Open spoilers – anything that has been available to stream will be open for discussion.
Created by Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan and starring Rhea Seehorn, the premise of the show is “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.”
The first two episodes are available for streaming now. The schedule says they’ll be released on Fridays, though these two episodes were apparently available Thursday night and I’m not sure if that will continue. As this will be one thread for the whole season, if you’re the first person posting after a new episode has dropped it would be nice to mention that to make it easier for people to track the discussion.
Early critic reviews are quite good but I haven’t read any details as I plan to watch the show soon.
It also sounds like a premise that benefits from knowing as little as possible going in. So if you have the discipline to avoid spoilers, that seems advisable.
P.S. Rhea Seehorn is a goddamn treasure and she deserves every showcase she can get.
I have no idea what direction the story is going to go from here. A singular resistance movement lead by Carol alone? The … collective is not being honest about its intentions and has some sort of ulterior motive?
It’s got a bit of The Good Place vibes because the show will almost certainly have strong philosophical underpinnings and Pirate Lady is a bit like Janet.
The only thing that I don’t like so far is the reaction of most of the other… survivors. Non-collective humans. Whatever we should call them. Carol is absolutely the most understandable reaction of the bunch and I feel like their reactions should’ve been more bewildered and varied more. They all seem entirely too chill with what’s happening.
I have to imagine the choices for nationality/culture were deliberate. China, Mongolia, Japan, India – all much more collectivist cultures than the American Carol. Individualism and collectivism will likely be a running theme in the show and. I do wonder if it’s significant that none of the other regular humans were from other western or otherwise individualist countries. I don’t know about Mauritania culturally whether they fit the collectivist mold or not. That said, Mr. Diabaté, the man from Mauritania, seems to be the only other character with an understandable reaction. His reaction is entirely self interested – suddenly the rest of the human race is treating him like a king and eager to please him and he’s all about it. While my reaction would be more like Carol’s, his reaction is entirely plausible.
It’s the others that don’t really make sense – they seem to think that what’s going on is no big deal. And they’re not written like they’re in denial, exactly, just that they’re cool with it and don’t really see what the big deal is. They all scoffed at Carol as if she was crazy for being bewildered and resisting what’s going on.
Without knowing more there’s something I don’t quite like about the mechanics of the collective. Carol’s girlfriend/wife/whatever died during the initial transition. They said that her consciousness or at least knowledge became part of the collective before she died. That makes me wonder how, exactly, their knowledge and their collective consciousness is stored. If humans just gained the power of telepathy, you could say that it would be sort of like networking everyone alive and pulling the knowledge of anyone you needed on demand. But Carol’s girlfriend is dead, so for them to retain her knowledge means that they’re not just actively querying her brain, but that all of her knowledge was preserved and integrated somehow. Maybe I’m thinking too much about the details but I’m not sure how that would work without some sort of external storage/processing device outside of the collective humans. It would make a lot more sense to me if they were only able to draw on the knowledge of living people. Maybe this will be a plot point later revealed about how the collective works or maybe I’m just thinking too much about it.
They certainly would have some goal, the question is what. If they managed to assimilate the remaining 12, what would they do then? Maybe try to reach out to whatever aliens sent the code.
I also think that the collective isn’t as “collective” as they’re saying. Pirate Lady seems to be showing some emotion and personal connection to Carol at the end. Maybe Carol’s tantrums are breaking them away.
I’ll also say it’s interesting that they seem to have revealed the mystery very quickly. Another show could’ve easily dragged out the “what the fuck is going on” mystery endlessly, but at the end of the first episode they just helpfully tell Carol (and us) what’s going on as best they can.
Of course it may end up being a deception and what’s going on isn’t known to the audience yet, but it at least gives the appearance of immediately explaining the situation rather than dragging out the mystery and that’s interesting.
I’m very happy to see Gilligan and Seehorn back in action again. As noted above, there’s a “The Good Place” vibe going on, with a dollop of “Invasion of The Body Snatchers”. Good start to the series, now I need to listen to the podcast. If previous podcasts are any indication, listening to Vince, crew and cast will prove both enlightening and entertaining.
The crew doing the rat experiments seemed to learn safety procedures from the Aliens universe.
Practical questions - if they can’t kill, even insects, then aren’t they are going to run out of food supplies pretty quickly? Hard to produce enough plants based food to feed a planet without insecticides.
How did they infect those people in the isolated locations like subs, polar installations, and in space, especially early one?
I’m getting more Childhood’s End “overmind” vibes than pod people.
Yeah, I do hate stories that hinge on horrific lab safety protocol. Like oh, someone in the lab was exposed to the mysterious virus and now they’re instantly incapacitated! Better get them out of the safe, contained area as fast as possible!
Alien Earth has an absurd lab procedure like that pretty much every episode. I wish this show had found a better way for the virus to get out than what we saw.
I’m fascinated by the idea that the collective includes every living creature on Earth. All the carnivores are going to have to adapt to vegetarian diets or willingly starve. Can a world-wide biome immediately adapt to a, frankly, human ethic? Do the lions and tigers just sacrifice themselves for the collective ethic of no harm to other living creatures?
Or is it just humans? The first creature infected by the virus was a rat who went through the whole paralysis experience the humans did, but I didn’t follow everything about the zoos being freed.
If you’d be willing to skip Better Call Saul because it was just another lawyer show, then give this a pass, too. The story points of the first episode seemed very predictable to me, but as they say, it is the journey getting there. After two episodes I do recommend it.
What was the time skip between the lab leak and the western bar? The collective said it spread slowly for several months, so I’d imagine they’d work hard to get the protovirus on the next ISS supply mission, and such.
I imagined a distributed file system, like Gluster or Ceph, where each node in the cluster stores some data, but there is redundancy, so as nodes go offline, no data is lost.
If insects are part of the collective, then they can just avoid eating the crops. If insects and such are not part of the collective, then perhaps the “try not to” kill has limits. To me, it is no different of a quandary than a vegan might encounter in deciding which kingdoms and phyla are acceptable to eat and which are not.
With all world knowledge, and no ulterior motives, the collective will also be able to use the best farming practices to minimize harm.
Also, they can’t find frozen lobster tails in Spain?
