Macrodata Refinement

(spoilers)

It was really good at building up a mystery over the course of the first season, but I've been a little disappointed in the second so far.

The pacing's become glacial; the first couple of episodes worked mostly to undercut the dramatic significance of the events of last season's finale.

And I feel like the way that the satire is slowly being replaced by self-serious "lore" is hurting the show; it was very funny and disturbing to see the way the innies are "raised" in a cult and view the CEO as a kind of Messiah (and observe the parallels to real-world corporate culture); Lumen really being an evil cult - as opposed to just an evil company - in "reality", feels less satirical and more ham-fisted.

The ending of the most recent episode suggests promising things to come at least.

I think season 2 will end up doing a lot tbh. It got great reviews from critics and they allowed critics to watch the full season before reviewing, which isn't as common. Usually it's only one or two episodes. It makes me feel like they had a big story that they wanted to be witnessed in its entirety for the critics.

It did the thing I hate, which is a cliffhanger climax, and instead of picking up the thread where it left off and providing resolution/denouement, it just sort of ... resets?

The gold standard, IMO is something like the TNG episodes "The Best of Both Worlds" pt 1 and 2 -- an end-of-season cliffhanger that rewards you returning to the show by telling you what happens next!

I think the lacuna here is meant to add to the tension and mystery, but I agree that the new season has started off frustratingly slow. You gotta wrap up stuff to move forward with a plot, otherwise it's all just treading water for the sake of atmosphere.

> Lumen really being an evil cult - as opposed to just an evil company - in "reality", feels less satirical and more ham-fisted.

Agreed. The 'banality of evil' horror of the first season was the show's strongest point.

Sadly, I expect it will eventually suffer from the same thing that torpedoed Lost:

1. Fans are originally attracted by the mystery and unexplained.

2. Those same fans then clamour for explanations.

3. Then when the show explains things, it loses its mystery and/or people complain the explanations aren't good enough.

To me, the only winning plot move is not to play: drip just enough teasy but mysterious stuff that nothing is ever explained, but everyone stays on the edge of their seats.

Then it can be incredibly successful, and people can bitch about the finale 30 years from now.

Counterpoint: I don’t think it was a reset (after watching more of season 2), I think it was supposed to look like a reset intentionally, but it won’t end up being one.

It becomes much clearer in episodes 2 and especially 3. They strongly and directly start picking up the pieces of the season 1 ending and carrying it through. Without spoiling anything, episode 3 (of season 2) had some massive movements I wasnt expecting to see until later in the season (at soonest).

I thought it pretty directly started from the cliffhanger. It took three episodes (at a much faster clip than Season 1 episodes) to deal with the consequences of that cliffhanger, but that's the nature of the severance procedure itself, half the characters can't directly talk to the other half.