[S2E9] That's Good, That's Bad

George: Hey, fancy seeing you here. I was just out for a little ride.Bree: Don't lie to me, George. You've been riding up and down this street for the last hour.George: I don't want to do this, Bree, but you won't return any of my phone calls.Bree: So stalking me is plan B?(Bree gets into her car. George gets off the bike and goes to her car window)George: Bree, I know I messed up. I know I got some issues to work on, but I'd be willing to see a therapist if that's what you want. I'll do anything but how can I show you that I, I can change if you don't give me a second chance? Come on. You know I'm not a bad person.Bree: I do know that, but I'm just not sure you're a good one, either.

[S2E9] That's Good, That's Bad

George: "Bree, I know I messed up. I know I got some issues to work on, but I'd be willing to see a therapist if that's what you want. I'll do anything but how can I show you that I, I can change if you don't give me a second chance? Come on. You know I'm not a bad person."

Addison: "My wife is on her way. The thing is, if Carol finds out that I've got an adult love child around, that's gonna be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I mean, it's not exactly the only time I've strayed."

Susan: "Oh, that's funny. So, all the times you were cheating on her, that was okay, but having lunch with your daughter, that just crosses the line? I just want a chance to get to know you."

Bree: "Yes, you did. But that's not what I'm talking about. You killed Rex. But I know it wasn't totally your fault because you're not well. So, if you'll just be honest with me, I can forgive you. It'll be the hardest thing I've ever done, but I'll do it. But you have to, you have to tell me the truth."

But on the other hand, it's more opaque than most; you can spend a lot of time turning over in your mind all the little things that invite interpretation. For instance, in a story that's kind of mysterious and magical, why is there this repeated bit about Beard's keys? Jeremy returns them at the pub, Red Dress returns them in her apartment, and her boyfriend returns them after he rescues Beard from James. Eventually, Beard even breaks his key off in the lock. You could read all this as meaning that he doesn't really want to go home, or that he can't really go home, or that home isn't the right place for him. It may well have a neat answer in the minds of the writers that I'm completely missing; I don't know, and honestly, that's not my business. To me, it underscores how lost he feels. He keeps literally losing his way home.

It also gives the pub boys, who are so nicely played by Adam Colborne (Baz), Bronson Webb (Jeremy) and Kevin Garry (Paul), a chance to do something besides stand at the end of the bar and yell, and that's a beautiful thing, too. They really know how to flex the apparently enormous music budget of this show, and just as they used a couple of epic songs at the end of "Man City," they go all-in with "We Are The Champions" here. This was the moment in the episode that brought me to tears (!), because as we've discussed, this show is a knot of love stories, and the boys' love of Richmond is pure and constant, even as the team has been through relegation, even on the heels of a humiliating loss. Where Jane's love collapses when she doesn't get her way, this love is genuinely unconditional, and that's one of the things that makes fans vexing and fascinating.

McDonald's challenge was to find a way to replace a hard fat with a liquid fat. And liquid fats are less than ideal in a deep fryer, that's problem number one. The first replacement oil McDonald's experiments with is a cotton seed and corn oil blend, but that turns out to be really high in something called "trans-fat" and it's not long before everyone realizes that trans-fats are way, way, way worse for you than animal fats; it's not even close. So in 2002, McDonald's changes the oils again, cutting the trans-fat in half. Six years later, they have to switch yet again, this time to get rid of all the trans-fat. Then, there's a problem that vegetable oils aren't nearly as stable as hard fats. All kinds of nasty things happen when you heat them up. The deep fryer suddenly becomes a kind of witches' cauldron, spewing dangerous elements.

MG: They would spontaneously combust! The point is that this is not some trivial matter, it's not. If you order a fried egg in a restaurant, you don't stipulate the medium in which you would like the egg to be cooked. It doesn't matter that much; a fried egg is a fried egg. But think for a moment about what a French fry is. You start with a potato and a potato was basically starch and water, maybe 80% water. You plunge the potato into a vat of cooking oil and the heat of the oil turns the water inside the potato into steam. That steam is the key to the fry. First, it makes the hard starch of potato swell and soften, which is why the interior of a fry is so fluffy and light. At the same time, the steam rising from inside the fry keeps the cooking oil on the surface of the fry instead of seeping into the middle; that's why a fry is brown and crisp on the outside.

Elizabeth Rosen once wrote a great book called The Primal Cheeseburger where she calls the French fry the, quote, "near perfect enactment of the enriching of a starch food with oil or fat," and she's absolutely right. You can add fat to potatoes without deep frying, that's called mashed potatoes, but at the end of the day, mashed potatoes are just mush. They don't have that crucial contrast between the fluffy and the crispy. The point is that the oil in which you deep fry the French fry is not incidental to the creation of the French fry. A French fry is, by definition, a potato derivative in which the water has been replaced with fat. The fat is as much a constituent of the French fry as the potato. So when you change the oil in a French fry from hard to liquid fat, from saturated to unsaturated, you change the French fry. In 1990, McDonald's started serving us a different product. That's why I had to go to the food scientists at Mattson.

MG: "The rosemary was so high that it tasted like a Christmas tree." Like a Christmas tree, that's so great. We weren't sitting for more than a few minutes when the door to the conference room opened.

Essentially, Lorelai uses the old "I don't want to mess up our friendship" excuse, but in a way that's endearing and feels legitimate. Kudos to John Stephens, because this dialogue is well-written and does a good job of putting a temporary pin in the "will-they-won't-they" discussion, while still leaving things open if circumstances change in the future. 041b061a72