S02.E03: Marcus’ Story

[Snazzy Daisy]

Quote

A successful tech entrepreneur (Nick Cannon) finds himself on trial after creating facial recognition software that leads to devastating consequences.

Air Date: Oct 22, 2024

 

Other Cast — Patrick J. Adams, Jerrika Hinton, Patrick Masurkavitch.

[AnimeMania]

Jerrika Hinton as Lycia 
Nick Cannon as Marcus Paul
Patrick J. Adams as Peter "Pete" Vanderkamp
Brendan Wall as Charlie Walker 
Amanda Zhou as Mary Wax
LisaGay Hamilton as Lenore Skilling
Patrick Masurkavitch

[DanaK]

This one threw me for a loop. I thought it was going one way, then it went another. I think the verdict could have gone either way, but I guess there wasn’t enough evidence to prove intent nor whether Marcus was close enough to save Pete, the latter given the witness was not at a good angle and was kind of compromised 

I thought Marcus was on trial for the death of Mr. Skilling and thought that was a pretty big reach

[Chicago Redshirt]

I thought this one was mostly pretty good with the requisite handwaving of the law stuff, and a few other things.

First, the trial was for involuntary manslaughter. So it didn't need to be the case that Marcus was close enough to prevent Pete from going over the railing but chose not to. There needed to be no showing that Pete intended to cause the death or that he could have prevented it in a split-second. That sort of intent to cause the death would make it either straight-up murder or voluntary manslaughter.

Here's the definition of manslaughter in California (leaving out vehicular manslaughter, which isn't relevant here).

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=192.

Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice. It is of three kinds:

(a) Voluntary—upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion.

(b) Involuntary—in the commission of an unlawful act, not amounting to a felony; or in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death, in an unlawful manner, or without due caution and circumspection. This subdivision shall not apply to acts committed in the driving of a vehicle.

It seems to me that the facts as they actually occurred were pretty fitting for this being a killing that "took place without due caution and circumspection." One could probably make the argument it was in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death, but that seems a stretch.

There really was no call to have Blackmailer be the eyewitness to the fight other than to make the defense attorney look good.

It seems to me that this particular prosecutor should have been more concerned about proving his case beyond a reasonable doubt. It seems like it would be tough to do, because all you had was Marcus' version of the events, plus some late observations from Blackmailer whose testimony was she couldn't really hear what was being said and who impeached herself about what she saw before Pete went over the railing. Plus it seems like Marcus would have available self-defense as (at least as depicted) Pete was as much of an aggressor as Marcus was. (I am spacing on who threw the first punch and am too lazy to fire up the DVR.)

What IMO the show should have done was to have the the prosecutor  contend that this was voluntary manslaughter, as it was also a killing instigated by a sudden quarrel. The prosecutor could argue that Marcus got pissed off at Pete for the guilt over concealing the algorithm's racial bias and making him an accomplice to the death of Skilling not to mention the personal attacks and that he started the fight and deliberately threw him over the railing.

I don't think that the powers that be thought through the software angle nearly enough.

First of all, I'm not sure on what the software's misidentification of Skilling was connected to the decision to shoot Skilling. Like with the premise that he shouldn't have been identified, there are a lot of steps between that misidentification and the officers shooting him, let alone the shooting being so clearly unjustified that the officers suffered criminal and civil penalties.

Also, regardless of whether there was a known or unknown glitch involved, it still remained the case that the software apparently misidentified a guy in a highly publicized case. Indeed, it seems like the individual officers and the city of Sacramento would be arguing, "Hey, we went there because this software told us he was a wanted criminal. Not our fault that he wasn't." With that defense getting shot down, it seems dubious that other cities would be reluctant to use the system for fear of bad publicity/civil liability. It also seems like the Skilling family would have gone after Pete and Marcus a long time ago, which at a minimum would lead to discovery into all the shenanigans involved in the software.

It seems doubtful that Google, or anyone, would pay out a billion to acquire a company that apparently contributed to a George Floyd situation. Especially because it foreshadows the notion that the software could be involved in other Skillings.

Also, I have to call bullshit on a Black entrepreneur not even conceiving of the possibility of software having racial bias or misidentifying people who were minority. If it was not on the dude's mind from jump street, and if the venture capitalists who funded the company didn't ask questions about it, and if it didn't come up in the decade or so that the company existed prior to the Skilling situation, it most certainly would have been in the wake of the skilling case. I guarantee you that any businessman of any race, but particularly a Black man in Marcus' position, would have been grilling his business partner about how the misidentification happened and if there was a racial component to be concerned about. Just to make the business case for the software, one would have to do those analytics.

The weekly contrivance is that Blackmailer resorted to blackmail. All she had to do is keep her mouth shut as one of the earliest employees, let the billion dollar sale go through and she stood to get paid anyways. The show did try to say that Pete promised to pay her and reneged, but that doesn't really make sense. They could have and should have changed her motivation to woman spurned by Pete wanting to get even if they wanted to do that, or just straight up whistleblower with a guilty conscience.  But I guess this way they kept us guessing about whether Marcus killed Blackmailer.

Most of the witnesses didn't make much sense. There was no valid reason to call Mrs. Skilling because she doesn't really know anything about the manslaughter. She could testify about Marcus swinging by her donut shop and buying the guilt donuts. But that isn't really relevant to the killing itself. And the testimony she gave about how great Skilling was is pretty prejudicial. Also shouldn't she be sorta glad that the guy who was like "this differential isn't significant" got killed? And not testify against the guy who didn't deliberately put out a potentially glitchy product?

Wife Lycia (sp?) similarly had no place on the stand. The fact that she was pushing Marcus to keep his mouth shut, pay the blackmail and get them all those dollar bills, y'all doesn't defend in any way to the notion that Marcus had accidentally or deliberately killed his partner.

The "Can I address the Court now that I've been acquitted" bit was preposterous. I don't understand why they don't just have the accused testify instead of giving these speeches.

And I am sort of curious if Google was going to pull out of the deal given the manslaughter trial was involved, regardless of the acquittal. 

[Halting Hex]

Marcus shoved Pete and he fell.  How is that "involuntary"?  Seems straight up Man 1.

(Marcus can't claim self-defense, because Pete wasn't trying to hurt him.  All Marcus had to do was stop trying to open the door.)

However, Marcus was a complete dick to accuse Pete of being racist, since if he'd bothered to actually look at the data, he might have seen that the Asian results were even less accurate than the black results.  So it was probably only that the more testing the app was able to do, the more accurate the results were.  And in a country that is 60% white, 18% black and 6% Asian (those numbers may have shifted [I'm too lazy to check], but the general point holds), it's hardly surprising that the testing had more iterations of whites than blacks.  I think Pete was right…Marcus saw him as a meal ticket but held him in contempt, personally, and was always ready to assume the worst.

With "friends" like that…well, you end up dead, apparently.   A little harsh, but Accused takes place in a harsh world, apparently.

[Chicago Redshirt]

11 minutes ago, Halting Hex said:

Marcus shoved Pete and he fell.  How is that "involuntary"?  Seems straight up Man 1.

(Marcus can't claim self-defense, because Pete wasn't trying to hurt him.  All Marcus had to do was stop trying to open the door.)

However, Marcus was a complete dick to accuse Pete of being racist, since if he'd bothered to actually look at the data, he might have seen that the Asian results were even less accurate than the black results.  So it was probably only that the more testing the app was able to do, the more accurate the results were.  And in a country that is 60% white, 18% black and 6% Asian (those numbers may have shifted [I'm too lazy to check], but the general point holds), it's hardly surprising that the testing had more iterations of whites than blacks.  I think Pete was right…Marcus saw him as a meal ticket but held him in contempt, personally, and was always ready to assume the worst.

With "friends" like that…well, you end up dead, apparently.   A little harsh, but Accused takes place in a harsh world, apparently.

It's involuntary as in Marcus did not form the intent to kill, or even necessarily harm Pete. The action of shoving Pete was of course voluntary. 

I have now gone back to the show to see what happened. Pete started the argument turning physical by light pushing of Marcus while lecturing him about how Marcus saw him as his golden goose. Marcus said take your hands off me or I'll make you and tries to leave. Pete stopped him. Marcus pushed him out of his way and tried to leave the stairwell. Pete got back and the two got in a grappling match. At the end, Marcus shoved Pete so hard that he and his 6'2" self fell backward like 10+ feet and over the railing. Which is improbable and looked like it was out of a cartoon, but then this is Accused.

The issue of identification and the obvious application for crime detection/solution inherently raises the question about possible racial discrimination. I don't see how someone could build a business in this area without some level of consciousness on that issue.

I think both Marcus and Pete had reasonable points of view in the argument. Not a statistician by any means, but the notion of a margin of error in identifying Black people being 2ish percent seems pretty damn good. Probably way better than the margin of error for human beings. Does it matter that the margin is twice as high as for White people? I'd say no. So in that sense, points to Pete and this is perfectly plausible as a race-neutral reason for going ahead with the project.

At the same time, Marcus is perfectly reasonable to think that Pete opted not to inform him because he suspected a Black man would be specifically concerned about the error rate being double for Black men. And it's also arguably biased to downplay the bias itself as insignificant when faced with the real world consequences of it -- more cases of arguably racially biased institutions using the software's racial bias to justify their decision-making, more cases like Skilling.

Marcus couldn't fairly be expected to look at the data because Pete (and Blackmailer) scrubbed it, and even if he hadn't, the data/code heavy part was out of his area of expertise. Which I guess brings up another point -- given that only two people knew about the margin of error issue being a problem from back of the day, it doesn't seem like figuring out that Blackmailer was Blackmailer would be that difficult. But we don't see or hear about Pete trying to do that. Even if you're super-rich, $20 million is nothing to sneeze at, and of course there's no guarantee that Blackmailer will hold up her end.

As to the realness of Pete and Marcus' friendship, I don't know. I mean we are told repeatedly that they were longtime best friends. There didn't seem to be anything from Marcus as we saw to suggest that Marcus looked the other way at Pete's general bad behavior to support the golden goose comment. The fact that Marcus was so broken up about the possibility that the software led to an innocent man's death strikes me as good evidence that Marcus wouldn't knowingly make a Faustian bargain and intentionally look the other way while Pete lies and cheats. And in fact if Marcus was the sort of person Pete accused him of being it would be an easy decision to pay off Blackmailer rather than potentially coming clean and killing the golden goose. The show did stack the deck in having Pete seduce a married woman and lie about it to Marcus' face. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to read the situation as Pete trying to drag Marcus down to his level/projecting his own lack of morals on him.

Incidentally, it seems doubtful to me that Mrs. Skilling would need to be running the donut shop with it being widely acknowledged that the cops who shot her husband were criminals and wrong to do so. By way of benchmarks, the George Floyd case settled for $27 million and the Breonna Taylor case settled for $12. I'd imagine a settlement in the Skilling case would therefore be similarly in the 8 figure range.  

[Madding crowd]

This episode didn’t grab me. It relied too much on the twist of viewers thinking the trial was about culpability of the software, but surprise! It was really about Pete’s death. They also leaned too heavily on Marcus being the good guy and Pete the bad guy. 

[possibilities]

Pete refusing to let Marcus leave puts Marcus strongly in the self-defense category, to my thinking. Pete brought the physical struggle on by being the one to both initiate it and continually maintain it by refusing to let Marcus go. 

All the other stuff that led to that point is relevant to the other issues in the episode, but not the outcome of the physical altercation that resulted in Pete's death.

It's like, if you are trying to rape someone and she manages to gouge your eyes out while struggling to get away, you can't win a case that she blinded you. You brought that on yourself by initiating an assault and putting her in the position to need to use force to get you off her.

The structure of the episode, faking us out about what Marcus was actually on trial for, and bringing on witnesses to talk about his character and having the judge overrule that testimony... it was weird.

I mean, what could the bakery owner/widow of Skilling possibly testify to that was relevant to the death of Pete? She wasn't there. She didn't know Marcus or Pete personally and had no information whatsoever as to what happened between them or at the moment of Pete's death. She met Marcus one time and all he did was buy stuff from her.

Likewise, Marcus's wife testified only about the Skilling-related issues, and was not present during the physical altercation between Marcus and Pete-- all she said was that she was on Pete's side in the question about disclosing the software bias. But we know SHE didn't "kill Pete" so in a way her testimony could make Marcus look MORE guilty, since he was on the other side of that debate and could maybe be inferred to have a grudge over it.

I think this show likes to make things confusing to stimulate the audience to see more than one possible outcome, and to examine our own biases. It's a discussion-starter kind of show more than a clean resolution kind of show. Very often there is a legitimately debatable conclusion and a moral question that lands in a grey area. 

So I think they inserted all that irrelevant and confusing stuff into this episode to bring a lot of different questions into it, and decided to just let the courtroom scenes be even more nonsensical than usual so they could cover all the various issues and not have to limit it to just one of them. 

I don't think the Shilling widow HAD to keep running the bakery. She said herself that she wanted to keep doing it because she enjoyed it, it was something she and her husband did together, and she liked doing it because of its relationship to the community. When Marcus went in there, I thought he was going to offer to buy it from her as a covert way of compensating her, but she really didn't seem to want to let it go.

Edited October 23 by possibilities

[Chicago Redshirt]

2 hours ago, possibilities said:

Pete refusing to let Marcus leave puts Marcus strongly in the self-defense category, to my thinking. Pete brought the physical struggle on by being the one to both initiate it and continually maintain it by refusing to let Marcus go. 

All the other stuff that led to that point is relevant to the other issues in the episode, but not the outcome of the physical altercation that resulted in Pete's death.

It's like, if you are trying to rape someone and she manages to gouge your eyes out while struggling to get away, you can't win a case that she blinded you. You brought that on yourself by initiating an assault and putting her in the position to need to use force to get you off her.

The structure of the episode, faking us out about what Marcus was actually on trial for, and bringing on witnesses to talk about his character and having the judge overrule that testimony... it was weird.

I mean, what could the bakery owner/widow of Skilling possibly testify to that was relevant to the death of Pete? She wasn't there. She didn't know Marcus or Pete personally and had no information whatsoever as to what happened between them or at the moment of Pete's death. She met Marcus one time and all he did was buy stuff from her.

Likewise, Marcus's wife testified only about the Skilling-related issues, and was not present during the physical altercation between Marcus and Pete-- all she said was that she was on Pete's side in the question about disclosing the software bias. But we know SHE didn't "kill Pete" so in a way her testimony could make Marcus look MORE guilty, since he was on the other side of that debate and could maybe be inferred to have a grudge over it.

I think this show likes to make things confusing to stimulate the audience to see more than one possible outcome, and to examine our own biases. It's a discussion-starter kind of show more than a clean resolution kind of show. Very often there is a legitimately debatable conclusion and a moral question that lands in a grey area. 

So I think they inserted all that irrelevant and confusing stuff into this episode to bring a lot of different questions into it, and decided to just let the courtroom scenes be even more nonsensical than usual so they could cover all the various issues and not have to limit it to just one of them. 

I don't think the Shilling widow HAD to keep running the bakery. She said herself that she wanted to keep doing it because she enjoyed it, it was something she and her husband did together, and she liked doing it because of its relationship to the community. When Marcus went in there, I thought he was going to offer to buy it from her as a covert way of compensating her, but she really didn't seem to want to let it go.

I overall agree with you and made many of the same points about the extraneous witnesses.

But to argue against our own points, a better constructed prosecution/show might have tried to use the testimony that Mrs. Skilling gave and Lyshia gave to try to establish the building emotional tensions going on in Marcus's mind ultimately causing him to snap...his increasing guilt about the connection with the Skilling shooting, the increasing doubt and stress about being blackmailed, him screaming at his kid, his drinking heavily all of the sudden...having whatever his cut of the sale (presumably in the mid-8 figures) be jeopardized, his growing doubts about Pete's hiding this from him, all this fed into his mindset during the argument and led to him potentially wanting Pete dead on some level.

But the prosecution in the show didn't attempt to connect these dots that way. Instead, they tried to spin the story that Marcus was in a position to save Pete from going over the railing, which he was not and they don't really have any evidence of that beyond the word of Blackmailer, now a convicted felon. 

A better constructed show would have made at least some ambiguity over good guy Marcus and bad guy Pete. Hell, even having Marcus be the one who is having the affair would have been a good step. (Although in fairness I complained during a previous episode about the lack of happily married couples and here the show gave us one, so I guess I should give them credit for that). 

[Halting Hex]

7 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

As to the realness of Pete and Marcus' friendship, I don't know. I mean we are told repeatedly that they were longtime best friends. There didn't seem to be anything from Marcus as we saw to suggest that Marcus looked the other way at Pete's general bad behavior to support the golden goose comment. The fact that Marcus was so broken up about the possibility that the software led to an innocent man's death strikes me as good evidence that Marcus wouldn't knowingly make a Faustian bargain and intentionally look the other way while Pete lies and cheats. And in fact if Marcus was the sort of person Pete accused him of being it would be an easy decision to pay off Blackmailer rather than potentially coming clean and killing the golden goose. The show did stack the deck in having Pete seduce a married woman and lie about it to Marcus' face. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to read the situation as Pete trying to drag Marcus down to his level/projecting his own lack of morals on him.

Well, the more I think about it, the more it smells like "telling without showing".  Marcus is supposed  to be Pete's best friend and business partner of 18 years…but the whole episode is Marcus judging everything Pete does and jumping to the worst possible conclusion.  Pete is a crook, Pete is a racist, Pete is a horrible person for seducing Random Wife. 

(Which btw, makes Marcus sexist as anything.  How does he just assume Pete is being a predator?  Pete's pushing 40, he's never been married, he's given his entire adult life to making Marcus rich…maybe he's just lonely.  Maybe he's fallen in love.  [It's not as if he has to go to random birthday parties to meet women; he has a whole office full that he works with and given that he's decent-looking and very successful, he won't have to be trolling Tinder for dates for too long.  Indeed, he could well be worried that he's going to be swarmed by gold-diggers and nobody will ever love him for himself, and so he's drawn to the authentic connection he feels he's made with Wifey.]

And it's not as if Marcus has Clue One about what Wifey thinks.  Maybe Hubby cheated on his first wife and she's worried that he's cheating on her now.  Maybe Hubby slapped an ex-girlfriend and now he's starting to get violent with her.  Maybe they only got married because she got knocked up and they've been trying to make it work for the sake of the kid and she's just so tired of being trapped in a loveless marriage and Pete is her last chance at the life she really wants.  We have no idea, and neither does Marcus.  He just automatically assumes Wifey is a Bad Person for sleeping with Pete and that "Best Friend" Pete is a Disgusting Pig whom Perfect Family Man Marcus is qualified to judge and scorn.)

When trouble strikes, does Marcus tell Pete they need to speak privately asap?  Maybe take him aside first thing in the morning at work? No, he shows up at Pete's house in the middle of the night, barges in, takes a few seconds to bitch at Pete for how Pete runs Pete's personal life, and then goes on the attack about the app (and the blackmailer had shown him the data by then, so Marcus knew the skew was both minor and not specifically targeted at blacks), reaching the worst-possible conclusions at light-speed.  Never mind that Marcus should have reviewed the data before releasing the app, never mind that a few days' thought made it easy enough for Pete to realize that there was literally one other person who ever saw the data, all Marcus wants to do blame Pete and castigate him and never have a serious conversation where partners work out a solution that works best for both of them.

That's not a friendship there that I could ever see.

I'm not saying that Pete was perfect; he shouldn't have scrubbed the data, he shouldn't have tried to pressure Marcus into paying the blackmailer (which never works, except as a means to play for time and find a better solution, which Pete actually did without needing to pay).  And maybe he gets his jollies by going after random 30-ish housewives, albeit that makes him virtually alone amongst lotharios, to my knowledge.  But still.  It was Marcus who IMO overreacted from an emotional place, and led directly to Pete's death.  And yet the show plays Marcus as the martyr and all but says that Pete deserved to die.

(Did Pete not have any family?  Presumably Marcus would have met his parents and/or siblings in 18 years of being "best friends".  But I don't recall Marcus using his final confession to apologize to them for his part in Pete's death.)

Perhaps I'm partially reacting this way because I'm seeing an agenda at play.  I don't know if Canada has a law that enforces Woke Casting, but you couldn't prove they didn't by this episode.

"Good" characters:  Marcus, his supportive wife, his innocent son, the Sainted Xavier Skilling (be funny if he was dealing crack on the side, after all the hosannas), the Widow Skilling, Responsible Prosecutor, and Marcus's attorney.  7 "good people", every last one black.

Neutral characters:  the repentant blackmailer, the corporate attorney who seemed a bit venal but not actually vile. (1 Asian, 1 white)

"Bad" characters:  Pete the Greedy Racist, who basically got Skilling killed and Deserved to Die, his Stupid Slut Bimbo Cheating Wife hook-up and the cops who killed Skilling. Presumably all white.  (Although one of the officers in the Floyd killing was Asian.)

I mean, come on, now.  I don't want to see this turn into Jordan Peele's desecration of The Twilight Zone, where every hero was black and every villain was white, but this is a bit troubling, IMO. 

(I didn't see every S1 episode, but has any black character ever been portrayed as a Bad Person?  We had Samir the Stalker, but Indian≠Black.  And Aaliyah was IMO the Worst Girlfriend Ever to Esme, but I don't think we were supposed to hate her.  JMO.)

Edited October 23 by Halting Hex

[Chicago Redshirt]

4 hours ago, Halting Hex said:

Well, the more I think about it, the more it smells like "telling without showing".  Marcus is supposed  to be Pete's best friend and business partner of 18 years…but the whole episode is Marcus judging everything Pete does and jumping to the worst possible conclusion.  Pete is a crook, Pete is a racist, Pete is a horrible person for seducing Random Wife. 

(Which btw, makes Marcus sexist as anything.  How does he just assume Pete is being a predator?  Pete's pushing 40, he's never been married, he's given his entire adult life to making Marcus rich…maybe he's just lonely.  Maybe he's fallen in love.  [It's not as if he has to go to random birthday parties to meet women; he has a whole office full that he works with and given that he's decent-looking and very successful, he won't have to be trolling Tinder for dates for too long.  Indeed, he could well be worried that he's going to be swarmed by gold-diggers and nobody will ever love him for himself, and so he's drawn to the authentic connection he feels he's made with Wifey.]

And it's not as if Marcus has Clue One about what Wifey thinks.  Maybe Hubby cheated on his first wife and she's worried that he's cheating on her now.  Maybe Hubby slapped an ex-girlfriend and now he's starting to get violent with her.  Maybe they only got married because she got knocked up and they've been trying to make it work for the sake of the kid and she's just so tired of being trapped in a loveless marriage and Pete is her last chance at the life she really wants.  We have no idea, and neither does Marcus.  He just automatically assumes Wifey is a Bad Person for sleeping with Pete and that "Best Friend" Pete is a Disgusting Pig whom Perfect Family Man Marcus is qualified to judge and scorn.)

When trouble strikes, does Marcus tell Pete they need to speak privately asap?  Maybe take him aside first thing in the morning at work? No, he shows up at Pete's house in the middle of the night, barges in, takes a few seconds to bitch at Pete for how Pete runs Pete's personal life, and then goes on the attack about the app (and the blackmailer had shown him the data by then, so Marcus knew the skew was both minor and not specifically targeted at blacks), reaching the worst-possible conclusions at light-speed.  Never mind that Marcus should have reviewed the data before releasing the app, never mind that a few days' thought made it easy enough for Pete to realize that there was literally one other person who ever saw the data, all Marcus wants to do blame Pete and castigate him and never have a serious conversation where partners work out a solution that works best for both of them.

That's not a friendship there that I could ever see.

I'm not saying that Pete was perfect; he shouldn't have scrubbed the data, he shouldn't have tried to pressure Marcus into paying the blackmailer (which never works, except as a means to play for time and find a better solution, which Pete actually did without needing to pay).  And maybe he gets his jollies by going after random 30-ish housewives, albeit that makes him virtually alone amongst lotharios, to my knowledge.  But still.  It was Marcus who IMO overreacted from an emotional place, and led directly to Pete's death.  And yet the show plays Marcus as the martyr and all but says that Pete deserved to die.

(Did Pete not have any family?  Presumably Marcus would have met his parents and/or siblings in 18 years of being "best friends".  But I don't recall Marcus using his final confession to apologize to them for his part in Pete's death.)

Perhaps I'm partially reacting this way because I'm seeing an agenda at play.  I don't know if Canada has a law that enforces Woke Casting, but you couldn't prove they didn't by this episode.

"Good" characters:  Marcus, his supportive wife, his innocent son, the Sainted Xavier Skilling (be funny if he was dealing crack on the side, after all the hosannas), the Widow Skilling, Responsible Prosecutor, and Marcus's attorney.  7 "good people", every last one black.

Neutral characters:  the repentant blackmailer, the corporate attorney who seemed a bit venal but not actually vile. (1 Asian, 1 white)

"Bad" characters:  Pete the Greedy Racist, who basically got Skilling killed and Deserved to Die, his Stupid Slut Bimbo Cheating Wife hook-up and the cops who killed Skilling. Presumably all white.  (Although one of the officers in the Floyd killing was Asian.)

I mean, come on, now.  I don't want to see this turn into Jordan Peele's desecration of The Twilight Zone, where every hero was black and every villain was white, but this is a bit troubling, IMO. 

(I didn't see every S1 episode, but has any black character ever been portrayed as a Bad Person?  We had Samir the Stalker, but Indian≠Black.  And Aaliyah was IMO the Worst Girlfriend Ever to Esme, but I don't think we were supposed to hate her.  JMO.)

"Tell, don't show" is the mantra for Accused, because they want to try to cram all sorts of topics in any given episode and the way to do that tends to prevent letting things breathe and evolve on their own. 

This latest episode tried to touch on: interracial friendships, misidentification of minority suspects, entrepreneurship and the American dream, moral dilemmas over blackmail, police misconduct, probably more that I'm glossing over.

Re: Pete, we are told a few things about him (in addition to being shown other things), so I think it's fairly safe to say that Marcus has at least some of his character pegged. Pete doesn't even deny any of the things except maybe the racism part. He basically admits that he has all the character flaws he was accused of having but claims Marcus didn't care about them while Pete was potentially laying golden eggs. I think that's transparently false, as proven by Marcus's crisis of conscience now. If all Marcus wanted was the gold, the whole "software used to be biased" wouldn't have bothered him as much as it clearly did. I suppose another way to read it would be that this was where he draws the line, but it's an odd place to draw the line, given that the payoff is just within reach. Signing the letter of intent (it sounds like) would make them each millionaires, especially if Blackmailer expected to get $20 million because of the LOI being signed. 

I guess I have to agree and disagree about the woke agenda stuff, to a degree.

Yes, there's a fair amount of casting of White males as the villains in the show. But most of the characters period still tend to be White and male. But the relevant characters with speaking roles have largely been White. I wouldn't include the judges, lawyers or other courtroom characters as "good" or "bad" -- they are mostly just there.

Thus far, the show has generally made its protagonists pretty saintly. There have not been a ton of relevant Black characters who were not also protagonists. But at least one was scummy. In Kendall's Story, Kendall is a Black guy sought to capture with some friends (also Black) the White guy who molested his daughter (or maybe it was near-molestation, been a while can't remember). The idea was the cops didn't care about finding the molester because they're racist (to the point of the show being liberal). Kendall and the friends find Molester and proceed to beat him down. Kendall tries to stop the beating after a bit, but the friends aren't about to stop. The friends ended up stomping Molester to death. The Black friends threw Kendall under the bus, leading to him being convicted for a crime he didn't technically commit, they did.

Circling back to this episode, I don't think the show portrayed Pete as truly evil. I think he was certainly flawed, but I think that he was reasonable in general until the contrived shoving match that ultimately culminated in his death. Yes, cheating with the MILF was a dishonorable thing to do. But I think it doesn't make him a superbad person.

Maybe I'm a sucker for Patrick J. Adams after watching Suits. 

[AnimeMania]

Next New Episode: November 12, 2024     

[JH Lipton]

Facial recognition misidentifying Blacks (and Asians IIRC) is pretty old -- it goes to sampling size and cameras being lousy until very recently at capturing Black faces.  Marcus should have known this and checked.

No facial recognition is100% -- this app would definitely have a warning not to use it as the end-all be-all.  The data was from beta tests; Pete didn't need to scrub data, just show that the mis-identification went down. 

Just so silly.  But Nick Cannon did a good job (I made the joke that when Marcus was kissing his wife that she would be Cannon's next baby-mamma!)