So I really liked this episode, especially the Shadow King fight at the beginning, but man, this really highlighted how bad the characterization has been. I'm way more interested in David and Lenny then any of the other goobers, so instead of being torn when David turned I was like "Yeah, fuck it. Kill all these dudes. Why not?"
Oh lord, I feel bad about it but I relate. Not that I'm excited to cheer on a rapist or anything, but David and Lenny fucking up the world sounds more interesting to watch than anything else being offered here at the moment. Might come back for S3 on that basis.
Honestly the show didn't earn the David-finally-goes-bad development. This is what they should have spent all season carefully setting up, instead of wasting time on some of the utter bullshit we had earlier like that episode with the huge mind-chicken (that can apparently stab you IRL? man I don't even know what happened there) or all the pseudointellectual digressions.
Even better if they'd done what they seem to think they've done, which is secretly establishing his downfall from the start while tricking us into sharing David's delusion that he's mentally well - but pulling off that narrative sleight-of-hand would have required a fiendish intelligence that has, let's be honest, never been on display in this show. As soon as they started doing the whole "look how evil he really is! Drill!" an ep or two ago I knew it was going to wind up half-assed. Bah.
Also I can't help but feel like for a show that makes such a huge point of being about mental illness, its handling of mental illness has become messy as fuck. Although fartsy rhetoric about how "perhaps we are
all Mad and it is the Mad ones who are sane, what is the true nature of Madness, etc etc etc" doesn't exactly flag up a real interest in the topic in the first place. The interpretation of David's illness in these last few episodes seems to veer between him being deluded in specific - even tantalisingly realistic - ways, and him just being all-encompassingly evil with a capital E which is not only less interesting but potentially even exploitative (worse since it feels increasingly like the sexual abuse was thrown in just to be "the point where he goes BAD!" rather than something given its necessary weight).
Frustrating. The bones of something good were here, but it never quite took shape.
