Episode #3

“So when Doc and Denis came in that night, it wasn't just the usual hungry doper thing. It was something else. And with Neptune moving at last out of the Scorpio death-trip and rising into the Sagittarian light of the higher mind, it was bound to be something love-related. And I thought I knew what it was…”

There are Inherent Vice fans, and then there’s Kayleigh Donaldson, a writer and critic who has been ardently stanning the film since December of 2012—exactly two years before Inherent Vice was released in theaters. And since that release, she has vociferously declared and defended Vice as Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece.

It’s a level of broad, absolute appreciation that leaves her uniquely suited not only for Increment Vice in general, but this scene in specific, in which Inherent Vice’s two very different tonal extremes—potfogged melancholy and zany comic tableaus—are cat’s-cradled together with some heavy heartache, a few slices of of pizza, “Vitamin C,” and a hair-changing intuition, all into a vast lattice of meaning that only grows deeper with every viewing, and every conversation.