Last week's episode fucked me up so hard. This one did too, although in a slightly different way.
First of all, a little piece of advice to Serena and Aunt Lydia: if you care about this pregnancy so badly and want June to carry to term, then maybe it's not the greatest idea to try to strangle her or show her the body of the guy who helped her and force her to admit that it's her fault. Just a thought.
There is a weird amount of sexual energy between Serena and June. Every time Serena confronts June, it's like she's 2 seconds away from hate fucking her against a wall. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's genuinely the vibe that she gives off.
Speaking of Serena, this is a character that I literally think about all the time. I read an interview with Yvonne Strahovski once where she really nailed this on the head: Serena is an incredibly intelligent, presumably well-educated woman who had a successful career before Gilead. And now she's trapped in a world - a world she helped create - where she can't work, can't read, can't be in charge of anything and her opinion on most things doesn't matter. She's like a caged animal with nothing stimulating to do all day. To her, this baby will be an escape from her terribly boring reality. I'm sure she wants to be a mother, but I think a part of her also craves something to occupy her mind and that's what motherhood will provide her with.
(Sidenote: all the horrible religious bullshit and ritualistic raping aside, I'd rather drown myself than live in a world where your only entertainment is sitting around all day and knitting. I would die so fucking fast in Gilead, you have no idea.)
And no, that ending didn't give me anxiety at all, why do you ask?
[9.5/10] Full disclosure -- Oliver is preaching to the choir for me here, and that makes it harder for me to be critical. But I still think he gives a strong and arguably empathetic account for why it's practically indefensible to want to keep confederate monuments up. Maybe there's countervailing points that Oliver didn't really address, but he lays out a very effective case for why glorifying people is different than remembering and that monuments are much more about one and the other. While some of the facts -- like when the confederate monuments went up and the statements from confederate leaders about slavery -- were things I already knew, the way Oliver framed everything did a nice at laying out the argument point-by-point. Most of all, I liked his final retort about Robert E. Lee not even believing in Confederate monuments, and the way he connected it to his own feelings about Jimmy Saville. Plus, the replacement statues, culminating in a delightful appearance by Stephen Colbert was an outstanding and silly bit to close things with.
That said, the opening was solid, but pretty much just a drive-by of the news of the week without the unifying theme or POV the show can usually muster. And I must be 10 years old because the "and now dicks" interstitial with various newscasters inadvertently drawing penises on telestrators was quite amusing.
Overall, an outstanding episode.
Outstanding episode. I have to admit, I bristled a bit when I saw that Oliver was doing vaccines as a topic. I'm 100% pro-vaccine, but it just seemed like a case where Oliver would no doubt be preaching to the choir in terms of his audience. But instead, he didn't just hit the "vaccines good/bad" issue, which is easy point, but the sub-issues, like vaccine ingredients and vaccine sequencing. Explaining how the opposition to these things is not just anti-science, but ascientific was a worthwhile tack to take, and explaining everything in terms of rhetoric and breaking down the arguments and issues served to make the topic interesting and compelling, even for folks relatively versed in them like yours truly. In addition, his comedy inserts, like insults for fish or riffs on R. Kelly or busting on himself landed delightfully.
Beyond the main story, the "And Now This" segment on people calling in about the local news train was the perfect slice of small town quotidian weirdness. And the intro stuff did a nice job at dressing down Trump's comments about any alleged taping and the dangers of complacency or not accurately estimating the chances of the Senate health care bill passing.
Overall, a really superb outing from the show.
[9.1/10] Very good episode. The opening story about copyright infringement of Eminem's "Lose Yourself" in New Zealand was the amusing sort of absurd, international minutia that the show does well. The follow up story on the Trumpcare bill was pretty much what you'd expect, with some fair handling of Congressman admitting they hadn't read the bill only to rake them over the coals for not knowing major details. There's a lot of the same jokes others have made at this point, but turning his call to contact your representatives into a callback to the Eminem "you've only got one shot" story was a nice touch. And the "Now This" segment with scenes of the newly engaged Morning Joe news anchors having tiffs with one another was a funny bit of editing as well.
And the main story, a sadly-needed encore about net neutrality, was well done as well. It's another case of Oliver giving good context to an issue and finding ways to cut through bureaucratic difficulties to get to the point. Word is the comments have already come in fast and furious, so hopefully they'll do some good. The way the segment talks about how we got to this point, and explains the current FCC chair's knowledge of it, was well done, with enough comic asides from the likes of Tay Zonday and Pizza Rat to keep things lively.
Overall, an episode that well well-produced, informative, and funny.
6.9/10. Another solid episode. Frankly, I'll be happy when we as a culture can hopefully move on from Trump, but Oliver still manages to juice some humor out of that orange in a hairpiece. While the Emmy bet was what grabbed headlines, my favorite part of the opening segment was the oddly fitting comparison between Trump and the Catholic Church. On top of that, the ridiculousness of the "And Now This" segment on Chris Matthews's favorite movie being Love Actually was the kind of amusing quirk that LWT exposes well.
The main segment on opioids was good not great. It was informative, and there were some nice moments, but it felt like one of those issues that's just a little too expansive for Oliver to be able to cover well in fifteen minutes, and it hewed a little too close to the usual Last Week Tonight formula in some ways, with the old promotional video, the human interest story gone bad, etc. Even Oliver's character asides (like the Oprah-phobia bit) seemed a little more forced than usual. It's an interesting issue, and the show had some notable things to say about it, but it didn't feel as incisive as the show can get at its best.
The final "How Did This Guy Get Elected?" segment was funny (especially the gags about his bizarre pronunciation of the word "racism," but frankly I was expecting the guy to have said a lot worse. Maybe it's just living in the era of Trump that does it.
Overall, not the show's finest hour, but still decent.
9.5/10. Another great episode from LWT. I especially enjoyed the opening segment on the 2016 Election because it's a great example of the show's strengths. It's not just riffing on or poking fun at the news of the day (though it does that too), but rather it covers Trump citing unscientific online polls in entertaining fashion, covers his comments about the former Miss Universe in entertaining fashion, but then digs into old interviews in connects them, threading the needle by an online poll Trump (presumably) rejected about the subject of his comments concerning Miss Universe. These are well-thought out, unified segments, not just indiscriminate jabs.
I also appreciated the main segment on police accountability. It was an interesting way to look at the current cultural debate about police shootings, and as LWT does well, zero in on a small part of the issue with wide-ranging implications. I don't know enough about the topic to say whether it was appropriately even-handed in its presentation of the info, but it certainly raised some troubling issues (like "bad apple" officers being able to resign when there's trouble and just move to a different station) that were eye-opening to me.
And the final segment, following up on the Wells Fargo business was great, if only because the reveal that the corporate PSA actor from the internal Wells Fargo fraud video they were going to bring back turned out to be already working as a writer on their show, is a wonderful coincidence.
Overall, another great episode.
9.7/10. The opening news round up was solid. Making fun of clips of people in authority saying dumb things (this time in the context of the riots in Charlotte) in pretty standard Daily Show-esque stuff, but it was conveyed in amusing fashion, and the Wells Fargo story was a classic LWT bit of exposing something ridiculous while injecting the right amount of humor. (I don't know why John Oliver saying "fuck you" to an eight-year-old Ron Howard is so hilarious, but it is.) And the Channel 2 news bumper montage is always hilarious.
But this episode really gets points for its main story about Hillary and Trump's biggest scandals. I appreciated the way it dug deep into both the private email server issue and the Clinton Foundation issue and didn't let Hillary off the hook. Instead, Oliver (and his team of writers and researchers) said, "yes, it's a low-level bad, but there is something to this." That gives the show creditibiliy when it goes on to show how Trump's issues with his school, his business practices, his history of lying, are all orders of magnitude worse. The whole thesis, that if you're bothered by the "ethics" element of this election you should be annoyed at Clinton but abhor Trump, was well supported and justified, and the final oatmeal raisin cookie stunt, with the shower of raisins, was an amusingly ridiculous way to illustrate that.
Frankly, it's some of the best reporting I've seen on either candidate's scandals, and with LWT and John Oliver's wit, you have the added benefit of laughing your way through it. A great example of what this show can be at its best.
I'm not sure what to say. I don't know how I expected this show to end. On one hand, I'm okay with this ending, and I think it was a good way to conclude the show. On the other, I feel completely empty inside. It's strange to think that we're not getting another episode next week.
I was sure that John would be the one to die. It made the most sense. He had a good death, fighting until the very end. Still, I cried my eyes out when it happened.
I'm glad that Shaw is alive, and that she has Bear by her side. I loved how she smiled in the last scene. She totally heard Root's voice on the phone.
Finch is finally reunited with Grace!
So The Machine was talking to a version of herself all along. I'd kind of suspected that.
This was a great episode, and the last few minutes of it were bittersweet but also hopeful. The Machine's final monologue was epic. You know how sometimes you hear something so profound and powerful, something that speaks to you so deeply that you have to fight the urge to get it tattooed on your body? That's what I felt like when I heard that monologue. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the way they tied it all up.
Now, it's time for me to say goodbye.
I discovered Person of Interest quite late - just a few months before season 5 started. I wasn't hooked right away, but I stuck with the show because I'd read stellar reviews online. It took me almost an entire season to really get into it.
And then Root showed up, kidnapped Finch, stole my heart in about 0.2 seconds, and I was officially obsessed. It took me only 10 days to binge-watch seasons 2-4 (after all, who needs school? Who needs sleep?). This show was a wild ride, and I'm grateful that I got to experience it.
Thank you, Person of Interest.
Thank you for giving us compelling storylines, jaw-dropping plot twists and intense action scenes.
Thank you for exploring fascinating themes, such as AI and the true meaning of humanity.
Thank you for gorgeous cinematography, spectacular score and special effects that blockbuster movies could be jealous of.
Thank you for phenomenal characters, fantastic relationships, consistent characterization and incredible character development.
Thank you for starting my obsession with Amy Acker, which resulted in me binge-watching 19 episodes of Angel in one day (no, I do not possess amazing impulse control).
Thank you for making me laugh, making me cry, making me think, making me lose sleep over you.
Is there something about this show that I'm not happy with? Absolutely. I wish CBS hadn't acted like dicks and had given us a full season instead of measly 13 episodes. I wish Root hadn't died, and a part of me will always be bitter about it. I wish Shaw and Root had had more time. I wish they had paced the final season better (Root and Shaw are reunited after 10 months and over 7,000 simulations, Root dies in the following episode, and then we get a case of the week as if nothing happened? That's just bullshit right there), but I also know that the showrunners tried to do the best they could with a reduced number of episodes. And overall, they succeeded, making Person of Interest one of very few TV shows that were just as, if not more, exquisite in their last season as they were in their first.
Goodbye, Person of Interest. You will always be one of my favorite TV shows of all time. I don't think I'll ever get to watch something as engaging, thrilling, smart, thought-provoking, heartbreaking and powerful as you again.
