The pacing is absolute rubbish, again. This far in and I’m more invested in how Lizzo’s diet’s going than in Carl’s incredibly banal daddy issues. It begins to feel like a spoof of itself by falling into all the worst pitfalls of bad reality tv plotting.
[Pause any meaningful review progress here and the repeat THE RIVER ROARING, DROWNING OUT ALL PACING to yourself for the next ten minutes before proceeding]
Pointless agonizing over situations this reader can no longer get invested in because I know it’ll be replaced by something else bigger and more agonizing via Deus Ex Machine right after the author has wasted my time having the protagonists cry about it for awhile, then making an elaborate plan to deal with the problem and executing half the damn plan.
Oh, and one Soundbooth Theater gripe. Whenever Matt doesn’t know what to do next and Carl is already crying (since “Have Carl cry” is his most used macro), he reaches for the “HAVE DONUT SCREAM” button. These sudden shifts in tone and volume needed to be handled responsibly and they were not. I like Donut. Donut’s character is the last redeeming quality of the series. All Carl does that doesn’t annoy me anymore is be a comic foil for Donut. This complaint is solely about the mishandling of the audio mixing in 27 hour production that relies on DONUT SCREAMING for a heck of a lot of that runtime.