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I just got caught up with the show (well, caught up through what's on Hulu currently) after having fallen off of it right around the time it moved to TBS, which unfortunately lined up with me dropping cable. The show is still good overall but "Gold Top Nuts" completely caught me by surprise. Impressed that they can still crank out "high-concept, even by American Dad standards" episodes this late in the run. (Along those lines, when I decided to check out an episode at random a while back it was "Rabbit Ears," which is what prompted me to say "I should probably just get back on the AD train.")muscles like this! posted:While season 1 of American Dad is still good you can really tell they were struggling to find their voice because it is very similar to Family Guy. I remember when Seth MacFarlane went on some late night show to promote the first season (I wanna say Letterman?) and was asked "So what's new and different about this series compared to Family Guy," his reply was "Ehhh, it's basically the same show." They weren't trying that hard to hide it.
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Feb 10, 2023 23:32
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muscles like this! posted:While season 1 of American Dad is still good you can really tell they were struggling to find their voice because it is very similar to Family Guy. I'm back on S1 right now - after I got current with the show, I realized I had no other show's backlog to burn through in the background while I work, so I decided to go back to the early seasons I haven't revisited since I bought the DVD sets. There's definitely a level of "Is this still just Family Guy? Is that what we're doing with this show? Let's force a pop culture/celebrity gag in there, to be safe" to the writing, but what's more striking to me is how they're leaning on some of the hoariest sitcom plots possible. "Stan's boss is coming over for dinner," "Stan needs to make a good impression with his boss to get the big promotion," "Stan forgets his anniversary," etc. It feels like a deliberate choice to go straight to the old standbys right away (and give them a "what we can get away with at 9:30 Sunday night on Fox" twist.) The two other things that have jumped out at me so far: Oh yeah, this show started when 4:3 was still the norm for most TV sets/broadcast, and one of those forced pop culture jokes describes Joe Rogan as a "polarizing figure" simply because he's the meathead who hosts Fear Factor and not 2023's Joe Rogan.
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Feb 17, 2023 21:29
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Up through mid-Season 2 in my rewatch. It has been fun to revisit the era where the production team is clearly struggling with how to handle Roger episode-to-episode; the rapid realization that having a main character who can't leave the home limits both his own storylines and his ability to get involved with other characters' (and how he's even a liability in that one location, when characters from outside the core cast show up.) I was surprised at how quickly the show starts dabbling in "Maybe Roger can wear a disguise for a little while before people get suspicious? If we call out that they think he's old, or sick?" before moving on to full-on "Roger just puts on a shirt and a hat and it's fine, nobody notices, who cares." The idea of him being multiple characters at all times still feels a ways off though. On the negative side, way more rape jokes than I remember. They really jump out at me because they're all of that crappy mid-00's "edgy" comedy sensibility, where the shock of a character casually saying "rape" essentially stands in for an actual gag. qirex posted:I just rewatched “Cheek to Cheek: a Stripper’s Story” and I love that the whole episode was probably just one of the writers came up with the phrase “chivalric cabaret” and went from there. Along those lines, best thing that I had completely forgotten about was Francine and Roger's B-story in "Camp Refoogee", where they both adopt characters and play act as an intellectual married couple for months before culminating in a full-on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? parody. Really feels like a write-what-you-know thing, where the impetus was "There's this guy on my improv team who seems to get off on sabotaging other performers' characters at every opportunity."
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Mar 15, 2023 12:55
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YeahTubaMike posted:*wipes glasses* That punchline rushed back to me when the scene started; the long, purposeful wind-up is so good. "Do you think our baby...couldn't have drowned in the pool?" "Oh, no; you left the gate open, she sank like a stone. You're going to have to live with that for the rest of your life."
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Mar 15, 2023 18:48
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muscles like this! posted:Watched a couple of early Debbie episodes and oof, they are not great. The episode that introduces her ostensibly is body positive, except it still makes a bunch of cheap fat jokes at her expense. Yeah, that's another thing I had forgotten - the show is merciless with the fat jokes early on; it's a pretty big part of Stan's character for a while. Debbie, Barry, strawmen and random background characters, they're all constant punching bags. That first Debbie episode is especially rough. I don't know if the fat jokes start to wane after that one or if it was just so loaded that everything afterward feels like they're laying off that topic.
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Mar 21, 2023 03:32
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drrockso20 posted:There's a reason why even though I'm a strong advocate for Steve getting a girlfriend again(and this time making it permanent) I've always suggested it be someone besides Debbie, she's just not a very good character Biggest surprise after "Oh yeah, Debbie was a character for a while" - seeing a pre-Party Down/Cloverfield Lizzy Caplan's name in the credits voicing Debbie. Giving Steve a girlfriend opens up a lot of new storylines and gags, but also cuts off the ability to use his desperation for a relationship for those same things (And having Steve be a hopelessly geeky loser is clearly the writers' preferred mode for the character.) Still, I'm surprised they haven't tried to establish a happy medium by giving him an on-again off-again relationship; a recurring character that they could use when it makes sense but quickly write out/around when having a steady girlfriend would butt up against the plot.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:16
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B12 video is still normal speed on the Hulu version, but I have noticed that earlier episodes have the TV rating bugs hard coded into the video. Watched "Joint Custody" yesterday and the payoff to Roger and the bag of cat food makes me laugh just as hard now as it did 16 years ago. His shocked/terrified expression before silently jetting off-screen, it's perfect.
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Mar 24, 2023 20:26
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Neeksy posted:Stan just staring at the chips while high is still so loving funny with the music. I forgot about the cut to Jeff and his dad on their way to Florida as Jeff is insistent that Mr. S is his friend and is on his way to save him right now... Only to cut back to Stan still vacantly staring at the chips while the same music plays. Perfect. I also forgot about the two scene B plot where Steve thinks he has The Dead Zone powers, but just for lost keys. Now we're getting into classic AD high concept territory.
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Mar 24, 2023 21:38
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Roger is like Charlie Sheen: a guy who is really into hard drugs but never really took to weed, for whatever reason (makes him fly uncontrollably)
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Mar 26, 2023 03:47
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Unfortunately the Hulu episode lineup still ends with "You Are Here" and the last 7 episodes of season 17 are still missing  The_Doctor posted:Reminder: Show’s back tonight y’all! Dive on in! Fellow Traveler A lunar misstep sends Roger on an unexpected detour to New Mexico.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:31
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I recall reading at some point that Turner's deal for the show is that they can hold the syndication rights indefinitely, as long as they commit to the continued production of new episodes, but hell if I can find a shred of proof to back me up on that. That is the one scenario where I could see TBS making more new episodes considering the purge of literally everything else related to new scripted content under Discovery ownership, since AD reruns make up a significant part of TBS/Adult Swim scheduling.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:46
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bull3964 posted:If the syndication thing is true, I don't see that as enough to get TBS to renew. They would rather put reality stuff on TBS and they could easily shrink adult swim by an hour (they've done it in the past) or run one of the other shows. Funny enough, just today there's a Deadline interview with Michael Ouweleen about how AS is going to expand by an hour beginning in May, and how he's been working to convince the new WBD management "Yes, animated programming takes longer to make, but it can be rerun forever." If TBS wants out of the original programming game entirely, I could see AD getting shuffled around in the T-net production hierarchy.
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Mar 29, 2023 15:27
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SeANMcBAY posted:Poor Patrick Stewart certainly looks close to that on Picard. I get nervous watching him since he looks so fragile. He sounds it now, too. In the course of watching Season 12 to current a while back it was like hearing Bullock's voice getting slowed incrementally season-to-season; each year a little more pitched down and a little breathier.
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Apr 2, 2023 18:06
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I just hit Season 4 and man, this show stayed in 4:3 so much longer than I remember. But they already ditched the newspaper headline intro, which I was assuming wouldn't happen until the move to HD. S3 is when they finally went all-in on "Roger having hundreds of personas is a key part of his identity"; the "We have to hide Roger!/You're taking a risk by going outside, even in costume!" stuff lasted maybe 40 episodes.
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Apr 15, 2023 02:07
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limp_cheese posted:The best part of the bowling episode was the animations that played when someone got a strike. This reminds me that I've still never watched the Moonbeam City episode about the bowling animation killer. (If you missed Moonbeam City, it was a Comedy Central series about 80's future cops from...Jesus, nearly a decade ago. Shares AD's willingness to go very broad and goofy for the sake of a joke, and to spin out into intense, high-concept B-plots. Only ran one season due to the usual "Well, we put you after South Park and you're not immediately as successful as South Park, so you're done" Viacom poo poo. Give it a shot, it's on Paramount Plus.)
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Apr 15, 2023 04:27
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SeANMcBAY posted:Is there a new one tonight? There is! Stretched Thin When Jeff finds out that the family thinks he makes terrible decisions, he decides to take a job selling stretchy leggings to prove them wrong.
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May 1, 2023 19:25
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Oh God what happens to Stan's face? but the real and more important question is, when are the rest of last season's episodes coming to Hulu
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Jul 21, 2023 03:08
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My parents got divorced. GAY DAD
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Aug 8, 2023 16:05
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:I'm blanking on which episode it's in, but I know Stan says "I'm taking a month off of work, and not just to play Animal Crossing this time" at some point. Last year's Christmas episode "The Grouch" (which I only know from Google, since the back half of the 2022 "season" still isn't on Hulu)
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Sep 7, 2023 04:21
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Just watched "Cops & Roger" and of course I remembered "Oh yeah, this one's got the exploding head elbow drop" pretty quickly - but I'd completely forgotten the "So, have you heard anything, is Chaz going to be okay?" "...No!" gag at the end. Got me good, such a perfect button to the episode.
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Sep 21, 2023 20:18
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muscles like this! posted:Hulu updated with all the newer episodes up to this week's. oh hell yeah
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Sep 30, 2023 23:39
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I started on the Hulu episodes I hadn't seen before last night. I know Seth MacFarlane has long been on the record that Stan is his least-favorite role because it's hell on his voice, but jumping from hearing Stan wherever I am in my rewatch (Season 6 or so) to a current episode was jarring. Both Stan and Roger's voices are dramatically different than they were in the past, both due to the gradual shift in character personalities and MacFarlane's voice changing with age, but with Stan especially I could hear the strain in the performance. Give this man some honey tea.Nichael posted:I never quite got the pecan sandies thing becoming a pseudo catchphrase despite him saying it only once as a joke in itself, and like two or three times in reference to that one line. It's still funny but I always felt like I'm missing something. It's just one of those nods to "Remember the early days, when the show was like this? When being an effete, junk food-obsessed and relatively harmless jerk was the extent of who Roger was as a character?" Similar to when Family Guy does a joke playing on "Oh yeah, we thought the baby being a matricidal evil genius would never get old."
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Oct 3, 2023 20:17
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Throwing in the occasional weird line read is such an effective gag. Was watching "The Grounch" yesterday and and had to rewind Francine's "Wuz dis?" in the cold open probably half a dozen times.
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Oct 6, 2023 16:39
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"Big Trouble" is super cringey...but man, I love that musical number. "White Rice," though, that's one that I realized on my rewatch that I had just completely wiped from my memory - and for good reason! It's like they looked at all the previous crap they'd done with Francine's parents and said "Yeah, but we can do worse, right? A lot worse?"
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Oct 17, 2023 21:58
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I'm up to Season 9 in my AD rewatch and late Season 7/early Season 8 has struck me as the point when the show really crystalized into what it still is today. It had been fun all along, but something about the tone of the humor and the high-concept plotting just gels right around there. That said, one big criticism that I have is that they really drove the "Principal Lewis is a loose cannon degenerate" stuff into the ground fast in Season 8. The writers went from "Would it be funny if the principal hinted at an unsavory past before his current job?" to "Lewis should always be talking about cocaine/sex workers or threatening people with extreme bodily harm." pretty much instantly. It doesn't help that they have "A Ward Show" and "The Worst Stan" back-to-back in broadcast order, which both hinge on the Smiths enabling Lewis' worst tendencies for their own benefit. SeANMcBAY posted:I don’t think Family Guy is that bad anymore. I’ve mellowed on it in my elderly years. I hate to admit that I agree with this. In the height of pandemic work-from-home times, I started putting FG on my second monitor during my workdays and eventually watched almost every episode since I'd given up on it in the late 00's. There was still like one joke per episode where I'd roll my eyes because it was in poor taste, or just lazy, but just as often there would be a gag that got a genuine belly laugh out of me. I also really enjoyed the outside the box episodes they do a few times a season now, like the one where the characters are recording a DVD commentary for a fake episode that we watch play out in silence while different stories and jokes unfold in the audio. Definitely also agree with the description of it as a "hateful show", though.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:20
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I just watched the wormhole episode today! The show really likes to use the conceit of "Well, it's been one full year since [X] happened...", they've burned at least decade of time using that device across episodes.
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Dec 22, 2023 03:14
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Watched it last night and it's so drat good. On the topic, "Dreaming of a White Porsche Christmas" might be the most unabashedly sentimental episode of the series.
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Dec 25, 2023 03:57
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I believe animation was largely spared by the strikes (they don't tend to operate under SAG/WGA rules)
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Dec 25, 2023 05:39
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Edward Mass posted:https://deadline.com/2023/05/writers-strike-seth-macfarlane-exits-family-guy-american-dad-wga-showrunners-1235365362/ ... Oh no! (Good for them)
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Dec 25, 2023 06:37
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I'm on Season 13 and just went through a stretch of episodes with great Roger B-stories. Roger is revealed to be an absentee state senator in Nevada...and the CEO of the chemical company that's poisoning the local water supply. Roger tries to go to college, but instead gets distracted by a student credit card offer and wants to earn reward points to get a branded jacket. Roger becomes obsessed with the "Dylan" card in Hayley's old 90's dating board game and tracks down the model as an adult. (There's also "Stan, comparison shopping for potential retirement homes, signs up for an overnight stay in one and is drugged into senility by an unscrupulous nurse" in there that's also fun.)Alxprit posted:I was thinking about the one that ended up with Roger starting a cockfighting ring. For some reason, I'll never forget the delivery of: Ha-ha, you thought they get top hats!
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Jan 20, 2024 16:54
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Tom Tucker posted:One of my favorite things is the show is the family getting preemptively annoyed that someone they are about to meet is going to be Roger. One of the highlights is “of course I’m not him. I’m the dog” and then Stan’s “we’re going to get there and it’s going to be you isn’t it” “strong possibility” "I'm just the secretary!" In the episode where Steve gets put in the class for delinquents, he has a great "Ohhh, no." when Roger shows up as the "inspiring" teacher who isn't going to give up on these troubled kids. (Great episode all around.)
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Jan 20, 2024 17:33
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The most important thing they gave Klaus was his alcove.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:38
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With the show's genesis being "What if we do Family Guy again, but with a Dubya-era political bent" thing, it's very easy to see Klaus and Roger as the Stewie and Brian stand-ins - but then (at least initially) they gave Roger all the roles that both of those characters serve. Roger is the unusual, egotistical friend and sounding board that Brian serves as for the Griffins, but he also takes Stewie's job of being the needy member of the family who acts as a kind of catty observer. All Klaus got was Brian's unrequited love for the wife/mother, amplified to the extreme. I wouldn't be surprised if they kept Klaus out of sheer inertia during development and said "Eh, we'll say he's connected to Stan's job, I'm sure we can find his role and figure out why he's there as we go."Neeksy posted:I kinda wish there was an episode where it turns out all the other agents also have similar 'pet' situations. I really like this idea. They've done things in that area once or twice (Reginald), but it seems like a good place to explore. Stan's coworkers are jealous because he got the fish and not one of the more mobile and active animal transplant subjects.
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Jan 25, 2024 23:13
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...bald-rear end alien piece of poo poo...
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Feb 1, 2024 22:23
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pixaal posted:There's several problematic episodes due to offensive stereotypes in the first several seasons. The show realizes it can be funny without them and ditches them at some point. I haven't tried to pin point it but my guess is if I checked writing credits they mostly have the same lead writer. The two parts of "Stan of Arabia" have different credited writers - Nahnatchka Khan for part 1 and Carter Bays & Craig Thomas for part 2 - though both "Big Trouble in Little Langley" AND "White Rice" are credited to Rick Wiener & Kenny Schwartz. Writing credits on sitcoms, especially animated ones, can be pretty arbitrary, but Wiener and Schwartz getting lead credit on both of those makes me think they had a big hand in conceptualizing Francine's parents.
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Feb 6, 2024 16:15
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The Smiths realizing they're about to deal with Roger is a gag structure that works so consistently. I watched "The Enlightenment of Ragi-Baba" last week and Hayley has a great "Oh no" moment when she pieces together who the new meditation guru is.
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Feb 7, 2024 16:21
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The progression of Steve's voice in "Portrait of Francine's Genitals" is so drat funny. I want a full episode where he's speaking in that even, golden baritone.
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Feb 8, 2024 17:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtxCf7UR5T8 The "Klaus takes Steve on a tour of ASU/puts him through frat hazing" stuff in this episode is great as well. "It was ranked number one in innovation!" "By who?" "THE RANKERS!" EDIT: Also has one of my favorite visual gags in the show: https://i.imgur.com/A75uocc.mp4 JethroMcB fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Feb 9, 2024 |
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Feb 9, 2024 21:22
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Chang's! I loved that place as a kid! I used to play around with the waiters by imitating their thick Chinese accents. Yep. I was a reallll racist lil' poo poo. 
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Feb 15, 2024 23:11
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MikusR posted:That episode accidentally going full Blade Runner is part of A plot or and additional B plot, or even C plot? Yes, the third act quietly slips into a Blade Runner parody in terms of plot/aesthetics, without ever really speaking to it.
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Feb 16, 2024 16:50
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