Okay. So I sat down this evening with the specific intent of not watching tonight’s episode with dread, not using the term “sludge pump,” and trying to honestly give this series a chance.

My reward, you may ask? A charming little vignette where I got to watch a genuinely innocent black inmate brutalized by prison management and his peers, then subjected to a sick Clockwork Orange experiment by Doctor Beauregard (yes, Hauser’s present day buddy) that turns him into an actual killer. But on the plus side, Diego Soto got a date with the cute coroner. So there’s that.

Just kidding. The title is “Johnny McKee.” It’s still really bad, though.

There’s lazy, and then there’s hackwork, and then there’s bad, and then there’s just giggle works bad. It’s rare, however, to see them all in one episode, an intricate tapestry of the dull and the absurd. So I guess that’s an achievement.

So here’s the deal—this episode did not leave me cynical about the worth of human existence. It’s ridiculous and improbable, yes. But it didn’t fill me with disgust. They finally broke their pattern, and the results were downright tolerable. We learned more this episode than we’ve learned in all the previous four combined.