This week's episode was bizarrely lame. Seriously, in 2017, in a fantasy show that's based on a comic book and presumably has a lot of nerdly-oriented people in its audience, we actually get an episode that treats Dungeons & Dragons as some weird game that has to be explained to the characters and that none of them have ever played, and whose players are portrayed as dysfunctional geeks worthy of mockery? Was this a rewrite of a script written 20 years ago? Come on, there's a whole generation or two of people who grew up playing RPGs, including many who are big names in media, computers, and such. Surely this is mainstream by now, and we should be well past the days when it was seen as a freakish subculture. Given that they actually went to the trouble of getting permission to reference D&D by name, I'm surprised by the episode's attitude toward gaming.
Plus, the portrayal of Liv on the DM's brain underlines everything that's wrong with how the show's being written this season. I doubt very much that most DMs act like DMs all the time. Just because they narrate and roll dice while playing a game that entails those things, that doesn't mean they do it in other situations, any more than a person who plays football recreationally would wear a helmet and pads in the office or tackle the waiter at a restaurant. But these days, all of Liv's personas are reduced to one-note caricatures, pure gimmicks that contribute nothing to the plots and don't have any depth. It's getting really dumbed down, and this was the dumbest yet.
Not only that, but it just got dumped midway through. The FBI took over the case, the murder went unsolved, and Liv ate tube brains to de-DM herself. So what was even the point? It's like the whole D&D thing was just filling time until the got to the arc stuff with Graves and Baracus and the returns of Bozzio and Mr. Boss. What a mess.
) wouldn't it be a weird twist of events if he turned bad like Blaine was before he took the cure...
