I’ve been reading a lot of people’s reactions to this season being less than or outright bad and... I’m not seeing it?

I think the same, but they’re referred to as VR goggles in the recap. I do believe they’re just a passive part of the sensory deprivation.

I don’t think they were VR goggles, just regular welding goggles with blackout lenses. All the imagery was in Barry’s head.

Isiah! Fuck. Even in death, just an absolute fox.

Crap, I never put two & two together and realized she was Mary. Damn, that makes so much sense.

At this point, does it really matter who Pit Girl is? All of the characters who have been developed and are important to the story in the past are still alive in the present. So unless something really comes out of left field plotwise (maybe the present-day authorities find some hidden evidence of Pit Girl, thereby…

She’s great! When Barbara showed up, I was like, she looks familiar (we had just finished watching Ghosts a couple weeks prior). Barbara is obviously a straight-man kind of character compared to Mary, but she’s still delightful.

One of my all-time favorite Taskmaster moments, she’s brilliant.

Twas the fennel of course!

I admittedly didn’t know who she was until I watched Stath Lets Flats a few months ago. Great there, too.

As critical as I’ve been of the show, I liked this one well enough. I think there may be a perspective problem here with your criticisms of Nate and Keeley’s stories. I don’t see them as one-episode conflicts that are resolved neatly, so much as the payoff to what’s been going on all season.

Mary Tyler Moore in “Ordinary People” is terrifying.

Greece doesn’t have a monarchy. They abolished the monarchy almost 50 years ago. 

I am so happy to no longer have to anticipate when the baby will die/what will happen to the baby etc etc.

It’s for a concert coinciding with the coronation, not the actual coronation. Not that you’d know that from reading this messy disaster of a story.

It’s hard for me to be invested at all in anything Nate does after last season.  And the decision to make him some kind of “wonder coach” who does not have any struggles at all as a first year coach makes me like him even less.  I could care less about his redemption arc and I don’t think I’m alone.  

Watching this from the UK, I was wondering how Sam’s plot would track; this is something that might not make it overseas, but currently there’s a huge immigration war going on with the UK Conservative goverment, because like the US, they have very little else left to put forward as their big campaigning tactic for the…

Yeah, I couldn’t tell what it was at a glance, but it blowing up in his hand was absolutely a gag on the gadgets never working. That cracked me up.

I think the “pea-shooter” was a gun disguised as a pen, a gag wonderfully set up by “gadgets that never work” discussion. 

“yeah those pictures were staged. no one’s calling her calculated. it was all set up by some team.”