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Episode three of this season brings in something Mr. Robot has been avoiding for awhile: genuine empathy. The series's MO has been cynicism for it's entire lifetime and it has served it well. But as we bring this journey to a close, if we are to truly reckon with Elliot's misdeeds and start to see progression in the way that Esmail has been pushing him it is a necessity to open up the world tonally to others' suffering. This episode does not exist in a vacuum. Mr. Robot has been hinting towards an empathetic break for years. But it is in this episode that it feels as though those teases are finally coming to fruition. Elliot has been changing from someone self-centered and pushed into understanding his actions for those around him. To actually see the other people he affects. Now, for the majority of the show's lifetime, Elliot and f_society have been hacking people around them with few redeeming qualities. But if the shift in super-objective is not only to revert 5/9 but also to rid the world of evil as he sees it, then Elliot must understand the consequences of the hacks he commits on the daily level. From a writing perspective, this pushes the boundaries of the world significantly and brings the perspective of the show into a different arena. By changing focus, we are now left to struggle with gray area in a more realistic way.
I am impressed by this season. Esmail has had tricks up his sleeves for years, but bravo on this one. It's not an outright twist so much as a subtle subversion ultimately tasty and nuanced.
I'm surprised this show returned so quickly after the holidays. In seasons 2 and 3 we had to wait until March.
The new logo is fucking sick. Easily the best one they've ever done.
I'm so mad about May. It's driving me insane that they're obviously going to make something happen between Coulson and the decoy. He'll be devastated when he finds out the truth. I can smell the angst from here.
If there was one thing I never expected to see on this show, it was Jemma Simmons doing a Southern accent. And totally kicking a guy's ass. What happened to that adorable and awkward scientist in an ugly sweater who couldn't lie her way out of a paper bag? Oh, right. As Daisy pointed out in this episode, she's been kidnapped like three times. And only twice on this planet. Jeffrey's "holy shit" face pretty much summed up all my thoughts on the subject.
I'm being nitpicky here, but why would you give your son a traditional Indian name like Vijay and then call your daughter something as quintessentially English as Ellen? It's like naming your kids John and Persephone or Mary and Rocket. Come on. Was it too hard for the writers to come up with an Indian name for the Senator?
The MVP award in this episode goes to Mack, who made me laugh repeatedly with his robot movie references. And that fist bump with YoYo after he cut Aida's head off? That is Marvel Cinematic Universe at its finest, guys.
Radcliffe is evil. I admit, I did not see that one coming.
This was one of the biggest "come ON! (>ლ) episodes of the show:
• Michonne's "this family thing isn't making me whole, I have to slice-and-dice some walkers".
• The Walker creeping on Michonne. WTF? those things makes so much noise. How it manage to ninja on her.
• the random girl's "maybe she's [Maggie] waited enough".
• Rick and Daryl stupid argue.
• Their stupid fall to the stupid hole. Who the hell pushes his friends in the zombie apocalypse without looking first.
• This show showing guts and gore constantly, it showed baseball bat head bashing, hinted rape and showed kids being eaten/losing their arm to a Katana, but they've made Norman Reedus 'cencore' the word f@ck (or fek as he said it).
• Michonne's "we're not the same" talk with Negan was good, but only because of JDM's acting. When will we learn about his past, and what his thing with Lucille. I haven't read the comics but I bat he was a baseball coach.
And finally...
• Rick looking at the 2 Herds and only says "No, No, No!" instead of riding the third vacant way and say it there. It's not like he could do something there in the middle of the crossroads.
Aside of that, I really enjoyed the episode.
That feeling when you have to go to school, and you can't watch the episode until you get home in the afternoon... Well, dear teachers, if you really expect me to put Maths or History ahead of one of my favorite shows' final season, you're seriously underestimating my obsession with fictional characters. I swear, tomorrow I'm getting up at 5 AM just to catch the next episode before classes.
The beginning of the episode was amazing. My multilingual baby Shaw in a cowboy hat? This is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Root with a big-ass gun is my new OTP.
ROOT AND SHAW! I'm screeching like a dying pterodactyl right now! Both actresses absolutely nailed that scene. Amy Acker's eyes are just inhumanly expressive. It's hypnotizing to watch. They should have their own award category. I wish that Person of Interest and its exquisite cast got more recognition because they absolutely deserve it. It's sad that even the show's own station doesn't appreciate it.
"The one person I couldn't kill... was you."
Everything hurts, and I'm crying. It's a good pain, though. The kind of pain that makes you feel alive.
The Voice was a compelling villain, and the plot twist was as unexpected as it was incredible.
The shootout at the precinct was an awesome scene.
Elias and Harold had a lot of good scenes too. Elias blowing up The Voice's car was great. I totally thought they'd really let him go, which would have been stupid, but that's how Harold rolls, so I would've understood it. Still, I was pleasantly surprised that they didn't just let the bad guy get away.
Fusco knows! Finally!
The whole team at the end made me cry even harder. Is this show trying to kill me?
4 episodes to go. I can't deal with this.
6.3/10. Carrie Matheson is always juggling, always keeping lots of balls in the air and hoping that none of them drop. So let’s take them one-by-one.
The most interesting of them is Sekou. As I said last week, it’s pretty gutsy stuff to take a character who is actively praising terrorists and make him sympathetic. The idea that he is just a kid who’s being railroaded by the system, set up, lied to, and made to face seven years in jail is intense stuff. You feel for Sekou, you feel for his sister and mother, and you feel the futility and injustice of all of this from the lawyer who tells Carrie that she’s doing Sekou a disservice by not steering him toward a deal. That lawyer’s been through this before, and the most dispiriting thing is how resigned he is, and how normal he seems about the unfairness handed to his client.
The plot twist that Sekou’s friend is actual an FBI informant who helped set Sekou up is a decent one. It twists the knife of that unfiarness, making it come from someone who was a part of Sekou’s and his sister’s lives, and who’s just the tool of someone else. The problem is that as soon as the lawyer emphasized that talking to him would be against the rules, you just knew Carrie was going to do it, so her emerging from the shadows had zero surprise or impact.
The other big problem is that it turns Conlin into a snarling villain. It’s not like Homeland has never had despicable bad guys before (paging Duck Phillips) but the idea of this guy who’ll set nobodies up in order to catch “terrorists” and threatens to have Carrie for interfering is some COBRA B.S. I’m sure it’ll turn out he’s doing it at the President Elect’s behest or something like that, but for now he just seems like a cartoonish villain, and it does the storyline no favors, even if Carrie getting to the bottom of who gave Sekou the $5,000 makes for a solid episode plot.
But that’s just one of the balls Carrie has in the air. Another is the fact that, as the Saul seemed to sniff out but then talked himself out of she’s advising the President Elect on the spycraft side of foreign policy. This is, like much of last week, more of a storyline that suggests some good intrigue going forward rather than anything especially interesting here and now. The prospect of Carrie teaming up with the President Elect to go against Dar and the rest of the intelligence community could be interesting, especially with each side thinking it’s playing the other by, for instance, having Saul manage the deal with the Iranian bagman, but for now it’s mostly a promise.
What is fleshed out, and arguably the strongest part of the episode, is Dar Adal doing what he does – playing games and being one step ahead of everyone else. The fact that he managed to play the President Elect’s advisor, tell a “bullshit story,” and smoke out that Carrie’s working for the Prez-to-Be makes him the crafty snake you can’t help but admire when the show gets all twisty like this. As I said last week, I appreciate the prospect of Dar trying to make a power play on behalf of the current intelligence apparatus, the old guard, against the newbies, and the fact that he’s keeping his knowledge of Carrie’s involvement from a trusting Saul just adds intrigue to the pot.
Of course last but not least in terms of the balls Carrie is juggling is Quinn, who is still setting up shop in Carrie’s basement and being recalcitrant and difficult to anyone who dares cross his path. I still don’t know how I feel about this storyline. On the one hand, I appreciate that the show is making Quinn earn his way back from the near-death experience the hard way, making it ugly rather than inspirational. You can’t just keep almost-killing your characters without there being consequences, so I’m glad that the show is committing to the notion that what Quinn went through is traumatic and not just doing a SIX WEEKS LATER title card and he’s suddenly all better like they did with Brody. What’s more, I’ve seen praise for Rupert Friend’s performance from folks who’ve experience combat trauma, so it’s nice to see those difficulties dramatized in a way that connects with the people who’ve experienced them.
It’s just not clear where they’re going with this stuff. We’re two episodes into the season, so that’s fine to some degree, but like much of this episode, a lot of it drags between the hints of what’s to come and the destination. It’s nice to see Max again for the first time in two seasons, and his steely but yielding dynamic with Quinn is a welcome one, but I’m not sure what the point of his misadventures at the bodega was beyond the notion that Carrie is trying to keep track of everything at once and Quinn’s miserable and a little
self-destructive, which we essentially knew from last week. Max gives the season’s second “Carrie, you’re bad for Quinn” speech, and maybe that’s building to something, but in the interim, it’s not especially compelling.
That’s the thing about Homeland though. There’s so often it can just skate by because folks like Claire Danes, Rupert Friend, Mandy Patinkin, and F. Murray Abraham are such good actors. The scene at the end where Carrie watches Quinn’s gassing video with him, and he asks her why she saved him could be Lifetime movie level stuff. But Friend is so good at playing this broken shell of a man, and Danes so good at selling the complicated pain of that question and the feelings stewing in the character, that the show, and the episode, get by.
But like those balls in the air, you can only get by on acting for so long. Again, we’re two episodes in, there’s plenty of time to pull the trigger on noteworthy developments and big moves. It’s worthwhile to be patient through the setup. Eventually though, Season 6 is going to need to make these stories compelling in the moment, and not just intriguing for what may happen down the line. “The Man in the Basement” can’t quite pull that off.
9.7/10. I always appreciate it when SNL has standup comedians on because, unlike many other performers, standups have a clear comedic voice -- it's essentially a necessity in their line of work -- and that allows the show to have a certain clarity and focus in its perspective that makes those episodes stand out. Getting a solid set from Chappelle riffing, as he is wont to do, on the election, on racism, on the unique position of being both black and wealthy in this country, was worth the price of admission alone, and as always his insights and laughs were cathartic. His closing bit about seeing the progress this country has made, and how it prompts him to want to give Donald Trump a chance, and the hope that he'll give the historically disenfranchised a chance too, was sincere and affecting -- the perfect way to end the monologue.
The cold open was affecting too. Kate McKinnon's not the world's greatest singer, but having her sing "Hallelujah," in a way that serves as the perfect mournful epitaph for both Leonard Cohen and Hillary's 2016 campaign, was an inspired choice. It's always a bit polarizing when the comedy people get a bit serious, but the hushed, sad atmosphere of the performance worked for me.
The election, understandably, permeated a lot of the show. The sketch after the monologue, with Chappelle hanging out with a bunch of stereotypical liberals on election night, did a nice job at capturing the sort of confidence morphing into shock that a good chunk of SNL's audience experienced. And the perspective behind the sketch (aided by a cameo from another great standup comedian, Chris Rock), that the African American community wasn't shocked by this, but rather sees it as a lot of more of the same, and that there's a naivete and myopia to the coastal elite crowd experiencing this, was the kind of nice specificity you appreciate from having folks like Chappelle and Rock host the show. (And the "kids talk politics" sketch felt like a neat little coda to that.)
Politics, again as expected, played a big role on "Weekend Update" as well. Jost and Che continue to offer cutting commentary in the wake of the election. (Che's chuckle at "united" in "United States" was a nice opening touch.) And their pseudo joint monologue at the top of the show did a nice job at commenting on the election and the response to it. Bits like Jost's "women of color in the senate" montage were great, and Kate McKinnon's Ruth Bader Ginsburg is always a fun mix of political commentary, goofy dancing, and amusing insult humor.
But the show was funny even when it wasn't digging into the political side of things. The "Inside SNL" sketch was a fun, inside baseball bit. The idea of turning the criticisms of a sketch into a post-game press conference was a nice way to explore the critiques of the show, and the way it leaned into the legitimate criticisms of this cast (which, I have to admit, I myself have made) from Kyle Mooney's broadness to Leslie Jones's unpreparedness to reliance on wacky props, worked well. It was a nice way for the show to respond to those criticisms without seeming too thin-skinned about it. And despite that, I actually liked the pre-taped sketch about Leslie and Kyle dating. It had a different energy than a lot of SNL bits (and Leslie and Kyle bits for that matter), using understatement and sincerity and drawing out the comedy from the little exaggerations on the edges. A highlight to be sure.
Really, the weakest spot was the Walking Dead parody, and even that was solid! It was a thrill to see all the old Chappelle's Show characters again, but there wasn't much of a point to the sketch beyond the nostalgia factor. (Though, Tyrone Biggums's weird speech at the end was good for some laughs.) The other pure comedic sketches worked for me as well. I have to admit I groaned a bit when I realized were gearing up for another "Kate McKinnon is the last girl at the bar" sketch, but the writing of the episode ("that gave me a hard-off") and the absurdity of Kenan's bartender character finding signs of the apocalypse and handing out yellow cards, won me over. And the middle-aged dude still breastfeeding sketch is the kind of out there premise that gets a little gross, but embraces the ridiculousness of it for laughs (and Kyle Mooney's character being oddly into it was a nice touch.)
Overall, it's as strong an episode as SNL has had in what has already been a strong season. I don't know if this is the kickoff of a Dave Chappelle "comeback" as he stated in the goodnights, but if Dave can bring this level of wit, insight, and humor to television once again, I will be incredibly grateful for it.
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.
Very enjoyable episode. I have to admit that my favorite parts were the least substantive. The opening review had me in stitches, but it was all just fun observational stuff. Vladimir Putin crushing children's dreams on his annual call-in show feels like the perfect sort of unintentionally existentialist, vaguely totalitarian comedy that one would expect from the Russian Prime Minister. An English MP calling David Cameron "Dodgy Dave" and the purely British commotion that followed had the dignified adorableness one comes to expect from that August body. And the leader of Turkey punishing people for comparing him to Gollum is as funny as it is a horrifying trampling of free speech rights. Plus, the montage of WCBS2 headline stacks the scare tactics, and frankly bizarre nature of their bumpers one after the other to a very humorous effect.
The main story on lead poisoning feels like one of those issues where there's probably a little more to it than Oliver lets on, but I just don't have the expertise to dispute it. That said, poisoning children does seem like it could be a straightforward enough issue that there's nothing really noteworthy he finessed or left out. Nevertheless, far and away the best part of it was the Sesame Street scene at the end (hooray for HBO synergy!). Sure, it's pretty blatantly manipulative, but I'm a sucker for Oscar the Grouch, and Oliver's comedy fit surprisingly well in a muppet-filled setting. (Shades of Stephen Colbert, Grover, and Spike Jonze!)
And what's more, Delores is a special host, which means that the current timeline Dolores is in, is like the one of the other hosts. And when Bernard talked to her ijthat room episodes ago, it could not be Bernard, but Arnold himself. I don't know, that photo of "Arnold" and Ford looked like there was someone missing there. Bernarnold maybe? Moreover, Arnold fell in love with the hosts, preferring them and in this episode, Bernard told Theresa that he understands the hosts and that the human beings confuse him. I was one of those who thought Bernard was a host since the very beginning: the only one with a backstory, he had his own reverie (cleaning his glasses), he saying he's been there forever. All this made me doubt him. And, if that scene with Bernard interviewing Dolores was not in another timeline or if it wasn't Arnold, it means that it was Ford the one who sent Bernard to interview her. that's why I think it was Arnold all along. That Bernard was designed as Arnold and that they look the same. That's the only way it makes sense, unless they say something different next episode.
And William and his story about reading books. Quite suspicious. I remember the MIB said something like he knew a lot of stories and that he wanted to get the meaning. Quite similar to what William said this episode.
This show is just mind-blowing. I don't know what it is what anymore.
7.75/10. It's nice to have Tina and Amy back on the SNL stage again. They definitely dominated the proceedings this evening, but that's to be expected with returning cast members. They were both raring to go, the episode did well because of it, though the best material was definitely frontloaded.
The highlights of the evening were largely political. The opening sketch about the Republican debate had basically the best take on the Republican field the show's managed so far. Positing Trump and Jeb as a bully and the nerd he picks on is an inspired choice, and everything from Ted Cruz's little monologue about people hating him to Chris Christie's intense Jersey guy routine, much more of this clicked with the writers and actors finding characters than in previous episodes. I still don't quite get Jay Pharoh's Ben Carson, but people seem to like it.
By the same token, the sketch with the two Hillarys was some of the sharpest political writing the show's had recently. McKinnon's Hilary is such a well-established role for her at this point, that juxtaposing her with Poehler's formerly prominent Hillary worked great to let these two superb comic performers bounce off of each other. I was never as enamored with Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression as the rest of the world, but she held her own here too.
And the other major highlight was the "Meet Your Second Wife" sketch. It's such a brilliant idea for the sketch, and beyond the great way that the sketch just built and built in terms of comedy, there were so many great little character moments, like Aidy Bryant accepting the show prize of a kayak and the twist with Kenan's future wife not being born yet. Similarly, the Time Life Collection of the Douglas Variety Show was a mixed bag, but the character dynamics between the two hosts of the "informercial" plus Maya Rudolph's performance made it work.
The lowlights were the Kenan Acting Coach sketch, that was silly without being much fun at the end of the day, and the Bronx Beat sketch, which was never a favorite of mine. When I saw the logo, I immediately thought, "well this is going to be a beating", and it was. Not sure who was clamoring for Amy and Maya to do this generally annoying, aimless sketch again, but Tina's all-over-the-place accent didn't help the sketch land.
As for the big middle, the monologue with Tina and Amy doing dueling X-mas songs was funnier in concept than execution; the Hoverboard ad was fine but pretty easy humor, and the Bad Blood parody was fine in principle but didn't really go anywhere and felt like viral video bait.
Weekend Update continues to have found its groove. While this wasn't one of the show's stronger outings, Jost & Che have clearly found their voice and so even the less-inspired Update segments are pleasant enough. McKinnon as Deenie, "Somebody's Mom" was kind of weak, but overall the material worked well enough.
And Bruce Spingsteen, who I like well enough but don't really follow, had good performances all the way through, with a surprise appearance from Paul McCartney (who didn't seem to know the words) at the very end of the show. Only a couple of duds, and a lot of fun material made this a solid way to close out SNL's 2015.
An odd number of sex offender jokes sprinkled in throughout, but despite (because of?) that, this was pretty damn funny episode, with only one real clunker of a sketch, and some of the best and most incisive humor of the season so far. Elizabeth Banks excelled as a host, showing off her comedy and performance chops, and disappearing into her sketches to where she felt like a part of the cast. On to the sketch-by-sketch reviews!
All-in-all a solidly funny episode after the disaster of last week.
