Why Revenge isn't the Only Dish Best Served Cold

It’s been a couple weeks, but do you remember the “controversial” Super Bowl halftime show with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira?  People were having intense debates online and in person either attacking of defending the show.  Busy, educated people wrote impassioned multi-paragraph essays about it.  Yet now that the moment has passed no one cares about it anymore.  

This is why the motto of this blog is, “Cold takes on yesterday’s emergencies.”   The work of making meaning is best done after some time has passed, when we can tell whether a specific event actually warrants further thought. It’s amazing how time swiftly resolves most problems.  For example, we love the recently concluded Good Place here at Intensely Casual, but there were many times during its run that moment of apparently bad writing frustrated us.  What made The Good Place one of the best written show we’ve seen in a long time was that these moments of “bad writing” were often the setup for amazing earned reveals which justified the previously inexplicable storytelling. 

Right now we are “holding fire” on the current season of Rick and Morty.   After waiting three years for new episodes, I found the first half of the season to be disappointing.  Not bad, mind you, but not at the same high level as seasons two or three.  To me, the first half of season four feels a lot like the first half of season 1, when the show was just finding its footing.  This isn’t surprising, as after three years off much of the writing staff is new and all of it is bound to be cold.  It makes sense that they would need a chance to warm up, and might have gone so far as to intentionally do a few softer episodes to find their stride at the beginning of their massive 70 episode order.

 So we give them time. The second half of season 1 began with Rick Potion #9 (technically the midpoint), the episode I point to as the moment Rick and Morty jelled and figured out what it wanted to be.  It then proceeded to finish strong with “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind” and “Ricksy Business,” which provided crucial character development and a satisfying conclusion to the season.   The strong second half justified and elevated its first half.  

Which brings me back to the Super Bowl.  At half-time the score was tied at 10.    In many ways, you could argue that the first half didn’t matter at all.  The meaning of the first half was determined entirely by what came later.  One of the most important pieces of the Intensely Casual philosophy is that we try not to get excited about things that don’t matter  in the long run and avoid predictions unless they serve some greater purpose than the chance of being right or feeling clever.  Whether it’s the Super Bowl or Rick and Morty, we prefer to let the dust settle and the smoke clear before making up our minds.  Anything else is waster of time and energy.