It’s a good show that takes its time in places, though it feels somewhat rushed toward the end. Still, it is well produced and competently made.

The Story of The Dropout

The series tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes fooling the world—and herself—into believing she was the female version of Steve Jobs. Everyone went along with it: investors, the media, politicians. They desperately wanted to believe in the feminist narrative that women can do it all.

The show doesn’t explore this in great depth; it even repeatedly frames Holmes’ downfall as an inversion of the true reality. At one point, a character says something along the lines of: “When she finally fails, it will be the biggest blow to all the good female entrepreneurs out there.” The underlying message seems to be that the patriarchy is still out there, waiting to tear women down.

What the show never really addresses is that Holmes only rose to fame because she was a woman.

The supposedly patriarchal Western world wanted a female CEO superstar. Politicians helped. Investors helped. The media helped. Everyone played a role in turning every lie she told into an accepted truth—until it inevitably collapsed and reality exposed the fraud.

Ironically, it was mostly men—the so-called patriarchy—who made Holmes famous. The role of politics is only briefly touched upon, but figures like Henry Kissinger were on Theranos’ board of directors very early on, providing political connections and access to funding. The media is portrayed as the force that ultimately unmasked Holmes and revealed the truth, yet it was the same media that aggressively promoted her and Theranos in the early days as a young female genius. She fit the feminist rhetoric perfectly and satisfied the desire for a female icon in the tech CEO space.

The Story of Theranos

In the end, Theranos was the story of a woman and an Indian man scamming Western elites by exploiting leftist virtue signaling. The company was marketed as a force for good—helping the poor and the sick, fighting evil capitalist corporations at the top of the industry with revolutionary innovation, all while claiming to make the world a better place.

Add a female CEO to win over feminists. Add an Indian man behind the scenes who actually ran things, and you get the multicultural angle as well.

It was a socialist-leftist wet dream. Theranos received endless benefit of the doubt until the scam became impossible to ignore.

It is said that investors lost more than $900 million. One can’t help but wonder how much taxpayer money was also poured into this black hole.

Conclusion

The Dropout is a good watch—one that is likely to make your blood boil. It doesn’t cover all the factors involved, particularly the political networks that enabled Theranos’ rise, but it succeeds as an interesting character study: of a woman who eventually believed her own lies, and of a liberal bubble caught in the web she and her Indian handler spun.

When Baywatch first aired in Germany, I wasn’t even ten years old. David Hasselhoff was already a big star thanks to Knight Rider, but Baywatch made him the biggest TV icon of that era.

The very first episode hooked me right away. The stories were simple, and the characters were all slight variations of the same good-hearted person who wants to do the right thing—sometimes failing until a friend steps in to help.

Of course, Baywatch became a global phenomenon largely because of its beautiful women. Erika Eleniak was a perfect ten, portraying the kind, loving, and caring Shauni McLane. When she left the show, Pamela Anderson rose to international stardom as C.J. Parker. Over the years, actresses like Yasmine Bleeth and Nicole Eggert were stunning additions to the cast. For the female audience, the producers also cast plenty of ripped male models.

But as a teenager, I never saw Baywatch as the “soft p**n” it might have been intended to be from the start. I liked the characters, the beach scenes, the sunshine, and the overall kindness of the show. Sure, the stories never evolved toward any real complexity; there was basically no character development, and you could predict the ending after the opening credits.

Yet it was entertaining. It was heart-warming. It was simply nice TV.

The world of Baywatch was uncomplicated and good: beautiful people, beautiful friendships, and big, beautiful hearts.

I wanted to live in that world. I still do. Today’s world makes me long even more for that idealized early-90s California beachfront life.

Our current world is dark, dangerous, and depressing—which is why so many shows today are dark, dangerous, and depressing too. I wish we could go back to a time when we were still allowed to dream of a life that looked like Baywatch—and be naive enough to believe that such a life could come true.

I’m a fan of the Alien franchise. Sure, it’s been a bit repetitive since the first sequel, but the second and third movies still added a lot to the lore. I also appreciated Prometheus as an ambitious attempt to provide a deeper backstory as well.

When they announced a show as the next installment, I was a little excited to watch it — though it took me months to finally find the time. But here we are.

Alien: Earth sticks to the dirty, realistic future style established by James Cameron, and it gives us another xenomorph running amok. But that’s basically where the similarities end. Narratively, the show goes in a completely new direction.

As much as you could criticize the repetitiveness of, for example, Alien: Romulus, you could now also criticize Earth for straying so far from its origins. It’s tricky to critique Earth for trying something new while also criticizing Romulus for not doing anything new at all.

But halfway through, I found myself asking: would I enjoy watching this if it wasn’t part of the Alien franchise? The answer I came up with was… maybe not.

The production quality is excellent. The xenomorph and other monster animations are fantastic, and I appreciated that the show didn’t tone down the horror or gore to make it more family-friendly.

But the storyline sidelines the alien in favor of a group of synthetic kids turning against humanity. Again, I can’t fault the show for trying something new while criticizing Alien: Romulus for sticking too closely to old ideas. Still, it sometimes feels like someone wrote a story that had little to do with the original Alien, then realized it might not attract viewers without the franchise name attached.

I’d still rate it 6 out of 10. I enjoy sci-fi and robot stories, and there’s at least one episode that feels like classic Alien. But for a show called Alien, I expected more.