Character and flair for some tertiary characters but not for others.

There exists a highly equipped and ready yet bizarrely ineffective mix of private security forces and police.

All of the chracters were so awkardly moving through 3D space at such a way that they were in psychically in the right place at the right time when the story needed them to be.

That’s close to the metaphor I was looking for. Intelligent high school kids, sure, but, Here’s one episode of every drama HBO ever made: go make your own.

“Go. He needs you...”

Everything was so arbitrary to the point where main characters could simply walk through a riot, where cops and security would sometimes shoot first and sometimes wait to get killed.

“Inelegant” was the perfect word for it.

Is the “reprogramming center” the Mexican base or is it the “day spa” overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge? Because that’s where they were tracking him.

And the reprogramming center was located in... one of the most visible, desirable, and expensive locations in all of San Francisco.

My problem with all of this is that there’s no longer “depth” to the world. They spent several seasons building up Delos and its architects as bold visionaries, working to extended human life. But now there’s multiple computers that control human activity, and Serac can buy out Delos in secret, stage a corporate…

By the episode, this show gets more ambitious in its vision, but is less able to pull it off.

Those killing platforms suddenly developed critical failures in their targeting.

I mean, we already found out that Caleb, like every human, was a pawn. But now he’s even more of a pawn. And there’s another computer system that’s running things. And... does it even matter? It looks like they’re already setting the reset button next week.

They’ve never *shown us* how he’s bad. We’re told that he’s treated his family poorly, and of course he’s a tough enough businessman to win the respect of James Delos, but those things do not equate with evil and do not equate with going hog wild in a live action video game.

I don’t quite get why Serac has to move in secret. If he’s willing to kill BoDs to take over a company, why not *do that* in the first place?

It’s not an aggressively terrible show, but it’s anemic. For such a high stakes show there seems to be very low stakes.

They suddenly introduced a new set of rule as to how it all works.

In as much as the episode made sense, it didn’t make sense. A lot of showing instead of telling, a lot of plot contrivances, new rules for how the simulations work...

In Caleb’s flashbacks, he’s not in uniform and there’s just one other guy. Was he infantry? Was he special ops? It’s definitely unclear.

I think it’s simply the direction. Actors don’t point prop even weapons at each other, for safety, but usually you don’t notice.