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Greg doesn't keep a low profile, considering how he came into a huge amount of money. He worked for the US government and he's got a big yacht and a spectacular villa. You would think that would make people suspicious of him or he just invites random people to his yacht or villa and nobody asks what he does or did. Is that how it usually works, you get invited to some yacht or a mansion and you don't wonder how the owner got so rich?

No all the females are expected to pretend to be interested in some male cast. It's possible they are genuinely attracted but they're being filmed most of the day and they're expected to dress up when they go out and flirt at least. But it's also possible that they're not interested or that they're interested in someone else, either back home or maybe near the port where they're working. Getting more skeptical that every young cast member who isn't married is on the prowl, in front of the cameras.

Well she assumes that Piper won't give up "creature comforts" because she herself wouldn't want to live if they're poor. In fact she said they need to make Piper fear poverty. We will see if she's right, if Piper is more like her mother than she would like to admit or she really wants to get out of the life that Victoria has planned for her. Maybe because they are about to become poor but that monk blew his mind a lot more by having him visualize water drops falling back to the water than he imagined blowing his brains out. Though he seemed to be thinking of Victoria when he then imagined blowing her brains out first and then killing himself, to spare her being poor. Saxon has no soul according to Chelsea, who was trolling him about getting with his brother, drugs or no drugs. But The Handjob is going to torture him for awhile. Probably until he learns that they're going to be poor. How is he going to be a tortured soul if he doesn't have a soul? Gaitok is turning it around. He retrieved the gun and he shot like a boss. Maybe he has a killer instinct after all. Mook seems to be into it, a man with a gun. The women friends subplot is boring though Laurie is salty that Jaclyn hooked up with the Russian. Jaclyn's husband claiming his phone was dead seems like a common or not believable excuse. What's Jaclyn's excuse going to be, he ghosted her for a couple of days so she hooked up? Greg/Gary doesn't seem to care if Chloe hooked up with one of the brothers. She just realized that she has a nice setup, living in some beautiful villa, with a baller yacht and meals and amenities at the WL below? Maybe she shouldn't be taking her LBH for granted. Rick sat and listened to Frank's story and now Frank has to do him a favor, pose as some film director so that they get to the house of the WL owners, so he can "talk" to the guy whom he believed killed his father.

Or she believes that to continue being cast on the show, including the seasons following this one, she has to get involved in the hookup drama, including dressing up and drinking and possibly hooking up on those crew nights out. If she decided to be "boring" by just doing her job, which is cooking the meals, and just kept her head down to focus on the work, obviously it wouldn't be as entertaining compared to having conflicts with other cast members. Hell unless she upped her "game" her scenes would be cut and not even make it on air.

Unless Lumon is a huge cult, extending way beyond the town they depict on the show, I would have a difficult time believing that it's widespread. They may sell it as a technology for making people more productive. However, we see clearly that's not the case, MDR works aren't some automatons who go full tilt for work throughout the workday. I'm not convinced there is a business model to make money or that Lumon even cares? Instead they're true believers, in Keir an how this whole project is some historic milestone for all of mankind. What would be the appeal unless you're in the cult? Does Lumon disclose that they can flip a switch and have your consciousness be replaced by the Innie, even OUTSIDE Lumon premises? Even if they lie about that, I don't see a big incentive for people to undergo severance. Mark said it helped cope with his grief. Well there's therapy and drugs to help people manage depression or discontent. These treatments may not be effective but they don't involve invasive surgery, cutting into your brain. Seriously who would sign up for that? People have brain surgery because it's a life and death situation, like a tumor. Otherwise they wouldn't take risks. Or at a minimum, there would have to be trials and studies proving that the severance procedure is both safe and effective. But we saw when Outie Dylan interviewed for that job that people have a dim view of severance and Lumon. So Lumon isn't experimenting with severance because they think it will be highly profitable. It's because they're true believers and they will abduct people and break whatever laws to get their way. At one point, one of the characters did say that if it was discovered, Lumon would be finished. I think it may have been Devon. But Lumon doesn't control politicians and the courts to the extent that they can do whatever they want.

Fincher movie about an assassin (Michael Fassbinder) based on a French graphic novel. We hear the Killer's constant thoughts through voiceover. He says he has a lot of free time on jobs and that is one of his biggest challenges. He's been waiting days for his target and is about to give up because the target isn't showing up so he muses on things like population rates, differences in cities, etc. He likes to check his pulse on his smart watch a lot and listen to The Smiths. Very meticulous, he repeatedly sprays his sink another other places where there might be traces of his DNA. When the target finally shows up, he makes a mistake and shoots just as someone else steps in the path of the bullet. The mistake leads to consequences and all the ensuing actions in the movie. For me, I've watched Day of the Jackal series recently and it's interesting to compare and contrast. Obviously the series has more scenes, more of an extended plot. The Killer here says to himself, "don't improvise, anticipate" over and over again. The Jackal is him improvising all the time. The Killer has one chase scene but he's not being chased by police, just leaving a crime scene and you know that he's planned out his route, knows when he's dumping a motor scooter and switching to a car. You also see him dumping part of his gear at different places. Then he goes and shaves and sprays down the sink. On the plane he sees someone on board that makes him wary so he leaves the plane and will take the next flight. The Jackal has a plan but he's having to improvise. There are some big action-movie scenes of very kinetic chases. That's the thing, nobody is chasing The Killer but The Jackal has a MI6 agent pursuing him in different countries. When The Killer returns to his hideout in the Dominican Republic, his home, which he shares with a girlfriend, has been invaded and there's blood and signs of violence. He finds her at a hospital, very cut up and he leaves because he's going to start taking revenge right away. The Jackal is married with a young child. His family never comes to harm but he's kept his trade a secret from his wife. So both The Killer and The Day of the Jackal show these serial murderers who kill for profit have significant domestic lives. Neither wants to give up their significant others, even though their work has put them at risk. The Killer's girlfriend is disfigured somewhat but he takes revenge and then goes back to her. Really interesting the way it delves into details. The Killer says there are 52,000 storage facilities in the US and he has storage units at 6 of them, full of weapons and fake IDs, credit cards. Fassbinder seems to have found a niche. After this he did The Agency show about spies and he's also in a new movie, Black Bag, a new Soderberg movie in which he plays a spy again.

Well they might not have a lot of security personnel inside the building but apparently they have very loyal goons like Drummond and true believers like Milchick -- in his case, at least for the time being. They put resources into the goat dept. and Burt's old group and the marching band. Who knows, maybe the company is past its peak. You look at Harmony's home town and that plant is not producing any more, so where is Lumon making its money now? They may dominate that particular town or region but that doesn't mean it's some global behemoth any more. Lumon has killed people, like that list Irv made and we see that they kidnapped Gemma, faked her death and made her a lab animal. We don't know if Gemma volunteered for severance, maybe under false pretenses, or if they just forced a very invasive procedure on her. So while they may not have many visible goons or henchmen, they're certainly capable of hurting people. Maybe they'll hire some more security, not just for inside the building but to "get" those opposing their interests, after what happened in this episode.

So much noise about the barber and JT thing. Not much going on in the episode except the usual dress up dinner party which the show ends each season with. I wonder if they get product placement money for dressing up the cast, because not only do they dress up often, the cast are talking about each other's looks many times. What is this, an infomercial for certain fashion? As a guy, I don't know what all these styles are suppose to be. But some viewers must be paying attention. Most of the tea seems to be in the epilogue, setting up drama for the reunion and maybe next season. Looks like Venita and JT will hash it out. If JT wants to be in any future seasons, he's going to have to play his role at the reunion, making a big deal out of something people could care less about, just like the Taylor vs. Salley dating the same guy or whatever. Craig will be expected to talk a lot about his breakup. Maybe he will say he's already found another girlfriend. Then next season, he will either be spiraling somehow or have another fake showmance. They will decide which is a better story fit. Austen's girlfriend has mostly been not on the show this season. The producers may demand that he contribute more to the drama again and since his "feud" with Craig was settled, maybe they will come up with some more relationship drama for him again. Oh yeah, they show Madison very pregnant in the previews for the reunion so that will be a story next season. But EVERYONE is shocked to see her pregnant! Again that just shows that when the cameras aren't running, these people aren't hanging out or paying attention to each other, though presumably you'd think real friends would be on some group chat all the time and would be following each other on social media. Are we suppose to believe Madison didn't post that she's pregnant? You know a reality show fame whore -- well that's redundant but you know ...

I don't get some of the reactions casting Mark Scout as a villain. He's exasperated and is now close to getting Gemma back and his Innie is saying he wants to keep doing what he's been doing, run around the floors of Lumon and hook up with Helly and Helena. If his Innie is refusing to help, Outie can just quit and Innie is gone. He didn't make that threat but what would be his motivation to keep going to work at Lumon after CH is done and Gemma is either rescued or gone? The Innies can't have lives other than to hang out inside Lumon and have pineapple bobbing contests. Nobody has raised the possibility of an alternate outcome for the Innies except for reintegration. So the Outies have the power in the relationship, most of the time, except Mark needing his Innie to get Gemma and guide her out of the depths of Lumon.

But Mark S. and Helly had that discussion before he finished Cold Harbor. That yeah they want to be together however Helly is Helena at the end of the day. Once Lumon got CH finished, they no longer need the innies. They can turn off the switch to turn on the innies or fire them. Mark Scout, in revenge for Mark S. not taking Gemma out of the building, could just refuse to go back to Lumon again. The Innies can't stay in there indefinitely. Are they going to live on vending machine food, waffles and pineapples? Are they going to be entertained by cheesy comedy acts with animatronic Keir and Milchick? It looked like Keir was going to use a racial slur against Milchick, dredge up all his doubts when they gave him those paintings. But instead, he was acting like a true believer and he tried everything to get out of the bathroom and probably would have stopped Mark and allowed Lumon to execute their plans, which included an animal sacrifice -- what the hell is this, they have a revolutionary brain control tech but they need the blood of a goat which has certain behavioral characteristics? We don't fully know Lumon's plans, whether CH test would have proven that they erased all of Gemma's emotions and memories, like having her work on the crib, which might normally trigger painful memories for her. So once Gemma became this blank vessel, they would have downloaded some different persona like the old Eagan guy onto her brain? Or maybe program it with the characteristics they wanted, so that she would have the Keir in her? That final choice Mark S. made in the corridor, Gemma on one end and Helly on the other, is kind of comical because they're running in circles, going nowhere, kind of like rats in a maze. Lumon doesn't need Mark S. any more so they can turn him off. Same presumably with Helly, who rebelled against Lumon. So Eagan can have her innie turned off too. That's why "See you at the Equator" was an ironic joke. They wouldn't be allowed to go to the equator, unless they reintegrate and regained the full combined consciousness of the inner and outie.

I got Max access through a Comcast subscription to HBO. They authenticate through your Comcast login. But I dropped Comcast and got a Max subscription directly. I don't get the HBO channels but that's okay, HBO has better picture quality and they make the Extras easier to find. Also, Max streaming gets you access to 4K and HDR streams, if you pay for their top tier. I don't believe cable systems have 4K versions of HBO channels yet.

Teams kind of overthought the strategy for the detours. The one nurse really struggled with the soccer thing and it probably got them eliminated. Meanwhile the brother and sister team, they let the brother do it and it helped them jump a couple of teams. They weren't worrying about saving the detours in the later legs for the more athletic partner, which seemed to be the rationale of the nurses. Wow a couple of teams tried the flipping task two dozen times or more, spent more than an hour before switching to the folding task? But both of them survived, though once they saw how hit and miss getting those spikes down was, they should have bailed. Scott and Lori win the leg, Scott is really good at details. Let's see if that is still true later in the race when they're likely to be more tired, sleep deprived. Lori said "that's rad" when she realized they were going to do a giant origami? Maybe that's the effect of raising 8 sons by herself. The couple who got the express pass, they were about to bail when she finally got it. Maybe they will have to use the EP because of the new gimmick coming up in the next leg.

Now the star holders are going down. Veronica and Katy are deluding themselves that they can run the final with poor athletes. The producers would really have to tilt the playground in their favor in the Final, just puzzles after puzzles after puzzles or something like the time zone challenge where they have knowledge that other teams don't have. That's if they make the final. I think the producers try to keep them in the game just for the entertainment value, since they seem to feature them a lot in the talking heads. Neither of them came close to tapping the star because Veronica appears to have let up on the gas before the end of the ramp so the quad buggy didn't clear the ramp and in fact fell and hit the side of the cliff before going into the water. I guess those things are completely water proof? There was a shot showing a couple of them in the water so they're not pulling it out and re-using it for each team. The elimination was pretty well designed. Just worked out that both teams were male-female and they only had to keep the table level for 3 minutes at a time. I don't think Dario was close to solving that puzzle, so it was going to be Ashley who would have to solve it. So he apparently ghosted her for 6 years? Man time flies, I vaguely recall the season where they met and had a little showmance going and they must have dated for some time and then 6 years afterwards, they're on the show again.

This whole friend group was a fiction from the start of the show. They cast some who were on other reality shows like Cameran and managed to get Thomas to join, as he's suppose to be from some old Charleston family. I'm not even sure Craig and Shep knew each other that well before the show either, though once it hit, they were doing appearances and tours together. When the cameras aren't running, how often are they in touch? My impression is that they do their own things, certainly they're not meeting each other at various Charleston bars and restaurants every other day or week like they would have you believe because most of the scenes on the show are just that.

That's my recollection as well. But remember, she was mocking the resort for rich bohemian wannabes wanting to do yoga or something like that and later she's doing yoga in Lululemon pants.