I liked the show but I kept obsessing over who is keeping power running, the bus and trains moving, making and packing food. They show the military is running the supermarket so I guess they are running all the infrastructure via martial law. But I kind of feel like all the infrastructure would fall apart with 7 months til extinction. Looking forward to the next episode.
Interesting take on this story, and kinda funny how the spoken French was so bad, felt very genuine.
Review by callie_jenningsBlockedParent2024-01-05T01:44:25Z— updated 2024-04-20T18:09:15Z
In the late oughts I was briefly obsessed with Garfield Minus Garfield. I'd been a massive Garfield fan as a kid, and Garfield Minus Garfield took those familiar strips and, by removing everything except Jon, turned them into an existential horror show. I couldn't look away.
Carol & the End of the World is Garfield Minus Garfield except with Cathy. Cathy is already a bleak, tormented strip about middle-age womanhood, except that in the original it seemed like we were expected to laugh at someone struggling with her body image and anxiety and diminishment under capitalism? Cathy wasn't funny, and it wasn't artful, but it was a cultural artifact that maybe revealed something?
And here this show takes a similar character and her attempts to maintain her dignity in the face of an undignified world and allows her existential conflict to take center stage. It kind of shocked me to see an everywoman like this, one whose ordinariness wasn't bumbling and charming, one who I don't expect will ever be transformed into a spunky sprite by a leading man, take center stage. Even though the dude version of this pathos is like, a quarter of contemporary literature.
When C&tEotW's isn't trying to be funny, it's both funnier and more effective. This episode has a gorgeous meditation on the beauty of Applebee's, a terrifying and revealing dream sequence thick with everything from early cinema to gas chambers, and several quiet juxtapositions of doom and everyday-ness that were gutting. The joke-y jokes - the cringe of Carol's parents' sexuality, the diorama of drunk dudes - didn't land for me.
The show is very patient, to a degree extremely unusual for western adult animation. And the animation, while not at all pretty in any kind of Ghibli-ish way, is quite artful. It reminds me a lot of the comics of Chris Ware: a limited, classical palette, bold geometric composition, central perspective shots that create a diagrammatic emotional coldness.
Based on the first episode, I do not expect this show to catch: it's very out of synch with 2024's hyperactive 90s-ish middle-finger-to-the-apocalypse zeitgeist. (It feels more like something out of 2008/2009.) But that's maybe the point: the pilot is a response to the emptiness of the zeitgeist.
I also have NO IDEA where this show is going to a degree that I haven't experienced from a TV show in a while - I think I don't even know what it's really about - and that's very exciting.