Penman61

I never cared for either of Carrie's main loves, Big or Aidan. I thought both characters (and actors) were offputting and didn't have much charisma. Carrie was treated like shit by Big, and she treated Aidan like shit. That said, the Carrie/Aidan story in SATC is responsible for two of my few enduring memorable acting moments in that series: 1) Carrie repeating, pleading, to the point of some kind of mania, "You have to forgive me!" to Aidan; and 2) Aidan finally breaking and nearly screaming "You broke my heart!!" to Carrie. So I'm fine seeing them back together, I guess, and I do think their brief interactions so far are the least awful writing for AJLT. (That restaurant mishap actually happened to me. Lasted a full hour. Pre-cell-phones, for the record.) I 100% get Aidan not wanting to go back into That Apartment, at least at first, with no prep. I also find the actor/character less grating so far: He was such a low-grade macho bro in SATC, and he always seemed so self-satisfied but with no cause except maybe he was good with wood? Guess time chastens us all.

My theory is that Steve break-up-fucks like nobody's business, and the high-decibel screams from his chain of satisfied partners is why he's experiencing hearing loss...

Encountering The Americans on this show is like biting into a surprise piece of prime steak on your shit sandwich.

I'm going to try to govern myself to manage my anger as I type this... Background: One of the truly great innovations of the past few decades is we've developed a culture around discussing sex BEFORE we do it: Consent is the foundation, it's not a binary, and explicit negotiation and permission about particular practices and participants has thankfully replaced a silent "I guess we're doing THIS now?!?" that went on in (mostly) women's inner monologues when they were coerced or forced into doing things they did not want to do. OF ALL PEOPLE ON ALL SHOWS, I would expect that combination of Miranda (savvy feminist lawyer) and Che (sex-wise, experienced NB) would not make the exchange they do at the start of a surprise, college-level "spontaneous" threeway: Che (as surprise threeway begins), to Miranda: Is this OK? Miranda (paraphrasing): Give me a minute. It might be hot, but I'm unsure. Che: The more you talk, the less hot this is. Are you fucking kidding me right now? Those words are, my friends, the words of a fucking predator. This is fucking coercion, and short of actual force, it's one of the most taboo things you can do in this brave and good new world of CONSENT, especially poly play and most any other sexual communities. It. Is. Not. Done. I actually paused the show in such rage right now. SATC especially, and to some, hopefully, lesser extent AJLT are attempts to lead the mid-culture in sex, however hamfisted and low-level reactionary the results could be. It's enraging to see them propagate one of the hoariest and most pernicious tropes about sex. I'm going to unpause and watch the rest now. No idea how it turns out, but unless Miranda walks the fuck out and dumps this motherfucker already, she is in a world of future hurt. Or worse, my god, this show will just glide right by the coercion and focus on Miranda's ickiness about the proposed Brave New Threeway. Ugh. (And I actually enjoyed the lunch scene with the foursome. Felt almost like vintage SATC.) ETA: My inner Charlotte now wants to apologize for all the "fuckings" in this post. But coercion is BAD, y'all. Esp from your PARTNER.

I can't say this is the worst-written show on tv. All I can say is that it's the worst-written show I've seen.

Thanks to posters explaining the use of the Edenesque video. But the follow-up idea—that the reason the Exiters then clean the camera lens is so the Siloers can see the “true” world—seems unconvincing. Does the Exiter really think the very detailed dystopic hellscape 10K people have been seeing for decades is because of some schmutz on the lens? That a few woolly wipes will reveal the blue-sky lushness? That makes zero sense to me. I can only fanwank that the Exiter is becoming oxygen-deprived and thus cognitively impaired. But I find myself unconvincing to myself on this.

Sure, and I’m fine with a brilliant showrunner giving himself (and being given!) room to stretch out. But tennis has a net, and the show is called Black Mirror, so I’m not expecting a frothy tech-free rom-com ep anytime soon, just as I wasn’t expecting a tech-free horror/supernatural ep. Between Joan is Awful, the true crime ep and this one, seems this is the season that Brooker Went Meta, and I just realized that this episode was explicitly introduced as an episode of Red Mirror—so I guess it’s not an episode of Black Mirror after all. :)

Loved this episode. I literally LOLed a few times, and I'm fine with BM expanding its tonal range. (I'm less sanguine about its leaping completely out of its topic universe, as happens in later eps this season.) I've seen more than one critic (respectable, mainstream) begin their reviews with something like "Joan is Awful is about Joan...who is awful." But she's not! That's a key point in the satire, in that Joan is pretty average, and we catch her on a day when she does two ambivalent but easily vilified things: firing an employee at the behest of her bosses, and seeing her hot ex for dinner as she's finding her fiancé a bit humdrum. That's it. That is not "awful." I mean, the point the ep is making is, by now, standard reality show technique--villain edits, after all, are a thing--so I'm surprised to see professionals missing this obvious point: Joan isn't awful; Joan is Awful is awful.

Halfway through, absolutely unclear how this is a Black Mirror episode... ETA: Finished. Still unclear.

I've now read a couple posts speculating that Shiv is becoming more "maternal," or some version of "well, she now realizes she's a mom, so..." I personally didn't see any shift in her because of her pregnancy. When she thought it would be useful (or wounding; if you're a Roy, they're the same) to bring the pregnancy up to Tom, she did. But as far as her factoring being a parent into her business decisions...if the show did that, it was so subtle that I missed it.

My own take now that we have the whole story is that all this talk of succession on Succession was really a MacGuffin. Or, to paraphrase the decades-proven wisdom of the classic movie WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The minute you mixed extreme paternal abuse and corporate succession, there was never going to be a good outcome for the Roy children. It just wasn't possible because they were seeking validation/approval not only from a person who could never give it--Logan Roy--but seeking it through a forum with its own incentives and cross-pressures: global corporate media. And these incentives are, to put it mildly, not conducive to gaining genuine parental acceptance and validation, even in the best of familial circumstances. That's why I found the three siblings' endings very true and satisfying: Kendall is lost, with no idea who he is or what to do if he can't try to be Logan; Shiv is still caught up in playing the game as best she can, wielding attenuated power and seeking acceptance through a man she has utter contempt for; and Roman drinking alone but apparently starting to enjoy himself free of the game, whatever that means for him in his corroded, twisted soul--yet the only one who seems close to understanding that the only way to win is to get out of the game.

My problem with Greg being CEO isn't that he's more unqualified than the kids (though I think he is); it's that as a dramatic choice it breaks credulity. The kids are in the running because actual humans apparently (still) have a wide monarchical streak in them: Bloodlines, chip off the old block, etc. But Greg is merely some kind of cousin--not a child--of the king, and been shown to be especially undertalented even among the unqualified. So if Armstrong chooses to make a (cringey, cheesy) point by making Greg the new king, then I think that's where believability is sacrificed in order to Make A Point.

I understand why it's being discussed--the show, esp in this episode, has been setting up Greg as a viable dramatic choice for CEO--but just repeating what I said weeks ago: If Greg has the crown when the music stops, this show will have jumped the shark as badly as any show ever has. It will reveal the creator Jesse Armstrong as having a puerile and shallow understanding of how things work, and instead wanted to make A Point about How Bad Capitalist Things Are (and I hate capitalism, unbridled, myself). Armstrong has already dramatized the point that underqualified nepobaby corporatists are ruining the world, and so far, he's done it convincingly and compellingly. But CEO Greg?....just, no.

I am not defending a single important character on this show BUT I will say that my own experience with unexpected grief is that a lot of it is not directly about the person you lost—it’s a response to a direct, unavoidable encounter with your own mortality. So at any particular moment in grief, your sorrow might be about YOU and not about how you felt about the dearly departed. And that, my friends, is how you see people genuinely crying (like Kerry?) at the funeral of someone they were indifferent to or even despised. The tears are for yourself; the funeral is just the occasion.

I'm fine describing Logan Roy as a bad man, full stop. If the best one can say about him is that he was a once-in-a-decade capitalist success, then that says more about capitalism than it does about Logan Roy. He beat his kids (at least Roman) when they were small. As adults, he manipulated them and pitted them against each other for his own gain, and occasionally, enjoyment. HE HIT HIS GRANDCHILD. Once a person dies, any possibility of redemption dies with them. Logan was awful, and is now offal.

The scene with Sally and her Dark Stranger or whatever...I mean, a good many of us are still not sure that this whole "8 Years Later" flashforward isn't a dream, so to have a dream/hallucination/whatever WITHIN that, then with no confirmation or explanation...it's frustrating. My only hope is that there's a payoff for all this imbrication. At the moment it just makes me annoyed and cranky.

For those wondering about election law & how defensible what Tom, Kendall, and Roman did in calling Wisconsin is, an interesting Twitter thread from an election lawyer's perspective (Twitter, so grain of salt, etc.). Seems like in the real world, losing a large number of ballots that could affect the outcome would trigger a re-vote. Money quote:

OMG the ep title is ironic.

Oversimple answer: A major network calling the election first on election night gives the “winner” a big boost in the “narrative,” which should, as you suggest, be 100% separate from the official counting and certification of ballots (which can take days or even weeks.) BUT, as we in the U.S. found out in 2000, 2016, 2020, and seem destined to find out again in 2024, setting the narrative can influence any of the hundreds or thousands of rulings/decisions by individual localities and courts about what to count, recount, etc. Ideally, every single one of those decisions should be walled off from media predictions, from the narrative. In practice, this is not so. I was only mildly exaggerating in my first post up top. It is actually terrifying how real this episode feels, how untethered from actual vote counts our elections are becoming.

This ep should've come with a trigger warning for 2016 and 2020 election night PTSD sufferers.

Hoping we don't share the same revelatory data point, but I will note I did qualify with "almost." :)

Thanks for going to the trouble to find and post the actual quotes. :) Wow. I guess the best we can hope for is that Sarah Snook is "intuitive" enough of an actress that when her unpregnant character heard "You'd be a bad mother!" the pregnant actress's true feelings about hearing those actual words spilt unintentionally across her expression... Man, I'd be a bit pissed, though, as an actor, were I her.

I don't have the original quote handy, but when I heard TPTB say "one ep = one day," I didn't take it to mean consecutive days, just that each episode's time period was 24 hours. (Happy to be corrected, though.) So, in theory, the next episode could be 6 months later than last week's, but it would just cover one day.

I'm sorry, what? Do you have a link? This strikes me as...well, wrong. I mean, there's probably an occasional pick-up scene here or there out of sequence for location purposes, but I truly can't imagine they filmed this run of episodes so out of sequence that they didn't know Shiv was pregnant during that fight scene on the terrace. (Also, if I were Sarah Snook, as an actor I'd be pretty unhappy about filming the series' climactic marriage fight WITHOUT KNOWING MY CHARACTER WAS PREGNANT at the time. Tom's biggest insult to her in the scene is "You would be a bad mother!") Sorry, I just get protective of actors sometimes lol.

Eyebrow density is almost always a harbinger. His ass is 100% hairy.