This show is like watching a dog catch a car. The epitome of "what no theory does to a mother fucker"
I think seasons 3 and 4 are the best ones, but...
The politics are very "interesting", i mean, it's a show about a mentally unwell anarchist written by liberals.
bait and switch lib show
this one
Oh, you thought capitalism was bad? You must be CrAzY! It's actually China! Now rebuild capitalism so you can fight the real enemy!
admittedly I stopped watching around this point so it may get better
I don't remember enough of the show to remember what specifically you are referring to but yeah while I liked the cynicism of the show it
mild spoiler I guess
seemed to be reactionary in that the position of the show seemed to be "why bother doing anything since it's only going to be coopted to reinforce the system and make things worse."
I kept bouncing off the mid season 2 (iirc) where Craig Robinson becomes a bigger character. I was pretty pleased with S1 mostly, but it just felt really tedious to watch. I must have tried to get through that episode 3+ times. I think I just get annoyed by shows that hype up some interesting concepts first season and then just string it along past that. (aka streaming series disease)
Maybe I'll get back to it eventually, but a lot of the 'which reality is real' stuff they were leaning into was so uninteresting compared to what had been setup previously. If it's just lib nonsense, guess I'll leave it be.
I really liked the anticapitalist ideology, esp. at the start of the show. But ultimately the whole premise of the show doesn't work if it tries to incorporate a genuinely realistic model of how capitalism is systemically entrenched in society. The show entertains a vision of change where a single gifted revolutionary can single-handedly cut off the head of global capitalism, and the challenge is just to find where that head is. But the reason why capitalism works is that wealth and power are just decentralized enough that no individual - not POTUS, not the Fed chair, not the CEO or top shareholders of some "E-corp", and certainly not some random Chinese diplomat - really functions as a necessary linchpin of the system.
Like the whole idea of the show is just, "I found the single person who controls all the money and took it and thereby ended capitalism." That's nice wish fulfillment, but an absolutely ridiculous premise. And so when that's the basis for your show, you can do a pretty good job of giving a psychological profile of life of the oppressed under a system of concentrated wealth ownership - as the show does - but you fundamentally cannot do systemic critique or advance a particular vision of change, because the model of your fictional society only has a very superficial resemblance to how the world actually works. And that's an incurable issue if you want to write a show about "guy destroys global capitalism with just his computer."
You could literal fedposting a whole ass corporate boardroom and still not kill their company