arc

Everyone in this class is wildly delusional! The actors have ambitions well beyond their talent levels. Barry thinks he can just drop his old life. Gene uses the class as a fill-in for the Hollywood glory he thinks he should have. Meanwhile, Noho Hank has surprisingly small ambitions. He was a good lieutenant to Goran because he apparently never wanted to be the sole guy in charge. He wants to be 50-50 partners with Cristobal but somehow this season he doesn’t want to eliminate the Bolivians. Yeah, in a lot of ways he’s delusional himself about what a life of crime means. I guess the cop (forgot his name) investigating Janice’s death used to be delusional about the state of his marriage. BTW, it kills me that his wife isn’t even Latina herself (probably) but insisted on opening a quinceañera store in a non Latinx neighbourhood.

I think she has some talent. More so than the rest of the class, certainly. Succeeding in Hollywood takes a mix of luck and talent and work. She’s certainly better than the sort of roles she’s booked so far. Now, is she also low key a pretty bad person? Yeah, probably. She’s petty and very shallow. But bad people can be talented.

Gene's face when his son called him out on the cabin -- he clearly isn't processing his own trauma in any kind of healthy way himself. If Esther is as smart as she seems, Hank completely gave himself up with everything he was saying in Cristobal's office. I do wonder why her hand showed no visible scarring from the knife trick though. I mean, that knife cut across bone. If it actually did... there was no blood, after all. But why are the Chechens all living at the stash house anyways? Where did they live before that? Surely not at Goran's house, because (1) it was too small for all those dudes and (2) if I remember right, Goran tried to provide a relatively normal situation at the house for his family.

Well, the way I took what he said was more about "you still benefited from slavery whether or not you personally supported it or not".

The nudity on this show feels exploitative. =/ Mai Ling is hella reckless. She’s cheating on her gangster boss husband with his second in command, she’s secretly defying his wishes for peace with the Hop Wei… BTW, according to Wikipedia, the most lucrative crime for tongs in SF was prostitution, but I can see how that would make these tongs too unsympathetic for TV. Also, I vaguely understand the bloodiest years of the tong wars didn’t actually kill that many people. The body count on this show will probably get up to 20x what history did. In what little I got from descriptions of Bruce Lee’s original notes, “Big Bill” was supposed to both be a friend and antagonist to Ah Sahm. So far this Bill is just the latter. Maybe they’ve split out the friend role to the rookie cop. I do like that Bill was a Union soldier and has the high road on slavery on the rookie, even while simultaneously having the low road on anti-Chinese bigotry. Going back to the pilot for a second, a lot of the dialogue was corny, but delivery was often solid. Father Jun imperiously demanding a bow, and Ah Toy flirting with Ah Sahm at the bar were both a lot of fun. The Armani-ish suits of the Hop Wei and the Taiwanese rap at the end make me wish this show was full on postmodern pastiche, Samurai Champloo style. It’s infuriating and kind of too real that the cops are furious about the murders of the two Irish murderers without ever even considering that they were themselves murderers too.

Since the move to Primetimer, I can't log in via Twitter. (Chrome, Windows 10, and also Dolphin, iOS.)

Mannnnnnnnnnnn, Andrew Koji's Cantonese* is really bad. I imagine it must be very hard to hear the tones when not brought up in it; I'm pretty bad at Cantonese myself and it is technically my first language. And I can't pronounce Mandarin words to save my life, so I know coming to a different language's tones is super hard. And I am sympathetic. But it took me several rewinds to even guess what he was going for, and that's with the English subtitles. * the non-Cantonese speakers learned their Cantonese lines phonetically, per this fascinating article about the choice to have the Chinese characters speak modern unaccented English when among themselves. The action was pretty good. I liked that the madam was a skilled martial artist herself, as was Li Yong, the high level guy in Mai Ling's tong. The nudity, eh. And the tension between being a period piece with Something Important To Say about immigration and being a Cinemax brawls and boobs show is... weird.

Well, he seems to care about Janice’s disappearance — her murder, as he personally knows — only because it’s interfering with his life.

For my money, Barry is at least as deranged as any of the Chechen gangsters or the struggling actors. Probably more, because he is both the remorseless killer and the actor who dreams of making it big in Hollywood. His particular coping mechanisms this season have made him seem a bit more sane than the rest of the actors, but it’s all in service of his own delusions. I don’t want Esther to die, but I do hope the season doesn’t end up with a three way gang treaty, sort of just a linear one-upping of how the Bolivian-Chechen gang war ended up in s1.

Ahahahahahaha. In "Barry", Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays a British struggling actor in LA, and in s02e01 she has a conversation with Barry where she says she'd never play an Australian.

https://tvline.com/2019/04/03/youre-the-worst-recap-series-finale-pancakes-jimmy-gretchen-wedding/

Oh, one liiiiiitle quibble: I woulda liked to hear Jimmy's heckle for Paul and Lindsay's wedding.

The flashforwards were fake-outs* after all! Fine, I'm way happier that they ended up together. And that Jimmy and Edgar reconciled. I did have to go back several times to compare Jimmy's groom's black bow tie to his wedding guest striped bow tie to be convinced about the time jump though. * played without real cheating though. Gretchen really didn't get married, and Gretchen really was potentially mad about seeing "him" again, but turns out the person she would have reason to be mad about was Edgar. Jimmy did sell the house. Jimmy did have reason to know Mariah's coffee order, and it wasn't because they were dating/married/cheating ("Afflecking"). I said it overall wasn't cheating, but it was kinda cheap for the Jillian re-wedding to book the same venue years later so the time jump would be confusing. Shitstainz' wife Jaclyn was the same actress from before. She didn't even have a line. They also brought back the fro-yo guy from season 1, and Ben Folds (delightful as he was the first time). Off the top of my head I don't recall any other deep cut recurring characters who came back for the finale. Killian is definitely a Scientologist; I did crack up at him earnestly insisting Tom Cruise is 6'1". I like that the "Peach" trilogy is "Width", "Height", and "Depth". Jimmy took pancakes and they didn't make a big deal of it, but Gretchen got eggs at the diner. Nice little callback to the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins eggs/pancakes dilemma from S1's Sunday Funday ep.

Edgar wasn’t wrong, but I guess I’m with Jimmy: a doomed romance isn’t something to run from. that said, I wish they actively sought therapy and otherwise tried to fix themselves.

It's also a callback to S1E08's long zoom in to Jimmy from a distance with binoculars and a fake mustache! And all the other times he used a fake mustache.

Killian's latest situation is pretty sad for Killian IMO. Sure he's not homeless and hungry anymore, but he's pretty clearly getting hooked into Scientology. Did Edgar have a fake mustache when he was following Gretchen? Aw, I love Edgar so much.

I feel like Gretchen has told Lindsay before that L changes for men. Going all the way back to the first Sunday Funday, when Silverlake-y hipster Lindsay becomes a Westside rich wife. Though tbf she ended up realizing she didn't mind being a Westside but she hated being Paul's wife. Then the show did another round of it when Lindsay tried to appreciate all of Paul's hobbies.

Oh, he definitely is very screwed up. He ghosted her right after proposing to her! And even in this season, he proposed Fuck Week rather than just come clean up front about the florist.

She's the florist. Same shoulder tattoo. I was reading a bit about the flashforwards and Aya Cash was saying that they are meant to be worrying, and Stephen Falk was really concerned about "sticking the landing". So, I want to believe this is all a fake-out and I hope things will turn out great, but in the meantime, yeah, these flashforwards are really bumming me out. I mean, it's not like there's any reason to believe Jimmy's a better match with the florist ("Mariah" in the credits) than with Gretch. I did really like the (sudden) evolution of Edgar and Jimmy's relationship. Honeynutz 2 is super funny. I have no particular fondness for methed out Soundcloud rappers in general or Nock Nock in particular but also I feel like they're trying too hard with that character. Or maybe that really is how methed out Soundcloud rappers are like. I wouldn't know, I'm old.

Also, didn't they love that extreme haunted house from s2's Spooky Sunday Funday? I loved the whole climax of the prank. Amazing. (I would never ever want my friends to put me through anything like that, of course.)

It’s on! It’ll be on Spectrum Originals, which I honestly just heard of today. https://deadline.com/2019/03/mad-about-you-revival-starring-paul-reiser-helen-hunt-picked-up-spectrum-originals-1202570610/

Well, Gretch aggressively teetotalling is very upsetting and I don't even like alcohol myself. Her blowing up the couples friendship was awful and might well be borne from depression but it's still awful and hard to watch. I used to really love Gretchen and Jimmy and this season (and TBH most of last season) I no longer do. Gretchen's casual cruelty -- also seen in not hiring the young publicist as her replacement -- is unpleasant and not fun. And Jimmy's curmudgeon act has been Flanderized up to 11. It's all too much.

Yeah. Basically, restoring Chidi’s memories of everything that happened in seasons 1 and 2. Michael only said that he couldn’t selectively wipe Simone from Chidi’s memories since her work in the study was so tied to the Soul Squad, meaning he’d have to effectively wipe every memory of Chidi’s life since there, meaning he might as well go right back to the air conditioner death. But none of that really means he couldn’t then restore Chidi’s old memories of all the afterlives he lived with Eleanor and Tahani and Jason and arguably even everything up to the Judge’s chambers at the end of S2.

Late realization: why not restore Chidi's pre-Simone but post-death memories so he and Eleanor would still be together? They could then explain to that Chidi what the current situation is and proceed with their original plan. Checkmate, you dingdong.

I kinda think Gretchen would care. They've sorta cheated in different ways since the first season, but she's never really been chill about it. But more to the point, I didn't buy that Jimmy would be this attractive to the florist just because he got in a mosh session, esp after yet another insufferable Jimmy monologue. (I love this show, I used to really love Jimmy and Gretchen, but for me they've really been some of the worst versions of themselves this season.) The flash-forward seemed pretty grim. Gretch isn't wearing either a wedding nor engagement ring. She seems to have pulled up short for a second at the floral display in the hotel lobby, which kinda looks like the wedding centerpiece Jimmy picked out. It could be a fake-out. Maybe there's a happy reason for all this. But weirdly, it seems upsetting that Gretchen is turning down alcohol.