Thogek

VIP

8

Any episode with this much extended Marshallness is like a fun bonus.

Do some parts of this season-starter feel rather more forced? That very different family. James. Heysen. Like a new set of writers stepped in and decided to wipe the slate to do something... else?

This start feels like a very different show than the first two seasons. Not sure what I think of that so far, except that it's an awkwardly jarring transition...

At this point, the show and story are starting to get halfway decent, even if Courtney is still acting like a moron.

I did expect a little better of smooth-investigator Pat at the hospital, though.

Hrm.

Wow. Didn't expect the episode title to end up feeling like a sort of hunting reference. :open_mouth:

As weirdly entertaining as the whole Five-vs-Five thing was to watch...

Would it have worked (and been much simpler) to never contact fourteen-days-ago Five but instead to quietly stalk him until he, as he did before, dropped his mission and briefcase to transport himself back to 2019, and then grab the briefcase he left behind? As it turns out, this seems like it'd have cost them the same amount of time and a lot less risk...

Other than that, fun and crazy entertainment as always...

Mostly good, except for the wild technobabble overdrive, and...

At the end, couldn't Jane have hit that door button and then slipped out the door before it finished closing? At least tried? Sigh.

I'm half-expecting to find out that, either due to the ZIP released in the room being from the "denatured" batch or due to Jane's previous experience with ZIP (and ZIP poisoning) that she now has some degree of immunity to ZIP, and will end up having some sort of weird memory-lane finale experience before waking up to an all's-well end... maybe... as long as they don't make it some overly simple "just kidding!" sort of save...

Just one episode left to wrap it up, one way or another.

Given how Patterson clearly knows those bunker tunnels better than anyone and has clearly planned a series of discovery contingencies, I have to wonder if her sad "I'm sorry"s through the closed-door window were about having failed everyone (as it seemed to suggest) or about having to leave everyone behind and captured while she slipped out yet another way from under all that fiery doom. Wishful thinking, perhaps, especially near the end of the series when writers are most likely to give some characters heroic ends, but... maybe...

Another mixed bag...

Good:
* Just about every moment with Greg in it. Not hard to like the guy, and to sympathize with what he must be going through with what he's learning. Even the mistake with the phone—not really something he would have known about—and the sadness that followed. I hope that that isn't all we see of him.
* I hoped and suspected that Allison, who is far too smart for this, was performing layers of prepared story for Madeline throughout all of that. And, indeed, in the end, Allison was giving the finger, so to speak.

Has Potential:
That end-reveal moment was kinda cool. I just hope they do something worthy with it.

Bad:
Every single emotional-crisis moment in this episode—and there were several—was sooo poorly manufactured. The concept behind them all is totally valid and in the background all the time, but, for some reason, every time it's been brought into the foreground it's been done with such supreme poke-you-in-the-eye clumsiness that I'd rather they just tossed it soft a line once in awhile and left it back there.

I think my only real gripe was the method and accomplishment of talking ~4 billion immersed Obsidian North users down from using the platform—not even by citing an immediate dangerous problem with the platform, but by arguing them out of the long-term escape at all—which was such a massive oversimplification of the situation (and the many various users' motivations for using such a platform) that was awfully hard to swallow.

But, otherwise, not a bad season-ender at all, especially given that this was originally intended to be season's fourth-to-last episode, but for the coronavirus-response production shutdowns. It will be interesting to see how this unplanned cliff-hanger's resolution is worked into the start of the next season...

Also, nice reference with the episode title, "Out of the Past", a 1947 film-noir crime drama movie...

So, they have a strict directive (Protocol 3) to not kill anyone.

However, in this case, due to the nature of the situation, shooting down (or even just wounding) a few soldiers would have resulted in the same number of deaths in the end (due to the final explosion) and a much higher chance of mission success (mandated by Protocol 1) without having to send back (and waste) more travelers to occupy the soldiers. No deadly force (and thus no direct Protocol 3 conflict) was even necessary; shooting the soldiers in the legs (sharpshooter?) would have sufficed.

Which seems to suggest that either (1) the writers were careless with such plot details or (2) something else (more complex/insidious?) is going on.

Naming an episode such as this after that Orwell 1984 reference... Oddly fitting.

About the selection of hosts for travelers...

I get the mistake concerning Marcy's selection: information isn't always perfect, and her case was unexpectedly odd. But... are there just so few viable options compared to the need that they have to accept traveling into people with babies and wives? Seems like an otherwise very odd choice that deserves a little explanation...

Overall, the animation was a bit stiff, but perhaps expected as such given the incredible short notice with which the project to produce it must have been thrown together. The inventive transitions helped. In the end, I appreciate the dedication that brought it to us rather than simply letting the season effectively dangle after ep. 18.

I wonder how much of Elizabeth's IMO-far-too-easy slide completely over to the Mom Side (my only real problem with the plot development here) was rushed by the need to complete it with this one episode as opposed to across the originally planned four episodes that this one effectively replaced.

Lots of fun moments (and plenty of wacky) in this one, although I think my favorites may have been watching Sara with her new Matt Murdock look and Johnny Smith moments, and wondering if the Paragon of Destiny wasn't a bit of oblique foreshadowing of Sara's upcoming entanglement with Fate(s).

Hmmmmm. The Sikorsky Archive... as in... sikorskyarchives.com? Or something entirely else?

Soooo, if, as the Major apparently has planned, the military is able to deliberately replicate the genetic mutation in new people, will it have the same effect as the 828ers; would the Death Date effect somehow still relevant (as those people didn't skip over any time) and, if it is, how? That plotline, with or without the Major, has some interesting possibilities...

In which Sir Hargreave Mcgrubney Cubbins Archibald Brian Effingham III -- a.k.a. Sir Effingham -- has his opportunity to be, indeed, an effing ham. ;-)

Con: The whole cause of the secondary Shakespeare emergency was the Legends being, as Damien always called them, idiots. (I mean real true you-guys-know-better-than-that idiots.)

Pro: Almost everything else, in classic wacky-Legends style.

And then, of the Original Legends, there were two...

Did I hear correctly Chester say "Thank Rao!"?
That was an... er... interesting cross-reference.

Mar-GoPro? Heh. Gotta love the odd cultural cross-overs.

So, lots o' fun stuff and a few bits of nefarious Lex-plot advancement, but a few serious gripes as well:

Why do the heroes always have to pause their frantically imperative rush to solve the crisis to have a deep heartfelt personal-life discussion? It was a good discussion, but... uh... there's a deadly battle going on upstairs and a wild timebomb ticking in those servers, guys; can we have this talk later?

Just about every DEO-agents-vs-hijacked-tech fight scene was utterly ridiculous. Super-advanced and deadly tech that apparently couldn't hit the side of a Sandcrawler, mad energy-bolt crossfire-chaos that somehow never manages to hit anything... C'mon, writers. I know you can formulate a scene where the super-tech poses a realistic deadly tech and is realistically and heroically fought off. Why the crazy-sloppy theatrics?

Sigh.

Farkakte. Indeed. Much farkakte. Macaroon?

Hologram of Zari Tomaz: Help me, Nathan Heywood. You're my only hope. [vanishes]
Nathan Heywood: Wait a minute. Where'd she go? Bring her back! Play back the entire message!
Gideon: What message?
Ray Palmer: That was so COOL!

That new title-intro is certainly different. And kinda weird. And I like it. Weirdly.
https://youtu.be/Ti3W74hset0

Okay, I think I get what they were doing, sort of following and wrapping up on the Legends worldwide exposure at Heyworld. And, it's Legends, so there's gonna be some wacky to it. But... uh... That was pushing even the Legends' capacity for making timey-wimey wacky work.

I do like how their movie-panel at the end called out everything that was wacky about this adventure (cough), although the effectiveness with which they seemed to achieve their nothing-to-see-here back-to-normal-ness was a bit... simple.

IAC, some good stuff sprinkled about. Meeting Behrad. A bit of Sara's Crisis after-effects. A hint of the soul-chit madness to come. Not really enough (IMO) to make this episode's wackiness factor flow together as well as it sometimes does with the Legends, but... Hoping that the season to come finds the feet that this episode seems to have stumbled off of.

In one corner of the universe, a clocksmith dwarf with loads of cave mushrooms wishing for a ham sandwich.

In another, an effing ham seeking a questor.

Now if I only we could find a cave-mushroom-craving questor and we'd have a deal...

I had forgotten how much I missed ProtoMiller. Daaamn.