Season 7 is out and per usual, I will rank these episodes definitively from best to worst.
Overall, it was a good season. I’ll take six episodes any day even if one or two are snoozers. It’s hard to tell if the show is getting too repetitive. When you watch three episodes and all three heavily involve the little tab thingy on the side of your temple, it can start to feel like they’re running out of ideas. They’re not there yet, and I still think there’s a lot of AI content they haven’t scratched yet, but this was the first time I rolled my eyes a bit and thought “Okay, this again“. Anyway, enough rambling. Here are my thoughts.
6. Bete Noire
Look, when Tom told me it was the worst episode he’s ever seen, I was skeptical. And for the first ~30 minutes of this 50 minute episode, I was genuinely interested. They did a good job of building up the story line. HOWEVER. The twist of the quantum compiler just felt… lazy and uninteresting. The tone of the story didn’t match the twist.
There’s so much this show can do with exploring infinite realities / multi-verse, and for it to be as mundane as this episode was disappointing. I wouldn’t put it as the worst episode I’ve ever seen, but not one I will rewatch anytime soon.
5. Eulogy
A love story instead of a commentary on society and technology. To be honest this was a somewhat refreshing episode and a window into what technology may work up for those who are old enough to have existed without it. Giamatti was good, though him not being able to picture the face of a girl he dated for three years seems far-fetched, even if it was decades later. I nearly cried when he read the message at the end. That said, it just wasn’t that interesting.
4. Common People
A low-hanging fruit episode with good execution and acting, but ultimately predictable and not particularly provocative. It’s certainly worth watching and worthy of the season. There’s a lot of meat on the bone for exploring Rivermind Plus and the notion of adjusting your mood via an app. I was pretty surprised they didn’t touch on that at all or make Rashida’s character crave it. There should 100% be an episode centered on that concept in the future.
3. Hotel Reverie
Once you get past the fact that A) the movie is going to suck B) the idea would never work to do it in one take, and C) it’s possible to NOT be able to bring someone out?! Then the underlying concept of the episode is pretty well-done.
It’s an altered, more out-there but also more interesting version of the movie Her. It’s not hard to imagine that Brandy wouldn’t want to leave the fake world after being stuck with an AI that she fell in love. I thought the actress who played Dorothy was phenomenal. Was it too long? Yes. Were there dumb aspects? Of course. But overall solid.
2. Playthings
These top two are on a different level than the rest, and flirting with top 5/10 status.
For as futuristic as this show is, it doesn’t have that much AI-doomer-commentary in it. There’s a lot about advanced technology and using digital clones of people, but not a lot about actual AI take over. All that said, I thought this episode was great. A PRE-AI-ERA-AI being the one to take over was fresh, and the notion that it can build upon itself given more compute is really not that far off reality (though some AI nerd would probably say it’d take a warehouse 10 miles long to fuel the thronglets). The LSD was a nice layer.
When he finally got the pen and paper I was ready for a stupid ending, but the QR-ish-code was creative and unexpected for me. Who knows what happened after everyone heard the noise. It doesn’t really matter. I thought this was well done, the young version and old version of the guy were pretty captivating. Overall it had pretty much everything I want in an episode.
1. USS Callister: Into Infinity
The first USS Callister is hard to live up to but I thought this was excellent. Honestly, this was too good. There were too many mind-bending interactions and concepts to wrap your head around in just one watch. Multiple times I felt like pausing to make sense of what was going on, to name a few:
- Meeting a clone of yourself and both of you know that the other one may try to kill you, but also that the other one would be so intrigued to meet you.
- Meeting Robert Daly who you’ve already met in real life but haven’t met his clone who was made a decade earlier when he was seemingly a good guy.
- Having to decide morally / ethically if it’s okay to restore your ‘real’ self at the expense of your cloned friends.
The list goes on.
The story was extremely well done and the characters are great. Walton and Daly are both awesome but for different reasons. Both Nanette Coles are good and drive the plot forward. Valdack had me lolin a few times, specifically when he said “What if we go back INTO Daly’s computer!”. A perfect suggestion for the stupidest member of the team to make.
The ONLY drawback of the episode is the ending. The idea that the four clones live in Nanette’s head indefinitely is… Weird? Stupid? I don’t know. I don’t know what ending would’ve been better, but that was a slight disappointment to an otherwise all-time episode.
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