Please Don't Put In The Newspaper That I Was Mad

Well, after reviewing last week's post, I want to reiterate that I unequivocally and in no way believe in the power of the jinx. My argument has always been: if I had that kind of magic power, to speak results into existence, things like election cycles would be way less stressful than they currently are. Like, the Trump campaign would be devolving into a series of self-parody singalong events or enduring publicly shaming vocal challenges from undecided voters resulting in an obvious surge or voter preference for the Harris campaign, putting the result comfortably out of question.

But see, I only got the first parts and not the results. Everything looks the same as it has since Biden dropped out, promising-but-too-close.

The only thing I did manage to do was watch the Detroit Tigers and San Diego Padres crash out of the baseball playoffs after advocating for both of them last week. But again, I accept neither credit nor blame. I also said at the time whomever was playing against the Yankees and Dodgers would be acceptable as well, so I am now a massive NY Mets and Cleveland Guardians* supporter. Since both teams are currently down in their respective series, I feel like it's safe to say that without incurring any legal liability for any failures going forward. I don't think there's a more pure expression of engaging with modern sports than indemnification, I think you'll agree.

What you're reading so far is the anxiety brain leakage of a man in the late stages of a presidential political cycle. I've been doing this blog thing for 20 years now, which means this is my sixth cycle where I've created a public record of my experiences as a partisan (in particular) and as a voter (in general) and an American (in the goofy-ass abstract). You don't have to go back and look it up, you can absolutely trust me when I say in all the previous ones, I took it all super well, with maturity and grace, with no recordable signs of undue alarm and/or full-blown tongue-swallowing panic. I understand these points are all potentially falsifiable as it's all in print, but also it's all in print, so you don't have access to my facial expressions or physical state at those points to get a real picture of my emotional wellbeing, not really, or at least not in any way that would be admissible in a court of law.

Just like now, you don't know if I'm fine or not. I can even say "I'm really not OK, you guys," and maybe, like Donald Trump, I can just say after the fact "I was being sarcastic, you know I was being sarcastic" about, say, injecting yourself with bleach to ward off COVID, with all the credibility implied therein.

Honestly though, two-plus weeks out, I'm in a really interesting place. I felt fairly sanguine for a couple of months, then absolutely panicked last weekend when the vibes online amongst the lefties I follow all went sour for no discernible reason. The vice president was on Fox News and The Breakfast Club and could be going on Joe Rogan's podcast for some reason... Basically I need Harris out there in public to reassure me that I don't only have Trump to listen to. I think the biggest big-picture takeaway is that being on the left, freakouts are just part of the process, unfortunately. I think we imagine that the people on the other side are just so locked in and certain that they don't experience the same kind of spasms of self-doubt that make us so charming and fun to be around in Octobers of election years.

But like most things we assume about The Other Side, I suspect that it's not true, it just manifests in different ways. I don't spend a lot of time in right-wing online outlets, but I see it herniating into the shared spaces expressed as rage, mostly working the refs (the evil "left wing" press, state election officials, Taylor Swift) and assigning blame to their perceived problem-area bad-actors (immigrants, Jewish people...). The targets differ from lefties and the means of expression hit differently, but these are questions of tone rather than content. When I say "I'm not sure I trust this country to vote for a woman" and they say "the NOAA and FEMA make hurricanes using satellites," we're saying essentially the same thing.

Anyway, I voted yesterday. I dropped off my mail-in ballot and it's behind me. I thought I'd feel a bit of relief as there's literally nothing else to be done, but there's literally nothing else to be done. All the noise persists, but the end of all the means has already occurred, for me at least. I'd love to feel disengaged and unburdened, but apparently that will come when I'm dead and/or these inconveniences of "representative democracy" are behind us. Depending on how things go November 5th, maybe one is closer than the other.

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*It's an improvement over the previous name, but *only* on the merits. You could have picked literally anything else. "Guardians" is so bland it becomes off-putting. Not the the point of making me root for the Yankees, mind, for that would have had to renamed the teams R*dsk*ns or something.

Standard Carriage Fees

So, Spectrum is a terrible company. I'm sure some people are happy with whatever particular service they are into them for (wireless, cable television, home internet, urinary tract infections...), but by and large they are still operating under an industry model that was created in the late 1970s that carves areas up as monopoly zones for companies like this (Spectrum fka Charter Cable here where I live, Cox in Orange County next door...) which gives them zero incentive to devote time or funds to improving customer experience, either in the use of their contracted service or in talking to customer service representatives. I will say, every time I've called customer service, the individuals working there have all been super nice and seemed genuinely interested in helping, but 100% of the time, I get directed to the wrong department at least twice and no one immediately knows how to help with my actual problem. Their reps seem to be largely based in the South, so you get your apology for having to recite your issue for the third time in a very sweet drawl. It doesn't get you any closer to your goal, but at least your ears got a show.

I was thrilled to have mostly cut ties with Spectrum when I dropped my TV package with them two years ago (I'm GenX, leave me alone about cord-cutting, I got there, goddammit). I couldn't do that with my cable internet unfortunately as the only other option is (and I'm not kidding) AT&T DSL, which works at about 6 MBps (vs. 400 for the cable internet). I've gotten so tired of waiting for ANYONE to extend fiber optic cable to my on-the-edge-of-rural subdivision, but apparently digging trenching into a road up 700 feet of elevation into an area where the coyotes outnumber the people 3:1, suddenly it's not "cost effective." If we can get these coyotes into something online like sports betting, we might have a better chance. How do we get Jamie Foxx on this?

If I'd wanted to do my own sports betting on the LA Angels, my baseball team of geographically-destined choice, I'd have had to do it blindly all year as our local, asphyxiating regional sports network has exclusive rights to their games and only appears on old-type systems, like cable (Spectrum) and I think DirecTV, if that's still around? If you get a bundled Hulu-Disney+ deal, that's far too advanced an idea. It turns out Disney has enough money, they don't need to bend to the extortionate demands of live-sports pirates. People will just hand their money over in steadily increasing amounts from one of their hundreds of other revenue streams, without the unknowable increase in subscriber numbers carrying the Angels, Clippers, Kings and Ducks might bring. It could be in the low dozens!

All of this is to say I haven't followed much baseball this year. And I don't feel as though I've missed out on too much as my team has been, without exaggeration, the worst it has ever been over its 60-plus years of existence. I've had to endure articles at my favorite workers-collective sports blog about how, yes, the Chicago White Sox flirted with being the worst team of all time this year, but somehow it still feels worse to be an Angels fan. This is a journalistic service I pay for. I guess there is a whole segment of the service economy out there for men who want to have their genitals stepped on by a woman in high-heeled shoes, this isn't that far off.

All that said, I have been intrigued enough to dip in to some of the playoff baseball this year. I've never felt a single second of shame for being motivated just as much by schadenfruede as I am by passion for my own team, so the easiest, most obvious ins for me are to root lustily and heartily for whomever happens to be playing either the Yankees or the Dodgers. That can only last as long as either are still in the tournament, so picking up a team in a more positive sense has more legs. As such, I've semi-adopted the San Diego Padres (I was just down in SD a week ago, having a great time with good company, even walked by the empty stadium while wandering the Gaslamp Quarter, close enough!) and the Detroit Tigers, the team my dead dad rooted for. On the one hand, my dad and I weren't especially close, but on the other hand, I do already have a Tigers hat. Typically its on my head more than my hand, but you're going to make this really difficult if you insist on reading this all so literally.

Essentially at maximum I have four teams to potentially root for (Tigers, Padres, Yankee opponent and Dodgers opponent), but that's down three since the Padres and Dodgers are playing each other. I will confess those ones are harder to watch as they include my ex-TV-boyfriend Shohei Ohtani, who continues to be charismatic and astounding. This is the first time I've seen much of him since we broke up last winter. When I see him, I tell him he looks good, I just wish he dressed better.

Let's not get crazy though, when I say I'm watching baseball, I've probably seen about 6 total innings of all the games played so far. But as a comparative percentage, I'm up about 600% from last year.

Doctor, It Hurts When I Go Like This

A few years ago, somebody in charge of California, the bleeding heart bright blue utopia set apart from our backwards sister states in the way that we're built on the unique principles of worker exploitation and police shootings, decided it should be illegal to buy and sell pets. The original law was passed in 2017 and has since been refined and strengthened in an effort to crawl our way toward the goal of being a no-kill state for shelter companion animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits, etc., I think the law means. I'm not sure how far down the policy extends to things like rodents and reptiles, but maybe at some point we just throw them all in a pit together and see who comes out on top. It won't be cruel because it will be like how it is in nature, if nature looked a lot more like UFC.

I'm not sure where these good-hearted no-sales people were when I bought a dog from a mall for $1500 in 2009, but hey, fine, good looking out for everyone else.

The new law means that there are no more pet purchases, only pet adoptions in this state. When I got my first-ever cat about a month ago, I had to fill out this whole adoption application that said I'd be home a bunch and could never abandon my animal and would subject myself to wellness visits by the agency. It feels intrusive and scary, but my son got his cat through the same agency and they have made zero follow-ups or checks on any of the things that seemed super important on the form. As vulnerable and judged as it made me feel, what was the consequence going to be? Would they repossess my cat? You just ask the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses or, hell, event he DoorDash drivers I invited here how easy it is to get me to open my front door. I could be in here doing some really darkly abusive shit to this cat--making her wear vests, letting her watch Fox News--and there's not a goddamned thing they could do about it.

After all that though, they still charged me $50 and I got her from a PetSmart, so it sure felt like I was buying a cat, except: I got a broken one! And even though the whole detailed contract I had to fill out exists, it doesn't count as a receipt! They made me promise I couldn't take it back, even if it was defective! That's Joe Biden's America right there.

Actually she's a good and decent, if jittery cat. She can't jump for shit, which is not the actual defective part, that's just hilarious to watch. No, she got this sore on her chin, but it healed up after a few days. But right above that now she has a fat lip, which does not seem to be healing in the same way. So I have no idea if the incidences are related or not, and no amount of googling "cat fat lip" has yielded encouraging results. It turns out googling pet symptoms has the exact same effect as googling human symptoms: eventually, they all say you have cancer.

I'm pretty confident my cat does not have face cancer, though. At $58 for just the visit, I feel like I'd be getting my money's worth if the vet found something, but at the same time, "something" from veterinarians is always super expensive. It's been a long time since I've had a pet (more than a decade), but they always said "well, the expensive part is the anesthetic." They want to knock these animals out for every goddamned thing, as I recall. X-rays on a squirmy dog, OK, fine, I guess I get it, but you're expressing anal glands, I think Tabby can tough it out fully conscious.

It's all too late now because I'm stuck with her. All the pets I've had in the past have been in multi-human households, so this is the first time I'm bonding with a pet, just one-on-one. That shit gets deep pretty fast, like full co-dependent deep. I probably should have sprung for the pet insurance just to cover the therapy.

Ba-dum Ba-dum

I'm typing this in a hurry, not that it's really necessary to say. Will you notice any decrease in quality or a lesser likelihood of typos or cul-de-sac sentences that abandon thoughts half way through? Absolutely not, and that's the beauty of my don't-try-so-hard-anyone-will-notice approach: if you apply it correctly inconsistency and consistency are the same thing.

I got up to start work at 5 am today (that's an hour earlier than usual) so I could get out an hour earlier to facilitate me going to do a Medical Thing. It's nothing at all serious, just the latest (not quite the last, but close) in this past summer's parade of Medical Things that seemed concerning enough to warrant some kind of test but turned out to be mostly fine.

Overall, I think I summarize the syndrome I've been positively diagnosed with as Impinging Terminal Middle-Age. Any time you get saddled with an array of medical challenges for which there is no cure but eventual death, well, it's disheartening. The irony of this one is you can only contract it by not bothering to die sooner. So it's hard to complain.

So far I've had my first EKG and my first echocardiogram. The latter, for those who don't know, is an ultrasound of your chest and abdomen looking for heart issues. Today I will be getting a wholly different ultrasound, this one recommended by my urologist, so I'll let you imagine exactly where the somehow-colder-than-room-temperature ultrasound gel is going to be applied. Unlike the echo, this is not going to be the first time I've experienced this, so I'm something of an expert in the field of showing unassuming radiology techs my down-belows. This should not be construed as bragging.

If today goes like the other days, I'll have been prodded at for the sole purpose of letting me know no further prodding will be required in the short term. After that happens, I won't have any more excuses to continue my delayed post-turning-50 anxiety carnival, which will really free up my late evenings and nights for things like sleeping. Sounds boring, but I know in my heart-of-monitored-hearts a bottomless black void of existential despair can't really be filled in. But you can always drop a fun, festive throw rug over it for a while. You know, given the right test results.

A Real Dog-and-Pony Show

I never really ranked my children, at least not in a manner in which it could be recorded into the public record. Sure, day to day you might make a mental note that one of them exhibited some kind of social utility contra the other two because they, say, emptied the dishwasher without being asked or didn't visually remind you of the uncle who said you should "not be such a bitch" that time he hit you in the face with a baseball when you were eight. In fairness to Uncle Fastball, the expectation on both our parts was that I would be catching the thrown ball, and my comprehensive lack of baseball-catching experience to that point made the outcome more or less inevitable in retrospect, but at that age, all experiences are new and the lack of comparative context makes them all potentially emotionally fraught. So bad luck to you, kid who looks like one of the many dipshit Boomers I'm related to. It's not that I love you any less, it's just that I inherently don't trust you for reasons that pre-date your conception by two full decades. You really should have considered that before you turned out looking like you do.

In the end, of course, you love them all equally. It's just that "equally" doesn't mean "at the same constant rate in the exact same divisible proportion at all times," it's more like "I don't really care for that one much today, but I trust it will balance itself out." This is easier to anticipate once some kind of event is approaching that you can use to validate your affection for any of them in whatever measure, like a parent-teacher conference or a sports-team tryout. Don't jump to conclusions, it's not all "you must achieve in order for me to love you more." Just in the case of the sports-team tryouts: is it a sport I hate? When do the games happen? How far am I going to have to drive to get you to them and what will the parking situation be once I get there? If they come home distraught from being cut from the team, they get a big long hug anyway, sometimes out of comfort, sometimes out of discreet gratitude/relief. Basketball is like four games a week, you guys. Sometimes having lumbering children with below-average depth perception can really pay off.

You don't have to be as careful with pets in this regard. For starters, they generally do not speak English, so you can talk about how much you prefer one over another right in front of them with very little fear of longterm emotional damage. With human kids, just one little slip-up and they will just go on and on and on about it in family therapy, Thanksgiving, at the wedding reception for your third marriage, wherever. Sure, sometimes a pet will shit in your bed, but they take their slights otherwise unremarked-upon to the grave.

I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I got a cat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with her, very sweet, adorable, playful, fine. It's just... well, the reason I--a heretofore avowed dog person--got a cat was because my oldest son who lived here until the spring of this year had gotten a cat of his own two years ago. And that cat, dang, from the second it showed up, it was like it had always lived here. Hold out a hand on first meeting in order to establish some kind of familiarity and she'd blow right past it and jump in your lap. All corners of the house (even some you forgot were there) explored, every surface jumped upon, every receptacle sat in. A brave, social and sociable creature, in direct defiance to every predetermined notion I had about felines as pets.

I'm not a total idiot, so I didn't think every cat was going to be that easy. But while I could have breakfast with my oldest human child who had moved out with the cat or stay in touch in a myriad of different 21st century ways, his cat, as far as I know, didn't have a cell phone plan or a laptop to get Discord on or anything. So save for a few visits to his place to watch some sporting thing or another, his cat had become definitively His Cat and I found myself in a four bedroom house by myself, missing out.

Selling pets is no longer legal in California, so the Petsmart locally has partnered with a rescue organization* to feature some of their adoptable cats in the store. It's the same place my son got his cat from, but it's not like I was going there for some kind of brand consistency for another cat, I'm not entirely delusional. They're mammals with drives and personalities all their own. We're still decades away from stamping out bespoke cats at a cat factory powered by Windows Copilot or whatever. A Windows cat sounds not great, but as long as Elon Musk doesn't get his hands on it, we'll be ok. It'll keep the number of people murdered by cats down to a minimum at least.

My cat is... well, a typical cat. It doesn't help that I don't really trust things that immediately like me (why yes, I do have a therapist, thank you for asking), so choosing the one in the Petsmart the recoiled at my touch was probably an early indicator of how things would go. Just to be clear: I don't like her less than my son's SuperCat, it's just that up until about an hour ago, she'd never even sat on the same piece of furniture as me, let alone on my lap. Every unexpected sound--including the prodigious bone creaks and pops from my 50-year-old human joints--sends her sprinting. She spent the first two full days voluntarily in a bathtub. This is exactly what it feels like to own a regular cat, entirely vibes-based creatures who decided WAY before they ever met you exactly how they would treat you. Because the vibes are all cat-centric, both projecting and receiving, and all you can do is guess at the right combination of gestures or postures that will convince them they aren't about to be murdered or, worse, picked up. Seriously, she drew blood the first and only time I tried that.

So as vibes go, all of that said, I must be putting out something she's picking up because as I type this (and this is true) she is asleep on the leg rest of the recliner I am occupying while typing this, a new world record for proximity for us. I already feel guilty for the future event where I close this laptop, which she will interpret as a gunshot and go flying across the room. Like I said, the vibes are hers to set. I just buy the kitty litter and deliver the treats and whatever little else I'm allowed. So far it's going exactly to plan, I'm just not sure whose.

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*So you adopt them, but there's an "adoption fee," which I guess goes to offset the costs of running an animal rescue, I get it. But the more desirable kittens were $125 while the adult cats were only $50, so I dunno, at what point something conceptually becomes a sale vs. adoption is I guess a question for the fat cats (ha) up in Sacramento to parse.

Viktor Orbán, Character Witness

I felt like last week it was OK to take a few steps back into some dopey pop culture as we were in a pretty natural lull with regard to the things otherwise forcefully preoccupying the conscious parts of my brain, mainly the 2024 presidential election and some rolling health issues of undetermined (probably fine) severity.

There's an old Ray Romano bit (before he got all the TV money and became a full-time recreational golf dork AND a surprisingly good actor appearing in more serious stuff) where he says you worry about a new pain or sensation, but you're relieved if you can feel it or recreate it on the other side of your body. I'm using the same logic to keep me off of too much dangerous false confidence after Kamala Harris dragged Donald Trump around by his ass in front of 65 million viewers two nights ago in Philadelphia. Is it always cathartic to watch a smart person stand across from a delusional stupid person and tell them to their face (in semi-polite American political-debate-talk) that they are delusional and stupid? Sure it is. But intellectually humiliating Donald Trump isn't really a feat. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, but he got dog-walked by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and that didn't end great. The effect is so similar, you can even see the exact same response (accusations of opponents wearing a wireless earpiece) all three times Trump has been the nominee.

Trump getting dominated in a debate is so expected, the one time it didn't happen, the entire electorate freaked out and fired the incumbent nominee.

Again, not trying to minimize (I'm capable of feeling joy, I really am! I'll publish the contents of my dream journal as an attachment), it just takes time for these kind of blows to crystallize into electoral polling results, so we're in the fuzzy limbo of wondering if and when this materializes into a Harris bump.

In the meantime, I just get to live with a bit more anxiety, but that's as normal as anything anymore. A few weeks ago, I started my annoying mental and physical health journey of subconsciously reacting badly to news that is probably no big deal at all. My doctor heard a heart murmur. Just to bring the info out in case anyone else has experience anything similar, after that I've had a lot of tension and tightness that floats through my chest, abdomen and throat, but that seems like 99% more likely to be related to anxiety and GERD rather than any actual heart thing. The fact that it started IMMEDIATELY AFTER hearing the words "heart murmur" doesn't feel like a coincidence. Unless I developed some kind of heart disease exactly at the moment the doctor put the stethoscope to my chest, I'm most likely fine.

Since then, I've been seen by my therapist (helped a lot), had an EKG at my primary care doctor's office (normal) and a scheduled echocardiogram at a cardiologist's office. I have my consultation appointment with the cardiologist one month from today. In the meantime, my body has decided to prepare for the worst by going back to the start of all this with the chest tightness and insomnia (which were finally going away). At 50, my subconscious has decided to cosplay as an 80-year-old, I guess just to get the practice reps in? But I should take some comfort in that as 80 isn't what 80 used to be. Hell, at that age, I could even be president.

And just to leave you on another cliffhanger, also in this same intervening period: I got a cat. Not for eating, I mean just to have around the house. Well, I won't say for sure "not for eating," we'll see how things go. Right now I live in the middle of a ring of active wildfires. We haven't really bonded fully yet and sometimes needs must.

Some Rain Must Fall

The Umbrella Academy, season 4

starring Elliot Page, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Ritu Arya, Aidan Gallagher, David Castañeda, Robert Sheehan, Tom Hopper, Justin H. Min, Victoria Sawal, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, David Cross, Liisa Repo-Martell and Colm Feore.

created by Steve Blackman (The Associates, Private Practice, Legion, Altered Carbon)

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IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS, WHY ARE YOU EVEN READING THIS FAR, MY GOD, STOP

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Look, there is a lot going on. And I don't even mean specifically with the show I'm ostensibly reviewing here. In fact, it could be argued that there's a lot less going on in Season Four (the final one!) than in all the previous ones. The story is not particularly convoluted in terms of plot line compared to previous arcs. In fact, by working in six episodes instead of the previous three seasons' order of 10, just in terms of volume there's 40% less going on already. The tone is also so much less self-serious than some of the earlier seasons, and it wasn't that heavy a show in the first place bar a few scattered moments of gravity. But this kind of lightness is welcome in this period of stomping, inevitable trudge toward a presidential election, an absolutely crushing heat wave here, some stupid health issues, some stupider car issues and the emotional work of integrating a new pet into the house (more on that in some other post later on). Of all those swirling things, Umbrella Academy is the only one thoughtful enough to break up the proceedings with at least one fart joke. That's the level I'm looking for in late Summer 2024.

In times of darkness, that's when you crave the light. I didn't even list the darkest dark, the premiere of season 2 of Rings of Power on Amazon Prime; I didn't want things to turn bleak. Don't worry, I'm back in the care of a professional therapist, I'm processing it all.

I didn't read any of the comic books Umbrella Academy is based on, so I can't be caught in the trap of despair and self-loathing that something like Rings of Power dooms me to. The great gift of ignorance means I only understand any of these characters (so many!) as they are presented in this context, with no preconception or expectation in place to be thwarted. Apologies to Messrs. Way and Bá, but I don't need to feel the kind of parasocial proprietorship about, like, Number 5 that I do about Celebrimbor or whomever.

So this is a nice escape! And I should complain about only six episodes of something I like when I might have expected 10, but look, I'm beginning to gain the kind of perspective in middle-middle age where, hey, I'm just grateful anything came out at all. I've developed enough empathy to imagine what it would have felt like to have been a big Batgirl fan. Just be happy it showed up at all! But you have to be careful with the gratitude mindset; for the less vigilant among us, that's a path that can lead to the unironic Live Laugh Love signs above the sectional couch.

Besides the shorter overall running time, what's new about season four? Well, they cast Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman as the heavies, which is automatically good news. It's only a stunt to cast a married couple as a married couple if one or both of them suck. Instead, these are not only two effortlessly charismatic performers, but their commitment and timing elevate everything they've been in individually and they play beautifully of one another. Their characters here aren't quite different enough to literally play off one another; they present as a unit, which works just fine for an antagonist. Just one could have done it, but in the end it's a por qué no los dos scenario. Everyone is better off for it.

For the rest of it, I really had to take a beat to match my expected speed of viewership to its trajectory, as it really skips off the simmering familial tension vibe that undergirds the whole premise of the macro-story--what if you and your siblings all had the same daddy issues and also super powers--and lands in a way more self-consciously broad comic space. This comes at the expense of some of the characters, but you were going to have to lose something when you cut episodes, and it was character that got it in the neck, like Allison in season 2, episode 8. She also lived, just in a diminished form.

Tom Hopper's Luther, Number One, he with the daddiest of the daddy issues, comes off the most changed, released from a running thread of sulking resentment to burst out into the broadest comic figure as a hirsute, space-suited stripper, complete with tin-foil banana hammock. There are way more wide smiles and laughing from Luther in these six episodes than the previous 30 combined. The earnest naïveté they had played for a few goofs in previous seasons is still there to some degree, but what could feel hacky, superficial and dismissible on its own reads as something like relief for this last run. It's a little reward for Hopper and for those of us along for the whole ride, which is the point.

Sadly, almost none of the other characters come off as well. Diego and Lila's trapped-in-suburbia subplot is forced and boring, though Ritu Arya can't help but be a force of gravity all her own as a performer in everything she's in (seriously, go back and watch season one without her, you can feel her missing). Robert Sheehan's Klaus, the previous seasons' brilliant comic relief, is left with a tedious and contrived subplot to keep himself and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) busy until the apocalypse. Elliot Page as Viktor is dragooned into being the plot-starter-offer and Justin H. Min as Ben, who never had much of an active role in previous seasons, is completely wasted as a lumbering, bitchy plot point eventually literally swallowed up by some kind of gross body-horror CGI.

All of this is to say that the plot kind of doesn't matter, and the writers agree. There's really only one goal here and that's to get seven Hargreeveses and Lila into a shiny circle of sacrificial light for the sake of the universe and make us all cry. And that's effective enough. Aside from an extended kaiju bit toward the end, any powers and effects-heavy sequences are more or less missing, which is fine since I don't think one person in the group has the same powers that were established back in the first season. They all just can kinda do whatever it takes to get us out of the predicament in the scene, which is fine. The message is clear: look, don't worry about the details, just spend some time with your pretend friends so we can all say a proper goodbye.

To be fair, the writers do try to give us one last emotional set-piece with Lila and Number Five being stranded together for years in alternate timelines and falling in love, an interesting and complicated button to put on a relationship that started years ago as literal murderous rivalry. Aidan Gallagher, by a good stretch the youngest of the cast, is given a lot to carry in both the emotional narrative and keeping up with Arya, and he acquits himself brilliantly. He's had the hardest job from the beginning, portraying an old man in a boy's body, and here even at 20 years old, he's got he chops to pull off the weariness and hurt the payoff requires.

Aside from that, it's all a bit broad, as I've said, not just comedically but plot-wise. There's a twist in the tale at the end that matters not at all. Colm Feore remains underused as he was in every season save bits of season three when he makes up half of a comedic double-act with Sheehan, but that just underscores what was left out. I get that Sir Reginald works best as a looming figure of memory and threat, but it's still frustrating to have someone so capable get so little to do.

Unlike most superhero things, it doesn't end with fighting a big beam of light in the sky nor in a last-second reprieve where all the protagonists are somehow actually OK. It cuts in the way Spiderman Far From Home tries to cut, but without the edge of future repercussions to sink the blade as deep as it might go. In the end what happens to them in the story is what happens to every character in every series studios eventually just stop making: they cease to be. The writers/creators here just chose to make it an explicit plot point. Which I liked.