I loved this episode. Owen Wilson looked he had a lot of fun, Pete was great, and James Austin Johnson had one of the most impressive SNL debuts I’ve ever seen. Really fun stuff. Old golden retriever laying by a fire. 

I agree with this assessment. I also think it’s a lot easier for people (well, white people) to believe that a handful of people could do horrible things to individual black people, i.e. lynchings, than for close to the entire population of a city and the National Guard completely destroying an entire neighborhood and…

That’s probably true (coincidentally PBS, at least our local one, just reran the Emmett Till episode of American Experience).  I still maintain they were too subtle here--if someone hadn’t heard of the real case, I severely doubt this would have led them in any direction to learn more (which isn’t true of Watchmen, if…

They kind of missed the boat by treating Emmit Till’s story in such a tacked-on manner. They’ve gone off source anyway so they might as well have done a better job of focusing on this event. To say he was her best friend when they never so much as mentioned him previously is just a miss. Having him show up earlier as…

The movements, the sounds, the look...This was very Jordan Peele, very Us, the depiction of the picaninny girls. Brilliant horror.

No, what Christina argued was that Ruby was tired of being treated like crap by society for being a heavy black woman with talent and skills and didn’t really care about the grand scheme of racism over getting herself a head which is definitely something EVERYBODY has to face. I think in particular Ruby is less…

He mentioned that the book was shoved into his hand by a man with a robotic arm.

They’ve only called him Bobo until this week, but that’s a known nickname of Emmett’s and the time/place have been rightish, so people here have been inferring it from the start (and/or letting book knowledge slip?).

Did I miss it in a previous ep/recap that we were supposed to know that kid was Emmett Till? He was the same kid who asked the Oijia board if he was going to have a good time on his trip and it said NO, right? Or was this in the book that you knew it was him before the funeral scene?

I completely agree. I knew about Till’s murder (I remember seeing a PBS documentary on it—almost by chance—when I was in my teens) but I can tell you that a large majority of my friends up here sure didn’t and didn’t even realize it was real so that they could go and look it up.  It’s a heavy burden for a show like…

caricature of black girls made by white men

It was so eerie to see the curse the white policeman put on Diana was the caricature of black girls made by white men. The images of the black tropes spy on her - from the ad on the wall to Uncle Tom’s Cabin book. And then she is followed by monsters only she can see.

I honestly thought with the timeline and the national significance of the horrible murder by Emmett Till would be incorporated more than just a glancing set piece. If “Bobo” (Till) was one of Dee’s best childhood friends, I think that our characters would have at least known Mamie his mother and realized what she did.…

I think it works as a way of making the show’s reality more fleshed out and three dimensional. It’s like, if I’m watching Archer or 30 Rock or something, sometimes there are references to old pop culture or classic literature or whatever that I don’t get. So I go on Wikipedia and look up what Bartleby the Scrivener is…

I saw that as an intentional slight against Veidt by Trieu. She displays him as a statue until the very last minute she needs him awake.

Just wanted to say thanks, Joelle, and that I am really happy the AV Club brought you on for these. You definitely improved upon the experience of watching the series.  Not to mention that it's nice to see some other brown faces around here. There's not as many of us as there used to be. 

Like all that dumb "paratext" at the end of Watchmen issues.

Paratext is literally the M.O. of Watchmen at its core, haha. See: review paragraph two, aimed at all those who skipped The Black Freighter when reading the original series.

My favorite part was that when it came down to it, it was Gilfoyle who trusted Dinesh to do the right thing.

I’m not sure it was “inevitable” exactly as it happened, but I do think Kendall’s arc was always to “rise up” in whatever way.