Seven episode season, watched over 3-4 days.
I was really excited for this as a big Coup/StBY fan, but I have to say this was a pretty deflating watch by the end.
Politically you are not ever going to find a more openly left-wing scripted show, period, at least not produced in America. That’s cool and all, but by the midway point we literally have the Boots surrogate character explaining capitalist exploitation, the need for a movement of workers etc via actual presentations that stop the thing dead in its tracks. My guess is Boots felt like he had one shot at this massive platform and felt the need to be as explicit and didactic as possible.
I won’t drill into it all here but so many plot elements and little beats feel like prescriptive messages aimed at the predominantly young male audience that will end up watching…at times it drifts into outright edutainment
And some of you will say that’s a good thing, and I the fairly online leftist is not the target audience…but hoo lord I have to imagine that anyone who is not already onboard with Boots’ vision of a world where (spoiler alert)
spoiler
superpowered fascists can be defeated with a single Marxist slideshow
is gonna turn this off fast.
The jolts of humanity (mostly via the performances which are great across the board) and occasional amazing bits of surreal humor got me to the end (I will say there is one sequence in the last episode that justifies my viewing time) but yeah, real letdown for me personally. I really thought StBY nailed the mix of elements whereas here I just felt pandered and preached to… Hope it works better for yalls, big love to boots if you’re reading :/
I don’t think that the lecture bits are bad at all, they are so well presented and performed that I think anyone could find them interesting. In fact, I think they’re less interesting to us because we already know what they’re gonna say.
The first one (well besides the really short one when they’re smoking and talking about relationships) was really good because it springboarded off of several emotional points in the episode, which were IMO the show’s highlights. So the viewer is already primed to sit down and hear an explanation for the violence that the characters are facing, which of course mirrors the violence the working class faces. I was tearing up before the speech, I’d imagine a pretty significant number of viewers would be emotionally affected too, and hearing a materialist explanation for why this violence occurs is most effective at that moment when we can relate it to experiences in the real world.
The second one I think also works well because of the drama of the hero’s character, his internal conflicts and his contradictory nature. He’s an idealist that just wants to justify his power to himself by punishing criminals. The show had illustrated that he had put up a ton of defense mechanisms to prevent the cognitive dissonance of doing harm to do “good” from catching up to him, so seeing him disarmed and shown exactly why he’s ineffective is some primo schadenfreude slop.
I honestly enjoyed the didactic bits a lot, not necessarily because I learned much, but because I really enjoyed the presentation and the mere fact that these segments exist - just casually explaining marxist concepts like the reserve army of labor or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - it made me giggle, at the sheer audacity of it all. Sure, capital subsumes and incorporates all critique and all that, but this is literally just streaming segments from Capital into people’s living rooms, like a Trojan horse made from magical realist quirkiness in which Marx himself waits to break out. Good stuff, imo.
the ending
Yea, I don’t know. Felt weird, anticlimactic, somewhat forced… I’m just guessing, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that wasn’t the originally planned ending. Maybe to set up a second season, maybe because some executive got cold feet, I can only speculate, but the main antagonist just leaving, having realized his legalist moralism is reactionary - as good as the preceding didactic segment was - felt… unfinished. Then again, maybe that’s the idea and Boots was shooting for a second season. Hope he gets it, honestly, even if the ending fell flat for me overall.spoiler
the main antagonist just leaving
Pretty sure it’s satire of what’s come to be known as “talk no jutsu” that liberals get away with in their slop all the time.
I don’t think anyone at Amazon is really “minding the shop” in terms of the specifics of the content they produce at the level of meddling with individual plot decisions like that.
I think you missed that the communist organizers superpower was being able to get into people’s heads to persuade them.
I got that. It didn’t help, in fact it just kinda made me wonder why every other character wasn’t lined up behind her instead since she’s obviously infallible.
