Chernobyl: Heavy, Haunting, and Essential

 This week we discuss Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries from 2019, and fair warning, it’s a heavy one. Jeff had stopped at episode four twice before, so this was his first time finishing it, and he binged the whole thing in one day, which he does not recommend. We go through it episode by episode, from the first night in the control room to the trial in the finale. Along the way we debate whether Dyatlov is lying or just clueless, what “preventing the spread of misinformation” really meant in the Soviet Union, and why the Soviet mindset of sacrifice is both horrifying and kind of admirable. I make the case that episodes one and two are terrifying while three and four are horrifying, Jeff explains why episode four is the one that broke him, and we both agree the friendship between Legasov and Boris is the best part of the show. We wrap up with whether a show this bleak is still worth watching, plus a few real life facts about Chernobyl today that are just as unsettling. Jeff’s final verdict is that it’s a great show he will never watch again. I have no idea what we’re talking about next, but we’ll be back soon. 

 This week we discuss South Park, and it’s a special one for me because South Park is my number one show of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff gave me five episodes of The Office to rank, and this week I return the favor. I gave Jeff five South Park episodes, and he ranks them from five down to one. Jeff never got into South Park growing up, but he has always loved Cartman. The five episodes are Scott Tenorman Must Die (Season 5, Episode 4), Safe Space (Season 19, Episode 5), Make Love, Not Warcraft (Season 10, Episode 8), Creme Fraiche (Season 14, Episode 14), and Grounded Vindaloop (Season 18, Episode 7). Along the way we talk about why twenty two minutes of South Park feels so much longer, how the show understands what it’s like to be a kid, how the best episodes start small and spiral out of control, and how the show has changed from season five to season nineteen. We also touch on whether South Park has passed The Simpsons. Next week we take on something a lot less fun, Chernobyl.

 This week Jeff and I take on the best deaths in Game of Thrones, and we do it as a draft. We go back and forth picking five each, and the rules are loose. Shock, satisfaction, the character, and how they go out all count. I open with Hodor, Jeff grabs Joffrey, and from there we get into Lady Olenna’s perfect exit, Oberyn’s fight with the Mountain, the Red Wedding, Ned Stark, Tywin Lannister, Ramsay Bolton, the Sept of Baelor, and the Night King. Along the way I share what changes between the books and the show, we argue about whether Joffrey or Ramsay is the more hated villain, and I nerd out about a real battle that may have inspired the Battle of the Bastards. We also get into whether the Battle of Winterfell deserves the hate the final season gets. We finish with honorable mentions like Viserys, the Hound, Littlefinger, and Lysa Arryn, plus one real life execution method that I still can’t believe exists. Next week I sent Jeff five South Park episodes to rank, the same way we did with The Office, and the week after that we take on Chernobyl, which is about as far from a happy show as you can get. Hodor (Josh): 2:03Joffrey (Jeff): 8:39Olenna Tyrell (Josh): 13:18Oberyn Martell (Jeff): 16:42Red Wedding (Josh): 21:29Ned Stark (Jeff): 29:30Tywin Lannister (Josh): 33:44Ramsay Bolton (Jeff): 44:53Sept of Baelor explosion (Josh): 57:42The Night King (Jeff): 1:05:06Honorable mentions: 1:12:56

This week we’re doing something way more fun than Lanterns. Jeff’s favorite show of all time is The Office, so he picked five episodes from across the seasons and I ranked them from fifth to first. The hard part is that they’re all funny, but two of them are all time top five Office episodes.Number five is The Lover. Michael starts sleeping with Pam’s mom, and the whole episode is everyone telling Pam “you want him to be happy, right?” Jim knows first, his deer in headlights face is one of his best, and “that could have gone one of two ways, but I never expected her to get upset” is peak Michael. We also talk about the mallard subplot, one of the rare times Dwight gets the better of Jim.Number four is The Convict. Prison Mike, purple bandana, gruel, Dementors, and an accent that sounds like Al Capone. We get into how this one plays today (the joke is Michael’s assumptions, not the person he’s wrong about), why every millennial knows this scene, and why Jeff has to look away from the screen when Dwight bends over with the money in his back pocket. Martin quits at the end. Honestly, fair.Number three surprised both of us: Pool Party, the only episode without Michael. James Spader as Robert California, Erin and Dwight’s chicken fight, Andy’s ring missing its center diamond, and Gabe looking like a praying mantis. I stopped watching after Michael left, so this was a great surprise. We also talk about whether a workplace sitcom can only run so long, and how Always Sunny gets to go anywhere.Number two is Stress Relief. I watched it live after the Super Bowl, and the fire drill might be the best cold open in the whole show. Stanley, “Save Bandit,” the CPR training, David Wallace being the most patient man alive, and then the roast, which is hard to watch and also “Boom, roasted.” Michael throwing full loaves of bread at no crows on the playground might be my favorite moment.Number one is Dinner Party. Jan is the best part of it. The candles, the song from Hunter, the tiny TV, Michael sleeping on the ottoman, and the vasectomy line everyone knows. Jeff also tells you to watch the ten minutes of bloopers, which are as funny as the episode.Jeff gives his quick ranking (Convict last, then Pool Party, then The Lover, with Stress Relief just ahead of Dinner Party), and we agree the top two are interchangeable. Rewatching these made me realize The Office has some of the funniest writing I’ve ever seen, and Michael Scott belongs in any conversation about the funniest characters ever.Next week we’re doing the best Game of Thrones deaths, and after that, five South Park episodes. Jeff also wants me to try a few episodes from after Michael leaves, so we might do a best episodes without Michael show down the road.

We finally made it to the end of Lanterns, and this week we're closing the book on the season with the finale, "Dirt and Stars." (I couldn't remember the title, which tells you how invested I was.)Here's the twist: Jeff really liked it. He had the show at a C going in and bumped it up to a B+ on the strength of this episode, and it mostly came down to Hal's last lines. I thought the episode was fine and the show stays a flat C for me. We both agree the ending was sweet, though. John's "I love you," Hal's "I think you'll be way better at this job than I ever was," the wink, and the flight across the lantern all landed. It's bittersweet because it isn't really Hal, and I think killing off such a well cast character is both a bold move and a bit of a wasted opportunity.Jeff also felt vindicated about the pep rally he ranted about last week, since it turns out Noah matters. We still have questions about him, though. If Zoe is a Manhunter and Noah is a Manhunter, why does the sheriff's dad skip a generation? Are Manhunters programmed to rule? Noah's casual path to power (get famous playing football, run for Congress, run for president) is both hilarious and probably accurate. We get into why Hal feels so guilty when the town benefited from Zoe, why the Guardians would be the villains from Rushville's point of view, and why Guy Gardner would ever notice a light in Nebraska. Guy is a tool, but he's our tool, and "What's up, Homes?" has been living in my head.Sinestro gets a whole segment as the show's biggest wasted potential. He spent the season looking like a sunburnt old man, but Jeff is convinced it's Palpatine style bait and he's coming back in a big way. We also dig into his point about fear and evolution, why Hal's "don't be afraid to be afraid" is the better philosophy, and why John's oath at the end of the episode really works.Then there's Sheriff Carrie, who shoots Hal after his "we're going to Guadalajara" speech. We debate whether Hal would really have handled a mother and her son that badly, and whether Carrie's reaction made sense. By the end we were both sort of on her side.To close, we hand out final grades, talk about why a show can look exactly like HBO and still not read like HBO, and get into why superhero universes are so hard to build well (Marvel's island full of writers planning ten years ahead, anyone?). I'm glad we watched it. I'm also glad it's over.Next week is something way more fun. Jeff sent me five episodes of The Office, we're both ranking them, and we're comparing the funniest lines. After that, South Park.

We're calling this one the homework assignment episode, because that's basically the theme for the whole thirty minutes.Episode 7, "Jordan Boys Legacy." Second to last of the season, and neither of us feels much different than we did last week. There are real flashes of a good show buried in here — the "good arm kit" callback to Hal's dad actually landed, and it's proof the writers can do this when they try. But it's surrounded by so much filler that it barely registers.The core problem, and we finally put our finger on it this episode: the show doesn't have a throughline. No central mission pulling everything forward, just a bunch of disconnected elements we bump into. Case in point — a five-minute detour to a pep rally deciding which college the sheriff's son is going to play football at. We don't need it, it doesn't move anything, and it's genuinely bizarre that it's in a Green Lantern show at all. We compared it directly to Dark, where literally every scene had a purpose, and the gap is stark.On the actual plot: Hal's hologram thinks the sheriff killed him, and Jeff rewatched her reaction and picked up on something beyond shock — some other emotion underneath it. We floated theories (did she do it, did he do it to himself, echoing his dad's suicide) and landed nowhere concrete. Then there's the wormhole trip to Anton's homeworld, which looked genuinely cool on screen, the reveal that the Manhunters gassed an entire civilization into turning on itself, and finding Sinestro conveniently waiting there with zero setup for how he escaped prison. Our best theory: Hal had something to do with it. Our worst theory, which Josh fully committed to: Superman freed him, he had an affair with John's mom, and there's a half-red-half-black bastard Lantern sibling out there. Take that one as seriously as it deserves.We also get into why we think this whole season might just be feature-length setup for John Stewart's appearance in Man of Tomorrow — and Josh's prediction that the payoff is one single throwaway line in that movie that only people who suffered through eight episodes of this will actually catch.Genuine bright spot: Sentry Hal is one of the best parts of the show, and they clearly know it, since he's noticeably younger and less weathered than present-day Hal. The small moment of him begrudgingly cheering for John's terrible high school football team because "it's his team" was legitimately sweet.We close it out checking IMDb live on the show — the series sits at 7.8, but nearly every individual episode is rated above 8, one at a 9. Neither of us fully understands how that math works, and also: this is not a water cooler show. Nobody's talking about it.One episode left. We're trying to stay hopeful, but we've said that a lot at this point.

Last episode felt like a season finale. This one felt like a fart.That's basically the review of Episode 6, "Bad Optics." We fully closed the loop back to episode one — Hal is dead, or "dead," we still don't know — but after the high-octane pace of last week, this one was almost nothing happening. Hal barely appears, and he was genuinely the most interesting character on the show, so losing him for a stretch is a real problem regardless of whether it's permanent.Guy Gardner shows up for about five minutes and is somehow still the best part of the episode. We both loved him in Superman and we're already fantasizing about a scene where Hal, John, and Guy are all in the same room together. Also: Sinestro is in a place called Spazkaban, which is, and we mean this, the funniest line the show has written so far.We spent a chunk of the episode trying to figure out what this show is even promising us. If John accepting the ring at the very end of the season is the whole payoff, we're not sure eight episodes of buildup for that is worth it — and we're both a little worried we're going to get roped back in anyway the second John Stewart shows up in a Superman movie.The real material this episode is John's family. Turns out his brother calls him "the Chosen" as a nickname, which is both hilarious and deeply telling, and the more we dug into the parents forcing this singular goal on him his whole childhood, the more it explains why nobody in that family talks anymore. Our read: he said no to the ring, and that's the actual rift. We also caught John not eating meat at dinner despite claiming he does now, which either means something or means nothing, we genuinely can't tell anymore.The mystery elements aren't landing for us. A good whodunit gives you four or five real suspects to argue about. This one gives you a town that hated Hal, zero actual leads, and a "don't tell anyone you were here" line that might mean Hal saw it coming, might mean nothing. We compared it directly to House of the Dragon, where even small choices had visible long-term consequences, and Lanterns just isn't doing that yet. The stuff that happened in Rushville over the last four episodes doesn't feel like it's paying off into anything.Also: if you've booby-trapped your own front door with a shotgun, maybe emphasize the "use the back door" part a little harder.Two episodes left, and by our own admission, we've been saying "fingers crossed for next episode" for a while now. Episode five was genuinely good, and that's the only thing keeping us fully in. The next two episodes have a lot of lifting to do.

Jeff genuinely thought he was watching the finale by accident. He wasn't. But this was, hands down, the best episode of Lanterns so far, and the first time we both actually felt the urgency.Zoe is dead. Will Macon is dead. The whole town is basically wiped out. And somehow the goodbye scene between them landed even though we didn't care about Will three episodes ago. Turns out he spent his entire life hiding her, learning her language and backstory well enough to impersonate her as a decoy, fully knowing it wouldn't fool anyone who checked for a heartbeat. That's love, apparently. Or something.We're still not totally sure who the good guys are here, which might be the show's whole point. There's an "alien hit squad" (Josh's words, not the show's), a former lover of Zoe's who couldn't conceive with her, Guardians who call an entire failed civilization "a mistake," and a small town that's apparently just an armed militia loyal to Zoe because she heals everyone and nobody there gets sick. We counted the factions out loud on mic and lost track somewhere around six.Also covered: the funniest scene of the season (Hal fake-flirting his way into an alien squad by claiming he and Will "did a lot of coitus"), the genuinely great green-goggles action sequence, Hal using the ring to protect John mid-fistfight (a small moment that tells you everything about who he actually is underneath the bitterness), and John rejecting the ring at the end, which might be the season's real turning point disguised as a throwaway beat.Then we went down a full Green Lantern lore rabbit hole neither of us saw coming, including the exact year the character was created, how many Lanterns exist across the whole Corps, and the full color spectrum of lantern rings, up to and including a literal Sorrow Lantern powered by a man whose fiancée left him at the altar. We did not make that up. Also, some fun Batman easter eggs buried in this episode that make us wonder how connected this DC universe actually is.Stick around to the end, because Josh's rapid-fire lantern color rankings are genuinely one of the funniest tangents we've recorded.

This week: Lanterns Episode 4, "The Weenie." Yes, that's the real title, and yes, we get into why.We think we're finally past the exposition stretch and into real forward motion. John was genuinely funny this episode, the gun shop scene, killing the vibe at Disneyland, and Hal's reaction ("did you just make a joke?") had us cracking up. It feels like John's figuring out that matching ten percent of Hal's energy without betraying who he is might actually be the move, and Hal seems to like him more for it.Then there's the naked scene. We won't spoil the specifics, but let's just say it's a very human kind of weird, not an alien kind of weird, which somehow spirals into a genuine conversation about how often men talk about their own anatomy compared to women. You're welcome.On the mystery side: Zoe supposedly dies in an explosion, and I'm calling my read vindicated. She's still the Manhunter, and either that blast was staged or Manhunters just can't be killed that easily. Jeff's not convinced Will Macon is cleared either. We also dig into the excellent detail work, the digging machine John builds off a single drawing, Hal's read on people during the interrogation scene (the man has genuinely great instincts, even if he's kind of an asshole about it), and the John's accent slips through moment that I only caught because a YouTube Short pointed it out to me.Sinestro continues to be the villain we can't help but like, even though neither of us trusts him for a second. Jeff's officially on record liking him, with the disclaimer that he reserves the right to take it back the moment Sinestro does something horrible. We also get into the theory that Hal might not even be the real Hal anymore, and our predictions for the next episode, including whether that "alien hit squad" is actually as sharp as they're supposed to be.

We were both lukewarm on last week's episode of Lanterns, and I've seen people online calling episode three the worst of the season. I think that's mostly racists being racists, but Jeff, who is not racist, still didn't love it either.His complaint: the interview scene has a super advanced intergalactic police force dropping applicants through a portal onto a stack of mattresses. Weird for the sake of weird, and it pulled him out of the episode. Fair point. I hadn't even considered someone had to set those signs up.But this was a real backstory episode for John, and it delivered. Turns out the apple off the head thing wasn't his dad, it was his mom, and honestly, they're both completely psycho. The theory we land on: dad might be a little jealous, since he wanted this life himself and never got it. Training your kid to be literally fearless is insane parenting, and it's exactly the kind of thing that makes his older brothers call him "the white kid" in the car, which, yes, I laughed at.The alien encounter scene might be the best racial commentary the show's done yet. To a species with only twelve members who all look the same, human racism makes zero sense, "when you say black, do you mean brown skinned?" is the funniest line of the episode. We get into a tangent about how the ultra powerful lose touch with small human details (George H.W. Bush and the grocery store scanner, basically), and whether the Guardians would even have a concept of "family," since John has to explain it to them.John completing a nine month solo sniper mission and then just watching Hal casually walk in and blow the whole thing up in five minutes is one of the funniest and saddest moments of the series so far. We debate whether that's psychopathic behavior or something closer to an athlete raised by a parent who wanted it more than the kid did, and whether John secretly wanted this life all along, which is why he's not resentful.Then the John versus Hal comparison: John will probably be the more technically gifted lantern (the art school background tracks), but rigid, by the book, humorless. Hal is worse at the craft but plays it smart, unconventional, street smart. We get into what Hal actually did wrong to fall from grace, whether it connects to Sinestro, and a Foundation comparison: Sinestro as dusk, Hal as day, John as dawn. I hope they run with that.And the most important discovery of the episode: John doesn't eat meat and is somehow more jacked than both of us combined. Bugs and berries apparently build a serious physique.We're still hoping this pays off. If it doesn't pick up soon, we might struggle to hit thirty minutes on these recaps. Next week we're finally catching up on Ted Lasso, three episodes at once.