absolutely disastrous fall-off

*I initially left this review on the main listing, but since I actually watched the uncut version, I've reposted it here.

God, where do I begin. I guess I'll say that at the start, I was enjoying myself. Sure, it was a little contrived and there were always pacing issues from the episode 1 on, but there were enough interesting elements to have me willing to go along. Over the following three months, I then experienced what the proverbial frog being boiled must have felt as around me the waters got hotter and hotter until I was being turned into rancid jelly.

Quick premise recap: Through a series of contrivances, Jack and Joke meet as youths (Joke is somewhere around 20, Jack is 18) and bond. Jack runs into Joke while Joke is robbing a bank, Joke approves a loan for him, then Jack gets accused of participating in the robbery, Joke turns himself in and goes to prison for 5 years while Jack ends up working for a loan shark referred to as Boss. Time skip forward, Jack is out of prison and wants to go apologize and is upset to find out that Jack is no longer the sweet kid he remembers but instead a (seemingly) brutal debt collector. He teams up with two of Jack's friends to steal Jack's parents' ring from Boss, which he's been using as leverage to keep Jack working for him, and free Jack from this life.

Okay. That seems fine, right? Except from there the plot proceeds to introduce more and more elements, getting increasingly out of control as it goes. I should have known it was doomed the moment they introduced The Evil Crime Boss monopoly game in a scene that must have taken a solid 10-15 minutes but felt more like an hour. I doubly should have known when in, like, the next episode they did an almost identical scene but with a digital game of Chutes and Ladders. In case you didn't get it, these rich people see the poor as their playthings. Do I understand what any of these people actually do? Nope!

From there, it just gets more comic book before reaching absurdist heights with a final episode that includes three characters handcuffed to video game consoles with bomb collars on while for some reason they're forced to play hangman in one of the most excruciating sequences of television I've been subjected to. And then it's revealed that all the danger the characters were allegedly in didn't actually matter, because the escalating events of the past three episodes were actually all just the Four Horsemen screwing with Boss. Which thematically, yes, makes sense, but also negated 90% of the character decisions that had come before.

It's hard to describe what a letdown this show was. It started with a promising premise and themes of the cycle of poverty and self-interest versus self-sacrifice, all to abandon that for a poor knock-off of Squid Game. Character arcs are introduced and dropped at the speed of light, interpersonal conflicts that should be a major problem are resolved in a few lines, and plot points that seem incredibly important just disappear into the wind.

Things that were good:
- War is still a great actor and manages to pull genuine pathos out of an insane script.
- Yin and War have the chemistry and heat to convince you of Jack and Joke's attraction even if their romance arc felt pretty anemic towards the end.
- For the most part, it looks great, and the early fight scenes especially are fun.
- Victor, perhaps the only actor who truly understood what genre he was in, chewed the scenery to bits and left no crumbs.
- The first heist involving the fashion show was pretty fun.

Things that were bad:
- Almost everyone was hopelessly incompetent. If you were looking for a fun, slick heist show, this is not it because no one is good at anything, including Joke who is allegedly a master thief even though we are given absolutely no reason to believe this.
- Wildly inconsistent pacing and tone. Perhaps the Saw traps at the end would have felt more fun and camp to me if the first couple episodes hadn't been relatively grounded.
- Character motivations bounced all over the place, especially for the antagonists. We're told in a two line exchange in episode 10 that Boss is actually doing his hostile takeover of the Four Horsemen as revenge for his parents, which is given no further explanation or depth aside from another single line in the finale that has no relevance and is never mentioned again.
- Characters and plot threads were dropped for multiple episodes. Side characters Save and Hope, who have a lot of bearing on the plot as minions for Boss, straight up disappear for like three episodes straight. Tattoo, Arun, and Hoy, who all seem really important at the beginning, also have arcs that are completely dropped.
- People/the show seems to conveniently forget there are guns for long stretches of time, or just forget how basic physics work.
- One of the most poorly executed twists of all time because we have no information about the people involved in said twist. You have time to make Jack bark like a dog for like five solid minutes but can't give us a Mean Girls-style rundown of the Four Horsemen? Please.

I think the most frustrating thing is that there were absolutely seeds of a good, fun show, but it was buried beneath ten layers of nonsense that should have been cut in the first round of edits. Like, not even. It should have been cut at the outline stage and then thrown into a fire never to be contemplated again. I am willing to accept a lot of nonsense in my media, I am able to suspend disbelief, and I have watched a lot of objectively bad television, but this manged to hit my threshhold on everything. Even watching it with friends didn't help; we ended up setting the finale on 2x when we realized there was still half an hour left after watching people mess with an ipad in a cheap-looking warehouse set for an hour. I guess I'm glad other people enjoyed it, because I like Yin and War, but kings, this one should have gone back to the drawing board.

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into the omegaverse

I remember seeing the trailer for this and thinking, huh, a story about a wannabe racer becoming the sugar baby of his idol, that sounds fun. And Pit Babe isn't not that, exactly, but boy what a mislead! At least the show itself makes it clear within the first five minutes that this is also a) omegaverse and b) a new and exciting take on omegaverse.

I want to be critical of the plot, but having read the novel in a futile attempt to see if I could make more sense of the world-building in a format where censorship didn't force them to sidestep male pregnancy, I know that they did their best with what they had, expanding on all of the characters outside of Charlie and Babe and integrating them, especially the rest of the racing team, into the wider plot. Really, I think the pacing was off--there were a lot of scenes that dragged on too long, especially the racing since that ended up being largely incidental--and it was of course hampered by the fact that they couldn't explicitly say that the villain's evil plot was to get Babe pregnant. Just that they'd make him "have a baby." Have a baby how!! I kept yelling at the screen. Whatever, it's fine.

(It is very funny how the omegaverse stuff manifests in a medium where they can't, apparently, say anyone is an omega. Honestly, the omegaverse aspect of the novel is more a vehicle for the male pregnancy to human trafficking scheme, since very few other common omegaverse tropes appear. I do like the innovation of "special" alphas etc., both because it's funny and because it's something new. I am less sure how I feel about enigmas and them being able to impregnate alphas, mostly because it raises existentially horrifying physiological questions. Do alphas have vestigial uteri?? Do they DEVELOP one when they're with an enigma??)

As for the show itself, it is well-produced, except for the absolutely hideous opening credits sequence, and clearly made with a decent budget. They did about as well with the action scenes as you'd expect from an average tv budget, and even if the racing bored me personally, they did not skimp on those sequences. A lot of care clearly went into making this show! The sponcon is not subtle, but isn't that delightful sometimes? I think the funniest one was when Charlie was given a carton of soy milk to "build up his strength."

The acting is somewhat variable, but in general I think everyone did a decent job! Pavel had a lot on his shoulders as the main character and the main emotional anchor of the show, but he handled it well, and looked beautiful doing so. The script writers said we are going to make that beautiful man cry, and he committed. His chemistry with Pooh formed a great foundation for the main relationship and even when they were saying cringe stuff to each other I had to go aww. They really did match each other's freak.

The other actors also put in the work. Standouts to me were Garfield as Kenta, a character who is almost nonexistent in the novel, but was given depth and pathos both from the writing and the performance, and Supanut as Way, bravely playing someone trying to be a top even if I think Way would actually burst into tears if he had to top for real. Sailub and Pon as Alan and Jeff provided a much-needed dorky awkward relationship foil to the nonstop hornytown that Charlie and Babe.

On the whole, I don't know if I would recommend Pit Babe to just anyone. If you can take some nonsense and some cringe, and want to watch something that just has a lot going on, this might be for you. It's a popcorn show, the same way a Fast & Furious installment is a popcorn movie. Come for the pretty people and high production value, stay for the implied mpreg...? Extremely curious what they're going to do with season 2 since they've already finished up what's in the novel--and I'll be there, with my clown shoes and red nose on, ready to watch.

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one does not simply review playboyy the series

What can I say about Playboyy? It has some of the best thriller plot writing I've seen in a bl. It has horrible dialogue and scene blocking. I watched every single episode rapt with attention. I actually screamed aloud (derogatory) at one sex scene. Every time they made those poor actors speak English I wanted to jump out a window. Recounting what happened in any given episode to my friends took at least 500 words, and that was usually just the last 15 minutes of that ep. There are like five sex scenes in each episode of varying quality and I think I actually learned something about the characters from each one. I don't think anyone takes their underwear off possibly ever because they had an underwear sponsorship.

Look, I can't in good conscience recommend this show. I don't even know if I really enjoyed it. But I was fascinated, and I was intrigued. When the last episode ended and revealed there was going to be a season 2, I resigned myself to the fact that I will watch it, even if some of the events toward the end made me go wtf was that.

To actually provide some sort of review, it's a thriller-mystery featuring a twin swap. Nont/Nant was actually the best part of the show for me--I was surprised both by how much I liked the character and by the performance given by Dech, who I think did a solid job with a difficult role. Out of the...seven?? I think?? couples in this show, Nont and Prom were by far my favorite, both because I think the actors bounced off each other well and because I enjoyed the dynamic of Prom assisting Nont in his revenge. Did I think the part where they were pointing guns at each other and then started making out sexy? Yes, because it was.

It's funny, because the show kind of presents itself as being about Zouey, who is pivotal to the story, but honestly faded from my attention early on--though given events at the end of the season, this might have been intentional. If I ever manage to rewatch, I'll have to keep an eye on him, because I can't tell if they had his arc fully planned from the beginning or if they adjusted it as they went along. Him and Teena were largely uninteresting to me but also did have the sex scene that made me scream. Take that as you will.

As I said, I found the plotting/structure of the thriller really compelling in how and when it revealed information about the characters. The first few episodes are incredibly confusing because they present you with almost the entire main cast at once and for a long time, you won't know why some of them are important. Did I think some of the writing choices were absolutely batshit? Sure, but sometimes that's just how it goes in a thriller. What it was good at was providing all the characters with layers of motivations and interpersonal relationships to complicate the mystery.

Also, when it says they use sex to solve the mystery, they weren't joking about that. There was a point in like episode 4 where I went oh my god...they're actually using sex to solve the mystery...

As for the characters themselves, I appreciated that very few of them were one-note, even the ones who I thought were underwritten. I think some of the relationships were more compelling due to a combo of relevance to the main story and performance. But with this many couples, there's kinda something for everyone.

I don't know, gang. It's a hard show to review. I felt like it was something that happened to me more than it was something I watched. If you do decide to watch it, know that it takes a couple episodes to really get going (not with regard to sex--they start that right away) and that the list of content warnings at the beginning is no joke. It isn't an entirely heavy show--there are a lot of comedic moments, some intentional and quite a few that were probably unintentional--but your brain will feel scrambled. I'll see you when season 2 airs.

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