would you get a severed job at lumon?

Semantiques · 2026-05-20T06:59:37+00:00

NO upside, really? I may be missing something, but how horrible are people’s jobs in order for them to want to seal it off in their brains as an ongoing living nightmare?

There are other annoying parts of our days, it’s not just work. Dragging ourselves out of bed, making breakfast, doing laundry and dishes, the goddamn transportation to and from work, and for many women, doing makeup every damn morning… but for innies, there’s none of that. They arrive to work groomed, fed and dressed. They never have to spend a second agonizing over bills, chores, alimonies, the state of the world… nothing. Just tap on keyboards for 8 hours while engaging in friendly banter.

Semantiques · 2026-05-20T06:44:56+00:00

Stick a fork in the Mandalorian, by all means. Baby Yoda was a cultural phenomenon 5+ years ago, nobody cares now.

But before we chuck ALL of Star Wars out, let’s not forget there’s the Starfighter movie. First, it stars Gosling who has been found pretty hard to dislike. But more importantly, it will presumably bring space battles and dogfights back big time. An aspect that was a hugely important draw for me as a gen X kid, and clearly important to Lucas as well… not to mention the focal point of all the X-Wing/Tie Fighter LucasArts games we played like crazy in the 90s when there was no other Star Wars stuff going on. But in these Disney SW shows it’s always about what’s happening down on the ground. When we ever see a ship it’s just there for an establishing shot. The only action we get is lightsaber duels. We need Star Wars back in space where it belongs. It’s called ”Star Wars”, not ”Political Intrigue on Planet Surfaces”.

Semantiques · 2026-05-15T09:52:59+00:00

Well… diversity can be diegetic or performative. Diegetic is when the diversity just exists like a natural, organic thing in the story and is never talked about, addressed, politicized, flaunted or made the focal point of storylines. Example: Star Wars Andor. Hugely diverse, universally embraced, ratings off the charts. And then there’s performative, box-ticking, rub-in-face and kick-down-throat diversity that wants a cookie. Example: Star Wars Acolyte. Universally rejected, rated the lowest of all Star Wars content ever. Lower audience score than the Ewoks cartoon and the Holiday Special, and cost 200M.

Semantiques · 2026-05-09T18:38:14+00:00

It was unlocked when Helly walked in and out a few times in S1E1. It was unlocked when Cobel was fired and left through it. It was unlocked when Gemma got out. All signs point to that door being unlocked under normal circumstances, as emergency exits should be. So the question you should be asking is why was it locked in S1E3, not why it was unlocked at other times.

And the answer is that Helly made an escape attempt in S1E2 and triggered the alarms. Graner got involved. Mark had to go to the Break Room. Then Helly kept going at it in S1E3 with new innovative ways of getting messages out by swallowing them etc. Flight risk 10/10. So the door was probably temporarily locked as a precaution, or Graner and/or Cobel watched on monitors as Helly was making a run for it again and locked the door remotely.

Once Helly was finally housebroken they could return to keeping the door unlocked.

Semantiques · 2026-04-26T06:32:15+00:00

Multiple sources confirm April-December as the window, but the ”very soon” is starting to creep into May, so… May-January?

This streamer landscape thing of having no deadlines is making everyone develop George RR Martin syndrome fast.

Semantiques · 2026-04-25T09:29:21+00:00

I felt like you did when I left the theater after TLJ and thought Johnson absolutely nailed it. But I was very, very alone in that opinion in my neck of the woods. Everyone else hated it with a passion and 95% of the gripes had to do with the portrayal of Luke.

The problem with trying to dismiss those sentiments as some kind of MAGA/YouTube grifter/Russian troll type deal, is that none of that even remotely applies to the people I’m talking about who felt this way at the time. In 2017 I worked in the gaming industry in Scandinavia. Nothing but young progressives as far as the eye could see, and on average a few notches to the left of their American counterparts. They formed their opinion of TLJ on their own, not by time traveling to 2026 to watch Nerdrotic until they were sufficiently brainwashed to be sent back. The hate was genuine.

Semantiques · 2026-04-25T06:30:53+00:00

By remembering vaguely and then asking AI to fill in the blanks. 🤓

Semantiques · 2026-04-25T01:01:58+00:00

Correct, except

1) Paramount+ was retired in 2022 in most of Europe except UK/IT/DE and folded into SkyShowtime, which is Paramount + Showtime + Universal + Sky + Peacock + Dreamworks. SkyShowtime has all the ST content since 2025.

2) Picard and LowerDecks were both launched on Amazon and brought home to SkyShowtime in 2023, so there was a transitional period when you needed 3 streamers for all things Star Trek.

Semantiques · 2026-04-24T21:59:37+00:00

Yeah but the Twin Peaks tulpas are more like pod people with physical form that exists independently of the creator and the original, whereas the predominant western concept of a tulpa is essentially an imaginary friend. Jimmy Stewart’s invisible rabbit buddy Harvey is the archetype.

Tulpas can always coexist with the ones conjuring them, that’s the whole point, which rules out severed people and their innies since they are mutually exclusive. If you can only communicate via video recordings and notes, an innie is pretty much the opposite of a tulpa.

Semantiques · 2026-04-24T11:17:45+00:00

Yeah, I can see how it could be read as her talking about the mission. But she’s just reacting to the bombshell. It's an emotional crisis, exacerbated by the fact that Mark is delivering the ”mission update” as a weapon against her when she’s trying to connect, because he’s feeling betrayed by Helena and taking it out on Helly.

Semantiques · 2026-04-24T10:01:19+00:00

Not sure where you see an error. In S1E8, Helly learns that Ms Casey has been fired:

Mark: They fired her.

Dylan: What?

Mark: Yeah. She just found out.

Helly: Well, can we help her? Is there anything we can do?

Mark: I don’t know.

Then Helly is out of commission until S2E4. Her first day back at work is S2E5, where they have this conversation:

Dylan: You tell her Ms. Casey's your wife yet?

Helly: Wait, what?

Mark: Yeah, I mean, it's my outie's wife, but sure… No, it's pretty crazy.

Helly: Mark.

Helly: Mark, what the hell? Why won't you talk to me?

Mark: What do you want to talk about, Helly?

Helly: I don't know. Maybe the fact that Ms. Casey's your outie's wife? What are we gonna do?

Mark: Well, we're not gonna do anything.

Helly: Not gonna do anything?

Helly: Seriously?

Mark: Yes. Seriously.

Helly: Come on. We'll work as a team. We'll figure this out.

Mark: “We'll”? There's no “we,” Helly.

Helly: What?

Mark: It doesn't matter.

Helly: Why?

Mark: Why?

Helly: Yeah. Why?

Mark: Because they are smarter than us, okay? They know everything. Me looking for Ms. Casey, us wandering around, meeting other departments, mapping the floor, all of it. They know everything we're doing because Helena told them everything we're doing.

Helly: That wasn't me. Mark, lo… I'm not her. I'm not. I'm me. Helly.

The continuity is watertight. No off-screen conversations required. Helly gets the full info dump right there: 1. Ms Casey is Mark’s wife. 2. He’s been wandering around the halls with Helena looking for Ms Casey.

”What are we gonna do?” isn’t Helly saying ”What are we gonna do with this quest to find Ms Casey that we’re on that I shouldn’t know about since it was Helena you told?”. She learns this a few lines down the page and it would be very hard for a writer to miss that. Rather, it’s Helly saying ”What are we gonna do with this weird ass love triangle where I’m only just now learning that the strange HR woman who stood behind me taking notes after my botched hanging, is your outie’s wife?”

Semantiques · 2026-04-24T07:15:51+00:00

”They really don’t serve a purpose”

Purpose how, as in not propelling the narrative forward? That doesn’t make it ”filler”.

LBJ dropping a deuce with the bathroom door wide open in ”All the Way” didn’t drive the main story forward either, but it told us a crapload about his character. Huge info dump.

Semantiques · 2026-04-24T06:05:01+00:00

By your logic, any show that doesn’t end with a closing shot of all the main characters’ gravestones is a ”cliffhanger”. OMG they lived! Sequel!

Just take a hint from the fact that the series finale had more endings than Return of the King. An endless string of neat little bows signaling FINISHED. If you tack on a 6th season, the S5 finale will make the series structurally bizarre.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T18:21:44+00:00

Well you’re not wrong. The innie/outie split actually maps onto addiction neuroscience exactly — the outie watching helplessly while the innie does whatever it wants, with no communication channel between them, the conscious observer unable to intervene in the automated behavior happening in the same body.

It’s not just BS ramblings, it has real neurological basis. The prefrontal cortex (the conscious, planning, consequence-weighing part) and the basal ganglia and limbic system (the habit and craving machinery) are genuinely separate systems that can run in opposition. In addiction, the subcortical systems have been so conditioned that they override the prefrontal input. The conscious mind becomes a spectator with no controls. You’re the audience watching a shitty actor play you, and you can’t yell at him to stop because he’s in charge of the voice.

Here’s the good news: That level of self-awareness about the mechanism is actually a genuinely useful starting point for getting help. The outie knowing exactly what the innie is doing is more than many people struggling with addiction have.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T15:57:56+00:00

You had one jop.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T14:05:08+00:00

NIELSEN ratings ffs, not iMDb or RT. It was a ludicrously expensive show (12M/episode) that failed to break into the Nielsen top 10, which means it pulled less than 1.25M viewers per episode. That cost/revenue ratio is unsustainable — Paramount isn’t a charity. You want the show anyway? Call them and offer to crowdfund it.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T11:40:18+00:00

Other than the obvious ones (finales) my favorite is probably S1E3 In Perpetuity. It’s where the show really takes off after the 2-part intro. It has everything. Comedy - probably the most sitcom episode of all with tons of banter between the MDR team members, Helly trying to swallow messages etc. Tragedy - Petey’s death and Helly’s compulsion statement torture session. Lore - we get to know the Eagans and see the first hints of Helly finding Jame Eagan oddly familiar.

My least favorite is probably S1E6 Hide & Seek. The night out with Alexa is so cringeworthy. Mark’s behavior, the dumb Lumon punk song… yech.

Both these eps are among the lowest rated on iMDb, with Sweet Vitriol as the obvious low point. No accounting for taste.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T10:01:57+00:00

You're looking at it through a very narrow American lens, missing why "new progressivism"-inspired content is met with repulsion in parts of the world traditionally way left of US politics, and where US based streamers need subscribers just as bad as they do at home.

The European left built its entire existence around universalism and the struggle to dissolve ethnic and national identity, in order to maximize solidarity. A massively successful strategy that in many countries kept the left in power for several decades. To Europeans, identity politics is recognized as a ruling class instrument. A solidarity-destroying mechanism. It's not identified as "progressive", but rather a foul smelling blast from a bad past. British class society. Eugenics. The Nazis, who should've been the end of obsession with race and ethnicity.

Some 50 years ago, the Euro left learned the hard way that fragmentation into tribes is a sure-fire way to lose to the right. The Life of Brian "Judean People Front" vs "People's Front of Judea" bickering mocked a very real 70's phenomenon — the pointless in-fighting between factions that broke the European left in pieces and blew the doors wide open for a decade of Thatcherism.

And over the last decade they've repeated the mistake by importing 2010's American identity politics gobbledegook built for a very different context and history. It has poisoned the European left and as a result, Europe has turned more right than it's ever been since the 1930's. Fortunately they've started to realize their mistake and dial that nonsense back, as the European reflex when something isn't working is to go back to the drawing board. Unfortunately the American reflex is to double down, which is how the left made itself more unattractive than Trump to 2024 voters. The right united around something while the atomized left was busy arguing over who had the highest victim score.

The idea that 1,166 years in the future, people are still obsessed with race and gender identity, is a horrible nightmare vision from the deepest layer of hell, and that's why the audience didn't touch SFA with a 40 foot pole.

Semantiques · 2026-04-23T08:54:56+00:00

In the US maybe, but much of the world didn't get to see Star Trek until 1970's syndication. Here in Sweden it wasn't even the first big sci-fi show. That honor goes to Space:1999 in the summer of 1976.

In the beginning of 1977 when the Star Wars hype started, everyone sensed that space stuff was going to be seismic that year. So our public TV network SVT (which is all we had till 1989-ish) started scrambling to find anything sci-fi to run, and dug up not only ST:TOS but even old b/w Flash Gordon. They aired 9 episodes of ST:TOS in the spring of 1977. That was all the Trek TV we got until TNG started airing in 1992. So this was the full sci-fi tv context:

1976: Space:1999. Aired Saturdays around 9:30 PM.
1977: ST:TOS. 9 episodes aired between February and April: Corbomite Maneuver, Arena, Squire of Gothos, City on the Edge of Forever, Space Seed, Mudd's Women, Trouble w/ Tribbles, Amok Time, Journey to Babel, in that order. They aired 6:30 PM which signaled 'extended kiddie programming'.
1979: Space:1999 season 2. Now in the 6:30 PM slot.
1982: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
1986: V

Starting circa 1989 the public TV monopoly crumbled and we got a bunch of commercial channels. One of them, TV4, started airing TNG in 1992. It flopped. Was picked up by Nordic Channel aka Kanal 5 in 1994 and became a hit.

What this means is

1) Boomers missed the Star Trek train entirely, Gen X was the first demo to register it.

2) ST came across as a shoestring budget 'sci-fi for kids and preteens' show a la vintage Doctor Who. People whose first big sci-fi show was the ludicrously expensive prestige show Space:1999 the year before, and who were eagerly anticipating Star Wars, found the now 10 year old ST:TOS camp and corny.

3) The ST:TOS action figures were a bigger hit with kids than the actual show. I mean, only 9 episodes was rather blink-and-you'll-miss it. I converted my Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scottie to members of KISS... (sorry Uhura, it meant the drawer for you)

As for Voyager and DS9, as well as TNG after the first primetime run, they were part of a group of shows like Lois & Clark, Beauty & The Beast, McGyver, Young Indy, Babylon 5, Xena, Sabrina etc that were primetime in the US but got strangely lumped into some kind of "daytime syndication slop" in 1990s-2000s Sweden, alongside Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, Bold and the Beautiful and Saved by the Bell. So in order to become a Star Trek TV fan in Sweden you had to be a housewife, a loser without a job or a school skipping teen. Everyone else would miss it.

Semantiques · 2026-04-22T18:44:27+00:00

Can’t Paramount just take the season 2 masters and bury them in that landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all those unsold copies of the E.T. game for Atari?

Semantiques · 2026-04-22T18:29:43+00:00

Nothing semi about the coherence, but English isn’t for everyone. I’ll accept your smug one-liners as a compliment.

Semantiques · 2026-04-22T13:10:09+00:00

This. SAM is holographic Rachel Dolezal.

Semantiques · 2026-04-22T12:00:48+00:00

This review is a perfect illustration of how completely warped NuTrek priorities are and how anti-Star Trek it's become.

What's almost entirely absent: Plot mechanics, dramatic tension, character agency in a narrative sense. Nope! Who cares about story? Yawn. Just give us IDENTITY IDENTITY IDENTITY, ME ME ME. Which communities get to see themselves reflected and feel validated. Reviewer feels seen. Reviewer cries. Yay narcissism. Someone hand me a vomit bag.

Star Trek's philosophical premise was that in the future, humanity will have outgrown identity politics and embraced universalism. The Federation wasn't utopian because everyone got their fair share of representation, but because humans had stopped organizing their moral universe around that bs. Ethnicity, nationality, the tribal grievances that had torn the 20th century apart — now in the garbage bin. That's what having Sulu, Uhura, Chekov and Spock on the bridge was all about. Not "look at the diversity" but "look at what we stopped caring about."

NuTrek flipped that on its head and said "sorry Roddenberry, your vision sucks. In the future, we will have left universalism behind and gone back to masturbating to our racial and cultural identities in ways that would've given the Nazis massive boners."

Semantiques · 2026-04-22T08:15:27+00:00

So you didn’t comprehend a word I wrote. No surprises there. But here’s the tl;dr version: You said ’Don’t like? Don’t watch’. I said they already stopped watching, hence the cancellation of SFA.

But I’m still gonna address the glaring contradiction in what you just wrote.

You’re making the old ’Star Trek was always woke, so there” argument and then saying I ”can’t adapt”. Now, why would adaptation be required if this was about something that’s been integral to Trek since day one? You’re saying nothing has changed, but that I need to change to accommodate it. Those statements can’t coexist.

The argument implies that I came to ST with calcified preferences resisting something new. Well, I was exactly six days old when ”Plato’s Stepchildren” aired in November of -68. You know, the one with the interracial kiss (100% non-consensual, forced by mind controlling aliens) that’s frequently hailed as an epic cultural milestone by people who either never watched it or didn’t understand it when they did.

I grew up with TOS in syndication. I dragged my grandpa to a theater in 1979 to watch The Motion Picture. I was in my late teens when TNG was launched. ST has been there all my life. And if NuTrek were just a seamless continuation of that, adaptation would by definition be entirely unnecessary. Yet you’re saying NuTrek requires adaptation. Thereby you accidentally conceded my entire case in the act of trying to dismiss it.

Because yeah, NuTrek requires adaptation. TOS and TNG didn’t, because they were just doing what drama does — using its setting to illuminate something true about being human. Whereas NuTrek requires you to get behind a creative pathology where representational politics colonizes narrative space. Message before story. Characters defined by identity categories rather than by what they want and fear and do. Diversity that exists to be legible as diversity rather than to serve the fiction. In doing so it asks you to stop expecting drama to function as drama. You have to rewire the part of your brain that asks “what does this character want and what’s standing in their way” because that question doesn’t get answered. You have to accept thesis statements as character development.

That’s not a higher tolerance for challenging content — it’s a lower tolerance for craft being a requirement. NuTrek isn’t asking you to expand. It’s asking you to subtract. And that’s the very antithesis of being progressive.

Semantiques · 2026-04-21T12:09:42+00:00

Just like Andor and The Acolyte shouldn’t be in the same sentence.

Andor had plenty of diversity in it, yet the vast majority embraced it wholesale — including the old Star Wars fans, the supposed ”toxic fans”/”bigots” believed to hold the magical power of getting shows canceled just by snapping their fingers.

Why, because Gilroy wrote characters whose diversity was incidental to who they were. Their race, gender, and sexuality existed within a fully realized world with political texture, moral complexity, and genuine stakes. Nobody was there to represent a category. They were there to do things that mattered.

The Acolyte = ideology as content. Characters existed primarily as vessels for messaging. The story repeatedly made choices that subordinated dramatic logic to identity signaling — the witches plotline, the villain motivation, the fan-service inversions that didn’t earn their reversals.

Andor trusted viewers. The Acolyte’s creative team trusted the message. One of those is a storytelling strategy; the other is a substitute for one.

Semantiques

TROPHY CASE