So, season four of Breaking Bad was going along great until Gus’s crew got shot at and then Gus comes strolling out like he’s Tony Montana or something, throwing his hands in the air like, what’s up? It was so bad that they even tried to explain it by having Jesse ask, “What was up with that Terminator shit?” to which we get some vague answer intended to blow things over. That’s it? We’re supposed to just buy that line and move on? What’s more, they finally went overboard with Jesse’s angst by having him accuse Walt of poisoning the little boy. But then lo and behold, the last scene hints that Jesse might’ve been right in his assumption after all. Either way, I hope they shore up this hokey writing in season five that they’ve been settling for. Otherwise it could escalate to the point where Heisenberg creates an ecto-skeleton made out of liquid metal that takes the shape of anything he touches, while going around saying, “I’ll be back,” in an Austrian accent.  

This past week in the NFL, I would’ve bet my life on New Orleans to beat St. Louis. Literally. If a man dressed in black and carrying a scythe came up to me and said, “I’ll give you a million dollars if New Orleans wins this game heads up, but if they lose I get your soul-slash-life,” I would’ve locked the bet in without even thinking twice. And I would be one soulless, lifeless loser right now. I mean seriously, how did the Saints lose that game? This was a team that had scored 56 points all year going up against a team that had scored 62 points the previous week alone. The Rams secondary is atrocious. So bad that in week three earlier this year, Baltimore kept dialing up the same play over and over –the deep ball to rookie Torrey Smith– until Smith had accumulated three catches for three touchdowns and over 180 yards. All in the first quarter. How was it possible that Drew Brees, the league leader in passing yards who somehow completes over 50% of his passes to receivers more than twenty yards downfield, was not able to exploit that porous secondary? The only answer I can think of is that old adage that starts off, On any given Sunday…

So I started watching The Walking Dead, the hit series on AMC about zombies, and was quite enjoying it until I started noticing all these loose ends that weren’t being tied up anywhere. Like the black guy with his kid from the first season. Or the redneck that got left behind after being handcuffed to the roof of a skyscraper in Atlanta. We at least know that he escaped after they went to all that trouble to show us that he’d cut off his hand and cauterized it and everything. I mean, did they just forget about him? Even his brother hasn’t mentioned his absence since the first season. So I did a little research and found out that the creator of the show had fired all the writers from the first season and was hiring different freelance writers to work on each episode. Which makes me wonder if the new freelance writers even care about tying up those loose ends? I mean after all, it wasn’t their idea in the first place.

Go to themolotovcocktail.com to read the first published piece of fiction by Paul Rinn. It’s flash fiction (only 650 words long), so there’s no excuses for not giving it a gander.