Finally getting around to watching this season, 2 episodes in.
Ep1 Common People. this one was hard to really watch. Premise is 100% on point but I feel that it relied on the strength of the premise alone. The story/writing was missing a few beats, I mean the acting was fine as well but the story doesn't really go anywhere and there is no conclusion. It's just bleak for the sake of being bleak? There's a million ways they could have explored this, could have focused on many different aspects of the story. hell this could have been one of those chose your own adventure episodes where you pick how the story plays out. Focus more on the extreme acts he does to earn money to pay for the treatment (and maybe she loses all respect/abandons him?) focus more on the ever expanding plus plus plus subscription models and how the "Basic" performance degrades even further if you don't keep upgrading (in addition to using brain function for cloud based processing requiring more sleep, and running ads, how about some of that time you are a robot/slave doing manual labor? prostitution? etc) could of had a terrorism angle where he gets revenge against the company/suicide bomber thing, could of had him reach his breaking point and abandoning the wife where she becomes basically a living mannequin/ad in a mall, being a brothel worker, etc.
The story could of been a million things, as a criticism of culture/society:
How far a man will go to keep his wife alive, and what he will (or won't) do
How far a corporations greed is allowed to go unchecked etc
And in the end it's just, nothing. they deal with it, they struggle, and finally they just give up. Bleak for the sake of being bleak but without any conclusion.
edit:
Ep2 Bête Noire. Ok once again really interesting premise and unlike Ep1 they actually made a choice and had things happen. the very very end is a bit cheeky but this is very reminiscent of twilight zone episodes with similar themes about godlike power and how you would use it. Ok, and then once you got bored with playing out all those power fantasies, what would you really do with it?
Really liked this episode. That being said, I would have done things a bit differently. First off the protagonist is a bit mary sue, clearly a self-insert from one of the writers. She figures things out almost instantly, never has any self doubt for even a second, and of course she "wins" in the end. Also think they wasted too much time setting up the whole foodie/food magician thing, like that wasn't important at all any generic office setting would have worked.
I would of focused more on torturing her, having her lose her mind, questioning everything, just pure terror, before the reveal. I probably would have had the whole barnies/bernies chicken restaurant mandela effect happen in the very beginning, completely innocently, and then call back to it in one of a few ways.
1. had her be "right" at the beginning, then had it play out much later just as it did in the show, where it's now changed to the other way, and she realizes that the antagonist is warping reality.
2. had it play out where she is wrong, then a million other mandela effects happen throughout the episode and she's going mad, then had her find her boyfriends hat with the correct (her) spelling on it, indicating that it's some magic power the antagonist has but it is limited in some way, perhaps it's only true within a certain range of her, or the number of realities she can control are limited so she reverted that meaningless change back to make room for one of the other more sinister mandela effects she's using on her.
Either way I would have used this initial innocent mandela effect to later reveal to the character what is happening, rather than just have her instantly figure it out with barely an inconvenience.
But so far, ep 1 great premise, no follow through. ep 2 great premise, poorly written follow through. Still, better than the last few seasons so far
