Eliana Willis

Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Bagman’It takes nerve and skill to tell a story as grueling as the one told in “Bagman,” an episode which consists largely of two men trudging through the desert, dragging $7 million in cash and some high powered weaponry. The nerviest choice made by the writers is surely the one made at the end.There is no end. At least there is no end to the suffering. We close with Mike and Jimmy, more parched than ever, walking on a desolate dirt road, no closer to salvation than when that Suzuki Esteem sputtered and died. Well, slightly closer. At least no one is trying to kill them now.Any other show would have written the last scene like this: Mike shoots the driver in the head. Driver crashes, but in a way that leaves the car intact. Also, there’s a jug of water on the passenger seat.In the merciless universe of this show — much as with the merciless universe we live in — good luck is doled out sparingly. Jimmy had the superb fortune to be tailed by Mike as he ran his $7 million errand, which saved his life. That, in tandem with Mike’s astounding chops as a sniper, is plenty of luck, when you consider the alternatives.Vince Gilligan takes a turn as director, and his debt to “No Country for Old Men” is evident throughout. It’s especially evident during the shootout, a spectacle that owes much to the unseen massacre that ignites the action of that great Coen Brothers movie, which leaves in its aftermath a gruesome menagerie of Mexican corpses, bullet-riddled vehicles and the notable absence of a large pile of loot.Gilligan is not just borrowing “No Country’s” plot, setting and color palette. Jimmy is a quintessential Coen Brothers character in “Bagman.” He’s a guy who pursues money, gets it and then finds it is both a physical burden and an existential threat. The bag of money in this episode weighs a little more than 154 pounds, according to the internet. I’d be tempted to bury it, too. By the time Mike explains why that is a lousy idea, it’s fair to assume that Jimmy would have gladly passed on his $100,000 commission for this “little drive through the desert,” as Lalo described it.By the time Jimmy walks down the road, a piece of shiny bait for a homicidal driver, odds are he would have gladly paid $100,000 to be anywhere else.Kim called it. Not surprisingly, she is the voice of sanity in this couple, and already the spousal immunity that was the rationale for taking Jimmy as a husband is paying off. At least, rhetorically. She gets to tell Lalo that she doesn’t pose a legal threat to him because she can’t be compelled to testify against her husband.Fine. But she could be compelled to testify against Lalo, couldn’t she? Not that she knows much at this point. She knows only that the guy is part of a Mexican cartel and sent her husband to retrieve $7 million in a desert.Which, now that I type it, sounds bad. Mike has a point when he says that Kim is now in the game. We now understand why the writers made such a big deal out of Kim’s insistence on full disclosure from Jimmy as a condition for marriage. It is borderline insane for him to have told her anything about her client, let alone this early morning mission.In “The Sopranos,” Carmella was wise enough to make sure she knew as little as possible about her husband’s mafia life, and when she asked too many questions, Tony reminded her of the value of her ignorance. The difference is that Carmella knew she had married into the mob. Saul, on the other hand, is becoming a criminal in real time, right before our eyes.Anyone else fear for Kim?Odds and Ends:Tony Dalton’s performance as Lalo is one of the standouts of this season. Were you to read the script alone, you wouldn’t find a lot of charm on the page. Yet Dalton has managed to infuse this rascal with devil-may-care charisma, which somehow makes him even more frightening.“Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” have set a high bar for the creation of villains and Lalo is a worthy addition to a Hall of Fame that includes such sociopaths as Tuco, Leonel and Marco Salamanca (the shark-skinned twins who make symmetry seem chilling every time they show up) and Gus Fring.But to the extent that the show’s writers are setting up a battle between Lalo and Gus, they have a problem: We know already that Gus wins. Actually, we know simply that Gus doesn’t lose. (Maybe Lalo becomes a telenovela actor in Mexico during the “Breaking Bad” era. It could happen!) In these circumstances, how will the writers wring suspense out of the coming battle?It’s a pickle. Gilligan and his staff love to put their characters in predicaments out of which they seemingly can’t escape, so maybe they are the right people for this job.Did you think that Eminen’s “My Name Is” was playing during part of the forced march through the desert? I did. Briefly. That’s because I had never heard Labi Siffre’s “I Got the,” a 1975 soul track which the rapper, born Marshall Mathers, sampled for his breakout hit in 1999.Plot question: When Lalo shows up at court with $7 million, as I presume he will, won’t that seem suspicious? I mean, very, very suspicious?Answers in the comment section, please.I’ve got people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, and they never will. More

James Drury, an actor best remembered as the stolid, black-hatted title character of the long-running NBC western “The Virginian,” died on Monday at his home in Houston. He was 85.Karen Lindsey, his assistant, confirmed the death in an email but did not specify a cause. Mr. Drury, who had iceberg-blue eyes and a no-nonsense mien befitting a frontier hero, appeared on television westerns like “Broken Arrow,” “Cheyenne” and “Wagon Train” before he landed the role on “The Virginian.” The show, which was loosely based on Owen Wister’s novel “The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains” (1902), began airing in 1962.Mr. Drury’s character, the tough but fair foreman of the Shiloh Ranch in Wyoming, was never named, and little of his history was revealed. He tussled with cattle rustlers and other outlaws threatening the ranch until “The Virginian” was canceled in 1971, after 249 episodes.Only two other television westerns, “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza,” lasted longer (“Gunsmoke” the longest).“The Virginian’s” weekly episodes were, unsual for a primetime series, 90 minutes long, requiring a grueling shooting schedule that Mr. Drury, speaking to Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2016, compared to “making a movie a week.”The show featured many stunts, including tricky riding sequences and fistfights, that Mr. Drury sometimes took part in himself rather than having a stuntman take his place.This had its advantages, like allowing Mr. Drury’s face to appear in action shots, and its disadvantages, like risking injuries. In one choreographed fight, a stuntman threw an extra punch, “which was not in the script and hit me in the temple like a Missouri mule,” Mr. Drury said in an oral history interview. He spent the next several days of shooting trying to hide the golf ball-size lump on his head.“The Virginian’s” cast, which rotated over the years, included Lee J. Cobb, Clu Gulager, Roberta Shore and Charles Bickford.The show also featured a host of guest stars, like Bette Davis, Lee Marvin, Joan Crawford, Robert Redford, Leonard Nimoy and Harrison Ford. Mr. Drury and Doug McClure, who played the lighthearted cowhand Trampas, were the only actors to stay with the series for its entire run.In 2018, Mr. Drury told the Oklahoma newspaper The Daily Ardmoreite that he was grateful for his years as the Virginian, even though the role defined the rest of his career.“The Virginian was an indelible character,” he said. “I had a great deal of issues getting past being seen as the man in the black hat.”James Child Drury Jr. was born on April 18, 1934, in New York City to James and Beatrice Drury. His father was a professor of marketing at New York University, and his mother’s family owned a ranch in Salem, Ore.He spent much of his childhood on the ranch, learning horseback riding, marksmanship and other skills that would prove useful to his career in westerns. He started acting in the theater when he was 8.Mr. Drury attended New York University but left after signing a contract with MGM. He appeared in films like “Forbidden Planet” (1956); “Love Me Tender” (1956), Elvis Presley’s first feature film; and “Bernardine” (1957), Pat Boone’s first feature. He also appeared in movie westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962).Mr. Drury’s first two marriages, to Cristall Orton and Phyllis Mitchell, ended in divorce. His third wife, Carl Ann Head, died in 2019.He is survived by two sons, James Jr. and Timothy; a stepdaughter, Rhonda Brown; two stepsons, Frederick Drury and Gary Schero; four grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.After “The Virginian” went off the air, Mr. Drury starred on the television show “Firehouse” and appeared on shows like “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.” He was also a regular at western festivals around the country, where fans were still eager to meet the man in the black hat. More

What’s on TVBROKEN PLACES 10 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This documentary from the writer-director Roger Weisberg looks back over his decades of work about at-risk children, weaving in the voices of researchers like Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dr. W. Thomas Boyce. Both pediatricians, Harris and Boyce have been recognized for their work with children whose development is affected by adversity. Through a series of interviews, these experts present hypotheses about why some people may be better equipped to overcome the challenges presented by their upbringings than others. Bobby Gross, 35, is one of the subjects who had been filmed when he was young, at age 5, in this effort to track people confronting adversity.ANTIQUES ROADSHOW: TREASURE FEVER 8 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This longstanding collectors’ classic will air a timely segment, “Treasure Fever,” continuing the tradition of appraising historical items with auction house experts. This time, the focus is on the history of medicine. The antiques include a doctor’s bag from the Lakota Sioux and the sword of a Civil War medical officer.What’s StreamingPIXOTE (1981) Stream on Criterion. The Portuguese word “pixote” roughly translates as “peewee” or “small child” — but the title character of this movie has a persona that is anything but. Though Pixote is a child, the streets of São Paulo — as well as its bars, brothels and juvenile detention centers — have left Pixote looking “about 60 years old,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times. The movie follows its protagonist who, after breaking out of detention, must survive in the city with the help of his new friends — and includes resorting to stealing and killing. “Pixote” is the third film by the director Hector Babenco, who “looks at his juvenile vagrants at eye level, in closeup,” Canby added, “as if he were one of them, making no judgments on their behavior, seeing no further into the future than they do.”INDIA SONG (1975) Stream on Mubi. A comment from the director Marguerite Duras on ennui, or “leprosy of the soul,” “India Song” is a meticulously arranged film about an unsatisfied woman who has come to an unfortunate end. Most of the movie takes place in the French Embassy in Calcutta, where the French ambassador lives with his wife, Anne-Marie (Delphine Seyrig). Anne-Marie is pictured in a red evening dress surrounded by her lovers and suitors — whom she has grown tired of — in a drawing room cut off from the rest of India. In what is perhaps a stylistic representation of Anne-Marie’s condition, the film’s dialogue is disembodied from its images, Canby wrote in his review for The Times, adding that “the movie looks and sounds like something shot underwater.”DEADWATER FELL Stream on Acorn TV. The actors David Tennant and Cush Jumbo star in this British mystery drama making its North American debut. After the suspicious killings of some members of a Scottish family, everything the characters know about each other is questioned. More

Season 3, Episode 4: ‘The Mother of Exiles’“No one knows you like I do. No one knows me like you.”Those were Dolores’s words to Charlotte-bot in a hotel room on last week’s episode of “Westworld,” which went out of its way to withhold the answer to a question that the show’s fans had been guessing about since the end of Season 2: Whose pearl is inside Charlotte-bot? The line suggested that somehow Dolores had saved Teddy’s pearl and popped it in Charlotte-bot’s head, or maybe it was her father, since both of them had been part of her loop. It was obvious that the writers were teasing us with a little misdirection, but the possible candidates were narrowed.And now this week, in a flurry of crosscuts across multiple planes of action, comes a mega-reveal: Charlotte-bot is Dolores. Martin Connells, the glowering “fixer” for Liam Dempsey Jr., is now a host and also Dolores. And Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Singapore yakuza boss sitting on barrels of android amniotic fluid? He’s Dolores, too. Dolores is clearly a believer in the idea that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Now the replicated control units she smuggled out of the park are a Borg-like hive of deadly, calculating, mission-oriented robots who have elegantly coordinated roles to play in the A.I. rebellion.The twist feels like a cheat, just as the show’s agonizing coyness about Charlotte’s host identity felt like a cheat. The assumption had been that bodies could be reproduced but control units could not, and that the pearls Charlotte-bot took out of the park each belonged to a separate host. But the writers of “Westworld” seek out assumptions like lemon juice to paper cuts, and this particular reveal has been calibrated to sting a little.Keep in mind, too, that Charlotte-bot told Dolores last week that she felt the real Charlotte was asserting herself, so along with these copies of pearls and copies of bodies, other metaphysical struggles are possible. So the question will then become not only who controls what body but also how much control those bodies can exert over them. Which is essentially a question about what “who” even means. Buckle up for that.In the meantime, Dolores’s plans are proceeding apace, since she has anticipated everyone’s moves, installed copies of herself in the right host bodies and choreographed an ambush, like Michael Corleone at the baptism in “The Godfather.” She and Caleb use encryption keys in the bloodstream to raid the hapless Dempsey’s bank account. She swiftly neutralizes Bernard and Stubbs’s attempt to stop her from a “kill and replace” plan to install herself at the head of Incite. She uses a Musashi-bot to run a sword through Maeve and put down the Serac threat for now. And, in Caleb, she has found a crucial disciple in the human world — at least for as long as he doesn’t question the mission, as Teddy did.In Charlotte form, Dolores also makes quick work of William, the Man in Black, but not before Ed Harris does quite a bit of acting. There’s no doubt that William is a tragic figure, though he’s brought all of the tragedies upon himself. He was instrumental in conceiving Westworld and unleashing the robot apocalypse that is currently on the march. His choices also led to his brother-in-law Logan sinking into despair and dying of an overdose, his wife Juliet slicing her wrists in the bathtub and William himself shooting his daughter Emily by accident, due to an itchy trigger finger and a loose grip on reality. Now he’s haunted by all these ghosts, Emily’s especially, and shattering enough mirrors to guarantee several decades of bad luck.Charlottes comes to William with the ostensible purpose of securing his support to take Delos private before Serac seizes the company in a hostile takeover. But getting him cleaned up and presentable allows the show — and Harris — too much latitude in expressing his mental state. In the first season, when a younger William, played by Jimmi Simpson, was exploring the park, it was fascinating to witness his corruptibility, but the Man In Black character is a caterwauling bore, doomed to rattle around the labyrinth of his own twisted conscience. There’s nothing in the center of that maze.Paranoid Androids:The question ghost-Emily poses to her father, “What if every choice you ever made wasn’t a choice at all, but something written in your code?,” continues to draw a connection between humans and hosts, and their similar inability to follow their own paths. The message of the third season is that humans have loops, too, and they also have monitors to make sure they stay on them.A flashback with Dolores and Bernard foreshadows the multiple Doloreses twist: “You taught me that anything was possible. We could be anyone we wanted, live however we want. Isn’t that what you believe?”The future may be a hellish Silicon Valley dystopia, but picking out clothes without the hassle of changing rooms is an undeniable victory for progress.Incidentally, Paris has been nuked. There will be no follow-up questions at this time.Genre is a hell of a drug. As is “Genre.” More

What’s StreamingINVISIBLE LIFE (2019) Stream on Amazon. Two inseparable sisters are torn apart in “Invisible Life,” a drama from the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz. Based on a popular novel by Martha Batalha and set in early 1950s Rio de Janeiro, the film begins by introducing the siblings, their tight relationship and their differing desires. Guida (Julia Stockler) has fallen for a Greek sailor; Eurídice (Carol Duarte) wants to pursue a career as a pianist. Then Guida elopes, Eurídice is pushed to marry and it becomes unclear whether the sisters will ever see each other again. That separation is largely due to their father, who lies to keep them apart. The film won the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and has done well with critics. In his review for The New York Times, Glenn Kenny called it “a modern melodrama that’s proud to be one,” adding that the film’s “mix of vivid period detail and raw frankness about sexuality and poverty and women’s oppression is heady and bracing; its depiction of female friendship and love is pointedly ferocious.”HOME BEFORE DARK Stream on Apple TV Plus. “I’m a reporter,” Hilde, the main character of this new series, says in the show’s opening minutes. “I know it seems weird, but I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember.” That can’t be very long: She’s still in elementary school. Based loosely on the life of the young journalist Hilde Lysiak, “Home Before Dark” stars Brooklynn Prince (“The Florida Project”) as Hilde Lisko, a girl who, inspired by her reporter father (played by Jim Sturgess), gets an early start on a career in journalism — and eventually breaks open a cold case in a small town.What’s on TVDISHING WITH JULIA CHILD 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Watch famous chefs watch Julia Child make food in this series, which has cooks like José Andrés, Carla Hall, Marcus Samuelsson and Vivian Howard give commentary on vintage TV footage of Child, and discuss Child’s influence. “She’s making it look very approachable,” Howard says in the second episode, as Child handles bread dough. “Like Tuesday afternoon.”TOP GUN (1986) 8 p.m. on AMC. What’s the ultimate balm for being stuck inside? Maybe it’s a nature documentary. Maybe it’s a travel show. Or perhaps it’s “Top Gun,” Tony Scott’s soaring (and unhinged) action blockbuster, filled with open blue sky and flattering shots of Tom Cruise. Cruise plays a cocky combat pilot, a role he’s set to reprise later this year in “Top Gun: Maverick.” This original “Top Gun” is “stupid,” Manohla Dargis observed in a recent article in The Times. “But it’s rarely boring,” she added, “and it can be irresistible. Watching it yet again, I was struck by the pictorial elegance and dynamism of the aerial sequences. They’re hypnotic, and I would have happily watched more looping, zooming action.” More

This obituary is part of a series about people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.TOKYO — Ken Shimura could make people laugh just by tweaking a traditional dance, mangling an English lesson or acting like a shogun fool.Mr. Shimura, a beloved comedian in Japan, died on Sunday at a hospital in Tokyo, the Izawa Office, which represented him, said. He was 70.His slapstick humor, physical comedy and naïve persona made him a household name in Japan for nearly five decades. Generations of children grew up watching his comedy skits and dance routines. And before there was “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” Mr. Shimura introduced the concept of broadcasting footage contributed by viewers on the variety show “Kato-Chan Ken-Chan Gokigen TV,” which aired for six years on Saturday nights on TBS, one of Japan’s main television networks.Mr. Shimura started feeling sick on March 17 and developed a fever and extreme fatigue two days later. He was hospitalized on March 20 and tested positive for the coronavirus three days later.Tell us about someone you’ve lost to the coronavirusThe Times is telling the stories of those who have died in the pandemic. Suggest a family member or friend below. More

If you’ve finished tearing through all seven episodes of the hit show “Tiger King” and you’re looking for more, we’ve got some reading suggestions.Image‘Geek Love,’ by Katherine DunnIn Dunn’s novel — which still sells briskly more than 30 years after its publication — Aloysius Binewski and his wife, Crystal Lil, run a carnival freak show stocked with their own children, all born with deformities thanks to their parents’ intentional experimentation “with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes.” There’s Arturo, or Aqua Boy, born with flippers instead of arms and legs; the conjoined twins Iphigenia and Electra; and Olympia, an albino hunchback. “America’s sentimental attachment to geeks is the dark side of its sentimental attachment to Mom and apple pie,” Stephen Dobyns wrote in his review. “That geekiness — the comic exploration of the peculiar as an end in itself — is what gives ‘Geek Love’ its main success.”Image‘The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird,’ by Joshua HammerThis mesmerizing true-crime saga burrows into the mind of Jeffrey Lendrum, a wild-bird trafficker and smuggler who takes unfathomable risks, like dangling 700 feet from a helicopter to swipe eggs from gyrfalcon nests. “Lendrum’s own demons run deeper than money or family,” Suzanne Joinson wrote in her review. “They spiral into everything that is wrong with humanity’s relationship with the natural world: ownership, possession, domination, an endless risk-seeking, thrill-hunting death drive and profound betrayal.”Image‘Swamplandia!,’ by Karen Russell“This is a novel about alligator wrestlers, a balding brown bear named Judy Garland, a Bird Man specializing in buzzard removal, a pair of dueling Florida theme parks, rampaging melaleuca trees, a Ouija board and the dead but still flirtatious Louis Thanksgiving,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review. “Sound appealing? No, it does not. But wait. Ms. Russell knows how to use bizarre ingredients to absolutely irresistible effect.”Image‘The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers,’ by Bryan ChristyOur reviewer summed it up like this: “Smugglers with lizards stuffed in their underwear waltzing through customs in American airports; designers breeding large pythons into dazzling colors and selling them as living art for as much as $85,000 — these and other eye-popping details are plentiful in ‘The Lizard King,’ Bryan Christy’s lively first book.” Christy, a former attorney, reports on the evolution of laws and treaties governing the reptile trade and highlights the work of “under­appreciated, underfinanced ­heroes fighting wildlife crime.”Image‘The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century,’ by Kirk Wallace JohnsonJohnson unspools an utterly fascinating and “complex tale of greed, deception and ornithological sabotage” about a young flutist named Edwin Rist, who in 2009 broke into a British natural history museum and stole hundreds of preserved bird skins. “He intended to fence the birds’ extravagantly colored plumage at high prices to fellow aficionados in hopes of raising enough cash to support both his musical career and his parents’ struggling Labradoodle-breeding business in the Hudson Valley,” wrote our reviewer, Joshua Hammer.Image‘American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land,’ by Monica HesseOver a five-month period starting in 2012, 67 fires were set across an isolated stretch of Virginia. A mechanic eventually took responsibility, but solving the mystery isn’t what makes this book so compelling: It’s the back story of an improbable outlaw and his fiancée, who quickly emerges as one of the most memorable femme fatales in recent true-crime cases. The story, our critic Jennifer Senior wrote, “has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex.”Image‘The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession,’ by Susan OrleanThe veteran reporter and bibliophile (don’t miss her latest, “The Library Book”) introduces readers to John Laroche, a 36-year-old who became so obsessed with orchids, he hired himself out to the Seminole tribe of Florida to set up a plant nursery and propagation laboratory on the tribe’s reservation — and hatched a scheme that would benefit the Seminoles, the world and himself. Our reviewer wrote: “In Ms. Orlean’s skillful handling, her orchid story turns out to be distinctly ‘something more.’ … She writes that orchids appeal to people because they are both smart and sexy: smart in their ability to survive; sexy in their look and feel. She describes the lengths to which collectors have gone to acquire them. She introduces us to people who deal in them, steal them, do anything but kill for them.”Image‘Strange Piece of Paradise,’ by Terri JentzIn 1977, Terri Jentz and her college roommate set out on a cross country bike trip. Seven days into their 4,200-mile journey, the two were camping at a state park in Cline Falls, Ore., when a man in a truck brutally attacked them — first with his truck, then with an ax. “Strange Piece of Paradise” is Jentz’s memoir of her own survival. Our reviewer wrote: “She is condemning American culture, one of easy violence that glorifies ‘the badass outlaw,’ that values ‘self-gratification, impulsivity and irresponsibility, and rewards preening narcissism.’ She is condemning violence against women and a society-wide indifference toward its ubiquity, what she calls our ‘passive complicity.’ … But Jentz keeps the editorializing to a minimum, and her soapbox is, for the most part, more of an easy chair. I felt a bit hopeless, but I never felt harangued.”Image‘Tooth and Claw,’ by T. Coraghessan BoyleThe title of this short-story collection tells you everything you need to know: Marriages are threatened by a batty neighborhood biologist; another man’s paradise in Florida is hit by waves of plagues. And yes, exotic animals do make an appearance — one character’s bedroom is sprayed with raw meat thanks to an African lynx. In many of these comic tales, our reviewer wrote, Boyle “delivers a hint of the sublime, that sensation of brushing against the pelt of something wild and unfathomable.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More