So, I forgot to tell the thing to stop getting this show. As a result, when the first ep of the new season dropped, it appeared and decided to watch it for a laugh.
I made it 11 minutes into it before shutting it down. Here's the breakdown:
Zoe Saldana in tight fitting athleisure gear working out while a supercut of cable news about how chaotic the world outside the US plays. 2-3 minutes
Zoe Saldana in the shower naked. very creepy lingering close up on mouths during her makeout session with husband. 2-3 minutes.
Incoherent exposition from good guy US Intelligentsia about how China is bad because communism is when US universities have chinese students. also foreigners studying in and paying tuition to US schools is just generally bad. 5-6 minutes.
Complex set piece action sequence of masked assailants kidnapping Zoe in broad daylight in DC. Very watchable if you like action sequences. 2-3 minutes.
Timeskip back 6 months: Several outrageously jacked dudes and models in undercover tight-fighting athleisure on a stakeout at a university. Intrigue with foreign national points to RUSSIA.
this is where i turned it off. the spycraft-intrigue was getting too convoluted to parse, and the idea that all these absurdly jacked meatheads in their 40s could blend into the backdrop of college students on campus despite all of them wearing an athleisure uniform of drab army colors was too much.
this show started out kinda dumb, premise wise, in season 1. and each season has become more deranged with the world building. it's like if they made a third sicario that was as divergently bonkers from sicario 2 as 2 was to 1. if that makes sense.
like imagine if you blended every alarmist headline on OAN about the world outside the US and constructed reality from that chopped, incoherent and undifferentiated goop of american exceptionalist excretions. with high production values, fancy establishing shots, and apparently a pretty big budget for complex action sequences with guns, explosions, civilian/military vehicles, equipment and fight choreography. like, they seriously build this world and it is scary/violent! if you meet someone who loves this show, they should be monitored.
it would be totally watchable if it wasn't 75-80% unwatchable exposition of randomly mixed crank politics, straight from the industrial blender at Banana Town.
yeah, the way season 2 opened with a sitting congressperson being kidnapped seemingly by a cartel kill squad (that completely lit up her entire family as they slept) gave me this moment like, maybe it was going to unfold as some sort of call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house type of intelligentsia false flag move.
didn't take long to realize they were playing that angle straight up.
season 2 was so far off the rails, i thought i was having a stroke as i tried to interpret the geopolitical landscape.
I barely remember s02 at all. My biggest memory is that I started to get really annoyed by the silliness a few times (or a even bunch of times) every episode. If it's annoying it kills the escapism vibe. How many series is Sheridan currently working on right now. ~6? Could the number actually be 7? He's the chud whisperer - he can pump that stuff out at will. He's a one-man Chud Studios.
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Ninja edit. Now that I'm thinking of it - s02 had a lot of way over-the-top unnaturallistic yelling. After it happened a few times - that was one more thing that irked me. The dialog was bad enough but THE YELLING turned it into shit and it wasn't bad enough to be funny. The following is made-up but it's the vibe I had...
"YOU THINK YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES!"
"YEAH! I GOT WHAT IT TAKES!"
"NAH! YOU DON'T GOT WHAT IT TAKES! YOU ONLY THINK YOU DO!"