Carole & Tuesday Episode 22 Discussion

Kougeru said:

Really not sure what everyone liked about "After the Fire". It's really not a good song aside from the lyrics.After the Fire had good lyrics but the melody was extremely basic and repetitive. Not something I could listen to very often. Not a great song at all.

Kougeru said:
The fake accent Angela's singer has still drives me up a wall. She's a great singer but that shit ruins it.

Kougeru said:
No offense to the singer but Crystal's singing voice would've been better if they just used Maaya Sakamoto for that as well as her speaking voice.
Why replace a professional? She's not even a better singer than Maaya -even in English

Really not sure what everyone liked about "After the Fire". It's really not a good song aside from the lyrics.After the Fire had good lyrics but the melody was extremely basic and repetitive. Not something I could listen to very often. Not a great song at all.



The fake accent Angela's singer has still drives me up a wall. She's a great singer but that shit ruins it. I hate that it's such a big fad in the West.


The actual plot moved well. Not sure how they're gonna deal with all the political stuff in only two episodes... Though I'm imagining Tuesday speaking out against her own mother would really damage her.

FuMomo-kun said:
Everything is happening so fast that this is feeling quite underwhelming.

ShiningLion said:
There is so much in this episode that disturbed me. I was disgusted watching all the Mars celebrities sit there cracking political jokes and basically using Carole & Tuesday as puppets to try to push their political views when the girls don't even fully understand their place in that or why Crystal wanted them to sing that kind of song. I feel like the industry is using them, and it's irregardless of whether their political views are justified or not. It's just petty to sit there cracking political jabs at a candidate while people within their own industry like Angela were suffering through so much with no support (so ironic too since she's the new artist of the year and the talk of the industry), and of course there are seemingly victims of poverty and the political climate as well who aren't mentioned and don't have a voice. It really feels like it shows the privilege of celebrity elites to be able to sit at their fancy, elaborate awards shows in expensive clothing and make cracks about the world while outside people suffer. Meanwhile, Angela seems to have written her own song for the first time. It feels like a bit of a role reversal, where she was the one being used by the industry previously but now Carole and Tuesday are.

I don't know if the After the Fire was really meant to come off as having been truly inspirational or what we were supposed to feel. A big problem I have with this show is I often can't tell what it is we're supposed to be feeling. Were my feelings of disgust toward the elites intended? Or were we supposed to be moved and feel all these artists are inspiring the world? It's hard to, when in real life and in Hollywood there is so much hypocrisy and lip service. Anyway, the song was really generic and I didn't care for it. Angela's Light a Fire is more moving to me. Her performance on this episode was haunting and beautiful as well. I prefer it over C&T's.

And on that note, this really has become "The Angela Show". To me, it feels like Carole & Tuesday aren't even the main characters in regards to the show's writing. Angela is way more fleshed out as a character and has more believable and dynamic struggles. C&T just sort of float through everything with lots of luck, support, and coincidences on their side, and almost no consequences to them personally when they have failures. Everyone else around them gets hurt, but they rarely do, and when they do, it's resolved too quickly (like Cybele's attack or Valerie kidnapping Tuesday) or over something trivial (like Tuesday's poorly established crush on the reporter).

Idk what to think. I'm not expecting a lot from the ending, but I am very glad the show has shifted to focus so much on Angela because she has been the most compelling character in this show since midway through the first arc. I clapped when she won the award. She deserves it. I do still hope that in the end she becomes friends with C&T and collaborates with them. I get what C&T are supposed to represent: hope, new energy, creativity, faith in yourself, ability to inspire others, etc. but as characters they are still so stereotypical and not as complex as ones like Angela.

I've been predicting the 7 Minute Miracle will also involve Angela in some way as a plot twist, but now that she's laid up I don't know. I also predict that the final episode's title will be "Imagine" by John Lennon, or something similar. Just throwing out some guesses. I REALLY can't wait for this show to end b/c so much of the messaging has felt vague or gray that I want to know where they're going with all this

P.S. Lol Keanu Reeves cameo

ShiningLion said:
I'd also just like to add, this show has a problem of constantly breaking the filmmaking rule "show, don't tell". The premise of the show on the website and elsewhere says it's about the struggle of music artists C&T trying to write their own music and succeed in a world where music is made by AI and people are passive consumers of it. That theme was never meaningfully explored in the show. It just fell by the wayside with only a couple of mentions shoehorned in (like the judge on Mars Brightest mentioning something about them writing their own music and being skeptical about it). Glad Ertegun was there in this episode to tell us "music has no rules" and don't be pretentious about what styles of music are valid or not, b/c the show's plot never really dug into this much. Sarcasm aside though, Ertegun's speech is another instance where they needed to "show, don't tell" and just feels stuck in there to make the point that the story itself didn't make clearly. There weren't enough characters reacting to the supposed phenomenon of C&T being one of the few artists left to write their own songs. It was barely ever mentioned and instead we got the political plotlines. It does seem the writer has tried to subvert our expectations and that the real struggle was not the world in this show needing to accept Carole & Tuesday's self-written music, but the viewers of the show needing to accept that A.I. produced music (which is already common in the industry) can still move people (hence Angela winning new artist of the year).

I just have a lot of problems with the expectation vs. reality of this show, because they've ignored a lot of the conventions of writing, and as much as they want to argue that art is free and there are no rules, it doesn't mean there are no skills to build, methods to convey things effectively, techniques to master, etc. You can bang on pots and pans and call it music, or rattle on about your day and call it a story, but it takes mastery of the conventions of music and storytelling to really reach a lot of people. Who's being pretentious here? Seems like the creators want to say we audience members are, when it may indeed be the writers of this show, who present a very jumbled story and expect us to be floored and changed by it. The emotional heft of the songs is inconsistent too. Desmond's song as he was dying was more impactful than Carole & Tuesday's collab with Crystal. The emotional peaks of the show come in such random waves that they never reach a true high, at least in the second half.

TheDopplerEffect said:
When was the last time they did anything out of their own free will?.

Old_School_Akira said:


When Gus told Carole & Tuesday to not see ezekiel 2 episodes ago because he is a gangster and Tuesday told Carole about that, but went to she him anyway and nothing bad happened to her.

Sure Angela breaks free for the 1st time but now she’s The Loneliest Girl 🤔

TheDopplerEffect said:
It just occurred to me that the girls are almost literal tools to be abused by Gus and the others to do their bidding. Gus says do that, they go and do it, Crystal says change the song, the go and change it. When was the last time they did anything out of their own free will? The show is supposed to be about creative freedom and the power to inspire people. It's ironic how the main duo is a personification of the opposite.
On the contrary, Angela breaks free from captivity by not only doing something on her own for the first time, but also by writing and performing her own song, despite being in clear emotional distress.
Is this intended? For some reason I doubt it.

MiiyoSon said:


Wait so Carole and Tuesday didn't write their own songs? I recall from the very first episode that they Wanted to be well known musicians.

TheDopplerEffect said:


They did write their songs in the first couple of episodes. But after a while they got this old guy in a hat telling them to redo the songs over and over until he was satisfied. And now we have Crystal, who, in the montage, is clearly shown to reject a couple of their drafts until she was satisfied with the result.
At this point the question becomes wether or not this even counts as writing something yourself. I mean, technically they did it themselves, but was that really supposed to be the message? Just listen to the others and do what they say?

MiiyoSon said:


So Toby's job isn't supposed to make sure that their work is polished? Or that Crystal's job isn't to make sure she's singing with other artist who can't hang with her?

Also Gus gave C&T an option in ep 13?

Money or freedom? They chose both. To continue as indie artists. Meaning they were going to need a lot of help (like Angela) to make it big as artist.

TheDopplerEffect said:
So the story clearly paints our protagonists as the underdogs trying to make it big in the harsh world of music.
So how do they achieve it? By meeting some old dude who sets everything up for them, then another one who helps them to make their music into what he thinks to be good. How exactly are they different from everyone else? Where's the struggle? Where is the expression of their artistic freedom?

TheDopplerEffect said:

regarding C&T's career decisions, Gus made the following ones: they play in a bar, they go to the music festival, they attend the talent show, they refuse the label deal, they meet the producer, they attend another music festival... You get my idea?

TheDopplerEffect said:
I'm just saying that the story is crap.