Chris's real feelings about his father and his surrogate father Tony and his life coming out through his acting classes, and him being unable to deal with it was powerful stuff. I also liked Big Pussy complaining about Tony having no honor in a scene where he was talking to The Feds. I got a kick out of how he said that the new generation was either on drugs or psychos, and Chris and Furio more or less prove him right. And the Furio scene at the massage parlor was incredibly well shot; very visceral and real.
I was less sure about the Melfi stuff, though her weird flirty phone call to Tony was interesting if odd. I have to admit, I've found Lorraine Bracco's acting stye a little weird. There's something affected about it, but it may just be a character choice. She seems to become more Tony-like in her scenes with her own therapist, and I think I see what the show is driving at, but it's still a bit off. In the same vein, Tony using Hesh as surrogate psychiatrist and Hesh copletely talking past him was fun. The episode is mostly carried by the Chris story, but it's fairly good aside from the Melfi stuff that stalls a bit.
5.6/10. Well, we're back to mediocrity again. Sokka showing off a strawman chauvinist streak, getting his but kicked by badass female warriors, learning their ways, and then falling in love with his trainer was all very, very rushed and filled with narrative shortcuts and cliches. In the same way, Aang letting his notoriety go to his head on the island, with more uninspired Aang-Katara relationship drama on top of a stock lesson about how adoration is intoxicating but distracting, was weak broth as well.
It wasn't all bad. The giant coy and snake monster riding was set up nicely and well-animated by this show's standards. Similarly, the showdown with Prince Zuko happened way too quickly, but it had some neat moments of the Fire Nation taking on the Kyoshi warriors.
The real strength of the episode only came at the end, when Aang looked down at the Kyoshi village in flames and realized that he'd been the cause of this. It's as nice a resolution to a pretty hackneyed fame story for him as there could be, with there being real pathos in the realization that even as a local celebrity and chosen one, he can't enjoy himself and has to be careful about whom she shares his identity with because his simply being some place can leave it in ruins thanks to the people hunting for him. There's weight to that, and it's something that was missing from the rest of this cheesy episode.
Yet again, I find myself liking the ideas behind this show, but not so much the way the show puts them into practice.
Great season! but I'm not sure whether I love it more than Season 1 which had far superior episodes ("Strawberries", "Refugees", "Ne Me Quitte Pas", "Saving Mikaela" and "Cairo Cowboy") which made me rave about it. Can't say the same about this one, though this might be because of the season arc with Mahershala Ali, who's a big name (it's already apparent he'd be a one-season character meaning there'd be some form of closure). So, I have to accept it changed its format in a certain regard and some episodes are really strong (If Ali deserves an Emmy for an episode it might be for either "Little Omar" or the finale, but I'd choose the "Little Omar" since it felt like a short story similar to the S1 episodes). I did enjoy "Frank", "Uncle Naseem" and "Atlantic City".
I binged the whole thing over the weekend but it would've been a better experience to watch it on a weekly basis (I do hope Hulu adopts this technique for all of their shows, I know The Handmaid's Tale does it but The Great and High Fidelity were released all at once, not fun for me). Definitely one of the best shows of the year. Hope the Emmys do recognize it for writing and Ali's supporting performance.
The Office is one of the most popular shows on the internet. It still remains as Netflix's most popular TV show after all these years, and is generally loved by most people. I watched all of it in the last month.
I have to say that I think it is kind of overrated, many of the jokes felt very forced, sometimes the quality of the humour was really childish and unfunny, and too cringey too many times for my taste. I found myself jumping 10 seconds ahead when I felt like I just couldn't deal with some scenes anymore. But why didn't I stop watching it?? The truth is there is some unidentifiable quality that kept me coming back, something special that I can't explain. I wanted to see more, see what would happen to the characters, what stupid things they would do next, how it was going to end. Some episodes were weak, some characters took turns and developed in a way that made no sense to me, but overall, the show remained strong and the last few episodes were great, specially the finale. The show ended on a high note, which is difficult to say about many shows nowadays. I really enjoyed it despite all my criticism, it was not as good as I expected it to be (you can see that the writers struggled after Steve Carrel left the show), but it's lighthearted and fun, and it really has some incredibly funny moments.
I came here to write a review on how great the season ended. I was, however, sadly made aware that this was the series finale as well. I started watching the show since it release three years ago. Over the three seasons you've seen the two main characters (Mickey and Gus) change. Sometimes for the best, others for the worst.
With the way this season felt, the creators had no indication that this would be their last; this is shown through the few character plots that were left open-ended. However, despite this - i feel we were able to see something of a ending. What we learned over our time with Mickey and Gus is that LOVE isn't easy. There is no cupid that shoots an arrow, that results in everything becoming great from there on out. Ney! The opposite. LOVE brings ups and downs. But! Most importantly, LOVE for Mickey and Gus brought out a better versions of themselves. Especially Mickey - and this season, we got a glimpse into Gus changing.
This series has brought me to tears a handful of times. Not many shows can do that. There has to be a connection, something that the viewer can relate to that allows for them open up emotionally. I'm saddened that the series is done, but i'm glad to have known it for as it was, when it was. Thanks!
Set aside the last few minutes of the finale for a moment. That last little reveal changes the shape of the episode, and the series, in significant and meaningful ways that make it easy to let it overshadow the rest of the episode. But stop and think about everything that happens here before the scene where he finally meets The Mother.
Because it is, at best, a mixed bag, long before we see the blue french horn again.
I understand the urge to give the audience some idea of what happens to the gang between 2014 and 2030. The problem is that covering a decade and a half in one big episode makes every story feel rushed and underdeveloped. One of the great things about HIMYM is how it used the past and the future to inform the present. Jumping back and forth between a prior conversation and a current one could be the crux of a joke, as could Future Ted's knowing commentary on some boneheaded mistake or unexpected development that was coming down the pipe. But those time jumps weren't just fodder for comedy, as the show did a great job of creating dramatic irony and emotional stakes by showing what lie ahead or the path that led us here. But by compressing fifteen years worth of life developments into an hour, nothing has time to really breathe or feel like it has the temporal scope the show is shooting for.
After all, there's a great story to be told about the gang drifting apart over the years. Another one of the series's best features is the way it combines the exaggerated goofiness of its comedic sensibilities with real, relatable aspects of being in your twenties and thirties. Well, one of the things that hits you once you start to move past that stage of your life is the way that friends, even good friends, can slowly drift apart, not through neglect or anger or hurt feelings, but just because you're suddenly at different places in your life. That's an idea worth exploring.
The problem is that the rush of years in "Last Forever" makes this process feel like something sudden instead of gradual. Sure, we see the chyron at the bottom of the screen showing that we've jumped ahead a year or two, and there's a boatload of semi-clunky expositional dialogue in the episode to let the viewer know where everyone is in their lives and what they're up to, but when all those developments take place over the course of just a few minutes and just a few scenes, it can't help but seem very fast.
One of the best choices HIMYM's creators made in the final season was to parcel out little scenes of the gang's future throughout, giving us a glimpse of what the future held without trying to pack it all into one big episode like this. Sprinkling those flashforwards in did a nice job at making the group's future feel as well-populated as its present and its past. Obviously there were limitations on how much they could do this in prior episodes given the reveals in store for Barney and Robin and Ted, but the method the show chose to relay the gang's future almost inevitably leaves it feeling too quick, too underdeveloped, and too unsatisfying, even apart from the directions the individual stories go.
Those plot developments, however, are another albatross around the finale's neck. The first and most obvious problem comes from Barney and Robin's divorce. Again, there's a legitimate story to be told of two people who care deeply for one another, but don't work as a couple, but it's a difficult story to tell in five minutes, especially when you've spent huge chunks the past season and a half trying to convince the audience that they make sense together. As someone who's been a Barney and Robin skeptic from the beginning, it's entirely plausible to me that the two of them could mean well and have real feelings for one another, but still end up divorced due to some basic incompatibilities. But the reason for their split feels thin here.
There's nothing we know about Barney that suggests globetrotting would be something he's so against. And while there's hints of bigger issues between the two of them, like not getting to see one another or not being on the same page about their respective plans and projects, we never really get to see these problems develop. We're just told about them, and expected to accept that as enough to break them up one episode removed their wedding. Is that result plausible enough based on what we know about Barney and Robin? Sure, but it's just presented to us, rather than developed before our eyes, and since we don't see their path from pledging to spend the rest of their lives together to getting divorced, that end point feels like it happens by fiat rather than something the show earned.
Barney's reversion afterward is just as unsatisfying. Again, there's a believable story about Barney having worked so hard to become a better person, in part to woo Robin, and reverting to his old tricks as a retreat and defense mechanism when his marriage falls apart. But because of the rapidity with which the finale goes from Point A to Point B, it doesn't feel like the natural result of a difficult event; it feels like throwing nine years of character development down the drain in less than a minute. There's a disparity between how much time the show spent building Barney up as more than just an cartoonish hound dog and how much time it spends showing him reverting to his old persona. That cannot help but feel jarring.
What kills me is that I love where they take Barney in "Last Forever." There's something beautiful about the idea that what really changes him isn't some conquest or accomplishment or even a great romance; it's becoming a father. For Barney, "The One" isn't a woman he'll meet some day; it's his daughter, and Neil Patrick Harris delivers a tremendous performance in the scene where he repeats his Ted-like plea, this time to his baby girl. It's a wonderful scene, but the path the episode takes to get there still comes off as a shortcut that has to ignore seasons of character development in order to make it work.
The finale isn't all bad though. While the story of the gang drifting apart is too quick, the scene where they all reunite for Ted's wedding is legitimately touching and full of the good will and warm feelings that the show's been able to generate during its run. Ted and Tracy (I can use her name now!) continue to be adorable together, and the twist that romantic Ted made it five years and two kids into his relationship before he actually married The Mother is a small but effective way to show how much the substance of finding The One was more important to him than the formality of it (even if he was planning on a European castle). It's one of those lived-in details that speaks to his character.
Beyond that, the actual meeting of The Mother is very well done, and it really had to be. Sure, there's a few meetcute cliches involved, but the easy rapport between Ted and Tracy soars once again and nearly saves the entire finale. After all, this was the moment the "Last Forever" had to nail, and it did. Ted and Tracy's conversation weaves in enough of the yellow umbrella mythos for everything to click, and Joshua Radnor and Cristin Miloti both sell the subtle realization that this is something special. For an episode that had to make good on the promise of its title, that meeting went about as well as any fan of the show might have hoped for.
And if the series had ended there, everyone might have gone home happy. Sure, the other problems with the rushed and shortcut-filled finale might have rankled a bit (particularly the way it undoes the wedding we'd just witnessed), but making that moment feel as big and as meaningful as it needed to after all that build up is no small feat, and that alone would have bought Bays & Thomas a hell of a lot of slack.
Frankly, the series could have still gotten away with Tracy dying shortly thereafter, another controversial choice in the finale. There's something tragic but beautiful about the audience watching Ted seek out the woman of his dreams for nine years and then realizing that he only gets to be with her for the same amount of time, while still cherishing and being thankful for the time the two of them had, for that connection and love that was wonderful and worth it no matter how all too brief it may have been. There's a touching theme about the fragility of things in that story, but also about the joy that comes from finding the person you love, that stays with you even after they're gone. It's sad, but it's sweet, in the best HIMYM way.
And then there's Robin.
The decision to pair up Ted and Robin in the last moments of the finale is as tone-deaf and tin-eared an ending as you're likely to find in a major television program, and the reasons abound. The most obvious is that the show devoted so much time to the idea of Ted getting over Robin, and had any number of episodes (the most recent being the execrable "Sunrise") where Ted seemed to have achieved that, to have moved on in his life. Folks like me may try to handwave it, and the show can call back to the premiere of Season 7 where Ted and Robin can declare that all you need for love is chemistry and timing, but at base, Ted and Robin getting together feels like it contradicts so much about the two characters' relationship with one another over the years. So much of the final third of the show involved going over the same beats between Ted and Robin over and over again, of having each move past the other, and coming back to them in the final, despite how iconic that blue french horn has become for the show, just feels like another poorly-established cheat or retcon that isn't in sync with where the show went since that finale was crafted in Season 2.
What's worse is that that ending transforms the story Ted's been telling from a heartwarming if irreverent yarn about the path that led to him meeting the love of his life, to a smokescreen to gain his kids' approval for dating an old flame after their mother's death. Look, to some degree you have to accept the conceit of the show for what it is and not take it too seriously. In real life, no two kids would sit through such a long story, and no father should tell his children about all the women he slept with before he met their mom. But taken in broad strokes, How I Met Your Mother is a story about how all the events in Ted's life, big and small, good and bad, planned or unexpected, went into making him the person who was ready to find Tracy and capable of being with her.
Future Ted himself put it best in "Right Place, Right Time." He tells his kids "There's a lot of little reasons why the big things in our lives happen." He explains that what seemed like chaos was bringing him inexorably toward the best person and the best thing to ever happen to him, that there were "all these little parts of the machine constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you're supposed to be, exactly when you're supposed to be there." And he tells them at the time, he didn't know "where all those little things were leading [him] and how grateful [he]'d be to get there."
That, to my mind, is the theme to take from this great, if tainted show. Sure, it's unrealistic that anyone would go on that many tangents in telling the story of their great romance, but the point is that each of these moments, each of these people, were crucial in who he was and who he became when he met Tracy, and that they were as important as that fateful meeting was. Yes, it's a long story, and it has many many detours, but it's the story of all the twists and turns and bumps in the road that brought Ted into the arms of his soulmate, and that smooths over the rougher edges of the show's premise.
Instead, the twist that it's all supposed to be about Ted having the hots for Robin turns that lovely story into a long-winded attempts by a middle-aged man to convince his kids that he should date their aunt That seems much more crass. There's still meaning to be wrung from it, meaning that finds parallels with Tracy and her dead boyfriend Max and the idea that you can have more than one meaningful relationship in your life. But it doesn't add up with what the show had really done to that point. The past nine seasons were no more about Robin than they were about Barney or Marshall or Lily. They no more feel like a way to suggest that Aunt Robin's good dating material than they do that Ted should spend more time with Uncle Barney. As great as that blue french horn was the first time, it had meaning because it represented something we knew was going to end, but which still had beauty and value despite that. This last time we see it, it's represents the opposite, that something beautiful has ended, and the value it had is cast aside in favor of a relationship the series spent years disclaiming. That is deeply, deeply unsatisfying.
Take away those final few scenes, concocted in a different era of the series, and you have a flawed but still potent finale, that delivers on the show's biggest promise and gives the gang one last "big moment" together. But add them back in, and you have an ending to the series that not only runs counter to so much of what the show developed over the course of its run, its final season in particular, but which, moreover, cheapens the story the audience had been invested in for the past nine years. It's almost impressive how a couple of truly terrible moments can do such retroactive damage to such a longrunning show , but here we are, with a sour taste in our mouth from such an ill-conceived finish.
Future Ted was right, a little moment can have a big impacts, and the one at the end of the series is a doozy in that regard. But maybe, just maybe, when we tell our own stories about How I Met Your Mother, we can do what Ted should have done many times -- just leave that part out. There's something wonderful to be gleaned from the ending to this fun, optimistic, heartfelt, and occasionally very rocky series, but it requires us to do what we always do when looking back on things: focus on the good stuff, make our peace with the bad stuff, and remember it at its best.
Better than I remembered! Ted chasing Maggie, the "ultimate girl next door" who can't stay single for more than an hour, and enlisting his friends in the attempt to keep all of her potential suitors off her scent, was a very sturdy premise for the episode, that gave everyone something to do. The heightened realism of all the guys trying to date Maggie was a fun engine to drive the story, and led to lots of great comic hijinx.
Ted having a heart-to-heart with his class, including trying to turn "MAGGIE" into an acronym nicely balanced Ted's emotional vulnerability and the absurdity of devoting an entire class period to your romantic life. Both Robin and Barney's storylines went pretty broad. Robin's comedic turns are rarely my favorites -- I feel like Cobie Smulders does better with down-to-earth comedy than with the wacky stuff, but she had some nice moments of bravado here. But Barney accepting his own challenge and trying to get laid in Marshall's overalls is exactly the kind of ridiculous quest that his character thrives on, and Robin busting on him with farm jokes kept the bit rolling.
Lastly, Marshall trying to resolve his disappointment with failing to live up to his fifteen year old dreams was sad and sweet. He's kind of a giant teddy bear, and the heart of the show, so seeing him struggle with that managed to walk the line between comedy and pathos, and Lily was understandably sweet and funny about it to boot.
The ending of the episode leaned more toward the sweet than funny, but then again, so do a lot of the better HIMYM episodes. The idea of Ted relenting when he hears Maggie and Adam's story, because he wanted something that good, and realized he was tired of chasing the single life when he wanted "the real thing" is a nice note to go out on that brings a fairly cartoony story back down to earth. Nice to see the show still putting on episode of this quality smack dab in the middle of its run.
I'm pretty sure I like this one better on rewatch than I did when I originally saw it. I like the central ideas the episode plays in -- Marshall's idea that family is important and not something that you can just cut out of your life, and Lily's that sometimes family members can do things that are so consistently awful and insensitive that your life is better off without them. I also appreciated the fact that by the end of the episode, they'd seen the other's point to where they actually flipped -- Marshall understood why Lily had such a hard time with her father, and Lily understood the idea of making peace even with people who have hurt you because you may regret it if you don't. It's obviously a bit simplified, but it's a nice idea for a Thanksgiving episode.
The slap stuff didn't do it too much for me. Let's face it, the whole slap thing was pretty much exhausting after Slap #2. The build up, the fanfare, the debates, all feel like trying to recreate one of the show's finest hours rather than forge ahead with something new and more original. It's not as though there weren't some funny moments (Mickey explaining that he doesn't know Barney, doesn't have anything against them, but just can't pass up the opportunity to slap someone in the face), but the entire slap-gifting chain was kind of contrived and broad even for a show that can get a little campy. There's a lot to like here, but it feels like the batting average is slipping.
7.5/10. Since I've been a Robin/Barney skeptic from the beginning, So this should be in my wheelhouse, right? Well, kind of. The idea that Barney and Robin aren't right for each other is a drum I've been beating for a long time, but this didn't really get at why. It posited that two awesomes cancel each other out, which could be a roundabout way of saying the same thing as that Barney is a cartoon character and Robin is a more realistic, self-respecting woman, and that both of them are too (as Marshall diplomatically puts it) independent for them to ever really make a go of being together. Instead, the thesis seems to be that they just suddenly turn into a lame nigh-married couple? We've seen Robin in relationships before, and (very mild spoilers) we'll see Barney in a relationship again, and it never really goes this direction, with little to indicate why it did in the first place.
Maybe that's the issue? The show is kind of wishy-washy about the whole thing. There's the implicit concept that the two of them fight all the time ("every moment's a battle") but have just settled into a groove, but I don't know that even the prior fight-episode adequately built up to that point. The best you can say is that their "think of it as two freinds getting back together" exchange is very sweet, and in my humble opinion, the best arrangement for Barney and Robin.
But you know what elevates the episode despite that? The scheming from Ted, Marshall, and especially Lily to break them up. From Ted's amateur attempts that end up blowing up in his and Marshall's face, to Lily's faux-retirement and then Machiavellian plan to remind them of their biggest fights, to the hilarious sequence in the stake out sttion wagon, with debates about porn, stake out vans, pizza, Alan Thicke, and how Crazy Meg knows so much about everyone's lives. There's a really comedy caper vibe to that portion of the episode, and it really makes the entire thing much more fun and laugh-worthy than it has any right to be. Not a great episode, given the muddled quality it's steeped in, but still a good one given the comedy and at least sticking to the idea that Barney and Robin don't work.
It's hard to know how much leeway to give a sitcom when it comes to things that would be horrifying in real life but can seem merely goofy in the context of a television show. In real life, Robin would be justified in never speaking to either Ted or Barney ever again after they turn her hopes, her personality, her very life into a class. The show attempts to sweep that under the rug by having Ted frame it as a use for all the Robin knowledge he'd generated when they were dating, and that it's the hardest he'd ever seen barney work to keep a girl. It doubles down by having Barney apologize and attempt to explain himself. But it still feels a little strange for Robin to forgive the both of them so quickly for such a gross violation, even if the show bends over backwards to make the argument that it was well-meaning.
On the other hand, there are demands of a sitcom, chiefly that things be more-or-less reset to the status quo by the end of the episode. Even in a comedy as continuity-heavy and intertextual as How I Met Your Mother, there's a certain inertia of the familiar, where outside of the season finale or Big Event context, the basic dynamic of the group has to stay the same. With that in mind, I can, more or less, make my peace with it. It helps that beneath the inherent creepiness of the whole thing, Ted's class is pretty damn funny, from the brick joke with the Flatiron Building, to Barney being a less-than-model student, to the list of items that can distract Robin when she's mad. Marshall's barrel B-story is pretty slight by comparison, but as usual Jason Segel makes the most of it.
All-in-all, the laughs are there for the most part, even if some of the humor is broad. It's just a question of whether you can separate how horrific something like "Robin 101" would be in the real world from the silly tone it has in the heightened reality of HIMYM.
7.3/10. Rewatching this one, I was ready to bash it. The slanted apartment story is a nice enough little B-plot, with the dutch angle selling it, but the whole ghost bit is pretty weak at the end of the day and hews toward the "no one in a sitcom can just tell each other the truth" cliche that drives me nuts. The resolution isn't ideal either, but whatever, it works well enough I suppose.
But what really had me about to turn on the episode was the way that Ted was acting. Ted has definitely been more Barney-like in the first half of this season. That's not necessarily so terrible; he leaned a little too far into the hopeless romantic side of things to the point where seeing him cut loose and experiment a bit was an interesting and realistic tack for the character.
But watching him ditch his date, steal from some random person, and kiss a married woman was pretty beyond the pale. Barney can get away with all of this to some degree because he's the comic relief and he's so ridiculous in his persona and tactics that none of it feels serious. But Ted is someone we're supposed to get behind, to identify with, and to root for, and it's really hard to do those things when he's being selfish treating other people poorly.
I had forgotten, however, Marshall's speech at the end, dressing Ted down and essentially ending his Barney-like adventures. It's a moment of realness and reflection, ("We don't need another Barney!") and show's a greater self-awareness about Ted than HIMYM necessarily always possesses. Call Ted out was a necessary course correction, and it retroactively makes the earlier nonsense worthwhile as a motivation for a change. The fact that he gets the yellow umbrella once he makes that shift and realization is the icing on the cake.
Plus, I love the conversation between Marshall and Ted because in addition to that kick in the pants that Ted needed, it feels very true-to-life. They joke around with each other after the heavy stuff, rib each other, and have a very lived-in friendship. One of the things that makes HIMYM an endearing show even when you're frustrated with some of the character choices is the way they get the feeling of friendship and interactions between buddies right. That moment feels real in both the serious talk and in the back-and-forth joking around, and it helps that moment hit home.
If you feel strangely sad at the funeral scene, it's because it's sinking in: we will no longer have the brilliant Michael McKean in this show :(
Overall it was a slow episode, even by Better Call Saul standards, but that's understandable considering where we pick up from. Chuck is gone and Jimmy, Kim and Howard have an increasingly strong feeling that it was no accident. I like the fact that Jimmy started the day happily, probably doing his best to brighten up Kim's morning (she only just got involved in her car crash despite it feeling like a year and a half for us) but then... stark contrast in his character during almost the entire episode as he deals with what happened to Chuck.
Jimmy's ridiculous reaction at the end suggests that far from mourning his brother, his biggest concern all along was whether he would be the one to blame for Chuck's mindset - but once he can pin it on Howard, it's all good, man. However, I think this is a coping mechanism and he truly mourns Chuck/feels guilty, which will likely manifest through destructive behaviour during the season. We saw the beginnings of a shift towards the Saul we know after his friend Marco died (end of season 1) and that wasn't even his fault... but Chuck's demise may be the point of no return.
Other than that, we had Mike doing Mike things - in this case, an infiltration in Madrigal. I thought he was trying to find out something specific, but in the end it seems he was actually working as a security consultant, which I could see becoming an issue for Lydia/Gus... but it's definitely too early to tell. One thing is for sure, there's an eerie entertainment value in the most mundane scenes with Mike, I feel like if it was 40 minutes of that I would still be fine.
One thing I love about Vince Gilligan and his team is this habit of repeating the last moments of one particular scene from the previous finale in a season premiere. They do this since Breaking Bad and I always love it because it brings you back to that moment immediately without trying to dump information on your brain while you actively try to remember the details. You don't have to be like "ohhhh right, Hector had a stroke, Gus looked at Nacho" because they show you, then continue it. On that side of things there was not a lot more other than Nacho and the other gentleman receiving orders from Bolsa... and Gus identifying a new opportunity and mentioning DEA.
(First thought: Gus' Spanish seems to have improved, which was terrible in BrBa, but they also have him talk less so far)
(Second thought: is Hank going to show up?)
I almost forgot to mention the intro but there isn't a lot to say, really. I'm starting to think these little teaser scenes of the future are... just that, teasers. Which is not a bad thing exactly, yet could be disappointing for viewers expecting more. But I could be wrong, they could always be saving some surprises, I guess it all depends on them using these future scenes in episodes other than premieres.
Absolutely love the direction this season is taking. I feel like there is a lot more "clarity" compared to watching last season and given that you're supposed to empathise with Elliot and see it from his perspective, it really feels like his mind is slightly more clear now, at least when compared to season 2 - he has a goal and is aware of things that are happening, but not everything.
I thought after Elliot realised Tyrell was real/got shot, he had a better grasp of how Mr. Robot operates, or how his mind works, somehow, and that's what shut Mr. Robot down for the most part. This episode suggests the therapy sessions are what help keeping Mr. Robot at bay, though, which is interesting - and so is the fact that Elliot and Krista have discussions about it.
I sort of enjoy the switching between Rami Malek and Christian Slater more than them being side by side. It really adds a lot in terms of making Mr. Robot a frightening presence, and it's written/directed in a way that makes those scenes incredibly good. Even the sound editing in the background set the tone for the transition, such as when Mr. Robot takes over while at therapy, which has happened before - if you go back to the Pilot scene where Elliot does his "fuck society" speech, right before he starts the same thing happens, this being even before the audience knows about the Mr. Robot personality.
My only disappointment is the whole Joanna Wellick thing - only reason why I don't give it a 10. If what happened doesn't factor into the plot (and it doesn't look like it will), then that guy just... killed them for a lame reason. I don't know, that was weird just for the sake of weird.
actually American dad is my third best animated series after futurama and the simspsons.
