All Episodes
Previous Next
April 14, 2020 - Adventures in HellwQrld
53:20
Money Heist

Money is bad and I hate it. Now you get to share in my pain. (Note: I spoil everything so if you really want to torture yourself wait till you finish before listening.) Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here, and today I'm going to bitch about Money Heist.
I don't know what it is about television shows, but god, I really have a tough time finding one that I enjoy watching.
A bunch of friends were just like, hey, watch Money Heist, give it a try.
So I did.
And I hate to watch the whole thing.
Just a warning, I'm going to spoil everything, so if you're not all the way through Money Heist, you should probably dip out on this podcast until you get all the way through it.
Unless you just want to hear me really complain about it and then watch so you too can feel the pain of watching just excruciatingly poorly written tripe.
Because boy, that's what Money Heist is.
So, Money Heist is basically two big robberies.
The first part, which is two seasons, is the first big robbery.
And then the second two seasons are the second big robbery, which still hasn't finished.
We have yet to resolve Big Robbery Number Two.
So, we'll start from the start.
So, Big Robbery Number One.
Big Robbery Number One is they're going to raid the place where the Spanish government prints $50 euro notes.
And they're just going to take control of the printing presses, print out a billion dollars in euros, and get out of Dodge with a bunch of money.
And that's the plan.
And the whole point of the show is that the guy who organized the plan, whose name is The Professor, is a super genius who has meticulously crafted this plan over years and years of just constant study and analysis.
And the whole point of the show is that he's always 20 steps ahead of the police, who can never defeat him.
And the plan almost gets destroyed at the very beginning because one of the bank robbers gets shot at.
And another bank robber, when they're told not to kill anyone, she opens fire on the cops.
But because this show is aggressively G.I.
Joe in nature, She only wounds them.
The bad guys never kill anyone because it would make them look bad.
And by bad guys, I mean the criminals.
Who are supposed to be the good guys in the show, but they're the robbers.
They're the bad guys.
And the professor's always like, don't kill anyone, don't shed any blood, we have to be good and maintain our public image.
And immediately, Tokyo, the main character of the show, in the narration, even though the professor's really the main character, She's such a moron, she just opens fire on the cops and wounds them and almost kills them, but because the plot demands they don't die, they don't die.
The cops in this show being completely invulnerable to obvious murder is a recurring theme, and we will get into that as time goes on.
So, anyhow, our eight criminals, who are all incredibly hardened, seasoned professionals, who have all incredible expertise in their fields.
We have an expert counterfeiter, we have an expert hacker, we have expert stick-up artists, we have muscles who are really good with heavy artillery.
Everyone has an incredibly Complete group of skills.
They have incredible knowledge about something.
There's a reason why they're on the team, and it's because they're very good.
They're the best of the best at their profession of criminality.
That's why the professor has picked them, and that's why they're gonna be in the robbery conducting this incredibly high-stakes operation.
Remember that it's very important for the second heist.
So, you have these eight dedicated, hardcore criminals.
And they go in, and they do the robbery, and everything goes great.
Of course, they have a lot of interpersonal squabbling.
So, at least 25%, if not about 50% or more of the dialogue in the bank robbery scenes is one gang member pointing a gun at another gang member.
Everyone's always mad at each other.
The titular leader of the group, named Berlin, is constantly having people point guns at him.
He's constantly pointing guns at them.
Everyone's mad at everyone.
The gang hate each other, and they're just barely keeping it together.
Except for when the plot demands they operate in perfect synchronicity and as a well-oiled machine.
In those cases, they do so.
So...
It's really obvious they hate each other, and it's really obvious they're around each other's throats constantly.
But besides that, again, the Professor's just overwhelming professor-ness in his impossible, impossible goodness makes it so they triumph no matter what.
They always overcome everything.
They always have an ace in the hole.
They always have incredible luck and timing and planning.
So whenever they need to get away with something, they just get away with it.
One of the ridiculous plot points of the show is they basically need the second in command of the police investigation to be a dude wearing thick glasses because then they need that guy to go into the bank as a nurse for a wounded victim.
And once they get him in there, they make him take off his glasses, belt, his shoes.
They run him through a metal detector screening device.
And while he's laying on the ground, they drill a hole in one of the legs of his glasses.
They put in a recording device, and then they seal it up.
And then he goes in, and they just hear everything that's said that's important.
Every important bit of exposition they need for the rest of the show, they get it from them.
And never not once does the police think we're bugged.
There's a bug in here somewhere.
Hey, Angel, the guy that seconded you into the investigation, you went into the
printing area, the bank, and they took all your personal belongings. You think they
might have put a bug in your shoe or your glasses or your wallet or anything
else they took from you? If they had possession of your stuff for a few
minutes, they could have slipped something on you. Nope, they never think
about that. Never in a million years do they come to that conclusion. The moment
that the lead investigator figures out that it's either her or Angel that has
been giving the bad guys information, She just assumes he's a rat and he assumes she's a rat.
Neither one of them for a moment thinks, wait a minute, they planted something on me.
I'm bugged.
The cops are so breathtakingly stupid in this show.
And it hurts.
It actually hurts to think about it.
So then, We get into the ridiculous plot armor of the Professor.
And I can accept all kinds of dumb plot armor for a character in order for them to survive and continue on in the story.
But when the plot armor actually is aggressively insulting to reality and makes no sense and is actually impossible, that's when I say, okay, wait, let's stop.
Let's dial this back a minute.
No one thought that this was a bad idea.
And the thing about this is that they didn't have to do the stupid things they did.
The Professor could have gotten away with these things.
Well, one of them.
The first one, they didn't have to do it.
The second one is just so dumb.
It's such an egregious plot hole that I don't even know why you put that series of events into the story because you can't resolve it in a good way.
It's just such trash.
So the first one, there's a witness who saw the professor.
And he's talking to the police.
And the police have out their laptop, and they're typing away at what's his nose look like?
And the guy's like, oh, his nose is like this.
And they're like, OK, we got his nose.
Now what?
And they're just typing away, and they're putting together this composite sketch.
The finished project product of this sketch is literally just the professor. It's like they took a
Actual headshot of him as a model and then digitized it slightly and then put it into the computer
So I mean you've never seen a sketch look this perfect in the history of the world. I mean, it's stupid how
Perfect a match that says you would know it was him immediately. It's not like any sketch
You've ever seen where it's like yeah, that could be a lot of people. Nope. They just pinned it
They just absolutely have a perfect drawing of this guy and that's it
and what happens is is through a Rube Goldbergian series of events the professor is able to
broadcast in to the tent where the guy is giving The description to the police of what the professor looks like, and he broadcasts into the tent in Russian, because the guy speaks Russian, that like, if you tell them what I look like, I will kill your mother, I will kill your family, I will destroy you, you will die, you must stand down, you cannot do this to me, or you will pay a terrible price.
And in response to this, the guy frantically deletes the photo.
And the sketch artists are like, oh, what are we going to do?
And everyone just looks at the guy.
They're like, what's going on?
And then the professor runs away.
And the witness starts crying and screaming and yelling, I won't talk.
I won't talk.
That's it.
I'm done.
I'm out of here.
Fuck all of you.
I won't do it.
I won't rat on the guy.
And it wasn't like they left this dude alone with the sketchbook and told him to draw it.
The police were working on the sketch with him.
They saw the sketch.
They can put it back together.
They can get it within 90% of where it was, if not 100%, because they saw it.
They saw what he did.
They heard his description.
They can remake it.
It was such a ridiculously stupid series of events.
All you have to do in that spot is have the guy get ready to give the description and then the professor threatens him and it's over.
And it's fine.
You don't have this terrible, stupid plot hole where apparently the cops who helped him draw the sketch got hit by a neuralyzer and didn't remember what he said.
So that was just like really took me out of the suspension of disbelief as it were.
And then the next one, and this one's the unforgivable one, is Angel suspects that the guy who's trying to sleep with the lead investigator is a bad guy and might even be the Professor.
And that's the duality of the show.
The professor's on the outside communicating with their bank robbers on the inside, and he's also aggressively attempting to court the lead investigator and to have a relationship with her.
He flirts with her on the phone as well, but he meets her in person and they hit it off and they're getting together.
And Angel also has wanted to get in bed with her, but she's rejected him.
So Angel's mad at this guy because she wants to sleep with the professor and that pisses him off.
So Angel meets up with the professor, they talk, and then he finally grabs, he steals a spoon that the professor has placed his thumb on.
And he takes the spoon back to forensics and they have some fingerprints From when the professor did the broadcast into the tent to scare the guy who was giving the description.
He did that from a police car and he left prints in that car.
And Angel's like, okay, analyze this print against the prints in the car and tell me if you find anything.
And they get a hit.
So, Angel is calling up the lead investigator lady, who will eventually go by the code name Lisbon, because, spoiler alert, she's poorly written and stupid.
And so he calls up Lisbon and he's like, hey Lisbon, guess what?
I found out that the guy that you're having sex with this very moment is actually the big bad guy of the show and you should like probably stop having sex with him and arrest him for his endless crimes and be a hero because that would be awesome.
But he can't give her that message because her voicemail is full.
So then he calls her senile, Alzheimer's-ridden mother.
And this is just a big plot point of the show, is that the mother has horrible memory problems.
She takes down all these notes for everything because she can't remember anything.
And that's just the way she is.
Her mind's falling apart.
And he calls up the mother who has crippling dementia and is like, Hey, tell your daughter that this guy, the guy that she's having sex with right now is the bad guy and stop having sex with him and arrest him ASAP.
Thank you, Alzheimer's granny.
Bye.
He doesn't like, I don't know, call other police people.
Or anyone also in the government or anyone.
And most importantly of all, he doesn't text message anyone.
Because God knows you couldn't just send a text message to someone when their voicemail is full.
He calls up Lisbon and voicemail is full.
Oh no!
Your voicemail is full.
I'll just text you.
Or I'll message you on Facebook.
Or I'll text you through WhatsApp.
Or a million other ways I can relay this information to you.
And again, because the plot demands it, he immediately gets into a massive car accident and is in a coma for the duration of the rest of the robbery.
So he can't give that information to her until it's far too late.
Because this show is just ridiculous with its plot devices.
But that one right there was just so egregious that it blows my mind.
They make it incredibly clear that this is the modern day.
It's 2017 when they filmed the show.
It's the modern day.
Everyone's using all the technology.
It's the way the world works.
Now I don't blame Sina Grandma for not texting because she's probably not in the texting generation.
But Angel definitely texts, and Lisbon definitely texts, so there's no reason why that wouldn't happen.
The moment he gets the message from the phone that she has her voicemail full, he should just pull over to the side of the road, as soon as he can find a spot, and just sends her a text saying, by the way, the professor's the guy you're having sex with.
Probably arrest him now.
That'd be great.
And so it's such a terrible plot hole.
It makes no sense because there's no justification for why he wouldn't do that.
There's no way that when you've cracked the case, when you've solved it, and not only have you solved it, you've gotten rid of the guy that you hate, the guy that's sleeping with the girl who wouldn't sleep with you.
This is the ultimate revenge You probably get that information out ASAP.
You don't just sit there going, oh, voicemail full, fuck, what am I going to do now?
And the voicemail full thing is just so pathetic.
I mean, it's just so ridiculous that that's how he can't call her.
Because again, I'll say that for the last time, text message, seriously, fuck you.
Awful.
So, all that goes the way it does.
And now, this is the thing that really, just the finishing blow of all of this terrible crap is when Lisbon finally catches him, when the inspector finally catches him, it's because he makes the most ridiculous mistake in the world.
He's so on top of things and he's so absolutely, incredibly careful and incredibly just, he just doesn't make mistakes.
He's detail orientated to the very last inch.
He micromanages everything out.
The number of steps you walk in a patrol, I mean all of it.
He's just precision incarnate.
And he gets caught because they did a thing where they tried to fake that Angel was waking up from his coma.
As a result, he was going to then tell, they knew that Angel had figured out who the bad guy was from the spoon, because they had gotten some smaller text message, voicemail that was like, yeah, I figured out who it was or something.
Oh, they figured it out.
They knew that Angel knew who it was, and once he woke up, they'd get the information.
And so they sent out the false information that he was waking up from his coma, and they did this so that they would try to flush out the bad guy who would then come to kill Angel before he would talk.
And the professor knew that this was probably a lie, but he had to confirm it was a lie, so he sent in a dozen people dressed as clowns, and then he came in as a clown And then after he came in as a clown he was able to figure out that it was a ruse and he ran away and that was that.
But the thing about that was he wore a giant orange wig and then when he was out on his date with the investigator Lisbon he...
left a strand of orange hair on his jacket and she sees it and then she figures it out and she begins the process of not turning him into the police because at this point she really loves him and now she's just so mad at him and how dare you break my heart you by being the bad guy and then so on and so forth and eventually she decides to just join his team because that's what any woman would do when she has a five-year-old daughter and a dementia-ridden mother who You abandon your tiny child and your assisted living needs mother to go have sex with a criminal mastermind who could any day now be captured by international law enforcement and take you into jail with him.
That's the incredibly logical, incredibly rational thing that a lifelong policewoman would do in that spot.
Because she's an incredibly well-written character that's very rational and accurate.
I really fucking hate that part of her character.
It's just so absurd.
In the second season, every police character, every good guy who interacts with her should have been like, so, abandon your daughter?
Aren't you a fucking piece of shit?
I mean, just literally.
Everyone should have just hated her.
They should have just... There's way too much kind of jovial, hey sister, how's it going?
Join the other team, eh?
And it's like, nah, it'd probably be like, hey, you abandoned your family to fuck a criminal.
Wow, you're kind of the worst human being that's ever lived.
So, anyhow.
The season comes to a dramatic conclusion.
The bad guys get away with the money.
Their leader in the prison, Berlin, the leader in the bank, Berlin, gets killed.
One of the henchmen named Oslo gets killed.
The father of one of the younger guys, his name is Moscow, he gets killed.
All the young people are absolute dogshit, terrible human beings.
All the bad guys are named after cities.
Tokyo is our main bad guy character that's not a leader.
She's a terrible hothead, irrational, stupid broad.
Massage knee, you're gonna hear about that in a moment.
I'm just being sarcastic about the broad thing anyways.
Denver is a dumb hothead, piece of shit, idiot.
Rio is a fucking loser, moron.
All these characters are so deeply unlikable and stupid.
I don't know why television decided, like after The Sopranos, someone just decided, you know what television needs?
Just fucking sociopaths all the time.
No one likable, no one sympathetic.
Every character is just a terrible human being that you probably want to see murdered.
That's what television needs lots of.
Just absolutely contemptible human beings that are completely irredeemable.
That's what everyone wants to see nowadays.
Just trash human beings that are just horrid.
Horrid human beings.
Bad people.
No.
None of them.
They can all go to hell.
So that's what we have.
That's the magic of television that we get.
And so what happens is after they get away with the money, they run away, everyone's happy, the bad guys win, the good guys lose, the investigator lady figures out where the professor is and she runs off to be with him.
One of the hostages Uh, decides to marry one of the terrorists, and when they talk about Stockholm Syndrome, she decides to take the name Stockholm as her gang name, which doesn't make it any less shitty.
That's what happened.
That she is literally a victim of Stockholm Syndrome thinking she's in love with a person who shot her in the leg and tortured her and was just a colossal piece of shit to her.
So all of that is, like, it's ugly.
It's really just kind of crummy thing.
That is a part of the show where it's like, hey, this guy fucking was just banging a hostage and now she totally loves him.
And Berlin also took a hostage as his sex partner and then he got killed so we didn't get to have that be a second Stockholm relationship.
But the guys in the show are just pigs that are scum and they're awful.
Now, We go into Season 2, and the hook for Season 2 is that Ryo, who is Tokyo's boyfriend, Ryo fucks up, uses a satellite phone that can be tracked, and gets caught.
Tokyo was on the other end of the phone call, she escapes from being captured, and then she goes and sees the professor.
And tells the professor, we're going to get Rio back.
I love him.
And so they reconvene the group, and they're like, OK, now we're going to pull off a crazy mega caper.
And the point of this mega caper will be we will get Rio back, and we will save him.
Then we'll also steal all the gold out of the Spanish equivalent of Fort Knox.
And this is the idea.
This is the hook of the second season.
Now, one of the first things they do in the second season is they explain that Rio and his hacking expertise and skill and acumen that they no longer have, because he's currently in Guantanamo Bay being tortured, has been replaced by 64 Pakistani hackers that can do his job on their behalf.
So they're just like, we've outsourced Rio's job to this gang of Pakistani hackers.
And that's their point.
And they make it abundantly clear that the gang has stolen about a billion dollars worth of money from the bank.
So they have an unlimited budget.
They have all the money in the world.
They can literally do anything they want.
They are practically gods.
And so, what do these gods who are sitting on a billion dollars do?
They run into the bank and rob it, or the Fort Knox, and they rob it.
And you just pause for a moment.
The record just sort of skips, and you say, OK, let's review what happened the last time you guys did this, the last time you guys did a multi-day robbery of a heavily defended and secured building.
You emotionally broke down and everyone pointed a gun at everyone at every moment.
And there was just constant screaming and yelling and infighting.
And you all hated each other and were just under the constant stress and agony of being
in an incredibly intense, dangerous situation where any of you could be killed at any moment
and three of you ended up dying.
And you want to do this to yourselves again.
You want to put yourselves in this unbelievably shitty spot again.
When you thought about the hacking problem you had with Rio and you were like, oh, we'll
just hire 64 Pakistanis to handle that for us.
Yeah.
You don't think you could find a guy that was fresh out of the Navy SEALs.
And be like, hey, Navy SEAL guy, here's 100 million euros.
Wait, that isn't enough for you?
Okay, here's 250 million euros.
You go find 10 of the baddest motherfuckers on God's green earth, and you and those guys go execute this plan that we
have for you, and crush the shit out of the Spanish Fort Knox, and get our boy Rio back and save the day for us.
And then boom, those guys do the plan perfectly, military precision, and they just win. And the gang that again is
sitting on a billion dollar pot can just go out and do drugs and fuck each other and just drink and party and
celebrate and then turn on the news and see that Rio got released and be like, woo!
Ain't it great to be sitting on a billion clams and you can just buy anything you want?
Now, instead of doing that, they just do it themselves.
And guess what happens immediately?
The first episode that they're inside the Spanish Fort Knox, Tokyo has a gun in the mouth of the leader of the robbery.
Because that's what they do.
They're just at each other's throats immediately, constantly screaming and yelling at each other and just infighting at all times.
And it's like, why?
Why would you put these incompetent morons In this situation when you can just hire competency with your limitless pocketbook.
And the police explain this constantly.
Whenever they're talking about the technological sophistication of the robbers, they're like, they have a billion dollar bankroll, they can do anything.
We have to work under the assumption that their massive bankroll allows them all kinds of flexibility.
to achieve whatever they want, whatever kind of sophisticated hacking technology they need,
they got it. Whatever kind of tools they need, they bought them. They've got everything.
They're outfunding us. We're the goddamn Spanish government, and we have less money than they do.
We're in trouble here because we are literally underdogs because these criminals have so much
money and power.
We're in trouble.
But the money and power that the criminals have wouldn't just get them to hire a team of actually competent criminals to pull off the heist.
And this brings up the most ridiculous part of the second season, besides the fact that the entire second season shouldn't fucking happen because, as I explained, it's dumb that the characters are actually doing the robbery.
They bring Stockholm, who was just an accountant or a secretary, in the first season.
She goes in as a bank robber in the second season.
And she and her Stockholm relationship husband, Denver, have giant arguments about this.
And she calls him a misogynist because she's like, you just think I can't do it because I'm a woman.
And it's like, well, no, in the first season, They explained that like literally all the criminals that were doing this robbery were incredible experts in their fields and the best of the best.
None of them were literally a secretary or just an office working drone a couple of years ago who then fell into a kidnapper hostage relationship, got married to the kidnapper, and now want to do crimes with them.
And it's like, it's just, it's so like the fact that the professor would let her go on the mission is just shows how it's stupid.
It's so dumb that Stockholm is in on this because she's not a hardened criminal.
She's not someone who's devoted her life to crime.
She's an office drone who frigging thought she loved a terrorist and now has had his child because that's weird and sick and fucked up.
And then, on top of that, when the Professor is out doing his mastermind, communicating from the outside into the inside with the bank robbers, he's now joined by his lover, Lisbon, the investigator from the first season.
Now, at least Lisbon has the inside knowledge of being a policewoman all of her life.
But she being there also leads to all kinds of infighting because they have their personal shit to deal with on top of the whole bank robbery.
And the entire show is just Denver and Stockholm fighting and arguing and vowing to get divorced after they leave the Spanish Fort Knox.
Tokyo and Rio break up and vow that they're going to never see each other again.
Denver and Tokyo start talking about getting together.
Rio and Stockholm start talking about getting together.
Lisbon and the professor have huge fucking arguments because they're mad at each other constantly because they're mad at each other and they can't get their personal and professional lives separate either.
And it's just so dumb.
It's just like, you know, again, why are you doing this to yourselves?
Why have all this crap happening?
And the real problem in this season, besides the fact that none of it makes any sense, and the Professor is literally God in the second season.
As ridiculous as he was in the first season, in the second season, he's just God.
They open the second season with the professor sending blimps throughout Madrid that rain
down 50 euro notes all over the town.
And then he hacks into the main big screen of basically Madrid's Times Square and broadcasts
a message to everybody.
It's like the scene from V from Vendetta when V hijacks the television and broadcasts to
everybody.
And you just look at it and it's like, okay, so this guy's God now.
can buy a bunch of blimps.
Mark them up with the logo of his criminal enterprise.
Have them rain money all over town.
And no one saw that coming.
No one could have caught that.
He's unable to hack into this public television screen and broadcast his message.
He can do anything.
He's just omniscient.
And it's just so ridiculous that At this point, when they conduct their second robbery, after having stolen a billion dollars the first time, you know what happens?
The powers that be just literally hit the building with two MOABs and just blow it into a crater in the ground.
They bomb the Spanish Fort Knox until you can literally see, they make a hole so big you can see the Earth's core pulsing at the bottom of it.
Because they just kill them.
They just kill everybody.
They kill all the hostages.
They're like, these people stole a billion dollars.
Their leader is literally a god.
No, we're not taking any chances with these guys.
We're just going to kill his team and then we're going to find him and we're going to kill him.
At one point in the second season, they have a drone that finds their location and is chasing them.
They're in an ambulance and a drone is chasing them.
And they're like, oh shit, a drone is chasing us.
We've got to get away.
And it's like, you know what that drone actually is in real life?
It's a predator drone and you're droned in that helicopter and everything in a hundred yard radius is the victim of a predator drone strike and you're dead.
You're absolutely dead.
They just kill you.
They do not allow the international criminal mastermind that's fucking with them in the most vicious way as possible to survive.
No, you're not getting a little camera drone following your ambulance.
You're getting a drone with a gun on it that will whittle death down upon your ambulance until it is disabled and then the drone's gonna fly around and make sure you're dead and kill you.
And that's gonna be The non-lethality of the police in this series is hilarious.
And on top of that, the non-lethality of the bullets in this series is hilarious.
There are so many times where people just would have to die and they don't.
There's one gunfight where this security officer inside the Spanish Fort Knox has a machine gun and he is firing into an elevator that four people are in.
Elevators are really small.
It is a very confined space.
He is in a narrow hallway, ringing bullets into an elevator, and he cannot hit any of them.
And then he gets pinned down in an alcove, and he is taking fire from both sides, and they fire like a couple hundred bullets at him, and they don't hit him either.
Then, um, he kills his hostage, that he was the only thing that was preventing the criminals from shooting him.
He kills his hostage and runs away, and he has to run at least 10, maybe 20 steps to get into cover.
And in his sprint, a hail of gunfire goes at him, and they just miss.
Everyone just misses him.
It's so ridiculous.
It's Stormtrooper inaccuracy.
It's just G.I.
Joe firefights.
Nobody can hit anybody, ever.
It's so absurd.
The other thing, at the start of the bank robbery, they have Tokyo, who is publicly known as one of the bank robbers.
The whole point why they caught Ryo in Tokyo is that they were publicly known.
Rio goes into the bank and she goes to see the governor of the bank and nobody recognizes her which you would think that after the whole professor goes on the big screen and gives his I am God speech and the balloons with the dolly-masked hooded figure which is their sigil was dropping the money you'd think the people would be on high alert for Tokyo and Rio And the known criminals that were identified from the robbery to show up.
And so they don't notice Tokyo, which is dumb.
But then Tokyo and Nairobi, the woman who ends up getting killed as the security guy is hostage.
And the Nairobi story arc is very weird because she gets shot, they go through this harrowing process of saving her, she's recovering, and then after she recovers Tokyo and Nairobi are facing down five armed security officers, one of whom is the security guard that kills Nairobi later on in the show.
There's neither here nor there.
Tokyo and Nairobi are facing down five armed security officers, one of whom is
the security guard that kills Nairobi later on in the show and
the story of him is so dumb because in this moment
he's just one of five security guards.
He's a dude.
There's nothing special about him.
But then when we get to the episodes when he starts raining terror upon the bad guys and trying to kill them and acting like the predator, hunting them down, suddenly he's the ultimate badass.
Suddenly he's just this stone-cold killer, just this monster, just this incredible guy.
The thing is, is that during this initial scene where it's five of them versus two of the two women bank robbers, there's innumerate times where one of the five security guards has a headshot, a clean headshot, on Tokyo while she's holding a hostage.
She's holding a hostage in front of her, but one of the security guards is not, the hostage is not blocking his line of fire.
He can just shoot her in the head and kill her.
And at no time do they do this.
And again, if they didn't know who she was, once they realize that they're trying to kidnap the governor of the bank and the whole Dolly Mask thing and the whole Professor Speech thing, you know these people are the ultra-serious bank-robbing terrorist organization from before.
So you should, I don't know, kill them and stop this.
And it's legal for you to kill someone when they have a hostage.
But this stupid convention, and I really hate it because the scriptwriter will write it to work out the way they want it to whenever they want it to.
If they need the police to stand down because the terrorist has grabbed, they've got the hostage, they've got their arm around the hostage's neck, they've got the gun pointed at the hostage's head, That typical cliched positioning of the terrorist to hostage situation.
If they need the cops to stand down, the cops stand down.
If they need the cops to hit a headshot on the terrorist to kill them, the cops hit a headshot to kill the terrorist.
And it can go either way, and it just depends on what the scriptwriter needs to write in order to make the story progress.
So it's a very cliched, very hackneyed situation, and I really wish no one would ever do it again.
Because we've shown that the resolution can be either way.
So you have the fact that these people should not be doing this to themselves.
It's dumb that they are.
And you have the fact that no one can hit anyone with a bullet except for when it's good for the plot that they actually do this.
And the dumbest thing that happens, and maybe not the dumbest, but it's one of the stupidest things, they get to this point where the police are going to launch a full-scale assault on the bank, the Spanish Fort Knox.
They're going to get in there and they're going to kill these assholes.
And they have an armored car come racing towards the building.
and one of the bank robbers shoots a rocket launcher fires a missile into the armored car and it hits the armored car and the armored car explodes it just blows up and you see a cop like jump out of the armored car and his entire body is engulfed in flames And he lives!
Because the story is so dumb that the cops can't die when their car takes a rocket launcher direct on.
And you can say it's an armored car, it was designed to take a rocket launcher hit, but no!
The thing exploded!
The blast wave would just shatter bones and rupture internal organs.
You wouldn't die from the fire catching you alive.
You'd be just killed by the blast wave, or at least badly injured by it, and there'd be shrapnel going into your body.
I mean, it's so dumb, the way the cops just survive all the terrible shit the bad guys do to them.
Because it's part of the plot that the bad guys don't actually kill anybody and are, like, moral.
And the whole Guantanamo Bay human rights thing is weird.
Again, because Stockholm Syndrome leads to a baby and a wedding.
That's cool, right?
Yeah.
And the other thing is, and the end of the final caper is, the main reason why the bad guys were able to get away with as much as they've gotten away with is they actually have access to the state secrets of Spain and they air the dirty laundry of Spain.
And the woman who is in charge of the investigation to defeat them, She was torturing Rio at Guantanamo Bay, and she's a bad person, and she's committed human rights violations.
So, she gets fired from her job, and she's very angry about it.
But then, she's like, oh well, I'm fired from my job, what am I going to do?
I'll just capture the professor.
So, the most important thing that any of these people can do in law enforcement, which is to capture the professor and win the game, The moment she's laid off from work, she puts two and two together and bangs it out.
And at the end of the cliffhanger ending of the series at this moment is she breaks into the Professor's hideout and has him at gunpoint and then the credits roll.
And this is not a cliffhanger to me because it means nothing.
Because every character in this show has been held at gunpoint by everyone at all times.
She's just going to hold him at gunpoint for five minutes and the next thing you know they're going to be best friends.
He's going to leave Lisbon for her.
She's going to fall in love with him because that's what all the women in the show do.
They just fall in love with the criminals because it's what you do when you're a woman on television.
Or, and I think this is something that will almost assuredly happen, this is my actual bet.
is they have made the bad guy, the main bad guy of this series, the woman, the Guantanamo Torturer woman, she is massively pregnant.
She has a giant baby bulge.
She's like nine months and ready to pop at any moment.
She's going to be about ready to kill the Professor.
Her water's going to break.
The Professor is going to deliver her baby.
I'm almost positive of it.
This is what's going to happen.
That she and the Professor are going to deliver the baby, and then they're going to bond over the fact that he helped her give birth, and then they'll let bygones be bygones, and then he'll steal all the gold.
She'll take a cut of the proceeds in order to be quiet or whatever and that'll be that.
She'll join the team.
And this is what's so silly about what happened at the end of the show.
And also the fact that she solved it in no time at all.
Everyone's been trying to figure out the Professor.
They've been chasing him, chasing him, chasing him for the entire series.
And then in one episode she just solves the puzzle, which is just so ridiculous.
This reminds me very much of the ending of the second season of 24, which made me incredibly angry.
Because the first season of 24 was a massive plot to assassinate.
The first guy who had a legitimate chance of being the first black president of the United States, David Palmer was his name.
And it was really, I don't know if he, I think he was maybe even before Obama, but it was very anogamous to Obama that like this was the nature of the character, that he was this historic person that could actually achieve this incredible moment for For black people and for America as a nation to rise up and win election as president and
The entire first season is predicated upon trying to kill this guy, and they thwart all these assassination attempts, and they solve all these riddles, all these puzzles, and they capture the bad guys, they prevent him from being assassinated, and the second season begins with him having won the presidency and serving as president.
So we have President Palmer, and he deals with the crisis of whatever the second season's crisis was.
It was nuclear bombs going off in America, and a potential false flag operation to generate a war in the Middle East.
And so the whole second season is that thing, and Palmer's dealing with it, and he gets 25th Amendment-ed, and all this other kind of political intrigue, but again, the main plot is just that kind of stuff.
And then, the final episode, after they've figured out what happened, they've solved how the bad guys were trying to do the false flag and trick us into going to war in the Middle East, They've stopped that from happening.
They've kept America from a needless war and all that good stuff.
The bad guy who has been thwarted is mad and then he calls up a woman and he's like, yo, lady person, execute plan B or whatever.
Click.
And then 10 minutes later, David Palmer, the President of the United States, is working a rope line and shaking hands with all kinds of happy constituents of the President.
And the woman is in the rope line, and she shakes his hand, and then he shakes a few more hands, and then he walks away, and he's waving to the crowd.
And then he looks at his hand and his hand's like all kinds of like mutilated and damaged and then he starts sweating and then he collapses and we fade to black with everyone rushing around the president trying to figure out what just happened to him.
And it was just like what really?
Like the entire first season was fucking trying to kill this guy and it was impossible and they had to work out all
these really convoluted like tough ways to get around the Secret Service and to
Solve the puzzle and do all this stuff and Keith or several ends like thwarting them
And it's this chess game going back and forth with David Palmer's life on the line
And then at the end of the second season this guy like literally calls up this girl
Like he's ordering a pizza from fucking Domino's and was like, oh, yeah, by the way, I killed the president for me
click and she just does she just comes perilously close to assassinating
the president and They turned out though. They actually ended up a cliffhanger
because they didn't know if they wanted to kill him or not They brought him back for the third season, but it just blew my mind that, like, you did all this work in season one to try to establish that assassinating someone is tough, and then in season two you're like, actually, it's not very tough at all.
Anyone can assassinate anyone if they really want to.
They just have to talk about it a little.
So, Detective Lady solves the puzzle in like two seconds, which is ridiculous.
But on top of that, she solves the puzzle after she's been relieved of duty.
Much as in the first season, when Lisbon solved the puzzle, she had already fallen in love with the Professor, so she wasn't actually going to arrest him and send him to jail and stop him.
So in this season, we once again have a woman who's deduced who the Professor is and figured out where he was and has him at gunpoint and is not in a position to actually turn him over to law enforcement and rectify the situation.
I mean, she could technically do that.
She could call them up and be like, hey, by the way, I've caught the Professor.
Come on down.
Here's my address.
But she's not going to do that.
We know she won't do that, because that's not the way this show works.
She and the Professor are going to have a dumb chat, and he's going to get away with it.
And then they're going to steal all the gold, and maybe they'll kill some other minor character.
And we'll have a crying scene, and that'll be that.
Because for all the kind of, like, silly drama they put into the show, it's really formulaic.
And it's just, it's really cheesy and lame.
I really, it blows my mind because everything that happened in the first season, they just repeat it in the second season.
They make the police a little, the police have a little more teeth to them.
But whenever the bad guys need to get away with something, whenever the bad guys need things to break their way, they just do.
They just get away with it.
They always find a way to just Pull off the win at the last possible second.
And it's really just not very good storytelling.
And... God.
God, the G.I.
Joe gunfire is so...
It's silly.
I mean, if you watch it, your eyes are going to roll into the back of your head just watching all these bullets fly everywhere and nobody ever gets hit.
I mean, it's just, it's absurd.
And what's really funny is like when they go into the bank, the first thing that happens is the security guy fires a shot and it hits the leader of the criminals in the eyes and blinds him and he has to have eye surgery.
So they established like right away that gunshots are really dangerous and scary.
And then the rest of the series is just, oh yeah, by the way, you can fire a million bullets and you're just not going to hit anybody, ever, under any circumstances.
Because the plot demands that no one gets hit by bullets under any circumstances.
Unless it is explicit that it's going to happen.
And then the incredible vast majority of the time those bullets will not be fatal.
Because why would we ever kill anyone?
Unless it's a really weird event like Nairobi's death, which again was just so, so bizarre that they went through all this trouble of saving her and rehabilitating her and then just killing her again.
Whatever.
Okay, I've gone over 50 minutes on this crap.
Holy shit.
I'm way too angry about Money Heist.
But now I've got it out of my system.
OK, Money Heist, to hell with you.
I'm going to start watching Ozarks.
I hope it's better.
You might get a review on that in a couple weeks.
So thanks for listening.
If you actually made it all the way through, no one left me any questions.
You all have better taste in television than me.
▲
Export Selection