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 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.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.
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 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.
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 haven't watched it yet. I have some hope based on this description that unfocused left-libs might be pushed in the correct direction by this at least, or that the marxist bits are less jarring when you don't already know anything about marxism, but idk, not betting on it either. It's very easy to be too subtle, misinterpretable, even when you're trying to be pretty explicit, so maybe this is better than that
The Marxist fantasy trilogy I’m working on is pretty didactic. In the last communist trilogy I cranked out, I tried to keep the communism on the DL as much as possible. Lib and chud reviewers didn’t care and still trashed its reviews exclusively because of its politics. So this time I’m just like, fuck it, we’ll do it live, basically. I have chapters of political discussions (which people can skip) but which make it abundantly clear that Marxism is good—also because it’s annoying when liberals appreciate communist art while pretending to miss the point. Urgh. Still, there’s just no way to win here. Lots of the trilogy deals with organizing a workers’ uprising, so that’s why a lot of the politics is there. But you also get superpowers from being in solidarity with workers and using dialectical materialism. There are also spirit vampires and lib wreckers based on people I’ve met during my own forays into politics.
I watched the first episode and a half of this show a few days ago and liked it, find myself thinking of it a lot in a positive way, etc. I support Boots using that massive platform to basically grab people’s heads and scream in their faces.
No way he doesn't want a second season, right? What was up with the skin disease? The ending, which I think everyone is criticizing for the same reason, works IMO because the show goes out of its way to depict the hero as an idealist. They shut him down by explaining to him in plain and simple terms that the ideal he was pursuing was completely false, and in fact through his actions he reinforced a system that undermined justice. If I had to guess where the show was gonna go with that in a second season, they might have a board of directors step in to play the role of villains, to really drive the point home that what they're fighting against is a system and not evil individuals.
Tough to imagine Amazon orders a second season unless it becomes some kind of critical/audience breakout, but stranger decisions have been made by streamers.
100% agree unfortunately. It doesn't seem to be doing so hot, saw almost no discussion of it on Reddit, I imagine it's probably not spreading much by word of mouth in other social media either. I also heard that the marketing for it was pretty lacking, I don't know much about that honestly since it's been a while since I've seen an ad for any show in general.
I'm sure it doesn't help that Boots can't really promote it due to the strike either.
I could picture that, I could also picture him going kinda nihilist but being replaced by his board of directors. There's a few possibilities.
Once people are into a show by a few episodes they are usually hooked and will watch the whole thing even if it declines at some point. If they switch off it's in the first 2-3 episodes, this is especially true of anything that's only 6-12 episodes long.
