mercurius

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for explaining and providing context for Chad and the Dickie Dollars (which sort of sounds like the name of a '50s band). That was very helpful! Who knows what sorts of targeted ads would have popped forever until the end of time if I'd tried to google it myself.

In this case, can someone explain Chad's character to me? I don't understand what it's satirizing. I'm familiar with the fraternity stereotypes of beer pong, preppy guys, football players, and so forth, but this isn't related at all. He keeps talking about how hot he is while wearing these odd and to me inexplicable outfits, and others in the fraternity seem to agree with his hotness while also wearing similar odd outfits. Then this episode they referred to themselves as dicks, though I thought I heard dickie, which is the suit workers wear, and these guys clearly aren't laborers, and I can't do an internet search with any permutation of the word 'dick', certainly not when coupled with 'fraternity'. Help? This may be an aspect of American culture I have absolutely no reference to or context for. No one else I know watches this and I don't know how to formulate my questions (see above).

Wow. There is no tonal consistency at all. Not just between different scenes, which would be jarring enough, but within them. Nevermind the problems with portraying academia -- Oliver Hudson says he's a professor and gets hired to teach a class outside his field by a dean whose conduct is inappropriate, not to mention creepy -- but then there's the whole starting class seriously after a confrontation with my daughter, and now let's show the entire film Texas Chain Saw Massacre where no one has a scheduling conflict and the whole class just stayed there stunned and wooden. That's just confusing. And the road trip to Chanel's house, where it first seemed the humor was to be the guard's asking whether the daughter is hiding in the large house and no one found her but the parent's seemed to play it straight...until the parents decided to take everyone to see the thank-you note from the wonderful guy who was helping the daughter... and when read aloud the thank you note is giving -- at length, and in detail, and repeatedly -- thanks for banging the daughter. Wft? It's not unsual to be dramatically over-the-top, self-referential, and funny. The source material for this very show did that well. This is a chaotic mess. It's like a bunch of writers were tasked to write dialogue and action which were then spliced together with a roll of the dice. In reading the comments apparently this is characteristic of a Ryan Murphy show? I don't understand if this becomes an acquired taste or if you either like it or not, so I don't know whether to tune in again.

For me it's less that the characters were miserable than they just weren't very interesting. Last season's Rust and Cole were miserable a lot of, if not most of,the time and usually by their own doing. They made choices, like affairs, or got in too deep as they crossed one line and then another, and they often were the architects of their own misery. As in classic film noir/tragedy, as others have pointed out. But we saw how they got there and why, even if it was their own fault, and they were interesting because of it. A lot of that for last season justly has been attributed to the performances but I don't think all of it can be. CF and RM did the best they could with the material and often elevated it, and they also were flawed miserable characters, but we didn't really get to see and experience the why and how. Ani had a crap childhood with the guru father, lost her mother, she and her sister suffered and now are living with all the problems that caused...but we see it all at a distance or remove. Same with Ray, though there are some flashes of the man he used to be, smiling in photos and holding his son, which maybe gives him more of a potential spark. So we get to see their angst and misery but it leaves them a bit one-note, and it's just not very interesting. And there wasn't enough of characters willing to call out others on their BS, which at least adds much-needed lightness and perspective. [Edited to add paragraph breaks]

Yes! Mr. Branson is openly perving because he's not Mr. Branson! Whoever he is, it explains why he's fine with soliciting sex acts, on camera, from a student. And I loved Emma's 'but he brings his soup in a thermos' as the reason he can't possibly be a fearsome murderer. Noah had it wrong with his response that all murderers have to eat (though he did have some great lines and deliveries elsewhere). The point isn't the eating, Hannibal eats. It's the thermos. The food equivalent of wearing short pants and knee socks pulled up to the knee. It's the fearsomeness that's lacking. She was wanting fearsome. And the mayor! Oh the mayor! Coming to meet his blackmailer sans money, and when he gets his money and the video back he still wants to draw his gun. Nevermind he didn't know he was the latest podcast subject. The mayor considers drawing his gun out of his waistband to maybe shoot his teenaged daughter's teenaged classmate. And then walks away, uttering a sort of maybe threat about there being a killer on the loose so watch out. I can see his wife self-medicating to cope with him.

I love the threads for this show so much more than the actual show. I keep thinking I've got a handle on what's going on, since it's sort of simple -- everyone is corrupt. But then someone will say some name like "Burriss" and I realize I have no idea who that is, and then someone else refers to the Israelis who I thought used to be Russians, and then someone else mentions the diamonds that I thought were blue but I don't think are now, and then the slimy mayor who was at the center of everything seems to be actually out of the loop, and nobody seems to know where the harddrive is that started everything (or do they?), and instead of simple I find I need a flow chart. It really shouldn't be this hard. Thanks,guys: reading this thread I now know Burriss = James Frain. Still fuzzy on the rest though.

Fully agree. The weirdest thing about this show for me is that I keep thinking the kid is an actual robot. Whoever is coaching him is fantastic, and he takes direction so well. When Molly came to him at the end, all excited to tell him he'll be spending time with her and expecting him to be thrilled to reconnect with his mom, he comes back with 'I don't want to be reprogrammed again'. It just slayed me.

I'm still loving this show. And I love the wft character of the week. This one goes to the mayor, who completely deadpans that his broken nose is because he's having work done and it makes total sense to his daughter and in his universe, and who sits beside his home security feed with a yellow notepad poised to take notes when he listens in on his daughter, and when he hears that it Will is now blackmailing him about the video footage of what looks to be him dragging his dead wife's body across the floor, he has to write in big letters WILL, and underline it three times. Because if he didn't write down and underline the name of his blackmailer, he'd...forget? Or this was his new to-do list? Whatever, I love it. That, and Audrey/Noah talking about mock turtlenecks, biker shorts, and what superheros should and should not wear. That was my understanding from last week -- the file self-uploaded upon opening.

I know, right!? Who knew that fertility issues could be so dull?

I did too. I'd expected Ethan to survive, defeat the Abbies, and help rebuild and remold the town along the lines of freedom (as much as there can be if you're the last of humanity in a walled town) and democracy. But the kids, who spent much or most or all of their lives in the town being taught Pilcher as savior and Pilcher's rules didn't want that and replicated his society. But then I'm also an easy viewer. I don't need to see how they did it, or even be told how they did it. I found it interesting, unexpected, and made me think.

Me too. It's not as gloriously over-the-top as Harper's Island but I'm the target audience for this. I was expecting Noah to show up at the hospital but not expecting it to be as fun as it was. The one I really don't get is the teacher. Not just for his icky behavior with Brooke, but he flat-out seems to have no sense of self-preservation, at all. Sexy times with the student is bad enough, but he's webcamming it. At a school where Audrey's kissing video went viral within the last week, not to mention all the other social media outlets that his own stuff could be posted to. I mean, it's one thing to be an uncontrollable perv, but here he's not even tweeting his own dick pics but giving Brooke, of all people, footage of him to post. If he's not violating consent laws, does he not actually care about or need this job, or a teaching job anywhere else? Is he independently wealthy? Does he know a good forger? Is he a secret hacker that can try to miminize the fallout from a Google search? I don't get it.

I think, though, it wasn't about trusting or not trusting anyone to do anything. Pilcher clearly didn't really care about the town, or the people, hence powering down not just the defenses but also life support and so forth. He didn't want to create a stable, long-lasting town and save humanity. He wanted to be the person responsible for saving humanity. Some of those true believers saw him like a god and wanted him to be revered as such. He saw himself as a god. He wanted the volunteers to revere, obey, and not question. He wanted the people in the town to obey and not question, and he seemed to take pleasure that they didn't realize he was their 'master'. If it was about saving humanity he'd have gone about this differently. He wanted to create, or recreate, humanity in his own image.

The whole styling for Ezra this season has been shockingly horrendous. I can't quite figure out what's wrong but it's the same style of shirt each week. The sleeves are too short maybe? The neckline too high or low? And it definitely gives him moobs. So distracting.

Well, Wayward Pines: The Next Generation is certainly a way to get season 2. I thought that was why Pam was so...insistent. In a chop, chop, time is running out sort of way.

Or another option: regime change and rebuilding? I usually see postapocalyptic stuff as political/social commentary so that's where I can see it going (in this case rise up against the god-playing dictator, and Ethan's clearly in favor of democracy as given in his conversations with the scientist). But that's probably my interpretive bias.