If this episode can be seen as an analogy for the treatment of whales, several of the poor reviews can serve as a metaphor for a spoilt and spoon-fed generation who consequently need everything explained to them, incapable of appreciating the joy of unanswered questions.
Both art and entertainment are like a mirror - If an idiot looks in, you cannot expect a sage to look out.
What you get out of a piece such as this, will largely depend on what you yourself have to bring to the table. The more open the mind is, the wider the capacity enabling the enjoyment of a subtle and thoughtful effort like this.
The 'I don't get it' reviews and complaints about the verbosity and supposed pseudo-intellectualism of the episode, presumably from those who prefer the relatively mindless-but-entertaining stylised gratuity of other episodes, is indicative of a generation of people who have not only never read a book in full, but are unashamed of that fact and balk at anything that does not do all the work for them.
There are plenty of works that tie everything up in a nice little bundle, in which all the thinking has been done for the audience, epitomised by Spielberg and which certainly has its place, but to repel anything that even attempts to try something different and commits the heinous crime of asking questions the audience is required to answer themselves, speaks of a lazy anti-intellectual attitude from a generation interested only in easy short-cuts that allow them to appear intelligent on a surface level, rather than putting in the hard work required in order to gain genuine intellect.
The very fact that, rather than applaud the effort to do something different, whether it has hit the mark or not, shows a demographic of people who are determined to condemn us all to an endless stream of predictable cliché and things we have already seen a thousand times before.
In the same way popular music has become inconsequential background noise, consisting of little more than the copy & paste ransacking of songs already written and then presented to an intellectually undemanding public to whom integrity, originality and depth are are simply not required, so it will be with visual art.
There will no longer be room for artists with something original to say or anything new to try, because the continual dumbing down that has now been going on for decades, will render it completely unnecessary, and the only people who will benefit are opportunists interested solely in making money, who will keep exploiting the all-too-easy route of pursuing the endlessly fruitful cash-cow that is pandering to the unthinking, who in turn will continue unwittingly to provide the rest of us with proof that being stupid is like being dead - It is only painful for others.
Both art and entertainment are like a mirror - If an idiot looks in, you cannot expect a sage to look out.
What you get out of a piece such as this, will largely depend on what you yourself have to bring to the table. The more open the mind is, the wider the capacity enabling the enjoyment of a subtle and thoughtful effort like this.
The 'I don't get it' reviews and complaints about the verbosity and supposed pseudo-intellectualism of the episode, presumably from those who prefer the relatively mindless-but-entertaining stylised gratuity of other episodes, is indicative of a generation of people who have not only never read a book in full, but are unashamed of that fact and balk at anything that does not do all the work for them.
There are plenty of works that tie everything up in a nice little bundle, in which all the thinking has been done for the audience, epitomised by Spielberg and which certainly has its place, but to repel anything that even attempts to try something different and commits the heinous crime of asking questions the audience is required to answer themselves, speaks of a lazy anti-intellectual attitude from a generation interested only in easy short-cuts that allow them to appear intelligent on a surface level, rather than putting in the hard work required in order to gain genuine intellect.
The very fact that, rather than applaud the effort to do something different, whether it has hit the mark or not, shows a demographic of people who are determined to condemn us all to an endless stream of predictable cliché and things we have already seen a thousand times before.
In the same way popular music has become inconsequential background noise, consisting of little more than the copy & paste ransacking of songs already written and then presented to an intellectually undemanding public to whom integrity, originality and depth are are simply not required, so it will be with visual art.
There will no longer be room for artists with something original to say or anything new to try, because the continual dumbing down that has now been going on for decades, will render it completely unnecessary, and the only people who will benefit are opportunists interested solely in making money, who will keep exploiting the all-too-easy route of pursuing the endlessly fruitful cash-cow that is pandering to the unthinking, who in turn will continue unwittingly to provide the rest of us with proof that being stupid is like being dead - It is only painful for others.