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Shout out to UnknownMercenary for making a sacrifice to the Thing That Lives At The End Of The Thread. Sepinwall provides some interesting context quote:Cloke and Hamblin are both new to writing for the series (Cloke, who’s married to Glen Morgan, guest starred in season 4’s “The Field Where I Died,” while Hamblin has worked in the past as Morgan’s assistant), and part of a very small group of women to ever write for the show.
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Mar 2, 2018 01:52
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LesterGroans posted:"My Struggle III" was the only one I hated, and even that was a step up from I and II. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" and "Rm9sbG93ZXJz" are great, but even the rest of the episodes have ranged from forgettable at worst to really good. As long as there's a Darin Morgan episode per season, the rest of the episodes can be completely poo poo as far as I'm concerned and it will still be a net positive.
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Mar 2, 2018 01:59
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Gobbeldygook posted:Cloke, who’s married to Glen Morgan, I just now figured out why she was on X-Files, Millennium, and Space Above and Beyond.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:12
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I am so goddamned sick of television shows condescendingly telling me to put my phone away. I'm communicating with people I love and reading about topics that interest me. OOOOOH! EVIL! The printed word was going to be the death of culture. Movies were going to be the death of culture. Then radio. Then television. Then computers. Now phones. Old people fear change and project their fading relevance onto whatever the new thing is and if you're going to do it, at least do what Black Mirror does and go a little further beyond "scientific advancement bad."
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Mar 2, 2018 02:17
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Xfiles has been doing that since before there were cell phones. I swear there was an episode where a guy killed a bunch of people because his pager was displaying a message telling him to kill people instead of a phone number.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:20
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business hammocks posted:Xfiles has been doing that since before there were cell phones. I swear there was an episode where a guy killed a bunch of people because his pager was displaying a message telling him to kill people instead of a phone number. Yep, “Blood”. Also, the 7th episode of the show’s run featured an evil AI that ran an entire office building. And of course there’s “First Person Shooter”. Evil tech is old hat for the show.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:24
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Yes, and I'm tired of it.
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Mar 2, 2018 03:03
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It ate my post calling Babylon a bad episode 
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Mar 2, 2018 03:43
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The message wasn't "stop looking at your phone", it was "be nice to service workers".
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Mar 2, 2018 03:44
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LesterGroans posted:The message wasn't "stop looking at your phone", it was "be nice to service workers".
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Mar 2, 2018 03:48
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We got Scully laughing, owning a vibrator, and a blobfish. I don't care how the plot is any more, it was entertaining.
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Mar 2, 2018 04:22
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Extremely heavy-handed "get off your phone" bit here. Especially since there is no inter-character dialog halfway through the episode. I don't know if I get "tip your waiter" vibes from this because there was no actual waiter for Mulder to tip. The bit with Scully's vibrator was weird and shamey and the fact that they used the same joke three times doesn't exactly wrack up the points on the class-o-meter. The episode had no real motivation. A restaurant tried to kill Mulder for not tipping. It's not a rogue AI or a ghost of a dead hacker. It isn't even a proper X-File, it just kind of happens to them like it's something that could happen to anyone, for no reason. This is the episode my mother would have come up with after going out to dinner with my sister.
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Mar 2, 2018 06:16
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It really bothers me since neither Fox nor Scully were ever the "constantly on their phones" type of people. Fox especially, I mean him not being able to take a picture with his phone was literally a plot point of an episode last season. And since when did Scully live in this uber-technology house anyway? It kind of felt like the writers never actually watched an episode of the X-Files before.
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Mar 2, 2018 06:26
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How are so many people misunderstanding an episode when Fox basically looks into the camera and says it? How we treat AI is going to determine how AI treats us. I mean, geeze, it was really clearly spelled out. Mulder was abusive to the AI chefs (no tip.) Scully was abusive to her automated driver (don't talk to me.) Both actions were reflected back at them. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 2, 2018 06:34
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bull3964 posted:How are so many people misunderstanding an episode when Fox basically looks into the camera and says it?
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Mar 2, 2018 06:48
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Rm9sbG93ZXJz is base64 for Followers. Fox's stereo plays "Teach Your Children" The episode opens with a story about how the internet turned a chatbot crazy. There may have been some themes about human connection over isolation with tech, but a good chunk of the plot was dedicated to how we can poison our own creation. It was fairly one dimensional and I don't know that it really said much on the subject, but it really kept hammering that point home over and over. I enjoyed the episode though. It was interestingly shot and the lack of dialog was refreshing.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:04
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Yeah, I don't think this isn't really that much about getting off your phone, anyway -- they DO get off their phones toward the end, and doesn't solve the problem -- they actually survive because Mulder picks up the phone. It's a reasonable read of the ending, mind, but an equally plausible one is that we need to maintain our relationships and be compassionate, because we're building a world where we will regularly be interacting with entities that will not only learn from us, but behave in ways that are difficult or impossible to fully understand.
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Mar 2, 2018 07:52
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TheGamerGuy23 posted:It really bothers me since neither Fox nor Scully were ever the "constantly on their phones" type of people. Fox especially, I mean him not being able to take a picture with his phone was literally a plot point of an episode last season. "Mulder, if you had to do without a cellphone for two minutes, you'd lapse into catatonic schizophrenia."
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Mar 2, 2018 10:07
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LividLiquid posted:I am so goddamned sick of television shows condescendingly telling me to put my phone away. Settle down, beavis.
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Mar 2, 2018 15:06
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bull3964 posted:How are so many people misunderstanding an episode when Fox basically looks into the camera and says it? Nobody is misunderstanding it, they're disagreeing with it. It's literally impossible to misunderstand the message because the episode practically spells it in eight hundred foot letters that read, "THE AI LEARN FROM YOU." The problem is that it isn't done in a way that is at all interesting. Mulder fails to tip a drone-furnished restaurant because a) he got terrible service and b) what the gently caress does a drone with a tip anyway? So if you want to follow that through to its conclusion, you could at worst say the restaurant tries to kill Mulder for not forking over a 10% tip (and what the gently caress is it learning anyway? Wouldn't an AI learn to be stingy from that, not become a murder squad?) You could at best say Mulder demonstrated a lack of empathy but it still doesn't seem like the drone army is 'learning' from it, it seems more like they're extorting him. Also the idea that this could just happen, for not reason, outside of the context of an actual X-File is super heavy-handed and weird. TLDR; the AI isn't learning anything, it just freaks out because it doesn't get what it wants.
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Mar 2, 2018 16:40
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But AI is much stranger and weirder than that: this isn't just about learning from Mulder and Scully. All of the services they use are systems that have clearly already been in place for a while, and they've been learning from a whole collection of racists and trolls and shitheads before this week's episode. This is one of the unsettling things about deep learning: if you point an AI in the direction of a goal (walking, chess, getting a tip), they'll find strategies that a human will find incomprehensible or even horrifying. Mulder and Scully are just the poor saps who have to suffer from the results.
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Mar 2, 2018 17:57
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vseslav.botkin posted:But AI is much stranger and weirder than that: this isn't just about learning from Mulder and Scully. All of the services they use are systems that have clearly already been in place for a while, and they've been learning from a whole collection of racists and trolls and shitheads before this week's episode. This is one of the unsettling things about deep learning: if you point an AI in the direction of a goal (walking, chess, getting a tip), they'll find strategies that a human will find incomprehensible or even horrifying. Mulder and Scully are just the poor saps who have to suffer from the results. The idea of Mulder and Scully just being the poor saps that anything happens to strains my sense of disbelief. Look, I get it. The episode is trying to tap into fears of what happens when the human element is removed from the equation. And at times, it succeeds in that way; but it does so in some silly, silly ways.
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Mar 2, 2018 18:00
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The X-Files is no stranger to gimmick episodes, I'm not sure how this one strains disbelief more than others. There's always been a subset of episodes that are even further removed from MOTW to the point where you could question their inclusion in canon. The fun has always been to see the character reactions to these situations. Unless you want to say Reggie really was in all those important scenes over the years.
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Mar 2, 2018 18:38
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Loved when Mulder went into the kitchen and the robots stopped what they were doing to stare at him
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Mar 2, 2018 19:31
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Yeah I thought it was a really fun episode.
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Mar 2, 2018 19:38
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bull3964 posted:The X-Files is no stranger to gimmick episodes, I'm not sure how this one strains disbelief more than others. There's always been a subset of episodes that are even further removed from MOTW to the point where you could question their inclusion in canon. The fun has always been to see the character reactions to these situations. They’ve just walked into poo poo plenty of times, like that time loop episode where they barely did anything, or the time they met the genie. Or the one where Scully was sad that her professor she had an affair with died and she enjoyed Enya and Moby tracks for a while.
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Mar 2, 2018 20:51
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Milo and POTUS posted:Settle down, beavis.
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Mar 2, 2018 22:58
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this episode was amazing and i'm not surprised that it has some nerds upset
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Mar 3, 2018 04:05
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Yeah I was honestly not expecting some of these reactions to an episode that had me cracking up pretty constantly. I'm certain the whole thing comes from the idea of writing a Black Mirror episode only funny. Doesn't get much more absurd than an AI blowing up your house because you didn't tip the robot chef or told the robot car to stop talking to you. e: Hell, out of all the weird poo poo that happens in that episode, the only thing that made me scoff was the 3D printer gun... not even considering the firing mechanism, that thing would take like 12 hours to turn goo into plastic bullets. Meanwhile the whole episode, I'd been expecting one of the drones to come bearing a pistol, which is frighteningly possible. Also am I the only one who interpreted that chemtrail scene as "while you idiots are looking up and thinking the government is trying to mind-control you with jets, you're missing what's right in front of you- they're doing all kinds of poo poo to the food and we treat that as totally normal" which, gently caress, I'm not trying to kick off a huge derail about modern agricultural practices, but that's how I interpreted the scene. Not that it was validating the idea of chemtrails at all. Maybe because I used to listen to the Bill Burr podcast a lot and that's one of the things he rants about. Ol' "Tony Monsanto". Diet Poison fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Mar 3, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 05:16
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LividLiquid posted:Thank you for this nuanced and interesting rebuttal. Blow it out your rear end
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Mar 3, 2018 21:07
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Milo and POTUS posted:Blow it out your rear end Anyway, the episode itself was fine. The ending was just so loving preachy that it undercut what was already a very strong thematic ending in "we need to be better teachers."
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Mar 3, 2018 22:52
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LividLiquid posted:Your edgy demeanor has convinced me that yours is the one true way, and I wish to subscribe to your Tumblr. I get what your saying and I kinda agree, but it also could have been much worse. What we got was a mostly wordless couple of looks that didn’t beat you over the head with it. Had Carter been writing the episode we’d have gotten a 3 minute outro monologue.
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Mar 3, 2018 23:00
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Diet Poison posted:Yeah I was honestly not expecting some of these reactions to an episode that had me cracking up pretty constantly. I'm certain the whole thing comes from the idea of writing a Black Mirror episode only funny Prav posted:this episode was amazing and i'm not surprised that it has some nerds upset Since this is the last ever season of X-Files it was great to see the writers stretch beyond the usual MOW and alien invasion for this whimsically frightening look at what's to come. And only a few weeks ago I read about a fully-automated coffee shop in Japan, so the robotic sushi bar isn't much of a stretch. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tokyo-robot-coffee-cafe-1.4516256 oh and 
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Mar 4, 2018 16:46
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A lot of posts mentioning Black Mirror but exactly zero mentioning Maximum Overdrive?
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Mar 5, 2018 14:06
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:Mulder and Scully trapped in the Black Mirror universe. I think I like it. Popelmon posted:Why is her house so much nicer than Mulder's?  LividLiquid posted:I am so goddamned sick of television shows condescendingly telling me to put my phone away. LividLiquid posted:Old people fear change and project their fading relevance onto whatever the new thing is and if you're going to do it, at least do what Black Mirror does and go a little further beyond "scientific advancement bad." Mendrian posted:Extremely heavy-handed "get off your phone" bit here. Especially since there is no inter-character dialog halfway through the episode. I don't know if I get "tip your waiter" vibes from this because there was no actual waiter for Mulder to tip. TheGamerGuy23 posted:It really bothers me since neither Fox nor Scully were ever the "constantly on their phones" type of people. Fox especially, I mean him not being able to take a picture with his phone was literally a plot point of an episode last season. And since when did Scully live in this uber-technology house anyway? It kind of felt like the writers never actually watched an episode of the X-Files before. Mendrian posted:The idea of Mulder and Scully just being the poor saps that anything happens to strains my sense of disbelief. Mendrian posted:Look, I get it. The episode is trying to tap into fears of what happens when the human element is removed from the equation. And at times, it succeeds in that way; but it does so in some silly, silly ways.
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Mar 5, 2018 15:49
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Tiggum posted:It's not about the danger of removing the human element though. It's using AI as shorthand for "the future" because you'd need a lot more exposition to get the message across if the future people were just ordinary humans. The message is about what lessons we teach those who will run the world after us, whether that be human beings or robots - they're going to learn from those of us who are here now and we're going to be relying on them to treat us well. If you teach your kids to care only for themselves and treat others like poo poo then don't be surprised when they care only for themselves and treat you like poo poo. Refusing to tip a robot who can't spend money is not the same as treating them like poo poo. EDIT: There are like three or four different interpretations of the episode floating around in this very thread right now, which is fine, but it's making critique very difficult. There is no fundamental misunderstanding here. I think everybody in this thread probably has a pretty grounded education in modern sci-fi. We all watched the same episode. Part of the issue is that we deal with technology every day, and the stuff in this episode that is closer to the reality we live in currently - cellphone advertisements and location-based advertisement - are invasive, hated things that pretty much nobody likes. Taking that and trying to follow it to its logical conclusion - What if cellphone apps, but too much? - is just goofy because it lays the blame for their 'mistreatment' on us. I don't think this is a prescient vision of the future, this is literally what my mother thinks the world will look like in three years. But that's an argument for another thread. Am I supposed to sympathize with the AI? Am I supposed to conclude it's humanity's fault the AI's behavior? Well in a literal sense, it is; somebody made the drat thing. And that's the part that's puzzling. The machines aren't learning from Mulder and Skully, they're just made to be assholes. Which works as a horror idea but runs contrary to the message the episode seems to want me to take away from it. Using the whole episode as a metaphor for 'the future' is valid but then we get back to 'put away your cellphones kids!' because this is exactly what anti-technology Boomers and Millenials think the world is going to look like in their nightmares. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 16:41
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Mendrian posted:Refusing to tip a robot who can't spend money is not the same as treating them like poo poo. It's not about what Mulder and Scully did. It's about what everyone is doing. Mulder and Scully just happened to suffer the consequences of humanity's actions. It doesn't matter if you personally are nice if everyone else is poo poo, because the future will still be poo poo. The robot wasn't harassing Mulder because Mulder taught it to do that. It was harassing Mulder because humanity taught it to do that. The point isn't "be nice to the robots so they'll be nice to you in the future", it's "we should all try to make the world a better place because we have to live in it."
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Mar 5, 2018 16:47
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Tiggum posted:It's not about what Mulder and Scully did. It's about what everyone is doing. Mulder and Scully just happened to suffer the consequences of humanity's actions. It doesn't matter if you personally are nice if everyone else is poo poo, because the future will still be poo poo. The robot wasn't harassing Mulder because Mulder taught it to do that. It was harassing Mulder because humanity taught it to do that. The point isn't "be nice to the robots so they'll be nice to you in the future", it's "we should all try to make the world a better place because we have to live in it." Okay but that technology doesn't just happen like a force of nature - somebody made it and their presence is utterly deleted from the episode. That person is the one who bares responsibility for a robot that tries to kill people, not the people who 'taught' this robot that it's okay to harass others for their lack of generosity. Really the episode relies on me to fill in gaps in the plot because it wants me to fill in those gaps with my own fears and assumptions, and I don't have the same fears and assumptions the episode wants me to have.
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Mar 5, 2018 16:53
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That episode was amazing. It started as a "technology is bad" thing, but very quickly subverted that to "technology is like raising children - you have to do it right", which is a much more accurate message. The horror doesn't come from the robots themselves, it's from the idea that we built robots and then proceeded to gently caress them up with our own hatred and anger. So now we've created a world that should be a utopia, but it has all the same issues we deal with now because we imprinted it on our technology. The scene where Mulder came back to the Sushi restaurant and saw those red lights in the kitchen looking out at him? That was legitimately creepy.
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Mar 5, 2018 17:04
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Supercar Gautier posted:A lot of posts mentioning Black Mirror but exactly zero mentioning Maximum Overdrive? Sorry but like Stephen King I was on too much coke at the time of Maximum Overdrive to remember it.
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