Episode 179: Talking Shit

I'm the best ever. I'm the most brutal and vicious and most ruthless champion there's ever been.

There's, no one can stop me. Lynx is a conqueror.

No, I'm alexander. He's no Alexander.

I'm the best ever. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable. And I'm just ferocious.

I want your heart. I want to eat his children.

Praise be to Allah. The greatest has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They take deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have tonight. Man, anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, President Trump was officially impeached yesterday as the official political pundit of the Very Bad Wizards podcast. How do you think this will affect his reelection chances?

Do you know what my reaction to Trump getting impeached was? I deleted the Twitter app on my phone. I actually did. Like, I can't handle it. I can't handle it. But I will have you know, I never toot my horn, because why? But I was quoted about the Trump campaign and the Christian Science Monitor the other day, and I thought it would be you might get a kick out of it, specifically to know how little I care about politics, but yet I'm being quoted about the Trump campaign. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Little did the reporter know.

Wait, Donald Trump is president? Is that what you're telling me? So today we're going to do a couple of things. In the first segment, we're going to talk about Mr. Robot. We are now just a few days before the finale, which is going to be a two part finale this coming Sunday. And then, of course, this episode will come out the following Tuesday. So any predictions that we make, you will either know that we're full of shit or somehow right. Or who knows?

I feel like this is brave of us.

This takes a lot of courage, what we're about to do. And then in the second segment, we are going to talk about two articles that you recommended on the topic of trash talking, the very interesting topic of trash talking. So we're going to something that I.

Have to put up with for seven years just on this podcast alone. So I thought you might I don't.

Know, you seem to give as good as you get.

Maybe.

But yeah, I think my prediction is we might get into our first real fight in a while.

And I'll tell you what, in that fight, I'm going to bitch slap your ass back to yesterday.

Eat your children. Praise Allah. So skip ahead if you're not caught up, at least through episode eleven of the fourth season, or if you just don't give a shit. But if you do, let's talk. So the last time we talked, I think, was after episode seven, where it was revealed that his father had molested him when he was a child. A lot has happened since then.

Yeah.

Because I'm going to be so negative about the two articles that are in the second segment, I want to be a little more positive about Mr. Robot than maybe I originally intended. I still say that my general impression of the season is that it's a very good season. I thought the 9th episode was one of the best Mr. Robot episodes ever. This was when which one was the 9th again? That's the one where they break the deus group, they bring them down, and Philip Price shit talks White Rose knowing that he's going to die. And that was really good. The filmmaking has been great all season. My concerns have come with the last two episodes. In the next episode, it was just about Dom and Darlene. And that one, I thought was pretty brutal to watch because they've just never given us much of a reason to care about Dom and Darlene's relationship.

We care about them like I care about Darlene. I care to some extent about Dom.

That's really it, Dom. I agree that we care to some extent about her, but to the extent that we did, I wanted her to be able to free her family from the clutches of the Dark Army. And she did that. And so that's like, I don't need closure for Dom anymore, and certainly not their relationship. And yet, at a time where the countdown is, there's like a few episodes left of the whole series to devote a whole episode to, that was rough.

It struck me as a little bit of fan service in the sense that a lot of fans I know that this is maybe I'm on the subreddit a bit too much. A lot of people really wanted to see this be a love story.

Dom Lean, which is fine.

Yeah, Dom Lean, which is fine. But make it a love story, then don't make it.

And then the last episode, episode eleven, which we really haven't talked about. No, it was one of these episodes where I've only seen it once, and maybe I'll go see it again.

Me too.

But there's been a few episodes of Black Mirror that have been like this too recently. It makes me wonder, not just did I like that episode, but was this show ever as good as I thought it was?

If you're going to be this positive for Mr. Robot, please, we should just not record about.

Like, I want to just say that that was my reaction afterwards. Not just, I didn't really like that episode, but was I fooled in some way into thinking this was a good show? I think the answer to that is no, and maybe even that the episode is better than I thought, but to the extent that I've ever been just not on board.

Okay, let me give some context to my reaction and in part context to why we're talking about it in the opening segment, at least from my perspective. So a lot of the Mr. Robot allure to me has been the complexity of the plot and the hint of something deeper going on in we've talked almost ad nauseam about the potential Sci-Fi elements. So White Rose was presumably building a machine that either could time travel or could take people to parallel universes. Dangled this, as a hope for Angela before killing her, seems to believe it herself, and this episode finally seemed to tackle that. Now, over the course of the four seasons, I think I've come to agree with many of the people who have commented on Mr. Robot, which is, if you're going to bring in explicit Sci-Fi at this point, this late in the series, then it doesn't feel right. It's always seemed as if the more plausible account of what's going on is that White Rose just believes in the Sci-Fi premise, but it doesn't really matter.

For the show or that she's using the Sci-Fi or that she's using right. For some other aim. Yeah, which it seemed like she was.

Doing with and we, you know, we didn't know if she was just trying to deceive Angela, and she did the same thing with Elliot. So we get this episode where Elliot has this final task of taking, like, the big bad Elliot versus White Rose, and he goes to the power plant where presumably she's been building this machine and they have like a dialogue with each other that I think is at the heart of what bothers me, which is not that the dialogue was I think, as you said, the only things we said to each other is we agreed that was too on the nose. Like, White Rose sort of lays it all out there about her motivations, and it's preachy in a way that it's been sometimes, but hadn't been lately. And then you get this. All of a sudden, we think that the power plant is about to explode. The nuclear reactor where the machine is being built is about to explode. Screen goes to red, and we get, apparently, an alternate version