Anyone watching this show? Season 3 premieres in an hour.
Season 1 was delightful anti-capitalist agitprop, portrayed hacking surprisingly realistically, and featured a main character who thought about and handled recreational drugs the way an actual self-destructive-but-well-informed drug nerd does.
Season 2 was trying too hard to be a mindfuck, but had solid character work and a few legitimately transcendent moments (I enjoyed the ALF bit a great deal).
I can’t 100% tell whether this show is going to end up a classic or a dud but it’s at least pretty interesting. It really needs to lay off the Fight Club homages though, and PLEASE no more big reality-bending twists, it’s getting tiring.
ok I need to know what episode this is, I don’t really care about the rest of the show (there was some incidental dialogue about KDE vs gnome in the first episode and I said no way) but I am an alf superfan
Anyway, this show is honestly pretty uneven in quality and season 3 is almost definitely gonna pale deeply in comparison to the last new TV I watched (Twin Peaks). But I’m still pretty interested to see how it’s going to continue in the age of Trump because a lot of the zeitgeist that was foundational for it has suddenly completely transformed around it.
Well, that premiere was… not great. The abstract spaciotemporal fuckery of season 2 has been made painfully literal, the show did engage with Trump but via a muddled and inelegant caricature of an Adam Curtis montage, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of interesting driving force to the narrative. Season 1 was about watching a team attempt to engineer the collapse of the financial sector and season 2 was about watching the fallout of that, but now it seems like season 3 is going to be about parallel universes, which is for me a pretty unwelcome turn into scifi.
I enjoyed the show enough to follow it, but I’m in no rush for S3. I will probably catch up in a year when it’s streaming like I did with the first 2 seasons.
I’m really not yet convinced that such a jump into sci-fi is going to happen, I think it’s largely teasing/messing with fans/the audience. Although I would kind of admire the show taking 3+ seasons to get into silliness most media with the same concept tends to serve upfront.
It’s true that it seems the parallel reality talk at the reactor and Angela’s mumblings are hinting at the same thing, but if the first isn’t a pure red herring, I think it might actually be in reference to how the universe of the show relates to our own reality (which is underlined by Elliot’s fantasy sequence in the restaurant).
As for what Angela believes, we should consider that she might just have been manipulated and fed bullshit by Whiterose - which would fit the pattern Elliot referenced of her showing interest in those who don’t care about her (her boyfriend, the e-corp dude, disaffected Elliot) and being unable to reciprocate love from those who do (her father, emotionally-invested Elliot). And we should furthermore consider the possiblity that Whiterose is also delusional, and the Dark Army is not just a collective but a cult.
Maybe season 3 will have a focus on religion, or at least how such belief structures form even in unlikely places. I guess I’m just spitballing right now, though. Stomache is grumbling at me.
I am definitely a sucker for fill-in-the-blanks episodes of plot gear heavy dramas so I liked seeing Tyrell’s perspective even though it did not come anywhere close to being worth the mystique around him and his tiny amount of screen time last year.
Making Trump into a literal Manchurian Candidate is somehow actually the corniest move they’ve ever done on a show that is hip deep in exploring every angle of angry suburban teen style philosophy
Modern popular sci-fi seems dominated by alternate universes and post-apocalyptic dread so I’m glad this show still persists in teasing both. All it’s missing now is consciousness horror, although I guess that’s arguably part of the fabric from the get-go.
Big fan of it insisting slowly turning into a straight up horror movie too.
this season has kinda been all over the place but i am a sucker for a no cutaway gimmick episode and i’m surprised usa let them get away with no commercials, just 45 minutes of pure pressure cooker. like two short heist movies back to back
i’m also glad that since, of course, in a “one take” episode you’re always looking for the digital seams where they could have cut away, that they also decided to go totally crazy and do those impossible swooping diorama cross cut shots where you could see high outside the building with cg. like using the artifice to their advantage to still be dazzling.
honestly one of the most amazing parts from a technical standpoint was the motion tracking to make it look like they were actually going outside the office cause E-Corp interior and exterior are filmed at totally different locations and it was so seamless I’d never even know.
plotwise i’m very glad to have elliot finally catch up to almost everyone in the story. i don’t know how much more suspense they can keep wringing out from him being so in the dark if they do another season. can’t believe he was out for 4 days good lord
yeah, what i really like about the better/best episodes of all seasons so far is that (at least for me) it takes a while until you realize what it is exactly that makes you realize “hey, this is a special episode”, because it just takes you along with such effortlessness that you’d really have to pay good attention to catch it right from the start.
Funnily enough, i only caught wind of it in this episode when
the cam turned to top-down style footage , beforehand i was feeling that it was doing something different than usual.
