Sorry I didn’t get this up last night, kids. Truly brutal day + TiVo upfuckery + no way I was going to stay awake long enough to pick it back up again at midnight. And thank Christ, because if I’d watched this after watching The Killing I think I’d have chopped all my own hair off too.

By which I mean, spoilers within.

UGGGGHHHH Maggie. And just like that I love her again. The quiet rage, the holding back, and the tension between her and Rebecca was just perfect. Remember in the pilot, the way Mackenzie and Charlie talked about Maggie and Mackenzie? “She’s been to way too many funerals for a girl her age?” “She’s me before I grew into myself?” She’s growing into herself now, and someday she’ll show her scars like an Olympian shows his medals, but it’s going to take a while. And I don’t know if Mack, if she knows, will be able to forgive herself.

The only thing worse than ruining someone is making them. It’s the worst thing you can do to someone, the worst thing in the entire world.

Quick takes: Elliott and Don had it exactly right, if you don’t say the word you don’t know what this was about. Will, admitting that you are an asshole does not make you less of an asshole. I don’t know why people keep falling for that instead of yelling THEN BE LESS OF A JACKHOLE YOU PENILE IMPLANT at him. And the thing about the Tea Party — how do they keep getting this so wrong? Those assholes constantly said they had no formal leadership. What they had, and what the movements Will cited had, was message discipline, which is not the same thing. And by the by, putting people in leadership roles in the civil rights movement lined them up to be shot, so maybe no so much on the unadulterated virtues of a visible spokesman for everything.

This show every week gives me flashbacks, because not telling your editors is a thing you do, when you don’t know what a story is yet. So they see you running around like a chicken on fire, complaining that you have no time and you’re not sleeping when all you’ve filed that day is a 10-inch meeting story, and they cannot fathom what the fuck your problem is. And then it drops. The story breaks or it’s time for you to break it and you throw it all at them, and it’s almost the end of the chase and you are exhausted but the Red Team is hearing it all new. So much about this rings true to me, so much more this season than last.

Neal hugging Jerry because you really do, in that moment, love someone you’ve basically just met and on a daily basis think is kind of an asshole THAT MUCH.

Jim and Hallie and Will and Mack and Sloan and Don because you spend all this time in a foxhole with these people and the boundaries get blurred. You start thinking you have a right to things you don’t have a right to. It’s not that you tip over into sex always. It’s so much more than that. These people fucking own you, body and soul. Sex is like the least dangerous thing that happens in those situations.

The whole ep I thought was fantastic, but this, most of all: The way Charlie, who was in a bar in Da Nang when the world exploded, read the report and went still and quiet in his soul. Sam Waterson, please, for all the awards, just for that moment of silence.

A.