Category: reason

The Trials of Rasmea Odeh, Part Five — Did PTSD Make Her Do It?

Thank again to Eugene Volokh for inviting me to blog this week about my book, The Trials of Rasmea Odeh. Part One is here; Part Two is here; Part Three is here; Part Four is here.

Rasmea Odeh’s answers on her naturalization application were so obviously false that her first lawyer—William Swor of Detroit—proceeded straight to plea bargaining without filing pretrial motions. Swor was no pushover, having received awards from the Arab American Chamber of Commerce, the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Defense Attorneys of Michigan.

Swor negotiated an extremely favorable deal, with no prison time, but Odeh rejected it. After consulting with Deutsch and Fennerty, she opted to raise a political defense—condemning Israel for torture and conspiring with the U.S. government—under the guidance of the leftist lawyers, who entered appearances in the case.

But even a politicized defense had to deal with the falsehoods on the naturalization form.

Fortunately for Odeh, one of the world’s foremost authorities on treating torture victims lived in Chicago. Dr. Mary Fabri, had been director of Torture Treatment Services and International Training at the Kovler Center, and had consulted on torture care in Kurdistan, Rwanda, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and Haiti. She met with Odeh for 18 hours over six sessions, confirming that she suffered from PTSD.

As a treating psychologist trained to believe victims, Fabri had unquestioningly accepted Odeh’s exaggerations and fabrications, credulously repeating them in her lengthy report. Fabri wrote, for example, that Odeh’s torture had continued for 45 days because “she had no information [about the bombing] to share” with her interrogators, when of course she had publicly admitted her role in the bombing before immigrating to the U.S. And in her most extensive previous account, Odeh had claimed to have been tortured for only seven days.

Worse, however, was Fabri’s continuous improvement of her assessment. She initially opined only about “a strong possibility” that Odeh would have misinterpreted the naturalization form’s questions, while admitting, “I don’t know what went on in her mind.”

As the case proceeded, however, Fabri enhanced her opinion far beyond her expertise, ultimately applying her novel PTSD filtering theory to conclude that “Ms. Odeh did not intentionally lie on the citizenship exam, but instead interpreted the questions” to apply only to her life in the U.S.

The prosecution successfully excluded Fabri’s testimony from the trial, based on its own convoluted theory that expert psychological testimony was inadmissible in a “general intent” crime.

Without Fabri’s opinion, Odeh was convicted by a jury in 2014, but the prosecution had unwittingly set the stage for a successful appeal.

With nothing in the trial record to rebut the filtering theory, the judges on the Sixth Circuit panel said they didn’t even understand the “general intent” argument, and unanimously reversed the conviction due to the exclusion of Fabri’s testimony.

The case was set for retrial before Judge Drain, with the prospect of Fabri’s testimony about the extent of Odeh’s torture and its alleged effect on her answers in the naturalization process.

At almost the last minute, however, Odeh decided to plead guilty, accepting virtually the same deal negotiated by Swor three years earlier—conviction of a felony, revocation of citizenship, and deportation. Her allies tried to spin the surrender, weakly claiming that they had successfully put Israel’s human rights record in the official court record.

In fact, Odeh and her attorneys had seen the writing on the wall. Fabri’s proposed testimony was shaky on the merits, and subject to impeachment for inconsistency. And the prosecution’s superseding indictment was going to put Odeh’s admitted PFLP membership at the center of the retrial. Cornered and exhausted, she had simply given up, despite her victory in the appellate court.

Odeh would continue to appear at anti-Israel rallies, claiming that she had been forced into a “racist” plea bargain, but that could not forestall her inevitable deportation in September 2017.

The post The Trials of Rasmea Odeh, Part Five — Did PTSD Make Her Do It? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Review: The Batman


rev-1-TBM-56056JOrv4_High_Res_JPEG

PRO: The Batman is a great action movie. Not that there’s a lot of action in it—the story’s a little too mopey for that—but there are a couple of sequences that tear things up in classic fashion. One of them, a car chase for the ages, has Batman (Robert Pattinson) roaring along in his Batmobile (not yet so-called) in furious pursuit of the cackling maniac known as the Penguin (Colin Farrell). They’re screeching down a highway through a choking pall of smoke and flame, knocking big 16-wheel trucks out of their way, when suddenly, Batman—okay, the Batman—disappears from sight in the fiery maelstrom. For a moment it looks like he’s out of the game. But then, in Penguin’s rearview, we see the Bat car soaring up out of the roaring inferno behind him and landing with a crunch back on the road. The chase continues, awesomely.

The movie’s other great action moment is set in a Gotham subway station. It’s Halloween, and a gang of mooks with neo-Joker, Day of the Dead-style face paint are menacing a blameless Asian guy. Out of the shadows, the Batman appears. To fully appreciate the havoc that ensues you must know that the movie is constricted by a PG-13 rating, so director Matt Reeves knew he had to keep the blood and the bone-break muted. Which is why a lot of the damage done in this picture is a matter of careful presentation and artful audio. We see one of the mooks rush forth to attack Batman and we sort of see Batman twist one of his arms into an unnatural position and we hear some kind of cracking sound—and that’s it. Likewise, as we watch Batman bending over a fallen mook and whaling away on him with a gloved fist, we hear what sounds like somebody stomping watermelons, but we don’t see the blows land. The Batman is a dark, intense movie that feels like it’s pushing PG-13 right up to the wall, but most of the nasty stuff is implied.

Another plus in the film is the fact that we’re not forced to sit yet again through the killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents. We know that’s the trauma that set him on the Bat-path in the first place; we get it. And Reeves, bless him, declines to keep giving it to us. Instead, he sets us down straightaway in soggy Gotham, the crud capital of the world—a city of crepuscular murk in which cops and criminals are totally in cahoots and nice guys count themselves lucky if they can live long enough to finish last. The big bad in this rainy burg is crime lord Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Falcone has many under-creeps, like corrupt DA Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard), and they can all be found every night at an unsavory club called the Iceberg Lounge, where a young woman named Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), slings drinks for a living and quietly works on a secret side project she’s got cooking—a project that will soon draw the attention of the Batman.

Hovering over all of this is a serial killer called the Riddler (Paul Dano), who knows shocking things about some of Gotham’s leading citizens—including Bruce Wayne—and has decided that now is the time to tell all. Cue the municipal panic.

Pattinson is an interesting actor who’s made some very interesting professional choices since being set free from the Twilight franchise a decade ago. He’s recently taken on oddball movies like The Lighthouse and the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, and now—why not?—he’s trying to do something new with The Batman. He semi-succeeds, but this haunted character offers minimal expressive possibilities, and he’s sometimes left looking dawdly and po-faced. It’s still a soulful performance, though—especially in his scenes with Andy Serkis, who plays the Wayne family retainer Alfred Pennyworth. And as always, Batman is surrounded by more colorful characters. Colin Farrell’s fat-slob Penguin makeup is a stunt, but it’s extraordinary anyway, and the actor uses it to help build a real character. It’s also a plus that Pattinson gets to share several (although too few) scenes with Kravitz—their flirty chemistry enlivens every scene they share.

CON: The movie is three hours long and I kinda wish it weren’t.

The post Review: <em>The Batman</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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Review: The Batman


rev-1-TBM-56056JOrv4_High_Res_JPEG

PRO: The Batman is a great action movie. Not that there’s a lot of action in it—the story’s a little too mopey for that—but there are a couple of sequences that tear things up in classic fashion. One of them, a car chase for the ages, has Batman (Robert Pattinson) roaring along in his Batmobile (not yet so-called) in furious pursuit of the cackling maniac known as the Penguin (Colin Farrell). They’re screeching down a highway through a choking pall of smoke and flame, knocking big 16-wheel trucks out of their way, when suddenly, Batman—okay, the Batman—disappears from sight in the fiery maelstrom. For a moment it looks like he’s out of the game. But then, in Penguin’s rearview, we see the Bat car soaring up out of the roaring inferno behind him and landing with a crunch back on the road. The chase continues, awesomely.

The movie’s other great action moment is set in a Gotham subway station. It’s Halloween, and a gang of mooks with neo-Joker, Day of the Dead-style face paint are menacing a blameless Asian guy. Out of the shadows, the Batman appears. To fully appreciate the havoc that ensues you must know that the movie is constricted by a PG-13 rating, so director Matt Reeves knew he had to keep the blood and the bone-break muted. Which is why a lot of the damage done in this picture is a matter of careful presentation and artful audio. We see one of the mooks rush forth to attack Batman and we sort of see Batman twist one of his arms into an unnatural position and we hear some kind of cracking sound—and that’s it. Likewise, as we watch Batman bending over a fallen mook and whaling away on him with a gloved fist, we hear what sounds like somebody stomping watermelons, but we don’t see the blows land. The Batman is a dark, intense movie that feels like it’s pushing PG-13 right up to the wall, but most of the nasty stuff is implied.

Another plus in the film is the fact that we’re not forced to sit yet again through the killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents. We know that’s the trauma that set him on the Bat-path in the first place; we get it. And Reeves, bless him, declines to keep giving it to us. Instead, he sets us down straightaway in soggy Gotham, the crud capital of the world—a city of crepuscular murk in which cops and criminals are totally in cahoots and nice guys count themselves lucky if they can live long enough to finish last. The big bad in this rainy burg is crime lord Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Falcone has many under-creeps, like corrupt DA Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard), and they can all be found every night at an unsavory club called the Iceberg Lounge, where a young woman named Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), slings drinks for a living and quietly works on a secret side project she’s got cooking—a project that will soon draw the attention of the Batman.

Hovering over all of this is a serial killer called the Riddler (Paul Dano), who knows shocking things about some of Gotham’s leading citizens—including Bruce Wayne—and has decided that now is the time to tell all. Cue the municipal panic.

Pattinson is an interesting actor who’s made some very interesting professional choices since being set free from the Twilight franchise a decade ago. He’s recently taken on oddball movies like The Lighthouse and the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, and now—why not?—he’s trying to do something new with The Batman. He semi-succeeds, but this haunted character offers minimal expressive possibilities, and he’s sometimes left looking dawdly and po-faced. It’s still a soulful performance, though—especially in his scenes with Andy Serkis, who plays the Wayne family retainer Alfred Pennyworth. And as always, Batman is surrounded by more colorful characters. Colin Farrell’s fat-slob Penguin makeup is a stunt, but it’s extraordinary anyway, and the actor uses it to help build a real character. It’s also a plus that Pattinson gets to share several (although too few) scenes with Kravitz—their flirty chemistry enlivens every scene they share.

CON: The movie is three hours long and I kinda wish it weren’t.

The post Review: <em>The Batman</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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Biden Still Wants Government Interfering in All Areas of Life


dpaphotosfive625817

During the State of the Union address, President Joe Biden’s opening comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were pretty good—inspiring even. If he’d stopped there, he might have walked away from the podium on a high note. Unfortunately, the president continued to talk, laying out a litany of intrusive and expensive interventions in American life, many of which represent stalled elements of his legislative agenda. He called for higher taxes, more spending, more regulations, and an end to criminal justice reform efforts when he wasn’t spitting out word salad. It was a lost opportunity for Biden to take what is usually the best course of action for politicians: support freedom and then shut up.

“From President Zelensky to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, literally inspires the world,” Biden noted during his early moments on-stage. “Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees to teachers turned soldiers defending their homeland.”

Evocative words they were, living up to CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s assessment that “given his speaking talents and challenges, it was a fairly strong performance.” If only the president had dropped the mic and walked away at that point. But he insisted on reading the rest of his script.

“One of the first things I did as president was fight to pass the American Rescue Plan,” he boasted of the massive spending bill pushed through Congress last year. “Because people were hurting. We needed to act, and we did.”

But, as Reason‘s Peter Suderman pointed out at the time, “only a few percentage points of its massive $1.9 trillion price tag is specifically geared toward, you know, addressing the pandemic.…Most of it is instead a pre-existing Democratic Party wishlist of increased spending on virtually every aspect of government.”

The spending actually hurt more people by devaluing the dollar and driving prices through the roof as part of a pattern, beginning under the previous administration and continuing with Biden, of flooding the economy with money.

“It is hard to ask for a clearer demonstration of fiscal inflation, an immense fiscal helicopter drop, exhibit A for the fiscal theory of the price level,” observed Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane.

Biden did concede that inflation is a problem, but he certainly didn’t admit that the government’s helicopter drop of money and other impositions were the cause. Instead, he saw inflation as a weird side-effect of the pandemic, like the loss of taste and smell. “The pandemic meant that businesses had a hard time hiring enough workers to keep up production in their factories,” he insisted, jumbling cause-and-effect involving mandatory closures of businesses, among other policy disruptions. His solution, predictably, is more government action.

“Tonight, I’m announcing a crackdown on those companies overcharging American businesses and consumers,” he said in a slap at firms understandably raising prices because dollars are now worth less.

“My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit,” the president asserted. Then he proposed to let the federal government set drug prices, subsidize home-weatherization along with solar and wind power, and underwrite part of the cost of purchasing electric cars as well as build 500,000 charging stations for those vehicles. Biden also wants the government to pay for childcare, subsidize long-term care, and pick up the cost of pre-kindergarten. All of this will come, he promises, without raising taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 per year. That’ll be quite a trick with national debt soaring above $30 trillion without such an ambitious agenda.

Biden also wants more government oversight of nursing homes, a higher minimum wage, and increased government subsidies for college education, among other federal schemes too numerous to mention, most drawn from the stalled Build Back Better monstrosity of a spending bill. None of this sounds like a plan for reducing costs, though it hides some by shifting them to taxpayers. The same can be said of Biden’s vow: “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs.” That’s guaranteed to increase expenses by eliminating consideration of overseas sources and the competition they offer.

“The benefits of Buy America/American policies are likely overstated, and they are, at least partially, responsible for higher infrastructure costs,” found a 2017 report from the American Action Forum.

There is one area of government action that Biden wants to curtail: criminal justice reform. Less than two years after protesters took to the streets against police brutality in demonstrations that sometimes turned violent, the president offers little but a single line about body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for federal officers. Then matters get worse.

“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police,” he huffed. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”

At least the cops will be well-equipped for the next round of protests against police brutality. 

The president also called for more firearms restrictions, including on home-built “ghost guns” that were specifically developed to put self-defense beyond the gun-grabbing reach of government. His plan includes banning firearms purchases by people on sketchy watch lists compiled without a modicum of due process.

But it’s hard to know how serious the president is about any issue or if any particular point is especially important to him. His address meandered here and there without any central theme. The speech seemed designed to assure the faithful that he is still committed to pushing stalled legislation, that he remains dedicated to the expanded state favored by Democrats and, most important, that he is still in mentally and physically capable. Some doubts linger on that final point.

“You can’t build a wall high enough to keep out a vaccine” Biden insisted at one point in a verbal fumble over efforts against COVID-19. He also assured the world that “[Vladimir] Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” Even less likely is Russian dictator Putin to gain the affection of the Ukrainian people.

That opening passage about the war in Ukraine really should have been the sum total of the president’s address. It was a unifying message offered to a deeply divided country before a detour into economic fantasy and disregard for liberty. Encouraging words about underdogs fighting for freedom against authoritarianism should have been left undiluted by ensuing verbiage contradicting that message.

The post Biden Still Wants Government Interfering in All Areas of Life appeared first on Reason.com.

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Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker


minisendwalker_Square-Enix

When the online multiplayer role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV hit the market in 2010, it was a disaster, panned by critics and series fans alike. The game lasted two years before servers shut down, failing to unseat industry leader World of Warcraft.

But rather than abandoning the game, developers heavily retooled and relaunched Final Fantasy XIV in 2013 with a new storyline. Over the next eight years it would slowly build a committed audience across several expansions of its world—one riven by war, plagued by elemental monstrosities, and manipulated by a shadowy cabal seemingly intent on destruction.

The persistence and story-telling would pay off in December 2021 with the release of Endwalker, an expansion to the game that also concludes the storyline people have been working their way through for nearly a decade. While the player—dubbed the “Warrior of Light”—engages in typical fantasy sword-and-sorcery high jinks, Endwalker‘s story is not of good triumphing over evil so much as of hope triumphing over despair.

The violent implosion of a once-oppressive empire is presented as a horrifying disaster despite the villainy of its leaders. The shadowy cabal is revealed as a pack of desperate, tragic fallen angels who have for centuries been ruthlessly attempting to restore a lost paradise that can never return. Amid the silly chocobo birds to ride and goofy maid outfits to wear, the game delves into themes of self-destruction, fear, helplessness, and even suicide. The hero fights not evil but nihilism.

Meanwhile, a rush of new interest in the game has left its publisher, Square Enix, fighting against supply chain issues. Initial sales of the expansion were so successful that existing servers couldn’t handle customer demand. Unable to acquire enough new servers, the company had to temporarily halt sales.

The post Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker appeared first on Reason.com.

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Biden Still Wants Government Interfering in All Areas of Life


dpaphotosfive625817

During the State of the Union address, President Joe Biden’s opening comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were pretty good—inspiring even. If he’d stopped there, he might have walked away from the podium on a high note. Unfortunately, the president continued to talk, laying out a litany of intrusive and expensive interventions in American life, many of which represent stalled elements of his legislative agenda. He called for higher taxes, more spending, more regulations, and an end to criminal justice reform efforts when he wasn’t spitting out word salad. It was a lost opportunity for Biden to take what is usually the best course of action for politicians: support freedom and then shut up.

“From President Zelensky to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, literally inspires the world,” Biden noted during his early moments on-stage. “Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees to teachers turned soldiers defending their homeland.”

Evocative words they were, living up to CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s assessment that “given his speaking talents and challenges, it was a fairly strong performance.” If only the president had dropped the mic and walked away at that point. But he insisted on reading the rest of his script.

“One of the first things I did as president was fight to pass the American Rescue Plan,” he boasted of the massive spending bill pushed through Congress last year. “Because people were hurting. We needed to act, and we did.”

But, as Reason‘s Peter Suderman pointed out at the time, “only a few percentage points of its massive $1.9 trillion price tag is specifically geared toward, you know, addressing the pandemic.…Most of it is instead a pre-existing Democratic Party wishlist of increased spending on virtually every aspect of government.”

The spending actually hurt more people by devaluing the dollar and driving prices through the roof as part of a pattern, beginning under the previous administration and continuing with Biden, of flooding the economy with money.

“It is hard to ask for a clearer demonstration of fiscal inflation, an immense fiscal helicopter drop, exhibit A for the fiscal theory of the price level,” observed Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane.

Biden did concede that inflation is a problem, but he certainly didn’t admit that the government’s helicopter drop of money and other impositions were the cause. Instead, he saw inflation as a weird side-effect of the pandemic, like the loss of taste and smell. “The pandemic meant that businesses had a hard time hiring enough workers to keep up production in their factories,” he insisted, jumbling cause-and-effect involving mandatory closures of businesses, among other policy disruptions. His solution, predictably, is more government action.

“Tonight, I’m announcing a crackdown on those companies overcharging American businesses and consumers,” he said in a slap at firms understandably raising prices because dollars are now worth less.

“My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit,” the president asserted. Then he proposed to let the federal government set drug prices, subsidize home-weatherization along with solar and wind power, and underwrite part of the cost of purchasing electric cars as well as build 500,000 charging stations for those vehicles. Biden also wants the government to pay for childcare, subsidize long-term care, and pick up the cost of pre-kindergarten. All of this will come, he promises, without raising taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 per year. That’ll be quite a trick with national debt soaring above $30 trillion without such an ambitious agenda.

Biden also wants more government oversight of nursing homes, a higher minimum wage, and increased government subsidies for college education, among other federal schemes too numerous to mention, most drawn from the stalled Build Back Better monstrosity of a spending bill. None of this sounds like a plan for reducing costs, though it hides some by shifting them to taxpayers. The same can be said of Biden’s vow: “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs.” That’s guaranteed to increase expenses by eliminating consideration of overseas sources and the competition they offer.

“The benefits of Buy America/American policies are likely overstated, and they are, at least partially, responsible for higher infrastructure costs,” found a 2017 report from the American Action Forum.

There is one area of government action that Biden wants to curtail: criminal justice reform. Less than two years after protesters took to the streets against police brutality in demonstrations that sometimes turned violent, the president offers little but a single line about body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for federal officers. Then matters get worse.

“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police,” he huffed. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”

At least the cops will be well-equipped for the next round of protests against police brutality. 

The president also called for more firearms restrictions, including on home-built “ghost guns” that were specifically developed to put self-defense beyond the gun-grabbing reach of government. His plan includes banning firearms purchases by people on sketchy watch lists compiled without a modicum of due process.

But it’s hard to know how serious the president is about any issue or if any particular point is especially important to him. His address meandered here and there without any central theme. The speech seemed designed to assure the faithful that he is still committed to pushing stalled legislation, that he remains dedicated to the expanded state favored by Democrats and, most important, that he is still in mentally and physically capable. Some doubts linger on that final point.

“You can’t build a wall high enough to keep out a vaccine” Biden insisted at one point in a verbal fumble over efforts against COVID-19. He also assured the world that “[Vladimir] Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.” Even less likely is Russian dictator Putin to gain the affection of the Ukrainian people.

That opening passage about the war in Ukraine really should have been the sum total of the president’s address. It was a unifying message offered to a deeply divided country before a detour into economic fantasy and disregard for liberty. Encouraging words about underdogs fighting for freedom against authoritarianism should have been left undiluted by ensuing verbiage contradicting that message.

The post Biden Still Wants Government Interfering in All Areas of Life appeared first on Reason.com.

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Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker


minisendwalker_Square-Enix

When the online multiplayer role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV hit the market in 2010, it was a disaster, panned by critics and series fans alike. The game lasted two years before servers shut down, failing to unseat industry leader World of Warcraft.

But rather than abandoning the game, developers heavily retooled and relaunched Final Fantasy XIV in 2013 with a new storyline. Over the next eight years it would slowly build a committed audience across several expansions of its world—one riven by war, plagued by elemental monstrosities, and manipulated by a shadowy cabal seemingly intent on destruction.

The persistence and story-telling would pay off in December 2021 with the release of Endwalker, an expansion to the game that also concludes the storyline people have been working their way through for nearly a decade. While the player—dubbed the “Warrior of Light”—engages in typical fantasy sword-and-sorcery high jinks, Endwalker‘s story is not of good triumphing over evil so much as of hope triumphing over despair.

The violent implosion of a once-oppressive empire is presented as a horrifying disaster despite the villainy of its leaders. The shadowy cabal is revealed as a pack of desperate, tragic fallen angels who have for centuries been ruthlessly attempting to restore a lost paradise that can never return. Amid the silly chocobo birds to ride and goofy maid outfits to wear, the game delves into themes of self-destruction, fear, helplessness, and even suicide. The hero fights not evil but nihilism.

Meanwhile, a rush of new interest in the game has left its publisher, Square Enix, fighting against supply chain issues. Initial sales of the expansion were so successful that existing servers couldn’t handle customer demand. Unable to acquire enough new servers, the company had to temporarily halt sales.

The post Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker appeared first on Reason.com.

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This Is Us


minis1

This Is Us, the addictive (or cloyingly annoying, depending on your ability to stomach unironic schmaltz about parenting, childhood, marriage, PTSD, and loss) program from NBC, launched its sixth and final season in January. The show’s delivery of a multigenerational family soap opera via Lost-style storytelling trickery and misdirection leaves many mysteries to be teased out between the tearjerker moments.

The most challenging such conundrum: Is Randall Pearson—the adopted black son who replaced a dead white triplet at birth—a true selfless hero or at least in part a self-important villain?

The show seems to accept Randall’s superior wonderfulness; casting the enormously strong and charming Sterling K. Brown puts a heavy thumb on that scale. Still, could there be hints of a subterranean jaundiced attitude when he becomes a Philly city council member, likely on his way to national political stardom? In his personal life Randall shows signs of the feckless officiousness of the politician, whether he’s forcing his family to upend their lives to follow his dreams (while guilt-tripping his long-suffering wife when she tries to do the same); forcing his sick mom into treatment that she and his siblings do not want for her; or letting his guilt lead him to bail out a criminal who terrorized his own family, who then promptly disappears.

Whatever the showrunners’ intentions, Randall’s actions hint at the dark side of people who are just trying to make things better for everyone—regardless of whether their victims want the help.

The post This Is Us appeared first on Reason.com.

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