Amarsir

It gets worse. I don't know about Tesla specifically, but Toyota soured a lot of people because: A) They added remote start through an app which requires a subscription. B) They rerouted the key fob remote start through the same system. So if you want to start your car in the driveway you need an active subscription instead of using 30-year-old tech. Which they may throw in for free on a new purchase, but SOL for used buyers. (After this hit the press Toyota went back and forth a bit, saying it wasn't supposed to restrict the key fob, then not issuing remote start fobs at all, and I don't know where they are now. But I don't trust them anymore.) I mean I do like network-based starts because even if I don't want to open an app I'd love to warm up my car with an Alexa command. I just don't need more recurring subscriptions in my life. --- Anyway, this was my favorite episode of the season. Very Dennis to be increasingly stressed by society and then calm himself down by visualizing murder.

Heading into this I was figuring the place would be unchanged from their youth, completely run down, and the gang being angry at kids for not appreciating it. And I wasn't super excited because we've seen that before. Happily it was the opposite. I think the show's just more fun when the world is sensible and the gang is dysfunctional. Sure, other weird characters in their orbit like the McPoyles are good additions too. But my favorites are the people like the lawyer or The Waitress who start normal and get worse with each interaction.

Well-acted. And the premise of taking over someone's likeness had a lot of potential. My problems in ascending order: If this technology existed, there would be lots of applications on Earth before it was used on astronauts. It wouldn't be that novel anymore. It would make vastly more sense to keep the real people on earth and send their avatars out into space. There was a line early on about "the human experience" but if it's just about bodies in space that's space station stuff you test in near-earth orbit. If a mission requires 2 people simultaneously, you definitely definitely don't send just 2. There's too much conflict between "We can't make a new avatar" and "You can use someone else's." I can suspend disbelief for one or the other, but not both. As everyone else has pointed out, there would be a ton of ground crew and handlers to help Josh Hartnett through a tragedy. In fact I think I read that during the Apollo missions the families had established go-betweens specifically so that if bad news had to be delivered it would come from someone they knew. The episode dragged on way too long. As soon as Kate Mara said "Let him use your link" we all knew what the conflict would be. Not how it would resolve, like whether she would be interested or there would be false pretenses. But we knew there'd be a love triangle. Yet it took 40 minutes for that to come to a head. They could have trimmed out some of the sadness and painting scenes to fit in a little more plausibility. And I didn't love the resolution, but Black Mirror always wants to surprise so that's OK.

This was said to take place at the end of April, 1979. But "I Don't Like Mondays" was playing at the bar and it wasn't released until July. Literally unwatchable. I think this was a fine episode of a show I'm not particularly interested in watching. The supernatural and the time period take away the "This could happen!" aspect that always made Black Mirror so chilling.

That window of relying on Barry was fairly short. She didn't want Barry handling her ex for her. When she had her own show she was telling him how to play the boyfriend, not relying on him as carer. He got rid of the body and played night watchman when they were fugitives, but even then she was the breadwinner. (And I don't recall any evidence Barry knew she was stealing.) And then in the end it's not like she became a particularly good mother to John, given that she responded badly to his "Love you." If they wanted to make it her character turn moment, she should have told Barry off and stormed out instead of slipping away in the night. That's what she wished she had done with her ex, but never could. At least leave him a note. Obviously she wasn't wrong to get John away. And it was some growth to do that instead of staying. I just don't think her character was substantially different afterwards. It felt like the show was moving her out of the way to arrange the Barry/Gene ending. Much like how easily Barry escaped the episode before. Or Unexplained House Destruction made her seek out Barry in LA. I understand she was never the main character. But it's still unsatisfactory.

I liked the ending as far as Barry, Gene, and Fuches. Barry never really accepted the difference between acting like a person and being that person. Out in the middle of nowhere he was much more consistent with his pious acting than Sally was in her role. But the instant Gene resurfaced Barry had no hesitation to go kill him. And only after that decision did he go on a podcast search to justify it. In the end he was prevented from taking responsibility and thus the legacy he leaves is also fake. Gene did himself in the moment he turned from opposing the movie to supporting it. We know it was shallowness to get Mark Wahlberg to play the part, but to everyone else that's so inconsistent with mourning the love of his life that he lost all trust. Shooting Barry isn't even necessary for Gene's story at that point, but it does tie things up more easily. (Specifically the portrayal of the law has never made sense. Not from minute one when an LA detective had enough time to dwell on "Who shot back at two known gangsters?" I was able to overlook it all along, but it's easier now if Gene's actually guilty of something.) Fuches earned his salvation by being an anti-Barry. He admitted to living his life as a non-soldier who encouraged violence in others. Then he got a life as an actual Boss, but resisted carrying violence forward to John. (Either by hurting him to punish Barry or making him the next Barry prototype.) Of everyone he gained the most self-awareness. What I wasn't crazy about: I can accept Hank's outcome via the poetry of dying under Cristobal's statue. But he deserved a tangible self-inflicted outcome and "close-range shootout with the Raven crew" wasn't punchy enough. He should have had the statue fall on him or throw a grenade and have it bounce back. His role was always rife with irony and his death should have been too. With Sally I feel like they dropped the ball. The broad strokes are fine: get John away from Barry and accept non-fame but never really be happy. But did the hallucinations ever go away? Did she ever recognize that she's the one who put John in danger by going to LA? Overall I just don't think she had enough of a through-line in the last season. Maybe she was just representing randomness for a while, getting good and bad breaks she didn't really deserve. Even the guy she killed in self-defense was a random intruder. Then she did some self-inflicted damage, still was able to come back, and chose not to. And since then she was just the means for Barry to have a son. In the end it wasn't a character arc so much as a character scatter-graph. Did she value fame, art, truth, approval, excitement, or motherhood? All were yes at one point or no at another, and I just don't know where she ended up.

Movie-Barry did murder people, but heroically. I think John has enough to believe what he wants to believe. I mean, presumably the movie had to cover the 8 years of being a fugitive and why he came back. So it's all pretty much explained away, if Sally didn't give enough details to refute it.

It will all turn out to be a hallucination. Not by Barry, but by Fuches!

Am I the only one who has no idea what happened to their trailer house last week? I thought we weren't supposed to know because it would get explored this week. But that clearly didn't happen.

Do you think the story is about committing your heart to a part instead of just being convincing? Clark espouses values that aren't anything like how Barry lived. He didn't temper his feelings, never avoided danger, and certainly didn't accept responsibility. But if we didn't know Barry I would think Clark was genuine (if deeply misguided) and was content with this life. He's throwing himself into the part every day. Sally wanted acting as a path to fame and excitement. No doubt she thought being on the run would be thrilling too. Now she acts every day and hates it because she's anonymous and bored. Unfortunately this view treats John as a prop, not a person. He's not too old for the lack of socialization to be fixed, but everything he thinks is real is just an act and I don't think the show will have time to do him justice.

After Cristobal died and Sally made the wrong choice (again), I don't think any main characters are getting a happy ending. At least Natalie seems to have found success as a happy and well-liked showrunner.

Good read, but quicksand is a bit different. It's stable and contains enough water to allow (slow) motion and create gaps. What they experienced is closer to a sinkhole opening up beneath you and then being buried alive. It is true though that quicksand has been a much smaller factor in my life than I was led to believe as a child. Also I've never been set on fire despite learning Stop, Drop, and Roll. Though I guess I don't begrudge knowing it. I agree. It was so calm that at first I thought the group was doing it on purpose for some reason. My guess is that the stunt was so difficult to pull off they couldn't let the actors portray a struggle.

Do you really want to know?

It's really something how the echoed "I love you" exercise has continued to repeat through the last two seasons; usually desperate and unanswered. What exactly are they holding Fuches on now? LAPD arrested him for killing Janice as The Raven, but they seemed to be all in on Barry once the Moss/Cosineau trap went down. Against Barry there would have been other charges too (which WitSec was willing to overlook). But if they really want to prosecute Barry for killing Janice, Fuches is necessary to connect him to the body so they should be nice to him. It seems to me he should have been out, threatened with at most a fraudulent 911 call, and he's only sitting in prison because the plot wants him there.

Finally got around to Barry. Finished season 2 and it's fun reading over everyone's episode-by-episode reactions. Through the first season and a half, I had two major problems with the show. 1) I felt we were supposed to like Sally but didn't. And I know I'm not alone on that. But the way season 2 ended perhaps we're not supposed to like her. Or at least, the show is aware of her flaws and isn't simply using her to represent the good life in Barry's dichotomy. 2) Barry simply wasn't a very good hitman. I don't mean the moral conflicts because that's a premise of the show. And they've consistently shown him to be a great shot. But he doesn't do enough research, acts impulsively, isn't cautious for the unexpected, and isn't very good about evidence. (Leaving the tooth is a prime example.) Yes that still made him relatively good when surrounded by comedy. But this show is about Barry's conflicts: famous vs anonymous. Emotionally connected vs dispassionate. And "good hitman vs bad actor," torn between the job he wants and the job he's good at. (This last is stated explicitly in the post-show commentary after episode 1.) And when I saw Barry being careless it undermined that. But using the pin as evidence of Chechans is brilliant, and something he'd have had to come up with quickly while panicking. He cleaned up all the detective's notes, even if hiding in a dress is comical. Taking out the monastery was full-on badass. That's enough to make me buy that he could be amazingly good if not feeling conflicted. I also felt 2 balanced comedy and drama better than 1 (except for the slapstick episode). The show proved it could surprise both ways: the classmate's story about aliens gave way to a heartfelt story about his dad. And the other classmate's story about a horse was played straight so they could throw away her actual tragedy as a joke. That's how most of the season felt - not knowing which way it would go but being pleased either way.

I've been finding the story a bit uneven, though admittedly I'm not the target teenage demographic. But the cast is all killing it. Iman Vellani shifts tones so effortlessly that every scene feels natural. You'd think that walking through the halls in this episode compared to the premiere would be hard to pull off both ways. But I totally believed her awkwardness the first time and the mojo this one. She's got quite a future.

I certainly thought so. It comes to mind easy because Chinatown was partially about water rights too. I liked the episode overall, although I really hate that Cardi B song and certainly didn't need it over a long montage. But I do wonder if they have an ending for this planned or have to write themselves out of a hole. Cartman with breasts could certainly launch its own A plot. But murders setting up a drought really needs resolution.

I completely agree. And Fennec was teleportation-level good at assassination there, which already seems lazy. I could overlook that if it wasn't supposed to be meaningful. But to explicitly make the connection and then not have Fett directly involved really drives home how he was barely a guest star in his own series.

Now this was a classic South Park. Cartman's cynicism gives him insight to manipulate the world for his own benefit. Charicatures based on trendy buzzwords. The mayor being all reactionary. And no Randy. My favorite little detail is the minor twist in pronunciation from City Wok guy. If you didn't catch it, every time he uses "city" as an adjective it's pronounced "shitty" like we're used to. But the one time it was used as a noun, no "h". Regarding last week's episode, if you go to official episode descriptions from streaming or on Comedy Central, any past mention of "Token" has been changed to "Tolkien". I don't know if they'll go so far as to re-render any old episodes, though it wouldn't shock me if they did. That's a really great addition to the joke to pretend it really was just us all along.

Matt Damon did a high-profile commercial for crypto dot com. He's basically urging people to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, with the tagline "Fortune favors the brave." And since the commercial came out 3 months ago, most of these coins have dropped a lot. (50% for bitcoin.) Plus bitcoin mining needs a lot of energy, which is bad for the environment and thus pretty hypocritical for Damon. So he definitely earned his target status on this one. It wasn't even that much about masks, more about the way we behave around them. If the metaphor is strict, does pajamas = mask? So PC principal was banning "masks" from kids who want them? That doesn't track. Of course yes, the restaurant saying "wear them to go to your table then take them off" is pretty direct. (Though arguably that's one of the less-strong cases for masks anyway.) But overall it's about demonstrative actions with no practical effect. I thought back to the whole "wearing ribbons' thing that really hit a peak in the 90s. Or more recently, people clashing with their employers over the right to wear BLM or MAGA clothing. If you want their position on the COVID vaccine, they were pretty clear in the special. Clyde was the only one who didn't get it, and he's an idiot who refused "for shellfish reasons".

I can overlook that by reasoning that they're about the sport of it, or more self-defense focused. That only Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do are really teaching competitive karate against equals. To that end, Eagle Claw wasn't even in the top 5 after the skills round. (Although Cobra Kai being #1 is still weird.) Stranger to me is that the committee and announcer are still hung up on Daniel winning two championships in the early 80s. The show itself hung a lampshade on that by having Daniel tell the announcer that Johnny was also a two-time winner. But there have to be a lot of repeat winners in the last 3 decades and even if the fighting wasn't as good those years, those dojos have to be going "What the hell?" that they don't even warrant a mention. Of course the show is going to focus on the leads, but that kind of reminder seems so unnecessary. Everyone watching already knows about the Karate Kid story. Heck, we probably watched a clip of it in a flashback 10 minutes earlier.

I wish Eli had more of an arc this season so his win was more significant. Instead he was toned down from years past and felt like "not Cobra Kai". I guess merging his Hawk personality with his original one counts, but it was really like the H-plot amidst everything going on. The show's self-awareness goes a long way. Earlier in the season we had shots at KK3 via Silver's obsession over messing with a teenager and the illogic of jumping to the finals. And when this little karate tournament seems ridiculously over the top they call that out as well. That's why I'm giving the show some leeway on Stingray. It's hard to call anything out as stupid when they're actively going "yeah, we know, have fun with it."

It amuses me that The Waitress was in 3 episodes and crossed paths with Charlie zero times. They could even do a callback to it later with him not realizing she was there.

The second episode was better than the first. I guess it had to be that way to get the setup done. But Dee's situation was just slightly enough her fault that I couldn't embrace pity for her like I'm probably supposed to. And moreover the whole thing felt a bit disjointed and forced. I liked it. It just didn't hang together. But good moments. Ronald MacDonald, son of Luther Vandross! The second was great though. Nice plot for all of them. They're a bit split up, but I'm a bit invested about how the Charlie / Shelley relationship gets ruined and how much more screwed up Dee and Dennis can get. And it makes sense Mac wants to assert his Catholicism again.

The AVClub hated the roller rink episode. While I disagree, they did have some good points about the thing that bothered me - Dee's continuity.