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

Awesome article! I've really wanted to hear your thoughts on this one for a while now.

As I've previously established (mainly on Reddit), I hate hate hate The Egg. The cringe comedy is something nasty, but you didn't cover that and I see a valid motive for it having no reason being discussed, so I'll just skip to the heart of the matter - Felicity's character.

Felicity is interesting. Her writing is amazing, and I won't deny that. The problem is that she's overdone in this episode specifically. We see her used perfectly in others - The Law and The Blame come to mind - but here they didn't have any zany antics or catharsis to balance out the hateability of her character aside from Nicole's fury, which frankly didn't do it justice. It's the same problem I have with The Origins Part Two - the beatdown on one character is so strong that the catharsis doesn't feel as satisfying as it should, but in this episode it's a hundred times worse than there. And I don't think the fight counts, like, at all, because nobody won when they were distracted by having to enter the museum. And she escapes unscathed from the teeth of Nicole's demon form, so I don't think that counts either.

As for the subplot with Anais and Billy - it was really cute, and I didn't mind their splitting up so much because they didn't actually hate each other, so it didn't rip the happy from the viewer's hands, it just softly removed it without being mean about it. It should've taken up more of the episode, and while I see what you're going for with the angle that it would've been too frustrating to see it go away, I think that's more a problem with The Pest. It being taken away wasn't that bad, and then The Pest came along and now they hate each other again. Greeeeeeat. Buuut that's my problem with a different episode, so it isn't too relevant. Back to Felicity.

Felicity's realism isn't necessarily a bad thing. You need to have someone grounded in reality to balance out the cartooniness of a show like this with the insanity that happens too, but when it's not played for laughs or balanced out like that, it's not entertaining. It just sucks. It's too serious, and we've seen before that seriousness isn't really this show's strong point. It can do it, sure, but there were so many failed attempts before The Rerun came around that were too relatable to be funny or intriguing. Still, I admire what the show was trying to do with her, and what they did manage to do with her a couple other times. The show is experimental, and they wanted to see how far they could take it, so kudos to them for trying that out, and to the people that liked it, I'm glad they did.

Anyway... good luck on the next one. That oughta be fun, both to read and to write. Character and how it colludes with plot to make a solid whole is always interesting.