This episode...is not very good. And it sucks because i know a lot of people are getting hung up on the omni man cliffhanger...but everything before that is SO BORING. Half the episode is a plot about Alvin the Alien, which is cute but its not as if he's a mega fan favorite or anything. It kind of feels like the writers are overestimating how much show-only fans like this character. The purpose of his section is some pretty good worldbuilding and some minor development in the Viltrumite plot. Then you have Debbie going to group therapy and Mark being in college. And its not like any of the ideas are bad but the issue is that the pacing is just atrocious... Why do the scenes drag so much? I still like this show but I'm starting to feel like not every episode needs to be 40 something minutes. There are like 15 minutes of mandatory material in this entire episode, and so many scenes are just characters talking and talking about stuff that doesn't matter at all.
If it were up to me, I might say put the Alvin part of the episode second and the normal Earth stuff first (outside of the end of that section), but also make the earth stuff shorter or at least more substantial. Alternatively, you can just start the episode with Allen and cut out the college stuff in the beginning and have the earth stuff as the second half, and that's a 35-minute episode. And it's not even that I'd remove any scenes per se it's that a lot of these scenes just feel too long. Compare to this to season 1, where the pacing felt mostly airtight and the Omni-man mystery was a ticking time bomb.
I had similar complaints for episode 2 but this was way, way worse. Mind you, I don't read the comics, so I'm talking purely from a show-only perspective, and I'm still a fan of the show, but this episode was not it...at all. And just because this episode ends in a way that has me excited for the next one, doesn't mean this episode gets a pass. This episode has an 8.6 right now so I guess most people don't feel this way idk or they're excited about the cliffhanger.
In summary, I still like this show, and the next episode could be a 10/10, but it still wouldn't change the fact that this is episode has bad pacing and is easily the worst episode in the entire series so far by a significant margin. I wouldn't even remove anything from it per se, I would just make the scene direction and editing snappier.
If it were up to me, I might say put the Alvin part of the episode second and the normal Earth stuff first (outside of the end of that section), but also make the earth stuff shorter or at least more substantial. Alternatively, you can just start the episode with Allen and cut out the college stuff in the beginning and have the earth stuff as the second half, and that's a 35-minute episode. And it's not even that I'd remove any scenes per se it's that a lot of these scenes just feel too long. Compare to this to season 1, where the pacing felt mostly airtight and the Omni-man mystery was a ticking time bomb.
I had similar complaints for episode 2 but this was way, way worse. Mind you, I don't read the comics, so I'm talking purely from a show-only perspective, and I'm still a fan of the show, but this episode was not it...at all. And just because this episode ends in a way that has me excited for the next one, doesn't mean this episode gets a pass. This episode has an 8.6 right now so I guess most people don't feel this way idk or they're excited about the cliffhanger.
In summary, I still like this show, and the next episode could be a 10/10, but it still wouldn't change the fact that this is episode has bad pacing and is easily the worst episode in the entire series so far by a significant margin. I wouldn't even remove anything from it per se, I would just make the scene direction and editing snappier.
