Notes for Episode 22: "Believe"

Hi folks! Sorry for the delay on this one, we've been having a hellaciously busy April. One thing to note here is that our notes contain some images, which obviously won't be translated to the Patreon version. Be sure to download the .docx file to see them! We'll see you all in a few days for this month's bonus episode, and later in the month for the next main episode, on Journeyman!

PATREON NOTES – BELIEVE

• Plot / Structure Stuff:

• This is immediately, moment to moment, more interesting than Touch

• Similar, except they’re always yelling at each other

• Kinda shocked by how strong of a pilot that was. Like it’s not necessarily gonna be a great show but it pretty cleanly outperformed expectations

• I think it’s great that they play so fast and loose with her powers. A big part of what sucked so much about Touch is they just laid everything about the stupid kid out so immediately, with so little fanfare

• No one on the bus did ANYTHING to identify Tate when he is the MOST identifiable person of all time. He was talking out loud about being in prison. His picture is seemingly everywhere

• He could never have stopped Provasic is all I’m saying

• The awkward waitress encounter is really good. This is just a show about what it’s like to be high in public

• I actually think it’s a good detail that Bo can’t distinguish between information gleaned by psychic intuition and normal conversation, so she just speaks as if it’s normal for her to know everything

• It’s a genuinely funny recurring beat for Tate to be like “oh boy, time to get  money :D” and then Bo has a different angle. She outfoxes him so bad

• Bo using her powers to get the ankle monitor off Tate and saying he can leave now… I think that’s a genuinely good emotional moment. This show is mostly “fun and sweet” but that’s the first time we both went “damn…”

• It’s a very strange decision that we just know Tate is Bo’s dad from episode 1 and they still play it like a reveal when he finds out in episode 6

• This is the first ever Lostalike hangout show

• Ostensibly they’re helping people but mostly they chill with them

• It would be really funny if the “Milton never told you what happened…” flashback just turned out to be Milton emptying a clip into Nina

• In the end, they do a really bad job of conveying the idea that it was Milton’s fault. It still mostly seems like Skouras’s fault

• It’s so funny how quickly they gave up on the Fugitive aspect. I guess they realized you can only have Tate put in handcuffs so many times

• They just ran out of time/resources/interest to do anything with the Kerry Condon subplot huh. Just wrote her out two episodes before the end of the show and then no character ever mentions her again

• Character / Performance Stuff:

• The cool Sienna Guillory assassin is just NOT in the show after the pilot? Uh oh, this might’ve been fucked with beyond repair…

• I really like that Tate’s a total scumbag. Obviously they’re gonna sand off the edges as the season goes on but they’re good edges

• Right away I think Kyle is head and shoulders above the typical Lostalike villain. They’ve tried to do this guy like fifteen times on other Lostalikes but they never just like… got Kyle MacLachlan

• The dynamic is really good! It seems like it’s SO fragile, so easy to fuck up, but like… the little thumbs up while he’s playing craps? Great!

• They’re not afraid to make him an idiot

• The show’s strong so far but Janice does NOTHING. They hired her just so she can stand in a warehouse and say “we need to kill Tate!”

• In general, this show wants to have fewer recurring characters. It doesn’t know what to do with anyone other than Bo, Tate, Roman, and Milton. MAYBE, at a push, the FBI agent? But let’s get real

• NOTE: Janice eventually becomes real

• Tate’s wearing a hoodie under a denim jacket in a dive bar and hugging a guy named Jack Callahan cause he couldn’t find Paddy and we’re expected to believe he’s a California man. Get real

• There’s a separate Shawn but it’s insane that the main guy, Tate, isn’t named Sean. You look at him and it’s like that’s Sean

• I love that some of the telekinetics have like, TV autism, but some of them are just normal ass women

• It took Hannah through episode 10 to realize that Tate is not like, a special forces veteran with trauma from his deployment. He has no special training. He is just a Boston asshole who was in prison

• I like the parts of the show that are just Bo and Tate pulling scams. Would have loved more episodes of that.

• Their relationship has two modes that are both rather effective: one where he’s her dad, and one where he’s just a Masshole scumbag who goes around teaching her how to get kicked out of casinos
  
  

• Technical / Aesthetic Stuff: 

• Cuaron directed this pilot? Yeah we could tell

• The title sequence registers so little as a title sequence that I keep thinking it’s just some interior establishing shots

• Taxicab ad for an animated film called “Forever Kiss” now that’s just sweet

• The scary vision stuff in the unaired episode is genuinely pretty cool. And when the guy touches the hot grill… I mean, this drew reactions out of us! Good stuff

• They were ripping out the copper wiring for this climax. The fire tornado is not their most impressive moment. If they’d somehow gotten a season two, this would NOT have made it into any previously ons

• Notable Quotes:

• It’s so funny how the last 5 minutes of the pilot are just them desperately saying HERE’S WHAT THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHOW WILL BE

• “And think of all the people they’ll meet along the way…”

• They said it SO many times in the pilot: “... believe”

• The autistic fella playing telekinetic Minecraft… it’s got the Fringe juice

• “I’d call it a miracle… how about you?”

• Ep 5 opens with an evil robot voice saying “Good morning. Look at your computer. [...] There’s a reason you were chosen. I’m a fan of your blog.”

• Bo trying out “You have a glow?” to explain how she knew a lady was pregnant is really good. It’s a great child performance

• “Why do you have to hurt people?” “Ah… hmm… sometimes you have t-” “Noyoudon’t”

• “Apparently this guy Balfour’s a breeder” Pause

• “I love horses. I love horses. I love horses.” “You mentioned that.” “You don’t like them?”

  • Esther’s kid sister talks like that

• Skouras saying “I read the psych evaluation, the incident is ambiguous” about the clearest-cut story of brother murder in history is really funny

• “Once it starts, the sicker you get until you die” ← Flubbed line alert! Read a book of English, buddy

• Cute Things We Said:

• This show is set in the world that Eric Adams believes he lives in

• Base form Bo can fucking wash Jake through all his powerups

• Bo when it comes time to fight Jake:

• If we had rolled 1 million dice and they had all come up 6, it would be less shocking than this show turning out to be good

• “A candidate to degrade” damn this shit’s about former gifted kids

• Noe one that Bo helps ever watches the news. She only ever helps people who are “not really part of the Amber Alert community”

• “He’s as mean as a dinner plate.” - Hannah, while her mind was clearly somewhere else

• The moment a blind character showed up we both said “AND he’s gay”

• Bo holding a Black man’s hand and showing him a vision of himself shooting a man is CRAZY. Tate’s really raising her like a Boston dad

• “I’ve never had my own room before… nor any needles… any tests to call my own…” “Oh, Dani, we’ve got plenty of those for you”

• E: “Her name is even Bo…..like for a violin”

• H: “And a violin is part of an ORCHESTRA!!”

• Esther gasped when Dani said that Dr. Zoe is a traitor to Orchestra as if Zoe hadn’t just been LITERALLY ON THE PHONE WITH WINTER that’s so good. That’s the worst miss she’s ever had in one of these

• You know how a lot of guys have idle fantasies about saving people from mass shooters, doing something heroic? I think specifically Boston guys named Sean have all independently fantasized the exact plot of this show

• As seen in the episode, we had our most Tate-and-Bo interaction of all time about this image: