Okay, so that speech at the end -- thoughts? Please limit your responses to three hundred words and refrain from using the following words: "messianic," "camera," "weirdo," "Milchian," and any definite articles. You have half-an-hour. Go!

My thoughts...I'm not much for scouring for hidden meanings midway through a show's run. After the first ten episodes, I'll probably be more comfortable going back and reviewing which line was imbued with deep symbolism and which one was a throwaway and evaluating everything on its own merits then. For now, certainly this was better than the last episode, which sounds like more of a left-handed compliment than I intend it to be. At least the show went somewhere this week and tried to say something. What exactly, I'm not sure of at this point -- but I certainly can't complain that it's not leading to something. Whether that something turns out to be a satisfying or cohesive denouement...well, that's the trick, isn't it? I suppose it's only fitting that your enjoyment of a show that deals with issues of faith would come down to how much faith you have in the show's creator to pull all this off. Given that this same week was when HBO executives were suggesting that those Deadwood movies we were promised probably will never materialize and that the Steve Hawk blog I linked to several pages back has David Milch dismissing logical storytelling as the stuff of squares and hacks -- well, my confidence that this is going to end in a fulfilling way is not tremendously high. You might feel differently, and if you do, I'm happy for you. Honestly.

Next time on John From Cincinnati: Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell shows up to talk some sense into Dylan McKay; Palaka has some sort of health crisis in Cissy's surf shop; and John tells Cass that Shaun will be gone soon. Yeah, like in four more episodes, Nostradamus.