Nerfect Drifty

The ending felt weirdly anticlimactic because it came down to one final duel, and the amount of territory was so lopsided. I had thought it would come down to something like 40 and 60 or something, but it was like 79 to 2. I liked that it opened with a big duel between two guys with lots of territory.

Been an addictive show and I wish I had remembered to post here before the night before the finale. Last week there were two huge swaths of territory on the board: the one on the left that kept changing hands and the one on the right. I kept wanting to see a challenge between the two big patches so we could get that satisfying huge light-up and someone controlling half the board. Of course that's not a good idea for the player because it gets harder to hold and jeopardizes the $20,000 nightly prize. At one point there will be only two people left so I wonder how that duel will go. It seems anticlimactic to just have it come down to a single duel. I'm hoping there will be special rules, like a best 2 out of 3 thing.

So this corrupt corporate executive is releasing a pesticide that is gonna kill people and cost his company a crapload of money in lawsuits. The only way he can be stopped is if his enemies get a copy of an incriminating memo of which there is only one copy. Instead of feeding the memo into the nearest convenient paper shredder or open flame, this idiot decides to hold on to it? I guess it's for sentimental reasons? Like his dearly departed mother gave him the sheet of paper it's printed on? Or maybe it's a religious thing? I've heard there are some ultra-strict sects of Judaism where you cannot destroy anything that has God's name written on it.

Remember Lothos from the original series? The evil leaper episodes got a lot of hate back then, but I thought it would have been cool if Gideon somehow became Lothos. Some people wrote some original series fan fiction which gave an origin story to Lothos, and that he was a normal guy who got trapped in a supercomputer after a leaping mishap.

I watch because I keep holding out a foolish hope that Sam Beckett will return home.

I think they did that in the original series because it would be too difficult to control animals and babies and stop them from reacting to Dean Stockwell's presence. Here they can just avoid animals all together and CGI them in when they want to.

You think the hacks that write this show are going to take a good actor and give him good material?

Yes but when they did that, it was the story. Like Sam being the young woman who got raped, or the housewife dealing with a husband who didn't approve of her feminist activism, or the first leap as a woman where he dealt with all the sexual harassment and sexism at the car company, or the one where he leapt into a possibly gay military cadet and they tackled the issue of gays in the military. They didn't have some story where Sam had to save someone from drowning, then tack on a "oh yeah by the way my husband is a regressive sexist jerk". This B-plot and that big scene with the bandages was nothing but Author Filibuster. Wanting to spread some message is no excuse for doing your job (entertaining) badly. And given all the problems with the A-story, that part felt more like an Excuse Plot.

Oh okay. That makes more sense.

I guess that's a good point, but did those surgeries even exist back then? I could tell where this thing was going when Dina insisted on being called Dean, so I'm just left to wonder if the writers expected that whole thing to be a surprising reveal. Because it felt like they were trying to do a surprise reveal when the bandages were revealed. I wouldn't put it past the writers on this show to think they were writing a surprising reveal. They really are that terrible at their jobs.

See that's what got me the whole time. The last time they did a story about this, it was set in 2012 when society was thinking about trans issues. Also, that was the entire leap story. I can't see anybody being comfortable being open about that in the 1950s. It just didn't make any sense and they shoehorned it in because they wanted to tell some preachy message. And if they wanted to do THAT, why didn't they set the story closer to the present so that this B-story didn't seem so anachronistic? I hate it when telling a story becomes secondary to preaching a social message. This episode was just indescribably bad. Heavy handed social issue messaging, cliched story, idiotic character decisions. At least they finally gave Rachel's boss a name. But it wasn't some big reveal like we could be all "OMG it was that guy???" It's just, some guy named Gideon walks in, and I'm all "why were they keeping his identity a secret?" I mean, I never refer to my supervisor at work as "my boss". I call him "Steve" because that's his name. None of the writing decisions made sense. Why did they set this in the 1950s? Why did they make Ben a 17 year old girl? Why did they give the satchel containing the ever important map away? They were ACTIVELY USING IT FOR A TREASURE HUNT. Why were they being secretive about the name of Rachel's boss if he was just going to be a new character all along? Why were Addison and Tom so eager to get married right away, to the extent that the guy had to pull some strings to get a judge to stay late? You know, I used to look forward to each new episode of this show. Now I wait several weeks because it's like some sort of chore to slog through.

But if they didn't fly through hostile airspace, they would not have needed decoys in the first place.

I simply could not get past the fact that the robbers didn't wear anything to obscure their faces. Nothing. Even if one of the robbers was not brother to a bank employee and thus instantly recognizable, and even if things had gone perfectly to plan and they were in and out before the cops showed up, their faces would be all over the security footage. I know this took place in 1986 so I should not make too many assumptions about the technology, but banks had cameras all over the place even back then. They were bulkier and more expensive, but they were there.

A lot of talk about the series in general here, but not a lot about the episode itself. It seemed like there were an awful lot of plot holes. Primarily, why was the Air Force flying something so important through hostile Soviet airspace in the first place? They were flying from Germany to India. Today, a flight from Berlin to New Delhi doesn't go through Russia, although back in 1978 it did go through some of the Soviet satellite countries. Still, for something this important they could have taken a longer flight path. Maybe go down through Italy, over the Mediterranean, and through the Mideast? Then those 4 Soviet soldiers showed up at the crash site. The gang subdued them and stole their guns but didn't restrain them or anything. So what were the Russians doing while the Americans were having their little confab? Just waiting patiently? They were too polite to counter attack or leave or anything?

This happened in the original series too, but it wasn't as drastic and it was just a footnote. Between Sam's first and second leap, something like 2 weeks passed in the present when it was just an instant for him. Also, the present year in the original series started at 1995, then abruptly jumped to 1999 at some time. I don't think there's any explanation that would be satisfying or not sound like a lot of weird sci-fi mumbo-jumbo.