The season ends at episode five.
I liked this more than Oppenheimer.
This episode needed some Schlansky.
The good thing is it was actually better than I expected when I saw the title.
Not sure if I’m reading too much into it but is this maybe related to the imminent death of an actual friend of LD?
:neutral_face:
There’s just not a lot here.
“Ew, you can be Lisa’s.”
I’m not yet willing to commit to my own. I need a rewatch I think.
But I have to say it’s one of the first actual instances of absurdism in what critics have described as a deeply absurd show, so idk. It’s only really as absurd as its subjects; until this we’d never gone there.
Loved it. I want theories.
Above all else, this season is about how certain types of men treat women, how they build structures under and within the patriarchy that give them impunity to do so, and how women either accede to these conditions—or push back and are punished. This episode is the most clear-headed articulation of that thesis (if I'm correct in describing it as such), and it's absolutely devastating.
How many millions of incels have been birthed by that very specific feeling in the final scene?
I guess if you've never felt that feeling—the overwhelming anxiety of the knowledge that you have no idea how to perform appropriately in a particular social context and the spotlight is about to reach you, and what can you do, run?, and then the crushing aftermath of knowing that you weren't even paranoid; your self-assessment was correct, and you failed—the character of Asher might not make a lot of sense and the notion of the brutality of that final scene may seem melodramatic...
But it's not.
Jack still sucks. (Five words.)
Incredible satire.
Many fictionalised critiques of awful people caricature them to the point where it feels like the only bad guy left is a straw man or something so uncommon as to be impossible to place in one’s mind. The Curse is more interested in the banality of awfulness, think Arendt or Solondz, and the banality is what connects it to the real world—I don’t know a Thanos or a Napoleon—we all know people like this.
This is very hard to watch, and even harder if you wish to sympathise with its targets, but it’s very good.
yo what the fuck don’t do that
Jack is stupid and gross
Strong "that's numberwang!" vibes.
Everyone's super chill about the 100 million dead people, huh.
Episode three is the clearly best episode but this is just really fun the whole way through. Learning is easy when it's fun.
No comments? Come on, people.
Finally the Wayne/Tom storyline makes sense. We already know this ATFEC organisation will just murder on sight, because we saw it. So when they offer to take care of Kevin's Guilty Remnant problem, we now understand exactly what's going on here. I hadn't thought much about the 9/11 links on my first watch (not because they're not obvious, but because I'm not American), but it's hard to deny that this is straight retort to the invasive powers smuggled in after that event.
This is is an incredible opening two episodes. Turns out all Lindelof shows end up being about a Christian metaphysics in some way or another but as someone raised that way but agnostic for thirty years I’ve let’s say religiously avoided art about faith. And yet I find Lindelof’s takes so thoughtful and nuanced that I can’t help but take them seriously.
This episode is wonderful.
And the cherry on top: the only tick in the “world is explicable” category that we really got all episode (seeing the kids meet his dog-shooting partner was something—I guess it makes him real—but hardly relieved my confusion) was the finding of the theretofore inexplicably disappeared bagels. Just a masterful touch at the end.
This guy might be a masochist but I'm not sure that he's really a survivalist, or at least that's the very strong vibe I got from the first ten minutes of this episode. (I'm open to being proved wrong, but if that's the case why open episode one with something that indicates the things I pointed out.)
Wow, I'd forgotten how completely absurd this episode is.
Not saying I didn't enjoy it though.
I like a lot of the performances here and it's a well-directed 45 minutes, but it's really let down by the schlocky writing (there were a couple of decent scenes, especially the end one, and that's why it's a four not a two).
I know that's a thing that happened when these kinds of shows routinely produced 20+ episode seasons, but I don't have to be happy about it.
That's not an Australian accent.
I cried a lot because this show is about kindness.
As far as overall impressions go, though: wow.
I totally understand that a lot of time, effort, and emotional energy would have been invested in the pregnancy reveal, but the reality is it didn't work. They should have cut it and found another way.
(To be more specific, the way it played out in a physical sense just didn't make any logical sense; as an actor she had to wait for the action—the movement and sound—to end before she could speak, or neither we nor the people she's speaking to hear her, but it makes no sense for her to do that IRL, of course, because once she realised everyone was looking at her she would not have revealed this information.)
Aida Turturro is on fire in this episode.
