Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 88 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT The Privilege of Irony
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.05.2014
If you didn't have villains, you might just have compassion instead. If you didn't have the need to be more wounded than the next person, or take a victim role to except yourself from being implicated in someone else's problems, you'd see how easy it is to get to where everybody can win. If you can get your head around the fact that actual racists are not invited to this conversation, and wouldn't get it anyway, you could stop alienating the people whose minds are actually ready for the download of what is really going on -- instead of being told explicitly that they are evil simply by existing, and therefore need to whine twice as loudly to be heard as clearly as usual.
So right then, this episode doubles down because you see both sides -- and it's rare that an issue actually has two sides -- of this thing: If Ryan Murphy is not an asshole, and doing something inherently good, and if Jonathan Coulton is not an asshole, and doing something inherently sweet, then who is the asshole? Trick question, because there is no asshole. Just people on the same side of the issue, violently attacking each other -- to prove who is a better person -- because they speak the same language, unlike the actual bad guys who can't even hear you talking. A conversation that happens to be about two kinds of people -- bigots and minorities -- who are not allowed, by design, into that conversation.
Murphy: "The thing is that artists are sponges. We take in the same information from the zeitgeist, and transmute it into something new..."
Alicia has changed into a particular white suit we've seen a few times before: It's the one she was wearing the first time she and Will closed the deal, and I think it's the one she was wearing during his "Decision Tree" fantasy revenge scene, as well. Needless to say, this throws him off a million times harder than his previous gambit did hers, as she refuses to look up at him at the next desk, adjusting her skirt, adjusting her décolletage, waiting effortlessly for him to finish Murphy's testimony. He goes down, of course, in flames, and it's beautiful.
F/A: "So you're saying the zeitgeist made you do it?"
Fox: "[One million objections, but not as a joke. Just as a spinning-out into crazy.]"
F/A: "My bad. So you're saying two artists are sometimes inspired by the same thing? Such as butts."
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