malbone street and the true genius of vince gilligan

Great storytellers borrow from history. Great storytellers borrow so well that you don't even realize they're doing it. Which raises an interesting question: did Vince Gilligan draw inspiration for one of the most memorable tragedies in the Breaking Bad universe from New York City's worst transit disaster?

Hear me out.

On November 1, 1918, the deadliest subway disaster in New York City history occurred beneath what was then Malbone Street in Brooklyn. The official explanation is familiar enough: a strike left the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company desperately short of qualified personnel, so they put dispatcher Edward Luciano—a man with virtually no experience as a motorman—in charge of a rush-hour train. The train entered a sharp curve at roughly five times the speed limit. The result was catastrophic. More than ninety people died. Historians point to a perfect storm of bad decisions: inadequate training, poor management, an improperly assembled train, wooden cars, and an unforgiving curve.

But there is one detail that has always stood out to me.

Just days before the wreck, Luciano's three-year-old daughter had died during the Spanish influenza pandemic. He himself had recently been ill. Whether his grief affected his performance is impossible to know, and historians are careful not to overstate the point. It was one factor among many -- not the cause of the accident, but possibly a cause

Fast-forward ninety years.

In Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad canon, Jane Margolis dies of a heroin overdose. Her father, Donald Margolis, an air traffic controller, returns to work while still overwhelmed by grief. Distracted, he makes a catastrophic error that results in the midair collision of Wayfarer 515 and another aircraft over Albuquerque. It's one of the defining tragedies of the Breaking Bad universe.

Now ask yourself...

A transportation operator.

Grieving the recent death of a daughter.

Returns to work before emotionally recovering.

Makes a tragic mistake.

The mistake kills large numbers of innocent people.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

But what if Vince Gilligan was quietly borrowing a page from one of New York's greatest transportation disasters?

Gilligan is famous for planting obscure historical references and constructing elaborate chains of cause and effect. The Wayfarer crash wasn't just random tragedy—it illustrated how one seemingly private event could ripple outward until strangers paid the price.

That's also, in a way, the enduring lesson of Malbone Street. The wreck wasn't caused by one person's grief any more than it was caused by one curve in the track. It was a cascade of failures: corporate decisions, inadequate training, unsafe equipment, labor unrest, bad luck, and perhaps one exhausted young man who never should have been handed the controls in the first place.

So no, I'm not actually suggesting Vince Gilligan sat down with Brian Cudahy's The Malbone Street Wreck while outlining Season 2.

I'm just saying...

Has anyone ever seen Edward Luciano and Donald Margolis in the same century?

cinema history class: class of 1984 (1982)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2 (my  choice): Class of 1984 (1982)
Directed by Mark Lester

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I've seen it several times.

Plot Synopsis:
An idealistic music teacher takes a job at a crime-ridden high school and clashes with a violent student gang. As the gang's campaign of intimidation escalates, the conflict becomes increasingly personal, leading to a brutal final showdown.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Since this was my entry for Bring Your Own Movie Month, I was especially interested in seeing how the movie held up after not having watched it in quite a while. The answer, I think, is...not quite as well as I'd remembered.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did. It's still an entertaining movie. But it also left me wondering why I instinctively separate "good movie" from "entertaining movie." If the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain, shouldn't succeeding at that be enough? I don't have a good answer, but somehow I still came away thinking that Class of 1984 is a fun watch without necessarily being a good film.

Keith observed that the acting was all over the map, and I think that's right. There are moments that really work. Timothy Van Patten's bathroom scene, where Peter Stegman brutally beats himself up to frame Mr. Norris, is remarkably convincing. Roddy McDowall is mesmerizing as the increasingly unhinged biology teacher, although he was such a gifted actor that I suspect he could have turned in that performance on autopilot. On the other hand, Merrie Lynn Ross never quite convinced me in her role, and some of the emotional scenes just didn't land.

It's also fun to see Michael J. Fox—still billed as "Michael Fox"—in one of his earliest film roles. He doesn't have much to do, but he's immediately likable, and it's easy to see why bigger opportunities soon followed.

Some sequences haven't aged particularly well. The gang fight beneath the highway, with everyone swinging chains and clubs while somehow forgetting that guns and knives exist, felt more than a little contrived.

The ending is especially odd. I did appreciate the final ironic title card explaining that Mr. Norris was never prosecuted because there were no witnesses—a neat callback to one of the movie's central frustrations, namely that the authorities were powerless because nobody would testify against the student gang. It's presented as a triumphant ending, but it's hard to ignore that Mrs. Norris has suffered an unimaginably traumatic ordeal and will almost certainly be dealing with those scars for the rest of her life. The movie seems eager to declare victory while quietly stepping around that reality.

All in all, I'm glad I picked it. It sparked a lively discussion, even if it didn't quite live up to my memories.

And, in a rare fit of real-world restraint, Joe gave it an 8.2.

what if -- tom lehrer version

History is full of little "what if" moments.

What if the Hindenburg hadn't caught fire? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if someone at Coca Cola headquarters had tasted New Coke and said, "Maybe let's not"?

Today I'd like to consider another.

What if Tom Lehrer had simply stayed a mathematician?

At first glance, it seems like the world wouldn't be all that different. Before he turned to musical comedy (or would "musical commentary" be more accurate?) Lehrer was a legitimate mathematician. He never earned a PhD (because of his foray into music), but he taught at Harvard, MIT, and UC Santa Cruz. He could have had an entirely respectable academic career writing papers that only six other people would ever read.

Perhaps he'd have solved the Four Color Theorem decades early. Maybe Fermat's Last Theorem would have been known as Lehrer's Last Theorem, depriving Andrew Wiles of his greatest achievement and forcing him to become an accountant. Entire graduate seminars would now begin with the phrase, "As Lehrer showed in 1958..."

But mathematics never happens in isolation, and neither does music.

Without songs like The Elements, chemistry students would have had to memorize the periodic table the old-fashioned way: by crying.

Without New Math, the "new math" movement might actually have succeeded. Millions of parents would have nodded knowingly as their third-graders explained why 7 + 5 equals 12 only in a culturally oppressive base-ten framework. There would be no backlash. By 1983, the IRS would require tax returns in base eight.

The ripple effects continue.

Without Lehrer proving that intelligent people could also be funny, generations of mathematically inclined undergraduates would conclude that humor was simply not an available elective. College campuses would become eerily silent except for the occasional muttering of eigenvalues.

This leaves a vacuum in satirical music.

Someone has to fill it.

Allan Sherman becomes far more influential than anyone intended. By the early 1970s, every political scandal is explained through novelty songs set to public-domain melodies. Congress establishes a standing Committee on Musical Parody.

The Beatles never notice Lehrer, and without his example of sophisticated topical satire, they decide there's really no point in getting terribly serious. "Revolution" is replaced with a cheerful tune encouraging everyone to remember their library books. John Lennon never writes "Imagine" (admittedly, a positive, since that is probably the most overrated piece of crap in musical history). Instead he records "Perhaps," a song about maintaining reasonable expectations.

Bob Dylan, finding himself without intellectual competition, decides he's done enough for folk music and enrolls at MIT to finish the topology degree he never knew he wanted.

Meanwhile, mathematics is advancing at an alarming pace.

Professor Lehrer solves the Poincaré Conjecture during a faculty meeting because the discussion about parking permits is moving too slowly. He casually jots down a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis on the back of a departmental memo, but the memo is accidentally recycled, forcing humanity to rediscover it seventy years later.

The Clay Mathematics Institute quietly disbands due to lack of unsolved problems.

With every famous theorem conquered, mathematicians turn their attention to more practical questions.

Can a sock truly disappear in the dryer?

Is there an optimal strategy for choosing the fastest supermarket checkout line?

Exactly how many cats is too many cats?

These, too, fall within a decade.

By the 1990s, with mathematics effectively completed, every former math department is converted into an escape room.

Artificial intelligence develops much earlier because the necessary mathematics already exists. However, lacking Tom Lehrer's satirical warning that brilliant people are perfectly capable of making terrible decisions, nobody sees any reason to be cautious.

The first AI immediately announces that the mathematically optimal form of music is a continuous 11-hour recording of an oboe tuning to A-flat.

The public accepts this without complaint because, remember, the Beatles never became philosophical.

Eventually historians identify the exact point where our timeline diverged.

Not the invention of the computer.

Not the moon landing.

Not the Internet.

Just one graduate student deciding, "You know...I think I'll write a funny song."

Sometimes civilization really does hinge on a rhyme scheme.

cinema history class: the invisible ray (1936)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1 (Bobbo's choice): The Invisible Ray (1936)
Directed by Lambert Hillyer

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I'd never heard of this

Plot Synopsis:
A brilliant but unstable scientist discovers a mysterious radioactive element in a meteorite that grants him the ability to kill with a touch. As the deadly radiation slowly drives him mad, his quest for scientific glory turns into a tragic spiral of obsession, jealousy, and revenge.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Bobbo got Bring Your Own Movie month started with the 1936 Universal horror/science fiction film The Invisible Ray.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching a movie like this is seeing science fiction in its formative years. The basic premise is genuinely intriguing: a scientist discovers a strange radioactive element from a meteorite that grants him deadly powers while slowly destroying his sanity. It's an idea that feels surprisingly modern, even if the film's understanding of science is firmly rooted in 1930s movie logic.

The execution, however, is... unusual. The story takes some unexpected turns, and the pacing can feel uneven. The expedition to Africa, in particular, was one of those sequences that had us alternating between laughing at its sheer absurdity and cringing at the period stereotypes that were all too common in Hollywood films of the era. It's a reminder that older movies are products of their time—for better and for worse.

The real attraction, of course, is seeing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi together. Karloff gives a wonderfully expressive performance as the increasingly unstable Dr. Janos Rukh, conveying both his initial excitement and his gradual descent into obsession and madness. Lugosi, meanwhile, gets a comparatively sympathetic role, and it's simply fun to watch these two horror icons share the screen. Their scenes together are easily the highlight of the film.

The Invisible Ray isn't one of Universal's undisputed classics, but it's an interesting entry in the studio's horror catalog and a fascinating glimpse into early cinematic science fiction. Even when it doesn't quite work, it's never dull.

And finally, one thing is certain: had Joe been there, he would have given it a 10.

cinema history class: helga, she wolf of stilberg (1977)

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg (1977)
Directed by Alain Payet

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you -- especially this, which doesn't even have the Ilsa name in its title.

Plot Synopsis:
A cartoonishly evil commandant spends most of the runtime proving she's the worst boss in history, while everyone else waits for the script to remember that revenge is a thing. It's less a war movie than a checklist of exploitation clichés with swastikas stapled to them.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
After four Ilsa movies, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would decide to make a fifth without actually making a fifth. So instead of Dyanne Thorne's infamous torture queen, we get Helgaa new blonde sadist played by a different actress, in what is essentially an Ilsa knockoff wearing a fake mustache. And to complete the identity crisis, Ilsa -- I mean Helga -- spends almost the entire movie in a bright red blouse that makes her look less like the commandant of a brutal prison camp than like she's on her way to Studio 54. It's the cinematic equivalent of changing one letter on a bootleg action figure and hoping nobody notices.

Unfortunately, this one makes even the weaker Ilsa sequels look respectable. The story is barely there, the acting is uniformly awful, and the soundtrack consists largely of atonal noise that seems less interested in setting a mood than in testing the audience's patience. Most scenes exist for one reason: to get another group of women out of their clothes before moving on to the next bit of cruelty.

One moment in particular perfectly captured how bizarre the whole production was. Two women are escaping, yet the soft-focus photography and syrupy music make it look less like a desperate jailbreak than the beginning of a romance. I honestly wasn't sure whether the filmmakers had become confused about which movie they were making.

Then there is the war sequence at the climax. The movie cut to stock footage of tanks and flamethrowers that make no sense in the context of the rest of the scenery or story. It went from tiny prison camp in South America to major battle in Vietnam and back. The scene arrives out of nowhere,  and disappears just as abruptly. And leave no impact whatsoever. It's as if someone found an old reel of old war footage in the editing room and thought, "Sure, why not?"

And just when I was ready for the ordeal to be over, the movie ends with an irritating tease that promises...something. I have no idea what. It felt less like an ending than the filmmakers saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if we implied there was more of this?"

Seriously...WTF?

As a final bit of trivia, Joe gave this one a zero. That's unexplored territory for him (for the class, honestly), and honestly, I can't say I blame him.