To love is to bury: Barely breathing, or not breathing at all? Is Alcide happier, now that he isn't "alive"? Is Debbie happier now that she's got V making her feel more alive than she's ever felt?

Poor Jason has to watch the first pitcher of beer -- Arlene's moving slow, due to her massive constant drama and the serial killer in her abdomen -- go to the new QB-1, a "cocky little shit" who goes by the name of Kitch Maynard and who, if it weren't flirting with blasphemy to say it, might be hotter than him. Hoyt knows all of his infos because Hoyt knows things like that, and Jason is getting more and more upset, because this is exactly the same go-round we did Season One with Andy -- I remember it well, because I got so much hateful hatemail about it from the oppressed white men who just can never get a fucking break -- where his weird jealousy of Jason was pretty much his only trait for awhile, and was as much a plotpoint as it was an inescapable fact:

The man of an obsolete generation loves in his successor the thing that he hates in his successor, which is a virility that once he thought defined him but has vanished, leaving him with no actual definition, which turns eventually and quickly into a covetousness that often expresses itself in a sort of hateful desire. Before Viagra, this kind of misplaced and projected lack often ended in violence, but now it's just about acting super fucking creepy and angry and not being able to understand, much less voice, why.

As Andy hated Jason right up until the point they settled into their natural father/son roles, so Jason is going to be hating Kitch Maynard until somebody gives him the nod of being a man. Which, for Jason, right now means using his FotS training to be a cop, no matter how little effort he actually puts into it, which lack of effort in turn comes from being that golden boy of their generation's desiring to begin with: He never had to try, because he fit the definition they were giving him, and he never had to step outside of it, which is where trying happens.

And there is a way in which this makes Jason a jackass, but there's also a way in which it is as disenfranchising and minimizing as any woman who's been defined growing up by her body, which is what turned Anna Newlin for example into something way worse than just a jackass, but also somebody I felt for the same way I feel for Jason. Which is to say: You're handed what you're handed. They got beauty, some of us got brains, some of us got nothing, but staying in the place that best defines you, which is to say the house of your best accomplishment, is something that everybody naturally does. Stepping out of that and trying to be better at everything, that takes a strength that we find lacking only in those who don't share our particular faults and lacks, or gifts and accomplishments.