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Making Lemonade

Watched The Fall of the House of Usher and it was very entertaining. The one bit that really impressed me was Roderick Usher's monologue about lemons in the middle of Episode 3. Every word in his exposition is sadly true and is drawn from real life. Not everyone feels the same way about the lemon speech: 

Taken in the context of the entire show, this whole business with the lemons completely undercuts much of what Flanagan is trying to say about wealth or the greed of corporations. Making a healthcare CEO who got rich on opioids into a caricature of evil because of the way he’d sell lemons is easy, but it also obscures the insidious and more straightforward ways corporations actually do exploit markets, or even the way Roderick himself knowingly pushed an addictive painkiller in order to sell more of it.

The way I see it, sometimes it is cathartic to create extreme caricatures to draw attention to a complex problem. We have to credit the viewer with a modicum of intelligence and believe that they will not treat the words coming out of Usher's mouth as if they were the handbook for running a successful business. But the hyperbole gets people's attention and hopefully they continue to think about how they can avoid getting suckered into the making of lemonade for a the mega rich to enjoy after working their lemon through its paces. I would look at it as a good public service announcement embedded into a nice show and not berate the thing on artistic merits as this author does. 

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