S01.E07: The Future of the Sport

[Ms Blue Jay]

2 hours ago, paigow said:

If she compared him to Sugar Ray Leonard, Apollo / Adonis Creed, Anderson Silva, Ivan Drago or Rocky Balboa - would that be more or less racist / problematic than M.P.?

Yes.  That was my original point.

Edited February 18, 2023 by Ms Blue Jay

[paigow]

48 minutes ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

Yes.  That was my original point.

So it would have been less racist to invoke Sugar Ray Leonard?

[Dev F]

3 hours ago, gesundheit said:

This was 100% how I took it and found it very clever. Not a false flashback at all, just not the zoomed-out, full-info "version."

No, the flashback is definitely different. The "Bourgeois Pig Shit List" changes from photos of Nixon and his cronies to photos of a bunch of high school kids, and the activists change from arranging flowers to putting shrapnel into pressure cookers.

The biggest change is that the actor playing Gabriel is different once Charlie finds out what he looks like. (She even mentions when the ladies point him out on Charlie's album cover T-shirt, "Not what I was expecting.") Originally he's played by an actor credited as "Hot Gabriel" and in the later flashback he's played by "Real Gabriel."

In fact, rewatching it now, I think they even went to the trouble of having the album cover feature Hot Gabriel the first time it appears inside the flashback, since Charlie obviously doesn't know how to picture Real Gabriel at that point.

Edited February 18, 2023 by Dev F

[possibilities]

6 hours ago, Cranberry said:

She's rebuffed two people now: Marge in episode two and Davis here. I kind of like that her sexuality (and her attitude re: sex in general) is ambiguous.

Her sexuality is ambiguous, but I found her hot this episode. I don't think we've seen her swagger or look comfortable before. Lyonne is not usually my type, but something about this episode gave her a different shine than usual. Charlie seems to be growing more confident in her abilities, and stammers less, for instance.

[Captain Carrot]

19 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I just can't get behind this.  Didn't Katy immediately drive into a wall?  How can one be sure someone won't die from that.  Maybe you're right that the logic of the show is putting that forward, but I don't know if I can.

I guess there's thee levels to to the question. How likely is it for someone to die in real life? Did the showrunners think it was likely for someone to die? Did Kyle think it was likely for someone to die? Only the last one is important in trying to determine how bad a guy Kyle was. Based on what we saw in the show Kyle didn't think anyone would be seriously hurt. So, he was definitely a bad guy in that instance, but not on the same level as Davis.

[gesundheit]

1 hour ago, Dev F said:

No, the flashback is definitely different. The "Bourgeois Pig Shit List" changes from photos of Nixon and his cronies to photos of a bunch of high school kids, and the activists change from arranging flowers to putting shrapnel into pressure cookers.

The biggest change is that the actor playing Gabriel is different once Charlie finds out what he looks like. (She even mentions when the ladies point him out on Charlie's album cover T-shirt, "Not what I was expecting.") Originally he's played by an actor credited as "Hot Gabriel" and in the later flashback he's played by "Real Gabriel."

In fact, rewatching it now, I think they even went to the trouble of having the album cover feature Hot Gabriel the first time it appears inside the flashback, since Charlie obviously doesn't know how to picture Real Gabriel at that point.

Ah thank you, I guess I wasn't watching very closely! (Or my memory is trash, equal chance of both)

[arc]

8 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

The absence of sound and the grainy flashbacks we see as Charlie talks to Davis about Katy's anticipated comeback signal to me that Charlie's version of her hospital visit is repackaged to have maximum impact on Davis

Yeah, but if it later comes out that she's dead or even that she was still in a coma when Charlie supposedly talked to her, then Davis will regain his 'flow' just like that, and then no real karma for him. Assuming car CSI doesn't find out he tampered with the seatbelt and doesn't connect the dots on the picture of Big Ed (which they would 100% not), then if Katy doesn't come back to kick his ass on the track, he just gets away with it.

The possibility that Charlie was lying about Katy's recovery therefore seems very unlikely to me, but it does echo a previous Rian Johnson project (spoiler for a years-old movie)

Spoiler

Knives Out.

BTW, all, y'all: Tim Blake Nelson played Keith. Not Kyle. There's no Kyle.

[Snazzy Daisy]

TVLine Performer of the Week

HONORABLE MENTION: Charles Melton 

[Irlandesa]

22 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I just can't get behind this.  Didn't Katy immediately drive into a wall?  How can one be sure someone won't die from that.  Maybe you're right that the logic of the show is putting that forward, but I don't know if I can.

You can't automatically know she wouldn't die because it's a dangerous sport.  But you can make a reasonable assumption that it's unlikely for the driver to die.

Race cars are designed withstand quite a beating these days.  For instance, I've watched Drive To Survive--the docuseries about F1 racing.  There are crashes in pretty much every race and some of them are amazingly brutal.  The drivers just walk away.

[shapeshifter]

2 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

Race cars are designed withstand quite a beating these days.  For instance, I've watched Drive To Survive--the docuseries about F1 racing.  There are crashes in pretty much every race and some of them are amazingly brutal.  The drivers just walk away.

That explains all the dents in both cars.
They were Chekhovian crash dents——past, present, and future dents.

[SnarkShark]

I like that this episode (deliberately) didn't wrap things up cleanly.  She's not a cop, and... in fact... one of the more precarious parts of the show's balancing act has been how inconsistent it is with the consequences of her being a fugitive (for example there's no BOLO on her vehicle?).  So it's great to have an episode pointing out she doesn't always have to get Cops or the FBI involved, then rely on them being too lazy to check on her.  She's relying on Karma here, and the power of suggestion.  It's not a clean resolution, but an interesting one.  

On 2/16/2023 at 6:59 AM, akg said:

So was Kyle trying to kill Davis or just cause an accident?

HIS words indicated he just wanted an accident.  He could be lying, but the circumstances where he confessed it makes that less likely.

[SomeTameGazelle]

5 hours ago, SnarkShark said:

She's not a cop, and... in fact... one of the more precarious parts of the show's balancing act has been how inconsistent it is with the consequences of her being a fugitive (for example there's no BOLO on her vehicle?).

Is she wanted by any legitimate authority? I thought it was just  the Frost family that was mad at her and Benjamin Bratt chasing her, not law enforcement and not a big enough crime syndicate to have such a broad reach either.

[Milburn Stone]

16 hours ago, Dev F said:

No, the flashback is definitely different...

Thanks for your whole post, @Dev F. 

So now I know that flashbacks, in the film grammar of Poker Face, can be deceptive--in particular when these flashbacks are being narrated, as it were, by someone other than Charlie. As regards "The Future of the Sport" and other episodes past and future, that leaves the question of whether present-time cutaways, especially when narrated by Charlie, are deceptive. In my mind, that's not a question. Nothing in the show would lead me to that conclusion.

 

[paigow]

1 hour ago, SomeTameGazelle said:

Is she wanted by any legitimate authority? I thought it was just  the Frost family that was mad at her and Benjamin Bratt chasing her, not law enforcement and not a big enough crime syndicate to have such a broad reach either.

Charlie is a Person of Interest / Material Witness... so she is not Top 10 Most Wanted, but definitely flagged on a search for outstanding warrants...

[possibilities]

They definitely do seem to have disposed of the 4 hour timeline for her to be found anywhere she stops. 

She's attached to her car the way Columbo was, but if she was as much being chased as was implied in the beginning, she'd have to have found a way to change vehicles, donned a disguise, etc.

I've decided to handwave it, for now.

 

[Ms Blue Jay]

I think the 4 hour timeline only applies if she uses an ATM.

[arc]

2 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I think the 4 hour timeline only applies if she uses an ATM.

Or otherwise gets on the radar, like say by going viral.

but yeah, she’s clearly picked up multiple weeks-long stints, from the go kart track to the retirement home to even the dinner theatre.

[Black Knight]

On 2/16/2023 at 10:48 PM, Chaos Theory said:

I do like that the show is showing that Charlie has her blind spots.  During the episode Time of the Monkey episode her bullshit meter caught lies on two occasions but since she “liked” the ladies she hand waved away the lies.  In this episode you see Davis purposely not lying to Charlie once he realize she can be used in his master scheme and instead just tells her enough of the truth to confuse the issue.   She has to catch him in a lie to someone else.    

Charlie explained in the pilot that everyone lies so often, and usually about completely stupid shit, that it's just noise. She has to have some reason to think that a lie might actually be important. So she goes through life handwaving away most lies. I don't think it really has anything to do with whether she likes the person or not.

She really should stop telling anyone about her being a cancer dog, but I saw in this episode that she is learning to make that work for her though by insisting on a direct answer to a direct question. Since the other person knows about her, both of them understand that to evade the question is an admission of guilt. It makes the situation much clearer than one where the other person does not know about her and might not be answering the question directly for some other reason that doesn't have anything to do with being guilty.

I was wondering why the writers just had Katy in a coma instead of being dead, when it's not like they've been shy about killing off even very sympathetic and likable people, and Charlie having to settle for unnerving Davis into losing his flow explained it.

[Ms Blue Jay]

I was very happy Katy wasn't killed.  Almost every victim is so sympathetic, it's overkill on this show!

[Haleth]

I don’t see that there’s any reason to doubt that Charlie was telling the truth about Katy being awake and recovering. As sensitive as she is to bullshit I don’t see her lying to anyone else. (Is there any example of her lying to anyone?  Too often she blurts out everything  she knows to the criminal.)

[SnarkShark]

11 hours ago, SomeTameGazelle said:

Is she wanted by any legitimate authority? I thought it was just  the Frost family that was mad at her and Benjamin Bratt chasing her, not law enforcement and not a big enough crime syndicate to have such a broad reach either.

There was a moment in I think the second episode (possibly the third?) where we see a report on her on a TV news segment.   I believe we also overhear some conversation/commentary that she was made the fall guy for one or more of the deaths we see in the first episode.   I'd have to rewatch to remember more, but it was definitely made clear early on that she was a fugitive from the law AND the mob, then later... the show played very fast and loose with that.   It doesn't hurt how individual episodes play as mini-dramas, but it just makes the serial aspects make less sense.  You have to suspend your disbelief on her calmly standing around when law enforcement shows up in a few episode.  And doubly so that there's an incompetent Fed she deals with who actually says her whole name at one point, but appears to have never run a background check on her.  And... the previously mentioned consistency of her always driving the same car.  Speed traps EVERYWHERE run license plate checks on vehicles, even when they're not speeding.  Especially muscle cars like she's driving.  

[Chaos Theory]

3 hours ago, Black Knight said:

.

I was wondering why the writers just had Katy in a coma instead of being dead, when it's not like they've been shy about killing off even very sympathetic and likable people, and Charlie having to settle for unnerving Davis into losing his flow explained it.

The whole point of the episode was the title of the episode who is “the future of the sport” you are lead to believe that it is Davis that he is being held back by poverty and the lack of name recognition but then the scene where he races Katy and she beats him.    

 

1 hour ago, Haleth said:

I don’t see that there’s any reason to doubt that Charlie was telling the truth about Katy being awake and recovering. As sensitive as she is to bullshit I don’t see her lying to anyone else. (Is there any example of her lying to anyone?  Too often she blurts out everything  she knows to the criminal.)

The episode doesn’t make sense unless Katy wakes up and survives since Katy and NOT Davis is the real future of the sport. 

[ItCouldBeWorse]

On 2/16/2023 at 10:33 PM, shapeshifter said:

Agreed.
But I thought according to the School of Law & Order that if nobody dies, it can always be walked back.  
Or maybe that’s just something they tell suspects to get them to confess?

I suppose the DA's office could always choose not to prosecute a crime, especially if the the victim does not want to.  You sometimes see that where a person helps their sick spouse commit suicide (where it is clear what the dead person's intent was.)  But you also need to send a message that you can't meddle with someone's car!  Owens can argue that he did not possess the intent to do severe bodily harm to McDowell, only to cause his car to crash, roll and burn, but the DA would argue that severe bodily harm or even death was a foreseeable outcome.  McDowell definitely possessed the intent to kill Owen's daughter (since he also disabled the seat belt).  Unfortunately, it seems likely that McDowell will not be prosecuted, but regardless of that, Owen's should be.  He did a really bad thing.  Since he already admitted his guilt, he will be offered a plea bargain.  Maybe he will avoid jail time, since his daughter , the victim, will request that.  Of course, McDowell, as the intended victim, could request a more severe punishment, if he wanted to be even more evil.

I was hoping that McDowell's mother would have overheard  him confessing to and threatening Charlie before she entered the garage, but apparently not.

On 2/17/2023 at 5:46 PM, paigow said:

There is NO Kyle!

Keith Owens a.k.a. Buster Scruggs rigged the fish hook booby trap...

Unfortunately, the casting credits might have been based on an early draft

On 2/18/2023 at 6:25 PM, arc said:

BTW, all, y'all: Tim Blake Nelson played Keith. Not Kyle. There's no Kyle.

You're both correct.  However, IMDB is still listing Kyle: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt19698924/?ref_=tt_eps_recn

On 2/17/2023 at 11:53 PM, gesundheit said:

On 2/16/2023 at 10:26 PM, ItCouldBeWorse said:

I'm not convinced that Katy is out of her coma, though.  Charlie could have been lying about talking to her.  And it seems like she should have been horribly burned.

They showed her though -- she looked pretty burned up, but was certainly talking. I don't think that was supposed to be imaginary.

On 2/18/2023 at 6:38 AM, Tuggy said:

It was showed, but it could as well be an invention rather than an actual memory. The way it was shown (no sound, a bit overexposed) made me also think that it was a lie supposed to make Davies lose his flow.

On 2/18/2023 at 10:11 AM, shapeshifter said:

Except:

And even more:
The absence of sound and the grainy flashbacks we see as Charlie talks to Davis about Katy's anticipated comeback signal to me that Charlie's version of her hospital visit is repackaged to have maximum impact on Davis, who Charlie has come to see as "a fuckin' monster," who did try to kill her the night before. 
On a rewatch of that scene (at about the 44 minute mark) I think Charlie reframed what happened at the hospital just a tad.
What is a "good talk," really? as in:

• . . .
• [CHARLIE] . . . and then I had a, a good talk with Katy. Oh yeah. She's totally lucid. Sort of a miracle thing. That doctor's saying she's gonna bounce back fast. I tell you, the way this girl talks about racing, I finally got it. A month, a year. I don't know what it's going to take, but she'll be racing again soon. And she's comin' for you. It's just a matter of time."

These last lines of Charlie's👆 also echo Columbo's voice.
And Charlie describing Katy's recovery as "Sort of a miracle thing" could be a signal that Charlie is spinning a story, so if someone with her ability was listening, the fictional part would not register as a lie. Maybe Davis has a little of Charlie's superpower himself.

I agree. And what's interesting, is that Charlie didn't even say she told Katy the truth about what Davis had done to her.  I understand why she didn't tell Katy's father;  he would have gone after Davis.  But if Katy were awake and well enough to chat, I think Charlie would have told her everything, and then told Davis that she had.  But she didn't want to give Davis a reason to go after a still-comatose Katy (he might have thought that Katy awoke, Charlie old her the truth about him, and then she fell back into a coma.)

18 hours ago, Chaos Theory said:

The episode doesn’t make sense unless Katy wakes up and survives since Katy and NOT Davis is the real future of the sport.

Hopefully, that will happen if it hasn't already.  But then I'm surprised that Charlie didn't tell her how Davis had set her up to die.

[kwnyc]

On 2/17/2023 at 11:48 AM, Milburn Stone said:

Presumably a conscious Katy, kept from crashing through the windshield or into her steering wheel, could have escaped before the inferno.)

That's what I thought, too. And I wonder if Charlie pointed Katy's mom in the direction of WHO altered the seat belt. (Especially since her husband confessed to rigging the engine, but did NOT mention the seat belt.)

[akg]

Based on what the mechanic said about how complicated seat belts are, I'm not sure they'd be able to prove Davis had done anything. He seemed familiar enough with his car that I could see him sabotaging it in a way that would look like a normal result of the crash. Or Davis could always push back and claim Keith had messed with the seat belt too but didn't include that in his confession to protect himself from an attempted murder charge. Just because Owens claimed he didn't mean to kill his competition doesn't mean that's true (from our point of view and that of the characters (like the police)).

[merylinkid]

Charlie is on the run, she needs to stop giving her full real name to people.  

[DearEvette]

Man, Charley is worse than Barry Allen about keeping her 'super power' to herself.  LOL.

Not one of my favorite outings, but I liked the change up a bit.  I was hoping it wasn't gonna be Keith who died, cuz I love me some Tim Blake Nelson and even though the guy who played Davis was a hottie, he was just plain evil.  A major asshole yes, but I was totally convinced he could have easily killed Charlie on that dark road. So yeah, evil.

Add me to the ppl who think Katy did wake up.  That flashback was done in quick succession after the flashback of Charlie relating how Donna talked about Keith's "flow."  Both flashbacks were filmed in the same way.  The only reason for the Katy flashback to be false was if it was coming from Davis, not from Charlie.  But because of the previous flashback, they both seemed like they were coming from Charlie.  Also, if Katie wasn't awake, the mind fuck Charlie put on Davis would only last as long until he found out the truth.

And finally, this episode made notice and one small thing which I appreciate --  I love how casually the show showcases interracial marriage.  So many of the episodes have featured IR marriages which is rather nice to see.

[akg]

12 minutes ago, DearEvette said:

And finally, this episode made notice and one small thing which I appreciate --  I love how casually the show showcases interracial marriage.  So many of the episodes have featured IR marriages which is rather nice to see.

I agree! I also liked that Tim Blake Nelson's wife was a gorgeous, dark skinned woman. Most shows/movies would have cast someone lighter.

[Ms Blue Jay]

6 hours ago, DearEvette said:

And finally, this episode made notice and one small thing which I appreciate --  I love how casually the show showcases interracial marriage.  So many of the episodes have featured IR marriages which is rather nice to see.

Me too.  Also, they cast thoughtfully, which a lot of movies and shows don't bother to do.  For example, Katie could realistically have been the child of the people cast as her parents.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Ms Blue Jay

[bettername2come]

I was so excited that Katy didn’t die. It was just a fun change-up to the formula. And I was so sure she would since the family legacy and accident at a practice immediately mad me think of Adam Petty. Charles Melton is so ridiculously pretty. I didn’t want him to be evil. He had good chemistry with Natasha Lyonne. And Natasha Lyonne has killer legs. These are my major takeaways from the episode.