User blog comment:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Egg/@comment-31620203-20170928231059/@comment-31194372-20170929070146

Thank you, it's always great to have you around and talking about the show!

To be honest, I always liked Felicity the most in "The Egg." Sure, "The Law" is fun, but it doesn't really demonstrate her as a fully fleshed-out character, and "The Blame" is largely an extension of her behavior here, but more bent on skewering oversensitive parents, making her message potent but slightly generic. There's something especially vivid, though, in her characterization in "The Egg," and considering that she's put in charge of manning a significant amount of the episode, she does a great job, basically as the ying to Nicole's yang. And considering how much I enjoyed Season 2's unadulterated cynicism, I didn't have too many issues in terms of Nicole properly balancing her out because we, as an audience, know that she triumphs in the end without a more explicit redistribution of justice.

While I didn't really discuss it, I actually liked Anais and Billy's dynamic a lot - they're the two most intelligent characters in the show, so there's definitely a sense of them being on equal ground for once, which was very cute. I think maybe a tiny bit more chemistry between the two characters, outside of the song, would've benefited the episode a lot and helped balance out the overarching sense of bitterness - their whole relationship seems to go by too quickly. "The Pest" faces issues in how seriously it implies their relationship blossomed, which feels more forced than anything else.

I'm really excited to talk about "The Roots!" Darwin, particularly, is such a fascinating character to look at from a mechanics standpoint because the dude has a whole lot of ups and downs.