O.k. this show is so weird. I just, again, cannot believe that it has given itself exactly 38 effing minutes to wrap up every goddamn storyline that still needs to be wrapped for the season (and I presume the entire series) in the finale next week. This week’s ep was 48 minutes, thank god, but next week’s finale is only 38 minutes!! There is no way in hell enough happened this week in order to wrap the entire thing up in 38 minutes next week. Team Future has not even gotten together yet to make so much as a game plan of how they will attempt to defeat this AI monster, let alone start executing on it. 38 minutes!!
And we’ve got some pretty giant leaps in character relationships in this episode, to the point where it’s almost starting to remind me of season 4 of Westworld, where they would make moves in the plot as colossal as “let’s end all of humanity” within the span of literally just a couple scenes. O.k. I’m gonna hit play again, let’s review this.
Tayo and Poet Get Back On the Same Wavelength
Just a side note first – I kinda love how every time Poet takes an FBI training test in The Past, we see Lennix sweating every second of it, and then feeling thrilled when she does well. It’s sweet, but in this ep we also get Tayo making notes of how Poet handles the final training test, which I also enjoy. Last week I said that I’ve been kinda bummed Tayo and Poet haven’t been able to interact as much in The Present and The Future, but in ep 7 we finally see how their paths converge again in The Present.
I also wondered last week how Tayo would sway Poet over to his side on the ol’ AI machine, and this week brought us the explanation. It was already kinda teed up last week when Hour’s database gave a shit ton of minute details to Poet for her serial killer investigation that she couldn’t do much of anything with. This week, Tayo gifts Poet with the ability to sift through all the data in mere seconds, and to come up with a top suspect to track down. Tayo trusts Poet to follow through with it and get the bad guy to give up the info they need to arrest him, because he knows her strengths – she’s not afraid to be the first in line to try something, and she’ll do whatever she can to close a case.
Hour side-eyes the entire operation, and she’s proven right pretty quickly (per usual) when Tayo immediately starts to get too big for his britches after the success with Poet’s case. He tries to fly too close to the sun, going after bank execs, and then putting corrupt politicians in his cross-hairs next. Turns out these people hold plenty of power to hire a guy to nearly murder him in his house in order to stop his investigations. Oopsie. Of course, I think we can safely predict that this will only cause him to dig his heels in further, as he knows he’s onto something.
And speaking of Tayo’s character arc, this ep also gives us the origins of his assignment to Billings, Montana, as well as more background on his lack of interest in toeing the line for the Powers That Be. He’s livid about the Billings assignment, but Gabriel explains to him that he’s trying to put him in the place where he can be the most successful and have the ability to play by his own rules. He also reveals that Tayo is his all-time best student. It is funny how Gabriel’s fave is Tayo and Drew’s faves are Poet and Hour. Each sticking within their own gender lines. Human nature. Speaking of this storyline, it’s kind of annoying that we never find out what Hour’s assignment is.
Back to Tayo, we also find out that the biggest reason he’s shitting his pants about Billings Montana is that he’s in love with Vivian and he’s certain there’s no way in hell Vivian’s gonna want to move to BFE Billings with him. And this is a good segue to …
Everyone’s Getting Back Together Again
Last week, everyone’s marriage was falling apart in The Present. This week, in The Future, everyone is getting back together again. Everyone, that is, except Hour and her loveless marriage to her man husband, luckily. But let’s start with Tayo and Vivian first, because as we know, Vivian did move with Tayo to Billings back in 2009, and stuck with him until he went too far into the AI abyss in 2025. In 2034, he has finally realized the error of his ways, and he makes an attempt at shutting down his AI system, which gets him fired. In a pretty funny way, I might add, when the system turns on him for trying to shut it down, and then immediately identifies him as the top suspect in its attempted murder.
After Tayo’s firing is plastered all over the news, Vivian comes looking for him at his favorite diner, and finds him there drinking away his sorrows. It becomes clear in this scene that Vivian has been waiting and hoping for a long time that Tayo would finally give up on his career obsessions and see the error of his path with the AI beast. It also becomes clear that if this roadblock were to finally be cleared, Vivian would love to pick back up where they left off when times were good with them. From Tayo’s side, we can only assume that it was Vivian who left him, and that he probably never wanted the marriage to end to begin with. Thus, he’d take her back in a heartbeat.
And then, we’ve got Poet and Lennix. This ep reveals that indeed, the FBI training camp fling they shared in ’09 truly was the entirety of their dating relationship, which continues to be crazy to me. But it also plays more into “the one that got away” scenario that this would set up. And in The Past, we see Poet instantly regret having shut Lennix down so hard last week when she finds out that, like a typical male weakling, he has run immediately into the arms of another chick to make it all better. Don’t they all. I assume this is the “Becca” that he ends up marrying.
Poet then gets the offer to train as an undercover agent, which will require her to basically give up having any kind of personal life, since she’ll have to fully inhabit the roles she’ll play in her undercover assignments. She’s just lost (tossed away) Lennix and her damn devotion to the job is too intense, so she figures she’s got nothing to lose and jumps at the opportunity to just completely bury herself in her career.
But as I said in my review last week, this show has made it pretty clear in several scenes throughout the season that Poet still loves Lennix and wishes she could change the past. In ep 4 we got the Future scene where Poet shows up to Lennix’s apartment ostensibly to tell him he doesn’t need to jump on her bandwagon to investigate Tayo … but it’s pretty obvious she’s also just taking advantage of the opportunity to reconnect. Adorably, she gets what she wants and more, because Lennix confesses that he’s been in love with her this entire time – as he says, “20 years” – but it’s actually been 25. But then annoyingly, all we get is an impression that they probably bone down after this; it’s quite unclear.
Ep 7 seems to confirm that the sexy times did happen, because we make a giant leap all the way from “Poet dumped Lennix in ’09,” to “He is still in love with her in 2034,” to he’s proposing “Fuck it, will you marry me?” just days after his love confession. All the things that happen between these points are just hints and implications. The marriage proposal is a very cute scene but it drives me insane that they don’t even hug or kiss or get within 3 feet of each other through the entire proposal, eventually getting distracted by Tayo’s firing on the news.
What makes me nervous about all these love reconnections is that we know from the trailer that everyone is gonna be in danger in the last flippin’ 38 minutes of this series next week. Is the show just setting up these characters to die even more tragically next week? I will be beyond pissed if they don’t let Poet and Lennix finally be happy after 25 years, my god. I talked last week about how tragic it is that Hour put her entire love life on hold for 16+ years for fear of coming out of the closet, but in a sense, this episode shows us that Poet has fucked herself over even worse. She chose her career over any love life whatsoever for 25 fuckin’ years. We know she’s had relationships during that time, but no true love connections.
Which makes me afraid that – last week I said “they better not just kill Lennix now,” but at this point I’m now afraid they’ll kill Poet, just to drive a stake into her tragic character arc. I will be very angry if they do this. They could also kill Tayo by making him sacrifice himself for his sins, but I’m hoping they don’t do that either. Or hey, maybe they’ll pull a Westworld and have the AI system end all humanity. I have no idea whatsoever what kind of ending this show is going for in its short last 38 minutes.
Everyone is Mildly Bummed That Murphy is Dead
I mean, I guess they seem sufficiently sad at the funeral. The episode really takes its sweet time getting around to addressing Murphy’s death, though that’s mainly a function of the different timelines. It’s certainly a way to push Tayo over the edge from “this system is going in a bad direction” to “fuck it, I need to burn this entire thing down.” R.I.P. Murphy, we hardly knew yeh.
I Was Right About Hour’s Apartment
Things get awkward between Hour and Poet in this ep, post-love-confession last week. First off, I predicted a couple weeks ago that the apartment they share together in 2025 would be Hour’s apartment, not Poet’s, at least initially. I was right! Though I get the feeling the roommate sitch isn’t gonna last long. Poet is fully on board with Tayo’s system now, and she’s moving full steam ahead.
We can tell that Hour is annoyed that Poet came into town without even telling her she was coming, kind of implying Poet didn’t have specific plans to hang out with her. There’s a moment in the new apartment where Hour tries to tell Poet something important, and Poet seems to deflect and change the subject. At first, I thought Poet was being kind of a jerk and doing this on purpose, but on rewatch, I realized that it’s only because Hour talks about going to dinner, and it suddenly reminds Poet that she has to do a business dinner with Tayo. It’s an innocent “oh shit” moment with evening plans, but it throws off Hour from whatever she was gonna say, which I’m currently assuming was along the lines of “Tayo and Amos stole my system and are going to use it for evil.”
And again, I can’t believe that argument has yet to be had, and we’ve only got 38 more goddamn minutes.
Welp, I guess we’ll see next week what kind of miracles this show can work in 38 final minutes. My past TV experience tells me they won’t give us anything satisfying, but I’ll wait and see.
Fangirls Anonymous 