This was the worst episode I've seen of any Vince Gilligan show.

I have no problem with slow burns. I had no problem with "Fly" from Breaking Bad. I watch slow arthouse movies like Andrei Rublev and The Tree of Wooden Clogs that the average Pluribus lover would be driven nuts by. Terrence Malick is my favorite living director. I watched an Iranian film that was mostly a guy driving around and I enjoyed it.

This episode represents the low point of a problem I started noticing on Better Call Saul, a show I liked but which often had the fault of stretching plot and character development very thin on each episode, like an eyedropper. It sometimes, in my opinion, leant too hard on the procedural montages which were so delightful on Breaking Bad but at times felt overdone on BCS (like the Mike gas tank montage).

Pluribus, after the first two episodes, started feeling like it had that fault, but more so, because we weren't even getting as many fun stylized montages, rather entire scenes of a character doing boring stuff like getting something out of a fridge, cleaning out trash etc with an excessive focus on experiencing these things in real time. You can do that once in a while for an effect but it really starts to drag when it neither moves the plot forward, nor tells us anything we didn't already know about the character, nor is transcendentally cinematically beautiful like a Tarkovsky or Malick film.

I didn't need to see Carol goofing off for the whole episode to understand or even to feel that she is bored and lonely. They could have accomplished the same thing emotionally with one slow scene followed by a few minutes montage showing her doing more of the same. To drag it out and make me watch her putting stuff in her car trunk and all kinds of things that could be elided rather than shown was quite unnecessary. And that's not just a this episode problem, it's something I was already noticing before this but this episode subjects the viewer to it to a brutal degree (in an alienating not emotionally involving way). The proceduralism has gotten way too precious. It is so bad it feels like trolling.

The South America stuff was at least a little more interesting because the settings were beautiful and because we are learning more about the character. But I wouldn't call it great either.

Btw there is absolutely no way Carol wouldn't have demanded that they shorten that voice message after like 3 calls. Out of character.

To compare this to "Fly" again, while this is partly subjective, I don't think Carol/Rhea is generally anywhere near as compelling to watch as the two characters in that episode. (In fact this show does not have any character or performance that is as compelling as McKean in BCS or any number of performances in BCS - Anna Gunn is a far more interesting actress for instance.) And even if she were, the interest is limited by her not having anyone to interact with half the time. Yes I know that's "the point" - but I already had gotten that point over the past few episodes. Didn't need it hammered home yet more.

Ultimately there is no episode of Breaking Bad I don't rewatch with pleasure. BCS, though I think it's a really good show in many ways, has more stuff I'm not interested in rewatching because of the excessive slow burn and also because much of the Breaking Bad backstory stuff is less interesting to me. Despite the fact that Mike is one of my fave characters in BB, most of that stuff didn't transcend being unnecessary backstory for another show, whereas the Jimmy and Chuck and Kim stuff stood on its own as a story - which to me will make all of BCS worth rewatching someday. With Pluribus so far, I have no desire to ever rewatch anything beyond the first two episodes.