u/Left_Goose_1527

I may be the last to notice this but - IT’S BACK!! It’s one of my go-to comfort watches and I skipped straight to episode 15 to make sure I wasn‘t having some sort of revisionist history thing going on with Lee Junho but no - he actually is 100% as good as I remember him and a perfect foil for Namgoong Min.

What I hadn’t remembered is that while NGM is over-the-top vocally and physically, LJH plays mostly with expression and physical gags and far fewer vocal bits, but the camera keeps going to him for amazing reaction shots and he delivers every single time.

Anyway. It’s back, it takes a bit to get into at first, but it braids up tight at the ends and all the weirdo characters you meet in the first half are needed in the back half and it’s great. And I have no idea whether the Swahili is remotely correct but I laugh every time I see that scene. So random.

I know the script won an award in 2022 in the 12-16 ep category, but does anyone know if the original script submitted was 16 episodes? I like the show a lot as popcorn entertainment, but these last few episodes have felt like a 16 hour story got 4 hours cut out of it, and that most of those cuts happened in the last 4 episodes.

There are shows with plot holes, and there are certainly some here, but this feels more like the story was mapped out - we’re just doing a whiplash-inducing series of small flash-forwards. So less like the writer didn’t think of it, and more like she wasn’t able to get it onscreen.

Were the scripts from 2022 made public, or is it a closed competition?

One of the most frustrating things for me about this condition is its unpredictibility in social settings. My poor family and friends are trying to figure out how not to set me off when I’m already feeling unsteady, and there’s really no rhyme or reason. They keep trying to identify topics to avoid, or how many people are speaking, or what ambient noise is happening and the truth is - I have no idea what combination of factors will team up and make me cognitively stall out and symptoms start storming. It just suddenly starts feeling like the floor’s tilted and I’m sliding and there’s no way to scramble and hold on. I can usually retrospectively point out the event that set it off, but not in a way that’s useful for future reference, because next time I might handle it just fine and ten minutes later I’ll get set off by a conversation about Oliver Cromwell instead. There’s really no pattern as to what will throw a spanner into my cognitive gears when I‘m already at low ebb.

But when it does happen, it’s obvious to everyone around me because I shut down - which is also perfectly reasonable for me to do, but it’s kind of rude to stop looking at people and stop listening and stop talking. And then I have to leave to go somewhere quiet to stabilize anyway.

I can do the graceful fade-away in settings where I don’t know people all that well, but it‘s really hard when I’m with close friends and family, and makes me feel guilty and horrible. Because it‘s all just me, short-circuiting at the picnic and making things weird. And since my triggers are almost entirely cognitive, they’re invisible externally until I’m shutting down.

This whole thing is hard on us, also hard on the people close to us who want to help, and then hard on us again because there’s often not much that can be done.