The Afterparty: Brett
January 31, 2022 7:23 AM - Season 1, Episode 2 - Subscribe

In Brett's action-packed retelling of the night, he had one goal in attending the reunion: reconcile with his ex-wife to get their family back together.
posted by simonw (6 comments total)
 
I liked how this one really started to lean into the unreliable narrator / different perspectives on what happened thing - in particular the koala plot.
posted by simonw at 7:24 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


Yeah, it's interesting to try to pull apart which details are part of the subjective memories/stylized retellings of the focus character of the episode, and which are important clues. Like Zoe's clothing changing in this episode, that's probably just Brett's vision of her and not related to anything, right?

Some things I have on my list to keep an eye on: who has access to the wifi, alarm/intercom system, and computer in Xavier's house at any given time? Is Chelsea faking her level of intoxication at some points, she seems very different in the school hallway in Brett's recollection compared to Aniq's (and was her "X" flask roofied? Or was the drink Maggie & Aniq both drank at the school?) The closet door in Xavier's room gets opened and closed a few times (and there's a lot of attention to it as characters look at themselves in the mirror on the door) so what's going on there (was someone hiding in that closet at some point)? I also feel like I was unable to follow the presence/absence/movement of the Jennifers (sometimes together, sometimes separately) which was probably just unclear so far since they aren't that important to the first two viewpoint characters.

Also, from this Sydney Morning Herald article:
Miller says they recruited puzzle-master (and magician) David Kwong to shore up the central whodunnit, and even plant hidden codes and ciphers throughout the show for any viewers “nerdy enough to freeze-frame” each episode.
Sigh, I'm not going to watch this all over again to look for Kwong-level puzzles, is there a Reddit where someone has already solved them?
posted by bcwinters at 7:58 AM on January 31, 2022


Oh no! I was treating the whodunnit as an excuse for the fun character stuff, but now that I know they're taking it this seriously I'll have to start paying more attention to it.
posted by simonw at 10:13 AM on January 31, 2022


Interesting take. Brett is awful, BUT him living in a wannabe Die Hard movie where he's just trying to be an action hero and get his wife back and take care of his kid is...kind of sweet, in a way? And he thought the slideshow would be sweet, vs. how Zoe took it...?

On the other hand, the peeing scene. Oy.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:26 PM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I thought the peeing scene was too much but in retrospect, Brett's version of confrontation with Xavier is a LITERAL pissing contest, which amuses me.

Did anyone else's clothing or other details change? I'm the least observant person on earth.
posted by mmoncur at 9:05 PM on February 1, 2022


Lots of fun. My only wish is that the other characters' personalities changed a bit more from POV to POV. You get a bit of it, like Zoe and Aniq interacting in the background in a few shots where her gestures are quite unlike anything in the Aniq episode, but many of the other characters when they do cross the attention of the POV character tend to be fairly similar so far. But perhaps as each of them get their turn in the sun, their roles both before and after will appear in new lights.

One of the fun things about Rashomon was how the entire ensemble changed from version to version. But even so, it's odd how often people forget or don't seem to realize that by the end of the film, you actually have a quite clear idea of what happened. Maybe at the end of this one we'll discover that all of this was just the layered fantasies of the detective with her self-important "mind movies," and then we'll see from some final pov that she has been fooled in some sort of Orient Express scheme...
posted by chortly at 4:28 PM on February 18, 2022


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