I Was the Maverick of Bagging Groceries But Declined My Invitation to Top Gun
🖐 The Friday High Five #119
Welcome to this week’s Mullet edition of the Friday High 5.
Business in the front: The 5 things I loved this week, free for all to enjoy.
Party in the back: A deeper exploration of something on my mind, for supporters.
Business in the front
Andor: S2 Episodes 8-10
Vibe: Desperate times call for desperate rebels.
Deets: Now that we’ve reached Andor’s endgame, I’ve drastically slowed my roll. I just don’t want it to end. I’m planning on finishing it this weekend, but I’m only sorta happy about it.
I’m going to step lightly in regard to spoilers in case you’re also sipping.
So. Ghorman.
Holy shit.
I can fairly confidently say Episode 8 is the finest 40-ish minutes of Star Wars we’ve ever seen. Front to back, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling and tension. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time. Which is crazy! This show is a prequel of a prequel, starring a guy who doesn’t make it out alive. The odds of Andor being as good as it is are infinitesimally small. But that’s not actually true. Because it turns out that if you treat a story as something real, and not just another brick in the wall of your self-referential ghetto, good stuff happens.
It also helps when you’re in the hands of a talented storyteller, like Tony Gilroy, who has ambitions beyond telling a Star War. Who comes to the work not with 40-years of expectations but a lifelong fascination with resistance movements. It shows. The big question coming out of Andor will be: How does this change Lucasfilm’s approach to Star Wars, if at all? I’m afraid I already know the answer to that, which is why I’m so desperate to make Andor last.
Part of what continues to please me is how often and ably the women of Star Wars are the ones making a difference. Even though his name is on the tin, this show isn’t about Cassian Andor. He’s part of an ensemble, a dirty dozen of desperate rebels, at least half of whom are women.
Streaming on Disney+.
Bad Monkey: S1
Vibe: Black comedy that’s more hilarious than dark.
Deets: What a delightful show. That might be weird to say considering Bad Monkey starts with the discovery of an amputated arm and goes from there, but the show is in on the joke. It wants you to laugh along with it, which totally undercuts the reality of people dying and being murdered. Maybe this says something about me, but Bad Monkey quickly became comfort viewing, something low stakes and yes, even lite, that I could settle into after the end of another long and exhausting day.
I partly believe this show exists just to give Vince Vaughn a platform upon which to do his Vince Vaughn schtick. Which means your mileage will depend entirely upon how you feel about Vaughn’s brand of quick quips and sly asides. I’m a big fan.
Season 2 has already been announced. I don’t even care that the first season wraps up so well that there’s not many plot points left dangling. I’m not there for the story. I’m there to see Vaughn do his thing.
Streaming on Apple TV.
Couples D&D Weekend
Vibe: Dice, mayhem, and carefully curated charcuterie.
Deets: Sometime last year, my 2 friends and I decided to play a game of D&D with our spouses, just to see how it feels.
It felt good.
We reconvened again this past Saturday. The three guys rotate Dungeon Master responsibilities. Which meant I got to play again as Sir Robert Gainsford, an elderly knight who looks like Joe Biden. I play Sir Robert as a brash defender of justice. When confronted with danger, he charges in, identifies the main threat, and uses an ability called Compel Duel to force the foe into a 1-v-1 fight. He greets his foe with a rejoinder: “Dance with me.”
Saturday, Sir Robert danced his last.
Weakened by poison from a giant spider, Sir Robert nonetheless pressed on in order to end the curse afflicting a small town. He engaged the Big Bad, gave him the what for, and fell in battle. He died when our cleric decided he’d rather be Iron Man than Dr. Quinn, Medicine Dwarf. (With my blessing, as it’s what Sir Robert would’ve wanted.)
So now my character is dead. And though I created him as something of a joke—he does morning yoga in his long johns with the butt flap open—I was rather bereft after. I liked Sir Robert.
The Last of Us: S2, Episodes 3-4
Vibe: It can always get worse, and definitely will.
Deets: I put this show off for a week because life was too much—too grim, too bleak, too much bad news—and I couldn’t take the full narrative payload of The Last of Us. Andor can be grim, but it’s undergirded by a clear fount of hope. The Last of Us is often unrelentingly dark.
If you’re watching the show, you probably understand why I needed a brief timeout after episode 2. But now I’m back, and hurtling forward into almost certain heartbreak. The experience of watching The Last of Us is one of knowing a boot is hovering overhead and constantly flinching, assuming this is the time it’s going to fall.
It hasn’t fallen yet.
Ellie and Dina leave the safety of Jackson Hole to go road tripping through the apocalypse, and the whole time I just wanted them to turn around. And even when they get where they’re going, and see what they’re facing, and have something to live for other than vengeance, they don’t leave. I’m going to be very put out when the inevitable happens.
Anyway, Dina is awesome.
Streaming on HBO Max.
Hacks: S4, Episode 6
Vibe: Truce?
Deets: Season 4 has been a hard watch. Not in the way that The Last of Us is. More like seeing two people you care about go through a break-up. Hard, and ugly, and you want them to just get over their shit and get back together.
Hacks is sometimes frustrating because we want the characters to change drastically in accordance with the story, but that’s now how life works. Change is slow and gradual, full of sidesteps and retreats. I don’t know if Debra will ever be the surrogate mother that Ava so clearly wants her to be, but she has changed since season 1. Nowhere is that more clear than in episode 6. Ava goes MIA and Debra legit panics. And in her panic, she finally recognizes how important Ava is to her. She even apologizes. It’s a great moment, and it seems like we might finally get this dynamic duo back on track.
The bigger bummer: this season is already halfway over and it feels like we haven’t really gone anywhere yet. I’m sitting here trying to recall vital plot points and can only think of a few (Debra’s anxiety attack, the dinner with Helen Hunt, Ava going off the reservation). The plot was always second fiddle to the relationship, but never before have I felt like we’re just kinda spinning our wheels. Hoping things get back on track this week.
Streaming on HBO Max.
Party in the back
I Was the Maverick of Bagging Groceries But Declined My Invitation to Top Gun
That headline probably has you picturing a sweaty, Kenny Loggins-backed montage of shirtless baggers flexing after efficiently packing a shopper’s purchases. Groceries by Chippendales. The reality is a bit less obviously salacious, but also not completely puritan.
A rich topic for another time.
During high school I bagged groceries in a Northern Michigan town. We were the second biggest grocery store—out of two. Couldn’t compete on selection or price, so instead we cornered the market on gawky teenagers schlepping groceries out to customers’s cars.
The store closed a few years after I left for college.
I’m not implying causality. But I was the store’s best bagger. Empirically—we’ll come to that momentarily. I don’t know if bagger groupies are a thing—and why not, if bouncer groupies exist?—but if so, I may have inadvertently led to the collapse of the local economy. “What—Eric doesn’t work here anymore? Screw this, I’m outta here. Lost my appetite.”
Bagging groceries is a lost art, largely because the bagging profession doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if you can call high schoolers working part-time “professionals,” but we were the only ones trained for the task. Cashiers would sometimes pitch in to “help” if it was a large order. Their version of bagging just meant throwing stuff into bags. It offended me, which was the first and truest sign I was a professional. I adhered to a standard.
Today, baggers have gone the way of the dodo. Self-checkouts made baggers redundant, and cashiers filled the remaining void. Chances are you bag your own groceries. That doesn’t mean you have any idea what you’re doing. I brush my teeth but wouldn’t presume to know more about dental care than my dentist. It’s basically the same thing. We just treat it differently because a dentist has years of study and a degree, and I learned how to bag in 30 minutes from a freckled kid named Pat.