User blog comment:Mattalamode/Improvable: "The Test" and Going Deep/@comment-29346007-20180825213448

Matttrick! (That's you're real name, right?) This article was a pleasant surprise. I completely forgot that this was coming! (Probably because it's four months late) I really enjoyed this article and thought you did clean up a lot of the trips and stumbles. Most of my future rambling takes your ideas from restructuring and fuses them with my ideas to rewrite the episode. Also, the extended Christmas scene actually sounds great, especially the Gworp dance scene. (WARNING: Confusion might ensue with the upcoming ramble. Everything sounds better in my head, so this might be a terrible incoherent mess)

I think the whole episode might (might!) have been written better with A. taking one scenario and running with it or B. making the episode (at least the Tobias scenes) last over the course of a few days/weeks. It would have made the Christmas scene feel more natural and less random (although that is the point of the joke, but whatever) and it would have made the whole "jumping the shark" and "it was all a dream" jokes more realized and fleshed out. What I mean by that is through the entire "Tobias Show", it wouldn't take place in one day, rather it would last a couple of weeks with the sitcom getting progessively worse with each day/"episode". Maybe I'm just rambling but I think it would have made the episode less choppy and made the descent into "sitcom madness" represent something longer and more established than just a few hours.

As for explaining structure A, I have to say it probably would have been a fifty-fifty chance at being sucessful. I guess it would have to depend on how you would write it. If you only took one scenario and just used that, it would have been much harder to create jokes parodying the whole genre. I honestly think the best way to do this scenario is to keep the different storylines but have them all connect for one giant convoluted climax, only to be abruptly undercut by the dream sequence. And to balance out the plots, maybe other characers like Banana Joe, Clayton and Leslie could become Tobias's sort of friend group and have their own little sitcom B-plot. I know, a lot of the factors to these scenarios require some major plot points and elements to be erased, but these ideas were much more of an idea of a rewrite, rather than a restructure.

Alright, this is the longest response I've ever written to you and that's something I'm proud of as I used to not write the most....thought-out...(important)...responses. Please tell me how proud you are or this won't happen ever again.

Great to have you back and I'll be waiting for the next one. I'm guessing"The Deal" or "The Worst", as The Deal is a giant snore and The Worst is, well, it's The Worst. You know what to do with that.