This episode was basically what I expected, though there were a couple surprises thrown in here because why not. They’re pointless and anticlimactic and the show is over, might as well try to give it a little spice even though it’s completely unnecessary. Sorry for being cynical.
Tao tells Angela that he’s leaked all the spicy info he has on Schwartz and that he now needs to go into hiding because of it. Angela of course is saddened and shocked by this, begging him to stay by her side since she’s alone now that her mother, who wasn’t her mother, died. That’s when Tao decides to grace us with another piece of information that really should have been mentioned much sooner, because at this point…who cares? He reveals that a Dr. Zeeman (whoever that is) created his own designer baby. He was found out, thrown in jail, then when he got out of jail he created another designer baby and was thrown in jail again, and he’s still there. Those two designer babies? Yup, Tao and Angela.
WHAT
At this point, why does this even matter? Who the hell is Zeeman, how did Dahlia come across Angela, why should I care? Also, this kinda makes them siblings? Ha! See, this is one of the show’s problems that I’ve mentioned before. It drops these huge bombshells on us with no build up or hint, and it’s never delved any deeper after that. I mean, this is the finale. This is it, we’re not getting more. Why on earth would you drop something huge on us like that and just…leave it at that? At that point (and this was the very beginning of the episode) I just laughed and stopped caring. For some reason the show likes to halfass all these sci-fi tropes and not do anything with it, I should be used to it by now. But the fact they’d do this in the finale floored me. Well, Tao leaves and Angela?
Of course she joins in on the singing later on. The whole scene with Valerie and Jerry was boring and predictable. Also, no, I’m not going to like her after suddenly making a good decision. She was a terrible mother to her children their whole lives, I don’t care that she’s watching Tuesday sing on TV with a smile on her face. Whatever.
The rest of the episode was standard. The girls finished their song and they celebrated with screaming at the sky and then going out for a run. I did think it was cute that the landlord finally spoke and told them how proud he was of them. He even ended up watching their performance live at the end. It was your standard “Everyone is here!” types of finales where all the characters we’ve met have all come together and say hi, and of course later on they have their performance and it’s streamed on the internet for everyone to see. The police for some reason come to raid the place with guns, but Gus tells them to listen to the song and I guess they do because nothing happens? LOL Also I couldn’t help but crack up when they were showing everyone’s reactions to the singers, and when they showed Desmond they showed his robot for his “reaction”. I have to admit, it was a very nice song so I’m glad it was worth it. They did kill the hype of the Seven Miraculous Seconds because they kept showing that intro for every episode. If they hadn’t and maybe showed that intro just a few times in the beginning, I think I would have been slightly more excited. Slightly. Thankfully the song was very nice.
It’s just disappointing that we couldn’t even see what the reception to the song was by the public, and how things changed from there and if the song was even significant enough. We didn’t even get to see Carole and Tuesday’s album drop, but I’m sure it was going to do well anyway.
FINAL IMPRESSION
Disappointing is the word I keep saying when describing this show. It’s not the worst show I’ve seen, but the disappointment I feel for it is HUGE. Extremely disappointed. There was so much hype surrounding this show with its staff, with how international it was, with gorgeous animation (that dipped later) and the sheer ambitious nature of it all. I saw the PV for this show and thought it was gorgeous and I was so excited for it. The first episode wasn’t perfect, but it was a good start that ended up having better episodes later. But they absolutely dropped the ball hard.
What I thought was going to be a smart and deep look into the possible future of music, with traditionally written music going up against AI-made music, ended up being a very bland and sometimes very convoluted mess.
I have no clue what this show was trying to be. It bounced around with so many ideas and had so many subplots that I had no idea what its direction was. It started off with the two music styles clashing, then moved on to only focusing on CandT’s journey, that Mars Brightest competition, to commenting on the music industry, to different backgrounds and stories of musical artists, to a small romance, a dangerous stalker situation, to racism and immigration mirroring the United States? The first half I suppose was supposed to be the set up for the next step in CandT’s journey, but I feel like the show forgot about that and decided to focus on other things that didn’t exactly add to anything and ended being very pointless. It wasn’t until the last four episodes that the show decided it wanted to get back on track, but it still dropped huge pieces of information on us but it was never delved any deeper so we just had to accept it. What’s worse is that we never got proper worldbuilding. Humans building basically a second Earth on Mars is pretty cool, but we never got any idea what the heck happened on Earth and why humans left in the first place. We got a glimpse of Earth a couple times and we can only make guesses, but that’s not satisfactory since it’s the show’s job to tell us why the whole refugee thing was significant other than to just force all the politics stuff we got. I mean, maybe it’s only been 50 years of humans being on Mars, where a lot of people immigrated to Mars themselves so the immigration thing was ridiculous.
The characters were another disappointment where most of them were around for a bit, then disappeared. Angela was the most interesting character of the show, but even then I don’t think the writers treated her well at all. And while I kind of don’t like this term, I feel in this instance it’s accurate to say it, and that is that both Carole and Tuesday are Mary Sues.
I don’t think I’ve called anyone a Mary Sue in years but this is exactly it. Carole and Tuesday had rough lives and they somehow became such huge stars with little to no obstacle in their path. Neither of them develop at all in the whole duration of the show, and what’s worse is that even in the end I still don’t feel anything towards their friendship. When it came to their journey, yes they struggled a bit but for the most part for some reason, the stars aligned for them and pretty much everything worked out for them. Everything was conveniently in place and they were able to succeed pretty easily. Example? They screw up in the Mars Brightest finale and should have been disqualified. So they do “lose” but actually they win and gain fame. Another, they head to the favelas to find Tobe and perform in the neighborhood where anyone would have jumped them. They sing and Tobe has dog ears or something and finds them, and when they meet he immediately says yes and takes a liking to them even though he’s so stubborn and hard to please. It becomes so boring after awhile and I started caring less and less every time this happened. If they’re going to make their journey to fame this easy and boring, then I guess I’ll have to focus on them as characters and enjoy the show like that. Oh…but the characters are boring too. Then what the heck should I care about?
The music. It’s…whatever? There’s A LOT of songs in this show and I can only think of a few that I ended up liking a lot, but for the most part I wasn’t too big a fan of the music. Of course everyone’s opinions on the music is going to be subjective, everyone has their own tastes, and I just don’t happen to be a fan of most of the songs and their style. And I’m kinda used to it, but the Japanese to English still is so jarring and strange. What’s really funny is that they got voice actors that are known for being great singers (Sumire Uesaka, Megumi Hayashibara, Aoi Shouta, etc.) and didn’t let them sing once. I do think it’s really cool that the show went international and worked with so many singers around the world, but it’s funny and weird when the Japanese speaking voice sounds nothing like their English singing voice (like Pyotr, pow!) I haven’t checked out the dub yet, but I hope they sort of fixed that problem.
I really don’t like complaining about a show this much. I know it’s such a bummer but the amount of disappointment I feel is immeasurable. There was so much potential and they ruined it completely. I expected Carole & Tuesday to be one of the best shows of the year, and it ended up being one of the blandest and disappointing. It was enjoyable sometimes and did have some entertaining episodes, but the writing was just bad and it was hard to care about the characters, the story, and the world they lived in. Kind of crappy to say, but I’m glad the show is over. For the people that enjoyed the show, that’s great! But sadly for me, I did not and I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone.
5/10
One more time
FIRE
