Zonk

What an amazing show. Funny, sad, great writing, amazing characters, great acting. Too bad this is never going to get more episodes. But then again, they told a story and they told it extremely well. I don't think I've ever seen a show centered around a gay man that wasn't about him being gay. Just a normal bloke, in a a job he is made for, but stuck in a shit system, which puts strain on him, his SO and people around him. Of course there were some strugles related to being gay, but that is to be expected and very relateable. For example how/when do you tell co-workers? If they ask you if you have a girlfriend, do you tell them "no, I'm gay." or do you just say "no". It's a bit more cut and dry if you have a boyfriend, but who always has one of those lying around? But overall this show was not about being gay and I really appreciate that. I wish we'd have had something like this much sooner. The show title is not wrong. A lot of this really hurt. It's sad to see so little money spent on essential health services when so much money gets thrown around for frivolous things. Not just by billionairs, but also by our governments. I don't think conditions in most of the western world are much better. I know in germany some aspects are much worse. 400.000 to 600.000 people a year get infected with multi resistant pathogens in german hospitals. 20.000 to 40.000 of these people die. That's a lot more than in our neighbouring countries (per capita). But does anybody do anything about it? No, instead they spend billions on "the war on terror". Do you know how many people terrorists killed in germany since the 80s? 13. Not 13 thousand or even 13 hudnred, just 13. Weigh that against ~30.000 deaths a year. Life is absurd. What especially hurt was realising that Shruti killed herself. When she spoke directly to the camera, saying "I'm sorry. I really did try." I didn't put it together. I thought she was just going to quit her job. It was a straight punch to the gut. But it was earned and it did make sense. She used to be so idealistic. By the end she just lost all hope in the system and in humanity. I guess at the end they were suggesting that Adam and Harry wouldn't get back together, because Adam couldn't give up being a doctor. But they left it a bit open ended, so my headcanon is going to be that Adam finally opening up, and telling Harry about what was going on in his work-life, was enough. I just liked those two together so much. I'm not crying while writing this post, you are crying! Man, this show was intense. I probably should have space it out a bit more. But I couldn't not watch till the end. PS: To leave you on a more fun, a bit nitpicky, note. This was set in 2006, so the following conversation doesn't make much sense: Harry: "It's my second-favourite doctor!" Adam: "Who's number one?" Harry: "David Tennant. First series." David Tennant's first series of Doctor Who aired in 2006. Even if this was set after, which not that likely, since it aired in the middle of the year and it didn't look like fall or winter in this show, who would say "first series" when there was only one of them out at the time?

2x01: The paralel universe is interesting. Guess the detective just found the Dollhouse. Wondering what Nina is doing in Prairie's body in the original universe. Sad to find out that this show will end on a cliffhanger, because Netflix couldn't get a heads up for the cancellation.

Like I said, she faked her securities. But as long as you still intend to pay the money back with interest, that has to be a more minor count than the intend to steal it all, right? Those aren't in question, but those were the more minor counts of fraud.

But was it? At least on the big counts? I assume she intended to pay the credit back with interest, once her business was up and running. That might have actually been the better defense. It can't be as bad, if you just fake your securities, than if you actually plan on defrauding the bank. Though that only goes for show-Anna, not real-Anna. Show-Anna really wanted to build a business and become rich and famous by doing so. She probably even could have pulled it off. Real-Anna strikes me as somebody who just wanted to party and spend money. She would have totally used that credit for some bullshit. On the more minor count: Of course Rachel was a victim here and I don't like how the narrative turned on her in the last episode. That she made some money off her horrible experience shouldn't be held against her. She got money for this? I can't really imagine why. The story is on record and should be useable by anybody. It doesn't seem like she provided any unique inside and if she had to be paid everybody else in the story would have had to. If anything the reporter or the magazine, they took this story from, should have been payed. Weird.

This was kinda fun to watch, but stuuuupid on so many levels. - those guns were super uneffective. Maybe at least give them some explosive ammo. - why not send mainly drones? You could mass produce them here and they could make nearly unbreachable perimiters in the future. - you lose 70% of soldiers in a 7 day rythm and spend one million dollars on each of their families. Yeah, any country would be bankrupt in weeks. - did they really only think of taking some blood from a female at the end of the war? - they developed a toxin that needs to be injected? What the hell is that supposed to be good for? You can just as well stick a granade in their maws. A toxin that doesn't effect creatures from earth and can be sprayed from a plane, now that would have been something. - for that matter, why didn't they stick a granade in the female on the oil rig? Might have scattered the males. Made no sense. - Maybe you shouldn't do your experiments on a female where your time bridge is, if you know that the males will come looking for her... - why did that toxin have to be developed in the future? Send samples back to the past. - does the future change or not? It wasn't clear. If it does, wouldn't it have been better to develop new technologies and try to find the source of the white spiked before they become a problem? Wouldn't that have been a good idea reagardless, because otherwise humanity in this timeline is fucked in 30 years? - why would there be that tell-tale vulcanic ash on the claw? - How did they ever find that spaceship? Nothing would have narrowed it down and russia is fucking big. - why would all the whitespikes wake up when they were there and not before? Just because some others screamed a bit. The life support for them still seemed to work and so I'd have to assume the containment did, too? Could they just break out during flight and murder the alien pilot, whenever they please? - why does it matter if the toxin kills females? If the toxin isn't crap and can be sprayed, it doesn't really matter. Kill all the males, then drop a bomb in the nest. The females never leave those. Rince, repeat until you have all of them. Those nests were pretty big. You should be able to find them easily with satelity imaging. If the toxin is crap and needs to be injected, why would you need it in the first place? - I was dubious at the beginning that all the world governments would commit this many resources for some future people. I mean we can't even stop climate change for the future people and that would be a hell of a lot cheaper, without sending people into a war. But okay, that's the world they established. But then when they had the origin of the white spikes and a toxin from the future leader herself, they couldn't get any government resources to produce the toxin and go clear out that spaceship? Buh humbug! You can't have it both ways. You can't have the governments of the world do everything in their power to fight that war and then have them do nothing in the end. - But lets take the last point as a given. Why was it so important to find the ship right now? They knew they had decades until the white spikes emerged. Take your time to produce a tanker full of toxin, wait till the riots have cleared up. Get some government assitance. Do it right. No, instead they are going in with a ragtag group of dummies and risk accellerating the timeline in a time where the world is busy with civil unrest. Real smart, these guys. There is probably even stuff I missed. It was jsut sooooo much dumb. There isn't just one queen. Females are a lot more rare, but there are still a bunch. Of course with that in mind it makes no sense that thousands of whitespikes swam an ocean to rescue this one female, but whatever. She was alive in 2021 though. They established that you couldn't be alive twice at the same time. They never quite explained what would happen, but presumably it would be bad.

And what these high society people really value (money) and what behaviour they will accept (basically anything, as long as you have enough money). That message would have been lost if they had changed her character for the show to be sweet and charming.

I'm sure he'll dry his tears with his piles and piles of money.

I blieve in her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Part of me believing in her is that she is cloying and grating.

Some comments about the scenes in germany: There was never in my lifetime a conductor yelling the stops live in the train. Used to be that the conductors voice would come over shitty speakers, you mostly didn't understand. Used to be a joke that you needed a dictionary to translate it into german. Now it's just a computer voice and in that train type it would have been a computer voice. I can also tell you that Eschweilers trainstation wouldn't have looked like that in 2006. But I guess those two are forgiveable since, they are in Vivian's imagination. In the present day, there was way too much luggage on the overhead racks. Those things are shitty, way too small, so most people don't bother and the luggage will instead clog up the aisles. Yay, Deutsche Bahn and train design. They always talk about Eschweiler as "small town germany". It has over 55.000 inhabitants. That may be small by american standards, but it certainly isn't for german ones. Yeah it's not a big city, but it's also not some backwater hick town. It isn't a 1000 people town in saxony, it is a big town in the west, so the butcher would never get away with and be so openly racist. I live in a town 4 times smaller than Eschweiler and that wouldn't fly here. Of course there are people who are racist, you have those everywehere, but it isn't socailly acceptable and so the racists keep it to themselves in public and only spout their hate in private or on the internet. I also really doubt that Anna was the only russian girl in her school. One third of my class were Russlanddeutsche. So germans who had migrated to russia like 80 years ago, or were living in regions that the soviet union captured from germany in WW2 and were now coming back after the fall of the sovjet union. Granted, my time in school was a few years before Anna's, but not by much. And not to give you the wrong impression, none of these people still spoke german. Maybe some of the grandparents of the kids in my class, but not even their parents did. So for all intents and purposes they were russian. Without reading much about her, I suspect that Anna also is from a family of Russlanddeutsche. Are we supposed to believe that Anna really lived in that contaminated Villa? Because that wouldn't fly in germany. Or was that just part of the idle speculation? Maybe in reality she just took some pictures of it and said she lived there. How they depicted that Gymnasium (high school) is bullshit on so many levels. Now more and more schools, including the one Anna went to, have lunch, but they didn't at the time. Anna's school started a lunch programm in 2011, when Anna would have gone there from 2007 to maybe 2010. Also, while it's a catholic school and looks a bit more drab than most schools because of it, it certainly doesn't look like Hogwarts. The cefeteria looks like this: The letter Vivian got with the return adress "Herr Vadim Sorokin" was a bit weird. You don't put the "Herr" in the return adress. It's a form of adress, like Mr. in english, you wouldn't use on yourself. What I did like is that they used actual german actors for the scenes. Often in american production you have american actors with horrible accents playing germans. They even had a pretty well known comedian as Anna's old teacher "Hoecker Sie sind raus!". The only one who sounded a bit weird was Anna's father. I don't really buy his russian accent. But I couldn't find anything about the actor. Doesn't seem to be on IMDB. Maybe I'm wrong here. Edit: Anna's father was played by Peter Kurth. He grew up in north-east germany. So yeah, that russian accent sounding wrong wasn't just my imagination.

But this story is a completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up. That is one of the completely true parts. When you look at interviews with the real one, she really is like that. That might have even lend her authenticity. People thought "she must be rich, otherwise she couldn't get away with being so rude and annoying".

Yeah that's a mixed russian-german-accent. That is not what Julia Garner is doing. I have no idea what she is doing, actually. Sounds like half the accent she has on Ozark (is that her natural accent?), half something I can't place, with occasional sprinkles of an english accent in there, with the occasional irish. She really, really didn't. Maybe it's because I'm german and about one third of my class were russian kids, but that is not resembling anything a russian or german accent sounds like.

Sure but the elements (from the periodic table, not air, water, fire and earth) are the same in the whole universe. If you can fly through half the galaxy and teleport things, you can puzzle elements into something you can eat. That's childsplay in comparison. You can't get something from nothing. That cow has to eat to produce the stuff the butterflies eat.

I liked it so far. We'll see how it goes. I'm not even sure what it is supposed to be. But maybe that's the point?

Fun episode and really good use of music, as always. The cow plot seems a bit far fetched to me. You are telling me aliens who traveled across the galaxy and can teleport things can't synthezise food for themselves? It's only arranging elements in a certain configuration, compared to teleportation, how hard can it be? Probably bi. He slept with quite a few men, from the sound of it. I already wondered in the second episode how heterosexual or not that threesome with vigilante was. Now I'm wondering even more. Would be kinda fun if those two would get it on alone at some point. They are a weird but weirdly good match. In general, it would be nice if they showed that side of him more next season. We've already seen him with women this season. Only paying lip service to a character being gay or bi always feels a lot like having your cake and eating it, too. Yeah, I figured it was his father making them fight when we saw the shorter flashback last week. He showed up way too fast after the brother went down. That he made them fight for money and not for some weird training exercise somehow makes it worse. I mean there is no way he needed that money right? He seems to be a brilliant scientist who has a Tardis in his house full of super tech. Then putting that all on your son, when you made him do it? Woof, what a piece of shit. Having to kill his own father must have been horrible, no matter what a bastard he was, but Chris had to do it himself to finally be free of him. Somebody else killing him wouldn't have been enough.

Helps that he's also pretty likeable, as opposed to the guy he's running the race with. Usually with the alpha male teams their personality is a big turnoff for me. With Ryan, not so much. Those legs did look really good in those shorts and once they got wet... dat ass... Chest could be a bit hairier though to make that package pefect. Maybe that will come with age.

Oh yeah, Batman is the worst. It doesn't matter how many people have to die, as long as he doesn't have killing supervillains on his concience. Selfish prick. Do mass murderers regularly break out of prison? Because the supervillains in Gotham sure do and they kill a lot of people, every time. First and foremost Joker. Actually you'll be lucky if he kills you. He has done far worse to people. So yes, that is Batman's fault and also the systems fault for not putting those villains down. I'm against the death penalty in the real world, but if you can't keep these criminals contained and they keep murdering people, you got to execute them.

I'm pretty sure you always had to take a penalty at the task you wanted to skip. Taking it at the mat was only a thing if you screwed up. I mean in the first few seasons. By season 5 production had gotten good enough at bunching the teams that it basically never happened. Though a team still being in another country while the first team crossed the finish line had its own charm. Same for me and most other people with ADHD. I can't remember anything short term. But some people develop some impressive coping strategies that can help in situations like these. 95% of the shots were from dashcam mounted cameras pointed at the racers, 5% were shots from behind from another car following them. They showed how they did it in detail. Something must have cut out for you there. I'm so gay I never even noticed. Women just dont enter my mind in a sexual context at all. Has actually gotten me in slight trouble once or twice. It's 47 minutes, not an hour and has a lot of behind the scenes information. Of course it takes a while.

I theorised quite a few episodes ago that these writers have no idea what a podcast is and think it's just radio. That was confirmed today when they were taking live fucking calls.

I mean "distant". The tasks where right next to each other and the mule task was pretty fast. They were maybe half an hour behind. Also it's not like bad taxi luck or something got them there. They got themselves to that point. I'll be impressed when they don't fuck themselves over.

Also as far as I understood it, the agreement was that they would stick together to look for the clue. Which is a good idea, since missing it and having to do the whole thing over would have been catastrophic and a guaranteed philimination. But after they had the clue, all bets were off. So I don't even think the flight attendants "betrayed" them. That was really a masterclass in whining over nothing. Well, there was no self-driving. They are reasonably competent in the challanges. Their downfall is navigation. As soon as there is self-driving again, they will be last. You can rely on that. Even though there is a saying about mules being stubborn, they are actually very chill animals. Smarter than horses, not as stubborn as donkeys. What would have been diabolical would be making them milk the goats as part of the Detour. Or blow the Kayaks up with their mouths. Just having them pump for a bit really wasn't anywhere close to diabolical.

Ugh Dusty is the type of guy I wouldn't want to spend 5 minutes with. As soon as there is some slight preassure he turns very unpleasent and I assume we didn't even see the half of it, since they are getting a very good edit. Even when they were on the amazing bathmat and save, his demeanor wasn't a good look. Ryan on the other hand handled this whole thing extremely well. Hard to believe those two are friends. Nice to see some other teams pass those two for a change. Gives you hope, that while they are most certainly in the finale, unless something catastrophic happens, somebody else might actually win this race.

I considered her handler being her mother early on, but dismissed it, because that would be too dumb. Well, guess this show is that dumb. Also the big twist of her being a sleeper agent doens't make any sense. So she was out of comission for 20 years, for what? So that she could be randomly found by a CIA asset and become a low level operative? She is a shapeshifter. She is waaaay too valueable for such a mission. Literally anybody else could have done that in way less time. Also I guess her mother was sent to siberia even thogh she was still loyal, as a cover? Man that is cold. But I guess she did deserve it.

I kinda doubt they are going to do the Aramenthes. They don't add much other than some character flavor for Keyleth. The slayers take, I hope they do. It came back multiple times and would add to the world. 99% sure they won't bother with vestiges and if they do, they could/should completely change where they are gotten. Getting every vestige at the places they were gotten in the campaign would take up waaay too much time. In the show they would all have to be in one place.

He probably bought a doctor title from the university of Manila or something. Well he was quite a bit heavier back then, too. In the world of the show it seems he never had that weight.