Achewood has really been on a roll lately. We just got through with the 'Philippe goes home' storyline which was funny-heartbreaking, and now we're on a new funny-horrifying Teodor/Nice Pete storyline.Nice Pete isn't one of my favorite of the secondary characters. Somehow, the idea of a straight-out serial killer as a recurring character never struck me as quite; it's more the kind of thing a webcomic that was more self-consciously striving for 'dark' and 'weird' would go for. Serial killers are such a feature of pop culture they're almost banal, whereas the disturbing thing about most of the creepier members of's cast is that you couldn't quite put your finger on what was wrong with them or what exactly their deal was: they're just somehow not right. Of course, the gruelling storyline where Nice Pete kidnaps Philippe worked exceptionally well.And he's also worked fantastically well in these episodes. It's quite clear that, while Teodor is rightly terrified of him, he would never think of himself as threatening T. He's a strange, lonely man with a fractured mind, ready to snap at any moment, who thinks of Teodor as one of his only friends. The latest installment also contains a classic example ofdialogue. "DAMNIT WOMAN YOU WANT I SHOULD GET ON THE BAD SIDE OF A CRAZY DRUG ADDICK?! THEY 'MEMBER STUFF LIKE WHERE THEY BEEN, Y'KNOW! THEY GOT ALL THEM!"The clever thing about those lines is that while they're stylized and weird, they're also weirdly authentic. "They got all them active pathways!" is not the kind of thing people ever say in books but it's exactly the kind of thing, based on a half-remembered read of some article on drugs or something, that gets said in real life every day, particularly on the spur of moment in confused situations like the one in which Mayner and Lurquilla find themselves.