movies

I don't think that the lecture bits are bad at all, they are so well presented and performed that I think anyone could find them interesting. In fact, I think they're less interesting to us because we already know what they're gonna say.

The first one (well besides the really short one when they're smoking and talking about relationships) was really good because it springboarded off of several emotional points in the episode, which were IMO the show's highlights. So the viewer is already primed to sit down and hear an explanation for the violence that the characters are facing, which of course mirrors the violence the working class faces. I was tearing up before the speech, I'd imagine a pretty significant number of viewers would be emotionally affected too, and hearing a materialist explanation for why this violence occurs is most effective at that moment when we can relate it to experiences in the real world.

The second one I think also works well because of the drama of the hero's character, his internal conflicts and his contradictory nature. He's an idealist that just wants to justify his power to himself by punishing criminals. The show had illustrated that he had put up a ton of defense mechanisms to prevent the cognitive dissonance of doing harm to do "good" from catching up to him, so seeing him disarmed and shown exactly why he's ineffective is some primo schadenfreude slop.

I honestly enjoyed the didactic bits a lot, not necessarily because I learned much, but because I really enjoyed the presentation and the mere fact that these segments exist - just casually explaining marxist concepts like the reserve army of labor or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - it made me giggle, at the sheer audacity of it all. Sure, capital subsumes and incorporates all critique and all that, but this is literally just streaming segments from Capital into people's living rooms, like a Trojan horse made from magical realist quirkiness in which Marx himself waits to break out. Good stuff, imo.

the ending

Yea, I don't know. Felt weird, anticlimactic, somewhat forced... I'm just guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that wasn't the originally planned ending. Maybe to set up a second season, maybe because some executive got cold feet, I can only speculate, but the main antagonist just leaving, having realized his legalist moralism is reactionary - as good as the preceding didactic segment was - felt... unfinished. Then again, maybe that's the idea and Boots was shooting for a second season. Hope he gets it, honestly, even if the ending fell flat for me overall.

I think you missed that the communist organizers superpower was being able to get into people's heads to persuade them.