had now. There was sharp betrayal with fatal consequence that left families irreparably broken. It was bleak. And even if you’d finger a different episode as...

Well, that was an unexpectedly busy episode. And a surprisingly good one. I had pretty strongly expected “Off Brand” to be quiet. Probably reflective. Coming off of the massive, important clash of last week’s “Chicanery,” this was a chance for the characters — and for Better Call Saul — to pause. To consider. To look forward and determine, carefully, what to do next. For comparison, think back to the stretch of episodes in Breaking Bad ‘s third season when Walt successfully (though temporarily) extracts himself from the drug trade. A crossroads has been reached. We may know here even better than we knew there that our hero will gravitate back toward darkness, but that silent moment during which the ball hangs suspended in the air is rife with tension. It’s a gift to the writers. It’s a chance to explore what remains after the bomb has gone off. A chance to breathe before everything comes crashing down again. And Better Call Saul doesn’t breathe. It barrels forw...

I probably pushed most of the Mega Man fans away when I said I actually wasn’t all that keen on Mega Man 3 , and I’ll push the rest of them away by saying that I absolutely love Mega Man 4 . It’s a truly wonderful game, and one of the best in the series. That’s not a popular view, I know, and it’s one that I was surprised to arrive at myself. A few years ago I was speaking to a friend of mine about the series, and he said that Mega Man 4 was his favorite. I was…shocked, to say the least. For starters, the answer to that question is Mega Man 2 . This is not up for debate. But for him to pick a game that wasn’t part of the initial celebrated trilogy? That was just…madness. Only it kind of wasn’t, and my surprise was a result of the game’s reputation, not its quality. The annual release of Mega Man games had — at exactly this point — started to grate on people. It made the series feel cheaper and more disposable than it actually was. Each game still represented an expe...

Last week’s episode felt a lot like Breaking Bad . This week’s episode feels a lot like Better Call Saul . There’s always been a balance between the two shows, facilitated mainly by the parallel protagonists. When we’re with Mike, this show feels like its predecessor. When we’re with Jimmy, this show feels like its own beast. And as much as I love Mike, I think it’s safe to say that anyone reading these reviews knows by now that I prefer the time we spend with Jimmy. And watching “Chicanery” — a rare hour without any appearance from Mike at all — I didn’t miss Mike one bit. Better Call Saul is always at its best when it’s charting Jimmy’s journey. When it’s mapping his transition from flawed attorney with a big heart to rampant shyster. When it’s peeling back the cartoon glossiness of Saul Goodman and revealing the hurting, caring, nearly respectable human being within. “He has a way of doing the worst things for reasons that sound almost noble,” Chuck says of him t...

Yeah, I know, my post title sucks, but I don’t really have a running feature on the blog I can tie this to. It’s just a piece of pretty cool television history that I can’t find anywhere on the internet. For all I know, I have the last surviving copy and am therefore morally obligated to drop it into a volcano. But, what the hell, I’ll archive it for future generations instead. I saw this at a convention, and Casey Roberson was nice/vindictive enough to buy it for me. The vendor described it as a piece of promotional material sent to networks to see if they wanted to air ALF . He wasn’t wrong, but I assumed he meant for its initial run. Instead this was distributed in 1989, toward the end of the show’s run, promoting the availability (starting fall of 1990) of ALF for strip syndication. Strip syndication refers to a show’s reruns airing at a fixed time across the entire week, thereby showing up as a long “strip” when laid out on a TV schedule. Of course that also me...

Before I got to watch this episode, I saw somebody say that “Sabrosito” felt a lot like Breaking Bad . That didn’t spoil anything, of course, but I knew exactly what must have been meant by that: there’d be a lot of Mike. That’s interesting to me. As many characters from that legendary show pop up in this one (“Sabrosito” adds Don Eladio to the list), it’s only Mike that feels the same. In some cases that’s clearly by design. Jimmy — the other main Breaking Bad character — is at an entirely different phase of his life. We may see him act like Saul Goodman now and then, but he’s still James Morgan McGill. He pursuing different things than Saul was, in different ways. He has different ways of approaching his problems. His station is almost entirely distinct from the one in which we find him during Breaking Bad . But Mike is Mike. He loves his granddaughter, he’s willing to get his hands dirty, he has an identifiable personal morality, and he has a preternatural gift...