![]() ![]() The men she's judging are actually undercover Union anthropologists studying the planet their terrible crime was not giving up a train seat to a pregnant woman they didn't notice. (That any society could function at as high a level as this one appears to with these dopey rules is probably ridiculous, but I'll grant the story its premise.) ![]() It's the sort of recognizable social reflection exaggerated by a sci-fi scenario that feels like vintage Twilight Zone. This is, of course, a terrible system for conducting important societal business, which is shown right up front when the young barista Lysella (Giorgia Whigham) wakes up and sees the latest judging subjects on TV giving their "apology tour" she thoughtlessly down-votes them for purely superficial reasons (with zero actual information) while having a trivial phone conversation. If you get more than 10 million down votes during the "judging window" (how the timing of the opening and closing of this window works is not really clear, but who cares), you are sentenced to a "correction" measure to fix your bad behavior - essentially a lobotomy that turns you into a docile mental simpleton. Everyone is required to wear a badge with an up and down arrow (you can press someone's badge with an up or down vote if they do something you like or dislike), and you can vote online to pile on for someone's mild transgression that somehow ended up in the public eye. The story presents us with a "pure democracy" in the form of an alien society that conducts all its legal proceedings (in particular, punitive criminal measures) through social media votes - up or down. In both cases, I got the sense that's what they were mostly going for. It alternates scenes of wry observation with others of grand absurdity. This is consistently entertaining, albeit not particularly challenging. It takes the frequently employed "alternate Earth" approach of those series and gives us an alien society that's essentially ourselves plus an exaggerated twist - and then mines that for an hour of whimsical social satire/commentary that our heroes find themselves mired in. "Majority Rule," while obvious and unsubtle, feels like a modern-day take on a Twilight Zone episode crossed with Star Trek: TOS.
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